site banner
KulakRevolt  1mo ago (anarchonomicon.com)   2719 thread views

Feral Aryan Femininity: Blonde Women as Bioweapons

anarchonomicon.com

10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.

What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Late, but I just wanted to say that you are my favourite poster on the internet. Never ever stop.

I'm deeply touched!

Novel, thought-provoking stuff.

I'll echo 2rafa and say that this post, while interesting, seems to contain a lot of "big if true" assertions. Many of these cultures eventually gave way to one empire or another, and for reasons likely unrelated to women selecting and being selected against beauty and femininity. Burn your boats, slay your babes, say "not a step back" all you want, if you can't win a fight, then you can't win a fight. Nowadays, warfare is much more complex than "get a bunch of guys to march and kick ass," and is so mechanized that women can probably still participate in some combat function, even if they can't quite be PBI like the men.

I am, however, not equipped with the knowledge to challenge your historical analysis, but I know enough pop culture to interject on a few things:

1: Re: nuns, I'm not aware of nuns being given spiritual aspects outside of literally like 2 or 3 horror movies. The demon nun trope does exist, but I think that's kind of about it. If anything, Catholic nuns are probably the most disapproving of any notion of assigning supernatural powers to them. I guess some Japanese media has nun-looking warrior women and spellcasters?

2: On the subject of Kyrgyz bride capture, I have to wonder if the horseback girl-chasing was what inspired Red Sonja, given her whole shtick of not being allowed to lay with a man unless he defeated her in a fight.

3: Speaking of women who fight in media, I'm somewhat surprised at the lack of mention of anime; plenty of Japanese media have women characters fighting directly and holding their own against big, beefy men. Outside of martial-arts-inflected shonen or fantasy-based isekai, you have sci-fi mecha shows where women can drive a robot just as well as a man (unless you're in a Tomino show; then it's more 50-50 as to how good you are).

4: If the VTuber Ironmouse has taught me anything, I would say that laughing at the 4'10" Latina D.I. would probably end badly--that's a can of Latina temper you do not want to open. Would she be able to choke you out, Gunney Hartman-style? Maybe not. Would she reduce you to tears with her mouth? Quite possibly.

5: I am very unfamiliar with the conception of the E-girl as the adventure travel influencer; the latter definition you give is by far the dominant image. If anything, e-girls are stereotyped as not going outside and living in some measure of filth.

See the real account of a great granddaughter of the great Khan https://www.historyskills.com/classroom/year-8/khutulun/

I worry about you, @KulakRevolt. That was a long post - it must have taken several days to research and write. And despite ample opportunity, you seem to have managed to write the whole post without once thinking about the Roman Empire.

Are you okay?

What are you talking about? Battle of Vercellae 101 bc.

I even Cite Plutarch's Life of Marius. There's an extensive block quote.

I really have to say: a man wrote this.

Won't sleep with any man who asks: frigid prude Protestant schoolmarm Will sleep with any man who asks: BDSM slave girl (Gor, I hear you calling!)

This is a male idea of female psychology. Why would women prefer death to slavery, he wonders. Well gee, could it be that being a slave in the house of your conqueror, with his legitimate wife and family over you, was a pretty shitty experience? At the best, grinding hard labour for life. At the worst, she goes all Clytemnestra on you.

Why would women go along with the idea of sacrificing themselves? Well, why do men? Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward? Why better a dead lion than a live dog? Why the idea that dying in bed in old age was the worst fate of all?

If you're soaking in the attitudes of your culture and society all your life, you'll adopt them. The pretty slave girls who didn't leap up and volunteer survived, but the status went to the girl who did. Same with the warrior.

As to the rest of it, that there was only one pretty girl per generation and all the other women were ugly, in the ritual sacrifice societies, I have to laugh at that. Oh yeah, Miss Universe is the one pretty girl who wins the contest and all the other girls are uggos. Ritual sacrifice societies also permitted or winked at giving substitutes - maybe you provided a slave, or bought a child off a poor family, instead of your own child. Maybe in time you substituted animals, or symbolic sacrifices. The Aztecs were bloody maniacs because they sincerely believed that the world would end without the shedding of blood to maintain the weakened gods and enable them to keep creation going. They weren't sacrificing people for eugenic purposes. Sure, part of the flower wars was to keep subject and tributary chieftains weakened and subordinate, but they also needed vast amounts of bodies for sacrifice. And the end result was that they made themselves so hated, when the Spanish turned up, the other tribes supported them to bring down the Aztecs.

I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.

Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward?

Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.

But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.

Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.

If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.

