There is literally a long, didactic dialogue between Rico and Dubois illustrating Heinlein’s view that the appropriate way to maintain order was to flog, beat, torture and kill people who broke the law.

So your position is that roughly 75% of members of the U.S. Army are not engaged in “military service.” http://foreignpolicy.com/2012/09/27/no-… (relevant quote “for every service member in a combat or combat-support position, there were more than three service members in non-combat-related positions”). The fact that…

Government enforces its will through routine violence and only people that have “earned the right” to vote by completing a term of military service have any say in said government. Yes, that sounds exceptionally “libertarian.”

Cite please.

Yeah, but the judges gave that 1080 an average score of 9.7 (damn Latvian judge). He’s definitely going to medal in Rhythmic Carnastics.

Three questions.

Elaborate snorkel.

At that height and his likely usage, I’d say 10 years is optimistic for those knees. But hey, NBA owners are still probably richer because of the absurdly overlong season, so fuck this kid and the game, right?

I didn’t say that Vonnegut was anti-military, nor am I anti-military. My point is that Heinlein fetishized the military, at least in Starship Troopers, in a way that is not explained by his simply having been in the Navy. This isn’t some retired Lieutenant filling his stories with needless detail about weaponry or…

How is that inconsistent with what I wrote? Also, as I’ve repeatedly pointed out in the comments, there is no textual evidence that you could satisfy the service requirement with non-military service. Heinlein just threw that out there decades later. Not only is it unsupported by what he actually wrote, it’s actually…

Heinlein’s presentation of the Federation is clearly idealized. I think it is unlikely that any implementation of a similar system would find a large, comfortable civilian class. More likely, you would have a small, aristocratic/oligarchic class of industrialists who benefited from military contracts and government…

That’s an interesting theory except that Vonnegut volunteered, and prior to the outbreak of the war had been in ROTC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonn…

Verhoeven says on the commentary track that he tried to present fascism in the best possible light because he thought that was the most cutting criticism. You’ve got actual world peace, and an actual enemy to fight to justify the insane militarism, at the same time avoiding the uncomfortable problem of killing human…

By the way, compare this write-up from Wikipedia’s description of fascism to the history of the government in Starship Trooper:

Frankly, universal military service is pretty fascist. It’s not sufficient to render a society fascist, nor is it necessary, but it’s one of the things that you would look for in a fascist society. It’s analogous to how interventions in market economies tend to make a state socialist or communist. Antitrust laws, for…

Lack of shoulder-mounted nuclear weaponry and sissy civilian government holding you back are not “weaknesses”.

Yeah, if you read waiting for the punchline, it’s a while in coming. 38 years from publication in coming, give or take.

Step 1 is really the key. The rest of it is optional if you get that right.

Kurt Vonnegut was a combat infantryman with the U.S. Army during WWII and served in the European theater of war (including being captured during the Battle of the Bulge), but somehow managed to love the military quite a bit less than Heinlein. You could say the same about a lot of authors with military backgrounds.

Here’s a paper discussing the textual support: http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrls…