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.
There's no justice system that can withstand loyalists in every position of power.
Trump is doing illegal things. Congress, and SCOTUS need to put him in a cell, they won't do that because too many memebers of those groups are also owned by the same people as Trump.
And a functional taxing system. And functional market rules.
Really if we just made half of our systems functional we'd be in much better shape
Any systems would already be an advantage. Except of systematic corruption. That one works just fine.
That's only partly true. Even if Trump had been locked up, and the courts hadn't said he can do whatever he wants, there could still be someone almost the same as him doing a ton of bad stuff right now.
Of course it is a disaster when the judicial branch fails, but we need to keep that in context of the complete lack of limits on campaign financing, of money coming from corporations and billionaires getting into politics, and how that guarantees the system will be corrupt in short order. In other words, Citizens United was one of the big steps towards the present disaster in the US. You simply cannot have a stable government when the ultra-rich have all of the power. And that, pushes us back to the destruction of anti-monopoly legislation in the '80s and '90s. Which is to say, the bad shit happening now was predicted by many, involves many aspects of government, and took a long time to unfold.
The fact that the other two branches decide the third branch’s members makes no sense. Congress doesn’t decide the president and the president doesn’t pick senators. So why does the president pick the judges and congress vote on them?
How do other countries pick them?
In the Netherlands, to become a judge you must first study Dutch law at a university, then get at least 2 years of work experience in a law-related job. Then you take a second study of 15 months to at most 4 years to become a judge, which also has very strict selection criteria.
After that, you can become a judge. The judiciary branch selects its own members in that way.
If you want to become a higher level judge, you need 10 years of related experience and another study taking at most 2 years.
There's no supreme court in the Netherlands. The legislative may make laws that supersede the constitution, but only if a very strong argumentation as to why is provided. The Raad van State (Council of State) can judge whether the cabinet has properly applied the law when writing new laws or taking executive decisions. The cabinet can suggest who should join the council, but the council determines if they are a good candidate (ranging from judges to scientists to former lawmakers). They then serve "for life" meaning until they turn 70, after which they retire. There can only be 11 members at a time.
Or a proportional voting system, that doesnt produce a two party situation.
Exactly. The red and blue corporations make so much noise that it drowns out other parties. On top of that, the belief that voting other party is just throwing your vote away.
What is a functional justice system? They all generally have little kings at the top. That's the problem. At the bottom, the US legal system is (well, was) very rigorous.
Or a functional education system.
Yeah no joke, when No Child Left Behind was implemented by Bush 2, I remember both my parents discussing how it's gonna lead to a dumber society within a decade or two, in a "Our nursing home is gonna be run by morons LOL" kind of way. I was waaaay too young to actually understand what they were talking about, but damn were they right.
None of us are going to be able to afford a nursing home lol
I mean, my parents and their generation can, for the most part. The rest of us... are probably not even making it to retirement lol 🥹
Or a functional journalistic media.
Or an equitable economic system. Poverty and inequality breed desperation and support for extremism, partnered with no functional education system it's the base for every authoritarian regime, ever.
Or the loophole for campaign funding via SuperPACs (technically judicial also since Citizens United)
No economic system is immune to flowing money to the top. We need strong education, "economic morals", to stay strong. No slogans, no, "My system is better!" Education.
We already have a wealth of history to draw on, see what has worked and what has failed.
What about economic systems that don't use money? I bet those are immune to money flowing to the top
Canada can still avoid it but your country is just as dumb as us too.
We were dangerously close to electing someone like Trump until Trump scared us into voting liberal
We're only a step or two behind. Especially with the leader of the Conservative party spewing Nazi rhetoric. He went into the last election looking like he'd win until Trump came along and we decided to dodge that bullet for now. But the guy we did elect is backing down on everything Trump related so I don't see him winning again.
we were 2 inches away from not having to deal with any of this nonsense.
It would've been someone else if not Donny. Power has been consolidated in the executive branch for decades, while that of congress and the senate has eroded. A system designed to be trilateral is no longer so when one of the three can just nope out of whatever the other two say. The US has only been fortunate that it's taken this long to have someone in that office with no morals.
