Guess we should just give up guys.

Please donate moneys to the communist cause for giving me more squid pizzas

XMR: 87QzevaAWiUUiwgpCSJ1hFe1j9NbdZhZuBToCsabwLfsYk8s1TU3Fja4XdWwYFgnaEUVoe8Xmfr4Q4VF3L6XqcQ2TcTDfJL

My gf and I have had discussions about teaching morals to kids. In that vein, I asked myself, would I teach piracy to my kids? Yes, it’s technically illegal and carries inherent risks. But so does teenage sex carry the risks of teenage pregnancy, and so we have an obligation to children to teach them how to practice safe sex. So, is it necessary to teach them how to stay safe in the sea? How to install adblockers, how to detect fake download sites that give you computer aids? Show them how to use a VPN and choosing the right one (a true pirate must always choose a VPN with port forwarding capabilities, so you can still seed) I feel like this is all valuable info we all learned as pirates the hard way, and valuable information to pass on to our kids.

I definitely want my kids to know about libgen. Want a book you want to read about? Wanna learn about dinosaurs from a college level textbook for whatever reason? Just go to libgen, son!

And I attribute most of my computer literacy and education to piracy, trying to install cracks to various games, trying to make games work, and modding the fuck out of skyrim as a young teenager. That, and also jailbreaking android phones. All the interesting things i’ve ever done with computers was probably against some BS terms of service.

So, is piracy something you would actively teach your kids? Sit them down and teach them how to install a Fallout 3 FitGirl repack? Or is this something you’d want them to figure out themselves?

I realize that, after all this time, I have never payed for my all-time favorite games I grew up playing (Fallout 3 & Skyrim). I can pay for it, but I really do not want to pay the money to the Bethesda’s marketing team, CEO, and whoever bullshit middle man who wants a cut of that. I want to give directly to the team that made the damn game, the artists, the sound designers, the voice actors, the programmers. If there was a way to do that, i’d be more happily inclined to spend my money on a decade year old game.

Just thinking

Apparently Apple can end-to-end encrypt your iCloud, but it’s opt in because they still want to profit off your data >_<

To enable this, go to Settings -> iCloud -> Advanced Data Protection

You need to have all the devices under your apple account to be fully updated, and you’ll need to remember a 28-key passphrase for recovery

I hate how big tech treats privacy as an afterthought. This should have been the default. But oh well. Spread the world people.

Hello Pirates.

Let me tell you a tale of a bounty I am proud of partaking. I have installed Risk of Rain Returns on a fresh Arch Linux distro, Wayland (i also needed XWayland) , KDE plasma 6, and GPU-accelerated.

Moreover, I have used another laptop i have at my disposal to become a 24/7 i2p router, which is able to capture the warez that were necessary to perform this bounty. This bounty can be obtained without the use of a vpn, since the game can be downloaded from the i2p postman site.

Because it was an exe file, I had to take certain steps to allow it to execute on my system. I installed lutris, as well as the arch linux dependencies that it required, and launched the installation executable through lutris

This journey was not without its challenges and setbacks. One such challenge I had to face to secure this bounty was to install the xorg-xwayland-explicit-sync patch. The nvidia drivers 550 is weird when playing games through XWayland, because it would render frames out of order. Applying this patch, as well as using envycontrol to switch to nvidia mode (i am on a dual-gpu laptop) worked in fixing this issue

overall, I am happy with this bounty. I actually feel morally regretful when pirating games, more so than pirating movies, because of just how much sweat and tears developers had to put in to making it happen. But I am broke, and I have bought Risk of Rain and its DLC in the past, so in the moral calculus of piracy I think I've balanced it out. I am quite broke right now, however, so games are outside of my price point and I'd rather have something to eat.

I love i2p. There's so many cool warez in there, and I believe it's the future of piracy. It allows us to decouple ourselves from VPN providers, because who knows how long until they turn against us.

