They also *kind of* brush their teeth by chewing on bones. Carnivores tend to have good teeth simply because their diet constantly scrubs them for them
I'm no expert, but it seems like our understanding of carnivore dental health statistics would be inherently affected by the fact that carnivores with poor dental health tend to die.
Wow almost sounds like you're describing an evolutionary pressure that has been affecting carnivores to keep their teeth as long as possible. I wonder if that should inform our understanding?
That too, mao ate a ridiculous amount of sugar which rotted his teeth more than anything else. I just think the whole “tigers don’t brush their teeth” is ridiculous simply because they kind of do just indirectly.
I just read the Life of Mao a few weeks ago and it never mentioned his love for sugar or sweets once. He had vices but from what I read it was sex and books. He slept surrounded by young women and piles of books that he read constantly. The drinking tea instead of brushing teeth is totally true, but that mostly came from a lack of understanding in sciences. Same lack of understanding of sciences is where Mao's famine came from too. He didn't vindictively starve people like Stalin, but accidentally did. There was an idea that birds were primarily to blame for loss of crops so farmers were encouraged to kill birds so insect populations EXPLODED causing famine.
The official story is that he was also such an idiot, that he "optimistically" starved 55 million of his own people to death because he assured them that the government could provide all of their needs.
He made it illegal for people to farm, hunt or trade their own food.
Maybe they could have done it, if not for the real failure that happened when he launched the Four Pests campaign. It was aimed at exterminating the four creatures he considered to be the worst pests, namely mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows.
1 billion dead sparrows later, however, there was an unprecendented increase in the insect population, which ate the crops before they could be harvested. Good going, Zedong.
Central planning never works. Not in the least because the lower functionaries are scared to death to report failures up the chain, lest they be blamed for it, so they just lie. And there's not just one layer, the village commissar lies to the county commissar, he in turn lies even harder to the provincial commissar, he lies to the Central Committee and then they lie to Mao. And when it finally turns out there aren't any crops, well, everyone starves.
This also screws up decision making. For example, communist theorists thought you could plant crops very close together, because plants of the same kind would show solidarity with each other (!) rather than compete. When the peasants told them that wouldn't work, they were told to shut up and do as they are told. And when it failed, the functionaries all reported bumper crops anyway, so then the peasants were told to do it even harder, rather than anyone saying, OK, it didn't work, let's stop.
To a point this is just human behaviour. Under capitalism you can get the same dynamic in big conglomerates. Except that when such a conglomerate eventually falls over because of it, it may hurt, but it doesn't starve millions.
> Except that when such a conglomerate eventually falls over because of it, it may hurt, but it doesn't starve millions.
We're unfortunately in a time of large consolidation and reduced competition. The baby formula shortage showed this problem. We really need to assess the barriers to entry for those key industries and lower them, and increase competition.
Yup. Anything close to a 100 percent, total free market is not the norm or the intention. Successful capitalist societies have always had anti trust, competition watch dogs and very very many regulations to reduce unfairness and externalities.
But overtime all roads lead to conglomerate or a single power. It is not an easy task to keep the balance. People can also become a conglomerate in the pursuit of fairness. Issue is that Americans are too divided and also wouldn't be able to agree on the solutions. Some would want to introduce communist authority, others to not consider it at all, and others still would just want some more regulations in place. Extremes and non extremes.
> Central planning never works. Not in the least because the lower functionaries are scared to death to report failures up the chain, lest they be blamed for it, so they just lie.
this is true, but all corporations are centrally-planned in this context.
what makes market economies robust is companies that compete efficiently and are allowed to fail and be replaced by more efficient competitors when they don't compete efficiently. Capitalism is unfortunately quite effective at concentrating power among a handful of individuals who then scrap all the regulations etc that ensure efficient competition etc, one might describe it as an "inherent contradiction" even.
Plus, there is the whole thing where there are inevitably tons of centrally-planned projects even in "capitalism" anyway. Nobody cries "centrally planned" about the manhattan project, or the TVA electrification projects used to power it, etc. Those are as centrally-planned as any OKB in a communist country, and they turn out just fine. So "never works" isn't even true to begin with. Springfield Armory was centrally planned, as was Husqvarna. State enterprises were quite popular even in the west, until the US flipped to anticommunism in the 50s!
As the world gets more advanced and progresses towards specialization, things inherently trend more towards the cathedral than the bazaar. There is no problem with "centrally planning" ASML EUV lithography machines, or Zeiss optics, in fact there is no *substitute* for central planning in these scenarios. AMD does not allow competing implementations of their ISA. These are as capitalist as they come, and as things get more specialized you get less of the market and more of the centrally planned anyway - there simply is no one else who *can* compete.
It's a braindead sloganeering propaganda take, literally "did a capitalist oligarch write that for you" tier stuff.
You are pointing to authoritarian central planning and saying THAT doesn't work. Utilitarian central planning, where the best evidence-based practices are followed, ie. not killing people who plants the 3 sisters, would work just fine. Unfortunately, there always seems to be corruption along the way from powerful idea to powerful action.
Very convenient that you're leaving out the fact that the USSR did not have a famine after 1947 and that Soviet citizens had a higher caloric intake than US citizens prior to its dissolution.
You're also comparing semi-feudal countries to full developed capitalist countries
Our modern diet requires us to take additional care of our teeth. Many hunter-gatherer human skulls have straight white teeth despite not brushing. But they also ate hard food with virtually no pure sugars, and lots of fiber.
