This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem.
A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what you pay for it. I pay nothing for access to Twitter; if I build a business or a social life on the platform, it becomes something I would pay thousands of dollars to prevent losing. I pay nothing for access to Facebook; the memories they store at this point in my life may be nearly priceless. I've paid a low triple digit sum for Blizzard games, yet the time and social investments I have made in those games make them a couple of orders of magnitude more valuable to me, now.
The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending.
The situation we're in now is one in which political thugs apply pressure to private companies to hurt individuals, in an attempt to chill free speech.
Free speech is expensive and valuable, and defending it from those who would wish to destroy it requires commensurate resources. We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world.
To my view, Blizzard is like a store clerk who gives up the store's money to a robber. It would be nice if he was a hero, but he's not equipped for it. Nobody is paying 7-11 to stand up to violent crime. The problem is too big and expensive to ask individuals to deal with. Society paying for police and courts is at least a response on the right scale.
The mechanisms we have for protecting individual rights are antiquaited, and need to be rethought to deal with the current situation. Perhaps a model like the unified response to patent trolls could work? I think, if we want free speech to exist in the current environment, it will have to be something that big.
When the Constitution was written, free speech meant literally that, your ability to go to a public space and physically talk. No third party was involved as it is with any telecommunication technology. So the resources consumed in that speech were totally your own.
The only way to strictly have that equivalent in the telecommunications realm is for me to own every communication circuit between me and those who I want to communicate with.
So lets say I have 10 wires coming from my house to other houses, and someone I know has 10 other wires connected to a different set of houses, that I'm not directly connected to.
I can rely on my own self and build new wires (expensive) or I can work with this person to forward my communication (probably cheaper but he/she can view/hear my communication).
If I want to communicate with someone else beyond my network, then a third party is carrying my speech, and we're really no longer in realm of free speech. This third party has rights and should be able to refuse to carry my speech for the same rights and reasons as me, unless entered into a contract beforehand.
I think your real question is should corporations be treated as legal persons to the extent that they have the Constitutional right of speech.
They never mentioned the constitution so I don't know why you are.
The idea, behind free speech and censorship, predate the constitution and the constitution is not the arbitrator of the ethical principles of free speech.
Ok, so fine, free speech predates the Constitution. Consider my reference to the Constitution an example, rather than the definition.
My argument is still that you are not performing speech in the sense meant by "Free Speech" when you utilize telecommunication services.
Free speech and compelling third parties with telecommunications infrastructure to carry any of your speech unaltered are separate concepts.
I am particularly interested in how you can, if possible, link the two without using egalitarian arguments if possible.
Most people defend free speech irrespective of the economic status of the speaker so I'm hoping you or someone can come up with something that is also similarly non-dependent on economic status.
it's inaccessible for somebody who is poor in montana to travel to new york city and speak on a soap box in central park.
Should that be an argument against new york having free speech because its not accessible to some people?
Your last sentence confuses me because it sounds like you are arguing that if it's possible for somebody to be too poor to use a platform then that platform should never have free speech, and i'm not sure how those two concepts link.
Anywho. The ideological and moral principles of free speech exist in tandem with other ideological and moral principles. I run a forum for a game server to an open source game (I also run the game and the game server, but that's besides the point). This forum has sections with various names and the section names all spell out what type of discussions that section is intended to hold
If somebody wants to post about how badly they hate how I run the site or the game server, and post it on the role playing and table top rpg board, it will get removed, as its off topic, and nobody in the community would care. If they instead post that in any one of 5 sections that it would be on topic for, and i remove it, as I technically have to right to do, I will have trampled on that posters free speech, and everybody has the right to tell me to fuck off for doing so.
What you are failing to understand is that the principle of free speech is akin to the principle of not being a dick, its enforced by society in the same fuzzy matter where conflicting interests are concerned
> People may have presented the concept before the US Constitution but it certainly didn't apply to many people legally (if any?) before then
You may want to check out topics such as Freedom of religion, the Peace of Westphalia, or Ancient Greece.
I don't know what the eastern equivalents would be, but I suspect at various points in history that individual freedoms were won in China too. Maybe Confucius is a good starting point.
Freedom of speech is not permanent. It has to continually be demanded, or it disappears. There will always be people trying to tell you what to do or say. If you don't decide for yourself, someone else will decide for you.
It seems pretty strange to me that individuals with the right to free speech and the right to assemble and freely associate would lose those rights if they chose the form of a "corporation" as the manner of assembly and association. So I don't think the problem is that the law treats groups of people as legal entities with substantially similar rights to the individuals.
I would expect that crimes associated with speech (slander, defamation, fraudulent representations, incitement to violence, threats, etc) would be applicable to individuals and to corporations equally.
I would agree that the control that a handful (relative to all corporations) of online companies wield is something quite new (historically speaking) and our laws, regulations, and even legal principles are playing catchup. We may need some original thinking to help us evolve our legal systems to meet the challenge.
Bigger philosophical question for the US Stage: When a corporation kills someone through their negligence, why does the punishment differ so much from what happens when a physical person does the same?
Are corporations trying to pick and choose when they are treated like a person? Does that place them above people?
1) I don't think "corporations" are picking and choosing, there is extensive legal history on this point.
2) Re: "kills someone through their negligence". I think you've abstracted too much for there to be a single answer. I gather you are talking about situations where no identifiable person lead to the death and so there is some sort of "collective" or "systemic" failure that "caused" the death. I think the particular facts matter in those cases and the result is a variety of punishments from fines, to external supervision and inspection, and even in some cases action against individuals that were connected to the faulty decision making. One size doesn't fit all in this case.
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"
The first amendment was written when it was much more difficult to abridge speech. You would have to trust hearsay and either remove someone from your property or have them face some consequence based on the word of somebody who heard you. Governments could punish you with crimes, but that was it.
Unless you were publishing work through somebody who owned a printing press, you were in complete control of the medium and delivery of your words and few people could restrict you and your words were soon forgotten.
Now most things that most people say go through a filter of several others infrastructure and they all can record what you say and limit what goes through.
We need active speech protections for platforms which act like the public square. The newspaper doesn't need to publish my whacky opinions, but Facebook needs to let me post as myself freely or change how it fundamentally operates from a space to talk to a publisher of selected material.
> We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world.
Blizzard is an American company. They don't need to answer to China. They may choose to do so, just as consumers may choose not to play their games.
This puts Blizzard in too soft a light, as if they have no choice.
A better comparison is Blizzard being a store owner who sells cakes to everyone, when one day a Nazi comes in and says you can't sell cakes to that uppity black person who upset me or you'll never be able to sell cakes to Nazis again.
Blizzard then gets to decide which is more important, business with Nazis or standing up for a core set of values.
As may occur in this instance, the free market may decide if they're going to side with Nazis, Nazis get to be their only client.
At this point people are deciding how delicious they think Blizzard cakes are, and if they still want to eat them.
I would argue that Blizzard is much less a hapless store clerk and more an addict whose supply is in jeopardy. They like Chinese money more than free speech, plain and simple. They could choose to get clean (stop taking Chinese money), and protect the public interest, but they choose not to.
>The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending.
I think that's beautiful, actually. Your ability to stay within this mini-society's good graces is entirely dependent on how you treat other people, and not on how much wealth you funnel in from the outside (to a degree).
Is it safe to say we're in the middle of the Software Wars? The headlines have been littered with stories like this lately. From major open source contributors taking down their projects, to Apple, Adobe, and Blizzard.
It's only a matter of time until it's a critical piece of software that can cripple a nation or beleaguer it's people.
If you're looking for positives, maybe this will finally force people to rethink digital ownership.
It's serendipitous all these events are happening now for me personally. I was recently burned by a piece of very useful and well crafted software (closed source). I did a fresh install on my machine and went to find their website which to my dismay had completely disappeared! I followed whatever breadcrumbs were left and found a whole thing had happened while I wasn't paying attention where the copyright for this software was now in complete limbo and noone who had recently purchased a license could redownload it.
Same thing happened with Tridef. The company went under, didn't release a free version of the software, and now people who bought it legally have to resort to using a crack.
I've said it a few times, but it's worth repeating IMO: copyright is a deal, where a creator gets a time-limited monopoly in exchange for works entering the public domain.
If a company have arranged things so their work can't enter the public domain (eg DRM) then they should not get copyright protection, fundamentally it's wrong to get the benefit of copyright without giving up your work to the public domain.
This can be solved by a requirement to register an unhindered copy, whilst they're at it orphaned works should be made copyright free, IMO.
I'm glad to hear that others have the same opinion regarding software copyrights. I'd even go one step further and say that the source code must be included in that unhindered copy. Otherwise, the public's right to make derivative works from things in the public domain cannot be upheld.
The companies will say that they're still using parts of the old code in newer products covered by copyright, so this won't happen.
Besides, we'd have to have copyright periods on software of 3-5 years, 10 tops, for software copyright to even make sense. Not 70+, which is longer than any recognizable computer industry ever existed.
I am assuming that this would be part of a wider reform of copyright. For the case you mentioned, already under current copyright law, creation of a derivative work does not prevent a work from entering into the public domain (albeit after an unconscionably long period of time). To prevent such a argument being made after the fact, source code should be placed in escrow at the time of publication, with copyright protection given only after it has been verified that the provided source code can reproduce the binary being protected.
This arrangement would also protect the public good in cases where the original company has gone bankrupt, or where the source code would otherwise have been lost.
Is source code covered by copyright at all if it's never published? I thought that was the bare minimum.
If they never release the source code at all, I think we're just screwed, legally anyway. The DRM was attached to your binary or stream (or book), not the original source material. We may not like it, but I don't think it's copyright you have to worry about when it comes to closed source code.
Under current law, copyright applies to any creative work, regardless of publication status. This leads to abominations such as Disney's Vault, intentionally restricting access to a work that is part of the public consciousness.
In my ideal world, if the source code is not placed under escrow and tested to result in the distributed binary, then there would be no monopoly given to that binary. Anybody is allowed to copy it to the fullest extent that they are able to.
This is why whenever i think about buying software i check if they have a DRM-free version for Windows. 99% of the time this ensures i'll be able to use the software for years to come even if the company shuts down.
Because software has this weird status where you increasingly don't own a perpetual use right to the copy of the code you bought, and can have it revoked for reasons that have nothing to do with the purchase agreement. What if one day in the not too distant the electrical system on your car stopped working because an auto software update from that vendor (not the company that sold you the car perhaps) detected your name was on a DB of no-service-updates, and there was a critical big patched?
For a tangible example, imagine saying something pro-HK on an online multiplayer and losing access to your entire library of Xbox games.
From Microsoft's community guidelines:
"Under permanent suspension, the owner of the suspended profile forfeits all licenses for games and other content, Gold membership time, and Microsoft account balances."
And in 2019, saying things as asinine as "haha I banged ur mom" are enough to trigger such a suspension, despite the embracement of such an immature, tongue-in-cheek culture being tantamount to Microsoft's early success in the gaming industry.
Or see yesterday's executive order putting sanctions on subset of Venezuelan population, followed by Adobe suspending accounts of everyone in that country. Think of entire occupations affected by this. What if tomorrow the tools for your job disappeared because some people on the other side of the world have a disagreement with your government?
If the current administration is serious about the trade war, sanctions, etc. against China (which seems the case), I have to imagine that someone has thought about what it would take to cut off China from the rest of the Internet.
Obviously the fallout from something like this would be incredible, and I'm not advocating for it, but... do we even have the technical capability to do something like this? With the Internet being designed to be resilient, what would it actually take to do this? Can it be done by electronic means rather than by cutting cables / bombing ingress points?
They're already quite isolated by the great firewall, but it seems like cutting off everything at once could still be a powerful splash of cold water to the face. It's certainly not going to happen piecemeal when most companies are this spineless.
The US could refuse to talk to them by adjusting the routes to their IP ranges, that's about it. Everyone else that wants to talk to China could still do it, provided they make sure their routes for Chinese IPs do not go trough the US (obviously hard to do for a number of American residents, or some countries). This would still be circumventable trough a VPN that brings packet outside of the denied routing area.
I just sold a video game disc for 3x what I paid for it because the company that made it went under, so it's no longer downloadable on any streaming service (XBL, PSN, Steam, etc)...
I wish local instances of SaaS were more common. As a consumer it doesn't fill me with glee that a company used cutting edge APIs and integrations that are hosted all over the place. It fills me with concern about their stability and I have to entirely forget about data security. Who knows where it ends up these days. Both physically and in administrative terms, on globally distributed servers and regarding which companies or countries have access to it.
This is not limited to closed software.
Remember the Chef developer who got all political and deleted his github.
This is the new norm in software it appears.
That doesn't seem like as big of a problem, because you, as the user of an open source library, can take steps to prevent such things from affecting you. Most places I've worked at have their own repos with copies of any maven/node/ruby/whatever dependencies used.
I agree 100% that we should boycott and sanction, however doubt there will be enough people who will, and enough people who care. And I don't blame most for not caring, there are more things to worry about than we have time available. Maybe 1% of hearthstone players will see your comment. Similarly, there are other entities which need to be sanctioned, which you and me won't find out about as it's outside of our areas of interest.
Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority", which would process information similar to this and make informed decisions who to boycott, how and when. Less informed would be able to make an impact without having to do research (which not everyone would do equally well)
Obviously this authority must operate with complete transparency, so that we could verify its decision process when required.
Any hostile actions against it must be treated as a crime against humanity?
Somehow it must be immune from corruption. Perhaps some mechanism to revoke user trust in case of wrongdoings.
>Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority", which would process information similar to this and make informed decisions who to boycott, how and when. Less informed would be able to make an impact without having to do research (which not everyone would do equally well)
You do realize how hilarious that is juxtaposed to the Chinese government, which is literally a 'morality authority,' right?
"I agree 100% that we should boycott and sanction, however doubt there will be enough people who will, and enough people who care. And I don't blame most for not caring, there are more things to worry about than we have time available."
Wait, what? A boycott is not doing something. It takes no time, you just choose to do something different, and let people know why you made the choice. I stopped playing Hearthstone, and let people know why. Cake, no time. Same for NBA, which I love, so I hope they'll pull their head out, but again, no time involved here.
Boycotting is the easiest form of protest. Don't be...lazy?
No, boycotting something entails changing your lifestyle to avoid something. For hearthstone players, that means stop partaking in one of their hobbies.
You aren't boycotting something because you are quitting it, anyways.
Also, you're kinda doing the thing where you go "Ugh, it's so easy, c'mon people! I never even played Heartstone in my life. See? It's not that hard to quit over moral principals!"
I have over 500 hours in Hearthstone. I played it on Saturday. It was my main online game. I haven't played it since.
And yes, it's still an easy call. I was in Hong Kong for quite a bit when I was younger. It's a glorious place. Or was, I haven't been back. I don't approve of the Chinese government, nor the United States relationship with China. We've compromised our principals for economic gain (I'm American). Hong Kong should get to stay democratic if that's their choice.
Note I was specific about disapproval of the Chinese government. The Chinese people are an amazing group with a wonderful culture and I appreciate them immensely. But they are governed by communist goons.
And you're right, I'm not quitting Hearthstone. If they say something akin to what the NBA is saying now, I might consider playing again. For now, no.
Not even close. The NBA did not ban a player in response to a comment, “Commissioner says league will continue to back Morey’s right to freedom of expression”. Activision / Blizzard on the other hand is actively suppressing speech.
It was a really good move for the NBA, they handled it extremely well, did not spur a controversy, just let the situation be and let fans decide themselves how they want to react to it, while also upholding American values in the process, a very classy move.
I feel that American values would not be falling all over themselves to claim the NBA is an apolitical organization. Or at least the American values I was raised with.
I'm glad to hear that. Speak up about your boycott. I have a cadre of friends who play Hearthstone, and they know why I stopped. Maybe I've now had .001% influence on them, and that'd be great.
I don't think it needs to be a moral authority, it can just be an index of well defined problems to lists of the top couple actors responsible for those problems.
Such an organization need not say that you should boycott anything (i.e. be a moral authority) but instead can say that IF you think that American companies participating in the Chinese censorship machine regarding Hong Kong is bad THEN boycotting companies X Y and Z would be effective. The morality comes from the users. In order to organize against a common nebulous baddie we need a mapping from nebulous baddies to actionable targets.
As much as I hate that everything needs to be a social network these days, this probably needs a social aspect--a place where you can post evidence that you cut the power to Company X's headquarters, or whatever, so you can check back occasionally and feel relevant when people attach metadata to your crime.
It would have to be careful to avoid being too specific to be liable for the actions of its users, while not being so vague that users can't use it to channel their frustration towards actions that actually do harm the entities identified. Alternatively, it could be specific as hell but hard to take down.
I guess what I'm proposing is something like Kickstarter, but for civil unrest.
HK protesters are doing exactly that. A list of yellow/blue (pro-democracy/pro-government) merchants and their locations on Google Maps:
https://www.restart-hk.com/ShopList.html
If you click on a merchant on the Google Maps, it also shows you why that merchant is marked as such, with links to forum discussions/news about comments made by its owner. This map has 3.5mil views in less than 2 months of existence, in a city with 7.5mil population.
HK protesters are actively boycotting many pro-government merchants because such information is easy to find.
>Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority"
This seems to always be an invitation to corruption though. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and all that. So getting to "trusted" may be hard. In the US we have Brent Kavanaugh, and in China they have the CCP, and in some countries they have religious clerics... I can't think of an example where there is such a body that I would trust.
> Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority", which would process information similar to this and make informed decisions who to boycott
Just sounds like cancel culture to me. And it has horrible results.
Cancel culture is about _using_ censorship to limit free speech, which blizzard purposefully participated in on behalf of China, so we want to stop that limiting and encourage free speech, or at least not immediately ban someone for a year and 0 their prize money.
One fights for censorship, the other fights for freedom. I uninstalled hearthstone, which is the last activision blizzard product I used.
Right, you cancelled Hearthstone from your life because you don't care for the actions of its creators. Not unlike, say, ceasing to watch a comedian because you don't like how they punch down, or ceasing to book rms for speaking engagements because he's too stressful to deal with.
Don't shy away from it; that's "cancel culture."
(Or, more accurately, "cancel culture" doesn't exist; it's just freedom of association in action ;) ).
> We don't have to argue with anybody. We don't have to curse and go around acting bad with our words. We don't need any bricks and bottles, we don't need any Molotov cocktails, we just need to go around to these stores, and to these massive industries in our country, and say, God sent us by here, to say to you that you're not treating his children right. And we've come by here to ask you to make the first item on your agenda – fair treatment, where God's children are concerned. Now, if you are not prepared to do that, we do have an agenda that we must follow. And our agenda calls for withdrawing economic support from you.
We need an equivalent to Godwin's law for making parallels to Orwell's 1984. It's thrown around so much in internet debates these days that it loses all meaning IMO.
Besides it doesn't even really work here, the Ministry of Love is about torture and spreading fear throughout the population. If anything what the parent proposes would be closer to the Ministry of Truth but even that is a stretch. I think the soviet Goskomizdat might be a better comparison.
>Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority", which would process information similar to this and make informed decisions who to boycott, how and when. Less informed would be able to make an impact without having to do research (which not everyone would do equally well)
Isn't that effectively the government's job in a democracy? They're elected (directly or indirectly) to enact the will of the people. Unless you have a different scheme in mind for constituting this "moral authority".
Traditionally it was the established/predominant religion's job, not the government. It was hoped by many that religious institutions could act as a counterweight to the nobles, kings and politicians. Which is why the civil power structure tried (often successfully) to co-opt religion as well. Of course, religious institutions have their own issues in that it often becomes a parallel power structure on its own. Or go from reflecting cultural norms to shaping them.
The enlightenment and rise of humanism in the latter 1600's and 1700's attempted to shift this moral authority to "the people". And today, post-modernism attempts to put forth the notion that all morality is simply cultural context and relative. Which, while perhaps strictly true, is, IMO, pointless. Sort of like positing that we live in a simulation. Might be true, but so what? How does it matter?
Anyway, in today's world I don't think it's possible to have a widespread "trusted moral authority". Too many people seem to not realize the contradiction of saying on one hand that other cultures (and sub-cultures) should be respected while on the other hand decrying the utter horror of differing morals and ethics. Cultural differences are more than variations in language, cuisine, dress and music. Cultural differences are, at their roots, differing beliefs about what is right and wrong.
> And today, post-modernism attempts to put forth the notion that all morality is simply cultural context and relative. Which, while perhaps strictly true, is, IMO, pointless.
Kind of self-contradictory: the statement "it's all relative" is itself an absolute statement.
Generally agreed upon definitions with respect to political systems/philosophies are a challenge, but I would respectfully disagree with the idea that the government is intended to be a trusted moral authority in a democracy (or a republic).
At least with respect to the US notion of limited governmental powers I think the goal was to keep the government from acquiring to much authority never mind something as all encompassing as "moral authority".
It should be the job of the government to follow and not lead here both from theie source of legitimacy and how abusable said position would be. Even if they follow there should fundamentally be constraints to protect the rights of the minority for otherwise it follows the "populist" demagog to mob rule to dictatorship progression.
A moral authority implies leadership - that others would trust and defer to for moral judgment.
From what I read the casters prompted and encouraged him to say it, hence why they were so quick to drop down out of frame. This is just what I have read, as I do not speak the language.
This might not be true though. I have heard that during the broadcast they had been supporting Hong Kong. Not saying this is the wrong thing to do though but just a fact.
I guarantee 100% that this is the exact reason. If they're truly deleting ALL your data, could you imagine the customer service nightmare if someone's account got hacked and the attacker could issue a request to delete the entire account with no method for recovery?
> As Andy reported earlier today, Blitzchung did not back down after the sudden removal of the broadcast, during which he wore a gas mask and goggles before shouting "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!" Following the incident he released a statement elaborating on his stance, writing "I know what my action on stream means. It could cause me lot of trouble, even my personal safety in real life. But I think it's my duty to say something about the issue."
Okay that explains it. I thought banning for 12 months was a little harsh for someone making a political statement once, but he knew what he was doing and doubled down on it.
There's a difference between accidentally and knowingly breaking a rule. Regardless of if you feel the rule is fair or right, knowingly breaking is more egregious, e.g. manslaughter is not as bad as first or second degree murder.
Knowing that you're doing something that is not in the interest of Blizzard or China and may bring you trouble is not the same thing as rule-breaking.
For example, I have a first amendment right to stand on the street and cry out "that store over there has awful working conditions," and I'm not breaking any rules, but I'm well aware that the store may well not let me in anymore.
More like you go in the middle of the street and say, America shouldn't support south american dictators, and as a result all ISPs refuse you provide you with internet service. They're private companies they have the right do to so but good luck navigating todays world with out it.
What a ridiculous comparison. The rule he broke here was literally "don't offend any portion of the public." The rule you're referring to is much more justifiable.
If the rules are ridiculous, then the reaction to them should be to dismantle the rules and disavow the rule-makers.
You are claiming that morality is irrelevant if there is a rule involved, and your action is substantially worse if you break a rule for a moral reason deliberately instead of accidentally?
Agreed. But you have to enforce the rules to make sure that people don't start breaking the rules over something trivial. The people making a moral choice to break the rules can live with a 12 month ban from the game.
I do. I don’t want sporting events, conventions, etc. to become platforms for advocacy about controversial politics.
I support non-disruptive actions like kneeling at an anthem, but advocacy about a political issue during a post-match interview streamed by the event organizer certainly crosses the line.
Crossing lines is the point of activism, we wouldn't have any of the rights we enjoy (and soon we might lose if we're not careful) in the west if not for people that systematically crossed lines and used high visibility occasions to make a point.
Were rules already established in the terms of service that would prevent him from protesting against a country or supporting oppressed people? If it was during the broadcast, then cutting the broadcast is sufficient punishment.
People should start boycotting western companies that perform this kind of humiliating bowing to China, Saudi Arabia, etc. Yet of course, most companies are doing that...
I expect companies to do what’s morally right not merely maximize profits while doing anything that is legally acceptable. I expect leaders of companies to do what’s morally right while explaining to shareholders that if they disagree they can sell their shares or replace them. I have zero respect for a manager at Blizzard or the NBA who decides to try to pull what they did this week.
It is part of our moral duty to punish a company for ignoring public good rather than excuse it as what a company must do. That's because if a company is punished financially (say by boycott) for making immoral decisions then they must follow a more moral course to maximize their profit.
Personally I don't think this is enough especially as companies become more pervasive and the confusion of subsidiaries which make it next to impossible to boycott the largest offenders, but that is fixed in the political sphere rather than the economic one.
I'd even expect the 'correct' long term 'required' choice for blizzard is to ignore any blow back and focus on the Chinese market. Still in this case shareholder focus being all about current quarter profits might help as company leadership might be more focused on keeping the shareholders happy than serving long term profit.
I agree. My point is that holding companies liable to an ever-shifting window of public opinion about their actions is not as long-term a solution as addressing the parts of the system that encourage or require their behavior.
They don’t have to. There are companies that pursue positive impact, though few large or public ones at this time. Patagonia is a great example of a semi-large one.
The topic of Hong Kong didn't struck me as sensational/desperate as it deserves until a Hong Kong friend send me this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q
Am moved by the clip, especially for the first 50s. It is english sub-ed. Would recommend anyone interested in the topic give it a look
> Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined.
That's crap. There's a Hong Kong-related story on the front page every couple days for a while now. Perhaps you didn't notice the pagination buttons at the bottom when sorting by date?
The Taiwan Flag Emoji topic got a lot of attention too. I think that's a fair spread. Censorship, Unicode standards, and Blizzard is kind of the expected overlap of interest topics for Hacker News.
Right, general politics is not really in the wheelhouse for HN, but these two specific cases encroached on tech, which is why they got much more attention. Other acts of technological censorship from China also often reach the front page. I don't think there's anything nefarious, it's that those other topics aren't really relevant to HN.
After bnetd I boycotted Blizzard for years. The only tangible result was that I missed out on Warcraft 3. After the 1-click patent, I boycotted Amazon for years. They didn't appear to have missed my money.
I'm all for collective action, but I'm not sure if boycotts are reliable. I've seen companies respond to social pressures, but like net neutrality, when they can make money they just try again more subtilely, and that presumes the original pressure was successful.
I'm not saying we SHOULDN'T boycott Blizzard and the NBA...but do we have other options as well? Governmental action to be backing, companies with clear "good" positions we should promote, etc?
I don't have ideas, I just have a pile of bitterness and hopelessness, and issues like Hong Kong feel a lot more important than 1 click.
Boycotting is the ethical thing to do but it almost never works. What works? I guess the same things that worked for women and blacks - enough people willing to stick their necks out and organise politically.
Boycotts only work when a reasonable number of people can make an impact on the bottom line of a corporation. Corporations have grown so large that the size of the group necessary to make that kind of impact is as large as a large corporation. Viral social media witch hunts can have that kind of impact, so if you want to organize a boycott, you better hire a PR company.
I feel like there are different levels here. The Bnetd thing was unfortunate, but still an exceptionally first-world problem. People being beaten to death in the streets may warrant a bit wider reaction.
The parent poster isn't claiming that certain issues are more or less pressing than others. Rather, we, as ordinary citizens, have zero control. Individual acts of protest are not working and do not change these companies' behaviors.
I realised the Emoji topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182705 after posting my comments. Blizzard, emoji, Hong Kong, and in part NBA too[1], once again shows how unpredictable viral-ness can be.
I don't understand why that YouTube video requires age verification. As far as I know that prevents it from being played to anyone not logged in, including embeds, and severely limits people from seeing it.
Social media flagging is censorship. More and more people are calling on videos to be flagged, taken down, etc — then we run into instances like this one where we wish the mechanism wasn't in place at all.
I hope HK brings to world back to a recognition of the important of free speech and that the world brings attention back to HK.
>I don't understand why that YouTube video requires age verification. As far as I know that prevents it from being played to anyone not logged in, including embeds, and severely limits people from seeing it.
Thanks. It's really obnoxious that they make you sign-in to verify your age, rather than just enter your birth date like some other sites. Especially since AFAIK it's impossible to create a Google account these days without giving them your phone number (thus exposing your identity). For politically sensitive videos such as this, such restrictions seem like a particularly bad idea.
I don't think you can. I tried creating a Google account anonymously once just to see if it was possible. A verified phone number was strictly required and they refused to let me use numbers from any of the anonymized online phone services I tried. Maybe they would have let me skip that step if I was connected over my home IP address rather than TOR, but doing it that way would have sort of defeated the purpose of not giving them my phone number in the first place (anonymity).
Same. I've seen a few of the videos that are used in that video and some of those videos (in longer form) are very powerful too.
For example, that short clip of the blindfolded prisoners on the ground in handcuffs is a drone video that is believed to show religious prisoners being taken to "re-education" camps. Of course, the Hong Kong protesters fear they will also be subject to "re-education" when the Chinese state regains control of Hong Kong as this transition period winds down:
> I am willing to die for this. Why? Because this is our home. Why won't you fight for your home? As simple as that. We are trying to do our best to fight for at least two or three decades. Do you see the students around here? When 2047 comes, they will all be slaves. When 2047 comes, the students will all become middle-aged, and they will all be slaves, we will all be slaves. If we don't fight now, we don't have another chance.
I can't help but think of the similar scene from LOTR:
> The power of the enemy is growing. Sauron will use his puppet Saruman to destroy the people of Rohan. Isengard has been unleashed. The Eye of Sauron now turns to Gondor, the last free kingdom of Men. His war on this country will come swiftly. He senses the Ring is close. The strength of the Ringbearer is failing. In his heart, Frodo begins to understand. The quest will claim his life. You know this... you have foreseen it. It is the risk we all took. In the gathering dark, the will of the Ring grows strong. It works hard now to find its way back into the hands of Men. Men, who are so easily seduced by its power. The young Captain of Gondor has but to extend his hands, take the Ring for his own and the world will fall. It is close now, so close to achieving its goal. For Sauron will have dominion of all life on this Earth, even unto the ending of the world. The time of the Elves is over. Do we leave Middle-earth to its fate? Do we let them stand alone?
