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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

#841

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.

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 Fac…

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

Sorry, but as others have said your wife is the bad guy in this story. She abused her authority and bullied a kid, then had an “oh shit” moment, as all bullies do, when someone stands up to them. She is lucky that that kids mother is a better person than her and let her off with a warning.

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

#842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello. I am a white lady born and raised in the South. Flying the Confederate flag is a sign to anyone else from the South that you are probably a racist. I would bet money that there is a strong correlation between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage” and “people who display the CSA flag”, because very few people are willing to come out and say “fuck yeah I am totally a racist and proud of it!”. As a bonus, I…

> “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant. This isn’t surprising. An heritage is well, an heritage, which is coming from ancestors. Only very few people get to aquire culture heritage accross race boundaries (for example by adoption). It’s like saying the overlap of "people who celebrate Chinese new year" and "people who are not asian" is v…

The big difference here is that part of this "heritage" is a tradition of being a white supremacist.

Like, okay, sure, I guess the pointy white hood your grandfather wore when he was a Grand Wizard of the KKK is part of your heritage, but if you take it out and wear it around town, people are gonna be all "hey look at that racist jerkass", you know? And if I hung up a CSA flag outside my house in a big Southern city, all my neighbors would say the same thing no matter how much I tried to convince them it's just me celebrating my heritage.

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

#843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people in the West are socialised to think that propaganda is something Other People do (preferably ones that can be thought of as Bad) but I'm afraid I have to inform you that displaying political symbols (such as flags) _is_ part of spreading propaganda. Why exactly do you think that there is an entire etiquette surrounding the proper display of a flag, or that flying particular flags has been variously crim…

> I'm afraid I have to inform you that displaying political symbols (such as flags) _is_ part of spreading propaganda. While propaganda requires displaying symbols, displaying symbols does not necessarily entail propaganda. The entailment is simply not bidirectional, ie. surgery requires a scalpel, but cutting my steak with a scalpel does not make it surgery. > At best you can say that one is simply being an unwittin…

Is it? Someone displaying a political symbol because it was fed to them without context in a popular media seems like the exact definition of an unwitting vehicle of propaganda.

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

#844

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then you are not in favour of free speech Correct. I'm in favor of certain restrictions on speech; I think Germany's bans on Nazi slogans and symbols are a good model. I draw a distinction between "I trained a dog to make Nazi salutes" and comedy routines, yes. It appears the UK does as well.

How can you be against free speech when all other freedoms stem from free speech? This is why I don't like what Germany and the UK are doing - any country without true free speech (barring death threats or incitement to violence, etc..) is not really free. Also, the UK has free speech, just not on online platforms and I'd like to see that distinction ended.

> How can you be against free speech when all other freedoms stem from free speech?

I don't agree with that bare assertion.

I subscribe to the belief that unlimited tolerance leaves societies open to malicious actors. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

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

#845

Interestingly hammer and sickle is not in the list

Why would it be? I don't recall it ever being used as a symbol of discrimination against one specific group... unless you mean landlords?

You should really meet someone from the former Communist block, it would probably change your mind. The father of a good friend of mine still remembers the time when the military police used to stop by his village and get the new prisoners they needed to fulfill the gulag quota.

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

#846
post #35

Honest question. For those of you happy that these censorship policies are being implemented by companies in reaction to pressure, do you believe that the ideal end-goal would be 'anti hate speech' laws like those of Germany?

Doing so would probably require amending the First Amendment, which I think would do more harm than good. But Germany seems to have implemented such a system without becoming a dystopian hellscape. Seems a pretty nice place to live.

Depends on what you want to do. Cancel culture is alive and well in germany, we have official and legal discrimination against men across the country and the whole stuff is becoming more and more cemented into laws with laws like the ones the parent comment spoke about

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

#847
post #32
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - we have them here in Canada and I’m a huge fan. Say whatever you want but you should be held responsible for you words.

As Idi Amin would have said "I guarantee freedom of speech but not freedom after speech"

You mean like you could totally say the Jews are great during the nazi time but had to live with the effects? Yeah right, sounds like free speech to me.

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

#848

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a different aspect of all this that troubles me and it has to do with projecting malice into people when it's unwarranted. One example is all the actors and such who did positive and loving impersonations of people which happened to involve wearing dark makeup. I completely understand the this practice is distasteful, but do we really need to go back years and cancel Kimmel for impersonating Chris Rock from a…

>We need more love in the world, we need to give people the space to be ignorant or wrong without being evil so we can welcome them out of the darkness instead of forcing them into it. I agree with this sentiment but history shows how quickly this can spiral out of control. If these symbols (stars and bars and all its variations) were not directly tied to domestic terrorism and other various forms of violence, it wou…

The only thing I see spiraling out of control is a moral panic being ginned up by a race baiting media.

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

#849

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you be against free speech when all other freedoms stem from free speech? This is why I don't like what Germany and the UK are doing - any country without true free speech (barring death threats or incitement to violence, etc..) is not really free. Also, the UK has free speech, just not on online platforms and I'd like to see that distinction ended.

> How can you be against free speech when all other freedoms stem from free speech? I don't agree with that bare assertion. I subscribe to the belief that unlimited tolerance leaves societies open to malicious actors. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

See, I do agree on paradox of tolerance, I just think we differ on the best way of resolving that paradox. Freedom of speech != freedom from social consequences. I'm not suggesting racists should get a free pass, just that advocating for it to not get you fined/locked up by the government. WDYT?

Edit: On my "derived from free speech" remark - I believe that's the case because freedom of speech is how we keep the government in check. The minute they can decide Nazi imagery is unacceptable, they have legal standing to do the exact same to whichever political party or marginalised group they dislike. Too dangerous imo.

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

#850

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The internet is a place and it's special - far greater than the sum of it's constituent parts (servers, networking gear, websites, etc..) might all be privately owned, but the concept of the network itself is free and shared.

Yes. I'm just saying it would be beneficial if there were a public alternative to services like Gmail, Youtube, Facebook, offered to the users at cost, and only moderated to the degree necessary to comply with the law. Perhaps in exchange for this "neutral media carrier" the user accounts should be linked to a Social Security number and with their real names attached to anything they publish. Nobody blames the postal…

> the user accounts should be linked to a Social Security number and with their real names attached to anything they publish

No no, no! Look at the early days of the internet, where LGBT folk had a space to talk but lived in constant fear of being doxxed. We're stifling those people by forcing them to use real names.

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