🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <>, cek@mercury.interpath.net (Camille Klein--Tech Support) wrote:

>Thus spake Gregor :
[Joel Furr originally responded:]
>: >I'm sorry that you think it's a bad idea to have basic health regulations 
>: >at restaurants.  

G: I think it's a bad idea to have excessive government regulation.  If people
G: were dying left and right from eating rare hamburgers in an adjacent state
G: where they are legal, don't you think we would be hearing about it?

>The same argument--with different words inserted in the appropriate places--
>has been used by many people who object to some sort of rule or law that
>puts a damper on their fun.  NAMBLA uses it to decry child-protection laws that
>are designed to keep predatory monsters like them from harming children under
>the guise of 'liberation', the NRA uses it to decry laws that prevent 
>unrestricted access to firearms by private citizens, and you are using it to
>decry basic health regulations.   

I whole-heartedly support basic health regulations; the recent outright ban of
rare hamburgers is not a basic health regulation.

N.B.:
G: People have been eating rare hamburger (even raw hamburger) for many
G: generations.  Three years ago the NC State Leg, in a knee-jerk response to
the
G: Jack-in-the-Box e. Coli cases, outlawed rare hamburgers instead of
addressing
G: the true problem of inadequate food inspection regulations and procedures.

G: E. coli is most dangerous to the very young and the very old.  I am
presently
G: neither.

>So?  This gives you licence to scream that a regulation designed to protect 
>public health and safety is a Bad Thing?  

Let's ban autos to save the tens of thousands of lives a year lost in them.
That would protect public health and safety.

An outright ban on rare hamburgers is a much more stringent regulation than
necessary to protect public health and safety. Like many regulations "designed
to protect public health and safety", it is a bad thing.  Jefferson ("That
government is best which governs least") and  Thoreau ("That government is
best which governs not at all")  had the right idea, IMNSHO. 

>: You can order *raw*  hamburger in Hamburg, Germany.  I can't remember the last
>: news item about someone getting sick from it.

>Non Sequitur, dear.  Germany != the US.  Germany also has health regulations
>that are in some cases FAR stricter than those here in the US.  Try a new 
>argument--preferably one that is based on a clue and not on some half-cocked
>knee-jerk whine about excessive regulations.

You demonstrate my point:  Germany has far more stringent health regulations
than ours in some cases, but they do not find it necessary to ban rare
hamburger.  Do you not believe that if it were a rational health regulation to
ban rare hamburger, that Germany would have already done it? 

Again,
G: I'm not advocating forcing anyone to eat rare hamburgers, but I assert that
it
G: is silly for the state to have OUTLAWED them.  And I was glad to have had a
G: GREAT one this week, in a state that respects individual liberty enough to
G: allow a man to order his meat cooked to his liking, not the the brown-nosed
G: sensibilities of some anhedonistic boor.

>*yawn*  If Virginia is so wonderful, then please feel free to move there and
>free up some land area for another person.

I guess you're bored by your own "love it or leave it" claptrap?  

>: This state really sucks.  They fill the rivers with pig shit and then worry
>: about grown men and women potentially poisoning themselves with cow shit!
 
>--Camille, who frankly prefers her meat heated through.  Something about cold
>beef just doesn't appeal to her.

Medium rare *is* warm in the middle, it is my favorite way to enjoy a thick
juicy burger.

Gregor