I'm not the person you replied to, but I assume it was more of an overly broad generalization than an intentional attempt at "myth-building".

A lot (but yes, not all) of that research is publicly funded and then locked away behind corporate paywalls.

JSTOR is a major repository of twentieth-century humanities publications. When these come from the US, they are usually privately funded research. HN is dominated by a STEM crowd that tends to think only about that scholarship, which is often publicly funded, but in a discussion like this one needs a good familiarity with what JSTOR is and what it contains.

Eh, I assume the humanities are a tiny portion of the funding for academia. Their equipment is what, coloured pencils and expensive tea? Hardly anything compared to a large hadron collider.

The humanities being cheaper than STEM is irrelevant to this thread about Schwarz bulk-downloading a source of myriad copyrighted papers.

I was referring to the comment about private vs public funding. Yes, the only relevant fact is about the morality of hiding knowledge behind exorbitant pay walls. Academics submit papers freely, and sometimes pay for the privilege, peer reviewers work for free, and then the rent seekers charge everybody to read it. It's immoral. I agree.