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PaperclipPerfector  20d ago (text post)   32840 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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So the movie was not very good, and also not Snow White.

I’m wondering if proof of concept for AI actors was the point, but surely that’s already done?

I also find it funny that what is easily the most "woke" movie in recent memory could plausibly be interpreted as endorsing dissident right ideals, Jews Bad, hereditary monarchy good, "the people" are sheep, etc...

Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle- they’re the same thing. They’re both revolutionary ideologies calling for to radically remake society in a short period of time. They merely disagree about who gets cushy sinecures doing stupid bullshit(black lesbians or white men). The DR weirds out classical conservatives once they figure out it’s not a meme. There is a de Maistre shaped hole in the popular consciousness but the slow growth of more functional societies will eat the revolution alive.

I think if the system is fundamentally broken, you need to take radical action to fix it. And I don’t think anyone sane can look at the old status quo and say “it’s fine, actually.” I don’t see the government as functional, doing useful things, or promoting ideas that are helpful to a civilization. And if anything, most of the indicators seemed to be moving very rapidly in the wrong direction. Slowly applying the brakes means we’re still going the wrong direction, but maybe not accerating as quickly. Instead of letting in 10 million illegal immigrants this year, we let in 5 million and pat ourselves on the back despite the fact that we’re still a net positive on illegals immigrants. Maybe we slow inflation of necessary goods from 10% to 5%. Okay, but that’s still much higher than it should be. Our school students struggle internationally, and we are not only not fixing it, but doubling and tripling down on pushing Woke on kids. A lot of this stuff is broken. Making it break more slowly is not fixing it.

At this point so much of our country just doesn’t work for the median American that I think the only answer is the wrest control from tha apperachniks running the government and to bring it to heel. I’d rather end the current departments and reinvent them because it guarantees that something will actually change. The school system will go back to educating kids and away from promoting The Narrative. A welfare system that works for the truly needy without giving money to people who refuse to work. A foreign aid policy tuned to support American interests and allies, rather than simply funding every do-gooder grant project that nets an over educated elite a sinecure for 100K a year.

Top down radical action according to rationalist principles is what got us into this mess. It won’t get us out; the system needs to be remade through functionalist path-building building, not top down design.

The master's tools will not dismantle the master's house.

You specifically can use house building and maintaining tools to dismantle all or part of a house. I've done major home renovation projects. I'm pretty clear on this.

Why not? A hammer has neither morals nor agency.

It is a reference.

Alfred Nobel begs to differ.

As far as I can tell no dynamite was used to bring down his house.

This is inaccurate. We are living in a world of radical change that does require a radical change of elites to stop this radical change that is already happening. Which it self was a radical revolution on past arrangement.

I won't deny that there are some right wingers that are sufficiently edgy boys to have greater similarities, but I would just say that woke with speed limit is on the radical side and is where to put fake conservatism and fake centrism. Conservatism has always been a revolutionary and forceful movement where it made sense from conservatives point of view. Conservatives even in ancient times when those in power did things they disagreed with wanted to reverse course and sought radical change from not conservative ends. Force has always been part and parcel of conservatism. That and actually caring to change things from non conservative ends. You simply aren't a conservative if you want a leftist status quo to remain and oppose changing it, even if you redefine conservatism.

There is no coherent conservatism without principles. If people claiming to be conservatism understands conservatism to be about losing and surrendering to the status quo, then they simply aren't promoting something that could be accurately understood as conservatism. Just a convenient group for the left as a false opposition.

Even to have centrist ends, you still need a radical change from the policies that are followed. For example mass migration as has happened in last decades and has accelerated and is accelerating is in fact a very radical agenda. But the general package of new left liberalism that supposed non leftists have compromised with, is in fact a radical agenda. And in so far, replacing and people and making them a second class citizens, changing names, etc fits foreign occupation, it is actually inherently quite illegitimate agenda.

It has been very presumptuous how figures who have radical agendas like Starmer and people who sufficiently compromise and agree with them in key areas ave been branded as moderates and centrists. https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1jm1atp/white_men_are_going_to_be_treated_a_lot_tougher/

A good analogy might be a communist country that was run by dogmatic radicals who were fanatical and thought changing things was a radical change from what they have done. This process also included fellow travelers throughout the world who opposed anticommunists. Yes it is a radical change but for something more sensible. Just like if you are falling on the cliff it is a big change to try to find something to hold up and far more so extremely radical to defy gravity and fly over the top of the hill again. Although political change isn't as fantastical. In the analogy, it is an attempt for change towards something more sustainable which is life. A more realistic radical change is chemotherapy towards cancer.

