I think that's more the nature of social media than anything else.
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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it's the nature of people.
they love to dog pile on the 'outsider'. and they also love to circle up the wagons over a perceived threat.
so what happens is outsiders form their own little tightly knit and hostile tribes. social media greatly expanded the specificity by which people identify themselves. so you have raw milk nutjobs jerking each other off over their 'pasturization is an evil conspiracy to ruin our immune systems' inside their little bubbles and feeling like big smart geniuses because everyone else is an dumb sheep who has been duped by Louis Pasteur's evil invention.
Mommy and daddy keep going on about horizontalism but then they make me go to bed even when I don't want to >:(
I mean this may be decentralized but its still social media. Its gonna be a cesspool by nature of social media.
the shit always rises to the top.
and to find the good stuff you have to wade through it.
This
No one is making you be here. You can click a button and start your own community or even spin up your own server and if your modding policies are that much better people will switch. ...or none or very few of the users like what you say and the mod just happens to be the one responsible for telling you.
Is it frustrating to be part of the outgroup? Sure. Is it frustrating to have an opinion people dislike or don't think is worth leaving their ingroup for? Sure. But that's just called being a weirdo. Lots of people are weirdos. I'm a weirdo. In fact it's often hard for me to get certain things done or find certain products. Bigelow doesn't stock my favorite flavor in most stores because it's not popular enough. That's not oppression that's just being unpopular.
Being a weirdo isn't for the faint of heart. Dialectal behavior therapy changed my life and teaches four ways to approach a problem. 1. Stop seeing it as a problem. 2. Fix the problem (conform). 3. Accept the problem. 4. Stay whiny. I tend to vacillate between 1 and 3 (sigh sadly and order my tea online) but I spend little time engaging in #4 (bitching online about how it's other people's fault).
I'm not even going to look into your specific ideology. With people who say these things I often regret finding out.
what's frustrating the most is how people hate you for factual true opinions, because those truths don't align with their delusional worldview.
true, it's ultimately about popularity. And what's popular... is often stupid, wrong, and cruel. Dialectical behavior won't do anything when you are getting harassed and assaulted, and increasingly we live in a world where people are become not just disagreeing and segregating, but straight up calling violent and bloodthirsty to those they disagree with.
Lemmy is rife with very pro-violence people. Who also claim they are anti-violence. But you know, only anti-violence against the 'good' people. Violence totally col against the 'bad' people.
factual true opinions
oh god that's it; you're an utterly insufferable person. And learning how to constructively approach injustice by conserving and directing your energy towards actions that will make the most real difference is a core goal of the therapy. Either put in the effort to become someone people want to be around or accept people don't want to be around you.
right, so if an external reality gets in the way of my feelings, I should simple ignore and or deny that it exists? if someone makes me feel bad they are bad person! such a constructive and mature way to approach other people.
I have no problem being around people who acknowledge there is a world outside of themselves. I don't get along with people who think the world is merely an extension of their feelings, or that any information that doesn't make them feel fuzzy is horrible and evil.
I mean i'm glad you don't think facts exist or reality exists outside of the thoughts in your head, and therefore nobody else is real, but most well-adjusted people don't engage in solipsism. If the acknowledgement of other people existing who are different than you is so painful, the issue isn't them. It's you.
also calling for violence isn't a constructive approach injustice, it's authoritarianism and bullying. just like you resorted to harassment and name calling in reply to my comment, per ad hominem nonsense because I said something you find upsetting and dislike. you can't create 'justice' by perpetuating injustice on other people, but if you live in a world of your own emotions, nothing like justice even exists. because justice isn't a feeling, it's a concept that is suppose to get you outside of your own monkey-brain way of thinking.
This reads like a freeze peach kinda thought.
Are you really comparing a completely optional forum to a society where people can and will point guns at you?
"They don't let me spread transphobic rhetoric in this optional community online, literally 1984!"
Anybody who sees Authority as a responsability is naturally averse to having it because they would feel the weight of it and would feel bad if, whilst holding Authority, they made a mistake and others got in some way hurt because of that.
Those who see Authority as power to advance something (be it their own personal upsides or some idea they believe in) with little or no feeling of responsability towards others (be it not all directly or they've suppressed it by convincing themselves their actions are somehow "for the greater good" hence any bad they do with the authority has that grand excuse to salve their conscience), have no such aversion to holding authority.
