Would the government system from starship troopers work?

The point of the Starship Troopers system is not exactly to put military veterans into power. The idea is rather that the only people who should be allowed to govern a body politic should be those who first have demonstrated that they would place the welfare of that body over their own. Even give their lives for it if need be. It is mentioned in the book that no matter who you are and what your physical limitations may be, even if you are paraplegic, the state will find some way for you to prove your commitment. If I recall correctly one of the examples given is that you might be used as a guinea pig for experimental medical procedures which might kill you just as well as a bug would in battle. So it's not military rule, the system Heinlein envisions is basically a democracy with a limited franchise. Limited to those who truly have the good of the body politic at heart and have the record to prove it.

It's an interesting concept to be sure. As for whether it would work as intended? Sadly I'm a bit skeptical. It sure sounds nice in theory, as a way to keep those out of office who seek power over the state to make it serve their own egotistical interests. But there is always a chance that this type of person would not be deterred and just take the gamble. Get the right to hold office or die tryin', as it were. You can expect the system of Starship Troopers to work probably about as well as a normal liberal democracy, but in my estimate it remains doubtful if it would actually perform significantly better as Heinlein thinks it would.

>There is a not so obvious issue with allowing military veterans to rule a society

good job explaining the book without ever even having read it. the majority of leaders in the society are not exmilitary and its stated multiple times in the book that only losers with no other path in life and preppy pretend warriors who do two years cleaning toilets and get out ever join the military. also their total man power is extremely small so there arent a lost of slots to fill anyway. the entire military is just a big special forces unit basically

literally the post i responded to above me. the try hard director stated that he didnt even read the book. sure in his weird European way he was trying to make an ironic movie but it didnt really work in my opinion and also it has nothing to do with the book

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This guy gets it. I'm more less in argeement with you but I do admit I really like the concept, especially when we look at what has become of American democracy.

>the entire military is just a big special forces unit basically

to add to this, they are so specialized that they dont even have guns to shoot the bugs. they only jump pack around planting bombs and shit and then extract. each individual works literally miles apart from the next closest soldier and one of the few times one comes face to face with a bug hes forced to punch it with his robot arm since they dont carry firearms at all. one of the main reason this book is associated with military people (i think its on the navys reading list and others) is because it presents an interesting future for how the military may evolve and operate, not because the book says the military should rule society (which it doesnt say at all).

if literally anyone who criticizes the book, ever just read the book they would see that it is critical of the action movie style presentation and image of the military and is actually trying to present an image of necessity and realism

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I don't want to derail this fine thread but that image triggers me so much, precisely because it's so true

The book points out what happens. Humanity is constantly at war with other species.

It's not though, in modern times most farmers around the world are depressed drunks who hate themselves. The exception are people who are basically running a business with a large hired workforce and automation at place. The only way you could have that kind of idealized life would be with the help of government subsidies or some other kind of income.

And in the past your lord would press you dry as much as he could and your life would always depend on the decisions, fortunes and misfortunes of some random guy who is put in charge of you by a hereditary system. So most of the time you would life in poverty only barely hold on. Not to mention the lack of technology especially in the medical field. Most children die during childbirth and a little scratch on your thumb can get infected and kill you.

Is that pic meant to trigger people, is it bait for retards that believe it or is it made by a fucking retard? Maybe all 3?

It also pictures them losing. It's a losing war, hence the desperate alliance with the skinnies and the fact that they are reduced to hit and run tactics. I think Rico has an epiphany once but then he just glosses over it because it does not matter to him and it's over his head.

unironically sounds preferable to what we have now.
inb4 muh facism

You could pick up rocks on some dustbowl planet if that was all you were capable of doing, it was civil conscription

Even with subsidies, I'm talking about EU single farm payments/CAP depression and suicide is rife among small holder farmers

Reminder that even though Rico could vote, pic related was actually pulling the strings, mainly because he was psychic and would sacrifice voters for slight gains.

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>reminder that its a war of necessity and that the bug really are trying to exterminate humans
>reminder that people mix up troopers and enders game all the time and end up thinking the war with the bugs in troopers is some evil government plot or was started by man see brainlets like

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It's essentially a glorified version of Plato's republic, extended to the stars. What I liked about it was instead of, as would be common today, deconstructing the oligarchic-junta of his fictional world, he actually explored it according to the viewpoint of people who actually live in that world. Too many SF authors insert modern values into works that have no innate ontological grasp of such values. Compare a Stranger in a Strange land, Heinlein doesn't force those characters to grasp fascism in the same way he doesn't expect troopers to adopt communal hippy lifestyles.

The movie sequels play a role in that as well.