It's fun to think about how this metaphorically applies to modern day planet earth. For example, "The Ring" could be, say, unrivaled permanent global superpower status, "China" could be Sauron, Hong Kong could be Middle Earth, and "the West" could be the elves. One significant difference however is that unlike the elves, we don't have a Valinor to flee to. And we might not have to wait until 2047 before we see this all unfold.
Now of course it's easy to chuckle at this as silly speculation and hyperbole, but really, is it literally not possible? Look at how quickly China has risen, and not only utterly unopposed by anyone, but aided by the West to the very, very best of their ability, with no end in sight (for the rise, or the aid).
But wait, am I implying that we should be fearful because Chinese people are bad, and I am simply demonstrating the fearful, small-minded thinking of your typical racist white person? This is indeed one possibility. Another simultaneous possibility is that what I actually fear is tyranny, except as a result of things I allude to in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21194097), many modern educated Western people seem to have become unable to think clearly about topics that have a racial component. Due to multiple decades of righteous and well-intentioned anti-racism indoctrination, hyper-reinforced over the last few years by various forms of propaganda and excessive public consumption of not-actually-consistent-with-objetive-reality social media content, our heuristics seem to have become hyperactive to the degree that we can no longer think rationally on certain topics. Most everyone can appreciate the risk of tyranny faced under the Nazis, and many seem able (if not enthusiastic!) to envision something similar returning under someone like Trump, but simply add a different color of skin into the equation and the ability to simply even envision such things not only disappears, but is replaced with an extremely passionate denial that such a thing is even possible!
This is the power of heuristics in the human mind, they can render us literally unable to think clearly, even highly intelligent people who have full knowledge of the existence of heuristics.
And I suppose for the above stated reasons it needs to be pointed out: these comments are largely of a speculative nature. I fully realize that LOTR is a movie, that we are not in fact elves, that China is not guaranteed to take over the world, if they do it does not necessarily have to be tyranny (I can even envision it could very well result in finally having worldwide peace and harmony), and so forth and so on. I am simply saying that reality is actually rather complex (as you might notice from a brief perusal of history), the ideas that each of us consume and hold in our brains are not always 100% accurate, and now and then things don't always trend towards improvement, as recent memes making the rounds would have us believe, based on "the facts". As history well demonstrates, occasionally there are times that it would have been prudent to manage risk, even if the risk happens to seems to partially correlate with race. The reality of reality is: despite what we're often lead to believe, anything can happen.
> an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined
That's definitely not true. Hong Kong has been discussed a great deal here, and China even more. These are probably the most-discussed topics of the last month; if not, I can't think of what would be. Perhaps climate change.
Just as interesting are all the instances where stories gained dozens of upvotes but very few comments, because they disappeared from the front page within a few hours after rising to the first spot. It's very easy to see even from the outside, if you simply filter for stories that are ranked lower than other stories that have a lower score, are older, and have more comments. Try this on for size:
I remember seeing that just go poof back then. One moment it's at the top, then it quickly sinks, then it's on page 7824.
Just about any subject is discussed a great deal here, because "a great deal" is no hard qualifier at all. But I know few subjects so consistently suppressed and messed with here as Chinese totalitarianism. You could convince me otherwise with a database dump, by making votes and flags public, but not just with mere claims and saying you didn't notice anything. Maybe you didn't, but that really just proves you didn't notice it.
For sure, there are submissions on that topic at every level of points, comments, and front page time. It's that way for all the hottest topics; if we replace Hong Kong with climate change in your query the result is similar: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The hottest topics are both the most discussed and the most "consistently suppressed", as you put it. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it's just what happens when you have 10x more submissions than front page slots. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
Because of this scarcity, everyone who feels strongly about a story feels that their story is being unfairly suppressed on HN, no matter how much coverage it's actually receiving relative to other topics. You seem to feel that Chinese political stories are being unfairly suppressed for who knows what reason—but there are at least as many users (probably many more) who feel that those stories are overrepresented and that HN is going downhill because of it. There's an email in the inbox right now saying so.
The actual moderation principles we use about all this are simple and have been the same for many years. Here they are: HN is a site for intellectual curiosity, so follow-up stories that don't add new information are mostly off topic, as are riler-uppers that don't gratify curiosity so much as stir up indignation and flamewar. When there have been a lot of stories about X lately, the bar for X stories gets raised; HN readers don't like it when the front page has a lot of stuff they've seen already. That's about it. The execution has a lot of subtleties, of course, but those principles fully explain what you're observing.
> Because of this scarcity, everyone who feels strongly about a story feels that their story is being unfairly suppressed on HN
Writing something to graph the course of stories over time was just something I did for fun, then I noticed that stuff. And again, I'm talking about stories that are ranked lower (and that can mean much lower, several pages lower) than stories that have a lower score, are older, and have more comments.
This story has over 2300 points and is at #32 after 14 hours, would you say that's normal?
Seeing this for a few months now, I did kinda pull back from other threads, at least from long comments on trivial subjects. I don't feel okay, at all, discussing harmless things while important things that intersect with the responsibility of the tech aren't able to be discussed freely. If you then read that as caring so strongly about China [sic], that doesn't mean I just dreamed all that. Or that I do care so much, for that matter: I just dig into things, swiftly and as thoroughly as I can, I've done this with dozens if not hundreds of subjects, and being German this is right up an alley which is way bigger and way more important than even the CCP, from my perspective.
It's not that other don't seem to get flagged by users, too. But for months, it was like clockwork when it came to the CCP. Whenever I saw something gain traction, I paid attention, and without fail, it sank.
> HN is a site for intellectual curiosity
And new software point releases, neat little CSS tricks, anything to do with money and making money, and so on. Including human rights, and the intersection with tech and/or games.
Sure, all those things intersect with intellectual curiosity, as well as writing advice and the life of Lord Byron and the Nobel prize in physics and lots of other topics that appeared on HN today. What isn't so good for intellectual curiosity is hammering on the same hot stories over and over again. One of our jobs as moderators is literally to moderate that, i.e. make it not so excessive.
It's human nature, or at least internet nature, that hot controversies and sensational stories get lots of upvotes relative to everything else. If you want to have a site for intellectual curiosity, you need a countervailing mechanism against that, or such stories will dominate the front page entirely. On HN, there are a number of such countervailing mechanisms—user flags, moderation downweights, and software penalties. When you see a story that seems like it has a low rank relative to its points, one or more of those is the reason why.
The Blizzard story was the top item on HN for its day (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2019-10-08), so I don't think it was underrepresented. Moderators gave it the standard downweight for indignation that all such stories get, which didn't reduce its rank much. Once it had been on the front page for 15 hours, software added an additional standard downweight. That helps flush yesterday's major stories off the front page so that the next crop of stories can come up.
Labeling this as "an incidence of gaming" is a framing that misses the main conflict of the situation. This real incidence here is an American company practicing censorship on behalf of the CCP.
This one is the top story, but "Apple Hides Taiwan Flag in Hong Kong", "Hong Kong protest safety app banned from iOS store", "Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests", and others all got substantial attention.
And they're both also about American companies censoring themselves and their users on behalf of China. For better or worse, it's that in particular that gets HN's attention.
Sorry for not entirely related to the main thread, but since it seems there are many people in this thread knowledgable on what's going on in Hong Kong, I'd like to ask 2 questions.
I'm not siding with CCP, but my issue is I'm not sure I can side with the protestors either. Because
1. Does the protestors representing the majority of citizens? If yes at this stage why the working class in Hong Kong hasn't started long term strike yet? I would imagine that the most effective non violence method of protesting by citizens would be stop working. That would for one stop the tax flow to the government.
2. Is it necessary for protestors to be violent against pro-China civilians/properties? I'm aware that the protestors have been subject to violence from both police and mobs alike, but fighting for democracy should be a higher cause than revenge? Aren't they fight for freedom of speech among others? Or it's just freedom for themselves and violence and totalitarianism for who else disagrees? [1]
Again I love freedom to the point I've spent many years fighting it for myself and helped a few people. I support Taiwan to be an independent country. But we all know many bad things have been committed under the name of freedom as well. Now I'm not sure if the Hong Kong protestors are fighting under the name of freedom to actually express their hatred toward mainlanders? Thanks for reading and hope my questions would not offend anyone. Just would like to understand the situation better.
Edit: some explanations on the downvotes would be nice.
1) Stopping HK employee taxes flow, will stop China how? This is not really their concern
2) Peaceful protest and cleaning up after themselves would make many people very happy. They did this during the umbrella and occupy central protests: however many thousands of people protesting, but the streets were spotless. They were very polite at that time; but still increasingly cannot trust the government
For instance the extradition law that started this protest was declared dead multiple times, but we're still awaiting the government to actually do that -- maybe when they re-convene on the 16th it will be removed from the agenda?
I like your views about peaceful protest, but will it lead to the peaceful removal of democracy, expression, belief, etc? Any HKers in support of the government are looking forward to that peaceful life
--
On your links:
The SCMP is a China owned news source, and it should be easy to find other videos of police shooting people with rubber bullets, etc??
My wife was just showing me a video of an undercover police officer trashing government property and threatening pepper spray when videoed -- I do appreciate your questions and approach though, and wish life was that simple
> Fighting under the name of freedom to actually express their hatred toward mainlanders?
Sorry you could feel that. I don't. We don't. We apologize
I asked some questions, rather than trying to convey some arguments, since I'm not expert in any way about Hong Kong situation. The only thing led me making this post is after watching the old lady video I felt it's important to introduce some other viewpoints to the discussion happening on HN, a website I visit daily and I appreciate the HN community. Other than that I don't have any stake in the game. You might watched the beginning of the second video and think I talk about clean up after pretesting? In that video protesters shined laser on that old lady.
I might not have expressed my question clearly. Thanks for bearing with me:
1. Let's say the whole city would like to obtain democracy as fast as they can, strike would be one of the most effective method for nonviolent resistance, no? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_resistance) I'm curious why this way of protesting has not been employed yet?
2.
>My wife was just showing me a video of an undercover police officer trashing government property and threatening pepper spray when videoed --
I'm very aware of those police shenanigans. I'm also ok with violence against oppressive police/military. However, does this justify violence against not armed civilians with different opinions? If your answer is yes then it's fine. It would help me understand the perspective of westerners better.
It's good to ask those things. I can only answer for myself, which is maybe not a western view point, but anyway:
I assume almost everybody thinks shining lasers on the old lady is bad. I don't think violence against civilians is ever justified. However wrong though, it is probably never fully one-sided
The last video you linked ends with a 'civilian' having molotov cocktails thrown at him, and the author of the video uses this to discredit the protests..... But... that 'civilian' has a gun in his hand. He is an undercover officer, and those events happened shortly after police shot someone with a live round in the same area
The police have not pressed charges against mafia caught on camera beating people up, but they have recently arrested a pregnant woman for wearing a facemask*
I think the protesters have been more restrained, but they still definitely make mistakes. Sadly this doesn't get us out of the spiral of violence: to do that the gov and police would have to face loosing their jobs; and maybe just as hard is they would have to accept that the protesters' anger and vitriol as true
--
Nonviolent means were employed during the earlier umbrella revolution and occupy central. These didn't seem to work. But I agree that the anger, vitriol, and violence on all sides is creating another wall...
*facemasks are quite different in HK than the west. The SARS epidemic and close living quarters means people see them as essential to health and safety -- so the facemask ban is bordering on offensive in HK culture
-- Hope that helps. Years ago I was in a warzone where the people were undefended by their government. The church was preaching forgiveness to those who attacked them, and it was impressive to see how effective it was. But it was a very big cost
Thanks for sharing your thoughts with me friend. I didn’t link any video with police. I know which video you were talking about but it’s not in my previous posts.
Regarding nonviolent, it’s great you read about umbrella revolution and occupy central. But again I think the precise reason those movements failed is because the working class didn’t strike. Many of our modern human rights, such as 40 hours working week, creation of unions, etc are created because workers bind together and strike and disrupted the production of goods. Without a committed working class’s support is exactly the reason previous Hong Kong peaceful movements didn’t work.
Again I’m ok with violence against any oppressive regime. For Hong Kong, I don’t think that alone with achieve freedom. Only when the working class stop paying taxes, stop providing services to the government and its allies, stop maintain the same old social structure, would the revolution has some hope of succeeding.
1.
Any short or long-term strike action would hurt the protestors more than the government due to lack of food and welfare.
2.
Violence against Pro government folk is bad. However there has also been a lot of documented instances of Pro government forces being dressed as protestors and sparking violence.
From what I've seen it all started remarkably peaceful and had since been escalated to a position where the government has free rein. Not something the protestors wanted.
1. Some non-vital sectors can go on strike without impacting food/welfare which has been done in the west for many times? Not every sector needs to be on strike at the same time?
2. I guess I was having too much hope that democracy fighters would hold onto their principles even when being enticed to use violence against civilians.
I wonder how far away the person with the laser pointer is from that lady in the second video - that pointer seems pretty powerful. With a 5mW class 3R laser you can damage someone's retina at 30-20m still with an accidental exposure, for typical collimation ~1mrad. If the spot is around 4cm in diameter and the laser is typically collimated (at 1mrad), they're about 40m away.
In the video at mark 01:16 https://youtu.be/0yXTHODE24Q?t=84 there is a quote about "non-believers". Does the chinese government have anything against atheists in their policies ? To my knowledge chinese government does not interfere in personal religious beliefs.
I interpreted "non believers" to be "not believing in the party" not "not believing in religion".
"the Chinese government doesn't interfere in personal religious beliefs" is quite the claim though, considering they literally have concentration camps full of Muslims.
> To my knowledge chinese government does not interfere in personal religious beliefs.
...
The Chinese government spent 1966 to 1976 violently destroying churches and holy sites of all religions and imprisoning, torturing, and killing priests and worshipers.
Since then they've officially embraced freedom of religion, especially traditional Chinese religion that emphasizes submission to authority, but in the last decade they've been "waging the most severe systematic suppression of Christianity in the country since religious freedom was written into the Chinese constitution in 1982," including "destroying crosses, burning bibles, shutting churches and ordering followers to sign papers renouncing their faith."
It's a shame but I feel like the majority of gamers won't care. They'll either be ignorant of this or they'll just shrug and continue playing. I boycotted Activision and by proxy Blizzard when Activision acquired them a long time ago but their continuing success shows I'm part of an extremely tiny minority.
At this point it goes far beyond just gamers. From the NBA to Google, this effect is everywhere. To be explicit, the effect is U.S. firms letting China dictate what they do or do not care about on a global political scale.
You probably want to use a different example than Google here. Particularly since Google doesn't have a China presence because they refused to censor search results, and relationships there still appear to be less than solid to say the least. Your statement works with most U.S. firms, but very much doesn't at all for Google in particular.
And yet they still have no consumer products in China, and still redirect search to Hong Kong, and still do not participate in any censorship efforts.
This should be applauded and supported, since it's pretty much what people want others like Blizzard to do as well. Google is much closer to a gold standard to follow with their approach to China than they are to being lumped in with the NBA or Blizzard.
If a game publisher can (whether directly or not) nuke the job of a journalist for a review and get away with it, I'm not surprised at all when a government does something along these lines.
It happened with a journalist on a gun magazine as well. Lifelong second amendment supporter blacklisted for not spewing exactly the party line. This makes me wonder whether the whole right to bear arms things is AstroTurf at this point.
Businesses too: there has been massive hatred directed at Dick's Sporting Goods when it changed its arms sales mix in response to a large shooting last year [1]. Gun makers such as Springfield took heat for trying for stepping even a smidgen out of line [2] resulting in an abrupt volte-face.
Gerstmann's firing was widely reported at the time, he immediately turned around and created an influential gaming website that's still successful today, and Kane and Lynch didn't do well. Not a great example.
If the Western governments could maybe grow a pair and call out how this is very unfair maybe something would happen.
I work for one of the largest news publishers in the Nordics, and we were criticized for letting the CCP take out a full page ad in our largest newspaper that essentially said "no need for the Western governments to get involved, this is an internal issue that is best handled by us". Our editor in chief of that paper responded with this:
"Now we have the moral high ground. Until the Swedish government can take out a full page ad in The Global Times criticizing the CCP we can use this as one of many examples of how China does not value freedom of speech, but we do."
There is unfortunately a gaping hole where United States leadership should be and I don’t feel the companies or countries that used to be able to “follow the leader” have figured how to deal with it.
> gaping hole where United States leadership should be
I've seen this exact wording a lot recently. Is this the new propaganda line everyone parrots? I must have missed the previous administration's strong stance on ANYTHING AT ALL dealing with international relations, besides killing people from the sky. When did the previous administration lead on anything and not just bow down (literally bowing) to international leaders.
Sorry, the gaping hole in leadership was filled with someone who cares about the USA.
> the gaping hole in leadership was filled with someone who cares about the USA
[citation needed], I wouldn't trust the guy with international business interests to actually have America's best interests at heart over his own if the two don't align.
No real dispute with your criticism of the previous leadership though.
The last message I saw before it was switched to private was a message from the moderators along the lines that r/blizzard is not the right place to discuss politics, and that they'll ban people who post politics there.
It's inconvenient for moderators of fora when the topic of the forum suddenly takes a political action, if they don't want politics discussed in their forum.
The simultaneity of the NBA and now Blizzard so publicly siding with Beijing may elevate this out of the realm of commercial issues (subject to boycotts) into a political one.
Ironically, there's little the US government can do here without dragging things back towards the McCarthy era.
What would we have them do? Apply pressure to Activision/Blizzard to reverse the company's own internal policy on "keep politics out of the game stuff?" That's a pretty clear violation of freedom of speech, the press, and / or association, to tell a private company who they must endorse.
It's not unprecedented, but the precedents are very tightly bound (and often tied up in a justification based on use of very finite public resources, such as broadcast airwaves).
We have laws prohibiting private actors from interfering with American foreign policy. And we have safe harbours for protected speech. Combining these two, narrowly, to apply to Hong Kong and Taiwan might thread the needle.
To get around First Amendment issues, it would have to be a law saying, in effect, private actors may not punish employees, contractors or members for expressing opinions connected to Hong Kong or Taiwan’s proto-democratic and democratic systems. (This would probably also require Congress recognise Taiwan’s sovereignty, which after Hong Kong looks necessary.)
Of course the first itself is largely hillariously unenforceable even a century ago because of global speech and the First Ammendment - which is a good thing.
I don't think that carve out would be constitutional unless it was even more broad. Say "personal capacity political advocacy is protected" so you could get fired for saying "<Company> supports Free Tibet" without proper permission/authority but "I, not speaking on behalf of <Company> support Free Tibet". Even that would open itself to damn uncomfortable side effects legally for a weatherman opening every broadcast with "I support the reestablishment of Rhodesia!" being protected as well.
> the first itself is largely hillariously unenforceable even a century ago because of global speech and the First Ammendment
The Logan Act [1] has been on the books since the 19th century, though it remains Constitutionally controversial.
Broadly speaking, however, there is difference between punishing certain views and expanding public-sphere protections around free speech. The latter is done e.g. with union-promotion laws, which restrict companies' abilities to suppress certain kinds of union-organizing speech. That precedent could certainly be extended to this issue.
Amend the constitution to provide first-amendment rights to all individuals instead of just citizens, for example. Then you can go back to claiming the moral high ground.
> Ironically, there's little the US government can do here without dragging things back towards the McCarthy era.
Concentration camps are evil, and so is using prisoners as living organ banks. Furthermore, China is run by competent people and has a large economy growing faster than the West. They are a bigger threat than Nazi Germany or the USSR were. China has a serious chance of dominating the world over a 20-30 year timescale.
I don't want that to happen. If McCarthyism is what it takes to stop it, so be it; I would prefer that over having my organs removed while I am still conscious.
I must have missed something, because all the coverage I have seen is of Adam Silver publicly supporting Morey and Tsai. Additionally, the Nets cancelled a media event in Shanghai over this.
Silver says that is not an apology[1], and the message quoted reads more like a diplomatic version of "Sorry this upset you, but tough shit". I'm not sure where the author of that opinion column got the idea that the message was an apology.
It was the CEOs attitude towards gamers and his derogatory comments about them as well as the way Activision treats/treated its developers. There was a lot of controversy around these issues and after reading quite an in depth article about it around 10 years ago I've avoided buying anything developed or published by Acti-Blizzard.
Nothing about the behavior of the average gamer, to date, should make any of us think they're going to lead the charge for much of any social change that involves distancing themselves from their favorite addic^Wgames.
It is hard to tell, that is true. And that reality is exploited to silence opposition and control others.
That’s why language policing, hate speech laws, Twitter mobs, and bully-the-bully efforts are abominations. So really, the answer is easy: everyone has the right to offend, and has no right not to be offended. Your simple rule doesn’t go far enough.
Hate-speech laws exist because people are programmable.
Try and tell me your opinions are your own and the books and media you consume do not own some portion of them.
Hate-speech laws exist to prevent the programming of people to systematically hate and exterminate other people, a lesson that has been learned many times over in history.
If hate-speech laws exist to deal with people that are programmed, wouldn't it also follow that hate-speech laws might exist because programmed people want to control the speech of others?
It would go like this: hate speech is first yelling fire in a theater, then it's espousing bigotry, then it's holding the wrong opinions, until it's finally speaking ill of the Party. That's also a lesson that has been learned many times over in history.
We're all programmable, sure. And I think it's important for their to be competing voices such that we don't end up in the Party.
But some level of social cohesion is desirable, and I think starting at the level of 'not allowed to advocate for the rape and murder of peoples' is a reasonable step towards ensuring less people think that is viable.
And to attain that social cohesion, outlawing wrongthink is certainly a way. It is allowed to advocate doing harm to people, it's just that you have to be selective. You can't do it to protected classes, but unprotected groups are just fine, which is why I believe the moral case for hate speech laws typically falls flat. If it was about morals, it would target everybody equally. It doesn't, so it isn't.
Weren't you saying about people being programmable? Every society throughout history has struggled with administering justice equally. Every single one.
I've found it to typically not be applied equally, neither in the US nor in Europe (which makes sense, since it's designed to protect marginalized groups). For a quick test, replace some words, i.e. "all X are ..." and make it "all Y are ...", switch minorities and majorities around - you'll be able to tell whether it's considered hate speech then. #YesAllXYZ
"Kill all men". There's plenty of generalizations, insults and derogatory statements against groups, it's just not a problem if those groups aren't perceived as oppressed. Change a word or two and voila: hate speech.
This sounds too much like you moving the goal post along, and I've had those conversations before; I did not find them fruitful. Next up "can you provide a case number where 'kill all $foo' was classified as hate speech by a federal judge who's first name starts with an E".
You can google that sentence, you can read defenses of it and make up your mind. I'm not that passionate about changing a single opinion that I'm going to waste time chasing after your ever expanding requirements.
Why bother replying if you're not going to be charitable in my assumptions?
I had never heard of the term but I would certainly agree that it's hate speech. It seems to me that it was a twitter hashtag that some people thought was funny.
I don't agree with it but I also think that an equivalent hashtag #killallwomen would have an equally hard time being brought before a judge.
> Why bother replying if you're not going to be charitable in my assumptions?
I find it rude to simply turn around and walk away without saying why I chose to. I remembered previous conversations I had that went the same way and ended in me being dragged along and my time being wasted. Fool me once, shame on me etc etc. I apologize if that was not your intention.
Too far down that philosophical rabbit-hole you find "There's no such thing as good and evil," which is a philosophy a person can have but not one I'd want to see a country's government embrace as a core tenant. It'd be a pretty shitty place to live for anyone who doesn't have the money or power to enforce their will.
And too far down the other hole is the ambiguity of definitions and other postmodern gobbledygook that will eventually expand the umbrella of what we call 'hate speech' far beyond what we might both agree is reasonable. It's probably already happened.
And you can't successfully legislative bad opinions and the validity of speech. Because an opinion being bad or speech being valid isn't something the government should concern themselves with.
Why not? There are time-tested slippery slopes in both directions here so the best approach is a cautious one where shades of grey are debated and disputed.
This particular cynicism justifies far too much. A liberal (as in liberty) society must trust the super-majority of its population to agree on and uphold its ethical foundations. Policing hate speech weakens one of those foundations no matter how you justify it, but if you justify it by saying "people are programmable and so can't be trusted to hear what hateful people have to say," it weakens it enormously.
A huge percentage of our speech is attempted "programming." Political debate, religious preaching, even mathematical models of the universe are attempts to get others to think about something a certain way. But it would be unethical to ban any of those things, because people aren't "programmable," they're suggestible.
> A huge percentage of our speech is attempted "programming."
I absolutely agree. I'm not saying ban hate speech because its programming -- I'm saying ban it because it's evil and effective.
It's morally reprehensible to defend the existence of advocating for racial superiority when we have witnessed hundreds of times where that leads to genocide.
I don't think that follows so clearly. We defend many rights that could lead to disaster. You could try to drum up a following to amend the constitution and make the country into whatever you wanted it to be, and you could do so legally. If you succeeded, it could be a total disaster. And yet somehow it's still right that we defend the right for you to do so.
> It's morally reprehensible to defend the existence of advocating for racial superiority...
This really is a slippery slope. Let's agree that it's morally reprehensible to advocate for racial superiority. Let's not argue that it's morally reprehensible to defend the right of somebody else to advocate for racial superiority. When we are faced with assailing what is supposed to be as close as possible to an unassailable right for pragmatic reasons, neither side of the argument is clearly moral or immoral. Or, rather, both sides are somewhat immoral. If we as a society come to the conclusion that hate speech is so dangerous that it is worth reducing the right to free speech to prevent it, then let's at least do so with a heavy heart. Political decisions that pit a great good against another great good are terrible. Don't make them more terrible by accusing those on either side of being morally reprehensible.
That's the rub with a free society. It's the same terrible people. If we foster hate speech, many people will eventually die. By allowing hate speech, you are allowing that outcome. Perhaps reprehensible is too strong of a word, but morally responsible certainly fits.
A small limitation on an 'unassailable' right (where is that status derived from?) is actually the solution that maximizes liberalism by limiting genocide.
> If we foster hate speech, many people will eventually die.
True, if we collectively foster it. Let's definitely not do that.
> where is that status derived from?
It's just agreed upon, or not. The extent to which free speech is unassailable is the extent to which free speech is unassailable. Every society has restricted it in some way or other; many (even western) societies have restricted it much too far, in my opinion. We can go as far as we choose.
Personally, I wish we wouldn't choose speech policing in the US at this point in time. The implications are far reaching. Policing something doesn't just affect the people who break the law, it affects anybody who could theoretically break it. Mechanisms to monitor and silence speech get another great justification. And the people doing the policing will of course err on the side of caution at times. Look at the recent stack overflow kerfuffle. Since intent is so difficult to judge, there is no way that the only thing hate speech laws are applied to will be speech with hateful intent. Some arguments in support of Israel are considered by some to be hate speech, as supporting the Hong Kong protests is by others. Both of those platforms are deeply offensive to a particular demographic. And the argument that these are just "bad applications" of the law is insufficient, because laws at their very best are applied badly sometimes, and at their worst applied badly _most_ of the time.
Saying that a limitation on this particular right for this particular reason "is actually the solution that maximizes liberalism by limiting genocide," is not a good argument. Genocide has some probability of occurring in a country with the policies in place today, and some other probability of occurring with different policies in place. If we just applied any policy that reduced the probability, there would be no freedoms at all. And even hundreds of examples in history don't work very well as evidence unless you can demonstrate an inverse correlation in history between the degree to which countries restricted hate speech and the extend to which they engaged in genocide, and I wouldn't be surprised if you found exactly the opposite.
Hate-speech laws are ridiculous. They only have their cheerleaders because some people hate Nazis more than they love what Nazis threatened to destroy. Never made sense to me.
> Hate-speech laws exist because people are programmable.
And some people would like to have us programmed with their opinion unchallenged, rather than have their view face opposing arguments in a fair and open debate.
Once you compromise on free speech for some views, it’s all a slippery down-hill slope from there.
This is entirely correct. As rhetorical advice, I recommend against calling things a "slippery slope". This causes alarm bells to ring in a pedant's mind, and they frantically search Wikipedia's catalog of Fallacious Reasoning for an appropriate article to copy-paste or internally justify downvoting you instead of authentically engaging with the argument.
Who do we kill with that? Just who you say is okay? And we can't talk about it? Hmm, you know. I don't think I like this arrangement. It already seems like you don't like me.
Quite the contrary. You should assume that if you step out into the stream of general discourse, you will be offended by something. You will have feelings. Be ready.
> It's really hard to tell the difference between what is genuinely offensive and what is not.
You can't have both "Free Speech" and "You Can't Say Anything Offensive" at the same time, because there is too much overlap. So you have to choose. The US constitution is pretty clear that "Free Speech" is the higher principle.
"Free Speech only protects you from the government, not private companies who don't want to tolerate your hate on their platform"
I don't agree with this stance, but it is an oft-heard one defending companies who stifle speech (as long as the stifled speech was a far right Nazi website or anti-LGBT comments).
As we see, that stance is dangerous and extends to companies stifling politically inconvenient speech like "I support Hong Kong protesters".
It's a silly stance, even if one thinks private companies should be allowed censor who they want on their platform. It conflates "free speech" (which is a wide philosophical concept) with the "first amendment to the US constitution", which is just a particular law regulating the government of a specific country.
The reason we constrain the government the way we do is that Blitzchung is still perfectly free to go on his own blog, or out in the street, or to any media network willing to broadcast him and share his view, and the FBI won't lock him up.
