blacksmith wrote: "What a novel idea that voting is actually so important that the right to do it should be earned..." The thing is, the people who have fought and struggled and worked their butts off to get to this country and get their franchise will understand this idea. The people who have been given the right of the franchise by virtue of being born here and turning 18 understand it too. They even know why it is a good idea. But accepting it and promoting it means they may not be able to earn their franchise. They will jealously guard their position at all costs, even the cost of the death of our beloved republic.

Blacksmith Heinlein specifically said that you could not under any circumstances be denied the right to earn your vote by service. The specific example, given as an joking aside by the character Johnny Rico, was that a blind person could always be given the job of counting the fuzz on a caterpillar by touch. This was meant as a joke, but Heinlein was underlining the concept that you could NOT be turned down for service. He also had another character there (who was too old and out of condition and had been evacuated from Camp Curie on a stretcher) being encountered later as a rating on a Navy ship. To go back to my earlier post on this subject, in Starship Troopers all schoolchildren were given compulsory instruction/propaganda in 'civics' by a verteran. You must volunteer to dedicate a significant amount of your time to public service of some kind (usually post office or equivalent) before being allowed to vote. That is, only civil servants were allowed to vote, after they had retired or left their jobs. Does anyone on this board know the Leninist definition of the party as the vanguard of the proletarian revolution? Just curious. Heinlein did, and as a matter of fact, this was the book he wrote about the subject.

Perhaps the point being made was that in order to be trusted with the vote an individual must deminstrate that they cared about something other than themselves? If a person has only his/her own self-interest in mind when they vote you end up with a disfunctional system. Bb

Heinlein devoted a fairly big chunk of the book to pointing out a fairly reasonable, and simple, ethical code: 1. Your actions are ethical so long as they bring no harm to another person, physically or emotionally. 2. Loyalty to something larger than yourself, family, town, nation, race (humans, not ethnic group), and a willingness to provide service to that group, is ethical. 3. Service and loyalty to the larger group cannot be ethically compelled, only volunteered. Point number 2 could be considered similar to Marxism, however points 1 and 3 are antithetical to Marxism.

in the book the troopers are power armoured super-soldiers kicking ass with 30 second bombs and the like, in the film they appear to be armed with something like an oversized .30 carbine, it doesnt seem to kill the aliens very well.

Trust the hollywood elite to find the entire book incomprehensible.

mike_golf wrote: "Heinlein....pointing out a fairly reasonable, and simple, ethical code:" "1. Your actions are ethical so long as they bring no harm to another person, physically or emotionally." "2. Loyalty to something larger than yourself, family, town, nation, race (humans, not ethnic group), and a willingness to provide service to that group, is ethical." "3. Service and loyalty to the larger group cannot be ethically compelled, only volunteered." Rebuttal: 1. Wouldn't that make military service inherently unethical since ultimately the military has to be able to break things and hurt people or so convince others of their intent to do so that opponents are compelled against their will or better judgement to comply? Heinlein's heros were never averse to breaking things or hurting people with provokation. His 'code of ethics' were more complicated than 1 would imply. 2. Loyalty to family and local community is the basis of the Mafia and street gangs. I'm am always drawn back to the an episode of Star Trek TNG which coined one of my favorite phrases. "The First Duty is to the Truth." All other loyalties have to be measured against the 'First Duty'. 3. I'll buy that one. Heinlein, in one book or another (I'm not going to go back and read them all) stated that 'duty' could not be imposed, it had to be chosen. Duty imposed was simply another form of servitude.

Blacksmith, I simplified items 1 and 2. In fact, on number 2, Heinlein argued that teenage gangbangers who were loyal to their street gang were actually behaving ethically within the confines of the ethics they had been taught by the larger society around them. Re-read Starship Troopers to find the section I'm talking about. It is in one of the flashbacks to the History & Moral Philosophy classes. As far as number 1 goes, idealistic Libertarians will strongly argue that confrontation and conflict, whether at the personal or national level are immoral and unethical. Heinlein was a pragmatic Libertarian and took the position that sometimes you had to choose the path of least harm or the path of survival, whether that survival was of the individual, the group, the nation or the race. He was a realist and could distinguish between the real world and ideals. He also clearly understood the tension between the ethics of the individual and the ethics of the group.

Blacksmith wrote: "I'm am always drawn back to the an episode of Star Trek TNG" Star Trek, all variants, has invariably proposed a social order and structure akin to idealized Marxism. Since I neither agree with nor believe in Marxism, idealized or not, this has caused me a lot of trouble with enjoying Star Trek. RAH, on the other hand, continuously proposed the least government possible and social structures that emphasized the individual over a compulsory structure. That I have no problem with. This may sound odd coming from a career soldier. But consider this, I chose, of my own free will, to be a soldier. I accepted the sacrifices I would have to make in my personal liberties, again of my own free will. I'm relatively certain that in a culture that had conscription I would not have made those same choices.

I also often marveled at how Star Trek painted the future as a galactic social welfare state where no planet in good standing could wipe its own posterior without a Federation bureaucraft advising them on which cheeck to pull. I'm afraid that would be the influence of hollywood. However, ignoring how the Federation managed to allocate resources without money (cows, shells, ??) the TNG series did manage to do justice to many episodes (maybe because it didn't have Shatner rutting through the universe?). The writers actually explored some of the issues raised. Most TV shows are too shallow for that. I can draw a direct relationship between a rather insightful episode of TNG and my going to grad school. The one called "The First Duty" I referenced before was memorable (otherwise I wouldn't have remembered it <:-O>. It was about a polital witch hunt which the good captain stopped. A takeoff of the poem "The Hangman". Even Marxist governments can produce admirable character