Darkman Fanpage posted:

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

sincx posted:

Oh just noticed he's one of the GBS trolls. Should've just added him to ignore instead of wasting my time giving a serious answer.

KaptainKrunk posted:

I love the eastern europeans 30 years on from their own revolutions being like "omg why does our society still loving suck?"

also the loudest, most annoying liberals from those societies have largely fled to the west anyway. pulling down the iron curtain was never about improving their own countries, but fleeing from them and from the people

Darkest Auer posted:

I know perfectly well what those random bags of pills are, but I'm looking for the explanation why TCM is such a big industry in China instead of, you know, having proper healthcare for everyone in a supposedly communist country. Is it anti-imperialist to die from preventable diseases because you ate sugar pills instead of antibiotics?

Darkman Fanpage posted:

SorePotato posted:

The shameless yanqui imperialists are mad that their sacks of pills and homeopathy cost a trillion times more

sincx posted:

Probably for the same reason that chiropractors exist in the US.

In my experience with Chinese medicine, TCM is considered "complementary" for serious illnesses. So a patient with a serious illness will be sent to a real doctor and be prescribed real medicine, and then afterwards the patient may go the TCM shoppe and get a bag of leaves to "mediate the qi" or whatever.

Best case, there might some antioxidants in the sticks and twigs that marginally help the immune system, akin to zinc or vitamin C supplements. Worst case, there's pesticide residue or toxic compounds that make the patient sicker. But the vast majority of the time, the TCM does nothing. Nothing except the placebo effect, which can actually be very powerful by itself. And TCM is generally pretty cheap.

So I suspect that's why TCM has stuck around. It's cheap and much of the time it actually produces an improvement in subjective well-being through the placebo effect.


edit:
Don't forget that a small fraction of TCM remedies may really be medically effective. If you can find and isolate the active compound and do a real clinical trial on it, you could win a Nobel!

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

“Democracy” and “human rights” aren’t real things, they’re just euphemisms for whether or not you tongue America’s geopolitical balls or not

true democracy and real human rights are unattainable anywhere in the world until capitalism is defeated everywhere in the world

Truga posted:

can confirm.

bananas and oranges are available in stores year round now, tvs are cheaper, and i don't have to smuggle computers across the border, but otoh my life is a neoliberal hellscape. i'm lucky because i'm a computer janitor so i'm pretty well off, but even if climate change wasn't going to erase everything in the next 30 years, i'd never be able to retire.

during the early 90s my family literally survived on loans and never having a positive number on bank accounts, my grandparents ww2 partisan pension (which not even the neoest of libs dared touch, but it also pretty much never got adjusted for inflation), and using the patch of land our previous state gave us to grow food, because my mom's a teacher and poo poo went from ok to bad in the 90s for her, and my dad's forklift driver wage went from "not good" to "not enough" as soon as socialism ended, and his employer was constantly in bankruptcy for like 5 years and then he lost his job anyway. if hyperinflation didn't pay for my grandparents' house during the late years of yugoslavia, we'd probably starve lol

OTOH, my town voted 24% literal socialists in the last election and statewide they're at 10% and gaining while tilting further left so we're probably gonna go places until EU cracks down on us lmao

Doctor Jeep posted:

and keep in mind, this is the from the balkans success story country

Norton the First posted:

It's cool that Marxists who never read Marx think this. Real cool.

Not like Marx didn't express really loving strong preferences for actually existing regimes -- regimes which imperfectly expressed concepts like these -- during his lifetime, repeatedly, in writing. Marx was a strict utopian, you see.

You loving idiot.

Norton the First posted:

It's cool that Marxists who never read Marx think this. Real cool.

Not like Marx didn't express really loving strong preferences for actually existing regimes -- regimes which imperfectly expressed concepts like these -- during his lifetime, repeatedly, in writing. Marx was a strict utopian, you see.

You loving idiot.

Mantis42 posted:

Marxists, of course, also read Lenin, who explained the class nature of the state and how Capitalism and Imperialism are related.

Mantis42 posted:

You're the one suggesting we treat Marx's every word as hadith.

Darkest Auer posted:

I know perfectly well what those random bags of pills are, but I'm looking for the explanation why TCM is such a big industry in China instead of, you know, having proper healthcare for everyone in a supposedly communist country. Is it anti-imperialist to die from preventable diseases because you ate sugar pills instead of antibiotics?

Bloodnose posted:

On the other hand, we have no public hospitals in the US at all and that sucks. Maybe if we did have them we'd have publicly funded osteopaths and chiropractors.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Slovenia or Croatia?

Raptor1033 posted:

I live in a major US city and there's a literal TCM shop within blocks of me. People love that poo poo.

Doctor Jeep posted:

the former, us croats are the number 2 "success" but that's like saying a turtle came in second in a 2 person race (and the opponent wasn't really a cheetah but it wasn't a slower animal neither)

Atrocious Joe posted:

this cia op is the lamest

Willie Tomg posted:

right now the standard in d&d is "people are being abducted off the streets of xinjiang and their organs scooped out in the vans, no i have no sources for this claim but there are Many Such Cases"