I Executed The Demon Lord With One Flawless Strike And After A Brief Power Struggle The New Demon Government Is Substantially More Committed To The War Because Of Some Reason I Don't Know
I Successfully Overthrew The Demon Lord And Instituted Demon Democracy But They Voted For A Commie So The CIA Not Some Fantasy Equivalent The Actual CIA Who Have Known About Magic And Alternate Realms The Whole Damn Time But Won't Just Unisekai Me Launched A Counter Coup And That's When Things Really Went To Shit
Someone somewhere is the best in the world at sucking dick and it's meaningless. They aren't famous. There's no prize. It's not a competition. None of us are competitors. You don't have anything to prove. All that matters is that you keep sucking. Maybe we can even suck on it together.
Starting to think all the backlash to the idea of the trolley problem is just people trying to hide the fact that, deep down, they know they would be too scared to pull the lever.
I suppose one of the advantages I've gained from having been in the military is that I went from a suspicion I would have the conviction to make those kinds of calls, an absolute certainty that I do have it. I've held lives in my hands, but thankfully I rose to my training and my convictions. I chose the best of the options I had available to me at the time.
There is nothing shameful about being too afraid of making the decision, in my view. But yeah, it's cowardice to project your anxiety by claiming the philosophical quandary itself is meaningless.
No reason to wonder. A ton of people openly bragged about how morally pure they were for not pulling the lever in 2024. They just hate it when you contextualize it like that and insist they were taking a third option to sound less terrible when their actions are 1:1 compared to the thought experiment.
If anything, the reason I reject it is because I consider the thought experiment ITSELF to be cowardly.
All human lives are worth the same amount, and any LOSS of human life is as large a tragedy as any other amount of lost human life. You aren't doing a GOOD thing by condemning one person to die to save four more, you're not even doing a BETTER thing. It might be the more valuable thing in a coldly utilitarian point of view, but from my moral stance death is death. You don't get to compare and contrast your way out of that.
People hate the trolley problem because it is inherent to the problem that choosing not to act is an active choice. That's why they reject the problem itself rather than making an argument for choosing to not pull the lever. They aren't afraid to pull the lever- they're afraid to admit that their priority is keeping their own hands clean.
You can tell by the "well I'M too moral and pure to think killing one person to save five is good - ". If that person had engaged with the experiment honestly they'd know that it's not ABOUT trying to establish one course as the moral one. It's not about being able to, as @darkladynyara says, come out with your hands clean; you won't. It's about making you consider what you should and would do when all the choices available are bad ones.
I'm sure that's true, but something tells me googling "nun tied up by other nuns" "hot wax" "confessing sins" will likely get what you might call rather un-academic results
My copy of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers proudly declares it "the controversial classic of military adventure." Military there is plenty, adventure not so much, but of course the real eye grabber is the controversy, which has mired the novel since its release. Is the futuristic sci-fi society Heinlein depicts fascist? Director Paul Verhoeven, who experienced the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands as a child, sure thought so when he adapted the book into a 1997 film; openly condemnatory of the novel in interviews, he framed shots to mimic Leni Riefenstahl and dressed Neil Patrick Harris in Gestapo uniform to make his point clear.
Verhoeven's film is itself one of the most fascinating Hollywood blockbusters ever made thanks to the satirical gloss it places on the source material, but I intend here to instead focus on the novel itself. I also don't intend to answer whether Starship Troopers is fascist, or libertarian, or some other offshoot (racially integrated fascism, maybe). Instead, I have one really pressing question:
Does the military in Heinlein's military society actually function at all?
Heinlein served in the military—during peacetime. Specifically, he served in the US Navy from 1929 to 1934, when he was discharged for health reasons. Prior to serving, he attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis starting in 1925. Taken altogether, this term of service is dominated by the process of training to become a soldier, and this experience is reflected in Starship Troopers by almost exactly half of the book being dedicated to boot camp rather than actual combat. In fact, there are precious few combat scenes in this tale of supposed "military adventure," limited to:
A routine raid at the beginning of the novel where the hero spends most of his time lobbing bombs at civilian infrastructure
A brief and confused depiction of "Operation Bughouse," an attempt by the humans to invade and capture the Bug home planet that immediately goes off the rails and ends in disaster
A detailed depiction of "Operation Royalty," in which the hero establishes a perimeter without resistance, manages troop reconnaissance, and finally goes to fight some Bugs in their tunnels only for a piece of debris to fall and knock him unconscious (the mission is over when he wakes up)
It's a strange absence of military action in a novel otherwise so committed to detailing the realistic minutiae of day-to-day military life, though a reasonable omission for an author who never saw any action himself.
However, Heinlein's personal understanding of the military from an entirely peacetime lens—studying, drilling, training—skews his ability to understand what a military actually does.
