yohuo 我把地址链接搞掉了。。。。。下次一定记得贴上！！！！ 标题被我抹黑了哟！（1，2是一起的 3，4，5是一起的 我把他们仨的文章名字不注意给吃了。。。突然发现 感觉消化不良了。。。。 ）上一次因为网络的问题开天窗了 真是对不起大家 抱歉。。。
SPEED [Time1] Power from the people
Does the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage ruling threaten direct democracy?
DIRECT democracy is often blamed for making California ungovernable. The state keeps holding ballot initiatives (ie, what non-Americans call referendums). Voters decide that taxes must fall but spending must rise. Elected politicians struggle to make the sums add up. But last week this dysfunctional system was sideswiped. The Supreme Court, in upholding the right of gays to marry in California, may have weakened direct democracy throughout America, some fear.
It is a convoluted story. In 2008 Californian voters passed Proposition 8, a gay-marriage ban. Two years later a district court ruled the ban unconstitutional. Usually state officials are charged with defending state law. But California’s governor and attorney-general agreed with the court’s verdict and declined to appeal against it. Instead, the state Supreme Court allowed the original proponents of the initiative to argue their case in federal appeals court.
On June 26th the federal Supreme Court threw back the case, ruling that Prop 8’s supporters had no standing in federal court. So the district-court verdict stands, and Californian gays are free to marry.
Many who applaud that result are worried about how it was reached. They fear the court has in effect granted a veto to officials in California (and the 26 other states that have similar ballot-initiative systems) over democratically passed laws that they dislike. They can scotch them simply by declining to defend them in court. In his dissent last week Justice Anthony Kennedy said the opinion “disrespects…the political process in California”.
Given that the whole point of ballot initiatives is to let voters bypass politicians, that seems perverse. Jon Coupal, head of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association—a lobby group set up to defend California’s most famous proposition, 13, which in 1978 curbed the state’s property tax—wrote that the verdict “could lead to the effective dismantling of the initiative power vested in the people of California”. (310) [Time2]
Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, says that in most cases state officials will continue to defend successful initiatives. (The attorney-general’s office says the state has declined to do so only once before.) But he worries about two types of ballot measure: those that threaten politicians’ self-interest, such as campaign-finance reforms, and “hot potatoes” that inspire intense feelings, like Prop 8. Although California’s gay-marriage ban is now dead, many other states have similar ones; one or more could reach the Supreme Court in the years ahead.
Mr Hasen backs a plan proposed by one of his colleagues: a law that would require officials to appoint a lawyer to defend initiatives when the government declines to. Another idea doing the rounds is to place a “meta-measure” on the ballot that would enshrine the right of initiative proponents to defend their laws in court. California’s initiative system remains popular, despite all the headaches it has caused. But will people vote to defend it? Joe Rodota of Forward Observer, a political consultancy, points out that such procedural measures often struggle to excite enough voters to pass.
Dismay at the way the Supreme Court reached its opinion can be found on both left and right. But most Californians do not appear outraged. As in the rest of the country, opinion on same-sex marriage in the state has rapidly liberalised in the past five years; one recent poll found 58% in support (Prop 8 passed with 52%).
Some ballot-initiative sceptics even think the justices’ decision may bring the Golden State’s electorate to its senses. “If this feels like a slap in the face to voters, good,” says Joe Mathews of Zócalo Public Square, a civic group. “They need this slap, and many more, until they get that they’re the authors of their own destruction.”
