I saw this Tweet and had a Poe’s Law double take.
No way could that be a serious opinion. This guy yearns for Soviet style bread rationing because buying bread is somehow unfair.
This guy can’t be real. I checked. He is. He’s from Portland.
Since I was curious, I decided to check Safeway to find the cost of bread in Portland. Store brand bread is $0.89 for a 16-oz loaf. Just because this jackass only buys Whole Foods bread, doesn’t mean it’s unaffordable.
I don’t know what kind of ideological bubble this guy lives in but clearly it is to the Left of Karl Marx.
The horrendously Right Wing news source NPR gave us an inside look at the bread situation in Venezuela.
Meanwhile, those bakers still in business scramble to find the flour their livelihood depends on. That includes people like Carlos Coelho, who has run the Latina bakery in Caracas for the last 15 years. On a recent day, he started making bread at 7 a.m. Outside the bakery, a line begins to form long before the bread is ready.
Coelho will only churn out about 500 French-style baguettes on this day. He would make more bread if he could, but he’s down to his last few 100-pound sacks of flour.
At midday, Latina workers pull the baguettes from the oven and dump them into bins. The smell drifts into the street and the people in line push forward. Coelho allows just five customers into the store at once. They’ve been waiting in line for two hours, and they are allowed just two baguettes each. In exchange for bread, two policemen monitor the crowd in case fights break out.
Within 40 minutes, the baguettes are sold out. But it could be a while before Coelho has any more to offer.
The people in Venezuela stand in line for bread because there isn’t enough of it. In 2017, Venezuelans lost and average of 24 lbs from a lack of food in a phenomon that has come to be known as the Maduro Diet.
The Houston Chronicle wrote a piece in 2014 recounting when Boris Yeltsin visited Texas. Of all the things the Yeltsin saw in the United States, what affected him the most? The most pedestrian of American activities, buying groceries.
Yeltsin, then 58, “roamed the aisles of Randall’s nodding his head in amazement,” wrote Asin. He told his fellow Russians in his entourage that if their people, who often must wait in line for most goods, saw the conditions of U.S. supermarkets, “there would be a revolution.”
Yeltsin asked customers about what they were buying and how much it cost, later asking the store manager if one needed a special education to manage a store. In the Chronicle photos, you can see him marveling at the produce section, the fresh fish market, and the checkout counter. He looked especially excited about frozen pudding pops.
“Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he said.
The fact that stores like these were on nearly every street corner in America amazed him. They even offered free cheese samples. According to Asin, Yeltsin didn’t leave empty-handed, as he was given a small bag of goodies to enjoy on his trip.
About a year after the Russian leader left office, a Yeltsin biographer later wrote that on the plane ride to Yeltsin’s next destination, Miami, he was despondent. He couldn’t stop thinking about the plentiful food at the grocery store and what his countrymen had to subsist on in Russia.
Here is how the New York Times (pre-TDS) covered Yeltsin’s experience.
During a visit to the United States in 1989 he became more convinced than ever that Russia had been ruinously damaged by its centralized, state-run economic system, where people stood in long lines to buy the most basic needs of life and more often than not found the shelves bare. He was overwhelmed by what he saw at a Houston supermarket, by the kaleidoscopic variety of meats and vegetables available to ordinary Americans.
Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’ ”
He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” An aide, Lev Sukhanov was reported to have said that it was at that moment that “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside his boss.
Let all of that sink in for a moment.
Boris Yeltsin rose to prominence in Soviet communism. He was the President of the Russian Federation.
What caused him the most mental anguish wasn’t a lifetime of living under the threat of nuclear Armageddon. It was the knowledge that working class Americans could buy frozen deserts and he as the post powerful man in Russia couldn’t.
But I guess Boris Yeltsin is too Right Wing for this jackass too.
There is no ideological argument that could be made that will work on this guy.
Anybody who yearns for breadlines for “free” bread, made in a bakery patrolled by police, with flour from wheat grown on a collectivized farm worked by political prisoner slave labor, because that’s somehow more fair than buying a loaf for less than a dollar is just gone.
All I can say to this is, I’m going to buy the cheapest bread I can and use the money I saved to stock up on ammo.
This guy is the kind of person that supported Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
God help us if or when Portland become the mainstream Democrat platform.
I fear it’s a “when,” not an “if.”
I think this guys tweet is an excellent example of so much of what we see today. An opinion or statent expressed in a manner specifically designed to deliver the most effective zinger, “wit”, or snark possible with that given combination of words. In this it succeeds, but most tweets and statements of this sort of nature fall apart under even the most minor scrutiny.
This sort of attitude is pervasive, a sort of edgy deliver the best zinger one upsmanship in all sorts of new media, and it is in my opninon a serious detractor and distraction from actual diaglogue.
