Strep Strobe
Under the gaze of a pulsar, men live in stop motion
Waiter, there is a Duckstack in my soup
Welcome new readers (I would like to believe all my readers are new readers. You have your whole life ahead of you.) I am glad you are here. If I was to describe you, I would use adjectives like “crazy”, “precocious”, and “important”, all of these describing your physical features, though I would perhaps use them again when describing you spiritually. You are somewhere between three and twelve feet high, and you think about yourself in the first person. Beautiful.
Anyway, I have a gift for you. It is a coupon for a free subscription to the hit newsletter The Duckstack, which you are currently reading, for free. Punch the coupon to read every other Duckstack for free also, and if you punch ten of these you will have exhausted the supply of Duckstack emails (please do not hog this therefore)
Who are Motte and Bailey?
Motte and Bailey, what a couple characters those are
There was a term coined on the internet a little while called “The Motte and Bailey” which is basically a rhetorical strategy enabling an argument loser to retreat to a more easily defended premise when their normal arguments start to fail.
As you can see, if a bunch of guys start killing you, you can put everyone in the wooden birthday cake to make the invaders lives more miserable (invaders hate climbing stairs1). Arguing this way is normal, because most people haven’t really thoroughly vetted most of their opinions, so when you start getting pressed about what you believe then you land on more basic and reasonable frameworks, which end up being a bit different than the less reasoned opinions you hold. As a simple example of this, most abortion advocates support elective abortions, but when arguing with a conservative, they will rhetorically “retreat” to the bailey of “what about rapes and incest and certain death". A very different position, but one much more comfortable to defend.
This can create a sort of parallax effect, where everyone is living in a world with all these characteristics and especially full of advocates for all these insane things, but when you try to poke holes in it the reasoning doesn’t stretch far enough to justify the insanity, and you feel like "the other side” is just lying or trolling you. But this effect goes both ways- those in the bailey sincerely feel like you are overreacting, seeing ghosts, or misrepresenting them. Neither party is being intentionally dishonest (usually2).
So bridging the gap in this sort of discourse can be as simple as pointing out the Motte and the Bailey exist. As an example, while my son Jethro was in the hospital receiving chemotherapy, a lot of hospital staff wore “pride” paraphernalia, with various LGBT slogans on it. It was LGBT month so you can imagine it was pretty ubiquitous, I suspect all staff had been encouraged to display something or another.
And I remember a member of one of the hospital sub-sub administration teams came in, sort of a “patient morale specialist” type role, and he was like “what are you feeling about our hospital and our teams as a parent, do you have any feedback” type comments at the end of his visit, he was very insistent, so I was like “well, the pride stuff is kind of an issue for me” and I remember he was not offended, in fact he was very confused. Because in his mind, he was wearing this stuff to “show support” for alienated kids, and he didn’t see it as a general thing. And I was explaining to him that a non-negligible portion of rainbow logo-wearers would be happy to “educate” my kid and distribute to him “materials”, but I didn’t want my kid being encouraged to “experiment”, and I heavily resented the possibility of having to explain adult sexual psychosis to my two year old. I worded this all in HR therapy-speak, of course, not so blunt as I put it here and I didn’t say half of what I felt, just that there was a public aspect to LGBT that made me very uncomfortable which was way beyond the mere “kids feeling lonely” tagline that he had been given in his HR training.
Because in the end, you don’t really choose what message you send, right? I love confederate flags, being southern by ancestry and having spent a lot of well-loved time there3. But my wife doesn’t want me to put up a confederate flag, because our neighbors will think I want to enslave blacks. Likewise I explained to this low-level administrator that rainbow pins and buttons make me uncomfortable because I have seen them send a very different message. And he was like, blown away. The main vibe I got from him was entranced, like he had never even considered the possibility that he was making a statement.
I think this means that a lot of “business ethics” have gone down the toilet. It used to be that you could have all kinds of worldviews, but you generally wouldn’t bring them to work- not up front like that. But with all these trainings, people are encouraged to put their most divisive and conflict-driven opinions at the forefront under the guise of authenticity. They say (I have literally been told this) “bring your whole self to work”. Which seems kind of demonic in my opinion, like I’m selling my soul to this company, adopting my coworkers as equal to my family, and viewing pecking out spreadsheets as equal to my hobbies. But a good social order usually has manners to partition intimacy levels, because working out the difference between my stance and your stance on kony 2012 just takes a lot of time and energy, may not be possible, and isn’t really necessary to helping each other, laughing together, or empathizing with each other.
