Edit: Literally took 5 minutes for the first downvote, despite not mentioning a single "issue". What's that old phrase? QED?
Live a little. Go ahead and share your perspectives. The maximum downvote damage is -5 points. You'll survive. I'll upvote you even if I disagree. Unless they're just the standard talking points from one side or another on some contentious topic, which is too boring to upvote.
Again, this is just an example, not my personal agenda. What I want to point out is that we've normalized that there are a handful of forbidden topics that you will get punched for if you approach them with anything but a pre-formed opinion that matches the status quo.
Edit: And just as a turn of the screw, I'm going to say that the COVID vaccines are pretty shit compared to ones like smallpox, polio, and rabies vaccines, which actually (and sometimes retroactively) prevent you from getting the disease you were vaccinated against. Oh heck, I'm not allowed to say that thing that we all know. I mean if you take a high level view of it, they take the edge off the problem, but they still kind of suck.
I was expecting something controversial. :)
The counterargument of course is that the region was annexed by aggression, which is dangerous to legitimize. Letting the bullies win is a recipe for creating more and bigger bullies.
But sometimes there are no good answers. I don't know any trustworthy sources of information from that area (only expats and news reporting which are all various degrees of clueless and biased).
Avoiding inflicting war on a reluctant people sounds humane. Restoring national sovereignty to a conquered people sounds noble. Impeding the spread of territorial aggression and natural resource theft sounds righteous.
Personal opinion, pragmatic I think: You can't retake Crimea without obliterating Russia. You can't obliterate Russia without horrifying consequences. Don't retake Crimea, but draw a very clear and public line, and allow no concessions regarding the next Crimea (Ukraine). This turns out to be very close to the foreign policy of most of the world.
Here we go, as requested:
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/16/world/europe/ukraine-cris...
> One voter, Grigory Illarionovich, told CNN, “I’m for restoring Crimea to Russia. Returning what Khrushchev took away.”
> Another voter in Perevalnoye, Viktor Savchenko, said he would never vote for the government in Kiev. “I want us to join Russia, and live like Russians, with all their rights,” he said.
> Victoria Khudyakova said she also had voted to join Russia, which she sees as being “spiritually close” to Crimea. “For me, Russia is an opportunity for our Crimea to develop, to bloom. And I believe that it will be so,” she said.
[...]
> CNN analyst and Russian journalist Vladimir Pozner similarly stressed that Sunday’s vote was in no way staged. “When you look at the celebrations, you can’t doubt that these people really are very happy,” he said.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/06/591266939/how-people-in-crime...
> DEMID KUPAYEV: (Through interpreter) I witnessed how babushkas came up and said, thank God the time has come for Crimea to return to its historic homeland.
> KIM: Kupayev says international sanctions have made finding work in commercial shipping harder. But like many Crimeans, he calls economic hardship the acceptable price of joining Russia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/dec/15/why-crimea-is-...
(The Guardian is pretty much pro-Ukraine, pro-war in general.)
It's hard to find balanced discussion on something like the status of Crimea. Which is complicated - as you say the locals are largely Russian. Then again Russia signed an agreement recognising it as Ukrainian, then invaded and used it as a base to launch war on the rest of Ukraine which they show every intention of repeating if they can.
There's nothing controversial about saying that it'd be better if the COVID vaccines were better!
The COVID vaccines we have are measurably better than not having a COVID vaccine, and people had worse health outcomes if they believed (acted) otherwise.
Some narratives allow nuance and some do not. Public health communication is a very problematic place for nuance, and the natural nuance of science was weaponized to serve an agenda (which was sometimes blatantly dishonest) -- so avoiding nuance became a pragmatic approach to achieving better outcomes under existing circumstances.
If you felt cancelled for holding out for the complicated nuanced reality, I can sympathize with that feeling. I can also sympathize with those who believed that focusing on the nuance would, broadly, harm people!