It was already evident in 2010 that something like this was increasingly possible, as noted in Executive Unbound by Eric Posner.
He was almost assassinated the day before the national convention. I wonder who the candidate would have been
God, we were truly robbed of one of history's greatest power vacuums. That shit would've made the Death of Stalin look like a church picnic. It starts with Vance saying he should be the obvious front-runner because he was totally the pick for VP, you just gotta trust him guys, he doesn't have anything in writing because it was a secret handshake deal but he was totally gonna be the VP, ask anyone, and it ends with Ron DeSantis burying Mike Pence in cement while Nikki Haley soaks the convention center in gasoline.
And then, the "reward" we would have gotten would have been someone competent in charge of all this horrifying stuff.
You want terror? It would already be packed up by now. The Democrats would be an illegal party, I think, and the paramilitary would already be semi controlling a lot of the streets, instead of doing such a good job at pissing people off and looking like the bad guys as they are doing now. It is still very very dangerous. But we are very lucky that Trump is in charge of it all.
None of that happens without a charismatic cult leader. They cannot replace Trump and I'd image they're shitting bricks behind the scenes. LOL, can you imagine the backstabbing and power grabs going on as Trump dives further and further into dementia and heart failure?!
I'd laugh, but I'm afraid they have a succession plan, a plan that might work.
Yeah, but so maybe it goes dormant for another 5-10 years and people forget. And then, when middle-aged Stephen Miller comes out like Pink Floyd when he shaved all his hair, all with big plans and fire in his eyes... maybe he's running against Gavin Newsom who's kind of a POS anyway and nothing the left can get excited about, maybe he wins, and maybe then he gets to work. And he's got energy, he's not old or stupid.
I think it's better that it's Trump. It's still awful, but I really think it's better this way. I don't think people will forget this once it passes, or get distracted.
Maybe America could learn something from more advanced, mature democracies like Brazil and Korea. They apparently know how to deal with traitorous insurrectionist authoritarian trash.
This is the point I keep reminding myself of. We had four years to do anything at all. We all knew version 2.0 would be back like deja vu but worse, and we (as a country) just let it.
Propaganda, election interference, election fraud, hostile nation interference, etc. it wasn’t just the voters, and it’s reasonable, given the evidence of corruption and election interference, to believe that they did get away with cheating the system this time. Not that we can do anything about it.
Yet most American presidents have been bad people.
It is functioning as it was intended to function. A thing is what it does
It's all been down hill since they did Bernie dirty.
It's all been downhill since Florida rigged the election for Bush in 2000.
I was in high school when it happened. Been in the work force for 6 years now, still fucking pissed
and the biden administration could've decided on a top-down instead of bottom-up approach to prioritizing prosecution. trump v. us meant that trump could no longer be prosecuted for diverting forces away from the capitol but did not end up mattering since the biden approach meant the trials for his capitol crimes were still in progress when he was elected anyways
As soon as the supreme court made that stupid ruling about presidential immunity, Biden could have cleaned house with inpunity.
Look at where we are now.
Assuming you're referring to Dark Brandon SEAL Team 6-ing everybody and instilling the new Dominion Americana, that would've set a bad precedent. But then again he pardoned his son.
And the current president violating the constitution isn't? I'd say sending the military to cities you don't like is setting a bad precedent.
But also a good opportunity to remove conservative supreme court justices.
Put in sensible ones, then reverse the ruling of presidential immunity. Carry on with trying to rebuild whats left of this countries rule of law.
Seriously. Go after the people who did crimes, make a big public push to impeach the dirty judges, and make sure to bring grocery prices down instead of pushing up wages. If he'd done that, maybe it would have partly worked, maybe it would have been tough, but I think pretty fantastic odds that however it shook out, Biden would be out there drooling his way through his second term right now, and Fox News would be screaming about what a problem it was every time he tripped going up the stairs, but there are lot of Florida detainees who would still be alive. Kilmar would still be happy with his family, right now.
Killing fascists before they have a chance to rise to power is never a bad precedent.
If I had a time machine I’d have better things to do than warn George Washington about this.
There’s like a dozen concerts I’d rather go to first.
Or a functional electorate.