This confusion is most obvious in the depiction of the main branch of the military described in the story, the Mobile Infantry (MI for short). The MI are simultaneously framed as disposable grunts used mainly as cannon fodder and highly trained elites who perform special missions with unparalleled finesse. On the one hand, they fight in power armor, which protagonist Johnny Rico describes as intuitively easy to use, compensating for all deficiencies in strength and speed with "negative feedback," requiring only a few days of training at most to get the hang of (and that training mostly dedicated to using its radio circuits effectively), while able to pack firepower as devastating as portable atomic bombs. In Operation Bughouse, the MI is deployed en masse for (attempted) shock and awe tactics; while their mass annihilation is seen as tragic, it's also par for the course throughout the rest of the story. The low survival rate of MI troopers is constantly mentioned, any named character has a good chance of offhandedly dying in a paragraph summary at any given time, and even officers (who always go out onto the field with their men) are said to "buy it" in droves—one line mentions that officers die at a higher rate than privates, because they are always the first to make their orbital drops onto a planet.
On the other hand, despite this disposability, the MI is extremely choosy about who it lets in. Rico's boot camp starts with 2,000 hopefuls and ends with under 200; everyone else is simply sent home, deemed not good enough to be in the military at all. And this in a military branch that exclusively fights in power armor, which removes the physical limitations of elite combat. The training to become an officer is even more demanding, despite the fact that officers drop like flies and Rico claims there are never enough officers to enable a squad to operate at optimal efficiency. All of this is on top of the fact that even making it to boot camp is a struggle; the military actively uses its most mangled recruiters to dissuade as many people as possible from signing up, and once they do sign up the recruiter is liable to flunk them from joining any branch except as a guinea pig for weapons testing. This is a military that only wants the best of the best, the physical and intellectual elite, which it proceeds to train for years just so they can die a few minutes into their first Normandy Beach-like drop.
And while fighting an existential threat that is truly built on disposable fodder. As Rico explains: "Every time we killed a thousand bugs at the cost of one MI it was a net victory for the Bugs." This comparison is fundamentally illogical; if the military wants to kill Bugs, the Navy can nuke a planet from orbit and eradicate all life on it. The logistics of killing shouldn't be a factor for the MI, whose military successes as depicted in the story are performing state-sponsored terrorism (blowing up that civilian infrastructure during the raid is used as an alternative to glassing the planet because the goal is to terrorize them into defecting from the Bugs) and capturing a live specimen of a Brain Bug so the military can understand it better. Why does it matter how many Bugs are killed per MI, then? Why are the MI used like fodder when planet glassing exists?
Of course, everything in Starship Troopers is filtered through the perspective of its protagonist, Johnny Rico. And Rico is confused. He is confused about how he conceptualizes himself as a soldier. Sometimes he describes himself as a "foot slogger," sometimes as a "scalpel." Of course, Rico doesn't know anything, understand anything. He doesn't know why he's fighting. Is it to earn the right to vote in this society where only veterans can vote? He thinks so at first, then later decides he doesn't actually care about voting. Despite all his Moral Philosophy lecturers telling him that the current government is "scientifically moral" because it is founded on its members achieving self-sacrificing devotion to the highest possible cause (humanity as a whole), Rico seems to have no real interest in humanity and refers to civilians back on Earth dismissively the few times he does refer to them. His devotion is only to his unit. When he learns his mother died, "smeared" when the Bugs hit Buenos Aires, it screws him up a little. His lieutenant asks him if he wants some time off; Rico says no, preferring to "wait until the outfit all took R&R together." He continues:
I'm glad I did it that way, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been along when the Lieutenant bought it . . . and that would have been just too much to be borne.
He's able to bear not being there for his mother's death. The implication is that his lieutenant, his squad, is more important.
This flies in the face of the lectures on morality littered throughout the story. In the same lecture about achieving self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity, the instructor Dubois discusses the "juvenile delinquents" of the 20th century. Street gangs, he means. Dubois claims these delinquents were morally undeveloped because they had loyalty only to the unit of their gang, rather than to society, the nation, the world... yet isn't Rico himself only really loyal to his "gang," his military unit? Is this "scientifically moral" society not simply sublimating the exact "immoral" impulses of the street gang into its own disposable tools?
That contradiction points to the real reason why Heinlein's military is so nonsensical. Despite officers being hard to come by, despite the MI being chronically understaffed, officers drop first -- to boost the morale of the troops who jump after them. It's the romantic notion of the general who leads from the front, which flies in the face of even basic military strategy (it's bad, actually, when the chain of command gets disrupted and your best men die first), but which feels virtuous, which hearkens to heroic ballads of soldiers past (ballads Heinlein loves and quotes liberally throughout the story). Hence too the confusion about what the MI even is: it is whatever it needs to be to feel pride about itself at any given time, whether that be via expression of elite soldiering, when the MI is doing elite tasks with finesse, or the beautiful expression of noble sacrifice, when the MI is mowed down as fodder.
