Who is this dumb fckn pigeon
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It is fascism though, plain and simple, and there’s literally nothing at all wrong with that.
Who is this dumb fckn pigeon
Sample comment
It is fascism though, plain and simple, and there’s literally nothing at all wrong with that.
Even Heinlein himself wouldn’t stick up for the politics of Starship Troopers, calling it a thought experiment and formally endorsing a different, even more absurd and elitist system (making votes per person unlimited but charging $1000 per vote they wanted to make, in the currency of whatever year he was writing that editorial, probably sometime in the 60s). Like out of all the dumb shit he endorsed not even he was willing to stand by Starship Troopers as anything but “playing with the idea.”
There’s no one ideology that you could identify as “Heinlein’s politics,” they changed drastically over the course of his life and from book to book. Like, the politics of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, or of Stranger in a Strange Land, much less those of For Us, the Living, bear almost no resemblance to those of Starship Troopers.
Idk, Heinlein’s politics pretty much boil down to libertarian crypto-fash with varying degrees of “crypto” and
in the fash, with weird new age stuff getting mixed in towards the end.
Like I’ll grant he was more complicated as a person than that (like he learned Russian and vacationed in the USSR, his writing was an outlet for some sort of otherwise untreated mental health issue and he described himself as “becoming physically ill” when he tried to stop writing, etc), but his politics seem like they mostly fit in one incoherent little trough of political slurry.
Toward the end of his career, this is fairly accurate, but the guy was writing for most of the 20th century. For Us, the Living portrays a substantially socialist utopian society. The short story “Coventry” is basically a parable of why libertarianism can never work. Revolt in 2100 is a specifically antifascist revolt, even more so than The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
I Will Fear No Evil is possibly the most egg shit ever written.
On the other hand, The Roads Must Roll glorifies scabs and demonizes striking workers and the Lazarus Long books are about how great eugenics is.
He was a land of contrasts.