Society seems to unravel pretty quickly.
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tecnogaming — 9 years ago(August 12, 2016 10:23 AM)
I think its in our best interest to stop just stop trying to critize one another.
I will be polite as it should be and start by saying that I am sorry I called you an idiot, that was totally uncalled for and it is not what i truly believe about you, at all, it's just something I said in the heat of the moment and it's more related to my personal insecurities rather than what I think you are.
Having said that, I prefer to switch the topic of discussion to the things we both agree on rather than replying one another like this, I think you could agree its a lot more preferable.
Once again, I'm sorry for my comments.
Alex Vojacek -
chimera-21 — 9 years ago(October 26, 2016 05:40 PM)
No. No Amerinds were more advanced that Europeans. Some were advanced in certain very specific areas but that is all.
No. The majority of ships over time were filled with families.
Are you actually totally ignorant? or are you just this much of a partisan, historical revisionist? Because almost nothing you write has even a shade of truth in it. And I am an Amerind and I do study history. -
busta_cap — 9 years ago(September 13, 2016 05:39 AM)
"Typical Marxist racism."
What the hell does that even mean?
"There are plenty of westerns condemned by the left as "racist" for simply showing the truth."
What "westerns" are you talking about, and what "truth" is it you think they're derided for demonstrating? -
saniainen-748-829141 — 9 years ago(August 12, 2016 12:07 AM)
You're underestimating how dependent of electricity we became. It's not just comfort and leisure, it's pretty much everything for us. If grid failed catastrophically like in the movie, most of us would become broke, unemployed and lacking in any marketable skills. Plus our communities are overgrown and cannot sustain themselves without electricity and transportation.
Those factors will lead to starvation and massive change in society, no doubt good portion of people will resort to crime in effort to survive.
Another problem is we became dependent on policing. Our trust in build upon the law instead of personal knowledge like it is in small communities you mentioned. In rapidly changing society like in case of black out, crime rate will go up and without effective policing it will skyrocket.
Extreme desperation and lack of policing is hell of combination that can destroy our societal norms rather quickly. -
tecnogaming — 9 years ago(August 12, 2016 12:19 AM)
Although I can agree with you that your assesment seems pretty logical and "may" happen, we never had the kind of outage described in the movie so, all the scenarios depicted in movies are, for all intents and purpose, theoretical.
I do not abide to the rule that human beings are inerently bad, it depends on a number of factors and everything can happen.
On the contrary, if the outage or problem is orchestrated, then, of course, you can begin to guess where it will lead to. We have evidence that orchestrations had the expected results, we had orchestrated wars and conflicts through the world and the outcome was expected because it was planned that way to begin with.
Alex Vojacek -
beeryusa — 9 years ago(September 27, 2016 04:50 AM)
The internet is not bound by the usual social constraints that people are under in real life. If I went to a town hall and started saying the kinds of things people say on the internet, I'd find myself in a world of hurt pretty quickly, because society doesn't tolerate that kind of behavior.
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umme4uke — 9 years ago(September 28, 2016 07:13 AM)
The internet is not bound by the usual social constraints that people are under in real life.
Which is exactly the same as a suburban neighbourhood would become without electricity, cops etc - the usual social constraints would be gone, that's the point. -
umme4uke — 9 years ago(September 28, 2016 07:06 AM)
It all depends on how scared people get (especially of other people). I agree with the idea that the more disconnected people in a given area the more quickly they would turn to self interest and violence in the absence of social norms. First week might be fine but I think suburbia would turn to hell within the fortnight.
A bunch of people that know each other and know how to work together, in a smaller rural community for instance, would probably hold on a lot longer. -
the_concreteguy — 9 years ago(December 24, 2016 09:15 PM)
@tecnogaming
I hate to sound like an ass, but you are mostly wrong in your posts. Not, I think, from a lack of understanding or an "attempt to rewrite history," but instead, from a desire to see the best in everyone.
Yes, there are many examples of small communities living and working together for the greater good, often without "modern" conveniences. However, those utopian communities tend to fall apart when they grow too large. This is what is known as the "free-rider problem." There are too many instances where people tend to take advantage of communities without contributing anything back. Check out Mancur Olsen for more about this (famous political scientist).
Alas, while Europeans did commit genocide on a massive scale, it is a bit much to claim it was merely for conquest. There are way more reasons than that for what went down with Native tribes, literally too many to list here. I agree that saying all tribes were at war with one another is a dumb thing to say. Many tribes were fairly peaceful. Yet, out of the hundreds of different tribes on the North American continent when Europeans first colonized, more than a few were war-like societies constantly in a state of conflict with each other.
