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That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika. And before you say "come on, swastikas are pretty extreme", remember the

That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika. And before you say "come on, swastikas are pretty extreme", remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign.

arcticfox 6y ago
> That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika. This seems semantic. For example, cheating is banned in many games, and if you cheat, you get banned. Banning cheating and cheaters is effectively the same thing.
- octocop 6y ago
  Choice is still present, is a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak by default non-racist?
  - gamblor956 6y ago
    There is a huge difference between thinking bad thoughts and expressing or acting on them. You can be as racist as you want in your own head. No one is stopping that. You can express those racist thoughts all you want on your own property. But you have absolutely no right to express or act on those racist thoughts on someone else's property.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    It's not like they can say or do anything racist, so the net effect is the same as if they were not racist.
  - bastawhiz 6y ago
    People who are paralyzed and unable to speak aren't spreading hate in video games, so it's pretty pointless to hold them up as a counterexample. I know my grandparents probably have a lot of racist thoughts but unless they're unloading them at the Thanksgiving dinner table I'm not telling my grandmother to shut her mouth.
- strombofulous 6y ago
  This is not the same thing at all. Banning swastikas would mean resetting the decals of a car with swastikas, not preventing the account from using the game license they paid for. Banning cheating means you ban the account of the person who cheated.
  - arcticfox 6y ago
    "Banning cheating would mean preventing the cheat, not preventing the account from using the get license they paid for." They're two different responses to bad behavior, both totally fair.
FireBeyond 6y ago
It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine". My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests. People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?
- norswap 6y ago
  But you see the issue with that thought process right? You can imbue political meaning on anything that way, and ban arbitrary things. What if there is a (perhaps bogus) polemic, and your favorite singer is singled out as a racist/misogynist/communist/whatever, and the Bad People start blasting his songs at rallies? Are you supposed to stop listening to your favourite songs. Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.
  - FireBeyond 6y ago
    Your conclusion here is that these people were all making this sign for non-nefarious meanings. On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.
    - Aerroon 6y ago
      >On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. 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.
aka1234 6y ago
> "That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika." If you don't ban the person displaying the swastika, how can you possibly enforce banning swastikas? There must be a consequence for displaying the offending symbol, otherwise the rule is toothless. You remove the swastika, and the person just replaces it. What then? Just keep removing it and hoping the Nazi/edgelord/'troll' will get tired of replacing the swastika? Trying to win a battle of attrition with a bad-faith actor is not an effective way to enforce rules. > "remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign." "Remember when 4chan 'trolls' said the OK hand sign was a white power sign and then white supremacists started using the OK hand sign as a white power sign?" --- There, I fixed it for you.
- toast0 6y ago
  Ban the car --- either don't let them use it online, or don't show it to others. If an account gets a threshold number of cars banned, don't let them use customized cars online. If they're spouting hate on chat, ban them from chat too.
  - aka1234 6y ago
    That seems like a lot of effort to address the symptoms, not the disease. The root issue is the user. Get rid of the user and you don't have to worry about all these half-measures.
    - loopz 6y ago
      What was the problem needing solving?
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        Depends who you ask. Some might say toxic expressions. Others might say people who declaim toxic expressions. Clearly MS has the latter goal in mind. I can imagine a very reasonable argument for this. Someone who puts a Confederate flag on their car seems highly likely to engage in other toxic behaviors. Just like someone who calls someone a nigger once is likely to do it again. So we use the behaviors as a signal of underlying tendency. We don't want people who have this tendency on the platform because they will tend to make life worse for other users, and the loss of their business hurts us less than we gain from other people feeling more comfortable. Therefore we ban them.
jacobolus 6y ago
