Marco Almada

[Editor's Note: The following is a guest contribution by Felix Bungay, a student at the University of Cambridge  reading an MPhil in Intellectual History and Political Thought.]

When looking at contemporary liberal political thought, philosophers like Samuel Freeman and John Tomasi like to play up the difference between classical liberals, like Hayek and Friedman, and high liberals, like Rawls and Nagel.

I happen to think there’s more common ground between the two groups than is commonly perceived. Let’s say, to engage in a thought experiment, we locked Rawls, Freeman, Friedman and Hayek in a room and we asked them to come up with some public policy positions. We’ll give them food and water, but they can’t leave the room until they all unanimously agree on a position. What policies (if any) would arise – or would they all just be stuck in the room arguing for eternity?

If I said they would agree to scrap the minimum wage, have a wholly private school system funded by vouchers and scrap most welfare and replace it with a simple negative income tax, would you believe me?

When discussing fair equality of opportunity in A Theory of Justice, Rawls says that the “Government tries to insure equal chances of education and culture for persons similarly endowed and motivated either by subsidising private schools or by establishing a public school system.” Significantly, Rawls himself does not think that the government needs to provide education or necessarily establish a public school system to fulfil the requirements of equal opportunity; a fully private school system is not ruled out. As Samuel Freeman says, Rawls’s “writings imply that a publically funded and regulated but still entirely private education system (for example, a voucher system) would be compatible with FEO.” Milton Friedman would be jumping for joy.

What about the minimum wage then? Well in an interview with PBS, Samuel Freeman said Rawls was opposed to the minimum wage (meanwhile the Economist tells us that Obama’s plan to raise the minimum wage makes him a Rawlsian – that’s poor scholarship): “He [Rawls] thought we ought to get rid of a minimum wage and let the labor market just go as low as it would and let employers just pay two, three dollars an hour if they could and let the government come in and supplement that.”

And what form did Rawls believe this supplement ought to take? Well, he again drew on Milton Friedman and argued for a negative income tax. When discussing the institutions associated with the second principle (chapter 5 of ToJ), Rawls says that “the government guarantees a social minimum either by family allowances and special payments for sickness and unemployment, or more systematically by such devices as a graded income supplement (a so-called negative income tax).”

So while Rawls, Freeman, Friedman and Hayek may not be best buds, there is perhaps more ground for positions associated with the “free market right” to be found in the work of Rawls than either classical or high liberals commonly discuss. Rawls the deregulatory school choice enthusiast is quite a different tale from the one you normally hear.

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allonsymywaywarddetective:

I don’t know if drawings count, but I drew these for a friend of mine who is obsessed with doctor who and llamas. So…yeah. Llamek and Cyberllama.

Today is the last day for the #Doctor Who tumblr tumbler tumblr thingy where you can win a Doctor Who tumbler from the Doctor Who tumblr.

“A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.”

“In the current abortion debate, there is no talk of children. … They never talk about nineteen-year-old fetuses,” lamented SNL’s Nora Dunn in a recent anthology of women writers and entertainers on the choice not to have children. But this sensitive subject was addressed even more eloquently and timelessly by beloved Italian writer, cultural critic, and literary jukeboxer Italo Calvino nearly three decades earlier, just as the second wave of feminism was gathering momentum. In a letter to Professor Claudio Magris from early February of 1975, found in the altogether fantastic newly released tome Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 (public library), Calvino responds in outrage to Magris’s pro-life article titled “The Deluded,” published in Italy’s premier newspaper, Corriere della sera, on February 3 that year. With a broader meditation on the meaning of life, Calvino makes a passionate yet crisply lucid case for abortion as respect rather than disrespect for life:

Bringing a child into the world makes sense only if this child is wanted consciously and freely by its two parents. If it is not, then it is simply animal and criminal behavior. A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people. If this is not the case, then humanity becomes — as it is already to a large extent — no more than a rabbit-warren. But this is no longer a “free-range” warren but a “battery” one, in the conditions of artificiality in which it lives, with artificial light and chemical feed.

