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Habibi posted:This is sort of the thing I'm dealing with as well. Along with stuff about FEMA "conveniently" being there the night before (they were - reportedly for training exercises, although I guess there's some controversy regarding what the then-director said about them being there); claims about FEMA generally preparing for some disaster that the government is going to cause; and so on. I should point here: The World Trade Center complex held most of NYC's emergency management facilities, and I believe a FEMA office. Plus FEMA personnel have always been stationed around and in NYC just like they are in the other major American cities - you want quick response in them.
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Oct 9, 2012 05:04
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One thing that always kept me away from the truther stuff was this: okay, let's say Bush planned it so he had a carte blanche to invade Iraq or Afghanistan. So why have the hijackers be almost all Saudis? That's the best Arab ally the USG has in the middle east. Of course lunatics will say "that's what they WANT you to think!" I think truthers give the USG way too much credit.
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Oct 9, 2012 05:25
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Would endorsing conspiracy theories really put your job at risk? People believe all sorts of poo poo.Zeitgueist posted:One of the things that gets people going on 9/11 conspiracies is that the buildings 'look like they dropped from a controlled demolition' which is to say they've never seen a building collapse that wasn't a nice pretty controlled collapse on TV. I find the whole line of incredulity about the damage bizarre. I'm no structural engineer -- nor anyone I've seen advancing these theories -- but that a commercial airliner would do a spectacular amount of damage to a skyscraper seems pretty uncontroversial to me. Beyond that I have so little comprehension about the problems involved that it's hard to imagine quibbling with the specifics of the damage (would it completely fall down? How much horizontal distance should the debris cover? Like, I just don't have a basis of reference).
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Oct 9, 2012 05:37
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One of the key features of the World Trade Center design, since they were going to be built so tall, was that they were designed to collapse downwards in case of catastrophic damage. Instead of falling over and wiping out a third of Lower Manhattan.
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Oct 9, 2012 05:50
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Install Gentoo posted:One of the key features of the World Trade Center design, since they were going to be built so tall, was that they were designed to collapse downwards in case of catastrophic damage. Instead of falling over and wiping out a third of Lower Manhattan. I hadn't heard this before - is it sourced somewhere?
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Oct 9, 2012 05:57
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Habibi posted:I need some good resources on 9/11, whether online or book. This isn't directly related to what you're looking for, but it's a fantastic resource and deserves a broad readership: The Terrorism Delusion. The subtitle, 'America’s Overwrought Response to September 11' is a good summation of its thesis. It's a very well referenced look at the nature of terrorism in America, and succeeds in showing that 9/11 was really just a once-off lucky break for a tiny contingent of badly-organised amateurs, that didn't portend any meaningful threat to the West.
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Oct 9, 2012 12:02
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Habibi posted:I hadn't heard this before - is it sourced somewhere? This is the only source I've found so far on the matter: "It has been suggested that it was fortunate that the WTC did not tip over onto other buildings surrounding the area. There are several points that should be made. First, the building is not solid; it is 95 percent air and, hence, can implode onto itself. Second, there is no lateral load, even the impact of a speeding aircraft, which is sufficient to move the center of gravity one hundred feet to the side such that it is not within the base footprint of the structure. Third, given the near free-fall collapse, there was insufficient time for portions to attain significant lateral velocity. To summarize all of these points, a 500,000 t structure has too much inertia to fall in any direction other than nearly straight down." I'm not a structural engineer or anything of the sort, but that makes a lot of sense to me; anything with sufficient mass to actually impart a large change in horizontal movement would probably punch a hole clean through the structure and out the other side. Buildings just aren't designed to take that much force and the materials making them up give way.
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Oct 9, 2012 19:15
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Yeah sorry I think I implied too much there. It's that the very way the structure was built, you couldn't topple it over; only force it to collapse pretty much straight down to its foot print. And if it were built a different way, it would have posed a hazard should you have managed to knock it over onto lower Manhattan.
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Oct 9, 2012 19:26
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That's very interesting, thanks to both of you. I've finally talked my friend into revealing his entire point of view, sourced and everything, in a few days when he gets it all organized. Should be interesting.
