Sick

Pediatric urologist Dix Poppas at Weill Medical College of Cornell University has been up to some pretty sick shit. Concerned parents bring their little girls to the good doctor and express their worries. Their worries, namely, that their developing child's clitoris is too large. The WTF factor only snowballs from here. Dix Poppas performs a "nerve-sparing" surgery on the little girls (most are around six years old) in which he removes the offending tissue from the shaft of the clitoris, then reattaches the glans to what little remains. 

Imagine growing up with the knowledge that your parents found the most private, sensitive part of your body so aesthetically disturbing, so very ugly that they arranged to have it chopped up by a creep who would later masturbate you as they watched. Ugh. 

I have few words to describe exactly how wildly unethical this is. Here's a Pharyngula post on the topic, and the original post from Psychology Today. The comment threads are worth reading and rather cathartic. Dan Savage has also caught wind of this, and has a long, passionately written post at the Stranger.

From Dan Savage's post:

There's lots to be outraged about here: there's nothing wrong with these girls and their healthy, functional-if-larger-than-average clitorises; there's no need to operate on these girls; and surgically altering a girl's clitoris because it's "too big" has been found to do lasting physical and psychological harm. But what's most outrageous is how Poppas is "proving" that his surgery "spares nerves." Dreger and Feder:


But we are not writing today to again bring attention to the surgeries themselves. Rather, we are writing to express our shock and concern over the follow-up examination techniques described in the 2007 article by Yang, Felsen, and Poppas. Indeed, when a colleague first alerted us to these follow-up exams—which involve Poppas stimulating the girls’ clitorises with vibrators while the girls, aged six and older, are conscious—we were so stunned that we did not believe it until we looked up his publications ourselves.


Here more specifically is, apparently, what is happening: At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch.... Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls....

I encourage you to vent your disapproval/outrage here (Weill Cornell Medical College contact form).


Now for something completely different: in the runup to next week's IWC meeting in Morocco,   celebrities are joining the "fight against whaling". If you're a Doctor Who fan, the wonderful Christopher Eccleston has gotten behind the cause. The BBC article also outlines the agenda for the meeting, which will probably result in the 24-year old moratorium on commercial whaling being overturned. Environmental groups are, of course, up in arms against this. More information is here, at the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society website. If you'd like to subscribe to their blog, the RSS feed is here.

Sluts and earthquakes

Hojjat ol-eslam Kazem Sediqi, the acting Friday prayer leader in Tehran, delivered a televised sermon at the Tehran University campus mosque last week. Given the wretched den of sin and iniquity in which he was speaking (all institutions of higher learning are like this), it is perhaps unsurprising that he chose to sermonize on the "prevalence of degeneracy" in modern society. Every generation of hypocrites laments the lapsed morals of the generation following theirs, nothing new there. When the degenerate youth asks why they need to behave exactly as their parents claimed they did, the elder generation rarely has anything convincing to say. But last Friday Sediqi put his finger on the real reason that strict Islamic morality is necessary, at least for women:

"Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray and spread adultery in society which increases earthquakes," he explained.

Tens of thousands of people have died in Iran earthquakes in the last decade.

More than 25,000 people died when a powerful earthquake hit the ancient city of Bam in 2003.

You heard it here first: 25,000 people died because some hussy pushed her veil an inch back to feel the sun on her forehead.

This is hilarious, but the "Unveiled women cause adultery" argument makes me crazy.  Male arguments for the necessity of the veil always puzzle me, because they are an admission of profound moral weakness. The veil is actually an insult to men: the statement it makes is that men are so very fallible that the very hint of a strand of hair will inevitably drive them into a lustful frenzy, after which point they cannot be held responsible for their own actions. It ascribes less agency to members of the male sex than most people ascribe to small children. For one of the most patriarchal religions in the universe, that's just... weird.

Arrest the Pope

Richard Dawkins wants to arrest the Pope:

RICHARD DAWKINS, the atheist campaigner, is planning a legal ambush to have the Pope arrested during his state visit to Britain “for crimes against humanity”.


Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church.


The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998.


The Pope was embroiled in new controversy this weekend over a letter he signed arguing that the “good of the universal church” should be considered against the defrocking of an American priest who committed sex offences against two boys. It was dated 1985, when he was in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which deals with sex abuse cases.


Benedict will be in Britain between September 16 and 19, visiting London, Glasgow and Coventry, where he will beatify Cardinal John Henry Newman, the 19th-century theologian.


Dawkins and Hitchens believe the Pope would be unable to claim diplomatic immunity from arrest because, although his tour is categorised as a state visit, he is not the head of a state recognised by the United Nations.

That last part (emphasis mine) is interesting.

Wiki tells me that the Vatican is "a recognised national territory under international law, but it is the Holy See that conducts diplomatic relations on its behalf, in addition to the Holy See's own diplomacy, entering into international agreements in its regard." The Vatican itself is not recognized by the UN.  It is the Holy See (the ancient episcopal jurisdiction of the Catholic Church in Rome) that wears the pants in terms of foreign relations.

Wiki:

In addition to the member states [of the United Nations], there is currently one non-member permanent observer state: the Holy See (which holds sovereignty over the state of Vatican City and maintains diplomatic relations with other states). It has been an observer state since 6 April 1964,^[37] and gained all the rights of full membership except voting on 1 July 2004.^[38] 

Wiki again:

The Holy See has been recognized, both in state practice and in the writing of modern legal scholars, as a subject of public international law, with rights and duties analogous to those of States. Although the Holy See, as distinct from the Vatican City State, does not fulfil the long-established criteria in international law of statehood; having a permanent population, a defined territory, a stable government and the capacity to enter into relations with other states,^[4] its possession of full legal personality in international law is proved by the fact that it maintains diplomatic relations with 177 states, that it is a member-state in various intergovernmental international organizations, and that it is: "respected by the international community of sovereign States and treated as a subject of international law having the capacity to engage in diplomatic relations and to enter into binding agreements with one, several, or many states under international law that are largely geared to establish and preserving peace in the world."^[5]

In that light, calling the Pope's trip to England a "state visit" sounds a bit pretentious (if not out of character). The Pope is a "head of state", but as far as I can tell he's not actually the head of any full-fledged state. Vatican City is a toy country, and the Holy See is "analogous" to a State. I don't know that either of those grant him diplomatic immunity.

Of course, he has immunity of a different kind. He's the kindly daddy (from Latin: papa; from Greek: πάππας (pappas), an affectionate word for father) of the  most self-consciously grandiose institution on the planet. He's the shining, beatific face of the patriarchy. He's the ultimate earthly arbiter of right and wrong.

You can't just clap him in irons for systematically sheltering and relocating the holy men who raped the children entrusted to their care.

Can you?

Google vs. China

Google just cold turkey stopped censoring in China. Who knows what happens next. I'm behind Google all the way, but sooner or later they're going to get kicked out. If the Party really decides to get its crackdown on, massive government cyberattacks are going to be the least of their problems.


From Wiki:

The apparatus of the PRC's Internet repression is considered more extensive and more advanced than in any other country in the world. The regime not only blocks website content but also monitors the internet access of individuals. Amnesty International notes that China “has the largest recorded number of imprisoned journalists and cyber-dissidents in the world.” The offences of which they are accused include communicating with groups abroad, opposing the persecution of the Falun Gong, signing online petitions, and calling for reform and an end to corruption.^[4]

Some pretty egregious offenses there. It certainly would be unacceptable to have anyone suggesting reform, pointing out corruption, communicating with "groups" (what groups?) abroad, or opposing persecution. That would be shameful. Or something.

I'm just waiting for the international fiasco when a Google employee gets thrown in jail on some similarly ridiculous charge.

From the article:

Thousands of police officers are employed to monitor web activity and many automated systems watch blogs, chat rooms and other sites to ensure that banned subjects, such as Tiananmen Square, are not discussed.

What must it be like to work as a censor? To possess illicit knowledge when your job is to obliterate it? Are there really thousands of people across China who know what their country's been up to and choose to smother the horror stories anyway? That's real patriotism. Or true denial.

