对不起大家啊!昨天正要发帖,结果突然断网了,一查才知道是家里木有网费了!刚才火速叫人来搞了一下终于可以上网了……
辛苦今天的童鞋要两天的作业一起做了……实在不好意思~~~
简单介绍一下(有剧透,大家可以读完再拖黑):
今天的Time 1的文章是人物描写,摘自《双城记》,这是里面比较简单的部分了……
Time 2 & Time 3 & Time 4摘自卢梭的《社会契约论》的引言和第一节……
Time 5 & Extension讲美国法律
Obstacle讲homosexual influence on politics
SPEED
【Time 1】 This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty, and he should have bean of a hot temperament, for, although it was a bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn the man.
Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counteras he came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her rightelbow supported by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but coughed Just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of aline, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while he stepped over the way. (336)
【Time 2】 I MEAN to inquire if, in the civil order, there can beany sure and legitimate rule of administration, men being taken as they are and laws as they might be. In this inquiry I shall endeavour always to unite what right sanctions with what is prescribed by interest, in order that justice and utility may in no case be divided.
I enter upon my task without proving the importance of the subject. I shall be asked if I am a prince or a legislator, to write on politics. I answer that I am neither, and that is why I do so. If I were a prince or a legislator, I should not waste time in saying what wants doing; I should do it, or hold my peace.
As I was born a citizen of a free State, and a member of the Sovereign, I feel that, however feeble the influence my voice can have onpublic affairs, the right of voting on them makes it my duty to study them: and I am happy, when I reflect upon governments, to find my inquiries always furnish me with new reasons for loving that of my own country. (197)
【Time 3】 THE most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.
This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he isthe sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master.
The family then may be called the first model of political societies:the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.
Grotius denies that all human power is established in favour of the governed, and quotes slavery as an example. His usual method of reasoning is constantly to establish right by fact. It would be possible to employ a morelogical method, but none could be more favourable to tyrants.
It is then, according to Grotius, doubtful whether the human race belongs to a hundred men, or that hundred men to the human race: and, throughout his book, he seems to incline to the former alternative, which is also the view of Hobbes. On this showing, the human species is divided into so many herds of cattle, each with its ruler, who keeps guard over them for the purpose of devouring them. (359)
【Time 4】
As a shepherd is of a nature superior to that of his flock, the shepherds of men, i.e., their rulers, are of a nature superior to that of the peoples under them. Thus, Philo tells us, the Emperor Caligula reasoned, concluding equally well either that kings were gods, or that men werebeasts. The reasoning of Caligula agrees with that of Hobbes and Grotius. Aristotle, before any of them, had said that men are by no means equal naturally, but that some are born for slavery, and others for dominion.
Aristotle was right; but he took the effect for the cause. Nothing can be more certain than that every man born in slavery is born for slavery. Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them: they love their servitude, as the comrades of Ulysses loved their brutish condition. If then there are slaves by nature, it is because there have been slaves against nature. Force made the first slaves, and their cowardice perpetuated the condition.
I have said nothing of King Adam, or Emperor Noah, father of the three great monarchs who shared out the universe, like the children of Saturn, whom some scholars have recognised in them. I trust to getting due thanks for my moderation; for, being a direct descendant of one of these princes, perhaps of the eldest branch, how do I know that a verification of titles might not leave me the legitimate king of the human race? In any case, there can be no doubt that Adam was sovereign of the world, as Robinson Crusoe was of hisisland, as long as he was its only inhabitant; and this empire had the advantage that the monarch, safe on his throne, had no rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear. (298)
【Time 5】 ON APRIL 3rd 1987 a convicted murderer called Willie Horton beat and repeatedly slashed a man, then stole his car and raped his girlfriend. At the time Mr Horton was serving a life sentence without the chance of parole for stabbing apetrol-station attendant 19 times; he was free on a “weekend furlough” as partof a well-intended but ill-advised programme Massachusetts program. When its then governor, Michael Dukakis, won the Democratic nomination for president the campaign of his Republican opponent, George Bush senior, made Mr Horton’s rampage the subject of a coldly effective attack ad portraying Mr Dukakis as soft on crime.
Crime has not played as salient a role in any presidential campaign since then, for two main reasons. First, America’s crimerate has steadily and dramatically declined since the 1990s. And second, Democrats have learned their lesson, joining Republicans in making all theright “tough on crime” noises. That may have eliminated a political issue, but not without some adverse consequences. Both political parties have driven America’scriminal-justice policy in one regrettable direction: towards locking up more people for more crimes for more time. A combination of over-criminalisation, mandatory-minimum sentences, tough drug laws and excessive prosecutorial powerhave stuffed America’sprisons to bursting. As of 2010 roughly 2.3m Americans were imprisoned, and 7.1m were under some form of correctional control (prison, probation or parole). In 1980 220 out of every 100,000 Americans were incarcerated. By 2010 that rate had risen nearly three-and-a-half times. It dwarfs the rates not only in therest of the rich world, but also in such human-rights-free zones as Iran, China, Cuba and Russia. Drug-related arrests account for much of that increase, and minorities for ad is proportionate number of those arrests. (288) Extension
Yet there are signs of change. In 2010—the most recent year for which reliable statistics exist—the number of people under correctional control declined for the third year running. States seem to have realised at last that incarceration is expensive. Some have begun experimenting with alternatives such as drug courts and day-reporting centres, which keep people out of prison and in treatment programmes, and with increased funding for job training and education behind bars in order to decrease reoffending. And though left-leaning advocates had called for such changes for years, many have in fact been implemented by Republican governors—among them Rick Perry inTexas, Chris Christie in New Jersey and Nathan Deal in Georgia.
Against this backdrop, Barack Obama’s criminal-justice and drugs record seems tepidly sensible; a decade or two ago he might have been felled by the soft-on-crime charge. His drug-control strategies, released annually, have emphasised treatment and prevention as much as jail. His most recent drugs budget spends more on the former than the latter. His health reforms will require health insurers to provide addiction and mental-health services. And his top drugs official has relegated the phrase “war on drugs” to the dustbin, and has warned that Americans “cannot arrest our way out of this problem”.
OBSTACLE
Following Wednesday’s Supreme Court arguments on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, there has been a lot of discussion of whether gays and lesbians individually, and the gay-rights movement in general, have become so politically powerful as to hardly warrant the safeguards of the equal-protection clause of the Constitution.
Substantial attention focused on an exchange during the argument between Chief Justice John Roberts and the attorney for EdithWindsor, who is challenging the law. Justice Roberts asked Roberta Kaplan, “You don’t doubt that the lobby supporting the enactment of same-sex-marriage lawsin different states is politically powerful, do you?” When she disagreed withhim, the Chief Justice somewhat snarkily responded, “As far as I can tell, political figures are falling over themselves to endorse your side of thecase.”
The issue is legally important—so important that itmerited its own front-page story in the Times today—because in order for the court to apply what’s known as “heightened scrutiny” in an equal-protection context, it has required, in the past, a finding that the group seeking redress has historically lacked political power. Heightened scrutiny would mean, forexample, that a court would look especially skeptically at a law that treated people of different races dissimilarly—the law would be suspect from the start. (One of the reasons that gay-rights groups may have been initially reluctant to take Windsor’scase for a large tax refund was that it looked like a claim for more money by an already affluent person.)
What is often lost in this discussion is that the legal test requires a finding of lack of political power historically. It has much less to do with political power, or lack thereof, in the present moment. In the DOMA context, what the court would need to look at, if it wanted to remain true to its precedents, would be the political power of gays and lesbians in 1996, when the law was enacted. Perhaps the best evidence of the lack of political power at that time is that the law—one of the most discriminatory anti-gay measure in American history—was passed by veto-proof margins in both houses of Congress and signed by a President who, even though he personally opposed the goals of the legislation, was unwilling to stand up against it in an election year out of fear that doing so would require that he defend himself against the charge that he supported the group stigmatized by the bill’s sponsors.
Moreover, and going directly to Chief Justice Roberts’s point about the success gay-rights advocates had in last year’selection—winning ballot initiatives in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and Washington—I hardly think having to raise tens of millions of dollars to obtain your rights, when they are free to everyone else, would suggest a lot of political power in the first instance. It’s more like good survival skills and ingenuity.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ ruling in Windsor, which is being reviewed by the Supreme Court, actually made a specific finding on this point.” Homosexuals are not in a position to adequately protect themselves from the discriminatory wishes of the majoritarian public,” Chief Judge Dennis Jacobs wrote in the controlling opinion. He might have added the modifier “historically,” but he was not wrong. After all, Proposition 8, California’santi-gay-marriage ballot initiative, was passed not in 1978, or even 1998, but in 2008. And in May 2012—less than a year ago—voters in North Carolina approved astate-constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Rob Portman is still the only sitting Republican senator to express his support. He didn’t have to fallover any of his colleagues.
But on a much deeper level than the court was prepared or able to get into, there is a difference between the political powerlessness of gays and the political powerlessness of racial minorities.That’s because gays and lesbians can hide their true identity in ways that racial minorities mostly cannot. So there are (and have always been) gays and lesbians who are extremely powerful but closeted. The attorney Roy Cohn, who,at various times between the nineteen-forties and the seventies, controlled much in both Washington and New York, certainly comes to mind. But that is not the kind of political power the equal-protection clause considers. Just becausea group is able to marshal its resources to undertake what is essentially a Herculean effort to protect itself, in a very limited and targeted way, does not mean it is unworthy of constitutional defense. Or think of it this way: just because the gay teen-agers on “Glee” are accepted, well-adjusted, loved by their peers, and able to kiss on television without consequence in their fictionalized reality does not mean that a poor, young, gay teen-ager living in the red-state South is not having a hard time of it. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t deserve a day in court. (816)
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