This is because it is not actually diaglogue but rhetoric, because it does the same thing a rhetoric; deliver the appealing argument to win, not necessarily the true argument.
Russia had rubles, still does though they aren’t worth much. They never had free bread. No allegedly socialist country did, or does, as far as I know. So his delusions go quite deep indeed.
In fact, bread or the lack of it is a tool for communist control. Trotsky said it well:
“In a country where the sole employer is the State, opposition means death by slow starvation: The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced by a new one: who does not obey shall not eat.”
I heard a similar story in college. Late in the existence of the Soviet Union, some students came to study at our university, smack-dab in the middle of Illinois farm country. On the drive from Chicago, the students marvelled at the towers they saw at farms and in the small towns. They asked what they were — silos.
“Missile silos?”
“No, grain silos. They’re for storing grain between harvest and delivery.”
Niel Bortz had a radio show. Back in the early 2000s he was talkin about “poverty” in the US
Running down the list of assets “ poor” people had the exact percentages escapes me,
Over 75 percent had more than 1 car, more than 1 tv. Microwaves ect. Americans are FAR better off than most other countries. I just love these morons who have zero clue on how capital based society works. We the People have a fight on our hands to keep America alive
Let me first express my appreciation for shining a national light on the insanity that rages in Portland. The local news seems to avoid addressing it at all costs.
Portland is a 50 minute drive – an hour with traffic – from my AO. We try to avoid it whenever possible, but they have a few landmarks and attractions that necessitate the occasional day trip. (OMSI and the zoo are almost required for a rounded homeschooling education.)
I won’t go near the place without a double-stack 9mm. And a reload. And we still stay out of downtown as much as possible.
Portlandians think they control the opinion of Oregon as a whole. They think they own the city. In the latter, they are mostly right; the mayor and city council refuse to hold Antifa accountable or control violent scuffles between “counter-protesters” and protesters (or even “counter-protesters” and uninvolved bystanders).
In the former, they are only half right; Oregon has a bit over 4 million residents – Portland city proper only has about 650,000. The Portland Metro area has more, about 2.3 million or so, so they have the numbers to control the legislature and governor’s office…
… but it’s amazing how quickly political alignments shift even a few miles outside the Portland Metro area. There’s almost no fade-in or fade-out. Cross certain county lines, and you go from 80% support for Democrats to 70% for Republicans (and the next county will be 85% Republican). The liberal socialists are highly concentrated in a few small counties in a corner of the state. If it weren’t for the voting numbers, it’d be easy to avoid them and their stupidity.
My reply to this “Revolver Volcelot” would be:
But somehow I don’t think that will penetrate the ideological wall he has erected for himself.
[…] I said Portland is why you should stock up on ammo, well New York City mayor, Bill De Blasio is why we should be allowed to stock up on full auto and […]
When a small child plays with matches inside the house, you stop them because of the extreme level of hazard. You stop them no matter what opinions they hold about what they think they’re doing. Same for every kind of authoritarian beyond some level of extreme.
I wish we could “deport” this moron to Venezuela for a week for some “learning” not school system indoctrination.
Socialism: Waiting [hours] in line to get bread for free [that ran out in the first 10 minutes].
There fixed it.
Waiting in line for bread that’s already run out, and being sent to a death camp for complaining about it.
Another thought that occurred to me:
“Socialism: waiting in line to get bread for free”
OK. Waiting in line for 2-3 hours to MAYBE get an 89-cent loaf of bread for free.
How much is your time worth, man?!
I could pick up soda cans from the side of the road and get enough in deposits to buy my own bread at market price in under an hour!
Alternatively, if you get a job (as in, actually apply with an employer), even under the state’s $9.50/hour minimum wage you can buy 10 loaves of bread at market price with the pay from one hour’s work.
Or… because the man is lazy and/or unemployable… he can stand in line for three hours for a “free” 89-cent loaf.
My time: ~$25/hour (not exactly, but we’ll use that for the sake of argument)
Average teenager’s time: $9.50/hour (minimum wage)
His time: <30 cents/hour
(For the record, I wouldn't hire him to do yard work, even at $0.30/hour.)
And after he devalues his own time and effort, he wonders why nobody wants to give him theirs.
How much is your time worth? That depends on the individual. (Oh my, what an un-socialist concept that is.) In your case, quite a lot. In his case, most likely nothing at all. He certainly doesn’t come across as a person who ever contributed or produced anything, or ever will.
Where does the bread come from, if it’s for free? Who bakes it, and who pays them for their time? Where do the ingredients come from, and who pays for the energy (gas, electricity, whatever) to run the stove?
Or is the “socialism” part of dude’s post based on some magic bread-creation artifact that requires neither flour nor baking and never wears out?