I would identify neocon type supposed conservatives who compromise with the multicultural liberal agendas or champion foreign nationalism, especially aligning with zionists and oppose any nationalism for their own people as another shade of the same liberal uni-party that supports radical destructive agendas and opposes any genuine opposition to them.

When in fact there are alternatives that are obviously more moderate on the nationalism question than what they support and certainly there are people even in the dissident right who are closer to them on that. It simply is a false honor to presume that an anti any European nationalist agenda is a moderate agenda. The moderate position on nationalism in general fits much more within the model that has nations support their legitimate rights but also compromise with each others reciprocal rights and there is basically a range of healthy ethnocentrism rather than too little or too much. While the agenda that concern trolls nationalism for whites is simply an extreme agenda that is falsely propagandized as a moderate one.

I also, wouldn't agree that the dominant party line on feminism and all sorts of issues that establishment supposed conservatives have agreed with is necessarily moderate in terms of outcomes. We are living a giant radical experiment in social change that has already resulted in fertility collapse.

Their very stance of being highly intolerant and hostile to people on their right seeking any sufficient change and much more so than those to their equal distance towards the left left, is it self an example of the left wing radicalism of this con inc space, because by it self is a radical way to behave but also because it would necessitate less revolutionary change if the con inc types compromised less with new left liberalism, neocons, and similar groups. Honestly, in countries like Denmark that have a coalition that includes nationalists and follow the kind of policies that are made taboo, I see no reason to consider what they are doing as bad as the woke. The truth is that the con inc space is sufficiently in bed with liberals and they are trying to suppress any right wing alternative to that, including ones that would work better.

Honestly, in countries like Denmark that have a coalition that includes nationalists and follow the kind of policies that are made taboo

That is exactly the problem. There is no love lost between me and the pro-European because think of the poor LGBT under sharia nationalists. In fact they tend to by their presence disarm the organizations which can outgrow the total state enough to eat the revolution alive. Geert Wilders is likely bad for the Calvinists in the long run.

In contrast the much less ethnonationalist GOP protects conservative Christianity nearly as well as the fossil fuel industry. And only subsocieties which continue to function as societies can execute the counter revolution by slow growth. We’re already seeing the beginnings, but it will take generations to get there. It needs non-state institutions to grow, adapt, build a parallel society which rises until the revolutionary institutions running society are eaten- dismantled or subverted. Scaring the hoes with orgiastic rhetoric or top down revolutions is counter productive. Wait until the Hutterite senators pass a repeal of the 19th instead of just openly talking about it.

The turning of the wheel of history is the only solution to the problem of leftism. Franco failed, the Islamic revolution failed, only growth from the middle and bottom can succeed.

Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.

Communists and Neoreactionaries only appear similar to you because they are both roughly equidistant from American GOP-style conservatives along the axes that are most important to you. There are other orthogonal axes along which they are also very far apart from each other, and those axes are equally important, if not necessarily to you personally.

As I told Hlynka frequently, your analysis here is useful to you as a Schmittian friend-enemy identifier, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of actually understanding the internal motivations of the people and movements you’re analyzing.

I’m a classical reactionary.

Communists and neoreactionaries are similar because they are similar. They believe in top-down change according to rationalist principles. In a sense, they’re both totalitarian ideologies. The NRX patchwork state is many tiny countries, not many individuals living in different ways in the same country, not many institutions enabling their members to live different lifestyles under one state. There’s no pillarization. There’s no room for the unknowable, for non-state institutions, only for the subsumption of man into the state, as varied as the state may be.

The main difference is who they think should be in charge/receiving sinecures.

I... dont think patchwork is very important to many "dissident rightists", possibly not even Moldbug himself. Its not really related to any of the things you quoted in your first comment, at least.

Was the HRE totalitarian in your view?

No, because totalitarianism is a state with no competing institutions to the government. The HRE was... the opposite of that.

What makes you think Patchwork would be in any way different given it advocates specifically for such competition and reaches for the HRE as a specific target outcome?

Keep in mind, Patchwork Moldbug and Absolutist Yarvin are as different philosophers as Early Marx and Late Marx. Land is still specifically supportive of only the former (the former two probably).

Huh? This does not match my interpretation of anything that figures such as Yarvin have advocated. “Totalitarian” means the populace is fully politicized and expected to interface thoroughly, on both a practical and, more importantly, an *affective level, with the state. Yarvin’s model is a depoliticized populace whose relationship with the state is either that of an employee to his employer, or otherwise that of a consumer to a provider. He doesn’t want the average person to have any reason to form an opinion regarding state policy, nor to have any illusion of political input regarding policy decisions. This might be authoritarian, but I don’t see much resemblance between that and, say, North Korean juche or Third Reich state-worshipping rallies. Perhaps you and I have differing understandings of what totalitarianism implies.

"Authoritarianism is when there are things which you cannot talk about; totalitarianism is when there are things which you cannot be silent on"

Once again I am begging you people to recognize that Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is not the Default Ideology against which all others are measured.

Is it not though?

At least within the context of the United States, Christian (Burkean) Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics was the dominant ideology from the nation's founding through the latter half of the 20th century, and while it may be in decline it's not dead yet.

Christian Conservatism With Liberal Characteristics is the ideology that conquered the continent and put men on the moon. It would seem to me that any discussion of "transforming", "reforming", or "restoring" America has to happen within that context.

Care to expand on the different axes?

Sure, some major ones that come to mind are:

1: Which class/stratum of society is the state (or whatever scale of local decision-making body one prefers) designed to serve? Realistically in any polity comprised of human beings, there will be some sort of unequal distribution of talents and proclivities, with most people clustering around some nebulous middle.

The hard right is split between a faction who want to maximize favorable outcomes for the extreme right tail — to make society a playground for the most intelligent/strong/rapacious/ambitious among us to compete for spots at the top, while the feckless and disempowered middle class try to enjoy whatever downstream goods and services are produced by the 1% and the left tail of the distribution simply starve and die off — and a more collectivist right who want to use the state to crush both tails of the distribution — to dispossess the greedy capitalists, and also to smash and persecute the underclass — in order to secure safety and stability for the middle class. Both of these camps have strong purchase in different sectors of the so-called “Dissident Right”. If something unites these two factions, it’s that they both have zero interest in providing any indulgence toward the left end of the distribution; they despise the “undeserving poor”, the mentally infirm, the criminal underclass, etc. The concept of Christian charity is seen as highly suspect, given that it obligates a significant redistribution of resources from the productive classes to the unproductive parasitic elements of society.

On the modern left, meanwhile, the overriding concern is to siphon resources and status (which, given the Critical Theory focus on social status as the ultimate capital good, are in fact inextricably linked) toward the classes who are most deviant from the middle class. The extremely poor, yes, but also minorities of any kind. The middle class is seen as this sort of undifferentiated demiurgic mass of conformism and stasis; the process of the historical dialectic, ultimately, is the slow but steady revelation of contradictions within the unreflective worldview of the bourgeois class, allowing various elements within it to awaken their consciousness.

Factions on the left are split between what, ultimately, one who has discovered their inner spark of awakened consciousness is obligated to do with it. There are factions who wish to maximize individual and personal freedom, up to and including full transhumanism; their hatred of the middle-class is a manifestation of their visceral hatred of feeling that their life and choices have been pre-determined for them. A different faction of the left is far more invested in pure redistribution for its own sake, out of an overriding visceral hatred of inequality of any kind. They despise the idea of any one person/group having more than another person/group, as well as the suffering and feelings of inadequacy experienced by the one who has less. This leveling instinct drives their hatred of the middle class, who, in this telling, didn’t even earn the things they have, but who nonetheless derive personal validation from the fact that they have more than the lowest among us. (“They were born on third base and think they hit a triple.”) This faction is far more comfortable with anarcho-primitivist and third-worldist rhetoric, with the end goal a sort of deindustrialized communitarian hyperlocalism, in which the accumulated slate of financial and social capital formerly hoarded history’s unjust winners has been wiped away, leaving everyone to start from square one. Each faction of the left basically sees the other as useful idiots, to be wielded as a weapon against the mutually-hated middle/bourgeois class and then discarded.

2: What are the primary determinants of an individual’s life outcomes? The mainstream American idea, on both the mainstream/center right and left, is strongly and overwhelmingly oriented toward “personal agency and hard work” as the answer. Conservatives like Hlynka and @TequilaMockingbird seem to really, really hate anything that smacks of “determinism” — the idea that any individual’s life outcomes are largely constrained by factors outside of that individuals control. This leads to a hatred of eugenics, but also of any focus on socially-constructed factors — and the resulting unequal distributions of status and resources — playing a part. The split between the hard right and hard left are between competing models of which deterministic factors to emphasize.

