this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
7 points (88.9% liked)

Showerthoughts

31314 readers
342 users here now

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: 1

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
    • If you feel strongly that you want politics back, please volunteer as a mod.
  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.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

all 45 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 days ago

I know, I got a 3 day ban for a silly reason from reddit. I figured it was a good time to make the move to Lemmy, it's even more leftist activist over here. Like tenfold. It's insane. I cang believe I'm saying this, but I'm looking forward to getting back to the standard low level leftist nutters.

Why can't we have nice things darnit.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

Not really meaning for this to sound as arrogant as it's going to, but... Lemmy is almost entirely populated by nerds so far.

Nerds tend to be open to tech, maybe a little smarter overall. You know? You can tell by the grammar, the spelling. It's a different group here.

Reality is left leaning, and the stupider someone is, in general, the more likely they are to lean right politically. The rest of the right are the really rich, who tend to be up the psychological spectrum toward sociopathic, so of course they would have no time for caring for others' needs.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 2 days ago

So you're saying stupid people like to lean left as to appear intelligent?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Reality is left leaning

I know this was a joke Colbert made, but the truth is the reverse: the left is reality-leaning. It's truly terrifying to see how divorced from reality the right-wing is, and how gleefully they just keep storming in that direction.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Reality is left leaning…

It really is. So much of conservatism involves pissing into the wind, and trying to argue against objective truth.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

There's been tons of right-leaning Reddit alternatives before, but they always quickly devolved into Nazi spaces.

Lemmy was the first one that I'm aware of, which told Nazis to fuck off right from the beginning.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 years ago

They just have their own instance and are defederated by some but not all, which is the best solution as it means they stick to their part of the fediverse instead of hijacking subs that weren't right leaning in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah, it hasn't been overrun by Russian troll farms and AI yet like reddit and facebook

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

wweeew replies to absolutely nothing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

I once got dogpiled in r/lsd of all places for saying employers shouldn't be allowed to drug test for thc. I got swarmed for "being a druggie" in a sub about lsd.

I quit reddit for good not too long after that. What a fucking shithole.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Reality has a well known left leaning bias.

Conservatives and their politics do not have equal status. In this climate, "both sides" is toxic and suggest each is equally supported and viable. They are not. The right is an incredibly hateful minority end should be treated as such.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Wow. Way to paint everyone with a different thought process the same. Very human of you.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

Now you've convinced me! I really ought to have been the bigger man when my mom called me in the middle of the night to tell me that Trump's a martyr like Jesus and that the Democrats are performing demonic baby-eating rituals inside underground tunnels, and just let her keep screaming about me being a brainwashed woke communist because we just have little differences and we all need to get along.

Haha, nope. I want scorched earth on every one of those conspiracy nut fuckers holding right-wing parties around the balls, since they went after my family with their brainrot. I don't give a shit that a handful of people exist who don't explicitly support Jewish Space Laser Marge or Venmo Bribes Clarence, because y'all still vote lock step to keep these crazy loons around because Roe v. Wade is worth killing for $300 extra on next year's tax return.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Is it miserable?

Having your entire identity based on a political team?

Constantly being angry and thinking the worst about your peers?

Because it SOUNDS miserable.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Probably not as miserable as it is to have to spend all your energy pretending to not see how your political ideas have fully doomed humanity to drive itself extinct

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of people are using Lemmy either because they prefer federated web platforms to centralized, which makes it antithetical to corporate interests, or because they're opposed to Reddit's API policy, which was a blatant move to squeeze more money out of their users. Either way, Lemmy's appeal is very anti-capitalist, and since opposition to capitalism is a generally left-wing philosophy, I can totally see why most Lemmy users would be left-wing.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

This is my thought as well. Lemmy isn't what everyone is looking for. It's a free open source software project for creating a decentralized federated network of content aggregators. For most people that sentence doesn't make any sense nor do they really care. They just want a site they can doom scroll for hours.

The people who choose to use Lemmy are people who care about open source projects, care about decentralization of online platforms, or both. These types of people by their very nature support groups of people coming together collectively to do something big.

