Also fired both casters working on the event, even though they did not know what was going to be said:
https://twitter.com/Slasher/status/1181443974420189185
replies(3):
What do you think Blizzard would do if some guy wore a MAGA hat in an official stream?
If someone manages to do it with Nike it will be fun to watch.
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.
Don't say things like that on HN. They don't like it...
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.
Really seems like a win win scenario.
But that doesn’t make it the right decision, morally. Sometimes rules should be broken.
Hence, the woke company needs to do pretty un-woke things, and their hypocrisy is exposed.
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.
The hong kong issue is just bringing the issue into the mainstream
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.
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.
But what about the share-holder value?
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.
In this case, the player sacrificed the prize money and some e-status, but for the publicity it got, it was probably worth it.
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.
Privacy and Encryption don't mean much when the government literally controls the servers
His "trade war" already puts him in an adversarial stance towards from the perspective of his base.
This is allegedly where the software exists now.
https://audiofile.engineering/
Which contains absolutely no trace of the program Myriad Pro.
This is the discussion from kvr about it.
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=525534
On the plus side I doubled down and learned SoX which I wrap up in some python now and it's fast, open source and others can develop on my efforts.
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.
Chinese Tencent owns 5 percent of Blizzard, if full owner of Riot Games, 48% of Epic Games, 11.5% of Bluehole (Fortnite and PUBG), 5% of Ubisoft. They are also investor in Discord. https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-...
AMC is fully owned by Chinese. The largest movie theater chain in the United States is fully owned by Chinese.
Legendary Entertainment Group is owned by Chinese.
Forbes Media sold majority stake to Chinese company.
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.
If it’s only happened once and they’ve punished it once, I think that’s as consistent as possible.
Although of course there’s a lot wriggle room re definition of “offensive”, which muddies the waters.
I'm tired of the idea that the Western and Chinese markets can both be appeased the middle of the road morality.
What is happening in HK right now is wrong, and the west has fought wars over this very issue.
If Blizzard actually were so politically progressive, perhaps they might not be in this situation of backlash.
I know it’s nothing but a drop in the bucket but I will no longer support Blizzard - time to find another game.
Perhaps we should organize a day of protest across all blizzard games.
I think it’s pretty telling that I don’t feel comfortable posting this on my main account.
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.
https://docs.npmjs.com/unpublishing-packages-from-the-regist...
It sure doesn't seem to me that bending to the will of an authoritarian state is "sitting in the moral grey area." They've made their decision.
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.
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.
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".
It's hard to imagine people stopping using Uber, Lyft, Twitter, Snapchat, Fox News just because Saudis are heavily invested.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There needs to be a law to prevent corporations from enforcing political censorship on behalf of another nation.
It's interesting to watch this unfold for someone who isn't entrenched in any of these spheres.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-para...
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.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-joe-biden-empowered-c...
https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/07/china-censorship-daryl-mo...
Is software special in this case somehow?
It just happened with the NBA:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/08/asia/nba-china-houston-rocket...
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.
But I agree, I’ll never spend another $ on anything blizzard unless they take a different stand on the issue.
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.
Literally noone could have seen this coming. /s
edit: XCabbage better explains what I was trying to say. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21191253
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
Of course it's not, but you're missing the point. They're simply taking advantage of this incoherence in the current western value.
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.
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.
Saying it didn't make it true. Do us all the favor of a more convincing argument.
Besides, are we really talking about censorship in "the East"? Blizzard is based in California.
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aegis_Ballistic_Missile_Defens...
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?
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.
Read Mao's "On Contradiction".
> 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.
AMC was majority-owned by China’s Dalian Wanda, but they scaled back from 60% to 38% about a year ago.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amc-dalian-wanda-silver-l...
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.
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.
1> New Top Gun Movie removed a patch on Tom Cruises jacketdue to Chinese funding.
2> NBA issued an apology for an owner showing Hong Kong support and China stopped NBA broadcasts.
3> Blizzard
4> Apple Hides Taiwans Flag emoji
Sounds trivial but they're the tip of the iceberg for censoring freedom of expression based on a DICTATOR's whim.
Xi "Winnie The Poop" is an autocrat and once he sealed his grip on power and lifted term limits.
The fact is, the people are fighting a restriction on their freedom, in order to benefit the powerful.
This is a tale as old as humanity itself.
This is also what I fear will happen to America if we're not careful.
I think we need to be united in standing up against restrictions on the freedom of expression.
Think of all the lives your organs will save!
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.
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.
