It's geopolitical and theological

Muslims in Egypt riot and burn and kill because somebody insulted their prophet, and a lot of people have very strong opinions as to just why they do this. Is it because of poisonous and violent teachings in Islamic theology? Or is it because of geopolitical circumstances, that put people in desperate situations with no effective rule of law?

Well, it's both, obviously. Those who want to reduce it to nothing more than geopolitics need to ask themselves what exactly these people would be rioting about if their holy book wasn't giving them an excuse. (And if the answer is that instead they'd riot against their ineffective governments and the negative influence of Western economic interests in the region, good for them!) And those who want to reduce it to nothing more than the negative influence of Islam need to ask themselves what was so different about the medieval period/Islamic Golden Age, when the successful countries were all Muslims and the angry witch-burning riot-prone idiots were represented by Christendom.

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Sorry, but AVG Secure Search is malware (Update: but maybe won't be in the next version)

Discovered AVG Secure Search today when I installed the trial version of WinZip on a laptop that I only intend to use temporarily. There seems to be some controversy over whether AVG Secure Search actually qualifies as "malware". I understand why some think it's not: AVG appears to be a legitimate company, the software does not seem to be harmful (and may even be beneficial for users who want it), and although I have not verified this myself, I am told that it's all there in the EULA/fine print/options of the software you are installing.

But here's why this little shit of a browser extension is malware anyway: It conceals itself deep in the fine print, piggy-backing on other software (and software that I, for one, generally consider to be trustworthy, to boot! Or did, at least, until today), and -- and this is the most important part -- it deliberately makes itself difficult to uninstall.

It installed itself on Chrome in no less than three ways, each of which in and of itself would have been sufficient for Secure Search's functionality: As my default search engine, as the default page that loads when you open a new tab, and as a browser extension. That's just absurd! And if you don't believe there's a problem, just do a little Googling (maybe even using AVG Secure Search, eh?) to see just how many links there are saying "I tried everything to uninstall AVG Secure Search and it's still there! Help!"

I would argue that if AVG were trying to conduct business in good faith, on the search page that loads there would be an option to uninstall, and it would do all the clean-up for you. Failing that, having it as just the default search engine, or just an extension, or whatever, would at least be reasonable. The fact that I tried two different ways of uninstalling it with no results... well, that kinda makes it malware.

Side note: For uninstalling this little leech from Chrome, there are excellent instructions here. Actually, those instructions would probably apply to cleaning out any sort of bullshit lying douchebags from Chrome.

Update: Please see the comment below from Jon Meyer with AVG Customer Care. The company does seem to be taking these complaints seriously, and to their credit they are resisting the temptation to simply take the "If you didn't read the EULA, then fuck you, it's user error" approach. They say the next version will include an uninstall button. While I'm still not crazy about the stealth bundling with WinZip, it was the combination stealth-install/tricky-uninstall that for me crossed the threshold of "malware". If they follow through with the simple uninstall button, I retract the accusation.

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The big names behind Atheism+ need to publicly distance themselves from Richard Carrier's regrettable post

And that's about all I'm going to say. I'm not even going to bother to provide links, because if you are the type of person who is even vaguely interested in this sort of internal politics of atheism, you already know exactly what I am talking about.

I really, really like this Atheism+ idea. I think it's great. Yeah, it's a little like humanism, but it's also a bit different, and anyway, branding matters.

But Richard Carrier's post just left a terrible taste, and a lot of people who are on the fence about Atheism+ are mentioning it. I haven't heard a peep about Carrier's weird rant from Jen McCreight, Greta Christina, PZ, Stephanie, or any of the others.

They really should publicly acknowledge it and say something about it. I agree with what I think Richard was trying to say, but the way he said it was just nasty and unhelpful.

To me, part of the whole point of Atheism+ is to define the movement in such a way that the douchebags want no part of it. And then good riddance. So Richard's language suggesting some kind of explicit purge is as superfluous as it is unseemly. You don't have to kick anybody out (what would that even mean, anyway?), because if you make the movement about the right things, the people you don't want as allies will kick themselves out.

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The Harris solution to the Wisconsin shooting

A few months ago, Sam Harris wrote a very convincing essay in defense of profiling at airports. He sure has me convinced!

This is why, in the wake of the Oak Creek shooting, I would like to propose a novel solution: From now on, all white male Army veterans will be subject to a secondary search upon entering the boarding area of any airport. I can't imagine anybody will oppose this plan!

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Help me make sense of this bad movie

So I watched part of Transformers: Dark of the Moon yesterday. I didn't watch it all the way through yet, and it is obviously terrible... but maybe somebody can explain something to me, because it's such an obvious and terrible plot hole that I just can't get over it. Spoilers below, but uh, don't really worry; the movie is awful, i.e. it comes pre-spoiled. Its only redeeming qualities are the sound design (which is excellent, actually) and the special effects (which are good, if frenetic... very much in the style of the day, if you know what I mean).

