You know what the most fucked up thing on this earth is?
The patenting of medication.
There are people dying in countries across the globe, not because they can’t be cured, or because the medicine is too expensive to make, but because companies can patent medicine. There are people sitting in their ivory towers, in their lab coats and business suits, holding paperwork that bans people from manufacturing medicine that will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people unless they are paid a shittonne of money.
There are countries being sued by said companies, because they saved the lives of many of their populations with drugs manufactured without them paying the patent holder sums of money so large there was no way it would be possible for them otherwise.
How shit is that?
Do any of you think before you speak? Yes this is wrong but the fact of the matter is if those 100k plus people have babies… Well you know what we are already fucked. Get an education.
Ok, no, fuck you. you are the person who needs to get an education, because I study human geography. THIS is what I do. And the simplistic world view you have presented is so so wrong it is actually offensive that you suggest I am the one in need of an education.
You have looked at the world and gone “we are over populated.” Which is true. But then you’ve gone “The way to fix this is to ensure that people in the developing world die.” Which is massively wrong.
There are two arguments I can present here, and I’m going to share both with you.
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The first is that though the world has too many people on it for the amount of resources we consume, that doesn’t mean people, (in this specific case, the poor) have to die. If we found a healthy middle ground, and the developed and developing world were to cut their resource consumption the planet could happily support us all, especially with the recent advances in desalination and GM technology.
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The second is a more in depth look at what your point is. You have looked at the world and gone, if there are too many people, the deaths of some will lower the population. HOWEVER population is a far more complicated issue. It is strongly tied to development level and peoples quality of life.
To avoid getting too complex here I’m going to present a simple (though more complex and accurate than yours) explanation of population dynamics and it’s link to a populations development level and their access to medicine.
As you can see, in this handy, simplified model, development is divided into stages.
Stage one shows the developing world, what most people describe as “Africa” though this dynamic is not limited to that continent. Stage one is less developed so there is little or no access to health care and the population is living in poor conditions where mortality (especially child mortality) is high and as such, there will be more births per woman, however, as these children are likely to die young the population growth is slow or non existent.
By the time we hit stage four we have reached the developed world, where the birth and death rate have stabilised at a lower level than before This is an ideal. We can even progress into stage five, which though not depicted on this diagram has death rates remaining constant and birth rates declining further leading to a population decline – a situation happening in Russia and beginning to happen in the UK and much of the western world as a whole.
The problem, is what happens in the middle.
In stage two a country begins to develop, an increased access to healthcare means the population rises as death rates drop significantly but birth rates stay the same as they have yet to adjust.
In stage three the birth rate adjusts and population begins to decrease and stabilise.
Now, how does this affect your comment?
Well, the developed world has been running aid programmes for years, giving countries in stage one and two access to vaccinations and such. However, due to a lack of funds to provide access to patented medicines aid programmes cannot enable countries to reach stage three.
We have created a situation where enough people are dying of preventable diseases that the birth rate fails to drop, whilst ensuring the death rate drops through the provision of vaccinations.
There are two ways of fixing this impending disaster.
1: Stop vaccinations. Which alongside being inhumane, is a really bad idea, we do not want certain viruses to gain a foothold in the population again.
2: Or, we provide full access to healthcare. Starting with the removal of the patenting of medicines. This would enable these nations to reach stage three, and even stage four
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Also, finally, the patents do not just cover medicines that save lives, they cover medicines for chronic pain and mental health, meaning many people live in agonizing pain because of these patents.
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Next time, educate yourself, before you tell others to educate themselves.
odin is like “when thor was born the sun shone bright upon his beautiful face. i found loki on the sidewalk outside a taco bell”
Oðinn spake:
Bright the sun shone | at the time of Þor’s birth, And bathed his count’nance fair. Loki, wolf-father, | the trickster, the liar, I found on the cold pavement While returning in glory | from a grand hunt For a 3 AM quesadilla.
earlier today i was nonverbal for a bit but no one was around except the cats, so i signed at molly that she’s a good cat and she. immediately started purring. this cat knows too much. i live in fear that someday s
Captain-Radioactive-Mentality 