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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   27265 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023

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Sorry, wait, sorry, is your impression that 'comfort women' were salaried government employees with due process rights and retirement packages and etc.?

Military conscription is bad but it's still qualitatively different from slavery in important ways.

The closest military analogy to comfort women would be something like child soldiers in Africa, which yes we do also strenuously object to.

You know that Japanese conscripts were treated pretty terribly and considered so disposable they were referred to by a term based on the price of postage on government mail, right?

So, listen: either you specify a type and context of conscription in which is is so exploitative and evil and that it is analogous to what happened to comfort women, in which case it is also an evil practice that should never be allowed, and once again the two things are not distinguished from each other.

Or you specify a type and context of conscription that's reasonable and ok in ways that make it unlikely what happened to comfort women, in which case it's a bad analogy that doesn't tell us anything.

We can play context games as much as we want, it doesn't change anything because the argument is fundamentally flawed. It's using the affective associations of the crimes and horrors committed against comfort women and trying to apply those to the notion of sex in general, which is a version of the Worst Argument in the World.

then the comfort girls in WWII would be no more victims than the conscripts.

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