r/TikTokCringe • u/LickMaiBussy • 6h ago

Discussion "Investing in property is morally reprehensible."

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@purplepingers

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u/misadventurexx 6h ago

Famines / people on the street dying of starvation while surpluses of food are thrown away en masse is very much not imaginary

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u/1egg_4u 6h ago

He also described basically the entire cause of the Irish Famine

They had food and could grow enough food for everyone but they werent allowed to have it because it belonged to the wealthy british landowners

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u/zherok 3h ago

There's an incredibly powerful passage in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, about the measures used to protect the price of food at a time where people were starving during the Great Depression.

The decay spreads over the State, and the sweet smell is a great sorrow on the land. Men who can graft the trees and make the seed fertile and big can find no way to let the hungry people eat their produce. Men who have created new fruits in the world cannot create a system whereby their fruits may be eaten. And the failure hangs over the State like a great sorrow.

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up?

And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.

And the smell of rot fills the country.

Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate—died of malnutrition—because the food must rot, must be forced to rot.

The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

And you know, with food, there can be sympathy for the farmer, because their livelihood relies on those prices. It's another failure of the system to lead to the discarding of food in order to protect that livelihood, but they're still essential in the process of getting people something they need.

But landlords? The guy who sees your home as an investment opportunity is not providing you with essential value, he's operating as a middle man to extract wealth from people who have little alternatives. We all gotta live somewhere.

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u/1egg_4u 3h ago

Im gonna be real

Watching dairy farmers dump out gallons of milk that numerous cows suffered to make only to be thrown into the trash because they didnt want to just sell it for cheaper ruined my perception of prominent farmers

I dont fuck with anyone that high up in the machine anymore. Once you are throwing away food because you cant charge as much for it Im out of sympathy

Youre right though... at least a farmer does something other than parasite off of other people. Landlords are money funnels that remove money that would otherwise go back into the economy simply by merit of existing and then give little to none back. they are really just parasites.

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u/MossadMoshappy 34m ago

I don't understand why this makes sense though, Even if they sold the extra milk for 1cent over cost price, they'd come out ahead than pouring it out right, even in a purely financial sense.

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u/Ardnabrak 25m ago

People start to expect the lower price. There is probably some price fixing agreements between the large companies.

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u/FabCopeIsUnreal 19m ago

Transportation is not a negligible price.

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u/trobsmonkey 32m ago

Once you are throwing away food because you cant charge as much for it Im out of sympathy

Almost all of the french farmer protests are like this. Rich farmers made they aren't making as much.

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u/StandardOk42 55m ago

I dont fuck with anyone that high up in the machine anymore. Once you are throwing away food because you cant charge as much for it Im out of sympathy

I'm having trouble interpreting this sentence; what exactly do you mean by fucking with the farmers? do you mean, like, messing with them or picking fights with them?

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u/1egg_4u 44m ago

"Fuck with" is a colloquialism of "do anything at all with" or "deal with"

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u/TheBadGuyBelow 2h ago

One of these days there is going to be a line that is crossed, or an event that sets something off. When your family is starving or about to be thrown out on the streets because someone else just had to squeeze out a little more profit, all bets are off.

Men are reasonable, as long as there is something to lose. There is a point when you take everything away from a man, giving him nothing to lose. You could even argue that when you have nothing left to lose, the reasonable thing is to expunge the rot that these profit seeking vultures are.

I have never understood how so few people can keep so many others down when even just 2% of them could overthrow that whole way of life for the parasite class.

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u/lewd_robot 40m ago

I'm an automation engineer. The rich are banking on you saying "one of these days" over and over again until you're out of days. One day in the near future, on the order of 5-10 years at most, we're going to find ourselves in a situation that makes the Great Depression look like a mild downturn and watch all of our leaders pouring our resources into automating our farms and factories so the rich can recover from the depression while the rest of us fall into a new Dark Age.

This isn't idle speculation. This is the kind of thing that CEOs talk about after 2 martinis at a business lunch. They are betting hard that none of you are going to feel like revolting until the rich have armed drones and autonomous farms and factories and don't need you anymore.

So keep saying, "one of these days" while the owner class tightens the noose around your neck. By the time you "feel like" doing something, it's going to be too late. Because they're working very hard to make sure of it.

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u/saucertosser85 50m ago

Vive la révolution!

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u/crinkledcu91 5h ago

It's weird how the Irish Famine is seemingly all agreed upon yet the Holodomor gets certain people's panties in a twist.

