HelixDab2

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Republicans need young men to turn out; from what I can see, they are trending conservative. They don't want young women to turn out, because they are trending overwhelmingly liberal.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

What exactly are the “material conditions leading to gun crime”?

Largely economic and educational, yeah, but also systemic racism and ingrained misogyny. While it's facile--and accurate--to say that Republicans block efforts that would help these problems, the fact is that Democrats often do as well, opting to ban firearms and features rather than addressing root causes. I recall one particular violence intervention program that got cancelled in Chicago by--IIRC--Rahm Emmanuel. And unfortunately, many of the centrist Dems don't really believe in programs that work, like enrolling inmates in college to reduce recidivism.

Why do other countries thar have lots of guns have less gun crime?

Other countries with a relatively high number of firearms also tend to have significantly better social welfare systems, more focus on rehabilitation than punishment in their criminal justice systems, and a lower rate of income inequality overall. If the US had, for instance, the social conditions of Finland, while still having the same number of firearms, I expect that you would see a sharply lower rate of firearm homicides. (Interestingly, Finland has very similar rates of suicide as we have in the US overall. I'm not sure what to make of that. But I also note that all of the Nordic countries seem to have fairly high suicide rates, and all of the Mediterranean countries tend to have quite low suicide rates. Climate and amount of sunlight, maybe?)

Aside from the, the right to keep and bear arms is an individual civil right. IMO, attempts to restrict that right should be subject to strict scrutiny. NYSPRA v. Bruen helped with that, but it hasn't gone far enough. Think of it this way: voting is supposed to be a right. Republicans want to limit the ability to vote in ways that favor them. I would say that this is wrong, and that Republicans need to change the way that they govern or message so that they can attract more voters, rather than trying to make it harder to exercise a civil right.

or the gas station clerk to get a gun pointed at her and told to give up the cash.

...Which you aren't very likely to do once economic conditions have been addressed. Not very many people go out and rob people for the sheer joy of it. Little Johnny shoots Susie because society has taught him that the only acceptable emotion is rage, and he can't deal with his emotions in any other way. Again: address the messaging--about gender norms and expression in this case-- and fix the underlying problems, and then access to the tools of violence becomes immaterial because there's no longer the impetus towards violence. Dems have made some inroads regarding gendered emotional expressions, but a lot of far-right influencers are actively working against those efforts.

parents of shooters bought them guns despite clear warnings

I think that this is probably appropriate in limited cases, such as with the Crumbleys in Detroit, MI, and with the Grays in Winder, GA. In both cases, the parents (father, in the case of Mr. Gray) had credible information from authorities that their child was at risk of harming other people, and both of them gave firearms to their child despite and after receiving the credible information about them being a risk. I would say that, if parents made a reasonable attempt to deny a child access to firearms, or did not have credible information about their child being a risk, then you should no longer be looking at a criminal or civil case. It seems to me that having your firearms locked inside your home or vehicle should be enough to say that you made a reasonable effort, because anyone that takes a firearm from those places knows that they're breaking and entering already.

The desire to make locking firearms up is yet another way of making firearms prohibitively expensive, and functionally denies the right to keep and bear arms to people that can't pony up the $1000+ for a locking firearms container that's even slightly secure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well. technically he was an ape rather than a monkey.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It really depends on where you bury the body. Once you get out of developed areas, it gets very hard to track things down. Take this example; she was missing for two years, and her body was found in a tent, in a sleeping bag, just two miles off the Appalachian trail, which is one of the busiest hiking trails in the US. If someone was actually buried out there, the odds that they'd ever be found are very, very poor.

Admittedly, carrying a body off trails through fairly dense forests ain't gonna be easy. If you were going to do it, I'd say start by getting an old car with no GPS, get some paper maps, make sure that you leave all of your electronics at home so that there's no electronic trail of where you've been (especially your cell phone!), and only use cash for gas, etc. while you're driving to your body dump site. Assuming that the body isn't recovered for at least a year, you're likely in the clear.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

The guy in the front is one of the producers for Drumeo on YouTube, not a member of Sleep Token.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

The entire Ultima series for sure. I think those were the first CRPGs I played. I loved Ultima: Underworld I & II, but I was never able to get Ultima VII: Pagan to run properly on my computer. (And, holy fuck, that was 30 years ago.)

But also The Elder Scrolls: Arena, TES: Daggerfall, TES: Battlespire, TES: Redguard, and TES: Morrowind. The first two TES games would be challenging to make, given that many of the areas were randomly generated, rather than being designed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Having seen the trailer for Gothic, it looks good. I really hope that it's actually good.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Example: roids. Used appropriately, they can help improve your body.

Correction: they can improve aspects of your body, at a very, very steep cost. Pretty much all oral anabolic steroids are C17α-alkylated, and they're hepatotoxic (i.e., cause liver damage). All steroids will fuck up your lipid profile to one degree or another, and all of them can cause heart disease, specifically hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. While most AASs will increase red blood cell count, Boldenone in particular will sharply increase RBC production, which in turn increases blood pressure and can cause strokes. All of them will shut down the hypothalmus-pituitary-testicular axis (HPTA) feedback loop in men, leading to testicular atrophy. Most AASs will cause hair loss in men that are sensitive to DHT. AASs can fuck up your hormones enough that men can start lactating (!!!). High doses of testosterone can cause gynecomastia, because testosterone aromatizes into estradiol. In women, all AAS will cause some degree of virilization.

There are not very many IFBB pros that make it to 80; if you want your candle to burn brightly, it's going to burn out fast.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Who TF is sending in their registration cards...?

I mean, seriously, I've never sent one in. I threw all of them away, along with the cards asking me to join the NRA.

Also, as I've said before: if Dems would drop gun control entirely--and concentrate on changing the material conditions that result in gun crime--that would absolutely gut right-wing orgs that rely on fears of gun bans and confiscations to rile up a base.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

unless one wishes to subject a certain percentage of the deaths in WW2 to Stalin’s decisionmaking

...Which would not be entirely unreasonable. But if we're going to do that, then we would have to do the same with Hitler and German casualties, and then you could argue that Hitler caused all of the German casualties by invading Poland.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

I believe that's correct; but it's not all handguns, only a very, very few. Any handgun that's gas operated (and there are, like, five) is definitely still going to fire.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

You have three issues - yeah, the pump doesn't use that much power, but it does use power. If you're trying to reduce electricity consumption to the bare minimum, a tankless water heater right at the tap will be slightly more efficient. It doesn't have to always run, but for people that don't have predictable schedules, that can result in my wasted water. And your water heater is going to have to run more, because even with insulated pipes, you'll be losing some heat as the water circulates.

It is absolutely better than running the taps wide open until you get hot water, especially if you live in a place with limited water availability. I wouldn't use my solution for anything other than new construction due to the cost of running so much new wiring.

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