Lord Ratner

And Hillary or Joe are? What country have you been living in? I've had to choose between different flavors of shit sandwich since, well, my whole adulthood. A lot of people decided that they'd rather have the narcissistic profiteering liar who seems to at least love the idea of America over the narcissistic profiteering liar who doesn't. I think Romney was the only post-primary candidate since Bush/Gore who was worthy of the seat since I've been voting.

Boy, I have bad news for the commentators here who aren't familiar with unions. You've got some of the most unstable people I've ever met in my life flying planes every day, and they are almost perfectly shielded from any consequences by the way unionized work functions. Off the top of my head, there is a guy who threw the TV out the hotel window because it didn't have the channel he wanted. The guy who shot his neighbor's mailbox multiple times because he was mad at him. The guy who got caught creeping around the union headquarters at night on the security cameras. The guy who called flight attendants "sugar tits" in 2020. The guy who punched a gate agent in a foreign country. The multitude of pilots who have shown me graphic, personal sexual photos in the cockpit. Guys who have entire second families in South America. I have one guy explained to me the whole Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy. How Kanye West's vice presidential running mate in 2020 was one of the Epstein child prostitutes who had been drained of their blood by the billionaires, and who had a demon possessing her body. He was dead serious. At a certain point, you just realize that there are lunatics everywhere. My friends in the medical profession have stories about highly credentialed surgeons and specialists that are quite similar.

You're putting off some major anti-gay-minister-who-secretly-hires-male-prostitutes vibes.

And yet, his actions selected him for a position of immense power. It's not a fluke, all the nonsense feel-good speeches from guys like Mosely and Welsh and Goldfein we're just fluff. The military is an organization that lacks/avoids any metric for success (profit, customer satisfaction, productivity, reduced casualties, successful pullout from Afghanistan, etc) and therefore the least valuable on the outside will become the most successful on the inside. Perhaps, like in the past, a real war will fix that, but a decade later we'll be right back to where we are today.

Of course they did. But that's the point, isn't it? Are we really prioritizing that type of conflict? We don't have the luxury of another, better country picking up our slack while we toy around with a dying empire. It's super neat watching a plane land vertically (but not take off vertically...). But it's fucking stupid for the US to prioritize that capability, to the great detriment of the more-relevant capabilities of the A and C models. We could barely fund enough of these planes during the most financially permissive environment in modern history. It's very possible we have austerity measures soon. But our Argentina-like foes will be suitably humbled I'm sure. Marine leadership, like nearly all government leadership, are unserious people in increasingly serious times.

And that's great, what a proud moment for USMC public affairs. But there's what's possible and what's plausible. The military is caught in the same "unlimited resources" model that has gotten us into a pretty big mess nationally and globally. If you want a jump jet, then justify it and build it. They couldn't, so it got shoe horned into the F35 and it's a much, much weaker MWS for it. Neat. China must be shitting themselves. Yes, the incredibly neutered European militaries are a great example of image over effectiveness, thank you.

What a stupid capability the Marines are obsessed with. Anyone who thinks we are landing those things on contested beaches is smoking the good shit. Good thing we didn't have to make humongous financial and engineering sacrifices to keep that party trick...

