05-29-2016, 08:25 AM
(05-28-2016, 09:17 AM)Odin Wrote: "Daddy" thinks the drought in California isn't real.
(05-28-2016, 09:41 PM)Odin Wrote:(05-28-2016, 06:16 PM)Kinser79 Wrote: So then you favor malnutrition and rioting then. Or is that you expect to be able to exploit farmers in the so-called third world to obtain food. Either are in direct opposition to the needs of the vast majority of humans.
Most famines nowadays are political problems, not food supply problems. We can grow more than enough food for everyone and still protect the environment.
Indeed, in Michigan most of our out-of-season vegetables are grown somewhat locally in hydroponic hothouses (these would be local, except that the DEA harasses hydroponic growers whom the DEA assumes can go quickly to growing marijuana instead of tomatoes or onions). Out-of-season vegetables have always been luxuries due to their cost of transportation. Now they can be produced at costs lower than for transportation from California or Florida.
We have a very different problem with nutrition, namely with people eating themselves into grotesque obesity and hence disability and early death. That may be one cynical way to solve the 'welfare problem' -- that people die of heart failure at age 45 or so if they can't hold jobs. They can sit on a recliner and devour chips and drink sugary sodas while watching the Idiot Screen and dig their own graves with their unhealthy appetites.
...Starvation is commonplace under tyranny. If a despotic or totalitarian regime wants to kill people but lacks the nerve to shoot or gas people that it wants dead, then it can starve people. So send them off to the desert or steppe where there is no food and simply have 'logistical problems' that allow bureaucrats to never have food (much of the Armenian genocide). Or put them in labor camps and have people work to exhaustion with the promise of food... and deliver food only to the administrators. That was the Gulag and Nazi 'labor' camps, the latter after 'selections' for quick gassing of children, the elderly, and women who would not part with their children. Or requisition food from peasants and return nothing. So they weren't going to give up their land and become serfs of the 'Socialist' state? The government gets to ensure that the State becomes the heir. Problem solved. But that is the twentieth century. The Irish potato famine occurred in the English colony known as Ireland because English plutocrats imposed a near monoculture upon Ireland, replacing other agriculture with the more profitable potato. In a rainy climate bordering on the subtropical, blights and insects flourish, and if there is but one crop, then that crop fails. The UK did not then have a responsible government; the Irish potato famine compelled many Irish to leave for the US, Canada, Australia, and other places... with many of the Irish dying.
Democracies recognize that food comes first. Tyrannies put power first. Plutocracies put profit first. Totalitarian states put ideology first. Kleptocracies put stealing first. It is telling that Ethiopia under the Commie Dergue and Botswana both endured the same drought. Botswana sacrificed its support for its anti-Apartheid agenda to get food aid; Ethiopia went full bore on collectivization. Ethiopia had a catastrophic famine.
Peasant farmers have no friends -- except in democracies. But if you want food, maybe you need peasant farmers more than you need show projects, a powerful military, rapid industrialization, a bureaucratic morass, or achievement of some ideological dream. Contrast India, for most of its existence a democracy, which has generally avoided any extremist ideology, to many similarly-poor countries. It has been slow to industrialize or set up a huge military establishment, or even to develop motorways. Its economy was long based upon peasant farmers and cottage industries. It put much more emphasis on elementary education than upon universities.
Nightmare? India last had a famine in Bengal when it was British India, and then when the usual source of food for people of eastern India, the rice crop of Burma, was cut off by the Japanese in occupation of Burma (again, as elsewhere in the "Greater East Asia Co-Prospeirty Sphere, the Japanese requisitioned the rice crops to feed the Japanese soldiers who in a peaceful Japan would have been working the rice paddies). India was a horrible place to visit, let alone to travel around. But people ate, which is more than one could say of Russia in the 1930s or China in the 1950s. That's the difference between having Mohandas Gandhi and having Vladimir Lenin or Mao Zedong as a hero in a very poor country.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.