It’s common English sentence structure, not a symbol of a group that killed six million Jews and many others.

Do not compare this to the holocaust. That is just remarkably immature.

Hehe…

I tend to reply to all my messages. It went on a while.

I use the em dash a lot. The codepoint is 2014 for the em dash and 2015 for the en dash. It’s quite easy to remember.

Good. I am just posting these because @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml removed his. I am glad you are open like this.

In case the comment to which I am replying gets deleted, it said:

Yes. That doesn’t inherently mean they’re endeavoring to implement Sharia in the games EA puts out.

In case this comment by @Carmakazi@piefed.social gets deleted, this is what it said:

I’m not entirely sure the house of Saud really cares about western video games enough to intervene like this. I always imagined they only cared about the money and diversification from oil, “deeply held beliefs” often can be overlooked for the right price. This could just as easily be because of the corporate weathervein pointing towards conservatism, lots of companies have made decisions like this recently without meddling from the middle east.

Real people use em dashes. That is a common place in human writing to use an em dash, or it would not have become a trend in the averaging that is LLM-generated text.

We cannot assume this comment was written by a bot. It was short and only used one em dash in a normal place.

Public displays of affection, yes. The Saudi Arabian government is very oppressive.

There is wrong characterization here.

I am merely providing the context of what you said because you are trying to skirt outside of public criticism by deleting your comments.

You made a fallacious claim that the removal of the Pride Flag had no meaning. You literally said it was “just a flag”. You literally said the removal was meaningless because it had no significance to you. You literally said that the removal of that symbol does not symbolize the removal of LGBTQIA+ rights. You literally said that gay people are equally welcome in bars. You literally said that changes that don’t impact gameplay or story have no meaning. You literally said that censorship before the release of the game was “not censorship” and that it has no meaning.

I have not misquoted you. If you feel like your own words paint you in a negative light, perhaps you shouldn’t have said them.

I’m just fed up with the bad faith argumentation.

Then why make a fallacious argument and protect it by restating it for several hours?

And its clear that people don’t accept any other opinion.

Sometimes there is a wisdom of the masses. Flags do have meaning, and their removal has meaning. You tried to argue against that point, which was misguided at best.

Have fun with your witch hunt.

This was not a witch hunt. No one accused you of saying anything you did not say. No one accused you of actions, or hunted you in any way. You just said something incorrect and refused to accept you were incorrect. Allow me to remind you that I didn’t fight you on your belief that it was an overblown issue, even though I disagree. I simply argued against your statement that it was without a qualitative meaning. The quantity was not a matter of discourse, but something you were entitled to have your own views on.

tl;dr: You weren’t mischaracterized. If you want your comments to speak for yourself, restore them from the deletion. This post will stay, though, since I do not trust you to keep them restored.

For context for any viewers who are wondering why @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml deleted his posts, he was saying this:

• that the Pride flag has no symbolic meaning, but is “just a flag”
• that because the Pride Flag is not significant to @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml, it therefore has no meaning (which they repeated numerous times)
• that the removal of a symbol does not symbolize the removal of the thing that symbol symbolizes
• that gay people are given equal welcome in bars instead of being discriminated against
• that any change without impact on the gameplay has no meaning
• that censorship before the release of the game is not censorship and has no meaning

If you were wondering why he has so many downvotes, that is why. :)

EDIT: This reply was a record of what was said in the deleted comments by @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml. It has been moved to a comment on the post, from this comment reply.

you invalidate my opinion because you do not agree.

These are not the grounds on which I consider your opinion illogical. I consider your view illogical because you have declared meaningless a thing that, per definition, has meaning.

It is, per definition, meaningless.

It is not meaningless. The flag represents an idea. Its removal, therefore, symbolically represents the removal of that idea.

Missing flag has no impact on anything.

We have gone over how the missing flag has a political and social impact. It does not impact the gameplay, but that is not the point.

It does not affect any freedom whatsoever.

I did not make the case that its removal hindered freedom. I made the case (with an axiomatic proof I provided earlier) that the removal of a symbol is freedom is symbolic removal of freedom. I did not argue that it is a literal removal of freedom.

