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Serious questions and musings

I totally agree with being able to choose your time to go. Basically being when you have no quality of life anymore. I've told my family that if I was to have an accident and got severe brain damage or something and was in a coma on life support, I'd rather them let the doctors turn off the machines as I wouldn't want to just exist not being able to do anything if I woke up and just be a burden on my family and society. Once there's no quality of life and only pain it's time to go.
 
Absolutely.
And one final point on the whole matter.
Pressure, what pressure?
My bed left the ward for A&E before me.
Honestly.
The very nice man from property management didn't ask, I offered, and sat in the chair to wait for my good lady.
He thanked me and left with the bed at speed.
"Bank holiday weekend guv, thanks for the help".
And a thumbs up from us both with a smile.

Local old pirate said it better than me yesterday.
As The Cat said, "It's better to live one hour as a tiger, than a whole lifetime as a worm".
Spot on.

But then again, I didn't know about his obvious prejudice against our bilateral friends...
 
I'm only catching this conversation late on. But can get the general premise.

I've seen 3 grandparents slowly die with Alzheimer's. Sat in old folks home, with no conversation, not even onkwing if they even know I'm there Or who I am. Or in another case. Holding the same conversation with one, asking how my grandad is over and over again, there is only so many time you can answer positively knowing full well he's been dead 4 years and she was at the funeral. A funeral of her husband of 70 years. Who couldn't even remember why she was at a wake not 30mins later.

Bollocks to that. Ive very little Family, neither me or my brother have bred. If mrs slugjc goes before me then I will be practically on my own. My biggest fear is being trapped in a bed, with a kind nurse turning some comforting music from my past, and having to suffer razorlight with no means of silencing it.

That's not a death worth having.
 
Lots and lots of conversations in the last few days about people wanting a version of the "special pill" my friend...two with clients, and clients young son, in the last hour.
Oh...and my sis in Canada, seventy and kayaking most days.
Keep it up sis.
 
I’ve got a serious question that I’ve been thinking about.

I was doing some reading the other day on the Blair ministry, and by extension Blair and Bush’s decision to bomb Iraq. The more I read up on it, the more I felt that this was completely the wrong decision by Tony Blair and George W Bush, and I was thinking; how exactly is Blair and Bush bombing Iraq all that different to the atrocities being committed by Putin in Ukraine or by Israel in Gaza?

I know that Blair and Bush bombed Iraq under the pretence that Saddam Hussein had “weapons of mass destruction”. However, this pretence was later proven false, so ultimately, Blair and Bush bombed an innocent country, killed many innocent people and left the country with life-changing damage for no reason. If you think about it, I don’t think that’s much different to Putin claiming that Ukraine is full of dangerous Nazis as his pretence for invading.

But despite the arguable similarities, everyone seems fine with Blair and Bush bombing Iraq, whereas Putin has been vilified, received wide-ranging sanctions and been made a complete pariah for his actions in Ukraine. My question is; why is it that Blair and Bush got off scott-free for invading Iraq while Putin and the like have been vilified worldwide for their atrocities when their actions are arguably quite similar? What exactly made Blair and Bush invading Iraq any better than the likes of Putin invading Ukraine or Netanyahu invading Gaza?

Just because the US and the UK were the perpetrators, I don’t get why that makes what Blair and Bush did in Iraq correct. They still invaded an innocent country and killed many innocent people for no reason.
 
Matt, everyone was not fine with it. Once it came out that the weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist all hell broke loose.

People who pay more attention to these things will be able to explain it better, but whilst they didn’t get sent to international court, their popularity decreased massively and it lead to changes in how people voted at the subsequent election(s).

Edit to add: someone was murdered/committed suicide over it too… David Kelly. Might be worth a google for you.
 
Matt N said:
how exactly is Blair and Bush bombing Iraq all that different to the atrocities being committed by Putin in Ukraine or by Israel in Gaza?
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Because "we won".

As @Alix has touched on, the majority of the population were not happy with the war. The Stop The War march saw the largest public demonstration ever witnessed in British history, but still the leaders went ahead. The driving force was the toxic Special Relationship, and our need to saddle up to the US. It also led to our relationship deteriorating with most of Europe and condemnation from most of the UN Security Council.

The war crimes question is a rather tricky one. The International Courts of Justice is a civil court, not a criminal one. The way it's set up gives each member of the permanent UN Security Council a veto on any action. The UK and US are permeant members, so why would they condone legal action against themselves?

The International Criminal Court was established in 2002, just before the invasion of Iraq, but crucially the US does not recognise it as a body. The court mostly focusses on punishing atrocities in Africa, not the actions of western states or actors against anyone else. I'm sure you can work out the colonial optics and why that might be the case.

The precise reason why Sir Tony Blair didn't get his customary honours until relatively recently, is precisely because most of the nation view him as a war criminal. Each successive government have resisted knighting him for fear of alienating the public. Even Gordon Brown's government didn't issue it. Blair only received his knighthood at the insistence of the late Queen Elizabeth II. Every single Prime Minister before him had been given an hour.

