One Year in Hell (2013) | Hacker News Reader

One Year in Hell (2013)

personalliberty.com

27 pointsTomte18 comments

This reads like a survivalist took a creative writing workshop.

For real. The blabber about 'amount of ammo' being the most important aspect seems farfetched to me. If you're in firefights enough that you need thousands and thousands of rounds you're going to die no matter what. I kept waiting for the 'use ammo as currency' bit and it never came.

He did mention trading ammo for food at one point, and later, food for ammo. It wasn't a question of drawn-out firefights, it was a question (as I read it) of always having effective weapons at your disposal, even after several years of continuous small drain.

Fair enough - and I think enough ammo for everyone in your group all the time is also important.

My bullshit detector went off at

> Correction: I’ll always value weapons and ammunition the most. Second? Maybe gas masks and filters.

Why Gas mask and filters? This is not really motivated and does not fit the frame of the story at all. Why you would need those? It sounds more like a Metro 2033 pitch.

Other than that, there are a few contradictions in there, i.e.:

> The politicians kept repeating over the TV that everything was going according to plan, there’s no reason to be concerned

> In my case, there was a man who needed a car battery for his radio.

Versus

> Many died if they went out to gather information, for example. It’s important to remember we had no information, no radio, no TV — only rumors and nothing else.

I'm not trying to discredit this article in any way, it's just that it leaves behind a large "citation/clarification needed"

Disregarding the reality of this writing I had a real scare when first hard lockdown was announced in germany, since no one knew what to expect and it was surreal.

For real, articles like these show how fragile our society is. For any major city it would take at most a week of closed supermarkets, after which people would start looting and the order would collapse. Nothing would help, except being armed and somewhat prepared. But that is almost impossible in most of western Europe :/

If shit hits the fan, we‘re screwed over here.

Members of organized crime are well armed though, they'll do just fine until the government restores order.

Where might this have occured? At first I guess Sarajevo, but then it mentions a population of 6000, so it must have been elsewhere...

> Today, I know everything can collapse really fast. The real takeaway from the story

And if you collapse, you will almost certainly die, unless you are, essentially, lucky: supplies, survival skills, clan, etc.

If the author is actually telling the truth, it is a classic survivor bias. Sure that will involve some useful stuff, but also it is survivor bias in the sense that they randomly survived and others did not, and they don't know what the others did or did not do to live.

It reads a lot like what I've read about the first year after WW2 ended.

This is some kinda prepper/conspiracy nut website

Okay, so I want to acknowledge that just because one might find a source to be generally dubious doesn't discredit everything that source says. But I don't think it's unreasonable to posit that if a lot of what a source is displaying as "news" seems generally dubious, it casts a bit of a dim light on all articles they publish.

And the actual front home page article on personalliberty.com is "Thanks to the efforts of the Independent Institute, Judicial Watch, and, especially, AIER, there can be NO QUESTION that lockdowns were disastrous policies that imposed enormous costs for no discernible benefit and that government mask mandates have no scientific basis." Really? No question, you say? Hmm. The rest of the front page articles are a weird mix of pro-Trump opinion ("Enjoying a fast internet during the lockdown? Thank Trump's FCC"), quackish-sounding medical claims ("the fruit that provides irritable bowl disease protection"), survivalist advice ("food and water storage now!"), and paleoconservativism a la Lew Rockwell ("Globalist elite-endorsed war on cash may be China's new and terrifying weapon"). This seems to basically be a project of one Bob Livingston, a self-described "ultra-conservative American" whose "suspicions of government and politics carried over into so-called orthodox medicine," and who is very, very interested in selling you a subscription to The Bob Livingston Letter®, on a "mission to expose those who would rob us of our hard-earned wealth or sap our precious health to make us more docile and controllable." (These are, again, all quotes from either personalliberty.com or boblivingstonletter.com, and he is the one who is making himself sound like a villain from Dr. Strangelove, not me.)

So, again, this account from Bosnia could be perfectly legitimate, given how bad things were there during the war, but it's at least worth keeping in mind that it is a story which fits perfectly into a narrative that Bob Livingston truly, sincerely believes in and would like to tell you more about for the low price of $19.95/year.

>I have seen the story below on multiple forums and posts. I have spent some time trying to verify the source of the story, but so far I have been unable to find the original source. (Though it may be an excerpt from Selco at the SHTFschool.com)

The article is quite transparently a forum post.

I'm not sure why (or if) you think that contradicts anything I said. The forum post was something that would absolutely play into Bob Livingston's biases, and I thought it was useful to point out what those biases were.

It's really too bad he didn't have access to bitcoin.

The insidious thing about cryptocurrency fetishism is that it induces people to believe that crypto will be useful in a societal collapse scenario.

As if society and the economy will collapse, cash will be useless, but we'll all still have broadband connectivity.

The insidious thing about the written word is sometimes it is very difficult to identify sarcasm, irony, or subtly.

The very thought that bitcoin or any other "distributed ledger" could provide any value in situations where society collapses is beyond absurd.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com