Wrong. The book openly states that during peacetime, most veterans come from non-combat services. From which you can infer that the system is supposed to work regardless whether society experiences war or peace.

If anything, Ender's Game was the actual righteous war. What would you think about an alien species that attacks you and you narrowly defeat in the upper atmosphere of Earth?

>lmao we didn't know
Yeah Queen Bee, you didn't realize those things attacking you in offensive and defensive patterns are actual intelligent life, sure. Fuck Card.

>It's essentially a glorified version of Plato's republic, extended to the stars.
But it's not, and Heinlein even directly makes fun of Plato's republic as "ant like communism." There are no philosopher kings, there are no actual castes divided by who is suited best for what task, there is no abolition of the family unit, there is no limitation on private property. The only reasons why Starship Troopers has a reputation of advocating for some totalitarian or fascist system are because it focuses on the depiction of military life, and because of the movie that satirized it.

At the time of the book's writing, the USA was contemplating, but not yet completing, a transition to a professional military, and various ideas were passed back and forth as to how such a military could provide sufficient manpower. Despite how we may view it today, books like this provided thought experiments in favor of volunteer military, which is why you haven't been drafted to fight ISIS yet.

ST is a love letter to the men in the army, not the institution itself or the political system backing it. It's a deeply personal work of fiction and not a political parable.

Sure, but that also acknowledges that Heinlein was thinking of the Republic when he wrote it, he just thought he could do better.

im not really sure what set you off but i was just pointing out that in enders game man secretly started the war by mistake. wasnt the bug queen only mistaken during their very first interaction? i thought that after the human "counterattack" both parties understood they were attacking intelligent creatures

anyway the bugs in starship troopers also attacked earth and was a galvanizing point of the war

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how can you satirize a book you never read? i wish this meme would stop

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Because it is missing the negatives of a Catholic/Feudal system. Sure, lots of holidays and belief in the afterlife. But, also heresy and blasphemy laws. Nothing like having your head mounted on a spike for insulting your mother on a Sunday.

On the other hand, being hardcore drunk during the winter months seems like the way to be.

Humanity treated the bugs as intelligent life from the beginning, but it doesn't really matter as long as the species' survival is at stake. If you read EG and nothing else you get the impression the queen is psychically manipulating Ender and it's still hellbent on wiping humanity out. There is absolutely no clue in the book that the bugs aren't violent expansionists, besides a telepathic overlord talking to a deeply troubled kid that feels guilty about xenocide. Completely justified xenocide. It's not like humanity expanded into Bugland and the war started, they were outside Pluto and then tried to destroy Earth.

Yes, and anyone who say otherwise is wrong.
This is a long wall of text that days nothing in the end. People who suffer from ptsd and others mental illness don't stay in institucions like the army, they are send for mental treatment or otherwise put into posicions that wouldent hurt the inner workings of such instirucions.
What I am even reading? Fucking go back to /pol/
This fucking nigga gets it.
This is a nice post. I like your post. Tho I would say I would much more like a limited democracy than a democracy where every retard has the "right" to vote (like such a thing exists)
>. also their total man power is extremely small so there arent a lost of slots to fill anyway. the entire military is just a big special forces unit basically
This is partialy due to the form of warfare they use in the book. The basic soldier in ST is much more especialized than the average soldier now-a-days. This is needed because the power armor they use is their primary method of combat on land and even so, this requires years of training and not everyone is capable of such thing.
>if literally anyone who criticizes the book, ever just read the book they would see that it is critical of the action movie style presentation and image of the military and is actually trying to present an image of necessity and realism
People who criticeze the book usualy read some smartass libtard saying the book is far-right. Heinlein himself said the majority of the letters he recieved were to say shit about the book, rather then real criticism. Is just that some people are retards and hate military because "gunz r evilzz11"
Just like real life than, just with the fact that in real life we need to dela with plebs having the ability to vote based on their feels?
Dis.

You're not wrong, it is a love letter to the men of the army. But it's also a tract on what Heinleing thought the ideal system of governance might look like. A whole chapter is dedicated to nothing but a lesson of political philosophy after all, nevermind these discussions are sprinkled generously throughout the whole book.

He also contrasts his system with the modern democracy of his time, as well as monarchy of ye olden times. Plato is only one reference among many. Which is how it should be. If you are sketching out a political philosophy of your own, it certainly doesn't hurt to be knowledgeable about other thinkers' and people's attempts of solving the question of how to best govern a society.

did Wilhelmite Germany work...

I kinda glossed over those political ramblings and corporal punishment(the fucking twit). The parts about his sergeant and colonel in the Canadian wasteland and interactions, also the marching band are so much more interesting and have this bittersweet tone that got me.

