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Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag as an excuse to clamp down on political dissidence and consolidate his power. It’s still not clear whether it was intentionally caused by the Nazis or just a convenient opportunity for them.

They’re both the respective heads of state, and they’re both not members of the legislative branches.

So yeah, in this context they are effectively the same.

I wasn’t claiming that he hasn’t been the president of France; I did, in fact, notice.

I said that’s not what the president of France does.

It’s like getting mad at the King of England for Canadian laws, that’s just not his responsibility, even if he is head of state.

There’s loads of issues with Macron, but I don’t see how he’s responsible for any of the above

The president doesn’t legislate, and he doesn’t command the police, he’s the executive head of state.

Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.

Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue

b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

“Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.

Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷

Actually, the Finns already spend 2.4% of their GDP on defense, making them one of the highest defense spenders in Europe (relative to GDP). And they’re famously very well prepared for wartime scenarios.

Turns out sharing a border with Russia makes military spending look very appealing.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by web tech? I don’t know much about how matrix works

GIMP is really powerful, but goddamn its UX is abysmal, unfortunately

(and reinforces it)