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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2592 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 7, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Jump in the discussion.

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-you don't have to show them your id.

-if you stuck to people who've been here a long time, especially once it's more established, that should prevent most bad actors. There's probably voluntary auxiliary thought police scraping this site in the never ending fight against 'fascism', but bad actors who'd pretend to be here for the debate for years seem .. implausible.

-getting personal info of people based on their license plate - is that easy in the US? It's not in Europe, generally speaking.

IIRC, there was a fairly big scandal when it was found storage of Swedish license plate register was outsourced to IBM and dozens of their remote admins had complete access to it.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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