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Oct 9, 2012 20:14
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Install Gentoo posted:And if it were built a different way, it would have posed a hazard should you have managed to knock it over onto lower Manhattan. And just so people don't think "pfft, that's just Michael Bay talk", the story about what was then the Citicorp Center is very interesting. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center#Engineering_crisis_of_1978 but the short version is: An engineering student determined that they had Done It Wrong, and due to its unique architecture, the tower was at risk of toppling in high winds. They worked hard to get it fixed in secret, but just in case, worked with the Red Cross to formulate an evacuation plan for Midtown Manhattan, because if it toppled (and a hurricane was heading towards New York at one point), they were concerned that it would create a domino effect. Some sources I find say it could have destroyed 156 city blocks, causing potentially over a hundred thousand casualties, but sadly I can't reliably source the numbers above, and I don't have access to the original New Yorker article.
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Oct 9, 2012 20:15
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Assuming the CitiGroup building merely fell over by itself and didn't cause a domino effect, it would still devastate between 5 and 10 whole Manhattan blocks, mostly dependent on the direction it fell, as well as blocking off dozens of streets and likely destroying a large section of the busiest subway line in NYC. And that's the best case scenario for the building falling over!
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Oct 9, 2012 20:30
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Does anyone have a map or chart of American gun crime vs. gun ownership by city?
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Oct 11, 2012 02:42
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I can't find Romney saying he wants to keep insurance for people with pre-existing conditions etc, because Google searching for "Romney Obamacare" just gives a billion terrible opinion articles. Anyone?
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Oct 11, 2012 23:48
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Sai posted:I can't find Romney saying he wants to keep insurance for people with pre-existing conditions etc, because Google searching for "Romney Obamacare" just gives a billion terrible opinion articles. Anyone? The only real difference between Romneycare and Obamacare is that Romneycare provided some abortion coverage. They're nearly identical plans, and both candidates know it....though I don't know if the same could be said for the voters. Romney has been very vague on what he'd do in office, IIRC, and my guess is he wouldn't significantly roll back the ACA. The only major healthcare differences between Romney and Obama that have been stated are on Medicare, where Romney has said he'd have a voucher program for people who are less likely to vote for him.
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Oct 11, 2012 23:53
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I remember seeing an analysis of how much Americans pay in taxes when everything is accounted for. It was like 40-something percent, +/- 5%. I can't find it. My search queries are always flooded out. Anyone remember this?Sai posted:I can't find Romney saying he wants to keep insurance for people with pre-existing conditions etc, because Google searching for "Romney Obamacare" just gives a billion terrible opinion articles. Anyone? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/romney-2012-presidential-debate_n_1940184.html Huffington Post posted:"I do have a plan that deals with people with pre-existing conditions. That's part of my health care plan," Romney said.
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Oct 17, 2012 02:45
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The Casualty posted:Does anyone have a map or chart of American gun crime vs. gun ownership by city? This is a tricky thing to ask; I'm not aware of any city-specific studies on gun ownership rates. Do you mean legal gun ownership or just gun possession? The latter is obviously pretty hard to get a handle on.
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Oct 17, 2012 06:26
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The closest thing I can say on that is about how, during the early 90s when Washington D.C. was the murder capital of the country, all handguns were banned in the district. Of course that didn't stop anyone from bringing one in from Maryland or Virginia, but the fact was that handguns were completely 100% banned in D.C., as I recall. Fat lot of good it did.
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Oct 17, 2012 16:19
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Golbez posted:The closest thing I can say on that is about how, during the early 90s when Washington D.C. was the murder capital of the country, all handguns were banned in the district. Of course that didn't stop anyone from bringing one in from Maryland or Virginia, but the fact was that handguns were completely 100% banned in D.C., as I recall. Fat lot of good it did. There's a blog post I ran across while searching for the graph I was after that basically claimed, with statistical evidence, that bans on handguns actually correlated with an increase in gun murders, especially if those cities (D.C. and Chicago in this instance) were near areas with lax gun laws. While the blog post incorrectly argued that the best way to reduce gun crime was to just reduce gun control everywhere (instead of, you know, cracking down on gun migration and arms trafficking, or tightening restrictions on sellers in these gun-friendly states), the statistics pretty much deflated my perceptions and I couldn't in good faith continue my line of rhetoric, that cities with harsh gun control have lower crime rates.
