But, things will be pretty bad at that point from every viewpoint. As essentially global markets are crashing. On other hand, in even bigger crisis gold won't be that valuable at least for a while. If food and fuel are first priority people are unlikely to trade them for shiny metal...
If we stretch it back a few decades we see things like the Wiemar republic, complete anarchy during the Russian civil wars when blacks, whites, reds, etc all marched across the countryside, Chinese civil war, or even just recently we have Yemen, ISIS, Ethiopia, and in none of these cases have a zombie apocalypse-style "have to defend myself with my gun and ammo" societal breakdown occured and people bartered with gold. It turns out that people organise very quickly, and a every-man-for-himself-style situation like in stories just doesn't happen.
Maybe a civil war breaks out, maybe there are food shortages, but for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars or local power struggles. One guy with a gun is not gonna help. Food protests are common, but rarely end violently. People keep thinking that "this time is different", and they're wrong every time.
Several times, I had taxi drivers refuse to accept fare when they picked me up from a bus stop late at night (both petrol/gasoline and buses were in short supply for a while). Once a motorcyclist literally stopped by and handed me his spare helmet saying "If you're heading my way, I can take you". Many people (including my wife and I) drove around distributing food and supplies to folks we felt were in need. It's hard to describe what came over us, but it seemed like a common phenomenon that affected a lot of people.
I still think if food became really scarce, selfish, violent behaviour would have emerged. But fortunately it never came to that and the country managed to go into a debt restructuring program with the IMF.
My spouse and I both had a short part of our childhood in a poor and wonky South Asian country. We both feel that people (and ourselves) are far less helpful to our neighbours and strangers in the west vs. back home. It actually felt different in the 90s vs. today. I recall being in the west and someone offering me a ride when the subway was closed (like 25 years ago). I just can't see that happening today. Just too many MLM schemes have been pushed on me, and too many reports of crazies on the news .. I dunno.
On the other hand, once in the New York subway, I was running toward the closing doors of a train, and some of the folks inside tried to keep the door open (which was not really possible) and clapped when I made it in by a hair's breadth. But then again it was a Friday night and many passengers at that time were a bit sloshed and quite friendly.
Turns out, most people aren't psychos and at one extreme, some would rather end themselves than hurt others.
> I still think if food became really scarce, selfish, violent behaviour would have emerged.
That does emerge, as you said, but it needs to be SUPER extreme. By SUPER extreme I mean gulag or shipwrecked crew on an island with no food. In human history these scenarios are very rare, probably since the dawn of agriculture.
And, I mean, we could implode that badly, but we're talking regressing 3+ thousands of years. It looks more like a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland or Earth being hit by an asteroid than a "regular" economic meltdown.
“But here's the main point: 'Preparing' for the disaster really didn't do anyone much good. Those who 'prepared' ate a little better for a while. They stayed warmer for a few extra days. They enjoyed the radio for a while longer (via batteries.) But in the end, they ended up hungry, cold and bored too, just like the rest of us. Guns and weapons helped no one directly and were even of little to no use in the defense of Sarajevo, since they were toys compared to the shells, bombs and high-powered armaments of the attacking forces. The worst parts of war were psychological - the fear, anxiety, boredom, loneliness, paranoia, bad dreams. Respite from those things came with sharing food with a neighbor, finding a piece of clothing that would fit someone you knew, commiserating with others in your position, figuring out how to make make-up from brick or french fries from wheat paste and spreading this newly-acquired war knowledge around the mahala.
We knew who had extra food and supplies. For the most part, they weren't attacked or hassled or bothered. Contrary to what these survivalists say, those in dire times generally hold on to their personal sense of pride even more than they do in normal times. I'd take a bite of a friend's salad without bothering to ask in normal times. I'd never have done that in wartime, no matter how hungry I was.
Within the domain of those trapped in the city, civility greatly increased.”
The question of course is the very same people who voted in these clowns in the first place.
I would not be surprised if the US is one of the few countries to end up like Mad Max if the world order should fully collapse due to climate change or other large scale events.
US charitable giving alone suggests your view of the country as individualism run amok is likely not the whole story.
A fair amount of the rest goes on political lobbying and influencing.
The proportion that goes on direct no-strings plain simple humanitarian work is not all that huge.
