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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2399 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 21, 2024

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?

Slowly going through The Master and his Emissary. His basic thesis is that the hemispheres aren't in a symmetrical relationship, hence the title, with the right hemisphere being the Master and the left the Emissary. So far there are only hints about the consequences of this, but it seems to lead away from scientism and postmodernism.

There's something about this book that is hard to pin down. I haven't assimilated much that I've read, but it's beginning to fascinate me.

Recently (as in yesterday) finished The Lone Samurai, which is a biography of Miyamoto Musashi. Have just begun the Dune series.

The most interesting book I have read in the last couple of years was probably Seeing like a State. In particular, there was a section about how surnames arose due the state needing a more precise naming convention to track down specific people. There are many Johns in England, there are fewer John Smiths, there's probably only a couple of John James Christopher Smiths. While we, or at least I, thought surnames were common throughout history it is apparently a fairly recent phenomenon outside of royalty.

It also delved into failed state attempts at making the world legible to itself, like how it tries to homogenize a forest to extract lumber, but removing all other tree species, plants and animals create a perfect condition for a disease to devastate this new orderly forest. This 'short-slightness' extends to city-planning as well as farming and many other areas.

I have a rule to finish at least one book per month and think this is a rather languid pace, but my bookshelf is steadily filling up.

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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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