Seriously, the draft is dead.

So people who know me know that I voted for Harris, and I think that Trump and Hegseth should be impeached. They should have been impeached for blowing up Venezuelan boats last year, and they definitely should be impeached for blowing Iranian school girls this year.

 But I need you all to understand that you don't have to worry about a draft. You might WANT to worry about a draft, because that places everything out of your control. It won't be your fault if you end up in the military, it won't be your fault if you get killed, but if you survive this war you didn't want and have some cool scars to show to potential sex partners, well that's still way more fun to think about than how to pay your bills next month, isn't it?

Young people should be worried about things like school, employment, and the upcoming midterm election. You still have control over the small things like your grades, job performance and how clean your room is. I think you should get involved in the upcoming midterm elections, but even if you refuse to get involved, it would still benefit you to understand how politics works.

Trump can be unpredictable. We can't be sure what he'll do next, but he is still constrained by certain realities. He isn't Thanos or anything like that. Legally he needs Congress to reinstate conscription and actually start drafting people. Even if he tried just signing an executive order, he'd still need Congress to fund a draft unless he intended to pay for it out of his own pocket.

Here are all the reasons why you won't be drafted.

1. The Pentagon doesn't want to draft you. Sorry, but you just don't have any skills that they are looking for. Your Call of Duty K/D ratio isn't going to cut it. The military would happily teach you those skills, but how well are you going to learn them if you don't want to be there in the first place? Historically, conscripts just didn't perform as well as volunteers. A draft is only useful if a military wants lots of infantry and doesn't care about how good they'll be in the field. Modern militaries care more about quality than quantity.

2. Congress doesn't want to draft you. This is a midterm election year. All members of the House and one third of the Senate are up for re-election and they know this is an unpopular war. They are funding it anyway, and they hope that their voters will care about things other than the war. A draft will make the war a much more important issue. It will make it harder to ignore the war. That is a big reason why they are making registration automatic, so that you won't have to think about it. As an American civilian, you can potentially lead a prosperous life without thinking about the Iran war at all. You shouldn't do that, but Congress is committed to giving you that option.

3. Trump's base doesn't want a draft. Seriously, who wants to be drafted? If you want to be in the military, you talk to a recruiter. You don't sit around the house and wait for them to make you go. So there are Trump supporters in the military, Trump supporters who would join but can't, and Trump supporters who just would rather finish college and work for Daddy than go serve overseas. And they don't see this as hypocritical. See, you have a fire department in your town. Do you support your fire department? Why don't you sign up to be a firefighter? Or maybe you are a firefighter. Do you support curbside trash pickup? Why don't you become a garbage collector? Because even if you think a war is just, the reality is that most people won't have to fight, and won't even be allowed to go even if that's what they want. And hawks tend to grasp this more than my fellow doves.

I'm a Democrat today, but I was a Libertarian for a long time. I've posted multiple opinion pieces calling for an abolition of Selective Service. When I've done so, I've gotten more kudos from Republicans, and more pushback for other Democrats. Which is fine; I'm an old fart and this isn't a dealbreaker issue for me. For better or for worse, many Republicans don't have any problem supporting a war without participating directly. For them, it's like my point about the fire departments. Also, I think they grasp that a draft would result in lots of left wing young people receiving arms and military training, and I think they could do without that.

4. Trump's billionaire donors don't want a draft. Of course they are too old and rich to worry about themselves getting drafted, but they still don't want you getting drafted either. Of course they don't care about you as a person, but they want to be able to exploit your labor and sell you crap. Which is easier to do if you are in the US and not in the Middle East.

In fact, it was laissez faire economist Milton Friedman who convinced Nixon to end the draft in the 1970's. So any movement to bring back a draft is going to have a lot of right wing money fighting it.

The draft is dead.

 

The draft is dead. This death might be permanent.

By the end of this year, young men turning 18 will no longer have to register with Selective Service. Instead, registration will be automatic. Generation X had to register at the post office. Millenials and Gen Z could register online. Gen Alpha won’t have to do anything special, and many probably won’t know that they are registered.

