> Peter Thiel, who’s written that capitalism is undermined by women being allowed to vote, is an investor in Yarvin’s startup.
I don’t know a lot about futurism, but given the author clearly doesn’t seem to know how to fact check I’m going to assume the time I spent getting to this part was wasted.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Thiel add's an update addressing this point:
> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
I frankly have no idea about what he is trying to say.
Is this an outlook on women constituents affecting American libertarianism?
Reread the passage several times and have to conclude it sounds like lawyer-speak: words generally make sense but are broad enough to encompass anything and open to judicial interpretation.
It definitely sounds like he doesn't believe in democracy and he does believe in some form of libertarianism. I could see how one might argue that once people get an entitlement like Social Security or military procurement programs that have components in forty plus states, it's hard to pare those programs back. On the other hand one might argue something like Social Security for elderly/disabled is what every country with enough development should do, unless one is a libertarian.
"Doesn't believe that voting will fix (the things he's concerned about)" and "thinks voting should be done away with" are two separate things.
Would you be similarly confused by the difference between "doesn't believe that eating peanut butter cups will cure bubonic plague" and "wants to ban peanut butter cups, or take away people's right to eat them"?
While Thiel could have been more clear here, I don't see any inconsistency in his statements.
It may be more confusing if you're one of those people who thinks that government intervention is the One True Solution to every single problem that troubles the human race.
In the original essay, he seems to imply causality (emphasis mine):
> the extension of the franchise to women .... have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
On the other hand, in the update, he seems to suggest that voting doesn't matter. I find that confusing. Why even establish causality in the original essay if there is no such causality as seemingly described in the edit?
> It may be more confusing if you're one of those people who thinks that government intervention is the One True Solution to every single problem that troubles the human race.
It might be helpful to not assume too many things from one sentence :)
> Do you actually believe that every single problem can be solved by voting?
I am not sure why you keep assuming my own personal opinions about voting, democracy, etc when I have not bothered to share any. I have merely pointed out that his update to the essay seems to muddle the point made in the original essay -- and that I am having trouble parsing it.
You parse the update to his essay as "voting doesn't matter for the issues that concern him". I agree -- that is what he seems to be saying in the edit.
How do you parse his original statement: "extension of franchise to women has rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron". Assuming he cares about capitalist democracy (based on the content of the essay), that statement certainly seems to imply that voting did matter -- so much so, that extending franchise to new demographics harmed capitalist democracy (the thing he cared about).
With that context, his update seems more like an attempt to recover from bad PR than anything else.
I stopped when the author wrote that "Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) — wove [his] worlds with far-right, reactionary, and even outright fascistic themes and heroes." This is just not at all an accurate read of Ender's Game. The later books, sure -- i.e. the character in one of the Shadow of the X books who says that the purpose of life is to reproduce and that he himself suppressed his homosexuality to fulfill this purpose (???) -- but Ender's Game's themes, while religious, are downright anti-fascist.
Thiel actually has said the thing that you quote [0] (though perhaps I'm misunderstanding you).
[0] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
Orson Scott Card's speaking outside of the books makes clear he is a far-right reactionary. Some of his books make it clear that he is gay curious and I'm not talking about Ender's Game. I have no idea what to make of this.
He's made some very strong anti-gay statements, which is usually a sign of a repressed homosexual. There was also a lot of homoeroticism in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow, made especially troubling by the fact that those characters were prepubescent children.
"He's made some very strong anti-gay statements, which is usually a sign of a repressed homosexual."
You know, I've heard many people make that claim over the years, but I've never seen any evidence for it (there are anecdotal cases where someone who was extremely anti-gay was later outed as gay, yes, sure, but I've seen no evidence that this is always, or even often, the case).
People can be racists without being "secretly black", and misogynist without being "secretly women", right?
>He's made some very strong anti-gay statements, which is usually a sign of a repressed homosexual.
Or, you know, someone that is just anti-gay (e.g. for religious reasons, conservative tendencies, or whatever).
For one, lumping people who make anti-gay statements as "repressed homosexuals" makes it like there's something wrong with their lives/mental state (as opposed to just with their ideas). There might be, but not for that reason. It deprives them of real agency.
Second, it makes it like it's specifically gay people who are fascists when they are repressed. Why would repressing their desires (something that straight people do as well) make them have a specific trait such as that?
Some people who repressed their desires (sexual straight or gay, career ambitions, love interests, etc) did good (became missionaries helping people, sacrificed themselves to save others, etc), and actual fascists (like, real Nazis, in actual 1933-1945) repressed few of their desires. If anything, they over-indulged in them.
I haven't dug incredibly deeply into Card's political statements outside of his fiction, so unlike my other comments in this thread, I'm shooting from the hip here, but...
My read is that Card (like a few other Mormon SF writers I can think of) is:
1) seriously invested in religion, especially but not exclusively his own religion, and absolutely unwilling to simply dismiss it
2) genuinely interested in social justice
3) struggling to resolve this conflict
This comes out strongly in questions about the tension between collective action and individualist conscience. And it's also pretty tightly-wound in the tension between churchly homophobia on the one hand, and on the other, compassion and empathy and respect for the sovereignty of the individual whenever possible.
I suspect that when one says that Card "is [clearly] a far-right reactionary", you're likely to be oversimplifying to the point of uselessness. Indeed, I suspect that in general, that description is unlikely to tidily fit very many people in the world. But on the other hand, I believe it's useful and accurate to say "some of Card's beliefs seem consonant with a deep connection to a reactionary ideology".
Regarding Card, yeah. I mean, I'd word it differently from you, but I think we agree.
The Ender's Game series collectively are constantly looking at fascistic themes. And these are invariably brought up for the purpose of looking at the drawbacks of that worldview. (Although they're occasionally sympathetic to the virtues of that worldview, too.)
The main way that Card is demonstrably "right-wing" or "reactionary" is that he has an abiding sympathy for the social mores of the religious right -- but even there, he does a lot of second-guessing himself too.
What is anti-facist about Ender's Game? From my perspective, they come out as the massive winners in that book. The caricature of a sociopath even ends up emperor.
I haven't read this, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
BIG ENDER'S GAME SPOILERS AHEAD.
EG as anti-fascist text: Buggers represent a perceived existential threat. Humanity gets together and forms a single government which lives on past the threat. The first criticism of the new world order is in the very beginning, in which you learn that Ender is the son of parents of a persecuted religious minority sect that wants to have more than the allotted number of children (I read this as a libertarian viewpoint). The biggest anti-fascist gut punch comes when you see things from the Queen's perspective: "'The humans did not forgive us,' she thought. 'We will surely die.'" It turns out that the entire coordinated militaristic response was premised on misunderstanding and inability to communicate. Had only the humans had empathetic, loving leaders like Ender, they would have understood the Buggers, and vice versa, and no war; I read the book as being about tragic misunderstanding, and how reasonable responses to those misunderstandings can lead to Xenocide. But I do not think this functions as an argument for a stronger state.
I also don't want to defend Card's out-of-book positions or much of the Shadow series. I just think Ender's Game itself holds up really well as a stand-alone piece of fiction.
My 2 cents, the books are symbolically rich and I appreciate that there are pieces of evidence I've ignored or forgotten about that would put it in a very different light.
The parts of the article you linked that are about how Card is sooooo right-wing, and so pro-facist, are pretty... insubstantial?
I'm attempting to write obliquely to limit spoiler effect.
But yeah, of course #2/#3 is the reason Ender's Game is so massively popular. But also notice that's not what the author thought he'd written (ha ha, so much for genius).
I mean, notice that Card thinks that SftD and Xenocide are the natural sequels to the important themes of Ender's Game, but 99% of his commercial audience (including me at the age when I first read SftD) thought they were unrelated and unrelatable, and preferred the Shadow sequence. But Card took over a decade to go for it and write the first Shadow book, Ender's Shadow (1999, 13 years after SftD, which only took a year after Ender's Game).
Ender's Game is pro-facist the way Robocop is pro-police-state. (And yeah, when I saw Robocop in my teens, I thought it was pro-police-state. sigh.)
I never got the feeling that Card wanted a strong military government, just that he believed it would be inevitable if the world faced a violent alien invasion.
There was a time that "fighting a war" meant that nearly everybody was involved. The US government rationed food during WWII to make sure there was enough for the troops. They rationed other things as well, such as cloth and metals that were needed for uniforms and supplies.
If the world were facing destruction on a larger scale, I have no doubt the military would get whatever people and materials it wanted as quickly as possible, regardless of any official legal limitations. But that doesn't mean I want to live in that world. And, if course, nearly every civilian in "Ender's Game" does seem to resent the military in some way.
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
and his clarification:
It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better. (published at the bottom of that article)
So how do I read that and not read something essentially the same as "capitalism is undermined by women being allowed to vote"? Is it merely that he thinks that the right shouldn't be withdrawn?
