Europe is still operating on the old logic wherein you have to throw a few overboard to keep the boat from sinking. America is operating on a basis of total impunity

I’m gonna go idle my car for an hour just to help Miami sink a little faster

They’re under siege you fucking moron

Personally I think someone should not only sendrelief, including oil, they should also station nuclear weapons there to deter US aggression

Don’t be naive

Oh, hell, sorry, I had no idea that the “V-Dem Democracy Index” judged that Cuba was the most evil country on earth. Yes, in that case I hope the nazi pedophile government of the united states completely cuts off all fuel, food, and medical supplies, and drops bombs as necessary, until every last man woman and child on the island has been freed. Then they can build some beautiful casinos over the rubble, like they plan to do with Gaza.

The western governments, I will remind you, are run by nazi pedophiles

Milton Friedman said it most succinctly in Capitalism and Freedom (1962): “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” He argued in short that a corporation’s sole responsibility is to increase shareholder value, and this argument is the foundation of modern business practives.

If a defence contractor were to produce affordable (i.e. low margin) products, they would be shirking their holy duty to the shareholders, the money would be invested elsewhere, and they would go out of business. China can get away with doing it since they just have a state-owned company do it cheaply, but that’s authoritarian (bad). We, being principled democratic states, can only buy what the free market has to sell.

It’s not that steep for the low-volume high-margin equipment built by the military industrial complex. The whole point is to produce a relatively small amount of expensive products with minimal capital investment, not to take advantage of economies of scale to produce large amounts of equipment efficiently. The former is much more efficient at converting taxpayer dollars to private profits.

Comparing this arctic vehicle program to China’s second-most modern tank isn’t exactly comparing apples-to-apples, but it’s nevertheless instructive. An Arctic vehicle is going to be more expensive than a comparable vehicle not designed for Arctic use since it needs a lot of special equipment to operate in cold temperatures for a long time, but it’s still basically just a metal box with tracks and an engine. A modern tank is a very heavy steel/advanced composite box with a larger engine, tracks, a cannon, and a bunch of other advanced equipment like thermal scopes, radar, lasers, and so on. More materials total, more moving parts, more low-tolerance parts, more high-tech parts.

Even still, the Chinese Type 99 tank costs 2.5 million USD (3.4 million CAD), $2.4 million less per unit than these $5.8m unarmed Arctic vehicles. You might think that a tank should cost more than what’s functionally an advanced truck for use in extreme enironments, or that they should at least be the same price, but not so fast! The Type 99 is made by Norinco, a large state-owned company that produces huge amounts of equipment. They take in $82 billion per year but only make 1.7 billion in profit. I don’t know who will be making these arctic vehicles, but one possibility is Lockeed Martin. They have a comparable revenue of $75 billion, but they make a net profit of $5 billion. This means that Lockheed Martin is three times as efficient at turning taxpayer dollars into profits as Norinco, hence proving the superiority of our system of free enterprise compared to asiatic communism.

I think he’s the same guy. I used to try to bust him up but he just kept multiplying into more pieces and then coming back whole every time I saw a new mirror, so I eventually gave up

I added the part about voting for the Democrats, as a joke. He said “you are in the belly of the beast”.

“You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You get to vote for the Democrats.”

• Ernesto “Che” Guevara

ich liebe der cuckstuhl

I checked with that other gorilla who lives in the bathroom and he says you’re wrong

I misinterpreted this for a second and thought you were saying you would lynch the ghost

Depends on the gun and the entity. A shotgun is a good general purpose weapon against most entities, especially since you can load it with rock salt, silver, or anything else an entity might be weak to.

A given type of gun might work better against certain entities, for instance a WW2 vintage mosin-nagant will be effective against Germanic entities like the krampus, while a cowboy ghost might have to be put down with a colt single action army. You can also anoint bullets with holy water, stuff like that.

They probably stopped steam-opening letters, so the mail is probably more secure than any kind of electronic communication. But basically, no, unless you have advanced encryption and state-level equipment produced with secure supply chains (i.e. you’re a member of the Chinese MSS using a ministry-issued device), you have to assume that anything electronic is compromised. The internet is a tool of the enemy and must be treated as insecure.

That isn’t to say you can’t criticize the government online. You can (and should!) call them Nazi pedophiles all day long and they won’t do anything about it. Unless you’re leaking classified information or plotting to overthrow the state, the worst thing that could happen is that you’ll be put on a list of people to be rounded up in the event of severe civil unrest.

I’m mildly peeved at the great Satan, the United $nakes of AmeriKKKa

Basic living standards are very expensive, you see. We would like to do something but we can’t

Which part, Tracer Tong, or the MKULTRA total control panopticon?

Tracer Tong is just a character from the 2000 computer game Deus Ex. He encourages the player to overload the reactor and destroy the facility at Area 51, taking with it the infrastructure supporting the Aquinas net and ending global communication. This frees people from control by the secret government, but brings the world into a new dark age.

As for the rest, MKULTRA is probably a stretch, but there’s a lot of evidence that the internet was intended for mass surveillance right from the start. It’s common knowledge that the internet originated as a distributed communication network that could survive many nodes being knocked out in a nuclear attack, but Surveillance Valley (2018) convincingly makes the case that the real origin was gathering and structuring intelligence - computer systems used in the Vietnam war to compile data gathered from sensors deployed in the Ho Chi Minh trail to track VC and PAVN movements, and computer systems used in the US proper to compile data on dissidents.

No matter the origin, it’s obvious that the internet is used as a surveillance tool. Even just on the commercial side, you have data brokers buying up user data from sites and apps, all of whom build detailed profiles on users. All of this information is compiled to build marketing profiles. Naturally, the state also has access to all of this information, and they work hand-in-glove with the tech companies. They also have access to everything on the “internet-of-things”, so every smart speaker, or just anything internet-connected with a microphone in it is a listening device; every suburban street has a network of surveillance cameras in the form of smart doorbells. Almost everyone on earth carries an internet-connected camera and microphone on them at all times.

At the same time, we all give our opinions freely on public forums, all of which can be correlated by IP, e-mail address, or associated accounts with a specific person. Sifting through all this data is no longer a problem now that they have sophisticated machine learning algorithms - dossiers can be compiled and updated automatically.

So, the state knows who you are, where you are, what you think, and can listen in on any conversation you have unless you’re far away from any phone or internet-connected device. Algorithms can be adjusted to subtly shift beliefs and behaviours. It’s a machine for total surveillance and control, and it’s important to remember in light of recent revelations regarding the Epstein files, that it’s controlled by Nazi pedophiles.