{"id":26356,"date":"2015-03-07T01:00:25","date_gmt":"2015-03-07T06:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26356"},"modified":"2015-03-02T22:44:03","modified_gmt":"2015-03-03T03:44:03","slug":"qotd-the-true-meaning-of-starship-troopers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/03\/07\/qotd-the-true-meaning-of-starship-troopers\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The &#8220;true meaning&#8221; of <em>Starship Troopers<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The central theme is expanded in many ways and many sub-propositions consistent with or corollary to the main one are shown: (a) that nothing worth having is ever free; it must be paid for; (b) that authority always carries with it responsibility, even if a man tries to refuse it; (c) that &#8220;natural rights&#8221; are not God-given but must be earned; (d) that, despite all H-bombs, biological warfare, push-buttons, ICBMs, or other Buck Rogers miracle weapons, victory in war is never cheap but must be purchased with the blood of heroes; (e) that human beings are not potatoes, not actuarial tables, but that each one is unique and precious &#8230; [sic] and that the strayed lamb is as precious as the ninety-and-nine in the fold; (f) that a man&#8217;s noblest act is to die for his fellow man, that such death is not suicidal, not wasted, but is the highest and most human form of survival behaviour.<\/p>\n<p>Robert A. Heinlein, letter to Alice Dalgliesh 1959-02-03 (but marked &#8220;Never Sent&#8221;), quoted in William H. Patterson Jr., <em>Robert A. Heinlein, In Dialogue with His Century Volume 2: The Man Who Learned Better<\/em>, 2014).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The central theme is expanded in many ways and many sub-propositions consistent with or corollary to the main one are shown: (a) that nothing worth having is ever free; it must be paid for; (b) that authority always carries with it responsibility, even if a man tries to refuse it; (c) that &#8220;natural rights&#8221; are [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,28,5,41],"tags":[576,217,478],"class_list":["post-26356","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-media","category-military","category-quotations","tag-philosophy","tag-rights","tag-robertheinlein"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6R6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26356","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26356"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26356\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26357,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26356\/revisions\/26357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26356"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26356"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26356"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}