"Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception" - Carl Sagan
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2025
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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.
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- 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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various assassinations, the brink of nuclear apocalypse, an unpopular political war away from home that caused a social movement, and political espionage.
It's been a crazy week.
You're not wrong about all the things that have happened, but there are lots of countries around the world over that same timeline who have had a much worse go of things. The US has been the most powerful country in the world, so what happens here has an outsized impact, however this seems like just another facet of "American exceptionalism," that the bad things that the US has done or had happen are somehow more special than all the bad things that have happened everywhere else.
It's like we built on top of a haunted Native American burial ground or something
EXACTLY
It's also already gone through everything happening right now.
Fuck America. Sincerely, Canada.
You can only drop something so many times before it actually breaks, and we never really fixed the cracks caused by the civil war.
Reconstruction ended early after Johnson took office and as a result we didn't end segregation in the south until a century after the war ended.
There are people alive now who still remember segregation and some of them liked it that way. And now they're empowered, both metaphorically and literally, thanks to the gerontocracy we've created.
We're going to tear ourselves apart trying to undo 60 years of progress over the next 4 years.
I feel like if we pull through this as an intact nation it's not going to be recognizable as the nation we grew up in until long after we're all gone. It's going to take generations to clean up this mess.
Agree 100%.
Although I don't just blame the old people, a lot of them were hippies.
We're still the same divided country we were in the civil war, racists and oligarchs vs people of better character.
Trump has, even at this early point, permanently changed the political realities of this country. He will be remembered for elevating the presidency to the point where the rule of law no longer applies.
I don't think this is only true for your nation. I mean, I'm from Belgium, not only did this nation massacre a lot of people in the Congo, it also provided the uranium for the Manhattan Project and the ensuing Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima.
It's not (per se) nations that get the worst out of us, it's the power structures controlling such nations.
No, I'm sure. But we seem like we're on some accelerated timeline or something. Gotta be awful quickly.
To the point of the one above you, Belgium is technically younger than the United States.
But honestly, the only reason we really know how messed up a lot of these things are, is because of people digging into these things and finding out that power corrupts. We need transparency, integrity and honesty if we are to get to a point where we don't read the news with existential dread.
I think most of governing at this point is cleaning up messes from before and creating new messes along the way because we are incapable of solving problems sustainably.
Take immigration, which has become a widespread issue all throughout the west. Rather than figuring out how to stop people from wanting to run away to our countries, we prefer to exile these people, separate them from our society and, if at all possible, just make them not come into our countries at all. I'm not saying there's a simple solution, I'm just saying we are so focused on combating symptoms, we completely ignore the actual cause of issues.
Agreed, most every nation has survived horrible things and quite a few have done horrible things. It's not just the US.
Are you saying that the country has survived through things, so you don't worry any more? Not sure if I understand your logic.
It's like people who say that you shouldn't get vaccinated, you should just get the disease so you don't get the disease.
It is more like saying that if you survived a stroke, you will live forever.
I am saying that the present situation is not out of character for the USA.
We are the Florida of the world.
I don't see how America is special relative to "the world". Many countries have gone through much more than that.
We're doing the disaster speedrun.
Japan might be the expert: Totally decimated in WWII, including two nuclear bombings. Earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, volcanic eruptions. Fukushima diaster. Tokyo Sarin gas attack. Economic crash, ageing population, mass suicides.
Without WWII the US would hardly be a relevant world power like it is today. The US minted its dominance in WWII by producing so much and pushing the world to adopt its standards in the aftermath. Of most everything, from goods to language. If it weren’t for that, diplomacy would probably still be conducted in French, and screws wouldn’t have 60° angle threads
WWII was bad for the world, but literally the best thing to ever happen to the US probably
I don't see that as cursed, but rather that humanity is so resilient no matter the size of the evil, humanity always endures. And it's not just the US, but pretty much any population in any region going back to thousands of years. The God that helps survive all this evil is called Oneness (cooperation & empathy). And that we are the product of strong ancestors.
PS: we'll be alright.