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Comment by supergirl | Hacker News Reader

do people really not remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident or are they conveniently forgetting it? it's an established practice.

"According to Bolivia, the flight was rerouted to Austria when France, Spain, Portugal and Italy[2] reportedly denied access to their airspace, allegedly due to suspicions that Snowden was on board".

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Russian and Belarusian propagandists like to disseminate superficially similar comparisons like this in order to distract people from their own malfeasance.

One big difference is that RyanAir was a commercial flight, and it's covered by the International Air Services Transit Agreement (IASTA), which protects the right to fly over a country's airspace in order to travel between two other countries. Evo Morales plane, on the other hand, belongs to Bolivian Air Force[0]. IASTA applies only to civil aviation (RyanAir), not to military flights (Evo Morales).

Second difference is that France and Italy denied that military flight the right to enter their airspace, which is entirely in their right. Iran and North Korea can similarly deny Biden the right to pass over them in Air Force One. Belarus, on the other hand, waited till RyanAir aircraft was 30 minutes in their airspace, and then — instead of asking it to leave it asap — forced it to land by sending a fighter jet.

Third difference is that in Evo Morales case, nobody used a (clearly fake) bomb threat.

So no, people do remember that. These are two cases that are superficially similar, but very different in practice.

[0] https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/fab-001

Please don't call people "Russian and Belarusian propagandists" just for pointing out political hypocrisy.

As for the differences they seem like technical legal details that do not really change the situation.

But if you want other similar cases then here is one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Achille_Lauro_hijacking#Interc...

> Please don't call people "Russian and Belarusian propagandists"

I didn't call anyone that; I've just pointed out that this is the argument these propagandists make. To be clear, I'm not calling you "Russian and Belarusian propagandist" either, I'm just pointing out you and them make the same arguments.

> they seem like technical legal details

But legal details is all that matters. If two guys sleep with the same girl, one a day before her 18th birthday, the other one day after, the acts may be similar — however, because of "technical legal details", one of these acts has no consequences, while the other is a statutory rape and may lead to imprisonment.

Ethically though both are the same act, this is the point. A lawyer might say "well achually" but that by itself does not make the western actions any better morally although it might give them a justification to pat themselves in the back.

This is the same tu quoque logical fallacy which goes all the way back to the Soviet propaganda and "in your place they are lynching Negroes"[0].

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

Pointing out hypocrisy would only be a fallacy if I tried to use it as an argument that the actions of Belarus are moral. I am not doing that.

"Appeal to hypocrisy" is the other name of tu quoque fallacy:

   Tu quoque, or _the appeal to hypocrisy_, is an informal fallacy that intends to discredit the opponent's argument by attacking the opponent's own personal behavior as being inconsistent with the argument's conclusion(s).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque

I am aware. Not sure what your point is. I am not trying to discredit anyone's argument.

The narrative is "that was different and totally valid course of action while we must now keep pointing fingers at Belarus look at how bad they are" and "disregard that Spain apologized to Bolivia".

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