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

#561

Post by throwaway_USD » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:37 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #226

throwaway_USD wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While I agree, please direct me to where I can speak "in the public domain" online. Same place as with pre-online TV and radio I suppose. Free speech doesn't guarantee you an audience at the time and place of your choosing. Take public buildings like a Courthouse or City hall, sure you have Free Speech rights, but good luck interrupting a court hearing to get your message out (without being held in contempt by the J…

Do you not believe that people can stand on a public street corner and express their ideas freely, where many people will likely see and hear them? Your examples are edge cases (court rooms at midnight) that seem designed to suggest that no such places exists. They do exist, and I am asking where is there online version. Are you suggesting that the only way to exchange free speech online is for each passerby to creat…

>Do you not believe that people can stand on a public street corner and express their ideas freely, where many people will likely see and hear them?

The Government can restrict you on the street corner too. Take Covid, states/counties/cities/municipalities across the country are enacting curfews, so violate the curfew and they will arrest your chilling your speech...assuming you consider that an edge case as well, then just read the case law from the good old "soap box" days, which deal exactly with people setting up their soap boxes on the corner to talk to the public and yes the government can regulate that speech to a certain extent.

>Are you suggesting that the only way to exchange free speech online is for each passerby to create their own website and respond on their respective websites?

Do you have a website? Can I freely post on your website without your consent?

>Where is the online public square?

The web is the public square, you want to set up your own soap box (website) do it, but you have no right to take over someone else's soap box (website), and if they do give you some rights to stand on their soap box they certainly can place restrictions.

>if you think having domain name and hosting is a public square, then you are ignoring all of the precedents of those things being removed by private entities.

You are ignoring self hosting from private servers.

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

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Post by aronpye » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:40 PM UTC

Soon it will be the American flag itself because someone somewhere will find it offensive. It’s not hard to imagine how it will go down, the American flag should be banned because something something slavery, something something oppression, something something offensive.

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

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Post by marshray » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #534

baddox wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that all symbols are their meaning are made up. To say "this gesture is a symbol of X" is to say "people made up that this gesture is a symbol of X."

It's a really odd social phenomenon. It's one thing to say "We don't like X and find it in poor taste. Please don't do that" I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside . It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it…

I don't believe that you don't actually understand the difference between "shoe or shirt color" and flashing hand signs for a photo.

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

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Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:41 PM UTC

generalk wrote: post #296

marcosdumay wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies aren't the only entities allowed to publish content on the World Wide Web Actually, the only entities with any capacity of publishing content on the WWW are a few tier 1 ISPs. If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers, and their ISP, and their ISP's ISP. If the end-state of that evolution is every entit…

> If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers Fair enough. My original parent comment asked where you can speak freely online, which for the purposes of my argument I'm equating to US law regarding free speech. (This may not be the angle you're coming from.) Most hosts will allow you to publish things that fit that d…

The US laws about free speech are greatly liberal (if extended to protect non-citizens). Even something more restrictive like outlawing hate-speech is still a complete no-issue.

But privatizing those laws on the hands of a few companies only work as long as (besides other constraints) there isn't a mob pushing those few companies around. So, I'm completely in favor of letting MS police their platform, but the universal ones ought to be declared public services and there should be guarantees of universalization there.

1 - Not only ISPs, as for example an app store on a locked phone is universal to that phone's userbase.

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

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Post by s- » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #509

donmcronald wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first time I've heard of that. I can just imagine being somewhere loud and giving the ok / perfect symbol to a friend across the room and then being called a racist. Damn, that's scary.

A thumbs up is still acceptable and has not yet been hijacked by assholes.

Thumbs up is definitely offensive in some cultures

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

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Post by naasking » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:42 PM UTC

notahacker wrote: post #556

naasking wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The implicit argument that an inability to display Confederate flags on others' property generates comparable negative externalities to environmental damage Attack the strongest interpretation of an argument, not the weakest. Your choice to focus on this flag incident and ignore the wider context that I described of platforms of all kinds censoring speech and banning people reveals the flaw in this sort of response…

Has there ever been a time when businesses didn't ban users from saying and doing things they didn't like on their property? The only trend seems to be that this time it's perceived racism which is the target, rather than stuff perceived as being vulgar or blasphemous or against their family values or age inappropriate or off topic or too critical of the platform owner, and you'll have trouble convincing me that this…

> Has there ever been a time when businesses didn't ban users from saying and doing things they didn't like on their property?

Sure, happens all the time. You think waitresses and restaurant managers like belligerent customers? They often tolerate them anyway.

Like I said, this specific instance wouldn't concern me at all if it weren't for the over-arching trend, and my post was specifically targeting a (frankly hypocritical) type of reply that comes up every time this topic is broached.

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

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Post by philwelch » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:43 PM UTC

softwaredoug wrote: post #488

philwelch wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 woul…

That’s a partial attempt to walk back a central point that received vast amounts of criticism from many actual historians.

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

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Post by kube-system » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

DanBC wrote: post #559

kube-system wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harassment laws are common in the US and don't have to enumerate a large list of different actions that constitute harassment. The clarification that you just quoted above from the Director of Public Prosecutions is only one sentence in length but it would entirely change the meaning of the law, if a clarification like that were actually in it. US harassment laws are not a list of 23,784 actions that constitute haras…

English law combines acts, statutes, statutory instruments, but also case law. The law is built to adjust to a changing society. You might be interested in this programme (from 2013, so there have been some changes since then) that explains how it works: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sn9cf

This is also the case in the 49 US states that base their legal system on English Common law.

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

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Post by theduder99 » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

aronpye wrote: post #562

Soon it will be the American flag itself because someone somewhere will find it offensive. It’s not hard to imagine how it will go down, the American flag should be banned because something something slavery, something something oppression, something something offensive.

Yep, can you believe those Americans who displaced and treated native Americans so badly?

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

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Post by zeveb » Thu, Jul 02, 2020, 9:46 PM UTC

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 couldn’t have imagined the pro-slavery position was so outspoken and blatant, it’s a bit of a culture shock.

Yeah, it is stomach-churning to us folks with a modern colour-blind sensitivity. It is hard to believe that folks believed that sort of thing.

> Economic incentives are perverse

Not just that, cultural and partisan factors. We see an echo of that sort of thing with the current lunatic rage against facemasks: it makes absolutely no sense to argue against them, yet … people do. The crazier they are the louder they are. Prior to secession, pro- and anti-slavery advocates eventually lost all respect for one another and lost the ability to compromise. Slaveholders thought that abolitionists literally wanted to see them murdered in their beds (cf. the Haitian Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Pottawatomie massacre, Harper's Ferry), and abolitionists had an equally low opinion.

Opinions polarised and ossified. The extremists got more and more vocal, and eventually there was no middle ground. And then everything dissolved into a cataclysm of violence.