this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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I mean a national labor corps with incentivized participation isn't the worst idea. Gives people the opportunity to get work experience without necessarily having to understand their career direction in life.
Shouldn't be a draft in any circumstances but absolute crisis situation, like essential infrastructure is on the brink of total collapse and regular pay incentives aren't getting bodies on it fast enough.
Who knows, might get some people into work they didn't realize they'd gel with, plenty of inspector positions are behind work load and I've got s feeling a part of that is just people not knowing the work is out there.
I'd be super on board for this. Treat it similarly to the military, where room and board are provided, and they ship you to an underserved part of the country to help.
Especially if we extended the GI Bill to cover participating. Like, do 4 yrs and you get full tuition covered at any public university.
I think it would really promote national unity and help to lift people out of poverty. You'd have people from all over the country working together, bridging a lot of our internal divisions. You'd get people out of their bubbles and echo chambers and have them actually seeing the country.
If we could normalize it, where it's just what people did after highschool, it would give people time to figure their lives out. Remove the pressure of having to choose a career right away. I know so many people who "had to go to college" because that was the next step, but didn't have a clue what they wanted in life, so got useless majors and have dead ended. This would be perfect for people like that.
Plus infrastructure in the US is a joke. And even as the OP implies, farming is a broken business in the US for a number of reasons. There are never enough people working soup kitchens and food pantries, or cleaning up our national forests to prevent forest fires. If we could mobilize our young people en masse, we could make a huge difference in this country.
I'm 1000% on board.
Yeah that's all fine but it's blocked by one of two major political parties in the US doesn't believe government should exist. At best they'd support a privatized version of the that siphoned money out and didn't help people that need help.
We're going to struggle to get anything done as long as conservatives are treated as if they have any merit.
No, I think that's actually the beauty of this. The OP meme is a right wing meme. A national civil service is a right wing position.
I think there's a way to craft this program in a hugely bipartisan way. You get all the "patriotism, one nation, farms and country" stuff the right wants, and all the "infrastructure improvements, social safety nets, free college" stuff the left wants.
I think there's a real potential to get some solid bipartisanism here.
Isn't it basically similar to the public work projects of the "New Deal"?
Without a draft it's just a Keynsian jobs program like CCC or Teach for America. Not the worst idea in the world.
I heard in Finland it’s kinda like this. You have to do something like a year in the military or a year in civil service and I like it. Don’t want to do the military? Fine, do the postal service or some shit just do something. It’s like a great equalizer since rich and poor have to do it and they all have the same options.
Nah, fuck conscription, people only have a limited time in this world and you shouldn't be forced to waste it on the military/civil service. The options should be there if you want to take them, make it appealing if you want, but no one should be forced into any service.
With Finland it's seen as a social necessity because they're neighbors with Russia.
Perhaps they will reconsider the 'need' for it with their new NATO membership. Will be hard to remove something so ingrained in their culture though.
I doubt it, but maybe. They're still what amounts to a front line territory.
The United States has had the luxury of an all-volunteer military for slightly longer than I've been alive. My name went on the Selective Service roster. They keep that list. They're having recruitment and retention problems. And the United States has a much bigger population than the likes of Finland.
We had recruiting problems because we had unrealistic medical standards. For decades people just lied about what they could. Then we decided to use a system that could actually check the records of recruits.
Once waivers were made easily available, instead of months of admin work, recruiting goals were magically met again.
Now we are having recruiting problems for entirely different issues. It also just so happened the easier waivers coincidentally went into affect when we were already going to meet recrui goals. Nowadays a draft would mean the end of America. Something like 70% of all Americans are unable to be drafted for one reason or another, and the last 30 would more than likely riot and shoot recruiters at the first opportunity.
Under the widest interpretation of the strict medical rules. This has been blown way out of proportion. Also much of the number is supposedly excluded under the height and weight standards which we know don't even correlate with PT scores outside of run time. And god forbid we have people who run their 2 mile a tad slower when we know combat is sprinting, and sprinting is muscle.
Rant aside, busting tape isn't even disqualifying. Which is why that number is misinformation at best.
you have to take in account that of all those people, there are babies, people over 55, schoolchildren, and what have you.
and try to draft a politician or a steelt factory worker, or an electronic specialist. that will not happen.