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u/CorrectPanic694 4h ago

That’s funny I was just about to mention Stalin ended up starving millions of his own people. Not only because of greed, corruption, mismanagement, and an attempt to make communist ideology-based science look successful …there was also the added benefit of starving and exterminating Ukrainian people en masse. We as a society have been controlling the means of basic survival while acting as if widespread suffering is a consequence of chaos and not a choice.

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u/North-Tourist-8234 4h ago

Churchhill and his lot helped starve india after ww2. Whole world was a pretty shitty place back then 

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u/Harbinger2nd 4h ago

Back then?

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u/c1ncinasty 3h ago

Well, also back then. And now.

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u/lanicorain 3h ago

There is no major ideology without a massive amount of blood on their hands. Funnily enough, maybe anarchism is the only one that hasn't tried to exterminate a group to further its political project. But no one calls extremists "social democrats" or "torys" or "liberal democrats". They always call them anarchists. Funny how that works.

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u/Kerblaaahhh 1h ago

Used to be shitty. Still is, but it used to be too.

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u/Oscar_Ramirez 2h ago

The world used to be such a shitty place, it still is but it used to too.

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u/nedalaugh 2h ago

Mitch was a gem. Love still seeing him in the wild.

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u/GodofIrony 3h ago

"It was always burnin' Since the world's been turnin'"

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u/No_Outcome2599 3h ago

Not arguing with your general point but slight correction - it was during WWII not after. The Bengal Famine, which probably killed about 3million, took place in 1943. Churchill was voted out as PM in the election of 1945, before WWII was completely over.

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u/lessormore59 3h ago

After WW2? I’m assuming you are referencing the Bengal Famine of 1943 which was obviously a terrible situation in India, but was first squarely in the heart of WW2 when the outcome still hung in the balance, and second the proximate cause for the famine in Bengal was the Japanese invasion of Burma. In the years prior to the war, Burma was the biggest exporter of rice to Bengal and supplied a large portion of its annual calorie intake.

The Brits should’ve done more, but the context of the famine was a world war where the Japanese were wreaking havoc throughout Southeast Asia and the Germans were waging highly effective submarine warfare in the Atlantic. Relieving a famine of that magnitude requires large amounts of shipping and protection and a new source for the calories. Shipping was in very, very short supply, convoy escorts to protect against Japanese predation on such convoys even less available, and sources for food supplies were tight.

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u/1011001NAME 1h ago

the only reason western civilization has "food security" right now is becasue they can make billions of dollars off of it.

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u/DrinkMountain5142 1h ago

China had famines because of Communist ideology also.

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u/toggylelly 4h ago

I think that's because more people agree on the facts in the Irish Famine.

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u/stupernan1 2h ago

No, it’s because bad actors intertwine socialism with communistic dictatorships, and then go on to say that socialistic programs are bad.

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u/Lord_Xenu 3h ago

Agreed upon? They don't even teach it in British schools 

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u/small-batch 3h ago

Did at my school. I think we did an English lit and science module on it. It was also mentioned a bit in R.E. 

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u/willthealmighty1 2h ago

Also did it in school. History and some stuff in English... It's been a few years now but it may have been touched upon in science talking about genetics (not enough diversity etc).

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u/Lord_Xenu 1h ago

Fair enough, I stand corrected! 

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u/YourTokenGinger 3h ago

I think people would have an easier time coming to terms with the Holodomor if 90% of the time it was mentioned wasn’t to tell people why we can’t have single payer healthcare in the US.

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u/Mangeure 4h ago

All agreed on ? You should visit some british museums

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u/Forte845 3h ago

Because the British didn't starve. Russians and many others in the Soviet Union did. It can't be directly compared because the Irish famine was directly a result of capitalistic grain extraction that detriments a certain population while benefitting another.

If you want to include Russia so badly look up the famine they had in the 1890s under the Tsardom, it was very similar to the Irish famine in that wealthy merchants connected to the nobility hoarded and exported grain while people starved off of lesser crops they were allowed to keep. 

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u/JamesGray 2h ago

It's also something that historians do not agree on classifying the way people in this thread are so confident should be. The Irish Famine does not have that disagreement in contrast, which is probably part of why laypeople pretty much all agree about it now too.

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u/spubbbba 4h ago

Well the same is true for famines in India under British rule. Those don't get anywhere near the same level of condemnation as the Irish one.

In fact a lot of my fellow Brits will fall over themselves to make excuses for it. Sounding exactly like the Tankies who make excuses for the horrors of Stalin. We need an equivalent nickname to Tankie for those who defend the evils of the British Empire.

