We can live with uncertainly only until there is no food available in the grocery stores (or anywhere, due to loss of production or logistics). If that happens, then what happens next is certain, people will take food with guns to feed their family. At that point we reach a place from which there is likely no easy return.
This might also happen if enough people have no money to buy food with, or no place to go to be fed. Not everyone is willing to die quietly of starvation.
Do we trust our state governments (or the Federal one) to be able to prioritize feeding 350M people, or to concern itself with long term business survival?
If they managed to feed themselves despite naval blockades and bombings, without the country completely falling apart, I don’t see why we can’t.
Of course, this might mean more agricultural land for vegetables instead of livestock. Changing our behaviour. Make do with less-than-straight carrots. People starting their own vegetable patches on balconies. Not throwing out half the food we buy. Maybe rationing. It might very well suck.
We’re from a cushy world. It will take time to adapt. But in the face of necessity we’ll manage.
The last thing we should do is to prepare (and hope?) for total anarchy. Serves nobody.
> I have family from all sorts of sides in WW2. If they managed to feed themselves despite naval blockades and bombings, without the country completely falling apart, I don’t see why we can’t.
I reached this conclusion a few days ago as well. I can't imagine the entire food supply thing having thousands of houses and factories bombed for years and years; and yet it happened. Civilization had a bit of a 'reset', but it was a long way from anarchy and cannibalism.
There's no way this virus is going to be as actually destructive in terms of both life and property; so that makes me optimistic.
For some reason I never thought about using the rational and civilized behavior of people in war-torn areas of WWII (specifically the UK & US) as a response to these kinds of comments. The people then really were ok with things like rationing (mostly of certain types of materials for war use).
There seems to be a large number of people who almost look forward to having their favorite (post-)apocalyptic movie/video-game becoming reality. Let's not pretend like there are not far too many people getting a minor degree of pleasure from thinking about how they will "out-maneuver" their fellow man in some sort of "apocalyptic end-game". The plethora of zombie shows, movies, and games probably does not help with this either.
But, your WWII anecdote inspired me to tell these people: "be more like your grandparents who remained heroic and civilized in the face of a purely chaotic and even evil era."
Couldn't agree more. I think there's a very foolish, immature, and naive impulse to fantasize about a dark future where we're fighting over scraps, but it doesn't have to be that way. Let's not start intoning darkly about the primal selfishness and animal nature of humans and instead plan to help out. It's an opportunity for everyday heroism and civility, not adolescent grindhouse survival fantasy.
Eh, give the people who say that stuff a break. Whether they understand or not that that's what they're doing, it's still nice of them to tell everyone up front that they aren't to be trusted in a dangerous situation.
>>What exactly is irrational about a kid with 300k in debt and no job hoping that a collapse could lead to a real future for himself and/or his kids?
For the start.....everything. No matter how much you're in debt and without a job you're still immesurably better than after actual collapse of the society. Unless your plan really is to establish yourself as some kind of warlord with guns and have others serve you. Which is about as realistic as Mad Max is. There's literally nothing rational about it, not even as a fantasy unless you're 12 and don't understand how the world works and what would actually happen if the societes collapsed in some kind of post apocalyptic scenario.
Totally
Roman civilization collapsed in britian sometime around early 5th century
The next time anybody heard of central heating or plumbing on that island was roughly 1500 years later
As an electrician I'm always amazed at the Wonder of how it all works, and at the blissful ignorance of many regarding just how much hard work and professional knowledge is involved in, you know such banalaties as keeping the lights on, the water running, the garbage disappearing, the shelves stocked...
Hold on. What I'm talking about is someone putting a gun to another person's head and taking that person's can of soup to scarf it down in the bombed out ruins of a building[1]. I'm not talking about anything else. That people are facing hardship is not a surprise to me, but we're not quite at The Road yet.
As someone supporting a household with a cumulative 200k of debt, I know what the possibility of a chaotic new future feels like, believe me (and I AM privileged!) I'm specifically talking about the fantasy of blowing away armed marauders with a shotgun. We're on the edge, a job loss would be brutal to us, and I recognize that many have it even worse. I guess I'm pushing back against grim (and I believe largely baseless) cynicism about human nature.
[1]Mind you, I'm talking about the United States. Yemen, Libya, Syria, many other countries graced with the interference of the US and our allies are another subject.
People with 300k of debt are very bought into our current economic system, poor people aren’t generally getting access to and taking on that kind of debt.
Such fantasies are normal and widespread. They often express frustration at the lack of immediately available solutions. They can also express the feeling that it's hopeless and unfixable.
