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Some Suggestions On Gender Wars, Ctd

A reader writes:

On the subject of false allegations of rape, we often hear of the Duke Lacrosse team and Tawana Brawley. Far less often, we hear of Jamie Leigh Jones v KBR and Charles Bortz. That case was tried to an eleven-person federal jury in the summer of 2011. I was Bortz’ attorney. The jury refused to find -on evidence that was beyond ample – that Jamie Leigh Jones was raped. She was not raped; her claims were not true and yet only one writer on the left, Stephanie Mencimer, ever came close to figuring this out.

Post-verdict, with both sides having had their day in court, Charles was as guilty in the left’s eyes as he was when Ms. Jones first made her allegations. Neither the evidence nor the jury’s verdict mattered at all. The mystery is why the current debate isn’t a source of terror for traditional civil liberties types. The current left, including elements of the current administration (these federal mandates are recent arrivals), prizes outcome – their outcome – over all else, including guilt or innocence, fair trial or kabuki play. When someone tries to explain why due process matters, the response is vilification and dismissal. No effort is made to explain why due process does not matter or why it should be secondary or diluted or what-have-you. Rather, the Progressive Feminist Left has spoken and further discussion other than assent is not tolerated. And they’re winning.

Another makes many legal distinctions:

You write that arguments for a serious response to the problem of campus rape, including changes to the standard of proof, “echo[] Ezra Klein’s endorsement of expelling male students accused of rape without due process.” Emphasis mine. A quick and honest question: what is your understanding of the term “due process”?

Because the concept is not so cut and dry as you are presenting it. “Due process” does not mean “maximal procedural protections in every case.” Rather, it means that a party to a dispute should receive the procedural protection (“process”) that is “due” given the circumstances.

Civil defendants, for example, do not have the same trial rights as criminal defendants, because if she loses, the civil defendant won’t be going to jail. To borrow a term from my favorite law professor, “due process” is an “error deflection” principle. The law understands that mistakes happen. Procedural safeguards work by “deflecting” the risk of those mistakes away from the protected party.

When you talk about campus rape, then, you need to remember the stakes, and assess the due process problem accordingly. In a college disciplinary proceeding, does the accused student risk being thrown in jail? Fined? His criminal history broadcast to the world through a public trial?

No, no, and no. He’s just going to be expelled from college, to re-enroll somewhere else. His risk of error is low, relative to a criminal case. By comparison, the risk of error borne by the accuser is about the same relative to a criminal case, if not higher. Following acquittal, the victim can’t avoid a wrongly-acquitted rapist. She must go to class with him, socialize with him, and live (in most cases) within a mile of him. She’s trapped, basically. With her rapist. In her home.

When campus reformers talk about making it easier to expel accused rapists, they’re not arguing against due process. They’re just emphasizing the “due” part over the “process” part. And with good reason.

A Massacre Of Jews At Prayer, Ctd

Speaking before a Knesset committee yesterday, Israel’s Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen pushed back on Netanyahu’s angry assertion that Mahmoud Abbas was to blame for inciting the horrific attack:

No one among the Palestinian leadership is calling for violence, Cohen said, noting that Abbas has reiterated that the path of intifada should be rejected. “ Abu Mazen [Abbas] is not interested in terror,” he explained, “and is not leading [his people] to terror. Nor is he doing so ‘under the table.’” At the same time, however, Cohen admitted that, “There are people in the Palestinian community who are liable to see Abu Mazen’s words of criticism as legitimization for taking action.”

J.J. Goldberg comments on why Cohen’s remarks are significant:

Cohen’s frontal attack on the prime minister’s stance toward Abbas is particularly shocking because the Shin Bet chief, appointed by Netanyahu in 2011, has been considered Netanyahu’s one reliable ally within the Israeli intelligence community. The heads of the Mossad and IDF military intelligence consistently take less alarmist views of Arab and Iranian intentions, repeatedly blunting the prime minister’s efforts to depict Israel’s enemies as unequivocally committed to Israel’s destruction.

