ChildeHarold

TLDR yes, they are wrong.

1. Prisoner's dilemma. As a pharmaceutical company, you know theoretically a cure for a given chronic illness exists. What you don't know is if your competitor is close to having one. If they are, it would render your pathetic non-curative regimes obsolete and you'd lose billions and be decades behind. Shareholders would be calling for blood, and if you're the CEO or board exec you'd lose your head. So you work on developing the drug because even if its possibly less profitable, its still in your best interest to do the research.

2. Most people doing this kind of research are universities, which are publicly funded and would gain more profit from a curative drug than they would from letting big pharma continue using non-curative regimens.

3. Government has strong interest in developing cures because chronic illness is a massive drain on the economy costing billions of dollars, with significant public health costs that eat into government budgets that politicians would much rather spend on things like weapons or parking meters that accept credit cards.

OP in 1939* "Why isn't there a cure for the consumption?! must be because the travelling physicians wouldn't make any money!"

This is a moronic take.

agreed. just for the record so nobody plays the "you never denied it" card: I'm totally opposed to antisemitism, I denounce discrimination on the basis of any ethnicity, race, or gender in the strongest possible terms.

I corrected it. I didn't mean in an ethnic sense, I meant in a foreign policy sense (like, Trump is very pro-Israel, and I happen to think that Israel manipulates the U.S. and we need to stay the heck away from them).

Long but I think worth reading:

There's this weird subliminal level of crime that exists among the upper echelons of society and yet remains below a response threshold, where the perpetrators put layers and layers between themselves and their victims, and disguise themselves in the trappings of class propriety, societal respectability, and commercial success. Then they all link arms, taking part in each others crimes, creating a diffusion of responsibility that like zebras herding together blends them and makes it difficult for we the lions of the people to find a target to blame. Who is to blame for United Healthcare's denial A.I.? the CEO? the Board chair? other members of the board? majority stock holders? the CFO? the business strategist who came up with the idea? the engineers who designed the A.I.?.

They drench themselves in plausible deniability, and THEN they align themselves with the very systems of civilization - the legal system, the healthcare system, the industrial sector - in such ways that reduce the possible forms of retaliation to almost exclusively include those that exist above legal response thresholds (i.e., the only way to punish them is to shoot them in cold blood, as everything else requires too much sophistication and power and takes too long)... and they do this so that they can hold us hostage against ourselves, blackmail us with our own livelihoods, so that we won't dare rise up because it could mean collapse of society as we know it, so that they can persecute us viciously if we try to punch up. They make themselves small, distant, moving targets, like trying to kill a swarm of bees with your bare hands or trying to spear a whole school of fish. Some of them even want to upset us, to provoke us to this violence, to use us to tear down and overthrow the bee hives of institutions and systems that bring power to their competitors.

And if we ever win, if we ever strike a blow, they adjust. They tighten security, deprive us of rights, imprison our supporters and spokespersons, and learn from their mistakes. They evolve. But they don't repent. They can't repent. Few and far between are the good men and women who as Rudyard Kipling said have the tenacity to "walk with kings and yet not lose the common touch". All the remainder are numbed, warped, and consumed by the insatiable hunger that drove them into their seats of power. Like hardy weeds that break off at the stem, their roots are deep and they grow back rapidly, spreading everywhere.

This is the nature of the elite. And it is the reality we face as the common masses. And although Rousseau was right that man is born free but everywhere is in chains, so too was Dylan Thomas when he observed "I sang in my chains like the ocean". I'm reminded of the Menu with Anya Taylor Joy where she accuses the angry masses of creating the very problem that has set them about in such a murderous fury: "you don't cook with love, you cook with obsession". We listen to the elites, we join their cults of personality, believe in them, we call them our heroes and we worship them with this petulant infatuation and fandom, all while failing to raise heroes that can deliver us! It is up to us to cultivate in our homes, our friends, and our lives people who can keep the common touch and who hunger to deliver us! We'd all rather be consumers. Ultimately, we are just as responsible for this mess as the elites who have entrenched themselves. We pay for that crappy healthcare plan rather than die in defiance to the despots. We vote for the doddering old carpet-bagging establishment fools that sniff the hair of our daughters on national television, and then we vote for the gluttonous lechers and foreign assets to take their places! We sit at home, we type away on keyboards, we let them shovel the social media slop down our throats.

And those of us who don't engage in the fervor are merely pissed off, retreating into the intellectual to make up for their own social incompetence. Or they disguise their own insufficiency as "righteous anger" that they redirect at elites who don't even know they exist. It is a chicken and the egg. We have created our hell, and we refuse to do the work necessary to transform it to a heaven. We exist in a binary, where we're either victims or violent revolutionaries. Because we are insincere. We are wrong. And we are unworthy of a better world.

If there is a hell, if there is a punishment after this life, then surely we will be there along with the people we claim to hate so much to a point of exulting in their murder.

this was super helpful!!!! thank you!

I never said post-modernists debunked Marx. I said Marx is debunked (he's a materialist, and recent developments in physics have shaken materialism to its core, like the double slit experiment and observer effect and collapse of the wave function), and that his influence on modern Leftism is that of the thesis whereas post-modernism is the antithesis (i.e., Marxism was a thesis, post-modernism was an antithesis - an overcorrection by Foucault et. al. in response to the failures of communism - and modern Leftism is the result).

thank you haha. duly noted.

thank you for explaining!!!!

yup. this.