I moved to essentially a small coastal town to get off the street and back in housing. Being in housing is better than being homeless, but it's hardly been a cakewalk.
So I sometimes have escapist fantasies and it's common for me to fantasize about chucking it all and up and moving to a small coastal town. Then I remember I'm in a small coastal town and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
On the one hand, I guess I've won and I can be spared the expense and hassle of relocating again. On the other hand, there's something distinctly disturbing about achieving your escapist fantasy and then continuity to fantasize about escape, especially when the fantasy is to do exactly what you've already done that hasn't yet put a stop to your desire to escape your current life and all of its attendant problems.
I'd like to hope that we'd do better this time, considering especially that there is even less basis now, for identifying any segment of the US population as potentially treasonous, than there was then. But that seems like an awfully bold claim to make, in a country that's operating internment camps right now.
how do the concentration camps in most european/russian/US countries factor into this? or do you consider those ethnicities/races as 'enemy civilians'?
I'm from a rural area and have noted an unfortunate overlap in doomsday preppers/survivalists and white nationalists/christian nationalists. This knowledge, for me at least, tends to add a additional context to the "I need my guns to shoot those that would threaten my family" comments that show up on every internet comments section.
There seems to be a large number of people who almost look forward to having their favorite (post-)apocalyptic movie/video-game becoming reality.
In times of prosperous peace, most struggle is crazy making pecking order BS. Are you doing better than your neighbor? Who is number one on this list? What does it pay?
During times when the world at large isn't trying to kill us all, hell is other people. Hell is being at the bottom of the heap because society will make sure that's a terrible place to be even if there is no objective reason that it needs to be.
During a real crisis, that crap tends to mostly drop away. Suddenly, people with money are willing to share it with those who have less those with less aren't treated like they must not be trying hard enough and clearly don't deserve better.
We revert to absolute measures rather than relative measures. Instead of "Do I have more or less than other people?" we ask "Did I get what I actually needed today?"
It's very rare for big change that kills off the most awful aspects of our lives to come some big positive change. It's almost always a disaster that leads to such.
Those dystopian fantasies very often include the idea of a sense of community and pulling together in the aftermath that is generally lacking in the lives of most modern people in developed countries. We seem to be unable to imagine creating a sense of community in the face of plenty.
Longing for community seems to be a primary reason to have such fantasies.
> There seems to be a large number of people who almost look forward to having their favorite (post-)apocalyptic movie/video-game becoming reality.
Which might be amusing as a thought experiment. But as soon as you need antibiotics or want your shit to magically disappear down a hole in your house, you want to go back.
Needless to say, chances are one gets nastily bludgeoned with rebar over a packet of pasta. Nothing romantic there.
Times definitely have changed in the past few decades. There was widespread looting going on during the 1977 blackout in NYC [1]. I hope that you're right and everything is being blown out of proportion, but lets not forget that:
* everything is possible
* looting and pillaging has happened before in lesser times
* it doesn't help to be unprepared
I honestly think that if we had a firmer, more coordinated, and less fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants government response and action plan, anarchy would definitely be reigned in and less of a concern in people's minds.
The looting was all opportunistic -- not needs oriented. Nobody starves in 12 hours.
From Wikipedia:
"Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting 31 neighborhoods. Possibly the hardest hit were Crown Heights, where 75 stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick, where arson was rampant, with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point, two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze. Thieves stole 50 new Pontiacs from a Bronx car dealership.[3] In Brooklyn, youths were seen backing up cars to targeted stores, tying ropes around the stores' grates, and using their cars to pull the grates away before looting the store.[3] While 550 police officers were injured in the mayhem, 4,500 looters were arrested."
> Do we trust our state governments (or the Federal one) to be able to prioritize feeding 350M people, or to concern itself with long term business survival?
This isn't an xor question. The existence of essentially all businesses is predicated on some degree of baseline social stability. If people in country X aren't able to feed themselves, businesses in country X are probably in deep trouble too.
We have to keep in mind that this is unlike a anything anyone alive has seen. Nature is essentially holding a gun to about 1% of the population and demanding we stop working and having fun.
So we stop working. However you cannot stop working so much that it causes more damage than that. We cannot and will not stop food production or distribution. This is a voluntary action to save lives, you cannot let it endanger more lives than what it is trying to mitigate.
They are grabbing their guns, going out into the world, and shooting and killing animals. Which they then butcher up and store in pieces in their garage freezer and maintain months of food this way. Tasty deer.
Please don't fear-monger. There is nothing wrong with the supply chains. The shelves you've seen empty in pictures are generally full again the next day.
The problem of people not having money to buy said products is less far-fetched, but still:
- As other here have pointed out, we've seen worse in our history, and nothing like what you describe played out
- We have so much wealth as a country and it's just a problem of figuring out how to get it to the right people. Yes, there are bumbling idiots making decisions and there are selfish bad-actors still trying to pad their pockets every chance they get. But when the rubber meets the road, this is too big for anyone to simply isolate themselves financially. The 1% are having their assets tank too. Our fates are bound. And when our country somehow manages to get everyone on the same side - even for the wrong reasons - we're really good at doing whatever needs to be done to solve the problem.
Don't over generalize and accuse them of fear mongering when you don't know the situation for the entire country. The grocery store by me has been consistently bare for the past two weeks, low quality pre-packaged food is pretty much all that's been available, and I've had to start making trips to multiple stores to get enough ingredients if I want to eat anything besides canned soup and deli meat. And I don't live in some podunk town, I'm right outside a major city. My wife's family in NC has said that their grocery stores have stayed mostly empty for a few weeks as well.
Bottled water running out is especially silly and indicative of the prepper/hoarding mentality going on. Even if food supplies started having problems, society would have to truly, completely collapse before water/electricity started having problems. It's irrational to clear the shelves of water.
Even in your case and the other anecdotes people are mentioning here, I'm not convinced it's a supply-side issue. I would guess that in some areas the supply simply isn't bountiful enough to bear the full weight of the extreme preppers. That's a real problem, to be sure, but it's an artificial one and hopefully once it becomes clear that a true famine isn't on the way those people will calm down and stop putting others in needless danger.
I generally think the same but locally, our grocery store can't keep items in stock either. Its only gotten worse over the last two weeks. Bread, milk, eggs, meat, paper products, trash bags, cleaning supplies all are either very low or just gone early morning or well into the evening.
Last night I even asked if there was a good time to come and the cashier just said, "there is no good time, the shelves will still be empty".
I am not saying this is going to happen, I am just stating I fear it more than the disease if it does become an issue. Yes I too have direct relatives who survived German collapse at the end of the war. But they lived in a small rural town with lots of farming. Sometimes people forget the enormity of losses in bigger towns that were bombed but generally it did not affect food production (but did make transport hard). Japan was in even worse shape but again rural cities were not affected as much (and 150,000 people dying in Tokyo in one night makes food logistics less of an issue). But Germany was 1/10th the size of the current US population and not much bigger than an average state in the end. It's a much bigger challenge in some ways.
We might have been ok if the people at the bottom were able to pay rent, no one cared about how unaffordable housing was getting except them and now we’re all in trouble.
It is very weird that nobody cares. I work a decent tech job in the Bay Area so I’m nowhere near the bottom, but housing costs are a massive barrier in my life. I can pay my rent, but ever buying a home to start a family feels like an impossibility.
But no one really seems to care. It’s completely fixable, but even most people I know don’t really care about it or connect that it’s the politicians making shitty zoning and local control laws that drives up the prices so high. Or they buy into the virtue signaling propaganda about affordable housing for those at the very bottom being the only thing we should care about, even though they and everyone they know live in market rate housing and are struggling with the cost.
The schadenfreude of watching first world snowflakes around me melt is hard to deny.
Growing up in a rural area that’s always had the emotional sense of “Trump country.” we just worked.
From the time I was a kid (40 now) I was repairing cars, soldering electronics, doing all kinds of stuff on friends farms, and helping aunts/uncles draw chemistry and calculus problems through college.
For me being catered to the way we are is pathetic. Still fix my own stuff, grow 1/4 of my plant food for a year, and work 40-50 hours a week writing code, mostly open source and I make bank. And I live in the middle of an overpriced urban area, helping out people that needed it this last week.
And I don’t care. It could all go away. I’ll find something else to do. Life for me isn’t propping up some imported emotional framework, like religion or making money.
Pretty sad the last generation is making the current one look like the disorganized, low effort do-nothings they always said it was.
There’s plenty to do around your neighborhood I’m guessing. The problem is ya gotta look.
The reality is somewhere out there is a big group of people we don’t care about helping. We all have one. Kids in cages or something. My indifference is for the nation. It’s gonna externalizations all its problems, ok. You did it to yourselves.