Just last week Cohen was at the center of a media firestorm (as I described here) after senior Shin Bet officials appeared with his permission on a television newsmagazine to claim that the security service had warned the IDF last January of Hamas plans to launch a war in July, but the military had overlooked the warning.

Yishai Schwartz is convinced that the attack was motivated by hatred of Jews, rather than anger with Israel:

There is irony in the latest attack. The synagogue was in Har Nof, an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in West Jerusalem. The worshippers lived in internationally recognized Israel and almost certainly never served in the army. They would never approach the Temple Mount, the holy site where recent visits by Jews have supposedly triggered the latest wave of Palestinian violence, because they believe that God’s law forbids it. In other words, these worshippers should be among the least offensive to Palestinians.

This is not to say that, for instance, last week’s murder of 26-year-old Dalia Lemkus was less obscene because it happened near a West Bank settlement. But the senselessness and brutality of the synagogue assault, and the otherworldliness of the victims, lays bare the inadequacy of rational political explanations for terror. No doubt the murderers had their grievances (and some perhaps were reasonable), but the butchery in Har Nof shows that any sense of strategy has been overwhelmed by hate. The murder of non-Zionist Torah scholars is an attack on Jews more than Israel, and explaining it requires an understanding of hatred, not of politics.

The attackers were members of the armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist militant group that hasn’t been heard from in a while. Ishaan Tharoor provides some background on the PFLP:

The group is considered a terrorist organization by the United States and other Western countries, but its ideology has very little in common with Hamas, whose jihad against Israel has blown hot and cold over the past two decades. Its legacy is a reminder of the older, secular nature of Palestinian militancy against Israel and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since the 1960s.

The PFLP was founded in 1967 by George Habash, a Palestinian Orthodox Christian animated by the pan-Arabism of then Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser and the insurgent socialism that inflamed anti-colonial struggles in many parts of the world at the time. At its peak, the PFLP was one of the leading factions within the Palestinian Liberation Organization, alongside the Fateh party of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas, the beleaguered current president of the Palestinian Authority.

Freddie deBoer detects a double standard in the American media, wherein Palestinians are blamed collectively for such acts of violence while Israelis face no such censure for atrocities carried out by their government:

That the Israeli people are not responsible for the murderous, cruel, and illegal occupation of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government is a matter of media consensus. And, indeed, it’s true– despite the fact that Israeli government is an elected government, despite the fact that Israel’s democratic polity is in the main vociferously committed to the greatest crime of this young century, no individuals deserve to bear the blame for the sins of their government or their military. That is as clear a lesson as any the 20th century taught to us: the notion of collective blame is the first step on the staircase to genocide. And yet when it comes to the actions of two desperate madmen, there is no similar consensus, for the simple, plain, unavoidable fact that to the American media, Palestinians don’t deserve human rights because Palestinians are not human.

Jonathan Tobin, unsurprisingly, sees it differently:

[W]hile it is true that a minority of Jews would like to alter the status quo on the Temple Mount to make it place where both faiths can be freely observed (Jews currently may not pray on the Mount, a stand endorsed by Prime Minister Netanyahu), the hate and incitement that leads inevitably to the kind of bloody slaughter witnessed in a Har Nof synagogue where five Jews were murdered yesterday is not a function of a few isolated zealots or a twisted interpretation of Islam. Rather it is a product of mainstream Palestinian political culture in which religious symbols such as the imagined peril to the mosques on the Mount have been employed by generations of Palestinian leaders to whip up hatred for Jews. The purpose is not to defend the mosques or Arab claims to Jerusalem but to deny the right of Jews to life, sovereignty, or self-defense in any part of the country.

Chemi Shalev loses hope:

The Israelis who routinely ride roughshod over Palestinian sensitivities stirred up a hornet’s nest at the Temple Mount while hate-infested Palestinians massacred Orthodox Jews as they were praying: It’s unprecedented, it’s true, though we’ve seen it all before.