Maybe they told them it was all a pack of Western lies, evidence be damned. Maybe it's a cultural thing and I'm being insensitive. Then again, maybe the toxic waste in the air and water has affected their heads.

China scares me on several levels. Intensely corrupt, wildly irresponsible, and childishly vindictive, it looms like an enormous dumptruck on the horizon. They'll be more powerful than the States one day. We're far from perfect, but at the very least, we've got a mostly democratic government and a fetishistic attachment to free speech. What does China have?

Evil

Dick Cheney, it appears, is even more of a sadistic, evil douchebag than we thought. I won't call him an arrogant bastard, because Arrogant Bastard Ale is delicious, but he is beyond arrogant, and most definitely a bastard. 

He has confessed to war crimes, without any of the shame or reticence that word usually conveys. In an interview with ABC News the other week, he made it clear that he had supported "enhanced interrogation techniques" from the beginning, and still does.

He's not making it easy to not hate him. He's even making life difficult for the people in the Obama administration who don't want him or his cronies prosecuted. From the article:

Those statements, both on Sunday and in his December 2008 interview with Karl, destroys a key line in the Bush administration's defense against war crimes charges. For years, Cheney and other Bush administration officials pinned their defense on the fact that they had received legal advice from Justice Department lawyers that the brutal interrogations of “war on terror” detainees did not constitute torture or violate other laws of war.

Cheney's statements, however, would suggest that the lawyers were colluding with administration officials in setting policy, rather than providing objective legal analysis.

Obama's not doing too great on this front. Even with Cheney spewing toxicity and lies to the media (if you'd like to consider Fox News "media"), the Obama administration has consistently resisted calls for government investigations. It has gone to court to block lawsuits that demand release of torture evidence or seek civil penalties against officials implicated in the torture (and yes, waterboarding was, and has always been, torture). A final word on this, from Rahm Emanuel:

"Emanuel worried that such investigations would alienate the intelligence community..." [...] "Emanuel couldn’t complain directly to Holder without violating strictures against political interference in prosecutorial decisions. But he conveyed his unhappiness to Holder indirectly, two sources said. Emanuel demanded, 'Didn’t he get the memo that we’re not re-litigating the past?'"

I understand the impulse to put ugliness behind you. But there are boils that need lancing, and the longer they fester, the uglier they get. I expected better.

What a mess.

Viva la Evolución!

Creation, a Darwin biopic starring the wonderful Paul Bettany, came out recently. In a disgusting development, the majority of US distributors have refused to pick it up. This is a film which would tear the nation apart, apparently. It would prove so hugely controversial in this, our country of Big Macs, guns and superstition, that they could only lose money on it.

That's my charitable interpretation, and the most likely scenario.

The uncharitable one, and the idea that fills me with fear, is that they are simply willfully ignorant, backwards people themselves. The elites, the presumably well-educated potentates who mandate what we see and hear and experience - because media is far more powerful than politics - could themselves be prey to the same regressive pettiness that the rest of us proles face. As a shameless elitist myself, I suppose I had more faith in the sinister media oligarchy.

Numbers after the jump.

Fitna فِتْنَةٌ‎

Geert Wilders goes on trial today, accused of incitement and discrimination against Muslims. His film, Fitna, presents suras from the Qur'an... and scenes of atrocities committed by people inspired by them. He could be fined or jailed if convicted.

Really?

Hideous pandering and audiovisual aids after the jump.

Morally perfect

I haven't been posting that regularly. The internet's been a bit of a sterile promontory recently, and I haven't found anything to get that worked up about.


In fact, that's sort of the problem. There are a great many social things I probably should be actively involved in, fighting against, agitating for, etc. But I'm not. I have good friends who are very much invested in society and politics and injustice, but I can't even get it up for international news. There's a distinct sense of unworthiness that comes of hanging out with feminist vegans, a kind of realization that my morality perhaps doesn't extend as far as it should.

Guilt and rationalizations after the jump.

