#“The Prepper”

[fortunaestalta]

[hellsgate-roadhouse]

📺 📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺📺

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The far right grows through “disaster fantasies”

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/25/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano">https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/25/mall-ninja-prophecy/#mano-a-mano

The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."

The ethnographer Rich Miller spent his career embedding with preppers, eventually writing the canonical book of the fantasies that power their obsessions, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times:

https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo3637295.html

Miller recounts how the disasters that preppers prepare for are the disasters that will call upon their skills, like the water chemist who's devoted his life to preparing to help his community recover from a terrorist attack on its water supply; and who, when pressed, has no theory as to why any terrorist would stage such an attack:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/preppers-are-larpers/#preppers-unprepared

Prepping is what happens when you are consumed by the fantasy of a terrible omnicrisis that you can solve, personally. It's an individualistic fantasy, and that makes it inherently neoliberal. Neoliberalism's mind-zap is to convince us all that our only role in society is as an individual ("There is no such thing as society" – M. Thatcher). If we have a workplace problem, we must bargain with our bosses, and if we lose, our choices are to quit or eat shit. Under no circumstances should we solve labor disputes through a union, especially not one that wins strong legal protections for workers and then holds the government's feet to the fire.

Same with bad corporate conduct: getting ripped off? Caveat emptor! Vote with your wallet and take your business elsewhere. Elections are slow and politics are boring. But "vote with your wallet" turns retail therapy into a form of civics.

This individualistic approach to problem solving does useful work for powerful people, because it keeps the rest of us thoroughly powerless. Voting with your wallet is casting a ballot in a rigged election that's always won by the people with the thickest wallets, and statistically, that's never you. That's why the right is so obsessed with removing barriers to election spending: the wealthy can't win a one-person/one-vote election (to be in the 1% is to be outnumbered 99:1), but unlimited campaign spending lets the wealthy vote in real elections using their wallets, not just just ballots.

You can't recycle your way out of the climate emergency. Practically speaking, you can't even recycle. All those plastics you lovingly washed and sorted ended up in a landfill or floating in the ocean. Plastics recycling is a hoax perpetrated by the petrochemical industry, who knew all along that their products would never be recycled. These despoilers convinced us to view the systemic rot of corporate ecocide as an individual matter, chiding us about "littering" and exhorting us to sort our garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/14/they-knew/#doing-it-again

We are bombarded by real problems that require urgent solutions that can only be resolved through collective action, which we are told is impossible. This is an objectively frightening state of affairs, and it makes people go nuts.

At the start of this century, in the weeks before 9/11, a message-board poster calling himself Gecko45 went Web 1.0 viral by earnestly bullshitting about his job as a mall security guard, doing battle with heavily armed gangs, human traffickers, and ravening monsters. Gecko45's posts were unhinged: he started out seeking advice for doubling up on body-armor to protect him while he deployed his smoke bombs and his partner assembled a high-powered rifle. Though Gecko45 was apparently sincere, he drew tongue-in-cheek replies from the other posters on GlockTalk, who soon dubbed him the "Mall Ninja":

https://lonelymachines.org/mall-ninjas/

The Mall Ninja professed to patrolling a suburban shopping mall while armed with 15 firearms as he carried out his duties as "Sergeant of a three-man Rapid Tactical Force at one of America’s largest indoor retail shopping areas." His qualifications? Mastery "of three martial arts including ninjitsu, which means I can wear the special boots to climb walls."

The Mall Ninja's fantasy of a single brave individual, defending the sleepy populace from violent, armed mobs is instantly recognizable as an ancestor to today's right wing fantasy of America's cities as "no-go zones" filled with "open air drug markets," patrolled by MS-13 and antifa super-soldiers. And while the Mall Ninja drew derision – even from the kinds of people who hang out on a message board called "GlockTalk" – today, his brand of fantasy wins elections.

On Jacobin, Olly Haynes interviews the political writer Richard Seymour about this phenomenon:

https://jacobin.com/2024/11/disaster-nationalism-fantasies-far-right/

Seymour's latest book is Disaster Nationalism:The Downfall of Liberal Civilization, an exploration of the strange obsessions of the right with imaginary disasters in the midst of real ones:

https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/3147-disaster-nationalism

You know these imaginary disasters: "FEMA death camps, 'great replacement theory,' the 'Great Reset,' fifteen-minute cities, 5G towers being beacons of mind control, and microchips installed in people through vaccines." As Seymour writes, these conspiracy fantasies are proliferated by authoritarian regimes and their supporters, especially as real disasters rage around them.

For example, during the Oregon wildfires, people who were threatened by blazing forests that hit 800'C refused to evacuate because they'd been convinced that the fires were set by antifa arsonists in a bid to "wipe out white conservative Christians." They barricaded themselves in their fire-threatened homes, brandishing guns and prepping for the antifa mob.

Seymour says that this "disaster nationalism" "processes disaster in a way that is actually quite enlivening." Confronted with the helplessness of a real disaster that can only be solved through the collective action you've been told is both impossible and a Communist plot, you retreat to an individualistic disaster fantasy that you can play an outsized role in. Every crisis – the climate emergency, poverty, a toxic environment – is replaced by "bad people" and you can go get them.

