Best Of

I lean in favour of assisted dying, but don't have a strong view.

Of course, one can take one's stance from our moral leaders - any proposed reform that churches oppose, from ending the burning of witches and heretics to legalising divorce to more or less anything Mrs Thatcher did, is usually an excellent idea.

Divorce laws in the UK are too liberal now with no fault divorce. Having a negative effect on the family and fertility rates

What conceivable benefit would you expect to acru from restricting divorce? Couples stuck in loveless marriages are not likely to bring children into them and if they did it would be for entirely the wrong reasons to the detriment of everyone.

Unless it was an arranged marriage no marriage would be loveless otherwise they would never have got married in the first place.

No marriage is perfect, you work through the downs and arguments as well as the ups

What a naive view.

Love sometimes lasts, but love sometimes dies. At which point it becomes loveless.

Go through ups and downs, yes, my wife and I have had ups and downs and we still love each other. That is a healthy marriage.

If you only have downs and the love is gone, then it's not a healthy marriage and it should be terminated.

All my biological grandparents divorced. Both my dad's parents remarried before I was even born and had a happy, healthy second marriage that took them to the end of their lives. Them divorcing and remarrying was the best thing that ever happened to them, and the family as a whole.

I was also lucky enough then to grow up with 5 grandparents (3 biological, 2 not) and am fortunate still have the two non-biological grandparents whom I love as my grandparents every bit as much as the biological ones.

My father's parents divorced and it had a negative impact on his teenage years and hit his mother hard while his father remarried.

Divorce is simply too easy nowadays, unless there is adultery or domestic violence involved divorce should be an absolute last resort and best avoided

My mother got a divorce in the late 1960's. It was incredibly difficult and took an absolute age, being one of the reasons the Denning Reforms came about. My father was a serial philanderer and he walked out the family home just after my sister was born in 1962. There was no fault on my mother's part. He was finally forced by the courts to pay maintenance in the princely sum of £4 a week. But the marriage still could not be ended for an age longer.

Allowing my mother to escape being trapped in a marriage was no "last resort"; splitting from him was not "best avoided", as for one thing it would have prevented her getting another successful, joyous marriage to my stepfather. The strain of the broken relationship and the attempts to get a divorce caused her to have several nervous breakdowns. No child should have had to endure seeing their parent go through ECT.

Your world view is so constrained. It would result in so much pain for others if rigidly adopted.

I have already said I don't oppose divorce on the grounds of adultery, even Jesus did not oppose divorce when one party had committed sexual immorality and cheated on the other.

That is not the same as supporting no fault divorce though, which I oppose even though it is now legal in the UK

You're obviously utterly ignorant of the realities of life in your preferred 1950s.

Just set up a seedy photograph session in a Brighton hotel and pretend adultery, hey presto divorce.

We are going through a difficult time with my mother in law at the moment. She is 88 and has vascular dementia. She has been a widow for 11 years now and was an effective widow for some years before that as her husband had dementia too and she devoted her life to caring for him.

She takes 7 pills each morning and a blood thinner at night. She has medication for her blood pressure, for her heart, for her tendencies to retain excess liquid and statins. She is utterly miserable. She sees people who are not there. They sometimes frighten her. Despite my wife's enormous efforts and 2 carers she spends a lot of time alone talking to her photographs and apparently hearing them talking back. She is becoming ever more incontinent.

She has expressed, repeatedly, that she sees no point in her life, that she is a burden and that she gets very little pleasure from it. But, of course, she would not be eligible under this bill. We are spending quite a lot of money and medical care keeping her alive. Why? Why do we torture our elderly in this way?

Many sympathies. I think (backed up by the findings in the survey) that most people feel that adults in that sort of hopeless situation should be allowed to end their lives, though of course family should do all they can to give an alternative that offers some pleasure. The condition that the illness must be fatal seems to me to miss the point - I'd be keen (I think) to live as long as possible, but if I didn't then it seems intrusive to insist.

The problem of family pressure is a real one but relatively small - I think that most families are 99% sympathetic, and only to a negligible degree concerned with earlier inheritance. But of course the Bill needs proper precautions to deal with the rare exceptions.

