I’m sorry for any part I played in inadvertently assisting a hijack in this thread:
https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=21362654#post21362654
I’m suggesting that, from now on, any time someone posts about circumcision in a thread about another topic, and someone wants to respond (perhaps to tell Slacker what an obnoxious piece of shit he is), they quote the post but respond in this thread, thus encouraging the would-be thread-hijackers to talk about it in this thread.
This is a really, really stupid comparison. That would be bad, and that is entirely different from you barging into a FGM thread and talking about circumcision – a separate issue (unlike rape, which is the same issue as rape, barring a fantasy-non-existent thread OP that made it very clear it was only for rape of a particular gender identity) – and continuing on even when people kindly (and not-so-kindly) ask you to stop your hijack.
Also, the OP was about a 7 year old girl, not an infant. I don’t think that’s been given enough weight. That’s such a huge difference. To extend to the rape analogy, it’s as if someone started a thread about the rape of a 7 year old girl and some guy came in and wanted to talk about whether the staff at a hospital might be getting sexual pleasure from diapering baby boys.
To be fair, I was the one who linked the GD circumcision thread in the Pit FGC thread in the first place, because the FGC case mentioned by Past Tense when bumping the Pit thread was also discussed in the GD thread.
But we did go on for a while after that discussing FGC issues before getting switched onto the ever-popular “Details of My Penis and Its Operation, by A Man” track.
Who was the guy, long ago, who was absolutely batshit about circumcision? He used to reference this, well, attachment that purportedly restretched whatever forskin one had left. Believe this magical device was called, no shit, the Tug Ahoy. Help me out, Dopers.
That was the not-so-dear departed Jack Dean Tyler, from about fifteen years ago. No links because you can easily find his threads from his username if for some inexplicable reason you want to.
This thread is useless because they aren’t in that thread to talk about their dicks-they are there to put those uppity females in their place.
This thread allows posters to respond to Slacker’s bullshit without further contributing to a hijack. But feel free to not use the thread, if you don’t want to.
I actually would like to apologize to Slacker for calling him an asshole. I think he’s a little…off…but I think he actually believes the things he says and isn’t deliberately trying to piss people off. In the thread, he described how he dealt with an actual RL friend who was considering circumcising his son; he sent him some information by e-mail, along with a preemptive promise to never bring the subject up again. That’s what you do when you’re not totally lacking in basic interpersonal skills and/or respect for others. Compare this to Blalron’s bizarre “ultimatum” that he will have an incredibly creepy conversation with his friend’s son in 18 years.
And then there’s clairobscur, whobelieves that parents who circumcise their children should be permanently stripped of custody.In other words, he believes that all Jewish and Muslim boys should be confiscated from their parents at birth and handed over to adoptive parents of other religions. In the event there is an insufficient supply of such parents, I’m not sure if he proposes to warehouse said children in orphanages or simply euthanize them. Hence, he is a shit-sucking Nazi scumbag.
:rolleyes: While I think that level of anti-circumcision zealotry is absurd and tyrannical, I think it’s ridiculous to interpret it as necessarily anti-Semitic or Islamophobic, much less “Nazi”.
If an anti-circumcision zealot has no problem with Jews or Muslims other than their subjecting non-consenting minor children to circumcision, and if they support prohibiting circumcision of minors among all groups irrespective of religion, then I’m going to need quite a bit more evidence before believing that their views are inspired by religious bigotry of any sort, much less Nazism.
Because…anti-Semitism and religious bigotry are such incredibly uncommon phenomena?
Religious people are the only ones who would be significantly burdened by a circumcision ban. Regardless of what the original motivation may have been, when it is pointed out to you that the logical consequences of your proposal would be to place a huge burden on a specific minority group (one which has a long history of being victimized by discrimination and persecution) while having no real effect on anyone else, you should rethink your opinions. But clairobscur, when called on it, just doubled down.
When someone uses flawed logic and false assertions to justify policies which harm a commonly scapegoated minority group, I don’t see why it’s unreasonable to default to the assumption that bigotry is the likeliest explanation for such behavior. Do you think that, for instance, Republican advocates of strict “voter ID” laws deserve the benefit of the doubt and should be assumed to be motivated only by concern for the integrity of the voting process?
Wow, really?
Be sure and tell that to LGBTs, POC, Jews, women, the disabled, the homeless, those without medical insurance, the mentally ill, abused children, abused spouses, victims of the Catholic Church abuse scandal, etc. I’m sure they’ll hop right on the band wagon!
NO MORE CIRCUMCISION!!! You hear that people? I know you’re really hungry, and you’re hearing voices and and that priest molested you and that your father is beating the crap out of you and your mom. BUT LITTLE BOYS ARE BEING CIRCUMCISED!!!
(checks other thread) Good call. They’re still at it over there.:smack:
It’s funny how they keep harping on “this Yale Bioethicist says…”
So you’ve established that there is at least one person with serious academic credentials who agrees with your stupid and wrong ideas. Big fucking whoop. I mean, it’s more than the anti-vaxxers or 9/11 truthers can say, but don’t expect everyone to roll over and concede the argument just because you’ve cleared *that *bar.
Well…would anyone like to discuss female genital mutilation HERE? Seems like the one thread that Certain People aren’t spamming.
Certainly not. I completely concur that anti-circumcision views may be influenced by anti-Semitism and/or Islamophobia, just as anti-FGC views or anti-polygamy views may be influenced by Islamophobia.
