Preppers

Right. "Prepper" vs. "being prepared." The former is almost like a subculture.

Peppers take a good idea, having extra supplies and tools for an emergency, and take it to 11.

I’m not a prepper, but I did read my local government’s disaster preparedness list and have everything on it that applies to my family. I keep 3 days or so of extra, shelf stable food in the house; bought a home water cooler and keep an extra jug of water that I rotate when we use the one in the machine so that we have a few days of clean water at all times, which is way more practical and safe than a camping water jug that will sit and stagnate in the basement; I have a battery “generator” that I keep topped up with a solar panel because we have a sewage ejector pump and a sump pump to stop the basement from flooding in bad weather; and I have good first aid kits for the house and cars.

The only thing not on my local government list are the emergency car kits, which is really just a basic vehicle toolkit, jumpstart kit, flares, sweater and space blanket, all in a cheap bag that lives on top of the spare tire.

I don’t live in the most disaster prone area, but we do get tornados and nasty thunderstorms that knock out power for a day or 3. We don’t exactly have the lights on when that happens, but we do have food, water, a non flooded basement, and even some heat in the winter, and both cars have something to keep you warm while you either fix the car or wait for the tow truck.

I kind of understand peppers, because planning all of this out after we lost power a few years ago for 4 days in fall was interesting, and there was just so much shit the internet was saying I needed: weeks or months of dried beans and rice, a generator for the whole house, enough guns and ammo to ward off a small army, etc. my local government list was hard to find compared to all of the forums and YouTube videos, but I’m glad I found it, it’s sensible and if spread out over months, very affordable. I highly, highly recommend you poke around your local government website for their natural disaster page, they’ll have resources of who to contact if you need help, and what you should have on hand. If it’s not on your city’s page, try your county or state government. One of them should have a page about disasters and how to prepare for them.

The issue is that you can't prepare for everything. Having extra food and water, sure. Maybe buying a generator so you can use electrical equipment, that's generally useful. But, aside from that, your preparations for a flood will be very different from your preparations for a military invasion, which would be different from preparing for a pandemic.

Also, the more extreme your preparations are, the more it matters when you pull the trigger and activate your emergency plans. If your preparation is simply having a cupboard with extra toilet paper and some extra canned food, it's no big deal to pull that stuff out if the store runs out. But, if you have some kind of bunker in the mountains, it's a bigger decision when to "bug out" of the city and go live in the mountains. You're basically quitting your job, so if the emergency is something like the COVID pandemic, when do you decide things are so bad that you can take that extreme step?

And then some of the same people will wear actual diapers in public while holding signs proclaiming that "real men wear diapers". Can't make that shit up.

preppers don't want to be dependent on society because they don't like society, but they're not bright enough to realize they will always be dependent on society

See also Emergency Skin by NK Jemison.

Real peppers never stop eating beans.

Remind me not to stay in one of their enclosed bunkers with them for an extended period of time.

Did you know that if you keep eating the same vegetable/food it can become somewhat toxic to your system? Also, different people have different tolerances.

But have you considered that going to therapy and dealing with their intense insecurity is scary?

Bros will have nuclear armegeddon before seeing a social worker and it shows.

I felt silly for buying a 63 gallon, foldable/portable water tank for my small farm because the vast majority of the ones I looked at were marketed towards preppers.

I just want my animals to have water in case the power goes out for a few days.

But the way things like that are marketed makes it sound like your the smartest, bestest, most prepared person to ever walk this earth. I don't need you to stroke my ego, just sell a foldable water tank with no leaks please.

Take every dime you can from those dingdongs.

I've been finding the crazy building in arid environments odd, because even aside from forest fires, if your water supply dries up, you're going to have to uproot and move to a state or location with a reliable water source. And you'll be part of a big mass of climate migrants at that point.

"Zombies". If you let them talk, it'll be pretty obvious that they're looking for a legal loophole to kill somebody. "Zombies" just means city people, which just means black people. They'll kill a white guy if that's what their lifelong dream comes to, but they'd feel bad about it later.

Nothing wrong in a good LARP, or masturbation for that matter. The problem with preppers is everything else about them.

Did you know that honeybees were not in America until they were brought here from Europe? Many other flies and bees did the pollination previously.

Put more money into tacticool guns than they did ammo. Spent more time making them look Gucci than they did at the range.

I wouldn't call that being a prepper. That's just sensible preparation for something like a natural disaster. Preppers think they'll survive whatever their conception of "the big one" is.

You should always have enough supplies for a short term emergency. That’s not doomsday prepping, it’s just common sense.

I’m not a prepper IMO, but I have rooftop solar with battery backup, a few smaller portable batteries and UPSes on my critical stuff, and some oil filled radiators since my heat pump isn’t connected to the solar setup.

