MS will ban Forza players who add the confederate flag to their digital cars

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.

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.

It was discussed here a few days ago. Stop firing the innocent or something, from the Atlantic.

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!

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 )

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".

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.

Context matters.

"Don't let them use customized cars" is extremely different from "ban them".

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

I'm also getting a little sick of down votes every damn time I mention Native Americans. I'm starting to wonder.

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.

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?"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Parler claims to be a free speech platform, but their new content policies are stricter - no offensive usernames, no porn, etc.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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...

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

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?