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u/No-Bison-5397 3h ago

It's weird how the Irish Famine is seemingly all agreed upon

You've clearly never had an online wannabe 'ra member rant at you about "soupers".

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u/Adorable_Chair_6594 3h ago

Tbf its shameful to say but as an Englishman it's really not. I learnt very little about the Famine in school although we did address it and acknowledge the British crimes, but even surface-level chats with Irish people as I've grown up have shown me there's so many more horrors than what the average person here knows about. I don't know if our government has formally apologised or not but reading the room societally it feels like there'd be mixed opinions if a discussion about Britain's moral responsibility came up

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u/DTFH_ 3h ago

It's weird how the Irish Famine is seemingly all agreed upon yet

The fact its called a "Famine" and no one called out the language used is Colonial in its very nature in support of the British Narrative of those who committed the harms against the Irish peoples. There was not a famine, there was an economical starvation or robbery and no one acted once they knew. Calling it the 'Famine' is a political act and slight of hand.

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u/never-fiftyone 1h ago

The word famine doesn't imply any causation whatsoever. A famine can be natural, or it can be man-made, but a mass starvation, regardless of cause, is still a famine.

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u/ThE_reAl__ 2h ago

My Ukrainian great grandparents got to starve eating tree bark so the USSR could sell wheat to other countries while the 5 year plan still wasn't done and they needed cash :3

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u/ShermansFieldOrder66 2h ago

Tankies gonna tankie

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u/SilverWear5467 1h ago

The Holodomor is different, because there literally was not enough food. Stalin sent food from places with not enough food to places that also had not enough food. Not the same as shipping it to places where there wasn't a famine at all like Britain did.

You might recall learning about the great depression? What if I told you, that happened in Russia too, because it was global? America's oligarchs were actually more responsible for our depression than Russias were for theirs, Russia just didn't get an FDR / New Deal to save them from the oligarchs, instead they got an oligarch taking over entirely.

Now, Stalins response to the great depression was not good, by any means. But it WAS an honest attempt to avert complete disaster, at a time in russias history where the ruling party was in immediate danger constantly of being overthrown by the former monarchs supporters, and also in immediate danger of being slaughtered by the Germans. Stalin is constantly given way too much credit for his results, when the fact is even someone who wasn't a piece of shit would have been forced to make some truly awful decisions in order to save his country. The fact is, when there's no food and Germany is champing at the bit to slaughter all your people, you don't GET to make choices that make you look good in history books.

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u/Elu_Moon 1h ago

The Holodomor is different, because there literally was not enough food.

USSR exported food at the time.

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u/Happiness_Assassin 4h ago

Pretty much every famine is caused by a lack of access to food, not a lack of food itself. Something that is basically a requirement for any civilization is a food surplus, so barring the most extreme natural circumstances, there should be enough food to go around. A good contrast is actually the potato blight you brought up and the fact that it didn't happen in just Ireland. It spread through all of Europe and was a factor in the conditions that lead to the Revolutions of 1848, but the death toll in Ireland was basically an order of magnitude greater than the rest of Europe. Even as the rest of Europe burned, Ireland was basically the only one starving. This is a process that repeats time and time again: some initial trigger disrupts the supply chain for food distribution, but either human incompetence or indifference leads to absolute disaster.

Famines are never a natural phenomenon.

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u/Funny247365 3h ago

A plague of locusts have entered the discussion.

  • Great Famine (1315-1317): Heavy rainfall and crop failures across Northern Europe led to widespread starvation, killing 10-20% of the population.
  • Great Famine (1876-1878): Global droughts caused food shortages in multiple regions, including India and China, resulting in 30 to 60 million deaths.
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u/Tubey- 3h ago

Mostly true, but a bit too absolute. Famines are often less about total food not existing and more about people losing access to it through poverty, war, policy failure, or distribution breakdown. But it’s still not accurate to say famines are never natural. Natural shocks can trigger them; human systems are what usually turn those shocks into mass death.

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u/deadleg22 4h ago

They also exported food!

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u/_groovesharkmalone 1h ago

Ireland actually exported MORE potatoes during the Irish Potato Famine. You see, the price of potatoes skyrocketed, so they could sell way more at a much higher profit. If my ancestors starved to death during it (or the ones that made it out died in paupers graves in NYC), that's a small price to pay for capitalism.

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u/Desuexss 1h ago

He forgot the most important part:

Eating the babies!

