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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.
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.
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.
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?
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I just saw something on Tumblr that seems rather relevant to this. It started with an anon saying
Which, a little down the chain, leads to thathopeyetlives's reply
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.
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.
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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).
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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.
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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.
define 'stupid'
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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.
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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.
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.
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Among the best, rather.
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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.
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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?
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I'm well aware of the contradiction, I wrote this 5 days ago [emphasis added]:
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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
This position is rare only here but pretty widespread in general public.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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