Saying that most ships that came here were filled with assassins and psychopaths while the Native tribes were more advanced than the Europeans is nonsensical. Technologically speaking, Europeans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the most advanced human beings had ever been. Much more so than the great civilizations in the Americas. Check out the "Columbian Exchange," which talks about how these two civilizations influenced each other.
Finally, modern society is based upon trade, often large-scale trade across vast distances. Lets say, hypothetically speaking, the power DOES go out across the entire United States. There would be no way to continue trade and society collapses in days. According to some research I've done, there is enough food in the City of New York to last three days without a constant influx of shipping (mostly trucking goods from distribution centers around the US). After three days, you'll have millions of people fighting for what is left. No matter how civilized you were, when you or your loved ones are starving without any other recourse, there will be the desire to do anything to fix it. This includes killing/stealing/lying, all marks of an uncivilized person.
Most people lack the skills to survive without modern society. Probably something like 90% of the population would die fairly soonish. Just imagine the disease that would run rampant without indoor plumbing. If human waste is within about 500 yards from your water supply, you'll die from disease. If you live someplace where there is no freshwater supply without piping it in, you'll die. These are just the facts of life as we know it. Civilization would collapse without indoor plumbing.
And before you ask, I am literally a trained historian with a BS and MA in history, with an emphasis in political science and the American West.
Cheers! -
beeryusa — 9 years ago(September 27, 2016 04:47 AM)
"It is in our DNA to do terrible things to each other."
If that were true, society would never develop. Humans are a social species. Individuals in a social species help each other, because survival demands it. That's why all the great apes live in social groups. -
umme4uke — 9 years ago(September 28, 2016 07:34 AM)
Sure, smallish social groups may be a natural predisposition for our species but civilisation usually develops through force. Take the rules away and civilisation would crumble fairly quickly, its a bit of a false construct.
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conchoreb-4 — 9 years ago(October 07, 2016 07:04 AM)
The family is naturally a close, protective unit and progressed to a tribal group also protective of itself. So, of course,they would not do "terrible things to each other" outside of punishment or rituals meant to hold the unit together. It was religions that held units larger than the tribe in check and prevented chaos and anarchy. Religion isn't very influential in the west now. It was not the innate goodness of man that held society together because that doesn't (never did and never will)exist.
To those who can't imagine things unraveling "pretty quickly", have you not heard news stories of the looting and violence in a blackout when the power is down for only a few hours? Of course this is usually in larger cities and is unlikely in smaller communitiesat first. If the power is down long enough (a week, a month?)and you're fighting for the last can of beans down at your friendly neighborhood grocery store so your family will have something to eat it all goes to hell "pretty quickly". -
desertrose0601-690-503760 — 9 years ago(September 18, 2016 12:13 AM)
But within days, people are raping women, killing minorities( I might as well just put Black people here), and killing each other over gas and food.
I actually do think it's very realistic to think that people would go on a power trip in a post-apocalyptic world, killing and raping. Just the fact that no one can communicate to police or other authorities very readily would lead to massive looting very very quickly. Six to eight months in I definitely wouldn't trust anyone to act civilly to each other anymore. Sure society would eventually correct itself into some sort of order, like has existed in generations past, without electricity, but in the immediate wake of the crisis, it's not instantly going to become a utopian pre-technology society. -
Thorakus — 9 years ago(October 18, 2016 08:09 PM)
The only real life example I can provide is when a city or part of a city suffers a black out look what happens. Riots, robbery, burglaries, etc. If people have no fear of getting caught I think they would surprise you what they are really like.
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ficoce — 9 years ago(November 21, 2016 10:11 AM)
A small, close knit community would fare better than a city. A community of a few hundred would do better than 20k or more. Through military history it's been found that it's hard for everyone to know much about each other in groups numbering more than 150. With strangers comes danger.
You can probably look at the history around your area for how the towns were set up, pre-automobile, to see how "safe" your community would be to strangers. Communities were usually set up around 20 miles from each other, give or take. This is about how far you could walk in a day. Settlers would camp at a river crossing and a town would develop. If your town is more than 30 miles away from anything and not on the way to someplace else - you can expect to be fairly isolated from people just wandering in on foot or horseback.
This film had the characters living 3 days walk from town - the two visitors that showed up only did because they knew something was there. If only Dad would have had a book on roof repair.