The Internet's reaction to this has warmed my heart a little. Overwatch and Hearthstone are among my favorite computer games. I've certainly played more Overwatch than any other game. I have made real-world and online friends in Overwatch. I met my girlfriend in Overwatch.
It made me sad to have to throw all that away yesterday.
But the conversations we're having as a result of this is great. The mainstream media is talking about it. Congress is talking about it. We're going to have to ask ourselves: can we really let China have this much influence? Is it really worth it? (Remember: this is what Europe is asking about Silicon Valley with things like GDPR, and it's working out quite well for them.)
Banning someone from Hearthstone GM doesn't matter. But we are heading down a path where we decide what our values are, and they're looking pretty good.
One thing to note -- it's not really troubling for a country to have a lot of influence. It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West.
This is not a question of a foreign country being different. This is a question of a foreign company forcing us to slowly give up the very things we consider to make us human -- our freedoms -- in exchange for a couple extra bucks. The fact that companies are willing to do it is pathetic. And I'm glad that people are finally waking up to this.
Hong Kong is literally protesting to have the right to a trail by jury! How anyone in The West could not take their side is baffling to me. I wish I was a gamer so I could boycott Blizzard. But I am a basketball player, and I'll make sure to tell everyone I can to boycott the NBA until they make this right.
The protesters are not wrong. The CCP is antithetical to our way of life in The West. Apologist companies to The CCP -- in my view -- are a direct threat to my freedom as a human being.
I’m amazed at just how open (and wrong) cctv’s recent reply to the nba scandal was:
“We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC“
This is not just wrong, it’s so wrong it’s not even remotely compatible with how we define freedom. To see this in writing is just disturbing and sad that after all these decades of lip service on moderation and opening up and being a global participant, China is basically no different than it was under Mao.
The message from Heartstone's official Weibo account read similarly. It reads like it's written by a party member, not some corporate PR employee. It reads like something I'd expect to have come out of the USSR in the 80s. It's all very disturbing. It's also strangely familiar in that regard, and quite frightening when taken from that perspective.
That's Blizzard America, of course. If I'm not mistaken, there is technically no Blizzard _inside of_ China. They license their IP, etc..., to a Chinese (CCP approved) company-of-sorts who is then responsible for it's dealings inside China.
But, yes, something fucky is going on with their account management system, which is actively blocking people from disabling their accounts (via blocking account verification attempts, I believe).
> China is basically no different than it was under Mao
This is very much not true. For one, there's rampant consumer capitalism, very little social net, no tens of millions starving to death, and something like 10-100x more personal income.
I don't know if you have family that grew up under Mao or not that you can go check with, but, this is a really, really false statement to make.
I'm not saying it's all peachy now, just that it is a far cry from Mao.
I do agree that CCP's statement there about freedom of speech is ridiculous to say about something spoken in the US.
> This is very much not true. For one, there's rampant consumer capitalism, very little social net, no tens of millions starving to death, and something like 10-100x more personal income.
Is this a list of four different differences? Under Mao, when tens of millions of people starved to death, how much of a social net was there?
Under Mao, despite an ostensibly strong social net, many still starved to death. I intentionally listed those two together because Mao time was not so great for many.
If you look at free speech in Europe for example, in eg Germany there are laws against hate speech or defamation of individual people (quite differentiated, an opinion is ok and true facts are ok, but invented facts are not). One of the targets is Nazi propaganda, and in general the support is good.
Still, the goal is similar, social stability, peace and protection of minorities. People do not get disappeared, but they do get sued.
I sympathize with the idea, but how does one define hate speech? Couldn't The CCP claim that any speech in support of Hong Kong is speech in hate of The CCP? Limiting speech in anyway gets very slippery.
Oxford defines as follows: “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.”
And it seems to be a general definition, I think sometimes it’s narrowed to threats or to calls for violence, I suppose?
The problem isn't that it's an unimaginable term; the problem is that every single person imagines it differently. Your definition of hate speech and my definition might be the same for some examples and drastically different for others. For some people, saying "men are not women" is considered hate speech, while others would say it has nothing to do with hate speech. Hate speech is inherently subjective, and banning it always results in the same question: who gets to decide what is hate speech?