Only those people … who are a hundred percent convinced that they possess the moral and physical possibility not only of rearing a child but of welcoming it as a welcome and beloved presence, have the right to procreate. If this is not the case, they must first of all do everything not to conceive, and if they do conceive (given that the margin for unpredictability continues to be high) abortion is not only a sad necessity, but a highly moral decision to be taken with full freedom of conscience. I do not understand how you can associate abortion with an idea of hedonism or the good life. Abortion is a terrifying thing…

In abortion the person who is massacred, physically and morally, is the woman. Also for any man with a conscience every abortion is a moral ordeal that leaves a mark, but certainly here the fate of the woman is in such a disproportionate condition of unfairness compared with the man’s, that every male should bite his tongue three times before speaking about such things. Just at the moment when we are trying to make less barbarous a situation which for the woman is truly terrifying, an intellectual uses his authority so that women have to stay in this hell. Let me tell you, you are really irresponsible, to say the least. I would not mock the “hygienic-prophylactic measures” so much; certainly you will never have to undergo a scraping of your womb. But I’d like to see your face if they forced you to have an operation in the filth and without any recourse to hospitals under pain of imprisonment.

Calvino ends the letter by making his convictions actionably clear:

I am sorry that such a radical divergence of opinion on these basic ethical questions has interrupted our friendship.

Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is indispensable in its entirety, a treasure trove of timeless insight on literature and life.

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WOOH!

season 3 episodes 1/14 - “The Runaway Bride”

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“Violence is never, EVER a choice that the man should make.”

Patrick Stewart’s infinitely moving account of how his childhood experience shaped his work on ending domestic violence against women, articulately arguing that this is not a “women’s problem” but, rather, its eradication is up to men. Amidst the epidemic of sexual assault on women in the military, Stewart points out the life-warping manifestations of PTSD across the spectrum of violence.

Please consider supporting Refuge, Stewart’s UK charity against domestic violence, and Joyful Heart Foundation, who do remarkable work to end sexual and domestic violence in the U.S.

(The Dish)

I love Rawls more than anyone else on this blog; perhaps a lot more. But sometimes you have to take out the trash and save the baby from the bathwater. So in this post, I’m going to list the Rawlsian positions and arguments I think Rawlsians (and libertarians) should jettison. My goal is to take the next step in explaining why libertarians should take Rawls seriously, following my explanation of Rawls’s project. By separating the bad from the good, I hope to show you a Rawls worth learning from.

Unlike many of my posts, I’m not going to make one sustained argument. I’m just going to give a laundry list of criticisms of quickly summarized Rawlsian arguments. We can talk about the details in the comments.

(1) The Veil Is Too Thick: the veil of ignorance deprives parties to the original position of too much information. I much prefer David Gauthier’s veil, where we know everything about people in our society, but we don’t know who we are. Rawls wanted a thick veil to ensure impartiality, but impartiality doesn’t require selecting principles of justice apart from facts about, say, the talents individuals have. This criticism is standard and much explored by many.

(2) Limited Agreement Behind the Veil/Indeterminacy: Unless we assume, as Rawls does, that parties to the original position are identical in every respect, there are considerations that will lead even these parties to disagree. This generates a lot of indeterminacy early on in the Rawlsian decision procedure. On this, see this.

(3) Principles Aren’t the Object of Justification: I think general principles are too vague to be useful action-guiding norms. How could we hope to determine, say, whether a society complies with the Difference Principle? As I argued in my POD series, it’s rather difficult to do. So it’s better to try to justify rules at a finer grain. It’s easier to determine whether rules are justified because it is easier to measure deviations from them and figure out how to bring social practices into alignment with them.

(4) Constitutional Essentials Aren’t the Object of Public Justification: In the same vein, where Rawls only thinks we have to publicly justify constitutional essentials, I think our first goal should be to publicly justified laws and judge constitutional essentials in terms of how reliably they promote public justification. I draw on related arguments from Jerry Gaus and Jon Quong on this point in their recent books.

(5) Natural Talents Aren’t Collective Assets: individuals can make fair distributive claims based on how they exercise their natural talents. It’s hard to see how such collectivism could be justified in the first place. It seems much more natural to assume that natural talents belong to individuals, and that principles of justice that allow coercing people to use their natural talents to serve others are prima facie suspect. That’s the grain of truth in the self-ownership thesis.

(6) The Political Liberties Are Less Important: Rawls argues that a regime can only be legitimate if the political liberties are guaranteed their fair value. This means that Rawls thinks political liberties are among our most important. But that’s not true. Political liberties aren’t that useful for familiar political science reasons and they’re certainly not more important the civic liberties that allow people to pursue their projects, be loyal to their religious principles, and so on. See J Brennan on this here.

