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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1244 thread views

Transnational Thursday for June 12, 2025

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

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Scary and sad stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

People sometimes survive absolutely unbelievable stuff because bodies just happened be in just the right way. And sometimes they die because their body has a mild shock in a very unlucky way.

The universe is capricious.

There's a lot of surprising survivals in takeoff and landing crashes: Northwest 255 is a pretty (in)famous takeoff misconfiguration that managed to kill more people than were on the flight and had one survivor.

It's early so things are still confusing, but there are reports that he was in 11A. That's right by the emergency exit. He opened it and jumped out before the crash.

I don't buy it. He'd have to time the jump perfectly and then there's still a lot of "how did you avoid debris / fuel / landing on something hard"

Somebody has to be the one in a million. Guy might just have gotten extremely lucky.

Movie main character stuff.

Didn't know people could survive being inside massive fireballs though.

Human bodies are amazing in pulling miracles of survival.

Exactly. With enough of air travel and air travel accidents, it's not extremely surprising that surprising coincidences happen now and then. In 1970s a Serbian stewardess reportedly survived after aircraft exploded midair. ("Air safety investigators attributed Vulović's survival to her being trapped by a food trolley in the DC-9's fuselage as it broke away from the rest of the aircraft and plummeted towards the ground.")

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