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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.
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.
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.
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