The last two years have been incredibly painful, almost solely because there’s been no signs pointing to anything but constant wheel-spinning. Berhalter has absolutely no ambition to be experimental at all, and like you said in the beginning of the piece, it’s making what was a promising youth movement regress in…

They did, however, passively aggressively encourage Berhalter to hose down the field afterwards.

Just a slight correction on the text, but I assume it was supposed to the brother of U.S. Soccer’s COO, not the other way around? I normally don’t bother which such small errors, but that one really stopped for a while before I understood what it was trying to say.

America is about 12 hours behind China, Blizzard is about 10 days behind everyone else

Yeah. It frustrates me that people see staying silent as being neutral. Like as if keeping the status quo and preserving the current power structures in play wasn’t in itself picking a side. Chinese government would like nothing more than other the rest of the world to not talk about their bullshit. So staying silent…

I am still firmly in the camp that they may cancel BlizCon. At the very least if it isn’t, the Chinese livestream of events will be pretty much edited into oblivion or scrapped altogether.  There’s just no way that Bliz can pull out of this nosedive that I can see.

That’s one way to state the painfully obvious, whilst bypassing the point of the statement.

You’re literally engaged in sophistry, and nothing will come of your conviction that you’ve issued a stinging rebuke.

I’ll try starting an Overwatch stream whilst screaming about the US (my home country) fucking the Kurds in Syria.

Bet nothing comes of it.

“Hey, we know you quit like a week ago but you’re fired.”

Yup. And that side is aligned with a government with one of the worst human rights track records on the planet.

Blizzard is not being a neutral party in this instance. They have clearly chosen a side.

Three things here—for me, anyway (YMMV):

1.) This is a delayed punishment, and it seems like that delay was largely a function of Blizzard gauging the (almost entirely negative) reaction to their sanctioning of Blitzchung. When most of the complaints coming out about Blitzchung’s treatment included acknowledgment that…

If they dig their grave far enough through the Earth, you know where they’ll end up...

Blizzard HQ: Hey, guys, we screwed up.

Damned if they do, Damned if they dont. Either they get roasted for having the stupid rule, or char broiled for not applying it fairly. 

So basically, they did this after a long delay because they were tired of hearing people talk about how this situation was a double standard. If no one had said anything, there would be no ban for these kids.

“Every voice matters - unless you disagree with us. Then, keep it to yourself, and make sure your demonstrations are meaningless.”

Of course, and it’s not complicated. Blizzard has a large financial stake in the Chinese market. A pro-Hong Kong position jeopardizes that stake.

I was watching the Jimquisition on this the other day and he made a fairly interesting point about Blizzard on this one. They argue that the matter is to keep politics out and keep the optics on the game itself. But if someone were to post something that is arguably political but less controversial (and certainly not…