Has anyone considered their Multihull as last refuge in Global Pandemic?

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by robert sailor

Its actually not true in all bigger countries. Coming from Europe it is very easy to understand your thinking as there is little space that has not seen a shovel. In Canada most of us live on strips of land within a few hundred miles of the USA border and we have thousands of miles going north where there is next to nothing. Many people used to live in these areas and had the skills to live off the land and have done it for centuries but those skills have all been lost to all but a very few. So is it possible?, yes but in all probability for 99% of the people who have absolutely zero outdoor skills the answer would be no!

Nor is it needed, if a functioning land resource remains then that land can be used to grow food. , even without any form of mechanisation. Land can be turned to food production, office workers are sent to the fields , parks , and other public land are converted to food production. , it has all been done successfully before

There is no need whatsoever to grab a gun and go looking for moose. , if anything that's actually a counter productive use of labour. , communities toiling on the land will generate far more food for all.

The reality , is the world has no trouble feeding itself. , other issues prevent that

Dave


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[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

It's even more amusing to see boaters believing a boat is a sanctuary, a boat is a modern machine and a product of the industrialised world. Personally I'd always want dry land first.

Dave


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Of all the "prepper" things I have seen on TV as I know no preppers, a boat seems to me the most logical, and other than stashing food, what would you want to do to a good cruising boat to make it more sustainable for extended periods? Seems like that goes hand in hand with what makes a good cruising boat, a good cruising boat.

Personally I think be prepared for a week or two of no infrastructure in your land life is just good common sense. I can see how a hurricane where I live could leave us without power and water for a couple of weeks.

I don't think being prepared to leave for a few months requires a Zombie apocalypse, Now if there was an outbreak of a virulent infectious disease, I might just be tempted to go on a long cruise until it burned itself out. Don't think it necessarily takes a Cat though, any good cruising boat ought to suffice?

[Blue Crab]

Dave: The solution to overcoming community wide or larger disasters is sharing not hoarding. History shows that hoarders typically get it all taken off them at the end of a pitchfork and a guillotine, thankfully most humans find sharing to be preferable.

The fundamental fallacies of prepers is that somehow will fail enough to justify their decisions , yet somehow not degenerate enough. So that the " angry armed mob" doesn't appear and " demand" you share it. That law and order has broken down yet haven't.

Simply arming yourself isn't enough either, the " mob" is always bigger. ( see historical precedents )

It's even more amusing to see boaters believing a boat is a sanctuary, a boat is a modern machine and a product of the industrialised world. Personally I'd always want dry land first.


Dang it Dave, if you don't find amusement under the strangest rocks. And RS, while your data is doubtless true, in my view it falls under the same category Dave is relying on, ie "historical prededents." And, we're not talking about "most humans."

Not to put too fine a point on it but the worry, whether it is ebola or an economic cause, is that the very large populations in the inner cities, worldwide, with no resources whatsoever when the delivery trucks stop running, will go foraging. We all would, I suspect.

"A hungry man is an angry man."

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by goboatingnow

There is no need whatsoever to grab a gun and go looking for moose. , if anything that's actually a counter productive use of labour. , communities toiling on the land will generate far more food for all.

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I don't know, assume the fantasy for just a second, the big solar flare or whatever happens and as of today, bang, nothing electrical works. How long before that first crop the office workers are going to plant comes in?
Maybe a nice Moose or two would fill a few stomachs until then.

Maybe, just Maybe floating around in your boat, just might not be such a bad place to be, until things settle down.

So why aren't the "preppers" buying up boats, I wonder?

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

Of all the "prepper" things I have seen on TV as I know no preppers, a boat seems to me the most logical, and other than stashing food, what would you want to do to a good cruising boat to make it more sustainable for extended periods? Seems like that goes hand in hand with what makes a good cruising boat, a good cruising boat.



Personally I think be prepared for a week or two of no infrastructure in your land life is just good common sense. I can see how a hurricane where I live could leave us without power and water for a couple of weeks.



I don't think being prepared to leave for a few months requires a Zombie apocalypse, Now if there was an outbreak of a virulent infectious disease, I might just be tempted to go on a long cruise until it burned itself out. Don't think it necessarily takes a Cat though, any good cruising boat ought to suffice?

Let's examine the fallacy

In the face of a virulent outbreak , you would leave behind , some sort of functioning medical system and launch out into the ocean, !!!!!! Please. , not to mention you'd probably find the borders closed when u returned and spend 6 months in jail ( quarantine )

As for being prepared for two weeks etc. Perhaps I live in a poorer place, houses lit with open fires and people cooking from gas bottles. We have regularity lost power for a week ( more several years ago ) and the snow used to confine us.

Sure we carried flour to bake bread, some tinned foodstuffs , nothing that didn't expand beyond a well stocked kitchen

We get 100 + mph winds very winter ( I'm high up ) , 30., to 60k people often without power , etc. Funnily power is typically restored within a few days. Electricity workers from Ireland , France etc regularity group with UK repair personnel to handle bad outages.

The longest was 8 days and roads completely impassible with snow, happened when I was a teen , had to hike 6 miles to get butane fir a two burner camping stove. It was basic , at least the water didn't fail..

I don't think surviving for a week or two is " prepping" , or survivalism !


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[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Blue Crab

Dave: [I]The solution to overcoming community wide or larger disasters is sharing not hoarding. History shows that hoarders typically get it all taken off them at the end of a pitchfork and a guillotine, thankfully most humans find sharing to be preferable.



The fundamental fallacies of prepers is that somehow will fail enough to justify their decisions , yet somehow not degenerate enough. So that the " angry armed mob" doesn't appear and " demand" you share it. That law and order has broken down yet haven't.



Simply arming yourself isn't enough either, the " mob" is always bigger. ( see historical precedents )



It's even more amusing Not to put too fine a point on it but the worry, whether it is ebola or an economic cause, is that the very large populations in the inner cities, worldwide, with no resources whatsoever when the delivery trucks stop running, will go foraging. We all would, I suspect.



"A hungry man is an angry man."

Perhaps you might look at how London fed itself during ww2

Large populations do have access to the countryside and huge amounts of land can be realised in cities , there an awful lot of gardens.

Equally cities don't exist in isolation, in a crises everything becomes public. A d that includes farming land outside cities.

Again see UK during ww2 , farmers were instructed what to grow , the market economy was basically shut down , people converted parks and gardens into vegetable gardens , allotments were all utilised etc.

The key thing is that while a few resorted to robbery , etc , the vast majority , didn't descend into slobbering mindless zombies , they sought solutions and enacted them.

That's the human spirit.
Dave


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[hpeer]

Goboatinnow,

No time to read the last group of posts throughly, I will later. I did see one comment I wanted to think about.

Re how the Europeans handled WEII vs how Americans fear Zombies....
In the first place, there was a World War where folks were trying to kill one another on massive scale. what you report is what occurred within a specific ethnic GROUP. so, yes, within a group things were civil. But don't forget that this group was trying to do that group, and having a pretty good go of it. Think of the Warsaw ghetto, for example. Or more recently the Yugoslavia break up.

In Europe, then, the local groups tended to be much more homogeneous. Still true to a large degree. Bavaria is almost exclusively Roman Catholic. American cities, and increasingly European cities, are amalgams of many ethnic groups.

I think when you hear folks talk of slobbering zombies it is the same as saying "folks from other ethnic backgrounds". One of the first things we do in strife is to dehumanize the enemy. It is very common. During WWII the Germans were portrayed as Huns (I'm thinking of posters I have seen) as huge monsters with distorted faces who raged across Europe raping and killing babies.

So making others somehow less human gives you permission to kill them. We tend to do this along ethnic group lines, people who are not like me, who come from a different group, aren't really human. Therefore it is not really murder to kill them. So we call them zombies, something kinda human, but not really.

Of course it goes both ways round, if I see someone,l some group as a zombie, there is a good chance they will be seeimg me as a zombie as well.

A good current illustration of this tendency is all the tension over the fundamental Islamic attitudes. It can be hard to feel warm to them, or for them to us.

Not to devolve in to a political thread I'm just trying to discuss basic human nature.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by hpeer

Goboatinnow,

No time to read the last group of posts throughly, I will later. I did see one comment I wanted to think about.

