Merry 9/11 and Happy Holidays - New General Megathread for the 11th-13th of September 2024
Merry 9/11 and Happy Holidays - New General Megathread for the 11th-13th of September 2024
Building implosion
In the controlled demolition industry, building implosion is the strategic placing of explosive material and timing of its detonation so that a structure collapses on itself in a matter of seconds, minimizing the physical damage to its immediate surroundings. Despite its terminology, building implosion also includes the controlled demolition of other structures, like bridges, smokestacks, towers, and tunnels. This is typically done to save time and money of what would otherwise be an extensive demolition process with construction equipment, as well as to reduce construction workers exposure to infrastructure that is in severe disrepair.
Building implosion, which reduces to seconds a process which could take months or years to achieve by other methods, typically occurs in urban areas[citation needed] and often involves large landmark structures.
The actual use of the term "implosion" to refer to the destruction of a building is a misnomer. This had been stated of the destruction of 1515 Tower in West Palm Beach, Florida. "What happens is, you use explosive materials in critical structural connections to allow gravity to bring it down.
The term "implosion" was coined by my grandmother back in, I guess, the '60s. It's a more descriptive way to explain what we do than "explosion". There are a series of small explosions, but the building itself isn't erupting outward. It's actually being pulled in on top of itself. What we're really doing is removing specific support columns within the structure and then cajoling the building in one direction or another, or straight down.
- Stacy Loizeaux, NOVA, December 1996
Building implosion techniques do not rely on the difference between internal and external pressure to collapse a structure. Instead, the goal is to induce a progressive collapse by weakening or removing critical supports; therefore, the building can no longer withstand gravity loads and will fail under its own weight
Numerous small explosives, strategically placed within the structure, are used to catalyze the collapse. Nitroglycerin, dynamite, or other explosives are used to shatter reinforced concrete supports. Linear shaped charges are used to sever steel supports. These explosives are progressively detonated on supports throughout the structure. Then, explosives on the lower floors initiate the controlled collapse.
A simple structure like a chimney can be prepared for demolition in less than a day. Larger or more complex structures can take up to six months of preparation to remove internal walls and wrap columns with fabric and fencing before firing the explosives.
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It's wild to me that 9/11 is supposed to be this huge solemn event but no one gives a shit about the thousandfold horrors we inflicted upon the Middle East in return. On the one hand, you have a few thousand lives and a handful of damaged and destroyed buildings, none of them critical. On the other hand, you have MILLIONS of lives, devastated infrastructure, imprisonment, torture. There's just no comparison. And when you spend so much energy memorializing the former, you are implicitly declaring the latter to be of lesser importance (some will go as far as to say it explicitly, but beyond civility there's little practical difference).
I really believe that 9/11 lives rent-free in the heads of the American ruling class because for the first time in history, their own people got got en masse. They didn't even give a shit about a million-plus working-class Americans dying from COVID, let alone people in the other side of the planet dying to prop up wealthy Americans' stock portfolios. They cannot be swayed as a class by appeals to individuals' consciences with evidence of various genocidal horrors. A relative handful might be swayed, but not nearly enough. Their class consciousness is too strong.
If the 9/11 hijackers had crashed a jet into a high school football stadium full of poor people in a deindustrialized town, or an Amazon warehouse at peak staffing, or a slum apartment building full of migrant farm workers, I think they'd have said it was a tragedy and largely moved on - except for trying to grift the situation a bit.
But the WTC? It was "important" people who died, MBAs and CPAs and VPs and others who "mattered". The whole ruling class lost their minds and helped the PNAC maniacs in the White House run rampant across the world. I also believe that the indiscriminate targetting, both strategic and tactical, was not an accident or incompetence. I think it was intended to send a message that the US would happily resort to extreme overkill in the future.
COVID in comparison disproportionately killed people who were forced by personal economic circumstance to still have frequent close contact with the general public. Most of the "important" people who "matter" could just WFH. And they had access to all the rapid PCR testing they wnted.
It's a really psychologically isolating day to be a leftist in what has been a very long series of psychologically isolating days. The extent to which people just... don't care, can't be bothered to consider the perspective of someone outside their borders is gross.
I was thinking about this earlier, we're still supposed to weep over 9/11 every year while not even paying lip service to all those people who died in the subsequent years. It's a kind of cruel irony that 9/11 was a result of US foreign policy (just don't even hint at this for the next several years post 2001 or you're cancelled, the terrorists hate us for our freedoms) and it resulted in even more dead people overseas.
It's also wild how the worm has turned on Bush, Cheney and all of their war hungry buddies. 20 years, libs at least correctly recognized them as monsters, now they're celebrated.
you are implicitly declaring the latter to be of lesser importance
This is probably the point, right? Maybe it helps minimise all the warcrimes in public memory?
It sends me up a fucking wall anytime I see 9/11 posts about "oh let's put the politics aside". Like what the fuck? One copypasta I saw literally called out how people should put aside their differences on foreign policy (probably a reference to whats going on in Gaza), but my brother in Christ... 9/11 was a direct result of American Cold War policy. It literally trained and supplied the same people who eventually planned and carried out the attack, which was also provoked by years upon years of the US fucking with the global south. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN SET ASIDE YOUR POLITICAL DIFFERENCES?
Its so funny how people often make fun of leftists having an "idealized" view of the world or how its young and inexperienced people who have leftist beliefs, but then these fucks will act as if something like 9/11 happened in some vacuum or was about good vs. evil like some Saturday morning cartoon.