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No one could have seen this coming

From the “it’s just a temporary emergency created by the need to suppress vicious anti-social elements, and we will restore things to normal after the crisis has ended” department:

Venezuelan farmers ordered to hand over produce to state.

I’m certain this new measure will finally end the reign of terror of the hoarders and restore food to Venezuelan homes.

Meanwhile, a word about toilet paper. The capitalist propaganda machine outside of the Bolivarist Paradise has been telling people that toilet paper is now largely unavailable for purchase in the country. But, does man really require toilet paper to be happy? A few centuries ago there was no toilet paper at all – indeed, mankind survived for most its history without toilet paper. The desire for toilet paper is simply a form of manufactured desire created by capitalist marketing and advertising – the production of a want in people for a product they don’t actually have a real use for. The creation of toilet paper despoils forests and the landscape, is unsustainable, and it is only to the good that Venezuela now leads the world in eliminating this scourge from our midst.

(See also: What Socialism Has Done To A Supermarket in Venezuela.)

46 comments to No one could have seen this coming

  • How long before they start eating each other?

  • John Galt III

    Interesting logic on toilet paper so let’s continue:

    We used to walk, so no need for cars
    We used horses and mules to pull wagons, so no need for trucks
    We sailed across the oceans so no need for planes
    We informed ourselves by reading so no need for the internet
    We used candles so might as well chuck electricity

    According to the envirofascisti everything could be gotten rid of as we formerly used something more primitive.

    Sustainability is a buzzword of the control freaks of the totalitarian left.

  • CaptDMO

    Once upon a time, a Fox came across a high arbor covered in grapes…..

  • Ellen

    I remember those glorious days when our sales tax was only 3%, and they promised it was temporary.

  • JohnW

    That damned Metzger will have the Russell Brand crowd turning up in droves if he carries on like this!

  • Veryretired

    Here is a petro-state swirling around the bowl, (whether clockwise or counterclockwise I’m not sure), just like so many other failed collectivist experiments, and all the usual outraged suspects, who have flown into utter frenzies whenever they could find something to characterize as repressive or corrupt or just plain non-prog bad, when done by Israel or the U.S. Or any of our allies, are either silent as tombs, or sputtering out rationalizations about how it’s all our fault.

    If it weren’t for the very real repression and hardship, it would almost qualify as a morbid form of comic opera—you know the kind, where they show you the banana peel, and then it’s just a matter of time till the inevitable pratfall.

    We’ve been watching this slow motion economic and social collapse for several years now. Nothing that has gone wrong is the least bit surprising, indeed, it was all painfully predictable, and was predicted by any number of critics of the fallacies of socialism.

    But, in the final analysis, it is not just an economic failure, but also the social, cultural, and political failure that inevitably follows the corrupting concentration of state power in the hands of a few, unrestrained, supra-legal oligarchs.

    And, as always, it is the ordinary citizen who ends up in the line for bread, or toilet paper.

  • Nicholas (Self-Sovereignty) Gray

    Ellen, it WAS temporary! But they meant the 3%, not the tax!

  • Tranio

    This article about toilet paper is a bit tongue in cheek. Is that how he wants his bum cleaned?

  • Perry Metzger (New York, USA)

    Quoth Veryretired:

    Nothing that has gone wrong is the least bit surprising, indeed, it was all painfully predictable, and was predicted by any number of critics of the fallacies of socialism.

    Indeed. And yet, somehow, we find ourselves in societies where socialism remains popular even among supposedly educated people. There’s no shortage of folks in the U.S., Europe and other supposedly civilized places that are quite convinced that the solution for all that ails the world is socialism, never mind how often this same sequence of events plays out with ridiculous inevitability.

  • Regional

    Veryretired,
    Only if it’s available, Fascist/Marxist gubbmints decide what you may have and can’t have.

  • PersonFromPorlock

    Looking on the bright side, people who aren’t eating much aren’t crapping much, either.

  • mojo

    What a coincidence – I just today found a Venezuelan 10 Bolivares coin in my change. It’s about the size of a US dime, slightly smaller. Made of aluminium.

    There’s a message there somewhere.

  • thefrollickingmole

    Next we will go after the hoarders of fallen leaves, corn cobs and smooth stones.

  • They’ll be eating grass next.

