Should've killed grandpa apparently.

We're already at "yeah the holocaust was bad but the holodomor was worse"

Oh so now you believe the CIA?

Taiwan only exists because it served, and continues to serve, US interests as a staging point for military operations against China. A war over Taiwan would absolutely see the US using Taiwan as a proxy, much as they are currently using Ukraine against Russia.

We've had one, yes, but what about second proxy war?

Also arrested trade union leaders and got into it with a teacher's union. I obviously support Sankara, and like you say he's really not different from any other communist leaders except that he was assassinated and his work undone.

Actually they're raising the price of meat now.

Communism killed 100 million in Europe alone and 300-400 million in China. Count other parts of the world and the number easily reaches a billion.

What's your source for this? Where did the other 500 million people die due to communism outside of the USSR and China? Did Fidel Castro kill every person in Cuba 50 times?

Yemen?

To clarify my stance, I want the war to end as soon as possible so that all the people on the ground can stop killing each other for no reason. I also agree that Russia invading was, in addition to being wrong because war is bad, incredibly stupid and needlessly damaging to their own position (I was one of the people saying they wouldn't launch an invasion because it seemed like it would backfire). We'll see how the economic and geo-political damage ends up shaking out in a decade or so, I imagine. And of course it's understandable for Ukrainians to take up arms to defend their land, though it will likely only prolong the suffering, especially if we agree that life on the ground under the Ukrainian state would be little better than living under the Russian one. I also recognize that Putin claiming the war was necessary for de-nazification etc was the equivalent of pretending to care about human rights to sell the war to the populace; yes there are nazis and the far right is a huge problem in Ukraine, but that isn't something Russia actually cares about (beyond a potential insurgency, anyway).

However, the point of my comment was not to condemn Ukraine. Instead, it was to point out that the US is not interested in helping Ukrainians (something we clearly agree on), and that in fact they are more than willing to sacrifice them in a conflict to achieve their own ends, namely isolating/weakening Russia and opening up Ukraine to even more voracious imperial extraction.

At a 2008 summit, NATO stated that it would attempt to expand to include Georgia and Ukraine, despite Russia having stated that NATO membership for those countries was a red line for them. Georgia was immediately invaded by Russia in response. Imo this makes it clear that NATO membership for either of those countries was so unacceptable that Russia would rather invade.

If we assume that Russia (and Putin in particular) is acting violently and irrationally like a wild animal, why did NATO continue to agitate Russia when the only possible outcome would be violence? Surely a neutral or even Russia-aligned Ukraine would be preferable to a war-torn Ukraine? This is proof that the US and NATO don't care about the average person actually living in Ukraine, and indeed don't care about the Ukrainian state beyond it being a useful (and profitable) proxy against a geo-political rival.

To be clear, I'm not excusing Russia here, but geo-politics aren't about what's "fair" or "right", and if they were, the US would be a global pariah.

It's an edit. The original has one guy saying 6, the other saying 9, because the creator naively thought "oh the political divide is really just down to people not understanding each other". This is a fairly common opinion of dipshit american centrists.

The edited version points out how this is incorrect, and that in reality different people have entirely different political views which cannot be reconciled. The example used is that rich people (the same ones that make up the US government and receive bribes from health insurance companies, for instance) want to keep making money from predatory health insurance and so oppose universal healthcare, while the average citizen supports universal healthcare.