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.
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
Xi fucking CALLED OUT, is he too much a coward to respond?
@XiJinping@hexbear.net this u?
他们一门心思都放在一件事情上，而我已经拓宽了我的技能。
deleted by creator
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!
The walls are closing in.
Any day now
deleted by creator
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
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.
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.
deleted by creator
I think it is actually authoritarian that we’re not allowed to hunt economists for sport
Infringing on the freedom to enact a centuries approved sport!
Or writers for the Economist
Nice profile pic, comrade
Thanks! The art from ghost is one of my favorite styles I’ve seen
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 weekdeleted by creator
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
This is so cruel and I will talk with my students about it in time.
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.
“Capitalism breeds innovation”
-Ea-Nāṣir
I want this inscribed on a shitty copper ingot that somehow is hurtling through the front window of the chamber of commerce at 32mph.
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.
President Biden, please start bombing. My country yearns for hunger.
Shit he’s giving food to people with his comically large spoon!
Communism with Chinese Characteristics
Oh no
XI FLIPPED THE SPOON LEVER! HE’S PUTTING GRAIN IN PEOPLE’S BOWLS! REVISIONISM! ABORT! ABORT! 🗽Xi’sd to feed you
wall, now
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!”
New China filter just dropped. China is neon orange now.
Is there a moral case against prohibiting any The Economist staff member from having access to writing materials of any kind? BEcuase I think, for the good of humanity…
That perilous yellow haze in the photo proves it to be the work of that dastardly paragon of scientific cunning - the Fiendish Dr Food Munchu.
This reminds me of a quote from Catch-22, it has the same naked obsession with the ‘rightness’ of profit that reads like it isn’t supposed to be satire but which I can’t help be seeing as comedy:
Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen." — Catch-22, Joseph Heller
I thought Catch-22 was a satire
It is, I guess the ‘dry’ delivery reminded him of this.
Yeah, sorry could’ve worded it better. I wanted to say ‘vibes were similar’ but felt that would be more confusing.
I look forward to having to hear about how this is a crime against humanity from all my lib co-workers soon!
It does suck how you have to keep on top of this shit so you know what someone is trying to say when you hear a less-than-half-remembered version of it next month. The shit I heard from the libs in my life about Evo Morales being a vicious genocidal election manipulating dictator, and a month later I wanted to rub it in their faces how I was right and they’re all “what’s a Bolivia??”
It takes a lot of energy to have to be simultaneously more and less engaged in news media than the people around you.
deleted by creator
midwest.social? Yeah it’s dunk time/mask off reactionary time.
deleted by creator
Lenin dismissed the Economist as “a journal which speaks for British millionaires”.
It’s amazing that the only part of that which has shifted at all is the wealth level implied by ‘millionaire’
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
Well he must be feeling stupid now since the economist exclusively speaks for Billionaires
Lenin is done for
deleted by creator
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.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
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!
deleted by creator
yes
Marx based his understanding of Capital from hate reading the economist.
deleted by creator
403 comments…
Okay, where’s the liberal?
