Despite sweeping sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia’s economy hasn’t broken down and even appears resilient, as it’s now being driven by wartime state spending on military activities and subsidies.
“Consumption is booming due to a combination of massive budget spending and labor force shortages leading to strong wage pressures,”
Y’all. Morphine, heroin, opium, and nearly all opiates are from pretty flowers. Cocaine is from leafy greens. Quinine (malaria medicine) is from a tree. Penicillin is from moldy bread. Digoxin (a.k.a. digitalis a.k.a. Lanoxin) is from pretty flowers. Paclitaxel (a.k.a. chemotherapeutic Taxol) is from a tree.
You are being idealist when you imagine that all medicine is divorced from history and exists only in Euro-techno laboratories from non-earthly components.
I’ve heard these lectures before and am well-aware that not every treatment is a gamma knife, but the proponent of modern medicine is perfectly capable of acknowledging aspirin, since my criteria is if it works or not, rather than how near or far it is from nature. It’s the primitivist who is forced into an untenable position by rejecting pharmaceuticals, because your primary criteria criteria is closeness to nature rather than efficacy, the latter only coinciding as a happy accident.
I never said closeness to nature was the standard. I said that the metaphor of “backwards magical thinking” being analogous to “plant-based medicine” is an ahistorical position. Before Dupont and Pfizer, there was herbalism, and it worked through the scientific method of experimentation and evidence gathering. Modern medicine is built on top of herbalism and even includes herbalism today, while simultaneously pushing the narrative that all previous medical interventions based on plants is to be ignored, derided, abolished, and forgotten. And the reality is that the reason they do this is for profit and white male Eurocentric social hegemony. We have so much more to learn from ancient medicine because European society deliberately ignored it, obfuscated it, distorted it, and tried to destroy it.