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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

#181

Post by ceejayoz »

kukx wrote: post #92
daenz wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Companies should be free to regulate hate speech on their platforms. The government should not regulate speech in the public domain. While I agree, please direct me to where I can speak "in the public domain" online.

For example there is Parler, an alternative to Twitter. While it is not a state company, it promotes free speech. They claim "Our content is moderated based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States which enables free expression without violence and a lack of censorship.".

That's the claim, at least. The reality is quite different.

https://www.iflscience.com/technology/free-speech-social-net...

> "When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED," the first rule states, which is just a fantastic start to any list of rules. A club that has to spell that out (presumably after multiple people broke that rule) is clearly one that needs to be joined. "Your username cannot be CumDumpster," the rules continue, adding that pornography isn't allowed. Sorry, Ted.

Twitter permits all of those things. Some "free speech platform".

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

#182

Post by bjourne »

drocer88 wrote: post #31

What next? Tibetan flags? Uighur flags? Palestinian flags? Basque flags? Chechen flags? Israeli flags? South vietnamese flags? Taiwan flags? Dominion of Newfoundland flags? Black nationalist flags? Who's the judge?

Palestinian flags have already been nixed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/10/student-order...

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

#183

Post by root_axis »

pfraze wrote: post #119
root_axis wrote: post #15

Why is this newsworthy? Random video game publisher implements arbitrary rule in video-game land. Seems to me like the goal of this story is just to stir up controversy over something that's not at all important. Anyone who plays a lot of online games knows that game publishers regularly ban users for a wide variety of arbitrary reasons, even mundane profanity is enough to earn a ban or suspension in many popular gam…

It's newsworthy because there's a pretty significant debate occurring in the US about how private companies can moderate speech in their spaces. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is being actively relitigated by both parties (though it's not clear yet if anything will come of it).

> Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is being actively relitigated by both parties

I feel like I am taking crazy pills. We're talking about the creator of a video game banning the confederate flag in-game, we are a long way off from free speech rights in the supposed public square of a private enterprise. In what world can you imagine video game creators not being able to determine what kind of content is acceptable in their own game. I don't feel convinced that this is anything other than aggrieved culture warriors trying to make something mundane into a controversy.

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

#184

Post by magnusmagnusson »

namdnay wrote: post #115
magnusmagnusson wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"This slope isn't particularly sloppy" is the single best reply capturing the delusion and dishonesty of the people who celebrate the limiting of speech and expression heere. At least admit it proudly, that you are placing a punishment on vocalbulary and imposing self-censorship and thus invading privacy too. All these masks attempting to cover-up reduction of politics to friend/enemy distinction are even more insult…

> At least admit it proudly, that you are placing a punishment on vocalbulary Yes I admit it proudly, I live in a country that places a punishment on saying hateful things. I’m pretty fine with it > and imposing self censorship Life in society is based around self censorship. I don’t run around the city center naked, I don’t shit in storm grates, and I don’t shout Sieg Heil. > invading privacy No I don’t think anyone…

Self-censorship on a public arena is predicated on invasion of privacy; the thought is implicitly not private at that point as you enact self-censorship due to norms imposed by institutions.

"Placing a punishment on hateful things" is a lot of words to cover the timeless and universal wisdom of "кто кого?".

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

#185

Post by egypturnash »

gentleman11 wrote: post #52

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…

I grew up in the South and there is a certain amount of propaganda about how it was the evil oppressors of the North who wanted to ruin our beautiful lifestyle, but when you get right down to it this beautiful Southern world was built on the backs of a whole lot of dirt-cheap labor in the form of slaves. All the human traffickers sipping mimosas on the verandah of their gorgeous, tree-lined work camps watching the people they thought of as sub-human animals laboring away wanted to be able to keep doing this, so they sent their kids and the poor people of the South off to die for this.

White supremacy was, and still is, an important component in the systematic oppression of Black people in the south. But the Confederacy went to war to preserve an economy that would be completely ruined if they had to pay their workers a living wage and treat them like humans.

Much of the Southern economy is still based on paying Black people shit wages. We throw a lot more of them into jail than we do white people, and so many of these jails are for-profit affairs designed to squeeze every penny possible out of their inmates and their families. We elect openly-racist sheriffs. We have literal KKK members get a hair's breadth from becoming governors. There is a case to be made that slavery never ended, it just changed shape.

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

#186

Post by otterley »

ebg13 wrote: post #174
ggreer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... )

The inability of HN commenters to grasp current cultural norms and the sensitivities of the people around them astounds me.

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

#187

Post by kube-system »

ceejayoz wrote: post #175
jaywalk wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

There are a number of examples of speech laws in the western world that have banned insults. From 1994-2014 the UK had a ban on speech that was "insulting"

The UK's Communications Act 2003 section 127 also says:

> (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he-

> (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or

> (b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.

> (2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he-

> (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,

> (b) causes such a message to be sent; or

> (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.

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

#188

Post by dragonwriter »

sacks2k wrote: post #26

I'm curious why the confederate flag should get special treatment. I had relatives murdered in the Alamo. Should the Mexican flag get banned because I'm offended by it? Every flag represents a group that has been in the losing side of a war and killed opposing citizens or soldiers. Yet, those flags aren't banned.

> I had relatives murdered in the Alamo.

Look, I know Texas liked rebelling over concerns that the parent country didn't look kindly on chattel slavery, but combatants getting killed, either in combat or when executed as traitors, after starting those wars isn't being “murdered".

> Should the Mexican flag get banned because I'm offended by it?

The Mexican flag of that war is no longer used; the current Mexican flag was adopted in 1968 (or 1995, depending on which side of the flag you are talking about, though the latter was clarifying an ambiguity in the spec more than a new design.) So, even if your concern was agreed to be otherwise valid, it's kind of like asking about banning the modern German flag because of the Nazis.

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

#189

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mikepurvis wrote: post #144
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think of the counterargument about statues? A few years ago, the idea that removing Confederate statues might lead to removing statues of founding fathers was considered an absurd slippery slope argument; a few days ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece arguing that statues of George Washington should be torn down. How can we be confident that this isn't a step down that same slope?

The NYT opinion page is hardly a barometer of broad public consensus— see the recent scandal of the Tom Cotton "send in the military" piece.

I'm not sure I follow. Opinion polls at the time showed that a significant majority of the public wanted the military sent in.

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

#190

Post by proc0 »

jammaloo wrote: post #142
proc0 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just trying to ban something that may seem like it has logic so people accept it and normalize it. American flag might be next, and yes I would not be surprised if Mexican flag as well because of the "evil spaniards". This whole thing has no logic behind it, it's just hate and evil, and it has always started with censorship. Hence the FIRST amendment.

I'm curious where you fall on the spectrum of this. Do you think that it's good, for example, for people to be displaying Nazi Flags in a racing game? Or if they showed graphic depictions of violence/gore. Where does your line fall, on what is and isn't okay to show?

Good question!

The flag itself is not a problem. It won't change my mind for sure. I've seen it in history books, the only difference would be if somehow I feel threatened by the other player holding Nazi beliefs - which I'm not because we defeated them. We can defeat them again, no problem.

I would be ok with taking measure if somehow a bunch of a Nazi flags started FLOODING the game. This would be its own problem however, and stopping this kind of trolling is different than censorship. One or two flags here and there, just tell you some people are stupid.

Question for you: Would you rather play a game that has secret Nazis and you don't know because their iconography is censored, or would you rather play a game that doesn't censor people so you know what people believe?

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