In response to my post “Quick, let’s talk about my pee pee” commenter namae nanka provided a link to an article entitled “A Rose by Any Other Name? Rethinking the Similarities and Differences between Male and Female Genital Cutting.” I read the entire thing from start to finish, and all I can say is thank you. I found it extremely illuminating, and I implore anyone considering becoming a parent to read it through and thoughtfully examine your position on circumcision.

The article cogently addresses the main point of my previous post — the assertion that consistently drawing a comparison between FGM and MGM can be useful:

[Some researchers] criticize the fortresslike separation of male circumcision from FGM and suggest that the real issue in the debate is child protection: “Whether we should be subjecting any children to . . . procedures involving the excision of healthy tissue” (Fox and Thomson 2005a:467). In a further article, Fox and Thomson (2005b) develop these arguments and criticize medical and legal authorities for neglecting the rights of children and failing to undertake a full cost-benefit analysis of the effects that routine circumcision has on males.

From an ethics perspective, no coherent criticism of FGM on the basis of a child’s right to bodily integrity can be mounted without also being a criticism of MGM. I think that’s an extremely important point to grasp. The authors drive it home by observing that practitioners of FGM often point to MGM as an equivalent Western practice, saying that it’s hypocritical of us to decry FGM while routinely circumcising our infant males. And in America, you’re cutting boys!

The authors also make an interesting conjecture about Western studies addressing the cost/benefit of circumcision:

…[O]ne wonders whether it is culture or medical science that is really in the driver’s seat here. The evidence thought to show a “potential health benefit” for MGA may in fact be an artifact of its cultural acceptability and long history in U.S. society. By the same token, the absence of any culturally conditioned demand for FGA has discouraged researchers from seeking evidence of the potential advantages of such surgery. It is the cultural demand for MGA that generates the research that appears to implicate the foreskin in whatever disease is holding the public’s attention (Goldman 2004). In a culture that values science, medical (usually miscalled scientific) justifications for cultural rituals must be found, hence the numerous horror stories about the terrible risks of retaining normal human anatomy (Van Howe et al. 2005). As Lawrence Dritsas (2001) has eloquently argued, the cultural tail would appear to be wagging the scientific dog.

Indeed.

One final excerpt, because everyone loves an appeal to evolutionary biology :)

All mammals have foreskins; males are what they are because that is how they have evolved … Evolution, however, appears to be favoring ever-longer foreskins in males (Cold and McGrath 1999), suggesting that they improve survival chances and reproductive health rather than the reverse.

Definitely worth the read.

Bill Maher nails it as always:

New rule: now that they’ve finished reading the Constitution out loud, the teabaggers must call out that group of elitist liberals whose values are so antithetical to theirs. I’m talking of course about the founding fathers.

In the video, he references this crazy f*cking painting:

I want to stab my eyes out.

Now that there’s been so much talk about the “Ground Zero” mosque, I figured it’s time I offer my two cents. Lots of good arguments have been made … entirely by those in support of the builders’ rights.

From the opponents’ side, I hear a lot of people asking “why does it have to be so close to Ground Zero?” That’s a question you’re free to ask yourself, or perhaps those who selected the site, but you cannot ground a serious objection in that question alone. Besides, what would you offer as a solution, to have a legally enforced radius around this hole in the ground where no Muslim edifice can be erected? Sounds constitutional to me …

I’ve also heard that it would be a “slap in the face” to the victims of 9/11. Well, I think that abandoning our nation’s principles is a greater affront to the memories of those killed in the attack than an “Islamic Cultural Center” ever could be. Not to mention the American Muslims who were in the towers when they were brought down; wouldn’t disallowing the construction of the Center be a slap in the face to them?

