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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   28516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself.

You've already got it:

They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red blue tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.

Suffice to say that liberals do not share conservatives' assessment about the balance of power.

Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Yes. The red tribe's hate for the blue tribe (and vice versa) is fundamentally normative. The red and blue tribes hate each other because they have values that are not in alignment and which they are not willing to compromise on.

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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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