Link aggregators have a problem on the fediverse. The approach is server-centric, which has positives, but it also has major negatives.
The server-centric approach is where a community belongs to a certain server and everything in the world revolves around that server.
The problem is that it's a centralized formula that centralizes power in a the hands of a whichever servers attract the most users, and potentially breaks up what might be a broader community, and makes for a central point of failure.
Right now, if user1@a.com and user2@b.com talk on community1@c.com then a lot of things can happen to break that communication. if c.com defederates b.com then the communication will not happen. If c.com breaks then the communication will not happen. If c.com shuts down then the communication will not happen. If c.com's instance gets taken over by management that doesn't want person1 and person2 to talk, then the communication will not happen.
Another problem is that user1@a.com and user2@b.com might never meet, because they might be on community1@a.com and community1@c.com. This means that a community that could reach critical mass to be a common meeting place would not because it's split into a bunch of smaller communities.
Mastodon has servers going up and down all the time, and part of the reason it's able to continue functioning as a decentralized network is that as long as you're following people on a wide variety of servers then one server going down will stop some users from talking but not all of them so the system can continue to operate as a whole. By contrast, I'm posting this to one server, and it may be seen by people on a wide variety of servers, but if the one server I'm posting this to goes down the community is destroyed.
There are a few ways to solve the problem...
one method could work as something like a specific "federated network community". There would be a local community, and the local community would federate (via local mods, I presume) with communities on other instances creating a specific metacommunity of communities on many instances that could federate with other activitypub enabled communities, and if any of the federated communities go down the local community remains. If any servers posed problems they could cease being followed, and in the worst case a community could defederate totally from a server (at a community level rather than a server level) In that case, community1@a.com and community1@b.com could be automatically linked up once both connect to community1@c.com (I'm thinking automatic linking could be a feature mods could turn off and on for highly curated communities), and if c.com shuts down or defederates with one of the two, user1@a.com and user2@b.com would continue to be able to talk through their federated network.
Another method would be something more like hashtags for root stories, but I don't know how server-server links would be accomplished under a platform like lemmy, kbin, or lotide. I don't know how hashtags migrate on mastodon type software and how that migrates. In that case, it might be something like peertube where a network is established by admins (or users, I don't know) connecting to other servers manually.
Finally, I think you could implement the metacommunity without changing the entire fediverse by having the software auto-aggregate metacommunities. You could create a metacommunity community1 on a.com that would then automatically aggregate all posts on communities called community1 on all known servers. The potential downside of this is you could end up with a lot of noise with 100 posts of the same story, I haven't thought much about how you could handle duplicates so you could participate but wouldn't have 100 similar posts. In this case with respect to how to handle new posts, each metacommunity would be a local community and new individual posts would be posted locally and federated to users on other metacommunities. If metacommunities of this sort became the norm, then the duplicates problem may be solved organically because individuals using metacommunities would see the posts on other metacommunities and wouldn't bother reposting the same story, much like how people see a story and don't repost in individual communities.
One big problem is scaling, doing something like this would definitely be a non-trivial in terms of load per community. Right now if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from one server. Under a metacommunity idea like this, if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from many, many servers. lemmy.world has 5967 total instances connected to it, and 2155 instances running lemmy, lotide, kbin, mbin, or friendica that could contain similar types of community, that's a lot of communities to follow for the equivalent of one single community, especially if some of the communities in the metacommunity have a lot of traffic in that community. You'd have to look at every known server to first see if it exists and second if it has a community appropriate for the metacommunity, and the metacommunity would have to routinely scan for dead hosts to remove from the metacommunity and live hosts that may start to see an appropriate metacommunity has been created.
I'm sure there are other solutions, but I'm just thinking of how things work within my current understanding.