The Sokal Affair

Long ago, the Sokal affair put Alan Sokal on my list of people I want to be when I grow up. Someone reminded me of him today, and I thought I'd share the wonderful. The Wiki page (linked above) is really worth reading, as is Steven Weinberg's analysis of the paper and the situation.

Sokal, a physicist and mathematician, wrote an essay in the postmodern style, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", arguing - tongue firmly planted in cheek - that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. The paper was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by a respected humanities journal. On the day it was published, Sokal announced that it had been a hoax: in his words, "a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense", which was "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics" made by postmodernist academics. It was a bad day for bullshitters everywhere.

Steven Weinberg, another physicist, summarized it:

The targets of Sokal's satire occupy a broad intellectual range. There are those "postmoderns" in the humanities who like to surf through avant garde fields like quantum mechanics or chaos theory to dress up their own arguments about the fragmentary and random nature of experience. There are those sociologists, historians, and philosophers who see the laws of nature as social constructions. There are cultural critics who find the taint of sexism, racism, colonialism, militarism, or capitalism not only in the practice of scientific research but even in its conclusions. Sokal did not satirize creationists or other religious enthusiasts who in many parts of the world are the most dangerous adversaries of science, but his targets were spread widely enough, and he was attacked or praised from all sides.

I've posted about this before (see "The White Stuff"), but the anti-science squawking of the academic far left is almost as irritating, if not as dangerous, as convergent nonsense excreted by the Know-Nothing far right. Education, it seems, don't cure stupid. It merely gives you the means to elaborate on stupid for pages and pages and pages.

On that note, for the linguistically inclined, the Chomskybot is also worth playing with.

One last tidbit of wisdom from Sokal:

Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)

Alan D. Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries - Toward a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," Social Text
46/47, 217-252 (1996).

Avatar

I enjoyed it, but I didn't think it was that great. It was visually stunning, just beautiful. Zoe Saldana was wonderful. But the characters had no depth and limited development. There were no difficult moral dilemmas and the Noble Savage meme was really overplayed. The bad guys were irredeemably awful, the good guys were idealistic and pure-as-the-driven (and the scientists were right, godammit… I liked that part, but it did irritate me). Above all, the natives were supremely harmonic and peaceful and in balance and such. It was Pocahontas in space. The only thing I didn't quite anticipate was the ending being as treacly as it was. I didn't think Cameron was going to go there. He did. Ordinary white man goes into the woods, learns to paint with all the colors of the wind, gets the girl, out-natives the natives and then saves the world.


So, in sum: absolutely gorgeous, but ultimately a rather transparent white-guilt-redemption fantasy. I came home unsatisfied.


The internet!Right, with hilarious predictability, flips out.


Congratulations, libertarian/contrarian commentators: you are smarter than all of us. You’re wise to the hippie leftist, socialist, pinko-commie Marxist agitprop being churned out by Hollywood in their evil plot to... what was it again?


Linking this to climate change was a smooth move too. Climategate proved beyond doubt that global warming is a liberal fantasy. No truth behind it whatsoever. Even if there is, it’s just science, right? Skinny nerds in the pay of the blue elite pumping out misinformation in a desperate bid for grant money. It’s not really as bad as the pantywaist fearmongers would have us believe. Yeah, ok.


I have some questions about that after the jump.

No sooner said than gratified

As previously noted, I have been lusting after a rosemary bush for some time. The boy, being lovely, just got me one. It's sitting in my room, smelling wonderful, and I couldn't help decking it out with a few Christmas ornaments. Happiness.

I spent last night making 70+ cookies for a bake sale for Linguistics Society instead of studying for a class I have not attended since the midterm. The textbook is 500 pages long and denser than a fruitcake, and I've got tonight and tomorrow to get through the thing. Most of the theorists featured in the text are fruitcakes too.

So far I'm averaging 9 pages of font size 10 notes per unit. Just a few more to go, then I'll actually start reading the notes. Feh.

Notes, thoughts, and a rant after the jump. Today's special: I think "Meaning" is meaningless.