Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
I think I read Starship Troopers before I saw the movie, because a small scene reveals that Johnny Rico is of Phillipine descent (his mother tongue is Tagalog) and I remember wondering if that would be part of the movie. Samuel R Delany mentions that scene as something that made him felt included in SF.
I was very young when I read it but even then I could read it as proto-fascist (or rather military-authoritarian, a bit like cod-Roman Republic)
When I was young the whole part where they misrecall history just felt like a 1984 bit to me. And I reread it after Helldivers 2 came out, and I noticed a lot of odd things, like how their ideology doesn’t make sense, how for some reason all the smart people seem to die (by being put in dangerous spots), people who disagree with them being setup as strawmen (old ladies, and crazy people basically), and how odd it is that Rico while not being smart (he only qualifies for the infantry after all) is judged as perfect officer material. Which felt to me like they were selecting for stupid people. (the guy not being able to do math properly while their ideology is based on some unspoken math science thing is also funny).
And then there is the whole uplifted scout dogs thing. Who all commit suicide the first time they encounter a bug (which means nobody ever tested that, and they still deployed their whole scout dog force on the planet). And due to some psychic link this also makes their handler useless.
It is just a weird book tbh. The military scenes make little sense (just randomly blow things up) and are just warcrimes. The ideology is dumb and is based on a handwave, and if you read between the lines (which was not intended obv) and make Rico into an unreliable narrator because he isn’t that smart (see also how he never doubts that people who get executed are guilty, the law system fucking up isn’t a thing he thinks about, but he knows the system isn’t fallible, as they complain about how big of a mess the war logistics are) and misses things, there seems to be a whole different thing going on.
Also democracy fell because kids were not spanked enough.
Hope this made it a bit clear why I think you can also read it as a dystopian unreliable narrator being manipulated novel even if it wasn’t intended.
But yeah the space suits are cool.