Which brings me to my next point: if there was ever any doubt in our minds that the Right is in the habit of systematically vilifying Islam and Arabs, that should by now be expunged. After all, these aren’t al-Qaeda operatives who want to build the Center, they’re Americans: that’s right the opponents are trying to deny Americans their right to worship wherever they want. Well, let them be reminded that the first line of the First Amendment reads

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;”

Yes, let them be reminded that their bellyaching can never beget any legal instantiation, because it would violate one of the first rights guaranteed to us by the Constitution.

In the end, I think that the anti-”mosque” people’s idiocy speaks for itself. But I should say that, while I think their entire rhetoric is vile, I would happily die for their right to voice it, as should any American for the free speech of their brothers and sisters.

For your viewing pleasure:

(Via)

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

(Via)

The US Military has a $660 million contract with the Michigan company Trijicon, which manufactures rifle sights destined for use in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As it turns out, the company has been surreptitiously placing references to Bible verses on their sights. So much for this not being a holy war.

From the company’s mission statement on their website.

“We believe that America is great when its people are good,” says the Web site. “This goodness has been based on Biblical standards throughout our history, and we will strive to follow those morals.”

John 8:12 "Prepare to eat lead, raghead."

Dear God. These people make me shudder.

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

Weinstein, an attorney and former Air Force officer, said many members of his group who currently serve in the military have complained about the markings on the sights. He also claims they’ve told him that commanders have referred to weapons with the sights as “spiritually transformed firearm[s] of Jesus Christ.”

He said coded biblical inscriptions play into the hands of “those who are calling this a Crusade.”

That’s precisely how this looks to Muslims.

When imperial powers engage in this kind of religious warfare, things can get very nasty. The Sepoy Rebellion was instigated by the same kind of tactics in colonial India, when the British were accused of greasing their bullets with beef tallow and pig fat, which are ritually unclean to the native Hindus and Muslims respectively.

In order to load their rifles, the soldiers had to bite the cartridges. For Hindus, this meant they would lose their caste. For Muslims, it meant that if they were shot by such a ‘tainted’ bullet, they would die unclean and be excluded from paradise.

So they revolted. And much fun ensued.

(h/t Pharyngula)

It’s been a while since I’ve posted to Sourapples (OK, about four months), and the shame of projects abandoned was putting distance between me and the blog I used to be so proud of. I thought I might never again have the courage to mount my online soapbox.

But lo and behold, last night I was given reason to return, thanks to my local news channel.

There, nestled in between the Black Friday consumer masturbation and the insufferable holiday football recap was a tiny little mention — couldn’t have been more than a couple sentences; I would have missed it if I had gone to open another beer — about the recent findings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

They concluded that in 2001, we had cornered Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan, but he escaped because we shifted our strategic attention to the nascent Iraq war.

There it was. The naked truth. The most important geopolitical factoid of the last decade, revealed non-chalantly in an momentary evening news aside. An ‘I-told-you-so’ bombshell a thousand times more powerful than Republicans’ ‘the surge worked,’ went off in my living room. And it barely made a sound.

Yet before my jaw could hit the floor, they moved on to the football scores.

It’s been a long time since I have posted to my blog, because things have been so busy at work and at home, but I feel I have to comment on this.

In case you haven’t been following the news, Dr. George Tiller, who was known for providing late term abortions, was killed this Sunday. He was shot to death while sitting in church.

Now, you may know my position on abortion, which is that it’s a necessary evil (there’s a clever little epigram that says conservatives need to recognize abortion is a necessary evil, liberals that it’s a necessary evil), so we should take steps to reduce the need for them. But I’m also committed to the stance that–for most cases outside of severe deformity of the fetus, or imminent danger to the mother’s life–the later the operation is performed, the more unconscionable it becomes. Still, he didn’t deserve to be killed.

Bill O’Reilly (whose word you should always take with a grain of salt, if not a whole salt lick) would have us believe that Tiller was killing babies right before their heads breached the birth canal, and was calling it “late term.”

I guarantee you he wasn’t. And for a guy who bills himself as ‘No-Spin,’ O’Reilly sure got people spun up over ‘Tiller the Baby Killer.’