Obligatory complaint about the mis-representation of Heinlein.
This is an author who also wrote a (glowing) book about anarcho-syndicalists liberating their prison colony from corporatists colonialists (that'd be MiaHM). Does it get more anti-facist than that? This is also the author who wrote a book about how free-love hippies are so much more correct than Mrs Grundy that physics itself obliges the hippies (I'm thinking of SiaSL).
But even Starship Troopers is a book not about facism, but about the virtues of service to the collective. (Again, other books talk, extensively, about the problems with service to a collective.)
Of course service to a collective is part of a facist state, but it's also part of a democratic state. Well, a healthy one, anyway.
Heinlein's politics were diverse and complicated (and sometimes thoughtful, and sometimes wrongheaded), and attempting to summarize them based on a shallow reading of one of his novels is a mistake no legitimate journalist should make.
Could you please try to start following the guidelines? We ban accounts that won't.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
>Of course service to a collective is part of a facist state, but it's also part of a democratic state. Well, a healthy one, anyway.
In fact "service to the collective" is also part of the first, and the most complete [1] democracy, the ancient Athenian one.
[1] complete in its depth of participation to decision making by those it included, not by it's breath, as it didn't include many categories of people. Then again, poor white males didn't vote in the US until 1820s, blacks until 1869 (and/or more depending on state), and women until 1920. So we can excuse Ancient Greeks for not letting slaves and women vote -- they did let the poor.
"In fact "service to the collective" is also part of the first, and the most complete [1] democracy, the ancient Athenian one."
I'm reminded of the current vogue for claiming that (e.g.) public roads are "socialism", and that if you support public roads you must support socialism.
Yeah, sure. Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible were "socialists". You betcha.
Heinlein's "I Will Fear No Evil" is a mind-bending read on transgenderism.
The quality of this article is just terrible, is the author not aware that Nazi super scientist's new employers after the war weren't corporations but the US government?
>> But even Starship Troopers is a book not about facism, but about the virtues of service to the collective.
Can we please not over-read politics into Starship Troopers' imagined society? It's first and foremost a book about space marines in power armour making war to giant bug-like aliens. There is some political subtext but it mainly serves the purpose of painting a convincing portrait of a future society, with mores that seem weird to uss (public floggings, voting only for the military etc). Or in any case, the desire to add some convincing fluff in an already interesting interstellar action romp, should suffice to explain all the weirdness of the imagined society.
Full disclosure: I've been called a fascist for declaring Starship Troopers one of my favourite Sci-Fi works ever; called that by a guy who played Warhammer 40K like crazy, I might add (you know, the game where a psychic vampire rules a humanity sinking into barbarism and sends forth his genengineered supersoldiers to subjugate the xenos, etc). My other favourite books tend to be Iain M. Banks ones, so not quite the fascist dystopias. Rather.
Sure, I won't over-read into it, I'll just actually read it.
For example, I won't make the mistake you made, of claiming that voting is only for the military. It might be one of your favourite works ever, but you might not have read it very carefully. Exactly zero members of the military get to vote. The franchise is granted to citizens who have finished a term of service, whether in the military or in another branch of public service.
But even the militarism and war-making is absolutely about "service to the collective". It goes on and on about that.
And on top of that, the context of this comment thread is the politics of science fiction. In that context, it's the powered armour and the bugs that are the "convincing fluff in an already interesting" speculative portrait of an alternative to universal-franchise democracy.
>> Exactly zero members of the military get to vote.
Fine, fine, bad turn of phrase- it's like you say, the vote is for the citizens who've finished their service (which is voluntary... except you don't get to vote without it, I think).
Really, I don't see why you need to doubt that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci-Fi works ever or that I read it "carefully". I haven't read it in ten years, at least. Does that sound so uncommon to you? I also haven't read Consider Phlebas in at least that long, so I hardly remember the finer details of it (I seem to remember Horza was hit by a train he derailed...?) and it sure blurs in my mind with other Iain M. Banks stuff- but I do remember very well the effect those books had on me when I read them. And there's few works I remember enjoying that much.
Sheesh. Happy now? What happened to "Assume good faith"? Or not insinuating people haven't read the (article)?
>> In that context, it's the powered armour and the bugs that are the "convincing fluff in an already interesting" speculative portrait of an alternative to universal-franchise democracy.
