It wasn't a racing car, and it was in a television show, and so what if there was? If there were a famous car from 1940s Germany with a nazi flag on it, does that make symbolically broadcasting nazism today fine behavior? The confederacy was a regime constructed explicitly to defend the practice of slavery. (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...)
This experience, which you've described well in just one sentence, is actually a consequence of how the site is structured. You might say "well, structure it differently then, so it doesn't suck". But giving up that structure would be bad, because although it is far from pleasant, it contains something that's both valuable and increasingly rare. What we need to do instead is find our way through the difficulty without cracking up. That's the question facing the community.
HN is divided much as society at large is divided, just like any large-enough population sample. It's also a highly international site. Cultural norms vary more than people assume they do, especially when you factor in the international aspects. Since the debate and struggle right now is around just what "current cultural norms" ought to be, it isn't surprising that commenters disagree.
The most important thing to realize about HN is that it's a non-siloed site. Everyone is in one big room here. That means you're far more likely to run into people who hold opposing views on these topics, and they may be the very same people who you agree with about other topics. This is very different from internet environments where users self-select into tribes (silos) and where the tribes are clearly identifiable. There, you know what awfulness to expect from the other side, you can dress up in the battle gear of the internet before confronting them, and you know that your own team will have your back.
On HN, by contrast, you don't know what awfulness to expect, because the tribes are not identifiable and the community actually functions relatively well some of the time (don't get me wrong, it's the internet and there are a ton of problems—but, relatively speaking). This creates a feeling of normalcy and so people expect this place to be normal ("current cultural norms", as you say). Some of the time it does indeed feel that way, and then—blam, you run into something awful and hideous, something anything but normal, which you did not expect to encounter here and which hit you when your defenses were down.
This comes across as a nasty shock. After a few of these shocks, the mind inevitably adjusts its view of the community from "normal place" to "painful nasty place", with the sense "HN is not what I thought it was". I'm going to guess that this is the reason why you use the phrase "astounds me".
In other words, we're in a paradoxical situation where the HN community is objectively less divided and nasty than other places on the internet (which "solve" or, more precisely, defer this problem by segregating into silos), but it's still divided and nasty enough to create unexpectedly painful experiences, which makes it feel more divided and nasty.
This has probably always been the biggest issue for HN's long-term survival, but it has taken years to begin to realize it, and of course current social pressures are intensifying and highlighting it. It's not clear yet what we can really do, let alone if it can survive in the long run, but from the beginning this place has been an experiment in staving off self-destruction for as long as possible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
The “tribes” are easily identifiable on HN, it seems to me. For all of the most prolific HN posters, it is quite easy to predict which side of nearly any issue they’ll support.
Good point, but it takes a lot of familiarity before those lines become clear. At that point, the shock experience gets weaker, there is more a sense of "I expect that from this asshole", and the discussions become more like the ant wars on the rest of the internet.
Even then, the community is big enough that you're going to regularly run into comments from users you either don't recognize, or didn't realize were of the opposing tribe (or opposing-tribe-adjacent, let's say). So the shock experience never goes away. But I think you're right that it's most intense for less-familiar users, and that explains why there are so many people who use HN for a little while, inevitably encounter the shock experience, feel hurt, and leave. That's a common occurrence and which pains me personally.
The deeper point is that the site is designed to keep everybody together. It's not partitioned by friends or follow lists. There are no subreddits or social graphs. Design differences at that level are profound and affect everything.
It's not really all that hard to know what awfulness to expect.
edit: That probably sounds more dickish than I meant it. I don't know a better place than HN for identifying clusters and following trends in the thought of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
It's not only that, which is why I still come here. But that's the strongest theme by far.
Such perceptions are notoriously unreliable. People notice different things and weight them differently, based mostly on what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since everyone dislikes different things, everyone has a different weighted average, each reflecting their own preferences. In other words they are in the eye of the beholder, which explains why people come up with such wildly contradictory generalizations about HN.
From my perspective, that's the strongest theme by far. Does my argument apply to my own perception? For sure. It has to.
Dukes of Hazzard was my second-favorite TV show as a kid, (next to CHiPs.) It saddens me that the symbol was foisted on me and millions of other kids throughout history and not just from the TV show. Turns out there was never a time that that flag stood for anyone's "heritage." It always was a symbol of hate. I don't know why people would do that to children.
Now memories of my childhood are darkened, and millions of adults are confused and don't know why. Because people who are long dead thought it would be great fun to raise a generation of f3cking racist kids who would grow up and raise another generation of f2cking racists. It f8cking sucks to be in this situation.
It was not used as a racist symbol in the show. That's what this whole discussion is about. For example:
"After the first season, it distressed producer Gy Waldron that the cast was entirely white. So in subsequent seasons, visiting federal agents that investigated Boss Hogg were black, as was the sheriff of the adjoining Chickasaw County."
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 show in the Arab world where the characters were all very charismatic, wholesome and diverse, but their car had an ISIS flag on it?
> 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 actors, did not even realize that about the flag.
Today, things are different, I think most people know the flag is racist. But in the past? I suspect the vast majority did not realize it.
> Because, despite attempts to rewrite history, until recently most people did not know that flag was racist.
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.
That's true, but most people don't realize the flag is a symbol of slavery, they just think it's a symbol of the South.
For example take a state flag from a rebel state (and assume the flag has not changed since the civil war). If someone flew that flag today, would you think they are implying state rebellion, or just pride in their state?
It's the same with the confederate flag, to most people it's just a flag that symbolizes a group of southern states. To northerners it means rebellion, specifically for slavery, but it doesn't mean that for everyone.
A state flag can be ambiguous because it refers to a state, which is an ambiguous entity with a long and varied history.
The Confederate States of America (CSA) is not an ambiguous entity. From beginning to end in its short 5 year history, it was made to fight for black slavery. It existed for no other purpose and was subsequently disbanded when slavery was abolished. Literally the only heritage the CSA created in its short life is rebellion and racism.
If you are aware of this widely-known history, it's obvious what this flag narrowly represents. The argument that the CSA could conceivably represent Southern pride is a joke. Ask any non-racist southerner if the most racist institution in US history and its deepest shame is a good stand-in for Southern pride.
Here's a thought experiment: if a group of Germans claimed that the flag of the German Reich represented their pride in Germany's independence and the valor of its veterans, would you be defending it like you are now? Would you use the same excuses?
I can accept that some people may be completely unaware or are too dim to put 2 and 2 together. I simply expect that once they do learn about it, they understand why it's indefensible.
I’d even go as far as acknowledging that many people were miseducated about the history of the CSA - our local used bookstore just had a kid’s ABC book about Virginia stating that Lee was anti-slavery - but that doesn’t excuse what happens when you learn the truth. The decent reaction is to apologize and stop using it; people who don’t change are just saying they’re okay with the racism but don’t want to have any personal accountability for it.
> 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.
Everyone has always known the flag was a symbol of racism. That's why it was adopted. That's what it was deliberately revived for in the 20th century—as a symbol specifically against racial integration and civil rights—and what it was actively and consistently used as throughout the civil rights movement.
Adults when the show was produced, less than a decade and a half after the Civil Rights Act of 1965, would not generally have failed to understand the symbolism of the flag, or the naming of the car after General Lee.
It's possible that the individual producer was ignorant, but TV shows are not made by one person alone in a vacuum.
>This means that somewhere on the Azure cloud there is a resnet instance that only looks for confederate flags.
Doesn't seem like that's the case according to the following quote:
> Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.
Interesting that the Japanese rising sun flag is mentioned alongside the swastika and the stars and bars; the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.
Yeah, I don't really understand that. Would they also ban anyone for adding the insignia for United States Army Air Forces? What about writing "Enola Gay" on the side of a car?
Imperial Japan was extremely cruel to the people in the places it invaded - which was a lot. Human experimentation, massacring civilians, torture, comfort women. They were basically the Nazis of Asia. They also didn't apologize for it, still glorify their brutal heroes and teach disinformation about it to their schoolkids. Chinese people still have a strong anti-Japanese feeling.
I don't exactly consider dropping two atomic bombs on top of hundreds of thousands of civilians an act of kindness. Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country). There's probably a whole laundry list of war crimes (and things that really should be war crimes) that the US has committed. And there are a lot of anti-American feelings across the globe.
So maybe we ban all references to nations of individuals that have in the past committed war crimes? Even the limited to recent history, the list is sort of long[1], but African nations seem to be well represented. As a convenient shorthand, maybe we just ban the African continent altogether?
I don't exactly consider dropping two atomic bombs on top of hundreds of thousands of civilians an act of kindness.
War used to be extremely brutal. Genghis Khan used to execute entire cities...even after they had surrendered. Hell, prior to WWII, civilian populations were still legally legitimate targets for military actions. It's a very modern development for war to be fought purely between recognized armed forces.
That being said, dropping two atomic bombs is estimated to have saved millions of Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost if the Japanese Emperor had waged a city-by-city resistance as they originally planned.
Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country).
This is not true, at all. The US Government is constantly apologizing for its past acts. We don't just apologize for them, we set up memorials to our own bad acts as a nation so that we can't erase them from memory or hide from them. And after the atomic bombs, the US paid for the surgeries and medical treatments of numerous survivors. Similarly, after Vietnam, the US has made significant efforts to make up for the damage inflicted on the Vietnamese people during the war.
To be frank, Japanese people(myself included) is somehow extremely cruel by default to anyone, and there’s an aspect that those defaults compounded in the war rather than those soldiers became cruel.
Like we still torture young subordinates in workplace to death and laugh at them, today, like pouring beer into an Italian shoe and get the new girl to swallow it, I never had to come across such things but some of us still do, just not as obscenely atrocious as treating completely innocent and defenseless local residents like a dog playing with plushes.
Swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. The original inspiration for Hitler was hooked cross. You will commonly find swastika painted across homes in India.
> Swastika is a sacred symbol in Hinduism. The original inspiration for Hitler was hooked cross.
No, the inspiration was the Indian swastika. Same reason he wanted to call himself "Aryan".
(The swastika is also a sacred symbol in Buddhism, for reference. One day someone will petition to have 卐 removed from the relevant Chinese Unicode block.)
The swastika was also in use in the west in the early 20th century before the Nazis came to power. One example of this can be seen painted on the inside of the nosecone of the Spirit of Saint Louis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spirit_of_St._Louis_Nose_...
(It should probably be noted that the Spirit of Saint Louis was flown by Charles Lindbergh, who is generally thought to have been a Nazi sympathizer a bit later in life. But I think it's unlikely this particular swastika from 1927 was painted with the Nazis in mind. Particularly, it wasn't painted by Lindbergh.)
Not really. The rising sun flag is the flag of the imperial Japanese army, the one that allied with Nazi Germany. They were brutal and deserve to be regarded in a similar manner to Nazi Germany.
The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic. It's like Mississippi or Georgia's state flags before 2020, it's a call back to things that should be left in the history books.
The rising sun flag was adopted before the turn of the century many years before the war. The confederate and nazi flags were used explicitly for those hateful movements (post civil war racism and nazis). These are quite different.
While it's true that it was adopted in 1870, it was adopted as the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army. The same one that committed horrific atrocities to Korea and China. Then it stopped being used after Japan surrendered in WWII.
To many Koreans (and likely Chinese) the wartime version of the rising sun flag is exactly the same as the Nazi flag if not worse. The anglosphere tends to gloss over the brutal behavior of Japan during this time, under this flag.
The difference with Germany is that they took responsibility and passed laws to regulate usage of the nazi flag, etc. Japan did not, and lied to the Korean government about things like the comfort women.
> were used explicitly for those hateful movements
Do you honestly believe the rising sun flag was not a part of a hateful movement? Is the fact that Korea was annexed and Koreans were treated awfully under this flag just a coincidence?
The swastika was a very popular symbol, and remains popular outside nazis. The swastika shouldn't (and really can't) be banned, but the Nazi usage of it should be.
The confederate flag had a bunch of variants and the popular version seen today was only used after as a symbol of hate. Should be banned.
The rising sun flag is just one variation of a couple themes used throughout Japanese history and it was used in a non-imperialist setting for hundreds of years since the Edo period. Its in the fuzzy place where most flags lie.
You can argue for the banning of that flag for those atrocities, but why stop there? Are you going to ignore the countless indigenous peoples who suffered under the American flag or all the colonialism done under the union jack? What about the Turkish flag which flew during the genocide they committed and still flies today. What you're essentially arguing for is banning all flags related to some kind of atrocity. That's most flags.
If you take a group of people and ask them what the rising sun flag represents, the majority response will be about WWII imperialist Japan. Which makes sense as they changed it immediately after their surrender in WWII. It legitimately is viewed like the nazi flag by the various Korean people I've talked to in Korea.
The context also matters. Korea has plenty of swastikas. Specifically at shrines/temples and on the ground; not being flown as part of flags.
"What about Y" is a weak argument to keep X flag. You could make that argument for basically any flag. To answer though, it's likely the US flag will be seen in a similar light once it's no longer a powerful hegemony. If the US had a flag that was only used during its "imperialist era" and a different modern one, one would have a stronger argument.
Seems rather disrespectful to be making this kind of argument considering the scale involved. Roughly 22 million people died in Asia as a result of the Japanese occupation preceding and during the Second World War. That's just shy of triple the dead of the Holocaust and 4.5 times the number of slaves in the US in 1860.
It's a question of how narrowly the flag is tied to the hateful movement.
Should the UK retire the Union Jack because of what they did in India? The Nazi imagery is very closely associated with the specific group that committed the atrocities rather than Germany in general. The UK flag is less so. IMO, the rising sun flag is somewhere in-between, having been in use over a slightly more heterogenous time than the Nazi symbols, bit less so than the Union Jack.
>The rising sun flag is the flag of the imperial Japanese army, the one that allied with Nazi Germany.
>The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic.
The flag of the National Republican Army is the Italian flag with a bird on it. Is the Italian flag also problematic due to its close relationship with the Axis?
Wow, rising sun flag is used in many games, since Japan is huge on games. First one that comes to mind is Street Fighter (E. Honda/Ryu stages and designs). This gon be interesting.
This is what I thought about too. I recently played sf2turbo via the 25th anniversary collection on the switch.
Seeing the rising sun flag as a big part of the stage background did legitimately make me feel uncomfortable, knowing the atrocities committed under that flag.
> Interesting that the Japanese rising sun flag is mentioned alongside the swastika and the stars and bars;
The stars and bars, while also a Confederate symbol, is not really a notorious hate symbol; the Confederate flags that are notorious hate symbols are the “battle flag” (flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, also used as the union of the second and third national flags; square), and the second Confederate Naval Jack (a similar design, but with a different aspect ratio). The Stars and Bars (the first national flag) never got revived by Jim Crow era racists the way the other two flags did.
> the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.
It's a slightly different flag, and while there might be some contexts where banning the present JMSDF naval ensign would be problematic, I don't really see how it is in a racing game.
Well, the Confederate Flag refers to that and later national flags (the Stars and Bars is the first Confederate national flag, the Stainless Banner—with the battle flag in the union and a solid white field—and the Bloodstained Banner—adding a broad vertical red stripe to the Stainless Banner) were the second and third.
Not merely pedantic, it's worth noting that the Battle Flag is a key element of the later national flags, though not itself one of them. (Though what is often flown as the “Confederate flag” isn't the square battle flag, either, but closer to, if not exactly, the Naval Jack.)
At the risk of being controversial... I'm going to go ahead and say that Japan doesn't care about racism like America does. Japanese people are extremely racist, but you just don't know it because Japan is 99+% Japanese with <1% being ethnic minorities.
But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".
The Dekasegi is an interesting piece to add to the discussion. Many are unaware that Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside Japan.
> During the 1980s, the Japanese economic situation improved and achieved stability. Many Japanese Brazilians went to Japan as contract workers due to economic and political problems in Brazil, and they were termed "Dekasegi". Working visas were offered to Brazilian Dekasegis in 1990, encouraging more immigration from Brazil.
> In 1990, the Japanese government authorized the legal entry of Japanese and their descendants until the third generation in Japan. At that time, Japan was receiving a large number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and Thailand. The legislation of 1990 was intended to select immigrants who entered Japan, giving a clear preference for Japanese descendants from South America, especially Brazil.
> Because of their Japanese ancestry, the Japanese Government believed that Brazilians would be more easily integrated into Japanese society. In fact, this easy integration did not happen, since Japanese Brazilians and their children born in Japan are treated as foreigners by native Japanese.[42][43] This apparent contradiction between being and seeming causes conflicts of adaptation for the migrants and their acceptance by the natives.[44]
> But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".
source for this?
my experience: my wife is Japanese, i have visited JP many times, we know a ton of non-Japanese immigrants living in Japan and they all live wherever the heck they want to live.
i've never heard of non-native minorities being segregated either officially (government) or privately (landlord collusion) other than perhaps stories of illegal immigrants being packed together in the seedier parts of town. is that what you're referring to?
The commenter you replied to may have been describing the discrimination faced by people such as the Ainu, Ryukyuans, and others who are not considered part of the majority ethnic Japanese group.
wow! this is indeed quite eye-opening! while i was aware of non-native discrimination in Japan in terms of employment, i had not heard of housing-specific discrimination! i asked for receipts and boy, you delivered!!!
thank you for opening my eyes. will read and discuss w/our family :)
To be honest, it's not really to the 'segregated' level. It's not like one building for foreigner and the other for Japanese.
Officially, it's illegal to deny rental based on nationality. In reality, you don't want to live in an apartment if the owner doesn't want you there anyway, even though you could push for it in the court.
> but you just don't know it because Japan is 99+% Japanese with <1% being ethnic minorities.
Racism is discussed on Japanese SNS quite often. There are also frequent demonstrations both for racism and against racism. I think the reason people don't really know because it's wasn't actively reported, even on Japanese media.
Additionally, there are 2.93 millions foreigners in Japan [0]. Japan population is 127 millions. That's already 2.3%, and not even counting Ainu and Ryukyuans. It's not large, but it's much larger than <1% you claimed.
Well the motivations are completely different. Xenophobia is a pretty normal human condition, and very reasonable as well (“strangers” carry germs, which is being amptly demonstrates right now). It could also be motivated be preservation of culture, nation, etc. - basically same reasoning as makes you prefer your children vs other children, just extended a bit to the whole nation.
No one cares about the literal definition of words anymore, it’s all about feelings and implied context now. The word “racism” is a perfect example. You’ll rarely see anyone using it literally as in “prejudice based on race” which is a shame. We’ve lost a lot of the ability to reason about _why_ these things are bad, now it’s just “I feel like it’s bad, I’m scared of someone doing something bad to me.”
The reason you prefer your children is that they are much more likely to contain your genes than other children, and your main purpose in life is, to some extent, to ensure that those genes may propagate to later generations.
For that matter, the swastika was still used by the Finnish Air Force until quite recently. I thought to double check this before posting and discovered news articles about the change posted within the past hour.
This one always seemed odd considering the Finnish military had particularly strong reasons to drop the symbol having ended up both fighting for and owing reparations to the Allies, and without any lingering affection for their alliance of convenience with Germany or sympathy with Nazi thought. If the Air Force didn't like the symbols the Defence Force switched to in 1945, substituting the Tursaansydän for the original swastika would have been an easy change to make...
How about this: scrape Google images, apply those images to cars in Forza, use in-game screens of these cars with a cnn (I doubt it's actually this complicated but I think it makes sense)
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?
Private company. I don't care. Jumping from Microsoft doing a thing about this to a law being passed restricting speech is quite the stretch and would be against the 1st.
I think it's hard to seriously argue that blanket prohibitions on using a particular symbol aren't censorship. Maybe there are reasonable arguments for censoring the confederate flag, but it's unhelpful to pretend that's not what's happening here.
Government only remains "by the people" if the people maintain the ability to exercise effective oversight over it. Speech is an effective means of exercising government oversight, which is why marginally increasing government power to suppress it is so contentious.
I've heard a lot of young people in my country saying "you have freedom of speech, you can say what you want, but then you will face the consequences".
Which makes me think they don't really know what freedom of speech is.
"consequence" doesn't necessarily imply a punishment or something at odds with your freedom.
For example: If you bad mouth a friend, they might no longer be your friend. This isn't a punishment for your actions or a restriction of your freedom.
Yes, but we're not talking about that here. Not being allowed to play a game you bought is a kind of punishment.
Will they also ban anyone who posts and Hindu swastika? Or the face of Che Guevara? Or anything related to ancient Rome? Or anything related to the Ottomans? And I could keep going and going and going.
> Not being allowed to play a game you bought is a kind of punishment.
I agree that is wrong, but I disagree on the grounds of contract law, not speech rights. I do think MS is well within their rights to prevent you from playing their game for any reason they want (other than membership in a protected class), but they should refund your money.
> If you are going to be punished in any way for what you say, you don't have freedom of speech.
So the punishment should instead fall on...other people? Because that's exactly what the sort of "free speech" you are advocating it - a restriction on other people's own freedom of speech and association.
Yes, in some places communications can be intercepted and blocked by government authorities before being delivered. Or, people can be deprived of communication privileges until they prove themselves sympathetic to oppressors. Some others will spy on potential dissenters and remove them from society before they have a chance to speak.
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.
This applies to most laws. People are hypocrites about everything, all the time. Laws that hurt people I don't like are good. Laws that hurt me are bad. Even if it's the same law. The point is, that's not a good argument against a law.
Ah, yes, Canada, also the country where any individual can mandate by force of law that others call them by their preferred pronoun. Since the law does not specify a list of allowed pronouns people can pick and choose at will. The country, also, where people like Lindsay Shepherd and Jordan Peterson gained notoriety for pointing out the actual (Shepherd) and potential (Peterson) abuse of these laws. Shepherd was 'a leftie' by her own accord but she's now being painted with a broad right-wing brush. Peterson called himself 'a liberal' but he quickly ended up in the same right-wing box. Of course the accusations are pointed towards the right since these laws emanate from the left side of the political spectrum. Those who violated the older version of a similar law - the one against blasphemy - would be more likely to be painted with a left-wing brush. Blasphemy laws were struck from most western law books, a change which was welcomed by most. Unfortunately they are now being replaced by similar laws which have the potential for an even larger societal impact.
While the potential for abuse of this type of law is enormous and there already have been clear cases of actual abuse, the benefits are vague and unclear. Some things - like pronouns - should not be mandated by law in a nominally free society. Other things - like 'hate speech' - are already actionable under earlier laws (against discrimination, slander, etc).
Saying that 'you should be held responsible for your words' can be interpreted in many ways. Since the new 'security law' in Hong Kong was put in place people who state that the place should be independent from China can be put in prison for life. If that is not enough it is worth considering that there are now calls to apply this law retroactively [1]. Before that law was put in place Hong Kong was a relatively free place. Now it is not. People can say whatever they want but they are held responsible for their words...
Given the immense resistance of the US system to hate speech laws (first amendment, the fact that Republicans exist and sometimes get elected), and also given the immense desire of corporate elites to get rid of hate speech, what we will probably see is a corporate extra-legal "pragmatic law" against it, but no real law.
The mechanism of "pragmatic law" is coordination between power centers mediated through shared cultural norms. In the 1950s this kept black people off TV, despite the lack of any law against it, for instance. Presently we have a rapidly strenghtening cultural norm against the tolerance of hate speech, so we are likely to see the same mechanisms kick in again.
Corporations coordinating to enforce elite norms has a terrible history, but so does the enforcement of democratically approved majority norms, so it is not entirely clear whether the fact that this can happen is good or bad.
Companies should be free to regulate hate speech on their platforms. The government should not regulate speech in the public domain.
The actions of private companies on private property (virtual or otherwise) are an entirely different domain than government intervention.
Even if you remove the censorship angle, it can be argued that moderating hate speech is simply good business sense. People buying Forza and paying for it don’t want to see this. If it becomes an issue, they lose customers.
And yet we've seen hosts, domain registrars, and other service providers restrict certain ideas on their platforms.
How practical is it in reality to be your own ISP, domain registrar, certificate authority, hosting service, web dev agency, and community moderator all in one?
But it's what the Constitution provides. It guarantees you the right to express your thoughts using your own resources. It does not force others to do it or make it easier for you.
The Constitution assumes a public space exists, otherwise if it was all private, there would be no point to any of the Bill of Rights, since private entities would/could override all of them. The internet is a land controlled entirely by private entities.
For example there is Parler, an alternative to Twitter. While it is not a state company, it promotes free speech. They claim "Our content is moderated based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States which enables free expression without violence and a lack of censorship.".
> "When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED," the first rule states, which is just a fantastic start to any list of rules. A club that has to spell that out (presumably after multiple people broke that rule) is clearly one that needs to be joined. "Your username cannot be CumDumpster," the rules continue, adding that pornography isn't allowed. Sorry, Ted.
Twitter permits all of those things. Some "free speech platform".
I did not know about the implicit rules. I do not use Parler yet. However the problem with trolls is a hard one to solve on any platform, especially on the platform that wants to promote free speech.
If they turn out to be a right wing version of Twitter it would be a shame. We need a platform that could accommodate both left and right wing people so that they can exchange thoughts with each other.
Are trolls a problem to solve at all if your goal is to promote free speech? Trolling is one of the most commonly censored forms of speech. It seems like trolls are a core feature, not a bug, in that scenario.
If you actually want to solve the problem of trolls, I think the first step would be to put away the "free speech" platitudes, sit down and figure out what kinds of speech you actually support and what kinds of speech you want to curtail and why.
Yes, trolls are a problem when one wants to promote free speech. It means you cannot censor them, but you should find a mechanism to discourage such destructive behaviour. Maybe a similar system that exists in real life and real personal relations. Maybe some form of hierachy. Unfortunately I do not know. However, I would look into establishing a meritocratic system or a representative system (much like the political system), where like-minded groups promote their representatives that have greater reach. And the anti social behaviour is punished at the social level and not by central purging.
Regarding your comment about ditching free speech and allowing only what I think is good. It would imply that I know what is good. I do not have such perfect knowledge and I do not believe anyone else has.
Well, but did they really ban more accounts than Twitter? I highly doubt it, just for the reason that Twitter is older and has more users overall. But if there are any stats that you can point us to, I can be convinced.
In the US, ISPs were a common carrier from 2015 through 2017, when the Republicans revoked that: while they might not let you say anything you want on the servers they own, they couldn't terminate your contract for you saying legal things on the servers you own.
Perhaps that regulatory regime will return. Maybe even next year. Not under a Republican-led FCC, of course.
Companies aren't the only entities allowed to publish content on the World Wide Web, you know. You're free to build whatever discussion platforms you like, or you could just, y'know, publish a website.
Sure. If I own a website or a newspaper or the patch of ground in front of my house, I get to decide what information goes there.
Are you arguing that there should be some legal provision that says anyone can publish anything on your website, or newspaper, or ground, and you don't get a say in it? That seems unreasonable.
I am arguing for a space online that is publicly owned, maintained by the government, easily accessible by your average person, with the same very few restrictions on free speech that exist in the real world.
I think that would be an interesting thing to have, and the implementation of it would have to solve a lot of issues (equal access to technology, etc) that need solving badly.
I'm also glad we finally got to the actual thing you want to see change.
Curious though: what would having this space solve?
Is this a trick question? It guarantees that any marginalized people has access to communicate easily and freely to the general public, and it cannot be denied by anyone.
A government-run, publicly owned online communication platform has several problems that prevent it from being the utopia you expect.
1. What value does it actually provide that Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr (and even Facebook) don't provide? I've learned more about marginalized communities both locally and globally on Twitter than I have anywhere else. Seems that they have a pretty decent platform today.
2. It's existence doesn't mean those platforms go away, so it by itself doesn't stop Facebook from doing the ridiculous things it's doing today. Folks may choose to patronize those private platforms over using the thing you describe.
3. Economically disadvantaged folks won't have access to it without a separate set of programs to ensure every household is connected to the Internet at a reasonable speed, and that they have the tech required to access it. (COVID-19 has laid bare the economic disparity even in my relatively affluent school district.)
4. Are we talking "run by the US"? If so: globally, marginalized people may not be able to communicate there due to policies from our government (which we can over time theoretically control) or their governments (which we cannot.) If not: who runs it then?
5. I think you'll find that the US government routinely denies people speech. Police violently responding to peaceful protests around the country is just one example. The US would definitely have to control for speech that violates US law, such as SESTA/FOSTA.
6. This is all ignoring the fact that people are people, and even the best examples of online communities have examples of folks being rejected by the dominant voices in the community irrespective of the rules.
I think a public-owned online space is fascinating, but I don't think it'd be a magic bullet to solving these problems.
While true if you run something small that goes unnoticed, we still have gatekeepers once you get to a certain size. Good luck taking payments if Mastercard blacklists you.
I will definitely agree that payment processing is subject to limitations I don't agree with. Many adult-oriented websites have found it difficult to find payment processors, even when their businesses comply with the relevant laws.
But if we're answering my original parent comment of "where can I speak freely online," we're probably not discussing payment processing.
> Companies aren't the only entities allowed to publish content on the World Wide Web
Actually, the only entities with any capacity of publishing content on the WWW are a few tier 1 ISPs.
If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers, and their ISP, and their ISP's ISP.
If the end-state of that evolution is every entity being completely free to decide what gets published on their private platform, that's a huge problem.
Hi, it's me, unironically pushing the "just make your own" narrative.
I posted a comment similar to this, but let me just lay cards on the table: if you want to publish child abuse images, or sell controlled substances, you're probably going to have a hard time finding hosting for that. Same if you want to publish content that violates US copyright law, which I agree with less but still applies.
The original question was "where can I speak 'in the public domain' online," and I'm fairly sure my answer holds.
Unless you were just trying to make some juvenile "any limits placed on my conduct online are invalid because Internet" argument, which I mean good luck with.
> If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers
Fair enough.
My original parent comment asked where you can speak freely online, which for the purposes of my argument I'm equating to US law regarding free speech. (This may not be the angle you're coming from.)
Most hosts will allow you to publish things that fit that description. To take the examples given in this thread: if you want to publish an image of the Confederate flag, or publish something and not have Twitter or Facebook placing ropes around your content, publishing your own website is going to solve that problem for you.
Now, you're not wrong, there are limits to that, but I'm struggling to find out how those limits apply to this conversation in any realistic way.
The US laws about free speech are greatly liberal (if extended to protect non-citizens). Even something more restrictive like outlawing hate-speech is still a complete no-issue.
But privatizing those laws on the hands of a few companies only work as long as (besides other constraints) there isn't a mob pushing those few companies around. So, I'm completely in favor of letting MS police their platform, but the universal ones ought to be declared public services and there should be guarantees of universalization there.
1 - Not only ISPs, as for example an app store on a locked phone is universal to that phone's userbase.
I think his point is that at the end of the day, you're going to be dependent on someone. With a self hosted blog you're dependent on at least an ISP and registrar, both of which are private entities.
It sounds like a big part of the problem is that we don't have a truly "public" internet, if the backbone of the internet is a bunch of private entities.
We need a truly decentralized internet that doesn't suck like tor currently does.
Your ISP is a utility. Twitter is not. Your ISP cannot block you from hosting your own blog on your own servers. Even if your ISP did, there are places which will allow you to host whatever you want. Alex Jones is still online for example. WikiLeaks is still online.
This argument is always about people complaining that they don't get to participate on the big platforms. But if there was so much demand for people shouting about racist loser shit online there would be a big platform for it. It's their responsibility to build it, not Twitter's
This is exactly what I was talking about here[0]. You don't want a place to post freely to exist because you already have a preconceived idea of what people will say, and you are against that. This kind of attitude is hidden behind so many of the "but you can already do X, kinda" responses I've seen before in these discussions.
Why not just lead by saying you don't think a government maintained platform for free speech should exist because you don't want to hear what people who want it would have to say?
I don’t have any problem with a government provided free speech platform. It would be an interesting experiment. But how are you going to get Congress to fund something that will host racists and pornographers?
>While I agree, please direct me to where I can speak "in the public domain" online.
Same place as with pre-online TV and radio I suppose.
Free speech doesn't guarantee you an audience at the time and place of your choosing.
Take public buildings like a Courthouse or City hall, sure you have Free Speech rights, but good luck interrupting a court hearing to get your message out (without being held in contempt by the Judge (the government) and thrown in jail). Or try getting your message out at mid-night when the building is closed.
Then as others have said, what is stopping you from registering your own domain and posting your message there? If the government infringing your rights in that regard?
Do you not believe that people can stand on a public street corner and express their ideas freely, where many people will likely see and hear them? Your examples are edge cases (court rooms at midnight) that seem designed to suggest that no such places exists. They do exist, and I am asking where is there online version. Are you suggesting that the only way to exchange free speech online is for each passerby to create their own website and respond on their respective websites? I've seen people claim voter suppression for fewer hurdles. Or are you suggesting that it is the responsibility of a private entity to create and maintain a public square?
Where is the online public square? That's the point I am trying to make. And as others have pointed out, if you think having domain name and hosting is a public square, then you are ignoring all of the precedents of those things being removed by private entities.
The online "public square" is the internet itself. If you want to say something in public, simply create a web site and publish it. My understanding is that anything you say on your own web site will be protected via the same laws as public speech.
>Do you not believe that people can stand on a public street corner and express their ideas freely, where many people will likely see and hear them?
The Government can restrict you on the street corner too. Take Covid, states/counties/cities/municipalities across the country are enacting curfews, so violate the curfew and they will arrest your chilling your speech...assuming you consider that an edge case as well, then just read the case law from the good old "soap box" days, which deal exactly with people setting up their soap boxes on the corner to talk to the public and yes the government can regulate that speech to a certain extent.
>Are you suggesting that the only way to exchange free speech online is for each passerby to create their own website and respond on their respective websites?
Do you have a website? Can I freely post on your website without your consent?
>Where is the online public square?
The web is the public square, you want to set up your own soap box (website) do it, but you have no right to take over someone else's soap box (website), and if they do give you some rights to stand on their soap box they certainly can place restrictions.
>if you think having domain name and hosting is a public square, then you are ignoring all of the precedents of those things being removed by private entities.
You are ignoring self hosting from private servers.
Easy. Set up your own web site and put whatever you want to say on it.
If the hosting company takes you down, host it yourself. If ICANN takes it down, host it on Tor.
There are always ways to bypass corporate control of speech. You may have to completely forgo the benefits provided by the corporate web sites, but nothing is stopping you from making your own platform.
I think there's a deeper underlying issue here, and that is that some people don't actually want a place online where people can speak freely without restrictions. They will claim that the internet is already "free enough", and will cite "workarounds" similar to yours, but when pushed, will admit that having a place online, very accessible to the average person, with effectively very few restrictions on speech, is a bad idea. Are you someone who believes this?
>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 wasn't originally addressed to you). Are you someone who believes that a place like that shouldn't exist because of the content you believe that would be posted?
To straightforwardly answer your question: you can always take that kind of stuff to 4chan.
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.
Except that it’s not a public space and the harm is far less than a beating. A hosting company can have terms of service just like any other business and the only real restrictions are legally-protected classes, and even that has context.
Think of it like going to a coffee shop: they can’t kick you out for being Catholic or male but they can ask you to leave if you are harassing other people, not following public health codes, etc.
> Except that it’s not a public space and the harm is far less than a beating.
As in "you can't speak any more, because your website is offline". A gag is the offline equivalent.
> Think of it like going to a coffee shop
I believe that example would be more accurate if we all lived in company towns, where no public space exists and your presence, and speech, is merely tolerated under normal circumstances, but you have no right to either being there nor speaking your mind, and can be removed at any moment, should anyone "in charge" have an issue with your behavior. That also has the angle that you lose a lot more than just your ability to speak: you lose your home and need to find a new place that will take you in, need to tell everybody you know and do business with about your new address etc, like when Google shuts down your Gmail account.
> > Except that it’s not a public space and the harm is far less than a beating.
> As in "you can't speak any more, because your website is offline". A gag is the offline equivalent.
