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You would also ensure that every voting member of the populace had been exposed to military discipline and doctrine during their impressionable post-adolescent
by rcoder 18y ago
You would also ensure that every voting member of the populace had been exposed to military discipline and doctrine during their impressionable post-adolescent years. Much of the message of military training is that you should accept orders, respect the chain of command, and resist the urge to second-guess the motivations of your superiors.
It's a great way to keep a bunch of heavily-armed people trained to efficiently kill other people from turning on each other, but it's not necessarily the thinking you want out your voting populace, unless you want to make sure that society never moves forward.
The military attitude also strikes me as being pretty much anathema to hacking.
Now, if you want to talk about mandatory public service, where that two years can be spent doing social work, student teaching, etc., then I can get behind the idea.
- DanielBMarkham 18y agoPlease stop the stereotyping of military service. It's shoddy and it's inaccurate. For most of our country's history, large portions of the population have been exposed to military service sometime in their lifetime. This is the longest period (since the 1970s) where the greatest percentage of people have not had that experience. It's a great social experiment, one that's not generally acknowledged. I'm not going to argue your stereotype. Suffice it to say I have several concrete examples that each of your points are wrong. "Not even wrong" would be a better characterization.
- rcoder 18y agoI'm not trying to perpetuate a stereotype, by any means. My family has a long history of military service, and while I may have overstated the potential social ossification that could arise from only veterans being able to vote, I very much stand by the assertion that military service affects your thinking in fundamental and powerful ways. There are of course other obvious problems with making voting rights dependent upon military service. Specifically, I doubt that same-sex marriage and civil unions laws would have passed in even the smattering of states where they did, if only because few of those most directly affected (i.e., homosexuals) would have been allowed into the military, and therefore, allowed to vote.