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Just my two cents, but GovDeals is probably the best clearinghouse. If you don’t have data from GovDeals it’s a non-starter.

> The current Japanese leader is also a war mongerer, so I'd bet they also threatened to enter the war on USA's side if their ships weren't allowed to pass.

The amount of misinformation foreign people have about Takaichi-san is staggering. She is by no means a "war mongerer" and the Japanese constitution has clear limits that prevent Japan from doing virtually anything. The reason why Japan can get a pass is because they specifically have diplomatic relations with Iran, and when she met with Trump, she promised absolutely nothing due to constitutional limits.


The most an average person in the west knows about Takaichi is that she "said" Japan would go to war with China for Taiwan. That's of course not true, but the person you're replying to also thinks Spain is on Iran's side. They are clearly misinformed or lying to fit their narrative.

Why would she promise anything to Trump? She just wants Iran to let them through, USA isn't blocking anyone here, USA isn't a part of that conversation.

why are you adding japanese honorifics when the rest of your post is in english?

In non-English texts it is not unusual to see English honorifics like Sir, Lord, Lady, Duke etc. or even Dr., Mr., Mrs.

Similarly, in English texts it is not unusual to see foreign honorifics besides the actual names.

It is quite frequent for someone who otherwise does not speak another language to address foreigners as they would be addressed in their own language in formal situations where politeness is expected, e.g. using Herr or Frau for a German, and so on, or using Takaichi-san or Takaichi-sama (more formal) instead of translating that to Mrs. Takaichi.

I think that when speaking about a prime minister, formal language is not inappropriate.

Trump is probably the most obvious chief of state whose name would look completely inappropriate in the context of using formal polite language, but this should have been an exception.


supplementing your points: Japanese seem to prefer dropping the honorifics when in English:

https://archive.ph/OI3S2

I've also heard that it's still common to address one's peers with -kun in parliament.

In GP's case it sounds rather quaint, but also endearing (like referring to a neighbor or a long lost schoolmate in the third person)

Pedantry: Takaichi is her father's surname. (I had to look that up, tbh)


It seems incredibly silly to me that this is being rushed into systemd and other linux components. I understand Apple making changes, and even Canonical, but systemd is not run by one corporation and there is no reason to adhere to a badly written law. Why play along with the charade? If root is root, the "age verification" field does not make any sense.

Why are these changes being made on a worldwide basis when the laws that have been introduced are a relatively small fraction of the world? California isn't going to go after individual systemd maintainers. Will California go after Torvalds? I doubt it. Apple? Surely, but this is, quite frankly, a ridiculous thing to even suggest for inclusion into these setups.


Open source is driven by contributions. Most of the time, if someone wants a feature, implements the feature, and submits a reasonable PR to a project, that project will have the feature. In this case, the PR appears to have been written by someone who is not a regular SystemD contributor, and (through a bit of Googling) works for a FinTech company with no obvious interest. I can't comment on why that individual wanted to add support. However, once someone added support, the question for SystemD is not if it is worth implementing, but if it is worth merging. At this point, it becomes a simple case of "the most intolerant wins". For people who care about complying with CA style laws, this feature is critical. For people who don't care, this feature is fine. I doubt it will even make it on mosts lists of SystemD feature bloat that most people don't care about.

This is the same reason a bunch of the food in your pantry is certified kosher. No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it.


> No one is going to not buy something because it is kosher. But if paying a thousand dollars a year to put a small circle-u symbol on the back of your box can increase sales by 1% among observant Jews, most companies are going to do it.

Contrary to perceived politics, many Muslims will eat kosher food because it's a superset of halal rules (excl. alcohol).

It's a globally consolidated certification through organizations like the Orthodox Union. This is unlike halal which is local and has many scammers offering to pencil whip compliance. This means many Muslims will prefer kosher to "halal" food to avoid due diligence on the certification agency.

To tie this into age-verification, companies and ecosystems will use the strictest method that makes them globally compliant. Consumers will prefer that convenience even in the presence of intense political beliefs.

