It seems the president had used military forces to try to control the legislative branch, so it had to be a coup. I will try to find the reputable news source in english for it.
To be honest, I though he is going to declare war on north korea when I saw the news headline that the martial rule being enacted, relieved that is not the case.
The military did enter parliament and the police surrounded the building. The reasons that make me pretty sure that they were not informed about what's going on/weren't supporting the coup attempt are in the videos, although I do encourage others to watch them. First they exist, the military was taping itself while doing things, second no one stopped lawmakers or their staff getting in. A guy livestreamed himself crawling over the barricade believing this was the moment he would become a martyr, everyone on that side recognized him and he just walked into the building. Third when they began moving further into the building they were stopped by staffers blowing a fire extinguisher at them. There is no universe where that stops a soilder hopped up on adrenaline with a gun who's there to save their country from the enemy within. Fourth after the vote everyone leaves. It's the most wild moment of "well I guess it's over" that everyone follows the law and exists. The protestors outside stayed longer than the military. Also the military wasn't fully kitted, you can see a lot of uniforms that don't have that parade style look to them that coup armies have for the media.
I think the military took the word of the president literally that there was a north Korean infiltration and then when confronted with easily verified lawmakers and their staff went "yeah those are the people who are suppose to be here". Then when martial law was lifted they all went home because that's how the law works and they were told this is the law because lawmakers did law thing.
The biggest thing about much more recent coups is the inherent deniability that the perpetrators can keep about the coup until it succeeds. We've got people here now trying to deny what is and isn't a coup because of how much a blender post jan6th has been in the US.
It also weirdly enough gives you a lot of confidence in the resilience of the South Korean democracy and rule of law. It seems that most of the military people will, when in doubt, err in favor of following the law.
It shows you how crucial it is for the military to be apolitical, with control of its own personnel structure to maintain its own values. This is, imo, one of the most important pieces of a resilient democracy.
It's also why an authoritarian party attempting to root-and-branch the military is one of the scariest precursors. All you have left after that is the common-sense of the soldier on the ground, which isn't guaranteed if the proto-dictator has the forethought to station the loyal legions in Rome.
On December 04 2024 01:53 Salazarz wrote: honestly, I think there's at least some truth to that. I don't think it's a coincide that our politics are steadily degenerating into stupid us vs them between the two major parties at a time when the US dems vs reps tensions are the highest they've ever been;
i'd say this is a prisoner of the moment kind of statement. The Dems and Republicans have been each claiming the other is destroying the country since my grandfather was 10 years old and probably before that. Reagan's belief in the Laffer Curve and his Voodoo economics was going to destroy the country. Carter rescinding punishment for deserters was going to destroy the country... Abolishing the draft was going to destroy the country... Having an actor as a President was going to destroy the country...etc etc etc.
The reality is, Reagan's fiscal policy mirrored the policy of left wing PM of Canada Pierre Trudeau. That whole " A Time For Choosing" speech Reagan gave was just BS. So were the speeches the left wing Trudeau gave on the same topics because both pursued nearly identical policies. Both were immensely popular in their respective countries and claimed to be beacons of hope for their respective left-wing and right-wing followers. Their alleged diametrically opposed philosophies resulted in the same policies on both sides. YAWN.
1964: A Time For Choosing Yes , folks, it was 1964 and it was the end of the USA as we know it because the Democrats want out of Vietnam! By the end of that speech I was like "hand me a machine gun and point me at the commies!" LOL.
This messaging serves to keep people distracted from real issues. The real issue is, there is no 3rd party in the USA. The Dems and Republicans are like Coke and Pepsi. They pretend to be enemies. In reality, the Vice President of Coke will leave to work at Pepsi as the President in a nanosecond. Reagan is halted in his rise to the top.. what does he do? He becomes a Republican and becomes President.
And, I'll give the Dems and Republicans credit... their fake "Good Cop// Bad Cop routine" fools hundreds of millions of people.