    Of course under Socialism there will be a shortage of grass.

  • Nicholas (Self-Sovereignty) Gray

    Talking about things not seen, have you heard about the EMdrive? Some German scientist is confirming that a British invention (the EMdrive) seems to work, and would be a viable engine with which to reach the planets, and maybe some of the nearest stars! It is NOT a faster-than-light drive, but they don’t know how it works, just that it does.
    Dale, have you heard anything?

  • Barry Sheridan

    I cannot help but think that warped western Marxist socialists are trying to create a situation where millions upon millions of people are going to die. In their eyes the world is overpopulated, a concern that seems to be driving some insane policies. For example, is not the agreement with Iran a chance to encourage open sectarian warfare, after all what better way to change the world than by having a nuclear confrontation.

  • Bogdan from Aussie

    I have to laugh (albeit bitterly); I’ve had my best, most productive years stolen and wasted while living under the boot and whip of a commune-fascist regime in Poland.
    One of the most prominent features of the life in such an entity was a chronic lack of toilet paper; one had to waste usually the entire day running around the city while following the rumors of that glorious product having allegedly appeared by some wondrous act in some remote shop on the city’s outskirts.
    That socialist phenomenon wasn’t the result of an accident; it was a result of a deliberate policy of social engineering conducted by the PARASITE RED REGIMES in order to exhaust the people’s will to seek better life. I can still remember the sense of an enormous relief and a primitive joy when I’d manage to finally get the grip on few rolls of sand-paper like stuff that was supposed to serve as **** wiper
    Then there was also the chronic shortage of meat, cheese, fruits and other stuff that here in the satiated, obese societies is being taken for granted.
    If they (the Venezuelans) keep going like that, they are going to finish like the Chinese under Mao when the calories intake was lower than in Auschwitz.
    By the way; I’ve read that on the farm owned by Ghandi when he was still residing in South Africa, food rations were also lower than in German concentration camps.
    But perhaps they were higher than in the Soviet Gulags…

  • Thailover

    The pursuit of socialist utopias always ends with human life being cheap and disposible and toilet paper being expensive.

  • Thailover

    Barry wrote, “In their eyes the world is overpopulated,”

    It drive them crazy when I point out to them that the entire human population on earth could fit within the boarders of Texas and the population density would be less than today’s NYC. They’d rather accuse me of lying to them than to do a bit of basic mathamatics themselves. Such demonstrable facts don’t fit the neo-marxist narrative it seems.

  • Paul Marks

    Good post.

    What charming people Progressives are.

  • Thailover

    Venezuela; because OPEC turned out so well. But of course it wasn’t OPEC that caused the gas shortage in the US, it was our government that caused the shortage by price fixing, stopping those “evil gougers” and thus had too little raw product (scarcity) resulting in gas having too low a price in relation to the supply (causing shortages). It wasn’t OPEC, it was Nixon that caused the gas crisis. Likewise, I imagine much the same is going on with every other commodity, (including toilet paper), in Venezuela.

  • Thailover

    “The creation of toilet paper despoils forests and the landscape, is unsustainable, and it is only to the good that Venezuela now leads the world in eliminating this scourge from our midst.”

    And as Winston just reported, our rationed allowance of chocolate just inceased, so expect less.

  • Vinegar Joe

    If they don’t have any food they certainly aren’t going to need toilet paper. I’m channeling my inner Stalin.

  • Ljh

    When I was young and kept my worldlies in a backpack, there was always room for soft double ply. UK public toilets at the time were provided with something akin to sandwich wrap, though I was grateful to sit rather than squat as in most of southern Europe, and flush the used paper rather than place it in an overflowing wire basket.

    My father, after experiencing dysentery in Egypt during WW2 warned my newlywed mother that he would consider divorce should the household supplies be inadequate.

    The clashof civilisations when in Islamic countries begins with the expectation of using the water jug and one’s left hand…

    Soft abundant double ply, one of capitalisms most underrated achievements!

  • Plamus

    Adding to Bogdan’s note: in my corner of the socialist paradise, in the early to mid 80’s, just as shortages were getting pretty bad, schoolchildren (myself included) were required to gather a minimum amount of recyclable paper every school term (5 kg, I think). In return we were given credits that could be exchanged for some goods not generally available in stores. The most popular ones were lids for glass jars (for preserving food) and, of course, toilet paper.

