azertyfun

Congrats. So you think that since you can do it (as a clearly very tech-literate person) the government shouldn't do anything? Do you think it's because they all researched the issues with these companies and decided to actively support them, or is it because their apathy should be considered an encouragement to continue?

You are so haughty you've circled back around to being libertarian. This is genuinely a terrible but unfortunately common take that is honestly entirely indistinguishable from the kind of shit you'd hear coming from a FAANG lobby group.

Why would you think only valid military targets were next to these?

That's... not a war crime is. I don't want to be the guy who justifies the death of civilians, because each one is a tragedy, but unfortunately in war there is such a thing as greater evils.

Why are you still believing the IDFs first reports when the vast majority of the time they’re lying?

Now that's fair. And of course we can as well point out that their whole war is self-inflicted to start with so there's not much legitimacy to any of their acts of war, even the less illegal ones.

I'm as critical of Israel as any reasonable person but that's like the one thing they did recently that was actually a (at least somewhat) targeted attack against their enemies.

Calling that a war crime unnecessarily and dangerously dilutes the term. Leveling cities and starving the fleeing population is a war crime and a crime against humanity. Intentionally shooting civilians, children, aid workers, and journalists is a war crime. How about we focus on those, it's not like there's a shortage of israeli war crimes to report on.

EDIT: Apparently Lebanon reports 2800 injured and 12 dead from these attacks... How many fucking explosive pagers were involved? I doubt a significant percentage of those were Hezbollah, which would make that a war crime. The callous inefficiency of IDF operations will never cease to amaze me.

Then you're knowingly engaging in the consumption of abusive products? Do you not see how you have literally no leverage whatsoever as a consumer?

Do you not consume a single Google/Meta/Microsoft product or do you not care about their abhorrent business practices?

You are conflating Consumers with Citizens, a classic pitfall of modern neoliberal democracies.

Just because people willingly Consume a Product does not mean they think The Product is good or even that it should exist at all. Neoliberalism is unable to acknowledge that, because Everything is a Market and the Market is Infallible.

In reality, the game theory is such that individuals may not have the means to get out of the local minimum they found themselves stuck in. Prisoner's dilemma and all that. That's what representative democracy is supposed to solve, when it isn't captured by ideology and corporate interests.

I would argue that Valorant or CS are terrible games for casual enjoyment anyways. The skill floor is already pretty damn high for a shooter.

In the FPS genre I've found Battlebit has faithfully replicated the feel of BF3/BF4 for those of us who just want to run towards the objective and shoot, and it had old school community servers.

The competitive scene happened. Can't have meaningful competitive matchmaking against the same 100 players. People don't just want to frag noobs, they want to grind the ladder to be able to say "I'm GE and you're Gold, therefore I know for a fact I'm better than you".

This is a global phenomenon. Even goddamn chess has this, first thing players ask each other nowadays is "what's your chess.com ELO".

I'm not a competitive player myself but I get why people rush after ELO progression. And it's not much of a stretch to say CS, Valo, and especially chess wouldn't have seen such widespread success without competitive ELO-based matchmaking.

France's historic language policy is certainly highly problematic yes. Although the point is not genocide but class warfare and/or colonialism, not that it's much of an improvement.

And now do Belgium. French is the language of the elites (the monarchy and, historically, the aristocracy and bourgeoisie) but also a minority regional language. Is Flanders banning French on public signage a form of oppression? I personally think it's stupid Flemish nationalism but I wouldn't call it oppression.

So how about we stop making blanket statements. Moscow's erasure of Belarusian identity is at least oppressive and imperialistic and follows a long history of oppression. IDK if that qualifies as genocide (IMHO that undermines the gravity of something like the Holodomor), but something not strictly being genocide doesn't make it unimportant.

Those ones are still under litigation AFAIK. Last I heard about it they lost their latest court case but it will be years before it reaches the top EU courts or an amendment is made to the GDPR.

I have uBlock Origin but didn't bother configuring any additional filters. My desktop has consent-o-matic as well I think (which unlike a filter actually auto-rejects the tracking stuff).

However on a new profile (no extensions) I didn't get the prompt, and neither did I on chromium. Just checked on windows as well, still not prompt. So it seems to just not prompt on desktop for some reason... I wonder if that means the tracking is disabled or they just auto-consent.

Unrelated to the article itself but I initially clicked on mobile and was presented with this clearly GDPR-violating prompt:

Where's the button to reject tracking? It doesn't exist.

For reference this is the correct prompt on admiral's own website:

First time I see GDPR violation this brazen. While writing this comment I finally figured out how to reject consent (clicking on "Purposes" and manually deselecting each purpose).

I double checked with remote debugging, the button is not just hidden in CSS; it's missing entirely:

For some reason I don't get a consent prompt at all from my desktop even on a brand new firefox profile – perhaps because of my user-agent?

Anyways I felt motivated today so I've sent an email to their Data Protection Officer and set a reminder for next month in case they ghost me.