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Old March 17th, 2012 #24
Alex Linder
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Good example of Chinese communist 'meritocracy':

All sorts of experiments were carried out to increase the weight of pigs, some of them inspired by the fraudulent theories of Trofim Lysenko. A protege of Stalin, Lysenko rejected genetics and believed that inheritance was shaped by the environment... Just as seeds of hybrid varieties were developed for greater resistance, hybrid breeding of livestock was envisated by senior leaders. Jiang Hua, party secretary of Zhejian,g, thus asked the county leaders to take steps to 'actively shape nature': he suggested cross-breeding sows with bulls to produce heavier piglets. (p.142)

This is the sort of zaniness leftists come up to when all opposition is finally out of the way.

Socialism destroys the environment too, not just the livestock and the people, but the trees and forests and lakes and rivers.

The Great Leap Forward decimated the forests. In the drive to increase steel output, the backyard furnaces that mushroomed everywhere had to be fed, farmers fanning out into the mountains to cut down trees for fuel. In Yizhang county, Hunan, the mountains were covered in lush primeval forest. A great cutting followed, some units felling two-thirds of the trees to feed the furnaces. By 1959 nothing but bare mountains remained. In Anhua, to the west of Changsha, an entire forest was turned into a vast expanse of mud. Being driven through thick ancestral forests along the road from Yunnan to Sichuan, Soviet specialists in forestry and soil preservation noted that trees had been randomly felled, resulting in landslides. Forests were brutalized everywhere, sometimes beyond recovery. (pp.174-5)

All kinds of shitty, badly placed, misengineered dams were built by the communists, many of them turning into time bombs:

This happened with the Banqiao and Shimantan dams in Zhumadian, Henan, built as part of the 'Harness the Huai River' campaign in 1957-9. . . . When a typhoon hit the region in August 1975, these dams broke, unleashing a tideal wave which drowned an estimated 230,000 people. (p.183)

Oops.

Reality exists. Communists and other ideological zealots pretend it doesn't. We see above the results.