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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28332 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.

I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.

I would like people to have a few takeaways:

  1. No one on this forum is infinitely excused of bad behavior. Having quality contributions and providing a unique viewpoint might get you some additional leeway, but our patience isn't unlimited.
  2. The mods do read and participate here. We know when someone is starting to abuse that leeway. We know when there is frustration about it.
  3. We do try to be deliberate and slow about things. It can feel real shitty when a cabal of people meet in secret to discuss your punishment and they decide permanent banishment is the solution. For longtime users that have put in the time and effort to be a part of the community here we don't lightly jump to permanent bans as a solution.

Please keep any discussion civil.

I just wish we could see an exit speech.

Good riddance. I have been reading Hlynka for years and while he had a lot to contribute and had a viewpoint very underrepresented and definitely worth having on this place, he got worse and worse as time went on.

The rule that I think is most important for this forum is listed immediately underneath "be kind". Make your point reasonably clear and plain.

The thing that I despise the most about this place is the weaselly nature of some posters on an anonymous forum on the internet. What is the point of implying something or putting words into other people's mouths? Hlynka went from contributing viewpoints and arguments to making poorly veiled sneers at other people, accusing them of believing things that they say they don't believe. In the worst cases, this came across as propping up the weakest version of opposing arguments and gaslighting behavior in the extreme. I lost count of how many times I saw him say something to the extent of "you say you believe one thing, but you actually believe another, I can tell." He should have the intelligence to know when he is being baited, and the ability to separate the bait from the true believers.

What are you supposed to say when he implies someone is an an anti-semite in response to a fairly well-reasoned argument about, I don't know, HBD? (To hell with the HBD argument, by the way, it's the same fights over and over.) Whether they're an anti-semite or not, the point of this place is to address the fucking argument instead of doing a snarky driveby. Who does he think he's convincing? If the person is a genuine anti-semite who believes in Jewish space lasers and Zionist control over America, what the fuck is the point of implying someone's an anti-semite out the sides of your mouth? Is it intended to make people discredit the argument because of who's making the argument? In which case, that behavior is well enough represented outside this place and I don't want to see any more of it.

The thing is, I don't know what he hated more, the people who baited him or the true believers he found abhorrent.

In an unrelated note, since there's no better places to discuss this, instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.

Reading the motte has become a dull slog, and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITLES pretending to say something meaningful without corresponding substance.

100% agree, I don't know some of you find the time to read every comment in this thread.

The reddit format doesn't help- small text on a white background with no images, every comment being indented further. Just put it on a blog and link to that, if you want to write a monograph.

I like long posts, but yeah, I think some of it is down to the mod rebukes about short posts and no more bare links - you have to make it substantive, which is often in reality "I could do this in two paragraphs but in case I get rapped over the knuckles I'm padding it out".

I've yet to see the mods knock an actually-good two-to-three paragraph post, so I'm dubious this is a report on the reality of the moderation's behaviors.

Seems self-evident that it's more difficult to moderate six+ paragraphs with five sentences each on each comment.

Many of my favorite posts here are long posts. It’s not really about the word count but about the quality. I’d rather read a 4000 word essay from one of our better writers than a 200 word comment from one of our worst.

I have nothing but applause for your constitution in being able to endure everything between those polar points.

The last time they changed the character limit they increased it!

Be the change you want to see. Write good posts.

Conciseness (or information density) and length are two different things. Someone can take a paragraph to say nothing or fill a dozen paragraphs with good insights.

I think a bigger problem is how often we all choose to make our own points, only tangentially related to the comments we're responding to, rather than actually responding. Instituting a word count would only make this problem worse.

instituting a more strict character count per comment would bring a breath of fresh air to the thread.

Brevity is wit, but for the rest of us it takes a long time to compose short letters, and those who tend to generate a lot of text are making the tradeoff to just get the comment out.

and many of these top-level comments consist of word soup with BIG TITTIES

I'm in favor of this; in fact, I think this would make any of the sex threads better. Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone's tried to use an LLM to /r9k/ these kinds of comments, where if you say the same thing too much it tempbans you?

I'd like to chime in from my lurker position and say that this is a good thing, in that this forum was obviously not for him - insomuch as he resolutely did not want to have his mind changed. Not knowing him personally, I'd say that my experience with him is that he resolutely held his ground and never conceded any point. Even if his opponent struck a point, he would ignore it.

And that's fine - if you have consequentialist priors. If you're convinced something is good and is the basis of your moral reality, then evidence and argumentation to the contrary will seem like sophistry. But he was made by his times. The simple fact is that it's been a decade since SSC first started going. His Bush-era anecodotes and rambles are very dated. Quite simply, he became old. Everything is postmodern to him because it is.

He was no longer 'with it'. As Simpsons says, it happened to him. It will happen to all of us.

And by God's grace, I hope I will carry myself with more dignity.

I don't mean to be flippant, but more substantive points have been already addressed. More than anything else, his stuff was a slog to read. I can't tell you how many times I've noticed a potentially interesting post, seen a giant subthread started by Hylinka, and had my eyes glaze over trying to read it. I do remember having vaguely positive associations with his name in the past, but I can't think of anything specific in the last couple of years.

Good! I resent the silly things he kept saying like 'HBD people/nazis are the real progressives'. He'd say these weird things and never provide reasons for them:

https://www.themotte.org/post/882/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/190055?context=8#context

WTF is this?

all those who were pushing DEI back during the Bush administration have transitioned to pushing HBD now that their chief opponents are secular academics rather than conservative Christians. As I've said before, the party (and the Partisans) of Woodrow Wilson, never changed sides, just their branding.

When I make a point, I try to do some quick research to make sure I'm not misremembering or confusing something. Some times I get things wrong but don't change my mind and I say something like 'oh well even despite that, these other things back up my point'. Sometimes I do change my mind. He never did either the sanity-check search or the 'despite that, here's why I'm still right', it'd be some pedantic or sarcastic, bizarre Parthian shot like 'actually chihuahuas are hunting dogs'.

I am Spartacus @HlynkaCG!

[User has been banned for this comment]

Cause of ban: Self-identification as an alt of permabanned account

Expiry of ban: Heat Death of the Universe

Ban Appeal Guidelines: Wait till expiry of ban and raise a ticket

Have you not see the film? https://youtube.com/watch?v=FKCmyiljKo0

Of course I've seen Spartacus. The fact that you're not actually banned should be a hint that was a joke.

Unless. Give me a reason, 'punk. 🔫

It's too bad that Hlynka wasn't wise or willing enough to just go make fun of this place on rdrama.net like I do. He seemed to take this place way too seriously and to be fair, that is common, and I myself have taken it way too seriously at some times in the past. Most of us are not enlightened Buddhas, we need to blow off some steam sometimes and call those who disagree with us on here morons - but this is not the place to do it unless you are able and ready to do it in a way that comes just up to the threshold of getting modded without quite crossing over it. I agreed with Hlynka about little*, and I found his "I'm wiser than you because I've been in violent situations" attitude occasionally grating (I've been in violent situations too, man), but I couldn't help but respect his ability to rile people up, especially given that it helped to enliven a place where 90% of people largely agree with each other because the people who disagree with the dominant views here have either never heard of this place, ran away from here when they saw that bad no-no people are allowed to speak their minds here, or just got bored of arguing. He just couldn't help but to fly too close to the moderator sun over and over again. So I'm pouring out a beer to a real G. It will be fun to talk with him if/when he comes back under a new identity, but knowing his earnestness, he'd probably make it completely obvious and just get immediately banned again.

*I do certainly agree with him that the similarities between the woke left and the alt/dissident right deserve more attention.

I agree. I invite @HlynkaCG to join us over on rdrama.net . We even have high brow holes for conservatives who don't find /h/chudrama particularly appealing.

I mean, who doesn't appreciate posts like: All Hail Emperor Barbecue as Haiti's Prime Minister is forced to resign as gangster warlords raze half of parliament. "They are no doctors, they've all fled last week."

I feel like this video pretty much sums up how that would go.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Yy4oURBLo98

Tell me I'm wrong.

I miss Hlynka. It’s a shame he didn’t follow the rules, and I mean that Unironically. I did notice his personal attacks, putting words in his opponents’ mouths, hair trigger temper, and just general poor argumentation. Many was the time that I considered pm-ing him to say, ‘dude, follow the rules’, but I thought it not my place. And many was the time I wondered why he hadn’t received a longer term ban.

But he made a good set of contributions, also. Someone has to point out that governance is effected by people who touch grass in meatspace, that there’s reasons beyond IQ to explain black underperformance, etc, etc. Honestly I’ll miss my role of being halfway between him and the rest of the motte.

Do I think a permaban was warranted? I’d have argued for a three month ban or something, see if it could knock some sense into him instead. But he did need to shape up. I don’t know if he would have or not, I’m not him, but I think it was worth trying.

there’s reasons beyond IQ to explain black underperformance,

Come on man don’t just copy Hlynka here by straw manning the other side. Just because one side has a lot of blank slatism doesn’t mean the other side mirrors it by being strictly biodeterminist. Like height and many other traits, genes and environment matter.

Seems like an overdramatic reaction. Probably due to you lot having known the guy for some time. So you express your own heavy heart with a heavy hand that's out of line with reality. More frequent short bans would be much better.

More frequent short bans would be much better.

He received stacks of those, too.

No comment on the permaban decision.

I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.

They're pretty common classical conservatism (FiveHourMarathon highlighted the "Hobessian" nature of it all) mixed with Gen-X / Millenial combat veteran comedic-fatalism. @JTarrou - think I've missed the mark here?

I understand that some of the drive-by insults were against the rules - and should be. I wonder how much, in Hlynka's mind, they were 40-layer deep irony / edgelord pills. Google the "November Juliet" scene from Generation Kill. Or "Whopper Junior."

Again, as this comment started out, no opinion being offered on the ban decision. I'm just pondering Hlynka's nature.

I'm surprised at some of the reactions to the "oddness" of Hlynka's views.

It wasn't so much his object-level political views, which as you point out were largely garden-variety conservative talking points that would have been at home on 00s Fox News. What really made him unique was his personality and his discussion style.

He was supremely confident in his own views, and seemingly oblivious to any and all criticism, despite being (in my own personal opinion) supremely wrong about some of those views. He frequently railed against "postmodernism", despite the fact that a simple transcript of his comments would constitute a pretty good experimental postmodern novel in its own right. He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath, in spite of the continued insistence by all of those groups that they had deep fundamental disagreements with each other. He had a habit of simply fleeing from any sub-thread where he was asked to provide direct evidence of his claims; this clashed very noticeably with the "grizzled military veteran, ride the tiger, don't take no shit from no one" personality that he wanted to project. It was this contrast that made him such a frustrating and fascinating character.

I'd rather have a discussion partner who's interesting and wrong, than a boring one who I agree with. In spite of my numerous disagreements with him, I would often check on his profile just to look at his recent comments and see what he was up to. So his ban will constitute a loss for me in that regard.

He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath

From the perspective of a space alien from another galaxy, all us 4-limbed Earth critters are alike. From my perspective, I barely comprehend why Trotskyist communists disagree with mainline communists, or what the substantive differences between the different Interantionals were. And there's absolutely a strain of conservatism that views all of us here as the spawn of the Enlightenment, and of a particularly virulent offshoot at that. We love defining, categorizing, systematizing, and playing games with Venn diagrams and 4-quadrant memes. We like reasoned and clear argumentation, we want evidence, and objective evidence at that, but all we really get is words words words. And even when we don't care about evidence, we pretend that we do.

We're the type of people who have a bunch of different ethical philosophies, but they all boil down to different varieties of consequentalism, clever hacks to work around the problem that we can't directly comprehend consequences, and so we've called these hacks by a salad of different names. But (and this is just a metaphor) when we encounter someone who's not actually a consequentialist, we don't even have the words to describe what that means, because we've used "non-consequentialist" to refer to other varieties of consequentialism.

He could be pulling this out of his rear, but the shouldn't the Mottely response to that not be to insist on the primacy of our nice little distinctions, but instead to question why he thinks he's so different? Maybe he can't put that in words, in a way that we can understand. Maybe we can't parse his binary blob*, but at least we can stick a wrapper around it and say "this dude has a Thing about politics that we don't understand". And maybe some of us conclude that there's no "there" there, that he's failed at constructing a perfectly rational system of the world from the bottom up, and that his views are fundamentally incoherent. But wasn't part of the problem that we don't want people claiming that they know what's going on in other people's heads, and ascribing views to the other people that the other people explicitly disclaim?

  • Yeah, yeah, "ATM machine".

He insisted that all of his ideological opponents, whether they be Rationalists, woke progressives, fascists, or anything in between, were all really "the same" underneath, in spite of the continued insistence by all of those groups that they had deep fundamental disagreements with each other.

I just saw something on Tumblr that seems rather relevant to this. It started with an anon saying

Islam and Christianity are much closer than you think. They belive that a woman's role is motherhood and servitude and they oppose homosexuality and abortion.

Which, a little down the chain, leads to thathopeyetlives's reply

I continue to be alarmed and frustrated by the attitude of “this thing I hate and fear is totally defined by that specific aspect of it that I hate and fear and has no notable attributes other than those”.

I wonder how much this drove Hlynka's attitude, because, looking back, it seems like the sets 'what he hated about Rationalists,' 'what he hated about woke progressives,' 'what he hated about fascists,' et cetera, were significantly overlapping — lack of traditional religiosity, insufficient colorblindness, insufficient Hobbesianism, and (possibly most importantly) intellectualism. Hence, everything else about them becomes irrelevant, "the narcissism of small differences," "Stalinism vs. Trotskyism" minutiae.

I wonder how much this drove Hlynka's attitude, because, looking back, it seems like the sets 'what he hated about Rationalists,' 'what he hated about woke progressives,' 'what he hated about fascists,' et cetera, were significantly overlapping — lack of traditional religiosity, insufficient colorblindness, insufficient Hobbesianism, and (possibly most importantly) intellectualism.

Now suppose that, based on the evidence available, one comes to the conclusion that the list of hated things you've just provided, along with a number of others, appears to emerge from a fairly tightly clustered set of similar values and philosophical primitives. Suppose that there's a specific set of memes and ideas that can express themselves in a variety of negative ways, but share a basic commonality in how one gets to those negatives. The worldview leads to a typical set of strategies, which when adapted to local conditions result in a wide variety of specific behaviors, but with significant commonalities between them.

Categorizing human ideologies is not a trivial problem. Grouping together people who seem wildly disparate under a specific theory is not an unusual occurrence.

