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Rwanda makes its own morphine while U.S. awash with opioids:
It was something, the silence. Nothing but the puff of her breath and the scuff of her slip-on shoes as Madeleine Mukantagara walked through the fields to her first patient of the day. Piercing cries once echoed down the hill to the road below. What she carried in her bag had calmed them.
For 15 years, her patient Vestine Uwizeyimana had been in unrelenting pain as disease wore away at her spine. She could no longer walk and could barely turn over in bed. Her life narrowed to a small, dark room with a dirt-floor in rural Rwanda, prayer beads hanging on the wall by her side.
A year ago, relief came in the form of liquid morphine, locally produced as part of Rwanda's groundbreaking effort to address one of the world's great inequities: As thousands die from addiction in rich countries awash with prescription painkillers, millions of people writhe in agony in the poorest nations with no access to opioids at all.
Companies don't make money selling cheap, generic morphine to the poor and dying, and most people in sub-Saharan Africa cannot afford the expensive formulations like oxycodone and fentanyl, prescribed so abundantly in richer nations that thousands became addicted to them.
Rwanda's answer: plastic bottles of morphine, produced for pennies and delivered to homes across the country by community health workers like Mukantagara. It is proof, advocates say, that the opioid trade doesn't have to be guided by how much money can be made.
(Score: 1, Disagree) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:22AM (26 children)
Government choosing who wins and loses is not an aspect of capitalism.
Of course it is. And it's as natural as the sunrise, as is every human interaction. The government is just another player. The government is us. Everything happens because we let or want it to happen.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:32AM (13 children)
No, it is an aspect of government. Which economic system they pay lip service to is irrelevant. Saying otherwise when you know better is simply lying out your ass.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @07:33AM (12 children)
Please, don't take yourself so seriously. All our systems are still simple might makes right. Capitalism is just normal natural animal exchange, actually an abstraction layer, like Java, to hide the innards. Still just chimps trading bananas.
You cannot separate yourself from your government. It is your creation.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:47PM (11 children)
Which neither alters nor refutes anything I've said.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:45PM (10 children)
Of course it does. You're making distinctions without a difference. You cannot separate "government" from anything else.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:48PM (9 children)
You most certainly can. It is an abstraction but it has important facets that do not apply to individuals.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:56PM (8 children)
No different than any other large institution. It responds to the same stimuli, from the same people. It is still your creation.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 31 2019, @10:28PM (7 children)
No, in fact a government does not respond to the same stimuli as an individual or any other form of large institution. Its scope and function are different from every other sort, thus what it responds to differs accordingly.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday January 01 2020, @05:24AM (6 children)
You create differences where there are none. All power works the same way. The force is universal, and singular. The only "government" you are subject to is finance.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 01 2020, @07:52AM (3 children)
(Score: 0, Troll) by fustakrakich on Wednesday January 01 2020, @08:26AM (2 children)
Only you can waste your own time. And you are still wrong... And since you don't listen, there is no point in explaining anything to you. You shall follow your master into the abyss.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:30AM (1 child)
Ah, the moderator, the scoundrel that has nothing to offer
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:48AM
fustakrakich is the embodiment of having nothing to offer.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday January 02 2020, @12:36PM (1 child)
You might as well say that water and hydrogen peroxide chemically react the same because they have the same kind of atoms. No, that's not generalized to absurdity enough to cover your argument. You're arguing more along the lines of diamond and elemental sodium will react the same because they're both made of protons, neutrons, and electrons.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Thursday January 02 2020, @05:18PM
You're looking at the various reactions and fail to see that the force that causes a reaction is the same, regardless the composition. There is only one. Obviously this is the nature of people also. We are aggregated, animated dust.
"Capitalism" works because it occurs naturally. It works better if kept open. Communism is simply closed capitalism by an elite group. Like a monarchy it restricts upward mobility. On our side of the curtain we use finance for the same purpose, to ration capital and provide distraction to pacify, divide, and disperse the anger, and the voters give full consent when electing the bankers' servants to high office. This is the "government" they want. If you got any complaints, chalk it up the well documented natural long term effects of majority rule and collective living [urban lifestyle]
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:13AM (11 children)
FTFY. Amazing how your post goes poof, when we correct this minor detail.
Remember capitalism is just private ownership of capital and the rules necessary to make that happen. Magical leaps of logic to claiming that deliberate breaking of capitalism, such as via the said non-private choosing of winners and losers, do not change that in the least.
(Score: 0, Troll) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @07:38AM (10 children)
You, as a simple mouthpiece of your benefactors, just express denial.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 31 2019, @02:19PM (9 children)
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @03:17PM (8 children)
You remain wrong
Your simple repetition does not make it so.
Words mean things.
And you make it clear they mean different things to different people, but yeah, you should listen to them some time.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:10PM (7 children)
Fortunately, I did more than merely repeat myself. Let's move on:
If I can't find your meaning in a dictionary, then fuck off. Semantics woo where words mean whatever you currently feel like is a waste of time, particularly, when you can't even be bothered to state the meaning as you choose to feel it. Look at this thread, for example. It's not just you. Nobody states a definition of capitalism until I do. In case you're wondering if my definition matches the real world, here's a real world definition of capitalism [merriam-webster.com]:
Where does governments picking winners and losers fit into that? It doesn't.
And I find it remarkable how you claim "mean different things to different people" while ignoring the explicit meaning of capitalism I stated. I made it quite clear what capitalism meant to me and you just blew it off with an idiotic conspiracy quip.
Practice what you preach instead of practicing semantics fallacies.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @04:25PM (6 children)
Where does governments picking winners and losers fit into that?
You pick the government. You are the government. You are the ones picking winners and losers. In both economics and politics your collective has all the power. It's why we can't get the sports package without all the ugly chrome trim and landau roof.
Everything you ever say is nothing but an appeal to authority. It defines your world, hence the corruption of "meaning".
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 31 2019, @05:06PM (5 children)
Still quite irrelevant to capitalism even if those sentences were true.
Collectives aren't capitalism.
No authority and no appeal to said authority makes that yet another false assertion.
And now semantics nihilism. You're subject to your own logic. Stop wasting my time.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday December 31 2019, @06:54PM (4 children)
Collectives aren't capitalism.
Again you prove yourself wrong. The market is a collective, on both sides, buying and selling. The collective decides what you see on the shelf and at what price. Your "capitalism" is communist!
And nobody is "wasting" your time but you.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 01 2020, @02:58AM (3 children)
"A collective" what? Words have meaning.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday January 01 2020, @05:30AM (2 children)
A collective mass of capital.
You keep repeating your little meme there, and still fail to comprehend... There is one word to define you... obtuse.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 01 2020, @07:13AM (1 child)
As opposed to "idiot" for you? You can't even explain the meaning you think words have much less say anything relevant and coherent. It's quite the remarkable dysfunction there.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday January 01 2020, @08:29AM
You're moving the semantics goalposts.
Nonsense, there are no goalposts, you are simply blinded by your own bias.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..