Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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

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.

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).

And no, they aren't. The two things may look superficially similar but Chinese political censorship is much, much older and the process but which it is done hasn't changed in a long time.

The only reason Blizzard was legally able to engage in this punishment - which involved stripping the player of his winnings - was that there's a player handbook banning offensive conduct and including this as a penalty. If that provision had not existed, China and Blizzard could not have used it. And the only political faction in the west who demand such codes of conduct are the SJWs.

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

No, it's the PR weasel words that have existed in sports contracts from the beginning of broadcast media

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

Citation needed. I don't know the sports world, but I know in my bubble, those "weasel words" are something that only SJWs would approve of. If this sort of thing existed in sports contracts in the pre-SJW era, that is an interesting point that to my mind fractures tomp's narrative... but it seems unlikely to me and so far you've simply asserted it without evidence.

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

How do you think Kaepernick was benched and then fired, or do you think that the NFL is filled with a bunch of SJWs who also somehow think we should all stand for the flag?

As far as I know:

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.