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(Thread IKs: fart simpson)
 
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Nonsense
Jan 26, 2007

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQkILxuYMCU

ROT IN JAIL

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DiscountDildos
Nov 8, 2017

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQoygnhlz2LjVEwAlrAU_v7uV9J7Ol6_2

Documentary series by a Hong Kong TV outlet about China poverty alleviation stuff. There's like 8 20 something minute episodes with English dub and subtitles. It's pretty good.

The cliff village in episode 1/2 is loving wild. I don't understand how that's real.

Corky Romanovsky
Oct 1, 2006

Soiled Meat

Lostconfused posted:

Is it though?

It isn't the same experience for everyone, and it isn't really comparable to the US where the cops might just end you.

They do target people for bullshit reasons, like checking to see if a bicycle is stolen, stopping a dude cycling to the grocery store on suspicion of stalking the lady on the bicycle in front of him (his wife), or just a papersplease. It can cause problems if the bicycle isn't registered in the rider's name, some people don't bother switching the registration. The papersplease technically needs a reason to stop the person other than suspicion of not being a Japanese national, but that doesn't stop them. The cops often seem to have too much time on their hands, some use it to profile people on the street, others browse social media to find traffic and other violations they could follow up on.

Then there was that forcible deportation of a man to Bangladesh (iirc) which resulted in his death.

Room for improvement, imo.

AnimeIsTrash
Jun 30, 2018

Foreign cops should 100% follow US troops around because otherwise they'd be committing rapes and murders.

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008

I meant specifically that they were targeting white people or something. The Reuters article didn't have any details at all besides that follow up with the BLM branch.

Yeah I remember reading articles about Japan having too many police officers employed for the amount of crime that happens so they tend to find things to spend way more effort on petty crimes to keep themselves occupied.

Palladium
May 8, 2012

Very Good
✔️✔️✔️✔️

No one could have seen this coming

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Slavvy posted:

This seems like a good place to ask: is there anything I can read about the holodomor that isn't just insane propaganda?

http://www.readmarxeveryday.org/bloodlies/intro.html

Southpaugh
May 26, 2007

Smokey Bacon


Lostconfused posted:

I fell into a pro Ukrain twitter hole where someone is posting "no you're the nazis" recently and stumbled on this

Don't even know where to post it

https://twitter.com/CharlieFlanagan/status/1464224876781264899

Irish Politicians and talking heads are reacting to globalisation by turning into standard issue neo-liberal shills.

The Great Irish Famine(s) of 1845-1849 was due to the cotter and peasant classes reliance on a subsistence diet of potatoes, while growing grain or other cash crops to pay their rent. "Laissez Faire" economic policy of the time dictated that god and causality had chosen death for the Irish and it would have been unchristian to intervene in anyway. Blight hits the potato crops, you eat the food you would otherwise sold, you fail to pay your rent and you are now out of your home and your livelihood.

Population goes from ~8 million, to 5.1 in the 1851 census. Historic low in the post-partition Republic is 2.8 million in 1961. The Famine in Ireland was a standard British Imperial famine and it destroyed any potential danger Ireland could have posed to Britain itself, while freeing up a whole shitload of land and concentrating the rural populace into the urban environment and workhouses. It was indeed a highly effective genocide. The memory of Wolfe Tones failed French backed 1798 Rebellion may have still been keeping some MPs up at night.

The "Holodomor" is a part of a much greater whole in the Soviet Union at the time and has been seized upon by Ukrainian Nationalists as a very beatable drum for the day and age we live in. The two events are only comparable insofar as a bunch of people starved.

From this year: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/ireland-population-surpasses-5m-for-first-time-since-1851

Southpaugh has issued a correction as of 02:56 on Dec 7, 2021

Southpaugh
May 26, 2007

Smokey Bacon


The ukraine

Judakel
Jul 29, 2004
Probation
Can't post for 9 years!

this woman got so many backrubs from us media. lmao

30.5 Days
Nov 19, 2006

sexpig by night posted:

Pretty much, it was a horrible famine, and you can point to government failures that didn't help, but there was no policy that could have prevented it.

Disagree with this. Famines always have two components: an unexpected drop in agricultural production (usually unavoidable) and a government that continues existing levels of agricultural export. There are always government policies that could have prevented a famine.

Rutibex
Sep 9, 2001

by Fluffdaddy

DiscountDildos posted:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQoygnhlz2LjVEwAlrAU_v7uV9J7Ol6_2

Documentary series by a Hong Kong TV outlet about China poverty alleviation stuff. There's like 8 20 something minute episodes with English dub and subtitles. It's pretty good.

