About time gamers did something useful.
That's a huge difference. China is free to make their own rules for when they do business with foreigners. Just like how the US enforces sanctions. Germany is free to business with, say, Iran, but if they do that then the USA is going to not do any business with Germany. So Germany has to decide whether they want to do business with the USA or Iran more. Is that censorship too?
A better theoretical might be if say the US were to force a company to choose between speech supporting a political dissident (maybe Snowden?) and doing business with the US. Not too hard to imagine really, and it would be censorship.
Valid in which sense? And is the logical extension of your position not a complete ban on trade with China?
See the NBA story from today where the NBA refused to censor a player for supporting HK. See why this isn't just about "a gamer"?
We crossed these sorts of lines long ago but it was political speech they disagreed with then, so it's only bad now. If everyone had been more inclined to defend peoples right to views they don't agree with then we wouldn't be here now.
Plenty here were fine with Stallman being fired over his personal views, now they're seeing the other side.
It's a weird argument.
Should you be able to lose your job, be cutoff from a private service, be banned from a project because of your public opinions? It's a yes/no question and modern society appears to be converging on yes. This is a consequence of that decision. An easy to see consequence that many of us warned about but got drowned out of the conversation being called racists, christian fundamentalist, pedophile apologists and everything else when we speak for their rights.
So congratulations to the people that cheered Stallmans firing, various de-platforming techniques, codes of conduct, etc, you've normalized this and given the CCP all the weapons they need to control speech in the west.
What I think instead is that people who were against previous de-platforming (whatever their reason) want to use this situation, which is obviously egregious and cowardly on the part of Blizzard, to muddy the water.
It's hard to prove the innermost opinions, but I do believe that there's a lot of outrage coming, among others, from people who are absolutely fine with deplatforming and consider it a valid tactic but don't consider that player a valid target. There definitely are others who are against deplatforming on principle. They are consistent, but I don't think all are. Of course, anybody can change their mind any time, and if this incident converts the proponents of deplatforming, then the next case will be very different.
De-platforming is a consequence, and the debate is not "is de-platforming OK?" but "when is de-platforming OK?"
For the last decade the left could have been focusing on extending worker protections and putting some hard lines on their personal opinions and what the can be punished for at work. Instead they've made corporations the morality police, and ultimately they only listen to money.
Of course they do, but there is no mention of a boycott in the article.
This is not the only article on this topic, nor the only thread of conversation about this.