I enjoyed poking at his cognitive dissonance and the internal inconsistencies of his worldview.

He was wrong but in pretty unique ways.

I personally wasn’t overly offended by his rule breaking, but it does seem his response to my comment is what led to the ban.

Ironically, he was fairly justified in being peeved at me there for my demonstrated ignorance (though he’d be on firmer ground if he hadn’t been constantly avoiding questions and misrepresenting many of us).

He felt like a chatbot to me lately. Where people would give counter arguments and instead of dealing with them he would claim no one is presenting the opposition. Sort of like if you keep telling a chatbot to show your a picture of a Viking raid party that is historically accurate and it keeps presenting you with black and Asian Vikings.

I found him unreadable lately and was close to blocking while trying to just skim. I don’t think it’s productive to just have people talking past each other and leads to clutter. Not sure if that’s permaban worthy but it did make the site less useful.

his often unique (for themotte) perspective

They're pretty common classical conservatism (FiveHourMarathon highlighted the "Hobessian" nature of it all) mixed with Gen-X / Millenial combat veteran comedic-fatalism.

He was a better written version of many people I encounter in real life all the time. Unique for themotte doesn't mean unique everywhere. My dad's view and mother in laws' views are probably somewhat similar, and I have a neighbor or two that might have nearly identical views. I like all these people, but I also recognize they'd probably not be a good fit here.

There are probably certain perspectives and viewpoints that can never really exist on this forum. This is sad, but to be expected. Not all(/many?) viewpoints allow for polite treatment of ideological enemies.

'polite' being the code word doing a lot of work, here.

You can say that black people are stupid and trans people are deluded pedophiles every day for years, as long as you maintain decorum. That's still 'polite'.

But if someones recognizes that what you're saying there is 'fuck everyone not like me' and responds with 'hey, fuck you too', that person is not being polite and must be eliminated.

Hlynka wasn't interested in maintaining decorum when it was an obvious papering over disrespectful or violent thoughts. I admired how long he was able to act on that disinterest without getting permabanned.

Personally, the masquerade is getting boring for me too. But out of respect for mod wishes, I'll try to fade out rather than flame out if it becomes too annoying to bother with.

  • -18

You can say that black people are stupid

define 'stupid'

Without decorum, why didn't you look into studying polygenic indices of different populations?

Hlynka wasn't interested in maintaining decorum, but also wasn't interested in making his POV clear or understanding opponents' POV.

I do think black people have a significantly lower average IQ than whites, that this has a genetic component, and this means that disparate impact civil rights law and affirmative action should not exist.

I don't think this comes from a believe in 'fuck everyone not like me' - I'm happy to work with smart Indians, Chinese, etc. And if I see a black person who's in fact contributing at the same level as a non-black person, I'm happy to work with that person too! (Clarence Thomas, for instance, doesn't seem to be any worse of a justice than the others).

I think most pro-HBD commenters here have beliefs like that?

I don't think most trans people are pedophiles though, or that they're transing our kids in the schools or w/e. I don't think transitioning is a good choice for anyone, but there's not really any concrete relationship between the way it's bad and pedophilia or schools.

I do think black people have a significantly lower average IQ than whites, that this has a genetic component

Wouldn't that, when compressed to 3 words, result in sentence @guesswho dislikes?

He's claiming we believe "black people are stupid" and "fuck everyone not like me". It's plainly not true that most people here who believe the first believe the second.

Clarence Thomas, for instance, doesn't seem to be any worse of a justice than the others

Among the best, rather.

Yes, the point of this community is discussing controversial topics with some decorum. There are plenty of places online where you can discuss boring and uncontroversial topics with decorum, or can discuss them with only prescribed mainstream views allowed. And there are many places where you can say edgy or controversial things with zero decorum, endless slurs and baiting, and a generally hostile userbase.

This exists as one of the only places where all views are tolerated provided they’re expressed in a polite and well-written way. That makes The Motte unique or almost unique, and it is a quality many of us care about.

The people you claim are saying “fuck black people” made their black neighbors the wealthiest black community in the world and regardless of race one of the most influential global cultural communities.

If that’s getting fucked sign me up for a good fucking.

You also seem to be overgeneralizing. And missing the dogs that don’t bark. Are they anti-Italian? Or have those people assimilated and function in society now so there is no issue? Are they anti-Asian? Anti-motorcycle Aficianados?

I'm well aware of the contradiction, I wrote this 5 days ago [emphasis added]:

This is a discussion forum for people with sometimes drastically different views. It feels like a fragile thing somedays. We are asking people to talk politely with one another when they may disagree with each other's entire existence. Most of the internet is filled with people pointing out that politeness in those circumstances is absurd. And thus most of the internet has descended into a bit of a hell hole that I cannot personally tolerate for any topic much less the topics where people might actually have a reason to hate each other.

Hlynka wasn't interested in maintaining decorum when it was an obvious papering over disrespectful or violent thoughts. I admired how long he was able to act on that disinterest without getting permabanned.

Personally, the masquerade is getting boring for me too. But out of respect for mod wishes, I'll try to fade out rather than flame out if it becomes too annoying to bother with.

I'm not really sympathetic to people that can't maintain the masquerade. Because I maintain it quite easily. I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and just about everyone on here is a statist of some sort. I believe most of those views are morally repugnant, and any statist view is an active advocation of violence against me. I also don't consider myself some paragon of self control. I think most people have the self control muscle and exercise it all the time. If you can drive in traffic and not run someone off the road when they do something dangerous to you then you also have that self control muscle. My 5 year old kid has the self control muscle. My 3 year old, does not. So its a skill you can learn and start using as young as 4 years old.

Also according to psychology there are bunch of psychopaths just walking around among us, following the rules, and not murdering people for shits and giggles. We don't threaten to purge all the psychopaths as uncaring monsters walking among us. And the psychopaths mostly don't act like the uncaring monsters that they are, except in specific high level managerial positions where we have designated their behavior "ok".

People complaining that it is hard not to say things in an online forum where they don't need to even participate is a bit mind-boggling to me. I truly do not understand how such a person navigates their day to day life. Perhaps they have an extreme set of blinders? Perhaps they are lying, and its actually very easy to follow the rules around here, they just don't want to? Perhaps they are in a special set of circumstances where people coddle them like I do for my three year old in order to avoid public tantrums?

Regarding you being an anarcho-capitalist, I'm sure you've heard it a hundred times, but why won't governments just step in and take it over?

Anarcho Capitalism I consider a moral imperative. Its the right thing to do. Even if all the practical details haven't been figured out. Similar to how I feel about anti-aging. We don't have anti-aging figured out, but when we do it will be the morally correct thing to allow.

So, practically speaking: you are asserting that it's more important that you not impose force upon others (that is, form a government) than that you prevent other, worse people (that is, your most conquest-prone local powers) from imposing force upon those same people?

I was not speaking practically. I was speaking of a moral imperative.

Practically speaking I'm a run of the mill libertarian.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and just about everyone on here is a statist of some sort.

Is there any plan to bring back the user viewpoint focus series? Hearing an ancap explain why their preferred system won’t just result in SomaliaHaiti is always at least interesting.

Pretty sure the viewpoint series died off by people just not doing it. No one ever asked me for my viewpoint, and I never quite felt arrogant enough to write something that long at that level of 'navel gazing' without prompting from someone else.

Should we resume?

Do we need to first gather a body of willing people, or how is it maintained?

I'm not against resuming other people resuming. I was never certain I'd be good about doing it. I typically only have the patience/interest to participate in a discussion for about 8 hours, and I'd spend most of that time just writing the things in the first place and then barely responding to any question.

It was maintained chain mail style. One person gets it and then they pick a person to pass it on to.

I'm an anarcho-capitalist, and just about everyone on here is a statist of some sort.

I’m an Objectivism-adjacent minarchist Christian, so you’re one of the few here to the freeward side of me. (As opposed to left or right.)

People complaining that it is hard not to say things in an online forum where they don't need to even participate is a bit mind-boggling to me.

I don’t know that this describes Hlynka. But neuroticism is a hell of a drug. I work to keep myself under control, but there’s definitely an undercurrent of subconscious screaming and threat detection that can get activated by online forums.

When young lefties talk about hate speech being violence and trying to purge the commons of hated speakers, I get it. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it, I think it’s wrong, but I understand on a deep level the underlying psychological impulses that motivate it.

I think following that logic makes the problem worse, and forms a catastrophization cycle that reinforces and strengthens their distress. But I can totally see how “these terrible ideas cause me so much pain, we need to get rid of them” is a train of thought people go through.

And there is pain. I know, when I see ideas that particularly get my gourd, ideas that threaten, if taken seriously, to damage values I hold dear — I know those things can easily make me freak out, become despondent, vindictive, to lash out like a cornered tiger.

This isn’t something I can easily describe to someone not familiar with serious anxiety, not because it’s some secret knowledge or something I’m “special” for feeling, but just because the feelings are so profoundly out of place that I think many people would find it shocking anyone could react in such a way.

I think this describes some of the “I can’t help but post on this forum I hate” phenomenon. People love hate-reading and hate-posting. It’s not helpful, it’s not healthy, but it is gut-level rewarding because of the great salience of threatening ideas.

But encountering a threat, however overblown, makes anyone want to eliminate it. And thus we get censorship, and long screeds whose text rhymes with “fuck you.”

The difference between me and the cancellers, I guess, is I know my emotional response to these things isn’t helpful, and it isn’t anybody else’s problem. It’s mine. And it’s my responsibility to deal with it, and to respond to the world in an intelligent manner. To be slow to speak and quick to listen.

I know I’m an unusual case. Sometimes I like to talk like I’m typical of the zoomers because of my experience of mental illness. But if I’m truthful, I’m not. My neuroticism is way higher than the average even for my generation.

I also… and this contradicts everything I’m saying here, but I don’t think of my struggles as an identity. But I talk to some people who seem like they view themselves as a Certified Generalized Anxiety Disorder Experiencer (TM) and not a person who struggles with anxiety. I’m not a person-first language advocate (I think language games are silly) but I do think there’s a mindset difference there.

I do think we’re doing things that lower the sanity waterline, lowering all boats. And social media is ground zero of this as far as I’m concerned. I’m not sure that exposure to random strangers’ ideas is actually helpful for people who struggle with calibrating their threat detector. I also believe that facing difficult situations is the only good way to calibrate. I just think there’s a balance to be struck between engaging in things that are scary but useful and being a masochist who tries to argue with people you believe deeply in your heart are wrong, and evil.

All I’m saying is, maybe Hlynka was higher in neuroticism than he let on. At the very least, some fraction of “involuntary” posters is explained by what I described.

I truly do not understand how such a person navigates their day to day life.

If we’re talking about the neurotic ones, often not very well.

I have two highly neurotic family members. One is very well adapted to society, and one isn't. The one who isn't very well adapted to society would probably love to post here, but then I'd have to ban them, because they'd probably be like hlynka but far less well spoken. The well adapted one would probably take one look and nope out.

Perhaps we are sometimes selecting for the neurotics who like the elevated threat level. The same kind of people who like roller coasters.

I still don't feel my sympathy increasing for those who severely lack the self control. I still think this forum is pretty low on the level of things that could trigger threat levels. Its purely text, which is far less stimulating than video and images. You have to have a long attention span to even pick up on some of the threats. You can find more blatant threats with even the most milquetoast set of social media friends. Every news station is trying to one up the threat level to get eyeballs. And daily life in any metropolitan area is plenty threatening enough.

I truly cannot understand why you would deliberately choose to spend so much of your free time in a specific online space when you believe that the majority of users in that space (excluding you) consciously endorse "fuck everyone not like me" as a lens through which they view the world; in which you don't seem to be having any luck persuading anyone not to endorse this worldview; in which you don't even seem to believe that anyone participating in this space can be persuaded not to endorse this worldview; in which I'm not even sure if you want to. It's just such an utterly baffling way to spend one's time. Do you really enjoy telling people "lol, you just hate everyone who's different from you" (not in so many words) only for the mods to tell you to knock it off for the nth time? Like, seriously, honest question - what are you getting out of this?

Why wouldn't you? It's much more fun to speak to people you disagree with - you make contact with their ideas, sharpen your rhetorical tactics and understanding of the subject matter, and maybe you'll learn something or maybe they'll learn something. And those people having moral flaws like "I hate everyone who isn't me" doesn't make the conversations any less interesting! They still have object level claims and complicated reasons for believing them.

Whereas being surrounded by people you agree with is (relatively) more like talking to a mirror. You know what it's going to say, so why bother?

Maybe I'm typical-minding. It really doesn't sound like much fun to me.

I agree with curious_straight_ca, and what they describe is also pretty close to the intended purpose of this forum.

I don't think you are, most people would find this place unpleasant as is, saying nothing about my hypothetical. But I think my approach is better, and so long as you can get good object-level disagreement out of it there's no reason to be put off by anything else.

I think both are found commonly.

I neither said excluding me, nor consciously endorse, nor that no one can be persuaded, nor that I'm not learning anything myself.

See discussion here and here.

Also, flagging @somedude and @sjet79, this is an immediate example of what I'm talking about. I don't thin this user is dishonestly putting words in my mouth to avoid the question, or w/e you were saying Hlynka did, but they sure are assigning beliefs and characteristics to me that I never said and don't follow from what I wrote.

Like I said to both of you, I think this is an honest mistake that happens when people talk across an inferential gap, and it gets noticed when the miscommunication is of a type that looks like hostility or strategy. But it happens all the time and just sometimes gives that appearance.

you got my username wrong, and misgendered me. Second thing is mostly in jest, idk why but sjet feels like a female form of my username.

Sorry about that, typing on phone at the time

You can say that black people are stupid and trans people are deluded pedophiles every day for years, as long as you maintain decorum.

But if someones recognizes that what you're saying there is 'fuck everyone not like me' and responds with 'hey, fuck you too', that person is not being polite and must be eliminated.

Do you consider there to be any possible explanation for those views other than "fuck everyone not like me?" I don't believe that black people are "stupid," though I do believe that there will be fewer high IQ blacks per capita than whites and Asians. I don't hate them, I just want to stop giving them handouts and discriminating in their favor. And I don't believe that all trans people are deluded pedophiles, just the overwhelming majority of the MtF ones.

Knowing that I hold these views, do you believe that I personally think "fuck everyone not like me?" If so, why?

See discussion here, the whole point is that hatred and endorsing name-calling are not necessary for your policy stance to be 'fuck them' in consequentialist terms.

