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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28291 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.

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.

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