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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Last week, in the context of the Ukraine war, we talked about conscription.

We also talked about the possibility of European countries like France or the UK sending "boots on the ground and planes in the air", to Ukraine to help secure a peace deal.

And finally, as usual, we talked about migration and demographics in Europe.

Here's an interesting tweet at the intersection of all three of these topics:

It is so obvious that as soon as European nations commit troops and get themselves into a war - they will trigger a domestic crisis.

Why?

Because CITIZENS will be forced to fight, and illegal migrants will not.

Imagine the civil unrest this will cause when young men start dying.

The West is walking into a disaster. I don't understand why the media and political class can't see it.

I have to agree. And I never thought about the issue that way. Since the Napoleonic era, European countries have relied on nationalism to mobilize huge armies. Even if the state was totalitarian, as in Russia, there was still national identity to motivate the troops.

A two tier society, as currently practiced in much of Europe, is fundamentally hostile to the young white men living inside it. Society may be able to tolerate injustice in taxes, housing, and criminal law, but will they tolerate their sons being sent to die on a godforsaken battlefield in the Ukraine, while migrants continue to loiter on street corners and shopping centers? I think this is a bridge too far, even for Europe.

The army of the UK has about 70,000 trained members and 30,000 reservists. Of these, it's questionable how many could be deployed. 30,000 maybe? This is a pretty small number in the context of the Ukraine war, less than 10% of the Ukrainian or Russian forces.

Honestly, I don't think it will ever come to conscription, for the simple reason that it can't. The state would lose all legitimacy. But, for British citizens, I think it's fair to ask. Under what circumstances would you risk your life for your country? Would you die to defend this UK like your great-grandfathers died to defend the UK of the early 20th century?

They could get people to volunteer by paying them. You ever think of that?

There are too many gibs to have an underclass of people desperate enough to fight for money. In Russia the money is life changing but that sum would be less than your gibs Europe.

what does this mean?

The value of the free stuff you get in a European country is literally more than the pay that people die for in Russia. https://theworld.org/stories/2025/01/15/russia-is-offering-higher-pay-to-lure-more-military-recruits

Being poor in a Western European country is still a better deal than receiving a generous salary to fight in a bloody war. The standard of living is too high for that tradeoff.

There are more than enough white British, French and German zoomers who would go to war for, say, €200k in cash.

Radical idea but I don’t think they could pay enough. How much per year would you require to fight as a mercenary in Ukraine?

Paying 200,000 guys 200,000 a year would cost 40 billion. Europe could easily afford that.

It’s funny, I came up with that exact number estimate in my head just before I saw that comment. But yes, I fully agree.

There are more than enough 19 year old kids in Europe with nothing to lose who spend their days in the gym and scrolling who would 100% take €200k to go to war.

Hell, it might work. Who knows.

I feel like I heard about a proposal that the US military radical reduce force size, essentially becoming a force of all-elite soldiers who are highly trained and highly paid. Just get rid of everything except the tip of the spear, and if shit ever hit the fan, they could rapidly train civilians like what happened in World War II. I think it's a good proposal, and I'd have no problem paying Army Rangers and Navy SEALS $200k a year.

The 19 year old British TikTok enthusiast however is decidedly not that. And would probably be worthless as a soldier, at least at until they're blooded. If they're doing it for the money, do the still get paid if they have a stomach bug and missed the big battle?

But who knows, maybe in ten years we won't need soldiers anyway, and China will just swarm the skies over any city they want with 10 billion drones who can hunt and kill anyone they want to.

Where do you think navy seals come from? They’re ordinary enlisted sailors who pass seal training.

More to the point, military logistics demands skilled labor in quantities and deployability that the civilian world doesn’t. There’s dozens, maybe hundreds, of individual highly technical niche fields where you learn by joining the army/navy, which handles the(lengthy) training pipeline, and then finding a civilian job once you’re out. There is no civilian pipeline to produce these necessary-for-the-military jobs, and they’re not exactly quick to train. You have them in your peacetime army or you don’t have them.

I feel like I heard about a proposal that the US military radical reduce force size, essentially becoming a force of all-elite soldiers who are highly trained and highly paid. Just get rid of everything except the tip of the spear, and if shit ever hit the fan, they could rapidly train civilians like what happened in World War II.

