Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
No bio...
User ID: 297
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Well I believe that you don't give people enough credit because they're part of your outgroup
Fair. People who hype genocidal warfare are indeed part of my outgroup.
and that your standards of what people are allowed caring about without being hypocritical
I do not think you understand what my standards of what people are "allowed" to care about are.
The idea that people feeling empathy for the plight of people who look like and feel like them is bad, empty or without meaning
This not what I believe.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I think you give too much credit. I don't believe people like that feel ordo amoris for anyone at all. It's not about concentric circles of affinity, it's about identifying an enemy and manufacturing a grievance. I might believe some people feel some faint amount of "ordo amoris" for distant white girls because they happen to be white, even if they otherwise hold them in contempt, but not when every other message is about how they're dirt. Oh, now you care because a Muslim touched them? No heat graph meme argument is going to make that convincing.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
The Rotherham girls are not his ingroup just because they're white. He constantly talks about what he thinks should happen to white people who are also not in his ingroup.
His feigned outrage over "European maidens" being besmirched by Muslims is because Muslims are doing the besmirching, not because he actually cares about victimized white girls. If it were Irish grooming gangs responsible, he might contrive some anti-Irish reason to wash the streets in blood (he's certainly flexible like that), but more likely he'd just find something despicable brown people are doing elsewhere.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I think he was actually closer to the mark there. You can see the hypocrisy when someone like KulakRevolt, for example, is calling for all of England to be burned down over the Rotherham gangs, as if he doesn't hold promiscuous fatherless girls from the lower classes in utter contempt himself. When all your grievances are formulated around tribal affiliations, you can argue that it's okay when we do it and bad when they do it, but you can't argue that you genuinely care about young girls being mistreated, and that sort of gives the game away when you're trying to convince people they should be outraged at rape and grooming when your actual objective is to stir hatred against your alien outgroup.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I second the suggestions below for Daniel Abraham's Dagger and the Coin series. (Daniel Abraham is one half of James S. A. Corey, the partnership that wrote The Expanse.)
In addition, you cannot go wrong with Adrian Tchaikovsky. The man is enormously prolific (like, Stephen King or Brandon Sanderson level prolific), but a much better writer than Sanderson, and he writes science fiction and fantasy equally well. His Shadows of the Apt series is ten books long, but I also love his Final Architects and Children of Ruin space operas.
You might check out Flames of Mira by Clay Harmon, but he's only up to two books. Ember Blade by Chris Wooding is also very good (and long), though much more traditional fantasy. Dreams and Shadows and Queen of the Dark Things by C. Robert Cargill if you like Dresden-style urban fantasy. Rob J. Hayes's The War Eternal starts out looking like it's going to be YA, but it really is not (and features the protagonist as a much older narrator looking back on what an idiot she was). Evan Winter's Rage of Dragons is also a good series but it is an unfinished trilogy at present. Both of the latter have very flawed protagonists in fucked-up societies, but I would not quite call them grimdark.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I don't know when any atomwaffenfront have marched in the US, but we've certainly had brownshirts, Klansmen, groypers, and whoever else is the rightist equivalent of "Globalize the Intifada" keffiya-wearers and tankies in Mao t-shirts, and Democratic boomers don't really march with them either.
You're just describing a difference in medium and frequency of the message. Republican activist groups with piles of money certainly exist, albeit not so much in academia. That you think LibsOfTikTok, TPUSA, and Project Veritas style "owning" is more credible and genuine just means they are on your side and leftist activists are not. Why is writing checks for ActBlue more unserious than buying TrumpCoins? Why is George Soros an archvillain but the Koch brothers were a cringeworthy leftist bogeyman and Elon Musk is just a buddy of the President? (If George Soros was handing out checks to people who showed up to vote in a state election, I cannot imagine your reaction being anything other than apoplectic.)
I don't see many people suddenly having their minds changed for them- I see a lot of leftists taking seriously trendy new ideas like men becoming women, but as I said, this seems no different than MAGAs who are all-in on Trump doing things they'd have considered abhorrent and un-American a few years ago (and some of whom were even Never Trumpers!).
They are the same picture.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Probably some people have forgotten when COVID was a racist conspiracy theory, just like some people have forgotten when they thought the vaccines were awesome and avoiding unnecessary public contact seemed reasonable. In general, though, I don't believe people actually download new updates and wipe the old ones. To the degree that some people are that, shall we say, malleable, I very much do not believe it's a left or right thing. Some people blow with the wind.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
This was an entertaining polemic, but you know, I could say the same thing about most broad political alliances, including those on the right. Now and then some Republicans will notice the cracks between atheist libertarians who want to legalize weed and don't have a problem with gay marriage but really hate taxes and foreigners, traditional American family values patriots, Jewish neocons who are pro-Israel and American empire, and the evangelical contingent who mostly want to ban abortion. But all will rally (somewhat uneasily) under the banner of a Reagan or (now) a Trump, and some will forget that five minutes ago family values and the Constitution were very important to them, and they'll all pretend they don't know the Andrew Tates and Repeal the 19th weirdos, let alone the ethnats. I know this is your conviction, that lefties are uniquely programmed and NPCed and just take marching orders from Leftism Central, but this is actually how all political machines work. The vast majority of all movements are divided into a tiny handful of True Believers, an even tinier handful of actual movers and shakers, and the vast herd who just sort of gets caught up in whatever tugs hardest on their sentiments.
