The End is Nigh?

[JMohegan]

I know folks who make ammo.

There you go.

Now all you need is the will to shoot people who are desperate for food, shelter, or drink.

If it's kill or be killed, that shouldn't be tough. But driving off a starving family with kids would presumably weigh on one's mind for a bit.

 

[rosco rathbone]

Which means that, holy shit, after a period of unrest, people are going to form governments of some kind and cooperate instead of marauding zombie looters forever more.

My mom is retiring to a farm in a very rural , very conservative area in Western VA. I keep telling her to start attending services at the local Baptist Church and for fuck's sake start making the kinds of friends who will matter when it all comes unglued. She'd rather start a yoga club or petition local farmers to raise their cattle by ethical standards.

 

[BiBunny]

There you go.

Now all you need is the will to shoot people who are desperate for food, shelter, or drink.

If it's kill or be killed, that shouldn't be tough. But driving off a starving family with kids would presumably weigh on one's mind for a bit.

Like I once told an old psych professor who liked to pose hypothetical lose-lose situations to us and ask us what we'd do, I don't think any of us know what we'd do stuck between a rock and hard place until we're actually faced with it. We'd just have to do the best we could and hope the best we could was the best thing to do in that situation.

 

[eastern sun]

I'm going to capitalize on the quality of my blowjobs.

 

[WriterDom]

I'm going to capitalize on the quality of my blowjobs.

I'd give you four out of five stars.

 

[intothewoods]

I'd give you four out of five stars.

Bitch, please.

 

[Netzach]

My mom is retiring to a farm in a very rural , very conservative area in Western VA. I keep telling her to start attending services at the local Baptist Church and for fuck's sake start making the kinds of friends who will matter when it all comes unglued. She'd rather start a yoga club or petition local farmers to raise their cattle by ethical standards.

Yoga is apparently from Satan, but I've found that everyone wants untainted meat and clean water. You'd be surprised.

 

[Netzach]

Like I once told an old psych professor who liked to pose hypothetical lose-lose situations to us and ask us what we'd do, I don't think any of us know what we'd do stuck between a rock and hard place until we're actually faced with it. We'd just have to do the best we could and hope the best we could was the best thing to do in that situation.

Dude, I'd be thinking "oh good, child labor" and kill everyone a chicken. I'm only a person removed from land, and I can't grow shit but I don't have huge moral visceral issues with cutting things up. Most people have always traded with AND fought their enemies.

Look, I know everyone is worse than ever before and blah blah, but if you look at places that ARE wartorn and lawless, people still group and huddle. We are social animals. Political ones. You can kill me if I'm trying to sell you my stuff, but that kind of prevents us from doing business again - under stress there are usually PERIODS of unrest followed by societal formation.

Now before anyone slaps an optimist label on me, I never said these forms of government would be especially GOOD - more like a mafia run town.

 

[Keroin]

I want to join in but my laptop is sick and in the shop, so I'm writing in the library on limited time.

Interesting comments, thanks to all.

 

[catalina_francisco]

Must say, I have made similar plans since childhood in my head. Human nature and governments being what they are though, if a person was to ensure their survival by securing their own land with water, food and power, and things went crazy, you can be sure you would not have it for long as it would either be accessed and confiscated by those in power, or those who seized power by force to take what you had worked hard to provide yourself with while they had whittled away their life having fun and thinking little, or doing little toward preventing doomsday arriving.

Catalina

 

[Keroin]

Must say, I have made similar plans since childhood in my head. Human nature and governments being what they are though, if a person was to ensure their survival by securing their own land with water, food and power, and things went crazy, you can be sure you would not have it for long as it would either be accessed and confiscated by those in power, or those who seized power by force to take what you had worked hard to provide yourself with while they had whittled away their life having fun and thinking little, or doing little toward preventing doomsday arriving.

Catalina

Interesting comment Cat, thanks.

I'm sure I've been thinking about this more than usual since my trip back through civilization. Clouds of agricultural pollution so thick in the air you can barely drive, thousands of beef cattle standing for their whole lives in their own shit, mile after mile of flavourless, generic housing developments, malls full of junk, fast food on every corner...it kind of already feels like the end to me.

Mind you, my little corner of the wilderness, where I now live, seems light years away from all that. But seeing what I did, after two years removed, certainly made an impact.

You're probably right, in any real crisis, land with water and food would be taken away quicker than you can say, "We're from the government, we're here to help."

I'm usually not this morose.

 

[YourCaptor]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spr5YFfrnA0

I have a friend who is doing environmental studies.

