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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24834 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).

Good on him tbh, I'm opposed to the draft on principle, unless every single guy in power who's job it is to decide if there will be a war or not, including the ones authorizing the military spending are right up there at the front, (and not at the rear).

Draft dodging can definitely show moral courage, but doing so in a relatively safe way doesn't show physical courage. In the specific context of a well-connected rich kid dodging the Vietnam draft, I would say it shows neither.

I am also opposed to the peacetime draft on principle, and the government and military brass ran the Vietnam war like a peacetime garrison operation for good but not sufficient reasons driven by Cold War grand strategy, so I count the Vietnam draft as morally equivalent to a peacetime draft. A draft in the case of existential war or grave danger thereof is an unfortunate incident of a state and society that wishes to continue existing, but the Vietnam war wasn't existential and wasn't treated as existential. But the chickenhawk argument you are making doesn't apply to the Vietnam draft - both the politicians who ordered the Vietnam draft and the generals leading the war had were WW2 veterans and most had been on the front lines. (There is some question about whether LBJ was ever actually shot at, but his staff job involved regular flight over hostile territory. McNamara was a REMF. JFK, Nixon, Laird, Westmoreland and Abrams were combat veterans.)

The contract between the generations has always involved old men who proved their valour in their youth but are too old to fight today's wars ordering younger men into battle. The ubiquitous Vietnam-era draft-dodging among elites broke that contract even if the draft was unjustified in that particular case. The breach of the social contract by the Greatest Generation leaders was sending the army to war with no idea of how they were going to win.

Would the women in power be up there too?

Ideally there wouldn't be any.

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