The "tooth-to-tail ratio" has been pretty low for a long time, since the advent of mechanized warfare. There are always food fights as to what the right number "should" be, and it's unlikely that anyone is going to solve that problem in a few comments on the internet. For the purposes of this comment, I'll take it as mostly a given that, when you actually go to war, you probably need something in the historical range. The question then becomes whether you can successfully and rapidly train civilians to perform all of those other tasks. I would guess probably not. I don't have super precise reasons that I can enumerate; I'm mostly just going on a background feeling that I got from when I listened to a bunch of this podcast, which is all about one of the big training centers.

So what happens there is that they have some folks stationed there who comprise a "red force"; they play the "bad guys". Then, another group of folks (I believe brigade-sized) show up and they set up a scenario and have a big fight ("fake" fight, with equipment like this to help judge when someone is declared magically dead). The US has a lot of brigades, so it's not like they're all down there all the time. You might train and do stuff mostly at your home station, and then every few years or whatever, your brigade will get a slot to go down there and test out your training, see how you do, see what works and what doesn't work so well.

The sense that I got is that a lot of the problems are not, "We don't have enough exquisitely-trained elite soldiers." They're operational stuff. How do you actually get people and equipment to where they need to go? How do you make sure resupplies happen when needed? How do you reorient to new information/objectives? How do you handle CASEVAC so that your teeth can get back to biting? (I've heard that the expectation is that with the move to LSCO, they're expecting significantly higher casualty rates and significantly higher strain on CASEVAC operations, which have to sync well with the teeth.) How do you manage equipment breakdowns? Etc.

It's easy to think that it's easy to just train someone to plan out logistics or to just drive a pile of stuff from one place to another or to pick up a casualty and take them somewhere safe and so on and so forth, but my sense is that getting all that stuff right is actually really really hard. I'm sure they also have plenty of lessons learned and lists of things that didn't work well on the level of the small groups of elite shooters (which they probably just don't talk about on a public podcast), but my sense is that all of these other things are actually important in order for the shooters to be able to do their jobs... and that these other things are actually kind of hard, that they don't "just happen", and that there's a reason that they bring the entire brigade to these events so that they can test their training and make sure the tail is well-oiled enough that the teeth can bite.

Since the invasion of Ukraine I've given the idea of serving in the military a lot of thought, but I legitimately hadn't considered this point before.

As a European, there is absolutely no way I would volunteer to be deployed in a military operation in a foreign country knowing some "asylum seeker" is safe at home living off social benefits. I would certainly enlist (albeit begrudgingly) if the country was facing a land invasion.

I think the ease with which huge numbers of human soldiers on both sides are being slaughtered in trenches in Ukraine by cheap drones means that conscription is less and less likely in future wars. Ukraine and Russia need it because we’re in a transition phase in terms of warfare, giving each drone a multimodal LLM for navigation hasn’t started yet, production lines are still being set up etc.

But when the big states can deploy swarms of literally billions of drones, what use is a meat body in a trench who will get killed 0.1 seconds after sticking his head above a parapet? That’s just pointless, and the cost of feeding him, housing him, transporting him to the front lines etc will take away from drone production.

Honestly, I don't think it will ever come to conscription, for the simple reason that it can't. The state would lose all legitimacy. But, for British citizens, I think it's fair to ask. Under what circumstances would you risk your life for your country? Would you die to defend this UK like your great-grandfathers died to defend the UK of the early 20th century?

As the below post says, you need to get Nybbler-pilled on this. Consent can be manufactured. With AI, gaming, ultra-addictive short form video, convincing zoomer Brits of all races to die in a war against Russia will be a breeze. 19 year old boys aren’t making reasoned judgments about the demographic future of England, for good or ill. As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy. Pay Andrew Tate $20m and drop all charges and he’ll tell the zoomers to die for whatever you want.

Consent can be manufactured. With AI, gaming, ultra-addictive short form video, convincing zoomer Brits of all races to die in a war against Russia will be a breeze. 19 year old boys aren’t making reasoned judgments about the demographic future of England, for good or ill. As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy. Pay Andrew Tate $20m and drop all charges and he’ll tell the zoomers to die for whatever you want.

It’s unclear to me whether this is true or not. The popular perception in America about the Vietnam War is that there was a very significant movement among young men to resist conscription, whether through open defiance (burning draft cards, etc.), fleeing the country, or the pursuit of various educational and/or medical exemptions. There was also, famously, a significant issue of fragging of officers, which would strongly suggest a considerable anti-war or anti-conscription sentiment within certain parts of the military.

