Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

A lot of comments here seem to take as a given that banning any offensive speech in any forum leads inexorably to situations like this, where the "offensive speech" is political speech offensive to an authoritarian government. But this implies that it's impossible to distinguish between different kinds of "offensive" speech based on any meaningful criteria whatsoever, and this just seems to be fundamentally incorrect.

(1) Someone in a forum makes an "offensive" comment that's a show of support for political protestors which might anger an authoritarian government that not so incidentally happens to be of a country with a lot of customers of a product the forum supports;

(2) Someone in a forum makes an "offensive" comment that's an insulting attack on other users based on race, and the offensive nature is pretty clear to most people -- at least those who don't agree with the attack -- even if it happens to be prefaced with "I'm not racist, I'm just saying...".

These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between. The commenter in the first case is supporting a marginalized group; the commenter in the second is attacking one. Punishing the commenter in the first case is kowtowing to an authoritarian government for baldly monetary reasons; punishing the commenter in the second case is showing support for an oppressed group in a way which is probably not going to bring you any financial benefit -- your company's accountants are not going to step in and say "you need to ban Pepe1488 for consistently sounding like a white supremacist because if you don't, it could cost us hundreds of millions of dollars" -- and whose PR benefit is, at the least, debatable. (The people in the oppressed group might love you, but if there is any press coverage whatsoever you are going to be inundated with threats.)

There's a principle involved here which can lead you to boycotting Blizzard, but that principle is "we should support the right of people to protest against their goverment." The principle isn't "you should never ban any offensive speech of any kind at any time because to do so inexorably leads you to taking the side of authoritarian governments." (Use a slippery slope argument once, and you'll use them everywhere.)

well thought out. its easy to get emotional on social media but i think you make an important distinction.

"The Most Intolerant Wins"

> 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...

>These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between

this is fundamentally misguided. who gets to judge who is the marginalized individual? global geopolitics is more complicated than there being strict good actors and bad actors

"Are they being shot at by police, or are they police shooting at people" is a good place to start.

>The commenter in the first case is supporting a marginalized group; the commenter in the second is attacking one.

It's remarkable that you apparently can't even conceive of how someone could not believe one or both of these statements.

You really can't see how someone could believe China is 'marginalized'?

You really can't see how someone could believe American blacks are either not marginal, or are marginal due to their own collective choices and thus not morally supreme?

Even going beyond these, you can't conceive of a morality or worldview where being 'marginalized' doesn't give one automatic, universal moral supremacy over everyone else. Try a worldview where loyalty to family and nation come first - ever heard of that? Or a achievement-oriented worldview, where doing great things is the goal instead of try to seek 'equity' for every group. Or even just a rationalist worldview, where differnet gender, race, national, ethnic, culture groups have characteristics that lead to their outcomes and it's not a giant moral equation you have to spend your life balancing because it's inevitable.

This is the problem with western discourse today. You're so deep in your left-bubble you can't even conceive of other viewpoints, so every conclusion of yours seems obvious and incontrovertible, so you must conclude anyone who disagrees is simply evil.

The actual principle which corporations apply is, "We should censor whoever it makes the most money to censor." Starting from the assumption that companies are operating on ethics at all means we're wrong right from the beginning. Hypothetically there exists an ethical way to censor, but where that falls apart is when you give that decision to ethics-blind corporations.

You should check out Schelling Fences on Slippery Slopes[1], particularly the section "Coalitions of Resistance".

There's also a separate disagreement which I have here, which is whether silencing people is actually an effective way to create change. It takes enormous resources even for governments to enforce it effectively, as we've seen with Nazis and the USSR in the past, and with China now. With bigots, censorship on other platforms has driven them together into some real cesspool platforms such as Voat[2]. I know for myself, having grown up in a homophobic environment, that the only thing that changed my mind about gay people was meeting and talking to gay people--a strategy which was explicitly executed by Harvey Milk in his coming out campaigns. Censoring bigots does the opposite: it drives bigots into echo chambers where they will only ever converse with other bigots who reinforce their views. In short: if you're censoring bigots, you aren't addressing bigotry, you're just sweeping it under the rug so you don't have to see it.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...

