This is an idea that’s been toyed with, but simply doesn’t give the same kind of situational awareness that a human pilot directly in the situation has, not to mention the issues with communication links, which not only present the problem of jamming as you said, but also make stealth much more difficult. With a human pilot, the craft can shut off all radio comms for a much lower signature.

What we’re seeing instead as the expected path forward is a hybrid approach; wingman drones.

You build a top of the line stealth fighter, and then you give it two drone buddies, which can be remotely fed instructions by the human operated craft. You retain situational awareness, and from a flying platform you can fall back to laser communication; unjammable and undetectable. Pilot safety is significantly enhanced because they can hang back and let the drones engage, and each pilot (a very expensive asset) can now command significantly more firepower.

Saab are working on this for their upcoming sixth gen fighter, which I’d very much like to see us collaborate on developing.

Imagine you and twenty of your friends have ganged up on someone in a fight. Would feel exactly as confident if they were armed with a knife as you would if they were armed with nothing?

It’s not always about being able to win the fight. Sometimes it’s just about making the fight costly enough that the other party decides its not worth it.

This, by the way, is exactly why our military is still pushing for the F-35, despite the very high political costs and risks that it now comes with. When you get down to the brass tacks of what an air war between Canada and Russia would look like, the unavoidable factor is that Russia simply does not have any 5th gen fighters. Even on paper their only claimed 5th gen simply isn’t. The specs they’ve announced for the Su-57 it barely qualify as stealthy. And it’s well known that Russia overstates their specs (whereas NATO tends to understate ours). We also know from what’s been happening Ukraine that Russian radar is dogshit.

Everything in Russia’s current air fleet, including their grand total of 6 “5th gen” fighters, would get stomped into the ground by an F-35. Stealth is a huge force multiplier. When you can kill the enemy without them even seeing you, it’s not even a fight, it’s just a turkey shoot. Even a small fleet of F-35s would inflict unimaginable damage on the Russian air force. They’d be limited only by their ability to maintain locations to launch from, and their available supply of fuel, parts and munitions.

Something like that dramatically alters the calculations when it comes to considering any kind of attack.

Canada’s geography isn’t exactly conducive to relying on anti-air systems alone. It’s the same reason Trump’s golden dome is a fantasy; he’s trying to recreate Iron Dome, but Iron Dome only works because Isreal is tiny. Canada isn’t.

There’s also a huge cost to air defense systems. Just for some rough perspective, a single Patriot missile system costs as much as 10 F-35s. A Patriot covers a radius of about 160km, an F-35, without midair refueling, covers a radius of about 1800km.

You simply cannot create the same kind of air defence network with ground batteries only as you can with aerial interceptors, and when you need to cover a country as large as ours that makes a huge difference. Far from being a fraction of the cost, your proposal would actually be orders magnitude more expensive.

Even when you throw drones into the picture they’re simply not going to adjust that calculation in any meaningful way. A drone capable of intercepting enemy aircraft or missiles as effectively as a fighter plane is going to cost as much as a fighter plane. There’s really no avoiding that.

They didn’t, either time. But reality got in the way of the meme so OP ignored it.

The first Iraq war was an unqualified success. There’s really no way around that. Should they have gone the whole way and removed Saddam from power? Maybe. But the goal of the war was to protect Kuwait and that goal was accomplished.

The second Iraq war was stupid, unnecessary, messy, pointless, badly mismanaged, and came at a staggeringly high cost. But it was successful. They achieved the regime change they wanted and ultimately created a puppet state in the Middle East. They’re using Iraqi bases right now in their attacks on Iran, something that would not possible if that war had been a failure.

Doesn’t make it a good idea. Getting what you want isn’t great if you massively overpay for it.

Afghanistan, on the other hand, absolutely counts as a loss. The US got nothing that they wanted - it didn’t even lead to the death of Bin Laden since he was hiding out in Pakistan - and wasted a tonne of lives and resources to ultimately just put the country back in the hands of the Taliban and give them a whole bunch of military hardware.

If they go that far, then yes, the only reasonable response would be to stop any purchases of US equipment altogether.

I doubt they will, for that exact reason. It’s the kind of hardball move I’m sure Trump would very much like to pull, but I’m also sure that his handlers / diaper changers recognize how damaging it would be, not just to any future sales to Canada, but future sales across the world. Nobody wants to buy from a store that constantly changes or refuses to honour their own terms of service. There are already concerns that the US might stop offering firmware updates to buyers of the F-35, but those concern are at least hypothetical, currently. If they pull this “red card” it very much stops being hypothetical. Maybe you sell a few more units to buyers who are currently locked in (that might even include Canada), but you lose basically any future business from everyone who has better options.