No, there is no moral equivalence, but there is more than enough responsibility and recklessness to pass all around. The leaders of both sides are too busy maligning each other, after all, as they resign themselves and their constituents to constant struggle and eternal strife and the incorrigible otherness of their enemies. It’s hard to imagine anyone who could inspire less confidence than Abbas and Netanyahu to lead us out of the morass, but given the mutual hatred and racism coursing through their constituents, the odds are that their successors will fare even worse.

(Photo: Israeli police officers stand next to the flag wrapped coffin of Druze Israeli police officer Zidan Sif during his funeral on November 19, 2014 in Yanuh-Jat, Israel. Sif, 30, died of his wounds on November 18, after two Palestinian cousins armed with meat cleavers and a gun stormed a Jerusalem synagogue during morning prayers, killing four rabbis. By Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

How Many Immigrants Will Obama Let Stay?

Dara Lind does some calculations:

Obama’s upcoming plan is being characterized, in advance, as relief for 5 million unauthorized immigrants. But based on the rumors about who’d be likely to be included in the plan, that’s not exactly accurate.

What it looks like is that, by the time Obama’s new plan goes into effect, 5 million unauthorized immigrants, in total, will be eligible to apply for protection from deportation. That includes immigrants who are already eligible for protection — even before any new plan is announced — because they qualify for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which the Obama administration introduced in 2012.

If the undocumented parents of American citizens are allowed to stay, Roberto Ferdman figures “we’re talking about an estimated 3.5 million immigrants who currently don’t have protection from deportation”:

There’s a separate possibility that the plan might also include relief for immigrants who arrived in the country as children and are still younger than 18 years old. Those, according to Pew, amount to another 650,000 people. If this group is also included in Obama’s executive action, that would bring the total number of people affected by his action up to 4.15 million.

But this massive number doesn’t account for the millions more indirectly affected by the reform: the families of those who would no longer be deported. Even the most conservative estimate—let’s say 2.8 million undocumented adults are paired up and each couple has one child—suggests that more than a million children will suddenly not have to worry anymore about whether their parents will be deported.

Why Was Kassig’s Death Different? Ctd

Frenchman Maxime Hauchard identified as executioner in ISIS beheading video http://t.co/6G4Vf2cxMT pic.twitter.com/ikn8rWDWkm

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 17, 2014

Tracy McNicoll suspects that the real purpose of the ISIS propaganda video showing Abdul-Rahman (Peter) Kassig’s severed head was to feature its expanding cast of foreign fighters, some of whom are seen taking part in the synchronized beheading of 18 Syrian military personnel. One of the executioners has been identified as 22-year-old Frenchman Maxime Hauchard:

Hauchard is the first of the unmasked executioners in the ISIS video to be positively and publicly identified, although French authorities have said a second young French Muslim convert’s appearance may be authenticated shortly. As intelligence services around the world are working to identify any other foreign fighters among the band of killers in the gory new video, speculation also surfaced that another of the killers is 20-year-old Welsh jihadist Nasser Muthana, but that has yet to be confirmed.

Indeed, analysts agree one of the video’s key functions for ISIS is to illustrate how far the group’s seductive reach is extending globally. As France took in the shock news that one of its own sons may be a throat-slitting, decapitating terrorist, the Islamist specialist Romain Caillet told Le Monde, “In putting forward soldiers from the four corners of the world, Da’esh [as the French call the group, using the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is looking to create a ‘United Colors of Jihad’ effect. The message is simple: there are hundreds of Jihadi Johns.”

