Category: Propaganda

WHO doesn’t understand the definition of “healthy”.

In an article in the New York Times on female genital cutting in Indonesia, here’s the obligatory mention. I’m only surprised that it appears so late in the story.

Any distinction between injuring the clitoris or the clitoral hood is irrelevant, says Laura Guarenti, an obstetrician and WHO’s medical officer for child and maternal health in Jakarta. “The fact is there is absolutely no medical value in circumcising girls,” she says. “It is 100 percent the wrong thing to be doing.” The circumcision of boys, she adds, has demonstrated health benefits, namely reduced risk of infection and some protection against H.I.V.

How much of “absolutely no medical value” is the result of scientific research finding no link between female genital cutting and potential health benefits? How much is the result of our realization that it would be cruel to investigate it, even on willing adult volunteers, with the forward-thinking realization that it would be cruel to impose on children, regardless of anything potential?

For many people, the history of male genital cutting precludes any reconsideration of the ethics and validity of imposing an extreme intervention on a healthy child (i.e. a human being). The surgery is wrapped up in tradition and “medical” justifications that society uses to pretend that an objective clinical finding is not merely a subjective wish when applied beyond the laboratory. That blindness is especially silly when looking at the disparity between volunteers in a study and infants with healthy genitals. Unfortunately, within that disparity rests the real issue of the individual and his/her inherent, identifiable rights. Those human rights are not predicated upon the claimed grandiosity of an action’s outcome. Nor are they predicated upon the gender of the person subjected to such irrational hope.

Healthy genitals, by definition, do not require intervention. As such, any intervention is excessive, unjustified, and thus, irrational. Healthy (i.e. medical need, or lack thereof) is the only reasonable standard needed to evaluate medical procedures when applied to a person who cannot exercise his own consent. Mounds of historical research are as irrelevant as any distinction based on gender.

As an informative aside, peruse the accompanying slideshow of an Indonesian circumcision ceremony (particularly this one). Try to justify how changing the gender of the participants – willing or otherwise – matters. Essentially, any time you see pink in a picture, change it to blue. Doing so demonstrates how arguing a difference based on subjective criteria imposed on non-consenting “participants” is a stupid mental exercise. Or, rather, I should say it’s a mental exercise by the stupid.

Buying Michael Kinsley’s libertarianism is no better than buying Ron Paul’s.

I didn’t have much respect for Michael Kinsley’s understanding of libertarianism going into today. I have less after reading his opinion piece in today’s Saturday’s Washington Post, titled “The Church Doctrines of Pope Ron Paul.” (Clever in its truthiness.) Consider:

Libertarians get patronized a lot. Chipmunky and earnest, always pursuing logical consistency down wacky paths, they pose no real threat to the established order.

If a path is logical, it is by definition not wacky. It may be different from what average citizens accept, but the average citizen believes that common and normal are synonyms. They are not. It is common to be circumcised¹ as an American male. The circumcised penis is not normal.

So what is wrong with the libertarian case for extremely limited government? Economics 101 teaches some of the basic justifications for government interference in the economy. Some things, such as the cost of national defense, are “public goods.” We can’t each decide for ourselves how much defense we want. We have to decide that together.

National defense is a very poorly chosen example. And I believe that Mr. Kinsley is smart enough and familiar enough with libertarianism to understand that it’s a poorly chosen example. This is intentionally deceptive, presented to make the main line of libertarianism appear much less reasonable than it is.

But assuming a naive grasp of basic libertarianism, there are quite a few libertarians who actively accept that national defense is a legitimate government function. Apart from Mr. Kinsley’s justification, which is valid, it’s also in the United States Constitution. Small-l libertarians may disagree that it should be there, believing instead that private markets can handle defense. But only crackpots deny that it’s in our Constitution. Mr. Kinsley incorrectly implies that such nonsense is a fundamental tenet of American libertarianism.

Then there are “externalities,” which are costs (or, sometimes, benefits) that your decisions impose on me. Pollution is the classic example. Without government involvement of some sort to override our individual judgments, we will produce more pollution than most of us want.

