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

What democracies?

You cannot have a discussion with an “anti-authoritarian” because they are naive and deeply delusional about the world.

so I ask, do you think the brutal domination of the third world by the first world is justified by the fact that the rich countries are “democracies”?

This is not how discussions work, my friend

I didn’t say that Chomsky was exempt from being invalidated, I just said that his theory about how propaganda works in a supposedly free press is by and large an accurate framework. Actually, I would argue that, although largely accurate, his theory is also in part chaff to cover up how deeply influenced by intelligence agencies the media is. Chomsky has always been very anti-conspiratorial, and the fact that he was also involved with a pedophile conspiracy should give one pause.

Anyway, you’re of course free to argue which “democratic” leader was whatever percent good or bad you like. You could argue that Churchill was 60% good because of WW2 but 40% bad because of the Bengal famine, something like that. My point is that bourgeois democracy is actually the dictatorship of capital, and however much they might buy us off (which is not very much, these days), they’re still operating an extractive/financial empire that enslaves most of the world, and their death toll is far higher than Stalin could have hoped to match in 100 lifetimes.

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’m not an American either, buddy. But they’re our mutual imperial overlord. You can’t just silo off Australia and Canada and Europe as the “good democracies” that are totally separate from the flawed American quasi-democracy - we’ve been following them in lockstep since the end of WW2, and only once the idiot Trump decided that soft power was gay did we even start to think about doing something different.

You have at least one former prime minister in the Epstein files, plus other politicians and businessmen. The Euros have plenty as well. This thing was an open secret and what just part of doing business. Beria was one man (I mentioned he’s part of the bad 30% btw) and he got shot pretty much immediately after Stalin died. The Epstein thing is the entire political and business elite of the western “democratic” world.

Sure, in principle democracy is obviously better than dictatorship, but what democracy? I used quotations around “democratic” because we don’t really have democracy. This goes for the rest of the western “democracies” as well as the US. Popular will has little effect on public policy, and voting just usually means selecting the bad option over the worse option. The worse option still wins about half the time. When a genuinely popular and progressive candidate comes along, the party and media machinery is sure to sabatoge them.

Chomsky (Epstein associate, but this doesn’t invalidate all of his points) wrote about this in Manufacturing Consent - the media, despite all of our nominal free speech rights, despite not being state controlled, only presents a narrow ideoloogical spectrum, acting as propaganda just as surely as the state-run media in an undemocratic country does. Chomsky argues that this is due to market forces, internalized assumptions, etc. As he said during an interview “I’m sure you believe all that, but you wouldn’t be working here if you didn’t.” Chomsky could get away with this not just because he was an anticommunist who was good friends with the ruling class’s child pimp, but because a certain level of dissent is required to maintain the illusion that free speech matters. The system is built to tolerate dissent and subtly mold public opinion and public expectations. It’s a very sophisticated and very effective method of control compared to the crude methods employed by “authoritarian” states.

But let’s put all that aside for a moment. What good is democracy when it’s democracy for a few rich countries that exploit the world’s poor majority? Even in a social democratic fantasy where we all have democracy, human rights, and strong social safey nets, we’re still just sitting at the top, extracting wealth from and oppressing the majority of the world. As Lenin said, “freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.”

Seems obvious enough to me. What’s not to get?

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”.

I’m only comfortable having public opinion shaped by American intelligence agencies, not Russian ones, so we should all have to provide identification to post on the internet.

“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

Truly, I too hope that the Nazi pedophile empire bombs Iran, in order to free them. “Them” refers to Israel, specifically. I hope he frees Israel from having any regional opponents. As for the Iranian people, they’ll have to pay for opposing America.

Removed by mod

It’s not called “fed” for no reason

ich liebe der cuckstuhl

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