The cliff village in episode 1/2 is loving wild. I don't understand how that's real.

this is great. i was watching the first episode and seeing all the efforts the goverment went through to get services to those people living on a remote cliff side and all i could think "wow and here the canadian government cant even get clean water to people living on the ground". then i saw the second episode where the government is like "ok that poverty relief wasn't good enough lets build them a brand new luxury village for free" and i just dont know what to say. what the hell is wrong with our society why cant we have nice things

Benagain
Oct 10, 2007

Can you see that I am serious?
Fun Shoe

Cao Ni Ma posted:

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/us-embassy-tokyo-warns-suspected-racial-profiling-by-japanese-police-2021-12-06/

I bet this is an eye opening experience to the white men experiencing something that blacks and hispanics go through daily in big cities.

You're going to be shocked, shocked when you read the article and find out who the racial profiling is against.

AnimeIsTrash
Jun 30, 2018

https://twitter.com/DanBoeckner/status/1467917938275541001

Cao Ni Ma
May 25, 2010



Benagain posted:

You're going to be shocked, shocked when you read the article and find out who the racial profiling is against.

I dont know why people see one line in the article and immediately think that they are only targeting black foreigners.

brugroffil
Nov 30, 2015


Mantis42 posted:

Applying American excess mortality rates to China does not tell you how many people died from Covid in China but does give us a clearer picture of how many lives Xi Jinping has saved.

:hmmyes:

Al-Saqr
Nov 11, 2007

One Day I Will Return To Your Side.

She was very smart to fall into every trap the military laid out for her and actively ruin her own reputation because she cant get over her hatred of muslims.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

30.5 Days posted:

Disagree with this. Famines always have two components: an unexpected drop in agricultural production (usually unavoidable) and a government that continues existing levels of agricultural export. There are always government policies that could have prevented a famine.

this is rather simplistic, though, and requires a lot of hindsight, right? Like I said, yea, you can look back and go 'yea they should have paused the taxes and sent aid faster than they did' but in the context of 'the guys who literally burned their own crops a few times just to avoid sending us taxes are saying they can't grow anything...they're full of poo poo right?' it becomes a bit harder to say those two sides are equally at play.

Cpt_Obvious
Jun 18, 2007


It's good to hear there are antivaxxers everywhere. Makes me feel a little less terrible knowing there are idiots everywhere.

Slavvy
Dec 11, 2012

Lostconfused posted:

The only thing I know about Holodomor are background and surrounding details of USSR.

Paradoxes of Power by Peter Kotkin spends some time on it. But generally speaking Holodomor wasn't anything more than a famine.

The early years of USSR were spent on turning an economy that was built around agricultural production into an industrial economy. The peasants weren't communists or bolsheviks, they were always in conflict with the government. The NEP (New Economic Policy) was supposed to just let the peasants do their own thing and the bolsheviks would collect a percentage of what they produced as tax, but that didn't work and what was collected was a lot lower than expected. That led to some heavy handed measures like forced collectivization, and dekulakaization.

So in the 30s there was a horrible famine in the middle of this conflict between the peasants and the communists government. The government continued to take agricultural produce as tax assuming that the peasants were just trying to withhold it because they were uncooperative. It wasn't until later that enough reports made it through that there was a famine and that there was just not enough food being produced for people to eat and to sell to the west. At which point the government reversed their course and attempted to provide relief for the famine.

It wasn't some planned genocide campaign by Stalin, but it probably was some mismanagement and circumstances making a bad famine even worse. I don't know if you can really hold anyone at fault for it.

sexpig by night posted:

Pretty much, it was a horrible famine, and you can point to government failures that didn't help, but there was no policy that could have prevented it. The famine hit during a major conflict that already reduced crops, you can argue that it was wrong to continue the taxation program during the beginning of it but in the context of a major clash between farmers already actively sabotaging their own crops to protest/damage the central authority measures it's pretty understandable why the initial reports of lack of production were chalked up to more of that.

There's valid things to critique, slowness of response, the staggered response to the initial conflict, etc, but the idea Stalin 'caused' it or it was a planned genocide is insane.

Thanks guys!

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

30.5 Days posted:

Disagree with this. Famines always have two components: an unexpected drop in agricultural production (usually unavoidable) and a government that continues existing levels of agricultural export. There are always government policies that could have prevented a famine.

I disagree with the second part. Food shortages are localized events driven by distribution. As in, the food's there, but it's not getting to the people who are starving.