He’s on slightly firmer footing here, but he still ignores the possibility that free, private markets could produce a solution. To accept his position completely, we must accept that individuals would willingly choose a slow-burn suicide through environmental destruction, past the point at which any fix could be achieved. Perhaps this is so, but Mr. Kinsley provides zero evidence that his favored position is any more likely than what he rejects. He relies solely on a belief that individual men are evil, while collective men are wise.

There are “market-oriented” solutions to this problem, but there is a difference –often forgotten, especially by Republicans — between using market forces and leaving something to the market. The point of principle is whether the government should intervene at all. How it chooses to intervene is purely pragmatic.

Libertarians have a fondness for complex arrangements to make markets work in situations where the textbooks say they can’t. …

He is off the rails here. Libertarians do not pretend to know what solutions will look like. We have ideas about how they “should” look, but we’re smart enough to know that others have ideas, too. Imposing ours blocks what might be better. Competition has a way of shoving less efficient solutions to the side. Free-market thinkers understand this.

The United States Postal Service, by virtue of being a “public good” (and in the Constitution), demands that the government handle this work. Everyone believed that until Fred Smith proved that belief to be dated nonsense. Some still believe the USPS should stick around, even though it clearly isn’t the best at what it does. Such thinking wandered long ago into irrational.

Libertarians also have a tendency to see too many issues in terms of property rights (just as liberals, they would counter, tend to see everything in terms of discrimination and equal protection). Pollution, libertarians say, is simply theft: you are stealing my clean air. Settle it in court. This is a really terrible idea: inexpert judges, lawyers and juries using the most elaborate and expensive decision-making process known to humankind — litigation — to make inconsistent decisions in different cases. …

What about “inexpert” politicians? Politicians believe that ridding ourselves of incandescent light bulbs will cure global warming. Politicians believe that manipulating Daylight Saving Time on the calendar will somehow decrease the amount of energy we use, rather than shifting around when we will use that energy. Politicians believe that subsidizing biofuels will save us from dependency on foreign oil, even though biofuels as currently subsidized by the United States is inefficient, expensive, and pollutes the environment.

More importantly, a decree from a judge when reviewing property rights generally means you can or can’t continue doing X, the action under consideration. Politicians see these actions and decide not only whether you can or can’t continue doing X, but they will also mandate the use or prohibition of Y, Z, A, H, K, P, and S. Inexpert politicians, through the elaborate and expensive decision-making process of legislation.

… And usually there is no one “right” answer: There is a spectrum of acceptable answers, involving tradeoffs (dirty air versus fewer jobs, etc.) that ought to be made democratically — that is, through government.

Earlier in the piece, Mr. Kinsley wrote this:

Furthermore, democracy and majority rule are no answers. Tyranny of the majority is a constant danger.

No kidding. So now we’re praising inexpert voters along with inexpert politicians instead of inexpert judges. Brilliant. What could go wrong?

So yes, a Rube Goldberg contraption of capitalism could replace a straightforward government regulation. But what if you aren’t interested in turning your grocery shopping into an ideological adventure? All that is lost by letting the government take care of it is the right of a few idiots to be idiots. That right deserves respect. But not much.

He is writing of unpasteurized milk. Notice that choosing to drink unpasteurized means the individual is an idiot. This is the classic central planner’s argument. His subjective evaluation of an issue is the only valid evaluation. By virtue of his certainty, its subjective nature becomes objective, enshrined in rules. It is the central planner’s job to protect everyone from themselves.

For what it’s worth, I don’t drink milk, pasteurized or not. Should I get to regulate everyone’s diet to exclude milk because I think drinking it is unwise? If you will not subject yourself to my opinion, why must I subject myself to yours?

Essentially, Mr. Kinsley seeks to indict libertarianism as a belief-system centered in a fantasy world in which everything works out efficiently and effectively, while asking that the reader accept that government is efficient and effective, generally as a result of its benevolence. But libertarians do not believe that capitalism is perfect. We know only that it’s superior to every other system tried by mankind. We know that government is inefficient and ineffective at every task it undertakes that don’t involve destruction. It is also operated by politicians who will sell any constituent to win a “better” constituent. Evidence demonstrates that, whether it’s taxes targeted
to “the rich”, forcing consumers to higher-margin fluorescent light bulbs, higher food prices so that gas doesn’t rise to a price that would force people to seek out alternative energy sources, or any other readily available example in which government acts to impose the subjective will of one onto another.

