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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.
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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