Lord Ratner

I just grabbed an H&K VP9A1 F because I'm tired of stretching my little girl hands as far as they go to hit the slide release. It's actually a really nice pistol so far. I'm not crazy about the trigger-guard-mag-release, but I guess nothing is perfect. Also been working on a custom storage wall since I have a 3D printer. Pretty happy with it so far

Hopefully they don't make a martyr out of the guy. Just give him an lor and make him serve as long as you possibly can.

And yet here you are defending them. "Human animals" is pretty generous for what those people did on October 7th. No, the children of Gaza did not participate in the rape and massacre, but they also weren't targeted. They were positioned like sacrifices by their parents and their parents' friends to make sure they would die when the Israelis attacked. "Human Animals" does not come close to describing that level of depravity. You can whine and moan all day long about the asymmetry and unfairness of the situation, but there's no amount of poverty or oppression that justifies sacrificing your children. If your moral compass is so defunct that you can't wrap your head around that, honestly it makes the rest of your positions a lot more understandable. It doesn't make them any less wrong, but at least there is an underlying consistency that can be predicted. “We love death like our enemies love life.” - Former Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh Killing monsters is never an atrocity (or genocide), no matter how many of them you have to kill, and no matter how many of their children they hold up in front of your weapons. It's ugly and tragic, and an inescapable feature of war for the entirety of human history.

How many pseudo-governmental militias does Israel train, fund, and direct within and surrounding Iran? You guys bend over backwards in ways that make a stripper jealous, all to excuse the acts of a bunch of islamist lunatics who are literally awaiting the prophetic arrival of the 12th imam. I'm a simple man. I just judge a society by what they say and do. And in ~75 years I have yet to see an Israeli street rally calling for death to the Muslims. I haven't heard the orgasmic phone calls of young Jewish men telling their parents they had raped and slaughtered Muslim women and children. I haven't seen any of them strapping bombs to their chest or jumping on buses with knives to kill as many Muslims as they can. You shed alligator tears for dead Palestinian children who are only dead because their parents decided that the 72 virgins in heaven are worth more than the lives of their kids. How many is too many, you ask with no conviction or thought. Because you know that if it was your daughter or wife you would kill every single one of them if that was what it took to stop them. And if you wouldn't, your wife or daughter deserves better than you. It's always been very simple for those of us who don't let the emotion get in the way of the reality. If the Israelis put down their weapons and opened up their borders to the Palestinians, how many Israelis would be left alive by the end of the week? And if the hypothetical was reversed? And let's not pretend like it's just because the Palestinians are oppressed. Absolutely nobody was oppressing the Iranians. No one was oppressing the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK. No one is oppressing the immigrants in France. Not all cultures are equal, and we will continue to support the ones that don't believe in the forcible conquest of the rest of us. If that means we print some more fake money to give to the Israelis so they can give it right back to us to buy the weapons that we make with other fake money, so be it. I'll worry about foreign aid to Israel and other allies once we stop mortgaging the future to keep old fat people alive forever.

I'm not so sure about that. I don't think Vance is winning any favor with Trump over the Iran negotiations. That's not even necessarily a critique of Vance, but Trump believes himself to be the world's best negotiator, so if he sends Vance to Iran and Vance comes back with nothing but trash, especially when Vance is the voice of anti-interventionalism in the administration, I think he is going to get cross with Trump. And to be clear, I think literally anybody, no matter how good, who ends up disagreeing with Trump on something will be in his bad graces. But Trump was never an isolationist, so it's just more likely that he and Rubio will be aligned more on foreign policy than he and Vance. Also, as we learned with Obama, the power of the charismatic president does not transfer over well to their endorsements. So Vance may be the heir apparent, but Rubio is still going to be the more marketable politician.

Who is denying that? It's in the name. You are not called being called out for describing them as pro-israel. You're being called out for giving them a completely unjustified amount of power in your mind. This is exactly like when liberals bring up the NRA Boogeyman, as though the NRA has controlled American politics, ever. The NRA did not create pro-gun politicians. It merely supports them. Now remove the NRA and replace it with AIPAC. Some of us believe that supporting the only pro-america democracy in the Middle East who happens to be a technological powerhouse is a no-brainer. The fact that we can share intelligence with them is another bonus considering they are probably the best espionage outfit on the planet. I also support dumping a shitload of money into Ukraine. So I'm not sure where your narrative holds up there unless of course zielinski is hypnotized by netanyahu and so really it's Israel all the way down 😂 Edit: oh and you can bet your ass if another country that shared our values and priorities was surrounded by barbarian cultures that sought a religious revolution that spanned the globe, constantly trying to exterminate them in the most horrific ways, I would definitely support us spending 5% of our foreign aid on that country.