OK no. Because the book goes all the way off-world, where the war with the bugs takes place and gets down to detailed descriptions of fighting. If the war was not the focus and its purpose was just to create an ambience, it would only be alluded to, never directly described- it would be a McGuffin, a ploy to allow Heinlein to talk about his future society. Instead, the descriptions of the fighting, and the ships and the power(ed) armour and the bugs are detailed and engrossing -and have influenced much SciFi imagery after them because of that (like, hey, Warhammer40K space marines in power armour).
If the war with the bugs was only alluded to, or otherwise did not take center stage, then yeah, I'd agree it was fluff, used to paint a portrait of a (grim) dark future etc. But when it's the main content of most of the book, no. I don't see it your way.
No objection of course to the fact that Heinlein would never just write a pure action romp, without any attempt at painting a fuller picture of the future.
Granted, I didn't read the whole article, but I didn't really get how the author went from "authors write about advanced Nazi societies that are clearly oppressive and evil" to "authors want Nazi societies". Can someone explain? Right now it seems to me that the article has some gaping holes (the average alt-right is a 20-something male working in IT, but so is the average libertarian).
I don't really know, that's what the article claimed. It seems odd to me, but I guess they have their sources? But yeah, over here we usually call them "neo-Nazis", as there's a lot of overlap.
I've only heard that term used to refer to groups in Western Europe. Those groups, incidentally, are very different from what is called the "alt-right" online.
Well for one thing, they alt-right hate the association with Nazis, whereas Neonazi groups in Western Europe are quite open about that connection. They talk and glorify Hitler, (often publicly, which is where a lot of problems are created), profess their hate on Jews, give the Nazi salute, etc. They don't have much of an economic agenda, if any at all, whereas the online groups such as the alt-right are defined by their economic agenda.
Neo-Nazis are also much more like the Nazis were: they are a youth movement. Most of what they do is not all that political. They organize parties. They go to soccer matches. They organize ping pong tournaments. They have biker clubs/gangs. They hang out in cafes. (I'm talking about North West Europe, don't know about Golden Dawn)
The alt right is much more about extreme laissez-faire, associated with the republican party (Tea Party, etc).
You have the same group on the left, sometimes referred to as the alt-left (as in associated with democrats), but the ideology is the same, they're about extreme laissez-faire and small government. Of course this is "very different" from the alt-right. Except, other than the association with the other large US party I can't find any real difference.
The funny thing is that of course anti-immigration attitudes (immigration, the concept of moving countries, as opposed to immigrants, the people), historically, was far more associated with the left than the right. You can understand the reasoning too: if the state is to control worker outcomes, then of course the state must strictly control competition. Otherwise, companies simply undercut eachother by hiring cheap labour overseas. So the State must tightly control the borders, for goods and for people, so as to prevent that from happening. Immigration, which directly affects the most important market that socialists want to control, the labour market, must be very tightly controlled if the government is to succeed.
I would even go so far as to say it makes very little sense, even today, for ostensibly leftist parties to be pro-open-borders. That is in direct opposition to their stated aims and clearly (and strongly) works against their stated aims.
But of course the solution to that conundrum is simple : the entirety of the US is simply extreme-right, extreme laissez-faire. Including Obama, of course, who "nationalized" healthcare into a private sector solution (leftists worldwide went WTF), and spent (sorry "loaned") almost 8 trillion dollars of government money to keep capitalism running.
The author seems to be complaining that this society isn't sufficiently depicted as morally abhorrent. The "alt-right", according to the article's author, is complaining that it's too much depicted as such.
In reality the author is trying to defend the absurd point that Nazis put existing corporate leadership in charge of the economy. This seems to be a veiled attempt to depict both the current administration, full of business leaders, and proposals of libertarians to put Silicon Valley business leadership in charge of the government as Nazis.
This is absurd. Like all socialist totalitarians, Nazis put government bureaucrats in charge of corporations entirely, rather than the other way around. Both left "middle management" in place for a while, but of course soon those bureaucrats realize that positions are the new currency and start trading them, so managers get replaced and it becomes a true government company, like the railways. There are many huge differences between, say, Russia's communism and the Third Reich, but this is not one of them.
Nazis, like all totalitarian socialists, believe that their ideology should totally determine all actions by everyone, everywhere, about everything. As a simple banal illustration: both Nazism and Communism (and other forms of real socialism) required jokes to be approved. Jokes, just used in a conversation between 2 people. You cannot imagine how normal this was: both had government bureaucrats whose job it was to compile acceptable things to say to neighbors and publish this information. They both had government rules about what kinds of hats were acceptable, and you could get arrested for even just getting it wrong.
