前几天我首先看到了有条报道的英文版 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30983402。初看时并没有引起我太多关注。我读博士的时候就知道有这样的大老板，他可以在大城市的黄金地角有一座大楼，却在大楼的顶层供养喇嘛。眼下的朝阳区更活跃着无数的仁波切。再后来，我发现这报道还有中文版 http://www.bbc.co.uk/zhongwen/simp/china/2015/01/150129_tibetan_budhism_xiao_wunan。扫描这篇新闻之后我大吃一惊，原来中国国家的领导人夫妇可能是佛教徒。
然后我搜索关键词“彭丽媛”+“佛教”，结果有三百多万条。有一些网站看起来不那么靠谱，但一些中国半官方的网站也可见习近平频频发表关于宗教的讲话，比如 http://fo.sina.com.cn/news/jnxw/2014-03-28/142117103.shtml。又如 http://fo.ifeng.com/special/hai9/ 还指习近平曾经在巴黎说中国要借佛教复兴中国文化。有的网页还指习近平在地方工作时迷过气功，抄过佛经。
若如网传彭拜藏传师，则夫妻双修的可能性很大。因此夫妻俩都是神棍的传说并非空穴来风。习在不同场合挺佛教，妻子又是藏传，老妖僧大癞蛤蟆恐怕不止窃喜，心里乐开了花都未可知。
以前很多人对军队养一大帮文工团员就有微词。最夸张的是中央警卫团也搞一个文工团，专门陪领导人跳舞。以前大头领够邪还能镇得住，现在似乎是反噬的模样。记得彭刚陪同习初次出访时还秀一苹果手机，当时只让人觉得格调一般，没想到她真实的一面更加不堪。
历史上国家元首或皇帝亲近宗教导致僧道祸乱宫廷的事件比比皆是，而宫廷祸乱绝非人民之福。起源与古代巫术、神灵、图腾崇拜的宗教曾经给人类带来过无数深重的苦难。即使是当代，宗教仍然是大多数地区冲突的主要原因。而从近代历史的几百年看下来，凡大国崛起无不是走民主和科学昌明之路，并且将宗教牢牢踩在君权的脚下。倘若没有圣公会，倘若不是当时英国的国王担任圣公会的最高首脑，哪里可能有日后的日不落帝国？！
我们还爱着的这个不可爱的中国，你到底要折腾到几何？
星期六, 一月 31, 2015
星期二, 一月 27, 2015
Why free speech is fundamental
最近太忙，先存后读。
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/01/26/why-free-speech-fundamental/aaAWVYFscrhFCC4ye9FVjN/story.html
By Steven Pinker January 27, 2015
bee johnson for the boston globe
More than two centuries after freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, that right is very much in the news. Campus speech codes, disinvited commencement speakers, jailed performance artists, exiled leakers, a blogger condemned to a thousand lashes by one of our closest allies, and the massacre of French cartoonists have forced the democratic world to examine the roots of its commitment to free speech.
Is free speech merely a symbolic talisman, like a national flag or motto? Is it just one of many values that we trade off against each other? Was Pope Francis right when he said that “you cannot make fun of the faith of others”? May universities muzzle some students to protect the sensibilities of others? Did the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists “cross a line that separates free speech from toxic talk,” as the dean of a school of journalism recently opined? Or is free speech fundamental — a right which, if not absolute, should be abrogated only in carefully circumscribed cases?
The answer is that free speech is indeed fundamental. It’s important to remind ourselves why, and to have the reasons at our fingertips when that right is called into question.
The first reason is that the very thing we’re doing when we ask whether free speech is fundamental — exchanging and evaluating ideas — presupposes that we have the right to exchange and evaluate ideas. In talking about free speech (or anything else) we’re talking. We’re not settling our disagreement by arm-wrestling or a beauty contest or a pistol duel. Unless you’re willing to discredit yourself by declaring, in the words of Nat Hentoff, “free speech for me but not for thee,” then as soon as you show up to a debate to argue against free speech, you’ve lost it.
Those who are unimpressed by this logical argument can turn to one based on human experience. One can imagine a world in which oracles, soothsayers, prophets, popes, visionaries, imams, or gurus have been vouchsafed with the truth which only they possess and which the rest of us would be foolish, indeed, criminal, to question. History tells us that this is not the world we live in. Self-proclaimed truthers have repeatedly been shown to be mistaken — often comically so — by history, science, and common sense.
Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history — one that is prior to every other discovery — is that our traditional sources of belief are in fact generators of error and should be dismissed as grounds for knowledge. These include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty.
How, then, can we know? Other than by proving mathematical theorems, which are not about the material world, the answer is the process that the philosopher Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course, depends upon the exercise of free speech. We offer these conjectures without any prior assurance they are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.
Once this realization sank in during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the traditional understanding of the world was upended. Everyone knows that the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa had to overcome fierce resistance from ecclesiastical authority. But the Copernican revolution was just the first event in a cataclysm that would make our current understanding of the world unrecognizable to our ancestors. Everything we know about the world — the age of our civilization, species, planet, and universe; the stuff we’re made of; the laws that govern matter and energy; the workings of the body and brain — came as insults to the sacred dogma of the day. We now know that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.
A third reason that free speech is foundational to human flourishing is that it is essential to democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. How did the monstrous regimes of the 20th century gain and hold power? The answer is that groups of armed fanatics silenced their critics and adversaries. (The 1933 election that gave the Nazis a plurality was preceded by years of intimidation, murder, and violent mayhem.) And once in power, the totalitarians criminalized any criticism of the regime. This is also true of the less genocidal but still brutal regimes of today, such as those in China, Russia, African strongman states, and much of the Islamic world.
Why do dictators brook no dissent? One can imagine autocrats who feathered their nests and jailed or killed only those who directly attempted to usurp their privileges, while allowing their powerless subjects to complain all they want. There’s a good reason dictatorships don’t work that way. The immiserated subjects of a tyrannical regime are not deluded that they are happy, and if tens of millions of disaffected citizens act together, no regime has the brute force to resist them. The reason that citizens don’t resist their overlords en masse is that they lack common knowledge — the awareness that everyone shares their knowledge and knows they share it. People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.
Common knowledge is created by public information, such as a broadcasted statement. The story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes’’ illustrates the logic. When the little boy shouted that the emperor was naked, he was not telling them anything they didn’t already know, anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes. But he was changing their knowledge nonetheless, because now everyone knew that everyone else knew that the emperor was naked. And that common knowledge emboldened them to challenge the emperor’s authority with their laughter.
The story reminds us why humor is no laughing matter — why satire and ridicule, even when puerile and tasteless, are terrifying to autocrats and protected by democracies. Satire can stealthily challenge assumptions that are second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that those assumptions lead to consequences that everyone recognizes are absurd.
That’s why humor so often serves as an accelerant to social progress. Eighteenth-century wiseguys like Voltaire, Swift, and Johnson ridiculed the wars, oppressions, and cruel practices of their day. In the 1960s, comedians and artists portrayed racists as thick-witted Neanderthals and Vietnam hawks and nuclear cold warriors as amoral psychopaths. The Soviet Union and its satellites had a rich underground current of satire, as in the common definition of the two Cold War ideologies: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.”
We use barbed speech to undermine not just political dictators but the petty oppressors of everyday life: the tyrannical boss, the sanctimonious preacher, the blowhard at the bar, the neighborhood enforcer of stifling norms.
It’s true that free speech has limits. We carve out exceptions for fraud, libel, extortion, divulging military secrets, and incitement to imminent lawless action. But these exceptions must be strictly delineated and individually justified; they are not an excuse to treat speech as one fungible good among many. Despots in so-called “democratic republics” routinely jail their opponents on charges of treason, libel, and inciting lawlessness. Britain’s lax libel laws have been used to silence critics of political figures, business oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, and medical quacks. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous exception to free speech — falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater — is easily abused, not least by Holmes himself. He coined the meme in a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld the conviction of a man who distributed leaflets encouraging men to resist the draft during World War I, a clear expression of opinion in a democracy.
And if you object to these arguments — if you want to expose a flaw in my logic or a lapse in my accuracy — it’s the right of free speech that allows you to do so.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/01/26/why-free-speech-fundamental/aaAWVYFscrhFCC4ye9FVjN/story.html
By Steven Pinker January 27, 2015
bee johnson for the boston globe
More than two centuries after freedom of speech was enshrined in the First Amendment to the Constitution, that right is very much in the news. Campus speech codes, disinvited commencement speakers, jailed performance artists, exiled leakers, a blogger condemned to a thousand lashes by one of our closest allies, and the massacre of French cartoonists have forced the democratic world to examine the roots of its commitment to free speech.
