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Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

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Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#221

Post by bduerst »

uoaei wrote: post #198
jbang5 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

Related: what's the name for this tactic in debate? Where a dissenter insistently demand citations so that the conversation has to pause and then the dissenter nitpicks the citation instead of the argument, effectively derailing the conversation. It's hard to see this account (jbang5) as anything but an internet troll who, if not literally on the payroll from the Chinese government, is still a useful idiot for their…

The term is Sea Lioning, though that typically comes with a repetition of forced burden-of-proofs on the presenter.

Based off of this web comic: http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#224

Post by undefined3840 »

throwaway66920 wrote: post #217
undefined3840 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of good, decent human beings justify doing awful things in their day job. Wasn’t there just a post on here a few days ago about someone who worked at Capital One writing about how everyone working there justified getting poor people deeper in debt?

FWIW, most McKinsey employees won’t be doing anything immoral. In fact it’s perfectly cool to turn down assignments for personal ethics. E.g. not wanting to work for a gas company, even if the specific task doesn’t have any moral implications.

Immorality is subjective. McKinsey is hired to (maximize|minimize) some objective. The fact someone didn’t want to work on the Purdue Pharma opioid marketing project when McKinsey employs a fungible pool of thousands of consultants means nothing.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#225

Post by closetohome »

jknoepfler wrote: post #144
minimaxir wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common albeit reductive meme around the entire controversy is that Blizzard games were already declining in popularity (especially Starcraft and HotS) so it's easy to boycott them. Path of Exile is an interesting case as I know a lot of Diablo players went there since Diablo III is effectively on life support (including myself), but the resurfacing of the Tencent ownership news is causing ethical complications: htt…

I think the good will that Blizzard earned with their early games has been eroding for a long time. They did, legitimately, used to have enormous community good will. I can think of two ways that's eroded: (1) Blizzard's early games earned huge amounts of goodwill by enabling players to mod them. The map editor of Warcraft and the UI mod-ability of WoW let people build entire communities around modded content (DotA,…

I'll add that personally I've lost a lot of respect for them over the bnetd fiasco/lawsuit, Starcraft II shipping with no local multiplayer, and their long-running legal crusade against private World of Warcraft servers.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#226

Post by bo1024 »

aeze wrote: post #152
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to note -- it's not really troubling for a country to have a lot of influence. It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West. This is not a question of a foreign country being different. This is a question of a foreign company forcing us to slowly give up the very th…

> The fact that companies are willing to do it is pathetic. I don't disagree with your post at all, but I wanted to note that it's important to remember that companies aren't people, they're machines generally designed to maximize profit. Morals don't apply to them - only the law, and money does. Personally I've boycotted Blizzard in response, and I hope more people do.

I generally agree and think this is a very helpful perspective. It's too much to expect companies to choose ethics over profit, even if the companies are temporarily made up of ethical people -- these are mere components. (Hence the goal of governments/regulations should be to align profit-making with societal goals.)

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#227

Post by throwaway66920 »

undefined3840 wrote: post #224
throwaway66920 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, most McKinsey employees won’t be doing anything immoral. In fact it’s perfectly cool to turn down assignments for personal ethics. E.g. not wanting to work for a gas company, even if the specific task doesn’t have any moral implications.

Immorality is subjective. McKinsey is hired to (maximize|minimize) some objective. The fact someone didn’t want to work on the Purdue Pharma opioid marketing project when McKinsey employs a fungible pool of thousands of consultants means nothing.

I don’t really think that contradicts anything I said

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#228

Post by ezrast »

jasonlotito wrote: post #53
jrockway wrote: post #14

The Internet's reaction to this has warmed my heart a little. Overwatch and Hearthstone are among my favorite computer games. I've certainly played more Overwatch than any other game. I have made real-world and online friends in Overwatch. I met my girlfriend in Overwatch. It made me sad to have to throw all that away yesterday. But the conversations we're having as a result of this is great. The mainstream media is…

It's interesting to see people give up Blizzard games, but still continue supporting companies like Apple that do far worse, like effectively giving the keys to iCloud to China. I think the conversation is great, and maybe now we'll actually reconsider what the TPP's goal was. But in the end, the people picked money first, so it shouldn't be a surprise when businesses do this as well.

It's not surprising. Blitzchung has a name and a face, and he earned a thing, and he had it taken away from him directly, deliberately, and unjustly. That makes him a strong symbol to rally around and more likely to incite a social movement than a faceless corporate policy. At the same time, the atmosphere of distrust fostered by those insidious but not-directly-motivating policies is something of a precondition for those movements to form. I don't think it's as simple as "people care about thing X but not thing Y".

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#229

Post by drucik »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #200
kaybe wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit more difficult than that, I think. If you look at free speech in Europe for example, in eg Germany there are laws against hate speech or defamation of individual people (quite differentiated, an opinion is ok and true facts are ok, but invented facts are not). One of the targets is Nazi propaganda, and in general the support is good. Still, the goal is similar, social stability, peace and protection of min…

I sympathize with the idea, but how does one define hate speech? Couldn't The CCP claim that any speech in support of Hong Kong is speech in hate of The CCP? Limiting speech in anyway gets very slippery.

Oxford defines as follows: “abusive or threatening speech or writing that expresses prejudice against a particular group, especially on the basis of race, religion, or sexual orientation.” And it seems to be a general definition, I think sometimes it’s narrowed to threats or to calls for violence, I suppose?

Let’s not act as if that’s an unimaginable term.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#230

Post by jknoepfler »

closetohome wrote: post #225
jknoepfler wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the good will that Blizzard earned with their early games has been eroding for a long time. They did, legitimately, used to have enormous community good will. I can think of two ways that's eroded: (1) Blizzard's early games earned huge amounts of goodwill by enabling players to mod them. The map editor of Warcraft and the UI mod-ability of WoW let people build entire communities around modded content (DotA,…

I'll add that personally I've lost a lot of respect for them over the bnetd fiasco/lawsuit, Starcraft II shipping with no local multiplayer, and their long-running legal crusade against private World of Warcraft servers.

I forgot about the absence of LAN in Starcraft II, which was utterly mind-blowing (good luck hosting a serious tournament). It's almost as if they built a business department to kill the company from the inside.
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