What is conscription? A "fun" way to waste a year of your life doing unpaid labor in some camp. Oh, sorry, it's not "unpaid", the wage is 8 euros.
"What's the big deal?" you say. "8 euros sounds decent for a guaranteed job for 1 year in a place with very low living costs compared to the US. That's about the minimum wage here". And that would be true, if it was 8 euros per hour. Except it is 8 euros PER MONTH. It's almost a joke, like I have no clue what you're supposed to do with 8 euros. But I guess they give you shitty food and a shitty bunker bed to sleep? Awesome. Oh wait they're now saying they're gonna increase the wage to 30 euros. Impressive. Except they're probably doing it because they want to make conscription last longer than a year, whoo!!
Basically it's a great place where a bunch of weirdos with anger issues scream at you while you're mopping floors and you just have to ignore them every day for a year, if you don't have anything left to do in there you can leave for a while but you have to be back by midnight, and you can only take leaves for a total of 18 days throughout the whole year. Dumbasses tend to become fashy in there too. What an amazing institution, I'm so fucking happy the state doesn't want to pay people to work in camps so they just have us do it for free. It's really wild how much you can get away with if you promote it as patriotic.
you can only take leaves for a total of 18 days throughout the whole year
tfw conscripts get more time off than workers in the US
Ummm workers get paid tho
Also when you work you can at least, you know, live in your own house and be there typically for no more than 8 hours etc...
Yeah, what you described sounds terrible. I was mostly taking the piss with my comment
In an ideal society all people would work for the advancement of communism at all ages; only they wouldn't need to be forced into doing so by threat of going to jail or being barred from accessing basic services.
In a socialist state that "young adults giving a few years to serve society, then going about their lives" would be one way to create whatever level of policing is necessary. It wouldn't be a career, it wouldn't self-select for the people most eager to do it, and more people would be better educated about what their rights are and how to use them. Imagine a mass protest where half of the people intimately know how the cops will respond and exactly what will give them the most trouble.
Yeah, make it needed work that someone has to do and pay young adults well to do it. There are all sorts of jobs that wouldn't naturally attract a ton of interest in an ideal society that this would be perfect for.
All males are required to sign up for selective service
before being able to get financial aid for collegeor face up to 5 years in jail and up to a $250,000 fine.And driver licence in some states. State legislation often helps in the coercion. Even to attend college in some states. Federal jobs too. Here is their page where they brag about it: https://www.sss.gov/register/state-commonwealth-legislation/
2 fking years, the best and most productive years you will ever have, at the peak of mental and physical fitness, spent sitting around a parking lot
Well it's 1. FOR NOW.
Seriously I am very pissed that they seem to be planning to increase it.
Well to be fair drones can only do so much. Land armies are still useful.
But the main reason is doing maintenance on camps I guess. It's not like we get any kind of serious military training. It used to be a lot worse too, my dad did 2.5 years.
WW3 is going to look a lot like WW1 since time has become flat.
OverTheTop2
Cultural impact
Trench warfare has become a powerful symbol of the futility of war. Its image is of young men going "over the top" (over the parapet of the trench, to attack the enemy trench line) into a maelstrom of fire leading to near-certain death, typified by the first day of the Battle of the Somme (on which the British Army suffered nearly 60,000 casualties) or the grinding slaughter in the mud of Passchendaele. To the French, the equivalent is the attrition of the Battle of Verdun in which the French Army suffered 380,000 casualties.
if i were in a conscription country i would simply. not.
remember when taylor swift updates went to jail for refusing to army? like that except maybe go on a vacation instead of jail
if i were in a conscription country i would simply. not.
If it was so simple more people would be doing it. But it's not worth it to go to jail instead of putting up with mopping floors unpaid for a year or so.
what is mopping floors unpaid for the army if not a prison :foucault-shining:
Dude it's not even really army service essentially, it's just doing chores for the army.
