OK I'm angry now

also, I have young children, and other people's children are going to die. so eff the draft idea.

Despite the fact that I'm of prime draft age, I agree, geyser. I think for a lot of people, Iraq feels like something so distant it doesn't register on their radar except for maybe reading the paper now and again. Public sentiment would be much diff if maybe they had something on the line.

Let's play guess how many people in my office have either been deployed to the shit since I started here in December 03 or just came back from the shit before starting this job?

I have always thought that, on the whole, the draft is more a good idea than a bad one even though I am not at all in favor of military conflict and do not want to serve in the armed forces. However, if everyone DID have to serve in the armed forces, you would probably go a long way towards investing real, honest civic pride in the citizens of this country through the magic of enforced shared experience.

That's the book that needs to on every tenth-grader's mandatory summer reading list.

I shouldn't want to ram my fucking truck into every tailgate I see with a yellow ribbon and a (W) sticker on the back.

I think it was Slate that had a piece today about the draft and the Bush administration's alleged resistance to the idea, despite the troop shortages, precisely because (and I'm paraphrasing here) a draft would further make each and every mom and dad in the country exponentially more of a stakeholder in the White House's current foreign policy and a more-or-less guaranteed election-loser come 2008. I know, for one, I'm not raising my son to be cannon fodder for dubious political expeditioneering in oil-rich countries.

Me too...I actually came very, very close to enlisting about two years ago (right after college). About 85% was out of post-college aimlessness, 10% out of misguided desire for adventure, 4.99% out of a desire to "learn some practical skills," 0.01% out of any sort of patriotism.

War sucks, tho, and I would never want to be in a position where I'd have to kill someone.

That being said: I can't help but think that the draft would be good for the country. And this is from someone who veers perilously close to Libertarianism at times.

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Um. What? I mean, I don't at all claim to have any knowledge of what happened in Kosovo, but WHAT????? Holy fucking shit. What purpose did putting a dog in there serve?

xpost

That Slate piece, I guess.

Not to target Dave specifically here, just using his quote because it was the first of many similar ones to follow, but: Anyone who seriously believes this is just as much of a dumbfuck as our president. You're angry that he's sacrificing human lives to further his ideology, so to oppose that, you're willing to sacrifice more human lives (to further your own ideology?

Why is it too bad? The only too bad thing is that we didn't leave that country sooner.

Killing is too good for humanity. Holy shit.

(xpost: I am angry that the President doesn't appear to have thought very carefully about the ideology he is spending lives on, especially considering he has never had to put his own life in harm's way. Fuck you, Nick.)

xpost n/a: Good point. For myself: I can rabbit on about the draft maybe not being a bad idea, but I'm still not enlisting unless someone makes me. Dishonest? Probably.

No. I'd like for the war/dying to stop immediately. I'm talking only strategy here. The army would do better with more, fresher troops, AND a draft and the pressure that follows may put and end to the war sooner or at least get leaders to put more effort into a strategy and proper resources... so FEWER people die. Dumbfuck.

You're going to be more angry if the lives that are sacrificed are draftees rather than volunteers?

If there's a draft, there'll be resistors and non-resistors, and once again there'll be hot social scorn poured on those who resist and plenty of death, maiming and trauma for those who don't. When the root is rotten, all the fruit is bad.

I should've said "experience" instead of "excitement" in my original comment anyway. Maybe if more people knew first-hand about those atrocities, they wouldn't be in such a rush to repeat them later on.

For example, maybe if George W. Bush had gone to Vietnam, he wouldn't be all touchy-feely with the stumps of returning soldiers who are now amputees. I swear that he has a fetish with that.

Have "NIGGER!" shouted at you a few times for no reason and see how you feel on the whole matter, asshole.

Of all enlisted men who died in Vietnam, blacks made up 14.1 percent of the total. This came at a time when blacks made up 11 percent of the male population nationwide. ...The combination of the selective service policies with the skills and aptitude testing of both volunteers and draftees (in which blacks scored noticeably lower) conspired to assign blacks in greater numbers to the combat units of the Army and Marine Corps. Early in the war (1965 and 1966) when blacks made up about 11 percent of our Vietnam force, black casualties soared to more than 20 percent of the total. Black leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., protested, and President Johnson ordered black participation in combat units cut back. As a result, the black casualty rate was reduced to 11.5 percent by 1969.