When I ask him what can be done, he says the best solution is killing half the worlds population.

Very practical guy.

 

[YourCaptor]

You know come to think of it, killing 90% of the world population would do wonders for mental health care too.

With so few people, you can't just hide those with problems anymore, can't throw them in the closet, they would be visible, and people would know they can do jobs that society depends on.

Everyone would have a few retarded friends, a schizo living on the block, and maybe unipolar/bipolar depression would stop being viewed as voluntary.

Yup, the abnormal would have so much exposure, they'd be normal.

And people care, if its in their face.

That would be nice.

 

[ZRT]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spr5YFfrnA0

I have a friend who is doing environmental studies.

When I ask him what can be done, he says the best solution is killing half the worlds population.

Very practical guy.

I despise that sort of nihilistic approach. When I hear people glibly commenting on the practicality of mass slaughter as a solution to habitat issues, I wonder if they're willing to step down from their high horses and wield the machetes themselves.

We've had plenty of alarmism over our future state in the past. That isn't to say that bad things aren't going to happen, but our species has a way of adapting to circumstances when pressured. Remember the population bomb?

People who are so willing to write off large portions of the human race should be willing to put themselves at the head of the line for elimination. The rest of us have work to do.

 

[Netzach]

I despise that sort of nihilistic approach. When I hear people glibly commenting on the practicality of mass slaughter as a solution to habitat issues, I wonder if they're willing to step down from their high horses and wield the machetes themselves.

We've had plenty of alarmism over our future state in the past. That isn't to say that bad things aren't going to happen, but our species has a way of adapting to circumstances when pressured. Remember the population bomb?

People who are so willing to write off large portions of the human race should be willing to put themselves at the head of the line for elimination. The rest of us have work to do.

I think maybe not treating people who are NOT having children like lepers with extra cooties might be a step in the right direction. Machetes are completely un-needed. Just a few rubbers and an attitudinal shift or two, so that more people aren't walking around saying "if push came to shove I probably would never have had them"

 

[Homburg]

I think maybe not treating people who are NOT having children like lepers with extra cooties might be a step in the right direction. Machetes are completely un-needed. Just a few rubbers and an attitudinal shift or two, so that more people aren't walking around saying "if push came to shove I probably would never have had them"

Or perhaps sterilising people that want it even if they aren't over 35 and have two plus kids. That'd be handy too. Sure, that 20 year old might just get buyer's remorse fifteen years from now, but he might not, and it is one less breeder over-populating the place.

Or maybe, I dunno, telling the Catholic Church to shut the fuck up and let those poor people use birth control without feeling like they're going to hell.

It pisses me off solid when people aren't believed when they say they don't want kids. Or, fuck, that they don't want any MORE kids.

 

[graceanne]

Or perhaps sterilising people that want it even if they aren't over 35 and have two plus kids. That'd be handy too. Sure, that 20 year old might just get buyer's remorse fifteen years from now, but he might not, and it is one less breeder over-populating the place.

Or maybe, I dunno, telling the Catholic Church to shut the fuck up and let those poor people use birth control without feeling like they're going to hell.

It pisses me off solid when people aren't believed when they say they don't want kids. Or, fuck, that they don't want any MORE kids.

QFT

I have several cousins. None of them want kids, and none of them can get a doctor to take care of the issue. It's asinine. You can choose to join the army, go to war, and die at 17, but you can't decide whether you want kids? I mean, seriously.

Of course, in the doctors cases, they're afraid of being sued, and that's to be blamed on this sue happy society. If people would take responsibility for their own decisions, no matter the age they were when they made them, then doctors wouldn't have to be so careful.

 

[YourCaptor]

I think maybe one would have to survive WWIII before falling back on their own resources.

 

[sb2009]

I really enjoy sci fi books with this premise. One that sticks out for some reason is "Folk of the Fringe" by Orson Scott Card.

My husband will probably be handy when everything goes to shit, he can fabricate things from things with minimal tools...I think I would be fairly useless. I can't even have kids anymore so I'd not even be good as breeding stock LOL

 

[ZRT]

My point actually is that in the sixties there was a lot of alarmism over the a projected population explosion that never occurred. Researchers were making linear projections based on birth rate trends that drastically leveled off and declined due to demographic issues in western societies, to the point where now the issue actually is a demographic imbalance skewed toward an overpopulated elder generation in several countries. Japan is a prime example.

