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Gender issues are a convenient way to double productive output and, apparently, double forced military enrolment. Mindless work for everyone; the right to live

Gender issues are a convenient way to double productive output and, apparently, double forced military enrolment. Mindless work for everyone; the right to live and die for someone else's interests.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> double forced military enrolment. 2×0 is still 0.
- farisjarrah 8y ago
  Hmm, I didn't know that I wasn't required by law to sign up for the draft as soon as I turned 18 as a ~30 year old male from the United States.... /s
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    Signing up for selective service isn't military enrollment. It's preregistration for potential future compelled enrollment, for which no current legal authority even exists. The US has no conscription, or even a legal framework for conscription. It has a vestigial legacy framework preserved so that it could, in principal, bring up a system of conscription slightly more quickly than starting from a standing start if it ever adopted law authorizing it again, along with nearly half a century of deliberately constructing the military in a way which does not rely on and is not particularly adaptable to conscript service.
    - djohnston 8y ago
      was something dismantled after vietnam?
      - dragonwriter 8y ago
        > was something dismantled after vietnam? Yes, the law authorizing the draft expired in June 1973, after a strategy was developed and a policy decision made to pursue it to meet military needs without conscription. Enforcement of the registration requirement that expired in the 1970s but was reactivated in 1980 without any actual draft law was discontinued by agreement between Selective Service and DoJ in 1988, but no actual prosecutions were pursued after 1986, and compliance has always been low (even with the stick of student loans, which gets lots of people heading to college registered, those who register are unlikely to update address when they move while registered.) So: we no longer (for 45 years) have a law authorizing conscription. We no longer (for 30 years) even pretend to have enforcement of the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it. And we no longer (for more than the 30 years of non-enforcement, really, but even moreso after that) have much compliance with the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it. Everything that happens around Selective Service registration requirements absent changes in all that is purely symbolic ritual with no real substance.
        AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        So this is just legal theater? That seems plausible... right up until it isn't. If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft, this precedent will be sitting there... if it stands. (As I said elsewhere, this story/circus won't be over until the Supreme Court decides one way or the other.)
        dragonwriter 8y ago
        > If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft ...the material facts will be substantially different, which means that this case, would quite plausibly, not be controlling. And, in any case, this only deals with registration requirements, not gender differentiation in any hypothetical draft law. (The fact that draft registration doesn't do much of anything substantive makes it a lot harder to make the case that there is sufficient service to an important government interest to overcome the presumptive invalidity of gender discrimination; it's pretty much, in effect today, just an added administrative burden to men in qualifying for college loans.)
    - subleq 8y ago
      What would make the military adaptable or not to conscript service?

Gender issues are a convenient way to double productive output and, apparently, double forced military enrolment. Mindless work for everyone; the right to live and die for someone else's interests.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> double forced military enrolment. 2×0 is still 0.

farisjarrah 8y ago
Hmm, I didn't know that I wasn't required by law to sign up for the draft as soon as I turned 18 as a ~30 year old male from the United States.... /s
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  Signing up for selective service isn't military enrollment. It's preregistration for potential future compelled enrollment, for which no current legal authority even exists. The US has no conscription, or even a legal framework for conscription. It has a vestigial legacy framework preserved so that it could, in principal, bring up a system of conscription slightly more quickly than starting from a standing start if it ever adopted law authorizing it again, along with nearly half a century of deliberately constructing the military in a way which does not rely on and is not particularly adaptable to conscript service.
  - djohnston 8y ago
    was something dismantled after vietnam?
    - dragonwriter 8y ago
      > was something dismantled after vietnam? Yes, the law authorizing the draft expired in June 1973, after a strategy was developed and a policy decision made to pursue it to meet military needs without conscription. Enforcement of the registration requirement that expired in the 1970s but was reactivated in 1980 without any actual draft law was discontinued by agreement between Selective Service and DoJ in 1988, but no actual prosecutions were pursued after 1986, and compliance has always been low (even with the stick of student loans, which gets lots of people heading to college registered, those who register are unlikely to update address when they move while registered.) So: we no longer (for 45 years) have a law authorizing conscription. We no longer (for 30 years) even pretend to have enforcement of the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it. And we no longer (for more than the 30 years of non-enforcement, really, but even moreso after that) have much compliance with the law requiring registration in case we decide we need conscription and pass a law authorizing it. Everything that happens around Selective Service registration requirements absent changes in all that is purely symbolic ritual with no real substance.
      - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
        So this is just legal theater? That seems plausible... right up until it isn't. If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft, this precedent will be sitting there... if it stands. (As I said elsewhere, this story/circus won't be over until the Supreme Court decides one way or the other.)
        dragonwriter 8y ago
        > If the time ever comes when things are dire enough that we need the draft ...the material facts will be substantially different, which means that this case, would quite plausibly, not be controlling. And, in any case, this only deals with registration requirements, not gender differentiation in any hypothetical draft law. (The fact that draft registration doesn't do much of anything substantive makes it a lot harder to make the case that there is sufficient service to an important government interest to overcome the presumptive invalidity of gender discrimination; it's pretty much, in effect today, just an added administrative burden to men in qualifying for college loans.)
  - subleq 8y ago
    What would make the military adaptable or not to conscript service?