It’s no big secret that many doomsday preppers yearn for the apocalypse — if for no other reason than the opportunities it will provide them to say “I told you so” to all those who doubted their paranoid fantasies. And to possibly shoot some of these unprepared scoffers when they come begging for food.
Nowhere is this more obvious than amongst those apocalypse-fantasizers who’ve convinced themselves that it will be feminism, rather than volcanic eruptions or nuclear war or Donald Trump, that will bring about the end of the world.
On the Men Going Their Own way subreddit, the regulars are talking apocalypse, as modern misogynists are wont to do. And it is as revealing as these exercises always are.
A fellow called BagOfBrokenBits dreams of a not-very-distant future in which uppity ladies “will do whatever they are told.”
The future as I see it, is that as society collapses around us (5-15 years?) most women outside of a tightly controlled patriarchal group simply will not survive, because nobody will put up with their sh*t long enough to feed them. When resources are scarce they will not be able to defend what they have and most lack the health, strength and abilities to obtain or build what they need. There will be no feminism, there will be patriarchy. Men will work together as they always have, in challenging and horrific conditions. Women will do whatever they are told because conditions will be too harsh to tolerate dissent.
And Mr. Bag will be one of those doing the telling, because of all the toiletries he is hoarding:
I am a Prepper. I currently have stores of food, toiletries etc for five years with tools, seeds etc to extend that.
He’s apparently filling his doomsday bunker with as many canned goods as he can get his hands on:
It has been noted that in past shortages due to wars an afternoon with a woman can be had for a tin of … anything really.
You know what I mean, you know what I mean? Nudge nudge say no more!
The pros and cons of the apocalypse:
Cons:
- Death of most of the human race
- Contamination of water sources with dead bodies
- No medical care beyond basic first aid
- Return to stone age civilization
Pros:
- Women will have sex with you for a can of beans
AOF_Semiramis suggests moving to New Zealand. And he has some interesting thoughts about Pokemon GO.
Go complete ghost in New Zealand or the likes.Heck even in the US with private as fuck properties.Grow your own food,have stable ways to get water and raise animals a la farm.Fish too if your near a lake.Assuming your far away enough,lake is isolated enough,your too far from idiot humans and any large concentration of them,then nukes won’t land on your spot too since it would be a waste of resources.(Its why the CIA funded Pokemon GO. So the brainless droves would fill the map for them.Obviusly there are still holes.)
Surviving the apocalypse is so easy that even a kid could do it!
Also..a 15 year old discovered an ancient city due to studying the stars in Central America.So you can bet that there are other places in the world where you can live safely.
Make sure to pack popcorn, for all the gloating you’ll be doing.
I know its f*cked up,but nothing you can do to stop it. You can only save yourself at most.So just chill,get some popcorn,and just accept the f*cking up.
timoppenheimer, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be doing any prepping beyond living as selfishly as he can:
WWIII is coming, and I am horrified too, OP.
My plan is to enjoy my life. They already took my foreskin; fuck society, I’m living my life for me.
Talkytalktalk is evidently a fan of Alex Jones:
This is the great culling of the human population. The eugenics population reduction freaks are going to kill billions and out the rest under the yoke of totalitarianism. It takes a woman to pick the runts and dispose of them.
But which woman? WHICH WOMAN!?
I need to know now so I can mangina my way into her good graces before the culling.
WWTH:
“Leftist” continues to be a tell. When someone uses that word, you can be fairly sure that a wild generalisation will follow not long after, one which bears little similarity to any left-winger you know.
I am mostly fond of cats, I just don’t care for their hairballs.
I wonder what level of crossover there is between the apocalypse dreamers and the “STEM is everything” folks. My best skills would take a bit (laboratory chemistry) to never (nuclear power*) to be all that useful.
*Unless we’re talking Fallout-style but then I’d still need detection equipment.
@Axe: I couldn’t recall for sure at the moment! That’s all. My memory is like a sieve. I pretty much rely on having this ether net cable plugged into my head at all times :d
@WWTH, perhaps his name is a typo and he meant Sedimentary Reactionary? It takes him a few epochs for his ideological strata to consolidate into a slate?
Either way, Mr Sedentary Reactionary, you have revealed yourself as thinking largely from the hip. These are very basic questions you are being asked. If you had the depth of knowledge which you had claimed, you would be supplying answers immediately, and would be able to provide citations and reference in short order. That is an indication of expertise, not big words, name drops of philosophers, or volumes of text. Something to keep in mind.
@Moggie
There you go, devaluing the sacred by comparing it to another product of sorts. The sacred is transcendental, you don’t share it like a cup of tea or offer to buy it for someone. It transcends ordinary likes/dislikes, and may differ from one people to the next.
And nothing in particular happens in my society when people disavow the sacred, but they won’t like it. We will encourage the pursuit of the sacred ideals of our society, but there are no legal penalties for failure to sufficiently appreciate them. They’ll all just have to sit around and scoff while the rest of society gets to enjoy the deep benefits of the sacred.
@Penny
I’ll have you know, my brother married a Jew, and he is extremely liberal, as are the rest of his family. I learned the hard way at the wedding that questioning certain liberal-progressive tenets are fighting words when done in the presence of Jews.
@Sedentary Reactionary, what tenets were they that you questioned at the wedding you attended?
I see Reactionary is the family member everyone dreads seeing at family functions.
@JoeB
It’s pretty high, I’d say. Aurini, Captain Crapitalism, and a lot of the more libertarian “capitalism is everything!” types are heavily invested in the notion that literature and arts are useless while STEM (particularly engineering) is viewed as the apotheosis of all useful knowledge.
It’s funny that you mention Fallout, because I seem to remember that Aurini’s shitty novel started out as a Fallout fanfic, which is still available for viewing online; if you don’t want to actually buy the stupid thing, you can actually find Aurini’s book on Soulseek.
@ALL of you
Whatever. I’ll be back when I’ve got my intellectual house in order. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Oh well, one wedding experience. It’s perfectly reasonable to generalise from that to all Jews everywhere.
Oh! Your brother married a [liberal] Jew! Clearly, you have superior knowledge. I should not have questioned it by asking you to consider my whole friggin’ country.
(Sorry, I’m usually not a fan of sarcasm, but this conversation just brings it out of me for some reason.)
[ETA: ninja’d by Moggie, darn.]
*waves*
Goodbye, goodbye! Good luck building your intellectual house now that you found out it was mostly a vague outline.
@Scildfreja
1. Don’t question multiculturalism.
2. Don’t question the efficacy of programs which seek to assist the poor*
3. Don’t question the notion of “progress”.
4. Don’t question immigration.
5. Don’t question whether or not the Democratic Party really cares about their constituents.
I could go on, but I won’t. I said nothing about the wedding being between two men, as I have no issues with homosexuality.
*I think programs which assist the poor and unfortunate are necessary because technological innovation and freely-flowing capital will continue to leave people out of jobs (it’s impossible to have a society with 100% employment), but I question whether or not these programs are really working.
@Sedentary Reactionary,
Your list reads like a bullet-point list of Less Wrong blog posts! Perhaps it could be that the happy families didn’t want to discuss heavy and contentious topics in the middle of a wedding?
Or maybe you’re right, and they have a monolithic culture which is unquestioningly leftist in defiance of all reason, God and man.
(That was sarcastic, sorry :3 Couldn’t help myself)
As for your comments on the sacred – there is something scared in the act of sharing a cup of tea. Or a tumbler of whisky, or – hell – half a donut. The sacred is close to the heart. If you think a comparison between sharing a treasure and the revering the sacred is debasing the sacred, I’m not entirely sure if you understand what sacredness means.
The most sacred and profound moments I’ve ever had have been huddled around a too-cold camp fire, waiting for the food to warm up, watching breath hang in the air like misty veils and listening to the chickadees singing for food. Incredibly pedestrian, universal moments – sustenance and sharing. They are shared between ourselves and our friends, between my community and yours, between myself and the birds and the trees. We all do it.
I’d be happy to share that whisky with you. It’s more sacred than any church, or temple, or tradition.
@Scildfreja
Coolio! And I’m fine being ‘Queen’ btw (or more honestly Marchioness. Tops). The girl titles usually sound cooler 🙂
@Sublimated Radon
You can question any of those things. We do so often around here. You’re problem isn’t that you question. You question without being willing or able to hold up your end of the conversation beyond ‘gimme a minute, I haven’t thought through even the initial implications of my ideas’. And cos I’m sweet on you:
1)I’m Murican, my culture is multicultural. Thus multiculturalism is unicultural
2)there’s a word for that. It’s called means testing. It’s gotten a bad rap due to Republican bullshit, but it’s a good idea in principle
3)progress is an active process. It requires we debate what we want our future to look like. If not, then we’re not progressing
4)we have questioned immigration. It’s just all evidence shows it’s a net positive for society
5)of course the blue team doesn’t care about people. It’s a legal, corporate entity made to get politicians elected. Individual Dems may care about people, but i wouldn’t care much if they didn’t. So long as they enact the policies i want them to, they can despise me for all I care…
Not to mention that sharing food and drink is part of pretty much every, if not every culture. It’s one of the few things that’s pretty universal.
Well, if we still have cows after the apocalypse we can have butter, and wine is actually one of the resources that a small surviving population might be able to use until we can start making our own. Assuming that we’re dealing with zombies or general collapse, not, you know, nuclear strikes, it may be possible for a small surviving population to scavenge plenty of bottled alcoholic beverages from liquor stores and warehouses and the like, and they will last in the bottles for years, and require no refrigeration. Also, very good nutritional supplement, and takes some of the pain out of post-apocalyptic living.
SR:
This seems a little evasive, and it’s not clear to me how this differs from the liberal democracies you dislike. Take the US, for example. Christianity is deeply embedded in national politics, and almost all politicians will frequently invoke God or the bible, but the first amendment (mostly) prevents them from penalising those who don’t share this faith. In concrete terms, how would your proposed society differ from this?
This thread is now about The Food of the Post-Apocalypse.
Scavenged wine and hand-churned butter for the sauce on pasta made of mixed grains and fresh eggs, yes pls very much.
Oh, yes, the wedding questions. I can answer those too, though The Inestimable Axecalibur already did a fabulous job.
(Honestly, those are pretty heavy topics for a wedding!)
1) I’m Canadian. We’ve always been multicultural. Our cultural icons are often emblems of that multicultural heritage. Living together encourages understanding and peacefulness. Ask the Haudenosaunee about the great peace, and learn.
2) Of course people get attached to the way things are done, because they’re the way-things-are-done. If you’re trying to change how things are done because there’s another way that’s better, you’re being progressive.
3) I don’t think you understand what the word “progressive” means, sir. A progressive is someone who admits that the world isn’t perfect right now, and wants to try to make it better. That’s pretty much the whole platform; everything else is riders and open to dispute.
4) Axe said it more clearly and more succinctly than I could. Look up there.
5) Dear Lord don’t talk about politics at a wedding. Of course the Dems are corrupt. The political system they’re working in practically guarantees that every politician is going to be influenced by big corporate interests. Is this a question?
You went to a wedding between two people of different ethnic backgrounds and thought that was the time to “question” multiculturalism? What happened to all that talk about respecting the sacred? Good lord, I hope you apologized profusely to your brother.
This is up there with the time the priest presiding at my grandmother’s funeral learned that her husband of 48 years wasn’t Catholic and proceeded to give a homily on the wickedness of marrying outside the faith. (He also told my grandpa they could have made it to 50 if he’d prayed harder.) He convinced exactly no one in the church to question multiculturalism. He did, however, earn the nickname “Father Peckerhead.”
@Scildfreja
I’d add another bit to that definition. A progressive also recognizes that, while the present ain’t perfect, the past, save some rare aspects, wasn’t much better
ETA: @Shaenon
At a recent funeral I attended, the minister decided it was appropriate to take time away from eulogizing the dearly departed in order to get his jollies that an insufficiently pious pastor was smote in Britain somewhere. Didn’t have anything to do with the rest of the service. Just super happy about the Almighty’s wrath. Ugh
Judging by the funeral stories I’ve heard, there are a lot of Father Peckerheads. In fact, there’s probably a Sacred Order of Peckerheads.
I would also like to point out, in case no one did yet, that none of these are actually tenets of Judaism (if they were, it’d make dealing with the Orthodox blowhards hete much easier).
So, your family (or family-in-law, anyway) is liberal. You aren’t. That can’t be fun at family events; it’s always hard to just sit there when everyone around you is talking about stuff you disagree with, and still remain civil and friendly, instead of bursting out and saying “No, aunt Sarah, I actually don’t think that the n-words are taking over our cities / we need to mobilize against the 1% / the FBI is stealing your chickens / [fill other stuff here], and you’re an idiot for thinking that way!”
But this is what we do, in society. We figure out which arguments are worth having, and which will just spoil the evening for everyone. Sometimes the best course of action is to just roll our eyes and go have a breath of fresh air.
The priest who showed up when my father was facing major emergency surgery decided to act out about the fact that my dad married a Jew, and his child (me) wasn’t baptized. (I was thirty-something at this point, so it was a bit late to get into it.)
He got intense, and awful. My dad has since refused to deal with any hospital chaplains, and is trusting he’ll hold on in any emergency for last rites until a priest he knows shows up.
The priest who presided over my grandma’s funeral didn’t want to let the grandchildren speak because ‘that’s a Protestant custom’. He was overridden, but was cranky about it. The whole family sat smiling and serene as one of my cousins delivered a lovely address about how supportive my grandma had been when he came out, just coded enough that Father didn’t understand what was being discussed, and everyone else did.
Penny Psmith:
That sounds like an important skill to have after the apocalypse!
Shaenon:
I’m sorry, this comment has forced me out of lurking to correct a grievous error. No one has actually laughed at Marmaduke. No one.