Is free speech merely a symbolic talisman, like a national flag or motto? Is it just one of many values that we trade off against each other? Was Pope Francis right when he said that “you cannot make fun of the faith of others”? May universities muzzle some students to protect the sensibilities of others? Did the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists “cross a line that separates free speech from toxic talk,” as the dean of a school of journalism recently opined? Or is free speech fundamental — a right which, if not absolute, should be abrogated only in carefully circumscribed cases?
The answer is that free speech is indeed fundamental. It’s important to remind ourselves why, and to have the reasons at our fingertips when that right is called into question.
The first reason is that the very thing we’re doing when we ask whether free speech is fundamental — exchanging and evaluating ideas — presupposes that we have the right to exchange and evaluate ideas. In talking about free speech (or anything else) we’re talking. We’re not settling our disagreement by arm-wrestling or a beauty contest or a pistol duel. Unless you’re willing to discredit yourself by declaring, in the words of Nat Hentoff, “free speech for me but not for thee,” then as soon as you show up to a debate to argue against free speech, you’ve lost it.
Those who are unimpressed by this logical argument can turn to one based on human experience. One can imagine a world in which oracles, soothsayers, prophets, popes, visionaries, imams, or gurus have been vouchsafed with the truth which only they possess and which the rest of us would be foolish, indeed, criminal, to question. History tells us that this is not the world we live in. Self-proclaimed truthers have repeatedly been shown to be mistaken — often comically so — by history, science, and common sense.
Perhaps the greatest discovery in human history — one that is prior to every other discovery — is that our traditional sources of belief are in fact generators of error and should be dismissed as grounds for knowledge. These include faith, revelation, dogma, authority, charisma, augury, prophesy, intuition, clairvoyance, conventional wisdom, and subjective certainty.
How, then, can we know? Other than by proving mathematical theorems, which are not about the material world, the answer is the process that the philosopher Karl Popper called conjecture and refutation. We come up with ideas about the nature of reality, and test them against that reality, allowing the world to falsify the mistaken ones. The “conjecture” part of this formula, of course, depends upon the exercise of free speech. We offer these conjectures without any prior assurance they are correct. It is only by bruiting ideas and seeing which ones withstand attempts to refute them that we acquire knowledge.
Once this realization sank in during the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, the traditional understanding of the world was upended. Everyone knows that the discovery that the Earth revolves around the sun rather than vice-versa had to overcome fierce resistance from ecclesiastical authority. But the Copernican revolution was just the first event in a cataclysm that would make our current understanding of the world unrecognizable to our ancestors. Everything we know about the world — the age of our civilization, species, planet, and universe; the stuff we’re made of; the laws that govern matter and energy; the workings of the body and brain — came as insults to the sacred dogma of the day. We now know that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.
A third reason that free speech is foundational to human flourishing is that it is essential to democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. How did the monstrous regimes of the 20th century gain and hold power? The answer is that groups of armed fanatics silenced their critics and adversaries. (The 1933 election that gave the Nazis a plurality was preceded by years of intimidation, murder, and violent mayhem.) And once in power, the totalitarians criminalized any criticism of the regime. This is also true of the less genocidal but still brutal regimes of today, such as those in China, Russia, African strongman states, and much of the Islamic world.
Why do dictators brook no dissent? One can imagine autocrats who feathered their nests and jailed or killed only those who directly attempted to usurp their privileges, while allowing their powerless subjects to complain all they want. There’s a good reason dictatorships don’t work that way. The immiserated subjects of a tyrannical regime are not deluded that they are happy, and if tens of millions of disaffected citizens act together, no regime has the brute force to resist them. The reason that citizens don’t resist their overlords en masse is that they lack common knowledge — the awareness that everyone shares their knowledge and knows they share it. People will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.
Common knowledge is created by public information, such as a broadcasted statement. The story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes’’ illustrates the logic. When the little boy shouted that the emperor was naked, he was not telling them anything they didn’t already know, anything they couldn’t see with their own eyes. But he was changing their knowledge nonetheless, because now everyone knew that everyone else knew that the emperor was naked. And that common knowledge emboldened them to challenge the emperor’s authority with their laughter.
The story reminds us why humor is no laughing matter — why satire and ridicule, even when puerile and tasteless, are terrifying to autocrats and protected by democracies. Satire can stealthily challenge assumptions that are second nature to an audience by forcing them to see that those assumptions lead to consequences that everyone recognizes are absurd.
