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Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

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Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#191

Post by beaconstudios »

notch656a wrote: post #188
beaconstudios wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, that's actually really cool that you've supported them, I respect that. I know they're not fully anarchist but there are anarchist elements within their society, as you say. There are a few different economic models within leftism, including market socialism, which still involves trade but replaces corporations with worker cooperatives. Obviously that's incompatible with anarchism but they can exist alongside eac…

That all really sounds great, I just don't understand how it works without a lot of people just performing labor in the hopes others will do it and also do it for free. There aren't goods if people don't make them, and people have to have incentive to make them. We have a way of making sure people get value from what they put in, it is trade. Surely someone is gonna say "hey I made this widget so I would like to dema…

Am important aspect of anarchism is community. Capitalism tends to atomise people, replacing community and cooperative relationships with work relationships and transactions. This erodes mutual trust and support, so without rebuilding communities I agree, you couldn't reasonably hope for cooperation and sharing. But people's attitudes are shaped by their environment, and with a greater sense of community and engagement, we are more willing to help each other out. I'm a lot more willing to lend or gift things to a friend or a neighbour than to somebody I don't know. Now, as you've rightly pointed out, that doesn't scale past Dunbar's number (the maximum number of people we can reasonably know personally), so the alternative to scaling this up is a democratic union-of-unions system where my community and your community both elect councils and delegates for coordinating with each other. That way the delegates can represent our communities' interests in a bottom-up fashion. Since there's no meaningful benefit to profit without a money system, we can support each other in a mutual/reciprocal fashion.

> Guess people like me gotta be put in the gulag.

Again, you're thinking of MLs. My primary value is decreasing human suffering and increasing preference fulfilment. Neither of those are fulfilled by senseless ideological violence.

> My personal view of what ends up happening to leftist communities is their either become dystopian to ensure your property is now the public's property, slide into democracies, or go into limited-government libertarian type scenarios.

I'd rather live under a social democratic capitalist society like I currently do than the USSR. Freedom is important - I want to increase it, not decrease it. There's plenty of room for democracy within anarchism, and anarchism is the original source of the term "libertarian" so yes I agree on the latter point - the main point of disagreement is whether capitalism can really be libertarian. I think that replacing a competitive, isolating economy with a cooperative sharing economy would be a positive thing for everybody.

I think the kurds are a good example of an incremental step in the right direction - their economy is more oriented towards sharing and cooperation, which is inherently a step away from capitalism because capitalism relies on individualistic trade negotiations rather than sharing.

Edit: I just thought, if you've watched the later seasons of The Walking Dead, the communities are a pretty good example of anarchist community, including the union-of-unions part.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#192

Post by waterhouse »

Nasrudith wrote: post #183
waterhouse wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how does the risk of that compare against: - the risks from whatever else the heroin is cut with (fentanyl?) - the risk of getting HIV - the risks of taking heroin in the first place I suspect that what they're doing is a net improvement.

The others aren't crimes against humanity unlike willful and deliberate human experimentation on unwitting and unconsenting human subjects.

Er... Is the anti-HIV stuff human experimentation? Are these guys collecting data? Seems like they're taking a drug that's known to help (incidentally it got FDA-approved in December 2021, based on trials whose results were announced in November 2020; I'm sure the FDA had excellent reasons for that delay) and sticking it where they think it'll help those who take it. This is compared to drug dealers who take a drug known to be harmful (fentanyl) and stick it where they think it'll substitute for more expensive ingredients and will keep the customers coming.

Are you really saying that the former is a crime against humanity and the latter isn't?

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#193

Post by psd1 »

trhway wrote: post #21
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #7

> After a few minutes of gloating about pharma bro Martin Shkreli “rotting at Fort Dix” for raising the price of Daraprim, a lifesaving HIV medicine, from $13 to $750, Laufer grew serious. “It’s been two years, but despite everything that’s happened, the price of Daraprim hasn’t changed,” he said. Shkreli went to jail for securities fraud- not raising the price of a drug. I think Shkreli was a convenient scapegoat fo…

while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who real…

> these vaccines have only limited use

It's clear that the vaccines don't confer total immunity. They do change the course of the infection if you contract it, though. As you'd expect: they induce your immune system to create antibodies.

Spend even a few minutes browsing stories from ICU nurses and you'll conclude that pretty much all their admissions are unvaccinated.

Vaccinated => get sick Unvaccinated => get very sick, maybe die

That seems like a great utility to me.

Sure, that's anecdata, but data doesn't convince people who call others "sheep"

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#194

Post by psd1 »

jjoonathan wrote: post #28
trhway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who real…

Pro-opiate and anti-vax? Niiiice!