Granted, O’Reilly wasn’t directly responsible for inciting the man to murder Tiller, but the baby-killing meme that he gives platform to is dangerous, and his singling out of Tiller is despicable.

As you may or may not have noticed from the little “Reading Desk” gadget I added to my sidebar, I have been reading a book called Supercapitalism, by Robert Reich. This book is outstanding, and it has drastically changed my perception of what’s wrong in our economy.

Anyway, below, I have reproduced an excerpt from the book, wherein Reich opines on employment linked healthcare. I typed it by hand, so please excuse any typos.

Finally, not only are corporations unfit to decide what is socially virtuous, but under supercapitalism they are often unable to deliver services that are inherently public. Pushing them to do so begs the question of whether the responsibilities would be better undertaken by the public sector. The campaign against Wal-Mart charged in full-page advertisements that “Wal-Mart’s low pay and meager employee benefits force tens of thousands of employees to resort to Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance. Call it the ‘Wal-Mart Tax.’ And it costs you $1.5 billion in federal tax dollars every year.” The problem with this logic is that America had already decided to provide Medicaid, food stamps, and housing assistance to the poor–even if the poor are also working. It seemed more efficient for these benefits to flow from government, and for employers to alert their low-income employees of the availability of them, than for the private sector to provide them as conditions of employment. If we wish to change the rules an require private employers to pay wages and provide health benefits sufficiently high that no employee has to rely on government largesse, we should seek to do that through the democratic process. But it makes little sense to chastise one employer–even one as large as Wal-Mart–for playing by the rules.

A major theme in the book is that corporations are money making machines; that’s their purpose, and that’s their design. It’s therefore foolish to rail against them when they engage in socially irresponsible behavior like cutting benefits and externalizing costs to the public at large–we shouldn’t expect anything different. The solution is to use our power as citizens of a democracy to impose social responsibility, through legislation, not market choices, as you’re about to see…

Should the rules be altered, as Wal-Mart’s critics advocate? What would be a worthy political debate, but we’re not having it. I, for one, think the minimum wage should be raised to be about half of the average worker’s hourly pay. That was the ratio in the Not Quite Golden Age[*], and it seems to me a reasonable compromise. But Wal-Mart’s critics also want Wal-Mart to provide employees with good health insurance coverage, which, in my opinion, is no longer a responsibility employers should take on.

Bear with me for a moment, because this is just the sort of issue the nation ought to be debating but that the focus on Wal-Mart obscures. The reason employers got into the business of providing their workers health insurance in the first place, remember, was because it is a form of payment that avoids being taxed. This made it attractive to both employers and employees in the Not Quite Golden Age, before medical costs skyrocketed and competition intensified. Even though employer-provided health care has diminished since then, in 2006 it still constituted the biggest tax break in the whole federal tax system. According to recent estimates, if health care benefits were considered taxable income, employees would be paying $126 billion a year more in income taxes than they do now. In other words, employer-provided heath care is a backdoor $126-billion-a-year government health insurance system that’s already up and running.

But it’s a crazy system. You’re not eligible for it when you and your family are likely to need it most–when you lose you job and you income plummets. And these days, as we’ve seen, no job is safe. Why add to family anxieties by ending eligibility for this backdoor government health insurance just when an employee is shown the front door? The system also distorts the labor market. It prevents lots of people from changing jobs for fear they’ll lose their health insurance, or won’t get the benefits they do now. And it invites employers to game the system by seeking young, healthy employees who pose low risks of ill health, while rejecting older ones who are likely to have more costly health needs. The system also encourages employers to try to push married employees onto their spouse’s health insurance plan so that the spouse’s employer bears the cost.

