this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2026
78 points (91.5% liked)
Showerthoughts
40155 readers
1448 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:
- 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.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So what if it is?
It doesn't change the fact that they need to be involuntarily committed for rehabilitation and have their assets seized. For their health.
Affluenza is a capitalist framing. We don't need to capitulate to capitalist framings (not even the tiniest amount) to say that the capitalists need to have their assets seized and be involuntarily committed for rehabilitation 🙂.
The "monster" framing precludes the idea that they even can be rehabilitated. Monsters don't get healing, they just need to be put away or executed. That's still an improvement over letting them run rampant, but it's a waste.
Maybe this makes me a bad anarchist, but it truly feels like capitalists are monsters that can't be rehabilitated. Like I really want to believe that everyone can be rehabilitated with enough help, but can we really rehabilitate the few thousand people who are like Epstein in finite time?
I mean I think you make a good critique here.
Even if we can't, should we not try? It's only, as you say, a few thousand. We can spare the resources to keep them locked up/under house arrest/whatever for the rest of their natural lives if we must.
If we must execute people to heal the wounds inflicted by their sheer callousness, then so be it. But I don't really accept the argument that anyone is "irredeemable" without even trying.
Of course we should try, that why I said it feels like capitalists can't be rehabilitated, not that they definitely cannot be rehabilitated and we shouldn't even try.
Yes I'm definitely biased to predict that almost all of the capitalists wouldn't succeed in even attempting to rehabilitate themselves, but I'm absolutely not willing to close the door for rehabilitation either.
Ah ok. That's not how I understood your comment initially, but that's reasonable.
There are degrees of sickness, right? An asshole business owner who feels entitled to run red lights and speed because they're white and have a nice car and know the police chief's son probably doesn't need life imprisonment or execution.
I mean, I wouldn't really be too upset if they were, but it just seems wasteful.
On the other end, people in the Epstein files might need to be hospitalized for more than a single human lifetime.
Absolutely, 1000%. And the example you gave, 1000% with you on the possibility of rehabilitation there. Frankly, I think that 99.9999% of people can be rehabilitated in finite time. The other 0.0001% are literally the billionaires and their cronies. (And I believe that this is numerically in the ballpark, since the billionaires number about 3000 and there are about 8.2 billion humans on this planet, and the figure I gave is an overestimate to include their non-billionaire cronies [e.g., Jeffrey Epstein; I believe that he was, numerically, strictly not a billionaire when he died].)
Yeah that's really who I'm talking about when I have my doubts about rehabilitation for a very small subset of people, and I believe that worldwide communism would make this subset asymptotically vanish ("asymptotically" to account for the presence of serial killers).
Maybe they can't be rehabilitated. Maybe they can. Idk. I'm not here to make that call. All I'm saying is that they make for very interesting case-study.
I don't think you can get to any level of extreme wealth without some amount of personality disorders. Is this what happened when those personality disorders are left untreated, or worse, enabled?