731–740 of 870 posts
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that doesn't mean everyone else knows though, and it at least detoxifies the conversation to observers
so you mean they can use coded language to spread hate without being discovered? Almost like a dog whistle, that only some can hear...
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Maybe they had innocent motives, or maybe they didn't. It's irrelevant. Attempting to normalize a symbol that for millions of people stands for brutality, terrorism and oppression, doesn't change its nature for that population of people. Now you might say that it doesn't matter how those people feel. They're not us. They have their culture and we have ours. Well, what if 10 years down the road there was a new hit sho…
> Now you might say that it doesn't matter how those people feel. They're not us. What?? How in the universe are you getting there? Talk about a strawman! The real explanation is much simpler: They didn't know the flag was racist. Because, despite attempts to rewrite history, until recently most people did not know that flag was racist. I mean, even the producer of the show, who went out of his way to hire black acto…
I find this extremely unbelievable. The American Civil War is a milestone in American history that has been taught in schools for a long time. Most people, despite attempts to rewrite history, know that the Confederacy fought for the right to own black slaves.
Why ban the players, and not just the design? I once ran a large online forum and set up a word filter to replace certain phrases with "fluffy bunnies" and other absurdities. It did a remarkable job of improving discourse once the foul-mouthed types realized their hateful messages were being massaged. Microsoft could use some kind of super-cool AI-drived ML-based image recognition to replace the flag with a rainbow f…
In your online forum case, what exactly do you do when toxic users wisen up and start working around your filter? Do you ban them or just continue letting them flaunt the rules?
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The origins of a symbol are mostly pointless, it's the intent of its use. It's a hard argument to say that everyone form Japan is a racist because their flag is based on a banned symbol. The confederacy existed _because of racism_. Its only purpose (and continued purpose) is to identify with a movement founded solely on the basis of hate.
This will be one of my argument about changing the current master-slave or blacklist-whitelist terminology in tech.
The country of Japan might not change its flag for whatever reason. That's their choice, and for them to sort out.
Using inclusive language is different because I'm not forcing anyone to type Japan's flag. The origin of Japan's flag doesn't equate "things that are not okay" with skin tone. Your black coworkers today, if they descended from enslaved people brought to the US, have a very high probability of having a white ancestor who was a slave owner—it's part of their identity. Or maybe your coworker was one of the millions of Americans who were forced to work hard labor because of the exception to the thirteenth amendment [0]. It's truly personal. Imagine if "blacklists" were "irishlists": if it was just the origin that was racist, would we be having the same conversation that the origin and the intent can be separated? It's not necessarily hateful to use the "old" term—how could you have been educated on inclusivity when the word is common jargon? But is it racist or hateful to say "I'm actively choosing not to use an equivalent but inclusive term because I prefer the one that I have learned is discouraging or hateful to others"? Yes, probably, in the same way that confederate flag aficionados claim that it represents something different now, or it's the way things "always" have been. In fact, the term probably didn't exist in computing when your parents were kids.
Inclusive language costs nothing [1] and most importantly, it's something that _you can control_. The difference is Microsoft regulating use of the Japanese flag, which they cannot change and which isn't celebrated as a racist symbol, and making the default branch on all new internal git repos "main," which they can easily change, costs ~nothing to do, and avoids terminology which isn't used to be hateful but which is derived from hate.
[0] the old "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted"
[1] I wrote and landed a PR to change "whitelist" to "allowlist" in 20 minutes. Another team codemodded >1k instances of "blacklist" away in a day. Ymmv, but it's easy to simply stop using an old term and start using a new one, replacing the old one over time.
What next? Tibetan flags? Uighur flags? Palestinian flags? Basque flags? Chechen flags? Israeli flags? South vietnamese flags? Taiwan flags? Dominion of Newfoundland flags? Black nationalist flags? Who's the judge?
It depends. Which ones represent the right of owning dark skinned people? I would be happy if they ban those too.
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It's a perennial source of amazement that so many Americans don't realise that literal political symbols are actually, you know, political. Flags, anthems, pledges, coats of arms, etc - these are (benign) nationalist symbols and displaying/rendering them is inherently a political choice.
Amazed or not, symbol or not, political or not, a person displaying a flag is quite literally not propaganda. Honestly, look it up: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda And I'm not American in case you were referring to me.
At best you can say that one is simply being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda, but to claim that the public display of such a strong political symbol as a flag is not intended to spread and reinforce what it represents is just absurd.
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People can speak freely without restrictions using their own resources. What you are asking for is to force other people to set up platforms for people to speak, which is a very different thing. Freedom of speech has always applied to the former, but never the latter.
>People can speak freely without restrictions using their own resources. The average person cannot. "Just host your content on Tor" (as it was eventually suggested elsewhere) is not a solution to there being lack of an accessible online public space, when faced with private entities who will deny you hosting and domain names. But I would like you to answer the question posed in the post you replied to (yes I know it…
But I don't think it's accurate to say that most people think these places shouldn't exist. The reality is simply that most people don't want anything to do with it. What you're witnessing is 99% of people collectively saying "not in my backyard", which leaves very little backyard for deeply unpopular views. I think that's an important distinction, even if the results are similar.
For what it's worth, I think a place for unrestricted speech should exist. I am honestly disappointed when I see calls for blanket bans, but I also understand why private platforms don't exactly aspire to bear this weight. These people and their views still exist, and ideally we as a society should confront it.
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If it didn't work, no one would be opposed to it.
That’s WHY I’m opposed to it: because it doesn’t work. It just annoys people but it doesn’t actually work.
Why are people worried about cancel culture and "SJWs" and the "Left" purging conservative voices and "erasing history?" Why are some adamant that we need to have the government force all platforms to allow all forms of speech without moderation in order to combat the absolute, near Stalin-like censorship power that social media is perceived to have over all human communication?
Just reading this thread makes it obvious that people are worried about a lot more than merely being annoyed by it.
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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.
That's a great reason to pick an innocuous symbol for this purpose. We don't reasonably expect everybody to stop using the gesture. But when the symbol does attract unjust backlash, that becomes the story; nevermind the many more instances where the gesture has been used as a genuine symbol of white nationalism. It's the perfect dogwhistle.
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I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants This is a race car game.
It's not only games that are doing this, and that was only part of my argument about the potential impact it has.