The token actions yesterday looked basically like people on all sides doing the minimum they thought necessary not to get fired. Unfortunately for Yoon's case this will probably lead to his firing anyway. If it was an attempted power move to level the playing field, end reciprocal investigations, and get the split government working together again, it seems to have failed. The surprise factor is also gone so any outside chance of him actually having worked out specifics and understood loyalty and plans to execute the first time would not work on a second attempt (without jinxing I hope). His staff also want to resign and hang him out to dry so there's not many routes for the same coalition to win the next election, which could be sooner than 2027.
On December 04 2024 22:03 Belisarius wrote: It shows you how crucial it is for the military to be apolitical, with control of its own personnel structure to maintain its own values. This is, imo, one of the most important pieces of a resilient democracy.
It's also why an authoritarian party attempting to root-and-branch the military is one of the scariest precursors. All you have left after that is the common-sense of the soldier on the ground, which isn't guaranteed if the proto-dictator has the forethought to station the loyal legions in Rome.
User name checks out.
That being said I don’t really know how much common sense of the soldiers on the ground matters. They are trained all their life to obey orders. I think the integrity of their hierarchy, and the loyalty of the officers to the principles of democracy is much more important.
On December 04 2024 22:03 Belisarius wrote: It shows you how crucial it is for the military to be apolitical, with control of its own personnel structure to maintain its own values. This is, imo, one of the most important pieces of a resilient democracy.
It's also why an authoritarian party attempting to root-and-branch the military is one of the scariest precursors. All you have left after that is the common-sense of the soldier on the ground, which isn't guaranteed if the proto-dictator has the forethought to station the loyal legions in Rome.
User name checks out.
That being said I don’t really know how much common sense of the soldiers on the ground matters. They are trained all their life to obey orders. I think the integrity of their hierarchy, and the loyalty of the officers to the principles of democracy is much more important.
Every Korean male does the same mandatory service, the number of 'lifer' professional soldiers we have is quite low. Hierarchy and obeying orders are obviously important in the military, but there's also quite a big focus on how Korea was established as a modern state, the struggles with military dictatorships we've had, the purges and the repressions, and how loyalty to individual should never supersede loyalty to the country and its people.
I wish I was at home and could dig into this more but I'm chilling on vacation and I'm collecting information from south Koreans who are also on this cruise.
So shit gets even dumber. Apparently the theory is now that the national assembly troops were a smokescreen for the real reason for martial law. Troops were stationed outside the election commission and when martial law was declared they moved in to seize data and evidence of election fraud from 2020. Big brain theory is that this was a 5d chess move to get the evidence during the few hours martial law was in effect.
But that's fucking stupid. That's hunter's laptop levels of dumb. No one who's serious will accept data or evidence produced from the bayonet. This guy is old enough to be alive during the last martial law and the public fervor of evoking those memories again will cook you for a generation.
They're singing Christmas Carol's outside parliament right now but with lyrics about how they want impeachment for Christmas.
Since the new impeachment vote went through it seems Yoon's visions of golf diplomacy with the incoming US administration will never come to fruition. Internationally the effect of a new election will be the same as 2017 with a good cop/bad cop setup in the Blue House and White House as far as North Korean relations go.
I'm sure many of you have already heard about this tragedy. A plane crashed and 181 people were killed, only 2 survived.
David Learmount argues that this was an entirely preventable disaster. He calls it "criminal", referring to the wall that shouldn't have been obstructing the path. The video is SFW.
Seen a lot of speculation that the airplane pilots made a lot of mistakes as well. There are manual releases for the landing gear as a single example.
The concrete at the end is an issue and should not be there. Without it there would still have been a crash and some amount of people likely die.
Not sure if planes normally land in the direction this plane was forced to take. Somebody mentioned they got approval to land in the opposite direction, not sure if that is common or not though.
I really think the bunker is a red herring. No airport in the world is designed for a plane to skid off the end of a runway on its nacelles at 200 kph. The number of things that had to go wrong for that situation to occur is astronomical.
Sure, the bunker probably shouldn't have been there and it's an easy recommendation for the report, but there's airports all over the world where the same situation would result in not only the same fireball, but the same fireball in the middle of random residential housing. The bunker is not the problem.
Even at this specific airport, if you take the bunker away they get another 1km of no mans land that could easily flip the plane at any time, and then some kind of carpark that would come down on top of them and kill a bunch of bystanders. I'm not convinced that's any better.
The thing that stands out to me is that they don't actually get it grounded until about 2/3 down the runway. Irrespective of the number of systems that must have failed to come down with no flaps, no engines and no gear, the pilots clearly got caught out by the ground effect. When they finally touch with only 1 km left and no power to go around, it's all over.
On January 01 2025 20:35 Belisarius wrote: I really think the bunker is a red herring. No airport in the world is designed for a plane to skid off the end of a runway on its nacelles at 200 kph. The number of things that had to go wrong for that situation to occur is astronomical.
Sure, the bunker probably shouldn't have been there and it's an easy recommendation for the report, but there's airports all over the world where the same situation would result in not only the same fireball, but the same fireball in the middle of random residential housing. The bunker is not the problem.
Even at this specific airport, if you take the bunker away they get another 1km of no mans land that could easily flip the plane at any time, and then some kind of carpark that would come down on top of them and kill a bunch of bystanders. I'm not convinced that's any better.
The thing that stands out to me is that they don't actually get it grounded until about 2/3 down the runway. Irrespective of the number of systems that must have failed to come down with no flaps, no engines and no gear, the pilots clearly got caught out by the ground effect. When they finally touch with only 1 km left and no power to go around, it's all over.
I don't know, I'd rather trust the expert. If he says on camera this is criminal, it most certainly is. I'd trust him that he'd testify in court repeating his words if he was asked. The point isn't that some other airports are even more dangerous (due to various limitations in most instances) but that this particular obstacle serves no point whatsoever being there at all.
Airplanes get grounded for various faults all the time, it happens. You can't prevent every bad landing because there are so many human variables at play where some technician miscommunicated with another and the other one miscommunicated back etc. etc. The work/safety protocols get updated accordingly over time to decrease the likelihood of miscommunication resulting in a bad landing or a crash. But eventually it happens again, and again, and in some of those instances a pointless wall in the middle of the landing can become the final killer, as demonstrated in this case.
On January 01 2025 08:24 Yurie wrote: Seen a lot of speculation that the airplane pilots made a lot of mistakes as well. There are manual releases for the landing gear as a single example.
The concrete at the end is an issue and should not be there. Without it there would still have been a crash and some amount of people likely die.
Not sure if planes normally land in the direction this plane was forced to take. Somebody mentioned they got approval to land in the opposite direction, not sure if that is common or not though.
I believe they landed opposite direction after going around, which was after the bird strike. The right engine very clearly took a big one.
They had gears down for the original landing, but retracted them for going around, also related to performance. Gears can add more drag than we might think. For similar reasons, when they landed they didn't have flaps out, which let you fly slower but need more power from the engines, which could have been in short supply, or of suspect reliability, if one or both engines were hit.
Once you've retracted the gears as they did, if you have a hydraulic problem, then redeploying them when you're urgently doing what could be or what you anyways view as your one chance to land - the manual release takes a bit to get to and they could have been in a severe time crunch, which is suggested by the fact they landed opposite direction after going around instead of rejoining - But if they had normal working hydraulics and just plain forgot to redeploy the gear after having retracted it, then that could be a mistake.
That could possibly manifest in the form of a wake up call like - hey we're 10 feet above the ground and flared, why aren't the gears making contact with the runway - oh shit - better pitch the whole plane down more because we can't go around like this - and then make the initial touch down way too far down the runway especially when you're already faster than normal without flaps.
This is not outside the realm of possibility. The CVR will help with that especially.