I don't know any of the tech billionaires who believe the crazy stuff and believe in God. So while Peter Thiel has a couple screws loose, I don't believe Vance has the same pathology. Also I don't want my politicians to be blue collar, I want them to have blue collar backgrounds. Vance fits that perfectly. He's for damn sure not a tourist 😂🤣. I find his foreign policy however to be mostly incoherent/irrational, far too close to Tucker Carlson. And since when is going to Yale bad? If he went because Daddy was an alumni, that would be one thing. I've got my fingers crossed for Rubio. He's been the surprise hero of the administration.

They're not a foreign lobby you walnut. Thomas Jefferson was so livid about the US failing to support the French against the British, he resigned. Was Thomas Jefferson secretly a French lobbyist? Americans are allowed to have foreign policy views. And they're allowed to donate and vote based on them. That doesn't make them puppets of a foreign government.

Sure wish there was a difference anymore.

Ah yeah, the Jews. The all powerful lobby that donates less to American politics than SpaceX, Coinbase, or Bloomberg, and who's lobbying is outdone by Lockheed, Facebook, the Realtors lobby, and AARP. But they have "complete subservience" from the US 🤣😂. You just can't live without the idea of a conspiracy. Weak tea.

So who thinks the Iranians are going to overplay their hand and piss Trump off into another 60-day AUMF bonanza?

Maybe I've got long covid, but who was the president in 2020? If there's one area that you and I will be in violent agreement on, it's that Donald Trump is a fierce critic of globalization and the destruction of American manufacturing. But he's been that way for decades, like a few other largely ignored voices, and it wasn't until a global pandemic erased the narrative surrounding just-in-time inventory that the Chips act was able to grow, let alone pass in 2022. Now, if I'm wrong and the pandemic had nothing to do with it, which is laughable given the numerous auto factory shutdowns during late 2020 and early 2021 that slammed everybody in the face over and over and over with semiconductor supply chains, but even so. The only other explanation is that the phenomenon is wholy and entirely attributable to Donald Trump, The first Republican and really first president of either party to dare to question the gospel of the free market. Personally I think he is a benefactor of timing rather than cunning, but if that's the route you want to go, sure. It is quite cute to hear someone attribute Chips to a democratic administration. If the supply-chain-wrecking pandemic that started before the chips act was drafted can't be responsible, I'm a bit perplexed as to how the Democratic administration that started after the act was drafted is somehow the champion. You can go back and forth on whether or not the Republicans or the Democrats get any credit for passing the thing. The Republicans were for it in isolation, but then the Manchin betrayal happened and everybody on the right went ape shit. It's not like the Republicans get much credit here, they've been shoving their head in the sand about globalization for decades. I'll give you the Russian invasion gaff. I was crossing wires between chips and energy. It's not frustrating, it's just boring. I understand that it's not necessarily some Grand strategy. You are in a vast majority of conservatives here, so there is more that you disagree with than you agree with, and only limited bandwidth to waste here (hopefully), and so you can spend all of your time trying to prove something wrong instead of just saying what you think is right. A contrarian has a contrary point. Not just "that's dumb let's just do all the good stuff without any of the bad stuff happening." I mean... You literally said that The point about harassing you to run for office is to illustrate that you are obviously either hilariously arrogant, which I doubt, or you just haven't considered how many hundreds/thousands of people exactly like you with exactly your ideas have tried and failed to get anywhere near the levers required to "do all the smart stuff ... But don't do all the really stupid parts." I could get that kind of policy prescription from the kids at my daughter's daycare. If it's so easy, why hasn't it happened? And if you know why it hasn't happened, and it's none of the things that I've said, then how do we get it done? I can't remember a single time that you have answered that question or even come remotely close to answering it. Your foreign policy basically boils down to finding a magic wand as far as I can tell. I'm no big fan of the political class, but there are some incredibly intelligent people throughout and none of them have been able to crack the egg. So what's your solution? What's your projection? You called it a straw man to say that you don't think there will be a giant war ever again. So when? Do you believe as time goes on we will be more or less prepared for that war? Do you believe we are more or less prepared than we were 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Is our preparedness for this type of conflict trending upward or downward over time, and do you believe it will continue in that direction? Of the things we need to do to be prepared for that type of war, what should we be doing, and why do you believe we would do it despite the fact that for the last 30 years we have done the exact opposite? A lot of people have put a lot of time into a lot of very insightful posts about what they think is happening, why, and what to do about it. I don't mind explaining my contribution to that conversation, but if it boils down to: you are a utopian and I am a realist, well, like I said, that's just boring. At a certain point any belief system must rely on an element of faith at the foundational level, and when you get all the way down to that level, you've exceeded the capabilities of debate and discourse. Despite my best efforts, I can't seem to find anything from you that isn't just an article of Faith. One of my volunteer gigs at the union was moderating the union message board. We dealt with a lot of the same few dozen people who couldn't pry themselves away from the keyboard, despite it obviously being in their best interests. Every once in awhile one of them would message me in private asking me to ban their access, because they just couldn't let go of the endless battle over nothing, no matter how many times they tried to block themselves or delete their account. They always came back.

