Need to change the thumbnail.

At first glance I see circumcision gone wrong.

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No, I'm basing it on the theory that farmers want to make money, and you don't do that by abusing the product.
Also, the theory that MOST farmers are in it because they love the animals, because there are WAY easier and more certain ways to make money than abusive ranching.
Of course, there are those freaks that want to abuse the animals, don't care about them, or are too dumb to know better, which is why I won't say 100%.

I would like to also point out that human circumcisions are done without anesthetic. Some level of pain infliction to prevent more pain and injury is acceptable....but by that be clear I'm not excusing the behavior in the video.

Damnit, I had written a long response addressing your points, but it got lost somehow and I can't be bothered typing it all out again.

Basically, your arguments are all either irrelevant or wrong.
Definition of monogamy? Widely accepted as one partner at a time, not one partner for life.
Romans / Greeks? Irrelevant, paranoid, and wrong. (They had good and bad stuff).
Circumcision? Irrelevant.
Polygamy is learned? I never said that.
Monogamy is inconvenient for "damn near everyone"? Patently false. Also irrelevant... what does the convenience or otherwise of monogamy have to do with anything?

Total misunderstanding....he planned on using it for a do it yourself circumcision, and was just checking it to be sure it fit in his pants.

I'm on the exact same page as @MilkmanDan

I very seriously doubt you'd have either one of these guys (Harris or Maher) using the term "shifty jew" ever, but they'd probably, without hesitation, be against the idea that during a circumcision the Mohel (jewish priest who pretty much is trained in the art of cutting and sucking baby penis) should put his dirty old man mouth on a freshly cut newborn cock.

I'm using some blunt terms here, but, again, I don't have any problems with jewish people, but I'm unashamed about criticism towards their religion's stupid ideas.

As someone who is against circumcision by default, let me just say:

If you chop off your sons foreskin for cosmetic, cultural or religious reasons, that's child abuse.

And if you do it with a freaky old man removing the skin with his mouth, well, that's just fucking weird....

but

if an adult male makes an informed decision to get circumcized, I have no problem with that.

if you can show a genuine harm reduction (i.e. lower chance of HIV) for infants, I can also get behind that. This is the point of science. When there is new evidence, you change your mind.

Without rehashing the circumcision debate all over again, that was an oddly one-sided clip with lots of refutable claims and information. Probably not what they want since their whole selling point is to be a trustworthy source of science-lite.

*controversy

Related:

- http://videosift.com/video/The-REAL-Reason-Youre-Circumcised
- http://videosift.com/video/US-Government-Promotes-Circumcision-to-Prevent-AIDS
- http://videosift.com/video/Have-It-Chopped-Off-Or-Wash-It-Tough-Choice
- http://videosift.com/video/Penn-and-Teller-Bullshit-Circumcision

Circumcision of a person without consent and without immediate medical reason should be made illegal. It's unbelievable in this day and age that it occurs and is seemed as normal, and yet people scream foul play over female circumcision.

Barbaric practice, needs to go. We don't accept unnecessary female circumcision, there is no reason to accept male. It offers significant drawbacks and no benefits to a healthy baby born into a western civilised country.

If you're likely to live and have sex with members of a population in which HIV is rife, i could see it being used to save a couple of lives out of every few hundred thousand. However if you live in a country where HIV is uncommon, circumcision is not any kind of protection - the child is not going to grow up using circumcision as a defence against STDs especially when trivial solutions exist that provide 99.999% protection. So you've taken away a wealth of nerve endings in the skin and furthermore deadened the sensitivity of the tip by exposing it to 'rough' surfaces, but there's no benefit.

That "prevention" method (above) only works in the same way as pre-emptive breast removal works. You'd only recommend it to those massively at risk.

Barbaric definitely is the word. And archaic. And the words "improper use of statistics and research to come to a poor conclusion". A bit like the fallacy of autism/immunisation that people bang on about to this very day despite it being bollocks of the highest order. Christ, even if it were true (which it categorically isn't), i'd rather my kid have ASD than die from polio or any of the other countless diseases that literally killed millions before being eradicated through immunisation.

As I recall the study that said circumcision reduces HIV was horribly flawed - the group that was circumcised was told to abstain from sex during healing and if not then to use a condom and taught in their use, while the uncircumcised group were just left to their own sexy devices.

Ultimately though this isn't a debate about science, I've been in multiple debates about it on the internet and it's always circumcised people saying it's good and uncircumcised people saying it's bad. Sure, there's occasionally lumps of science in the mud being hurled back and forth, but mostly it's just mud.

