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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

#201

Post by bsder »

Noos wrote: post #77
ddtaylor wrote: post #15

As much as I want to think change will happen, it's much more likely this will be a few weeks of PR and ultimately nothing will change. For something to change people have to vote with their wallets. In this context that means cancelling subscriptions or dropping games they are already playing in favor for ones by competitors with better integrity, and I don't see that happening. Diablo players could go to Path of Ex…

Keep in mind its Activision-Blizzard, not just Blizzard. Even if you boycotted all Blizzard products, the call of duty series and candy crush would take the hit. Also, I don't think it would work period; if Blizzard made this a hill to die on, it's because the Chinese market must be growing and higher profit than the west. The people who pay set the rules.

> The people who pay set the rules.

Good, then let them exist only in China.

Somehow, if Blizzard has to choose, I think it will dump China first. Just a hunch.

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

#202

Post by BEEdwards »

capableweb wrote: post #104
kop316 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sad to see you downvoted. Its frustrating to me too when a company like Apple champions human rights in the USA then hands over the management of iCloud to China. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

The juicy parts from the Legal Agreement for folks in China using iCloud: > E. Access to Your Account and Content > We reserve the right to take steps we believe are reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or verify compliance with any part of this Agreement. You acknowledge and agree that we may, without liability to you, access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Account information and Content to law en…

mind blown meme levels of wtf.

They sleep at night with the sad belief that because they hand it over to the Chinese and don't do it themselves it's all fine...

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

#203

Post by bllguo »

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…

I think this is very well said. Even as a Chinese-American born and raised in the US I feel unease with many aspects of the western narrative. It is very easy for me to see how things could be interpreted as xenophobia and/or arrogance, from the Chinese perspective.

I also want to add that 2019 is probably the worst possible time to extoll the virtues of free speech and democracy. The western world is facing difficult questions with the interplay between freedom of speech and internet technologies. Politically it's been an era of chaos and a resurgence in populism across the entire west. The Chinese aren't blind; they look at the aftermath of the Arab spring and see failure after failure. The US is hardly a persuasive role model right now.

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

#204

Post by overcast »

ohithereyou wrote: post #191
wpdev_63 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should pickup TF2. It has tighter gun mechanics and doesn't have the ultimate garbage(imo).

TF2 is also less aggressively monetized despite being free to play.

What exactly is monetized in Overwatch? A bunch of silly skins you don't need? Everything is included, they are constantly updating, and releasing new characters, all for no additional cost. Best $20 I've ever spent for a multiplayer game.

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

#205

Post by stale2002 »

uoaei wrote: post #198
jbang5 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

Related: what's the name for this tactic in debate? Where a dissenter insistently demand citations so that the conversation has to pause and then the dissenter nitpicks the citation instead of the argument, effectively derailing the conversation. It's hard to see this account (jbang5) as anything but an internet troll who, if not literally on the payroll from the Chinese government, is still a useful idiot for their…

Yeah, it is an interesting tactic, but I've actually developed an effective counter to it.

What I usually do, to counter this trolling tactic, is to provide them with the source that they were asking for, and then I call them an idiot for not being aware of such an obvious fact.

Because, by definition, they are uninformed about the matter, as they didn't know about the source and had to ask for it. So I just make fun of them for not knowing about it, and rub it in their face when I provide the information that they asked for and didn't know about.

If you have to ask for sources on the matter, you are by definition "ignorant" on the matter.

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

#206

Post by cwkoss »

dang1234throw wrote: post #197
cwkoss wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unpleasan…

Of course I'm aware that freedom of speech is in the US constitution. It is in the Chinese Constitution as well. My point is that just as you hold genuine doubts about the level of sincerity behind this second fact I gave, most Chinese harbor just as genuine doubts about the level of sincerity behind the first fact you gave. There are rarely any self-consciously unjust wars. Throughout history, all wars have been jus…

You have every right to your opinions, and I vouched this (then [dead]) reply because I do not think you should be censored, despite being skeptical of your argument.

I'm glad you are suspicious of the US, that is a healthy emotion to feel when you are on the weaker side of a power imbalance. I am also suspicious that the US intelligence apparatus may play a role in the Hong Kong protests - though I sincerely hope they are not.

I believe the 5 demands being made by the Hong Kong protests are rooted in noble moral principles, so I am comfortable supporting them regardless of their origin. Powerful secretive organizations manipulating discourse always ends up hurting the common man, and the more we as humans stand together, the more we make a just world for all people into the future. I believe individuals choosing their actions and words based on consistent moral principles is one of the best defenses we have remaining in a world of increasing ambiguity of truth. Allowing free and open discourse seems like another good defense.

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

#207

Post by cgarvis »

celticmusic wrote: post #164
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing to note -- it's not really troubling for a country to have a lot of influence. It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West. This is not a question of a foreign country being different. This is a question of a foreign company forcing us to slowly give up the very th…

> It's troubling for China to have as much influence as it does when it's directly trying to undermine freedoms that we have fought tooth and nail and died a million lives to get in The West. WE have thrown it away already, China is just trying to speed things up. I've thought quite a bit about this, and my conclusion is that everything is cyclical and has a rise and fall because it only takes a few generations to un…

“The Lessons of History” by Will Durant and Ariel Durant talks about the cyclical nature of history. They talk specifically about the cycles of control and chaos. How our liberties are only possible after a period of control.

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

#208

Post by tptacek »

_bxg1 wrote: post #93
pvg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just ascribing the negative aspects of communism-as-realized to fascism but this seems trivially ahistorical. The internecine conflicts in communist states were much more pronounced than in the fascist ones, perhaps in part because communism was always a more complex and developed movement ideologically.

Sure; in my mind, fascist == authoritarian + nationalist. I realize that's extremely simplified - I'm not a historian - but that's what I meant by it.

Communism as a political theory is anti-nationalist, and fascism as a political phenomenon arose in part as a reaction to Marxism. One of Payne's Fascist Negations is "anti-Communism".

There are multiple species of authoritarian tyrannies; fascism is just one of them. I think people get in trouble trying to generalize and apply fascism to places it doesn't fit. "Communist are fascists" might be one of the text book instances of that problem.

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

#209

Post by pnako »

tossAfterUsing wrote: post #78
_bxg1 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth pointing out that today's China is communist in name only. They literally arrested the president of Peking University's Marxist society on ideological grounds: https://news.yahoo.com/china-arrests-marxist-student-leader-... China in 2019 is a simple fascist dictatorship. Edit: Fixed a broken link

> China in 2019 is a simple fascist dictatorship. Maybe the community could help me to understand whether this is accurate?

Fascist is maybe not a good term, because fascism is actually quite specific and to some extent euro-centric (plus, nowadays it just means "bad people" without people necessarily understanding what fascism actually is).

But China seems to be a country run on a totalitarian and ethnic nationalist ideology.

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

#210

Post by K0SM0S »

lilyball wrote: post #95
kop316 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351 They allow a Chinese company to manage iCloud data.

They are legally required to do this. The alternative was completely disabling iCloud in China. This only applies to Chinese users of course.

What happens when you travel to China? Is it documented by Apple?
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