#motte and bailey maybe?

[unconventiononthelawofthesea]

I've also never actually seen the reference to an IRL ass-kicking actually mean "I think those are fighting words"

[iisthepopeoffools]

The irony that there are so many terminally online primitivists.

[max1461]

There is a common motte-and-bailey argument applied to paper over expressions of dissatisfaction with life in industrial society.

The motte is "before industrial production of vaccines and antibiotics, infant mortality rates were extremely high, and this was an inordinate tragedy that can now thankfully be prevented".

The bailey is "your claim to personal dissatisfaction with being a (post-)industrial wage laborer is invalid, it is false that you would feel more stimulated or satisfied (etc.) by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle (etc.) than by your current lifestyle".

Look, I don't know what type of lifestyle would make random internet posters feel the most stimulated or the most satisfied. I don't know if it's running around in the woods or working at a desk job or being a rich failchild. I have no fucking clue and neither do any of us, maybe not even them! Although obviously I suspect they have a better approximation of the answer than any of us do.

But what I do feel confident in saying is that 90% of people complaining about industrial society online are not anti-civ. They're not saying "let's get rid of vaccines". They're saying "boy this wage labor shit makes me unhappy, and the way people used to live looks more rewarding". I don't know if they're right, in any individual case, and also people have a lot of misconceptions about how we used to live that are worth correcting. But I can say with great confidence that no important aspect of this discussion hinges on historical child mortality rates or vaccine production. Those are relevant points when discoursing with a small set of radicals, and not with the average tumblr user romanticizing pre-industrial life.

It is not a law of the universe that when one thing gets better, everything else gets better too. Maybe that cottagecore girl or whatever actually would feel more fulfilled living off the difficult physical labor of a pre-industrial farm. Is that so hard to imagine? It seems straightforwardly plausible to me.

I think a lot of the frustration that people have with this is that the cottagecore girls and the running-around-in-the-woods guys present these ostensible lifestyle preferences with a moralizing tone. Like "you're all such sheep for wanting to live a modern life". And I get that that's annoying, but I'll point out that their discourse-foils are also doing much the same thing in reverse: "you're all such fools for thinking you'd enjoy working on a farm more than in an office". I don't know, maybe they would! I don't think they are necessarily being fools!

[river-taxbird]

JK Rowling has denied Nazi crimes against trans people on twitter.

People have been calling her a holocaust denier for denying the nazis targeted trans people. Obviously she thinks this because she doesn't believe that trans people really exist, so nothing would convince her, and more attention has been drawn to this by her trying to silence a critic calling her a holocaust denier using legal threats.

So should we call her a holocaust denier? Maybe not. By doing so, it makes it sound like she is denying the holocaust as a whole, (As nazis and people aligned with them are a fan of doing.) That is an easy statement for nazis and terfs to argue with.

However, I would like to propose an alternative. In 2022, German phd student and terf Marie-Luise Vollbrecht pulled the same stunt on twitter that JKR is pulling now, and was accused of "denying nazi crimes." For this, she filed a lawsuit against the people accusing her, and the court ruled against her. It was deemed that she was, in fact, denying nazi crimes.

JKR is a big fan of Motte and Bailey arguments, where you try to hide a hard to defend argument (That she hates trans people and is lobbying to make it illegal to be trans) inside an easy to defend argument, (That she is just trying to protect women and girls you guys, seriously.) She doesn't say what she means, so I think when criticizing her, we should say what we mean.

By calling her a holocaust denier publicly, you open yourself up to "Well she is not denying the holocaust happened, just that trans people were involved." which when it comes to terfs is an argument you can't win because they will never acknowledge trans people even exist as a meaningful political group, and by taking the very specific thing she is doing and generalizing it as holocaust denial, is that not also somewhat of a Motte and Bailey?

But, if you say "She is denying the Nazi crimes against trans people," what argument can be made against that? A german court decided for the first time in 2022 that the nazis were, in fact, targeting trans people as a separate class from gay men, and by denying that fact, you are "denying nazi crimes," and that's an opinion you could defend in a court of law.

[patternsinnoise]

can you elaborate on the stealth deradicalization unit you have to teach?

Okay, so, I've been a composition teacher since 2016. Up until last May, I taught at a small college in a rural area that serviced first generation and ex-military students. Many of them were relatively fine, leaving aside structural issues with the military.

A few of them weren't -- getting into Q-anon related bullshit. I didn't want to read that stuff, and I was a bit troubled like this. Given that critical thinking is part of my remit for these classes, I worked on this.

