[rjf72]

That's awesome to hear, but I expect you must see you would be a very small minority. Most people now a days seem to base their worldview not on any system of consistent ethics, but instead on who's being benefited and who's being hurt.

For instance on what precipitated this particular issue (the Blizzard stuff), many are framing it as an issue of free speech. But that's incredibly disingenuous because there's no doubt that many of the same people outraged ostensibly about a violation of free speech would have been the first ones lining up to cheer and rejoice had Blizzard chose to ban a player who chose to show up in a MAGA hat and screamed "Build the wall!" in an identical venue. It's safe to assume they also would have taken it further and done all they could to try to get said player banned from any other gaming venue as well, in an effort to kill his livelihood and, by proxy, him. In other words, they couldn't care less about free speech - but only speech that they support, or oppose.

This example here (in our reverso world China) would take this to an even bigger extreme since you would be expressing support not only of a group with next to no national support, but simultaneously expressing support of a deeply unpopular foreign government which could be framed as borderline treasonous. And all of this being done in a highly nationalistic nation? That's a tall order for sure.

[jackvalentine]

> For instance on what precipitated this particular issue (the Blizzard stuff), many are framing it as an issue of free speech. But that's incredibly disingenuous because there's no doubt that many of the same people outraged ostensibly about a violation of free speech would have been the first ones lining up to cheer and rejoice had Blizzard chose to ban a player who chose to show up in a MAGA hat and screamed "Build the wall!" in an identical venue.

I've seen this argument so many times in relation to this and I don't get it - this isn't what happened and you can't presume to know what "many of the same people" would do. It's such a shit argument because you can state that "many of the same people" would do anything you want to frame as bad and it's impossible to disprove.

Why not just address what actually happened?

[jplayer01]

> I've seen this argument so many times in relation to this and I don't get it - this isn't what happened and you can't presume to know what "many of the same people" would do. It's such a shit argument because you can state that "many of the same people" would do anything you want to frame as bad and it's impossible to disprove.

I'd even suggest the complete opposite would happen. People would be criticizing Blizzard for banning the player. Of course, we can't know what could've happened, but we do know what happens when pro-Trump protestors are in the streets protesting. Nobody is out there saying the government needs to suppress these people and their opinions. No, the people start their own grass-roots protests on the same street. As in, they fight free speech with free speech. The vast majority don't put pressure on the government to stamp out contrary opinions, nor is there an expectation that they should, and there'd be protests against it if they did.

Meanwhile, we know exactly what would happen in China.

[rjf72]

The original post I was responding to was pondering what would happen if the NBA pulled out. In order to try to predict this it's important to try to accurately characterize how people would behave in response. In the US we ostensibly value free speech, but especially in modern times this is increasingly often set aside faster than you can blink when it becomes an issue where somebody says something we disagree with. See for instance practically every major social media platform that has been censoring increasingly loosely, largely to stabilize (and ideally increase) their profit by satisfying advertisers. When people dislike the groups censored they not only could not care less, but are often genuinely enthusiastic about it.

Think of the countless times people have, rather enthusiastically, argued that 'free speech doesn't mean you're free from the consequences of your actions'. Yet when it's a group that individuals ideologically align with they rapidly segue from free speech being a technical legal requirement as defined by the first amendment of the US constitution, to a value - an ethos. And we are not speaking in hypotheticals - this is happening, right now.

In modern times people increasingly seem to not like defending the right of groups they disagree with. We could debate the reasons there, but I suspect a large part is because we now live in an era of never-ending social media virtue signaling. That's actually what makes what I wrote above so easy to show. If you are genuinely arguing in good faith and do not believe people are engaging in wide-spread hypocrisy, you could go obsessive-compulsive and digging through people's post histories and find many of the same people upset about corporate censorship today cheering it on not long ago. Because they felt that by cheering on nasty groups getting censored, that they were showing their own virtue in being so adamantly against such things. We are, in effect, living out the "First they came ..." poem. As always, what's new is old.