Microsoft Confirms It's Distancing Itself From Minecraft Creator 'Notch' (onmsft.com) 808
Minecraft creator Marcus 'Notch' Persson, who sold the title to Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014, won't be part of 10-year anniversary plans for the game because of his "comments and opinions," Microsoft said in a statement. From a report: Minecraft's creator Marcus Notch Persson has recently made some seemingly controversial white supremacist and transphobic comments via Twitter that have all but forced Microsoft to put some space between itself and the games creator. "His comments and opinions do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of 'Minecraft'," a Microsoft spokesperson said. Fortunately, Persson's has had little to no involvement with Minecraft since its sale to Microsoft for $2.5 billion back in 2014, so it's been easier for the company to remove loading screen text that referenced Notch as well as uninviting him from future Minecraft events such as the 10-year anniversary shindig coming up soon.
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Re:Let the unpersoning begin en masse (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm so tired of hearing this comparison. Every time some bigot is ostracized for saying horrible things bigot-apologists come out with their persecution-complex McCarthy comparisons. Free speech in the United States has never freed one from the consequences of speech. The First Amendment forbids the government from restricting speech. It does not require citizens to put up with your bullshit. If you say something in my house and I don't like it, I can ask you to leave. If some guy Microsoft once had a business relationship says things they don't like, they're under no obligation to invite him to events they stage. There is no analog to McCarthism. Social consequences for being a jackass are in no way equivalent to being persecuted by the government.
In one sentence you demonstrated that:
1) You don't even have a basic understanding of the First Amendment
2) You don't know anything about the McCarthy era
3) You will grasp at straws to defend bigotry
Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:4, Insightful)
What did he post that is "white supremacist"? I have yet to see anything other than
"It is okay to be white" and "Privilege is a made up metric".
Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:4, Insightful)
It is definitely in doubt, there is no such thing as a fast lane without a slow lane and when you promote others while excluding those who are "white" you in fact are attacking white people and just spinning it as benign. It is no different than people who give the benefit of the doubt and support to others who share their religion. Just because you spin it to yourself and others as a positive message doesn't mean it is positive.
The fact you have such hate in you and paint everyone who doesn't want to be repressed in this way with horrible labels says a lot about the person you are choosing to be.
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Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:5, Insightful)
"All he said is that pretty much the only people who use the phrase are white supremacists, because virtually nobody else thinks anyone out there is criticizing them for being white."
No, he characterized the millions of people out there saying things like this as being white supremacists.
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=13864480&cid=58511034
You are sticking your head in the sand. Affirmative action, reparations, the GQ author covering this story who said tweeted "Fuck white people" with no consequence but talk from people ignored, the hiring and retention policies and protectionism in corporate America, and this story. There are very public examples of racism against whites and genderism against males every day all swept aside and supposedly justified by history. But if genderism and racism aren't valid there is nothing to correct because the distribution amongst them doesn't matter, if they are valid as suggested by attempts to even the score then the issue is with the race/gender and not their actions which is racial and gender discrimination and I for one oppose that.
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"Have you turned on the news lately and seen how they're treating black people and Jews and Muslims?"
Sure, then I looked at the actual numbers which make those statements a lie... but why lie? Racial and gender discrimination.
"Are you feeling alright? Bad case of the measles perhaps? I know, I got hallucinations when I had the measles back in the 1970s, so that might explain it. Talk to the doctor, stay warm, hydrated, fed, and rested, and let it get out of your system. Also talk to your parents about vacci
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"Past racism might to some degree confer better odds of you being born into that economic strata if you are white but it isnt exclusive."
For all we know we enter a lottery and which parents you get is purely a matter of what ticket came up. Without racism it doesn't matter what the distribution of skin color is. What would it mean if all the other races were wiped out and only the "insert any race here" were left and thus got all the wealth and privilege? Nothing really, just that people would stop introduc
Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:4, Insightful)
The statics make it plain that there is no privilege to being a white male.
Then you should be able to provide a source for both the statistics along with a detailed analysis of why somehow being "white" isn't relevant despite the fact that you just pulled out a whole lot of other statistics that affect outcomes which neatly are able to split people by skin colour.
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38 fucking percent of the federal inmates are black and they only represent about 12% of the general population
Does the fact that majority of inmates are men, while they only represent 50% of the population, also point to female privilege ?
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Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:5, Informative)
I didn't, TFS did. But it is about race.