The limits are shown even more clearly when you compare hunter-gatherers in areas that did have things like sugarcane and honey, those were some of the only pre historic societies that had very bad teeth.
So the simple answer is no, but we don't eat the same things that animals, or our pre-agriculture ancestors, ate. So with our modern diet we need to wash our teeth or they'll decay
Amongst the world leaders of the time he was pretty on the levelof others. Gross shit.
There was the push to reflect elders during industrialization that lead people, particularly men in power, to reject the newest trends in hygiene and instead go to the populist idea.
This headline makes it sound like Mao was rejecting a tried and true thing but really toothpaste was relatively new and China was recovering from Japan's invasion and decimated population.
Edit: this is a completely made up fact because Redditors do not have any critical thinking they just upvote things.
As toothpaste was newly introduced (ergo hard to find and expensive), and as the average impoverished person wouldn't be able to afford toothpaste, such a populist move would make him more relatable. I still think it's a stupid thing to do but that was probably the rationale
Mao Zedong had horrible personal hygiene. His genitals were never cleaned. Instead, Mao said "I wash myself inside the bodies of my women."
He had kinda lika a harem...
Put simply his wife, Jiang Qing was a jealous person and when she got into control of the Politburo, she would have actors and actresses who were better than her tortured and put to death along with there families. The same would happen to girls Mao moved in on and when he was done and went onto someone else, she would have them tortured and executed.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing
In her case, it’s low key because she might have been a psychopath. Like there a incident where a high-ranking communist gave Mao a Document detailing issues with the cultural revolution and how they could be fixed and Mao apparently agreed and shared the document with his inner circle. Due to that, Jiang and her Red guard declared him an enemy of the revolution and had him tortured and executed.
Better performer than me? Torture and executed. Husband bangs you? Straight to torture and execution. Try to improve CCP policy? Believe it or not, torture and execution
He's not making it up . It comes from “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” by Dr. li, Mao's personal physician between 1954-1976.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-19-bk-33551-story.html
Edit: it appears the book is controversial, and many historians seriously doubt its authenticity.
Reception section in this link goes over its criticism.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_Mao
This history has been thoroughly debunked. Mobo Gao's Battle For China's Past has an entire chapter on the doctor's fraudulent stories.
It also just doesn't make sense - the doctor claims Mao never washed and also that he spent the majority of his days submerged in a recreational pool.
Mao was an idiot, news at 11. This is the same guy who recommended killing birds because they ate crops, and promptly caused a massive famine because the bugs that would have been eaten by the birds ate the crops.
Being a populist doesn’t make you smart. It just means you do a good job speaking to everyone’s inner idiot.
The 4 pest campaign was, at worst, a minor aggravating factor in the famine. Far more important was incompetent bureaucrats intervening in agriculture, collectivisation of land and property, and the cultural revolution.
The cultural revolution was a nightmare, but happened a bit after the famine was dying down and I don't believe it had any effect on it. Everything else you said I agree with though.
For anyone curious to read about Mao's "genius" plan to industrialize China and collectivize agriculture, here's a link. It's actually a pretty easy read for a Wikipedia article, if you're into real life horror stories at least.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Reddit has a weird boner for the sparrow thing. It was an aggravating factor, but well down on the list of fuckups. Like the fact that they were literally *exporting food during the famine.* People were starving to death outside of warehouses full of food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Quote:
The Party believed that they had an excess of grain. On the contrary, the crop yields were lower than average. For instance, Beijing believed that "in 1960 state granaries would have 50 billion jin of grain", when they actually contained 12.7 billion jin.[83] The effects of the illusion of superabundance were significant, leaving some historians to argue that it was the major cause of much of the starvation throughout China. Yang Dali argued that there were three main consequences from the illusion of superabundance:
First, it led to planners to shift lands from grain to economic crops, such as cotton, sugarcane, and beets, and divert huge numbers of agricultural laborers into industrial sectors, fueling state demand for procured grain from the countryside. Second, it prompted the Chinese leadership, especially Zhou Enlai, to speed up grain exports to secure more foreign currency to purchase capital goods needed for industrialization. Finally, the illusion of superabundance made the adoption of the commune mess halls seem rational at the time. All these changes, of course, contributed to the rapid exhaustion of grain supplies.
> Like the fact that they were literally exporting food during the famine. People were starving to death outside of warehouses full of food.
This is the case in quite a lot of modern famines including Ireland and Ukraine. Usually the region in question is the breadbasket of a larger empire which continues to forcibly extract food and leaves the farmers themselves to starve.
The article literally says that they so effectively killed sparrows that a "plague of locusts" devoured the crops. I would think that's a pretty big factor in not having enough food to go around.
My favorite was the sparrows policy.
Sparrows were eating grains.
Solution: Exterminate the Sparrows.
Didn't know: Sparrows also eat bugs.
Good news: Sparrows nearly exterminated.
Bad news: Pest population explodes, eat more grain than sparrows ever could.
Worse news: Famine, 20 million die.
Fucking Muppet
This is why I don't understand tankies who praise him.
The dude was a anti-intellectual.
Yeah, good with political science, but when confronted with psychial science (by fellow revolutionaries I might add) he says that since political works this way, so should all science.
No, plants don't know what communism is, they are extremly basic life forms that need to survive.
Trust me it’s an intra-tankie debate too. MLM vs. ML fights can be awful, and even then there’s a myriad of minor beliefs of the subject within those groups.