It's a key distinction, and yes, the media still has the liberty to not broadcast is views (because the same liberty that lets them refrain from repeating "I support Hong Kong protesters" lets them refrain from repeating all manner of "Death to all X").
Is that gameable in a multinational world where some media companies are cross-oceanic superpowers? Sure. There are other media outlets that aren't that.
It's possible the solution to these speech issues is to aggressively enforce antitrust.
> The reason we constrain the government the way we do is that Blitzchung is still perfectly free to go on his own blog
...unless Cloudflare or Amazon or whomever is hosting his blog arrives at the same conclusion as Blizzard. I would argue free speech as a philosophy doesn't work unless corporations are on board.
They don't need to be on board; they just need to be competing. "It's possible the solution to these speech issues is to aggressively enforce antitrust."
Then your definition of Free Speech is something different from the one generally agreed upon and implemented in many constitutions.
You can look at it that way: If a private entity is prohibited from deleting user content, isn't that also an infringement of free speech? And at what level are they prohibited to filter such content? Are they allowed to require an account? Are they allowed to delete spam?
No "Right to Free Speech" can be enforced between private persons or entities. Nobody can be forced to listen to you, nobody can be prohibited from taking measures to not read or hear you, just because you claim a right to free speech.
Thus the only correct level to fight against this particular instance of private censorship is indeed the private domain, and that's mainly counter-speech.
We're free to protest the move, but I'd hardly say that Apple should be forced by anyone to actually change their stance. It's their choice where they want to stand on public opinion - much as it's our choice to boycott Apple products or protest that decision they've made.
> The US constitution is pretty clear that "Free Speech" is the higher principle.
No, the US Constitution doesn't even purport to set out social priorities outside of the relations between the government of the US and it's people.
You might believe that free speech is an important principle outside of that context, but (even if dead guys once wrote it in a document was a valid argument for a set of social priorities) the Constitution of the United States doesn't make that claim, and if you want to make it, you’ll have to make the argument yourself, not just rely on “the Constitution say so”.
> the Constitution of the United States doesn't make that claim
> the US Constitution doesn't even purport to set out social priorities outside of the relations between the government of the US and it's people.
I disagree. The fact that the US Constitution deals with a specific relationship between government and individual is incidental to the implicit claim. The US society therein is governed (for whatever it's worth) by the "priorities" and principles within that constitution. This is what marks the confusion. I agree there is a legal distinction between the principles and law. The principles remain.
>It's really hard to tell the difference between what is genuinely offensive and what is not.
It's not hard to tell the difference actually. You know when you are offended quite obviously.
The hard part is knowing when other people are offended. This is why we can't have rules based on subjective experience.
I remember reading an article about how someone breaking your heart is a much more egregious crime than shoplifting. Yet, there is no law against breaking hearts.
I think perhaps the more important point is that one should not be prevented from voicing an offensive opinion. If you look very hard in an extremely boring place, e.g. a phone directory, you might just by chance perhaps find something that won't be offensive to anyone on this Earth. Outside of contrived scenarios, the moment we let "being offended" be the watermark of censoring ideas, we might as well pack up the idea of freedom altogether.
E.g. I don't agree with Trump's policies, I generally disagree on most topics with his voters, but I wholeheartedly support their right to voice their opinions. I want them to voice their opinions, even if sometimes they will result in rules that I dislike. I'm too terrified of the alternative where a certain group is not allowed to participate.
In an open society, there can and should be heated debates, sides that stand firm behind their beliefs and everyone should be prepared to fight (in debate) for what they deem important. Crucially however, no debate should be won by silencing the other side through decree.
It is easy to handwave this case away as fringe, but it is only fringe inasmuch as you only see the tip of an iceberg. As other posts have pointed out, this seemingly low impact act by Blizzard is actually a sign of a cultural collision.
Where the culture of open dispute and free expression of ideas is met with a closed and conformist culture of be silent or be silenced by force.
We must fight back against this problem every time it surfaces, because the moment we stop, we lose. Whenever it becomes normalized and accepted that corporations that arose from the support and foundations of a free society can turn on those principles whenever they deem profitable, we lose a bit of those freedoms.
If history is of any indication, freedoms once lost this way can only ever bought back by bloodshed.
I agree in principle, although in practice this is impossible to be preached. In China it's that political opinions aren't tolerated, especially anything that notes on the edge of separatism. In America it's the same, certain racial, gender chats are simply taboo, whether it's personal or national level. While there is no explicit governmental prosecution, you can be sure that you'll be punished in a way.
The idea is that in America such topics are prohibits because there is the idea of historical injustice and bringing everyone to a fair level for a "better society" (very well-intended). It is no different in China when political topics bring an uprising flux of emotion from within the Chinese people (also very well-intended in the context of Chinese legacy). There is no fundamental difference, only a difference in how the freedom of expression is backed by historical context and reigning ideology.
You confuse state prosecution with private consequences.
A right to Free Speech can only protect you from government sanctions. How other private parties react to your "taboo" opinions cannot be legislated.
And I'd like to break a lance for "political correctness" here. Hate speech and offensive language in general do make a public or private space uncomfortable for certain people. Not all of this can be avoided, but in the case of race and gender, those who feel offended can't really change their offendedness. And because those people are usually a minority, it is usually someone else who steps up to the task of defending such a space.
Unfortunately, an aggressive climate fueled by hate speech leads to worse consequences than offended feelings. So, in many cases, why not avoid offending people? And in many cases at issue, the main motivation of the offenders is the offending, not what they believe is the "truth".
> It's really hard to tell the difference between what is genuinely offensive and what is not.
Calling for liberation of any territory is genuinely offensive to the government from which one is calling for it to be liberated, and to people who support that government (and often to those who support the territorial integrity of the relevant state event if they don't strongly support the government in question.)
> It's really hard to tell the difference between what is genuinely offensive and what is not.
That's because it's not up to the prankster or the offender or a third party to decide if one is suffering. It's up to the offended, mocked or bullied one who are the only ones knowing what they feel.
Of course, in the public political space, everybody tries to play the victim/innocent game to their advantage.
We can however be convinced, that certain offenses are indeed worthy of recognition. Racial slurs, for example. Sexual or sexist jokes in certain contexts.
Feeling offended because somebody criticized a state is harder to make stick.
I agree that for some culture or some communities or in some part of the world there are consensus around things.
Coincidentally I stumbled upon a comment on imgur today that went like this:
- canadian guy is in saskatoon, in a bar
- chinese guy at the counter
- chinese guy backs away from the counter with beverage
- bumps into canadian guy he didn't see
- canadian guy blurps 'woops, sorry'
- chinese guy 'YOU APOLOGIZE TO ALL OF CHINA'
- canadian guy thinks it's funny, laught it off
- mates from chinese guy laugh and pull him away
Then imgur commenters: "Yeah, some Chinese tourists/expats/students can be very sensitive about China".
Feeling offended because somebody criticized a state is harder to make stick.
All that to say that in some parts of the world personal identity can be tied real tight to national/territorial origin. And we all meet on the intertubes.
So we are at the point where American video game developers are banning people from e-sports competitions for their comments over a domestic issue in a foreign country? Because the Chinese government probably didn't like his comments, that counts as 'public disrepute'? This is just wild to me.
It's part of the new push by corporations and organizations to subvert the law to appease their own ideologies. Despite there being no legal precendence or requirement for things to happen, those in authority positions are more than happy to silence those that disagree with their expectations. It is a direct result of cancel culture and deplatforming - if everyone assumed the best of intentions until explicit circumstances demonstrating otherwise, we wouldn't be in this mess - everyone would go about their day as normal as there are no laws requiring you to do or penalizing anyone for the things people are deplatformed over in this day and age. But when power comes into the mix, and as our culture has inflated the value of ideologies, those with power stand more to gain by taking the nuclear approach.
That's a generic catch-all rule that means basically nothing. No one can determine ahead of time what is allowed and what's not under that rule.
He didn't say anything "offensive" or "disreputable" to anyone other than authoritarian regimes, and if that's the standard Blizzard is going by they can fuck right off.
He didn't make some off-hand comment about Hong Kong. He made a deliberate political statement complete with props and all. That very obviously falls under the rule.
There's nothing inherently offensive and disreputable in making deliberate political statements complete with props and all.
The rule as written very obviously (at least to me) does NOT prohibit making public political statements in support of particular political groups and processes, actively and instensively advocating for or against certain policies or parties, using props to do so, explicitly condemning policies of certain governments, being a politician or candidate or pundit opinion-maker yourself and expressing strong political agendas to others, etc. It does seem to cover certain forms of expressing these statements (e.g. profanity and insults would fall under the prohibiting language) but not the political opinion as such.
An explicit prohibition against "offending certain groups of the public" is inherently assumed to include demographic groups but exclude political opinions, governments and individual politicians; so shouting "Government of X is horrible and their leader Y is evil" does not violate such a rule in any way whaotsover; that's legitimate political opinion; it's unalienable right of everyone to believe and communicate such things if they want to. Criticizing and insulting policies and political organizations simply can't be offensive in the way that insulting individuals or groups of people can be; if someone says that a statement of "stand with Hong Kong" or "stand with united China" hurts their feelings, then that's probably their (valid) opinion but it doesn't make that statement offensive or insulting no mater if someone claims that, statements of such format simply aren't offensive no matter what political group they support. "Fight for faith, stand with ISIS" or "Fight for man-boy love rights, stand with pedophiles" are justifiably unpopular slogans which would/should raise some eyebrows but they aren't offensive or insulting.
He did this during a post-match interview on the Hearthstone stream. This wasn’t some personal political statement outside of his participation in the game.
Correct. It was a personal political statement made during his participation in the tournament. And I agree with jcranberry and PeterisP: the rules do not prohibit that.
That's vague wording on purpose to cover anything they want. So what we've determined they want is to avoid any public show of support for the people of Hong Kong. I don't know if I'd call it unfair so much as showing their true intentions.
Yes. You presuppose that all rules - via their nature of being rules - are automatically fair. They aren't. Especially not if they're not arrived at by consensus, but unilaterally laid out.
Let's highlight the absurdity of the presupposition with an extreme example that they might understand: what if there's a rule that says "Black people are not allowed to play"?
They're saying we should just assume it's fair? What kind of idiotic notion is this?
The day you can hold a corporation accountable for breaking their own terms of service is the day I will come around to this argument.
As things stand, they can have an obligation to keep your data secure, have system with massive security holes, loose your data resulting in you being a victim of fraud, and the company will not pay a penny.
Yes. Humans are not suddenly owned because they take part in a contest or work for an employer. We should be allowed to point out literal genocide and authoritarian beatdowns without losing our jobs -- especially when it's an entirely different country.
They're trying to silence the people by pressuring companies to punish those people. Any companies that bow to this pressure are straight up saying that they'd rather support genocide and the right for China to detain and treat protestors however they feel like --- rather than let someone who won a contest to have a personal opinion about it.
Or, you know, gamers need to grow some moral principles and stop giving companies like this money. I already didn't like where Blizzard was going, this seals it for me. I'm not giving them any more money.
Fortunately the games mentioned don’t require any money other than the initial upfront cost, hence the protest. Protesting could also vastly raise queue times, making the experience i enjoyable for many.
But I agree, I’ll never spend another $ on anything blizzard unless they take a different stand on the issue.
I really don't like how this is made out as "China clamping down on Blizzard", just like it was framed when Ubisoft tried to get a lower age-rating for Rainbow Six Siege and claimed that was what China demanded for their market.
Blizzard has been suspending plenty of pro players in plenty of their games for all kinds of questionable, and not so questionable reasons.
And because Blizzard is a private company, offering a service they maintain, they have the house right, they have the final say about who can partake and who can't.
To that end, they don't need the Chinese government to pressure them because they will already do it themselves to make their product as uncontroversial as possible. In that context politics is just not something that Blizzard, or any of the big publishers, want to be as a part of their "e-sport scene".
What they want is the least controversy possible and the lowest ages ratings possible, so they can sell their products to as many people as possible. That's their main and only motivation here, not "pleasing the CCP!".
> just like it was framed when Ubisoft tried to get a lower age-rating for Rainbow Six Siege and claimed that was what China demanded for their market.
Ubisoft straight up said the changes were for compliance for their plans to expand into Asia. With not a single mention of a lower age-rating. [1]
> We are currently working towards preparing Rainbow Six Siege for expansion into Asian territories. As such, there will be some adjustments made to our maps and icons to ensure compliance.
> In addition, we can guarantee that any future changes are aligned with the global regulations we are working towards.
While I don't agree with the gamer rage it caused, the changes were made unambiguously for release in China.
> Ubisoft straight up said the changes were for compliance for their plans to expand into Asia. With not a single mention of a lower age-rating.
Their very first bullet point is "A SINGLE, GLOBAL VERSION".
All the example changes they showed would very likely have lowered the game's age rating across the board, which right now is 18+, the worst possible and considered poison for sales because many parents do still care about them.
Violence removed (Germany), substance abuse removed (Australia), depictions of gambling removed (again Australia&UK). The whole package of changes had the potential to get the game rated down to something like 13 years, maybe 16 years in Germany.
You can't disregard something like that and then focus on Asian markets, while only using it as a synonym for China, as if China is the only country with these kinds of regulations.
As a German, it just irks me, when it was the norm that we would get specially censored versions of games, replacing humans with robots and making hostages in CS unkillable, there was no outrage about the authoritarian German government "forcing US companies to comply".
But they are not a private company. Blizzard is a component of Activision Blizzard, Inc., a publicly-held corporation traded under ATVI on the Nasdaq.
This is actually part of the problem. If they were still privately held, we would much more likely be sitting on an imminent 2020 Diablo/Starcraft/etc PC title release, rather than mobile game rehashes, 'classic' relaunches of decades old products, etc. Privately held companies seem to be the only companies with consolidation of power and control required to stand against ridiculous "profit in every market at any cost" trends.
Just take a look at Valve Software for a comparison of the private vs public effect on a company with a large creative aspect. I realize they haven't put out anything new in ages, but at the same time, has Valve really compromised on any of the core values they've built over the last decade or so? As far as I am aware, the Steam store is about as open and censorship-free as you can get in this era of entertainment.
You accurately describe the dynamic of self-censorship, but miss the point that China gets to set the threshold of what is "uncontroversial" by choosing how strongly to react in cases like this.
Either way you end up embroiled in politics; the only difference is whether you let a foreign country dictate your behavior, or make your own decisions.
> And because Blizzard is a private company, offering a service they maintain, they have the house right, they have the final say about who can partake and who can't.
Except it's not a matter of some Chinese customers taking their business elsewhere. They don't have "the house right" if they are facing consequences from the Chinese government for exercising their freedom of association.
"They are a private company" is quite literally always the argument for why Facebook, Twitter, Google, Cloudflare etc should be able to ban anyone, any time for any arbitrary reason.
I get why people are upset at Blizzard's behavior, but the outcry looks a bit fake. It looks more like there's a lot of anger because it hit somebody they agree with. Had the player said something supporting China, and Blizzard banned him, there would be congratulatory comments and "their game, their rules" arguments.
> "They are a private company" is quite literally always the argument for why Facebook, Twitter, Google, Cloudflare etc should be able to ban anyone, any time for any arbitrary reason.
Exactly, and usually, that's also the consensus on HN on any such issues: It's the companies infrastructure and ecosystem.
There is no "human right to service", if they don't want you there then they can just kick you out and usually wouldn't even need much of a justification, that's what hundreds of pages of ToS, EULA, and whatnot are there for.
> And because Blizzard is a private company, offering a service they maintain, they have the house right, they have the final say about who can partake and who can't.
And most people here were endorsing this right when it came to things they didn't like while I and many others were pointing out that one day this sort of stuff would be applied to things they don't like.
Now that it's being applied to things the majority don't like is there any support for some sort of universal service obligation?
"As you know there are serious protests in my country now. My call on stream was just another form of participation of the protest that I wish to grab more attention. I put so much effort in that social movement in the past few months, that I sometimes couldn't focus on preparing my Grandmaster match. I know what my action on stream means. It could cause me lot of trouble, even my personal safety in real life. But I think it's my duty to say something about the issue."
Wow, when a government can ruin someone's professional career of choice simply because he or she has an opinion that goes against the People’s Republic, that’s when companies should decide to no longer do business in China.
Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.
This wasn't the government's decision though, was it? It was Blizzard's decision.
Just makes me wonder where all of this is going. Americans left and right are choosing China's cultural decisions over America's cultural ... legacy for the lack of a better word.
Over money.
It's like the Americans who love America, because America made them rich, are now loving China because China is richer. I don't know which is more American, actually.
It might be more "American" to love money more than America. Americans have shown it is more important to love money more than where you were born.
Nicely put. I'd add that increasing shareholder value if the shareholder is a not exactly friendly foreign nation state, either directly or via a proxy company, isn't exactly a good long term strategy for any country.
> It's like the Americans who love America, because America made them rich, are now loving China because China is richer.
China isn't richer. That debunks the rest of your follow-on premise. China has less than half the household wealth of the US. The US has 35%-40% of all the world's millionaires and about 32%-34% of all the world's wealth (with just 4% of the population).
Fun fact of the day: Since any of the years 1990, 2000, 2005, 2010 (pre or post great recession) the US has produced more new household wealth than China has. Not an outcome very many people would expect. China went from $4 to $52 trillion in household wealth since the year 2000 and the US gain still exceeded that gain by another 1/3.
Since just 2007-2008 the US has added $42 trillion in new household wealth, and only added $1.7 trillion in new household debt. The greatest net positive household balance sheet expansion in world history. Americans have been busy boosting savings (~8% savings rate) and paying down their mortgages (share of homes without a mortgage at 15-20 year highs along with strong growth in household equity figures).
America has always been all about the money, especially when you have half the country voting for a politicians based primarily on how much free shit they’re planning to give away. Disgusting.
This type of overly-simplistic thinking is devilry. Done for the sake or rhetoric rather than actual original thought of the individual. It's done by people who are run by selfishness and the illusion of being separate from others.
I completely agree. Same as the NBA "outrage". We are normalizing China's outrage here by acknowledging their false-equivalences. China is "angry" at the NBA, but the NBA has nothing to do with a private citizen's tweet.
What does China expect? The NBA should throw the man in a private work camp/prison and re-educate him?
>Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.
That's an intrinsic feature of capitalism. There's no realistic hope of corporations acting morally (hurting their own bottom-lines), because the sole metric that is valued is maximisation of profit. If they ever do something moral it's merely by "accident".
A lot of comments here seem to take as a given that banning any offensive speech in any forum leads inexorably to situations like this, where the "offensive speech" is political speech offensive to an authoritarian government. But this implies that it's impossible to distinguish between different kinds of "offensive" speech based on any meaningful criteria whatsoever, and this just seems to be fundamentally incorrect.
(1) Someone in a forum makes an "offensive" comment that's a show of support for political protestors which might anger an authoritarian government that not so incidentally happens to be of a country with a lot of customers of a product the forum supports;
(2) Someone in a forum makes an "offensive" comment that's an insulting attack on other users based on race, and the offensive nature is pretty clear to most people -- at least those who don't agree with the attack -- even if it happens to be prefaced with "I'm not racist, I'm just saying...".
These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between. The commenter in the first case is supporting a marginalized group; the commenter in the second is attacking one. Punishing the commenter in the first case is kowtowing to an authoritarian government for baldly monetary reasons; punishing the commenter in the second case is showing support for an oppressed group in a way which is probably not going to bring you any financial benefit -- your company's accountants are not going to step in and say "you need to ban Pepe1488 for consistently sounding like a white supremacist because if you don't, it could cost us hundreds of millions of dollars" -- and whose PR benefit is, at the least, debatable. (The people in the oppressed group might love you, but if there is any press coverage whatsoever you are going to be inundated with threats.)
There's a principle involved here which can lead you to boycotting Blizzard, but that principle is "we should support the right of people to protest against their goverment." The principle isn't "you should never ban any offensive speech of any kind at any time because to do so inexorably leads you to taking the side of authoritarian governments." (Use a slippery slope argument once, and you'll use them everywhere.)
Chinese feelings towards Hong Kong arise out of a history of subjugation by the British. The Opium Wars devastated China's economy and sovereignty, including the British forcing them to cede Hong Kong. This was the beginning of the "century of humiliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation
It's not just the authoritarian government that is angered, it is the people of China who remember this history of imperialism and domination. Before the first Opium War, China's economy was the largest in the world. Is has only recently begun to recover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...
Everyone has a story about why they are oppressed. Who is oppressed and who are oppressors? What actions are oppressive, and which are not? Free speech is necessary as a way of litigating these very questions.
>The commenter in the first case is supporting a marginalized group; the commenter in the second is attacking one.
It's remarkable that you apparently can't even conceive of how someone could not believe one or both of these statements.
You really can't see how someone could believe China is 'marginalized'?
You really can't see how someone could believe American blacks are either not marginal, or are marginal due to their own collective choices and thus not morally supreme?
Even going beyond these, you can't conceive of a morality or worldview where being 'marginalized' doesn't give one automatic, universal moral supremacy over everyone else. Try a worldview where loyalty to family and nation come first - ever heard of that? Or a achievement-oriented worldview, where doing great things is the goal instead of try to seek 'equity' for every group. Or even just a rationalist worldview, where differnet gender, race, national, ethnic, culture groups have characteristics that lead to their outcomes and it's not a giant moral equation you have to spend your life balancing because it's inevitable.
This is the problem with western discourse today. You're so deep in your left-bubble you can't even conceive of other viewpoints, so every conclusion of yours seems obvious and incontrovertible, so you must conclude anyone who disagrees is simply evil.
> You really can't see how someone could believe China is 'marginalized'?
I am not sure what you mean by marginal here.
The fact that the NBA and Blizzard will apologize to China in a debased fashion is very strong evidence that China is in no way marginalized, but is actually in a position of incredible strength.
I agree with you that it calls into question what it means to be "marginalized" when people from these groups can have the power to demand apologies when they are offended.
You're playing both sides here. You want to use the progressive definition of marginalized when you want something to attack, but you aren't willing to say that's what marginalized actually means.
Right now, by calling China marginalized, it sounds like you agree with the definition given by those examples without staking a claim on what the word really means.
I'm asking you point blank: Are these groups marginalized? What are you actually trying to say? I don't think China is marginalized, the definition of "marginalized" does not include a nuclear armed, economically ascendant global nation state with the ability to make multi national corporations and interest groups apologize at a whim.
I think the progressive definition of "marginalized" is fundamentally broken. It's used as a way of a priori deciding who is the aggressor and who is the victim in any conflict or disagreement, based solely on the identities of the people involved and their historical grievances as a group.
I reject this framework. But if you accept it, I think it's hard to rebut the idea that China is oppressed, given their history over the last 200 years. I certainly believe that they feel oppressed by the west. And my observation of progressive thought is that the feeling of being oppressed combined with legitimate historical grievance is an unimpeachable claim to be a marginalized party.
In particular, progressive thought seems to say that once marginalized, a group by definition continues to be marginalized until there is "equity." But China's economy still lags far behind that of the west on a per capita basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... . So there is certainly no "equity" here.
I don't "want" to use the progressive definition of marginalized. I want to call it into question by pointing out its contradictions.
It seems like your actual goal is to reframe a discussion on China in order to attack progressives, something completely off topic from the original post.
It was entirely on topic to the post I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21193515), which tried to introduce a clear distinction between progressives banning speech and China banning speech. I disagree.
I wish you would be willing to acknowledge that bans on speech that offend others are legitimately problematic, instead of redirecting the conversation to me personally.
>These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between
this is fundamentally misguided. who gets to judge who is the marginalized individual? global geopolitics is more complicated than there being strict good actors and bad actors
some things are not quite as well-defined as that: "whose home land is this" is a common motif you can ask. ask that question towards North Americans, and you might have to say all your land originally belonged to the Native Americans; Canadians are in the process of reconciliation with the Indigenous groups, but speaking as an outsider, it doesn't seem like the reconciliation process can do much justice compared to what they suffered through.
The problem with this is that context matters. I think we'd probably agree that the most conservative requirement for somebody to discharge a weapon is when he has a reasonable reason to believe his life, or the life of another person, is in danger. So what were the contexts of the shootings? Were they arbitrary, unjustified? Or did the officers have some reasonable justification in fearing for their lives or the lives of others?
Fortunately, unlike in times past, we don't need to rely on hearsay or propaganda. Everybody has their camera out and we can see what's happening, at least most of the time. This [1] is the video of the first shooting. And this [2] is the video of the second and, to my knowledge, final shooting. Do you feel the officers acted disproportionately, abusively, or in an otherwise inappropriate fashion?
Do they? More often I see the police protecting the neonazis, or marching with them out-of-uniform.
The FBI has been warning about white supremacist infiltration of police departments since 2006[1], and nothing has been done about it, because the infiltration is already complete: most cops are at least comfortable with white supremacy. Those who speak out against white supremacy from within police departments get kidnapped and beaten by their colleagues, or left in dangerous situations without backup.[2]
and don't forget the fact that police (by intended function) go after criminals: are you supposing that every obvious criminal that police go after are actually the oppressed one?
well.... maybe you can make that argument.... but i think that is beyond the scope of the original intent.
In the general case of offensive speech, we're not usually talking about global geopolitics -- that's a relatively unique feature of this specific case. The premise "there are specific cases where making a judgement call is going to be difficult" is true; that doesn't make the conclusion "therefore, we should never make judgement calls" true.
i agree with the conclusion: that we should make judgement, and step up if the occasion requires us to; but i find the general claim that "These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between" to be very delusional and harming
in the case of offensive speech, i agree that usually we can see what is bad. but without going into detail, i think its also a bit more subtle that
The actual principle which corporations apply is, "We should censor whoever it makes the most money to censor." Starting from the assumption that companies are operating on ethics at all means we're wrong right from the beginning. Hypothetically there exists an ethical way to censor, but where that falls apart is when you give that decision to ethics-blind corporations.
You should check out Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes[1], particularly the section "Coalitions of Resistance".
There's also a separate disagreement which I have here, which is whether silencing people is actually an effective way to create change. It takes enormous resources even for governments to enforce it effectively, as we've seen with Nazis and the USSR in the past, and with China now. With bigots, censorship on other platforms has driven them together into some real cesspool platforms such as Voat[2]. I know for myself, having grown up in a homophobic environment, that the only thing that changed my mind about gay people was meeting and talking to gay people--a strategy which was explicitly executed by Harvey Milk in his coming out campaigns. Censoring bigots does the opposite: it drives bigots into echo chambers where they will only ever converse with other bigots who reinforce their views. In short: if you're censoring bigots, you aren't addressing bigotry, you're just sweeping it under the rug so you don't have to see it.
> Let’s go one step further, “Should a society that has elected to be tolerant be intolerant about intolerance?”
> We can answer these points using the minority rule. Yes, an intolerant minority can control and destroy democracy. Actually, as we saw, it will eventually destroy our world.
> So, we need to be more than intolerant with some intolerant minorities.
It seems that without the article's context, these are controversial points. The word 'minority' here is used to describe a group of people bound by their ideas and opinions.
The minority rule states that the opinions of a few can be projected onto a whole through an emergent property. If a few people do not like to eat spicy food, the whole office might cater mild or bland for an event. An outsider would think that the entire office dislikes spicy food.
If there is a small group of people who think that expressing certain ideas is incorrect, then an entire group might avoid speaking them.
A free society needs to make constant, conscious decisions about what ideas cannot be expressed, because if smaller groups are allowed to make these decisions without review, then all free speech will dry up in a real way.
We should always argue when some group says they don't like hearing certain things. The fact that we are often arguing is a sign of good health for free speech.
To understand the issue (and any issue for that matter) I think it's important to make an effort to try to see things from perspectives outside your own frame of reference. There are 1.4 billion Chinese, the vast majority of whom see what we frame as democratic protests, as unlawful acts of arbitrary destruction and now increasingly often - violence as well. And they too are framing the violence as increasingly racial/cultural. For instance mainlanders tend to speak Mandarin. Hong Kongers tend to speak Cantonese. Guess whose property is getting disproportionately destroyed. And as these protests are turning increasingly violent, it's easy to see where that is and will continue to be focused as well.
Even within Hong Kong there seems to be no reliable information available on aggregate views. The only poll I can find, potentially of dubious reliability, is from 2016. [1] And in that poll, the vast majority of those living within Hong Kong were against separating from China once the 'one country, two systems' agreement expires, in 2047. Only 17.4% supported independence from China even when it was just in theory and 2 decades away. What percent of the protesters are within that 17.4%, and what are the views of the 82.6% on these protests? These seem like important questions that are going unasked, let alone answered by our media and reporting. Whatever the exact numbers may be, there are a lot of people who are very much against whatever you want to call what is happening in Hong Kong. This isn't just a scenario of "good guys" vs "authoritarian government." Its large groups of people who feel very different about the same situation.
Of course you will reference propaganda and I fully agree with you. But there too I am left to wonder something. Take the average Chinese who relies on his regular sources of information for news. And now take the average American who similarly relies on his regular sources of news for information. Who would be able to provide a more accurate response to factual queries on the protests, Hong Kong's relationship with China, and the views/values/etc of those within and without the protest group? Similarly, do you think that, for instance, the New York Times has provided accurate and objective reporting on this topic? Or do you think that their reporting and presentation is attempting to present this story from a distinctly prejudiced angle?
Something that I think social media has masked for many people today is that our own views are not "THE" moral imperative for the world. In fact they, regardless of what they are, tend to be quite obscure when contrasted against the world at large. Step outside the anglosphere and it's amazing how insane we are starting to look from the outside. Or perhaps we always looked this way, but by living inside the bubble for so many years I was equally a part of the insanity.