So here's the basics of the critical thinking unit I used:

1) I only rarely directly pushed back on anything. People clam up if directly opposed, especially if you're in a position of authority. Keeping them engaged is key.

2) I tried to frame everything that I use in practical terms, even outside of academia. For example, you should learn research skills to make smart decisions for voting and consumer choices. Critical thinking is useful not just in general, but specifically to counter moral panics.

2a) I might take a stop through talking about cults on the way to Moral Panics. I try to emphasize that it's often very intelligent people who fall for these: it's not about being smart, it's about learning habits of questioning -- I might prime them for this by fitting the afterword to J. Michael Straczynski's comic book Midnight Nation into a prior unit where it fits.

3) moral panics are fun and interesting to learn about, especially when the alternative is learning semicolon placement.

4) I run through the satanic panic of the 1980s, which is old enough that a lot of the people who I teach don't directly remember it and it seems ridiculous. However, we can point to wrongdoings by both conservative and liberal actors, so that also avoids alienating the largely conservative audience. It's also similar enough to Q-anon that it can begin to make them question it.

5) I limit this to one -- maybe two -- days, and then turn to discussing rhetoric soon thereafter. So, while they're beginning to question things, I can introduce them to common techniques used to manipulate people alongside the techniques they need to do their course work. For example, I can teach them how to recognize a motte-and-bailey argument or some of the more common logical and rhetorical fallacies.

This is... mostly it. I've got to go to bed so I can get up early to teach, but if you find yourself stuck with a position of authority, the trick -- as far as I can see it -- is to not engage them on the conspiratorial topic and then offer legitimate rewards for doing legitimate work that depends on skills and mindsets antithetical to the set of beliefs in question.

Evidence: I want to believe in UFOs and high strangeness, but I've been trained to teach research skills and all of that stuff is so poorly done that it offends my sensibilities. I'm still open to hearing about it, but I've been disappointed every time.

[transgenderer]

okay so i know the atheism posting is tedious to everyone but i need to get this out of my system: any discussion about whether perfectly general god in the abstract exists bears essentially no relevance to religion as it is practiced. because like...people dont worship perfectly genetic god! they worship some specific god (or gods)! and like...theres no evidence for one of those over any other! whether "god" exists is a total red herring, its whether *this specific god* exists, in which case like. well, you have to draw on some much more specific argumentation dont you! its classic motte and bailey

(i think if you want to believe in a specific god you can do that rationally, but only if you have a specific experience i generally refer to as revelation, where your brain asserts facts about god persistently and with the same certainty-level and directness as it asserts that like, your hands exist. however this is a weird sort of evidence because its totally non-transferable, it only applies to you. ive discussed it before. also kind of sus if your revelation mathces anyone else)

of course, you could believe in god but not know any of their traits, or try to derive their traits from the choices they evidently made about the world (loves beetles and hydrogen, evidently), but this would bear almost no resemblance to any extant religion! i mean, from the evidence, maybe god hates us and shouldnt be worshipped at all! (le sad demiurge). certainly any specific rituals are unjustified. you could still do them, but cmon. youre doing them because you like doing rituals. not for god

[creature-wizard]

Is there a specific word/concept for "dogwhistles, only positive?" Because between hearing about TERFs plotting to put "terfs don't interact" on their own damn posts, and the Theosophical Society having a literal "Freedom of Thought Statement" claiming that "we don't consider Blavatsky or anyone else our sole authority, so we really do want you to think for yourself! Honest!!!1", I've realized I'm pretty damn susceptible to bigots repackaging my moral compass into bait for their propaganda.

I can't think of one that's specific to this exact thing, but I can think of a few things that could be related to the kind of thing you're doing.

The term "bait and switch" is used to describe when someone dishonestly offers a product they don't actually have; then when they have the customer's attention, try to sell them something else. Maybe something like "value baiting" could describe what you're seeing?

There's also the motte-and-bailey defense (also called the "motte-and-bailey fallacy," but I find that it's very often just part of DARVO) where people proposing or advocating something objectionable pretend they just want something that sounds fairly harmless, even reasonable. For example, "we want to eliminate all [insert minority here]" is the kind of sentiment that turns most people off and attracts a lot of criticism, so when it inevitably does you'll often see the people who hold it "retreat" to a more defensible position such as "we just want to protect the children!", "we just want to protect our culture!", or "we just want to worship God in peace!"