“I believe most members of the public want to do the right thing,” said Sonja Rasmussen, professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Florida and a former executive at the CDC, in an email. “It’s essential that people know the implications of their actions.
Nope. Just wrong. you only have to look at peoples' behaviour in parts of the UK at the weekend to realise that even if some people know the implications of their actions they don't care. The UK has largely degenerated into an "entitled" society, and any veneer of sensibility and fairness has been stripped away with a vengeance. Unfortunately for us, the Prime Minister's advisers seem to think like Prof. Rasmussen and now we're in a dire situation.
This is happening across the pond as well. My wife's best friend was texting her saying she was going on a first date with a dude. She was asking for date ideas , in corona virus season. We are just like, paige shut the fuck up. This was 7 days ago. Just yesterday she texts my wife again saying she went to the mall with her friend. She says wow all the stores are mostly closed and the fitting rooms for trying clothes are not open...
this person is a fucking doctor. A DOCTOR. and she cant comprehend the severity of the situation.
I think a lot of people - including me to an extent - are about to come crashing into the real world at 1000 mph. The difference is that I've suspected this was in the post for a long time. It only takes a few hours or less on a plane from almost any part of the world to reach somewhere that demonstrates clearly how utterly detached from reality advanced nations have become.
If the virus hits hard some poor country, we'll be able to compare and verify if the advanced countries are detached from reality, or is it really just baseline human selfishness.
Many people can’t imagine if they are not directly effected by something. It is not necessarily they are not intelligent in certain domains, but they have trouble seeing beyond the familiar.
All this is explained in Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb, everyone should read it! Please do it now.
Just to put that in context, MD big bosses were still laughing dismissively at us for worrying on Monday evening.
A week later, the hospital is at 2/3 from max capacity and they're pissing their pants. This doesn't stop them from engaging in academic research for their own interests and assuring the public that all will be fine, though.
I think the ties that bind in the Anglosphere are pretty much done for. These countries are basically malls that people move-to to get stuff, I think we need a little more collectivism - at least on the state/provincial level to be better balanced (US perspective).
> The UK has largely degenerated into an "entitled" society, and any veneer of sensibility and fairness has been stripped away with a vengeance.
Why should people do the right thing when they feel they have nothing in common with their fellow countrymen? It used to be the case that we had a strong shared national culture that enforced certain standards of behaviour, and thus one had a stake in maintaining these standards due to collective reciprocity, but we've been told for decades that said national culture is hateful and outdated and must be destroyed without any decent replacement. I cite Orwell:
'England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.'
'If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible.'
edit: yeah, suspected a dose of uncomfortable truth wouldn't go down easily.
> What does having a shared culture have to do with having humanity?
I'm not trying to kick off a flamewar but this is hopelessly naive - divide and conquer has been used for thousands of years - just look at Rwanda for a recent dreadful example.
With the UK being a diverse multiracial population it's even more important to attempt to unify everyone around some kind of shared values etc. Otherwise you end up with people living right next door to each other that are mentally living in completely different universes. It should be obvious that this is not an ideal starting point for rallying a population around a unified goal.
The USA used to be seen as particularly successful in absorbing everyone no matter their origins, and giving them a strong identity as American that superceded everything else. Not sure if that's still valid though.
> edit: yeah, suspected a dose of uncomfortable truth wouldn't go down easily.
It might be worth considering if maybe you are the one in the wrong here. Could it be that the majority of people disagree with you not because your view is "uncomfortable" but because it's not truth? Your phrasing certainly reads to me like reactionary defensiveness when presented with legitimate criticism of certain aspects of this culture and a refusal to evaluate things from any other point of view than your own.
Not necessarily. Once someone has established that they won't engage in good faith ("told for decades that said national culture is hateful and outdated and must be destroyed without any decent replacement" isn't exactly an opening for discussion) it's wasted effort to engage.
It's still worth hoping they'll at least consider that downvotes aren't because people hate and fear the secret truth that they are the only one smart enough to see, though.
("Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.")
Yes, characterizing any anti-racist efforts as being "told for decades that said national culture is hateful" and "must be destroyed without any decent replacement" is a dogwhistle.
This sort of cherry picking and sliding definition of terms while pretending to be "just asking some questions", however, is known as sealioning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sealioning
I'm not saying anything particularly controversial here. Even Gordon Brown - our last Labour Prime Minister - recognised as such and was seeking to create some kind of coalescing new national identity. When even the left recognise it as a problem, you know something's up.
"Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality" - George Orwell.
"Even the devil can quote Orwell to his purpose" - me.
