this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
530 points (96.0% liked)
Showerthoughts
32870 readers
1508 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
Why do people talk about law as if it has any sort of substance? If all the books were burnt we would only be able to faithfully reproduce the science books, everything else is just some stuff we made up.
In 1241 the danish king signed the first major law of the land. The law itself is pretty much outdated, but its preamble is still a very useful explanation of 'why laws?'
Allow me to quote it fully and then mark a few bits that I consider important in 2025.
Now, this, of course is just a tiny local law based on ideas from the countries further to the south of denmark. But it holds some concepts that all who dabble in lawmaking ought to consider.
That's an interesting origin story. I suspect these ideas came about and came to possess a utility as larger societies formed. Nobody needs to be told that murder and stealing are wrong, we know it instinctively. It has been shown that primates understand this concept generally.
One problem with large societies is that customs becomes entrenched over time. We keep following the same rules and forget where they came from, we mistake the menu for the food. We cannot turn to a naturalistic solution to this problem, where everything is eating everything else because that amounts to fascism. Instead we must settle for a kludge where rich people get a different type of justice than do the poor, sentencing is more punitive before lunch and many other idiosyncrasies. My point is, I don't want to forget that a menu is just a menu. Some things will always be true and the law is not one of those things.