Toys R Us was killed by wall street via leveraged buyout. Its death wasn’t due to millenials or recession or even Amazon murdering brick & mortars in general. Just greedy corporate pricks raking in profits by defrauding millions from investors and destroying hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.
My dad told me that he has a coworker who’s a trans woman. She was married to this girl before her transition and they remained together after it. Everyone at work respects her pronouns. My dad is in a chiefing position at his office and he told me that nobody jokes behind her back. She and her wife have two cute dogs together and I felt like I should share this story bc I want everyone to know that this positivity and respect exists and you deserve it. Don’t ever dare think that you don’t because you do.
I bet even Batman likes Riddler. He gets the call that Riddler’s broken out of Arkham and is terrorizing the city, and he’s like “Oh, good. I get to give my mind a workout and keep Eddie from doing anything too stupid. I’ll bring the kids. They could use some critical thinking training.”
Ahh, the riddler. Just remember, in the Arkham games, he’s just “hey batman, I hid question marks. Can you find them?” And then just wandered off. No murder no mayhem. Just puzzles.
In honor of Lord Byron’s birthday I would like to remind you all of the time that Shelley and Keats, having not heard from him for some time, became concerned for his safety and it was determined that Shelley would go looking for him. Keats received a letter some time later that Shelley had found him in Venice, where he’d been having so much sex that he’d nearly died from malnourishment and dehydration. Keats’ entire response amounted to essentially, “You should probably have let him.”
Shepard has the most immersive version of Pokémon go ever and it’s freaking up the Normandy’s crew everytime the commander get excited trying to capture a Legendary.
Yeah, I got one of Tumblr’s you-may-have-unwittingly-interacted-with-propaganda-blogs emails too. And like everyone else, I kind of shrugged because really, what am I supposed to do about that now? I have search disabled on my blog, and my tags are a mess; there’s no way I could go through and actually find any of the propaganda I may have inadvertently boosted over the seven years I’ve been on this site.
But out of curiosity I looked over Tumblr’s list of IRA-linked blogs. And one username stood out to me. I recognised it because for several months last year it had been showing up constantly in my notifications after I reblogged one of their posts with a response.
When I first saw the post by black-to-the-bones, I wanted to know more about these women. I dug up the original Tweet, ran a reverse Google image search and… well, as you can see from my reblog, there turned out to be quite a lot of information about them on the internet, which I spent the next hour or two collating into my post.
Now, don’t get me wrong here: I am one hundred percent aware that history regularly erases the contributions of women, and especially women of colour. But as you can see from my reply, in this particular case the history of these three women absolutely is not “hidden from us”. The person attempting to hide these women’s history was black-to-the-bones themself.
The original post – which we now know was posted by a state-sponsored propaganda blog – took a legitimate issue, but misrepresented facts to stir up emotion about that issue. The issue was perfectly tailored to resonate with Tumblr’s culture of social justice, and it worked. The vast majority of reblogs of the original post do not include any correction or further information.
Again, don’t get me wrong: anger is important. It’s a necessary part of social justice. But we have clear evidence that bad-faith actors are intentionally fomenting false anger to keep us reacting emotionally rather than thinking rationally. And they are smart about it. They will mix in their attempts to divide and enrage us with innocuous cute videos to gain followers, and legitimate posts about issues. So that when they do post actual misinformation, it slips under our radar.
When propaganda blogs do something like try to smear a Jewish woman as a white supremacist, it’s obvious who their target is, and what their goal is. But I wanted to highlight the black-to-the-bones post above because it’s a subtler, more insidious kind of propaganda. It’s part of a continuum of tactics designed to keep up a constant background noise of outrage.
Because while anger is important, constant anger makes it harder for us to empathise with each other. It makes it harder for us to be constructive, rather than destructive. And ultimately, it just exhausts us and leaves us too apathetic to care.
So getting back to my original question: What are we supposed to do about that now?
Fact. Check. Everything.
Your racist grandparents aren’t the only ones being targeted by fake news. We are being targeted with posts that are specifically designed to appeal to Tumblr’s social justice culture. So if you see a post about an issue that makes you angry, stop before you reblog. Check the source. Google the details. Make sure your anger about legitimate issues isn’t being exploited by malicious actors.
Propaganda like this relies on us reacting to outrage before we stop to think. Be smarter than that. Don’t let yourself be manipulated.
Im literally imagining some government worker in russia logging onto tumblr.edu and thinking to themselves “better change my url to ‘black-galaxy-magic’ to stay young n hip and relevant with the youth of america”
so to sum up, the email you and a ton of other people got is saying that you were following and sharing posts from russian pro-trump propaganda blogs. i’d ask that you PLEASE reblog this, because it’s super important that everyone who got this email knows why they got it, knows what it means, and hopefully knows what they might be able to do better in the future