> "Another marked characteristic is the emotional shallowness of people who live in a world of ideas and have little contact with physical reality" - George Orwell.
Care to elaborate? This seems like a personal attack.
> "Even the devil can quote Orwell to his purpose" - me.
>Care to elaborate? This seems like a personal attack.
Your post seemed to me mainly composed of
1. some quotes from Orwell
2. a knock against that all-purpose bogeyman "the Left" as an enabler of fascism. Which is funny how often the Left is an enabler of the ultra-right, but the Right never is.
3. and some references to such vague things as shared national culture. Which, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it - a concern with a shared national culture is really top priority with those nasty people the Left enables.
All these abstractions show someone who maybe lives in a world of ideas, and I thought it's funny that Orwell in the same part where he talked about the nasty Left and so forth, also noted this marked characteristic as something that was one of the roots of their problems.
Finally, and I didn't point this out before but I shall now, I doubt that Orwell's Left is the same as today, mortality being what it is, and the cause of personal disaffection from the national culture might not have the same causes as it did in the 20s-40s.
The Left that makes saying "God Save the Queen" unpopular has been replaced by media that makes it old-fashioned and silly (Look at that Silly John Lydon up there, done up like my granny!), and while I know that it is often pleasant to point at the media and say Look, the Left - I think there is just as much reason to point at it and say Look, the Corporations!
Although since saving the Queen has been out of fashion for longer than I've been alive I have to think there may be bonds less nation-state sounding that have been worn through more recently that we could worry about, and whatever those bonds should be, if we were to agree to worry about them being broken I would think it were more reasonable to accuse multinational corporations of destroying them than a powerless political viewpoint. Or, if we were to choose a political viewpoint as the chief source of our woes, then choose one with more power at the moment - such as The Right.
on edit: however I didn't downvote you although your on edit about truth at the end did put it right on the border. Because who really knows what the truth is.
My last word: we should hardly be surprised that the product of a couple of generations of laissez-faire leftist moulding acts as if it doesn't have to listen to authority. This is precisely the intention of said leftism...
Are you talking about the parliamentary left and right here?
"laissez-faire leftist" are two words otherwise seldom heard together.
If so, I don't think Orwell was discussing Parliamentary left and right divisions, but cultural ones. And so in his case "laissez-faire leftist" wouldn't make much sense.
on edit: oops, sorry, I saw it was your last word. So I guess I will never know what it is you're actually talking about.
> edit: yeah, suspected a dose of uncomfortable truth wouldn't go down easily.
I suspect you're getting downvoted because your argument is based on the idea that Britons have nothing in common with one another. Which is a clearly false supposition. It comes off as either ignorant of the other nations or low-key racist.
As of this morning, Youtube (ie the default 'recommended' feed) seems to have been scrubbed of all negative coronavirus vids and all negative stock market vids, except for mainstream news videos.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadThis might also happen if enough people have no money to buy food with, or no place to go to be fed. Not everyone is willing to die quietly of starvation.
Do we trust our state governments (or the Federal one) to be able to prioritize feeding 350M people, or to concern itself with long term business survival?
I fear this more than the disease.
If they managed to feed themselves despite naval blockades and bombings, without the country completely falling apart, I don’t see why we can’t.
Of course, this might mean more agricultural land for vegetables instead of livestock. Changing our behaviour. Make do with less-than-straight carrots. People starting their own vegetable patches on balconies. Not throwing out half the food we buy. Maybe rationing. It might very well suck.
We’re from a cushy world. It will take time to adapt. But in the face of necessity we’ll manage.
The last thing we should do is to prepare (and hope?) for total anarchy. Serves nobody.
I reached this conclusion a few days ago as well. I can't imagine the entire food supply thing having thousands of houses and factories bombed for years and years; and yet it happened. Civilization had a bit of a 'reset', but it was a long way from anarchy and cannibalism.
There's no way this virus is going to be as actually destructive in terms of both life and property; so that makes me optimistic.
There seems to be a large number of people who almost look forward to having their favorite (post-)apocalyptic movie/video-game becoming reality. Let's not pretend like there are not far too many people getting a minor degree of pleasure from thinking about how they will "out-maneuver" their fellow man in some sort of "apocalyptic end-game". The plethora of zombie shows, movies, and games probably does not help with this either.
But, your WWII anecdote inspired me to tell these people: "be more like your grandparents who remained heroic and civilized in the face of a purely chaotic and even evil era."
What exactly is irrational about a kid with 300k in debt and no job hoping that a collapse could lead to a real future for himself and/or his kids?
