As usual, Stallman is right about software.
And yet, so wrong about people.
There are not antithetical.
Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
141–150 of 1001 posts
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#142China 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
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#143Is 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 d…
I'm not clear what software has to do with this. It's happening across all industries, here's a good roundup of a bunch of other examples: https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/07/china-censorship-daryl-mo... Is software special in this case somehow?
Because software has this weird status where you increasingly don't own a perpetual use right to the copy of the code you bought, and can have it revoked for reasons that have nothing to do with the purchase agreement. What if one day in the not too distant the electrical system on your car stopped working because an auto software update from that vendor (not the company that sold you the car perhaps) detected your name was on a DB of no-service-updates, and there was a critical big patched?
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#144Can we please start a cultural movement that forces large corporations to choose between appeasing Chinese censors and looking like fools to the rest of the west or getting banned in China. Really seems like a win win scenario.
Six Corporations control 90% of the media in America. They can make business decisions to censor whomever they want and they are global corporations doing lots of business in China.
> Six Corporations control 90% of the media in America
Totally incomparable.
America has the First Amendment. Its government and corporations can be held accountable in courts. Any rando has the capacity to pine off about anything on Twitter. Meanwhile China boasts a centralised bureaucracy literally censoring Winnie the Pooh images because its dictator doesn’t like his resemblance.
Yes, America has a media ownership concentration problem. No, it’s not remotely comparable to Xi’s Beijing.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#145Blizzard is 100% fine with their games having a political message when they think it gives them free brownie points (announcing various characters as being explicitly gay), but are complete total cowards when it might cost them something.
Being gay isn’t political.
True, if you are privileged enough for that to be your immediate reality
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
How about Chinese owners? Chinese Tencent owns 5 percent of Blizzard, if full owner of Riot Games, 48% of Epic Games, 11.5% of Bluehole (Fortnite and PUBG), 5% of Ubisoft. They are also investor in Discord. https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-... AMC is fully owned by Chinese. The largest movie theater chain in the United States is fully owned by Chinese. Legendary Entertainment Group is owned…
This is what happens when you fund your deficit spending with foreign investors for too long.
That's a too simplistic conclusion based on myth... https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080615/china...
And these are private companies bought by private investors (ok one could argue it's Chinese government money..), what does that have to do with government deficit?
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#147[deleted]
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make them choose between the two markets. I'm tired of the idea that the Western and Chinese markets can both be appeased the middle of the road morality. What is happening in HK right now is wrong, and the west has fought wars over this very issue.
> and the west has fought wars over this very issue Which ones? Also, China has nukes, we probably don't want to see that war starting. I don't think there's a good military option available.
They aren’t saying we should start a war. They are saying we’ve gone to war to defend those principles but now we put up much less resistance, such as denouncements, sanctions, etc., lots of things short of war that we’ve done with the USSR and Russia.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#149China 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.
Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments
#150Can we please start a cultural movement that forces large corporations to choose between appeasing Chinese censors and looking like fools to the rest of the west or getting banned in China. Really seems like a win win scenario.
How about Chinese owners? Chinese Tencent owns 5 percent of Blizzard, if full owner of Riot Games, 48% of Epic Games, 11.5% of Bluehole (Fortnite and PUBG), 5% of Ubisoft. They are also investor in Discord. https://www.pcgamer.com/every-game-company-that-tencent-has-... AMC is fully owned by Chinese. The largest movie theater chain in the United States is fully owned by Chinese. Legendary Entertainment Group is owned…
How about Chinese owners?
That’s a tricky one. The “woke” don’t care about all the Saudi money in Uber and WeWork despite that regimes hideous treatment of gays, women, dissidents and so on.