Again, a private company choosing not to use their resources to support your speech is not a gag. You are still free to pick any one of thousands of other options and you are free, even encouraged, read their terms before signing any contract.
Your Gmail comparison is similarly invalid: beyond the extreme rarity of that, when you choose to accept Google’s terms for getting free email service you are, well, accepting their terms. People have chosen for decades to register their own domains to avoid needing to update addresses and outside of uncommon legal situations this will avoid needing to do so.
> You are still free to pick any one of thousands of other options and you are free, even encouraged, read their terms before signing any contract.
Right, again, there aren't thousands of other options. If you want to host your site, you need a domain. That limits yourself to a hand full of registrars. And you need somebody to transmit traffic, if you hold any kind of controversial opinion, you need DDOS-protection. That leaves you with another hand full of corporations. Otherwise you're offline, as in, unable to speak.
> People have chosen for decades to register their own domains to avoid needing to update addresses and outside of uncommon legal situations this will avoid needing to do so.
How do you handle email on your domain when the registrar decides to drop your domain? And why shouldn't it, it's a private company, it can do whatever the hell it pleases.
Similarly, network capacity and servers are available from many companies around the world.
If your content is so toxic that you can’t find anyone in the world to provide even basic network connectivity, it might be time to ask whether you’re using “controversial” as a synonym for “illegal”. That happens to groups like ISIL, but even that’s not completely successful, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone reading this has “international takedown” as a realistic threat.
> If your content is so toxic that you can’t find anyone in the world to provide even basic network connectivity, it might be time to ask whether you’re using “controversial” as a synonym for “illegal”.
Ah, the good old "only criminals have something to hide" aka "all speech that is good is free, if your speech is suppressed, it's probably evil, and evil speech should be suppressed, because it's evil". That's really not a sensible approach imho.
Sure, it might not violate the law. The problem with private companies trying to enforce political opinions and controlling speech on their platform is that it is pretty much the definition of McCathyism. With people losing their job over liking a tweet. I remember when the left was looking at the McCarthy period as a dark page of american history. I am appalled how quickly this went 180 degrees.
I think you might be viewing the situation at too low a resolution. Do you not see any salient differences between a Senator running an inquisition to root out political adversaries, and a social platform forbidding people from threatening other users?
McCarthyism wasn’t so much about the senator, it was about the media and hollywood not hiring anyone they thought had leftist opinions to not give them a platform and spread their toxic ideas. I think it is like for like what is happening now.
Legal status of so called 'private companies', and their 'private property' is granted to them by the State. This distinction is meaningless, and another delusion of legal positivism, with the great tradition of making corporations people and babies not.
Besides this presumes something as in "hate speech" exists, let alone that some confederate flag is such speech. It's a not so subtle attempt at creating idea of "words as violence" and promoting arbitrary law enforcement and anarcho tyranny.
> The actions of private companies on private property (virtual or otherwise) are an entirely different domain than government intervention.
And yet, private businesses are subject to certain restrictions. For example, it is illegal to refuse service based on one's race or sex. I am not sure if companies are allowed to discriminate based on one's political views.
Like when the Colorado baker refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, and the Supreme Court ruled in his favor?
Based on this comment, it appears you have a poor understanding of what qualifies as a protected class and what they are protected from. You might want to brush up on that.
Umm let's see what the SCOTUS said [1] : ... a State decision in an adjudication “in which religious hostility on the part of the State itself” is a factor violates the "State’s obligation of religious neutrality" under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution...The Commission compared Phillips' religious beliefs to defense of slavery or the Holocaust. Kennedy found such comparisons "inappropriate for a Commission charged with the solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement of Colorado’s anti-discrimination law"...
So first of all, SCOTUS "avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise"[2]. Second of all, you chose to bring this example up and comment on my understanding without having done your due diligence and understanding the issue properly. Oh the irony!
I think that's a dodge. It implies that there is something inherently different between government power and other forms of power. And yes, there are subtle differences, like use of force, but at the end of the day, power is power. To be clear, I don't think Microsoft has done anything wrong here, but I don't think free market economics is the right angle to take.
Imagine if it were Facebook or Twitter instead of just a video game. You could apply the same logic to say that Facebook is just a private company, and what they allow on their platform doesn't qualify as a curb on free speech. But those two companies effectively form an oligopoly on on-line discussion, and what they allow on their platforms has a huge effect on the country as a whole. Because their policies end up dictating what people are and aren't allowed to say on the internet, their moderation strategies should absolutely be held to a higher standard.
None of this applies to Turn 10, because a racing game is not intended as a platform for discussion, but that's a nuance that needs to be considered. The blanket statement, "private companies should do whatever is good for their business" does not capture that.
There is something inherently different between "the government is sending you to prison for doing that" and "a private entity will prevent you from using their service for doing that", yes, even if that service is Facebook or Twitter.
At a point which is beyond the confederate flag. There may well be a slippery slope somewhere along this road, but it's not here.
Gun advocates resist common sense reforms with the same logic, but lots of military weapons (minigun, flamethrower, rocket launcher, etc) are already either banned or highly regulated and have been for years without anyone's rights having been trampled.
What do you think of the counterargument about statues? A few years ago, the idea that removing Confederate statues might lead to removing statues of founding fathers was considered an absurd slippery slope argument; a few days ago, the New York Times published an opinion piece arguing that statues of George Washington should be torn down. How can we be confident that this isn't a step down that same slope?
Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and even Lincoln have already been attacked by the mob. Mount Rushmore is now a symbol of white supremacy. The Emancipation Memorial, paid for by former slaves, is also considered racist now. Boston is going to remove it. The slippery slope has turned into a slide with no end in sight.
> But Blacks weren’t part of the design process, and the memorial’s central visual takeaway — a Black man kneeling before his white savior — has had people cringing for years.
They paid for it, but didn't get to have input on how it'd look. Seems like the precise sort of thing folks are upset about.
Rushmore was a treaty violation from the very beginning, and Native Americans occupied it as far back as 1971 in protest.
Most of the coverage I saw was people horrified at the constitutional implications of the military being turned on US citizens, on US soil, by order of the president.
There are constitutional implications to the use of the Insurrection Act against largely peaceful demonstrations, like the ones in DC at the time it was invoked.
The First Amendment does not protect riots, but it does protect protests outside the White House.
I agree with regards to private companies banning racist symbols, but the top comment was talking about anti hate-speech _laws_, which seem like a departure from my understanding of the first amendment. If a law against displaying the Confederate battle flag can be justified without a change to the constitution, then it really does become a slippery slope when determining what other unpopular expressions the first amendment fails to protect.
Reminds me of when Trump a while ago (before the recent George Floyd stuff) was commenting on statues being torn down, and commented something like, "next they'll go for George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, where does it end?" John Oliver did a bit on it answering "Somewhere. It ends somewhere," implying that he was an idiot, that it was a stupid comment, and everybody laughed. Now we're here and it has actually happened in reality. It's even gone further. Roosevelt. Lincoln?? We even have prominent BLM figures saying the western portrayal of Christ is systemic racism and must be erased.
Since then I've come to see the answer "it ends somewhere" as completely void of any value or meaning, and mostly just a justification for mindless erasure. It's not a smart zinger, it's empty.
As far as the others, clearly there is an Overton shift happening here, and that will embolden some advocates to make more extreme demands. Is that bad? Probably not, but I think most statues of Washington are likely safe for at least another generation or two, and if they get moved from the public square into museums at that later point, well, that's something the future will have decided on.
> figures saying the western portrayal of Christ is systemic racism
You mean the ones where he's shown as west-european white? I suppose we could bother thinking about why he looks like that in those portrayals when he definitely wouldn't have in real life.
One reason is that people might feel closer to something that they think superficially resembles themselves. This is part of the reason why diversity is important, according to so many people right now. Not just because groups have more perspectives, but because the people in the minority feel more comfortable when the minority is not so small.
I remember some years ago about a situation regarding a movie. I forget the exact details, but it was something like a Filipino movie about an American disaster, like 9/11. The movie was based on a historically inaccurate story of a Filipino man or family involved in the circumstances, when in reality there had been none. I don't know whether or not the Filipino person was a replacement for a white person's real story.
But as someone much closer to the original circumstances, my perspective is not that I or my community's history has been replaced or been removed due to "racism." It is rather very touching that this foreign community felt close enough and impacted enough by the story to envision themselves inside it, taking part in it. To me, it was an expression of closeness and understanding, not appropriation or racism.
Plus it seems strange to me that in a story where people walk on water and talk to burning bushes and kill gays, that the most offensive or historically inaccurate thing is that some people have envisioned the main character as being similar to them.
> One reason is that people might feel closer to something that they think superficially resembles themselves.
I agree! And then they proceeded to spread that image throughout the world (commonly via imperial colonialism) as "god looks like me, not you". That closely aligns with the concept of systemic racism.
> Plus it seems strange to me that ...the most offensive or historically inaccurate thing is...
"Most" is a strawman. We don't need to start assigning gold/silver/bronze medals to badness in order to recognize that it's bad and work to change it.
If imperial colonialism is responsible for bringing the idea of Jesus to new areas to begin with, then it's not replacing something. I don't understand what's "systemic racism" about that?
You skipped the meat of my comment, which is about closeness and understanding.
Criticism of celebrating deeply flawed men with deeply flawed ideals is not, in any way, erasure. We all know about Nazism and the Holocaust despite the lack of statues of Hitler. Christians somehow know about Satan even though he’s got no statues celebrating his greatness.
I dunno, people pretend that they know about what these historical figures were thinking but I feel like nobody's read a book about it, they're all just learning from their assumptive misinformed peers and that there isn't necessarily an interest in the history.
Thomas Sowell, a black man, had some interesting historical perspectives on these figures in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, which is worth a read. This is just a small excerpt from a google search, and in itself can't directly address everything people are trying to erase, but it's a starter for listening to more and broadening your perspective:
It's important to remember that the majority of these statues were not created after the civil war in order to remember them, but during the Jim Crow era in order to intimidate black people. The intent was never to teach history.
I don't know the history of that so I can't argue it. If you could link to some education on it, I'd like to read about it.
I would imagine that it's possible in some circumstances for this to be true for some, mostly confederate figures. I'm really skeptical that that's true for figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
The weird-power-dynamic-Lincoln statue with the freed black man aside, I generally agree on statutes of the founding fathers. I doubt a statue of Washington was erected in honor of his support for slavery.
In the greater context of what is happening in America right now, tearing down statues of Washington isn't necessarily about Washington himself. Instead, it is about challenging the idea that our historical figures (and America itself) are infallible.
If I may paint a picture, put yourself in the shoes of a black man in America in 2020. You see thousands of videos of police brutality, blatant racism, and disregard from those in power. A significant portion of the representatives in this country refuse to outright state that racism is still a problem in this country, but you see it with your very eyes every day.
However, you see these statues symbolizing this "ideal" version of America, where everyone is equal, which never actually existed. Further, when people challenge the existence of these statues (and by proxy, that non-existent "ideal") in the face of all of this inequity, they are defended orders of magnitude more intensely than the rights of actual-flesh-and-blood people. It's hard to look at a statue of General Lee, or even Washington, and see anything but a symbol of the fact that America at large cares more about the "appearance" of equality and equity than actually granting it to the people. If the people who defending these statues so vigorously also defended the civil rights of their fellow Americans with the same energy, I don't think we would see as much of a struggle over this.
Respectfully, without a place to read about the intimidation tactic of statues, I'm not sure that I put much weight in it. An alternative explanation on the timing could for example be that people in the majority in those communities sensed that the tides of public opinion were shifting, and they felt a strong desire to reach backward and preserve the past that they had fought for, which they felt like they were now losing. This seems more likely just psychologically to me, with the primary element being about a sense of independence and not really about slavery specifically.
As for blacks in America today, it's complicated to discuss and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to go down all the paths. I think to some degree your picture is based on the news and what is visible, rather than what we know people actually think. Does BLM/the mob speak for all blacks? Are there any who dissent, on either the history, today's context, the solutions, or all three? Yes, definitely. And if opinions vary, should we not attempt to understand whether or not there is a right or wrong, and proceed according to rightness? If it is not about right or wrong, but the perception of offense, what does that mean? If a symbol stands for something good, and one person out of a million falsely perceives it to be a hate symbol, is that sufficient for a teardown? What if it were 10% or 50%? Is it just a matter of threshold? Do we even know the percentages today for what's happening before we let the mob do its thing?
I think a lot of people are smart enough to know that there is a difference between representing "an ideal version of America," and specific ideals that individuals represented. Washington for example largely representing the fight for independence; Roosevelt standing for social justice; Lincoln for freedom and equality - not American utopia.
When considering people as symbols it is important to isolate what they did that made them stand out from their time, from their common beliefs or actions that were the same as everyone else. Without doing that, we expose symbols to the injustice of being judged by modern moral standards, and sacrifice the good that we isolated. Like it or not, the acceptance of slavery was not exceptional in Washington's time. The ability and bravery to lead a revolution certainly were exceptional. The exceptional is what we isolate and create a symbol from.
It is of course possible to have been exceptionally cruel within the time of American slavery, which would be a reason to not symbolize someone. But that isn't the case for these figures and in fact Washington eventually came to flip his perspective on slavery in his lifetime.
The morality of the past is fixed and the morality of the future is in perpetual development, meaning that if we continue to take the same approach that's happening now, all symbols will eventually be lost in time, because with an unbound future we will likely run the gamut of what is considered right and what is considered wrong in any given "now." By keeping this up, we deprive ourselves of a story and a guideline of history to help us project our own future. We sacrifice timeless positive principles to shifting moral discoveries. We leave our children with less guidance.
> I think a lot of people are smart enough to know that there is a difference between representing "an ideal version of America," and specific ideals that individuals represented. Washington for example largely representing the fight for independence; Roosevelt standing for social justice; Lincoln for freedom and equality - not American utopia.
There are mainstream politicians and political commentators who explicitly say that racism used to be a big problem in the United States but that it simply does not exist any more. I suspect it's a very common belief.
"But the story of the monuments is even stranger than many people realize. Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition."
It's not about statues, but the Wikipedia article about the modern display of the Confederate Flag seems to offer a decent summary of its usage beginning in the 1950s:
FWIW the founding fathers did not want to be idolized and probably would not like the idea of Rushmore. I'm not sure I see why its outrageous to think that people want to remove statues honoring pieces of history they think ought not be honored. On the face of it, nothing is owed to the past and society does evolve. I don't feel particularly strong on preserving or removing imagery of George Washington from public art. But the gut wrenching feeling of those who feel its spitting on their heritage, well, they're gonna have to learn to cope with the awareness that a country is defined by its people, not its history. For ages 18 and under, whites are no longer the majority in the US (or very very close last time I checked). The aspects of heritage that the country chooses to celebrate are going to change over time.
This is the gist of democracy. You don't get bonus points for historical relevance. You may not agree with the angry mobs of protestors, but the same change is happening in formal government, albeit slower.
History is important because it lets us see ourselves in the arc of time and be more cognizant of how and why we arrived at the present moment. When we idolize figures who we believe did good things, we project a guide line from the past into the future for ourselves to follow. When we erase history, we lose this guidance and direction. It's no mistake that the mob is responsible for the destruction, because a lack of guidance leads to mob-like behavior. Just as fatherless children are more likely to find guidance from their peers and in the streets, with a statistically worse fate as a result.
You could say then that these specific idols are not good idols because of the realities of their actions in the past. But there are other perspectives [0] that should be considered before taking that as a foregone conclusion - a conclusion mostly adopted from peers and not study.
It feels tired to still be repeating this when so many others have said it, but Germany is capable of learning about Hitler and Nazism without the monuments glorifying it; Americans can learn about Robert E. Lee without the whitewashed monuments everywhere. And anyway, there was none of this clutching of pearls about history-erasure when the Saddam Hussein statue was toppled in Baghdad in 2003.
I think you're still taking as a foregone conclusion that (all of) the statues represent bad men with evil ideas, and that's what I'm disagreeing with.
That's great. And the growing shift of culture suggests that slave owners are not emblematic of people who did good things, so we should remove them from the public display. The intent is not to erase history, it is to signal changing values.
Choice is certainly a factor and I don't think it needs to be minimized. If we choose well and isolate and elevate symbols of positive and productive principles, we create better guidance for ourselves and for future generations.
Part of doing this well is being able to isolate properly, identifying what made historical figures exceptional, and being able to forgive sins which are considered sinful now, but were common behavior in the past. If you can't do that, you can't preserve people as symbols of principles at all, because the morality of the moment is not guaranteed to be held forever.
> When we erase history, we lose this guidance and direction.
The AHA has specifically put out a statement[0] about monuments. The prime quote:
> To remove a monument, or to change the name of a school or street, is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history.
Thucydides, arguably the very first historian ever, criticized statues and monuments as poor representations of history. It is important to understand the difference between history and historical memory. Monuments are not pedagogy tools. Actual professional historians do not see them as relevant for teaching us about the people they represent.
Historians are record-keepers of history, they are not arbiters of ethics, spirituality, and guidance. Statues of people are not meant to teach us about those people per se, but rather hold to us an example of exceptional attributes of those people that should be considered timeless so that we can follow them into the future. The determination of relevance in this context is not something that should be ceded to historians in any capacity other than to simply confirm or reject that the specific attribute that we appreciate in a figure is based on a historical accuracy. Did Lincoln free the slaves? Yes. Did Washington help lead a revolution? Yes. These are easy questions. The distinction between history and historical memory is not lost; based on an accurate history, we can highlight good attributes use them to reinforce timeless principles that we'd like to continue to carry through time.
If the absolute worst case scenario you can imagine is that we no longer have any huge chunks of metal in the shape of people displayed on public property, then your slippery slope argument isn't very compelling.
I believe the parent poster is referring to the extremely recent reforms going on in Germany, which are above and beyond their historic control of Nazi symbols:
That sounds like they're just setting up a mandatory reporter scenario, akin to how certain private entities are obligated to report child abuse in the USA.
Because that’s not already the case in the US? Ask a Muslim friend to post a joke about blowing up JFK and see how long it is until their door is broken down
There are a number of examples of speech laws in the western world that have banned insults. From 1994-2014 the UK had a ban on speech that was "insulting"
The UK's Communications Act 2003 section 127 also says:
> (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he-
> (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
> (b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
> (2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he-
> (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,
> (b) causes such a message to be sent; or
> (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
> On 19 December 2012, to strike a balance between freedom of speech and criminality, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued interim guidelines, clarifying when social messaging is eligible for criminal prosecution under UK law. Only communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted.
Implying they already expect to reevaluate this decision?
While this statement sounds reasonable at face value, these kind of important distinctions really need to be codified in law, not left up to prosecutorial discretion. Vague speech laws plus a great degree of prosecutorial discretion is exactly how a lot of brutal regimes oppress dissenters while justifying their actions.
> Vague speech laws plus a great degree of prosecutorial discretion is exactly how a lot of brutal regimes oppress dissenters while justifying their actions.
Sure, but it's also how a lot of non-brutal regimes keep laws from growing out of control with silly edge cases.
If you are harassing someone, law enforcement doesn't have to consult the legislated list of 23,784 actions that constitute harassment. That seems reasonable.
Harassment laws are common in the US and don't have to enumerate a large list of different actions that constitute harassment.
The clarification that you just quoted above from the Director of Public Prosecutions is only one sentence in length but it would entirely change the meaning of the law, if a clarification like that were actually in it.
US harassment laws are not a list of 23,784 actions that constitute harassment either. Here's an example of one state's law. It is clear and specific, something all laws should be: https://definitions.uslegal.com/h/harassment/
English law combines acts, statutes, statutory instruments, but also case law. The law is built to adjust to a changing society.
You might be interested in this programme (from 2013, so there have been some changes since then) that explains how it works: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sn9cf
Then why was this guy[0] sued by the Scottish Government for a joke, offensive as it may be? Prosecution specifically labeled intent to cause offense as the crime.
Do you realise what comedy is? This guy was a comedian who had performed on stage, so he certainly fits the bill. Think of all the current celebs who have said far worse on stage.
I'm British, here, almost all good humour is targeting/focusing around some group in some way (e.g. Monty Python, Fawlty Towers). We call it black comedy because it's horrible out of context.
Then you are not in favour of free speech, and logically should believe that mainstream comedians like Jimmy Kimmel, Jack Whitehall, Jimmy Carr, etc.. should all be deplatformed and their lives destroyed, just like this man's. They've all said terrible, mean, things to formulate jokes.
Or does your rule only apply when the little guy does something offensive?
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.
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.
I doubt you can make a joke about blowing an airport on any country regardless of your religion and don't expect a visit of the police. It's a very clear exception to freedom of speech.
Somehow I feel like this is a milder version of "an armed society is a polite society".
Everyone has a gun? Rational people are theoretically less likely to try and piss people off, because they know everyone is carrying.
It's super-easy to sue people for hate speech? Rational people are theoretically much more likely to consider their words, because they know everyone can get their ass fined and possibly imprisoned.
(The obvious problems are of course that not everyone is a perfect rational being with no emotions or extenuating circumstances, and that there are people who will immediately start trying to game any system for profit - goading someone into doing something that gives you an excuse to punish them for Bad Behavior, whether via the gun in your pocket or the State's justice, is an old, old tactic.)
>It's super-easy to sue people for hate speech? Rational people are theoretically much more likely to consider their words, because they know everyone can get their ass fined and possibly imprisoned.
Hate speech isn't well-defined though. It seems to just be a du jour list of things that upset people too much. What about a picture of a famous slave ship?
2. Search for "Notes from the Field: EU Defamation Laws and Journalism", where the International Press Institute (IPI) "takes a closer look at the application of defamation law in EU countries, seeking to illustrate the practical consequences of these laws upon both individual journalists and the free flow of information necessary for democratic governance."
We get to pick each time. "Well, we banned the confederate flag, better prevent white people from listening to rap" isn't the sort of thing that happens. Each adjustment to social norms is an independent choice that our society gets to make.
>will you also consider whatever other symbol gets co-opted?
Yes, if it does get co-opted to the extent of replacing its original meaning. Luckily that only happens rarely. That's just how symbols and communication work - it's an unfortunate and unavoidable reality. The swastika is the most obvious example.
I think a photo of the Che is a hate symbol. It is glorifying a psychopath who killed without a second thought for a genocidal ideology. That's my opinion. So do I get to get it removed everywhere because it offends me?
1. Spend time educating people on why Che doesn't deserve to be idolized
2. Garner support for his removal
3. Go to any company using or selling his image and use your support to have it removed
Do you find the Paradox of Intolerance to be a dangerous idea?
The premise is that maximalist tolerance means tolerating intolerant ideas, and that there's a risk that a movement of intolerance can form which destroys the culture of tolerance. It suggests that rational discourse might not always lead us away from intolerant views, and maximalist tolerance could therefore be self-defeating.
You have to decide what's worth tolerating. You can't just say "can't we all be nice to each other" when there are people trying to celebrate an icon of slavery and white nationalism.
You're talking past the point. You assume some idiots with slavery icons can't be embarrassed and shamed out of their views.
Where does this conclusion come from that rationality is so weak and our tolerant views are on such shaky ground that we have to prevent people from expressing intolerance?
It would be wonderful if things actually played out that way. What I'm seeing, are elected officials caving in to mobs with torches and pitchforks. So no, if I think Che Guevara is a hate symbol, I need only muster up a few hundred individuals, cause damage to private property and presto! No more Che...
Are Che Guevara statues on public property a common thing? I think I would support removing them from public property in my community. It also seems like the few mentions of Che statues I can find online indicate that they have long been controversial, like this: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/no-more-statues-of-che_b_1626...
So I'm not really sure what your point is. You seem to be trying to make a reductio ad absurdum, but it doesn't seem absurd to me for a community to be upset about a public statue of Che Guevara and demand it be removed.
It’s so odd for people to mention it being a slippery slope. The confederate flag is a symbol of when traitors in our own country tried to rise up so that they could keep people as slaves. People say it was about state’s rights, yes the rights to keep people as slaves was a huge factor of it. There is nothing to celebrate here, the South wanted to unify and overrun the North. A lot of people died over this, it’s not worth celebrating there’s no heritage there worth putting on display. Full disclosure I grew up in the north, so it wasn’t until I moved out East that I ever encountered people that really tried to pass off flying the Confederate flag as a symbol of heritage. My belief is the Nazi flag is to Germany as the Confederate flag is to the US. They are symbols of hate and symbols of a dark past. The case seems clear cut, there’s nothing slippery.
I don't think this is accurate. There are, or perhaps until recently were, a large number of people in the South who flew that flag out of a sense of regional pride and cohesion, and who had absolutely no problem with black people. Of course, that's not enough to forgive flying it - as a Jew I wouldn't be happy about a German person flying a Swastika, even if the only meaning it had for them was a benign pride in German accomplishments.
Still, though, it's important to recognize the wholesome impulse to celebrate the South, as it is a distinct region with its own valuable culture. A few years back there was an attempt to replace the Stars and Bars with a new "Southern Pride" flag [1]. Predictably, it's bland garbage.
There are definitely people who have been bamboozled into recognizing it as a symbol of abstract southern pride - but the connection remains. Regional pride can be a valuable thing. But "Southern Pride" should not just exist among white southerners. It should include the whole south, and using a symbol of the enslavement of black people doesn't exactly bring black southerners along for the ride of southern pride.
The problem is that this history is rooted in racism: the Confederacy was founded to preserve the institution of slavery (people who claim otherwise need to read the states’ own declarations) and the Army of Northern Virginia battle flag most commonly displayed has a long history from the Jim Crow era of being used to intimidate free Black people.
Just as someone proud of being German has a wide variety of symbols they can use other than a swastika, someone proud of their Southern ancestry could pick almost anything else to express that. Choosing a symbol which racists have proudly used to intimidate others for a century in a half immediately calls motives into question and even if someone somehow managed to avoid learning the history until now the only polite response is “I had no idea. I’ll use something else!”
So the problem is you are conflating southern pride (pride in the culture) with the confederacy. Many people in the south used to view the confederate flag as representative of southern pride (iced tea on a porch while complaining about the heat).
If people want to display pride in the south without supporting the Confederacy, they can do so without using the most iconic symbol of the Confederacy. Nobody has to wonder if you’re not entirely honest when you say your southern pride isn’t secretly about race if you use, say, a Georgia peach or a tobacco barn.
I think the status quo is the ideal. Companies can react to pressure from customers as they see fit with respect to their business needs. There is a market opportunity for a company willing to allow racist user-content in their games based on customer demand.
We've already been there a long time in terms to "What you can do on Xbox Live." You'd be insane to put a German swastika on your Forza car and expect not to get banned.
But there is a big difference between you and Microsoft. Microsoft is a business serving public, and hence subject to different regulations. For example, Microsoft cannot refuse to serve to women or brown people. You can choose to forbid entry to them in your private garden.
Sex and race are protected classes, using a particular image is not a protected class. I'd be quite surprised if there is any country in the world where you can't discriminate against someone using the confederate flag or some other iconography. And honestly I don't think there should be.
In this specific comment, I am not discussing what are the dimensions along which discrimination is permitted vs the ones where it is not. I am simply pointing out to moksly (GP) that what individual people are allowed to do in their gardens is very different than what private businesses are allowed to do in the US.
But your example is a strawman, there is no difference between Microsoft and me as far as preventing people from putting a slavery celebration picture on their virtual cars.
Companies have been filtering which words you’re allowed to use as your username, in chats, as your e-mail address. Filtering what kind of pictures you’re allowed to put on your cars is no different than that.
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.
I may be biased, having lived here all my life, but I would agree, it is a pretty nice place to live.
To be frank, there's few countries that I would even consider moving to.
Try publicly criticizing government politics (especially the 2015 kind) and watch your life be "cancelled" in Germany. Dystopian hellscape comes pretty close.
TBH, there are a lot of other factors that make Germany a decent place. A less polarized society is one of them, a representative parliament another. IMO, it takes more than a law to keep it civilized.
There are already many things that don't count as free speech based on case law, if something like that were to happen in the U.S. it probably wouldn't be an amendment rather a major supreme court case.
It seems to me that there are already plenty of laws that breach the 1st amendment if you interpret speech as absolutely any speech (e.g. death threats, libel, ...). And it is constitutional because the current interpretation of speech is narrower than "everything".
Doesn't that mean that, if there were the will to do it, free speech could be reinterpreted (by the supreme court?) to not include hate speech, thus not requiring to change the 1st amendment?
You're correct about the mechanism through which that could happen — if the Supreme Court decided it so, they could certainly narrow the first amendment protections for hate speech. But it's incredibly unlikely that would happen any time soon, as it would be in contradiction of many many years of free speech jurisprudence — not an expert but Brandenburg v. Ohio seems to get brought up a lot in this context.
Yes and no. Yes, the supreme court is the ultimate interpreter of the constitution, and could theoretically decide that the 1st amendment does not cover hate speech. But there's so much precedent around this that it is profoundly unlikely.
If there really was the will to do it, it would be by passing a constitutional amendment. If you aren't familiar, there is a process by which the constitution can be modified, and this can be done to completely rewrite or contradict the current text. But it's a very difficult hurdle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unit...
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
A politicians who told Germans to leave their country was killed. That was taken as a welcome opportunity to turn things to 11. There is now another new law "zur Bekämpfung des Rechtsextremismus und der Hasskriminalität".
> "Dabei reicht dann auch schon, dass man als Gleichgesinnter auftritt und solche Inhalte teilt oder mit einem "Gefällt mir" versieht"
No. I think that it is a responsibility and a duty for citizens and private organizations to self enforce censorship amongst themselves, as we see happening here. But, I do not think it is a good idea to grant that power to the ruling class due to the risk of abuse. Free speech is specifically a check on political power -- this is why it is entirely okay for private companies and individuals to censor speech but we greatly restrict the government's ability to do so. Yes, some governments with "hate speech" legislation have managed not to abuse the power, but there are plenty of examples of abuse to show that it is a risky step to take. Why should we take the risk of expanding state power if we have alternative solutions?
I think we should at least seriously consider that advocating for the murder or enslavement of people falls under the same speech category as incitement and yelling "fire!" in a theater.
And the Confederate Battle Flag and Nazi Flag absolutely do advocate the for murder and enslavement of people.
"This slope isn't particularly sloppy" is the single best reply capturing the delusion and dishonesty of the people who celebrate the limiting of speech and expression heere.
At least admit it proudly, that you are placing a punishment on vocalbulary and imposing self-censorship and thus invading privacy too.
All these masks attempting to cover-up reduction of politics to friend/enemy distinction are even more insulting than the act of limiting speech in the first place.
People don't want to see hateful shit in video games. You do not have god-given right to be shitty in a car game. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and create your own community that tolerates hatred.
Frankly, I consider this position to contribute much more greatly to the "reduction of politics to friend/enemy distinction" than any of the comments you're referring to. If a symbol of hatred is banned on a private platform and you consider that an attack on your politics, that makes it borderline impossible to believe that you are arguing in good faith.
Self-censorship on a public arena is predicated on invasion of privacy; the thought is implicitly not private at that point as you enact self-censorship due to norms imposed by institutions.
"Placing a punishment on hateful things" is a lot of words to cover the timeless and universal wisdom of "кто кого?".
There’s a lot of grandiosity here. Just before going deeper, what is your position on bookstore that don’t sell porn magazines, night clubs that refuse smelly people, and school fairs that don’t showcase student’s penis drawings.
AFAIK Germany's anti hate speech laws revolve around the use of national socialist related lexicon and symbolism. I think it is perfectly reasonable that a line is drawn in this case, regarding where free speech goes to far - i.e. fascism is never OK.
Whether the goal of these censorship policies in other countries / companies, is something that should probably be determined on a case-by-case basis. Generally your question brings to mind 2 more questions I would ask you in turn for elaboration:
1) Do you think there should be a line drawn anywhere to say that this is the absolute limit of free speech? E.g. being able to say that some people are less valuable as human beings arguably brings little value any discussion.
2) Do you believe that symbols may change overtime to represent ideas that perhaps do not relate as much to their original meaning as a symbol? I'm talking about the confederate flag here. Granted, I'm not a US citizen, but I do not understand want possible purpose the confederate flag could serve in today's age, other than as an acknowledgement of antiquated values and ideas no longer endorsed by today's culture? Maybe 20, 30 years ago, not as many people really cared whether the confederate flag had anything to do with racism or slavery. But now, its meaning is arguably more hostile, just due to the way it is used as a counter to the BLM movement and other related anti-racism movements.
So, why would some one honestly use the confederate flag as a artistic symbol in this way today? Just as no-one would use the SS lightning bolt as an icon or symbol in Europe and expect to not get a reaction from people. In these cases, I would argue that doing is more an act of ignorance than it is an act of freedom of speech.
Disclaimer: I am a EU resident in Germany who knows next to nothing about censorship law in this country - this is my humble and probably misinformed opinion. Any knowledgeable Germans please feel free to correct my interpretation.
No, I think the ideal end-goal is that hate speech is rejected in the private marketplace of ideas whose protection is the goal of the First Amendment, making anti-hate-speech laws unnecessary.
End goal? No. The end goal is eliminating oppression, and the ideal is to have strong enough cultural norms around this that specific laws are unnecessary.
A step in the process? Maybe. I don't know if this kind of legal enforcement is the shortest route from here to there in the US. I could be convinced either way.
I think all the prejudice and intolerance in the world is really just bad behavior we need to unlearn and this will be just another tiny little step towards 'detoxifying society'. Hacker News demands we be civil to each other because antagonizing other users has always been superfluous to discussing tech news, if we intend to discuss tech news it is obviously better if the discussion isn't me calling you names. Users intent on antagonizing others have been an unnecessary distraction in multiplayer gaming for many years.
> Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.
Why is this newsworthy? Random video game publisher implements arbitrary rule in video-game land. Seems to me like the goal of this story is just to stir up controversy over something that's not at all important. Anyone who plays a lot of online games knows that game publishers regularly ban users for a wide variety of arbitrary reasons, even mundane profanity is enough to earn a ban or suspension in many popular games.
It's newsworthy because there's a pretty significant debate occurring in the US about how private companies can moderate speech in their spaces. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is being actively relitigated by both parties (though it's not clear yet if anything will come of it).
> Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is being actively relitigated by both parties
I feel like I am taking crazy pills. We're talking about the creator of a video game banning the confederate flag in-game, we are a long way off from free speech rights in the supposed public square of a private enterprise. In what world can you imagine video game creators not being able to determine what kind of content is acceptable in their own game. I don't feel convinced that this is anything other than aggrieved culture warriors trying to make something mundane into a controversy.
> In what world can you imagine video game creators not being able to determine what kind of content is acceptable in their own game.
You're over-generalizing. If a game explicitly banned players from creating characters that look like black people, would you still make that comment? I'm sure you can at least see why others would find that newsworthy.
> If a game explicitly banned players from creating characters that look like black people, would you still make that comment?
YES! Without a shadow of a doubt I would. In the most extreme case I might say "Wow, very disappointing, I won't be purchasing any more titles from that publisher" and that'd be the end of it, I certainly wouldn't regard it as newsworthy discussion except in a gaming forum.
I'd also add that for the vast majority of gaming history, the vast majority of games do NOT allow you to create black characters, and while I've heard activists decry the lack of inclusion, I've never seen the lack of black characters in a specific video game title presented as a news story.
Image recognition people - is the approach to detecting something as "regular" as a particular flag any different than any other image recognition task? Or are you still just pumping in a ton of training data and doing hotdog/not hotdog?
> is the approach to detecting something as "regular" as a particular flag any different than any other image recognition task
It can be. It doesn't have to be. Image recognition research existed long before the current trend of throwing the kitchen sink at a neural net.
Practically speaking, the best outcomes always come from applying as many different techniques as you can justify and applying a controlled failure-scenario-aware synthesis to the results.
