MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by GaryNumanVevo » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

soraminazuki wrote: post #221

While it's emotionally pleasing to see racists being kicked out of online platforms, another side of me feels wary of these tactics. For starters, being deplatformed from major online players today would have serious consequences. Although it's true that these platforms are "private property," the entire society has become too reliant on them to be seen that way. I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a…

This assumes that racists are putting confederate flags on their cars in good faith.

Also, what kind of discourse is so precious that it should be respected on the ... Forza decal platform?

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

#252

Post by kukx » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

iron0013 wrote: post #219

kukx wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.".

To the surprise of no one who isn’t a hopeless naif, Parler has turned out to ban and censor far more than Twitter ever did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23684512

Well, but did they really ban more accounts than Twitter? I highly doubt it, just for the reason that Twitter is older and has more users overall. But if there are any stats that you can point us to, I can be convinced.

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

#253

Post by baddox » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

beaned wrote: post #82

mikepurvis wrote: post #28

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…

If the absolute worst case scenario you can imagine is that we no longer have any huge chunks of metal in the shape of people displayed on public property, then your slippery slope argument isn't very compelling.

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

#254

Post by csours » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:57 PM UTC

50ckpuppet wrote: post #220

csours wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you my personal standard: Did they act or campaign to make things worse for their fellow man (and woman)? In other words, did they simply act in the context of their time period, as other men in their position would, or did they specifically act to curtail the rights of others. This makes it very easy for me to condemn symbols of the Confederacy, because they specifically acted to preserve slavery. If anyon…

offending other people should never be the standard. By your definition we should ban South Park because it offends nearly everyone, so fsck your sensitivities. The confederate flag should be banned because the kkk and other white supremacists adopted it, rebranded it as their own flag, and most importantly, no one cared to stop them. Try that with the Irish flag and see what the Irish have to say about it.

> "By your definition we should ban South Park because it offends nearly everyone, so fsck your sensitivities."

My standard is: Did they act or campaign to make things worse for their fellow man (and woman)? Someone could make a case that South Park has done this, but it would be hard for me to take it seriously.

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

#255

Post by catalogia » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #214

newyankee wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. The original inspiration for Hitler was hooked cross. You will commonly find swastika painted across homes in India.

> Swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. The original inspiration for Hitler was hooked cross. No, the inspiration was the Indian swastika. Same reason he wanted to call himself "Aryan". (The swastika is also a sacred symbol in Buddhism, for reference. One day someone will petition to have 卐 removed from the relevant Chinese Unicode block.)

The swastika was also in use in the west in the early 20th century before the Nazis came to power. One example of this can be seen painted on the inside of the nosecone of the Spirit of Saint Louis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spirit_of_St._Louis_Nose_...

(It should probably be noted that the Spirit of Saint Louis was flown by Charles Lindbergh, who is generally thought to have been a Nazi sympathizer a bit later in life. But I think it's unlikely this particular swastika from 1927 was painted with the Nazis in mind. Particularly, it wasn't painted by Lindbergh.)

Here is an American postcard from 1910 featuring a swastika in the notorious "tilted" orientation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...

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

#256

Post by ricktdotorg » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #224

i_am_proteus wrote: post #4

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.

At the risk of being controversial... I'm going to go ahead and say that Japan doesn't care about racism like America does. Japanese people are extremely racist, but you just don't know it because Japan is 99+% Japanese with But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".

> But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".

source for this?

my experience: my wife is Japanese, i have visited JP many times, we know a ton of non-Japanese immigrants living in Japan and they all live wherever the heck they want to live.

i've never heard of non-native minorities being segregated either officially (government) or privately (landlord collusion) other than perhaps stories of illegal immigrants being packed together in the seedier parts of town. is that what you're referring to?

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

#257

Post by throwanem » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 6:59 PM UTC

hamandcheese wrote: post #129

I’m not convinced that everyone who displays a Confederate flag is doing so out of hate (despite the history behind the symbol). It seems classifying it as a hate symbol and banning it only gives it more power as a hate symbol, and will also upset plenty of non-raciest southerners in the process.

I was born and raised in Mississippi. You're wrong. Maybe you wouldn't have been when I was a baby. But that's been a long time ago now.

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

#258

Post by Aqua » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

I'm not American, but I don't understand those of you who support such decisions. The world of politics is infecting various gaming communities with politically driven changes that in many cases aren't supported by the actual users(or majority of the users, anyway). It's worrisome that many companies succumb to the demands of the mob just because they want to be left alone.

On another note, the fact that it's just the confederate flag and swastikas is deeply disturbing and acts as sound evidence that those are American problems. What about soviet symbols? Overall, the total number of soviet victims vastly exceeds those of Nazis or the victims of American slavery, why is everyone so one-sided in that aspect?

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

#259

Post by aidenn0 » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

soraminazuki wrote: post #221

While it's emotionally pleasing to see racists being kicked out of online platforms, another side of me feels wary of these tactics. For starters, being deplatformed from major online players today would have serious consequences. Although it's true that these platforms are "private property," the entire society has become too reliant on them to be seen that way. I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a…

I want all controversial views to be deplatformed, because I don't see any other way that people will care enough about centralization to actually change.

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

#260

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 7:00 PM UTC

iron0013 wrote: post #248

dang wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This experience, which you've described well in just one sentence, is actually a consequence of how the site is structured. You might say "well, structure it differently then, so it doesn't suck". But giving up that structure would be bad, because although it is far from pleasant, it contains something that's both valuable and increasingly rare. What we need to do instead is find our way through the difficulty withou…

The “tribes” are easily identifiable on HN, it seems to me. For all of the most prolific HN posters, it is quite easy to predict which side of nearly any issue they’ll support.

Good point, but it takes a lot of familiarity before those lines become clear. At that point, the shock experience gets weaker, there is more a sense of "I expect that from this asshole", and the discussions become more like the ant wars on the rest of the internet.

Even then, the community is big enough that you're going to regularly run into comments from users you either don't recognize, or didn't realize were of the opposing tribe (or opposing-tribe-adjacent, let's say). So the shock experience never goes away. But I think you're right that it's most intense for less-familiar users, and that explains why there are so many people who use HN for a little while, inevitably encounter the shock experience, feel hurt, and leave. That's a common occurrence and which pains me personally.

The deeper point is that the site is designed to keep everybody together. It's not partitioned by friends or follow lists. There are no subreddits or social graphs. Design differences at that level are profound and affect everything.