I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes, but I do actually have to try and get some stuff done today. Hopefully this was a useful starting point.

Excellent analysis. However, if I recall correctly, Hlynka never claimed that the far-left or the far-right are exactly the same; Hlynka only claimed that the implementation of their politics ended up being nearly identical. Isn't that claim compatible with your analysis? Both the far-left and the far-right, on a fundamental level, want to re-order society to elevate either the lower, middle or upper class, with moderates being agnostic or wanting to help everybody.

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.

I could go deeper and analyze some other potential axes

I would enjoy this, when you have time!

Fuck it I’m taking up the hlynka posting mantle

You are not the only one.

If so many people are channeling @HlynkaCG, maybe we should let him back?

I'm doing my part!

I have consistently maintained that banning him was a mistake. Although he might be prideful enough that even if the invitation was extended, he wouldn’t come back.

Maybe he already is back. OP is carrying the mantle of Hlynka with the kind of things he has been arguing. I actually believe that he is Hlynka but I am not 100% certain about it.

I know Hlynka decently well from off-site and would bet heavily that he doesn't post here anymore.

Wait how many motters do you know IRL? Are you running meetups, or did you just know both of them already?

A whole lot and yeah I guess you could say something like that. Not Motte meetups per se but extremely heavy overlap.

I can assure you, we aren’t the same person(you saw us in the same thread at the same time and the mods do enforce sock puppeting) and we don’t actually share an ideology. We have certain cultural similarities which make my organic counterrevolution ideas look more similar to his social contract absolutism than they actually are.

To name a few things- I am perfectly willing to believe that the black-white IQ gap is real(although I doubt the strength of it as an explanatory factor), I hold significantly more socially conservative views on sex and gender, and I’m far more skeptical of state capacity as a solution.

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.

My mistake- I thought you were referring to this sub thread from my reference to hlynka posting.

I interpreted @Belisarius as accusing @TequilaMockingbird of being the return of Hlynka — a suspicion which I share, although my confidence has been too low for me to publicly level the accusation myself — not that you are. You’re significantly more articulate, and your ideas on a far stronger footing, than most of what Hlynka ever contributed, in my opinion.

I’ll take the complement, although I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way.

Hlynka had a particular posting style, and I simply don’t see it from him.

Random question. I just wrapped up the chapters in Gibbon about Belisarius, so I wanted to ask. Is he your namesake because you imagine yourself the greatest general of a degenerate and declining age, or because your wife is one of the top 10 most flagrant whores of history?

I kid, I kid. But man, what a way to go down in history. Greatest general of an era, and the biggest cuck.

Are you a Whining Coil?

That is pretty a stupid and insulting question but I will answer earnestly against my better judgement.

I picked the figure Belisarius because he was the greatest general in the fight for the restoration of the roman empire, but I certainly don't see myself as a general, or great general. And it was a bit random I chose that name over different ones. Just one of the figures of history I liked. It is good for us to be inspired by history and part of a degenerate and declining age is this hostility to a positive historical heritage. Why should I have to be attacked by you for picking the name of a great general?

Procopius was generally considered unreliable writer who promoted plenty of sleaze which is what is these claims are based on. Even if one was to accept that his wife really was a whore, he is still a positive figure in general.

It is your choice to take this kind of framing on a figure that is certainly much more known for being a great general than his wife's alleged exploits. We have enough problems dealing with much more common collective cuckholdery of our times to worry about the purity of Belisarius wife.

I truly, truly wish you could see from my perspective how hilarious all this is. I mean, I know now that you can't. But I wish you could.

This was not drive by derailing, I've actually had a hard time keeping up this week since I've been building my wife a new chicken coop, and reading Gibbon in the evening to unwind. I literally did just read the chapters about what a (apocryphal?) whore Belisarius' wife was, and thought it'd be a fun conversation starter since you are obviously a fan. I don't literally think you are a cuck.

Also, I mean, I guess it's uncouth to talk about this. But I've been getting all these notifications tonight that I can't see because I have Amadan blocked. I find his argumentation style tailored to try to get me to break the rules and then punish me. I had to check the thread in incognito mode to even see what the hubbub is about. So yeah, no love lost there.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to literally imply your wife is a whore. It's like if someone said they were a huge fan of Bill Cosby and you asked "They show.... or the other stuff?" The joke is how obviously it's not the other stuff. Obviously Belisarius is notable in history for being the greatest general of his age, not the biggest cuck.

