611–620 of 1001 posts
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…
(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.)
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…
We're all programmable, sure. And I think it's important for their to be competing voices such that we don't end up in the Party. But some level of social cohesion is desirable, and I think starting at the level of 'not allowed to advocate for the rape and murder of peoples' is a reasonable step towards ensuring less people think that is viable.
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The key identifier for me was what seemed to be either a certain level of intellectual dishonestly, or a real language barrier as sometimes their responses felt like a misunderstanding ... and then the real kicker were the identical links to US news sources that inevitably involved some US college professor (they like those stories) but also didn't quite say what they thought the story said.
If it was a real language barrier it was kinda sad as it was clear they couldn't understand what I was saying in English and their response was sometimes equally baffling to me.
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…
Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... 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, especial…
I don't care about video games. I don't care about Blizzard. I've never heard of Hearthstone. But I do care deeply about freedom of speech, and I'm getting tired of this crap.
Freedom of speech does not protect you form the consequences of your actions.
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…
Give me a break. When companies censor speech HN likes , it's all about how we have to boycott companies to preserve our society. When it's speech HN doesn't like , it's all about how censorship is actually good and that companies are just "showing people the door" via their freedom of association. People around here need to make up their minds. If you want to object to censorship, great. But if you do, you need to d…
Sorry, but I don't see a world where supporting open, self-proclaimed Nazis is the same as supporting advocacy for democracy.
I can believe that we should drown out the Nazis and amplify the voice of democracy. That doesn't make me a hypocrite. That makes me someone with an ethos.