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Sir, there's been four new Nazi/Hitler/antisemitic issues in the conservative community in just the past day
Following the recent Politico expose on the Young Republicans groupchat leak among mid 20s-30s leaders of the organization containing comments about gas chambering their political opponents and antisemitic remarks like this
In the followup to this, yes you heard it right, at least four new antisemitic and/or Nazi controversies in the past day or so.
A flag with a swatiska embedded in it was spotted in the office of Representative Dave Taylor. Rep. Taylor has called it out and condemned it, and it's quite possible he never noticed it before himself but it does seem to be another sign of the embedded antisemitic and pro nazi rhetoric in lower level staffers if one of them put it up.
Additionally, the Border Patrol posted a video on an Instagram containing an antisemitic slur. While the higher ups of the border patrol likely don't have much to do with what gets posted on the social media, it's again another bad sign that the lower levels who coordinate posts and approve them are antisemitic. Someone had to specifically pick that particular verse of that particular version of that particular song, they knew what they were posting and whatever approval process they use, the others would have heard the lyrics and yet signed on.
The third controversy is the most explicit of them all. Myron Gaines, host of the Fresh and Fit podcast (1.58 million subscribers on YouTube alone) posted
Now, I never would have imagine that the word woke includes "thinking the Holocaust is real and Hitler is bad", but that seems to be where we are at now. Gaines is also a former employee of the DHS, which is just another point of evidence of low level gop aligned staffers having pro Nazi/antisemitic views.
But in fact, all of this seems to be par for the course, according to Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab. who also wades into the ring of antisemitic Holocaust denialism with comments like
That's right, at least two major conservative names have directly engaged in unashamed pro Nazi/Holocaust denialism/etc rhetoric in response to the group chat leak and both of them strongly believe that many other high level conservatives agree with them (Myron's use of "We like Hitler and Torba saying it's normal).
As Richard Hanania (Writer of "The Origins of Woke" who has been in many conservative spaces before) explained months before the leak, this is actually pretty common. As he's said before, the two types of comments he tends to get "it can't be that bad" and "lol that's exactly what it's like" such as this agreement from National Review reporter James Lynch
What's interesting is that the one thing both the Nazi denouncers (Hanania/Lynch/etc) and Nazi defenders (Myron/Torba/etc) here both seem to agree on, is that this is common among the young right. There seems to be a broad consensus that this gropyer antisemitic Nazism is growing among conservatives, especially young ones. We've seen this with Kanye and his descent into Nazism, we've seen this with John Reid and Mike Robinson both exposed over their Nazi fetish. We've seen this with Tucker Carlson and Daryl Cooper. The rapid growth of figures like Nick "six million cookies" Fuentes, Ian Carroll and Theo Von. In fact a neo Nazi inspired kid was even behind a recent school shooting in Colorado a few months ago
EW Erickson says https://x.com/EWErickson/status/1978812093773041964
Ben Shapiro says that unity with radicals will destroy the right wing as it pushes moderate Americans away.
Right wing conservative libertarian speaker Phil Magness says
So with all this recent controversy, how big of a Nazi problem is actually festering, and why do the Nazis seem to feel so comfortable in modern conservativism? They even seem to be dropping hints at the highest levels if the border patrol video was intended as a dog whistle to be dropped before deleting. Is this growing widespread agreement (from Hanania to Torba) that this is just the tip of the iceberg among young conservatives accurate? Will this growing trend of Nazi radicalism destroy the Republicans chances among moderates in the future like embracing left wing radicalism hurt Biden? And how do the non Nazi conservatives and moderates balance fighting off Nazi accusations from the left also working to stem this apparant rise of unashamed nazism and Holocaust denialism?
You know I don't think people are being fair to you. I can only address this by speaking to my own experiences.
I remember being there in 2007 or so, forming swastikas in Club Penguin with the other anons. Obviously at the time this was pure shock value and didn't indicate any serious ideological commitment. Now we may argue about exactly how serious /pol/ is today, but it's hard to deny that it is a lot more serious about Nazism than we were as teenagers in 2007 harassing kids in Habbo Hotel and Club Penguin.