Ans, yes, there are plenty of non-ideological ways to arrive at a conclusion like black people have lower IQ, or that most trans people are pedophiles, or that immigrants are dangerous and disgenic, or that feminists have gone too far, or etc.

But if you believe all of them at once, I'm not wrong to notice the correlation between that and one of the two dominant ideologies that define most political discussion in the english-speaking world, and guess that your bottom line is being written by a cultural affiliation, rather than the arguments above it.

Hlynka was at least interesting in being both anti-progressive and anti-HBD. Yo need to actually think about things for yourself to find yourself in that position.

That's more interesting than me, and most of the people here. Which makes it valuable to the discourse, right or wrong.

Hlynka was at least interesting in being both anti-progressive and anti-HBD. Yo need to actually think about things for yourself to find yourself in that position.

This position is rare only here but pretty widespread in general public.

Yo need to actually think about things for yourself to find yourself in that position.

Actually, that's just mainstream conservatism from the pre-Trump era. Anti-progressive and anti-HBD was actually just the default package for people in his circumstances, as far as I could tell.

But more importantly, he didn't actually think about things for himself! The moment you tried to press him on HBD issues he just vanished into smoke. I tried to interrogate his beliefs and figure out what he actually believed at one point ( https://www.themotte.org/post/587/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/120781?context=8#context ), and he just disappeared and stopped responding. It isn't like this is a particularly unusual case either - I've seen multiple comments from pro HBD people talking about his refusal to actually argue his own points when the topic comes up.

"HBD is false" is the implicit and in many cases explicit messaging embedded in almost all modern culture, modern advertising, modern political narratives and explicitly in legislation. It isn't impossible to come to those views by virtue of your own reasoning, but I find the idea that you need to think for yourself in order to arrive at the position that societal elites are doing their best to inculcate in the general population isn't terribly rigorous.

Pretty sure anti-progressive and anti-hbd is the tribal position of “one of the two dominant ideologies that define most political discussion in the english-speaking world”

I’ll grant you that these two beliefs are definitely overrepresented on this forum though.

The vast majority of users here hold many opinions that are outside of the two main dogmas. If you don’t see that I think it would be worthwhile to spend time either delving the various posters beliefs better or to reassess what the dominant beliefs actually are in the West.

Saying clear facts outright, which may be controversial, negative, or inherently “disrespectful,” is a lot different than “boo outgroup” using inflammatory language.

For example, saying “there’s a racial achievement gap” used to be uncontroversial as an empirical fact, and it was only controversial to bring up certain forms of causation. In more recent years there have been cases where even mentioning the fact of, which is indisputable, got somebody fired. See also: Damore and differences between sexes.

All of this is to say that you have a lot of gall for criticizing those here who try to discuss distasteful facts with decorum, given how basically everywhere else on the internet works (either censorship or cesspool).

The mods forcing consistent decorum even for those where it’s thinly papering over antipathy is a pretty fucking important norm to preserve even for the actual Nazi defenders around here, among others.

So please don’t cry that you have to work a little to hold in your contempt for your outgroup(s) here because that’s how it is for most of us on any given issue. (I’ll grant that you are playing on hard mode relative to the average poster here.)

But if someones recognizes that what you're saying there is 'fuck everyone not like me' and responds with 'hey, fuck you too', that person is not being polite and must be eliminated.

One man's recognition that his interlocutor is secretly saying 'fuck everyone not like me' is another man's uncharitable mind reading.

I would think that there would be pattern matching. It’s one thing to have an opinion that those on the receiving end won’t like, and then there’s active dislike for those people. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize any group or culture. On the other hand, when a person is running down the Welsh every chance he gets, and pointing out everything that those Welsh do is stupid and they shouldn’t act so darn Welsh, even if the person is polite, it’s hard to miss that this person has an active disgust towards Welsh people. And I think even when stated politely, active disgust is not a good thing.

And I think even when stated politely, active disgust is not a good thing.

I have explicit and active disgust for the neoconservatives who supported and advocated for the Iraq war, and though I usually state this politely the underlying disgust most likely comes out anyway. Is this a problem only for identity groups (like Welsh people) or does it apply more broadly?

Consequentialist 'fuck everyone else', not deontological 'fuck everyone else'.

(which is to say, if that wasn't clear: part of the entire functional purpose of a political ideology is to come up with an intellectual and narrative framework in which you can advocate of policies and ideas which advantage you and disadvantage your enemies, without ever descending into negative-valence emotions or traits. EG, coming up with arguments for why the policies that favor you and hurt your opponents are actually best for everyone 'in the long run' or are morally correct, without relying on having to say that you selfishly want things that benefit you or vengefully want things that hurt your opponents. Coming up with rational scientific matter-of-fact reasons why people like you are better than people like your opponents, and why that means society will be better served by people like you having more power and privilege. etc.

The fact that you honestly feel no explicit hostility or superiority towards the people who are screwed over by the things you are advocating, and would never dream of being directly rude to those people and telling them to go fuck themselves, is not impressive, even if it's 100% sincere. The whole point of ideology is to construct teh narratives and dialogues which allow you to do that while still taking the side that favors yourself and your team.

That's why a consequentialist looks at the slate of policies/stances a person or group takes and goes 'cui bono?' Everyone thinks their beliefs are dispassionate truths, if the set of dispassionate truths you believe all add up to obviously rationally objectively point towards policies that fuck over group X, that's the same as you just saying 'Fuck group X' in terms of consequences

See The bottom Line for why you look at the consequences rather than the justifications in cases like this).

Then you doom us to antagonism. Every division of spoils cannot be neutral, it is an assault against you by the other group who could give you just a little more.

You may say there is some fair division, but you literally just argued that you can't trust any such argument.

Seems like a non sequitur?

Not that I think this is the strongest form of the argument, but... One side points at specific statistical material gaps between two groups and says 'the gap is evidence that there's some form of discrimination or inequality at play somewhere, we should have policies to try to eliminate the gap.' The other side says 'One group is naturally inclined to outperform the other on whatever metric there's currently a gap in, so those gaps are natural and unavoidable and we shouldn't try to close them.'

To me, it seems like that second position is the one that can justify literally any size of gap, since there's no comprehensive a priori model of how big the performance difference is, or how big of a gap that should translate to (comprehensive and a priori being relevant word here).

Whereas the first side at least has a natural stopping point of eliminating the gaps, and would need some kind of major narrative shift to justify going past that.

But you think the opposite is true? I don't understand your reasoning.

Conservatives underrepresented in academia and owners of websites? Oh, it's not our fault conservatives cannot create modern software themselves. Men having higher suicide rates than women, shorter life expectancy and higher chance to be homicide victim? Again, not a problem.

More comments

The issue is that there isn't an objective standard of a fair split (this is precisely what you argue).

I don't think you'd think we should make these sorts of policies broadly applicable.

One side points at specific statistical material gaps between two groups and says 'the gap is evidence that there's some form of discrimination or inequality at play somewhere, we should have policies to try to eliminate the gap.' The other side says 'One group is naturally inclined to outperform the other on whatever metric there's currently a gap in, so those gaps are natural and unavoidable and we shouldn't try to close them.'

Now let those two groups be defined differently. Urban areas have higher GDP per capita. Should we, to fix this inequity, direct money to even this? There are many other axes you could look at: even if you choose a 50-50 split, always, as the fair option, your selection of what measures to check along itself involves bias.

Whereas the first side at least has a natural stopping point of eliminating the gaps, and would need some kind of major narrative shift to justify going past that.

We know what happens when gaps are eliminated: switch measures until you find one where your favored groups are disadvantaged, or just stop caring.

You see this in education: no one complains that it's unfair that more women go to college than men.

I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans. The forum does not (yet) have the userbase numbers where permabans are favorable over longterm bans. If there were hundreds of users who ate bans and who would be expected to participate again, then permabans would be preferable, because no one wants to read one horrible comment every day from the returning exiled. But we don’t currently have that problem. Were Hylnka to be banned in 6month increments, we (1) sufficiently stave off the problem of bad content, because one bad comment every 6 months is entirely acceptable, and one bad monthly from ~6 banned longterm users is also acceptable; while importantly, (2) we benefit from the (perhaps) 20% chance that upon return the content follows the rules, especially because people generally become more pacified with age which increases the percent every iteration. If that 20% chance occurs, it’s a longterm supply of valuable contributions which are worth the few one-off bad comments you have to read before the correct dice roll. There’s also a unique benefit to forum culture for retaining those invested longterm.

An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period. And an alternative safeguard for good content upon return would be to automatically delete every comment by the user upon hitting -2 points after 10min, for a set duration of time proportional to number of times automatic deletion of comment occurs.

This is my analysis, deontologists may disagree.

I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans.

For whatever its worth, my suggestion for Hlynka's ban was "a year and a day," which was what we temporarily replaced permabans with back on the subreddit.

But I didn't argue strongly for it, because after we'd been doing 366 day bans for a little over a year, people started coming back... and they weren't any better than they'd been before. One theory had been that sometimes people get too caught up in whatever the $CURRENT_THING is, and we want to allow people to grow, and... to the best of my recollection, it has not ever worked out that way in the history of this community. People who did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans came back and... immediately did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans.

Permabans are not great, especially when we're actively looking for ways to grow the community (productively) rather than shrink it. But allowing long-time community members to actively degrade the discourse is, unfortunately, worse.

I understand that Christian caritas is not a guiding principle here, but from a secular perspective, I still value allowing people the opportunity to grow and improve, even if people rarely take it. It feels like the right thing to do. Humane.

I'm not a mod, I don't want to be a mod, but I've been mod-like elsewhere at times. I don't know you, but in your shoes I've felt weary; worn down. And who knows, maybe this is one of those cases where enforcing the line with one person can help others veer back before crossing the line themselves. @HlynkaCG would probably appreciate how that works. But I'll go on hoping for the mods to collectively show mercy, or grace, or something like that.

An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction, after some ban period.

If I really valued participating in a particular online community, I would eat a six-month ban, no problem. But I will absolutely stop participating in online communities if further participation is made conditional on grovelling to the jannies like this. There's a specific online community which I went on practically every day for the best part of a decade, and when they asked me to jump through this particular hoop I said fuck you, I'm out. I suspect I'm pretty close to the norm for the kind of person who participates in male-dominated online communities.

I remember getting banned from a forum when I was much younger. The policy there was 'after X amount of time you can write to the mods, admit you were wrong, and they will reinstate your account'. No way in hell I'd admit being wrong for what I considered an unjust banning.

If some community was daft enough to demand me to perform penance in the form of 2 pages of essay homework, then leaving aside why I would want to come back, that's going straight to ChatGPT.

I'm not entirely opposed to something like a rehabilitation program for rule breakers. In my experience the rule-breakers themselves are often very much not ok with such a system. I believe anyone that is capable of living in modern society and not constantly getting involved in violence and being thrown in prison is capable of filtering themselves. So most forum users are capable of filtering themselves, but they are not willing to filter themselves. So adding an external filter that is not under their control is not something they want, its just seen as an imposition.

requiring a two page essay on rule-following as a costly signal of contrition and to promote salience of infraction

I've wanted to do things like this in the past. But its not a good idea. We got a lot of complaints that we were just being petty tyrants abusing our power, and that we just wanted people to "bend the knee" and "respect my authoritaay!" And those complaints seem generally correct to me. Some of the libertarian types (myself included) have an allergic reaction to such requirements, and may swing much harder towards "fuck you and your impositions".

I'd rather just treat people like adults, rather than misbehaving kids. If you can't or aren't willing to control your behavior here then we should just part ways. I don't want to try and parent you. I don't want you ass kissing or crawling on your belly to be allowed back in. I just want you to act within the rules we have set out while you are here. That is my only requirement. And because it is the only requirement it becomes a much stronger one. There is no getting around it by willing to be a sycophant.

Having said all that nothing is forever set in stone. Hlynka could come back in a year. But it would have to be an active decision by the mod team. Not a passive one. And if it were to happen, I'd like to see the most reluctant members of the mod team and community convinced.

My ideal moderation style would be something like your first and last suggestions, ‘problem users’ have a rolling 2 month ban window that is restarted immediately upon each infraction with no leeway or recourse unless they remain unbanned for - say - 18 months and then return to normal user status.

But I respect that the mods probably have better things to do than to nanny the most frequently reported users.

I'd agree with 6-month bans; if people come back, they'll either improve, or they'll get in a couple of bad posts and get re-banned. Either way, it's not a huge strain on the forum.

An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following

LLM go brrrr...

It has to be hand submitted, in fountain pen, at Zorba’s business address.

I would not recommend Zorba list his business address, it's liable to receive mail bombs.

Good thing I own (way too many) fountain pens... Is their going to be a stipulation on what ink has to be used? I'm quite partial to Sailor Yama Dori and Diamine's Oxblood and for those days where I want a bit more shine to it, their Starlit Sea.

Hlynka was, in my opinion, one of the best posters this community has ever seen. I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence. What he had to offer, this community needed quite badly, whether the members recognize it or not. I'm quite sure he was right about most things, and of the few I'm less sure of, I'd still rather bet with him than against him.

That being said, I am pretty sure he knew the ban was coming, and was in no particular hurry to forestall it. My impression is that he just got tired of the bullshit, a situation with which I sympathize even if it doesn't change the outcome. We ask questions to find answers, and having found them, the purpose of a space designed to facilitate question-asking falls rapidly to zero, and it is time to move on. Godspeed, good sir.

I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.

This is healthy for me to hear. He and I had a falling out some time back, and I admit it's colored my impression of things; I'm glad to have such a clear reminder of what he could bring to the table at his best to balance against my own sentiment.

I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.

What was the argument about? Could you link it?

Several people have asked, Reddit's search functions are trash so I don't have a link, but I'm working on a writeup. the short version was that I was super-black-pilled and 100% committed to what I perceived to be Red-Tribe Accelerationism, went in hard asking what the alternative was supposed to be, and left convinced that I had, in fact, been thinking like a Blue, should stop doing that immediately, and should endeavor to actually think like a Red instead. People who've talked to me long-term often mention that I've mellowed out a lot since then; that conversation is what did it.

A lot of people dump on him for his theory that blues and the "radical" right are actually the same thing, but I know for a fact he is correct, because I have observed the divide between the two in my own thinking. I was raised Red, and went deep blue for more than a decade before drifting back. What I thought of as moving back to the "right", though, was only surface detail, and my core ideological and philosophical commitments were still intrinsically Blue. His response clearly communicated the difference, and I have endeavored to emulate his good example ever since.

Was it the one gattsuru cited somewhere in this thread?

I can't find a post by gattsuru citing Hlynka in this thread. got a link?

....Still working on the writeup.

https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193321?context=8#context

Ah, thanks much. None of those are the actual exchange, but they are part of the lead-up to it, as he and I started poking at each other more and more. This and this are close preludes, and probably contain most of the information, but it took an actual head-on argument about it to drive the point home.

I don’t know if you’re still planning on posting your comprehensive writeup, but if you aren’t, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could elaborate more on what it means to think like a Red and think like a Blue, and in particular what bearing this has on the question of the radical left and the radical right being “the same thing”.

(If you are still planning on posting your writeup and it will address these questions, I will patiently await it.)

The writeup is still in progress, but I want to try to at least communicate some portion of the insight in the meantime.

Let's leave aside "Red" and "Blue" as labels, and substitute "A" and "B". From Orwell's "politics and the English Language", here's an example of the same idea written written two different ways:

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Let's call the first style "A" and the second style "B". Obviously the two are quite different, and Orwell, being a master of composition, has intentionally written the second to be bad and wrong. Let's ignore aesthetics completely, and not care at all about which is more pleasing to the eye or ear.

I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.

Does that description make sense to you?

I would say further that the former is better than the latter

I agree that the former is clearly superior to the latter, but I confess that I don't know why.

The former is certainly closer to the soil; although we shouldn't forget all the nasty, poisonous things that lurk in the soil as well.

there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest.

I'm more inclined to say that there is no inside. There is only outside. (I'm very influenced by Zizek and McGowan's psychoanalytic reading of Hegel on this point - there is nothing that escapes contradiction, not even God.)

the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something

On the most literal reading, this seems straightforwardly false. Otherwise how could we explain the possibility of lying, or the ability of authors to write convincing dialogue for characters who think differently from themselves?

At any rate, I'm happy to discuss these issues independently, but I'm not sure what all this has to do with the question of the equivalence between the contemporary far left and far right, or the question of equivalence between political ideologies in general. I have some guesses as to where it might be going, but it would probably be better to save that until you post the definitive account of your position.

I'm more inclined to say that there is no inside. There is only outside.

Hmm. Let's try it this way.

A: I returned and saw under the sun...

B: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion...

The former admits appropriate subjectivity: I saw frames the sentence as the author's personal experience, which you are implicitly invited to measure against your own. The later inappropriately claims objectivity: Objective consideration, with no mention of who is doing the observing, is the language of a textbook, presenting information to be ingested uncritically. It implies a comprehensive system of knowledge, of which this is one piece.

...Or I can make it even simpler, and hopefully divorced from any political or social connotations.

A: It seems obvious to me that...

B: Everyone knows that...

Both strongly assert a position. The latter bakes in an inherently inappropriate social claim to reinforce the point. You see that, right?

In this case, A is speaking from "inside" themself, about a perceived reality they recognize as outside them. B is speaking from "outside" themself, about a "reality" that almost certainly does not exist. It seems to me that there is nothing that "everyone knows", most especially because the phrase is usually deployed at someone who evidently doesn't know the thing in question.

Likewise:

A: "but time and chance happen to them all"

B: "but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account"

...Are not equivalent either. The former frames time and chance as something to be accepted. The latter frames them as something to be managed, if not outright overcome. But the whole point of the passage is that they are to a considerable extent unmanageable; the A version is highlighting this, and the B version is minimizing this, perhaps even denying it.

It seems to me that the A version presents itself as inside a box, the self, looking out at the world, while the B version presents itself as Systematized Knowledge, looking into a box, which is the world. That is what I mean by inside and outside. I'm further asserting that there is no Capital-S Systematized Capital-K Knowledge, though to really chase that point down will probably require a lot more drawing of definitions. Suffice to say, the implicit claim I'm pointing to is false.

Does that make more sense, whether you agree with it or not?

On the most literal reading, this seems straightforwardly false. Otherwise how could we explain the possibility of lying, or the ability of authors to write convincing dialogue for characters who think differently from themselves?

Lying is difficult, and simulating is likewise difficult. No one can do either perfectly, and we're talking here about conversation, not fiction. I'm asserting that how people argue, especially when they argue well and forcefully, reveals a lot about how they think.

but I'm not sure what all this has to do with the question of the equivalence between the contemporary far left and far right

Because the assertion that I am endorsing is that the appropriate way to group ideologies is not by position statements, which observably change with some frequency, but rather on core axioms and values, which do not. I've argued previously that the core of Enlightenment/Progressive/Left-wing thought is the axiom "we know how to solve all our problems", with the point being that it is a false axiom, and anyone who uses it is making the same fundamental error, regardless of what specifically they think the problems and solutions are. With the example above, I'm trying to show how that thought iterates out into even basic statements about observable reality, like "chance exists".

I've argued previously that the core of Enlightenment/Progressive/Left-wing thought is the axiom "we know how to solve all our problems"

Are you sure that's a uniquely Enlightenment axiom? Isn't traditional Christianity quite opinionated on how we can solve all our problems? "For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."

Anyway, this strikes me as more of a statement of personal credence about the results of a given policy program, rather than a core philosophical axiom that we might expect to find wedded to one ideology over another.

There was and still is definitely an element of this in Marxism, the faith that the world revolution would usher in the end of history and the final utopia. Absolutely. But there are also Marxists who are critical of that tendency. It's a fortunate coincidence that I mentioned Zizek and McGowan in my last post, because they're both self-described Marxists who are critical of traditional eschatological Marxism. Zizek has transitioned over the years towards a position where he treats Marxism as more of a regulative ideal to strive for, rather than a single defined end state. McGowan critiques the traditional Marxist conception of a utopian social order free of contradictions because it fails to account for the lessons of Freud and Lacan about the fundamentally self-destructive nature of the human psyche. He describes his position as one of "permanent revolution" - yes we should strive for a socialist economic order, but he explicitly acknowledges that that won't be the end of our problems. There will always be new problems, new tensions, the need for new revolutions. If a Marxist thinks like this, is he no longer a Marxist? Well, he obviously doesn't become a traditional Red.

Do you think that white identitarians think they "know how to solve all our problems"? I've never really heard any of them talk in those terms. But if any of them do believe that, then they should obviously stop. There have been lots of (almost) 100% white societies throughout history and they all had lots of problems. White people have a long history of violently murdering each other. So it's just a simple historical fact that white nationalism can't solve every problem. I think that every intelligent white identitarian who has reflected on meta-politics is aware of this.

You can use almost any political ideology as an example. Let's take ancaps. Do ancaps think they know how to solve all our problems? It seems obvious to me that there could be some who do and some who don't. And they're all still ancaps. It wouldn't make sense to classify them any other way.

I'm not opposed to the idea of looking at political ideologies through the lens of common foundational commitments, if we can find the right ones, but "we know how to solve all our problems" just doesn't strike me as a good one. Dividing people based on that would lead us to put people with severely disparate ideologies into the same camp.

Because the assertion that I am endorsing is that the appropriate way to group ideologies is not by position statements, which observably change with some frequency, but rather on core axioms and values, which do not.

I won't comment upon this assertion except to point out that this was absolutely not what Hlynka was doing. Hlynka would just tell people they were lying about their positions, make up some of his own to attribute to them, and then strut off as if he hadn't just made a fool of himself.

His bullshit system of categorization wasn't leading him to some deeper insight others failed to understand, it was leading him to make stupid nonsensical posts where he attempted to call people out for failing to defend arguments they had never made.

Did you make a point against his IQ skepticism that he doesn't want to answer? Prepare to have him ask you how your point is supposed to invalidate colorblind meritocracy. Have you ever posted about meritocracy before? Doesn't matter if you haven't. Are you actually in favor of it? Fuck you, Hlynka can read your mind and knows you really aren't.

More comments

Reddit's search functions are trash

I noticed that too. I wonder why nobody can come up with a Reddit search engine that is actually usable.

There were several, but the shut down the public API for IPO$/fuck you reasons and now they are all broken.

Listen, once you reserve the right to disregard the other guy's actual post and respond to the one you imagined him making, you're not participating in a forum in good faith. If you're going to respond to someone with "How does this prove X?" like it's some kind of comeback then X can't be something the other person has never posted about.

You can suspect whatever you want about what kind of autistic power level hiding fatlords everyone is, but you have to respond to posts that exist. You have to participate in the conversation people are actually having.

People do this to me almost literally every time I post.

I think what you are referring to is the inferential gap, not malice. People from a different hivemind than yours will have so much different context than you that the words you write won't mean the same things when they read them. Replies will look bizarre and non-sequitur and like they're ignoring things you already said.

You just have to have faith and be charitable in assuming that people are trying to make constructive replies and the inferential gap is making the two of you talk past each other, and try to work it out using smaller words. If your response to someone making a bizarre reply that seems to miss the point is to say 'that person is being dishonest', then you'll preferentially disregard all communications from people outside your filter bubble until you eventually can't even talk to anyone who doesn't already agree with you.

I agree with you and I think people treat you with unnecessary disdain here for your politics. That said, you and Hlynka are quite different in that I think you’re able to engage in much better faith with users you strongly disagree with, even when you occasionally get too mad (and so do all of us).

In general, I agree with you (and will miss him), but Hlynka definitely was pretty bad about this, far worse than people are toward you—people repeating dozens of times in a single conversation that they don't have the view imputed to them, and his response is essentially just to repeat the assertion.

I think what you are referring to is the inferential gap, not malice.

No, I'm not referring to an inferential gap. Dude literally sees fit to tell you that you're lying about your own opinions and then make some up for you. Check Prima's example, there are others. Thanks for the twee little lecture, but you'd have been well-served to acquaint yourself with the discussions in question before delivering it.

When people talk about Hlynka disregarding other people's posts, they're talking about stuff like this. There's no "inferential gap" here - he's just flatly accusing people of lying about their own positions, and ignoring their pleas to the contrary. I'm not sure how else you could interpret it.

You can suspect whatever you want about what kind of autistic power level hiding fatlords everyone is, but you have to respond to posts that exist. You have to participate in the conversation people are actually having.

You can also not do that because you decide it is beneath you, and accept a ban as the consequence. Each person makes their own choices, and I would be very surprised if Hlynka did not fully expect the ban and at least weakly agree that it was justified based on his behavior.

It takes a certain kind of person to come into a community where their opinions are going to be very frequently and widely disagreed with, and to take that disagreement from ideological enemies day after day for 5+ years without flipping out, resorting to name-calling or just getting buttmad™️. Unfortunately Hlynka, for all his many interesting stories, life experience and wit (and he had a lot of it), was not equipped for it.

The great majority of people here are able to not insult other users even though ideological disagreements are very much commonplace.

even though ideological disagreements are very much commonplace.

In the '50 Stalins' sense, maybe. Or in the sense of the Emo Philips joke.

But it definitely looks to me like most posts agree with each other in terms of valence on most of the issues that come up here, and directional disagreements are rare.

(directional disagreements being 'trans women are women vs men who think they're women are delusional,' rather than disagreements of the form 'are men who think they're women sad victims of social contagion, or are they dangerous predators trying to groom children?' I would not say the latter two people have an ideological disagreement, at all.)

I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.

Well. Don't leave us hanging.

What was the sentence?

I remember that conversation vividly like it was yesterday, that sentence was "Democrats are the real racists."

I'm quite sure it wasn't, but if you've got a link I'd love to have it. I'm working on a more in-depth writeup to answer the question above, and it'd be interesting to check my recollection against the actual conversation.

I would be excited to see what sentence had that power! Can you dredge it up from the depths of reddit or the motte or SSC?

And thus continues the spiral into well-mannered, "rational" circlejerking.

I take a "know it when I see it" approach to whether I think someone is genuine and fiery versus a troll (E.G. Impassionista was most certainly a troll in my book), and HlynkaCG never appeared to be in the latter camp. He just got snarky.

And yeah, being snarky is against your rules. "Your" rules. I appreciate the need to gatekeep to enforce community standards, but if it means removing people like HlynkaCG, then I guess those rules aren't making a community I even want to lurk in.

Have fun regurgitating the same genteel, blowhard-lensed talking points, I'll be hanging out on Rdrama and Kiwifarms. The discussion there is also shit, but at least the users there don't go through foreplay before verbal defecation, and I can call people faggots without getting banned.

And yes, I am being intentionally hyperbolic; I could have spent this post hemming and hawing and then politely asking for a ban, but where's the fun in that?

then I guess those rules aren't making a community I even want to lurk in

Then leave. You shouldn't need us to ban you. What's keeping you here?

Hlynka didn't get banned for trolling. He got banned for repeatedly being a dick to people he argued with. You want to be a dick to people you argue with? You're right, rdrama and kiwifarms and a ton of other places are out there. This isn't any of those places.

Btw, I don't think Impasionata was a troll either, at least not in the classic sense. I think he genuinely believed what he was saying. He just took great pleasure in being as insulting and obnoxious as he could be while saying it.

Crazy, I used to mix it up with him back in the old days on slate star. I eventually mostly stopped because he stopped making sense. RIP Hlynka

I would be a lot less frustrated over this if the group here hadn't done the following:

  1. Allow a community of like minded people to congregate on /r/themotte

  2. Encourage those people to leave

  3. Lock the door behind them once they do

Maybe you don't like hylnka, but a lot of people did. The whole pitch on moving everybody here was that we could avoid the overbearing influence of reddit admins, but now we just have...you guys.

Hylnka was a dick, and banned me at least once on themotte...but as I have pointed out before: you guys (specifically you, cjet) over way overtending this garden. Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another. Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.

Here's a suggestion for how to improve themotte and course correct it: give us something like "showdead" on hacker news. Give me the option in my userprofile to have a non mod curated experience where I can see naughty posts and interact with them. People who want the more curated experience can untick this "show naughty" option, and never have to see it. I don’t think you will do this since it takes the power of being a mod away (although keeps the practical purpose), but it would be appreciated.

I am honestly confused by your accusations.

Allow a community of like minded people to congregate on /r/themotte

Yes, we have done this, where others have not. If others were doing this, we would probably not bother.

Encourage those people to leave

Leave what? Leave reddit? No, we only encouraged people to also be on themotte website. There is no requirement or encouragement to leave reddit. I still have an account there for subreddits I enjoy.

Lock the door behind them once they do

What door has been locked? We also permabanned people over on the subreddit.