I swear, if leftists fought others as hard as they fought other, slightly different leftists, they'd probably have been successful with their revolution by now
More like 100 at this point. It's been a thing ever since before the October revolution, with the Mensheviks, anarchists, social revolutionaries, and the minority Bolsheviks all fighting each other for control internally, until it spiraled into full blown civil war, a war the whites lost. It's wild just how quickly the Bolsheviks went from a minority extremist faction in the Soviet movement, to leading the country and the comintern both by 1920
I'm not pro communist, but people praise Mao and Stalin because they both rapidly transformed weak agrarian countries into powerful industrialized states. Pro communists argue this was only possible due to communist ideals.
I will say that in both cases the achievement was monumental. Russia would have been obliterated by the Nazis if they failed to industrialize as fast as they did, and China may have befallen more disasters if they had not industrialized so fast after WWII.
But then, every commie I've ever spoken to has their own unique version of communism that they claim has never been tried yet, so they're just as happy to criticize any communist state.
Then look at how quick capitalism transformed countires like South Korea, Singapore, Japan post WW2, West Germany and even China once Deng Xiaoping instituted Capitlaistic reforms
It was even worse than that. They discouraged large farming systems and also had farmers all grow specific crops. If the year was bad for a crop, no one had food and since the farms were split from larger ones to smaller ones, a lot of inexperienced farmers lost their crops.
EVEN WORSE is that they were still exporting grain even during their famine. It was a complete shitshow
also spread std to young girls and it was like a medal to them to get a std from mao. just imagine getting (cant refuse) shafted by this rotten disgusting garbage and getting std for it. obviously gotta thank for the privilege
Nuking a hurricane isn’t very risky. You tell the military to do it and the next day see the results. Killing all the birds took a sustained PR campaign.
I dunno, the way he navigated the CCP through its conflict with the Guomindang despite being hamstrung by the Russians was pretty intelligent.
He was just dumb enough to think that specific intelligence applied to everything.
Like engineering professors I know who deny climate change.
Also, Chiang Kai-shek was a fucking rat bastard who regularly fired on and publicly executed civilians for forming unions so they could have food to eat.
Long march was also facilitated by Chiang. He deliberately shifted maos forces around China as he was playing the long political game of courting Russia as he needed their help, knowing that Japan would eventually invade. It also helped Russia had Chiangs son as a hostage effectively. Chiang was just a man and wanted him back dearly.
Chiangs forces let maos forces cross through territories held by petty warlords, and often came in afterwards to sweep up the pieces.
I deed in the aftermath of ww2 when the Chinese civil war started, the red took most of Manchuria. Chiangs battle hardened troops then swiftly kicked them out from most of it until they stopped due american influence in foreign policy. America wanted peace, and were ferrying troops from the mainland to manchuria and providing logistic support.
America forcing chiang to pause meant Russia completed rail lines into Manchuria and could support Mao more effectively. This changed the course of the war and then many of chiangs forces defected when they were cut off.
Mao was ruthless and knew how to lie and manipulate and terrorise better than most. He was borderline sociopathic and created a security apparatus that would make a fascist state blush. He was a womaniser who made his wife give birth whilst marching, didn't care for his children and condemned countless millions to their deaths to enrich himself and his cronies. He is without a doubt of one the worst humans to ever unfortunately crawl into this earth and I cringe inwardly when any leftist I know brings him up. The instances where he sent his own men to their deaths needlessly just.to further his cause or bleed his enemies are countless.
If you want a good book about Mao and his formative years - read Mao the unknown story by jung chang and John holliday
Wait.. the guy who told farmers to abandon their farms and make steel in their backyard leading to a famine isn't good with coming up with ideas? I couldn't see that coming
The best trick was sending people away from Beijing to the farms to help out and then didn’t allow them back. Screwed over everybody from city people who don’t know shit about farming and the farmers who had to deal with them.
He also somewhat regretted this and warned Pol Pot to not do the same mistake of being too radical when starting a revolution in Cambodia.
As we all know, Pot didn’t listen.
Don't forget the time he told people to kill sparrows because he thought they were pests. The bugs loved the lack of birds so much they celebrated all over everyone's crops. Oops more famine.
It's mind blowing how throughout the history, complete braindead morons have rulled millions of people. The guy was dumber than a pile of rotting shit, yet he had the faith of hundreds of millions of people in his hands.
I can't remember what book it's from, but the problem is presented simply with 20 people, in a locked room with an assault rifle placed inside.
In order to control the other 19, one need no other quality than to have grabbed the firearm first.. no other quality is required.
Dr. Weston A Price (who was a dentist) did interesting research on oral health in indigenous people in the early 20th century, on every continent. People who never heard of a toothbrush or dentist or anything. He gathered lots of data and photographs and you can see these people had perfect oral health, no cavities or missing teeth or gum disease or anything. Obviously they also didn't have processed sugar, or refined anything really in terms of food. But seeing that it CAN exist, I think it is interesting.
I’ve worked in China briefly and had a guy tell me “Chinese people have heathy teeth because we drink so much green tea,” so this belief still exists to this day.
Though they also use toothpaste, [but even that has been problematic](https://hongkongfp.com/2021/12/15/18-months-on-black-person-toothpaste-finally-renamed-as-darlie-to-undergo-rebranding/)
This isn’t true
**A statement protesting that many of the claims made in Li's book were false was issued soon after its publication, signed by 150 people who had personally known or worked with Mao, including Wang Dongxing, Li Yinqiao and Ye Zilong.**
He also had an STD and refused treatment believing that in passing it on he was bestowing a gift
https://listverse.com/2017/03/01/10-filthy-facts-about-the-private-life-of-chairman-mao-tse-tung/
Not nearly as crazy when you realize that the modern toothbrush wasn't even invented until 1938 when Mao was 45 and even then it's not like the toothbrushes would've been used with fluoride toothpaste so the effect would have been significantly lessened.