  • rantingkraut

    … one had to waste usually the entire day running around the city …/quote>

    now, there’s an app for that:

    https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=engtoolsdev.abasteceme.com&hl=en

  • Bogdan from Aussie

    Thank you Plamus for sharing your own glorious experience from the time in the WORKERS’ PARADISE. I forgot to add that shortly before my (enforced) departure from Poland one enterprising fellow was put in prison for an attempt to start the production of the above mentioned glorious product without the local the so called council approval.

  • JohnK

    Bogdan:

    Didn’t you get newspapers in Poland? I would have thought the opportunity to wipe your bottom on the faces of the party apparatchiki would have been quite satisfying.

  • We know that Bernie Sanders spent his honeymoon in the USSR. Did he bring his own toilet paper?

    Maybe he understood ‘Real existing socialism’ better than he lets on.

  • Jordan

    Speaking of Bernie Sanders, at least the people of Venezuela are spared the hellish experience of having to choose from 23 brands of deodorant.

  • pst314

    “They’ll be eating grass next.”

    When the Chavez regime collapses, I recommend that they eat the socialists.

  • “When the Chavez regime collapses, I recommend that they eat the socialists.”

    Yes, I do agree with you, but knows what horrible diseases they carry.

    Guevara wasn’t called The Pig for nothing.

  • wildman

    have they no tp?? let them use bidets!! so spake the liberal

  • Richard Thomas

    Clearly the advanced and progressive socialist nation of Venezuela is already making the move to the three sea-shells. Unfortunately, due to a completely avoidable misunderstanding, the instruction manuals are in Italian.

  • Richard Thomas

    On the upside, when the whole socialist mismanagement that is Venezuela tumbles into the inevitable chaotic shithole, as a libertarian, it will make a nice change from being told to go to Somalia.

  • Rob Fisher

    That toilet paper bit has given me an idea: a book full of such unassailable arguments that I can give to watermelon useful idiot acquaintances as a “gift”, to torture them with either guilt or the inconvenience of following through on their logic.

  • Rob Fisher

    Plamus: that’s nothing. In North Korea they have schoolchildren collect “night water” when farms are low on fertilizer.

  • Bogdan from Aussie

    Rob Fisher: In Maoist China they boiled the little babies who were dying in mass out of hunger (deliberately inflicted on Chinese by Mao) until their little bodies would be cooked to rags and then used the THIS as a fertiliser.
    Yung Chang together with her husband Jon Halliday has described the entire HORROR of Mao’s period in her famous book “Mao- The Unknown Story” which can be regarded as a Chinese version of Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago”
    Greetings from Aussie

  • Jim

    Just wondering how you say “kulak” in Spanish.

  • Rob in AZ

    Why don’t they just wipe their asses with bolivars ?

  • Johnathan Pearce (London)

    The desire for soft toilet paper is a form of Western decadence aided and abetted by Jewish neo-liberal conspirators and should be resisted by all right-thinking traditional conservatives and socialists.

    (Fart)

  • The Sanity Inspector

    What’s Spanish for “dekulakization”?

  • Julie near Chicago

    Alas, Johnathan, I have long since sunk into the abyss of Western decadence. And to my decadent but profound gratitude, the abyss is outfitted with indoor plumbing.

  • Jerry

    ‘But, does man really require toilet paper to be happy? ‘
    Um, yes, he ( I ) does ( do ) now !
    ‘A few centuries ago there was no toilet paper at all’

    There also wasn’t –
    indoor plumbing
    penicillin
    surgery
    hygiene in general
    clean water ( at least in populated areas )
    the availability of reliable, wide spread electricity
    ( some say that too is ‘unsustainable’ hogwash ! )
    automobile, trains , airplanes
    on and on.
    The list is virtually endless. ( credit to the above posters )

    Just how ‘far back’ would you like to regress ????

  • pst314

    “Jewish neo-liberal conspirators”

    That’s rootless cosmopolitan Jewish neo-liberal conspirators

  • Mr Ed

    What’s Spanish for “dekulakization”?

    Spanish is hostile to loan words, but ‘deskulakizacíon’ might get it across, or perhaps ‘La política de matar o destruir a los campesinos ricos y/o listos‘ for those less inclined to borrow.