This is an opinion piece, how can one person make such sweeping claims about an entire generation without even doing any interviews or anything.
It’s a stupid opinion piece too. Ofc the army numbers go down during peacetime… What would be the point of paying for a 500k+ army you aren’t using?
Also I’m pretty sure when most people were drafted for WW1 or WW2 they weren’t happy about it.
Ah just saw the note about the site being an opinion news site, makes sense then
LBC is generally just shit rage-bait and controversy farming.
They don’t do journalism.
Actually many people were happy to be drafted in WW1 and 2. They volunteered. Women wouldn’t date you if they thought you were a coward. People wouldn’t hire you.
It was such a problem that people with invisible handicaps (epilepsy, hearth issues, flat feet, etc.) carried around their 4F papers to show that it wasn’t their fault they weren’t at the front.
Yeah people used to actually be proud of their country, which I think is going to be the most interesting difference with ww3
Who downvoted me within 2 min of posting this? Lemmy why are you like this? It makes it not fun to post here
Are we genuinely worried there might be a big war with Russia? We’re basically talking about WW3 here. Shouldn’t this issue be confronted at a deeper level than “whether to do conscription?” The (perceived) necessity for conscription should be resolved.
The concern is that when a strongman is in power and backed into a corner, they have very few ways out of that corner. Their systems are designed in ways to suppress the possibility that someone will try to coup them, and to keep the population from getting too unstable.
One of the more reliable ways to keep the ball rolling is to keep the situation so ugly and chaotic that its too costly for anyone to want to come in and replace them.
It looks like madness to us, but when you look at it through the lens of self preservation atop a fundamentally corrupt system lacking in checks and balances, it starts to make a sort of twisted sense.
At the end of the day, Russia is more or less immune to ground invasion, due to the nuclear threat. So, there isn’t a whole lot of reason not to broaden the conflict, just to buy a couple more years of personal safety for the guy on top.
One rational way to attempt to head that off is to power up to the degree that a ground invasion would rapidly fail, not buying a couple years, but instead just hastening the decline through more military catastrophes. So, free people may consider mobilization, to posture strength and scare off aggression. Posture strength and sabre rattle, so you don’t have to fight a war.
Or, y’know, we could just arm Ukraine and let them do the job. But Putin is undermining that effort with every resource at his disposal already.
It’s unlikely to be WW3 at any rate, because Xi Jinping would want no part of such a dangerous and short-sighted undertaking. Though, he could use the distraction to try to take Taiwan.
I think that’s fair. And I hope you’re right about WW3. Maybe the existence of nukes will deter the kind of factions that led to the first two. But the escalating global tensions (already an understatement) don’t give me much comfort.
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For obvious reasons
If you think Russia poses any threat to the UK beyond fucking with their economy you’re delusional.
That seems naive
The West would rather threaten human extinction than actually do diplomacy. This is just the progession of imperialism against the Global South and Russia.
Russia has already put down the frothing at the mouth Ukranian govt. So now the US is going to do the same thing to the rest of Europe and have them become proxies in the American assault against Russia. The EU will let this happen because they are also a bourgeois dictatorship.
Any western libs who deny this just want to see dead ukrainian children fight for them. The West will not win, only throw tantrums.
For me it would depend on the war. If it’s the start of WW3 and they’re going to give me a gun to shoot myself with then sign me the fuck up! Much better than waiting for the nukes to fall
Good on them
It’s usually fashionable for older fucks like me to hate on younger generations, but I’m genuinely encouraged by some of the noise coming out of Gen Z’s corner. I can’t comment on an entire generation, but some of the news headlines I come across, and the few young folks I know personally both give me a peace of mind for the stewardship of our planet after the fuckups of boomers and inaction of Gen X.
Inaction of who? I hear you say, and yes, we’re so inactive that we’re barely noticeable.
inaction of Gen X
Which actions could gen X take to prevent the Anthropocene extinction from becoming a mass extinction event? We’re such a small cohort that there’s not enough of us to vote-in ethical parties. Should we jail or hang most of the boomers, biological parents, drivers, and fliers undemocratically? There’s not enough of us to vote-in crimes-against-life laws.
Isn’t our inaction the best we can do? By many more of us not contributing to unsustainable levels of human overpopulation, we’re at least much less complicit in the biggest cause of anthropogenic climate change and the root cause of almost all the major existential/ethical problems facing us.
By not flying and driving, we’re not complicit in the 2nd and 3rd biggest omnicidal acts.
By not consuming animals, we’re not complicit in factory-farming and fishing - which causes more pain and suffering than all other atrocities ever committed in history, combined. Hundreds of billions of animals are enslaved in torturous conditions and trillions of fish tortured to death every year.
We’re too small a group to fix things, but we can abstain from the psychotic things older people think are normal.
Millennials and gen Zs are turning out on average to be much more ethical than us gen Xers, and they might actually vote in Greens once enough boomers die out. Hopefully that happens before anthropogenic climate change cascades.
You say you’re too few to do much but what you are doing is a massive contribution already. As the population ages, more boomers are going to die off and gen X are going to raise more children to be conscientious people who act with integrity.
It might take another 20 years but then we’ll have the numbers from millennials, Z and X (am I forgetting anyone? The generation labelling confuses me) to truly effect change