There are some cases where something that might appear to be value baiting is genuinely what someone believes. For example, many conspiracy theorists often believe that they are the only free thinkers in the world, and believe that if everyone else was set free from manipulation and mind control, they would believe exactly as the conspiracy theorists do. There's usually a lot of Dunning-Kruger effect at work here, because they often just don't know enough to really comprehend why anyone would or could disagree with them unless they were brainwashed, or a brainwasher.

This is all I've got. Maybe some of my followers have suggestions?

[brazenautomaton]

I don't know what kind of prophetic vision you must have had when you made that post about strawmen that's become a meme, because my gosh your blog somehow attracts responders that fit that behavior exactly.

As an actual response to your post, I've got two (kinda pointless) thoughts.

One, your commentary on how people can say verifiably false statements about corporations without being challenged reminded me of an old forum thread on how 9-11 truthers use vague and logically valid but not sound statements to appear reasonable. E.g. "how could a terrorist cell operating out of a bunch of desert caves fly an airplane the way they did?" despite there being verifiable proof the hijackers lived in western cities and literally went to flight school in the US. Their statement being internally valid (from a layman's understanding) lets them motte-and-bailey when you point out how unsound the statement is in context. Internet communists are essentially these people except they somehow got an argumentative majority.

Two, assuming what I just said is true, I am completely stumped as to how these people became the majority at all. Any explanation I come up with for why, in the early stages of this rhetoric on the internet, nobody would just...point out the lie and undercut the whole talking point requires the communist's statement to already be the majority opinion/moral high ground. Thus, the rhetorical apparatus to debate/criticize communist talking points (and be taken seriously) had to be removed before these talking points started invading every space. Or, to use your term, the ability to ignore the rules had to have been established before communist talking points took over the internet, which I would assume would necessitate interference from outside the internet. I just don't know where that interference came from.

Apologies if this is an unreadable wall of text, I'm on mobile. Your posts on this topic are very thought provoking.

because communism is extremely flattering to the biases of a certain type of person, and that person is also very often the type of person who is an Opinion Leader and Taste Maker and who decides what Is Talked About, so communism has always gotten a free pass, always had things bent over to excuse it. if you weren't a conservative you always had the obligation to view communists as "maybe taking it too far" instead of "murderously violent and always wrong." the chattering class and social elite were covering up and excusing all kinds of communist revolutionary violence in the 70s because oh their hearts are in the right place, what are you senator mccarthy?

it's supposed to be laughable that anyone would complain about hillary clinton being close to that dude from weatherman when like -- yes a communist revolutionary is a thing to be concerned about! if the right wing was one tenth as accepting of fascists as the left were of communists, these people would be planting bombs in government buildings, but it's always okay for communists.

communism is an ideology of pure intellectual laziness, and it is the exact shape of the intellectual laziness that people with inherent social power have. it's too flattering to them to ever reject.

[came-out-of-the-coffin-desisted]

writing dragon age fanfiction is so so so so hard for me because every time i spot another historical inaccuracy that’s like “i don’t care that it’s fantasy they have the same level of technology this is WRONG” i have to have a moment of like. “kaed NO ONE ELSE will EVER care about this. you watch ‘ranking period dramas on corset accuracy both in construction and writing’ videos on youtube for entertainment normal people simply do not give a FUCK about medieval castle layouts!”

and yet this cycle continues, because the dragon age devs so so so so clearly DID research but they did BAD research and it HAUNTS me. like WHYYYYY is there only one courtyard that isn’t even really a courtyard in castle cousland WHY is the “main hall” huge with no furniture while the great hall “dining room” is tiny as fuck and in a horrible to access spot WHY are there no ovens in the kitchens where the FUCK do they bake the breaaaad!! like ok fine cool servants get beds in thedas i’ll bite. that fucks hard, actually! but WHY are there more servant rooms than rooms for visiting nobles do you honestly think anybody in the middle ages fucking had servant rooms???? they slept on the FLOOR in the GREAT HALL! and WHY is there a fucking library and a ‘treasury’ (which what the fuck is THAT there should be a DON-JON in there you locked your valuables in the TOWER at the TOP, not in ONE room centrally located on the first floor with TWO guards!!) like i KNOW it was for level design i KNOW it was but oh my fucking g-d it’s gonna KILL ME to write out creeping through corridors when there WERE NO CORRIDORS! like look at this. look at this.

castle cousland: stupid, awful design, honestly they kinda asked to be coup’ed with their garbage unsurvivable castle that supposedly nobody sieges regularly even though it’s literally a death trap. there is ONE main exit, no way to trap your enemies, and only one official guard post that i can see. fuck awful.