(7) Economic Liberties Are More Important: Rawls only makes freedom of occupation and right to own personal property basic status, along with the civil and political liberties. But there’s just no good justification for excluding other economic liberties, like the right to own private capital. If we’re going to do the whole Rawls ’71 thing, we should learn from John Tomasi (see his posts at BHL and his book here). (Note: giving more economic liberties basic status does not mean they have maximal reach and weight, as they do on some libertarian views.)

(8) The Difference Principle is Wrong Because Maximin Sucks: maximin as the principle of choice in cases of uncertainty is unsound. In the end, it’s too risk averse. So the argument for the DP fails insofar as it is based on maximin. I still like Harsanyi’s early criticism here.

(9) The DP Is Wrong Because Reciprocity Arguments Assume (5): the implausibility of maximin has led many Rawlsians (including Rawls) to offer a reciprocity-based argument for the DP. Basically, the DP is supposed to express the idea the people don’t deserve their natural endowments, and so can’t fairly insist to benefit from them while denying others the right to do the same from them. But (5).

(10) The DP Is Wrong Because It Is Reasonably Rejectable: as Rawls admitted in Political Liberalism and The Law of Peoples, reasonable people can reject the Difference Principle (as I discussed in my last post). Rawls doesn’t think reasonable rejectability means that the DP is not part of the most reasonable conception of justice, but surely there are less problematic conceptions of justice that are more reasonable, such as ones with a sufficientarian distributive principle, which are far more widely endorsed (see David Miller on this).

(11) Full Compliance Is Too Demanding: Rawls is a proponent of ideal theory. Principles of justice can count as valid if they can self-stabilize under conditions of full compliance. In other words, citizens of a well ordered society are presumed not to deviate from complying with coercive institutions based on their self-interest or even their own ideology or principles when they require deviating justice as fairness. Citizens and elected officials, for instance, will follow the law even at serious cost to themselves. But this is not a plausible psychological model on which to base selection of principles of justice. Rawls’s non-ideal critics are right (Sen and Schmidtz are good on this; and yes, the Sen book sucks in general, but it has a few insights).

(12) No Ideal Regime Types: Once we give up on justifying principles, full compliance and determinacy behind a thick veil, the idea that we can formulate ideal regime types as models of justice is implausible. The best we can do is make a series of much more precise arguments about which laws and policies to support. The case for a system of free institutions will arise from the conjunction of these restricted arguments.

(13) No Property-Owning Democracy: given the importance of the economic liberties, the rejection of ideal regime types, and the rejection of the difference principle, there are no good Rawlsian arguments for POD. Plus, even if the case for the two principles is sound, POD fails to satisfy them. See my POD series.

(14) Public Reason Is Misunderstood: public reason should not be restricted to shared reasoning or prioritizing shared reasoning. There’s no good argument for restricting public discourse in this way (as I have argued in print here and here). I’ve argued with a friend that Rawlsian public reason is also a very poor assurance mechanism.

The image you see above comes from Redditor “manolo88″ who earlier today wrote, “My Turkish friend posted this on Facebook, on the left is Turkish CNN, and on the right is international CNN.” Should you think, as I originally did, that maybe the TV on the left was airing a commercial or digitally manipulated, think again.

Turk here. I can see why you would think that but, nope, this is exactly what it looks like. It was a long documentary about penguins, I think this one and this is just one of the many programs they keep showing while Turkey is burning. Before the penguin show there was a cooking show, if I remember correctly.

They refuse to share atrocities going on in all over Turkey and what little news they do offer either doesn’t pay justice to the gravity of the situation, or consists of airing the speeches of government officials who try to put the blame on the protesters. Turkish brand of CNN really did drop the ball on this one and there is a massive boycott and uproar against them right now, along with other TVs and newspapers that remain quiet. (Via)

In other words:

(Via Reddit)

From David Jacobs:

Code is like poetry; most of it shouldn’t have been written.

triguenaista:

problackass:

glovesinthesummertime:

thechanelmuse:

Photos that speak: Fuck your fountain. Fuck your tree. Fuck voter suppression. Fuck your labels. Fuck your stereotypes. Fuck your hatred. Fuck your restaurants. Fuck that dude. Fuck police brutality. Fuck white supremacy. 

I have nothing left to say.

The pictures they don’t show in our US History books.

