Hey everybody. This is James Lindsay. You're listening to New Discourse's Bullets, where I give a short bullet point like summary of a single topic relevant to woke that we need to understand so we can beat it.

And today I want to talk about this concept of the Mott and Bailey, which I think I've covered before. Maybe I didn't do a bullet about the Mott and Bailey, but we'll let this be the

introduction. But I actually want to talk about a different variation on the Mott and Bailey

that I'm going to call the Nested or Iterated Mott and Bailey strategy I'm going to call the nested or iterated Mott and Bailey strategy.

And it requires kind of multiple people, not necessarily coordinated, but maybe coordinating

together in order to pull it off.

And let me reiterate, not necessarily coordinated.

I got this idea just for full credit from the very insightful, very intelligent guy who goes by Entropyrian on X.

You should look him up and follow him.

This is a brilliant way to understand something.

But let me briefly explain the Mott and Bailey rhetorical strategy. A lot of people

mistakenly call it a fallacy. It is not a fallacy. It is a strategy. The technical way of

describing that strategy would be called strategic equivocation. So when you equivocate, what you do

is you bounce back and forth between two understandings of something,

and to do so strategically would be strategic equivocation, or what's called the Mott and Bailey

rhetorical strategy. The Mott and Bailey Rhetorical Strategy is identified with postmodern activism,

linguistic games played by postmodernists who are not interested in truth, but think

that all dialogue is an assertion of or combat for power. This technique, the Mott and Bailey,

was named by a philosopher at Oxford, who is really pretty interesting, named Nicholas Shackle.

He explained it for the first time in 2005 in a paper titled, If I Remember Right, on the vacuity, meaning the emptiness, the vacuity

of postmodern methodology. So he saw this as a postmodernist methodology that is actually empty of real content.

It is a malicious or strategic language game being played in order to steal power from people.

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