this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

Rules

  1. All posts must be showerthoughts
  2. The entire showerthought must be in the title
  3. No politics
    • If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
    • A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
  4. Posts must be original/unique
  5. Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS

If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.

Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.

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I can't really think of a reason for that as Reddit is hated somewhat equally by "both" sides of the spectrum. It's just something I find interesting.

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[–] mindbleach@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (8 children)

Federated sites overlap with leftist-adjacent interests. Software freedom, opposition to Facebook, weird illustrated porn, that sort of thing. Even if we're not leftists - we're the people who heard about Lemmy and went "oh, like Mastodon."

Many leftists were also familiar with Mastodon, because they saw Twitter as a harassment engine. Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results. Even before Elmo took over, Twitter was a continuous source of misery by design, if not on purpose. Now it's definitely on purpose. And it's been tilted against leftists, specifically, for a long damn while.

Some people are here because the mainstream options were a threat to their physical safety.

Meanwhile, right-wing assholes aren't leaving Twitter until they run out of victims. They just want an outgroup to yell at. They don't even like alternatives made for them specifically, because they can't stand each other, either. When they get tired of suffering their own company they'll migrate over to Threads. And then endlessly whine that Threads is "bias" against them, no matter how blatantly Zuck ignores their abuse and silences their victims.

Reddit was in a damningly similar situation, long before Spez decided to burn down every scrap of trust and goodwill. Some of us have been waiting on a better alternative for ten fucking years. There wasn't one. There still isn't. The bastards in control just made reddit itself worse, in ways that make even passive use feel like a failure and a betrayal. Spez could personally hunt me down and kick me in the groin, and it wouldn't leave me any less likely to waltz back in with a smile on my face. Dumb bastard made insane demands, killed the best interfaces, told us stupid lies, threw away our money, declared protest powerless, and threatened the people who do all of the fucking work on his empty box of a website... then says 'they'll come crawling back.' Nooo shit the first people out were principled self-organizing curmudgeons.

That aside:

People here reasoning from what they pretend "conservative" must mean are actively doing harm. Political conservatism obeys none of the other dictionary definitions. It's just a label. It's the label chosen by generations of influential public figures whose general philosophy is "Well someone has to be the king." That is their only constant, and it is a thought process baked into the human brain. It is our default. That's why dealing with it is such frustrating bullshit.

[–] JTode@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Every system is perfectly designed to produce its observed results.

I don't know if you strung that set of words together yourself or read it somewhere, but I had never quite heard it put that way before. Very succinct. Sorry, I'm very into language, sentences are like flowers to me and that's a particularly nice blossom.

Re "conservatives," it's an extremely frustrating word because of how it's been misused. I took Intro PoliSci once, my teacher was an open Marxist like me, and he taught us a non-loaded, non-controversial, non-toxic definition of political Conservatism - it was along the lines of, "Conservatives believe that societal change should be done slowly, with careful consideration, with as little disruption to the existing society as possible." - and in all honesty, I once knew a few people who fit that description pretty good. They are long dead now, and I considered them devils at the time we knew each other, but I wish they were around right now, because I know we would all pretty much agree about all this bullshit - we spent a lot of time debating in places like this, and we got into a lot of what ifs. I don't believe any of them would pinch their nose for the current leader of our (Canadian) Tories.

I'm not saying, if we were to apply your maxim about "observed results" to the matter, that that is what Conservatism is "perfectly designed" to do, but that's more or less what the word actually means, and what the traditional branding of Conservatism has been; neither a desire to anachronistically cosplay the worst parts of the past, nor a desire to pointlessly harm life (another word they have barbarized to the point of uselessness), is actually an ideological feature of the traditional Conservative political body. In the 1950s the SBC approved of abortion. Look it up if you don't believe me - there was once a time when they really did believe that life was precious. Jimmy Carter was one of em.

It's the most fundamental aspect of how the modern Right uses routine gaslighting to sell their baldfaced neo-aristrocrat sceheme, because whatever individual opinions modern Conservatism might share with the GOP Nixon admin that started the EPA - an institution with a foundational intent so thoroughly conservative that they should be running CPAC - they are the ones attempting to radically change society in as short a time as possible.

If we go back to my Marxist professor's definition, my Marxist ass is generally the most conservative one in most of the rooms I occupy.

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[–] azuth@lemmy.world 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It's not corporate based social with a mostly US based audience.

It was literally started because of political censorship of leftists on reddit.

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