Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

So, I'm not american, but I visited that page, and from the comments here I was expecting to see a confederate flag. Instead I see an old C90 style audio cassette?

Also, my grasp of American history isn't great, but the south lost this war right? And this particular battle at Gettysburg. And the Gettysburg address is fairly famous.

So, if not for the context of this being posted and then other comments here, I would assume this was a total non-event. Am I missing something? What's the supposed link between this and recent happenings with Apple store regulations and racist symbolism in the US?

edit: answering my own question, this particular cross-platform game got removed from the Apple app store as they were unwilling to edit it to remove the confederate flag from the game believing they shouldn't fall under the content ban as it was only used in historical context. It's not clear to me if it's presence is anything but a coincidence as it seems to be a well regarded game anyway.

Confederate flag controversies are a means of propagating the American myth that virulent American racism is a uniquely Southern trait and its primary form is based on proximate African ancestry. It's a comforting make believe that allows the American West off the hook in regard to indigenous peoples and Asian immigrants and Spanish speakers, and the states of the former Union off the hook for 100 postbellum years spent condoning Jim Crow and Federalizing its policies under the rationalization of sensitivity to well bread Southern sensibilities [not to mention the North's role in creating the events of the American West].

The current political motivation has far more to do with the shooting happening in a church [as was the case with the Birmingham bombing fifty years ago] than with some sudden realization that flying the Confederate flag represents an expression that going to war for the sake of preserving race based chattel slavery and the political advantage it afforded under the 3/5 clause of the US Constitution was a noble act. Were it nine black members of the Nation of Islam, Alabama wouldn't have pulled the Stars and Bars from the Statehouse this week...it's been flying a three wood from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and the Southern Poverty Law Center for many years.

All the corporations are pretending to be hyper sensitive to the church shooting tragedy, there has been a rush of some kind to blame the flag, although its a minor if any kind of factor in the issues of race in this country, especially in the south, Ferguson doesn't fly the flag anywhere and they have serious race issues. It's basically a marketing strategy under the guise of being supportive, its an old issue that many have seemed to hijacked the recent tragedy to push an old issue to the fore.

There has been a giant band wagon of support behind taking down the confederate flag at the SC state capital in front of a memorial, as its still seen by some like the nazi flag, or representation of a traitorous flag, for most, it represents slavery, so there is plenty of argument why its not appropriate in front of a government building. Personally, I think there are far worse crimes the U.S. flag represents (killing and past and current treatment of Native Americans, internment of Japanese, pointless wars that left millions of innocents dead in Iraq, Laos, Vietnam, the years of slavery under the U.S. government and the Presidents who owned slaves, etc) so there is a lot of hypocrisy in pointing out the issue with that flag and the history behind it. I lived in the south long enough to realize the issues with race are prevalent everywhere and has little to do with the flag, and hiding the history of it won't fix a crazy kid shooting up a historic church that had to fight for the right to worship during its inception in this country. I do think that its inappropriate to fly it in front of a government building, but wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda that doesn't really fix why it happened.

Yeah, what he said. Well illuminated. Have an upboat.

I largely agree with your comments, but

> wrong to use someone's tragedy as ammunition to push a long standing personal agenda

Ugh. No one is using this as "ammunition." The shooting was a symptom of a problem. Acceptability of racism and pride in racist heritage are possible contributing factors to this problem. When the symptoms present themselves, it makes sense to use that opportunity as a reminder that the problems still exist and that we should take steps to fix them.

Although, we don't yet know what the problem is or if that's a symptom. If it is a symptom, then the flag is just another symptom.

I speak of course, that the knee jerk reaction wasn't even a day after the shooting based on people's misguided views and stereotypes of the south. Recent evidence points to the shooter having black friends, and talked of shooting up other places for non-racist reasons, so the whole race motivated thing could just be a ruse to gain notoriety. But sure, the flag thing is the most important thing the controversy loving media wants to cover since it distracts from the T.P.P. being passed, and waiting for all the facts to come in doesn't make for good ratings. Also, no reason to focus on the victims recovery from this tragedy, or the long history of the AME Zion church, or the struggles they've gone through in the past, focusing on the shooter is better.

It's totally ammunition, because its a side show, it has little tangential relationship to the actual event. It's grasping at straws to find a root cause we can fix.

