I was out with my wife and some of her coworkers for some cocktails. The only other male there was an English teacher, and as you can guess from his useless degree, he is a flaming liberal. We got into a conversation about how movies that are based on books are largely trash. One of the ones we talked about was Starship Troopers. His point was that the story was about the evils of Capitalism and the dangers of letting a capitalistic system have control of the military. Proving that he doesn’t know who Robert Heinlein is, nor has he actually read any of his work, to include Starship Troopers.
Then he went on to tell me how his favorite author was Steinbeck, with Hemingway and Melville being tied for a close second. Then he went on a 20 minute spiel about how The Great Gatsby was actually just a retelling of Moby Dick, framed in a way to illustrate the crass waste that is Capitalism. Of course he is a fan of those three authors- all three of them are Socialists.
Why is it that Socialists always picture a socialist system in which they are permitted to sit around and talk about poetry and Stalin, and not the real version of socialism where they toil in the fields or labor in a death camp?
12 Comments
Don Curton · August 13, 2023 at 11:27 am
I’d argue that the USA is, by and large, socialist already. What little capitalism left occurs at the fringes where the corporations don’t care to play. They already tax my income somewhere around the 45-50% mark once you include sales tax, property tax, etc. on top of income tax. And that money goes to support idiots like what you just described.
A regular old guy · August 13, 2023 at 12:59 pm
Don, Ditto in spades from the heart of Silicon Valley I savvy 50% taxes to morons who waste it on a galactic scale.
Purcellrebels.pub@gmail.com · August 14, 2023 at 9:17 am
I like Hemingway and Melville and I ain’t no damnsocialist.
I have seen the Starship Troopers movie but have not read the book. IIRC, the society in the movie seems closer to Sparta, arguably a proto-communist society.
WDS · August 13, 2023 at 12:44 pm
I’m curious, did you ask him about what the socialist liberals are remaking the military into?
Some Guy · August 13, 2023 at 1:41 pm
Why does every past life regression idiot believe that they are the reincarnation of Cleopatra, Napoleon, or Ned Stark?
Everyone is the hero in their own story. No one is the reincarnation of some poor Irish bastard who got shipped of to the West Indies to die of sunburn and yellow fever.
it's just Boris · August 13, 2023 at 2:45 pm
I think they picture the idealized version because it’s (a) not what they have in life right now, and (b) if they’re going to be fantasizing about being Someone Of Influence And Importance (I’m thinking the traitor from The Matrix, for instance), they want a pleasant backdrop. There are clearly those who fantasize about controlling and killing others – Twitter illustrates that point quite nicely re what some people are willing to say publicly they want to do to conservatives, for instance. Those aside, I suspect most liberals have even worse of an idea of how things actually work to get that latte into their hands than I do, so, it’s easy to ignore most workers as NPCs who happily cater to the needs of the intellectuals.
The Hairy Ape · August 13, 2023 at 4:49 pm
When will he redistribute his capitalist pig property?
For the good of the collective he can volunteer to be first in the bugs and pods.
You’ll own nothing and like it, comrade.
How times have changed, my junior and senior year English teachers were a former sailor with a beard who let us cuss while reading Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, 1984, Slaughterhouse Five and others, and the dreamiest dreamboat amazon green eyed blonde goddess I have ever seen!
Jester · August 13, 2023 at 6:25 pm
Well mostly because these folks assume they are not the ones destined for the labor you till you die camps somewhere either miserable in heat or cold. That is for the other, not as important, influential or supportive of the regime as they are you see.
Anonymous · August 13, 2023 at 10:00 pm
Why is it that Socialists always picture a socialist system in which they are permitted to sit around and talk about poetry and Stalin, and not the real version of socialism where they toil in the fields or labor in a death camp?
Because you, 100 million “conservative” voters, allow them to promote these lies on mainstream media without being called on them. Pecking order is a thing, for hominids derived from great apes as well as wolves, big cats, and chickens. And you’ve individually decided you should be at the bottom of the pecking order. The law of physics called Darwinism is having its say.
Mitchell · August 14, 2023 at 10:07 am
I went to see Starship Troopers when it came out, having read the book two or three times.
The movie was Hollywood junk at its finest.
No, that is not a compliment.
Reader · August 14, 2023 at 1:23 pm
The rumor is, Verhoven made the Starship Troopers movie as a mockery of the book. Beautiful, dumb people as the characters, make it cartoonish with the funny (to me) TV infomercials, say nothing about the real history lesson that’s found in the book.
Nemo · August 14, 2023 at 4:28 pm
These pretentious so called educated people somehow seem to forget the pogroms, purges and outright slaughter of the intellectuals under Hitler’s Nazi’s, Stalin’s Communists, Mao’s CCP and Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
The next order of business, after outlawing and confiscating citizen’s firearms, is to kill off the intellectuals, especially the teachers and college professors of those societies … every … damn … time.
Comments are closed.