Re: Slippery Slope

[Guest guest]

Chris-

>Because sawdust is self-evident.

Why? It's certainly not self-evident to children, many of whom try to eat

all kinds of non-food substances. The only difference is that more or less

all adults now know that sawdust is Not Good Food. But there was

undoubtedly a time when someone tried to eat it and the human race

discovered that it's bad. Now is that time for HO (or at least I hope it is).

But perhaps a clearly non-food item like sawdust isn't the perfect

analogy. How about poisonous mushrooms? It requires great expertise to

determine which mushrooms are poisonous and which aren't, so the solution

is generally for parents to keep their kids from eating any wild mushrooms

they might find. They don't have to understand any of the science, they

just know that some mushrooms are toxic, so they make sure their kids avoid

all of them. It's bad parenting to let your kid run off and eat mushrooms

unless you happen to be a mushroom expert and can educate your kid in which

ones are good and which ones will kill him. But poisonous mushrooms look

just as much like food as non-toxic mushrooms. Without having a

near-encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms, it's just not possible to be sure.

Who knows how many millennia ago the human race learned this lesson. It

was probably learned many times in many different places. But now we're

learning the lesson about HO, and hopefully soon everyone will know to

avoid HOs like the plague.

And BTW, if a kid went off and ate a wild mushroom and got sick, he

wouldn't be taken away from his parents on the basis of that one event

alone. The parent would be told to stop the kid from eating wild

mushrooms, and if the parent didn't supervise the kid -- or worse,

encouraged the kid to keep eating wild mushrooms -- then further steps

might be taken. The same would be true of HO in some hypothetical future

scenario.

>But you can't know it's wrong in the case of HOs unless you understand the

>science. Otherwise, crisco looks more or less like lard.

In addition to my mushroom analogy, so what if crisco physically appears

like lard? We have labeling laws, and the cannister of crisco will say

" partially hydrogenated something-or-other " , which increasingly should be a

huge red flag to everyone in the country.

>But you DO need to

>understand how trans-fats work in the body to know they're bad.

No, you don't. You don't need to know how a poisonous mushroom works in

the body to know it can make you sick, you can just see that poisonous

mushrooms have made people sick. Same with HO.

>Unless they just listen to the

>gov't. And that obviously cannot be our criteria considering the gov'ts

>position on food vis-a-vis ours.

How about doctors and medical researchers? The government is no more the

root of all evil than it's the source of all good, and industry and

medicine have been up to their eyeballs in promoting all this bad

science. When there's a news report on ABC about the dangers of

pick-your-food, is that the government at work? Probably not. Maybe, but

probably not. There are many sources of medical information people listen

to, and yes, many of them are interconnected, and yes, many of the have

given lots of bad advice, but it's a fact nonetheless that people get their

information from these sources.

>But

>as a hypothetical...

But what I'm asking about are systemic problems that exist today. You said

the system is already deeply flawed, so that's what I'd like to hear

about. If there are flaws I don't know about, I'd like to hear about them.

>Kind of a bad analogy, since parents can give kids alcohol on their own

>property.

Is it legal, though? I think it's not actually legal, and if they give the

kid enough to make the kid sick, they're going to be in deep s***.

>Not really. Maybe if the kid's getting *drunk* and it's " all the time. " But

>I don't think if the kid is habitually served alcohol in very small amounts

>or is once in a great while getting drunk, *especially* if he/she's a

>teenager, then no, that's why out of line for the gov't to take the kid away.

OK, good point, I shouldn't have included small amounts of wine at meals in

my example. I certainly wouldn't support an intervention then! But how

about lots of scotch?

>Like all the widely understood harms of butter and eggs and all those babies

>with high choleterol problems?

The difference is twofold. First, a kid served those foods isn't going to

get sick from them, and second, it's possible to use science to defend such

a diet in court.

>Just

>because we're *right*... what if the pendulum were to change back?

Always a danger, and I'm certainly much less interested in some kind of

theoretical family intervention than I am in the hard reality of banning

HO, which would vastly improve tens or hundreds of millions of lives in

this country alone without tearing apart a single family (except those in

which some members passionately believe in the ban and some are

passionately opposed... <g>).

>And how

>do you define " widely known " ? If it is that widely known, they would be

>banned at that point and so it is an implasible scenario.