I agree we should not let "it isn't natural" be a counter argument, that is after all the same argument anti-vaxxers use.

"No harm" is where I doubt the report you link (though I guess you do not actually mean NO harm). I see a lot of cited reviews in the Mayo report on the negatives of not being circumcised and very few on the negatives of being circumcised which leads me to suspect bias, or that less research has been done there. There are also pretty big flaws in some of the reviews I had access to (for example one of the randomised studies on sexual dysfunction that is cited by a review are entirely based on self-report [and some results were puzzling and not explained] and only over a few years - this still proves nothing when it is done to infants though I doubt it has large effects on sexuality if any). Unfortunately I can't access most articles due to being at home.

Of course my scepticism could very well be a cultural prejudice to it being "wrong" and me searching for minor flaws in their argument.

Don't misconstrue (or misunderstand) my words.

I said it's ignorant to just blindly state everyone who circumcises is barbaric and misinformed and that otherwise everyone is only possibly motivated by religious or aesthetic reasons.

The bottom line is we were not sure about doing it one way or the other, but we decided to give our boys what we know is the best chance against contracting HIV (heterosexually) among other things.

Finns probably have a lot less disease to worry about spreading around.

Yes, like everything in life, there may be valid reasons that could convince anyone to do it or to not do it. In my case, we made an informed decision that the foreskin isn't necessary and the only real consequences of it removed would be beneficial. Others don't feel that way, and that's fine. I'm not going to shove my opinion down everyone else's throat or call them names for disagreeing.

It would be nice to be afforded the same courtesy.

I've heard reports from several men who had sex before and after and said there was zero difference in sensation.

I circumcised my boys but not at all because of aesthetics, nor to "look like me", and especially not for any kind of religious reason.

We weren't dead-set against leaving them un-cut. In fact, we initially figured we'd just let them be natural.

One reason we decided to go ahead with it is we heard about lots of uncircumcised men have issues that require them to have it done later in life (e.g., phimosis, etc.), but the bigger reason was recent (at that time) studies showed strong evidence that circumcised men are at substantially lower risk for serious life-threatening diseases such as HIV and penile cancer (that results from HPV).

>> Yep, it's fucking barbaric. It is genital mutilation of children, period.

Talk about misinformation from a bunch of barbarians.

It's more barbaric to be completely close-minded, backward-thinking, and ignorant as to why there might possibly exist valid reasons to provide your children an almost 100% chance to avoid a plethora of penis-related problems and life-threatening diseases for their entire life in exchange for what's really a very minor procedure when done soon after birth.

The reasons against it? "It's fucking barbaric." Because... why again? "It just is," I'm sure is the best possible response.

The reasons in favor of it? Don't be so glib. Read the research.

Science Daily from Jan 2010:

Other epidemiological studies have shown that male circumcision is associated with significant reductions in HIV acquisition in men.

The strongest evidence for a cause-and-effect relationship between circumcision and HIV risk reduction came from three randomized-control trials in sub-Saharan Africa, where the circumcision rate is relatively low and the HIV infection rate is relatively high. All three demonstrated a more than 40 percent reduction in HIV acquisition among circumcised men.

The largest of these three studies -- in Rakai, Uganda -- was led by Dr. Ronald H. Gray, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins and the scientific paper's senior author. Dr. Gray's group collected penile swabs from all of the circumcision trial study participants, which provided the data for the new TGen-Johns Hopkins study.

The new study found that circumcision -- the removal of the foreskin, or prepuce, from the penis -- eliminates an area of mucous membrane and dramatically changes the penile bacterial ecosystem. Significantly, TGen's analysis of more than 40 types of bacteria, using a 16S rRNA gene-based pyrosequencing approach, suggests that the introduction of more oxygen following circumcision decreases the presence of anaerobic (non-oxygen) bacteria and increases the amount of aerobic (oxygen-required) bacteria.

HPV can also cause cancer of the penis in men. HPV infection is found in about half of all penile cancers. It’s more common in men with HIV and those who have sex with other men.

There is no approved screening test to find early signs of penile cancer. Because almost all penile cancers start under the foreskin of the penis, they may be noticed early in the course of the disease.

...

The 2 main risk factors for genital HPV infection in men are having many sex partners and not being circumcised.

The risk of being infected with HPV is strongly linked to having many sex partners.

Men who are circumcised (have had the foreskin of the penis removed) have a lower chance of getting and staying infected with HPV. Men who have not been circumcised are more likely to be infected with HPV and pass it on to their partners.