harlech castle in wales: it took 115 years for someone to successfully take this castle, and it’s withstood COUNTLESS sieges, you can go visit it right the hell now if you go to wales (not at all getting into the evilness of the english building castles in wales, that’s not the point i’m trying to make.) see how the outside makes it so that even if your enemies breach the walls, to actually reach anyone important they have to survive the volleys of arrows from the ramparts? and then presumably kill everyone ON the ramparts, or the minute you go to open a door or try to drag someone out, you’re going to get shot full of arrows. that’s after breaching TWO heavy doors (which would require a battering ram both times) which would wake up the entire castle LONG before they got anywhere NEAR the heir to the castle’s wife and child.

and before somebody says “oh well kaed maybe you just don’t know your castle building periods very well” think again. i know my castle building periods. that style above is concentric (harlech castle’s initial construction was finished in 1289 and was one of the first finished castles in england in this style,) which came after the keep and bailey style, which came after the motte-and-bailey style, which came after the burh (which arguably WASN’T a castle but whatever,) etc. there are no fortified castles in english history that look like castle cousland, because it’s fucking indefensible. now, this does lead to the question of “oh, well, what is the timeline for the game, maybe there’s something you missed!” so let’s examine the time period of origins:

at the very, very latest, origins could be based off of the BEGINNING of the british “wars of the roses” (the civil wars between the various members of the house plantagenet) which began in the 1450s— this is personally what /i/ think origins is based off of, for a couple reasons. 1) trevelyan was a real person— g.m. trevelyan was a british historian who wrote about the wars of the roses, and in one instance there’s a quote of his the devs almost verbatim used for the design of the free marches: “the Wars of the Roses were to a large extent a quarrel between Welsh Marcher Lords, who were also great English nobles, closely related to the English throne…” they ixnayed the part about the marcher lords being ferelden nobles, i imagine because it was too complicated, but trevelyan? marcher lords? a close relationship with this country? (i.e. like somewhere that might take in their refugees after a catastrophe?) cmon. 2) because ferelden is fucking huge and the histories are kinda weird, because they aren’t 1 for 1, i’m gonna say that we have to use the norman conquest of england as our unification date. in other contexts i wouldn’t try to argue this, but in this one, i’m saying 1066 is the unification date of the anglo-saxon kingdoms into england. calenhad gives us a hard unification date for ferelden— the first landsmeet was in 5:42 exalted, ergo origins is 388 years later. the wars of the roses started in 1455, 389 years after the norman conquest ended. 3) the wars of the roses happened because of a succession crisis— admittedly, these two succession crises are very, very different, but there are definitely parallels between loghain and henry vi and alistair and edward iv. henry vi was crowned at a young age (loghain largely ruled for maric at various points in his life, starting when he was very young,) and was very ineffectual— he suffered from an unknown mental illness which made him extremely unstable and unable to rule for large periods of time. loghain, on the other hand, ruled when the /theirins/ weren’t stable, so you argue he had the opposite— meanwhile, his policies WEREN’T sustainable, whatever you might think of him. loghain is too shaped by his own experiences to be a truly good leader, and by the time his rule/anora’s rule is threatened by cailan, he’s sacrificed enough of his principles that he’s willing to commit atrocities (notably, margaret of anjou ruled during the worst parts of her husband’s mental instability, which again could apply to loghain OR anora, as they ruled fairly jointly after a certain point.) edward iv was the son of richard of york, who was eligible for the throne at a very young age (18 to alistair’s 19) because his father was dead. he was coaxed and led into battle by his cousin, the earl of warwick (also known as the kingmaker— sound like a protagonist you might know?) that’s about where the similarities end, but that’s largely because alistair is a grey warden— if he weren’t, he’d probably be able to have kids and end the question of succession. but he can’t, which, assuming the devs eventually remember, WILL lead to another civil war. hence why i say this is at the BEGINNING of the wars of the roses.

another option that could be argued but makes much less sense and i have no evidence for is that alistair has similarities to edward ii (second son who only became king because his brother died, married a more powerful woman to consolidate power, not very good at ruling, no offense to alistair,) but that still puts origins at like 1307-1327. in either case, they would have been using concentric castles— and given what time period castle cousland was originally built in, it would have been built as a motte-and-bailey, which would NOT have lasted four hundred years. so the castle had to have been rebuilt, and bryce cousland would have had to update that rebuilt castle, because no one lived in it during the orlesian occupation. so where the hell does this winding, weird multi-level design come from?

