Skua

They’re only struggling because the West is arming Ukraine. The Ukrainians fought hard from day one, but they’d have been overrun and at best operating a guerilla campaign without being given heaps of equipment. Look what has happened while America stopped sending stuff over, and’s while Europe was still sending stuff. Europe’s arms industry is substantial, pretty much on par with the US in terms of value exported, but it’s lacking things like the ability to supply an artillery war like the one going on in Ukraine. Since the US doesn’t seem to be very reliable, Europe is gonna have to cover that base itself if it wants to be able to deter actions like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

They’re American

The European NATO members did continue supplying Ukraine. However, the US had previously accounted for roughly half of the total arms supplied and Europe didn’t do anything extra to make up for that sudden colossal shortfall.

The UK openly said Ukraine could use British-supplied weapons on Russian territory a few weeks ago. We’re much closer to the Russian heartlands and have a much less scary military than America, but Russia hasn’t done shit about it

They got to announce that inflation is more or less back down to normal levels, so this is about as good as the polling is likely to be. A there was one a few months back that actually showed the Conservatives getting fewer seats than the SNP. To be clear it was only one poll and I do not think it will happen, but for readers that don’t already know this, the SNP only even contest less than 10% of the total seats. The fact that that was ever even close to the bounds of possibility is wild.

As the article correctly points out, 3 C warming is still really fucking bad. Just because it can technically be worse and we won’t all die does not mean it’ll be nice to live through. Bringing about the extinction of 29% of all species is madness. To quote the article:

“The most comprehensive and authoritative assessment of risk across all sectors — health, food, water, conflict, poverty, and the natural ecosystem — by the IPCC in 2018 basically concluded that we don’t want to warm the planet beyond 1.5°C (2.7°F), and we really don’t want to warm it beyond 2°C (3.6°F). And if we do happen to overshoot those targets, we want to keep the duration of overshoot to a minimum.”

If someone could convincingly scientifically back up their belief that climate change isn’t going to be a big deal, they’d be swimming in oil company money to promote their work. There’s definitely an incentive to research it if you think the other way.

It feels weird to frame this as an EU objection considering that Greece has also put the same kind of ban in place. It’s specifically France objecting.

But for other Brexiteers, the policies help illustrate the flexibility the U.K. has outside the EU on matters which would have previously been subject to lengthy negotiation under the Commons Fisheries Policy — and which Brussels and member states are outright hostile to for their own reasons.

Brexit benefits! We could never have done this as EU members without a whole load of negotiations, please ignore that we’re still dealing with a whole load of negotiations over it and also that EU member Greece did it on a larger scale than us!

They didn’t always go as planned! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bent_Pyramid

That’s not true at all

We now deport those people to Rwanda

Fuck it, buy extra Taurus systems with frozen Russian assets. We can have both.

The Ukrainian government clearly reckons that famous people getting special treatment is worse

Why would Olympic athletes not be drafted?

A UN mission that China has actively voted for repeatedly, no less. Every UNSC resolution against North Korea going back to 2006 has been unanimous.

I don’t think this is really a good assessment. Plenty of movies then looked terrible and plenty now look amazing. The recent Dune films look absolutely phenomenal. It’s a matter of how the films use the technology available, whether that means miniatures with camera tricks or it means completely CG stuff

It makes a fair bit of sense for someome that already speaks English to want to claim asylum in an English-speaking country, and a lot of people already speak at least some English. They’ve got a far better chance of being able to make a life for themselves if they can already converse with everyone.

Gazprom went from a profit of 1.2 trillion roubles in 2022 to a loss of 630 billion in 2023, so I’d say that the current effots are already paying off too. If the EU can do more, fantastic

It’s worth remembering that WW2 was an existential threat to the Soviet Union and most of the people living in it. This war isn’t. See how the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan turned out.

And, of course, Ukraine was also part of the Soviet Union. Russians weren’t the only ones fighting the Nazis on the Eastern Front

They meant Russia has more bodies to spend

Fascinating how Finland has one of the best literacy scores and worst behaviour scores. Apparently Finns understand how to be financially responsible and simply do not care for it