The shift from agrarian to industrial levels the birth rate out because children are no longer a survival asset in industrial/information societies like they were in an agrarian society. They're actually the opposite, a drag on survival resources due to the fact that they're not financially productive and consume a goodly portion of the family budget. My family is a prime example of this trend:

Great grandparents: 14 children.
Grandparents: Eight (one died as an infant.)
Eldest aunts: Three.
Younger aunts/uncles: One or two.

This trend was reflected throughout America. The 'seven or eight sibling' family is now an oddity most places, outside of religious enclaves. Even with the heavily religious you see it less and less. My Catholic acquaintances may have two or three kids compared to the one or two others have around me, but you can't tell me that a couple stays married seventeen years, has a typical sex life, and has only two kids while using the rhythm method as a means of keeping the pregnancies down.

Natural trends take care of some things. Action takes care of others. What bugs me is this nihilistic thread we've had forever and a day that basically treats human existence as something innately unnatural and tends to look for excuses to say 'The world would be better off if we weren't here and hence ergo the great mass of humanity is expendable.'

The people saying that usually don't consider themselves expendable. I remember reading a Daniel Quinn book a few years back (a mistake I'll never repeat), and I particularly enjoyed the part about how the benighted savage hunter gatherer is so content with his existence, and hey, if there's a famine, some people will die and the world goes on. Easy to say in the context of a book, but when it's your own children starving to death in front of you, maybe your attitude changes a bit. So the hypocrisy of it offends me.

I like critters. I like open spaces. Hell, I don't kill bugs unnecessarily, because they're living their lives and I'm living mine. But I'm also a patriot of the human race, and that means that this ongoing self-loathing in western society just pisses me off. Can we do things better? Sure. Aspire to that. Work toward better answers and positive solutions.

That idiotic speech in the Matrix, 'mankind is a virus' just pissed me off to no end, in no small part because I knew a lot of people would just eat that up. First of all, animals -don't- find natural equilibrium in their environment. They get hammered into it by competition, the Red Queen Scenario. We've transcended the most of our competition in this small window of evolutionary time, and there's no natural right or wrong to our status in that regard. Because we are thinking apes, we can take steps to protect other species, and I'm all for that, but acting as though we're 'distorting the balance of nature' is the height of arrogance.

The dead zone in the gulf is bad. Why? Not because of any inherent natural law- nature couldn't give a shit if everything on the planet was alive or dead. It's bad because it's damaging our habitat and capacity for survival, first of all, and on a more altruistic level, it's damaging things that we'd rather not see damaged. Be honest about it- we should take care of our environment because it better serves our survival, and because we -like- to take care of things, not because it serves some bullshit notion of natural law that we're violating and are therefore trespassers in the eyes of 'mother nature'.

Sore point for me.

 

[ZRT]

On the Catholic Church, I do regard their position as reprehensible on several levels, -especially- when applied in the third world, not only because it does contribute to population issues there, but also to STD transmission.

 

[ShyVixen]

I went to see 2012 in the big theater. (Popcorn and fizzy drink, yahoo!). Let me just start by saying that I don't believe in that particular prediction/conspiracy theory/call it what you will. (Actually, I don't believe in any conspiracy theories). I do, however, believe that humankind is working hard to make itself extinct and my future plans take this into consideration.

Now, you won't find me moving to Oregon and shacking up with some wacky survivalist group in the woods, hunkering down at night in my underground bunker with my AK-47 and 100 cases of Stagg Chilli but I am going to plan.

Eventually I want to have my own little patch of land here, with my own source of water. I will try to get off the grid as much as possible for my power - solar, wind, whatever I can do. I will learn to grow my own food and preserve it. I don't expect to become 100% self sufficient but I do intend to be in a position where, worst case scenario, if society came apart at the seams I wouldn't have to run around screaming and panicking.

So, I'm curious if I'm a lone freak or if anyone else is thinking this way? Do you think the human race has an expiry date and, if so, how are you planning to face this?

*I should also add that while I will prepare for the worst, I always hope for the best and will continue to do my part to try and make things better.

As this thread has shown, you are not alone. I do believe we have an expiry date...or a very large percentage of the world's population do.

For me though, I doubt it'll be because of climate change. Personally, I worry about a pandemic - naturally occurring or biologically enhanced. I read an article recently about the GVFI (Global Viral Forecasting Initiative) and some of their publications on recently emerging viruses. Pretty scary stuff.

Could I survive if mankind faced extinction? Urrrm, probably not. I would like to believe so, but alas, I think people in the UK are less inclined towards self sufficiency.