MPs seem deeply divided on the issue, more so than the general public. At a crude level there's the question of losing votes over such a seminal issue, but I hope most people will accept that MPs are generally seriously wrestling with the details and it's inappropriate to threaten to withhold support over the issue.

We are going through a difficult time with my mother in law at the moment. She is 88 and has vascular dementia. She has been a widow for 11 years now and was an effective widow for some years before that as her husband had dementia too and she devoted her life to caring for him.

She takes 7 pills each morning and a blood thinner at night. She has medication for her blood pressure, for her heart, for her tendencies to retain excess liquid and statins. She is utterly miserable. She sees people who are not there. They sometimes frighten her. Despite my wife's enormous efforts and 2 carers she spends a lot of time alone talking to her photographs and apparently hearing them talking back. She is becoming ever more incontinent.

She has expressed, repeatedly, that she sees no point in her life, that she is a burden and that she gets very little pleasure from it. But, of course, she would not be eligible under this bill. We are spending quite a lot of money and medical care keeping her alive. Why? Why do we torture our elderly in this way?

Let’s hope Leon is sleeping it off after his outbursts last night, or this thread will be hard work.

On topic, I’ve not had time to follow closely but surely the major issue with the current bill is nobody has yet written the safeguards into it, saying they will be added later?

*pokes raddled old hungover bear*

I wonder what are the views of Muslims on assisted dying?

Shabana Mahmood is against it and has cited her faith.

I don’t see why religious conviction causing an objection should be an issue.

She and others should stick their religion up their arses. If she does not want it fine, the clown should not be forcing her religious beliefs on the rest of the nation

Hi there Malc. Good morning. Hope all is good with you and yours

Hi Taz, Yes all great hope same for you. Mind you reading the tosh on here at times is not good for a human's blood pressure. A rarified cross section of the population to say the least and many have no grasp of real life..

Was my daughter's birthday recently , a significant one , got her this as a present

Are international institutions breaking down?

COP29, which started badly with plenty of no shows, is now on the verge of a complete breakdown, and that's on top of the Commonwealth hustle and FUBAR last month:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c8jykpdgr08t

If they are, and I fear they may well be, then our descendants are basically fucked. The high point of international cooperation has been and gone, and the future is one of nationalist insanity and environmental destruction.

Darwin got it all wrong. We're regressing.

Evolution is not teleological. Darwin never said it always means "progress or improvement"

Yes, things can zig zag. I know that.

Anyway, as I now keep saying to all and sundry, Left Populism is coming. A radical economic offer for the struggling classes without the tacky xenophobic nostalgia that defines the right wing version.

It won't get funded by billionaires (for obvious reasons) but that won't matter once it gets rolling. I'm in. ✊️🕺

(please refrain from the very tedious "lol" if you choose to reply, which you shouldn't feel you have to)

I have seen you suggest this a couple of times and I don't really get it. Left populism would be an utter disaster for all of us (see Venezuela for an obvious example).

Populism is the enemy of progress, both of the left and right variety, and I think of you as a progressive. What's going on?

I mean a politics that shifts wealth and opportunity in favour of those who are in most need without corruption or financial recklessness or xenophobic obsession with borders and immigration. Nothing like Venezuela.

What do you honestly think will happen if Britain becomes, say, 30% Muslim? Or 40%? Think about it, and be honest

At 50-60% we could even get Sharia law

I'm not aware of any large country where that has happened in modern times, though there are certain small examples. There are majoritarian Muslim smaller countries in Europe - Albania, B&H, Kosovo. I'm not sure of the status of Sharia Law in those.

Same sex marriage and civil unions are certainly illegal in Albania, same sex marriage is not legal in Kosovo or Bosnia either so even if not full Sharia LGBT rights would likely regress

LGBT rights are also limited in Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, which are all largely Christian, so is it Islam in Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo, or something about those countries being in the Balkans?

Slovenia is in the Balkans and has same sex marriage and Croatia has civil unions. No Muslim majority nation has same sex marriage.