(W touching people's heads)

I do also think that the draft generally served us well in the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, and those were wars where our present Iraq casualties were dwarfed in single days. There are very few justifiable wars, but if any war is justifiable it should be conducted with the full support of the informed American people and not just with 'volunteers' over-representing the ill-favored in our society and the most jingoistic.

I know that reading into such things isn't helping the situation at all, and could possibly be making it worse, but I can't help it. War shouldn't ever be partisian, but check out how overwhelming those overseas ballots count for the Right-Wing side. Whenever some mourning father says, "My son died defending his country", this very awful part of me thinks Well, actually, Pops...

Maybe this has more to do with the Conservative Media that's presently controlling what we see of this war. I'm sure there are a lot more angry parents out there that we don't know about, Michael Moore movies notwithstanding.

Dam, take a break from the imperious self-righteousness and the bullying moral superiority, it can't be good for you

It's going to disproportionately impact minority and working-class/poor people, just like in Vietnam, just like the military already is. So now it'll just be that some kid who gets out of high school to go pump gas and get high for a couple of years will be thrown into combat. Yay.

I consider it inconceivably immoral to send someone to kill (and even more important, to die) against their will. You either do it or you go to jail and remain stigmatized for the rest of your life. Whatever message needs to be sent to bougie America about its apathy and the fucked-up situation in Iraq, sending more innocent people to die isn't the way.

At my most depressed and hopeless I've considered joining the military, but there's just no way I can reconcile my beliefs and attitudes with our military. There should be an outlet where someone in their late teens or early '20s can help out/serve humanity without the requirements of the Peace Corps (yo, motherfuckers if I could graduate from college I'd find a way to help without you!) or the civil volunteer force that Dubya's budget gutted.

um, maybe in the two world wars, but not in the civil war. draft riots, rich people buyng their way out of it, etc., etc.

xpost

Word. I have non-college graduate friends at home that are interested in the Peace Corps and can't do it. And I've heard from a friend of mine that's done a LOT of field work in Benin that the Peace Corps volunteers that are there are a bunch of small-minded idiots that think their stint should play more as a study abroad program rather than an actual humanitarian mission.

xpost: I consider it inconceivably immoral to send someone to kill (and even more important, to die) against their will. Me too. And yet I still can't help but think the draft isn't a wholly bad idea. I'm completely on the fence. As far as saying that people that are ineligible for the draft aren't entitled to an opinion: shut up. THere's a whole raft of reasons that's an inane thing to say, but whatever. Still: Dan, chill out.

xpost.

You wouldn't think of a rural grandmother HA HA, BUYER BEWARE, you IGNORANT FUCK!! when she loses her life savings to a charming con man. Just the same you'd be an asshole for thinking HO HO, WATCH OUT MR. CONSERVATIVE VOTER, BIBLETHUMPING RETARD!! when he loses his child to a war being dragged out with no end in sight by, well, some "charming" con men.

It's really doing yourself a disservice, as PP points out pretty well. The people to be angry with are in the cabinet. Don't get angry at your fellow voter, 51% or whatever, they're still all individuals and have no more power at the polls than you do. Can we please stop being so fond of pettiness and generalizations?

xposts

That pretty much sums it up right there.

I guess I'm not so much angry at the driver of that ribbon-clad pick-up with the (W) sticker. I'm angry at how he's been manipulated by the people in charge of this war.

Then again, last November I voted for a man who voted FOR this war as well. Maybe that Red-Stater ahead of me ain't the only one being manipulated.

and i have to say, i have even had dark daydreams of enlisting, but it's the same impulse that made me think of being a cop when i was a teenager ("at least there'd be ONE person who knew something in there") (pretty arrogant position, no?) however nightmarish the iraq adventure is, the larger WoT IS vital, too important to be left to people who don't seem to like the degenerate lazy secular west they say they are defending.

Killing is too good for humanity. Holy shit."

It's what happens when you dehumanise the enemy as happens in all the worst ethnic wars, The horrors inflicted on Ugandan children are of such a level of evil it transcends wrongness and I was almost physically sick when I read what these people were forced to do to each other. Your mind recoils and you want to believe it doesn't happen, yet it's happening right now, all across Africa.

And Kevin has a point - it's easier to cheer for a draft when you're not going to be the one dying. You haven't signed up, but you have no qualms sending someone else to die.