A bank that uses seamless OS-level age checks everywhere will win against one asking manually in the jurisdictions it isn't required.


I hope everyone’s bank knows how old they are— what with all the documentation we have to cough up to keep us safe from Terrorism , patriot act, 9/11, never forget, etc

> systemd is not run by one corporation

Two corporations, e.g. Canonical and Red Hat, might suffice.

I hope everybody remembers how systemd was thrust upon the community by having Gnome largely depend on it. This was mostly done by efforts of Red Hat, and that sufficed.


IIRC all that's been done is a field has been added to store the user date of birth and a protocol that can be used to retrieve said date.

That's it.


Okay, but why do this now? If it’s such an important feature and unrelated to the barrage of legislation, why was this not implemented a few months or years ago?

Because someone came with a pull request for this; this additional field was meant to support a feature in something else they were working on (an xdg portal). It was a simple PR that addressed a need that the programmer had. And it was accepted.

California has both vendors and clients that are big enough to warrant immediate compliance. A very measurable chunk of Linux is from corporations, most major advancements are corporate backed in some way.

>It seems incredibly silly to me that this is being rushed into systemd [...]

Making user-hostile changes seems exactly on-brand for systemd, to my mind.


I think the most obscene thing here is that macOS is now littered with permission prompts for camera, background execution, etc, but makes no effort to stop even industry partners from spraying the disk with dozens of files that can’t be removed easily.

That's because this particular sort of cyber security is merely theatrics with the goal of reducing user agency and increasing paranoia and vendor lock-in. The user facing friction is the goal. There will always be scams and viruses; the only practical outcome will be that you have less control over your computer, and Apple/MS/Google have more. See: Sideloading, Wayland, UWPs, iOS JIT, Windows XP and 7 still being used for accessibility

I strongly disagree.

I often have apps on my Mac or iPhone that ask for permission to see my camera, microphone, contacts, etc etc that I don't want it to see. But I do want other apps to be able to access those things.

Being able to stop those apps from accessing before they do instead of trying to fix it after is incredibly valuable.

Sure some users just accept everything, but that is not an argument against them existing in the first place.


Those examples are very reasonable. However I also had Mac OS suddenly treat all m4a files on the system as potential malware and it blocked any attempt at opening them. Why did it do that? Because I checked the "set as default app" option, one minute after I had already opened the same file using the same application. The only way to open the files was by entering the password in the settings app each time - but re-setting the same app as default in the file's Get Info dialog got rid of that "protection" system-wide without any password prompts or extra permissions. I don't see how that was supposed to help with security.

I am pretty sure you're running into a bug and trying to make sense of a behavior that wasn't intended to exist.

This has been a thing long enough for online guides to exist that explain how to get rid of it. Fortunately, because setting the default program in a second place to get rid of a security barrier wasn't my first guess. When does a bug start to become an undocumented feature?

This certainly isn't the only Mac bug that would be old enough to drive.

We are moving away from the old world where you can trust the applications you are running on your computer, to today's world where you can't. The unix permission model is based on apps running as your user having access to every device and file you, the user, have access to. The threat was "other system users trying to access your files and devices" but now the threat is "applications you run trying to access your files and devices." OS vendors have been slow to adapt to this new threat model.

Even today, any rando application I download and run can read and/or write to any file on my system that I own and have permission to read and/or write, unless I go out of my way to run it in a chroot, a container, a jail or whatever. That's just poor security in a world where nearly every commercially developed application is an attacker.


To be fair, this is partly because of the internet.

If you install random apps and it destroys your PC, you can fix that by having backups. By contrast on work computers with important data, everything is supposed to be locked down and you can't install random apps. But then we started to increasingly connect devices to the internet.

Now gaining access over a smartphone essentially means being able to send payments via the banking apps. People are sending money with crypto so they are susceptible to simple clipboard swap attacks that are almost impossible for the user to detect until it happens. Then there is all the personal data that can be stolen that can be used for other attacks in the future.