Not necessarily. Some wild mushrooms are widely known to be poisonous, but

they're not banned. It's unfortunately possible that it could become

conventional wisdom that HO is highly toxic without HO actually exiting the

industry.

>If they are widely

>recongized to be tantamount to motor oil as a food source, then yes, it is

>clear and clear child abuse, but at that point, they wouldn't be allowed in

>foods period.

Yes, which is why most of this argument is moot.

>As for things that are legal and not sold to minors... do you think parents

>should have their kids taken away if they give them cigarettes? It's a

>highly questionable parenting decision, but to say the kid should be taken

>away is rather revolting in my view.

That's a tough one. If the kid is already smoking, no. If the kid never

would've smoked otherwise, maybe. I don't know. I haven't given such a

scenario much thought, but hooking your kid on cigarettes isn't just a

highly questionable parenting decision, it's indefensible and very

harmful. That's not a lightweight act.

>Dunno... so far have mixed feeling on the case but know practically nothing

>about it. Would have to learn more.

The kid was going to turn into a vegetable.

>If the court order is broken, then more

>intervention might be necessary, but he surely shouldn't be taken away

>without prior court order for diet change.

So you'd allow the kid to be permanently stunted to a dramatic degree, if

not killed, rather than break up the family? I understand your reluctance

to condone intervention, but at some point I think you have to look at the

reality of the choice: leave the baby to die or grow up subhuman, or save

the baby. I don't think that's meaningfully different from the choice

between leaving a kid to be sexually abused or taking the kid away, except

that the sexual abuse involves intentional harm. But as far as the gravity

of the results for the kid, they're on similar levels.

-

[Guest guest]

>Because sawdust is self-evident.

Why? It's certainly not self-evident to children, many of whom try to eat

all kinds of non-food substances. The only difference is that more or less

all adults now know that sawdust is Not Good Food.

----->i believe sawdust *was* actually used in human foods in previous

centuries, and I believe it's currently used in some petfoods and perhaps

livestock feed as a source of cellulose (fiber).

Suze Fisher

Lapdog Design, Inc.

Web Design & Development

http://members.bellatlantic.net/~vze3shjg/

mailto:s.fisher22@...

[Guest guest]

Suze-

I didn't know it was used in human food in the past, but it is used in pet

and livestock feeds.

And I should've asked _why_ it's self-evident. It's not like there's no

life on earth which can eat sawdust, and it's not even like one dose is

necessarily going to cause visible harm.

>i believe sawdust *was* actually used in human foods in previous

>centuries, and I believe it's currently used in some petfoods and perhaps

>livestock feed as a source of cellulose (fiber).

-

[Guest guest]

Chris-

>The mushroom analogy still isn't a perfect analogy because no child or adult

>could have a similar response to the HO in an oreo.

Is that really true? I know next to nothing about wild mushrooms, but I'm

sure there are types which are only modestly poisonous and which only

visibly harm a child over the course of a long period of regular consumption.

And anyway, come on, it's close enough. Poisonous mushrooms look like food

and taste like food.

>because if HOs are recognized as dangerous

>enough to have court orders about them, they simply wouldn't be allowed in

>food.

Yes, and as I've said, I'd never want family intervention to be the first

line of offense against HO, even if it could somehow happen that way, which

it couldn't. I'm just saying that if we ban HO, even if it's just for sale

or serving to children, eventually it might reach that status legitimately,

the same way serving booze to a kid can, at least under some conditions, be

grounds for intervention. (I.e. getting a kid drunk all the time, not

serving a little wine with dinner or letting the kid drink a shot on his

birthday -- or even helping the kid get really drunk once so that he never

wants to do it again, though that latter example is likely a really bad idea.)

>To add complexities to this, we've agreed that sugar *shouldn't* be banned.

>What about immoderate use of sugar? What does more harm, sugary junk food

>with every meal and a couple sugary snacks, or occasional use of HOs, maybe

>once a week?

It depends how immoderate the use. If a six-year-old weights 180 pounds,

that's probably grounds for intervention. I'm not opposed to the

interventions that have already been done in cases like that, though it's

likely that the kids are being put on low-fat diets afterward, which we

have to do everything in our power to educate the country against. (And

now that low-carbing has become so popular, maybe we're getting there,

though I'm very nervous about the direction things will head in with

low-carbing's sole popular, nationally known spokesman dead.)

>I recognize that most kids who eat HOs eat them and sugar much

>more often than once a week. But the possibilities for complexities make any

>possible law to vague. What constitutes safe levels of HOs?