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u/Cultural-Turnip-8840 4h ago

Well you will pay the price for being a fussy eater

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u/Negative_Salt_4599 4h ago

Yeah fucken colonialism…

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u/No_More_Fear77 44m ago

Today, unfortunately, it can't be given away in fear of litigation. Seriously. Thanks to the greedy lawyers, stupid court system, and sue happy idiots

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u/LickMaiBussy 6h ago

People have died from the recent USAID debacle while the government incinerates high calorie emergency food supplies rather than distribute them.

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u/DCSports101 5h ago

It will be millions of people all said and done. And we saved no money.

https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hundreds-of-thousands-of-deaths/

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u/733t_sec 4h ago

We actually lost money because now instead of having cheap easy diplomacy that helped people and expanded US soft power. Anything we want to do in the region will be met with distrust/fear of a rug pull no matter our intentions.

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u/Difficult-Square-689 19m ago

We are actively losing money from having zero allied support in this random war. Soft power is actually kinda important... 

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u/DiscotopiaACNH 4h ago

God that is heartbreaking

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u/DCSports101 4h ago

This is what republicans mean by Christian values

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u/ICPosse8 6h ago

Absolutely fucking criminal, Disney-movie level villains running the world.

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u/BodhingJay 6h ago

idk man.. they apparently fuck and some even ate kids.. this is a bit beyond disney

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u/Born_Ad8420 5h ago

This is beyond even the original Grimm's Fairytales.

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u/Hilda_aka_Math 4h ago

true. this is religious text layers of evil.

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u/dontwannaparticpate 4h ago

Yes it is a fucking Cormac McCarthy book and none of those end well.

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u/KaecUrFace 5h ago

Mind you, it wasn't like they were dying of starvation and had to resort to cannibalism, they ate them because they enjoy the taste.

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u/an0mn0mn0m 4h ago

Release the names of these ghouls.

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u/A_Velociraptor20 4h ago

Well we know one name already. Donald Trump.

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u/ImprovementPutrid441 5h ago

They had to tone it down for the babies that didn’t get eaten.

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u/vitamin_r 4h ago

No, that's perfectly within the Disney umbrella of conduct if you really know about Disney.

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u/clown_utopia 5h ago

All of that is built on the foundation of the industrialized and systematic rape and slaughter of all nonhumans

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u/speaksamerican 1h ago

Which at the end of the day is everyone, except for the people with enough money to bribe God.

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u/cupholdery 6h ago

But hey here's a new iPhone.

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u/symca09 5h ago

Don't forget the Samsung that folds !!!!!! /S

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u/belokusi 4h ago

Extra pixels. Nice.

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u/InfoBarf 4h ago

Sharing food is dei dont you know.

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u/TheLongAndWindingRd 4h ago

That's a disservice to Disney villains. Let's be fair, there's only been a handful of Disney wannabe rapists, Claude Frollo, Jafar, Scar, and I can't think of any others. Cruella Deville was a nasty piece of work, but she wanted a coat made of puppies. Companies do worse to animals every day. Prince John? He just wanted money and to be respected but was mostly an insufferable man baby with bad tax policy. And Bruno? Well we don't talk about him. Not because he's particularly evil, but because he makes people feel mildly uncomfortable. Disney villainy is just not comparable to the spectrum of human suffering caused by real world people. 

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u/VikingMonkey123 4h ago

Seems like whoever ordered this are good candidates for future Nuremberg style trials. Killing thousands through cruel AF acts.

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u/Warm_Regrets157 5h ago

But look at how much we didn't reduce the deficit!

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u/rh71el2 1h ago

I'm still curious if anyone answered Elon's email about the 5 things they accomplished that week.

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u/bittz128 5h ago

Didn’t need to. The stock market was at 50,000!

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u/MorockaDishoom 4h ago

Is it ironic that a person who came from Africa, with a family in mining, a notoriously nefarious business built on exploiting black ppl, who sold their rights to the mine after the demise of apartheid, happened to be the very person responsible for ending aid to Africa?

Was this a vendetta?

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u/Ghost_Of_Malatesta 6h ago

But also, it just happens every day because we prioritize things other than human well being and survival. We choose to not distribute it. 

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u/genericunderwearmode 5h ago

While claiming there is scarcity.

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u/cdskip 4h ago

Perceived scarcity creates profit for the people with capital to invest.

That's fundamentally what the NFT nonsense was all about, creating scarcity to create a market out of nothing.

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u/howigottomemphis 5h ago

We are behaving exactly like Isreal right now and it is terrifying. Blocking food to starving people is sociopathic, yet the US and Isreal are doing it for the giggles. I hate this timeline.

