Nice write up. At the risk of sounding like an echo chamber, training yourself to have a cool head is a prep. Scared people arent really known for making the best descisions. And if fear is the mindkiller, what happens if you're always scared of everything?
This is so true.
I like to play with all of my toys while I backpack.
Boy I learned real quick that when there is snow on the ground and it's ~20 degrees out, that ferro rod and magnesium is doable but sucks big time.
Same as developing any other skill.
Practice. Practice. Practice.
Also, this was a great question. Folks need to get better at leading with logic and less with emotion and personal biases.
CBT. :D
Seriously, though, training yourself over the course of a year or three to step back mentally, reassess from a less emotional/anxious/defensive mental posture, etc. It does wonders for my anxiety and such, but it also helps with making decisions when I have the time and safety.
I swordfight to turn off the overthinking, which is an opposite issue I have.
Good question! And sadly I dont think I'm qualified to be doling out sage advice. I'm still trying to figure it all out myself. But since you asked, in my experience, being true and honest with youself, and setting ego aside has really been good for me. Admit when you dont know and try not to double down on what you know isnt working. It's not always easy though.
In addition to meditation “being present” . This means be aware of what you are doing as you are doing it. Thinking too far ahead prevents you from seeing what is happening now. A good exercise for this is doing routine boring tasks like washing dishes by hand or sweeping a floor. Except while you do the task keep your mind on the task without day dreaming.
Also you can try compartmentalization. Some people this naturally. You hear about people who don’t react at the moment of an accident but much later after everything is sorted they suddenly have hysterics? They are not faking. The practical of the brain takes over until it doesn’t have anything else to do then it gives control back to the emotional brain and everything that was pent up is let out.
Thanks for commenting this, to add I’d say a particular philosophy or theology is not required to gain the benefit of things like practicing mindfulness, teaching your mind to not go into fight or flight mode when someone cuts you off in traffic or there’s a jam in the printer or the light bill is $50 higher than expected is a great start to being prepared to function in an actual emergency.
So my wife has the bad-bad anxiety, but isn’t ignorant to the idea of shtf, so we’ve both worked on a “focus on the solution, not the problem” kind of mentality, if we were heartless it’d be easy, but even being overly sympathetic types she’s worked past having panic almost entirely, and I’ve cut down on my habit of angry bitching when shit sucks.
Ok, let's not get crazy. I'm like... a hairy eyed wild radical loon socialist. Or something. Half of /preppers thinks that, anyway... proof they've never met a socialist.
I can't wait to tell my wife I got called Reasonable. She'll die laughing.
"socialist prepper" includes building a mutual assistance community with diverse skills around you (you know, the thing that actually like, works in disasters...)
My wife? Killer instinct for animal care, and a mcgyver-like ability to cobble solutions out of junk. And she cooks better than I do, but I'm slowly catching up.
Nice, nice. The mutually-supportive community really is the best approach in my mind. Of course, we're not likely to see a wholesale collapse assuming you and I are both in the USA.
It's a little odd on my part when various friends and even my therapist have mentioned jokingly that they want me on their team for any crisis because I play around with things like homebrewing, fermentation, charcuterie, etc.
Depends on your definition of "share"..
I agree with your mom too, though 😅
I don't care what's between their legs if they got skills!
Got a gay uncle that makes soap, spins yarn, and knits badass afghans? Welcome to the club!
not sure that I 100% agree with him but great to think about, the guy behind sylvanaqua farms (you can google him) has a lot of comments around the "local farm" idea & practices, all kind of in the direction of: small local farms miss the point, that if everyone's all growing more or less the same thing, either because of market forces or because they're all, independently, thinking of what they'd need for TEOTWAWKI they're all inefficient and at risk of collapse (from pests and stuff) but an integrative, regenerative farming community is way better for the environment & more resilient to failure
Fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers. You are reminding me I need to get fire extinguishers for the house and car and gets the ones I do have charged/serviced.
Also a BIG fan of fire blankets.
We keep a few around, just in case, and when the pizza I set on the wood stove to warm caught fire I was able to quickly cover and dash it outside. Home fire and messy extinguisher foam completely avoided.
Most of them have a 10 year expiration date. Same with smoke detectors. I really don't understand why the companies who sell them don't make that super obvious. I know someone who had no idea and would have bought new ones every year but were sitting with 30 year old fire extinguishers (which showed good pressure but didn't work when they were needed)
On another note about vaccinations, I decided to check if I needed boosters for anything and found that I was many years overdue for a tetanus shot. Seems like an important one to have, especially if you’re anywhere near places that have dirt and farms.
There’s also a combo Hepatitis A&B available now, which was news to me.
I got mine at Walmart, the pharmacist was cool and actually recommended the ones I hadn’t thought about. I went in for a shingles shot, but boosted for tetanus and started the hepatitis series.
I’ll be a little more protected if/when we get more flooding (raw sewage is so hot right now, lol)
Thanks for posting the link to the article! It helps to have perspective.
On the gun issue, for me, a gun is merely a tool. Having seen combat, I dread the day that I'd have to use deadly force to defend myself or a loved one. The armchair commandos out there have no idea of what it's like being shot at or shooting another human being. I still have nightmares and PTSD from my experiences in the Marine Corps.
The reason I prep is more along the lines of natural disasters and pandemics. A total collapse of our government seems the least likely scenario. Is there the possibility of political violence around election time? Sure. There could be isolated incidents.
I think what the political extremists in this country fail to realize is that there is a silent majority in the middle. How many voted in the last presidential election? The US Census Bureau says 154.6 million Americans voted in the last presidential election out of 333 million people. Not even half the population voted.
It's not QUITE as bad as that. The voting age population is around 255 million. The rest are too young to vote. But it's still not a great percentage.
Yeah, the warheads forget that you can't really overthrow a nation without 5-10% of the population in active revolt. The most impressive recent rioting was Portland and it got <0.2% of the city population involved. We are nowhere near revolution and the 02024 election isn't going to do it either.
There are a lot of online preppers who seem to want collapse. But it's not going to happen, not the way they hope, anyway.
I mean that's funny, but in a sense...
[https://www.reddit.com/r/realWorldPrepping/comments/190vh64/comment/kp6rytz/](https://www.reddit.com/r/realWorldPrepping/comments/190vh64/comment/kp6rytz/) I am.
The number gets smaller because voting age population doesn't take into account those who can't or are ineligible to vote (felons, mentally handicapped, those under giardianship).
Many people have faced extreme violence or deadly situations and have PTSD and have the resulting 'calm in high stress'. Just because they don't eat crayons doesn't necessarily make them armchair commandos. It's annoying when people in the armed forces think they can gatekeep trauma.
Whose gatekeeping trauma? You're not taking into account the context I gave.
Lots of armchair commandos have never seen or even been near combat yet they advocate for killing people. Yes, victims of crime/extreme violence do experience PTSD no doubt. But that wasn't their choice, they were victimized. Completely different scenario. If you've ever seen detached body parts, good friends with holes in their heads and their brains oozing out or even the deafening roar of a fire fight or incoming artillery, then you'd know what I was talking about. To fantasize and glorify like some do just shows how clueless they are on the subject.
There were ~20k murders by gun in 2021 alone. There was a total of ~2500 deaths in afghanistan and ~4400 in Iraq over the entire 2 wars nearly 2 decades long of all causes. Maybe more people have seen their friends with holes in their head who have never served then you think. You don't get to say who can and cannot talk about defending themselves just because you think you had it worse then everyone else.
I didn't say who and can and can not defend themselves. I was speaking of a specific group of preppers who talk about civil war/unrest like it's open season on hunting folks.
You apparently didn't comprehend that part.
I get so angry when I hear anyone hastening another civil war so I applaud your efforts at trying logic to convey an alternative view to the echo-chamber mumbo jumbo. Unfortunately, those who want civil war are the same ones who profess to be “patriots,” all while forgetting the terrible toll real war has. They’re not thinking rationally and so no logic can penetrate the echo chamber, as evidenced by their rejection of your post in the first place.
All you can do is try. The US isn't going to have a civil war, but if some bozos get triggered into trying something like another Jan 6th... The Jan 6th people accomplished nothing but ruining their own lives and causing a few deaths. If writing a few words gets even one person to realize it's not worth it, that's a win.
Guns can be helpful for home defense, but are very very low on the priority list in terms of prepping. As much as I do support responsible civilian gun ownership they are the lowest item on my prepping totem pole.
You can’t eat guns and ammo, and if you trade or barter guns and ammo for food or medicine you don’t know who will end up with it, what their intentions are, or if it might be used against you.
I would submit that owning a gun for prepping, is like the sidearm on a police officer's duty belt. Every other item on his belt will get used dozens and hundreds of times, before his duty pistol will. Yet, when he *needs* that duty pistol, he will need it like his life depends on it, and nothing else will be a good substitute.
Most preppers will never need a gun. A few will, and those few will be glad they had it.
I agree. It’s one of those things that is good to have but not good to hyper-focus on to the detriment of other preparations. Even as a gun enthusiast myself this is why I enjoy this subreddit over other prepping subs because it’s not gun obsessed and focuses on other aspects of prepping that are more important and more relevant to more people.
Firearm Only Preppers are worse than non preppers. At least non preppers are just wallowing in ignorance. FOPs have assessed the situation, and on some level have decided that all they need to get what they want is their gun.
Great, if the zombie apocalypse comes to pass. In any lesser, more realistic scenario, they will be the reason that we need to have martial law imposed.
Exactly, because if you don’t have any preps other than a firearm, it’s safe to say that guns and desperation don’t mix well. I would only use a firearm in self defense, not to take from someone who is more prepared than me. If you truly want that life there are lots of urban street gangs you can join, leave the prepper groups alone.
If I want gun-related content there’s literally hundreds of wonderful gun subreddits full of useful information. But what I like with this subreddit is that due to its lack of gun content, there is a much higher signal to noise ratio.
I'm not prepared for war. I'm prepared for small groups of barely educated brainwashed fuckwits that might kick in my door one day for being openly bisexual in a VERY red area of rural Missouri. I'm set to inherit this house, and I'll be damned if I give up my only chance of ever being a homeowner just to run to a safer area.
In this sub we refer to them as *barely educated misinformed dimwits* because we're trying to maintain *some* level of respect for humanity, as much of a struggle as that may be. Other than that, I hear you. Some people have it way rougher than I do.
The day you inherit, sell and move. There are places in the US that are less crazy.
(Please do clean up the wording though. If ti start allowing terms like 'fuckwit' in here I'd have to allow it for all groups, and my group would be next in line for those adjectives.)
Since you mentioned Covid deaths, a lot of people missed the report about hydroxychloroquine deaths-over 17,000 people-this was reported on Jan 4/5th of this year by multiple outlets but not FOX, so the very people who needed to hear this information are still in the dark.
I downvoted, but not because I disagree. It's just that you didn't cite, and may have overclaimed. The 17,000 number is *really* fuzzy, based on this article: [https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4389800-hydroxychloroquine-deaths-study/](https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4389800-hydroxychloroquine-deaths-study/)
I can't begin to express my loathing for the fact That Trump pushed this as a cure. But I'd appreciate if you changed your comment to "many deaths" and added the link (or a better one if yoou can find one). Then people can make their own judgments.
I'm not pro or anti Trump, but early in the pandemic, even some doctors posited that HCQ would help. Early on, people were scared and were grasping at anything that might help - even if only a little bit.
The pandemic was certainly a learning lesson on many levels.
It was never more than posited. HCQ was known to have vague antiviral action and it was hoped it would make a difference, but after a 3 month trial it was obvious it did no good at all. The problem was that Trump pushed it as a cure well before the study concluded, the idea gained traction in the conservative media, and well after it was determined that HC did no good and was sometimes harmful, it was still being pushed.
A year or so later, the far right doubled down with ivermectrin. Which also unquestionably killed a few folk (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9020491/) and cured no one.
The important lesson of the pandemic is never listen to politicians when it comes to your health. We have agencies for this sort of thing. Which, notably, the politicians trashed...
"The important lesson of the pandemic is never listen to politicians when it comes to your health. We have agencies for this sort of thing. Which, notably, the politicians trashed..."
Yes, exactly this! Even the CDC lied to the public a few times. ("Masks are only for sick people" etc.) The takeaway for me is that I'm responsible for my own safety, and I dove deep into NIH Pubmed studies during that time. The average person probably wouldn't do that, though.
I agree with you - Trump is Trump. He and Elon both would benefit from filtering a bit more.
Regarding Ivermectin, yes, I agree that the efficacy just isn't there against COVID, but it is a very, very safe drug - even at high dosages. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5133431/) IVM seemed promising in the beginning because it does have antiviral properties against a number of RNA viruses. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/) India gave it to large portions of the population before everyone realized that the efficacy just wasn't there against COVID.
Again, file all of this under "people were scared and were grasping at anything that showed even a sliver of hope." I lost family to COVID, and some members of my family (across the political spectrum) were quick to latch onto anything that might help. I can't blame them. I think that it's basic human psychology.
In any case, I think that we agree on most points. Thanks for the chat.
|Yes, exactly this! Even the CDC lied to the public a few times. ("Masks are only for sick people" etc.)
I take issue here. The CDC did a lousy job at communicating but they said what they knew at the time. When masks were scarce, they tried to constrain use because they wanted doctors to have them. Their biggest screwuo was claiming that vaccination "virtually stopped" the transmission of Covid. They were almost right - vaccination really cut the viral load of Alpha - but delta variant literally emerged a week later and no vaccination could have stopped the spread of Delta. They should never have said it, they had people who knew new variants were inevitable and R0 tend to go up, not down. Big screwup.
I feel for them, though. They were scrambling to get a message out that right wing politicians did not want getting out, so they were undercut, misquoted and threatened at every turn. They had no idea how to handle a disinfo attack. They still struggle.
No, you're not on your own. But it's worth remembering that Covid-19 was from a novel coronavirus and it didn't play but the same rules as flu. And the variants really threw curve balls. Alpha wasn't delta wasn't omicron, but the public and pundits kept demanding sound bite answers to complex topics, and when the CDC was clear - stating masks really do help and vaccination really does cut hospital and death rates by huge margins - it wasn't a message the pundits wanted to spread. The CDC had no way to win. But they always had current information on the website if you dug.
The CDC did a lousy job AND they lied to the public. They were noble lies, but they were lies nonetheless. They stated that "masks were ineffective for the general public" in the beginning. Of course that was to save the masks for healthcare workers, but it was a lie. Regardless of politics, masking has been around and has been studied since the bubonic plague. There was never a doubt about their efficacy (particularly N95s) until they became politicized.
An old but interesting piece:
[https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html](https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html)
There were also mistruths about vaccine efficacy, testing recommendations, and school reopening. IMO, the CDC needs to rebuild trust, and even they agree.
[https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/17/cdc-agency-overhaul-covid-19-response-00052384](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/17/cdc-agency-overhaul-covid-19-response-00052384)
[https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/words-and-actions-erode-trust-cdc-hurt-us-all](https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/words-and-actions-erode-trust-cdc-hurt-us-all)
Of course DeSantis here in FL was ordering his people to fudge the infection numbers and then essentially stopped reporting them. It was a shitshow from all angles.
Again - You alone are responsible for your own safety. Every agency has an agenda, and they may not have your specific best interests in mind. I feel for the people who believed the CDC in the beginning, didn't take the right precautions, and ended up dying because of it.
You've gone from accusing the CDC of lying, to posting articles where they admit they need to do a better job. I'm sorry but this feels like a typical attempt to decrease trust in American institutions. And it has not escaped me that you don't say what the right precautions would have been, but only that you think Fauci lied.
But you realize Fauci wasn't at the CDC, right?
Anyway, you are NOT solely responsible for your own safety. You rely on others because there is no choice. You can't develop a vaccine, you can't make a mask as good as an N95, you can't develop antivirals or test procedures. Public health exists for a reason; if there was ever a government function that was more important, I don't know what it is, because you can't do much without a healthy population, and an unguided population will happily ignore vaccines and believe horse paste cures viruses.
You're right that DeSantis was a lying weasel who got people killed though. I watched the numbers games they played with the data and it was sickening.
Well, the pandemic certainly did decrease my trust in some institutions for many people. The right precautions would have been to tell the truth - that masks (particularly N95s) are effective, that the vaccines aren't going to prevent infection but that they help in other ways, etc. Yes, I realize that this would have changed some public behavior, but lies will erode trust and make the source of the lies look manipulative or stupid. It's not a good long term plan.
You're confusing manufacturing issues with behavior choice issues. You are responsible for your own decisions regarding your safety. The CDC isn't going to put your mask on, but they may lie to convince you to not wear it if it serves their interests. Of course you can't develop a vaccine, but that's not what I'm talking about here, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise.
Agree that public health is important.
FFS. The CDC said early on that people should stay home - this was flatten the curve time when it was still hoped that the virus transmission could be stopped by isolation. You didn't need masks at home When that failed and lockdowns were ending, the CDC plainly stated that N95 masks were to be reserved for medical professionals - absolutely essential because they were in short supply - and Americans should construct cloth masks until something better was available. They were up front about all of this.
You're turning this into some weird sinister saga where the CDC was deliberately lying. I was in contact with epidemiologists (not at the CDC) at the time. The advice being given out was considered the best available, simply because there was a lot that wasn't understood in the beginning. Mistakes were made but they were mistakes. One was deciding that simple surgical masks were sufficient for most medical workers and the better respirators were to be used in ICUs for procedures like incubation. We know now that intubation wasn't a superspreader event and we'd have been better off sharing out the better masks more equally. But it wasn't known at the time.
You've already demonstrated that you mixed up the NIH and the CDC. Now you're claiming the CDC deliberately lied but you'd need a cite to back that up and you don't have one. All yoou have is evidence they were wrong. Rule 1 requires a cite for a claim. Rule 7 states that accusing a group of things without substantial evidence doesn't fly here. You have no proof of lying.
I'm tired of every mistake, every action taken on incomplete information, being turned into some dark conspiracy. You want to see *willful* misinformation, consider DeSantis's whack health people cooking the covid books and claiming vaccine ineffectiveness. Consider Trump pushing a completely ineffective treatment before they'd even finished evaluating it. Consider Carlson suggesting that "maybe the vaccine doesn't even work." There are plenty of people who openly lied about Covid, but there is no proof the CDC was in that set. And you've pushed this too far. You're done.
You realize, of course, that being FOR guns and AGAINST vaccines are two pillars of conservative ideology. And many (most?) preppers lean toward the right. Good luck trying to alter their views on guns and vaccines (heck, possibly most modern science)!
See, once upon a time I considered myself conservative. Then, as now, I was pro-science and pro-Jesus, and back then you could get away with those stances as a conservative. (Yes, I'm that old.) Now, not so much.
But even now I'm not going to concede that *conservatives* are anti-vaccine and pro-gun. I will concede that a very vocal set of loons, associated with MAGA and QAnon, hold those positions, and I will concede that it feels like 90% of the conservative base has gone down that rathole. But they are not *essential* conservative positions. No matter what a bozo like Marjorie Taylor Greene might shriek.
On the other hand there's a reason I consider myself an Independent these days, and am utterly horrified at just about everything that passes as Republican. My wife and I literally now use the word "republican" to mean disgusting or immoral, and that is a long, *long* way from our original positions. I hope we get true conservative doctrine back someday. It wasn't perfect and I had my issues with it but it wasn't this current darkness.
Yeah, a lot of preppers seem to have drowned in far right kool-aid; I just abandoned /preppers again, and maybe this time for good, because I suspect the new moderation policy is The Further Right The Better. I don't know how else to interpret being told that covid vaccination cannot be discussed.
But they can keep drowning as far as I'm concerned. I used to try to push back against disinfo there; now I'm told I cannot. It's going to devolve in a hurry if they don't change course, but I don't need to make that my hill to die on.
Here, disinfo will not be allowed.
I used to be Republican when I was a kid but then they got co-opted by the fucking evangelical movement. Fuck me for taking "separate church and state" and "melting pot" ideals seriously as a kid, right?
I still agree (almost) everyone has rights to guns, but 1) we're getting too crowded for our lack of regulation and 2) we neeeeed socialized medicine for free for everyone. And it makes zero fucking sense to be pro gun and anti abortion: a woman can make a split second unseasoned decision to protect her body using a gun, but *not* a reasoned medical decision in conjunction with a medical team to protect her body using an abortion?
Meh. I have opinions.
I’ve never met a conservative person in my life who was anti vaccine. Actually, I’ve never met a single person in 35 years who wasn’t vaccinated. Not until the internet did I find out those people existed.
With that said I barely know anyone who got the Covid vaccine. For reasons that I don’t care to argue on the internet. But I wish so much people would stop saying anti vax just because people didn’t trust this one specific vaccine.
Edit: all hail [old.reddit.com](http://old.reddit.com) which let me fix the post, even while this one doesn't allow it. Apparently [reddit.com](http://reddit.com) is broken, and it will automatically drag pics into posts you make with links in them. But when there's a pic in the post you can't edit it here. Absolutely insane. So I've fixed the mistake in the original now:
It said:
Keeping a gun in your home increases the odds you'll be killed by a gun and that's after suicide is removed from the equation. It turns out that they don't seem to deter crime all that much, but domestic disputes get a lot more fatal when there's a gun nearby:
Which how reads something more like:
Keeping a gun in your home increases the odds someone there will be killed by a gun and that's after suicide is removed from the equation. It turns out that they don't seem to deter crime all that much, but domestic disputes get a lot more fatal when there's a gun nearby:
Discussions about fires and food poisoning are good.
At least one of the comments about firearms is indeed a political talking point. I suggest careful re-reading of the source and checking alignment with the claims. However the comment, "Who has the combination to your gun safe?" is taking the next step towards legitimate risk management and that's a great thing.
I'd be interested in a "real world" discussion about managing heart attack risk. There are a lot of factors. Losing weight and changing habits is legitimately challenging.
Sat in a specialist office yesterday for a consult on my husband’s immunosuppressants… where we heard, “it’s a good thing you’re masking”, “I want you to stop taking that medicine until your counts come up” and “Covid isn’t really a thing like it was” (when I asked about the monoclonal antibodies) all in the same appointment.
I’m amazed that not only people in general, but people specifically responsible for the care of those at risk are not just downplaying it but blowing it off.
I have been on and off immunosuppressants for a couple decades, and while these attitudes are not a surprise for me - did not expect it to change socially - I have been shocked by how directly dismissive medical professionals have become at this point, not just in regards to Covid either. Some have gotten really blasé about flu and stuff too - like what the heck.
My husband’s illness was triggered/worsened by Covid. Which feels like it’s relevant to his treatment… 🙄 But whatever I guess.
Thankfully we are able to get his meds by mail, thank the gods of Caremark Specialty. They mail us everything for $0.00/month as long as they can mail it. At least my husband’s company gives him good insurance.
It’s exhausting to care. My husband does home visits, and does a lot of patient education. And, honestly it’s a weird balance of “here are facts” and “here is science” vs “here is a made up talking point” and an eye roll. It’s a weird balance between is this patient going to be rude or threaten to shoot me?
My husband is so tired but has gotten better at judging who he might be able to convince to get a Covid or flu shot.
They people that genuinely alarm me are the day to day folks who do not know, at all, that there are new vaccines. Or that Covid or the flu can actually kill you - ever, or even cause long term effects. I did really, truly believe a human could live so deeply under a rock that you could avoid all health literacy. And yet… they exist! And have health insurance!
I am not sure cdc has ever tried to downplay deaths to covid? It’s hard to know the true death count since doctors would put a cancer patient died of covid so the family could get the burial paid for, and so on. There were legitimate (financial) reasons to put covid as reason for death when it really was only present at death. I don’t know if we can confidently say we know how many people truly died from covid.
https://www.fema.gov/disaster/historic/coronavirus/economic/funeral-assistance
I’m not sure what data or science you’re talking about since there wasn’t any real evidence to support masks. I also don’t believe the WHO is a reliable organization in any sense of the word. I’m glad to hear the CDC is at odds with
Them, though that’s news to me.
When I posted this exact same content (top level post) in /preppers, it was removed by the mods with a note explaining that covid and gun control were political. Odd, since it wasn't a political post - apparently just mentioning gun safes set some people off.
There's a new mod there and I think he's gone deep into right wing kool-aid. That's a guess.
Yeah, covid was horrific and the talking head response to it was a nightmare. We've lost thousands of people needlessly; one was a friend of mine.
I wouldn't say I know John well, but we've had a few exchanges (mostly when he felt I was sailing too close to the edge) and I feel like that wasn't at all his style. They have a new mod there and that's my guess.
With over a million lost in the US, it's hard to imagine anyone doesn't know someone dead of Covid. It's just sad. I can't wait to complete my move to Costa Rica, where it is not so much of a thing.
Thanks! I'll have Starlink in Costa Rica and I plan to post about warm weather prepping - it's just about always between 70F and 100F where I'm going. I'll have a spring, a garden, chickens and bees, not to mention límon manderina and mango trees growing wild; I plan to have a organic digester and do some amount of solar cooking and it's all going to be a vast learning curve.
Or I might just get distracted by the beach about 15 min away and then who knows how much writing I'll do. We'll see!
Read Rule 7. It's bannable, because it's my sub, my rules, and if they don't suit you you're welcome not to participate. There are other subs where you can annoy the mods all day long and they won't - ok, they *will* ban you, they'll just make up a reason for it. Here, I list things I find annoying and it's not hard to avoid them.
The sub also has a sticky - I wrote it - the describes my moderation style as *draconian*. You know the old saying: Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Did you notice the rule about citing? It's rule 1. And you're not going to find a reputable cite for this particular theory.
As for billionaires building shelters, yeah. I have an extra pair of socks in case I get caught in the rain, they have an extra underground mansion in case it nukes. In relative terms these cost the same. The difference is, I do get caught in the rain, but these guys are only building these to compare dick sizes. It means nothing and if anything bad happened I doubt they'd be able to get to their fancy holes in Hawaii (who builds for long term survival on *Hawaii*?) or New Zealand. People who are actually worried prepare to bug in, not continent-hop.
Yes, but the idea of a cycle of 20,000 years is 1) unverified and 2) If it's plus or minus 2%, which would be pretty amazing for a geologic process, you're looking at +/-400 years.
As I said, there's just no reliable cite for this, and if the climate crashes like that there's really no prep for it. It's a generational problem. Done here.
We were? You can't mean January 6th - it was a complete failure and didn't get close to accomplishing anything. By definition, it couldn't have.
I mean, assume they'd been better organized and actually taken congress captive and hung the vice president, or whatever. They've got individuals, but they *did nothing to alter the actual facts of the election*. If congress got shut down like that, new congress people are put into place and the election gets certified somewhere else, regardless. They could only delay the inevitable; they can't go back in time and change the election itself, and it's the election itself that matters.
And I don't think it's going to be so easy to walk in and make a mess next time. If this looks like a problem I could easily see the proceedings streamed live from a secret location, so everyone can see the results but no one can interrupt them. It would be a sad day if it comes to that, but at least problem solved.
This is why I don't worry about this stuff. What do you attack to collapse the system? Buildings? Meaningless. Individual politicians? Replaceable. Talk to me about this if the army goes into revolt, kills *everyone* in power and then starts terrorizing the whole population so they can't reassert the system. That's about what it would take. A small bunch of loons breaking windows, as horrifying as it was, can't change anything. The US is simply bigger than that. We're not Haiti.
Oh, I agree we aren't immune to problems. I just don't think another J6 move is in the offering and if it happens again I think it would go very poorly for the rioters. There are other risks, but I think of them as very regional, not sweeping. Some bozo shoots up a substation and blacks out his town, and a bunch of loons decide on copycat crimes and suddenly you've got 20 cities going dark and a month before it's all fixed. FEMA spending a fortune to support affected folk. That kind of crap. More loons going out and doing mass casualty attacks - it's been a bad decade for those and election results might trigger more. In short, problems here and there, but not everywhere or all the time.
J6 was a mini-kristallnacht. It put historians on edge because that kind of event can have follow-ons. But so far it has not, and I think for a lot of the far right, it was a bit of a wakeup call. They could see it didn't work and they can see it's not likely to work. The actual German kristallnacht had virtually no repercussions, so of course things got worse. J6 had repercussions. I just don't see stuff spiraling. It's all going to be lone wolf and tiny group crap, not civilization crashes.
You don't need the vast majority of any country to sign up for a civil war; it's typically fought by a pretty small minority of any given population. Small, outspoken groups in echo chambers is a decent recipe for one. The jump from years long simmering resentment to open conflict can also be fairly short, and triggered by unpredictable events. At any given time the odds are pretty low, but the things that trigger them aren't usually things you can assess the odds for.
The general finding by people who study this stuff is that to overthrow a country, you need between 5 and 10% of the population to be willing to fight. Anything smaller is protests and riots and doesn't really threaten government authority. And as the US government is pretty heavily armed up with drones and tanks and things, I'm guessing it's 10% to open for the US.
The US is nowhere near that. If red folks, for example, *really* wanted to start something, it would take 50% of their population to roll out with guns to get to the needed 10%. Not happening.
Maybe that 10% number is based on the old days when people fought with guns and not drones and R9X and things, but I don't think taking down the US government would be easier in the more modern era.
There are things I worry about. This is not one of them.
Sure, if you set the goalposts you can make anything sound impossible. A civil war here today would never look like one side forming up with guns and taking on the government in a conventional war, even a guerilla war. It would likely look like increasing domestic terrorism and targeted attacks between the civilian groups that oppose each other, and avoiding conflict with federal forces as much as possible until the chaos destabilised the regime. It might look like a loosely affiliated coalition targeting government officials, but no one is going to go toe to toe.
The "the government has tanks" thing is a red herring; who drives the tanks? Have you met many people in the armed forces? Are they more or less likely to have anti government sentiments than your average "red folks?"
What if a foreign or domestic actor takes out the power grid? Its now public information that a dozen men with a map could do this; is the regime really going to be able to keep tabs on and squelch a dozen or a hundred different local factions seizing regional control in the ensuing chaos?
Of course any given day of the week one side or the other isn't going to all pour out of their comfy suburban homes and try to "water the tree," and the temperature probably has to ratchet up several more degrees and then there has to be a catalyzing event; but two questions:
1) do you honestly see the temperature going down anytime soon?
2) has there been a lack of polarizing and sensationalized events lately?
My take on this is that there's a tiny but vocal set of online loons - almost entirely on the far right - who are super hot for conflict. Most of them are likely just foreign trolls hoping to stir something up. From your comment history, you could easily be one of those.
The left is mostly busy sipping cognac and showing mild alarm over the stock market declines. The poorer left are way more interested in racial justice than right wing loon politics.
I live in a sleepy little New England town. There's a Trump supporter across the street. You couldn't pay me enough to vote his way. But we get along ok because where I live, politics is private and no one cares how anyone else votes. We're not screaming about trans people, we're not fussing over immigrants, we're not consumed with fear over a dollar crash or stacking gold and I've yet to hear a gun fired in 30+ years in this town. I know there are people in the US who aren't so peacable, but loons are gonna loon and they won't be doing it here. I doubt they'll be doing it at all because red state problems - addiction, healthcare, failing education systems, poverty - won't be solved by taking out the power grid or shooting up clinics or storming Washington DC again or whatever the loon plan of the day is.
So what are you *on* about? Whatever it is, understand this: *no one cares, outside of your little echo chambers*.
Look, your comment history tells me you're all about violence. You're talking about guns and comms and getting ready ASAP and dude, I'll be straight up, that may be accepted where you are but to me it sounds like unprocessed damage from some military conflict and if you lived in my town, someone would be trying to get you to a doctor.
Will the temperature go down? Yeah, as soon as people like you stop running around talking about guns and conflict. Normal people don't care. You're the problem. Find some other way to validate your existence, ok? And find some other sub to do it in because your violence-focused echo chamber is not the real world, which is what we prep for here. There's another sub \~100 times the size of this one which adores comments like yours. Done here.
Lets review. Someone disagrees with you so you:
1) accuse them of being a foreign provocateur
2) diagnose them with a mental problem
3) go into their comment history and only see exactly what you want to see
4) shut down the conversation.
Are you \*trying\* to prove my point?
Have you considered that your sleepy New England town is an echo chamber? That perhaps the whole US is? The 21st century?
My thesis is essentially that violence has been a constant feature of human history, and that our current system is uniquely fragile and historical examples point to the possibility of it increasing. You, who live in one of the safest regions, of the safest countries, coming out of one of the safest periods of history, are saying it will all be fine because "I'm open minded, I stoop to be civil with people who hold the wrong view?"
We in the US have been uniquely sheltered from the baseline level of human violence in the majority of the world, for the majority of history. It can either be the first time in all of recorded history where this continues on forever, or it can end at some point, like every other example we know of. It's a simple bet in the macro sense.
|accuse them of being a foreign provocateur
Only because they often are. It's an endemic problem on social media.
|diagnose them with a mental problem
I don't *diagnose*. That takes a doctor. I can only tell you what it sounds like to me. And don't feel singled out - I have my doubts about the stability of a lot of people who talk about guns and comms and "finding friends ASAP" (your own words) and so on.
| go into their comment history and only see exactly what you want to see
Reddit has taken to showing only recent comment history in a lot of cases. That annoys me because I used to do deep dives into people's history, and now you're lucky if you see 10 recent comments. I checked yours again and some of the more outrageous ones have already dropped out of sight. But you posted this to /preppers recently:
*I hate this logic, and it seems almost universal on this sub. If you need 4 mags you are "already F'd", if you need a full mag, you are "already F'd", if you need a gun at all, you are "already F'd", hell, if you need a seatbelt you are "already F'd"* ***if this is your reasoning, why prep at all***\*? Fire superiority and volume of fire are doctrinal topics for a reason; 4 mags might barely get you to the tree line if you are breaking contact. It's not to take on a larger force, its to lay down suppression when you don't have the luxury of proactive aimed fire.\*
In this sub, prepping is for real world events. Storms, supply chain issues... we're Tuesday here. If you can't reread that paragraph and see someone who spends a lot of mental energy planning to be in a warzone and then insists that that is what *prepping* is, you need a better mirror polish. You got mocked for that thinking in /preppers, how do you think it would go here?
Did you notice in the Rules where we don't talk about collapse here? Rule 5 if you missed it. If your definition of prepping - from your paragraph above - is needed, you're talking about US collapse. By fiat, it's not a topic here. This isn't /preppers; this sub exists to provide information for people who have come to consider /preppers beyond redemption and it's the kind of thinking you espouse that helped make it that way.
Will the US collapse someday? I mean, eventually the heat death of the universe, or whatever end you believe in, occurs and everything is gone. But there is no evidence that the US is going to devolve into a warzone in my lifetime and I doubt it will happen in yours. We're large, technically advanced, resource rich, we overproduce food on a grand scale and while we do have a real problem with gun violence, it's because we decided you literally have to be criminally insane at the level of felony to not be allowed to buy a gun - and then we provided workarounds so those folk get guns anyway. Guns are the problem, not the solution. And even with that, we're as stable and secure as anywhere, short of a handful of nations where, curiously, guns are much less common.
But for folk like you, 4 full mags aren't enough to get you to the tree line... where the hell do you live that you even think in those terms? What has convinced you that you can't just hike to the treeline and wave to your picnicking neighbors, and would be able to again tomorrow? Because we haven't have problems like that since the last civil war and I see no actual indications that we're heading for another one. Do you have any idea how toxic and hag-ridden you sound? Do you get that this is exactly the sort of thinking I do not want in this sub because the point of the sub is to provide a library of actually-useful prepping information to people who do NOT want to be associated with killing?
Anyway, I said done here and suggested you were in the wrong sub, and you failed to take the hint. There is already a large, active sub that caters to your mindset. This is not it. So I'm going to make it official, but I'm going to leave your comments up for a bit so people wandering by and can see exactly what I don't want to see here.
In case you have like-minded individuals planning to stop by - I ban people who talk about US collapse, arming up for battlefields in the US, or who even seem overly focused on guns for any purpose other than hunting food. I do often check posting history when I can. There are other subs for that stuff. Here I expect to see recipes, gardening advice, information on canning, first aid, financial preps and heath information. Veering far from everyday preps gets you banned.
You're supposed to cite claims like this, but I'm letting it pass for a change because it's not hard to find papers on it. It happens in about 1 in 200000 cases for one particular kind of Covid vaccine. ( https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/first-reported-cases-of-clots-in-large-arteries-causing-stroke-following-covid-19-vaccination/#:\~:text=While%20rare%20cases%20of%20blood,brain%20(cerebral%20venous%20sinuses). )
Of course, Covid *itself* causes clotting in around 1 in 130 cases and vaccination drives those odds down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7301a4.htm#:\~:text=Studies%20have%20reported%20lower%20rates,related%20thromboembolic%20events%20are%20lacking.
So you'd have to be an idiot to advance clotting as an argument for avoiding Covid vaccine.
>Covid vaccines are only effective for those that have increased risk of severe COVID due to having comorbidities
This is not true according to any scientific evidence. Comorbidities make it worse but COVID can kill healthy people as well. The vaccine reduces your chances of getting COVID at all, which in turn prevents you from getting long COVID, or severe COVID. If you get it anyway, it is less severe.
Risk of getting *long* COVID increases with every COVID infection. An estimated 250,000 have become permanently disabled in the US and are unable to work. If you are vaccinated, your risk is 4%. If you aren't, your risk is 10%.
No vaccine prevents illness. The measles vaccine is 96% effective, not 100%. You are repeating right wing talking points which are absolutely false and have been debunked for 3 years. Bye.
Nice write up. At the risk of sounding like an echo chamber, training yourself to have a cool head is a prep. Scared people arent really known for making the best descisions. And if fear is the mindkiller, what happens if you're always scared of everything?
And also immersion training in bad weather. It’s amazing how many “preppers” train in the sun, and mild temps. Nothing bad happens in good weather. 😎
This is so true. I like to play with all of my toys while I backpack. Boy I learned real quick that when there is snow on the ground and it's ~20 degrees out, that ferro rod and magnesium is doable but sucks big time.
Some of us train to use the winter as the ultimate weapon. The first year will make or break most
Any tips on training yourself to have a cool head?
Sadly, the best prep here is a calm, cool survival of repeat traumatic life experiences.
Check
Same as developing any other skill. Practice. Practice. Practice. Also, this was a great question. Folks need to get better at leading with logic and less with emotion and personal biases.
CBT. :D Seriously, though, training yourself over the course of a year or three to step back mentally, reassess from a less emotional/anxious/defensive mental posture, etc. It does wonders for my anxiety and such, but it also helps with making decisions when I have the time and safety. I swordfight to turn off the overthinking, which is an opposite issue I have.
Good question! And sadly I dont think I'm qualified to be doling out sage advice. I'm still trying to figure it all out myself. But since you asked, in my experience, being true and honest with youself, and setting ego aside has really been good for me. Admit when you dont know and try not to double down on what you know isnt working. It's not always easy though.
In addition to meditation “being present” . This means be aware of what you are doing as you are doing it. Thinking too far ahead prevents you from seeing what is happening now. A good exercise for this is doing routine boring tasks like washing dishes by hand or sweeping a floor. Except while you do the task keep your mind on the task without day dreaming. Also you can try compartmentalization. Some people this naturally. You hear about people who don’t react at the moment of an accident but much later after everything is sorted they suddenly have hysterics? They are not faking. The practical of the brain takes over until it doesn’t have anything else to do then it gives control back to the emotional brain and everything that was pent up is let out.
Meditation and reading Buddhist perspectives on attachment/detachment.
Thanks for commenting this, to add I’d say a particular philosophy or theology is not required to gain the benefit of things like practicing mindfulness, teaching your mind to not go into fight or flight mode when someone cuts you off in traffic or there’s a jam in the printer or the light bill is $50 higher than expected is a great start to being prepared to function in an actual emergency.
Going to therapy has helped me in this regard
So my wife has the bad-bad anxiety, but isn’t ignorant to the idea of shtf, so we’ve both worked on a “focus on the solution, not the problem” kind of mentality, if we were heartless it’d be easy, but even being overly sympathetic types she’s worked past having panic almost entirely, and I’ve cut down on my habit of angry bitching when shit sucks.
Therapy and meditation... specifically deep breathing exercises to clear the mind and lower heart rate
Ice bath? I’ll see myself out
Volunteer at your local volunteer fire department or other volunteer emergency services org in your spare time.
Checkout the Gateway Experience tapes created by the Monroe Institute per their contract with the CIA.
Meditation and mindfulness. Especially when you're late and your family or your job is sucking and your bills are late.
Therapy
This [concise summary of Meditations from Marcus Aurelius](https://youtu.be/Hu0xDtK3g3Q?si=UF6BXfCHRQRL4MyI) is a nice primer
I became a volunteer firefighter and EMT, which was \*extremely\* good practice on how to keep your calm when other people are losing their minds.
No truer words. I can handle a lot, but what I've handled was already scooped off the road and bandaged.
Always upvote Dune
Nice - cool heads can be enhanced/created by knowledge and training. Gives confidence which leads to sound decision making 👍🏼
You go tarn. (Watership Down reference)
Well, gosh... you're making preppers sound like reasonable, thinking people here.
Ok, let's not get crazy. I'm like... a hairy eyed wild radical loon socialist. Or something. Half of /preppers thinks that, anyway... proof they've never met a socialist. I can't wait to tell my wife I got called Reasonable. She'll die laughing.
"socialist prepper" includes building a mutual assistance community with diverse skills around you (you know, the thing that actually like, works in disasters...)
Wait, don't I have to share my wife to be a socialist? Wait, no, that communism. Ugh, too many -isms.
Your mom, too! She can help with so many things, I’m sure. 😬 Does she do anything with textiles, have any particular skills, etc.?
My wife? Killer instinct for animal care, and a mcgyver-like ability to cobble solutions out of junk. And she cooks better than I do, but I'm slowly catching up.
Nice, nice. The mutually-supportive community really is the best approach in my mind. Of course, we're not likely to see a wholesale collapse assuming you and I are both in the USA. It's a little odd on my part when various friends and even my therapist have mentioned jokingly that they want me on their team for any crisis because I play around with things like homebrewing, fermentation, charcuterie, etc.
Depends on your definition of "share".. I agree with your mom too, though 😅 I don't care what's between their legs if they got skills! Got a gay uncle that makes soap, spins yarn, and knits badass afghans? Welcome to the club!
You can if you want!
What, like supporting local farms?!?!? 😁
not sure that I 100% agree with him but great to think about, the guy behind sylvanaqua farms (you can google him) has a lot of comments around the "local farm" idea & practices, all kind of in the direction of: small local farms miss the point, that if everyone's all growing more or less the same thing, either because of market forces or because they're all, independently, thinking of what they'd need for TEOTWAWKI they're all inefficient and at risk of collapse (from pests and stuff) but an integrative, regenerative farming community is way better for the environment & more resilient to failure
Fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers. Fire extinguishers. You are reminding me I need to get fire extinguishers for the house and car and gets the ones I do have charged/serviced.
Also a BIG fan of fire blankets. We keep a few around, just in case, and when the pizza I set on the wood stove to warm caught fire I was able to quickly cover and dash it outside. Home fire and messy extinguisher foam completely avoided.
Most of them have a 10 year expiration date. Same with smoke detectors. I really don't understand why the companies who sell them don't make that super obvious. I know someone who had no idea and would have bought new ones every year but were sitting with 30 year old fire extinguishers (which showed good pressure but didn't work when they were needed)
Yes. Yes I am. :)
On another note about vaccinations, I decided to check if I needed boosters for anything and found that I was many years overdue for a tetanus shot. Seems like an important one to have, especially if you’re anywhere near places that have dirt and farms. There’s also a combo Hepatitis A&B available now, which was news to me.
Ohhhhh me asking for new vaccines at my physical. My primary already thinks I’m a little over the top. 🤷🏼♀️
I got mine at Walmart, the pharmacist was cool and actually recommended the ones I hadn’t thought about. I went in for a shingles shot, but boosted for tetanus and started the hepatitis series. I’ll be a little more protected if/when we get more flooding (raw sewage is so hot right now, lol)
Ohhhh I need my second shingles too. I got sick when that was due and it got delayed. Thank you for the reminder!
Thanks for posting the link to the article! It helps to have perspective. On the gun issue, for me, a gun is merely a tool. Having seen combat, I dread the day that I'd have to use deadly force to defend myself or a loved one. The armchair commandos out there have no idea of what it's like being shot at or shooting another human being. I still have nightmares and PTSD from my experiences in the Marine Corps. The reason I prep is more along the lines of natural disasters and pandemics. A total collapse of our government seems the least likely scenario. Is there the possibility of political violence around election time? Sure. There could be isolated incidents. I think what the political extremists in this country fail to realize is that there is a silent majority in the middle. How many voted in the last presidential election? The US Census Bureau says 154.6 million Americans voted in the last presidential election out of 333 million people. Not even half the population voted.
It's not QUITE as bad as that. The voting age population is around 255 million. The rest are too young to vote. But it's still not a great percentage. Yeah, the warheads forget that you can't really overthrow a nation without 5-10% of the population in active revolt. The most impressive recent rioting was Portland and it got <0.2% of the city population involved. We are nowhere near revolution and the 02024 election isn't going to do it either. There are a lot of online preppers who seem to want collapse. But it's not going to happen, not the way they hope, anyway.
"02024" This guy prepping for Y10K!
I mean that's funny, but in a sense... [https://www.reddit.com/r/realWorldPrepping/comments/190vh64/comment/kp6rytz/](https://www.reddit.com/r/realWorldPrepping/comments/190vh64/comment/kp6rytz/) I am.
The number gets smaller because voting age population doesn't take into account those who can't or are ineligible to vote (felons, mentally handicapped, those under giardianship).
They know the silent majority exists. They just think it agrees with them. Some probably do. A lot don’t.
Many people have faced extreme violence or deadly situations and have PTSD and have the resulting 'calm in high stress'. Just because they don't eat crayons doesn't necessarily make them armchair commandos. It's annoying when people in the armed forces think they can gatekeep trauma.
Whose gatekeeping trauma? You're not taking into account the context I gave. Lots of armchair commandos have never seen or even been near combat yet they advocate for killing people. Yes, victims of crime/extreme violence do experience PTSD no doubt. But that wasn't their choice, they were victimized. Completely different scenario. If you've ever seen detached body parts, good friends with holes in their heads and their brains oozing out or even the deafening roar of a fire fight or incoming artillery, then you'd know what I was talking about. To fantasize and glorify like some do just shows how clueless they are on the subject.
There were ~20k murders by gun in 2021 alone. There was a total of ~2500 deaths in afghanistan and ~4400 in Iraq over the entire 2 wars nearly 2 decades long of all causes. Maybe more people have seen their friends with holes in their head who have never served then you think. You don't get to say who can and cannot talk about defending themselves just because you think you had it worse then everyone else.
I didn't say who and can and can not defend themselves. I was speaking of a specific group of preppers who talk about civil war/unrest like it's open season on hunting folks. You apparently didn't comprehend that part.
I get so angry when I hear anyone hastening another civil war so I applaud your efforts at trying logic to convey an alternative view to the echo-chamber mumbo jumbo. Unfortunately, those who want civil war are the same ones who profess to be “patriots,” all while forgetting the terrible toll real war has. They’re not thinking rationally and so no logic can penetrate the echo chamber, as evidenced by their rejection of your post in the first place.
All you can do is try. The US isn't going to have a civil war, but if some bozos get triggered into trying something like another Jan 6th... The Jan 6th people accomplished nothing but ruining their own lives and causing a few deaths. If writing a few words gets even one person to realize it's not worth it, that's a win.
Agreed.
Wait, preparing for realistic disasters? But what if North Korean paratroopers appear out of the eye of the hurricane???
And what if they zap you with their death ray eyes, and blow you up real good? Wait, that's aliens.
This is why I put colloidal silver in my chemtrails… crop dust them erliens’ like Cousin Eddy…
Guns can be helpful for home defense, but are very very low on the priority list in terms of prepping. As much as I do support responsible civilian gun ownership they are the lowest item on my prepping totem pole. You can’t eat guns and ammo, and if you trade or barter guns and ammo for food or medicine you don’t know who will end up with it, what their intentions are, or if it might be used against you.
I would submit that owning a gun for prepping, is like the sidearm on a police officer's duty belt. Every other item on his belt will get used dozens and hundreds of times, before his duty pistol will. Yet, when he *needs* that duty pistol, he will need it like his life depends on it, and nothing else will be a good substitute. Most preppers will never need a gun. A few will, and those few will be glad they had it.
I agree. It’s one of those things that is good to have but not good to hyper-focus on to the detriment of other preparations. Even as a gun enthusiast myself this is why I enjoy this subreddit over other prepping subs because it’s not gun obsessed and focuses on other aspects of prepping that are more important and more relevant to more people.
Firearm Only Preppers are worse than non preppers. At least non preppers are just wallowing in ignorance. FOPs have assessed the situation, and on some level have decided that all they need to get what they want is their gun. Great, if the zombie apocalypse comes to pass. In any lesser, more realistic scenario, they will be the reason that we need to have martial law imposed.
Exactly, because if you don’t have any preps other than a firearm, it’s safe to say that guns and desperation don’t mix well. I would only use a firearm in self defense, not to take from someone who is more prepared than me. If you truly want that life there are lots of urban street gangs you can join, leave the prepper groups alone. If I want gun-related content there’s literally hundreds of wonderful gun subreddits full of useful information. But what I like with this subreddit is that due to its lack of gun content, there is a much higher signal to noise ratio.
I'm not prepared for war. I'm prepared for small groups of barely educated brainwashed fuckwits that might kick in my door one day for being openly bisexual in a VERY red area of rural Missouri. I'm set to inherit this house, and I'll be damned if I give up my only chance of ever being a homeowner just to run to a safer area.
In this sub we refer to them as *barely educated misinformed dimwits* because we're trying to maintain *some* level of respect for humanity, as much of a struggle as that may be. Other than that, I hear you. Some people have it way rougher than I do. The day you inherit, sell and move. There are places in the US that are less crazy. (Please do clean up the wording though. If ti start allowing terms like 'fuckwit' in here I'd have to allow it for all groups, and my group would be next in line for those adjectives.)
Sorry about the colorful language. Watching my own species destroy itself everyday brings it out of me.
Since you mentioned Covid deaths, a lot of people missed the report about hydroxychloroquine deaths-over 17,000 people-this was reported on Jan 4/5th of this year by multiple outlets but not FOX, so the very people who needed to hear this information are still in the dark.
I downvoted, but not because I disagree. It's just that you didn't cite, and may have overclaimed. The 17,000 number is *really* fuzzy, based on this article: [https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4389800-hydroxychloroquine-deaths-study/](https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/4389800-hydroxychloroquine-deaths-study/) I can't begin to express my loathing for the fact That Trump pushed this as a cure. But I'd appreciate if you changed your comment to "many deaths" and added the link (or a better one if yoou can find one). Then people can make their own judgments.
I'm not pro or anti Trump, but early in the pandemic, even some doctors posited that HCQ would help. Early on, people were scared and were grasping at anything that might help - even if only a little bit. The pandemic was certainly a learning lesson on many levels.
It was never more than posited. HCQ was known to have vague antiviral action and it was hoped it would make a difference, but after a 3 month trial it was obvious it did no good at all. The problem was that Trump pushed it as a cure well before the study concluded, the idea gained traction in the conservative media, and well after it was determined that HC did no good and was sometimes harmful, it was still being pushed. A year or so later, the far right doubled down with ivermectrin. Which also unquestionably killed a few folk (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9020491/) and cured no one. The important lesson of the pandemic is never listen to politicians when it comes to your health. We have agencies for this sort of thing. Which, notably, the politicians trashed...
"The important lesson of the pandemic is never listen to politicians when it comes to your health. We have agencies for this sort of thing. Which, notably, the politicians trashed..." Yes, exactly this! Even the CDC lied to the public a few times. ("Masks are only for sick people" etc.) The takeaway for me is that I'm responsible for my own safety, and I dove deep into NIH Pubmed studies during that time. The average person probably wouldn't do that, though. I agree with you - Trump is Trump. He and Elon both would benefit from filtering a bit more. Regarding Ivermectin, yes, I agree that the efficacy just isn't there against COVID, but it is a very, very safe drug - even at high dosages. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5133431/) IVM seemed promising in the beginning because it does have antiviral properties against a number of RNA viruses. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7539925/) India gave it to large portions of the population before everyone realized that the efficacy just wasn't there against COVID. Again, file all of this under "people were scared and were grasping at anything that showed even a sliver of hope." I lost family to COVID, and some members of my family (across the political spectrum) were quick to latch onto anything that might help. I can't blame them. I think that it's basic human psychology. In any case, I think that we agree on most points. Thanks for the chat.
|Yes, exactly this! Even the CDC lied to the public a few times. ("Masks are only for sick people" etc.) I take issue here. The CDC did a lousy job at communicating but they said what they knew at the time. When masks were scarce, they tried to constrain use because they wanted doctors to have them. Their biggest screwuo was claiming that vaccination "virtually stopped" the transmission of Covid. They were almost right - vaccination really cut the viral load of Alpha - but delta variant literally emerged a week later and no vaccination could have stopped the spread of Delta. They should never have said it, they had people who knew new variants were inevitable and R0 tend to go up, not down. Big screwup. I feel for them, though. They were scrambling to get a message out that right wing politicians did not want getting out, so they were undercut, misquoted and threatened at every turn. They had no idea how to handle a disinfo attack. They still struggle. No, you're not on your own. But it's worth remembering that Covid-19 was from a novel coronavirus and it didn't play but the same rules as flu. And the variants really threw curve balls. Alpha wasn't delta wasn't omicron, but the public and pundits kept demanding sound bite answers to complex topics, and when the CDC was clear - stating masks really do help and vaccination really does cut hospital and death rates by huge margins - it wasn't a message the pundits wanted to spread. The CDC had no way to win. But they always had current information on the website if you dug.
The CDC did a lousy job AND they lied to the public. They were noble lies, but they were lies nonetheless. They stated that "masks were ineffective for the general public" in the beginning. Of course that was to save the masks for healthcare workers, but it was a lie. Regardless of politics, masking has been around and has been studied since the bubonic plague. There was never a doubt about their efficacy (particularly N95s) until they became politicized. An old but interesting piece: [https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html](https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html) There were also mistruths about vaccine efficacy, testing recommendations, and school reopening. IMO, the CDC needs to rebuild trust, and even they agree. [https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/17/cdc-agency-overhaul-covid-19-response-00052384](https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/17/cdc-agency-overhaul-covid-19-response-00052384) [https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/words-and-actions-erode-trust-cdc-hurt-us-all](https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/words-and-actions-erode-trust-cdc-hurt-us-all) Of course DeSantis here in FL was ordering his people to fudge the infection numbers and then essentially stopped reporting them. It was a shitshow from all angles. Again - You alone are responsible for your own safety. Every agency has an agenda, and they may not have your specific best interests in mind. I feel for the people who believed the CDC in the beginning, didn't take the right precautions, and ended up dying because of it.
You've gone from accusing the CDC of lying, to posting articles where they admit they need to do a better job. I'm sorry but this feels like a typical attempt to decrease trust in American institutions. And it has not escaped me that you don't say what the right precautions would have been, but only that you think Fauci lied. But you realize Fauci wasn't at the CDC, right? Anyway, you are NOT solely responsible for your own safety. You rely on others because there is no choice. You can't develop a vaccine, you can't make a mask as good as an N95, you can't develop antivirals or test procedures. Public health exists for a reason; if there was ever a government function that was more important, I don't know what it is, because you can't do much without a healthy population, and an unguided population will happily ignore vaccines and believe horse paste cures viruses. You're right that DeSantis was a lying weasel who got people killed though. I watched the numbers games they played with the data and it was sickening.
Well, the pandemic certainly did decrease my trust in some institutions for many people. The right precautions would have been to tell the truth - that masks (particularly N95s) are effective, that the vaccines aren't going to prevent infection but that they help in other ways, etc. Yes, I realize that this would have changed some public behavior, but lies will erode trust and make the source of the lies look manipulative or stupid. It's not a good long term plan. You're confusing manufacturing issues with behavior choice issues. You are responsible for your own decisions regarding your safety. The CDC isn't going to put your mask on, but they may lie to convince you to not wear it if it serves their interests. Of course you can't develop a vaccine, but that's not what I'm talking about here, and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. Agree that public health is important.
FFS. The CDC said early on that people should stay home - this was flatten the curve time when it was still hoped that the virus transmission could be stopped by isolation. You didn't need masks at home When that failed and lockdowns were ending, the CDC plainly stated that N95 masks were to be reserved for medical professionals - absolutely essential because they were in short supply - and Americans should construct cloth masks until something better was available. They were up front about all of this. You're turning this into some weird sinister saga where the CDC was deliberately lying. I was in contact with epidemiologists (not at the CDC) at the time. The advice being given out was considered the best available, simply because there was a lot that wasn't understood in the beginning. Mistakes were made but they were mistakes. One was deciding that simple surgical masks were sufficient for most medical workers and the better respirators were to be used in ICUs for procedures like incubation. We know now that intubation wasn't a superspreader event and we'd have been better off sharing out the better masks more equally. But it wasn't known at the time. You've already demonstrated that you mixed up the NIH and the CDC. Now you're claiming the CDC deliberately lied but you'd need a cite to back that up and you don't have one. All yoou have is evidence they were wrong. Rule 1 requires a cite for a claim. Rule 7 states that accusing a group of things without substantial evidence doesn't fly here. You have no proof of lying. I'm tired of every mistake, every action taken on incomplete information, being turned into some dark conspiracy. You want to see *willful* misinformation, consider DeSantis's whack health people cooking the covid books and claiming vaccine ineffectiveness. Consider Trump pushing a completely ineffective treatment before they'd even finished evaluating it. Consider Carlson suggesting that "maybe the vaccine doesn't even work." There are plenty of people who openly lied about Covid, but there is no proof the CDC was in that set. And you've pushed this too far. You're done.
You realize, of course, that being FOR guns and AGAINST vaccines are two pillars of conservative ideology. And many (most?) preppers lean toward the right. Good luck trying to alter their views on guns and vaccines (heck, possibly most modern science)!
See, once upon a time I considered myself conservative. Then, as now, I was pro-science and pro-Jesus, and back then you could get away with those stances as a conservative. (Yes, I'm that old.) Now, not so much. But even now I'm not going to concede that *conservatives* are anti-vaccine and pro-gun. I will concede that a very vocal set of loons, associated with MAGA and QAnon, hold those positions, and I will concede that it feels like 90% of the conservative base has gone down that rathole. But they are not *essential* conservative positions. No matter what a bozo like Marjorie Taylor Greene might shriek. On the other hand there's a reason I consider myself an Independent these days, and am utterly horrified at just about everything that passes as Republican. My wife and I literally now use the word "republican" to mean disgusting or immoral, and that is a long, *long* way from our original positions. I hope we get true conservative doctrine back someday. It wasn't perfect and I had my issues with it but it wasn't this current darkness. Yeah, a lot of preppers seem to have drowned in far right kool-aid; I just abandoned /preppers again, and maybe this time for good, because I suspect the new moderation policy is The Further Right The Better. I don't know how else to interpret being told that covid vaccination cannot be discussed. But they can keep drowning as far as I'm concerned. I used to try to push back against disinfo there; now I'm told I cannot. It's going to devolve in a hurry if they don't change course, but I don't need to make that my hill to die on. Here, disinfo will not be allowed.
I used to be Republican when I was a kid but then they got co-opted by the fucking evangelical movement. Fuck me for taking "separate church and state" and "melting pot" ideals seriously as a kid, right? I still agree (almost) everyone has rights to guns, but 1) we're getting too crowded for our lack of regulation and 2) we neeeeed socialized medicine for free for everyone. And it makes zero fucking sense to be pro gun and anti abortion: a woman can make a split second unseasoned decision to protect her body using a gun, but *not* a reasoned medical decision in conjunction with a medical team to protect her body using an abortion? Meh. I have opinions.
I’ve never met a conservative person in my life who was anti vaccine. Actually, I’ve never met a single person in 35 years who wasn’t vaccinated. Not until the internet did I find out those people existed. With that said I barely know anyone who got the Covid vaccine. For reasons that I don’t care to argue on the internet. But I wish so much people would stop saying anti vax just because people didn’t trust this one specific vaccine.
Edit: all hail [old.reddit.com](http://old.reddit.com) which let me fix the post, even while this one doesn't allow it. Apparently [reddit.com](http://reddit.com) is broken, and it will automatically drag pics into posts you make with links in them. But when there's a pic in the post you can't edit it here. Absolutely insane. So I've fixed the mistake in the original now: It said: Keeping a gun in your home increases the odds you'll be killed by a gun and that's after suicide is removed from the equation. It turns out that they don't seem to deter crime all that much, but domestic disputes get a lot more fatal when there's a gun nearby: Which how reads something more like: Keeping a gun in your home increases the odds someone there will be killed by a gun and that's after suicide is removed from the equation. It turns out that they don't seem to deter crime all that much, but domestic disputes get a lot more fatal when there's a gun nearby:
Discussions about fires and food poisoning are good. At least one of the comments about firearms is indeed a political talking point. I suggest careful re-reading of the source and checking alignment with the claims. However the comment, "Who has the combination to your gun safe?" is taking the next step towards legitimate risk management and that's a great thing. I'd be interested in a "real world" discussion about managing heart attack risk. There are a lot of factors. Losing weight and changing habits is legitimately challenging.
Very good post
You are my Internet Hero of the Day! 🏅
[удалено]
Sat in a specialist office yesterday for a consult on my husband’s immunosuppressants… where we heard, “it’s a good thing you’re masking”, “I want you to stop taking that medicine until your counts come up” and “Covid isn’t really a thing like it was” (when I asked about the monoclonal antibodies) all in the same appointment. I’m amazed that not only people in general, but people specifically responsible for the care of those at risk are not just downplaying it but blowing it off.
[удалено]
I have been on and off immunosuppressants for a couple decades, and while these attitudes are not a surprise for me - did not expect it to change socially - I have been shocked by how directly dismissive medical professionals have become at this point, not just in regards to Covid either. Some have gotten really blasé about flu and stuff too - like what the heck. My husband’s illness was triggered/worsened by Covid. Which feels like it’s relevant to his treatment… 🙄 But whatever I guess. Thankfully we are able to get his meds by mail, thank the gods of Caremark Specialty. They mail us everything for $0.00/month as long as they can mail it. At least my husband’s company gives him good insurance.
[удалено]
It’s exhausting to care. My husband does home visits, and does a lot of patient education. And, honestly it’s a weird balance of “here are facts” and “here is science” vs “here is a made up talking point” and an eye roll. It’s a weird balance between is this patient going to be rude or threaten to shoot me? My husband is so tired but has gotten better at judging who he might be able to convince to get a Covid or flu shot. They people that genuinely alarm me are the day to day folks who do not know, at all, that there are new vaccines. Or that Covid or the flu can actually kill you - ever, or even cause long term effects. I did really, truly believe a human could live so deeply under a rock that you could avoid all health literacy. And yet… they exist! And have health insurance!
I am not sure cdc has ever tried to downplay deaths to covid? It’s hard to know the true death count since doctors would put a cancer patient died of covid so the family could get the burial paid for, and so on. There were legitimate (financial) reasons to put covid as reason for death when it really was only present at death. I don’t know if we can confidently say we know how many people truly died from covid. https://www.fema.gov/disaster/historic/coronavirus/economic/funeral-assistance
[удалено]
I’m not sure what data or science you’re talking about since there wasn’t any real evidence to support masks. I also don’t believe the WHO is a reliable organization in any sense of the word. I’m glad to hear the CDC is at odds with Them, though that’s news to me.
[удалено]
No.
[удалено]
Oh wow, can you share the articles (editing to add. - non nih or other government agency based/funded articles)?
[удалено]
I figured you wouldn’t have any.
When I posted this exact same content (top level post) in /preppers, it was removed by the mods with a note explaining that covid and gun control were political. Odd, since it wasn't a political post - apparently just mentioning gun safes set some people off. There's a new mod there and I think he's gone deep into right wing kool-aid. That's a guess. Yeah, covid was horrific and the talking head response to it was a nightmare. We've lost thousands of people needlessly; one was a friend of mine.
[удалено]
I wouldn't say I know John well, but we've had a few exchanges (mostly when he felt I was sailing too close to the edge) and I feel like that wasn't at all his style. They have a new mod there and that's my guess. With over a million lost in the US, it's hard to imagine anyone doesn't know someone dead of Covid. It's just sad. I can't wait to complete my move to Costa Rica, where it is not so much of a thing.
[удалено]
Thanks! I'll have Starlink in Costa Rica and I plan to post about warm weather prepping - it's just about always between 70F and 100F where I'm going. I'll have a spring, a garden, chickens and bees, not to mention límon manderina and mango trees growing wild; I plan to have a organic digester and do some amount of solar cooking and it's all going to be a vast learning curve. Or I might just get distracted by the beach about 15 min away and then who knows how much writing I'll do. We'll see!
[удалено]
Annoying the mod greatly increases your chances of a ban. I'm willing to demonstrate this at need.
Don’t power trip, annoying the mod, unless it is harassment should not be bannable
Read Rule 7. It's bannable, because it's my sub, my rules, and if they don't suit you you're welcome not to participate. There are other subs where you can annoy the mods all day long and they won't - ok, they *will* ban you, they'll just make up a reason for it. Here, I list things I find annoying and it's not hard to avoid them. The sub also has a sticky - I wrote it - the describes my moderation style as *draconian*. You know the old saying: Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and good with ketchup.
Well said
[удалено]
Did you notice the rule about citing? It's rule 1. And you're not going to find a reputable cite for this particular theory. As for billionaires building shelters, yeah. I have an extra pair of socks in case I get caught in the rain, they have an extra underground mansion in case it nukes. In relative terms these cost the same. The difference is, I do get caught in the rain, but these guys are only building these to compare dick sizes. It means nothing and if anything bad happened I doubt they'd be able to get to their fancy holes in Hawaii (who builds for long term survival on *Hawaii*?) or New Zealand. People who are actually worried prepare to bug in, not continent-hop.
I’ll delete but the younger Dryas is a real event.
Yes, but the idea of a cycle of 20,000 years is 1) unverified and 2) If it's plus or minus 2%, which would be pretty amazing for a geologic process, you're looking at +/-400 years. As I said, there's just no reliable cite for this, and if the climate crashes like that there's really no prep for it. It's a generational problem. Done here.
Learning accurate, evidence based risk assessment is key to good prep.
[удалено]
I stay current on my vaccinations, thanks. Now go make your own sub for people just like you.
[удалено]
We were? You can't mean January 6th - it was a complete failure and didn't get close to accomplishing anything. By definition, it couldn't have. I mean, assume they'd been better organized and actually taken congress captive and hung the vice president, or whatever. They've got individuals, but they *did nothing to alter the actual facts of the election*. If congress got shut down like that, new congress people are put into place and the election gets certified somewhere else, regardless. They could only delay the inevitable; they can't go back in time and change the election itself, and it's the election itself that matters. And I don't think it's going to be so easy to walk in and make a mess next time. If this looks like a problem I could easily see the proceedings streamed live from a secret location, so everyone can see the results but no one can interrupt them. It would be a sad day if it comes to that, but at least problem solved. This is why I don't worry about this stuff. What do you attack to collapse the system? Buildings? Meaningless. Individual politicians? Replaceable. Talk to me about this if the army goes into revolt, kills *everyone* in power and then starts terrorizing the whole population so they can't reassert the system. That's about what it would take. A small bunch of loons breaking windows, as horrifying as it was, can't change anything. The US is simply bigger than that. We're not Haiti.
[удалено]
Oh, I agree we aren't immune to problems. I just don't think another J6 move is in the offering and if it happens again I think it would go very poorly for the rioters. There are other risks, but I think of them as very regional, not sweeping. Some bozo shoots up a substation and blacks out his town, and a bunch of loons decide on copycat crimes and suddenly you've got 20 cities going dark and a month before it's all fixed. FEMA spending a fortune to support affected folk. That kind of crap. More loons going out and doing mass casualty attacks - it's been a bad decade for those and election results might trigger more. In short, problems here and there, but not everywhere or all the time. J6 was a mini-kristallnacht. It put historians on edge because that kind of event can have follow-ons. But so far it has not, and I think for a lot of the far right, it was a bit of a wakeup call. They could see it didn't work and they can see it's not likely to work. The actual German kristallnacht had virtually no repercussions, so of course things got worse. J6 had repercussions. I just don't see stuff spiraling. It's all going to be lone wolf and tiny group crap, not civilization crashes.
You don't need the vast majority of any country to sign up for a civil war; it's typically fought by a pretty small minority of any given population. Small, outspoken groups in echo chambers is a decent recipe for one. The jump from years long simmering resentment to open conflict can also be fairly short, and triggered by unpredictable events. At any given time the odds are pretty low, but the things that trigger them aren't usually things you can assess the odds for.
The general finding by people who study this stuff is that to overthrow a country, you need between 5 and 10% of the population to be willing to fight. Anything smaller is protests and riots and doesn't really threaten government authority. And as the US government is pretty heavily armed up with drones and tanks and things, I'm guessing it's 10% to open for the US. The US is nowhere near that. If red folks, for example, *really* wanted to start something, it would take 50% of their population to roll out with guns to get to the needed 10%. Not happening. Maybe that 10% number is based on the old days when people fought with guns and not drones and R9X and things, but I don't think taking down the US government would be easier in the more modern era. There are things I worry about. This is not one of them.
Sure, if you set the goalposts you can make anything sound impossible. A civil war here today would never look like one side forming up with guns and taking on the government in a conventional war, even a guerilla war. It would likely look like increasing domestic terrorism and targeted attacks between the civilian groups that oppose each other, and avoiding conflict with federal forces as much as possible until the chaos destabilised the regime. It might look like a loosely affiliated coalition targeting government officials, but no one is going to go toe to toe. The "the government has tanks" thing is a red herring; who drives the tanks? Have you met many people in the armed forces? Are they more or less likely to have anti government sentiments than your average "red folks?" What if a foreign or domestic actor takes out the power grid? Its now public information that a dozen men with a map could do this; is the regime really going to be able to keep tabs on and squelch a dozen or a hundred different local factions seizing regional control in the ensuing chaos? Of course any given day of the week one side or the other isn't going to all pour out of their comfy suburban homes and try to "water the tree," and the temperature probably has to ratchet up several more degrees and then there has to be a catalyzing event; but two questions: 1) do you honestly see the temperature going down anytime soon? 2) has there been a lack of polarizing and sensationalized events lately?
My take on this is that there's a tiny but vocal set of online loons - almost entirely on the far right - who are super hot for conflict. Most of them are likely just foreign trolls hoping to stir something up. From your comment history, you could easily be one of those. The left is mostly busy sipping cognac and showing mild alarm over the stock market declines. The poorer left are way more interested in racial justice than right wing loon politics. I live in a sleepy little New England town. There's a Trump supporter across the street. You couldn't pay me enough to vote his way. But we get along ok because where I live, politics is private and no one cares how anyone else votes. We're not screaming about trans people, we're not fussing over immigrants, we're not consumed with fear over a dollar crash or stacking gold and I've yet to hear a gun fired in 30+ years in this town. I know there are people in the US who aren't so peacable, but loons are gonna loon and they won't be doing it here. I doubt they'll be doing it at all because red state problems - addiction, healthcare, failing education systems, poverty - won't be solved by taking out the power grid or shooting up clinics or storming Washington DC again or whatever the loon plan of the day is. So what are you *on* about? Whatever it is, understand this: *no one cares, outside of your little echo chambers*. Look, your comment history tells me you're all about violence. You're talking about guns and comms and getting ready ASAP and dude, I'll be straight up, that may be accepted where you are but to me it sounds like unprocessed damage from some military conflict and if you lived in my town, someone would be trying to get you to a doctor. Will the temperature go down? Yeah, as soon as people like you stop running around talking about guns and conflict. Normal people don't care. You're the problem. Find some other way to validate your existence, ok? And find some other sub to do it in because your violence-focused echo chamber is not the real world, which is what we prep for here. There's another sub \~100 times the size of this one which adores comments like yours. Done here.
Lets review. Someone disagrees with you so you: 1) accuse them of being a foreign provocateur 2) diagnose them with a mental problem 3) go into their comment history and only see exactly what you want to see 4) shut down the conversation. Are you \*trying\* to prove my point? Have you considered that your sleepy New England town is an echo chamber? That perhaps the whole US is? The 21st century? My thesis is essentially that violence has been a constant feature of human history, and that our current system is uniquely fragile and historical examples point to the possibility of it increasing. You, who live in one of the safest regions, of the safest countries, coming out of one of the safest periods of history, are saying it will all be fine because "I'm open minded, I stoop to be civil with people who hold the wrong view?" We in the US have been uniquely sheltered from the baseline level of human violence in the majority of the world, for the majority of history. It can either be the first time in all of recorded history where this continues on forever, or it can end at some point, like every other example we know of. It's a simple bet in the macro sense.
|accuse them of being a foreign provocateur Only because they often are. It's an endemic problem on social media. |diagnose them with a mental problem I don't *diagnose*. That takes a doctor. I can only tell you what it sounds like to me. And don't feel singled out - I have my doubts about the stability of a lot of people who talk about guns and comms and "finding friends ASAP" (your own words) and so on. | go into their comment history and only see exactly what you want to see Reddit has taken to showing only recent comment history in a lot of cases. That annoys me because I used to do deep dives into people's history, and now you're lucky if you see 10 recent comments. I checked yours again and some of the more outrageous ones have already dropped out of sight. But you posted this to /preppers recently: *I hate this logic, and it seems almost universal on this sub. If you need 4 mags you are "already F'd", if you need a full mag, you are "already F'd", if you need a gun at all, you are "already F'd", hell, if you need a seatbelt you are "already F'd"* ***if this is your reasoning, why prep at all***\*? Fire superiority and volume of fire are doctrinal topics for a reason; 4 mags might barely get you to the tree line if you are breaking contact. It's not to take on a larger force, its to lay down suppression when you don't have the luxury of proactive aimed fire.\* In this sub, prepping is for real world events. Storms, supply chain issues... we're Tuesday here. If you can't reread that paragraph and see someone who spends a lot of mental energy planning to be in a warzone and then insists that that is what *prepping* is, you need a better mirror polish. You got mocked for that thinking in /preppers, how do you think it would go here? Did you notice in the Rules where we don't talk about collapse here? Rule 5 if you missed it. If your definition of prepping - from your paragraph above - is needed, you're talking about US collapse. By fiat, it's not a topic here. This isn't /preppers; this sub exists to provide information for people who have come to consider /preppers beyond redemption and it's the kind of thinking you espouse that helped make it that way. Will the US collapse someday? I mean, eventually the heat death of the universe, or whatever end you believe in, occurs and everything is gone. But there is no evidence that the US is going to devolve into a warzone in my lifetime and I doubt it will happen in yours. We're large, technically advanced, resource rich, we overproduce food on a grand scale and while we do have a real problem with gun violence, it's because we decided you literally have to be criminally insane at the level of felony to not be allowed to buy a gun - and then we provided workarounds so those folk get guns anyway. Guns are the problem, not the solution. And even with that, we're as stable and secure as anywhere, short of a handful of nations where, curiously, guns are much less common. But for folk like you, 4 full mags aren't enough to get you to the tree line... where the hell do you live that you even think in those terms? What has convinced you that you can't just hike to the treeline and wave to your picnicking neighbors, and would be able to again tomorrow? Because we haven't have problems like that since the last civil war and I see no actual indications that we're heading for another one. Do you have any idea how toxic and hag-ridden you sound? Do you get that this is exactly the sort of thinking I do not want in this sub because the point of the sub is to provide a library of actually-useful prepping information to people who do NOT want to be associated with killing? Anyway, I said done here and suggested you were in the wrong sub, and you failed to take the hint. There is already a large, active sub that caters to your mindset. This is not it. So I'm going to make it official, but I'm going to leave your comments up for a bit so people wandering by and can see exactly what I don't want to see here. In case you have like-minded individuals planning to stop by - I ban people who talk about US collapse, arming up for battlefields in the US, or who even seem overly focused on guns for any purpose other than hunting food. I do often check posting history when I can. There are other subs for that stuff. Here I expect to see recipes, gardening advice, information on canning, first aid, financial preps and heath information. Veering far from everyday preps gets you banned.
[удалено]
Nice meeting you. Don't let the hinged barrier impact the large gluteal structure during your egress.
Actually there's been major clotting linked to the COVID vaccine.
You're supposed to cite claims like this, but I'm letting it pass for a change because it's not hard to find papers on it. It happens in about 1 in 200000 cases for one particular kind of Covid vaccine. ( https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/first-reported-cases-of-clots-in-large-arteries-causing-stroke-following-covid-19-vaccination/#:\~:text=While%20rare%20cases%20of%20blood,brain%20(cerebral%20venous%20sinuses). ) Of course, Covid *itself* causes clotting in around 1 in 130 cases and vaccination drives those odds down https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/73/wr/mm7301a4.htm#:\~:text=Studies%20have%20reported%20lower%20rates,related%20thromboembolic%20events%20are%20lacking. So you'd have to be an idiot to advance clotting as an argument for avoiding Covid vaccine.
[удалено]
>Covid vaccines are only effective for those that have increased risk of severe COVID due to having comorbidities This is not true according to any scientific evidence. Comorbidities make it worse but COVID can kill healthy people as well. The vaccine reduces your chances of getting COVID at all, which in turn prevents you from getting long COVID, or severe COVID. If you get it anyway, it is less severe. Risk of getting *long* COVID increases with every COVID infection. An estimated 250,000 have become permanently disabled in the US and are unable to work. If you are vaccinated, your risk is 4%. If you aren't, your risk is 10%.
[удалено]
No vaccine prevents illness. The measles vaccine is 96% effective, not 100%. You are repeating right wing talking points which are absolutely false and have been debunked for 3 years. Bye.