Of course, for some people, the problem is one they don't want solved because it isn't a problem in their view (and that's a legit view even if it's one I'm not really amenable to). Some people prefer smaller communities, or want tighter control over their communities. For servers or communities that don't want to be brought into a metacommunity, it seems like some sort of flag to opt-out (or opt-in as the case may be) should be designed in -- I'm thinking something in the community description like a textflag NOMC or YESMC that server software would be designed to respect.
With respect to moderation, It seems to me that you could have a variety of strategies -- you could have a sort of default accept all moderation where if one instance moderates a post other instances take on the same action, or whitelist moderation where if one instance or one set of moderators on a whitelist take an action then other instances take the same action, or a sort of republican moderation where if a certain number of instances take an action then other instances take the same action, and probably an option for individual metacommunities to only accept moderation from the local community the original post came from. I suspect you'd want a choice in the matter per metacommunity instance on a server.
The server-centric approach is where a community belongs to a certain server and everything in the world revolves around that server.
The problem is that it's a centralized formula that centralizes power in a the hands of a whichever servers attract the most users, and potentially breaks up what might be a broader community, and makes for a central point of failure.
Right now, if user1@a.com and user2@b.com talk on community1@c.com then a lot of things can happen to break that communication. if c.com defederates b.com then the communication will not happen. If c.com breaks then the communication will not happen. If c.com shuts down then the communication will not happen. If c.com's instance gets taken over by management that doesn't want person1 and person2 to talk, then the communication will not happen.
Another problem is that user1@a.com and user2@b.com might never meet, because they might be on community1@a.com and community1@c.com. This means that a community that could reach critical mass to be a common meeting place would not because it's split into a bunch of smaller communities.
Mastodon has servers going up and down all the time, and part of the reason it's able to continue functioning as a decentralized network is that as long as you're following people on a wide variety of servers then one server going down will stop some users from talking but not all of them so the system can continue to operate as a whole. By contrast, I'm posting this to one server, and it may be seen by people on a wide variety of servers, but if the one server I'm posting this to goes down the community is destroyed.
There are a few ways to solve the problem...
one method could work as something like a specific "federated network community". There would be a local community, and the local community would federate (via local mods, I presume) with communities on other instances creating a specific metacommunity of communities on many instances that could federate with other activitypub enabled communities, and if any of the federated communities go down the local community remains. If any servers posed problems they could cease being followed, and in the worst case a community could defederate totally from a server (at a community level rather than a server level) In that case, community1@a.com and community1@b.com could be automatically linked up once both connect to community1@c.com (I'm thinking automatic linking could be a feature mods could turn off and on for highly curated communities), and if c.com shuts down or defederates with one of the two, user1@a.com and user2@b.com would continue to be able to talk through their federated network.
Another method would be something more like hashtags for root stories, but I don't know how server-server links would be accomplished under a platform like lemmy, kbin, or lotide. I don't know how hashtags migrate on mastodon type software and how that migrates. In that case, it might be something like peertube where a network is established by admins (or users, I don't know) connecting to other servers manually.
Finally, I think you could implement the metacommunity without changing the entire fediverse by having the software auto-aggregate metacommunities. You could create a metacommunity community1 on a.com that would then automatically aggregate all posts on communities called community1 on all known servers. The potential downside of this is you could end up with a lot of noise with 100 posts of the same story, I haven't thought much about how you could handle duplicates so you could participate but wouldn't have 100 similar posts. In this case with respect to how to handle new posts, each metacommunity would be a local community and new individual posts would be posted locally and federated to users on other metacommunities. If metacommunities of this sort became the norm, then the duplicates problem may be solved organically because individuals using metacommunities would see the posts on other metacommunities and wouldn't bother reposting the same story, much like how people see a story and don't repost in individual communities.