Without digging too deeply into semiotic philosophy, symbols are also defined by those who use them. 99% of people brandishing Nazi flags have horrific views, and use the flag to show their allegiance to those views, so we prefer people not to brandish them. Same thing for confederate flags
> I had relatives murdered in the Alamo. Should the Mexican flag get banned because I'm offended by it?
Given the treatment of slavery in both the Republic of Texas and the Empire of Mexico back then, I would say that you may not need to be offended about it.
> Given the treatment of slavery in both the Republic of Texas and the Empire of Mexico back then
Neither Mexican Empire was contemporaneous with the Texas revolution or Republic. The first Empire was earlier, the second Empire was later, roughly contemporary to the US Civil War.
Not many, and realistically most were heading down the road to phase-out. None, as far as I'm aware, were putting the idea that _slavery must always exist_ in their constitutions. The CSA was bizarrely, uniquely, absolutist about the importance of slavery.
The "confederate flag" that everyone refers to was never actually used by the confederacy but was used by racists after the fact as a symbol of white supremacy.
If the Mexican flag only stood for racism and not any nation, then yes it should probably get banned.
They're just trying to ban something that may seem like it has logic so people accept it and normalize it. American flag might be next, and yes I would not be surprised if Mexican flag as well because of the "evil spaniards". This whole thing has no logic behind it, it's just hate and evil, and it has always started with censorship. Hence the FIRST amendment.
I'm curious where you fall on the spectrum of this. Do you think that it's good, for example, for people to be displaying Nazi Flags in a racing game? Or if they showed graphic depictions of violence/gore. Where does your line fall, on what is and isn't okay to show?
The flag itself is not a problem. It won't change my mind for sure. I've seen it in history books, the only difference would be if somehow I feel threatened by the other player holding Nazi beliefs - which I'm not because we defeated them. We can defeat them again, no problem.
I would be ok with taking measure if somehow a bunch of a Nazi flags started FLOODING the game. This would be its own problem however, and stopping this kind of trolling is different than censorship. One or two flags here and there, just tell you some people are stupid.
Question for you: Would you rather play a game that has secret Nazis and you don't know because their iconography is censored, or would you rather play a game that doesn't censor people so you know what people believe?
I'd rather there be no nazis, and if there are nazis, I'd rather they feel uncomfortable expressing that; and if they do feel comfortable expressing that, I want to be able to report them and have them banned.
It's absurd that one must have to deal with hateful political views in a game about racing cars.
"I'd rather they feel uncomfortable expressing that"
How is this useful though? Are you afraid to adopt those views? Are you saying ONLY others are in this danger of adopting those views (if so, why are you so special)?
At best you are making them stealthy and they are playing with you but you don't know, and at worse their beliefs are reinforced because they already hate people.
The confederacy was founded to fight for slavery, because they believed people of colour to be inferior. It's the same reason we give "special treatment" to the flags of the Nazis, as their main goal and purpose was genocide.
Every country has committed various atrocities, but their flags do not necessarily represent those atrocities.
This isn't about the Confederates losing the war, and it's not about the southern states. No-one is asking for removal of all flags from the southern states. it's about what the confederacy stood and fought for. White supremacy and slavery.
Did they act or campaign to make things worse for their fellow man (and woman)? In other words, did they simply act in the context of their time period, as other men in their position would, or did they specifically act to curtail the rights of others. This makes it very easy for me to condemn symbols of the Confederacy, because they specifically acted to preserve slavery.
Taking it back to your question about Mexico: War is terrible, and flags are used in war. Flags are used after the war is over to show their solidarity with the principles of one side or the other. The flag of Mexico was primarily just a marker to say "We are Mexico"
Some people associate the confederate battle flag with a spirit of rebellion, and that's understandable. But other people associate it with hatred. You don't get to choose how someone else will understand it and be affected by it. It's hard to be a grown up, but part of it is deciding how much you care about offending other people.
offending other people should never be the standard. By your definition we should ban South Park because it offends nearly everyone, so fsck your sensitivities.
The confederate flag should be banned because the kkk and other white supremacists adopted it, rebranded it as their own flag, and most importantly, no one cared to stop them. Try that with the Irish flag and see what the Irish have to say about it.
> "By your definition we should ban South Park because it offends nearly everyone, so fsck your sensitivities."
My standard is: Did they act or campaign to make things worse for their fellow man (and woman)? Someone could make a case that South Park has done this, but it would be hard for me to take it seriously.
The southern states seceded to preserve slavery; slavery was and is evil and they were wrong to secede in order to preserve it. But secession was and is constitutional, given the Tenth Amendment and no constitutional provisions against secession or mandating a perpetual union; the states had a right to do it, even though it was wrong.
The southern armies did not fight for slavery: it was legal in the United States before, during and after the war. They did not even fight for independence: the seceding states were legally independent as soon as their secessions took effect. Rather, they fought to defend their homes from a foreign invader.
Two non-contradictory things may be true at once: secession to preserve slavery was utterly contemptible; fighting honourably in self-defense is praiseworthy.
Edit: That said, given that the flag in question is so closely associated with white supremacy, it is hard to be too incensed over the ban.
Of note, slavery remained legal in the United States until well after the military defeat of the Confederacy: Lee surrendered on the 9th of April; the last Confederate ship surrendered in England on the 6th of November; the 13th Amendment making most slavery unconstitutional was not ratified until the 6th of December.
Protecting your family for a foreign invading army,
Sure some rich folks have slave, but what do i have to do with it? Shouldn't i protect my home from invaders?
Are you arguing that being a "grown up" means never offending other people? I'm really not trying to troll you, just not sure how to interpret your last sentence.
That's not what I said and that's not what I meant. Being a grown up means deciding what you want to offend people about. It means taking responsibility when you offend someone.
Look, I know Texas liked rebelling over concerns that the parent country didn't look kindly on chattel slavery, but combatants getting killed, either in combat or when executed as traitors, after starting those wars isn't being “murdered".
> Should the Mexican flag get banned because I'm offended by it?
The Mexican flag of that war is no longer used; the current Mexican flag was adopted in 1968 (or 1995, depending on which side of the flag you are talking about, though the latter was clarifying an ambiguity in the spec more than a new design.) So, even if your concern was agreed to be otherwise valid, it's kind of like asking about banning the modern German flag because of the Nazis.
Our 1968 flag closely follows the 1916 and 1934 design, with the eagle in the same position and using (almost) the same symbolic elements. Even the 1821 flag is similar.
My great-great-great-great-something uncle COMMANDED at the Alamo. And you know what? Everyone who got killed there, including him, was on the WRONG FUCKING SIDE. So no, of course the Mexican flag shouldn't be banned. The Confederate flag should be, though, because it explicitly glorifies treason in defense of slavery.
Before it was invaded by China, Tibet had serfdom and what most would consider to be slavery. Also Tibetan punishment for crimes often involved removal of eyes or amputation of limbs.
4chan anons should have made a real flag of a nation as some sort of meme for slavery. That “white power” thing feels half assed now, just feeding the racists.
The game publisher is the judge in this case. Not everyone will agree with the judgement of course but I don't think there is something inherently wrong with that.
Voting with your wallet doesn't work, because the amount of online racing games for the xbox specifically and even videogames in general is very small. Sports games increasingly are becoming a near monopoly as licensing becomes very expensive and limited.
A good move. However, French national anthem with the words “to arms, let an impure blood
water our furrows!” should also be considered hare speech and therefore censored in all sports events.
I am not very familiar with the American civil war. The way people talk about it seems weird to me though: it is as though the entire southern United States were overcome by an irresistible race hatred and they started a war in order to ensure their white supremacy- but mostly out of ignorance of the morals of this.
I have a hard time believing the entire southern United States was only fighting for the right to own slaves. Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later? What other reasons were there for the war? (Considering the slavery issue though, thank goodness they lost)
Edit: thanks for the responses. I couldn’t have imagined the pro-slavery position was so outspoken and blatant, it’s a bit of a culture shock. Economic incentives are perverse
James McPherson, a Princeton Civil War historian says: “Probably 90 percent, maybe 95 percent of serious historians of the Civil War would agree on the broad questions of what the war was about and what brought it about and what caused it, which was the increasing polarization of the country between the free states and the slave states over issues of slavery, especially the expansion of slavery.”"
Look at the secession documents from the states:
At the very onset, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared that President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
On January 7, 1861, the ordinance signed in Montgomery that “it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the Slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States.”
On February 2, 1861, Texas declared its decision to be “based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.”
On March 9, 1861, Arkansas’s George B. Smoote added a resolution: “Resolved, that the platform on the party known as the Black Republican Party contains unconstitutional dogmas, dangerous in their tendency and highly derogatory to the rights of slave states, and among them the insulting, injurious and untruthful enunciation of the right of the African race of their country to social and political equality with the whites.”
On April 17, 1861 latecomer Virginia, provoked by Lincoln’s raising troops to suppress the already seceded states, declared “Lincoln’s opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” as it cut ties with Washington. Tennessee was the 11th and last, its population divided on secession (eastern Tennesseans generally opposed it), but not on the slave issue.
...yeah, that's why the war was fought. Don't let confederate apologists change history here. Every confederate state had "slavery" in their constitutions.
It was very much over slavery. The entire economic system of the south depended on chattel slavery, and the south didn't really recover economically for a century.
And despite the idea of it being over the abstract idea of "states' rights", the confederate constitution mainly reduced a state's right to make choices for itself. It was pretty much a clone of the US constitution, with a clause that states couldn't ban slavery if they wanted to.
Why did their economy suffer for a century? You would think the landowning class would lose out badly but that, overall, economic activity would increase. We’re all those farms so badly run that they couldn’t compete once they had to pay wages? Or was money just so concentrated that once slavers lost their slaves, nobody had any money at all?
They clung to the existing system as much as they could, but the extra steps they had to go through (keeping people as slaves even when it was illegal but hiding it from the relevant officials, the overhead of using prison labor, etc.) wouldn't have made it economically viable even if they didn't have to rebuild a completely destroyed infrastructure on top of that.
But it took a long time though for the stored wealth (and associated power structures) to disappear. Around 50 to 75 years. It wasn't until the New Deal investments of the late 1930s (in the entire country, including the south) that the south stared to recover. Before that there were a lot of parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan. A destroyed country with US contractors taking an obscene amount of reconstruction money and not really doing much with it. Locals clinging to their existing way of life including secretly joining brutal militias to enforce the former power structures; some trying to bring "law and order" back to their locality in a distinct power vacuum, some trying to bring back power structures that they had internalized as moralistically correct. That's how the KKK started, with a lot of parallels to ISIS.
No, it wasn’t a factor that was emphasized later. It’s sometimes a conservative talking point that it was about ‘economics’ or ‘states rights’ but really the economics they were talking about was free labour from slavery, and the states rights they were talking about were the southern states rights to allow slave ownership.
Slavery was always the main issue. Anyone saying otherwise is just trying to divert attention from that fact or is totally ignorant or the history.
In the 1800s, the North embraced industrialization while the economy of the South continued to depend largely on slave ownership. So, like you guessed, it's not quite race hatred; more like race superiority. Slaveowners didn't hate black people, they liked them a lot, and wanted them to keep working for free. The North was going to take away their free labor, and the folks with money and power in the South didn't quite like that. My guess is that race hatred came later, when the white slaveowners saw their former slaves succeed in business, education, etc., while their former plantations rotted.
If anything, the opposite is true. You can read the declarations of secession for the southern states; e.g. see South Carolina's [1]. They seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Surely some people had other reasons to support secession, but this is the primary one. Decades after the war ended, there was a push to deemphasize slavery as a cause for the war for reasons of propaganda and nostalgia.
There's also the Cornerstone Speech, from the Confederate Vice President Stephens, which is quite plain and explicit regarding slavery and white supremacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
It was similar in some ways to the unification conflicts happening in Europe in the 19th century. The contentious issues, slavery and tariffs, forced a disagreement about the nature of the Union. There was not a shared sense of identity across the United States, so when Virginia, for example, seceded, Virginians sided with their state. Generally, only the more cosmopolitan upper classes felt conflict between a duty to preserve the union and a state citizenship; the enlisted ranks and home support were more uniformly provincial. In the north, an almost religious belief in the moral and social good of a nationalist Union drove pro-war sentiment (again, similar to other unifications.)
It’s an expansive topic; I’d encourage you to pick a few accounts of the era as well as biographies of Lincoln and generals Grant and Lee.
The rationale for succession had slavery as a primary factor, but the war was fought for the right of States to leave the union if they wished. Federalism and states rights sentiments are tied up with the symbol of the flag, though it might be more accurately framed as anti-federal government than pro-state government. Importantly though I'm not denying that there are also those who use the flag as a symbol of racial animosity, nor are the two groups completely separate.
Southern states by and large seceded over fear that the northern states, which outnumbered the south, would outlaw slavery throughout the country. That's clear from most of the declarations that southern states passed to formally state their reasons for leaving the Union. So it's not true, as sometimes claimed, that the primary reason for the war was "states's rights" (well, yes, but the right of a US state to maintain slavery), or "northern capitalists keeping the agrarian south under their heel".
But that doesn't explain why the average southern soldier—who didn't own any slaves (that was for the rich planter elite minority), who probably personally knew and possibly were friends with slaves, fought and died for the Confederacy. Claiming that "the entire southern United States were overcome by an irresistible race hatred" is as ridiculous (not saying that you are claiming that; you recognize that such a statement is silly) as stating that "every German soldier in WW2 was a Nazi", which was incorrect on both a literal sense (in terms of being a Nazi Party member) and a figurative sense.
Ultimately the average southern soldier fought and died for the same reason the average German soldier did: For his home (and homeland), his family, his friends and comrades, his way of life. Nothing more or less grand than that.
There was hatred for sure, but also the fact that the entire southern economy ran on slavery. So there were also economic reasons, but they were based around the free labor provided by slavery.
It was mostly about states' rights, and trying to keep the economies propped up, which were supported by cotton and textiles... which were supported by slavery.
As soon as Lincoln was elected, without being on any ballots in the south, they knew what was coming (abolition of slavery), and the southern states attempted to secede.
The racism wasn't a sudden thing. What was new was the movement to ban slavery, especially in new states, which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.) The election of an anti-slavery President was the impetus that turned it into war before he even took office.
It's not just about owning slaves, but also the belief that some people are fundamentally an underclass. Poor people didn't own slaves but feared that they would be put in the slaves' position if the slaves were gone.
So yes, it's a basic racism that goes back to the beginning. It only seems sudden because the election indicated that the tide of history was against them.
I hadn't read these before and, wow. From Mississippi's:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization
> The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.
The Three Fifths Compromise gave slave states extra power. The 14th Amendment nullified it. The Senate and Electoral College still give less populous states extra power. Most of those were in the north.
> What was new was the movement to ban slavery, especially in new states
Abolition wasn't a new thing in 1861. All the northern states had banned it in the decades after the revolutionary war. Indeed, slavery was banned in Georgia in 1735 when it was founded. The British Empire abolished slavery in 1833. Southern states in 1861 were fighting to preserve an institution that many people had recognized as evil for more than a century.
> which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.)
You're mixing up two different things. The creation of a House with representation based on population and a Senate with a fixed number of Senators per state, which continues to exist today, was a compromise between big states and small states. Four of the seven states that were smaller than average and benefited from that arrangement had few to no enslaved people: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey and Connecticut. Conversely, three of the six states that were bigger than average and were hurt by that arrangement enslaved large numbers of people.
Additionally, the Constitution did not "give extra power" to slave states. It reduced the power of the slave states using an anti-slavery argument. Look at the text of the 14th amendment, which governs apportionment:
> Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
Compare that to the 3/5 clause:
> Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Both then and now, the Constitution allocates votes based on the number of "persons" in each state, not just people who can vote. So today, the apportionment is based on a population count that includes children and non-citizens, not just adults over 18. Moreover, even in 1789, the Constitution deemed enslaved people to be "persons." It distinguished between "free persons" and "all other Persons" but both were "persons." So what would have happened if the 14th amendment text was in place in 1789? Slave states would have had even more representation, because the "number of persons in each State" would include enslaved people.
The anti-slavery argument was this: because slaveholding states treated some people like property, enslaved people should not be included in the "number of persons in each State." It partially succeeded in reducing the power of slave-holding states. It was a compromise with the devil, no doubt. But the idea that the Constitution increased the power of the slave states is false. Without the 3/5 clause, the slave states would have had even more power.
I grew up in the South and there is a certain amount of propaganda about how it was the evil oppressors of the North who wanted to ruin our beautiful lifestyle, but when you get right down to it this beautiful Southern world was built on the backs of a whole lot of dirt-cheap labor in the form of slaves. All the human traffickers sipping mimosas on the verandah of their gorgeous, tree-lined work camps watching the people they thought of as sub-human animals laboring away wanted to be able to keep doing this, so they sent their kids and the poor people of the South off to die for this.
White supremacy was, and still is, an important component in the systematic oppression of Black people in the south. But the Confederacy went to war to preserve an economy that would be completely ruined if they had to pay their workers a living wage and treat them like humans.
Much of the Southern economy is still based on paying Black people shit wages. We throw a lot more of them into jail than we do white people, and so many of these jails are for-profit affairs designed to squeeze every penny possible out of their inmates and their families. We elect openly-racist sheriffs. We have literal KKK members get a hair's breadth from becoming governors. There is a case to be made that slavery never ended, it just changed shape.
What's really funny is that the south had more than enough money to reinvest and industrialize. This lack of industrialization is what lost the civil war as they relied on northern factories to produce equipment / weapons.
Train supply chains allowed the north to move troops and supplies an order of magnitude faster than the south.
> I couldn’t have imagined the pro-slavery position was so outspoken and blatant, it’s a bit of a culture shock.
Yeah, it is stomach-churning to us folks with a modern colour-blind sensitivity. It is hard to believe that folks believed that sort of thing.
> Economic incentives are perverse
Not just that, cultural and partisan factors. We see an echo of that sort of thing with the current lunatic rage against facemasks: it makes absolutely no sense to argue against them, yet … people do. The crazier they are the louder they are. Prior to secession, pro- and anti-slavery advocates eventually lost all respect for one another and lost the ability to compromise. Slaveholders thought that abolitionists literally wanted to see them murdered in their beds (cf. the Haitian Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Pottawatomie massacre, Harper's Ferry), and abolitionists had an equally low opinion.
Opinions polarised and ossified. The extremists got more and more vocal, and eventually there was no middle ground. And then everything dissolved into a cataclysm of violence.
I’m not convinced that everyone who displays a Confederate flag is doing so out of hate (despite the history behind the symbol). It seems classifying it as a hate symbol and banning it only gives it more power as a hate symbol, and will also upset plenty of non-raciest southerners in the process.
Most likely the primary reason why anyone would use the Confederate flag in Forza is to recreate the General Lee. There's probably General Lee replicas and scale models all over the world with not that much regards to the flag on the roof.
For those who are curious about the confederate flag - that is displayed, that isn't the confederate flag. It's the Battle flag. I know everyone wants the confederate flag removed but that isn't the confederate flag which is being removed.
While it's emotionally pleasing to see racists being kicked out of online platforms, another side of me feels wary of these tactics.
For starters, being deplatformed from major online players today would have serious consequences. Although it's true that these platforms are "private property," the entire society has become too reliant on them to be seen that way. I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's technically private property. If platforms want to censor, there should be at least more oversight than what we have today.
Another problem with censorship is that it's not always about being right or wrong. A lot of the time, it's more about power or popularity. Thankfully, many corporations today are in favor of diversity and inclusivity, at least on the surface. However, things do change, and it's not always for the better. There are worrying trends of growing authoritarianism worldwide, and I think now is a good time to consider how censorship could be used against us.
Finally, racists are racists and no amount of censorship won't change what they are. I think Snowden had a point when he said that the answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.
I don't think it's a good faith claim that everyone using one of the banned symbols is a racist
1. The current flag of Japan is based off of one of the banned symbols
2. Probably the most famous car in pop culture uses one of the banned symbols. Microsoft has gone as far as banning parodies of the General Lee that have none of the controversial symbols[0]
If the flag of imperial Japan was banned due to its association with imperialism and colonialism [1], should the USA flag still be allowed[2]? IMO, the banning of the US flag would be excessive, but is also necessary if the rule is implemented in a fair fashion against all imperialist nations.
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.
Not sure how you can argue that the purpose of master-slave or blacklist-whitelist terminology is to identify with a movement based on hate. Unlike the confederate flag, it was never a good bet that people using those words are racist.
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.
> Its only purpose (and continued purpose) is to identify with a movement founded solely on the basis of hate.
If you care about intent:
I would guess a large cohort of confederate battle flags in race car games are on orange dodge chargers, with the intent of looking like the car on a show centering around the escapades of cousins trying to fight the corrupt county sheriff and county commissioner.
I don't know the intent behind putting it on the car in the show; but the intent of putting it on a car that looks like the car in the show is to identify with the show.
Anybody doing that today is at least a little insensitive and clueless, but that doesn't mean their intent was to actually identify with the confederacy (although, I guess there probably are some people who do intend such affiliation).
A lot of these are General Lee dukes of hazard recreations. I wouldn't immediately assume that everyone with the livery was a racist, more people collecting historic car livery.
I want all controversial views to be deplatformed, because I don't see any other way that people will care enough about centralization to actually change.
Thank you for sharing. I didn't know this term even existed.
for others like me:
> In political and social theory, accelerationism is the idea that capitalism, or particular processes that historically characterised capitalism, should be accelerated instead of overcome in order to generate radical social change. "Accelerationism" may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the intensification of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately lead to its collapse.
I beg to differ. Without this pandemic and current US president the odds of us seeing the BLM movement would be nil considering the consistently slow burn that we've had over the past decades.
Now that the swing has been so great in one direction more people will vote and more people will care. I don't like it but that's how it's working. People who are tired and apathetic lack the impetus to enact meaningful change.
It goes both ways. There are just as many people who consider BLM to be an anarcho-marxist movement who hate white people. This is why accelerationism is bad, because it can radicalise literally everyone.
I didn't say I was going to help it along; I do see the companies trending in that direction already and I would prefer that if they are going to go in that direction anyways they do it quickly enough for people to take notice.
Also, I think I would point out passive resistance movements as an example for something like accelerationism working; it takes subtle mostly private acts of injustice and provokes those people to make unsubtle public acts.
I assume Microsoft never allowed, say, swastikas. There's no reasonable expectation that you are able to spread racist propaganda in a car racing game (or for that matter in an actual car race; I think those tend to have very strict rules around decoration).
I can see an _argument_ that Twitter, say, should be forced to pander to racists. I don't buy that argument, mind you, but I can at least see the thought process. I can't see any reason that imaginary car livery should have to, though.
That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika.
And before you say "come on, swastikas are pretty extreme", remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign.
> That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika.
This seems semantic. For example, cheating is banned in many games, and if you cheat, you get banned. Banning cheating and cheaters is effectively the same thing.
People who are paralyzed and unable to speak aren't spreading hate in video games, so it's pretty pointless to hold them up as a counterexample. I know my grandparents probably have a lot of racist thoughts but unless they're unloading them at the Thanksgiving dinner table I'm not telling my grandmother to shut her mouth.
This is not the same thing at all. Banning swastikas would mean resetting the decals of a car with swastikas, not preventing the account from using the game license they paid for. Banning cheating means you ban the account of the person who cheated.
It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine".
My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests.
People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?
But you see the issue with that thought process right? You can imbue political meaning on anything that way, and ban arbitrary things. What if there is a (perhaps bogus) polemic, and your favorite singer is singled out as a racist/misogynist/communist/whatever, and the Bad People start blasting his songs at rallies? Are you supposed to stop listening to your favourite songs.
Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.
Your conclusion here is that these people were all making this sign for non-nefarious meanings.
On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.
>On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner.
Based on what? If you go looking for things with a specific interpretation in mind you're going to find a lot of it even in places that it wasn't meant that way. The adage about malice and incompetence comes to mind.
Based on the fact that a group of eight or so people with Confederate flags, tattoos and armed and wearing body armor went out of their way to pose, in front of a BLM protest, all making that sign.
"wasn't meant that way" - you're going have to try harder than that. Saying "oh, they meant nothing inflammatory, even though they're the group (3%ers) who are most associated with the nefarious intent and are absolutely aware of it's purported meaning" is wilfully disingenuous.
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.
That won't happen; context matters. If you're posing with the confederate flag and a bunch of guns during a BLM protest, and flashing the OK hand symbol, it's going to be taken very differently from just using that same gesture to a friend in a random grocery store or something.
I remember from back when I picked up Norwegian litterature, a short story or essay or something that ended with something along the lines of: "cucumbers is the only thing that hasn't been deemed unhealthy yet. Hurry up and eat cucumbers while they are still healthy!"
If that's what you got out of this, I'm not sure what to say.
I even used the SCUBA shop, which is next door, for reference.
No-one that I've seen has advocated that the OK sign be abandoned for divers. I've been mid mouthful at a restaurant when a server has asked how my food is and I've made this sign and not been called a racist.
However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."
A bloke (and a less privileged bloke at that, 75% non white according to himself) was recently fired because someone had shot a photo of him resting his hand out the window of a company truck in what lpoked line an OK hand.
It was discussed here a few days ago. Stop firing the innocent or something, from the Atlantic.
oh, come on. "resting his hand ... what looked like" ???
Wasn't the story that people in another car taunted him and urged him to make the symbol, and they recorded it when he did? He may have not known what the meaning was (I believe that is what he claimed) but that is an entirely different defense to make than "I wasn't doing it, it just looked a bit like it".
Point is it seems he did it after they kept following him and trying to get him to do it, it seems the guys in the other car even did it first to try to get him to mimic it.
And that is before we talk about the problem with firing someone over this in the first place.
Context is important.
I have had to tell my kids more than once that when an elderly person use their middle finger to point at something it isn't offensive because they grew up in a time when it didn't matter. That elderly person sure doesn't mean "F* you" as they are pointing their middle finger horizontally towards something while saying "look there".
In fact I think we all do something every single day that would be considered offensive by someone at some point.
The person who took the video went to significant effort to ruin Emmanuel Cafferty’s life and it is a great shame that he has suffered no consequences from doing so.
>NBC 7 spoke to the man who originally posted the picture on Twitter. He has since deleted his account and said he may have gotten "spun up" about the interaction and misinterpreted it. He says he never intended for Cafferty to lose his job.
but things can change to make the OK sign tabu too, can't they?
We are saying that if you use a potentially racist sign (hand OK) in real life it's not a big deal, since you're not using it in conjunction with other racist stuff.
At the same time you cannot use another potentially racist sign (the confederate flag), even if you were just trying to make a videogame version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and are not trying to associate it with white supremacists.
I mean, I assume the confederare flag was not too problematic at some point, but now it is, so likely the OK sign will become problematic too.
Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!
> Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!
MonkaS dude.
Pepe is fine, even the group that classified it as a hate symbol weren't referring to general usage.
One group of people I watch on Twitch use it all the time in the way it's meant to be used. As a very expressive cartoon frog that can convey emotions extremely succinctly.
And before you assume they're all closet neo-nazis: this group includes members who stopped streaming for about a month after Trump was elected, who frequently talk about eating the rich, and most recently they just ran a charity drive across multiple channels to raise money for BLM.
Context is key here. Lookup racist pepe images, and compare them to a picture of a sad/happy/etc cartoon frog. You won't have much difficulty telling the difference.
So all racists have to do is adopt something as a “inside” symbol, then publicly advertise its “real” meaning, and everyone rushes to avoid it no matter how common it is.
I could see white supremecists doing this for fun.
Amusingly, given the starting point for this discussion, what you've described part of how the "OK" sign became associated with racism. In 2017, someone on 4chan's /pol/ board suggested "Operation O-KKK": flood Twitter etc with warnings about the supposedly racist meaning of the "OK" gesture. The initial target of the hoax was the regular "are you all right?" sign, but the inverted "circle game" version came under fire as well. Later, after the hoax had run its course, those who are wont to "own the libs" used it ironically as a joke. Time passes, only the most dedicated continue to use it, and its meaning becomes less a farce and more a serious signal.
(There is a similar, earlier sign used by a milita group called the "Three Percenters", but that was not the source of the spread. They are an extreme libertarian group, not a white supremacy one. Though one can imagine some overlap. Their hand sign became so closely associated with white supremacy partially because of the 4chan hoax.)
>However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."
yeah, but that's the story required for your credulity.
another 'reasonable person' with an axe to grind could have a much more minimal story required for credulity, say someone resting their hand outside the window of their car, tweet the photo with a license plate, and ruin someones life.
my meaning : don't expect your reasonable demeanor is going to be the same as some other random bystanders' 'reasonable demeanor'.
I understood your underlying point immediately. There's no shortage of people actively seeking to be offended by something. Add an out of context image grab and a clickbait title and you can be the next viral enemy of the internet in a few hours.
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 Facebook where she can be seen pulling her shirt down by pinching the bottom of it between her thumb and pointer finger, inadvertently making the "ok" symbol. 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 and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.
> My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.
Well, the hunt began when your wife made a kid run laps because he made an OK sign on his leg because he thought that was a 'cool' thing to do comparable to giving the person in front of you 'rabbit ears' by making a V-sign behind their head, not when that kid's mother started social media dumpster diving for 'evidence' to use against your wife. The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.
In Dutch there is a saying which applies to this; "Wat gij niet wilt dat u geschiedt, doet dat ook een ander niet", it translates to "Do not do unto others what you do not want to have done upon yourself".
> The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.
I don't get this - it was clearly a summary of events. The only detail you really have to go on is "after". How you can assume all of this somehow went down without any talking-to or explanation is beyond me. Even so, the admin would probably have said the same at the time.
I honestly don't know what the 'ok symbol' is in relation to racism/whatever. In my country I don't think it is a thing and I stopped following silly things on the internet. BUT even if it is a racist symbol/white supremacy/whatever, your wife is still in the wrong. (I am assuming the symbol is not illegal)
Your wife punished a kid for making a symbol she disagrees with, heck, you could even say by making a political statement. If that happened to my kid I would probably go after you as well (not in social media, but with a formal complain to the school to get you punished).
If he wore a MAGA hat would she made him run laps? What about a BLM tshirt? Rainbow pin?
It is not her job to punish someone she disagrees with. She can talk with him and explain what the symbol means and let the kid make his own conclusion, but she can't, and shouldn't punish a kid for disagreeing with him. (which I think is the reason we are now in this place in the world, where you either agree with everything I defend or you are a racist/fascist, or if you are from the other side, you are a communist hippie skyflower)
In the US, showing the ok symbol, usually upside down, is a kid's game. If an American child shows that to you below their waist, and you witness it, then they have 'earned' the right to punch your shoulder. That kid probably punched his whole class.
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.
Note that all symbols are their meaning are made up. To say "this gesture is a symbol of X" is to say "people made up that this gesture is a symbol of X."
It's a really odd social phenomenon. It's one thing to say "We don't like X and find it in poor taste. Please don't do that"
I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside. It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it. I can look at your shoe or color of your shirt and conclude that you are a bad person inside.
I don't find that to be especially rational, but what is one to do?
Read about the Bloods and Crips in the '80's, '90's. Schools were banning wearing red and blue because those gangs had hijacked those two colors. Anyone not in those gangs would take care to not wear anything containing those colors.
The op is not wrong for supposing it's possible for someone to be targeted due to wearing "shoe or shirt color".
We're really just talking about deliberate communication here, and like with all communication, context is important. In general, the color of someone's clothes isn't communicating much, but it might be at a sporting event.
If you're flashing an "OK" sign in clear view, I would understand that to mean things are okay. If you're flashing the sign below the waist so very few people would notice, I would understand that to mean "I'm giving this sign to very few people and only those in that community would understand what I'm saying".
I suppose that’s pretty reasonable, but from what I have seen causing trouble from people, I really don’t believe that your view is shared by the majority of people causing the outlast against these symbols. I think either already, or in the near future, when someone makes an innocuous OK symbol, it will simply be interpreted as a symbol they are an even worse and more blatant racist, how dare they.
Generally, flashing that sign below the waist is a juvenile game where if one's friend sees the sign, one is entitled to punch them in the genitals (or something to that effect). That would be my first assumption before any kind of racism.
I have a pet theory that this resonates with people that enjoy the simplicity of the puritanical thought patterns and approaches being taken by the (far?) left. Unsurprisingly it fits the terse, inflammatory nature of twitter to the T. I cannot relate with it.
I think the political side isn't even important. A lot of the behavioral patterns we see in the social justice left is what we saw with the religious right a few decades ago. I'd say it's more about adopting popular values from people around you without understanding why these values are important. It's very much like religion in this sense.
This is also a difficult distinction to draw these days because white supremacist groups specifically choose coded symbols in order to publicly display their allegiance while maintaining plausible deniability. I think it's tricky to say anyone who makes the "OK" symbol is a racist because there's a long-standing meaning to that symbol that isn't racist, but on some level the same can be said of the numbers "14" or "88" which are more clearly tied to white supremacy. White supremacists count on the fact that, on the surface, no reasonable person can say that using these symbols makes you a racist. Because this is an explicit strategy to grow their numbers while keeping "normies" in the dark, I think it's important to view things like this in that context. Is it possible someone did something innocent and accidentally used a covert symbol of racism? Absolutely. But when you see repetitive uses of those symbols or a person has a long backlog of questionable actions and comments, at some point you have to draw a line.
> It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine".
Absolutely. But the corollary is that every time someone claims that something (a flag, a gesture, a tradition) is racist, then it actually transforms it into something racist. Because at that point you're forced to abandon it or consciously make a statement that you don't care about being considered racist.
If next year someone comes up saying that Santa Claus is racist, then dressing as Santa Claus becomes a statement, that you want it or not. This is a huge power that is easily abused.
> It is from these Minutemen where the 3% name originated. It is a rough estimate that only 3% of the colonists were actively fighting in the field against British forces at any given time.
> "That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika."
If you don't ban the person displaying the swastika, how can you possibly enforce banning swastikas? There must be a consequence for displaying the offending symbol, otherwise the rule is toothless.
You remove the swastika, and the person just replaces it. What then? Just keep removing it and hoping the Nazi/edgelord/'troll' will get tired of replacing the swastika? Trying to win a battle of attrition with a bad-faith actor is not an effective way to enforce rules.
> "remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign."
"Remember when 4chan 'trolls' said the OK hand sign was a white power sign and then white supremacists started using the OK hand sign as a white power sign?" --- There, I fixed it for you.
That seems like a lot of effort to address the symptoms, not the disease. The root issue is the user. Get rid of the user and you don't have to worry about all these half-measures.
Depends who you ask. Some might say toxic expressions. Others might say people who declaim toxic expressions. Clearly MS has the latter goal in mind.
I can imagine a very reasonable argument for this. Someone who puts a Confederate flag on their car seems highly likely to engage in other toxic behaviors. Just like someone who calls someone a nigger once is likely to do it again. So we use the behaviors as a signal of underlying tendency. We don't want people who have this tendency on the platform because they will tend to make life worse for other users, and the loss of their business hurts us less than we gain from other people feeling more comfortable. Therefore we ban them.
Some may say it’s not a significant problem and it’s cheaper for MS to make a PR statement about doing something than spending effort in moderation software changes.
This explanation really creeps me out, if major corps can just do about anything, based on any arbitrary rule ie. RND() or even own biases and legal discrimination.
On the other hand, too many on gaming platforms are engaging in clearly racist behaviour, ie. choosing offensive nicks, spamming chat, and need correction.
I'm sorry it creeps you out, but as a general rule company managers are free to do what they please with their company, as long as it is not illegal. Banning racists isn't illegal so ...
The comment provided a list removing more and more capabilities from the game. That's exactly what a gradual process of banning someone would be. Sure, you can give them time to correct their behavior, but eventually you might have to ban them.
The other capabilities would only be removed if they broke other rules. That's not a gradual process toward banning. That's a completely unrelated disciplinary measure.