Don’t brag about blocking people, it’s a shameful thing. Then you can spare us the excruciating story on how you had to remove your own barriers.

Be less antagonistic, and get a sense of humor.

I would expect this quality of moderation from 4chan, not TheMotte.

Of course you know I have had a beef with your partiality and believe that you treat users and tribes you are sympathetic to favourably, but this is an entirely new level of tendentiousness. User A makes an off-topic post trying to relate User B's username to a common slur/fixation, User B responds in a mildly standoffish manner but actually clarifies the origin of the username, and User B - only User B - gets a modhat reprimand? Of course, I fully expect that any objections will be met with the same old "I disagree, and no, I am not going to justify anything" sort of response from you. Is that what it is going to be, or do you have something better to offer?

(I don't even understand what you find so funny. Is it just "haha bro just called him a cuck"?)

The fact that you think I am being favorable to @WhiningCoil, of all people, or his "tribe," is much funnier than anything posted in this thread.

I have occasionally been accused of reading people wrong, and I'll cop to it when it happens. I read @WhiningCoil as injecting a bit of jocularity concerning a historical name he happened to have just been reading about. Not literally accusing @Belisarius of being a cuck with a famously whoreish wife, or being general of an empire in decline. I read it this way because I know @WhiningCoil's posting habits, and I also know @Belisarius's tendency to be aggressive and overly serious with anyone who argues with him about anything.

If the post was just an attack on a user for his username because WC didn't like him and saw an opportunity for a cheap shot, my response would have been different. Instead, I told @Belisarius to cool it because the exchange doesn't warrant this kind of heat and he is prone to escalation.

Is that a sufficient answer for you? Because that's as much as I feel like justifying myself to you, because yes, per that post you linked to, I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal, and I will continue to dismiss your demands that every time two people have an exchange, I carefully admonish everyone involved and make sure I am evenly distributing my admonishments along tribal lines.

For the record, I think neither user had wrong intent in this thread (similarly relying on personal judgement about @WhiningCoil. His comment is in fact weird and I may have warned him anyway for objectivities sake), and I think jeroboam is to blame in the linked thread. Im fairly sure Im not tribally aligned with @4bpp, though I like him personally. I think his psychologising you is false, but Im not sure what you are thinking.

I think you're a bad faith objector whose objections are purely tribal

Does the objection here break along tribal lines somehow? I couldn't tell who of the two is more "right-wing" for sure. At most, my sense is that WhiningCoil is more of a prolific and popular user that I figure you like, and my objections are "tribal" insofar as "users that Amadan likes" constitute a tribe. In that case, though, any objection against favouritism is definitionally tribal, and in your concept space, the only people who can have "good faith" objections to moderator bias are those who benefit from it. Maybe you think that is right and well, but then I can only say it is unfortunate if it turns out you only favour users who lack the principles to protest favouritism they benefit from.

(Though maybe you think that not finding a beloved right-wing slur intrinsically funny is already sufficient evidence of bias against the Right that rises to the level of bad faith...?)

To be fair, I should say I do appreciate that you explained your reasoning here. It does help me understand why you arrived at that decision, though I still think that the optics of it are terrible and it betrays an extreme double standard that you can muster the level of charity to interpret WhiningCoil's post, which really does not read as anything other than a wanton drive-by attack to me, as an innocuous "bit of jocularity" while also the level of anti-charity to interpret Belisarius's really rather level-headed response as "antagonistic".

More comments

You can't just ask if someone imagines himself a great general or is a cuck with a whore wife and then say just joking. You might find it funny if you dislike the target, but you are only showing a lack of impartiality.

WhiningCoil was being antagonistic and I assumed I offended him when I suspecting Hlynka was the OP and I replied with relative restraint all things considered. Or offended him by arguing against the people I argue, and by my type of argument. Hence "Great General". Saying that it is stupid and insulting to ask if someone imagines himself a great general or a massive cuck is not a particularly antagonistic response to an actually antagonistic post.

Knowing you, and your own sense of humor, I know that you would have responded harsher manner and likely at least threatened a mod action if you have been the target of this kind of "joke", adapted to your circumstances.

If someone wants to be funny about historical figures in a manner that is insulting he can easily do so without making it personal about the user but instead make it about the figure.

