My belief in "DOOM" has been on a general decline as I aged. This isn't to say any number of things aren't a PITA, or even a straight up bad problem, but that it's absolutely positively certain to all build up in some confluence, creating a SHTF collapse of some sort?

For fucks sake, get over it. It's not. If it was, it would have already in any number of ways

Or, if/when some big SHTF does happen, the details and the "Who, What, Where, When, Why, & How" will bear zero relationship to most anyone's predictions or warnings.

Yes, there's "Normalcy bias" and it'll burn you bad, especially if there's cattle cars & Gestapo rounding folks up. Or the volcano is rumbling. However, the opposite is true. And, "Normalcy bias" is not the same as "Optimism bias."

And it's important to note, it's very rare that someone can sell you something with "Normalcy bias." Instead, it's almost "Worst Case bias."

Even when Normalcy or Optimism biases are being used to sell something, it's often still got some negative aspects to it, usually trying to instill FOMO, etc.

And if/when they do match someone's warnings & predictions, it's almost always complete blind luck. Because when there's a bazillion different doom predictions and warnings being thrown everywhere, one will be "correct" sometimes.

As you get older, you have the opportunity to gain perspective, although that doesn't mean everyone takes that opportunity. And, one should realize there were historical times just in the US alone, where things were very very spicy as compared to today.

Bleeding Kansas.
The actual Civil War.
The Great Depression.

And more recently on the US domestic culture & politics front, the late 60s and early 70s were extremely spicy in real terms. Race riots in multiple cities. And in '71 & '72, radicals were getting extremely salty that the huge counter-culture shifts, "Sumner of Love," Woodstock, hippies, free-love, drugs, Vietnam protests, and whatever else that seemed so "big," was just kind of flattening out, leveling, returning to the mean.

At least that's how it looked from their perspective anyway. They all thought, or hoped, that it was some huge tsunami they could ride, and maybe steer just a bit, that would wipe everything away.

And as they got frustrated that it didn't, they tried to make it happen. There were 2,500 terror/political bombings in the year and a half span between 1971 & '72. That's roughly 5 a day.

Granted, these weren't ANFO truck VBIEDs like OKC or the first '94 attempt on the WTC, but they were all bigger than the Unabomber's devices, and were from the last years of when retail "ditching dynamite" was still a thing at rural hardware and feed stores.

Then look at the hand wringing shitshow over the single lone '96 Olympic Park Atlanta bombing, and Richard Jewell made it a nothingburger with zero casualties because he raised the alarm, and the FBI had such a hard-on to solve it, they fucked him as the suspect on a "fake hero" theory.

And perhaps a big incentive for the FBI to ignore it might have been Eric Rudolph whom they'd been unable to catch, and was an embarrassment

Then of course Ruby Ridge, Waco, the '94 AWB which had the big "they're trying to disarm us" aspect to it. And the building impression there were double-standards of justice for the Democrats/Left vs. The Republicans/Right, as the absolutely sleazy Clintons were embroiled in endless scandals. Several of which arguably were official misdeeds easily as bad or worse than Watergate.

Then, 9/11, with its own set of problems and overreactions, bullshit, and security theater like the TSA in response, 20 years in Afghanistan.

It just goes on...

Economic? With the debt-backed fiat dollar, and perpetual inflation, even if Fed Reserve & Treasury monetary policy was sound, and Congress hadn't deficit spent once since WWII?

Yeah, that absolutely sucks, I won't lie. You coukd fill an encyclopedia with all the problems it causes. And a lot are arguably things the whiny-ass SJW Left bitches about too. Including the poor, and "generational wealth." And it has implications for when they bitch about the ultra-wealthy too. Because they generally have ASSETS, not MONEY. And the assets get bigger numbers as the money inflates, or individual bills shrink in value.

However, it wasn't all rosebuds & unicorns when money was "real" with actual silver/gold backing it either. There were big swings, and crunches, and inflation/deflation cycles, stuff that royally screwed over "little people" just trying to pay bills and get groceries.

And, there's not enough silver, gold, platinum, or other rare & expensive metals on Earth in its crust, to represent even the US economy. Plus, instead of coins, jewelry, & a King/Queen's crown, we've gotten industrial uses for all of it now. And gold in your smartphone or laptop isn't in a bank vault or coin, and vice-versa.

And "goldbugs" or even "multimetals" guys, that just confidently state "Just let it float, and inflate/deflate until it matches the economy..." that is so retarded, there isn't a school bus short enough to take them to special-ed kindergarten.

Because your (currently) $1000 smartphone, as priced in shitty debt-fiat FRNs, if it was $10,000 in gold, or $10 in some gold or PM backed currency, either way, it represents a catastrophe the size of the Great Depression and Venezuela combined, and then some. And if you can't understand WHY that is, you really aren't competent to hold any opinions on this at all.

I'm not even asking anything sketchy here, like stepping outside the Austrian School.

And if you're old enough, you also remember the 1960s & x70s doomerism of overpopulation and starvation and "food wars" as Earth reached impossible populations of five, even six billion... How the next ice-age, the energy crisis, and nuclear winter from the "inevitable" WWIII with the Soviets would make all this incredibly worse... add in the Ozone Layer, and Acid Rain from coal plants too.

