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VR Devs Pull Support For Oculus Rift Until Palmer Luckey Steps Down (vice.com)
After it was revealed that Oculus founder Palmer Luckey backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America that is dedicated to "shitposting" and spreading inflammatory memes about Hillary Clinton, several developers of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset have announced that they will stop supporting the headset until its founder steps down. One of the biggest developers for Oculus Rift, Insomniac Games, told Motherboard, "Insomniac Games condemns all forms of hate speech. While everyone has a right to express his or her political opinion, the behavior and sentiments reported do not reflect the values of our company. We are also confident that his behavior and sentiment does not reflect the values of the many Oculus employees we work with on a daily basis." Fez and Superhypercube developer Polytron also said in a statement, "In a political climate as fragile and horrifying as this one, we cannot tacitly endorse these actions by supporting Luckey or his platform." Motherboard reports: Motherboard has reached out to several other, more well-known VR developers who work with Oculus including Fantastic Contraption makers Northway Games and Job Simulator makers Owlchemy Labs. Northway Games couldn't be reached immediately for comment but tweeted the following: "What. The. Fuck. [accompanied with a link to the news via Kotaku]" and "Definitely using every fibre of my 'professionalism' to not tweet some tweets right now." Owlchemy Labs, which is currently developing for Job Simulator for the Oculus Touch controls, declined to comment either way. E McNeill, who has developed a couple of games for Oculus Rift and GearVR, suggested that like-minded VR developers raise money for Hillary Clinton's campaign to counter the money Luckey has raised for Trump. [E McNeill tweeted: "Idle Q: Would any Oculus devs join me in a donation drive for HIllary? We could aim to beat Nimble America's $11k. I'd start with $1k myself."] "This backlash is nonsense," said James Green, co-founder of VR developer Carbon Games. "I absolutely support him doing whatever he wants politically if it's legal. To take any other position is against American values."
So basically these developers are intolerant of any type of political message other than their own.
As long as you think EXACTLY the way they do.
Of course if he was "shitposting" Trump, that would be A-OK, right?
"While everyone has a right to express his or her political opinion", because the second part to that sentence always comes out being something like, "we don't think this person should be able to express theirs."
Also apparently Luckey's girlfriend has been harassed off of Twitter, and you'll get banned from NeoGaf if you suggest that maybe she shouldn't be harassed. Stay classy, internet.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
And so, in the name of "tolerance", they consigned heterodox unbelievers to a blacklist.
Palmer Lucky is Brendon Eich 2.0.
Considering how much corporate money is flowing into Hillary's campaign... She's obviously not going to change that.
Hillary... on paper, she's everything Democrats claim to hate.
And for a party that claims to fight hate... There sure is a lot of violence, racisim and hate coming from the party that says they want to bring us together.
Of course... they mean "we want to unite... as long as you vote Democrat and agree with everything we say". It's all about freedom of speech and freedom of expression until you say "Hillary is a POS".
Can they not even see what parodies of themselves they've become?
TV tells them someone is hitler and they all try to out-tantrum one another.
It's not even about supporting Trump anymore, it's about being ashamed to stand with or anywhere near these people. They don't have any liberal values. They run on feigned indignation and trying to publicly shame others.
It's pathetic. Pull yourselves together, you numbnuts.
What is astonishing to me is the level of rhetoric and the stretch of logic that has come into place since our Alien vs. Predator presidential race (i.e. whoever wins, we lose). Now we have a situation just like the Mozilla debacle with Brendan Eich except that it is much much flimsier an argument this time around.
But here's the thing, Insomniac and Polytron management: your job is to make money for the investors of your company, not to use them as some political tool because you disagree with the politics of one of the employees of Oculus. Period.
These decisions will only harm these companies financially because of diminished interest from people who own an Oculus. Unless the management has concrete data that their continued support of the Oculus will harm their sales due to the political connection (and I'll bet diamonds to dollars that they don't), then the boards of directors of all of these companies should direct the executive management of the companies that withdrew support for Oculus to reverse their decision or be terminated for breach of fiduciary duty.
Enough of this SJW bullshit, especially when investor money and returns are at stake and the backlash from these actions could be worse. E McNeill is totally correct - if you want to fight a Trump supporter, put your own money up rather than trying to suppress others as if you were some Soviet-era state enterprise licking the boots of the party you support.
Disagree with Hillary being what Democrats hate?
Rich? White? Elite? Above the law? Votes for every war put before her? Is a LARGE part of what's responsible for the Middle East being the cluster fuck it is? Racist comments like "I'm late? I must be on CP time." because, you know, colored people are to lazy to be on time? Super Predators?
What about Hillary doesn't scream "This is what Democrats hate"?
