US federal court rules male-only draft unconstitutional - Polidicks

Always love when anyone bring this up, its such an absurdly asinine fart-sniffing argument its not even funny. As if its just that easy to go ahead and move someone else. Just drop everything and live in Sweden!

The lottery for the draft is based off of birthdays, and Selective Service registration is compulsory for all males. Not really sure how racial minorities and poor folks get mulled into that unfairly. The line I wrote about there being no benefit was about there being no benefit to starting another newsworthy war. Military industry will survive just fine by propagating police actions and small interventions to keep their numbers up. You basically setup your own fabricated point int the first sentence. "The state and its people" means the nation and the people who belong to it (ie. the people who are in the nation). Nothing really more to argue against here because you made up your own boogeyman. The draft is the guarantee you speak of. If people do as you say then the draft would never even need to be activated in the first place. It's there as an "oh shit" measure.

As is the case for Trump, the rich and powerful are able to cheat the system and get deferments, whereas poor people have neither the connections nor money necessary to cheat the system.

Nope. The nation and the state aren't really independent concepts, and the two words are often conflated. The nation is a social construct which manufactures a national identity on which to justify the imposition of state rule. And thus, the dominance of the nation-state as societal organization, means that it takes a significant deconstruction of both of those concepts to consider any alternative forms of societal organization (but right now that might be beyond the scope of this discussion). If one rejects the concept of the nation and the concept of the state, but still abides by the state's rules because of a lack of other options, would you still owe anything to the nation-state? because I can tell you right now, if I was forcibly drafted into the military, I would refuse to follow orders, and as a result would probably land in prison. I wouldn't consent to be governened nor to fight for an institution that I reject, and be punished as a result. How is that just, ethical or moral?

Back in vietnam you didn't even need to rich or powerful. Being in college or having an "essential" job could be enough. Which at the time meant that statistically speaking it was bad to be black. That combined with a lack of economic opportunity making black people go to vietnam voluntarily caused a disproportionate number of black people to be in the number at the time. To make it even worse even if who gets drafted was truly random (it wasn't) its never been the case that the roles of the draftees are also determined by draft. Which in vietnam meant that it less likely to avoid active combat if you were black and harder to obtain roles where you would remain safe.

It certainly is outside the scope of the discussion because it is an entirely semantic argument you're making between the words "nation" and "state". If you say something doesn't exist, that doesn't mean it goes away. You live in the country, you take advantage of the benefits that country provides, and you are a member of society within that nation/state/country/entity/whatever term you desire. What you decide to do is your own decision. If you hypothetically get drafted and fail to abide, then your alternative course is likely arrest. You can make that decision, and that has been deemed by whatever jurisdiction you live in to be an adequate alternative.

That's not what I'm saying. The concepts still exist within our collective consciousness and the material effects of state rule are still there, I don't despute that. Instead I reject the premise that the nation-state is inherent to societal organisation or what you might call human nature. This does not amount to an ethical justification. Because as I've tried to get across multiple times now, "living in a country" and "taking advantage of the benefits" is not something I see as a voluntary decision. And by extension, joining the military wouldn't be either. If you basically think it's a-ok to punish people by taking away their freedom for refusing to take part in a conscripted military then I don't know what to say to you. That's just abhorrently authoritarian. But if you can at the very least come up with a better justification then this conversation might have value. Because right now all you've got is "you exist –> get drafted and refuse –> go to prison".