Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 870 posts

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

#441

Post by jjjensen90 »

lopmotr wrote: post #413
paulchap wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's _technically_ private property. It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights. The users agreed to the ToS while signing up, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS.…

>perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS. I don't think companies should be directly regulated/penalized for banning users. I don't believe you really meant what you said there. Private companies aren't allowed to ban users because of their race. Do you want them to have that freedom and allow segregation? Or perhaps you only accept tha…

I realize you've made a weak straw man argument here, but there are important distinctions that need to be made in discussions about platform/user base moderation. While there are classes of people protected from discrimination by civil rights laws, what is not protected is discrimination or refusal of service for customers based on what they do rather than who they are. Banning someone for cheating, harassment, circumventing moderation, etc is not comparable for banning users of a certain race, and even attempting to equivocate them is a weak argument.

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

#442

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

mikepurvis wrote: post #277
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most of the coverage I saw was people horrified at the constitutional implications of the military being turned on US citizens, on US soil, by order of the president.

I mean, there just aren't any constitutional implications - it happened in 1992 with no lasting repercussions.

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

#443

Post by bronson »

Spivak wrote: post #368
user982 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pride in what? Heritage of what? The South has hundreds of years of history. Why are the 4 years of the Confederacy so celebrated?

I see lots of people on the internet making the 4 year argument, and I have to admit it's a snappy quip, but I don't think the point is made entirely in good faith. I really do see it being flown as a symbol of rural and/or southern pride that is informed by, but largely disconnected from, the civil war other than as a historical symbol that broadly represents an opposition between rural folk and urbanites. I mean it…

> people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle

The Confederate flag has always been a racist dogwhistle. Right from day 1.

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

#444

Post by gamblor956 »

octocop wrote: post #372
arcticfox wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika. This seems semantic. For example, cheating is banned in many games, and if you cheat, you get banned. Banning cheating and cheaters is effectively the same thing.

Choice is still present, is a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak by default non-racist?

There is a huge difference between thinking bad thoughts and expressing or acting on them.

You can be as racist as you want in your own head. No one is stopping that. You can express those racist thoughts all you want on your own property.

But you have absolutely no right to express or act on those racist thoughts on someone else's property.

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

#445

Post by fpgaminer »

beervirus wrote: post #352
softwaredoug wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sole cause of the confederacy was defending the right for white men to own black slaves. All those other things were not solely about defending slavery.

That's not even true. The confederacy also stood for the cause of self-determination, and the right of a state to remove itself from the union that it had voluntarily entered.

The second and third (final) confederate national flags were white to represent the supremacy of the white race:

> In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...)

It's absolutely clear that the confederate was about white supremacy.

It's also hard to argue that the confederate was about self-determination in any way when their very constitution is a litany of laws banning things, like a state's rights to regulating slave ownership.

> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

This idea that the confederacy was founded for any other reason than slave ownership is absurd and a complete fabrication, unfortunately perpetuated by Texas school books used throughout the United States public schools.

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

#446

Post by TheAdamAndChe »

filleduchaos wrote: post #412
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you never been to a southern state? It's been flown ever since the war and has been detached from the war and attached to southern identity. It's part of the culture here.

People keep throwing around words like "heritage", "southern identity" and "culture", but are most often very hard pressed indeed to explain what exactly is the identity or culture that is best represented by what's at the very least a flag of sedition/treason (even if we leave out the racist overtones). I mean, it's not like I'm wholly unsympathetic to failed secessionist states and their symbols/paraphernalia. Peop…

People are hard pressed to explain what is the identity or culture best represented by what's a flag of sedition/treason

It's just a symbol of identity or culture, like most flags. There's a massive cultural difference between the rural south and the highly populated coastal cities. The flag to many is a symbol of that difference, and has many of the psychological undertones that makes the "don't tread on me" flag popular, mostly a willingness to push back against external influences.

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

#447

Post by luckylion »

acdha wrote: post #349
luckylion wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the hosting company takes you down, host it yourself. If ICANN takes it down, host it on Tor. That's a bit like "if the police beats you up in public, you're still free to speak your mind in your basement" though.

Except that it’s not a public space and the harm is far less than a beating. A hosting company can have terms of service just like any other business and the only real restrictions are legally-protected classes, and even that has context. Think of it like going to a coffee shop: they can’t kick you out for being Catholic or male but they can ask you to leave if you are harassing other people, not following public hea…

> Except that it’s not a public space and the harm is far less than a beating.

As in "you can't speak any more, because your website is offline". A gag is the offline equivalent.

> Think of it like going to a coffee shop

I believe that example would be more accurate if we all lived in company towns, where no public space exists and your presence, and speech, is merely tolerated under normal circumstances, but you have no right to either being there nor speaking your mind, and can be removed at any moment, should anyone "in charge" have an issue with your behavior. That also has the angle that you lose a lot more than just your ability to speak: you lose your home and need to find a new place that will take you in, need to tell everybody you know and do business with about your new address etc, like when Google shuts down your Gmail account.

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

#448

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

notyourday wrote: post #390
rsynnott wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Amazon should be allowed do that (and of course, there's a lot of context there; if they started putting swastikas, or confederate flags, on the cars in Top Gear there might be more eyebrows raised). It probably shouldn't be _compelled_ to carry all material containing swastikas, though.

Ah, so they did it all over NYC subway a few years ago. To a point where I had to do a double take before I realized it was just an Amazon promo. There are quite a few Eastern Europeans and Jews in NYC. Why was that OK?

Since precision is important: no, there were not swastikas. There was a symbol of an eagle (the Reichsadler) over an 'iron cross' symbol as part of the advertising. You can find that fairly easily by looking at an image search on your favorite search engine.

n.b. the iron cross symbol is still used in Germany for e.g. the roundel of the German Air Force.

I don't doubt that the design would fall afoul of the MS content guidelines as I'm sure perching the Reichsadler on top of the iron cross would be the kind of thing they mean by "contextual clues".

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

#449

Post by davidgay »

jeegsy wrote: post #358
rsynnott wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume Microsoft never allowed, say, swastikas. There's no reasonable expectation that you are able to spread racist propaganda in a car racing game (or for that matter in an actual car race; I think those tend to have very strict rules around decoration). I can see an _argument_ that Twitter, say, should be forced to pander to racists. I don't buy that argument, mind you, but I can at least see the thought process…

I'm assuming that swastikas have much more universal unpopularity than the confederacy flag. Heck, in 2020, MS just voted to remove confederate symbol from the state flag. SO I dont think the comparison is all there. My concern with these sort of deplatforming moves while understandable, is they tend to drive these bigoted ideas underground. So maybe they cant express it publicly but boy, do they find other ways to d…

> I'm assuming that swastikas have much more universal unpopularity than the confederacy flag.

Coincidentally, a news item from yesterday about swastikas: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645

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

#450

Post by baddox »

beaner wrote: post #297
rickbutton wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to remember that the majority of these statues were not created after the civil war in order to remember them, but during the Jim Crow era in order to intimidate black people. The intent was never to teach history.

I don't know the history of that so I can't argue it. If you could link to some education on it, I'd like to read about it. I would imagine that it's possible in some circumstances for this to be true for some, mostly confederate figures. I'm really skeptical that that's true for figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

It's not about statues, but the Wikipedia article about the modern display of the Confederate Flag seems to offer a decent summary of its usage beginning in the 1950s:

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

Post reply on HN