Substack promoted Andrew Tate as their #1 "bestseller" last week. Cool company. Great leadership.

So I went ahead and made a browser extension.

Kill Yr Substack intercepts every Substack link (even on custom domains) and redirects it to `archive.is`.

Substack's numbers go down. You still get to read the thing tho.

https://jasoncosper.com/kill-yr-substack/

Not part of the crowd, the cat wasn't.

Not particularly worried about it either.

The Cat Walks Alone art print -- https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-cat-walks-alone-steve-henderson.html?product=art-print

#art #artwork #mastoart #fediart #buyintoart #ayearforart #italy #italia #travel #history #fedigiftshop #europe #cats #catsofmastodon #cat #afternoon

戦没者ばかり苔むす春高野 / 蒼穹

#俳句
#haiku
#dailyhaikuprompt

We sang of a tree,
roots planted near the water,
to become that tree.

#DailyHaikuPrompt - Planting

as some of you know, I was raised in a fundamentalist proto-maga environment, and so I have extensive first hand experience with cognitive dissonance and cult tactics

I wanted to point out that if someone wildly disagrees with you: they’re not lying. No matter how stupid or obviously wrong you think their take is, they’re not lying to you about what they believe; almost no-one does that.

To be clear, I’m not talking about national politicians or billionaires or obvious influence campaign bots. I’m talking about real, normal people that you know perfectly well are real, normal people but their take is so ridiculous or extreme to you that you feel tempted to conclude they’re lying.

There are real, actual reasons they believe those things and real, actual reasons they feel the need to tell you about it. If you can’t engage with that, you’ve not only already lost any chance of convincing them, but you’re setting yourself up to believe patently untrue things yourself, because you have taught yourself to shut down contrary thoughts with “they’re lying.”

accepting that the people I was told were agents of Satan *weren’t lying about their beliefs just to hurt me* is a big part of how I got out of fundamentalism.

My current way to interest people to join us: The Fediverse is more like local politics, with small communities discussing things. Centralised networks like Twitter, TikTok, instagram etc are more like national politics, with loud mouthpieces shouting over everyone else.

This mental image helps me in understanding why the influencers fail here and they of course think that means that the fediverse must be a lost cause while we commoners happily chug along and enjoy our little street parties ;)

Such silent spring mist,
no sound of drumming drizzle,
gently clinging drops.

#DailyHaikuPrompt - Spring Mist

When AI boosters talk about universal basic income to excuse all of the jobs they claim they can eliminate, ask:

“Then why are you working on AI, and not on universal basic income?”

If you are a journalist in this space and you don’t ask this every time UBI comes up, you are not doing your job.