What fucking idiocy is this? It’s not enough that half our economy is tied to a fossil fuel that’s rapidly being replaced by renewables, now we have to double down?

Jesus wept, I didn’t think reading comprehension had gotten that bad.

Yes, this clarification is correct. I meant that the increase amounts to an extra five dollars when you renew your passport once every ten years.

God damn, you’d think people could put that together from context.

By 2.7%. That’s the really rather important detail that they decided not to include in the headline.

It’s about $5 every 10 years. If you can afford to travel abroad in the first place, you’ll be fine.

Found 'em

Trump doesn’t spend time thinking about the practicalities of something like this, because when he says “51st state” what he means is “The latest expansion of my kingly domain.”

He has zero intention of letting newly subjugated Canadians vote. He doesn’t even want to let Americans vote. These are the fantasies of an autocrat, not carefully thought out plans.

I’d be really interested to see an actual example of someone who was wrongfully charged in a situation that was clearly self-defence, as I’ve never yet seen one. And by that I do mean a) the charges stuck, and b) the situation was still clearly self-defence once all the facts were known.

Where did I sound like I was panicking?

I was being charitable. As we’ve just discussed, fear makes otherwise smart people come to bad conclusions.

It’s literally in the title: “Assault charges dropped against Ontario man who confronted [emphasis mine] home intruder”

You’re reading a LOT into a choice of wording in a headline there. We do not know anything about the circumstances of the “confrontation” in question. Nothing there indicates that he, for example, went out of his way to get into a fight when he didn’t have to.

You’re forcing someone into making a split second decision at that point, and you can’t expect those decisions to always be the correct one, and I don’t think it is criminal to make what might be the wrong decision (or might be exactly the right decision) in such an extreme situation.

Correct. It is not, in fact, criminal to do that. Defendants are given significant leeway in self-defence claims precisely because the law does not expect people to make the right judgement call in a split second. If you responded to a seemingly legitimate threat in a moment of panic, that’s still covered by self-defence. What’s not covered is a) going out of your way to get into a fight, and b) using force that is clearly unnecessary or disproportional to the threat against you. Everything else is fair game.

Remember, the charges against this guy were dropped. Even though his assailant ended up on death’s door, in an emergency room, covered in lacerations and bleeding to death, that was still considered fair and reasonable self-defence. You’re panicking over nothing.

This says the man confronted him.

I’ve not seen any reporting to that effect. You’re welcome to provide a source.

If you go after a guy who’s broken into your house and you’re wielding a baseball bat, that is, at least as far as I understand it, assault with a weapon. It doesn’t matter that he was in your home, and it’s not self-defense because you were the aggressor, and entering someone’s house is not an “assault”.

Correct. If an altercation is not necessary, and you chose to make one happen anyway, you are the aggressor.

maybe I’m mistaken, but I believe the reason this guy is not being punished for what he did is not because what he did is not an actual crime (as far as I know, it still is) but because police are simply declining to prosecute it in this particular case.

You are, indeed, mistaken.

Self-defence is not a crime in Canada. If you’re starting from the position that it is, you’re wrong, and you need to educate yourself more on how Canadian law works.

Section 34, Canadian Criminal Code:

34 (1) A person is not guilty of an offence if

(a) they believe on reasonable grounds that force is being used against them or another person or that a threat of force is being made against them or another person;

(b) the act that constitutes the offence is committed for the purpose of defending or protecting themselves or the other person from that use or threat of force; and

(c) the act committed is reasonable in the circumstances.

What the police did in this situation is they looked at the evidence, said “This isn’t clear cut enough for us to make a judgement call, so we’ll leave that to the courts.” And the Crown looked at all of the evidence, and made the judgement call that he was innocent. That’s how law works. Sooner or later someone has to make a call. Whether that’s the cops, or the prosecutors, or the jury, you cannot ever have a legal code that is so thorough in its detail that no judgement calls are ever required. That’s why courts and the adversarial justice system exist.

And this particularly case was not even remotely a clear cut one. No amount of detail in the law would have prevented this from being messy and complicated. But when you refuse to look at the details, and just consume only the briefest headline version - “man charged for defending himself from attacker with crossbow” - it’s always going to sound easy, because you’re not looking at the reality, just an oversimplified caricature of it.

My point of view may be tinted by the fact that in my hometown several children ranging from age 3 to age 12 were recently brutally raped and some left with permanent life altering injuries by a well-known and previously convicted sex offender.

