Popular modding site Nexus Mods has banned the user who removed the Pride flags in the PC version of Marvel’s Spider-Man, sparking an outcry that the site has actively disengaged from.
The original mod was called “Non-Newtonian New York,” and replaced the in-game Pride flags dotted around New York City with US flags.
As today’s announcement from Nexus Mods explains, “In regards to the replacement of Pride flags in this game, or any game, our policy is thus: we are for inclusivity, we are for diversity. If we think someone is uploading a mod on our site with the intent to deliberately be against inclusivity and/or diversity then we will take action against it.”
No, a flag is signalling you are supporting something or identifying with something. That is a political statement. For example supporting LGBT is a political statement in every country, just more safe in some, like in France nobody would probably mind, in Poland you will get sometimes yelled at and maybe vandalised and in Saudi Arabia it’s probably illegal.
All of those are political statements, even if very minor and moslty inconsequential (“identifying with something”). But depending on circumstances the outcome might change. Imagine you’re a Russian living in the West and you just want to “communicate where you are from” and fly a russian flag - people were losing jobs and got a death threats for that.
I think that’s too liberal of an interpretation of the definition of political statement - at that point doing pretty much anything is a political statement, which calls into question what the point of calling something a political statement even is.
Yes because everything in society is firmly placed in politics. Some acts and stances of course are too minor and inconsequential to have an any impact or even be noticed. A lot is commonly thought apolitical because of it or beacuse people don’t think it’s politcs based on whatever - often based on liberal propaganda which is pushing the postpolitics very hard. Because, again, postpolitics is just the acceptance of status quo.