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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

#831

Post by Rebelgecko »

vonmoltke wrote: post #641
nickthemagicman wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far I've noticed: 1> New Top Gun Movie removed a patch on Tom Cruises jacketdue to Chinese funding. 2> NBA issued an apology for an owner showing Hong Kong support and China stopped NBA broadcasts. 3> Blizzard 4> Apple Hides Taiwans Flag emoji Sounds trivial but they're the tip of the iceberg for censoring freedom of expression based on a DICTATOR's whim. Xi "Winnie The Poop" is an autocrat and once he sealed his…

> 2> NBA issued an apology for an owner showing Hong Kong support and China stopped NBA broadcasts. The NBA has not issued an apology to China: https://chicago.suntimes.com/2019/10/8/20904593/nba-china-co...

According to random people online that speak Mandarin, the statement the NBA released on Chinese social media was DRASTICALLY different from their English statement. Paraphrasing slightly, the English statement was along the lines of "we're sorry if he hurt your feelings". The Mandarin one was more like "we're sorry that these wrong and despicable statements were made".

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#832

Post by chipotle_coyote »

colorincorrect wrote: post #713
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #613

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…

>These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between this is fundamentally misguided. who gets to judge who is the marginalized individual? global geopolitics is more complicated than there being strict good actors and bad actors

In the general case of offensive speech, we're not usually talking about global geopolitics -- that's a relatively unique feature of this specific case. The premise "there are specific cases where making a judgement call is going to be difficult" is true; that doesn't make the conclusion "therefore, we should never make judgement calls" true.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#833

Post by wnkrshm »

theseadroid wrote: post #724
a_c wrote: post #477

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…

Sorry for not entirely related to the main thread, but since it seems there are many people in this thread knowledgable on what's going on in Hong Kong, I'd like to ask 2 questions. I'm not siding with CCP, but my issue is I'm not sure I can side with the protestors either. Because 1. Does the protestors representing the majority of citizens? If yes at this stage why the working class in Hong Kong hasn't started long…

I wonder how far away the person with the laser pointer is from that lady in the second video - that pointer seems pretty powerful. With a 5mW class 3R laser you can damage someone's retina at 30-20m still with an accidental exposure, for typical collimation ~1mrad. If the spot is around 4cm in diameter and the laser is typically collimated (at 1mrad), they're about 40m away.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#834

Post by sounds »

lr4444lr wrote: post #143
SkyMarshal wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

This was the example I thought of:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#835

Post by NeedMoreTea »

UIZealot wrote: post #826

It helps to know a little bit about what's been going on in Hong Kong, before you all line up and take your daily dump on China. It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions in the regi…

> crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong

There's a lot more to that story. Taiwan explicitly ruled out accepting the proposed extradition law, despite IIRC a HKer murdering their HK partner whilst on holiday in Taiwan.

> chief among them universal suffrage, or the direct election of the HK Chief Executive

You mean the promised universal suffrage of the Chief Executive that was written in the Sino-British agreement, and decades later has still not materialised.

I can see why that might be a sore point to the citizens of Hong Kong.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#836

Post by diveanon »

goatinaboat wrote: post #150
nabla9 wrote: post #61

Earlier 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…

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.

Do uber and wework monitor the conversations of their customers to see if they criticize Islam?

Have uber or wework fired employees for being gay or women?

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#837

Post by monster2control »

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.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#838

Post by PavlovsCat »

dang wrote: post #775
a_c wrote: post #477

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…

> an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined That's definitely not true. Hong Kong has been discussed a great deal here, and China even more. These are probably the most-discussed topics of the last month; if not, I can't think of what would be. Perhaps climate change. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://hn.algolia.com/…

> hong kong comments > 10

Just as interesting are all the instances where stories gained dozens of upvotes but very few comments, because they disappeared from the front page within a few hours after rising to the first spot. It's very easy to see even from the outside, if you simply filter for stories that are ranked lower than other stories that have a lower score, are older, and have more comments. Try this on for size:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That even gets a few results of you increase the score to 100, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304526

I remember seeing that just go poof back then. One moment it's at the top, then it quickly sinks, then it's on page 7824.

Just about any subject is discussed a great deal here, because "a great deal" is no hard qualifier at all. But I know few subjects so consistently suppressed and messed with here as Chinese totalitarianism. You could convince me otherwise with a database dump, by making votes and flags public, but not just with mere claims and saying you didn't notice anything. Maybe you didn't, but that really just proves you didn't notice it.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#839

Post by diveanon »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #261
diveanon wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like social media is the best legal venue for it. Start sending messages to every game dev, project manager, and director at these companies asking them why they support the totalitarian oppression of HK. Ask them what they are currently doing to limit the influence of totalitarian regimes on their corporate policy. Make the issue personal for the companies by fomenting discontent from within.

"Make the issue personal for the companies by fomenting discontent from within." But the only options available to the employees from that point onwards is group organization (eg. unionization) which is itself politically controversial and prone to ruining their careers (see: google employees' organizing efforts resulting in the majority of the original organizers being foistered out of google) or leaving which puts…

Change requires sacrifice.

If people aren't willing to stand behind their beliefs at the risk of temporary financial hardship to support people putting their lives at risk to stand against a lifetime under tyrannical rule then they do not deserve the freedoms their country affords them.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#840

Post by UIZealot »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #835
UIZealot wrote: post #826

It helps to know a little bit about what's been going on in Hong Kong, before you all line up and take your daily dump on China. It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions in the regi…

> crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong There's a lot more to that story. Taiwan explicitly ruled out accepting the proposed extradition law, despite IIRC a HKer murdering their HK partner whilst on holiday in Taiwan. > chief among them universal suffrage, or the direct election of the HK Chief Executive You mean the promised universal suffrage of the Chief Executive that was written in the Sino-British agreement, an…

Reasonable people disagree on what exactly was promised in terms of universal suffrage.

Whichever way you lean, it's absolutely no excuse or justification for the violence and destruction.

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