121–130 of 147 posts
Why the scare quotes? I think we can be pretty confident that Iran did not do this on purpose.
Every time a BBC link is posted this comes up. BBC does not use scare quotes but BBC prefers (requires?) important/central descriptive or modifiers to be directly quoted, even when they’re single words.
Subhead: Offers “thanks” to ComputerGuru
This is why my number 1 fear for the destruction of humanity is not climate change, plague, asteroids, or super volcanoes. It’s nuclear weapons. One wrong “Oops!” by the military and the entire world self-destructs in mutually assured annihilation. Absolutely depressing.
But indeed, the biggest bug of them all is us, humanity.
What an absolute tragedy. Well done to Iran for coming forward, admitting it and expressing their regrets over it. It's a stark cry from the utter denial others have expressed when similar accidents have happened, and astronomically further than when George H. W. Bush proclaimed "I will never apologize for the United States — I don't care what the facts are... I'm not an apologize-for-America kind of guy." when the N…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it was. Planes are very reliable. What's the odds there's a crash in Iran hours after they attach the US and are on high alert for a counter attack? It's a safe bet.
Not a “safe bet.” Reasonable assumption yes but no more. An American Airlines planet crashed only a few weeks after the September 01 attacks, but it was just an actual accident.
I’m no fan of what Trump did. But after a lot of sabre rattling and threats against the US, Iran holds a state funeral where innocent Iranians get crushed to death, launches a token missile strike, then incinerates a bunch of innocent Iranians by accident. How many own goals can you kick in one week?
I don't get what you are comparing? Trump's actions were deliberate, and almost universally acknowledged as misguided, dangerous, and foolish (with the reneging of a working deal the first and largest blunder). Iran, under pressure, made a mistake. An accident happens. I don't see how one assigns some score to these events, yet your comments reads like "they deserve a few more assassinations and maybe a bit of bombar…
Yes Trump’s actions are deplorable, I agree.
It's interesting that for once, the immediate rumor take within an hour of the event (e.g. in the HN thread about the video) was simply correct.
The main argument against this interpretation is that Iran would have no reason to intentionally shoot down an innocent airliner. I don't know that this is true. One theory is that there were people on the plane they wanted dead even at significant cost in embarassment. This doesn't seem impossible. Another theory is that they shooting was done intentionally by a faction trying to make Iran look bad, and Iran decided that calling it a mistake was less embarrassing than calling it treason or mutiny.
Anyway, my point isn't that there is necessarily some deeper conspiracy, only that it may still be too early to claim that the initial conspiracy theory was entirely correct, or offers a full explanation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time a BBC link is posted this comes up. BBC does not use scare quotes but BBC prefers (requires?) important/central descriptive or modifiers to be directly quoted, even when they’re single words.
Headline: HN user dilap claims BBC quoting style is “confusing” Subhead: Offers “thanks” to ComputerGuru
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Who wants to destroy the world and why wouldn't they have done it already? Who wants to shoot down a civilian airliner and why wouldn't they have done it already? It's not about the desire to destroy humanity. It's about the catastrophic scenarios that can arise when nuclear armed countries think they're under nuclear attack and start getting jumpy about counter strikes or even pre-emptive strikes. The only sensibl…
I think MAD was an effective strategy when you had one and only one sure adversary. Only one other country that was willing and able to come at you with nukes. Today’s world - say someone nuked Moscow - who would the russian nukes be set to fire on? USA, China, Germany? If it was a single nuke it most probably is from a terrorist / under cover organization from one of the smaller nations Russia has wronged in the pas…
What happens if, say, the US or Russia detect what they think is an incoming attack and have the time to respond before it hits?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No this isn't well done. It took them three days to say this. How did it take them three days to realize they shot a missile? Especially since they had a denial campaign going on for three goddamn days. This was just external pressure on Iran forcing them to do this. If this flight wasn't an international one it would've been swept under the rug.
Three days is insanely fast for a nation Think of how many level of people are there. There are the guys that shot the missile. The ones that command those guys, the ones that command those and commanders above those. In the chaos of the tragedy, no body wants to open their mouth, in case they are executed for saying something that is against the direction which the nations top leaders want to take. Then come the top…