But what about me? Am I meaningfully more Nazi now than I was in 2007? Did those formative years on 4chan have any lasting influence on my politics? It's hard to say, of course from my own perspective our jokes in 2007 had nothing to do with it. My beliefs seem to me to be merely a logical progression based on what I've learned and experienced over the past 18 years. But either way I've somehow ended up reading SecureSignals posts thinking to myself "Hey this guy may have a point" and to some degree embracing beliefs that would be described by some as white nationalist.
Perhaps this is just another manifestation of the fully generalizable Toaster Fucker Problem. 30 years ago I may have done my fair share of "noticing" but dismissed it without a community of noted race scientists like the Motte to further radicalize me. It seems obvious to me that while "haha just joking" extremism doesn't literally mean the jokers hold those specific beliefs in earnest, it does meaningfully shift the Overton Window and creates a space where serious discussion of previously taboo beliefs can blend with the jokes. If you believe that White Nationalism and Antisemitism are very evil then it is reasonable IMO to be concerned about these jokes and want to stamp them out.
Basically I don't think most of the people engaging in these jokes are seriously Nazis but I do think it creates a space for those ideas to spread and does probably contribute to the popularity of taboo far right beliefs if not outright Nazism. To be clear I think the Left has their own version of this same problem, in fact, to a much more advanced and concerning degree.
I think this is an eminently reasonable position. However, I disagree with it, and I have another position which I consider just as reasonable, but more convincing. Which is that, without overwhelming tyrannical force, no one individual, organization, or even side can control the Overton Window. Despite the recent performance by the modern left, such tyrannical force just isn't viable in America, certainly not in the long run (except maybe in the really long run where America as we know it doesn't exist anymore). As such, we can't rely on our ability to keep Nazism out of the Overton window; so we should have ample protections against it when it does enter the Overton window, so that it doesn't go from "within the Overton window" to "ruling us by convincing enough people."
And I see no better way to prepare such defenses than analyzing and practicing against the best, strongest, most well-developed and convincing versions of their arguments, put forth by their smartest, most charismatic proponents. Just like how any professional athlete will tell you that no amount of practice scrimmages against teammates can make up for actual playtime against an opposing team in terms of teaching one's flaws and building resilience and grit. For that to occur, we need these people to argue with each other and with us, so as to better refine their ideas and arguments. This can only happen openly if their ideas are in the Overton window. So I want it in there. Otherwise, I'd be dealing with artificially weak versions of their arguments and/or be ignorant of what they're cooking up outside my view. Leaving me worse prepared for defending against them.
I don't think my reasoning is foolproof or proven beyond a reasonable doubt. And I certainly wouldn't condemn people who want to keep Nazism outside the Overton window as being secret Nazi sympathizers who want to leave society vulnerable for when they've gathered enough power on the margins outside the Overton window to pounce. Because I know that they have their own thinking, a way of thinking that I think is reasonable that makes them believe that they're actually helping to prevent the rise of Nazism in our society in the future. I think they're reasonable and wrong, but it's being wrong that is their crime, not supporting Nazism.
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He posted a long rant which left out the fact that one of his "Nazis" is a pro-Palestinian Muslim. People are being plenty fair to him.
IMO it's more true than not. We are not being fair to him. We're dogpiling him pretty hard, even though technically there really is a point to be made about nazism being bad and extremism being possible in the republican party.
I also think that he really set himself up for it because he's very obviously trying to exaggerate the supposed nazism angle for shock effect, and this falls completely flat here.
So, shrugs all around.
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Respect. I was there, Gandalf...
