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?

Read Craig Murray on this:

Craig Murray: Something Changed in the Assange Case

Mentioning “what is at stake here” was the first real acknowledgement of the major issues in this case from the judiciary in over a decade of proceedings. It did feel like something had changed.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/05/22/craig-murray-something-has-changed-in-assange-case/

Also, the Hill headline is slightly wrong. He can appeal the extradition. Not he can petition to appeal. Full appeal hearing coming up, not sure if the date’s been decided on yet. He won the right to appeal on the grounds that he has a case that he will be discriminated for his nationality and denied first amendment protections as a non-US citizen. This comes after the US failed to provide satisfactory assurances that this won’t happen.

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?

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. ;-)

Child - das Kind - grammatical gender: neuter. Referred to in context using the gender-neutral pronoun ‘es’ (it). The pronoun used correlates with the grammatical gender of the noun used, not the gender of the person referred to.

Eg Ein Kind lacht. Es hat etwas gesehen. (transl: A child laughs. He/she/they saw something.)

Agree, there’re some decent < 0.5% beers around, made with just a different strain of yeast.

‘backed by mountains of bodies’

is what I read initially…

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.