In this particular instance? The German legislative branch drafted and passed the law(s?), and the German judiciary branch interprets it. People who are accused of practising hate speech are given an opportunity to defend themselves in court.
Despite the kind of hand-wringing about this that folks such as yourself routinely engage in over this subject, German society has somehow managed to survive and thrive despite this relatively minor limitation on their freedom of speech. They even have some hateful racist shitbags gaining seats in the Bundestag.
Everyone has an opinion, but it doesn’t make a word meaningless. Of course there is some grey area, but if “men are not women” is the best example you can think of, I’m pretty sure most of law-educated people will quickly agree where the line is, if there’s ever a need. ;)
In the UK (Scotland specifically) we had the ridiculous prosecution of Markus "Count Dankula" Meechan. We've certainly not found the right balance over here.
Read the actual judgement, and it's just about impossible to conclude that the conviction was anything but deserved and perfectly balanced.
The judge explicitly asked his defence to explore freedom of expression. He chose not to. The rest of his "defence" was laughable and easily disproved lies. The judge pointed out his failure to explore freedom of expression in his summing up. Short of using neon, how much more clearly could the judge have telegraphed it? The conviction was therefore on pure technical breach of the law with no mitigation.
Markus Meechan was left looking like a complete moron who threw away his opportunity of defence. In addition to being a bottom feeding racist. Oh, and a scammer as he crowdsourced a load of money for the defence he didn't bother offering.
Justice was done, and clearly seen to be done. I'm very comfortable with the balance of the law after that trial. Had the defendant bothered to offer a defence exploring freedom of expression, we might be discussing his acquittal.
Reading the judgement took my opinion from surprise at an apparently ridiculous verdict, to one that was entirely fitting.
>> a load of money
> deserved in my opinion
For what? A defence he did not use after encouragement?
I wouldn't argue that he hasn't committed a crime. My issue is that it's a crime at all. Everything is grossly offensive to someone.
I watched the actual video in question, and with regards to the judgement, I disagree that it was menacing, anti-semitic, or racist.
The video, if anything, is anti-racist and anti-anti-semitic. It's certainly not threatening to anyone of reasonable mind, unless one considers the pug to be a danger to the Jewish community.
It's not painting Nazi atrocities as a positive thing, it's making clear that it's literally the most horrendous thing possible.
The judge takes issue with some things having a different impact when part of a joke.
>"You accepted that the phrase “* the *” was anti-Semitic though not, you said, when used as part of a joke."
It isn't anti-Semitic in context. Did you watch the video?
Have you read the whole judgement? I think it's still available as a pdf on the court website. Not the carefully selected snippets and quotes dumped in the media. I recommend it, it's hilarious (at Meecham's expense), and IIRC only a couple of pages.
He had a defence. He chose not to use it, despite the judge explicitly encouraging him to. So after the judge points to the exit, he faces the other way and sulks.
He deserved conviction. Except we're not nearly done.
(From memory) His tale of the joke intended solely for his girlfriend was completely shredded as a pack of lies in court. His girlfriend didn't even subscribe to his channel, or know of his joke. The judge had a better awareness of how Youtube worked than the guy with the channel. In context the "private joke" was for mass distribution and nothing to do with his girlfriend.
Now he deserves prosecution for perjury. Moronic and obvious perjury, but perjury nonetheless. So bad I was laughing while reading the judgement. I think perjury carries the lengthier maximum sentence. We're still not done.
> It isn't anti-Semitic in context. Did you watch the video?
[Yes I did. The judge very clearly states the conviction is on the simple breach of the law. Context and mitigating circumstance is irrelevant as Meecham chose not to use the freedom of expression defence. Thus "in-context" does not matter at all.
So forget the pug. Forget the joke, the context, the way he made it totally not funny unless you're seven. It's obviously anti-semitic, but not especially harmful. Meecham accepts it's anti-semitic. It's not threatening compared to a march with dozens of thugs chanting the exact same phrases, into the faces of actual people. The law must cater for both ends of the threat scale being videoed and distributed. Clearly it is reasonable for there to be some offence, and some chance of mitigation for the lesser or technical breaches and parody or humour.
