I mean the actual medicine part. When I think about it, there are still no cures for the major things that ail us (e.g. cancer, etc.). China cured that one guy from his diabetes, but I haven't heard anything beyond that.

The "promise" of stem cell technology from 20 years ago still hasn't amounted to anything that your average person can get (and there are all sorts of shady overseas places that give ppl "stem cell" injections, but honestly we should have figured out that shit by now).

If you tear a ligament/tendon, guess what, that shit will never heal back to 100%, and the "oh just rest and do physical therapy" shit is annoying because you're only really working around the problem and not solving it.

On top of that, as you get older it's harder for your body to heal from injuries, sickness, etc. and I've yet to see any legit progress on anti-aging. If your heart is damaged or arteries clogged, I don't see any way to reverse it.

And after covid, it's all been fucked. How many people have long covid and the medical establishment just throws it's hands up basically treating an entire segment of the population as though it was a bad crop yield ("I guess there's always the next batch!!).

And doctors themselves are often the biggest dipshits out there. They are high off their own supply because they're "smart" and lack the empathy to actually listen to patients. Either they're older conservative types or younger lib dipshits. And there are so many horror stories about nurses that talk shit about patients. It's just dismal.

The common reply is that "biology is hard" but honestly that's a WEAK excuse. So many advances were made in the past, and there are so many more to be made. An actual concerted international effort, unhindered by profit motives and fucking insurance, hospital, pharmaceutical industries, etc. would almost certainly yield results. I mean look at Cuba coming up with a lung cancer vaccine and curing HIV in an infant. Look at China curing diabetes in that one guy. These advances are possible, but honestly they aren't coming fast enough. If you're suffering from a terrible disease/ailment, the "promise" of a new drug that still may be 10 years away is just terrible.

So even if we had 100% socialism now with free healthcare, there are still so many things that need to be addressed. I can't help but think that had the Soviet Union not fallen, we would have had cures for many things. Hopefully can do something about this, but overall I'm still super bummed that the future we dreamed has not materialized.

I kind of had Coates pegged as the quintessential Obama-Era liberal consensus thinker. But he's spitting on Israel in this article

This time, he lays forth the case that the Israeli occupation is a moral crime, one that has been all but covered up by the West. He writes, “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel

That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”

“All states at their core have a reason for existing — a moral story to tell,” he told me. “We certainly do. Does industrialized genocide entitle one to a state? No.” Especially, he said, at the expense of people who had no hand in the genocide.

On the ground in the occupied territories, he saw the segregated roads, the soldiers with their American-made weapons, the surveillance cameras, and the whole archipelago of impoverished ghettos. “I felt a mix of astonishment, betrayal, and anger,” he writes. “The astonishment was for me — for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity … The betrayal was for my colleagues in journalism — betrayal for the way they reported, for the way they’d laundered ethnic cleansing, for the voices they’d erased. And the anger was for my own past — for Black Bottom, for Rosewood, for Tulsa — which I could not help but feel being evoked here.”

One of his first encounters with the Israeli state is a soldier stopping him on the street to ask him his religion, a confusing question for an atheist. It becomes clear that if he does not give the correct answer — “Jew,” “Christian,” anything but “Muslim” — he will not be allowed to pass. “On that street so far from home,” he writes, “I suddenly felt that I had traveled through time as much as through space. For as sure as my ancestors were born into a country where none of them was the equal of any white man, Israel was revealing itself to be a country where no Palestinian is ever the equal of any Jewish person anywhere.”

In Coates’s eyes, the ghost of Jim Crow is everywhere in the territories. In the soldiers who “stand there and steal our time, the sun glinting off their shades like Georgia sheriffs.” In the water sequestered for Israeli use — evidence that the state had “advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.”

In the book, he writes of the pain he observed in two of his Israeli companions: “They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth — that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”

“The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”

“What I suspect,” he told me, “is that American media in general thinks of itself as separate from the ends and goals of American power. And I don’t think that’s true.”

https://archive.is/cR8ob

I've been following this stuff for a while, but I really don't know much outside of GOP pollsters loving to wishcast for some reason. What are the best polls to predict what's going to happen? What do you think happens?