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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   26846 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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Well, why do you think they fight?

Increasingly, they fight because they are conscripted and forced to. Ukrainian men are being treated as if their lives have no value.

"The Ukrainians only fight because they are conscripted and forced" is also something that I've seen for the entire war. The whole idea seems to have originated as cope by Russians and pro-Russians who claimed that since Ukrainians are just Russians who speak funny they'd run directly into the arms of Mother Russia once given an opportunity and who have then flailed to find explanations for why that didn't happen. You don't fight for two years with this intensity with forced and conscripted troops. It's possible that this might change at some point, but even then I'd need far more evidence to actually believe it to be true this time.

What do you make of the videos of screaming Ukrainian men being dragged into the backs of vans by "recruiters"?

The claim isn't that every single Ukrainian wants to fight, just that most do. If a country has conscription, there's bound to be stragglers even when most conscripts would not complain about going.

Making analysis of anything on the basis of online videos circulated with partisan debators with an obvious intent of altering the information landscape is generally not a good way to make sense of events in any case.

If a plantation has 60% free workers and 40% slaves, that hardly excuses the plantation owner does it?

Is your position that Ukraine conscripts are 60% free and 40% slaves?

If not, what percent do you think are the slave-analogs here? 30%? 15%

Isn't conscription itself evidence that there is a fairly significant portion of people who don't want to fight?

Conscription, like all laws restricting individual liberty, can be societal equivalent of Ulysses tying himself to mast.

Very few people really want to go fight in a war. Yet the consensus may be that all men are needed to fight or the war is lost and the war ought not to be lost.

I'd expect a lot of people don't want to fight regardless of conscription.

If you're asking if conscription as a policy indicates a lack of public support for a war, not really. No major war as a share of national population has been fought on a volunteer-only recruitment basis. At the same time, there have been many wars where support for continuing the war has remained high even as conscription numbers ran high.

Suppose military service were entirely voluntary. Do you expect there would be a substantial drop in the number of military recruits? If conscription doesn't conscript many people who don't want to fight on the front, why is Ukraine strengthening penalties for evasion and expanding conscription operations?

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