Repeating a phrase he accepts as racist, over and over, to clips of Hitler, jews and for some reason Buddha (IIRC, it's been a while), is clearly anti-semitic in context. Clearly it's not threatening on the scale of possibility of people using the same phrase and actions in a different context. Just a feeble joke, but accepted as anti-semitic by Meecham in court nonetheless. Still, he's not on trial for how funny he is or isn't either.
This is all 99.9% pointless discussion. None of this section is relevant as it's mitigation that the defendant chose not to use. Were he not a complete moron he would have most likely been reasonably acquitted for freedom of expression.]
He was offered an out by the judge in the context of the legal system. Then ignored it.
Reading the full judgement warmed my heart and restored a little faith in British justice.
OK, he's a moron as well as a convicted criminal, and clearly shown to be a perjurer. End of. I wonder what happened to the thousands he crowdsourced for his defence, but no-defence-offered really.
Is that the judgment? If so, when you say "He had a defence. He chose not to use it, despite the judge explicitly encouraging him to", are you referring to this part?
> I should note that although I invited both legal representatives to make legal submissions during the trial about the law on freedom of expression, that was done only to a very limited extent. In the absence of focused submissions on that topic by either the Crown or the defence, all I can say is that, while that right is very important, in all modern democratic countries the law necessarily places some limits on that right.
That's the one. I'd forgotten the Crown hadn't bothered either. The judge was trying to encourage an exploration of freedom of expression. Had the defendant bothered, he would likely have had very reasonable chance of acquittal or trivial fine in place of the £800. That the Youtube and "private joke for his girlfriend" aspects of his defence were shown up as lies probably didn't help his case. :)
The next paragraph is relevant to the context, as he makes clear that in the absence of those explorations, the conviction rests solely on the narrow fact of whether the law was breached or not. i.e. without any mitigation taken into account:
“This trial, unusual though some aspects have been, was therefore concerned, ultimately, only with the narrow fact-based question of whether the Crown has proved beyond reasonable doubt that your using a public communications network on one day to post the video onto your video channel, constituted an offence contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. I found it proved on the evidence that it was. My finding establishes only your guilt of this offence. It establishes nothing else and sets no precedent.
> Hong Kong is literally protesting to have the right to a trail by jury! How anyone in The West could not take their side is baffling to me.
Because local prejudice can provide bias, jurors can be influenced by a lawyer's courtroom performance, most juries aren't actually a random sample of the population, long trials usually create hasty verdicts, most jurors don’t have a background in law, and jurors do not need to reason their decision.
Not to say that there aren't pro's to trial-by-jury, but not every Westerner is convinced that trial-by-jury is better than many of the alternatives, and that doesn't make a Westerner any less of a "Westerner."
Juries are not about accuracy. They are there as another line of defense against tyranny: it's harder to make up charges or convict people of ridiculous things when a jury can nullify it.
Nullification is rare and unfortunately that line of defense largely failed during the drug war. But I think that's largely because the government was able to successfully make it a racial issue. It's not always easy to take advantage of deep social divisions for all kinds of policies, and that's why dictators don't like juries.
Kind of like guns. How useful are they against tyranny really? Useful enough that tyrants try to take them away, and that's all I need to know.
Is that actually the case? A dictator should have little problem punishing jurors for bad judgments, incentivizing them to fall in line like judges. But in (western) democracies, dictators seem to arise from demagogues / populists winning elections. Such a zealous fan base will be reflected in the jury.
> The fact that companies are willing to do it is pathetic.
I don't disagree with your post at all, but I wanted to note that it's important to remember that companies aren't people, they're machines generally designed to maximize profit. Morals don't apply to them - only the law, and money does.
Personally I've boycotted Blizzard in response, and I hope more people do.
This is false. Companies are made of people. They're not machines, they're organizations of people. There is no "business ethics" there's just ethics. People in leadership positions can take actions that aren't always in the interest of short term profit maximization, and will not get fired for it, so long as these actions are vaguely aligned to the long term health of the organization.
One might suggest that encouraging freedom / democracy is in the long run health of all for-profit companies. I haven't seen any boards or shareholder activists argue against this yet.
