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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.
Hlynka was, in my opinion, one of the best posters this community has ever seen. I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence. What he had to offer, this community needed quite badly, whether the members recognize it or not. I'm quite sure he was right about most things, and of the few I'm less sure of, I'd still rather bet with him than against him.
That being said, I am pretty sure he knew the ban was coming, and was in no particular hurry to forestall it. My impression is that he just got tired of the bullshit, a situation with which I sympathize even if it doesn't change the outcome. We ask questions to find answers, and having found them, the purpose of a space designed to facilitate question-asking falls rapidly to zero, and it is time to move on. Godspeed, good sir.
What was the argument about? Could you link it?
Several people have asked, Reddit's search functions are trash so I don't have a link, but I'm working on a writeup. the short version was that I was super-black-pilled and 100% committed to what I perceived to be Red-Tribe Accelerationism, went in hard asking what the alternative was supposed to be, and left convinced that I had, in fact, been thinking like a Blue, should stop doing that immediately, and should endeavor to actually think like a Red instead. People who've talked to me long-term often mention that I've mellowed out a lot since then; that conversation is what did it.
A lot of people dump on him for his theory that blues and the "radical" right are actually the same thing, but I know for a fact he is correct, because I have observed the divide between the two in my own thinking. I was raised Red, and went deep blue for more than a decade before drifting back. What I thought of as moving back to the "right", though, was only surface detail, and my core ideological and philosophical commitments were still intrinsically Blue. His response clearly communicated the difference, and I have endeavored to emulate his good example ever since.
I don’t know if you’re still planning on posting your comprehensive writeup, but if you aren’t, I’d greatly appreciate it if you could elaborate more on what it means to think like a Red and think like a Blue, and in particular what bearing this has on the question of the radical left and the radical right being “the same thing”.
(If you are still planning on posting your writeup and it will address these questions, I will patiently await it.)
The writeup is still in progress, but I want to try to at least communicate some portion of the insight in the meantime.
Let's leave aside "Red" and "Blue" as labels, and substitute "A" and "B". From Orwell's "politics and the English Language", here's an example of the same idea written written two different ways:
Let's call the first style "A" and the second style "B". Obviously the two are quite different, and Orwell, being a master of composition, has intentionally written the second to be bad and wrong. Let's ignore aesthetics completely, and not care at all about which is more pleasing to the eye or ear.
I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.
Does that description make sense to you?
I agree that the former is clearly superior to the latter, but I confess that I don't know why.
The former is certainly closer to the soil; although we shouldn't forget all the nasty, poisonous things that lurk in the soil as well.
I'm more inclined to say that there is no inside. There is only outside. (I'm very influenced by Zizek and McGowan's psychoanalytic reading of Hegel on this point - there is nothing that escapes contradiction, not even God.)
On the most literal reading, this seems straightforwardly false. Otherwise how could we explain the possibility of lying, or the ability of authors to write convincing dialogue for characters who think differently from themselves?
At any rate, I'm happy to discuss these issues independently, but I'm not sure what all this has to do with the question of the equivalence between the contemporary far left and far right, or the question of equivalence between political ideologies in general. I have some guesses as to where it might be going, but it would probably be better to save that until you post the definitive account of your position.
Hmm. Let's try it this way.
A: I returned and saw under the sun...
B: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion...
The former admits appropriate subjectivity: I saw frames the sentence as the author's personal experience, which you are implicitly invited to measure against your own. The later inappropriately claims objectivity: Objective consideration, with no mention of who is doing the observing, is the language of a textbook, presenting information to be ingested uncritically. It implies a comprehensive system of knowledge, of which this is one piece.
...Or I can make it even simpler, and hopefully divorced from any political or social connotations.
A: It seems obvious to me that...
B: Everyone knows that...
Both strongly assert a position. The latter bakes in an inherently inappropriate social claim to reinforce the point. You see that, right?
In this case, A is speaking from "inside" themself, about a perceived reality they recognize as outside them. B is speaking from "outside" themself, about a "reality" that almost certainly does not exist. It seems to me that there is nothing that "everyone knows", most especially because the phrase is usually deployed at someone who evidently doesn't know the thing in question.