(304) [Time3] The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s new book, “Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False,” restores the primal force of a great old philosophical word, “metaphysics.” He starts with a boldly discerning look at that strange creature, mankind, and comes to some remarkable speculations about who we are and what our place is in the universe. Incidentally (and seemingly unintentionally) he illuminates, along the way, some significant aspects of the cinema, and of art overall. The book deals with science—specifically, Darwinian ideas regarding evolution and natural selection—and it’s filled with the quasi-scientific language and argumentation that characterizes much of Anglo-American analytical philosophy. This is unfortunate, because the ideas that Nagel unfolds ought to be discussed by non-specialists with an interest in the arts, politics, and—quite literally, in this context—the humanities. Where the book has been discussed, it has stirred up controversy, largely of an implicitly political nature. Jennifer Schuessler reported in the Times, on the praise that it has elicited from creationists. Proponents of evolution have, in effect, responded to it with a concerted “Et tu, Nagel?”: having spent their careers fending off attacks on evolution from right-wing religious creationists, they now find themselves having to defend the idea on, so to speak, their left, hyper-rational flank. But as H. Allen Orr rightly notes in the New York Review of Books, there’s nothing in “Mind and Cosmos” that supports or sympathizes with the religious point of view. Rather, Nagel is seeking to improve science, even to expand it, not to repudiate it. Physics is the question of what matter is. Metaphysics is the question of what exists. People of a rational, scientific bent tend to think that the two are coextensive—that everything is physical. Many who think differently are inspired by religion to posit the existence of God and souls; Nagel affirms that he’s an atheist, but he also asserts that there’s an entirely different realm of non-physical stuff that exists—namely, mental stuff. The vast flow of perceptions, ideas, and emotions that arise in each human mind is something that, in his view, actually exists as something other than merely the electrical firings in the brain that gives rise to them—and exists as surely as a brain, a chair, an atom, or a gamma ray. (387) [Time4] In other words, even if it were possible to map out the exact pattern of brain waves that give rise to a person’s momentary complex of awareness, that mapping would only explain the physical correlate of these experiences, but it wouldn’t be them. A person doesn’t experience patterns, and her experiences are as irreducibly real as her brain waves are, and different from them. Nagel offers mental activity as a special realm of being and life as a special condition—in the same way that biology is a special realm of science, distinct from physics. His argument is that, if the mental things arising from the minds of living things are a distinct realm of existence, then strictly physical theories about the origins of life, such as Darwinian theory, cannot be entirely correct. Life cannot have arisen solely from a primordial chemical reaction, and the process of natural selection cannot account for the creation of the realm of mind. Biology, in his view, becomes a variety of science that is radically distinct from physics—it deals with a vast and crucial realm of phenomena that physics doesn’t and can’t encompass, precisely because they’re aspects of living things that are not physical: subjective consciousness, if it is not reducible to something physical, … would be left completely unexplained by physical evolution—even if the physical evolution of such organisms is in fact a causally necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness. Since neither physics nor Darwinian biology—the concept of evolution—can account for the emergence of a mental world from a physical one, Nagel contends that the mental side of existence must somehow have been present in creation from the very start. But then he goes further, into strange and visionary territory. He argues that the faculty of reason is different from perception and, in effect, prior to it—“an irreducible faculty.” He suggests that any theory of the universe, any comprehensive mesh of physics and biology, will need to succeed in “showing how the natural order is disposed to generate beings capable of comprehending it.” And this, he argues, would be a theory of teleology—a preprogrammed or built-in tendency in the universe toward the particular goal of fulfilling the possibilities of mentality. In a splendid image, Nagel writes, “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” (401) [Time5] In effect, the universe tends toward maximizing certain goals and places “value in the result toward which things tend”—and Nagel assimilates this metaphysical tendency to human morality, which would mesh, gradually and incrementally (with backward as well as forward steps) with the value that inheres in the universe. In this view, the discovery of those values is inextricable from the understanding of what the universe is. Physics and metaphysics, biology and moral philosophy join together in Nagel’s vision of a distant, eventually unified-field theory of the universe, of existence. His cosmic, overarching vision is remarkably anthropocentric—anchored in an idea of practical progress at a scale of human experience, with human history echoing the history of the universe. I’m immensely sympathetic to Nagel’s line of thought (full disclosure: he was my professor for a semester at Princeton in the mid-seventies). It offers, in a vastly more substantial form, a parallel to my own view of movies. When discussion arose here several years ago regarding new trends toward realistic movie-making, I contended, in effect, that everything is real—that the realities that matter in movies are mental constructs, whether emotional or political, and that, therefore, a movie that rigorously represents solely the physical aspects and actions of its characters doesn’t necessarily come any closer to anything like reality, and may even get further from it. A work of animation, a C.G.I. fantasy, or a film that depicts its characters’ dreams, visions, hallucinations, and inner voices—or that fragments events with montage of images and sounds—may well get to reality more intimately, deeply, or fully. The recent movie that seems best to embody a perspective similar to Nagel’s is Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” with its view of a kind of prehistorical history as related to lived (albeit imagined) experience. (The most famous example is the remarkable scene of C.G.I.-generated dinosaurs discovering a primordial sense of mercy.) (318) [The Rest] Nagel’s thesis has, I think, similarly radical consequences for philosophy itself. His argument implies that consciousness—indeed, mental life, whether conscious or not—is not atomic but holistic: there is no such thing as a piece or an atom of experience, but, rather, a mind at a given moment is flooded with an incalculable number of perceptions, memories, ideas, judgments, and desires. Even enumerating them in the plural is a little silly, because it implies the ability to isolate them as singular events or things. Therefore, philosophy, in order to account for mental life, will need to turn aside from isolated experiments in logic and argumentation in favor of rough-edged, life-sized chunks—historical events and figures, works of art, artists themselves, cities, countries, languages, human dramas of all sorts, lived or imagined. Which is to say that, though Nagel doesn’t write about art in “Mind and Cosmos,” the book’s widest implications involve art and how it helps us to understand the world. If Nagel is right, art itself would no longer be merely the scientist’s leisure-time fulfillment but would be (I think, correctly) recognized as a primary mode of coming to grips with the mental and moral essence of the universe. It would be a key source of the very definition of life. Aesthetics will be propelled to the forefront of philosophy as a crucial part of metaphysical biology, and so, the writing and practice of philosophy will come to look more like texts by Nietzsche, with their own built-in aesthetic and subjective components and emphases on historical and practical events. The very beauty of Nagel’s theory—its power to inspire imagination—counts in its favor.
