【Hawk组】comment 贴

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【8月4日作业】25-1
【by 小谦】
GRE word
New word
Good expression
My comment

The moderator's closing remarks（仲裁者的结束语）
Jul 28th 2010 | Jon Fasman  

With apologies to Raymond Carver, what do we talk about when we talk about gambling? What is it, fundamentally: the friendly game of poker around the kitchen table? The bartender酒保 who makes book for his regulars and runs a Super Bowl pool? Or a roomful of retirees, sallow in the neon light, feeding their pensions into slot machines, coin by sad little coin? And what do we talk about when we talk about legalising it: preventing ordinary people who want to take a flutter on a match from becoming criminals, or—as Spencer Bachus, one of the American Congress's staunchest opponents of online gambling, puts it—turning every computer terminal into a 24-7 casino.

Natasha Dow Schüll, one of our experts, takes a run at these questions by pointing out that "relatively harmless" forms of gambling are criminal, while slot machines, which are "designed to make sure that any player" bets until his money runs out, are legal and regulated in America. She charges, though, that such regulation serves the gambling industry more than players. Other countries' regulations offer the player a little more help: in Canada machines have to show the cash value of bets, rather than just abstract credits, and in Norway players can pre-commit the amount they will spend before they take their first spin. All laudable值得赞赏的, to be sure, but they merely propose tweaks拧 to an extant regime; the harms of prohibition examined by Radley Balko and his supporters remain unmentioned.

Peter Reynolds, another featured guest, claims that gambling websites offer far more scope for such player-friendly regulation. The problem, at least in America, is that online gambling remains illegal. A bill to change that is moving swiftly through Congress this week, but what its ultimate impact will be remains unclear. Meanwhile, polls still show that most Americans oppose making online gambling fully legal.

So again, what is the true face of gambling? The truth is it is all of the things mentioned above, which makes this debate so thorny多刺的，痛苦的. Which side you choose depends on which set of undesirable consequences turns your stomach least. But that's politics, and also policy—a game not of perfect, but of least worst. Side with Les Bernal, and you may keep people from spending money on lotteries and slots that they cannot afford to lose, but you would also criminalise宣告为违法行为 the kitchen-table poker players. Side with Mr Balko, and you make it safe for kitchen-table poker players and bartenders taking friendly bets from their customers, but you would also shrug at social-security payments going into slot machines by the nickel. But this is the real world, not an ideal one, and those are the choices. Time to vote.

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【8月6日作业】26-1
【by 小谦】
GRE word
New word
Good expression
My comment

The proposer's closing remarks（反方总结陈词）
Jul 28th 2010 | Radley Balko
  
It is one thing for gambling opponents to argue that negative external effects caused by addiction are so harmful that giving government the power to limit the individual freedom to wager is justified. I do not agree, but it is at least a reasonable argument. In his rebuttal反驳, Les Bernal stakes a much more absurd, downright Orwellian position: banning commercial gambling would expand our freedom.

"But the business model for casinos and lotteries only works if our government takes away the freedom of millions of Americans," Bernal writes. "By definition, someone who is an addict or someone who is in deep financial debt is not free."

Well, no. Someone who has become an addict or is in deep financial debt due to gambling is suffering the consequences his decisions. No one forced him to make those decisions. He is no different from people in debt from living a lifestyle beyond their means or speculating in high-risk real estate. You are free to walk out of a casino at any time. Scores of people do it every day, shirts still on their backs and savings intact.

Mr Bernal knows it would be unpopular to argue against personal freedom. So he is trying to change its definition. In Mr Bernal's world, freedom means having the government take bad decisions away from you. To borrow from (and slightly bastardise退化) a song by the great Kris Kristofferson, for Mr Bernal, freedom's just another word for nothing left to choose.
Our moderator asked if there was a role for government to shape the national character. I would submit that there is not. Public service announcements and publicly funded health research are harmless enough, but in this case "shaping the national character" means prohibitions on consensual behaviour that are backed by the use of force. That is far too invasive. Though we can all probably agree on a broad outline of what makes for "good character" I would imagine we would start to disagree pretty quickly as the conversation became more specific. I know Mr Bernal and I would certainly disagree. And while it may sound promising to give government the power to enforce good character while your favoured political party is in charge, you are likely to rethink the proposition once an election hands the government over to someone whose concept of good character is quite a bit different from yours.

Some of the commenters in this debate have argued that gambling is not a "victimless" crime, citing the effect a gambling addict's losses can have on his family, his employer and society at large. Mr Bernal goes the same route in opening his rebuttal with an anecdote about a woman who turned to robbing banks to support her gambling habit.

But of course millions of people patronise casinos each year without resorting to armed robbery to replenish their chips. Banning gambling because a seventh-grade teacher knocked over banks to feed her addiction makes about as much as sense as banning Jodie Foster from appearing in movies because John Hinckley Jr shot Ronald Reagan in an effort to impress her. We should not be passing laws in response to anecdotes.

But more broadly, any number of our day-to-day decisions can have indirect repercussions影响 for lots of other people. If you are going to argue that we should prohibit gambling because problem gamblers might go into debt, causing hardship for their families, or requiring them to seek publicly funded social services or welfare, you could make similar arguments for banning everything from unprotected sex, to laying on the beach, to rock climbing, to investment banking, to pie. There are people who enjoy all of these things to excess, or with an insufficient appreciation of  their risk. Some indirectly harm others or require publicly funded medical care or assistance as a result. But we do not talk about banning them. (At least not yet!)