Scientific efforts by the Nazis were exceptional in many ways, but not how they were funded. The thing people forget about Nazis is that they were incredibly popular, especially amongst the young crowd. People in high schools, people going to universities, people creating new and exiting "startups". That was their base. Conservatives were their big (real) enemy.
Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is the only novel I've read which deeply explores the cultural impact of pervasive social media coupled with machine learning and post-scarcity. I found it far more thought-provoking than the usual "oh lookie robots errywhere".
> But these visions of a Nazi tech utopia aren’t just provocative settings for pop sci-fi. In fact, such science fiction and anti-fascist alternative histories reveal how those who imagine our future are deeply attracted to fascism.
Wait, what?
> Some of science fiction’s most beloved, canonical writers – Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land), Jerry Pournelle (Lucifer’s Hammer) and, more recently, Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) — wove their worlds with far-right, reactionary, and even outright fascistic themes and heroes.
False. It may be true that t he later Ender's Game's book have fascistic themes (I haven't read them), and it might even be true that Card has some fascistic beliefs (I'm not familiar with his personal philosophy). But I have read Heinlein and Pournelle in general, those books in specific, and am familiar with their philosophies, and that's simply an incorrect claim to make about Pournelle, and a bizarrely wrong claim to make about Heinlein.
It's pretty bizarre about Pournelle, too. I recall a hit piece that came out after his death equating his beliefs with the CoDominium government in some of his books, blithely ignoring the fact that the CoDominium were not the good guys in those books (far from it).
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadI don’t know a lot about futurism, but given the author clearly doesn’t seem to know how to fact check I’m going to assume the time I spent getting to this part was wasted.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Thiel add's an update addressing this point:
> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
I frankly have no idea about what he is trying to say.
Reread the passage several times and have to conclude it sounds like lawyer-speak: words generally make sense but are broad enough to encompass anything and open to judicial interpretation.
Would you be similarly confused by the difference between "doesn't believe that eating peanut butter cups will cure bubonic plague" and "wants to ban peanut butter cups, or take away people's right to eat them"?
While Thiel could have been more clear here, I don't see any inconsistency in his statements.
It may be more confusing if you're one of those people who thinks that government intervention is the One True Solution to every single problem that troubles the human race.
> the extension of the franchise to women .... have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
On the other hand, in the update, he seems to suggest that voting doesn't matter. I find that confusing. Why even establish causality in the original essay if there is no such causality as seemingly described in the edit?
> It may be more confusing if you're one of those people who thinks that government intervention is the One True Solution to every single problem that troubles the human race.
It might be helpful to not assume too many things from one sentence :)
He suggests that voting doesn't matter for the issues that concern him.
Do you actually believe that every single problem can be solved by voting? I feel sure that you don't. So what's the issue here?
I am not sure why you keep assuming my own personal opinions about voting, democracy, etc when I have not bothered to share any. I have merely pointed out that his update to the essay seems to muddle the point made in the original essay -- and that I am having trouble parsing it.
You parse the update to his essay as "voting doesn't matter for the issues that concern him". I agree -- that is what he seems to be saying in the edit.
How do you parse his original statement: "extension of franchise to women has rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron". Assuming he cares about capitalist democracy (based on the content of the essay), that statement certainly seems to imply that voting did matter -- so much so, that extending franchise to new demographics harmed capitalist democracy (the thing he cared about).
With that context, his update seems more like an attempt to recover from bad PR than anything else.
Because your (mis)interpretation of Thiel's words isn't consistent with any other interpretation. So what are you saying, then? Anything?
> How do you parse his original statement: "extension of franchise to women has rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron".
That he does not think that his goals can be best served by resorting to democratic governmental means.
Which is not the same thing as him being opposed to democracy.
> so much so, that extending franchise to new demographics harmed capitalist democracy
No, he's not saying that at all. When you say something is an "oxymoron" you're saying that it's a contradiction, not that it's "been harmed".
Also, I don't think Peter Thiel gives two shits about "bad PR".
Thiel actually has said the thing that you quote [0] (though perhaps I'm misunderstanding you).
[0] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio... "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."
You know, I've heard many people make that claim over the years, but I've never seen any evidence for it (there are anecdotal cases where someone who was extremely anti-gay was later outed as gay, yes, sure, but I've seen no evidence that this is always, or even often, the case).