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.
When tomp says that China coopted the machinery of censorship laid by SJWs for its own purposes, he's entirely correct.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180623
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21180714
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.
https://amp.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1877753...
No easy answers. In this case, maybe there is a relatively simple rule: Supporting democracy must not in itself be regarded as offensive...
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.
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.
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!".
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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."
> 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."
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
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.
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.
Suspending a player in order to curtail their speech because of China's politically motivated demands is, itself, a political act.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1. https://rainbow6.ubisoft.com/siege/en-us/news/152-337194-16/...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-...
They're saying that cancel culture has normalized private sector political censorship in the west prior to this, making it a smaller reach.
The $ considerations are certainly there in all cases.
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.
Good on your paper for having the some fortitude.
"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.
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..
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Kotick#Business_strategy...
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.
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.
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.
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.
>boycott HearthstoneFrom 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.
My Steam games aren't much better off.
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?
https://twitter.com/InvenGlobal/status/1180954142396710912
Blitzchung is wearing a tear gas mask and laughingly says "reclaim Hong Kong, revolution of our time [光復香港 時代革命]" in Mandarin.
This slogan (which is also translated 'Liberate Hong Kong' or 'restore Hong Kong') is ubiquitous in the protests; you can read more about its meaning here: https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3021518...
Blitzchung also issued this statement:
"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."
Source of the statement: https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/9242/hong-kong-player-b...
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.
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 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.
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.
From a pure business decision it seems to make sense as the lesser of 2 evils.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Not really scary. It's better for superpowers to have intertwined economies, rather than be isolated. Less incentives for conquest and war.
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".
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.
'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.
Honest question: Can we call this unfair if it was already laid out as part of their rules?
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).
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.
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.
Just sounds like cancel culture to me. And it has horrible results.
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%.
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.
http://www.rhsansfrontieres.org/en/183-to-see/287-forced-lab...
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.
EDIT: nm, was on the wrong subdomain. Account removal requested & all my blizzard games gone. I hope they'll ask me why.
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 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.
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”.
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?
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
A few companies and minority ownership stakes does not mean any super power owns the majority of another super power. That's a wide gulf.
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.
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.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-GR88q8pIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPYuGYLesx0 (the planting of CCP flag near the end is really distasteful for me)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NFb2chXt9k
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3031906... (trashing trains while passengers still inside)
(Toby Guu is a Canadian software developer) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Jgp7-tXfc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFwGqF3QlVc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcw7lcZA7SE
Gaming companies cant set up pro leagues and treat players as if it was still football in the 1950's
Just because you don't call for somebody to be killed doesn't mean you don't hate them.
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.
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
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.
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.)
One fights for censorship, the other fights for freedom. I uninstalled hearthstone, which is the last activision blizzard product I used.
You do realize how hilarious that is juxtaposed to the Chinese government, which is literally a 'morality authority,' right?
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?
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.
edit: "say" for "stay" typo.
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.
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.
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.
Moreover, my above comment is grayed out right now as some people downvote it. Let's all think about that irony for a moment.
>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.
> 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.
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)
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.
Hopefully this pushes more people to use open source software.
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.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/alibaba-shopping-s...
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.
I hope they do stand up for what they see as right, though. I just understand why they might not.
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.
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.
In all seriousness, this is ridiculous. I hope this makes people understand how frighteningly China is intertwined with our corporations and culture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
Hearthstone is massive in China. Hearthstone has far more players than all other regions combined. The chinese market is what keeps the game alive.
That is the problem here.
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.
To your second point: I agree. They’re not at all the same company that they once were.
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.
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.
It couldn't be more obvious.
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...
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.
"Every voice MATTERS Great ideas can come from anywhere. Blizzard Entertainment is what it is today because of the voices of our players"
Maybe time for an update?
Edit: They have a statue in front of their office: https://i.imgur.com/5PJxrZr.jpg
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.
The incredibly bloody events that are likely to happen enacting a regime change that wouldn't ensure a freer government.
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.
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.
-- 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.
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.
Good for the people of Hong Kong.
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
Would Amazon stop selling 1984 if China asked it to? Hopefully not.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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)
https://www.nba.com/article/2019/10/08/nba-china-relationshi...
Not enough in my opinion.
It's curious that I've never seen anyone campaining against childless marriages, only against gay marriages.
I encourage you to hold companies to account for their actions even if those actions do not technically violate any laws.
P.s. Political opinions are on the official schedule of Disneyworld: https://dl3.pushbulletusercontent.com/UW7YGjoleObdVw7HDPeapr...
