this post was submitted on 23 May 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.

Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:

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The butterfly effects would add up and and any zygote formed would not be the hitler-as-we-know anymore, since it would be a different combination of sperm and eggs.

Who needs guns when you got a time machine? Don't like your highschool bully, just bump into their parents back in time. Or you know, "bump" ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) into their parents.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago

Dude, don't you think we tried that? The first time we got Schickelcutlerstalin for some reason who killed everyone with his out off-control biological weapons. Then for some fucking reason we got a fucking snake hitler!

And now we are all out of time-travel juice and locked down in a reality where hitler lived AND an orange is also hitler. Well, I had a little bit left,but a giant testicle came along, kicked me in my testicles,shouted "you want fucking Mother Theresa torturing everyone to death" and disappeared.

Now I am stuck here. Fuck.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Butterfly effect is as likely to make him more dangerous as it is to make him less

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Someone should go back in time and convince monke to stay in tree

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We have our own hitlers living now. I think we should care about them first before thinking on time traveling

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe someone did send a time traveler. But idk why they sent a kid with zero training and no scope lmao. It was so fucking close.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Everyone is always assuming that these time travelers have good intentions...

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Then get hit with the plot twist that it was your "bumping" that actually conceived Hitler

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Oh man, this happened with my wife too, just bumped into her and next thing you know she's pregnant. I can't believe how fertile I am sometimes.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Knowing what his father was like, it's very likely that they'd still produce a horrible kid.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I doubt that a child assigned female at birth would be as horrible in that patriarchal and misogynistic environment.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Ehh, people are capable of doing pretty nasty shit regardless of sex or gender. But on the other hand, had Hitler not been a cis man, it'd have been a lot harder to get in a position of power that'd enable hitler to do what he did. So I see your point.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

cuckolds Hitler's dad

discovers that paradoxes don't exist the hard way

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It wouldn't be a paradox if Hitker's dad wasn't actual Hitler's dad. It turns out you went back in time to make that deposit and give us the timeliness we know.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

B. F. Skinner would like a word

For twenty-five hundred years people have been preoccupied with feelings and mental life, but only recently has any interest been shown in a more precise analysis of the role of the environment. Ignorance of that role led in the first place to mental fictions, and it has been perpetuated by the explanatory practices to which they gave rise.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I read a short story... I don't remember the name of it... Anyway the guy goes back in time and kills Hitler, only to discover upon his return that everything was worse. So he went back and stopped himself.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Possibly "Making History" by Stephen Fry - although at 380 pages it doesn't quite match as a short story, and the protagonist doesn't stop himself so much as do something else to reverse the effects of his actions to save Hitler.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (3 children)

The butterfly effect refers to divergent chaotic systems. Chaos in math isn't the layman's chaos. It doesn't mean wild. It only means there is no closed form mathematical solution. For example stepping on a butterfly can't affect the weather such that the moon would crash into the Earth.

Bumping into Hitler's parents wouldn't necessarily change anything. You have to do something drastic such that he was conceived days to weeks apart such that the sperm was completely different. Even a minor delay wouldn't affect it because the sperm that fertilizes an egg isn't random. There are selection hurdles in mobility that the sperm passes such that the most "fit" is likely the one that fertilizes the egg.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

No it doesn't mean that. It means that tiny changes in input result in big changes in the output.

By your definition, a simple ellipse is chaotic. Which it clearly isn't. Tiny changes in the axes result in tiny changes to its shape, and by extension its perimeter. Yet there is no closed form formula for the perimiter of an ellipse.

This could also be verified using a simple dictionary, not even a math textbook.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A tiny change could mean a big change but it doesn't mean that change must be unlimited. For example a double pendulum is a classic chaotic system. There is no solution but that doesn't mean the pendulum can move greater than the length of its segments. It's still a bound system.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory

More importantly, in the real world, if you push a double pendulum, it won't flail endlessly. It will eventually converge to the single state of rest.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

what does any of that have to do with anything I said? By the way, that wikepedia page doesn't contain the word "closed" anywhere in it. just saying

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

A double pendulum is bound by definition! It is a fixed point, a line with a 2 axis joint, and another line. That's the definition.

Just because a system is chaotic doesn't mean it can move in unlimited ways. A chaotic pendulum cannot move outside it's predefined limits of its geometry despite being chaotic.

The real world imposes far more constraints. A double pendulum starts out in a known state. It gets pushed. It moves chaotically for a minute, then returns to its original rest state.

In the context of Hitler's parents, you shove the dad, he moves chaotically for a second, then goes back to walking. No long term change has happened.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (7 children)

I completely agree with what this comment says. It's still irrelevant though. Where did I say it has to be unbounded? You are countering an argument I did not make. Whether the result is divergent or not is irrelevant. The point is that "not having a closed form solution" is not the meaning of chaos, which was your original wrong statement.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Kick his dad in the nards!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Chaos means that a small change in initial conditions can lead to drastically different places in the long term, so I think OP was using the idea correctly. Though I agree that just bumping into the parents may not be enough to push the system into another trajectory.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Chaos means that a small change in initial conditions can lead to drastically different places in the long term

Yes, what I was trying to explain is that it could (no closed form) but doesn't necessarily mean that is must. A chain with 2 segments is a double pendulum, the classic simple chaotic system. If you hold a piece of chain and give it a light tap, it will move chaotically for a few seconds and then come back to rest. The system will not have changed. Even with a hard push, the chain can't move beyond the limit of the links.

If you gave Hitler's dad a push, he would stumble for a second (chaotically), then go back to walking (return to initial state). Nothing would change.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

yeah. you, your parents, your grandparents, all your people, GONE. never happened. different versions of same still happen, possibly even happy and flourishing. love that for them. Also Hitler still happened, under a different name.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Believe it or not... You've got Hitler Squared now 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Let's say you're right and you've prevented the birth of Adolf or altered him to send him to another life trajectory. Who is to say that there wouldn't be another mad person, naturally a man, who would rise to power and commit similar if not even worse crimes. It's not only the person that made the fuehrer possible, it's also everything happening in the world, especially politics at the time. So you've bumped Adolf but you've created Anton who was similarly radicalized but he wasn't a landscape painter, he was a physics major and he made Germany develop nuclear weapons much faster. So now you have to go back and disturb Anton's conception. Which brings about fuehrer Armin and so forth. You might be stuck in a time loop you'll never be able to stop because you can't control all the variables.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

El. Psy. Congroo.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Reminds me a bit of the setting for the Red Alert series of games. Although there they actually go back in time and kill Hitler so different from the scenario in this post but the possible alternate timelines are fun to think about.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Without the Holocaust, there'd have been no international horror over the atrocities of concentration camps, gas chambers, human experimentation, genocide. Anti-Jewish sentiment was rampant around the world.

Progressives made a lot of progress off the back of WWII, and the anti-fascist sentiment in the US that survived until the greatest generation died and their grandchildren took over. It's entirely possible that, without WWII, the fascism we see in the US today would have happened much earlier, and we'd have run our own concentration camps.

Ironically, the people who probably would have benefited most from preventing "Hitler" would be the modern Palestinians, because without Hitler, Israel would not exist today, and it wouldn't be carrying out a genocide.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

For real, there was nothing particularly special about Hitler that made him the one and only being of his type.

It was a confluence of multiple differing things, the emergence of new media technologies, and the ability to repeat a single message over and over again to as many people as needed to hear them without any equally as loud voices of dissent.

Combine that with an incredible financial depression and the consequences of an ill thought war being foisted upon your country's shoulders.

Admittedly, it was his own personal biases against the Jewish people that caused the Holocaust, and the Aktion T4 was similarly born out of his hatred of people with mental disabilities.

In any case, if you take a miserable nation, give them a lightning rod to direct all of the misery of their own lives at, and an eloquent or charismatic leader to tell them it is okay to vent their frustrations on the helpless people that surround them, then you too can create another Hitler.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

They told me to "get rid of hitler" and I technically acomplished the mission. 🤷‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Ah... shit... here we go again...

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

All you had to do was follow the damn train (to Auschwitz) CJ!

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

If the same geopolitical environment still led to World War II but with a different German leader then the outcome of the war could very well have ended differently.

Leading up to major invasions like D-Day in Normandy and the invasion of Sicily the allies implemented major deceptions to confuse the Germans. Despite some senior leadership recognizing at least some aspects of those deceptions, Hitler himself fell for them pretty thoroughly and ordered troop movements that reduced German defenses where the attacks took place, and delayed moving them back because he still believed the deceptions were real. There are other examples of poor decisions by Hitler throughout the course of the war that proved helpful for the allies as well.

If Germany had a more qualified military leader running things then events like the Normandy D-Day invasion could have had a very different outcome. If the Germans had the Normandy beaches better defended then that invasion could very well have failed. And if that happened then there’s a good chance Germany could have won the war.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (3 children)

on a side note...

Important Note: In order to marry, Alois and Klara had to obtain a dispensation from the Church due to their close familial ties. This highlights the fact that they were indeed related and their marriage was considered unusual for the time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

The church 50 some years later...

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

See Alabama? This is why incest is bad. You get literal hitler....

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Alabama will see that as a selling point.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I need to know more. Source for quote please?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

https://allthatsinteresting.com/alois-hitler

Alois Hitler wanted to marry his cousin immediately, however, their close relation posed some legal difficulties and they had to request a dispensation from the local bishop. The bishop was clearly also disturbed by the very few degrees of separation between the pair and forwarded the request to the Vatican, who eventually granted it (perhaps because by this time Klara was already pregnant).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Were they cousins or 2nd cousins? Cuz these two links say both.

It's all gross, but one's grosser than the other.

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