That's ONE negative cartoon, and even that only if you call the author with his stated intentions a liar.
If I scoured Indian media, would I find at least ONE negative cartoon about "the West" or whatever, I wonder? If so, this naturally would justify any volume of attempts to interfere with Indian democracy.
> Sometimes science involves learning things for which an immediate economic benefit is not apparent.
Exactly. That's why I want to find out how you would react to being stimulated with a powerful current 5 minutes after you fell asleep. My thesis is that you wouldn't last long, but who knows what use could come from the experiment decades down the road? So instead of delaying, strap on those electrodes so we can make some progress up in this bitch. As you yourself said, knowing more things is almost always better than knowing fewer things.
A pessimist and an optimist will probably consider various interpretations as realistic, yet neither will see the world "as it is".
Even just the idea of the world as something that can be seen, thought of, considered, described etc. is squeezing it through a very human-shaped filter, and what you get out of the other end is always more about us than about the world.
Building such spikes etc. means going out of one's way to make it uncomfortable for everyone, just so it may be uncomfortable for the homeless, too.
Not building these spikes isn't "going out of one's way", it's the default.