Maybe you don't like hylnka, but a lot of people did. The whole pitch on moving everybody here was that we could avoid the overbearing influence of reddit admins, but now we just have...you guys. Hylnka was a dick, and banned me at least once on themotte...but as I have pointed out before: you guys (specifically you, cjet) over way overtending this garden.

No, I like Hlynka. If there is such a thing as "internet friends" I would consider him one. I was the most reluctant among the mods to ban him, and have stuck up for his behavior quite often in the back-channels. The fact that I am the one to ban him is more similar to a "George shoots Lennie" situation. Not comparing Hlynka to Lennie, but the social dynamic of the situation where the most ardent defender of the accused who gave them as many chances as possible has to be the one to carry out the execution.

And yes you have us. This was always the agreement. If you want the reddit admins and some other set of moderators, you know where reddit is. We have gotten significantly more lenient since moving off of reddit, because there is more of a worry of eroding our user base and having no replacement source. If you want no moderation there are places on the internet like that. This isn't such a place, never has been, and never will be given that zorba will probably just shut it down if it came to that.

Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another. Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.

People are allowed to say "naughty words" here. They aren't allowed to put words in other's mouths. Accuse people of beliefs they don't hold with little or no evidence/discussion. And throw out broad sweeping insults to others.

You can say cunt, but you can't call another user one without breaking our rules. If you are not a fan of "politeness" as one of the rules of discussion, I'd again suggest that most of the rest of the internet is still out there.

Here's a suggestion for how to improve themotte and course correct it: give us something like "showdead" on hacker news. Give me the option in my userprofile to have a non mod curated experience where I can see naughty posts and interact with them. People who want the more curated experience can untick this "show naughty" option, and never have to see it. I don’t think you will do this since it takes the power of being a mod away (although keeps the practical purpose), but it would be appreciated.

No. Zorba has been asked about this multiple times before. He has a post somewhere about trash in a river as a comparison. The general point is that our users actually do most of the filtering for us, and mods are here as a backup to make sure there is a clear bright line.

They aren't allowed to put words in other's mouths. Accuse people of beliefs they don't hold with little or no evidence/discussion.

People do this to me (I'm guessing) 70% of the times I post here.

I don't think it's malice, I think it's the inferential gap. When someone from outside your local hivemind cluster reads your post, they don't take away from it the same things you put in. So their response often assumes a lot of things about you that are not present in the post and are dead wrong.

I could report every time that happens to me, but it would be counter-productive. I think it's a symptom of people with different contexts finding an area where they both have something to learn, and should be explored rather than punished.

(which I don't always have the emotional energy for, but, you know. In theory.)

People getting things wrong in good faith is one thing.

Blatantly disregarding clarification is an order.

There’s still enough diversify of thought here that any given stance is going to risk an inferential gap with someone, and consistently striving to pass an ITT is the best we can do.

What door has been locked? We also permabanned people over on the subreddit.

Every post on /r/themotte is locked for comments and nobody can post anything new. That's the door that has been locked.

Wasn't it locked when the migration happened? The motive was to prevent the division of the community between the two platforms, and make sure it launches successfully, right?

We have gotten significantly more lenient since moving off of reddit, because there is more of a worry of eroding our user base and having no replacement source

Why do you believe more moderation (relative to our reddit level) would lead to greater attrition than less moderation? It's not at all obvious to me.

Speaking for myself, if there were a bunch of jannies lording over people constantly with a long list of rules, I wouldn't participate.

The whole move here was because of the reddit admins making clear they wanted more bans, more policing, etc.

way overtending this garden

I don't think this is an entirely baseless claim, but I do think the mods generally do a great job of modding for tone and not content, which is what we want from them. This is the only public forum I'm aware of where Nazis and progressives both make regular contributions to the discussion. We want to curate and preserve a space for that kind of ideological diversity, and if the cost of that is that the tone of the average post becomes somewhat more stilted, then that's an acceptable loss. A complete withdrawal of moderation would lead to people with minority viewpoints self-selecting out of the discussion even more than they already have.

Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another.

Many of the regulars were posting here before ChatGPT (or even before GPT-3).

I liked Hlynka well enough, but my biggest issue him was the near constant question dodging whenever he got challenged with something difficult. Now mind you in a lot of those cases there are wats he could have responded/answered from his own viewpoint (even if I think the arguments would have been wrong) but he didn't even do that. But he would continue responding to other people's posts that didn't contain hardball questions in the meantime.

Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.

Producing heat in a place dedicated to productive political discussions is a bad idea.

If you think being a mod for a place where charged political discussions happen is a power trip, you are so far off base that you aren't even in the stadium. I've modded a forum like that before, and let me tell you: it fucking sucks. You spend almost all of your time dealing with shitty posters who are spoiling for a fight and deliberately antagonizing others, but who are just on the good side of the rules most of the time. They are the equivalent of a child who runs up to a line in the sand going "haha, you can't touch me" the entire time. They make the experience worse for everyone except themselves, and the moment you give them a warning (let alone a ban) they will raise bloody murder about how you are biased and persecuting them. Meanwhile, the good users aren't giving you shit but they don't really care about the work you do either. The "janitor" analogy is apt here, because people rarely take notice if you're doing a good job but notice right away if you're doing a bad job. In general it's a thankless job which can easily lower your opinion of humanity if you aren't careful to not let it get to you. Any minor power trip you might be able to get from moderating a backwater politics forum simply is not worth it, and nobody is doing that.

Contrary to your assertion, the mods actually use a pretty light touch. FFS you can go look yourself and see all the times Hlynka got temp banned and given a lot of lenience. And in many of those cases you can find people bitching "ah, so Hlynka continues to get away with posts like this and the mods do nothing". So even the "overbearing" mod presence you decry is considered by many posters to be far too light. That by itself should tell you that you are way out of touch if you think that this is overbearing.

Thankfully, we have wildcard rules allowing us to mod people for repeatedly toeing the line, even if they can claim with a straight face no individual line has been crossed. This is rarely used, unless someone has been consistently obnoxious, or low level obnoxious while just avoiding what they perceive as the threshold for mod action.

Regarding Hlynka's second chances (all 25 of them), in general we give additional leeway to longterm users in good standing.

If you have multiple AAQCs, a history of quality posts and are generally in good standing, then if you have an off day, the mods will consider that and go easier on you. A ban might be shortened, or converted into a warning. A warning might be replaced by "knock it off" that doesn't go on the record.

But the leeway extended is not absolute, or infinite. Hlynka pissed me off to no end, beginning with unwarranted personal attacks and casual racism, so if I hadn't recused myself from moderating him, he'd have been shown the door ages ago. But this ban came when his friends in the mod team, people who had worked alongside him for years back when he was a mod, had enough.

Re: racism, I just realized that's funny that he was somewhat racist to you, considering the recent topics he was arguing in.

He's gone to other extremes to demonstrate his hostility against me, including impugning the validity of my medical degree.

Thankfully the medical registration authorities of two different countries respectfully disagree, but if I ever end up working for the VA, his back pain, tinnitus and so on will inevitably turn out to not be service related, and good luck getting anything stronger than motril.

(For legal reasons, this is a joke. Leaving aside that's how the VA does things by default)

If you think being a mod for a place where charged political discussions happen is a power trip, you are so far off base that you aren't even in the stadium. I've modded a forum like that before, and let me tell you: it fucking sucks.

I think you're typical-minding. There are people for whom it is a power trip.

Oh get out of here with this. Dude routinely reserved the right to ignore others actual posts and try to call them out over arguments they never made, and would sit there fantasizing about what they "really" thought and what bad people it made them. There's never been a version of this place where that was tolerable, other than in the case of Hlynka himself and the "999 strikes and you're out" rule he was allowed to live and die by. It's absurd that he lasted this long.

In this thread: users asking why now, what was so bad about recent actions, is there a possibility for leniency.

Also in this thread: users rejoicing like the UK on Thatcher's death.

I'm going to provide a little more context in hopes of reconciling these two extremes. If nothing else, it'll serve as a eulogy for a guy I genuinely respect.

Over the last week, the mod queue saw a lot of action. And after any of us cleared out the obvious warnings and bans, there were always multiple comments from Hlynka left sitting at the bottom. Turds on the doorstep.

  • Dripping with disdain for the outgroup.
  • Ending an actual response by suggesting his interlocutors are either sockpuppets or stupid.
  • Accusing multiple users

He was last banned two months ago for this turd. Before that it was a different driveby. Before that, another. And another. And another.

At the same time, Hlynka reliably generated a lot of actual contributions. I'm not just talking about the quality stuff, though there was plenty of that. (Notice, also, how that last one leads to throwing shade at Nybbler. Some things are eternal.) No, I mean the fact that Hlynka could be relied upon to show up, present his ideas, and poke holes in others--maybe even with some tact. He provided real value to the Motte. He kept doing so up until his ban, so long as you steered clear of the wrong topics. Hell, with the appropriate encouragement, he remained perfectly capable of giving a level-headed defense on those topics, too, once he stripped out the call-outs and persecution complex.

But as time has passed, those topics have gotten more and more attention. I couldn't say whether that represents a shift in the Discourse, in the makeup of our userbase, or in Hlynka himself. At the very least, there is a nasty little feedback loop where his reputation as a partisan strangles productive discussion in the cradle. You could basically guarantee that if he wrote anything about race, half a dozen users would show up to fight, and vice versa.

So here we are. Warnings have done next to nothing. Bans have failed to leave a lasting reminder. They've worked well as a cooldown period, but Hlynka doesn't really need that--he's perfectly capable of switching modes and writing a nice comment about movies or sports or the Fermi paradox or another user's excellent story. That's Hlynka.

I'll miss his work.

You could basically guarantee that if he wrote anything about race, half a dozen users would show up to fight, and vice versa.

Half a dozen kids beating up another kid in the playground. Happens every day for two weeks. Principle decides that they can stop all of these disturbances by just dispelling the one kid getting beat up. After all, that's less disruptive than dispelling six kids, or seven.

If you're aware of the pattern and the community it leaves you with after pursuing it iteratively for years, and are accepting that intentionally as still the best solution to a hard problem, fine.

If you're not aware of it and the community it produces, you kind of need to be.

Not sure how far this metaphor stretches.

Some degree of roughhousing is expected here. But once one kid pulls a knife, nothing good will come of it. So the school policy punishes knife-wielding harder than it punishes fistfights, even though the most desperate kid probably isn’t the one who started it.

That’s melodramatic, but I’m trying to distinguish between choosing to punish the one student because it’s easier and choosing it because it’s fair. Yes, the student is denied his great equalizer, because the world where everyone pulls a knife is worse.

I don’t like it either, recognizing the perverse incentives. My consolation is that the bullies don’t have a great track record with knives, even when they aren’t being threatened. That gives me some hope that the system will continue to select for a better community in the long run.

The point is that one side has disseminated rulebreaking, because there are a lot of them. Hlynka had concentrated rulebreaking, because there was one of him. Take the bottom percentile of shitty posts distributed across a dozen people and always direct them towards Hlynka. If he were to respond in kind, he'd eventually eat a permaban while the others would take a day here or there.

I've studiously ignored every single one of the threads he would get involved in, so you and the other mods know the situation much better than me. That being said, the forum is a worse place without Hlynka. This is how you end up with conformity and groupthink even with neutral and fairly-applied rules.

who is hlynkacg? can i get a summary of who he is like any top level comment would be expected to give? this seems oddly vague given the standards we expect from people posting a link to their blog for example

Maybe this doesn't technically follow the rules, but it's from the mods and is a justified aberration.

You can click on the blue link to follow it to the user. They had nearly 2500 comments before being banned. No one else needed a summary. If you are still confused just minimize this discussion and move on.

I don't think that's anywhere near the standard to which (especially top level) comments are held. A short comment without any context or analysis, and a response of suggesting I read 2500 posts by someone to figure it out, the totally unfounded assertion that nobody else needed a summary (Based on what 7 replies? Your comment was posted at like 3 AM EST and I asked my question 8 hours later), and finally "If you don't get it, just minimize it and move on?"

  • -13

It's a fairly unusual post in many ways. If you really don't know Hlynka, "just ignore & minimize" honestly seems like the best advice. For those of us who've been here literal years, he was like part of the furniture; It's a nice courtesy of the mods to let us know and start a dedicated thread on his ban.

You can read my summary here. :)

This is a thread about a longstanding forum member so some familiarity with them is probably presupposed.

I'm sorry to hear this. I've had my own tussles with Hylnka but didn't think he was at the point of permabanning. But I'm not a mod, and I do believe this wasn't a kneejerk reaction.

Any chance of redemption, or is this "banned forever, unless you get a brain transplant and change all your views"?

Any chance of redemption, or is this "banned forever, unless you get a brain transplant and change all your views"?

We made multiple attempts at redemption. I don't know if people realize this, but tempbans are our attempt to get through to users and say "hey you need to change". They aren't just punishments for doing a bad thing. We would prefer if we just needed to warn people, and then once they were warned they forever stopped that behavior.

I am theoretically not against redemption for a permaban. However, every time I try and think of a process for redemption I remember what kind of users we permaban, and realize that such a process is useless. The process for redemption would involve showing an ability and a willingness to change the behavior that lead to a ban in the first place, and for them to humbly ask for that chance at redemption. The users that get permabanned often lack a willingness to change, so they usually can't get through the first hurdle of simply asking for a chance at redemption.

Even removing the requirement that they ask us is sufficiently difficult for most permabanned users. Because they still lack an ability and a willingness. As others have pointed out, banned users can create new accounts. But then to not get banned they have to act sufficiently different from how they were before. And not just removing the bad parts of their behavior which were the most obvious, but the identifying good characteristics that kept us patient with them for so long. If you are capable of doing this and basically putting on an entirely different persona that conforms to the rules of this place then my hat is off to you and thanks for rejoining. From my perspective its basically like getting a new user.

If people asked to be unpermabanned in a believable way, would there be a decent chance of it being granted?

I don't know. The mod team would discuss it. Individual facts in the case would matter. Its never happened before.

I appreciate the forthrightness from the mod team, but I think it is necessary for you to point out some "a few different posts." Without any hard reference, the community is left gossiping about Hylnka in general -- which feels not only tasteless and rude, but is actually fostering the sort of remarks I think good moderation avoids.

I still remember when he banned me for using the historical framing of the word shibboleth. According to him, I wasn't interested in which beliefs are so alien to red and blue tribes that they are incapable of faking them even for the highest stakes, I was actually interested in getting people killed.

Good riddance.