Hello :)

I just finished my first arch install I wanted to set my sights on something more challenging. So, I booted a live image with QEMU Virtmanager to try out gentoo, and after reading the wiki I thought to myself “man i should have started with gentoo”

The arch wiki is good in its own right, but as a beginner i felt really confused and overwhelmed. I felt like I had to google terms just to catch up. The gentoo wiki, however, is really good at explaining concepts and the overview of the technology. When the Arch wiki just says “use mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda2” or something the gentoo wiki actually explains what sda, sdb, etc and ext4 means. I sort of learned it the hard way with arch, but i learn and understand lot more from the gentoo wiki. I love that it explains partition tables, filesystems, heck it even explains what is an IP in the networking section. Making a gentoo system and reading the wiki is basically an interactive computer science course lmao

So, thank you gentoo wiki :)

I believe that the only two privacy extensions you really need to meet 90% of your privacy goals are uBlock origin + NoScript

uBlock origin is effective because it stops the injection of ads which might contain and inject code. NoScript forces you to look at which scripts you really need for the website to function. Say you visit a trusted site, like your lemmy instance, then you can enable running of javascript by default the next time you visit the site. You'll be surprised how functional some sites are even without javascript. I did not like the idea of browsers having Javascript: it's remote code execution and if there's anything malicious in there and your browser is not patched against it you're fucked. This way yeah it'll be annoying when you first visit a site but it remembers your settings for the next time you visit.

When I was configuring my searxng I noticed a search engine that piqued my interest. Link: yep.com

From their about page:

>Here's how it works.

>We offer an unbiased, private search experience that rewards and compensates the makers behind the content. To do this, we use a 90/10 revenue share business model where we pay 90% of advertising revenue directly to these makers.

>Simply put, when you use Yep, you’re directly putting money in the pockets of your favorite content creators.

Hello sailors,

I have been job hunting for a while and I have felt a great disadvantage in my job search due to my lack of access to high-quality LLMs. Writing cover letters is honestly so bullshit. GPT-3 is honestly quite bad nowadays, but as a true pirate at heart I couldn't quite get myself to cough up the coin for OpenAI's GPT4 out of principle. I hate them for putting their cutting edge technology behind a paywall, making it inaccessible for their own gain. I feel like this is not what the internet was supposed to be. So today, call me the great emancipator cuz i'm teaching u how to get that shi for free baby

Requirements: Docker

It's all gonna be based off of this github repo: gpt4free

Installing through docker (there's also a way to install with Python PIP if that's more convenient for you. The docker worked for me though)

1. docker pull hlohaus789/g4f

2. docker run -p 8080:8080 -p 1337:1337 -p 7900:7900 --shm-size="2g" -v ${PWD}/hardir:/app/hardir hlohaus789/g4f:latest

3. Open up the webui in your browser at localhost:8080

4. In the "Provider" dropdown in the bottom look for "Liaobots"

5. Choose "gpt-4-plus" under the "Models" dropdown

??? Profit

!

The cool thing about gpt4free is that there's a lot of providers and a lot of models to choose from! So if gpt-4-plus from Liaobot doesn't work for you you can switch to something else easily. Do note that some models require you to provide an authentication token or be logged in. Most of them work right out of the box tho.

*this post was not made with any use of an llm I promise ;)

!

^^list of gpt4 providers

Hello mateys,

There's a lot of discussion recently about the ethics of piracy. A lot of good points have been made out of a handful bad ones. The most compelling one is of course the data preservation one, that piracy is the only way to mass preserve digital media in a medium that is prone to error.

However, sometimes discussions about the ethical justification to privacy often lead to rationalizing. Pirating, as others have exclaimed, is at best morally grey, and there are some cases, namely pirating works of small creators, where it is actively harmful and wrong.

I would like to share my perspective on it. I studied some game theory in college and that course made me look at the world in a different way. I believe piracy is a perfect example of a game theory concept known as the prisoner's dilemma and evolutionary game theory, if you all haven't heard about it. My essay is less of a justification of piracy, but more of an explanation of why piracy happens and grounding it in theory.

As a background for this concept, here's a scenario. Let's say you're a criminal faced with two options: snitch or stay silent. There is also another criminal, your accomplice, who is also in jail and faced with the same option. Depending on your response and your accomplice's response there are different payouts:

I stay silent and accomplice stays silent: 2 years of jail for both of us

I stay silent and accomplice snitches: 5 years of jail for me, 1 year of jail for the accomplice

I snitch and accomplice stays silent: 1 year of jail for me, 5 years of jail for my accomplice

We botch snitch on each other: 3 years of jail time for both of us

Most of you probably know where this is going, but bear with me because i'm gonna go further. The quick analysis of the situation is that there is a best-case scenario, which is both of us staying silent. But this best-case scenario can only happen with the result of cooperation. This is because if one of us flips, the other will have to serves longer sentence. The best case scenario can only happen if we both agree before the game that we will stay silent so we can guarantee the outcome, or else we will serve the longer sentence if the other betrays us.