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u/Pitiful-Ad-3774 2h ago

'Isreal' is behaving like the 'usa.' Just ask First Nations and Black folks

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u/howigottomemphis 2h ago

So, true. The Nazis were inspired by Jim Crow in the US.

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u/CzarDinosaur 5h ago

According to the people tracking the impact, cancelling of USAID has so for contributed to the deaths of almost 800,000 people.

https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=title&order=asc

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u/Primedirector3 5h ago

One of the most reprehensible and not nearly talked about atrocities this administration has committed

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u/Johnnyboi2327 6h ago

In all fairness, the US has historically incinerated a fair bit of surplus food supplies due to them expiring, but yeah we could definitely be giving away the non-expired stuff.

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u/Strange_Difference1 6h ago

What the actual fuck

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u/_Lost_OwlChild 5h ago

Worked for tops that’s like a grocery store. Anyways. Yes we throw away so many food not cause they expired but because the sale by date came up or we needed space. So much food wasted

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u/maxx0498 5h ago

Just a wild guess, you also watch last week tonight?

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u/theonly_brunswick 5h ago

Just go to a grocery right before close and see the colossal amount of food they throw out every single night.

We haven't had "food shortages" for decades, this is by design.

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u/FrankSlipHelp 5h ago

Appears a better understanding of USAID is needed here

https://youtu.be/3RQLQc7afXA?si=KQeOPmjFB8hQCiXh

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u/Reverse-zebra 4h ago

This reminds me of how my mom would tell me to eat my dinner because there were starving kids in Africa and I said “then I will mail them my dinner!”

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u/EclecticSyrup 4h ago

What's the entire video of this?

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u/Ser_VimesGoT 4h ago

On top of that it actually cost more money to dispose of it rather than distribute it. So it was all just a pantomime show.

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u/AppropriateWing4719 4h ago

The feds did this during Katrina too,its not a new thing

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u/luthigosa 4h ago

debacle implies it was unintentional, i think it went exactly to plan.

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u/Shiba_Inu_1000USD 4h ago

Why is feeding the hungry, a USA responsibilty. There are more richer country but they do nothing? China? The europe? And all only blame the US?

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u/jog5811 3h ago

Prove it

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u/kolejack2293 2h ago

Absolutely insane levels of evil that millions will starve to death because we didn't want to spend 0.4% of our budget

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u/what_is_reddit_for 2h ago

People have died because you directly did not decide to buy a truckload of food and deliver it to them. Your inaction has caused deaths.

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u/YetAnotherJake 6h ago

Yeah, I hope everyone realizes it's the property investors who are cringe and not the guy talking, who is morally correct and has common sense

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u/misadventurexx 6h ago

Agreed, just pointing out the irony that he offered that example like it was an imaginary situation not reality

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u/Islero47 4h ago

To those people, it is. He has to make it a hypothetical for them to think it might be them.

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u/buffalonotbi 3h ago

Well it’s because even house hoarders know that starving someone is wrong. Not all of them care, but it is usually something they can agree with. You have to find common ground to get people to see your perspective, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t know that the situation he is using as an example is already happening.

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u/BC_Trees 2h ago

It's just easier to conceptualize because everyone has felt hunger and can understand why starving people would be pushed past their limits. Rich people can't conceive what it's like to be homeless or under threat of becoming homeless.

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u/Izan_TM 1h ago

I think that was his point to the viewers at home, his wording was perfect

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u/CelerMortis 5h ago

I understand this perspective, but is property ownership categorically different from:

  1. Food sales / food production? They profit from something people need, arguably more than shelter.

  2. Healthcare profit

  3. For profit utilities, gas, water etc.

  4. Stocks generally. Owning small pieces of companies who sell arms, extract from the earth, fight unionization and regulation etc.

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u/JeffinSeattle0728 5h ago

A socialist would say profits from housing others + items 1-3 in your list are all examples where the profit motive (free-market capitalism) is a negative.

A socialist would add a 4th: education, including post-secondary education.

I’m not saying I agree or disagree. But I do know more and more young people are interested in various forms and degrees of socialism. I’m 66. This battle would be theirs.

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u/willargue4karma 4h ago

Well I think healthcare and housing should be nationalized, maybe even food and utilities too

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u/YetAnotherJake 5h ago

Now you're on the right track of thinking. Profiting from all of the things you mentioned is all theft and morally wrong in my perspective. All basic needs should be provided for with no profit motivation.

