I laugh at / die a little inside thinking about all the backlash and conspiracism around Covid restrictions. There’s nothing even left to say about it, is there?
To me this is and has always been a dry run for the “real deal” when all of this won’t be a drill anymore. We won’t have the option to cry about it politically, because the devastation will be visible all around us. (Even moreso than it already is, I mean.)
I watched this Tucker Carlson video earlier, from June 2021, with them suggesting there will be climate lockdowns, following Covid. I took a screenshot of one of the funnier (for me) bits:
The caption reads, “‘CLIMATE LOCKDOWN’ WOULD MEAN NO MORE RED MEAT & LIMITS ON VEHICLE USE.”
These guys live in a parallel universe to me, or else a tangent universe. Where these catastrophic systemic changes aren’t already happening and visible all around us on a massive, global scale. But I guess if you can get yourself to believe in a Flat Earth, you can get yourself to believe in anything, including the idea humans have nothing whatsoever to do with the emerging Earth Changes.
It’s not necessarily just a right-left division on this either. If only it were that simple. This article on phys.org is a good example of the meta-problem that I see in a lot of mainstream scientific discourse about these issues:
“Global warming will cause extreme sea levels to occur almost every year by the end of the century, impacting major coastlines worldwide, according to new research from an international team of scientists.”
If that only happens by the “end of the century” we will have been extremely lucky. My personal prediction, based on I guess merely paranoia, intuition, observation, and catastrophism is that we’ll see these events increase in frequency and severity globally within the next 5-10 years. All the predictions are playing it way too safe. I don’t know why. To appear credible? To build options for the reporting team to pull down grant money with whatever their particular prescribed brand of fix is? Unclear.
I suspect it is more along the lines of that nobody wants to be that pessimistic. Nobody wants to be like: this will happen not just within our lifetimes, but within the next few years. In fact, it’s already happening. You look like a dick when you’re that guy, but here we are.
So the thing that’s outright wrong for me about that Fox News screengrab above, with them crowing about red meat and driving (American rights, obvs), is that because people are not pessimistic enough about what’s happening (a.k.a., realistic), then they will not be aggressive enough about near term mitigation.
In other words, by the time we see “lockdowns” in place around Climate Change, it will not be because it’s some optional thing put in place by a government you don’t like or agree with. It will because red meat was wiped out by a super-plague (see: African swine fever in China for a parallel example). And entire cities were lost due to extreme weather events, so not only were supply chains massively disrupted, but there is an increased strain on neighboring resources caused by climate refugees. “Driving restrictions” will be in place because there is not that much fuel available anymore. Or because the government of the place you live collapsed, so the roads aren’t kept up anymore. And you basically can’t get parts to fix your car.
But yeah, keep crying about Communism & China. Defend your god-given right to infect one another at Lollapalooza. Stick to your small games where the bad guys are easy to spot, and ignorance of the enormity of the real problems facing not just the U.S., but all of us, is bliss. It seems to be working great so far, right?
I’m not gonna preach about it that much more. I just find it annoying, so had to rant. Me, I’m studying up to buy or maybe build a whole house air filter to plug into the supply side of my HRV (air exchange system). Because the sun turned red one evening this summer from wildfires that are many hours’ drive away. To me, now, the question is simply how to adapt & survive under conditions on the ground which are already showing indicators of radically altering. It’s not about prepping for “one day” when the SHTF. It’s already too late. The fan was made of shit all along.