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.
Yeah as I expected you're projecting right wing talking points on what I said and answering those instead of anything I -at the very least- meant.
I just do not think that, in a frictionless vacuum, one can completely dismiss the idea that there can be some, however microscopic and inconsequential downsides to immigration (through no individual fault in the vast majority of the population).
Do consider that at the very least if Europe hypothetically did away with border checks entirely and strived for massive immigration, the ensuing brain drain would wreak havoc on the Global South (even worse than right now, kinda like happened within the EU with the former eastern block). Regardless of the exact mechanism, mass migration has long-lasting sociocultural impacts and to say these are only positive is pure globalist ideology.
You gloss over the part where even with the best intentions imaginable European immigration would have killed 90 % of American Natives with their new pathogens. No matter which way you slice it that is a scenario where European culture becomes the dominant culture, though it would certainly be nice not to have overt genocide and oppression sprinkled on top.
(Of course that's not the case right now and the great replacement theory is a fascist invention, if that needs saying)
Also be careful not to infantilise immigrants. There is a marginal but highly visible issue happening for example where Saudi Arabia is funding Wahhabit (i.e. highly orthodox) mosques and imams in Europe that when combined with depressed socioeconomic opportunities fuels religious antagonism/radicalism particularly amongst particularly vulnerable teenage second generation immigrants. Is it an existential threat to European hegemony or something Europe is incapable of absorbing? Certainly not. Doesn't mean it's an issue we have to refuse to acknowledge in the name of our own leftist orthodoxy.
I wonder how many terrorist (and "terrorist") plots that were foiled were from compromised telegram messages. How many Ukrainian airstrikes were called from similar sources. My gut says a whole lot more than people think. Since nothing is encrypted, one backdoor is all the NSA needs to read everyone's group messages. Like the much lamer version of Crypto AG, because in this case it's an open secret.
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?