are you really saying that professional troops are less effective than untrained conscripts who really don’t want to be there?
Firstly… there is absolutely no rule that says conscripts have to be untrained, just like there’s no rule that says a conscript wouldn’t necessarily want to be there - but that’s irrelevant to the question at hand.
More importantly, yes - a citizen army can be more effective than a professionalized one. Napoleon Bonaparte’s armies proved that to the world to such a degree that military theorists of the time literally thought the professional military obsolete. Of course, the problem with a citizen army is that you have to animate the citizenry with a cause that can actually be justified - kind of a difficult thing to do if you’re waging colonialist wars that only benefit the wealthy half-way around the world. Which is what a professional military is good for - that’s why the US didn’t experience the same level of revolt in the ranks during the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as they did during the war on Vietnam.
but a professional army would have been much more effective
Ukraine did have a professional army at the start of the war - almost all countries do. Not even NATO would be able to defeat Russia with a purely professionalized force - that’s pure fantasy.
“Progressive” is merely another word for reformist… ie, people who will (at best) achieve absolutely nothing except the continuation of “business as usual.”
What meagre labor protections (for instance) the working class in the west has wasn’t won because of reformists… it was won in spite of them by militant and thoroughly radical labor organising.
It’s not my country.
Yep… it’s always “our country” this and “our country” that when they need you to play cannon fodder - and when it’s all over, it just goes straight back to being their country. No different than rich people telling us how we’re “all in this together” during COVID.
Elon Musk - the whole reason he skipped South Africa right before his 18th birthday was to avoid being conscripted into the SADF. That’s the actual reason - him and his family had no problem profiting off Apartheid until it was his turn to actually doing the dirty work of maintaining it. It’s what a lot of rich white kids in SA did.
It’s about ensuring that the children of the wealthy and powerful would die alongside the children of the poor in any conflict.
Bullcrap. The children of the wealthy and powerful always get to have have convenient loopholes to get out of conscription - just look at Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
like building projects and disaster preparedness and relief.
Or, you know… have groups of trained civilians around to repress anything that threatens the precious status quo.
For the most part wars are better fought by paid professionals.
That only goes for dirty wars that you have no good reason to fight.
It has much to recommend it. It creates a shared experience in otherwise fragmented societies, breaking down barriers of class, race and gender.
The US would like to disagree.
It can be used to instil the values of a country in its population.
In other words… nationalist brainwashing.
And it subjects a pampered population
Only a boomer could think this.
“Welfare” is not socialist. It’s something states implemented to prevent socialist ideas from gaining ground - that’s how they ended up with the (so-called) “Scandinavian model.” Like every other country in the west, it was an anti-socialist measure used to prevent working class revolt - unlike actual socialism, it does not dismantle power and privilege but actively protects it.
Social justice isn’t even something that was implemented - power and privilege simply pretends to implement it.
The whole point of social democracy is to borrow concepts and values from socialism
The nazis borrowed the word “socialist,” too - and it doesn’t make the nazis any more socialist than social democracy. And just like the nazis, social democracy borrows nothing from socialism except the word “social.”
Socialism only has one value and one concept - the workers control the means of production. You can’t “borrow” this concept because it’s already free for anyone to take. If you don’t take it, it means you don’t have anything that can be called socialism with a straight face.
Part of it yes, it is a mixed economy.
So the answer is no.
Which means… drumroll… no socialism involved whatsoever.
State-owned corporations
Soooo… no socialism?
all in all within capitalism.
Soooo… still no socialism?
just plain socialism
There is no such thing as “plain socialism” - there is socialism and then there is not-socialism.
Social democracy = nationalism + capitalism. Ie… zero socialism involved in any way whatsoever. There is no such thing as a liberal that will accept the working class taking control of the means of production - on the contrary, liberals would rather ally themselves to fascists than allow socialism to take hold.
Here’s the problem with your argument.
after being raised within some kind of faith
If you had this stuff shoved down your throat as a kid, it’s still there - no matter what you choose to believe in your adult life. It’s very easy to decide what you believe when you’re relaxing on your sofa… but that might not matter when you undergo events that are psychologically traumatic. It’s called a regressive state - a term I actually picked up reading the torture manuals the CIA used to train it’s death squads in Latin America. There’s a very good reason you have people from these “prosperity gospel” scams hanging around drug rehab centers and mental asylums - it’s just so much easier getting their claws into people when they’ve undergone such traumas and are vulnerable. I’ve lived long enough to have experienced it myself and watched others experience it - it’s not pretty. It’s scary, because it implies that we are not as much in control of our own psyches as we’d like to think we are, and that’s perfectly understandable.
But killing every Nazi wouldn’t have killed the ideology.
No… to kill the ideology (of which nazism was merely one expression), you have to dismantle the thing nazism (and other right-wing ideologies) served.
Right-wing ideology exists for one reason and one reason only - to protect the power and privilege of elite establishments. You have to kill that which it serves.
As a non-USian viewing all this from the outside, I’d say blaming the people at the bottom for what the largest gaslighting machine in the history of human civilization has managed to achieve is absolutely masochistic.
Your anti-democratic political establishment is to blame for this.