CS Lewis / Tolkien tag team, a classic
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I partially agree with you, but would shift 80% of the blame for the establishment of this environment to the left. The left made Nazis cool again, by being simultaneously awful and anti Nazi. 99% of people's experience with Nazism is bad people on the left equivocating between Nazis and normal people on the right. If Trump is a Nazi, and Elon Musk is a Nazi, and Joe Rogan is a Nazi, then someone who likes all of those guys is going to think Nazis are pretty cool. Or at least, make jokes in that direction. People are going to feel comfortable pretending to be a Nazi, because what's the worst that's going to happen, some angry leftist is going to accuse you of being a Nazi? They were already going to do that just by you not supporting open borders.
When you spend ten years crying wolf, and telling everyone all their pet dogs are wolves, don't be surprised when kids grow up thinking wolves are cool, and the dog lovers start wearing wolf shirts and howling to mock you.
Fair enough, but there might be a substantial percentage of young people on the right (though it might be approximately zero for all I know) who want to round up all the jews and exterminate them and return all the blacks to chains. At least they claim this is what they want, or so the rumor goes.
Evidently we can't call these people Nazis because the term's become meaningless and, besides, some kids get off on being shocking. So the discussion has essentially gone nowhere. Though now I'm curious how many people here are actually supportive of an American Jewish genocide or a return to legal private slavery or of some other course of action that is way, way, waaaaay outside the Overton window and just a minute ago was super-duper-ultra-taboo. The discussion of those particulars can't really be derailed by someone's individual definition of what he thinks a Nazi is.
No, the problem is that you lose all the oomph when you also use that word for anyone who works out and doesn't hate themselves. It's archetypal motte and bailey arguing. Wanting to kill all the Jews is terrible, but also insanely fringe. Working out is much, much more common, so by tactically conflating the two, you can pretend that the number of people who want to kill all the Jews is much larger.
Meanwhile, a third of the left is over there chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab".
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Everyone's a little bit Nazi
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“If you continually tell people that everything they want is fascism, they’ll eventually come to the conclusion that fascism is everything they want.”
Or as Sh0eonhead comically put it in a clip I can’t find;
“Oh wow, that sounds great! You’re telling me this is fascism? Uh, waiter! More fascism please!”
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I feel like I showed up to this site too late and missed all of this because I keep seeing people make side references to this/HBD but no one ever actually talks about it, they just talk about talking about it.
Well first off the best way to make people want to talk about something is to tell them they can't talk about it. And that happened a lot with hbd, the ssc mods literally banned discussion of it for a while.
To be fair, you do have to keep in mind that on reddit having your entire community summarily banned because people are making cogent, well-reasoned, and factually grounded arguments that reddit admins don't like, as opposed to merely posting acceptable content like rape fantasies, is an everpresent threat. So it was understandable.
Hbd is an annoying topic too because it was just constant ping ponging between, "No populations can't possibly differ on genetically derived mental traits even though they are no different genetically than height or skin color or hirsuteness which clearly and measurably differ the average brain is identical between every single human population no matter how you divide them because it just is ok you nazi?" and, "Ok now that we've agreed races differ in intelligence let me explain why every other race but mine are all untermensch and need to be confined to ghettos and we shouldn't waste time educating them."
But its so tempting to debate the merits of the second! Its not "keep them stupid" its "look after our own" and oh no magicalkittycat is right I can feel the hitlerstache growing noooooo
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Personally, I was mostly HBD-pilled by Scott Alexander, who once hosted the ancestor of the motte. It helps that I had read a lot of other stuff from him, which convinced me that he was a kind and thoughtful person, not some Nazi looking for an excuse to enslave the Untermenschen.
Basically, Ashkenazi performance in science is very hard to explain without group differences in intelligence. The alternatives are either silly ("Reading the Torah as a kid outperforms any science education known to man.") or very silly conspiracies ("The Jews have controlled academia since the early 20th century, and favored their own kind (but not the Sephardics, for some reason). Their shadow organization probably murdered the gentile scientists who had written the four Nobel-worthy papers in 1905 and had Einstein publish them instead, despite him not even having a post-doc job.")
