Ergo you are on the side of Joseph Stalin. Death camps. Force labour. Expansionist military aggression. Civilian infrastructure retooled to produce a state-controlled war machine. Genocide of perceived "lesser races". Rejection of religious freedom. Restriction of travel. Secret police encouraging people to inform on their neighbours. Thought police enforcing the norm through "party membership" as a de facto prerequisite for employment.

All the evils we see from the Nazis were evils that Soviet Union had been visiting on its population for a good decade before Hitler rose to power. Knowing what Stalin was doing to them already, and not knowing that the Nazis were equally dangerous as Stalin, it was perfectly logical for them to side with the Nazis.

Sevastapol is largely Russian, but Crimea on the whole is ethnically Tatar. The problem is a hangover from the old imperial tactic of settling a privileged minority to try to make the local populace easier to control, and to try to trigger language change. Congo's crisis came because independence didn't do enough to start the process of returning land from the privileged settled whites to the native population, and then Mugabe gained power on the land reform ticket with no real plan on how to do it right -- because land reform clearly wasn't all that important to him. Apartheid in South Africa was a privileged minority brutally supressing the local population in order to maintain their own status. The settlement of Scottish Protestants in Ireland was aimed at the same goal, and the partitioning of Ireland was designed to keep the "loyalists" in the majority over the republicans, thereby maintaining British control. This led to decades of bloodshed and bitterness after the partition.

Now I'm not saying I have the answer, but the problem starts with the settlements, and Russia "defending" them under a banner of human rights is entirely disengenuous. They were planted there as a lever for Soviet Moscow to retain power, and they are being used by CIS Moscow to try to regain power (or control, at the very least.

As I recall it, Saddam said the UN inspectors were welcome, as long as there were no American inspectors there, because he was convinced they were CIA spies. Hans Blix felt this was reasonable, the Americans said "hell no" and used their permanent security council status to block any agreement to carry on without any US presence on the ground. In effect, it was the US that stopped the inspections.

It's not about rational arguments, it's about unconscious preconceptions. BellaCaledonia, the blog that started this (I cannot believe that a blog post from a no-name blogger misrepresenting the views of another blogger made the Slashdot front page -- for pity's sake!) was talking about self-perception. We are presented as marginal, both in the sense of insignificant numbers and in the sense of being geographically on the fringes, and I know that I grew up with a vastly distorted view of the size and population of Scotland (and that was in the days when the BBC weather map was a flat projection). In September most of Scotland's population will be voting not based on logical, rational decisions, but based on their preconceptions, which are fuelled by such seemingly insignificant matters as the predominance given to English sport in the news, English news stories, weather maps, accents on TV etc etc.

Perhaps you would disagree with BellaCaledonia's argument if you read it in the original, but your knee-jerk reaction without even reading the argument does you no credit.

That is at best an oversimplification, at worst wrong. National debt is a contractual affair between a lender and a state. The lender has legal protections in international law that allow them to pursue the state if they fail to pay up. If Scotland is given the status of "successor state" and the rUK "continuant state", then international law means only the rUK would be liable to the debt -- we're not talking mere "labels", we're talking legal definitions.

George Osborne's already walking the line very dangerously, having declared that the UK will guarantee all debt and saying that rather than transferring a portion of the debt to Scotland, the UK would retain the balance and would charge Scotland annually for our share. That stretches the definition of a continuant state beyond all credibility in my book.

I failed to notice this statement first time round. Sorry, but this is entirely untrue. Scotland's total budget is determined in a single calculation under the Barnett formula. That calculation is made on English spend. When England spends more, Scotland's budget increases; when England spends less, Scotland's budget decreases. The Scottish Parliament cannot make any decisions that change the amount of money England gets.

Bzzt -- wrong. "National Rail" doesn't exist -- "National Rail Enquiries" is the company responsible for centrally managing and communicating train running information to the public. Network Rail is the state-owned company that operates the entire UK rail network, including Scotland. Meanwhile, ScotRail is the operating name of the rail franchise that operates trains.

I didn't realise it was that simple. I'd thought that Spain might have bigger fish to fry... such as access to Scottish waters for their fishing boats. Fishing is about the only thing of any value to their economy right now, and they're in a serious financial funk, but they'll just throw away the access they get to Scottish waters on a whim, will they?

Nope. Standard practice when countries split is that their citizens automatically become citizens of the part of the country they live in, unless they choose otherwise. A Scottish born resident of Kent would therefore not become an "immegrant"[sic -- you know there are dictionaries online these days, right?]

No, but budgetary issues have not been divorced from everything else. The devolution settlement did not result in a proper separation of concerns. With a Scottish block grant, a Welsh block grand and a Northern Irish block grant, but no English block grant, the system is completely borked.

"Your opinion" and "fact" are two very different things. The figures do not support this assertion.

There are actually precious few issues that don't have knock-on effects for Scotland. The Barnett Formula allocates block grants to Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and it does so based on the expenditure under the Westminster government, meaning both UK-wide politicies and England-only policies.

This means that any issue that has a price-tag attached has a knock-on effect in Scotland. When Westminster cuts budgets for the English NHS, Scotland gets less money. When Westminster cuts funding for higher education, Scotland gets less money. If Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs abstained on all English matters, the result would essentially be that the UK budget was administered by English MPs alone, and that would also be unfair.

The devolution settlement is inherently dysfunctional, but again: that's not Scotland's fault.