This is what you get for cosying up to bullies. It may be exhilarating while it lasts, but since the bully doesn't care about anyone but themselves, you will eventually always loose. The west has been gorging on cheap products from China and we started getting dependent. Now the bully senses power over us, and starts applying pressure. The better bullies know how to do this incrementally, slowly at first, so that it's hardly noticeable. Then, at some point you realize you're in a situation that you don't want to be in, but it's too late.
Yep, exactly, and furthermore this is a deliberate strategy on the part of China, and a naive strategy on the part of the US. Here’s a good article on this very topic that you might enjoy:
China is clearly up to no good, but I can't shake the feeling that there would be something off about allowing political soapboxing in apolitical events like this. Should people have a set list of political ideas to propagate at the end of every interview? "My deck was not strong enough in the end-game. And also legalize assault rifles and support the Kurds".
In sports it has generally been frowned upon to politicize competitions, somewhat broadly supported by both organizers and competitors. Whether this is something to strive for or not is a separate debate, but it is how it has been.
Personally, I believe that support has shifted in computer gaming as compared to sports, and will continue to shift.
In sports we use things like spears, shoes, bicycles, up to racing cars. But none of them relies on a narrative or story, except by the story around the sport itself. Few - if any - of the sports are part of culture the way computer games already are, and we see no stopping of this progression anytime soon.
This explicit cultural relevance taken together with the fact that China, and several other countries for that matter, already has made gaming political by requiring games to not feature elements that oppose their regime, sensibilities, or culture, makes a compelling argument that competitors must be allowed a greater freedom of speech, even in the context of competitions.
I just went through the process to delete my account. First attempt to use my Authenticator was “denied - too many attempts. Try another method”. Tried using SMS auth, “denied - too many attempts. Try another method”. Uploaded my driver’s license.
Irrespective of stance on China, for this behaviour alone Blizzard can go and get fucked.
It needs to be that way. Deleting a MMO account or several thousand dollars worth of hearthstone collections should not be something a casual hacker can do with just your password.
I didn’t make myself clear. I have 2FA enabled and neither the authenticator nor the SMS verification was accepted. And yet I strangely had no problem logging into the game last time I played. I’m pretty sure they’re just creating hoops to dissuade casual leavers.
#blexit
I said a similar thing yesterday but I think it has become clear that importing from China was mostly fine for our country, debatable on the lost jobs and environmental part sure, but exporting to China was a poison pill that we never should have swallowed.
China has become less liberal, in the meaningful ways, since Nixon "opened up" China in the 20th century. And the flip side is that when we began exporting to them we installed pathways for China to control and de-liberalize the US.
The more economically important China becomes to the US the more it will control our companies and public political sphere.
Hey, I wonder where did you get the less liberal part? From my experience China has become greatly more liberal during the last 30-50 years. When Nixon "opened up" China it was during the culture revolution and those were really tragic years for Chinese people. Since then average Chinese has become less poor and more liberal steadily each year.
That's a totally fair point, I think maybe since 1980's might be more accurate?
In my experience, and this is mostly for Chinese who fled to either Hong Kong or the US at some point in their lives, if they are >40 years old they dislike China and view it as an oppressive regime. That makes sense since they ran away.
If they are <40 years old they're pretty blasé about China and don't really care about the regime or view it as particularly oppressive. In university is where most of these people I met came from.
I agree with you that >40 years old dislike China more as they never benefitted from the China's economic take-off that happened after 1990.
But I think for regular Chinese, the younger they are, the more liberal their world views are. This is because the education they received are more westernized each year (You might be surprised). Younger Chinese are generally more proficient in English. And to learn English people have to expose themselves to original English materials. I still remember when I was learning English I got access to things like TED, Open courseware such as Harvard's Justice, shows like the Newsroom, movies like the 12 Angry Men. China's human right records today is not good, but it was much much worse 30 years ago. Back then rural Chinese would kill new born female babies, have no issue buying and selling women (here's a movie about the topic[1]) and toddlers. People from different provinces fought and discriminated each other. And those are not government sponsored, just people being poor and illiterate. Now average Chinese are more literate and many more attended higher education (there's no higher education during the culture revolution)[2]. To this end I need to thank Nixon and people doing business with China. The average Chinese has a better life and can think more rationally thanks to economic and educational improvements.
On the other hand, internet censorship has become more strict after 2010. People do find ways to access VPN, it's just they don't discuss sensitive topics on Chinese internet.
The issue is that the more you import from China, the more USD they accumulate, and the more attractive an export market they become. Trade is a two-way street, you can't keep up a permanent stream of imports forever without giving something in return. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
Between this and the NBA drama over the same issue: is there a coordinated campaign going on re: censoring the west’s information on HK?
It disturbs me that most older people I talk politics with seems to think we ought to confront China over IP violations... human rights violations and anti-democratic activity seem infinitely more important to me.
I can’t boycott the NBA as I’m not a fan - but I’ve given Blizzard a lot of time and money - in the past. What a shame. Are there other recent examples besides the NBA and this?
They've made it crushingly, erode-absolutely-all-of-their-good-will-and-prestige-as-a-developer-despite-monopolizing-your-childhood-imagination easy.
Natural late-stage corporate life cycle, I guess. :,c But they'll keep making EZ $$$ as long as store whales keep buying mounts and pets. :D Tell them to boycott.
I mean they became successful by making Totally Not Warhammer: The Video Game and Totally Not Warhammer 40K. And I’m pretty sure those people are long since gone away from the company. Companies are like the Ship of Theseus. When every plank has been replaced, it’s not the same ship even if it looks like it is.
They became a successful company by producing amazing games. Games like Warcraft 1, 2, & 3, Starcraft, Diablo 1 & 2 were straight-up fantastic games. The fact that they borrowed heavily from existing fantasy art and literature does not have anything to do with their gameplay merits. Fantasy is a genre that is always borrowing heavily from previous material. Did Warhammer invent Orcs and Dwarves?
To your second point: I agree. They’re not at all the same company that they once were.
Seems like all of the other pro Hearthstone players should come together and voice their support at once. It would certainly be fun to see how Blizzard reacts then – shut it all down?
I see that American businesses play double standard here. In the USA, sport teams and entertainment businesses are the loudest when it comes to free speech and civil rights, LGBT rights. But they will bend over for CCP money instead of standing for the same causes. I have yet to see ANY business roll the freedom drum and make a stand about human rights when it comes to the violations in China. It’s sad that a recent South Park episode is exactly the reality here and not a satire.
Sadly it's not a double standard if you define standard as income. In US it brings money to shout with lgbt in china it brings money to squash the shouting.
If you redefine your morals to money it works well. Not sure if that's good but it seems it happened.
What is happening there is literally what has led to revolutions in several western countries over the last couple centuries.
The Chinese are correct to be afraid, they have spent the last half century cleansing the concept of freedom from their society and they are terrified of what comes next.
People are going to start dying publicly in HK very soon, and the rest of the world will have to decide which side of history they want to stand on.
The American's needed allies to succeed in their revolution against a much more powerful nation, HK will need allies too.
Exactly, I work on at a popular tourist destination for a lot of Chinese and HK residents.
I have had conversations about this over drinks with quite a few of them and the general consensus is that people will die, and all of them hope to be as far away from it as possible when it happens.
Considering how Trump bowed down before Turkey about the christian Kurd fighters issue(basically abandoning people who were promised aid in exchange for dismantling their border security), I don't think he's going to care about Hong Kong too much
I can't stand the guy either, but his ability to mobilize his base can't be understated.
If it can someone be framed as a choice between the freedoms that Americans have died for and bending over to a totalitarian state I think it would be possible to sway conservatives into opposing these policies.
Do you want to help the people in Hong Kong or just start a war though?
Having China and the US grandstanding will make it a wedge issue and decrease the chances of compromise and a peaceful solution. At some point the parts need to sit down at the table and find a solution they can all present as a win.
This is shaping to be fun tactic in the culture war. To force corporations that want to be seen as woke in the west to bow to China which will hurt their image at home.
If someone manages to do it with Nike it will be fun to watch.
They pulled the 2017 All-Star game from Charlotte over transgender bathroom laws, but bent over for China when a prominent manager spoke out in support of Hong Kong. Utterly spineless.
Not sure why this is downvoted. I think it's great and we may see users deliberately do such things to get companies to ban them, which leads to bigger publicity and awareness at little expense.
In this case, the player sacrificed the prize money and some e-status, but for the publicity it got, it was probably worth it.
Made me laugh when Apple made a big stink about privacy BUT "chose" to headquarter their messaging servers in China under "Chinese oversight" basically compromising every iMessage user in China.This is of course labelled as "compliance"
Privacy and Encryption don't mean much when the government literally controls the servers
I think the part that confused me was the idea of one side in the culture war forcing companies to bow to China, as a tactical manoeuvre. I just can’t see the “unwoke” segments siding with China.
After reading further reply, I understand the idea as this: the "unwoke" side of the culture war sees a company proclaiming to be woke, and to expose them as hypocrites they do something that forces the company to either defy China or to reveal that their woke marketing is full of crap.
You don't get it. It is not woke. That is the fun part. To make them dance morally in the chase of profit. To put them in between the blue checkmarks and the china government and to end pissing off both sides.
Oh, okay. It seems to me like being critical of the Chinese government is popular with both sides of the American political spectrum. Maybe even more so with conservatives!
Yeah, but claiming moral high ground for boycotting Georgia over transgender bathrooms is hard while simultaneously doing business with China with the Uygur and Hong Kong situations.
Agreed! But (in the example of the Georgia boycott) who exactly is going to use the tactic you mentioned of forcing a company to bow to China? In concrete terms, how do you see that playing out?
Not OP. But actors and companies calling for boycott of Georgia for unjust abortion laws are not voicing similar boycotts of China over HK, uyghurs, etc. I try to avoid whataboutism, but it’s hard not to notice how boycotting Georgia has a pretty negligible impact to bottom lines, but boycotting China (or even saying things like “freedom for HK”) results in being cut out of China for films.
I think the reason we don’t see lots of actors talking about HK is that it could mean that if they are in a future film it will be harder to market in China. Producers know this. Actors know producers know this.
Then we have to boycott Hearthstone.
While the current case is neither surprising nor substantially important, it is important because of principle.
Blizzard is not responsible for what players say in interviews. In our society, it still matters that people can tolerate other opinions.
The Chinese government tries to make it a new normal that entire people can have their "feelings hurt" (what?) by mere non-insulting opinions, and it tries to make it a new normal that all actors should censor any undesirable or potentially undesirable opinion.
If that is indeed the way, then our society and the discourse therein is no longer free, and the CCP has won.
We need to keep these firms in our mind. We need to keep a list of when this happens, and we need to sanction this as best as we can. Similarly, anyone standing up to censorship should have our support.
I can be pro HK, or I can be pro China, and I can voice opinions because doing so either way is an equally valid form of free expression. But it can not be that one side gets pre-emptively censored to appease the CCP, or any actor with the power to DEFINE the bar of what is reasonable expression of opinions.
>Blizzard is not responsible for what players say in interviews. In our society, it still matters that people can tolerate other opinions.
I think Blizzard has a legitimate "time and place" argument here. They shouldn't regulate competitors speech across the board but I think it's reasonable to mandate that interviews associated with official events focus on Hearthstone and stay away from controversial topics.
Of course Blizzard really stepped into it by citing the "brings you into public disrepute" rule. That makes them look like their taking China's side. And this is a full on Streisand effect. The banning brought way more attention (at least in the West) than the initial interview did. Few of us would have even known it happened without hte banning.
If they had just kicked him out of the tournament, I'd definitely be on that side of things. I don't want a world where all competitions are full of people yelling about hot-button issues. But banning him for a year is so obviously disproportionate, it's hard to see how it could have happened if not for fear of China.
It more than "looks like" Blizzard is taking China's side. They have outright said that they are in their chinese language statement
> We strongly condemn the player and the casters on what happened in the game last weekend ,and we firmly DISAPPROVE people to state their own political POV in any tournament. The player will be banned from the tournament,and the casters will never be granted the chance to cast any official tournament from now on. Besides,we will firmly PROTECT THE PRIDE OF THE COUNTRY just like what we always do.
(translation taken from another comment on HN, google finds lots of sources with similar translations, including news articles from reputable papers)
>https://truth.bahamut.com.tw/s01/201910/acd1e702747963b5e6d6... I'm a heartstone player from Taiwan. Just here to share information from another aspect. The picture above is the comment from the official hearthstone account on China social website. (the V means verified) translation:We strongly condemn the player and the casters on what happened in the game last weekend ,and we firmly DISAPPROVE people to state their own political POV in any tournament.The player will be banned from the tournament,and the casters will never be granted the chance to cast any official tournament from now on. Besides,we will firmly PROTECT THE PRIDE OF THE COUNTRY just like what we always do.
——
Remember Blizzard is also the company that prominently feature Pride during many Overwatch events on western streams - but didn’t show the same content on Eastern streams.
I’m deleting anything I have of Blizzard-Activision not because it’ll hurt their bottom line, but so I can know I’m doing the right thing for this particular situation.
It seems account deletion is mysteriously unavailable at the moment for me due to 'too many attempts' and now my 2nd factor verification had been blocked :|
EDIT: nm, was on the wrong subdomain. Account removal requested & all my blizzard games gone. I hope they'll ask me why.
> In our society, it still matters that people can tolerate other opinions.
Who is "our" in this? If you mean USA, then are you sure about your claim? Eg: "Guy chooses to kneel on the field because kids were getting shot, guy gets canned.". How is that significantly different than what is happening in this case?
I suspect that few people who dislike Blizzard's response like the NFL's response. They are similar cases, but the first one was punishing an American, only seen by Americans to applease an American audience. The HK issue is punishing someone, seen globally, to appease a foreign audience.
Honestly, you've changed my mind right here about the NFL issue by putting it into this perspective.
I always thought Kaepernick had the right to kneel, but that the NFL had the right to bench the player as well.
I thought the President, being a US citizen, also had the right to be raucous about the issue as many politicians were, as long as it didn't extend into actual executive action.
The reason people in the US might find this action offensive (the reason I do) is because it supports a communist government and I'm sick of US-based MNCs cow-tailing to China instead of taking a principled stand for Western values, but that should include the NFL supporting Kaepernick's right to free expression as well.
Perhaps the same reasoning can extend to so-called "cancel culture" of people getting fired for expressing their private opinions online.
I think it’s a bit different. In this case you’re economically punishing the responsible party - not trying to raise awareness (make a scene).
I can silently stop playing Hearthstone and the effect would be felt. I’m not wasting other people’s time or breaking a contract.
In regards to the kneeling specifically, my impression was it was free publicity to the players. Honestly, looked like they were taking advantage of the situation, a way to get free press for themselves. I know I wasn’t the only person who felt this. That’s likely part of the reason they were canned.
Ah yes, how dare those black players lift their heads up and 'make a scene'. What grifters they are, taking advantage of their blackness to promote themselves.
I agree with your position but it is at odd with the general de-platforming movement. Where banning people from platforms where they can express their opinion seems to be now an acceptable form of political discourse.
That's not what's happening. People are being de-platformed for carrying out or inciting harassment and violence. The only thing that's changed is that we've decided that it's unacceptable to hide behind passive speech when it's obvious to a reasonable observer what you mean to do. E.g., "I heard there might be a fire in this theater!", "My friend says there's a fire in this theater!", "It'd be great if someone yelled 'Fire!' in this theater," might not get you criminally prosecuted, but it's perfectly reasonable for a theater to ban you after the nth time that you've made an alarmist reference to fire on their premises.
Well, sometimes subjectivity is necessary. Our systems of justice are loaded with reasonability and community standards tests, because the ultimate arbiter of right or wrong in cases of harassment or morality often is, "Did it make someone feel bad?". I guess that sucks for the people who don't care about making others feels bad, but having to consider what your actions (speech is an action) might mean for others down the line is generally considered prudent. All that's happened now is that that notion's been given teeth.
Give me a break. When companies censor speech HN likes, it's all about how we have to boycott companies to preserve our society. When it's speech HN doesn't like, it's all about how censorship is actually good and that companies are just "showing people the door" via their freedom of association.
People around here need to make up their minds. If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to do it as a general principle, and that means tolerating speech you don't like too. You don't get to just lean on freedom of speech selectively.
The hypocrisy of supporting corporate censorship against things you like and opposing it against things you don't --- well, it's breathtaking.
> If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to do it as a general principle
Why? I think it's perfectly reasonable to say "Blizzard, you should ban people who make racist statements from your tournaments, but you should allow people whose who voice support for pro-democracy protestors to compete. And if you decide not to do that, I won't watch your tourneys or buy your games."
Are you saying that I am a hypocrite for liking the contents of some speech but not others, and acting on that preference? Note that no one is saying the government should use its monopoly on force to ban speech - we are talking about private action.
> Are you saying that I am a hypocrite for liking the contents of some speech but not others
Not OP, but I believe they are talking about objecting to censorship ostensibly because of freedom of speech, and then not objecting to other censorship.
If you don't believe in freedom of speech then there is no issue, if you do, you can object to the content of someone's speech, but not their right to express it. That is, if you care about not being a hypocrite.
If you believe in some kind of censorship, that's great, we probably agree on a lot. You just can't take that position and believe in freedom of speech. If you believe in freedom of speech you object to the content of speech you find objectionable, not the right to say it.
This is an extremely naive view of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is not unlimited. Your freedom of speech does not supercede my right to not have to constantly put up with your toxic bullshit on my platform.
Your freedom of speech also does not create in me an obligation to give you a megaphone. My freedom of speech, however, gives me the prerogative and the moral duty to take back my megaphone if I find you to be using it to hurt people.
> This is an extremely naive view of freedom of speech.
It's just a definition, I'm not presenting any opinions. The first definition you can find on Google says:
"the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint."
If you are "for" any kind of censorship, even of hateful views, then you can't be also for freedom of speech, by definition.
> ..your toxic bullshit on my platform.
I hope you don't feel I've been 'toxic', I thought we were having a friendly discussion.
> Your freedom of speech also does not create in me an obligation to give you a megaphone.
I didn't say that it did. I didn't say a lot of the things you're commenting on. I just said that if you care about being consistent and not hypocritical, you can't claim to be for certain kinds of censorship and also freedom of speech.
"your" above was hypothetical. I had no intention of referring to you in particular, just "you" as the rhetorical character opposite to "me", because I think inventing whole jew characters and giving them names Alice and Bob style is odious.
I contend that the Google definition you quoted is bad, or at least incomplete. Taking away a loaned megaphone is a type of censorship. It is also a type of speech: you are "saying" that you no longer want to amplify that person's ideas. It is necessarily both.
To be a free speech absolutist is to say that the New York Times must publish every nonsense article every 8 year old sends them, because editorial curation is a kind of censorship.
> To be a free speech absolutist is to say that the New York Times must publish every nonsense article every 8 year old sends them, because editorial curation is a kind of censorship.
This is a straw man argument and not what it means at all. I feel like we've found where we diverge though. I'm using the American definition of freedom of speech, it's true that other countries may have similar rights that are defined differently and with restrictions. In my view though, the definition includes the words "all" or "any" and precludes restrictions. You either have the right and are able to express 'any' ideas or you don't have it.
You've created a false dichotomy between an absolute right to free speech and absolute disregard for free speech.
There's a third possibility, which is to believe that freedom of speech is an important right, but not an absolute right that trumps all others.
One version of this belief says that freedom of speech is useful to society because it allows dissenting views to be resolved through debate rather than violent conflict. It would be reasonable to argue that speech that incites or promotes violent conflict doesn't qualify for protection on these grounds.
Another version of this belief says that freedom of speech is just, because society should only intrude on an individual's freedom (e.g. by preventing them from speaking) when the exercise of that freedom threatens another individual's freedom. Again, speech that incites or promotes intruding on other people's freedom, to an extent greater than the intrusion caused by preventing the speech, could reasonably be excluded from protection on these grounds.
It's obvious how either of these beliefs about free speech would be compatible with censoring speech that promotes violence or the overthrow of democracy, while at the same time being compatible with objecting to the censorship of other speech.
But here's where it gets interesting for me. From the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, the demonstrators in Hong Kong are threatening the stability of a society that within living memory has seen periods of instability that killed millions. From their point of view, the demonstrators are acting violently and putting millions of lives at risk.
I wouldn't personally argue that speaking out in favour of the demonstrators is promoting violence. But the line is less clear than I'd like.
"the right of people to express their opinions publicly without governmental interference, subject to the laws against libel, incitement to violence or rebellion, etc."
> If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to do it as a general principle, and that means tolerating speech you don't like too.
Sorry, but I don't see a world where supporting open, self-proclaimed Nazis is the same as supporting advocacy for democracy.
I can believe that we should drown out the Nazis and amplify the voice of democracy. That doesn't make me a hypocrite. That makes me someone with an ethos.
- 2009 Red Dawn remake originally filmed to use China as the invaders but was edited to use North Korea afterwards [0]
- Apparently the same thing was done for the 2011 game Homefront [0]
This is a tangent, but the "Red Dawn" example is kind of amusing to me because in 2009, a China-is-the-new-Cold-War-Russia film seems patently offensive to Chinese and Chinese-Americans, even without Chinese government political pressure. That the filmmakers belatedly switched the villains to North Korea is kind of offensive to me as an Asian, since it seems to reveal a thought process of "let's just make any Asians the villains".
In 1984, Russia as the villains makes sense since we were several decades into the Cold War at that point. Putting aside the fact that they are hugely valuable trade allies, we have never been at war with China, or (at least in 2009) been involved in any kind of proxy conflict along the scale of Afghanistan and Vietnam. Making China the new Russia is as off-putting as making Mexico the villains of a "Red Dawn" remake.
If the rationale is: "Well, only China makes sense because they're the only rival superpower left". That still leaves unanswered the obvious question of: why do we need this kind of military occupation fantasy at all? Or, if realism truly is a concern, and the filmmaker's artistic passion for the military occupation genre, then why not remake it with the U.S. as the invading superpower, and the hero resistance being, well, just about any other country (doesn't even have to be Middle Eastern)?
The cynical answer to the latter question, of course, is that such a movie would be so denounced by American public figures (political and non-political) that the studio/fillmaker would be effectively blacklisted from mainstream U.S. business. Much like releasing a "China is the Bad Others!" film would be if you wanted mainstream Chinese patronage.
”We’re strongly dissatisfied and oppose Adam Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right to freedom of expression,” CCTV said in a statement. “We believe that any remarks that challenge national sovereignty and social stability are not within the scope of freedom of speech.”
Chinese state television clearly stating that the organization (and government that manages it) does not hold to the principles China agreed to when they voted in favor of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which reads:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
There's also South Park being banned in China because of an episode that depicted the way everyone tries to please the Chinese government. Oh the irony.
According to random people online that speak Mandarin, the statement the NBA released on Chinese social media was DRASTICALLY different from their English statement. Paraphrasing slightly, the English statement was along the lines of "we're sorry if he hurt your feelings". The Mandarin one was more like "we're sorry that these wrong and despicable statements were made".
Would "having links to the chinese government" make the cut for this list? because if so, you can add Tencent, and by extension Epic games, Reddit and Riot games.
Seems kind of nuts that a country with such a drastically different governance and economic model is allowed to exert (effectively direct) control over so many companies. Seems like a glaring weakness.
> Then we have to boycott Hearthstone. While the current case is neither surprising nor substantially important, it is important because of principle.
Boycott the Hearthstone pro players/streamers.
Blizzard won't notice the money from a couple hundred people going away. The streamers/pros on the other hand will most certainly notice even a couple of people going away and will leave Hearthstone to rot.
Once the pros leave Hearthstone for another game, Hearthstone will die. THAT will get Blizzard's attention.
There are non-Blizzard alternatives to most (if not all) of Blizzard's offerings. Magic: The Gathering Online instead of Hearthstone. League of Legends or other MOBAs instead of Overwatch. SW:TOR, Shroud of the Avatar, or even Destiny to scratch the MMO itch.
The first thing I did when hearing this news is look into how I could delete my Hearthsone account. This sets such a dangerous precedent if Blizzard gets away with no consequences.
1. Chinese government didn't involve this. It's pure Blizzard's behavior.
2. As you said, you can boycott Hearthstone or Blizzard as the consequence of their actions
3. Meanwhile, Chinese players can also boycott them as well as the consequence of Blizzard's ignorance
4. So at the end, it's Blizzard's decision based on their interest
The idea of "cancel culture" is generally surrounding boycotting people for opinions unrelated to what they are doing. Blizzard suspending the Hearthstone player could be considered "cancel culture," although I don't really think it fits super well, but boycotting Blizzard is protesting a specific action that happened recently, not an irrelevant opinion or statement they have apologized for. It is standing up for the ideals of free speech, not shutting them down.
>tries to make it a new normal that entire people can have their "feelings hurt" (what?) by mere non-insulting opinions, and it tries to make it a new normal that all actors should censor any undesirable or potentially undesirable opinion.
No, very simply they are protesting censorship, which is the opposite of what you're implying.
You are saying that boycotting is itself censorship- no, it is a tool, that can be used by many people, with many POVs, and like most tools it can be used as a weapon either in defense of liberty or against it.
> "a new normal that entire people can have their "feelings hurt" (what?) by mere non-insulting opinions, and it tries to make it a new normal that all actors should censor any undesirable or potentially undesirable opinion"
Umm... yeah... but... oh boy... okay look, I AGREE with your ultimate conclusion here. But I think you might need a new rubric which with to argue it. Because as-written, this calls to mind half of all social interaction within United States culture today.
To differentiate these things, you have to tap dance around the "non-insulting opinions" qualifier. Which is kind of a mess, because we've largely coalesced around the idea that insult should be determined by the insulted.
I do think there's a great (and obvious) point here. I'd love to see it phrased differently, because that might be helpful more broadly.
> we've largely coalesced around the idea that insult should be defined by the insulted.
I know that is not an opinion I share. I suspect it is not one many people share at all. I think it's just the one of a vocal minority on the far left.
Ideas have a place in the open. If they're going to die somewhere, it needs to be in public discourse.
> I think it's just the one of a vocal minority on the far left.
I think you might be allowing your bias to zero in on one particular group here. Outrage politics is everyone's tool these days, not just one "side" (if you insist on picking sides).
I don't consider myself to be on either side, but a counterpoint for you to consider: "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "pry my guns from my cold dead hands"..
These are examples of using ideological offence to an idea or concept as a way to shut down discourse.
> I don't consider myself to be on either side, but a counterpoint for you to consider: "if you're not with us, you're against us", or "pry my guns from my cold dead hands"
You’re mixing up two different things. There’s a difference between shutting down discourse, and expressing an unwillingness to compromise. The two examples you give are the latter. There is nothing wrong with being unwilling to compromise, and expressing that in an emotional way (e.g. the Resist movement).
Is it a bias? I definitely intended to zero in. My bubble is a bunch of podcasts and NYMag articles in which I'm told that the people wanting to shut down speech are doing so to protect ourselves from hateful speech at the expense of expression, discussion, and dissent.
If that is everyone's tool then can we agree that my calling out of one group was bad, but that the sentiment against the idea is correct?
I think you mean "side" as political party or ideology in a way that I don't hold, unless you actually mean siding with "insults should be defined by the insulted" versus "not necessarily."
Can you elaborate on your examples and how they counter something that I claimed? I read both as examples of rhetoric that are best countered by continued discourse and not the false dichotomy presented:
1) you are either permanently an opponent or will accept my idea
2) you are required to engage in violence with me to resolve our difference
I can't find the original comment so some of the context is missing (I can find my comment, though).
It happened during an event sponsored by Blizzard. Player may have their opinions but they are paid (through prizes) and broadcast by Blizzard. It means that Blizzard gets to set the rules about what can be said. And in case it wasn't obvious, it is explicitly stated in the competition rules.
There is a difference between tolerating Blitzchung's opinions and letting him hijack an interview to make a political statement that has nothing to do with Hearthstone. I mean, he appeared wearing goggles and a gas mask, and the first (an only) thing he said was "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times" in a post-game interview.
I disagree but don't think you should be downvoted.
I wouldn't say it is explicitly stated in the rules – the rule they cite prohibits "Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image."
Which is basically a catch-all for, if we decide we don't like it, we can prohibit it.
Doubt that would be justiciable in most countries, other wise you could sack a Premier league player because they supported a particular political party.
Gaming companies cant set up pro leagues and treat players as if it was still football in the 1950's
UK, 2018: Pep Guardiola has been fined £20,000 by the Football Association (FA) [..] after wearing a yellow ribbon supporting political prisoners in his native Catalonia.
The NFL suspended Colin Kaepernick for kneeling during the national anthem. That's mild compared hijacking a speech with a gasmask and calling for revolution.
Kaepernick was not suspended by the NFL at any point during the anthem protests. Neither was he fined. There is nothing in the NFL rulebook about what you should do during the anthem.
Kaepernick suspects that his activism is the reason no team has signed him since he became a free agent. And he may be right. But he was not fired, suspended, or in any way punished officially for what he did.
Fair enough. I don't really follow football. I still think that he would have been suspended if he put on a black panther beret and called for a revolution.
> There is a difference between tolerating Blitzchung's opinions and letting him hijack an interview to make a political statement that has nothing to do with Hearthstone. I mean, he appeared wearing goggles and a gas mask, and the first (an only) thing he said was "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times" in a post-game interview.
Wow, that is really offensive. I can see why they would ban him for a year for saying such horrible things.
Look I understand that we need to have free expression and free speech. Absolutely. But a business wants to protect itself from negative political reputation. If the gamer was talking about say LGBT rights, and his opinions were considered against the current acceptable position on the matter, and then he was banned, I am sure everyone would have applauded blizzard.
Let us not put burden of being politically correct on free market corporations.
> Let us not put burden of being politically correct on free market corporations.
Isn't that what blizz just did? They were worried about political correctness so they banned someone?