For authoritarian politicians, a world of bad people at the gates who can only be stopped by "the good guys" makes for great politics. It impels proto-fascist movements to electoral victories, all over the world: in the US, of course, but Seymour also analyzes this as the phenomenon behind the electoral victories of authoritarian ethno-nationalists in India, Israel, Brazil, and all over the world.

I find Seymour's analysis bracing and clarifying. It explains the right's tendency to obsess over the imaginary at the expense of the real. Think of conservatives' obsession with imaginary and hypothetical children, from Qanon's child trafficking conspiracies to the forced birth movement's fixation on "the unborn."

It's not just that these kids don't exist – it's that the right is either indifferent or actively hostile to real children. Qanon peaked at the same time as Trump's "kids in cages" family separation policy, which saw thousands of kids separated from their parents, many forever, as a deliberate policy.

The forced birth movement spent decades fighting to overturn Roe in the name of saving "the unborn" – even as its leaders were also overturning the Child Tax Credit, the most successful child poverty alleviation measure in American history. Actual children were left to sink into food insecurity and precarity, to be enlisted to work overnight shifts in meat-packing plants, to fall into homelessness – even as the movement celebrated the "culture of life" that would rescue hypothetical children.

Lifting kids out of poverty and building a world where parents can afford to raise as many children as they care to have is a collective endeavor. Firebombing abortion clinics or storming into a pizza parlor with an assault rifle is an individual rescue fantasy that escapes into the world.

Mall Ninja politics are winning.

[queeranarchism]

If people make cutesy posts about growing food and herb spirals and composting but never talk about stuff like preventing and getting rid of rats in a garden, I get this suspision that they either haven't actually gardened much or they're more interested in presenting an aesthetically pleasing image than in actually preparing people to deal with a garden.

[diablo1776]

Wifey material 💍

[harzeke]

they are yuri and yaoi to me at the same time

[frownyalfred]

The Batfamily all have “go” bags hidden around Gotham. Just in case things go south and they need to bail. Or resupply.

The contents range from “incredibly sensible” (Bruce, Alfred, Duke and Barbara) to “weird but useful” (Damian and Cass) to “why the fuck would you bring that to the zombie apocalypse?” (Dick, Jason and Tim)

[rad-batson]

Love how Bruce Wayne would totally say some astronomically dumb shit like “I’m training my heart to beat in Morse code just in case I need to contact Superman but I’ve been rendered mute,” and his kids would just be like “you need therapy” while Alfred is having a breakdown in the kitchen because how on earth has Bruce stayed alive this long

[yearzerosurvival]

See more rain harvesting ideas.

[majimasleftasscheek]

commish for @babylonstalker~

[reality-detective]

SHELF STABLE BUTTER...

To all the Preppers out there.... what are your experiences or tips to store butter? 🤔

[hellsgate-roadhouse]

UK underground (AI generated art)

Abandoned

1

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Who would like to live in the world's largest Doomsday Bunker Community located in Edgemont, ND. (I don't see any neighbors, but there are supposed to be 100s of homes. I guess they're all underground.) This is Lot E 103 Bunker Rd. (not very original). Notice the big E - 103 over the door, so visitors will easily find you. Price for the 1945 bunker is $69,900.

The front door (there is a rear exit somewhere). The Black Hills Army Base was originally built by the Army Corps of Engineers as a fortress to store bombs and munitions, from 1942 to 1967, when the base was completely retired.

I don't know what this is. Maybe some sort of ventilation?

It looks like some of the dirt has sloughed off the building. There're some mounds of dirt to cover it back up.

It's pretty clean inside. All bunkers feature a standard 26.5 foot interior floor width, with lengths of 60 feet and 80 feet, each with a 12.5 foot high ceiling to the top of the interior arch.

This bunker has flooring in place, water hookup and air filtration/blast valves.

There's some sort of trench dug on the right. Each bunker includes a concrete floor and steel blast door, that seals to stop any water, air or gas permeation; air and exhaust ventilation shafts, and a secondary emergency exit.

Lease is owned by Vivos XPoint. (The community organization.) Potential buyer will need to make application and Owner must approve all purchases and leases. They're pretty choosy about who buys them.

The Vivos Community means business.

Vivos says: Away from Riots, Violence, Targets and Submersion Zones. The yellow circles represent Anarchy Zones. This former military base is no longer a target, having been retired since 1967.

It's difficult to capture the enormous scale of Vivos xPoint, nearly 3/4 of the size of Manhattan, NYC. Standing at one end of the complex, you cannot see the furthest bunkers on the horizon.

Massive. Safe. Secure. Isolated.

This is what it could look like.

You must visit the Vivos website. I was fascinated. They have a survival gear shop and you also would want to apply for membership in Vivos.

[diablo1776]

Be self sufficient

[official-nature-posts]

Ah yes a healthy diet post SHTF