(As an aside: Despite how highly Heinlein esteems sacrificing one's life for one's country, he manages to mention as one of the positives of his ideal society that taxes are low. Sacrificing one's money for one's country, I suppose, is a bridge too far.)
Heinlein's vision of the military is one seen by a man in perpetual training, never in combat. A man who served safely between the two greatest wars humanity ever fought, who got to watch both wars from the sidelines. A military that can always be the ideal it wishes it was, righteous and noble, and never has to butt up against the reality of what it becomes when its true function is inevitably brought to bear.
Verhoeven's adaptation does not really critique fascism. There is no explicit commentary on Heinlein's society within the film, only implicit commentary via the visual connection to the Nazis. Verhoeven assumes the audience already considers fascism loathsome, and doesn't bother explaining why that is. In doing so, Verhoeven's adaptation becomes much more concerned with critiquing propaganda; the way an ideology can be implanted in someone, transforming them into a willing soldier for a cause. In doing so, Verhoeven much more directly strikes at the heart of what Starship Troopers the novel is really obsessed with. Is Heinlein's proposed society good, or even functional? Like all proposed societies, Heinlein claims it will be both good and functional because it will be run exclusively by good people (military veterans). At its base level, it's merely another shade of the theoretical "benevolent dictatorship," only Heinlein is convinced veterans must necessarily be benevolent. (As with all these proposed benevolent dictatorships, nobody ever stops to ask whether the benevolent dictator is competent too.) Heinlein has wholly bought into the narrative of the military, and prioritizes that narrative over the reality of how the military functions. Starship Troopers is, for all its dry logistical minutiae, simply a story where the man Heinlein wishes he was stands on top.
Before Starship Troopers, I read a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, an author who was actually a fascist, or at least a Nazi collaborator in occupied France. This novel, the semi-autobiographical Journey to the End of the Night, details Céline's experience in World War I, a war Heinlein only ever understood from a distance. Céline recounts being caught up in a sudden rush of patriotic fervor to enlist, only to realize in the trenches the utter horror of war, the depravity and the insanity of it, and to immediately do anything in his power to escape it. Despite this, he was wounded—wounded heroically even—and received the medaille militaire, an award that would later save him from serious prosecution after his much less patriotic activities during WWII.
Céline looked upon the medal as a joke, the war a joke, all of it a joke. He would despise war thereafter, he would despise governments, he would despise all authority. In his cynical writings he skews anarchist, if not merely nihilist. Yet he wound up carrying water for the Nazis, producing propaganda for them that even the Nazis at times found too extreme to print. Why? The reason is simple.
Céline really, really, really hated Jews.
These two novels by two supposed fascists could not be more dissimilar. Celine and Heinlein would despise each other, are in many regards utterly ideologically opposed. I suppose you can discover in this contradiction the mercurial nature of fascism, which seems to be any kind of radical right-wingism at any time. Heinlein reveals that his protagonist Johnny Rico is Filipino on almost the final page of the book, as though it's a twist, similar to the twist Verhoeven pulls when NPH marches into frame in full Gestapo regalia during the film's climax. Aha, Verhoeven seems to say, it was fascist all along—and you didn't realize! Aha, Heinlein seems to say, it wasn't fascist (or at least racist) all along—and you didn't realize!
In the end, though, Heinlein was an author of speculative fiction. He existed only in theory, only in the mind, only in the space of narrative. For him, the military—war itself—was a narrative. Céline and Verhoeven lived through war, and for better or worse that experience informed their art. Heinlein could write about war the way he did only because war meant nothing to him.
#that is a man who A: has tripped over his sword before and been laughed at by EVERY ELF IN RIVENDELL and is NOT going to do it again#and B: knows that he has more leg than anyone else in the room and is GOING TO USE IT BY GODS#he is COVERING GROUND with every step#he got that moniker of strider through HARD HONEST WORK (and very very big steps)#aragorn#lotr movies#viggo mortensen
#So basically. He runs like an actual real person would over uneven ground 😂#The Hollywood Run is pretty to watch sure but also takes place on a paved surface usually#There is no way to look dignified whilst running across lumpy bumpy ground down across a hill. Unless one is an actual gazelle#thankyou Mr. Viggo for that Real Human rep (saving @jonairadreaming's excellent tags because everyone who has ever tried running down an incline over uneven, possibly shifting, ground knows you try to get down there as fast as possible with the least amount of time of foot actually touching the ground and constantly being prepared to shift your weight to keep your balance. By the time the stones actually shift from your weight you already want to be two steps away)
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