Just had to hit this one since it's the funniest part of your post. Was the pandemic not a... global calamity? You think after approximately 30 years of our advanced microchip manufacturing ability declining to zero, it's a coincidence that we suddenly decided we want to make chips in America at the same time a pandemic crushes supply chains and Russia invades Ukraine?

All? I'm just talking to you. You haven't presented one particularly interesting thought in months. If there's a spectrum of intelligent, novel thinking, Clark Griswold is all the way on the right side of the spectrum, and you are fairly close to the far left side. You wonder why nobody responds to you positively, yet you don't seem to realize that the "cheerleaders" on this forum (CH, brabus, Fourfans, viperman, me, etc.) aren't here to beat the other team. We're here to discuss with similarly experienced humans with similarly matching values things that are going on in the world. If our goal was to prove our own intelligence to ourselves by going up against a couple dozen antagonists, we wouldn't be here on a mostly conservative leaning forum of mostly old vets. It's also why guys like negatory and Day man and NS player and 17D Guy end up rage quitting in a huff. They didn't see a bunch of like-minded people discussing issues from different perspectives in the same neighborhood, they saw some sort of den of conservative malignancy and made it their righteous duty to stand on behalf of "the other side." Bottom line, they were here to prove people wrong. Sure, Cleared Hot gets a little Fox Newsish from time to time, and I use big words that Boomer6 has to sound out each syllable to understand, but none of the conservatives come to this site thinking it's time to prove you or the other token liberals wrong. Hell, it's not like you've said anything that you believe that anyone can address, but even if you had, I'm not particularly interested proving you wrong. You say you don't understand my view, and so I explain. I never said you had to agree with me, and like I said you're obviously not at a point yet where you can accept the existence of a philosophy that might disprove your own. I don't mind wasting the time because my daughter is taking a nap and I have nothing to do right now. It would be nice if baseops was what it used to be, a repository forum primarily for military flyers to get information about life and work in the military. But technology evolved and web forums that aren't hyper-specialized hobbyist groups are basically dead, so a few dozen Ghosts of Air Force Past come here to chat amongst themselves, show off their guns, and occasionally respond to one of you guys who seem to have decided that of all the places on the internet you can go to battle with people of the opposite ideology, this is where you'll make your last stand. I mean my God, look at Negatory. The dude is still here with a new username that reminds you every time you look at it that he literally could not pry himself away from fighting with a bunch of online strangers. It's an addiction. 🤷‍♂️

This is really the Crux of the whole thing. No, we can't. We hypothetically can do all of those things without doing the things you find illogical, but history and reality suggest otherwise. You still seem to be in the part of your ideological journey where you think societies and the politicians they produce will make hard choices without going through hard times. I do not. I don't think it's a coincidence that as the generation that endured world war II started to lose political power, we started making all the same mistakes that lead towards the conflict I believe to be inevitable. This isn't some wacky theory I came up with on my own. You've heard it before in one of its many various wrappers. Soft times create soft men. Soft men create hard times. Hard times create hard men. Hard men create soft times. Soft times create...