That’s why humor so often serves as an accelerant to social progress. Eighteenth-century wiseguys like Voltaire, Swift, and Johnson ridiculed the wars, oppressions, and cruel practices of their day. In the 1960s, comedians and artists portrayed racists as thick-witted Neanderthals and Vietnam hawks and nuclear cold warriors as amoral psychopaths. The Soviet Union and its satellites had a rich underground current of satire, as in the common definition of the two Cold War ideologies: “Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man; Communism is the exact opposite.”
We use barbed speech to undermine not just political dictators but the petty oppressors of everyday life: the tyrannical boss, the sanctimonious preacher, the blowhard at the bar, the neighborhood enforcer of stifling norms.
It’s true that free speech has limits. We carve out exceptions for fraud, libel, extortion, divulging military secrets, and incitement to imminent lawless action. But these exceptions must be strictly delineated and individually justified; they are not an excuse to treat speech as one fungible good among many. Despots in so-called “democratic republics” routinely jail their opponents on charges of treason, libel, and inciting lawlessness. Britain’s lax libel laws have been used to silence critics of political figures, business oligarchs, Holocaust deniers, and medical quacks. Even Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous exception to free speech — falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater — is easily abused, not least by Holmes himself. He coined the meme in a 1919 Supreme Court case that upheld the conviction of a man who distributed leaflets encouraging men to resist the draft during World War I, a clear expression of opinion in a democracy.
And if you object to these arguments — if you want to expose a flaw in my logic or a lapse in my accuracy — it’s the right of free speech that allows you to do so.
星期一, 一月 26, 2015
星期日, 一月 18, 2015
星期一, 一月 12, 2015
星期五, 一月 09, 2015
几句话影评
最近看了好几场电影，包括《Gone Girl》和《Hobbit》。前者的情节实在狗血，我睁大眼睛从头看到了尾。相比之下，《敢死队 3》我看了 4 遍，每次都在 15 分钟左右成功入睡。以致好长时间都不知道结尾。有网友说，他看完《Gone Girl》想了大半夜怎么来对付那个女人。
虽然一开始不知道《Gone Girl》剧情，但女演员的出场就让我感觉不妙，那表情就像死人一样。或许是导演有意安排，或者是女演员演得好。从讲故事的角度来看，电影的目的达到了，可以算作一部好电影。
前几天炒作很厉害的《Interviewer》是一部滥片子，打分恐怕只有十之四五。
《Interstellar》不错，值得一看。据说拍摄这部片子时，编剧导演咨询了不少物理学家。不过预测未来就像编瞎话，往往很难把细节都说圆乎。比如倘若人们都如影片中所说的那样只能吃玉米，那么大多数人不会那么长寿，至少长得不会那么水灵。
