Author: Tony

Bigotry can be defensible?

From Andrew Sullivan, a comparison of bigotry:

As for Sharpton, surely Imus hs a minor, but valid point. Sharpton deploys the vilest form of racist assumptions against whites in general, and gets away with it. He got away with it while accusing specific people of rape – people who turned out to be innocent. Again, since whites still enjoy vastly more cultural power than blacks, Sharpton’s bigotry is more defensible than Imus’s. But it’s still bigotry. (And, to give Sharpton his due, he has spoken out against the rhetorical depravity of much hip-hop.)

Surely Mr. Sullivan left something out of that paragraph? Bigotry is not defensible. When we start laying out levels of defensibility, we start laying out levels of acceptable responses to the same type of statements. A standard with degrees based on victimization will never end well, as we should be able to see from the current Don Imus mess.

This intellectual blind spot is still wrong.

In response to S. Kadokech’s essay claiming that female circumcision is a cultural right I blogged, here’s an opinion discrediting the ridiculous claim.

Here he is introducing the old fashioned concept in the FGM debate of the ‘arrogant perceiver.’ This concept holds that aliens in communities that practice some practices measure those communities’ standards by their (aliens’) standards and arrogantly perceive those communities’ standards as barbaric and outrageous.

This concept has been widely criticised because it ignores the idea that there are minimum standards below which any community cannot justifiably treat its people. You cannot say that because in our community it’s a cultural practice to kill baby girls those people who criticised our practice do so because they perceive our cultural right arrogantly.

Kadokech has misunderstood or deliberately ignored the meaning and extent of human rights in Uganda. It’s true that all Ugandans have a right to practice their cultural practices.

Of course. This is obvious, so you probably suspect there’s a reason I’m bringing it up. Indeed.

It is wrong to equate FGM with male circumcision. These are two different things, carried out differently with different consequences. Men who undergo circumcision do not cease to be sexually sensitive.

Once again we get the same warmed-over nonsense. Forced genital cutting is bad for girls because the cutters just want to diminish female sexuality. It’s not the same for boys, because cutters do so to help the boys through circumcision’s medical benefits. Uh-huh. The distinction between right and wrong in unnecessary genital cutting on a non-consenting individual is a subjective analysis of the validity of intention. That can never be right.

The parallel is transparent when looking at this honestly:

On the issue of consent, the majority of the people who are subjected to FGM are young girls who are compelled by their parents or guardians, on whom they depend for financial support and many other things. They never consent and where they allegedly consent they never offer informed consent. We have read about cases in Kenya, Ethiopia, Senegal, Egypt and many other parts of the world where FGM is practiced that girls as young as eight years fall victim.

Infant males are not asked if they consent. An infant is younger than eight, so he can’t even surrender the uninformed consent “offered” by the girls.

Kapchorwa is not an exception. If FGM is based on consent, why don’t those communities who practice it avail all the relevant information to the potential victims in time and let them make decisions whether to undergo the practice or not when they reach the age of 18. The only information availed to the young girls is that when if they don’t undergo FGM they will not get married, or they will be a disgrace to their families.

And infant males are circumcised in the United States because their future female sex partners will find the foreskin disgusting and will refuse to have sex with him. You don’t want your son to die a virgin, do you?

The author goes on to discuss an earlier notion that Chinese girls would be unable to get married if their parents didn’t bind the girl’s feet. Same thing. Cultural pressure used as an excuse to force body modifications on a non-consenting individual is wrong. There is no difference, regardless of whether it’s feet-binding, arranged marriages¹, female genital cutting, or male genital cutting. This includes potential health benefits, since some benefit could inevitably be argued from any preventive cutting. Infant mastectomies, anyone?

Human rights require more than good intentions and potential benefits.

¹ Kip made this astute comparison in the comments here.

Ethics is the buffer between “can” and “should”.

Here’s an interesting study:

Could smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee protect you from Parkinson’s disease?

