#doomsday prepping

[post-s2-reblogs]

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[queersatanic]

Ok, regarding voting/not voting in the US presidential election because neither candidate is a good option: What other choice is there?

I want to understand because I've seen so many people say that voting for the lesser of two evils is pointless and that I must not actually care about marginalized/oppressed people if I choose to do so, but voting in the presidential election is one of the vanishingly few scraps of influence I feel we have in this country.

Does it amount to much? No. Am I happy about it? No. Are we actually living in a democracy? Not even a little bit. Am I under the impression that Kamala Harris would solve every problem ever had around the world? No, absolutely not. The way I see it, voting for Kamala definitely isn't solving problems. It's just preventing Trump from arriving on the scene to create more problems for us because the last thing any of us need on top of the colossal shit-storm we're all currently dealing with is more bullshit, and of the two viable options that we've been given, Kamala is the one that would give us less of that type of bullshit. Again, I'm not happy about it. I'm fully aware that this is a band-aid solution at best, but this is the most influential thing I can do as a US citizen. There is nothing else I could possibly do as a single individual to meaningfully sway who's in power here.

I'm lucky enough to live in a state that allows us to mail our ballots. Voting only takes me like, five minutes, and it seems worth doing if it prevents us from having Trump back in office, even if Kamala is only better by a miniscule fraction of an amount.

So, if voting is truly pointless, if there's truly zero difference between Kamala and Trump, what should we do instead? I really can't imagine an alternative that would result in swift, positive changes for anyone. (Again, not that voting would create swift, positive change either, but it at least seems like it would give us a better chance at positive change eventually.) Anarchy and protesting and raging against the machine are all well and good, but those are also things that will endanger and cause the deaths of vulnerable people, just as much as voting. Not that they aren't also worth doing, because they are, but it seems like it would be just as lengthy of a process and as impactful as it would be to vote in the election. And it's entirely possible to do those things on top of voting in an election. So I want to know what it is that I should be doing instead. Please help me understand. This is a genuine question, I'm not looking to argue, I want to know what other avenues there are and what I'm not seeing about the situation.

So, here is the simplest way to understand this: replace everything you are saying and thinking about "voting" with "signing a petition". It only takes a few minutes, it amounts to more than nothing, etc., etc.

Do you think that signing a petition — any petition — deserves to be given so much money, attention, conversation, and so on that it forms the boundary of political imagination and is used as a synecdoche for political action?

Sign a petition or don't; vote or don't vote. But it's not the most important thing you do, it shouldn't be the thing you devote hardly any of your life to, and it should not be how you neatly reduce other people around you.

This includes voting third party for president.

This includes writing in "Free Palestine" on your ballot.

This includes not voting at all.

The anarchist critique of electoralism is usually not even that you shouldn't do it but to recognize it for what it is: a mostly meaningless gesture over who you want to run the orphan-crushing machine. You can say that it's important to you to select someone who will read a land acknowledgment while operating the machine or that it's critical with global warming to have an orphan-crushing machine operator who will commit to installing solar panels by 2035 or that it's a moral imperative not to cooperate with the machine at all and express no opinion on who the operator ought to be. But none of that has anything to do with stopping the machine from crushing orphans, and the purpose of a system is what it does.

By the way, this is not new or something that privileged keyboard warriors invented in 2013. A hundred years before that, the Japanese anarchist Ōsugi Sakae wrote a short allegory called "The Chain Factory" about people wrapped in chains, making even more chains they add to it, and the only the factory boss has the key to free all of them.

The narrator wants to free himself, but he needs the help of others, and other people have different ideas about how to go about this.