Although I reported several of his posts recently, this is very unfortunate and it's not the outcome that I would have preferred.

There were many obnoxious posts in Hlynka's extensive oeuvre, but most of them stopped short of actually breaking the rules. What really crossed the line for me recently were posts like this in the recent thread on HBD and identitarianism where he accused other posters of lying about their own positions without providing any supporting evidence.

To be clear, I think that people failing to appreciate the implications of their own position, or people failing to introspect on what their true position actually is in the first place, is a real phenomenon. People consciously lying about their own position is definitely a real phenomenon. I think all of those accusations should be fair game for discussion on TheMotte. But if you're going to levy those accusations, you should be prepared to support them with substantial argumentation. Hlynka was content throughout that entire thread to simply repeat his talking points without substantively engaging with the (very lengthy and thorough) rebuttals that other posters were offering. I had hoped that some mod warnings might cajole him into actually responding to other people's arguments.

Regardless, I would have preferred to deal with the issue through informal social consequences, like what @somedude was cooking up, rather than an actual permaban.

He brought a very unique flavor to TheMotte that can't easily be replaced, and I would hope that there's still a way for him to return someday.

That thread has Hlynka violating most of these 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.

Regardless, I would have preferred to deal with the issue through informal social consequences, like what @somedude was cooking up, rather than an actual permaban.

No, somedude was likely to get a ban for this behavior, because its harassment. It was never reported and I only saw it yesterday after trying to extensively read Hlynka's recent posts.

Chiming in to note my severe disagreement with this stance. I believe @somedude was providing a valuable public service, and limited their efforts only to the extent Hlynka continued to engage in the HBD topic.

Rages likes "IQ not real" and "McNamara is a moron" are very loosely associated to HBD. HBD predates IQ tests.

I would disagree that it's harassment. Hlynka engaged in bad faith argumentation on the regular, and documenting it and bringing it up is not necessarily bad.

I've noticed him weaseling out of his own words, refusing to acknowledge clear evidence disproving his point, and in general engaging in convenient forgetfulness about the dozen times his claims were substantially rebutted.

Now, if this was posted everytime he asked for advice in the Wellness Thread on how to minimize the risk of lead poisoning from carrying his baby in a MOLLE rig, that would be harassment, but I strong agree with @somedude that if Hlynka were to engage in his usual antics, dropping by to point it out when relevant is a valuable public service.

I've noticed him weaseling out of his own words, refusing to acknowledge clear evidence disproving his point, and in general engaging in convenient forgetfulness about the dozen times his claims were substantially rebutted.

Straight talk - is this grounds for banning now? ...because you're going to have a lot more work to do. Do you just need people to document it?

That is, unfortunately not grounds for banning, or it wasn't the grounds for banning in this particular instance.

But as always, the wildcard rules allow mods to act on repeated bad faith behavior, even if no given instance violates bright lines. It's just not a rule lightly applied.

If documented, it'll certainly be taken into consideration, though for the sake of civility we'd prefer you DM us, or even just use the report system instead of airing grievances in public.

This was the right choice, given what he was doing to discussions. It's been years since he was a genuine contributor, rather than a drive-by "you're wrong but I won't explain why" poster.

He was much better back in the Reddit days.

He was still getting quality contributions up until the end.

https://www.themotte.org/post/865/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/185267?context=8#context

I think he was generally just as good as back in the reddit days, but the presence of actual nazis on this forum was not something he really tolerated well. And I think he has also become more of a minority viewpoint on HBD stuff.

Bit of historical trivia: Hlynka and myself were active mods way back in the day on the slatestarcodex reddit when discussion of HBD was banned for a limited time. I am not sure of his exact opinion on the topic ban, but I do remember being the only mod saying "I am sort of against this".

I remember those days.

I don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but I imagine it's not easy to have to ban someone you've worked with for so long. Frankly I had long hoped for this to happen, but it's still not without pathos. I didn't talk to him much, but I've been reading HlynkaCG comments for like a quarter of my life at this point.

Even while I think his baiting is often incredibly obvious, his schtick mildly cringe and inflammatory turns of phrase barely concealed, I don't think a permanent ban was the right choice. Some-weeks-long timeouts should be inconvenient enough for the poster himself, simple enough for the janitors (it's not like there's a shortage of reasons to mod) and give themotte at large enough "breathing room" as it were, that they should be an effective deterrent.

Since I'm turning into a one-issue poster I might as well bring up an unrelated parallel. I'm a regular of chatbot threads on imageboards, and 4chan's thread is probably the worst, most schizo-ridden shithole I've ever seen (believe me that's a fucking high bar to clear) which is constantly raided from outside splinter communities, beset by a self-admitted mentally ill schizo that has made it his quest in life to make the thread suffer (he is on record for owning some 30 4chan passes to spam/samefag with, which he discards and buys new ones as they get perma'd), etc. The on-topic chatbot discussion is frequently a fig leaf for parasocial zoomers and literal fujos to obsess over notable thread "personalities", shitpost liberally and spam frequently repulsive fetish-adjacent stuff. Jannies have summarily abandoned the thread to fend for itself, to the point that when shit gets bad it is a kind of tradition for some heroic anon to take one for the team and spam the thread with NSFW to attract their attention (obviously eating a ban himself in the process). By any metric imaginable it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I also sometimes read 2ch's equivalent thread that lands on the other side of the spectrum: it has an active janny that rules the nascent /ai/ board with an iron fist and mercilessly purges any kind of off-topic discussion, up to and including discussion of his own actions so you can't even call him out in any way. This hasn't stopped their thread from being filled with GPT vs Claude console wars (the one "sanctioned" flame war topic, I guess), and to his credit the thread has genuine on-topic discussion, especially on prompt engineering, but other than that the thread is utterly sterile, the console wars get rote incredibly fast, and every single slav I've talked with and seen in thread prefers 4chan's thread to 2ch's - for the "activity" if nothing else. Even shitty activity is better than none (besides being more entertaining, although YMMV).

Now I am aware themotte is decidedly not that kind of place, I understand that increased tolerance puts more strain on janitors and don't object against extended banning for high heat - only against permanently banning. All similarities are coincidental, et cetera, I hope my overall point is clear - while janitors have my respect now that I've seen what life is like without any, with every prolific poster banished there's a risk of becoming sterile or collapsing into an echo chamber, and this risk is higher baseline for more obscure communities that don't have a steady influx of newfriends. Surely it's not that hard to hand belligerent posters the occasional vacation (and as I understand themotte forbids alts as well)? Again, by your own admission it's not like there's a shortage of reasons.

NB: I'm mostly a civil poster now but I ate my share of timeouts from /g/ jannies for occasional tomfoolery.

and every single slav I've talked with and seen in thread

Is this one of those board-dweller endonyms like fa/tg/uy or /k/ommando? What's the etymology?

No, it means literally people from Slavic countries, 2ch is a Russian-language imageboard. Weirdly enough slavs seem to be somewhat overrepresented in the chatbot "hobby" from my impression, I'm not sure what's up with that. Suppose escapism is a national pastime.

...Isn't 2ch Japanese, or is that different from the actual original 2chan/Futaba Channel?

Apparently when some Russians made a local chan-style imageboard, they went a bit too far with being inspired by the original name (at least change the number).

I would like, with morbid curiosity, to see the world where the entirety of the population of Russia and neighboring Russian-speaking countries are a board-dweller subpopulation.

I don’t disagree with you, and I think there should exist some option for Hlynka to return. That said, he’s been here for 6+ years and in that time his issues with drive-by insults just seemed to get worse. In the last 2 years he seemed to develop this understanding of all the users he didn’t like (a group that spanned veritable progressives, myself, @SecureSignals and various other far-from-ideologically-aligned regulars) as part of some communist-fascist-Jewish conspiracy against America. And sure, I’ve encountered Christians online who’ve suggested much milder, somewhat more coherent versions of that argument. But Hlynka went so deep that he just started replying to comments with ad-hominem drive-bys on that basis without actually engaging with any of the points people were making. And this place can’t really operate like that, if people reply to far rightists by saying “well, you’re a Nazi” and they reply with “well, you’re a Jew” you may as well shut down the forum now because it’s clear that there’s no actual discourse happening.

Regulars here (including me my fair share of times) are already exempted from a lot of janny action unless an offense is extremely egregious. Hlynka had been modded dozens, probably hundreds of times over the years. I disagree with a true permaban (as I did in Darwin’s case, who as I understand is now back with us) but I respect that the mods have to draw a line somewhere.

In the last 2 years he seemed to develop this understanding of all the users he didn’t like (a group that spanned veritable progressives, myself, @SecureSignals and various other far-from-ideologically-aligned regulars) as part of some communist-fascist-Jewish conspiracy against America.

It's a Hayekian Road to Serfdom schtick.

Fascism is considered "reactionary" by academics because the Academy was dominated by communism, so any ideology opposed to the inevitable global Proletariat revolution is "reactionary" according to their priors.

Hayek inverted this by grouping together any ideology that doesn't accept Liberal priors under the "tyranny" umbrella.

Traditionally, Road to Serfdom rhetoric has been invoked on the Right/Libertarian sphere to associate Socialism with Fascism, in order to discredit the former due to the anti-fascist consensus that exists across the political spectrum.

But Hlynka is observing a large, organic shift of that paradigm in the Dissident Right sphere, where the anti-fascist psychology within the Right is becoming discredited. So he is attempting to denounce that trend by associating it with Wokeism/Socialism as being part of the same "road to tyranny."

I understand where he's coming from, but it's a boring argument... "Woke Progressives don't accept Liberal priors, SecureSignals doesn't accept Liberal priors, look you are basically the same!" is the essence of his argument. The problem is the argument only works if you accept Liberal priors and if you don't then there's not much to discuss. He just repeats that accusation over and over.

Fascism is considered reactionary by academics because it is. In the Nazi case, it was also revolutionary, just in a direction which specifically criticized the Weimar liberals and the socialists. Yes, they also fought the junkers for political power; that doesn’t diminish their traditionalist aesthetics.

Then you’ve got Italy, pining for long-lost Rome and adopting traditionalist slogans: “La guerra è per l'uomo come la maternità è per la donna.” Francoist Spain, claiming monarchist symbols and called his war a Catholic crusade.

Though…is Road to Serfdom where Moldbug got his ideas about “demotism”?

Fascism is considered reactionary by academics because it is. In the Nazi case, it was also revolutionary,

I refer you to George Orwell's essay, "What is Fascism?" The point being that the word had already been diluted beyond any sort of agreed upon meaning before WW2 had even finished. No one can agree on what fascism actually is:

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

Modern definition: Everybody I don't like is a fascist

Liberal definition: Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini were fascists.

Conservative definition: Franco was a fascist but not Hitler.

Schismatic Conservative definition: Hitler was a fascist but not Franco.

Orthodox definition: Franco and Hitler weren't fascists.

Ultraorthodox definition: Mussolini wasn't a fascist.

Portuguese position: Thank God everyone forgets about Salazar

I don't think traditionalist aesthetics alone make something reactionary, particular when it is employed to push the envelope forward. The Founding Fathers of America heavily leaned on Classical aesthetics but were not Reactionary. The Futurist movement was associated with Fascism, and even today the Vaporwave aesthetic broadly used across the DR shows the uncanny nostalgia of the combination of classical aesthetics and futurist artistic expression. Within science fiction, fascism seems to aesthetically fit all too well, with Starship Troopers and Star Wars being two of many such cases, also pointing to a futuristic rather than reactionary ideological inertia.

Of course fascism became associated with eugenics and the trope of "science going too far." It was a revolutionary ideology, it is only accused of being Reactionary from the point of reference of left-wing academics who are doing basically what Hlynka is doing by accusing the DR and Wokeism as being cut from the same cloth.

"Fascism" has basically become synonymous in common parlance with Right-wing futurism as opposed to Right-wing conservatism or reaction. "Fascists" aren't "super conservative" they are revolutionary futurists.

Having a vision of the future doesn't disqualify them from being reactionaries, though. It's part of having an effective political machine. Christian millenarians are perfectly capable of holding reactionary beliefs despite having very clear claims about 1) the shape of the future and 2) how everyone ought to get there. So too with the agrarian conservatives whom the Nazis supplanted.

The key feature of reaction is opposition to liberalism. Nazis were very eager to check those boxes. It's that, more than the aesthetics, which I find dispositive.

Many reactionaries were obviously deeply critical of fascism, but the nuance of their criticism is usually about the approach rather than the goal (building a society with, in generalized terms, traditional values and built around faith, family and fatherland all defined vaguely). All reaction today is revolutionary, even obviously-not-futurist reaction like French traditional Catholicism of the SSPX kind is ‘revolutionary’ in a country that has been secular and progressive for the best part of 250 years (some exceptions excepted). Milquetoast Americana ‘Christian nationalism’ is revolutionary in the modern US.

Fascist aesthetics are interesting but complicated by the huge differences between Italy/Germany/Spain and the fact that even within countries there was a huge amount of inconsistency; the Nazis selectively deployed both modern sans serif futurist fonts and Fraktur until they arbitrarily decided the latter was Jewish in 1941. Architecturally there was always tension between a veneration of classicism and the fact that fascism had its roots in part in architectural modernism/futurism, such that you get complicated and extremely interesting, but also arguably aesthetically incoherent (especially when one looks at interior design and exterior design side by side) buildings like Hitler’s chancery.

I think one of the few points of agreement is that fascism sees the centralized state as playing a much more central role in cultural, economic and political life than other forms of reactionary conservatism (a term that I disagree is oxymoronic, almost all hard rightists today agree that conservatism is revolutionary because there is very little left to conserve). Other reactionaries typically want a smaller state and a larger role for other institutions (religion, social organizations, communal groups and local politics, gender and age-based associations etc).

Fascism never had a Karl Marx figure to consolidate a general philosophy, hence the inconsistency. It is expressed more organically relative to the people and their historical context rather than a monotone global revolution. I still do not agree that harnessing the immense power of classical aesthetics makes you a Reactionary. Talk about confused!

"Democrats are the real racists, please stop DEI because it's the real racism" is not a revolutionary ideology. People like Hlynka have long been appropriated as Enforcers for the prevailing cultural ethos and moral paradigm as one kosher side of the anti-fascist dialectic: the Progressives claim the right is more fascist due to their social conservatism, while the Right claims the left is more fascist because of their cultural and economic authoritarianism. So the prevailing dialectic is defined by the debate over who claims the moral high ground by being the most anti-fascist. Conservatism is highly entrenched in this game, with Hlynka being a quintessential example of many people we all know in real life and which completely dominated right-wing discourse during the Bush era and prior.

