Lord Ratner

Hang on, what? On which particular issue are you opining? Jefferson and Washington were the farthest things from allies. And Jefferson was fiercely interventionist. He resigned specifically because of his desire for the US for fight with/for the French during the revolution. There's a part of me that deeply hopes you are as stupid in person as you are online, it would be intensely entertaining. But I know that's not likely.

What's the issue? Civilian led military. He's not even the 6th person in the last 70 years (very weird metric) to fill this role.

This seems very simple. You want conscientious objector status? No. What's the next crisis?

I've said this here before. The "AI" that exists currently is sufficient to make an anti air missile that is inescapable by any existing aircraft. I'm guessing Anduril or Palantir are already working on this, but in the end the human G limitation will make it impossible for a manned aircraft to escape this technology. There is a reason we are so aggressively blocking China from obtaining any of nvidia's most advanced chips. It won't matter, the processing power required for these models is already plummeting, and older video cards are capable much more than just a year or two ago. It does make me wonder if we will see a return to guns as a primary anti-aircraft weapon. Creating an unmanned fighter that is capable of out-maneuvering whatever plane it is following and responding faster than any human can would make it relatively easy to get within range of a target and use cheap bullets to take it out. Reusable anti-aircraft drones would be a better value proposition than blowing up $100k in processing power with every launch. It's going to be an interesting decade ahead.

I don't know what you're talking about... My wife is definitely not looking over my shoulder right... now..

Stop with the PC Charger! I've already blown my gun budget for the year.

You say this, yet it is belied by actual testing. I'm not disputing that a meth'd out burglar can survive a few incorrectly-placed shots of any caliber (probably not BMG...), but that doesn't really prove one thing or another. Too many people in this type of discussion assume that birdshot at 20 meters = birdshot at 5 meters. That's largely true for 9mm, 5.56, 300BO, or even a slug. It's not remotely true for shot. Shattering the rib cage and embedding in the heart is going to stop a crack head. But like you said: Paul (RIP) also goes over using turkey loads in another video. Again, making the determination that you'd rather have longer range, or a different weapon to wield, all valid decisions. But that's different than saying birdshot doesn't work very well. It doesn't work as well, but it also is the only option that meaningfully reduces the chance of collateral damage from a stray shot, and effectively eliminates the possibility of shooting through the burglar/rapist and still poking a hole in a loved one. That's probably going to be fine if you live in Texas. But you don't want this mindset in trial. If you've never been on the other end of a talented prosecutor, you might not appreciate how much of your own words will form the basis for your conviction. It's not a pleasant experience. And you won't find and attorney who would suggest you say that in trial. I'm going to requote you to hammer in the point: To everyone else, don't ever say this. Ever. Repeat after me: I was trying to stop the threat. In the state of Texas you can use deadly force to stop someone from stealing your property, even if they are fleeing. Consider the jury sentiment in this scenario as opposed to shooting a 6"5' meth head with a history of rape convictions. Were you trying to kill the 16 year old you pointed your gun at, or just protect your property? Being prepared to kill is very different than trying to kill. Anyone planning to use a gun to defend themselves, their friends, or their property should be listening to guys like Andrew Branca to understand these distinctions. No matter how solid your case, your fate is in the hands of a government attorney and 12 Americans who were probably too dumb to get out of jury duty. Start thinking, acting, and preparing accordingly. None of this means aim for their leg or any other such nonsense. But we don't live in the wild west anymore, and there are people who would rather you and your family be raped and killed than to have a "victim" of the system get shot to death in your home. Ignore this at your peril. I'm not trying to be in SOCOM. I'm trying to defend my family and prevail at the inevitable criminal or civil trial. That's it. The ballistics are clear that in close quarters, birdshot will absolutely ruin a perp. And finally, the benefit of bird shot is when you, the defender, decide that the concern for inadvertently penetrating a wall and killing a kid is sufficient to override the desire for military-level mortality rates or capacity. I do not consider the possibility of multiple hardened targets invading my home to be realistic enough to justify making my primary home defense weapon a rifle. The good news is that if I hear the thump and I see multiple intruders on the cameras, I can reach 6 inches to the left and suddenly .300BLK has entered the chat. Or just switch tubes to buckshot. Great dialog, like I said I love hearing other people's calculus.