Most of the US population lives in cities. If the US wasn't "individualism run amok" it wouldn't have tent cities of homeless people, and its health industry wouldn't be bankrupting half a million people a year. (For example.)
And I don't think it's totally fair to exclude religious donations as somehow "not valid", especially in the context of the critique that Americans don't value community with each other. Religious charities tend have less access to alternative funding sources, so rely on these donations more. Note: I'm very much not religious.
> A fair amount of the rest goes on political lobbying and influencing.
I get a little mixed-up on whether donations to non-tax-deductible non-profits "count" in the metrics (e.g., does my donation to the ACLU which has a lobbying arm count just as my donation to the ACLU Foundation which cannot be used that way?). Nevertheless, I think it's wrong-minded to discredit charitable giving to organizations that influence public policy given the multiplicative impact that policy has on the lives of people and communities. Some of the biggest impacts to the lives of people came out of organized efforts to influence policy.
> If the US wasn't "individualism run amok" it wouldn't have tent cities of homeless people, and its health industry wouldn't be bankrupting half a million people a year.
This feels like a pretty uncharitable and over-simplification of very complex issues that also get into inter-state dynamics. I also think there's an error made in treating US culture as some sort of homogenous cultural construct. More than many other countries, the US is constantly at war with itself culturally.
It is peak collectivism to accomplish this without requiring the monopoly on violence and the taxation that comes with it.
All this has fallen to the wayside in the US as we have some weird form of individualism permiating on both sides of the political spectrum.
There’s always a few bad apples but there’s always some counter pressure, too. The story of the deuce and half owner who drove into a hurricane comes to mind.
I'm not really seeing how that counts as "friendly and collective", but I live in the EU so perhaps I just don't understand these things.
And I think you're right; if you look at how people behave in times of flood or famine, they do tend on the whole to come together.
From the outside looking in, I think in part it has to do with the history of parts of the US as a slaveholding society. In a society where a large minority (or in some places even a majority) are under the thumb of coercion, when order breaks down, there will be reprisals and violence. And I think this history has formed a cycle in some parts of the US long after the end of slavery, and also informs a lot of the gun ownership self-defense fetish there. e.g. for me, growing up in rural Canada guns were just a rather boring part of life because people hunted or had farms. But since then the have clearly become a kind of shibboleth, or cultural marker. Gun ownership is apparently at an all time high but actual hunting for meat is at an all time low.
If you think the US is at risk of collapsing however I would suggest you buy a gun before gold.
You need friends and allies before you need guns.
In one short sentence you may have summarised the difference between other societies and the USA.
I'd say I'm "prepper" enough that I'm heavily armed and have enough shelf-stable food to feed by family for a few months in an emergency - but I'm also "homesteader" enough that our garden seems to get bigger each year, I know all of my neighbors, and we regularly share skills and information.
I don't think anything catastrophic is likely to happen, but it's had an overall very positive impact on my day-to-day life. If something does happen, I have far more tools to deal with it than either approach alone would give me.
The fact that society didn't descend into complete apocalyptic anarchy made it even better for the gold hoarders, because they didn't get robbed and murdered for their savings.
> Maybe a civil war breaks out, maybe there are food shortages, but for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars.
If a war breaks out, the tradition is that the armies will raid you for food. The issue was never that other locals would do it. A war breaking out is what people are afraid of.
That's what I meant -- people get organised very quickly. In Rwanda, people quickly formed armies and militias, the same in Ethiopia, Columbia, and literally every other time this has happened before. One guy is not gonna accomplish much.
Civil war is also, by most measures, the least likely outcome. Usually civil war causes the breakdown, not the other way around. Usually it's really a deterioration of state capacity that leads to a powerless central government (see Venezuela, Yemen, Syria), or repeated coups that lead to unstable governance (all of west africa basically). Things are mostly stable, by and large.
Once you need to form a militia, you bring your gun and join your neighbors. That way you can actually resist the army. They will do more than just raid for food. They raid for people: conscription, slavery, and “comfort”.
But we have per capita probably the largest number armed private security companies - what happened when we had unrest in one of provinces - the owners of these companies formed self defense groups where they lived with their staff and had AK'47/AR-15 and stuff not available to normal citizens.
Our suburbs are still racially segregated so they turned around those folks who did not fit the profile.
