Geoagorist Territory wrote:Ostroeuropa wrote:
Do you think women being forced into the kitchen is bad, or good?
Is it an example of female privilege?
Why, do you think nobody should ever cook? Clearly cooking is necessary, right? So it's female privilege by your logic.
As I was merely demonstrating the consequences of accepting conscription as a good, I see this as non-issue.
No, you said something monumentally stupid.
There is an enormous difference between something which is good for an individual (which we might understand as a privilege) and something that is good for society at large. That is, in general, there is neither no correspondence between the two nor any reason to believe in such unless you somehow (LSD?) believe that markets generally don't fail (clue: they have extremely stringent and, often, deliberately unrealistic assumptions to the extent the only example one ever encounters of a successful market is market gardening... which probably isn't true anyway, because how much do you really know about plant diseases?).
That is to say, if you want to argue conscription is a good thing (and I must say, I know people who have been conscripted and they never give any impression of the experience either way... which suggests it is neither incredibly awesome or terribly awful, the latter more strongly*) you very rarely find yourself talking about individual benefits like camaraderie. What people do talk about is a necessity of conscription (e.g. this thread) and this is defined not in some "you need it to build character" individualist perspective but in a societal survival sense. But necessity does not come with a moral value. Conscription is just a thing. It is a responsibility or a duty or a burden or an obligation. It is like taxation... and the privilege comes from be excepted from paying your taxes.
Now, some people like paying taxes and would happily pay more (certain people high up on certain lists which we won't care to name as an examples) while other people (not quite as high up on the same certain lists who we also won't care to name as examples) don't. The important thing is that this "moral" assessment is individual and doesn't change that tax exemptions are a privilege (perhaps, even one the original privileges). So, surely, we should equate the phenomena that are similar? Is that not consistent?
It must also be said that there's some serious sexism in the offending sentence's neighbour:
In either case, phrasing it as "female privilege" doesn't make much sense. If it's something for both genders to avoid, then equality in conscription is an evil even worse if it means more people dying.
You thus necessarily assume that a conscripted army of 100 people will have a lower casualty rate if those 100 are male than if they are male and female. Bollocks to that.
Additionally, as has been pointed out, further insane mutterings on this point naturally also don't line up with reality... mass casualties and conscripted generations are an issue however they're distributed (and my personal thinking is that if you can keep the gender ratios the same, you're actually better off**) and you really do have to be talking about extreme percentages (and maybe not even then, have you ever heard of baby boomers... do you know where the name comes from? now, why is that relevant today)... which it must be said seem very unlikely in an era that has forgotten what MAD is and which believes in asymmetrical warfare.***
And if we want to reject consequentialist reasoning, in the sense that preferring the approach (given the idea is going to happen) which is least bad is consequentialist, on principle (and this seems to be the standard logic) the issue is that it's completely arbitrary to only conscript men or women or Lizard People or soccer players or whatever (whether you conscript everyone, a random selection from everyone or some other means).
*Negative experiences are well known to be more likely to result in reviews, i.e. telling people. On the other hand, most of said conscripted people are vague acquaintances... and the sole friend I have not seen much of since conscription (partly because, you know, Singapore isn't in NZ).
**Even now, you often find articles noting people complaining about too few or too many men/women in the "dating" pool... whether we're talking about "young educated professionals" or "whole societies".
***Naturally, wherever the conflict actually occurs is is going to have massive personal costs regardless of its approach to conscription or not. This tends to happen if your cities are besieged/warzones/near warzones.
