this post was submitted on 14 May 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:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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If last time's violence was so great, why did we still get this time? And every other time before that where violence bought a reprieve during which evil was given every advantage to regain what it lost and more? It has never solved anything for longer than a generation, and even then deals were being made in secret to preserve the evil, by the very champions of "good".
Because people stopped doing violence and said “violence is wrong, we can resolve the system through the system” except the system was captured by the rulers.
No solution is permanent. And violence isn't technically the fix either.
The problem is you can't solve certain problems from within the broken system. It's possible to go outside the system but without violence but it's rare. The violence is what enables outside system fixes to be possible and those have been of varied quality.
It's not what we do when we're violent, it's what we do immediately afterwards that matters.
Nonviolence often just means you don't get to make any meaningful changes at all, because they aren't going to just let you vote them out of power and into to jail.
Violence is that system.
Thanks. It's a lonely life sometimes.
To me it's rather that the would-be fixers have just been tricked into thinking this violence is the solution when it's not, causing their efforts to be short circuited. They might seem to get somewhere, but only far enough to satisfy their sense of victory or tire their whole generation out. Then the system which was never really beaten to begin with slides right back into our lives, putting the lie to the idea that violence was ever a useful solution.
I mean peaceful solutions seem to have the same problem. It'll seem like it works for awhile and then later generations realize that that issue was never really resolved. Just look at the civil rights movement. Supposedly solved 'peacefully' by MLK, but as we've all come to learn, the only thing that happened was that racists just grew quiet for awhile and waited for a chance to be racists again.
It's true, and it seems to be an unfortunate fact of the current state of the human animal. The capacity for and expression of such things as compassion and the desire for earnest cooperation is too new to humanity on the evolutionary timescale. Technology has developed much faster, raising the stakes of the periodic violence higher and higher. I hope the human race can weather it until the capacity for compassion becomes more widespread.
Because people got tricked into thinking they could vote things better.
But first they got tricked into thinking violence would get them to that point. Both failed to Solve The Problem.
There is no system you can set up that will not eventually become corrupt or compromised. Even the word "revolution" suggests its cyclical nature. It must periodically happen.
I agree. I then surmise that earnest efforts to avoid periodic systemic violence are the doings of the portion of humanity which is both capable of utilizing their prefrontal cortex, and have had occasion to develop it. They are a minority, a condition partly reinforced by said periodic violence. We need more time - time enough to evolve out of it before we render the Earth uninhabitable.