And two of these pictures aren’t very old either. One was taken in 2012 I think? (Not sure).

doctorwho:

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.

Doctor Who: The Time Warrior

A straight line may be the shortest distance between two points, but it is by no means the most interesting.

Doctor Who: The Time Warrior

Relationships can be challenging, but social networks make connecting with the special people in your life a little bit easier. Connecting and tweeting, Instagramming and poking.

In this comic, illustrator and comedian Teddy Hose breaks down the ways sites like Facebook and Twitter can improve our real-life bonds.

Remember, lovehounds, nothing expresses your feelings like pinning

Image courtesy of Teddy Hose Read more...

More about Comic, Social Networking, Comics, Humor, and Watercooler

This Saturday, Bayern Munchen won the Champions League final game against Borussia Dortmund 2:1, securing the team's fifth title in Europe's most prestigious football cup

The game was intense, with Arjen Robben scoring for his team in the 89th minute for the victory. Now, you have a chance to watch the shortened version of the match, recreated with Lego bricks, courtesy of The Guardian

The 3:14-minute long video has all the highlights from the game, including the three goals and the celebrations that followed the game

How do you like the video? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Image courtesy of The Guardian Read more...

More about Football, Lego, Watercooler, Videos, and Bayern

Sim.

Try typing this, or any question with roughly the same meaning, into the Google search box:

Which UK papers are not part of the Murdoch empire?

Your results (and you could get identical ones by typing the same words in the reverse order) will contain an estimated two million or more pages about Rupert Murdoch and the newspapers owned by his News Corporation. Exactly what you did not ask for.

Putting quotes round the search string freezes the word order, but makes things worse: It calls not for the answer (which would be a list including The Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, etc.) but for pages where the exact wording of the question can be found, and there probably aren’t any (except this post).

Machine answering of such a question calls for not just a database of information about newspapers but also natural language processing (NLP). I’ve been waiting for NLP to arrive for 30 years. Whatever happened?

In the 1980s I was convinced that computers would soon be able to simulate the basics of what (I hope) you are doing right now: processing sentences and determining their meanings.

To do this, computers would have to master three things. First, enough syntax to uniquely identify the sentence; second, enough semantics to extract its literal meaning; and third, enough pragmatics to infer the intent behind the utterance, and thus discerning what should be done or assumed given that it was uttered.

Take Flying planes is dangerous as an example. The syntactic step includes identifying it as having a singular subject (a gerund-participial clause), accounting for the singular agreement form is. (The distinct sentence Flying planes are dangerous has a plural noun phrase as subject, hence plural agreement on are.)

The semantic step involves (at the very least) noting that Flying planes is dangerous talks about a risky activity. (Again, contrast this with Flying planes are dangerous, which is about aircraft being a danger.)

Pragmatically, however, an utterance often conveys far more than its literal meaning. If Bob has just said “She gets so panicky when her husband is at work,” and Jane responds, “Well, flying planes is dangerous,” you will probably conclude that Bob and Jane know a nervous married woman whose spouse is a pilot, possibly a test pilot, and Jane sees that hazardous job as justifying some level of anxiety. Yet none of this was explicit in the two utterances. Such inferences rely on a complex process of common-sense pragmatic reasoning that we have no idea how to model computationally.

So ignore the pragmatic step; useful work could still be accomplished by a system limited to syntax and semantics. Why do we not find computer programs in general use that can analyze simple questions and provide answers in response? Imagine sending off queries like these, by text or e-mail, to an NLP server:

• “Can your site be accessed without using Internet Explorer?”
• “What is the validity period for multiple-entry business visas?”
• “Do you offer telephone support from the USA?”

Imagine that the machine—not some underpaid message-taker in a Mumbai call center whom you only reach after 10 minutes listening to “The Girl from Ipanema”—could process the questions, look up the answers, and return appropriate responses in a few hundredths of a second. Even if occasionally it replied “Sorry, I didn’t understand the question,” it could still be a boon in the average case.

One company was headed in that direction a few years ago, and had a nascent Wikipedia-based NLP question-answering service up and running in 2008: Powerset. But within a few weeks of its release, Microsoft made them an offer they did not refuse. Now, it seems, the science sleeps with the fishes: www.powerset.com simply redirects to Bing (a plain old keyword-based search engine with which Microsoft is trying to rival Google). Once again there is, to my knowledge, no available system for unaided machine answering of free-form questions via general syntactic and semantic analysis. (Clever ad hoc tweaks make some search engines answer selected simple question forms—try Google on “What is the square root of 1531?”—but don’t be fooled by imitations.)