The comments were protests as a victim of discrimination. The backlash is because he is a member of the wrong race and gender.
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"If it walks like a duck..."
That logic, in this context, condemns anyone labeled as "white" or who self labels as "white" and is attacked on the basis of race and dares protest it as a monster promoting genocide.
The Nazi party in the earlier part of its rise to power pointed out an economically advantaged racial correlation and vilified them. Initially economic policies to correct the situation and propaganda associating them with monsters. Oh wait, you were saying walks like a duck because the people objec
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Saying "being white, is OK", is a true statement there is nothing wrong with being born with any kind of skin it black/white whatever. Saying Hitler (without any context referring to another Hilter, not the German Leader) is a good person, is not he is arguably one of the worst people in history, if you think a person that tried to commit genocide based on race is a good person then you are racist.
I think Hitler was a horrible person, makes me NOT racist
I think it is OK to be white, makes me racist
Oh
I guess labels are stop words for you... (Score:2, Insightful)
People throwing around labels to unperson people when those labels are unfounded, however, is something related to him.
It's amazing how labels work as stop words, allowing people to stop thinking about whether the label actually applies and why.
The press would never lie to us, after all. And it's not like their greatest prize is named after one of the biggest names in yellow journalism, right?
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The comments I could find have nothing to do with white supremacy and were actually positive in nature. The hate is found in the attack on notch.
https://www.gq.com/story/notch-whiteness-tweets
Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to find dip shits on the left (Score:3)
The right, OTOH (as well as right wing Democrats like Nancy Pelosi & Chuck Schumer) use identity politics to divide the working class. They would _not_ be OK with racism going away tomorrow
Re:You're a dumb shit (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the point is partly whether he truly is a "white supremacist" of whether his views have been taken out of context or otherwise misrepresented.
We've seen this happen plenty of times before - from Sir Tim Cook (forced out of his job for a joke some feminazi took well out of hand) to Roger Scruton (where an interview was deliberately edited to show him in a bad light) recently.
See, its all fun and game going for the "nazis" until someone decides something you said was not acceptable to the groupthink and comes for you.
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Oh, it's terrible. The billionaire might not get invited to a few dinner parties with people who don't want to hear his ideas. Yeah, that's a real shame. Poor guy. That's just what the Nazi's did, all right.
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It's not about that. It's about a huge company painting itself as more catholic than the Pope and sending a signal of zero tolerance towards IMAGINED labeling of various people.
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It got press. That's what's up.
Re: You're a dumb shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, much of this "everyone who disagrees with me is a NAZI" rhetoric is simply them giving themselves permission to be racist.
Re: You're a dumb shit (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem of judging people by the race like that is that you end up blind.
There's enough white people in poor condition in the US to elect a freaking president, and most likely reelect one.
So, either you stop being intellectually lazy and start to look to people as people again instead of racial labels, or you will have 4 more years of a very annoying orange.
I read the tweets. (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't seem worth talking about, much less acting on. That John Oliver hit piece on WWE before GoT with the CM Punk tweet...ok I understand how that was pulled.
Re:I read the tweets. (Score:5, Informative)
In other words the only non-racist in this story is, in fact, Notch.
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You make it sound like that statement exists in a vacuum. The implication is that some believe that it's not okay to be white, that white people face some kind of persecution. It doesn't exactly take a student of history to understand how untrue that implication is and how insulting it is to many non-white groups in this country who do in fact face persecution. The ideas that efforts to curb systemic racism are "reverse racism" and that white people are disadvantaged in today's society are not only false, b
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He knew damn well what he was doing.
Proving the reactionism and bigotry that has infected the left?
Re:I read the tweets. (Score:5, Insightful)
For me the order of operations matter (Score:3)
Not really (Score:4, Insightful)
The trick was meant to expose the hypocrisy of liberals, and how they are easily triggered by menial rhetoric due to their extreme views. It's meant to counter all of the anti-white, borderline insane, views that many liberals and minorities seem to propagate against white people.
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The trick was meant to expose the hypocrisy of liberals, and how they are easily triggered
This is true, except can you please not tar all "liberals" with the same brush? Most educated left-leaning Americans above the age of 25 or so would have a similar disdain for such political correctness. The noisy far-left extremists are concentrated in a few places.
And how did "liberal" become a dirty word for conservative Americans, when most of them (like all Westerners) agree with the principles of liberalism? It was the founding philosophy of the War of Independence.
