Where’s the beef?
Foreskin- It isn’t just for breakfast anymore
Kimstu,
> Now of course you still have every right to hold to your own beliefs even if so many other people disagree with you out of their own personal experience. <
Positive experimental results that are alleged don't have any bearing on the negative experimental results. Where is the cost-benefit analysis?
> There are lots of issues on which reasonable people can disagree. <
Circumcision is not one of those issues upon which reasonable people can disagree. You're just going back to the old farce of weighing the pros and cons of the experimental results of circumcising a large population of men. If there is evidence that damage is being done, then the pro-circumcision people have to re-examine their cost-benefit analysis that shows that circumcision is a good thing. In the case of circumcision, there never was a cost-benefit analysis to begin with. How can there have been when there never has been a thorough histological study of the what is being amputated?
> But if you insist on maintaining that your position is obviously and necessarily the only right one and that the only reason for the opposition you encounter is that “the masses are brainwashed,” well, I don’t see how you can expect any reasonable person to listen to you. <
Oh, c'mon. Obviously, any reasonable person is going to insist that the medical establishment at least know the physiology of what it is that they are amputating before they do it. Anybody that doesn't agree with that is not reasonable.I think we have Jack’s philosophy on life right there.
weirddave, I love you, too. OMG, my stomach hurts from laughing. Especially since I read this right after reading Coldy and JDT’s little exchange in GD.
HEY! I’m offended.
All this time, and no one’s commented on how my name has been oddly appropriate for this topic.
Now, to randomly pick a JDT statement and point out how ridiculous it is:
Yes. Ha ha, what a farce that is. Everyone knows that good researchers pick a conclusion then find evidence to back it up!
Guess who said:
Can anyone tell me what this means? Anyone? Anyone? Beuller?
Sorry, Cantrip. He lost me there, too. Try as I might, I couldn’t find a sequiter anywhere in that post.
JDT here is a little tip for you…
Must . . . unscramble. . . . syntax…
Anyway, I would imagine that Jack is trying to say:
Let me second the people who have voted for this, in any of it’s permutations as a sig.
JDT’s sig:
When they circumcised him they threw away the wrong bit.-- (David Lloyd George on his Liberal Party colleague Sir Herbert Samuel) Usually taken to be an insult, but when said to me I take it to mean I’m sensitive all over.
Well, I suppose we all were just too polite to say anything. (Now, that’s a first!)
Sig suggestion:
Jack Dean Tyler: “My foreskin’s so big, it’s more like an eight-skin.”
Foreskins: they’re not just the best football team in the DC area.
Out of curiosity, I did a search in Westlaw for cases related to circumcision and the military. There is not a single case in the the Westlaw “military justice” database with the word “circumcision” or any related word in it. I found a small number of cases related to circumcision. One was some guy who got himself circumcized before joining the military, then tried to sue the military for complications related to his circumcision. Another was some guy who was in fact circumcized while in the Army – in 1957, two years after he was inducted in 1955. (This particular veteran alleged that during his circumcision, nerves in his temples were cut which caused him to go blind. Perhaps his foreskin was attached to his forehead.) Most of the rest deal with botched infant circumcisions at military hospitals.
I found no instance of any person having been prosecuted for refusing to consent to a circumcision. This is not proof, of course; Westlaw’s database is not very complete before 1945, and minor court martials do not generally generate documents of the sort that would appear in Westlaw anyway. But an appeal of such a conviction would – and the fact that a soldier was allowed to serve for two years starting in 1955 before being circumcized does seem to contradict Jack’s assertion that the military routinely snips inductees.
He dreamed of a “turtle neck sweater”;
He wanted his life to be better.
He woke with his “crew”,
and I’m telling you,
he did more than write a mean letter.
Here in the statistics world we have a little saying:
“Absence of evidence is NOT evidence of absence.”
This, along with the “I know you are but what am I” method of debate and discussion will not enlighten anyone.
FTR, the Associate Spritle and I were “confronted” with the circumcision issue when we found out that the little critter popped out as a boy. Being one of those Jewish persons Associate Spritle called a mohel and we had a brit (bris). (Sorry to drop the Hebrew on y’all.) More than a couple of nurses at the Hospital made comments like “Good. You don’t really want doctors to do that.”
My brother-in-law and sister-in-law are both BO/GYNs (imagine the dinner conversations) and have both done circumcisions. They both have said, to paraphrase, “I do two or three a week and learned the procedure in med school. Mohels were specifically trained to do the procedure and do two or three a day!”
Incidentally, if anyone is not Jewish and wishes to have their newborn son circumcised, some reform rabbi/mohels will perform this procedure for you. (insurance may not cover it)
I didn’t think it appropriate to get into the details here, but as someone who has watched 5 circumcisions (brits), one of them on my own child I can say that the procedure was quick, clean and painless in all cases. That doesn’t get to the fundamental question of the need or lack thereof for the procedure, but I just thought I’d stick my neck out (as it were) and chime in.
No need to be snippy,
Spritle
You know, Jack, I’ve been following the threads you’ve been involved in, and I’ve noticed you have a fondness for baseless speculation about others lives. So, just to even things out, I thought I’d speculate a bit about yours, mmmkay?
It seems to me that what we have here is a male, probably somewhere in his thirties, with a long history of social and sexual inadequacies. He’s either had no or very few relationships with women, and those he has had have been disatrous. Suddenly, he happens upon a website (or book, or tabloid TV show, or whatever), espousing the theory that all the worlds ills are caused by circumsicion, and EUREKA! The light dawns!! None of this is his fault, it’s all because he’s circumcised!
Oh Happy Day! He’s relieved of all responsibility for his own failings, it’s all the fault of his stupid parents and some evil doctor. Damm them. Why, he’d probably be a blissfully married millionare industrialist now if it wasn’t for them callously cutting that bit of skin off his penis.
But, there’s no help for it now, (Well, except for that Tug-Ahoy thing, do let us know how that works out for you, Jack), all he can do now is go forth and spread the gospel of non-snipping, and (this is critical) ignore all evidence to the contrary, because then we are back to that pesky “I’m responsible for the happiness or lack thereof in my own life” thing.
So, bubby, am I close? Let me know, 'cause I kind of enjoy this wild speculation thing, if I’m good at it I might do is some more.
Oh, and for a sig? (singing) “Every foreskin’s sacred, every foreskin’s great. When any foreskin’s wasted, God gets quite irate!”
Kelly,
I think that you may have stumbled upon the underlying cause of the vehemence of one side of this debate.
At the very least you gave me a good chuckle.
My foreskin is gone.
You bastards snipped it off and
now I’m pissed. Fuck you.
Circumcision is
mutilation without <snip>
oh! haiku is cut!
My magic foreskin
Long lost, all powerful, I
miss you so. Alas.
I’ve watched this saga unfold for several days now and have been alternately amused and insulted by JDT’s ramblings.
That said, I want to include something that I saw on the way home from work yesterday. A rather ragged man was carrying a huge sign and was bothering the camera crews camped out in front of our capital building here in Tallahassee. His sign makes a perfect sig for JDT:
Circumcision Causes Brain Damage!
Perfect.