More thoughts at East Coast Libertarian.

¹ Speaking of circumcision, following the logical consistency that we don’t normally amputate healthy body parts from children, it is not wacky to denounce the giant exception applied to infant male foreskins.

Subjective evaluations require only the individual.

The mindlessness of both research and reporting about circumcision is exhausting. I fear this story is going to be the new gold standard for the smug dismissal of any challenge to pro-circumcision advocacy. Consider:

Circumcision does not reduce sexual satisfaction and so there should be no reservations about using this method as a way to combat HIV, a study says.

Nearly 5,000 Ugandan men were recruited for the study. Half were circumcised, half had yet to undergo surgery.

There was little difference between the two groups when they were asked to rate performance and satisfaction, the journal BJU International reports.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. The ways this is going to be abused by those who’d rather cheer their reality-free position than think their way into an honest conclusion that recognizes medicine and ethics…

Sexual satisfaction is a subjective measure, unique to each person. Collective judgments are irrelevant.

The men in the study are adults volunteering for the surgery. Don’t read more into it than that.

These results do not change the medical and ethical issues surrounding infant circumcision.

There is a difference in the skin of a freshly healed circumcision and a circumcision that occurred in infancy many decades ago. The former is still pink and moist. The latter is keratinized and tough. This is not open to debate.

Par for circumcision advocacy reporting, the article immediately restates that (volunteer, adult) circumcision may reduce the risk of female-to-male HIV infection. It leaves out most of that specificity, of course. Consider what the journalist reports on how (voluntary, adult) circumcision may achieve this result.

Specific cells in the foreskin may be potential targets for HIV infection, while the skin under the foreskin may become less sensitive and less likely to bleed – reducing risk of infection – following circumcision.

In any other academic pursuit, such obvious contradictions would be called out and the position advocated on faulty thinking would be dismissed. These two claims conflict. (Voluntary, adult) circumcision doesn’t affect sexual satisfaction, but it might reduce sensitivity. So which is it?

Still, we must focus on circumcision as an individual procedure. The study found the following:

Some 98.4% of the circumcised men reported satisfaction, compared to 99.9% in the control group.

And so on, with the reported caveat that these differences aren’t clinically significant. That doesn’t matter for the individual.

I don’t have the numbers, so I’ll use assumptions based on what’s reported. I’ll assume 5,000 adult men volunteering for the study, with 2,500 in each group. So, of 2,500 voluntarily circumcised adult males, 2,460 are happy with the results. That leaves 40 men who are not satisfied. For those 40 men, they can claim “oops” and have that suffice. If the study’s findings hold for infant circumcision, which I doubt on a one-to-one comparison, “oops” is not sufficient to justify the implied harm done to those 40 males circumcised as infants at the decree of their parents.

Only people who offer a different option are lobbyists.

When I’ve looked at our candidates for president, I find little to be happy about. The only candidate I can moderately stand is Sen. Obama, and I’ve already discussed more than enough issues (no means yes, school “reform”, economic illiteracy, and catering to special interests) with his candidacy to demonstrate that I will not vote for him. That said, I suspect he’s the least bad choice out there. That should not be construed as anything as complimentary as back-handed praise. A vote for Sen. Obama is a vote for little more than more of the same, but with a smiley stamped on the decree.

As we approach the real beginning of the election process in Iowa, it’s important to focus on the lack of change offered in promises of change. Sen. Obama spoke in Iowa yesterday. (Text via Andrew Sullivan) A few highlights:

At this defining moment, we cannot wait any longer for universal health care. We cannot wait to fix our schools. We cannot wait for good jobs, and living wages, and pensions we can count on. We cannot wait to halt global warming, and we cannot wait to end this war in Iraq.
…

Most of all, I believed in the power of the American people to be the real agents of change in this country – because we are not as divided as our politics suggests; because we are a decent, generous people willing to work hard and sacrifice for future generations; and I was certain that if we could just mobilize our voices to challenge the special interests that dominate Washington and challenge ourselves to reach for something better, there was no problem we couldn’t solve – no destiny we couldn’t fulfill.

