Just posting to register an objection to this, unpopular, interpretation of events.

A different slant - Falkland Islanders pay local local income tax, but nothing to the UK which currently spends about £60 million on their defence.

(That's about £16k per Falkland Islander, for perspective UK NHS spending is less than £4K per capita).

I knew the answer, it's just that some of these countries rely on the taxes paid by citizens in the UK to provide some of their services. Some might call it leeching.

dbd is quite right, I should not have used the word "bloodthirsty" - quite unnecessary, and plain silly. Moddies, is there any way you can take that word out of my post? If not, too bad - and my apologies to all.

See post #302!

Yes, that seems a bit wild. But I have read, that Britain's interest in the islands is their proximity to some potential oil-fields. If that's so, then the UK government probably reckons that 16 pounds a head is a good deal. If there's nothing to that story, it makes no sense for Britain to defend them. Let 'em go!

Missed that, but mine was following an earlier exchange about the tax havens.

Unfortunately Gordon the oil hasn't really delivered - as you say, let 'em go!

The damage is done. Your sympathies in that conflict -- the Russian unilateral invasion of Ukraine -- are now quite apparent, and frankly quite opposite to mine, and to those of most of the Western world.

I apologised for the words, not the sentiment. When most of the Western world has cheered on the slaughter of tens of millions of people in the non-Western world for the past umpteen years - Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, etc, etc - it has no moral standing worth defending.

" One one hand we have the Donbass, currently being defended by Russia from their bloodthirsty neighbours"
With or without the word 'bloodthirsty', your post is cockeyed. It's Ukraine that's defending the Donbas and the rest of its country from Russia's invading forces.

I am genuinely intrigued... how do you get to "cheered on"? If I squint, I can see 'did not value non Western lives as much as Western', but 'cheered on'? Other than Korea, all those wars [police actions...] were highly unpopular with vast swathes of the population. Without googling it, I cannot be sure, but I think the protest to Blair's Iraq excursion attracted the greatest ever crowds. Also, doesn't Serbia sit oddly in the list? It was precisely the **lack** of Western intervention that led to the slaughters.

I will park comments on your views on Russia. Contrary views can be entertaining, especially in an office groupthink situation, but...

It's a cockeyed situation, and outsiders' comments are always influenced by what they read. Partisan reporters are always prejudiced. RT.com and BBC can be relied on to tell different stories - each of them unreliable. "The first casualty of war is the truth", right? I would like to think that if France were ever to occupy the Channel Islands, at the Islanders' invitation, Britain would not spend the lives of 400,000 British soldiers and the devastation of the entire nation to reclaim them. That's what's been happening in Ukraine. It just isn't worth doing. Too brutal by far.

I see. So Russia hasn't invaded Ukraine then. When the BBC says it did, it's unreliable.

Okay, so now we know where you stand.

Your comments certainly have been quite the turning point and I expect you have lost a lot of respect.

No respect lost here. This is the first thread on which I've encountered the OP so no respect was ever gained.