There are so many who do not realize that they are bound by chains. There are many more still who, were they to realize it, would only be grateful for their chains. There are also many who, while not grateful, have resigned themselves to working industriously to forge their chains. And there are the many who, seeing the chain-making as ridiculous, frequently find openings in the watch of the guards to rest their bodies while harbouring selfish delusions in their heads and passionately spouting nonsense about actually being free and not bound by chains at all. It is more foolish than I can bear to watch. I then suddenly cast my gaze about. I found others around me that seemed to be aligned with me. They are few, and they are scattered all around. But they all desire the key to their bellies in the clutches of the master. And like me, they seem to be aware of being unable to take back their keys alone, so they whisper frequently to their neighbours to forge alliances. “They are few; we are many. They are outnumbered. If we act together, we can take back our keys in one fell swoop.” “However, since we make pronouncements about justice and peace, we must not permit violence. We must proceed through peaceful means. There is a simple way to do this.” “Once a year, we send a representative to the master to decide every aspect of our lives. All of those chaps in that meeting are representatives of the master, and if we muster up our own true representatives now, we can be the majority in the meeting, and that's how we can pass the resolutions that we want.” “All we need to do is shut up and forge the chains. Just continue to wrap the chains around ourselves. Then, when the day comes every few years that we choose our representative, we simply vote for our own representative.” Our representative will gradually loosen our chains, and will, ultimately, take back the key to our bellies from the master. We will then find ourselves in a factory under a new organization and a new system of our own ideals, with our chains in the hands of our representative.”

So, how does this relate your question of what you should be doing? Vote or don't vote in the five minutes it takes you. Find whatever slate recommendation you trust most and follow that, then turn it in or throw it away. But live your life.

Talk to your neighbors. Talk to your coworkers. Bring food to each other. Lend tools to one another. Be available to take people to the airport and pick them up from the hospital. Talk about rent. Talk about wages. Talk about working conditions. Exchange contact info so you don't have to call down the drone strike that is cops showing up in your neighborhood over people yelling. Take people into your home when you can so they can escape domestic violence. Shun rapists so they actually face consequences even if it comes at social cost you yourself. Yes, get trained on first aid and shooting, too.

If all that sounds small, you could argue that. It's certainly more personal. But it's the stuff you do every day to build relationships with another another outside of capitalism and hierarchy, or maybe it's just the cigarette burns you put into those things, hollowing them out.

You creating trust with your coworkers so that you can perform a work stoppage together on any day is much more significant that who you vote for on some day because no matter who you vote for president, they will side with "small business owners" and "main street" over your boss shorting you on your paycheck. You talking to fellow tenants about your living conditions matters much more than your vote for city council because even in the most overwhelming Democratic city, county, and state, your electeds will side with landlords over renters. When there is a hurricane or a heat wave or a pogrom, you will know each other and be there for each other.

Vote or don't vote. When you see a petition coming to put abortion rights on your state's ballot, feel free to sign it. But you'd better have other plans when the courts throw it out. You'd better have plans for when political coalitions who don't recognize you as legitimate regardless of what you and people like you do, because that antagonist coalition will ignore the courts and do what they want anyway.

Anti-electoralism is not about voting. It is about opposing the magical thinking that voting is efficacious or will save us from fascism. The special counsel Robert Muller will not save us from fascism, or the courts, or the media, or the Democrats, or the police. There is no "someone else will solve this for us" that you can rely on, so you should engage in a sort of realistic doomsday prepping that isn't just about bugging out and running off but about creating networks of mutual reliance that build up and exercise the muscles now you will need even more in the future.

[toppickreviews]

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[the-illustrative-interloper]

Coping Mechanisms

[reginaldstroudus]

It' Time To Start Preparing

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

Prepping

If society breaks down, you want to avoid big cities, which means avoiding interstates.  If you have to travel, take state routes and minor highways through or around small towns.  Set up camp down south so the winters are warm; the Mississippi River basin seems ideal because it has very fertile soil for crops, but it also has racist gun nuts who aren’t smart enough to grow crops and will kill you for yours.  Plus, if society goes in a nuclear strike, New Orleans is an major port target, so everything within a hundred miles will be covered in nuclear fallout and black rain.  Find a river in the middle of the country, not too far north, maybe the Missouri or Ohio, and try to rough it there instead.  Problem is, a lot of big cities lie on these rivers, so if any of them are targeted, then everything downriver is contaminated.  St Louis, Louisville, Cincinnati, Memphis, you have to hedge your bets and find a spot as far from them as possible while keeping close enough to the river for it to be useful.  Maybe find a tributary off the beaten path.

