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.
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!
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
@XiJinping@hexbear.net this u?
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’
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.
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.
dutch devoting 100% of arable land to tulip futures
spoiler
probably didn’t happen but what if it did
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.
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.
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.