First off, that’s horrific, and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. I’m sorry that those people went through that, and I’m sorry that you had to experience being a part of a community that went through that.

But if I’m understanding you correctly - and please correct me if I’m not - it very much sounds like you feel that the police used too light a hand in that case. There was a person with a known history of the same exact crime, and that person was left to continue their actions without any intervention. You would, I assume, concur with the idea that the accused’s past should have played a much stronger role in the investigation and that the police should have been quicker to pursue a charge, yes?

So let’s take a closer look at this self-defence case.

Historical court records reviewed by CBC News show he [McDonald, the man who defended himself] has a violent past. McDonald pleaded guilty to three charges, including assault, following a 2001 incident involving a baseball bat. The more serious charge of assault with a weapon was withdrawn. Seven years later, McDonald again pleaded guilty — this time to assault causing bodily harm — in connection with an attack on another man. He was sentenced to a three-month jail term and 18 months’ probation. McDonald also admitted to breaching probation and, separately, failing to comply with a release order.

So, the cops arrive at the home of a man with a well known and extensive history of violent assaults, and find in his home a violently assaulted person in critical condition. This well known violent criminal with a history of doing stuff exactly like this says “Oh no officers, he attacked me, I was just defending myself.” And the cops look at the person bleeding to death, in critical condition, covered in lacerations (this is established elsewhere in the article, feel free to check), being rushed to hospital, and they look at the known violent criminal with exactly zero credibility, and they call bullshit.

Just like they should have called bullshit when that sex offender said something to the effect of “Oh no, it wasn’t me, it must be some other serial rapist.”

You can’t have it both ways, can you? You can’t have a world where the cops call bullshit on the rapist, while also having a world where the cops immediately suss out that the man with a history of violent assaults did not in fact commit a violent assault in this situation where it really, really looks like he committed a violent assault. They did their jobs; they arrested him, they pressed charges, and then when all of the evidence was in view the Crown determined that the defendant’s story actually did line up well enough that they’re pretty sure he’s not lying. This time.

But the stories I’ve come across tend to highlight how self defense laws are lacking in Canada

Here’s the thing. I hear this a lot. And every single time that I’ve ever been presented with an example, and looked into it deep enough, or enough time has passed that more information came to light, every obvious case of Canada’s self-defence laws “failing” has always turned out to be “No, actually, in this case there really was a line crossed.”

That’s not to say that no law can ever fail. Laws do get misapplied, and no law is perfect. There are edge cases where people will simply disagree; that happens a lot with the law. There are entire fields of academia basically devoted to disagreeing about laws. But it is remarkable that I have never yet seen even one clear cut case of “Wow, that guy totally did not deserve to get charged with anything, he was clearly just defending himself,” that didn’t turn out to be something far more ambiguous, if not outright damning to the defendant when the details are known.

To paraphrase a line, fans of castle doctrine seem to see home invasions as a kind of cosmic lottery where every now and then one among them will be annointed with the opportunity to legally commit murder.

You told on yourself hard with that Kevin McCallister bit. This isn’t about safety. It’s not about justice. It’s about you foaming at the mouth at the idea that one day you might be granted the chance to unleash all the resentment and anger festering inside you.

Meanwhile the reality of castle doctrine is stuff like this; https://apnews.com/article/indiana-house-cleaner-shot-wrong-address-2068589a1c3de79c36d88430674fae78

The Crown dropped the case of their own accord after reviewing the additional evidence. He didn’t have to defend himself in court.

Obviously that doesn’t mean that no legal costs were incurred. We do have public defenders in Canada, so it’s likely those costs were born by the state. If he did incur any out of pocket expenses I would certainly like to see him compensated for those. Unfortunately I’m not aware of what the specific law is on that matter.

But again, as I pointed out elsewhere, this is a very, very rare case. Normally cases for self-defence are never even brought to begin with. The Crown either fucked up very badly here, or they sincerely believed that they had a very strong case that this was not legitimate.

That can happen in any justice system. Unless you simply declare that all murder is legal, there is absolutely no version of a self-defence exemption that will not sometimes be wrongly prosecuted. The question here is not whether or not the prosecuters were right to bring the case, it’s whether or not Canada’s legal self-defence standard makes sense. And given a choice between what we have, which works extremely well, and very rarely produces outlier results like this (remember, you never hear about the self-defence incidents that don’t get prosecuted) and a system where cleaners get shot for knocking at the wrong house, I think the choice is clear.

In that both of those things are apparently legal in the respective countries? Yes.