Re how the Europeans handled WEII vs how Americans fear Zombies....
In the first place, there was a World War where folks were trying to kill one another on massive scale. what you report is what occurred within a specific ethnic GROUP. so, yes, within a group things were civil. But don't forget that this group was trying to do that group, and having a pretty good go of it. Think of the Warsaw ghetto, for example. Or more recently the Yugoslavia break up.

Rather then focus on the wider military scale , I was focusing on how communities dealt with the loss of normality.. This is true of Sarajevo just as much as the polish ghettos. The experience in ghettos is that people came together , they dud not feed of each other. Humans in general don't " prey" on each other. You have to leave out the overall militiady-political situation, just to focus on how people in civilian communities acted

Actually the European theatre of ww2 as not a big loss of life area. , the Soviet Union was far more problematic there. If your view was prevalent , the soviets would have burned east Germany off the map , interestingly once cooler heads prevailed they didn't.

In Europe, then, the local groups tended to be much more homogeneous. Still true to a large degree. Bavaria is almost exclusively Roman Catholic. American cities, and increasingly European cities, are amalgams of many ethnic groups.

When communities are subjected to strife , that is not a religiously defined conflict , religions rarely matter, the muslin, Jew and Christian will all happily grow carrots if they need to eat. Where man made conflicts are perceived to be ( often incorrectly ) religious in nature , then conflict occurs. But even then communities persevere .

I think when you hear folks talk of slobbering zombies it is the same as saying "folks from other ethnic backgrounds". One of the first things we do in strife is to dehumanize the enemy. It is very common. During WWII the Germans were portrayed as Huns (I'm thinking of posters I have seen) as huge monsters with distorted faces who raged across Europe raping and killing babies.

Not sure how wartime propaganda relates to survivalism. At a personal level. German POWs were treated well in the UK, some stayed and married, no one marched to the camps to kill them. Reports of upwards of 400,000 POWs existed at one time.

All nations descend into propaganda, but generally people realise at a human level people are people. Again prepping and survivalism is NOT going to protect you from an army with jets and tanks. ( see Syria)

So making others somehow less human gives you permission to kill them. We tend to do this along ethnic group lines, people who are not like me, who come from a different group, aren't really human. Therefore it is not really murder to kill them. So we call them zombies, something kinda human, but not really.

Yes and no, religion is often presented as a cause for inter community strife , in fact it rarely is in itself.

Equally , when the immediate aggression ends, all these communities can and do sit down together to trash out a solution.

In reality no one sees the other side as a zombie often in these conflicts , both sides " understand" why the other is acting so, even if they disagree

A good current illustration of this tendency is all the tension over the fundamental Islamic attitudes. It can be hard to feel warm to them, or for them to us.

Not to devolve in to a political thread I'm just trying to discuss basic human nature.

Perhaps but in the face of a common enemy ,like starvation, I suspect you'd happily plant carrots together

One cannot compare survivalism as it is understood say in the US , with " surviving" modern armed conflicts, in that regard attempting to live in isolation is the very worst form of defense.

Fundamentally humans want peace and stability , every now and again a bar fight breaks out. It never gets to the point of mass extermination , even if the numbers in isolation get quite big ( no straying into this thread please ) ultimately communities do not decend into anarchy , they reform , share, rebuild and quickly establish rules and some form of order.

What I am saying is your evidence actually supports the fact that humans don't decend into zombies , even if at times it might look to you ( as an outsider ) that it is. I have worked in some " conflict areas" , you'd be amazed at a human level how normal life continues.


Dave




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[Blue Crab]

HP: Not to devolve in to a political thread I'm just trying to discuss basic human nature.

Yepper. We've had many a thread on these points. As history goes, Europe has weathered some storms in the past for sure. I think US communities are untested in this regard. Even though Dave's opinion reads like it's chiseled in stone, it's just an opinion. I hope you're correct sir but I fear you are driving along looking in the rearview mirror, and on the wrong side of the road.

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by Blue Crab

HP: Not to devolve in to a political thread I'm just trying to discuss basic human nature.