Likewise:
A: "but time and chance happen to them all"
B: "but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account"
...Are not equivalent either. The former frames time and chance as something to be accepted. The latter frames them as something to be managed, if not outright overcome. But the whole point of the passage is that they are to a considerable extent unmanageable; the A version is highlighting this, and the B version is minimizing this, perhaps even denying it.
It seems to me that the A version presents itself as inside a box, the self, looking out at the world, while the B version presents itself as Systematized Knowledge, looking into a box, which is the world. That is what I mean by inside and outside. I'm further asserting that there is no Capital-S Systematized Capital-K Knowledge, though to really chase that point down will probably require a lot more drawing of definitions. Suffice to say, the implicit claim I'm pointing to is false.
Does that make more sense, whether you agree with it or not?
Lying is difficult, and simulating is likewise difficult. No one can do either perfectly, and we're talking here about conversation, not fiction. I'm asserting that how people argue, especially when they argue well and forcefully, reveals a lot about how they think.
Because the assertion that I am endorsing is that the appropriate way to group ideologies is not by position statements, which observably change with some frequency, but rather on core axioms and values, which do not. I've argued previously that the core of Enlightenment/Progressive/Left-wing thought is the axiom "we know how to solve all our problems", with the point being that it is a false axiom, and anyone who uses it is making the same fundamental error, regardless of what specifically they think the problems and solutions are. With the example above, I'm trying to show how that thought iterates out into even basic statements about observable reality, like "chance exists".
Are you sure that's a uniquely Enlightenment axiom? Isn't traditional Christianity quite opinionated on how we can solve all our problems? "For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."
Anyway, this strikes me as more of a statement of personal credence about the results of a given policy program, rather than a core philosophical axiom that we might expect to find wedded to one ideology over another.
There was and still is definitely an element of this in Marxism, the faith that the world revolution would usher in the end of history and the final utopia. Absolutely. But there are also Marxists who are critical of that tendency. It's a fortunate coincidence that I mentioned Zizek and McGowan in my last post, because they're both self-described Marxists who are critical of traditional eschatological Marxism. Zizek has transitioned over the years towards a position where he treats Marxism as more of a regulative ideal to strive for, rather than a single defined end state. McGowan critiques the traditional Marxist conception of a utopian social order free of contradictions because it fails to account for the lessons of Freud and Lacan about the fundamentally self-destructive nature of the human psyche. He describes his position as one of "permanent revolution" - yes we should strive for a socialist economic order, but he explicitly acknowledges that that won't be the end of our problems. There will always be new problems, new tensions, the need for new revolutions. If a Marxist thinks like this, is he no longer a Marxist? Well, he obviously doesn't become a traditional Red.
Do you think that white identitarians think they "know how to solve all our problems"? I've never really heard any of them talk in those terms. But if any of them do believe that, then they should obviously stop. There have been lots of (almost) 100% white societies throughout history and they all had lots of problems. White people have a long history of violently murdering each other. So it's just a simple historical fact that white nationalism can't solve every problem. I think that every intelligent white identitarian who has reflected on meta-politics is aware of this.
You can use almost any political ideology as an example. Let's take ancaps. Do ancaps think they know how to solve all our problems? It seems obvious to me that there could be some who do and some who don't. And they're all still ancaps. It wouldn't make sense to classify them any other way.
I'm not opposed to the idea of looking at political ideologies through the lens of common foundational commitments, if we can find the right ones, but "we know how to solve all our problems" just doesn't strike me as a good one. Dividing people based on that would lead us to put people with severely disparate ideologies into the same camp.
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I won't comment upon this assertion except to point out that this was absolutely not what Hlynka was doing. Hlynka would just tell people they were lying about their positions, make up some of his own to attribute to them, and then strut off as if he hadn't just made a fool of himself.
His bullshit system of categorization wasn't leading him to some deeper insight others failed to understand, it was leading him to make stupid nonsensical posts where he attempted to call people out for failing to defend arguments they had never made.
Did you make a point against his IQ skepticism that he doesn't want to answer? Prepare to have him ask you how your point is supposed to invalidate colorblind meritocracy. Have you ever posted about meritocracy before? Doesn't matter if you haven't. Are you actually in favor of it? Fuck you, Hlynka can read your mind and knows you really aren't.
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