Human rights, cultural diversity, and moral relativity

before you make judgements about the destruction of cultural diversity, you really must judge whether it really is diversity or inherent harm. before you judge that, i strongly suggest you educate yourself by reading people who lived this.The Hidden Face of Evethere are, of course, plenty of other books. but really, look into the prevalence and voice of feminist movements within the culture. it's not an imposition if these women are crying out for protection.

well, that brings out the question of whether men and women have distinct cultures, which they might, as many of the cultures which practice fgm have segregated societies. in which case, it is not an imposition on the men, because it's effects on their culture may be negligible. Edited by brennakimi, : No reason given.

ooh yay for them. they've made a coming of age ritual out of creating an open, oozing, infected sore in their bodies. we should take care to make sure that we don't impose our culture of antibiotics and health on them! you're insane. if you don't have the time to educate yourself, then you don't have the time to spout off your insanity. if you refuse to be informed, stop throwing your ignorance at the world. i really don't think you understand what goes on here. we're not talking about a simple clitoridectomy. we're tlking about slicing off the entire external apparatus, clitoris, labia majora, labia minora, and all right about marrying age and then marrying her off. they sew the vagina closed so it's nice and tight for every time her new husband fucks her. it rips open every time and they sew it back up. because of the lack of cleanliness, it gets infected and doesn't clear up. it can't heal because it's infected... you know. if she wasn't having it ripped right back open whenever her husband needs his cock rubbed. then, she has a kid, which ripps her open agin, and they sew her up again so her husband can enjoy her tight little pussy. and if you think i'm exaggerating, you have no idea. i'm really, honestly holding back.i don't care how many women are so damaged that they actually have embraced this horrid experience. i don't care. it's not culture. it's hellish torture.despite what you may think, and what people here would like you to believe, feminism is anything but a monolithic movement. it's not a western thing. it's certainly not only a western thing.

ah, lip disks and neck rings. another example of how women's bodies are mutilated to please their men. disgusting.

oh, what happened to ? you understand wrongly. women with lip disks often suffer from broken lips. they also have a great deal of problems doing ordinary things with their disks in once they get up to a certain size. sure, it's just an exaggeration of ordinary piercing, but i wonder if they have any individual choice in the matter.further, women with neck rings cannot support their heads if they remove the rings. i think that's a pretty severe problem. and? i have two lobe piercings, two cartilage piercings, and a nose piercing. i have no issue with personally selected body modification. i certainly wonder if the more exaggerated examples might be symptomatic of some psychological issues, ie pain-seeking behavior. sure, maybe it's merely aesthetics, but sometimes it must be at least just curiosity of what the body can take, if not potentially something more serious. now, not everyone with a full-body tattoo is a whacko, but i know some people whose tattoos are symptomatic of their issues and it's patently obvious with the nature of some of the artwork. sure, sure anecdote isn't worth anything on here, but i don't have time to fight the nutballs here about "evidence". these people have diagnosed psychological maladies and have told me specifically that the tattoos are a product of the maladies. i'm willing to bet they aren't alone in the universe.but the biggest issue is that these women don't choose these behaviors. oh maybe they want it because it will help them get a husband or whatever, but cultural coercion is not choice.

it may not amount to sexism, but that won't magically prevent it from being oppression. who said anything about coercion? many of the people who participate in fgm do so under erroneous religious understandings which have been discounted by the religious authorities. their own societies are working to correct the problem, just not very well. it's like the question of family planning versus population control. there is a huge unmet need for family planning and reproductive health services in the world. however, this has been used to defend coercive population control programs. but. providing the necessary health services doesn't require coercive programs. proper education is not coercive. demonstrating that a given practice is harmful is not coercion. showing genocide deniers that they're wrong is not a coercive attack on their culture. it's not evil to demonstrate reality and truth to people. this is really the heart of the issue.everything i know comes from the understanding of the universality of individual liberty. is it possible that this isn't the end-all be-all of humanity? yes. liberalism doesn't even account for all modern views of industrialized society. but. i'm quite convinced that even a social contract that doesn't protect the individual rights of all isn't a legitimate form of social government. i'm horribly limited by my paradigm. but if this is limitation, i'll take it.that said. if we go around wondering if anything can be objectively analyzed, we won't really accomplish much. because the answer is no. nothing can be objectively known. everything is subject to perception and perception is inherently biased. even real mathematicians will tell you that everything in that universe depends on the assumptions and corollaries that have been determined. we think that somewhere there must be objectivity, but there really isn't.