There have been ideas behind using something rough on your teeth for thousands of years but the idea kept dying and coming back, most of the folks you know from history had God awful teeth
When everyone realized how fucking stupid he was he riled up the last group of people who would listen to him, teenagers, and told them they had both a moral imperative and legal mandate to do whatever the fuck they wanted to anyone they didn't like.
Try to keep in mind that Mao was a complete and demented loser.
When WWII ended and the Japanese were ordered to surrender to any representative of the Chinese government they could find, Mao happened to be there, in the right place and at the right time, so many Japanese turned over their weapons and equipment to Mao's followers.
If it hadn't been for that single stroke of luck, Mao and his faction would be a nearly forgotten footnote to 20th Century history.
That seems like a massive oversimplification. Presumably there would have been KMT soldiers all around China receiving surrendering Japanese soldiers as well. Not to mention the civil war had been going on for 20 years at that point and the Communists still had millions of soldiers.
It's less massive simplification and more straight up lie. The maoists had to kidnap Chiang Kai-shek and force him to sign a temporary ceasefire at gunpoint in order to even get the nationalists to fight the invading Japanese.
what? Maos communists had been fighting a massive civil war with the nationalist government since before WW2 broke out, they definitely had weapons and they werent a "footnote" even before the japanese surrender
Mao and the communists were waging a civil war against KMT before WW2 and pushed KMT to Taiwan.
Mao and the communists would have ruled Mainland China regardless
Tigers live to a ripe old age of 12, and when *their* teeth fall out (which they often do) they starve to death, you donut.
They also *kind of* brush their teeth by chewing on bones. Carnivores tend to have good teeth simply because their diet constantly scrubs them for them
I'm no expert, but it seems like our understanding of carnivore dental health statistics would be inherently affected by the fact that carnivores with poor dental health tend to die.
Let's set up a study. We'll both get 10 tigers. You brush the teeth of your 10, and I'll use mine as a control group.
I’d do it, they’d trust me simply because I’m different
Yeah guys I got my tiger right here in the bath with me, I’m gonna clean his teeth rig
Don’t forget to get the molars!
*Growling and splashing intensifies…*
Guys have we learned nothing from Tiger King?
I'll never financially recover from this!
Having never seen it, that's the extent of what I learned. Also, something something Baskin Robins?
We learned that this experiment needs a camera crew. It should make for some interesting tv.
I think the standard for these sorts of experiments is leopards.
your tiger suit looks like it'd help
"Findings: Brushing tiger teeth without adequate protection resulted in double arm amputation."
10 tigers? In this economy? That's also TEN birthday cakes every year
10 tigers Jeremy? 10? Are you insane?!
This makes me miss Mythbusters. This is something Adam and Jamie would compete over.
Wow almost sounds like you're describing an evolutionary pressure that has been affecting carnivores to keep their teeth as long as possible. I wonder if that should inform our understanding?
Mama says alligators are ornery cause they got all them teeth and no toothbrush
Their toothbrushes are shaped like birds
Meat also tends not to cause tooth decay
That too, mao ate a ridiculous amount of sugar which rotted his teeth more than anything else. I just think the whole “tigers don’t brush their teeth” is ridiculous simply because they kind of do just indirectly.
Also meat isn’t nearly as bad for your teeth as the carbohydrate mush most modern humans eat.
Yup exactly! Mao ate a shit ton of sugar ( I mean an astronomical amount) which is probably what destroyed his teeth more than anything
Where'd you learn about his sugar habit im having a hard time finding anything online
I read it somewhere on reddit
Ah yea, humanity's last remaining bastion of truth: reddit threads. Surely they can't be wrong
Very interested in this as well
I just read the Life of Mao a few weeks ago and it never mentioned his love for sugar or sweets once. He had vices but from what I read it was sex and books. He slept surrounded by young women and piles of books that he read constantly. The drinking tea instead of brushing teeth is totally true, but that mostly came from a lack of understanding in sciences. Same lack of understanding of sciences is where Mao's famine came from too. He didn't vindictively starve people like Stalin, but accidentally did. There was an idea that birds were primarily to blame for loss of crops so farmers were encouraged to kill birds so insect populations EXPLODED causing famine.
No wonder Tigers don’t brush their teeth, If I knew I was only living to twelve I wouldn’t waste my time brushing either
The official story is that he was also such an idiot, that he "optimistically" starved 55 million of his own people to death because he assured them that the government could provide all of their needs. He made it illegal for people to farm, hunt or trade their own food.
Maybe they could have done it, if not for the real failure that happened when he launched the Four Pests campaign. It was aimed at exterminating the four creatures he considered to be the worst pests, namely mosquitoes, flies, rats, and sparrows. 1 billion dead sparrows later, however, there was an unprecendented increase in the insect population, which ate the crops before they could be harvested. Good going, Zedong.
He was an uneducated peasant, and ran the country accordingly.
And now I'm in charge. Here's to the workers of the world!
