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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.
Even while I think his baiting is often incredibly obvious, his schtick mildly cringe and inflammatory turns of phrase barely concealed, I don't think a permanent ban was the right choice. Some-weeks-long timeouts should be inconvenient enough for the poster himself, simple enough for the janitors (it's not like there's a shortage of reasons to mod) and give themotte at large enough "breathing room" as it were, that they should be an effective deterrent.
Since I'm turning into a one-issue poster I might as well bring up an unrelated parallel. I'm a regular of chatbot threads on imageboards, and 4chan's thread is probably the worst, most schizo-ridden shithole I've ever seen (believe me that's a fucking high bar to clear) which is constantly raided from outside splinter communities, beset by a self-admitted mentally ill schizo that has made it his quest in life to make the thread suffer (he is on record for owning some 30 4chan passes to spam/samefag with, which he discards and buys new ones as they get perma'd), etc. The on-topic chatbot discussion is frequently a fig leaf for parasocial zoomers and literal fujos to obsess over notable thread "personalities", shitpost liberally and spam frequently repulsive fetish-adjacent stuff. Jannies have summarily abandoned the thread to fend for itself, to the point that when shit gets bad it is a kind of tradition for some heroic anon to take one for the team and spam the thread with NSFW to attract their attention (obviously eating a ban himself in the process). By any metric imaginable it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
I also sometimes read 2ch's equivalent thread that lands on the other side of the spectrum: it has an active janny that rules the nascent /ai/ board with an iron fist and mercilessly purges any kind of off-topic discussion, up to and including discussion of his own actions so you can't even call him out in any way. This hasn't stopped their thread from being filled with GPT vs Claude console wars (the one "sanctioned" flame war topic, I guess), and to his credit the thread has genuine on-topic discussion, especially on prompt engineering, but other than that the thread is utterly sterile, the console wars get rote incredibly fast, and every single slav I've talked with and seen in thread prefers 4chan's thread to 2ch's - for the "activity" if nothing else. Even shitty activity is better than none (besides being more entertaining, although YMMV).
Now I am aware themotte is decidedly not that kind of place, I understand that increased tolerance puts more strain on janitors and don't object against extended banning for high heat - only against permanently banning. All similarities are coincidental, et cetera, I hope my overall point is clear - while janitors have my respect now that I've seen what life is like without any, with every prolific poster banished there's a risk of becoming sterile or collapsing into an echo chamber, and this risk is higher baseline for more obscure communities that don't have a steady influx of newfriends. Surely it's not that hard to hand belligerent posters the occasional vacation (and as I understand themotte forbids alts as well)? Again, by your own admission it's not like there's a shortage of reasons.
NB: I'm mostly a civil poster
nowbut I ate my share of timeouts from /g/ jannies for occasional tomfoolery.I don’t disagree with you, and I think there should exist some option for Hlynka to return. That said, he’s been here for 6+ years and in that time his issues with drive-by insults just seemed to get worse. In the last 2 years he seemed to develop this understanding of all the users he didn’t like (a group that spanned veritable progressives, myself, @SecureSignals and various other far-from-ideologically-aligned regulars) as part of some communist-fascist-Jewish conspiracy against America. And sure, I’ve encountered Christians online who’ve suggested much milder, somewhat more coherent versions of that argument. But Hlynka went so deep that he just started replying to comments with ad-hominem drive-bys on that basis without actually engaging with any of the points people were making. And this place can’t really operate like that, if people reply to far rightists by saying “well, you’re a Nazi” and they reply with “well, you’re a Jew” you may as well shut down the forum now because it’s clear that there’s no actual discourse happening.
Regulars here (including me my fair share of times) are already exempted from a lot of janny action unless an offense is extremely egregious. Hlynka had been modded dozens, probably hundreds of times over the years. I disagree with a true permaban (as I did in Darwin’s case, who as I understand is now back with us) but I respect that the mods have to draw a line somewhere.
It's a Hayekian Road to Serfdom schtick.
Fascism is considered "reactionary" by academics because the Academy was dominated by communism, so any ideology opposed to the inevitable global Proletariat revolution is "reactionary" according to their priors.
Hayek inverted this by grouping together any ideology that doesn't accept Liberal priors under the "tyranny" umbrella.
Traditionally, Road to Serfdom rhetoric has been invoked on the Right/Libertarian sphere to associate Socialism with Fascism, in order to discredit the former due to the anti-fascist consensus that exists across the political spectrum.
But Hlynka is observing a large, organic shift of that paradigm in the Dissident Right sphere, where the anti-fascist psychology within the Right is becoming discredited. So he is attempting to denounce that trend by associating it with Wokeism/Socialism as being part of the same "road to tyranny."
I understand where he's coming from, but it's a boring argument... "Woke Progressives don't accept Liberal priors, SecureSignals doesn't accept Liberal priors, look you are basically the same!" is the essence of his argument. The problem is the argument only works if you accept Liberal priors and if you don't then there's not much to discuss. He just repeats that accusation over and over.
Fascism is considered reactionary by academics because it is. In the Nazi case, it was also revolutionary, just in a direction which specifically criticized the Weimar liberals and the socialists. Yes, they also fought the junkers for political power; that doesn’t diminish their traditionalist aesthetics.
Then you’ve got Italy, pining for long-lost Rome and adopting traditionalist slogans: “La guerra è per l'uomo come la maternità è per la donna.” Francoist Spain, claiming monarchist symbols and called his war a Catholic crusade.