People can be racists without being "secretly black", and misogynist without being "secretly women", right?
Or, you know, someone that is just anti-gay (e.g. for religious reasons, conservative tendencies, or whatever).
For one, lumping people who make anti-gay statements as "repressed homosexuals" makes it like there's something wrong with their lives/mental state (as opposed to just with their ideas). There might be, but not for that reason. It deprives them of real agency.
Second, it makes it like it's specifically gay people who are fascists when they are repressed. Why would repressing their desires (something that straight people do as well) make them have a specific trait such as that?
Some people who repressed their desires (sexual straight or gay, career ambitions, love interests, etc) did good (became missionaries helping people, sacrificed themselves to save others, etc), and actual fascists (like, real Nazis, in actual 1933-1945) repressed few of their desires. If anything, they over-indulged in them.
My read is that Card (like a few other Mormon SF writers I can think of) is:
1) seriously invested in religion, especially but not exclusively his own religion, and absolutely unwilling to simply dismiss it 2) genuinely interested in social justice 3) struggling to resolve this conflict
This comes out strongly in questions about the tension between collective action and individualist conscience. And it's also pretty tightly-wound in the tension between churchly homophobia on the one hand, and on the other, compassion and empathy and respect for the sovereignty of the individual whenever possible.
I suspect that when one says that Card "is [clearly] a far-right reactionary", you're likely to be oversimplifying to the point of uselessness. Indeed, I suspect that in general, that description is unlikely to tidily fit very many people in the world. But on the other hand, I believe it's useful and accurate to say "some of Card's beliefs seem consonant with a deep connection to a reactionary ideology".
The Ender's Game series collectively are constantly looking at fascistic themes. And these are invariably brought up for the purpose of looking at the drawbacks of that worldview. (Although they're occasionally sympathetic to the virtues of that worldview, too.)
The main way that Card is demonstrably "right-wing" or "reactionary" is that he has an abiding sympathy for the social mores of the religious right -- but even there, he does a lot of second-guessing himself too.
But far-right or fascistic? Hah.
Is it though?
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2010/09/12/21238/
EG as anti-fascist text: Buggers represent a perceived existential threat. Humanity gets together and forms a single government which lives on past the threat. The first criticism of the new world order is in the very beginning, in which you learn that Ender is the son of parents of a persecuted religious minority sect that wants to have more than the allotted number of children (I read this as a libertarian viewpoint). The biggest anti-fascist gut punch comes when you see things from the Queen's perspective: "'The humans did not forgive us,' she thought. 'We will surely die.'" It turns out that the entire coordinated militaristic response was premised on misunderstanding and inability to communicate. Had only the humans had empathetic, loving leaders like Ender, they would have understood the Buggers, and vice versa, and no war; I read the book as being about tragic misunderstanding, and how reasonable responses to those misunderstandings can lead to Xenocide. But I do not think this functions as an argument for a stronger state.
I also don't want to defend Card's out-of-book positions or much of the Shadow series. I just think Ender's Game itself holds up really well as a stand-alone piece of fiction.
My 2 cents, the books are symbolically rich and I appreciate that there are pieces of evidence I've ignored or forgotten about that would put it in a very different light.
I'm attempting to write obliquely to limit spoiler effect.
But yeah, of course #2/#3 is the reason Ender's Game is so massively popular. But also notice that's not what the author thought he'd written (ha ha, so much for genius).
I mean, notice that Card thinks that SftD and Xenocide are the natural sequels to the important themes of Ender's Game, but 99% of his commercial audience (including me at the age when I first read SftD) thought they were unrelated and unrelatable, and preferred the Shadow sequence. But Card took over a decade to go for it and write the first Shadow book, Ender's Shadow (1999, 13 years after SftD, which only took a year after Ender's Game).
Ender's Game is pro-facist the way Robocop is pro-police-state. (And yeah, when I saw Robocop in my teens, I thought it was pro-police-state. sigh.)
There was a time that "fighting a war" meant that nearly everybody was involved. The US government rationed food during WWII to make sure there was enough for the troops. They rationed other things as well, such as cloth and metals that were needed for uniforms and supplies.
If the world were facing destruction on a larger scale, I have no doubt the military would get whatever people and materials it wanted as quickly as possible, regardless of any official legal limitations. But that doesn't mean I want to live in that world. And, if course, nearly every civilian in "Ender's Game" does seem to resent the military in some way.