That is "technically correct" but meaningless in practice. It's like saying that people are just a collection of molecules. While technically not wrong, humans are of course more than the sum of its parts. The collection of molecules, arranged in a certain way, exhibits emergent behaviour; it will seek food or have intelligent thoughts, which molecules individually can't be said to do.
Likewise, companies as institutions are more than the sum of their people, and will display behaviour that cannot be fully explained by looking at their people individually, and this has very much real consequences. Like a nation is more than a collection of people, and this fact has consequences on the real world.
It is not meaningless in practice. I can agree it is insufficient and that groups lead to emergent behavior. But it is meaningful to note that the individual components of an organization have free will and potentially a sense of ethics/morality.
Each company has different behaviors, some broadly can be assumed, like, a company won’t usually want to deliberately destroy or bankrupt itself (there have been exceptions to this!). Others will contribute greatly to social or environmental programs that directly hurt short term profits. how they get to those decisions is complex and requires strategy, execution, leadership, etc. Not something so 19th century as “profit maximization”
My original post was to state that’s it is false to suggest that a company is always a profit-maximizing amoral machine. People aren’t machines and The emergent behavior of any given corporation rarely is “Profit maximization”. It is sort of like saying the emergent behavior of a sports team is “point maximization”. It is meaningless and not true.
I generally agree and think this is a very helpful perspective. It's too much to expect companies to choose ethics over profit, even if the companies are temporarily made up of ethical people -- these are mere components. (Hence the goal of governments/regulations should be to align profit-making with societal goals.)
>It's too much to expect companies to choose ethics over profit, even if the companies are temporarily made up of ethical people -- these are mere components.
What's with the apologist mindset there?
If you can't hold a group of people accountable for ethical conduct, from whence comes the idea that singular actors should be regulatable by traditional justice systems?
Corporations were intended to distribute risk to enable collective groups to attempt something which none individually could have hoped to do without a significant chance of losing everything.
They were not intended as a bulwark through which to engage in ethically dubious behavior in search of profit. Profit is not a right. Merely a happy byproduct of a job well done.
Ethical behavior, and actually performing a valuable service for the society hosting the corporation is the primary goal. Not profit generation.
The sheer bullheaded insistence that profit is the be all end all of human activity needs to die.
Thanks for the post, I strongly agree with your points and may have stated mine badly. I am purely stating a descriptive view of how the world works. My conclusion is that we cannot just sit back and hope companies will act ethically. We have to actively shape the rules to incentivize or require them to do so.
> It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West.
WE have thrown it away already, China is just trying to speed things up.
I've thought quite a bit about this, and my conclusion is that everything is cyclical and has a rise and fall because it only takes a few generations to unlearn hard-fought lessons. Only this time around technology is going to enable a level of control that has never been achieved before. I can only hope that technology will also allow the escape of that same level of control.
A perfect example is how larger and larger swathes of the populace is ok hampering free speech in the name of empathy. They don't fully understand the implications, and there will be generations that will be forced to relearn those lessons, and it won't be a cheap lesson.
“The Lessons of History” by Will Durant and Ariel Durant talks about the cyclical nature of history. They talk specifically about the cycles of control and chaos. How our liberties are only possible after a period of control.
just a follow up, I found myself on a lakeside this weekend and took the opportunity to read the book.
Thank you again for recommending it, I really enjoyed the insights it had. I found the idea that democracies tend to end up dictatorships/authoritarianism to be extremely fascinating.
And the observation that market driven economies have happened in the past helped me realize current times are not nearly as unique as I believed.
It's interesting to see people give up Blizzard games, but still continue supporting companies like Apple that do far worse, like effectively giving the keys to iCloud to China. I think the conversation is great, and maybe now we'll actually reconsider what the TPP's goal was. But in the end, the people picked money first, so it shouldn't be a surprise when businesses do this as well.
I'm sad to see you downvoted. Its frustrating to me too when a company like Apple champions human rights in the USA then hands over the management of iCloud to China.
The juicy parts from the Legal Agreement for folks in China using iCloud:
> E. Access to Your Account and Content
> We reserve the right to take steps we believe are reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or verify compliance with any part of this Agreement. You acknowledge and agree that we may, without liability to you, access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Account information and Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or a third party, as we believe is reasonably necessary or appropriate, if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, disclosure, or preservation is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with legal process or request; (b) enforce this Agreement, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of GCBD, its users, Apple, a third party, or the public as required or permitted by applicable law. You understand and agree that Apple and GCBD will have access to all data that you store on this service, including the right to share, exchange and disclose all user data, including Content, to and between each other under applicable law.