And maybe you noticed the gradual shift over to Global Warming and then the even more (conveniently) vague "Climate Change." As if to say, "Whatever the weather is like, hotter, colder, wetter, or dryer... it's a big problem that's our fault, and the only way to fix it is FO EVERYTHING WE SAY."

Almost as if... "the Doom industry" figured out that the earlier stuff from the 60s & 70s fell flat because it was too specific, hit deadlines that disproved it all in embarrassing fashion, or it had reasonably easy fixes, like sulfur scrubbers on coal plants, and switching fluorocarbon formulas. (And that all happened after the Dupont CFC patents expired too... odd.)

And, other subsets of the "Doom Industry" ranging from flat-earth whackjobs, to rather respectable things like economics, inflation, China, illegal immigration, that are more appealing to those on "our side" of the political fence... they do this too. Because, maybe they've got a book to sell.  Or, it's not even deliberate or intentional.

Doomerism just always has legs, because the pessimism seems astute, and it has a certain sense of cynical wisdom to it.

And, one also learns to understand, and filter a bit on the basis that the signal volume, the noise-level, or the signal-to-noise ratio overall, is NOT an indication of "seriousness" or risk.

And that's been of increasing importance over the years. The media inflation of the 24/7 cable news channels, then the Internet & Web, then Social Media, then smartphones... now means the "Doom Industry" isn't getting under your skin from the 1 ton oak Curtis Mathes console TV in the living room, with ABC, NBC, CBS, a PBS, and maybe 2-3 UHF channels running old re-runs...

Now, it's in your back pocket, and completely interactive, filtered, and selected, & curated based on your interests and clicks or viewing patterns.  

In terms of how we mainline the Doom Industry today, every day, 24/7 with a drugs analogy, we went from "strong tea or coffee" to straight up smoking Crystal Meth in just a generation.

The problem with: "Look at how stupid/wrong everyone is!" Is that it's just more confirmation bias.

This is another signal to noise ratio problem.

By and large, people have always been that stupid, that misinformed, or that undereducated. We just now get to see it every day on smartphones.

And if one pulls in academic test data, like the math middle schoolers were expected to do in 1955, and their scores, vs. today, history, literacy, or whatever else... they arguably had all the less excuse for whatever dumb ideas or ideologies they held.

Besides being able to "see" The idiocy, there is the aspect that idiots before the internet, smartphones, and social media, or the profusion of "narrowcasting" that started in just before it, on cable & satellite TV, & home video... now, instead of keeping their mouth shut, the idiot, (weirdo, pervert, or freak) they now often find people "just like them."

Partly, it's just another aspect of the "we just now know..." factor.

However, there is also the factor that the idiot now has friends, and is no longer alone.

Which is the most likely scenario.

Disaster DOOM! preparedness is one thing, and an entirely different thing when it hurts your preparedness for the much more likely non-DOOM! (i.e. assets/efforts are diverted to the unlikely DOOM! senario at the expense of preparing for the likely scenario).

I was going to go through this claim by claim, but even just the first has so much to unpack here, I am just going with the first as an example.

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." Did "the government," or a loose, or even uncoordinated cabal of Democrat/Left biased officials actually swing the election? I mean, I've seen the graph with the jump in it, everyone has. But does it really indicate anything? Did any of the other sub-scandals about the 2020 election, the ballot box cartons left here & there, the observers not allowed to be at XYZ, did any of it get anywhere substantive?

If not, that was all suppression by the MSM, or more officials too? I certainly understand that none of it looked good, and election systems that have far more rigor and trust or actually zero-trust elements would be great. And I am also sympathetic that opposing any or all of that, or audits & investigations, is: "Exactly what the side benefitting from fraud would do and say..."

However, none of that is the same as proving it actually did happen. When do claims of massive fraud and stolen elections become an endlesss game of "move the goalposts" just like UFO, Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot claims, and there's just never any good cut-n-dried unambiguous evidence? Because reasons... or "the conspiracy" suppressed it yet again?

That Trump didn't get a 51% popular vote majority in 2016, and only pulled out an Electoral College Squeaker, against an incredibly flawed, cold, disingenuous, and unlikeable candidate with enormous political/scandal baggage... that didn't have anything to do with not winning a second term in 2020?

Not even a little?

But say for the sake of argument it's true, or, stands a high chance of being true. And the whole: "You are an election-denier, and are endangering our democracy!"-narrrative & talking-points, besides being a terribly ill-advised self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing to say... is indeed a big-ass Catch-22 trap, and makes forging ahead difficult. And yeah, the FBI, and DOJ, ad various state bureaucracies are biased against you, or overtly part of the scheme...

Isn't then the wise approach to: STFU, & "Do your homework" and gather the evidence without broadcasting it to everyone, so the opponent or, outright enemy, is less likely to circle the wagons? Then, when you've got something that's difficult for the other side to dismiss, THEN come forward?

I'm not saying it's going to be easy, not by a long shot, but if it's absolutely as dire as claimed, nobody is trying this approach? Nobody could gather up a truly credible "Cross the frozen Delaware"-moment to try and save the Republic? Not even anyone that suddenly became Public Enemy #1 in overwhelming dogpile coordinated MSM character assassination, that might indicate they were the one getting close?

Or, is screaming and yelling about in the absolutely most ineffective manner possible what someone, or an entire movement does, when it's not really about "the issue" and its just a chest-beating exercise?