Lord Ratner
-
Posts
2,657 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
151
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Gallery
Blogs
Downloads
Wiki
Everything posted by Lord Ratner
-
Loyalty is everything to him, and he seems to be addicted to trolling. Trump is also hypersensitive to any suggestion of political witch hunts now. Couldn't even make it a year. Pity.
-
We got a good example of "Bad Trump" recently. Really I'd say 90% of his actions towards Canada have been bad, but throwing a tariff on them because you don't like an ad run by a provincial government is particularly stupid. One tragedy of Trump v2 is going to be that we finally have a president who uses tariffs, which are a phenomenal tool, but he's using them like a distracted child, and he's going to end up discrediting them for another few decades.
-
I agree with that specific question, but that doesn't actually matter to anybody. What matters are the favorability ratings of the various players, in particular Trump, which will play into the midterms. Not to mention six points isn't enough to get anybody excited. And since we just happen to have a president who presided over another shutdown during his first term, where his favorability ratings did drop, it's a pretty apples apples to comparison... It was either yesterday or the day before I saw on MSNBC them talking about Trump gaining a point in favorability. That doesn't indicate any real consequences from the shutdown. The other dirty little secret is that no one really gives a shit about this anymore. There are so many carve outs for what government activity continues despite a shutdown that the average American isn't being impacted.
-
Commanders are dropping like flies this year
Lord Ratner replied to MDDieselPilot's topic in General Discussion
So let me get this straight, 20 million illegal immigrants coming into the country is better than a small number of constitutional violations that are being resolved in the courts? That's the math. I don't work in the Congress, so I don't get to pick a made-up third option where the border is closed and there are no violations of constitutional rights. I have a choice between a candidate that made everything worse, dramatically, and a candidate who single-handedly reduced illegal immigration to near zero, while fucking up in some edge cases. That's pretty easy math to me. No one is denying the constitutional violations, though I suspect you would view far more of the deportation activity as a violation than I would. But even if I agreed with you on every single case, the alternative was a slow rolling catastrophe for my country and the country my children will inherit. Caveats are part of living in the real world. I will be very black and white in this point. If this is a literal statement, then you are a hack. And while I could put together a rather extensive list of individual things he has done that are quite easy for me or any other conservative-minded person to support, and I can even make a smaller list of things that any fair-minded liberal would support, if you can't do that on your own, then you are simply beyond any position that is worth engaging with. In that case, TDS is a fair label. -
The nuance matters, but absent additional nuance I'm still inclined to agree with bonsai on this one. The Republicans in the house and the Senate are working in lockstep, so they should be pulling by the same rules as far as what is and isn't shut down business. Philosophically it's a bit hard to argue that you can't swear in a representative during a shutdown, as Congress is the mechanism for resolving the shutdown, and representatives and senators make up the Congress. What if 140 Republican congressman died in a plane crash during the shutdown? Should they be replaced by Republican governors and maintain the majority, or should Democrats be given the majority because the fatalities happened to coincide with the government shut down? Not that it matters. The Democrats overplayed their hand by demanding the reversal of fairly-passed legislation in exchange for opening the government. The polls support this pretty convincingly.
-
From what I'd gathered, for the moment at least, the ATF has given up on forced reset triggers on rifles. In their settlement agreement with rare breed, they had two interesting conditions. The first was that it would not be adapted to conventional pistols (conventional in the sense that it doesn't include all of the pistol AR and pistol rifle type guns), and the second was that he would agree to enforce his patent against others. I suspect the restriction on pistols was directly related to their ongoing attempts to get rid of the Glock switch.
-
Got a link? If true, then we agree, that's a bunch of ridiculous bullshit. But then you won't have to search very hard to find my criticisms of the Republican party.
-
Things you should listen to drunk while on BO
Lord Ratner replied to Clark Griswold's topic in Squadron Bar
One of the most iconic voices ever. -
They don't read or listen. This is just where they take out their frustrations on the amorphous "Republican voter" as depicted by their favorite news outlet. Every time one of them breaks out the "why aren't you criticizing Trump like you do the liberals" routine, someone points out that nearly every conservative here regularly criticizes Trump, and then suddenly their keyboard goes quiet. It's boring.
-
I'm not at all against buying the Argentinian pesos. America is going to have to accept that we are not at war with free market enemies. Would it be better or worse for us to have stable allies in our hemisphere? After 30 years of funding the buildup of China, we are now in the unfortunate position of competing with the monster we created. That monster is going to dump money on every country that it can to weaken our sphere of influence. That doesn't mean we give everyone money and bankrupt ourselves like the Soviet Union did, but it does mean we have to be realistic about what it takes to cultivate and retain allies. Argentina is in the very rare position of having elected a leader on the message of hard choices to fix things. Unsurprisingly, those hard choices are making it hard for him to retain control. No one here should be surprised, Americans have become entitled and lazy as well. But of all the countries in South America to support, and hopefully turn into an example, the one with a historically humongous economy and fiercely pro-american leader is probably the best bet. I wish we could go back in time and divert trillions of dollars in manufacturing build up to the people much closer to us that share a much more similar history and moral philosophy. But we didn't, so now we have to do it the harder way.
-
Bought some toys to make range day a lot more fun: https://ar500targetsolutions.com/product/12x20-ar550-reactive-hostage-target-system-1-2/ And this fancy bit of kit: https://shootingtargets7.com/products/dueling-tree-target I'll report back in a couple weeks with the review
-
If she's kept from the House when the government reopens, I'm with you 100%. Until then it's just mock outrage. The Constitution did not contemplate a government shutdown.
