Why does the service have to be military?
The Mormons send their young men overseas to do missionary work.
My understanding is that some countries which have mandatory conscription (such as Switzerland and Israel) offer non-military options, at least for conscientious objectors.
Make them better shots?
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: Do any of you people know who Charles Whitman was? None of you dumbasses knows? Private Cowboy?
Private Cowboy: Sir, he was that guy who shot all those people from that tower in Austin, Texas, sir!
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: That’s affirmative. Charles Whitman killed twelve people from a twenty-eight-story observation tower at the University of Texas from distances up to four hundred yards. Anybody know who Lee Harvey Oswald was? Private Snowball?
Private Snowball: Sir, he shot Kennedy, sir!
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: That’s right, and do you know how far away he was?
Private Snowball: Sir, it was pretty far! From that book suppository building, sir!
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: All right, knock it off! Two hundred and fifty feet! He was two hundred and fifty feet away and shooting at a moving target. Oswald got off three rounds with an old Italian bolt action rifle in only six seconds and scored two hits, including a head shot! Do any of you people know where these individuals learned to shoot? Private Joker?
Private Joker: Sir, in the Marines, sir!
Gunnery Sergeant Hartman: In the Marines! Outstanding! Those individuals showed what one motivated marine and his rifle can do! And before you ladies leave my island, you will be able to do the same thing!
We don’t have any kind of mandatory service here, but there are plenty of labour-intensive jobs young people do in our Public Works department as a job creation and skills programme- clear alien vegetation, rehabilitate wetlands, roadworks, that kind of thing. People get paid but a bit below minimum wage - they’re also housed and fed on a lot of the various programmes.
Seems like the US could use something like that, in forestry management and other disaster prevention infrastructure work.
How does that help the US?
It gets Mormons out of the country?
Yes, and it did, starting under George W. Bush: AmeriCorps. Unfortunately it has been defunded, under, you guessed it, Obama Trump.
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Not Bush, it was President Clinton who established the corporation for public service.
Nancy Mace being her, usual, wonderful self,
The law that got the ball rolling, so to speak, was signed by Bush, but the H one, not the W (my mistake). So it does predate Clinton, though not by much.
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Arguably, they are exporting their problems until the rough edges are knocked off. Might be good for Utah, for other people not so much.
Although the recent events demonstrate that clearly Utah still has problem children prone to violence.
It keeps their young men busy in an extremely ordered environment until they are slightly older men.
We were talking about:
Missionary work isn’t exactly cryogenics, but they are pretty tightly supervised.
You might be thinking of Bush’s Points of light. But it was Clinton’s Americorps legislation he signed in 1993 that built on that earlier effort for volunteer national service.
Way back under President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression we had the Civilian Conservation Corps doing stuff like that.
That doesn’t sound like mission work to me - I see LDS missionaries here, they’re just moving about on the streets, like. Not completely isolated from other people at all. If they did decide to overdose on testosterone or whatever the fear of 16-26 males is, they would still be able to harm others. I thought that JKM’s point was to contain them away from society (My point was do that and get some useful work out of them)?
My understanding is that they work in pairs, and are allowed almost no time to themselves.
I wasn’t making any claims about it being useful, as i was comparing to cryogenics. But i think the Mormons believe that mission work is worth something.
Yep. LDS missionaries are never allowed to be alone during their missions (outside of bathroom breaks). They travel in pairs. They have a list of tasks to accomplish each day and it takes up pretty much all of their time. It’s a very controlled situation with a ton of rules. The communications they’re permitted are tightly controlled. I think the internet is forbidden. If they’re being indoctrinated it’s solely in LDS ideology, they aren’t be radicalized by, oh, Al Qaeda or the KKK. There are numerous former LDS on line who go into considerable detail about their mission work.