One of the reasons to wear uniforms in war is to mark yourself as a target- I’m in the game, I consent to being shot at4. You might say “why would I do this” but its so that civilians don’t get caught in the fire. It is a deeply chivalrous thing to do, and there’s a lot of pride in it. But in the HR age, everyone is in uniform all the time, but not everybody wants to be shot at. This is a recipe for resentment, and in the internet age it isn’t possible to present your opinions as separate from yourself5, between doxing and all of these other incentives, partitioning is impossible, and as a result, freedom of speech is impossible also.
Shy Fly
Something like a shoo-fly6
We’ve got a new fly here, which we’re calling a shy fly. The key changes are that instead of buzzing around annoyingly it plays dead whenever you are around and instead of landing on your food it politely waits for you to leave the room in embarrassment of its disgusting lifestyle. We hope you enjoy the new shy fly.
Historrrrrrrry
Our toddler overnight started putting together full sentences, such as “here you go, I give it to you” and then headbutting you
Explaining jump starting the car to Jethro: “So this battery connects to the car’s battery, and gives it enough juice to start the car.” Jethro: “Like Gatorade?”
The toddler was giving kisses to mama, and then he noticed that his “kisses” tend to be a bit slobbery. he looked down at the drool puddle and said: “uh oh, kisses makea mess!”
The toddler, picking his nose: “Oh no, boogers. Gross!”
Jethro: “mosquitos are the worst bug ever, they get your blood from you!” perceptive
Reification of Names
Etymologies for some common male names7. While the science8 is always changing, the best research we have currently made up suggests female names simply do not have etymologies (we’ll do girl names next week).
Alfred is a name derived from the word “alfredo”, a type of white pasta sauce. As such, this is a name only given to blondes9
Rich is a nickname, short for Richard, which is short again for “Richardest”. Each name corresponding to increasing proportions of wealth, of course. Few people indeed can pull of “Richardest” on their drivers license.
Rob - Same thing, except for stealing things from people.
Carter - commonly understood as the name for the people who do the carts, its actually a contraction of carpenter, the people who make the carts. Of course, most carters are no longer carpenters today, which is a consequences of microplastics inhibiting blood talent.
Dustin: A type of vacuum cleaner
Cameron: Another contraction, this time between camera, and on. According to tradition, Camerons as babies are born with camera in hand, to take pictures of their astonished mothers. “how did that get there” it was grown the same way the baby was.
Jack: This name dates to a popular medieval game called Jacks, where a man named Jack would bludgeon peasants and take their stuff.
Kevin: an ancestral misspelling of a type of temperature.
David: This is a girls name and has no etymology
Matthias: Tribes of mathematicians were called “Matthies”, so this surname is passed down to those with good logical acumen.
Logan: A latin word for “the act of lumberjacking”
Benjamin: A name given only by rockstars.
Rory: A distinctly priests name, meaning “one who prays the rosary a lot”.
Joseph: the suffix “seph” is derived from the latin “seraphim” Joseph is a seraphim named Joe.
Derek: Wrecker.
Cole: Bad on Christmas.
Jesse: “I see” in french
Tanner: Sunburned
Bryan: Brye is a type of mispelled cheese, and the suffix “an” means “currently”. Currently Cheese.
Aaron: In a town full of Rons they were mostly interchangable, which gave rise to calling them just “A Ron.”
Bryndler: I don’t know, but it has sort of an arsonist feel, don’t you think?
Brad: Names derived from Brad (Bradley, Brady, Brad, Bradderton) without fail have one thing in common. The word “Brad”. Brads are historically Bradders, and you can really never have too much of those.
Jeffery: A name meaning “fast” in american.
Mike: Derived from microphone, Mikes are well known orators and diplomats.
Bob: Destined for greatness, flawless, handsome, indefatigable, loyal, loving, humble, and “honored”. It also means “float”, like that thing on a fishing line
If you were an invader you would hate climbing stairs too.
I firmly believe in assuming nobody knows what they’re doing, let alone what you’re trying to do
Its also super cool. Top tier flag design, and symbolizes rejection of tyranny and a general independence of spirit that no other flag can properly convey except maybe a Japanese kamikaze flag, but I’m not putting that on our house
make sure to work out proper safe words with the enemy and sign the waiver forms each time you engage their army
through anonymity or even just shooting the breeze, the internet seals everything in stone, forever
I don’t think this list covers all male names but I think it covers most of them
we do science like you wouldn’t believe
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