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this post was submitted on 19 Apr 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
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.
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Dude, you keep arguing as if the Snowden leaks haven't been scrutinized to hell and back. I need to only search once for the US reading the communication of americans and it brings up countless articles like this one making reference to the Snowden leaks. You keep dissing Snowden and Greenwald, as if those two were the only ones analyzing the files. In truth, entire teams of journalists from multiple outlets worked on different parts of those stories. Do I trust you, who can't even provide a source, or hundreds of journalists and the obviously scummy and sometimes downright illegal behavior of the US government to shut those journalists down? And just because it isn't "illegal", because the government gave itself the right to fuck you over, doesn't mean that it is morally permissible. You didn't even address the fact that the US forced the plane of the president of Ecuador to land in Europe due to pressure from the US, because it flies in the face of your narrative that the US is a righteous place where you can trust the law, even when the government itself wants to silence you. You know how they got around not being able to spy on Americans? They got the brits and other countries to do it for them. That is what the Five-Eyes organization is all about. The Wikipedia article I linked detailing the Snowden leaks even break down in which direction the data transfer went between the different spy agencies.
Do not support Snowden's claim that the NSA could read any American's emails or listen to any American's phone calls. Greenwald (through Snowden's insistence) thought that DITU was an NSA computer inside American Internet companies. That's the source of the misconception, which resulted in Greenwald's sensational claim, "But the Prism program renders that consent unnecessary, as it allows the agency to directly and unilaterally seize the communications off the companies' servers."
The article itself is a misreporting of this WaPo article that said half of the communications contained references to American residents. This makes sense of course, because the foreign accounts being surveilled were thought to have national security importance for the U.S.
And the ones who knew what they were talking about disparaged Greenwald's reporting that was based solely on Snowden's ignorance. The first newspaper to get the story right was the New York Times. Then CNET's Declan McCullough repeatedly called Greenwald out on his poor reporting. ZDNet quite reasonably asked why neither Greenwald nor his editor bothered to consult a subject matter expert. The tech blogosphere ripped it apart at the time, to the point that Greenwald kept responding in an unhinged way to open source tech celebrities on Twitter. But you didn't need to be in tech at the time to understand this. This got picked up in mainstream news summary sites like The Week.
That's because it was Bolivia, and each country has a right to police its own airspace. France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy can choose which planes they allow to fly over their countries, and that is their right under international law. The US didn't unlawfully down a plane over a European country's airspace.
This is a conspiracy theory that isn't supported by any documents at all, especially nothing in Snowden's documents. This agreement started as BRUSA, which was a no-spy agreement, which Germany requested access to after the Germans and the Americans had been caught spying on each other in the early 2000s. This no-spy provision is alluded to in the WaPo article I linked to above: "At one level, the NSA shows scrupulous care in protecting the privacy of U.S. nationals and, by policy, those of its four closest intelligence allies — Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand."