Friday Fun Thread for February 14, 2024
What is this place?
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
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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."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
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Notes -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
I suggest I know better than you about the range of ideas under the label of “libertarianism”.
My views on speech, guns, trade, and taxes put me pretty far from “popular” and “normie” in the US let alone globally, but it’s cute that you think you can extrapolate all that from my thinking seat belt laws are justified.
Define yours then -- as you say there are many. For the record I would not self-describe that way, although there's some intersection and I'm probably on average more likely to agree with a libertarian than not.
I’m a classical liberal or a right neoliberal or a state capacity libertarian. I’m not a deontological libertarian or an anarcho-capitalist, though like Scott I find David Friedman to be a very interesting thinker.
Rule utilitarianism and humanism are my underlying moral philosophies.
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