Today, a documentary was aired in Russia in which Putin calmly recognizes that he did annex the Crimea, that the “referendum” was a sham, and that he was ready to deploy nuclear weapons if anybody had tried to stop the annexation.
I remember how much time and energy I wasted on convincing people here on the blog and elsewhere of exactly this and feel very annoyed. It would be great if the next time I say something about Ukraine and Russia people whose knowledge about the region is limited to something they vaguely heard on the radio manage not to inflict their useless “opinions” on me.
Nothing is more frustrating than having to deal with folks who believe they need to have opinions about evrtything and refuse to get even minimally educated before opining.
A right to an opinion has to be deserved by a massive investment of time and effort into learning and getting informed.
Clarissa's Blog 
The way I see it, everyone has the right to have an opinion, which has as an obvious corollary the fact that everyone has the right to have the opinion that certain uninformed opinions are utterly idiotic, and that combined with the right to free speech means said uninformed opinions can be mocked relentlessly. As for the overly opinionated, as Linux folk say, redirect to /dev/null
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“The way I see it, everyone has the right to have an opinion”
The best thing we could do is to adopt the slogan of “not everybody is entitled to an opinion” because the mistaken belief that all opinions are equally valid is causing enormous damage to the world. Global warming, evolution, vaccines, public education – on and on the brainless opinionated go destroying everything in sight.
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Pff, if we adopt that slogan, the brainless opinionated will just raise one of them to crowned ass status so they can use him or her in ad magister arguments. The thing that might actually fix this is ensure a vast majority of people has access to education and hope they remember the effort and learning it took to have an opinion about stuff in their field that wasn’t egregiously stupid and are able to generalize this to fields they weren’t educated in. But I think we agree about that one.
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Btw, I don’t comment much on your war posts because I don’t have the knowledge to express an informed opinion about all this (hell, I don’t even read Ukrainian or Russian, and the Romanian and English language coverage mostly sucks), but thanks a lot for making them.
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I never doubted you were a reasonable, intelligent person whose opinions are always rooted in knowledge.
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Do Romanians care about Moldova and Transnistria?
What’s the historical relationship between Romania and Ukraine?
Romania and Russia?
Ceausescu largely went his own way in the Warsaw Pact but that seems because the USSR wasn’t bloodthirsty enough for him.
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I kind of had my suspiscions when first hearing about this, though again with some people you begin to doubt some of what you hear due to alegations of Western media bias. (Ironic that you perceive the BBC as being biased in the other direction w.r.t. the whole “pro-Russian rebels” thing- I suspect this may be down to the habit of their being over-cautious to be “balanced”.)
Now these suspicions are confirmed.
With regard to “opinions” I hope this wasn’t directed my way, mind- if so do note I was uncertain about the issue and wanted clarification, one thing I did get wrong being to oversimplify the history of Ukraine to reach entirely wrong conclusions over its links with Russia.*
It might be worth drawing attention to the part where you report “…that he was ready to deploy nuclear weapons if anybody had tried to stop the annexation.” I imagine this could be the real reason the West was so reluctant to act. Risking a nuclear war is not something really to be considered. Though it does seem to make a mockery of the whole business of “international law” (as did the 2003 Iraq war if you ask me, but that’s another matter and did not at least result in annexation.)
*See republicoflyniezia.wordpress.com/2015/02/19/is-russia-really-a-threat-to-the-baltics-or-the-west/
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(Apologies for the typos).
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“With regard to “opinions” I hope this wasn’t directed my way, mind”
“It might be worth drawing attention to the part where you report “…that he was ready to deploy nuclear weapons if anybody had tried to stop the annexation.” I imagine this could be the real reason the West was so reluctant to act.”
“Though it does seem to make a mockery of the whole business of “international law” (as did the 2003 Iraq war if you ask me”
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They’ve been talking about this special on Polish TV for a while. Though footage shown from Crimea at the time made it completely clear that the little green guys were Russian troops.
Interesting dog that didn’t bark (and strongest indication that maybe there is something like a coup going on)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrea-chalupa/kremlins-troll-army-is-qu_b_6875282.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592
I also like the implication that Putin is “the face of the Kremlin”, not necessarily as in charge as everyone thinks.
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