Any possible law? How about eliminating them from the food supply

entirely, 100%. That's not complex, it's simple. And there's sound

science to defend the idea that there is no safe level of HO consumption

(maybe aside from something like having one meal of them in your life, or

eating two molecules of them in a scientific experiment).

>In addition to

>mushrooms, we could use the example of tap water, which is often full of lead

>and other metals, sometimes aresenic or whatever, usually (*hopefully*) at

>very low levels that would never do immediate harm but probably contribute to

>harm over a life time.

Toxins in water can presumably be flushed out of the body as well as being

taken in, so there probably are levels at which they simply have no impact

even in the long term.

Also, tap water isn't a good analogy, because it's a government service,

and therefore it's the government's responsibility to ensure that it's

safe. (And as citizens, it's our responsibility to make sure the

government makes it safe, and it's malfeasance, plain and simple, for large

corporations to use their financial might to turn tap water into a dumping

ground for their industrial waste while calling it a plan to save people's

teeth.)

>No kidding, but if it looks like food (kind of) tastes (kind of ) like food,

>and is ALLOWED TO BE SOLD as food, it's pretty safe to assume it's food!!!

>(Or it *should* be anyway)

It should be, yes, which is why HO (and probably some other non-food

substances) should be completely banned.

>Sure, but I've never seen anyone or heard of anyone getting violently ill

>from eating an oreo.

Not from eating one oreo, but from eating them for a good long time? You

bet. They just didn't know it was the oreos, in much the same way I bet

some people who ate slightly-poisonous mushrooms (or other pseudo-foods)

didn't initially realize what was making them sick.

>There has to be some clearly defined criteria, and the gov't

>statement is best I can think of.

Clearly-defined criteria for what, exactly? If we ban HO, that's the end

of the story. If we ban it for sale or serving to children, well, that's a

step in the right direction but opens up a whole can of worms, so I'd hope

we'd take the next step very, very rapidly.

And nobody's talking about banning sugar, and parents can legally and even

morally serve their kids at least some sugar, but parents who create

morbidly obese kids are in danger of losing their kids because they're

doing such a remarkably bad parenting job. I don't think there are any

sharply defined criteria, like you lose your kid when he's X percent

overweight. It's just considered on a case-by-case basis.

>No, I think you're wrong. It's either legal everywhere or it depends on the

>state. It's legal in MA anway, afaik.

Hmm, well, it appears it's illegal in NY but legal in SC. I don't know

what the national picture looks like. However, I'm not opposed to serving

children alcohol, provided it's done in moderation. (I was served wine as

a minor, and AFAIK it did me no harm and maybe did me some good.) However,

just as with sugar, it's possible to go overboard enough to warrant

government intervention.

>Depends on the age of the kid, how much scotch, how drunk or sick the kid

>got/gets. Yes, it is certainly conceivable for me to see getting a kid drunk

>in certain circumstances as abuse, but it is an iffy line to try to draw.

>Have to see it on a case-by-case.

Well, everything like this is case-by-case, including morbid obesity.

>I didn't see the case... if he was going to die or become a vegetable, then

>of course he should be taken away. I didn't know what " failure to thrive "

>meant in this particular example.

It means he hadn't gained any weight since being born and was dramatically

behind babies his age in development. His brain and body weren't

developing. I can't think of a better example of inadvertent abuse.

I really don't want to spend further time discussing the family

intervention issue. I think we're both on the same page about banning HO

completely, and I don't think we're even necessarily that far apart on

family intervention. Maybe in a given huge number of families you'd

support three interventions and I'd support five, but it's just not worth

arguing into the ground.

-

[Guest guest]

In a message dated 5/19/03 4:48:27 PM Eastern Daylight Time,

Idol@... writes:

> I really don't want to spend further time discussing the family

> intervention issue. I think we're both on the same page about banning HO

> completely, and I don't think we're even necessarily that far apart on

> family intervention. Maybe in a given huge number of families you'd

> support three interventions and I'd support five, but it's just not worth

> arguing into the ground.

I agree. I think this discussion has more or less evolved too many

convolutions that are all derived from some initial miscommunication between

us, and it's pointless to continue nitpicking on those when we now know we

have no disagreements regarding the core issues ;-)

Chris

" To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are

to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and

servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. " --Theodore

Roosevelt