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:
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.
This is why the US ditched the draft after the Vietnam War.
The only time we ever had a meaningful anti-war movement was when people were forced to send their own kids to die. Having a "volunteer" force eliminates that. The excuse is always that people signed up for it, and people just ignore that it's the poor and minorities who are still effectively pressed into military duty due to manufactured lack of opportunity.
keeping college education and health care expensive is used as motivation for young people to enlist despite lack of conscription, as they see their only opportunity to have those fees waived
The draft wasn’t ditched. The selective service has been active for decades, it isn’t supposed to be left active unless somebody is going to use the draft.
The excuse is always that people signed up for it
not on the other side though
I'm a veteran with combat experience and people look at me like i'm a crazy person when I advocate against wars. It's really hard to get people to realize that someone who's been to war (and isn't a psychopath) doesn't want anyone to have to go to war. It breaks everything and everyone.
Thank you for doing something I couldn't.
people look at me like i'm a crazy person when I advocate against wars
You might consider finding new friends.
username... checks out?
I have a brother who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and while he's always been an absolute chud, it was a very radicalizing experience. He came back with PTSD and then started "self-medicating" with meth. He made our family's lives a living hell, like we were 24/7 911 operators, always waiting for the day he was going to act on his paranoid delusions. He finally went out to some innocent family's house with a gun and pulled on the cops who'd followed him and got shot in the arm. He's recovered somewhat, but still has relapses.
These experiences are the most traumatic thing that has ever happened to me or any of my family. Still it pales in comparison to what he experienced, which in turn pales in comparison to what the people living in those countries experienced. My dumbass brother chose to go over there, but they didn't choose to be born there, and the casualty rates were so much higher for them.
People look at casualty rates (if they bother to) and imagine that that's the full price of war. But my brother isn't on any of those casualty lists, because his wounds were "only" psychological. The true scale of harm is literally incomprehensible.
I remember one night that I had come to visit and I went out to eat with my parents, thinking, hoping, that for one night things could be peaceful. Then the texts started coming in. Another crisis, more schizophrenic accusations, veiled threats, reading into every little thing. I remember the tears streaming down my mother's face as she tried not to make a scene at the restaurant.
Whenever I think about any of the people responsible for those wars, I take what I felt in that moment and multiply by a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as I'm capable of, and it's still not enough.
The government and media do such a good job sheltering the public from what war really means. So many people just treat it like a movie or a video game because they know that more than they know about reality. The media rarely covers the human cost, especially of the other side. And so when I come on to Lemmy and vent about how war is bad and we should build schools and hospitals instead of tanks and bombs, people call me a tankie and accuse me of having some secret agenda. Because real life action movies are so cool, who could possibly have a problem with them?
Calling for schools and healthcare instead of tanks and bombs is not tankie crap. Tankies want the other side to have tanks, instead of the US.
Eww.
There's no faster way to get called a tankie than opposing the construction of more tanks.
Opposing the construction of more tanks necessarily means arguing that those tanks are unnecessary. Arguing that tanks are unnecessary means arguing that the supposed threats our rulers want us to be afraid of are not as significant as they'd have us believe. And if you're arguing that an "enemy" country is not as much of a threat as our rulers claim, then it's trivial for someone to accuse you of minimizing the threat because you actually support the enemy.
This is how it's always been. I opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the start. Back then, instead of "tankie" they called you "terrorist sympathizer." People who opposed the wars in Vietnam and Korea were called "reds" or "pinkos." Those who opposed WWI were accused of being "Bolsheviks." Some dude once criticized Rome's violence and was accused of plotting violent insurrection and got crucified for it. Same shit, different day.
I guess I'm a tankie then. Fuck the wars, fuck this administration, we need education and healthcare more than anything. We need a government that supports its own people rather than trying to obliterate all others.
I think it's your defense of China that's getting you called a tankie.
I don't want to go to war with any country. I am also willing to refute misinformation about any country. Those two things constitute 99% of what "defending" means in this context.
Why limit yourself to China? Just say, "In North Korea the government forces everyone to eat each other's brains and we need to invade to get them to stop," I'll say that's not true and we shouldn't, and now you can attack me for "defending North Korea." Surely there's worse countries than China out there for you to pick from.
Thank you for sharing this.
I'm sorry you, your family and specially your brother had to go throw this.
Your brother is a victim also.
For each casualty in war there is at least a dozen people's lives that won't be the same any more.
When the Germans invaded my country in 1940, someone in the street I currently live in was standing behind the window, looking at the approaching soldiers. (I live real close to the border). The Germans, upon seeing him, shot him and he died right there. There's no memorial, no history book where this guy is mentioned. I only know about this through oral history, my grandfather told my dad and he told me. History is always about the leaders and the armies, never about the civilians.
People always think stuff is just fairy tales and sing along songs until they're hit with it.
There are exceptions though. But for most it's true.
People always think stuff is just fairy tales and sing along songs until they're hit with it.
The current anti-vax movement would not have flourished in a generation that lived through widespread polio and measles.
Yup, I’ve said this for years. To antivaxxers, those old diseases are boogeymen. They legitimately don’t believe the diseases are bad, because “well people survived for thousands of years before” (survivorship bias) and the fact that they’ve never been personally affected by it.
They never lost a childhood friend to measles. They never saw entire hospital wings full of kids in iron lungs because of polio. They never watched a friend or family member go deaf because of a childhood case of mumps. They never had a brother, uncle, etc have to come to terms with being unable to have kids, because a childhood case of mumps left them sterile.
But you know what is real to the antivaxxers? Autism. Everyone knows (or has seen) someone who was severely autistic. It doesn’t matter if the link between autism and vaccines is fake; the imagined threat of autism is a bigger threat in their minds than the very real threat of these diseases.
I dunno, there were pretty big anti mask movements back in the 1918 “Spanish” Influenza pandemic. I think it’s completely possible that ignorance can persist, even in the face of obvious oblivion.
It’s easy to think that people in the past were just different. That they could handle the brutalities of the past in a way we don’t.
The truth is that they were all humans just like us. They were just born in a different age.
US just haven't suffered any big wars on their soil for too long and lost the touch of true misery replacing it with trans issues and shit.
not since the civil war, and that was half-assed because the confederates were allowed to exists even then.
R/combatfootage is where I sent the blow hards yelling for a US civil war last year.
And if we do war, the first to go are the young and poor.
"You people of the South don't know what you are doing! This country will be drenched in blood and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war, you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing!"
An oddly prescient quote for our time, I would say.
To institute a draft, Congress would have to update the Military Selective Service Act with specific references to the current conflict, and then the president would have to sign it...
Or, apparently, Trump could just bypass all of that with an Executive Order, because why bother with following the law? Also, it seems, he could make the ages anything he wants, whereas now it's ages 18 to 25.
Americans in particular are clueless, war is a game to them and it’s always fought on somebody else’s soil. They need it to come to them for once, maybe if it’s their homes on fire they will finally get it
War. War never changes.
Sure, but when certain countries are targeting civilians intentionally there is good reason to be horrified. You know, the ones that targeting schools and universities and religious buildings and it isn't just the normal horrific collateral damage.
Look into any major war in human history. This is just modern and highly covered. Its horrific and terrible but completely in line with historical war. Civilians are fodder for casualty numbers. Believing/preaching this is different from other war action in the past (atrocities/crimes/whatever) is ignorance or performative. It's always been horrific and always will be. Carthage, moguls, every dark ages seige, Dresden, Tokyo firebombings, Japanese nuclear bombs, My Lai, Kosovo, Darfur, North Korean bombings, Iran-Iraq war(1980s), Yugoslavia bombings (1999), battle of Grozny. I could go on for literal pages. This isn't a country thing its a human thing and until thats accepted and addressed it'll never stop.
Americans aren't keen on reading history. It's partly how we ended up electing a man who paid smarter people to write his term papers.
Can't say we're particularly keen on empathy either.
hold up. you're telling me all the movies from the past century that showed war were lying to me??!
/s
there's a reason why Vietnam was both the most televized and most protested war in American history.
Call of duty is actually a bad thing. It gamifies war and doesn't mention the true horrors.