I’m still kinda agape at the idea of a 20 year old Welsh Jihadist. But I fail to be intimidated by that kind of ludicrous Western loser. They seem as evil as they are ridiculous. Simon Cottee reflects on why ISIS makes a point of showing off its beheadings:

The conventional wisdom holds that ISIS’s savagery will be its undoing—that it will alienate ordinary Muslims, and that without their support the group cannot succeed. But what this view overlooks is that ISIS’s jihad, as its progenitor Zarqawi well understood, isn’t about winning hearts and minds. It is about breaking hearts and minds. ISIS doesn’t want to convince its detractors and enemies. It wants to command them, if not destroy them altogether. And its strategy for achieving this goal seems to be based on destroying their will through intimate killing. This, in part, is what the group’s staged beheadings are about: They subliminally communicate ISIS’s proficiency in the art of the intimate kill. And this terrifies many people, because they sense just how hard it is to do.

Cottee’s analysis squares with a new UN report on the jihadists’ reign of terror, which also concludes that it serves a strategic purpose:

There’s a terrible logic at work here. “By publicizing its brutality,” the UN concludes, “the so-called ISIS seeks to convey its authority over its areas of control, to show its strength to attract recruits, and to threaten any individuals, groups or States that challenge its ideology.” Such violence isn’t rare in war zones. According to Stathis Kalyvas, a Yale professor who studies civil wars, rebel groups understand that civilian defection is an existential threat to their rule. Their violence is generally targeted to coerce civilian cooperation with the group — which is why ISIS labels the people it publicly executes as traitors. The message: defect to the government or a rebel group, and you’ll pay.

Meanwhile, Rodger Shanahan notices something odd about the timing of these videos:

Note that the latest video showing the beheading of Peter Kassig and Syrian military personnel was released a day or two after the fall of the town of Bayji to Iraqi government forces. … This is part of a broader pattern. A day after the Turkish parliament authorised military action against ISIS (not good news for ISIS), video of the beheading of British aid worker Alan Henning was released. And if we hark back to the recapture of Mosul Dam by Kurdish forces backed by US air support in mid-August, the beheading of US journalist James Foley followed shortly after.

None of these actions are designed to dissuade Western military intervention in Iraq or Syria, or even to goad the West into becoming decisively committed on the ground, because ISIS understands this is unlikely to occur. Rather, it has a much more short-term aim: to get ISIS’s military and political setbacks out of the media cycle and replace them with bloody imagery that demonstrates ISIS is still a force.

But they somewhat detract from that message, don’t they? They seem desperate and the last one rushed.

Some Suggestions On Gender Wars, Ctd

A reader writes:

It’s good to see you continuing address this issue, regardless of how you are attacked by the illiberal left. It’s pretty sad how they’ve turned into the censorious, judgmental sticks in the mud that liberals have always accused the right of being. While I don’t consider myself a conservative (as per GOP definition), I really cannot stand the intolerant left. As a person of color, I’ve dealt with the standard right-wing bigots, but it’s at least with them, it was open and you could, you know, get them to treat you as a regular joe with enough interaction. With the illiberal left, if I’m not with them, then I’m either patronized as being a child with no agency, or they find some other term (misogynist is the current favorite) that can allow them to ignore you and get your views hounded off any public sphere.

Identity politics is really one of the most divisive problems on the left. For those of us who value freedom (of speech, of religion), the fervor with which these people are trying to shut down any disagreements is really mind-boggling.

A black lesbian and “something of a conservative lefty” writes:

I come to my belief in equality of opportunity the honest way, by which I mean my prior commitment is not to feminism or to anti-racism or to the gay rights movement but to a larger principle that it is morally repugnant to treat an individual person as nothing more than a representative sample of some group or another.

That prior ethical commitment is the only wholly secular means by which one can stand up for the rights of one’s own group but also wish for others those same rights or, at absolute minimum, recognize that the rights of others might need to be protected from you. Me being treated as nothing more than a walking representative of the categories “black”, “woman” and “lesbian” is wrong, and so treating you as nothing more than representative of “white”, “gay” and “male” is also wrong. Anti-racism, feminism, being in favor of gay rights all naturally flow from that.