So, what if we play this game without cooperating beforehand? Well, looking at my options:

if i stay silent, i can either get 2 years or 5 years of jail time

if i snitch, i can get either 1 year or 3 years of jail time

when faced with both these options, which strategy will you choose? of course, I do not want to got to jail for 5 years. Snitching definitely looks mad appealing to me when looking at it from this perspective. That's why, in game theory, snitching is what's called a nash equilibrium. Staying silent is not a nash equilibrium, because if the other snitches then I get a resulting jailtime which is worse off than if i just stayed silent.

Note that this does not mean that everybody should snitch. It's just that, given the choices handed to us, snitching is the one that will result in the least bad jail sentences. As with life, there may be other factors at play, such as the fact that if I snitch, the gang boss might kill me when I get out, which will definitely affect my decisions whether I should snitch or stay silent.

Okay. So how does this relate to piracy? What if we now play this game at a massive scale. Each and every one of us is faced with two options: pirate or buy. Currently, the majority of people actually buy software and media!

But wait. If buying is analogous to staying silent, and pirating is analogous to snitching, why aren't we at Nash equilibrium? why isn't everyone pirating software? My sweet summer child, I present to you the concept of law. The purpose of the law is precisely to coordinate people so we don't fall into our shitty Nash equilibriums and ruin everything, and it does it precisely by attaching a more negative result to snitching (pirating). That's why we have stoplights (seriously, we talk about stoplights a lot in my game theory class) and why (mostly) everyone follows stoplight laws. (before you say tRagEdY oF tHE cOMmONs!!!! the guy Garrett Hardin who coined the term was a hardline eugenicist and his intellectual contributions is a shitstain in academia so shut the fuck up.)

(for people that are curious, this is the realm of Evolutionary game theory. It studies the scenarios where each individual pair off in a population and play a game, and studies stable populations and stable strategies under this model. Ironically, i learned this from Game Theory, Alive by Anna R. Karlin and Yuval Peres. which i got from libgen XD)

So, as we have it, we have a majority of people buying software, with a minority of pirates who are getting that software or media for free. We aren't at nash equilibrium!! More technically, piracy is stable strategy under the parameters of the system. We pirates know that buying all the software we interact with will just make us poorer and sad in the end, and we'll be stuck with all the DRM. But on the other hand, it's untenable if everyone just pirates everything all the time! We pirates profit so long as the majority of people keep buying software. This puts us, pirates, at a very precarious position. It is dangerous when the population of pirates to increase, because this will cause things and create domino effects which will put us at nash equilibrium due to more regulation of piracy and a crackdown of piracy, leaving us worse off and needing to adapt to these changes.

My advice:the most stable strategy right now is buying software whenever you can spare the coin and if you think the value of the software to you matches its price, but pirating if it's convenient or unaffordable.

Too long, didn't read: piracy is a stable strategy under the current parameters of the system. If everybody pirates it fucks everything up. So, be as sneaky as you can. Also, read up on your evolutionary game theory you pleb

Seriously. There’s so many floating around. It feels like there’s a cycle of

Random programmer thinks xyz language sucks -> she/he makes a slightly different, slightly faster, slightly more secure version -> by luck this gains mass adoption-> random programmer thinks new xyz language sucks

I propose when the revolution comes and the last guillotine falls we decide a general-purpose programming language that coders should stick to. I vote Lisp or any of the dialects (scheme, clojure, racket), but i also feel something about the Julia language for scientific research. Maybe we can decriminalize using C. Absolutely ban and hunt down the use of any of the hipster languages teenagers are into these days.

Nim? Zig? Crystal?? I am absolutely losing my damn mind. It compiles to bytecode people. Make up ur damn minds. To jail with all of u

At least in arch, the package qbittorrent-nox now contains the ability to connect to i2p. For people starting out, using i2p you wouldn't need to use a VPN to download your favorite "linux ISOs"; just use i2p and have a fully automated Jellyfin server!

I recommend using i2pd as the i2p router

Alt text: an ad for Github Copilot when viewing files in a github repo

I nominate Nikita Krushchev to be the most important figure in the cold war, literally playing 3d chess with a bloodthirsty imperialistic regime and preventing nuclear war.

Commenting on Kennedy’s government giving the OK to launch the Bay of Pigs attack on Cuba:

“ If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.”

-the man himself

Imma scurry back to my radical left safe space. Personally i know all ya’ll are based, though. Communism and marxist-leninism is still a bad word in centrist lemmy spaces, apparently.

Original post: https://feddit.ch/post/4129197

Original comment:

> Can someone explain like what are the lemmy devs political stance?

