banned
Hoffmeister is correct that I did not suggest that you are Hlynka but that TequilaMockingbird is and therefore there is no great gap. For the record when Hlynka was banned I wasn't there to gloat even though I don't like him nor do I suggest that mods ban or not ban this guy if he is Hlynka.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.
This is in fact what he got banned for. He was an extremely valued commenter, but he eventually decided that he was no longer willing to abide by the rules here, and over the course of a number of repeated and very obvious rule violations presented the mods with a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation. They chose the rules.
@HlynkaCG remains my all-time favorite commenter here, and my interactions with him were, by far, the most constructive and formative of all those I've had here. I maintain to this day that his notable positions and arguments were simply correct. I myself have experienced fundamental conflict between the opinions I wish to express and the rules of this forum, and there was a stretch of time where I fully expected to receive a permaban, not because the mods were unfair in some way, but because I straightforwardly perceived my own intentions as fundamentally contrary to the forum's mission. It's something I and others have written about before: it's entirely possible for good, thoughtful, well-intentioned people to find themselves incapable of further participation here, because what this place requires, often enough, isn't goodness or thoughtfulness or fine intentions, but a peculiar sort of ice-cold abstraction.
To my knowledge, the behind-the-scenes mod drama consisted of mods arguing with him in private that he had to either stop breaking the rules or be banned, and the top-level ban announcement was to increase visibility for the people who had been arguing that him not being banned proved that the rules were fake.
why don't you link the post that actually got him banned?
Because that comment never came up in the discussion.
Yeah, because all the moderators are massive HBDers,
Members of the mod team did endorse the harassment of him for his views on IQ as "providing a valuable public service".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2mo ago
Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ. A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee"
Yeah, because all the moderators are massive HBDers, to the point they won't tolerate dissent. I like a good conspiracy theory, but come up with one that makes some sense.
Also, why don't you link the post that actually got him banned?
Officially he got banned for antagonism and boo-outgroup posting.
Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ. A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee", and the fact that his ban was announced as a top level post without citing any specific rule-breaking comments would seem to suggest that whatever happened to justify his ban happened out of the public eye. Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?
Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism", so it was decided that he would go away to reduce the potential of theMotte.org getting caught up in Trump-related drama.
gattsuru
2mo ago
Yes. Yes it was.
Falsely.
I’m not gonna say that’s an exception the swallows the rule on its own. The wrong position on the ACA or AWB might be cited as wanting to kill poor people, before found justification for firing, and there’s other times where positions are seen themselves as evidence of disqualificating in capability, such as where just having the wrong background had an academic review board talk about ‘beating that college out of her’ (and, tot’s coincidence, not hiring her) . Of course, most stuff gravitates to race and sexuality as most controversial, regardless of the facts on the ground, and especially if Skibboleth is trying to distinguish ‘criminal justice’ and ‘immigration’, that makes for a self-parody. An RPG forum I once frequented formally banned any support of ICE or defense of antiabortion laws (and informally banned any serious criticism of BLM); there is no position that modern progressives will fail to call racist or sexist or both.
But let’s look again at Skibboleths claim:
The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus.
Not ‘understood as’. Not ‘painted as’. Is.
The amount of pushback on the leftist was zero. I didn't get banned this time, but I can't risk continuing to talk about it either.
And it's not hard to find places where being open about right wing political beliefs unambiguously gets people banned.
JarJarJedi
2mo ago
That's because Europe hasn't had a US style batshit insane anti-abortion movement outside small rare niches.