Here's the Thiel quote[1]:
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
and his clarification:
It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better. (published at the bottom of that article)
So how do I read that and not read something essentially the same as "capitalism is undermined by women being allowed to vote"? Is it merely that he thinks that the right shouldn't be withdrawn?
[1] https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...
This is an author who also wrote a (glowing) book about anarcho-syndicalists liberating their prison colony from corporatists colonialists (that'd be MiaHM). Does it get more anti-facist than that? This is also the author who wrote a book about how free-love hippies are so much more correct than Mrs Grundy that physics itself obliges the hippies (I'm thinking of SiaSL).
But even Starship Troopers is a book not about facism, but about the virtues of service to the collective. (Again, other books talk, extensively, about the problems with service to a collective.)
Of course service to a collective is part of a facist state, but it's also part of a democratic state. Well, a healthy one, anyway.
Heinlein's politics were diverse and complicated (and sometimes thoughtful, and sometimes wrongheaded), and attempting to summarize them based on a shallow reading of one of his novels is a mistake no legitimate journalist should make.
The author is clearly one of those who uses "fascist" as a synonym for "a person who isn't a communist", and can thus be safely ignored.
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In fact "service to the collective" is also part of the first, and the most complete [1] democracy, the ancient Athenian one.
[1] complete in its depth of participation to decision making by those it included, not by it's breath, as it didn't include many categories of people. Then again, poor white males didn't vote in the US until 1820s, blacks until 1869 (and/or more depending on state), and women until 1920. So we can excuse Ancient Greeks for not letting slaves and women vote -- they did let the poor.
I'm reminded of the current vogue for claiming that (e.g.) public roads are "socialism", and that if you support public roads you must support socialism.
Yeah, sure. Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible were "socialists". You betcha.
JFK's "ask what you can do for your country" would also sound socialist to these people.
The quality of this article is just terrible, is the author not aware that Nazi super scientist's new employers after the war weren't corporations but the US government?
Can we please not over-read politics into Starship Troopers' imagined society? It's first and foremost a book about space marines in power armour making war to giant bug-like aliens. There is some political subtext but it mainly serves the purpose of painting a convincing portrait of a future society, with mores that seem weird to uss (public floggings, voting only for the military etc). Or in any case, the desire to add some convincing fluff in an already interesting interstellar action romp, should suffice to explain all the weirdness of the imagined society.
Full disclosure: I've been called a fascist for declaring Starship Troopers one of my favourite Sci-Fi works ever; called that by a guy who played Warhammer 40K like crazy, I might add (you know, the game where a psychic vampire rules a humanity sinking into barbarism and sends forth his genengineered supersoldiers to subjugate the xenos, etc). My other favourite books tend to be Iain M. Banks ones, so not quite the fascist dystopias. Rather.
For example, I won't make the mistake you made, of claiming that voting is only for the military. It might be one of your favourite works ever, but you might not have read it very carefully. Exactly zero members of the military get to vote. The franchise is granted to citizens who have finished a term of service, whether in the military or in another branch of public service.
But even the militarism and war-making is absolutely about "service to the collective". It goes on and on about that.
And on top of that, the context of this comment thread is the politics of science fiction. In that context, it's the powered armour and the bugs that are the "convincing fluff in an already interesting" speculative portrait of an alternative to universal-franchise democracy.
Fine, fine, bad turn of phrase- it's like you say, the vote is for the citizens who've finished their service (which is voluntary... except you don't get to vote without it, I think).
Really, I don't see why you need to doubt that Starship Troopers is one of my favourite Sci-Fi works ever or that I read it "carefully". I haven't read it in ten years, at least. Does that sound so uncommon to you? I also haven't read Consider Phlebas in at least that long, so I hardly remember the finer details of it (I seem to remember Horza was hit by a train he derailed...?) and it sure blurs in my mind with other Iain M. Banks stuff- but I do remember very well the effect those books had on me when I read them. And there's few works I remember enjoying that much.
Sheesh. Happy now? What happened to "Assume good faith"? Or not insinuating people haven't read the (article)?
>> In that context, it's the powered armour and the bugs that are the "convincing fluff in an already interesting" speculative portrait of an alternative to universal-franchise democracy.
OK no. Because the book goes all the way off-world, where the war with the bugs takes place and gets down to detailed descriptions of fighting. If the war was not the focus and its purpose was just to create an ambience, it would only be alluded to, never directly described- it would be a McGuffin, a ploy to allow Heinlein to talk about his future society. Instead, the descriptions of the fighting, and the ships and the power(ed) armour and the bugs are detailed and engrossing -and have influenced much SciFi imagery after them because of that (like, hey, Warhammer40K space marines in power armour).