How could we have drifted into the second decade of the 21st century with absolutely no commercial NLP products? I believe the answer lies in three initially unexpected developments having little to do with NLP. Each enabled a previously near-useless technology to become a useful substitute, reducing the need for the real thing.

Next Monday (May 13, 2013) I’ll discuss the first of those three breakthroughs.

[Editor's Note: My USD Colleague, Lori Watson, delivered this speech last week. I liked it a lot, and thought BHL readers would appreciate it too.]

 Last week, the Pride organization, a student group at the University of San Diego, put on its 2^nd Annual Drag Show. The inaugural event was developed last year, in part to provide an entertaining educational context in which to inform the community about California’s recent inclusion of gender identity and gender expression as protected classes under California discrimination law. The showmet with vehement and outraged criticism; critics argued that allowing such performances was incompatible with the mission of a Catholic university.  Some critics went so far as to suggest that the University of San Diego should no longer be allowed to identify as a Catholic institution of higher education, and claimed that USD had signed on to the “radical homosexual agenda,” whatever that is and despite the fact that though drag shows do take place often in gay identified spaces, drag performance and sexual orientation are separate things.

As the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at USD, I was asked by the Pride group to give an introductory speech.  Here is what I said:

Imagine this:

You are walking down the street, wearing your brand new purple, silk shirt, feeling good.

The police stop you, and question you: “Where did you get that shirt? Who are your parents? Do you have right to wear that shirt?”

“What?” you ask.

The police ask: “Well, are you the King, the Queen, a member of the royal family?”

“No,” you reply. And you are promptly arrested.

Now this may sound silly to our modern ear, but the situation I’ve just described is based on the Sumptuary laws of Elizabethan England.

Various forms of clothing were forbidden to the lower classes, reserved for Nobles, enforced by law, and punishable by imprisonment.

What was the purpose of such laws? To enforce the class structure, and hence the power structure of that society, through clear regulations as to how one can present oneself in public.

One’s identity, one’s status had to be publically announced through external signs… clothing… and purposefully misleading the public by representing oneself as a member of a higher station, a higher class, was considered both an affront to the natural order and to the political order.

Now, fast forward to 1864…

You are in St. Louis, you have just purchased your first bicycle, a relatively new form of transportation. You are excited to try our your new means of mobility, but wearing a skirt is an inconvenient garment given the way the seat and the pedals work, so you put on a pair of “bloomers.” Since it’s cold, you grab your husbands over-coat, and jump on your bike.

You don’t get far before the police stop you. You are arrested.

Your crime? Dressing in disguise – gender fraud.

Fast forward again to 1978:

You are in Chicago, having brunch with a friend. As you walk out of the dinner, both of you are promptly arrested.

The statute under which you are charged makes it a crime for “any person who shall appear in a public place…in a dress not belonging to his or her sex with intent to conceal his or her sex…”

The rationale for this law?

• to protect public from fraud
• aid in the detection of criminals
• prevent crimes in washrooms
• prevent inherently anti-social conduct

Fast forward to 1993, in Humboldt Nebraska…

You pick up the paper and read the story of a grizzly rape and murder of a young man named Brandon Teena.

And, though the facts of this case are complex, ultimately the reason Brandon was raped and murdered is that though he was biologically female, he successfully “passed” as a man. His “friends”, those that raped and murdered him, felt tricked…duped. Brandon had “misrepresented” his “true” gender identity, and he needed to be taught a lesson.

What do all these vignettes have in common?

In each case either the law or the prevailing social norms (or both) called for the punishment of an individual for expressing his or her identity in a way the departed from socially acceptable ways of being.

Importantly, those socially acceptable ways of being are often justified in terms of what is “natural” what is “normal” … where “natural” and “normal” are to be read as not deviant.

So, this brings us to the topic of drag shows, and in particular the criticism of this event, and the practice of drag more broadly.

“It’s wrong!” they exclaim! As if the louder and more frequently one says this the more true it becomes.

So, I would like to ask: “What is it that is wrong? And why is it wrong?”

“Well, men dressing in women’s clothes! Women dressing in men’s clothes!

It violates the natural law!

It overturns the natural order of things!

It’s against nature!!”