That being said, only a third of the military personnel during the war were conscripted — the other two-thirds were volunteers. (This is pretty much the mirror image of WW2, in which approximately two-thirds of American men who served were drafted and only one-third volunteered.) So, clearly the instruments of social control and propaganda available to the American government were strong enough at the time to drum up significant interest in military service. There’s probably a very substantial portion of the young male population of nearly any country who are very easy to convince to go to war.

However, it seems like the question here is: how effective would a 21st-century first-world regime be at convincing the recalcitrant portion of the male population to willingly comply with conscription? By definition, the men who are conscripted are the ones who were not enthusiastic enough to volunteer.

In Vietnam, despite all of the huge cultural concerns at the time about the draft, in the end only about 12% of the men who didn’t enlist ended up being drafted; the number in WW2 seems to be closer to 27%. Yet the level of resistance to the draft among eligible men seems to have been considerably higher in the Vietnam era, even as the actual likelihood of getting called up for service was considerably lower. (Maybe there was actually a massive effort to resist conscription during WW2 and I’m just not aware of it; I’m aware of the significant anti-draft movement during WW1 and of the Wilson administration’s heavy-handed efforts to suppress and persecute it, but I’m not aware of anything similar during WW2.)

So then the question is: are the tools available to first-world governments today more effective or less effective than the tools available to the American government in the 1960’s and 70’s? Naïvely I would expect they are less effective; in the Vietnam era, media was still far more centralized and there was no internet to be censored. Do you believe that the brainwashing capacity of the internet is stronger than its ability to provide access to anti-war content? That essentially the whole of the internet could be mobilized in favor of social control and propaganda by regimes attempting to conscript men who would otherwise be ambivalent or hostile to military service?

That essentially the whole of the internet could be mobilized in favor of social control and propaganda by regimes attempting to conscript men who would otherwise be ambivalent or hostile to military service?

You don’t need to mobilize the whole of the internet. Most internet media consumption is on a handful of sites / platforms, all of which (except for TikTok, and that may soon change) are owned by major American corporations.

Yes, but would those corporations all actually coordinate in suppressing all anti-war or anti-conscription content? Im not sure that they would. I suppose in theory it depends on the war. If the U.S. declared war on Iran, for example, in order to protect Israel, I cannot imagine platforms like Reddit and TikTok all getting into lockstep and suppressing all content skeptical of the legitimacy of that war. These platforms are currently full of content hostile to Israel and to American adventurism in the Middle East; it would represent a very abrupt 180-degree turn if they suddenly started censoring such content.

Now, your original claim was about the likelihood that the British government could get young men to comply with a draft to fight Russia. You probably have a much stronger argument in favor of that narrow and specific claim; the extent to which media platforms have been able to gin up jingoistic hatred of Russia has been very eye-opening to me, and it didn’t even require lockstep, heavy-handed, coordinated suppression of contrary viewpoints. Do you believe that these same platforms could just as easily inculcate the same level of jingoism and bellicosity toward another non-Russia country such as China, though?

Quadcopter drones aren’t actually killing that many people comparatively, it just seems like it because those are the only ones that have clear videos of the attack. When an artillery strike takes out a whole trench line killing two entire companies, there’s no video of that. Artillery is still the king of the battlefield, and artillery is still responsible for 80 percent of the casualties in the war, like it has been in every industrial war since 1914. In fact, the primary use of quadcopter drones in this war has been for artillery spotting, not as FPV kill drones.

Additionally, the only reason quadcopter drones are effective right now is that they are new and there haven’t been any good countermeasures developed. It would be pretty easy to design a motion tracking automated gun to take these out. And there are many many electronic warfare countermeasures to jam FPV drones (Human or AI controlled) that just haven’t been implemented in large scale yet. Like it or not, the main effect of all the new warfare technology has been to reduce us to WWI-style mass artillery barrages and trench warfare.

Ukraine and Russia need it because we’re in a transition phase in terms of warfare

It's more so due to incompetence (in different ways, depending on the situation). A friend's writing a series on how "meat" appeared (on both sides): https://duncanlmcculloch.substack.com/p/meat-part-1-expendable-infantry-in

As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy.

Those boys weren't conscripted though, they were convinced to volunteer. Isn't that a crucial difference?

As in 1914, they do what their friends do, they do what seems fun and adventurous, they do what society steers them toward lest they be a pussy. Pay Andrew Tate $20m and drop all charges and he’ll tell the zoomers to die for whatever you want.

