One tied to becoming a full voting citizen. -- Call it a boot camp for the franchise. -- No service, no vote.Heinlein pointed out a few times that he wasn't quite advocating such a system, he was just saying it could be made to work. He definitely had contempt for general conscription, believing that a nation that needed it to defend itself didn't deserve to be defended.Read Starship Troopers by Heinlein.
Military service OR a somewhat longer term in social/community service or no franchise.
Interesting read even with out the bugs.
It's important to note that all the men and women in Iraq today and at Pendleton volunteered before they had any formal military training.
-Eric
I agree with your Starship Troopers comment. I've said for years that such a policy would go a LONG way towards correcting the vast majority of social wrongs in this country.
But it's so uncool, it'll probably never happen...
Interesting read [Starship Troopers by Heinlein] even with out the bugs.See also:
Touch 'Em All: The 'EWWWW!' Factor
[GIANT "camel spiders" menace our troops in Iraq]
TheWBALChannel.com ^ | April 9, 2004 | Larry Frum, Jr., Managing Editor
Posted on 04/10/2004 2:38:36 AM PDT by RonDog
The "EWWW!" Factor
My brother is a member of the United States armed forces. I can't tell you what he does, because I don't think I completely understand it myself -- which is probably best for me.-- snip --However, with all that is going on over in Iraq, he does have a pretty good sense of what some of the personnel are going through over there. His latest e-mail makes me wonder if we here at home really understand.
Take a look at this picture:
This is a camel spider (or rather two of them) -- one of the indigenous creatures in Iraq. The following is from an e-mail my brother sent me with the picture:
The camel spider isn't really a spider, because it is also called a wind scorpion, but it is not a scorpion either. It is related to both the spiders and the scorpions, and it belongs to its own group of animals.
It can be as long as 6 inches across and camel spiders like to live in barren parts of the desert. They don't like oases either, and they feel most at home in the open, uninhabited places of the desert.
Most of the time camel spiders hide in their burrows, coming out only when they're hungry. So when they do come out at night to feed, they are very ferocious and dangerous. A hunting camel spider runs across the desert floor almost at lightning speed, and it is so fast that it is impossible for the human eye to follow...
...One guy said he killed about a dozen of these things because they kept coming into their tent.Ya think?While they knew they weren't poisonous, they still freaked out the soldiers -- especially the new ones...
CLICK HERE for the rest of that thread
Read Starship Troopers by Heinlein.
Military service OR a somewhat longer term in social/community service or no franchise.
Interesting read even with out the bugs.
FYI, see the discussion at the thread here, in particular post #102