I'll once again bang my "Read American history" drum. Machine politics in the 19th century were really something else (and yet also, extremely familiar). The Whigs (a coalition that really had nothing in common beyond hating Andrew Jackson, and eventually fell apart because you can only keep slaveowners and abolitionists together in one party for so long) are an illustrative lesson in political movements that incoherent if you stop to think about them for five minutes and yet persisted long enough to elect several presidents.
Your story about "Daily Kos grandmas" who literally don't remember what they used to believe in is of course nonsense (just like all those Never Trumpers who are now MAGAs do, in fact, remember what they used to believe in). People remember, they just rationalize it or else they develop coping mechanisms for the cognitive dissonance.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Watching @SecureSignals and @DaseindustriesLtd exchange vituperative personal attacks about who's the more disreputable ethno-nationalist is kind of an entertaining trainwreck, but nonetheless it is a trainwreck, collecting reports on both sides. Stop it, both of you. Dase, if you block someone, just block them, and refrain from goading finger-waggling about it.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
fwiw, I was on the fence about whether this post should be approved. First-time poster with a rather dry summary of a 2014, very academic book. Huh.
My first thought was that this was generated by an LLM, probably by someone establishing a new alt with innocuous posts. I realize that's somewhat uncharitable to you, @radar, but experience makes me suspicious of someone who appears out of nowhere to drop a post like this, with no introduction. There is nothing rule-breaking about the post itself (unless it was written by ChatGPT, and I'd be surprised if you admit it), but while we're going to leave the post up, if you keep posting things like this that tell us nothing about you and seem like an LLM could have written them, I will shadowban you.
This is one of the things I hate about the dawn of AI. This post could have been written by a human. It could have been written by an LLM. We can't know for sure. From what I hear, a lot of teachers who require written essays in their classes are pretty near to giving up because they can't ever be sure (or prove their suspicions) either.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
This is not much more than a "boo my outgroup" with "vast, vast majority" used as the thinnest of veneers over an absolute generalization.
Undoubtedly there are many people who fit your description, but "My enemies are soooo dumb, and they're all gonna get what's coming to them" isn't adding anything valuable to the discussion. Keep that to your own bubbles.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
You've been warned before about posting nothing but one-liners, and when you make it an attack, you're becoming an aggressive nuisance. Stop this.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Kulak is LARPing an imagined history, not reading the historical texts that he actually refers to. The ancients were extremely conscious of the perils of violence, and, though not always uncomplicatedly, prized mercy and reconciliation as well.
This is basically everything Kulak writes. He makes up a version of what people in the past thought, from the ancient Greeks to the American founding fathers, that bears no resemblance to anything they actually wrote, but in Kulak's version always boils down to "Violence, violence, and more violence."
I'd say he's historically and culturally illiterate, but accuracy isn't the point. It's all a con to convince other people that violence is the answer (to everything).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I can't say I have seen any clear examples of that. In fact, I had you pegged as a clear instance of the "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" sort of authority.
You're wrong.
All of this could have been avoided if you didn't think it is a good idea to exempt users "in good standing" from the rules as written
That is not what happened.
I have honestly tried to hear you out, but everything from your initial complaint and your report to this convinces me that you have no insight and are so wildly off base that even the most basic statements you make do not conform to the visible evidence. Whether you actually believe everything you say or not, there is nothing to be gained here. You are unhappy with moderation (specifically, mine). You are not alone. Duly noted.
I will leave your report for another mod to adjudicate (as I always do when people report me).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ.
You do not know what you're talking about.
TheMotte is rationalist-adjacent because of our origins, but we (and especially the mod team) are not enforcing some kind of "rationalist consensus" on anything, least of all race and IQ. Hylnka was very open about his disdain for HBD and HBD posters. Most of the mods are also critical of it and HBD obsessives to varying degrees. What consensus were we trying to enforce?
A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee"
Hlynka said a lot of stuff that was rank bullshit.
and the fact that his ban was announced as a top level post without citing any specific rule-breaking comments would seem to suggest that whatever happened to justify his ban happened out of the public eye.
This was officially the post that finally earned him a permaban, but it was really an accumulation of posting over months and months, during which we repeatedly asked him to stop doing that (I mean, we literally told him "Please stop doing this or eventually we will have to permaban you and we really don't want to do that"!)
Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?
No. He did argue with us in DMs, but it was not much different from what he was saying in public: that we should be quicker to ban people and we should especially ban the people he didn't like, and police the place up more. Meanwhile he'd continue aggressively attacking the people we weren't banning.
Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism"
That's, uh, quite a theory all right. I know of no such discussions among the mods, and if Hylnka has become a public figure under another name I am unaware of it. And of all the regular or former motteposters who might draw the Eye of Sauron on us, Hlynka wouldn't be in my top 10.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
At most, my sense is that WhiningCoil is more of a prolific and popular user that I figure you like
Your sense is lacking in perspipacity.
and my objections are "tribal" insofar as "users that Amadan likes" constitute a tribe
That you believe this confirms my belief that you do not actually pay attention to moderation and are only complaining because you have an axe to grind.
