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In case it isn't clear to anyone yet, kiki is only pretending to care about starving people to push what she really cares about - her own communist ideology.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:

Was there bad weather leading to a reduced harvest?

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The "too much democracy" train rolls on.

Last week's Brexit vote prompted pundits and social media mavens to wonder aloud if allowing dumb people to vote is a good thing.

Now, the cover story in The Atlantic magazine features the most aggressive offering yet in an alarming series of intellectual-class jeremiads against the dangers of democracy.

In "How American Politics Went Insane," Brookings Institute Fellow Jonathan Rauch spends many thousands of words arguing for the reinvigoration of political machines, as a means of keeping the ape-citizen further from power.

He portrays the public as a gang of nihilistic loonies determined to play mailbox baseball with the gears of state.

"Neurotic hatred of the political class is the country's last universally acceptable form of bigotry," he writes, before concluding:

"Our most pressing political problem today is that the country abandoned the establishment, not the other way around."

Rauch's audacious piece, much like Andrew Sullivan's clarion call for a less-democratic future in New York magazine ("Democracies end when they are too democratic"), is not merely a warning about the threat posed to civilization by demagogues like Donald Trump.

It's a sweeping argument against a whole host of democratic initiatives, from increased transparency to reducing money in politics to the phasing out of bagmen and ward-heelers at the local level. These things have all destabilized America, Rauch insists.

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And in under a minute I found this:

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Was there bad weather leading to a reduced harvest?

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There is a widespread view in the West that Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and confrontational policies toward the United States and Europe are an attempt to revitalize aspects of its lost Soviet glory days. But if we look at some of the Kremlin’s domestic policy initiatives, we see a country struggling to become less “Soviet” in its actions and reform its decrepit institutions before it’s too late.

Many of the reforms now underway reflect Moscow’s long-overdue recognition that the Russian state simply cannot afford to maintain costly Soviet-designed structures, such as free higher education for all students or an oversized military based on mass mobilization. Though many of the current changes are forced by dire necessity rather than any grand progressive vision, they are reforms nonetheless. This in itself is a striking development. In general, Russians are ready to tolerate the loss of personal freedom, but they still cherish Soviet social benefits like free health care, and the Kremlin has always been afraid to tamper with them.

But now that President Vladimir Putin’s patriotic propaganda has managed to distract popular attention from dismal political and economic conditions, the reforms, haphazard though they might be, are going forward. The irony is that the leaders who have been trumpeting Soviet grandeur on the world stage are presiding over its retreat at home.

A case in point is health care. Today, a few years into the reforms launched when Mr. Putin returned to the presidency in the spring of 2012, the overall picture remains bleak. Moscow has been giving regional governments incentives to close inefficient, duplicative and deteriorating hospitals and health centers, trim the medical work force and improve efficiency in exchange for more funds for modern equipment, renovation and better pay for health workers.

While many hospitals are being revitalized, the number of closures is too drastic. Rural areas are bearing the brunt of the disruption. More than 17,000 towns and villages once served by small health clinics now have no medical services at all. Between 2005 and 2013, the number of health centers was cut from 8,249 to 2,085, and the number of rural hospitals plunged from 2,631 to 124, according to government reports.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_Union
Ukraine
This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (April 2014)

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Originally posted by kpo:

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_Soviet_Union
Ukraine
This article contains weasel words: vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information. Such statements should be clarified or removed. (April 2014)

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Is this a weak attempt at a strawman? Posting a link to an article no one else has posted before, and then pointing out that there are errors in it?

Are you trying to make it look like you have an answer to my post, when in fact you don't?

#Embarrassing

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
But to address the history very briefly before I move off this topic ... there's a general recognition that the weather was bad, in this case too much rain rather than drought. Some articles indicate productive areas of Ukraine received three to five times the normal amount of rain, leading to the inability to harvest grain and having it rot in the field. One article traces a series of bad years, from 1929 onwards. You'd THINK that that kind of disastrous weather would get a mention in the historical accounts.

But, like a lot of other bullshit you all eat with gusto, the bullshit on this topic leaves out the very salient fact that weather led to greatly reduced harvests.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
"Weather is localized ..."

What a stupid statement. Do you think weather patterns don't encompass large areas, covering entire countries, even continents? How much of Europe would you say is under cloud cover in this image?

"... but food is transportable. You would think that Stalin would have shared Russian food with Ukrainians so that all Soviets could experience the same difficulties and eat the same number of calories."

I already addressed this regarding the China example. You must not have read it. And I'm not going to bother repeating it.

As to Stalin's speeches about how intended to starve Ukrainians, perhaps you mean this one:
In August, 1932, at a critical juncture in the events leading to the Holodomor, Stalin expressed his concern that “if we do not correct the situation … we could lose Ukraine.” ... “That explains the fact that the peasantry constitutes the main army of the national movement, that there is no powerful national movement without the peasant army, nor can there be. That is what is meant when it is said that, in essence, the national question is a peasant question."
Pretty ambiguous statements, wouldn't you say?


But I'm sure you have lots and lots of quotes ready. Let's see them.

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Originally posted by 1kiki:
"Is this a weak attempt at a strawman?"

The article from WIKI... recreates every argument you all have been making.

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The catastrophe - often labelled as a genocide - took place under the brutal Soviet regime of Joseph Stalin, who was determined to crush the rebellious Ukrainian peasants and force them into collective farms. The policy meant farmers conceding their land and livestock to the state, and Stalin would then sell the excess grain abroad in a bid to catalyse Soviet Russia's industrialisation and make it a military superpower.

Hell-bent on teaching farmers "a lesson they would not forget" for resisting collectivisation, millions died in areas that were heavily populated by Ukrainians "while the Soviet Union simultaneously denied the famine and exported a quantity of grain great enough to feed the entire Ukrainian population," notes Rutgers University.

Bolshevik forces marauded through villages taking food and carrying out mass executions. Those who were caught stealing food or trying to leave the region in search of bread were imprisoned, turned back or executed.

At the height of the Holodomor, 17 people died each minute, 1,041 people died each hour and 25,000 people died each day. "It was the Soviet regime's deliberate seizure of Ukrainian crops and refusal to provide food relief that turned Europe's breadbasket into a land of immeasurable human suffering," a US statement read.

The trauma which swept through the nation was unimaginable. Entire villages starved to death as cities and roads lay strewn with the corpses of people searching for food in some of the world's most fertile land. People were forced to use dried nettle leaves and other weeds to make bread as they desperately tried to evade death. Villagers used wax in place of cooking oil, women were forced to offer sex in return for food and there are even reports of cannibalism.

"The peasants ate dogs, horses, rotten potatoes, the bark of trees, anything they could find," witness Fedor Bleov wrote. A young communist named as as Lev Kopolev observed "women and children with distended bellies turning blue, with vacant lifeless eyes. And corpses. Corpses in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts in the melting snow of Vologda [in Russia] and Kharkov [in Ukraine]." Citizens were banned from travelling abroad to obtain food, effectively decreeing a death sentence on the population.

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KIKI has been paying attention to starving children for a long time. http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=60398

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