Maybe, during a time in which we are still reckoning with the fact that our social media networks and social justice communities were, very recently, heavily infiltrated by Russian agents…
Don’t expect me to see you say things like “The Constitution is bad,” and treat that like an innocuous argument being made in good faith.
So, I too received the “We’re not mad you reblogged Russian propagandists, we’re just disappointed” email from Tumblr. As per @copperbadge‘s suggestion, I searched for the posts by typing the usernames into “paxpinnae.tumblr.com/search/RussianTrollGoesHere” (Note that you have to have Tumblr search enabled in your profile to do this, but that’s a quick fix.)
Now, I’ve deleted all the posts, because better safe than inadvertently complicit in undermining American democracy, but for those who are interested, this is the quality content the Russian IRA was putting out:
That post with the Google results showing the Obamas as the President and First Lady and saying “reblog this it’s the last day they’re true.”
A post bitching about how Howard the Duck might be getting a(nother) Marvel movie before Kamala Khan, America Chavez, or Miles Morales saying “When Marvel would rather make a movie about a duck than a person of color.”
A post with a Twitter screenshot of a guy saying feminists don’t have loving dads and getting dragged for it.
A post about Imran Yousef, the marine vet bouncer at Pulse in Orlando who helped save people, which actually was a twofor on Russian trolls, with one reblogging the other to give an assist.
That post about Hillary Clinton’s interview where she says she keeps hot sauce in her back, which the troll framed as “admitting to pandering to black people.”
A post promoting Solomon’s Shield, an app that will give you your rights during a traffic stop and help you livestream the stop to Facebook and urging me to “OMG STOP POLICE BRUTALITY!!!!!”
A post about some A+ queer moments from Betty & Veronica with the caption “heteros explain this” that I’m actually really mad about deleting because it was GR8.
A post with a bumper sticker reading “Proud Parent of a Child who has Resisted His Teachers’ Attempts to Break His Spirit and Bend Him to the Will of His Corporate Masters” which I am also really mad that I had to delete.
There are a few trends I noticed as I went through the posts that I want to take a moment to highlight, for the sake of my own critical thinking skills as well as others’:
Most of these posts seemed to come from a standard Tumblr left-wing point of view… BUT:
Most of them ALSO promoted a defeatist attitude toward our current systems and cultures. “Why is no one talking about Imran Yousef?” “You know why.” “Just admit you don’t want equality for all”
The fundamental goal of the Russian propaganda machine is to undermine Americans’ faith in our political and cultural institutions. If everything is inherently terrible, how can we fix it? If both sides are equally bad and corrupt, then it’s better just to give up on government and try to live as best we can.
Which is an interesting take, but a few counterpoints:
No.
Fuck that.
American democracy has many problems, but the solution isn’t to give up; it’s to fight harder.
Change is slow and hard and yes, involves compromise, and doing a few things that you don’t like in the short term, and talking to people who you personally disagree with, and that’s okay! If you continually subject everything to a rigid test of moral purity, the world will always fail you, but if you approach things with an attitude that even people with whom you disagree can have valid points, you might find something good.
(I’m still mad about how good that Betty & Veronica post was. I mean, I know it was probably intended to undercut American culture somehow, but that thing was AMAZING.)
Part of the real punch to the guts here is that:
1) The things they point out aren’t *wrong*. We ARE a racist society. We ARE a a sexist society. We ARE a deeply hetero-normative society. Insert a justice problem, and it probably applies.
2) It’s super easy to agree with and promote the defeatist attitude because these are giant systemic problems it’s super easy to feel defeated by.
3) I fully expect to be hoodwinked by more such accounts in the future. Just look at how tumblr people and people of a certain age talk all fatalistic about the future, how we make our depression and low expectations for our lives into jokes. You can try to be more aware about WHO you’re reblogging, but you’re gonna make a mistake on that someday, not cause you’re an idiot, but cause it’s just that hard not to.
So what to do about it?
Do like Pax and use the tips from @copperbadge to delete the posts you’ve reblogged. Then, in the future, if you see a post that, per @paxpinnae‘s comments, takes a defeatist stance towards a real problem, by all means, reblog it. But add to the post – add a call to action. If it’s about trans bathroom bills, include a form letter for your state reps. Do something similar if it’s about lack of representation in the media – why not send emails to movie studios saying we want Miles Morales and Kamala Khan cause they’re fucking rad as hell and could totally bring in Black Panther $$$. If it’s about police brutality against black people, link to BLM fundraisers.
That way, you’re being civically engaged. You roll your eyes and feel sad about the ways in which our world is shit, but then you do something about it, even IF it seems small and useless. It’s still something, and then you’re maybe – hopefully – perhaps inspiring someone else to take incremental action along with you. And bonus, you’re undermining some asshole’s attempt to undermine you, so if nothing else, you’re getting spite points.
And that’s my thought. Time to do some research and gather rebloggable resources so I can do my best to put my money where my mouth is here.
I did not plan to mire myself this deeply in this whole event when I made An Humorous Post about being in league with Russian agitators, but it has led to some really awesome analysis that I wanted to share with everyone, so this is well worth reading. Thanks for tagging me, guys!
Incidentally, here’s a bit of HTML you can use to search your blog for these. I’m not deleting the ones I commented on, but when I searched I found 6 posts from 6 different blogs that I’d reblogged:
A photoset of Overwatch dog cosplay, taken from a cosplayer on Twitter and Instagram. (Here it is at the source, so you can have a well-dressed shibe before you continue reading this post.)
This post about the artist who did a famous portrait of Dwight Eisenhower, falsely claiming she was never credited. Note @jumpingjacktrash’s extremely salient commentary: “it feels to me like these posts that claim black artists in history were
less respected than they actually were achieves the opposite of their
intent. it belittles the artists rather than inspiring people to give
them more credit. and it’s pretty demoralizing, isn’t it, to paint a
picture of obscurity and disrespect as the only think black artists have
ever achieved?” yeah, uh, turns out that’s exactly what they were aiming for.
Almost all of this content was reposted, mostly from Twitter. We’ve got a post clearly made to reel in followers with the combo of “cute animal” + “popular fandom”, some fairly reasonable commentary that happens to dovetail well with the message of “everyone is out to get you and no one respects you,” rage-clickbait that’s presented as being about race when there’s no special indication it is, anti-intellectual reframing of a college student’s cool science project as a Decadent Evil of Capitalism, and malicious erasure of a black artist’s legacy to feed into a narrative of hopelessness.
They did a really good job blending in. I would never have guessed any of these was someone deliberately spinning a narrative if I didn’t know already know, and where they do distort things, it’s within the bounds of plausibility, not something where you can clearly say “this person had to be a deliberate and malicious liar.”
Only after days of mulling over these stories and thinking about how every woman has one did I think back to the time I wanted to have sex with my ex and he wanted to play his guitar and call it a night. “I just feel like relaxing tonight,” he told me as I ran my hands over him. With my hopes crushed and my ego bruised, I strategized: I would take off my clothes and lie on the floor naked until he’d feel too guilty to refuse. It worked. I convinced myself I had turned him on, but in the morning, he told me he’d done it for the reason I’d secretly anticipated: He didn’t want me to feel bad.
And then, only after that, did I think back to the time my first boyfriend expressed reluctance to have sex with his parents in the next room, and I said “I’ll be quiet” and got on top of him. Or the time he said he didn’t want to have sex while I was on my period and I (dishonestly) convinced him it wouldn’t get messy. To be honest, I don’t remember the details of these encounters, like what specifically he said or whether he eventually said “okay.” But that just goes to show I wasn’t paying attention.
