Quote:
Originally Posted by panerd
I enjoy this as well. I also enjoy when people's degrees make them an unquestioned expert in something but when they talk out of their butt about something else (i.e. Obama and economics) against someone with a degree in that area then it is all purely opinion.
EDIT: Not defending Dutch, in political threads his opinion is very easy to figure out. Also not bashing DT, but he needs to at least acknowledge that his Soviet studies professors are definitely going to have some sort of slant and while he may have read A LOT more than all of us on this subject it still doesn't make him an expert or his opinion any more valid.
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Of course my primary Soviet studies professor had a slant. But when I did my own independent research (and FWIW when I carried those same conclusions into other classes - for say U.S. Foreign Policy for example), nobody that I read who had any degree of learning about the topic argued against my conclusions.
Glasnost & perestroika, the eternal "guns or butter" debate, the debacle in Afghanistan, social agitation by returning veterans of Afghanistan, the increasing regional fragmentation and ethnic self-determination movements among the various republics. That's just a short list of some of the primary causes.
My opinion is certainly not more valid, but you also cannot deny that by virtue of the greater knowledge that I have of the subject it is much more informed, much more nuanced, and therefore much more likely to be "the truth."
That doesn't even take into account that it is the position of (insert appropriate numerical adjective here - I have no desire to attempt to quantify which one it should be) of the people who spend their lives studying this.