https://nitter.net/TheEconomist/status/1690713079405768704
Fixation on food security
The man is OBSESSED with food security.
All he thinks about is FEEDING PEOPLE.
What kind of SICK FUCK just goes around all day wondering how to GENERATE ENOUGH FOODSTUFF FOR 1.4B PEOPLE
Jesus FUCKING Christ, what a psycho.
Why would this country that has a written history going back thousands of years recording famine and its resulting upheaval be concerned with food security?
Must be the inscrutable oriental brainpan.
The See See Pee bribes the Chynese people with food, water, and shelter for support
Xi is done for
It's despicable when governments bribe people to vote for them by performing the basic functions of government!
Just appaling. How dare they.
I can build my own infrastructure, thankyouverymuch!
I take offense with this because I AM actually obsessed with food security and food-related struggles, and Xi Jinping does other things than single-mindedly doing food-related activism and work all the time. He's a poser
Translation
They have their minds set on one thing, and I have broadened my skills.!!!! xi-lib-tears :::.
This text was translated using DeepL.
No they are straight up the paper of record for the Forces of Evil. If Sauron had a paper delivered to his house every morning it'd be the Economist.
And it's a particularly shameless, unself aware, boorish, British kind of evil, too.
Lenin dismissed the Economist as “a journal which speaks for British millionaires”.
Well he must be feeling stupid now since the economist exclusively speaks for Billionaires
It's amazing that the only part of that which has shifted at all is the wealth level implied by 'millionaire'
never feel like you need to apologize for not being aware of something here! education is an eternally ongoing process.
This is true in the small but also the large:
As revolutionaries, we don't have the right to say we are tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We know that when the people understand, they cannot help but follow us. ― Thomas Sankara
I am always happy when someone encounters something interesting for the first time
In case of the meme it was the Cyrillic alphabet. Writing systems and their origins can be fun!
Chinese farmers are just yearning for the opportunity to grow bananas for the United Fruit Company.
In East Germany, no banana.
In Venezuela, only banana.
In Glorious People's Republic of Walmart, choose any food you want and one of our child slaves will be by shortly to bring it to you.
And it doesn't even pay off, because you a very limited selection of flavorless fruits and veg because they've been bred solely to be stable for transport.
It's very "They have all this stuff but they don't even enjoy it!"
Like endless misery to deliver mediocre produce.
Idk, I don't know if that makes it worse, but it does feel more perverse somehow. Like in stories you expect the baddies to cause vast misery and suffering to procure the best, most exotic, most delicious luxuries, not bland bananas with barely any flavor or shitty mangoes that are almost all pit and taste vaguely of soap.
Like endless misery to deliver mediocre produce.
I mean, I think this would be somewhat overstated if not for the fact that everything is so crazy expensive.
Like in stories you expect the baddies to cause vast misery and suffering to procure the best, most exotic, most delicious luxuries, not bland bananas with barely any flavor or shitty mangoes that are almost all pit and taste vaguely of soap.
There's plenty of high end food available in trendier and more upscale corners of the country. It isn't as though grocery store mangos are the only mangos.
Mexico is a huge producer and they ship everywhere. Maybe they're not as good as ones from Thailand or Indonesia, but you can get them without too much trouble.
Imperialism with a smile and a pat on the head, that is all the capitalists bring
I think it is actually authoritarian that we're not allowed to hunt economists for sport
no no thats a philosopher and the socratic argument successfully made them into a protected species
Going to the Philosophical petting zoo and giving Focoult some head pats as he exists in existential dread.
going to an uni campus and selling homemade bread called foucaulcchia as part of my
for the week
Thanks! The art from ghost is one of my favorite styles I've seen
I want this inscribed on a shitty copper ingot that somehow is hurtling through the front window of the chamber of commerce at 32mph.
dutch devoting 100% of arable land to tulip futures
spoiler
probably didn't happen but what if it did
I don't know if it ever meaningfully ate into the supply of arable land, but the tulip speculation must certainly incentivized a whole bunch of farmers to plant additional tulips (or, at least, claim to do so) for the purpose of cashing in on the bubble.
Not in their lovely, white, European metropole of course, but in their colonies in Indonesia (Dutch East Indies), the Dutch would rip up food crops and force villagers to plant cash crops instead as part of their "Cultivation System" (Cultuurstelsel)
Instead of land taxes, 20% of village land had to be devoted to government crops for export or, alternatively, peasants had to work in government-owned plantations for 60 days of the year. To allow the enforcement of these policies, Javanese villagers were more formally linked to their villages and were sometimes prevented from traveling freely around the island without permission. As a result of this policy, much of Java became a Dutch plantation. Some remarks while in theory only 20% of land were used as export crop plantation or peasants have to work for 66 days, in practice they used more portions of lands (same sources claim nearly reach 100%) until native populations had little to plant food crops which result famine in many areas and, sometimes, peasants still had to work more than 66 days.
This is so cruel and I will talk with my students about it in time.
Ugh. Just had to do some bureaucracy hell to get an id and the whole time i was thinking id is just a weapon the state uses to control and exploit you.
3rd horseman of the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse from the book of Revelations is commonly called Famine, but he specifically does NOT blight crops, does not damage food. His weapon is the scales, and "destroys" not by weather or worm, but market manipulation.
Show
In a world where food is more than abundant, the only reason why a person would starve to death is because it's unprofitable to save human lives.