Fascism is neither liberal nor pre-liberal. It is post-liberal. That's why any sort of gesture towards a Right-wing post-liberalism is automatically tagged as fascist or Nazi no matter how irrelevant it is to 1930s German National Socialism.

So I feel you are playing into the game here by claiming a Right-wing post-liberalism is impossible. It either must be liberal or reactionary. But this obviously isn't the case. I do not consider myself a reactionary. I do not want to go back to the 1950s, or Retvrn further back than to whatever year Moldbug pegs. The only way out is through, not backwards. I and many on the DR don't associate with NRx for this very reason.

"Democrats are the real racists, please stop DEI because it's the real racism" is not a revolutionary ideology.

I very much agree, but I don’t think Hlynka was on the hard right, for all of his strange and contradictory ideas. I don’t really think Hlynka was an enforcer for the status quo, just a believer in a strange form of classical Anglo-American liberalism with some additional characteristics that is, today, probably more embodied by the GOP than the left in some ways.

So I feel you are playing into the game here by claiming a Right-wing post-liberalism is impossible. It either must be liberal or reactionary. But this obviously isn't the case. I do not consider myself a reactionary. I do not want to go back to the 1950s, or Retvrn further back than to whatever year Moldbug pegs. The only way out is through, not backwards. I and many on the DR don't associate with NRx for this very reason.

I think I’m mostly in agreement with you (not politically, obviously, but on this point) but I’d still describe myself as a reactionary. I think pretty much anyone who opposes the progress cult is, at least on some level. I don’t want to go back to the 1950s or any particular previous time. I don’t think Moldbug does either; he argues that liberalism traces its roots to the reformation or even renaissance, but he’s not advocating a return to 1400, he doesn’t think it’s possible in any case.

All post-liberal ideologies of the right (as opposed to liberal ideologies of it, like Hlynka’s), for all their diversity, are reactionary. That’s not a criticism, it’s just obvious, because in their rightism they will be, necessarily, reactionary.

Fascism is considered reactionary by academics because it is.

Oh come on, it's a lot more complicated than that. Evola's Fascism Viewed from the Right makes a compelling argument that Fascism is a modernist ideology, and there's very many brands of reactionary criticism of Fascism, notably because it tended to abolish the Church in favor of State worship and pagan occultism.

And despite its falangist roots, I believe very strongly that Francoism is not a Fascism for this reason among others. And I'm not exactly alone in that in the literature.

Fascism's palingenetic component is inherently reactionary for certain definitions of reaction and inherently not reactionary for others. You can't just pretend it's a simple, obvious, settled issue when it's still debated after almost a century.

You've got me; I oversimplified it to match the OP's choice of simple, obvious, settled boundaries.

Fascism is considered "reactionary" by academics because the Academy was dominated by communism, so any ideology opposed to the inevitable global Proletariat revolution is "reactionary" according to their priors.

I'm arguing that the layman's definition of fascism, the one that your average communist had in mind, really is more reactionary than progressive. Ongoing debate on the fringes of the category doesn't take away from the fact that Nazi Germany was specifically reacting to Weimar liberalism, multiculturalism, internationalism, and especially the communist project.

Same goes for you, @ChickenOverlord. I don't mind admitting that fascism is an umbrella concept for some surprisingly different ideologies. But if that rules out general statements about the category, I think you ought to take it up with the OP.

It’s a shame he was simply unable to follow the rules. He made some very good posts, but then would have occasional outbursts at random people. Who can forget the time he was randomly racist to @self_made_human and accused him of not being able to understand English because he was Indian or something?

It’s a shame he was simply unable to follow the rules.

Not unable. Unwilling. He used to be a mod in the Reddit days for Pete's sake (not that I was terribly thrilled about that), very few people know more about how to toe the line. No way was he incapable of doing so. He made an active choice not to.

Well I certainly didn't, if only because I speak better English than he does and that requires some working memory.

I think the specific claim in question was I was unable to parse his clear language and misunderstanding him because it's difficult for me to translate from English to "Indian".

The audacity, I find it even hard to be mad. I did find his takes on machine learning and LLMs to be far worse for my blood pressure, as they were the kind of "not even wrong" mixed with gish-galloping and a pugnacious inability to know when he was conclusively and incontrovertibly mistaken, in a manner not easier to falsify than reading a comment I write, in English.

Anyway, I for one am not sad he's gone, though I have repeatedly had to recuse myself from taking mod action against him however justified it was because of the obvious conflict of interest (and so do other mods with people they have some kind of personal tiff with, unless they're the kind of asshole who has beef with all of us) . I knew this would happen, he can't help himself.

this is the most Jewish contribution I've ever seen you make

'shame he was simply unable to follow the rules' lmao okay, fair point. Shame you killed Jesus and His blood is on you and your people

  • -41

What a goofy post that seems like it's straight out of 4chan. But given that this account just started posting 12 days ago, I presume it's a ban-evader who will just make a new account.

The only other post from Vino I recall is him praising Hitler. It's definitely bait and not of great quality.

What the hell kind of comment is that supposed to be? I don't know who is or isn't Jewish, atheist, Buddhist, wiccan, Wiccan, etc. on here because I don't keep that kind of information on people to hand. We're coming up to Easter, is that supposed to be a crack in advance?

When you're ready, you won't have to

Shame that Christianity that sees Jews as "Christkillers" is dead and Christianity that sees Jews as "beloved elder brothers" and "forever Chosen people" is growing by leaps and bounds world wide.

I’m not sure what you were expecting, but take a 1 day time out for your bizarre culture warring.

What do you think of all the dead Palestinians recently?

Unable to similar-mind someone who would find that comment 'bizarre culture warring'

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!' ...

I don't really care how you or Eetan feels about Jews, Christians, or Palestinians. You have to talk about them with a level head.

This may be a perfectly appropriate response to something from somewhere, but probably not to the question 'what do you think of all the dead Palestinians recently'?

They’re alright, I guess.

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I may be misreading him but I took this as pointing out Christian philosemitism is much larger than Christian antisemitism in modern times.

So it’s not really “bizarre” because he was matching the framing of the previous comment to say “shame most Christians disagree with your views.”

Though I guess it’s unavoidably culture warring in that responding in kind to a comment blatantly breaking the rules is still going to break the rules. But it didn’t strike me as over the top, so I would think this was more of a warning situation (unless you have other violations as a pattern).

@Eetan is probably somewhat antisemitic but I don’t think that was the intention of the comment, it was just bait/trolling. Of course, the latter is arguably more deserving of a ban here.

And that’s what makes the Motte special

Is the Motte supposed to be funny?

This is the funniest shit I've read all morning

And by the time this discussion is done, Zorba will come in and find that everyone has banned everyone and he's all alone on the Motte.

There definitely needs to be a day where absurdist comedy is allowed, maybe we can unban Hlynka on it

I think if Hlynka should be unbanned if he does “The Hock”, with photographic evidence to back up his claim. Trial by ordeal.

I’m not even remotely kidding.

That might be the funniest deep cut mashup of internet niche humor ever produced. It would be a scream come true.

I would kill myself if this happened.

Then again, Hlynka probably has a much higher chance of surviving the Hock than Skookum does.

Place your bets people, military training and oppositional defiant personality disorder versus medical training and weapons-grade autism. Who can weather the wastes first?

I am on standby to make the rdrama thread if that ever happens.

Much as I realise it's suicide to do so and that consciously I can not condone it, deep down a part of me very much wants someone from here to do The Hock (and hopefully live to tell us the tale) because the memes it will generate will be fire.

You know, and I had been meaning to ask in the fun thread this week, what happened to Mr Hock?

He was banned for only ever posting about the Hock. His reddit account is still active, so clearly he hasn't gone into the woods to his death.

I asked the same question about a month ago. Apparently he chickened out came to his senses and realized it was a suicide mission. He went on a big mountain climbing trip instead, which is less fun but more sensible.

Easter seems like the obvious choice for a resurrection.

As an Easter treat can we have a Skookum vs hlynka debate, ‘are some races doomed to die out because their men are short?’

Having everyone unbanned for 24hrs before being rebanned on April Fools would be absolutely wild.

God: Hey, I need you to turn my son over to the Romans so that can crucify him.

Jews: :-/

God: Trust me, it'll be awesome! You're my chosen people! Would I lead you astray?

Jews: Well, there were those forty years in the...

God: Oh, for my sakes! Will you let that go already? I gave you manna, didn't I?

Jews: Okay, fine, you're the god.

Jesus: X-(

A thousand years later...

Jews: :-(

How did you get that from the scripture, which to refresh your recollection, reads:

What shall I do, then, with Jesus who is called the Messiah?” Pilate asked.

They all answered, “Crucify him!”

23 “Why? What crime has he committed?” asked Pilate.

But they shouted all the louder, “Crucify him!”

24 When Pilate saw that he was getting nowhere, but that instead an uproar was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd. “I am innocent of this man’s blood,” he said. “It is your responsibility!”

25 All the people answered, “His blood is on us and on our children!”

Shame you killed Jesus and His blood is on you and your people

Eh, I wouldn't blame all the Jews for killing Chirst. Caiaphas and his ilk yes, but extending it to all Jews is just taking it too far. Even Herod Antipas (who was Jewish) didn't want to convict Jesus.

Eh, I wouldn't blame all the Jews

Well, you might not, but Christians for 1900 years nearly unanimously interpreted this biblical passage that way.

Until Scofield Bible and Nostra Aetate, but this is another story.

What exactly are you trying to convey through this comment barring pure antagonism? Consider this a warning. I don't extend a short ban only because you don't have any prior offenses in the mod queue, but personal attacks of this nature, especially so non-sequitur, are not kosher.

Edit: After this received a bunch more reports, I'm upgrading you to a day's ban. I feel like even a regular in good standing would deserve rebuke for an uncalled for and random attack of that nature, and you haven't earned that. Do not do that again.

Incidentally I partly agree that the above response does sound vaguely condescending, but just out of curiosity before you inevitably get modded - what did you expect to gain with this accusation? What was the point of the specific (((angle))) when you surely could've gotten away with simply calling the response out as smugly condescending without the added insults on top? Does it just not hit the same way?

Genuine question, feel free to respond in DMs if you think I'm baiting you to dig yourself deeper.

Once in a blue moon there is value all to itself in saying what you wanted to

Can't disagree, but counterpoint: keeping your power level in check doesn't automatically make you a cuck (not by itself, at least) and is a generally beneficial, widely applicable practice.

For what it's worth the modded post gave me a good chuckle but it's not worth getting sniped for.

The left has successfully eliminated every space available to the less-than-50-Stalins...except for this one. Our king Zorba probably deserves a statue or at least a portrait for this - it didn't happen by accident. But that was just a little side-cuck to your deserved response lol

Point is that I keep my power level in check 99.9% of the time. Turn on the radio, bite my lip. TV, hold my tongue. Out for drinks, better not say anything. I work for myself but otherwise can only imagine.

Once in a blue moon there is value all to itself in just saying "fuck" with an extra "k" on the exhale and pointing people to scripture (Matthew 27)

The left has successfully eliminated every space available to the less-than-50-Stalins...except for this one. Our king Zorba probably deserves a statue or at least a portrait for this - it didn't happen by accident.

Yes, but one of the methods by which this place continues to withstand elimination is exactly what you got shot for - i.e. immediately turning any issue or disagreement into culture war. Personally this is exactly why I value this place and am willing to hide my power level by e.g. not participating in political discussions or not considering "cope and seethe" a valid way of responding.

It's a feature, not a bug. You might see it as cuckoldry, I see it as a price of admission, I can always (and often do) slum it with fellow /g/entlemen but the quality of discourse and the IQ of the median poster is dreadful in comparison.

Point is that I keep my power level in check 99.9% of the time. Turn on the radio, bite my lip. TV, hold my tongue. Out for drinks, better not say anything. I work for myself but otherwise can only imagine.

Such is life for high power level beings, and for what it's worth I empathize. I still think that's not an excuse to flip out at people in the sole place where tone is the only thing actually being moderated (YMMV but I believe in this particular bit of propaganda) and you can otherwise freely post on [MIND-KILLING TOPIC] as long as you are verbose enough and make a passing effort at sounding neutral (the One Weird Trick jannies don't want you to know!)

We're in furious agreement all around it seems

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I wasn’t really being condescending. Hlynka had a longstanding dislike for me, but except for one time he was being almost comically racist to another user for no reason I never reported him (actually even then I’m not sure I did, but I might have). I enjoyed a lot of his posts, and as another user said I thought he brought a valuable perspective as a Christian red state Reaganite conservative, a group who make up the bulk of American conservatives but who are certainly underrepresented on this board.

For what it's worth, I didn't interpret your post as condescending, but as simply regretful.

Good.

Not good. But I'd have to say necessary evil.

I have to be honest, I never really understood what you folks saw in that guy. Even aside from his personal antagonism (which I found very trying) his comments just seemed to be the same three or four points repeated ad nauseum.

The Leviathan-shaped hole. HBD is a normative belief, not an empirical belief. Democrats are the real racists. Liberals think that's air they're breathing now. Mix and match as necessary, throw in some stories that don't go anywhere and you've got the full package.

his comments just seemed to be the same three or four points repeated ad nauseum.

To be fair, that describes like at least half of the posters here.

At least they usually have the courtesy to word those points slightly differently each time. Hlynka used the phrase "Leviathan-shaped hole" word for word in eight separate comments, "think that's air they're breathing" in six, "HBD... is a normative belief" in five. We should have printed bingo cards.

I've long been frustrated with him -- I never got him to actually say what refusing to be ruled meant -- but positions like this or this or the more general parts of this... are things other people could have written, but most didn't.

Even before he started his beef with me, I was frankly confused by many of his posts that were nominated and accepted as AAQCs.

A lot of it came off as incoherent rambling, he was often incapable of writing clearly to save his life. When his post on "Marvin's Marvelous Minutiae" came out, I had an aneurysm reading it, as I've said elsewhere, it was in the "not even wrong" tier as far as I'm concerned.

But despite being a moderator, I don't handle the AAQCs, and the other mods have far more fondness for the man than I do and saw something in him I don't. That earned him a lot of leeway and n-th chances, and his permaban was when even the people positively inclined towards him got fed up with his antics and inability to improve.

