This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Have we discussed the live-action remake of 1937's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs since it came out?
In an effort to drum up business my local theater is running a promotion that includes free movie tickets for spending money at local bars and restaurants. While it's not something I would've spent my own money on, I elected to use one of my free movie vouchers to see the new Snow White because I was curious, and wanted to form my own opinion of it.
I expect most readers of this thread have at least a passing familiarity with the various controversies surrounding this production and more knowledgeable people than I have already done the business and Culture-war narrative side of things to death. So I'm going to focus on the on-screen product.
As a movie Snow White is solidly "Mid". Not good, but not terrible. The writing, acting, and set-peices are all passable. The humor is bland and inoffensive, and the songs are mostly forgettable. Gal Godot may have the dramatic range of an Electric SUV on 5% charge, but "Sultry Femme Fatale" is well within that range, and she seems to be having fun vamping it up (As is often the case the "villain song" is one of the better ones). To Rachel Ziegler's credit she sings well and serves adequately in the role of "pretty princess" / "coquettish ingenue" coming across as substantially less "Girlbossey" than I had expected given her off-screen persona.
The movie wastes no time establishing it's left wing-wing politics. The opening song and dance number is essentially all about how wonderful life is when people give according to their ability and receive according to their need. The word-play between "fair" as in "light-skinned" or "pleasing to the eye" and "fair" as in "fair use" "fair trade" and a "fair contest" is a recurring leitmotif throughout the script and it gets established in this bit.
Because Disney princesses are not allowed to have a mother the good queen falls ill and dies at the end of the song which is when a wild Gal Godot appears. She is a beautiful noblewoman from a far-off land across the sea whose people, covet wealth, power, and beauty above all else, and have magical powers. The King (Snow White's dad) is naturally smitten and immediately marries Gal Godot presumably because she is wealthy, powerful, and looks like Gal Godot.
In her new position as Queen, Snow White's stepmother immediately begins to subtly corrupt the Realm and remake it in her own harder and more covetous image (think Pottersville versus Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life). In case you haven't picked up on it yet, Snow White's canonical origin story in this movie is about a virtuous and happy left-wing government being subverted and taken over from within by an evil Jewish woman through a combination of sex-appeal, blood magic, and propaganda.
We skip forward an indeterminate number of years, Snow White has been kept cloistered in the castle "because it is not safe". The evil queen Gal Godot has been sowing fear about a nebulous threat on the southern border as an excuse to get Snow White's Dad out of the picture and to crack down on dissent. (I wonder what that was intended as an allegory for?) Snow White catches a thief named Johnathan played by Handsome McStrongJaw raiding the Castle's pantry, and he informs her that life outside the castle walls is not all sunshine and adorable woodland creatures. Snow White's response is to inform the Queen. You see, if only the queen knew what was going on she would put a stop to it. Johnathan is arrested and put to death, but Snow White helps him escape the castle because this is a Disney movie and he is the designated love-interest.
Snow White is getting a bit too uppity and too "fair" for her own good so Gal Godot convinces the one black guy in the palace guard to take Snow White out to the woods and kill her by getting all up in the guard's personal space and offering him anything he wants. Black guy takes Snow White out to the woods to kill her, but he gets cold-feet and decides to tell Snow White about the whole murder plot because she was nice to him and asked him how his day was going.
Snow White flees into the enchanted wood where she meets the Seven AI-Generated Dwarves we are all familiar with from the 1937 original. After some hijinks and another musical number the Dwarves inform her that the enchanted wood is also home to Seven Bandits. A troupe of erstwhile actors who are plotting to overthrow Gal Godot and have recently been joined by our "prince of thieves" Johnathan. Snow White sets out to find them and a bunch of stuff happens without any real rhyme or reason. There is singing, there is dancing, there is peril, but none of it really effects the plot or evokes a feeling.
The proverbial "final battle" of the movie is Snow White and the Seven Bandits leading a protest march against Gal Godot that ends with the Townspeople and Palace Guards
all drinking a pepsiturning on the queen and reinstating the socialist order from the opening musical number.In conclusion, for what is otherwise a very bland and boring movie in the watching there seems to be a lot going on. And im curious to hear other people's thoughts on it.
I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...
So the movie was not very good, and also not Snow White.
I’m wondering if proof of concept for AI actors was the point, but surely that’s already done?
Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle- they’re the same thing. They’re both revolutionary ideologies calling for to radically remake society in a short period of time. They merely disagree about who gets cushy sinecures doing stupid bullshit(black lesbians or white men). The DR weirds out classical conservatives once they figure out it’s not a meme. There is a de Maistre shaped hole in the popular consciousness but the slow growth of more functional societies will eat the revolution alive.
You are not the only one.
If so many people are channeling @HlynkaCG, maybe we should let him back?
I'm doing my part!
More options
Context Copy link
I have consistently maintained that banning him was a mistake. Although he might be prideful enough that even if the invitation was extended, he wouldn’t come back.
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe he already is back. OP is carrying the mantle of Hlynka with the kind of things he has been arguing. I actually believe that he is Hlynka but I am not 100% certain about it.
I know Hlynka decently well from off-site and would bet heavily that he doesn't post here anymore.
Wait how many motters do you know IRL? Are you running meetups, or did you just know both of them already?
A whole lot and yeah I guess you could say something like that. Not Motte meetups per se but extremely heavy overlap.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I can assure you, we aren’t the same person(you saw us in the same thread at the same time and the mods do enforce sock puppeting) and we don’t actually share an ideology. We have certain cultural similarities which make my organic counterrevolution ideas look more similar to his social contract absolutism than they actually are.
To name a few things- I am perfectly willing to believe that the black-white IQ gap is real(although I doubt the strength of it as an explanatory factor), I hold significantly more socially conservative views on sex and gender, and I’m far more skeptical of state capacity as a solution.
Hoffmeister is correct that I did not suggest that you are Hlynka but that TequilaMockingbird is and therefore there is no great gap. For the record when Hlynka was banned I wasn't there to gloat even though I don't like him nor do I suggest that mods ban or not ban this guy if he is Hlynka.
My mistake- I thought you were referring to this sub thread from my reference to hlynka posting.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I interpreted @Belisarius as accusing @TequilaMockingbird of being the return of Hlynka — a suspicion which I share, although my confidence has been too low for me to publicly level the accusation myself — not that you are. You’re significantly more articulate, and your ideas on a far stronger footing, than most of what Hlynka ever contributed, in my opinion.
I’ll take the complement, although I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way.
Hlynka had a particular posting style, and I simply don’t see it from him.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Random question. I just wrapped up the chapters in Gibbon about Belisarius, so I wanted to ask. Is he your namesake because you imagine yourself the greatest general of a degenerate and declining age, or because your wife is one of the top 10 most flagrant whores of history?
I kid, I kid. But man, what a way to go down in history. Greatest general of an era, and the biggest cuck.
Are you a Whining Coil?
That is pretty a stupid and insulting question but I will answer earnestly against my better judgement.
I picked the figure Belisarius because he was the greatest general in the fight for the restoration of the roman empire, but I certainly don't see myself as a general, or great general. And it was a bit random I chose that name over different ones. Just one of the figures of history I liked. It is good for us to be inspired by history and part of a degenerate and declining age is this hostility to a positive historical heritage. Why should I have to be attacked by you for picking the name of a great general?
Procopius was generally considered unreliable writer who promoted plenty of sleaze which is what is these claims are based on. Even if one was to accept that his wife really was a whore, he is still a positive figure in general.
It is your choice to take this kind of framing on a figure that is certainly much more known for being a great general than his wife's alleged exploits. We have enough problems dealing with much more common collective cuckholdery of our times to worry about the purity of Belisarius wife.
I truly, truly wish you could see from my perspective how hilarious all this is. I mean, I know now that you can't. But I wish you could.
This was not drive by derailing, I've actually had a hard time keeping up this week since I've been building my wife a new chicken coop, and reading Gibbon in the evening to unwind. I literally did just read the chapters about what a (apocryphal?) whore Belisarius' wife was, and thought it'd be a fun conversation starter since you are obviously a fan. I don't literally think you are a cuck.
Also, I mean, I guess it's uncouth to talk about this. But I've been getting all these notifications tonight that I can't see because I have Amadan blocked. I find his argumentation style tailored to try to get me to break the rules and then punish me. I had to check the thread in incognito mode to even see what the hubbub is about. So yeah, no love lost there.
