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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (65202)	12/5/1999 6:28:00 AM
From: nihil	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

There's a moral issue for you. Like the poor man stealing a loaf of bread and being sentenced to the galleys. What's his name, Jean Valjean? There ought to be a book in that. I remember a study in which college kids in Utah and in Singapore were asked about the morality of using unlicensed software. The Singapore kids thought that knowledge belonged to everyone and mostly believed piracy was okay. The Utah kids mostly that software piracy was a dreadful crime. The neat part of course, is that the Wellcome Trust (the world's largest tax-exempt charititable trust) owns the patent to AZT. Gates' trust, the second richest, is founded from the profits of software manufacture. I won't invest and never have invested in drug companies. I have always believed in socialized medicine. I loved walking into drug stores in Thailand long ago and buying drugs for 10 cents on the dollar because of their free market. Of course, sometimes they were fake. I believe in free markets and free trade in drugs.

To: Ilaine who wrote (65202)	12/5/1999 10:43:00 AM
From: Grainne	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 108807

I'm unclear about what your position is on the AIDS drugs, Blue. You sort of threw me off when you described it as a "heart-warming story you'll get a lot of laughs about". I don't exactly see what is funny about millions of people dying because of the greed of American drug companies, which after all are making plenty of money anyway. This planet did not begin with private ownership of land or resources. In many cultures, wealth was shared. The fact that in the industrialized nations we do it this way does not necessarily make complicity in the deaths of millions of people who do not have the resources we have a moral or correct or even reasonable position, in my opinion. Are you saying that the government of the world's only superpower has no responsibility at all to try to assist in less privileged areas of the planet, to ease human suffering? One of the continuing problems that I have with libertarianism is that there seems to be no humanity involved in it at all. And yet most people have big hearts. So it doesn't seem to be a natural way of looking at things.

To: Ilaine who wrote (65202)	12/5/1999 9:32:00 PM
From: one_less	Respond to of 108807

That just shows how uninformed I am. I didn't know drug patents were effective in other countries or even if they were that the US had anything to say about patent laws being broken in other countries. I know that for several years there have been groups of Americans taking medications into Iraq, deliberately violating the sanctions. I also know they're hoping to get busted so that a public trial might raise the public's awareness on the issue. So far it hasn't gotten much coverage.