Lol, of course he is. That level of obedience is a wing king's dream 🤣

Yeah the line is definitely somewhere before you get to the dog mask. But that doesn't make it easy to define. That's also why I said someone in a position of actual command makes this worse. He has to deal with a level of necessary reputation that I think it's fair to say completely explodes when you see him in a bondage puppy suit. As for the 19-year-old Gunner versus a commander, I stopped believing in aged-based maturity a long time ago. People with far more to lose than this schmuck have been caught doing what seem like absurd things. Remember the senator who got caught soliciting gay sex in an airport bathroom? As I've gotten older and seen more, my perspective on these types of seemingly reckless actions have changed. Not to say that I condone them, because I think there has to be a disincentive form of punishment, but it is also very easy for people without those proclivities to judge those who have them. I did, and often still do. Let's take an extreme example. Pedophilia. Anyone who thinks you make a decision to be a pedophile is delusional. Something is broken in their head, and despite the incredibly dire ramifications, they still go out there and get caught diddling kids. Can you even imagine what that must be like? To have that type of evil in you and be unable to stop it? I had a very simple view of it until one of my friends blew his brains out, because he had been caught. None of us had any clue. He should have gone to jail for a very long time for what he did, but that doesn't change the very difficult moral question of how you deal with people with broken brains. So on a less extreme level, if you're the commander who spent his whole life dreaming of butt fucking a younger man in a gimp puppy suit, no, I'm no longer surprised that people succumb to those desires. Nothing is more powerful than sexual urges in humans, and I simply count myself lucky that my urges are boring and socially acceptable 🤣😂 Maybe the answer is to destigmatize the non-harmful kinks to the point that people are comfortable identifying them, but coming to an agreement that such predilections make one unsuitable for command. I don't know dude, but this isn't going to be the last scandal like this.

In uniform is clearly a problem. Parts of the uniform, as allowed for by reg, meh. Sex within the chain of command is clearly an issue, but most especially for someone actually in a command position. Parts of the uniform for Only fans: not really. However, if they are identifying themselves as a member of the service, then it becomes representational and clearly an issue. But just wearing the costume? Not really. Only fans in general, I'm not sure I have an objection so long as the member is not broadcasting their status as a military member, either verbally or with identifiable uniform items. Wearing a mask at work... How so? Was it a some sort of stunt, or did this person just expect to be able to wear a dog mask at work all day? Clearly anything beyond a joke would be unacceptable. But then I know lots of people who wore unauthorized ball caps in the cockpit. Are they the same? No. But what is the distinction and how do you define it? The problem with kinks is that many people who have a normal sex life (I fall into this category) are quick to associate kinks with an inability to function properly outside of the bedroom. But that's mostly because they have no idea how many people they work with on a regular basis are into some pretty freaky shit. On the other hand, I think that some of the more extreme kinks are linked with a sort of mental instability that cannot be confined to the bedroom. And no, I don't know where the line is. We at least have one data point that dressing up as a combat bondage puppy is associated with poor workplace decision making 🤣😂.

There were a lot of posts in that thread, so before I pass judgment, was he exploiting his position, taking advantage of children, or otherwise engaging in some sort of predatory behavior? I'm not sure I'll ever understand the people who want to role play animals while having sex, but I can think of far more damaging kinks.

Huh, is almost like the attention-seeking type that are drawn to (YouTube) celebrity are also less stable than those who prefer a more normal existence.

They are free. Just has to be setup properly. I'm actually upgrading my servers this month, so I could host it easily. Won't be as bulletproof as a datacenter, but it'll be cheaper 🤣. And the certificates won't expire

Does whoever is running this site need help with certificates? I have no idea where it's being hosted or how, but this should be an automated process. This is a really low-traffic site, so I can host it pretty easily on my servers if needed. Lemme know.

Agree entirely, but it's unlikely to happen. They set us on a crash course then didn't procreate. It'll be nearly impossible to replace them with votes, since old people have nothing else to do but vote for more benefits. We just have to wait for them to die and hope the damage is contained.

Maybe you forgot your previous post? Here: And here: And now here: That's who I'm talking to, the person who said that. And those quotes indicate a very misguided belief that "equipment and munitions" are the primary factors in Ukraine's success. Yet you completely ignored "training and intelligence," which can be thought of as multipliers in this conflict. No, we can't easily take back our equipment and munitions, but if we take the Intel and support, you're now multiplying by zero, and the result will be obvious. So you either don't know what you're talking about, or you're trying to exclude the "secret" parts by completely mis-characterizing the entire ground reality, which seems like a pointless endeavor. I hope our support for Ukraine continues until the last Russian body is dragged back over their border. We have been given a tremendous opportunity to utterly decimate, the military and standing of one of the only credible geopolitical foes, and at an incredible discount. As long as the Ukrainians are willing to fight and die for their sovereignty, I see no problem with simultaneously fulfilling a major objective of ours. But that doesn't change Ukraine's reality, and there is no victory without our continued support. The United States military is not the training wheels, it's the whole f'n bike.