That’s the startling suggestion of a new U.S. study of families that also found NSAID use has no impact on the disease risk.
…

The people with Parkinson’s disease were 44 percent less likely to report ever smoking and 70 percent less likely to report current smoking compared with unaffected relatives, the study authors found.

“Increasing intensity of coffee drinking was inversely associated with Parkinson’s disease,” they added. “Increasing dosage and intensity of total caffeine consumption were also inversely associated, with high dosage presenting a significant inverse association with Parkinson’s disease.”
…

It’s not known how smoking or caffeine consumption may help reduce the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease.

I enjoy science. Basing decisions on evidence is common sense. But I also believe there is more than just evidence. In applying scientific discoveries, I stand by evidence and ethics, devoid any speculation. The more common approach appears to be evidence and speculation, devoid any ethics. How else to describe the push to circumcise more infant males based on the recent findings regarding HIV transmission and voluntary adult circumcision?

The preliminary facts in this study mirror the fact pattern in the HIV studies, down to it’s not known how the action achieves the benefit. So should we start encouraging adults with a family history of Parkinson’s to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes? Should we speculate and encourage parents in those families to give their children coffee and cigarettes?

Those suggestions are laughable. We know that this is one study. We also know that drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes carry an amount of risk. We’re going to be conservative in applying these findings.

Yet, infant circumcision is so accepted as “good” that we don’t question extending any findings, however preliminary or speculative, to conform to our accepted, untested ideas. Unlike coffee and cigarettes with Parkinson’s, we don’t stop to assess whether unnecessary genital surgery on a child to reduce an already small risk is logical. (We definitely don’t ask if it’s ethical.)

This is catering to intellectual bias, not the application of science.

Choose: Bankruptcy in Solidarity or Survival in Reality

In today’s Washington Post, Harold Meyerson attempts to suck us into his view of the world. Imagine how he gets to this line:

It was, in short, just a normal day in contemporary American capitalism.

Any number of scenarios could build to that. When you have an aversion to economic liberty because it means some people will “lose,” you arrive via this route:

On March 28, Circuit City announced that it was laying off 3,400 of its salesclerks. Not because they had poor performance records, mind you: Their performance was utterly beside the point. They were shown the door, said the chain, simply because they were the highest-salaried salesclerks that Circuit City employed.

Their positions were not eliminated. Rather, the store announced that it would hire their replacements at the normal starting salary.

One can only imagine the effect of Circuit City’s announcement on the morale of the workers who didn’t get fired. The remaining salesclerks can only conclude: Do a good job, get promoted, and you’re outta here.

I’m in a somewhat useful position to critique this. As of next Friday, I will not have an active client. The funding for the project I’ve been working on disappeared. I’m a bit concerned, but I’ve planned for this possibility. That’s mere responsibility. But as much as capitalism can be blamed for losing my current contract, it will also be responsible when I land my next contract. Change may mean death for some opportunities, but it’s only the natural re-ordering in response to reality. This is inherently good.

In the case of Circuit City¹, what function do salesclerks serve? When I visit an electronics retailer, I either know what I’m looking for or am browsing to discover what’s out that I’ve missed. I rely on the Internets for my pre-education, if you will. I rarely make an impulse buy. (Danielle is saying “no kidding” right now.) The one time in recent memory where I did make an impulse buy, I called my brother from the store and asked him to pull up reviews of the product. I gave my usual “just browsing” response to any salesclerks who accosted me offered to help. I didn’t need anyone other than a cashier, and if a store offers self-checkout, I always do that. From my anecdotal observations, most shoppers behave this way. Expert knowledge is no longer valuable in store the way it used to be.

That doesn’t stop Mr. Meyerson:

Over at Wal-Mart, the employer that increasingly sets the labor standards for millions of our compatriots, wage caps have been set for certain jobs, and many longtime employees are now required to work weekends and nights in the hope that they’ll quit. A memo prepared by a Wal-Mart executive in 2005 for the company’s board noted that, “the cost of an associate with 7 years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with 1 year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity.”

