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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#591

Post by luckylion »

wbl wrote: post #481
ndury wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These studio's should not stop publishing their games in China. The issue lies that these studio's happily comply with whatever restrictions a govt is willing to oblige due to possibly playerbase loss. Think lootboxes, forbidden skins in regions, exc... exc.. Companies as big as Blizzard should be prepared to lose 5/10/15% of their playerbase to defend free speech, the thing is they do not care about free speech. All…

Lootboxes are one thing. But I doubt an aircraft simulator with a Taiwan Straits scenario would be massively published, or a Wolfenstein set in a Xinjiang reeducation camp. Would Amazon stop selling 1984 if China asked it to? Hopefully not.

Amazon will not only stop stelling 1984, they will even remote-wipe 1984 from their customer's devices, all you need is a copyright claim.

Jokes aside, I believe they would if China was a large enough market for them. They are complying with local laws, and often that means pulling a product world wide, because they don't want to go through the trouble of making sure it's only unavailable in the US. Since Amazon has never managed to gain traction in China, they likely don't care too much about China's wishes.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#593

Post by trentnix »

shadowgovt wrote: post #555
trentnix wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If hate-speech laws exist to deal with people that are programmed, wouldn't it also follow that hate-speech laws might exist because programmed people want to control the speech of others? It would go like this: hate speech is first yelling fire in a theater, then it's espousing bigotry, then it's holding the wrong opinions, until it's finally speaking ill of the Party. That's also a lesson that has been learned many…

Too far down that philosophical rabbit-hole you find "There's no such thing as good and evil," which is a philosophy a person can have but not one I'd want to see a country's government embrace as a core tenant. It'd be a pretty shitty place to live for anyone who doesn't have the money or power to enforce their will.

And too far down the other hole is the ambiguity of definitions and other postmodern gobbledygook that will eventually expand the umbrella of what we call 'hate speech' far beyond what we might both agree is reasonable. It's probably already happened.

That's an awful place to live as well.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#594

Post by umvi »

shadowgovt wrote: post #568
umvi wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Free Speech only protects you from the government, not private companies who don't want to tolerate your hate on their platform" I don't agree with this stance, but it is an oft-heard one defending companies who stifle speech (as long as the stifled speech was a far right Nazi website or anti-LGBT comments). As we see, that stance is dangerous and extends to companies stifling politically inconvenient speech like "I…

The reason we constrain the government the way we do is that Blitzchung is still perfectly free to go on his own blog, or out in the street, or to any media network willing to broadcast him and share his view, and the FBI won't lock him up. It's a key distinction, and yes, the media still has the liberty to not broadcast is views (because the same liberty that lets them refrain from repeating "I support Hong Kong pro…

> The reason we constrain the government the way we do is that Blitzchung is still perfectly free to go on his own blog

...unless Cloudflare or Amazon or whomever is hosting his blog arrives at the same conclusion as Blizzard. I would argue free speech as a philosophy doesn't work unless corporations are on board.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#595

Post by avar »

We're increasingly at the mercy of private companies for what used to be considered civil liberties.

I'm sure I'll get someone arguing about private v.s. public oppression, but at the end of the day being a professional video game player in someone's walled garden is no less of a specialized or acquired skill than say being an expert cabinet maker.

So we're increasingly ending up in situations where people's hobbies or professions exist at the whimsical pleasure of private corporations.

If this guy talked shit about a foreign government 50 years ago and liked to play football as a hobby, and was a skilled cabinet maker that government couldn't pressure a private company to ban him from all football pitches worldwide, or exile him from cabinet making.

The answer isn't to boycott Blizzard, that's raging against the smallest cog in the machine. The answer is to eliminate these power relationships with a concerted effort of moving to free & open source software, and at the federated services when something needs to be hosted centrally.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#596

Post by swamp40 »

As South Park has just demonstrated, Ridicule is a powerful and effective world-wide weapon against the CCP censors. Imagine how much work it must have been to scrub every reference of South Park characters from the entire CCP-controlled internet? And how embarrassing and petty that looks from the outside?

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#597

Post by actuator »

Is Twitter's Worldwide Trends not just based on tweet frequency anymore? I went to Twitter to see if people are talking about this outside Reddit and HN and my trends is filled with unrelated topics. The Blizzard one was at 13th position with more tweets than the topics above it. https://imgur.com/a/Ymb9D04

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#599

Post by testACCT321 »

echelon wrote: post #451
missosoup wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What factories? Everyone already has or currently is moving manufacturing operations from China to Viet Nam or India. 5 more years and the only factories China will have are going to be domestic.

If we're going to repeat the same cycle with Vietnam and India, we'd do well to encourage democracy this go-around. If we elevate authoritarian countries to our level, democracy may be in for a rough future. We should be learning a lot from the China situation. Modern China proves that authoritarian capitalism works and that you don't need freedom or liberty for your citizens. And that's incredibly scary. Imagine if…

Democracy is failing. People have realized that votes are largely based on demographics, which are driven by immigration and birthrates.

In short, democracy is ethnic warfare. Why would you want that?

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#600

Post by reaperducer »

zwaps wrote: post #139

Then we have to boycott Hearthstone. While the current case is neither surprising nor substantially important, it is important because of principle. Blizzard is not responsible for what players say in interviews. In our society, it still matters that people can tolerate other opinions. The Chinese government tries to make it a new normal that entire people can have their "feelings hurt" (what?) by mere non-insulting…

We need to keep a list of when this happens

I would love to see a list like this.

Unfortunately, it would contain the names of virtually every airline. But I would still like to see it.

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