Of course, I also try hard not to over-update on HBD. For individuals, I will update much more on education attainment and similar metrics than on ethnicity. I do not even have a coherent model about what the racial bonuses to INT are. Mostly, I think that HBD is a rock under which humanity might have well avoided to look, if not for the SJ insistence that unequal outcomes are always indicative of systemic racism.
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It was a hot topic in the earliest days of the forum (like around the 2016 election) because a lot of people were suddenly encountering these ideas for the first time.
Interest has dropped a lot since then because the old regulars have simply had those arguments many times now and don't find them as interesting as they used to, plus it's not quite as hot a topic in internet discourse as it used to be so we don't have as many new people wanting to learn about it for the first time. Even after the move to themotte.org it still came up sometimes but over the last year or two it's been quiet.
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Ah, the Before Days. You didn't miss much, I can tell you. The same old same old trotted out and fought over until everyone was too exhausted to keep going and agreed to stop (much like the Wars of Religion in 16th to 18th century Europe).
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This is just my personal opinion, not an attempt to consensus-build, but the way I see it (picture your friendly bartender chatting about the customers he's seen come through over the years), the forum went through the HBD wars relatively early on in its lifetime and, well, the HBD side won so conclusively it's sort of in the background now. This isn't to say that any particular hard HBD thesis has been proven ("the IQ gap between Belgians and Malaysians is x points and y% genetic!"), our scientific knowledge isn't there yet, but the soft HBD thesis ("genetics matter and vary between groups") won. Sometimes arguments just get won. People move on. Like I say, this isn't a crushing victory, it's mostly just disproving the hard environmentalist thesis ("humans are blank slates, environment explains all mental differences") and the specifically anti-HBD hard thesis ("genetics may matter for the individual but don't vary meaningfully between groups") - and we still do have plenty of environmentalists arguing softer theses (e.g. "we just don't know yet, so we can't assume a genetic cause"), and even right-wingers arguing against HBD from religious/tribal perspectives. But this has a couple effects which massively reduce the level of HBD discourse:
I do not think that this is especially hard. Meritocracy performs well both in worlds where HBD is highly relevant and in worlds where it is irrelevant. There is no reason to select for Ashkenazi ethnicity as a proxy for academic performance when you can just select for academic performance directly instead.
On the flip side, "have a progressive tax system which lessens the burden of people whose economic output is not highly valued, so that they still can live a decent life" is basic compassion, and utilitarianism (the marginal dollar helps the poor man a lot more than the rich man). I am very capable of feeling the pain of those who work in minimum wage jobs without first inquiring to their ethnic distribution and then deciding if they deserve my pity or not.
I will grant you that things might become more icky once a state decides to maximize the number of smart babies. But even there you would not directly select for ethnicity. Instead you might use IVF to create embryos from the gametes of humans with family histories of high education attainment, and then pay surrogates to turn them into babies and have them adopted by couples. Or just CRISPR the heck out of any embryos.
At the end of the day, the gaussians overlap, substantially. There are no large gaps as there are in the intelligence between dogs and humans, which is the reason why we do not allow dogs to even attempt to gain a driving license. Anyone who is arguing for a similar level of discrimination among ethnicities is simply using HBD as an excuse to be a racist.
I agree with you almost entirely. But that's the issue, there's not that much to debate, except the boring old "how much exactly should we redistribute and how much exactly should we reward merit?" That sort of Bush v Gore stuff doesn't really get people fired up. Of course, there is the CRISPR point, which I think can reasonably safely (between the anti-HBD FAQ and Society is Fixed Biology is Mutable) read as Scott's esoteric position: "Don't talk about this shit until we can just gene-edit everyone to decent IQ and prosocial personalities". Then when you get to the practicalities of moving towards these policies, it's a tremendous kettle of worms that nobody wants to even think about.