(That, of course, is because Wal-Mart does nothing to raise its employees’ skills lest it have to raise their wages.) Coincidentally, in the same week that Circuit City axed its clerks, an analysis of Internal Revenue Service data from 2005 that became available showed that the bottom 90 percent of Americans made less money that year than they had in 2004. According to a study by economists Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, total reported income in the United States increased by 9 percent in 2005 over its level in 2004. All of that increase, however, came from the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans, and the wealthiest 1 percent experienced an increase of 14 percent. Among the remaining 90 percent, income actually decreased by 0.6 percent.

Capitalism, as cruel as it is, generally demands that one provide more value to earn more return. If Mr. Meyerson prefers the world of government, his skewed view is understandable, for the government is far more lax in requiring measurable return for its increased expenditures. But the government has guns to enforce its demands. The private sector must use persuasion.

When Mr. Meyerson quotes the IRS data showing a decrease in income for the “bottom 90 percent”, the only context he provides involves the change in income for the top 10 percent. Big deal. There is more than just income to determine how well a person is doing. Mr. Meyerson offers no analysis of how this affects Poor American other than the outrage we’re supposed to feel because his absolute dollar income decreased. This is the fallacy of a mind unconcerned with the basics of economics.

There’s a bunch of progressive gobbledygook in the rest of his essay, but given his poor economic foundation, Mr. Meyerson offers little beyond the usual chants. Unions! Health care! Equality! Blech, all socialist crap. When American workers who buy into this start treating themselves as mini-capitalists offering a product rather than pawns in a game for business elites, this drivel will die away from all but the tiniest group of “intellectuals”. Until then, we’ll suffer through more harmful policies masquerading as help for the working man.

¹ I shop at Best Buy because I like it better and I’ve only had bad experiences the last few times I’ve given Circuit City a chance. But the buying process is the same.

Convenience isn’t worth forsaking innovation (and liberty).

I normally enjoy John Dvorak’s curmudgeonly writing, but I’m afraid he might be serious with this article.

In this week’s complaint session, I’d like to complain about the little things. And I mean that literally. Little bitty things like proprietary PC connectors. I honestly believe that Congress should pass a law on PC connectors, keeping the number of designs to an absolute minimum. By law, product makers should have to choose between, say, two types of connectors, ensuring that devices work only with those two designs. I’m not kidding.

I agree with the complaint. I know Danielle would agree, given that she’s going through a re-organization of our junk, and we have boxes of orphan cables and connectors. But a law? No, thanks, even though here his call for legislation appears in the same type of context where people incorrectly use literally.

But he continues:

Why, for example, do we have so many variations of USB cables? One side is always the same—the side that attaches to the PC. It’s always a standard rectangular USB connector, and it plugs into any computer you like. But on the other end, the connector is always different. There are large, square connectors. Small, rectangular connectors. Trapezoidal connectors. I-have-no-idea-what-that-is connectors. And God knows how many others. Needless to say, you can never find the right cable when you need it. You end up accumulating so many of them, they’re inevitably scattered around the house. And when that Apple iPod connector goes missing, you can’t update your iPod.

What is the point of all this? I’ve complained about it before, pointing out that camera companies don’t even use the same connectors from camera to camera. Why not? Are they saving 2 cents per connector? Or what? It doesn’t have to be this way. This is USB we’re talking about, a ubiquitous 4-pin standard—not the wiring harness on a 1958 Studebaker. Seriously, we need legislation. This is costing us money for no good reason.

Again, I agree with the complaint, but now I think he might be serious. He gives Toshiba and Nokia as examples of companies that approach this well by putting the company name on the connector/power cord. Dell also does this, although it’s harder to confuse a laptop power supply than it is a router power supply. Still, not every company is dumb. We should applaud and encourage that.

