• weeeeum@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Kind of weird that in the last 100 years nearly all the worst famines occured it communist countries.

    • novibe@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Except that’s not true? China had much worse famines before the communist revolution, and both China and the USSR never had a famine after the ones you are thinking about.

      Meanwhile, we hear every 5 years that hundreds of thousands of people will die of hunger on the Horn of Africa, that millions of people are food insecure at the seat of capitalist power (the US, UK etc.). We see breadlines in the UK, families going hungry because of foodstamp cuts.

      And then you see Vietnam, China, Cuba… and they have eliminated famine. Not hunger, but famine. Meaning there are no food insecure people. The USSR had done the same before it collapsed. People in the USSR had better food security than people in the US after the 50s.

      You basically don’t know what you’re talking about and are just repeating propaganda points from the Cold War. It’s vibes based ideology, no facts or science.

      • SupraMario@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        ROFL nothing what you said is remotely true lol

        Saying people in the ussr had better food security than people in the USA in the 50s hahahahahaha

        Tankies…lol

      • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        millions of people are food insecure at the seat of capitalist power (the US, UK etc.). We see breadlines in the UK, families going hungry because of foodstamp cuts.

        There’s food insecure people in China too. It’s not different in that respect at all.

        • novibe@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          I don’t have to find sources for you. But the Irish famine literally was a famine of laissez faire policies. The British landowning class of Ireland deliberately chose to export the agricultural produce of Ireland because it was more profitable. The government refused to step in to create regulations or limitations on exports and that’s what caused the famine. Also, the mono-culture of potatoes was also a factor of capitalism. Industrial mono-culture is the agricultural form of capitalism.

    • recapitated@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      I would suggest not drawing the line between capitalist corporate societies and authoritarian communist dictatorships. Not every message needs to be about government models.

      I take a message like this to start a conversation about cooperation instead of greed. Conceptually, I don’t see it scaling to 8 billion people.

      But the great thing is that we can all individually make the choice to operate this way within our smaller communities, and offer support to those in need when we can afford to. You can even scale this concept down to your family or your team at work. Cooperation can convert certain resources away from being a fixed-sum game.

        • recapitated@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          I’m just trying to support cooperation with the idea of starting small with our friend who isn’t ready to think big about it yet. I think people need to experience immersive demonstrations to understand the amplification power of cooperation.

          • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            That’s certainly commendable but it ignores the power of easily repeated lies.

            There is great value in earnest discussion. It, however, requires all sides to be ingenuous. If someone’s opening gambit is calculated artifice then all you are doing is giving them soapbox from which to bend pliable minds to their regressive agenda. By all means try to draw them into open discussion but only within a framework of honest representation.

        • roscoe@startrek.website
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          11 months ago

          I’m not agreeing with op but for this meme it does make sense to limit the timeframe. Production and worldwide logistics have only recently given us the ability to feed everyone on earth reliably and consistently.

          Two hundred years ago a surplus in Argentina couldn’t easily be applied to a failed crop in Bangladesh. The world as a whole now produces more than enough food and we have the ability to transport it from anywhere to anywhere. We just don’t do it. In the past hunger sometimes couldn’t be avoided, now it could.

          • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            It’s true that the transport system is much faster and reliable now than the 1840’s but you didn’t need a Prime subscription to lift a famine. Transport back then was still fast enough.

            The conditions that cause famines lasted multiple seasons/years and they didn’t drop in over night either. Famine struck areas slide into scarcity slowly as the price of the cheapest food available rises above what is affordable by the poorest in that society.

            In some areas, such as the Irish potato famine in the 1840’s, there was still a surplus of food being exported to markets that could afford it. Aid, when it eventually arrived in Ireland came from Britain, USA, Indian Ocean, France, Canada, West Indies, Australia, Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, south America, Russia, Latin America, the Ottoman Empire, Spain, Portugal and other British Dependencies. The world was much more connected back then than you may be aware.

        • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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          11 months ago

          It does make sense to limit at least when there’s socialist states if you want to compare capitalist states to socialist ones.

          • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            Only if you wanted to hide all the earlier famines that happened under capitalism under the tenuous argument that there’s some overarching uniformity of development, opportunity, meteorological events, natural disaster etc etc worldwide that allows for fair comparison within the same timeframe.

              • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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                11 months ago

                On the contrary. There is no cognizant reason to limit the timeframe other than to bury relevant facts unfavorable to anti-left rhetoric.

                • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee
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                  11 months ago

                  I thought the point was to compare the two. Wouldn’t make sense to give one a much longer timespan in the comparison.

                  • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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                    11 months ago

                    That would only make sense if there was some tangible link between the occurance of famines and the passing of time. But there isn’t really. There is to things like war, drought, flooding, epidemics, vermin infestation, mis-management, a country’s degree of development etc etc. If you want to make some qualitative comparison between systems of government then use those not some superficial framing set to prejudice the outcome.

    • Blue@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Hunger in capitalism is not about famines, it’s about mass produced cheap food full of sodium, sugar and chemicals, yes people are feed but at the cost of obesity and other health problems, it’s about farmers pushed to plant specific crops to the detriment of the environment and the land, pushed to buy seeds from Monsanto and punished if they dare to plant their own crops.

      People still are going hungry in the world, but not we’re you can see it, and you will never see it, in your bubble of lights and advertisment.

      • novibe@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        It’s also about famines tho…

        The Irish Famine was 100% caused by capitalism. The Bengal Famine is the same. All famines today in the capitalist world are the fault of capitalist logic. When people die of hunger in Ethiopia or Eritrea, it’s capitalism killing them.

          • novibe@lemmy.ml
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            11 months ago

            What are you talking about? The Irish famine was caused by two factors:

            1. The potato blight, and potato mono-culture. Potato mono-culture being caused by capitalism, by industrialisation, privatisation of Irish land at the hands of British landlords, and profit maximisation in a laissez faire market.
            2. During the famine, it was more profitable for the British landlords to export agricultural produce to England and other parts of Europe than to sell it in Ireland. So laws of the market dictated pretty much everything was exported.

            The famine was literally caused by the government NOT stepping in, doubling down on laissez faire liberalism and using racist Malthusian excuses like “helping the Irish would just make things worse cause they would procreate like rabbits and need even MORE food”…

    • loxdogs@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      try to convince all manufactures to stop selling. If won’t happen, because of huge profits that follow deficit