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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- 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
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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.
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It's a misunderstanding of anarchy to equate it with either total chaos or total control. True anarchism is about opposing coercive authority, not creating a new, rigid authority that dictates what discourse is acceptable.
You can absolutely oppose bigotry and harm (which are coercive actions) without resorting to silencing anyone who doesn't conform to a specific ideological viewpoint. Genuine community defense is about voluntary association and preventing harassment, not about restricting the exchange of ideas.
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.
Start building what works now, where you are.
Every reform you like started as people organizing. The second the state touches it, it turns care into control. Prisons, cops, "rehab", all began as community ideas. Now they’re cages.
Anarchy isn’t "no system." It’s systems we control. Local, adaptable, replaceable. The state just standardizes failure.
And what I'm saying is "local" systems will lead to "local" pedophile cults. Which absolutely has happened in America already, and which I think any society should have a mechanism to stop.
The fact that they still exist in an authoritarian system hardly argues in favor of them.
You know they exist because when they're found they're punished and it's not normalized.