I have begun to see propaganda for the the Selective Service on buses and billboards this year. Something to the effect of 'fill out your draft card. It's every man's duty'.
I use my studies privilege and I HOPE the entire undergrad-masters-PhD chain will take sufficiently long for it to get cancelled. There's these sorts of exceptions you can exploit, in Cyprus it is more cursed because there is no exception and after school you go directly to the army.
You’re forcing people to die for you.
No one dies in conscription here. There is no war going on. It just sucks.
When Germany used to have conscription, there was the option to refuse military service on moral grounds and to work in a medical, environmental or social services institution instead. The pay was higher as well. It was still pretty damn awful. Nursing and social services professions are fairly demanding and pushing untrained randos into them doesn't work very well. Most conscripts ended up just doing the most mind-numbing, least demanding jobs that nobody else wanted to do. It was ultimately just a band aid to provide a healthcare system overextending and underpaying its personell with more cheap labor by pressing young men into service.
BTW, the sole reason conscription in Germany is not a thing anymore (it's actually just "on hold" indefinitely) is that the army needed fewer conscripts, which led to people being drafted totally at random, which was then deemed unconstitutional after a couple of years.
I knew a guy who had long hair and just went to military prison for a few days, when he refused to obey any orders, said that they were al nazis there and to this day only speaks with disgust about germany.
The nazi problem of the German army is so bad that the army's own intelligence agency has an "early warning system" where doing public Hitler salutes counts as moderately strong likelyhood of being a nazi.
The only exmilitary guy i know has gone full on fash(but he killed some americans in Afghanistan who did some warcrimes at least, he used to be better). The long-hair guy also talks aboit how you can go " nazi-watching" at hitlers old mountain villa, they are not even hiding.
You can kind of, sort of do something like that here only it's a major pain to get it approved unless you're refusing on religious grounds, and it's not that much different anyways, plus it is longer.
Non-military conscription was longer in Germany as well. When i served, it was 13 months instead of 10 - in the 1960s, it used to be two years instead of one. Back then, people also had to go through an interrogation in front of a comission, where they'd bombard them with loaded questions along the lines of "would you be able to use violence to protect your girlfriend when somebody assaults her?", as if that had anything to do with somebody's willingness to kill his East German relatives in the prelude to a nuclear war. They were barred from pulling off stuff like that after a while, i just had to write an essay, but the easiest way to get that approved was actually to cite religious grounds as well.
I always thought that a service like this would be a good third option between entering the workforce and college. Like a system where you sign up for a year or 2, get paid, fed, and housed, and spend your time learning construction, maintenance, bricklaying, welding, plumbing, stuff like that.
In Finland you can opt for civilian service instead, don't you guys have that option?
You still have to pick between the two or go to jail*... unless you're a Jehova's Witness who get exempted for some reason
(*Unless you have a mental or physical condition that prevents service)
In Finland you can opt for civilian service instead, don’t you guys have that option?
You can kiiiind of do that but it is pretty damn hard to get your request accepted unless you are a Jehovah's witness or smth, and it lasts longer than the army service.
I'm sure they check you have the cloven feet or whatever those guys are supposed to have
No, but because of voluntary military they have made the incentives the basic necessities of life.
3 meals a day, roof over your head, Camaraderie, a job, source of income, sense of purpose, exercise, college education paid for.
That’s why they try to privatize the VA all the time and don’t tell us what benefits we receive or can receive. It’s a weird and distinct kind of community for sure, but so does one form when developing class consciousness. I’m openly communist here. And even guys I don’t tell agree with all the critiques and criticisms of capitalism.
I agree with a civil service, but not under amerikkka of course.
I feel like it's gonna be one of those things that's gonna be real hard to get rid of. Because everyone hates it. Then today's conscripts become tomorrow's old people, and the olds will be damned if they're going to let young people not suffer like they did growing up.
Except leftists, who seem to be the only people on this planet who seems actually give a fuck about the next generations actually having a better life than we have.