Re:I read the tweets. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. He knew that if he said "it's Okay to be white", it would get under the skin of those idiots who make a huge deal over things like saying "it's okay to be white". He poked them with the stick that he knew would best anger them.
Pointing out how over-reactive and sensitive and angry and ranty these idiots are doesn't make him or his comment "white supremist". Has society really completely fucking lot touch with the concept of trolling?
Re: I read the tweets. (Score:4, Funny)
In favor of Microsofts defense #ItsOkToBeH1B. Thats all they care about.
Re:I read the tweets. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I read the tweets. (Score:4, Insightful)
but it's in style right now to hate on white people.
Man, I bet people hate on your whiteness so bad they cross the street rather than pass you on the sidewalk. I bet cops stop you because they hate your whiteness and harass you and you're terrified they might just shoot you just for being so white. I bet you have to be careful not get caught using your white dialect in front of certain crowds because they may think you're uneducated or an illegal immigrant or even a terrorist. I bet if you go into a Starbucks and you wait on a friend before ordering then they'll call the cops on you. I bet it's really tough for you and your whiteness. Real tough.
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People know what you're talking about when you say 'white'; generally just someone with lighter skin tones, usually of some European descent. It's why it's generally grouped with 'caucasian' on forms when asked about race/ethnicity. No, it's not a race in the strictest sense, but people generally know what you're talking about when you refer to someone as 'white'.
It's more than a fringey few, unfortunately. I've watched people that used to be level-headed spout this nonsense. Real people that I know.
The p
Re:I read the tweets. (Score:5, Insightful)
White is not a race.
Don't be disingenuous. If you want to speak biologically, race doesn't exist at all, every Homo sapiens sapiens is the same race. If you want to speak practically, white is just as much a race as black. The categories on the US Census for race are white, black, Asian, native Hawaiian or Pacific islander, American Indian or Alaskan native, and two or more. And it is just as "OK" or "not OK" to be any one of those as it is to be any other, or any mix. None of them fundamentally deserve to be treated any differently than any other in any situation, all other things being equal (assuming you're not talking about incidence of disease or something like that).
msmash is a lying piece of shit (Score:5, Informative)
https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
https://www.newsweek.com/minec... [newsweek.com]
These are examples of "wrong think" as far as the progressive woke crowd is concerned, but it isn't white supremacy or transphobia. I disagree with most of these comments, but it is super scummy to slag people with false accusations, just because you disagree with them.
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It's the unfortunate result of people trying to make words have multiple meanings.
All privilege should be is to be able to think about your situation and how others may or will have different experiences based on all kinds of variables (skin color, gender, class, etc.).
Instead, it's usually thrown around as "you're part of X group, so you don't get to have an opinion. Shame!"
Re: msmash is a lying piece of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
The man is unhinged. That's a fact.
The man has $1.5 billion. Effectively in cash. After growing up in an apartment-dwelling little family. So yeah, he is unhinged. He was unceremoniously thrust into a position of wealth he was utterly unprepared for.
His confusion stems directly from having all that money and still being an outsider. The phrase is "wealth and privilege". He has the wealth part. He's discovering that the privilege part isn't automatic. He didn't grow up rubbing elbows with the "right" people. The amount of money he has now is "supposed" to open the doors of power. That's what all the whinging on Twitter says, right? Turns out it doesn't. Notch is nouveau riche and is discovering exactly what that means. It's a pejorative, and the 99.99% of Twitter whining about "white privilege" don't even know the phrase because they aren't in the 0.01%. Notch is financially in the 0.01% and socially in the 99%. It's got to be very confusing.
Re: msmash is a lying piece of shit (Score:4, Interesting)
According to your theory, how does one prepare properly to be wealthy? Who gets to deem you sufficiently prepared? What kind of ceremony is necessary?
You go to Deerfield or Phillips Exeter or Woodberry Forest or Taft. Then you go to Yale or Dartmouth or Princeton or Harvard. You rush Skull and Bones or Sphinx or Porcellian Club or Pacifica House. Then you intern at the Supreme Court or Congress or the executive suite at a Fortune 100 company (for your daddy's brother-in-law's uncle). The official induction ceremony is when you join in the gang rape of a couple of drunk cheerleaders with your frat brothers. Oh, and graduation. The really keen boys get the gang rape out of the way while still in prep school. The late bloomers take care of it in college. It's not optional. The Old Boys Club doesn't know for sure they can trust you until you've done it, thereby giving them something on you and them giving you something on them, and incidentally demonstrating the necessary level of sociopathy to be successful.