If the war with the bugs was only alluded to, or otherwise did not take center stage, then yeah, I'd agree it was fluff, used to paint a portrait of a (grim) dark future etc. But when it's the main content of most of the book, no. I don't see it your way.
No objection of course to the fact that Heinlein would never just write a pure action romp, without any attempt at painting a fuller picture of the future.
How so? Or is it just because "alt-right" is an internet construct, normal people just call them "far-right"?
Neo-Nazis are also much more like the Nazis were: they are a youth movement. Most of what they do is not all that political. They organize parties. They go to soccer matches. They organize ping pong tournaments. They have biker clubs/gangs. They hang out in cafes. (I'm talking about North West Europe, don't know about Golden Dawn)
The alt right is much more about extreme laissez-faire, associated with the republican party (Tea Party, etc).
You have the same group on the left, sometimes referred to as the alt-left (as in associated with democrats), but the ideology is the same, they're about extreme laissez-faire and small government. Of course this is "very different" from the alt-right. Except, other than the association with the other large US party I can't find any real difference.
The funny thing is that of course anti-immigration attitudes (immigration, the concept of moving countries, as opposed to immigrants, the people), historically, was far more associated with the left than the right. You can understand the reasoning too: if the state is to control worker outcomes, then of course the state must strictly control competition. Otherwise, companies simply undercut eachother by hiring cheap labour overseas. So the State must tightly control the borders, for goods and for people, so as to prevent that from happening. Immigration, which directly affects the most important market that socialists want to control, the labour market, must be very tightly controlled if the government is to succeed.
I would even go so far as to say it makes very little sense, even today, for ostensibly leftist parties to be pro-open-borders. That is in direct opposition to their stated aims and clearly (and strongly) works against their stated aims.
But of course the solution to that conundrum is simple : the entirety of the US is simply extreme-right, extreme laissez-faire. Including Obama, of course, who "nationalized" healthcare into a private sector solution (leftists worldwide went WTF), and spent (sorry "loaned") almost 8 trillion dollars of government money to keep capitalism running.
In reality the author is trying to defend the absurd point that Nazis put existing corporate leadership in charge of the economy. This seems to be a veiled attempt to depict both the current administration, full of business leaders, and proposals of libertarians to put Silicon Valley business leadership in charge of the government as Nazis.
This is absurd. Like all socialist totalitarians, Nazis put government bureaucrats in charge of corporations entirely, rather than the other way around. Both left "middle management" in place for a while, but of course soon those bureaucrats realize that positions are the new currency and start trading them, so managers get replaced and it becomes a true government company, like the railways. There are many huge differences between, say, Russia's communism and the Third Reich, but this is not one of them.
Nazis, like all totalitarian socialists, believe that their ideology should totally determine all actions by everyone, everywhere, about everything. As a simple banal illustration: both Nazism and Communism (and other forms of real socialism) required jokes to be approved. Jokes, just used in a conversation between 2 people. You cannot imagine how normal this was: both had government bureaucrats whose job it was to compile acceptable things to say to neighbors and publish this information. They both had government rules about what kinds of hats were acceptable, and you could get arrested for even just getting it wrong.
Scientific efforts by the Nazis were exceptional in many ways, but not how they were funded. The thing people forget about Nazis is that they were incredibly popular, especially amongst the young crowd. People in high schools, people going to universities, people creating new and exiting "startups". That was their base. Conservatives were their big (real) enemy.
Wait, what?
> Some of science fiction’s most beloved, canonical writers – Robert Heinlein (Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land), Jerry Pournelle (Lucifer’s Hammer) and, more recently, Orson Scott Card (Ender’s Game) — wove their worlds with far-right, reactionary, and even outright fascistic themes and heroes.
False. It may be true that t he later Ender's Game's book have fascistic themes (I haven't read them), and it might even be true that Card has some fascistic beliefs (I'm not familiar with his personal philosophy). But I have read Heinlein and Pournelle in general, those books in specific, and am familiar with their philosophies, and that's simply an incorrect claim to make about Pournelle, and a bizarrely wrong claim to make about Heinlein.
The tech occupation may as well describe an average inhabitant of Seattle.
What is the point of the article? Some techies are fascist / alt-right? And...?