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I just want to say, this comment describes almost exactly how I feel about HBD. I see the progressive/leftist/liberal principles I subscribe to and try to follow as being completely orthogonal to whether HBD is true or not. But HBD's truthiness does heavily influence how we would go about accomplishing our goals. Which is why I want my side to openly accept HBD as being possible and begin investigating it using actual science. Because if we actually want to accomplish our goals, then we need to get as accurate and precise a map of the landscape as possible. How true HBD is and to what extent it influences our society are things that we need to actually investigate, because right now, it's been declared by fiat that it's False and 0 respectively, and our strategies for achieving our goals using this faith have left something to be desired.
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This is profoundly interesting. Aside from digging into the archives here, know anywhere to read about this?
Closest I’ve got is:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/
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Hmm, that's actually a really hard question. Bronze Age Pervert makes an excellent argument against the "Dork Right", but it's in service of fighting the threat of high-IQ Asians to his Nietzschean dream rather than supporting small-l-liberal-HBD public policy. Likewise Nick Land, whose "hyperracism" (racism as the pure ranking of intelligence) is a very reasonable response to HBD - if you're a Landian in service of totalizing intelligence maximization instead of looking for any policy goals that would be palatable to the typical American. Freddie DeBoer acknowledges individual ability from a leftist perspective, but understandably can't bring himself to say anything about groups. Yarvin approaches it at points (Moldbug-era Yarvin is a small-l-liberal, fight me), but obviously he's trying to be maximally provocative and maximally against existing American models of government. Scott's writing may often be informed by an understanding of HBD, but it's buried under infinite layers of esoteric writing. I don't think there is a single figure who presents the maximally reasonable version of the "HBD, so what then?" perspective. A market niche many here could fill if they wanted (don't get attached to your job). Education Realist might be the closest, in his particular field, and he does seem to have genuine empathy for students of all classes, races, and abilities, but I haven't read him in a long time.
This is why I love HBD discussions. It makes everyone on both sides seethe.
Thanks for the comment, it's a great write up
Cheers!
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but that’s bad. One of the rules is literally don’t do consensus building or assume everyone agrees. And now everyone is dogpiling a view; where are the mods when someone called magicalkittycat retarded? The quality of this debate forum has dropped so bad because of bad moderation this place isn’t really a debate anymore just a rightwing echo chamber.
Hello brand new account that was created yesterday. I see that every comment you've ever made has either been defending magicalkittycat, replying to magicalkittycat, or attacking their detractors. I find it interesting that you would say the quality of this debate forum has "dropped" since you've only been here for about twenty four hours. What baseline has it dropped relative to?
Either you're a longstanding lurker who decided to create an account for the sole purpose of defending magicalkittycat's honor, or...
Well, it's hard not to connect these chains of logic with a certain someone has been accused of using alts and/or being an alt.
justawoman has been around the block here before, and parsimony would suggest that this is her rather than magicalkittycat (or whoever mkc may be).
Well, if mkc is Impassionata rather than Darwin, you have to throw out parsimony and assume he's got at least a half a dozen alts of various ages participating. But I doubt it, Passionflower usually couldn't keep his main alt sounding sane-ish for this long, nor resist the urge of obviously arguing among his own alts.
I don't think he's Impassionata or Darwin (justawoman is also clearly not Impassionata, though I thought Imp was a woman for quite a long time). I'm not even sold on him being an alt. There are a lot of these Hananian contrarian-against-the-right types floating around in our general sphere now, Turok was far from the only one. Mkc is clearly not a practiced or polished troll, so my guess lands closer to my comment on "people coming here to argue with the forum".
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I don't know how I could make it clearer that I'm not trying to consensus-build - should I add in another couple disclaimers that this is just one old-timer's opinion? Why, when I was a boy, this town was a great place, we all used to go down to the soda fountain...
As for magicalkittycat, people shouldn't call him retarded, and I should think the mods will get to whoever did once they see the reports. But he is a very bad poster even at making the arguments he wants to make. While themotte is supposed to show charity to people who make arguments against the prevailing winds, they still have to be good arguments, and you can't ask people here not to tear apart bad ones, and particularly not bad ones made in bad faith. Dogpiling a bad post has nothing to do with building consensus when it's being done to magicalkittycat any more than when it was done to securesignals.
