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.”

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

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.

You’re going to want to be sitting down for this. I regret to inform you that two of the last five democratically elected US presidents, as well as other democratically elected leaders, have been directly implicated in a child sex trafficking operation. The other US presidents; war criminals George Bush, Barack Obama, and Joseph Robinette Biden, certainly knew about this operation but chose to do nothing, for some reason. It was an open secret among the democratic leaders of the free world and also their good friends in the gulf monarchies (which are paragons of human rights despite using slavery and being ruled by dictators, and are therefore friends rather than enemies of the democratic west.) It brings me no pleasure in having to relay this information.

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.

Fair enough, then

Not really. Plenty of democratically elected leaders are bad, why can’t some dictators be good? Gaddafi was pretty good, given the alternatives. Fidel Castro was good. Democratic leaders are also usually nowhere near as democratic as they’re made out to be, (nor are dictators often as dictatorial), so the line is much blurrier than you might think.

As for Stalin, he purged a lot of people that didn’t need purging, he had Beria as the NKVD head, he made the famine worse than it could have been, he supported the creation of the state of Israel, and he withheld support for the communists during the Greek civil war in order to maintain good relations with the west. There’s other stuff that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Tracer Tong knew the way. We have to destroy the MKULTRA total control panopticon known as the internet.

Yes, my father is orange and my mom is green. That means I get my solar panels from a forced labour camp.

That would make perfect sense if it wasn’t for the signs pointing in other directions: The star on a gear is very reminiscent of communist imagery, the green/orange flag is a reskin of the anarcho-communist flag (yes, there are other variants for other kinds of anarchist, but they’re even less relevant than anarcho-communists), and the naming format (greenist-orangeite) is more reminiscent of “anarcho-communist” than the Nazi formulation of “National Socialist” or the anarcho-nazi formulation of “National Anarchist.” I can only see this being about communists and anarcho-communists from a disgruntled anarchist of some type. Perhaps a solarpunk guy.

I think it is? The only other ideology would be anarcho-capitalism (lol), but a star on a gear as symbology would seem to preclude that. All in, it’s not a very coherent comic.

Hard not to look at Peter Thiel or Alex Karp and think they belong anywhere more pleasant than a forced labour camp

I’d actually be all for just keeping this current system, put in Norway style socialism for taking care of sick poor and old, tax billionaires 99%, and make money in politics illegal. Oh and outlaw controlled centralized social media while we’re at it.

Well they’re not going to do that. At this point you would need a revolution to get it done, so why not just go all the way and actually overthrow them rather than just asking concessions?

There was an interesting tidbit in the Epstein files released recently. It was from a third person to Epstein, referencing a conversation Epstein had with Bill Gates about “how to get rid of poor people as a whole.” Given that the only other interpretation of that is “how to ensure all the poor people have a good standard of living and are therefore no longer poor”, and that’s the least likely thing that Epstein would be talking to Bill Gates about, it’s pretty obvious what it means. They certainly aren’t doing much about global warming, and it’s poised to kill an awful lot of people, but I strongly suspect there’s more to it than that.

You say that communism is “easily harnessed by a small power group to starve everyone and have them live terrible lives.” The USSR had its last famine in 1947, and China had its last famine in 1961. They also both had massive increases to the standard of living. Compare that to the capitalist world order, which I will remind you is run by Nazi pedophiles - 10 million people die of hunger every year, and they’ve been supporting Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation campaign against Gaza. I don’t see how some theoretical communist tyranny could be any worse than this.

Simple, you replace it with socialism. That doesn’t mean history just ends and there’s nothing else to worry about in the future. Suppose “human nature” just exploits the system and ends up with a few party elites benefiting - so? Is it worse than what we have? Will the new elite be able to hold on to power permanently without offering the mass of the people concessions?

The first real liberal revolution ended with an empire, but the empire was still better than the old regime that the revolution overthrew, and it spread liberal ideas throughout Europe. Then Napoleon was defeated and there was a reactionary monarchist restoration, which was overthrown and replaced with a constitutional monarchy in under 20 years. The constitutional monarchy was itself overthrown and replaced with a second republic less than 20 years after that. Then there was an imperial restoration under a lesser Napoleon, who went on to lose a war and get overthrown, replaced with a third Republic. They’re on the fourth Republic now, but they haven’t had a monarch since 1870 or a king since 1848. I would say the chances of France undergoing a monarchist restoration at this point are very low.

At no point in this process was “it” over. It’s not over now. Maybe something is over, but that something stopped being “it”, and was replaced by a new “it”.