Ever heard of folks called "catholics"? I am pretty sure they have some positions on abortion. I am not sure "batshit insane" can be considered as argument and not a spit-spraying, but I think it's reasonable to believe at least some of them hold views that abortion needs to be restricted. Moreover, if those people didn't exist, how exactly would Germany end up with laws like "Abortion is banned forever, but we decide to ignore it for the first 12 weeks" instead of "Abortion is allowed as a sacred right and nobody is to restrict it by any stupid terms or conditions" - as it is the official position of the US left and the official interpretation of RvW until recently? I mean if nobody is so batshit insane as to ban abortions, how does it happen abortion is banned? Was there an alien invasion or something? If everybody agrees banning it is batshit insane, why not just come out and say so and enshrine it like California etc. do?
where the nominal prohibition is kept due to a technicality
Kept from what? You just said Europe didn't have anybody wanting to ban abortion, so how do you "keep" something that nobody ever wanted? How did it got there in the first place? Why didn't they remove that "technicality" long ago - what's so hard about it?
as a way to allow conservatives to signal "morally appropriate behavior".
Are those the same conservatives you just called "batshit insane" and claimed they don't exist in Europe? If they don't exist, why they must be made allowances?
I'm sorry, I find your explanation to be a weak sauce.
A weirdo leftist failing to get you banned for sharing a conservative opinion seems like evidence in favor of my point.
Jiro
2mo ago
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice.
I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.
Eetan
2mo ago
Nuclear power is still banned of course.
Yes, this is the most egregious failing of our world from Dath Ilan rational paradise perspective.
Imagine alternate world that is just like us, except it has problems with food. Not like us, problems of too much food, but problems of not enough food.
In this world, in richest countries, people spend about half of their income on food, the poor regularly go hungry and it is not uncommon for the poorest to starve to death. And in poor countries, massive famines killing millions are normal occurence.
The world does not like it, and tries hard to remedy it. Every day, there is new government initiative to solve the food problem, every day there is new startup business promising new and revolutionary ersatz food from sawdust and coal. But the problem persists.
You, as visitor shocked with their plight, offer an obvious (to you) solution.
"Do you know you could use pesticides to kill pests and this way to raise agricultural yield by order of magnitude?"
"Here are some very simple ones your chemical industry can easily manufacture."
"This way, no one will have to go hungry, food will be in such abundance that even homeless could be as fat as millionaires!"
The locals, shocked and horrified, answer:
"This is organophosphate chemistry! This is NERVE GAS! Do you want to kill us all? Are you Adenoid Hynkel, the most evil man that ever lived?"
ResoluteRaven
2mo ago
I suppose I'm just tempermentally different in some fundamental way from many people here, but despite going through the same Great Awokening experiences as most college-educated individuals with heterodox views, I never felt this crushing sense of repression that others seem to. It has never been more than a minor annoyance to me that I had to attend diversity trainings, disinterestedly listen to whatever my progressive peers have decided to rant about that day, or that I would be mildly discriminated against by college admissions and hiring committees on account of my race(s), and one day in the past few months things seamlessly flipped over and I started being mildly annoyed instead that federal research grants were being canceled on account of including banned words. So it goes.
Perhaps I just never had any naive expectations of fairness, or that things like freedom of speech counted for much in practice, so the fact that I couldn't talk about race or sex differences in public didn't strike me as some sort of betrayal that needed to be avenged. Perhaps I don't have any real principles, and so, like the average person, I have no qualms about passively accepting whatever the ruling ideology happens to be and getting along as best I can without taking a stand for Truth and Justice. Perhaps I spent enough time in the third world that Americans complaining about basically anything at all strikes me as laughable. Whatever the reason, I notice that I am confused by this in the same way I am by the broader "mental health crisis" that has double digit percentages of my generation popping SSRI's like they're candy.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2mo ago
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/27/british-steels-chinese-owners-reject-500m-go-green/
Jingye, the Chinese steel group that owns the plant, blamed Donald Trump as it announced plans to shut key operations, putting up to 2,700 jobs at risk.
British Steel has announced plans to close its two blast furnaces in Scunthorpe, making Britain the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own steel.
Jingye said it has invested more than £1.2bn to maintain operations since 2020 but said losses have ballooned to around £700,000 a day.
British Steel’s latest available accounts show pre-tax losses grew tenfold to more than £408m in 2022.