Tuition, fees, room, and board at the prep school is $50,000/year. Tuition, fees, room and board at the Ivy League is $72,000/year. Hush money to the cheerleaders depends on your negotiating skills.
Isn't one privileged inherently according to their race? If so, doesn't that make it automatic?
No. See above. The full entrance requirements to that strata of society do require you to be male or to marry one of those men, but race isn't particularly relevant.
Nouveau riche is perjorative popularly? Lots of old money blabbing on Twitter and Instagram?
No. It's a pejorative on the other side of the doors of power, the side Notch is unable to access, for all his wealth. (And I use "wealth" here intentionally. $1.5 billion is far past merely "rich".) The ignorant 99% babbling on Twitter and Instagram don't even know the phrase nouveau riche, and think Notch is only rich, and hate him for that.
Re:msmash is a lying piece of shit (Score:5, Insightful)
> The dog whistle is so loud it is deafening... I guess those who stood too close to it are now immune to the sound. Not to worry AC, I'm sure there were some 'very fine people' in the crowd.
Is it not ironic that you are the one dogwhistling ?
Calling every argument you dont like a "dogwhistle" is just a technique to shut down debate. Whenever you cannot find anything factually wrong or genuinely biased in someones argument, you can simply call it a dogwhistle and walk away with a smug grin knowing that there is no possible way anyone can refute that.
Nothing twitch said was racist neither overtly nor implicitly. If he really is a racist, then it shouldnt be hard to find actual racism.
These are the tweets he made (Score:5, Informative)
It's ok to be white.
Tweet 2: [twitter.com]
Privilege is a made up metric used to silence and repress. We are all different, and that is ok. We listen to individuals and help each other based on individual strengths and needs.
We do not generalize based on skin color, bigot.
Tweet 3: [twitter.com]
(protip: believing in race based privilege needing to be checked fits the literal definition of racism)
These aren't racist, they are definitely not white supremacist. They are insensitive.
Someone else can look for the "transphobic" ones, I'll bet they're just insensitive, too.
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Re:These are the tweets he made (Score:5, Informative)
Look like Microsoft is using these nothing tweets as a rationalization to push Notch out of the picture.
And these are "insensitive" only if you define insensitive as things SJWs don't want to hear.
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If by "dick" you mean not a cuck afraid of group-thinkers lashing out then yes.
Re:These are the tweets he made (Score:4, Insightful)
We do not generalize based on skin color, bigot.
Except we really do.
At the point you're denying racism exists you're basically part of the problem no matter how you work the semantics of "techincally" racist.
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Can you tell us exactly what white supremacist values he holds? Not everything is a dog whistle. Some people just don't like what the regressive left has done.
Re:These are the tweets he made (Score:4, Informative)
he's...fucking..swedish.
Re:These are the tweets he made (Score:5, Informative)
He's obviously upset that the privilege he has from being white in the US is being questioned.
You're still an idiot, aren't you. Notch is Swedish. American racial nonsense is completely unique to America. Most of the rest of the world is incredibly homogeneous in comparison. Historically, the response by any particular ethnicity to some other ethnicity intruding on their territory was to kill them all. Local genocide was the go to foreign policy for the planet for thousands of years. American black slavery by white people is also unique to America. It did not happen in the rest of the world, so they have none of that baggage. Yes there were some black slaves in other historically white parts of the world, but they were a rounding error demographically. Culturally they were invisible.
American "white privilege" is irrelevant to Notch's upbringing because he grew up in Sweden which is so white they actually distinguish the ethnicities of different kinds of white people. In the south are Scanians. In the north are Norrlänningar. Near the Finnish border are Finns. There are Poles and Yugoslavs and Norwegians. From the outside, they're all just white people. You have to actually live there to be able to distinguish them at all.
Notch spent stupid money on a mansion in Beverly Hills but he's about as American as fermented herring.
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What do you call the privilege of someone who grows up with two parents who go to Harvard or Yale and the gets in themselves as a legacy? Who inherits enough money to never have to work another day in their life if they don't want to?
How do you compare that privilege above to someone who grows up literally dirt poor, as in, they lived in a one-room house with a dirt floor. Whose parents were meth addicts who could barely keep a job?
