And might those ethnic Russians have been there due to a sustained campaign on the part of the Soviets to depopulate the region of ethnic Ukrainians and replace them with ethnic Russians as part of a plan to increase loyalty of the region to the central Soviet authority?

Literally the exact opposite happened. The Soviets did a Ukrainization campaign to support and popularize Ukrainian language, literature and culture in regions where it had previously been marginal at best. Ukrainians were disproportionately represented in the leadership positions of the Soviet state. The Soviet Union was extremely pro-Ukrainian.

> “I’m not racist”

> Proceeds to be racist towards Russians, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis

Russia was invading militarily Crimea well before 2014

Lol, do you mean the lease agreement in which Ukraine was getting a ton of money for the Russian naval base in Crimea? Is that your definition of “invading”?

Ah yes the dehumanizing Russian rhetoric towards the Ukrainians of… *checks notes* calling them a brotherly people. Smh…how awful of them.

I think they realize it’s quite unlikely to “make it” as a musician.

A lot more children from developing countries tend to want to be teachers because education is not taken for granted there (even when it has been universally available for a couple generations like it is now in China, the times in which it was not are still in living memory…go back to the 1960s and 70s and you still had many people in especially rural China who had very low levels of education). Education is seen there as a noble profession helping people on the path to a better life, and they look at teachers not too differently from how they look at doctors.

By contrast, developed countries tend to take education for granted, and young people see that education is not really that necessary to become rich, powerful and famous, and the most glamorized people in the society tend to be either some kind of entertainer, sports or pop star, or rich entrepreneurs.

How convenient to fall back on arguments about self-determination only after the island spent decades under a repressive military dictatorship, and then decades under a US controlled “liberal democracy” with US controlled media and an education system that brainwashed and indoctrinated entire generations of people to see themselves as different from the mainland. Why was the issue never put to a referendum? Why are sympathies with the mainland still harshly repressed and any talk of reunification suppressed?

Humility is key to learning. Admitting that you can be wrong and don’t know everything. Unfortunately in capitalist society the opposite behavior is encouraged and rewarded.

Definitely. I have liked the attitude i have seen so far from this person a lot. I think the most important thing is being curious and open to learning. Ignorance is only a sin if it’s willful. Unfortunately, as you pointed out, some other people choose go to great efforts to remain ignorant.

They are also very racist.

Lol. If we didn’t do that then we would get accused of not including our sources. But i get your point, sometimes we can tend to be overly thorough.

I view this as being a bit like mathematics. The things we say make sense to someone who is already versed in the subject but for someone who doesn’t already understand or agree with certain concepts or ideas we don’t necessarily want to rehash arguments that were already laid out in works a hundred years prior so we just refer back to those in the same way that when you do modern mathematics you don’t need to repeat proofs that were already done in the 19th century. You can just take those theorems as given and if you are really interested in how they were derived you can still go back to the original literature and read up on it.

Of course you can still engage with and understand the more advanced arguments even without going all the way back to the basics but then you need to accept certain things as axiomatic, because it would take too much time to go back and explain them every time.

Let’s say for instance that we are talking about imperialism. To clarify what exactly we mean when we talk about imperialism we may briefly give the Leninist definition of imperialism. You can either accept that this is the definition or you can ask why. Why is it defined that way and why does it make sense? Well for that you would have to go and read Lenin’s work on Imperialism. Which in turn references but does not necessarily thoroughly explain certain concepts about the nature of capitalism that were worked out earlier by Marx.

You see, you can either choose to go down this rabbit hole and invest the time it takes to really go to the basics and build up from there, or you can take it as given that this has already been worked out and you can try and understand how we apply it to the modern day, which saves time and is more practical. Neither is wrong, it just depends on your personal interest.