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.