For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to literally imply your wife is a whore. It's like if someone said they were a huge fan of Bill Cosby and you asked "They show.... or the other stuff?" The joke is how obviously it's not the other stuff. Obviously Belisarius is notable in history for being the greatest general of his age, not the biggest cuck.
Don’t brag about blocking people, it’s a shameful thing. Then you can spare us the excruciating story on how you had to remove your own barriers.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Be less antagonistic, and get a sense of humor.
I would expect this quality of moderation from 4chan, not TheMotte.
Of course you know I have had a beef with your partiality and believe that you treat users and tribes you are sympathetic to favourably, but this is an entirely new level of tendentiousness. User A makes an off-topic post trying to relate User B's username to a common slur/fixation, User B responds in a mildly standoffish manner but actually clarifies the origin of the username, and User B - only User B - gets a modhat reprimand? Of course, I fully expect that any objections will be met with the same old "I disagree, and no, I am not going to justify anything" sort of response from you. Is that what it is going to be, or do you have something better to offer?
(I don't even understand what you find so funny. Is it just "haha bro just called him a cuck"?)
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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. You might find it funny if you dislike the target, but you are only showing a lack of impartiality.
WhiningCoil was being antagonistic and I assumed I offended him when I suspecting Hlynka was the OP and I replied with relative restraint all things considered. Or offended him by arguing against the people I argue, and by my type of argument. Hence "Great General". Saying that it is stupid and insulting to ask if someone imagines himself a great general or a massive cuck is not a particularly antagonistic response to an actually antagonistic post.
Knowing you, and your own sense of humor, I know that you would have responded harsher manner and likely at least threatened a mod action if you have been the target of this kind of "joke", adapted to your circumstances.
If someone wants to be funny about historical figures in a manner that is insulting he can easily do so without making it personal about the user but instead make it about the figure.
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.
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.
You're mistaken. I have no sense of humor, but that's in the job description.
More options
Context Copy link
FYI my respect for towards you didn't move when Coil made the crack but dropped when you proved unable to roll with the punch. Self-seriousness will make you a target.
More options
Context Copy link
I think you are taking someone obliquely implying you picked your namesake for his cuckoldry entirely too seriously. This is an internet forum for witches, not the UFC ringside. Profuse defense of masculine honor looks out of place here, IMVHO.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
How is he gone? I missed all of that and I definitely would have campaigned on his behalf if I was here. I miss him so much.
Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.
Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ. A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee", 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. Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?
Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism", so it was decided that he would go away to reduce the potential of theMotte.org getting caught up in Trump-related drama.
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?
Hlynka said a lot of stuff that was rank bullshit.
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"!)
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
God damn those are great threads, I am sad I missed them. Thanks for the write up, it does look like breaking with the hbd consensus was instrumental in his ban - not as a reason, but it's still part of the why.
Although there is variation in the opinions of individual mods, my impression of them as a group is that they certainly have no interest in enforcing an “HBD consensus” (in either direction).
Tequila didn't say the mods enforced the hbd consensus he said unofficially hlynka got banned for breaking with the hbd consensus. Despite his contrariness he was still a member of this community and despite his cynicism it seems he couldn't tolerate the community converging on something he found so immoral. It was the reason he decided it wasn't worth playing by the rules to whatever extent he had been before.
My opinion (which I think I shared at the time) was that he got banned for a combination of "breaking with the HBD consensus" in the form of wrangling with many/most of the actual neo-Nazis around here, and being a bit of a cantankerous fuck who posts a lot -- which (the latter) provided lots of opportunity for said Nazis to report him for technically correct but minor rule violations which would have otherwise flown under the radar.
The reports-volume-based moderation strategy is fundamentally flawed when it comes to high-volume cantankerous posters, and I say this as somebody who was banned more than once by Hlynka for cantankerous wrangling, and kind of pissed off about it in the moment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is in fact what he got banned for. He was an extremely valued commenter, but he eventually decided that he was no longer willing to abide by the rules here, and over the course of a number of repeated and very obvious rule violations presented the mods with a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation. They chose the rules.
@HlynkaCG remains my all-time favorite commenter here, and my interactions with him were, by far, the most constructive and formative of all those I've had here. I maintain to this day that his notable positions and arguments were simply correct. I myself have experienced fundamental conflict between the opinions I wish to express and the rules of this forum, and there was a stretch of time where I fully expected to receive a permaban, not because the mods were unfair in some way, but because I straightforwardly perceived my own intentions as fundamentally contrary to the forum's mission. It's something I and others have written about before: it's entirely possible for good, thoughtful, well-intentioned people to find themselves incapable of further participation here, because what this place requires, often enough, isn't goodness or thoughtfulness or fine intentions, but a peculiar sort of ice-cold abstraction.