Getting rid of Selective Service has been a pet issue of mine. On the one hand, I’m glad that young men won’t be penalized for noncompliance. On the other hand, conscription may be even less of a credible possibility for young men, so that’s one less of a reason for them to pay attention to politics.

It might seem like poetic justice for Nick Fuentes and Barron Trump to be drafted into the army and sent straight to the front. But that’s just now how the leopards choose which faces to eat. Fuel prices will go up, the economy will suck, and Iran might retaliate in ways we can’t predict. This war will suck for all of us and not just the people who voted for Trump. It’s not fair and it can’t be made fair, but that is how it is.

Conscription is an institution created by warmongers for the purpose of waging war. Peace activists should oppose the draft as a tool of war. We should refrain from saying “draft Barron Trump” because nobody should ever be drafted. No American should be forced to fight in Iran, because no American should be allowed to fight in Iran.

The draft and the current war have always been interconnected, but distinct issues. During the Iraq War, there were pro-war people who were anti-draft, and anti-war people who were pro-draft. Both sides understood the draft would make the war even more unpopular. But a young man who does not want to be drafted might be more motivated to support an anti-draft hawk candidate over a pro-draft dove. Because the issue of the war itself is more important than the draft in particular, we should resist the temptation to propose bringing back the draft. Yes, the thought of a drill instructor yelling at a squad of alt-right incels crawling through the mud is immensely gratifying. But fantasies often make for bad public policy.

For that matter, I refuse to call Donald Trump a “draft dodger”. He is a demented sexual predator who either belongs in a prison or a memory care ward, but at no point in his life did he belong in the Army. Avoiding military service was one of the best choices that he made.

The draft is dead, because not even warmongers have a use for it anymore. We can carry on the fight against dumb wars without it. We can talk about American military casualties, Iranian civilian casualties, higher gas prices, and higher inflation. We can even finally kill the blood-soaked myth that war is good for the economy. But let’s not get distracted by a draft that has no chance of happening.

History blindness.

 There are people who lack a sense of history. I'm not even talking about a lack of education: somebody who only watches TV can still grasp that there was a time before TV when people had to watch plays instead. I'm talking about people who don't seem to grasp that an era ended before a different era began.

Here are examples that I have observed from just talking to people. These are adults who are at least mentally sound enough to have gainful employment, and did not seem at all sarcastic when they said what they said.

1. I joked to a coworker that a different coworker was so old that she had a Confederate birth certificate. He looked at me and said "Really?" as if I was telling him a weird fact instead of a joke. A high school graduate should know when the Civil War happened and the limits of a human lifespan.

2. I was chatting with a coworker who was a Vietnam veteran. He told that he shook hands with a general and got rifle grease on his hands, and the general just laughed it off. I asked him if it was General Westmoreland. The vet confirmed that it was Westmoreland. Another coworker overhears this, looks at me, and asks "How old are you?" with a confused look on his face.

3. At a party, I was talking about a place that I used to work at. At that location, uranium was rolled into bars for the Manhattan Project, and workers had no idea that these bars were being used to develop the first atomic bombs. A woman asked "But you didn't have anything to do with that, right?"

4. A friend of mine was telling me about a guy in her gaming group. She said that he was in his 50's and had served in World War 2. This is especially egregious because I met her grandfather who raised her and had actually served in the Battle of the Bulge.

Ruthlessness doesn't work

 So I see a lot of posts on Threads where MAGAhadeen are celebrating the destruction of boats. A couple thoughts. 

1. The war on drugs is an expensive mistake. If you actually care about saving addicts from themselves, focus on treatment and harm reduction, not incarceration.

2. Sinking a boat is only justified if that boat shoots at our people. Boats that try to run can be incapacitated by shooting the engine.

3. The only way to tell if a boat is a drug boat or a fishing boat is to board and inspect it. Because any commercially produced boat can carry both drugs and fishing gear. If you think a boat has illegal goods, you can signal it to stop, shoot the engine if it tries to run, arrest the crew, and seize the boat and its cargo.

