That’s a mighty broad brush yer wavin’ there,wanna paint my house?
But this is the Pit. I expect the “sane” argument points raised here to be found in a GD. People aren’t coming here saying "ooh, this is a poor rant, or a poor pitting, instead they are arguing against the very core of the pitting itself. If this issue is so debate worthy then someone ought to open a GD on it.
I often see good debates break out in the Pit. I have much fewer problems with unsubstantiated opinions than I do with opinions substantiated by bullshit.
Daniel
Granted Miss Purl used some extreme examples to bolster her point. Still she retracted them (I think) and yet people kept attacking for what I perceived was her judgement of certain risk takers. I stand by my observation that everyone at one time or another has made judgements of someone elses actions that had no direct bearing to themselves.
There’s the “oh how could she wear that out of style dress?” comment, or
the “why is that idiot driving 95 in the left lane when there’s no traffic?” comment.
People are entitled to make these comments. They are only opinions. They need no justification.
Added note, from a recent Washington Post article:
“In July, scientists from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported test results for raw milk collected from 861 farms in 21 states. Nearly a quarter contained bacteria linked to human illness, including 5 percent with listeria, 3 percent with salmonella and 4 percent with types of E. coli that can cause diarrhea and other gastrointestinal illnesses. Less than 1 percent of samples had the most dangerous form of E. coli, 0157:H7.”
“Drinking raw milk “is like playing Russian roulette,” says Gregory Miller, vice president of the National Dairy Council. “Why would you take that risk?””
Regarding the argument that it’s unfair to expect people to raise their own cows if they’re hot on the idea of drinking raw milk, here’s an analogous situation:
There are a surprising number of credulous people out there who advocate using a product called “black salve”, made from the bloodroot plant, as a caustic to remove cancers (mostly skin cancers, but I’ve heard of people doing it for deeper tumors as well). They are convinced that it magically destroys only cancerous tissue and leaves the healthy skin alone (a delusional belief that has led to horrendous scarring, not to mention metastases from incompletely removed tumors). It is impossible for, say, an apartment dweller to raise their own plants and make their own salve. Yet (thankfully) it is illegal to market black salve as an anticancer agent in this country.
Are we being horribly unfair to people without access to gardens, by preventing them from buying a potentially dangerous product from heedless/greedy/unscrupulous sellers?
She retracted the silliest of them. She did not retract several other silly ones (polio!), instead resorting to lame insults and flouncing out of her thread.
True. The problem, as I said, is when they justify them with bullshit. If someone mocks a person for wearing out-of-style dresses because studies show that the fashion-blind are rapists, I’ll think they’re an idiot. If they mock the fashion-blind without bogus reasons, I’ll have a lot less contempt for their opinion.
Daniel
crap–Daniel
Crap–the last two posts were me. Here’s the last one reposted.
Shitty analogy, and again I’ll limit myself to explaining its shittiness instead of pretending to know something about black salve. Assuming your description is accurate, this is a case in which the only benefit of the salve is a false one. Nobody is claiming an aesthetic benefit, a quality-of-life benefit. If there were a significant contingent of folks who used said salve for quality-of-life purposes–e.g., they liked the scarification it cause and considered it similar to tattooing–I would think it perfectly legitimate to sell it for this purpose.
If people only drank raw milk for bogus health purposes, your analogy would be apt. People drink it for the pleasure of its flavor.
People who mock quality-of-life concerns baffle me. Is life a marathon, and the winner is the person who lives the longest? Or do we live for the experience of living? If it’s the latter, then of course we’re going to risk shortening our life for those experiences: if we don’t, we live a bland, pleasure-free life. Again, it’s all about balancing that risk against that pleasure.
Daniel
Wow! Milk wars.
Strictly anecdotal and of no value past that, I grew up on a dairy farm and there was a stainless cup on a twine lanyard hanging from the tank. I can not even imagine the germs and bacteria in that string and on the cup.
We would occasionally drink from it (not often) but the tank truck driver always did.
Always.
It was his test before he would begin the transfer. And he did it at every farm he picked up from.
Everyday.
The other anecdote I’ll leave you with was that no dairy farmer I’ve known drinks milk. They can’t fathom why adults would need milk. Its for animals who are still growing. They use it for cooking or to put in coffee but not sit down and have a glass.
And for the straight dope-milk-dairy farm connection. I lose my internet connection everyday at 4:30 AM and 4:30 PM when the milkers next door fire up.
LHoD, if you pay attention to the quote you’re attacking, I’m specifically addressing the “it’s unfair to deny people a commercial product they can’t be expected to produce themselves” argument.
Beyond that, it seems a fair comparison. In the case of both raw milk and black salve, you’ve got a bunch of dubious and outright false health claims, and significant associated dangers which make it logical to ban sales of both products based on public health concerns.
The articles and posts I’ve seen on raw milk focus heavily on the purported health benefits and not taste. Bypassing for the moment the question of whether aficionados could tell raw and pasteurized milk apart on a consistent basis - is this what “quality of life” has come down to?
This isn’t vintage Bordeaux we’re talking about - it’s fricking milk!
If I’m gonna live dangerously, it’s gonna be for something more rewarding than bovine secretions.
