That just seems petty. They both sound like generic German names to me. There even used to be a Kaiser named Fritz. Just recently I was asking someon “was your name James?” reply: “no, Jason”. It was a non-issue

How is that culturally insensitive?

Russia stole the Presidential election by hacking DNC and Podesta emails for WikiLeaks to publish so Russian asset reality tv star Donald Trump would win? But also it was Russian bots and memes that did the trick? LMAO.

In reality, Clinton stole the primaries from Bernie and made sure her opponent would be Trump who she believed would be a weak opponent, by getting her media mates to constantly talk about him. This ‘pied-piper’ strategy was a massive own-goal. So she blamed Russia for her own failures and of course everyone ran with it.

‘Some liberals’ - you mean all of blueanon? Democrats, Msnbc, cnn, etc.

It’s unhinged because this sort of Russophobia may very well lead to WW3 and nuclear armageddon. Also because it has no basis in fact whatsoever. It’s every bit as unhinged as the ‘The Jews rule the world’ one.

counter-question: Is it impossible to be private offline?

Qantas used to have a ‘u’ in it, but they changed their name so now you don’t even know!

Russiagate

who does this?

Yes, XMPP, a long-standing protocol that’s also not a walled garden, doesn’t require a phone number or even a phone. For android I use the Conversations client combined with Dino on computers. Currently logged in to a handful of devices synchronously. You can choose what server to make an account on; conversations.im I found to be reliable. Drawback is Signal doesn’t let you bridge to it from anywhere outside of Signal. So I have accounts on both.

Np

You still need a phone number to register an account as far as I could tell when I did the other day. You no longer need to share your number with any contacts and can set it so noone who has your number can look you up on signal. You can optionally set a unique alphanumeric ‘username’ instead to hand to people to look you up. But yea, Signal still requires you to give them and their authenticatian service (through sms code) your phone number.

Yea, I hear you. I use both.

The Signal servers it connects to run proprietary or unauditable software, no?

Well if only those samsung & ios users that never get my messages until I see them and tell them to open their app had phones that didn’t interfere with it running in the background / push notifications it would be working out for me even better, but that’s not an issue with the protocol or client but with OS’s being hostile to xmpp.

Hmm, I see. But isn’t there an obvious solution to this? One of you just run two different clients side-by-side?

I use xmpp all the time. Biggest hurdle for certain fam/friends using xmpp has been certain android builds (samsung) and ios interfering with timely notifications. User knowlege is not a problem as I can recommend the apps that are compatible encryption protocols with mine.

Molly is just Signal with a different name and on more depositories

Signal does the same

Ok but my point is that when it doesn’t correlate, it becomes clear how grammatical gender is independent from the person’s gender.

It becomes even clearer when you consider all nouns by definition have a grammatical gender - inanimate objects, abstract concepts, etc, even though the thing described clearly doesn’t have a gender. Eg die Tür ist offen. Ich schliesse sie. (transl.: the door is open. I close it.) ‘Sie’ being the female pronoun used to refer to the grammatically female door.

When my brain interpreted ‘they’ singular to refer to a unspecified so-far unnamed person or an already mentioned group, it was definitely confusing to have it suddenly used to refer to someone who had just been referred to by name. This was definitely a novel use of ‘they’ for me at the time and I don’t understand why no-one else ever seems to have this kind of confusion. I did get used to it but I don’t think it’s as universal as some of y’all realise.

Edit: I just learnt the term ‘indeterminate antecedent’ from the Wikipedia article someone else linked. Thanks to them, I just got a little bit smarter. ;-)