Preppers are being hysterical and scaremongering

[FindingMeno]

Who else is fed up with hearing this, and has it changed your perspective on plans as a result?

I'm sick to the back teeth of the mockery and incompetence of some people. The piss takers. The ones who make out they can't work out what could possibly happen and deliberately refuse to listen to explanations. The ones who are completely clueless and have no idea what you might need. The ones who think 'they' (the government) will provide everything or not let anything happen.

Where I would have liked to help others, (and I still will if they haven't had the ability to increase their resilience) I am now feeling far more that it's me and mine first.

I just wish people would wise the fuck up,grow a pair, and stop bleating!

Anyone else?

Yeah I agree. But its on them.
I think some people are jaded with the Government so see it as a form of protest.
Some people are burying their heads in the sand.
A very few people have practical or financial difficulties which prevent them preparing.

I've got to say that for a campaign that was only officially launched on the 22nd Oct and is meant to last for 3 years:- Well done Government.

I'll take a bit of flack if it helps get sensible messages out there to the rather resistance to information portion of society.

If thry are not neurotic about this it wpuld be something else I just leave them to it some people always need something to panic about

It didn't help that we had the government deliberately "frightening the pants off the public" (their words, not mine) in 2020 and 2021, and now we know for certain that this was a deliberate decision by the government. I expect lots of people feel jaded because of this, seeing it as a massive cry of wolf, especially combined with Partygate.

See also the media constantly trying to frighten us about something, to sell papers, as they have done for decades. Terrorism, paedophiles, your mobile microwaving your brain, small boats, nuclear war, weapons of mass destruction, cancer from everything, people having too many children, the birth rate dropping dangerously low, extreme heat, extreme cold, the list goes on: the papers are constantly telling us that disaster of one kind or another is just around the corner, whether this is true or not.

While I do believe that we are living in dangerous times, and that covid was a real danger to many people, the "prepare for disaster" message can lose its impact if it is overdone. Some people wave it aside with "whatever, heard it all before". Maybe there is a sense of "it is for real this time", but for some people, that is lost among all the previous "disasters" which came to nothing.

I think it's more likely that if anything does happen, it will be government instigated, and would likely last longer than three days. The message has been replicated all over the world so it's not solely a mistrust of the local government.

Well perhaps if this government had not misused the emergency messaging system to warn us not to have a bloody barbecue, people might be more willing to listen (I nearly had a sodding heart attack when it went off).

But also, stop treating us like children; if there is a threat, tell us what it is and then we can make an informed choice.

We live fairly rurally and not a year goes by without a power cut or the water supply being cut off for a few hours, so we already take sensible precautions anyway.

It is annoying but it's got a lot better than it was, thinking back to pre-brexit days and then early covid. There seem to be a lot fewer sneery posts saying that unless your preps will see you through the zombie apocalypse then there's no point. And fewer posts confusing slow, sensible prepping with panic buying and causing shortages - although there are still some of those.

People don't like to think about disaster striking - it makes them afraid, and the trouble with prepping is it focuses your mind on what might happen. I see the dismissive responses, and the piss-taking and sometimes angry responses as a defence against that - borne out of fear, so I try not to get frustrated.

I think the current government campaign is helping quite a lot of people wise up to the fact that 'disasters' can be small scale, local and time limited, but still worth preparing for.

I volunteer for a parish council. We collect soon to be out of date food, and make it available on a local estate. A quick straw poll at a recent delivery found that more than half hadn't even heard of the govt campaign. Most had done nothing.

There are whole sections of society who don't read news web sites, don't listen to news broadcasts. Plus most of the under-25s just think it's old people making a fuss.

My ds is in halls and when I asked him if there had been any mention of how students should prepare, he had no idea what I was talking about. There are 2 million undergrads in the UK and I'd bet most have done nothing.

If there is an emergency, I fully expect my ds to arrive home the following day, or ask me to go and get him if the trains are disrupted (a 360 mile round trip), and I expect the parish council will be tasked with providing food/warmth or a distribution centre for water, for a fair proportion of our locals.

Money is very tight for some. Others are determined to assume the govt is involved in some sort of conspiracy or trying to frighten us, and to ignore the advice at all costs. My guess is 25% of the population will be completely unprepared.

One thing I'm doing is (whispers) keeping my petrol tanks full: that's something the government is not talking about, because they (sensibly) don't want a mass panic on that, as it's happened before, and indeed, they're keeping very quiet about the high price of fuel: "search Google maps" is a deflection. At any moment, Trump might do or say something stupid. Maybe I'm misguided in doing this, but it makes me feel safer. It also means that I don't see what the price of a full tank is (shudder). I haven't forgotten the panic in early 2022, or 2000, when the message was "please don't panic buy", so people did exactly that.

Sometimes I think that what the government or other authority is not saying can be much more significant than what they do say. And yes, I know that does lead to all kinds of wild speculation.

@ImNotAsCooperativeAsYouMightWantAWomanToBe And yes, I'd appreciate it if the government told us WHY we should stockpile. But I can just hear Sir Humphrey Appleby: "The public do not have a right to know, they have a right to be ignorant. Knowledge means complicity in guilt: ignorance has a certain... dignity." And yes, I think the finger-wagging barbecue message was indeed an abuse of the emergency alerts system. I'm sure they saw it as an opportunity to test the public response (and I think there was a lot of that during the covid madness as well).

yabu

it's very sensible government guidance.
the more people are aware the better.

