this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Wait till OP hears about mandatory service in other countries.
Do the kids of the ownership classes also have to serve with the rest of the grunts? Or are they sectioned off to champaign units the way George W. Bush did his Coast Guard tour? Or given exception like for Trump's bone spurs?
If aristocrats are on the front line with the of the enlisted, there might be better regard for vets.
I wonder if those countries also face the same degrees of top-down abuse and sexual assault for which the US Army is reputed.
War is Hell, but the US armed forces have more special hells than Big Trouble in Little China
You will never see the child of a ruler get sent to the front lines.
They all have enough money to avoid serving, anyways. Just go to a different country.
Over in Russia, the art of dodging the draft is a finely developed one. It has been so even before the, ahem, special military operation.
Lol that's what I was going to say.
There's nothing wrong with mandatory military service if your military doesn't pick fights with everyone else's.
Yes there is, because forced labor is slavery.
Voluntarily discipline style camps sure.
Mandatory would backfires on me. I am happy to help but to command my body around requires my consent and respect for my pacifist boundaries.
It's not an exclusive thing. Most European countries with forced service allow alternate forms of service as well. My coworkers worked with an emergency medical service instead.
It's really moe like forced community service, but one of the ways you can serve your community is learning to defend it in a time of war.
I am a huge fan of community service but you'd have to be specific about forced or i regard it the same thing.
I love my real life job but i hate that i need it to earn a wage, because i need a wage to survive and i would deliver better work if i could do it just because it enjoy it (and choose my own workhours)
I admit i am a bit of an edge case, if i broke the law i would gladly serve a sentence if they can convince me with logical argument that i made the wrong choice and can be improved.
If they cant convince me of that i means i am punishment while believing my innocence, it would be the most definitive proof of evil an immorality baked into the social contract and fuel me to use the few rights i would still have in jail to radicalize myself further within anti-centralized-state ideology
I'm of the opinion that when a democracy forces you into the military there will be no democracy left to defend
Well, depends.
Note that US military history picks me from trusting them in this fashion, but if mandatory military service were: -severely limited term -purely domestic (prepare for defense from active attacks, relief, and rescue) -not used in any vaguely law enforcement capacity.
Then I could see that as possibly reasonable.
Of course I'd be skeptical that a nation would display that sort of restraint, but just saying I could imagine a hypothetical that included that
In Australia we had conscription in WW2 where the Citizen Military Force could only operate in Australia... but they changed it to include PNG so I guess your skepticism is justified. Then for Vietnam and Korea (why were we involved???) we had conscription for overseas.
I think you just described most military services actually (from democratic nations at least)
HA! Sure, like countries that are protected by the US military? Like countries insulated on all sides by close allies? C'mon.
Also, America is the superpower. Nobody comes close to their wealth and power and military technology, and superpowers don't become or stay superpowers by being totally chill and getting cats out of trees. I would fucking love that alt-universe though. Sadly, it's power by force or show-of-force. USA kinda straddles the line of both. But so does France, India, and Finland, to name a few.
Have you seen the Nordics? They manage both pretty well.
Compulsory customer service for a couple years might make retail customers less miserable to deal with overall.
I have not served but I did feel that mandatory civil service (outside of the military) that included getting you trained in a 4 year degree would do a lot of good.
I haven't really thought about that in a while though, to see how that would backfire.
No, slavery is slavery, even if its for a noble cause.
No, that is a definition that was constructed as apologism for various different forms of forced labor
A lot of reasonable people define forced labor as slavery:
Forcing someone to do civil service is unfree labor, depriving you of freedom of action. Also, you can disagree without being rude.
So you see no distinction between…
“chain around your neck, abducted from your place of birth, sailed across the world stuffed into a deck 2 foot high, sold to the highest bidder, brought to a farm, whipped until you’re bloody, served gruel, tortured at will, killed if you escape, never being compensated for your labour, worked until you die or killed off when no longer economically useful”
… and …
“joining the forces for 9 months, fully paid, or become a conscientious objector and file books in a library for 9 months; in either case your full legal rights remain”
?
There's a wide spectrum of bonded servitude between plantation slavery circa 16th century and the Levée en masse. Regardless, when jobs are obligatory, and the option to change jobs is difficult or impossible, it opens the victims up to abuse, which develops universally.
So while I can see you're trying to make a case for the latter, as if it isn't cause for harm, invariably it will drift towards the former, and history has demonstrated it time and again. The United States, especially cannot be trusted; if we wanted a truly professional military force, we would utilize poverty and lack of civilian opportunity to drive our recruitment. To the contrary we'd full transparency that our soldiers are treated well from recruitment to death.
The United States should have let sexual assaults get out of hand. They should have been generous to their wounded the shell shocked and the families of the fallen. There shouldn't be a running litany of officers who bully the ranks beneath them, sometimes to the extent of extortion and violence.
Not that it will stop the US from restoring the draft once it neuters democracy and becomes a one-party autocracy. But when that happens it will be only months before Fall Weiß.
I didn't say I see no difference? Killing someone by slowly torturing them over years and just shooting them is different. They're both still murder though. Forced labor is slavery, some slavery is worse than others- but all slavery is bad.
Go fuck yourself, civil service is socialism. Communist scum.
Funny, because the generation who last went to war to fight communism was drafted into it.
Shit, I forgot the /s
Ouch. Poe's law strikes again.
Yeah, I needed to see one. Some people here seem sincerely... tankie? Is that the term?
There very much is.
For starters, should things actually go south, they'll send you to war. I don't want nor plan to partake in this festival of turning people into slabs of bloody meat. I'm an aggressively pacifist civilian, and fuck everybody who tries to turn me into a soldier.
Second, no work should be mandatory. Turning it into a "duty" is essentially stealing my autonomy and forcing me to do things against my will. This is institutionalized slavery.
I mean, the US doesn't. It just drone strikes them. Picking a fight presumes it's a fair fight.
All's fair in love and war?
Sometimes, sometimes not. That's why books are written and classes are created and endless debates are had on the subject.
Bomb them. No more debates.