In response, I invite you to entertain this thought as you watch the performances tonight and as you reflect afterwards…

The folks performing on stage tonight are no more in drag than anyone else in this room.

Let me repeat that thought. Each of you sitting in this theatre tonight is as much in so-called drag as those who will perform here tonight.

Each of you is performing a gender: in your choice of underwear, in your choice of shirt, of pants, of hairstyle, of adornment, of shoes, of deodorant, of whether your wear make-up, of body language, the way you sit, the way you stand, the way you walk, the way you greet you friends… do you hug them? Do you nod at them? And on and on and on…

Ask yourself: what, if anything, do any of these choices or these social signs of gender have to do with your biological sex?

Does wearing high heels make you a woman? Reflect an innate fact of your biology?

Well, not if you are in 17th Century France, in which high-heeled boots were introduced as a form of shoe for Royal men, who were copying Turkish horse riding boots!

Finally, I will ask you to reflect on one further thought as you participate in tonight’s events and in the days and weeks after…

Let’s go back to our story of Elizabethan Sumptuary Laws. Recall my suggestion that the purpose of those laws was to reinforce class structure. Specifically, to reinforce a distinction between those who are entitled to power, privilege and authority and those who are subject to such authority, lacking the necessary power and privilege.

How might we extend this analysis to the cultural enforcement of gendered distinction? Men wear suits, men wear ties… women wear dresses, women wear high heels, women wear make-up.

These gendered differences are sharp, they are pronounced, they are enforced, if not by law any longer then by social opinion, social shame, and social ostracism.

What hierarchy are they preserving?

I was wrong.

One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul."

It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free.

And now I'm supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I'm supposed to be enlightened. I'm supposed to be more "real," now. More perfect.

But instead it's 8PM and I just woke up. I slept all day, woke with eight voicemails on my phone from friends and coworkers. I went to my coffee shop to consume dinner, the Knicks game, my two newspapers, and a copy of...

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According to the majority of pilots, takeoff and landing are the most dangerous aspects of a flight.  Still, some conditions are riskier than others—but it seems that all the mountain peaks, cliff faces, crowded beaches, and main roads on our list, haven’t managed to discourage the brave pilots who navigate them every day.

Since the topic of the deadliest airline disasters has been covered before, let’s have a look now at the most extreme and hazardous airports around the world.  Fasten your seatbelts:

10 Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport Saba Island

Getting to this amazingly beautiful Caribbean island can be a bit distressing, thanks to a mere 1300-foot-long runway—only slightly longer than most aircraft carrier runways. The incredibly short runway is surrounded by tall cliffs, and it comes dangerously close to a steep slope which leads directly to the ocean.

For these reasons, it is one of the most dangerous airports in the world. An incorrect assessment of the pilot during the takeoff may take the airplane straight into the abyss. Large planes avoid this airport for obvious reasons, but even for a very small aircraft such as a Cessna, landing seems to be a difficult mission—especially when the weather conditions are bad. At least everybody knows what’s to blame for the constant decrease of tourism in the island.

9 Qamdo Bamda Airport Tibet

Qamdo Bamda Airport is the world’s highest airport, perched more than 14,000 feet above sea level. Even more impressive than the airport’s altitude, however, is the nearly 3.5-mile-long runway.  

Having a runway that’s the length of sixty soccer fields may seem a bit excessive, but apparently long runways are crucial to making safe landings at higher altitudes. At sea level, where the approach speed is about 150mph, it may take five thousand feet of runway to stop. But at more than fourteen thousand feet above sea level, the same approach speed will require around twice as runway to bring a plane to a halt.

Traveling at high altitude can in fact be pretty dangerous all round, and travelers should make themselves aware of conditions before they decide to fly in such places

8 Gustaf III Airport Saint Barthélemy

The small airport of Gustaf III, on the Caribbean island of Saint Barthélemy, provides pilots and passengers alike with some fairly grave dangers. The corridor in which the runway has been built is incredibly narrow, and planes come frighteningly close to hitting the slopes of the adjacent upland area, or plummeting into the ocean, every time they land.

This video on youtube clearly shows what you might have to go through if something goes wrong during the landing. The good thing is that—in this instance at least—no one was even slightly injured.

7 Ice Runway Antarctica

The dangers of Ice Runway have more to do with the extreme weather conditions that the pilot has to deal with, rather than the design or position of the airport itself. The Ice Runway is one of three major airstrips used to haul supplies and researchers to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station. As its name implies, there’s no tarmac in sight—just long stretches of meticulously groomed ice and snow.