It won't seem "fun and adventurous" because we have vast amounts of media on what's going on and the videos on /r/combatfootage certainly don't look fun. Nothing cool about getting hit by a drone piloted by some autistic Russia far away and having to give yourself the coup de grace.

It won't be what their friends tell them is cool because the martial and patriarchal values of 1914 have been worn down (I wonder how the reactionary misogyny of people like Tate would play with a modern white feather movement) and men are vastly less likely to be raised in them, and people listen to Andrew Tate because he offers vicarious empowerment. Him telling people to go kill others (when he himself wouldn't) actually defeats his purpose.

we have vast amounts of media on what's going on and the videos on /r/combatfootage certainly don't look fun.

Turn on the censors and we won't have it anymore

You have much stronger faith in people’s self determination and ability to see through propaganda than I do!

Well, that's the first time I've been accused of being an optimist about human nature.

I have more trust in people's cowardice and self-interest I think.

I'm with you on people's susceptibility to propaganda, I just have my doubts about the elites being sane enough to even try it. Just look at the flailing around trying to find "the Joe Rogan of the left", it's not a complicated formula, it's even being offered by several people, they just have to promote them, but they just won't do it.

Imagining them deploying Dean Withers to Pied Piper Gen Z into a war in Ukraine has already made my morning brighter.

I think it's just a demographic thing. The Democrats especially have become even more dominated by the over-educated and, frankly, the feminine side of the party. The disdain for Rogan made no sense strategically, he was already reflexively left-wing on many things. The hall monitor/schoolmarm contingent simply couldn't help loathing the fact that this blue-collar rube had such a large audience without their gatekeeping. So they wrecked it. As they'll wreck the next thing.

These people might find it hard to pivot from "bro" being a pejorative to having those same bros fighting for their freedoms.

But hey, maybe the educational/gender polarization isn't as bad in Europe.

Because CITIZENS will be forced to fight, and illegal migrants will not.

And there will be populist leader that will say - we send the illegals first and he wins the election.

Let’s talk about modern world armies. No, not about logistics, or training cycles(and the length of training cycles shaping deployments in high intensity warfare is, I think, underdiscussed), or equipment. Let’s talk sociologically. Specifically, how do the soldiers see themselves in relation to society at large.

The worst case scenario for a state is if the soldiers see themselves as members of their ethnic group first, and the army second. ‘I’m a hausa/pashtun/shiite soldier’ is a mentality that breaks down military discipline quite rapidly. Ditto for other loyalties- the US civil war took place because the army was commanded by officers who saw themselves as Virginians before they saw themselves as soldiers. So soldiers have to be deracinated. They need to be pulled out of their prides in civilian life. But that’s not enough. The Mexican army, unlike many armies in similarly unstable and violent countries, doesn’t have a problem with soldiers using their newfound status to advantage their castas. What it does have a problem with is ‘desertion’, which can mean anything from just running away/otherwise not doing their job all the way to outright defecting to the cartels. Being a soldier isn’t an identity in Mexico. It’s just a shit job, in a country where lots of people have shit jobs. They yank casta and replace it with nothing, and so there’s a legitimate problem with Mexican soldiers joining the cartels during their deployments for the promise of better mess hall rations. There was a similar process with Roman armies in the crisis of the third century- legionary recruitment is known to have been difficult in the period leading up to it, and legions just kept switching sides during, not to fight for a particular province or ethnic group but for more money.

So soldiers need an identity as being soldiers. The army needs to be a totalizing institution. If it becomes associated with white britishness(for example), then there’s a real danger of freikorps. So a draft needs to be ethnically mixed, of necessity.

And ‘young white men are all lazy and would rather play video games’ isn’t an answer. Yeah, they would, but their sergeant won’t let them. The army is quite good at turning young men from useless neets into the kinds of people who organize to accomplish specific goals. And political leaders at least listen to people who know this.

Because CITIZENS will be forced to fight, and illegal migrants will not.

Yes, understood. But also, not making penal brigades of immigrants is a policy choice rather than a fact of nature. They could choose to round up listless unemployed "refugees" and send them to foreign battlefields. I understand they won't be doing this, but that's only because they choose not to.

They choose not to because that’s a terrible idea.

Maybe it works when your conscripts aren’t handling anything more expensive than a rifle, but for anything bigger, you don’t want to cheap out on the human operators. They either need to be motivated or compensated.