It's one of America's primary weapons. We dump corn on a region until all the local food producing farmers are driven under, then the region has no choice but to import. And sometimes, whoopsie, we decide we want to use the corn for some other awful product, and people starve.
There's a moment from "Fed Up" that I'm absolutely obsessed with for some reason that this reminds me of. (AutiADHD moment).
Bill Clinton is one of the interviewees in it, and at one point he's talking about corn syrup, and pauses to say in the mostly faux-folksy way imaginable "which I don't think is a good use of corn". Idk why but it just stuck in my head.
Yes. The single individual. Forcing this country of over a billion people against their will to have their own sustainable food supply. On his own. Like a dictator.
Believing that over a billion people are all unilaterally controlled by a single person is not only peak great man theory, but also just another extension of rabid racism
4chan calls us Chinese people "soulless bug men" and it's just so cool and good that the Economist is printing the polite version of that.
Bu.. But you're brainwashed! YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY NEED FOOD! DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND?!
Do not, my friends, become addicted to food. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!
That was such a brilliant, wonderful, terrible line. Just... so much... political bullshit and lies and dissembling and cruelty and indifference is tied up in that line.
It's a great film; so much of it could easily have come across as hokey or dumb, but somehow it all works.
I found it really authentic because everyone was totally bought-in to the camp. The things that would have been camp were part of these people's lives, and there was so much attention to detail in how they spoke, moved, dressed, and acted that it sold the whole thing as real people in a real culture living their lives. Like the war boys weren't dumb, mindless thugs throwing themselves to their death for nothing like in an 80s action movie. They took time to show how they were devoted to Joe, they had religious beliefs, they genuinely thought of themselves as heroes fighting for a worthwhile cause. They invested the warboys with so much depth and character that I, at least, never thought they were silly. These are warriors from a warrior culture who have their rituals of war, their symbols of valor, their pride, their pathos. When the one guy takes a bolt to the head and his buddies are praying for him to get up so he can die as a hero there's just so much realness in that moment.
And for me, personally, I know a little bit about guys like General Butt Naked in the Liberian civil war, and some other pretty out-there gangs and warbands and mercenary companies, so a lot of the "over the top" elements were recognizably similar to things that warrior cultures do in real life.
From observation it seems really handy for crushing all nuance, too. Who did the Holodumber? Stalin. By himself. WIth a big spoon. Don't ask why Ukrainian communist officials in Ukraine were genociding Ukrainians. Stalin did it, alone, by himself.
The cultural revolution? Mao did it. Just Mao. No one else was involved. We can condemn the entire country because the entire country is just one dude on a framed propaganda poster. Or like "we're going to sanction Saddam" or whoever, because sanctioning hte dictator is justifiable, whereas people might ask why we're pushing millions or tens of millions of people because we don't like the guy that supposedly single handedly runs the entire country.
I like how they took a photo that is clearly very mundane and used a filter to make it look like literal hell. Very subtle.
Meanwhile in America:
Show
https://fortune.com/2023/06/08/how-long-will-smoke-new-york-city-air-quality-last/
The wealth of farmers is not more important than the food security of a nation. We do not need modern day kulaks, which is probably what the economist wants in China.
not even just that, capitalists want all nations to be dependent on imported food so it can be used as leverage
Yeah,
said it best. Look at your plate and where your food is from if you want to know who the imperialists are
Nooo you can't just make food to feed people without a profit motive!
Real “why are the cells multiplying and building tissue without a profit motive?!” energy
Xi jinping failed to consider that food isn't a universal right under capitalism. How are we supposed to condemn China as capitalist and fascist if they do socialism?!?
Have you considered that food cannot be a right because it is the only recognized right that requires labor and you're not entitled to other people's labor?
(I'm paraphrasing this fash-lite talking point because it lives rent free in my head and makes me extremely angry)
the maoist uprising against the landlords was the largest and most comprehensive proletarian revolution in history, and led to almost totally-equal redistribution of land among the peasantry
fixation on food security
caring more about feeding people than feeding profits makes you a monster to The Economist
it's not the feeding people that they're even mad about so much as the freedom of action that a country has when it doesn't rely on trade with other nations for essentials like food and energy
B-B-B-BUT muh COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE. This isn't PARETO EFFICIENT, and that's against the RULES. (Please ignore the inseparable intertwining of economic and political power and just play along like dupes)
Guevara has a bunch of speeches about this. IIRC, he differentiated between "political freedom", the power of a people to make their own decisions and act on them, and "economical freedom", the power of a people to decide over their production and trade. He argued that a revolution aims for the former; after that, the post-revolution state builds the latter.
damn that sounds really good. I'll have to go looking for those
This is the book, but it's in Portuguese. It's in chapter one: political sovereignty and economical independence
Communism with Chinese Characteristics
Oh no
XI FLIPPED THE SPOON LEVER! HE'S PUTTING GRAIN IN PEOPLE'S BOWLS! REVISIONISM! ABORT! ABORT! 🗽What the hell is he saying! That’s revisionism! Pure revisionism! Worse than revisionism! Has he gone off his head? I hope Stalin hasn’t gotten wind of this yet, or there’ll be hell to pay. Tell Xi I want to see him in my office TODAY at 4:00 pm SHARP. And he better have a good explanation for this garbage!”