If, on the other hand, I start from the premise that racism against black people is wrong or that sexism is wrong or that anti-gay sentiments are wrong, without first grounding it in the principle that not only do I not deserve to be ill-treated this way, but no one deserves to be so treated, it invites the kind of theological responses that you get. It is not that you have (entirely justified) reservations about the way that feminism is advanced rhetorically online. No, you are deemed irredeemably hostile to the advancement of women in society. You are, therefore, opposed not only to equal pay but to women’s education and you wish to put us under a regime so regressive that even Saudi Arabia will look at us and say “Dayaaam, we put our desire to constrain women’s lives second to none but we bow before your teachings…” I mean how could it be any other way?

Likewise, if you question the wisdom of gay couples pressing straight proprietors of public businesses who refuse to take their gay money because of religious beliefs, then you are somehow secretly in favor of sending us back to the pre-Stonewall regime – the regime that robbed the world of the brilliant light that was Alan Turing’s mind. Again, how could it be any other way?

The latter stance destroys any possibility for civil dialog. How do you negotiate with someone who is malevolent in thought and deed? You really can’t.

There is one salutary effect I think may come out of this. I am as much a social democrat as the next West coast Democratic voter, but increasingly I’m finding myself becoming something of a conservative lefty. By that I mean that as a matter of policy, I would like to see a strong social safety net, a public primary education system that is the envy of the world, a public secondary education system that is also the envy of the world, and I believe in the progressive income tax and that corporations should not be rewarded for laying people off and/or sending jobs over seas.

But I’m becoming increasingly conservative in the sense that Roger Scruton uses the term because there is much that I think the left is attacking that we need. In fact, I think that the identity politics that lies behind all of this Internet political kabuki is a malign influence in the academy and in the larger culture. It makes civil discussion and discourse upon which republican citizenship depends impossible. It undermines the one thing tying all 300 million Americans together, and that is our shared ideology and ideals. It tells the people who have the most to lose from rejecting mainstream values and the most to gain from doing so that they should not do so. That there is no need to do so.

It is a malevolent force in our national politics because it undermines the ability to deploy facts in order to influence policy. It simply no longer matters if Obamacare has a line in it mandating the summary execution of every white, heterosexual Christian over the age of 70. Fox News will report that it does. They will have experts on who will talk about how this phantasm will do its devil’s work. The non-FOX media will report “Fox News reports that Obamacare has death panels in it, the Obama administration denies this…” and not once ever ask the obvious question “why is Fox News saying something that is manifestly untrue’. The critical theorists do not believe that there are facts, only power narratives. But facts are the way we can know if our policies are effective or if the best policy is no policy.

As an American, as a Westerner, I reject the idea that my being a black lesbian makes me somehow a stranger to my culture. I reject the idea that the culture of the Anglophone world isn’t my home culture because of my race. When I was born, I don’t think that would have made me a conservative, but I think it makes me a conservative today but not in the right-wing republican mode. More in the sense that I look at my civilization and all its works and see much worth preserving that the current ideological critical theory/social justice left wishes to destroy. I can’t sign on for that. It took a lot of long hard struggle just to get to the English and Scottish Enlightenment. It took yet more long and hard struggle for the Enlightenment to include the likes of me within the circle of people rational enough to be given the honorific “citizen”. It enrages me that, in my name, just as society has said “this ladder is yours to ascend by your own efforts and to your own comfort” the social justice left wants to take that ladder, break it into kindling, set fire to it and then lament how I, as a black woman, couldn’t get any higher because the white, capitalist patriarchy would not allow it. That, I think, makes me a species of conservative.

A Burkean Liberal? A Rawlsian Conservative? I don’t know. That’s thin lemonade to make out of so big a lemon but it’s the best I can do. Keep up the good fight.

Another points to “Exhibit A of feminism eating its own”:

If you want to link to an example of how feminists shame beautiful women, look what Keira Knightley got in exchange for taking a very feminist stance of refusing to be photoshopped: This nasty Daily Beast column, where Knightley is accused of “arguing for diversity from an extremely privileged and exclusive platform.” Rather than acknowledge that this is a step toward progress, the writer says, “Unfortunately, it’s hard to win a war over diversity and inclusion when the only women who are being given the mainstream platforms to speak out are the white warriors who have been deemed hot enough to merit a topless photo shoot.”