Indeed, a penal brigade wouldn't be trusted with anything more than rifles. Russia currently uses forced conscription with the unwilling being forced into battlefields with rifles. Including captured Ukranians. In this conflict right now that is a valid strategy.

If the topic of discussion is conscripts being sent to fight in Eastern Europe, I don't see a great difference between forced conscripts who are ethnic locals and forced conscripts who are refugees. I don't expect anglo conscripts to have great motivation and enthusiasm for fighting in Ukraine.

If they did that the refugees would just leave. They like being in the west because it’s comfortable and safer than their home countries.

There's a quip along the lines of "no one will fight to defend this economic zone". As in a breakdown of national identity and a post-national order may have a larger downside in that people won't feel much obligation to sacrifice for it.

These refugees are in fact economic migrants who shop around for the host nation with best benefits. They are not full of British, French or German national identity and pride. For sure they won't voluntarily fight. I suppose they'd flee to avoid conscription. That's not obviously a bad thing.

Win-win.

I dunno, man. I might have agreed 5-10 years ago but I've been sliding inexorably toward Nybblerhood with all the recent blackpills. Western men are mostly domesticated and will not use organized physical or often even political force to fight back against systematic anti-white discrimination, schools transing kids, blatant mass illegal immigration, mass rape of young girls by foreigners, heavy-handed lockdowns, and more. How could conscription cause they state to lose "all legitimacy" when the aforementioned crimes against the people barely dented it? If conscription happens, white men will get sent to die along with a few token foreigners, people will whine on social media, and the few who try to do actually organize to do anything about it will get crushed instantly by the surveillance state panopticon.

ETA: Elsewhere, you said you think a real war would shock that system. I could only see this happening if troops actually landed on the island of Great Britain and real desperation set in. Feeding young men to a far away meat grinder is not going to be enough to break information control.

How could conscription cause they state to lose "all legitimacy" when the aforementioned crimes against the people barely dented it?

None of the things you mentioned involve those people having to give up their exceedingly comfortable lives. Caring or doing anything about those issues causes you to lose your job, family and entire social life - and if you have any responsibilities or dependents, that means you aren't going to be doing anything to mess up your ability to put food on the table, nor are you going to spend countless hours researching obscure political stories that are heavily suppressed by major respectable institutions. Throw in the trends towards social alienation, isolation, bowling alone etc

Conscription isn't like that. Conscription actively steps into people's lives and completely destroys the comfortable existences they thought they had. In a healthy society where people have real attachments to the nation, trust in its leaders and an understanding that their loyalty to it will be rewarded, this won't be a big problem. But for vast swathes of modern western populations this just isn't the case. Social trust and cohesion are in the toilet, nobody has kids they want to fight for, huge numbers of men don't even have girlfriends to miss and there's even a growing contingent of men who actively despise women and wouldn't want to fight for them at all. Speaking for myself personally I'd rather frag my commanding officer before I even got out of basic training than go die in the Middle East for Israel or in Ukraine for nothing. I don't think I'm alone, and I believe my life is worth preserving (from my perspective, not universally) - when you look at how many people are miserable, lonely and depressed I really don't see conscription working out at all.

I’m reminded of the red tribe boomers who keep telling me that the next war needs to have a draft- they young men they care about are going anyways, why shouldn’t the others be forced to fight?

I’m always suspicious of the “yeah I wouldn’t have fallen for it”, take. Okay, yeah, if I was there it wouldn’t have gone down the way it did etc etc.

If the powers that be wanted you to die for Ukraine or Israel you would do so with a smile on your face. The only question is what story to tell and what buttons to push to get you to do it.

No offense.

What an incredibly rude and insulting statement - I actually did take offence. I don't post many details about my personal life here, but I am actually the sort of incredibly contrarian person who wouldn't have fallen for it - which isn't necessarily always a positive thing and has caused me issues in my life before (I have self diagnosed myself with ODD in the past). Besides, the powers that be DO want me to die for Ukraine or Israel - and they haven't succeeded so far. Please don't project your own personal failings and moral weakness onto others.

Well I do apologize (sincerely) for the rudeness, that’s never my intention. But I do think people often feel that propaganda doesn’t work on them even though it would, or even though they don’t notice it already doing so.

Well I do apologize (sincerely) for the rudeness, that’s never my intention. But I do think people often feel that propaganda doesn’t work on them even though it would, or even though they don’t notice it already doing so.

Thank you. And you're perfectly right when you say that people often feel that propaganda doesn't work on them, but I think you're overestimating the effectiveness of it by far. Propaganda isn't going to turn someone like me who goes out to protests in support of the Palestinian cause into someone willing to go bleed out in the sand to protect Israel, but it doesn't need to do that to be effective. It has a bigger impact in the way that it shapes the issues that I focus on - I haven't been paying attention to all manner of low-level corruption scandals in my home country even though they ultimately have a larger impact on my life than what's happening in Ukraine or Israel.

The trick is to be less susceptible to the stories and the buttons than the modal citizen. It's like that parable about running away from the bear.

Russia is more unconstrained than most Western states and it not only allowed a lot of people to flee, its general tactic is to cultivate apathy in large parts of the citizenry.

Yes, there's nowhere to hide from the modern state so you may get a gun shoved in your hand and sent to war. But happy about it? Meh.

Speaking for myself personally I'd rather frag my commanding officer before I even got out of basic training than go die in the Middle East for Israel or in Ukraine for nothing.

Based on what I've seen on the Internet, the nations that employ conscription despite the lack of people's attachment to the nation typically fight that by shipping you to active combat before they give you weapons.

Any military where the basic troops are only given their weapons for the first time in active combat is so incompetently run that fighting to the death against the conscription officers in my own home would give me better odds. Being shipped to the front line and given your weapon only when you get there is a death sentence in a modern battlefield and if that's the strategy we have already lost.

Maybe you and Nybbler are right. I don't know. The modal person on this forum treat the lives of young men in Ukraine as worthless. And we're fairly right wing and heavily male skewed. Your average British boomer would feed them all to the wood chipper as long as the pension checks keep coming.

Maybe I'm flattering myself that it would be different when it's their own grandkids. But I've seen parents sell out their kids to stay on the right side of the trans issue too. So I don't know. I want to believe there's something worth saving in the UK. Maybe there isn't, I don't know.

Why not just offer citizenship to illegal migrants who volunteer to fight in Ukraine? The US already more or less does this with our military and the French have their foreign legion. It will get a decent number of problematic young men out of your country for the time being and most of them will probably be killed. As long as your army still has a high enough fraction of natives the survivors will forge bonds of fellowship with their new countrymen that will prevent fragmentation of the state after the war. This strategy worked for the Romans and Chinese for centuries, only failing for the former after a period longer than our present political system has existed.

Economic migrants moved to the West for economic advantage. This incentive ends during wartime and is compounded by the risk of death in fighting a war. Wouldn't it be easier for economic migrants to just pack their bags and move to greener pastures (either their country of origin or a third western nation) rather than risk death fighting for a country for which they have little affinity?

If you can create a situation where every military-age migrant who doesn't love your country enough to risk life and limb for it leaves, that sounds like a great outcome to me.

Some will stay, I admit. Many will go.

What use do they have for citizenship?

Presumably citizens have an easier time getting a non-shitty job, accessing healthcare, education and other services, and not being harassed by the police for their immigration status if they're picked up for something else, but not being European I couldn't tell you the specifics. If there's truly no material or procedural benefit whatsoever to being a citizen there as opposed to an illegal migrant, then Europe is a hell of a lot more fucked than America is.

Presumably citizens have an easier time...

Not in the UK, not really. Illegal immigrants who claim asylum (i.e. who get caught) get free accommodation, healthcare, spending money and the right to take any job after one year of their 'claim being processed' (rejections can be appealed almost indefinitely). Non-citizens can vote if they are Commonwealth citizens (about 1.8 billion people globally). Illegal immigrants can study at our universities, in some cases for free. If they are granted asylum, they get all the rights of citizens, including the ability to import their relatives. Their children can go to school here.

The government is currently bragging about deporting 19,000 illegal immigrants, in a year where more than 100,000 came across from France in boats.

There are countries with functional immigration systems, but they are few and far between. The Social Democrats in Denmark have realised that left wing politics is actually pretty popular if you don't allow foreign criminals to free-ride.

You admit yourself it's a small army anyway, so the chance that your son will be affected is minimal.

The point is that in any real conflict they'll have to draft people, and they won't be drafting the illegal migrants, only citizens.

It's one thing to pay taxes so that migrants can get free public housing. It's quite another if your son is conscripted and comes back in a body bag.