While I can buy this as a means of propagating the memes of a society, your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers. Moreover, how likely was a man to actually participate in a battle so large that routing was possible? I have a hard time believing the selection effects here would be anything but incredibly weak.

your individual genes would have an exceptionally small effect on the outcome of a battle with hundreds/thousands of soldiers

Why?

I'm having a hard time imagining why you think so. I'll try two angles but lmk if neither is what you meant.

  1. You mention "your individual genes" not making much of a difference, but humans fight as ethnic groups. The other men in your army are probably much more closely related to you than the enemies are, and share a lot of the traits which distinguish you from the enemy. So no, one soldier being a bit more courageous isn't likely to affect much, but in aggregate it's likely that one side is going to be substantially more courageous than the other, for several reasons including culture, nutrition, and, yes, genetic distinctiveness. Over enough iterations this should propagate.

  2. Maybe you think that the relatively tiny (in absolute numerical terms) genetic differences between ancestral groups can't amount to much? In fact there are plenty of single-allele mutations which have outsized effects on all sorts of things from body shape to behavior. A lot of the ones we think about most often are deleterious because those stand out more: when someone gets a nasty FOXP2 mutation and can't really engage in human-level speech, that's obvious and we go looking for the cause, which happens to be easy to spot. But suppose there were a mutation which made someone (and by extent his descendants) 20% more courageous? How would that even play out? We'd probably only know about it if it had unfortunate side-effects like also making carriers prone to violent crime or something, which seems plausible. Here's an interesting candidate, though due to the prohibitions on research into such topics set in place by today's dominant religion, we seem to know less about it today than we did fifteen years ago.

But women facing slavery are not calculating "I can still reproduce". See the play The Trojan Women, where their fates are discussed. Their children will be killed, and if they do have children by their new masters (not their new husbands) those children will always be second-class to the legitimate children, and probably also second-class in life, either slaves themselves, or even if freed, denied citizenship.

Hecuba was a queen, now she's just going to be an old woman servant in a foreign land. Her daughter is killed as a ritual sacrifice, her grandson is murdered:

Andromache's lot is to be the concubine of Achilles' son Neoptolemus, and more horrible news for the royal family is yet to come: Talthybius reluctantly informs her that her baby son, Astyanax, has been condemned to die. The Greek leaders are afraid that the boy will grow up to avenge his father Hector, and rather than take this chance, they plan to throw him off from the battlements of Troy to his death.

The women won't be lolling around in a harem like some Orientalist fantasy, they'll be put to work. There's no reason to think their owners will be particularly fond of them, after all their main value is as booty to demonstrate the warrior's status. If he wants a woman to fuck, he can probably get one easily enough. The legitimate wife, the mistress of the house, will have a lot more control over the life of the slave, and if her husband is partial to the slave, so much the worse consequences for the slave woman. A slave woman who had been high status in her old life might have some protection, but the ordinary women won't even have that.

And of course, as societies became more evolved and civilised, the economic benefits of "don't kill all the men, enslave the boys and some of the men" were evident.

Born in the last years of the 5th century BCE, Phaedo was a native of Elis and of high birth. He was taken prisoner in his youth, and passed into the hands of an Athenian slave dealer; being of considerable personal beauty, he was forced into prostitution. The occasion on which he was taken prisoner was no doubt the war between Sparta and Elis, 402–401 BCE, in which the Spartans were joined by the Athenians in 401 BCE.

Why do you assume courage is or can be a purely Y chromosome gene? Let's agree that it might be advantageous if it were, it still has to be.

No, it doesn't. Most of the genes that are activated only in men (e.g. the ones to build testes, or to synthesise dihydrotestosterone) aren't on the Y chromosome. They're switched on either directly by testis-determining factor (the product of the SRY gene on the Y chromosome) or indirectly by various other things downstream of it (e.g. testosterone levels).

Genes for the brain having different activation based on testosterone levels in gestation would be the obvious mechanism.

Ok you've added another mechanism, hypothetically, by which it could happen. That does not mean at all that it does. Many genetically determined values that are more advantageous in men or women are nonetheless determined by the genetics of both parents.

I mean, men are more aggressive and independently courageous than women, generally, and I'm pretty sure that's genetic, although I don't think I've ever seen a good study on that. Not that that's connected to the above argument, which is kinda weird.

Many genetically determined values that are more advantageous in men or women are nonetheless determined by the genetics of both parents.

I... think you might be misunderstanding me?