Generally, if all parties directly affected by an activity are of age, consent to the activity knowing its likely effects, and have not been misled by fraud or false claims, the activity ought to be legal. Banning vices恶习 like gambling does not make them go away. It only makes them more difficult to monitor and regulate, and enforcing such prohibitions requires the particularly intrusive入侵的 government powers I mentioned in my opening statement.

I play online poker (even though my government has banned it—imagine that!). I am not particularly good. But I continue to play and wager, well within my means, because I enjoy the game. It's entertainment. I am going to guess that Mr Bernal does not enjoy poker. Here is a good way for him to express his dislike of poker: don't play it. He is even free to educate people about  what he believes to be the dangers and addictive properties of online gambling. Good on him for it. But merely refraining克制 from activities he finds distasteful令人不愉快的 is not enough for Mr Bernal. He wants to impose his preferences on me, as well. I would not dream of advocating that Mr Bernal be jailed for refusing to play poker. I just ask that he extend the same courtesy to my enjoyment of the game.
Rose，这句话是嘛意思？
Mr Bernal's peculiar特殊的 attempt at lexicography aside, any notion of freedom in which the government has removed all of our "bad" choices is not freedom at all. Let us let people find happiness and entertainment where they please, so long as they are causing no direct, non-consensual harm to anyone else.
反方观点很鲜明！赌博是人们的自由，不需要禁止

谦行天下UID: 2797557

【8月6日作业】【by 小谦】
GRE word
New word
Good expression
My comment
26-2
The opposition's closing remarks（正方总结陈词）
Jul 28th 2010 | Les Bernal  

In his recent book "False Economy" Alan Beattie shatters the common perception that the present state of countries and societies and economies was somehow predetermined. "Countries have choices," Mr Beattie writes, "and those choices have substantially determined whether they have succeeded or failed."

Today, one of the critical choices we face as a people is whether we will confront America's emerging national ethic of phony假的 prosperity, living beyond our means, cutting corners and distrust. This Las Vegas拉斯维加斯 ethic has come to permeate一种观念的浸透 our society in large part because the same ethic, through its promotion of lotteries and casinos, has been the daily voice of government to most Americans for the past 30 years. "Give people a big incentive and they will generally react to it," Mr Beattie says.

The choice before us is not whether government "permits" social gambling like playing cards at the neighbours' house or buying a square in the Super Bowl office pool. The choice is should our government actively own and promote predatory gambling.

Predatory is the word that best portrays our government's practice of using gambling to prey on human weakness for profit in partnership with commercial gambling interests. "Harrah's has quietly conducted thousands of clinical-style trials to determine what gets people to gamble more," reported the Wall Street Journal about America's biggest casino operator in 2000. "Based on its findings, Harrah's has developed closely guarded marketing strategies tailored individually根据个人调整 to the millions of low-rollers who make up its bread-and-butter基本的，实用的 business."

Harrah's makes 90% of its gambling profits from 10% of its visitors, most of whom come from these low rollers. No one describes "the new VIPs" better than Harrah's emulator仿真器 Dave Jonas, CEO of Parx Casino, located just outside Philadelphia, who proudly says his profits come almost exclusively from local low-rollers using slot machines:

"When I was in Atlantic City, to have 12 to 15 trips (per year) out of customers, they were VIPs," Mr Jonas says. At Parx, "it's not uncommon for us to have 150 to 200 trips … That's three to four times a week, essentially".

"We have customers," Mr Jonas boasts, "who give us $25, $30 five times a week." It did not take much to lure诱惑 them, beyond proximity, free valet parking代客停车 and $50 comps同伴.

The American government's current partnership with gambling interests is justified by some for at least three reasons.

First, if the government was not partnering with与作伴 billion-dollar gambling interests like Harrah's all this would be happening illegally anyway, or so the reasoning goes. Virtually no one would disagree that some forms of predatory gambling would occur underground. Yet only the uninformed and the ignorant can argue that organised crime would be running almost 900 casinos across America, overseeing 800,000 electronic gambling machines and pushing instant lottery scratch tickets up to $50 in tens of thousands of locations in cities and towns across the country, all backed by billions of dollars of advertising on TV, radio and billboards alongside state-of-the-art marketing technology.

Second, they argue, the prohibition of alcohol was a failure. Yet most will agree that drinking a glass of wine or a can of beer is far different from buying a $20 lottery scratch ticket or playing a slot machine. No sip of a Bass ale has ever offered the false promise of life-changing jackpots. One out of five Americans does not think the best way to achieve long-term economic security is to drink Budweiser. Most telling of all, the vineyard葡萄园 owner drinks his own wine—predatory gambling is the only product or service where most of the people who own it do not use it themselves.

Third, some claim that casinos and lotteries are no different from the stockmarket. While there may be risk associated with buying shares in the traditional stockmarket, that is where the analogy ends. When an individual buys a stock, he is buying a piece of a company. An applicant for a bank loan can put down $10,000 worth of stock certificates as collateral, but try putting $10,000 worth of lottery tickets on the table instead and see if the bank makes the loan.
政府参与赌博三个论点
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson best summarised why predatory gambling milks existing wealth rather than creates new wealth: "(Gambling) involves simply sterile transfers of money or goods between individuals, creating no new money or goods. Although it creates no output, gambling does nevertheless absorb time and resources. When pursued beyond the limits of recreation,娱乐 where the main purpose after all is to kill time, gambling subtracts from the national income."

Mr Beattie concludes his book with an exhortation劝告: "The experience of history should lead us to hope and strive to make the world better, not to despair and resign ourselves to fate."

The experience of human history has taught us one more thing: to love your neighbour like yourself. The business of predatory gambling is all about loving yourself more than your neighbour.

正方观点，反对政府助长赌博的做法，反对抢劫式赌博