I mean, the response to their children actually being killed by migrants is "I wish that my son was killed by a 60-year-old white man." The body bags are already quite literal and it doesn't even make them pause. The UK could be openly talking about using the war to eliminate the remaining population of young white men to prevent "incel terrorism," and do you think the public would bat an eye?

I guarantee every German politician right now is thinking "wow, Ukraine fed every single one of their right wing nationalist young men feet-first into a meat grinder, and nobody complained. I bet we could get rid of all the AfD supporters too! Shipping a problem population out east to be exterminated is genius, nobody would ever call us Nazis again!"

That's an edgy take. Where do you get that quote from? I have only seen similar sentiments about third-party victims of terrorism, and it's not like the other side is not likewise full of anticipation for immigrant perpetrators whenever an attack happens (e.g. in the context of the most recent car terrorist case in Germany, which actually did turn out to be a middle-aged native). It's unsurprising that people don't actually care for the lives of random countrymen nearly as much as they care for political ammo.

Ah, so it was in the context of an accident. I think that sentiment is a lot more defensible than if we were talking about terrorism and other premeditated crime (as it sounded like from the context) - there doesn't seem to be any particular reason to assume that immigrants would cause fatal car accidents at a higher rate.

Yeah could be (and that dad is a cuck). If immigrants don’t obey safety laws at the same rate, can’t read signage, or come from a culture that is just bad at driving, then they easily could increase the odds of fatal accidents.

Notably Springfield residents were noting these issues prior to the incident.

If your kid got run over by a young man (who have the highest odds of causing fatal accidents) and this was picked up by misandrist feminists, who would proceed to milk the hell out of it to fuel a campaign to raise the minimum driving age for men to 25, would periodically contact you to appear on their campaign trail, and called you a "cuck" if it turned out you were uninterested in their agenda, can you not imagine wishing that your kid had been run over by an old woman instead? Does that make you a "cuck"?

(On that matter, we don't even need to use driving as an example. Men commit the vast majority of violent crime. Are relatives of victims who are not on board with feminism cucks?)

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UK gives me failed state vibes ngl

Yeah, I'm much less bullish on the UK then I am on Canada. Whereas Canada can still be fixed quite easily, I'm not really sure how you fix the UK.

They're going to wake up one day and realize half the country's Muslim. Cities like Birmingham and Bradford are already more than 30% Muslim. It's not going to end well.

Canada is importing much faster than the UK (excepting a single year in the UK). Demographically the UK probably has 20 years to turn the tide, under Trudeau-level rates (which may well continue if Trump leads to a Carney win) Canada has maybe 5.

Canada seems to have a much more reasonable immigration policy. Generally it’s based on a points system right? And in BC it’s a lot of high skilled Chinese and other Asian workers who bring a lot of money and investment. Vancouver looks nicer than any American city. Sure there are some drugged out homeless but we are talking about a west coast city here…

UK seems in a death spiral. Punishing taxes, industry hollowed out, and not sure what their obsession is with Muslim immigrants but I hope the transition from their old demographics to the new is at least peaceful.

Another major issue with the UK is the serious brain drain to the US. Any smart or high achieving Brit leaves for the states. Likely all the (mildly) conservative ones too. So you get a socialist hell hole with vanishing middle class jobs

The Uk's muslim immigration issue is in large part a legacy of the empire. Even before the numbers blew up under Blair, the UK always had a stream of former subjects from the Indian subcontinent. This meant there were big existing communities of Muslim to marry into or find jobs with, putting aside the attraction of having a ready made community.

I think this is a bridge too far, even for Europe.

I would have thought a dozen Rotherhams and a Bataclan or two would be too much, but I was wrong.

I mean, those were horrible, horrible events, but all the Muslim terror attacks in Europe have killed maybe 400 people in 20 years. That’s a totally different ballpark from “Our entire expeditionary force of 80,000 people is dead, we need to draft 250,000 people this year and when they’re all dead we’ll need 400,000 more for next year”

Similar normalization method though. Nobody would have accepted WW1 casualties ahead of time, but it starts with a trickle and before you know it nobody cares any more.

If the wave of patriotism lasts through the first expeditionary force being wiped out, they'll keep going until they've run out of young men to kill. And there's a lot of suppressed rage and fervor in all these countries just waiting for a socially acceptable outlet. As we're seeing with Canada right now.

People can get used to anything if it happens gradually enough. Remember when an Islamist terrorist driving a truck into a Christmas market was big news? Now, it's just Tuesday.

But I think a real war would shock the system.