We know the solution, right? It’s the one we allegedly haven’t tried yet. It involves hope, even though Bill Clinton ran on that in 1992. Hope expressed through government. For example:

I’ve heard from seniors who were betrayed by CEOs who dumped their pensions while pocketing bonuses, and from those who still can’t afford their prescriptions because Congress refused to negotiate with the drug companies for the cheapest available price.

Please provide examples of the former rather than the same “corporations are evil” rhetoric. Please explain to me how the drug companies would not be a special interest in “negotiations” with Congress. And where in the Constitution does it say that the government is responsible for either of these?

Just two weeks ago, I heard a young woman in Cedar Rapids who told me she only gets three hours of sleep because she works the night shift after a full day of college and still can’t afford health care for a sister with cerebral palsy. She spoke not with self-pity but with determination, and wonders why the government isn’t doing more to help her afford the education that will allow her to live out her dreams.

No one is owed a college education, period, but especially when individual life steps in the way. I sympathize with this woman’s plight and admire her willingness to push through to achieve everything she values. But it is not my responsibility to pay for that. If she can’t afford college and caring for her sister through work, the solution is to drop out of college right now if paying for that interferes with paying for what she must pay for or deems more worthy of receiving her personal financing. Yet, Sen. Obama pushes more government intervention in education, as if the existence of grants and federally-subsidized loans don’t exist, or that they’re not already increasing the cost of education. How is a group of individuals like this woman not a special interest if it leads to more government intervention for a preferred-by-some outcome?

You know that we can’t afford to allow the insurance lobbyists to kill health care reform one more time, …

Who might prevail, then, if not a universal health care lobbyist? Sen. Obama is not against lobbyists if they advocate his government solution. If you want change, run on removing the perverse incentive that ties insurance to employment without creating a perverse incentive that ties insurance to citizenship. One size does not fit all, of course, and being practical, shifting the cost from the individual in some form is never a good idea.

…and the oil lobbyists to keep us addicted to fossil fuels because no one stood up and took their power away when they had the chance.

This is immature and the type of soundbite nonsense that proves Sen. Obama is a politician first. Anyway, who is the lobbyist “keeping us addicted” to <insert government program/subsidy> and why are we not standing up to them, too?

But that’s not what hope is. Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task before us or the roadblocks that stand in our path. Yes, the lobbyists will fight us. Yes, the Republican attack dogs will go after us in the general election. Yes, the problems of poverty and climate change and failing schools will resist easy repair. I know – I’ve been on the streets, I’ve been in the courts. I’ve watched legislation die because the powerful held sway and good intentions weren’t fortified by political will, and I’ve watched a nation get mislead into war because no one had the judgment or the courage to ask the hard questions before we sent our troops to fight.

Why no mention of Democrats standing in the way? Beyond that, how exactly does Sen. Obama expect to achieve that change in Congress while sitting in the White House? The only tool at his disposal to achieve what he is promising is the veto. Yet, he ignores that and pretends as though he can make all of this magically appear. Can he not grasp that government involvement always leads to special interests, favored and non-favored? He’s engaged in enough of it in this speech to convince me that he grasps the concept quite well. He’s not selling change, only his chosen winners and losers. And we know who “wins”. The same person who always win in this collectivist idiocy.

If you believe, then we can stop making promises to America’s workers and start delivering – jobs that pay, health care that’s affordable, pensions you can count on, and a tax cut for working Americans instead of the companies who send their jobs overseas.

I am part of America, too. I do not want promises. I do not want the government to “deliver” me a job, health care, pensions, targeted tax cuts, or any other illegitimate present. That is the current way of doing things. Wrapping them in bromides is not change.

I’m still not voting for Sen. Obama.

The clowns are piling into their car in preparation.

Who said this?

“If players believe they are wrongfully accused in the report,” [he] told the paper, “they are welcome to volunteer and we’ll take it under consideration. But as I understand it, all these players had a chance to cooperate [with Mitchell], and everyone declined to cooperate.