Women are also discouraged from working with men in the same workplaces in Islam

Slovenia and Croatia are more western looking. I referred you already to Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania. You can also add North Macedonia. Moldova, Ukraine and eastwards also have no recognition of same sex marriages. Rights are limited in Slovakia, Poland and Lithuania. The dividing line in Europe is clearly not Muslim/non-Muslim.

Not a single Muslim majority nation on earth has same sex marriage, same sex unions or a female head of state or government.

The dividing line globally is clearly Muslim/non Muslim

Not a single Hindu, Jewish, Shinto or Daoist majority country has same sex marriage. Same sex marriage is largely confined to Western Europe and the Americas, with a few exceptions.

Taiwan has same sex marriage now. Israel has cohabitation rights for same sex couples. Even several Indian states give same sex couples cohabitation rights. India and Israel have also had female PMs and India a female head of state

Taiwan is not a Hindu, Jewish, Shinto or Daoist majority country, so it doesn’t disprove what I said. However, I was not aware of that welcome change in Taiwan. Thanks for bringing it to my attention.

As I said, Israel and India do not have same sex marriage.

There are several Muslim countries that have had female heads of state as well, like Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Mali, Senegal, Kyrgyzstan and Tunisia.

Israel recognises same sex civil unions and they are now protected by a supreme court ruling. My wife's cousin had a lesbian civil union ceremony performed over a video link in Tel Aviv a year or so ago before the war started. It's convoluted but Israel basically has gay marriage, or at least gay people in Israel are able to have all the same rights as straight people.

Indeed

And yet.... Queers for Palestine. And waving Hamas, Houthi and Hezbollah symbols and flags, despite the fact Hamas would slaughter them in short order

The galaxies weep

It's just ridiculous, another think that bothers me is that he mentions "Hindu, Jewish and Shinto" countries but that's literally just India, Israel and Japan. Each of those religions get one bite at the cherry because there are no other Hindu, Jewish or Shinto countries in the world. Islam, otoh, has got the whole middle east, a big chunk of South Asia, huge parts of Africa and a small part of Europe where they are the majority and not a single country has legalised gay marriage or given gay people the same rights as straight people. There's no equivalence there between them and yet that's the kind of comparison he needs to make so that Islam seems reasonable.

My point is that the dividing line on same sex marriage in the world is not Muslim v non-Muslim, it’s Western Europe + the Americas v nearly everywhere else. Nearly all non-Muslim countries in Africa and Asia don’t have same sex marriage.

And do you want to team up with Leon, someone who thinks your children can’t count as fully British if they’re not white?

I said no such thing. I said we need more white British kids (a census definition, btw: White British) because they're not having enough kids, and they are not. This is a universal lament. I also heard it in Korea - not enough Korean kids! - and Japan - not enough Japanese kids! - on my recent visits

To develop the argument, because it isn't incendiary enough, I just read an argument by an evolutiuonary psychologist arguing that fundamentalist Islam is a logical Darwinian development if you are Muslim and you see collapsing birthrates in the non Muslim world. You lock up your women and force them to have babies

a) Why is 'white' the key word? Why not ginger hair or, as @rcs1000 asked you last time, why not discriminate based upon earlobes? What is special about 'white'?

b) It is difficult to know where to start with the last paragraph. It is gibberish.

Is it gibberish? I dunno. My first reaction was yours: yes, gibberish

But then you look at Afghani birthrates: TFR of 3.74 as of 2024. One of the highest in the world outside Africa

We all think that orthodox Islam is driven by religious/political movements around the world, but what if it is driven - at least in later years - by barely understood and primal - indeed evolutuonary reactions to population movements eleswhere? It depends whether you believe in group/tribal evolutionary motivations

An observer from Betelgeuse in his drone might observe: "ooh look, humans start dying out with collapsing birth rates if they educate their women, and let them free, that seems to be universal. That's surely why some Muslims especially the Taliban have gone the opposite way, and they have confined their women and turned them into breeding machines, soon the Afghans will outnumber the Germans"

There are so so so many other reasons for various groups to have a higher birth rate. I mean so many obvious reasons, the idea we have to create a new one is daft. I think we all know why Catholics in the past had a higher birth rate or poor Africans or our ancestors did. Different reasons which were all easily explainable without coming up with a cock and ball irrational reason.