They also hadn't deployed speedbrakes after landing, which starts to be an issue because with no gear, no flaps, and no speedbrakes, it becomes difficult to see how the aircraft is supposed to slow itself. While the lack of flaps deployment doesn't directly support having no hydraulics - because you could purposefully land in a no flaps configuration for reasons of engine performance - they DID have thrust reversers deployed. But this is also puzzling if you had a full loss of thrust in one engine, because you would have asymmetric reverse thrust, meaning the plane would only decelerate on the side of the wing with the working engine, leading to a visual kind of cartwheeling that we absolutely didn't see. So either they deployed thrust reversers and didn't use them, or they did deploy thrust reverses and used them, they just couldn't slow the plane in time, in which case the plane didn't cartwheel because both engines were producing thrust symmetrically, in which case... why would we be landing like this to begin with?
We can say "mistake" in hindsight (even though our hindsight is still foggy with regards to this) but the truth is if you have questionable engines and are very close to the ground, doing what needs to happen to get out of the air in the most controlled way possible immediately is going to take priority. So while a belly landing with no speedbrakes is not ideal, it's possibly more ideal than nosediving into a hill.
If you're relying on gear brakes which is why you haven't deployed speedbrakes, only to realize you have no gear when you touch down, that would also be consistent with what happened. So you spend most of your time wondering where your gear went instead of deploying speedbrakes that you weren't prepared for/thinking about, the plane can't stops, and then impact. But a lot of explanations are consistent at this point which will get narrowed down as more evidence comes.
Not to condescend in case this is anything you already knew, but for someone else reading.
I'm in the anti-obstacle camp here. There are things you need to put at airports, like hangars, control towers. But people with good reason locate these things to the sides of runways, not directly in front and behind them.
Have a problem landing at DFW you'll probably be safer in the flatness of the wide open fields and huge spaces than at SFO where you might end up in the water. Not that one is unsafe. But you have no choice in terms of the water being there. You do have a choice whether to put obstacles to runway overshoots or not, it's introducing a problem for no reason. (This is just an example. If someone wants to argue no actually the water is SAFER, fine, then DFW could engineer moats around itself and increase safety, that's not germane to the point.)
Any barrier/protective stance on this is BS - planes can crash literally anywhere they like, you can't wall off the world from crashing planes, and if that were the objective, airports would all be walled off like that. They aren't. Airports have walls mostly to keep people and animals out. In this particular case, it's the ILS. You don't have to put the ILS there, and even if you do, you don't have to fortify it like that. You simply do not. It's not a contingency people thought about because people are stupid. Nevertheless more people are now dead who wouldn't be. Even incidentally it wasn't protecting anything. There's nothing there. Past it is a single brick width cinderblock wall, then a field, then trees. If it were protecting something, the entire boundary of the airport would be similarly fortified to protect in the event of a dangerous plane gone wild. But only the ILS was fortified. Because it's not designed to protect anything but the ILS. Because that means some asshole intentionally designed that one day, he designed an airport with a runway and said I need to put the ILS here, which is fine, but that equipment is expensive, and if an airplane crashes into it we'd prefer not to have to replace it. Better fortify it to protect it. That is the single and only explanation.
The guess I heard for having an overly solid wall there is that it used to a blastoff wall, thus served a purpose. They then redesigned the airport and re-used the wall for a new purpose, which it works for but is now also a safety hazard.
If they did it as a new feature on the current airport setup it is clearly an error. Nobody is arguing that the wall should be there. If it wasn't there the accident would likely have been less lethal. That still doesn't make it the cause of the crash, only a contributing reason for it being so lethal.
On January 03 2025 04:31 Yurie wrote: The guess I heard for having an overly solid wall there is that it used to a blastoff wall, thus served a purpose. They then redesigned the airport and re-used the wall for a new purpose, which it works for but is now also a safety hazard.
If they did it as a new feature on the current airport setup it is clearly an error. Nobody is arguing that the wall should be there. If it wasn't there the accident would likely have been less lethal. That still doesn't make it the cause of the crash, only a contributing reason for it being so lethal.