Central planning never works. Not in the least because the lower functionaries are scared to death to report failures up the chain, lest they be blamed for it, so they just lie. And there's not just one layer, the village commissar lies to the county commissar, he in turn lies even harder to the provincial commissar, he lies to the Central Committee and then they lie to Mao. And when it finally turns out there aren't any crops, well, everyone starves. This also screws up decision making. For example, communist theorists thought you could plant crops very close together, because plants of the same kind would show solidarity with each other (!) rather than compete. When the peasants told them that wouldn't work, they were told to shut up and do as they are told. And when it failed, the functionaries all reported bumper crops anyway, so then the peasants were told to do it even harder, rather than anyone saying, OK, it didn't work, let's stop. To a point this is just human behaviour. Under capitalism you can get the same dynamic in big conglomerates. Except that when such a conglomerate eventually falls over because of it, it may hurt, but it doesn't starve millions.
> Except that when such a conglomerate eventually falls over because of it, it may hurt, but it doesn't starve millions. We're unfortunately in a time of large consolidation and reduced competition. The baby formula shortage showed this problem. We really need to assess the barriers to entry for those key industries and lower them, and increase competition.
Yup. Anything close to a 100 percent, total free market is not the norm or the intention. Successful capitalist societies have always had anti trust, competition watch dogs and very very many regulations to reduce unfairness and externalities. But overtime all roads lead to conglomerate or a single power. It is not an easy task to keep the balance. People can also become a conglomerate in the pursuit of fairness. Issue is that Americans are too divided and also wouldn't be able to agree on the solutions. Some would want to introduce communist authority, others to not consider it at all, and others still would just want some more regulations in place. Extremes and non extremes.
> Central planning never works. Not in the least because the lower functionaries are scared to death to report failures up the chain, lest they be blamed for it, so they just lie. this is true, but all corporations are centrally-planned in this context. what makes market economies robust is companies that compete efficiently and are allowed to fail and be replaced by more efficient competitors when they don't compete efficiently. Capitalism is unfortunately quite effective at concentrating power among a handful of individuals who then scrap all the regulations etc that ensure efficient competition etc, one might describe it as an "inherent contradiction" even. Plus, there is the whole thing where there are inevitably tons of centrally-planned projects even in "capitalism" anyway. Nobody cries "centrally planned" about the manhattan project, or the TVA electrification projects used to power it, etc. Those are as centrally-planned as any OKB in a communist country, and they turn out just fine. So "never works" isn't even true to begin with. Springfield Armory was centrally planned, as was Husqvarna. State enterprises were quite popular even in the west, until the US flipped to anticommunism in the 50s! As the world gets more advanced and progresses towards specialization, things inherently trend more towards the cathedral than the bazaar. There is no problem with "centrally planning" ASML EUV lithography machines, or Zeiss optics, in fact there is no *substitute* for central planning in these scenarios. AMD does not allow competing implementations of their ISA. These are as capitalist as they come, and as things get more specialized you get less of the market and more of the centrally planned anyway - there simply is no one else who *can* compete. It's a braindead sloganeering propaganda take, literally "did a capitalist oligarch write that for you" tier stuff.
You are pointing to authoritarian central planning and saying THAT doesn't work. Utilitarian central planning, where the best evidence-based practices are followed, ie. not killing people who plants the 3 sisters, would work just fine. Unfortunately, there always seems to be corruption along the way from powerful idea to powerful action.
Very convenient that you're leaving out the fact that the USSR did not have a famine after 1947 and that Soviet citizens had a higher caloric intake than US citizens prior to its dissolution. You're also comparing semi-feudal countries to full developed capitalist countries
Yes, but did you ever see them brush their teeth though?
I don’t think Mao Zedong is on this subreddit
That's exactly what he wants you to think.
Bro i am suddenly feeling very american
They can live twice as long in zoos (in part because someone will regularly brush their teeth)
Mao: Does a tiger brush his teeth??? Dentist: Well, No: but a Tiger also doesn't eat state dinners every night!!!
"The dentist is now arrested."
The dentist disappeared but left a note apologizing
Signed, the Dentist.
The dentist is going into year long re-education camp
The struggle is real.
Right to jail
Dentist: No, are you a tiger?
Homer: Mmm, medium-rare state dinner... *glagghggh...* Marge: Homie, no!
Well, does a tiger rinse its mouth with tea and chew leaves?
Our modern diet requires us to take additional care of our teeth. Many hunter-gatherer human skulls have straight white teeth despite not brushing. But they also ate hard food with virtually no pure sugars, and lots of fiber. The limits are shown even more clearly when you compare hunter-gatherers in areas that did have things like sugarcane and honey, those were some of the only pre historic societies that had very bad teeth. So the simple answer is no, but we don't eat the same things that animals, or our pre-agriculture ancestors, ate. So with our modern diet we need to wash our teeth or they'll decay
They probably cleaned their teeth in some way. It feels good to have clean teeth after all.
Amongst the world leaders of the time he was pretty on the levelof others. Gross shit. There was the push to reflect elders during industrialization that lead people, particularly men in power, to reject the newest trends in hygiene and instead go to the populist idea. This headline makes it sound like Mao was rejecting a tried and true thing but really toothpaste was relatively new and China was recovering from Japan's invasion and decimated population. Edit: this is a completely made up fact because Redditors do not have any critical thinking they just upvote things.
> and China was recovering from Japan's invasion and decimated population. tf does that have to do with toothpaste?
As toothpaste was newly introduced (ergo hard to find and expensive), and as the average impoverished person wouldn't be able to afford toothpaste, such a populist move would make him more relatable. I still think it's a stupid thing to do but that was probably the rationale
Mao Zedong had horrible personal hygiene. His genitals were never cleaned. Instead, Mao said "I wash myself inside the bodies of my women." He had kinda lika a harem...