I personally find it acceptable and a non issue.

You can do this. That is fine. But the flag does, per definition, have a meaning, whether or not that meaning has value or significance to you. And therefore its removal does, per definition, have a meaning, whether that removal has value or significance to you.

In a bar LGBT people are welcome as anyone else. Only flags representing anyone is not.

Matthew Shephard was murdered by bar clientele because of his sexuality. That is a digression, but it feels worth mentioning that LGBTQIA+ people are not always welcomed.[1][2] That said, again, this is a digression.

The issue here is not the lack of a flag. The issue is the political symbolism of the flag’s removal. If a Pride flag were torn down from the window of a bar, it would be a political statement. In the same way, if the flag is removed from the game, it also has political symbolism.

The point is that there is political symbolism. I am not trying to convince you that the symbolism should matter to you. I am just saying that the removal of a symbol represents the removal of the thing that symbol symbolizes. That’s the only case I’m making here.

I did not.

You argued that because it was not important to you, it was meaningless. That is a non sequitur. You did.

Because it matters to you, does not change its meaning either.

True. I am not changing its meaning. The meaning of the Pride Flag has always been a simple symbol of LGBTQIA+ rights. Its removal is symbolic of a removal thereof. That has nothing to do with my personal view; I am simply stating the existing meaning, not trying to modify the purpose of the flag as you are simply discarding its symbolic meaning.

If we speak about real world rights, then it would be significant. But in a game lacking a flag, I think is not important.

Again, the censorship of the flag, which is a symbol, is symbolically meaningful. The degree of significance is not the subject of debate.

The flag doesn’t matter, what matters are the actions and story.

To the gameplay, perhaps. But I am not discussing the gameplay. I am discussing how the removal of the flag is symbolic of opposition to LGBTQIA+ rights.

when I say something is irrelevant then you don’t accept it

This is because so far, you have relied on fallacy to make those points.

a non issue to me

Whether it matters to you does not change its meaning.

A meaningless action

We have gone over why and how it provably has political meaning. It is, per definition, not meaningless.

I can have an opinion without being in the club

This is irrelevant. I didn’t say you cannot have an opinion. I said that your opinion on the quantitative meaning (severity of the meaning) of the action has no significance to the qualitative meaning of the action (the fact that the action is provably anti-LGBTQIA+ in intent).

Again, we have gone over the political meaning. The lack of change to gameplay is irrelevant. The political meaning of the action is the significance, not the evidence of that action to the end-user.

Edit:

The context was @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml once again stating that the flag has no meaning, its removal has no meaning, and that it has no meaning because there is no impact on gameplay.

Because the game was still developed. You don’t know what the replacement for the flag would be.

The removal of a symbol carries meaning, irrespective of what they would have replaced it with. Also, their motive in removing it had to do with anti-LGBTQIA+ policy in Saudi Arabia, so it most definitely wasn’t to replace it with another open-minded option. This was censorship of the developers and, symbolically, of queer folk.

It’s just a flag in a videogame. I personally don’t care about that.

What you care about doesn’t change the fact that censorship took place.

people put too much weight into this in my opinion

You can hold that view.

the censorship is meaningless

Symbols have meaning. Censorship of symbols, therefore, is symbolic censorship of the meaning of those symbols. The censorship is provably not without meaning.

It is, factually, a political action. Whether it has significance to you doesn’t change that.

I did not argue that the flag changes rights. I said that the censorship of the flag (which is a symbol of LGBTQIA+ rights), before or after development, is therefore symbolically a censorship of LGBTQIA+ rights. It carries political weight because it is a symbolic opposition to LGBTQIA+ rights. This is irrespective of time of removal and gameplay. Those are irrelevant to my argument, and you cannot rebut an argument in a case that does not really involve the gameplay or time of removal with the gameplay or time of removal.

Edit:

The context was @thingsiplay@lemmy.ml saying that the censorship does not matter because it was before release and did not limit actual queer rights.