Apple and other "major retailers" are pulling anything that includes the Confederate flag as content from their stores because, as we well know, the best way to respond to intolerance is to bury our heads in the sand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_Confederate_State...
The confederate flag wasn't all that common in the south until the civil rights movement in the 1950's and 60's at which point southern legislatures specifically started adopting it as a symbol of their opposition to the federal government's efforts to force southern states to end segregation and enforce the civil rights legislation. In other words it was adopted by the anti civil rights movement explicitly to represent their racist cause. That is why it was put on the South Carolina state house and incorporated into flags of other southern states. That is why it is disingenuous to say it was placed there for 'historical' reasons.
Apple's apparent banning of all use of that flag in any context shows a lack of understanding for why it's problematic to begin with and an ignorance of the history of the civil rights movement.
Here's a fairly thorough discussion: http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/jun/22/...
Mentioning a thing is not equivalent to endorsing it, this is like burning history books because they also depict the Confederate flag.
Of course if one considers games to be media content analogous to books or movies (or dare I say it, Art), such a view seems insane. Then again, one doesn't normally hear about curated gardens erring on the side of free expression, so maybe it's exactly what we should expect.
We will have truly won when we can look at those symbols as nothing more than pieces of history: no emotion either positive or negative would be derived. We have won when we are so far removed from what those symbols mean that we simply cannot comprehend them.
If Apple's actions are anything to go by, that war never actually ended. These problems need to be faced, not made as though they don't exist.
Very few people/groups use Nazi flags for themselves anymore.
For example by crossing it out, for example, or by using it in a caricature where one compares it with trash.
This symbol https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Anti-Naz... obviously contains a swastika, but is obviously legal even under current German law, as it does not encourage Nazism
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Evil is not a magical force, it's something every human being is capable of under the right (wrong?) circumstances [2].
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us/on-facebook-dylann-roof...
>We have removed apps from the App Store that use the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways, which is in violation of our guidelines. We are not removing apps that display the Confederate flag for educational or historical uses.
They are working to restore some games to the app store.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/25/apple-bans-games-and-apps-f...
Clearly Apple is struggling to draw a sensible line here -- which is probably going to be very tricky. And they certainly should have come up with a reasonable policy before banning things left and right. But, nonetheless, it is no longer correct to claim that
>Apple and other "major retailers" are pulling anything that includes the Confederate flag as content
(Why would a corporation willingly want to play this babysitting game? Doesn't that expose them to bunch of liability?)