You literally only have something you call "free speech" because (a) your constitution isn't an inalterable set of laws and because (b) the wording of the constitution is open to interpretation. Both things are wonderful, of course, both things are the hallmarks of great democracies, because "we do it like that because some rich trouser snakes with muskets and hella sideburns 300 years ago commanded us to do it like that" is certainly one the worst arguments known to man.

Well first of all we don't call getting brainwashed and/or getting shot dead "getting offended". Even over here, two fuckwits in Hanau and Halle started shooting people because they've been fed your glorious protected QAnon™ free speech. And the victims' families couldn't even take you folks to court for that, so freedom of speech even meant freedom from consequences here. You may have every right to get your brain washed by Russian propaganda in the States, and if you want to revel in that, fine, but please understand it's not quite as welcome in the rest of the world, which suffers greatly from the fallout. You're virtually not on American soil here. The American missionary spirit of bringing the ideology of absolute/suicidal free speech to the uneducated masses of the third world i.e. Europe is indeed rather despised as the pastime of pretentious pricks.

Over here, Russian propaganda is a huge problem that threatens democracies and costs lives. GOG is in Poland. Putin has already said in no uncertain terms that Poland is next after Ukraine. There's a reason why quite a few people in this thread have immediately ceased tumbling down the free speech slippery slope after the Kyiv/Kiev point was made.

This comment has got nothing to do at all with video games, it's purely political from start to finish. Not even a pretense anymore that it's something about mods for a video game sold here.
@Gog moderators: I'm fine with your ban on discussing politics in the forum (and don't care if that includes removing references to controversial mods), but please enforce it equally and tell users like Vainamoinen to desist from making such sort of comments which imo are clearly against the code of conduct and provoke other users to retaliate in kind.

This. I'm just here telling people to grow thicker skin and not get offended by video game mods and we have that guy intentionally turning it into some political rant.

I'm ultimately here (and in other gaming communities) to play and discuss video games. I'm all for political discussions being banned, though I'd argue that the game mod discussion doesn't have to inherently be political as long as people are discussing the issue of censoring mods FOR political reasons. In other words, like I was arguing, I believe that people should be free to mod their games as long as they're not doing anything illegal with those mods, and they should not be censored because some folks got triggered over it. That argument isn't even political, it's just one of common sense and long-standing internet etiquette.

If you're serious about involving moderators, you'll need to actually go knocking on a door around here to actually get their attention.
In other words, message a blue or use the support ticket system to report the comment.

I'm not even certain the staff are actively reading threads on a weekly basis these days.

In fact, it might be faster to send a letter to Warsaw these days.

Posting history revisionist mods that pay lip service to russo-fascist propaganda, that's a political act from start to finish. Links to mods that literally "reskin" the only POC in Kingdom Come 2, that's politically charged. Links to mods that remove the only three minutes of LGBT content in a 100 hour game, that's political. Fluffing the whole post up with the conspiracy theory of Cultural Bolshevism, 800+ words, that's a political manifesto if I ever saw one.

All that political crap apparently has quite a lot to do with video games these days.

I really wish that wasn't the case. Sometimes I lie awake at night wishing reactionaries would just leave video games alone and got a new hobby, I mean, one that fulfills and sates them, which video games apparently never do, not even Kingdom Come 2. And I really don't want to know what kind of satisfaction they're getting out of the game when they have their racist mods installed.

Detailing the damage done by unfettered hate speech, I mean, yeah, that's political too. I did that, guilty as charged. But spare me your crocodile tears, because there's hardly a more politicized topic out there than absolute free speech, and I certainly didn't start that topic. I'm about as tired of the old and settled free speech discussion as humanly possible.

The Kingdom Come 2 nazi mod controversy is not about free speech

"Free speech" rights simply don't apply to hate speech, not in Poland, not in Austria. I still care deeply about the situation in the States (where my rapidly expanding family lives). But that doesn't mean we have to sleep in the beds they shat into.

