u/FaceDeer — FaceDeer

They do have guards on the sides, so it's not completely out in the open.

Hopefully politics won't get involved in the final report like it did in the EgyptAir case.

Or someone was lying.

A suicide like this has happened before. It even involved the fuel being shut off.

hanlon's razor and all that

The fuel switches have been very carefully designed to take "stupidity" out of the equation.

It's going to be hard to conclude *for sure* that this was suicide without some form of note or other evidence we don't have yet, but really, at some point the effort it takes to come up with alternatives is going to start looking silly.

so it doesn't appear one was trying to force it off or anything.

I don't think it indicates that given how the flight was already doomed at that point. The damage was done.

Surely someone committing suicide and taking hundreds of people with him in the process wouldn't *lie* about it.

I watched a very comprehensive and professional video by Captain Steeeve on this subject earlier today. He didn't outright literally *say* that one of the pilots deliberately downed the plane, but it was very clear that he thought that was the only explanation that really made sense here. Why do you say it sounds like they "did not mean to do so"? The switches are designed to not be movable without considerable deliberation and intent, you can't just bump these with your knee and switch them off. And both pilots were plenty experienced enough to know that you don't turn those switches off at that point in the flight.

Indeed. This sort of thing goes way back - the term "barbarian" was literally a result of Romans making fun of how non-Roman languages sounded to them (they used the onomatopoeia of "Bar Bar" to represent what they thought foreign languages sounded to them). Dismiss their language as meaningless gibber and you dismiss their thoughts as meaningless too.

Saying a black person is "well spoken" is such a common slight in the US, as if it should be surprising somehow that they're not all speaking Jive or Hip-hop or whatever. If people insult African-Americans like that what hope do Liberians have?

Yeah, this is more of a camp. A camp where they can concentrate a specific sub-population of people into.

Don't know if there's a specific word for that.

Next headline up: Taliban sends troops to Kursk to support Russian defenders there.

This timeline just keeps getting weirder.

Israel: "Hang on, we're not done killing everyone first."

Okay, but not sure what that has to do with my point. It still supports the notion that giving weapons and similar supplies to a party fighting a war *involves* you in that war.

Iron, aluminium, titanium, oxygen, silicon, phosphorus, potassium, I could go on listing elements at great length. There are plenty of resources out there. Celestial bodies are *made* of resources. You name it, you can find it out there in various abundances.

Helium-3 is just one of the few things you can find out there that is basically unavailable on Earth. It's myopic to focus solely on that.

I don't care about what international law says, this is what world war means as *I* understand it. I said that to begin with. International law is often even more nebulous and open to interpretation than most national law given there isn't really a universal framework for adjudicating it.

I'd be curious for a citation, though. I looked for some and found way more instances where international courts and laws held that supplying weapons counted as being involved in a war than the contrary. For example:

• The law of neutrality (Hague V & XIII of 1907) prohibits neutral states from furnishing “supplies of war” to any belligerent. Violating that duty strips a state of its neutral status and exposes it to lawful countermeasures by the aggrieved party.

• Under state-responsibility rules (ILC Articles on State Responsibility, Art. 16), a state “aid[ing] or assist[ing]” another in committing an internationally wrongful act—armed force included—is complicit, provided it does so with knowledge of the circumstances.

I think you've got an overly narrow view of "direct involvement." If I'm in a war with someone and a country tells me "here, take these weapons" and I say "you know I'm going to use these weapons to kill soldiers of the country I'm at war with" and they say "yes, we know. We actually have some specific conditions about how and where you can use these to kill them, and some satellite photos to help you target them" then I'd call that direct involvement. Flesh-and-blood soldiers are only one small part of a nation's military these days and not every part of a military needs to be involved for the military overall to be involved.

I think we're already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a *million* Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it's easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.

Angela Merkel had to tell Trump this 11 times in one meeting during his first term. I guess he forgot since then.

Well, the Germans wouldn't have because they got defeated long before the Manhattan Project produced a usable weapon. Their own attempt at it failed. Some suspect that Heisenberg actually did sabotage the German project, though it's also possible that he was just bad at it.

But the Soviet Union would have done it later on. Or any of a variety of other countries that probably shouldn't be the first or only countries to have nuclear weapons. Science is not unique to the discoverer, other people can independently discover the same things.

And not only that, Israel *has* nuclear weapons.

The problem with that kind of thing is always "who decides what's hate-filled and false?" If there was a Federal government mechanism for that in the United States it would now be in the hands of Trump and the Republicans.