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.
That's all self-censoring. The law says use of such symbols is fine if it serves art², however the agency tasked with judging the youth impact of games does not think games are art. However, that's just their opinion and does not reflect actual legality, since this was never challenged in court.
So, until they change their opinion, or a game company decides it's worth it and takes them to court, game companies just end up censoring themselves in advance so they don't have to deal with it in the first place.
I find the flying of the confederate flag in real life reprehensible, but censoring a civil war game using it as a symbol of the confederate armed forces? I'm not sure that makes sense.
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...
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?
I only just heard about this "controversy" (I'm not even American) and decided to buy a confederate flag shirt for fun. I'm unable to find them on Amazon now - all searches come back with US flags.
When I search online and find links to Amazon with such items, clicking through shows an error message/item removed.
Am I just bad at searching or is this actually a thing? Hilarious.
Edit: Holy shit, it's actually a thing; eBay too. When did Americans become so pro-censorship? I wish Amazon wasn't so critical to buying everything otherwise I'd cancel prime and drop them for being so moronic.
"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?
"It seems Apple has started down a slippery slope."
A more reasonable interpretation is that there was a vaguely defined rule that was applied in a silly way and it will all be straightened out as we might expect and has happened in the past.
Although, it's interesting that Apple seems prone to not only making vague (and possibly ill-thought out) rules, but also very aggressively applying those rules before there's been any assessment as to whether they need some tweaking.
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
This analogy fails, imo. From the Strafgesetzbuch sec. 86a:
>> Subsection (1) shall not be applicable if the means of propaganda or the act serves to further civil enlightenment, to avert unconstitutional aims, to promote art or science, research or teaching, reporting about current historical events or similar purposes.
I'm no lawyer, and know almost nothing about German law, but this wording would appear to preserve an exception for cases exactly like this one, i.e. artistic or historical portrayal.
then we can argue if the game has civil enlightenment purposes.
Let's put it this way, if the game allows the south to 'win' then its fairly close to not meeting that standard. The reason is because it also serves the purpose of providing alternative fantasies to those who wish to imagine the continuation of southern institutional racism.
That's an interesting argument, but the statute also included an exception for art, and I think we can agree that the definition of art is broad, and has no requirement for telling the truth about history.
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.
Not sure if you read the article or not, but you are correct that this is still a racist symbol to many, however if it also happens to be a piece of actual history. It's usage outside of something history related is pretty much always the former, but it's usage in this particular game is clearly the latter.
Surely dog-whistle politics doesn't apply to Ultimate General: Gettysburg though. The flag is there for purely historical reasons. Obviously putting it on your bumper or flying it above your state capital is a completely different story.
I don't believe he was saying anything regarding whether or not he believes it is a racist symbol. He said, "I think games, documentaries and such are not showing the flag to be racist." Can a documentary portray the Civil War without automatically favoring the Confederates? Can a game allow you to play for either side? In either case, does it not make sense to show the Confederate flag to be more authentic? It's part of history, and I'm extremely wary of the idea of leaving out history because it's got a "bad guy".
Does the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution not "guarantee" to individual citizens freedom of speech and freedom of press, so that individuals (not collections of them such as states) can say "confederate flag" and display the confederate flag as much as they want? I mean, if they are doing so to be hateful, they can do that, and, in doing so, they declare themselves unsavory, to say the least.
Pretending like it doesn't exist doesn't serve anyone though. Especially when approached from a historical context, I think it's a disservice to pretend like it never happened.
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.
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.
Here's a question to that end: Can you play as the Confederate army?
I can certainly see a game that is a valuable teaching tool also being joyfully used by someone to imagine the south rising again, every day after working as a TSA agent.
While I wouldn't really hold the developer of such a game morally responsible, I think what people are missing out on here is that Apple doesn't want to participate in distributing a game that could be a PR disaster for them.
This actually fits rather well into Steve Jobs', "Freedom from porn" notion, that essentially the opportunity to play a civil war reenactment as the Confederate army is more or less equal to racist war porn.
In leftist politics, Apple often gets to stand in for the entire computer industry, so let's say this game were available on all platforms, at some point, someone is going to say, "And look at Apple, THEY still distribute video games that let people play as the confederate army!"
Even if you try to explain to a person with this position that, well, Google, Microsoft, Sony, and Valve all also distribute this game, you're unlikely to dent their argument. In this way, Apple's brand is constantly being eroded in political conversations that have little to do with them, and they may have some foresight that continuing to distribute this game would blow up in their face.
OR, even though all of that is true, they will decide to reverse this because it's a historically accurate teaching tool.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For what it's worth, the people of the city of Charleston is responding to the tragedy about as beautifully as anybody could ask.
Everybody outside of the state seems to be on the other end of the spectrum at the moment. Outside groups are actively driving in to try to stir things up and the people at AME have been calmly singing them away.
It's been amazing to watch. You have a big chunk of the country that seems like they're begging for chaotic racial incidents and the people in Charleston saying "No...this ends here."
Yes, it is really the popular reaction across the country that I am referring to. I don't personally condone banning symbols, but at the same time I think that, historically speaking, if you've been able to fly the flag of a failed rebellion over your capitol for any significant period of time that is pretty liberal on behalf of the winner of said rebellion. Wherever you come down on that, the flag is certainly beside the point here.
There are very people remaining claiming it's not time to take it down. People get defensive about it because most of them take pride in being from the south and that was the most applicable symbol to represent the whole region. It got even more popular with the Dukes of Hazzard. For people like that, they get defensive when people accuse them of racism when nothing could be further from the truth. They aren't thinking "racist flag" they're thinking "southern flag".
On the other hand, it means something all together different for a lot of other people and once people really got that through their heads, there was no question it needed to come down. Very few people are defending keeping it where it is at this point.
Not to mention a failed rebellion that was deliberately formed to protect the economic institution of slavery!
Symbols are important, and for great evils people at different times have decided to ban symbols. And it's time for this one to be banned.
Don't think of this as a knee jerk reaction, this has been on the tables for a century. Finally now public sentiment has turned, and savvy politicians have put the phrase "never let a crisis go to waste" to good use.
There's a lot of interesting reading on the subject. Each state had it's own reasons for secession. Slavery was a part of each but the significance varied dramatically by state. Here's a really interesting read I found on it while all of this was going on. In South Carolina at least, it does look like the states rights side of things was a much bigger factor.
Robert E. Lee even called slavery a moral and political evil in a letter to his wife and speculated about how long it would take to be eliminated. Here's the 1856 letter.
Well shit, why are you downvoted? For linking to documents that dare to "revise" history and look for original source material to determine why the United States went to war?
Most curious in your first link is the fact that of the four states whose declarations of causes were evaluated, South Carolina used more of the document to argue for states' rights than slavery (37%, 20%).
Obviously slavery had a huge part to do with the conflict, but for a state that still had the Confederate States of America's flag over their capital, it seems their primary reason for war was to preserve their rights as a state in the union.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