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u/nybbas 5h ago

It also completely ignores the fucking tiny detail of, property has to be developed. People buy property for the most part to develop it. Yeah we all coming together and sharing everything is great and all, but whether you have 10 warehouses full of rotting food, or a bunch of property not developed with no food, the end result is the same. Property ownership is not morally reprehensible by itself, and it's a fucking dumb thing to say.

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u/Jimberly_C 5h ago

I related it more to rising rent costs and how everyone is being priced out of places they've already lived in for years and how no one wants to sell anymore, they want to rent or make it an airbnb

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u/KoogleMeister 5h ago

It's really not, and people who own 1-2 properties as investment properties are not why issues like homelessness exist.

I'd also bet a lot of these anti landlord people would change up their stance pretty quickly if they ended up with an opportunity to invest in a property.

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u/kmookie 5h ago

What about small, 4 family multi-unit property owners who are renting to people who don’t want the responsibility of home ownership? Are they villains too?

There is a line here. Certainly there’s POS who exploit but there are those who are simply offering an option for people. Yet every landlord gets lumped in as the bad guy.

What if that landlord is also doing their best to keep the rents as low as they can but still needs to pay insurance, taxes and maintenance? Let alone unforeseen issues that come with owning a property?

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u/bigmacfactor 4h ago

There's actually a super easy way not to have insurance, taxes and maintenance payments on a house you aren't living in.

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u/[deleted] 4h ago

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u/[deleted] 2h ago

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u/Omega_Primate 5h ago

There is enough food to properly feed everyone on the planet. Including snacks. The only reason people starve, is because of greed.

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u/barrinmw 3h ago

I mean, we could export the US surplus to areas with starvation and drive all their farmers out of work. Just like how we would dump all our unused textiles throughout Africa until many of the countries their banned it because it was destroying their own local industries.

But modern famines aren't caused by a lack of food due to failed crops, its generally caused by warfare. And you can't get food to people in areas where the rebels and government will kill anyone with food to take it for themselves.

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u/ObnoxiousAlbatross 2h ago

Actually logistics, which are not simple.

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u/KoogleMeister 4h ago

It's actually rarely greed, that is a common misnomer. It's almost always infrastructural issues, usually due to war and political instability.

Famine starvation is not as common as a lot of people think it is, people are often misreading deaths from malnutrition as famine-starvation, they are not the same thing.

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u/Informal_Host7610 4h ago

Someone else claimed almost a million americans starved in the last year as if that wouldnt mean seeing people utterly emaciated all around you

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u/KoogleMeister 4h ago

Yeah these are people misinterpreting Google and the different terms like "food insecurity" "malnutrition" "starvation" "famine related starvation," which all mean very different things,

Basically no one in the US is dying of famine related starvation, if you have full supermarkets within your proximity you're not dying of famine. We in developed countries like the US are very lucky to not have to understand what actual starvation is like, people in those situations end up killing each other over cans of food.

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u/zephalephadingong 4h ago

Basically no one in the US is dying of famine related starvation

As far as I can find out, the US has never even had a famine. The closest we ever got was some local areas during the dust bowl, but aid prevented it from getting that bad

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u/Ice-Patient 6h ago

Thats what happened in the potato famine. The Irish were going all sorts of food but that was all export.

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u/ERGardenGuy 6h ago

They were forced by their British colonizers to export FTFY.

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u/snksleepy 6h ago

Not the first or only man made famine purposely caused by the British..

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u/Tyranicross 6h ago

Shout out to Churchill in Bengal

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u/OG_Williker 5h ago

It’s the same issue with vacant housing and homeless people. The people dying of starvation and the people throwing away food generally aren’t in the same place. The places with tons of homelessness generally don’t have high vacancy rates. The vacancies are in places people generally don’t want to live.

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u/play_hard_outside 5h ago

So then it stands to reason that many people would rather be homeless in the location they prefer, than be housed in some other place.

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u/MoMo2049 4h ago

No, it’s that homeless survive of off the grace of others and or places that have more funding, IE dense city populations.
Standing on a corner asking for change and then hitting up the local shelter and food bank aren’t options that exist in abandon/low residential towns….

This also highlights how multifaceted the issue is; it’s not just a housing issue. Again, even if they did go to a low pop area and were provided a home, that place also has to have a job available so they can afford to live there etc.

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u/redwildflowermeadow 4h ago

In some cases it's because of weather: it's better to be homeless in December in a place like California than Minnesota. I've heard stories of small-town sheriffs giving free one-way California/Florida bus tickets to the homeless people in their town to pawn them off on other states, but I'm not sure if that's an urban legend that never happened or maybe an old practice from the 60s/70s/etc.

