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Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

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Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#171

Post by gtirloni »

prepend wrote: post #170
gtirloni wrote: post #156

Boycotting Blizzard is easy and achieves almost nothing. Boycotting Chinese products on the other hand...

Blizzard survives on monthly recurring revenue streams. Boycotting disrupts this stream in a very consistent manner. 1M boycotters mean $10M lost per month plus all the addition revenue from lost streamers and watchers. Blizzard made $1.4B last quarter [0]. It doesn’t bankrupt them but losing 2.5% of earnings sucks. [0] https://investor.activision.com/news-releases/news-release-d...

I thought the point was to affect China's policy, not to bankrupt companies we don't like.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#172

Post by morningseagulls »

mantap wrote: post #19

If Hong Kong becomes a Palestine-style cause celebre it will be bad for China. China is trapped. They are stuck with this democratic appendix attached to a communist body. China can't keep Hong Kong under a democratic system as they have zero understanding of democracy. But if they try to repress it they risk endangering China's relationships with the rest of the world. They made a mistake thinking they could transfo…

>If Hong Kong becomes a Palestine-style cause celebre it will be bad for China.

Nope. Like Palestine, it'd just be another showcase of the British strategy of "divide and quit". Heck, someone wrote a book about it:

https://www.amazon.com/Divide-Quit-late-Penderel-Moon/dp/019...

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#174

Post by morningseagulls »

dragontamer wrote: post #157
morningseagulls wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The discussions I've seen point more towards Legalism, a Chinese theory of governance that's similar to fascism. I agree, but "legalism" has its own meaning in Western philosophy, so "fascism" is the more appropriate terminology to avoid confusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legalism_(Western_philosophy) >Especially because China has a long, cultural history with Legalism This is something that most people won't…

Hmm, perhaps the best approach is to use the official translated word from Chinese: Fajia, to represent the concept and minimize confusion. Ex: We could translate "Samurai" into "Knight", except a Samurai code of feudalism was completely different than a Knight's code of feudalism (even if both were forms of feudalism). There are also major differences in how the aristocracy worked between Japan and Europe. At some p…

>perhaps the best approach is to use the official translated word from Chinese

Sadly, the "best approach" has a good track record of being the approach that is usually not taken.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#175

Post by undefined3840 »

mrosett wrote: post #120
undefined3840 wrote: post #10

By far the most egregious example of western firms working with China are management consulting companies like McKinsey that work directly with governments on expensive contracts, including of course China. I mean, in those cases they are often writing the playbook for the government when it comes to implementing certain policies. Crazy that is even legal for a western firm.

That's a really good point and not one I had considered in the context of everything that's happened recently. McKinsey has been involved with a lot of bad stuff internationally over the last decade or two. Monitor's work with Gaddafi was also really gross. There's an odd dichotomy though - the ex-McKinsey employees I know personally and work closely with are all very thoughtful, ethical people.

A lot of good, decent human beings justify doing awful things in their day job. Wasn’t there just a post on here a few days ago about someone who worked at Capital One writing about how everyone working there justified getting poor people deeper in debt?

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#176

Post by gtirloni »

cwkoss wrote: post #169
gtirloni wrote: post #156

Boycotting Blizzard is easy and achieves almost nothing. Boycotting Chinese products on the other hand...

Is there a website that helps consumers identify brands that do not have Chinese investors and don't use Chinese manufacturing in their supply chain?

Not that I know of. Doing this at the consumer level requires a lot of convincing, grassroots movements, etc. It's messy and ends up creating xenophobic groups.

IMHO, it's more efficient done at the government level where it can impact big state-owned companies.

Reading what I just wrote, it may sound like I support Trump's tax war, which is not true at all. He's not doing that to forward an agenda of human rights, which I think it's the point of this whole discussion.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#177

Post by beirut_bootleg »

orasis wrote: post #111
jrockway wrote: post #14

The Internet's reaction to this has warmed my heart a little. Overwatch and Hearthstone are among my favorite computer games. I've certainly played more Overwatch than any other game. I have made real-world and online friends in Overwatch. I met my girlfriend in Overwatch. It made me sad to have to throw all that away yesterday. But the conversations we're having as a result of this is great. The mainstream media is…

You can also flip GDPR on its head - should American web sites be subject to European laws?

GDPR compliance is obligatory as long as either data controller, processor, or subject operates, resides or is temporarily passing through Europe. The only way to avoid GDPR is if say you were a US company handling Chinese data, or vice versa.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#178

Post by timbowen »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #114
orasis wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also flip GDPR on its head - should American web sites be subject to European laws?

But they only have to actually follow GDPR for European users, right?

As a practical matter, no. Legal told me I have to implement it for all users because it covers EU citizens who might be accessing our site from or living in non EU countries.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#179

Post by cwkoss »

dang1234throw wrote: post #165
lambdasquirrel wrote: post #20

This is probably not going to be a popular opinion here, but I wonder if any folks have considered what it looks like on the China side? Specifically, you are in China, and the HK protestors want what to happen to China? You have HK protesters waving American and British flags. These are the countries that have started wars all over, in the last 70 years since the end of WWII, ostensibly to promote democracy, and eve…

I'm Chinese and can say some words explaining the perspective from where I sit. I don't think memory of historical wrongs lie at the root of Chinese reactions. They may be the reasons most commonly given, but I don't think it's psychologically operative for most Chinese people. (This as following partly from introspective observation as a Chinese, and partly from the general principle against giving much credence to…

Freedom of speech is a core moral principle in the United States: it is literally the first right enshrined in our constitution and for good reason.

I believe much of the recent moral outrage stems from China (and Chinese companies on their behalf) using the financial threat of lost profits to force American businesses to self-censor in ways that do not uphold this value.

Allowing totalitarian censorship of unpleasant truths like Tiananmen Square and organ harvesting of political prisoners gives governments the ability to continue committing similar atrocities in the future. If you look at American political discourse that is critical of the government, a significant portion of it is related to similar government suppression of information that prevents the public holding government officials responsible for the atrocities they commit: see Abu Ghraib, Wikileaks Collateral Murder, Bay of Pigs, Snowden revelations, current Trump whistleblower crackdown, etc.

I would strongly encourage you to read Orwell's 1984 if you can access it: it is somewhat superlative and dated, but artfully illustrates the danger to personal freedoms that can result from totalitarian government control of discourse.

Re: Blizzard Employees Staged a Walkout to Protest Banned Pro-Hong Kong Gamer

#180

Post by andrepd »

parasubvert wrote: post #161
aeze wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that companies are willing to do it is pathetic. I don't disagree with your post at all, but I wanted to note that it's important to remember that companies aren't people, they're machines generally designed to maximize profit. Morals don't apply to them - only the law, and money does. Personally I've boycotted Blizzard in response, and I hope more people do.

This is false. Companies are made of people. They're not machines, they're organizations of people. There is no "business ethics" there's just ethics. People in leadership positions can take actions that aren't always in the interest of short term profit maximization, and will not get fired for it, so long as these actions are vaguely aligned to the long term health of the organization. One might suggest that encoura…

>Companies are made of people.

That is "technically correct" but meaningless in practice. It's like saying that people are just a collection of molecules. While technically not wrong, humans are of course more than the sum of its parts. The collection of molecules, arranged in a certain way, exhibits emergent behaviour; it will seek food or have intelligent thoughts, which molecules individually can't be said to do.

Likewise, companies as institutions are more than the sum of their people, and will display behaviour that cannot be fully explained by looking at their people individually, and this has very much real consequences. Like a nation is more than a collection of people, and this fact has consequences on the real world.

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