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Started by Doktor Howl, October 24, 2014, 06:53:02 PM

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Mesozoic Mister Nigel

Quote from: Cain on October 26, 2014, 09:47:46 AM
Quote from: President Television on October 25, 2014, 05:29:41 PM
Quote from: Cain on October 25, 2014, 04:11:24 PM
To be honest, the whole "post-apocalyptic" thing is pretty much a libertarian masturbatory fantasy anyway.  Government completely collapses tomorrow, a fresh slate upon which the new order can be built.  An interim where men are men, women are women and we all live in bunkers with our automatic weaponry, relying on our wits, selfishness and huge gold reserves to survive.

Because that's totally likely to happen.  It's not like governments around the world have continuity plans which stretch right down to the individual town level, and that should something happen to cause central government to lose control, that local government, law enforcement, local military deployments and similar will step into the breach.  And those plans are pretty damn detailed, and have quite extensive chains of command.

Eh, I could see the whole post-apocalyptic scenario happening in a very localized sense. I mean, small towns fall apart all the time even with a functioning federal infrastructure, for simple economic reasons. And then you have places like Detroit and Camden, New Jersey. But yeah, even then guns and bunkers would be incredibly unhelpful, and any inhabitants would likely die off at an alarming rate. About the closest I think we could get to the libertarian fantasy is a quasi-feudal state ruled by warlords and fundamentalists in the vein of Somalia. And unless they're willing to go out, organize(not likely) and raid farmers for their crops, these gun fetishists are ending up at the bottom of the shitheap. That's not even getting into the practical issue of whether there'd be enough unprotected farmland to survive on with banditry for a year, or how long it'd take law enforcement and military to start cleaning them up with overwhelming superiority in firepower, discipline, morale, numbers, and supplies.

All good points.

However, I hasten to point out, most survivalist types live in advanced western nations.  In fact, they are almost exclusively American, Canadian or British.

And Somalia actually reinforces my point.  Somalia was not a powerful, rich or especially well developed state.  Siad Barre ran the place pretty badly, and in the aftermath of the civil war, what happened was power devolved to the clans and to customary religious institutions.  Some parts of the country, like Somaliland, emerged as almost fully functional states in the aftermath, and most of the actual zones of lawlessness and violence were the disputed lines of control between the various civil war factions - they were,in fact, warzones, and not the typical way of life for Somalis outside of those areas.  The civil war was the major cause of both the conflict and the collapse of the state.

If a state like Somalia can manage a collapse in such a fashion, governments with the resources and sophistication of the UK and USA are not likely to devolve into libertarian feudalism any time soon, even while weathering a major crisis.

Yeah, it wouldn't even take an economic collapse... it would take an ecological collapse, which guns and gold stockpiles are no help against. Especially in the central US states.
"I'm guessing it was January 2007, a meeting in Bethesda, we got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk," Charles Wick said. "It was very complicated."


Q. G. Pennyworth

you would need a complete oil collapse. Like, no more oil ever and all of a sudden. Power plants mostly run on coal, but the coal needs to move by train (diesel, oil) or boat (diesel, oil), so after you blow through whatever's lying around electricity becomes a problem, too. Without easy transportation across the country, you could theoretically get down to city-state level governance in short order.Those smaller governments would probably be stable, though.

And, of course, even with peak oil being a thing there's no way you get the sudden NO MOAR OIL LOLZ transition like that.