testfactor

Google doesn't seem to find anything with that title when I Google it?

The Ash Tree seems to be some early 1900s story, and Daniel Harms doesn't seem to have anything of that title as far as I can tell. :(

No, it was kind of a standalone type web forum. Greyish background, iirc.

Pretty sure I was linked it from Lemmy, and I don't subscribe to no sleep here.

No, I think that's actually the beauty of this. The OP meme is a right wing meme. A national civil service is a right wing position.

I think there's a way to craft this program in a hugely bipartisan way. You get all the "patriotism, one nation, farms and country" stuff the right wants, and all the "infrastructure improvements, social safety nets, free college" stuff the left wants.

I think there's a real potential to get some solid bipartisanism here.

Fair. I get that. I do think it could be something great, but agree it would be better structured as voluntary with heavy incentives for participating.

That said, to your original point, I doubt the intent was to have mandatory service for recent college graduates. Most systems like this require service immediately after high school. So you wouldn't have a bunch of debt or anything at that point.

I don't know that the torch completely works. I didn't know what it was, read your text, looked back at it, and it still took me 30sec or so to figure it out.

A more stylized torch might work better?

Love it overall though! Absolutely gorgeous. :)

Would you feel differently if people who choose to serve have student debt forgiveness? Like, if the GI Bill covered participants?

I'd be super on board for this. Treat it similarly to the military, where room and board are provided, and they ship you to an underserved part of the country to help.

Especially if we extended the GI Bill to cover participating. Like, do 4 yrs and you get full tuition covered at any public university.

I think it would really promote national unity and help to lift people out of poverty. You'd have people from all over the country working together, bridging a lot of our internal divisions. You'd get people out of their bubbles and echo chambers and have them actually seeing the country.

If we could normalize it, where it's just what people did after highschool, it would give people time to figure their lives out. Remove the pressure of having to choose a career right away. I know so many people who "had to go to college" because that was the next step, but didn't have a clue what they wanted in life, so got useless majors and have dead ended. This would be perfect for people like that.

Plus infrastructure in the US is a joke. And even as the OP implies, farming is a broken business in the US for a number of reasons. There are never enough people working soup kitchens and food pantries, or cleaning up our national forests to prevent forest fires. If we could mobilize our young people en masse, we could make a huge difference in this country.

I'm 1000% on board.

The issue isn't that you're not well informed.

The issue is that, when confronted with being wrong about something you're uninformed about, you double down and act like an ass.

Well, not every metric. I bet the computers generated them way faster, lol. :P

To be clear, harassment and defamation are crimes in the US as well. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that you can harm people with your speech with impunity. It's a prohibition on the government from meddling with political speech, especially that of people who are detractors of the government.

Printing Nazi propaganda isn't illegal in the US.

And I realize this isn't in the US, obviously. But I think that the idea that the government shouldn't be able to ban people from saying things, or compel them to say things, is so baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a member), that it feels wrong in a fundamental moral sense when it happens.

It's the old, "I don't agree with anything that man says, but I'll defend to the death his right to say it," thing.