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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

#641

Post by 8note »

Rebelgecko wrote: post #387
GaryNumanVevo wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think it's a good faith claim that everyone using one of the banned symbols is a racist 1. The current flag of Japan is based off of one of the banned symbols 2. Probably the most famous car in pop culture uses one of the banned symbols. Microsoft has gone as far as banning parodies of the General Lee that have none of the controversial symbols[0] If the flag of imperial Japan was banned due to its associatio…

For something you could use with a consistent approach:

If they willingly undid their imperialism and colonialism, it's fine; the symbol is one of learning to not be racist

If you had to invade and force them to stop it, and the regime ended while clinging to the racist policies, then it's bad

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

#642

Post by filoleg »

freehunter wrote: post #629
Dylan16807 wrote: post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other capabilities would only be removed if they broke other rules. That's not a gradual process toward banning. That's a completely unrelated disciplinary measure.

So basically, if someone murders another person we should ban them from murdering people but not put them in jail. They should only go to jail if they commit multiple unrelated crimes.

>if someone murders another person we should ban them from murdering people but not put them in jail.

If conflating the act of violently taking someone's life away irreversibly to displaying an offensive custom skin in a videogame sounds like a reasonable and genuine argument to you, I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince you otherwise.

I agree with the parent comment that restricting customization for the offending users in the game is a reasonable punishment. They can still play the game AND have zero actual possibility of committing the same offense. The desired outcome of the user not using offensive imagery in custom skins is achieved.

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

#643

Post by cgrealy »

jeegsy wrote: post #618
bronson wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but boy, do they find other ways to do it as certain church members' families can attest. Your argument is that, if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people? History indicates otherwise: the US was a lot more tolerant of racism in the past and there was a lot more violence.

> if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people In your defense, that may be the surface level interpretation of what I said. However, I am not saying that in any way shape or form. Closer to what I'm saying is that, censorship artificially reduces the number of monsters in our polity that we are able to identify. They are prevented from expression so we…

The problem with that is that the primary effect of open racism and bigotry is to normalise and encourage more open racism and bigotry.

It's all well and good to be able to identify these people, but the downside is that their victims have to put up with more racism and bigotry.

Frankly, if we drive it underground, great! Let's keep driving it underground until it suffocates.

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

#644

Post by jcranmer »

henriquez wrote: post #481
morley wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> To completely dismiss the more prominent factors at play including states rights

Question #1: Name three states rights the South supposedly aruged for.

Question #2: Count how many of those rights they actually granted to their own states.

For it being supposedly such a major factor in their succession, states rights are conspicuously silent in both the ordinances of succession, contemporary oratory, and in the text they wrote in their own Constitution.

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

#645

Post by bastawhiz »

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?

People who are paralyzed and unable to speak aren't spreading hate in video games, so it's pretty pointless to hold them up as a counterexample. I know my grandparents probably have a lot of racist thoughts but unless they're unloading them at the Thanksgiving dinner table I'm not telling my grandmother to shut her mouth.

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

#646

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

prepend wrote: post #589
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Some may say it’s not a significant problem and it’s cheaper for MS to make a PR statement about doing something than spending effort in moderation software changes.

> Some may say it’s not a significant problem

But not the people who have the authority to make the call, plainly.

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

#647

Post by cgrealy »

TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #360
filleduchaos wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that the Confederate battle flag was in use for less than five years and solely as an icon of a conflict that was very much about the (rather racist) keeping of chattel slaves. Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.

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.

If your culture and heritage is "treason and racism", maybe that's not a culture or heritage worth preserving?

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

#648

Post by iRobbery »

skinkestek wrote: post #551
edoceo wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I remember from back when I picked up Norwegian litterature, a short story or essay or something that ended with something along the lines of: "cucumbers is the only thing that hasn't been deemed unhealthy yet. Hurry up and eat cucumbers while they are still healthy!"

https://www.businessinsider.com/spain-cucumber-crisis-ecoli-...

i hope you stopped eating them 2011 ;-)

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

#649

Post by breakbread »

donmcronald wrote: post #429
FireBeyond wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine". My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests.…

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.

My wife is a high school teacher and, until we had our first child, was also the swim team coach.

Early last year she made a kid run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs.

Then she gets an angry text message from the kid's mother who believed her son was being punished specifically for making the "ok" symbol. This woman had found a picture of my wife on Facebook where she can be seen pulling her shirt down by pinching the bottom of it between her thumb and pointer finger, inadvertently making the "ok" symbol. She basically said she was going to put my wife on blast and out her as a racist. Ridiculous (Hilarious, even, in retrospect).

My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.

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

#650

Post by bastawhiz »

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.

Does the popularity of a racist symbol have any correlation with whether it should be suppressed? Swastikas were a lot more present in the 1940s but that doesn't mean they were less reprehensible.

If a far-right group started using a brand-new symbol to signify their racist ideology, is it suddenly worth waiting for the symbol to pick up steam before prohibiting it? That doesn't make a lot of sense. The people using the symbol are saying "I don't think you should exist" _right now_, not when there is a sufficient number of others rallying around their belief system.

The confederate flag is hundreds of years old. Waiting for "informal social pressure" to kick in is a great way to ignore a problem.

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