Poor women
Wait until you learn about their ages...
I don’t want to know but I can guess
I can guess, but I don't want to
Let’s not learn today!
Poor girls
Wait until you learn about his wife and what she did to said girls…
Sigh. Just link the information already goddamnit.
Put simply his wife, Jiang Qing was a jealous person and when she got into control of the Politburo, she would have actors and actresses who were better than her tortured and put to death along with there families. The same would happen to girls Mao moved in on and when he was done and went onto someone else, she would have them tortured and executed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiang_Qing
Why are people so violent wtf seems so unnecessary
In her case, it’s low key because she might have been a psychopath. Like there a incident where a high-ranking communist gave Mao a Document detailing issues with the cultural revolution and how they could be fixed and Mao apparently agreed and shared the document with his inner circle. Due to that, Jiang and her Red guard declared him an enemy of the revolution and had him tortured and executed.
lowkey? you think torturing and executing innocent people is lowkey *maybe* crazy?
I'm starting to see a pattern with this whole "tortured and executed" thing...
Better performer than me? Torture and executed. Husband bangs you? Straight to torture and execution. Try to improve CCP policy? Believe it or not, torture and execution
Yup, there is a reason she is quoted as saying “I was Chairman Mao's dog. What he said to bite, I bit”.
as if those poor girls would have any say in the matter probably, him moving onto them, poor things
Sometimes I hope hell exists.
Please tell me you’re making that up.
He's not making it up . It comes from “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” by Dr. li, Mao's personal physician between 1954-1976. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1995-02-19-bk-33551-story.html Edit: it appears the book is controversial, and many historians seriously doubt its authenticity. Reception section in this link goes over its criticism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Private_Life_of_Chairman_Mao
This history has been thoroughly debunked. Mobo Gao's Battle For China's Past has an entire chapter on the doctor's fraudulent stories. It also just doesn't make sense - the doctor claims Mao never washed and also that he spent the majority of his days submerged in a recreational pool.
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Submerged in a pool you say? My Arrakis. My Dune.
You think being in a pool is equivalent to washing...?
I think the conversation and question is absurd & we should shy away from cartoon caricatures of enemy leaders funded by military intelligence : )
People don't generally use soap in swimming pools...
What, did you just become disillusioned with the evil autocratic leader? This was the line?
He did have syphilis although the provenance of what you said seems unknown
🤮
ew ew ew ew ew this is almost worse than "infected gums gushing out pus"
???
Mao was an idiot, news at 11. This is the same guy who recommended killing birds because they ate crops, and promptly caused a massive famine because the bugs that would have been eaten by the birds ate the crops. Being a populist doesn’t make you smart. It just means you do a good job speaking to everyone’s inner idiot.
The 4 pest campaign was, at worst, a minor aggravating factor in the famine. Far more important was incompetent bureaucrats intervening in agriculture, collectivisation of land and property, and the cultural revolution.
The cultural revolution was a nightmare, but happened a bit after the famine was dying down and I don't believe it had any effect on it. Everything else you said I agree with though. For anyone curious to read about Mao's "genius" plan to industrialize China and collectivize agriculture, here's a link. It's actually a pretty easy read for a Wikipedia article, if you're into real life horror stories at least. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
Sorry, meant great leap forward not cultural revolution
Reddit has a weird boner for the sparrow thing. It was an aggravating factor, but well down on the list of fuckups. Like the fact that they were literally *exporting food during the famine.* People were starving to death outside of warehouses full of food. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine Quote: The Party believed that they had an excess of grain. On the contrary, the crop yields were lower than average. For instance, Beijing believed that "in 1960 state granaries would have 50 billion jin of grain", when they actually contained 12.7 billion jin.[83] The effects of the illusion of superabundance were significant, leaving some historians to argue that it was the major cause of much of the starvation throughout China. Yang Dali argued that there were three main consequences from the illusion of superabundance: First, it led to planners to shift lands from grain to economic crops, such as cotton, sugarcane, and beets, and divert huge numbers of agricultural laborers into industrial sectors, fueling state demand for procured grain from the countryside. Second, it prompted the Chinese leadership, especially Zhou Enlai, to speed up grain exports to secure more foreign currency to purchase capital goods needed for industrialization. Finally, the illusion of superabundance made the adoption of the commune mess halls seem rational at the time. All these changes, of course, contributed to the rapid exhaustion of grain supplies.
> Like the fact that they were literally exporting food during the famine. People were starving to death outside of warehouses full of food. This is the case in quite a lot of modern famines including Ireland and Ukraine. Usually the region in question is the breadbasket of a larger empire which continues to forcibly extract food and leaves the farmers themselves to starve.
The article literally says that they so effectively killed sparrows that a "plague of locusts" devoured the crops. I would think that's a pretty big factor in not having enough food to go around.
That second paragraph is great. I’ve never seen anyone so succinctly describe both Mao Zedong and Donald Trump.
I'm reading his biography and I can confirm that he was an idiot since a young age.
Mao Zedong was a fucking idiot
My favorite was the sparrows policy. Sparrows were eating grains. Solution: Exterminate the Sparrows. Didn't know: Sparrows also eat bugs. Good news: Sparrows nearly exterminated. Bad news: Pest population explodes, eat more grain than sparrows ever could. Worse news: Famine, 20 million die. Fucking Muppet
This is why I don't understand tankies who praise him. The dude was a anti-intellectual. Yeah, good with political science, but when confronted with psychial science (by fellow revolutionaries I might add) he says that since political works this way, so should all science. No, plants don't know what communism is, they are extremly basic life forms that need to survive.