> his opinions were considered against the current acceptable position on the matter, and then he was banned, I am sure everyone would have applauded blizzard.
Supporting HK protests is very different from falsely claiming that the hiring bar was lowered for women (it said this in the doc, I know enough people at Google who participate in hiring committee to know that it was a false statement).
Fair enough. I could have used a different example. Though might be worth a thought experiment might be worth considering if people would in fact confirm they treated women differently in hiring process.
Yeah, it's a tricky situation. This could be dismissed with the phrase "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" that gets bandied about when certain people get deplatformed.
By going after Blizzard for suspending this guy for his speech, you're saying that you care more about the targets than the action. That certain actions are ok as long as we're hurting the right people.
So that's what they actually have to defend. They can't hide behind "free speech" now that it's speech they support. They have to make the case as to why this speech should get a pass while other speech should not.
FWIW worth, I have limited knowledge of gaming communities. Most of my concern have been with behavior of twitter when it comes to policing content, specially anti-Islam content which violates blasphemy laws in certain countries like Pakistan. For long time I was of the opinion that twitter is wrong in the way it bans people or removes content which violates these laws. And that twitter should stop operating in those countries instead. Since then I have changed my views about this. I think twitter as a company has every right to operate where ever it pleases and if it means adhering to local laws, so be it.
There rule specifies that offensive speech is something that is not allowed. I assumed that same rule will apply to all kinds of offensive speech, including the hong kong related comment. I, for one, dont want people to use platform likes those to spew say homophobic comments. If that means they have deal with all such comments which may be deemed offensive have to be banned, so be it.
I have made similar set of argument, but against a religion. That an archaic religious dogma is winning over 21st century progressive principles. I got shut and banned for displaying something-phobia.
Not sure if you're talking about here or somewhere Blizzardy, but as far as here goes: you're right—religious flamewar isn't allowed, you've posted such comments before, and we ban accounts that do that. Comments like these, which users correctly flagged, would probably have gotten you banned here if we had seen them:
I hope that what people see is that we've been in a cultural war with China for 20+ years. Now that the Chinese market is big enough, Western companies are dropping any standards they have to keep access to the market.
Individual companies are not going to fight this war.
I don't like Trump as much as anyone, but when Trump adds some tariff on Chinese goods everyone goes batshit insane in the US. The Chinese government almost every day shuts some company or product off from access to the Chinese market for not doing something they say. But until the Hong Kong protests, it seems like no one cared. I hope now that it's LITERALLY, blantantly, and obviously about freedoms and human rights -- it's enough to get people to care. China should lose access to the WTO if it forces any company anywhere (including in China) to censor anything in order to gain or keep access to its market. End of discussion.
Boycotts usually don't achieve anything (historically most boycotts have had no effect whatsoever), so it's hardly going to be a good solution in the short term. Legal action (if possible, but I doubt so since a private corporation can basically do what they want according to their rules) would be better. The best would be to simply throw a continuous torrent of tweets, videos and articles to ridicule Blizzard and Hearthstone and its parent company as long as possible. Public shaming tends to bring more valid results.
You not giving them money wont hit their bottomline. However, you blaming them online and amplifying other people doing so is more likely to make them feel bad about it.
i wish people would stop trotting out this cynical nonsense: it's the same tired argument that people use about why they don't vote (because "it doesn't matter").
it does matter. it might not matter very much, but it does matter. it changes the amount of money the company receives. that cannot be argued against.
more importantly, it also empowers others who may be open to the idea to do the same. it can spread the idea that "hey, yeah, i don't need to patronize this company". if enough people do this, change can be enacted. see loot boxes, or consuming less junk, or .....
if however this cynicism causes people to stay home on election day, or do nothing in their lives bc everything is inevitably status quo, or keep patronizing companies like this, then nothing will ever change.
so please keep this factual inaccuracy out of discussions like these: it's not productive and demonstrably false, and arguably harmful to contributing to "wokeness" generally.
This one cuts across partisan lines- and in fact conservatives/libertarians are more likely to be affected by corporate censorship nowadays, and more than happy to push back on obvious over-reach/kowtowing like this.
Maybe we can force companies to divest from Tencent now like we made Grindr divest? Seems like a bad idea to let foreign state-companies own large swaths of your economy.
A few months ago we were talking about Facebook and Twitter censoring bigots, and a lot of people responded that it's fine when a corporation does it on their own platform--they own the platform and can do what they want with it.
My position was that when corporate platforms are such an important part of our communications, protecting free speech on those platforms remains important even though they're corporately owned[1]. It's easy to be pro-censorship when you agree with the censors, but corporations are amoral and if we set the standard that censorship doesn't matter, there's no guarantee that they'll only censor the way we want them to.
[1] I'd further argue that we shouldn't give up so much of our communication to corporately-owned platforms for this reason, but that's a separate discussion.
We're increasingly at the mercy of private companies for what used to be considered civil liberties.
I'm sure I'll get someone arguing about private v.s. public oppression, but at the end of the day being a professional video game player in someone's walled garden is no less of a specialized or acquired skill than say being an expert cabinet maker.
So we're increasingly ending up in situations where people's hobbies or professions exist at the whimsical pleasure of private corporations.
If this guy talked shit about a foreign government 50 years ago and liked to play football as a hobby, and was a skilled cabinet maker that government couldn't pressure a private company to ban him from all football pitches worldwide, or exile him from cabinet making.
The answer isn't to boycott Blizzard, that's raging against the smallest cog in the machine. The answer is to eliminate these power relationships with a concerted effort of moving to free & open source software, and at the federated services when something needs to be hosted centrally.
Hence the analogy to cabinet making v.s. all of carpentry, he's been banned from something he's heavily specialized in.
But I think that misses the point, 20 years ago nobody would have been able to ban anyone from Quake III, because running the servers was distributed, today you have major game companies like Sony, Microsoft etc. that can ban you from entire game ecosystems.
In another 20 the whimsy of one company might be enough to ban you from all of gaming for all practical purposes.
You don't have to forgo any rights. I'm not saying a mob should get between you and a customer, but that customers should be more picky about who they deal with.
A lot of people in this thread are calling for a boycott of Blizzard, I'm pointing out that this isn't a productive way to solve the problem at large while those people continue to subject themselves to the whims of other companies.
The only problem is China is too big to care. Streisand effect only affects those people where a spotlight from a small percent of the internet heavily affects them
I assume Blizzard were under pressure from China, as why else would they do this. So if this assumption is true they were cornered in they had to 'offend' someone and felt China has a longer memory than the rest of their market + China would likely ban their games whereas how many ROW people will do this?
From a pure business decision it seems to make sense as the lesser of 2 evils.
I was also mostly referring to potential bad effect on Blizzard.
However, I would find it funny if the whole episode made some of your "average" Blizzard-gamer care about China and HK.
(Emphasis on the "average" here: I obviously have no data, but I suspect that the average Blizzard-game player is a young teenage boy who's spending too much time playing with friends to be passionate about international Asian politics. Again, using an hyperbole here. I know you exist, DoTA-geopolitics-nerds.)
Yeah. China won't ultimately care whatever we do, but Blizzard can me made to feel it. Their own annual gaming convention is coming up in less than a month, and hopefully this will backfire on them badly.
To quote South Park, "You gotta lower your ideals of freedom if you want to suck on the warm teat of China."
The saddest part about this is that Blizzard simultaneous says that it supports people's rights to express their individual thoughts and opinions while disqualifying and banning a player for doing exactly that. It's corporate doublespeak. I would have more respect for them if they were simply honest and said that they (clearly) don't support the expression of thoughts and opinions which may lead to loss of business in China. That would actually be a consistent position. They can't have it both ways.
An aside: Blizzard has been fighting harder and harder to control the esports that revolve around its games. Now that it is succeeding in centralizing things as it hoped, it is using its power to destroy careers and impose political censorship literally for the Chinese government.
Can we get the top leaders in tech to say something about the situation in Hong Kong? I feel like with enough public pressure, this should be doable. For instance, have Paul Graham or any of the YC partners expressed any support for democracy and freedom in HK?
Not at all the same though. If I release software specifically for a national market, I adapt to the local law of that nation. In this case, the software is WoW, and the country is China. It could have been Wolfenstein and the country being Germany. It could have been a nipple in a game, and the country being USA. We don't notice such.
However, in this case, we're at an Asian (not Chinese) esports event where one should be free to express their opinion. It is not as if we don't see skeleton cosplay on esport events being banned, or that Germany demands Wolfenstein esports events (?) don't contain blood and Nazi paraphernalia. It is not as if the USA complains about a nipple on TwitchCon in Amsterdam. This is about a country applying censorship beyond their jurisdiction.
Nothing wrong with that. You might laugh at skeletons being where they choose to draw the line, but we have rules as well about what can happen in a video game. There are no kids in Grand Theft Auto for a reason.
Also, Blizzard only removed them from the game in china
What would be more disturbing is if they had to rewrite some orc-politics story so it wouldn't offend chinese sensibilities, and US consumers got the rewritten version as well.
The movie Red Dawn(2012) was a remake of a 1984 action film where a communist army invades the US. They updated the invader from the USSR to China, come to "repossess" the US after we defaulted on national debt. This offended the chinese, so the producers had to spend $1M editing every reference to china in the film and making it a North Korean invasion instead. This was the version US consumers were sold.
China is successfully extending their censorship regime to US companies who are gladly accepting it. All because 50 years ago pro-business deregulationism got us $50 million CEO bonuses, $100 TVs, and gladly turned China into a superpower.
With the risk of being flagged I may say that Blizzard did the right thing BUT ONLY if the interview was a an official post-match interview. Otherwise they did wrong, since they cannot force people into not telling whatever they want by any other mean.
I think it is the right thing to do in order to avoid future sociopolitical references in official post-match interviews: imagine someone saying 'power to the whites' or whatever in an live Blizzard interview. Like it or not, if you urge to call this move "censorship" you (and Blizzard) would have to tolerate slurs like that.
Sort of agree, but I’ll add that the constraints need to be clearer too. I’m sure pro athletes have contracts that mention what they can and cannot say in the league TV interviews when it comes to political or commercial messages for example. This just had a vague catch all formulation.
Also: Blizzard should stand up for liberal democracy. It’s as simple as that. One can’t treat all political messages the same.
From the blog post: "players ... must abide by the official competition rules."
They have a set of rules to follow. I don't know how much clear these are.
>> Blizzard should stand up for liberal democracy
Blizzard sells videogames and hosts a tournament. Liberal democracy is a moral philosophy, point of view, preference that goes well with you and others, but many may not agree. It's a right to not agree to the same idea.
And of course is not up to Blizzard to choose which philosophy is right or wrong. It's like the old bar rule: "no religion, no politics".
Disclaimer: I am not in favor of China or dictatorships or against democracy.
These were my opinions, which extend basically to this: Hold companies to higher standards than merely "maximizing profits while following laws". I completely expect companies to take a stand either for or against the protesters in Hong Kong even though all they really want to do is sell computer games in the West, Hong Kong and China and no one asks them what they think. It's an impossible luxury to (as incidents such as this shows) to think it's possible to choose "no politics". There simply is no "no politics" option in business.
I think it's also important for Blizzard to be consistent with their bans. Eg, if a player makes a comment about how much he/she supports American trade policy I would expect them to give out the same level of punishment.
Blizzard doesn't want to take ownership of their problem. If you're serving a country that doesn't have free speech, you need to limit what information is transmitted to that country. Just like any other tech company that has done major business in China...
Rather than just censoring information that's transmitted to China's citizens, they are moving the censorship worldwide. I personally cannot support a company who's goes this route rather than the former.
I know it's long, protracted, painful for consumers and companies alike, but I think if we get one good thing out of our current China trade war and economic de-integration -- and this is a big thing -- it is corporate and media independence from PRC pressure.
The PRC exerts pressure on every corporate and media entity which wants access to the Chinese market, and it's amazingly subtle and effective propaganda. In movies, this means a lot of small things that the average consumer doesn't even notice anymore:
- Most blockbuster action movies have a China scene. The China scene invariably shows glistening skyscrapers, futuristic technology, and effective allies.
- You want to film in China? You don't have Chinese antagonists. Use North Koreans. Use Russians. Or some other anonymous / fake country.
Much less criticize the actual government? Hah, good joke.
Now, if average, non-Hollywood companies are self-censoring users to stay in the Chinese market, it's time to cut the umbilical cord. It's going to hurt, but at least we'll come out of it with free expression and companies who simply have to follow the rule of law. Not the rule of subtle pressure and self-censorship to help a foreign government's propaganda campaign.
Speaking of forcing companies into doing whatever a national government sees as its political policy ...
How about the US forcing other companies (Huawei) into not doing business with countries it doesn't like (Iran) and attempting to extradite foreign individuals (CFO of Huawei) to advance that aim.
I'm not saying what CCP is doing is correct but the US has been doing the same shit for decades. Governments have always used companies as pawns for political purpose.
That makes me wonder whether they'd nowadays act on the "Bolvar died for our sins" [1] meme from BlizzCon 2015 (for those who aren't familiar with the WoW universe: Bolvar is one of the heroes of a WoW expansion, as he sacrificed himself for the world ie. he is a martyr).
Is Twitter's Worldwide Trends not just based on tweet frequency anymore? I went to Twitter to see if people are talking about this outside Reddit and HN and my trends is filled with unrelated topics. The Blizzard one was at 13th position with more tweets than the topics above it. https://imgur.com/a/Ymb9D04
If they ever setup an automated global power reach that allows them to censor people anywhere imagine what they could use that for if it ever came to an actual armed conflict or some orchestrated attack on another country.
They could stop people from warning us or confirming afterwards that they were even involved. Hell, imagine what a government could use this for when going to war against it’s own people? Yes, hell.
The US needs to get serious here. We are in a battle for the future, make no mistake. We need to back our companies up when they promote our ideals and reprimand them when they bend to the will of enemy actors - CCP in specific.
CCP is an enemy actor and should be treated as such. Their ideals are no more valid than ours. So by default all should be given an equal footing. What happened here is not that.
The USSR was very explicit about spreading communism and destroying the west. China has been vague about what they want, which is why you have the current culture wars over China's influence in the west and what it all means. It's a much harder to get in the mood to fight someone when they're not right up in your face with a gun.
It's funny how Western companies talk about diversity, inclusion, and all of these democratic values. Then the minute a rich totalitarian regime complains, all of those concerns go out the window because $$$. Hypocrites.
I get it, if you don't cozy up to China, they'll just ban you and rip your product off. Seems like that's preferable to spinelessness.
Blizzard is 100% fine with their games having a political message when they think it gives them free brownie points (announcing various characters as being explicitly gay), but are complete total cowards when it might cost them something.
The whole point is that it is considered as political in quite a few countries. (and even where it isn't, it is considered as such by quite some people)
(yes, this might change in the future, but we're talking about today)
No, being gay itself is not a political decision, but making a big deal about how progressive you are as a company because your game has gay characters is very much a political statement.
I am completely unaware of blizzard tooting their own horn for being progressive about having a gay character.
Undoubtedly they’ve used gay and lesbian characters in marketing, but marketing towards gay and lesbian people is, again, not a political statement in and of itself.
Think of them as widget-collecting aliens who understand nothing about humans but are told that by putting a rainbow on a trinket they can collect more widgets.
There is nothing political about it, it’s just a function of maximised self interest.
Huh. You have a very different definition of politics than I do. I'd even say that insincerely aligning yourself with a political group is even more of a "doing politics" move than sincerely doing so.
Somehow I am sure if he protested against US government, or climate change, or plastic straws, or patriarchy, or use of wrong pronouns, or anything else we've seen protested against by celebrities lately, Blizzard would probably celebrate it and publish a press release about how brave he (and by extension, they) are.
The cowardice and hypocrisy of US corporations, especially on the background of them pretending to uphold higher values, is astonishing. Good thing it's being revealed so clearly and overwhelmingly. They only understand money - so whoever ever paid them money or intends to - should take note.
Well if people can get hurt because they see a nipple of course a grown up person can also get upset about some rando on the internet having an opinion on Hong Kong. Both things make equal sense to me at least.
> While we stand by one’s right to express individual thoughts and opinions, players and other participants that elect to participate in our esports competitions must abide by the official competition rules.
Democracy is more important than Hearthstone - there are a ton of games to play and a ton of developers that have the ability to show a spine (which public companies may be mechanically missing).
Blizzards statement about having an “investigation” into a “ rule” violation is very disingenuous. The rule is just they can ban anyone at their sole discretion that hurts their image.
>You can't use someone's event as a platform to express your political views when their terms forbid it
Their terms are a generic, vague catch all yo allow them to punish you for saying anything they don't like. There's nothing "explicit" about them.
And who cares really? The issue at hand is whether or not we, many of us Blizzard customers, feel that they have exercised their power in a just and defensible manner. Saying "welp they're a business and it's their platform!" is just a cop out. You're skirting the issue at hand and completely ignoring the ramifications of continual kowtowing to oppressive governments in ways which help them to further oppress.
The question isn't whether or not they _can_, it's whether or not they _should_.
One difference between and autocratic government and a democracy is the speed at which decisions can be made, and that’s what Blizzard, Apple, and the NBA are up against when having to choose who to appease.
The Chinese government can unilaterally shut them down while people in the U.S. need to organize and lobby and fight to get change, and then when change finally happens, it’s only half-baked.
I’m not saying an autocratic government is better, just making an observation.
Perhaps it's because of the overt nature of it's pressure, but it seems to me that China has definitely reached a level somewhat equal to the US in terms of "soft power". Considering Belt & Road and it's influence over Africa, along with the Europeans not responding to US pressure and accepting Chinese Telecom infrastructure, it definitely seems like a 50/50 balance of soft power going forward.
I play Hearthstone and sometimes I watch Twitch. I once watched two major hearthstone GMs dissing about how tough and weird they're getting treated by Blizzard during tournaments. Every single word that comes out of mouth is carefully evaluated by supervisors and you have to be stand-by like 10 hours ago before the remote event in front of your PC without any reasons.
I don't know how to feel about the protests anymore, but I don't blame companies for trying to not get involved.
I think in tough situations, self-preservation tends to take priority over ideals, so I am not surprised to see a business demonstrate double standards or inconsistencies when they're pulled into a situation that could threaten their well being.
Many people make up a company and one person's actions should not put everyone else under threat because that individual's beliefs is not representative of everyone else working there.
The actions of the competitor could have threatened many people's jobs, families, and lives so you can't blame blizzard for doing what they did.
The underlying problem is the Chinese government and how they black list businesses for not following their draconian policies to do business within the country.
Mentioning a solution like having businesses collectively boycott China just doesn't seem well thought. You can't just walk away from half of your market over personal beliefs, and another company within China would jump for joy at the chance to grab that lost market share.
The point I'm making is I think we should focus on the cause for all of this which is the Chinese gov rather than blaming someone or a company who has a gun pointed at them for acting in their own best interest rather than what is right. We're not the ones being threatened so it's really easy to call people cowards.
It's a sad situation with HK and we should not accept it.
But I can't help but feel that a sports competition may not be the right place for political activism. Especially seeing as the rules states it won't be accepted.
If Blizzard did not suspend him they would jeopardize all of their rules, and I hope they would have done the same if he was shouting something pro-China.
Blizzard clawed back winnings (earnings) and fired the commentators. This is not a measured response to alleged misbehavior. This is the response of a bully, a lunatic, or both.
They do have 5x the population. Obviously not the same purchasing power, but it is quickly growing. I wouldn't be surprised if it was a very significant chunk of their revenue.
As South Park has just demonstrated, Ridicule is a powerful and effective world-wide weapon against the CCP censors. Imagine how much work it must have been to scrub every reference of South Park characters from the entire CCP-controlled internet? And how embarrassing and petty that looks from the outside?
FIFA (The governing body for soccer) issues similar fines and bans for any political messages. ie fined they recently fined English/Scotish FA's 100k for players wearing poppies (a flower) which symbolize fallen soldiers from WW1*.
In both cases while on a base human level it FEELS wrong, if you follow the $$ end of the day the broadcast is the product they're selling to advertisers. Adding any sort of political/divisive messaging could be easily kill those deals - makes sense given the finances. You're attacking their primary income stream, of course they're gonna come at you hard.
The player is not owed any platform by participating in this Blizzard event. If they banned him for comments made on his own social media outside of the event it would be a different story.
To be clear I'm not defending Blizzard, just explaining why most broadcast orgs will react similarly.
It is what it is, until the advertising based model of entertainment changes it'll continue to be this way.
>> Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image...
It says : "Blizzard is a commercial entity and it doesn't want to be involved in anything else than gaming".
For me Blizzard acts in a very corporate way. There's nothing wrong with that, provided you accept the corporate way is the good way.
If you think Blizzard's action is wrong, then just don't abide to their rules.
Blizzard has no moral, it's a commercial entity and it makes whatever compromise needed to expand its commercial activities.
Let's talk about that on the next tournament, just to see how the rules have been updated.
(try to express political opinion inside Disneyworld, just for fun)
I don't say Blizzard has broken any law. It hasn't. I just tried to remind people that Blizzard is a private/corporate entity that will not endorse political debate because it may hurt its commercial value.
I'll add that Blizzard is absolutely right in doing so. Because, it clearly can't be an open space for expressing opinions. That's because its values may be in competition with those opinions. So any opinions expressed inside Blizzard stuff would be "tainted" by Blizzard's nature/control. So Blizzard wouldn't be very good at letting opinion being expressed. So Blizzard's decision actually helps to maintain the expression of opinions in place where it is most efficient : the public places, the parliament, etc.
And yes, that holds for FaceBook, Google, etc. Much of Internet is privately held => expressing public opinions over the web is tricky.
Now, following you reaction, I've checked the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically article 19 :
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."
Which basically says that Blizzard should not oppose the expression of opinion (provided one interprets "media" in a wide way : speech is a medium).
I admit that the more I look into it, the harder it gets...
People seem to be really surprised that capitalism doesn’t equal freedom. Time to wake up. Free world is in decline. Democracies of today are mostly facades to a more-less controlled societies. Sure, people can vote, but what happens after that? The accountability and controlling mechanisms have been in erosion for years now. Even the EU legislation, once a model of democracy, is now so far from the individual citizen that it’s often difficult to understand why Brussels is voting on certain laws.
It used to be that free press kept close tabs on those in power. Well, thanks to the Internet it got very easy to attack the press and very hard for the press to stay profitable. We are heading towards a cliff and hopefully we will create a better system after that. But man, it will hurt to fall.
It's important that we clarify what the word "Democracy" means in our language, and whether to accept or reject the fact that its current use is tragically removed from its original meaning: it used to describe a concept, it's now simply a label with no intrinsinc meaning.
Corporations ARE NOT the government. Corporations have NO obligation to tolerate your hate speech on their platform. Free speech ONLY applies to government.
Cancel culture is becoming universal. Violations of political correctness can cause cancellation of TV shows, loss of jobs, and now banning from video game competitions. It is interesting that these days this is primarily a tool of the left end of the political spectrum even though in the past, book burnings, etc. were seen as a conservative tactic. However, cancel responses are becoming so common that I would not be surprised if conservatives start doing it too, if they haven't already.
At a broader level, this is why I think that "core values" of a corporation in a capitalist system are always, 100% of the time, complete and total bullshit and exist solely to motivate employees to work harder: https://www.blizzard.com/en-us/company/about/mission.html
I have NEVER seen a "core value" that takes precedence over the almighty dollar at the end of the day. It's not a core value if you uphold it only when it also conveniently aligns with making money. The thing that make values, well, values, is that you're willing to uphold them even when (or, more correctly, especially when) it's difficult.
This is such a transparent example of cozying up to an authoritarian regime for profit purposes, I'm really wondering how all the Blizzard employees with Western-style values are reacting to this.
Opposing communist takeover of a free society apparently violates the following:
> Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image
That's why it's only fair we as users uphold the same rules by immediately severing any ties, present and future, with Blizzard. The rules are perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
50 years ago we could have squashed China like a bug. Instead we singlehandedly turned it into a superpower. We needed Trump’s China stance in a normal person five decades ago.
This is why Trump's trade war is the only thing he's done that I support. I'm not even sure he's doing it for the right reasons, but at this point trashing the economic coziness between our nations is a good thing as far as I'm concerned. This can't continue.
And in addition to chilling investment in/from China it's giving India and Vietnam an opportunity to get footholds in manufacturing, weakening the sector that was central to making China such a powerhouse to begin with.
South Park is spot on this season. You could say they are good with predictions, but I think they just gave different perspective to something that already has been happening
(episodes on China censorship)
I guess what I meant - I looked at these issues differently, others probably too.
Apple, Google "selling out" to be in China? Oh well - that seems reasonable since its a big market.
South Park put it into different perspective. I guess that is what art does
China has been leveraging their power "quietly" for some time now. Anything anti-China gets buried or discredited or shouted down using whataboutisms. Even here on hackernews you'll see tons of posts on negative chinese news from month old accounts fuzzing the narrative saying some variation of "it's not easy to understand if you're not chinese etc etc"
The hong kong issue is just bringing the issue into the mainstream
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I've wasted too much time on HN arguing with people who simply don't believe China isn't as bad as portrayed, and believe everything that comes up here or on other sites is nothing but anti-Chinese propaganda.
There are plenty of people who are so jaded that they're unwilling to condemn China for all the immoral things they do, much less economic or political behaviours that aren't overtly immoral, but do have clear negative impact on the Western sphere of influence and economic status.
As bad as the US is, I don't want a country run by such an authoritarian, ruthless government like the CCP to take over the position as the world's superpower.
>but do have clear negative impact on the Western sphere of influence and economic status.
And this is such a problem that you think the US should take actions to try and overthrow their government? Even considering how terribly most US regime changes damage a country, and the horrible civil wars that have accompanied the previous Chinese collapses?
>As bad as the US is, I don't want a country run by such an authoritarian, ruthless government like the CCP to take over the position as the world's superpower
I'm not thrilled at the prospect of a Chinese super power either. However, I also view the US as a rather terrible superpower, and unlike in China I have some amount of agency to change that.
> And this is such a problem that you think the US should take actions to try and overthrow their government?
I didn't say that. Judging by the successes of forced regime changes in recent history, I'd say there's little actual practical value in doing so. I'm a pragmatist as much as I am an idealist. There are other options to counterbalance China's growing influence and power. The TPP was the most obvious option, but the US scuttled it and abandoned all the Asian countries who were relying on them to protect them from encroaching Chinese pressure.
> I'm not thrilled at the prospect of a Chinese super power either. However, I also view the US as a rather terrible superpower, and unlike in China I have some amount of agency to change that.
Believe me. I'd like nothing more than for the US to gain even a tiny fraction of the moral values and character that they traditionally pretended to have. Still, I prefer a world order where the US is in charge. As abhorrent as they may be, they're the lesser evil here. Unfortunately, Trump and the Republican party are eroding what little faith (and it's miniscule at this point) I have in the US ... if there were any other, better option, I'd be really fucking happy.
For many people worldwide, the difference is that China is not bombing them, isn't overthrowing their governments and creating & fueling a civil war in their country.
I'm quite certain that China will do those things if they ever become the world's single global super power, but so far they haven't. Not because they wouldn't for moral reasons, but for lack of opportunity. Still, in practice, the worst China is doing to other countries somewhere across the world is blocking some website or creating tariffs, not level a city.
Is that true? Seems they are doing a lot in Africa. And even if it were, it's hard to believe they'll treat foreigners any better than their own people.
They are buying Africa via development aid, that's quite different from bombing Africa. The Chinese will certainly leverage their power, but they tend to do it in more subtle ways, at least where their power isn't overwhelming. Their posturing in the South China Sea certainly looks different from their behavior in Africa or South America. But as I mentioned, I don't believe that it's because they care about human rights, the sovereignty of countries etc, it's that they can't get away with openly bombing random countries on the other side of the globe yet. The US -for the most part- can, so they don't care for subtlety and just do.
American imperialism has never been about traditional colonialism, so I'm not sure what you mean.
As you asked originally, I find neither the US nor China to be moral, but I can't understand the outrage over China's acts while ignoring and trying to justify US acts.
Sure it depends on what manner, but what is wrong with a regime change? I am sure there are plenty of Falun Gong, Muslims and Christians who would not mind a freer government. I think only US business would mind because they would not have such easy access to cheap labor and electrical and human parts.
Yes I agree. Revolution is not the way. That's how China for into the current mess. But I see no problem with assisting with regime change from within.
So you want to replace Xi with some other member of the Politburo? Pulling that off seems unlikely to help much, and failure would strengthen his position.
I don't know any other internal regime change that isn't a revolution.
I think the biggest is from the rest of the world. We are complicit because we happily buy goods from such a horrible regime. We need an international boycott on China until they shape up.
Ideological. Communism and human rights violation are seen as acceptable due to a specific worldview. Demonstrating the error with the worldview can change people's minds and lead to internal regime change.
>. We need an international boycott on China until they shape up.
Right, so you want to economically cripple China over human rights abuses. Not only is this likely to end in war, millions would likely die from supply shortages.
>Demonstrating the error with the worldview can change people's minds and lead to internal regime change
The capitalist societies banding together to starve China out is unlikely to convert them to your side. It didn't the last time we tried.
Ah, yes. We should continue the status quo, where China continues to perpetuate human rights abuses, as well as utilizing their economic power to influence and control international companies.
Probably there's a bit of a continuum here between starving China and not batting an eye as they scoop the living eyes out of some poor Falun Gong after they slice him open and cut out all his organs.
> Anything anti-China gets buried or discredited or shouted down using whataboutisms.
Interesting. The only time I see whataboutism and China/Russia brought up in the same HN thread is when somebody tries to defend China/Russia by pointing out similar problems in the West, and that person gets shouted down and accused of engaging in "whataboutism".