Essentially the amount of damage you can take by losing access has increased much faster than the security devices meant to prevent.

To make matters worse, the security devices that are marketed to the average user tend to be exploitative rather than trustworthy (e.g. OneDrive).

It feels like instead of protecting users developers seem more interested in creating something that only does half of the job and then blaming the user for not knowing how to do the other half, so a comprehensive solution for the problem is never created.


I think there are a lot of things that users can be protected from:

1. Protect users from attackers external to the computer

2. Protect users from attackers who are other users on the computer

3. Protect users from applications run by other users on the computer

4. Protect users from applications they themselves run on the computer

5. Protect unprivileged (non-root) users from their own actions

6. Protect privileged (sudo/root) users from their own actions

OSes have been historically OK at 1-3. Not great or even good. There have been a lot of remote code vulnerabilities and local vulnerabilities over the years.

OSes have pretty much ignored 4 until maybe a decade ago, and are making token progress toward it, but I don't think many of them take it very seriously.

OSes have instead started to crack down on 5-6, which I'd argue isn't even the job of an OS.


macOS now implicitly sandboxes your Documents, Downloads, and Desktop folders. Random apps can’t read from those locations without triggering a security prompt.

Namespaces in 9front (actual ones, not second hand ones like under Linux) makes isolating software trivial.

> this particular sort of cyber security is merely theatrics with the goal of reducing user agency

Literally all security features carry the hazard of being used for oppression and being ineffective or counter-effective. That's how constraints work.

You need two things for a security feature:

- a segmentation under which a behavior is considered unsafe / unsecure (arbitrary, subjective)

- a technical solution that constrains the behavior of <thing> in <usage context> so that the aforementioned is mitigated

So something being "a tool of oppression" or "a tool of safety" is a matter of your alignment with that segmentation. And it being a theater or not is a matter of functional soundness given a threat model. So is its tendency to become counter-effective.

Constraints are just constraints. Whether they're effective and whether you're disadvantaged by them are both separate, independent matters. Empirical too.


I think we're on the same side in principle. The ability for people to interact with the wider world using general purpose computers that they fully control should be sacrosanct, and attempts to interfere with that such as remote attestation, app store exclusivity, and developer verification are evil.

Sandboxing apps by default is not that. The principle of least privilege is good security. If I vibecode some quick and dirty hobby app and share it with the world, it's better if the robot's mistake can't `rm -rf ~/` or give some creep access to your webcam.

The user should be able to override that in any way they see fit of course.


>Wayland

I can see the rest, but why did you mix in Wayland, a open source display protocol?


I think there's some controversy regarding that programs are limited in what extent they can access each other. You need sudo to do global hotkeys/keylogging, probably accessing pixel contents of other apps, etc. I suppose they mean it only prevents some specific threats while leaving open goals in other, even more easily exploited places

Maybe I don't understand your point, but why is Waylabd in your list?

It’s like they went backwards on this. The utility that handles .pkg files used to have a command line uninstall option.

Anyway, I kinda like PearCleaner for removing the cruft. It’s not perfect but it’s open source and one of the better options imo.


You often cannot even tell what the permission prompts are for. Sometimes they have generic names like a programming language is requesting something. Not sure what that’s about.

those are interpreters, the language is interpreted by a binary called `ruby` or `python`, for example, so that happens to be the process that's requesting the permission

They could also use Ghost of any other random CMS. Everyone uses WordPress because of network effects in terms of site design and ecosystem. This has been the whole pitch of Squarespace too!

On my first load of this page, it took 4.85 seconds to get meaningful content and the whole page took 8.09s. The vast majority of the delay seems to be from assets like the PNG images and the fonts, which don't seem to be on a CDN. I am located in Tokyo, Japan, with a 1Gbps symmetric connection, so while I am regionally quite distant from the site, I assume, I still think there are ample CDNs available that would speed this up.

Lucky you. Blog.js fails for me with a TypeError and I'm disinclined to debug someone else's javascript on a whim, so I don't get to see any of the content at all.

To the OP: JS is for enhancements. If you are using it in such a way that it becomes a potential blocker for all of the content then you are not going to reach the audience that you otherwise would. If you are on somebody else's platform/framework then by all means pass this up the chain.



Sorry about that! Performance is really important to me, I just didn't get around to configuring CDN caching and optimizing the assets. All the HN traffic hitting our server also didn't help.

I signed up and I'm finding browsing a repo quite snappy. Good job.

Important to note that this is a comment on this article: https://lwn.net/Articles/1065586/.

“Reversing was already mostly a speed-bump even for entry-level teams, who lift binaries into IR or decompile them all the way back to source. Agents can do this too, but they can also reason directly from assembly. If you want a problem better suited to LLMs than bug hunting, program translation is a good place to start.”

Huh. Direct debugging, in assembly. At that point, why not jump down to machine code?


For the purposes of debugging, assembly is machine code, just with some nice constructs to make it easier to read. Transpiling between assembly and machine code is mostly a find-and-replace exercise, not like the advanced reasoning involved in proper compilation.

On x86/x64/variable instruction length architectures this isn't always the case. You can jump in middle of an instruction to get a different instruction. It can be used to obfuscate code.

Decompiled assembly is basically machine code; without recreating the macros that make assembly "high level" you're as close to machine code as you're going to get unless you're trying to exploit the CPU itself.

i think they aren't saying "it's more effective to debug at assembly level" but just that LLMs might be less dependent on decompilation/RE that tries to recreate high level code (the context is specifically about closed-source programs)

> “For women who aren’t considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it’s wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000,” Lubarsky said.

I mean, if I were a choosing person and I could choose to have a human radiologist review AND an AI review I think I would prefer that. 3/10,000 sounds like a very good rate but a false negative on a cancer diagnosis is life threatening, no?


"The AI is wrong only 3:10,000 times" is a statement screaming out for the follow up question "how often are the humans wrong". Maybe 3:10,000 is astonishingly good, maybe humans are 10x or 100x better, right now I have no real way of knowing short of a literature review in a field I know nothing about.

At a certain point the false positives start creating more harm than trying to further reduce the false negatives (which is, perhaps counterintuitively, eventually true for even the most serious of risks). Whether that's the case here depends on a lot of information not in the article.

It’s always been the Apple strategy to wait. Every Apple product has been “late” by the rest of the industry standards, because they never play early game anything. iPhone was years after the first smartphone. Features Android had came significantly later. It’s just never been the strategy to be early to any new technology.


But isn't that part of the Apple distortion field? They do seem to wait a very long time, but then when they do execute, there seems to be this air of "look what we've invented" when it's something that's been around for a long time.

For example, liquid glass.


Page 7 [0] of the report seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this. I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!).

[0]: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.18.712572v1...


> seems to indicate that FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery.

> Longitudinal data indicate that approximately 22% of women who undergo clitoral reconstruction experience a post-operative decline in orgasmic experience [25, 26]

From [25] abstract: Most patients reported an improvement, or at least no worsening, in pain (821 of 840 patients) and clitoral pleasure (815 of 834 patients)

So, I think the quote needs to be interpreted as surgery, even though beneficial on average, still having a pretty high percentage of negative outcomes (22%) and nerve mapping potentially helping reduce that.


> I'm also shocked to see how prolific FGM is too (230 million women?!)

And talk to any gyn doc in the west: it's happening among those communities in the west too (but on a lesser scale). In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family). You may not have gyn doctors friend but I do. And midwives. And they know.

"... surveys show that the practice of FGM is highly concentrated in a swath of countries from the Atlantic coast to the Horn of Africa, in areas of the Middle East such as Iraq and Yemen and in some countries in Asia like Indonesia, with wide variations in prevalence. The practice is almost universal in Somalia, Guinea and Djibouti, with levels of 90 per cent or higher, while it affects no more than 1 per cent of girls and women in Cameroon and Uganda"

Now from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_views_on_female_geni...

"FGM is practised predominantly within certain Muslim societies,[13] but it also exists within some adjacent Christian and animist groups.[14] The practice is not required by Islam and fatwas have been issued forbidding FGM,[15] favouring it,[16] or leaving the decision to parents but advising against it."

Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.

Ponder this.


> In several EU western countries the most common gynelogical surgery act is re-building the hymen (so that the woman can pretend she's a virgin once she marries, often forcibly by her family).

Can you source that claim?


> Let's call a cat: of these 230 mutilated women, a vast majority are muslims. There are 900 million muslim women on earth and nearly 1/4th of them have been mutilated by their community.

If the point here is that this is an Islamic/Muslim issue, then you'd find this in other Muslim populations. It's an Africa issue. Ethiopia is 60% Christian, yet had a 65 percent rate of FGM. Look at Pakistan, and the levant in general. Very Muslim populations yet very low levels of FGM.


Saudi Arabia does not do FGM. What does that tell you?

I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.

The fact that SA recently (past ~15 years) passed quite a few reforms that significantly lax old theocracy rules (e.g., women are now legally allowed to drive, they are no longer obligated to wear hijab outside, no male chaperone requirements, western-tier public music festivals and concerts can now be hosted, etc.) only solidified that opinion.


> I am not the person you are asking, but (to me personally) it just says that Saudi Arabia had made massive strides to become a modern 21st century society, as opposed to some of their regional neighbors who still practice FGM on a notable scale.

That assumes that Saudis did use to do FGM.. and that's not true either.


>230 million women

500,000 in the USA. 98%+ in some other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevalence_of_female_genital_m...


Male genital mutilation is very common

Respectfully, this article is not about the male experience, it's okay to talk about women without putting men in the story.

No, it's important context, and attempting to suppress it does everyone a disservice. Without taking these kinds of points of comparison into consideration, one becomes susceptible to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy , and may become convinced about supposed bias where the evidence doesn't support the claim, contradicts it or even shows the opposite.

Another classic example is the discourse around "missing and murdered Indigenous women" in Canadian politics. It was popular enough around a decade ago to be more or less a set phrase. To listen to politicians and wonks discussing the matter, you would imagine that Indigenous men didn't ever get kidnapped or murdered. As a matter of fact, the statistics showed that it happened to them at over twice the rate of the women. (They also showed that it was not an alarmingly high rate compared to other Canadian populations, and that the perpetrators were usually themselves Indigenous — as you'd expect for generally fairly isolated communities.) But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.


> But you would get silenced in many places (e.g., banned from the Canada subreddit) for pointing to those statistics.

Canada has an incredibly censorious culture. I have been downvoted to -4 [0] [1] and flagged for merely suggesting that Canadians do not care about medical privacy (or privacy in general) in light of things like Bill C-22 and DNA collection at the US border [2].

Interestingly enough, questioning gender ideology and being trans critical (maybe even transphobic) is now acceptable on HN [3], but Canadians have something very dark to hide when it comes to respecting medical privacy given how hard posts of this nature are downvoted, flagged, and censored.

    Surprised he didn't willingly relinquish a sample.

    Privacy is not actually a core Canadian value.
    Neither in spirit nor in letter do Canadians actually
    demonstrate that they give a shit about privacy; see
    for instance Bill C-22.

    I invite commenters to demonstrate otherwise instead of
    merely downvoting incontrovertible facts.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571182

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571396

[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/london/article/canadian-man-denied-en...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47538165


To someone who is shocked at the prevalence of female genital mutilation in other cultures, the widespread acceptance of other types of genital mutilation in (probably) their own culture is an important piece of context, I'd say.

[flagged]


Whether removing the tip of your finger or the whole arm, the imposition on bodily autonomy is equal. It is a violation of your personal sovereignty at the deepest level.

What about fingernails? Would cutting a fingernail without consent be equal?

Absolutely. Let's switch away from fingernails to hair because that's something I can talk about with person experience. I have long hair, plenty of people have jokingly threatened to cut it in my sleep or such. To have my hair cut like that would impart no physical injury or ailment to me at all, but it would be such a severe violation of my bodily autonomy that I would have no reservation about considering it assault and bringing charges as such.

I think your point is that fingernails are just a bit of extraneous keratin that is universally removed as part of grooming and so the violation cannot be equal to having your entire arm removed, but perhaps you forget the many women and some men out there who like to decorate their fingernails and that this is an expression of self.


My point was merely that it's a matter of degree, and while having part of your fingernail removed against your consent is assault, it's not exactly the same thing as having your whole arm removed.

I hear what you are saying. But hear me out. I think their comment is ok.

No one is forced to follow that thread. And the comment does provide additional information.

In fact, I never considered circumcision a form a gender mutilation. Despite being circumcised. But that comment got me thinking about it in a new way. And thinking about GM in a larger context.


On some levels yes, but if the male experience isn't being talked about, then no.

If we were to talk about domestic violence the automatic assumption is male against female. Ignoring the fact that a third of victims are men. That isn't exactly a small minority, before you take into account that it probably an undercount as no one talks about men getting abused.

The same goes for breast cancer. Men can get it, its almost never talked about.


This is a bad take. If society takes genital mutilation of children seriously, and it gets outlawed in more and more countries, it helps save ALL children from genital mutilation. Only a shortsighted person would see it as a zero sum.

Is it? Did "all lives matter" help prevent police brutality? Or was it an attempt at whataboutism so you don't have to do anything?

There wasn't really an all lives matter on the same sense as the black lives matter movement.

Plus there's 'all lives matter' as in the proponent doesn't want to do anything, and 'all lives matter' as in police brutality is bad no matter who it's aimed at, and should be stopped completely.

The latter more closely mirrors the parents example.

Further I would say your example is flawed. BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is. This isn't a case of KKK members wanting to get the <racist slur>s out of the country and back where 'they belong' it's more an issue of laziness and profiling. That isn't to say it isn't racism, but just talking about racism allows police that aren't KKK members to tell themselves they aren't the problem. Focussing on the issues of laziness etc means they do actually need to face up to the issues.

The same thing with genital mutilation, this isn't simply a case of something that happens to girls in a far away land, this is happening to kids right now in the west. Focusing on FGM kind of misses the point.


BLM also never claimed cops were KKK members. You're really fictionalizing the movement and its history; also, you have presented zero credibility as an expert in how much racism exists among US police forces.

We're we talking about the US in particular?

The KKK reference was to make clear that there are some that might identify themselves as racist. Whereas there are those that may for whatever reason, legitimate or not treat different groups differently. It isn't considered ageist to treat 1 yr olds and 91 year olds differently for example.

You presumably don't class yourself as racist. If someone were to claim your group were racist, would you automatically accept you were? Simply stating the outcome and some extreme examples doesn't force the rest of the group to actually engage with the problem. Worse it could create division where there was none because the majority feel they have to treat a particular group better than the rest.

I'm a white man, I've had similar experiences to what ethnic minorities would describe as racism, except in the context of domestic abuse. Are the police man hating sexists, or is it more that it sounds about right that a man would abuse a woman rather than the other way round, and is more a case of laziness and not really caring, which yes is technically sexist/racist, but ignores the fact that the perpetrators don't think of themselves as racist and were 'just doing their job'.


> BLM assumed a level of racism that I don't think there is

Why is your lived experience greater than that of an entire group of people?


I have my own experience. And my experience is that they don't give a toss about me as a white male. Should I infer that they are sexist also? Or is it a case of them treating me like shit is related to them treating ethnic minorities like shit? And if that's the case there's a unifying factor more nuanced than just 'racism'

Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time, maybe there would be paradoxically more time for women. Unless we make it a zero-sum game where we’re all extremists who would lose if it makes the opponent lose too.

Mixed school is a bane for men, for example. I’m full on with the Mollahs on this one.


> Respectfully, if we didn’t shutter men all the time,

Respectfully, what are you talking about?