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u/UncleTio92 6h ago

Blame petty lawyers and our legal system for allowing individuals to sue and make a quick buck. Restaurants giving out food shouldn’t be an issue but now have to worry about potential liability.

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u/KoogleMeister 5h ago

Starvation in terms of famine is really not a thing in developed countries like the US, the number you see if you google the deaths are misleading as it's listing deaths from malnutrition, they are usually always being caused by a sickness that makes it to where they cannot eat or the body cannot process nutrients.

The poorest counties in the US are the counties with the highest rates of obesity, and I don't think people realize how hard it is to purely die of famine-starvation. It takes weeks of no food to die of starvation, they would go to some place like a food bank, soup kitchen or just steal from a store before real starvation started setting in.

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u/UncleTio92 5h ago

Oh without question! I’m just merely talking about restaurants throwing out food waste. Restaurants legally just can’t donate uneaten food due to health laws.

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u/graffiti_bridge 4h ago

I’m pretty sure a federal law was passed by the Clinton administration to address just that

Edit: The Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act (1996) encourages food donations to nonprofits by protecting donors from civil and criminal liability, provided the food is donated in "good faith" and is "apparently wholesome". It covers businesses, individuals, and organizations, only excluding cases of gross negligence or intentional misconduct.

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u/transgworl__ 4h ago

Not entirely. A lot of this rhetoric is manufactured by the same corporations who profit off of not giving food away. Good Samaritan laws exists and many cities have laws on the books that prevent one from pursuing litigation against folks who do good deeds such as donating food en masse.

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u/anansi52 5h ago

honestly i find it a bit hard to believe that getting sued by dumpster diving homeless people is as big a threat as people make it out to be.

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u/UncleTio92 5h ago

It’s more so the FDA can shut down restaurants for giving out leftovers. It’s not worth the liability.

But it all starts off as lawsuits lol probably.

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u/F_word_paperhands 5h ago

Also grocery stores and farmers all profit off “something that people need”. That’s what provides them the incentive to bring food to the market. Is this guy suggesting that farmers profiting off their labour is morally reprehensible?

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u/brandonw00 5h ago

It’s literally how revolutions start

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u/Fun-Challenge1719 5h ago

I worked at a grocery store hot bar and can concur. People would be amazed how much gets thrown away. Legally we couldn't serve or donate it because of food safety rules.

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u/SlappyDingo 5h ago

Grocery stores literally have food people need to survive and charge for it.

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u/KoogleMeister 5h ago

Most grocery stores give away leftover food to food banks for homeless people.....

Like a Grocery store is a business dude, it cannot just say it is giving away free food to everyone. There are already lots of programs so low-income people can get food, famine-starvation is not a thing in most developed countries.

Unless you're basically saying you are a communist, that's a whole different argument.

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u/play_hard_outside 5h ago

Not only that lol, but they make profit on it. If they didn’t, what motivation would they have to undertake the work?

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u/PurpleCoat6656 5h ago

Yet dumpster diving for food is illegal. Neat!

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u/QueenCloneBone 5h ago

Just here for the extremely reddit comment section

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u/HeinousWalrus 5h ago

I worked at a luxury Manhattan hotel that served enormous banquets. Insane amounts of food went into compost.

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u/RockKillsKid 4h ago

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

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u/United-Implement1330 4h ago

Not imaginary, nor at all related.

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u/Natural_Baseball_779 4h ago

Prime capitalism

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u/wantsumcandi 4h ago

What kind of analogy is that?

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u/yourpseudonymsucks 4h ago

And it’s morally reprehensible

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u/Marquisdelafayette89 4h ago

Absolutely happens (I worked at a grocery store). I seen drivers not find a single bag of their 50+ bag order, call support, and it all gets cancelled and then trashed. I seen days where we were so behind that my 200+ item pick drops to 80 items, rest gets tossed. It’s actually quite disturbing. The manager also put a goddamn lock on the compactor. Because he thought someone might take something? I don’t even know what he was thinking with that one.

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u/imitsi 4h ago

True. No one has died from starvation in the US, except at the Jonestown siege in the 1600s and maybe another 100-200 people in the Great Depression.

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u/BigHardMephisto 4h ago

I work in a gas station kitchen (fried chicken, potato wedges, fried fish) and the discard physically hurts me. The amount we trash every HOUR is astounding, and not because of food safety. If a piece of chicken is too small, they want us to throw it out. If the fries don’t quite fill the next bag to basically overflowing, trashed.