[2] https://voat.co

Chinese feelings towards Hong Kong arise out of a history of subjugation by the British. The Opium Wars devastated China's economy and sovereignty, including the British forcing them to cede Hong Kong. This was the beginning of the "century of humiliation": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

It's not just the authoritarian government that is angered, it is the people of China who remember this history of imperialism and domination. Before the first Opium War, China's economy was the largest in the world. Is has only recently begun to recover: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_t...

Everyone has a story about why they are oppressed. Who is oppressed and who are oppressors? What actions are oppressive, and which are not? Free speech is necessary as a way of litigating these very questions.

To understand the issue (and any issue for that matter) I think it's important to make an effort to try to see things from perspectives outside your own frame of reference. There are 1.4 billion Chinese, the vast majority of whom see what we frame as democratic protests, as unlawful acts of arbitrary destruction and now increasingly often - violence as well. And they too are framing the violence as increasingly racial/cultural. For instance mainlanders tend to speak Mandarin. Hong Kongers tend to speak Cantonese. Guess whose property is getting disproportionately destroyed. And as these protests are turning increasingly violent, it's easy to see where that is and will continue to be focused as well.

Even within Hong Kong there seems to be no reliable information available on aggregate views. The only poll I can find, potentially of dubious reliability, is from 2016. [1] And in that poll, the vast majority of those living within Hong Kong were against separating from China once the 'one country, two systems' agreement expires, in 2047. Only 17.4% supported independence from China even when it was just in theory and 2 decades away. What percent of the protesters are within that 17.4%, and what are the views of the 82.6% on these protests? These seem like important questions that are going unasked, let alone answered by our media and reporting. Whatever the exact numbers may be, there are a lot of people who are very much against whatever you want to call what is happening in Hong Kong. This isn't just a scenario of "good guys" vs "authoritarian government." Its large groups of people who feel very different about the same situation.

Of course you will reference propaganda and I fully agree with you. But there too I am left to wonder something. Take the average Chinese who relies on his regular sources of information for news. And now take the average American who similarly relies on his regular sources of news for information. Who would be able to provide a more accurate response to factual queries on the protests, Hong Kong's relationship with China, and the views/values/etc of those within and without the protest group? Similarly, do you think that, for instance, the New York Times has provided accurate and objective reporting on this topic? Or do you think that their reporting and presentation is attempting to present this story from a distinctly prejudiced angle?

Something that I think social media has masked for many people today is that our own views are not "THE" moral imperative for the world. In fact they, regardless of what they are, tend to be quite obscure when contrasted against the world at large. Step outside the anglosphere and it's amazing how insane we are starting to look from the outside. Or perhaps we always looked this way, but by living inside the bubble for so many years I was equally a part of the insanity.

[1] - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-china-survey-idU...

It seems that without the article's context, these are controversial points. The word 'minority' here is used to describe a group of people bound by their ideas and opinions.

The minority rule states that the opinions of a few can be projected onto a whole through an emergent property. If a few people do not like to eat spicy food, the whole office might cater mild or bland for an event. An outsider would think that the entire office dislikes spicy food.

If there is a small group of people who think that expressing certain ideas is incorrect, then an entire group might avoid speaking them.

A free society needs to make constant, conscious decisions about what ideas cannot be expressed, because if smaller groups are allowed to make these decisions without review, then all free speech will dry up in a real way.

We should always argue when some group says they don't like hearing certain things. The fact that we are often arguing is a sign of good health for free speech.

some things are not quite as well-defined as that: "whose home land is this" is a common motif you can ask. ask that question towards North Americans, and you might have to say all your land originally belonged to the Native Americans; Canadians are in the process of reconciliation with the Indigenous groups, but speaking as an outsider, it doesn't seem like the reconciliation process can do much justice compared to what they suffered through.

That seems like an extremely bad rule of thumb to me. Neo nazis sometimes get into violent confrontations with the police, for example

and don't forget the fact that police (by intended function) go after criminals: are you supposing that every obvious criminal that police go after are actually the oppressed one?

well.... maybe you can make that argument.... but i think that is beyond the scope of the original intent.

Do they? More often I see the police protecting the neonazis, or marching with them out-of-uniform.

The FBI has been warning about white supremacist infiltration of police departments since 2006[1], and nothing has been done about it, because the infiltration is already complete: most cops are at least comfortable with white supremacy. Those who speak out against white supremacy from within police departments get kidnapped and beaten by their colleagues, or left in dangerous situations without backup.[2]

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

2. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/414/right-to-remain-silent#...

The problem with this is that context matters. I think we'd probably agree that the most conservative requirement for somebody to discharge a weapon is when he has a reasonable reason to believe his life, or the life of another person, is in danger. So what were the contexts of the shootings? Were they arbitrary, unjustified? Or did the officers have some reasonable justification in fearing for their lives or the lives of others?

Fortunately, unlike in times past, we don't need to rely on hearsay or propaganda. Everybody has their camera out and we can see what's happening, at least most of the time. This [1] is the video of the first shooting. And this [2] is the video of the second and, to my knowledge, final shooting. Do you feel the officers acted disproportionately, abusively, or in an otherwise inappropriate fashion?

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN4MvOrPotk

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHKbe5mAoNo

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For those concerned the videos are mostly safe-for-life in what is depicted, even if it is somewhat unsettling.

I think a more nuanced essay on this subject is: I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup[1].

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

In the general case of offensive speech, we're not usually talking about global geopolitics -- that's a relatively unique feature of this specific case. The premise "there are specific cases where making a judgement call is going to be difficult" is true; that doesn't make the conclusion "therefore, we should never make judgement calls" true.

i agree with the conclusion: that we should make judgement, and step up if the occasion requires us to; but i find the general claim that "These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between" to be very delusional and harming

in the case of offensive speech, i agree that usually we can see what is bad. but without going into detail, i think its also a bit more subtle that

> You really can't see how someone could believe China is 'marginalized'?

I am not sure what you mean by marginal here.

The fact that the NBA and Blizzard will apologize to China in a debased fashion is very strong evidence that China is in no way marginalized, but is actually in a position of incredible strength.

That is exactly what happens when people offend the groups considered "marginalized" in the USA.

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.

You're playing both sides here. You want to use the progressive definition of marginalized when you want something to attack, but you aren't willing to say that's what marginalized actually means.

Right now, by calling China marginalized, it sounds like you agree with the definition given by those examples without staking a claim on what the word really means.

I'm asking you point blank: Are these groups marginalized? What are you actually trying to say? I don't think China is marginalized, the definition of "marginalized" does not include a nuclear armed, economically ascendant global nation state with the ability to make multi national corporations and interest groups apologize at a whim.

I think the progressive definition of "marginalized" is fundamentally broken. It's used as a way of a priori deciding who is the aggressor and who is the victim in any conflict or disagreement, based solely on the identities of the people involved and their historical grievances as a group.

I reject this framework. But if you accept it, I think it's hard to rebut the idea that China is oppressed, given their history over the last 200 years. I certainly believe that they feel oppressed by the west. And my observation of progressive thought is that the feeling of being oppressed combined with legitimate historical grievance is an unimpeachable claim to be a marginalized party.

In particular, progressive thought seems to say that once marginalized, a group by definition continues to be marginalized until there is "equity." But China's economy still lags far behind that of the west on a per capita basis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... . So there is certainly no "equity" here.

I don't "want" to use the progressive definition of marginalized. I want to call it into question by pointing out its contradictions.

It seems like your actual goal is to reframe a discussion on China in order to attack progressives, something completely off topic from the original post.

It was entirely on topic to the post I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21193515), which tried to introduce a clear distinction between progressives banning speech and China banning speech. I disagree.

I wish you would be willing to acknowledge that bans on speech that offend others are legitimately problematic, instead of redirecting the conversation to me personally.

The post you replied to didn't mention progressives. It drew a distinction in the abstract. You assigned the position the OP held to progressives.