this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2026
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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:

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    • 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
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[–] pfried@reddthat.com 1 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

articles like this one

Do not support Snowden's claim that the NSA could read any American's emails or listen to any American's phone calls. Greenwald (through Snowden's insistence) thought that DITU was an NSA computer inside American Internet companies. That's the source of the misconception, which resulted in Greenwald's sensational claim, "But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers."

The article itself is a misreporting of this WaPo article that said half of the communications contained references to American residents. This makes sense of course, because the foreign accounts being surveilled were thought to have national security importance for the U.S.

In truth, entire teams of journalists from multiple outlets worked on different parts of those stories

And the ones who knew what they were talking about disparaged Greenwald's reporting that was based solely on Snowden's ignorance. The first newspaper to get the story right was the New York Times. Then CNET's Declan McCullough repeatedly called Greenwald out on his poor reporting. ZDNet quite reasonably asked why neither Greenwald nor his editor bothered to consult a subject matter expert. The tech blogosphere ripped it apart at the time, to the point that Greenwald kept responding in an unhinged way to open source tech celebrities on Twitter. But you didn't need to be in tech at the time to understand this. This got picked up in mainstream news summary sites like The Week.

You didn't even address the fact that the US forced the plane of the president of Ecuador to land in Europe due to pressure from the US, because it flies in the face of your narrative that the US is a righteous place where you can trust the law

That's because it was Bolivia, and each country has a right to police its own airspace. France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can choose which planes they allow to fly over their countries, and that is their right under international law. The US didn't unlawfully down a plane over a European country's airspace.

You know how they got around not being able to spy on Americans? They got the brits and other countries to do it for them. That is what the Five-Eyes organization is all about

This is a conspiracy theory that isn't supported by any documents at all, especially nothing in Snowden's documents. This agreement started as BRUSA, which was a no-spy agreement, which Germany requested access to after the Germans and the Americans had been caught spying on each other in the early 2000s. This no-spy provision is alluded to in the WaPo article I linked to above: "At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand."