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Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not

Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers but given how many dictators out there love the idea to cut their country off Internet whenever anything starts going not in their favor, I imagine a lot of people may find this useful. I wouldn’t want to lose access to knowledge how to fix a sink or which medication is better, just because the local kingface currently feels that free exchange of opinions about him threatens his kingship.

iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.
- jmuguy 7mo ago
  Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.
  - wisty 7mo ago
    Do you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water? OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
    - bee_rider 7mo ago
      I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
      - judahmeek 7mo ago
        The term you're looking for is "homesteader"
      - armenarmen 7mo ago
        Mormons?
        JuniperMesos 7mo ago
        Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.
      - moorow 7mo ago
        "staff engineer"
      - pigpop 7mo ago
        Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1]. [1] another example of a successful smear campaign
  - reaperducer 7mo ago
    the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals Both of which are available at Wal-Mart. I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food. I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      Costco sells those, too. https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-food-pallet-246ct-2814-total-servings/100843064?langId=-1 https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f... Sometimes they even appear in stores. Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.
      - yobert 7mo ago
        Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
      - vetrom 7mo ago
        Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to. Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-centers?lang=eng https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)
    - vetrom 7mo ago
      This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement. Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific. "For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S. There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues. Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
  - K0balt 7mo ago
    I think that pepper mostly exists in movies. Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it. Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?” Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural. Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day. As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv. A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence. Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.
  - philipallstar 7mo ago
    This is just a straw man, though. We all have biases of course.
- coldtea 7mo ago
  The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo ago
    But I bet they would've loved the opportunity to do so before it all went sideways.
    - coldtea 7mo ago
      I mean they practically know and prepare in different ways, because the popular idea of prepping is bullshit.
  - vetrom 7mo ago
    I have lived in places like that, and absolutely prep like that when the environment calls for it. I'd expect a non zero proportion of the HN readership has as well. See: Burning Man, the fanciest refugee camp on Earth, where you need to schedule, plan, haul in, and haul back out again everything you need to survive. (I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an hour away, YMMV)
    - komali2 7mo ago
      The most important aspect of Burning Man and why it works is the thing most preppers/American Libertarians ignore: the community. Burning Man isn't interesting because a bunch of individuals pitch tents in the desert, it's interesting because a society is built in the middle of the desert, spontaneously.
      - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
        The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.
- colechristensen 7mo ago
  I mean preppers are mostly cosplayers and I don't criticize people who go to comicon either. If you're not hurting anyone there's nothing wrong with having an unrealistic hobby or one without a lot of practical utility (even if the premise of the hobby is having practical utility). But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years. And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters. My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.
  - msla 7mo ago
    > But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years. > And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters. The only one of those things someone survived by being an individual prepper is the natural disaster, because in the other cases the government didn't just go away, it was replaced by other groups who could kill any given individual and take their stuff. The only way to survive is to leave and become a refugee or to band together in an even bigger group that can kill all individuals and smaller groups and take all their stuff. This is how you get the Carolingian Empire, Los Zetas, MS-13, the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge. Individual preppers are living in a fantasy land to the extent they think they can wait out political collapse. They might well be competent enough to wait out a terrible natural disaster, but at that point they aren't "preppers" so much as people who listen to what FEMA and NOAA and other disaster-focused government agencies recommend for their regions.
    - colechristensen 7mo ago
      Many places around the world will have gone through five or six vastly different governments seated in very different locations over the last century or two and during the transition 1) most of the people stayed 2) most of the people had no part in whatever new group held power and 3) there usually wasn't mass slaughter of the people living there during the transition. You overestimate the importance of government and underestimate how it very much can just go away... and how distant it can be even when it exists, particularly historically. And how the local warlord equivalent isn't going around to everybody's house and murdering them. And yeah in those times having food and a means of defense and whatever else is useful as often times very very many people had no option but to stay wherever they were. Famine and revolution are much more common and more mundane than you expect.
- globalnode 7mo ago
  calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.
  - atoav 7mo ago
    Well yes and no. You will always have some have actually prepared; people, and you will have people who cosplay people who are prepared. The latter see buying things that help survival more as a hobby than a thing that needs to get done in order to survive. It is the difference between a hunter who needs a gun as a tool and a gun nut that collects guns because he likes theorizing over minor differences between them online and nerd out about them. That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone. This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      Every peppers' dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M
  - computably 7mo ago
    Calling somebody a racist is an "adhom," but it's not very controversial to say racists exist and it's bad to be a racist...
    - sigbottle 7mo ago
- nxobject 7mo ago
  > I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash! In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children. In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)
- expedition32 7mo ago
  I live in a country with a functional government with an unlimited creditcard. The prepping is their business not mine. I remember when Russia invaded we were all supposed to freeze to death- in reality 2.5% of GDP was diverted and it was Bangladesh that didn't get their LNG tankers.
brightball 7mo ago
Stuff like this is why I keep a small library at my house. Full encyclopedia set, Merck Manual, home repair book, etc. May never use them, but I like having them. Facebook ads even successfully targeted me for that “how to rebuild all of civilization” book. :)
- nojvek 7mo ago
  Is there a serious “rebuild all of civilization” book? Sounds like a good read.
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    In a doomsday scenario one wouldn't need a "rebuild all of civilization" book, but more a "basics like building a fire, filtering water, repairing a car engine, basic wound treatment" and such book. Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo ago
      And we did it all without a manual the first time, so it stands to reason we (or more accurately, our descendants) could figure it out.
      - mememememememo 7mo ago
        What so we gotta go through the middle ages again :(
        komali2 7mo ago
        Not necessarily, basically the majority of our technology is the result of a very, very brief period of innovation. So long as we don't forget that it's important to wash our hands and clean out wounds with soap, we're already centuries out of the middle ages.
      - 7mo ago
chr15m 7mo ago
"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst." Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.
- tartoran 7mo ago
  I’ll tell you why.. because the whole thing is commercialized, drives fear and doom into people minds then profits off people’s fears by selling media, merch and so on or spreads misinformation. They’ve been around for a while
- atoav 7mo ago
  Because I want the people around me to be actually prepared. The whole prepper thing is a market targeting a specific kind of man with the fantasy that they are in control when shit hits the fan to the loint some of these men want shit to hit the fan. In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
- kstrauser 7mo ago
  Often because they keep intruding into hobbies I enjoy with a clear misunderstanding of the space or even a hostility to playing within the rules. Examples include people coming into Meshtastic chats and wondering if a 50W amp will help them talk to their buddy on the other wide of the mountain when civil war breaks out ("no, you'll just be ruining the airwaves for everyone else in the mean time, you still won't have line of sight to your friend, and your radio will look like a spotlight in the dark when the National Guard goes fox hunting"), or which ham radio they buy without a license ("no government's gonna tell me what I can say on the air"). If they'd be doing this in private, I couldn't care less. But in these cases, their actions would actively make my hobby less enjoyable, and I'll judge them for that.
Havoc 7mo ago
> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers Yes though watching that crowd is worthwhile. They often think about things different from mainstream and notice different things so good additional signal even if you ignore it
angiolillo 7mo ago
> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers The doomsday preppers with a scarcity mindset and a bunker full of tin cans and military surplus make for good TV, but plenty of "preppers" don't look like that. They also have a well-stocked pantry but focus more on strengthening the community to absorb shocks. Things like mutual aid networks, skill sharing, tool libraries, noodling with GMRS/HAM/LoRa comms, going on camping trips, helping each other out with kitchen gardens, and general community resilience. This approach doesn't cover every disaster scenario but it seems like a more pleasant (and realistic) option for the ones it does cover. And if nothing truly bad happens then at least they got to spend time doing things like gardening with their neighbors. Being able to have offline Wikipedia, maps, and educational tools would be useful in either case but potentially even more so as a community resource because there are only so many skills each individual can learn.

iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago

I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. If you see clouds on the horizon, reasonable people start preparing. Some preparations take longer than others so longer than others. And this does not account for the fact that one the steady lull ( in US and most of Europe ) of the past 70 or so years is not the norm in our world.

jmuguy 7mo ago
Well usually when people refer to someone as a prepper its the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals but still living on city water - like they're preparing for a disaster movie but not anything real. Specifically the idea that you would be able to stay in place, with all your hoarded disaster crap, during the end of the world is kind of funny.
- wisty 7mo ago
  Do you know of any preppers who buy guns and rations but don't have a plan for water? OK steelmanning you, certainly a lot of them are way more interested in gun collecting and making beef jerky than other aspects.
  - bee_rider 7mo ago
    I don’t think we have a term for people who quietly keep a well stocked pantry, have a water setup, garden, have hobbies like canning, etc. That’s just being a bit rustic/prudent I guess. So then, the “prepper” derogatory label is only applied to the people who do it in the action movie/silly way. But, the question of how prevalent they are is a good one…
    - judahmeek 7mo ago
      The term you're looking for is "homesteader"
    - armenarmen 7mo ago
      Mormons?
      - JuniperMesos 7mo ago
        Mormons have a widespread cultural practice of prepping, which I understand is mostly the sensible kind where you keep stocks of food and water onhand in case of a natural disaster (rather than the generally-less-sensible rifle militia LARPing). This is something that the institutional Church of Latter-Day Saints encourages among its members, and it strikes me as a pretty good thing to do. Nonetheless, there's no reason why you need to accept the other religious tenets of the LDS church in order to do sensible emergency preparedness, and I'm not sure that not every Mormon community or household is equally diligent about preparedness.
    - moorow 7mo ago
      "staff engineer"
    - pigpop 7mo ago
      Well, we did have a term for it until it got dragged and sensationalized in the media. I'd tell you that's a standard "psyop" that the propaganda arm of the government often uses against communities and subcultures that they want to discredit and suppress for one reason or another but then you'd probably call me a conspiracy theorist[1]. [1] another example of a successful smear campaign
- reaperducer 7mo ago
  the specific type of person that is buying hundreds of guns, tons of dehydrated meals Both of which are available at Wal-Mart. I always knew about the guns, but only recently discovered that Wal-Mart stores (at least in Louisiana) carry huge buckets with weeks worth of dehydrated survival food. I'm sure it's for hurricanes. Yeah, that's it.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    Costco sells those, too. https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-food-pallet-246ct-2814-total-servings/100843064?langId=-1 https://www.costco.com/p/-/mountain-house-1-year-emergency-f... Sometimes they even appear in stores. Apparently Mormons are required to keep some amount of emergency food on site.
    - yobert 7mo ago
      Not required. It's recommended by the church leadership though to have a garden and to have a years supply of food storage if you can. I'm not a Mormon but appreciate it as a good idea.
    - vetrom 7mo ago
      Say what you will about Mormons, but they take the idea of local stockpiles amazingly seriously. It rises to the point where they subsidize stores selling bulk food product direct to customers, at a scale that otherwise you'd need a Sysco or commercial restaurant license in most places to get access to. Source: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-centers?lang=eng https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/life/home-storage-center... (In older literature & analysis it used to be called the LDS Cannery or LDS Dry Cannery, but I guess they recently rebranded it.)
  - vetrom 7mo ago
    This is a reductionist view of even the suburban United States IMO. There are plenty of locales in what I'd call 'middle suburbia', which I'd define as less than an hour from whatever their geographical city center is. Even in these areas, multiple day power outages, or other localized or regional disasters have been endemic in the last 25 years; often due to utility or local resource mismanagement. Take, for example, the 2018 California Camp Fire, the various southern winter flash power outages, or the endemic hurricane season pretty much everywhere exposed to the middle or southern pacific. "For hurricanes" is a cute way to minimize it, but in much of the country it's rather little that separates you from being left to your own devices, at least for a little while, even when you're just suburban and haven't even looked out to the rural U.S. There is a real deferred maintenance and resource mismanagement issue in this country. The increasing evidence of "preppers" and items like ration buckets becoming prevalent at bulk store operations like Walmart & Costco are early indications of the increasing prevalence of these issues. Take a survey of the items that are always available at most Costos or Sam's Clubs across the country and you'll see similar results. They essentially market decentralized infrastructure for those that can afford it (or those who can't afford not to have it).
- K0balt 7mo ago
  I think that pepper mostly exists in movies. Certainly some people probably emulate the Hollywood version, but I think that’s about it. Most “peppers” are fathers that have had the good sense to pause and think “so, what would I be able to do to serve my family if something disastrous happened? What might that look like?” Usually, a disaster go-bag of some kind with enough basic supplies to weather a day or two of displacement suspension of normal services. Sometimes, if they live in a place where it’s reasonable to imagine staying put is a good option, they might also have a generator and fuel, a week or two worth of long shelf life food, and some water storage. That ensures the wellbeing of their family will not be contingent on outside help, at least during most common disasters. Many of these people may also have a gun or two, for defense or for hunting if they are rural. Some people go beyond that, and sometimes with a military focus, other times with months of rations, a bunker, or other unusual preparations. Mostly, those are not based on realistic scenarios. In almost any protracted disruption, having a lot of supplies , armaments, or resources will be as much a liability as an asset. People that buy guns -for prepping- are just living out some kind of hero fantasy. If you own guns, and use guns as part of your normal life, it would make sense to have a solid reserve of ammunition. If guns are your disaster scenario, you’re going to have a bad day. As an individual or nuclear family, to weather an extended problem, you’d need to have a literal secret underground lair that was either so hard to get to or so well hidden that no one would know, and you’d have to be completely self contained. That’s simply not practical for all but actual billionaires, but people cosplay this to varying degrees. Even billionaires might find ymmv. A much more practical and wholesome approach is to be part of a community that includes farming, independent sources of power and water, and generally sustainable independence from less robust centralized systems. This provides for basic necessities as well as a common defense. Humans lived in tribes for a reason, and 30 people with well aligned incentives and sustainable infrastructure for food, water, and energy is probably the absolute minimum viable structure for security during a disruption of more than a couple of months. Otherwise you would be dependant on total stealth or extreme isolation. Some neighbourhoods would probably coalesce into something resembling this, but organisation ad-hoc under pressure would probably end up with tensions if not violence. Projects like this one can be real resources for well organized communities. I’ll probably look at running this on our servers as an additional resource, along with our library.
- philipallstar 7mo ago
  This is just a straw man, though. We all have biases of course.
coldtea 7mo ago
The kind of prepping in "prepper" culture though is bullshit. People living and having actual experience in such dangerous places don't prep like that.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo ago
  But I bet they would've loved the opportunity to do so before it all went sideways.
  - coldtea 7mo ago
    I mean they practically know and prepare in different ways, because the popular idea of prepping is bullshit.
- vetrom 7mo ago
  I have lived in places like that, and absolutely prep like that when the environment calls for it. I'd expect a non zero proportion of the HN readership has as well. See: Burning Man, the fanciest refugee camp on Earth, where you need to schedule, plan, haul in, and haul back out again everything you need to survive. (I've also spent time living in legit BFE where the closest store for something can be more than an hour away, YMMV)
  - komali2 7mo ago
    The most important aspect of Burning Man and why it works is the thing most preppers/American Libertarians ignore: the community. Burning Man isn't interesting because a bunch of individuals pitch tents in the desert, it's interesting because a society is built in the middle of the desert, spontaneously.
    - bigfishrunning 7mo ago
      The "preppers" I encounter are on ham radio, and I'd say they are more community conscious then the average person. Many of them work in public services (EMTs and the like) or are retired and formerly did. Most have stocked pantries, gardens are common. Most are willing to help out when there's a power outage or a fire. The anti-social picture that popular culture paints of preparedness-minded people is entirely not true in my experience.
colechristensen 7mo ago
I mean preppers are mostly cosplayers and I don't criticize people who go to comicon either. If you're not hurting anyone there's nothing wrong with having an unrealistic hobby or one without a lot of practical utility (even if the premise of the hobby is having practical utility). But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years. And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters. My prepping is limited to buying toilet paper at costco and having bags of beans and rice and such in my pantry and just... knowing how to do things in general.
- msla 7mo ago
  > But the western Roman empire fell and cities depopulated and folks switched back to subsistence farming for hundreds of years. > And plenty of places have been at war and had much of civilization's usefulness diminished from days to decades. Not to mention straightforward natural disasters. The only one of those things someone survived by being an individual prepper is the natural disaster, because in the other cases the government didn't just go away, it was replaced by other groups who could kill any given individual and take their stuff. The only way to survive is to leave and become a refugee or to band together in an even bigger group that can kill all individuals and smaller groups and take all their stuff. This is how you get the Carolingian Empire, Los Zetas, MS-13, the Soviet Union, and the Khmer Rouge. Individual preppers are living in a fantasy land to the extent they think they can wait out political collapse. They might well be competent enough to wait out a terrible natural disaster, but at that point they aren't "preppers" so much as people who listen to what FEMA and NOAA and other disaster-focused government agencies recommend for their regions.
  - colechristensen 7mo ago
    Many places around the world will have gone through five or six vastly different governments seated in very different locations over the last century or two and during the transition 1) most of the people stayed 2) most of the people had no part in whatever new group held power and 3) there usually wasn't mass slaughter of the people living there during the transition. You overestimate the importance of government and underestimate how it very much can just go away... and how distant it can be even when it exists, particularly historically. And how the local warlord equivalent isn't going around to everybody's house and murdering them. And yeah in those times having food and a means of defense and whatever else is useful as often times very very many people had no option but to stay wherever they were. Famine and revolution are much more common and more mundane than you expect.
globalnode 7mo ago
calling someone a prepper is an adhom, just like calling a greenie a tree hugger. just another way to dismiss something that is emotionally confronting so one can continue to feel some comfort in their own bubble.
- atoav 7mo ago
  Well yes and no. You will always have some have actually prepared; people, and you will have people who cosplay people who are prepared. The latter see buying things that help survival more as a hobby than a thing that needs to get done in order to survive. It is the difference between a hunter who needs a gun as a tool and a gun nut that collects guns because he likes theorizing over minor differences between them online and nerd out about them. That doesn't mean anybody who does a lot of research online or buys a lot of things is a obsessive hobbyist of course. The difference can at times be hard to tell from the outside, but someone whose first thought when an apocalypse brews on the horizon is to get weapons and turn their home into a bunker, instead of e.g. relying on a strong neighbourhood network and helping others is certainly a specific type of person. The problems that will arise are of the type that will be hard to solve alone. E.g. prep all you can, but what if your family member needs a doctor? Or something is fucked with your electrical system and you need someone. This is why people make fun of preppers. Not because being prepared is a bad thing (it is not!), but because you get the feeling some of them can hardly wait for the end times to come around so they can test drive their gear.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    Every peppers' dream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeSd1GoUW-M
- computably 7mo ago
  Calling somebody a racist is an "adhom," but it's not very controversial to say racists exist and it's bad to be a racist...
  - sigbottle 7mo ago
nxobject 7mo ago
> I am not a prepper, but I always found immediate dismissal of their stance odd. I always just assumed that the all-around "prepper" framing was just the market gravitating towards people with cash! In my conversations with neighbors, people understand preparedness for specific situations well. For example, disaster preparedness – "if the internet goes off, I'd like an LLM to tell me what the best way to stablize X medical emergency". Given the complete long-term erasure of Gaza's educational system, a lot of people also empathize with how useful educational resources would be for children. In that context, I've assumed people just react against commercialism and the kitchen-sink paradigm of preparedness. (I certainly react against the first, but not the second... but then again I love playing the handyman even in times when things are going well.)
expedition32 7mo ago
I live in a country with a functional government with an unlimited creditcard. The prepping is their business not mine. I remember when Russia invaded we were all supposed to freeze to death- in reality 2.5% of GDP was diverted and it was Bangladesh that didn't get their LNG tankers.

brightball 7mo ago

Stuff like this is why I keep a small library at my house. Full encyclopedia set, Merck Manual, home repair book, etc. May never use them, but I like having them. Facebook ads even successfully targeted me for that “how to rebuild all of civilization” book. :)

nojvek 7mo ago
Is there a serious “rebuild all of civilization” book? Sounds like a good read.
- coldtea 7mo ago
  In a doomsday scenario one wouldn't need a "rebuild all of civilization" book, but more a "basics like building a fire, filtering water, repairing a car engine, basic wound treatment" and such book. Nobody is going to be building cathedrals, and factories and computers for a good while...
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 7mo ago
    And we did it all without a manual the first time, so it stands to reason we (or more accurately, our descendants) could figure it out.
    - mememememememo 7mo ago
      What so we gotta go through the middle ages again :(
      - komali2 7mo ago
        Not necessarily, basically the majority of our technology is the result of a very, very brief period of innovation. So long as we don't forget that it's important to wash our hands and clean out wounds with soap, we're already centuries out of the middle ages.
    - 7mo ago

chr15m 7mo ago

"I don't like people who prepare for the worst, but I now realise I should have prepared for the worst." Why cringe at something people do privately in their own time that doesn't affect you? Why cringe at people who want to be prepared, even if you think their preparations are misplaced or nonsense? People deserve to be incorrect without being judged.

tartoran 7mo ago
I’ll tell you why.. because the whole thing is commercialized, drives fear and doom into people minds then profits off people’s fears by selling media, merch and so on or spreads misinformation. They’ve been around for a while
atoav 7mo ago
Because I want the people around me to be actually prepared. The whole prepper thing is a market targeting a specific kind of man with the fantasy that they are in control when shit hits the fan to the loint some of these men want shit to hit the fan. In reality far more important than most gear will be a good neighborhood network for example. But that means working on your own character.
kstrauser 7mo ago
Often because they keep intruding into hobbies I enjoy with a clear misunderstanding of the space or even a hostility to playing within the rules. Examples include people coming into Meshtastic chats and wondering if a 50W amp will help them talk to their buddy on the other wide of the mountain when civil war breaks out ("no, you'll just be ruining the airwaves for everyone else in the mean time, you still won't have line of sight to your friend, and your radio will look like a spotlight in the dark when the National Guard goes fox hunting"), or which ham radio they buy without a license ("no government's gonna tell me what I can say on the air"). If they'd be doing this in private, I couldn't care less. But in these cases, their actions would actively make my hobby less enjoyable, and I'll judge them for that.

Havoc 7mo ago

> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers Yes though watching that crowd is worthwhile. They often think about things different from mainstream and notice different things so good additional signal even if you ignore it

angiolillo 7mo ago

> Normally I cringe at doomsday preppers The doomsday preppers with a scarcity mindset and a bunker full of tin cans and military surplus make for good TV, but plenty of "preppers" don't look like that. They also have a well-stocked pantry but focus more on strengthening the community to absorb shocks. Things like mutual aid networks, skill sharing, tool libraries, noodling with GMRS/HAM/LoRa comms, going on camping trips, helping each other out with kitchen gardens, and general community resilience. This approach doesn't cover every disaster scenario but it seems like a more pleasant (and realistic) option for the ones it does cover. And if nothing truly bad happens then at least they got to spend time doing things like gardening with their neighbors. Being able to have offline Wikipedia, maps, and educational tools would be useful in either case but potentially even more so as a community resource because there are only so many skills each individual can learn.