Womp womp. If you’re Knightley, who happens to be insanely talented and smart, why would you want to be on the same team as women like this who take you out at the kneecaps? Fuck that.

Heh, it also contains an old quote from Lady Gaga: “I’m not a feminist… I love men.” If international superstar women think that the two concepts are mutually exclusive, you miiiiiight have a bit of a public perception problem.

Another sends a civil dissent:

I am lapsed subscriber on the fence till recently, but I now know I renew, in part because of your efforts on the recent gender threads, though I mostly disagree with your takes. The reason is, I’m a male of Indian descent who is a Sikh religiously, and these threads allow me to see you come by your blind spots honestly regarding points of view informed by these origin-points of mine. I better understand you as you have dug in your heels, and I can see you mean no malice, though in important ways, you do not see things that are important to see to really understand the topics you are speaking on.

What you are not seeing is the people of goodwill you are opposing are coming from a real point of view and reacting from that point of view and you are removing the context in a way that does you no service. It is fairly apparent (no offense meant) that you do not really understand these points of views either intellectually or from lived experience.

If you are not able to run the thought experiments, sincerely take a page from one of your readers and consult a woman you trust, as you do, in a way, regarding race with Ta-Nehisi Coates. You as much as anyone else know you do not bestow favors on Coates when you refer to him in posts; you do yourself a favor because he really can teach on a point of view you lack familiarity with. No one has to agree with him, but he provides a really valuable education. You would do well to have an interlocutor or teacher regarding these issues.

What To Think Of Bill Cosby?

Reading through six near-identical accounts of women who publicly testify that he drugged and raped them, it seems clear to me, at least, that he is a serial sexual abuser and rapist. Does he deserve the benefit of the doubt? In a court of law, absolutely. In the court of public opinion? Not at all. The odds of all these women lying – when they have nothing to gain and a certain amount to lose from telling the truth – is close to zero. Or as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it:

Believing Bill Cosby does not require you to take one person’s word over another—it requires you take one person’s word over 15 others.

Here’s the latest version from Janice Dickinson:

And the fact that he got away with this abuse is not at all surprising. In Britain, we now have a flurry of cases where stars in the era of peak network TV were treated by almost everyone as demi-gods: unimpeachable, untouchable, and beyond any human accountability. And they thereby got away with the rape of children, of women, of the mentally ill, and even of corpses in plain sight. Only decades later have they been called to account, but in Jimmy Savile’s case not till after his death.

That this entire issue only resurfaced because of a man’s comedy routine is also disturbing. I take Barbara Bowman’s point seriously:

Only after a man, Hannibal Buress, called Bill Cosby a rapist in a comedy act last month did the public outcry begin in earnest. The original video of Buress’ performance went viral. This week, Twitter turned against him, too, with a meme that emblazoned rape scenarios across pictures of his face.

While I am grateful for the new attention to Cosby’s crimes, I must ask my own questions: Why wasn’t I believed? Why didn’t I get the same reaction of shock and revulsion when I originally reported it? Why was I, a victim of sexual assault, further wronged by victim blaming when I came forward? The women victimized by Bill Cosby have been talking about his crimes for more than a decade. Why didn’t our stories go viral?

I don’t know. I wasn’t really aware of any of this till recently. But it seems to me the least we can do to honor these women – and accord them some way overdue respect – is to treat Cosby differently in public life.

Being Conscious Of Your Own Circumcision, Ctd

More readers share their stories:

My heart goes out to your reader. We opted not to circumcise our son, only to have him develop the same non-retraction problem at age three. We tried a variety of topical treatments and visited a number of doctors. We were told that the problem might resolve with time, but if it didn’t, we’d be looking at circumcision of an even older child. That seemed untenable to us, so we went ahead with the procedure, which required a visit to an outpatient facility, general anesthesia, and several hundred dollars out of pocket.

