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Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

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Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#841

Post by RulingWalnut »

squarefoot wrote: post #247
abbadadda wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point it goes far beyond just gamers. From the NBA to Google, this effect is everywhere. To be explicit, the effect is U.S. firms letting China dictate what they do or do not care about on a global political scale.

If a game publisher can (whether directly or not) nuke the job of a journalist for a review and get away with it, I'm not surprised at all when a government does something along these lines. https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/03/21/gaming-the-...

Gerstmann's firing was widely reported at the time, he immediately turned around and created an influential gaming website that's still successful today, and Kane and Lynch didn't do well. Not a great example.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#842

Post by diveanon »

marcosdumay wrote: post #499
diveanon wrote: post #27

Can we please start a cultural movement that forces large corporations to choose between appeasing Chinese censors and looking like fools to the rest of the west or getting banned in China. Really seems like a win win scenario.

Isn't this what we are doing here?

It needs to be organized, focused, and have real consequence for the companies that choose to stay in the middle.

A couple of snarky tweets isn't going to save hong kong, and taiwan after that.

The writing is on the wall, if we don't stand against China now the rest of the world will stand idly by as they erase 200+ years of liberalism and the greatest improvement in human rights in our species history.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#843

Post by colorincorrect »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #832
colorincorrect wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between this is fundamentally misguided. who gets to judge who is the marginalized individual? global geopolitics is more complicated than there being strict good actors and bad actors

In the general case of offensive speech, we're not usually talking about global geopolitics -- that's a relatively unique feature of this specific case. The premise "there are specific cases where making a judgement call is going to be difficult" is true; that doesn't make the conclusion "therefore, we should never make judgement calls" true.

i agree with the conclusion: that we should make judgement, and step up if the occasion requires us to; but i find the general claim that "These are not incredibly difficult to distinguish between" to be very delusional and harming

in the case of offensive speech, i agree that usually we can see what is bad. but without going into detail, i think its also a bit more subtle that

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#844

Post by Ajedi32 »

SirLotsaLocks wrote: post #776
Ajedi32 wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. It's really obnoxious that they make you sign-in to verify your age, rather than just enter your birth date like some other sites. Especially since AFAIK it's impossible to create a Google account these days without giving them your phone number (thus exposing your identity). For politically sensitive videos such as this, such restrictions seem like a particularly bad idea.

I'm pretty sure you can, but if you're creating a lot of the mat once they begin to require it.

I don't think you can. I tried creating a Google account anonymously once just to see if it was possible. A verified phone number was strictly required and they refused to let me use numbers from any of the anonymized online phone services I tried. Maybe they would have let me skip that step if I was connected over my home IP address rather than TOR, but doing it that way would have sort of defeated the purpose of not giving them my phone number in the first place (anonymity).

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#845

Post by groby_b »

bdowling wrote: post #691
groby_b wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. You presuppose that all rules - via their nature of being rules - are automatically fair. They aren't. Especially not if they're not arrived at by consensus, but unilaterally laid out.

Creating rules by consensus is actually a terrible way to ensure that those with views counter to the majority are treated fairly.

It works better than fiat rules. That's kind of why we have democracies. (Well, not in China. So maybe that's the point)

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#846

Post by throwaway1997 »

UIZealot wrote: post #840
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong There's a lot more to that story. Taiwan explicitly ruled out accepting the proposed extradition law, despite IIRC a HKer murdering their HK partner whilst on holiday in Taiwan. > chief among them universal suffrage, or the direct election of the HK Chief Executive You mean the promised universal suffrage of the Chief Executive that was written in the Sino-British agreement, an…

Reasonable people disagree on what exactly was promised in terms of universal suffrage. Whichever way you lean, it's absolutely no excuse or justification for the violence and destruction.

Name a country who democratised through entirely peaceful means. Hint: there aren't many

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#847

Post by tsegratis »

theseadroid wrote: post #724
a_c wrote: post #477

Interesting how an incidence in gaming garner more eye balls on the topic of Hong Kong politics than whole month combined. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Good for the people of Hong Kong. The topic of Hong Kong didn't struck me as sensational/desperate as it deserves until a Hong Kong friend send me this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q Am moved by the clip, especial…

Sorry for not entirely related to the main thread, but since it seems there are many people in this thread knowledgable on what's going on in Hong Kong, I'd like to ask 2 questions. I'm not siding with CCP, but my issue is I'm not sure I can side with the protestors either. Because 1. Does the protestors representing the majority of citizens? If yes at this stage why the working class in Hong Kong hasn't started long…

1) Stopping HK employee taxes flow, will stop China how? This is not really their concern

2) Peaceful protest and cleaning up after themselves would make many people very happy. They did this during the umbrella and occupy central protests: however many thousands of people protesting, but the streets were spotless. They were very polite at that time; but still increasingly cannot trust the government

For instance the extradition law that started this protest was declared dead multiple times, but we're still awaiting the government to actually do that -- maybe when they re-convene on the 16th it will be removed from the agenda?

I like your views about peaceful protest, but will it lead to the peaceful removal of democracy, expression, belief, etc? Any HKers in support of the government are looking forward to that peaceful life

--

On your links: The SCMP is a China owned news source, and it should be easy to find other videos of police shooting people with rubber bullets, etc??

My wife was just showing me a video of an undercover police officer trashing government property and threatening pepper spray when videoed -- I do appreciate your questions and approach though, and wish life was that simple

> Fighting under the name of freedom to actually express their hatred toward mainlanders?

Sorry you could feel that. I don't. We don't. We apologize

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#849

Post by LeoNatan25 »

a_c wrote: post #528
Timpy wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Taiwan Flag Emoji topic got a lot of attention too. I think that's a fair spread. Censorship, Unicode standards, and Blizzard is kind of the expected overlap of interest topics for Hacker News.

I realised the Emoji topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21182705 after posting my comments. Blizzard, emoji, Hong Kong, and in part NBA too[1], once again shows how unpredictable viral-ness can be. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21176976

Don’t forget the well placed South Park episode to pour more gas on the fire.

Re: Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

#850

Post by UIZealot »

throwaway1997 wrote: post #846
UIZealot wrote: post #840

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reasonable people disagree on what exactly was promised in terms of universal suffrage. Whichever way you lean, it's absolutely no excuse or justification for the violence and destruction.

Name a country who democratised through entirely peaceful means. Hint: there aren't many

India comes to mind.

Maybe you're right, there aren't many. But that doesn't make the violence and destruction right, that doesn't make the violence and destruction just.

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