[sabbatic13]

OP described exactly how the author began his article. Your apologetics are tendentious. I hate to break this to you, but the author you have gone out of your way to praise is a very shallow thinker who darts around to create the illusion of a solid argument. It's just sad that you find him thought-provoking. I suggest Critical Reasoning 101 for you.

[TeMPOraL]

What part of the first sentence "imagine if a chemist told you offhandedly that the Russians had different chemical elements than we did" you both fail to understand?

The OP seems to have read something completely different than I (or somehow skipped every other paragraph). At this point it doesn't matter what the text is or who wrote it. It's a failure of reading.

[DanBC]

That is how author began the article, but that's just shitty writing. The author goes on to say:

> If a chemist told you this, you would think they were crazy. Science, you would say, is science everywhere. You can’t have one set of elements in Russia and another in the US, everyone would work together and compare notes. At the very least one side would have the common decency to at least steal from the other. No way anything like this could possibly go on.

> But as far as I can tell this is exactly the state of modern psychopharmacology.

Which is telling us that the peculiar elements stuff was some weird hyperbolic example to make us realise just how strange it is that we ignore Russian pharmacology.

(I downvoted you for your needlessly aggressive tone.)