On the Karl Marx hijack:
Bradford DeLong’s wideranging and very helpful overview of Marx disects his theory of value, a framework mostly tossed aside by Western leftie radicals for the past 50 years. First he dispenses with its substance:
Then he speculates on where Marx went wrong:
“The deeper layer of real reality” bit comes from Hegel.
Or worse, Marxists start claiming that markets themselves are a false consciousness; that prices or even whether an endeavor is profitable or not are simply an artifact of the capitalist system, that would vanish like dew in the morning sun if the workers simply refused to go along with it.
I think Marxists are the economic equivalent of Freemen On The Land.
As for Karl Marx himself, Professor DeLong discusses a number of things he got right in the link.
Not least because the speaker of the line, Dick the Butcher, is one of the unambiguous villains of Henry VI.
Funny, the impression I got from Atlas Shrugged is “libertarianism leads to a utopia where society’s best and brightest can pull their own weight, but only after you first solve for the needs of energy and security by inventing a literal magical perpetual energy machine.”
Minor nitpick to your excellent post: Johnny’s mistake was not firing off a weapon. Rather he was leading a squad of his fellow trainees in a field exercise that was simulated as being at night. He was supposed to use only some kind of night vision device, but was not very good at using it. So he snuck a look at where his squad members were without it. That sneeked look is what got him into trouble.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve read the book, but I’m sure this is what happened in that. Perhaps the movie changed that detail or something.
Anyway, we now return you to your regularly scheduled libertarian/Marxist/Randian/Heinleinian/Steinbeckian discussion/flamewar/whatever.
I think you’re thinking of the movie (I never saw it). I went and checked the plot summary of the novel in Wikipedia, since I don’t have a copy of the book anymore:
If the movie changed that to getting a flogging just for sneaking a peek with the wrong equipment, sounds like another example of them doing everything they could to make it about military fascism.
No, its a takes skill to pull off (something Ayn Rand is sorely lacking IMO) but a good chunk of the greatest pieces of literature are absolutely attempts to extol some philosophy or other while telling an interesting story with engaging characters and imaginative or engaging situations (you could argue its a prerequisite for great literature). Of the top of my head 1984, The Jungle*, Les Misérables and An Inspector Calls are all examples off the top of my head.
On reading the plot summary for Starship Troopers I see that I got the name of the Johnny’s CO wrong; he was Lieutenant Rasczak, not Capt. Rubik. Dangers of relying on memory.
I never saw the movie, so I don’t know what, if anything, they did with this scene.
However, I did dig up my copy and I find we’re both wrong to an extent. Yes, it was about Johnny firing a missile that may have endangered a member of his unit, but that’s not precisely why he got the punishment. The real reason was that the proper procedure for firing that weapon was to use his radar to find the target location. But since he was not good at reading the radar display, he eyeballed it. Now if he’d followed correct procedure and still endangered the troop, all it would mean was that he needed more training. It was the fact that he violated procedures that got him the lashes.
They made it look suggestive of gay sadomasochism.
So you’re basically saying that the best alternative would be just go read a completely different book? I’m okay with that!
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(Full disclosure: I’m a former Randian Objectivist. I got better…)
Here’s the scene in question:
In a nutshell: Rico is serving as squad leader in an (extremely stupid and unsafe) live-fire exercise. One of the other troops complains that his helmet is blocking his vision, and Rico helps him remove it. At that exact moment, another trainee trips and accidentally fires a burst backwards, hitting the helmetless soldier in the head.
And of course, it hits him in the eye, a part of the face not covered by the helmet anyway. Assuming of course, that a helmet would deflect a direct hit in any case.
Still not the best idea to take off your armor in the middle of an exercise, but that death was on the idiots that decided to make this a live fire exercise, not on Rico.
Terrible movie based off an okay book. I was mostly excited to see the movie as I wanted to see the suits, as described in the book, in action. Not having those suits was my largest, but certainly not my only, disappointment in the movie.
If we want to get inside the mind of Heinlein and grok his preferred cultural and governmental structure, I’d say that Stranger in a Strange Land is written with a sort of yearning, rather than the more analytical approach to other systems of civilization explored in his other books.
Yeah. A lot of the movie was about the idea that during the Bug War, signing up to the MI wasn’t quite a suicide mission but it was close. And the lethal risks start immediately in training because the only way to toughen the troops for their future is to sear them with violence.
Experience in other militaries has not born this out as a valid training tactic. But it does make for movies that appeal to teenage boys. Then again, we’ve never had to fight aliens; what works for fighting humans may not work when dealing with aliens.
There are many, many stupid things about that scene, but I think the worse is that they were holding a live fire exercise in the middle of a base. There were other soldiers just walking around in their arc of fire!
Yeah. It reminded me of the horrifically hokey scene in one of the early James Bond / Sean Connery films where the supervillain is showing off the training camp for his faceless minions to some visitor.
We see a walled compound with small squads jogging, rapelling, doing hand-to-hand combat drills, etc., as the supervillain narrates.
And a few goons machine-gunning a fleeing group of men in different uniforms. While the supervillain cavalierly says something about “… and target practice … with live targets of course.”
Pretty darn lame then and really lame now.
And therein lies the problem. The film representation of SST is one of the few instances where I have come to accept that, first impressions as a teenager aside, it really was meant as a work of satire. Honest to god, I totally didn’t get it, even when NPH came out dressed like an SS officer. The director just did too good a job in making fascism look fun and appealing, representing a fascist society as he fascists themselves might allow it to be portrayed.
So… even as I know this is a common way to shrug off or minimize just criticism of bad/idiotic movies… just this once… maybe it was satire?
Atlas Shrugged (the movie, part I—the only part I saw) was so bad I might have sworn it, too, was intended of satire. But I know enough about Rand’s work and her philosophy to understand that that’s not the case. Objectivism really is as bonkers as it seems.
Nope.
No. It really, really was. The film version of SST was satire. Either done too well or not well enough, but satire all the same:
And a look at the director’s other works may be illuminating. Particularly Soldier of Orange, Black Book, and yes, even the original RoboCop.