There is no shortage of space on the Ice Runway, so super-sized aircraft can land with relative ease. The real challenge is making sure that the weight of the aircraft and cargo doesn’t bust the ice or get the plane stuck in soft snow. As the ice of the runway begins to break up, planes are redirected to Pegasus Field or Williams Field, the two other airstrips servicing the station.

6 Courchevel Airport France

The city of Courchevel in the French Alps is one of the most famous ski resorts in Europe, but it seems like the city owes much of its fame to its airport, which is located inside the mountains. Courchevel Airport is not only famous for its incredible height and bizarre location, but also for the fact that it has had a leading role in a James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies, which depicted Mr. Bond landing a plane successfully in the extremely dangerous airport.

5 Barra International Airport Scotland

This is quite possibly the only airport in the world that also serves as a beach. Takeoffs and landings at Barra Airport occur on the same sand that people can stroll along during airport off-hours. And that’s just the beginning: during high tide in the evening, the illumination from the lights of all the cars passing by assist the pilot with his landing. For those who simply want to enjoy a romantic walk along the beach, there are warning signs informing them of all expected upcoming flight arrivals.

Believe it or not, Barra is still an officially recognized international airport by the Air Traffic Organization, and it seems like any kind of logical or critical suggestion would be deemed irrelevant by the authorities. We can only hope that they know better than us!

4 Toncontin International Airport Honduras

In Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, we can fly into one of the most dangerous and notorious airports in the world. It has been the subject of scrutiny following several accidents, including a 2008 crash that caused the deaths of five passengers. The airport opened back in 1934, an era when planes were less powerful and didn’t require such lengthy runways.

Toncontin’s runway is just over seven thousand feet long, and it’s situated in a valley surrounded by mountains. What’s even harder to believe—and by far the most hazardous aspect of this airport—is that there’s only one way in and one way out for the planes, which increases the risk dramatically. Despite all these high-risk factors, planes as large as Boeing 757’s land at the airport on a daily basis.

3 Tenzing-Hillary Airport Nepal

Lukla Airport, as it was called originally, was later renamed Tenzing-Hillary Airport to honor the first climbers to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Located in Lukla, Nepal, the airport serves thousands of climbers hoping to “conquer” Mount Everest, as well as trekkers wishing to explore the Everest region.

Dangers at this airport include high winds and extreme cloud cover—but these are by no means the scariest aspects. Like Gustaf III Airport, one end of the runway is preceded by high terrain; but instead of a beautiful sandy beach on the other end, there is a two-thousand-foot drop.

There have been several accidents at Lukla airport, most recently on October 12, 2010.

2 Madeira Airport Portugal

The two main runways at Madeira Airport were just 5,250 feet long when the airport was first opened back in 1964.

After a horrifying crash in 1977, in which an incoming Boeing 727 smashed through a stone bridge and ended up on the beach, one of the runways was extended by 655 feet. In the early 2000s, the runway was further lengthened by extending it across the beach, supported by columns.

Lengthened or not, the basic approach to Madeira Airport remains tricky to this day, even for the most experienced pilots. Against their better instincts, pilots must first aim the aircraft directly at a looming mountain peak, and then quickly bank to the right in order to avoid crashing into the mountain, in order to put themselves on course for the runway.

1 Gibraltar Airport Gibraltar

Gibraltar airport is not only one of the most dangerous airports in the world, but one of the busier ones as well (especially compared to the other risky airports included in this list). No matter how unbelievable this might sound, the corridor of this airport actually passes through the main street of the city.

Vehicles are made to stop every time an aircraft lands or takes off. It’s amazing that there has never been a major accident—and we can only hope it stays that way.

Theodoros II is a budding author and a law graduate. He loves History, Sci-Fi culture, European politics, and exploring the worlds of hidden knowledge. His ideal trip in an ideal world would be to the lost city of Atlantis.

The post 10 Extreme Airports That Flirt With Disaster appeared first on Listverse.

Susan Griffiths died yesterday. She died by drinking poison that knocked her out, put her in a coma, and slowly killed her… all without pain.

It was her choice to drink the mixture. It was either that or eventually succumbing to a painful, debilitating brain disease.