One big problem is scaling, doing something like this would definitely be a non-trivial in terms of load per community. Right now if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from one server. Under a metacommunity idea like this, if one person signs up to one community, they get a lot of posts from many, many servers. lemmy.world has 5967 total instances connected to it, and 2155 instances running lemmy, lotide, kbin, mbin, or friendica that could contain similar types of community, that's a lot of communities to follow for the equivalent of one single community, especially if some of the communities in the metacommunity have a lot of traffic in that community. You'd have to look at every known server to first see if it exists and second if it has a community appropriate for the metacommunity, and the metacommunity would have to routinely scan for dead hosts to remove from the metacommunity and live hosts that may start to see an appropriate metacommunity has been created.
I'm sure there are other solutions, but I'm just thinking of how things work within my current understanding.
Of course, for some people, the problem is one they don't want solved because it isn't a problem in their view (and that's a legit view even if it's one I'm not really amenable to). Some people prefer smaller communities, or want tighter control over their communities. For servers or communities that don't want to be brought into a metacommunity, it seems like some sort of flag to opt-out (or opt-in as the case may be) should be designed in -- I'm thinking something in the community description like a textflag NOMC or YESMC that server software would be designed to respect.
With respect to moderation, It seems to me that you could have a variety of strategies -- you could have a sort of default accept all moderation where if one instance moderates a post other instances take on the same action, or whitelist moderation where if one instance or one set of moderators on a whitelist take an action then other instances take the same action, or a sort of republican moderation where if a certain number of instances take an action then other instances take the same action, and probably an option for individual metacommunities to only accept moderation from the local community the original post came from. I suspect you'd want a choice in the matter per metacommunity instance on a server.
"that's great... but you're a cat.... so you're still getting your bits chopped off so you don't piss everywhere...."
"Heavy understeer, poor visibility and the fact that it overheated often (as engine cooling was difficult) along with many drivers disliking the incredibly low seating position helped kill the Steinwinter Supercargo 20.40 Concept."
I have to admit, the first thing I thought before I read the article was cooling, since most big trucks are mostly a huge radiator. I never thought about understeer or visibility.
I have to admit, the first thing I thought before I read the article was cooling, since most big trucks are mostly a huge radiator. I never thought about understeer or visibility.
The Jan 6th attack on the capitol preceeded by half a year of attacks.
But we won't talk about all those.
But we won't talk about all those.
I'd call it prescient but it probably never changes.
It's really funny that these people use the same psychological impulse as 1938 germany while pretending they're so much better as human beings.
It's really funny that these people use the same psychological impulse as 1938 germany while pretending they're so much better as human beings.
It's interesting that in an era where everything is psychologized to the degree that solely psychological arguments are made for major swaths of civilization, we are living in an era of the highest mental illness recorded history.
As an observation based on the data, it would definitely suggest that either the psychological way of looking at the world is not actually true and so actions taken upon that foundation don't have the effect that we expect, or something else is so bad in the world that in spite of being overdosed on treatment we are still worse than that we've ever been.
Some people think it's because we are poorer than we've been, but humans have been in desperate grinding poverty for most of their existence as a species and weren't this bad. You can go to places where people still live in desperate grinding poverty but they aren't mentally ill the way that Western Civilization is.
I tried to avoid the use of the word modern because the modern period was actually a very long time ago now. The modern period was the era of heavy industrialization and the massive increase in quality of life leading up to the world wars. That was our. Of high social cohesion, where people really felt like their civilizations had a powerful future. The combination of world war 1, the great depression, and world war II and all of the horrors that came with all three of those ended up sort of becoming a repudiation for western civilization of the modernist mindset, and so the postmodernist period began, and whereas the modernist worldview was practical and masculine and scientific, the postmodernist world was in many ways a rejection of these things -- one of the core philosophies of postmodernism is that nothing is real, and that many ways the world is made up of social constructions that may have at some point been based on reality but that reality is long gone, just like a save icon being made up of floppy disk that generations of kids have never seen. The modernist period had a respect for the wisdom of our ancestors, and everyone became well versed in the classics such as the works of the Greeks. The postmodernist period tried to reject that ancient wisdom as well as all common sense.