And only now, as I’m writing this, am I thinking back to the time my current partner said he was too tired for sex, and then I touched his penis until he changed his mind — but did he really change his mind, or did he just want to appease me?
Yes, I see myself in Grace. But I also see myself in Aziz.
When the conversation around the #MeToo hashtag moved from morally unambiguous sexual predators like Harvey Weinstein to self-described feminists like Aziz Ansari, some took the opportunity to discuss how rape culture is so ever-present, nearly every woman has been violated, and even “good men” have violated women. But more and more, I’m realizing it goes even further than that: Nearly everyone of every gender has the potential to be both the violator and the violated.
just sent this joke poem about goblins to this girl on okc and was
going to follow it up with a message saying “please rate my poem 1-10”
but okc changed it so you can only send one message so she’s received
this ominous goblin poem without any context
Wow Goblins Are Really Good
They Hide Their Green Faces Under A Hood
They Steal Lots Of Coins To Buy Food
They’ll Never Kidnap Me And Take Me To Their Brood
Women using these services in cities say they like the speed and no-hassle privacy they get by making a purchase through the app. And in some rural areas where women’s health clinics are few and far between, being able to buy prescription contraceptives online — starting at around $15 for a month’s supply — can be not only much more private, but much more affordable and less time-consuming than driving an hour or more to the closest clinic, or paying for a doctor’s appointment.
NURX is now available in 18 states. It’s popular in Texas, where many women live in what some health policy analysts call “contraception deserts” — places that lack easy access to women’s health services.
The company’s process is pretty simple. After users log in to the NURX app, they fill out a questionnaire.
“They tell us about their medical history,” says Jessica Horowitz, a nurse practitioner with NURX who consults with patients via online chats. “They give us a blood-pressure check.”
A clinician like Horowitz then reviews the answers and, based on that, makes a suggestion about what type of hormonal contraception might be best for that individual; a pill, a ring or a patch are available, as well as emergency contraception. If the patient has a question about the product she’s considering, she can send an instant message or call to chat with a provider.
“It doesn’t matter what time of day it is,” Horowitz says. “Someone responds.”
Then NURX sends a prescription to a pharmacy and the drugs are mailed out via priority mail, or faster for emergency contraception. The cost of a month’s supply of prescription birth control is often free to patients, if they have health insurance, Horowitz says, and otherwise starts at $15 out-of-pocket for a month’s supply, depending on the brand.
Texas has become a big market for the app. Dr. Brook Randal, an emergency medicine physician in Austin who works as a provider for NURX, says her patients come from different backgrounds and use the app for different reasons.
“A lot of them are low-income women who may not have a low-cost clinic available to them in the communities where they live,” she says. “And so we provide an important service for those women.”
In 2013, the state passed an abortion bill that led half of all Texas clinics that performed abortions to close — clinics that often also provided birth control and other medical services to low-income women.
“Many of those women will tell us that they would have had to drive a really long distance in order to get to a clinic where they can get birth control economically,” Randal says.
And their access to birth control got even worse when Texas lawmakers cut funding for the state’s family planning program, says Stacey Pogue, a health policy analyst with the Center for Public Policy Priorities in Austin. The cuts came at a time when the state’s population was growing and more women were seeking services, Pogue notes.
“The ability of our safety net system to meet those needs and deliver health care — to actually get health care to women who are looking for contraceptives and well-woman exams — that has certainly been diminished,” she says.
Apps like NURX that give women access to at least some types of contraceptives are definitely helpful, she says. But they aren’t a comprehensive solution.
Some of the most effective types of birth control — IUDs and implants — aren’t available through the apps, Pogue notes, because they require a visit to a health provider. And apps will never substitute for the missing medical clinics — places where, beyond contraception, women could also get life-saving services, such as pap smears, breast exams and cervical cancer screenings.
Texas is one of two states (Indiana is the other) where minors can’t buy prescription birth control through NURX because of laws restricting minors’ access to contraception.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.