What a dweeb.
Megyn Kelly Tells Dems to 'F Off' After Mass Shooting: 'The Gun Debate Is Lost'
But no one's told voters that. Fox News ran a poll showing that vast majorities support tighter restrictions on gun purchasing.jezebel.com
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- Thread starter Agema
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I hate to say this, but she ain't wrong. She isn't, because of three nuances that render the debate completely impotent.
1. Conflating "gun deaths" with "gun homicides" isn't productive. Gun deaths break down into three categories: suicide, homicide, and accidential/unintentional. There's a fourth category of "legal intervention" which amounts to "shot by LEO", that's kept separate because of the suicide-by-cop phenomenon, but for all intents and purposes it's still firearm homicide. The three categories, for reasons that should be obvious, have different and distinct causative factors which need to be addressed individually, which gun control won't necessarily fix; at best, it's addressing a symptom and not a cause (which is what we love to do here in the US).
2. We barely, if at all, enforce the laws already on the damn books. Additional gun laws aren't going to change that; if we can't enforce the laws we already have, how are we expected to enforce new laws? That isn't a "Republican" thing, that's an "our criminal justice system is completely fucked" thing; Republicans don't help, but they're not the exclusive cause.
3. Gun violence is a symptom of a bigger problem in the first place. The strongest correlative to gun violence isn't gun ownership, but Gini coefficient; the poverty-crime correlation is one of the longest- and best-studied in contemporary criminal justice (for good or ill), and the availability and commonality of firearms are simply aggravating factors. Again, this isn't something with which Republicans can be trusted to be any help, but centering the conversation on the symptom rather than the cause is nothing more than distraction away from America's dire economic straits and actually doing something about that instead.
You're not wrong, but guns are easier to fix. Capitalism requires a working poor class. That's not an error in a capitalistic system, its the intended outcome.
So it'll be easier to remove guns from a capitalistic society than it would be to remove capitalism from that society.
And the whole 2nd Amendment argument is based entirely on a Gun lobbyists paying Judges and political officials to purposefully misinterpret the Amendment to allow for individual citizens to own guns.
It's the strongest correlation within the United States, but not internationally. Countries with drastically worse Gini coefficients have far less gun crime than the US.
It's a combination of elements: the widespread poverty and inequality, alongside nonexistent mental health support, a truly toxic and polarising political atmosphere, the drug epidemic, and the wide no-questions-asked availability of guns.
Gini coefficient measure wealth disparity, not poverty and so is not at all a good measure for this situation. Case in point, China and the US have almost the same Gini coefficient (despite Chinese being poorer per capita) but very different murder rate (about 10x in the USA). Mexico also has a pretty close Gini coefficient to the US and has much higher murder (about 5x the USA). Poverty will increase crime in general but gun makes murder much more likely.
I mean, at the end of the day, Megyn Kelly is just mad that people are yelling at the poor, abused conservatives for doing less than nothing to address gun deaths being the leading cause of death in children, and aren't accepting the conservative argument that the cause is the vague moral decline in our country caused by everybody who doesn't believe in their very specific version of White Jesus
You're missing one thing: capitalism requires a working class incapable of coercing government to act in accordance to social contract, or failing that, revolution. If it's not politically possible to remove guns from a capitalist society, it's necessary to turn the working class against itself. The former is the political reality in the US, and the latter is the social outcome we've experienced as a result. It's no wonder the US is unique in its mass shooting epidemic, compared to every other Western liberal democracy.
Not so much. Lest we forget, not sixty years ago the NRA and gun lobby championed gun control, in its support for the Mulford act.
Let's check that for veracity.
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Yes, internationally. This is a point I've made on the forums before:
No. She ain't right about crap. She ain't part of the solution, she's part of the goddamn problem. She can quit being part of the problem or sit her ass down and shut the hell up.
So regarding this E. Jean Carroll case, Trump is already out there lying about how the Judge refused to let him present a defense. But it turns out that his team declined to offer a defense, and chose not to call Trump to testify.
Ten bucks says I know what Trump's town hall will be about.
Ten bucks says I know what Trump's town hall will be about.
Without necessarily disputing the conclusion of some relationship between GINI coefficient and firearm homicides, I'd be very wary of a chart that doesn't appear to include the data on about half the world's countries.
Right, but you'll also notice the US on that graph (the largish yellow dot at about 40 on Y-axis and 5 on X-axis) is further to the right than any of the ~15 or so countries with very similar Gini ratings, and further right than ~9 or so with worse Gini ratings.
So yeah, you're right that broadly speaking it's the best indicator. But the US is performing significantly worse on firearm homicide than the trend alone would explain.
I'm not super worried about what name of which ash you're using, the basic idea is right. Except, I think, for calling it a replacement for cement. Fly ash (or gypsum in general) is not performing the role of cement, it is an additive that changes the way, particularly the rate, that the chemicals react. Without something like this, it isn't just "well, now we gotta use more cement", it's "well, now the concrete sets too fast and releases too much heat that we have to rewrite the logistics of how we mix and pour entirely and still end up with a lower quality structure."
We're gonna use some sort of gypsum, the only question is which. Do you want more mines and quarries to rip similarly radioactive chemicals out of the ground, or would you prefer recycling industrial byproducts we generate anyway?
And as in any discussion of radioactivity, it would be wrong not to use bananas for scale. Bananas are quite well known to be radioactive from the potassium, about 3.5 picocuries per gram. Best I can find, phosphogypsum is between 5 and 35 picocuries per gram. So, at worst, it's 10x the radiation of a banana. But also, products like fly ash are used as like 10-20% of the cement mass, and the cement is 10% of the mass of the concrete, you end up with like 2% of the total mass made of this stuff. So it's actually contributing 1/5th the radiation density of a banana in the final product.
the foremost imperial police state is desensitized to violence. that is, indeed, separate from GINI coefficient. Though not really unrelated.
You already know that's a matter of which countries have produced in-depth studies, legal records are kept, and the accessibility of data by researchers. Which is why North American and European countries are wildly overrepresented in data, and subsequent conversations, regarding violent crime, homicide rates, and firearm ownership. That's something I pointed out later in the past thread (with additional data on firearm ownership, firearm homicide, and income inequity by country), that contrary to popular belief North American and European countries are actually outliers, and the economic south's combination of low firearm ownership rates but high rates of firearm-related violence and firearm homicides tells the real tale.
True. However, the question is whether stricter gun control laws would solve the issue, and the data doesn't support the conclusion it will. Rather, gun control debates are purpose-designed to obfuscate the actual root causes behind violent crime, firearm-related crime, and firearm deaths (homicide or suicide). The problem specifically is there are deeper societal problems in America, that politicians and the pundit class are unwilling to address directly.
Look at her, parading around in that candy shell. She's just asking for it!
Now do that in Sv.
One is an isotope (K-40) that decays to a stable radioisotope with the emission of either a single beta particle or gamma ray, internalized through the digestive tract. The other is an element (Radon) that itself is an intermediate step in a decay chain of short-lived products that emit alpha particles every step of the way, internalized through the respiratory system.
(Hint: one's an acute effective dose measured in microsieverts; the other's a chronic effective dose measured in millisieverts per year. Assuming you work and sleep indoors, you'd have to eat about 38 bananas per day, every day, to match the average effective dose from radon exposure.)
Emission is not the same as exposure, neither are the same as absorption, none of the above is the same as equivalent dose, and equivalent dose is not the same as effective dose. A dose internalized via the respiratory system is not the same as a dose internalized via the digestive system. And of course, acute dose is definitely not the same as chronic dose.
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I know what you're referring to, but its not quite so clear cut. In NA Fly Ash was very nearly labelled a hazardous material due to the combined factors of a very serious release in the States and the presence of water-soluble known hazardous materials like mercury. At the time I was working in a concrete design and testing facility as a researcher and it was the talk of the town - labeling that stuff as hazardous would have changed our entire industry. The EPA ended up backing down on that because the disaster was not necessarily related to the components of Fly Ash and the water soluble hazardous materials made up a relatively small portion of the overall material in most NA Fly Ash. We are finding though that there is a much larger portion of acid-soluble mercury which is concerning in areas where there is a carbonation risk, and there is talk of higher mercury contents being found in limited Fly Ash samples. China in particular seems to be reporting rising mercury content in their Fly Ash, but its hard to say if thats a source or a handling issue, and this material is generally not shipped globally so that's not as much of a local concern.
The fine-ness of the material is still an issue though, and has been under scrutiny and probably will continue to be so. Many of the concrete plants I work with have over the years instituted higher standards for PPE requirements for mixing concrete due to the fly ash apparently being able to slip through a lot of standard face masks. Cement may be more immediately toxic to breathe, although I question that in my neck of the woods and I'm gonna ask around a bit, but its also much less fine and way easier to filter out of the air.
The general point being, we really thought Fly Ash was perfectly safe in my industry and we've been getting steadily worse and worse news about how accurate that assumption might have been. I'm kind of afraid I'm gonna start hearing about people getting the Grey Lung or some shit in ten years and then I have to see a doctor every two months until I die. God knows people who do rehabilitative construction work on concrete have been finding some nasty shit at times - turns out some psychos mixed asbestos into concrete at times, and guess what happens when you use a grinder on that.
You've got a few different ideas going on here, and some of it is headed in the right direction but I think you got your wires crossed at some stage. To start, it is absolutely a replacement for cement - in fact in the standard specifications for bridge construction used where I live we directly refer to Fly Ash as a supplementary cementitious material, because it both adjusts the properties of the overall mix and hydrates with a byproduct of cement hydration to add to the strength of the overall matrix. Its also completely capable of hydrating on its own without cement - I had to deal with a power plant that had been dumping fly ash on the ground instead of storing it properly and the stuff at the bottom hydrated with rain runoff over time. We had to bring in a coring machine to cut through it and the sample we got clocked in at over 80 MPa, which is nearly double what is referred to as "high performance" concrete.
Now, when you said it is used because concrete hydrating too fast can release too much heat you are correct that it can be used in this way, but that isn't always, or really even usually, the end goal of including Fly Ash in a mix. Excessive heat of hydration is an issue that arises in mass concrete placements, and won't drive most of the uses for concrete you come across day to day - the specifications I work with require a least dimension of 1m/3ft before a placement even counts as mass concrete and that's not happening in the vast majority of concrete work. In fact its primary use in high performance bridge concrete has to do with improving the workability of the overall mix rather than anything to do with the heat of hydration and target strength. Thanks to superplasticiser we can hit damn near any strength with not much more than cement powder and sand if we really want to.
While you can mix concrete with no Fly Ash the fact is that Fly Ash is a cheap as hell substitute with notable benefits and cement costs a lot and has only been increasing in cost over time. Everybody uses it in everything, because at 25% replacement that's a lot of saved money.
I'm not really sure why your getting into the radioactivity of gypsum though - the thrust of my original gist was that in the past structural engineers and researchers have believed things to be safe and chosen to dump it in concrete without really checking that, considering the material to be fully mitigated once cast. Now we are finding that this isn't necessarily the case, and working with the additives before casting and the concrete after casting is starting to be troubling as we look into the long term effects of having it present in almost all concrete, which is a tremendously widely used material. Thusly, I think the person suggesting we mitigate fertilizer byproducts by casting it into usable concrete has a good heart, but we still need people to use their heads for a while first before we jump in with both feet.