-
That's not really the issue though. I agree with you that they will do us they're told (and right now they are just being told to make money). The issue is that what they produce is fundamentally unhelpful in a great war. China will be in a better position to manufacture the precision components required to mass-produce F-35s. That's a result of companies like Apple funding both the industrial capabilities and the intellectual capabilities required. They can convert their existing infrastructure towards wartime production. We can too, just not for the types of weaponry that we currently procure. One of the more fascinating things lucky pointed out was how China mandated all of the civilian Maritime assets be designed to military spec. So a ferry that is used to shuttle cars and semi trucks from Port to Port still has the ability to handle tanks. That type of foresight simply does not exist in America.
-
This is the Crux of it. You either have to believe all of them are stupid, which is true for the majority but not the entirety of our executive and general officer class, or they just don't care. The ugly reality is that the F22 is a completely useless airframe in a great conflict, purely by merit of its scarcity. And the F32 is most likely not far behind based on how difficult it would be to ramp up production. And just like all the bankers during the great financial crisis, these "leaders" will skitter away into the shadows like the cockroaches they are, never to be held accountable, while dudes like Luckey end up being the secret ingredient to winning the next war.
-
Palmer Luckey on Rogan is pretty good. Hearing a defense contractor talk about designing weaponry that can be manufactured in an auto factory is refreshing. At the end of the next war I don't think the current defense giants will be on top anymore. How many F-22/35s are we going to crank out in the next global conflict?
-
My favorite part of a government shutdown are the news mashups showing every politician from both sides taking the exact opposite position during the previous shutdown when it was the other team leading it.
-
Right now the only obvious enemy is China. Not only do they have enough people, they have a huge imbalance in the male:female ratio. Excess unmarried men are a societal risk. Additionally, the population hasn't fully appreciated that their life savings have been squandered building ghost cities that will never be occupied. That won't go over well as their boomers attempt to retire. Even without that, their demographics are terrible because their Baby Boomer generation was huge and the one-child policy created a much larger generational imbalance between the boomers and millennials than exists in the rest of the world. Last I saw the revised population estimates were 200-300 million fewer Chinese than we thought 10 years ago. Shrinking population = shrinking economy = social unrest. You know of a better way for a dictatorship to quell social unrest (with a bunch of excess males) than war? We're already in the early phases with the trade war. Think of it from their perspective, not ours. The US is forcing a reindustrialization in the West, which is a direct attack on China's wealth generation. And the primary pressure points against America (rare earths production being a huge one) are being identified and, at least rhetorically, mitigated in future plans. If we allow China to take over their half of the planet, particularly all the east Asian countries, then maybe there's no war. But we won't, so eventually everything will spill over into another global conflict. Honestly I'm amazed at how many people just operate on the assumption that humanity has evolved out of wars.
-
War.
-
Initial Pilot Training and Future Pilot Training
Lord Ratner replied to LookieRookie's topic in General Discussion
Is that a gondola pole? When I flew with Huggy he may have tried to hand-start the prop, but he still knew about powered flight 😂😂 -
At least now we know what the bargain was to get the qataris to abandon Hamas and force the ceasefire. This might be another bit of 4d chess on behalf of the Trump administration. Giving the qataris a no shit facility in the United States is going to tie them to us in a much more concrete way than simply having a base in their country. My suspicion is that the Trump administration has decided that we are going to buy the qataris away from the Chinese and the Iranians. And we're going to lock them in with a deeply integrated military, similar to how we have locked in the Saudis. Obviously the 4D chess bit is tongue in cheek, but it's just another example of the Trump administration making a decision and buying into it 100%. In an era where the dreams of a cosmopolitan worldwide alliance have fallen apart, if the Republicans commit themselves to the concept of a Balkanized world again, we can start making moves to make sure that our sphere of influence is the more powerful one. The real problem of course will be the the pseudo-utopians on the far right and the far left that have turned into New age isolationists. They'll bitch and moan about the duplicitous nature of the Qatari regime as though that's not an inescapable facet of international relations. It's got to be a rough time to be a libertarian.
-
I wasn't sure what people saw in her when she was nominated, and I haven't seen much from her to change my opinion. She's pretty, and I suspect that was enough for Trump 🤣😂
-
This is correct. Last I saw Fort Worth was the largest and only "major" Republican city in America. And they don't have a notable crime issue to speak of. Dallas is completely blue, minus the strange politics of the current mayor.
-
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/09/restoring-law-and-order-in-memphis/ Also, you think Memphis is Red?
-
Philosophically, if the governor isn't asking for help, then I'm inclined to be against it. I would make exceptions for the protection of federal buildings, such as during the race riots of 2020, but that's not happening right now. Politically, I have no idea. It could work, and it's not a stretch to see how. That could be a big political win if it forces Democrats out of their reflexive embrace of crime.
-
The guy who owns my local gun shop is an M1 collector, and I asked him to take a look just to make sure it seemed fine. We got the gun from my wife's family, apparently the friend of an uncle or something brought it back from the war. The mags don't look ancient, but the only markings on them are "U" on one, "SW" on another couple, and "M2" on the extended. Right now the site isn't letting me upload pics. From AI: "In summary, your "U" and "SW" marked magazines are authentic pieces of World War II history. Your extended "M2" magazine is more likely a later, commercial product, but a careful examination of its features can help to more definitively determine its provenance"
