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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35361 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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Something that always bothered me about the Motte is that while massive cultural/political events are going on in Europe, one needs to dive deep into the roundup thread to find any discussion of it at all. Meanwhile the latest trans-people-in-school or outrageous-nytimes-oped controversy (which nobody will remember in a week) will have 500 comment threads dedicated to extreme nitpicking.

I suppose being the change you want to see is the ultimate solution. So good on you for delivering on that other than just complaining about it.

I think the bare links repository (BLR) would help alleviate this. What some stupid teacher said to her stupid student in Stupid Small Town, in Stupid State in USA about boyss being girls and girls being boys; can just be posted about in the BLR.

All the raging hot CW topics that generate much albeit low quality discussion could be contained that way. Another hidden benefit of the BLR was that it added an element of transcience since the posting rate was so high that some stupid trans story wouldn't sit there and gather 500 comments it would get discussed a bit and eventually get burried by newer links.

I've been pestering the mods to reinstate the BLR for a while, but I obviously don't have much influence other than just being annoying. The mods cite their reasons for not doing so, but I ultimately see little value in just one more conversation about trans or race issues.

As it stands right now, if I see something I want to discuss about on the Motte but I am not well informed about it, I just have to ignore it, instead of just sharing the link which would have generated some conversation at least. The BLR adds diversity of topics.

You could also become informed on such an issue, then make a careful top-level. That seems like a win-win as far as inciting effortful responses for you to consume.

The BLR seems likely to encourage more trans- and race-outrage posts, even if an individual example is more transient. And I’m not sure that the latter would be true given memetic fitness, toxoplasma of rage, etc. I don’t want to lower the barrier to contributing in the thread because even users capable of producing decent top-levels will be incentivized to wage culture war through the BLR.

Maybe—maybe—we could benefit from a Bare Link BWednesday. I still think it would act as a giant witch magnet.

We had the BLR before. Did it act as a witch magnet?

Hard to say.

One one hand, that was when we had a larger sub, a better connection to other reddits, and (American) CW events that were drawing in a lot of posters anyway. On the other, those same CW events were apparently attracting enough witches that moderation thought the BLR would help.

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Why are you called The Motte?

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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