So basically, if someone murders another person we should ban them from murdering people but not put them in jail. They should only go to jail if they commit multiple unrelated crimes.
>if someone murders another person we should ban them from murdering people but not put them in jail.
If conflating the act of violently taking someone's life away irreversibly to displaying an offensive custom skin in a videogame sounds like a reasonable and genuine argument to you, I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince you otherwise.
I agree with the parent comment that restricting customization for the offending users in the game is a reasonable punishment. They can still play the game AND have zero actual possibility of committing the same offense. The desired outcome of the user not using offensive imagery in custom skins is achieved.
When your parents buy you a Hot Wheels set for your 18th birthday, and say, "What are you waiting for? Hit the road, [freehunter]!" you'll be fine. It symbolizes transportation.
When your brother aims down the sights at you in Call of Duty and - gulp - pulls the trigger, you'll necessarily have him sent to jail.
That's okay, though - when you're counting on your fingers and get to three, and... hey.. are your thumb and index kinda.. touching? you'll be right there with him.
So, you are confirming that you believe that the act of displaying the Confederate flag is equivalent to taking away someone's life irreversibly. Displaying that flag is literally exactly the same as a murder in your eyes.
Case closed, I don't think there is much left to say here then.
> The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”
This case seems to involve a white supremacist jerk experiencing road rage, then tricking a Latino guy into making the hand gesture, taking a photo, and then publicly lobbying his employer to fire him. Both the white supremacists and the intolerant and incurious (exclusively white) investigators/managers at the man’s company end up looking horrible.
But this doesn’t seem too relevant to the confederate flags in video games case.
Not everyone knows that white supremacist internet trolls have appropriated the OK hand gesture, but everyone living in the US understands that the confederate battle flag and other confederate symbols represent slavery, white supremacism, and treason.
Yeah, it's terrible that people can be fired for literally no reason in this country. This wouldn't have happened in a country that has any semblance of workers' rights.
"Literally no reason" ?? He was recorded flashing a white power symbol while driving a (presumably liveried) company truck.
Now I think, after hearing his story, that a public apology and explanation would have been enough. But he brought the company into disrepute. Firing him seems to be a valid option they could take. I personally think that raising awareness with a public apology and a statement from the company would have been better for everyone, but so often, a company's first response is to cover their ass. Or maybe they didn't believe him, while the reporter did? I wasn't there and can never know.
You're going to tell me this one guy "brought the company into disrepute" to a point that warranted firing him, when Equifax can expose the financial history of almost every American adult, and nobody gives a shit anymore? The guy worked for the power company. What are people gonna do, stop paying their electric bills? Buy electricity and gas from another supplier?
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.
That's a great reason to pick an innocuous symbol for this purpose. We don't reasonably expect people to stop using the gesture. But when the symbol does attract unjust backlash, it makes "the libs" look foolish and foam-mouthed because of the exceedingly few if any instances where the gesture has been used as a genuine symbol of white nationalism. It's the perfect troll.
I don't think there was a moral panic. Just a reaction. Slurs come from somewhere. The N-word didn't just spontaneously appear in every one's dictionary the night after it was first used. What if we could have stopped the N-word when the 4chans of 1400 started using it?
This is assuming that the internal policy is "we ban any symbol thought to be racist", vs. ""we ban symbols clearly established over years to be racist".
That is, swastikas and the confederate flag have an established history of their meaning, whereas the 4chan sign does not.
Which is something I think deserves a bit of context. It had been the Finnish air force's official insignia since 1918, so it was unrelated to the German Nazi Party, although of course that association was inevitable once they seized power.
Similarly, the stone elephant holding the gate building to the old Carlsberg grounds in Copenhagen bear huge swastikas on their sides, since they were erected in 1901:
I think that was explained quite well in the article, and while the symbol has had a long history I think it is fair to say that these days the majority of people would see the symbol and think "Nazi".
Removing it feels like a reasonable thing to do, though I'd probably draw the line at chisel it off old-buildings, etc.
I thought it was a better meme personally when Malcolm in the middle made it so everyone would do the ok sign below their waist and if you looked, you got a punch in the shoulder.
That definitely went on for a couple years when I was a kid, to the point where everyone got really sick of those few people that didn't get when it stopped being funny.
That's the thing though, all it takes is one meme to take off to change the meaning of a symbol and you can't really predict what or how.
The entire Deaf community also has a beef with those who may object to certain signs. We're about inclusivity without any connotations associated with each sign because they are a communication tools. (Same for SCUBA divers and SEAL teams).
The faux outrage can step aside while we sign to each other in relative peace and comfort.
But what happens if hearing people started seeing our signs and get offended and (gasp) started shooting at us; oh wait, that has happened already and all too often.
For that, get off of us. Signs are a communication tool, even the offensive FUCK YOU ones.
The Nazi flag is inarguably racist propaganda. The Confederate flag, however, has for decades been a symbol of southern pride for many people. I read somewhere recently that over 40% see it as a symbol of heritage more than racism.
It's also not the flag of the Confederacy (as in the nation). No one uses that. What everyone uses is the Confederate Battle Flag, which is specifically the flag of the army of secessionists. There's no rational argument that it represents Southern culture.
> Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban.
That's exactly what Georgia did. In 1956 they added the Confederate Battle Flag to their state flag in support of white supremacy and segregation, and in 2003 switched it for the Confederate Stars and Bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
Here's a fun quote from the article about the design of the second flag
>On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as "The White Man's Flag."[6] In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
I see lots of people on the internet making the 4 year argument, and I have to admit it's a snappy quip, but I don't think the point is made entirely in good faith. I really do see it being flown as a symbol of rural and/or southern pride that is informed by, but largely disconnected from, the civil war other than as a historical symbol that broadly represents an opposition between rural folk and urbanites.
I mean it's definitely being flown by racists and edgy teenagers and I think there's a strong case to be made that a different design is warranted since the heritage people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle. But I think it's important to meet the heritage people where they are and start from there.
The Nazi flag was in much longer actual use than the Confederate flags. If anything, the Nazi flag has a more legitimate "heritage" defense than the Confederate one.
But are you counting the years the Confederate flag has spent after being adopted?
I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride.
What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and being drowned out by racists. And the public discussion on the matter is an absolute shitshow because those people see the desire to ban the Confederate flag as a racist symbol as an attack on Southern culture/pride. Worse! We have people in this fight who actually are doing that because there is a very real anti-rural anti-Southern sentiment that exists in the US. And on the other side we have racists who are hiding behind Southern pride in an attempt to keep their symbol. Ugh.
So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
Nothing could be further from the truth. It first started as a battle flag during the Civil War. Then in 1948 the Dixiecrats reintroduced it as a symbol of their opposition to integration and the civil rights movement.
If it's being used now by people intending it to represent regional pride who are simply unaware of its history (which I find unlikely, but a lot of people are claiming that), then all it should take to convince them to take down their flags is to share that history with them.
The Confederates in the civil war were fighting to own black people as slaves.
As a symbol for part of the Confederate army, it's still racist even in its first use. Some of the people fighting might have been conscripted against their will, but the symbol itself is still one that promoted slavery of black people
> So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
That pretty much sums up most modern sociopolitical discouse right there.
I think you're missing the angle the parents bringing to the table:
The flag was flown as the symbol of the actual Confederacy for a short time sure, because the Confederacy itself was short lived. But it's been flown as a symbol of southern pride for a long time since then.
And traditions need only span one's own lifetime to be meaningful.
Perhaps, but that’s not my experience. I’ve spent a lot of time in the south and met many people who had the flag on stuff, I knew them quite well and didn’t think they were dog whistling.
The flag, as far as I understood it, was about being a rebel, “don’t tell me what to do” anti-authority.
Maybe my experience is quite different from yours. I never saw a klan rally or anything like that.
I did only buy a “git ‘er done” lighter from a gas station for its redneck kitsch. I didn’t intend to be a racist signal. Comically it’s stuck somewhere and I suspect should my grandkids ever find it in my estate it will be revered as some nazi memorabilia, incorrectly based on my intent.
If it's the case that some people are flying that flag who genuinely do not know the recent history of it (it was introduced in the late 1940s by the Dixiecrat party to symbolize their opposition to integration and the civil rights movement), then informing them of that history would surely cause them to immediately take it down.
One could even argue that it's at best negligent to fly a flag without knowing the most basic history of its symbolism, but if that's really what's going on, then surely it wouldn't be hard to educate all these people who are unintentionally flying the flag.
This ignores that the "Confederate flag" isn't even the Confederate flag, it's the Virginia specific one.
The point it became a "southern symbol" is a previous set of edgy teenagers and racists who flew it while legislating against black people and trying to stop civil rights.
The point of that iconography is to be a racist dogwhistle, and it's been a very successful one over the past hundred years
I'm sure if you did a poll in Germany you'd find a non-zero percentage of people who'd answer something similar RE the Nazi flag, with the right wording. Nothing like 40%; that particular variety of lost-cause-ism isn't as common as the confederate stuff in the US, but, there are certainly people who would claim that it was something more benign than it is generally perceived.
That's why it's illegal in Germany in the first place; if there was universal acceptance that it was an obscenity there wouldn't be much purpose in banning it.
Another issue, of course, is that teaching about the US civil war, and general cultural treatment of it, has been, and in some cases still is, far more dishonest than teaching about World War 2 in Germany. Note that in this thread there are people questioning whether it was about slavery. The initiators on the confederate side would not have questioned that, they could hardly have been more clear that it was. There's a huge amount of mainstream cultural baggage glorifying the confederacy and important confederate figures in a way that there isn't about the Nazis (with the possible exception of some rather creepy Rommel apologia that shows up sometime).
My point is that what is considered "racist propaganda" is extremely context sensitive. Germany banned the Nazi flag to avoid the exact ambiguity that has occurred in our country, but we need to accept that this ambiguity has occurred here in the States. Most people who use the flag don't use it to be racist. That changes the situation when compared to Germany.
And I'm sure some Germans felt (and perhaps even still feel) that the nazi flag is a symbol of German pride? The pride that they feel for that part of their heritage is still unmistakably antisemitic and hate-filled. I would argue that the number of Germans who feel that way is so much less than the number of southerners who feel that way only because of just how strong and universally nazism was rolled back. In the south after the Civil War, things stayed far more similar to how they had been pre- and mid-war
Reminder that the Confederate battle flag was in use for less than five years and solely as an icon of a conflict that was very much about the (rather racist) keeping of chattel slaves.
Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.
Have you never been to a southern state? It's been flown ever since the war and has been detached from the war and attached to southern identity. It's part of the culture here.
I understand the desire, but know that there are real-world reprocussions to such hamfisted attempts to leverage power, particularly before an election. Cultural issues and conflicts were a big part of why the 2016 presidential elections turned out the way they did.
And why did it just so happen to be chosen as a symbol by a short-lived but prominent segregationist political party in 1948 in response to the civil rights movement?
They didn't. They chose the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia because of widespread admiration of Lee, who, while no abolitionist, called slavery a political and moral evil; who insisted on reconciliation after the war and rejected Lost Cause mythology; and who called upon Southerners to vow loyalty to the United States.
There's a reason they chose Lee's flag and not a CSA flag associated directly with a rabid slaver like Jefferson Davis. Indeed, the Army of Northern Virginia flag used to be a symbol of progressive racial integration, at a time when poor white southern migrant workers and poor African Americans found common cause against unfair wages and unsafe working conditions.
History is nuanced. Insisting that your view of what a symbol means should control others is toxic and Orwellian. Our society should be better than that.
It is the flag flown by an armed group that killed soldiers in the United States Army, is it not? [1] This fact gets lost in the debate. No American should fly the flag of any group that targeted and killed members of the United States Armed Forces.
How can someone be "defending" themselves when they initiated hostilities? [1]
Unilateral succession is illegal. Those flying the confederate flag were not defending themselves, they were committing treason. Our Union is an indestructible one. It was safeguarded then by the U.S. Army who will continue to safeguard it as long as America endures.
It feels me with great sadness to think of the blood that was spilled, but at the end of the day Americans who take up arms against the U.S. Army are criminals and traitors. No American should fly the flag of those who have killed our soldiers.
> Following the declaration of secession by South Carolina on December 20, 1860, its authorities demanded that the U.S. Army abandon its facilities in Charleston Harbor. On December 26, Major Robert Anderson of the U.S. Army surreptitiously moved his small command from the vulnerable Fort Moultrie on Sullivan's Island to Fort Sumter, a substantial fortress built on an island controlling the entrance of Charleston Harbor. An attempt by U.S. President James Buchanan to reinforce and resupply Anderson using the unarmed merchant ship Star of the West failed when it was fired upon by shore batteries on January 9, 1861. South Carolina authorities then seized all Federal property in the Charleston area except for Fort Sumter.
To summarize:
1) South Carolina secedes.
2) South Carolina demands the Union remove its troops from their soil.
3) The Union refuses, garrisons a fortress on foreign soil, and attempts to resupply said garrison.
4) South Carolina offers an ultimatum--remove your soldiers or we will attack.
5) The union refuses to remove their troops from foreign soil.
6) South Carolina's militia attacks Ft. Sumter.
South Carolina's militia fired the first shots, but I'm not sure how you can say that they 'Initiated hostilities'. Occupying foreign soil has always been considered an act of war.
History is written by the victors, I suppose.
Your entire premise is built on a faulty foundation-- step 1 in your summary is an illegal act and treason. At the time of succession they were firmly aware the United States considered it as such. After the war, Texas v. White is the SCOTUS case that enshrined this position: unilateral secession is illegal.
After seceding those who were illegally occupying the land were the secessionists themselves. You cannot unilaterally seceded from the Union. Hundreds of thousands of my countrymen died in the Civil War to establish this principle; it is the law of the land and to imply otherwise is to dishonor their sacrifice.
No unilateral secession, period. That is what 350,000+ U.S. military personnel died for. If you believe it was legal for those folks to secede I suggest you renounce your U.S. citizenship and leave.
People either have the right to self-govern, or they don't. If you think the right of a population to self-govern is subject to veto by another population, you don't actually believe in a right to self-govern.
That's just a bunch of words, a grab-bag of facts, and it lacks a philosophical or moral foundation connecting it together. However, it would satisfy an automated grading system.
An actual moral reason not to fly the confederate flag on your home or your video game automobile would be because many black people interpret it as a racist symbol, and they might feel unloved and alienated.
A philosophical reason would be if you disagree with the sectionalist politics of it. That's why many groups opposed the introduction of the symbol into state flags in the past. That sounds more aligned with your reasons, but is a different reason. The act of flying Italian, German, Mexican, or British flags to celebrate one's ethnic heritage seems quite different than that of flying the confederate flag.
The racism aspect has been well covered elsewhere. In addition to this, it is the battle flag of an illegal militia who killed U.S. soldiers. Opposing this clearly has an extremely strong moral foundation.
Your arguments are transparently shallow, poorly thought out, and profoundly un-American. If my arguments would satisfy an automated grading system, yours would fail immediately upon parsing. I see no value in continuing a conversation with someone who claims there is no moral foundation in opposing the killing of U.S. troops by illegal insurgents. Feel free to have the last word here on this message board; in the real world the last word was the surrender of the Confederacy.
People keep throwing around words like "heritage", "southern identity" and "culture", but are most often very hard pressed indeed to explain what exactly is the identity or culture that is best represented by what's at the very least a flag of sedition/treason (even if we leave out the racist overtones).
I mean, it's not like I'm wholly unsympathetic to failed secessionist states and their symbols/paraphernalia. People still use the flag of Biafra where I'm from, after all. But those that do are self-aware enough to acknowledge/be upfront about the values they hold and the message they pass when they use it (it certainly helps that Biafra attempted to secede in response to ethnic tensions/discrimination, not because it wanted amongst other things the right to keep slaves).
People are hard pressed to explain what is the identity or culture best represented by what's a flag of sedition/treason
It's just a symbol of identity or culture, like most flags. There's a massive cultural difference between the rural south and the highly populated coastal cities. The flag to many is a symbol of that difference, and has many of the psychological undertones that makes the "don't tread on me" flag popular, mostly a willingness to push back against external influences.
There are a lot of people in the South who do not show or like the Confederate flag, even in rural areas.
And there are a lot of people outside the South who do show and like the Confederate flag.
So while I agree that it's a symbol of an identity and culture, I don't think it's a geographic regional identity and culture.
I think you're arguing in good faith based on your own experience, but I would gently suggest this is an opportunity to consider a wider variety of data and perspectives.
The point is that a rebel fighting for slavery doesn’t have to be the defining identity of southerners. The Civil War is a sliver of time in history experienced by a specific branch of someone’s ancestry (if even that).
Have you never been to rural NY? The Confederate flag flies all over the place there, and I rather suspect that very few of those flying it are doing so because of Southern heritage.
> Have you never been to rural NY? The Confederate flag flies all over the place there
Many times, and I can earnestly say I've never seen that. Nor in rural Pennsylvania for that matter, which I would otherwise characterize as slightly less sophisticated than NY. Are there racists in that region? Certainly. But I can't recall ever seeing somebody in those states flying the confederate flag.
I'm sure it's happened before, I'm sure you can find me local news reporting on instances of it. But it's definitely not a common sight.
Counter anecdote: I’ve spent 20 years around PA and I’ve seen it plenty of times throughout the state. Just recently I saw a set of half confederate half American flags near the Water Gap, which was new for me. It’s uncommon in most of PA but it’s pretty common to see handful of Confederate bumper stickers on a drive across the state.
I'm from Michigan, the state that gave the Union General Custer and when asked to give one regiment actually supplied seven regiments of men to fight against the CSA. And the Confederate battle flag flies everywhere around the state. It's an absolute travesty of history and it's downright embarrassing.
I've seen it in New York, in Pennsylvania, and, memorably, once in northern Ohio, while doing a canvass --- one I wish I'd seen before I knocked on the door and got chased off the property.
Canvasing in Ohio is a blast. I did it once and the field office was based out of a recently shuttered gambling den. Getting yelled at on someone's front porch is unfiltered democracy!
I've seen it in Europe too and those guys definitely couldn't even name one southern state. They did find something about the symbolism very appealing though. Something about some group of humans being superior to others, I can't recall exactly.
In Europe it's used by hard rock fans as a merchandising trope with the American "route 66" myth and so on, we don't relate it to racism but to guys in bikes listening to Motorhead.
Southerner here. The South is a very diverse place with a sizable African-American population.
Perhaps I'm just missing all the African-Americans who proudly fly the Confederate battle flag, but my perception is the flag is used by a small subset of white southerners as an anti-virtue-signaling device.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag flown in service of keeping their ancestors enslaved, or did you mean that the flag had attached to a particular subset of Southern identity? Please expand, I'm curious.
The fact that it isn't a symbol of southern heritage for everyone doesn't mean it's not a southern symbol for many.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag...?
No, and nothing in my comments suggested that. It makes sense that they wouldn't since their relatives probably didn't after the war. For many people, their relatives did identify with the flag. It probably started as something racist by the survivors of the war, but morphed into what it is today, something that isn't considered racist by most around where I live. Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
> The fact that it isn't a symbol of southern heritage for everyone doesn't mean it's not a southern symbol for many.
Could that be because there isn't just one type of "southern heritage?" Do you really want to equate the southern heritage of black people in the south with those who fly the Confederate battle flag?
If you search at images.google.com for "black people confederate flag" without quotes, you will see black people who support the confederate flag. Strangely, that is practically all that is shown for pages. I don't know what all of their reasons are, but they exist and those people have just as much of a right to their beliefs as others have. They are people with their own heritage. One heritage is that some people fought for freedom and the ability to secede, not for slavery.
> It probably started as something racist by the survivors of the war, but morphed into what it is today, something that isn't considered racist by most around where I live.
I am saying this as gently as possible: the majority of bigots don't walk around thinking or saying "Wow I sure am a bigot!". They mostly just think of themselves as normal people with normal values.
> Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
There is a team in the NFL that is named a literal slur against indigenous Americans. I am not quite sure where one would get the idea that the US sports industry is a bastion of sensitivity.
> I am saying this as gently as possible: the majority of bigots don't walk around thinking or saying "Wow I sure am a bigot!". They mostly just think of themselves as normal people with normal values.
This argument tends to make me agree with the southerners who want a symbol of their own.
Q: What do you get when a San Jose doctor has a Google engineer over to dinner?
A: Lively conversation about how stupid everyone is in Alabama.
I'm not making that up. Here's the conversation piece (a piece of paper) a family friend brought over for dinner with my parents:
M R DOGS
A R NOT
O S A R
C M P
L I B
M R DOGS
As he delighted in explaining to everyone, this is the "Alabama literacy test". You're meant to read it as follows:
'em are dogs
'ey are not
oh [y]es 'ey are
see 'em pee?
[w]ell I be!
'em are dogs!
The southerners responding to this sort of sentiment are doing exactly the same thing Mark Knopfler did in Money for Nothing:
That little faggot with the earring and the make-up
Yeah buddy, that's his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane!
That little faggot he's a millionaire!
The "faggot" in question is of course Mark Knopfler himself, responding to his own haters with an implicit "screw you".
Spend enough time telling a group of people that you hate them and everything about them, and they'll start developing cultural elements specifically oriented around flipping you a middle finger.
(And for what it's worth, it seems like a safe assumption that the use of the confederate battle flag as a symbol of southern culture derives from its use in that role on The Dukes of Hazzard.)
Slavery was also something that wasn't considered bad by most around where you live. Thankfully, people not around where you live disagreed. "Universally" is just a weasel word.
It was started as something racist and still remains incredibly racist to pretty much everyone else, despite doe-eyed claims from southerners who want people to believe that a 5 year long pro-slavery rebellion represents the history and pride of the South.
Exactly. I would probably believe someone who spent many thousands of dollars to own one of the 20-50 existing, authentic Confederate battle flags [0] if they said they kept it as a symbol of "heritage." That's a real, historical artifact, worthy of preservation so future generations can understand what it represented.
I do not believe those who spend a few hundred to have it tattooed on their bodies, or people who buy one for $7.50 from China off Amazon [1] when they say such things, because there's no value in displaying a representation of a thing that's historically represented nothing but hate.
Owning and preserving an authentic flag shows a commitment to history. Displaying a representation of it shows a commitment to hatred.
This is the Lost Cause revisionist history fallacy at work. It is an early analogue of the recent technique used by Pepes, the white power sign, Neo-Nazi '88' and '14' iconography, etc: giving an in-group meaning to an innocent number, phrase or image to give a superficial plausible deniability.
The Confederate flag is even more powerful because people have been convinced it has something to do with Southern (white) culture and Yankee oppression. Maybe they need a new symbol, that isn't intimitely tied to slavery.
It's interesting to watch the votes oscillate. For a little while it plunged into grey obscurity as rascists and Confederate battle flag lovers each savaged with the little down triangle, but alas, not leaving a comment to explain which they were. Then back up, up, to dizzying heights of black text again, and now back down, down to the mediocre 1 point which doesn't do justice to its story.
Southern pride is another way of saying "treason against the U.S." that resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands so that a few people could treat other people as property.
The winner gets to make the rules. The South has had 150+ years to celebrate their treason. It's more than enough time that the winners put that symbol to rest.
“Heritage” in this context is a white supremacist codeword for “the southern states should never have been forced to give up on slavery”. Statues of confederate leaders, incorporation of confederate flags into later state flags, etc. were (and still are) part of a large-scale campaign to promote and defend segregation and racial inequality and injustice, explicitly intended to intimidate and disempower southern blacks.
You can easily find (racist white) people displaying the confederate flag in northern states, but you will be hard pressed to find any black people in the south who feel regional pride toward confederate symbols.
Why not adopt a new symbol of Southern pride? Something with pickup trucks and horses, steers and cowboy hats, peaches and iced tea, guns and saxophones. You know, all the beloved and positive aspects of Southern culture and heritage. It seems very un-American to me to use the flag of a treasonous rebel army that attacked their fellow countrymen.
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 would also bet that the overlap between “people who say it is a symbol of heritage and/or display it” and “people who are not white” is virtually nonexistant.
> “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 virtually non-existent to shame them; this make no sense.
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.
Are they flying it while they protest racism against black people or something? Fly it for defunding the police?
It's got a lot of history being flown specifically to spite black people -- if you want to reclaim that as a non-racist symbol, you'll have to do a lot of work. Otherwise the obvious response is "heritage of what, racism? Why are you proud that your parents tried to keep black people from voting?"
The Swastika is a racist symbol across an entire hemisphere of this planet. The Nazi flag, itself, isn't racist minus the Swastika - in fact, when people want to graphically portray a Nazi analogue without offending people, they usually just use the flag with the Swastika swapped out for something else.
The fact that it isn't racist in, say, China doesn't mean it also isn't racist when spray painted on a synagogue.
I don't believe it is. This is what you wrote, verbatim:
> While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol.
You deliberately distinguished between the Nazi flag and the Swastika, an element incorporated into the Nazi flag, and claimed that between the two, only the flag was racist.
And I'm merely pointing out that in the Western world the only part of the Nazi flag even considered racist is the Swastika.
My original comment was in error. I had meant to write, "While the Nazi flag may believed to be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol." The swastika symbol may exist in Chinese, but the word swastika is from another large country of people.
Symbols are not racist, which is what should obviously be taken away from this.
I'm assuming that swastikas have much more universal unpopularity than the confederacy flag. Heck, in 2020, MS just voted to remove confederate symbol from the state flag. SO I dont think the comparison is all there.
My concern with these sort of deplatforming moves while understandable, is they tend to drive these bigoted ideas underground. So maybe they cant express it publicly but boy, do they find other ways to do it as certain church members' families can attest. I don't have a definite solution but there is something to be said for using informal social pressure (i.e confederate decal dude all of a sudden not finding anyone to play with, because people quit the game as soon as they see the flag) rather than deplatforming.
I don't think "taking underground" is the right metaphor, but it intensifies polarization, and makes these people feel persecuted. It's not that they care about the flag that much for most of them. It's that suddenly, it's not even allowed anymore and they don't agree with that. Frankly, I couldn't care less about the confederate flag, but the thought process here is very relatable.
And then these people vote. People who feel (rightly or wrongly) persecuted tend to lash out, whether it's by breaking statues or electing far-sides candidates.
> it has a relatively recent negative connotation in Europe & US
Seventeen million people died in the Holocaust. That number is larger than the dollar amount that many of the companies on this website raise. That's more people than you'll meet in your entire lifetime, perhaps more than you'll _see_ in your lifetime. This is the population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston put together. Those people were physically destroyed by folks identifying with that symbol.
It's really, really hard to say this symbol doesn't carry hate universally—even if a Buddhist practitioner were to use it—because putting it on your video game car on _a global game_ whose audience is ~100% folks who are well-aware of nazism (and, in fact, people whose histories are tainted by the effects of the Holocaust). But more to the point, the confederate flag _was invented_ to represent hate. It had no established use before the confederacy. Pedantry about whether swastikas are universally racist or not is pointless, because the topic at hand is about a symbol which is universally recognized as one of hate.
The crusades killed around 3 million. Can we ban the cross as well from everywhere? Please?
The Mao era probably around 75 million. Lets ban any symbol related to them (sickle and hammer, red flags, etc).
(ps: I am not in favor of the swastika, just don't like how a symbol can be used for thousands of years, hijacked by some pricks, and now everyone can't use it anymore, and the people that have an emotional connection to it have to censor themselves. Also, isn't the buddhist one reversed from the Nazi one? Mirrored? Which makes it even worse as you are using a similar but not exactly the same symbol and ignorant folks can't spot the difference)
> but boy, do they find other ways to do it as certain church members' families can attest.
Your argument is that, if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people? History indicates otherwise: the US was a lot more tolerant of racism in the past and there was a lot more violence.
> if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people
In your defense, that may be the surface level interpretation of what I said. However, I am not saying that in any way shape or form. Closer to what I'm saying is that, censorship artificially reduces the number of monsters in our polity that we are able to identify. They are prevented from expression so we don't hear or see them and thus have the mistaken belief that more progress has been made when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I want people to be open with their racism/bigotry, so that I know to steer clear.
> I'm assuming that swastikas have much more universal unpopularity than the confederacy flag.
Does the popularity of a racist symbol have any correlation with whether it should be suppressed? Swastikas were a lot more present in the 1940s but that doesn't mean they were less reprehensible.
If a far-right group started using a brand-new symbol to signify their racist ideology, is it suddenly worth waiting for the symbol to pick up steam before prohibiting it? That doesn't make a lot of sense. The people using the symbol are saying "I don't think you should exist" _right now_, not when there is a sufficient number of others rallying around their belief system.
The confederate flag is hundreds of years old. Waiting for "informal social pressure" to kick in is a great way to ignore a problem.
Do you literally want to give the racists power to cherry pick from all of culture to take things that have existed for thousands of years and lock them away behind censorship?
If someone is specifically using the Nazi version of the swastika, then by all means handle it. But if it's the non-Nazi version, then why do people not get to reclaim it?
Is putting a swastika on your Microsoft car truly the way to reclaim a symbol which, in the last century, has been used almost exclusively for hate? No. It's not the venue. There is no room for explanation or context. It's a symbol on a car. If you're going to reclaim a symbol—arguably the symbol MOST APPROPRIATED for hate—indiscriminately regardless of the context, you're either a fool or a troll.
I would say swastikas have much more universal POPULARITY, and that Microsoft or Hitler don't get to define their meaning globally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika
> There's no reasonable expectation that you are able to spread racist propaganda in a car racing game
Merely displaying a flag seems like a pretty generous interpretation of "propaganda". It certainly doesn't fit any definition of which I'm aware.
Perhaps there's an argument for banning such symbols, but don't use hyperbole to try and prove your point, you just undermine the legitimacy of this effort.
Suppose trump took down all the American flags in the whitehouse and replaced them with Russian flag, or if Obama had taken them down and replaced them with the Isis flag.
There's no world in which that would be taken lightly
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.
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 criminalised around the world (such as flags associated with socialism/
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.
> 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 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.
No it's not. Someone who grew up on the Dukes of Hazzard maybe just really loved that car and associates it with great memories of a happy childhood. To call this "being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda" is losing the plot completely.
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.
> I assume Microsoft never allowed, say, swastikas.
Let's replace Microsoft with Amazon. Should Amazon be able to produce "The Man in The High Castle?" Should "The Man In The High Castle" be available to watch? How about merchandise from the show? Would it be OK to have it?
Sure. Amazon should be allowed do that (and of course, there's a lot of context there; if they started putting swastikas, or confederate flags, on the cars in Top Gear there might be more eyebrows raised). It probably shouldn't be _compelled_ to carry all material containing swastikas, though.
Since precision is important: no, there were not swastikas. There was a symbol of an eagle (the Reichsadler) over an 'iron cross' symbol as part of the advertising. You can find that fairly easily by looking at an image search on your favorite search engine.
n.b. the iron cross symbol is still used in Germany for e.g. the roundel of the German Air Force.
I don't doubt that the design would fall afoul of the MS content guidelines as I'm sure perching the Reichsadler on top of the iron cross would be the kind of thing they mean by "contextual clues".
卍 is often used here in Japan for figure in maps meaning temple. I hope western world doesn't kill irrelevant figure.
I generally don't like the thought of cultural appropriation (IMO Anyone should be able to wear kimono) but I feel that forbidding something outside western country by western people is a bad cultural appropriation.
I'm not saying that we should "pander" to racists and let them spread racist propaganda without consequence. That's an extreme take of my expressed views. I'm arguing that having an easy way to censor speech can cut both ways. It's rarely the case that the system works the way we want it to, and there should be more independent oversight for these cases at the very least. It's about being careful about what we wish for.
I also believe that we should be exploring more ways to fight racism other than censoring it outright. Censorship seems like an easy answer, but it's not going "cure" the racists and has unwanted side-effects on society. I think racism is a complex issue that needs more deeper solutions.
> I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's _technically_ private property.
It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights. The users agreed to the ToS while signing up, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS. I don't think companies should be directly regulated/penalized for banning users. I do think however, that people should be more conscious of what they're signing up for. Consumer protection law should protect consumers, not their convenience.
> It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights. The users agreed to the ToS while signing up, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS.
So by parity of reasoning, companies that pollute within the bounds of the EPA's restrictions are also perfectly within their legal rights, and so shouldn't be chastised or further regulated, right?
Of course that's nonsense, because we're all interested in a better civilization, which occasionally means reviewing and accounting for the negative externalities of which we might have been previously unaware.
So please stop using this point against people raising concerns over how corporations are acting. There are legitimate concerns over the negative externalities of policing speech and banning people on private platforms with no recourse for appeal.
Your argument makes no sense. It's a complete non-sequitur unless you want the federal government to enact laws that enable them to micro manage every form of communication.
That would get laughed out of the SCOTUS in an instant.
It's quite literally not a non-sequitur. The parity of reasoning in both cases is clear: they are the same argument, I just swapped the details.
Every good regulation is intended to address some negative externality. Before a regulation is enacted, people point out the negative externalities and how they're harmful and that we should do something about them. Maybe they have some idea what that entails, maybe they don't.
You can't consistently dismiss such concerns by arguments like, "it's private property", while simultaneously supporting other regulations, like those enforced by the EPA, that also restrict one's rights to use one's property.
> unless you want the federal government to enact laws that enable them to micro manage every form of communication
I don't know what a good solution would be, I just know negative externalities in this case do exist. You can continue to deny them, you can accept that they exist but deny their importance, or you can accept they exist and that they are important, and so participate in a dialogue about how they should be addressed.
I don't think that laws that dictate companies how they have to manage their property are inherently bad.
> Consumer protection law should protect consumers, not their convenience.
My comment was targeted at the claim that mild censorship on privately owned platforms should be regulated in such a fashion, because their users depend on it. If you sign up for something, you should know what you sign up for. It's perfectly alright if you disagree with their measures. That doesn't mean you should call upon a body of law to penalize them. If Mrs. Fisher doesn't like the fact that her landlord is asking her to lock the door on her way out, she shouldn't be lobbying for the OPEN IT act. She should settle matters responsibly, or... move?
Basically, I'm just saying I found the grandparent a bit... overkill ;-)
> My comment was targeted at the claim that mild censorship on privately owned platforms should be regulated in such a fashion, because their users depend on it.
If this incident happened in a vacuum, I would agree. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The censorship ranges from mild to extreme these days, and now even the mild cases drive the wedge deeper. The unrest in the US is only just beginning I think.
Anyway, the post to which I initially replied is a common response to private censorship, and the irony of arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their private property apparently escapes most people who make it. "Oh, private property, right. So let's eliminate the minimum wage then, because that money they wouldn't otherwise pay to fill a role is the corporation's private property. No? Is private property suddenly not the only thing that matters?"
Private property is not the only thing that matters, but Congress cannot taking away a company’s free speech rights, per the constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
You might not like it, but that is the current reality. Personally I like it. I would much rather have corporations decide which speech is allowable on their platforms than have the government decide which speech is allowable.
> but Congress cannot taking away a company’s free speech rights, per the constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
This is not quite correct. Corporations used to be bound by their own charter until Congress relaxed those restrictions. Congress makes the rules under which corporations can operate. The Supreme Court ruled on how the current rules should be interpreted against the Constitution, but those rules are fairly arbitrary.
In any case, I'm not even suggesting "taking away their free speech rights".
> I would much rather have corporations decide which speech is allowable on their platforms than have the government decide which speech is allowable.
The implicit argument that an inability to display Confederate flags on others' property generates comparable negative externalities to environmental damage is certainly a bold one, and not, I would argue a better one than the more usual argument that private entities are bound to facilitate freedom of speech by the US constitution. You'd have a tough time persuading me any externalities generated by user generated Confederate flags within computer games were positive at all, still less that they were sufficiently positive to warrant government intrusion in the moderation process to protect them.