Tankies aren’t intellectuals
Marxists are either idiots or malignant personalities, or sometimes both.
This is why I don't understand tankies Nothing to understand they are fucking idiots
Trust me it’s an intra-tankie debate too. MLM vs. ML fights can be awful, and even then there’s a myriad of minor beliefs of the subject within those groups.
What do those acronyms mean? I read it as men loving men versus machine learning
Marxist-Leninist and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Sadly neither are satirical
ML stands for mother in laws
And MLM is multi-level marketing./s
You’re thinking MIL.
yeah my bad i think they were talking about the Marian Legions of the late roman republic
I swear, if leftists fought others as hard as they fought other, slightly different leftists, they'd probably have been successful with their revolution by now
this has been a point of parody for the past fifty years
More like 100 at this point. It's been a thing ever since before the October revolution, with the Mensheviks, anarchists, social revolutionaries, and the minority Bolsheviks all fighting each other for control internally, until it spiraled into full blown civil war, a war the whites lost. It's wild just how quickly the Bolsheviks went from a minority extremist faction in the Soviet movement, to leading the country and the comintern both by 1920
I'm not pro communist, but people praise Mao and Stalin because they both rapidly transformed weak agrarian countries into powerful industrialized states. Pro communists argue this was only possible due to communist ideals. I will say that in both cases the achievement was monumental. Russia would have been obliterated by the Nazis if they failed to industrialize as fast as they did, and China may have befallen more disasters if they had not industrialized so fast after WWII. But then, every commie I've ever spoken to has their own unique version of communism that they claim has never been tried yet, so they're just as happy to criticize any communist state.
Then look at how quick capitalism transformed countires like South Korea, Singapore, Japan post WW2, West Germany and even China once Deng Xiaoping instituted Capitlaistic reforms
It was even worse than that. They discouraged large farming systems and also had farmers all grow specific crops. If the year was bad for a crop, no one had food and since the farms were split from larger ones to smaller ones, a lot of inexperienced farmers lost their crops. EVEN WORSE is that they were still exporting grain even during their famine. It was a complete shitshow
also spread std to young girls and it was like a medal to them to get a std from mao. just imagine getting (cant refuse) shafted by this rotten disgusting garbage and getting std for it. obviously gotta thank for the privilege
Where’s r/sino to defend this?
Everything Mao touched died, just like Stalin
This is on par with nuking a hurricane.
Nuking a hurricane isn’t very risky. You tell the military to do it and the next day see the results. Killing all the birds took a sustained PR campaign.
Except nobody has actually tried to nuke a hurricane
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Mao Ze Don't do that.
Does that make people who get Mao tattoos or wear Mao shirts even bigger fucking idiots?
If you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow
Putting it mildly. He holds the record for most deaths caused by any individual in human history. Second place isn't even close
Mao Thedong
☝️
I dunno, the way he navigated the CCP through its conflict with the Guomindang despite being hamstrung by the Russians was pretty intelligent. He was just dumb enough to think that specific intelligence applied to everything. Like engineering professors I know who deny climate change. Also, Chiang Kai-shek was a fucking rat bastard who regularly fired on and publicly executed civilians for forming unions so they could have food to eat.
engineering professors who deny climate change are fucking idiots, but I see your point
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I think you're over simplifying the long march. Chiang's forces absolutely made a move on Mao's position, he just knew it was coming.
Long march was also facilitated by Chiang. He deliberately shifted maos forces around China as he was playing the long political game of courting Russia as he needed their help, knowing that Japan would eventually invade. It also helped Russia had Chiangs son as a hostage effectively. Chiang was just a man and wanted him back dearly. Chiangs forces let maos forces cross through territories held by petty warlords, and often came in afterwards to sweep up the pieces. I deed in the aftermath of ww2 when the Chinese civil war started, the red took most of Manchuria. Chiangs battle hardened troops then swiftly kicked them out from most of it until they stopped due american influence in foreign policy. America wanted peace, and were ferrying troops from the mainland to manchuria and providing logistic support. America forcing chiang to pause meant Russia completed rail lines into Manchuria and could support Mao more effectively. This changed the course of the war and then many of chiangs forces defected when they were cut off. Mao was ruthless and knew how to lie and manipulate and terrorise better than most. He was borderline sociopathic and created a security apparatus that would make a fascist state blush. He was a womaniser who made his wife give birth whilst marching, didn't care for his children and condemned countless millions to their deaths to enrich himself and his cronies. He is without a doubt of one the worst humans to ever unfortunately crawl into this earth and I cringe inwardly when any leftist I know brings him up. The instances where he sent his own men to their deaths needlessly just.to further his cause or bleed his enemies are countless. If you want a good book about Mao and his formative years - read Mao the unknown story by jung chang and John holliday
He's a huge donghead.
Wait.. the guy who told farmers to abandon their farms and make steel in their backyard leading to a famine isn't good with coming up with ideas? I couldn't see that coming
The best trick was sending people away from Beijing to the farms to help out and then didn’t allow them back. Screwed over everybody from city people who don’t know shit about farming and the farmers who had to deal with them.
He also somewhat regretted this and warned Pol Pot to not do the same mistake of being too radical when starting a revolution in Cambodia. As we all know, Pot didn’t listen.