He’s now almost seven and doing just fine, but it was a sad experience for all of us. To this day he talks about the time “when Mommy was crying so hard.” I’d tried to put the antibiotic ointment on his incision and he ran away screaming. I was emotionally worn out and worried about infection but also hoping and praying that he wouldn’t get a complex from having a wound on his penis that his parents had to slather with ointment several times a day.

As much as my husband and I couldn’t stomach the thought of a newborn undergoing this procedure, what our son experienced was more traumatic. Would we have done it differently had we known? Probably, but that’s the problem – there’s no way to know ahead of time if your child will develop this issue.

Another got his penis sliced much later than age three:

Having read about your reader’s dilemma regarding his child’s circumcision, I’d recommend that he go ahead and do it. I had issues with phimosis in adolescence and actually needed a circumcision, but I had to wait until I had health insurance to get one. I remained a virgin through college because I was too afraid of something bad happening during sex, which I will forever regret, even though I am happily married now.

One of the first things I did after getting healthcare coverage through a job was to get a circumcision. I was 24 then, and I can attest as to how terrible it is. Imagine getting multiple shots of local anesthetic on your johnson, feeling the sutures being sewn because the anaesthetic is wearing out, and having the whole thing witnessed by four nurses, presumably because of the sheer novelty of an adult circumcision. The recovery is equally horrendous, with painful mid-sleep boners and the skin of my glans getting chapped and flaking off. I took three days off work when I was told one would suffice.

When all was said and done, I had a scarred dick that lost a lot of its sensitivity, but that was mitigated by the lost fear of actually using my penis.

So having experienced circumcision as a grown man, I can attest that it is a barbaric experience. Performing it on a newborn child does not change that. I do not plan on having my children circumcised, if I have any. Still, if it is an issue of medical necessity – which it can be – the sooner it gets dealt with, the better. Once puberty hits and shame becomes inevitably correlated with private parts, a lot of damage can be done.

Another suggests a novel solution:

Why do stories on circumcision never discuss the “dorsal slit” procedure, which leaves the foreskin intact? This simple procedure combines the health benefits of circumcision with all the pleasure of remaining intact. While I do not advocate routine mutilation, this neatly resolves the issue for anyone with retraction problems. Those seeking middle-ground might consider this compromise.

A colleague of a reader seems to have done just that:

The image that came to me when I read your post was when I was working in a very busy neonatal unit. The head of the department did the circumcisions if the child did not have a pediatrician yet. I came on to work one morning and was so shocked when I pulled back the diaper to reveal something – to my eyes – that was horribly wrong. It looked like a mutilation, and I have seen lots of circs (performed by the pediatricians on their patients – this was the first one I saw that the neonatologist had performed).

I immediately went to find him and asked him to come and take a look. I thought he would really want to know – thinking that there was swelling or infection or some thing gone awry. He made a rather sniping comment – that I had been to Paris and seen the best or something to that effect. What I learned about this doctor is that he did not like to do circumcisions and so he performed a “mini circ” – essentially just nipping a bit off. Everybody is happy.

The Keystone Jobs Plan

It’s underwhelming:

Citing the State Department final environmental impact statement, the lawmakers say the project would create 42,000 jobs. But it takes the economy less than a week to create that many permanent jobs. What’s more, these pipeline jobs wouldn’t be permanent. The State Department report uses the notion of “job years.” So the project, which is expected to take two years to build, requires 3,900 job years for the construction workforce, or 1,950 jobs that last over a two-year period. Another 26,000 jobs (or 13,000 over twoyears) would go to suppliers of goods and services.

Once the project is completed, operations would require 35 permanent employees and 15 temporary contractors, the State Department report says.

