A multilateral embargo and military action against China would do something useful. If you destroy the world's biggest market, foreign companies won't be tempted to do business there.

What rational scenario would involve taking direct military action against a nuclear armed superpower?

The threat of nuclear armaments is another question entirely, one that needs careful evaluation. It's still possible to have a cold war - or even a hot war- with purely conventional weapons.

What? For what? In case you didn't know "military action" means people die. A lot of countries aren't democracies. You want to bomb them all?

Of course, if we wait too long to do so, then a buildup like that would only provoke China, not contain it.

Sometimes the gamble is worth the risk.

When are you enlisting?

Directing messages at these companies is like speaking English to a Senegalese kid who only speaks Wolof and maybe a bit of French. The kid is just not even gonna make out what you're talking about. You affect their quarterly results, that's when you're speaking the language these companies understand.

In fact, I'd argue that they basically never react to statements made in dollars, one person can only control a small number of dollars by speaking in dollars, and can control a surprisingly large number of dollars by speaking in English.

I'm giving Blizzard a chance because they have a lot of good will built up, but as time goes on it's becoming clear that they aren't going to do the right thing. Right now, it feels to me like if they could personally take the right to vote away from 8 million Hongkongers, they would. And that is not where I'm going to spend my money.

What I think is interesting about all of this is that China tried to make a power grab. Our market, our rules. But it appears that they like watching basketball more than they like every employee of the NBA to be opposed to reform in Hong Kong. And I'm guessing they like having their Chinese teams competing in the world stage in things like Hearthstone Grandmasters and Overwatch League, so they can't really tell Blizzard to take a hike. So with that in mind, I feel like Blizzard is free to do the right thing here; the last thing China wants is isolation. But it's a game of who blinks first, and corporations are pretty bad at playing that game.

> Those of us that spend money on Blizzard products are definitely making our statement with dollars. I really want to play this new Priest deck in Hearthstone, but don't have any of the cards. Instead of buying some, I'm just not playing. I really want to play Overwatch with my friends that have a Switch, but I'm not buying Overwatch for the Switch until they make clear what their values are.

You can't make much of a statement with only dollars. There are a million reasons why someone may have chosen not to buy something, so the message sent is highly ambiguous and unlikely to be interpreted correctly.

Every boycott needs to be backed up with a statement outlining its reasons, and the boycott will only be maximally effective if each participant echos these statements to the boycotted company and in the media.

The former works, the latter will sound extremely convincing (because you see the comments as being entirely one sided in favor of boycott) and achieve nothing.

Let's wait and see.

I deleted the account and I urge you to do the same. Just not spending does nothing.

*Two WoW subscriptions + me buying Hearthstone cards.

Unfortunately I think that pretty much limits us to TuxRacer so far as the gaming space goes

We have more than Tux Racer. There are a lot of games without DRM and with full offline single-game experience, like for example the excellent Factorio. Factorio isn't without issues either, because it isn't free software. It is only released as a x86-64 binary, so when I get rid of my x86-64 desktop and switch to then hopefully RISC-V or POWER, I won't be able to run Factorio. Still, this is much better than anything Activision Blizzard offers. There are many other games like that.

Also, for many consoles the software works in emulators and are outside of the control of any company.

Yet, we need free software. There is no way around it.

Companies growing so that they can be worth more when their investors sell them is the whole point of businesses in general. It's the reason we all go to work every day.

China's political censorship abroad, enforced via sheer economic muscle, has received extremely strong bipartisan condemnation in the US during a time of unprecedented partisanship; even AOC and Ted Cruz have blasted Blizzard. What China's trying to do goes against everything Americans have been raised to believe, from the most conservative to the most liberal. Political outrage within the US about domestic US affairs is often ineffective because it's too partisan, and it tends to just energize the other side (e.g., the Chick-fil-A controversy in 2012/2013 actually increased their sales). This is different because everyone agrees and there is no "other side" to energize, not within the US.

They will never be your customers. You think they will, so you hand over your IP to a local partner, and then they don’t need you anymore and take those customers themselves. I am surprised any Western company still falls for this ruse.

That's a choice.

Companies growing so that they can be worth more when their investors sell them is the whole point of businesses

Also a choice.

Companies are accountable for their choices. Accountable to their shareholders and to their customers. When those groups aren't aligned, then you're in a tough spot. You might wind up with a new set of shareholders or a new set of customers.

I would argue that in America, the public is allowed to exist by corporations.

(Tongue in cheek cynicism, mixed with more truth than I'm comfortable with.)

Thanks for showing your position on the side of "money first people second, if at all".

If I say that male lions kill the cubs of rival males when they take over a pride, I am stating an observation, not making a moral claim that I am "on the side" of lions killing cubs.

It's a fair observation that the structural incentives of modern investment driven capital are that growth is absolutely rewarded and morality is often not. Good citizenship only rewards a company when there are enough consumers aware of that citizenship and who care enough to change their spending habits. At the scale of many corporations, it's very hard for enough people to care enough to affect the company's actions.

Eww. I thought it was about trading products and labor for currency and vice versa. The investor class is just a parasite on the whole endeavor.

-- Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER2/thoreau/life.html

Nobody is making anything up.

https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/storage/301/d5d23e36-3c35-11e8...

I am not sure why everyone keeps believing this lie.

There was no rule that banned political statements.

Instead the rule was something like "we can ban anyone for doing anything that might make blizzard look bad".

It was absolutely not some specific rule about banning political statements.

The pre-stated rules don't talk about politics but about offending users.

So, ok, let's say that political statements are offensive, which is a weird proposition.

This is not being enforced for other political views and statements, nor for all users, so clearly it's not applying a pre-stated rule.

I feel the backtrack blizzard did can be considered a fair excusation, and people could reasonably forgive them, but let's not lie to ourselves by treating this as "just applying the rules".

That is imposing China's rules. There is nothing illegal or even offensive about naming your gaming account "FreeHK". (Battle.net has plenty of political account names; seems like half the people in my Overwatch games are named Trump2020, and they're probably not talking about the Starcraft/Hearthstone streamer.)

Edit: I did go to actually check, and this account is currently #2 and Asia and North America, and #1 in Europe. Clearly Blizzard is aware of it, though, and has chosen to take no action.

Because that's totally going to happen. Countries within themselves barely function without split alliances, different parties and ambitions. Now you want 7 billion people to act as one? I'll faster reach richest guy on the planet before that happens.

Quit pretending that wishful thinking is what you should bank on for better things to happen in the world.

Clearly we have flags => different "laws".

No, get a ladder.

Because the no country, no flag idea makes people blind to finding practical solutions.

No comrade asulnatao. Since this is your first ever post with your account, they're an American company imposing Chinese censorship upon Americans and other nations. That's a hard no go. They follow whatever law they need to in their established foreign entities. But none of that spills out to anywhere else.

Oh my god, that's funny. Especially since I've been posting anti-communist since, well, forever and even today. Good try there homie. Oh, that was funny. I actually laughed out loud.

And also that's fine. Ban me. But remember, when they silence everyone else, there's no one left to speak up for you.

Which is congruous with you being a GRU operative, or even a CCP shill spreading black propaganda by making poor arguments.

> And also that's fine. Ban me. But remember, when they silence everyone else, there's no one left to speak up for you.

Stop being melodramatic. Somebody disagreed with you on HN, you're not getting sent to a death camp. Plus you weren't exactly "speaking up" for me in the first place.

EDIT: No matter the parallels between the CCP and Nazi Germany, bringing up Nazis will make many think "there's Goodwin's law in action again" and move on. Focus your arguments on the problems, not on making superficial comparisons.

No, it doesn't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21289611

The comparison isn't "superficial".

I fail to see how that implies that Godwin's law is dead.

EDIT: reporters of protestors!?!

1) China has done >0 bad things

2) Comparison is whataboutism

3) Therefore China is literally Nazi Germany (actual topic of this subthread, not a strawman).

https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/542499/marshall-curr...

What seems snazzy and modern today, what is presented with smug sophistry and self-righteous downvotes, will be revised or swept under the rug tomorrow.

Worth remembering, IMO. Lots of passionate people calling for a conflict, and it's not clear that they've thought about ramifications very deeply.

> The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt. Even those of the intelligent who believe that they have a nostrum are too individualistic to combine with other intelligent men from whom they differ on minor points. This was not always the case. A hundred years ago the philosophical radicals formed a school of intelligent men who were just as sure of themselves as the Hitlerites are; the result was that they dominated politics and that the world advanced rapidly both in intelligence and in material well-being.

> It is quite true that the intelligence of the philosophical radicals was very limited. It is, I think, undeniable that the best men of the present day have a wider and truer outlook, but the best men of that day had influence, while the best men of this are impotent spectators. Perhaps we shall have to realise that scepticism and intellectual individualism are luxuries which in our tragic age must be forgone, and if intelligence is to be effective, it will have to be combined with a moral fervour which it usually possessed in the past but now usually lacks.

-- Bertrand Russell, "The Triumph of Stupidity" https://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM

It sounds like you're saying that you're so right, self-doubt would be an unnecessary encumbrance.

How many words of Chinese do you know? How much Chinese history? Have you ever seen a subsistence farmer?

What sentence gives you that idea?

People hold the Nazis up as this great evil that the world banded together to defeat. But from what I can tell the world mostly didn't care until they were directly attacked. Most people truly don't give a crap about this stuff. Never have. Probably never will.

So I guess all those ships and supplies we sent to the UK and France before Japan hit Pearl Harbor were just for shits and giggles, right? What utter and complete nonsense.

Fuck Goodwin's law and any asshole that hides behind it because they're too scared to deal with reality. Might as well ban scientific literature and evidence to prove the Earth is round too. "There they go! Eratosthenes' law in action! They're trying to prove the Earth is round with science!"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

But the people refer to his quip are often wrong -- certainly in context of a bona fide totalitarian regime that has been murdering dissidents for 7 decades -- and are using said quip as a cheap way out, while projecting that on those who made the comparison.

"Never again" and "don't even think of comparing anything with the Nazis, not even mass murdering totalitarian regimes" don't go together.