Bah fuck. It was to a Daily Show clip making fun of the reduced standards at boot camp. Too busy to be arsed to find it again.
I don't see why young men should have to suffer disproportionately. Women should be conscripted along with men out of the very principle of equality.
Why don't you just go and do the better, egalitarian thing and remove conscription for all sexes?
Sometimes these days I wonder...
There's a pretty decent argument to the opposite effect: that egalitarianism is better served by universal conscription than by an all-volunteer force. One problem with the all-volunteer force is that it effectively segregates the military from the civilian world, and more importantly, segregates the civilian world from the military.
A lot of people today just do not understand how the military operates because they weren't in it, nobody in their family was in it, none of their friends were in it. Likewise, people can afford to be a lot more gung-ho about going to war if they know their asses (and their kids' asses) won't be on the line. They're also less understanding of the problems of veterans returning home. Sure, people love flag stickers and maybe making a donation to some veterans' cause. But ask them if they'll hire a vet who might have PTSD, and they'll find a reason not to. Ask if they'll keep a Guardsman's job waiting for them when they come off deployment. Ask if they'll fight for VA benefits. A lot of armchair patriots talk a good game about how much they love the military, but they don't give a REAL flying fuck about them once the shooting stops.
On the flipside, the all-volunteer military often suffers from a superiority complex as a self-selected warrior caste. They're the "protectors of liberty", so fuck civilian law. If they had a little too much to drink, or got a little rough with a girl, or got in a bar fight, the cops should cut them some slack, right? Not like that fucking fatass cop ever saw time in Iraq. I've been around enough base towns to know that this is an almost ubiquitous problem -- military personnel trying to use their status to get away with shit. Even my dad used to wear his full Navy dress uniform when he drove back to Iowa, because once he got more than 40-50 miles outside of Norfolk, he could break the speed limit with near-impunity. Any cop that pulled him over would see the uniform and let him go with a warning.
If everybody has a potential stake in the warfighting (and I mean EVERBODY..none of this bullshit exemptions for rich kids), I think US society as a whole would become far less enthusiastic about wars, and the military would be more integrated into society and stop pulling so much bullshit.
I am curious to see what Strife's reaction is, since he's in the combat arms.
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Topic: American Politics Omnibus Megathread of DOOM (Read 71859 times)