Maybe I worded it poorly, but I stand by my point that Verhoeven essentially created a satire of what he thought was the content of the book based on hearsay and the few pages he did read. As far as I can tell, Verhoeven did believe Heinlein was something of an earnest fascist and responded to it with the wacky fascism of his movie. Either way, the movie has completely distorted the mental image many people have of ST, as is evident in this very thread.

There is not a single militaristic state that ever succeeds. In the end the soldier is a useless drain on your resources and nothing else. Sparta was a depopulated shithole 100 years after their victory against Athens.

It actually did for almost half a century, and if it hadn't lost the war it might have well gone on. But that's kinda irrelevant to the question at hand, since the Kaiserreich was not built on Heinlein's principles in any way.

The things that worked were industrial expansion and Bismarck, not militarism.

Yes, thing's went quite downhill after Bismarck's dismissal and the junkers abandoned his conservatism for romantic militarist illusions.

but sparta did away with its hard core military society over time until there were almost no real spartans left and of course they faded into insignificance because they had no more military strength and had a string of defeats

can you really not link all the most successful empires and societies in history with very strong armies? seems like over expansion, corruption, and large scale immigration is what actually becomes a drain on societies and causes a collapse. along with shifting values and cultures over time and maybe in some cases natural disasters/change in climate/loss of farmland etc

hard to think of an example where a societies military was such a drain it caused a collapse

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You might as well argue the police is a useless drain on ressources. Sure would be great if we all lived in high trust societies where everyone respects the law voluntarily and we don't need to waste taxes on shamus. But the fact of the matter is that you simply cannot do without security forces and a military to safeguard peace and order and your geopolitical interests.

I should have made it clear I'm talking about modernity. Sparta had one advantage over other Greek states: trained units. Not much better in quality, but just enough to make a difference. When other cities started training their hoplites, Sparta couldn't compete: it takes a lifetime to train a Spartiate but only one year for a Theban. In the end it was a retarded model that can not compete with an endlessly replenishing opposing force.

I said militaristic, as in Warsaw Pact or North Korea, where a bloated military ended up fucking the economy. I completely agree we can't all be Costa Rica, unfortunately.

costa rica just has a large militarized police. how much of a retarded brainlet do you have to be to belive the >no military meme? it just has no military in name only

>implying the police can't be a drain on resources

I guess I just didn't dig deep enough and took it at face value for some reason.

Arguably it wasn't the military that fucked over the Warsaw Pact or the Norks, it was/is their retarded communist economic policies and the rampant corruption. The USSR also didn't really have any other option than to go for militarism in a world where most other nations were hostile to its commitment to communist ideology. The US were never really shy about trying to overthrow communist regimes wherever possible.
The Norks are an interesting case in that even with their huge military, on the face of it it's essentially pointless since they probably could not win a war without China's backing anyway. The Nork military is more important as a means of keeping the populace in line and to give them one thing to take pride in, rather than to actually defend the country or project power. But one should keep in mind that a lot of Nork soldiers are usually busy tilling the fields instead of doing any soldiering, which makes it complicated to estimate how much of a drain the military really is. And as with the USSR, the root problem is the completely fucked up economic policy and blatant corruption and not the military per se. (Anecdotally, the Kim regime has been hit hardest by the embargo of luxury goods, because what's the point of being a mad communist dictator if you can't abuse your position to enjoy the finer things in life?)

>Arguably it wasn't the military that fucked over the Warsaw Pact or the Norks, it was/is their retarded communist economic policies and the rampant corruption. The USSR also didn't really have any other option than to go for militarism in a world where most other nations were hostile to its commitment to communist ideology. The US were never really shy about trying to overthrow communist regimes wherever possible.

No one forced the Soviets to poorly manage their food supply, while being one of the world's leading exporter of cereal grains.

No one forced the Soviets to ignore demand for consumer goods like cars, appliances and housing.

No one forced the Soviets to build massive apartment blocks with too few public toilets instead of in-unit restrooms.

No one forced the Soviet system to be hostile to political plurity, or to fall apart as soon as a second party was legally allowed to exist.

These were not mistakes. They were the intetion of the system built. The problem was people weren't always onboard with the heartless decisions being made on their behalf.

Yes, communist policies are shit. The point is that it's those policies which actually brought down the Soviets, not their militarism. You can be militaristic and still do fine. The modern day US is infamous for its immense military expenditures which eat up a very seizable percentage of GDP, but it's still a successful state despite asserting a militaristic state shouldn't be able to.

>US military primarily consists of minorities now
I'd avoid at all costs