Note: Video with flashing graphic
This is supposed to be a video of Ilhan Omar being welcomed back to Minneapolis, but you might not be seeing it. Why?
Anyway, here is the link.
Not much commitment to the idea, it turns out.
Seizure warning for Gizmodo site. They need to consolidate under one title, so people don’t get hurt.
There are many different embeds depending on news site, so possible flashing in the video link.
This is actually the correct thread, more as a how-to than a success story.
Seattle has always been callous, but there used to be the corollary benefit that people there knew how to mind their own business. When I was homeless in Seattle nobody ever bothered me, not the cops, not random civilians. There are worse things than being invisible.
Yes. Please god, stop coming here it’s horribly dangerous.
Really not sure conscription is de-Nazification, even if it starts out fairly compensated, even if it starts with some people building roads instead of killing foreigners. There are still all the question of who commands and what they might do with their authority, who is compelled and what might happen if they aren’t willing or able, and what happens to people like say undocumented immigrants when everyone is asked to turn in.
Yes, America needs to build new infrastructure. No, it does not need to expand its damned armed forces. Other countries have found very successful ways to do one without the other, ways that don’t push shipping everyone’s kids off to Iran toward being a problem of middle management. And if economic and racial segregation haven’t found ways to work through conscription in the past, it’s news to me.
To me this only makes sense if you accept that the government should never do any public spending except for military stuff, so you can only make everything and everyone into military instead. The fascism is in the first half, the second doesn’t fix it.
Good point, but it might be good if people are forced to learn to live and work with people not like themselves. I don’t know much about the military; does it work there, at least to some extent?
I’ve also heard that a lot of high schools are mandating community service.
The WPA worked pretty well back when (though I guess it wasn’t mandatory). Maybe just having good jobs at decent pay would be enough to get people.
Better late than never…
A jobs guarantee might end up being de facto conscription as entry level jobs disappear to automation.
(Regardless of whether or not the above is true, we should have a jobs guarantee).
Thus has been a thing in Ontario since 1999-ish, and was brought in by the last Tory government prior to the current one. Students have to complete 40 hours of community service.
It kinda seems like a good idea to me, but with one overwhelming caveat. During the Great Depression there was the CCC, the WPA, the PWA, the TVA, etc., which was great, and did a lot of good, but they were all means-tested, discriminatory, and somewhat limited in weird ways that sometimes ran counter to their intent. I like the idea of a general “everybody spend a year together making your country better” program.
That kind of experience, being mixed in together with people who are different from you and the people that you grew up around, and having to work together, to make the world a better place for each other, makes a huge difference in how you see people and society in general. (source: I did some time in Job Corps when I was 17, it was eye-opening)
There are, as you mention, some concerns about how authority might abuse it and how to deal with the mandatory/compelled factor. But those are fairly minor and I don’t see building picnic tables or whatever as being ‘expanding the armed forces’.
My biggest concern by far is that someone would undoubtedly add in some kind of ‘corporate sponsorship’ clause which would ultimately end up meaning that the whole program would be the government forcing people to provide free (or dirt-cheap) labor to corporations, with the various politicians rigging it for their corporate buddies. Just as we ended up with mandatory health insurance (but not provided by the government, you were required by law to pay a corporation or else be fined). I have strong doubts that this would actually end up as intended, a proper public, social program. In our current political society, those good intentions would undoubtedly end up as more corporate welfare subsidizing the wealthiest.
So in short, I think it’s a great idea and would be very good for society if it could be done properly, but our society isn’t mature enough to handle that and would inevitably corrupt it with corporate greed.
I mean, it was fun for a while…
In principle compelled labor could be used for a lot of things – improving communities, constructing monumental tombs for kings, harvesting cotton and coffee for plantation owners, providing free menial work for corporations (the choice of US prisons today). But you know getting more people in the armed forces wasn’t an idle example on my part, right? It’s something Delaney actually said.
Generation Z is not going to be happy about a new draft, but who cares what they want