A collection of people working together towards a common goal without a strict hierarchy. You could say these people are community focused. Maybe we could call that communityism or something. Where people make rules as a group, or a union you could say. So yeah, no idea where the left lean is coming from.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

progression tends not to be conservative

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I'm afraid future will be conservative nevertheless due to the simple fact that they're the only ones making kids. I'm liberal myself but I don't have kids and will never have so my traits don't pass to the next generations. The conservative neighbours with 7 kids on the other hand..

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Politics being genetic, of course.

What?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Politics aren't genetic.

But they ARE communal. Where you grow decides 90% of what you believe in.

It's actually why I disagree with the top comment chain that smarter means more left leaning. I think it's more that left leaning communities have better education standards and lead to smarter generations. Cause and effect reversed.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

The ability to propagate the politics depends mightily on the success of the community though. It's sort of the other side of the 'brain drain' principle-- if people have to leave the community for educational or economic opportunity, they're probably not going to be able to reconstruct the same echo chambers.

Even when you see a preserved group within a larger population (think of Chinatowns and Little Italies), they're inherently getting a lot more cultural exchange than back in the home country.

A lot of the most self-destructive policies (neglecting education, running the environment into the ground, skate-where-the-puck-was-in-1972 economic policy) are just begging for decades of brain drain. The kids are going to leave because there's simply nothing there but the Gizzard Extraction Plant, and that got automated in 2032.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Hot take: you shouldn't subscribe to an ism.

You know what my political affiliation is? I'm an engineer. You want to solve a problem, you break it apart and fix the broken parts.

Abortion? Sure.

What's the problem? Women are pregnant and they don't wanna be.

Well how'd they get pregnant? They had unprotected sex, or they got raped(including all kinds here). Teach people how to use birth control and make it easy to get. Teach men about consent. Fund sex crime policing.

That takes care of the input side of the equation. What's next? Oh yeah, they don't wanna be pregnant. Why not? Because it could kill them, or wreck thier bodies. OK, well let's fund research and support for maternal mortality issues (including post-partum). If a pregnancy is likely to kill a woman (like double the normal mortality rate) she should be allowed to abort, even if she's not in immediate danger. You can't force somebody to risk their life.

Any other reasons? Because the fetus is severely deformed and will die in pain if allowed to make it to full term? Abortion, no question. Honestly any other position on this one is fucked up. I'm sure of very little when it comes to God, but I'm sure it doesn't want preventable suffering.

What else? Families can't afford a kid? Free high quality childcare for everyone. Free healthcare for kids and post-partum mothers (probably for everyone but that's a different topic).

What about adoption? Well, as they say, adoption is the answer to a different question. Just to cover all cases though, let's fund high-quality adoption services, including counseling for the birth mother for as long as she needs.

How do we pay for it all? Taxes. Taxes are good for society. Shut the fuck up and pony up your fair share. If you use our stuff, eat our food, drink our clean water, taxes are what you owe.

These are just off the top of my head. The real answers are probably way more complicated, but it's going to take work to figure it all out. This is how you fix a problem though. Lots of hard work to understand the whole thing, soup to nuts, and then you fix it all.

Does that make me a leftist?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Even Donald Duck doesnt subscribe to the abortion ban

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

It is driven entirely by the moderators. r/Canada got taken over by alt-right moderators which attracted alt-right redditors.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

Yeah but Reddit admins are more than happy to remove mods if they don’t like them.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I spent 15 minutes looking at all the links and clicking on a few.

North Korea is apparently a functioning democracy that gives its civilians everything they need. They're all extraordinary happy and love their fairly elected leader. The ones who defect only do it because they're filthy, selfish capitalists.

Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors, but the site of a skirmish between capitalist pig armed provocateurs who assaulted and killed soldiers in cold blood and acted surprised when the soldiers (with extraordinary restraint) defended themselves against their attacks, leading to just 200 deaths (including those poor innocent soldiers).