They kept the looters out - but some got out of control and shot up innocent people that was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The army was eventually mobilized and the sight of soldiers and wheeled APC's convinced them it is was time to go home now that the professionals were here.
Yes, as we all know Sri Lanka, Argentina and Venezuela are all known for their low degree of violence.
I suggest reading Larken Rose - The Most Dangerous Superstition.
I feel way safer in places with a neighbourhood watch and local people banding together to fend off criminals over places where the police may show up some times, if they're done fining people for going 5km over the ridiculously low speed limit or jailing people for selling pot.
Source: the EU pays my government to allow into the country jobless economic migrants, males in their 20s-30s, and local people have to defend themselves because the police won't do shit.
secondly it is true that most short term instability results in people pulling together, but I do remember a study from about 30 years ago on long term multi-generational social collapse (I think it was Eritrea) in which the population became much less let's pull together to get through this and much more f* you I got mine.
What a bizarre interpretation.
To this date more than 20% of Venezuelans left the country.
What happens over and over is that fiat currency becomes worthless and that people who have the means to leave leave.
Obviously if you own some gold you have a better chance of being able to escape to another country.
Bank accounts gets frozen all the time and for a variety of reasons.
The problem came with the freedom of assembly, which is bound up with the right to protest ... and long curtailed with restrictions from causing substantial disruption.
That last part was the line crossed when roads were shutdown for days on end, horns blared round the clock, etc.
Additionally, IIRC, the Canadian Gov't didn't debank individuals for the act of donating .. they froze accounts that donations were flowing into. The last time this came up in a forum several people linked to discussions in the Canadian Question time (or some equivilant) where "gotcha" questions were being posed about whether the law in question could be used to debank individuals .. as it was broad legislation targeted toward shutting down the protests by drying up funds the answer "yes, but ..." .. followed by a general failure to produce any non core individuals that had their general savings frozen - just the accounts used to collect donations and some(?) organisers taking part (again, IIRC).
It was surprising to see how quickly people turned around into saying that blue collar workers uniting and striking was a bad thing (with several suggestions that they be forced to work somehow), that protesting government authoritarianism is in fact fascism, that calling someone a Nazi is somehow supporting Naziism, and that the government coercing people by threatening their livelihoods due to their political activities (or refusing medication), and deciding what is and isn't "legitimate" political views, is actually defending democracy
And I have no faith in "yes the law has technical pathological cases but obviously nobody would do that". I used to, but I've just seen enough cases of the letter of the law being twisted with complete disregard to the spirit. E.g. practically any law to do with terrorism
I actually count this as the primary positive outcome of COVID.
So many people woke up to the reality of state power during that period. No more "this couldn't possibly happen here" or "they'd never!".
And even more after COVID, once the propaganda relented and the veil dropped even further. You'd have to be really obtuse (or otherwise invested) to not get the memo by now.
The pool of people who got a taste of the oppressive medicine has extended from "fringe" / "criminal" to wide swathes of "normal", middle class population. A costly lesson for sure, but extremely valuable.
What a bizarre non-sequitur.
But why then complain when societies act? Having strong reactions to pandemics is historically normal nor can I see anything to wake up to in terms of oppression.
don't get to close off access to and from work sites for days and weeks on end, nor do they get to block customers.
> protesting government authoritarianism is
A-OK in my book - but blocking intersections and pissing off fellow citizens and stopping their free travel is not.
The line crossed, in the view of many people who might have otherwise supported them, was the nature of their protest - not the fact that they were protesting and not the words that they were saying.
Am I understanding this right? They think the government should step in and freeze the bank accounts of people who haven't been tried or found guilty of a crime, and who just inconvenienced them?
As I mentioned in a comment above I'm not aware of any individual that had their personal savings frozen.
I recall a lot of reporting that it might happen and I recall a question time in which the accusation was made that it had happened but when pressed no actual details of to whom could be provided.
That dates back to about the time of your linked reporting which also talks about the potential for abuse but does not cite an example of abuse.
If you have an actual verified account of this actually happening it would be of interest.
Either. I don't really understand that anyone would think that a government being able to freeze someone's assets for protesting that government is a good thing.
This isn't the potential for abuse, in a sort of "price of freedom" way. This is an abusive power that, at best, was not used.