I initially read kkarakk's comment as a reverse of what I wrote, but even if we're talking the same, I personally believe that any and all accusations of whataboutism are just thought-terminating cliches and are invalid from the start.
It's not to defend China/Russia but to prove that the accuser is not interested in the problem itself but only in weaponizing the problem against those countries. Defense is not necessary or actually even possible since the claims are always made without any evidence.
Exactly. Someone responding to something shitty one person does by pointing out something someone else did is attempting to “shout down” the original comment with whataboutisms.
South Park were the sellouts that paved the way for all of this.... but around 8 years ago they decided that money was more important than their principles... And here we are.
> money was more important than their principles
BTW that's really been the core principle. The US citizens lost their game of chicken with the govt.
That user has no other comments. Their punctuation and wording is odd. Their post contains no substantive info. This whole thread is full of weird whataboutisms. Chinese paid troll army puts Russia's to shame.
American video games? What about American companies that have factories there or other presence there? Hello Apple! Hello Tesla! Hello Google.
Blizzard has been bending over backwards for some time with regards to China but this is the first time I remember them taking action against someone who does not work for them.
the simple matter is, you cannot pick and choose, all the companies must be shamed into not bending to China's censorship because it won't be long before such actions suddenly show in law; not that some of the speech regulations in the EU aren't close as it is with regards to what you can and cannot say with regards to religions
For companies using China for manufacturing it's less visible than entertainment companies like the NBA and Blizzard (to choose the two most recent examples) who are bending to China on censorship so it's natural the big hits would come from those companies actively censoring personalities rather than those just quietly not doing something because of China.
Google Translate, Maps work in China, for example. Google Maps in particular, when viewed within the country, follows ruling party line on where to draw the borders[0], though it is not a practice they apply to China exclusively.
And it brings them absolutely no good really, either in good will or cash, which is a good lesson for others not to take the same stand if the country they hail from doesn't do it as a whole.
Google used to obey China's censorship requests, and was allowed in China. Then Google decided to stop obeying the requests, and China blocked Google.
You're saying that China was happy about that because China wanted Google out anyway and needed an excuse? If China didn't need an excuse, China could have blocked Google from the start. China has blocked things it considers offensive without an explicit action from that party (such as Winnie the Pooh).
If Google was obeying China's censorship, what would China find offensive about Google?
Does China find a similar level of offensiveness in the NBA and Blizzard, such that China is disappointed that they censored themselves and thus China doesn't have an excuse to block them?
If we're going to repeat the same cycle with Vietnam and India, we'd do well to encourage democracy this go-around.
If we elevate authoritarian countries to our level, democracy may be in for a rough future.
We should be learning a lot from the China situation. Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works and that you don't need freedom or liberty for your citizens. And that's incredibly scary.
Imagine if that meme spreads to democratic countries...
We need to be handling this situation with urgency. As bad and as pressing an issue as climate change is, this is much more terrifying.
India actually has a functioning democracy. Many Indian intellectuals are unhappy with their current PM, but plenty of American intellectuals are unhappy with their president, and America will still have an election next year (the point being, the system still works even if your favorite person doesn't get elected, which is stronger evidence of systemic health than the system working when your favorite person does get elected). I have a lot of hope for their future. Vietnam is controlled by a one-party system, but even they are not as bad as China. (They may become as bad as China, but at least it's another roll of the dice, or for the people who live there another chance to act.)
Right to internet access was recently construed as fundamental under articles 21 and 21 A of the constitution of India by Kerala high court but is currently not extended to all “integral parts of India”
> If we're going to repeat the same cycle with Vietnam and India, we'd do well to encourage democracy this go-around.
I don't think the idea is to introduce democracy, because it's cheaper if the people making our consumer goods had less rights. It was like that with the original banana republics, and it's like that now. Sure we the people may want democracy and we may elect people who want to spread democracy (like Obama or Merkel bringing up the topic of human rights in talks with China) but corporations run the world. And we the people prefer having cheap phones and clothes rather than pay the "made in a democratic country" tax.
You bring up climate change, well, maybe the Chinese government was wondering if they could keep up their oppression, but maybe they also think, "well, just 30 more years, and the world's going to end after that anyway."
> "well, just 30 more years, and the world's going to end after that anyway."
I don't think that kind of exaggeration is productive. People have been saying that for decades, and now climate change deniers are using it as evidence for the whole thing being overblown, even though we're already suffering from the effects of climate change and they're getting progressively worse
It's not technically going to be the end of the world, it'll just be a much crappier world for most of the people living on it
I think you're right that people are making a choice to get cheaper goods over promoting democracy. I think we need to make this choice more visible and strongly push companies and individuals to make choices that support democracy.
How intriguing that "we" automatically move the cycle to Vietnam and India. If "we" means USA, why not just move the cycle into the USA. If "we" is Germany or Australia or Norway, why not move the cycle into your own borders?
One obvious reason is cost. Why is it so much cheaper to manufacture in China or Vietnam?
1. Labor costs. Democracy can lead to safer, healthier, more expensive working conditions.
2. Environmental protections. Democracy can lead to safer, healthier, more sustainable, more expensive pollution controls.
If you want to push production out of China and into Malaysia or Vietnam or wherever instead of into your own backyard, I question your real commitment to democracy or human rights.
I am as guilty as anybody else. I want to purchase $2 SOCs and $0.01 resistors for my hobby. I don't buy them from Texas because anything produced in Texas is too expensive. (Read: more expensive than alternatives.) I buy from some place with undrinkable water, unbreathable air, and children missing fingers and eyes. If you show me pictures of those children I might try to pay a tiny bit more (but only a tiny bit) to buy from some place that doesn't yet have reporters taking pictures.
The truth is that I don't know anybody producing MCU in Australia or USA or Norway. I'm not sure it's even possible with the restrictions those governments impose. If it is possible to do it, it is not practical.
If I support a government that makes it that difficult to impossible to manufacture domestically in an irresponsible manner--and I do whole-heartedly support such governments--why am I willing to support manufacturers outside those requirements? Why do I drive misbehavior out of my neighborhood and embrace it in other neighborhoods?
Conversely, if you and I are willing to accept the behavior of manufacturers in Thailand or Laos, shouldn't we allow that same behavior from manufacturers in our own backyards?
I actually think that everybody has had unrealistic expectations about the speed of democratization in China. That doesn't mean that it won't yet happen.
If you look at the recent US-led debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, or even the results of all the Arab Spring protests, I think it's fairly obvious that you can't just take a people with no background and hard-fought experience in governing themselves through elections and say poof, you're good. The west tends to forget this - but you have the legacy of Greece and Rome from thousands of years in the past; The Magna Carta started to limit monarchial authority in England beginning in 1215; The French had not one but a whole series of revolutions from the late 1700's through the 1800's. And yet, in between, there were decades and centuries of backslides into fiefdoms and dictatorships and absolute monarchies; even when progress was made, it was incremental - giving political say first to landed aristocracy and clergy, then men, then women. Human progress almost never goes in a straight line, and sometimes, slow and steady and making sure you build a base of support in the general population for the change you're making can work better than monumental sudden changes the populace may not be ready for (look at the different paths, for instance, the acceptance of gay rights and abortion have taken in the US).
Also, keep in mind that China's growth has really only taken off since the mid-to-late 90's. That's less than one generation. Look at the path that comparable economies in Asia took who developed much earlier. Korea's economic miracle took off in 1960, but it was basically ruled by military dictatorships in all but name until 1987. Taiwan saw it's main burst of economic growth in the 60's and 70's, but it was also ruled as a dictatorship by the KMT since they lost the Chinese Civil War. In fact, the first opposition party was not formed until 1986, and martial law, which had been in effect since 1949, was not lifted until 1987, a year before Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai Shek's son and successor, passed away. Singapore's government all during its economic miracle was famously authoritarian.
China's the most populous countries on this planet. I just tend to think that things like this take time, that in fact, sometimes it works out a little better with a certain base level in the population at large. Also, overwhelming consensus in the foreign policy establishment always seems to be wrong - they were wrong in the 90's about the path and speed that liberalization would occur, and now that everyone concurs that it will never happen....well, I tend to think that they might be wrong there too.
It’s called winning and was the the right call. See bilat deals with Japan and South Korea. And soon with India and the U.K. Oh, don’t forget about USMCA that Congress needs to approve instead of holding back for politics.
> Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works
For some definition of "works". China has recently (2017) became richer than Brazil, what is a feat, but well, Brazil isn't a liberal democratic paradise and whatever democracy we have is very recent.
All the stable democratic countries are much richer than China.
> All the stable democratic countries are much richer than China.
They had a substantial headstart, China is really only about two decades into this, and they're just getting warmed up. If things continue more or less along the same path, and I see little to expect otherwise (China only gets stronger, it's citizens more allegiant) Let's see where they are 10, 20 years from now. Especially now that they are actively exploiting one of the West's biggest Achilles heels: our unique combination of greed + the sense of individual freedom + corporate control of the economy. China is demonstrating how easily they can control Western corporations, and in turn individual people. What percentage of the American public works for a corporation with interests in China? This control may not be that sophisticated yet, but give them some time.
And what plausible recourse do we have?
- Government sanctions? The trade abuses were far more obvious than this, and look what a shitstorm of half-informed but hyper-emotional arguing that turned into.
- Corporations recognizing they are strategically putting themselves into a situation that threatens their long term existence, or, thinking beyond a 5 year window? It seems unlikely.
- Western society collectively recognizing there is a genuine existential threat and banding together to do something about it? We can't even get people on forums to even remotely agree, so seems unlikely.
It's going to take time, but my hunch is this capability will be a big part of China's eventual checkmate on the West. And all executed within a timeframe of < 50 years. History in the making.
You are speculating the phenomenon will go on for long, on a thread about how China is proof that the phenomenon can go on for long. Speculation is not proof.
Indeed I am speculating (honestly, was that not obvious?), as is everyone else. The difference I would say, is that I clearly realize I am speculating. I am making a bold and provocative prediction of future doom for the West, with the naive intention of shocking some people out of their sleepwalk of unconsciousness.
I would argue HN has one of the highest concentrations of informed logical minds in existence, yet go into any thread on HN on any topic of this general nature, and marvel at the inability of people to even remotely agree upon what the facts are that we're dealing with. Now imagine the general public, and our comically theatrical political system, somehow coming up with remotely optimal solutions to deal with the massively complex issues modern existence is forcing upon us (China is but one). If we can't even have reasonable conversations here, I speculate that it will always be far worse in our broad political and social spheres.
The long term risks (risks are always potentials) of the rise of China should have been clear to any logical and informed person for many years, but it's really just the last year or so that this idea has started to creep into the mainstream discussion. Remember how Trump's trade concerns were utterly mocked in the media and on forums like this at the start ("Trump thinks trade is a zero sum game, hahahaha what an idiot!!"), until magically something changed and the media simultaneously all got onto a different page.
We often hear how the American military has numerous scenarios & reactionary plans planned out "just in case", and the typical reaction to that tends to be "but of course, it's only logical". How likely does it seem that no one in past administrations were considering and planning for the possibility that democracy wouldn't magically bloom in China once they became wealthy? And yet, are there any signs that there were, or conversation among the serious political talking heads (whoever that might be)? Is this incompetence, or something else? No one knows, we can only speculate, but we seem to be not even doing that. Too conspiratorial.
I speculate that time is not just ticking, but accelerating. Each day China becomes richer, extends their sphere of influence, moves further up the technology chain, becomes ever more clever at global propaganda and skilled in exploiting the many obvious weaknesses in the Western system, and in Western minds. And they are moving fast, way faster than democracies could hope to even when they are operating at their very maximum efficiency. I speculate that an intelligent (yes, easier said than done, but this idea that only democracies can be successful is a meme, not a fact), authoritarian state will beat out a democracy every time, in the aggregate (which is what matters in such situations). Add in all their other advantages: 4x the population of any other single powerful state, a nearly completely ideologically aligned populace (as compared to our incredibly emotionally polarized populations), media/government/educational/corporate organizations of your "opponents" operating propaganda campaigns (to some degree) in your favor, the eye of the tiger, and so forth and so on.
Honestly, I simply don't see how China loses, short of some sort of unexpected shock to their system. I speculate that modern Western civilization is literally unable to counter this threat, short of military conflict. We would have to fix so many fundamentally broken things in our systems and thinking, and fast, to even hope to be able to compete. That seems incredibly unlikely to me. But hey, this is all speculation, maybe the wildly popular meme-based Pollyanna predictions will actually turn out to be correct after all. I am perfectly happy to consider that possibility. But I suspect very few are willing and able to even consider the possibility that my less optimistic predictions might turn out to be right. Rather, I speculate that the very reading of ideas such as this will provoke a very strong emotional reaction and an immediate, extremely confident mindset that this person is wrong, self-evidently and to such a degree that no counter reasoning is even necessary. This behavior is one of the broken things I refer to, by the way: emotions completely overpowering rationality, very often in even the most rational of Western minds as is the norm here on HN. I speculate that we have largely lost the ability to even think clearly (particularly on topics of a particular kind) at the individual level, let alone at the collective level.
Something could be done about this, and HN in theory seems like one of the better places on the planet to start, but for the above stated reasons I suspect it would be passionately and overwhelmingly opposed. That the genuinely intelligent refuse to think is perhaps the primary reason I see no hope.
No one knows. It's completely possible that China could bring an authoritarian but peaceful utopia. We've certainly had our time in charge and squandered it, I can hardly blame China for not trusting us and wanting to take charge from here on out, through whatever means necessary.
Actually, thinking about it a bit more, I'd bet my money (but of course, pure speculation) that China would continue to take a path of minimizing risk, with little concerns for so-called "human rights". So, the same treatment the Uyghurs are currently getting I expect would eventually be applied to all groups that could be plausibly considered to be non-conforming. Considering the typically independent thinking personality of a lot of Westerners, I expect we would eventually be in for a bit of that ourselves. Whether some old scores are settled (Japan) is another wildcard.
Of course, all of this is not only speculation, but a work in progress - even if I do turn out to be mostly right, it is all subject to a combination of which particular person is running the show in China at the time, the general nature of Chinese culture (including how that changes over time as things progress), as well as whether there are complications in terms of pushback or natural disasters. So....who knows. But a lack of certainty in no way means risk management is a completely pointless exercise...if we'd been doing any for the last 20 years, we needn't have ended up in this current predicament where we hold very few of the cards, and any path we choose almost certainly comes with massive pain.
This Canadian youtuber has some interesting commentary on the matter now and then:
The 2:40 point where he opines on China's approach to the Uyghurs is very interesting. Trigger warning: it is not quite compliant with the "facts of the matter" as dictated to us by all right thinking Western institutions.
I like watching these sorts of opinions on YouTube from people that actually know something about the world, rather than spending all their time in a classroom or TV studio, it shows how silly the "facts" of how we "should behave" are, and how it's just a bunch of largely empty ideology that's been drilled into Western people's heads through several vectors over decades. Chinese people have been subject to propaganda as well, but a completely different kind than us. We've been told ad naseum that all cultures think like us, and want the same things we do, but it simply isn't true. Going into battle for superpower status of the world with a head full of utterly delusional ideas doesn't seem like a winning strategy to me, but then maybe I need some more schooling.
They had a substantial headstart, China is really only about two decades into this, and they're just getting warmed up.
In the 1960s the economy of North Korea was outstripping the South. Cuba seemed also to be doing well. The US was terrified of a “domino effect” where countries would turn communist one by one. That’s one reason it got involved in Vietnam. But look at the North now.
Sure China is doing well right now. But let’s see how they handle boom-bust cycles.
I've wondered about this. Are there sourceable numbers in this? Is it the case that a couple newsworthy departures are giving the impression that everyone's leaving? Or is it the case that these are exceptions in the statistical noise?
These studio's should not stop publishing their games in China. The issue lies that these studio's happily comply with whatever restrictions a govt is willing to oblige due to possibly playerbase loss. Think lootboxes, forbidden skins in regions, exc... exc..
Companies as big as Blizzard should be prepared to lose 5/10/15% of their playerbase to defend free speech, the thing is they do not care about free speech. All these companies care about is revenue.
Lootboxes are one thing. But I doubt an aircraft simulator with a Taiwan Straits scenario would be massively published, or a Wolfenstein set in a Xinjiang reeducation camp.
Would Amazon stop selling 1984 if China asked it to? Hopefully not.
Amazon will not only stop stelling 1984, they will even remote-wipe 1984 from their customer's devices, all you need is a copyright claim.
Jokes aside, I believe they would if China was a large enough market for them. They are complying with local laws, and often that means pulling a product world wide, because they don't want to go through the trouble of making sure it's only unavailable in the US. Since Amazon has never managed to gain traction in China, they likely don't care too much about China's wishes.
Companies either abide by the laws of the countries they operate in or they risk being shut down. Most countries have appeal processes for these kinds of things, but just neglecting to follow a legal order is not something that works for multinationals.
Blind defense of this narrow and immature notion of free speech from Blizzard would have people up on stage shouting racial slurs.
Rather, I think a consistent and humane stance on ethics and human rights abuses would help and address the real issue here.
They have the right to deny people access to their services and nothing they do is essential, but they do and will very obviously grab a lot of negative attention when they cut someone off for supporting the liberation of a group that's being brutalized by a major world power's corrupt police force.
> Blind defense of this narrow and immature notion of free speech from Blizzard would have people up on stage shouting racial slurs.
What narrow and immature notion of free speech? What the player said or what I have said?
Of course a consistent and humane stance on ethics and human right abuses would address the real issue. I do not believe for one second that its own employee's believe in the stance Blizzard has taken.
Will some not care? Of course, it is their right to not care.
Is it feasible to think Blizzard has done risk analysis on the outcome of these events depending on which stance they've taken?
What would they lose by taking a negative stance on the matter (which they have done)?
They've currently created a situation where players of their games, whom aren't even located anywhere close to China have decided to step down from any blizzard game.
What would they gain by taking a positive stance on the matter?
Say the Chinese were to cut them off entirely, revenue loss of 25-30, perhaps 35%?
I understand the decision from a management perspective, I truely do.
I do not understand the decision from a neutral, humane perspective.
Blizzard entertainment does not have roots in China
Blizzard entertainment's main focus is entertainment, fictional entertainment. Can u imagine a game, based on a pseudo-reality where free speech is non-existent? I for one can't..
I'm not sure where I'm going with my reply, I just wanted to write out these few sentences.
I think the person you're replying to was just saying that the CEO would probably be replaced if they prioritized something other than profits, not that it was legally mandated.
Corporations have a strong incentive not to piss off the rest of the world to serve one country. They've been able to get away with it for a while but the demands from China will naturally keep growing and growing (as all censorship does once you give in to it).
The eagerness of companies to completely abandon free speech and differing opinions will eventually have real consequences.
There is no such thing as an American company, if you're an American and you start a business and build it up then decide to retire and sell it off, it isn't guaranteed (and is actually rather unlikely) that all the production and business will stay in the US. People are American - not corporations.
Thanks to the tremendous criminality and wealth concentration of the last 200 years, western corps generally only answered to western wealthy audiences. The game has changed, that's all....
Well, at least you left out the "legally required" part. The board most certainly has a responsibility to shareholders. It can be a long and tiring argument, but from my POV there is only "responsibility" not "fiduciary responsibility". Now, most of the time the shareholders want more money. But AFAICT, there is not a law on the books that says that the board must maximize profits above all else. For instance, and perhaps it's a poor example, but Costco says they will make 15% profit. That's it. You want more money, sell more stuff. Doesn't the board have a "fiduciary responsibility" to bump that to 16% if they can get away with it? Apparently not.
Nearly a billion potential customers can be worth a lot of cash, which can buy all sorts of influence in all sorts of places.
For a struggling game company, it can also mean "winning the game," as it were.
Outside of legal constraint (which is unlikely, since China is a US frenemy given the close international economic ties), it's unlikely we'll see the entertainment industry voluntarily embrace such a boycott anytime soon. Market's simply too big; too much money left on the table.
Most video game companies (and most companies) are not "American, they are "corporate" and have minimal national allegiance and minimal principles beyond "maximize shareholder value". The former is arguably defensible, as national governments are arbitrary borders and susceptible to corruption.
Then US shareholders need to be reminded of the fact that they are moral agents as well as financial ones.
The reality is that while a "shareholder" title means you want dividends from your holdings, that title attaches to a real human being or entity run by human beings, and the moral or immoral consequences of your policy as shareholder DOES affect the world.
It's time for shareholders to put their money where their morals are. And for those who choose to support immoral policies to be called on it.
That could be a big conflict of interest though. What if the intelligent financial decision is not in line with your morals?
I am all for people running away from investing in these companies, but in reality that is a conflicting request of an investor and not something anyone who is focusing on returns will have much patience for or interest in. I just don't think it's going to convince real investors.
Then you've identified the "real investors" who are exactly the class I'm talking about. If money is more important, and the cost to society less important, in their value system, they are as much a part of the problem as the actual perpetrators that they're paying.
A conflict of interest indicates that you have a choice between two goals. Choose money, and you've lost my respect. And business, when it comes down to that.
This is China’s soft power, restricting access to its economy to erode away the freedom of speech. How long before the chilling effect of criticising China start to affect those outside because the corporations depend too much on the Chinese economy for their survival?
There needs to be a law to prevent corporations from enforcing political censorship on behalf of another nation.
I've seen plenty of US business types on LinkedIn who are China fans and seem envious of how well China controls it's populace. In general there is a complete ignoring of the human rights issues. They seem to think that's something that irrelevant, idealistic people care about. In their mind the only people who matter are those with power, and China seems to have loads of power.
This is just asking for a variation of Streisand effect. Now everyone will comment about Hong Kong, whether they care about it or not. And Blizzard will relent eventually, after much gnashing of teeth.
If you want to unpublish a package after 72 hours have passed, contact npm Support. For more information about why we don’t allow users to unpublish packages after 72 hours, see our unpublish policy.
Not sure how npm works in detail, doesn't it pull directly from devs' repositories? In that case can't the devs just publish an update that breaks everything?
npm allows for installation of specific versions. So even if a dev publishes a new version that breaks you can select a previous version known to work. A good dev shouldn’t be updating willy-nilly to the latest version just because it’s the latest. They ought to spec a particular version and update after testing.
China is very smart. They saw what was happening in the West - oppression of freedom of speech on account of "hurt feelings" - and applied the same principles for their own nefarious purposes ("hurt Chinese feelings" a.k.a. political censorship).
> China is co-opting modern liberal censorship in the West to do it's own political censorship
No, it’s using good old greater-pile-of-money diplomacy. SJWs aren’t running around rooting for Xi. This is a company with major economic exposure to China bowing to censors’ wills.
Again, the point is we've created an easily abusable system.
The default response to any problem is now censorship and banning. We've trained corporations to take the easiest path and never stand up for speech or unpopular views being pushed on their platforms.
This idea that we can easily define was is 'not okay' to say on the internet from a rational leftist perspective and expect it all to just work out in the end is laughable and constantly being proven wrong.
These same left leaning people would never hold this sort of trust in big institutions to make these decisions in any other case. It's actually scary that so many people are so happy to throw the baby out with the bathwater to serve some political ends.
There's a very good reason ACLU defended the right for neo-Nazis to protest in the streets for decades (including their work allowing Charlottesville to happen). Precedent matter.
Blizzard et al should have taken a stand against regulating the speech of their customers private lives long ago. And I'm not talking about forum moderation in individual communities which has its own rules of civil discourse.
Being better than centralized TV networks owned by a few billion dollar companies, likewise with the newspapers, is no excuse for modern corporations actions 2019.
We have something special here where we can make a stand and protect our internet celebrities the same way we have if it wasn't on the internet. Far too many people are cynically willing to give it up either for political ends and ignore the early censorship by nation states believing both would be contained within a manageable subset and won't be both broaded used against legitimate dissents or openly abused to silence ideological opponents.
This is the natural and predictable outcome, the conditional free speech policy thing doesn't when it faces the reality on the ground.
And as I've said multiple times today this has nothing to do with how discourse is moderated on internet forums. The rules of civil discourse in individual communities is much more flexible than defining it purely on the loudest complainers political redlines.
To say that censorship at gunpoint is a bigger problem now than it's been in the past is revisionism. I can say way more things without consequence now than I could have said 100 years ago.
And no, they aren't. The two things may look superficially similar but Chinese political censorship is much, much older and the process but which it is done hasn't changed in a long time.
The only reason Blizzard was legally able to engage in this punishment - which involved stripping the player of his winnings - was that there's a player handbook banning offensive conduct and including this as a penalty. If that provision had not existed, China and Blizzard could not have used it. And the only political faction in the west who demand such codes of conduct are the SJWs.
When tomp says that China coopted the machinery of censorship laid by SJWs for its own purposes, he's entirely correct.
No, it's the PR weasel words that have existed in sports contracts from the beginning of broadcast media
> Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image
Citation needed. I don't know the sports world, but I know in my bubble, those "weasel words" are something that only SJWs would approve of. If this sort of thing existed in sports contracts in the pre-SJW era, that is an interesting point that to my mind fractures tomp's narrative... but it seems unlikely to me and so far you've simply asserted it without evidence.
I note that the exact phrase "offends a portion or group of the public" has only ever been used in Blizzard's rules as far as I can tell (you can use a date-filtered Google search to confirm; prior to today there are only a handful of results, all Blizzard-related). So at the very least, they didn't lift it verbatim from sports contracts. If there used to be equivalent language in sports contracts a decade ago, I'd like to see it.
I admit I tend to reflexively look down on comments that throw around terms like "SJW" unironically. But the rest of your comment belies some of the most profound ignorance I've seen in awhile. Did you Google "offends a portion or group of the public", and, finding no literal matches prior to GamerGate circa 2014, conclude that moral clauses did not simply exist before the "pre-SJW era"? Do you believe it was SJWs that forced the U.S. Olympic Committee to punish Tommie Smith and John Carlos for holding up their fists on the Olympic podium?
> The USOC issued an apologetic statement condemning the athletes’ “untypical exhibitionism,” which violated “the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States.” [0]
Morals clauses for athletes have existed since for athletes at least 1922, according to Wikipedia [1].
Also, there's an argument to be had over the unbacked assertion that "SJWs" were the reason behind the "offends a portion or group of the public", as opposed to, the actual thing that that clause is now being used to punish. You know what else happened around the same time as the "SJW era"? China becoming a world-dominant economic and political force.
I honestly struggle to conceive of the educational history needed to conflate the long history of censorship with "SJWs". Some of the greatest works of western literature in the twentieth century directly address the concept, and the majority of texts that influence "SJWs" were incredibly subversive and likely to be banned at their time of release due to their attack on conventional power structures that had the ability to censor them (Black people voting! Women voting! Anti-religious scientific heresy! Human rights!).
This strategy of demanding proof for something that is easily discoverable through any simple google search ("history of censorship") is such an exhausting argumentative tactic.
How do you think Kaepernick was benched and then fired, or do you think that the NFL is filled with a bunch of SJWs who also somehow think we should all stand for the flag?
1. Kaepernick wasn't fired. He simply wasn't signed by anyone team after his contract with the 49ers ended.
2. It's a matter of factual controversy whether his treatment by the NFL was affected by his advocacy at all. As far as I know, no manager has explicitly admitted to making different choices about how to deal with him based on his kneeling.
3. It was never suggested by anybody that Kaepernick's kneeling might be a breach of his contract.
4. Kaepernick was not denied his pay for matches he'd already played in as a consequence of his kneeling.
Assuming I am correct on the facts, there is, at the very least, a significant difference in degree between that case and this one. Do you claim that anything I say above is wrong?
It also seems relevant here that basically all coverage I saw of Kaepernick's case - from the nearly-exclusively right-wing commentators I follow - was harshly critical of the minority on the right who were calling for him to be punished. By contrast, I have never seen anyone on the left criticise speech codes or corporate censorship. I do not think it is reasonable to try to draw an equivalence between the right and left on these issues by comparing the positions of a minority on the right, heavily criticised by other right-wingers, with the position of an unchallenged hegemony on the left. There is a real asymmetry here, both in terms of what the majority position of each coalition is and the extent to which they actually punish the speech they disfavour in practice.
If Kaepernick's advocacy didn't adversely affect "his treatment by the NFL" in any way "at all", then isn't it strange coincidence that the NFL went out of its way to pass a rule banning kneeling during the anthem after the controversy? https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2018/05/24...
Seems strange for the NFL to risk a First Amendment controversy with that rule if the NFL were truly unperturbed by Kaepernick's advocacy.
You're right, Kaepernick had an option on his contract for an additional year, but he declined that option and decided to test the free market because he wanted a guaranteed starter job and he wasn't getting that in San Francisco.
And I'd like to add that the deal with Kaepernick isn't that no team would sign him. It's not even if it was due to his political stance. Kaepernick's entire beef was whether or not the league was colluding to keep him from being signed.
To put it as simply as I can: It's ok that teams like the Patriots who don't need a quarterback didn't sign him. It's ok if a team didn't sign him because of his opinions. It's ok is no team at all wants to sign him.
What isn't ok is if hypothetically the Browns and the Bills agree that neither will sign Kaepernick. You don't even need all 32 teams in on it, 2 would have been enough.
> Chinese political censorship is much, much older
Since 20th century, isn’t it? Or are there any historical sources confirming that political censorship across provinces of China under Qing dynasty was comparable to the one currently under CCP?
I don't think the poster was suggesting that 'cancel culture' has affected the chinese political process. I believe they were suggesting that it has created a means for their censorship to be pushed in the West. In so many words; Blizzard can say they don't want to offend the Chinese and use that as their excuse to support this kind of censorship.
Free speech was once valued in USA. In that context this wouldn't have happened. Now that freedom of speech is no longer valued, this sort of thing can happen.