Can't agree with this. Inside of 30ft (reasonable assumption if you're shooting inside the home) birdshot is quite fatal, especially 12 gauge. Out to 75ft it's really going to fuck up your day, but much, much less reliable. With training and practice, absolutely agree. But I've found overwhelmingly that shotguns are more approachable, especially for women, even though I consider an AR personally simpler. Recoil however is a function of weight, and something small like the Rattler, even as heavy as it is for the length, has a lot more kick than an M4 with a 16" barrel. The.410 recoil is also very reduced while still being a fuck-you-up machine at close range. Personally the 12G recoil isn't an issue for me, but for my wife it's a huge difference. But like I said, to each their own. This is my concern, and it's been shown in gel testing. Problem is, gel testing just isn't as transferable to actual flesh and bone testing, especially at the fringe. I'd wanna see some actual testing on pig corpses (or living pigs) to know that a specific subsonic 300 out of my 6.75" barrel will actually expand. 147 grain 9mm, however, will perform as expected out of the pistol-like barrel of a PCC, and will be pleasantly quiet with a can on it. It'll still go through drywall if you miss, but you don't have to worry about it zipping through the bad guy and the wall behind him like an unexpanded rifle round. But there's also a ton of research showing that the penetration of the different calibers ends up being the same if the rounds expand correctly. Similarly, the belief that 5.56 won't go through much drywall because the bullet is so fast it breaks apart isn't supported by testing. But there is one round that is meaningfully slowed by drywall... Birdshot. I think the conversation surrounding shoot to kill, shoot to neutralize, and shoot-to-disarm is not particularly clear in a lot of gun owners' minds. The number of people with punisher logos or "you're fucked" etched in the dust cover supports this... Obviously shoot to disarm is retarded, so we'll leave that to Joe Biden. But in home defense I am not shooting to kill. I am shooting to neutralize. They look the same because in isolation I'm using the same ammunition and aiming at the same body parts for both, the only difference is there's only one way to be dead and several ways to be neutralized, and I'm fine with any of those ways to be neutralized. And yes, birdshot is absolutely less likely to neutralize than 556, or buckshot, or pretty much everything else. But if I can pick a round that will still have a high probability of neutralizing the intruder, while reducing the likelihood of collateral damage, that's a trade-off I'm interested in researching further. Again, I'm going to aim the gun at the exact same body parts of the intruder, and I'm perfectly comfortable if death is the resultant means of neutralization, but especially considering that the house I'm building uses both slightly thicker drywall and cavity insulation in the interior walls of the bedrooms, I will have a setup where where bird shot absolutely will penetrate less than any other round, while still making disgusting bloody holes in the bad guy. Again, many variables, but I think bird shot is dismissed too readily for the specific scenario of family defense in an American-built home. Also, I like that racking a shotgun signals to someone that I don't actually want to shoot that they should announce themselves immediately. It's more likely the intruder isn't an intruder at all where I live in Texas suburbia.

I have the Rattler from a few pages back, and 300BLK is an awesome round if you are suppressing, but I'm not sure it makes sense when you are shooting at someone in your house where a couple sheets of drywall are potentially all that separate you from your kids. In that case, I think something slow and fragmenting/spreading could be the safer bet. But I haven't dug into the ballistics of 200+ grain hollow point 300 BO. Defending your property's exterior or a camping iyt truck gun? Absolutely. It's also for this reason that I still like birdshot in a shotgun as the primary self defense firearm. Buckshot as the second round for if you end up in the rare situation of needing a second shot, at which point you might be less worried about shooting through drywall. To each their own, obviously, but I do like hearing other people's cost/benefit analysis. I also have to consider what my wife is comfortable using if I'm away on a trip. .300BLK (and the gun using it) is a lot less approachable than the above shotgun where you just rack it and go.

Are you a big .45 guy? I'm not sure if the increased cost is justified by the ballistics. And there are a ton of cheaper (and really cool) 9mm PCCs. That being said, that's a sexy looking gun... I saw a bunch of the super cheap bulpup shotguns on PSA and ended up getting a KSG410. The dual tubes capacity convinced me. Bird shot and buck shot in one gun, selectable? Neat. I don't have anything in .410 and I'm not at all crazy about adding calibers to the collection, but I figure I'll need to get .410 eventually for when my kids learn to shoot, and as a home defence shotgun, the low recoil makes more sense for my wife. For $350 (plus taxes and fees) I figured it's worth a try. And it looks like a space gun 😂🤣