Depends on the circumstances - which specific protest in the US continuously occupied and blocked off major transport thoroughfares in the USofA for a month?
What do you mean “blocked off transport”? Is that the only form of protest deserving of harsh measures?
Do you not think rioting in commercial centers and setting fire to businesses would rise to a similar level as blocking downtown streets as was done in Ottawa?
Clearly you feel blocking city streets is sufficient, so burning down businesses must as well?
Flawed conclusions.
> What do you mean “blocked off transport”
See the upthread link to the Canadian Charter. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_2_of_the_Canadian_Ch...
Follow the links to see how "freedom to assemble" allows the "Right to protest" but doesn't guarantee the a right to "substantial disruption".
Unions (for example) have (location dependant) a right to strike, to protest, but not a right to block access to a business.
> Do you not think rioting in commercial centers and setting fire to businesses ...
For which specific protest was this a stated core goal of that protest? Surely these were incidental actions by third parties that happened coincidental with otherwise peaceful protests?
In the Canadian case under discussion the entire purpose was specifically to blockade, inconvenience, and shutdown key areas until their demands were met - this took place over the course of a month.
Again, which which specific protest in the US continuously occupied and blocked off major transport thoroughfares in the USofA for a month?
And whether or not the protest has that as the "stated goal" is irrelevant. It happened, thus in order to stop it you should be willing to apply the same force of law.
You seem fine having two different standards - one where blocking a street in protest deserves suspension of Charter rights and one where burning down businesses doesn't.
You're entitled to your belief, but I can state that it doesn't make a lot of sense.
There's no issue there with the protest, go nuts arresting the rioters, arsonists and looters.
You're all over the shop and struggling to make a point here ..
> just blocking the street temporarily
for a month, 24/7.
What exactly, BTW, is my belief?
Scroll to the top and my first comment - I simply correctly stated that the Canadian Trucker protest didn't have a Freedom of Speech clash with the Canadian Gov., they had problems as they overstepped their right to assemble.
That is my belief and I stand by that.
You seem intent on imagining things.
No there isn't. The point in question is the impact - one of them blocks streets, one of them sets fires to buildings.
You keep coming back to intent because otherwise your argument makes no sense. But intent is irrelevant to the impact in the end - temporarily blocked businesses (which can reopen after the blockade stops) versus businesses burned down (which won't open for months or even years, maybe not at all).
If you're willing to suspend Charter rights for a temporary blockade, then logically you should be willing to do the same for something with a far greater effect.
But you're unwilling to do so because you want the political goals of the protest to temper the force of the law against them. Unfortunately that's not not how the law works, we have (or are supposed to have) Rule of Law - every person is subject to the same law regardless of who they are or what they believe.
It is firmly established precedent here that murdering people and burning down buildings is a superior form of protest to slightly inconveniencing commerce.
I don't know what you thought you'd accomplish arguing on the basis of net harm on this site, but that doesn't happen here. You need to only understand the oppressor/oppressed dynamic. Protesting injustice against ten million gainfully employed oppressors is unacceptable. Protesting injustice against a single violent criminal is praised.
Your downvotes are well and truly deserved. Not for being wrong, which you're not, but for not knowing your audience.
Have you considered that the percent of the people in the crowd committing crimes makes a big difference for how some people want to enforce the law? Instead of that stupid strawman?
Thankfully the voting system here doesn't represent the beliefs of most Canadians/Americans when it comes to the Rule of Law.
I do get a kick out of calling out the logical inconsistencies of those who try and talk around it.
I heard about freezes for people doing the protesting (including organizing). But that's an extremely different thing from supporting the free speech rights of the protesters.
Sometimes governments jail people for protests, and locking a bank account seems similarly or slightly less bad to me. Not great but not newly worrying.
Or is it that you don't consider direct organizational efforts to be a subset of taking part in a protest? I'm generally fine with it, I think. Do you have anyone in particular in mind that was in this role but shouldn't count?
And sticking someone in jail does those too.
There’s a class of crime that can only really exist in a rule-of-law situation, without that people just get summarily executed.
It only has value because we collectively agree it's valuable. But in itself it's not super useful, yes there are some industrial applications where it's better than other metals but if it was only valued on this basis it would be worth much, much less.