That seems like an abstract point, but maybe... "I had gotten the impression that Germania wasn't so secure as to be able to safely eschew conscription?  So Theologian Agnew's point is probably academic?"

"If public torture is needed to maintain public order because - what, the people would revolt without the threat? - that paints a very unflattering picture of Taldor! On Earth everyone would conclude that such a state is an oppressive tyranny ruling against the wishes and to the great detriment of the population, and expect it to stage a revolution at the first opportunity."

It might seem to make sense to sacrifice some of your human resources if that motivates the others sufficiently, if they work harder and are more loyal because they're afraid of being purged, but humans don't actually respond well to threats and uncertainty. The communists don't have constant internal revolts, but they also don't have productivity nearly as high as nations that place people in a system they are happy to be part of with positive reinforcement and incentives. 

"Germania does practice conscription, because unfortunately no matter how wealthy you are your army has to compete against equally wealthy nations and bigger armies tend to win, all else being equal. At least, until technology is so advanced that most people either can't be trained to use it or are genuinely unnecessary on the battlefield. In peacetime most men were conscripted for a brief duration to prepare them for later reserve service; in wartime conscription quickly became universal, or rather, the army decided who not to enlist because their civilian jobs were more important to the war economy, in a sense conscrpting them into those jobs."

"I wasn't setting conscription policy or rounding up recruits, obviously, but I was in command of mostly conscripted soldiers. Some might have volunteered otherwise, but I'm sure many of them did not start out wanting to be there," because Tanya expects better than that from her men; most of them became crazy battle maniacs during their service but that's just following incentives and the known psychological effects of wartime service in an elite unit.

"....I volunteered for service myself, because I would have been conscripted as a mage once I came of age and I saw no profit in waiting. It was still peacetime then." Tanya was still foolish enough to hope the peace would last, that everyone's rational incentives would win out against Being X's thumb on the scale and whatever it is that makes men wage ruinous war even in the absence of Beings.

"Taldor is indeed not the best managed state, and even at it's height before Aroden's death its politics were fractious and counterproductive.  I think you've described reasonable conditions for conscription to exist under, so I'll move on."

He is starting to get more of a picture of Von Degurechaff.

"...you mentioned you were a man in your first life, were you married or did you otherwise have a romantic partner or partners?"

He'll skip a few if she was not.  She (he?) may have a life and a half of experience, but they still look like a young girl.

That one is at least straightforward: every human society has rape and every society must see it as a problem (and so Tanya has naturally not committed it). ...although Being X also thought not procreating was a sin, so maybe she shouldn't assume? This takes her back to her first life, with different cultural norms from Germania that she has no idea how the locals will judge, but she can still answer promptly.

"I was never married and didn't have serious romantic relationships, or children. I patronized sex workers several times, including in a work-adjacent context... ah, that is, with a group of coworkers in after-hours social events."