What a pathetic story of British-style governance in action. Sell the steel industry to China. Wreck the economy with ridiculously expensive 'clean energy'. Lose basic industrial capabilities for warmaking or building anything. Lose jobs. Lose relevance. Lose everything, sooner or later (sooner).
Development economics needs a new category to go along with developing and developed, studying declining countries like the UK.
Australia does basically the same thing, albeit with the extra steps of 'bail out the industries wrecked by gross economic negligence' and 'invest in green hydrogen': https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/20/whyalla-steelworks-government-bailout-administration-sa
Green hydrogen isn't even a thing, surely most physicists could tell you the concept is a fantasy. Who has ever dreamed of expensively converting electricity into hydrogen, struggling to store the ultra-leaky, diffuse, explosive gas and then turning the hydrogen back into electricity? Even in the fantasy-world of renewable energy economics it's an unusually silly dream. Nuclear power is still banned of course.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
2mo ago
A certain someone reported you for impersonating a mod. Unlike him, most of the mods have a sense of humor about such things.
[User was banned for this post]
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2mo ago
I find it rather telling that the one regime this tribe constantly holds up as the bright shining light of model liberal democracy is the FRG i.e. former West Germany. It makes sense, as it’s an otherwise nonsensical polity that was artificially created by first merging America’s local zone of military occupation with those of Britain and France i.e. states that economically and militarily depended on the American empire for their very existence after 1945, and then absorbing another fake state, the GDR into it in 1990 and then lying that this constituted the “reunification” of two sovereign states.
I don't remember where I read it — if it was Unherd or Compact or elsewhere — but I recall about half a year ago or so reading an essay by a German about German politics, and specifically why the AfD should be banned. The author argued that the West German constitution — and thus modern Germany — was basically set up to be a system with three major parties that would pretty much set the limits of political options, and thus the space on which the electorate may vote. That where those parties are in agreement on an issue — such as immigration — then the voters simply don't have a say. And especially that trying to form a party around such a forbidden view, particularly those beyond the rightward edge of elite-acceptable views, must be shut down.
That modern "democracy" is when elites decide most issues, then let the electorate vote from a carefully curated and limited menu of options for the remaining issues (because anything less restrictive risks another Austrian Painter Party).
I suggest that instead of linking to two dozen or so comments, you post the first comments of comment chains / discussions where you participated.
Except I tried to make sure those comments were all from different comment chains / discussions (though I may have gotten one or two from the same). They should be spaced out across various discussions over the past several months or more. Thus, that would still be about the same number of links.
When I said I've written a lot about this, I meant it.
TheDemonRazgriz
2mo ago
I don't think it's worth it if you already consider yourself to have an "addictive personality", so to speak. It definitely feels good, but once you start getting cravings that pretty much cancels it out, in my opinion. My now-fiancée and I both got into vaping for a couple years or so during college and, honestly, only decided to quit when our state banned all the non-tobacco flavors of vape cartridges and it became too much of a pain to support the habit. I found it surprisingly easy to quit given the reputation (it was kind of unpleasant for a week or so but then I felt back to normal) but she had an absolute bitch of a time, with physical withdrawal symptoms that went on for months. I'll still take a hit off a friend's vape or share a cigarette at a party once in a blue moon -- again it really is a nice feeling, especially in a party environment where you're talking to people and already a little tipsy -- but she's convinced (probably rightly) that if she tried it again at all it would kickstart the addiction all over again. So if you already think you're susceptible to that kind of thing, I think it's pretty much a guarantee that you'll end up with a proper addiction/dependency -- which in my view makes the juice very much not worth the squeeze.
WhiningCoil
2mo ago
Not particularly? Or maybe properly informed parental consent is good enough? You see this a lot with football now, where the concussion risk is so high that parents won't let their kids play it anymore, and instead encourage other sports.
