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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

#471

Post by rsynnott »

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?

Wasn’t aware of that. I’d argue that that wasn’t okay, personally, and that the city shouldn’t have permitted it.

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

#472

Post by DevKoala »

jacobolus wrote: post #460
sukilot wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika. And before you say "come on, swastikas are pretty extreme", remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign.

Here’s a NY Times summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.ht... > The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”

It also weaponized the outrage and ruined the lives of innocent people.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

I don’t understand how people can justify the collateral damage; it is going too far.

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

#473

Post by baddox »

rayiner wrote: post #397
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.

That begs the question. Why did southerners pick the battle flag of the war they fought to preserve slavery as the symbol for "southern identity?"

And why did it just so happen to be chosen as a symbol by a short-lived but prominent segregationist political party in 1948 in response to the civil rights movement?

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

#474

Post by raz32dust »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #301
glangdale wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like how your slippery slope argument (itself a fallacy) kicks off with the fallacy that the pyramids were constructed by slave labor.

Well, even if they were built by paid labor force comprised from free persons, they still glorify dead slaveowners, don't they?

No, they don't. What a certain symbol glorifies or does not glorify is not something you can measure objectively. It is an intersubjective reality. i.e, if enough people believe that pyramids glorify slavery, then it does! At the moment, you are the first person I have heard who thinks so. Confederate flags, on the other hand, are considered as glorifying slavery even by many people who support it.

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

#475

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

shultays wrote: post #265

Interestingly hammer and sickle is not in the list

I think mainstream historians would argue that Soviet Communism was terrible - but it wasn't an ideology based on hate or subjugation. Displaying the Hammer and Sickle likely means you stand for unity with the working-class and seek an egalitarian society - or you have grievances with the current system of capitalism - and not that you hate on any particular group of people, and especially not for any of their immutable characteristics.

I know Tankies and Holomdor apologists exist - and their calls for guillotining billionaires are concerning - but I compare that to a person proudly displaying a (non-Hindu) swastika: it means that person is either a fascist who actively supports genocide - or is being an edgy teenager. Similarly proudly flying the Confederate battle-flag means they either actively support white-supremacy and subjugation of black people - or they're very ignorant of history and bought into the post-reconstruction propagandizing by Confederate apologists.

That's the difference between what I feel those symbols mean.

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

#476

Post by jcranmer »

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 right of a state to remove itself from the union that it had voluntarily entered.

Funnily enough, CSA's constitution not-quite-explicitly didn't grant the Confederate states that right.

I have yet to find a "state's right" that the CSA argued for that they didn't then refuse to grant to their own states.

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

#477

Post by root_axis »

lopmotr wrote: post #399
root_axis wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In what world can you imagine video game creators not being able to determine what kind of content is acceptable in their own game. You're over-generalizing. If a game explicitly banned players from creating characters that look like black people, would you still make that comment? I'm sure you can at least see why others would find that newsworthy.

> If a game explicitly banned players from creating characters that look like black people, would you still make that comment?

YES! Without a shadow of a doubt I would. In the most extreme case I might say "Wow, very disappointing, I won't be purchasing any more titles from that publisher" and that'd be the end of it, I certainly wouldn't regard it as newsworthy discussion except in a gaming forum.

I'd also add that for the vast majority of gaming history, the vast majority of games do NOT allow you to create black characters, and while I've heard activists decry the lack of inclusion, I've never seen the lack of black characters in a specific video game title presented as a news story.

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

#478

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

_y5hn wrote: post #406
aka1234 wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a lot of effort to address the symptoms, not the disease. The root issue is the user. Get rid of the user and you don't have to worry about all these half-measures.

What was the problem needing solving?

Depends who you ask. Some might say toxic expressions. Others might say people who declaim toxic expressions. Clearly MS has the latter goal in mind.

I can imagine a very reasonable argument for this. Someone who puts a Confederate flag on their car seems highly likely to engage in other toxic behaviors. Just like someone who calls someone a nigger once is likely to do it again. So we use the behaviors as a signal of underlying tendency. We don't want people who have this tendency on the platform because they will tend to make life worse for other users, and the loss of their business hurts us less than we gain from other people feeling more comfortable. Therefore we ban them.

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

#479

Post by tshaddox »

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…

If it's the case that some people are flying that flag who genuinely do not know the recent history of it (it was introduced in the late 1940s by the Dixiecrat party to symbolize their opposition to integration and the civil rights movement), then informing them of that history would surely cause them to immediately take it down.

One could even argue that it's at best negligent to fly a flag without knowing the most basic history of its symbolism, but if that's really what's going on, then surely it wouldn't be hard to educate all these people who are unintentionally flying the flag.

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

#480

Post by Garbage »

softwaredoug wrote: post #281

I don’t see how you can make a good faith argument the confederate flag is any different from a swastika. Both represent institutions built solely for racist motives and the subjugation of another race.

Swastika is a symbol of prosperity in Hindu culture for hundred of years. It doesn't seem right to ban it because Nazi used it for their doings.
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