Microblog Memes

What's funny is that antimaskers still blat on about how they won't wear a face diaper for anything or anyone, two years after such requirements ended. These people just need negative attention like tantruming toddlers.

There are "Preppers" and there are people who actually prepare for when things go wrong. Preppers seem to me like someone who watched a few too many survivor man and YouTube clips and decided to make a personality out of it.

Real peppers never stop eating beans. You buy new and eat the old ones. Oh and real peppers buy a truck they can repair themselves, not a 2024 Ram Clownsmobile.

There’s a Simpson’s episode about preppers where they assume the big bad thing happens and fuck off to their bunkers, stuff happens, and they eventually come back to town. When they come back everyone is happy and doing fine and Marge says something like “things were okay after the first few hours. We all worked together and made it work. It was like all the mean, angry, and resentful parts of the town had just disappeared!”

Pretty much, just a power fantasy disguised as being prepared

All the solar panels, ARs, and "Patriot" food kits won't prep them for when the pollinators die off.

You lost them at considerate.

COVID didn't have a solution based around people being the main character.

Unless you wanted to cause trouble. Then you could be the main character.

Preppers: I'm ready for anything; economic collapse, zombies, apocalypse, sinkholes, foreign invasion, aliens...anything!

[covid-19 hits]

Preppers: fuck this i'm not wearing a mask! it's all a hoax!

Also preppers: I need to go to the store and buy 27 cases of toilet paper!

Saw an episode of doomsday preppers years ago. These dudes had a whole property out in Oregon or Washington state designed to endure a potential onslaught of zombies.

They had to quickly evacute their property and leave all their fancy stuff, because of a very real forest fire that came to visit, for which they were entirely unprepared.

As a guy who built shit for preppers (because some of them are stupid as fuck and have gobs of money from some shady bs) this is spot on.

Preppers are fucking losers. The cunts who want WW3 deserve no love.

Hair cuts of all things made people lose their god damn minds. That was wild

Imagine living such a privileged life that the closest you've ever come to feeling oppressed was when you had to wear a mask to pick up dino nuggets at Walmart. Preppers have always been clowns, but COVID definitely ruined what little facade there ever actually was about the "movement" being anything other than a masturbatory LARP.

I'm a person that most people would consider a prepper. What am I prepping for? Unemployment. Being able to survive with as few possible inputs as possible.

I'm a hard core skeptical nerd that doesn't believe a single conspiracy theory. I'm like an anti doomsday prepper. Making life easier even if things don't go bad.

So… Yeah, doomsday preppers definitely showed their true colors.

But I think we also saw that there’s a lot of merit to being a reasonable prepper.

I’m lucky to have a reasonable prepper in my friend group. Because of their insistence, I had masks, a full tank of gas, and a comfortably-stocked pantry way ahead of time so I wasn’t yet another person adding stress to a lean/just-in-time/low-margin distribution system that can’t handle even minor hiccups.

Much like the goal of lockdowns was not to completely stop the spread but just slow it so our healthcare system could handle it, the goal of prepping should be to avoid causing shortages when our productive capacity is lowered.

I'm in the "be prepared" group where we usually have a couple weeks of food and water around. We also have two forms of heat for when the power goes out.

Will we survive WW3 on this? No, but it has been very helpful after big winter storms that took out the city power.

Having some supplies to use in the short term is good for everyone. Being ready to go out to help neighbors and get the community back on its feet is how we get through to the next good times.

my dads a mild prepper and had his 'told you so' moment when he brought up 2 boxes of n95 masks. he donated a box to hospital and the other box got the family through the worst months

So if a zombie outbreak occurred these people would fuck us even worse

I don't consider myself a prepper, but I do prepare for unlikely scenarios with highly negative outcomes. In terms of expected value vs. investment, I think having a "go" or "get home" bag is cheap and useful. I have two weeks of food and water supplies to shelter in place. I have face masks and hazmat suits (they came vacuum sealed so they just sit in the bottom of the shelter in place Tupperware bin). A solar generator and battery. A few medkits and some basic medicines including prescription antibiotics. And then my camping/hiking stuff: so more mres, water purification, water filter, fire kit etc.