i GUESS— and this is SO charitable— they could have designed castle cousland based off of a country house design from the mid 1500s, but none of them look like that, either. they’re exclusively rectangular, for one thing, and one of the huge bragging rights of owning one was that they weren’t fortified— they came into fashion during a period of relative stability under the tudor rule, when it was considered guache and maybe even treasonous to build a fortified castle. ferelden is NOWHERE NEAR a period of stability, if anything at the end of origins they’re entering their greatest period of INstability, given what happens in inquisition, and that no matter who ends up on the throne, there’s no way for them to have children. so there’s NO way this castle is a country house, or inspired by one.

leaving us with the final conclusion that a) the game devs definitely did do research into the time period because i can fairly directly trace a line between the event i think inspired origins and the plot, but they didn’t do enough research to figure out what the everloving fuck the BUILDINGS looked like. so these castles make no fucking sense and can’t possibly be called historically accurate even with the fantasy defense, and b) i care WAAAY too much about this for somebody who isn’t even a medieval historian. my area of expertise is the paleolithic, i have no clue why this bugs me so bad i spent four fucking hours writing this post.

[sabakos]

Ok maybe i should use terminology y'all understand. Saying you derive all of your knowledge from sense-perception is a "motte-and-bailey" where you can reject the testimony of others based on that testimony not being derived from your own personal sense-perception (the easy to attack from position), but then turn around and compromise your own sense-perception with the testimony of others whenever it prevents you from believing something stupid (the easy to defend position).

Ergo, you need to do more work to reject others claims than trying to claim you are "empirical," a word that either means a commitment to a position you do not hold, or is a purely masturbatory nonsense word you use to talk about how smart you are for being correct all the time.

[wuggen]

I have this like tiny little phrase stuck in my head, it's a feminine voice with a very british accent saying "an old Norman motte and bailey," and it's driving me fucking insane because I'm so sure it's from some piece of media but I can't fucking figure out what the fuck it's from!!! I don't even know what media I would have been hearing in which an old Norman motte and bailey would even be a topic that came up!!! It feels like the context was like talking about something that wasn't an old Norman motte and bailey that was built on an old Norman motte and bailey?? I wanna say it was a video game maybe??? I almost wanna say it was Witcher 3 but that can't fucking be right, the Normans didn't fucking exist in that world!! I'm losing my fucking mind

[vergess]

Okay. I do think you’ve had this argument before with people that weren’t me and said things you’re reacting to right now, but that I never said.

Obviously reading and writing that book isn’t the same thing as pedocriminality. Who said that? I hope you understand that when I said "that’s pedophilia", I was talking about the content of the book, not any living person involved with it…

As for what it means, the first definition I found online contradicts yours. As in pedophilia being the act of having sexual feelings towards children, not necessarily acting on it (that I would define as pedocriminality). What happens in The Host falls under that specific definition, and it happens to be one I agree with. It doesn’t mean it’s the right one, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong, it means maybe your opinion on the matter is not shared by everyone.

I see that you’re very upset though, and I’m sorry. I have no idea who you are apart that one post I disagreed with, and it’s the first time I interact with your content. Obviously it’s something very personal and upsetting to you and I sincerely hope that you’re okay.

Fuck off and die.

God fucking damn.

Let's say I meet your terms and we separate the word 'pedophilia' from the word 'child rape,' which is a motte and bailey that people use to pretend they're 'just' talking about a mental illness when they're damned well accusing you of sex crimes against children.

Let's do that.

Pedophilia is a compulsive attraction to sexually immature, prepubescent children.

Being romantically drawn to a sexually mature adult and then not having sex with her for years afterwards is NOT PEDOPHILIA EITHER.

Jesus fuck you people just say whatever pops into your fucking heads and goalposts be damned.

The Host novel has NO GODDAMN PEDOPHILIA IN IT AND READING IT DOES NOT MAKE YOU A PEDOPHILE OR A CHILD RAPIST

How the FUCK you cannot tell that is beyond me. Do you fucking think people who watch Marvel movies are all secretly superheroes too?

What the fuck is wrong with you.

Go away. Do not fucking come back. I am not interested in trying to make someone who thinks a FICTIONAL NOVEL IN WHICH A WOMAN MEETS HER FUTURE HUSBAND AT AGE 17 MEANS READERS OF IT ARE PEDOPHLIC

[max1461]

Sorry if you've already made posts about this, but what's your opinion on the validity of universal grammar? I'm taking a syntax course and trying to figure out how to go into it.