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Oct 18, 2012 00:26
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The Casualty posted:There's a blog post I ran across while searching for the graph I was after that basically claimed, with statistical evidence, that bans on handguns actually correlated with an increase in gun murders, especially if those cities (D.C. and Chicago in this instance) were near areas with lax gun laws. While the blog post incorrectly argued that the best way to reduce gun crime was to just reduce gun control everywhere (instead of, you know, cracking down on gun migration and arms trafficking, or tightening restrictions on sellers in these gun-friendly states), the statistics pretty much deflated my perceptions and I couldn't in good faith continue my line of rhetoric, that cities with harsh gun control have lower crime rates. In general, you're going to have a hard time building a statistical argument for (or against) gun control--there's always a study out there that says the opposite of what yours does, and your opponent will find it.
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Oct 18, 2012 10:49
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A city with completely open boarders surrounded by a state with laxer laws isn't going to be a particularly good test case for gun control. Likewise a society that already has an entrenched gun culture and black market in illegal firearms probably posses additional problems that wouldn't exist if we were designing all of our laws from scratch. To actually work effectively I imagine that gun control would need to be widely implemented and there's need to be some sort of check point dividing the controlled region from areas with laxer enforcement regimes. If Canada outlawed all firearms tomorrow but also abolished boarder inspections then I can't imagine the result would be much of an impact on (illegal) gun ownership because there would still be a large supply and existing criminals have already internalized a culture of gun ownership. Policies need to be scaled properly, so to adequately test gun control you need to implement it on the right scale, and policies also need to be sensitive to history. To illustrate: I think its highly possible that a very aggressive and militant police campaign many decades ago might have halted the spread of crack cocaine. At this point, however, crack has become so endemic that militant police tactics are not only ineffective, they're outright destructive. This is one of many examples where a policy that might have been sensible once becomes overtaken by subsequent events. Effective gun control won't be some kind of timeless one-size-fits-all policy. If it were going to work it'd have to be implemented based on a close analysis of the existing situation. Simply passing, say, a blanket ban on handgun ownership (as my current city is currently thinking of doing) is mostly just a way for politicians to demonstrate that they are doing something, but that doesn't mean that some other methods of gun control might not be effective.
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Oct 18, 2012 19:38
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Helsing posted:
Welp, good to know that it's no use worrying about it then until the official police state comes into practice.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:11
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I'm not really sure what point you thought I was making, or what point you were trying to make, but thanks for confirming that pretty much any post starting with "Welp" is going to be terrible.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:14
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Helsing posted:I'm not really sure what point you thought I was making, or what point you were trying to make, but thanks for confirming that pretty much any post starting with "Welp" is going to be terrible. My point is that gun control is (still) a dead issue. You're not going to see if it works unless you literally put a police state into place (complete with checkpoints), and that's not going to happen in the US (for guns anyway).
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Oct 18, 2012 20:18
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Regulating firearms doesn't require a literal police state. Firearms are already regulated and heavy weaponry tends not to be made available to the public. Ammunition and clip size can and are also regulated. These regimes are imperfect, and improving them would be hard, but the dilemma you're presenting is totally false.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:29
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Helsing posted:Regulating firearms doesn't require a literal police state. Firearms are already regulated and heavy weaponry tends not to be made available to the public. Ammunition and clip size can and are also regulated. These regimes are imperfect, and improving them would be hard, but the dilemma you're presenting is totally false. If this: quote:To actually work effectively I imagine that gun control would need to be widely implemented and there's need to be some sort of check point dividing the controlled region from areas with laxer enforcement regimes.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:34
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computer parts posted:If this: Do two small hypothetical European countries employ 'police states', in a given situation where both of them fall outside the EEC and thus have customs checkpoints? If no, then it seems 'police state' is not really the word you're looking for, if Helsing's 'controlled region' would amount to the equivalent of an American state. If yes, then let me show you some stuff that will blow your mind SSJ2 Goku Wilders fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Oct 18, 2012 |
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Oct 18, 2012 20:43
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computer parts posted:If this: No, it doesn't. The point about "checkpoints" was to illustrate why an American city isn't the appropriate administrative scale for fire arms control, it wasn't a suggestion that placing domestic checkpoints around the country is the only (or the best) way to regulate firearms. I mean you do realize that current firearm laws substantially regulate the industry, right? Modern states are capable of outlawing high powered rifles, anti-tank weapons, hand guns etc. without resorting to a police state. Unless that is you consider the boarder crossing (i.e. a more realistic example of a check point than what you're thinking) between America and Mexico is tantamount to a police state.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:47
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SSJ2 Goku Wilders posted:Do two small hypothetical European countries employ 'police states', in a given situation where both of them fall outside the EEC and thus have customs checkpoints? No, but we're (presumably) talking about US states, not different countries. e: My thesis: Gun control in the US is not possible given the above concerns because states have never had customs controls (for guns anyway) like actual countries do.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:54
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computer parts posted:No, but we're (presumably) talking about US states, not different countries. They're both 'controlled regions', and for the sake of gun control, I really don't see a huge difference. e: they've never had them so they can never have them. literally all progress is impossible
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Oct 18, 2012 20:55
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SSJ2 Goku Wilders posted:e: they've never had them so they can never have them. literally all progress is impossible America is individualist as gently caress, surprise surprise they're not going to let custom checkpoints develop between state boundaries.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:57
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computer parts posted:America is individualist as gently caress, surprise surprise they're not going to let custom checkpoints develop between state boundaries. Friend, I know, but what is is not what can or should be, IMHO!!