They're tankies, ie radical communists who support authoritarian regimes like North Korea and the CP, and fully support Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The devs also onboarded someone who openly said many times on October 8th that "all Israelis are valid targets", "anything that moves and isn't Palestinian is a valid target" and "there's no such thing as an Israeli civilian" and he's still in their team. On their own instance lemmy.ml (their choice of the mI TLD is a reference to Marxism-Leninism), if you mention the Tiananmen massacre you get banned for "orientalism", and if you say that Hamas are terrorists you also get banned for "bothsidesing (sic)".

Does that leave a stain on Lemmy, the open-source project? Yes, for sure, it leaves Lemmy with a very questionable governance, and weird decisions like the absence of any prioritization of work on moderation tools and the very weird and completely random fact that they suddenly disabled sign-up captchas last summer leading to a bot infestation of most instances. Coincidentally, tankie instances like lemmygrad and hexbears rely on brigading, bots, and cyber-harassment to spread their poison, and strong moderation tools would hinder them a lot. Now does that make it impossible for Lemmy to succeed? No, it's again an open-source project, and it can be forked away from the tankies at any time. In fact, there's even a highly credible rewrite in Java currently whose goal is to be 100% API-compatible with Lemmy: https://sublinks.org/ (see the announcement here: https://lemmy world/post/11005411 )

Reply:

I don't think forking lemmy is a good idea honestly, let's stick to what we have and what currently works well. The beauty of lemmy is that, you can make an account on a hexbear/lemmygrad instance to see what's up, and switch back to your main instance with more reasonable, less extreme content. But also I vibe with some of lemmygrads less delusional communities. I'm on dbzero's server who federates with hexbear but not with lemmygrad and i find that to be a nice balance of content. I find it reductive to say that anything on hebear/lemmygrad is "tanky" shit, because there are some legitimately great communities in either one (hebear, for instance, has communities about socialism and marxist philosophies, which I find to be intellectually stimulating and not at all radical, though some would disagree. And chapotraphouse has got some spicy leftist memes)

True, sympathizing with terrorists and supporting Russia's invasion of Ukraine is a bad look, but there's good info on the radical leftist corner of the internet. Of course some people post insane shit to get attention and that's unfortunate. But I believe these instances at its heart safe spaces for Marxists, Marxist thought and the growing global leftist movement which I personally believe is a harbinger for change in the world

I say let's cut the bad shit and preserve the good bits instead of throwing out the entire block of cheese

Dear Mr. President: I have received your letter of October 25. From your letter, I got the feeling that you have some understanding of the situation which has developed and (some) sense of responsibility. I value this.

Now we have already publicly exchanged our evaluations of the events around Cuba and each of us has set forth his explanation and his understanding of these events. Consequently, I would judge that, apparently, a continuation of an exchange of opinions at such a distance, even in the form of secret letters, will hardly add anything to that which one side has already said to the other.

I think you will understand me correctly if you are really concerned about the welfare of the world. Everyone needs peace: both capitalists, if they have not lost their reason, and, still more, Communists, people who know how to value not only their own lives but, more than anything, the lives of the peoples. We, Communists, are against all wars between states in general and have been defending the cause of peace since we came into the world. We have always regarded war as a calamity, and not as a game nor as a means for the attainment of definite goals, nor, all the more, as a goal in itself. Our goals are clear, and the means to attain them is labor. War is our enemy and a calamity for all the peoples.

It is thus that we, Soviet people, and, together with US, other peoples as well, understand the questions of war and peace. I can, in any case, firmly say this for the peoples of the Socialist countries, as well as for all progressive people who want peace, happiness, and friendship among peoples.

I see, Mr. President, that you too are not devoid of a sense of anxiety for the fate of the world understanding, and of what war entails. What would a war give you? You are threatening us with war. But you well know that the very least which you would receive in reply would be that you would experience the same consequences as those which you sent us. And that must be clear to us, people invested with authority, trust, and responsibility. We must not succumb to intoxication and petty passions, regardless of whether elections are impending in this or that country, or not impending. These are all transient things, but if indeed war should break out, then it would not be in our power to stop it, for such is the logic of war. I have participated in two wars and know that war ends when it has rolled through cities and villages, everywhere sowing death and destruction.

In the name of the Soviet Government and the Soviet people, I assure you that your conclusions regarding offensive weapons on Cuba are groundless. It is apparent from what you have written me that our conceptions are different on this score, or rather, we have different estimates of these or those military means. Indeed, in reality, the same forms of weapons can have different interpretations.