You can't just ask if someone imagines himself a great general or is a cuck with a whore wife and then say just joking.

Well, yes, actually you can, and if you had even the tiniest sense of humor, you'd know it. Just like when people ask if my username means I am a great fool.

WhiningCoil was being antagonistic and I assumed I offended him when I suspecting Hlynka was the OP

If there is one thing I am nearly 100% certain of, it is that @WhiningCoil is not @HlynkaCG. Hlynka is very recognizeable and shitty at disguising himself (he's tried a few times), and @WhiningCoil has a long history here and on reddit going back multiple usernames.

Knowing you, and your own sense of humor,

You're mistaken. I have no sense of humor, but that's in the job description.

I'm nobody but you look like shit here. Anyone who's lurked this place longer than a week or two has seen people catch hell for less obnoxious comments than WhiningCoil's. Modhatting the levelheaded response to it is ridiculous.

FYI my respect for towards you didn't move when Coil made the crack but dropped when you proved unable to roll with the punch. Self-seriousness will make you a target.

I think you are taking someone obliquely implying you picked your namesake for his cuckoldry entirely too seriously. This is an internet forum for witches, not the UFC ringside. Profuse defense of masculine honor looks out of place here, IMVHO.

In Current Year, defensive of masculine honor is a witch characteristic.

How is he gone? I missed all of that and I definitely would have campaigned on his behalf if I was here. I miss him so much.

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.

Unofficially it looks like he may have been banned for breaking with the rationalist consensus on race and IQ.

You do not know what you're talking about.

TheMotte is rationalist-adjacent because of our origins, but we (and especially the mod team) are not enforcing some kind of "rationalist consensus" on anything, least of all race and IQ. Hylnka was very open about his disdain for HBD and HBD posters. Most of the mods are also critical of it and HBD obsessives to varying degrees. What consensus were we trying to enforce?

A week before he got banned he alluded to having been threatened with a ban if he didn't "bend the knee"

Hlynka said a lot of stuff that was rank bullshit.

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.

This was officially the post that finally earned him a permaban, but it was really an accumulation of posting over months and months, during which we repeatedly asked him to stop doing that (I mean, we literally told him "Please stop doing this or eventually we will have to permaban you and we really don't want to do that"!)

Is there an epic blowout in some mod's DMs that we never got to read?

No. He did argue with us in DMs, but it was not much different from what he was saying in public: that we should be quicker to ban people and we should especially ban the people he didn't like, and police the place up more. Meanwhile he'd continue aggressively attacking the people we weren't banning.

Conspiratorially he and the mods knew that the 2024 election might make him a public figure and target for "journalism"

That's, uh, quite a theory all right. I know of no such discussions among the mods, and if Hylnka has become a public figure under another name I am unaware of it. And of all the regular or former motteposters who might draw the Eye of Sauron on us, Hlynka wouldn't be in my top 10.

God damn those are great threads, I am sad I missed them. Thanks for the write up, it does look like breaking with the hbd consensus was instrumental in his ban - not as a reason, but it's still part of the why.

Although there is variation in the opinions of individual mods, my impression of them as a group is that they certainly have no interest in enforcing an “HBD consensus” (in either direction).

Tequila didn't say the mods enforced the hbd consensus he said unofficially hlynka got banned for breaking with the hbd consensus. Despite his contrariness he was still a member of this community and despite his cynicism it seems he couldn't tolerate the community converging on something he found so immoral. It was the reason he decided it wasn't worth playing by the rules to whatever extent he had been before.

My opinion (which I think I shared at the time) was that he got banned for a combination of "breaking with the HBD consensus" in the form of wrangling with many/most of the actual neo-Nazis around here, and being a bit of a cantankerous fuck who posts a lot -- which (the latter) provided lots of opportunity for said Nazis to report him for technically correct but minor rule violations which would have otherwise flown under the radar.

The reports-volume-based moderation strategy is fundamentally flawed when it comes to high-volume cantankerous posters, and I say this as somebody who was banned more than once by Hlynka for cantankerous wrangling, and kind of pissed off about it in the moment.

Yeah that's pretty much how I see it too, and those technically correct objections feel like the trap snapping shut when you are particularly aggravated - otherwise why not a more substantial response (autism just feels like another cop out when you are in that frame of mind) - and if you don't recognise that (hell, sometimes even if you do) you can break out the big guns and sink yourself further.