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Oct 18, 2012 21:01
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Given what Americans will tolerate in the war on drugs or in schools or at airports, I'm not sure anybody can authoritatively predict what future generations of Americans will or will not tolerate. I doubt Orwell ever imagined that a 1984 style surveillance state would be adopted voluntarily through Facebook and google. You're right to point out the substantial political obstacles to gun control, but it isn't impossible. It already exists in America. What we're discussing is actually modifying an existing regime, not imposing an entirely new one. One obvious example of prudent gun control that could be implemented by focusing on the supply side rather than the demand side would be regulating clip size. That would be achievable within the pre-existing regulatory framework (though it'd require new legislation) and could be more focused on manufacturers than end users. Many of these policy questions are fundamentally technocratic. How do we thinker a bit here, alter a bit there, fudge the margins here, etc. to get slightly better results than what we have now? Politics is the art of the possible, and that includes regulatory regimes. So I'm not coming in here and saying "Follow steps X, Y and Z and gun control will be easy to implement in America." What I am saying is that gun control is a complex and multifaced problem. Its neither solvable by a blanket ban on firearms in a single city, nor is the larger issue reducible to "its guns or a police state, you have to pick one."
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Oct 18, 2012 21:06
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SSJ2 Goku Wilders posted:Friend, I know, but what is is not what can or should be, IMHO!! So are you saying there *should* be checkpoints, or are you just responding to the fallacy of "it never was, so it never will be"? Because if it's the former, then no sir, I don't like it.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:20
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Golbez posted:So are you saying there *should* be checkpoints, or are you just responding to the fallacy of "it never was, so it never will be"? I ain't him but from my lookin' it seemed like Goku Wilders objected to the characterization of 'customs checkpoints' as 'police state'.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:34
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I can tell you about two dozen backwoods gravel roads that only have route numbers instead of names that take you between MS and Louisiana. Check points would be nigh impossible.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:58
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Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:I can tell you about two dozen backwoods gravel roads that only have route numbers instead of names that take you between MS and Louisiana. Check points would be nigh impossible. Why would Mississippi OR Louisiana be the sole state with gun control laws in the area in the first place?
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Oct 18, 2012 23:46
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Install Gentoo posted:Why would Mississippi OR Louisiana be the sole state with gun control laws in the area in the first place? Because we're discussing a hypothetical where a state has gun control laws that a neighboring one does not, and sets up check points to make sure that their laws aren't being violated.
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Oct 19, 2012 01:03
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computer parts posted:Because we're discussing a hypothetical where a state has gun control laws that a neighboring one does not, and sets up check points to make sure that their laws aren't being violated. Just being a hypothetical doesn't mean going full moron though. It would be way harder to process the traffic on the interstates crossing the same border or really any state borders than the 5 people a month trundling down each anonymous backroad when we're talking feasibility. Those backwoods path things could just have plain old fence put up along them, the interstate needs a full customs plaza.
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Oct 19, 2012 01:45
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computer parts posted:America is individualist as gently caress, surprise surprise they're not going to let custom checkpoints develop between state boundaries. We already have. California has checkpoints at the border to forbid you from bringing fruit into the state.
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Oct 19, 2012 04:35
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:We already have. California has checkpoints at the border to forbid you from bringing fruit into the state. Yeah but nine times out of ten they are wide open, and they aren't asking you for papers or any poo poo like that. They mostly just inspect the truckers and move on, which is the same thing you'd see at most weigh stations across the country.
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Oct 19, 2012 04:42
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