All in all, it didn't cost much, it doesn't take up much room, and it's good to have. I'm not necessarily worried about a revolution so much as, in order if likelihood: a bad storm, electrical grid issues, natural disaster, or mild civil unrest. All of which I've been through before, so I guess they're not exactly black swan events. I wouldn't really call those "SHTF" events, since, again, I've experienced each one and yet things are now fine.

What I consider "preppers" are thinking about (and seemingly hoping for) civilizational collapse.

I know a guy who owns a retired nuclear missile silo that he made into a doomsday bunker/business. The top several floors or so with the old control rooms and stuff has been converted into his bunker, but most of the main silo is flooded with water, so it's a scuba diving attraction.

Anyway: when Covid came his bunker and years of food and fuel, so he and the wife went out there and used it for their lockdown. I'm happy for him that he got to use it.

They took out the old control rooms and completely remodeled the inside into a pretty comfy house. It's just underground and has 3-ton blast doors.

What a lot of right wing preppers and a lot of 'militia' guys (the tacticool heavy infantry kind) seem to completely lack is the willingness to be inconvenienced at all.

They buy or craft whatever stuff seems cool to them (some of which sure can actually be quite useful), train some skills they find fun to do (usually shooting/hunting) but most seem to ignore anything they don't like, find difficult or uninteresting to do (such as keeping reasonably fit). It also usually includes being willing to take orders or cooperate.

The lack of some skills/equipment/preparation could be overcome but not with the mentality that lead to it on the first place.

I'm proud that in that time of crisis I was strong and served my country and fellow citizens, simply by staying home and not bothering anyone.

If you just went hunting, fishing, and living in the woods COVID wouldn't be a problem for you though.

They weren't ready for a SHTF scenario where survival means personal hygiene.

Same people who won't get a vaccination are the same ones who take huge dumps and don't wash their hands. Venn diagram is a circle.

Me, buying some extra rice, pasta and salt, watching my neighbor buying large game butchering knife kit (we live in the suburbs)

Or ever bother learning something to benefit society now and in the case of a rebuild. Great, you have food, shelter and guns. Do you know how to dress wounds? Do you know how to build a generator? Fuck electricity actually- do you know how to build a steam engine? Wait before we can get here, do you know how to make steel? Cast iron? There should be plenty of it after an apocalypse. Wind copper?

What about welding? Not the kind you need modern tools for, you won't have those. Do you know basic chemistry to get what you need to restart society? No? Well good luck.

Turns out survival in an apocalypse isn't all that difficult if you payed attention to anything in school. It pisses me off people get bent out of shape about "useful practice skills like doing taxes aren't being taught."

I can remember a ton of important ass survival shit from school. Crop rotation! Agricultural practices from thousands of years ago! Steam power, basic electricity, Simple chemistry. Oh, and Math! How many Preppers can't do basic fucking math that would save them?

The irony in the "prepping" movement these days is that it was never intended to be this thing about having an inexhaustible supply of resources just for you and your family (if you're still on speaking terms with them) to live off of when the nukes fall.

It's not about sitting in your attic and picking off starving people who are looking for a meal while you sit on a cache of food and ammunition.

It's supposed to be about being a useful person in your community who can help each other weather the worst in life. You will get much further in a disaster if you have skills than if you have stuff. You might have an entire Home Depot to yourself, but it's far too late to learn carpentry when the rain starts to fall.

Was there actually news indicating that preppers, as a group, were more likely to be against masking than for it?

I wouldn't be too surprised, but I haven't actually seen any evidence to this effect.

I don’t think preppers are a monolith. There are people from different backgrounds, different politics, different concerns, and different methods (and degrees) of preparedness. People who make it about hoarding goods and resources are probably just doing it wrong.