(Sure, there are slippery slope arguments about what happens if speech is not permitted on any media or if media companies are permitted monopoly power, but since Forza car designs are pretty far from that scenario, government intervention based on the assumption that computer game-designers do not have rights to curate their world or that displayers of the Confederate flag deserve special protections falls down much slipperier slopes of eroding property rights or enforcing [unpleasant] speech)
> The implicit argument that an inability to display Confederate flags on others' property generates comparable negative externalities to environmental damage
Attack the strongest interpretation of an argument, not the weakest. Your choice to focus on this flag incident and ignore the wider context that I described of platforms of all kinds censoring speech and banning people reveals the flaw in this sort of response.
This is but one more example of a trend, and the trend is what should be alarming. One should rightly be suspicious of any claim that a specifically bad storm, or a specific heat wave was caused by global warming, but one should be very alarmed at the growing trend of worsening storms and increasing incidents of heat waves.
Has there ever been a time when businesses didn't ban users from saying and doing things they didn't like on their property? The only trend seems to be that this time it's perceived racism which is the target, rather than stuff perceived as being vulgar or blasphemous or against their family values or age inappropriate or off topic or too critical of the platform owner, and you'll have trouble convincing me that this time [and especially this particular instance] it's not considerably less alarming than most existing forms of corporate moderation.
> Has there ever been a time when businesses didn't ban users from saying and doing things they didn't like on their property?
Sure, happens all the time. You think waitresses and restaurant managers like belligerent customers? They often tolerate them anyway.
Like I said, this specific instance wouldn't concern me at all if it weren't for the over-arching trend, and my post was specifically targeting a (frankly hypocritical) type of reply that comes up every time this topic is broached.
No, it's really not. I can be very unhappy with what FB is doing and want it to change without disputing in any sense that it's their right to have that policy.
>perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS. I don't think companies should be directly regulated/penalized for banning users.
I don't believe you really meant what you said there. Private companies aren't allowed to ban users because of their race. Do you want them to have that freedom and allow segregation? Or perhaps you only accept that because it's already the law and you would have opposed civil rights laws had you been around before they were introduced?
I realize you've made a weak straw man argument here, but there are important distinctions that need to be made in discussions about platform/user base moderation. While there are classes of people protected from discrimination by civil rights laws, what is not protected is discrimination or refusal of service for customers based on what they do rather than who they are. Banning someone for cheating, harassment, circumventing moderation, etc is not comparable for banning users of a certain race, and even attempting to equivocate them is a weak argument.
Sure. But Paulchap made a general statement without any of those distinctions. People often make such broad statements of belief when they're trying to make their position sound powerful and important but end up contradicting their actual beliefs. If you restrict it to a certain case or list a bunch of exceptions, it sounds less fundamental or important and makes it look more arbitrary. But that's more honest.
Most people's beliefs about right and wrong are arbitrary, not based on any fundamental principles, and there really isn't much of a defense for them other than "well, that just happens to be what I believe."
They eventually dropped he case, probably because of the public uproar, but to even consider such a criminal case definitely isn’t a hallmark of a “freedom of speech” society.
> Someone was criminally prosecuted because he insulted Erdogan.
No they weren't. He was never prosecuted - an investigation was opened after a complaint by Erdogan and then dropped before charges were laid.
From your own link:
"Erdogan then filed a complaint alleging that he had been insult" and "The prosecutors in the western city of Mainz said they had not found sufficient evidence to continue the inquiry against Jan Boehmermann."
Additionally:
"Mrs Merkel added that the authorities would move to repeal the controversial and little-used Article 103 of the penal code, which concerns insults against foreign heads of state, by 2018."
Which was done[1].
Seems a pretty good example of a functioning democracy.
Germany has in the past prosecuted anti-fascists for using a strike-through of a swastica. There were some considerations for changing the law, but I don't recall what happened to it.
They're banning a hateful symbol. That's totally fair game for censorship.
I don't know where you come from, but in my home state where we JUST THIS WEEK removed the Confederate emblem from our state flag, only people with real hatred towards non-white people use that symbol.
> we JUST THIS WEEK removed the Confederate emblem from our state flag
That was long overdue, but it has little to do with the point that I'm trying to make. What I'm saying that we should be more careful about what we wish for, especially for something as dangerous as censorship, because things never work out the way we want it to. If the system worked as intended, there wouldn't be a problem of systemic racism now.
The system is working exactly as intended, that’s why we have systemic racism. If you look at the history of Reconstruction in the South and how it ended and gave rise to Jim Crow rule, you’ll see that we are very much an intentional system of white supremacy.
I think it's fair to say that the public opinion has shifted significantly from that point, and if democracy was working in its most ideal form, it should be protecting the rights of black people.
But the point is that even with the best of intentions, supposed "solutions" to any sort of problem won't always be effective and could end up making the situation worse if people don't think through. Racism matters, but how you solve it equally matters as well.
You're right that public opinion has shifted. However, institutionally, hardly any change has happened.
Also, you're essentially making the slippery slope logical fallacy about needing to be careful with how you censor people. I don't buy into your argument.
>I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's technically private property. If platforms want to censor,
For some topics such as the Confederate flag, you don't even have to complicate the discussion with "private company vs public utility".
E.g., tax-payer government funded public schools also banned kids from wearing the Confederate flag on shirts because they were "disruptive". In some cases, the free speech advocates fought the rule and yet the ban was upheld by courts even on appeal:
In other words, even if the government nationalized Microsoft into a state-owned enterprise, we'd still be having this debate about free speech being censored.
Do we have to treat every one of these issues with the same gravitas? We are talking about people putting a traitorous and many would argue a racist flag on their virtual car in a video game. This isn't a sign of growth of authoritarianism world wide. I think your argument would be better served if it was saved for an issue with more pervasive ramifications than a video game.
If you're young, you have many years ahead of you. A lot of time for culture and norms to keep changing and evolving. I guarantee that one day, you're going to wake up as an old person, and something that you like that's innocuous today will have been deemed terrible and hateful by a future generation. Maybe even for good reasons. You'll be kicked off platforms, called ignorant, and shunned for being associated with this now-controversial thing. It's going to be confusing. You're going to feel as though the world has gone off in some crazy direction and left you behind.
I'm not saying have empathy for racists. But maybe we could try to put ourselves into the shoes of someone for whom time and culture are moving too fast and imagine how disorienting and confusing what's going on today might be for them. I'd guess that these people might want to lash out at the rest of the world who suddenly seem to be against them. Or turn inward into hermits and avoid society. I don't really understand it, but I'm still young enough to keep up with all this change. But I feel I'll be left behind eventually. It'll probably happen to us all.
I've found through my years that it's relatively easy to keep an eye on trends and when something or someone becomes problematic to society, to evaluate why that'd be and let go of it from your life.
My first example of this came when I was ~7 and Robinsons' badges that I'd been collecting since a toddler were seen as an image of racism. It didn't take much work to accept that they were no longer acceptable and that while fun to collect, their time had passed. As it happened, at around that time collecting Star Wars figurines became the de jour thing, so there was something new to enjoy in it's place.
Some people still swear that the badges' meaning is divorced from the racism, and still collect them to this day. I don't know how they can really.
The Confederate battle flag has been around for 150+ years. It was, from the very beginning, a symbol of treason, of racism, of owning other people as property, of being allowed to rape and murder other humans without consequence.
Those who want to "celebrate" their Southern "heritage" have plenty of symbols and flags to choose from that don't have inherently racist and treasonous implications.
> Those who want to "celebrate" their Southern "heritage" have plenty of symbols and flags to choose from that don't have inherently racist and treasonous implications.
Such as? What are those examples?
Is there a reason you feel the need to put scare quotes on celebrate and Southern heritage? Are they not allowed to have a heritage?
I don’t want to defend the flag, because the Confederacy was a monstrosity. But I also don’t like seeing people that have never met a Southerner in their lives (not necessarily you specifically, but certainly most people attacking it) thinking they know all about it and all about the people that fly it.
There are ample numbers- by no means a majority, but certainly a large number- of Black people that use the flag because, whatever its flaws and whatever evils committed under it, that flag is the most popular symbol of Southern culture- their culture.
That’s another factor; most people insulting the South don’t realize just how much of their attacks land on Black people themselves.
> However, things do change, and it's not always for the better. There are worrying trends of growing authoritarianism worldwide, and I think now is a good time to consider how censorship could be used against us.
Very true. For example, there are definitely places where antisemitism is becoming more and more socially acceptable.
Unfortunately no part of the internet is a public venue. There is no internet street corner, no "common carrier" internet phone company, no internet post office. Everything you do is subject to the whims of shareholder value. If tomorrow enough people decided left-handed people are the scum of the earth to affect Youtube's bottom line you'd start seeing left-handed videos demonetized. If enough people decided left-handed people don't deserve a voice to make a racket with their hosting providers and registars you'd see left-handed communities purged from the internet with no legal recourse whatsoever. In the real world that's only happened to Nazis and terrorists but I suspect we'll see it expanding as people realize the power an angry mob can wield.
It's a bit fascinating that media which attempts to censor this content seems to have worse problems with it than media which doesn't. There's nothing illegal about sending Nazi content through the mail but the mail isn't utterly swamped with Nazi newsletters but places like video games seem to fight an endless battle to keep half their users from turning racist.
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 service for delivering racist newsletters or pirated DVDs or drugs. The responsibility lies solely on the user, who is prosecuted if their conduct exceeds the scope of the law. We need that for the internet.
> 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.
I understand removing confederate flags and movements from public areas, but I don't think it is necessary to ban people for using it in games like Forza. I mean Microsoft can do whatever they want, but it is overreacting. Most people who would use it wouldn't have any bad meaning behind it and most likely would be used more as a joke. When playing Forza I remember I liked skin that made my car look like a beater car, and it was so fun winning races in car that looked like it would fall apart at any moment.
The difference is that your beater car skin doesn't remind an entire demographic of a time a whole bunch of people went to war so they could keep said demographic as property.
If you want to be funny about the confederate flag, go do an open mike. There's no context in a racing game... so while it might be some hilarious meta-commentary on the ridiculousness of racism, the only thing another player sees is "there's someone who wishes they could still keep slaves".
You’ve never heard of the Dukes or Hazzard have you? Their 1969 Dodge Charger is one of the most iconic cars in tv history, and Forza happens to have a ‘69 charger as a drivable car
> For starters, being deplatformed from major online players today would have serious consequences. Although it's true that these platforms are "private property," the entire society has become too reliant on them to be seen that way. I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's technically private property. If platforms want to censor, there should be at least more oversight than what we have today.
In this instance, it’s a public company and one particular game. Some companies don’t allow you to wall hack or use aim assistants. Others will allow you to use hacked clients, like Minecraft anarchy servers. It should be up to the company to moderate, as you sign a TOS agreement with them when signing up or purchasing their game.
Government oversight is not needed here, because it’s a contract between an individual and a corporate entity.
Which is part of a broader trend. I also don't find the "it's just a game" argument convincing either. Just take a look at how Reporters without Borders use Minecraft to evade censorship in opressive regimes. For-profit companies would be happy to censor these types of content too if the mechanism exists and are given free reign without any sort of oversight.
> I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's technically private property.
I agree with the direction, but that is the core of a bad argument; if a principle doesn't apply in important cases then it isn't really a principle. It is exactly the same as the "free speech except for things I don't like" crowd. Companies can and should have the power to choose who they serve.
Corporations making decisions about who they serve based on the character of their customers and pressure from intolerant groups is indeed a highly risky political strategy. But the risk is from the power of intolerant and their ability to declare it a 'good outcome' rather than from the corporations themselves.
If censorship is merely annoying, but otherwise ineffective, why do people keep portraying every act of moderation that any site performs as a slippery slope towards global Orwellian dystopia?
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.
Censorship is pretty good at suppressing the words or images that are being suppressed. It's not very good at suppressing the thoughts or feelings that are considered wrong.
Nazi symbols are banned in Germany, but they still have neo-Nazis.
It's unfortunate when artistic works have a banned symbol and so the work is suppressed, and that art becomes hard to obtain and difficult to discuss with others.
At my company we’ve taken a stand against cancel culture. We do not believe that anyone should be compelled to sign away their freedoms as part of our working relationship. The right to free speech is just that—a RIGHT. There’s more than enough legal precedence to manage our workforce effectively.
> For starters, being deplatformed from major online players today would have serious consequences. Although it's true that these platforms are "private property," the entire society has become too reliant on them to be seen that way.
With is why the KKK was allowed to run full page, front page ads in national newspapers 60 years ago. No? We’ve always allowed private companies to block content they deemed unworthy, regardless of whether they were relied on by the public.
Ordinary people don't have the resources to run a newspaper ad, so it's not what I was referring to. I had things like your email and social media accounts in mind, where banning has consequences other than not being able to deliver hate speech.
> I think Snowden had a point when he said that the answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.
Yes! A lot of people get angry when you tell them that, but I think that people should be able to say vile, hateful things. Not because those things contribute anything meaningful to society, but the only way you can possibly have a chance to challenge the views of those people is by knowing that they have those in the first place.
Do you think that black people should debate the confederate flag in the marketplace of ideas of the Forza Motorsport Decal Upload form? When they see that the car next to them in a race is full of hateful symbols, they should reply by quickly going into their car customization screen and equipping their "BLM" decals?
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 place of love and adoration?
I also understand the feeling some others have when they see the Confederate flag. I grew up in the South. I'm confident many people I grew up with do not associate the Confederate flag with slavery or racism. For them it's merely a symbol of rebellion against authority.
In my opinion banning the Confederate flag is fine. Banning black face, also fine. But neither of those things is sufficient to prove a person is racist. This current moral panic is taking us to dark places. Racism is real. Evil is real. Witch hunts are bad. 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.
>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 would be easier to create room for learning.
Unless a balance is struck, we leave historically disenfranchised minorities to be potential future victims of the majority's ignorance.
There are laws in some states where squares or common areas of apartment buildings are considered public for the purposes of speech, etc. I think we will eventually see this gravitate online.
One case heard was about an apartment complex which made up some absurd percentage of a district. If people were barred from distributing fliers it would have seriously upset campaigning in that district.
As the world becomes more authoritarian what these platforms do to censor on their own won't matter. Governments will mandate whatever they want in the future regardless of what platforms do today.
I totally get what you're saying though, it's the tyranny of the majority. What happens if the majority of people decide to censor the truth of history because it's not politically correct? What happens if they decide that the confederate flag and what it stands for needs to be stricken from the history books?
These things should not be glorified but should be remembered so we don't tread the same horrible road again against some other group of people. But glorifying it is kind of what they're trying to prevent now by removing it from games.
I'm not American, but I don't understand those of you who support such decisions. The world of politics is infecting various gaming communities with politically driven changes that in many cases aren't supported by the actual users(or majority of the users, anyway). It's worrisome that many companies succumb to the demands of the mob just because they want to be left alone.
On another note, the fact that it's just the confederate flag and swastikas is deeply disturbing and acts as sound evidence that those are American problems. What about soviet symbols? Overall, the total number of soviet victims vastly exceeds those of Nazis or the victims of American slavery, why is everyone so one-sided in that aspect?
The list of "bad" ideas blows this way and that with the wind. It's not about what it was used for in the past or how much bad was done. It's about whatever mobs with pitchforks demand. They can always come up some reason like "used for hate" or "causes offense" or "safe environment" but they don't really mean it. Those are just rationalizations for organizations making decisions out of fear.
The list specifically says "including but not limited to". If you are implying that there is a leftist slant to their rules, I would point to the examples of banned offensive phrases that includes the anti-police "FTP" and "ACAB".
I think mainstream historians would argue that Soviet Communism was terrible - but it wasn't an ideology based on hate or subjugation. Displaying the Hammer and Sickle likely means you stand for unity with the working-class and seek an egalitarian society - or you have grievances with the current system of capitalism - and not that you hate on any particular group of people, and especially not for any of their immutable characteristics.
I know Tankies and Holomdor apologists exist - and their calls for guillotining billionaires are concerning - but I compare that to a person proudly displaying a (non-Hindu) swastika: it means that person is either a fascist who actively supports genocide - or is being an edgy teenager. Similarly proudly flying the Confederate battle-flag means they either actively support white-supremacy and subjugation of black people - or they're very ignorant of history and bought into the post-reconstruction propagandizing by Confederate apologists.
That's the difference between what I feel those symbols mean.
> "but it wasn't an ideology based on hate or subjugation"
This is really stretching. I doubt may people who supported the Nazis early on would have thought their party was going to commit genocide. You don't see cognitive dissonance while you're in it.
The Confederate Flag does represent Treason and many declarations of independence mention defense of slavery explicit in the first two paragraphs. However, if the Confederates has succeeded, there's a good chance they would have ended slavery anyway. There were a lot of moral concerns around slavery at that time. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence, at that time, did not directly mention the word "Slave," not to mention it started to fade internationally not long after.
In that case, slavery could have been seen as just an artifact of a previous, ignorant group of their population, that also founded the country. And no mistake, between Iraq, the Iranian-Contras, the School of the Americas, MKUltra .. the Union/US has done terrible terrible things around the world to extract resources in the name of democracy.
You can't say something is going to turn out while you're in the center. Looking at the current anarco-anti-cap left groups right out, some of their action are fascistic.
Inhibiting the freedom of people to speak their minds and express their unpopular or controversial opinions is a dangerous path to go down, and many on the progressive-left are already showing contempt for the freedom of speech.
> However, if the Confederates has succeeded, there’s a good chance they would have ended slavery
[citation needed] do you have some sort of source to back this claim up?
Why would a region willingly give up it’s main source of economic power a la slaves? The south was notorious for avoiding investment into public infrastructure like roads, rail, foundries, etc. Why would they enter into a civil war over slavery if they were “about to give it up” anyways? This take flies counter to everything I’ve read about the confederate south
That's right, it's just a symbol that has been used historically to kill tens of millions of people, enslave many more millions, and violently steal other people property. No hate here at all, nothing to see.
No hate against a specific group. The cross has been used as a symbol in the slaughter millions over the centuries. But it is not generally used as a symbol to threaten any one specific group.
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.
On a similar note, why raised fist is not on the list? It's been used throughout the 20th century to commit atrocities on a grand scale and force tens of millions of people into labor camps. It was used to incite violence that killed many millions of people in Russia and across the world. It still used nowadays by people promoting violence and class warfare.
It seems very disingenuous for MS to ban one specific symbol of hate, but not other, much more prominent ones.
For the next act we'll censor images of the pyramids of Egypt, which were constructed by slave labor. And then we'll ban texts of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which was influenced by an enlightenment thinker, Voltaire, who also supported the slave trade. And for our next act we'll ban images of Washington, D.C. with its columns and white marble, which glorifies Roman slave-owning society.
No, they don't. What a certain symbol glorifies or does not glorify is not something you can measure objectively. It is an intersubjective reality. i.e, if enough people believe that pyramids glorify slavery, then it does! At the moment, you are the first person I have heard who thinks so. Confederate flags, on the other hand, are considered as glorifying slavery even by many people who support it.
That's not even true. The confederacy also stood for the cause of self-determination, and the right of a state to remove itself from the union that it had voluntarily entered.
> The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
Two things jump out: 1) someone defending secession in 1861 unambiguously calls out the founders for mostly believing that slavery was evil; and 2) it's an early invocation of "science" against the "zeal above knowledge" of (overwhelmingly religious) abolitionist "fanatics."
The Cornerstone Speech is really important, and I'm surprised it isn't more well known. A lot of progressive dogma rests around the (incorrect) notion that the entire American experiment was white supremacist by design / from the beginning.
This historical revisionism is strikingly similar in its ignorance to the "Lost Cause" narrative that the CSA was about "states rights" and not slavery.
The second and third (final) confederate national flags were white to represent the supremacy of the white race:
> In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
It's absolutely clear that the confederate was about white supremacy.
It's also hard to argue that the confederate was about self-determination in any way when their very constitution is a litany of laws banning things, like a state's rights to regulating slave ownership.
> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
This idea that the confederacy was founded for any other reason than slave ownership is absurd and a complete fabrication, unfortunately perpetuated by Texas school books used throughout the United States public schools.
You’re not wrong. It just doesn’t matter. The American Revolution has been cast by revisionist historians as another war to preserve slavery while protesters have toppled and threatened states of abolitionists, Union generals, and Abraham Lincoln.
That’s like saying criticizing Nazi Germany doesn’t matter because the kaiser was maybe antisemetic during WW1 too. There’s no morality because maybe someone else was bad too.
Its rank whataboutism. We can evaluate morality from not great, to bad, to really really bad. We can make judgments about individual situations on their merits. The “merits” of the confederacy are really really bad!
Also you’re nutpicking[1] - distractingly from the central facts by finding the most extreme , nuttiest examples of an ideology l
For reference, characterizing the American Revolution as a war to preserve slavery was literally the central focus of a project that was published in the New York Times and that public schools are adopting as curriculum. It isn’t fair to characterize it as “nutpicking” when the nuts hold that degree of institutional power.
FWIW I agree with you about the Confederacy and about Confederate symbology, and I think I said that at the very beginning. But to a large number of increasingly powerful people, the facts don’t actually matter. And to some degree, they never have: consider the differing treatment of Nazi and Soviet symbology. They will use the facts when they suit them, and invent new facts when they don’t.
The 1619 project said it was one cause, not the sole cause, as
> that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. This assertion has elicited criticism from some historians and support from others.
> We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery.
The British Caribbean held (far) more slaves than British North America did, and did not abolish slavery until 1833. One of the principal reasons that these Caribbean colonies did not follow the North American colonies in revolt was that they were far more terrified of slave revolts, as slaves were a much larger fraction of their population than the case in any North American colony.
Personally, I think the existence of the nonrebellious slave-driven plantation economies in the Caribbean undercuts the argument that protecting slavery was a major motivation for those colonies that did revolt.
> For the Southern colonies, participation in the American Revolution was part of their effort to maintain slavery.
Slavery was legal to some extent in every colony, northern or southern, throughout the Revolution. Some states had (laudably) started to abolish it in whole or in part by the end of the war. Interestingly, Wikipedia indicates that the last Pennsylvanian slaves died in the 1840s, which seems surprisingly late.
I don’t see how you can make a good faith argument the confederate flag is any different from a swastika. Both represent institutions built solely for racist motives and the subjugation of another race.
But, it's just a picture. If you want to put a swastika on your car, the punishment should be that you made yourself look stupid, not that you get banned from the game!
This assumes that people are acting in good faith. If someone uses a swastika it’s unlikely that they are otherwise a positive contribution to the community.
Slavery was not the primary factor of conflict in the Civil War. Both Union and Confederate states owned slaves and engaged in slave trade. Conflating the Confederate flag with racism or white supremacy is a popular, but historically ignorant viewpoint.
The election of Lincoln and John Browns raid were threatening to the south exactly because of their threat to slavery. The south was not only paranoid of a slave uprising, but also owned people was the bulk of their wealth.
And the Cornerstone Speech by the VP of the confederacy:
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
There's the old saying that if you know nothing about it, the Civil War was about slavery; if you know a little about it, it was about state's rights; and if you know a lot about it, it was about slavery.
The "states rights" trope was a deliberate attempt of a few Southern, revisionist historians to blunt their racist past. The truth is that the South seceded because their states wanted the right to hold slaves.
Yes I believe slavery was the straw that broke the camel’s back but it wasn’t the primary factor of conflict. Slavery and protecting the property of rich plantation owners was not the reason poor southern kids were fighting and killing their own family members. To completely dismiss the more prominent factors at play including states rights as “historical revisionism” is itself historical revisionism.
The question is complicated, but slaveholding was not some thing just done by rich gentry. There was a long-tail of slaveholders with just a handful of slaves. With white slaveholding families in the confederacy comprising 20-50% of white families...
> To completely dismiss the more prominent factors at play including states rights
Question #1: Name three states rights the South supposedly aruged for.
Question #2: Count how many of those rights they actually granted to their own states.
For it being supposedly such a major factor in their succession, states rights are conspicuously silent in both the ordinances of succession, contemporary oratory, and in the text they wrote in their own Constitution.
Your questions miss the point. The Confederate states wanted to be free from federal economic control. Such a freedom is not an individual liberty that would be conferred by the state upon its citizens but rather an organizational mainstay that would define the state’s relationship with the federal government.
Slavery was the tipping point but the conflict goes much deeper than that.
The only federal economic control they objected to was the abolitionism movement that would rid them of slaves. At an extreme stretch, maybe you could claim objections over federal industrial policy and internal improvements, but you'll have to observe that there was zero mention of this in their ordinances of succession, they were avid supporters of this on the state level, and despite their constitutional prohibitions against it, they enacted such policies during the Civil War due to their abysmal infrastructure. And as a footnote, it is worth pointing out that a large part of the animus against internal improvements is driven by fear of the dilution of wealth in the slaveholding elite.
> Slavery was not the primary factor of conflict in the Civil War.
The historical record written in the confederacy's own words disagrees with you.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States shows slavery up front and center. These Declarations from five states, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia include the word "slave" 83 times. (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...)
Mississippi: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery"
Georgia: "For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery...The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by [the northern Union's] leaders and applauded by its followers. The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of [the northern Union]. For forty years this question has been considered and debated in the halls of Congress, before the people, by the press, and before the tribunals of justice. The majority of the people of the North in 1860 decided it in their own favor. We refuse to submit to that judgment, ..."
South Carolina: "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."
Texas: "[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race ..."
Indeed, the only role that "state's rights" played in the Civil War was maintaining the rights of the Southern/slave states to allow slavery to continue.
The Confederate states certainly didn't respect the right of the Northern states to terminate slavery, and indeed forced through a number of laws (prior to the Civil war) requiring the Northern states to participate in the return of escaped slaves.
> The confederate flag was created for the sole purpose of committing treason
Secession is not treason. The Tenth Amendment reads in whole: 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people'; the Constitution does not delegate the power of separating a state from the union to the United States, nor does it prohibit secession to the individual states, nor does it mandate a perpetual or irrevocable union; therefor it is plainly true that secession is constitutional.
Moreover, the same Constitution states 'Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.' Neither advocating for secession nor actually seceding consists of levying war against the U.S. or adhering to their enemies.
One might argue that the secessions of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee & North Carolina, coming as they did after the battle of Fort Sumter, constituted treason, but one might instead argue that secession itself was not adhering to the enemies of the U.S., but rather those states removing themselves from the union.
None of the following is support for any of the actual secessions of any of the states: each state which seceded did so to preserve the profoundly evil practice of slavery. It is constitutional to secede, but deeply wrong to have done so for that reason.
But it is extremely important to be precise about words. The Confederates were evilly wrong about slavery and race, but they were not traitors.
>I don’t see how you can make a good faith argument the confederate flag is any different from a swastika
The stars'n'bars is a relevant part of automotive history, see the Duke brothers, history of NASCAR, etc. Banning players who display it is similiar to banning players who stick swastikas or iron crosses on their Panthers and Tigers in a video game about tanks.
Culturally convenient or not it is part of the history of the subject matter and likewise it should stay.
>The stars'n'bars is a relevant part of automotive history, see the Duke brothers, history of NASCAR, etc.
NASCAR has banned the flag too[1], and the modern General Lee[0] hasn't had it since 2015. And the point of these games isn't to simulate car culture or history, it's a racing game, so it's not even relevant. We're literally just talking about skins in a video game, here.
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 flag or something.
I like this idea as long as it’s transparent that’s what’s happening, because it creates less of a wedge and is humorous to most. Booting people off a platform would lead polarizing resentment imho.
I think it'd be funnier if it was done silently like shadowbanning, so the racist troll didn't know why people kept apparently innocently assuming he was gay. But I wouldn't expect MS to go for humour, especially not dealing with sensitive politics and audiences involving a lot of minors.
I played similar games when I ran forums, but really you're just shuffling the problem around. Bored trolls/extreme ideologues will be delighted to play cat and mouse with your measures, and will feel particularly proud of themselves when they circumvent them creatively.
In the end, you have to decide what outcome you want - using half effective measures hoping that the racists will keep it down, or kicking them out and making it clear that they aren't welcome? You can't have it both ways.
This is a silly complaint IMO. If you break the rules, whatever they are, a ban is a completely reasonable punishment. A 1- or 2- strike policy gets the same result you are talking about with no "super-cool AI-driven ML-based image recognition"
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?
I've seen the replacement filter on a few forums, and it's _surprisingly_ effective. People just ... didn't bother working around it. No idea why, it seems like they would, but I guess they just couldn't be arsed.
Don't forget that the replacement filter is just for banned words. Toxic/abusive behavior would be covered by the usual manual moderation. Though I don't recall ever seeing someone banned for working around the filters on the rare instances that they did.
EDIT: This is in stark contrast to normal filters which just remove or blank out words. Those were _always_ worked around. For whatever reason people feel affronted by those kinds of filters, but the silly replacement filters were "fun".
>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.
Really? When I've seen this done, all that happens is you end up the 'approved' word. Everyone knows what it means though. So I guess if all you care about is the word itself, and not the meaning of it, it does work great. In reality if every instance of 'shit' is replaced with 'barnacle', if I call you a 'barnacle head' on said forum, we both know what I'm saying.
Hearthstone and some other online games only allow you to say a handful of positive messages to your opponents. Of course, what happened is that this somehow made interactions MORE toxic, since any time I say "Good game" or "Well played!" my opponent assumes I'm being sarcastic, and starts repeatedly blasting me with the same emote again and again.
I mean, ok... Is saying "fuck!" spreading hate? what about "you asshole!"? Sometimes humans just express their emotion using words. It isn't always about race. Gaming in particular evokes lots of emotions and always has. Personally I don't like when words are scrambled such as the case with Rocket League, because as someone else pointed out, you end up with barely being able to say anything without some part of it being scrambled. But I can understand the motivations for a company to do such a thing.
The words "idiot", "retard", and "moron" used to have legitimate scientific meanings (at the time). Now they're used as insults, completely interchangeable with each other.
Turns out it's not the word, it's the intention behind the word. And who gives intention? People. Not words.
Why not ban the players? The game platform will do fine without them. Accommodating them --- tracking the number of "strikes" they've received, etc --- costs resources. There's a finite amount of resources; why spend any of them on these particular players?
It's way more efficient to just keep a graphic from being uploaded, than it is to set up a super-cool AI ML system that constantly monitors every car for unapproved imagery.
If we hypothesize that it would take X level of effort for MS to centrally detect and alter the graphics of every car, we can conclude it would be at most X/accounts effort (way easier) for each human player to detect and remove the same graphic from each of their own cars.
The goal is not to censor the image, it is to change the behavior of society. The goal is to punish bad behavior and set a good example.
The reason we are in this mess in the first place is that people turn the other way and sweep bad behavior under the rug instead of facing it head on and addressing it.
This is actually how "weeaboo" became a word (outside of the Perry Bible Fellowship cartoon[0]). There was a filter on 4chan that turned "wapanese" into a "weeaboo", and pretty soon the former was completely forgotten and the word that is actually in use in "weeaboo".
Heh, I wonder how many Germans will get hit by this. Because here, the confederate flag can imply you are a racist, but it can also mean that you are someone who likes country and truckers and has little to no knowledge of US history.
We get many confused Americans on Reddit’s /r/Germany asking what’s up with all the confederate flags they see.
It's truly terrifying to see the number of people calling for limits on speech similar to ones in Germany. [1] The right to freedom of speech was seen as so important, it was put first on the bill of rights.
For anyone who cares about socialism, there was a time where it would have been argued that all talk for socialism should be banned. As for Communism, that undeniably would have been banned in the 50s, if it hadn't been before then (they did try in the 20s, but was eventually overturned). And countless other causes that at one time, over 90% of constituents were against.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 344 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Lee_(car)
It wasn't a racing car, and it was in a television show, and so what if there was? If there were a famous car from 1940s Germany with a nazi flag on it, does that make symbolically broadcasting nazism today fine behavior? The confederacy was a regime constructed explicitly to defend the practice of slavery. (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...)
HN is divided much as society at large is divided, just like any large-enough population sample. It's also a highly international site. Cultural norms vary more than people assume they do, especially when you factor in the international aspects. Since the debate and struggle right now is around just what "current cultural norms" ought to be, it isn't surprising that commenters disagree.
The most important thing to realize about HN is that it's a non-siloed site. Everyone is in one big room here. That means you're far more likely to run into people who hold opposing views on these topics, and they may be the very same people who you agree with about other topics. This is very different from internet environments where users self-select into tribes (silos) and where the tribes are clearly identifiable. There, you know what awfulness to expect from the other side, you can dress up in the battle gear of the internet before confronting them, and you know that your own team will have your back.
On HN, by contrast, you don't know what awfulness to expect, because the tribes are not identifiable and the community actually functions relatively well some of the time (don't get me wrong, it's the internet and there are a ton of problems—but, relatively speaking). This creates a feeling of normalcy and so people expect this place to be normal ("current cultural norms", as you say). Some of the time it does indeed feel that way, and then—blam, you run into something awful and hideous, something anything but normal, which you did not expect to encounter here and which hit you when your defenses were down.
This comes across as a nasty shock. After a few of these shocks, the mind inevitably adjusts its view of the community from "normal place" to "painful nasty place", with the sense "HN is not what I thought it was". I'm going to guess that this is the reason why you use the phrase "astounds me".
In other words, we're in a paradoxical situation where the HN community is objectively less divided and nasty than other places on the internet (which "solve" or, more precisely, defer this problem by segregating into silos), but it's still divided and nasty enough to create unexpectedly painful experiences, which makes it feel more divided and nasty.
This has probably always been the biggest issue for HN's long-term survival, but it has taken years to begin to realize it, and of course current social pressures are intensifying and highlighting it. It's not clear yet what we can really do, let alone if it can survive in the long run, but from the beginning this place has been an experiment in staving off self-destruction for as long as possible (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).
I wrote another thing about the shock experience here if anyone is interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
Even then, the community is big enough that you're going to regularly run into comments from users you either don't recognize, or didn't realize were of the opposing tribe (or opposing-tribe-adjacent, let's say). So the shock experience never goes away. But I think you're right that it's most intense for less-familiar users, and that explains why there are so many people who use HN for a little while, inevitably encounter the shock experience, feel hurt, and leave. That's a common occurrence and which pains me personally.
The deeper point is that the site is designed to keep everybody together. It's not partitioned by friends or follow lists. There are no subreddits or social graphs. Design differences at that level are profound and affect everything.
edit: That probably sounds more dickish than I meant it. I don't know a better place than HN for identifying clusters and following trends in the thought of "temporarily embarrassed millionaires".
It's not only that, which is why I still come here. But that's the strongest theme by far.
Such perceptions are notoriously unreliable. People notice different things and weight them differently, based mostly on what they dislike: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Since everyone dislikes different things, everyone has a different weighted average, each reflecting their own preferences. In other words they are in the eye of the beholder, which explains why people come up with such wildly contradictory generalizations about HN.
From my perspective, that's the strongest theme by far. Does my argument apply to my own perception? For sure. It has to.
Now memories of my childhood are darkened, and millions of adults are confused and don't know why. Because people who are long dead thought it would be great fun to raise a generation of f3cking racist kids who would grow up and raise another generation of f2cking racists. It f8cking sucks to be in this situation.
Thanks for nothing, ancestors.
"After the first season, it distressed producer Gy Waldron that the cast was entirely white. So in subsequent seasons, visiting federal agents that investigated Boss Hogg were black, as was the sheriff of the adjoining Chickasaw County."
https://www.neatorama.com/2011/05/04/23-facts-you-might-not-...
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 show in the Arab world where the characters were all very charismatic, wholesome and diverse, but their car had an ISIS flag on it?
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 actors, did not even realize that about the flag.
Today, things are different, I think most people know the flag is racist. But in the past? I suspect the vast majority did not realize it.
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.
For example take a state flag from a rebel state (and assume the flag has not changed since the civil war). If someone flew that flag today, would you think they are implying state rebellion, or just pride in their state?
It's the same with the confederate flag, to most people it's just a flag that symbolizes a group of southern states. To northerners it means rebellion, specifically for slavery, but it doesn't mean that for everyone.
