Circumcision is the only case in which our culture removes a healthy body part as a routine part of medicine.
As I explain in @QueerMajority, the evidence supposedly justifying such an extreme practice is laughable, and it needs to end. queermajority.com/essays-all/was…
You could of course find benefits. Cutting off your arm would have benefits. Imagine we dulled the sense of taste so people wouldn't eat fatty foods, and then used science to say this is a good thing.
The benefit has to be *extreme* to justify such a drastic change to the body.
One might compare circumcision to gender affirming care, but we don't do that to babies! The person has some say in what happens to them. How did we get to the point where we consider the human penis a mistake of evolution?
One study shows that circumcision is tied to a lower rate of urinary tract infections. But you need to slice 111 penises to prevent one infection, most of which are a minor problem. This is not how you make rational tradeoffs.
How did Christians start getting circumcised?
It was to prevent them from touching themselves.
Westerners look down on Muslims mutilating girls because they're afraid they might like sex.
We're not so different after all.
The foreskin exists among practically all mammalian species, which indicates it's doing something important. What is that? I don't know. Burden of proof is on those who think the whole thing is a mistake to prove their case. Again, we don't do this for any other body part.
Thankfully, immigrants are helping us move away from this barbaric practice.
And some states are cutting Medicaid funding, which research shows helps save penises.
This is one public policy area anti-circumcision activists can focus on.
Muslims will argue they have "reasons" for female circumcision too. We dismiss them, not even seeing whether they might have a point here or there. The only reason we don't do the same for male circumcision is because of our cultural bias.
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NYT on one of the first things Kamala Harris did after becoming vice president:
Paging through intelligence reports just weeks after she was sworn in as vice president, Kamala Harris was struck by the way two female foreign leaders were described. The reports used adjectives that, in her view, were rarely used to describe male leaders.
Ms. Harris, the first woman to hold her office, ordered up a review that scrutinized multiple years of briefing reports from various intelligence agencies, looking for possible gender bias.
The study found some questionable word choices but no widespread pattern, according to a senior intelligence official, one of five who requested anonymity to discuss the review. (None would disclose the words flagged by Ms. Harris because the reports were classified.)
Still, the exercise had an impact: Intelligence officials added a new training class for analysts on how to judge and assess female foreign leaders, according to another official.
Remember all the race craziness during covid? Guess who was the driving force behind it in the administration:
During the pandemic, she repeatedly asked her vice-presidential staff for demographic breakdowns on Covid vaccination recipients and pressed the administration’s health officials to address gaps, according to two former administration officials.
She pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business — so much so that her advisers seldom briefed her on domestic policies without having prepared a ready answer about their impact on women, Black and Hispanic people and other racial minorities.
When Trump says that these are stupid, unserious people, stories like this are what make his charges sound credible.
She doesn’t talk about it during the campaign. But this is where her heart is at. nytimes.com/2024/10/25/us/…
Her staff knew that DEI was her obsession. This ended up influencing everything about how they did their jobs. They knew that Kamala would have DEI-related questions on every issue and prepared with that in mind.
She pushed the federal bureaucracy to incorporate concerns about equity into routine business — so much so that her advisers seldom briefed her on domestic policies without having prepared a ready answer about their impact on women, Black and Hispanic people and other racial minorities.
“She was always interested in race and gender,” said one former aide who requested anonymity because of lack of authorization to speak publicly. “We all knew it was really important to her, so we would proactively add that to her briefings. She didn’t have to ask for it.”
The human capital problem on the right is bad and getting worse. Eating pets and imaginary whistleblowers today. What's next? Diagnosing it is easy. Finding solutions is hard.
My theory of our politics would suggest it's hopeless. There are lots of stupid people out there, and they used to be kept out by gatekeepers and distributed across the parties. Now they're increasingly in one party, and have the internet. A simple story of supply and demand.
But the electoral college makes it much worse.
For most of US history, the electoral college hasn't mattered. But two things have changed since 2000 that have made the electoral college go from an afterthought to vitally important to presidential politics.
To celebrate, I've written an article on why you should not support labor unions.
They are anti-meritocratic cartels that achieve gains by harming the rest of society. If you are concerned with poverty, there are better ways to help. richardhanania.com/p/unions-are-n…
We can have reasonable debates about the size of government or how much it should distribute wealth. But the way to help the working class is not to favor one group of people and let them take from everyone else, lower economic efficiency, and harm consumers and other workers.
The story of American ports. They are the least efficient in the world because unions fight technological innovation. Labor bosses actively benefit from making everything function worse.
How to understand the RFK phenomenon? I explain Dale Gribble voters. The ultra paranoid have always been around, but before they were divided between the parties.
Top two podcasts in the country are Rogan and Tucker. They're considered on the opposite sides of the political spectrum, but both are RFK fans. Other alt media personalities like Alex Jones and Bret Weinstein are also part of this group. It's not right/left, but something diff.
What binds them isn't ideology as traditionally understood, but paranoia and a belief that the world is run by shadowy forces. A "they" who are keeping the truth from you. Gribbles love talking about UFOs, ancient technology, Atlantis, etc and believe they have hidden knowledge.
The selection of JD Vance can be seen as a triumph for the Tech Right. I explain where they came from and what makes them different from others in the GOP. They're socially liberal, anti-egalitarian, and ultimately for dynamism and progress. 🧵 richardhanania.com/p/understandin…
Ironically, there is a group of leftists who saw this coming. They came up with the acronym TESCREAL, which is so ugly that it's actually catchy. The leftists paying the most attention knew that tech elites were different from other elites in academia and journalism.
If you believe in technology and progress, it's going to put you in conflict with the ruling class if it doesn't believe in those things. In most societies that may be religious authorities. In the modern West, it is wokes, driven by an egalitarian vision that discounts progress
The time Israel sent a commando team into downtown Beirut that assassinated three high-ranking members of the PLO and got out. The team was led by Ehud Barak.
Westerners hate Israel because it fills them with a sense of inferiority by showing that heroism is still possible.
Stop and read about the Entebbe Raid, after a plane was hijacked and taken to Uganda. The Israelis secretly flew a team from Suez to Uganda, slaughtered the Palestinian terrorists, their German allies, and Idi Amin’s soldiers, bringing almost all of the hostages home alive.
What were the Palestinians doing during this time? They had their own version of heroism. They were blowing up synagogues, killing random Jews all over the world, massacring flight crews, and getting the Gulf Arabs to pay them ransom money.