I've written about most of my thoughts on this before in the #linguistics tag, but in summery: proponents of UG tend to do a motte-and-bailey between formulations of the idea that are trivially true and formulations that are totally unfalsifiable (with current technology).

In addition, UG is a hypothesis (or, perhaps more accurately, vague set of ideas) about cognition, while generative syntactic theories, properly speaking, are not. A particular generative-style analysis of a given language's syntax is theory (in the Popperian sense) which makes predictions about the corpus of all possible sentences in that language. These predictions can be directly tested by comparison to data. A "(generative) theory of syntax", on the other hand, is a model constraining which types of analysis are possible; as such it is a theory (in the Popperian sense) of language structure in that it makes predictions about what sorts of corpora it is possible for a natural language to have. This is literally what the "generative" in generative syntax refers to.

But generative syntactic theories are not theories of cognition, and are equipped with no apparatus to make predictions about cognition (beyond the very weak "any language structure generated by the theory must be cognitively possible for a human to use"). Chomskyans have a tendency to use ad hoc arguments to bridge the gap between purely generative predictions and conclusions about cognition, but this is not science.

Essentially, no theory of UG which is called such and which is in fact a theory of UG exists, to my knowledge. But I'm not a syntactician; maybe somebody out there has proposed one and I just haven't seen it.

[rotationalsymmetry]

Re:

yeah but also, there’s a billboard a couple blocks from where I live that literally says that being anti-Israel is being antisemitic, and given that this is the site of motte/bailey fallacies maybe it’s not paranoia/itself a form of antisemitism to wonder if someone’s meaning “antisemitism” as code for “being against Israel.”

Unfortunately.

[transgenderer]

Significant idea that just clicked for me: Imprecise statements are almost meaningless, precise true statements are very difficult to identify.

Let me unpack my meaning a little bit here. By precise I guess I mean a bit more like specific, something like "there is an effect, and it has something like this particular magnitude" or "x caused y, in the simple sense that x must occur for y to occur, and if x occurs y always occurs". I think it's fairly straightforward why these are difficult to identify. This is not to say that they are impossible to identify, in some sense the whole project of science is identifying them, and it's gotten pretty good at it, but if an answer seems to have been arrived at without much work, and is also very precise, one should be skeptical (although the conception of precise is important for this)

The other side is maybe particularly useful for me in particular. I love imprecise claims, because imprecise claims wear their ignorance on their sleeve, they say "I don't know, and I don't claim to know" up front. But nonetheless, I think there's a meaningful sense in which imprecise claims are almost meaningless. There are lots of ways you can consider the relationship between statements and word states, but one way I like is to imagine a statement as corresponding to the set of all possible worlds where a statement is true. A precise statement filters out a lot of worlds, leaving relatively few behind, while an imprecise statement doesn't. And a maximally imprecise statement doesn't filter out any worlds. So when I say an imprecise statement is almost meaningless, I'm trying to get at...the extent to which a statement resembles the empty statement, or a tautology.

Anyway I think what you should be imagining here is a set of tradeoff curves, where for a given set of evidence you have a spectrum of statements, with the very imprecise but very certain on one side and the very precise but very uncertain on the other. I think to me at least this helps characterize stuff like the Motte and bailey, starting in the bailey of the certain and imprecise and trying to slide along the curve to the precise without dropping your certainty or gaining a lot of evidence

[creature-wizard]

Value-baited, motte-and-baileyed anon here! Much appreciate your considered response. I've been working to detach from my former Theosophical circles ever since last year, after discovering your blog and CT's.

It hurts, but I've realized that before I can feel safe again I might have to discard all my esoteric books and tools and all the friends I've made from back then-- even including some professional connections, damn it. There's also a lingering fear that allowing myself to keep any little related gift or memento will somehow leave me vulnerable (energetically and/or otherwise) to being sucked back into their ranks. What are your thoughts?

Everyone's different, so I don't think there's any one single way to go about deconversion/deconstruction. That said, getting interests, hobbies, and friends who can keep you grounded is always a good place to start. And it's been my experience that studying actual science and history that debunks and precludes the woo is a good way to deprogram yourself and keep yourself grounded. And studying other forms of spirituality and learning to take them on their own terms, instead of the terms that a movement like this put them in, can also be very helpful because it helps reaffirm just how out of touch the movement is.

Maybe my followers have more advice?