Now I state for the record that I know these are the censorious actions of a private firm, not those of the USA federal government. It is of course possible to value speech outside a strict 1A framework. In previous decades, many Americans did so value free speech.
No it wasn't. The same political sphere that's now complaining about how SJWs are ruining free speech had no problems black balling a large chunk of hollywood in the 50s for their private political speech.
The people who regard 1950s Hollywood as an example of malfeasance are the same people who are currently doing the exact same thing to the text industry with the polarity reversed. They have no moral standing whatsoever to complain. If this weren't my industry, the hypocrisy would be hilarious.
As long as you get people fired from their jobs for having the wrong opinions about social issues in the US, you have no right to demand that companies not censor what the Chinese censors dislike. Now do you realize the value of free speech as a general principle?
Or... there's a difference between the government enforcing deplatforming, and people voting with their wallets and companies reading the political guide winds turning.
Unless you're saying that you have an issue with free association as well.
Tencent owns 12% of Blizzard, and Tencent is an actual company, not a Chinese government department. Sure, the Chinese government might influence Tencent, but to say that Blizzard's action here is government censorship is so ridiculous that it amounts to a blatant lie.
Is your argument so weak that you have to just lie?
12% is more than enough to control a publicly traded company, because speculative shareholders don't typically vote.
The Chinese view of ownership is that the CCP ultimately owns everything. For instance there are no land deeds in China, just rental agreements from the party. Tencent, as one of the largest telecommunications companies in China is very much an adjunct of the CCP.
Don't accuse someone of lying just because you don't understand the underlying facts.
Which era are you referring to? I remember Sinead O'Connor having her career eviscerated after she protested child abuse in the Catholic Church on SNL, so it couldn't be the 1990s. I'm assuming it's not the 2000s (Dixie Chicks, among others). So the 80s? The 70s?
You do realize that censorship is only limited to governments in a legal context? People can be, and are, censored by private entities all the time.
How do you figure that cancel culture isn't defacto censorship? Deplatforming somebody because you don't agree with their viewpoints is absolutely censorship in a moral sense.
Calling people "childish" who don't agree with you is a weasel tactic. Those tactics should invalidate the whole argument, but for some reason they don't. Make the argument without the weasel tactics if you want people to listen.
'Cancel culture' may not be censorship in its technical definition, but isn't that effectively what it's achieving? A comedian, for example, tweets some half-baked remark that some (loud minority) find offensive. Of course, they do respond to this negatively but the media also runs with it and this group of loud people call for the cancellation of shows, appearances, and sometimes even call for the firing of the person.
You are correct in that this person, even after all of this, has outlets and ways to practice their freedom of speech - but it's essentially sending other people a not-so-subtle sign that there are certain things they simply shouldn't say, lest they would like a twitter mob aimed at them.
Occasionally, older public remarks are even dug up by journalists and used to smear the character of those people who made the remarks today. There needs to be some form of restitution, but one currently does not seem to be well defined.
I agree with a lot of what you say here, and I also think people should be more resilient to offensive remarks by others. I'm only saying that calling it censorship is alarmist and untrue.
Moreover, my above comment is grayed out right now as some people downvote it. Let's all think about that irony for a moment.
Censorship is the simple act of not allowing someone to say something.
Companies censor all the time. Movie studios. Recording companies.
I've noticed this trend with people, they identify something as negative, in this case censorship, and then they try and contort definitions to excuse their involvement in it. Because that's a bad thing and they're good people and good people don't do bad things.
I'm going to come in with a hot take: censorship isn't inherently bad. It just is. Censorship can be used to focus discussion on what's important. To keep garbage out of discourse. Those are good uses of it. Yes, it can be used to simply silence dissent. That is a bad use. But just because it can be used in a bad way doesn't make it bad itself.
That would be utter nonsense, yes, if it was what the parent claimed. But as I understood the parent it was about enforcement of eastern censorship in the West. I found it a quite interesting observation (relatively unrelated to modern liberal views).
I see what you mean, but even then I find it to be untrue. Blizzard didn't react here because they were hurting China's feelings, but because they have a strong business relationship with the Party in China via Tencent.
You're asking me to defend me disagreeing with the original point - the burden of argument should really be on them, but anyway...
Tiananmen square is an immediate and obvious pick. People who publicly referenced the events of Tiananmen square were not allowed to interact with China on a business level. If Hearthstone had existed back then and the streamer had mentioned Tiananmen square, Blizzard would (I think) have taken exactly the same approach as they did today. There's no co-opting of Western politicking here.
> Besides, are we really talking about censorship in "the East"? Blizzard is based in California.
Blizzard is heavily integrated with Tencent in China. The actions they took are to preserve that relationship. Ergo the censorship of China is what we're looking at here - without it this event would not have occurred.
They have some sort of partnership arrangement, but it really is a surprise to me to find out that a partnership like that has had the censorious effects we've seen here. It's hard to imagine that this would have played out the same way for a partnership with a firm based in e.g. Russia or UK or Brazil. [EDIT: Or even a firm from those nations that owned 5% of Blizzard.] I guess I'm saying that I didn't "see this coming". I suppose that you and thread parent did, but it still seems notable to me.
They (China and foreign dictators) find the openings they can in Western society and echo those narratives that are convenient for them. This is a very good analysis.
Yep. All the "it's a private company, they can ban whoever they want" arguments have perfectly primed us to the current state of affairs. Just another reminder that speech you don't like should be protected before it will inevitably result in speech you do like being suppressed.
>They saw what was happening in the West - oppression of freedom of speech on account of "hurt feelings" - and applied the same principles for their own nefarious purposes ("hurt Chinese feelings" a.k.a. political censorship).
You have this reversed. Blue checkmarks learned these tactics from the original Maosists and Stalinists.
Can you give an example of what you mean with "oppression of freedom of speech on account of hurt feelings"? Because I wasn't aware that such oppression were ongoing. To me it sounds like a fringe theory spread by those who oppose hate speech laws.
Can we please start a cultural movement that forces large corporations to choose between appeasing Chinese censors and looking like fools to the rest of the west or getting banned in China.
This is conquest. The chinese are gradually accumulating wealth and control in our country. Their laws prohibit foreigners from doing the same in their country.
I can have a chinese landlord gouging me for west coast rent but can never be a landlord in china.
You can't really exploit cheap labor and buy huge amount of cheap stuff and then expect those people to not buy anything back from you. And yeah, they'll not be buying the same kind of crap from you that they're manufacturing and selling to you. So they buy land, companies, anything comparatively valuable to them that they can afford.
You can prevent foreigners from buying/owning land/property in US, but that will just lower the value of US dollars held by foreigners significantly and your currency will crash in value.
The foreigners already hold too much US dollars. The ship has sailed. You'll pay either way for enjoying the fruits of cheap foreign labor in the past. It's either devaulation of your currency, or accepting that foreigners will get a piece of US land.
I find it suspicious that silent conquest of this kind is not spoken about more in politics. It's a very real threat to US sovereignty, especially with superpowers like China and Israel.
Saudis barely have any influence, if anything - the opposite is true, any hint of editorial intervention by any middle eastern/african nation and the west is up in arms about journalistic integrity but chinese have been exerting their power for quite sometime.
It's interesting to watch this unfold for someone who isn't entrenched in any of these spheres.
They aren’t saying we should start a war. They are saying we’ve gone to war to defend those principles but now we put up much less resistance, such as denouncements, sanctions, etc., lots of things short of war that we’ve done with the USSR and Russia.
I read them as implying it, though even if they aren't, in previous HK threads I've seen comments that were, as if open war between two ICBM-equipped nations was something that wouldn't have disastrous consequences for every single one of us.
I also would love to know which wars we (the US, or the Western world) have gone to over those principles (versus e.g. "over oil"), because I can't think of any.
For very different reasons. Venezuela is "communists in our backyard" and Russia isn't about human rights, but about global hegemony, human rights is just the big argument.
If there was an actual point in "it's about human rights", the US would come down on Turkey like an anvil on a cartoon character in old animated movies. Instead, the US appears to support Turkey's new expansive invasion of Syria that goes hand in hand with their genocidal desires to annihilate the Kurds. It's never about human rights on the international stage, it's about power.
Its true human rights is rarely the true or stated reason, and it needn’t be here either.
It could be about hegemony and influence. the NBA and Hollywood having to cater and cave in to official Chinese positions. I think it’d be different than say hoi polloi (public opinion) in China dictating what Hollywood does. One is freedom of speech and opinion the other is government coercion and control.
Venezuela is also in top 10 of net oil exporters, which I do believe is the reason other nations in general, and US in particular, care about it at all.
As noted in that article, the system is ineffective (officially, at least) against ICBMs. It only works against ballistic missiles that don't leave the atmosphere.
Good to know. Now the question is, can the newest AEGIS deal with China's newest hypersonic ICBMs. It's a question I very much don't want to see answered through actual test.
Chinese propaganda is well-spread. I had a Chinese roommate, well educated to boot - PhD in Econ from Columbia, and I could feel the reverence he had for Mao even though his ancestors were landlords.
Mao’s picture has been greatly undermined after 2000s as even the CCP history book said he made terrible mistakes and there were several wide spread videos criticizing Mao. His time has been long gone and only a little respect passed to the next gen mainly from grandparents.
It’ll be interesting if you could talk with him regarding his position for the government, recent issues and long term policy. My bet is he’ll be super supportive and you might be surprised that “greater good” trade off is well accepted
Similar experience. He said Mao had to make hard choices as a leader to propel his country forward. I asked him why India didn't have to starve millions to do the same thing.
After 1949, Mao barely did anything right and I’m surprised if any Chinese born after 90s would still defend him. But I doubt India is such a great example, we probably all have seen photos of the Gange
You do realize that floating a family member's body down the Ganges is considered a sacred ritual and that what you just said has nothing to do with mass deaths due to negligence right?
I've traveled throughout eastern China and I've encountered this indoctrination many times when talking to otherwise reasonable people.
But despite the widespread nationalist zealotry, most ordinary folk still seem to enjoy bootlegging Western media choc full of Western morality. They're not trying to ban it.
Though of course China does have its very own PC police that are encouraged by the government.
Lots of Americans express admiration for our founders and institutions too, though. Flags and conspicuous patriotism are everywhere in our country.
It's possible that that's just normalized for you but it seems jarring when you see someone revering a 'commie'. The programming runs deep on all sides.
Different forms and examples of government exhibit relatively different levels of authoritarianism. Communist governments are invariably more authoritarian than liberal democracies.
If that's true then your comment still doesn't make sense. As there cannot be non-authoritarian government, calling a government authoritarian makes objectively no sense and is just meant to provoke emotions obviously.
All government is authoritarian but not to an equivalent extent. From a liberal point of view the current Chinese government is relatively authoritarian, as evidenced by many things including recent examples of censorship.
That’s a tricky one. The “woke” don’t care about all the Saudi money in Uber and WeWork despite that regimes hideous treatment of gays, women, dissidents and so on.
And these are private companies bought by private investors (ok one could argue it's Chinese government money..), what does that have to do with government deficit?
You think this sort of investment is any different than investment in general? Investors will pick a bucket of investments with differing risk pools like tbills, stocks, bonds etc.
The solution is very simple. The government should take possession of any company that grows beyond a maximum size and distribute the shares to the public.
Six Corporations control 90% of the media in America. They can make business decisions to censor whomever they want and they are global corporations doing lots of business in China.
> Six Corporations control 90% of the media in America
Totally incomparable.
America has the First Amendment. Its government and corporations can be held accountable in courts. Any rando has the capacity to pine off about anything on Twitter. Meanwhile China boasts a centralised bureaucracy literally censoring Winnie the Pooh images because its dictator doesn’t like his resemblance.
Yes, America has a media ownership concentration problem. No, it’s not remotely comparable to Xi’s Beijing.
As has been spammed in many threads about hate speech type censorship before, only the government is legally accountable to the First Amendment, private businesses and that corporate personhood BS can use their own freedom of speech to censor whoever they want on their platforms.
Exactly. By surrendering more and more of our society to the private sector, we're surrendering more and more to organizations in which we don't get a vote.
Yes because there is only one government for any given piece of land. Fortunately for you, there are many private businesses to choose from. You can even start your own if you like.
> Can we please start a cultural movement that forces large corporations to choose between appeasing Chinese censors and looking like fools to the rest of the west or getting banned in China.
Corporations love sitting the moral grey area on issues like this, but putting them in a position of having to choose between looking like Chinese stooges or getting banned from China will break their minds.
Yes, if laws were optional then they would cease to be laws. Laws subordinate individual freedom and every state has laws.
Also the state itself determines what the constitution is and even how it's interpreted or overriden. So saying state is accountable to constitution (which is determined by state ) is circular reasoning.
There's a distinction here, or we wouldn't bother to have the word. People find it useful. You're in the minority if you don't, which is fine, but you're wrong about common use of the word, as recorded in a typical dictionary.
> Also the state itself determines what the constitution is and even how it's interpreted or overriden. So saying state is accountable to constitution (which is determined by state ) is circular reasoning.
Well, sort of. Human systems are messy and insisting that any term applied to them be absolutely true or else invalid won't get you far. That some governments would have more success and ease modifying the terms of their own constitution wildly counter to the will or interests of those they rule than others can easily be seen as true, I think, and is related to the set of norms and ideals held by those who believe they ought justly and actually to have a say in how the government runs, and to who sees themselves as being legitimately entitled to same, for that matter (i.e. do most expect that, or only some minority), and furthermore both of those are influenced by the constitution, laws, and actual historical practices of the state they're operating under.
Technically possible matters less than what is practical and likely when it comes to classifying human systems, as they're hard to pick apart and take one element at a time what with all the feedback and mutual influence involved.
The constitution is not determined by the state, it is ratified by a democratic vote. Sometimes this vote is conducted by representatives, and sometimes by popular vote.
I feel like you are missing a vital part of your understanding on how liberal democracies were founded and how the balance of power is distributed between the people and institutions that govern them.
I don't think it will, really, because as a Chinese stooge with access to Chinese market, you have ample money to spend on PR & marketing that makes you not look like a Chinese stooge.
USA population is close to 330m. I was reading that NBA has 500m "followers" (I will translate it to consumers). Assuming that only half the US population follows (consumes, pays) for NBA related products, then Chinese market is every NBA official's wet dream. Unless this becomes a binary choice (dictatorship Vs freedom) all the money making sharks (FIFA, NBA, etc) will pretend that they "were not aware of such events taking place in China/do not comment on internal affairs of other sovereign nations" as long as the money rolls in.
I was glad to see earlier on CNN a 'super' writing "NBA Commissioner: we are no apologizing..."
But the first 24h the reactions went from not existing to laughable. Good to see that freedom is more important than revenue.
>Assuming that only half the US population follows (consumes, pays) for NBA related products
I would say at most, 10% of the US consumes/pays for NBA related products. NBA finals are estimated to have 15M viewers last year, so even doubling that you're only getting to 10%.
How do you suppose this would be implemented? These things only affect a very small niche audience. Most people don't care what is going on in HK and even less people will care about this incident.
I feel like social media is the best legal venue for it.
Start sending messages to every game dev, project manager, and director at these companies asking them why they support the totalitarian oppression of HK. Ask them what they are currently doing to limit the influence of totalitarian regimes on their corporate policy.
Make the issue personal for the companies by fomenting discontent from within.
"Make the issue personal for the companies by fomenting discontent from within."
But the only options available to the employees from that point onwards is group organization (eg. unionization) which is itself politically controversial and prone to ruining their careers (see: google employees' organizing efforts resulting in the majority of the original organizers being foistered out of google) or leaving which puts their livelihoods in jeopardy as they abandon one of the biggest employers of their industry..
If people aren't willing to stand behind their beliefs at the risk of temporary financial hardship to support people putting their lives at risk to stand against a lifetime under tyrannical rule then they do not deserve the freedoms their country affords them.
What happens if I have dependents? Should I sacrifice the wellbeing of my child with a medical condition? My spouse with their medical condition? Should I sacrifice my parents who need me to help paying for their care? What if I come from an impoverished neighbourhood and I'm putting my nephews and neices through college- should they also be sacrificed?
What happens if it's not temporary? What happens if I'm blackballed for my whole career?
Asking for sacrifice from the people who have the least amount of power as individuals, and the most to lose, when there is another option-- demand the sacrifice on the part of an unfeeling instution with no family just a C-suite and a board-- is borderline inhumane.
What about the people who enlisted in the continental armies to gain freedom from British tyranny.
They had dependents, they had parents, they had the least amount of power as individuals. Yet they were able to defeat a world super power and usher in an era of personal freedom that swept the world.
A couple of employees having a difficult conversation and maybe writing a memo that starts a conversation in a tech company is not the same sacrifice as the ones made by the people who shaped the world we live in now.
The logical argument you are making re: these employees is to say that women and men should all enlist to fight the British Army and if they don't then the British Army is right to continue committing human atrocities on them.
The continental armies were entirely composed of volunteers who believed in the cause, so yes that is the argument I am making.
If you work in a company that has a presence in China, and you believe in the concept of inalienable human rights then these are issues you raise in a constructive manner in your workplace.
If you are unwilling to take that risk due to financial repercussions then so be it, but you are a coward.
"If you are unwilling to take that risk due to financial repercussions then so be it, but you are a coward."
Financial repercussions like losing healthcare for your children or spouse, whose chronic illnesses (At least 30% of the general population) may require medication costing thousands of dollars a month? Again, should the person's families and communities be sacrificed?
It needs to be organized, focused, and have real consequence for the companies that choose to stay in the middle.
A couple of snarky tweets isn't going to save hong kong, and taiwan after that.
The writing is on the wall, if we don't stand against China now the rest of the world will stand idly by as they erase 200+ years of liberalism and the greatest improvement in human rights in our species history.
The main focus of a business is to turn in a profit and making decisions that doesn't align in some way with that key objective is not something they will likely engage with.
The situation in HK is bad, but at the end of the day people still want to keep their jobs, and company leaders need to try to do what is in the best interests for the company and the employees.
It wouldn't happen, but assuming if it did and you made companies pick between demonstrating integrity or looking the other way to do business with China and be publicly denounced, any half decent leader would bite the bullet and do the former, essentially every large US company.
Also keep in mind how much money from Chinese companies is integrated into the US. Things are much more complicated than you make out, I don't think it is right to draw a line in the sand and push this 'you're either with us or against us' narrative.
Things can't stay like this in China for long, the change will happen from within the country, all we can do as business partners is try to not get involved in the ensuing chaos and protect our own well being and loved ones.
It is rather optimistic to think a change would be possible to emerge on its own, given the active and increasing, almost total surveilance going on. Technology is a game changer here, freedom movements are getting harder and have to perhaps evolve their own tech...
Have we all forgotten when Mozilla replaced the CTO with a long history of internet freedom work to replace him with a marketing director and the disaster that followed?
Are we going to keep trampling on all our freedoms in the name of ... freedom(?) and then blame it all on China?
EDIT: I knew some people were going to try to spin it into something it wasn't.
Surely not another flamewar about that. Would you please review the site guidelines, paying special attention to this one?
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
If you look carefully the controversial discussion wasn't started by me but by the comment Steltek wrote below my post. I think you do owe me the courtesy of recognizing this and in that case detaching that comment might have been the right course of action instead of throwing threats towards me.
It is relevant in the sense that in the sciences department (FOR NOW) we don't judge scientific discovery or papers by their ethnicity or political opinion, but rather on the basis of their scientific merit. Although this too seems to be quickly fading away, judging from the daily comments I'm seeing on my Facebook stream.
I don't mean to pick on you personally, but it was clearly your comment that brought in the "unrelated controversy and generic tangent" that the site guidelines ask users to avoid. Steltek ought not to have stoked the flames, but the fate of the thread was already determined at that point, which is why phrase that guideline that way.
I'm sorry you felt like I was throwing threats at you—definitely not how I want a comment like that to come across.
Unfortunately no, I get reminded every single update when something else which has worked for fifteen years suddenly goes wrong. Mozilla has gutted themselves politically.
People forget the context of the uproar and protests against Brendan. Indeed he was the lover of freedom that sent in political donations to take freedom away from others - namely, those not like him. It's interesting to see how people, especially champions of freedom of expression, can compartmentalize that mentality so easily and justify it to oneself. Those people deserve to be called out. Calling them out is also something freedom affords.
By a careful examination of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam and atheism I can tell that a large number of people are spreading damaging mistruths about some of the most important aspects of life. Much more damaging than being wrong about gay marriage.
We have to be able to compartmentalise what people are wrong about that affects their work and what they are wrong about that does not. It is distasteful to support someone who is obnoxiously wrong but their being excellent at what they do has to count for something.
Dunno what the story is for this specific political spat at Mozilla; but compartmentalising "relevant to my work" and "irrelevant to my work" is a fundamental plank in the wobbly structure of civilised society. Even the most rabid will support some aspects of freedom and not others. Support compartmentalisation, even if in this case it meant he was the wrong man for the job and had to go.
If you think back to before gay marriage was accepted as a culturally obvious fact, some of the arguments against it involved hating gays, but others didn't. Without the ability to tell which beliefs actually motivated his donation, it is not possible to discern if he was against gays or not. (I'll refrain from giving any specific examples in order to avoid starting that debate again, but I think most of us can remember that time in fair detail.)
It's kind of hard to say "you do not deserve to share your life with the person you love. You don't deserve to take care of them when they're sick. You don't deserve a family with them. Because you're gay" without actually hating gay people.
Just because you don't call for somebody to be killed doesn't mean you don't hate them.
In 2008 some people were against gay marriage without saying any of those things. At the time some arguments against gay marriage didn't involve being against gay people. One example would be the people who saw marriage and its attendant privileges as a reproductive subsidy. Yes, there are many reasonable ways to disagree that, but I'm not saying Eich was right - only that we don't have clear proof of any inner hatred. A nice, rational person can believe something that is realized to be untrue a decade later, that's just how science works. Even if you're 100% convinced that every argument in 2008 against gay marriage was false, that's still not sufficient to demonstrate that everyone who was against it was evil.
I'm not sure what world you live in that not being able to enter a formal contract with a partner means "you do not deserve to share your life with the person you love. You don't deserve to take care of them when they're sick. You don't deserve a family with them. Because you're gay"
A piece of paper and some legal guarantees is not stopping you from having a family, sharing your life with and aiding said person in sickness.
I am and always were in favor of gay marriage as long as marriages were a thing(as in, i'd rather they not exist as a "formal" thing), but this hyperbolic nonsense that the only possible reason there is disagreement on it is because they hate the gays and nothing else is just silly.
There are lots of legal wrinkles to that "piece of paper", for instance with respect to hospital visitation policies and the ability to adopt. So yes, some of those things are directly impacted.
Are you aware of California's form of civil unions, Domestic Partnership Law? Still on the books, and it provides the same positive rights with respect to hospital visitations, etc. I was among the majority of Californias who supported this law as passed and amended. I would not have supported Prop 8 without it on the books.
US immigration laws require an actual marriage, not just something that looks like one. Please educate yourself about what marriage actually means, not just what you think it means.
Federal law (DOMA) preempted state law here. I was against DOMA on legal grounds, FWIW. California was not going to get around DOMA by changing state law.
Eich donated to a campaign that wanted to nullify gay marriages. I mean sure, you can make the argument that it came from a dispassionate place, but that applies to Eichman et.al. too. You can create hateful end results without ever investing the energy to hate the people you affect.
Retroactive or ex-post-facto law is unconstitutional. I am a big fan of this principle. It protects all of us."
I did not support nullification, and it was never going to happen, because it would have been unconstitutional, as then-AG/once-and-future-governor Jerry Brown said. What's more, Prop 8 actually passed, and no nullifications occurred.
With all due respect, discriminating against gay people was also unconstitutional, that didn't stop it from being introduced. And nullification was a part of what prop 8 proponents asked for from the very beginning. (And filed a lawsuit to achieve right after prop 8 passed)
You chose your bed to lie in, part and parcel - because that's how voting on & supporting propositions works. You don't get to claim post-hoc you were only supporting parts of it.
I'm not claiming anything "post-hoc", because I have never supported retroactive laws. Have you? Or were you ignorant of their unconstitutionality and projecting that ignorance onto me?
I voted for Obama in 2008, but I didn't endorse everything he did or stood for. If you voted for him, were you at that time lying in bed with his rejection of marriage equality? Answer honestly, and by your own phony standard! You don't get to claim "post-hoc" that you were clairvoyantly counting on him to "evolve" in 2012.
Not allowing a legal marriage recognized by the state doesn't strictly prevent much of what you wrote. Although it does prevent some privileges (e.g. hospital visitation rights) which was definitely an issue at the time.
Hospital visitation is not just "an issue". Taking care of your spouse when they're sick is one of the core aspects of marriage. What else would "in sickness and in health" mean?
Hey, we can have a conversation like adults or you can browbeat me with semantics. Your choice. You haven't taught me a lesson here by trying to police the words I used.
My point is that hospital visitation rights are incredibly important and a society which fails to extend them to all relationships is actively discriminating.
We should protest the hospitals, that's a ridiculous policy.
Plenty of people aren't getting married today and are in long term relationships equivalent to old-school marriage. My spouse and I have made it a point not to.
Abortion, gun control, taxation, etc. are all referred to as "issues" in politics. I get your point is that this is more important than just an issue, but really the other side of your point is you assumed that I must not think it was of significant importance to use such a phrase as "an issue" to describe it.
Do you rail against society every time abortion is referred to as an "issue"? Seems like an important one, whether or not we think terminating a fetus is moral or immoral.
Do you get upset if you look at a political candidate's campaign website and see a link to a page called "issues"?
You perceived a slight that was not there.
I think / thought it was messed up that two people who love each other, regardless of gender (please don't lay into me for using that word if it's incorrect), could be denied visitation rights at a hospital. That doesn't mean I cannot refer to it as "an issue."
There are very solid reasons for seeing marriage as a life-long commitment between a man and a woman for the purpose of providing a stable home for the children that they conceive that has nothing to do with hating gays. This is something humans have understood for thousands of years, but only in my lifetime we seem to have forgotten.
No, there really aren't. The socioeconomic consequences of a couple are the socioeconomic consequences of a couple, no matter the dangly bits. We're not all having children.
It also turns out raising children also is not negatively affected by the parents being gay. (Plenty of studies on the subject, go read some).
Leaves actually having children. Is your argument that we all should breed? Then your argument is seriously broken, the world is about 300% over capacity already.
So, no - it's still rooted in hate. (Or fear, really)
You're providing counter-arguments against the correctness of the argument the parent suggested, but otherwise good people can believe incorrect arguments. You can't assume that someone was aware of all those studies, some of which have been conducted in the years since, and none of which are taught about in elementary school. It is not sufficient to demonstrate that the Mozilla CEO believed something incorrect, you also have to demonstrate that evil was the only explanation.
This is a common misconception which reduces structural discrimination to individual resentment. In reality, it does not matter at all whether the actor had evil in their heart — it only matters what the effects are (ability to adopt, hospital visitation rights, ability to immigrate etc).
Being right about everything that matters is an unreasonable standard to hold people to, because nobody is right about everything that matters. I guarantee that you and I are both mistaken in ways that cause us to support sub-optimal policies whose effects legitimately hurt people. If we keep open minds, we may even realize some of these errors in the future - unless we're just wrong so we can be evil, which is why there's a distinction between "wrong" and "purposely wrong in order to be evil."
In your life, how do you handle the guilt for your countless unknowing political sins? Does it look exactly the same as what you would do if you didn't think you were guilty?
I still don't understand, how would gays being allow to marry have an effect on hetero marriges?
By the way today a man and a man, or a woman and a woman, or whatever, can have children , and in that case should provide a stable home for them. In my country most gay couples that bother about marrying, usually also want to raise children and provide them with a stable home.
This' "gays" are destroying family values', is a silly fallacy, because these marrying gays, WANT a family.
Saying Your family is OK and their family is somehow dangerous reeks of hate.
.
The point is that differentiating between a gay couple and a straight couple on anything (other their sex organs) is just absurd and without any hold in reality. Even if there was a significant difference between these couple regarding child rearing, the burden of proof is on you.
The fact that marriage between man and woman is old and known doesn't mean it is good, or better than other types of couples.
Most people who assume this difference, assume it a priori to any knowledge or facts. People who want to limit others because of ignorance is called hatred in my book, even if some of your best friends are gay...
so before getting married a couple has to sign a contract expressing that they will conceive children, otherwise be stripped from their married status?
It's curious that I've never seen anyone campaining against childless marriages, only against gay marriages.
My 20 something cousin had emergency surgery that resulted in a hysterectomy. She can never have children. According to your argument she shouldn't get married either?
What is A genuine reason for being against gay marriage that does not include hating the concept of gays, or the concept of marriage?
Two adults want to share their life, with the burdens and rights that non gays get.
Really, why would you care if not because you find the concept of same sex couples bad and harmful?
Marriage yields children. Making new people grows a civilization. The state would definitely want to incentive any means to grow a civilization. In the modern day, these incentives look like tax deductions. Gay marriage doesn't yield children. Why should the state give the same incentives?
My solution: The State shouldn't create incentives for people to get married. People will get married because they want to.
I can give a silly example in order to avoid restarting the debate. Someone who truly believed that gays would cause earthquakes could vote against prop 8. purely on the basis of the San Andreas fault. If you think for long enough you could probably come up with less and less silly sounding arguments, until eventually you arrive at one that a rational and non-evil person could convincingly be misled by. The essential point is that even if you are 100% convinced that the Mozilla CEO held an incorrect belief, it still remains to be shown that evil was the only explanation for that belief.
You could never prove evil.
Because it's a matter of values.
You could easily say, that holding negative opinions on something strongly enough that you act upon them, without any proof of that thing being dangerous or bad is a sign you are prejudice about that thing.