I didn't start the free speech tangent.
Free speech missionaries did.

morolf has been the embodiment of mob justice and right wing conspiracy mongering since he first entered the forum 13 years ago. He thinks his time has finally come. Maybe he's right, I have no idea where these shit times are heading. But let me put at least this in no uncertain terms:

Freespeech Cultists pointing at and slandering posts they'd like to be censored, that's peak dishonest. And it is the worst advertisement for absolute free speech that you could possibly think of.

I feel people is overreacting.
I remember the fights in Twitter about KCD2 being woke, that originated from an engagement farmer that got rightly humiliated by Vávra.

Thinking that KCD2 is a woke game is delusional.
Said so, I do not believe those looking to mod the game should be silenced.
The only reason I won't look into the mod thread is because of the spoilers that supposedly are to be found there.
Otherwise I would totally look into the mods and decide by myself if I want them or not.

We are adults, enjoy the game and let others enjoy it too the way they prefer to play it, even if you find their ways to be wrong.

You didn’t check very hard, did you? Even something as simple as the Wikipedia article on U.S.A. free speech outlines the basic conditions and limitations:

“In the United States, some categories of speech are not protected by the First Amendment. According to the Supreme Court of the United States, the U.S. Constitution protects free speech while allowing limitations on certain categories of speech. Categories of speech that are given lesser or no protection by the First Amendment (and therefore may be restricted) include obscenity, fraud, child pornography, speech integral to illegal conduct, speech that incites imminent lawless action, speech that violates intellectual property law, true threats, false statements of fact, and commercial speech such as advertising. Defamation that causes harm to reputation is a tort and also a category which is not protected as free speech.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

That’s just the quick Wikipedia overview. If you really want to dig deeper, there’s a long trail of legislation and court rulings that lay it all out in detail. So, while the U.S.A. doesn’t have explicit hate speech laws, certain utterances can still fall under existing legal categories, such as true threats, obscenity or incitement to violence. Additionally, the U.S.A. has hate crime laws that come into effect when the line between speech and action becomes blurred.

In addition to those content-based restrictions, the U.S.A. also enforces Time, Place, and Manner restrictions. As stated in the Supreme Court ruling in City of Chicago v. Alexander (2014):

“The First Amendment does not guarantee the right to communicate one’s views at all times and places or in any manner that may be desired. A state may therefore impose reasonable restrictions on the time, place, or manner of constitutionally protected speech occurring in a public forum.”

So yes, even in the U.S.A. , free speech has clearly defined limits - and that’s by constitutional design.

What I've never liked about hate speech laws/rules is that they're clearly designed to punch up. The "protected characteristics" are not sex, gender, race. They are: not male, not straight, not white. It's why in this very thread about "hateful mods", people had no problem dismissing the counter because "that doesn't count, it's not an agenda or hateful when we do it". For the record, neither should be a problem (which was my entire point throughout).

Also, how is this thread still going? The dude the thread is about hasn't even replied to anything since their post, lol.

Edit: Less yap.

It's a mystery that modern science may not be able to explain.

Dude, I LIVE here. Provided you're not threatening violence or creating content like the aforementioned CSAM, you're free to speak your mind and make art that you want to make.

Our laws in the US regarding free speech are common sense. They assume that grown adults can handle themselves and not utterly fall apart because someone said something they didn't like or made a piece of art they don't appreciate. This is the ethos of the internet itself! Express yourself, and if people don't like what you have to say, that's their own problem: they have every ability to ignore or, in cases of social networking, the ability to block people they don't like.

As I said, people will always find things to be offended by. No matter how much you try to walk on eggshells and avoid stepping on toes, you'll always find that one guy who is offended by the very fact that you're trying to be polite. So guess what? People need to learn to grow the heck up, ignore the stuff they don't care for, and stop trying to police free speech because some people got triggered.

Lol, I stopped replying at page 5. Looks like after that it became a derailed mess. Not uncommon for the Internet.

It's probably the most unintentionally fittingly named thread ever.

Dude, it's been explained to YOU specifically a billion times already, from myself, Catventurer, and others. You're just burying your head in the sand at that point.