> there has been a rush of some kind to blame the flag

This is the big thing that I just cannot understand. One day, someone kills several innocent people. The next day, the country is focused on it. And on the third day, we decided that a flag was causing white people to kill black people.

> One day, a white supremacist dude kills several innocent people. The next day, people are appalled that such racist ideology leads to mass murder. On day 3, people that have long been upset that a racist flag that the killer revered, that's representative of an ideology that was actively disenfranchising people on the basis of their race, is present on public buildings.

There, fixed that for you.

And still, no where in there, a single mention of the mental illness these individuals clearly suffer from that is utterly disregarded by society.

I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.

Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?

Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.

I think defining it as "evil" or "mental illness" is really just semantics. The fact is, someone murdered innocent people in cold blood. You're minimizing the issue by shrugging it off as "some people are just evil".

And you're minimizing it by claiming the targeted killing of these people is the result of mental illness. I'm sure it's very comforting to try and say "This guy must have been mentally ill", but that defense seems to be uniquely brought up when a mass murder is committed by someone white. School shootings, church firebombings, church shootings - these are all the acts of the "mentally ill", and not "terrorist attacks".

Aside from the fact that it mischaracterizes mental illness, it serves no purpose other than to throw an entire portion of the US population who lives with some form of mental illness into the camp of mass-murderers, and gives those who have not yet committed a mass murder (but otherwise share the same extreme beliefs) an easy way to distance themselves from a heinous act.

Congrats - you've made sure we continue to think of those with mental illness as crazy murderers, rather that this individual was a product of a culture that dehumanized those different from himself.

Maybe it minimizes mental illness, but at least it's more of an attempt at a response than "he was just evil". What do you propose we do with the purely evil people? How can we detect them early?

Also I think it's kind of a stretch to say calling this mental illness is propagating a poor image for all mental illness any more than calling cancer deadly makes ALL ILLNESSES sound deadly.

> I'm curious why you think he was clearly suffering from mental illness.

Because psychopathic behavior is classified in our society as a personality disorder?

> Did he leave a long broken worded diatribe full of references to imaginary voices and animals? Did he have a recorded history of increasingly frequent or intense mental breakdowns?

No, but he did write a > 2,500 word manifesto (I'm not linking sources, this is all on Wikipedia) justifying his actions and stating that he knew what he was planning to do was morally and socially wrong and that the people he intended to hurt were innocent. He confided in friends, over a full week before he carried out his plans, what his plans were. That seems to me a cry for help by any standard.

> Certainly just because someone commits mass murder does not mean they are 'insane'. They can merely be evil.

And that certainly stops the conversation and limits us from beginning to understand what is going on that is causing psychopathic behaviors to manifest. Calling it "merely evil" is dismissive. I'm much more interested in trying to understand what the hell is happening in our society by exploring the mental illness angle since it is grounded in medical science and not some nebulous "evil" or "insane."

edit/ I'd also like to say, I don't think it is minimizing mental illness to call mass murderers mentally ill. My own brother is diagnosed schizoaffective and I don't consider him a potential or future mass murderer just because of his health issues. That would be ridiculous.

The south lost, but they didn't handle it the way say Germany did WWII (internalizing a deep sense of shame for what they did and purging their culture of anything glorifying that period). They lost, but they didn't repent. Hence why we're still seeing this conflict today.

Apples and oranges, isn't it?

Hitler began a campaign for global domination and genocide. The South said "Fuck this, we're out" and seceded from the Union, then the North attacked it.

The South's motivation wasn't particularly great, but their actions didn't exactly tear apart the world and change it's development forever.

Yeah, I'm not saying the people who caused the secession were good people. There's a lot of evidence that they're not. But choosing to secede I would suggest is a fairly mature act.

If you're getting a raw deal politically then extracting yourself from said raw deal is probably a better option than starting a war to assert your dominance over those who disagree that your deal is a bad one.

I think the people in the South had dishonorable motivations for what I think were ultimately honorable acts. At least up until they attacked the North first.

And then Lincoln goes and proves that the South was right to secede, by suspending parts of the Constitution in the Union as he saw fit.

If you read the secession declarations, the slavery question was just the straw that broke the camels back.