The Confederate States of America (CSA) is not an ambiguous entity. From beginning to end in its short 5 year history, it was made to fight for black slavery. It existed for no other purpose and was subsequently disbanded when slavery was abolished. Literally the only heritage the CSA created in its short life is rebellion and racism.
If you are aware of this widely-known history, it's obvious what this flag narrowly represents. The argument that the CSA could conceivably represent Southern pride is a joke. Ask any non-racist southerner if the most racist institution in US history and its deepest shame is a good stand-in for Southern pride.
Here's a thought experiment: if a group of Germans claimed that the flag of the German Reich represented their pride in Germany's independence and the valor of its veterans, would you be defending it like you are now? Would you use the same excuses?
I can accept that some people may be completely unaware or are too dim to put 2 and 2 together. I simply expect that once they do learn about it, they understand why it's indefensible.
Everyone has always known the flag was a symbol of racism. That's why it was adopted. That's what it was deliberately revived for in the 20th century—as a symbol specifically against racial integration and civil rights—and what it was actively and consistently used as throughout the civil rights movement.
Adults when the show was produced, less than a decade and a half after the Civil Rights Act of 1965, would not generally have failed to understand the symbolism of the flag, or the naming of the car after General Lee.
It's possible that the individual producer was ignorant, but TV shows are not made by one person alone in a vacuum.
If he had really wanted to do something he could have introduced a regular POC character.
I am inspired to write it a haiku:
poor descent machine
seeking orange tradition
longs for better things
Doesn't seem like that's the case according to the following quote:
> Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.
Practically speaking probably doesn't make that much of a difference though.
/sarc
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_indicted_in_t...
War used to be extremely brutal. Genghis Khan used to execute entire cities...even after they had surrendered. Hell, prior to WWII, civilian populations were still legally legitimate targets for military actions. It's a very modern development for war to be fought purely between recognized armed forces.
That being said, dropping two atomic bombs is estimated to have saved millions of Japanese civilian lives that would have been lost if the Japanese Emperor had waged a city-by-city resistance as they originally planned.
Americans also don't exactly apologize for their acts, still glorify their brutal heroes (and even people who fought against their own country).
This is not true, at all. The US Government is constantly apologizing for its past acts. We don't just apologize for them, we set up memorials to our own bad acts as a nation so that we can't erase them from memory or hide from them. And after the atomic bombs, the US paid for the surgeries and medical treatments of numerous survivors. Similarly, after Vietnam, the US has made significant efforts to make up for the damage inflicted on the Vietnamese people during the war.
They will all be hidden soon.
Like we still torture young subordinates in workplace to death and laugh at them, today, like pouring beer into an Italian shoe and get the new girl to swallow it, I never had to come across such things but some of us still do, just not as obscenely atrocious as treating completely innocent and defenseless local residents like a dog playing with plushes.
No, the inspiration was the Indian swastika. Same reason he wanted to call himself "Aryan".
(The swastika is also a sacred symbol in Buddhism, for reference. One day someone will petition to have 卐 removed from the relevant Chinese Unicode block.)
(It should probably be noted that the Spirit of Saint Louis was flown by Charles Lindbergh, who is generally thought to have been a Nazi sympathizer a bit later in life. But I think it's unlikely this particular swastika from 1927 was painted with the Nazis in mind. Particularly, it wasn't painted by Lindbergh.)
Here is an American postcard from 1910 featuring a swastika in the notorious "tilted" orientation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_use_of_the_swastika_in...
I saw the Corn Palace in South Dakota one year, and it was decorated with traditional local indian symbols, including the swastika.
Yes, it's widely used in Sri Lanka for this reason.
Check out the logo for one of the largest all girls schools in Sri Lanka
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musaeus_College
Hitler appropriated a Hindu/Buddhist symbol that is more than 5000 years old, and as you say it would be erased out of the digital world.
Isn't it time to return the original meanings and intent of these symbols.
The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic. It's like Mississippi or Georgia's state flags before 2020, it's a call back to things that should be left in the history books.
To many Koreans (and likely Chinese) the wartime version of the rising sun flag is exactly the same as the Nazi flag if not worse. The anglosphere tends to gloss over the brutal behavior of Japan during this time, under this flag.
The difference with Germany is that they took responsibility and passed laws to regulate usage of the nazi flag, etc. Japan did not, and lied to the Korean government about things like the comfort women.
> were used explicitly for those hateful movements
Do you honestly believe the rising sun flag was not a part of a hateful movement? Is the fact that Korea was annexed and Koreans were treated awfully under this flag just a coincidence?
The swastika was a very popular symbol, and remains popular outside nazis. The swastika shouldn't (and really can't) be banned, but the Nazi usage of it should be.
The confederate flag had a bunch of variants and the popular version seen today was only used after as a symbol of hate. Should be banned.
The rising sun flag is just one variation of a couple themes used throughout Japanese history and it was used in a non-imperialist setting for hundreds of years since the Edo period. Its in the fuzzy place where most flags lie.
You can argue for the banning of that flag for those atrocities, but why stop there? Are you going to ignore the countless indigenous peoples who suffered under the American flag or all the colonialism done under the union jack? What about the Turkish flag which flew during the genocide they committed and still flies today. What you're essentially arguing for is banning all flags related to some kind of atrocity. That's most flags.
If you take a group of people and ask them what the rising sun flag represents, the majority response will be about WWII imperialist Japan. Which makes sense as they changed it immediately after their surrender in WWII. It legitimately is viewed like the nazi flag by the various Korean people I've talked to in Korea.
The context also matters. Korea has plenty of swastikas. Specifically at shrines/temples and on the ground; not being flown as part of flags.
"What about Y" is a weak argument to keep X flag. You could make that argument for basically any flag. To answer though, it's likely the US flag will be seen in a similar light once it's no longer a powerful hegemony. If the US had a flag that was only used during its "imperialist era" and a different modern one, one would have a stronger argument.
Should the UK retire the Union Jack because of what they did in India? The Nazi imagery is very closely associated with the specific group that committed the atrocities rather than Germany in general. The UK flag is less so. IMO, the rising sun flag is somewhere in-between, having been in use over a slightly more heterogenous time than the Nazi symbols, bit less so than the Union Jack.
>The Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force flag is problematic.
The flag of the National Republican Army is the Italian flag with a bird on it. Is the Italian flag also problematic due to its close relationship with the Axis?
Seeing the rising sun flag as a big part of the stage background did legitimately make me feel uncomfortable, knowing the atrocities committed under that flag.
The stars and bars, while also a Confederate symbol, is not really a notorious hate symbol; the Confederate flags that are notorious hate symbols are the “battle flag” (flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, also used as the union of the second and third national flags; square), and the second Confederate Naval Jack (a similar design, but with a different aspect ratio). The Stars and Bars (the first national flag) never got revived by Jim Crow era racists the way the other two flags did.
> the rising sun flag remains in contemporary use by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.
It's a slightly different flag, and while there might be some contexts where banning the present JMSDF naval ensign would be problematic, I don't really see how it is in a racing game.
Confusingly, people often use "the Confederate Flag" and "the stars and bars" to refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Battle_flag_of_the_Confed...
While technically both terms refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_the_Confederate_S... (and earlier variants) many people don't know that; look how many of the results on https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=stars+and+bars and especially https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=confederate+flag are actually the "battle flag".
Language is a living thing.
Well, the Confederate Flag refers to that and later national flags (the Stars and Bars is the first Confederate national flag, the Stainless Banner—with the battle flag in the union and a solid white field—and the Bloodstained Banner—adding a broad vertical red stripe to the Stainless Banner) were the second and third.
Not merely pedantic, it's worth noting that the Battle Flag is a key element of the later national flags, though not itself one of them. (Though what is often flown as the “Confederate flag” isn't the square battle flag, either, but closer to, if not exactly, the Naval Jack.)
And it causes relations issues between Japan and South Korea.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-japan-flag/jap...
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-08-17/japan-...
But the ethnic minorities that _do_ live there live in segregated apartment complexes, etc. to prevent "mixing with the natives".
> During the 1980s, the Japanese economic situation improved and achieved stability. Many Japanese Brazilians went to Japan as contract workers due to economic and political problems in Brazil, and they were termed "Dekasegi". Working visas were offered to Brazilian Dekasegis in 1990, encouraging more immigration from Brazil.
> In 1990, the Japanese government authorized the legal entry of Japanese and their descendants until the third generation in Japan. At that time, Japan was receiving a large number of illegal immigrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, and Thailand. The legislation of 1990 was intended to select immigrants who entered Japan, giving a clear preference for Japanese descendants from South America, especially Brazil.
> Because of their Japanese ancestry, the Japanese Government believed that Brazilians would be more easily integrated into Japanese society. In fact, this easy integration did not happen, since Japanese Brazilians and their children born in Japan are treated as foreigners by native Japanese.[42][43] This apparent contradiction between being and seeming causes conflicts of adaptation for the migrants and their acceptance by the natives.[44]
More can be read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Brazilians#The_Dekase...
source for this?
my experience: my wife is Japanese, i have visited JP many times, we know a ton of non-Japanese immigrants living in Japan and they all live wherever the heck they want to live.
i've never heard of non-native minorities being segregated either officially (government) or privately (landlord collusion) other than perhaps stories of illegal immigrants being packed together in the seedier parts of town. is that what you're referring to?
https://www.refworld.org/docid/55a4fa5115.html
https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/housing-discrimina...
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/04/17/national/social...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-discrimination-fore...
thank you for opening my eyes. will read and discuss w/our family :)
Officially, it's illegal to deny rental based on nationality. In reality, you don't want to live in an apartment if the owner doesn't want you there anyway, even though you could push for it in the court.
Racism is discussed on Japanese SNS quite often. There are also frequent demonstrations both for racism and against racism. I think the reason people don't really know because it's wasn't actively reported, even on Japanese media.
Additionally, there are 2.93 millions foreigners in Japan [0]. Japan population is 127 millions. That's already 2.3%, and not even counting Ainu and Ryukyuans. It's not large, but it's much larger than <1% you claimed.
[0]: http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/13256541
>basically same reasoning as makes you prefer your children vs other children, just extended a bit to the whole nation.
still completely holds.
https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Finnish-Air-Force-...
Which makes me think they don't really know what freedom of speech is.
In some places, you can be prevented from saying something that others do not want you to say.
Freedom of speech doesn't mean that there's nobody physically preventing you from talking.
For example: If you bad mouth a friend, they might no longer be your friend. This isn't a punishment for your actions or a restriction of your freedom.
Will they also ban anyone who posts and Hindu swastika? Or the face of Che Guevara? Or anything related to ancient Rome? Or anything related to the Ottomans? And I could keep going and going and going.
I agree that is wrong, but I disagree on the grounds of contract law, not speech rights. I do think MS is well within their rights to prevent you from playing their game for any reason they want (other than membership in a protected class), but they should refund your money.
So the punishment should instead fall on...other people? Because that's exactly what the sort of "free speech" you are advocating it - a restriction on other people's own freedom of speech and association.
Not really. The consequences in some places are just so severe that it might be one of the last things you say.
Everybody is a huge fan until those laws turn against them.
While the potential for abuse of this type of law is enormous and there already have been clear cases of actual abuse, the benefits are vague and unclear. Some things - like pronouns - should not be mandated by law in a nominally free society. Other things - like 'hate speech' - are already actionable under earlier laws (against discrimination, slander, etc).
Saying that 'you should be held responsible for your words' can be interpreted in many ways. Since the new 'security law' in Hong Kong was put in place people who state that the place should be independent from China can be put in prison for life. If that is not enough it is worth considering that there are now calls to apply this law retroactively [1]. Before that law was put in place Hong Kong was a relatively free place. Now it is not. People can say whatever they want but they are held responsible for their words...
[1] https://hongkongfp.com/2020/06/29/delegate-calls-on-beijing-...
The mechanism of "pragmatic law" is coordination between power centers mediated through shared cultural norms. In the 1950s this kept black people off TV, despite the lack of any law against it, for instance. Presently we have a rapidly strenghtening cultural norm against the tolerance of hate speech, so we are likely to see the same mechanisms kick in again.
Corporations coordinating to enforce elite norms has a terrible history, but so does the enforcement of democratically approved majority norms, so it is not entirely clear whether the fact that this can happen is good or bad.
Companies should be free to regulate hate speech on their platforms. The government should not regulate speech in the public domain.
The actions of private companies on private property (virtual or otherwise) are an entirely different domain than government intervention.
Even if you remove the censorship angle, it can be argued that moderating hate speech is simply good business sense. People buying Forza and paying for it don’t want to see this. If it becomes an issue, they lose customers.
While I agree, please direct me to where I can speak "in the public domain" online.
How practical is it in reality to be your own ISP, domain registrar, certificate authority, hosting service, web dev agency, and community moderator all in one?
But it's what the Constitution provides. It guarantees you the right to express your thoughts using your own resources. It does not force others to do it or make it easier for you.
https://www.iflscience.com/technology/free-speech-social-net...
> "When you disagree with someone, posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section WILL NOT BE TOLERATED," the first rule states, which is just a fantastic start to any list of rules. A club that has to spell that out (presumably after multiple people broke that rule) is clearly one that needs to be joined. "Your username cannot be CumDumpster," the rules continue, adding that pornography isn't allowed. Sorry, Ted.
Twitter permits all of those things. Some "free speech platform".
If they turn out to be a right wing version of Twitter it would be a shame. We need a platform that could accommodate both left and right wing people so that they can exchange thoughts with each other.
If you actually want to solve the problem of trolls, I think the first step would be to put away the "free speech" platitudes, sit down and figure out what kinds of speech you actually support and what kinds of speech you want to curtail and why.
Regarding your comment about ditching free speech and allowing only what I think is good. It would imply that I know what is good. I do not have such perfect knowledge and I do not believe anyone else has.
Parler claims to be a free speech platform, but their new content policies are stricter - no offensive usernames, no porn, etc.
Perhaps that regulatory regime will return. Maybe even next year. Not under a Republican-led FCC, of course.
Are you arguing that there should be some legal provision that says anyone can publish anything on your website, or newspaper, or ground, and you don't get a say in it? That seems unreasonable.
I'm also glad we finally got to the actual thing you want to see change.
Curious though: what would having this space solve?
Is this a trick question? It guarantees that any marginalized people has access to communicate easily and freely to the general public, and it cannot be denied by anyone.
A government-run, publicly owned online communication platform has several problems that prevent it from being the utopia you expect.
1. What value does it actually provide that Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr (and even Facebook) don't provide? I've learned more about marginalized communities both locally and globally on Twitter than I have anywhere else. Seems that they have a pretty decent platform today.
2. It's existence doesn't mean those platforms go away, so it by itself doesn't stop Facebook from doing the ridiculous things it's doing today. Folks may choose to patronize those private platforms over using the thing you describe.
3. Economically disadvantaged folks won't have access to it without a separate set of programs to ensure every household is connected to the Internet at a reasonable speed, and that they have the tech required to access it. (COVID-19 has laid bare the economic disparity even in my relatively affluent school district.)
4. Are we talking "run by the US"? If so: globally, marginalized people may not be able to communicate there due to policies from our government (which we can over time theoretically control) or their governments (which we cannot.) If not: who runs it then?
5. I think you'll find that the US government routinely denies people speech. Police violently responding to peaceful protests around the country is just one example. The US would definitely have to control for speech that violates US law, such as SESTA/FOSTA.
6. This is all ignoring the fact that people are people, and even the best examples of online communities have examples of folks being rejected by the dominant voices in the community irrespective of the rules.
I think a public-owned online space is fascinating, but I don't think it'd be a magic bullet to solving these problems.
But if we're answering my original parent comment of "where can I speak freely online," we're probably not discussing payment processing.
Actually, the only entities with any capacity of publishing content on the WWW are a few tier 1 ISPs.
If you push that rope you will discover that your capacity to publish anything you want is restricted by the policy of whoever hosts your servers, and their ISP, and their ISP's ISP.
If the end-state of that evolution is every entity being completely free to decide what gets published on their private platform, that's a huge problem.
this is obvious and anyone still unironically pushing the "just make your own" narrative is aware of it but has no other comeback
I posted a comment similar to this, but let me just lay cards on the table: if you want to publish child abuse images, or sell controlled substances, you're probably going to have a hard time finding hosting for that. Same if you want to publish content that violates US copyright law, which I agree with less but still applies.
The original question was "where can I speak 'in the public domain' online," and I'm fairly sure my answer holds.
Unless you were just trying to make some juvenile "any limits placed on my conduct online are invalid because Internet" argument, which I mean good luck with.
Fair enough.
My original parent comment asked where you can speak freely online, which for the purposes of my argument I'm equating to US law regarding free speech. (This may not be the angle you're coming from.)
Most hosts will allow you to publish things that fit that description. To take the examples given in this thread: if you want to publish an image of the Confederate flag, or publish something and not have Twitter or Facebook placing ropes around your content, publishing your own website is going to solve that problem for you.
Now, you're not wrong, there are limits to that, but I'm struggling to find out how those limits apply to this conversation in any realistic way.
But privatizing those laws on the hands of a few companies only work as long as (besides other constraints) there isn't a mob pushing those few companies around. So, I'm completely in favor of letting MS police their platform, but the universal ones ought to be declared public services and there should be guarantees of universalization there.
1 - Not only ISPs, as for example an app store on a locked phone is universal to that phone's userbase.
The internet isnt just SV companies. There's nothing stopping you from creating your own platform that espouses your ideals.
It sounds like a big part of the problem is that we don't have a truly "public" internet, if the backbone of the internet is a bunch of private entities.
We need a truly decentralized internet that doesn't suck like tor currently does.
This argument is always about people complaining that they don't get to participate on the big platforms. But if there was so much demand for people shouting about racist loser shit online there would be a big platform for it. It's their responsibility to build it, not Twitter's
This is exactly what I was talking about here[0]. You don't want a place to post freely to exist because you already have a preconceived idea of what people will say, and you are against that. This kind of attitude is hidden behind so many of the "but you can already do X, kinda" responses I've seen before in these discussions.
Why not just lead by saying you don't think a government maintained platform for free speech should exist because you don't want to hear what people who want it would have to say?
0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23716909
Same place as with pre-online TV and radio I suppose.
Free speech doesn't guarantee you an audience at the time and place of your choosing.
Take public buildings like a Courthouse or City hall, sure you have Free Speech rights, but good luck interrupting a court hearing to get your message out (without being held in contempt by the Judge (the government) and thrown in jail). Or try getting your message out at mid-night when the building is closed.
Then as others have said, what is stopping you from registering your own domain and posting your message there? If the government infringing your rights in that regard?
Where is the online public square? That's the point I am trying to make. And as others have pointed out, if you think having domain name and hosting is a public square, then you are ignoring all of the precedents of those things being removed by private entities.
The Government can restrict you on the street corner too. Take Covid, states/counties/cities/municipalities across the country are enacting curfews, so violate the curfew and they will arrest your chilling your speech...assuming you consider that an edge case as well, then just read the case law from the good old "soap box" days, which deal exactly with people setting up their soap boxes on the corner to talk to the public and yes the government can regulate that speech to a certain extent.
>Are you suggesting that the only way to exchange free speech online is for each passerby to create their own website and respond on their respective websites?
Do you have a website? Can I freely post on your website without your consent?
>Where is the online public square?
The web is the public square, you want to set up your own soap box (website) do it, but you have no right to take over someone else's soap box (website), and if they do give you some rights to stand on their soap box they certainly can place restrictions.
>if you think having domain name and hosting is a public square, then you are ignoring all of the precedents of those things being removed by private entities.
You are ignoring self hosting from private servers.
If the hosting company takes you down, host it yourself. If ICANN takes it down, host it on Tor.
There are always ways to bypass corporate control of speech. You may have to completely forgo the benefits provided by the corporate web sites, but nothing is stopping you from making your own platform.
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.
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 wasn't originally addressed to you). Are you someone who believes that a place like that shouldn't exist because of the content you believe that would be posted?
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.
That's a bit like "if the police beats you up in public, you're still free to speak your mind in your basement" though.
Think of it like going to a coffee shop: they can’t kick you out for being Catholic or male but they can ask you to leave if you are harassing other people, not following public health codes, etc.
As in "you can't speak any more, because your website is offline". A gag is the offline equivalent.
> Think of it like going to a coffee shop
I believe that example would be more accurate if we all lived in company towns, where no public space exists and your presence, and speech, is merely tolerated under normal circumstances, but you have no right to either being there nor speaking your mind, and can be removed at any moment, should anyone "in charge" have an issue with your behavior. That also has the angle that you lose a lot more than just your ability to speak: you lose your home and need to find a new place that will take you in, need to tell everybody you know and do business with about your new address etc, like when Google shuts down your Gmail account.
> As in "you can't speak any more, because your website is offline". A gag is the offline equivalent.
Again, a private company choosing not to use their resources to support your speech is not a gag. You are still free to pick any one of thousands of other options and you are free, even encouraged, read their terms before signing any contract.
Your Gmail comparison is similarly invalid: beyond the extreme rarity of that, when you choose to accept Google’s terms for getting free email service you are, well, accepting their terms. People have chosen for decades to register their own domains to avoid needing to update addresses and outside of uncommon legal situations this will avoid needing to do so.
Right, again, there aren't thousands of other options. If you want to host your site, you need a domain. That limits yourself to a hand full of registrars. And you need somebody to transmit traffic, if you hold any kind of controversial opinion, you need DDOS-protection. That leaves you with another hand full of corporations. Otherwise you're offline, as in, unable to speak.
> People have chosen for decades to register their own domains to avoid needing to update addresses and outside of uncommon legal situations this will avoid needing to do so.
How do you handle email on your domain when the registrar decides to drop your domain? And why shouldn't it, it's a private company, it can do whatever the hell it pleases.
If you want your own domain you can check any company on this list:
https://www.icann.org/registrar-reports/accreditation-qualif...
Similarly, network capacity and servers are available from many companies around the world.
If your content is so toxic that you can’t find anyone in the world to provide even basic network connectivity, it might be time to ask whether you’re using “controversial” as a synonym for “illegal”. That happens to groups like ISIL, but even that’s not completely successful, and it’s extremely unlikely that anyone reading this has “international takedown” as a realistic threat.
Ah, the good old "only criminals have something to hide" aka "all speech that is good is free, if your speech is suppressed, it's probably evil, and evil speech should be suppressed, because it's evil". That's really not a sensible approach imho.
Besides this presumes something as in "hate speech" exists, let alone that some confederate flag is such speech. It's a not so subtle attempt at creating idea of "words as violence" and promoting arbitrary law enforcement and anarcho tyranny.
all around fake endeavour
And yet, private businesses are subject to certain restrictions. For example, it is illegal to refuse service based on one's race or sex. I am not sure if companies are allowed to discriminate based on one's political views.
Based on this comment, it appears you have a poor understanding of what qualifies as a protected class and what they are protected from. You might want to brush up on that.
So first of all, SCOTUS "avoided ruling broadly on the intersection of anti-discrimination laws and rights to free exercise"[2]. Second of all, you chose to bring this example up and comment on my understanding without having done your due diligence and understanding the issue properly. Oh the irony!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...
Imagine if it were Facebook or Twitter instead of just a video game. You could apply the same logic to say that Facebook is just a private company, and what they allow on their platform doesn't qualify as a curb on free speech. But those two companies effectively form an oligopoly on on-line discussion, and what they allow on their platforms has a huge effect on the country as a whole. Because their policies end up dictating what people are and aren't allowed to say on the internet, their moderation strategies should absolutely be held to a higher standard.
None of this applies to Turn 10, because a racing game is not intended as a platform for discussion, but that's a nuance that needs to be considered. The blanket statement, "private companies should do whatever is good for their business" does not capture that.
Where does it end?
Gun advocates resist common sense reforms with the same logic, but lots of military weapons (minigun, flamethrower, rocket launcher, etc) are already either banned or highly regulated and have been for years without anyone's rights having been trampled.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/boston-art-commissio...
> But Blacks weren’t part of the design process, and the memorial’s central visual takeaway — a Black man kneeling before his white savior — has had people cringing for years.
They paid for it, but didn't get to have input on how it'd look. Seems like the precise sort of thing folks are upset about.
Rushmore was a treaty violation from the very beginning, and Native Americans occupied it as far back as 1971 in protest.
The First Amendment does not protect riots, but it does protect protests outside the White House.
Since then I've come to see the answer "it ends somewhere" as completely void of any value or meaning, and mostly just a justification for mindless erasure. It's not a smart zinger, it's empty.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/boston-art-commission-unanimous...
As far as the others, clearly there is an Overton shift happening here, and that will embolden some advocates to make more extreme demands. Is that bad? Probably not, but I think most statues of Washington are likely safe for at least another generation or two, and if they get moved from the public square into museums at that later point, well, that's something the future will have decided on.
You mean the ones where he's shown as west-european white? I suppose we could bother thinking about why he looks like that in those portrayals when he definitely wouldn't have in real life.
I remember some years ago about a situation regarding a movie. I forget the exact details, but it was something like a Filipino movie about an American disaster, like 9/11. The movie was based on a historically inaccurate story of a Filipino man or family involved in the circumstances, when in reality there had been none. I don't know whether or not the Filipino person was a replacement for a white person's real story.
But as someone much closer to the original circumstances, my perspective is not that I or my community's history has been replaced or been removed due to "racism." It is rather very touching that this foreign community felt close enough and impacted enough by the story to envision themselves inside it, taking part in it. To me, it was an expression of closeness and understanding, not appropriation or racism.
Plus it seems strange to me that in a story where people walk on water and talk to burning bushes and kill gays, that the most offensive or historically inaccurate thing is that some people have envisioned the main character as being similar to them.
I agree! And then they proceeded to spread that image throughout the world (commonly via imperial colonialism) as "god looks like me, not you". That closely aligns with the concept of systemic racism.
> Plus it seems strange to me that ...the most offensive or historically inaccurate thing is...
"Most" is a strawman. We don't need to start assigning gold/silver/bronze medals to badness in order to recognize that it's bad and work to change it.
You skipped the meat of my comment, which is about closeness and understanding.
Thomas Sowell, a black man, had some interesting historical perspectives on these figures in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, which is worth a read. This is just a small excerpt from a google search, and in itself can't directly address everything people are trying to erase, but it's a starter for listening to more and broadening your perspective:
https://www.aei.org/*/thomas-sowell-on-slavery-and-this-fact...
I would imagine that it's possible in some circumstances for this to be true for some, mostly confederate figures. I'm really skeptical that that's true for figures like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
The weird-power-dynamic-Lincoln statue with the freed black man aside, I generally agree on statutes of the founding fathers. I doubt a statue of Washington was erected in honor of his support for slavery.
In the greater context of what is happening in America right now, tearing down statues of Washington isn't necessarily about Washington himself. Instead, it is about challenging the idea that our historical figures (and America itself) are infallible.
If I may paint a picture, put yourself in the shoes of a black man in America in 2020. You see thousands of videos of police brutality, blatant racism, and disregard from those in power. A significant portion of the representatives in this country refuse to outright state that racism is still a problem in this country, but you see it with your very eyes every day.
However, you see these statues symbolizing this "ideal" version of America, where everyone is equal, which never actually existed. Further, when people challenge the existence of these statues (and by proxy, that non-existent "ideal") in the face of all of this inequity, they are defended orders of magnitude more intensely than the rights of actual-flesh-and-blood people. It's hard to look at a statue of General Lee, or even Washington, and see anything but a symbol of the fact that America at large cares more about the "appearance" of equality and equity than actually granting it to the people. If the people who defending these statues so vigorously also defended the civil rights of their fellow Americans with the same energy, I don't think we would see as much of a struggle over this.
As for blacks in America today, it's complicated to discuss and I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to go down all the paths. I think to some degree your picture is based on the news and what is visible, rather than what we know people actually think. Does BLM/the mob speak for all blacks? Are there any who dissent, on either the history, today's context, the solutions, or all three? Yes, definitely. And if opinions vary, should we not attempt to understand whether or not there is a right or wrong, and proceed according to rightness? If it is not about right or wrong, but the perception of offense, what does that mean? If a symbol stands for something good, and one person out of a million falsely perceives it to be a hate symbol, is that sufficient for a teardown? What if it were 10% or 50%? Is it just a matter of threshold? Do we even know the percentages today for what's happening before we let the mob do its thing?
I think a lot of people are smart enough to know that there is a difference between representing "an ideal version of America," and specific ideals that individuals represented. Washington for example largely representing the fight for independence; Roosevelt standing for social justice; Lincoln for freedom and equality - not American utopia.
When considering people as symbols it is important to isolate what they did that made them stand out from their time, from their common beliefs or actions that were the same as everyone else. Without doing that, we expose symbols to the injustice of being judged by modern moral standards, and sacrifice the good that we isolated. Like it or not, the acceptance of slavery was not exceptional in Washington's time. The ability and bravery to lead a revolution certainly were exceptional. The exceptional is what we isolate and create a symbol from.
It is of course possible to have been exceptionally cruel within the time of American slavery, which would be a reason to not symbolize someone. But that isn't the case for these figures and in fact Washington eventually came to flip his perspective on slavery in his lifetime.
The morality of the past is fixed and the morality of the future is in perpetual development, meaning that if we continue to take the same approach that's happening now, all symbols will eventually be lost in time, because with an unbound future we will likely run the gamut of what is considered right and what is considered wrong in any given "now." By keeping this up, we deprive ourselves of a story and a guideline of history to help us project our own future. We sacrifice timeless positive principles to shifting moral discoveries. We leave our children with less guidance.
Can't put in any more - you get the last word!
There are mainstream politicians and political commentators who explicitly say that racism used to be a big problem in the United States but that it simply does not exist any more. I suspect it's a very common belief.
Five seconds of googling yielded several results from when this was last discussed in a major way, in 2017:
NPR piece includes a chart of dates for confederacy iconography: https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...
HuffPo piece says it was never about "history and culture": https://www.huffpost.com/entry/confederate-monuments-history...
Vox talks a bit about the process:
"But the story of the monuments is even stranger than many people realize. Few if any of the monuments went through any of the approval procedures that we now commonly apply to public art. Typically, groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which claimed to represent local community sentiment (whether they did or did not), funded, erected, and dedicated the monuments. As a consequence, contemporaries, especially African Americans, who objected to the erection of monuments had no realistic opportunity to voice their opposition."
See: https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/18/16165160/confeder...
And then some newer pieces:
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confede...
https://www.wral.com/confederate-monuments-were-meant-to-int...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_display_of_the_Confeder...
This is the gist of democracy. You don't get bonus points for historical relevance. You may not agree with the angry mobs of protestors, but the same change is happening in formal government, albeit slower.
You could say then that these specific idols are not good idols because of the realities of their actions in the past. But there are other perspectives [0] that should be considered before taking that as a foregone conclusion - a conclusion mostly adopted from peers and not study.
[0] https://bit.ly/2NN8Wbv
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/06/19/destroying...
It feels tired to still be repeating this when so many others have said it, but Germany is capable of learning about Hitler and Nazism without the monuments glorifying it; Americans can learn about Robert E. Lee without the whitewashed monuments everywhere. And anyway, there was none of this clutching of pearls about history-erasure when the Saddam Hussein statue was toppled in Baghdad in 2003.
I think that framing minimizes the extent to which we can and do choose how we portray history in order to choose how we see ourselves.
Part of doing this well is being able to isolate properly, identifying what made historical figures exceptional, and being able to forgive sins which are considered sinful now, but were common behavior in the past. If you can't do that, you can't preserve people as symbols of principles at all, because the morality of the moment is not guaranteed to be held forever.
The AHA has specifically put out a statement[0] about monuments. The prime quote:
> To remove a monument, or to change the name of a school or street, is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history.
Thucydides, arguably the very first historian ever, criticized statues and monuments as poor representations of history. It is important to understand the difference between history and historical memory. Monuments are not pedagogy tools. Actual professional historians do not see them as relevant for teaching us about the people they represent.
[0] https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/ah...
Slippery slopes have varying levels of steepness.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/06/19/germany-tightens-online-ha...
I don't have an opinion on this as it's way too fresh to have observed the effects of it and render a judgment; just here to provide context.
The UK's Communications Act 2003 section 127 also says:
> (1) A person is guilty of an offence if he-
> (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network a message or other matter that is grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character; or
> (b) causes any such message or matter to be so sent.
> (2) A person is guilty of an offence if, for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another, he-
> (a) sends by means of a public electronic communications network, a message that he knows to be false,
> (b) causes such a message to be sent; or
> (c) persistently makes use of a public electronic communications network.
> On 19 December 2012, to strike a balance between freedom of speech and criminality, the Director of Public Prosecutions issued interim guidelines, clarifying when social messaging is eligible for criminal prosecution under UK law. Only communications that are credible threats of violence, harassment, or stalking (such as aggressive Internet trolling) which specifically targets an individual or individuals, or breaches a court order designed to protect someone (such as those protecting the identity of a victim of a sexual offence) will be prosecuted.
Implying they already expect to reevaluate this decision?
While this statement sounds reasonable at face value, these kind of important distinctions really need to be codified in law, not left up to prosecutorial discretion. Vague speech laws plus a great degree of prosecutorial discretion is exactly how a lot of brutal regimes oppress dissenters while justifying their actions.
Sure, but it's also how a lot of non-brutal regimes keep laws from growing out of control with silly edge cases.
If you are harassing someone, law enforcement doesn't have to consult the legislated list of 23,784 actions that constitute harassment. That seems reasonable.
The clarification that you just quoted above from the Director of Public Prosecutions is only one sentence in length but it would entirely change the meaning of the law, if a clarification like that were actually in it.
US harassment laws are not a list of 23,784 actions that constitute harassment either. Here's an example of one state's law. It is clear and specific, something all laws should be: https://definitions.uslegal.com/h/harassment/
You might be interested in this programme (from 2013, so there have been some changes since then) that explains how it works: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sn9cf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
I'm 100% fine with slipping that far down the slope.
I'm British, here, almost all good humour is targeting/focusing around some group in some way (e.g. Monty Python, Fawlty Towers). We call it black comedy because it's horrible out of context.
So, are you in favour of getting rid of comedy?
Or does your rule only apply when the little guy does something offensive?
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.
Also, the UK has free speech, just not on online platforms and I'd like to see that distinction ended.
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
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.
Everyone has a gun? Rational people are theoretically less likely to try and piss people off, because they know everyone is carrying.
It's super-easy to sue people for hate speech? Rational people are theoretically much more likely to consider their words, because they know everyone can get their ass fined and possibly imprisoned.
(The obvious problems are of course that not everyone is a perfect rational being with no emotions or extenuating circumstances, and that there are people who will immediately start trying to game any system for profit - goading someone into doing something that gives you an excuse to punish them for Bad Behavior, whether via the gun in your pocket or the State's justice, is an old, old tactic.)
Hate speech isn't well-defined though. It seems to just be a du jour list of things that upset people too much. What about a picture of a famous slave ship?
Then maybe you are not looking hard enough and are unaware of the realities in Europe? Some examples:
1. UK libel regime failing abuse victims: https://www.ibanet.org/Article/NewDetail.aspx?ArticleUid=075...
2. Search for "Notes from the Field: EU Defamation Laws and Journalism", where the International Press Institute (IPI) "takes a closer look at the application of defamation law in EU countries, seeking to illustrate the practical consequences of these laws upon both individual journalists and the free flow of information necessary for democratic governance."
We get to pick each time. "Well, we banned the confederate flag, better prevent white people from listening to rap" isn't the sort of thing that happens. Each adjustment to social norms is an independent choice that our society gets to make.
Is this a hate symbol?
If it is and it gets banned, will you also consider whatever other symbol gets co-opted?
I disagree.
>Is this a hate symbol?
I believe so.
>will you also consider whatever other symbol gets co-opted?