“So, to an extent, that’s what they get.”

That would be Congressman Tom Davis, who I believe was sworn to uphold the Constitution when he entered office. Allow me to unpack his assumption of what is acceptable:

  • Absence of a trial by jury.
  • Absence of a trial.
  • Absence of an indictment.
  • Absence of criminal charges.
  • Absence of Fifth Amendment rights.

I’m reminded today of all the reasons I despise being represented by a moronic, meddling malcontent.

Top Ethical Breakthrough, circa 1776: Individual Liberty

Time announced its year-end list. While everyone else is in freak-out mode about Putin being named “Man of the Year,” I’ll be in my corner noticing the perpetuation of the same silly myths through omission and a refusal to question. The top “medical breakthrough” of the year:

Circumcision Can Prevent HIV

In December 2006, the National Institutes of Health halted two clinical trials of male circumcision after an early review of the data showed that the procedure dramatically reduced transmission of HIV. Early this year, the details of those studies were published in the Lancet: In the two randomized trials, which included 7,780 HIV-negative men in Rakai, Uganda, and Kisumu, Kenya, researchers found that medically circumcised men were at least 51% less likely than uncircumcised [sic] men to acquire HIV during sex with women. The editors of the Lancet called the discovery “a new era for HIV prevention.” Scientists don’t know yet whether male circumcision can also provide protection for female partners — a new study on the hypothesis is forthcoming next year.

Aside from the general [sic] surrounding “prevention” in the title of its story, Time’s joined the mass blindness and ignored the two key words in the study, voluntary and adult. The glaring ethical problem created from the ommission of those two words means nothing, apparently. Of course, neither does the truth that researchers do not know the specific cause of this alleged benefit for men who engage in unprotected sex with HIV+ women, so I’m not going to fake surprise at this reporting.

Time’s reporting also ignores the potentially greater benefit provided by safe-sex education and the inherent fallacy in looking at data from a 21-month period in which the circumcised men were asked to refrain from sex for 6 weeks after the surgery and the latency period for the disease is up to 6 months. What’s 7.5 months over the long stretch of 21 months?

Please note that Time ranks this revelation ahead of such breakthroughs as a Test for Metastatic Breast Cancer, First Human Vaccine Against Bird Flu, and Early-Stage Test for Lung Cancer.

**********

In related news, Time named this the top scientific breakthrough of the year. Now is a great time to mention how this improves the ethical debate. Instead of using human embryos, molecular biologist James Thomson figured out a way to create stem cells from “regular skin cells”. From Science Magazine (pdf):

Instead of cells from adults, Thomson and his team reprogrammed cells from fetal skin and from the foreskin of a newborn boy.

It’s a good thing we’ve resolved all the ethical issues in the stem cell debate, because taking the healthy skin of a living infant male is much better than taking cells from an embryo that will never be a living human. (Listen to an NPR interview on this story, with mention of Thomson’s use of an infant’s foreskin, here.)

Be scared to scar your baby boy.

Bernadine Healy M.D. writes an ethics-free, logic-free essay in the latest U.S. News & World Report on male circumcision. She mostly offers the recycled nonsense promoted by people uninterested in thinking the issue through. However, Dr. Healy searches for a new bottom in the discussion. She comes as close to stating it as anyone I’ve read:

I caution parents, however, against delaying the decision until the child is old enough to decide for himself. Get real. Not many teenage boys would relish the discussion, let alone the act. Nor do I think they would have the perspective to weigh the medical pros and cons.

So, because he would not relish the discussion or the act, it’s better to force it on him as an infant? As if his presumed refusal as a teenager is not a timeless opinion, as true when he’s 13 hours old as it is when he’s 13 years old. And how unfairly low does your opinion of teens have to be to guess that he wouldn’t have the perspective to understand that his foreskin is healthy and doesn’t require surgical removal? How unfairly high is your opinion of parents if you trust that they’re worried more about his (absurdly low) risk of HIV than the risk that daddy junior will freak when he sees that junior daddy looks different?

In a time when it is appropriate to question the use or overuse of certain medical procedures, however minor they might seem, having these discussions in medical journals and in public circles is healthy.

