每天一篇economist,持续更新（from1-6 to 3-1)

seashell199005UID: 2984887

本帖属于备考日记，我会每天从economist摘选一篇新闻贴在坛子里，并作笔记，和大家分享，欢迎大家一起阅读哈!
http://www.taisha.org/bbs/viewthread.php?tid=1884262&page=1&extra=page%3D3
前期一直很菜鸟，不知道在GTER上怎么发帖子，审核审的很不方便(表示理解，要不就广告漫天飞了），全贴太傻上去了（上面为太傻的链接）。
偶一日，闲来逛GTER,发现还有这么多人在关注和恢复这个帖子（愚早以为此贴已沉水了），感动不已，决定每日也在此贴一篇economist,与大家共勉！

from 1-24 to 3-1
楼层链接如下：(点击即可进入）

1.同性恋婚姻single sex marriage
2.英国报业的困境与考验the crucible of print

seashell199005UID: 2984887

Topic:Single-sex Marriage
帖子发不了，一直在审核，附件也传不了，晕！那位高手指点一下？

只好先链接到太傻上了：

第一篇: 是一个关于同性恋婚姻的debate   http://.taisha.org/bbs/thread-1884262-1-1.html  ,taisha前加3个W

weaselUID: 2739489

支持，楼主坚持啊，不是件容易坚持的事儿

litingcoolUID: 2761220

快贴吧，我也好跟着每天你来看一篇，哈哈~

惊鸿照影hsUID: 2985285

支持楼主

alimenticeUID: 2897199

支持~

bzr2915UID: 2612029

:)

seashell199005UID: 2984887

Single-sex Marriage


The opposition's rebuttal remarks(反对者）
Jan 5th 2011 | Maggie Gallagher
Evan Wolfson's essay is mostly dedicated to "social proof"—since more people agree with him, maybe you should, too.
If you are the kind of person who, when considering a great moral question, says "What would Bill Clinton do?", you may find Mr Wolfson's argument persuasive. Similarly, if you like arguments from authority, "Judge Vaughn Walker says so" might be compelling—except for all those other judges whom Mr Wolfson does not quote, who have ruled exactly the opposite.
I do thank Judge Walker for making the consequences of gay marriage so clear: getting to gay marriage requires rejecting basic truths about human nature upon which civil marriage is based. Marriage arises again and again across diverse human societies, because all societies have to grapple with the same basic facts: sexual passion between men and women creates children, and those children do better and society does better when the mother and father who make them raise them together.
Judge Walker ignored history, social science evidence and clear legal precedent to rule that neither biology nor gender matters to children or to marriage. He did not merely say that we need to value responsible parents wherever we find them. He ruled as "fact" that society has no rational interest at all in bringing together the child's two natural parents, his mother and his father, to raise the child together, where possible. In so doing, he made crystal clear that the ideal of the natural family itself must be discarded if the central promise of gay marriage is to be achieved.
Why? Because gay marriage is premised upon, and promises a society dedicated to, the proposition: "there are no morally significant differences between same-sex and opposite-sex couples." That is what "equality" means. But when we cut off marriage as a civil institution from deep roots in human nature, government's involvement in marriage becomes increasingly hard to explain: Why sex? Why fidelity? Why two? Why not close relatives? Advocates for gay marriage cannot explain any of the basic features of "civil" marriage.
Of course marriage is under deep challenge today from many sources, most of them heterosexual. Gay marriage would not be plausible except for the growing disconnect between sex, love, babies, mothers, fathers and marriage. In America, 40% of births are outside wedlock and perhaps 40% of first marriages end in divorce. For me, far from being a reason for us to accept gay unions as marriages, this emergency is the reason the foundational questions about the meaning and purpose of marriage raised by same-sex marriage are so important.
Here is the question we face, the decision we are making: are we going to renew our marriage culture, to rededicate the civic institution to its core public purposes? Or will we accept the emerging, competing conception of marriage as a celebration of adults' right to love and caretaking?
I do understand why gay marriage advocates like Mr Wolfson want the promise and the premise of gay marriage to be realised. But I do not think he (or they) genuinely understand those of us who disagree.
When I was a young woman, I was told repeatedly that technology had conquered procreation, that sex and reproduction had been separated. But what I found instead, as a daughter of the sexual revolution, was that sex continues to make babies, and those babies continue to suffer when the man and woman who made them fail to form a stable family through marriage. Today, three-quarters of all babies are unintended by at least one of their parents. When parents are married, "unintendedness" does not matter much to children. When they are not married, it means suffering, risk and sometimes permanent damage.
Gay people do not get children as a result of acts of sexual passion. The relationship of marriage to their children's well-being is deeply unclear. A society deeply focused on sexual fragmentation as a major source of suffering and inequality for our children would not accept a movement that seeks and celebrates changing marriage so that procreation and the natural family are no longer part of its public meaning.
Sexual unions of male and female really are different. Whether or not they result in a child, they are freighted with the possibility, both for good and for harm. Millions of years of evolution have freighted the sexual relationships of men and women with a weight that same-sex relationships simply do not carry.
Whose suffering is most important here? Adults who understandably feel slighted that their unions are not considered marriages? Or the children who will grow to adulthood in a society, after gay marriage, in which the idea that children need a mom and dad is treated as scientifically discredited bigotry?
At least now, the choice is clear.