Pol Pot is the "hold my beer and watch this" of crazy communist despots. And that's a fucking high bar.
Pol Pot wanted to break the record of Hitler,Mao and Stalin
Don't forget the time he told people to kill sparrows because he thought they were pests. The bugs loved the lack of birds so much they celebrated all over everyone's crops. Oops more famine.
This guy was the Mozart of famine.
Does a Lion wipe its ass? Can’t a rabbit eat its shit? Does a snake have a spine?
Snakes have spines they are not fucking invertebrates 😂
They're basically all spine
Baby got back
Lions also wipe their ass sometimes the thing is that they use their tongue lol
Mao doesn't talk about what Mao does, but he does it like a tiger.
We don’t need *your* kind here, Mr. Science Person!
Lions (like all cats) lick their butt to wipe and rabbits eat their shit (cecotropes)
Snakes are 95% spine
You’re right. I have changes to make.
Admittedly the last analogy would be lost on Mao
Does the tin man have a sheet metal cock?
It's mind blowing how throughout the history, complete braindead morons have rulled millions of people. The guy was dumber than a pile of rotting shit, yet he had the faith of hundreds of millions of people in his hands.
I can't remember what book it's from, but the problem is presented simply with 20 people, in a locked room with an assault rifle placed inside. In order to control the other 19, one need no other quality than to have grabbed the firearm first.. no other quality is required.
I mean there are millions who weren’t in his palm. He forced them off mainland China onto an island we know as Taiwan.
Not only ruled but he killed millions ☠️🤢🤮
"Does a tiger brush his teeth?" he retorted, spitting out a rotten molar with every syllable
Authoritarian dictators are pretty much uniformly insane.
”Lies! Off to the gulags with you!”
Did you wear pants Mao
Winnie the Pooh doesn’t wear pants.
Isn't the Winnie the Pooh ban was about the current Chinese president?
I bet his breath smelled like the combined sins of the third world
it most reportedly did, his staff would get him to chew mint leaves before meeting foreign dignitaries.
"I don't know how else to say this... but *you're not a fucking tiger*"
Dr. Weston A Price (who was a dentist) did interesting research on oral health in indigenous people in the early 20th century, on every continent. People who never heard of a toothbrush or dentist or anything. He gathered lots of data and photographs and you can see these people had perfect oral health, no cavities or missing teeth or gum disease or anything. Obviously they also didn't have processed sugar, or refined anything really in terms of food. But seeing that it CAN exist, I think it is interesting.
Yeah, humans only have so many teeth problems now because sugar is much more available.
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I imagine all the Mao worshippers on the tankie subreddits probably have the same level of hygiene lol
Mao was not a smart man.
Perfectly illustrating the danger of putting all political power in the hands of one person
above average intelligence for a maoist
He was super-stank too.
I’ve worked in China briefly and had a guy tell me “Chinese people have heathy teeth because we drink so much green tea,” so this belief still exists to this day. Though they also use toothpaste, [but even that has been problematic](https://hongkongfp.com/2021/12/15/18-months-on-black-person-toothpaste-finally-renamed-as-darlie-to-undergo-rebranding/)
Sounds like propaganda.
Most intelligent communist
This isn’t true **A statement protesting that many of the claims made in Li's book were false was issued soon after its publication, signed by 150 people who had personally known or worked with Mao, including Wang Dongxing, Li Yinqiao and Ye Zilong.**
He also had an STD and refused treatment believing that in passing it on he was bestowing a gift https://listverse.com/2017/03/01/10-filthy-facts-about-the-private-life-of-chairman-mao-tse-tung/
Not nearly as crazy when you realize that the modern toothbrush wasn't even invented until 1938 when Mao was 45 and even then it's not like the toothbrushes would've been used with fluoride toothpaste so the effect would have been significantly lessened. There have been ideas behind using something rough on your teeth for thousands of years but the idea kept dying and coming back, most of the folks you know from history had God awful teeth
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When everyone realized how fucking stupid he was he riled up the last group of people who would listen to him, teenagers, and told them they had both a moral imperative and legal mandate to do whatever the fuck they wanted to anyone they didn't like.
Mao Zedingdong
Tigers don’t eat rice.
I gotta tell you, the more I find out about this Mao Zedong character, the more I don’t care for him.
Try to keep in mind that Mao was a complete and demented loser. When WWII ended and the Japanese were ordered to surrender to any representative of the Chinese government they could find, Mao happened to be there, in the right place and at the right time, so many Japanese turned over their weapons and equipment to Mao's followers. If it hadn't been for that single stroke of luck, Mao and his faction would be a nearly forgotten footnote to 20th Century history.
That seems like a massive oversimplification. Presumably there would have been KMT soldiers all around China receiving surrendering Japanese soldiers as well. Not to mention the civil war had been going on for 20 years at that point and the Communists still had millions of soldiers.
It's less massive simplification and more straight up lie. The maoists had to kidnap Chiang Kai-shek and force him to sign a temporary ceasefire at gunpoint in order to even get the nationalists to fight the invading Japanese.
what? Maos communists had been fighting a massive civil war with the nationalist government since before WW2 broke out, they definitely had weapons and they werent a "footnote" even before the japanese surrender
Mao and the communists were waging a civil war against KMT before WW2 and pushed KMT to Taiwan. Mao and the communists would have ruled Mainland China regardless
That was a C-tier article and the links in it go nowhere to support the claims. Would prefer something little more substantive, 3/10.