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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 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
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- 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
- Posts must be original/unique
- 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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Your insistence that language can only be prescriptive and never descriptive is honestly offensive in its anti-intellectualism and dismissal of the importance of truth and accuracy. We can’t solve problems which we can’t accurately assess, and we can’t stop the actual ecofascists without acknowledging that they are the ones who hold power in most of the world. Their narrative is unfortunately the future that is most likely to come to pass because they are in the position to ensure that it does, not because those of us who would like to see them stopped recognize the difficulty of doing so.
Your main argument seems to be that we shouldn’t ever try to make value-neutral, factually-based assessments of probabilities, and instead we should only propagandize. This is literally the exact mistake China made in the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Doing so lost them a generation of scientists who either fled or were killed for insisting that truth and accuracy were more important than narrative. It is ultimately no different than Trump banning certain news organizations from White House press events because he doesn’t feel like they portray him positively often enough. This is magical thinking, end it doesn’t end well regardless of where you stand on the political spectra.
Speaking of which, you throw around the term “liberal” like a 20 year old that decided to skip Das Kapital and go straight to the writings of cold-war tankie academics that can’t see the forest for the trees. In the most classical sense, I am a liberal simply because I am anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy, and pro-science. But at the same time, I am a Marxist who believes that the means of production should belong to the workers (not the state), and an Anarchist who dislikes the coercive nature of social hierarchy. All of those positions are born out of the understanding that truth is more important than narrative, and honest analysis is fundamental to solving problems. Persuasion, if deceptive, is always a hindrance, and the need to change facts to better prop up an ideology is the very foundation of fascism. In chastising us for not focusing on your preferred narratives, you embody that which you claim to oppose.
There is no such thing as anarcho-Marxism. You do not know what neither of these terms mean if unironically believe you are both.
The only plausible way one could justify anarchism in a Marxist framework is if they submitted a thesis demonstrating a flaw in Marx's analysis of capitalism's development and showed that the trends he identified will not actually occur, but rather, capitalism trends towards the foundations of a new mode of production conducive to anarchism instead.
But if you point this out, most anarchists' heads explode, and they have no idea what you're even talking about. I remember asking one other self-identified anarcho-Marxist for this analysis, and he looked at me and said, with complete sincerity, "what does the development of capitalism have to do with socialism?" Indeed, I recall another telling me that the development of capitalism has nothing to do with socialism, because the systems are "different," so of course we're just going to change it all so it doesn't matter.
Do you actually understand what I'm talking about at all?
I'm happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
Yeah, no. I am familiar with poststructuralism, and even read some Foucault a couple of decades back. I’m also well aware of its historical ties to relativity and (to a lesser extent) quantum physics, and that, similarly to how those discoveries ruptured ideas of objective reality in physics, poststructuralism did so for objective meaning and the primacy of authorship in literature, history, and other humanities.
Poststructuralism is very useful for understanding how fascism takes hold and the power of propaganda. It allows us to better understand how Western colonialists shaped ideas of race to enforce their own supremacy. What it does not do is demand that we all choose to obfuscate and intentionally distort perspectives to obtain our goals. I would actually argue that, on the contrary, one of the important lessons of poststructuralism is that we should focus on the factual if we want to address the world’s problems in a non-zero-sum manner - it is often our attempts to codify subjective meaning into false narratives of supposed truth that are the source of strife and anomie when a society (or humanity at large) is capable of materially supporting itself.
All of which is to say, in a thoroughly roundabout and unnecessarily academic way, that’s its fucking annoying when you put words in people’s mouths and make assumptions about their beliefs based on things they didn’t even say. Please learn to take simple statements at face value, and don’t assume that everything is said for the purpose of trying to shape people’s understanding of the world. A prediction is not the same as an endorsement, and an acknowledgement of factual events is not a value judgement as to whether that reality is desireable or not.