I think we can agree that the bad landing was caused by a few errors, but it should be clear that it was also a reasonably executed landing given the terrible circumstances. After everything that went wrong they came up with a logical solution and this had a good chance of saving all lives on board. The wall is the only thing that made survival literally impossible. Without it, perhaps a dozen people die, maybe a few dozen people die, but 181 people likely wouldn't die.
On January 03 2025 04:31 Yurie wrote: The guess I heard for having an overly solid wall there is that it used to a blastoff wall, thus served a purpose. They then redesigned the airport and re-used the wall for a new purpose, which it works for but is now also a safety hazard.
If they did it as a new feature on the current airport setup it is clearly an error. Nobody is arguing that the wall should be there. If it wasn't there the accident would likely have been less lethal. That still doesn't make it the cause of the crash, only a contributing reason for it being so lethal.
I think we can agree that the bad landing was caused by a few errors, but it should be clear that it was also a reasonably executed landing given the terrible circumstances. After everything that went wrong they came up with a logical solution and this had a good chance of saving all lives on board. The wall is the only thing that made survival literally impossible. Without it, perhaps a dozen people die, maybe a few dozen people die, but 181 people likely wouldn't die.
This is complete conjecture. We can't have any idea whether their solution was logical when we do not know the details of the situation they were responding to.
The sequence of events and the systems that appear to be disabled are very hard to reconcile with how the plane's systems are designed. The things that plainly happened, should not ever happen, so we are well beyond the point where anyone can declare from their armchair that they know the circumstances and can assess the correctness of the pilots' solution.
The only real options are that there was an incredibly unlikely and precise sequence of multiple strikes, disabling multiple redundant systems in a way that has never happened before.... or the pilots made significant errors under pressure that turned a bad situation into a catastrophe.
We will not know which until the investigation is completed. Personally, the second seems more likely than the first, but there is little point speculating beyond that.
I won't even bother to address the idea that you know how many people would have died from something as chaotic as an airplane sliding on its engines through multiple obstacles at 200 kph.
On January 03 2025 04:31 Yurie wrote: The guess I heard for having an overly solid wall there is that it used to a blastoff wall, thus served a purpose. They then redesigned the airport and re-used the wall for a new purpose, which it works for but is now also a safety hazard.
If they did it as a new feature on the current airport setup it is clearly an error. Nobody is arguing that the wall should be there. If it wasn't there the accident would likely have been less lethal. That still doesn't make it the cause of the crash, only a contributing reason for it being so lethal.
I think we can agree that the bad landing was caused by a few errors, but it should be clear that it was also a reasonably executed landing given the terrible circumstances. After everything that went wrong they came up with a logical solution and this had a good chance of saving all lives on board. The wall is the only thing that made survival literally impossible. Without it, perhaps a dozen people die, maybe a few dozen people die, but 181 people likely wouldn't die.
This is complete conjecture. We can't have any idea whether their solution was logical when we do not know the details of the situation they were responding to.
The sequence of events and the systems that appear to be disabled are very hard to reconcile with how the plane's systems are designed. The things that plainly happened, should not ever happen, so we are well beyond the point where anyone can declare from their armchair that they know the circumstances and can assess the correctness of the pilots' solution.
The only real options are that there was an incredibly unlikely and precise sequence of multiple strikes, disabling multiple redundant systems in a way that has never happened before.... or the pilots made significant errors under pressure that turned a bad situation into a catastrophe.
We will not know which until the investigation is completed. Personally, the second seems more likely than the first, but there is little point speculating beyond that.
I won't even bother to address the idea that you know how many people would have died from something as chaotic as an airplane sliding on its engines through multiple obstacles at 200 kph.
It's funny that you accuse me of being the one to divert criticism when I'm going entirely by an expert opinion. Are you a pilot? Are you arguing that his assessment is wrong?
Pilots will make errors, this is expected. No human is perfect. In some instances the pilot is mostly to blame for a crash, but in most instances it's a combination of events and the pilot is only one variable. To put blame squarely on the pilot in this instance and not on the wall is absurd.