There's a vast difference, namely a geographical one. Blizzard compromising the freedom of a non-Chinese resident because of something he did in a non-Chinese platform.
Apple is compromising the freedom of Chinese residents in China.
While I don't really support Apple's action it's easy to see why the first issue should be Blizzard's blame while the second issue is China's blame.
Can you explain why you think that complying with hard legal requirements that are a hard pre-requisite to doing business in an authoritarian country is worse than eroding freedom of speech in a non-authoritarian country?
Apple can chose to operate in China and backdoor iCloud there or they can chose not to operate in China at all. It's hard for me to see how either choice will substantially affect people's liberties in China, it's not like apple products are in any way vital to the surveillance state.
On the other hand more and more companies retaliating (out of a desire to curry economic favor with China) against people who exercise their freedom of speech in non-authoritarian countries would seem to affect people's liberties to me.
Tim Cook defied the US goverment over the exact same issue, and even said:
"Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us."
So to me, seeing him allow Chinese authorities access to that same data in China in the name of sales is incredibly hypocritical.
This way he gets to sell iPhones in China and the Chinese should obviously avoid using iCloud. If Apple was hiding this fact then I would have a problem with it. And if the device encryption isn’t compromised, then local data is probably safer on an iPhone than a lot of other devices.
It's not surprising. Blitzchung has a name and a face, and he earned a thing, and he had it taken away from him directly, deliberately, and unjustly. That makes him a strong symbol to rally around and more likely to incite a social movement than a faceless corporate policy. At the same time, the atmosphere of distrust fostered by those insidious but not-directly-motivating policies is something of a precondition for those movements to form. I don't think it's as simple as "people care about thing X but not thing Y".
Related: what's the name for this tactic in debate? Where a dissenter insistently demand citations so that the conversation has to pause and then the dissenter nitpicks the citation instead of the argument, effectively derailing the conversation.
It's hard to see this account (jbang5) as anything but an internet troll who, if not literally on the payroll from the Chinese government, is still a useful idiot for their cause.
Yeah, it is an interesting tactic, but I've actually developed an effective counter to it.
What I usually do, to counter this trolling tactic, is to provide them with the source that they were asking for, and then I call them an idiot for not being aware of such an obvious fact.
Because, by definition, they are uninformed about the matter, as they didn't know about the source and had to ask for it. So I just make fun of them for not knowing about it, and rub it in their face when I provide the information that they asked for and didn't know about.
If you have to ask for sources on the matter, you are by definition "ignorant" on the matter.
A link to a wikipedia article about the list of the worlds top supercomputers (the near majority of which are in China and presumably used by the CCP) doesn't mean that strong, well-applied crypto can be broken (I assume you're referring to brute force breaking). Mathematically, the computing power, energy and time necessary to break it are known in relation to all current computing power and, more importantly, methodology. Thus, taking just one of the Chinese supercomputers from the top500 list, the Tianhe-2, the calculation for that particular machine, working alone, to break just half the keyspace of AES 256 doesn't lend credibility to your claim:
=33 860 000 000 000 000 keys per second (33.86 quadrilion)
3.386e16 * 31556952 seconds in a year
2255 possible keys
2^255 / 1.0685184e24
=1.0685184e24 keys per year (~1 septillion, 1 yottaflop)
=5.4183479e52 years
Needless to say, that's a long fucking time. Yes, cracking an access password would be much less time-consuming and so would finding and using non-brute force attack methods to guess or steal the key but for your basic claim that "Yes", China has cracked strong encryption, I just don't see where you get that idea from.
Chinese government nationalized the data centers six months later, gaining access to all the encryption keys and user iCloud data at rest. Apple complied:
Google did not have as much skin in the game as Apple does. If Apple defied the CCP, they could lose their factories overnight. To say this would cause immense damage is an understatement. They would have no product to sell within weeks and they would have no means to produce anything. It would be catastrophic.
