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   elilla&, The Fediverse Thicc (elilla@transmom.love)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 19:00:57 JST elilla&, The Fediverse Thicc

   sooo for the first time in Germany I got visited by a couple Jeovah Witnesses. I did not immedately close the door on their face because I like people and I like talking to people, and do you know how often you get people smiling at you in Germany? like I'm *starved* ok, don't judge me, the rank-and-file isn't the real monsters they're just like, old ladies being scammed.

   anyway I listened to their spiel as much as I could, but eventually I tried to get out of it with good ol' "tut mir leid, ich kann nicht gut Deutsch verstehen". what they did here is the following. they had a tablet with videos in basically every language—I was offered if my Portuguese was European, Brazilian, Angola or Mozambique—and after showing me the video gave me a card emphasizing that there will be people who speak Portuguese if I come and maybe they could bring a friend next time? and of course they were extremely sweet the entire time and did not judge me for like, my deep voice, my punk appearence or my broken German, they were super chatty with me in German despite me breaking my German *on purpose*.

   now I expect most of you are thinking of this as dirty cult tactics and all the horrible things the JW have done. while I am thinking that I would stab my own kidney to have an anarchist or antifa organisation that puts 30% this much effort into welcoming immigrants and the outgroup. heck if this was anything else than an abusive cult—if it was, dunno, a knitting circle or fundraise campaign—I would probably have joined on the spot simply to have kind people to talk to.

   for other Brazilians: I have to disappoint everyone and report that, tragically, the video had none of those genuinely nice illustrations of multicultural folk petting tigers in paradise, as featured in the meme "today I just wanna hang out at Jeovah Witness leaflet paradise petting tigers". it was, you guessed it, all AI slop. nowhere is safe. not even Jeovah Witness leaflet paradise.

   ...

   they didn't even pet tigers :bowsette_redhead_angry:

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     nadja (dequbed@mastodon.chaosfield.at)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 21:24:39 JST nadja

     in reply to

     @elilla the Jehovas Witnesses in Berlin tend to set up shop in the subway stations, and said shops are multilingual based on where they are. It's fascinating to see JW material in Arabic :D

   • Embed this notice
     Jean-Christophe Helary (jchelary@sciences.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 21:24:48 JST Jean-Christophe Helary

     in reply to

     @elilla I loved when my Japanese local JW came to my place, because I was basically working from home, in the Japanese country side, with not many people to talk too. And I’d chat with them for hours about the Bible, because as a translator I have many different translations (and of the Torah and the Koran as well), until they got tired and left. 🙂 And I always had a deadline the days they invited me to join their religious office.

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     GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) (greenskyoverme@ohai.social)'s status on Thursday, 30-Jan-2025 21:26:43 JST GreenSkyOverMe (Monika)

     in reply to

     @elilla It's not just JW. A Turkish-German friend got into a German evangelical cult when she was young and she eventually got out but she says this is still the only culturally really diverse and open and inclusive group she ever really experienced in Germany. That's so sad. You're right, the antifa and anarchist groups need to get up to speed.