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MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

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Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#171
post #85
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean countries where you can be arrested for a tweet that offends someone? Yeah, no thanks.

Because that’s not already the case in the US? Ask a Muslim friend to post a joke about blowing up JFK and see how long it is until their door is broken down

Come on. Threatening to blow up an airport is not in the same ballpark as hurting someone's feelings.

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#172
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As Idi Amin would have said "I guarantee freedom of speech but not freedom after speech"

I've heard a lot of young people in my country saying "you have freedom of speech, you can say what you want, but then you will face the consequences". Which makes me think they don't really know what freedom of speech is.

I don't follow. It sounds like they know exactly what it is.

In some places, you can be prevented from saying something that others do not want you to say.

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#173

Interesting that the Japanese rising sun flag is mentioned alongside the swastika and the stars and bars; the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.

> Interesting that the Japanese rising sun flag is mentioned alongside the swastika and the stars and bars;

The stars and bars, while also a Confederate symbol, is not really a notorious hate symbol; the Confederate flags that are notorious hate symbols are the “battle flag” (flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, also used as the union of the second and third national flags; square), and the second Confederate Naval Jack (a similar design, but with a different aspect ratio). The Stars and Bars (the first national flag) never got revived by Jim Crow era racists the way the other two flags did.

> the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.

It's a slightly different flag, and while there might be some contexts where banning the present JMSDF naval ensign would be problematic, I don't really see how it is in a racing game.

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#174
post #162
post #2

“...and nothing of value was lost.”

Isn't there a famous racing car that has the design? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Lee_(car)

> Isn't there a famous racing car

It wasn't a racing car, and it was in a television show, and so what if there was? If there were a famous car from 1940s Germany with a nazi flag on it, does that make symbolically broadcasting nazism today fine behavior? The confederacy was a regime constructed explicitly to defend the practice of slavery. (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...)

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#175
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because that’s not already the case in the US? Ask a Muslim friend to post a joke about blowing up JFK and see how long it is until their door is broken down

Come on. Threatening to blow up an airport is not in the same ballpark as hurting someone's feelings.

Which European nations have rules against mere "hurting someone's feelings"?

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#176
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a point which is beyond the confederate flag. There may well be a slippery slope somewhere along this road, but it's not here. Gun advocates resist common sense reforms with the same logic, but lots of military weapons (minigun, flamethrower, rocket launcher, etc) are already either banned or highly regulated and have been for years without anyone's rights having been trampled.

Reminds me of when Trump a while ago (before the recent George Floyd stuff) was commenting on statues being torn down, and commented something like, "next they'll go for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, where does it end?" John Oliver did a bit on it answering "Somewhere. It ends somewhere," implying that he was an idiot, that it was a stupid comment, and everybody laughed. Now we're here and it has actually h…

FWIW the founding fathers did not want to be idolized and probably would not like the idea of Rushmore. I'm not sure I see why its outrageous to think that people want to remove statues honoring pieces of history they think ought not be honored. On the face of it, nothing is owed to the past and society does evolve. I don't feel particularly strong on preserving or removing imagery of George Washington from public art. But the gut wrenching feeling of those who feel its spitting on their heritage, well, they're gonna have to learn to cope with the awareness that a country is defined by its people, not its history. For ages 18 and under, whites are no longer the majority in the US (or very very close last time I checked). The aspects of heritage that the country chooses to celebrate are going to change over time.

This is the gist of democracy. You don't get bonus points for historical relevance. You may not agree with the angry mobs of protestors, but the same change is happening in formal government, albeit slower.

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#177
post #85
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean countries where you can be arrested for a tweet that offends someone? Yeah, no thanks.

Because that’s not already the case in the US? Ask a Muslim friend to post a joke about blowing up JFK and see how long it is until their door is broken down

I doubt you can make a joke about blowing an airport on any country regardless of your religion and don't expect a visit of the police. It's a very clear exception to freedom of speech.

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#178

I am not very familiar with the American civil war. The way people talk about it seems weird to me though: it is as though the entire southern United States were overcome by an irresistible race hatred and they started a war in order to ensure their white supremacy- but mostly out of ignorance of the morals of this. I have a hard time believing the entire southern United States was only fighting for the right to own…

> Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later? If anything, the opposite is true. You can read the declarations of secession for the southern states; e.g. see South Carolina's [1]. They seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Surely some people had other reasons to support secession, but this is the primary one. Decades after the war ended, there was a push to deemphasize slavery as a cause for the war for…

There's also the Cornerstone Speech, from the Confederate Vice President Stephens, which is quite plain and explicit regarding slavery and white supremacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. The rising sun flag is the flag of the imperial Japanese army, the one that allied with Nazi Germany. They were brutal and deserve to be regarded in a similar manner to Nazi Germany. The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic. It's like Mississippi or Georgia's state flags before 2020, it's a call back to things that should be left in the history books.

The rising sun flag was adopted before the turn of the century many years before the war. The confederate and nazi flags were used explicitly for those hateful movements (post civil war racism and nazis). These are quite different.

While it's true that it was adopted in 1870, it was adopted as the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army. The same one that committed horrific atrocities to Korea and China. Then it stopped being used after Japan surrendered in WWII.

To many Koreans (and likely Chinese) the wartime version of the rising sun flag is exactly the same as the Nazi flag if not worse. The anglosphere tends to gloss over the brutal behavior of Japan during this time, under this flag.

The difference with Germany is that they took responsibility and passed laws to regulate usage of the nazi flag, etc. Japan did not, and lied to the Korean government about things like the comfort women.

> were used explicitly for those hateful movements

Do you honestly believe the rising sun flag was not a part of a hateful movement? Is the fact that Korea was annexed and Koreans were treated awfully under this flag just a coincidence?

Re: MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did their economy suffer for a century? You would think the landowning class would lose out badly but that, overall, economic activity would increase. We’re all those farms so badly run that they couldn’t compete once they had to pay wages? Or was money just so concentrated that once slavers lost their slaves, nobody had any money at all?

They clung to the existing system as much as they could, but the extra steps they had to go through (keeping people as slaves even when it was illegal but hiding it from the relevant officials, the overhead of using prison labor, etc.) wouldn't have made it economically viable even if they didn't have to rebuild a completely destroyed infrastructure on top of that. But it took a long time though for the stored wealth…

That is fascinating - can you recommend any books on the subject?
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