I mod people I like all the time, often with great regret. Even more often, I decline to mod people who have been reported on what I considered insufficient grounds, even when I frankly dislike that person very much.
and in your concept space, the only people who can have "good faith" objections to moderator bias are those who benefit from it
Wrong. While someone who gets modded a lot for their behavior and complains that our moderation is unfair does obviously present an obvious bias that we're going to factor in, we do hear everyone out. If I were only taking seriously people who benefit from moderation, I'd put more weight on your objections - to my knowledge, you have never been modded.
(Though maybe you think that not finding a beloved right-wing slur intrinsically funny is already sufficient evidence of bias against the Right that rises to the level of bad faith...?)
I know the history of "cuck" as a right-wing slur, and maybe you should consider that the word triggered a disproportionate response from you when @WhiningCoil was using it in a more literal sense (and talking about the historical figure Belisarius, not the poster @Belisarius).
Now if WC speaks up and says "No, actually, I did wonder if @Belisarius was into cuckolding" - well, I'll own to granting him too much charity (and give him a warning not to do that again).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Man, every single mod (and a few non-mods) tried to convince him to change tack. We tried to reason with him in public, we tried to talk him down in private. His permaban was not some sudden thing we did without warning, and I'm genuinely surprised that you missed all of this while it was going down, because we were pleading with him for months to please stop deliberately posting things he knew would earn him a timeout or we'd have to make it permanent, while half the forum was saying "Noooo, you can't ban Hlynka!" and the other half was saying "Just fucking ban him already!"
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
You can't just ask if someone imagines himself a great general or is a cuck with a whore wife and then say just joking.
Well, yes, actually you can, and if you had even the tiniest sense of humor, you'd know it. Just like when people ask if my username means I am a great fool.
WhiningCoil was being antagonistic and I assumed I offended him when I suspecting Hlynka was the OP
If there is one thing I am nearly 100% certain of, it is that @WhiningCoil is not @HlynkaCG. Hlynka is very recognizeable and shitty at disguising himself (he's tried a few times), and @WhiningCoil has a long history here and on reddit going back multiple usernames.
Knowing you, and your own sense of humor,
You're mistaken. I have no sense of humor, but that's in the job description.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
The fact that you think I am being favorable to @WhiningCoil, of all people, or his "tribe," is much funnier than anything posted in this thread.
I have occasionally been accused of reading people wrong, and I'll cop to it when it happens. I read @WhiningCoil as injecting a bit of jocularity concerning a historical name he happened to have just been reading about. Not literally accusing @Belisarius of being a cuck with a famously whoreish wife, or being general of an empire in decline. I read it this way because I know @WhiningCoil's posting habits, and I also know @Belisarius's tendency to be aggressive and overly serious with anyone who argues with him about anything.
If the post was just an attack on a user for his username because WC didn't like him and saw an opportunity for a cheap shot, my response would have been different. Instead, I told @Belisarius to cool it because the exchange doesn't warrant this kind of heat and he is prone to escalation.
Is that a sufficient answer for you? Because that's as much as I feel like justifying myself to you, because yes, per that post you linked to, I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal, and I will continue to dismiss your demands that every time two people have an exchange, I carefully admonish everyone involved and make sure I am evenly distributing my admonishments along tribal lines.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
Be less antagonistic, and get a sense of humor.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
We miss him too. But he left us little choice.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3mo ago
I remember the "minorities can do no wrong, so the police had better find no wrong" attitudes of the time, and I'm very much not surprised you were mixed up in it.
Stop lobbing personal attacks, especially with no foundation in anything the person you're attacking said.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4mo ago
I wasn't commenting on the quality of your argument or whether nor not I agree with it. Just the tone. Even if your "you" was meant rhetorically (as I suspected it was), we're going to step in when people start posting things that seem meant to turn up the heat.
You are allowed to hate here. We are used to hate, seething hate, boiling, barely-contained rage. But we have rules about expressing it. Yes, that is frustrating to those who want to feel the hate flow through them. But unfiltered rage-posting just isn't what this place is for, as the unfiltered rage-posters are wont to tell us, before they storm away.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4mo ago
Oh, are we still making Polack jokes?
This didn't really read like a joke, more like yet another in your long, long series of low-effort, derogatory and antagonistic posts.
Your record is sufficiently long that you're really asking for a permaban, but since I was persuaded last time that my response to you was too harsh, and this was, as shitty posts go, fairly mild, I'm banning you for a week. But you are already on strike four.
My objection is that I think people like Kulak who engage in performative outrage about Rotherham do not actually care about the victims and are not advocating race war because white girls were victimized. They are not motivated by empathy at any level.
There certainly are some people who care, and there are probably some people who care only because they were white girls raped by Muslims (and yes, I am judgmental and critical of them too). But the strain of race warrior who wants Rotherham to be a causus belli against the coloreds otherwise have nothing but contempt for the sort of girls victimized in Rotherham, white or not.
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