Snoopy wrote:
Doesn’t matter.
No it doesn’t Snoopy. When civilian lives are sacrificed, 500k in Iraq? 3000 a month currently in Afghanistan. 1 million in the Iran/Iraq US proxy?
No it doesn’t matter a jot. Unless it is your sister, your mother, your father…….
Snoopy wrote:
This discussion is very interesting. It unveils the demographic engaged in private general aviation well.
Bit of an old boys club, isn’t it? :)
An accurate observation. And possibly one of the main problems in out hobby, the underlying mindset is stifling necessary change…
@beechbaby
I have no idea what you’re getting it. We must have a misunderstanding.
My „doesn’t matter“ was solely directed to saying that confirmation bias doesn’t differentiate between fact or fiction. If we proof our beliefs and coincidentally the source is factual than that’s nice, but we’d do the same with fiction, so it’s a moot point.
If you believe that dead civilians in dictators hands are to be preferred over those because of (perhaps illegal) military intervention then so be it.
I think both cases are horrible and prefer not to approve of one because of the other, whichever way.
What would be a “legal” military intervention?
Was the loss of ~250k of American lives in removing Hitler a part of a legal operation? Probably not. I don’t recall a vote in the UN authorising it. The UN wasn’t established back then.
In warfare it is always victor’s justice…
Europe has for decades relied on American military protection (NATO etc) while its intellectual class has been slagging off America at every opportunity. Just my opinion, as an old boy of 62 whose family escaped from communism in 1969 
We are all the product of our past. If you are a young European you will probably hate America – because that feeling is all around you as you are growing up. It is the default social media position, for a start.
And for sure GA – the portion of it that actually flies anywhere – is mostly older people… that’s simply because most people don’t get the money and the time until later in life, and that’s assuming that (if male) you didn’t get divorced or if you did, you didn’t get too badly fleeced. I am still flying despite a divorce (in which I lost all except the business; I was presented with no other option if I wanted to see the children) because it happened 20 years ago and I have a business which did OK afterwards.
The subject of Iraqi WMD and the “illegal war” is a separate thing. Sure the govt lied to justify participation in Gulf War Mk 2. The original GW Mk 1 left Saddam in place, to carry on doing his dirty work domestically.
In foreign policy there is no good solution, most of the time. I think everybody now realises that “nation building” is really hard and will take – at best – many decades. Look at Russia… when communism collapsed, there was nobody there who remembered anything resembling freedom (under the Czars, if you minded your own business, the not very efficient secret police left you alone). So it is run by gangsters. So should one leave the 3rd World to fight its wars, internal and external, as they wish? I don’t think anybody has a good answer.
Snoopy wrote:
I have no idea what you’re getting it. We must have a misunderstanding.
We may well have. Please accept my apologies if I misconstrued the point you were making. It was close to my bedtime on a Saturday night!!
Peter wrote:
If you are a young European you will probably hate America – because that feeling is all around you as you are growing up. It is the default social media position, for a start.
Well, I know a lot of people considerably younger than I am. I am myself probably well to the left in the EuroGA political scale. None that I know of (including myself) “hate” the US. That many people (myself included) take exception to a lot of US policies — domestic and international — is a quite different thing from “hating”.
I think Trump derangement syndrome definitely affects a reasonable sized group.
The not my president vanity protest seems to have bled over to the not my prime minister loons. Like any good socialist, they refuse to accept democratic votes.
What a wonderful young medical student, wishing a horrible death to the just elected prime minister. I would hazard a guess in conversation she would be pretty anti USA. I’ve certainly met people around my age, corbynista types who work in the public sector, They hate tories and seem to hate the US. Usually it’s just orange man bad and the general population are all racist, stupid, fat rednecks.
For a medical student, what a wonderful role model for healthy eating And if somebody with her intellect can get through the system, god help us all. I recommend going private
Mind you, when I was in my 20s, all the nurses I knew could drink me under the table
The good news for us now living the US is that we watch most of this stuff with bemused detachment. Hopefully it will remain that way forever. It is certainly true in my experience that Europeans seem to take an odd and emotional interest in the US, while we just get on with enjoying life and mainly have little reason to be interested in European gyrations
I’ll be in Europe tomorrow and will try to avoid discussing anything except enjoyment of the holidays and staying warm. My brother in law will doubtless try to drink me under the table, as is his habit. Americans can’t hold their liquor, you see, and it must be demonstrated 
Peter wrote:
For a medical student, what a wonderful role model for healthy eating And if somebody with her intellect can get through the system, god help us all. I recommend going private
Only in countries with a real messed up health-care systems is “going private” any better for the patient. Here in Germany, you just pay more (in most cases, unless you are young and healthy) if you have private insurance while the level of treatment is the same or even inferior to that of publicly insured patients (inferior because private patients often have a stipulation in their contracts to be treated by the chief physician/head of department only, who is often less current at the actual medical procedures because he has to do a lot more office work than e.g. their deputies).
The only benefit of private health insurance in Germany is that you get an appointment with a specialist faster, for non-critical things, mind you.
