Comment by newspaper1

Comment by newspaper1 2 days ago

5 replies

That's not what they said. Pagers are used by civilians, no one would be on guard around them, they are not considered to be weapons. If you saw someone in a grocery store with a pager, you wouldn't distance yourself from them.

tptacek 2 days ago

I don't agree but also don't care to litigate this point; the only point I'm on this thread to make is that no professional who routinely carries a pager could have mistakenly been carrying a Hezbollah pager. Also: it is interesting that Hezbollah literally fought a war over phone systems in Lebanon! The rest: these are some of the most complicated conflicts in the world and we're not going to settle anything on HN. I don't begrudge you your take, I just had those two claims to make.

  • newspaper1 2 days ago

    Children were wounded and killed because they picked up these pagers (which they assumed to be safe). Explosives were distributed into public disguised as innocuous consumer devices, it's actually not that complicated.

    • dralley 40 minutes ago

      You're assuming that. There has been no reporting on the details. For all we know she could have been sitting next to her father when the pager went off.

    • tptacek 2 days ago

      I think the situation is much more complicated than that but can also, in rare circumstances, detect an intractable argument when it shows up on a message board. Does anything you're saying have anything to do with whether industrial engineers were unknowingly carrying Hezbollah military pagers, or whether Hezbollah fought a war against opposition parties in Lebanon to ensure that it had its own phone system? If not: there's not much productive for us to discuss here --- which is totally fine, there doesn't have to be.