You are a military man and, I hope, will understand me. Let us take for example a simple cannon. What sort of means is this: offensive or defensive? A cannon is a defensive means if it is set up to defend boundaries or a fortified area. But if one concentrates artillery, and adds to it the necessary number of troops, then the same cannons do become an offensive means, because they prepare and clear the way for infantry to attack. The same happens with missile-nuclear weapons as well, with any type of this weapon.

You are mistaken if you think that any of our means on Cuba are offensive. However, let us not quarrel now. It is apparent that I will not be able to convince you of this. But I say to you: You, Mr. President, are a military man and should understand: Can one attack, if one has on one's territory even an enormous quantity of missiles of various effective radiuses and various power, but using only these means. These missiles are a means of extermination and destruction. But one cannot attack with these missiles, even nuclear missiles of a power of 100 megatons because only people, troops, can attack. Without people, any means however powerful cannot be offensive.

How can one, consequently, give such a completely incorrect interpretation as you are now giving, to the effect that some sort of means on Cuba are offensive. All the means located there, and I assure you of this, have a defensive character, are on Cuba solely for the purposes of defense, and we have sent them to Cuba at the request of the Cuban Government. You, however, say that these are offensive means.

But, Mr. President, do you really seriously think that Cuba can attack the United States and that even we together with Cuba can attack you from the territory of Cuba? Can you really think that way? How is it possible? We do not understand this. Has something so new appeared in military strategy that one can think that it is possible to attack thus. I say precisely attack, and not destroy, since barbarians, people who have lost their sense, destroy.

I believe that you have no basis to think this way. You can regard us with distrust, but, in any case, you can be calm in this regard, that we are of sound mind and understand perfectly well that if we attack you, you will respond the same way. But you too will receive the same that you hurl against us. And I think that you also understand this. My conversation with you in Vienna gives me the right to talk to you this way.

This indicates that we are normal people, that we correctly understand and correctly evaluate the situation. Consequently, how can we permit the incorrect actions which you ascribe to us? Only lunatics or suicides, who themselves want to perish and to destroy the whole world before they die, could do this. We, however, want to live and do not at all want to destroy your country. We want something quite different: To compete with your country on a peaceful basis. We quarrel with you, we have differences on ideological questions. But our view of the world consists in this, that ideological questions, as well as economic problems, should be solved not by military means, they must be solved on the basis of peaceful competition, i.e., as this is understood in capitalist society, on the basis of competition. We have proceeded and are proceeding from the fact that the peaceful co-existence of the two different social-political systems, now existing in the world, is necessary, that it is necessary to assure a stable peace. That is the sort of principle we hold.

You have now proclaimed piratical measures, which were employed in the Middle Ages, when ships proceeding in international waters were attacked, and you have called this "a quarantine" around Cuba. Our vessels, apparently, will soon enter the zone which your Navy is patrolling. I assure you that these vessels, now bound for Cuba, are carrying the most innocent peaceful cargoes. Do you really think that we only occupy ourselves with the carriage of so-called offensive weapons, atomic and hydrogen bombs? Although perhaps your military people imagine that these (cargoes) are some sort of special type of weapon, I assure you that they are the most ordinary peaceful products.

Consequently, Mr. President, let us show good sense. I assure you that on those ships, which are bound for Cuba, there are no weapons at all. The weapons which were necessary for the defense of Cuba are already there. I do not want to say that there were not any shipments of weapons at all. No, there were such shipments. But now Cuba has already received the necessary means of defense.

I don't know whether you can understand me and believe me. But I should like to have you believe in yourself and to agree that one cannot give way to passions; it is necessary to control them. And in what direction are events now developing? If you stop the vessels, then, as you yourself know, that would be piracy. If we started to do that with regard to your ships, then you would also be as indignant as we and the whole world now are. One cannot give another interpretation to such actions, because one cannot legalize lawlessness. If this were permitted, then there would be no peace, there would also be no peaceful coexistence. We should then be forced to put into effect the necessary measures of a defensive character to protect our interests in accordance with international law. Why should this be done? To what would all this lead? Let us normalize relations. We have received an appeal from the Acting Secretary General of the UN, U Thant, with his proposals. I have already answered him. His proposals come to this, that our side should not transport armaments of any kind to Cuba during a certain period of time, while negotiations are being conducted--and we are ready to enter such negotiations--and the other side should not undertake any sort of piratical actions against vessels engaged in navigation on the high seas. I consider these proposals reasonable. This would be a way out of the situation which has been created, which would give the peoples the possibility of breathing calmly. You have asked what happened, what evoked the delivery of weapons to Cuba? You have spoken about this to our Minister of Foreign Affairs. I will tell you frankly, Mr. President, what evoked it.