But I think it’s very unconvincing to try to argue that we should therefore assume that anti-circumcision views are necessarily based on anti-Semitism and/or Islamophobia.
Some people are just strongly opposed in principle to performing medically unnecessary permanent surgical modifications on non-consenting minor children, and I don’t see any reason so far to conclude that clairobscur isn’t one of them.
I’m not sure I believe that without a convincing cite. There are still quite a lot of non-Jewish, non-Muslim people in several countries who circumcise their sons for non-religious reasons even when it’s not medically necessary, and I don’t know how many of them would consider themselves “significantly burdened” by being told they couldn’t make that choice.
But to continue your line of reasoning to analogous issues, other religious people—specifically, Christian Scientists—are (almost) the only ones who are burdened by laws saying that you can’t refuse necessary medical treatment for your child. Does that mean that support for such laws should be assumed to be inspired by religious bigotry against Christian Scientists?
Likewise, the majority of proponents of female genital cutting advocate it for religious reasons, especially among Muslims. If you oppose FGC, does that imply it’s because you’re anti-Muslim?
Why are we suddenly talking only about Jews here, AFAICT? Jews are a very small minority of people worldwide who practice circumcision of minor boys, and even a very small minority of people worldwide who practice circumcision of minor boys for explicitly religious reasons. They’re even a pretty small minority of the people who practice circumcision of minor boys for explicitly religious reasons in France alone, which is presumably the context most relevant to clairobscur.
But your reference to “a specific minority group […] which has a long history of being victimized by discrimination and persecution” suggests that you are thinking of a hypothetical circumcision ban as affecting only the specific minority group of Jews “while having no real effect on anyone else”. Don’t Muslims who circumcise for religious reasons count as “anyone else” in your view?
Also, I’m not really buying the argument that somebody opposing a practice that he considers to be child abuse is ethically obligated to “rethink his opinions” just because prohibiting the practice would primarily impact members of minority groups. On the contrary: if somebody who claimed to view circumcision as a human rights violation changed his mind about opposing it just for that reason, it would make me more suspicious about the integrity of his position.
AFAICT, the “flawed logic and false assertions” in this particular argument are not primarily coming from clairobscur. And mind you, I say that while still firmly of the opinion that his custody-depriving level of anti-circumcision zealotry is absurd and tyrannical. I just think you’re up shit’s creek, logically speaking, in attempting to defend the position that the default explanation for such zealotry must be religious bigotry.
(And I think a sincere anti-circumcision zealot would probably argue that it is not in fact “harming” Jews or Muslims to legally forbid them to commit human rights violations on their children by circumcising minors, just as opponents of FGC wouldn’t consider bans on FGC to be “harmful” to Muslims.)
I repeat: if somebody held equally draconian views about prohibiting FGC, would you think it reasonable to “default to the assumption that bigotry is the likeliest explanation for such behavior”?
No, because there’s an obvious practical benefit to Republicans in promoting voter-ID laws. We don’t have to postulate any far-fetched notions of ideological bigotry towards Democrats to arrive at the simplest explanation of why Republicans would want to disadvantage Democratic voters.
Likewise, we don’t have to postulate the existence of religious bigotry to arrive at the simplest explanation of why people who consider circumcision to be an infringement of basic human rights would want to ban it.
In the ATMB thread I started, mods have said that a thread on the topic in question should be started in one of the other forums, and they claim that they will moderate it appropriately. Being male, I don’t think I should be the one to start such a thread to see what happens, but if one of the female members would, we can maybe shut the trolls up. It’s worth a try.
Give me foreskin, or give me death!
Kimstu:
Look, this guy is literally calling for the genocide of the Jewish and Muslim people. If he had his way, in a couple generations there would be no Jews or Muslims. True, nobody would actually be killed, but preventing a targeted group from reproducing or from raising children is included in generally accepted definitions of genocide.
Now, of all the people throughout history who have called for the extermination of Jews and/or Muslims, what percentage would you say were motivated in large part by animosity towards Jews and/or Muslims? I’m going with “way, way over 50%”, which by definition means it is the most likely explanation for any given case of such advocacy.
What would you consider a more likely explanation? That a rational, well-intentioned human being watched stuff like Blalron’s youtube link and, despite being exposed to counterarguments, decided “Wow, circumcision is THE BIGGEST HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION IN THE WESTERN WORLD!!! Forcibly removing millions of infants from their families would be a reasoned and measured response to this appalling crime against humanity!”
Your post implies that it’s possible a reasonable person might believe that circumcision is “child abuse” or a “human rights violation”, and it’s just not.t’s a minor surgical procedure. Examples of actual human rights violations include preventing minority groups from practicing their cultural traditions and preventing parents from making medical decisions on behalf of their children.
Yes, if we are talking about some form of female circumcision practiced only by Muslims that causes no harm whatsoever to the child, then of course I would regard calls to outlaw that practice as appalling anti-Muslim bigotry. What else could it possibly be motivated by?
If we are talking about forms of female circumcision that do cause some degree of harm, and some people are calling to punish those acts in a way grotesquely disproportional to the way we punish other, comparably harmful, acts committed by parents against children, then, yep, also bigotry.
And your attempt to use a grammatical point to imply that I somehow don’t think Muslims “count” is fucked up.
PS The Christian Scientist analogy is ludicrous. Denial of medical care to children actually harms children, and constitutes child abuse by neglect. The overwhelming majority of parents convicted of that crime aren’t Christian Scientists, they’re just parents who are also abusive and neglectful in other ways.