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Re: [ox-en] Maussian ideas and Free Software



On 13 Dec 2003 at 13:24, Martin Hardie wrote:

On Saturday 13 December 2003 11:11, Niall Douglas wrote:
* Money spent on third world pharmaceutical drugs is far better
spent on providing clean drinking water and decent nutrition. I know
it's trendy to bash big business for cynical sales, but in the end
far more lives are saved by forgetting about pharmaceutical drugs.

Well Niall sorry
40 million dying of aids.THe street outside where I type covered with
people begging and with aids, the WHO will give 3 million of this 40
million free drugs in the next 5 years. In the emantime how many die.
Two kilomters from here near the Toll Gate for the Soth african
constructed and run tollway there is avtap that services a few
thousand people.

Money is better spent on  third world pharmaceutical drugs AND on
providing clean drinking water and decent nutrition RATHER than buying
software.

Getting a little off-topic, but obviously both together is best.
However, my point still stands that pharmaceutical drugs are
unimportant compared to nutrition, clean water and education - all of
which might I add are far cheaper than even discount pharmaceuticals.

The big problem with how we traditionally address third world poverty
for the last 50 years is that we really create more of it. Every time
we build a well or save some lives, those people go on to have many
more children who then will starve en mass in a few years time. We
are just digging a deeper and bigger hole each and every time and
consigning MORE people to die, just a bit later than now.

Far far better to recognise that poverty is totally artifically
created. There are starving millions because the west has made it so.
Not because it's natural, not because it's god's choice, not *most*
*definitely* because the west doesn't send enough aid. The third
world is perfectly capable of looking after itself if the west just
butted out and stopped deliberately destabilising their regimes,
installing ruthless dictators and using "free market economics" to
cripple the local infrastructure and orientate production totally
around the fickle tastes of western consumers.

If tomorrow all drugs totally vanished, the quality of life for most
westerners would not change. Painkillers are useful but well-fed
people with clean water just don't get sick enough to die normally.
Antibiotics, the other mainstay of the drugs revolution are also
useful but again, not particularly crucial with a healthy population.
Those who notice the drugs revolution the most are those who have
made themselves unwell via lack of exercise, fatty foods, unprotected
sex etc ie; totally 100% preventable things.

There is this aura about medicine about it being oh so great and what
makes us different to mankind of bygone ages. This is crap. Most of
the health benefits of our time have zero to do with medicine or
anything about it, but obviously the doctors have little interest in
making the hard figures about it too public.

Mark my words - Africa if she continues this path is going to screw
itself totally. However though the history books won't say so, AIDS
will not be the actual cause - politics is the real root of this
evil.

Cheers,
Niall






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