It’s also an upside down system. The lower your pay, the less coverage you’re likely to have. Even if Wal-Mart is pressured into providing more health insurance for its lowest-income workers, this wouldn’t change the overall pattern across America. Workers in the lowest-paying jobs don’t generally get any health insurance from their employers. The higher your pay, the more health coverage you get, with top executives and their families getting gold-plated plans guaranteeing top-notch medical attention for just about every health-risk imaginable. As a result, our current $126 billion backdoor government health insurance system mainly benefits upper income people.

[Emphasis added]

That seems like a knock down argument for socialized medicine to me; in a sense, we’re already paying for it! By making it an explicitly socialized structure, we’d only have things to gain. Direct oversight of the system would guarantee that we weren’t subsidizing care for the super rich, and we could be sure we were doling out coverage to those who need it most. Decoupling healthcare from employment would increase job mobility because employees would be more confident to switch jobs knowing they wouldn’t lose health coverage. Moreover, taking healthcare decisions out of the hands of sticky fingered business managers would make the system fairer, as well as free them up to do what they should be doing: running a business.

–

I highly recommend this book. It’s enlightening, and empowering, and it’s not that heavy.

*The Not Quite Golden Age is the name Reich uses to refer to the seeming boon times of the ’50s.

It hit me this morning what a socialist enterprise the military is. The government decides — usually without the consent of the taxpayer — what munitions will be manufactured, where troops will be sent, and what operations will be carried out on his/her dollar. Not only that, but our troops receive all kinds of benefits we would deem “socialist” if they were provided to the population at large: medical care, housing, childcare, education assistance, pensions etc. Now, you may be quick to point out that maintaining a military is vital to securing the freedom and prosperity of our nation, and that we should be obliged to take care of our troops — I am inclined to agree — but that doesn’t negate the fact that the military is by definition a socialistic institution.

America actually tolerates a great deal of such institutions: the post office, public schools, unemployment benefits, social security, medicare, emergency services and so on. However, no one but the most hard-line libertarian would suggest we do away with these programs. In this regard, we are all what I’d like to call “convenience socialists.” We are to socialism what Ted Haggard is to gay.

That said, I’d like to point out that we socialists differ from the mainstream only in where we draw the line. Most people see no ideological conundrum in publically funded defense against threats to our freedom. We socialists count the downhill slide to plutocracy among those threats.

Six years ago today, Bush announced we were going to war with Iraq.

Listen to the language he uses:

“…to disarm Iraq, to free its people, and to defend the world from grave danger.”

“…Saddam’s ability to wage war…”

“We have no ambition in Iraq, except to remove a threat, and restore control of that country to its own people.”

“[we] will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder.”

“We will meet that threat now, with our Army, Air Force, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines, so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters, and police, and doctors on the streets of our cities.”

“…the dangers to our country, and the world, will be overcome.”

Today we look back, and we can say there was no threat. Yet the Bush Administration clearly whipped up support for the war by implying impending attacks on the American people. We were duped, and it can be very hard to admit that.

It’s especially hard for the families of the troops still over there. Faced with a lack of justification, many of them have understandably substituted a new rallying call: the liberation of the Iraqi people. Don’t get me wrong, spreading freedom is a noble cause, but this gripes me for two reasons.

First, the American people are not generally preoccupied with this kind of thing, and if we were, there would be far more worthy subjects for our attention. I don’t mean to downplay the atrocities committed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, but North Korea, East Timor, Rwanda, Darfur, and Cambodia are all instances where someone should have stepped in to end brutally oppressive regimes or mass murder, and the U.S. didn’t step up to the plate. We shouldn’t be allowed to wear the ‘liberator’ hat unless we are out there indiscriminately liberating.

Of maximal relevance is Saddam’s gassing the Kurds. There was no palpable threat to the American people at that time, so we let him have at it. When we went to war in 2003, it was because we were made to fear him. Make of that what you will — our obligation to peace and freedom as a superpower is another debate entirely — but we are not liberators, and that is not why we went to war in Iraq.

