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I don’t know about SNL, but the thing that pisses me off about Blizzard is that they have been parading around as a company that supports human rights. They recently held a pro LGBT+ event, they’ve held numerous humanitarian aid campaigns and they even have a statue outside their headquarters that features one of their core values “Every voice matters”.

You simply can’t do all that, and then go against democracy and basic human rights like this, and then expect people to not call you out for your bullshit.

>They recently held a pro LGBT+ event...

That was mysteriously absent from their Chinese servers.

Activision/Blizzard being hypocrites about their stance on human rights has been around for a while - here's a _long_ forum thread from last year about "Blizzard selling out LGBTQ+ to Chinese money".

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/blizz-to-censor-wome...

Not to denigrate supporting any kind of human rights, but promoting LGBT and humanitarian causes in almost any western country won't lose them a single customer. Today, that's the easy way out. 20-30 years ago it would be gutsy.

It can still cost them customers, e.g. hardcore Christians. Today, it is still brave, just less than 20-30 years ago.

Throughout the entire existence of WoW they've actively prohibited LGBT community to express themselves in WoW. While they did nothing about virtual RP sex on RP servers.

I agree that Blizzard is reasonable to want to limit political speech, including speech related to Hong Kong, on their event broadcast.

However I think the response was totally out of scale. They banned the player from competing for a year, rescinded winnings, deleted the VOD of the event, and fired both casters who were interviewing him. Would that have happened if a player on stream said something else political and inflammatory? No way.

Example: https://www.polygon.com/2018/1/20/16913072/overwatch-league-... $2000 fine and a 4 day ban

An $x000 fine and y game suspension is a punishment in line with this offense in literally every professional sports league.

Proof that “e-sports” is an amateur endeavor at best.

Maybe the management of it is amateur. The money and eyes on it are not.

>>>I'm not so sure it's okay for him to do it on Blizzard's show/event.

>>>...but was she right to do it from Saturday Night Live's Live broadcast?

If SNL wants to not invite O'Connor back, or cut her from the rest of the show, or yank her off stage, yep it's their show, fair enough. Same with blizzard - they can stop the interview and tell him he doesn't get to say what he wants on their show. I wouldn't exactly be impressed with that, but in general it's their show, their rules.

To take his winnings and ban him from the game is absolute bullshit.

Taking his winnings is outright evil, and I don't think he should've been banned either.

I'd like to play Devil's advocate with your argument, if you'd be interested and willing. Couldn't one say the same thing about Blizzard: "it's their game/tournament, their rules"? They banned him from participating in Hearthstone esports for 1 year. Is the primary distinction that O'Connor doesn't depend on SNL for her livelihood? Would the argument hold if O'Connor were employed by SNL?

I felt the same, but...

When it comes to politics, there are no hard and fast rules. On the one hand, a lot of people look to games for escape from life's problems. It might be reasonable to agree with Blizzard that political speech during a gaming competition isn't appropriate for that reason. On the other hand, entertainment is a form of art, and players are human, through which expression of all forms is interwoven. You can't walk a step in the world of games without stumbling into political expression of some kind.

And sports also fall prey to geopolitics ... in pretty much every match ever held.

Even the "dumbest" action movies made purely for entertainment find a foundation on some good versus evil morality, at least to establish a reason for the ensuing hour and half of thrilling gunfire and explosions. Not many people want to watch their action hero shoot up hundreds of people for no reason at all. We want a "good" hero to shoot up "bad" guys.

So it's all messy. Life is messy. Life is art. Sometimes life/art does something outside of the rules, and it's okay, for no other reason than because it moves people.

So like you I don't feel that Blizzard committed some heinous crime here. But they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. That happens; life is messy. What's happening in HK is more important than hard and fast rules.

> I'm not so sure it's okay

I'm not sure its okay for China to be maiming and killing protestors while trying to subjugate a city under tyranny,

The reality is that there are not okay things out there, and people often feel helpless against them, and will do things others will feel is not okay to try to get their message across when they feel the okay way isn't working.

And as a global people we should support those that feel, out of desperation, they need to destroy their careers or risk their own safety to try to help others. Its the inverse side of the coin school shooters and terrorism occur on - both are driven to extreme action, but one is sacrificing oneself to try to help others while the other seeks only to destroy for selfish egotism. Both are indicative of systemic issues that need addressed.

There hasn’t been a single death in Hong Kong.

The same can’t be said about the current protests in Iraq, Sudan, Indonesia, and Kashmir.

>There hasn’t been a single death in Hong Kong.

What about many people who got "disappeared" during the protests? We have no way of knowing how many of them are dead, and I bet at least a few of them might be, with the rest just being tortured and imprisoned per usual.

Such a bad argument: "Well X did it first so we're fine"

I despise the “I’m all for free speech, just don’t do it here” rhetoric. So where else then? On the streets where most people can ignore it?

This is how protesting works. It has to be in places people can see and hear. Creating controversy is even better because it gets the media talking about it.

I’d argue this was 1,000 times more effective in spreading a message than taking to the streets.

In the end Sinead O'Connor was totally right so maybe that should count for something.

I'm not so sure it's okay for him to do it on Blizzard's show/event.

Interviews are not scripted, the interviewer asks questions but the interviewee says whatever they want. It has always been like this.

IIRC because of that incident SNL added a 5 or 10 second delay so they'd have time to cut if something similar happened again.

A comedy show is in business for fifty years, and the only off-color appearance was a musician with a political opinion? As if we ever needed a demonstration of how bland and conventional SNL really is, regardless of the image they would like to convey.

SNL has had a great number of off-color appearances. Sinead O'Connor was not the reason they added the delay. SNL was already on tape delay by the time she appeared on the show. She slipped past the network censor because they didn't recognize what she was doing until the images had already been broadcast. (Per Wikipedia, she used a different photo during rehearsals. Her stunt was not edited out of the West coast tape-delayed broadcast but was replaced with rehearsal footage in repeats.)

Richard Pryor was the reason that SNL was on tape delay. In fact, per PBS, he's the reason most live broadcasts are on a several second delay. (Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake are the reason that half-time shows at sports events are now also on tape delay.) https://ca.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/6feba07a-e711-40ab-...

While many skits on SNL can be bland and conventional, a great many of their skits are classics. And especially during political cycles, SNL skits can define a political candidate or campaign. (See, e.g., Dan Quayle and spelling, Al Gore and the lockbox, Sarah Palin and seeing Russia, John McCain as himself on SNL.)

Every Saturday, Lorne Michaels picks an older episode of SNL and it is run alongside the live broadcast. In the event of something catastrophic that would stop the show, like a performer dying, the feed will switch from the live broadcast to the older episode.

Only tangentially related, but morbidly fascinating.

What's the point of showing support in secret? It's no martyrdom if no one hears or cares.

>I'm not so sure it's okay for him to do it on Blizzard's show/event.

>She's was arguably right to critize the Pope but was she right to do it from Saturday Night Live's Live broadcast?

>I also believe I want US businesses to all stick up for freedom of expression and not sell out to China.

Well this is what happens when our culture is so insistent on upholding capitalism as a virtue. When our best platforms for speaking up are businesses, it's only fair for us to use them like we would any other service that we're paying for (whether directly or through our taxes that fund their allowances, or through our suffering of their practices). Why do people only come to the defense of corporations when the "invisible hand of the market" is punching up?

finally someone else who sees it, im fully behind the HK people but using a companies event as a vehicle for a political message is very likely against some part of his contract etc it doesnt matter if we support the message or not thats not the place to do it