4. Ruthlessness is a bad strategy in general. Imagine if a future Democratic president issued an executive order that required police to shoot anyone flying a Confederate flag or wearing a swastika. Most of these people cheering for exploding boats might squawk at the idea of 21st century Nazis being shot in the street. Because they already know where that slippery slope is headed: if I say that all fascists should be shot and I get to decide who is a fascist, then I can just say that anyone who says negative things about me is a fascist.

There are real world examples that prove my point. Germans who surrendered to the Soviets could expect to be sent to a gulag and possibly freeze or starve to death. Germans who surrendered to Americans could expect to sent to a camp in the US and get fed and even take correspondence courses for credit with German universities. So of course they fought hardest against the Red Army, and that's a huge reason why the USSR suffered more military casualties than all of the Axis powers combined. So even when you are fighting the most evil regime in history, it still pays to show compassion to men who can't fight back anymore.

My theory on Trump's endgame

One of the most famous line from Game of Thrones is "Tell Cersei I want her to know it was me."

If you haven't watched the show, Lady Olenna knows she's going to die anyway, so she admits to killing King Joffery, the least popular character on the show. This is relevant, because there are things that people do that they have to keep a secret, but still really want to brag about. They want for a time that is right, even if they have to wait for their deathbed.

My theory is that not only is Donald Trump a pedophile, he is proud of it and want to tell everyone about it.

Remember the 80's and 90's? Donald Trump used to. Back then, if you were gay, you often had to hide it, depending on where you live and the people around you. There were states where two men having sex could be charged with sodomy if they got caught. As a straight person, I would speak out against this injustice and people would accuse me of being gay. Other straight people probably felt the same way, but they didn't speak out because they feared risking their reputations and livelihoods. 

One argument against LGBTQ acceptance was that it would lead to a slippery slope: if gay people were accepted by society, why not accept adults who molest kids? Today, most of us believe that what consenting adult do is their own business, but children cannot consent to sexual acts.

But if a pedophile doesn't view his actions as wrong, then he might hope that his lifestyle might gain mainstream acceptance. He might test to see how other people feel about it by dropping hints. For example, he might talk about pardoning another pedophile, like Ghislaine Maxwell, and seeing how people would react to that.

And if people still don't like it, what could they do about it? Donald Trump could take a gun and sex with a little girl on Fifth Avenue and there is nothing we could about it besides impeach him again. Still, we should impeach him again.

When that fascist got fired

 Recently a fascist got fired for something he said on YouTube. I don't want to look up his name, and I don't want to make him even more famous.

Fascism is an ideology for losers. Julius Caesar standardized the calendar. Napoleon spread the metric system throughout Europe. All Hitler and Mussolini did was start and lose a world war.

But unemployment is a common problem for extremists on both the left and the right: employers prefer to hire moderates. It's challenging enough to get Democrats and Republicans to get along at work. Unless you are independently wealthy, maybe you aren't in a position to tell the world what to do.

We should be allowed to talk about suicide on social media

 First of all, I am fine and thank you for asking. I almost died from natural causes this year. Doctors and nurses put in a lot of time and effort to keep me alive, and my family and my insurance company spent more than six figures on my surgery and rehabilitation. I like being alive, like most people.

Suicide is a taboo topic on social media, to the extent that filters are employed that flag people who even use the word "suicide" in a post. On the one hand, this can deter people from advocating suicide, which is still a problem online. On the other hand, it stops people from seeking help, and it stops people from discussing how certain historical figures died.

The real motivation for these social media filters is that the topic of suicide makes people uncomfortable. If you are the type to use social media to share cat photos and pictures of your lunch while on vacation, then maybe Facebook should provide an option where such content is filtered out. But there are people out there who are hurting, and social media can be a resource where they can connect with people who know them and care about them. Maybe they don't feel comfortable calling 988 and talking to strangers. The algorithm should never stand in the way of people getting help.