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.

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

Russiagate

who does this?

Look I’m not saying you’re wrong in your assessment of global affairs, but believe me when I say that there is more to life than that. I’d advise you to spend some time each day looking at the world at a different scale than that, for example the life of insects, or the world of classical music or mathematics. Perhaps pick up an interest from your childhood. We’re not dead yet! It may also be advisable to see a doctor and tell them about your wanting to spend all your time in bed and your panic attacks while smoking. Hope you feel better.

good point, but how active are those 2 Million users on Bluesky counted? Even the daily active user count is said to be 2 orders of magnitude more than Bluesky. That’s a lot of people with a very wide range of interests, political leanings and priorities. Most of them have never heard of federated networks and won’t be interested unless their favourite celebrity, jounalist, politician or you name it moves to a platform that just so happens to be federated. By all means, build bridges, but I don’t have the solutions.

I believe Twitter still has hundreds of millions monthly active users. That’s tough competition.

My question is: are 2020’s kids even gonna be upset?

Ok. I’d be interested to know how Bluesky compares in size to Twitter.

I’m not familiar with Bluesky so I don’t know the answer to that. But I don’t think any entity can just ‘take all the celebs & public figures’. They are unlikely to move unless they think it’s an advantage to themselves or their organisation.

Someone recently told me this anecdote:

I overheard on the train home two middle aged ladies talking about their kids mobilephones.

One was saying how they dragged their teen and their mobile phone to the iphone store so they could setup the location tracker and “quiet mode” (parent phone can completly disable the teens phone), and how their child was upset but they are glad it was done.

The other lady was asking how she to can do the same.

Twitter is a celebrities’ and public persons’ playground. As well as organisations. Anyone else is on there either to gain prominence or to follow the prominent accounts. Until there’s a suitable fediverse platform that appears as an advantage to those big names, nothing’s gonna change on that front. In spite of all the censorship and cancellations.

the feeling of not being spied on 24-7

yes.

The US tortures its dissidents. Just look at how they treated War on Terror whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Even the UN special rapporteur on torture spoke up about her treatment. She was driven to attempt suicide in prison multiple times. Including when she refused to cooperate with the secret Grand Jury investigating WikiLeaks and Julian Assange.

Julian Assange is about to be buried in a US prison and get a taste of that same medicine. Where are the Guardian outrage-articles on that? Oh, wait, that’s right. They threw him under the bus as soon as he’d given them access to the best scoops of the century (US diplomatic cables). The Guardian journos divulged the pass phrase to the unredacted cables in their book giving anyone who could locate the files online access. Cryptome published the unredacted cables before WL did while Assange called the State Department trying to warn them of the bad news. The Guardian then tried to make out like WL had acted irresponsibly in publishing the unredacted cables, when in reality the cat was already out of the bag and WL was doing harm-minimization. The Guardian’s blame-shifting makes my blood boil.

The ‘Guardian’ has no ethics and can’t be trusted on anything political imo.

Instead, it’s thrown out any time an act of war appears to be particularly unfair or evil, often without full context or detail.

I often see news reports being quite careful and describing what appears in detailed evidence documenting murder by the military as ‘apparent’ war crimes.

I would argue that the credible accusation of war crimes, that is, with evidence available, requires a full investigation and trial full stop. If no trial occurs, and nobody sues for defamation, the papers can say whatever they feel confident enough to say. Except WikiLeaks…

In Australia there was the interesting defamation case recently with a civil court finding that the soldier who brought the defamation case had no case and did in fact commit war crimes in Afghanistan. He has not been charged with a crime. What does this say about impunity for war criminals? In contrast, Australian military whistleblower David McBride had to plead guilty last month for releasing evidence of war crimes and their cover-up by military leadership to a journalist with the state-broadcaster, the ABC. In both cases though, the news organisations publishing the news articles are seen to be in the right by the government and courts. (Although the ABC did get raided just a couple of months after Julian Assange was dragged out of the Ecuadorian Embassy, the journalist was not charged.)