You might be interested in watching the 2910 film, The Special Relationship, which dramatises the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
en.m.wikipedia.org

The Special Relationship (film) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org en.m.wikipedia.org
 
Much of it is simply that "we" are the good guys in our own story. Or at least, any given government has a narrative in which everything they do is good, and where the actions of their enemies are always bad. It has nothing to do with any sort of objective morality, it's just a story attached after-the-fact to what the powers that be were going to do anyway. I can only speak to my own upbringing but as an American this is how we can have a powerful national narrative about having "the most freedom" while the country was quite literally built by slaves and now has more prisoners than any other country in world history.

Also, international law is, quite unfortunately, fake. There's no way to enforce it and, as mentioned, it's generally meant to further punish less-powerful countries rather than to hold everyone to a consistent moral standard. I can't find it now but I believe it was the Bush administration's legal stance that any attempt to enforce international law against American officials would be viewed as a declaration of war, or something like that.
 
Weird how Nato decided that Serbia needed bombing in the 1990s but then their pals Israel have done much worse to their neighbours and are still flattening the place. All depends on who your pals are whether something is an atrocity worthy of repercussions or not.
 
Alix said:
Edit to add: someone was murdered/committed suicide over it too… David Kelly. Might be worth a google for you.
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Yup. He totally killed himself. Nothing to see here. Move along.
The fact that our nations press never questioned it and just fed us the official story is sadly not surprising. If ever there was an event that should have triggered a revolution...
 
It’s a little more complicated but as others have said there was huge public outcry at the time.

Basically the question is do you take at face value the proposition that at the time the decision was made to invade Iraq the government was told by security services that there was a high likelihood of WMD being used by the Iraqi government and that they made the decision in good faith, with the lack of WMD being an intelligence failure. Or do you feel that it was a cover-up.

The official enquiries concluded the government acted in good faith but lots of people strongly disagree.

The other reason people don’t get too stressed about it is Sadam Hussain was a truly nasty leader to his own people, there was a lot of jubilation in Iraq when he fell, but in true western style we didn’t do anything to support the country once we invaded.
 
Dave said:
in true western style we didn’t do anything to support the country once we invaded.
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That's not fair critique! We help other western nations rebuild once we've invaded or stripped them to parts; Germany being the prime and most recent example. 😉

Edit: Further watching for @Matt N would be Battle for Haditha; a dramatisation of the Haditha massacre in which US Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians. - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_for_Haditha
 
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I remember going on the big "stop the war" protest. For all the good it did.
It was then that my younger self realised us peons have no say in anything.
 
I was in Unison at the time and was a shop steward. Was told to march but went to work instead in protest over the union focussing on this and not the new pension scheme the council was putting through.

Rebel me
 
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I was going to wade in that everyone certainly did not seem "fine" with it at all! It was deeply unpopular at the time, there were mass public protests, Labour back bench rebellions, and the Lib Dems used to talk about almost nothing else. But others have pointed out that fact already.

In answer to your questions, there are a lot of differences. The UK is a democracy and the war had overwhelming support in the commons at the time. Russia isn't, this is Putin's decision.

The Chilcot inquiry found that the UK government acted in good faith and genuinely did have bad intelligence fed to them regarding Iraqi WMD. There is no intelligence to suggest that Ukraine is run by Nazis hell bent on the destruction of Russia.

Although a military threat with Weapons of Mass destruction was the justification, unless you're George Galloway, there's hardly anyone who wouldn't tell you that Sadam Hussain was an incredibly evil man. If you look at his long list of atrocities, he was one of the most evil dictators of modern times. Ukraine on the other hand, despite it's many problems (and yes, there are many ethical concerns), is a fledgling democracy. There is no dictator in Ukraine plundering the countries wealth and murdering a quarter of a million of their own people, sometimes with chemical weapons.

That's not to say that Blair was right. I hated the invasion of Iraq from the very first rumours, to the first missiles that went in. I remember watching the war launch live on the telly, knowing that I was a citizen of a country that was acting as an agressor. I hate the war even more now, and it's consequences have been far reaching. Far from being "fine" with it, the reputation of the UK and US has been so tarnished by it, that it's left us now fairly impotent (and for a long time, militarily stretched) in foreign interventions ever since.
 
Alix said:
Matt, everyone was not fine with it. Once it came out that the weapons of mass destruction didn’t exist all hell broke loose.
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Photo proof of young Diogo, Kelpie and our uni friends not being 'fine' with it - along with hundreds of thousands of others.

IMG_20240718_2334147.jpg

Also, look up the Andrew Gilligan incident - BBC staff have never forgiven the govt for the forced resignation of Greg Dyke (the then Director General).
Dyke's biography was deliberately positioned prominently in the bookcase on the Andrew Marr Show set in low key protest for years afterwards, including after moving buildings (funnily, the one photo where I could find a shot of this happened to be when Greg Dyke was a guest....)

greg dyke2.jpg
 
Kelpie said:
Photo proof of young Diogo, Kelpie and our uni friends not being 'fine' with it - along with hundreds of thousands of others.

IMG_20240718_2334147.jpg

Also, look up the Andrew Gilligan incident - BBC staff have never forgiven the govt for the forced resignation of Greg Dyke (the then Director General).
Dyke's biography was deliberately positioned prominently in the bookcase on the Andrew Marr Show set in low key protest for years afterwards, including after moving buildings (funnily, the one photo where I could find a shot of this happened to be when Greg Dyke was a guest....)

greg dyke2.jpg
Click to expand...
Diogo used to have hair?! 😮😛
 
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