Not the best choice? Neither candidate is trustworthy, but Trump hasn't gotten a good portion of the world mired in failed countries at war. When it comes to war, Hillary is probably to the right of any previous president, including W.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"This backlash is nonsense," said James Green, co-founder of VR developer Carbon Games. "I absolutely support him doing whatever he wants politically if it's legal. To take any other position is against American values."
I have little to no interest in VR, and negative interest in Oculus. But I now know of Carbon Games and have a respectful view of them.
Conversely, I also now know of Polytron and have a negative opinion of them. Insomniac was also a 2nd rate developer and now I have further reason to ignore them.
Please remember your history. There was a lot of mire in the Middle East before 9/11, exacerbated by the mess Pres Geo Bush got us into.
This isn't her fault, much of it isn't Pres Geo Bush's fault. This has been boiling for forty+ years.
You're not paying attention, in my opinion.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
"Shitposting" is fraud rather than speech for a few reasons.
It is knowingly false. For example, "shitposters" distribute a purported photo of Hillary Clinton in blackface with Bill, which doesn't match her eye color or her and Bill's appearance at the time. But they keep distributing it.
They then spoof the comment system by having robots upmod posts and downmod their detractors, thus fraudulently promoting their comments as highly regarded.
They mis-state the first amendment of the constitution by telling people that reactions to their abuse are hypocritical and against the first amendment, when the first amendment does not protect anyone from the consequences of their speech, nor does it promise anyone the podium of their choice.
Taking action to show your disapproval of such action is laudable.
Bruce Perens.
Very, very true. I'm against Citizens United, but also, campaign contributions from 1) outside the USA of any kind 2) outside of an electoral district from any source 3) contributions that aren't made from an anonymous donor pool and 4) contributions of over $500 by any individual-- and only corporations domiciled within the electoral district, paid once, to one candidate per office.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It's Trump's emphasis on "defeat them quickly" that led me to the same conclusion. I don't think a few nuclear bombs will do that much damage, though they would still be war crimes. The real risk is that Trump bungles his "limited" nuclear attack and somehow sucks Pakistan or Israel into the mess... Given the Donald's record of bungling everything he touches, I wouldn't bet on a good outcome. There are some Trump supporters who would gladly welcome a permanent state of war with 1.6 billion Muslims.
On the Hillary thing, I don't even like her, but I don't see how to get to "dystopia" if she wins. Seems most likely that she'll pretty much stay the course, and we certainly haven't gotten to dystopia yet. I'd prefer her to change the course in a more positive direction, but I don't expect her to do it unless we give her a progressive Congress and they put the pressure on her. There used to be a time when that could have included some progressive Republicans, but they've been exterminated from today's so-called Republican Party.
On my Subject: question, I really have no idea. Too many years since I got one.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Give Trump a chance, he'd probably invade the sun.
The secret plan is to surprise them by going at night.
"This backlash is nonsense," said James Green, co-founder of VR developer Carbon Games. "I absolutely support him doing whatever he wants politically if it's legal. To take any other position is against American values."
I think you meant to say you absolutely support other people doing what they want politically if it's legal, such as disagreeing with Luckey, or boycotting his product, or raising money for Clinton in response. Because taking any other position would be against American values _and_ hypocritical, right?
And yes, he's perfectly within his rights to say what he said, and i'm within my rights to point out the contradiction, and other people are within their rights to respond to me with disagreements, and etc. Saying that one person gets to have their say and everyone else needs to shut up about it after that is not how political discourse works.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
They weren't explicitly endorsing any side. The Hillary support is an implicit consequence of our current electoral system, but I don't think you can use that unfortunate fact to automatically brand them hypocrites.
People have a general right (if not a duty) to boycott their company if their leader is using or has used the MONEY he's making from their labor (not merely his words) to support an odious cause. Boycotting is in general reasonable when the person or organization is actively spending large amounts of money on an odious cause. If you disagree, then I'm not sure how you can ever support boycotting; ergo, you should boycott yourself for boycotting these guys.
I personally wouldn't do what they've done in this particular situation, and I think half of the attacks against Trump are laughably off-mark and in their self-destructive hysteria they threaten to make the word 'liberal' even more of a dirty word, but what these developers are doing is (in principle) completely reasonable.
The Middle East has been a region of conflict since the dawn of time. The most recent bout started in the 1910s as the Ottoman Empire imploded, and basically has continued through the present day. And it was hardly peaceful before.
Both candidates are very far from ideal and have a distant relationship with whatever passes for the truth in this post-factual world but considering what a stranger he also is to logic, reason and intellect, I'm surprised at the amount of support he gets on Slashdot.
It's OK to refuse to tolerate intolerance. Indeed, it's something you need to do.
Bruce Perens.
Constant shouts of Soros are pretty silly. He's the ostensible boogeyman behind everything. I don't think he gives a fleep about the whole matter. OTOH, I know individuals that have nothing to do with corporate money that are plentifully incensed about the pipeline, and it would seem from the facts, with good reason.
