Lord Ratner

I know this won't make sense to you, because fundamentally the progressive sees only problems in the present and solutions in the future, whereas the conservative sees success in the present and problems in the future. Both are necessary, but they see the world differently. Kamala, Obama, Bernie, AOC, whoever. Now that the DNC is being steered by the progressives (and not the Clinton style liberals), there's no question for a conservative. Progressives are proudly and loudly vilifying the institutions and norms and conservatives believe made our society possible and prosperous. They defend real threats today (illegal immigration, the failures of socialism, the death of meritocracy) in the name of invisible threats (trans genocide, islamophobia, unconscious bias). The things we believe make America what it is (individualism, limited government, free speech, law and order) are the stated enemies of the progressives. Sure there are definitely threats from the right. Anyone now associated with Tucker Carlson is most likely a populist threat. But they aren't in charge, and I'm fact, they increasingly hate Trump. But I'll take the insane liar (Trump) who at least claims to support the things I support (and acts on them frequently) over the "sane" liars (Kamala) who have opposed my ideals for their entire career. You want it to be a hard choice. Hell, I want it to be a harder choice. But it's not. I like most of Trump's policy. I detest almost everything the progressives stand for. So if you want me to say Trump is a lunatic, yep, agreed. But if you want me to say Kamala would have been better for the country... Nope. Canada tried that with Trudeau and it was a disaster. No thanks. I know. You disagree. But you keep reinforcing our point when you think you're disproving it.

Except it's not working at all. The first assault weapons ban was in in 1993, and States like Illinois and California are just trying to get back to that baseline. Bruen an earthquake, and Rahimi is being corrected. We look to be on the cusp of the legalization of high capacity magazines and all semi automatic rifles in all states. After 100 years the NFA has been de-taxed, and suppressors may be next. FRTs are spreading like wildfire and the govt is afraid to go after them because of the bump stock ruling. As far as wars of attrition go, for the first time in my life they are objectively losing.

Yep. I think maybe one of the ugliest things coming, and I don't mean ugly as in wrong, I just mean it's going to be turbulent and brutal, is the termination of legal immigration to the United States. It wasn't even on my radar until recently when someone who had just written a book about it was making the podcast circuits, and pointed out that a lot of what we're seeing today was happening in the early 1900s, and it was a couple decades of functionally zero immigration that re-enabled the cultural integration machine. Turns out, people don't integrate into a new society if you give them a steady stream of new immigrants from their original cultures. It happened with the varying European cultures back before the world wars, and it's happening with the varying third world cultures today. The H-1B is just a particularly cartoonish example of what goes wrong when you turn immigration policy into a global Utopia issue rather than a pragmatic issue of national interests. All right

Well it's got to be less embarrassing than having the Ukrainians eventually blow the thing up, right? 😂

Hey man, I've only got 20 minutes to catch my commute flight home.

Is anybody else going to be completely unsurprised if we find out that M2's old ass died a year ago and a rogue AI agent trained on his content and took over his account without anyone noticing? 😂🤣

He's old as shit, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise.

Okay so now we've gone from this shouldn't be mandatory, to this should be mandatory and so should a whole bunch of other things? I'm just trying to follow along.

Are they producing new ballistic missiles? I'm just reading what you quoted.

Just so I understand. Low-T is a brutal condition that affects the ability to maintain physical conditioning. And it affects multiple service members on this board alone. and We shouldn't be testing for low-T. Do I have that right? Are we doing to pretend like we care? Women in the military was never about physical performance.

Big day for the 2A. It still surprises me to see so much progress in support of the 2A

There's no such thing as correcting exactly back to the trend line. Hegseth was the response to things getting way out of whack on the dei/safe space/pussification side of the spectrum. He's going to spin the wheel hard right, get back to the center line, and blow through it a little bit. We're never going to know whether or not this is handled correctly because we're not going to know what the actual debrief for that pilot sounds like. But if he is chastised, given a few shitty additional duties here and there, and otherwise not punished for a singular mistake, then I would say hegseth and company have handled this well. There is absolutely no need to discuss the disciplinary side of this publicly, because ultimately nothing happened.

First article: Garbage. The headline doesn't match any of the actual quotes in the article. The actual quotes are much more boring. The best you have is "a few Jews at a rally said evil things." Now, if the minister with the flag had said something like "we will kill any Palestinian that prevents us from retaking the Temple Mount" then you might have something. But to try to compare this to even the now-boring "from the river to the sea" is idiotic. Second article: “There’s no such thing as ‘means, intent and ability’ in Gaza,” Vilk says. “No soldier ever mentions ‘means, intent, and ability’. It’s just: a suspicion of walking where it’s not allowed. A man aged between 20 and 40.” Nonsense. The article pretends that there was no enemy at all. Just a bunch of refugees looking for food. There's tons of footage of Hamas fighters engaging the IDF. If their repeated, documented use of civilians and civilian disguises made the IDF paranoid and trigger happy, that's a bummer, but entirely predictable. The US soldiers killed a lot of unarmed Germans as we took Europe from the Nazis. Yet no one is stupid enough (except for Tucker Carlson) to claim the allies were the bad guys. Welcome to war. Maybe your military service was so blessedly uneventful that you never saw or heard these very human things happen. Your general philosophy does usually reek of ignorant utopianism. It still doesn't make it even remotely difficult to know who the bad guys are in this situation.

Okay, so no longer the largest generation. Interesting. But I'm pretty sure they're still the largest voting block, as far as actual participants go: From AI Baby Boomers cast the largest number of votes in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. Using standard Pew generation ranges and the Census Bureau’s single-year age data, the estimated totals were: Generation Approx. voters Baby Boomers (born 1946–1964) 47.2 million Generation X (1965–1980) 39.8 million Millennials (1981–1996) 37.8 million Generation Z, voting-age members (1997–2006) 19.2 million Silent Generation and older 10.3 million