The study they're referencing is specifically 17-24 but they're also severely misquoting it. Which isn't surprising because conservative news sources spent a lot of time trying to use it to paint our youth as useless layabouts.
ah, sorry, i didnt look that far. i should have. maybe its because of obesity? also, iq under 80 is not draftable.
Yes, 11% are because of weight. However you have to very very overweight, like 300 pounds, before they don't just give you a waiver and a weight loss program at the replacement company everyone goes through before basic. Same with convictions and alcohol issues. In that age group alcohol issues usually means an under age drinking ticket. Which is a waiver. Alcoholism, if it's on your record somewhere, is waiverable after some years dry. Most people with convictions actually have a single drug possession charge which is also a waiver. Medical is a lot harder but there's millions of kids who are ADHD kids and they just get a waiver for their Ritalin use.
The 70% percent number is strictly without waivers involved. Most of them are very easy waivers to get, and in the case of a draft they'd have a standing waiver for draftees. Nobody is going to be 4F for carrying some chub through high school.
thanks for that detailed explanation, i value that. thats very interesting. yeah, i was in military at age twenty, we had a couple of bigger dudes, and they all passed those tests you have after 3 months.
at the first 5 km march someone died though. heart failure, nobody knew about his heart condition. luckily, that dude wasn't in my building. pacing was way slower after that incident. they were deeply ashamed about that accident...
Yeah we lost 2 people to mental health. It's a big stress test and some people are going to have hidden things.
Absolutely.
We had one farmer buy that was, in hindsight, obviously abused by his parents, one 17 year old that became father, one 1,95 dude wanted to bash Noncoms skull in, we prevented that and saved him from jail time, same guy got back to base after weekend, his face beaten to a pulp.
they send him to infirmary as soon as he stood in formation, he looked like a humbled sad dog, personality broken. well, berlin train stations, you dont want start attidude with guys you dont know.
(noncom had it coming, this guy tried to kiss and touch me in the latrine, I was so confused, managed to struggle free some how. I whish I had found my anger, today I would have... i bet I wasnt the only guy who was molested)
and me with adhd in the middle, without knowing it.
i got ONE guy i whish I would have stayed in touch with. he called my roommate once, but they did not take his number. He was so friendly, humane and well meaning, I never forgot that.
well, military service is something. i am glad I did that.
According to the 2020 Pentagon Qualified Military Available Study. 77% of American 17 to 24 are not qualified, of that 77%, 11% are overweight beyond a waiver, 8% cannot due to alcohol or drug abuse, 7% cannot due to mental or physical health, aptitude or conduct was 2%, and multiple reasons was listed at 20% including a combination of the above and factors like prior convictions.
So low end 48% of 17 to 24 year olds are inelligble. This doesn’t include specific draft exemptions like being in college or working with critical infrastructure which have always been exempt from selective service.
The topline of the study is specifically the percentage of 17-24 year olds who can join without a waiver. There is no "beyond a waiver" category in the study. Surely some of them are beyond a waiver, but the study does not make that distinction.
And it straight up says the reduction of availability is because of an increase in standards, not a decrease in the population's capacity.
I already think some kind of required (paid) community service year should be required for every citizen, so I guess part of that could be agriculture.
Required I think doesn't cut mustard, like I said, it should be required only when all other possibilities to address a labor shortage crisis have been exhausted.
Required service is something you do when you're in a weakened or threatened position with what you're invoking it for, so doing it unnecessarily just doesn't help quite as much as one might think.
There's better ways to address a perceived national attitude problem than forced labor.
We are in a weakened, threatened position. 🤪
There's great arguments here about how a service corps could bridge divides and give all youth a better pathway from highschool into the (often predatory) worlds of job markets and higher ed, and also great arguments about why mandatory service infringes on freedom pretty significantly.
Is there a way to structure a national year of service idea that gives people the freedom to opt out yet would still get chosen by many kids from diverse backgrounds? Like how do we get kids who have had a college fund ready to go since they were born to see the benefits of spending a year building bridges? It would be a neat cultural shift.
Probably from social isolation by everyone who did do that.
Like if the rich asshole kids wanna mark themselves out by skipping out on a national service that's their prerogative, just the same it's everyone else's to make judgements about them based on that.
That "some of y'all never worked a service job and it shows" tweet hits a lot harder when there's a federal budget for the messaging about the good of lending a working hand to your fellow countryfolks.
Nobody with a college fund from day one is going to see the service job tweet and care. They already have a rich kids club of other wealthy friends.