Have you misunderstood the OP and only read the title in bold?

@Meadowfinch repeated surveys show that it is just over 50% who have done nothing. Hence the bigger oomph of this campaign.

Many people are sceptical and don't think it will ever happen that we will need an emergency box of stuff.

Prepping for many is seen as ridiculous and the advice is seen as scaremongering from the Government. I've heard a few people say (in jest?) that it is designed to get us out there buying this and that for the emergency box, to keep the economy going ha ha!

Those who do prepare are probably keeping quiet enough about it, not to be seen as "mad preppers". The connotation is out there, that those who prep are a bit bonkers.

The message is the problem as I see it. It should have been much clearer (even if they were lying!) that emergency supplies were merely in the event of prolonged power cuts - and what would you do if that happened to YOUR household?, that would cover most other events beyond control.

I agree with pp. there is a fear factor in ignoring the message. Whistling past the graveyard, as my old Dad used to say!

It makes me really cross!
Are people really so shortsighted??
It's one of the reasons I don't tend to talk about having some plans in RL

We are abroad at thr moment and we were on a trip yesterday with people from mainland Europe. I told then about the government messages for uk and Ireland and asked if they'd had similar. . Theyve been told to split money between different banks, both national and an international, and to prepare for war.

I think that there is a growing number of people who avoid the news, full stop, citing reasons such as mental health, and being sold an agenda. When I used to drive a lot, I would notice how the word "misery" would appear a lot on news billboards. "Another week of rail strike misery. Extreme heat misery. More snow misery on the way."

I used to listen to Radio 4 every day, until I heard "corrrrrronavirus" once too often. I abandoned it in 2020, and I've never looked back. I watch one political commentator on Youtube, and that is all I need. I take the view that if something really important is happening in the world, I will find out about it one way or another.

I don't know because I don't watch news, but I have heard that news (especially BBC) would usually have something funny or light-hearted as the last item, but they don't any more. Is this true, and it's now wall-to-wall doom and gloom? If so, it's hardly surprising that people avoid news.

Instil fear, control the people, keep them on high alert.

I don't know what's going on, whether it's common sense emergency prepping - since the Government cannot provide emergency cover for over 60million people all at once - or is there intelligence out there that something big is going to happen, i.e. war that affects us on land.

It's a bit scary - if you let it.

I have taken some common sense precautions as advised. Nothing major but I prepared a box in the event of a three day powercut with no cooking facilities for that amount of time.

I don't think we can prepare for much more than that in the real world.

I wouldn’t describe myself as a prepper - I’m very much unprepared! But I’m unnerved by the future and I’m now trying to be more mindful of having a stock of food and bottled water.

It’s much easier for people psychologically to label preppers as hysterical rather than the alternative which is that climate emergency / cyber attacks are coming. It’s a coping mechanism

I’m not a prepper but will have to do precisely nothing. We don’t have mains water, gas, or electricity and have a well stocked pantry.

All the talks of people's primary plan being to break into others houses on here means I would be very very weary of offering to help others if shtf. But MN is a specail kind of cruel and hopefully not a direct reflection on % of nasty replies = % of arseholes in society.

My neighbour has a toddler so I just have to hope they have planned to provide for her in a power cut. I have my own kids to think of.

Still i wouldn't take that risk. First sign of trouble I'd move my tiny prep upstairs and have my kettle with boiling water up there too. Because some of the vitriol is more scary then going hungry.

Agree about the car. My first priority in a real shtf is emergency transport.

Stop discussing it with anyone the first rule of prepping is don't tell anyone you're prepping I mentioned to a friend before covid that I'd heard this thing was coming over and that it might be a good idea to stock pile a bit of paracetamol etc she said I don't need to you'll have plenty I'll just ask you!

Don't tell anyone you plan ahead if people say to you that they think prepping is silly you can say well I'm a bit on the fence but don't ever tell people that you stockpile.

Oh I absolutely tell no one!
If people are being idiots because of fear, they really need to toughen up a bit, and accept it may not be comfortable to think about these things but life isn't all unicorns and fairy dust all the time!

I love all these beardy blokes being interviewed on telly in lumberjack shirts and/or fisherman’s gilets breaking the first rule of being a prepper 🤣

Some are ignoring the fact that a power cut for days is the most likely issue. So those saying they are going to keep their kettle in the bedroom are not prepared for no electricity!

I don't know how formula fed babies will manage, as I don't have any kids, but I'd imagine there are made up bottles available, and that would be what I'd do if I had a baby in the house. Not sure of the expiry length on them though.

@scalt “It didn't help that we had the government deliberately "frightening the pants off the public" (their words, not mine) in 2020 and 2021”

yeah, and it turns out people don’t think that much or that deeply…

Because the last one was a manufactured crisis, people aren’t listening. I’ve tried telling them that whether or not it’s a manufactured crisis isn’t the point. If the government do or don’t create it, what’s the difference? It’s still a good idea to have some stuff just in case.

But people are a bit resistant to that

But if it’s true that radios have sold out and so on baked beans I heard have sold out… then people are listening.

I must admit I didn’t realise how many people are just going out and getting food every day. I don’t know where they get the time.