
Apple removes Civil War game from App Store until it removes Confederate flag - shaneramey
http://www.ultimategeneral.com/blog/our-game-has-been-removed-from-appstore
======
sctb
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777854](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9777854)

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kdamken
This is rather silly. What's next? Are we going to change the uniforms of
Nazis in World War 2 games? Start putting "CENSORED" watermarks over the
confederate flag in civil war themed movies?

The flag shouldn't be flying on state buildings, but leave historically themed
art and media out of this.

~~~
fixermark
You might not be familiar with the German videogame marketplace.

[http://www.destructoid.com/see-how-wolfenstein-the-new-
order...](http://www.destructoid.com/see-how-wolfenstein-the-new-order-is-
censored-in-germany-275315.phtml)

~~~
zxcvcxz
Is there any evidence that censorship in Germany has really prevented racism?

~~~
smacktoward
They don't have half their country driving around with swastikas painted on
their pickup trucks, so they would certainly seem to be doing better than we
are...

~~~
zxcvcxz
Your comment implies that half the people in the US fly that flag and that
everyone who flies the flag is a racist and that the fact that so many people
fly it hasn't made it lose much of its meaning.

Your comment makes a lot of assumptions and appears to me to be painting half
the country (probably the south) as racists. This is a bigoted narrow minded
attitude.

Even Kanye West has a line of clothing with the confederate flag, do you think
he's part of the KKK?

------
beamatronic
"Spielberg’s "Schindler's List" did not try to amend his movie to look more
comfortable. The historical "Gettysburg" movie (1993) is still on iTunes."

It seems Apple has started down a slippery slope. Will they now remove any
movie from iTunes that contains the image of a Confederate flag anywhere in
the movie?

It begs the question, is there any "fair use" of a Confederate flag, anywhere?
Or is it now fully taboo? If so, was this way overdue?

~~~
ryanobjc
This is really not unlike banning the nazi flag post WWII germany. The
parallels are apt.

Perhaps in time, the flag will lose its emotional charge but that isn't the
case now.

~~~
screwedup
I'm very comfortable with games that display the Nazi flag, why shouldn't the
Confederate flag be different?

~~~
andreyf
Are you in post WWII Germany? The justifications for Apple's or Europe's
limits on speech are wholly unaffected by any one person's feeling comfortable
with it.

That reasoning aside, I think that ignoring or changing parts of history that
some find uncomfortable, even if they evoke strong emotions, seems like a
dangerous game. It seems wiser to draw the line at "all speech ought to be
protected from those who have power to control it" and then make thoroughly
thought-through exceptions with well-grounded and regularly reevaluated
justifications.

edit: markbnj makes a good point, that whatever the justification for
Germany's limits on free speech are, they do not apply to a game trying to
reenact historical events
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779899](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9779899)

------
PaulHoule
This seems stupid to me.

It is one thing for a state government to fly that flag, it is a different
thing for a private individual. (i.e. it is different when the police kill
people and held unaccountable then when it is some nutjob.)

I think games, documentaries and such are not showing the flag to be racist.

~~~
ryanobjc
While YOU may not see the flag as a racist symbol, I assure you that others
do. The general term is called dog-whistle politics. Eg:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-
whistle_politics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics)

~~~
knodi123
you seriously think a civil war game, or a historical documentary, are
practicing dog whistle politics?

Just because that's a thing that occurs doesn't mean that it's everywhere it
could possibly be.

~~~
ryanobjc
Don't deflect - lets talk only about civil war game. Forget documentaries they
aren't part of the argument, they are just tossed in there for lazy
argumentation sakes.

The issue is a game is trivially a propaganda piece and even if people are
painting it as a historical thing, it is also a contemporary piece of art that
speaks to people in different languages depending on who is listening.

~~~
knodi123
I was addressing the issue of dog whistle politics. Are you _seriously_ saying
that civil war games are being marketed intentionally to help people fantasize
about successfully defending the institution of slavery? That seems a little
like a paranoid conspiracy theory.

------
freewizard
We can’t change history, but we can change the future.

We can't change Apple, but we can buy Android.

------
LordKano
This has jumped the shark and landed in the land of absurdity.

It's one thing to display a confederate battle flag on a government building
as a sign that you're opposed to the civil rights advances of the 1960s and
it's an entirely different matter to use it in its historical context.

I heard on the radio that they're considering removing the flag from
Gettysburg.

The one time that it's completely appropriate and inoffensive to display that
flag is in the historical context of the civil war.

This has to stop.

------
narrator
It's like Someone flashed the bat sign and suddenly every single major
institution in America implements a policy in less than a week that could have
been implemented at any time over the last 150 years.

Weird...