Here’s a NY Times summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.ht... > The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”
- DevKoala 6y ago
  It also weaponized the outrage and ruined the lives of innocent people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... I don’t understand how people can justify the collateral damage; it is going too far.
  - jacobolus 6y ago
    This case seems to involve a white supremacist jerk experiencing road rage, then tricking a Latino guy into making the hand gesture, taking a photo, and then publicly lobbying his employer to fire him. Both the white supremacists and the intolerant and incurious (exclusively white) investigators/managers at the man’s company end up looking horrible. But this doesn’t seem too relevant to the confederate flags in video games case. Not everyone knows that white supremacist internet trolls have appropriated the OK hand gesture, but everyone living in the US understands that the confederate battle flag and other confederate symbols represent slavery, white supremacism, and treason.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Yeah, it's terrible that people can be fired for literally no reason in this country. This wouldn't have happened in a country that has any semblance of workers' rights.
    - Smoosh 6y ago
      "Literally no reason" ?? He was recorded flashing a white power symbol while driving a (presumably liveried) company truck. 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.
undersuit 6y ago
I don't think there was a moral panic. Just a reaction. Slurs come from somewhere. The N-word didn't just spontaneously appear in every one's dictionary the night after it was first used. What if we could have stopped the N-word when the 4chans of 1400 started using it?
fwip 6y ago
Your metaphor would be better if white nationalists hadn't actually adopted it as a sign to identify each other. Yes, it started as a joke/hoax. Then they started doing it sincerely.
jhanschoo 6y ago
This is assuming that the internal policy is "we ban any symbol thought to be racist", vs. ""we ban symbols clearly established over years to be racist". That is, swastikas and the confederate flag have an established history of their meaning, whereas the 4chan sign does not.
stevekemp 6y ago
Today there was a news story about Finland dropping the swastika from their air-force logo: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  Which is something I think deserves a bit of context. It had been the Finnish air force's official insignia since 1918, so it was unrelated to the German Nazi Party, although of course that association was inevitable once they seized power. Similarly, the stone elephant holding the gate building to the old Carlsberg grounds in Copenhagen bear huge swastikas on their sides, since they were erected in 1901: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg#/media/File:Elefantporten_-_detail_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg#/med... There are a lot of swastikas still present in old sculptures and designs with no relation to nazism.
  - stevekemp 6y ago
    I think that was explained quite well in the article, and while the symbol has had a long history I think it is fair to say that these days the majority of people would see the symbol and think "Nazi". Removing it feels like a reasonable thing to do, though I'd probably draw the line at chisel it off old-buildings, etc.
grawprog 6y ago
I thought it was a better meme personally when Malcolm in the middle made it so everyone would do the ok sign below their waist and if you looked, you got a punch in the shoulder. That definitely went on for a couple years when I was a kid, to the point where everyone got really sick of those few people that didn't get when it stopped being funny. That's the thing though, all it takes is one meme to take off to change the meaning of a symbol and you can't really predict what or how.
- js2 6y ago
  > do the ok sign below their waist and if you looked, you got a punch in the shoulder This was going around my college friends in the early 90s, predating Malcom in the Middle (2000-2006). I have no idea where it originated.
  - grawprog 6y ago
    I never knew, I know that's what popularized it for kids around my school around grade 5 or 6. Now I'm curious where that actually came from.
    - egberts 6y ago
      It was popularized in 1976 in Ste. Saint Marie, Michigan as we started doing that in our high school, this circle game. That is, until someone can chime in an earlier date.
pelliphant 6y ago
Isn't "banning anyone who displays a swastika" a method of enforcing "banning swastikas" ?
egberts 6y ago
The entire Deaf community also has a beef with those who may object to certain signs. We're about inclusivity without any connotations associated with each sign because they are a communication tools. (Same for SCUBA divers and SEAL teams). The faux outrage can step aside while we sign to each other in relative peace and comfort. But what happens if hearing people started seeing our signs and get offended and (gasp) started shooting at us; oh wait, that has happened already and all too often. For that, get off of us. Signs are a communication tool, even the offensive FUCK YOU ones.