At any given time we generally have a month or more worth of food in the house in frozen and dry/canned goods. Also, several gallons of bottled water.

I also keep some stuff under the back bed of my car’s hatch, first aid kit and emergency blanket, and battery jumper kit as well as a battery powered tire inflator.

I live in a semi-rural area, and in an emergency, getting out and/or getting food and necessities may not be possible. And if there’s a wildfire I may need to evacuate fast, so important to have what’s needed. This sort of thing is like… If you have the means, why wouldn’t you?

I think when most people think of a prepper, they think of someone preparing for everything to collapse. Badly. So I wouldn't consider you a prepper.

Drag thinks prepping is about learning useful skills and building community. A prepper should know how to sew, how to garden, how to repair and operate a radio, how to make friends, how to organise labour, and first aid.

Drag wants to see a zombie show about a grandma who looks after her community, resolves interpersonal disputes, fixes clothes, and looks after the little ones. Drag thinks grandmas are the demographic best prepared for an apocalypse.

Cute, but it's just a single hit on a lifetime of misses for most. He got lucky once and could easily use it to reaffirm a bunch of nonsense instead of crilically asking himself what all the other wasted shit is for.

But hey, I have hobbies too, and I'm glad he's smart enough to listen to science. So he's about a million miles ahead of most

The being cooperative thing is the key.

Id be willing to bet my left testicle those that survive an apocalypse are those who work together to grow food, build shelter, etc. and not the goobers who lock themselves in a crate with some beans.

The one doomsday prepper I knew had to weigh at least 400 pounds. I often wondered if he knew how to make insulin for when the apocalypse happens.

He was actually a nice enough guy, but not the brightest bulb in the box.

A lot of these militia guys also don't learn the survival tasks they consider feminine. How many know any sort of gathering skills, cooking anything not meat based, laundry, mending clothes? Those are probably more day to day useful during the apocalypse than rifle shooting or how to wear camo paint.

Make sure the antibiotics don't expire. Most of them just become useless when they expire, but Tetracycline becomes poisonous when it expires. Also, not all antibiotics are good for all infections, so make sure the ones you have are useful for the kinds of infections you anticipate.

Yeah, I feel much the same. Shit happens sometimes and it's good to be prepared. That goes for situations where civilization is collapsing and also in day to day life too. "Preppers" are so hyper fixated on one particular hyper-individual fantasy outcome. The merits of, say, integrating into a mutual aid network are completely missed.

It's always so much more useful to have AND KNOW WHERE every one-off necessity you might need is. A flashlight and spare batteries. First aid supplies. Spare medication. Superglue. A good utility knife. Emergency bedding. Enough shelf stable food for a few days. Some card games to pass the time. A few creature comforts that are easy to keep on hand. An appropriate weapon you practice with regularly. Some space an unhoused friend could crash for a week.

You get whatever you can together and organized and then you SHARE IT, because these things will all solve day to day problems for people in your life who maybe don't have them on hand. And then you pay attention to other needs that come up and make small additions so you're prepared for the needs of people you care about. And then boom there you go you've done actual fucking preparation! And get to sleep a little easier knowing you're ready for a lot more that life could throw at you.

Margaret Killjoy has a great podcast on effective preparation that comes from a very practical community readiness perspective. Definitely worth a listen. Live Like The World Is Dying

Yeah I fill up some whisky bottles with tap water and keep them in the cupboard. I guess in an insane scenario I might need to use it as drinking water, though I'd probably want to figure out how to boil that water first since it's been sitting there for awhile.

I have actually used that water... but just to wash my hands when they turn off the water in the building when they're doing some maintenance.

Sometimes some disaster preparedness is just useful for relatively banal circumstances.

Tell that to all the gay frogs I heard coughing in the woods last night

that guys living my dream

Flooded with stagnant water? Do you want brain worms? This is how you get brain worms.

Whereas I hate getting my hair cut and I will just shave it all off when it gets too long.

Actually, I can't think of anything during COVID I actually found to be a huge imposition other than wearing a mask at work got hot after a while.

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.

Unfortunately for many it is.

I don't really generally circulate with far right wing folk. However this is one place that overlaps with my interests. One of the most unlikely intersections between the far left and the far right is home solar power. When you start to stray way from purely commercial groups trying to sell you stuff, you get to the DIY solar community.

Here you'll find multi-gun toting, hardcore Randian libertarians, that "want the damn government control out of their lives" right next too tree hugging, LGBTQ/feminist equality supporting, carbon-neutralling liberals. Both groups squint hard not to see who they're talking to or asking for advice on Charge Controllers, panel interconnects, AC inverter config settings, or off-grid battery solutions. Every now and then one person from one side or the other won't be able to help themselves and they'll make reference to their particular extreme political views. Everyone just holds their breath hoping a fight doesn't break out and most of the time its just ignored by both sides.

