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TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-l...
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Hello family, friends and fans of Michael F. Flynn. It is with sorrow and regret that I inform you that my father passed away yesterday,... -
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown 2. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: Down for the Count 3. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown: The Great Gali...
Excellent. That reminds me - I should look into that whole 'grow your own food' thing I've heard rumors of...
ReplyDeleteI think I've seen this Dilbert character go into ultra-cynical prepper mode before. But let's talk about the term "first hour". It's worth exploring.
ReplyDeleteI mean, even an ultra-cynical prepper cannot mean that as the first hour that the economy collapses, the massive EMP hits, whatever. Even in this up-to-the-minute age of information word simply does not spread that quickly, and any energy-based apocalypse will make both the collection and the acting upon information that much more difficult. And even the most sudden of neighbor-against-neighbor slaughters built up, overtly, over the course of eight weeks or so. No, she's thinking the first hour of a movie or a TV series.
Implicitly, she's thinking that a societal collapse essentially turns people, instantaneously, into zombies. Soulless zombies you need have no compunctions about killing. Mindless zombies that you can fend off, indefinitely, by holing up with beans and ammo. You haven't got any obligation to honor toward zombies. You will, of course, recognize obligation as the very mortar of that "society" that, at bottom, she realizes is a thing very much worth having. But if everyone's a ravening murderer, there is no future anyway. Beans and ammo and solitude it is, then, not to any purpose, just to stave off grim Death for a moment longer.
In reality, of course, she's the ravening murdering scavenger she fears so deeply. There are a lot of real preppers like this, and it seriously scares me.