There's a lot going on in here, so I'll try to break it apart for clarity. America is a state, not just an ideal. Obviously we all love the ideal set forth by the founders, but what America is-and-does today is part of America, and in this case, the "self" we are referring to. "Us" is the more appropriate word, but we do not normally say "us-loathing." The past is nothing more than a memory. America (and thus "us/self") is what we are doing as a nation today. Something a handful of posters here portray in a very negative, and thus self-loathing manner. The implication here is that we are being disrespectful. Laughable. Russia and China have violated every possible concept of peace and comity short of an actual kinetic attack against us. They are enemies. That doesn't mean we have to attack them militarily, and there is an entire valid argument over the pure financial decision to fund Ukraine. But bfargin, Bashi, and a few others repeatedly veer into some variation of we brought this on to ourselves. That's self-loathing. See above. Also note: I did not reply to you when I said self-loathing. As far as I can remember, you have kept mostly to the financial argument, where we disagree, but not to blame the US. And if I recall you were very critical of Putin in his interview with Tucker claiming this was all the West's fault. But for simplicity and clarity, do you believe we provoked Russia into their "special operation" against Ukraine? By "provoked" I mean to say that Russia's invasion is in any part justified by our actions prior to the invasion. Putting our misadventures in the Middle East into the same bucket as Russia/Ukraine is to reduce foreign policy/intervention so much as to have no useful argument at all. There is almost zero comparison between the nation-building fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan with the defense of an "ally" (we can argue that elsewhere) against an adversary. They were different operations with different goals and different cultures and different international considerations with different forms of intervention and different price tags in both blood and treasure. If you learned that we have feckless leadership and shifting attention and prideful generals and difficulties committing, then great, you've uncovered all the weaknesses of democratic governance. But no one is doing it better. No one. Surely you noticed that in your travels, as I did. I have no patience for redefining terms. You can be a moron and make every bad decision in the world and still love yourself. You can be doing a bang-up job and still self-loathe. Lets not play the semantic games every fuckwad professor since Derrida plays in trying to win an argument by pissing on the dictionary. You're better than that. Bashi is not.

You make it sound like they've been holding out an olive branch for decades and we just keep spitting in their face. Russia and China have been poking and prodding at our weaknesses and vulnerabilities for at least two decades. Y'all have some serious self-loathing I just don't understand.

I wonder, and this is just a crazy theory my captain and I came up with, but if they floated Matt Gaetz to see which Republicans would fall in line and which would protest. Further, how many otherwise resistant Republicans told Trump's team behind closed doors "anyone but Gaetz," and are now going to be held to that promise?

I TOLD YOU NOT TO USE THE PHONE WHEN I'M CLEANING MY ROOM!!!1

It's remarkable how Sachs has built an entire narrative about Russian/NATO relations off of one conversation with absolutely no legal authority that even Gorbachev himself has disputed. A better take, from the same thread: https://x.com/JonathanHessen/status/1858789212952125463?s=19

While I agree with your overall concept, and I believed it for a long time, it may not be entirely accurate. Constitutional arguments have one venue that turns out to be more effective and more powerful than many others. The Supreme Court. The right answer might not be to appeal to the American people for objectives that are already covered by the Constitution. The better plan of action might be to simply act, and have a bulletproof case ready to go when it is inevitably elevated up to the Supreme Court. Part two, however, is to be ready for the aftermath. Roe v Wade is a good example. 50 years of appealing to the public accomplished absolutely nothing. But bringing the correct argument to the correct Supreme Court ended it overnight. Republicans were obviously not ready for the state battles that followed, but that's a republican problem, not a constitutional option. As this election showed in spades, those of us who believed abortion had been removed from the national debate were correct.

What's she going to do? Destroy the department of education? That would be ideal. It shouldn't exist.

Hemingway is a great journalist. Has been for years. I take her reporting seriously in a way I don't most other mainstream journalists.

The Ford analogy is flawed. You get to keep the truck after you drive somewhere. This would more be like you using an Uber to go commit a sexual assault. And then Uber bands you from using them in the future. Selling weapons with conditions is nothing new. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't restrict what they do, but the idea that we have no right to limit how they are used ignores the fact that they need a hell of a lot more than one shipment.

