this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
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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. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Adolf Hitler has been called the most documented human in history though

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

He's not really known for being a bad leader, to be fair. Kind of the opposite. A bad leader wouldn't have been able to rally an entire country to commit genocide.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago

So you mean "those with the least ability to lead". Yet Trump is still somehow running and he can't even wipe his own ass.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yes he is. His military decision making was thankfully shit, his hatred of Jews caused a brain drain ahead of the war; nuclear research wasn’t prioritized because it was considered a “Jewish science”. Also his rearmament of Germany was completely unsustainable and would have collapsed the German economy if not for the onset of the war. Effective demagoguery =/= successful leadership.

If I set out to make a thousand year empire that only lasted 11 years would you consider that successful leadership?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)

He was great at leading them to lose. I am only defining leadership in the sense of "leading people." He was great at that. Just not at tactics or strategy or sane ideas.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Okay, so to be clear, your critera for "great" leadership doesn't include any sort of decision-making skills nor effective delegation when said leader is out of their depth?

If I worked at a company that had leaders making a long series of bad calls at a tactical and/or strategic level, for instance, I shouldn't call that "bad leadership"?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago

You're overanalyzing a comment intended to be humorous, dude.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I was thinking about the future. Think of a cornered Hitler with access to hydrogen bombs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Considering a lot of what we know about him is later propaganda, it still fits.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I think the idea you're driving at is that the worst leaders in human history will drive us to extinction. That's not the scary thought to me. The scary thought to me is that decent or even good leaders might do the same when put in the wrong position. There are plenty of cases where individual rational decisions combine to disastrous consequences for all involved. I wonder if it's possible for humanity to continually avoid such survival-threatening prisoners' dilemmas...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Wow that's even scarier than what I had in mind. Good intentions all the way down.

The fucked up thing about humanity is that we invented our own destruction, put a shiny red button on top and wrote on it "do not touch". As if there would ever be a scenario where pressing it would make sense. And seeing the rethoric coming out of Russia these days, I can't help but wonder. Damn, I guess this is what my parents lived with at the height of the Cold War?