I'm agreeing that such genes would be passed down from both parents. Genes for how to build a penis are present in women, and can be passed down from grandfather through mother to son (or great-grandfather through grandmother and mother to son). It's just that in the mother, those genes aren't active. (There are a few genes relating to spermatogenesis that are directly on the Y chromosome and cannot be inherited through women, but not that many - and obviously, every gene that only affects women is also present in men.)

There are quite a lot of genes that are turned on and off by the sex of the individual they reside in.

(Oh, forgot another plausible means; same structure built, but activated more in men by hormone levels "at runtime".)

And, well, I'm not sure if you've noticed, but "men take more physical risks" is not exactly controversial; there's a reason we're the vast majority of blue-collar criminals.

You hypothesize without proof.

Equally likely is that sex and hormones accentuate a trait in one sex.

Height works this way. A tall mother with both sons and daughters will, cetetis paribus, have sons taller than her daughters. But the sons and daughters of a tall mother will be taller than the sons and daughters of a short mother respectively (ceteris paribus).

Similarly, courage may be more present in the male than in the female offspring of a brave mother, but present in both in greater measure than in the offspring of a cowardly mother.

This would more match the folk wisdom of a Herodotus or a Tacitus, and most folk-genetics as they existed up to modernity.

You're demanding I prove someone else's claim? No, I won't. There is a reason I haven't made positive claims about the central point here, and that's that HBD is not my area of expertise. You said something specific which didn't understand biology well on a level even I could spot, and I pointed that out. I have no obligation to defend others' points about which I'm agnostic myself; go demand proof from them.

There's a problem with your Darwinian reasoning - and it has economic resonance, such that I recall David Friedman once writing about it - which is that a single man's contribution towards victory in a line battle is so minuscule as to make no difference in the battle's result, and so would neither make for a powerful behavioral incentive, nor for a powerful influence on his ability to reproduce. Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.

I think there is some Darwinian selection going on here, but it works more like this: the cost of being a coward isn't that your tribe gets slaughtered in battle, it's that your social reputation gets ruined and your fellow tribesmen shun you.

So men are selected on the basis of whether they integrate into their tribes properly, courage being a particularly valued trait, but also conformity - whatever gets you there. Courage is perhaps more of a manifestation of behavioral traits than a trait that is selected for by itself, or perhaps it is both. In any case, I think it's more likely to be intra-tribal social selection that drives gene selection in this case than inter-tribal warfare.

I'm talking about individual selection, not group selection. The exact result will vary depending on what kinds of battles you end up fighting throughout your life, but in general being courageous increases the individual's reproductive chances, not just the group's. If you flee the battle then you can't partake in the spoils of war. If you flee the battle, you may survive but the victors will steal your wives and daughters, and the next generation will be more like them than you. Thus, courage spreads even if cowards are more likely to survive.

Also, it must be said, the vast majority of violence throughout human history has been small-scale. For the majority of battles that most people have participated in, one man's individual courage does make a difference on the outcome. Skirmishes between groups of 20 men were far, far more common than battles between groups of 20,000.

Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either.

This is perhaps tempered by the fact that ancient armies were recruited from segmentary lineage societies and so the winning side was closely related to one another.

Instead, it would be his compatriots' group effort that would make the difference, thus suggesting the possibility of group selection being a thing, although I think there are broader arguments (with a mathematical basis?) for why group selection isn't likely to be a thing, either

Yes, this is group selection. There are good arguments that group selection's not a thing in a lot of cases. Human prehistory is probably not one of those cases; tribe extermination due to military defeat was like 10% of mortality in prehistory.

Haidt does a full defence of group selection in humans in The Righteous Mind.

Group selection, AIUI, only works when selective advantage for groups traits is stronger than selective advantage of individual traits. This is generally not the case because 1) individuals reproduce faster than groups and 2) individual heredity is much more reliable than group heredity. Strong pressure on groups is not necessarily sufficient to counter these two factors. That said, the situation is different if the group selection is in fact kin selection, in which the component individuals of a group have a high probability of sharing the genes being selected for.

Oh yeah, obviously selecting on randomly-assorted groups isn't going to get very far. But that's not super-relevant to HBD questions since human prehistory did not consist of randomly-assorted groups.

I do enjoy that you write in the Moldbuggian tradition of essentially making things up while gesturing at the suggestion of evidence, spuriously. I do it too, so I feel a kind of appreciation for your writing style.

I’ll leave it to you to speculate which modern people are descended from these ugly women

Do women from persecuted middle eastern tribes have a reputation for being ugly? I'm not just talking Jews who have obviously been through a particularly weird diasporic selection process, but rather those other small minorities that have hung around in the region for thousands of years. I think breeding beautiful people is actually pretty hard, much harder than breeding smarter people. Perfect features exaggerated just a little too much become very quickly grotesque. Some unions produce beautiful sons and ugly daughters, or vice versa, often precisely because features that work for one sex don't for the other. Then consider the different status red headed men versus red headed women have in contemporary discourse on attractiveness, for example.

And you can find eerily similar accounts right up 1945 when mass suicides occurred in Germany amongst not just Nazi officials and party members, but amongst their women, lovers, and children. Over 7000 suicides were recorded in Berlin, and various ballpark estimates of 100 to 150 thousand in all of 1945

I was under the impression that the vast majority of suicides of women in Berlin and East Germany were by women who had been raped, many of them pregnant. I suppose the historical record is necessarily spotty.

RE: Blonde women

There is actually some additional evidence you left out. 50% of female S&P 500 CEOs are blonde; just 2% of male ones are, zero overrepresentation. Obviously most are bottle blonde; the white ethnics who settled the United States from the 1840s onward were largely not from people with high prevalence of natural blonde hair, except for some Scandinavians. But still, the yearning for blondeness is eternal.

You see it in Latin America especially, where an ugly blonde, blue-eyed girl from Southern Brazil or Europe can date multiple classes upward, while objectively much more beautiful brunettes (even pale ones!) cannot. This is not wholly explained, in my opinion, by the pure fetishism for nordic features that one sees in the Middle East, in Asia and so on. It's more primal. In my experience, limiting for comparison's sake to europeans of the same ethnic group, blonde women are friendlier to other women and tougher on men than brunettes. They also seem to take more risks.

There appears to be little understanding of the relationship between natural hair color and temperament; I googled the usual autistic genetics forums and it doesn't appear to be a popular topic there either. My mother and sister both have natural blonde hair and blue eyes, as I understand it this was very rare in Polish and Russian Jews but more common in German and Balkan ones. There's actually a fascinating section of the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia which contains a detailed survey and discussion of the hair and eye colors of various European Jewish populations, their relations to head shape and head size and so on. But they both have quite a different temperament to me or my brother. It's an interesting discussion, they seem more headstrong.

I do enjoy that you write in the Moldbuggian tradition of essentially making things up while gesturing at the suggestion of evidence, spuriously. I do it too, so I feel a kind of appreciation for your writing style.

How can we know when you're doing this?

the white ethnics who settled the United States from the 1840s onward were largely not from people with high prevalence of natural blonde hair, except for some Scandinavians.

The Irish have a very high prevalence of blonde hair, the Germans and slavs also have plenty of blondes.

Can you please tell me the names of these autistic genetic forums? I've recently picked up an interest in genetics and behaviour in different groups of people.

The Apricity is one, I know there were others but I can’t remember.

Do women from persecuted middle eastern tribes have a reputation for being ugly? I'm not just talking Jews who have obviously been through a particularly weird diasporic selection process, but rather those other small minorities that have hung around in the region for thousands of years. I think breeding beautiful people is actually pretty hard, much harder than breeding smarter people. Perfect features exaggerated just a little too much become very quickly grotesque. Some unions produce beautiful sons and ugly daughters, or vice versa, often precisely because features that work for one sex don't for the other. Then consider the different status red headed men versus red headed women have in contemporary discourse on attractiveness, for example.

For those who stayed within the tribe, I would say yes. A woman who looks too good would be easily able to catch the eye of any powerful man, and thus would likely use that to their advantage by marrying into the dominant tribes. A pretty Palestinian girl can get a fairly nice lifestyle upgrade by marrying into an Israeli family. And in the more distant past Jews in Roman Palestinia could do well by seducing a Roman and being part of a fairly rich Roman household rather than marrying a poor Jewish boy.

Generally in insular tribal communities the prettiest women don't marry out, they're just more likely to marry whoever the highest status men within the tribe at that time are. It's not like modern Copts send their prettiest women to marry Muslims even though they're still an arguably-sometimes-disfavored minority in Egypt today (it's complicated, I suppose). You never saw the prettiest black women marry white men in the US (if anything the most beautiful black women have always tended to have a preference for high-status black men). Asians date out at higher rates, but I'm skeptical that beautiful Asian women are more likely to have a white husband than their less attractive peers. It's an interesting topic.

Are mail-order-brides selected for being prettier than average in their home countries?

From what I've seen, they aren't. Sugar babies are, but most mail-order brides I've seen were plain Janes marrying plain Joes of the same relative status.