The other thing I have noticed is a consistent decline in the quality of non-RW posters (some honourable mentions excepted) - RW posters have declined in quality somewhat, but not nearly as sharply. We started off with some great non-RW posters, some of whom were driven off by the ickiness of the HBD debate (rip yodats), more by the continuing success of HBD arguments against the strong environmentalist thesis, more of whom were lost due to 2020 covid/blm/election fedposting, and more of whom have since evaporatively cooled off, or flamed out over some particularly emotional point and gotten banned. There are a couple reasons for this, some better and some worse, though I suspect a major one is that there's just a deep incompatibility between the discourse norms of themotte and those of liberal/leftist spaces, such that somebody who is a high-quality poster in those spaces is unlikely to be able to transition to themotte, and that there will always be a certain psychic friction for people who are on themotte to debate in good faith but are otherwise marinated in those spaces (there's also an incompatibility with people who are totally in the jug of hard right-wing spaces, but they usually get themselves banned pretty quickly).
Your assessment of themotte as an echo chamber does bring up my assessment of the stage of decline we're currently at. I've seen this happen on many 4chan boards, for instance - it's the stage of forum decline where people come in specifically in order to argue with the forum. Incels on /fit/ are the purest example, but also just about everything on /pol/ post-2020 or so (and /pol/'s decline into that started much earlier). Both low-quality liberal posters and low-quality Hananian contrarians like kittycat/Turok all see this place as a featureless Outgroup blob and want to come here to Argue With The Forum. I'm not sure where we get new blood at this point; I see every non-RW poster with the intellectual subtlety and emotional stability to hang here as a minor miracle.
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Are Hakan and Drukpa the same guy? I had heard that Hakan had a new account, but I had not linked the two as the tones are quiet different even if the subject matter is the same.
No, they’re not. Very different guys. But I think there’s something similar, not the same but similar, in their general approach to race/culture (though KD has taken it to the next level with all his travels).
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tl;dr: Given a whole fuckton of spiled ink, it turns out that yeah, there are biological differences between ethnic groups, but you can just use IQ as a proxy metric rather than talk about ethnicity directly, so you don't get stuck in the nazi corner, and we* do that instead.
I am not sure that if you want to select for e.g. the genetic component of intelligence, ethnicity would do a better job than IQ.
My belief is that the quantity which should (!) be unproblematic to discriminate on is also the one which is closer to what we actually care about.
Of course, once we have excellent genetic models to determine which genes actually causally affect intelligence (as opposed to being merely correlated with it), states might want to use that for immigrant selection instead (if the goal is to raise the long term sanity waterline of the population).
But given that government discrimination based on genetic scores is a third rail politically, I would avoid it before such a time. The only reason it is useful for embryo testing is that measuring the intelligence of any embryo directly will always yield a value of zero, which makes the current IQ a terrible proxy.
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I do remember when it was both everywhere and tedious.
The Motte goes through waves - for a while it was HBD/racism, for a while it was Holocaust denial, every now and then some people are determined to force their pet issue and it's everywhere. I won't say it's not a problem, or that it isn't a reason to avoid this place sometimes, but it does come and go.
Again, the reason it was "tedious" is because the left-leaning side wasn't satisfied with "maybe it's true, but I oppose doing anything about it on moral grounds", and had to own the chuds on factual grounds as well, which just left a huge opening for a handful of autists to slap them down over and over.
Arguably it could be no other way, as it's something that struck at the core of unspoken rationalist premises, and possibly even liberalism itself, that's why we couldn't help but pick at that particular scab. Trusting The Science, and following Reason and Rationality was supposed to be The Way to manage society, and The Way was specifically supposed to result in progressive social democracy. Suddenly it turns out that Trusting The Science makes you racist, and distrusting The Science undermines the foundations of your own legitimacy, so there was nothing left to do but SegFault over it.
I suppose the other option is to act like the conversation is tedious, and it's just evil chuds going through a wave of an obsession for no reason at all.
Lot of people took that option. It’s the progressive version of the cope cage.
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Yeah, there was a time when people would discuss it so often, the more left-leaning mods decided to ban the entire topic for a month. Partly a result of 1-2 posters having a hobby horse, and partly of the more left-wing posters not being satisfied with making moral arguments against it, insisting that it must be false, and stepping on rake after rake in the process.
Most people are happy to leave well enough alone, if you don't press the subject.
This is why I commented, this sounds hilarious and I'm sad I missed it
I'll see if ChatGPT can find threads with good argument density later when I'm not working
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My understanding is that the HBD crackdown (more often just: conspicuous non-moderation of rule-breaking anti-HBD posts) was a project by the "bourgeois right" leaning (right but emphatically not alt-) mods, in the class of @Amadan or Hlynka (PBUH), rather than the handful of more "left" ones such as @netstack. This makes sense, too, as to the latter any HBDers are just the fargroup, while the former would feel irritated and threatened by the possibility of association with them ("I just wanted order, discipline and capitalism, but everyone including the racists insists that I am on the racist team").
As part of the pedantic minority(?) that subscribes to HBD as stated but is genuinely not interested in its common application as a resistance band for "therefore whites are superior" mental gymnastics (usually of the "IQ matters, but also the >100-average-IQ groups all have a disadvantage in some nebulous additional category like creativity so they are not actually superior" type), I just find the whole situation sad.
Your diagnosis of me and Hlynka is comically off-base. Also, the brief moratorium on HBD posting was before my time as a mod.
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If Hlynka was here to see you call him "bourgeois right" I think he'd get himself banned again. Hlynka was an actual Red Triber and as far as I can tell he saw HBD as Blue Tribe Right egghead nonsense.
"Bourgeois" was probably the wrong term, I should have said something like "normie right" - I intended to contrast with a group that would include Moldbug fans, frog posters, antisemites who hate Jews for their treatment of Euro gentiles rather than for their treatment of Muslims, Great Replacement theorists and the "dark enlightenment". This includes a lot of people you would consider "Blue Tribe Right".
Yeah I'm not debating your wider point, just couldn't let the amusement of the Hlynka point go. Something I do notice is that non-liberal anti-HBDers tend to end up getting a lot more emotionally het up about it (sometimes, not in the case of the mods here, but sometimes jumping straight into outright dishonesty, like Michael Lind). It's understandable, in that the threat is coming from inside the tribe and so can't be instantly dismissed as liberal anti-HBDers prefer.
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If memory serves the episode I referred to happened on /r/SSC, where neither of the people you mentioned were mods. Hlynka and Amadan started in /r/TheMotte, Netstack only became a mod after we moved here.
I'm also not talking about mere toleration of rule-breaking coming from one side, there was at one point a literal moratorium on the subject.
I remember the moratorium you are talking about, but thought you were talking about a more recent incident (I think we also got a sort of moratorium after moving here for a while? Maybe I'm mixing it up with a moratorium on SS's single-topic SSposting, which felt like another instance of right-wing mods wanting to bury the wrong and cringe kind of right-wing posting?). Not sure who were the mods back then and what was their motivation, though my instinct would be that it must have been similar, since the outgroup/fargroup relations to HBD in the SSC/Motte community have been like this for the longest time.
Didn't happen - pretty sure we've never imposed a topic ban in the Motte. (We have occasionally told individual posters to grind something other than their singular axe for a while.)
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I don't know if I can make a case backed by any specifics, but my subjective impression was that there was a qualitative difference between the moderation style of /r/TheMotte and /r/SSC, even when the former also had it's biases / failure modes.
You might well be right; if nothing else, /r/SSC mods lived in constant fear of the Reddit ICE busting into our sanctuary city and tried to limit discourse that would draw their ire.
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