Lol I should probably also say, in case anyone thinks I'm trying to rewrite history and jump on a bandwagon, that hlynka and I didn't start off well at all either, he called me the worst poster on the mod more than once and I think I told him that I wouldn't piss on him if he was on fire at one point. And I have no idea if his opinion of me ever changed, but I also don't care. I grew to like him as a user, I think the demodding changed his perspective and sharpened his skill at argument, and I don't need reciprocation.

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.

a choice between the rules as a credible institution or his continued participation

A third option is to enforce the rules, but not via permabans.

Permabans should be reserved for the most egregious trolls, spambots, or accounts that are otherwise doing harm to the forum in some way. The way I see it, there’s almost never a reason to permaban a good faith poster (which Hlynka obviously was). I would set the maximum suspension length somewhere in the range of 6-12 months.

Yeah, I'd be happy to see him return.

Yeah, I'll +1 on this. Permabans seem unnecessary, and even stranger in light of the old "a permaban is no more than 1 year long, ackshully" rule, that we used to have, but dispensed with for some reason.

I liked Hlynka but my biggest issue with him was when people would respond to him with specific arguments and he would completely ignore them and/or refuse to address them

Yeah, he'd had some pretty bad threads before he was banned.

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?

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".

Ymeshkout hasn't been an active moderator for as long as I can remember, not even in the private mod discord. He had nothing to do with Hlynka's ban.

I was surprised ymeshkout is even a mod. You can see how active he was after the move offsite here. And the post you linked to (without context, for some reason) is in response of a mod who declared said activity to be harrasment in the first place!

Because that comment never came up in the discussion.

Neither did the ones you linked to, that's not an excuse.

Sorry, i thought i had provided the full link.

I definitely would have campaigned on his behalf if I was here

I'm not sure if there was much to campaign for. As much as I wish he was still around, he basically pulled a suicide by cop.

We miss him too. But he left us little choice.

Fair, and I shouldn't have assumed otherwise and said for/to. I don't know if I could have convinced him to change tack but I'd have liked a chance to try.

Man, every single mod (and a few non-mods) tried to convince him to change tack. We tried to reason with him in public, we tried to talk him down in private. His permaban was not some sudden thing we did without warning, and I'm genuinely surprised that you missed all of this while it was going down, because we were pleading with him for months to please stop deliberately posting things he knew would earn him a timeout or we'd have to make it permanent, while half the forum was saying "Noooo, you can't ban Hlynka!" and the other half was saying "Just fucking ban him already!"

I promise you I don't doubt that you all tried to change his mind as hard as you could, I just think personally trying to convince him would have been a great conversation (for me, probably no one else). I missed it because it happened during my sabbatical, which is what I am choosing to call my six month flounce these days.

I remember towards the end both a) defending large parts of his thesis and b) pleading with him to just engage with people better.

The problem is he just can’t be trusted not to let his temperament get the better of him. Even an act of magnanimity (and there were many) and a final warning (and there were many) are not enough.

Truly, there is a Hlynka-shaped hole in the Motte's discourse.

That doesn't mean a ban should be reversed just for that, and I'm fairly sure he'd respect that reasoning, but it is amusing.

On the other hand the last thing we need is a story in the Atlantic about Trump officials leaking classified war-plans on theMotte.

I'm going to second @Amadan and ask: what? Hlynka was a Trump official?

It has been theorized that JD Vance or somone else highly placed within the Trump campaign was a Mottizen or SSCer due to how seeming references to the community like "Shiri's Scissor", "this is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence", and "youre still crying wolf" kept making thier way into official statements and twitter posts.

Shakesneer and Hlynka were considered to be the prime suspects.

Yeah, obviously Vance has read SSC and Moldbug. Are there any references that are Motte-specific, though? Or indications that any of them are active members of the Ratsphere rather than lurkers?

where the references were published?

Interesting if true -- do you have any Vance-links on these?

Not to hand, sorry.

Maybe don't be bullshitting around here next time then?

More comments

I'd also be interested. What I've seen people of saying things like this in the past, it's seemed like people notice Vance's overlap with their community, but don't really understand him, and so misinterpret him and what he's doing.

Well, Hlynka was a self-admitted Warhammer 40k player. The Trump-as-God-Emperor meme was directly from 40k-aware communities. Furthermore, iirc Hlynka was an orks player, which is to say low-class social barbarian faction.

Ergo...

[/sarcasm]

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