Just don’t have them with your kid when it’s his genitals at stake. He might not understand. He might even say “no”. Otherwise, yeah, let’s discuss this.

What is not healthy in this free flow of ideas is to diminish the real abuse of female genital mutilation with a trumped-up portrayal of the “abuse” that infant circumcision allegedly exacts on our helpless baby boys.

This is the obtuse thinking of a dullard. For (not) the last time, comparing male and female genital cutting does not diminish what is done to girls. That is evil. It is unnecessary. It should not occur. It is a basic violation of the right to remain free from harm.

But the exact same thing is perpetrated upon boys. That is evil. It is unnecessary. It should not occur. It is a basic violation of the right to remain free from harm.

There is nothing complicated about understanding this. The mutilation of boys rises to the level of unacceptability of what is done to girls. No one is saying that the comparison now justifies cutting girls. Stop hearing what you want to hear and listen to what is being said. Medically unnecessary genital cutting on non-consenting individuals is wrong, ethically and morally. Gender is not a factor in the violation.

Their agitation is morally unacceptable.

Religious prudishness is not surprising. It’s nice, though, when it’s advocates do not pretend that they demand laws based on rights. Regarding Alabama’s current ban (and current efforts to repeal the ban) on the sale of sex toys in the state:

Dan Ireland, executive director of the Alabama Citizens’ Action Program, a Baptist group, said it would oppose any effort to overturn the law.

“Laws are made to protect the public,” he said. “Sometimes you have to protect the public against themselves.”
…

“Sexual matters are not to become a nuisance to people and the community,” he said. “We have enough problems with sexual-oriented crimes without enticing or promoting it.”

Sometimes I forget, sex is for procreation only. If it’s engaged in with intention to not procreate – or if it’s enjoyed, even during procreation – we’re just enticing the devil to rape America.

I don’t care how sexually repressed an individual chooses to be. But his personal religious beliefs do not deserve any credible reverence in American government. Any branch of government that respects this perverts liberty in favor of mob rule.

From The Bitch Girls, via Hit & Run.

Sloppy Burial of Relevant News

How much media play will this news get in the United States?

Circumcision may reduce a man’s risk of infection with the AIDS virus by up to 60 percent if he is an African, but it does not appear to help American men of color, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Black and Latino men were just as likely to become infected with the AIDS virus whether they were circumcised or not, Greg Millett of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.

“We also found no protective benefit for a subset of black MSM (men who have sex with men) who also had recent sex with female partners,” Millett told reporters in a telephone briefing.

Looking at the link, note that it appears filed in the “Africa” category. It’s filed from Washington, D.C., discusses the absence of protection black and latino men receive from circumcision, but it’s miraculously pushed to another country’s news. Why, if not to bury the article from U.S. readers?

Also, the article, in its opening phrase, uses the same lazy assumptions for Africans that nearly every previous story has spread. Nowhere does it mention that voluntary, adult circumcision may reduce a man’s risk of female-to-male transmission. It’s only important that readers be reminded that circumcision is now officially awesome.

The nonsense continues:

Doctors believe circumcision protects men because of specialized cells in the foreskin of the penis, which is removed in the procedure. The foreskin is filled with immune cells called Langerhans cells, which are the immune system’s sentinels and attach easily to viruses — including HIV.

In addition, sexual intercourse may cause tiny tears in the foreskin, allowing the virus into the bloodstream.

Aside from the incoherent mess of the first paragraph, note that doctors “believe” this is why circumcision appears to work. While I find such speculation absurd, speculating relies on ignoring the possibility that long-term results will not match the short-term results if behavior does not also change. And if behavior changes, circumcision becomes less important.

Nonsense like this complicates the ability to demonstrate the need to change behavior:

The data has been so clear that the World Health Organization now recommends circumcision as one of the ways to prevent HIV infection. But circumcision does not protect men 100 percent — the studies in Africa have suggested it is 50 to 60 percent protective.