In here you'll find those far right preppers and they are convinced that they'll have to be 100% self supporting when the government falls "real soon now".

There was a really good 1970s post-apocalyptic show in the UK called Survivors that dealt with those issues. One episode involved the fact that the only person who knew how to take care of their livestock committed rape and what to do about it. Others involved the just basic drudgery of returning to a medieval life. Really good show (apart from the last episode, which subverts the whole fucking show).

I feel like a lot of stuff from ancient times wouldn't be all that useful. A lot of stuff back then was optimized for a society that didn't know anything about electricity.

We know how electricity exists, we know that with some magnets and copper wire we can turn mechanical energy into electricity. It seems like making a wind turbine is something they could've made in ancient times, but they didn't do that simply because they didn't really know anything about electricity. Some more copper wire and some more magnets and you could drive a pump. Some chemistry and you have a battery, maybe not Li-ion but something that'll work well enough. Resistors and you can have an electric stove and a heater.

It always strikes me as odd that preparers aren't all-in on green technology. If you had some wind turbines and/or solar panels and electric vehicles almost nothing other than communications would really change much. Dependency on complex oil refineries is the biggest weakness of our society. If you live in a rural area that has some farming and has green energy and electric vehicles you're dependent on very little that's not produced in your community.

You would like Doctor Stone. It's about a high school science geek who has to restart civilisation from scratch.

Sounds like a smart guy. He gets meat AND all your dried goods!

As Weird Al sang in Tacky, "if I get bit by a zombie, I'm probably not telling you."

I lived in a small town on the New Madrid fault line in the middle of tornado alley most of my life and yep, we stocked up because we knew if a sizable enough earthquake hit the area, we were small enough to not get any attention for a long time while the nearby cities were recovering. There's definitely point of wisdom for sticking back supplies for a few months, but stacking a cellar full of tactical mil spec fishing poles and the like is mental masturbation for delusional assholes with less sense than money.

Technically just having a preparation in place for fires or earthquakes does make you a prepper. There may be varying degrees of it, but prepping for natural disasters is actually a much larger section of preppers than "zombies" or whatever bullshit. Hurricanes too in those areas is another common one, and you'd be surprised how many people carry and IFAK just in case of a car crash or shooter.

But any way you slice it, building firebreaks, storing food and water, and forming a microgrid, those are some good preparations my prepper friend.

The toilet paper thing is fascinating to me, because everybody went to the store, saw the empty shelves, and assumed that their neighbors were freaking out and hoarding toilet paper. People actually needed more TP during lockdown, because they were doing all their pooping at home instead of at work.

Businesses have a completely different supply chain for toilet paper, and you had a deficit in one and a surplus in the other. You can't just move product from one supply chain to the other, either.

Always ready to just give up and die

Piers Morgan was one of the few horrible British people America shipped back.

You live like a nomad hunter-gatherer if you like. Count me out.

If the problem is going to last significantly longer than a month, then no one is really "prepared." Those preppers then just become resource targets.

Prepping is just a normal gay/anal sex term, no kink necessary

I feel like if we've got to the point where we go back to bartering, I've kind of lost interest in surviving because that means pretty much all of the civilization is gone.

Sounds fun. But there's a huge Venn diagram overlap between them and the sovcits, covid-hoax, various types of "truthers" and doomsday cult types. So the target market, if you're marketing to preppers, is not just the clever Doctor Stone cosplayers.

Because a lot of them are far right nutjobs.

I’m not hating on all preppers, one of my partners is one. She has a massive food garden, quite a few guns (though that’s largely because her ex is armed and violent), and cultivates skills useful in dangerous situations, such as woodwork and textile work. That’s not the judgement.

The judgement is for the ones who openly fantasize about city folk dying in a disaster and dream of using their hoarded food to buy human beings.

Do you think it has anything to do with, like, the entire text of what I posted above?

SHTF doesn't have to mean the end of the world,.

When hospitals have to use refrigerated trucks to store bodies because the morgue has filled up, I think the shit has indeed hit the fan.

Nothing that doesn't knock out power or wipe out humans quickly on a wide scale will qualify for an apocalypse, and thus only annoy preppers.

I've heard people say they honestly miss it. They're quick to say that people dying was awful, but they have honest nostalgia for the covid days.

Or maybe you don't like being lumped in with a bunch of conservative reactionaries who dream of running their own post-apocalyptic fiefdom. It's not our fault that those are who people think of when they think of preppers. I guess you should pick a new name for yourself.