Statistically, pipeline spills are up, and their damage increasing. I have no financial stake in any of it.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Worked for Nixon. Matter of fact it's been the basis of our defense since the 50s.
No, I'm telling you they're hypocrites. If you don't like what somebody is saying and want to use your entire company's financial weight to silence them, good for you, but that is the opposite of supporting somebody's ability to espouse their opinions.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Well, I run a business. It's all that supports me, and it brings in the money reliably. The way I got there is by building a reputation for behaving ethically. Part of ethics is not standing up for it when people do the wrong thing. Ethics is not neutral, people with ethics have to be able to back it up with action. Maintaining that reputation means opposing garbage like "shitposting" with lawful action as well as words.
Bruce Perens.
And people should stop taking Trump's campaign statements seriously. Candidates running for office say and promise anything to get elected but rarely implement any of their campaign promises.
Then what should we judge him on exactly? His many fraudulent businesses dealings? His terrible interpersonal skills? His constant, pathological lying about things that can be simply fact checked? His ridiculous hair? Give me something here.
Trump would have no support from either party and the chance of him getting some of his more crazy ideas moved forward is effectively nil.
Again, if you don't believe any of his platform will actually happen then you are effectively voting for a complete unknown politically, and a person that has shown to be vulgar, petty, vindictive and racist on a personal level.
Good for you! And as long as you don't claim to support people's right to express their political opinions at the same time that you try to use your business to silence them, you're not a hypocrite.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Well that may be because you don't remember the events.
Here's the timeline for you
Paris Peace Accords 1973
Nixon Resigns 1974
Saigon Falls 1975
This is free speech working the way it should work.
I refer you to the XKCD panels about the First Amendment.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/fr...
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Aha, I figured it out. I've been trying to figure out what kind of point you were even trying to make, as it seems like you've been trying to argue that you're not a hypocrite if you're doing it for moral reasons, and you've been doing so by trying to trick me into saying the magical words "free speech" so that you can trot out the typical censorship-apologist line about how it's only illegal if the government does it, and then you can try to convince everybody that because it's not illegal for private entities to do it, it must be moral...
But I didn't actually say "free speech," nor did I imply what the companies in question are doing was illegal at all, and you're going off on a tanget and putting lots of words into my mouth. Stop it.
Let me try to clear up the cognitive dissonance you're going through right now. You've always been told that, as an American, free speech is paramount. On the other hand, you believe that when somebody says something you think is immoral, it's your job to stop them. You don't like being labeled a hypocrite; you internally associate that with being bad because you've been raised to believe that suppressing speech is bad, and you don't want to acknowledge that's what you're doing. Internally you realize that it's true, so rather than acknowledge the dissonance you're doing your best to convince everybody that it's not hypocrisy if you're doing it for moral reasons.
What the companies in question (and you) are doing is perfectly legal, and possibly even morally correct, but I haven't commented on that at all. It's still hypocrisy. Stop trying to weasel out of it.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
Not the best choice? Neither candidate is trustworthy, but Trump hasn't gotten a good portion of the world mired in failed countries at war.
Trump heads the political party that started those wars, and he is their elected candidate. He supported those wars.
His plan at the moment is to kill millions of innocent people with trident missiles fired from submarines in the persian gulf.
Unless he is lying?
Remember, Trump solicited campaign contributions from foreign nationals. He has business interests all over the world, including many in Russia. His idea of a "blind trust" for his businesses is for his children to run them. There's no way Trump can avoid massive conflict of interests around the world. He's heavily indebted to Russian oligarchs and other areas that are in conflict with our national security.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I wonder what the people supporting this will say when the Trump-et crowd hounds someone out of their job for donating to the "racist, segregationist, pro-violence-on-cops Black Lives Matter hate group"?
You don't think that's a fair description of BLM? Try explaining your reasons to the baying mob.
No, these attacks on Luckey, Brendan Eich and so forth aren't censorship, exactly, but they are certainly intimidation, and an attempt to move certain political positions outside the realm of legitimate discussion. That's not something I welcome, and nor will the people doing it when they discover their opponents can do it to them as well.
Pulling support for Oculus Rift is also political and legal. If James Green doesn't support this just as well, then by his own logic, he is taking a position against American values.
They could, however, be Republicans (alt right... Whatever).
Asserting that Clinton is responsible for most of the Middle East is deeply disconnected with historical perspective. "Humans rode dinosaurs" would be in roughly the same boat.
And you still posted AC...
A game developer boycotting a platform, and hence forego millions in profits, is a good illustration of the idea that money and the actions it pays for amounts to political speech.
