@Silversnapples @semitones That is clearly an edit of the 1972 photo ‘The Blue Marble’ into some moon-looking foreground (looks itself like a fake)

(You don’t claim otherwise in your toot, but given recent events it might be interpreted as a new, real photo taken by the Artemis crew)

So, when you see someone make an outrageous claim (especially if they then retreat to a more defensible one) or a false equivalence or an obvious attempt at rage-bait, please stop and consider what they will gain from your response before you reply.

Will it cause more people to see their original argument? Will it lend credence to the things that they've said?

Will it actually serve to change their mind? (Sometimes the answer is yes! I've had many very productive conversations on this platform that started with the basic "If I interpret this the way it sounds, the two of us will never interact again, can we unpack it and figure out if that's really what you mean?")

These techniques work because we pay attention to them.

When JD Vance says "I think UFOs are actually Demons" he gets your attention and he gets to control the conversation for the next five minutes.

When he tampers that with "I mean, every faith around the world for all of human history has had a concept of some kind of spirit or unseen force, and maybe this is just a continuation of that, just things that we don't understand yet" then you get to look like you've lost touch with reality when you try to engage substantively with the fact that he said UFOs are demons.

He gets all the benefits of making the demon connection in the minds of his followers (those benefits being "There is a literal war happening between good and evil, god and the devil, and I as the vice president of the united states understand that, and I can tell you who the demons are") and that's a fucking powerful thing to be able to do.

But he gets those benefits while also immediately re-framing and softening the conversation, forcing anyone who tries to engage with what he's said to deal with the much more defensible "There have always been things in the world that we don't understand"

SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT

Dorsey got at one point an infusion of money from Jay-Z and Snoop Dog (they have separate investment firms). this is also part of the whole manufacturing of the #Blacktwitter mystique.

the day any Black celebrity decides to set up shop with their own #Mastodon instance, it’s game over for corporate social media.

no, not a Bluesky instance; but a truly independent, open source and federatable social network built on Mastodon.

🧵…