So Sentinel Prime betrays the Autobots so that he can get the Pillars back and lead a Decepticon invasion of Earth, so now the Transformers will have a new place to live after Cybertron. Okay, so far so good. He's going to use a wormhole to transport a Decepticon army directly from their secret base into the mall at Washington, D.C. Good plan!

But where are the Decepticons hiding? On the moon. Okay, um, in real life, yeah, the moon is actually pretty far away, and a wormhole to the moon would be pretty useful. But earlier in the movie, the Autobots find out that the Ark is on the moon, and they're just like, "Okay, let's go check it out," and they hop in their ship and it's like taking a spin down the the 7/11 for them. I guess the Decepticons don't have that technology or something? I guess? It just seems... I dunno... inexplicable... The Decepticon army got all the way from Cybertron to the moon, but then they ran out of gas or something? Wouldn't the movie have made more sense if they were using the Pillars to transport the secret Decepticon army from some barren planet near Cybertron or something, i.e. somewhere that is ACTUALLY FAR AWAY for an interstellar spacefaring race?

This is not the only bizarre plot hole in this turd of a script... For instance, when they revive Sentinel Prime, they are in a secret base in Washington, DC, and the rest of the Autobots who brought him back to life are just hanging out with a bunch of human government types. So Sentinel Prime is all like, "oh hai, we iz frendz i gess but i dun taek orderz n stuf from meatbags, kthxbye" -- even though he's been in some kind of suspended animation since the conflict at Cybertron, i.e. before the Transformers even made contact with Earth. Shouldn't his reaction be more like, "GAH! What the fuck is up with these weird squishy d00dz?"

There also seem to be some plot points in the movie which, if I heard them right (admittedly I was kind of ignoring most of the dialog by that point) seemed to hinge on the so-called "dark side of the moon" being literally dark all the time, rather than simply facing away from Earth. Which, um, it's not. Not dark, I mean. You know how the moon has phases because there's always a different side of it facing the sun? That's because THERE'S ALWAYS A DIFFERENT SIDE OF IT FACING THE SUN, YOU IDIOT.

This is all not to mention that any part of the movie that involved humans interacting with each other was poorly written, poorly acted, very poorly directed... Really, they should have just called the movie "Robots Fighting with Cool Noises", kicked Shia LaBeouf in the nuts and made him sit out the rest of the movie, and just had it be a bunch of Transformers duking it out. It would have been much improved -- and the plot would have been more engaging and made more sense!

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FtB: The totalitarian hivemind that doesn't tolerate dissent... but is also tearing itself apart in an internal flamewar?

I hate to say it, but I agree with this commenter. The Harassment Wars over at FtB, well, that was a conversation that needed to happen, but it's getting really tedious at this point, and it is frankly starting to turn me off to FtB just a little bit. It's not really the actions of any particular individual (though I have to point out that a solid month before his involuntary departured, I pointed out that Greg Laden was the prime example of somebody who was on the right side but being a total dick about it), but rather, it's just that this admittedly necessary discussion is getting really, really tiresome.

Which makes it all the more funny when people post all kinds of nonsense about how FtB is a "totalitarian state", a "hivemind", does "not tolerate dissent". Yeah, um... if FtB was like that, it would be a lot more peaceful right now. Just sayin'...

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Scattered thoughts on circumcision

In the wake of a German court ruling that circumcision cannot be performed on a child who is too young to give consent, I thought I would share my thoughts on circumcision. This post will be broken down into sections to organize it a little, but I am not going to attempt to really weave it together into a coherent whole. Just some scattered thoughts.

My background

In the interest of full disclosure: I am circumcised. Both of my sons are not. Most (but not all) of my male peers are circumcised; most (but not all) of my friends with young sons have chosen not to circumcise. I'd like to think this is a generational thing, but while there is some data to support a shift, I think in my case it has more to do with selection bias, namely in the fact that a lot of my friends are into natural birth, attachment parenting, and related stuff.

The health effects

Well, there's a lot of conflicting data out there. My general read is that the risks and benefits seem to very nearly cancel each other out. Circumcision does seem to have some modest prophylactic effect against infection, some sexually transmitted diseases, possibly against a rare form of cancer, etc. Given the sociopolitical pressures to justify circumcision, I suspect this data might be exaggerated, but there does seem to be something to it.

This, of course, is weighed against the direct risk of complications from the procedure, which are rare but not unheard of. The upshot is that you are balancing a very small number against another very small number, and it is difficulty to say which is larger.

In any case, one thing we can be certain of is that the total effect on health is small, even if we don't know whether it is a net positive or net negative. With the possible exception of curbing transmission of HIV in areas experiencing an extreme epidemic, it does not seem that health effects alone are sufficient to indicate either for or against circumcision.

Update: I am glad I used the phrase "possible exception" in the above paragraph, as it has since come to my attention that there is good reason to doubt the claimed efficacy in terms of HIV transmission. The research that has been used to back this contention has some very serious problems (most egregiously, the circumcised groups received sexual health counseling that the control groups did not), and to further compound the matter, there are reports of circumcision being oversold to African men, even going so far as it being pitched as a "natural condom". Obviously it is a terrible HIV prevention policy if men are getting circumcised in lieu of using a condom!

The quality of life effects

This is something you don't hear a lot about outside of outspoken anti-circumcision circles. Part of that is because people tend to focus only on the health effects and cultural issues, but I think it's also partly because this is incredibly difficult to measure.

There are numerous anecdotes to suggest that circumcision has a negative effect on sexual pleasure, possibly for both partners. I employ my routine skepticism here, in that I generally am not willing to accept a conclusion based on anecdote alone, but the idea is at least plausible.

In short, there's not enough data here to really say much of anything... but the fact that this is at least a possibility ought to enter into the evaluation.

Consent

Here's where I agree, at least in principle, with the German court. It is possible based on what we've seen so far that there is a very small but real health benefit, and that there are no quality of life effects. My response: So?

It would seem that performing an invasive medical procedure that resulted in a rather drastic cosmetic change, without consent, for only a modest health benefit, violates the principle of primum non nocere. Even if there are no quality of life effects -- which is far from certain -- you're still performing a non-trivial body modification, and to do so without patient consent seems to be a cost that must be taken into account. And while that cost is not insurmountable, the modesty of any possible health benefit (if it even is a net benefit) does not seem to me to have any prayer of balancing it sufficiently.

In other words: In even the best possible scenario, the lack of consent argues against routine circumcision.

Culture, religion, and discrimination against an ethnic minority

This is where it begins to get a little tricky. Not so much in Israel or in Muslim countries, of course, but in countries where circumcision is a ritual practiced primarily by an ethnic minority. I don't really have much to say about it, other than that it's important to examine both others' as well as one's own motivations. It is undeniable that opposition to circumcision has, at sometimes in history, been used as a club to promote antisemitism and Islamophobia. And that's just not okay.

Harm reduction

So one can pretty easily tell from this that I don't think circumcision is a good idea. But what do I think about public policy? Do I agree with the German court? Should circumcision without consent be banned?

I'll give my answer in the final section, but first I want to point out that if circumcision were banned in the US tomorrow, it would put countless baby boys at risk. Why? Because there are thousands of Jews and Muslims who are simply not going to stop the practice, and if you make it illegal then they will find a way to have it done underground. The back alley abortion will be joined by the back alley bris. "I know a guy who knows a guy... I can vouch for you, but don't bring anything with you except the cash and the baby. These mohels will cut you!" (Bah-dump)

I joke, but this is deadly serious. If people are going to circumcise their infants, it's better that they get hospital care (or, if having a mohel do it in a home, at least know they can go to the hospital if necessary without fear of prosecution). This, of course, has to be weighed against all the people who presumably would not circumcise if it was not a legal option. But I have a partial remedy in mind for it...

Conclusion

So my wife and I choose not to circumcise, and I exhort others to make the same choice. But what do I think about public policy?

I would like to see it start with a very modest incremental step, which I think would drastically reduce the number of circumcisions taking place in the United States, while not creating any sort of undue burden on ethnic minorities nor creating any inadvertent dangers by way of driving the practice underground. It is simply this: Hospital staff should be legally barred from bringing up the topic of infant circumcision, unless there is a specific medical indication in favor of it. If a parent/guardian inquires about it, doctors and nurses are then free to discuss it without limitation, just as they are now.

It is impossible to quantify, but it seems highly likely to me that there are tremendous numbers of parents, in the US at least, who have their sons circumcised as a matter of course, not because they have strong feelings about it, but because they just assume that is what's done. They would presumably not seek it out if it were not offered, but if offered, they may simply check the "yes" box (figuratively speaking) without thinking about it. If we can only get these people to stop circumcising, that is a tremendous win, and could have a profound snowball effect against routine circumcision.

On the other hand, the most harm that can possibly result from such a policy would be that a family who was passionate about circumcising for cultural reasons might "forget" to ask about it, and would have to come back later. That would indeed be a nuisance, but it is a relatively minor one, and I imagine it would be relatively rare: most people who are passionate about it will simply ask their obstetrician at a prenatal appointment.

Many would argue that such a change would not go far enough. I don't necessarily disagree, but nevertheless I fear the specter of black market circumcisions, and in any case I think anything more drastic is simply a political non-starter right now. My suggestion would reduce routine circumcision dramatically, while enacting a tactical retreat in regards to religious tradition.

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