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I always reflect on this right here when the subject comes up. I first read Starship Troopers as a high schooler in 1999. It impacted me greatly and I took what

I always reflect on this right here when the subject comes up. I first read Starship Troopers as a high schooler in 1999. It impacted me greatly and I took what I wanted to from the book thinking it made me wiser. Upon reflection now 20 years later I think the book is a strong warning against incentivizing civic duty. A strong sense of civic duty and a respect for law must be value enough without reward for a democracy to remain healthy. I am open to the notion that 20 years from now I will think that 2020 me was equally foolish to 1999 me.

jessaustin 6y ago
It has been some decades now, but that warning also escaped me on first reading. I certainly appreciated the film adaptation, which was a bit less subtle...
- logical_proof 6y ago
  “I’m doing my part” - yeah that movie nailed it in a way that I think was subtle the other direction.
- mudita 6y ago
  The film has very little to do with the novel, actually. Verhoeven, the director, hated the book: “I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring … It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book.” The film is basically intended as parody of fashism, while the book is much more positive about the military and an exploration of an alternative society, where everyone has to do voluntary military service before having the right to vote and hold office (later Heinlein claimed that 95% of the Federal service is civil service, but the book itself seems to imply it’s mostly military). Personally I find the book much more interesting than the film. While the film is a parody its message is actually not that complex and in my memory seems to me to boil down to “Fashism is bad, mkay”. In contrast to this, the book is partly deeply problematic, but contains much more original though and interesting world-building with a political system, which is somewhat orthogonal to the established political dimensions of thinking. Which leads to criticism, when people like Verhoeven lazily project it down to the dimensions, they are familiar with. It’s a bit like a weirdtopia instead of an utopia or dystopia: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cWjK3SbRcLkb3gN69/building-weirdtopia https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cWjK3SbRcLkb3gN69/building-w... Personally in my mind I group this book somewhat together with non-fiction book “Shake Hands with the Devil “ by Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire. As a German the thought that you could have pride in being part of a military felt foreign and distant, for example routinely thanking soldiers for their service is still unthinkable for me and these two books in very different ways made me have more empathy with a perspective where being a soldier for a democratic society is something you can be proud of. By the way, somewhat fittingly for the original blog post, the main character in the book is implied to be of Filipino descent (but played by a white in the film).
halostatue 6y ago
Heinlein was serious about the proposal.
- notahacker 6y ago
  Yep. It was written in a fit of patriotic enthusiasm for the Cold War, and Heinlein was still offering defences of the political system two decades later after his own politics had moved on. I do think there's merit in reading books that were utterly serious about their ideas as satirising them though. The conquistador heirs, oil barons and philosopher pirates in Atlas Shrugged make so much more sense as parody of how the 'self-made man' tends to accumulate wealth than in a parable about the ills of not enough capitalism

jessaustin 6y ago

It has been some decades now, but that warning also escaped me on first reading. I certainly appreciated the film adaptation, which was a bit less subtle...

logical_proof 6y ago
“I’m doing my part” - yeah that movie nailed it in a way that I think was subtle the other direction.
mudita 6y ago
The film has very little to do with the novel, actually. Verhoeven, the director, hated the book: “I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring … It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn't read the thing. It's a very right-wing book.” The film is basically intended as parody of fashism, while the book is much more positive about the military and an exploration of an alternative society, where everyone has to do voluntary military service before having the right to vote and hold office (later Heinlein claimed that 95% of the Federal service is civil service, but the book itself seems to imply it’s mostly military). Personally I find the book much more interesting than the film. While the film is a parody its message is actually not that complex and in my memory seems to me to boil down to “Fashism is bad, mkay”. In contrast to this, the book is partly deeply problematic, but contains much more original though and interesting world-building with a political system, which is somewhat orthogonal to the established political dimensions of thinking. Which leads to criticism, when people like Verhoeven lazily project it down to the dimensions, they are familiar with. It’s a bit like a weirdtopia instead of an utopia or dystopia: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cWjK3SbRcLkb3gN69/building-weirdtopia https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cWjK3SbRcLkb3gN69/building-w... Personally in my mind I group this book somewhat together with non-fiction book “Shake Hands with the Devil “ by Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire. As a German the thought that you could have pride in being part of a military felt foreign and distant, for example routinely thanking soldiers for their service is still unthinkable for me and these two books in very different ways made me have more empathy with a perspective where being a soldier for a democratic society is something you can be proud of. By the way, somewhat fittingly for the original blog post, the main character in the book is implied to be of Filipino descent (but played by a white in the film).

halostatue 6y ago

Heinlein was serious about the proposal.

notahacker 6y ago
Yep. It was written in a fit of patriotic enthusiasm for the Cold War, and Heinlein was still offering defences of the political system two decades later after his own politics had moved on. I do think there's merit in reading books that were utterly serious about their ideas as satirising them though. The conquistador heirs, oil barons and philosopher pirates in Atlas Shrugged make so much more sense as parody of how the 'self-made man' tends to accumulate wealth than in a parable about the ills of not enough capitalism