If you redefine your morals to money it works well. Not sure if that's good but it seems it happened.
[0] https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-china-red-dawn-2...
Blizzard/Activision is a multinational corporation. Incorporated in the US, but beholden to more cultural norms than just the US ones.
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 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.
[0] https://www.outsideonline.com/2402740/john-carlos-tommie-smi...
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.
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.
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.
Seems strange for the NFL to risk a First Amendment controversy with that rule if the NFL were truly unperturbed by Kaepernick's advocacy.
Does anyone know how that fits into the picture?
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.
I dunno.
Nature of a publicly traded company in a nation that deifies capitalism. Blizzard is on the S&P 500, for pete's sake.
If the CEO prioritized something other than profits, he'd be replaced by the board for breaching his obligations to the shareholders.
This is so overloaded with subjectivity, and it's the main problem of why regulating speech remains problematic and dangerous.
I can apply this statement to anything and validate what I claim is the baseline for objectivity.
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.
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.
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 ;) ).
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.
[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.
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.
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).
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/media/banished-f...
https://archive.fo/v5b1x (use this link)
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicwow/comments/dez4yc/breaking...
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."
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.
The GOA competes with the NRA because they find the NRA more pro-Republican than pro-gun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Owners_of_America
I'm not sure if there is a gun organization that promotes more nuanced theory of partially-limited gun rights but not just shilling for a party.
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.
Also: Blizzard should stand up for liberal democracy. It’s as simple as that. One can’t treat all political messages the same.
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.
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.
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.
Kind of self-contradictory: the statement "it's all relative" is itself an absolute statement.
You have this reversed. Blue checkmarks learned these tactics from the original Maosists and Stalinists.
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.
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.)
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.
They're saying we should just assume it's fair? What kind of idiotic notion is this?
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.
That's an awful place to live as well.
...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.
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.
I would love to see a list like this.
Unfortunately, it would contain the names of virtually every airline. But I would still like to see it.
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.
But I do care deeply about freedom of speech, and I'm getting tired of this crap.
[1] https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/10/8/20904593/nba-china-co...
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.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/nba-china-hong-k...
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.
Unless you're saying that you have an issue with free association as well.
(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.)
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.
Freedom of speech does not protect you form the consequences of your actions.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/200_(South_Park) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Best_Friends
I don't know any other internal regime change that isn't a revolution.
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)
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.
Does that not gel with your experience?
Blizzard: As a result of this action, you have lost my business. I've been a loyal customer, but this behavior is unacceptable.
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.
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_.
"the Chinese government doesn't interfere in personal religious beliefs" is quite the claim though, considering they literally have concentration camps full of Muslims.
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.
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.
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 NBA has not issued an apology to China: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/10/8/20904593/nba-china-co...
I can have a chinese landlord gouging me for west coast rent but can never be a landlord in china.
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.
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.
https://thewire.in/government/home-ministry-believes-in-inte...
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.
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."
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/10/8/20904593/nba-china-co...
Wait, are you saying there’s nothing anyone could say to you that would make you not want to work with them?
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 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.
A moral authority implies leadership - that others would trust and defer to for moral judgment.
If it was really capitalist, it would have stopped being cheap long ago.
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."
It’s just that some ideas that were considered normal in the corporate world are being questioned for the first time in a long time.
The idea that “everyone used to be able to say whatever they wanted without consequences!” is a little absurd if you think about it for a minute.
Is your argument so weak that you have to just lie?
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.
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?
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The point was that “ China is co-opting modern liberal censorship” to advance its agenda.
That’s simply not the case. One is driven by mass outrage—bottom up. The other by central diktat—top down. They’re separate and unconnected vectors.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Consider this an "I told you so" post.
EDIT: More on this subject, perhaps a bit better-thought-out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21194433
[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.
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.
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.
Yep. Usually, they play when changing from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q
https://www.youtube.com/embed/0yXTHODE24Q
But
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q
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.
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.
People REALLY hate the idea that they’re responsible for things they haven’t even conceived of.
The interesting thing is, how would we know that they haven't already handled them, and in such a way that we don't even recognize they occurred?
Also, let's not forget: Past performance is no guarantee of future results.
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.)
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.
https://www.learnliberty.org/blog/t-he-constitutional-rights...
[0] https://qz.com/224821/see-how-borders-change-on-google-maps-...
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.
https://twitter.com/AirMovingDevice/status/11811206016430735...
> 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.
[0] https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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.
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.
1. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blind_mountain_2007
2. http://uis.unesco.org/en/country/cn (notice the Tertiary education section)
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.
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.
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
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
we can't continue with appeasement of a totalitarian state bent on controlling the discourse of the world if we want to claim that we are a democracy.
unless we're willing to lose money to stay true to our ideals, our ideals aren't real whatsoever.
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.
Censoring racists and serial harassers isn't the same as censoring pro-democracy activists.
> 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)
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:
https://observers.france24.com/en/20190925-drone-video-shows...
Also, here is the longer version of the "give me liberty" speech that they used. May be NSFW (coarse language):
> 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.
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.
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-GR88q8pIw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPYuGYLesx0 (the planting of CCP flag near the end is really distasteful for me)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NFb2chXt9k
https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3031906.... (trashing trains while passengers still inside)
(Toby Guu is a Canadian software developer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6Jgp7-tXfc
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.
Irony of ironies.
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.
Why are you so sure of this?
It's honestly not much. Goes to show how fragile the PRC's ego is.
They seem to have picked up the torch themselves on this one.
There is no such thing as "apolitical", it is code for "supporting the status quo and agreeing with those currently holding power".
Blizzard pushed Pride hard when it suited them to do so. What is the proper time and place exactly?
It would seem that only certain political opinions are ok and those would be the type that won't hurt their bottom line.
I think people are just trying and failing to voice their actual feelings on the matter.
You could respect Blizzard's right to suspend the player for his opinion. And fully acknowledge that it is them showing him the door and all that.
You could also believe that Blizzard is on the wrong side in this conflict and withdraw your support based on that.
So you wouldn't be boycotting Blizzard for censorship so much as for supporting something you find wrong.
People complaining about "free speech" and "censorship" are complaining about the wrong thing here.
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.
Cutting LGBT characters and banning people who criticize the regime is entirely different.
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.
[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...
[2] https://voat.co
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.
https://www.fourfourtwo.com/us/news/breaking-news-guardiola-...
I'd agree with a slap on the wrist. Like $500 fine or something. But forfeiting all winners and 12 month ban is insane.
Seems like Blizzard is pandering to China because they don't want locked out of the market.
Shame on them for enjoying democracy in their own country (US) but assisting with suppressing it in other countries for their own profit.
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.
Now look at the submissions for that account [3].
Now read more of the comments [4].
That account has been around a while, so I'm not sure it qualifies as "shill", but it certainly seems suspect to me.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21124115
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21126141
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.
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1181497808563658752
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrY6bKFVD3Q&feature=youtu.be...
https://twitter.com/ShamsCharania/status/1181497808563658752
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrY6bKFVD3Q&feature=youtu.be...
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.
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-china-survey-idU...
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.
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.
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.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-joe-biden-empowered-c...
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?
Edit: a word
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
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.
well.... maybe you can make that argument.... but i think that is beyond the scope of the original intent.
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.
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.
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.
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]
1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...
2. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent#...
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.
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.
Honestly never even heard of it so that's pretty easy then.
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?
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHKbe5mAoNo
---
For those concerned the videos are mostly safe-for-life in what is depicted, even if it is somewhat unsettling.
> 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.)
If the rules are ridiculous, then the reaction to them should be to dismantle the rules and disavow the rule-makers.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20646888
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,
—
"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190597 and marked it very off-topic.
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.
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.
> Just because you don't call for somebody to be killed doesn't mean you don't hate them.
Just because you disagree with somebody about policy, it doesn't mean you must hate them. Unfortunately, nowdays it appears to be almost mandatory.
People here lack so much perspective on geopolitical issues.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21190558 and marked it off-topic.
Still, the national grid of my European country is controlled by a literally state-owned Chinese company, so Tencent seems tame in comparison.
Do this instead: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag.
Wow, that is really offensive. I can see why they would ban him for a year for saying such horrible things.
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.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/09/20/chef_roasted_for_ic...
Luckily it was something that could be easily remedied.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
False. He chose to use a clause in his contract that let him leave the 49ers early.
I don't agree with Trump on pretty much anything except for his stance on Chinese trade.
There is an imbalance that needs to be addressed that is being completely ignored by the progressive candidates.
Not saying it will make me vote for the guy in 2020, but it will be a key issue for many others.
China and what it stands for is the antithesis of those principles.
Our unwillingness to act on what our ancestors viewed as infringements on basic human rights will be the end of the free world.
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.
Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.
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:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That even gets a few results of you increase the score to 100, e.g.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304526
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.
