When I see “the FDA has stated…” I automatically think it is probably a corrupt conclusion bought by some powerplayer to maximize their own profit instead of having to do with whether the statement is true or not. I’ve always viewed FDA as basically a council of a bunch of power players on boards of Big Capitalism companies like Pepsi that make decisions based on control and market share rather than health.
but I see posts now about how trump attacking FDA equals bad. So is my view of FDA wrong? Are they noncorrupt? Are they a necessary evil? Should they be thrown in a volcano and remade?
That statement is there because the company selling that milk is advertising that it is rBST free. It is illegal to make health claims for a product without proof and it can lead to large fines and forced product withdrawal. The disclaimer protects the company from any false advertising claims.
Let say, hypothetically, a regulatory agency like the FDA, lets 50% of bad thing get approved.
Well what happens without the FDA?
100% of the bad things will be legal to sell.
So do you still want an FDA even if they are corrupt and let 50% of bad things go through?
And the FDA lets way less than 50% of bad things go through (I don’t have an exact number tho).
This is what people fail to take into account. Yeah, there are some departments that are going to be ran by incredibly incompetent people with almost no sane idea. But, that’s disregarding the people who’re not them who are still managing things and keeping said department from totally going batshit.
Remember that the stories you hear are always going to be the ones that are most controversial, otherwise they would not be news. The day in day out work of the FDA is enormous and most of it, I believe, necessary for the level of trust in what you find on the shelf, what you’re doctor recommends, what your pharmacist hands you, that we enjoy.
I don’t want to have to know my farmer, my chemical compounder, my importer, my distributor, my restaurant chef, etc, etc, for every stupid thing just to avoid eating lead or feeding hepatitis to my kids.
The loudest complaints-- selling raw milk is technically illegal? they allow red food coloring as long as you list it in the ingredients? they may or may not allow you to call oat liquid a “milk”?-- sound pretty small to me, and also even these issues are reviewed and discussed more or less transparently in response to people’s concerns.
Is the FDA good or bad?
This is a false dichotomy.
Are they a necessary evil?
Framing things in moralistic terms just further obfuscates things.
The FDA is an enormous organization. It contains contradictions. It contains multitudes. Yes it is in a variety of ways compromised by the capitalist class, but that doesn’t mean the entire enterprise is without value. Black and white thinking isn’t going to cut it here.
Should they be thrown in a volcano and remade?
If you remade the FDA from scratch under capitalism, the result would be roughly the same, because the structures of political power would still be the same.
I think you’re confusing “false dichotomy” with “question”. You could argue this if they were talking more in depth about the organisation. But that’s not what’s happening here
A question framed as having a only two possible answers is a dichotomous question, and if the answer doesn’t fit that framing then the framing is false. It’s the wrong question to ask.
Ahh, I don’t think the question is to be taken that literally. And if you look around in the responses, you see plenty of people with more nuanced answers.
However, you can still have an opinion about the overall organisation regardless of the nuance.
As bad as Trump is, being not-Trump does not equal good. Politics in the US is not a bad/good, Trump/not-Trump binary. Even if the two political parties in power would like the masses to believe it.