Philip Bump illustrates those numbers with the above chart:

For those out of work — a difficult and frustrating experience — the creation of any job that could offer a salary and benefits is worthwhile. The question for lawmakers is how to balance the jobs that would be created by the pipeline — either 42,000 or 50, depending on your feelings about the project — with other considerations, such as the environmental effects of increasing tar sands oil production. If we’re talking about adding the same number of jobs by 2017 that would be added by building a Target, for example, that likely shifts the calculus.

Chait sees the GOP’s Keystone fixation as a way to avoid having a real jobs plan. Which puts Obama in a bad negotiating position:

Republicans need to have a jobs plan. They’re much better off blaming Obama for standing in the way of the huge number of construction jobs that would be made available to hardworking Americans being blocked by the left-wing environmental agenda than they are taking credit for the pipeline. Republicans don’t like cutting deals with Obama even when he offers them something they want. In this case, the trade value of Keystone is negative. Which is to say, Republicans aren’t going to give him squat.

Male Culture In The 21st Century

Perhaps not coincidentally this week, in the wake of gamergate, The New Republic, as part of its 100th anniversary, has republished my June 2000 essay, “Male Culture Should Be More Than Beer, Sex, and Cars”. After bemoaning the often sexist tropes promoted in glossy men’s magazines, I argue:

The notion of the “gentleman,” or indeed any notion of masculinity attached to gentility, has almost vanished from the cultural air. What happened, one wonders, and why?

I guess you could start by observing that many areas of life that were once “gentlemanly” have simply been opened to women and thus effectively demasculinized. A college education, for one thing, along with all the journals, books, and conversations that go along with it, is now thoroughly—and rightly—integrated. Education is no longer a function of becoming a man but a function of becoming a nongendered citizen. There are whole swaths of public life—business, politics, sports, and so forth—that once inculcated a form of refined masculinity but are now unsexed. Even military schools and seminaries, once the ultimate male bastions, have thrown open their doors to women.

I’m not going to quibble with this. Why should I? Greater opportunity for women is probably the most significant gain for human freedom in the last century. But with this gain has come a somewhat unexpected problem: How do we restore a sense of masculinity that is vaguely civilized? Take their exclusive vocations away, remove their institutions, de-gender their clubs and schools and workplaces, and you leave men with more than a little cultural bewilderment. The only things left that are predominantly male—sex with women, beer, gadgets, sex with women, cars, beer, and more gadgets, to judge from men’s magazines—tend to be, shall we say, lacking in elevation.

A certain type of feminism is, I think, part of the problem.

By denying any deep biological or psychological difference between the sexes, some influential feminists refuse to countenance any special treatment for men and boys. They see even the ethic of the gentleman as sexist and regard the excrescences of the current male pop culture as a function of willful hostility to women rather than the clumsy attempt to find something—anything—that men still have in common. So, while women are allowed an autonomous culture and seem to have little problem making it civilized, men are left to their own devices, with increasingly worrying results.

Take a look at education. American boys are now far behind girls in high school. As [Christina Hoff] Sommers points out in her book [The War Against Boys], the Department of Education reports that “the gap in reading proficiency between males and females is roughly equivalent to about one and a half years of schooling.” The gender gap in American colleges is now ten percentage points—55 percent of students are women and 45 percent are men—and growing fast. Yet any attempts to address this problem with single-sex classes or schools for boys, for example, meet with ferocious opposition and more often than not get struck down in the courts. The more extreme examples of this ideology come in the ludicrous attempts to police gender stereotypes as early as kindergarten, even when those “stereotypes” conform to the way little boys and little girls have naturally interacted, or not interacted, for millennia.

You can understand how we got here, of course. For far too long, girls and women were second-class citizens, marginalized, frustrated, punished, and denied the possibility of advancement. But a visit to any American college campus today will show how far we have come from those pernicious days. Instead, we are arguably at the beginning of a different crisis—a crisis of the American male. Until we find a way for men to chart a course that is not dependent on the subjugation of women and yet is unmistakably their own, that crisis will continue.

And the beat goes on …