If you're a modern left-wing racist, you might call the second one privilege
Re: These are the tweets he made (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: These are the tweets he made (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:These are the tweets he made (Score:5, Insightful)
They're very loud white supremacist dog whistles.
If you keep hearing dog whistles that no one else hears -- maybe you're the dog.
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No it isn't, you ignorant fuck:
-The belief that race accounts for differences in human character or ability and that a particular race is superior to others.
-Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
Re: These are the tweets he made (Score:4, Insightful)
-Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
You just contradicted yourself. Saying that one racial group can use a word but another can't is discrimination based on race.
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What's that?
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That doesn't change the fact that you're discriminating based on someone's skin color. So you're racist.
But if you're upset that you're not allowed to say that one word as a white person, well, there may be a word for you...
Yes, I'm not a fan of inequality.
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You feel discriminated against, because there's a single word that you shouldn't say? Really? Are you that delicate, or are you just trying to be a dick, for the sake of it?
Nothing you wrote counters my point. Do you have an actual argument on how it's not racial discrimination?
I hope that one day you'll learn that the world isn't fair and it's not black and white. "Equality" is not a simple binary thing in our world today, as much as you'd like to think it is, apparently.
Equality is a two-way street. Kinda baffling that you'd actively advocate for inequality. All this shows me is you don't actually believe in equality and you're okay with some people being more equal than others.
White supremacist? (Score:2, Insightful)
Can someone point to a post or tweet of his that can be considered white-supremacist (or however its spelled)? This tactic of labeling people so we don't have to discuss uncomfortable realities has to stop.
Show some specific examples (Score:4, Insightful)
When you go public, you are judged by the public (Score:2)
Once you or your creation "goes public", it's like running for the top office in your country. You are now owned by the public - and the thin-skinned public sphere you or your creation live in.
You are no longer free to say what you want, and the First Amendment no longer applies. All that matters is not making people angry and maximizing popularity (and thus profit) off of your (or your creation's) image.
If he said anything that's off-putting to said public, that's the way the $2,500,000,000 cookie crumbles
Gentlemen(/women/queers/inter), PLACE YOUR BETS! (Score:5, Insightful)
seemingly controversial white supremacist and transphobic comments
You know, if I had read a headline like this five years ago, I would be shocked and intrigued and perhaps above all instinctively disappointed in the person (Notch, in this case) even before I'd read any of the details. As a liberal, that would be my default starting point.
But this is 2019. And in 2019, if I see a headline that says someone is accused of making "white supremacist" and "transphobic" comments...
Tell you what, slashdot. Let me throw it to you. If you haven't RTFAed yet, what do you think the story is gonna be about? What goes through your head? What do you expect and what do you feel? And is it any different from what you would've expected or felt if you saw this headline 5 years ago?
I'm interested in hearing from all parts of the political spectrum. I'm curious about what these words actually mean and do these days.
Or, you know, we could leap straight into the SJW vs. anti-SJW slugfest. Amimojo, where ya at?
(I seriously, honestly haven't clicked anything or Googled it or checked Wikipedia. For all I know he's been extolling the joys of cross burning. Yet somehow I feel like the odds are actually over 50% that he said something entirely reasonable and non-hateful...)
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Speaking of CROSS BURNING (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, you know, I think this really calls for some Netherrack cross burning. Maybe with some custom skins. Nothing actually racist but framed in such a way to, you know, draw attention to the fact that Microsoft believes that it's absolutely not ok to ever say "it's ok to be a white person."
Has MS done any takedowns on fanmade Minecraft videos yet? Well there's one way to find out. You'd just need to be sure to spell out the irony on signs nearby so there's no mistaking it for any sort of actual KKK sympathy. I dunno, though... liberals have become so tone-deaf about irony and satire and the alt-right has got so good at trolling that on certain topics I'm not sure it's possible (i.e. permissible) to use anything other than blunt literalisms.
Hmnm. Burning bookcases, perhaps? Well, to be fair they're not actually censoring anyone right now, but maybe it's a thought if they did start doing video takedowns. Man I wish I had the energy to do something like this. (But speaking of burned, I'm just too burnt out myself. Exhausted from the constant enjoyment re: all of this glorious white privilege, I guess.)
It's just so fucking stupid. Notch was completely right on that point. Privilege in its most common formulation IS a dumb and made-up metric. It should be called "potential privilege", which isn't at all the same as actualized privilege. I've been somewhere between poor and dirt poor my entire life, but because I'm white (with a little native American mixed in, but not enough), that means that some spoiled black millionaire brats at Yale have less privilege than I do. It's absurd on its face, and it's a fucking joke, it is a ridiculous oke that is actually turning the entire left wing of this country into a joke that actually saying any of this out loud can now be equated with white supremacy.
