This is because Microsoft approached 2b2t, and said if they don't implement these rules, they will be blacklisted.
Blacklisting is a penalty normally given to pay-to-win or gambling servers, where the client will refuse to connect to the server's domain name or IP address. In this case, Microslop used it to force a server to censor the word "fuck", because Microslop are political extremists.
MS really hates minecraft's inherited self hosted server model. You can actually get a global ban for wrongthink commited on your own private server. (granted, someone needs to report you but still)
Also not really a censorship issue but I'm kinda bummed that the new version will default to having the server whitelist on. Going on an ip scanning site and joining random minecraft servers accindentally left on for years is an experience like no other. Some of the longer running ones are full of signs left by other explorers, or just griefed to shit. One of the few remaining wild wests on the internet.
I think broadly I'm in agreement that the censorship via blacklisting threats was unwarranted. That said, I also think we should keep in mind that this isn't some public forum made for adults to have discussions, it's a public block game server. I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children. Personally I think there was potential for some kind of middle ground, but I'm also not mourning the loss of the obsidian nazi builds too hard. The paradox of tolerance and all that. The vast majority of the anarchy spirit is still there, it's just slightly less edgy. It's hard to discuss in good faith because the advocates for lack of censorship here are largely people who want to spam the N word in chat all day or their unwitting allies. Ultimately, whatever the outcome (and I think the current outcome is at least /ok/), I've made peace with the possibility of losing minecraft as a medium for totally free speech. It's just a block game.
> I think it's more than reasonable to say that the average minecraft player is probably a child and one of the most popular servers being full of swastikas and racial slurs probably isn't good for children.
Maybe. They’ll encounter if eventually and if they are coddled too much they can’t handle it. I also think folks forget, or perhaps they were coddled, that kids already know about a lot of this stuff and when parents aren’t around say all the bad works and make very, very crude jokes. That’s what kids do. That’s what we did.
Sure, kids will encounter a lot of things, but there’s a difference between coddling and having conversations when the time is right (well, better - there’s rarely a correct time in any exact sense with kids).
Our kid is old enough now to have a good grasp on “world war 2 was bad, nazis are bad”, and if they were to hop on this server and then we have discussions surrounding ie the “obsidian swaztikas” mentioned above, I think it would go alright.
This kid is also smart, and emotionally aware, and actually a pretty cool dude. They can swear around us, and never in anger towards someone, and tbh they’ve said “oh shit” once while playing a game with us because they got spooked and last night during a run on Marathon they went “hey phatskat, I might use a swear word”. I asked what they wanted to say and why they were hesitant (since they know the rule that it’s ok generally), and they explained that swearing makes the “queasy” lol. A couple minutes later they went “ok, I’m gonna say it. Fuck yeah!”
All that is to say, I don’t feel like they’re coddled, and they also aren’t just going to grow up like I did in the Wild West of the 90’s internet. I saw a LOT of things I shouldn’t have, way too soon, and I also grew up in an environment where hiding that from my parents was the safest option. So yeah me and my friends swore and made off color jokes around each other because the adults would get mad, despite us learning a lot of the crude stuff from them and then Something Awful et al. In hiding it, I felt like the harder topics were absolutely not able to be broached with my parents, and looking back on it that sucks.
The way my partner and I are approaching it is to be up front and have the conversations we can at the kid’s level in a way that makes sense (eg age six: war bad, age ten: World War Two was a war about…).
There’s a middle ground between coddling and bootstraps, and it’s the kind of parenting I want to encourage others to do if they can.
You making the rest of the world foam padded because you don't want to control what your kid can access is gross. The rest of the world didn't have a kid. You did.
That’s a wild take tbh. In a different comment I did say that ideally the community would’ve taken action before MS had to step in. I don’t want to make the world “foam padded”, and in particular when it comes to fascism it should be stomped out wherever it appears, point blank. It’s a bummer that Microsoft came in and threatened to blacklist the server, and at the same time if you have a nazi in your bar and you don’t kick them out, you own a nazi bar.
Yes, my kids will run in to nazism in the wild, and I can’t control that, and if they ran into in a Minecraft server we’d talk about that and maybe even make an effort to clean it up ourselves - that’s what I think that community and frankly any community that doesn’t want to be a nazi community should do.
That’s a false equivalence and imo disingenuous - Nazis are understood by the broad majority to be “bad”. We, the public, don’t want nazis around - period. If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis there, I’m leaving because said bar has said “we’re ok with Nazis” and that’s a Nazi bar.
Most communists don’t hold abhorrent beliefs such as “Jewish people should be eradicated” or “the world belongs to the aryan race”, but a Nazi is a Nazi, there’s no grey area there.
1) that said bar knows everyone's political mindset, including those which haven't been made public;
2) that said bar actually treats said Nazi with decency;
Also, most communists hold the belief that there must be a violent revolution and the opposition should be executed, specially those of the tankie variety.
Edit: I have noticed you switched the count of Nazis from singular to plural ("if you have a nazi in your bar" -> "If I go to a bar and there’s a handful of obvious nazis") while proposing I'm being disingenuous. This might not have mattered to you, but the prevalence of an ideology is very important to whether a bar "is a Nazi bar" or "happens to have a Nazi".
3) “most” is doing some heavy lifting, and even so, you are showing the shades of communism. Nazism expresses an ideology of hate and racial superiority, it’s a completely different beast. (And yes I know that communism has been party to some ethnic cleansing such as in Stalinist Russia, however, that belief system of ethnic superiority is not inherent to communism)
1) fair enough, I was focusing on the original post;
2) disagree, the bar might be a pretty public place, so being allowed in is just the default; or they might have been personally allowed in, but is treated as the butt of jokes;
3) is it? "most" is pretty big group. If you take issue, we can replace it with "tankie". Also, does it really matter whether the motivations are racial or not? Mass murder is still mass murder, regardless of motivations.