I'm of two minds about it. I'm a huge proponent of fitness, and I fucking loved the decade I spent in martial arts. The concussion I got from it was not so much fun. Nor the spots I still have in my vision, my torn ankle that aches at night if the sheets are tucked in, or the fact that I broke my right hand twice and the knuckles on my right hand line up different than the knuckles on my left now. But I suppose for a 10 year amateur career, that's not horrible, and those were the choices I made largely as an adult. Nobody rode my ass, I pushed myself exactly as hard as I wanted to, until I didn't anymore. And I wouldn't fault anyone for wanting their kids to do a sport, within the boundaries of safety and reason.
It seems somehow more sinister when coaches are pushing children beyond the limits of safety and reason, with health outcomes they would be in a unique position to be aware of, but which they ignore. And if there were programs or coaches that systematically abused children in that way, I would like to see them banned.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
2mo ago
As The Guardian reported:
The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise.
"None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms.
The exchange of information continued a long-standing relationship Mr Feith and other Washington neo-conservatives had with Israel's Likud party.
In 1996, he and Richard Perle - now an influential Pentagon figure - served as advisers to the then Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu. In a policy paper they wrote, entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, the two advisers said that Saddam would have to be destroyed, and Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Iran would have to be overthrown or destabilised, for Israel to be truly safe.
The Israeli influence was revealed most clearly by a story floated by unnamed senior US officials in the American press, suggesting the reason that no banned weapons had been found in Iraq was that they had been smuggled into Syria. Intelligence sources say that the story came from the office of the Israeli prime minister.
The OSP absorbed this heady brew of raw intelligence, rumour and plain disinformation and made it a "product", a prodigious stream of reports with a guaranteed readership in the White House. The primary customers were Mr Cheney, Mr Libby and their closest ideological ally on the national security council, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice's deputy.
In turn, they leaked some of the claims to the press, and used others as a stick with which to beat the CIA and the state department analysts, demanding they investigate the OSP leads
Douglas Feith, on whose authority the Israelis were cleared into the Pentagon, is a Zionist Jew who co-authored the Clean Break Memo as part of an advisory group directly to Netanyahu himself. The memo calls for removing Saddam as an important objective:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq—an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right—as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
So you have Doug Feith working directly with the Likud party to provide plans for securing Israeli objectives in the Middle East. Then you get Doug Feith on the OSP, who laundered false Israeli intelligence from a clandestine office of the Israeli Prime Minister directly to the White House. Then you have Netanyahu himself giving a hard sell to the American Congress.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Same! I hate those apps and how theyve ruined dating for everyone. Even if yiu dont use them, everyone else is if there was a movement to ban them like how they almost banned tiktok, i'd be a fanatical supporter
benmmurphy
2mo ago
I was also banned from going to the US but no one would wrote up my sob story, but I also didn't break the law by entering the US so no real story to write up.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2mo ago
Banned for one week. You seem to be on an unfavorable trajectory.
SSCReader
2mo ago
I regret you were too late but Nybbler already beat you to it, so we had traced back to Baldassaro and also to another article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which has another unsourced quote about the 1928 ban in Chicago. Though as knowledge is its own reward so I hope you do not feel your time wasted!
Still being banned for being communist means my overall point holds thankfully.
Magusoflight
3mo ago
I agree with you and one consolation is that print media is dying and with it a whole cohort of left wing journos who no longer have a livelihood. There’s fewer and fewer each year, and That’s a Good Thing
As an aside, does anyone else remember when in 2019 you could get banned on Twitter for telling a journalist to learn to code? Ahhh memories
No, his analysis went far beyond that, and he explicitly claimed on countless occasions not only that there is a set of psychological/lifestyle traits uniting both the far-right and the far-left, but also that in very many cases they are literally the same individuals — pointing out that many people he identified as “dissident right” (mercifully, the term “woke right” had not yet gained purchase prior to Hlynka’s perma-ban, or else he’d have embraced its usage with gusto) were, at one point or another in their lives, at least tepidly interested in leftism.
One effect of the fact that he has been banned is that it’s not difficult to sift through the most recent of his comments on his user page, wherein you can find many representative examples of his claims.
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