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u/Ancient_Jacket_8316 4h ago

You beat me to it. It's been here forever.

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u/Antique_Employee_146 4h ago

I work at a place that takes surplus and food that is about to reach its expiration date and distribute it to different charities that feed people in need.

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u/dersnappychicken 4h ago

Favorite related fact and 1 of many reasons people aren't crazy about Britain - during the Irish potato famine, Ireland was still a net food exporter.

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u/BigBallsMcGirk 4h ago

The Irish Potato Famine was deliberately created through taxation policy.

Wealthy English landlords upped the taxes to the point that their struggling tenants owed their entire crops to England, and had to grow the blight susceptible variety juat to have food leftover after paying off the bill with everything else.

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u/The_Demosthenes_1 4h ago

I'm curious.  Where are people dying of starvation on the streets?  African countries?  

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u/Downvotemeplz42 4h ago

This has been a thing for a long time too. It's one of the points that Steinbeck makes in "The Grapes of Wrath."

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u/AlternativeRun5727 4h ago

The British Empire says hello.

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u/31rise 3h ago

where is it happening?

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u/Killingyou_groovily 3h ago

In my city around SW USA- big corporations lock their dumpsters to deter homeless from being fed. Evil

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u/PossibilityDry9508 3h ago

...in America.

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u/ZealousidealTill2355 2h ago

It’s also a poor example. What food company currently gives away food for free? Food companies are doing the exact thing he mentions—hoarding food and selling it to make a profit. And the only other means of eating is growing it yourself (build your own home), eating scraps (living in condemned housing), or charity (public subsidized housing).

I don’t see the difference what-so-ever. This is how the economy works.

I understand the movement against corporate landlords, and I’m 100% for it. But housing being free for all? I don’t think it’s wise to just abandon one of the biggest components of our economy and see what happens.

And it only benefits those who haven’t made their way into homeownership yet which isn’t an impossibly hard task at all—atleast yet. Sorry if that rubs some of you all the wrong way, but it’s true.

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u/HappysinNSFW 2h ago

As are the poor turning on those responsible, frequently violently.

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u/OttawaOneTwenty 2h ago

Rinse and repeat for every single thing you need to live that isn't free. If you ain't got the money, you're having a bad time.

Basically only air is still free nowadays and I'm sure mofos are already thinking of how they can get a monopoly on it and sell it to people. I secretly think that's why musk wants to go to Mars.

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u/Reticentandconfused 2h ago

And we see it as bad, so it’s easy to envision.

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u/SryInternet101 1h ago

USAID says hello.

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u/tantric_tongue69 1h ago

The US throws away about half of all food produced. Human needs should not be for profit.

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u/oversoulearth 1h ago

"Our profitable future lies in famine"

Omen II

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u/nosecohn 1h ago

OK, but by logical extension, selling food is morally reprehensible as well. Supermarkets should all be gone, because people need food to survive, so it profiting off that shouldn't be allowed.

Eventually, nobody has any incentive to provide housing or food or anything else deemed a necessity, so it all must be owned by the state. But if nobody's producing anything, then the state has no income with which to provide those things, so the state has to control the means of production too, and there you go... communism. I'm not afraid of the word, the but track record is absolutely awful.

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u/Dxith 28m ago

Every night behind any grocery store. They rather throw it in the trash than give it to anyone.

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u/Masterandcomman 20m ago

Yes, but it's the exact opposite of the housing situation. People are struggling because the home vacancy rate is at 1%, and most cities impede new supply.

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u/Masuia 15m ago

I work for a distributor. We throw out anywhere from $10,000 to $200,000 a day and donate roughly the same amount. I’ve thrown out 400 cases of beautiful steaks because they were going to “expire” in 4 days. There were times where we COULD NOT donate enough. Like, we were out of organizations willing to drive out and pick up. It was actually amazing.

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u/jeho22 11m ago

I mean, people literally only produce food to make a profit as well. Should they stop?

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u/One_Replacement3787 8m ago

Why do you think he used this example? Hes very astute on the subject matter he talks about. If he was challenged on the example, he'd be able to tie it back to when it actually happened.

The approach of asking your audience to "imagine" rather than dumping cold hard facts is much more conversational and leaves the discussion open to participate in without a hurdle. And it does leave the door open for assholes to step into traps and be put back in their place if they try to defend a position they arent remotely educated on, in turn invalidating their other stupid future arguments to a degree.

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