Word. It’s way more fun digging around in a whale carcass doing a necropsy anyhow.
I have actually never said that. I have just disagreed with your claim that anyone that wants raw milk should buy a goat or a miniature cow. I own goats and trust me when I say they are a pain in the ass! Unless you have a very good pen, they will escape and eat your trees, flowers, gardens etc. Can you imagine the havoc in the neighborhood? Goats are not solitary animals, so you need at least 2, and then they need to be properly socialized if they are living in your back yard. Are you getting the picture yet? This is all assuming that you even LIKE goats milk, it really is an acquired taste now isn’t it?
Can we talk about miniature cows now? I have researched them for my farm. They really are not all that “mini”. You certainly cannot keep them in your yard. As LofD said, this is unreasonable, I say it is not even doable unless you live in the country.
Yes, I got what you considered to be the point of the analogy. I already explained why it fails as an analogy, including consideration of what you said in the second paragraph above.
That’s great if you want higher quality-of-life rewards for your risk. Peachy, even. The evidence I’ve seen of the risks of raw milk do not justify government intrusion into the lives of those people who prefer the flavor of raw milk.
Daniel
Daniel,
You seem to have a better grasp of all the statements made here; I’m under the weather and don’t feel like going through all 200+ posts.
Did the OP or someone else advocate legislation to ban raw milk?
Even though I agree with the OP with regards to the clear-headedness of raw milk devotees, they should still be allowed to drink it/buy it.
Heck we let people sky-dive.
I have spent the last hour surfing the net trying to find some stats on raw milk deaths. While I won’t say there isn’t any, I couldn’t find any stats in Canada or the USA from 1990 to date.
The problem I have with the OP is simple, I find it way over the top typical “Chicken Little” hysterics over something that really is not a very important health issue. More people get ill from the freaken flu and are hospitalized and actually die. Does that mean if anyone shows symptoms of the flu we should quarantine them from the babies, the elderly and the people with suppressed immune systems? Because that is an actual issue that KILLS people.
BTW, as far as I know, raw milk is not available for sale in Canada, and I would never advocate for it, but at the same time, if I as a farmer chose to drink it, I sure as hell will. I would have to be a criminal over a damn glass of moo juice.
I would say your google-fu is lacking, but since the below is the second hit when you google “raw milk deaths” I’ll say you obviously tried NOT to find anything.
http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2007/NEW01576.html
I hope the CDC is a sufficiently authoritative source for you.
From the Washington Post article I linked to earlier:
“But Peggy Thiel, 52, of Spring Grove, Pa., who grew up drinking raw milk on her family’s dairy farm in Wisconsin, says she learned the benefits of pasteurization the hard way. Thiel says she and her older brother were often sick until the family doctor urged her mother to begin pasteurizing their milk. Their mother bought a small countertop pasteurizer and the illnesses stopped.”
Even if you don’t support the idea of public health regulations to protect adults from the implications of their foolishness, there are minors who aren’t given a lot of choice in the matter.
There are also minors who get injured when their families go camping, yet we don’t outlaw camping. Or driving cars. Or eating rare hamburgers. Or any of a number of other potentially risky behaviors.
If you want to set up some narrow legislation that bans providing raw milk to children under a certain age, or requiring labels on raw milk about its dangers especially to certain groups, I’ll support that.
Daniel
Dammit, I actually spent the majority of that hour ON the CDC website, I did try to find something dipshit, I knew the numbers if any would be so ridiculously small that it is laughable.
So, 2 deaths in 7 years. Oh yeah thats a fucking epidemic alright. I think we best just do away with dairy products all together. Some other poor idiot may choke on their hunk of cheddar and die too.
If camping was responsible for a high rate of injury and there was a fast, inexpensive way to make it a great deal safer without measurably changing the experience, you’d be against mandating that?
Discussed earlier in this thread - the tremendous reduction in food-borne illness that came about in this country because of pasteurization of milk. If you don’t know about all that misery and death, it’s easy to think pasteurization should be optional.
Because analogies are such fun, let’s consider skydiving which someone else mentioned as a potentially hazardous activity adults should be able to enjoy.
Let’s say there’s a skydiving outfit that’s discovered a way to offer a much cheaper and more exciting experience for devotees. It’s bought up bulk parachutes from a Chinese company that have been found to fail in operation once in every thousand deployments. And by skimping on plane maintenance, there a chance of engine trouble several times greater than if you used the services of a competitor. But hey, it would be exciting, more like if you went skydiving in the 1940s.
Why force the skydiving operator to bring his business up to safety standards? Shouldn’t adults be free to take the risk?
Hell, why have an FDA to oversee drug safety? (There was a letter to the editor of the Wall St. Journal recently arguing that the FDA should not be permitted to block the sale of any drug on grounds of lack of safety or efficacy - let patients get whatever they want. The letter was from an M.D. :rolleyes: ) We could return to those exciting patent medicine snake oil days of yesteryear.*
Again, I think all this Ron Paul-esque romanticizing of Personal Freedom reflects an astonishing degree of memory loss and/or ignorance of history.
*what with current non-regulation of “dietary supplements”, some would say we’re part way there already.