To my knowledge, the behind-the-scenes mod drama consisted of mods arguing with him in private that he had to either stop breaking the rules or be banned, and the top-level ban announcement was to increase visibility for the people who had been arguing that him not being banned proved that the rules were fake.
A third option is to enforce the rules, but not via permabans.
Permabans should be reserved for the most egregious trolls, spambots, or accounts that are otherwise doing harm to the forum in some way. The way I see it, there’s almost never a reason to permaban a good faith poster (which Hlynka obviously was). I would set the maximum suspension length somewhere in the range of 6-12 months.
Yeah, I'd be happy to see him return.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I'll +1 on this. Permabans seem unnecessary, and even stranger in light of the old "a permaban is no more than 1 year long, ackshully" rule, that we used to have, but dispensed with for some reason.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I liked Hlynka but my biggest issue with him was when people would respond to him with specific arguments and he would completely ignore them and/or refuse to address them
Yeah, he'd had some pretty bad threads before he was banned.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, because all the moderators are massive HBDers, to the point they won't tolerate dissent. I like a good conspiracy theory, but come up with one that makes some sense.
Also, why don't you link the post that actually got him banned?
Because that comment never came up in the discussion.
Members of the mod team did endorse the harassment of him for his views on IQ as "providing a valuable public service".
Ymeshkout hasn't been an active moderator for as long as I can remember, not even in the private mod discord. He had nothing to do with Hlynka's ban.
More options
Context Copy link
I was surprised ymeshkout is even a mod. You can see how active he was after the move offsite here. And the post you linked to (without context, for some reason) is in response of a mod who declared said activity to be harrasment in the first place!
Neither did the ones you linked to, that's not an excuse.
Sorry, i thought i had provided the full link.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure if there was much to campaign for. As much as I wish he was still around, he basically pulled a suicide by cop.
More options
Context Copy link
We miss him too. But he left us little choice.
Fair, and I shouldn't have assumed otherwise and said for/to. I don't know if I could have convinced him to change tack but I'd have liked a chance to try.
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!"
I promise you I don't doubt that you all tried to change his mind as hard as you could, I just think personally trying to convince him would have been a great conversation (for me, probably no one else). I missed it because it happened during my sabbatical, which is what I am choosing to call my six month flounce these days.
More options
Context Copy link
I remember towards the end both a) defending large parts of his thesis and b) pleading with him to just engage with people better.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The problem is he just can’t be trusted not to let his temperament get the better of him. Even an act of magnanimity (and there were many) and a final warning (and there were many) are not enough.
More options
Context Copy link
Truly, there is a Hlynka-shaped hole in the Motte's discourse.
That doesn't mean a ban should be reversed just for that, and I'm fairly sure he'd respect that reasoning, but it is amusing.
On the other hand the last thing we need is a story in the Atlantic about Trump officials leaking classified war-plans on theMotte.
I'm going to second @Amadan and ask: what? Hlynka was a Trump official?
It has been theorized that JD Vance or somone else highly placed within the Trump campaign was a Mottizen or SSCer due to how seeming references to the community like "Shiri's Scissor", "this is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence", and "youre still crying wolf" kept making thier way into official statements and twitter posts.
Shakesneer and Hlynka were considered to be the prime suspects.
Yeah, obviously Vance has read SSC and Moldbug. Are there any references that are Motte-specific, though? Or indications that any of them are active members of the Ratsphere rather than lurkers?
More options
Context Copy link
where the references were published?
More options
Context Copy link
Interesting if true -- do you have any Vance-links on these?
Not to hand, sorry.
More options
Context Copy link
I'd also be interested. What I've seen people of saying things like this in the past, it's seemed like people notice Vance's overlap with their community, but don't really understand him, and so misinterpret him and what he's doing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Well, Hlynka was a self-admitted Warhammer 40k player. The Trump-as-God-Emperor meme was directly from 40k-aware communities. Furthermore, iirc Hlynka was an orks player, which is to say low-class social barbarian faction.
Ergo...
[/sarcasm]
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link