I haven't stumbled on the details of his "transphobic" comment yet. Maybe he said he didn't quite like the idea of injecting hormones of the opposite gender into healthy 12 year olds just because they say they want it? Maybe he said that *biologically speaking* there were only two genders (plus intersex, I would hasten to add.)? Man, I'm giddy with anticipation.
This is such a waste of... everything. I just want the left to grow the fuck up already. I AM a leftist. (I even recently made a lengthy post on
Do you have any idea how disheartening it is to look around and see that most of the Jon Stewarts and Sam Harrises of this generation are right wing? How the hell did this happen? How can it be it that anyone in their right mind thinks that the proper reaction to the 2016 election is to double down on this particularly humorless, ironyless, anti-intellectual flavor of political correctness?
Fuck.
Re:Gentlemen(/women/queers/inter), PLACE YOUR BETS (Score:5, Insightful)
As a center-leftest, honestly I just feel tired. I assume the person in question made a comment someone didn't like and then didn't immediately back down/apologize profusely. To a vocal few that makes them part of the "enemy", who are seen as completely monolithic and unchanging in their opinions, and who cannot be acknowledged or reasoned with, only destroyed. It's a weird punitive mindset that has no goals save discouraging apostasy, even now it's starting to fail as people see that there really are few consequences. I guess Notch can't go to a promotional event? I'm sure he's heartbroken.
The ironic part is that all this recrimination hasn't made anything better, if anything racist views are becoming more prevalent and accepted. Every time the cry goes up fewer people care, eventually the racists won't have to even have to hide it anymore.
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Re:Gentlemen(/women/queers/inter), PLACE YOUR BETS (Score:4, Funny)
Nah. Too many traps over there.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
References for academic work going back decades.
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I give up, I've stated it very clearly and precisely, there is nothing more I can say to you other than read my posts again.
Fake News (Score:3)
Everyone knows Hatsune Miku created Minecraft. Notch even conceded the point.
https://twitter.com/notch/stat... [twitter.com]
This has to stop (Score:5, Insightful)
This is insane. Look at this GQ article covering the tweets, look at the comments by the author:
https://www.gq.com/story/notch-whiteness-tweets
" I saw some exit poll data that said the only two demographics to vote for Trump were white men and white women. As a result, I tweeted "Fuck White People." And then tweeted it again, giving more context and including a screenshot of that exit poll data. A huge number of people got pissed at me, and though the countless death threats I got were uncalled for, I understand why people were mad. I didn't phrase that tweet correctly. What I should have said was "fuck whiteness.""
What do you think would happen (not threaten to happen) if this person had tweeted "Fuck Black People" or "Fuck Blackness?" GQ would have fired them immediately and they wouldn't be writing any articles, they would be subject mass destruction and infamy in the court of public opinion. There have been more than enough instances of exactly this happening to public figures in our society who have done far far less to say this with absolute certainty. How thick does your bias have to be to blind yourself to this rampant racism and means justify the ends mentality?
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Just going to point out that a lot of things people are getting in trouble for recently are things they said or did many years ago that were "acceptable at the time".
Today it's acceptable to say things like "fuck white people", but 20 years from now it may well be the case that this tweet keeps an otherwise mainstream F-M Trans African American candidate from becoming president.
It's upsetting that I HAVE to check what was said. (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned a long time ago to try to dig in to stories and be a least a little cautious in treating a story at face value. That doesn't mean everything is "fake news", it just means journalists aren't always very reliable.
But these days I've found that whenever someone is said to be "a racist" or "a sexist" when I look for the actual quote, it's only racist about 50% of the time. Even that is sometimes questionable since you don't know the context. The other 50% it's just outright not racist, and either blown up by the media, or blown up by idiots on twitter or both. This case is the latter, not the former.
20 years ago I didn't have to do that. Media stories about racism were by and large about people that were actually being racist.
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Racism has largely been redefined as a bunch of ingrained cultural attitudes that have almost zero to do with the actual biases or intent of the people saying them.
Probably because there's not anything like the overt, intentional and malicious racism there used to be, and it's hard to maintain a siege mentality unless you have a siege.