For the start.....everything. No matter how much you're in debt and without a job you're still immesurably better than after actual collapse of the society. Unless your plan really is to establish yourself as some kind of warlord with guns and have others serve you. Which is about as realistic as Mad Max is. There's literally nothing rational about it, not even as a fantasy unless you're 12 and don't understand how the world works and what would actually happen if the societes collapsed in some kind of post apocalyptic scenario.
As someone supporting a household with a cumulative 200k of debt, I know what the possibility of a chaotic new future feels like, believe me (and I AM privileged!) I'm specifically talking about the fantasy of blowing away armed marauders with a shotgun. We're on the edge, a job loss would be brutal to us, and I recognize that many have it even worse. I guess I'm pushing back against grim (and I believe largely baseless) cynicism about human nature.
[1]Mind you, I'm talking about the United States. Yemen, Libya, Syria, many other countries graced with the interference of the US and our allies are another subject.
Edited for formatting.
I moved to essentially a small coastal town to get off the street and back in housing. Being in housing is better than being homeless, but it's hardly been a cakewalk.
So I sometimes have escapist fantasies and it's common for me to fantasize about chucking it all and up and moving to a small coastal town. Then I remember I'm in a small coastal town and I'm not sure how to feel about that.
On the one hand, I guess I've won and I can be spared the expense and hassle of relocating again. On the other hand, there's something distinctly disturbing about achieving your escapist fantasy and then continuity to fantasize about escape, especially when the fantasy is to do exactly what you've already done that hasn't yet put a stop to your desire to escape your current life and all of its attendant problems.
Well, except for the rapes, murders, mass internment, civilian bombing, etc. Its a nice fable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...
Do you see the problem here?
I'd like to hope that we'd do better this time, considering especially that there is even less basis now, for identifying any segment of the US population as potentially treasonous, than there was then. But that seems like an awfully bold claim to make, in a country that's operating internment camps right now.
As if there are not bad choices and bad actors in all aspects of society at all points in history ...
Many weren't as noble (or identify with organisations that weren't as noble) as they would like to believe.
That's the fable bit.
In times of prosperous peace, most struggle is crazy making pecking order BS. Are you doing better than your neighbor? Who is number one on this list? What does it pay?
During times when the world at large isn't trying to kill us all, hell is other people. Hell is being at the bottom of the heap because society will make sure that's a terrible place to be even if there is no objective reason that it needs to be.
During a real crisis, that crap tends to mostly drop away. Suddenly, people with money are willing to share it with those who have less those with less aren't treated like they must not be trying hard enough and clearly don't deserve better.
We revert to absolute measures rather than relative measures. Instead of "Do I have more or less than other people?" we ask "Did I get what I actually needed today?"
It's very rare for big change that kills off the most awful aspects of our lives to come some big positive change. It's almost always a disaster that leads to such.
Those dystopian fantasies very often include the idea of a sense of community and pulling together in the aftermath that is generally lacking in the lives of most modern people in developed countries. We seem to be unable to imagine creating a sense of community in the face of plenty.
Longing for community seems to be a primary reason to have such fantasies.
Which might be amusing as a thought experiment. But as soon as you need antibiotics or want your shit to magically disappear down a hole in your house, you want to go back.
Needless to say, chances are one gets nastily bludgeoned with rebar over a packet of pasta. Nothing romantic there.
* everything is possible * looting and pillaging has happened before in lesser times * it doesn't help to be unprepared
I honestly think that if we had a firmer, more coordinated, and less fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants government response and action plan, anarchy would definitely be reigned in and less of a concern in people's minds.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977
From Wikipedia:
"Looting and vandalism were widespread, hitting 31 neighborhoods. Possibly the hardest hit were Crown Heights, where 75 stores on a five-block stretch were looted, and Bushwick, where arson was rampant, with some 25 fires still burning the next morning. At one point, two blocks of Broadway, which separates Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, were on fire. Thirty-five blocks of Broadway were destroyed: 134 stores looted, 45 of them set ablaze. Thieves stole 50 new Pontiacs from a Bronx car dealership.[3] In Brooklyn, youths were seen backing up cars to targeted stores, tying ropes around the stores' grates, and using their cars to pull the grates away before looting the store.[3] While 550 police officers were injured in the mayhem, 4,500 looters were arrested."
A lot of people really want to go back to work, despite the risk. Arguably we should send many (but not all) back soon.
This isn't an xor question. The existence of essentially all businesses is predicated on some degree of baseline social stability. If people in country X aren't able to feed themselves, businesses in country X are probably in deep trouble too.
