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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2844 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. It has been on the backlog for years.

Paper I'm reading: Dombrink's The Touchables: Vice and Police Corruption in the 1980's.

The Two Towers, by Tolkien.

It's comfy. I tend to look up https://tolkiengateway.net for landscape drawings and paintings relevant to the passages I read, and it makes for a very nice experience.

Neat. I'm halfway through a TT re-read. Fall is a perfect time to read this series.

I was looking for the source of my Silmarillion’s cover art. Through the Gateway, this led me to the absolute madness of Middle Earth calendars. Some of these are absolutely perfect examples of a certain 80s style. I ended up with a sweet Mount Doom for a phone background.

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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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