This is an ignorant simplification of the data. From one of the three African studies commonly referenced, the trial included 1,393 adults voluntarily circumcised and 1,391 adults who remained intact. Within those two groups, 22 circumcised men contracted HIV in the study period, while 47 intact men contracted HIV. That’s a 1.6% infection rate for circumcised and 3.4% infection rate for intact. That means 69 new HIV cases resulted during the study among 2,784 men. That’s an absolute infection rate of just under 2.5%. That 50 to 60 percent figure is valid, but only in a context not being offered to readers of the news story. It’s not quite as egregious as this, but it makes such egregiousness more likely.

More importantly, that 2.5% infection rate in the study was significantly lower than the 6% infection rate in Kenya. Assuming that the presence of the study measured the actual population, with all extraneous factors controlled for apart from circumcision, the intact men should’ve seen an infection rate of 6%. They didn’t. What was different in the study for the participants that wasn’t as common among the general population of Kenya? I’d theorize the presence of safe sex education in the study helped, but the basic point is that something else was even more helpful than circumcision.

Bottom line: this news article isn’t reporting. It’s one nugget of common sense wrapped in a lazy regurgitation of propaganda.

**********

In its own reporting, the Washington Post can only offer this incredulous reporting, in a larger story about HIV-positive gay men and unsafe sex:

And, in a finding that puzzled experts, another study showed that circumcision — long thought to reduce HIV infectivity — doesnothelp [sic] shield black or Latino men from the virus.

The Reuters story above reports the startling theory that the higher infection rate of HIV among black and Latino men in the U.S. exposes them to more risk, as a group. Since we’re theorizing, might the lower prevalence of HIV in other groups in the U.S. imply that there’s less HIV to be protected from through circumcision? I would call my theory a halfothesis because there’s more complexity than dividing by race, but the basic point is worth considering. The U.S. HIV epidemic does not mirror the epidemic in Africa. Why are we speculating with the bodies of males (children, particularly) based on incorrect assumptions and cultural comparisons of the United States and Africa? We should not be puzzled when the theory fails to transfer to our society.

(Not Really) Newsflash: UNAIDS lies.

This story should make me angry. I suppose it does, but I’m so numbed to the incredible pile of garbage people distribute in defense of their agenda that I have a harder time bringing forth an outburst than I’d like.

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

Good intentions are enough, remember. There is no need to worry about effectiveness, even in the reality of limited resources. There’s certainly no need to worry about uncomfortable details. If the method promotes what is good, it is worthwhile. Or so goes the logic of UNAIDS and the United Nations.

Of course HIV is terrible. Yes, we should work to promote effective strategies. But the desire to do good does not justify misrepresentation. We have to have this conversation? This doesn’t discredit, or at least render questionable, everything else the organization claims?

Remember this the next time someone from UNAIDS or the United Nations advocates male circumcision. It can’t even get the ethics of properly representing the problem correct. Who should trust them to get the ethics of genital cutting correct?

Just as frustrating, despite the clear indication that some renewed questioning is justified, the media is comfortable repeating the preferred story line:

Rates are lower in East Africa and much lower in West Africa. Researchers say that the prevalence of circumcision, which slows the spread of HIV, and regional variations in sexual behavior are the biggest factors determining the severity of the AIDS epidemic in different countries and even within countries.

The studies looked at voluntary, adult circumcision. That’s more accurate than a blanket statement about male circumcision. Isn’t the point of this report that details matter? Why ignore the most important scientific and ethical aspect of the recent studies in reporting them? (Unfortunately that’s rhetorical because I know the answer is about cognitive dissonance.)

To the point, researchers said that nearly 40 million people are infected with HIV. That’s not true. But we should believe them about circumcision without clarification on correlation and causation? Why? Statistics from the countries involved in the reporter’s claim are messier than advertised. (See here.) Also, it’s reasonable to assert that education had a far more effective benefit for all study participants than voluntary, adult circumcision had. (See here.)

Still, it’s supposed to be okay to take everything – lumped together without questioning – and trust that something will work if we try them all. I don’t particularly care about anyone pursuing that intellectually lazy path. People should have the right to make stupid decisions about their lives. But I demand that we follow all parameters involved when we make decisions for another. Particularly, voluntary and adult must never be forgotten.