Jim Sterling (The Jimquisition)

Think the topic has drifted slightly.

It tends to happen in this thread.

I blame EA and Ubisoft

I blame Konami.

Should I watch him?

no

I blame Activision.

I think they were asking about Jim Sterling.

I'd say yes, myself.

I was going to post TB's "Fuck Konami" section from the podcast, but it has DMJared in it, which slightly spoils it.

Jared has come clean of the more heavy allegations so he shouldnt be a problem.

Unless you never liked him to begin with and i'm just rambling nonsense

this is all the fault of those SJWs

Its obviously Captain Marvel's fault.

This is going to derail again, isnt it?

re:Pro Jared, if the best defense he's offered is still "that doesn't sound like something i would do, ask my friends", then he's not clean of anything. the cheating never mattered as much as the accusations of exploiting underage fans.

I'll just say that's very YMMV and leave it there.

Edited by GoldenKaos on Oct 11th 2019 at 5:12:37 PM

funny thing is all his friends already agree with the allegations and side with the accusers, though i guess he means his new friends.

This is a great take from Taliesin, a popular WoW news streamer.

Summarized:

• Blitzcheung did violate the tournament contract and some degree of punishment for that is warranted.
• Blizzard is in the wrong for the draconian and obviously politically motivated nature of the punishment it gave out.
• Blizzard is entitled to restrict political speech in its own private events and streams, lest it be forced to let neo-Nazis rant on camera as much as pro-democracy protesters.
  • In turn, Blitzcheung, Taliesen, you, and I are fully entitled to make whatever political statements we want in our own content.
• Boycotting Blizzard is great if you want to make a political statement, but in terms of effectiveness at changing their policy, it's about as much use as giving a paper cut to a dinosaur.
• Not Blizzard, nor Apple, nor Google, nor any of the myriad other companies who have been forced to accede to Chinese censorship rules in order to do business in that country are directly at fault for the economic system that they operate in. You can't boycott all of them.
  • People who get ad revenue from Youtube for posting videos about Chinese human rights abuses are being paid by companies that kowtow to China. You can't escape it.

Or, in a nutshell, "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism".

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 12:36:21 PM

> Boycotting Blizzard is great if you want to make a political statement, but in terms of effectiveness at changing their policy, it's about as much use as giving a paper cut to a dinosaur.

Which is why boycotting only works when it's lots of lots of their costumers doing it,you practically need their entire fanbase to deprive them of revenue for them to remotely care

And that simply is not going to happen. Sorry, it's just the truth. Boycotts almost never work. Besides, to avoid being labeled as a hypocrite, you have to boycott everything associated with companies that do business in countries that sponsor human rights abuses, right?

So... that means you have to stop posting on TV Tropes, because we get ad revenue from Google, and Google allows China to censor its content.

You pretty much have to boycott all video game companies, except maybe indie studios, on the premise that they're too small to have been affected.

You should stop watching television, because the media companies, you know...

You should stop watching movies. Disney is all about pandering to China, but so are the other major studios.

You shouldn't buy anything made in China, but that's not enough. You shouldn't buy any product whose manufacturing stream includes any company that does business in China.

Oh, and while you're at it, the U.S. government has done some pretty awful things with respect to human rights, especially lately. So you clearly shouldn't buy anything made in the U.S. But also while you're at it, the EU is currently busy overlooking the destruction of democracy in Hungary, so don't buy anything made there.

You'd better boycott Amazon, of course, because of shitty labor practices. Wal-Mart: forget about it, but look at any major retailer closely enough and you'll see cracks.

You see where this goes? It's pointless.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 12:56:26 PM

So what's the next best thing? Raising enough of a vocal stink that shareholders think everyone's boycotting them, maybe?

Then again {insert any company here} would probably just pull some obviously-biased statistics out of their bum to appease the shareholders. They'd probably successfully do that even during a successful boycott.

I should add that I am already personally boycotting EA (in the sense that I never buy anything from them) because of their shitty practices as a gaming publisher, never mind their shitty actual games, but this has nothing to do with any hypothetical political stance the company takes vis-a-vis Chinese human rights abuses... or American human rights abuses, for that matter.

It is not the role of businesses to enforce morality on a national level. It's the role of businesses to do business. Governments enforce morality on a national level, so if you want to make anything happen at all, vote for representatives who will work to fix the problems that allow these sorts of abuses to happen. Also, march in the streets. Wear gas masks and Winnie the Pooh costumes. Make your voice heard. These are effective. Boycotts are not.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 1:00:38 PM

Boycotting only really works on a psychological level "I'm not buying their products,therefore I feel some form of vindication if I hear they're sales are down"

Other then that yeah,boycotts don't work

while it's true that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, there are degrees of unethicality. the average consumer doesn't think about how they got what they're consuming, where it came from, who it hurts, unless they're forced to. if a company takes action that forces people to realize just how bad they really are, that company is fucked, and Blizzard has placed themselves in that position.

all corporations are scum, but they can get by with it as long as they have plausible deniability. Blizzard has shed that.

Not really, or else the whole 'Made in the USA' fad for almost 3 decades would have died out rather quickly.

Also none of that covers the two casters who were fired as well for just being there even though they did NOTHING.

It is widely believed that the casters were aware of what the player was going to do and elicited it. They are not innocent.

The "Made in the USA" craze is a political movement, not an economic one. It has staying power because companies can print it on the labels of their products and generate business from people who don't understand economics but want to be seen to be waving the flag.

It did very little, if anything, to stem the tide of manufacturing globalization, but that's so far divorced from the experience of the typical consumer that the movement could commit egregious affinity fraud by ignoring it.

Here's a great rule. If a political movement drives economic behavior for genuine moral reasons, it will be short-lived unless continually inflamed by events. If a political movement drives economic behavior for the purpose of affinity fraud, it will live indefinitely. Witness Fox News, megachurches, organic food, and modern Libertarianism.

I am excited by these events not because I think that the boycotts will materially harm Blizzard but because I think they have a genuine chance of raising so much social pressure that Blizzard will be forced to shit or get off the pot regarding their political speech rules. Don't forget that this isn't the first time they've gotten in trouble for similar behavior. Bans on people expressing support for LGBT rights through in-game activities were the hot topic a few years back.

That said, if you need to wait for an event like this to understand that corporations value their bottom line over social ethics, you haven't been paying attention. Actiblizz is no better or worse in this regard than any other. Next week, EA will do something dumb and get everyone mad at them. It never ends.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 11th 2019 at 2:18:34 PM

The more and more the whole "companies are entitled to restrict speech on their platforms" comes up the more and more it ends up a failure.

Compare this to a pathetic slap on the wrist xQc got for his homophobic remarks towards a fellow player - the "punishment" was miniscule compared to the one Blitzcheung got and it cannot be unintentional. It is pretty clear Blizzard values the speech of CCP more than the speech of everyone else and now de-facto enforces Chinese censorship on a global scale.

Maybe it shouldn't be up to corporations to decide which speech is and isn't allowed, especially as the corporations grow more and more stupidly powerful.

Protections against hate speech, a-la "letting Neo Nazis in" should be a domain of governments, not corporations. Corporations adore hate speech - sure, they can symbolically fire a racist once or twice and maybe put up a rainbow flag begrudgingly once a year, but in the end the Neo Nazis aren't the ones hurting their profits, so they won't do anything about them.