That's straw-manning

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#195

Post by trhway »

psd1 wrote: post #193
trhway wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who real…

> these vaccines have only limited use It's clear that the vaccines don't confer total immunity. They do change the course of the infection if you contract it, though. As you'd expect: they induce your immune system to create antibodies. Spend even a few minutes browsing stories from ICU nurses and you'll conclude that pretty much all their admissions are unvaccinated. Vaccinated => get sick Unvaccinated => get very…

that has no meaningful bearing on the situation of many people who has very low risk of serious decease to start with. Yet the industry got its way, and the vaccines are forced down the everybody's throat.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#196

Post by netizen-936824 »

tehjoker wrote: post #158
netizen-936824 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a very important step in the production of medications. We need to know that nothing went wrong with the synthesis and we aren't ingesting toxic and potentially fatal byproducts. Dosage can also be wrong if measuring an impure compound.

Imagine injecting too much epi! Not good!

Honestly my concern is too little. Say you make a measurement expecting 90% purity but its actually 60%. You're getting way less epi and may continue struggling to breathe after taking the shot. Scary shit.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#197

Post by denton-scratch »

kragen wrote: post #154
cloudfifty wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is an absolutist fallacy. Why? You haven't really answered anything with regards to the incentive structure of Capitalism to manipulate the market ASAP. What good "free markets" segments of society even exists today? Restaurants? No, the big chains lobby intensely there as well - less profits if employees earn a living wage. > I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, prec…

Almost the entire world economy, by value, consists of more competitive markets than US healthcare. Restaurants, yes, but also the rest of retail, energy, agriculture, transportation, mining, metals, automobiles, clothing, shipbuilding, forestry, fishing, custom manufacturing, industrial food processing, scientific instruments, electronics, electrical equipment, and the financial markets. Some of these sectors don't…

> Some of these sectors don't engage in wage-labor production, or aren't dominated by it, and so aren't capitalist, while others are

You seem to be relying on a rather narrow definition of "capitalism".

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#198

Post by denton-scratch »

notch656a wrote: post #137
beaconstudios wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of people had a lot of hope in the Soviet Union, especially when there were actual soviet councils involved. It didn't take long to devolve into a regular dictatorship. After all the state was supposed to be a vanguard for the implementation of socialism but power begets power and in the end it existed to serve itself. I think that's the main reason that most sane leftists* are some flavour of anarchist…

How can one be both anarchist and leftist? Doesn't re-allocating resources in an unprofitable way for the owner require some sort of involuntary transaction, or would you expect owners of capital will all relinquish them peacefully? It seems like capitalism is more compatible with anarchism as capitalism can be contained within voluntary transactions.

You seem to be confusing anarchism with libertarianism. Libertarianism is basically capitalism on steroids; it's an individualistic, "rules-are-for-little-people" ideology. Anarchism is any of several different kinds of non-hierarchical socialism.

For clarity, by "socialism" I don't mean Robin Hood socialism, taking from the rich to give to the poor; that's coercive. I mean that socialists aim for a more-equal society. So I'm saying that anarchists are people that aim for a more equal society, and hope to achieve that using processes and structures that minimise hierarchy.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#199

Post by denton-scratch »

notch656a wrote: post #144
kragen wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anarchism is leftist.

I consider myself anarchist in the sense I do not believe in the legitimacy of government. I do not have any leftist view whatsoever, but I think people should retain ownership of their property except through consensual trade. Does that mean I'm not an anarchist, or does that mean I'm a leftist?

It means you're an extreme libertarian, but no anarchist.

Re: Anarchists making their own medicine (2018)

#200

Post by denton-scratch »

notch656a wrote: post #167
kragen wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose it depends on what definitions you're using of words like "government", "leftist view", "their property", and "anarchist"; clearly at least one of them differs from the mainstream definitions. I suspect it's "anarchist", since anarchism (as normally understood) opposes coercive hierarchy more broadly than just the usual definition of "government", including things sometimes described as "property", but I ca…

I've looked it over. I understand leftists have a rich history of invoking anti-state ideology. I'm using the oxford definition of anarchism. I'm not saying leftists can't exist in anarchism as some sort of pact or contract amongst leftist, in the sense of without coercive hierarchy. But I don't see how anarchism is inherently leftist. If leftism means socialism or some form of redistributing property involuntarily,…

> I'm using the oxford definition of anarchism.

Which Oxford definition? You've cited "The Oxford Dictionary" up-thread. There's a bunch of online lexicographical resources that are unrelated to the OED, but trade on its name and reputation.

At any rate, a brief definition from a concise lexicon is no substitute for doing some proper reading on the subject. And even reading will leave you pretty confused about how it can possibly work; participation in an anarchist collective might blow your mind.

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