Men do not like being compared to dogs, but in the grand scheme of life on Earth the two have a lot more in common than they have different. A large dog with lots of energy needs to be given some kind of labor. If you don't walk your dog and run out their energy, they will make tasks for themselves, and without leadership to tell them what to do, the tasks would be things that are unproductive or anti productive such as digging up the yard, tearing up the furniture, barking at people passing in the street and trying to bite the mailman. In the same way, lacking meaning because it has been systematically eliminated by the ideology of the era takes all of the reasons to live away from humans, and then in the in the same way that the dog goes crazy so does the man.
I've noticed that ever since my son was born, and I made the decision that my goal was to try to raise him to be as great as possible, my mental health has never been more solid. I have a mission now, and one of the things that I had to do very early on was reject postmodernism -- within the first week of my son being alive I realize that I had a little voice in the back of my head telling me to stop saying heartfelt things because they could be taken as double or triple entendres. Shutting down that valueless but hyperanalytical part of my brain (or at least not allowing it to dominate every thought that pops into my head) ended up being a huge weight off. We can laugh when someone says something that is a double entendre, but our entire society has become based upon it and based upon analyzing things from six different angles in a heartbeat, all supervised by a moralism process that Warren does not to make judgments about anyone or anything.
Tl;Dr bro it's just a meme don't overthink it.
As an observation based on the data, it would definitely suggest that either the psychological way of looking at the world is not actually true and so actions taken upon that foundation don't have the effect that we expect, or something else is so bad in the world that in spite of being overdosed on treatment we are still worse than that we've ever been.
Some people think it's because we are poorer than we've been, but humans have been in desperate grinding poverty for most of their existence as a species and weren't this bad. You can go to places where people still live in desperate grinding poverty but they aren't mentally ill the way that Western Civilization is.
I tried to avoid the use of the word modern because the modern period was actually a very long time ago now. The modern period was the era of heavy industrialization and the massive increase in quality of life leading up to the world wars. That was our. Of high social cohesion, where people really felt like their civilizations had a powerful future. The combination of world war 1, the great depression, and world war II and all of the horrors that came with all three of those ended up sort of becoming a repudiation for western civilization of the modernist mindset, and so the postmodernist period began, and whereas the modernist worldview was practical and masculine and scientific, the postmodernist world was in many ways a rejection of these things -- one of the core philosophies of postmodernism is that nothing is real, and that many ways the world is made up of social constructions that may have at some point been based on reality but that reality is long gone, just like a save icon being made up of floppy disk that generations of kids have never seen. The modernist period had a respect for the wisdom of our ancestors, and everyone became well versed in the classics such as the works of the Greeks. The postmodernist period tried to reject that ancient wisdom as well as all common sense.
Men do not like being compared to dogs, but in the grand scheme of life on Earth the two have a lot more in common than they have different. A large dog with lots of energy needs to be given some kind of labor. If you don't walk your dog and run out their energy, they will make tasks for themselves, and without leadership to tell them what to do, the tasks would be things that are unproductive or anti productive such as digging up the yard, tearing up the furniture, barking at people passing in the street and trying to bite the mailman. In the same way, lacking meaning because it has been systematically eliminated by the ideology of the era takes all of the reasons to live away from humans, and then in the in the same way that the dog goes crazy so does the man.
I've noticed that ever since my son was born, and I made the decision that my goal was to try to raise him to be as great as possible, my mental health has never been more solid. I have a mission now, and one of the things that I had to do very early on was reject postmodernism -- within the first week of my son being alive I realize that I had a little voice in the back of my head telling me to stop saying heartfelt things because they could be taken as double or triple entendres. Shutting down that valueless but hyperanalytical part of my brain (or at least not allowing it to dominate every thought that pops into my head) ended up being a huge weight off. We can laugh when someone says something that is a double entendre, but our entire society has become based upon it and based upon analyzing things from six different angles in a heartbeat, all supervised by a moralism process that Warren does not to make judgments about anyone or anything.
Tl;Dr bro it's just a meme don't overthink it.
One thing about many conspiracy theories is that we find out that nothing really needs to be a hidden conspiracy anymore.
Its like they'll just come straight out and say "yeah we've actually been using contrails to spread mind control chemicals for like 60 years. What are you gonna do about it, bitch?" And apparently there's no negative consequences except for the journalist who first breaks the story who has to live in a bunker on the moon for the rest of his life to avoid stray sniper fire.
Its like they'll just come straight out and say "yeah we've actually been using contrails to spread mind control chemicals for like 60 years. What are you gonna do about it, bitch?" And apparently there's no negative consequences except for the journalist who first breaks the story who has to live in a bunker on the moon for the rest of his life to avoid stray sniper fire.
I'm seeking truth so I don't know if I'm right either. It's just a journey, but I like putting thoughts like this down so I have to articulate them fully and usually from there I can also start to research my assumptions.
Certain political philosophies claim that the West is a patriarchy, and when you compare the way that the West works to true patriarchies historically and in the present day, you can see that that's just not the case.
So let's start off with what a patriarchy would look like. Under a true patriarchy, the father, the head of the family, at the head of the entire family, would have immense political power over the entire family and would essentially be the dictator of their family. Ancient Rome was a patriarchy. The head of the household could straight up murder his wife, and it really wasn't a big deal. The head of the household controlled all the slaves, and was the one who made all the decisions about how resources were to be divvied out amongst family members.
This concept of a nuclear family relatively speaking derives from the UK and the US as well as commonwealth nations, but tends to exist in some form throughout Europe. In addition to pure structure, there's a question of inheritance. In the nuclear family, whoever gets the inheritance is essentially arbitrary. It might be the firstborn son, the favorite daughter, it might be everyone, it might be nobody. By contrast, in other societies the firstborn son inherits everything, the secondborn son might be allowed to stay and help, maybe the third, but generally there's nothing left for sons past that, and there was never anything for the daughters. Such rules of inheritance also cast long shadows on history and a country's economic distribution, as power can accumulate in firstborn sons, or it can disperse amongst many descendants.
It's something that seems alien when you look at media from other cultures, the level of power the father or the grandfather has over the family. In the west, if your father disagrees with your marriage it's unfortunate but largely meaningless. In much of the east, if your father disagrees with your marriage you may have your whole life stripped from you. As a westerner you look at that media and it just looks odd, like nothing similar to your own life.
By contrast, Western Civilization is not a patriarchy at all, it is a nuclear family. Instead of the head of the family having overwhelming power over the entire bloodline, each individual goes out into the world on their own to make their own fortune and find their own power. As a result, rather than the patriarch being the head of the family, the family as a unit is a thing unto itself. In some families the man may be dominant, but another family is the female might be dominant, and another family still there might be a very reasonable balance of power.
Now I'm not talking at all about whether men have many positions of power in society, because in the grand scheme of things I don't think that that's really patriarchy per se. Patriarchy is rule by patriarchs, rule by the male heads of families. Under such a system, there is no place for matriarchs in positions of power, and there's also no place for men who are not patriarchs.
Indeed, it is I think no mistake, no accident that feminism only came from Western civilization and to an extent doesn't exist in many other civilizations today. That family structure which is so different from patriarchy ends up being the impetus for women to gain equal political power and equal treatment under the law because governments often end up taking the form of the family.
There can be imbalances and imperfections in a system without that system being those imbalances and imperfections. I think that's one of the places where academia ends up really broken -- they see that problems exist and then attribute those problems to the entire foundation of the society when they don't realize they're a part of that society and that society they hate so much is the foundation that has them asking the questions. In western societies, the imbalances and imperfections (at least the ones that can be solved)
A society with universal suffrage is one that by definition isn't a patriarchy in government, either. It would be easy to give voting rights only to the heads of families -- imagine the mafia, where the male heads of each family get together to make decisions. Now *there's* a patriarchy.
I think it presents a major strategic blunder among feminists to constantly attack western society when it is the one society on earth that consistently sees women as equals. Once western culture collapses (and arguably it is in the process right now), if virtually any other region's culture takes over it's a near total certainty that feminism will be destroyed.
Some people advocate for the destruction of the family as a unit altogether, insisting that such a structure is oppressive towards women. There are places that exists today, but they're not good. Fact is, the data shows definitively that our lives are better with at least 2 parents who are with you throughout your entire childhood. If you consider the outcomes for women, women should practically speaking want men raised with fathers, because men who grow up without fathers make up a disproportionate number of violent criminals at an overwhelming rate, and also make up a disproportionate number of sexual offenders. Far from making life better for women, such a society would be markedly worse.
I think in part it's from living in a society that's so good that women don't realize how bad things could be. They don't realize in other societies how unsafe women are, how much like chattel they're treated, how little agency they have, and that it's not because they don't have feminism, it's baked right into those cultures in the same way that feminism is baked into the concept of a nuclear family where a man and a woman court each other and get married largely independently of their families.
This goes back to a core point: The right won't like it, the left won't like it, but western civilization is unique in how it is structured, and so if one wants to conserve western civlization then progressivism and social justice are in a sense baked in and you can't fully remove it without having something new that isn't western civilization anymore, and also western civilization is unique in how it is structured, and the only reason anything resembling "progress" is possible is because the fundamental ideas of the west are compatible with and in fact became the garden from which these ideas sprouted and grew, and any other civilization would not have (and did not) come up with these ideas and without western influence would not continue to accept them.
Something the left won't like, but the right will is that there's no guarantee that progress is social justice and what today is called progressivism. It's entirely possible that having gone further than anyone else, progress ends up being a more explicit acceptance of objective reality and a push to achieve balance between many different ideas that are all valid but don't exist in a vacuum, rather than a continued push towards only one or two ideas.
So let's start off with what a patriarchy would look like. Under a true patriarchy, the father, the head of the family, at the head of the entire family, would have immense political power over the entire family and would essentially be the dictator of their family. Ancient Rome was a patriarchy. The head of the household could straight up murder his wife, and it really wasn't a big deal. The head of the household controlled all the slaves, and was the one who made all the decisions about how resources were to be divvied out amongst family members.
This concept of a nuclear family relatively speaking derives from the UK and the US as well as commonwealth nations, but tends to exist in some form throughout Europe. In addition to pure structure, there's a question of inheritance. In the nuclear family, whoever gets the inheritance is essentially arbitrary. It might be the firstborn son, the favorite daughter, it might be everyone, it might be nobody. By contrast, in other societies the firstborn son inherits everything, the secondborn son might be allowed to stay and help, maybe the third, but generally there's nothing left for sons past that, and there was never anything for the daughters. Such rules of inheritance also cast long shadows on history and a country's economic distribution, as power can accumulate in firstborn sons, or it can disperse amongst many descendants.
It's something that seems alien when you look at media from other cultures, the level of power the father or the grandfather has over the family. In the west, if your father disagrees with your marriage it's unfortunate but largely meaningless. In much of the east, if your father disagrees with your marriage you may have your whole life stripped from you. As a westerner you look at that media and it just looks odd, like nothing similar to your own life.
By contrast, Western Civilization is not a patriarchy at all, it is a nuclear family. Instead of the head of the family having overwhelming power over the entire bloodline, each individual goes out into the world on their own to make their own fortune and find their own power. As a result, rather than the patriarch being the head of the family, the family as a unit is a thing unto itself. In some families the man may be dominant, but another family is the female might be dominant, and another family still there might be a very reasonable balance of power.
Now I'm not talking at all about whether men have many positions of power in society, because in the grand scheme of things I don't think that that's really patriarchy per se. Patriarchy is rule by patriarchs, rule by the male heads of families. Under such a system, there is no place for matriarchs in positions of power, and there's also no place for men who are not patriarchs.
Indeed, it is I think no mistake, no accident that feminism only came from Western civilization and to an extent doesn't exist in many other civilizations today. That family structure which is so different from patriarchy ends up being the impetus for women to gain equal political power and equal treatment under the law because governments often end up taking the form of the family.
There can be imbalances and imperfections in a system without that system being those imbalances and imperfections. I think that's one of the places where academia ends up really broken -- they see that problems exist and then attribute those problems to the entire foundation of the society when they don't realize they're a part of that society and that society they hate so much is the foundation that has them asking the questions. In western societies, the imbalances and imperfections (at least the ones that can be solved)
A society with universal suffrage is one that by definition isn't a patriarchy in government, either. It would be easy to give voting rights only to the heads of families -- imagine the mafia, where the male heads of each family get together to make decisions. Now *there's* a patriarchy.
I think it presents a major strategic blunder among feminists to constantly attack western society when it is the one society on earth that consistently sees women as equals. Once western culture collapses (and arguably it is in the process right now), if virtually any other region's culture takes over it's a near total certainty that feminism will be destroyed.
Some people advocate for the destruction of the family as a unit altogether, insisting that such a structure is oppressive towards women. There are places that exists today, but they're not good. Fact is, the data shows definitively that our lives are better with at least 2 parents who are with you throughout your entire childhood. If you consider the outcomes for women, women should practically speaking want men raised with fathers, because men who grow up without fathers make up a disproportionate number of violent criminals at an overwhelming rate, and also make up a disproportionate number of sexual offenders. Far from making life better for women, such a society would be markedly worse.
I think in part it's from living in a society that's so good that women don't realize how bad things could be. They don't realize in other societies how unsafe women are, how much like chattel they're treated, how little agency they have, and that it's not because they don't have feminism, it's baked right into those cultures in the same way that feminism is baked into the concept of a nuclear family where a man and a woman court each other and get married largely independently of their families.
This goes back to a core point: The right won't like it, the left won't like it, but western civilization is unique in how it is structured, and so if one wants to conserve western civlization then progressivism and social justice are in a sense baked in and you can't fully remove it without having something new that isn't western civilization anymore, and also western civilization is unique in how it is structured, and the only reason anything resembling "progress" is possible is because the fundamental ideas of the west are compatible with and in fact became the garden from which these ideas sprouted and grew, and any other civilization would not have (and did not) come up with these ideas and without western influence would not continue to accept them.
Something the left won't like, but the right will is that there's no guarantee that progress is social justice and what today is called progressivism. It's entirely possible that having gone further than anyone else, progress ends up being a more explicit acceptance of objective reality and a push to achieve balance between many different ideas that are all valid but don't exist in a vacuum, rather than a continued push towards only one or two ideas.
The meaning of life is to grow and become someone worthy of raising a child who will become much like you, and then help that child (or those children if you have many) achieve their potential so they can eventually become someone worthy of raising a child and start the cycle again.
I sorta feel like if you can be "gatekept" from a hobby where you don't need to ask permission to start, to engage, or to continue to engage, then you should be because you're clearly not in it for the right reasons.
"I wanted to participate in a hobby where I sit alone and do a thing I like intently for hours at a time, but someone in another state told me I couldn't so I'm thinking about quitting" Oh yah? That's terrible! You should quit immediately.
"I wanted to participate in a hobby where I sit alone and do a thing I like intently for hours at a time, but someone in another state told me I couldn't so I'm thinking about quitting" Oh yah? That's terrible! You should quit immediately.
Ironically, KOTOR 2 basically was what the new trilogy desperately wanted to be, but unlike the new trilogy people really like KOTOR 2 (in spite of it only being half done) because it's made with love and ambition to make a great star wars thing.