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.
That doesn't make you any less hateful.
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
A small limitation on an 'unassailable' right (where is that status derived from?) is actually the solution that maximizes liberalism by limiting genocide.
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.
Had you taken the time to really look, you'd find posts about traveling wave reactors (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21175545) and biaxial helicopters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21168582) and Economist articles (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20950878) just in the last month. This is not how "suspect" accounts behave. This is how normal users, who are as intellectually curious as you and simply have a different background and perspective, post to HN.
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.
Is that really the community we want to be?
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.
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.
It's all so ... poetically disturbing.
That's not correct, if you search over the past month and sort by Most Popular. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr... This story is #1, but #2 and #3 combined outstrip it by themselves.
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.
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.
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.
We're enabling and funding this. We should stop.
The last step for me to stop doing business with a bad actor is by giving up my privacy.
This would be like the USA demanding all mentions and images of Jiangshi - The hopping zombie/vampire undead where removed.
...
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_China#People's_Rep...
EDIT: "Account created: 3 hours ago"
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?
EDITED to correct spelling.
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.
Legality-induced Digital Dark Ages. :-)
Here is Kevin Hart apologizing repeatedly for offending the LGBT community: https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/kevin-hart-apo...
Here is cyclist Jen Wagner-Assali apologizing for offending the trans community: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/cycling-champion-apologizes-...
Here are YA authors apologizing profusely for offending people in Muslim and other "marginalized" communities: https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-...
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.
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 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.
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.
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).
how poetic
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.
It looks to me that it was written with stuff more in line with white supremacy advocation and stuff like that in mind.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19403358
[2] https://twitter.com/AirMovingDevice/status/11811206016430735...
Is it the most appropriate of all possible analogies? No.
Is it contextually close enough? I thought so. A few people seem to agree.
If your contribution to the discussion is to critique the efficacy of my analogy, then I feel like you've missed the point a bit.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0aCI3d0D8
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.
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.
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.
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.
What does China expect? The NBA should throw the man in a private work camp/prison and re-educate him?
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.
-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unnao_dead_bodies_row
And many sources mention they did this just because they can’t afford proper cremation.
Another funny picture is Train with many people attached outside, not sure if that’s another convention or custom :)
[1] https://www.racked.com/2018/5/10/17339690/dicks-sporting-goo...
[2] https://gunstoday.com/why-is-everyone-boycotting-springfield...
No it isn't. That is to say, censorship and banning are less of a problem now than they've been at any other time in US history.
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.
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.
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".
One of Capitalism's many flaws.
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.
Boycott the Hearthstone streamers. Without the pros to tell the punters what the meta is and what cards to buy, the game dies out.
While Blizzard won't notice a couple people leaving, streamers will notice even a couple of people telling them they are leaving their channel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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?
It might be worth checking this out:
https://theundefeated.com/features/mexico-city-olympics-prot...
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.
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.
With newly known ones, I feel bad, and then I try to understand how I could be better.
I’m not sure I understand your question.
Or, put another way, how big can my business get before I have to forgo my right to make my own decisions about who I collaborate with?
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 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.
I'm sorry you felt like I was throwing threats at you—definitely not how I want a comment like that to come across.
So, the shareholders would be for practical purposes passive investors in what would become a defacto Chinese run company?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
People may have presented the concept before the US Constitution but it certainly didn't apply to many people legally (if any?) before then
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
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".
Feeling offended because somebody criticized a state is harder to make stick.
The decision to abandon democracy can never be democratic or democratically legitimated.
In the example of Venezuela, both parties agree to the same constitution, though they interpret it differently.
"the right of people to express their opinions publicly without governmental interference, subject to the laws against libel, incitement to violence or rebellion, etc."
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.
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.
Are corporations trying to pick and choose when they are treated like a person? Does that place them above people?
No it isn't. This is alarmism.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks for the discussion
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
"Prop 8 would not and did not "nullify" any marriages licensed by the state in the middle of 2008. See
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Prop-8-not-retroactive...
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.
Here are various explanations if you want to read some:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200971
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21201077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21199884
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195089
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898
Previous comments on this at:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Blizzard obviously doesn't authenticate these IDs as that isn't really possible.
The fact that you can do essentially anything to a Battle.net account with just an ID scan is a huge vulnerability.
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.
In addition, Milton's 1644 Areopagitica is meant to be an inspiration for the first amendment, and it is all about the need for freedom of the press.
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 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.
Your reply is deeply dishonest.
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