Yepper. We've had many a thread on these points. As history goes, Europe has weathered some storms in the past for sure. I think US communities are untested in this regard. Even though Dave's opinion reads like it's chiseled in stone, it's just an opinion. I hope you're correct sir but I fear you are driving along looking in the rearview mirror, and on the wrong side of the road.

We have a weather forecaster here that's works for exacta weather , James madden , who each year forecasts tremendous amounts of snow and bad weather. Every year he's proved wrong , once in about 20 years he " sorta " right. I don't see many bothering buying snow cats

Crap can happen , that's why it's called crap. But rather then planners humans are better innovators , we examine , adapt , overcome , move on

Sheesh chiseling these stones is taking too much time , I think I need a better way of communicating the infallibles

Dave

[Blue Crab]

[a64pilot]

Ask the few that were in Bosnia and other places when it hit the fan, people do in fact prey upon each other, I've seen it, it's not pretty, and I will do most anything to keep my family out of a situation like that.

WWII as far as food stuffs is an interesting point. First they had a long time to prepare and I think if you look, the Victory gardens etc., actually had very little impact, as did the scrap drives for metal etc. What they were invaluable for was giving the common person the belief that they were contributing, and that is important.

The couple of weeks food comment I made wasn't meant to be prepping or anything, just it seems to be good common sense, and the cost is insignificant as you eat that food anyway, nothing else to buy.

I'm no prepper, but to me a good cruising boat makes more sense as a way to deal with the Zombie apocalypse than building a Castle in the mountains of Tennessee, I wonder why those types aren't buying boats?

[goboatingnow]

I'm no prepper, but to me a good cruising boat makes more sense as a way to deal with the Zombie apocalypse than building a Castle in the mountains of Tennessee, I wonder why those types aren't buying boats?

for the Zombie apocalypse I keep chuck norris on speed dial

of course the US is well prepared

US draws up plans to fight off zombie invasion - Telegraph

we in cheese loving Europe, will continue to ignore the Zombie and I suppose you'll just have to rescue us again, don't expect us to thank you though

dave

[captain58sailin]

One of the other frighteners is the computer virus creators that try to disable power plants and other infrastructures. Ebola's big downfall is it manifests too quickly, the last out break has been the most successful, perhaps it will mutate and the next time the spread will be more invasive. One of the nice things about being offshore and not connected, is that you don't hear about all the negative stuff the different news sources report on, and amazingly one's out look on life gets more positive. With regards to the OP, by virtue of that some of us gear up and plan for longer stays offshore, we are more or less prepared for the "The end of the world as we know it". I don't think it is a bad idea to be prepared for what ever eventuality comes along, that is just good seamanship. I am sure Noah had to listen to a lot of derision and naysayers whilst he was building the ark.

[goboatingnow]

Ask the few that were in Bosnia and other places when it hit the fan, people do in fact prey upon each other, I've seen it, it's not pretty, and I will do most anything to keep my family out of a situation like that.

Indeed, these are of course not in the " preppers" mindset, primarily because invasion or occupation by a large armed force cannot be stopped "by a few buys in Montana" , so survivalists etc tend to fixate on "problems" that suit their intended solutions.

What is clear in the former Yugoslavia, is that people were keen to end the conflict, establish new boundaries, and restore normal life. I was there just after the conflict and it was amazing now people were determined to restore the place.

Of course in any such " tribal" and land based conflict , open sores remain for many many years, but that isn't germane to the discussion here.

WWII as far as food stuffs is an interesting point. First they had a long time to prepare and I think if you look, the Victory gardens etc., actually had very little impact, as did the scrap drives for metal etc. What they were invaluable for was giving the common person the belief that they were contributing, and that is important.

well I don't have the figures for the UK, where it was known as " Dig for Victory", it is claimed that in the US at its peak 1/3 of all vegetables were produced from such gardens
In fact arguably it was more successful in the US then the UK. The fact is that while peoples diets suffered, Northern European countries had never much trouble feeding its population. Though Germany came close to mass starvation in the immediate aftermath.


Again I wasn't focusing on wars per se. merely community response to crisis , people prefer to pull together, rebuild and expand communities, not break way from mainstream society and go live in the hills ( nothing wrong with that by the way)