my argument is that informing people doesn't require coercion... that you don't have to be coercive to change cultures, and that to change culture to defend welfare isn't damaging and won't inherently destroy the whole of that culture. fgm doesn't define tribal african and arab culture. and i don't really see where national sovereignty comes into play here. and that is the basic understanding of social contract theory. you do have a point that liberalism (the theory of individualism) is a socio-economic theory, but it is not one that developed on it's own. it was a recognition of a process of liberalization which began even before it's first codification in the Magna Carta. liberalism developed as a result of evolving sensibilities and evolving social contracts. of course, social contract theory has it's own weaknesses. (do you really thing that tyrants have a social contract with their oppressed masses?) i really dislike this use of the idea of mgm. male circumcision, while not the greatest idea in the world, does not amount to a comparable practice. using this term is dishonest. i'm also very disturbed by the way people treat raising children. i have a great desire to homeschool my children. i want to make sure they're exposed to reality and scientific truth. i want to make sure they can be competent academically, and i'm not convinced that any school can provide that. i think most school is a waste of at least 8 years. also, i'm unconvinced of the value of "socialization". i'm quite sure that school was far more damaging to my ability to relate to others than any other singular experience in my life. everyone i express this desire to looks at me like i've grown several extra body parts in funny places. i'm sure someone will demand i be put away for it. likewise, there are plenty of people (my fiance included) who claim that raising children in a religion is child abuse. i think that's insane. religion is one thing. no matter what people on here will tell you, fanaticism is entirely disparate. and this is another point of social contract theory. a society determines the contract as a whole. if you choose to break contract, you will be forced to live outside it. there is some limitation in this theoretical construct of how much an individual can control his surroundings... it suffers from some degree of determinism. i think it's one of the greatest things we can do as a great power... to support education. i wrote a paper last fall about population control and the research demonstrated that the number one way to encourage birth limiting is to encourage policies which promote gender equality and sufficient education. as it is, our population control programs --on which, among other things, much world bank funding often depends-- tend to rely on incentive and disincentive programs based on immediate financial rewards which amount to coercion in many of the impoverished societies they're instituted in, and promote more permanent methods, ignoring cultural practices, reduced agency of women in matters of reproduction and family government, and often not providing long-term medical care for the individuals who accept the treatments... including notification of and care for side affects of the treatments. the problems of cultural intervention is when the programs involved are just as detrimental as the current cultural institutions. it would appear that i actually have managed to learn something in school. also, i'd recommend you look into the used book section at amazon. that's where i get all my books. i have another one for you, if you're interested in population control issues. reproductive rights and wrongs look, they have it for a penny (plus probably $4 in shipping).

i really would suggest that you're far to interested in confusing nationhood and culture.i also think that you're too concerned with the idea that removing damaging parts of cultures will create a hideous global monoculture. tell me. when we stopped pressing witches, did we lose our cultural identity?

it's also been about 2 or 300 years. culture isn't and has never been constant. i doubt the only thing that's changed is that they stopped pressing witches. i think they lost their cultural identity when it was tortured out of them. did the jews lose their culture when they stopped sacrificing animals? Edited by brennakimi, : No reason given.

i've heard a lot of things about circumcision. this i have not heard. did i say that? i said snipping off a little tiny bit of flesh doesn't equate to excising large amounts of tissue and creating a permanent, infected wound. don't put words in my mouth, jerk.

i didn't say that.if circumcision is done properly, it's a tony little bit of flesh. if it is done improperly, that's an entirely different matter. if fgm is done properly, it's a lot of flesh and a permanent infection, if not death.if heart surgery is done improperly it means death. great. wooo. you're not arguing rationally.

i've seen way too many circumcised adult penises for any of these people to have been "flayed". hell. there are way too many jewish men for this to be an accurate representation of reality. you've failed to show me any proof of this massive genocide of little baby boys, and, as such, i'm going to continue to think you're just angry about your penis. however, loads of data has been presented here about the very real impacts of fgm.i'm not sexist. you're insane.

where? i never said they weren't just as real. i said they didn't warrant wording which suggests equivalence. if the suffering isn't equivalent, the wording shouldn't be either. men get circumcised in very few places, relatively. in the us, some 85% are circumcised. in europe, it's quite low. it's also high in the middle east and africa, and among muslims in asia, oh and south korea, thanks to us. that's about it. (i'd imagine australia is low, except among immigrants of various faiths). that leave gigantic chunks of high populations without it and fairly good reason to cite us experience. if it causes no serious harm, there's no real reason to oppose it. if it's merely a cosmetic procedure, then the only issue is consent, which is how i see the male circumcision issue. this is no less a valid plaint, but it's certainly not the creation of a fistula.in such cultures that participate in these practices by tradition and not by force at a legitimate age of consent, i see little issue. yes, coercion is a problem, but, for the most part, these individuals -if forced out of the group- will not risk death by exposure. the world is small enough now. but when these practices are done by force to people to young to consent, we have a significant issue. even worse when they cause life or health threatening problems.

it wasn't. you're just feeling threatened by the impending doom of the knife it's not that men survive the procedure. that's not my claim. your claim is that this causes a fatal injury. it clearly does not. my complaint is that fgm always creates an unhealable wound. circumcision does not. i'm not. no one will show them to me. you keep making vague claims about mass genocide and i keep asking you to demonstrate it. you refuse. hence, i must assume you're lying. using the same word to describe inequivalent things is unnecessarily confusing to the public. that's why we have a separate term for crimes against humanity and genocide. one requires a specific intent to destroy in whole or in part. lethal injection is barbaric. it is less barbaric than hanging. hanging, in turn, is less barbaric than boating. see this magical thing we have the capability to express? degree. it's amazing.see. the problem here is that you think i'm all warm and squishy about circumcision. i'm not. it's certain inescusable to do to someone by force before an age of consent. i just take issue with the equivalency of the term. learn to keep up. it saves me a lot of work.

oh, i see. well. considering no one has an estimate of how many men are circumcised, those numbers mean nothing. but, even without that, those numbers amount to very rare issues all dealing with improperly performed procedures. it would seem that rhain would have us believe that every other boy circumcised is killed because it's such an inherently heinous procedure. do you notice that they are divided into separate terms? or did you think those numbers were decoration. no. relative to the world population centers and to rhain's vague references to worldwide genocides. there's only one negative effect when the procedure is performed properly, and that is a slightly reduced degree of sensitivity at the tip of the penis. they certainly have lasting effects, but they are still cosmetic procedures. it's not deep tissue surgery we're talking about. now. if you're going to argue that "proper" circumcisions can be performed on newborn babies with trauma to fresh mucosa tissue, i'll say you haven't been paying attention. cosmetic procedures can almost never be "properly" executed on a non-consenting individual. but. even some very deep surgeries are cosmetic and can be quite life-threatening, especially with even some minor mistakes, so i don't see why you're so offended by the use of the word.but let's be realistic. done properly, the flesh is cut, not torn. the area is sanitized. sharp tools are used, along with proper anesthesia. see? this is why they can't possibly be properly done to infants... people won't anesthetize infants.