The proposer's rebuttal remarks（支持者）
Jan 5th 2011 | Evan Wolfson
As 2011 dawns, a majority of Americans support the freedom to marry, having seen loving and committed gay and lesbian couples making a public promise to one another, and marrying in five states and the District of Columbia, all while the arguments made by Maggie Gallagher's anti-gay activists against the freedom to marry prove empty. Repudiating the National Organisation for Marriage's scare tactics, leading professional authorities in the country—from the American Psychological Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics, from the American Bar Association to the US Conference of Mayors—have called for an end to marriage discrimination. The APA summed it up: "Prohibiting civil marriage for same-sex couples is discriminatory and unfairly denies such couples, their children and other members of their families the legal, financial and social advantages of civil marriage."
Realising that they have no case, anti-gay forces such as the NOM now rely on diversionary claims and abusive raw power, flooding states from Maine to California, Iowa to New Hampshire, with money in political attack campaigns, all to distract from the reality that when more committed couples join in marriage families are helped and no is one hurt. But, whatever Ms Gallagher says, there is nothing "respectful" about spending millions of dollars to strip away some Americans' ability to fully protect their loved ones.
The truth is that ending the exclusion of gay people from marriage does not change the "definition" of marriage any more than allowing women to vote changed the "definition" of voting. It would remove a discriminatory barrier from the path of loving couples seeking to strengthen their commitment and participate fully in society while taking nothing away from anyone else. By contrast, denying marriage hurts kids whose families are deprived of the critical safety net, support and meaning that marriage brings.
A few years ago, while on a play-date at her home in Iowa, a little girl named McKinley BarbouRoske learned that her moms, Jen and Dawn, were not married. She was devastated because she thought it meant that her parents did not love one another enough to make that commitment to each other and their family. Jen and Dawn explained to McKinley that they loved her, her sister Breanna and each other very much, but even though they desperately wanted to marry, they were not legally able to do so in Iowa. McKinley could not understand why her friends' parents were married while her family was being left out. But she did not take the news lying down; she immediately asked if she could write a letter to the president to ask him to treat her family fairly and let her parents get married.
Jen and Dawn, who had always wanted to marry and were heartbroken at McKinley's reaction to their not being married, did not take their exclusion from the freedom to marry lying down either. In December 2005, they became plaintiffs in Lambda Legal's lawsuit seeking to end the exclusion of gay and lesbian couples from marriage in Iowa. Later, McKinley and her sister were included as plaintiffs in the case because they were also affected by the state's denial of marriage to their family. A trial judge held that there was no evidence to justify the exclusion. In 2009, all seven justices on the Iowa Supreme Court unanimously upheld the trial judge's findings and ordered an end to the exclusion of same-sex couples and their families from marriage. (Three of these justices were the Republican and Democratic appointees that the NOM brags about recklessly attacking in 2011, having spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to oust them, knowing that an independent judiciary is dangerously vulnerable to such raw politics.)
Little McKinley was thrilled when the decision that would allow her moms to marry was read aloud at the court. That same year, the BarbouRoske Family was named "Person of the Year" by the Iowa City Press Citizen. After 19 years together, Jen and Dawn had a July wedding so that all of their friends and family could be there to witness them follow through on their commitment to each other, McKinley and Breanna.
I would not want to take that day away from McKinley and her family. Why does Ms Gallagher?
Couples have a mix of reasons for wanting to marry, and for many, it is not about kids. George and Martha Washington's marriage did not produce children. Does Ms Gallagher believe their marriage hurt others or was less worthy? Does she believe we should have left the marriage rules unchanged, leaving women subordinated, divorce prohibited and interracial marriage banned? A large portion of people during that century had that fundamental view of marriage.
The reality is that couples who cannot have children, or choose not to, have not historically been excluded from marriage.
Ms Gallagher's airy allusion to other ways to provide benefits is ironic, given the NOM's bait-and-switch opposition, even to partnership and civil union. She makes it sound as though marriage itself really is not that important. But we know that marriage matters; that is why committed, loving same-sex couples want the same rules, responsibility and respect—the freedom to marry.

seashell199005UID: 2984887

搞不懂，为什么还要审核……贴不出来呀

seashell199005UID: 2984887

I had a post before but stopped afterwards
looking forward to your post~^^
Bela1229 发表于 2011-1-7 02:29

谢谢前辈的支持！！

咖啡盐UID: 2973669

up

seashell199005UID: 2984887

第二篇（1-7）The crucible of print
Britain’s embattled newspapers are leading the world in innovation Bold newspapersJan 6th 2011 | from PRINT EDITION

