Sam Roberts
Sam Roberts is the ethics officer for Reaxxion. Think we're doing something wrong? Want to chat? You can follow him on twitter, or email him from our ethics policy page.
I have a number of German friends, and for years they’ve been complaining about how horrible it is to buy video games there. The German government bans the depiction of the Nazi swastika for any reason, which means any World War II game is, by default, banned. You’re either stuck with the special “German edition,” or you won’t be able to get the game at all. And for years, I’ve been laughing at them. “Free speech is a great idea, you guys should try it!” I’ve said, or sometimes, “What, do they think the swastika is going to fly off the screen and stab someone in the neck?”
Well, the joke’s on us now, because America has started to ban flags too. This week, Apple, the company that brought you the slave-labor-manufactured iPhone (slogan: “Our workers aren’t killing themselves anymore. We installed nets to catch them when they jump off the buldings!“) has decided to take the “moral high ground” after the Dylann Roof shootings and ban any representation of the Confederate flag from their app store.
Any representation. Not just “pro-Confederate” apps (whatever those might be), but all representations whatsoever.
I Can’t Even…
The Confederate flag, of course, had nothing to do with the Dylann Roof shootings. There are no photos of him with it, and he seems to prefer the flag of the now-forgotten nation of Rhodesia. Like most mass shooters over the past decade, Roof was a lunatic whose brain was addled by a dangerous psychiatric drug. In Roof’s case, it was a drug called Suboxone whose side effects list is a thousand words long and includes phrases like “depersonalization,” “hostility,” “hallucinations,” and “attempted suicide.”
But no one is calling for a national conversation on whether boys need powerful psychostimulants. That would be a hard discussion, and we might not like the answers we get. No, we are a stupid, petty people, and stupid, petty people have stupid, petty conversations. So we’re talking about the Confederate flag, and now we’re banning it.
Most of the apps booted from Apple’s store were Civil War simulators. Developers were notified that their apps were removed because they “used the Confederate flag in offensive or mean-spirited ways.” If you’ve ever played a Civil War sim, you’ll know they’re about as “offensive” as a bus timetable. “Used in an offensive way” means “used at all.”
Trigger warning: This screenshot is “offensive” and “malicious.”
In the end, this has nothing to do with any controversy. This has nothing to do with the Civil War. SJWs just like banning stuff. They love the rush of power that comes from telling someone they can’t do something, and since the Confederate flag is an easy target, expect to see a lot more of this. There’s already calls to ban Gone with the Wind, one of the greatest movies of the last century. It was set in the South, you see, and thus it must be banned.
Censorship is more than just the government coming into your home at night and throwing you in jail if you say something they don’t like. Free speech means more than “the government can’t stop you from speaking.” For a long time, America understood that having a diversity of viewpoints and beliefs is one of the things that made us strong. And now we’ve regressed to the point where you can’t even show a Civil War flag in your Civil War game.
Read More: Australian SJWs Lied To Get GTA V Pulled Off Store Shelves