Susan Griffiths (Ruth Bonneville – Winnipeg Free Press)

In her Winnipeg home, they wouldn’t allow her to die on her own terms, so she had to fly to Switzerland to end her life. Lindor Reynolds captured her story beautifully in this article (and accompanying video). Griffiths, an atheist, really was an incredible woman.

There’s a lot of conversation in the local Canadian press about end-of-life care and why Canada should allow people to die with dignity, but the most jaw-dropping response may have come from someone who read Reynolds’ story:

The day after my story about Susan ran, I got a phone call from a distressed man. He wanted me to give him Susan’s number. He was a Christian, he said, and he needed to tell her she’d go to hell if she went ahead with her plans. She was in Europe, I said, and an atheist with no belief in an afterlife. He insisted she was a sinner. I suggested, as gently as possible, that he add Susan to his prayer list. She was already on mine, I said. He said he’d pray she changed her mind. That was his right, I said.

I can’t tell if that gesture is loving or dickish. Maybe it’s both. Either way, I’m grateful to the religious reporter for politely declining his request.

It would be great if Griffiths’ decision could inspire lawmakers in Canada to change their laws. There’s no reason to deny people the opportunity to end their lives as they see fit. Want to require some counseling first? Fine. A few restrictions? Okay. But to deny it completely, especially after seeing what Tony Nicklinson had to go through, is simply barbaric.

(Thanks to Jackie for the link)

Source: Wikipedia

A atual Secretária de Planejamento de São Paulo recentemente concedeu entrevista à Folha falando sobre o caso de Pinheirinho e o que ela chama de desenvolvimento urbano pautado pela lógica mercantil.

Em larga escala, concordo plenamente que as cidades brasileiras sempre foram definidas por essa parceria nefasta entre o público e o privado poderoso, mas acho que ela erra tremendamente ao apontar as principais causas e soluções para o caso. A situação nada tem a ver com o fato de trabalho e terra serem mercadoria, como ela comenta na entrevista, mas pela intervenção do estado neste mercado (o conceito de mercantilismo) já que é ele que usa a força e a coerção sobre o planejamento urbano, deixando-nos sem opção. Quanto ao mercado, nenhuma oferta comercial é irrecusável, apesar de usarmos o termo com certa frequência.

Ao criticar as relações de trocas, a Secretária esquece do papel do estado como o principal excluidor do pobre do mercado e ao seu direito à moradia. Como escrevi em uma postagem recente, "O estado não permite o usucapião de terras públicas, determina cerca de 1000 páginas de regras e normas para o cidadão construir sua própria casa, passando por mais de 10 secretarias, além de cobrar impostos e taxas. A construção na favela é crime e moradias para porta de saída da favelas são proibidas."

Assim, como que o peso da propriedade privada seria tão forte, se a propriedade é tão amplamente regulada e, neste caso, se moradores de favelas não tem direito à ele? Aliás, como defender coerentemente a regularização fundiária e o direito à moradia sem defender a propriedade privada ao mesmo tempo? Como dizer que os preços dos imóveis são pautados pelo mercado quando a oferta é limitada por leis que limitam severamente a construção nos centros? E ainda, como dizer que "Se o Estado não entra para reequilibrar o jogo, é um desastre" quando o papel dele sempre foi forte significativo no desenvolvimento urbano das nossas metrópoles? A conclusão de Leda Paulani fica ainda mais esquisita quando vejo que o desfecho comum das comunidades "informais" - favelas - é, justamente, a sua invasão e remoção por tropas do próprio estado, principalmente no caso Pinheirinho.

A lógica mercantil - no seu conceito original, de mercantilismo - deve sim ser quebrada, permitindo que os moradores de favelas finalmente tenham seu direito à propriedade e acabando com o conluio entre mercado imobiliário e estado, gerado unicamente pela captura regulatória sobre o setor. Se a entrada de novos concorrentes no mercado de construção fosse mais simples, pequenas incorporadoras poderiam ter sua vez de crescer, acabando com a dominação de grandes grupos comerciais. Por fim, se a interferência do estado no setor não fosse tão grande, seria irrelevante o investimento das empresas em  alianças com o poder público, já que este em nada poderia ajudá-las. Seguir o caminho oposto, da fé na autoridade estatal ao considerá-lo uma entidade intrinsecamente justa, seria simplesmente ignorar os erros sistematicamente cometidos, independente se foi nesta ou na outra gestão.