The second problem is that we were not spreading freedom. Freedom would entail allowing the Iraqis to choose their own goverment and economic systems. We essentially installed your standard western Executive/Parliamentary/Judicial representative republic, which we assume to be the most highly developed form of government (debatable). It was certainly better than the dictatorship they had before, however what concerns me is that with American style democracy, came American style economy. We didn’t separate the two concepts, we just set up a capitalist market and called it done.

Nowhere is it written that Democracy = Captalism, which is one thing that frustrates me so much about the American political environment today. One could imagine a capitalist dictatorship, a socialist democracy, or a communist republic, but in practice we don’t distinguish economic system from political system — we mistakenly think it’s a package deal.

The Iraqis very well may have wanted to be socialist country like France, but we didn’t give them the option. Instead, we opened their market to all of our ridiculously cheap American products and services, so they will never be able to develop industry of their own. We won’t let them institute tariffs on our goods, so they will be perpetually suckling at the teat of American hypercapitalism; without economic autonomy, they will remain a third world country forever.

We are quick to “bring ‘em what we got,” but we soon forget how we got here: a century of sky-high tariffs and economic isolation, which fostered growth of our own economy. Only then did we open up our market to foreign goods. We are denying this to the Iraqis.

Some ‘freedom.’

–

One last thing Bush said:

“…coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm.”

Yeah Right.

h/t Andrew Sullivan

[Update 5/18: apparently, Billy Graham didn't write this. Blast! Foiled again by the e-mail forward goblins.]

Yet another silly e-mail. This time, a friend of mine got one entitled ‘Prayer for our Nation.’ It started with a huge black and white picture of a seated Billy Graham, staring stoically off into space. Following that was this prayer:

Billy Graham’s Prayer For Our Nation

‘Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance. We know Your Word says, ‘Woe to those who call evil good,’ but that is exactly what we have done. We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values. We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery. We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare. We have killed our unborn and called it choice. We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable. We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self esteem. We have abused power and called it politics. We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition. We have polluted the earth with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression. We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and Set us free. Amen!’

I don’t even know where to begin, it’s just so wrong. I guess the worst part is that it just forgoes the debate as to whether or not these things are indeed wrong, calls them a loss, and beseeches the sky fairy for forgiveness.

I think the ridiculousness of the self-flagellatory judgment is evident enough, but there is one sentence that was particularly ridic. When Graham said “We have polluted the earth…” I was on the verge of conceding that he had at least one point, but then he went on to totally ruin it by specifying “with profanity and pornography.” Damn him.

–

It’s amazing how religion mutates with time. The ’sins’ it obsesses about are totally a product of the political climate of the era. Religious people ally themselves with a certain political group, and all of a sudden, the positions of their political opponents are listed among the religious transgressions, and the behaviors of their own party that are explicitly condemned in their holy-book are just swept under the rug.

Abortion? The bible says nothing about it, but it’s arguably one of the most egregious sins, according to fundies.

Usury? The bible condemns it repeatedly, but it’s a non-issue among religious conservatives, because the business world runs on interest, and Republicans love business.

Destroying the environment? I’m sure there are plenty of verses in the bible that could be used to condemn those who knowingly destroy that which god has given us. But conservatives pussyfoot around this topic, because environmental protection is the Democrats’ bit.

Slavery, subjugating women? The bible condones it throughout, but it’s not in vogue today so religious people just jump on the bandwagon.

Homosexuality? There are a few passages about it sprinkled through the bible, but there are far more about how it’s immoral to be rich. Nonetheless Christians fixate on gay marriage, and virtually ignore the socialistic implications of their holy-book.

Religion can a tool of political movements: it allows the difference between you and me to be more than a matter of opinion, but a matter of supernatural law. It’s a powerful weapon to wield against your ideological adversary, to call him/her damned. It’s even more powerful when you try to take some kind of moral high-ground — like Mr. Graham does above — by asking for forgiveness for your rival’s political positions.