Presumably, GP is referring to the crystal-clear attempt to do exactly that, in GGP.

Yes, yes, you're right, I see that on HN all the time.

And it is an order of magnitude more common for boys than for girls. And it’s legal to genitally mutilate boys in every single country on the planet.

(Nonconsensual) genital mutilation is bad no matter who you are or what parts you have.

Also: If pain becomes a contest, we're all losers.

Also: Thank you for complaining. There is much to complain about. There's so much to complain about that we can sit in a circle and take turns complaining and everybody will probably learn something.


Spot to complain that I missed a spot:

(P.S. you can also add a new thread)


Spot to complain about intersex genital mutilation:

Spot to complain about female genital mutilation:

Spot to complain about male genital mutilation:

My understanding is that (nonconsensual) circumcision of infants is quite common in some regions of the planet, and that some impacted individuals wish that this decision had not been made for them without their consent.

That seems bad.


*in the US

Not in Europe.


presumably you are referring to circumcision, which has recognized benefits.

Very weakly supported benefits, to be weighed against quite severe risks and frequent issues.

Circumcision is not one thing worldwide.

> Circumcision is prevalent among 92% of men in North Africa and around 62% in Sub-Saharan Africa. In western and northern parts of Africa it is mainly performed for religious reasons, whereas in southern parts of Africa it rarely performed in neonates, instead being a rite of passage into manhood.[22]

> Studies evaluating the complications due to traditional male circumcision have found rates varying from 35% (Kenya) to 48% (South Africa). Infection, delayed wound healing, glans amputation and injury, bleeding, loss of penile sensitivity, excessive removal of foreskin, and death are the major complications reported.[23]

...

> ...There are tribes, however, that do not accept this modernized practice. They insist on circumcision in a group ceremony, and a test of courage at the banks of a river. This more traditional approach is common amongst the Meru and the Kisii tribes of Kenya.[40] One boy in Meru County, Kenya was assaulted by other boys because they wanted him to be circumcised in a traditional ceremony as opposed to in a hospital.[44]

...

> Amongst the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania, male circumcision has historically been the graduation element of an educational program which taught tribal beliefs, practices, culture, religion and history to youth who were on the verge of becoming full-fledged members of society. The circumcision ceremony was very public, and required a display of courage under the knife in order to maintain the honor and prestige of the young man and his family. The only form of anesthesia was a bath in the cold morning waters of a river, which tended to numb the senses to a minor degree. The youths being circumcised were required to maintain a stoic expression and not to flinch from the pain.[40]

...

> In some South African ethnic groups, circumcision has roots in several belief systems, and is performed most of the time on teenage boys: "The young men in the eastern Cape belong to the Xhosa ethnic group for whom circumcision is considered part of the passage into manhood. ... A law was recently introduced requiring initiation schools to be licensed and only allowing circumcisions to be performed on youths aged 18 and older. But Eastern Cape provincial Health Department spokesman Sizwe Kupelo told Reuters news agency that boys as young as 11 had died. Each year thousands of young men go into the bush alone, without water, to attend initiation schools. Many do not survive the ordeal.[59]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcision_in_Africa (includes NSFW images).

[22]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5422680

[23]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3474774

[40]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080906115430/http://htc.anu.ed...

[44]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7dBMLHNxhg

[59]: https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3069491.stm


Surgery is essentially mutilation, just with a lot of effort to get the patient a positive outcome. Hopefully, this information will help.

I don't see how this provides any useful context.

The information for where nerve endings are likely to be will probably help surgeons give their patients a better outcome.

You understand you're replying in a thread about female genital mutilation?

Yes, I was being a bit terse with my language, which is why I clarified a bit in my last comment. Here's how I might have written it better:

> FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this.

Surgery is essentially mutilation, just in the physical sense (you are cutting through healthy tissue), not a moral sense (the whole point is to make the body more healthy). The information gathered from mapping nerve endings in a clitoris will hopefully help surgeons perform reconstruction surgery with less damage to the body.


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