Sure, but the court of public opinion should still have an expectation of evidence. Point me to a single piece of evidence. One. That's all I want to see. This conversation is irrelevant specifically because of the number of times Democrats have outright lied about these exact situations to smear their opponents. If they hadn't pulled this as many times as they have, allegations might have more weight. And so far the only thing I've heard that is remotely substantiated about Gaetz is that he goes/went to sex parties. So yeah if my daughter decides to be a swinger with a soft spot for narcissists, then exactly what would I be objecting to? I'm also not sure what you mean by "let" my daughter date him. Is she a minor in this hypothetical? If so then obviously I'm not letting a minor date someone my age. If she's an adult, I'm not sure what type of backwards old-timey nonsense you're asking. My daughter will no more need my permission to date as an adult as I needed my father in law's permission to marry my wife. Look, I know you've still got wounds here from the number of times you've been wrong, so kudos for sticking around. But your inability to comprehend a simple point is keeping you in this Doom loop of nonsensical posts. Allegations are no longer trustworthy. We simply have to see the evidence that is made against politicians in this era to be able to make a decision. Your example illustrates this perfectly. All of the evidence regarding Trump's 34 felonies have been laid bare, and they are found wanting. I'm not denying that he had sex with a pornstar and then paid her off to keep quiet. That's the most believable thing I've heard in this entire election. I wish our choices were better than this, but they're not. If you can't tell why Americans didn't give a shit about these convictions, you're as out of touch as the Democrats who watched breathlessly as their candidate went down in flames. Trump has been pitched as a rapist, a literal Russian spy, the harbinger of Doom for democracy, a literal Nazi, a racist, a sexist... You get the idea. For nearly a decade we have listened to every shade of "expert" explain the many and incontrovertible ways that Donald Trump was a criminal and villain. And after all of that, to include a multi-year special prosecutor investigation with the full weight and resources of the federal government behind it, we get... "ledger entries for legal expenses." Cognitive dissonance indeed.

Innocent. Until. Proven. Guilty. If you have some evidence you would like us to consider, share it. Unless *you* know why the DOJ didn't prosecute Gaetz, why waste everyone's time with hypotheticals?

Here we go again. If innocent until proven guilty is a technicality for you, then your evidence-free initial response to COVID seems to be the standard by which we should judge you. I'm old enough to remember when the Democratic party called Brett Kavanaugh a gang rapist based on absolutely zero evidence, including the newly-rejected vice president. So pardon me if I choose to trust our founding-principals on the assessment of guilt rather than the oft-corrupted media complex when deciding if Gaetz is a child rapist. Until the sin of the Kavanaugh hearing is confessed and atoned for, I won't be trusting *any* accusations of guilt from Democrats unless I see the evidence myself. You know, the same way I literally saw the Hunter Biden laptop materials with my own eyes. Why is it you pop up here only to make the absolute dumbest arguments?

Yeah I listened to it. Maybe read what I wrote again? I didn't claim he was crushing it. But it is unfamiliar and refreshing to see someone so boldly go against their party on something like Israel. That doesn't redeem him into some sort of intellectual giant. But he is surrounded by other people equally stupid. One of them just lost the election for president, and her answer on the border was indistinguishable from his. So as far as being shocked that he's in the Senate, there's a lot of other idiots to get rid of before I worry about him.

Assert dominance. Make it bigger.

Hey you walnut, this isn't your strong suit but try thinking from a perspective other than your own. I understand why you don't support Trump over Harris. Obviously I think it's the wrong decision, but I have the cognitive capacity to view it from your perspective based on what you've said. Are you too stupid to do this, or are you just too hurt from the loss to do anything but snipe right now? I sincerely hope that the rest of your party, or better put, the people who think like you do absolutely nothing to analyze the constitutional failings of "their side." Because nothing at this point would make me happier than 4 years of trump followed by 8 years of JD Vance. You had a literal cartoon of a toxic progressive running for president against Donald Trump. That's why Trump won. If you sincerely think that a riot at the Capitol is the most dangerous threat to the Constitution in the past decade or so, then you just aren't paying attention. Some of us are familiar with and care about the entire Constitution, not just the parts that are convenient to our political narrative. I have two candidates who selectively favor parts of the Constitution/BoR. The Democrats far and beyond threaten more of, and more important parts. When the Republicans start threatening all of the norms of Congress, the executive branch, and the supreme Court, then I will wholeheartedly agree with you. But you are pretending like Donald Trump started all of this, when in fact he is just a response to the constitutional disregard of progressives for the past 20ish years.