Though…is Road to Serfdom where Moldbug got his ideas about “demotism”?
I don't think traditionalist aesthetics alone make something reactionary, particular when it is employed to push the envelope forward. The Founding Fathers of America heavily leaned on Classical aesthetics but were not Reactionary. The Futurist movement was associated with Fascism, and even today the Vaporwave aesthetic broadly used across the DR shows the uncanny nostalgia of the combination of classical aesthetics and futurist artistic expression. Within science fiction, fascism seems to aesthetically fit all too well, with Starship Troopers and Star Wars being two of many such cases, also pointing to a futuristic rather than reactionary ideological inertia.
Of course fascism became associated with eugenics and the trope of "science going too far." It was a revolutionary ideology, it is only accused of being Reactionary from the point of reference of left-wing academics who are doing basically what Hlynka is doing by accusing the DR and Wokeism as being cut from the same cloth.
"Fascism" has basically become synonymous in common parlance with Right-wing futurism as opposed to Right-wing conservatism or reaction. "Fascists" aren't "super conservative" they are revolutionary futurists.
Having a vision of the future doesn't disqualify them from being reactionaries, though. It's part of having an effective political machine. Christian millenarians are perfectly capable of holding reactionary beliefs despite having very clear claims about 1) the shape of the future and 2) how everyone ought to get there. So too with the agrarian conservatives whom the Nazis supplanted.
The key feature of reaction is opposition to liberalism. Nazis were very eager to check those boxes. It's that, more than the aesthetics, which I find dispositive.
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Many reactionaries were obviously deeply critical of fascism, but the nuance of their criticism is usually about the approach rather than the goal (building a society with, in generalized terms, traditional values and built around faith, family and fatherland all defined vaguely). All reaction today is revolutionary, even obviously-not-futurist reaction like French traditional Catholicism of the SSPX kind is ‘revolutionary’ in a country that has been secular and progressive for the best part of 250 years (some exceptions excepted). Milquetoast Americana ‘Christian nationalism’ is revolutionary in the modern US.
Fascist aesthetics are interesting but complicated by the huge differences between Italy/Germany/Spain and the fact that even within countries there was a huge amount of inconsistency; the Nazis selectively deployed both modern sans serif futurist fonts and Fraktur until they arbitrarily decided the latter was Jewish in 1941. Architecturally there was always tension between a veneration of classicism and the fact that fascism had its roots in part in architectural modernism/futurism, such that you get complicated and extremely interesting, but also arguably aesthetically incoherent (especially when one looks at interior design and exterior design side by side) buildings like Hitler’s chancery.
I think one of the few points of agreement is that fascism sees the centralized state as playing a much more central role in cultural, economic and political life than other forms of reactionary conservatism (a term that I disagree is oxymoronic, almost all hard rightists today agree that conservatism is revolutionary because there is very little left to conserve). Other reactionaries typically want a smaller state and a larger role for other institutions (religion, social organizations, communal groups and local politics, gender and age-based associations etc).
Fascism never had a Karl Marx figure to consolidate a general philosophy, hence the inconsistency. It is expressed more organically relative to the people and their historical context rather than a monotone global revolution. I still do not agree that harnessing the immense power of classical aesthetics makes you a Reactionary. Talk about confused!
"Democrats are the real racists, please stop DEI because it's the real racism" is not a revolutionary ideology. People like Hlynka have long been appropriated as Enforcers for the prevailing cultural ethos and moral paradigm as one kosher side of the anti-fascist dialectic: the Progressives claim the right is more fascist due to their social conservatism, while the Right claims the left is more fascist because of their cultural and economic authoritarianism. So the prevailing dialectic is defined by the debate over who claims the moral high ground by being the most anti-fascist. Conservatism is highly entrenched in this game, with Hlynka being a quintessential example of many people we all know in real life and which completely dominated right-wing discourse during the Bush era and prior.
Fascism is neither liberal nor pre-liberal. It is post-liberal. That's why any sort of gesture towards a Right-wing post-liberalism is automatically tagged as fascist or Nazi no matter how irrelevant it is to 1930s German National Socialism.
So I feel you are playing into the game here by claiming a Right-wing post-liberalism is impossible. It either must be liberal or reactionary. But this obviously isn't the case. I do not consider myself a reactionary. I do not want to go back to the 1950s, or Retvrn further back than to whatever year Moldbug pegs. The only way out is through, not backwards. I and many on the DR don't associate with NRx for this very reason.
I very much agree, but I don’t think Hlynka was on the hard right, for all of his strange and contradictory ideas. I don’t really think Hlynka was an enforcer for the status quo, just a believer in a strange form of classical Anglo-American liberalism with some additional characteristics that is, today, probably more embodied by the GOP than the left in some ways.
I think I’m mostly in agreement with you (not politically, obviously, but on this point) but I’d still describe myself as a reactionary. I think pretty much anyone who opposes the progress cult is, at least on some level. I don’t want to go back to the 1950s or any particular previous time. I don’t think Moldbug does either; he argues that liberalism traces its roots to the reformation or even renaissance, but he’s not advocating a return to 1400, he doesn’t think it’s possible in any case.
All post-liberal ideologies of the right (as opposed to liberal ideologies of it, like Hlynka’s), for all their diversity, are reactionary. That’s not a criticism, it’s just obvious, because in their rightism they will be, necessarily, reactionary.
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