Still, I feel like you are missing my main point. Having a Nazi, even if an obvious one, isn't enough for a bar to be nazified. It might be the trigger for that, but it might not. I argue that this "nazification process", which mirrors the "degeneration" process in libertarian literature, isn't a binary thing that should be treated this reductively.
I disagree on the “nazification” point, your main point, because fascism is the kind of insidious thing that can’t be allowed a foothold. To your point 2, even if the Nazis were allowed in to be the butt jokes, it’s still allowing them in and tolerating them.
If an establishment is aware of Nazis in their ranks and they aren’t condemning them, then they’re supporting them by way of not removing them. It’s the paradox of tolerance at play.
I don’t want to really derail into different aspects of communism, just want to say that most communists I’ve met or been exposed to only believe in violent revolution if peaceful revolution isn’t an option. Again, this isn’t, to me, an equivalent to the violent beliefs of Nazism.
I have to disagree on fascism being this insidious bogeyman. While I agree that they ought to be fought against, IMO this is reaching into red scare territory (which is fitting, given that both share a really close ideological root).
I also disagree that merely keeping a Nazi in your establishment is support for Nazism. Simply not removing a Nazi is no more than not removing a person, it doesn't speak whether the ideology will actually take root.
The paradox of intolerance, in its original form written by Karl Popper, is about discussions. In this context, intolerants are people who forego argumentation. Kicking a person, Nazi or not, who has been acting peacefully and has been engaging in argumentation isn't "intolerance against intolerance", it's intolerance proper. You may argue that you are trying to prevent a future situation with this, but unless it is a 100% guaranteed (which I argue it isn't), it's just plain intolerance.
Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).
> Finally, bear in mind that there are more equivalences in beliefs than you think. Mein Kampf didn't speak anything about Jew mass murder (and it still happened), and most (as in, the ones you see "marxist-leninist" in their profile) socialists admit that a nonviolent approach is basically impossible. In the end, both ideologies share the willingness to dehumanize and murder their opposition (and for similar reasons, Nazi-brand racial hatred derives from the same core idea).
Spot on. It's interesting to me that we've failed to stomp out communist sympathies but I guess we didn't stomp out Nazi sympathies either.
Both are authoritarian ideologies that are incompatible with free expression, free trade, and free peoples. Yet people openly talk about being communists despite the above and despite the fact that tens of millions of dead precisely because of communist ideologies and failed economic policies. To claim that fascism and specifically Naziism is an insidious boogeyman means you should also claim the same about communism. Curious how some/many folks don't or don't seem to understand that.
Tbf, communism is indeed more broad than Hitler's Nazism, from pre-marxists to Proudhon ancoms (although a similar comment may be made about the common sense definition of Fascism), hence I changed scope towards traditional Marxist-Leninists.
It's more broad but I don't think that changes anything with respect to the destructiveness and need to stamp out the ideology. Nazism is just a flavor of either authoritarianism or maybe just a flavor of a broader racial/cultural superiority ideology. Typically in the west we reject the whole tree and not just some of the branches. I apply the same argument to communism. And you can certainly find more charitable interpretations where maybe some freedoms are still present, but you can do the same thing racial or cultural superiority ideologies or similar.
its sad ppl cant run their own servers without companies interfering. Was never an issue on games like CS. sure there was a lot of toxic ones but also rly nice ones. you cant moderate human nature. hiding it does no one any good either.
I don't understand why you're being downvoted for this. Microsoft should not be moderating privately-run servers.
Sure, on the realms or whatever they're called or whatever servers Microsoft do operate, fair game and good idea. But if I'm running a Minecraft server on my homelab it should be my decision what behaviour is acceptable within that server.
It's a case of some people making it worse for everyone. If people behaved on the server, MS wouldn't have intervened, which then wouldn't have made 2b2t cave on a what feels like a core ideal. It may only have chipped a corner of that ideal, but it still stings.
That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation. MS wasn't going to let one of the biggest and most famous servers of its most popular game be filled with swastikas. Even less so when it's so popular with kids.
In a funnier world, 2b2t would have said 'no', but I have a feeling MS would escalate, and that whatever email or whatever the admins got probably implied as much, so maybe that world wouldn't be funnier after all.
> That said, I think it is inevitable for any anarchist server that gets large enough to end up in this exact situation.
Agree, and I think it’s the community’s responsibility to decide what is and isn’t tolerable - even within anarchy. Forget MS, the (imo) proper response should have been the community actively choosing to deface and destroy the nazi stuff, or outright ban it from the moment it became a thing.
Microsoft just wants to avoid press of kids getting groomed or seeing adult content on Minecraft servers. Stuff like this is bad for a brand that primarily targets kids as new players and could get them into hot water with regulators.
I personally believe that they probably should add parental controls to Minecraft so parents can control what if and what kind of servers kids can join. I also believe more control will put more scrutiny on Microsoft since I haven't a lot of negative press about child safety in Minecraft especially in comparison with Roblox for example.
Where else would it start if not "you're not allowed to say this word because I don't like it"? Personally, I don't see why that word being banned gets a free pass. Would this proverbial slope start with speech at all? I can't imagine why one would accept one word being banned, then stand up to decry another being banned. What word would that be? Why is it more worthy than any other word?
Historically, it doesn't seem like much of a fallacy to say speech controls become more stringent after being introduced. Indeed, historically, one could remove the word "speech" and still be correct. The control doesn't go away in most cases until power changes hands, and even then it's often meeting the new boss, same as the old boss.
