Polling in Ukraine consistently puts approval of Zelensky’s handling of the war at around 90%.

Please actually try listening to the people you’re speaking on behalf of before you speak.

In the analogy, I have a whole lot of their money. You never watch Heat? Like that, but I didn’t fuck it up thanks to my many years of watching heist movies and playing Payday 2.

Oh man, love this idea. I’m gonna try it on my bank. “Here’s the deal, I keep all the money that I’ve already stolen, and you have to agree not to call the cops or hire any additional security.” Brilliant.

Not sure what the bank is supposed to get out of it though.

Stealth

Citation needed

No, on that score I fundamentally disagree. Ukraine has used its limited pool of armor extremely effectively, and even with a small, outdated airforce they’ve been able to utterly neutralize Russia’s ability to bring its naval assets to bear. The reason air and armor haven’t mattered as much in this war is simply because one side can’t risk what they have, and the other side doesn’t know how to use what they have.

Russia has not used these assets effectively because what they have is outdated, badly designed, and being operated by poorly trained crews with terrible doctrine. The reason Russian armor keeps getting popped by ATGMs isn’t because Javelin and NLAW are wunderwaffen, it’s because they’ll park a fucking T-72 in the middle of an open fucking field with no infantry support, crew all buttoned down so they have no visibility, and then act surprised when someone pops a rocket at it.

The single most telling piece of footage from the initial invasion was a video of a Ukrainian squad firing an RPG at a Russian tank, then reloading and firing again from the exact same fucking position! There is no world where you should ever, EVER be able to do that. Against any competent military, the moment you let off that first rocket you should be running like fucking crazy because the entire area you are in is about to become a shooting range with you as the paper. There should have been multiple machine guns lighting up their position. Instead the Ukrainians are just calmly taking their time, reloading and popping another shot because they know the Russians have no infantry support and no situational awareness.

Same with Russian air power. They’ve been losing expensive planes and top of the line helos to MANPADs. Not high end stationary air defense systems like Patriot. Fucking MANPADs. Because their pilots are dogshit.

In an actual war with NATO, Russian artillery would be meaningless because every single gun would get deleted from the air the moment it fired (the US literally has radar systems that can detect the trajectory of incoming rounds and calculate exactly where they came from). But Ukraine can’t do that because they barely have an airforce. Russia can’t do that because they have an incompetent air force. So we get WW1 trench warfare. What neither side has is ground attack aircraft with a radar signature the size of a bumblebee. You throw that into the mix and suddenly you’re going to see just how important air power really is.

To be vaguely credible for a moment, it is and it isn’t. On the one hand, Russia will have a very hard time replacing high end losses like Su-57s, Ka-52s and other hardware that relies heavily on modern electronics, materials, and manufacturing techniques. On the other hand, they don’t need any of those things to grind Ukraine down by sheer weight of numbers, armour, and artillery fire. The Ukraine conflict has basically devolved into WW1 trench warfare, which suits Russia prefectly. A slow, grinding, attritional war is one that plays entirely to their strengths. It doesn’t take a lot of modern to equipment to lay minefields and pre-range howitzers, so on the defence Russia can crush any Ukrainian push, and on the offence they can pay in blood for every mile.

Ultimately, the loss of something like a Su-57 is largely meaningless to Russia, because they only ever existed as a propaganda tool in the first place. Even if the Su-57 was the ultramodern fighter Russia claims (its not), they only ever built six of the damn things. That’s a rounding error compared to the US stock of F-35s and F-22s. It’s no different than all the noise over deploying the Armata. Whether they did or didn’t was never going to matter because they’ve got something like twenty of the things in total, and that’s not enough to affect anything in a conflict of this scale. It’s all just propaganda and posturing.

Hold on, you’re right, we should consult someone with actual military experience who handles fully automatic long guns professionally. Preferably someone like a front line soldier with excellent marksmanship credentials.

One sec…

Yeah, my wife said this is dumb and you shouldn’t do it. You’ll just fuck up your barrel. If you want to get good at holding a gun while shooting, hit the range.

No joke, my wife actually owns that helmet and it is so much more ridiculous looking in reality. Like, truly one of the dumbest helmets of all time.

I’d watch the shit out of that movie.

A comment that really stuck with me was when someone said “How people treat furries is a great way of finding out what kind of person they really are.”

Furries harm no one. In fact, they bring a lot of joy to a lot of people. At Toronto Pride the furries are one of the highlights of the parade. Kids absolutely love them; all these fun people in their animal costumes just out having a great time.

But it’s considered socially acceptable to mock them. Even among self-proclaimed leftists. And that tells you that those people would mock you too, for being queer, or black, or trans, if not for the fact that they had built an identity for themselves around being “the good guy.”

Find out how someone feels about furries, and you’ll very quickly learn who are the performative progressives, and who are the real ones.

I know from my wife that food in the CAF varies wildly from base to base. Some places are pretty good, others are dogshit.

Every single headline about this aid distribution should just read “US still somehow taking orders from nation that only exists because of their support.”

The idea that Isreal can block the US from just driving aid over the border is insane. The idea that Isreal can dictate any terms to the US is insane. If the US actually pulled all support, Isreal would be fucked, and they know it. But the US government keeps throwing up its hands and acting like Isreal has them over a barrel.

Just to be disgustingly credible for a moment, I imagine that the biggest practical issue with tethering a drone to, say, a tank, is that as soon as someone spots the drone (which is floating in the air with zero ability to camouflage itself) they have now spotted that you have a tank somewhere very close by. Close enough that just dropping an artillery barrage on the whole area probably isn’t a waste. With good enough optics you could probably even follow the cable in order to get an exact location on the operator, and then introduce them to Mr Missile.

Yeah, loathe as I am to say anything kind about the Iranian regime, this is still a remarkably constrained response given the circumstances. Isreal blew up their embassy, killing two of their top generals. Obviously, in an ideal world you’d work out a purely diplomatic solution, but then in an ideal world Isreal wouldn’t have blown up that embassy in the first place. The Iranian government know they have to show strength or else the backlash among their people would be insane. They were put between a rock and a hard place and picked a pretty smart way out.

And they know damn well that this whole thing kicked off in the first place because Netanyahu is trying to engineer a war. He knows he’s losing international support with his genocide in Gaza, and a war with Iran would effectively reset the field. As soon as its “ally vs enemy” all the other questions go out the window. Isreal gets a clean slate, and probably wipes out or at least seriously damages several enemies in the process. The only question is how he can make it happen in a way that will draw the US in.

Sorry, I can’t hear you over the sound of the C7 being the best AR15 ever made.

Bruh, you know NDP voters exist, right?

To be fair, given what happens when Canadians get violent it’s probably better for the rest of the world if we don’t spend more on our military. They’re dangerous enough already.

And I say this as someone who’s married to one of them.

I think you’re talking about the Geneva Checklist there bud.

Weird headline given that the Tories are the UK government.

What this seems to actually mean is “some backbenchers”

Too stealthy. Crews can’t find it.