arcticfox 6y ago

> That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika. This seems semantic. For example, cheating is banned in many games, and if you cheat, you get banned. Banning cheating and cheaters is effectively the same thing.

octocop 6y ago
Choice is still present, is a person who is paralyzed and unable to speak by default non-racist?
- gamblor956 6y ago
  There is a huge difference between thinking bad thoughts and expressing or acting on them. You can be as racist as you want in your own head. No one is stopping that. You can express those racist thoughts all you want on your own property. But you have absolutely no right to express or act on those racist thoughts on someone else's property.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- pmiller2 6y ago
  It's not like they can say or do anything racist, so the net effect is the same as if they were not racist.
- bastawhiz 6y ago
  People who are paralyzed and unable to speak aren't spreading hate in video games, so it's pretty pointless to hold them up as a counterexample. I know my grandparents probably have a lot of racist thoughts but unless they're unloading them at the Thanksgiving dinner table I'm not telling my grandmother to shut her mouth.
strombofulous 6y ago
This is not the same thing at all. Banning swastikas would mean resetting the decals of a car with swastikas, not preventing the account from using the game license they paid for. Banning cheating means you ban the account of the person who cheated.
- arcticfox 6y ago
  "Banning cheating would mean preventing the cheat, not preventing the account from using the get license they paid for." They're two different responses to bad behavior, both totally fair.

FireBeyond 6y ago

It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine". My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests. People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?

norswap 6y ago
But you see the issue with that thought process right? You can imbue political meaning on anything that way, and ban arbitrary things. What if there is a (perhaps bogus) polemic, and your favorite singer is singled out as a racist/misogynist/communist/whatever, and the Bad People start blasting his songs at rallies? Are you supposed to stop listening to your favourite songs. Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.
- FireBeyond 6y ago
  Your conclusion here is that these people were all making this sign for non-nefarious meanings. On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.
  - Aerroon 6y ago
    >On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. 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.

aka1234 6y ago

> "That's an argument for banning swastikas, not banning anyone who displays a swastika." If you don't ban the person displaying the swastika, how can you possibly enforce banning swastikas? There must be a consequence for displaying the offending symbol, otherwise the rule is toothless. You remove the swastika, and the person just replaces it. What then? Just keep removing it and hoping the Nazi/edgelord/'troll' will get tired of replacing the swastika? Trying to win a battle of attrition with a bad-faith actor is not an effective way to enforce rules. > "remember the moral panic we just went through when 4chan trolls convinced people that the OK hand sign was a "one-sided version ofna White Power" sign and got people fired from their jobs for making the sign." "Remember when 4chan 'trolls' said the OK hand sign was a white power sign and then white supremacists started using the OK hand sign as a white power sign?" --- There, I fixed it for you.

toast0 6y ago
Ban the car --- either don't let them use it online, or don't show it to others. If an account gets a threshold number of cars banned, don't let them use customized cars online. If they're spouting hate on chat, ban them from chat too.
- aka1234 6y ago
  That seems like a lot of effort to address the symptoms, not the disease. The root issue is the user. Get rid of the user and you don't have to worry about all these half-measures.
  - loopz 6y ago
    What was the problem needing solving?
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Depends who you ask. Some might say toxic expressions. Others might say people who declaim toxic expressions. Clearly MS has the latter goal in mind. I can imagine a very reasonable argument for this. Someone who puts a Confederate flag on their car seems highly likely to engage in other toxic behaviors. Just like someone who calls someone a nigger once is likely to do it again. So we use the behaviors as a signal of underlying tendency. We don't want people who have this tendency on the platform because they will tend to make life worse for other users, and the loss of their business hurts us less than we gain from other people feeling more comfortable. Therefore we ban them.

jacobolus 6y ago

Here’s a NY Times summary: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/15/us/ok-sign-white-power.ht... > The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”