So we stop working. However you cannot stop working so much that it causes more damage than that. We cannot and will not stop food production or distribution. This is a voluntary action to save lives, you cannot let it endanger more lives than what it is trying to mitigate.
Pedantically not quite true:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/be-careful-spa...
They are grabbing their guns, going out into the world, and shooting and killing animals. Which they then butcher up and store in pieces in their garage freezer and maintain months of food this way. Tasty deer.
The problem of people not having money to buy said products is less far-fetched, but still:
- As other here have pointed out, we've seen worse in our history, and nothing like what you describe played out
- We have so much wealth as a country and it's just a problem of figuring out how to get it to the right people. Yes, there are bumbling idiots making decisions and there are selfish bad-actors still trying to pad their pockets every chance they get. But when the rubber meets the road, this is too big for anyone to simply isolate themselves financially. The 1% are having their assets tank too. Our fates are bound. And when our country somehow manages to get everyone on the same side - even for the wrong reasons - we're really good at doing whatever needs to be done to solve the problem.
Meat, Eggs, bottled water are disappearing, its hard not to feel a bit panic.
Even in your case and the other anecdotes people are mentioning here, I'm not convinced it's a supply-side issue. I would guess that in some areas the supply simply isn't bountiful enough to bear the full weight of the extreme preppers. That's a real problem, to be sure, but it's an artificial one and hopefully once it becomes clear that a true famine isn't on the way those people will calm down and stop putting others in needless danger.
Last night I even asked if there was a good time to come and the cashier just said, "there is no good time, the shelves will still be empty".
"Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they don't give you work or bread, take bread." - Emma Goldman
But no one really seems to care. It’s completely fixable, but even most people I know don’t really care about it or connect that it’s the politicians making shitty zoning and local control laws that drives up the prices so high. Or they buy into the virtue signaling propaganda about affordable housing for those at the very bottom being the only thing we should care about, even though they and everyone they know live in market rate housing and are struggling with the cost.
Growing up in a rural area that’s always had the emotional sense of “Trump country.” we just worked.
From the time I was a kid (40 now) I was repairing cars, soldering electronics, doing all kinds of stuff on friends farms, and helping aunts/uncles draw chemistry and calculus problems through college.
For me being catered to the way we are is pathetic. Still fix my own stuff, grow 1/4 of my plant food for a year, and work 40-50 hours a week writing code, mostly open source and I make bank. And I live in the middle of an overpriced urban area, helping out people that needed it this last week.
And I don’t care. It could all go away. I’ll find something else to do. Life for me isn’t propping up some imported emotional framework, like religion or making money.
Pretty sad the last generation is making the current one look like the disorganized, low effort do-nothings they always said it was.
There’s plenty to do around your neighborhood I’m guessing. The problem is ya gotta look.
The reality is somewhere out there is a big group of people we don’t care about helping. We all have one. Kids in cages or something. My indifference is for the nation. It’s gonna externalizations all its problems, ok. You did it to yourselves.
Oh, the horror: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/23/health/us-pollution-satellite...
It's the reason why you're seeing people hoard things from stores: they're worried about being without.
This feeling of uncertainty is a result of the system we live in where, at least in the US, there's barely any safety net.
The vast majority of the population lives precariously, and it's not by choice.
Nope. Just wrong. you only have to look at peoples' behaviour in parts of the UK at the weekend to realise that even if some people know the implications of their actions they don't care. The UK has largely degenerated into an "entitled" society, and any veneer of sensibility and fairness has been stripped away with a vengeance. Unfortunately for us, the Prime Minister's advisers seem to think like Prof. Rasmussen and now we're in a dire situation.
this person is a fucking doctor. A DOCTOR. and she cant comprehend the severity of the situation.
All this is explained in Black Swan by Nicholas Taleb, everyone should read it! Please do it now.
It was ok though, because they were going with a scientist and a doctor so they must know what they are doing!
When they got back from the vacation they spent a week going out to the park when they could with the kids.
A week later, the hospital is at 2/3 from max capacity and they're pissing their pants. This doesn't stop them from engaging in academic research for their own interests and assuring the public that all will be fine, though.
Why should people do the right thing when they feel they have nothing in common with their fellow countrymen? It used to be the case that we had a strong shared national culture that enforced certain standards of behaviour, and thus one had a stake in maintaining these standards due to collective reciprocity, but we've been told for decades that said national culture is hateful and outdated and must be destroyed without any decent replacement. I cite Orwell:
'England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.'