The South fired first. (Fort Sumter)

And wanted to expand southwards in Mexico, Cuba and the Carribean in order to have a large slave-based empire.

I have not previously heard of that second part, regarding expansion. Do you have a reference for that? I would like to read more about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Circle_%28proposed_coun...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_%28military%29

If you're looking for a more serious reference, Freehling's Road to Disunion devotes a chapter to the subject.

You realize you just posted a link to an idea created by a secret society headquartered in the North, right?

That's what I get for citing Wikipedia. But the idea was also brought up by actual southern politicians, particularly in the discussions at the end of the Mexican War.

Ta-Nahesi Coates recently highlighted a number of sources.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-thi...

For extending slavery beyond the borders of south, see the quotes of Edward Pollard and Albert Gallatin Brown at the end of the post.

Yes, the South fired first but it was clearly much more complicated than a simple "they started it!" The North had made it clear they were not going to allow the secession.

This is part of why the South hasn't just dropped it. The war was started, in large part, over slavery but we learned that the United states are no longer united by choice.

This is part of the ongoing argument over state's rights vs federal power. The confederate flag is a racist symbol, but it's also a rejection of federal power over the states. Politics are complicated.

That's the modern, historical revisionist version, but the "state's rights" the South seceded over weren't a rejection of federal power over the states. Their complaint was that the Northern states were not returning escaped slaves or allowing them to take their slaves into states where slavery was illegal, and that the Federal government was attacking their state's rights by not forcing the Northern states to do so. That's not a rejection of federal power. See for example http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp

I suspect the revisionist interpretation of state's rights probably comes from the 50s fight against desegregation.

The revisionism happened almost immediately after war ended. Basically, the South felt bad they lost a war over a really evil cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Cause_of_the_Confederacy

I don't think you're saying anything that disagrees with what I was trying to say. Slavery was most or all the cause of secession. However, after finding they couldn't take their toys and go home the southern slave holding states had another reason to be upset.

It's a bit of a tautology really, but there isn't a conflict between State and Federal powers until there is a specific disagreement. The document you linked says as much:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

> The South said "Fuck this, we're out" and seceded from the Union, then the North attacked it.

The Confederacy (or the states that would become it) were taking over Federal military forts. The first shots fired were by Confederate troops on Fort Sumter in 1861. While the northern states (what remained of the Union) went to war, the Confederacy was not without blame in providing them with an immediate cause (Fort Sumter) to rally around.

It's pretty well established that the South fired the first shots of the civil war when they attacked Fort Sumter.

Right, arguably what the Confederacy truly stood for is State's Rights, which is a totally good American thing, right? It's part of what our country was founded on!

It just so happens that their flagship "right" was the most evil and hateful thing to have ever happened systematically in America. That's why the defense of the flag falls short: in broad scope, it stands for something that really is actually kind of good. But when you take into consideration the details, it's racist as fuck.

Edit: to add on, this is the same argument as "Hitler had some good ideas". Not technically untrue, but they're far from the ideas Hitler as a figure really stands for.

The Confederacy never stood for state's rights. That's part of the Lost Cause historical revisionism. In reality, the Confederacy used both state and federal legislature in attempts to keep slavery legal when necessary.

I was taught that the southern states were simply for states rights and doing the "fuck this we're out" thing but that storyline is highly revisionist. They had dreams of empire as well. If you read what they were saying at the time it's scary and enlightening:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-thi...

That being said, I think the confederate flag is a terrible symbol to be proud of but the reaction to this game is a huge overcorrection. I have played it and it's a great game that gave me a ton of respect and insight into how pivotal that battle was. Leave it to us Americans to focus on learning the wrong lessons and applying simplistic rules to a nuanced situation.

The south didn't merely say "fuck this we're out" and secede. They raised an army and fought viciously to protect human slavery. The Civil War was a war for slavery. Fighting for slavery is shameful.

People today shouldn't be ashamed of what people in 1864 did; that's silly. But they shouldn't be proud of it, either.

That's the point I think 'rayiner is making.

The game in the link is the same game Apple removed. So the story is that Steam is promoting the same game Apple blocked.

The cassette tape seems to just be the graphic they're using for the top-page feature. The game's store page shows regular trailers screenshots.

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