Yes, if it does get co-opted to the extent of replacing its original meaning. Luckily that only happens rarely. That's just how symbols and communication work - it's an unfortunate and unavoidable reality. The swastika is the most obvious example.
You asked how it works, that's how it works
The premise is that maximalist tolerance means tolerating intolerant ideas, and that there's a risk that a movement of intolerance can form which destroys the culture of tolerance. It suggests that rational discourse might not always lead us away from intolerant views, and maximalist tolerance could therefore be self-defeating.
You have to decide what's worth tolerating. You can't just say "can't we all be nice to each other" when there are people trying to celebrate an icon of slavery and white nationalism.
Where does this conclusion come from that rationality is so weak and our tolerant views are on such shaky ground that we have to prevent people from expressing intolerance?
So I'm not really sure what your point is. You seem to be trying to make a reductio ad absurdum, but it doesn't seem absurd to me for a community to be upset about a public statue of Che Guevara and demand it be removed.
Still, though, it's important to recognize the wholesome impulse to celebrate the South, as it is a distinct region with its own valuable culture. A few years back there was an attempt to replace the Stars and Bars with a new "Southern Pride" flag [1]. Predictably, it's bland garbage.
[1] http://thesouth.us/
Just as someone proud of being German has a wide variety of symbols they can use other than a swastika, someone proud of their Southern ancestry could pick almost anything else to express that. Choosing a symbol which racists have proudly used to intimidate others for a century in a half immediately calls motives into question and even if someone somehow managed to avoid learning the history until now the only polite response is “I had no idea. I’ll use something else!”
Companies have been filtering which words you’re allowed to use as your username, in chats, as your e-mail address. Filtering what kind of pictures you’re allowed to put on your cars is no different than that.
It seems to me that there are already plenty of laws that breach the 1st amendment if you interpret speech as absolutely any speech (e.g. death threats, libel, ...). And it is constitutional because the current interpretation of speech is narrower than "everything".
Doesn't that mean that, if there were the will to do it, free speech could be reinterpreted (by the supreme court?) to not include hate speech, thus not requiring to change the 1st amendment?
If there really was the will to do it, it would be by passing a constitutional amendment. If you aren't familiar, there is a process by which the constitution can be modified, and this can be done to completely rewrite or contradict the current text. But it's a very difficult hurdle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amendments_to_the_Unit...
> "Dabei reicht dann auch schon, dass man als Gleichgesinnter auftritt und solche Inhalte teilt oder mit einem "Gefällt mir" versieht"
https://www.pcgameshardware.de/Internet-Thema-34041/News/Bun...
And the Confederate Battle Flag and Nazi Flag absolutely do advocate the for murder and enslavement of people.
obligatory mention every time this gets brought up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18917746
At least admit it proudly, that you are placing a punishment on vocalbulary and imposing self-censorship and thus invading privacy too.
All these masks attempting to cover-up reduction of politics to friend/enemy distinction are even more insulting than the act of limiting speech in the first place.
All I ask of the people who are against these historical symbols is that they wear their power proudly without such lame constructs as "hate speech".
Yes I admit it proudly, I live in a country that places a punishment on saying hateful things. I’m pretty fine with it
> and imposing self censorship
Life in society is based around self censorship. I don’t run around the city center naked, I don’t shit in storm grates, and I don’t shout Sieg Heil.
> invading privacy
No I don’t think anyone cares what you say to your friends within your home. We just won’t let you say it in public
"Placing a punishment on hateful things" is a lot of words to cover the timeless and universal wisdom of "кто кого?".
There was a war about this. The enemies of the United States waved that flag.
Whether the goal of these censorship policies in other countries / companies, is something that should probably be determined on a case-by-case basis. Generally your question brings to mind 2 more questions I would ask you in turn for elaboration:
1) Do you think there should be a line drawn anywhere to say that this is the absolute limit of free speech? E.g. being able to say that some people are less valuable as human beings arguably brings little value any discussion. 2) Do you believe that symbols may change overtime to represent ideas that perhaps do not relate as much to their original meaning as a symbol? I'm talking about the confederate flag here. Granted, I'm not a US citizen, but I do not understand want possible purpose the confederate flag could serve in today's age, other than as an acknowledgement of antiquated values and ideas no longer endorsed by today's culture? Maybe 20, 30 years ago, not as many people really cared whether the confederate flag had anything to do with racism or slavery. But now, its meaning is arguably more hostile, just due to the way it is used as a counter to the BLM movement and other related anti-racism movements.
So, why would some one honestly use the confederate flag as a artistic symbol in this way today? Just as no-one would use the SS lightning bolt as an icon or symbol in Europe and expect to not get a reaction from people. In these cases, I would argue that doing is more an act of ignorance than it is an act of freedom of speech.
Disclaimer: I am a EU resident in Germany who knows next to nothing about censorship law in this country - this is my humble and probably misinformed opinion. Any knowledgeable Germans please feel free to correct my interpretation.
A step in the process? Maybe. I don't know if this kind of legal enforcement is the shortest route from here to there in the US. I could be convinced either way.
> Microsoft will not automatically ban players that create designs with these controversial images; instead, the original designer will need to be reported by submitting a ticket.
Sounds like it's a manual process right now.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills. We're talking about the creator of a video game banning the confederate flag in-game, we are a long way off from free speech rights in the supposed public square of a private enterprise. In what world can you imagine video game creators not being able to determine what kind of content is acceptable in their own game. I don't feel convinced that this is anything other than aggrieved culture warriors trying to make something mundane into a controversy.
I don't wholly disagree, my point is that the culture war is hot right now over this specific topic and that's why it's news-worthy.
You're over-generalizing. If a game explicitly banned players from creating characters that look like black people, would you still make that comment? I'm sure you can at least see why others would find that newsworthy.
YES! Without a shadow of a doubt I would. In the most extreme case I might say "Wow, very disappointing, I won't be purchasing any more titles from that publisher" and that'd be the end of it, I certainly wouldn't regard it as newsworthy discussion except in a gaming forum.
I'd also add that for the vast majority of gaming history, the vast majority of games do NOT allow you to create black characters, and while I've heard activists decry the lack of inclusion, I've never seen the lack of black characters in a specific video game title presented as a news story.
It can be. It doesn't have to be. Image recognition research existed long before the current trend of throwing the kitchen sink at a neural net.
Practically speaking, the best outcomes always come from applying as many different techniques as you can justify and applying a controlled failure-scenario-aware synthesis to the results.
I had relatives murdered in the Alamo. Should the Mexican flag get banned because I'm offended by it?
Every flag represents a group that has been in the losing side of a war and killed opposing citizens or soldiers.
Yet, those flags aren't banned.
Given the treatment of slavery in both the Republic of Texas and the Empire of Mexico back then, I would say that you may not need to be offended about it.
Neither Mexican Empire was contemporaneous with the Texas revolution or Republic. The first Empire was earlier, the second Empire was later, roughly contemporary to the US Civil War.
4 in the New World and that's counting the USA and CSA separately.
About 5 more in the west coast of Africa which are in the “Western Hemisphere." But not “many”, in any case.
But only one of them was formed in rebellion citing preservation of both slavery and white racial supremacy as key motivations.
If the Mexican flag only stood for racism and not any nation, then yes it should probably get banned.
The flag itself is not a problem. It won't change my mind for sure. I've seen it in history books, the only difference would be if somehow I feel threatened by the other player holding Nazi beliefs - which I'm not because we defeated them. We can defeat them again, no problem.
I would be ok with taking measure if somehow a bunch of a Nazi flags started FLOODING the game. This would be its own problem however, and stopping this kind of trolling is different than censorship. One or two flags here and there, just tell you some people are stupid.
Question for you: Would you rather play a game that has secret Nazis and you don't know because their iconography is censored, or would you rather play a game that doesn't censor people so you know what people believe?
It's absurd that one must have to deal with hateful political views in a game about racing cars.
How is this useful though? Are you afraid to adopt those views? Are you saying ONLY others are in this danger of adopting those views (if so, why are you so special)?
At best you are making them stealthy and they are playing with you but you don't know, and at worse their beliefs are reinforced because they already hate people.
Every country has committed various atrocities, but their flags do not necessarily represent those atrocities.
This isn't about the Confederates losing the war, and it's not about the southern states. No-one is asking for removal of all flags from the southern states. it's about what the confederacy stood and fought for. White supremacy and slavery.
Did they act or campaign to make things worse for their fellow man (and woman)? In other words, did they simply act in the context of their time period, as other men in their position would, or did they specifically act to curtail the rights of others. This makes it very easy for me to condemn symbols of the Confederacy, because they specifically acted to preserve slavery.
If anyone believes the Confederates did not rebel and fight specifically to preserve slavery, they should read the words of the seceding states: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
---
Taking it back to your question about Mexico: War is terrible, and flags are used in war. Flags are used after the war is over to show their solidarity with the principles of one side or the other. The flag of Mexico was primarily just a marker to say "We are Mexico"
Some people associate the confederate battle flag with a spirit of rebellion, and that's understandable. But other people associate it with hatred. You don't get to choose how someone else will understand it and be affected by it. It's hard to be a grown up, but part of it is deciding how much you care about offending other people.
The confederate flag should be banned because the kkk and other white supremacists adopted it, rebranded it as their own flag, and most importantly, no one cared to stop them. Try that with the Irish flag and see what the Irish have to say about it.
My standard is: Did they act or campaign to make things worse for their fellow man (and woman)? Someone could make a case that South Park has done this, but it would be hard for me to take it seriously.
The southern armies did not fight for slavery: it was legal in the United States before, during and after the war. They did not even fight for independence: the seceding states were legally independent as soon as their secessions took effect. Rather, they fought to defend their homes from a foreign invader.
Two non-contradictory things may be true at once: secession to preserve slavery was utterly contemptible; fighting honourably in self-defense is praiseworthy.
Edit: That said, given that the flag in question is so closely associated with white supremacy, it is hard to be too incensed over the ban.
Of note, slavery remained legal in the United States until well after the military defeat of the Confederacy: Lee surrendered on the 9th of April; the last Confederate ship surrendered in England on the 6th of November; the 13th Amendment making most slavery unconstitutional was not ratified until the 6th of December.
Agree
> "secession to preserve slavery was utterly contemptible;"
Agree
> "fighting honourably in self-defense is praiseworthy."
Lost me here. Fighting in self defense is understandable and necessary sometimes, but in defense of what principles? Context cannot be ignored.
in your eyes they fought to preserve slavery, in their they fought bravely against the more powerful north to preserve their homes.
The Alamo battle was fought because your Texian relatives revolted against Mexico's abolishment of slavery.
Look, I know Texas liked rebelling over concerns that the parent country didn't look kindly on chattel slavery, but combatants getting killed, either in combat or when executed as traitors, after starting those wars isn't being “murdered".
> Should the Mexican flag get banned because I'm offended by it?
The Mexican flag of that war is no longer used; the current Mexican flag was adopted in 1968 (or 1995, depending on which side of the flag you are talking about, though the latter was clarifying an ambiguity in the spec more than a new design.) So, even if your concern was agreed to be otherwise valid, it's kind of like asking about banning the modern German flag because of the Nazis.
Who's the judge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom_in_Tibet_controversy#H...
For forza: as a private company they can ban whatever the hell they want. Vote with your wallet.
I have a hard time believing the entire southern United States was only fighting for the right to own slaves. Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later? What other reasons were there for the war? (Considering the slavery issue though, thank goodness they lost)
Edit: thanks for the responses. I couldn’t have imagined the pro-slavery position was so outspoken and blatant, it’s a bit of a culture shock. Economic incentives are perverse
Look at the secession documents from the states:
At the very onset, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina declared that President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s “opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.”
On January 7, 1861, the ordinance signed in Montgomery that “it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the Slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States.”
On February 2, 1861, Texas declared its decision to be “based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color—a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law.”
On March 9, 1861, Arkansas’s George B. Smoote added a resolution: “Resolved, that the platform on the party known as the Black Republican Party contains unconstitutional dogmas, dangerous in their tendency and highly derogatory to the rights of slave states, and among them the insulting, injurious and untruthful enunciation of the right of the African race of their country to social and political equality with the whites.”
On April 17, 1861 latecomer Virginia, provoked by Lincoln’s raising troops to suppress the already seceded states, declared “Lincoln’s opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery” as it cut ties with Washington. Tennessee was the 11th and last, its population divided on secession (eastern Tennesseans generally opposed it), but not on the slave issue.
> Wasn’t that a factor that was emphasized later?
States rights was a factor that was emphasized later. Historical documents indicate that the war was explicitly over slavery.
And despite the idea of it being over the abstract idea of "states' rights", the confederate constitution mainly reduced a state's right to make choices for itself. It was pretty much a clone of the US constitution, with a clause that states couldn't ban slavery if they wanted to.
But it took a long time though for the stored wealth (and associated power structures) to disappear. Around 50 to 75 years. It wasn't until the New Deal investments of the late 1930s (in the entire country, including the south) that the south stared to recover. Before that there were a lot of parallels to Iraq and Afghanistan. A destroyed country with US contractors taking an obscene amount of reconstruction money and not really doing much with it. Locals clinging to their existing way of life including secretly joining brutal militias to enforce the former power structures; some trying to bring "law and order" back to their locality in a distinct power vacuum, some trying to bring back power structures that they had internalized as moralistically correct. That's how the KKK started, with a lot of parallels to ISIS.
Slavery was always the main issue. Anyone saying otherwise is just trying to divert attention from that fact or is totally ignorant or the history.
If anything, the opposite is true. You can read the declarations of secession for the southern states; e.g. see South Carolina's [1]. They seceded to protect the institution of slavery. Surely some people had other reasons to support secession, but this is the primary one. Decades after the war ended, there was a push to deemphasize slavery as a cause for the war for reasons of propaganda and nostalgia.
[1] https://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
It’s an expansive topic; I’d encourage you to pick a few accounts of the era as well as biographies of Lincoln and generals Grant and Lee.
But that doesn't explain why the average southern soldier—who didn't own any slaves (that was for the rich planter elite minority), who probably personally knew and possibly were friends with slaves, fought and died for the Confederacy. Claiming that "the entire southern United States were overcome by an irresistible race hatred" is as ridiculous (not saying that you are claiming that; you recognize that such a statement is silly) as stating that "every German soldier in WW2 was a Nazi", which was incorrect on both a literal sense (in terms of being a Nazi Party member) and a figurative sense.
Ultimately the average southern soldier fought and died for the same reason the average German soldier did: For his home (and homeland), his family, his friends and comrades, his way of life. Nothing more or less grand than that.
As soon as Lincoln was elected, without being on any ballots in the south, they knew what was coming (abolition of slavery), and the southern states attempted to secede.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff_of_Abominations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri_Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullification_Crisis
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
The racism wasn't a sudden thing. What was new was the movement to ban slavery, especially in new states, which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.) The election of an anti-slavery President was the impetus that turned it into war before he even took office.
It's not just about owning slaves, but also the belief that some people are fundamentally an underclass. Poor people didn't own slaves but feared that they would be put in the slaves' position if the slaves were gone.
So yes, it's a basic racism that goes back to the beginning. It only seems sudden because the election indicated that the tide of history was against them.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization
The Three Fifths Compromise gave slave states extra power. The 14th Amendment nullified it. The Senate and Electoral College still give less populous states extra power. Most of those were in the north.
Abolition wasn't a new thing in 1861. All the northern states had banned it in the decades after the revolutionary war. Indeed, slavery was banned in Georgia in 1735 when it was founded. The British Empire abolished slavery in 1833. Southern states in 1861 were fighting to preserve an institution that many people had recognized as evil for more than a century.
> which would undo the political balance that had been put in the Constitution from the beginning. (The Constitution still gives extra power to those states.)
You're mixing up two different things. The creation of a House with representation based on population and a Senate with a fixed number of Senators per state, which continues to exist today, was a compromise between big states and small states. Four of the seven states that were smaller than average and benefited from that arrangement had few to no enslaved people: New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and New Jersey and Connecticut. Conversely, three of the six states that were bigger than average and were hurt by that arrangement enslaved large numbers of people.
Additionally, the Constitution did not "give extra power" to slave states. It reduced the power of the slave states using an anti-slavery argument. Look at the text of the 14th amendment, which governs apportionment:
> Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed.
Compare that to the 3/5 clause:
> Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
Both then and now, the Constitution allocates votes based on the number of "persons" in each state, not just people who can vote. So today, the apportionment is based on a population count that includes children and non-citizens, not just adults over 18. Moreover, even in 1789, the Constitution deemed enslaved people to be "persons." It distinguished between "free persons" and "all other Persons" but both were "persons." So what would have happened if the 14th amendment text was in place in 1789? Slave states would have had even more representation, because the "number of persons in each State" would include enslaved people.
The anti-slavery argument was this: because slaveholding states treated some people like property, enslaved people should not be included in the "number of persons in each State." It partially succeeded in reducing the power of slave-holding states. It was a compromise with the devil, no doubt. But the idea that the Constitution increased the power of the slave states is false. Without the 3/5 clause, the slave states would have had even more power.
White supremacy was, and still is, an important component in the systematic oppression of Black people in the south. But the Confederacy went to war to preserve an economy that would be completely ruined if they had to pay their workers a living wage and treat them like humans.
Much of the Southern economy is still based on paying Black people shit wages. We throw a lot more of them into jail than we do white people, and so many of these jails are for-profit affairs designed to squeeze every penny possible out of their inmates and their families. We elect openly-racist sheriffs. We have literal KKK members get a hair's breadth from becoming governors. There is a case to be made that slavery never ended, it just changed shape.
Train supply chains allowed the north to move troops and supplies an order of magnitude faster than the south.
Yeah, it is stomach-churning to us folks with a modern colour-blind sensitivity. It is hard to believe that folks believed that sort of thing.
> Economic incentives are perverse
Not just that, cultural and partisan factors. We see an echo of that sort of thing with the current lunatic rage against facemasks: it makes absolutely no sense to argue against them, yet … people do. The crazier they are the louder they are. Prior to secession, pro- and anti-slavery advocates eventually lost all respect for one another and lost the ability to compromise. Slaveholders thought that abolitionists literally wanted to see them murdered in their beds (cf. the Haitian Rebellion, Nat Turner's Rebellion, the Pottawatomie massacre, Harper's Ferry), and abolitionists had an equally low opinion.
Opinions polarised and ossified. The extremists got more and more vocal, and eventually there was no middle ground. And then everything dissolved into a cataclysm of violence.
For starters, being deplatformed from major online players today would have serious consequences. Although it's true that these platforms are "private property," the entire society has become too reliant on them to be seen that way. I think it's dangerous when platforms function like a public utility and is yet allowed to do whatever it wants because it's technically private property. If platforms want to censor, there should be at least more oversight than what we have today.
Another problem with censorship is that it's not always about being right or wrong. A lot of the time, it's more about power or popularity. Thankfully, many corporations today are in favor of diversity and inclusivity, at least on the surface. However, things do change, and it's not always for the better. There are worrying trends of growing authoritarianism worldwide, and I think now is a good time to consider how censorship could be used against us.
Finally, racists are racists and no amount of censorship won't change what they are. I think Snowden had a point when he said that the answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship.
Also, what kind of discourse is so precious that it should be respected on the ... Forza decal platform?
1. The current flag of Japan is based off of one of the banned symbols
2. Probably the most famous car in pop culture uses one of the banned symbols. Microsoft has gone as far as banning parodies of the General Lee that have none of the controversial symbols[0]
If the flag of imperial Japan was banned due to its association with imperialism and colonialism [1], should the USA flag still be allowed[2]? IMO, the banning of the US flag would be excessive, but is also necessary if the rule is implemented in a fair fashion against all imperialist nations.
[0]: https://forums.forzamotorsport.net/turn10_postst162853_offen...
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Japanese...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_military...
If they willingly undid their imperialism and colonialism, it's fine; the symbol is one of learning to not be racist
If you had to invade and force them to stop it, and the regime ended while clinging to the racist policies, then it's bad
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.
If you care about intent:
I would guess a large cohort of confederate battle flags in race car games are on orange dodge chargers, with the intent of looking like the car on a show centering around the escapades of cousins trying to fight the corrupt county sheriff and county commissioner.
I don't know the intent behind putting it on the car in the show; but the intent of putting it on a car that looks like the car in the show is to identify with the show.
Anybody doing that today is at least a little insensitive and clueless, but that doesn't mean their intent was to actually identify with the confederacy (although, I guess there probably are some people who do intend such affiliation).
I wouldn't call them "racists" if I believed that.
> Also, what kind of discourse is so precious that it should be respected on the ... Forza decal platform?
It's not only games that are doing this.
That's a pretty controversial view. Expect to be deplatformed, citizen.
for others like me:
> In political and social theory, accelerationism is the idea that capitalism, or particular processes that historically characterised capitalism, should be accelerated instead of overcome in order to generate radical social change. "Accelerationism" may also refer more broadly, and usually pejoratively, to support for the intensification of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-destructive tendencies and ultimately lead to its collapse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism
Now that the swing has been so great in one direction more people will vote and more people will care. I don't like it but that's how it's working. People who are tired and apathetic lack the impetus to enact meaningful change.
https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/06/12/amid-protests-maj...
Also, I think I would point out passive resistance movements as an example for something like accelerationism working; it takes subtle mostly private acts of injustice and provokes those people to make unsubtle public acts.
I can see an _argument_ that Twitter, say, should be forced to pander to racists. I don't buy that argument, mind you, but I can at least see the thought process. I can't see any reason that imaginary car livery should have to, though.
And before you say "come on, swastikas are pretty extreme", remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign.
This seems semantic. For example, cheating is banned in many games, and if you cheat, you get banned. Banning cheating and cheaters is effectively the same thing.
You can be as racist as you want in your own head. No one is stopping that. You can express those racist thoughts all you want on your own property.
But you have absolutely no right to express or act on those racist thoughts on someone else's property.
They're two different responses to bad behavior, both totally fair.
My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests.
People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?
Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.
On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.
Based on what? If you go looking for things with a specific interpretation in mind you're going to find a lot of it even in places that it wasn't meant that way. The adage about malice and incompetence comes to mind.
"wasn't meant that way" - you're going have to try harder than that. Saying "oh, they meant nothing inflammatory, even though they're the group (3%ers) who are most associated with the nefarious intent and are absolutely aware of it's purported meaning" is wilfully disingenuous.
Damn, that's scary.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...
how many times does that have to be proven wrong?
Mob-justice is all the rage right now.
All that matters is that someone is pointing the pitch-forks at you or your cause.
i hope you stopped eating them 2011 ;-)
I even used the SCUBA shop, which is next door, for reference.
No-one that I've seen has advocated that the OK sign be abandoned for divers. I've been mid mouthful at a restaurant when a server has asked how my food is and I've made this sign and not been called a racist.
However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."
It was discussed here a few days ago. Stop firing the innocent or something, from the Atlantic.
Wasn't the story that people in another car taunted him and urged him to make the symbol, and they recorded it when he did? He may have not known what the meaning was (I believe that is what he claimed) but that is an entirely different defense to make than "I wasn't doing it, it just looked a bit like it".
The point is he didn't make a racist gesture, so why are we even talking about it.
And that is before we talk about the problem with firing someone over this in the first place.
Context is important.
I have had to tell my kids more than once that when an elderly person use their middle finger to point at something it isn't offensive because they grew up in a time when it didn't matter. That elderly person sure doesn't mean "F* you" as they are pointing their middle finger horizontally towards something while saying "look there".
In fact I think we all do something every single day that would be considered offensive by someone at some point.
I cannot wrap my mind around the level of cognitive dissonance there is around racial things. Real people's lives are harmed by this overreaction.
Meanwhile on reddit it's cool to he racist if it's against white people.
https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-ove...
We are saying that if you use a potentially racist sign (hand OK) in real life it's not a big deal, since you're not using it in conjunction with other racist stuff.
At the same time you cannot use another potentially racist sign (the confederate flag), even if you were just trying to make a videogame version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and are not trying to associate it with white supremacists.
I mean, I assume the confederare flag was not too problematic at some point, but now it is, so likely the OK sign will become problematic too.
Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!
MonkaS dude.
Pepe is fine, even the group that classified it as a hate symbol weren't referring to general usage.
One group of people I watch on Twitch use it all the time in the way it's meant to be used. As a very expressive cartoon frog that can convey emotions extremely succinctly.
And before you assume they're all closet neo-nazis: this group includes members who stopped streaming for about a month after Trump was elected, who frequently talk about eating the rich, and most recently they just ran a charity drive across multiple channels to raise money for BLM.
Context is key here. Lookup racist pepe images, and compare them to a picture of a sad/happy/etc cartoon frog. You won't have much difficulty telling the difference.
I could see white supremecists doing this for fun.
(There is a similar, earlier sign used by a milita group called the "Three Percenters", but that was not the source of the spread. They are an extreme libertarian group, not a white supremacy one. Though one can imagine some overlap. Their hand sign became so closely associated with white supremacy partially because of the 4chan hoax.)
yeah, but that's the story required for your credulity.
another 'reasonable person' with an axe to grind could have a much more minimal story required for credulity, say someone resting their hand outside the window of their car, tweet the photo with a license plate, and ruin someones life.
my meaning : don't expect your reasonable demeanor is going to be the same as some other random bystanders' 'reasonable demeanor'.
Alas, it’s not up to reasonable people to interpret the rules, it’s up to those in power, who can and will interpret it in whatever way benefits them
(See also, the Shirley Exception - https://twitter.com/AlexandraErin/status/1004400861865488384 )
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 Facebook where she can be seen pulling her shirt down by pinching the bottom of it between her thumb and pointer finger, inadvertently making the "ok" symbol. 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 and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.
Well, the hunt began when your wife made a kid run laps because he made an OK sign on his leg because he thought that was a 'cool' thing to do comparable to giving the person in front of you 'rabbit ears' by making a V-sign behind their head, not when that kid's mother started social media dumpster diving for 'evidence' to use against your wife. The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.
In Dutch there is a saying which applies to this; "Wat gij niet wilt dat u geschiedt, doet dat ook een ander niet", it translates to "Do not do unto others what you do not want to have done upon yourself".
I don't get this - it was clearly a summary of events. The only detail you really have to go on is "after". How you can assume all of this somehow went down without any talking-to or explanation is beyond me. Even so, the admin would probably have said the same at the time.
Based on what you said, isn't that exactly what happened? This paragraph makes it seem like your wife was punishing him for making that sign:
>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.
Your wife punished a kid for making a symbol she disagrees with, heck, you could even say by making a political statement. If that happened to my kid I would probably go after you as well (not in social media, but with a formal complain to the school to get you punished).
If he wore a MAGA hat would she made him run laps? What about a BLM tshirt? Rainbow pin?
It is not her job to punish someone she disagrees with. She can talk with him and explain what the symbol means and let the kid make his own conclusion, but she can't, and shouldn't punish a kid for disagreeing with him. (which I think is the reason we are now in this place in the world, where you either agree with everything I defend or you are a racist/fascist, or if you are from the other side, you are a communist hippie skyflower)
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.
I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside. It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it. I can look at your shoe or color of your shirt and conclude that you are a bad person inside.
I don't find that to be especially rational, but what is one to do?
The op is not wrong for supposing it's possible for someone to be targeted due to wearing "shoe or shirt color".
The topic was "amazingly-broad generalization".
Context matters.
Absolutely. But the corollary is that every time someone claims that something (a flag, a gesture, a tradition) is racist, then it actually transforms it into something racist. Because at that point you're forced to abandon it or consciously make a statement that you don't care about being considered racist.
If next year someone comes up saying that Santa Claus is racist, then dressing as Santa Claus becomes a statement, that you want it or not. This is a huge power that is easily abused.
This sounds like something out of a Borges story. Final scene narrated in the few remaining words designated as not harmful.
> It is from these Minutemen where the 3% name originated. It is a rough estimate that only 3% of the colonists were actively fighting in the field against British forces at any given time.
If you don't ban the person displaying the swastika, how can you possibly enforce banning swastikas? There must be a consequence for displaying the offending symbol, otherwise the rule is toothless.
You remove the swastika, and the person just replaces it. What then? Just keep removing it and hoping the Nazi/edgelord/'troll' will get tired of replacing the swastika? Trying to win a battle of attrition with a bad-faith actor is not an effective way to enforce rules.
> "remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign."
"Remember when 4chan 'trolls' said the OK hand sign was a white power sign and then white supremacists started using the OK hand sign as a white power sign?" --- There, I fixed it for you.
If an account gets a threshold number of cars banned, don't let them use customized cars online.
If they're spouting hate on chat, ban them from chat too.
I can imagine a very reasonable argument for this. Someone who puts a Confederate flag on their car seems highly likely to engage in other toxic behaviors. Just like someone who calls someone a nigger once is likely to do it again. So we use the behaviors as a signal of underlying tendency. We don't want people who have this tendency on the platform because they will tend to make life worse for other users, and the loss of their business hurts us less than we gain from other people feeling more comfortable. Therefore we ban them.
But not the people who have the authority to make the call, plainly.
On the other hand, too many on gaming platforms are engaging in clearly racist behaviour, ie. choosing offensive nicks, spamming chat, and need correction.
"Don't let them use customized cars" is extremely different from "ban them".
If conflating the act of violently taking someone's life away irreversibly to displaying an offensive custom skin in a videogame sounds like a reasonable and genuine argument to you, I don't think there is anything anyone can say to convince you otherwise.
I agree with the parent comment that restricting customization for the offending users in the game is a reasonable punishment. They can still play the game AND have zero actual possibility of committing the same offense. The desired outcome of the user not using offensive imagery in custom skins is achieved.
When your brother aims down the sights at you in Call of Duty and - gulp - pulls the trigger, you'll necessarily have him sent to jail.
That's okay, though - when you're counting on your fingers and get to three, and... hey.. are your thumb and index kinda.. touching? you'll be right there with him.
Case closed, I don't think there is much left to say here then.
Also this was just an explanation of how it's an option, to the person that didn't understand how. You might want to do a full ban, you might not.
> The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”
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.
But this doesn’t seem too relevant to the confederate flags in video games case.
Not everyone knows that white supremacist internet trolls have appropriated the OK hand gesture, but everyone living in the US understands that the confederate battle flag and other confederate symbols represent slavery, white supremacism, and treason.
Now I think, after hearing his story, that a public apology and explanation would have been enough. But he brought the company into disrepute. Firing him seems to be a valid option they could take. I personally think that raising awareness with a public apology and a statement from the company would have been better for everyone, but so often, a company's first response is to cover their ass. Or maybe they didn't believe him, while the reporter did? I wasn't there and can never know.
Yes, it started as a joke/hoax. Then they started doing it sincerely.
That is, swastikas and the confederate flag have an established history of their meaning, whereas the 4chan sign does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
Similarly, the stone elephant holding the gate building to the old Carlsberg grounds in Copenhagen bear huge swastikas on their sides, since they were erected in 1901:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg#/med...
There are a lot of swastikas still present in old sculptures and designs with no relation to nazism.
Removing it feels like a reasonable thing to do, though I'd probably draw the line at chisel it off old-buildings, etc.
That definitely went on for a couple years when I was a kid, to the point where everyone got really sick of those few people that didn't get when it stopped being funny.
That's the thing though, all it takes is one meme to take off to change the meaning of a symbol and you can't really predict what or how.
This was going around my college friends in the early 90s, predating Malcom in the Middle (2000-2006). I have no idea where it originated.
That is, until someone can chime in an earlier date.
The faux outrage can step aside while we sign to each other in relative peace and comfort.
But what happens if hearing people started seeing our signs and get offended and (gasp) started shooting at us; oh wait, that has happened already and all too often.
For that, get off of us. Signs are a communication tool, even the offensive FUCK YOU ones.
Heritage of what?
The South has hundreds of years of history. Why are the 4 years of the Confederacy so celebrated?
Wouldn't surprise me to see these people switch to one of the other, lesser-known variants to work around the ban.
That's exactly what Georgia did. In 1956 they added the Confederate Battle Flag to their state flag in support of white supremacy and segregation, and in 2003 switched it for the Confederate Stars and Bars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Georgia_(U.S._state)
>On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as "The White Man's Flag."[6] In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
I mean it's definitely being flown by racists and edgy teenagers and I think there's a strong case to be made that a different design is warranted since the heritage people have been largely unsuccessful in keeping the iconography from becoming a racist dogwhistle. But I think it's important to meet the heritage people where they are and start from there.
I think the fundamental argument here is this: clearly the Confederate flag has been spoiled -- the racists won out and now people associate the flag more with racists than Southern/rural pride.
What should happen? There are people who I think have a legitimate non-racist benign claim to the flag but they're now in the minority and being drowned out by racists. And the public discussion on the matter is an absolute shitshow because those people see the desire to ban the Confederate flag as a racist symbol as an attack on Southern culture/pride. Worse! We have people in this fight who actually are doing that because there is a very real anti-rural anti-Southern sentiment that exists in the US. And on the other side we have racists who are hiding behind Southern pride in an attempt to keep their symbol. Ugh.
So everyone thinks everyone else is arguing in bad faith, nobody believes anything anyone else says, some of the people are actually lying and arguing in bad faith and we're all arguing against caricatures of our opponents.
This postulates that the Confederate flag did not start out spoiled by racism.
If it's being used now by people intending it to represent regional pride who are simply unaware of its history (which I find unlikely, but a lot of people are claiming that), then all it should take to convince them to take down their flags is to share that history with them.
As a symbol for part of the Confederate army, it's still racist even in its first use. Some of the people fighting might have been conscripted against their will, but the symbol itself is still one that promoted slavery of black people
That pretty much sums up most modern sociopolitical discouse right there.
The flag was flown as the symbol of the actual Confederacy for a short time sure, because the Confederacy itself was short lived. But it's been flown as a symbol of southern pride for a long time since then.
And traditions need only span one's own lifetime to be meaningful.
The Confederate flag has always been a racist dogwhistle. Right from day 1.
The flag, as far as I understood it, was about being a rebel, “don’t tell me what to do” anti-authority.
Maybe my experience is quite different from yours. I never saw a klan rally or anything like that.
I did only buy a “git ‘er done” lighter from a gas station for its redneck kitsch. I didn’t intend to be a racist signal. Comically it’s stuck somewhere and I suspect should my grandkids ever find it in my estate it will be revered as some nazi memorabilia, incorrectly based on my intent.
One could even argue that it's at best negligent to fly a flag without knowing the most basic history of its symbolism, but if that's really what's going on, then surely it wouldn't be hard to educate all these people who are unintentionally flying the flag.
The point it became a "southern symbol" is a previous set of edgy teenagers and racists who flew it while legislating against black people and trying to stop civil rights.
The point of that iconography is to be a racist dogwhistle, and it's been a very successful one over the past hundred years
That's why it's illegal in Germany in the first place; if there was universal acceptance that it was an obscenity there wouldn't be much purpose in banning it.
Another issue, of course, is that teaching about the US civil war, and general cultural treatment of it, has been, and in some cases still is, far more dishonest than teaching about World War 2 in Germany. Note that in this thread there are people questioning whether it was about slavery. The initiators on the confederate side would not have questioned that, they could hardly have been more clear that it was. There's a huge amount of mainstream cultural baggage glorifying the confederacy and important confederate figures in a way that there isn't about the Nazis (with the possible exception of some rather creepy Rommel apologia that shows up sometime).
Before trotting out the "it's a symbol of heritage" line, ask yourself exactly what that heritage is.
I just saved everyone a ton of time there.
There's a reason they chose Lee's flag and not a CSA flag associated directly with a rabid slaver like Jefferson Davis. Indeed, the Army of Northern Virginia flag used to be a symbol of progressive racial integration, at a time when poor white southern migrant workers and poor African Americans found common cause against unfair wages and unsafe working conditions.
https://consortiumnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/8gvw5g...
https://images-theconversation-com.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/im...
History is nuanced. Insisting that your view of what a symbol means should control others is toxic and Orwellian. Our society should be better than that.
