That’s just wishful thinking that doesn’t address the problem at all. Even though you might want the 90-9-1 ratio to change, it isn’t. It’s an established pattern for a reason. Even if the person you responded to was gonna post a lot, they might get a few upvotes, maybe a comment or two on their posts. Simply because there aren’t enough people here to engage with niche topics. And then it feels like your effort is futile (which honestly it is if your goal is an active community), they get discouraged and stop posting and we’re back to square one with no meaningful changes. Sometimes it is about numbers and this is one such case.

I’d argue the end of civilization as we know it is the end of the world. Some amount of humans will survive with vastly less knowledge and technology, but survival of some humans isn’t the metric.

You mean the only ones you hear about communing as a westerner. Pretty much every geographical region has political and economic collaborative institutions for long term stability and growth, and then there’s also things like BRICS that’s not just bound by geography. The BRI is a plan so incredibly long term election-based democracies could never even dream of it, that spans East, Central and West Asia, and is economic, political, social, infrastructural etc etc. Just because you never bothered to broaden your horizon doesn’t mean the entire fucking rest of the world doesn’t collaborate with each other just like Europe and western countries in general do.

A gay person existing doesn’t actually literally harm anyone though. A homphobe shouting slurs at a gay person, excluding them from vital social, economic or whatever activity or beating them up does very concretely harm someone. It’s not that difficult.

The problem with eating meat is not the eating meat. I don’t give a fuck if someone eats meat from an animal that hasn’t suffered, that was free and in its natural habitat. I don’t know if I would myself because after 15 years of not eating meat I don’t think I’d still like it, but it’s not unethical. The problem is the untold amount of widespread suffering and cruelty of beings with emotions and sentience and attachments and capacity for both physical and emotional pain that is industrial livestock farming.

It’s not the government who is settling the West Bank. Yes, it is their policy, but it’s regular Israeli citizens who are killing Palestinians, burning their homes down or taking their homes from them and driving them away.

Where I live you do a big research project as one of the qualifications of getting your high school diploma. I had a hypothesis for mine that I could only answer with ‘not true at all’ at the end of it. My teacher actually loved it because it proved I had objectively looked at the literature and was willing to follow the facts wherever they led.

Take it from someone who is autistic, highly introverted and has only lived in apartments in my adult life: you do not ever need to see or interact with your neighbors. It’s as optional as with a house. The most I see of my neighbors is that once every few weeks I might stand in the elevator with one of them for 15 seconds.

Fun fact about the guillotine, it’s not named after the person who ‘invented’ it (there were other iterations outside of France). Or well, it was briefly, it was called the louisette after Antoine Louis, but the guy named Guillotin was just the person who proposed using it as a more humane way to carry out the death penalty instead of the more brutal breaking wheel at the very beginning of the French Revolution.

It’s actually insane how many teachers and other education professionals waved me off with ‘you’re smart enough, just try harder’ while I was obviously suicidally depressed and extremely dysfunctional. Having undiagnosed autism because I was a teenage girl in the '00s was fun.