My own mod log has hilarious examples from my own arguments with Hlynka, such as a "ban both the chucklefucks if they do it again" from @Amadan. But unlike Hlynka, I am capable of acknowledging error and not doing the same damn thing over and over again, and I stuck to my promise to studiously never engage with him, since I knew that if I did, he'd piss me off enough into violating forum rules about decorum. Hell I even recuse myself from enforcing mod actions against him when I became a mod, because no matter how much they were justified, the optics would be bad. Caesar's moderati must be above reproach and all that.

The best I can say about him is that his anecdotes about military/PMC life were occasionally interesting, but he annoyed the hell out of me with his pugnaciousness, inability to accept being wrong even when corrected with evidence and backup from people who know what they're saying (I'm a dilettante in the field of ML, I just read things), and general incorrigbility.

At least I know I won't miss him, sad as the loss of a regular can be.

I buy his longstanding argument that the Hobbesian perspective is noticeably absent in modern discourse, and thus the perspective of people who can do violence and know the base realities that maintain society standing is valuable.

But I can't exactly say that I'm surprised given this being often paired with vehement contempt for anyone too far from his position.

He brought a unique voice to the forum. One can of course doubt any story on the internet, but I recall a SSS thread where I asked how many marriageable partners each poster had a shot with over the course of their life. Of course various personal narratives of how each poster met their partner were part of many responses. Hlynka's was unique in that he reported marrying the girl he accidentally knocked up. It was simply a very different vibe.

I've had frustrating philosophical disagreement with him. I think he discounts the degree to which political affiliation is something born into rather than chosen, and find his Trump support baffling. But I also thought he fought the good fight in many cases.

I ultimately find the weird mommy issues of the posters who just can't obey the rules to be so interesting. This is at the end of the day a clubhouse, no one makes money off it, no one pays to play. The desire to rebel seems so cheap in the context, like it comes from a thwarted desire to do so with a real authority figure.

Hlynka's was unique in that he reported marrying the girl he accidentally knocked up. It was simply a very different vibe.

FWIW I married the first girl I ever kissed. And the first I ever went on more than 3 dates with, for that matter.

that's very sweet, so romance is not dead!

Thread for reference

Going 1/1 isn't as rare as I would have thought, we have a decent quantity of romantic snipers around these parts.

Our dear departed Hlynka, on the other hand, replied that he had wound up with his wife...

[W]e got along well and became friends with benefits. After about a year I was looking at relocating for a job and called her with the intention of cutting things off, only for her to reply with "I've got something I need to talk to you about to". We met for coffee, I told her that I was leaving town, and she told me she was pregnant. After a brief moment of panic I asked her if she would like to come with me. Edit to add: that was about 9 years ago now, and we've been together since.

No other story posted came close to that in tone. The accidental-ness of it all is what struck me as different. The lack of planning (and the lack of adequate use of birth control methods!) that lead into the situation, and then the dutiful assumption of the consequences.

The desire to rebel seems so cheap in the context, like it comes from a thwarted desire to do so with a real authority figure.

Something like this.

Would you say a majority of people find the linked image amusing, or sad?

I gotta say the cat at the end really bummed me out. Poor little chap

It's that "shit rolls downhill" meme, isn't it? Or that saying was around before memes. I haven't seen the one with the crying cat at the end, but in reality it would probably be the cat killing a mouse or small bird.

Boss unloads on employee, who can't talk back without losing his job. Employee goes home and unloads on wife for small error which is only the excuse for him to blow off steam. Wife does same to kid. Kid does same to cat. Everyone takes it out on the less powerful person because they're unable to stand up to the more powerful person, and this is life, and this is what people are like, and be aware of this the next time you want to blow up in somebody's face after someone unloaded on you and you weren't able to defend yourself.

and be aware of this the next time you want to blow up in somebody's face after someone unloaded on you and you weren't able to defend yourself.

But the only thing "being aware" lets you do is choose between blowing up in somebody's face anyway... or refraining from doing so and making yourself the ultimate receptor of all the shit.

More comments

I find it sad but also amusing in a dark humor way. And for me, dark humor is a pretty good defense mechanism against things like actually letting myself feel the depth of emotions that I am capable of, and have some reason to feel, but which might consume me for days on end if I allowed myself to truly feel them. The picture of that particular cat with crying-seeming eyes is a very common one used in Internet memes, so it's not like using that picture actually hurts that real cat. I don't know why the cat in the original source of the image looked like that to begin with, maybe some eye infection. I think, having known a number of cats and witnessed to some extent the depths of their various emotions, that cats are probably capable of feeling sadness, but I somewhat doubt that they express it through watery eyes like humans often do. In any case, I don't feel like I am hurting any being by finding the use of the picture amusing.

I'd imagine most people find it funny. It comes down to identification. If you see the characters as people you dislike, it's funny: impotent loser is yelling at me because he doesn't have the stones to yell at his boss. If you identify with the characters you see what you're doing.

Darkly amusing. There's a comic effect to the aesthetic, but it mostly evokes the tidal wave of nastiness that comes from treating people badly.

I certainly find it sad.

I'm not going to go through all his posts to find them, but he's made some good ones and that's enough for me to say "the good solution was Hlynka making good posts and not making bad ones". But he refused. So the lesser evil was taking him out of the picture.

This is too bad, but I understand the decision.

I do wish we had more representation for the sort of old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism he embodied. In his advocacy for colorblindness and a sort of common-sense anti-wokeness (rather than a more complex philosophical anti-wokeness) he represented the mainstream strain of conservatism that retains a great deal of power within the West and especially in the US. Of all the posters here, he's the one whose words sounded the most like the conservatives I know in person. In an (admittedly distant) second place is hydroacetylene. Probably FarNearEverywhere is in there somewhere, despite not even being from the same country as me. On the other side of the aisle is resident liberal netstack.

Heck, even his bugbears about all his enemies being the same people sounds a lot like the conservatives I know in person, who would probably be keen to make claims about Democrats being secret HBD-pushing racists. So there's a weird way that, even in his failures, he represented a constituency in our political sphere.

I'll miss his crotchety conservatism. I think the elder realism of posters like him is necessary at times to counteract the philosophical idealism and youthful exuberance that permeate this space. We need more dad energy. And Hlynka had it in spades.

I do wish we had more representation for the sort of old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism he embodied.

I don't. I mean, to the extent that having diverse views has intrinsic value, it's good to have more people to engage with as far as that goes, but I don't think it actually goes very far. This strain of conservatism is the most common strain that I encounter in real life, most frequently from family members, and I just don't actually find it interesting at all. I rarely encounter anything original coming from that intellectual position, often to the point that reactions to modern events feel downright stunted by a need to relate everything back to how Reagan would have handled it or drawing tenuous analogies to events from a bygone era. Doing another lap around how Dems are the real racists (did you know what side of the Civil War they were on???) is just not interesting at this point. Overall, it's the same experience as going back and doing the New Atheist arguments all over again as though it's still pretty fresh; personally, I don't really need a center-right version of PZ Myers, complete with all the unearned smugness.

This doesn't all apply to Hlynka, who I liked more than the median poster here apparently does, but it is what I think about '80s conservatism more broadly. I'd much rather engage with a Buchananite than a Reaganite if I'm going to get '80s right-wing politics brought forward.

I'd much rather engage with a Buchananite than a Reaganite if I'm going to get '80s right-wing politics brought forward.

I have a feeling that I'm the closest thing we have to a Buchananite here, and even I have a decent number of views that an 80's-90's era Buchananite would see as beyond the pale. Mostly because I've got a bit of a crypto-anarchist streak. At least when I'm not channeling Uncle Ted.

I am a registered member of the Constitution Party though.

I suppose incoherent, contradictory, frequently erroneous rambling, cheap low-effort barbs that deliberately mischaracterize forum regulars with years of coherent, level-headed history, and stubborn commitment to jackassery against a backdrop of numerous mod warnings and small-time bans is representative of an unsettlingly vast portion of the general polity. For some reason, I'm having trouble attaching these characteristics to Reagan or Bush. I don't think you're intentionally aiming to paint this major faction of conservatism as being fundamentally incompatible with the forum rules, but holding up Hlynka as an exemplar of crotchety conservatism in a thread where we explain why we banned him for being crotchety isn't making a stellar case for why we need more of that around here.

I do want to see more posters who can see the world through a Hobbesian lens, without succumbing to cynicism, tribalism, or conspiratorial ad-libbing. I can also appreciate simplifying the story around race relations and wokeness, much as I suspect such a project is doomed to fail. In the not-too-distant future I've been meaning to post at length about why the kind of conservative I'd like to see here is a particularly hard bar to clear for our forum - this ban may be a good catalyst.

Old-school Reagan/Bush conservatism is dead and gone though, for good reasons.

A form of it is gone, but the views of the vast majority of eg. Trump voters or even MAGA-hat-wearers aren’t really represented on this board. There are many millions of this kind of Evangelical megachurch, son-or-brother-or-cousin in the military, “thank you for your service”, thin blue line, ‘why can’t we all just get along’, DR^3 type in the US, that perspective is an interesting one.

All of this is indeed true. It’s also true that, unlike in 1980 or 1990, this demographic is much less politically relevant, a relatively smaller group demographically, pretty much lost all cultural soft power and influence it ever had, and is destined to remain a reviled laughingstock of modern society, on the path to cultural-political extinction, like kulaks.

no, this not a correctional facility and you are not correctional officers

we like hlynka and are looking forward to his contributions under his new name

  • -18

You're correct that this isn't a correctional facility, but you're mistaken if there isn't moderation involved in keeping our tiny enclave in the internet wastes that way.

Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to leave. There plenty of other forums out there. The mods here still take pains to maintain the Mandate of Heaven approval of the supermajority of the users, since without them, we'd be a glorified day drinking club and Zorba's AWS bill would be significantly less justified, if a lot smaller.

But that's that for Hlynka. Making an alt after being permabanned doesn't work as well as you'd like, especially for such a colorful character as Hlynka. Anyone can tell it's him even behind seven layers of VPNs, and anyway, I think he has more of a martyr complex and feels vindicated rather than desiring to sneak in under a new alias.

Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to leave. There plenty of other forums out there.

This line was worn out 5 years ago. There is no where else to go.

Yeah that's a boatload of responsibility for you shepherds who didn't sign up for that job - but even the birdwatchers started banning each other years ago for political incorrectness. There is no where else to go.

If Hlynka (me lol jk) is gone from here for good, he's just gone for good. Damascus Steel. Greek Fire. Roman Concrete.

Or, off our grid at least, which is the same thing. How many OG's does it take to determine how many angels fit on the head of a pin? Because we're trimming the muscle from the bone real quick if Hlynka isn't able to do his Hlynjinx anymore. And I genuinely don't even like the guy. I've met Mr 'when I was in the service' a lot in my life, and wouldn't think he added much, if he weren't the only one still doing it!

Here's to all the posts to which we have to look forward on the newest thing in san francisco nimbyism, how ai is gay now and forever, and why Trump is really done this time

This line was worn out 5 years ago. There is no where else to go.

There are plenty of places to go. There may not be any places that are run according to your specific desires.

You are right that this place is small enough that every permabanned regular costs us something. Members aren't easily replaced. But that cannot become a justification for letting people repeatedly stomp on the norms that are the reason this place exists. No one's contributions are that irreplaceable.

Also, your trolling (e.g. reporting your own post as "fake and gay") is not clever. If you want to leave, just leave. If you want to be banned, just say so.

Everyone's contributions are that irreplaceable. This is the most self-selected self-sorted self-assembled group of freethinkers left on planet earth that's not buried in a telegram feed somewhere impenetrable.

Everyone's contributions are that irreplaceable.

No, they're not. I'm glad you think this place is so special and irreplaceable, but the reality is that all Internet communities die eventually, and people will move on, and very few people here (you and me included) are that special. So regarding your argument, that we should stop banning people for being trolls or uncivil, that isn't going to happen. No one is so special and unique that we should tolerate whatever shit they want to spew indefinitely just for their unique perspective.

So regarding your argument, that we should stop banning people for being trolls or uncivil, that isn't going to happen.

This wasn't my argument and this attempted characterization of my argument doesn't engender any feeling in me that any further exchange would be productive

If HlynkaCG messaged the mods with a clear description of how he's not been engaging constructively recently and expressed an intent to not do that in the future, he'd probably be unbanned quickly. He's probably not going to do that though.

The only thing keeping us all here is both 1) that it's the best place to be and 2) that it's the only place to be. Not unlike America or Ancient Rome, even as it dives evermore into the shitter, it's still wrong to unperson someone because both of those things will remain true for the foreseeable future.

NTA but no one ever's probably going to do that, in this very thread (in other branches) people have clearly expressed their views on bending the knee and writing mea culpas to the janitors. I'm not keen on getting modded any time soon but I'm happy to join in the collective sentiment of "fuck that noise". It sounds like a good idea in the abstract but one mental test run of you yourself doing that should reliably dispel any notion of real-world applications.

I've seen it done on other forums, it's definitely cringe but it often works - just the ability to coherently articulate the mods' perspective on what the user was doing wrong is something most people who get banned for being annoying lack - and if it doesn't work the first time you just permaban them again.

Making an alt doesn't work well in the sense that it's liable to be detected, but it works fine in the sense that there is a venerable and proven record of it working for known / suspected / mods-openly-identify-person-as-alt-but-don't-take-action case. A reoccuring point from past mods when identified alts were raised in the past is that if someone Alts after being banned but isn't currently breaking the rules that got them banned, then their change in behavior is 'Mission Accomplished.'

Fair enough, but I doubt Hlynka will ever change his spots, so I strongly expect that if he was to return, he'd be back at it again, and his identity would be obvious.

There's a difference between having an alt, and having an alt after you were permabanned. Off memory, I can't recall an example of the latter that the mods knowingly condone, but it could well be true.

I agree that he wouldn't change his spots to passive-aggressive. He's too pugnacious to conform to the Motte's selection effect.

I agree, and I think if Hlynka returned on an alt and somehow avoided his worse habits he would probably be welcome, certainly in time, even if we all knew it was him.

F

I remember when he was a mod himself. His fuse was short back then, which was one of the reasons he stopped being one, and I guess it grew even shorter.

and I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.

It's a shame, I also really liked his posts, but at that point, what can you do?

Is this an actual permaban, or do we still have the policy of the Great Reset after a year?

Is this an actual permaban, or do we still have the policy of the Great Reset after a year?

Great reset was mostly a result of us moving from reddit.

I thought there was a "a permaban == 1 year ban, actually" policy as well? Have I just dreamt it?

I think we might have done that on reddit a few times, but I don't think its a current policy.

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