ProfessorDetective wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 1:01 amAnyway, the best term for me would be a 'Social Democratic Egalitarian'.
(snip for length)
To be clear, and sorry if there's any confusion, I'm not saying that being an egalitarian is bad. I'm saying that bad actors can poison anything. I don't let them define me.
phantom000 wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 4:49 amI haven't read
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and I keep telling myself i will read
Stranger in a Strange Land but i never do.
I have read most of his juvenile stories and i think a lot of his work is a kind of thought experiment. What happens to the legal system when you make contact with alien civilizations? How do you run a business in a world where magic is real? So the Terran Federation is just another thought experiment.
My main complaint with
Starship Troopers is how everyone so certain that there system cannot fail and how it alone is the cause of this perfect world they seem to be living in. It feels less like Heinlein trying to tell a story and more like him getting on a soap box and preaching. Either you just shut up and accept what he is saying no questions asked, or you start arguing with him, and i am very much in the ladder category.
Still, I have to give credit where it is due.
Starship Troopers was the first modern mecha story, which is easily my favorite genre of science fiction. So whatever i say about the book, this did lead to a lot of stuff i actually like, such as
Mobil Suit Gundam and
Battletech.
Yup, his early YA works were very much "one idea spun into a story" (what if you won a spacesuit? What if Lord of the Flies was bullshit?). Starship Troopers was one of his earlier ones where he started spinning multiple ideas into a story. It started out because science fiction authors were making fun of the Navy and military ideals and basically saying "how could anyone be suckered in by that". So he wrote a story to say "this is the ideal world they envision." Along the way it dragged in the evolution of combat on alien planets, the philosophy of how fascism might function (note: it requires an actual endless enemy who really is that much inferior to the 'superior race' - what was it, a million bugs for every human that died?) and quite a few other things.
Heinlein novels only got more complex from there as he started to weave more and more together. Except Friday. Fucking Friday.
Darth Wedgius wrote: ↑Thu Jul 16, 2020 6:21 amI think GreyICE would call that not an example of a white culture because not all whites have it, and many who aren't white have it too.
Close. I'd say it's a summary of middle class white culture in the American Northeast, some of the Midwest, and parts of the rest of the country. Not all cultural elements are unique to a single culture. Many cultural elements are shared between cultures. Also not all cultural elements are bad. Not all cultural elements are good. Not all cultural elements can have moral values attached to them.
You should be aware of the lens of what your culture values and how you view other cultures when you consider those values, but it doesn't mean either one is inherently anything from a moral perspective. It's simply something to keep in mind.