OBSTACLE
Boom and bust in Asia
Going for growth
Explaining Asia’s economic success is as easy as one, two, three
Jul 13th 2013 |From the print edition How Asia Works: Success and Failure in the World’s Most Dynamic Region. By Joe Studwell. Grove; 366 pages; $27. Profile; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN 1989 John Williamson, a British economist in Washington, DC, listed ten economic policies that enjoyed the backing of the IMF, the World Bank and many of their clients in Latin America. Whatever the merits of these policies, the “Washington consensus”, as he called it, proved badly named. Its prescriptions—stabilise, privatise and liberalise—have caused no end of controversy. Almost 25 years later, they get another drubbing in Joe Studwell’s provocative new book, “How Asia Works”.
But Mr Studwell’s own manifesto for economic success does resemble the Washington consensus in one respect: it holds that poor economies can prosper by following a short recipe of tried and tested policies. This is now an unfashionable approach among economists, who have turned their attention from policies to “institutions”: the social and political constraints that weigh on ministers, whatever policies they avow. Most authors shy away from prescriptions for success, arguing that every development dish is different.
Mr Studwell has no such inhibitions. Asia’s post-war miracle economies emerged, he argues, by following a recipe with just three ingredients: land reform; export-led, state-backed manufacturing; and financial repression.
The process began with the ousting of the landlords. Feudal estates were broken up and divided among small farmers, who also received cheap credit and valuable advice. Smallholder farming requires “grotesque” amounts of labour, Mr Studwell concedes. But that is a good thing, because countries as poor as Taiwan or South Korea were in the 1950s have labour—and only labour—in abundance.
Tightly planted, closely tended farms coax the best yields out of each parcel of land. This rural bounty then creates room for the next step: export-led manufacturing. The state, Mr Studwell argues, must nurse manufacturers through their infancy, helping them to learn how to stand on their own feet. This nurture should, however, be combined with discipline: the state must oblige firms to export. Foreign sales provide an external test of their progress, allowing the state to “cull losers”, even if it cannot pick winners.
The final secret of Asian success, Mr Studwell argues, was a cowed financial system. Captive savers, penned in by capital controls, were ripped off by the banks, which paid low interest rates. This allowed the banks to subsidise industrial firms through their years of education.
Mr Studwell’s recipe is not original: the formula dates back at least 140 years, he shows, to Japan under the Meiji emperor. Only the first step, smallholder farming, would be backed by this newspaper. But “How Asia Works” is a striking and enlightening book, which reflects the author’s unusual career. Having worked as an analyst (for the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister company) and a consultant, he wrote books on China’s seduction of foreign businessmen and Asia’s crony capitalists. Then he went back to school, embarking on a doctorate at Cambridge, home to a number of unorthodox economists.
The result is a lively mix of scholarship, reporting and polemic. Its heart is a historical account of how smallholder farming, export-led manufacturing and financial repression took root in Asia’s miracle economies, such as Japan and Taiwan, but failed to bed down in the Philippines and Indonesia. This is punctuated by travelogues, describing Asia’s landscape of economic triumph and tribulation, from the kitsch houses of rice farmers in Japan’s Niigata prefecture, who have great agricultural know-how but little architectural taste, to the unfinished towers of Jakarta’s Bank Alley, their growth stunted by the Asian financial crisis.
The most impressive part of the book is the 68 pages of footnotes in which Mr Studwell dips into his trove of reading and reporting. He includes observations on Javanese chickens, the sex life of a Korean chaebol-founder, the constitutional rules that Meiji-era Japan copied from Prussia and his exchanges with Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s former strongman.
In these notes, Mr Studwell wanders into the weeds of development (quite literally: Japanese rice is weeded nine times a year, he writes). But he never gets lost. The three-step doctrine he advocates is even shorter than the ten-step Washington consensus he opposes. But it will no doubt prove similarly controversial.
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