Hey Lana KFC Australia once had an ad of a white bloke soothing a rowdy West Indies crowd with buckets of fried chicken which was pulled after it caused the internets to asplode. Are KFC Australia being oppressed?
Or does the company just want to keep selling buckets of salted grease and not be forever branded KKKFC. Could impact sales.
No. A business choosing to pull a commercial due to poor general reception is not being oppressed.
But a seller wanting to pull a product from their shelves is? I thought you were at least sympathetic to libertarians, who are you to tell someone what to do with their shelf?
Left-libertarians. I believe in preserving the rights of individuals, whether it be from the government, big business, or their fellow citizens.
Is it left anything to demand a left wing bookseller stock copies of Mein Kampf just because you want to leaf through it?
And big business never stopped anybody buying the Hatred game. It just meant briefly that you had to order through the publishers website instead of the curators. Any inconvenience is not automatically a breach of your fundamental rights!
Also a science fiction scenario of one book behemoth is not a threat to you any more than a Dalek or a Xenomorph!
This is a thought experiment.
Lana, I am going to indulge in a hyperbolic example here, and use it to ask you a few direct questions. It's not necessarily realistic, and I'm not saying that your argument invariably leads to this, so it's not a slippery slope. It might be a bit reductio ad absurdum, but I'm also not saying that you are necessarily supporting this.
So. A man owns a clothing store. Among other things, they sell T-shirts. Note, please, this is not a secondhand store. One day, a person comes in, wants to sell a shirt emblazoned with an black eagle holding a black wreath. Encircled in the wreath is a black swastika on a white background. Above this is the word Sieg. Below is Heil. On the back is an image of Hitler and a bunch of silhouettes saluting him, in the manner that is their custom. Is the man obligated to order a hundred of these shirts and sell them? What if he's black? Jewish? Roma? Gay? Any combination of these? Is he still obligated to do it?
Now, say the shirts aren't full of hate. Say, instead, that they're ratty, with holes worn or chewed in them. Is he obligated to sell them in his store? What if the shirts are obviously stolen? What if they're none of these, but the images of them aren't hateful, just... not his? (For example, what if the image is Mickey Mouse, and this man is not at all a representative of the Disney corporation. He's Joe Blow from the trailer park with 2 DUIs and who got busted for meth a while back. He don't work for Disney.) When, if ever, can someone refuse to carry a product?
...You actually make good points. Maybe I should re-evaluate my stance on free speech as it pertains to consumer goods.
Know what's neat? I picked those particular examples for reasons. One of them being that ALL of those have direct analogues on Steam. Games that spread hate. Games with no QA and where you can fall through the levels, or where there's no .exe. Asset flips. Games stolen whole cloth. Games with IP that they most certainly did NOT get the lisences for.
Though admittedly, that last is the least of these to me, but probably the greatest to Valve, and maybe to the clothing store owner, because selling that could probably get you sued by the Mouse and his army of lawyers. Though in that situation, the bigger concern might be the shirts that, uh, fell off the back of a truck. Fines are one thing. Prison's another. But I digress.