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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

(playhearthstone.com)
2525 points hownottowrite | 1 comments | 08 Oct 19 09:23 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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tomp ◴[08 Oct 19 11:17 UTC] 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 ◴[08 Oct 19 11:19 UTC] 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 ◴[08 Oct 19 11:23 UTC] 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 ◴[08 Oct 19 11:25 UTC] 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 ◴[08 Oct 19 12:00 UTC] 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 ◴[08 Oct 19 12:11 UTC] 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 ◴[08 Oct 19 12:49 UTC] 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. jmagoon ◴[08 Oct 19 16:26 UTC] No.21193978[source]▶
I honestly struggle to conceive of the educational history needed to conflate the long history of censorship with "SJWs". Some of the greatest works of western literature in the twentieth century directly address the concept, and the majority of texts that influence "SJWs" were incredibly subversive and likely to be banned at their time of release due to their attack on conventional power structures that had the ability to censor them (Black people voting! Women voting! Anti-religious scientific heresy! Human rights!).

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.