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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:
Please keep any discussion civil.
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 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 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.
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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.
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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.
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