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That's not very strange. In every country there are people working for their own benefit against the good of the nation. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
by winter_blue 11y ago
That's not very strange. In every country there are people working for their own benefit against the good of the nation. It's called the tragedy of the commons.
This kind of thing is actually all too common in the United States. One (rather shocking) example of this is/was the promotion of Oxycodone, a drug derived from Opium to doctors all over the US for common cases of pain.[1] Purdue Pharma spent millions promoting the use of Oxycodone for minor cases of pain, and misrepresenting its addictiveness. This has more or less been responsible for the heroin epidemic in the US, with the consequence being thousands upon thousands of lives being destroyed (first through addiction, and then by death).
And I might be wrong here, but in my experience, the vast majority Americans actually care a lot lot more about the common good than Indians. In my experience, a lot of Indians (in India) will happily screw over their neighbors and their country for their own selfish gain. Conscientious Indians are hard to come by. The few who stand up for what is right, get killed[2] or trampled over[3].
One glaring example of this is how people in India have no problems trashing the streets of the very cities/towns they live in. The streets of most major cities in India look like steaminggarbage dumps. I suppose they think: "What do I care? It's public property, not my home." And they litter the streets with garbage.
If a country like the United States, where the majority people are actually a lot more conscientious, moral, and patriotic[4] than most countries has problems of a few screwing over the majority, then there's nothing shocked about.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-new-heroin-epidemic/382020/ http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/10/the-new-he...
[2] Satyendra Dubey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Dubey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Dubey
[3] One of my relatives worked for an Indian government agency. He wouldn't stand for any corruption, and fought against from the inside. The people in the agency literally ruined his life. He even sued some of these people, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court of India, and he actually won the case -- but the compensation he won for all that he had went through was a pittance. He ended up dying in his early 50s from a heart attack, most likely from the stress from all of this. His entire life was consumed by this.
The level of corruption in government in India is staggering. From the highest to the lowest levels of government, everyone cares just about themselves (and their families) and is a Judas to everyone else, their neighbors, and the nation as a whole. It is very sad.
[4] Being patriotic should mean actually caring about the country and people in the country -- that manifests itself in the person's behavior. Not empty words. By this measure, a lot of Indians living in India are some of the least patriotic people in the world.
- awakeasleep 11y agoOverall I agree with your point but I want to make a squabble with your example. Purdue's marketing of Oxycontin definitely crossed my line of honesty, BUT there has been, historically, an enormous amount of untreated pain in the US (probably everywhere), because of the stigma around those drugs. It's ok for someone to develop a tolerance and addiction to the drug if they have the actual pain issue. That is usually less disruptive to someone's life than living with crippling pain. In a way, getting opiate pain medication into the hands of more people is a good thing. The problem was a little more complicated- 1) Perdue promoted Oxycontin in a misleading way. 2) This happened during an economic downturn with our post-manufacturing economy turning out tons of people on disability, and others without a clear future. 3) Legislators freaked out, making it harder for doctors to prescribe opiates without making it easier for them to prescribe opiate treatment pills like suboxone, which basically forces addicted users of pharmaceuticals onto the street to score heroin. So it's a social, legislative, and corporate morality problem all at the same time.
- eklavya 11y agoI take strong exception to your extreme interpolation. You found 3 anecdotes in a country of 1.25 billion people and branded them the least patriotic bunch? I actually live here and it's far from the truth. Can you name any other country where the people fasted and rid it of foreign dependency on food imports by one call of their prime minister? This is just one example, please research/understand countries/people before making such bigoted (Americans are much more patriotic) statements.
- rspeer 11y ago"Bigoted" is an unnecessarily strong and insulting word to apply. The GP sounds like he is of Indian descent and unsatisfied with the way things are in his family's country of origin, which is anyone's right.
- eklavya 11y agoI only disagreed with his claim "Indians are least patriotic, Americans are more patriotic". I didn't say anything about the rest of the comment. I wrote a strong word because the claim was extraordinary.