Google, on the other hand, walked away from China and it's business as usual for them.
At the time of walking away they had 33% of the Chinese search market - so it is hard to see how they did not have skin in the game - to lose all access to the largest market in the world forever. And not only for search, but also youtube, android and so many other things.
Android is open source so of course the lowest tier phone OEMs are going to fork/use it. I was in Shanghai a while and could buy counterfeit iphones too despite Apple being there.
Google famously pulled out of China rather than censor, but that was just a PR move because they already were failing in China. I'd argue that censorship is an altogether different situation anyway.
Apple removing iCloud from China helps literally nobody. Chinese users don't have an alternative that isn't subject to the same Chinese laws. Any user that wishes to resort to less-than-legal alternatives can do so whether or not Apple provides iCloud services.
Ultimately this boils down to "should the Chinese court systems be able to decide when to hand data over to the Chinese government", because that's the effect of using a Chinese partner company to manage the iCloud data. For everyone else it's "should the US court systems be able to decide" instead, which honestly isn't all that much better.
And? Companies here are legally required to respect NDAs and hand over large swaths of personal information. "bUT iT'S LEgAL" is not a valid excuse for anything, at any given time.
I clicked on a tweet in the article and then the tweet contained within by Rob Breslau and the top reply is (with 4.2 likes currently) "American gamers are too busy being horny for Overwatch heroes to hold Blizzard accountable for this."
Doesn't seem that heartwarming at all, just gross.
What exactly is monetized in Overwatch? A bunch of silly skins you don't need? Everything is included, they are constantly updating, and releasing new characters, all for no additional cost. Best $20 I've ever spent for a multiplayer game.
And they give out Loot Boxes like candy in game. There's no need to purchase them. Play some games? Loot box. Be a positive player? Loot boxes. New event? Loot boxes. Play "Anything but DPS" right now? Loot Box.
I've bought game merch and London Spitfire (Overwatch League) merch, I've bought the OWL Pass thingy, I've cheered bits. And I bought the game at launch (no pre-order).
I've played a lot for a casual player, and I've watched even more. It's the only esport that I've enjoyed watching.
Only once did I ever buy Loot Boxes.
That purchase of Loot Boxes was because they brought out a new event that I loved, for free, and it seemed like a cheap but quantifiable way of showing support for what they were doing. I didn't need any of the skins.
I felt the way they've done Loot Boxes is "Loot Boxes Done Right".
So this feels like a real kick in the balls.
The home stand games for OWL will be brutal. Fan signs are already a bit rough on old Blizz on occasions. I'd give it three matches before a "FREE HONG KONG" sign makes it onto broadcast and there's a massive shitshow.
Yeh I've never purchased a single loot box, and I play roughly once or twice a week since it was launched. I'm currently sitting at about 75% coverage for skins and what not, with 22,000 credits. Just playing the game, gets you more than enough.
I thought so too, but I stumbled upon SC2 with it’s war chests, and I like the idea of paying 25$ and getting the whole set of skins* instead of loot boxes.
* - I suppose there’s a little less content. And old sets are ridiculously expensive for stupid skin packs. But the idea itself is neat.
As a practical matter, no. Legal told me I have to implement it for all users because it covers EU citizens who might be accessing our site from or living in non EU countries.
European in terms of nationality is irrelevant, but I'm not sure if that's what you mean.
Most articles I've read on it state the user must be in Europe and taking a product/service delivered to Europe. A US tourist buying something in a store when they arrive in Europe has GDPR protection, a French tourist visiting the US (or even at home in France but buying something online to be delivered to a friend in the US) is not.
GDPR compliance is obligatory as long as either data controller, processor, or subject operates, resides or is temporarily passing through Europe. The only way to avoid GDPR is if say you were a US company handling Chinese data, or vice versa.
It made me sad to have to throw all that away yesterday.
But the conversations we're having as a result of this is great. The mainstream media is talking about it. Congress is talking about it. We're going to have to ask ourselves: can we really let China have this much influence? Is it really worth it? (Remember: this is what Europe is asking about Silicon Valley with things like GDPR, and it's working out quite well for them.)
Banning someone from Hearthstone GM doesn't matter. But we are heading down a path where we decide what our values are, and they're looking pretty good.