Agricultural export is one way that can happen, but it can also just be people shuffling around food domestically, as we saw during famines in India.

The difference is that in a market system, you're actively encouraged to move the food away from the people who need it most, because they're the ones who won't be able to pay what you could otherwise get for it.

Raskolnikov38
Mar 3, 2007

We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold
however 30.5 is right that continued grain exports in exchange for hard currency contributed to the severity of the holodomor in ukraine and kazakhstan

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

quote:

The Question of Grain Exports

Like the Tsarist governments the Soviet government exported grain. Contracts were signed in advance, which created the dilemma Tauger describes as follows:

quote:

The low 1931 harvest and reallocations of grain to famine areas forced the regime to curtail grain exports from 5.2 million tons in 1931 to 1.73 million in 1932; they declined to 1.68 million in 1933. Grain exported in 1932 and 1933 could have fed many people and reduced the famine: The 354,000 tons exported during the first half of 1933, for example, could have provided nearly 2 million people with daily rations of 1 kilogram for six months. Yet these exports were less than half of the 750,000 tons exported in the first half of 1932. How Soviet leaders calculated the relative costs of lower exports and lower domestic food supplies remains uncertain, but available evidence indicates that further reductions or cessation of Soviet exports could have had serious consequences. Grain prices fell in world markets and turned the terms of trade against the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, its indebtedness rose and its potential ability to pay declined, causing western bankers and officials to consider seizure of Soviet property abroad and denial of future credits in case of Soviet default. Failure to export thus would have threatened the fulfillment of its industrialization plans and, according to some observers, the stability of the regime.

At the same time that the USSR was exporting it was also allocating much more grain to seed and famine relief. Tauger documents the fact that the Central Committee allocated more than half a million tons to Ukraine and North Caucasus in February, and more than half a million tons to Ukraine alone by April 1933. The government also accumulated some 3 million tons in reserves during this period and then allocated 2 million tons from that to famine relief. Soviet archival sources indicate that the regime returned five million tons of grain from procurements back to villages throughout the USSR in the first half of 1933 (Tauger 1991, 72; 88-89). All of these amounts greatly exceed the amount exported in this period.

The Soviet government was faced with a situation where there was simply not enough food to feed the whole population even if all exports had been stopped instead of just drastically curtailed, as they were.

quote:

The severity and geographical extent of the famine, the sharp decline in exports in 1932-1933, seed requirements, and the chaos in the Soviet Union in these years, all lead the conclusion that even complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine. This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable. (Tauger 1991 88;89. Emphasis added)

Grain delivery targets (procurement quotas) were drastically cut back multiple times for both collective and individual farmers in order to share the scarcity. Some of what was procured was returned to the villages. (Tauger 1991, 72-73) It is these collection efforts, often carried out in a very harsh way, that are highlighted by promoters of the "intentionalist" interpretation as evidence of callousness and indifference to peasants' lives or even of intent to punish or kill.

Meanwhile the regime used these procurements to feed 40 million people in the cities and industrial sites who were also starving, further evidence that the harvest was small. In May 1932 the Soviet government legalized the private trade in grain. But very little grain was sold this way in 1932-1933. This too is a further indication of a small 1932 harvest.

About 10 per cent of the population of Ukraine died from the famine or associated diseases. But 90 per cent survived, the vast majority of whom were peasants, army men of peasant background, or workers of peasant origin. The surviving peasants hard to work very hard, under conditions of insufficient food, to sow and bring in the 1933 harvest. They did so with significant aid from the Soviet government. A smaller population, reduced in size by deaths, weakened by hunger, with fewer draught animals, was nevertheless able to produce a successful harvest in 1933 and put an end to the famine. This is yet more evidence that the 1932 harvest had been a catastrophically poor one. (Tauger 2004)

Government aid included five million tons of food distributed as relief, including to Ukraine, beginning as early as February 7, 1933; the provision of tractors and other equipment distributed especially to Ukraine; "a network of several thousand political departments in the machine-tractor stations which contributed greatly to the successful harvest in 1933" (Tauger 2012b); other measures, including special commissions on sowing and harvesting to manage work and distribute seed and food aid.

quote:

This interpretation of the 1932-1933 famine as the result of the largest in a series of natural disasters suggest an alternative approach to the intentionalist view of the famine. Some advocates of the peasant resistance view argue that the regime took advantage of the famine to retaliate against the peasants and force them to work harder. Famine and deaths from starvation, however, began in 1928 in towns and some rural areas because of low harvests and of some peasants' unwillingness to sell their surpluses. The food supply generally deteriorated over the next few years, due not only to exports in 1930-1931 but also to the crop failures of 1931-1932. The harsh procurements of 1931 and 1932 have to be understood in the context of famine that prevailed in towns as well as villages throughout the Soviet Union by late 1931; by 1932-1933, as noted above, workers as well as peasants were dying of hunger. If we are to believe that the regime starved the peasants to induce labor discipline in the farms, are we to interpret starvation in the towns as the regime's tool to discipline blue and white collar workers and their wives and children?