My (very limited) experience is the opposite. I know two, now older, Filipina mail order brides, one of whom I knew when she first came over here. She was quite pretty, tall, thin, and is, probably not insignificantly, either half or quarter Spanish (I forget which). She has a number of other female relatives who became mail order brides, and I’m guessing they were probably similarly attractive. I don’t know what my other mail order bride acquaintance looked like when she was young, but her daughters are both attractive, if a bit short, so I’m guessing she was good-looking when young as well.

I think this ties into the distinction @orthoxerox touches on between mail-order brides and sugar babies, or something like it. For example, is Melania a 'mail order bride'? In a way, she's a Slavic woman from a poor country who married an old fat American for (we presume) financial reasons. But, on the other hand, Trump was a billionaire and could easily have a found a pretty American 25 years younger to marry, as many of his peers did and do. At the same time, one could just as easily imagine Melania marrying some super-rich Slovenian. Marrying a billionaire is hypergamous for someone of any nationality. The mail order bride phenomenon distinctly captures 'average' Western men marrying women from much poorer countries. Similarly, if a handsome and successful Western guy who could date pretty women of his background and class happens to marry a pretty Filipina he meets online, is this a mail order bride scenario? Again, not really, I'd say.

Are they? My extensive 90 Day Fiancé viewership doesn’t suggest so.

Yeah, that’s what I’m asking, I genuinely don’t know. Every mail order bride I’ve met in person has been old enough that she’s not turning heads anymore even if she was when she walked down the aisle.

I have no doubt mail order bride sites advertise ‘most beautiful women of Ukraine’ or whatever, it’d be kind of dumb not to. But are Ukrainian women who become mail order brides on average more attractive than ones who stay home? No doubt this is complicated substantially by heavy use of makeup in photographs taken for the obvious data sources(that is, the mail order bride sites themselves).

This seems like an important datapoint to check on your argument with Maiqthetrue.

Great article.

I'm reading Virgil, and I'm thinking a lot about the Aenied as a primal legendary record of a kind of migratory war that was familiar in history right up to, in some ways, the Age of Discovery: the loser in a one regional war is driven out and forced to migrate to a less developed region, and because the loser is used to competing in a more developed/vicious/effective form of warfare they conquer the new region very effectively. Carlin's line about the Mongols attacking the west being like Brooks Robinson playing baseball like he came down from a higher league.

We see this throughout Roman and Classical history. The Goths, the Cimbri and Teutones, the Magyars, the Huns, these were all losers driven out of the wilderness by presumably even stronger and more ferocious rivals, who come on the scene in the civilized world and are immediately deadly. The barbarian warriors who invade civilization were sometimes Chinggis' who manage to unite the barbarians into a unified confederation, but they are more often the worst of the barbarians at barbarian warfare, driven out of their homes and forced to migrate, forced to travel south and fight.

What the Aenied reveals is that the Romans themselves perceived that they were of this same lineage! The Trojan exiles, lead by Aeneas, are the losers in the Trojan War, but noblest portion of the Trojan remnant the ones who will not submit to slavery or die in despair, they are forced into exile. They travel to Italy, a barely civilized backwater at the time, and despite arriving in exile, bedraggled and half dead from years of wandering, they run the table. Half the locals immediately rally to the obvious power and prowess of Aeneas, to the technology and wealth he shows and to the prowess in battle he is known for; or maybe the way Tlaxcala became nobles for allying with Cortes to settle scores. The rest, despite playing on their home court, against a handful of exiles who already got trashed for decades by the Greeks, get demolished. The Trojan strain becomes dominant genetically and culturally.

Speaking of Cortes, is the Age of Discovery the last and final and best of these examples? Christendom lost the long struggle with Islam, giving ground over decades and centuries in the series of wars that occupied the history of Byzantium. It was after these losses that Europe took to the western seas. Unable to defeat Islam, they turned West and Came Down From A Higher League, they conquered the weak and built empires that would develop and turn and subjugate the Islamic world.

The Age of Discovery was started by the Spanish and Portuguese who didn't lose against Islam but had actually just completed the Reconquista by destroying the Emirate of Granada

The pressures that sent trade missions West and South were the result of Christian failures to retake Eastern territories and reopen trade routes going East.

It's a more edge case analogy, but I do think it's an interesting dynamic to think about.

But literal elite overproduction in Iberia played a huge role as well. Castile, Aragon and Portugal had too many nobles and too little land to support them. Invading Morocco was their original plan, but the rulers were on the lookout for additional outlets of this pent-up power, so they would sponsor various half-crazy proposals to sail out there and find something worth invading.

Oh there are a number of factors to be considered. But there was a definite dynamic of losing control of the Mediterranean trade and seeking alternatives.

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 optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


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.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats