"Is It Thunderdome Yet?" A Rolling Looming Apocalypse Thread

The whole thing is just red queen stuff, both humans and all the things that scare humans matching one another at the same rate, but no one's really the worse for it, It's all scary bcz it is new and in the news constantly.

abott otm

Also do you guys like that these two competing evolutionary hypotheses are called 'Red Queen' and 'Vicar of Bray'? I do.

there is no reason there couldn't be a bubonic plague or asteroid or magnetic field shift whatever in the next 50 years that would totally change human civilization.

not saying there will be

Yeah but change ≠ destroy.

I don't think anything's fucking up our nation more than millenarian thinking.

Yeah, exactly. I said this elsewhere the other day:

"...I have long been intrigued by/aware of the sense of apocalypse in American sociocultural/political life and rhetoric. There's always a sense of 'all is vanity, we're going down' somewhere, over the centuries -- consider the talk a few years back with the Y2K bug as a recent instance, specifically from those doommongers who essentially made their living at it and used the bug as a new framework for such stuff. But the full list of examples, drawing on any number of political and religious and other stances, goes on forever. So the use of that kind of language in any form has to be recognized as the rhetorical move it is -- the question is, is it justified?"

On various points I think some of it can be, but you have to keep this in mind, this sense of "OMG THE END!" and its grip on the American psyche.

the question is, is it justified?

this is my concern: it seems to be.

when it comes to climate change at least.

One of my favorite examples of said thinking at work -- the Millerites.

We just need all the robots to fart at one. I learned this from the TV.

xp

HOOS it is zero degrees in Green Bay today-- i can see it on NFL coverage. There's is no way global warming is real.

bahahahahahahahahahaha

http://www.theglobaleducationproject.org/earth/images/final-images/g-pop-growth-chart-map-sm.gif

I think it is actually great and beautiful that without humans, the exponential population growth model would be purely a theoretical idea. (Tho obv it will level off eventually!) (Is this graph not pretty & nicely designed?)

http://www.globalchange.umich.edu/globalchange2/current/lectures/human_pop/worldpop.jpg

That tiny dip before it zooms up = the black plague.

BP = before present, 'present' being 1950, the year they discovered radiocarbon dating! HAHAHAHahahahaha

Beginning in 1954, metrologists established 1950 as the origin year for the BP scale for use with radiocarbon dating using a 1950-based reference sample of oxalic acid.

When faced with these sorts of depressing global possibilities it is important to emphasize which kinds of positive steps an individual can take to strengthen their own future prospects. I've already participated in enough doomster discussions (think Y2K) to have formed my own thoughts on this sort of hell-in-a-handbasket scenario.

First off, it is important to realize that you shouldn't dismiss doom-laden scenarios out of hand, just because they are drastic and hypothesize futures that do not resemble the present. Similarly, just because there are so many flimsy, unbelievably stupid conspiracy theories doesn't mean there are no successful conspiracies. You have to sift through them and decide what is plausible and what is not. Luckily, the crazy-stupid ones don't require much thought before you can reject them.

I would rate certain kinds of doomsday projections that are kicked around presently as worth serious consideration: the twinned trends of climate change and species extinction are extremely serious imo. The peak oil scenario would seem to be a mathematical certainty. Lastly, the notion that the global economy could enter a seriously unstable period of correction, with a contraction of wealth in the USA and Europe, seems very plausible to me.

All these scenarios have either a large stack of persuasive evidence, major historic precedents, or an undeniable basis in physical reality. It does no good to just cross your fingers and hope they will go away.

So what do you do?

First, you accept the idea that you can't control anything outside of your own actions. You can't play King Knut and turn back the tide. Instead, you make yourself a stronger person. You evaluate your skills and abilities, your tool set, your habits, your resources to meet adversity. As you do this, you identify your weaknesses and strengths.

Then, you address the weaknesses. It might be as simple as acquiring a few hand tools, paying down debt, or learning to sew. It might be getting to know your neighbors better, so you live in a stronger community. It could be seeking out a leader who understands what needs to be done, or becoming a leader yourself. Or, for many people, it may include limiting your excessive and self-harmful desires.

The good thing about this generalized approach is that it works across all kinds of problems. It makes you a better person, parent, neighbor and citizen. And it shows others the right way, too. By example.

So, don't give in to despair. It is a demon that eats your heart. Become wise and life will be good, no matter what else it is.

^^^ flowing straight from the survival scroll

I like the way Stan Goff put it: "Women. Community. Improving your skills. Every day, from here forward."

Been wandering around lego blogs today, there's even a contest for post-apoc lego creations

is apocalyptic thinking a particularly male fantasy?

it's particularly geeky, to be sure.

Or at least, the mental exercise of "ok, when the zombies come, where do i hide out?" is. A good local answer to this is the CostCo.

So you could topple 30-foot high stacks of merchandise onto the zombies, crushing them?

I am lacking in ammo for the coming zombie plague.

but I live around a lot of old people, so taking them out and hoarding their supplies shouldn't be a problem.

let it be known that i only read insurgent american irregularly.

"The name is not meant to call up visions of gun nuts in the back alleys. We like a bit of irony."

big hoos aka the postapocalypse-jeep-driver

Read Max Brooks' two books. As he points out, the problem with zombies ain't so much the zombies, but the millions of refugees fleeing an outbreak. In World War Z, the three or four waves of refugees heading north completely deforested parts of Canada, and the amounts of shit people had to burn after the wood was gone put so much contaminants into the atmosphere than nuclear winter set in. In other words, it's like in Dawn of the Dead, where the zombies were overcome quite easily, but 'twas the biker gang that caused all the problems.

That's kinda the cool thing about those books, where the premise of a zombie outbreak is the metaphor/allegory Max uses to talk about the problems of how to survive or cope when mass society breaks down.

Some of their "practical" suggestions are a bit 0_o ("start a blog"?), and they do have a survivalist bent to them ("become a gunsmith," "start a worm farm: worms are crucial for rebuilding soil").

Realistically though? Yes, yes, a thousand times yes to Aimless's post.

xp to self, obv

I grew up Mormon, where it is a commandment from God (!!!) to have a year's supply of food, water, necessities. So my parents had giant barrels of water in this bedroom-sized storage facility in the basement, and like 100 pounds of wheat sitting there. Wheat stores better than flour, but even with a wheat grinder and everything, my parents never used the goddamn wheat. They never used the 20 lb. bags of powdered milk (well, sometimes my mom would use it for cooking).

Advantages: always lots of food around, easy to make a snack (pot of pasta or rice, bowl of cereal from those non-brand giant 5-lb. bags). Never having to go to the store if you run out of TP. And that's stuff that's worn on me but srsly it is at least 2/3 a waste of space.

I mean, if you move, how the hell are you going to empty all those 50 gallon barrels of water?

kingfish are the zombie books funny? i've gotten mixed signals. i was initially under the impression their intent was to be "serious" comedy.

I didn't think they were funny at all. They were completely fucking grim! (And medically inaccurate, about situs inversus at least, but I am a pedant.)

i did not know that about mormons!
i ran out of toilet paper today
some survivalist i am

the drugstore is a few blocks away and it has not fallen to the zombies yet unless you count metaphorical zombies i guess

Yeah in Utah/Idaho most of the houses have a room bigger than a walk-in closet but smaller than a bedroom simply assumed to be for your year's supply.

They are all about growing gardens too, but that shit is just sane and it is impossible to buy a decent tomato at all. Gardens, good.

blurrg soaaap bllarr toilet paper nnrrg dish detergent

xpost that was zombies talking

Yeah, the Mormon one-year supply is pretty excessive.

I do keep a pantry with enough to stay fed for a month, and about a week's worth of drinking/cooking water. The pantry stuff is nothing I would not normally eat throughout the year so it all gets used within about 15 months of purchase.

No, they're written completely straight, which really helps in the believability. There's some political jokes in WWZ(like what happens to an ex-Admin figure named "Grover Carlson" and the job he's assigned to do after everything settles down and the world starts up again), but a lot of the stuff is straight ahead socio-economic analysis. I recommend them, and especially the WWZ book on tape.

I ran out of ketchup today! Seriously, panic city.

But the thing about zombie outbreaks, as Max Brooks has stated outright and I think George Romero has alluded to, is that they're a good way to address the concerns of what happens when modern civilization breaks down, only you use this completely impossible event(zombies going apeshit and eatin' brains) as a starting off point. I got a kick out of how much of WWZ was actually Brooks discussing the problems of how wasteful & destined-to-fail(which is how insustainable things should actually be described) too much of our current life is, and how he goes at solving the problems in his book with an almost New Deal approach.

well yeah zombie books/movies/etc are never actually about zombies

not to be all film studies 101 or anything

When will zombies get a proper non-stereotypical treatment by the mass media?

HOARD NOW, GET RICH LATER: noize board post-apocalyptic flea market

Too many people, including a substantial majority of so-called survivalists, get caught up in ideas of apocalypse as a romantic fanatasy of heroic struggle and chest-beating triumph, a'la zombie wars.

In fact it would be a grinding lot of work and worry, interspersed with very small victories and pleasures. Read about the Russian Civil War and the consequent famines, or about refugees in eastern Europe during WWII and after if you want to get the proper flavor of survival when the usual structure of society is ripped up and inoperative. Then hope for a gradual descent into genteel poverty, instead.