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BY MOST conventional measures, Britain’s newspapers look doomed. Young readers are abandoning them for the internet and television. The Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, both tabloids, have shed about two-thirds of their circulation since the mid-1980s. Yet Evgeny Lebedev, co-owner of the Independent and the Evening Standard, is optimistic. “People are hailing the death of newspapers,” he says. “But if you go into the Tube, you’ll see almost everybody is reading one.”
Britain’s newspaper market is the world’s most savage. It is unusually competitive: there are nine national daily papers with a circulation of more than 200,000. And advertising has migrated online more quickly than elsewhere. Since 2009 more advertising money has been spent on the internet than on newspapers, according to ZenithOptimedia, a marketer. British papers receive no government funding (as is the case in France, for example). Indeed, they face a fearsome state-sanctioned competitor in the BBC.
Fierce competition has created a scrappy, sometimes immoral trade. This week the News of the World, a tabloid that has been caught up in a celebrity phone-hacking scandal, revealed it had suspended an editor. But Britain’s papers are also exceptionally innovative, busily testing new format sizes and prices. Paul Zwillenberg of Boston Consulting Group says they are now experimenting in dramatically different directions. There are three main trends.
The first is being driven from Wapping, London home of News Corporation. Its four British titles—the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World—are moving behind an exceptionally tough online paywall. Unlike the Wall Street Journal, also owned by News Corporation, the Times does not allow people to read any articles free on the web. Its prices are steep: £2 ($3.10) per week after the first month.
Not worth the paper they aren’t reading
As online commentators and rivals have gleefully pointed out, News Corporation’s paywalls have led to a drastic drop in traffic. A survey by Mark Oliver, a consultant, finds that only 14% of regular Times readers and just 1% of non-regular ones subscribe to the website in some form: upon hitting the paywall, most head for the BBC’s free website instead. That does not worry News Corporation. It sees online advertising as an unreliable source of revenue. Online ad spending is growing, but the number of ad slots available is rising much faster; as a result, prices are so low that a reader who visits a website once or twice a month is hardly worth having. The firm would rather extract more money from dedicated readers directly.
Thus the pages of the Times and Sunday Times are thick with in-house ads offering entertainments to readers, from iPad applications to theatre tickets and Italian holidays. Some 250,000 people buy from the Times wine club. These things tend to make money, but the main goal is to hook readers on a bundle of services. Katie Vanneck-Smith, chief marketing officer for News Corporation’s British papers, wants to get to the point where a newspaper subscription is like its pay-television or mobile-phone equivalents: something it hurts to cancel. Rivals fear the firm will bundle newspapers with BSkyB, a hugely successful satellite broadcaster that it controls and wants to take over completely.
Britain’s second great innovator takes the opposite view. The Daily Mail contends that online advertising works fine—if you are huge. The paper has been one of the most consistent sellers in print over the past few years, crushing its nearest competitor, the Daily Express. But it is even mightier online. With 35m unique visitors each month, it is now the world’s second-biggest newspaper website, according to comScore, which measures online traffic. It may take the top spot when the New York Times goes behind a paywall this year.
In contrast to the paper, which is conservative and often alarmist, the Daily Mail’s website is a breezy read. It is big on celebrity news, particularly reports involving attractive women in swimsuits. Lots of online news aggregators link to it. Executives claim that the website is now so successful that it competes not with other newspaper websites but with portals such as Yahoo! and MSN.com. The Mail is now steering readers to its iPhone application.
Perhaps the most counter-intuitive strategy is being pursued by Mr Lebedev and his father, Alexander, a Russian tycoon. In the past two years they have acquired the Independent and the Evening Standard, a London paper that they have made a freebie. In October they launched i, a cut-down Independent, priced at 20p—one-fifth the price of most quality daily newspapers. It is the first new national paper since 1986.
Not one of the Lebedevs’ British papers has a compelling website. They think young people do want to read newspapers—they just don’t want to pay much, or anything, for them. The Evening Standard’s circulation has more than doubled since going free, to 700,000. Distribution costs have plunged. Papers are now handed out in central London and moved around the capital by Tube: because they are free, commuters often leave them on trains.
The Independent and i face a harder road. Because i is so cheap, newsagents make little money from sales. They often shelve it with bottom-feeding tabloids and the Racing Post. Yet i is an intriguing effort to prop up the Independent, which was nearing the point at which marketers were losing interest: now advertising often runs in both papers, which together offer a higher circulation. It costs little to assemble and may help keep alive the newspaper habit, by offering a halfway house between free and premium papers.
The strategies being pursued by News Corporation, the Daily Mail and General Trust and Lebedev Holdings rest on distinct assumptions about what readers want, what they will pay for, and the future of advertising. It is highly unlikely that all three experiments will work. It may well be that none of them does. But none can be faulted for lack of boldness.
The innovators also exude more confidence than others. The Guardian, which first championed a big, free online presence, has been overhauled by the Mail’s website. It lacks News Corporation’s expertise in bundling and is far more expensively staffed than the Lebedevs’ outfits. It is a measure of how quickly things are moving that the newspaper closest to the cutting edge a few years ago now seems most in need of a new strategy.

ttuuttuuUID: 2299729

this activity is very useful~I encourage u to post this article everyday~^^

原地兜风UID: 2812262

楼主陕西人不?

原地兜风UID: 2812262

怎么不更了。。。这个论坛还是不错的，有版主推荐过 http://www.ecocn.org/forum.php