While Soviet food distribution policies are beyond the scope of this article, it is clear that the small harvests of 1931-1932 created shortages that affected virtually everyone in the country and that the Soviet regime did not have the internal resources to alleviate the crisis.

Finally, this essay shows that while the USSR experienced chronic drought and other natural disasters earlier, those which occurred in 1932 were an unusual and severe combination of calamities in a country with heightened vulnerability to such incidents. ... The evidence and analysis I have presented here show that the Soviet famine was more serious and more important an event than most previous studies claim, including those adhering to the Ukrainian nationalist interpretation, and that it resulted from a highly abnormal combination of environmental and agricultural circumstances. By drawing attention to these circumstances, this study also demonstrates the importance of questioning accepted political interpretations and of considering the environmental aspects of famines and other historical events that involve human interaction with the natural world. That the Soviet regime, through its rationing systems, fed more than 50 million people, including many peasants, during the famine, however poorly, and that at least some peasants faced with famine undertook to work with greater intensity despite their hostility to the regime in 1933, and to some extent in previous years as well, indicate that all those involved in some way recognized the uniqueness of this tragic event. (Tauger 2001b, 46, 47)

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
that's an excellent summary.

Yea, the sad truth is that the famine was nearly inevitable, and as cold as it is to say it actually could have been orders of magnitude worse than it was. This doesn't mean it wasn't a tragedy and the dead don't deserve to be mourned of course, but trying to assign malice and blame to it is just at best reaching for someone to point to and say 'you did this' to explain a horrible tragedy, or at worst pure political agenda disrespecting the memories of the dead. There's a lot of very good study to be done about the famine and stories to tell, but the political agenda it gets wrapped in smothers it.

thatfatkid
Feb 20, 2011

by Azathoth
hi everyone, did anything cool happen in the last 30 days I was probated for providing feedback in the dnd mod feedback thread?

PS CommieGIR, fool of sound and handsome Ralph are thinskinned neoliberal deadshits

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

thatfatkid posted:

hi everyone, did anything cool happen in the last 30 days I was probated for providing feedback in the dnd mod feedback thread?

PS CommieGIR, fool of sound and handsome Ralph are thinskinned neoliberal deadshits

we have like 50/50 odds of going to war to protect Ukrainian nazis.

Also China has disappeared a woman who is completely public and famous and has many times told western journalists she's not disappeared.

Mr Hootington
Jul 24, 2008

I'M HAVING A HOOT EATING CORNETTE THE LONG WAY

thatfatkid posted:

hi everyone, did anything cool happen in the last 30 days I was probated for providing feedback in the dnd mod feedback thread?

PS CommieGIR, fool of sound and handsome Ralph are thinskinned neoliberal deadshits

Someone in d&d said a certain head of state should be killed.

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008

Cao Ni Ma posted:

I dont know why people see one line in the article and immediately think that they are only targeting black foreigners.

I assumed they were targeting koreans tbh.

Top City Homo
Oct 15, 2014


Ramrod XTreme

Nonsense posted:

Why is India throwing in with a washed up and suicidal rump state?

the united states?

THS2
Oct 2, 2021

the american century wasn't even a century. 1945-202? RIP

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008

sexpig by night posted:

that's an excellent summary.

Yea, the sad truth is that the famine was nearly inevitable, and as cold as it is to say it actually could have been orders of magnitude worse than it was. This doesn't mean it wasn't a tragedy and the dead don't deserve to be mourned of course, but trying to assign malice and blame to it is just at best reaching for someone to point to and say 'you did this' to explain a horrible tragedy, or at worst pure political agenda disrespecting the memories of the dead. There's a lot of very good study to be done about the famine and stories to tell, but the political agenda it gets wrapped in smothers it.

Yeah the last bit is important.

The conflict between peasants and the proletariat is real and it's tied in with the rural vs urban communities. It's a complicated topic and deserves further exploration.

Holodomor though specifically is another genocide produced by communism - a political ideology that has created more human suffering than any other.