Now being prejudice is not evil in my opinion, but if you value being prejudice more than finding out the actual reality of your negative assumptions, makes you pretty much the text book definition of a bigot.
There weren't good arguments though, it was a rehash of the same 'debate' forty years prior on whether people of different races should be allowed to get married.
You know, 40+ years ago, if you brought up legalizing gay marriage many would have seen it as attacking interracial marriage. Even 5 to 10 years ago I met many people who held the view that it was an insult and attack on interracial marriage to bring up gay marriage.
Today, if I bring up possible future rehashings, I think people would react the same, thinking instead I was attacking and insulting gay marriage. I wonder how long in the future before we see history repeat again.
Depends upon what freedoms we consider freedoms. Today, do you support any laws that would deny people what others may consider freedom? For example, supporting age limits on activities. If you support people under 18 being unable to vote, are you not supporting taking away their freedom to vote?
Once you strip away the modern day cultural norms of what is acceptable freedoms and not, and begin to consider other arguments and social views as to what counts as freedom, you find most anyone out there fights to strip freedom from others. Sometimes under the guise of protecting them, but not always.
The same people condemning this person from the freedoms he opposed likely support removing freedoms from others for ageist reasons.
> Wait, are you saying there’s nothing anyone could say to
> you that would make you not want to work with them?
I am human, of course I can be personally offended. But if I had some fair competition and the winner happened to disagree with my political leanings, it's tough cheese. The moment your company becomes political, there is an expectation that they react to every single outrage. No sane person would link the beliefs of the rightful winner to the companies public facing ethics, but, if you continuously inject yourself in such matters, it becomes expected of you.
> As long as it’s “just words” you welcome it in your
> workplace?
> There’s no level of verbal abuse that you consider grounds
> for dismissal?
The work place is something different, there is an agreed etiquette which is there to ensure productivity. Employees can typically bring their personal lives into the office up until the point it causes disruption.
I've been in a high stress work place with people verbally abusing each other. It could have been grounds for firing, but it was resolved by simply taking them aside and talking with them. In other cases I've had quite interesting discussions in a coffee break about politics that I didn't agree with. None of these cases reflected on the company itself and neither of these cases I would expect the company to weigh in on.
Morally wrong, but technically not wrong. Many a dumb law was only changed after some politician ran afoul of it.
If you're going to take "direct action" you should probably try to keep it fitting to the issue at hand. Swatting someone because they are in charge of something you don't like won't make your cause any more likeable to most observers.
Yes, because beating someone for doing or thinking something is a proven way of making them stop doing or thinking that thing.
In reality, what will happen is swatters will get caught, tried and put into prison. As they should be. What you're proposing is anathema to civilization.
Historically very few swatters have been caught and convicted. Not unsurprising given how easy it is to conceal the source of a phone call on the internet.
E: throttled and can’t reply below
I don’t think you understand how swatting works, the only way you’re too high profile is if you live in the white house.
In theory. In practice you can only act like a bully like that when you are already on the side with much more power. Repeatedly swatting (or whatever, doesn't have to be swatting) people richer and more powerful than you will just get them to use their power to make the problem go away (maybe by leaning on politicians to lean on police to not respond so over the top to unsubstantiated calls or to create harsh punishments for the callers).
In a situation like this (i.e. small minority who care vs small group with power who don't) you need to either convince the people with the power (the CEOs and execs you initially referred to) to see your point of view or convince the apathetic masses to take your side. In either case you need to be persuasive or at the very least not acting in a manner that makes you hard to sympathize with (e.g. swatting people).
Now, if you were already in power (say for example, you were the government) then you could act like a bully and kick down people's door, shoot their dogs, etc. But do that will make the targets and people like them resent you and if you do it too much or to too powerful people/groups you will either find yourself voted out or lined up and shot (depending on the power transition mechanism of the government in question).
TL;DR affecting change is much more nuanced and complicated than just being a thorn in the side of the people you don't like.
>In theory. In practice you can only act like a bully like that when you are already on the side with much more power. Repeatedly swatting (or whatever, doesn't have to be swatting) people richer and more powerful than you will just get them to use their power to make the problem go away (maybe by leaning on politicians to lean on police to not respond so over the top to unsubstantiated calls or to create harsh punishments for the callers).
They'll only be able to keep the police from responding at their home and office, anything beyond that will be difficult and require significant constant effort to arrange. And besides, it's not enough to just coordinate this with the local police, you'll also need to talk to various state agencies, sheriffs and so on.
A bomb threat will take down a plane, a single individual targeting you can permanently prevent you from flying commercial. A single individual submitting online visa applications with threats can make any kind of border crossings extraordinarily difficult too.
There's no end to the awful things a person can remotely do to you if they know who you are, being a powerful executive just leaves you much more exposed.
You're missing the bigger picture. You're debating on basically becoming a terrorist. Which in small isolated incidents might be shown to work, but then the institutional response happens. For example, look at the middle East, they can do a few attacks but when it gets too big the UN or US or whatever comes in with huge armies and destroys the country the terrorists were trying to fight for. Not good.
In this case if you try to commit domestic terrorism here, it may initially be successful, but then the institutional powers will respond by passing laws and turning the suspicion on their own citizens making life shittier for everyone here.
So for the love of God, please don't try to seat powerful people (or anyone at all).
> You're debating on basically becoming a terrorist
While on some technical level you may be correct, I think it is intellectual dishonesty to compare the targeted activism I'm suggesting to the indiscriminate violent attacks typically associated with terrorism.
I'm certainly not advocating that anyone fly a plane into a building, that doesn't help anyone.
Sorry for not entirely related to the main thread, but since it seems there are many people in this thread knowledgable on what's going on in Hong Kong, I'd like to ask 2 questions.
I'm not siding with CCP, but my issue is I'm not sure I can side with the protestors either. Because
1. Does the protestors representing the majority of citizens? If yes at this stage why the working class in Hong Kong hasn't started long term strike yet? I would imagine that the most effective non violence method of protesting by citizens would be stop working. That would for one stop the tax flow to the government.
2. Is it necessary for protestors to be violent against pro-China civilians/properties? I'm aware that the protestors have been subject to violence from both police and mobs alike, but fighting for democracy should be a higher cause than revenge? Aren't they fight for freedom of speech among others? Or it's just freedom for themselves and violence and totalitarianism for who else disagrees? [1]
Again I love freedom to the point I've spent many years fighting it for myself and helped a few people. I support Taiwan to be an independent country. But we all know many bad things have been committed under the name of freedom as well. Now I'm not sure if the Hong Kong protestors are fighting under the name of freedom to actually express their hatred toward mainlanders? Thanks for reading and hope my questions would not offend anyone. Just would like to understand the situation better.
Also I'd like to suggest for whoever suggesting going to war with China first consider asking your government to grant full citizenship, permanent residency, or unconditional asylum to Hong Kong permanent residents who wants it.
Edit: would like to hear some thoughts when you downvote.
Keep your politics out of my games. It's the only way games are tolerable. I can't even keep up with having to mute/ignore people in games for their constant political rants, trolling, or other stupidity. I play games to have fun. I don't care about your causes. I don't care about your beliefs. I don't care about any problems in the world. Gaming is escapism. Piss off with that nonsense and find another venue. Blizzard was right, hands down.
Seems reasonable that they don't want to allow players to push their politics using the official Blizzard streams. They are free to do so in their spare time.
What do you think Blizzard would do if some guy wore a MAGA hat in an official stream?
They interview the player/person, what they stand for is their own prerogative. It isn't up to Blizzard to dictate what people should think or are allowed to say on issues such as human rights. It is their right to ban someone for what they deem 'misconduct' though, so yes they are in their rights doing what they did here.
They will also have to deal with the consequences of that decision, a lot of people are cancelling their subscriptions and deleting their blizzard accounts.
This will probably not impact them much, but hopefully there will get big enough that it does.
"Human rights" = politics. Blizzard can choose what they broadcast using their streams. I'm sure if someone decided to wear a tshirt with a fasces in it you'd agree... but since this is on the other side of the spectrum of politics, you disagree. Honestly, very short-sighted.
Not Blizzard, but in pro Dota, one of their champions, PPD, was wearing his MAGA hat with no repurcussions during last election cycle. Valve is also pretty bad about bootlicking Chinese authorities, so I don't think this comparison works.
Make Azeroth Great Again [0]? You could by them at https://shop.esfand.tv/ before, but it’s currently under construction (the website’s <title></title> still has it in the name).
Into your message is built the assumption that all "politics" is the same.
That's not the case. And further, pretending that oppression and fascism and ethnic cleansing is the same as fighting against those things, because oppressing and murdering people is just another "politics" and not something special, is by itself pro-fascist and evil stance.
>Into your message is built the assumption that all "politics" is the same.
Not really: there are politics I agree with and politics I disagree with. That doesn't mean that I believe Blizzard should give a loudspeaker to those who agree with me. I think that's stupid because it could turn against me at some point. Some people seem not to think ahead.
It’s reasonable from the perspective of maximising profit, sure. And it’s true that they’re (as far as I know) consistently applying a rule they set out a long time ago.
But that doesn’t make it the right decision, morally. Sometimes rules should be broken.
> Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
That's completely true, except for the fact that none of it is true.
Go to China and openly criticize the government, hand out fliers about Tienanmen square with Winnie the Pooh on it and see what happens.
God forbid you actually are a citizen of China, because as a foreigner you will be put in a detention center until deported. As a citizen you will disappear.
I think GP was responding to the way you said “codified into the constitution” as if that were the main differentiating factor (whereas it’s clearly not, because China also codified freedom of speech).
Public mockery of China is a small but important part in fighting against what is happening. Pride is important to them, it's why they banned Winnie the Pooh just because some people said he kinda looked like the party's general secretary.
I've been held in a Chinese detention center for 6 days before, when was the last time you were locked away without access to due process just for expressing an opinion?
I lived in China for several years, and I will never go back. I made a choice to move there to advance my career thinking I could tolerate living in a totalitarian state, and now that I have experienced it I will forever oppose it.
Are you actually trying to claim that China is a free country with freedom of speech?
There is a big difference between saying you are a free country and actually being one. In totalitarian regimes the government is not bound to the constitution, that is why they are called totalitarian.
If you truly believe that China is free, which I doubt, I highly encourage you to educate yourself on the half century of fear and murder that they have systematically used to oppress all dissension.
It is not my responsibility to educate you, but you are arguing against history. History may be malleable in China, but outside of the Great Wall we know what they have done and it is my dream that one day China is held accountable for the atrocities it has committed in the name of "peace and prosperity".
It helps to know a little bit about what's been going on in Hong Kong, before you all line up and take your daily dump on China.
It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions in the region, including Taiwan and mainland China.
The proposed law even explicitly stated that it's not applicably to crimes political in nature. But some HK people were nevertheless concerned that it might be abused by China to target political dissidents in HK.
So they have taken to the streets to protest that law. As a result, the law was quickly suspended before it had a chance to pass, and a few weeks ago the HK Chief Executive officially announced the withdrawal of the law.
However, despite the concession from the HK government, the protesters pressed on, demanding four more concessions from the government, chief among them universal suffrage, or the direct election of the HK Chief Executive, who up to this point have been nominated from a narrow pool of Beijing-approved candidates, then voted on by a committee.
It's not entirely clear that China even had anything to do with the proposal of the law which started this ordeal. But the protesters have been shrewd to paint a picture, to great effect, of big bad China stomping on the poor helpless people of HK.
What I cannot stress enough, is the rampant violence and destruction from these protesters, which has done this great city, and many innocent citizens, unimaginable harm. Feel free to support their peaceful protests, but please don't simply pile on and encourage these violence and destruction.
(EDIT: If anything I said is untrue, please correct me. Use the truth to argue your side, don't be a coward and hide behind your downvote.)
There's a lot more to that story. Taiwan explicitly ruled out accepting the proposed extradition law, despite IIRC a HKer murdering their HK partner whilst on holiday in Taiwan.
> chief among them universal suffrage, or the direct election of the HK Chief Executive
You mean the promised universal suffrage of the Chief Executive that was written in the Sino-British agreement, and decades later has still not materialised.
I can see why that might be a sore point to the citizens of Hong Kong.
I am from China. I'm happy and proud to live in China. I feel sorry for those (who thinks) being suppressed by CCP, all in this thread. I respect any ideas people expressing anywhere. It's nothing right or wrong in politics. They're basically games for adults.
Not teenagers.
Teenagers are always being used in these games. They just feel like heroes when they find they can play these games like adults (I believe they pretend being like adults in their day-to-day life). If they win in a quarrel, they feel a sense of accomplishment and self satisfaction. It's just black or white in their worlds. They don't tolerate other voices. (However teenagers do help at some moments. So they are being trained and used all the time in the history.)
IMO these are called mature:
* hear from different voices, do not trust one single voice
* think by own brains, not others
* seeking reasons from both side of one thing, like yin-yang
* all information is suspicious unless you see and feel it by yourself
* love C/C++
"If you ever wondered how the whole world stood by and watched as the Nazis came to power and began committing atrocities here’s your answer."
The whole thread has similar commentary - along with morbid humor: "The next Disney movie will feature forced abortions to appease China."
Makes me think of brand names - who are still in existence today - who provided services, products, to similar regimes; Russell Brand Rips on GQ, Hugo Boss, referencing Syria War and Nazi Germany - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inB-6R1-4ng
Edit to add: Seems the pro-tyrants of China's leadership brigade is here: I had 2 upvotes, now at 0. Or if the people downvoting don't understand what's going on in China is akin to Nazi Germany then they're either indoctrinated in propaganda or haven't studied, analyzed, understood the situation adequately.
You managed some sort of internet trifecta here: Reddit, Nazis, and astroturfing.
This comment breaks several of the site guidelines badly. Could you please read them and follow them here from now on? We've had to ask you this before.
The pro-china movement on HN is extremely strong. It's fun to look at all the pro-China commenters, and then look through the account history for how long their account has existed, the kind of articles they submit and their comments.
Your comments here and below have broken the site guidelines badly. Please read and follow them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Note this one: Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email us and we'll look at the data.
No one who reads these threads remotely objectively would say "The pro-china movement on HN is extremely strong". Accounts that argue that side are a tiny minority, and frequently get barraged with accusations of bad faith, which is a form of internet bullying. It's true that people sometimes create throwaway accounts to argue the other side. But it's easy to understand why—like I just said, they get barraged.
When we look into such cases, we nearly always find—to the extent that we find anything—that these commenters are people in Western countries who are either of Chinese background, have experience in China, or are Chinese expats. Sometimes they are Westerners living in China. Overwhelmingly, the evidence is that they are good faith users just like you are, who have different backgrounds and experiences from you, which lead them to see the same situations differently than you do. What that calls for is not accusation and suppression but tolerance. As a seasoned HN user, someone who has shared many of your own wide-ranging experiences over the years, you ought to be practicing and modeling that for others.
Could they be spies or shills or foreign agents? Sure they could; so could you. What can we do other than look for evidence? Some evidence of something—anything. You have zero evidence for making these dramatic sinister claims, which poison discussion and destroy community. Just imagine if someone accused you of being a paid propagandist or spy when you were simply posting in good faith. This is a mob behavior. It's not welcome on HN, which is why we have that guideline. (No, not because we're pro-Chinese or secret communists.)
How you leap from zero evidence to "it couldn't be more obvious" or (downthread) "the increasing number of accounts that are very, very obviously paid or otherwise government controlled to influence opinions on HN" is really shocking to me. You're far from the only user doing this—it's rampant—but it's utterly dismaying to see a longstanding and good HN contributor pouring this poison in here by the bucket.
By the way, when we find accounts that are using HN primarily for political battle, including nationalistic battle, we either ban them or ask them to stop. We do that regardless of what they happen to be battling for—it's against the site guidelines either way. But I can tell you from the heart, as the person responsible for keeping the peace here, that pro-China accounts doing such things are barely a blip of an issue compared to comments like the ones you posted here. They exist, but they're impotent. It's comments like yours, which manifest the real shadow of this community, that have me scared and worried for HN.
Thank you for taking the time to type out such detailed and thoughtful replies here and down thread. I sincerely appreciate your input and perspective.
Obviously you have infinitely more experience and insight than I do, and you have given me a lot to think about. I had never before realized that it is in fact me who is the toxic element in this community by singling out individuals and putting them on trial. I feel bad about it (as I should) and I will never do that again.
Down thread you linked to [1], and I also appreciate your thoughtful and detailed explanation there. I agree with you that putting individuals on trial pitch-fork style is not a nice path to go down, though I can't help wonder if there isn't a "bigger picture" or anonymized way to demonstrate to the community (or just me) that the "shill" problem isn't really an issue on HN.
Like you said I seem to have jumped to the conclusion that "paid government influencers" (for want of a better term) are at work on HN, and it feels like it will be a hard assumption to shake. I'm at a point in my life where I utterly distrust any media, and I have extended that to social media. I strongly believe that virtually everything we are given from media is only one perspective, and typically it's given to us that way to benefit the entity giving the media (financial or political power).
I can only imagine how busy you are, so I feel bad adding to your stack. Would you have any interest in writing a blog post, or a "sticky" with numbers and and data that demonstrates how you know the shill problem on HN is minor? I'm thinking something along these lines [2] , though I'm sure you have way better ideas than I do.
Thanks for such a calm and kind reply. I've not gone easy on you and I know it sucks to get those sort of moderation comments. I hope you can trust that it's absolutely not personal and that my point was directed at the community, not you.
I do need to write something more definitive about this, if only so I can link to it in the future instead of writing variations of the same comment over and over again, which is slowly driving me crazy. But I fear it won't convince anyone. Personal interactions, like the one we're having here, sometimes seem to move the needle—which btw goes a long way toward repairing the hopelessness I often feel about this issue. But I'm unsure how to effectively deliver this message to the community as a whole, or if that's even possible.
My gut feeling about a statistical analysis is that it would probably be unsatisfying and stir up more objections than it settled. That tweet you linked seems to depend on much higher volume, 1000x if not more, compared to what we see on HN. That is, he's analyzing 5000 instances of a measurable kind of comment, of which HN probably wouldn't even get 5 over the same time period. Trying to analyze the HN corpus on these questions would be frustrating, because you'd be forced into semantic analysis right away and no one would agree whether you'd done it right. But I'm open to suggestions.
I've run into it on Reddit over a period of time last year as well.
The key identifier for me was what seemed to be either a certain level of intellectual dishonestly, or a real language barrier as sometimes their responses felt like a misunderstanding ... and then the real kicker were the identical links to US news sources that inevitably involved some US college professor (they like those stories) but also didn't quite say what they thought the story said.
If it was a real language barrier it was kinda sad as it was clear they couldn't understand what I was saying in English and their response was sometimes equally baffling to me.
Agreed. It's important to understand such things - to have compassion. It's why I also try to explain the circumstances in detail - in hopes that it may reduce the indoctrination, help them develop critical thinking further; building secret allies within the tyrant's machine.
Translation: "Let me dismiss and trivialize that which I'm too scared to admit might be true." Good luck keeping on pretending the opinions of a large chunk of the world don't exist, don't make sense or don't matter.
Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?
Sure, I guess it's easier to pretend the other side doesn't really exist, than to come to understand it. Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?
The other side exists. They have their opinion. I deny them the right to censor me, though.
> Or maybe it's you who needs to expand your mind, show a bit of empathy and try to understand the other side?
If the other side was doing the same, sure. The other side is actively denying my side the right to speak, though. I give zero empathy to their actions.
> Keep arrogant and ignorant at your own peril. But I guess it's easier to close your mind and feel better by pretending it's wrong, than to try to know the rest of the world?
You don't find it arrogant for China to try to prevent the rest of the world from saying that they support Hong Kong? You don't find it ignorant for China to try to keep information from the west out of China via the Great Firewall? You don't find that "closing your mind"?
China has no right to appeal for us to show those values, when China so clearly has no interest in them itself. (Yes, we should support the values that we claim. China has no right to demand that we do, though.)
I give empathy due to the coercion (active or passive), relatively forcing them to act in the way they do - but I don't stand idle.
There's not only ignorant behaviour coming from the tyrant-lead China, however the hypocrisy is blatantly obvious. Makes me think of the pro-China indoctrinated students in Canada (and elsewhere) who have the freedom to protest whatever they want, yet they're protesting to allow censorship and against freedom of peaceful assembly; it's clear indoctrination, likely with fear of consequences with falling out of line (for themselves, friends, family) - their own critical thinking perhaps not developed, and perhaps stunted from development - tied into whatever propaganda they're actively fed.
For the record I'm not complaining about "genuine" Chinese people expressing their opinions. As you said, it's important they have a voice, and we should listen.
What I'm pointing out is the increasing number of accounts that are very, very obviously paid or otherwise government controlled to influence opinions on HN (and obviously elsewhere on the internet)
Do you have some examples? It'd be good if we could keep a list and screenshots of this sort of thing, with some research into the usernames.
I hear people on Reddit talk about 'Russian bots' constantly and I've always wanted to see some examples on a site like HN/Reddit.
The above person lists his Github account and AFAIK he's not a paid shill, just a political contrarian or provocateur for political ends. Which IMO is an important difference if we're going to accuse everyone of being bots and "paid shills".
A green name with a single comment being downvoted immediately isn't influencing opinions here, they can't even downvote. But it'd be interesting to measure their frequency as well for a research project.
At the risk of being labeled one myself... there are no examples. I've seen dang respond to complaints like this many times and every time it was real people with real profiles being accused of shills, trolls etc.
Also, if you look it up it's almost all politics threads wrt China this year on HN with overwhelming anti-China sentiment, yet here we are, arguing about pro-China influence being too strong.
Then the question is no longer about how many shills are objectively out there that can be quantifiably measured, because this fact is obviously not what people have been basing their accusations on, but what results in the very question of shills being raised in the first place.
The only theory I can think of would be Chomsky's fifth filter, that is, a common external enemy that helps maintain consensus and divert ideological stress from internal antagonism, be it terrorists, Russian trolls, Chinese shills. This is compounded by the universalist belief that it is impossible to hold "genuine" political thoughts other than the End of History liberal democracy project, which is in itself beset on all sides already, making it all more intense.
The vast majority of users doing this will be real people who're simply indoctrinated - it's why China's tyrant leadership and censorship/control mechanisms is so effective, albeit powerful - however I don't like wrongly conflating the idea of what true power is with control.
You couldn't be more wrong, and the example shows how rooted these discussions are in imagination and skirt the margins of some truly ugly behaviors, which I'm certain you would never knowingly engage in.
I know who baybal2 is—we've exchanged perhaps a couple dozen emails over several years. I know his name and nationality. (Unless you want to argue that he's been emailing under a false identity? That's what spies do, after all.) He's someone with a technical background who's done extensive business in China. His views come from those experiences and no doubt from the rest of his background. This gives him a perspective that's very different from that of more mainstream HN demographics. Do we want a community member like that here? Or would we prefer to hound him out with suspicion and insinuation? Of course we want a community member like that here.
Why all the emails? Because for a while we were repeatedly banning and/or penalizing his account when it broke the site guidelines. When we think a user is persuadable, we'll often try to persuade them by email to use HN in the intended spirit. baybal2 may not have fully cleared that bar, but he's come a long way and that counts for a lot. And if you read his emails you'd see that he's a nice guy who means well and mostly has no idea when he's breaking the rules here; in other words, much like you and me.
In most cases, you can easily figure this out simply by taking the time to look at an account's public posting history. Unfortunately, what people seem to do instead is see a handful of data points—and when I say "handful" I'm being generous—that pattern-match a pre-image they have in their minds ("pro-Chinese agent" or whatever). From those few data points, they autocomplete the rest of the dots into a sinister picture—the picture they already had to begin with. Once they've done that several times, a feeling of pressure builds up that they call "overwhelming evidence" or something like that, which they can't help but vent into the threads. This is the real problem, not the posting history of someone like baybal2.
I feel ambivalent about writing this. On the one hand, it's important to look at specific examples that illuminate how this internet phenomenon of accusing others of astroturfing, etc., fundamentally comes from projection: reading into external situations the image that one carries in oneself. This community badly, deeply needs to take that insight in.
On the other hand, it feels sickening to pick apart individual histories in public. Because we have baybal2's email address, I can at least check in with him. But there have been other cases where that wasn't an option, including this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358, which had a mixed outcome. The user who made the accusation responded magnanimously. Unfortunately, though, the accused user really was hounded off HN and never came back. IIRC, they sent an eloquent email but refused our invitation to keep participating—or maybe that was someone else. There have been many such cases, including one that's sitting in the inbox right now, that I have yet to figure out how to reply to.
Thank you dang. I often think about how great of a job you're doing here and wondered if I could build a Reddit replacement built on your approach to community building. It's such a challenging problem to solve. I wonder if a strong creed and hiring approach could scale up to a larger site but I have my doubts.
It can't be easy doing your job and I hope you understand we very much value your work, even if everyone doesn't realize it's being done.
What would make you to reconsider? I don't really hide my identity on the Internet, and see no reason to do so for as long as I want to have a life.
Can you be one of those men who trolled me and my coworkers on email in July? If so, you need to work harder "to break my life." We were having good laugh reading that silly correspondence on lunch brakes. Very glad that I work in China now, and that people here don't give a f* about such drama, unlike in US.
What I want to see is the HN data - anonymized if necessary, so we can calculate averages - and know what accounts are behaving in what brigading behaviour; and so in essence the community of HN can crowdsource moderation - at minimum to help spot and highlight patterns, so each reader or user can independently analyze, interpret and decide for themselves what the data means.
You're making the argument that pro-China activists have more to fear in their online presence than Hong Kong activists? Could you point to some data that backs this up, because it overwhelmingly appears to be the opposite.
That's not playing devil's advocate, it's just projection, i.e. those who pay attention to the stifling of resistance against violence and murder are the real dangerous people, projecting what they resist on them.
> I remember once asking my mother, ‘How did you do in your studies?’ She replied, ‘What are you talking about? How could you study under those conditions?’. When she saw the segregation of African-Americans, whether at a lunch counter or in the school system, that was, for her, like the prologue to the Nazi holocaust. Whereas many Jews now say, Never compare (Elie Wiesel’s refrain, ‘It’s bad, but it’s not The Holocaust’), my mother’s credo was, Always compare. She gladly and generously made the imaginative leap to those who were suffering, wrapping and shielding them in the embrace of her own suffering.
-- Norman Finkelstein
> Of course, the terrible things I heard from the Nuremberg Trials, about the six million Jews and the people from other races who were killed, were facts that shocked me deeply. But I wasn't able to see the connection with my own past. I was satisfied that I wasn't personally to blame and that I hadn't known about those things. I wasn't aware of the extent. But one day I went past the memorial plaque which had been put up for Sophie Scholl in Franz Josef Strasse, and I saw that she was born the same year as me, and she was executed the same year I started working for Hitler. And at that moment I actually sensed that it was no excuse to be young, and that it would have been possible to find things out.
-- Traudl Junge
My points being
1.) to not compare, even with mass murder, is not being respectful to the victims of the Nazis, and it doesn't make them alive again. It simply means having a reason to look away, today, from the people who need your attention, now.
2.) If 10 billion people shrugged and said "nothing to see here", even one person seeing what they claim doesn't exist would prove that the others could have seen it, too. If ignorance is the result of not wanting to know, it's not really ignorance that could free one from culpability.
The big difference is that Nazi Germany wasn’t as fundamentally important to us getting larger, cheaper TVs. Economics clearly trump everything else. It’s ok to harvest organs from countless members of ethnicMinorities as long as the system that does it helps out bottom line. If the Soviet Unions economic system has worked well, we would have supported them too /s
I think you underestimate just how much of the US's immigrant population and culture was either directly German or German-influenced leading up to and in the early years of WWII.
I don't think most lefty-left Westerners are also pro-China. I know in my circles going after China—however ineptly and weakly—is probably the only major thing Trump's done that any of us agree with.
You do realize that Y Combinator the business is a separate entity from the thoughts and views of the thousands of people who comment here, right?
pg and dang aren't sitting here in the comments slapping everyone for posting their political ideologies. There certainly is not a small number of commenters with a negative view of capitalism here.
Just search for phrases like "late stage capitalism" and you'll find them.
#/media/File:1_AD_to_2008_AD_trends_in_%_GDP_contribution_by_major_economies_of_the_world.png){kind=link}
A lot of private companies control exclusive access to something with a value that dwarfs what you pay for it. I pay nothing for access to Twitter; if I build a business or a social life on the platform, it becomes something I would pay thousands of dollars to prevent losing. I pay nothing for access to Facebook; the memories they store at this point in my life may be nearly priceless. I've paid a low triple digit sum for Blizzard games, yet the time and social investments I have made in those games make them a couple of orders of magnitude more valuable to me, now.
The problem is that since these companies control services so valuable to me, anyone who wishes to hurt me for any reason can do it through them. Since no one is paying them to defend me -- I'm certainly not -- they have no resources commensurate with the value of what they're defending.
The situation we're in now is one in which political thugs apply pressure to private companies to hurt individuals, in an attempt to chill free speech.
Free speech is expensive and valuable, and defending it from those who would wish to destroy it requires commensurate resources. We should not expect Blizzard to stand up to the Chinese government; that is the job of the Chinese people, of other goverments, of perhaps the whole world.
To my view, Blizzard is like a store clerk who gives up the store's money to a robber. It would be nice if he was a hero, but he's not equipped for it. Nobody is paying 7-11 to stand up to violent crime. The problem is too big and expensive to ask individuals to deal with. Society paying for police and courts is at least a response on the right scale.
The mechanisms we have for protecting individual rights are antiquaited, and need to be rethought to deal with the current situation. Perhaps a model like the unified response to patent trolls could work? I think, if we want free speech to exist in the current environment, it will have to be something that big.