看《Hobbit》后感觉这是 LotR 所有六部片子中最差的一部，也可能是前面都不错，期望与现实的落差导致。最后一场大战铺垫很大，进程和结束都很马虎。但是前面都看过了，这次去看也是一场任务。
本来是计划年前和孩子们一起去看后者，但年前各种应酬安排的很满，只有 29 号一天有空。结果花了 450 克朗买了票，一忙活我把电影的事儿给忘了。我打电话给电影院，本没打算让他们退票，只是希望能给我们重新安排。毕竟电影已经上映很长时间，电影院空位置很 多。
接电话的态度很不好，说重新安排门儿都没有。没办法，我因为和儿子们有约在先，只好在别的电影公司买了三张票，并决定以后不再去他们公司看电影。毕竟现在不单单是卖方市场，一部电影花的 900 块可以看一年多 Netflix，而且家庭影院的效果现在比电影院差不了那么多。
打电话之前我还给他们公司写了一封电子邮件。电话之后本来我对这个公司死了心，没想到前几天他们回了我的信，说要赠我三张电影票。嗯，暂且给这个公司留档察看一年吧。
虽然一开始不知道《Gone Girl》剧情，但女演员的出场就让我感觉不妙，那表情就像死人一样。或许是导演有意安排，或者是女演员演得好。从讲故事的角度来看，电影的目的达到了，可以算作一部好电影。
前几天炒作很厉害的《Interviewer》是一部滥片子，打分恐怕只有十之四五。
《Interstellar》不错，值得一看。据说拍摄这部片子时，编剧导演咨询了不少物理学家。不过预测未来就像编瞎话，往往很难把细节都说圆乎。比如倘若人们都如影片中所说的那样只能吃玉米，那么大多数人不会那么长寿，至少长得不会那么水灵。
看《Hobbit》后感觉这是 LotR 所有六部片子中最差的一部，也可能是前面都不错，期望与现实的落差导致。最后一场大战铺垫很大，进程和结束都很马虎。但是前面都看过了，这次去看也是一场任务。
本来是计划年前和孩子们一起去看后者，但年前各种应酬安排的很满，只有 29 号一天有空。结果花了 450 克朗买了票，一忙活我把电影的事儿给忘了。我打电话给电影院，本没打算让他们退票，只是希望能给我们重新安排。毕竟电影已经上映很长时间，电影院空位置很 多。
接电话的态度很不好，说重新安排门儿都没有。没办法，我因为和儿子们有约在先，只好在别的电影公司买了三张票，并决定以后不再去他们公司看电影。毕竟现在不单单是卖方市场，一部电影花的 900 块可以看一年多 Netflix，而且家庭影院的效果现在比电影院差不了那么多。
打电话之前我还给他们公司写了一封电子邮件。电话之后本来我对这个公司死了心，没想到前几天他们回了我的信，说要赠我三张电影票。嗯，暂且给这个公司留档察看一年吧。
星期一, 一月 05, 2015
挪威怪事
地名
奥地利有一个村子叫做 Fucking，村前的路也叫 Fucking，总共几栋房子。因为这地名，假正经的英国人每年有很多来 Fucking 观光。
挪威有个村子叫做 Hell，地方跟 Fucking 差不多大，也是只有几栋房子，但有火车站。零九年我开车去瑞典 Åre 附近听课，同事有人坐火车。结果火车出了故障，困在 Hell 这个地方了。
不放弃
年前我参加了一位博士的答辩晚宴。博士来自印度，为一家鱼育种公司工作。席间当然还有不少其他人。有一位挪威老先生，听人介绍，他今年都 87 了，还在坚持科研工作。我立即对他肃然起敬。
另外还听说去年又发表了一篇文章，而且经过了 26 年的几易其稿，他始终不放弃，终成正果。当然，也可能是编辑放弃了。
孕妇装
同事，男，害怕电脑“辐射”。偏偏我在管理我研究组的几台服务器，因此我的办公室经常有几台电脑。有一天他忍无可忍的样子进了办公室，让我必须把电脑搬走。之前他已经和楼下的技术员发过脾气了。
其实我早就建议他不妨穿一下孕妇装了。很简单的道理，电脑“辐射”倘若有，其剂量也应该与距离的平方成反比。另外三台电脑与他的距离都是他自己电脑与他距离的五、六倍以上。只要他罩住自己或者是他的电脑，其它两三台本都可以忽略不计嘛。
结果，我们还是把电脑搬走了。安全起见，我衷心希望他早日穿上孕妇装。
奥地利有一个村子叫做 Fucking，村前的路也叫 Fucking，总共几栋房子。因为这地名，假正经的英国人每年有很多来 Fucking 观光。
挪威有个村子叫做 Hell，地方跟 Fucking 差不多大，也是只有几栋房子，但有火车站。零九年我开车去瑞典 Åre 附近听课，同事有人坐火车。结果火车出了故障，困在 Hell 这个地方了。
不放弃
年前我参加了一位博士的答辩晚宴。博士来自印度，为一家鱼育种公司工作。席间当然还有不少其他人。有一位挪威老先生，听人介绍，他今年都 87 了，还在坚持科研工作。我立即对他肃然起敬。
另外还听说去年又发表了一篇文章，而且经过了 26 年的几易其稿，他始终不放弃，终成正果。当然，也可能是编辑放弃了。
孕妇装
同事，男，害怕电脑“辐射”。偏偏我在管理我研究组的几台服务器，因此我的办公室经常有几台电脑。有一天他忍无可忍的样子进了办公室，让我必须把电脑搬走。之前他已经和楼下的技术员发过脾气了。
其实我早就建议他不妨穿一下孕妇装了。很简单的道理，电脑“辐射”倘若有，其剂量也应该与距离的平方成反比。另外三台电脑与他的距离都是他自己电脑与他距离的五、六倍以上。只要他罩住自己或者是他的电脑，其它两三台本都可以忽略不计嘛。
结果，我们还是把电脑搬走了。安全起见，我衷心希望他早日穿上孕妇装。
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