First stop, every pharmacy in town; 5-finger discounts, EVERYTHING MUST GO.  Pain medication will be worth its weight in gold after the end; opiates and opioids and oppa-gangnam-styles and whatever the hell else people are addicted to now will be indispensable.  People will kill you for them, so guard them with your life, don’t advertise what you’ve got or where you got it.  Only use it when someone else has something you want; welcome back to a barter economy.  Gold is just shiny metal, gems are just fancy rocks, they’re heavy and useless, their value will fluctuate as people get used to their new lives.  They will be worth a lot at the start because everyone believes gold is valuable, but as they realize they can’t actually do anything with it, the price will plummet.  Then, years later, after society has started coming back, its price will go up again as people try to establish a currency so they don’t have to barter anymore.

If you want to set up shop south of south of the border, try growing coffee and cocoa beans, maybe weed to a lesser extent; you will be hailed as a GOD in the new world.  Everybody needs their fix, so if you can set up a trade network across the Caribbean, your farm will become a boomtown for international commerce.  If you’re in the midwest, and think you can handle northern winters, grow as many grains as you can.  Corn and wheat as far as the eye can see (post-apocalyptic Iowa will look a lot like modern day Iowa).  Penicillin will be very useful, but don’t just let bread go moldy, you’ll end up killing yourself that way.  Do your research NOW, before the collapse.  Poppies can be grown for opium and morphine, cause you’re gonna run out of supplies you looted from CVS at the start of the end.

Don’t just stock up on goods, stock up on the means to make new goods.  Don’t get vegetables, get vegetable seeds.  Your new life is agrarian, so get out the Farmer’s Almanac and prepare for the autumnal harvest.  If you can make bread, you can make beer, which means you can make lots of friends who may or may not kill you for your bread and beer.  Be careful who you let into your inner circle, try to keep your community small at first until you have a dedicated security network.  I don’t trust people anymore, not since 2016, so when it all ends, it’ll be every man for himself for a while.  No rules, no repercussions, just might-makes-right, so try to avoid the “mighty” until things settle down.

Time to go back to the stone age, because you gotta learn to make fire without flint; it’s not hard, you just need sticks and rope to make a bow drill (your shoelaces will work perfectly).  With fire, everything becomes so much easier; boil your water, cook your food, sterilize your needles if ever you need to.

Astronomy will help you navigate and tell the time.  Create an analemma; check the position of the sun at the same time every day, and you’ll be able to tell what time of year it is.  You can tell your latitude based on the angle of Polaris against the horizon; longitude will be more difficult, because you need to know what time it is in a certain location.  It’s “noon” when the sun is highest in the sky; not necessarily overhead, it drifts north and south with the seasons because of the Earth’s axial tilt.  When it’s solar noon, check the last of your digital clocks to see what time it actually is; depending on how far off you are, you can determine your longitude based on how far you are from the center of your timezone.  If possible, get a solar charger for your phone; the internet will be dead, but the compass, level, clock, calendar, pedometer, and flashlight will be extra useful in the After Times.

[ignisgalaxia]

GUYYYYSSSS

My dashboard is flooded with people jumping ship, trying to make the situation humorous, or just flat out harassing the staff.

And can I just say

STOP

I AM A DOOMSDAY PREPPER AND ALL THIS FLOODING IS MAKING ME PANIC! Stop making me panic please!

To all me J/C peeps, please tell me where I can follow you guys because I don’t wanna lose the only online friends I have. We have to stick together. I had so many plans for fanart and now I might not even be able to post them. Protect your fellow bloggers! Give me all the info you can.

Meanwhile I’ll be panicking in the corner until someone calms me down.

P.S. for the record I will NOT get a Twitter or Instagram because both are stupid and I hate them. Anything else is good.

[constellationmelody]

You know, I thought my mom's stockpiling stuff like she's doom prepping was a little worrying but after these whole 7 days with the raid, threat from Canada about making it expensive or cutting NY's electricity and food shortage from the bird flu, I don't think she's crazy anymore. I'm looking up survival skills too. I wish i knew how to drive, I would love to learn to do that and travel out and buy a farm. I don't like vegetarian diet but if it needs to come to especially with the bird flu happening, I'm going to need good recipes because I am NOT eating the nasty ones. Also, I can't kill animals so the chicken will be safe. They are more important alive than dead, especially with eggs.

Trying to find this book but even with sites that have free pdf book, they don't have it.