this post was submitted on 01 Mar 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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Eh?
Coercive authority is how we enforce rules that not everyone agrees with. Rules like "don't rape your kids". The answer shouldn't be "they get their own community but we kick them out of ours", right?
I really, really hope that having rules against molesting kids aren't the only thing keeping you from doing it.
You can hope all you want that I'm not a pedophile, and coincidentally I'm not, but some people are. For some people, the only reason they're not doing it is because they're in jail for doing it.
And that's my problem with all of these explanations of anarchy that I've heard. They all rely on people being fundamentally good and choosing to do the right thing together as a society. And most people are like that. But a not insignificant amount of others aren't.
How would anarchy handle those people?
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/24695927
Responded to someone else.
That doesn't actually answer the question. You make some very good points about the futility of our current mode of criminal punishment. I very much agree. But you offer no solutions that would require anarchy or benefit from it.
A centralized institution to implement all the changes that you mentioned is absolutely something a government would be more capable of.
I really, really, hope that you can understand that for some percentage of the population, morality isn't a guardrail, & that has been visible for millenia.
The person you're replying-to isn't the only person in the world, & evidence is that without coercive-force & enforcement & enforced-accountability, then DarkTriad IS GOING TO rule the world, no matter what, & making-believing isn't going to prevent that.
It isn't "mere coincidence" that NOT fighting organized-crime ends-up with them running the territory, and it being impossible to root them out.
Ask northern Mexico how it went for them with their insufficient-enforcement paradigm, & then they lost control of the territory, & can't get it back.
IF you have an immune-system, THEN you systematically assault & kill pathogens, within your own body.
THAT is the fundamental-fact of viability in natural, competitive ecologies, inhabited by pathogens, parasites, cancers, & their equivalents.
All the people who live in goddamn making-believing that "utopia is the natural default: all we have to do is remove all structure, & it will spontaneously arise, blessing all of our lives" are fucking incompetent at knowing actual-human-nature & actual-human-history.
Go without an immune-system, with AIDS, & no medication, & see how long it takes for pathogens to destroy your life.
Will you live multiple months? Your avg remaining lifespan should be somewhere between 1/30th & 1/100th of the average human lifespan, right? Something like that.
If, after they've done that, THEN they'd have validity to stand-on, about no civil-immune-system being required, except that they'd be gone, just as their making-believing wants us gone/nonviable.
"Snakes in Suits" had a perfect vignette in it:
a psychopath who'd been let out on a daypass butchered-up somebody.
they couldn't understand why that was a problem, because it had been ages since they'd done it last-time!!
Utopian morons who pretend that diversity never could extend to THAT kind of diversity, get other-people slaughtered.
And that isn't tolerable.
IF somebody wants to live in lala-land, THEN it is THER lives which ought be available for the monsters to butcher, NOT random innocent others.
Won't-grow-up should automatically get one removed from authority, including voting-authority.
This race, humankind, isn't viable, unless it grows-the-fuck-up, quickly.
& if it won't, then the universe is going to be scoured-of-it by next century.
All because ignorance is "more comfy" than growing TF up, .. & in the deathmatch between the 2, humankind sides with ignorance, obliterating upright-objective-integrity.
Bring it on: universe's LAW is Natural Selection, & we pretend we know reality, but our behavior contradicts what we say, consistently.
Universe is the only judge of whether any of us exist next century, NOT our making-believing.
Sorry to be absolutely fed-up with won't-think, no matter how fashionable & politically-acceptable it is, but humankind's on the traintracks, and the rumbling of the oncoming-train is thrumming the rails, now.
_ /\ _
There's more to human behavior than expressing ideas of correct behavior and violent enforcement of those ideas. Both of those are very limited, rely on oversimplified abstractions of how people are, and often have adverse side effects. What we are like and how we live is a complex product of how we engage and relate to our environment and the people around us; the best overall solutions to problems will be holistic improvements to that environment.
To extend your medical analogy, sometimes serious threats to your health call for antibiotics, but it is not the case that scouring your body of foreign organisms will make you healthier in the absence of an antibiotic-treatable threat, it's actually important to have those.
Bringing it back to how online spaces are organized, I think it's important for most people to feel like there is a way to express their genuine thoughts because if it's all just people finding different ways to repeat a dogma, that's a failure of communication, communication is not meaningfully happening, and an environment where you are unable to communicate is a shitty and dysfunctional one. That doesn't mean all spaces must accept all points of view, but sincere and open communication should generally be a priority, protecting that is what free expression is about.
You’re right, predators exist, and ignoring that is dangerous. But coercive systems don’t solve the root problem; they just move it around. Prisons don’t stop abuse, they concentrate it. Cops don’t end corruption, they institutionalize it. The illusion is that punishment equals justice, when really, it just perpetuates the cycle of suffering: hurt people hurt people, and systems that rely on domination will always produce more of both.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be consequences. It’s consequences without hate and domination. A world where harm is met with accountability and prevention at the root level, not exile and fear of punishment. The question shouldn't be "How do we punish?" but "How did we fail this person, and how do we stop failing each other?" That’s not softness. That’s seeing through the delusion of separation, the idea that "monsters" are a different species, not products of the same broken systems we all inherit. It's the admission that IF NOT FOR THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF YOUR GENETIC MAKEUP AND YOUR ENVIRONMENT, you would be exactly as dangerous and harmful. True safety doesn’t come from bigger cages. It comes from communities that refuse to abandon their own, even the difficult ones.
And yes there are cases where the only answer is to keep someone harmful separate from the rest but it's possible to do that out of love and care towards those that they would harm, NOT out of hate towards them as a demonized "other". I'm talking about being pre-emptive, which requires ability for people to have open discourse. It requires the ability to rationally look at horrible behavior and address the causes.
Anarchism is not about zero enforcement of rules. Especially wise ones like don't dittle kids...