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

#481

Post by henriquez » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:31 PM UTC

morley wrote: post #437

henriquez wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slavery was not the primary factor of conflict in the Civil War. Both Union and Confederate states owned slaves and engaged in slave trade. Conflating the Confederate flag with racism or white supremacy is a popular, but historically ignorant viewpoint.

There's the old saying that if you know nothing about it, the Civil War was about slavery; if you know a little about it, it was about state's rights; and if you know a lot about it, it was about slavery. The "states rights" trope was a deliberate attempt of a few Southern, revisionist historians to blunt their racist past. The truth is that the South seceded because their states wanted the right to hold slaves. http…

Yes I believe slavery was the straw that broke the camel’s back but it wasn’t the primary factor of conflict. Slavery and protecting the property of rich plantation owners was not the reason poor southern kids were fighting and killing their own family members. To completely dismiss the more prominent factors at play including states rights as “historical revisionism” is itself historical revisionism.

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

#482

Post by mikepurvis » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:33 PM UTC

beaner wrote: post #419

rickbutton wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have any resources to link, sorry. The weird-power-dynamic-Lincoln statue with the freed black man aside, I generally agree on statutes of the founding fathers. I doubt a statue of Washington was erected in honor of his support for slavery. In the greater context of what is happening in America right now, tearing down statues of Washington isn't necessarily about Washington himself. Instead, it is about chall…

Respectfully, without a place to read about the intimidation tactic of statues, I'm not sure that I put much weight in it. An alternative explanation on the timing could for example be that people in the majority in those communities sensed that the tides of public opinion were shifting, and they felt a strong desire to reach backward and preserve the past that they had fought for, which they felt like they were now…

> Respectfully, without a place to read about the intimidation tactic of statues, I'm not sure that I put much weight in it.

Five seconds of googling yielded several results from when this was last discussed in a major way, in 2017:

NPR piece includes a chart of dates for confederacy iconography: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...

HuffPo piece says it was never about "history and culture": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/confederate-monuments-history...

Vox talks a bit about the process:

"But the story of the monuments is even stranger than many people realize. Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition."

See: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/18/16165160/confeder...

And then some newer pieces:

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confede...

https://www.wral.com/confederate-monuments-were-meant-to-int...

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

#483

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

throwanem wrote: post #302

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…

It's not really all that hard to know what awfulness to expect. edit: That probably sounds more dickish than I meant it. I don't know a better place than HN for identifying clusters and following trends in the thought of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". It's not only that, which is why I still come here. But that's the strongest theme by far.

> strongest theme by far

Such perceptions are notoriously unreliable. People notice different things and weight them differently, based mostly on what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since everyone dislikes different things, everyone has a different weighted average, each reflecting their own preferences. In other words they are in the eye of the beholder, which explains why people come up with such wildly contradictory generalizations about HN.

From my perspective, that's the strongest theme by far. Does my argument apply to my own perception? For sure. It has to.

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

#484

Post by kgwgk » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #200

gnusty_gnurc wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No more WWII games with nazis...god forbid someone sees a swastika /s

Even Germany allows the swastika when presented in a historical context in artistic or educational works, come on.

In games they allow them since 2018 only: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45142651

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

#485

Post by baddox » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:34 PM UTC

user982 wrote: post #452

Spivak wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But are you counting the years the Confederate flag has spent after being adopted? I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride. What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and bei…

> clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride. This postulates that the Confederate flag did not start out spoiled by racism.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It first started as a battle flag during the Civil War. Then in 1948 the Dixiecrats reintroduced it as a symbol of their opposition to integration and the civil rights movement.

If it's being used now by people intending it to represent regional pride who are simply unaware of its history (which I find unlikely, but a lot of people are claiming that), then all it should take to convince them to take down their flags is to share that history with them.

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

#486

Post by tarkin2 » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:34 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…

Allowing it legitimises the racist ideas.

Yet racist aggressors have legitimised many horrors through victimhood.

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

#487

Post by rayiner » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #362

beervirus wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Remove themselves, so they can own slaves. Read The Cornerstone Speech[1]: that "Our new government['s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." Don’t fall for Lost Cause mythology.[2] 1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Speech_ti... 2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederac...

The Cornerstone Speech is required reading: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto...

> The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.

Two things jump out: 1) someone defending secession in 1861 unambiguously calls out the founders for mostly believing that slavery was evil; and 2) it's an early invocation of "science" against the "zeal above knowledge" of (overwhelmingly religious) abolitionist "fanatics."

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

#488

Post by softwaredoug » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:36 PM UTC

philwelch wrote: post #459

softwaredoug wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s like saying criticizing Nazi Germany doesn’t matter because the kaiser was maybe antisemetic during WW1 too. There’s no morality because maybe someone else was bad too. Its rank whataboutism. We can evaluate morality from not great, to bad, to really really bad. We can make judgments about individual situations on their merits. The “merits” of the confederacy are really really bad! Also you’re nutpicking[1] -…

For reference, characterizing the American Revolution as a war to preserve slavery was literally the central focus of a project that was published in the New York Times and that public schools are adopting as curriculum. It isn’t fair to characterize it as “nutpicking” when the nuts hold that degree of institutional power. FWIW I agree with you about the Confederacy and about Confederate symbology, and I think I said…

The 1619 project said it was one cause, not the sole cause, as

> that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. This assertion has elicited criticism from some historians and support from others.

> We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the...

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

#489

Post by gamblor956 » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

Hamuko wrote: post #318

lopmotr wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imperial Japan was extremely cruel to the people in the places it invaded - which was a lot. Human experimentation, massacring civilians, torture, comfort women. They were basically the Nazis of Asia. They also didn't apologize for it, still glorify their brutal heroes and teach disinformation about it to their schoolkids. Chinese people still have a strong anti-Japanese feeling.

I don't exactly consider dropping two atomic bombs on top of hundreds of thousands of civilians an act of kindness. Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country). There's probably a whole laundry list of war crimes (and things that really should be war crimes) that the US has committed. And there are a lot of anti-Americ…

I don't exactly consider dropping two atomic bombs on top of hundreds of thousands of civilians an act of kindness.

War used to be extremely brutal. Genghis Khan used to execute entire cities...even after they had surrendered. Hell, prior to WWII, civilian populations were still legally legitimate targets for military actions. It's a very modern development for war to be fought purely between recognized armed forces.

That being said, dropping two atomic bombs is estimated to have saved millions of Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost if the Japanese Emperor had waged a city-by-city resistance as they originally planned.

Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country).

This is not true, at all. The US Government is constantly apologizing for its past acts. We don't just apologize for them, we set up memorials to our own bad acts as a nation so that we can't erase them from memory or hide from them. And after the atomic bombs, the US paid for the surgeries and medical treatments of numerous survivors. Similarly, after Vietnam, the US has made significant efforts to make up for the damage inflicted on the Vietnamese people during the war.

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

#490

Post by protomyth » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 8:37 PM UTC

naruvimama wrote: post #468

protomyth wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there are a couple of tipis that go up every year that get comments from the damn ignorant. What can I expect from people looking for outrage?

Meanwhile it is used by radical groups to run smear campaigns elsewhere in the world. https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/from-devi-in-hijab-om-as-...

Well, that is them and this is us. I think expecting other cultures to stop using something because someone else "ruined" it is stupid.

I'm also getting a little sick of down votes every damn time I mention Native Americans. I'm starting to wonder.