Category Archives: Well Worth Reading

Sex and the Culture Divide

Well Worth Reading, , ,

In Red Sex, Blue Sex, New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot explores the differences in teen pregnancy and attitudes toward sex in “blue” and “red” states. What’s fascinating about the article is that it highlights a real schism between those who claim to care the most about “family values” (the latter) and those who achieve the best outcomes for families (the former).

Among the stats and anecdotes recounted, Talbot highlights the following:

In 2004, the states with the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower percentages of teen births within marriage,” [family-law scholars] Cahn and Carbone observe.

The tempting takeaway is to say, “These people are nuts, and that’s why I don’t live in Oklahoma.” But Talbot is careful to temper holier-than-thou-ism against the holier-than-thous by pointing out that the issue is muddled by poverty and lack of resources. On the whole, though, the article offers a damning indictment of the abstinence-only industry.

In closing, she offers a heartening case for liberal values offering an edifice for healthy kids and marriages:

Evangelicals are very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality—indeed, they may feel that it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about values—maybe they were about maximizing education and careers—yet the result is a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures, including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive, emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that teen-agers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a while, liberals might point that out.

Why, it almost makes a social liberal want to say, “Amen!”

The Banks Built Their Own Pyre, Then Lit a Match

Well Worth Reading, , ,

Dean Starkman has an excellent story, “Boiler Room,” at the Columbia Journalism Review exploring how greed and irresponsibility inflamed our current financial crisis. Predatory lending, abandoned regulations and amoral financial industry groupthink led to an atmosphere where home buyers were reduced to suckers begging to be bilked out of their money.

His analysis is summed up as follows:

I realize that borrowers who signed the notes can never be fully let off the hook; no one knows what went on in the room at each closing—although the reporting of the last several years certainly yielded plenty of examples of loans made to stroke victims, the retarded, the elderly, the illiterate, and people who don’t speak English. A fine piece in April of this year by The Indypendent, a New York alternative paper, for instance, describes how an eighty-six-year-old Brooklyn man diagnosed with dementia decided it was a good idea to refinance his 5.95 percent, thirty-year, fixed-rate loan with an option ARM, an instrument that BusinessWeek described as “the riskiest and most complicated home loan product ever created.”

But more broadly, it pays to remember that the borrower is the amateur in this equation, someone who might execute a mortgage twice in a lifetime. A lender will do it a hundred times before lunch.

So, that’s what we know: the lending industry used marketing deception—including boiler-room tactics—on a mass scale against a class of financially vulnerable borrowers (which subprime borrowers are, by definition) and other middle-class financial amateurs already laboring with stagnating incomes and rising costs for health care, education, and, of course, housing.

Conservation Challenges Seen in Gorilla Killings

Well Worth Reading, , , ,

Mark Jenkins’ July 2008 National Geographic article, “Who Murdered the Mountain Gorillas?,” offers a heartbreaking look at the challenges of conserving endangered species. Corruption, greed and extreme poverty intersect in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Virunga National Park, with dire consequences for the area’s mountain gorillas.

Released Detainee Recounts Guantanamo

Well Worth Reading, , ,

Jumah al Dossari has an op/ed piece, “I’m Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo,” in today’s Washington Post. In the article, he recounts his mistreatment while in U.S. custody, from the time he was imprisoned in Afghanistan to the day of his return to Saudi Arabia.

We were taken to Camp X-Ray, which consists of cages of the sort that would normally hold animals. Imprisoned in these cages, we were forbidden to move and sometimes forbidden to pray. Later, the guards allowed us to pray and even to turn around, but whenever new detainees arrived, we were again prohibited from doing anything but sitting still.

Physical brutality was not uncommon during those first years at Guantanamo. In Camp X-Ray, several soldiers once beat me so badly that I spent three days in intensive care. My face and body were still swollen and covered in bruises when I left the hospital. During one interrogation, my questioner, apparently dissatisfied with my answers, slammed my head against the table. During others, I was shackled to the floor for hours.

In later years, such physical assaults subsided, but they were replaced by something more painful: I was deprived of human contact. For several months, the military held me in solitary confinement after a suicide attempt. I had no clothes other than a pair of shorts and no bed but a dirty plastic mat. The air conditioner was on 24 hours a day; the cell’s cold metal walls made it feel as though I was living inside a freezer. There was no faucet, so I had to use the water in the toilet for drinking and washing.

I was transferred to the maximum-security Camp Five in May 2004. There I lived — if that word can be used — in a cell with cement walls. I was permitted to exercise once or twice a week; otherwise, I was alone in my cell at all times. I had nothing to occupy my mind except a Koran and some censored letters from my family. Interrogators told me that I would live like that for 50 years.

Hundreds of detainees received similar assurance that they would be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. Many, including al Dossari, attempted suicide during their time at Guantanamo. But despite the government’s assurances that these were terrorists—”the worst of the worst”—the majority have since been released.

All of these prisoners were brutalized by America’s fearfulness. We should familiarize ourselves with each of their stories in the hope that their undeserved misery will provide some small innoculation against torture and tyranny during our next crisis. This is what happens when you don’t care about what happens to people because they’re “bad.”

Immigrant in U.S. Custody Ignored to Death

Well Worth Reading, ,

What the hell is wrong with our country? From the New York Times:

 In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months

…

In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng’s lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

A political party has seen fit to unleash our collective lizard brain for political gain. Many more monstrous things are sure to happen as a result.