But he continues:

Look, if there’s a law that forces a company to tell you what’s in a can of peaches (“Contains: Peaches, sugar, water”), then there can be a law that forces companies to label their power supplies. Can’t there? The construction industry abides by a book full of rules and regulations when they build out of wood. Can’t we consider mandating some aspects of technology design? Can’t we make a connector that everyone is required by law to adopt and use? Folks, the USB connector has only four pins! How many variations do we really need? Four pins! Now don’t get me started on the subject of batteries.

We do not need legislation. The next time someone needs to use an electronic device and the necessary cord or connector has gone missing, contact the maker of that electronic device and tell them you will no longer buy their products until they start labeling their cords and use standard connectors. Then follow through. It’ll change.

We don’t want to get into a situation where Congress legislates the use of Firewire cables, thus negating the development of the better USB 2.0 standard.

Unpopular is not synonymous with bad.

Yesterday, I wrote this in response to a judge’s moralizing about an American’s speech while upholding its constitutional protection:

For what it’s worth, I don’t think the judges had any business inserting the court’s opinion that it has little regard for her vulgar epithets. So what? If it has no bearing on how the case should be interpreted under the law, keep the subjective disdain out of the ruling. I might accept “While the court recognizes that A.B.’s use of vulgar epithets is unpopular, …” or some such pandering to community morals. I doubt it, but even then, speech is speech.

It turns out I only had to wait one day for an example of how it should be done. Via Hit & Run, a federal judge in Orlando demonstrated how to approach this correctly. Consider:

Should strippers be allowed to touch themselves on stage? Orange County thinks not. County law specifically prohibits “fondling, stroking or rubbing of human genitals or anus.”

On March 30, however, a federal judge in Orlando struck down that and other portions of the county’s adult entertainment code as unconstitutional impediments to free speech. “Some self-touching, even of the genitals or anus — no matter how crude or distasteful — may be ‘central to the expressive nature of the dance itself,’” ruled Judge John Antoon II, quoting from a 2005 ruling from a case in Georgia.
…

“The First Amendment cannot both protect the expressive element of erotic dancing and also restrict and contort it by prohibiting the very movements that contribute to its erotic message,” Antoon wrote. “While the public en masse may not approve of such explicit performances, the First Amendment does not turn on generally accepted views of propriety.”

Bingo. Objective interpretation of the Constitution without the subjective opinion about the content being protected. Exactly as it should be. Bravo to Judge Antoon.

The Logical Conclusion of Majoritarianism

Normally, I’d present the facts and comment on them. Thanks to YouTube, I don’t have to do that. See for yourself what democracy mob rule really is.

That’s why, in the wisdom of America’s Founders, we are a republic, not a democracy. It’s why nonsense like the National Popular Vote Plan are ill-conceived. The will of the people is instructive, but it should not be exclusive. We have principles enshrined in our Constitution to protect the minority viewpoint from unjust harassment and an outright ban on their liberty.

Original story here, via Fark.

Update: New York City Department of Health on Circumcision

Found via RealityBias’ diary at Daily Kos, this follow-up on last week’s news from Thomas Frieden and the New York Department of Health.

Recent media reports misrepresent the Health Department’s response to recent studies showing that circumcision significantly reduces HIV transmission in some contexts. We do not yet know what impact circumcision could have on HIV transmission in New York City, and we have not suggested or planned any initiative or campaign. Quite to the contrary, I indicated in an interview with the New York Times (the source of the misrepresentation) that I very much doubted that even 1% of men at high risk in NYC would undergo the procedure.

Commissioner Frieden claims he was misrepresented. Maybe, and if so, I retract my statements implying as much. But that’s a conditional retraction, for I think he’s trying to save face while forging ahead with his push for circumcision. Saying that he doubts “even 1% of men at high risk in NYC would undergo” circumcision is different than saying “we are not pushing circumcision. Regardless of how he gets to office, Commissioner Frieden is acting like a politician. I don’t trust him.

Continue reading “Update: New York City Department of Health on Circumcision”