Microsoft's right hand doesn't know it's left hand (Score:4, Insightful)
For a company that makes the vast majority of its money from large multinational corporations - many of which lean conservative - it seems Microsoft's SJW stance against Notch doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I have a hard time finding anything actually racist coming from the people that the left loves to label as racist. Meanwhile, it looks like merely having vocal conservative opinions is the easiest way to be labeled racist by the left.
Also, calling someone racist merely for being conservative is missing quite a bit logically to make that connection. People that do it over and over are liars. Some conservatives are racist; the vast majority are not. Saying conservative equals racist is false.
For transphobic - who decided one day that this debate was settled?
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Re:totalitarianism (Score:4, Insightful)
You can be a white supremacist. Nobody is saying you can't. It's just that decent people won't want to have anything to do with you. That's nothing like totalitarianism.
True, but the implication of your statement is that Notch is a white supremacist. Honest question: do you think Notch is a white supremacist? If so, what statement of his are you basing this assessment on? The only statement I could find of his about race is "it's OK to be white". Do you think it's not OK to be white? Or that it's not OK to say "it's OK to be white"? I don't know Notch well enough to know if he's a racist or not. But there are certainly situations where the phrase could be used where it wouldn't be racist (e.g. in response to someone else saying "All whites are racist".)
Re:totalitarianism (Score:5, Insightful)
I will say I didn't know who this guy was until 10 minutes ago. I've never played minecraft. I have no dog in this fight.
Let's say for the sake of argument Notch doesn't think white privilege exists. Let's further assume that white privilege does exist and Notch is wrong.
That still doesn't make him a white supremacist. It makes him misinformed. Maybe it makes him an insensitive asshole. But does it mean he thinks the white race is superior to all other races?
I've seen a lot of people say some really racist stuff. To me this doesn't seem so bad. Ok I get there is context. What is the context? What else did he say? I don't know any semi-famous racist people who've said only 1 racist thing.
Maybe he is a white supremacist. I don't know the guy. But I'll remain skeptical until I see some better evidence.
Also I think it's totally appropriate for anyone to distance themselves from anyone else for any reason. This isn't McCarthyism or censorship. It's freedom of association.
Re:totalitarianism (Score:4, Funny)
Our company doesn't hire assholes, either. I don't see it as a controversial thing to do.
You'd think, but then again a lot of people really don't mind having one as president.
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And Notch is 100% correct. In the US all that matters is money and connections. If you have the right friends and money you can literally get away with murder. If you are missing either of those things the wrong adjective on twitter gets ejected from society. How do see his "white privilege" working for him right now? huh?
Right its not because it does not exist and people that think it does are tools!
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So then, over the counter pregnancy tests are like totalitarianism...?
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Have you ever considered actually debating the ideas
Even if his ideas were worth debating once, they have been done to death so many times you will have a hard time finding anyone to discuss them with. Also, you can't really expect people to want to discuss their personal medical history and if they are entitled to basic levels of human dignity, so claiming that the problem is them not engaging is disingenuous or showing an extreme lack of empathy.
More over, there are people actively discouraging discussion of this. On many forums, including Slashdot, trying
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You only say that because you lack the moral and physical flexibility.
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Who painted Notch as a white supremacist in the first place then?
*someone* gave Microsoft a reason to distance themselves from him, so who was it?
Especially if it's not actually true.
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Re:totalitarianism (Score:4, Funny)
>which means all citizens are first class citizens
So they can be passed as a function to class methods to be resolved into a closure?
Re:totalitarianism (Score:4, Insightful)
If you can't use the phrase "It's okay to be white" because bad groups have said that at some point, then I think we should make it illegal to like kids. Like at all. I'm sure you can guess why.
Sometimes words are just words, and the same FIVE WORDS can describe more than one feeling.
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I mean, I don't deny there is context. But I'm not sure what the context is that makes that particular 5-word-phrase okay. It's either coded racism or it's trolling as coded racism. I'm fine condemning people either way.
But sure, some phrases have multiple meanings and context changes them.
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Libel and defamation to begin with. He didn't say white supremacist or transphobic things, he's arguably not a white supremacist - that's 3 counts of defamation and the statement from Microsoft one of libel.
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Then how do you feel about the stuff coming from Trump? I ask because I'd like your opinion on a politician expressing terrible thoughts. If you think a private citizen should hold back their thoughts in public areas because of a business relationship does that also apply to a public citizen responsible for running the country?