Homeless Friend
Jul 16, 2007
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch2Rqte6XOs

THS2
Oct 2, 2021


inshallah the missiles reach their targets

dead gay comedy forums
Oct 21, 2011


30.5 Days posted:

Disagree with this. Famines always have two components: an unexpected drop in agricultural production (usually unavoidable) and a government that continues existing levels of agricultural export. There are always government policies that could have prevented a famine.

it's lot more harder than that

the agricultural failure was consequent of having a world war, then the civil war plus the foreign intervention of all other powers that fought the war united against the soviet union which, as expected, shut down all possibilities of trading. To survive, a series of policies that were combined to be called War Communism were enacted. Under war communism, agricultural production was entirely controlled by the state with tremendous rigor; farmers that didn't cooperate would be shot by peasants themselves and/or suffer the cheka. As the USSR turned things around, war communism was revoked in order to rebuild and reaccumulate capital development in the country, which was a very high priority of Lenin and other like-minded bolsheviks at the time.

Among other things that comprised the aforementioned NEP, a massive de-escalation of the state control over the economy was pursued, contrary to the will of the most well-known bolshevik figures: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin all hated it, but by democratic centralism, Lenin told the opposition to stop whining and let's make it work. The USSR entered a state capitalist stage that, among other things, relaxed the oversight on agriculture and used state capitalist regulation instead of direct control over farming, collectivized land reform excepted (as they were agricultural soviets formed during the revolutionary phase)

kulaks - basically agricultural rentiers and landowners - liked the NEP and were very eager for the restart of trade, to benefit from exports. However, the USSR enacted a very novel move: the implementation of export tariffs. If they wanted to produce for exportation, past a certain threshold, they got taxed hard. As expected, they got very loving mad and they started burning crops and killing animals "in protest"; what then happened to their surprise was that no bolshevik was going to have any of that poo poo again (because that happened before in the civil war) and they were to be arrested and their property seized.

Ukrainian agriculture, being very oriented in the kulak model, made these guys have a very disproportionate amount of power relative to the peasantry. As they destroyed food and livestock, they starved them. The USSR began in the mid-to-late 20s to assert direct control in what ended up being a low key minor conflict and coda to the civil war, successfully destroying the base of kulak power in the country with significant but still quickly recoverable damage to agricultural activity.

Then Lenin had a second stroke and Stalin had to centralize control of the party. Remaining kulaks believed this to be an opportunity to wreck again the state, while theoreticians considered that state planning is absolutely indispensable to push the soviet economy into a more advanced stage (which was Stalin's original position): this required capital, to be leveraged by harnessing the agricultural export capabilities of large-scale state-organized farming. The political struggle and the purges hosed up the administrative capabilities of the soviet state, which were compounded by the kulak wrecking in the Ukrainian SSR; to solve that, Stalin went for the decree for immediate collectivization of all agricultural activity in Ukraine, while maintaining a trade balance of unfavorable terms to themselves to the benefit of the West

It's one of the toughest poo poo sandwich scenarios ever gone by a modern state. honestly, by 1929, I think the famines were inevitable

Lostconfused
Oct 1, 2008

Just to add the economy specific bits. War Communism was also just people scrounging through every stockpile, warehouse, and factory in the country and redistributing whatever is found as needed to keep the war effort going. It's not so much an economic model as Bolsheviks doing whatever they can to survive.

NEP only lasted a few years. Large scale industrial development planning started in 1920s with GOELRO plan. By 1930 GOSPLAN and the centralized controlled economy existed and would pretty much stay the same until Stalin's death.

Anyone that opposed forced industrial development or spoke out against it got purged from GOSPLAN between 1928 and 1930.

https://www-solidarnost-org.translate.goog/articles/articles_2046.html?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US

Lostconfused has issued a correction as of 05:09 on Dec 7, 2021

THS2
Oct 2, 2021

russia no longer has famines, so everything worked out in the long run

exmarx
Feb 18, 2012


The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

why couldn't they find data for nz and australia

Some Guy TT
Aug 30, 2011


so did they just forget that weve been acting like anyone who doesnt want to give their kids a covid vaccine is a homicidal maniac for the past three months or what

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
https://twitter.com/danieltilles1/status/1467633573524029445

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crepeface
Nov 5, 2004

r*p*f*c*
ladies and gentlemen, i present the smartest bbc journalist

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FvejGdS3i4

thatfatkid posted:

hi everyone, did anything cool happen in the last 30 days I was probated for providing feedback in the dnd mod feedback thread?

PS CommieGIR, fool of sound and handsome Ralph are thinskinned neoliberal deadshits

welcome back buddy

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