this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
105 points (92.0% liked)

Canada

9544 readers
1111 users here now

What's going on Canada?

Related Communities

🍁 Meta

🗺️ Provinces / Territories

🏙️ Cities / Local Communities

Sorted alphabetically by city name.

🏒 SportsHockey

Football (NFL): incomplete

Football (CFL): incomplete

Baseball

Basketball

Soccer

💻 Schools / Universities

Sorted by province, then by total full-time enrolment.

💵 Finance, Shopping, Sales

🗣️ Politics

🍁 Social / Culture

Rules

  1. Keep the original title when submitting an article. You can put your own commentary in the body of the post or in the comment section.

  2. Election Interference / Misinformation

Reminder that the rules for lemmy.ca also apply here. See the sidebar on the homepage: lemmy.ca

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
otter
mp3
otters_raft
105
How could Canada deter an invasion? Nukes and mandatory military service (theconversation.com)
submitted 4 days ago by otters_raft to c/canada
60 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Conscription is authoritarian, definitionally. Education and conscription are two entirely different things and it is wildly disingenuous to try and equate them.

Cute line, I'm not trolling though. If you're unwilling to defend your position then just stop responding, stop making a spectacle of yourself.

[–] charles 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Just FYI, you're the only one making a spectacle of themselves in this thread.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I was heated, sure. I responded to the notion that conscription can or should be brought here the same way I would if someone said "times are tough were going to have to start using slave labor to save the economy." Mandatory enlistment, forcing everyone in society to join the military, is equivalent to that, in my opinion. It is one of the most objectionable things any society has ever done, in my opinion.

[–] charles 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I completely agree with you that mandatory enlistment is essentially never acceptable as if a conflict is so dire, you'd expect citizens to feel empowered to join the fight without fear of penalty or retribution if they didn't.

That being said, I think most of what you were replying to was not an argument for mandatory enlistment, they were suggesting that we might want to include a couple years of work placements following high school, with one option being military service but other choices being available and none decided by the government. I also believe they were suggesting that the penalty for not doing so would be similar to penalties for not attending high school and not what we've seen countries implement as penalties for conscription. I'm not saying that plan is perfect but I can at least see a significant nuance between their suggestion and military conscription.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

I think a big part of this miscommunication was the language used earlier, like civil service and conscientious objectors. In a system like you've described, i don't think that having that as an option is necessarily a bad thing so long as it is voluntary. There are lots of benefits to programs that incentivise community service. I don't particularly like the way we recruit high schoolers into the military already, I genuinely just think a lot of the practice is manipulative and misleading. But so long as it is voluntary, it is what it is.