The Uighurs are apparently all happy. The Chinese government forcibly took thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and placed them in camps, all out of a selfless desire to help those poor, misguided souls. There's definitely no cultural oppression, no forced labor, and no human rights abuses. They're just all-inclusive resorts with free "cultural lessons" to help them understand both Uighur and Chinese culture. The CCP loves their Muslim citizens and definitely doesn't consider them terrorists in need of forced reeducation. All the horror stories we've heard from people whose family members were captured, or about forced organ harvesting, or rape and torture, they're all just unproven lies. The Chinese government even offers tours of their Uighur "resorts" to prove to the world that it's a diligent effort to support their Uighur brothers!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Tiananmen Square was apparently not a massacre of thousands of unarmed civilian student protestors,

Actually, that one is true, you can look it up on wikipedia (including plenty of reliable sources): The massacring was in side streets while the main protest on the square was dissolved "peacefully" by telling students "well, you can go, or we also have rifles here".

The whole thing was flanked by a power struggle within the CCP between reformers wanting to work with the students and hardliners, who ultimately won out but didn't go so far as massacring the students without giving them a chance to cave in and leave on their own. They wanted obedience, after all, not blood. And, culturally speaking, obedience is what they got out of it there has been no popular questioning of the overarching party line since then. Localised protests for or against local issues, sure, and even plenty of them and that's tolerated but nothing that could shake the system, and most of all it's not movements. The CCP is very keen on there being no movements but their own.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think there's a wide range of people on Lemmy too but the extreme right and extreme left have ended up on instances that have been defederated from the main group. So what you're seeing are the sensible, rational people, and in America such people are considered left wing I guess 😉

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

"FR" I need to take a look at the instances because I haven't encountered one yet

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

reddit had given into the "work the refs" strategy of the American right wing. That artificially elevated the voices of the right and suppressed the voices of the left. It's actually the case when you look at surveys and voting behaviors that right wing ideas are abysmally unpopular.

So when we're on an actually free platform that doesn't have an "engagement" based algorithm driving anger and division, with no one putting their thumb on the scale (or people who try getting defederated), "leftist" ideas come up.

The confusion reflected in the OP is the obvious outcome of the post Fairness Doctrine "both sides" media landscape. There really aren't as many right wing people as left wing. We are legion.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Reddit has banned most right wing subs and clearly has a pro left bias from the top. The userbase was more right wing before most right wing users were pushed off the platform.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Makes sense that leftists would be more likely to reject the platform that is centralizing power

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

centralisation of power is not an inherently right or left wing ideal, and some of the largest left wing communities on the fediverse are practically or outright authoritarian

the centralising power thats being opposed being a profit oriented organisation does make it more of a leftist thing, though still not exclusively

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I'd say it is the definitive distriction between left and right. These concepts mean things to me on a vacuum. Show me a "left wing community" that is authoritarian and I'll show you a community that isn't actually leftist.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago (1 children)

im not really interested in discussing your definition of a scotsman

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago

Ok but if you want to discuss politics with me in any way, which you seem to want, your need to know what I mean when I say words. Maybe get out of the kitchen?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

So was reddit a long long time ago. I watched and felt it shift to the centre then heavily to the right. Conservatives destroy everything in the world. I don't doubt your favourite communitues will start heavily skewing right soon enough. (edit:typo)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

You can’t actually be serious can you?

Reddit back in the early 2010s was infamous for worshipping Ron Paul. In the early and mid-2010s there were literally subreddits dedicated to racism. It was controversial in the 2010s to ban or censor anything, meanwhile today all of the big subreddits are run by a handful of mods who will ban anyone who says something they don’t like, or even ban people automatically if they comment in a sub they don’t like.

If you think Reddit is somehow more right-leaning today than in the 2010s, I think that might just mean that you became far more left-leaning since then and everything else looks right-leaning in comparison.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

Left wingers: "The right is full of neo-fascists who want to exploit natural resources, subjugate minorities, project their own pedophilia habits onto us, roll back the clock on women's rights, and are willing to lie, cheat, beg, borrow, and steal to get it all done!"

Right wingers: "The left is ANNOYING!"

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

Yup it is. There are a lot of communist techie people I guess. I still generally state my political opinions here though. Let them be downvoted.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

I posted some memes about communism, you should see the comments in there

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 years ago

You're absolutely clowning if you think you have the breadth of data available to confidently make such an assessment. This is, ironically, an incredibly Reddit moment.