This is a very specific instance of a much more general problem.
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.
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.
"Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech"
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.
> 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.
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.
This puts Blizzard in too soft a light, as if they have no choice.
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.
I would argue that Blizzard is much less a hapless store clerk and more an addict whose supply is in jeopardy. They like Chinese money more than free speech, plain and simple. They could choose to get clean (stop taking Chinese money), and protect the public interest, but they choose not to.
>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.
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).
Is it safe to say we're in the middle of the Software Wars? The headlines have been littered with stories like this lately. From major open source contributors taking down their projects, to Apple, Adobe, and Blizzard.
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.
It's serendipitous all these events are happening now for me personally. I was recently burned by a piece of very useful and well crafted software (closed source). I did a fresh install on my machine and went to find their website which to my dismay had completely disappeared! I followed whatever breadcrumbs were left and found a whole thing had happened while I wasn't paying attention where the copyright for this software was now in complete limbo and noone who had recently purchased a license could redownload it.
If the current administration is serious about the trade war, sanctions, etc. against China (which seems the case), I have to imagine that someone has thought about what it would take to cut off China from the rest of the Internet.
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.
I just sold a video game disc for 3x what I paid for it because the company that made it went under, so it's no longer downloadable on any streaming service (XBL, PSN, Steam, etc)...
I wish local instances of SaaS were more common. As a consumer it doesn't fill me with glee that a company used cutting edge APIs and integrations that are hosted all over the place. It fills me with concern about their stability and I have to entirely forget about data security. Who knows where it ends up these days. Both physically and in administrative terms, on globally distributed servers and regarding which companies or countries have access to it.
I agree 100% that we should boycott and sanction, however doubt there will be enough people who will, and enough people who care. And I don't blame most for not caring, there are more things to worry about than we have time available. Maybe 1% of hearthstone players will see your comment. Similarly, there are other entities which need to be sanctioned, which you and me won't find out about as it's outside of our areas of interest.
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.
>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)
You do realize how hilarious that is juxtaposed to the Chinese government, which is literally a 'morality authority,' right?
"I agree 100% that we should boycott and sanction, however doubt there will be enough people who will, and enough people who care. And I don't blame most for not caring, there are more things to worry about than we have time available."
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?
I don't think it needs to be a moral authority, it can just be an index of well defined problems to lists of the top couple actors responsible for those problems.
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.
>Which makes me believe we need some kind of trusted "morality authority"
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.
> 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
Just sounds like cancel culture to me. And it has horrible results.
>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)
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".
> 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."
People should start boycotting western companies that perform this kind of humiliating bowing to China, Saudi Arabia, etc. Yet of course, most companies are doing that...
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
It's a shame but I feel like the majority of gamers won't care. They'll either be ignorant of this or they'll just shrug and continue playing. I boycotted Activision and by proxy Blizzard when Activision acquired them a long time ago but their continuing success shows I'm part of an extremely tiny minority.
So we are at the point where American video game developers are banning people from e-sports competitions for their comments over a domestic issue in a foreign country? Because the Chinese government probably didn't like his comments, that counts as 'public disrepute'? This is just wild to me.
Or, you know, gamers need to grow some moral principles and stop giving companies like this money. I already didn't like where Blizzard was going, this seals it for me. I'm not giving them any more money.
I really don't like how this is made out as "China clamping down on Blizzard", just like it was framed when Ubisoft tried to get a lower age-rating for Rainbow Six Siege and claimed that was what China demanded for their market.
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!".
"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."
Wow, when a government can ruin someone's professional career of choice simply because he or she has an opinion that goes against the People’s Republic, that’s when companies should decide to no longer do business in China.
Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.
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.)
This is what you get for cosying up to bullies. It may be exhilarating while it lasts, but since the bully doesn't care about anyone but themselves, you will eventually always loose. The west has been gorging on cheap products from China and we started getting dependent. Now the bully senses power over us, and starts applying pressure. The better bullies know how to do this incrementally, slowly at first, so that it's hardly noticeable. Then, at some point you realize you're in a situation that you don't want to be in, but it's too late.
China is clearly up to no good, but I can't shake the feeling that there would be something off about allowing political soapboxing in apolitical events like this. Should people have a set list of political ideas to propagate at the end of every interview? "My deck was not strong enough in the end-game. And also legalize assault rifles and support the Kurds".
I just went through the process to delete my account. First attempt to use my Authenticator was “denied - too many attempts. Try another method”. Tried using SMS auth, “denied - too many attempts. Try another method”. Uploaded my driver’s license.
Irrespective of stance on China, for this behaviour alone Blizzard can go and get fucked.
I said a similar thing yesterday but I think it has become clear that importing from China was mostly fine for our country, debatable on the lost jobs and environmental part sure, but exporting to China was a poison pill that we never should have swallowed.
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.
Hey, I wonder where did you get the less liberal part? From my experience China has become greatly more liberal during the last 30-50 years. When Nixon "opened up" China it was during the culture revolution and those were really tragic years for Chinese people. Since then average Chinese has become less poor and more liberal steadily each year.
The issue is that the more you import from China, the more USD they accumulate, and the more attractive an export market they become. Trade is a two-way street, you can't keep up a permanent stream of imports forever without giving something in return. There's no such thing as a free lunch.
[+] [-] Dove|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tenebrisalietum|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unityByFreedom|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hharlequin|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pmiller2|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aymeric|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsanr|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] SennaD9|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cooperadymas|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qmmmur|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cooperadymas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyMarshal|6 years ago|reply
https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/07/china-censorship-daryl-mo...
Is software special in this case somehow?
[+] [-] ohazi|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] inanutshellus|6 years ago|reply
Legality-induced Digital Dark Ages. :-)
[+] [-] ehnto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] excursionist|6 years ago|reply
Hopefully this pushes more people to use open source software.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] IanSanders|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ameister14|6 years ago|reply
You do realize how hilarious that is juxtaposed to the Chinese government, which is literally a 'morality authority,' right?
[+] [-] redleggedfrog|6 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] natch|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|6 years ago|reply
Just sounds like cancel culture to me. And it has horrible results.
[+] [-] bovermyer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|6 years ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] Natanael_L|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ludamad|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] krige|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dylanz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|6 years ago|reply
> 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."
[+] [-] enriquto|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a_c|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] alimbada|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bayesian_horse|6 years ago|reply
No easy answers. In this case, maybe there is a relatively simple rule: Supporting democracy must not in itself be regarded as offensive...
[+] [-] FillardMillmore|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blzrdnofreespch|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jplayer01|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freeflight|6 years ago|reply
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!".
[+] [-] idlewords|6 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] monster2control|6 years ago|reply
Sadly, however, the dollar is more powerful than the the moral high ground.
[+] [-] chipotle_coyote|6 years ago|reply
(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.)
[+] [-] geertj|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mekkkkkk|6 years ago|reply
I dunno.
[+] [-] phs318u|6 years ago|reply
EDITED to correct spelling.
[+] [-] cco|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] theseadroid|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magicsmoke|6 years ago|reply