As for the choice these game developers are making, I think they are a bit naive. Hillary Clinton and her wealthy supporters, PACs, and affiliated groups, have a large number of highly skilled political message consultants and PR experts working for her, trying to manipulate public opinion in her favor, including through massive use of social media. The only thing that is remarkable about someone sinking millions into an organization whose job is to create "shitposts" about Hillary on social media is what an inept attempt at PR it actually is.
As usual, we have Hillary Clinton's well-oiled political machinery versus Donald Trump's incompetent attempt at running a political campaign. The really remarkable thing is that Hillary Clinton is such a lousy candidate and her political program is so bad that she still is struggling to put together a decisive win. Just imagine how poorly she would be doing if she actually ran against a serious candidate.
Hillary did not say the c.p. time statement. It was the Mayor of New York who said that. It's clear that Hillary didn't like it from her own comment, calling it cautious politician time.
Bruce Perens.
Oh wait, you already got done with KKK and Byrd business. Which you know, leaves out the Republican side of things that actually matters today.
Funny that.
Your sad attempt at post-rationalization and logic are what is "funny."
First, I noticed you conveniently left out the blatant behavior of Democrats racists and bigots (especially the "leadership") that is happening today. The DNC emails (classified as a "today" event) just scratch the surface. An inconvenient truth I know.
Also you left out the tremendous influence, Sanger and Byrd had and continues to have on Hillary which ends up in concrete actions today. How do we know? Because these facts have come from Hillary's own mouth, words came out of her mouth (not yours) about this influence and that is incontrovertible. No matter how much an Anonymous Coward wants a revisionist reality to make themselves feel better about Democratic Racism we have the stark true reality of Chicago, Washington, Detroit and Baltimore to name just a few.
Those places are wholly "owned" by progressive liberals because they have controlled them, unopposed, for many decades. And they are still controlled and operated today by these same people. Done.
Your point really bears repeating. I don't know how people can be so willing to just dismiss what a candidate says they'll do. I mean, saying that all politicians make meaningless campaign statements, though true some of the time, ignores the many, many campaign statements that, once elected, politicians actually follow through on. In fact, the majority of campaign statements made by politicians actually do manifest in some form or another.
Of course, I can already hear the, "Trump isn't a politician," sentiments. Fine. To those to whom that applies, if you prefer to ignore actual campaign statements under the assumption that, really, Trump is a decent guy who'll just do whatever the right thing is (or at least, less wrong than Hillary), I'm sure he'll happily sell you exclusive real estate too.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
we could get a law written that forbids negative advertising towards the other candidate.
I'm kinda tired of seeing all the " Look how bad X is for this position because of Y " ads that dominate the airways this time of year.
I would much rather see " I believe I'm the better choice for the position because of the following accomplishments or strengths I posses " instead.
Considering neither candidate has much to brag about, the number of ads would be quite limited in number.
A win-win all the way around.
> Yes, but democracy doesn't mean that you have a right not to be criticized, shunned, fired, boycotted, and abused in any other lawful manner for your speech.
Actually, your own state laws define such a right, at least for being fired. Surprised to see you champion abuse in there, though. I mean, you do realize that some woman is being abused just for being this guy's GF, right? I find it interesting that's not in conflict with your values, given that you've yet to condemn that in any way. Anyhow, I hope you remember all that some day when the shoe is on the other foot. FWIW, campaigns to abuse anyone who doesn't share your beliefs rarely end well.
I don't like any lies, though, Trump's or Hillary's (or anyone else's). I'm not deluded enough to believe either of them.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press...
Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities.
From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.
That is 110 counts of Felony mishandling of classified information.
With respect to the thousands of e-mails we found that were not among those produced to State, agencies have concluded that three of those were classified at the time they were sent or received, one at the Secret level and two at the Confidential level. There were no additional Top Secret e-mails found. Finally, none of those we found have since been “up-classified.”
There are three more counts.
Now, as to the government issued cell phone, she was offered a Blackberry like every other government employee, she chose instead to have her own Blackberry, so how did she exactly avoid the "poor excuse" for a cell phone?
http://www.politico.com/story/...
As well, the fact that she failed to turn over official records, that were improperly stored and destroyed breaks the records retention laws that were clarified after she left office, but were always assumed to cover email as well as paper.
https://www.archives.gov/about...
You can choose to believe that she did nothing wrong, but fact is, she committed many felonies, and concealed evidence of them by running her own server. We will never know what she did or didn't do for Benghazi, but we do know that she destroyed emails related to it. It is rather hard to run an investigation when the party is destroying evidence the whole time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
It is quite clear that there are many emails not delivered to the investigation. and in fact, there were several emails requesting additional security before the attack that were ignored, that would have been sent to Clinton, but none were in her email dump. In fact, other countries had already closed their embassies at that time, so it isn't like no one knew there were issues.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
But, I wasn't even speaking about Benghazi, you bring tha
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?