~~~
olefoo
Could it have been implemented at any time in the past 150 years? I rather
doubt it.

What we're seeing is that the pressure on institutions to conform to social
norms in this specific area has exceeded the critical value required for
change. Institutions that do not at least passively make this change in policy
are at high risk for losing legitimacy.

The thing is, the confederate battle flag was not as charged of a symbol in
the first 75 years after the armistice was signed at Appomattox. It gained
relevance in the post-war years as a response to the civil-rights movement.

That the change now happens so rapidly and so quickly can be directly
attributed to the speed at which social consensus can change and crystallize
due to the new communication technologies that we have.

But the real question that a lot of people are actively working on in relation
to this is "How do you manage and steer political legitimacy in the current
environment?"

Also remember that the flag in question is merely a symbol and that banning it
does very little to reduce the racism and violence that claims it as a
standard. This doesn't fix systematic oppression, economic disenfranchisement
or the fact that most of the political power remains with a group that is
overwhelmingly white, male and dedicated to the continuance of an
unsustainable economic system that will surely destroy the ecosystem we rely
on if we don't fix it soon.

------
markbnj
Completely silly. I would like to see, just once in my life, our population
respond to a tragedy with calm deliberation rather than knee-jerk reactionary
tilting at windmills.

~~~
justizin
What's silly is to say that a national movement to delegitimize a racist
symbol which was actually REVIVED during the civil rights movement is knee-
jerk reactionary tilting at windmills.

It's actually ridiculously fucking late. We have much bigger things to do to
bridge racial divides but this elephant has been in the room for a while.

That said, and you can read my previous comment more focused on apple's
decision, I think there is a possibility this is something they'll reverse.

If that's the case, and they removed a large amount of non-historical content
in iTunes and the App Store which glorifies the confederate flag, and in the
scuffle, for a short time, some historic works were mis-flagged, I think
that's a reasonable price to pay.

~~~
markbnj
I was specifically referring to banning the symbol in question from a game.
That's the completely silly knee jerk reactionary part.

As far as "delegitimize a racist symbol" is concerned, be my guest. I have no
particular love for that flag, and in fact to steal a quip from a friend of
mine, the only Confederate flag that matters in my view was solid white.

But what often happens when you make a stink about symbols like this is that
you simply raise their profile even higher.

------
zxcvcxz
Hopefully they'll ban all songs that contain blatantly racist lyrics.

~~~
knodi123
Including any songs that contain nigger or nigga or niggaz? Well, it's a sad
violation of the first amendment, but I don't think there's any other way to
stop racists from killing people.

~~~
zxcvcxz
Isn't it nice that we live in a society where we can trust companies to
restrict the first amendment when the government won't step in to protect us?

------
davexunit
I sure am glad that I use operating systems whose software isn't strictly
controlled by a single corporation. How anyone can continue to defend Apple's
draconian policies is beyond me.

~~~
wordbank
As a developer, I'm more happy with Apple's closed ecosystem than with
Google's 95% piracy rates.

I'm not an Apple fanboy though.

~~~
davexunit
[https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-
avoid.html#Piracy](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy)

------
Wintamute
If we censor history how do we learn from it as a society? By giving nazi,
confederate or any other problematic symbology special status as something too
terrible to even gaze upon we elevate it to something almost suprahuman, and
we forget that these atrocities were perpetrated by humans for the most part
just like us. It makes those dark times just that bit more likely to come to
pass again. This is small minded, unethical and irresponsible of Apple.

------
fenomas
This is insane. How can educated adults fail to distinguish _depicting_
something from glorifying it?

------
higherpurpose
Not surprised that Apple is one of the first companies to censor something. If
it appeases a large part of the population, even better.

Now games can't show historically accurate events even if they want to. I'm in
no way "supporting" the Confederate flag, just like if I support someone's
free speech right even if he says something stupid or "offensive" doesn't mean
I support _that_ speech. But it's one thing to take down the clearly obsolete
Confederate flag from the _government 's_ buildings, and it's quite another to
start censoring it on websites, apps, etc...

~~~
michaelchisari
Most often, the confederate flag is not used in a historically accurate way.