That posture towards authority of people of the second kind applies more broadly to all manner of things which serve to pressure, convince or manipulate others (Authority is generally power force something on others) so of course they also have no aversion to using other such tools, including using ideology to manipulate others, and sometimes that means passing themselves as somebody who holds a certain ideology, and that includes Anarchism.
So yeah, you're going to find that certain people who parrot Anarchist talk aren't in fact people whose Principles mean they're naturally Anarchist but rather people being Performative Anarchists in order to fit-in and manipulate others driven by entirelly different Principles, and such people are absolutelly pro-Authority as long as they're in control of it.
In summary, there are two types of people who seem Anarchist:
- Those whose personal principles means they are averse to people controlling other people. There are naturally against any form of Authority.
- Those who want to control other people and are in a specific situation where Theatre Of Anarchism can advance their objectives. These are against forms of Authority which hinder their objectives but are in favor of forms of Authority which advance their objectives.
IMHO, the best way to spot the second kind from the first is to look for the often repetition of common slogans and having a superficial level of ideology with no actual tracing back to personal principles since they learned the ideology at an intellectual level rather than being drived by their Principles - i.e. what feels Right and what feels Wrong - to finding that formal ideology as something that fits them.
By the way, this method to identify the real ones from the performers also works for all other ideologies and even things like Faith - start paying attention and you'll spot all manner of teatrics around ideologies all across the entire political spectrum as well as in people professing some faith or other.
Just wanted to say this is a fantastic take. 100% agree.
Too many people want to argue in the sense they are a 'greater' authority than you, to try to force you into agreement with them. And generally lack any ability to genuinely reflect on themselves, their actions, or the flaws/contradictions often inherent in their ideology. So ultimately they just fall back on slogans as self-evident truths that must be preached and obeyed.
That's very different than actually reading the source material of an ideology. How many Anarchists have read Bakunin? Anytime someone claims to be anarchist I love asking them that and looking at the total look of confusion on their face...
Looking at you, leftymemes
ugh
groupthink central, do NOT divert an inch from the state sanctioned opinions, OR ELSE
It's all fun and games until you say that China is wearing socialism as a cloak the same way America wears Christianity or Israel wears anti-semitism.
People's takes on China here are so clueless and weird.
Xi is essentially a dictator at this point. Like Putin, he has systematiclly consolidated power over the years and increasingly removed any federation of government power that was more in line with socialist ideals and power structures. China was more socialist 30 years ago than it is today, and the USSR was far less centralized than Russia is now. But we can't let the facts get in the way of the ideals.
Israeli's problem is also the same, the consolidation of power in a single person that increasingly fails to manifest the democratic ideas on which it argues its cultural superiority.
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Okay, I'll bite. I need to add to my block list anyway.
Y'all have heard of the Nazi Bar problem, right? Paradox of intolerance? Which turns out not to be a paradox after all? You should def look that one up rather than waiting for me to type it all out.
People like to refer to the paradox of tolerance but always skip out on the inconvenient bit:
""Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.
— In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.
We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.""
If you are not able to rationally argue why we shouldn't be bigoted, I don't know what to tell you.
We are all bigoted.
The idea is we have institutions that minimize our bigotry by not being subject to the judgements of any one particular person and their biases.
People who claim some absolute stance of non-bigotry... are basically the most likely to engage in bigotry because they deny it is even possible they could be.
People who whinge on about the the paradox of intolerance are always cunts who want to have a reason to beat people up because it makes them feel big. It's a stupid argument either way, because there is no such thing as unlimited tolerance, and no society is ever 'free'.
i mean, seems you're also conveniently skipping over the part that says:
as long as we can counter them by rational argument
it's right there in the text:
popper states outright, that there are some ideologies and by extension people, that straight-up cannot be argued with. these, therefore, must be excluded from the community, and thereby form the limit to tolerance that must be enforced.
people really love to misinterpret popper...
what goes along nicely with the tolerance of paradox is the quote about anti-semites being entirely aware of how absurd their position truly are:
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
take both popper and sartre together into consideration of a larger context and it becomes abundantly obvious that a certain minimum of intolerance is strictly necessary for a functional society.
what happens when all checks on speech are removed can be clearly seen in the rotting corpses of facebook and twitter... it's disastrous.
One problem with bigots is they dont care about truth or logic. Its a waste of time to continually argue the same points over and over again with people who refuse to learn or think.
But remember, be sure that your point is logical and truthful, and not parroting talking points in spite of them being repeated all around you.