We were very grieved by the fact--I spoke about it in Vienna--that a landing took place, that an attack on Cuba was committed, as a result of which many Cubans perished. You yourself told me then that this had been a mistake. I respected that explanation. You repeated it to me several times, pointing out that not everybody occupying a high position would acknowledge his mistakes as you had done. I value such frankness. For my part, I told you that we too possess no less courage; we also acknowledged those mistakes which had been committed during the history of our state, and not only acknowledged, but sharply condemned them.

If you are really concerned about the peace and welfare of your people, and this is your responsibility as President, then I, as the Chairman of the Council of Ministers, am concerned for my people. Moreover, the preservation of world peace should be our joint concern, since if, under contemporary conditions, war should break out, it would be a war not only between the reciprocal claims, but a world wide cruel and destructive war. Why have we proceeded to assist Cuba with military and economic aid? The answer is: We have proceeded to do so only for reasons of humanitarianism. At one time, our people itself had a revolution, when Russia was still a backward country. We were attacked then. We were the target of attack by many countries. The USA participated in that adventure. This has been recorded by participants in the aggression against our country. A whole book has been written about this by General Graves, who, at that time, commanded the US Expeditionary Corps. Graves called it "The American Adventure in Siberia."

We know how difficult it is to accomplish a revolution and how difficult it is to reconstruct a country on new foundations. We sincerely sympathize with Cuba and the Cuban people, but we are not interfering in questions of domestic structure, we are not interfering in their affairs. The Soviet Union desires to help the Cubans build their life as they themselves wish and that others should not hinder them.

You once said that the United States was not preparing an invasion. But you also declared that you sympathized with the Cuban counter-revolutionary emigrants, that you support them and would help them to realize their plans against the present Government of Cuba. It is also not a secret to anyone that the threat of armed attack, aggression, has constantly hung, and continues to hang over Cuba. It was only this which impelled us to respond to the request of the Cuban Government to furnish it aid for the strengthening of the defensive capacity of this country.

If assurances were given by the President and the Government of the United States that the USA itself would not participate in an attack on Cuba and would restrain others from actions of this sort, if you would recall your fleet, this would immediately change everything. I am not speaking for Fidel Castro, but I think that he and the Government of Cuba, evidently, would declare demobilization and would appeal to the people to get down to peaceful labor. Then, too, the question of armaments would disappear, since, if there is no threat, then armaments are a burden for every people. Then too, the question of the destruction, not only of the armaments which you call offensive, but of all other armaments as well, would look different. I spoke in the name of the Soviet Government in the United Nations and introduced a proposal for the disbandment of all armies and for the destruction of all armaments. How then can I now count on those armaments?

Armaments bring only disasters. When one accumulates them, this damages the economy, and if one puts them to use, then they destroy people on both sides. Consequently, only a madman can believe that armaments are the principal means in the life of society. No, they are an enforced loss of human energy, and what is more are for the destruction of man himself. If people do not show wisdom, then in the final analysis they will come to a clash, like blind moles, and then reciprocal extermination will begin.

Let us therefore show statesmanlike wisdom. I propose: We, for our part, will declare that our ships, bound for Cuba, will not carry any kind of armaments. You would declare that the United States will not invade Cuba with its forces and will not support any sort of forces which might intend to carry out an invasion of Cuba. Then the necessity for the presence of our military specialists in Cuba would disappear. Mr. President, I appeal to you to weigh well what the aggressive, piratical actions, which you have declared the USA intends to carry out in international waters, would lead to. You yourself know that any sensible man simply cannot agree with this, cannot recognize your right to such actions.

If you did this as the first step towards the unleashing of war, well then, it is evident that nothing else is left to us but to accept this challenge of yours. If, however, you have not lost your self-control and sensibly conceive what this might lead to, then, Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose. Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.

We welcome all forces which stand on positions of peace. Consequently, I expressed gratitude to Mr. Bertrand Russell, too, who manifests alarm and concern for the fate of the world, and I readily responded to the appeal of the Acting Secretary General of the UN, U Thant. There, Mr. President, are my thoughts, which, if you agreed with them, could put an end to that tense situation which is disturbing all peoples. These thoughts are dictated by a sincere desire to relieve the situation, to remove the threat of war.

Respectfully yours, [s] N. Khrushchev October 26, 1962.