~~~
themeek
That doesn't matter for his argument, though.

Sure the Confederate flag used today was the battle flag and not the flag of
the union. I don't think people flying the flag really care about that. Flags
are symbols and the south attempt at secession did rally under their military
effort and flag.

Today the flag means something very different than what it did.

That happens all the time with flags.

But again, none of that matters for OPs argument.

------
clamprecht
They'd have a field day with Cook Clothing Company in Argentina, whose logo
seems to be the confederate flag:

[http://www.johnlcook.com.ar/](http://www.johnlcook.com.ar/)

Photo: [http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/cook-buenos-
aires?select=EKHE...](http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/cook-buenos-
aires?select=EKHEZlCgd2CgFVYryAWKnA#EKHEZlCgd2CgFVYryAWKnA)

------
jogjayr
It seems like one of those silly things that happen when a bored drone in a
bureaucracy blindly applies rules passed down from on high. I would expect a
decision reversal pretty soon.

This is clearly a bug in Apple's internal policy stemming from an edge-case
that wasn't considered while drafting it. Or whoever made the banning decision
didn't closely read the "Exceptions to this rule" part of the policy (if it
exists)

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peterwwillis
No one ever got fired for buying IBM or removing the confederate flag from
store shelves.

It's stupid for a game, since most games allow us to choose between being good
guys or bad guys, but here they get to posture, score points and gain brand
loyalty without alienating any substantive sales. Really good PR.

------
bnolsen
This is getting as bad as the washington redskins non controversy.

~~~
peterwwillis
You realize 'redskins' is a racial slur, right?

------
themeek
Apple is not and should not be a political actor.

More and more the United States has included corporate activities into the
fold of law enforcement and legislation.

A host of institutions called FDRCs exist in a public-private limbo -
representing the interests of the state but inside the private world.

NGOs - non-governmental organizations - are in fact very governmental. They
are enumerated by the United States, many times funded nearly exclusively by
them, and are often fronts for the CIA and other parts of the government.

The government will make causal reference to Civil Society in speeches. Civil
Society is not you and I - Civil Society are organizations (many times funded
again by those elements that flirt inside and outside of government boundary).
For example George Soros funds huge numbers of Civil Society Organizations for
US-aligned political purposes around the world.

The United States has discusses standards of corporate governance and
responsibility under the expectation that its partnerships with international
corporations overseas act as 'proxies' for US government inspired cultivation.

US corporations are allowed and encouraged to participate in the creation of
legislature. Given the inevitable pass of TPA it's timely to mention US
corporate input into the one of the largest and most important pieces of
modern US foreign policy. Wall Street wrote a bill draft for the House to
remove limitations on derivative trading (put in after the housing crisis) and
the House passed their bill without altering it.

Private corporations draft and/or research most of our legislation. Washington
think tanks are critical pieces in the legislative process.

Private corporations own the fourth estate of our government - there's a
looong long history here to write about how this has been used for private
profit.

The majority of NSA work (it was discovered) is outsourced to private
corporations and much of our intelligence work is done by private intelligence
corporations (Palantir, HB Gary Federal, Stratfor).

Our military uses Blackwater (now rebranded because of their human rights
violations) a benefit being that if a private corporations commits war crimes
- it isn't technically the US governments fault.

Issues like modern surveillance (revealed by Snowden) and propaganda are not
performed by placing laws on corporations that they must follow, but by
partnerships. Corporations are allowed to do things that government can not
and vice versa. Both benefit when an exchange can be made.

But probably the easiest place to see the blur and partnership between the
state and the corporate world is the Republic and Democratic parties and their
Commission - which also runs the presidential debates. This institution (our
political parties) themselves are, legally, in practice and by definition, a
corporation.

I do not want Apple to be law enforcement or national security enforcement. I
do not care if it is more efficient to have private citizens perform the
function of public institutions.

Public institutions have limitations that private bodies do not.

This is on purpose. The limitations on governance were placed to ensure
liberty.

~~~
themeek
Could use an explanation for downvotes. Seems on topic to me.

------
droopybuns
Dumb.

~~~
JustinJBM
One of those bits that seems so dumb that there's obviously more details to
come. My guess is some group send in massive reports against the game OR the
developer is making it all up for publicity.

