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2525 points hownottowrite | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.981s | source
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tomp ◴[] No.21190973[source]
China is very smart. They saw what was happening in the West - oppression of freedom of speech on account of "hurt feelings" - and applied the same principles for their own nefarious purposes ("hurt Chinese feelings" a.k.a. political censorship).

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

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johnday ◴[] No.21190990[source]
This is utter nonsense. Political censorship in the East is not a response to modern liberal views in the West.

That is so completely obvious that it boggles the mind that I even needed to say it.

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tomp ◴[] No.21191010[source]
Well thank God then that wasn't my argument.

What I'm saying is, China is co-opting modern liberal censorship in the West to do it's own political censorship (edit: in the West).

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johnday ◴[] No.21191030[source]
And no, they aren't. The two things may look superficially similar but Chinese political censorship is much, much older and the process but which it is done hasn't changed in a long time.
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XCabbage ◴[] No.21191253[source]
The only reason Blizzard was legally able to engage in this punishment - which involved stripping the player of his winnings - was that there's a player handbook banning offensive conduct and including this as a penalty. If that provision had not existed, China and Blizzard could not have used it. And the only political faction in the west who demand such codes of conduct are the SJWs.

When tomp says that China coopted the machinery of censorship laid by SJWs for its own purposes, he's entirely correct.

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monocasa ◴[] No.21191324[source]
No, it's the PR weasel words that have existed in sports contracts from the beginning of broadcast media

> Engaging in any act that, in Blizzard’s sole discretion, brings you into public disrepute, offends a portion or group of the public, or otherwise damages Blizzard image

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XCabbage ◴[] No.21191650[source]
Citation needed. I don't know the sports world, but I know in my bubble, those "weasel words" are something that only SJWs would approve of. If this sort of thing existed in sports contracts in the pre-SJW era, that is an interesting point that to my mind fractures tomp's narrative... but it seems unlikely to me and so far you've simply asserted it without evidence.

I note that the exact phrase "offends a portion or group of the public" has only ever been used in Blizzard's rules as far as I can tell (you can use a date-filtered Google search to confirm; prior to today there are only a handful of results, all Blizzard-related). So at the very least, they didn't lift it verbatim from sports contracts. If there used to be equivalent language in sports contracts a decade ago, I'd like to see it.

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1. danso ◴[] No.21193000[source]
I admit I tend to reflexively look down on comments that throw around terms like "SJW" unironically. But the rest of your comment belies some of the most profound ignorance I've seen in awhile. Did you Google "offends a portion or group of the public", and, finding no literal matches prior to GamerGate circa 2014, conclude that moral clauses did not simply exist before the "pre-SJW era"? Do you believe it was SJWs that forced the U.S. Olympic Committee to punish Tommie Smith and John Carlos for holding up their fists on the Olympic podium?

> The USOC issued an apologetic statement condemning the athletes’ “untypical exhibitionism,” which violated “the basic standards of good manners and sportsmanship, which are so highly valued in the United States.” [0]

Morals clauses for athletes have existed since for athletes at least 1922, according to Wikipedia [1].

Also, there's an argument to be had over the unbacked assertion that "SJWs" were the reason behind the "offends a portion or group of the public", as opposed to, the actual thing that that clause is now being used to punish. You know what else happened around the same time as the "SJW era"? China becoming a world-dominant economic and political force.

[0] https://www.outsideonline.com/2402740/john-carlos-tommie-smi...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morals_clause