DevKoala 6y ago
It also weaponized the outrage and ruined the lives of innocent people. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin... I don’t understand how people can justify the collateral damage; it is going too far.
- jacobolus 6y ago
  This case seems to involve a white supremacist jerk experiencing road rage, then tricking a Latino guy into making the hand gesture, taking a photo, and then publicly lobbying his employer to fire him. Both the white supremacists and the intolerant and incurious (exclusively white) investigators/managers at the man’s company end up looking horrible. But this doesn’t seem too relevant to the confederate flags in video games case. Not everyone knows that white supremacist internet trolls have appropriated the OK hand gesture, but everyone living in the US understands that the confederate battle flag and other confederate symbols represent slavery, white supremacism, and treason.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Yeah, it's terrible that people can be fired for literally no reason in this country. This wouldn't have happened in a country that has any semblance of workers' rights.
  - Smoosh 6y ago
    "Literally no reason" ?? He was recorded flashing a white power symbol while driving a (presumably liveried) company truck. 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.

undersuit 6y ago

I don't think there was a moral panic. Just a reaction. Slurs come from somewhere. The N-word didn't just spontaneously appear in every one's dictionary the night after it was first used. What if we could have stopped the N-word when the 4chans of 1400 started using it?

fwip 6y ago

Your metaphor would be better if white nationalists hadn't actually adopted it as a sign to identify each other. Yes, it started as a joke/hoax. Then they started doing it sincerely.

jhanschoo 6y ago

This is assuming that the internal policy is "we ban any symbol thought to be racist", vs. ""we ban symbols clearly established over years to be racist". That is, swastikas and the confederate flag have an established history of their meaning, whereas the 4chan sign does not.

stevekemp 6y ago

Today there was a news story about Finland dropping the swastika from their air-force logo: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53249645

KozmoNau7 6y ago
Which is something I think deserves a bit of context. It had been the Finnish air force's official insignia since 1918, so it was unrelated to the German Nazi Party, although of course that association was inevitable once they seized power. Similarly, the stone elephant holding the gate building to the old Carlsberg grounds in Copenhagen bear huge swastikas on their sides, since they were erected in 1901: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg#/media/File:Elefantporten_-_detail_1.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_Tower,_Carlsberg#/med... There are a lot of swastikas still present in old sculptures and designs with no relation to nazism.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I think that was explained quite well in the article, and while the symbol has had a long history I think it is fair to say that these days the majority of people would see the symbol and think "Nazi". Removing it feels like a reasonable thing to do, though I'd probably draw the line at chisel it off old-buildings, etc.

grawprog 6y ago

I thought it was a better meme personally when Malcolm in the middle made it so everyone would do the ok sign below their waist and if you looked, you got a punch in the shoulder. That definitely went on for a couple years when I was a kid, to the point where everyone got really sick of those few people that didn't get when it stopped being funny. That's the thing though, all it takes is one meme to take off to change the meaning of a symbol and you can't really predict what or how.

js2 6y ago
> do the ok sign below their waist and if you looked, you got a punch in the shoulder This was going around my college friends in the early 90s, predating Malcom in the Middle (2000-2006). I have no idea where it originated.
- grawprog 6y ago
  I never knew, I know that's what popularized it for kids around my school around grade 5 or 6. Now I'm curious where that actually came from.
  - egberts 6y ago
    It was popularized in 1976 in Ste. Saint Marie, Michigan as we started doing that in our high school, this circle game. That is, until someone can chime in an earlier date.

pelliphant 6y ago

Isn't "banning anyone who displays a swastika" a method of enforcing "banning swastikas" ?

egberts 6y ago

The entire Deaf community also has a beef with those who may object to certain signs. We're about inclusivity without any connotations associated with each sign because they are a communication tools. (Same for SCUBA divers and SEAL teams). The faux outrage can step aside while we sign to each other in relative peace and comfort. But what happens if hearing people started seeing our signs and get offended and (gasp) started shooting at us; oh wait, that has happened already and all too often. For that, get off of us. Signs are a communication tool, even the offensive FUCK YOU ones.