This is pretty accurate, but it should be noted that ALL ideologies can be and often are treated essentially as religions.
They all serve as dogmas and myths around which a set of true believers congregate, who then alternate between telling each other their myths of inherent superiority, proselytizing non-believers and lashing out at the followers of competing sects. They all lay out moral guidelines by which they can both affirm the faithful and condemn the heretics and unbelievers. They all demand absolute submission and attack any sign of deviation, and since they've defined themselves as inherently morally superior, they consider any of those attacks to be self-evidently morally justified. They all have a hierarchy (whether formal or informal) by which dogma is disseminated to the faithful, with the view (again, whether formal or informal) that ideas that have not been sanctioned by the designated people somehow don't qualify.
And, pointedly, they all have their own "Satans" - the ideas and/or people that they can generally be counted on to blame for whatever evil might arise.
To be fair, the movie was pretty much doomed to fail. Robbins is one of those authors for whom the plot isn't really the point - it's just a sort of framework on which he then hangs... pretty much anything and everything.
You don't read a Robbins novel just for the story - you read it for the experience of him telling a story, and for all of the digressions and diversions along the way.
Yes - I've had many of those asshats over the years insist that I have to "choose a side."
That's generally because they can't actually argue for their position, and the best they can manage is to find fault with a self-serving characterization of a falsely dichotomous opposing position. So they need to be able to assign me to one or the other team, so they know whether they can ignore me or if they need to hurl some emotive rhetoric and fallacies somewhere in my general direction.
And yes - they're almost never worth engaging with.
And to go all the way back, it could be said that the exact problem is that they have unfounded confidence.
And it's sort of ironic really, because they're generally driven by a psychological need to be right, and clinging desperately to one fixed position pretty much guarantees that right is the one thing they will not be.
There's a line in Nicholas Roeg's movie Insignificance that has stayed with me for decades now.
There's an obvious Einstein expy just called "The Professor." At one point, he's asked why he's so cautious about his claims - why he habitually says things like, "I think that..." or "The theory is that..." or "One might argue that..."
His response is, "If I say 'I know,' I stop thinking."
That, IMO, points to the primary answer to your question - don't try to remove self-doubt. Nourish it. Revel in it. Because it's the thing that will keep you thinking, and the more you think, the more likely you are to get to actual truth.
You know - I've been thinking the same thing about water. There must be a team of people all working together to push the idea that it's wet. Why else would so many different people all say the same thing?
I browse on All almost exclusively, and if a community or poster is notably toxic or spammy I block them, but if they just don't interest me, then I just scroll past them.
Honestly, I don't even understand what the supposed problem is. The world is full of things that don't interest me. That's just the way it goes, and really it's just background noise that I barely even notice.
This'd likely a bit more than inconvenience, but honestly, to the degree that it would be more than that (or more accurately to the people to whom it would be more than that), I just don't give a shit.
Make it literally impossible to knowingly lie. Full stop.
One of my personal favorites, and technically an example of media universe crossovers though probably not quite what one would think of, is the Japanese manga series Saint Young Men, which is about Jesus and Buddha sharing an apartment in modern-day Tokyo.
I doubt it, particularly because it's almost certainly the case that the people who deride it when others do it do it themselves in other situations.
It's far and away most common in partisan politics, and it happens because the simple fact of the matter is that most professional politicians and political parties are loathsome slimeballs, and the only thing a partisan can dependably say in support of their preferences is that they're (purportedly) better than the alternative. So it's nearly always the case that in attempting to defend or advocate for their preference, they'll bring up the alternative and shift focus to them.
And then they'll potentially turn right around and deride their opponents for doing the same.
It doesn't matter what you, I or (almost) anyone else thinks about much of anything here.
You say that you're "well aware of the decentralized aspect of Lemmy," but apparently you really haven't thought it through.
The simple fact of the matter is that there is no mechanism by which any self-appointed "we" can do anything.
The instance owners are entirely free to run their instances as they prefer, and the community owners are entirely free to run their communities as they prefer, and that really is that.
Because it's basically saying that you're so dull or lazy or unimaginative that you can't even manage to come up with a post of your own, and so pathetic and needy that you're just going to copy someone else's.
That's not uncommon in trades - plumbing, construction, auto mechanics and the like.
There are tricks and techniques that one can learn over time to make things easier or more efficient, but they're often complex enough or require enough skill and experience that if you don't know what you're doing, you're just going to unnecessarily screw things up trying. So new people are taught the standard, safe, dependable way of doing things, even if that's not the way the old hands do it.
Edit to add: in a moral context rather than a practical one, I don't think it ever is appropriate. IMO, the first requirement for any moral stance is that one abide by it oneself, and unless and until one has managed to accomplish that most basic of tasks, one has no standing by which to even meaningfully comment on other people's behavior.
Yes - I know lots of childless genXers, including myself.
I think we were the first generation to see the bullshit fairly clearly, but we weren't even close to being in a position to do anything about it.
The earlier generations generally didn't see it, and the boomers only saw parts of it - they were too easily distracted by their own greed and self-indulgence. Stuck in the shadows as we were, and growing up right in the middle of it - in the world after the Kennedy/King assassinations and Vietnam and Watergate and OPEC and stagflation and Iran/Contra and on and on and on - we couldn't really miss it. But we've never had any real influence (other than our brief but notable time at the vanguard of music, art and fashion), so it mostly just left us sort of cynical and detached. It's fallen to the later generations to get fired up enough to maybe do something about it.
And yeah - my plan too has long been to mostly keep a low profile, try to share a bit of what hopefully amounts to wisdom, then slip off-stage before the inevitable shit hits the inevitable fan.
Invisibility is the defining characteristic of Generation X.
When Douglas Coupland popularized the term in his novel of the same name, that was an awful lot of the point. Generation X was the generation that just sort of fell through the cracks, lost in the shadow of the baby boomers.
Over the years, we've just adapted to it, and really, at this point, it's sort of nice to be forgotten. We can just sit on the sidelines, munching on popcorn, offering up a bit of snidely cynical commentary and reminiscing about great music, great times and great hair.
Generally, for me, it means something less than entirely "good."
The times I'm most likely to use it are when I'm finding minor fault with something - "Well... it was pretty good, but..." or when something is better than I expected, but not quite fully good - "Hey! That was actually pretty good!"
Presumably, yes. It's scheduled to end next month.
And her goal is now his goal too, so it's just a matter of him saying it out loud.