They decided to fight Russia instead of cave. There were only two branches from that point: lose, or get help from us. Now that they are on that path, until they decide to return to "lose," they are stuck doing what we say. They can find another source of support, but there aren't many options. It's not fair, but it's reality. I hope we continue to support them, but that support comes with an "*" I don't think you realize how much more we are doing than just sending pallets of weapons. It is not through Ukrainian cleverness that so many high ranking Russians keep getting blown up. When we sent them HIMARS, it came with the six month subscription to SiruisXM targeting.

Do you think we were at war with the Vietnamese during Vietnam? Or to a lesser extent, North Korea in the Korean war? We definitely fought their militaries, but if say there's a pretty good argument to be made that we were really fighting the Chinese and Soviets in those wars. They were definitely fuzzy. It's also notable that Hawaii was an overseas base attacked by the Japanese, not a state, so I wouldn't be surprised if the very-isolationist faction of the government was making the same type of arguments. I don't think people change as much as we wish they did. And I didn't think we solved the social impulse to war after WWII. But I do hope I'm wrong.

Agreed, I don't think they'd come to us. Nuclear is definitely a "new" dynamic.

Unless you're about 75 years old, I would say your confidence is not historically supported. But I do sincerely hope you're right

Not so sure anymore. I would have *never* thought the West would support Ukraine the way they have. Nor did I expect the Ukrainians to mount such a strong defense. And I know I'm not alone. Perhaps the human spirit is a bit more robust than the age of social media would have us believe. It is also entirely possible that 20 years of war in the Middle East has conditioned us to think about warfare in a certain, apathetic way. But that changes a lot when the target looks like you, both physically and culturally. At least that's what Ukraine seems to indicate.

We're not going to do anything proactively. That's just not how democracies work. If we haven't figured that out by now, then we are supremely ignorant. But it is fun to imagine the unholy shit storm that would befall China in a true war. You have to consider all of the assets in America that are loathe to be associated with any sort of military endeavor. But watching your people die changes things. Everybody in the public thinks China and Russia have an edge on cyber warfare, but can you even fathom what would happen with the full weight of silicon valley suddenly dedicated towards an electronic attack on our foes? What type of weapons could they develop? If the defense contractors dabbling in AI weaponry had even just the open source community, currently creating amazing software that identifies when your dog shits and whether or not it needs to take Imodium, what would that look like? The Chinese are one of the least innovative societies on earth, at least out of the developed nations. Nearly everything they have is stolen or copied, and the recent ban on chip technology proves their inability to build anything of substance on their own. The software being developed in the civilian sector has truly terrifying implications in a military conflict. There must be somewhere around a hundred or so Elon Musk-type innovators currently in the industry. What does it look like when the most dynamic innovators on Earth turn their attention towards slaughtering the Chinese?

I agree. Doesn't change the fact that Ukraine, despite whatever their desires may be, is subordinate to us in this war. There is no Ukraine victory without our weapons. I don't have to like it, but that's politics. Saying "it's their decision" implies they can do whatever they want. False. If their choice is to lose, then yeah I guess they can do whatever. But they can't win without us, which means their choices are limited to those they can get the US to agree to. Politics and power.

Honestly I'd be shocked if he had anything at all to do with it. More likely the cabinet running the show.

Did you miss the reporting where the White House has been pressuring Ukraine to open the possibility of negotiations? When your patron tells you to do something, you do it. And you do it with a smile.