[1] https://history.army.mil/books/R&H/R&H-FM.htm, Section VI with Ulysses Simpson Grant as part of the unbroken chain of command.
Unilateral succession is illegal. Those flying the confederate flag were not defending themselves, they were committing treason. Our Union is an indestructible one. It was safeguarded then by the U.S. Army who will continue to safeguard it as long as America endures.
It feels me with great sadness to think of the blood that was spilled, but at the end of the day Americans who take up arms against the U.S. Army are criminals and traitors. No American should fly the flag of those who have killed our soldiers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Fort_Sumter
To summarize: 1) South Carolina secedes. 2) South Carolina demands the Union remove its troops from their soil. 3) The Union refuses, garrisons a fortress on foreign soil, and attempts to resupply said garrison. 4) South Carolina offers an ultimatum--remove your soldiers or we will attack. 5) The union refuses to remove their troops from foreign soil. 6) South Carolina's militia attacks Ft. Sumter.
South Carolina's militia fired the first shots, but I'm not sure how you can say that they 'Initiated hostilities'. Occupying foreign soil has always been considered an act of war. History is written by the victors, I suppose.
After seceding those who were illegally occupying the land were the secessionists themselves. You cannot unilaterally seceded from the Union. Hundreds of thousands of my countrymen died in the Civil War to establish this principle; it is the law of the land and to imply otherwise is to dishonor their sacrifice.
No unilateral secession, period. That is what 350,000+ U.S. military personnel died for. If you believe it was legal for those folks to secede I suggest you renounce your U.S. citizenship and leave.
An actual moral reason not to fly the confederate flag on your home or your video game automobile would be because many black people interpret it as a racist symbol, and they might feel unloved and alienated.
A philosophical reason would be if you disagree with the sectionalist politics of it. That's why many groups opposed the introduction of the symbol into state flags in the past. That sounds more aligned with your reasons, but is a different reason. The act of flying Italian, German, Mexican, or British flags to celebrate one's ethnic heritage seems quite different than that of flying the confederate flag.
Your arguments are transparently shallow, poorly thought out, and profoundly un-American. If my arguments would satisfy an automated grading system, yours would fail immediately upon parsing. I see no value in continuing a conversation with someone who claims there is no moral foundation in opposing the killing of U.S. troops by illegal insurgents. Feel free to have the last word here on this message board; in the real world the last word was the surrender of the Confederacy.
I mean, it's not like I'm wholly unsympathetic to failed secessionist states and their symbols/paraphernalia. People still use the flag of Biafra where I'm from, after all. But those that do are self-aware enough to acknowledge/be upfront about the values they hold and the message they pass when they use it (it certainly helps that Biafra attempted to secede in response to ethnic tensions/discrimination, not because it wanted amongst other things the right to keep slaves).
It's just a symbol of identity or culture, like most flags. There's a massive cultural difference between the rural south and the highly populated coastal cities. The flag to many is a symbol of that difference, and has many of the psychological undertones that makes the "don't tread on me" flag popular, mostly a willingness to push back against external influences.
And there are a lot of people outside the South who do show and like the Confederate flag.
So while I agree that it's a symbol of an identity and culture, I don't think it's a geographic regional identity and culture.
I think you're arguing in good faith based on your own experience, but I would gently suggest this is an opportunity to consider a wider variety of data and perspectives.
Many times, and I can earnestly say I've never seen that. Nor in rural Pennsylvania for that matter, which I would otherwise characterize as slightly less sophisticated than NY. Are there racists in that region? Certainly. But I can't recall ever seeing somebody in those states flying the confederate flag.
I'm sure it's happened before, I'm sure you can find me local news reporting on instances of it. But it's definitely not a common sight.
Southerner here. The South is a very diverse place with a sizable African-American population.
Perhaps I'm just missing all the African-Americans who proudly fly the Confederate battle flag, but my perception is the flag is used by a small subset of white southerners as an anti-virtue-signaling device.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag flown in service of keeping their ancestors enslaved, or did you mean that the flag had attached to a particular subset of Southern identity? Please expand, I'm curious.
Are you suggesting that African-Americans identify with the Confederate battle flag...?
No, and nothing in my comments suggested that. It makes sense that they wouldn't since their relatives probably didn't after the war. For many people, their relatives did identify with the flag. It probably started as something racist by the survivors of the war, but morphed into what it is today, something that isn't considered racist by most around where I live. Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
Could that be because there isn't just one type of "southern heritage?" Do you really want to equate the southern heritage of black people in the south with those who fly the Confederate battle flag?
I am saying this as gently as possible: the majority of bigots don't walk around thinking or saying "Wow I sure am a bigot!". They mostly just think of themselves as normal people with normal values.
> Do you really think NASCAR, a big business, would have previously allowed it to be flown if it was universally considered a hate symbol?
There is a team in the NFL that is named a literal slur against indigenous Americans. I am not quite sure where one would get the idea that the US sports industry is a bastion of sensitivity.
This argument tends to make me agree with the southerners who want a symbol of their own.
Q: What do you get when a San Jose doctor has a Google engineer over to dinner?
A: Lively conversation about how stupid everyone is in Alabama.
I'm not making that up. Here's the conversation piece (a piece of paper) a family friend brought over for dinner with my parents:
As he delighted in explaining to everyone, this is the "Alabama literacy test". You're meant to read it as follows: The southerners responding to this sort of sentiment are doing exactly the same thing Mark Knopfler did in Money for Nothing: The "faggot" in question is of course Mark Knopfler himself, responding to his own haters with an implicit "screw you".Spend enough time telling a group of people that you hate them and everything about them, and they'll start developing cultural elements specifically oriented around flipping you a middle finger.
(And for what it's worth, it seems like a safe assumption that the use of the confederate battle flag as a symbol of southern culture derives from its use in that role on The Dukes of Hazzard.)
It was started as something racist and still remains incredibly racist to pretty much everyone else, despite doe-eyed claims from southerners who want people to believe that a 5 year long pro-slavery rebellion represents the history and pride of the South.
Some comment I saw online made me research it, which then made me aware of other symbolism it has.
So don't be so quick to assume racism in those who fly it.
I do not believe those who spend a few hundred to have it tattooed on their bodies, or people who buy one for $7.50 from China off Amazon [1] when they say such things, because there's no value in displaying a representation of a thing that's historically represented nothing but hate.
Owning and preserving an authentic flag shows a commitment to history. Displaying a representation of it shows a commitment to hatred.
---
[0]: https://www.newsweek.com/2015/07/17/value-confederate-flag-c...
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/ZHENGYU-Polyester-Double-Sided-Milita...
If they assert that the confederate battle flag is a symbol of their heritage, then it is.
Are you going to respect that?
The Confederate flag is even more powerful because people have been convinced it has something to do with Southern (white) culture and Yankee oppression. Maybe they need a new symbol, that isn't intimitely tied to slavery.
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-wor...
The winner gets to make the rules. The South has had 150+ years to celebrate their treason. It's more than enough time that the winners put that symbol to rest.
> resulted in the mass murder of hundreds of thousands
In other words, a war
You can easily find (racist white) people displaying the confederate flag in northern states, but you will be hard pressed to find any black people in the south who feel regional pride toward confederate symbols.
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 would also bet that the overlap between “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 virtually non-existent to shame them; this make no sense.
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.
It's got a lot of history being flown specifically to spite black people -- if you want to reclaim that as a non-racist symbol, you'll have to do a lot of work. Otherwise the obvious response is "heritage of what, racism? Why are you proud that your parents tried to keep black people from voting?"
The fact that it isn't racist in, say, China doesn't mean it also isn't racist when spray painted on a synagogue.
> While the Nazi flag may be a racist symbol, the Swastika, however, is not a racist symbol.
You deliberately distinguished between the Nazi flag and the Swastika, an element incorporated into the Nazi flag, and claimed that between the two, only the flag was racist.
And I'm merely pointing out that in the Western world the only part of the Nazi flag even considered racist is the Swastika.
Symbols are not racist, which is what should obviously be taken away from this.
My concern with these sort of deplatforming moves while understandable, is they tend to drive these bigoted ideas underground. So maybe they cant express it publicly but boy, do they find other ways to do it as certain church members' families can attest. I don't have a definite solution but there is something to be said for using informal social pressure (i.e confederate decal dude all of a sudden not finding anyone to play with, because people quit the game as soon as they see the flag) rather than deplatforming.
And then these people vote. People who feel (rightly or wrongly) persecuted tend to lash out, whether it's by breaking statues or electing far-sides candidates.
The current polarization happened before Microsoft stopped letting you make racist cars
Whereas for Asians, native Americans & for much of the ancient world it has entirely different meanings.
https://swarajyamag.com/news-brief/from-devi-in-hijab-om-as-...
I'm also getting a little sick of down votes every damn time I mention Native Americans. I'm starting to wonder.
Seventeen million people died in the Holocaust. That number is larger than the dollar amount that many of the companies on this website raise. That's more people than you'll meet in your entire lifetime, perhaps more than you'll _see_ in your lifetime. This is the population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston put together. Those people were physically destroyed by folks identifying with that symbol.
It's really, really hard to say this symbol doesn't carry hate universally—even if a Buddhist practitioner were to use it—because putting it on your video game car on _a global game_ whose audience is ~100% folks who are well-aware of nazism (and, in fact, people whose histories are tainted by the effects of the Holocaust). But more to the point, the confederate flag _was invented_ to represent hate. It had no established use before the confederacy. Pedantry about whether swastikas are universally racist or not is pointless, because the topic at hand is about a symbol which is universally recognized as one of hate.
https://www.facebook.com/upwordindia/videos/2662610620694569...
The Mao era probably around 75 million. Lets ban any symbol related to them (sickle and hammer, red flags, etc).
(ps: I am not in favor of the swastika, just don't like how a symbol can be used for thousands of years, hijacked by some pricks, and now everyone can't use it anymore, and the people that have an emotional connection to it have to censor themselves. Also, isn't the buddhist one reversed from the Nazi one? Mirrored? Which makes it even worse as you are using a similar but not exactly the same symbol and ignorant folks can't spot the difference)
Your argument is that, if society was more tolerant of bigots and their symbols, then Dylan Roof might not have murdered nine people? History indicates otherwise: the US was a lot more tolerant of racism in the past and there was a lot more violence.
In your defense, that may be the surface level interpretation of what I said. However, I am not saying that in any way shape or form. Closer to what I'm saying is that, censorship artificially reduces the number of monsters in our polity that we are able to identify. They are prevented from expression so we don't hear or see them and thus have the mistaken belief that more progress has been made when that couldn't be further from the truth.
I want people to be open with their racism/bigotry, so that I know to steer clear.
It's all well and good to be able to identify these people, but the downside is that their victims have to put up with more racism and bigotry.
Frankly, if we drive it underground, great! Let's keep driving it underground until it suffocates.
Coincidentally, a news item from yesterday about swastikas: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
Does the popularity of a racist symbol have any correlation with whether it should be suppressed? Swastikas were a lot more present in the 1940s but that doesn't mean they were less reprehensible.
If a far-right group started using a brand-new symbol to signify their racist ideology, is it suddenly worth waiting for the symbol to pick up steam before prohibiting it? That doesn't make a lot of sense. The people using the symbol are saying "I don't think you should exist" _right now_, not when there is a sufficient number of others rallying around their belief system.
The confederate flag is hundreds of years old. Waiting for "informal social pressure" to kick in is a great way to ignore a problem.
If someone is specifically using the Nazi version of the swastika, then by all means handle it. But if it's the non-Nazi version, then why do people not get to reclaim it?
https://www.facebook.com/upwordindia/videos/2662610620694569...
Merely displaying a flag seems like a pretty generous interpretation of "propaganda". It certainly doesn't fit any definition of which I'm aware.
Perhaps there's an argument for banning such symbols, but don't use hyperbole to try and prove your point, you just undermine the legitimacy of this effort.
Suppose trump took down all the American flags in the whitehouse and replaced them with Russian flag, or if Obama had taken them down and replaced them with the Isis flag.
There's no world in which that would be taken lightly
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.
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 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.
No it's not. Someone who grew up on the Dukes of Hazzard maybe just really loved that car and associates it with great memories of a happy childhood. To call this "being an unwitting vehicle of propaganda" is losing the plot completely.
Let's replace Microsoft with Amazon. Should Amazon be able to produce "The Man in The High Castle?" Should "The Man In The High Castle" be available to watch? How about merchandise from the show? Would it be OK to have it?
There are quite a few Eastern Europeans and Jews in NYC. Why was that OK?
Found this on Gothamist. Can you point to the swastika?
Or is this a different NYC Subway campaign for The Man in The High Castle?
Though still a bit... off, to be honest.
n.b. the iron cross symbol is still used in Germany for e.g. the roundel of the German Air Force.
I don't doubt that the design would fall afoul of the MS content guidelines as I'm sure perching the Reichsadler on top of the iron cross would be the kind of thing they mean by "contextual clues".
No, don't just censor me away with your little "downvotes". Discuss!
I wonder why it'still considered "taboo" in the Western society in the information-age.
I generally don't like the thought of cultural appropriation (IMO Anyone should be able to wear kimono) but I feel that forbidding something outside western country by western people is a bad cultural appropriation.
I also believe that we should be exploring more ways to fight racism other than censoring it outright. Censorship seems like an easy answer, but it's not going "cure" the racists and has unwanted side-effects on society. I think racism is a complex issue that needs more deeper solutions.
It _is_ private property. The companies in question are just exerting their rights. The users agreed to the ToS while signing up, and it's perfectly reasonable for them to cut off your access to their service, as long as it's within the legal bounds of the ToS. I don't think companies should be directly regulated/penalized for banning users. I do think however, that people should be more conscious of what they're signing up for. Consumer protection law should protect consumers, not their convenience.
So by parity of reasoning, companies that pollute within the bounds of the EPA's restrictions are also perfectly within their legal rights, and so shouldn't be chastised or further regulated, right?
Of course that's nonsense, because we're all interested in a better civilization, which occasionally means reviewing and accounting for the negative externalities of which we might have been previously unaware.
So please stop using this point against people raising concerns over how corporations are acting. There are legitimate concerns over the negative externalities of policing speech and banning people on private platforms with no recourse for appeal.
That would get laughed out of the SCOTUS in an instant.
It's quite literally not a non-sequitur. The parity of reasoning in both cases is clear: they are the same argument, I just swapped the details.
Every good regulation is intended to address some negative externality. Before a regulation is enacted, people point out the negative externalities and how they're harmful and that we should do something about them. Maybe they have some idea what that entails, maybe they don't.
You can't consistently dismiss such concerns by arguments like, "it's private property", while simultaneously supporting other regulations, like those enforced by the EPA, that also restrict one's rights to use one's property.
> unless you want the federal government to enact laws that enable them to micro manage every form of communication
I don't know what a good solution would be, I just know negative externalities in this case do exist. You can continue to deny them, you can accept that they exist but deny their importance, or you can accept they exist and that they are important, and so participate in a dialogue about how they should be addressed.
Basically, I'm just saying I found the grandparent a bit... overkill ;-)
If this incident happened in a vacuum, I would agree. Unfortunately that isn't the case. The censorship ranges from mild to extreme these days, and now even the mild cases drive the wedge deeper. The unrest in the US is only just beginning I think.
Anyway, the post to which I initially replied is a common response to private censorship, and the irony of arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their private property apparently escapes most people who make it. "Oh, private property, right. So let's eliminate the minimum wage then, because that money they wouldn't otherwise pay to fill a role is the corporation's private property. No? Is private property suddenly not the only thing that matters?"
You might not like it, but that is the current reality. Personally I like it. I would much rather have corporations decide which speech is allowable on their platforms than have the government decide which speech is allowable.
This is not quite correct. Corporations used to be bound by their own charter until Congress relaxed those restrictions. Congress makes the rules under which corporations can operate. The Supreme Court ruled on how the current rules should be interpreted against the Constitution, but those rules are fairly arbitrary.
In any case, I'm not even suggesting "taking away their free speech rights".
> I would much rather have corporations decide which speech is allowable on their platforms than have the government decide which speech is allowable.
This is a false dichotomy.
(Sure, there are slippery slope arguments about what happens if speech is not permitted on any media or if media companies are permitted monopoly power, but since Forza car designs are pretty far from that scenario, government intervention based on the assumption that computer game-designers do not have rights to curate their world or that displayers of the Confederate flag deserve special protections falls down much slipperier slopes of eroding property rights or enforcing [unpleasant] speech)
Attack the strongest interpretation of an argument, not the weakest. Your choice to focus on this flag incident and ignore the wider context that I described of platforms of all kinds censoring speech and banning people reveals the flaw in this sort of response.
This is but one more example of a trend, and the trend is what should be alarming. One should rightly be suspicious of any claim that a specifically bad storm, or a specific heat wave was caused by global warming, but one should be very alarmed at the growing trend of worsening storms and increasing incidents of heat waves.
Sure, happens all the time. You think waitresses and restaurant managers like belligerent customers? They often tolerate them anyway.
Like I said, this specific instance wouldn't concern me at all if it weren't for the over-arching trend, and my post was specifically targeting a (frankly hypocritical) type of reply that comes up every time this topic is broached.
So is Facebook and yet those applauding this are up-in-arms about FB's policies. Seems like a double standard.
I don't believe you really meant what you said there. Private companies aren't allowed to ban users because of their race. Do you want them to have that freedom and allow segregation? Or perhaps you only accept that because it's already the law and you would have opposed civil rights laws had you been around before they were introduced?
Most people's beliefs about right and wrong are arbitrary, not based on any fundamental principles, and there really isn't much of a defense for them other than "well, that just happens to be what I believe."
Discrimination against race or another protected class falls outside of the "legal bounds of the ToS".
They already accounted for the case you're trying to argue against.
Am I wrong?
If no, how have they accomplished this?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37554167
They eventually dropped he case, probably because of the public uproar, but to even consider such a criminal case definitely isn’t a hallmark of a “freedom of speech” society.
No they weren't. He was never prosecuted - an investigation was opened after a complaint by Erdogan and then dropped before charges were laid.
From your own link:
"Erdogan then filed a complaint alleging that he had been insult" and "The prosecutors in the western city of Mainz said they had not found sufficient evidence to continue the inquiry against Jan Boehmermann."
Additionally:
"Mrs Merkel added that the authorities would move to repeal the controversial and little-used Article 103 of the penal code, which concerns insults against foreign heads of state, by 2018."
Which was done[1].
Seems a pretty good example of a functioning democracy.
[1] https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-en/service/cabinet-overt...
https://www.dw.com/en/minister-wants-to-legalize-anti-nazi-s...
I don't know where you come from, but in my home state where we JUST THIS WEEK removed the Confederate emblem from our state flag, only people with real hatred towards non-white people use that symbol.
That was long overdue, but it has little to do with the point that I'm trying to make. What I'm saying that we should be more careful about what we wish for, especially for something as dangerous as censorship, because things never work out the way we want it to. If the system worked as intended, there wouldn't be a problem of systemic racism now.
But the point is that even with the best of intentions, supposed "solutions" to any sort of problem won't always be effective and could end up making the situation worse if people don't think through. Racism matters, but how you solve it equally matters as well.
Also, you're essentially making the slippery slope logical fallacy about needing to be careful with how you censor people. I don't buy into your argument.
For some topics such as the Confederate flag, you don't even have to complicate the discussion with "private company vs public utility".
E.g., tax-payer government funded public schools also banned kids from wearing the Confederate flag on shirts because they were "disruptive". In some cases, the free speech advocates fought the rule and yet the ban was upheld by courts even on appeal:
https://www.google.com/search?q=confederate+shirt+banned+pub...
In other words, even if the government nationalized Microsoft into a state-owned enterprise, we'd still be having this debate about free speech being censored.
If you're young, you have many years ahead of you. A lot of time for culture and norms to keep changing and evolving. I guarantee that one day, you're going to wake up as an old person, and something that you like that's innocuous today will have been deemed terrible and hateful by a future generation. Maybe even for good reasons. You'll be kicked off platforms, called ignorant, and shunned for being associated with this now-controversial thing. It's going to be confusing. You're going to feel as though the world has gone off in some crazy direction and left you behind.
I'm not saying have empathy for racists. But maybe we could try to put ourselves into the shoes of someone for whom time and culture are moving too fast and imagine how disorienting and confusing what's going on today might be for them. I'd guess that these people might want to lash out at the rest of the world who suddenly seem to be against them. Or turn inward into hermits and avoid society. I don't really understand it, but I'm still young enough to keep up with all this change. But I feel I'll be left behind eventually. It'll probably happen to us all.
My first example of this came when I was ~7 and Robinsons' badges that I'd been collecting since a toddler were seen as an image of racism. It didn't take much work to accept that they were no longer acceptable and that while fun to collect, their time had passed. As it happened, at around that time collecting Star Wars figurines became the de jour thing, so there was something new to enjoy in it's place.
Some people still swear that the badges' meaning is divorced from the racism, and still collect them to this day. I don't know how they can really.
For info on the badges I'm talking about: http://www.golligosh.co.uk/
Those who want to "celebrate" their Southern "heritage" have plenty of symbols and flags to choose from that don't have inherently racist and treasonous implications.
Such as? What are those examples?
Is there a reason you feel the need to put scare quotes on celebrate and Southern heritage? Are they not allowed to have a heritage?
I don’t want to defend the flag, because the Confederacy was a monstrosity. But I also don’t like seeing people that have never met a Southerner in their lives (not necessarily you specifically, but certainly most people attacking it) thinking they know all about it and all about the people that fly it.
There are ample numbers- by no means a majority, but certainly a large number- of Black people that use the flag because, whatever its flaws and whatever evils committed under it, that flag is the most popular symbol of Southern culture- their culture.
That’s another factor; most people insulting the South don’t realize just how much of their attacks land on Black people themselves.
Very true. For example, there are definitely places where antisemitism is becoming more and more socially acceptable.
It's a bit fascinating that media which attempts to censor this content seems to have worse problems with it than media which doesn't. There's nothing illegal about sending Nazi content through the mail but the mail isn't utterly swamped with Nazi newsletters but places like video games seem to fight an endless battle to keep half their users from turning racist.
Nobody blames the postal service for delivering racist newsletters or pirated DVDs or drugs. The responsibility lies solely on the user, who is prosecuted if their conduct exceeds the scope of the law. We need that for the internet.
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.
If you want to be funny about the confederate flag, go do an open mike. There's no context in a racing game... so while it might be some hilarious meta-commentary on the ridiculousness of racism, the only thing another player sees is "there's someone who wishes they could still keep slaves".
And then, I grew up.
You can still drive a charger if you want. Now you just can’t paint a racist flag of treason on it.
In this instance, it’s a public company and one particular game. Some companies don’t allow you to wall hack or use aim assistants. Others will allow you to use hacked clients, like Minecraft anarchy servers. It should be up to the company to moderate, as you sign a TOS agreement with them when signing up or purchasing their game.
Government oversight is not needed here, because it’s a contract between an individual and a corporate entity.
Yet racist aggressors have legitimised many horrors through victimhood.
You're talking about video games. You're talking about not expressing racism in video games.
This is a race car game.
https://uncensoredlibrary.com/en
I agree with the direction, but that is the core of a bad argument; if a principle doesn't apply in important cases then it isn't really a principle. It is exactly the same as the "free speech except for things I don't like" crowd. Companies can and should have the power to choose who they serve.
Corporations making decisions about who they serve based on the character of their customers and pressure from intolerant groups is indeed a highly risky political strategy. But the risk is from the power of intolerant and their ability to declare it a 'good outcome' rather than from the corporations themselves.
Having grown up and seen the Internet come into being, I feel like all evidence suggests the opposite of that.
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.
Nazi symbols are banned in Germany, but they still have neo-Nazis.
It's unfortunate when artistic works have a banned symbol and so the work is suppressed, and that art becomes hard to obtain and difficult to discuss with others.
With is why the KKK was allowed to run full page, front page ads in national newspapers 60 years ago. No? We’ve always allowed private companies to block content they deemed unworthy, regardless of whether they were relied on by the public.
Yes! A lot of people get angry when you tell them that, but I think that people should be able to say vile, hateful things. Not because those things contribute anything meaningful to society, but the only way you can possibly have a chance to challenge the views of those people is by knowing that they have those in the first place.
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 place of love and adoration?
I also understand the feeling some others have when they see the Confederate flag. I grew up in the South. I'm confident many people I grew up with do not associate the Confederate flag with slavery or racism. For them it's merely a symbol of rebellion against authority.
In my opinion banning the Confederate flag is fine. Banning black face, also fine. But neither of those things is sufficient to prove a person is racist. This current moral panic is taking us to dark places. Racism is real. Evil is real. Witch hunts are bad. 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 would be easier to create room for learning.
Unless a balance is struck, we leave historically disenfranchised minorities to be potential future victims of the majority's ignorance.
One case heard was about an apartment complex which made up some absurd percentage of a district. If people were barred from distributing fliers it would have seriously upset campaigning in that district.
I totally get what you're saying though, it's the tyranny of the majority. What happens if the majority of people decide to censor the truth of history because it's not politically correct? What happens if they decide that the confederate flag and what it stands for needs to be stricken from the history books?
These things should not be glorified but should be remembered so we don't tread the same horrible road again against some other group of people. But glorifying it is kind of what they're trying to prevent now by removing it from games.
On another note, the fact that it's just the confederate flag and swastikas is deeply disturbing and acts as sound evidence that those are American problems. What about soviet symbols? Overall, the total number of soviet victims vastly exceeds those of Nazis or the victims of American slavery, why is everyone so one-sided in that aspect?
I know Tankies and Holomdor apologists exist - and their calls for guillotining billionaires are concerning - but I compare that to a person proudly displaying a (non-Hindu) swastika: it means that person is either a fascist who actively supports genocide - or is being an edgy teenager. Similarly proudly flying the Confederate battle-flag means they either actively support white-supremacy and subjugation of black people - or they're very ignorant of history and bought into the post-reconstruction propagandizing by Confederate apologists.
That's the difference between what I feel those symbols mean.
> "but it wasn't an ideology based on hate or subjugation"
This is really stretching. I doubt may people who supported the Nazis early on would have thought their party was going to commit genocide. You don't see cognitive dissonance while you're in it.
The Confederate Flag does represent Treason and many declarations of independence mention defense of slavery explicit in the first two paragraphs. However, if the Confederates has succeeded, there's a good chance they would have ended slavery anyway. There were a lot of moral concerns around slavery at that time. The Constitution and Declaration of Independence, at that time, did not directly mention the word "Slave," not to mention it started to fade internationally not long after.
In that case, slavery could have been seen as just an artifact of a previous, ignorant group of their population, that also founded the country. And no mistake, between Iraq, the Iranian-Contras, the School of the Americas, MKUltra .. the Union/US has done terrible terrible things around the world to extract resources in the name of democracy.
You can't say something is going to turn out while you're in the center. Looking at the current anarco-anti-cap left groups right out, some of their action are fascistic.
Inhibiting the freedom of people to speak their minds and express their unpopular or controversial opinions is a dangerous path to go down, and many on the progressive-left are already showing contempt for the freedom of speech.
[citation needed] do you have some sort of source to back this claim up?
Why would a region willingly give up it’s main source of economic power a la slaves? The south was notorious for avoiding investment into public infrastructure like roads, rail, foundries, etc. Why would they enter into a civil war over slavery if they were “about to give it up” anyways? This take flies counter to everything I’ve read about the confederate south
It seems very disingenuous for MS to ban one specific symbol of hate, but not other, much more prominent ones.
All those other things were not solely about defending slavery.
Read The Cornerstone Speech[1]:
that "Our new government['s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."
Don’t fall for Lost Cause mythology.[2]
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech#Speech_ti...
2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederac...
> The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science.
Two things jump out: 1) someone defending secession in 1861 unambiguously calls out the founders for mostly believing that slavery was evil; and 2) it's an early invocation of "science" against the "zeal above knowledge" of (overwhelmingly religious) abolitionist "fanatics."
This historical revisionism is strikingly similar in its ignorance to the "Lost Cause" narrative that the CSA was about "states rights" and not slavery.
> In explaining the white background, Thompson wrote, "As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...)
It's absolutely clear that the confederate was about white supremacy.
It's also hard to argue that the confederate was about self-determination in any way when their very constitution is a litany of laws banning things, like a state's rights to regulating slave ownership.
> No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.
This idea that the confederacy was founded for any other reason than slave ownership is absurd and a complete fabrication, unfortunately perpetuated by Texas school books used throughout the United States public schools.
Funnily enough, CSA's constitution not-quite-explicitly didn't grant the Confederate states that right.
I have yet to find a "state's right" that the CSA argued for that they didn't then refuse to grant to their own states.
Its rank whataboutism. We can evaluate morality from not great, to bad, to really really bad. We can make judgments about individual situations on their merits. The “merits” of the confederacy are really really bad!
Also you’re nutpicking[1] - distractingly from the central facts by finding the most extreme , nuttiest examples of an ideology l
[1]https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nutpicking
FWIW I agree with you about the Confederacy and about Confederate symbology, and I think I said that at the very beginning. But to a large number of increasingly powerful people, the facts don’t actually matter. And to some degree, they never have: consider the differing treatment of Nazi and Soviet symbology. They will use the facts when they suit them, and invent new facts when they don’t.
> that one primary reason the colonists fought the American Revolution was to protect the institution of slavery. This assertion has elicited criticism from some historians and support from others.
> We stand behind the basic point, which is that among the various motivations that drove the patriots toward independence was a concern that the British would seek or were already seeking to disrupt in various ways the entrenched system of American slavery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/11/magazine/an-update-to-the...
Personally, I think the existence of the nonrebellious slave-driven plantation economies in the Caribbean undercuts the argument that protecting slavery was a major motivation for those colonies that did revolt.
Slavery was legal to some extent in every colony, northern or southern, throughout the Revolution. Some states had (laudably) started to abolish it in whole or in part by the end of the war. Interestingly, Wikipedia indicates that the last Pennsylvanian slaves died in the 1840s, which seems surprisingly late.
https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyrami...
Pyramid workers were highly skilled and paid professionals though.
The election of Lincoln and John Browns raid were threatening to the south exactly because of their threat to slavery. The south was not only paranoid of a slave uprising, but also owned people was the bulk of their wealth.
I think this skeptics SE is pretty good summary:
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/16275/was-slave...
And the Cornerstone Speech by the VP of the confederacy:
> Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
The "states rights" trope was a deliberate attempt of a few Southern, revisionist historians to blunt their racist past. The truth is that the South seceded because their states wanted the right to hold slaves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy
https://studycivilwar.wordpress.com/2017/04/18/the-extent-of...
Question #1: Name three states rights the South supposedly aruged for.
Question #2: Count how many of those rights they actually granted to their own states.
For it being supposedly such a major factor in their succession, states rights are conspicuously silent in both the ordinances of succession, contemporary oratory, and in the text they wrote in their own Constitution.
Slavery was the tipping point but the conflict goes much deeper than that.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...
States rights... to own slaves.
The historical record written in the confederacy's own words disagrees with you.
The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States shows slavery up front and center. These Declarations from five states, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia include the word "slave" 83 times. (https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declarati...)
Mississippi: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery"
Georgia: "For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery...The prohibition of slavery in the Territories, hostility to it everywhere, the equality of the black and white races, disregard of all constitutional guarantees in its favor, were boldly proclaimed by [the northern Union's] leaders and applauded by its followers. The prohibition of slavery in the Territories is the cardinal principle of [the northern Union]. For forty years this question has been considered and debated in the halls of Congress, before the people, by the press, and before the tribunals of justice. The majority of the people of the North in 1860 decided it in their own favor. We refuse to submit to that judgment, ..."
South Carolina: "A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery."
Texas: "[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race ..."
The Confederate states certainly didn't respect the right of the Northern states to terminate slavery, and indeed forced through a number of laws (prior to the Civil war) requiring the Northern states to participate in the return of escaped slaves.
The swastika was used by multiple cultures for thousands of years before it was co-opted by the Nazis.
The confederate flag was created for the sole purpose of committing treason so that some people could enslave others.
Not even remotely the same thing.
Secession is not treason. The Tenth Amendment reads in whole: 'The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people'; the Constitution does not delegate the power of separating a state from the union to the United States, nor does it prohibit secession to the individual states, nor does it mandate a perpetual or irrevocable union; therefor it is plainly true that secession is constitutional.
Moreover, the same Constitution states 'Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.' Neither advocating for secession nor actually seceding consists of levying war against the U.S. or adhering to their enemies.
One might argue that the secessions of Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee & North Carolina, coming as they did after the battle of Fort Sumter, constituted treason, but one might instead argue that secession itself was not adhering to the enemies of the U.S., but rather those states removing themselves from the union.
None of the following is support for any of the actual secessions of any of the states: each state which seceded did so to preserve the profoundly evil practice of slavery. It is constitutional to secede, but deeply wrong to have done so for that reason.
But it is extremely important to be precise about words. The Confederates were evilly wrong about slavery and race, but they were not traitors.
The stars'n'bars is a relevant part of automotive history, see the Duke brothers, history of NASCAR, etc. Banning players who display it is similiar to banning players who stick swastikas or iron crosses on their Panthers and Tigers in a video game about tanks.
Culturally convenient or not it is part of the history of the subject matter and likewise it should stay.
NASCAR has banned the flag too[1], and the modern General Lee[0] hasn't had it since 2015. And the point of these games isn't to simulate car culture or history, it's a racing game, so it's not even relevant. We're literally just talking about skins in a video game, here.
[0]https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/10/us/nascar-bans-confederate-fl...
[1]https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2020/06/16/bubba-watson-says-l...
you think that racism and racial subjugation were the PRIMARY motives for National Socialists?
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 flag or something.
In the end, you have to decide what outcome you want - using half effective measures hoping that the racists will keep it down, or kicking them out and making it clear that they aren't welcome? You can't have it both ways.
This is a silly complaint IMO. If you break the rules, whatever they are, a ban is a completely reasonable punishment. A 1- or 2- strike policy gets the same result you are talking about with no "super-cool AI-driven ML-based image recognition"
Don't forget that the replacement filter is just for banned words. Toxic/abusive behavior would be covered by the usual manual moderation. Though I don't recall ever seeing someone banned for working around the filters on the rare instances that they did.
EDIT: This is in stark contrast to normal filters which just remove or blank out words. Those were _always_ worked around. For whatever reason people feel affronted by those kinds of filters, but the silly replacement filters were "fun".
It didn't happen. The system worked fine for the 15ish years I was running it, with about 30,000 daily active users.
The offenders just got bored and moved on.
Really? When I've seen this done, all that happens is you end up the 'approved' word. Everyone knows what it means though. So I guess if all you care about is the word itself, and not the meaning of it, it does work great. In reality if every instance of 'shit' is replaced with 'barnacle', if I call you a 'barnacle head' on said forum, we both know what I'm saying.
Almost like a dog whistle, that only some can hear...
That you don't think you can communicate without swearing and slurs says more about you and gaming culture than it does about censorship.
Turns out it's not the word, it's the intention behind the word. And who gives intention? People. Not words.
If we hypothesize that it would take X level of effort for MS to centrally detect and alter the graphics of every car, we can conclude it would be at most X/accounts effort (way easier) for each human player to detect and remove the same graphic from each of their own cars.
The goal is not to censor the image, it is to change the behavior of society. The goal is to punish bad behavior and set a good example.
The reason we are in this mess in the first place is that people turn the other way and sweep bad behavior under the rug instead of facing it head on and addressing it.
[0] This comic is the original source of the word: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo
We get many confused Americans on Reddit’s /r/Germany asking what’s up with all the confederate flags they see.
For anyone who cares about socialism, there was a time where it would have been argued that all talk for socialism should be banned. As for Communism, that undeniably would have been banned in the 50s, if it hadn't been before then (they did try in the 20s, but was eventually overturned). And countless other causes that at one time, over 90% of constituents were against.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23715358