Being truthful and logical is not always a popular position. Some would say it's not even often the popular position.
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i think people not knowing how to actually win an argument against a bigot is exactly the reason there are so many these days
shit's easy. not that they'll admit defeat but getting them babbling irrational nonsense takes very little debating skills. and when they inevitably start throwing ad hominems, then the mods have legitimate grounds to kick them out.
"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves in to."
Though it is occasionally possible to point out how their arguments don't stand up to scrutiny and get them to engage on it.
Only works with the ones not doing it on purpose, however.
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Y’all have heard of the Nazi Bar problem, right?
Bullshit genetic or reductio ad hitlerum fallacy. Carried to its logical conclusion, anything tainted by Nazis (eg, the universe) is a Nazi bar. Have you considered finding yourself another universe to inhabit, since this one is irredeemably tainted? While we may argue the universe is far too vast to be a "Nazi bar", so is the internet or any "platform".
Worse, censoring ideas gives them covert power. It doesn't discredit them or strip them of power like challenging them in a public forum could. It's also a disservice to better ideas
- it withholds opportunities for people to become competent enough advocates to discredit bad ideas
- instead of deradicalize opponents, it drives their discussion elsewhere: they continue to radicalize & grow opposition unchallenged.
Censorship is incompetent advocacy: it mistakes suppressing the expression of bad ideas for effective advocacy that directly discredits bad ideas, develops intellectual growth, and steers toward better ideas.
Paradox of intolerance?
The bogus social media version subverting the original message or the real one?
text alternative
The True Paradox of Tolerance
By philosopher Karl Popper[^popper-source]
You think you know the Popper Paradox thanks to this? (👉 comic from pictoline.com)
Karl Popper: I never said that!
Popper argued that society via its institutions should have a right to prohibit those who are intolerant.
Karl Popper: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.
For Popper, on what grounds may society suppress the intolerant? When they "are not prepared to meet on the level of rational argument" "they forbid their followers to listen to rational argument … & teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols". The argument of the intolerably intolerant is force & violence.
We misconstrue this paradox at our peril … to the extent that one group could declare another group 'intolerant' just to prohibit their ideas, speech & other freedoms.
Grave sign: "The Intolerant" RIP
Underneath it lies a pile of symbols for Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Black power.
A leg labeled tolerance kicks the Gay Pride symbol into the pile.
Muchas gracias a @lokijustice y asivaespana.com Karl Popper opposed censorship/argued for free inquiry & open discourse.
I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise.
Censorship (or willfully blinding ourselves to information) plays no part in suppressing authoritarianism.
Only cowards fear words. Words are not the danger. It's the dangerous people whose words we fail to discredit.
[^popper-source]: Source: The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl R. Popper
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The anarchist code of conduct
This is very true - I usually refer to it as "BOFH behavior". I think it stems from many people who end up hosting or moderating feeling that they themselves have been marginalised before so "now they're going to show them!".
A great example is a Mastodon instance where if you don't agree with the site's admin they'll block you at the server level instead of from their personal account. The belief is that if they have an opinion that opinion must then be enforced for everyone else under their control too.
You know that anarchism doesn't mean no rules right? It just means no rulers, but that's not how it works on Lemmy or any social media of this type for that matter.
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I think "being able to select which community(ies) one is part of and having the ability to opt out" vs being born into it is a key differentiator.
Fwiw, I'm not part of any moderating teams.
I have a pretty low opinion of moderators generally.
In the vast majority of cases, the people who actually want to be moderators are precisely the worst kinds of people to do the job.
Of course there are exceptions but all too often they're doing it because they like the power and attention.
Sounds like you'd make an excellent moderator!
Because who do you think moderators and admins are? Literally just people trying to look after computer systems for the benefit of everyone who wants to use and support that system.
It is very thankless and unrelenting work. I've done it for decades and right now I'm not doing it at all because it's too exhausting to have as a background thread with the rest of my family life.
If you have a low opinion of mods then seriously, try being one for a few years. It's a hard sell without much good about it. Mods are just people taking turns at a job very few actually want to do.
Volunteer admins and moderators are really why we have any public internet at all.
Yeah that's fair.
Being an administrator is different, you don't volunteer for that task because you like the attention.
I’ve done it for decades and right now I’m not doing it at all because it’s too exhausting to have as a background thread with the rest of my family life.
I feel this. I used to volunteer for some local groups but don't presently as I have a young family and it's all consuming.
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