Shame on America and shame on most of Europe for abstaining

when this post was first going around, i went and read the U.N.'s report on the debate, and a bunch of different articles on it, and wrote a long rebuttal, explaining that this was russian state propaganda intended to try and get international support for a proposed invasion of ukraine by claiming that ukraine was full of nazis

(this is not me telling you how clever I am, I was just repeating back information from other people who know a fuck of a lot more about international politics than me, because the people who know about that shit all knew what this was)

[the tldr for anyone who didn't see a rebuttal is that the bill was basically just the words 'nazis=bad' not any kind of attempt to combat nazism, a lot of countries abstained because they thought it was stupid, the usa voted against because any condemnation of free speech is considered unconstitutional, and ukraine voted against because they were 100% aware of why russia proposed the bill in the first place]

mostly it was ignored, and the responses i did get were from people like the ones above, telling me i was shilling for capitalism or whatever

because this doesn't look like what people in left-wing online spaces expect right-wing propaganda to look like. it says nazis are bad, how can it possibly be pro-facist? it's reporting accurate facts, how can it be propaganda?

because it is technically accurate. this bill was proposed, it was voted on, and the usa and ukraine were the only countries to vote again. that's all true

it's just also only a tiny part of the picture, selected to make people who don't like nazis (also do note it's specifically neo-nazis not white supremecists or facists - russia has major problems wth the last 2 but historically hasn't been a big fan of nazis, hence the very specific wording) think russia is good and ukraine is bad.

when you're used to shit like prageru it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking right-wing propaganda is just really obvious lies, but prageru is 5 dipshits with access to powerpoint (they're 5 dipshits being funded by oil barons, but the point still stands) of course the stuff they make is going to be obvious bullshit. the tweet at the top of this thread is propaganda by people who actually know what the fuck they're doing and have spent a very long time getting extremely good at it.

if they just lied, people would notice. not everyone, obviously, the internet left contains people who thought wayfair was selling kidnapped children locked in overprice wardrobes ffs, but enough people

so they share what is, very technically, the truth. they edit it to fit their needs, they obsfucate the background, but they tell the truth. and it works. thousands upon thousands of people shared this. people who quite rightly view the invasion of ukraine as absolutely monstrous went to the matt for russian state propaganda over and over. they drowned out anyone trying to add the context back in

this is what effective right-wing propaganda looks like. this is why people yell about reading beyond the headlines, doing research, and most importantly, applying common sense!

I didn't go and read up on the context of this people i'm cleverer than you. i noticed germany was on the list of people who abstained, and i know enough about germany to know they have very strong opinions on nazis, and that made me think probably it was bullshit, so i went and did some research.

if i didn't know that about germany, i might have shared this uncritically, because it's really fucking easy to hit reblog and a lot harder to go and read reports on united nations debates (it's actually surprisingly easy to do that, but they're mostly boring as shit)

but the existence of this post, and the sheer number of notes it has and the number of retweets the original had, are a reminder that doing that extra work is very very important. there are people in left-wing spaces right now loudly supporting the invasion of ukraine, because they read shit like this uncritically, and that's really fucking bad! i hope we can all agree that the invasion of ukraine is bad, and supporting it is a sign that something has gone very wrong.

and i want to say that i'm different, i'd never drink the cool aid, and on this specific issue, no, i probably wouldn't. but i've done it in the past, on less important issues, because it's easy. the internet makes it easy. propagandists who know what they're doing make it easy

your medication does not work properly when you’re on your period

because of lazy, misogynistic research practices in the testing of ADHD medications, it has only been discovered recently that hormone imbalances during your menstrual period essentially cancel out the effect of your medication.

(if you want to know about the aforementioned lazy research practices, the scientists doing the testing for adderall and vyvanse only used male mice and AMAB humans to test them on because the hormonal cycles of female/AFAB test subjects “affected test results, causing data to be inconsistent”.)

A regular monthly pas costs around $70 where I live, and you can use it to use the busses, trains and trams within the city limits.

The 9 Euro ticket on the other hand costs, as the name implies, 9€ (about $10) and you get to ride regional trains, trams, busses and ferries ALL OVER GERMANY FOR A MONTH.

You can travel from one end of the country to the other for the cost of a freaking starbucks coffee... for a month.

Granted, you'll need to take regional trains so going across the entire country will probably take about a day and changing trains 10 times, but the option is there.