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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29775 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Related question: Does the military treat its troops better if you have universal conscription or if you force the military to compete in labor markets?

Conscription in Turkey used to be universal and quite tough. This spawned about a million ways anyone with connections or money could get their sons an easy deployment or even an exemption. Meanwhile the average peasant would have to endure near slavery conditions in the hands of commanders. Also certain deployments in the Kurdish areas could be genuinely dangerous with serious casualty rates.

Nowadays anyone can legally pay some amount (not low, not crazy high) to do only a one month training course and be exempt from the rest of the service. The actual fighting army is a professional force and it pays a pretty decent salary for a stable job requiring no education.

The conditions in the training and service are much much better nowadays. Some of this is because Turkey is a wealthier and more middle class country now so overall conditions are better anywhere. But I suspect a big part is due to the need to recruit contract soldiers from the conscripts.

My lesson from this change is that without a very established civic culture and a homogenous society (not necessarily in terms of race but broadly in terms of group identity) it doesn’t work to try to take elites hostage in the system to force skin in the game. People with means almost always find ways to work around the system, and they cause enormous inefficiencies and dysfunction while doing so.

Finnish conscript troops are treated fairly well. I hated the army myself, but that probably reflected my own weaknesses as a 20-year-old, really. The food was really good, at least, and I got into a better shape towards the end of it.

I've heard that in the Israeli Defence force, young conscripts are generally treated with kid gloves (e.g. not ordered around much or expected to suffer) to the point where boot camp is referred to as "summer camp", apparently because even the children of the powerful have to do it.

It's not enough that the silver spoons have to do it - they also have to lack the ability to segregate themselves to cushier-than-average deployments.

On the other hand South Korea’s similarly ‘no exceptions’ conscription seems to have a reputation for being rough.

Jury duty is an example of a service that people are universally compelled to provide. So looking at the working conditions and pay of jurors may also be instructive towards answering this question.

Comparing this comment with astrolabia's IDF comment, I wonder if that's a reflection of different culture in the US vs Israel (the US seems uniquely bad at public goods relative to peer countries) or jury duty being easier to escape than IDF time.

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