'If the English people suffered for several years a real weakening of morale, so that the Fascist nations judged that they were ‘decadent’ and that it was safe to plunge into war, the intellectual sabotage from the Left was partly responsible.'
edit: yeah, suspected a dose of uncomfortable truth wouldn't go down easily.
.. why would that ever be a condition for doing the right thing? What does having a shared culture have to do with having humanity?
I'm not trying to kick off a flamewar but this is hopelessly naive - divide and conquer has been used for thousands of years - just look at Rwanda for a recent dreadful example.
With the UK being a diverse multiracial population it's even more important to attempt to unify everyone around some kind of shared values etc. Otherwise you end up with people living right next door to each other that are mentally living in completely different universes. It should be obvious that this is not an ideal starting point for rallying a population around a unified goal.
The USA used to be seen as particularly successful in absorbing everyone no matter their origins, and giving them a strong identity as American that superceded everything else. Not sure if that's still valid though.
It might be worth considering if maybe you are the one in the wrong here. Could it be that the majority of people disagree with you not because your view is "uncomfortable" but because it's not truth? Your phrasing certainly reads to me like reactionary defensiveness when presented with legitimate criticism of certain aspects of this culture and a refusal to evaluate things from any other point of view than your own.
It's still worth hoping they'll at least consider that downvotes aren't because people hate and fear the secret truth that they are the only one smart enough to see, though.
("Am I out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong.")
Even in middle-age, my ears aren’t so bad that I don’t know a dog whistle when I hear it.
Isn't that exactly the "national culture is hateful and outdated" notion he's talking about?
This sort of cherry picking and sliding definition of terms while pretending to be "just asking some questions", however, is known as sealioning: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sealioning
I know what a dog-whistle is, I'm asking why you think you know OP is referring to "anti-racist efforts".
> This sort of cherry picking..
What are you referring to as "this"? my comments? I don't see the words you quoted (""just asking some questions").
"Even the devil can quote Orwell to his purpose" - me.
Care to elaborate? This seems like a personal attack.
> "Even the devil can quote Orwell to his purpose" - me.
Well fair enough, that made me chuckle.
Your post seemed to me mainly composed of
1. some quotes from Orwell
2. a knock against that all-purpose bogeyman "the Left" as an enabler of fascism. Which is funny how often the Left is an enabler of the ultra-right, but the Right never is.
3. and some references to such vague things as shared national culture. Which, I mean, not to put too fine a point on it - a concern with a shared national culture is really top priority with those nasty people the Left enables.
All these abstractions show someone who maybe lives in a world of ideas, and I thought it's funny that Orwell in the same part where he talked about the nasty Left and so forth, also noted this marked characteristic as something that was one of the roots of their problems.
Finally, and I didn't point this out before but I shall now, I doubt that Orwell's Left is the same as today, mortality being what it is, and the cause of personal disaffection from the national culture might not have the same causes as it did in the 20s-40s.
The Left that makes saying "God Save the Queen" unpopular has been replaced by media that makes it old-fashioned and silly (Look at that Silly John Lydon up there, done up like my granny!), and while I know that it is often pleasant to point at the media and say Look, the Left - I think there is just as much reason to point at it and say Look, the Corporations!
Although since saving the Queen has been out of fashion for longer than I've been alive I have to think there may be bonds less nation-state sounding that have been worn through more recently that we could worry about, and whatever those bonds should be, if we were to agree to worry about them being broken I would think it were more reasonable to accuse multinational corporations of destroying them than a powerless political viewpoint. Or, if we were to choose a political viewpoint as the chief source of our woes, then choose one with more power at the moment - such as The Right.
on edit: however I didn't downvote you although your on edit about truth at the end did put it right on the border. Because who really knows what the truth is.
My last word: we should hardly be surprised that the product of a couple of generations of laissez-faire leftist moulding acts as if it doesn't have to listen to authority. This is precisely the intention of said leftism...
"laissez-faire leftist" are two words otherwise seldom heard together.
If so, I don't think Orwell was discussing Parliamentary left and right divisions, but cultural ones. And so in his case "laissez-faire leftist" wouldn't make much sense.
on edit: oops, sorry, I saw it was your last word. So I guess I will never know what it is you're actually talking about.
I suspect you're getting downvoted because your argument is based on the idea that Britons have nothing in common with one another. Which is a clearly false supposition. It comes off as either ignorant of the other nations or low-key racist.
The truth is now officially anyone's guess.