War Handwavium

“Old Man’s War” novel

This is the War Handwavium score for “Old Man’s War”, a novel by John Scalzi.

Score: +324 points

WARNING SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!!

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What Kind of Story?
—–

“Old Man’s War” is often compared to Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers”. The author, John Scalzi, in fact acknowledges and thanks Mr. Heinlein at the end of the book as the last acknowledgement in the book. Having just read both novels for the first time and within a short time of each other, I’m not exactly sure they’re really the same kind of story.

I’ve been trying to figure out what kind of story “Old Man’s War” is. I couldn’t wrap my head around it so I listed out each chapter and what happens. This is what it looks like:

Part I
Chapter 1, Perry visits wife’s grave, signs up with CDF
Chapter 2, space elevator
Chapter 3, On the station
Chapter 4, exam, meet clone
Chapter 5, transfer to new body
Chapter 6, sex, sex, sex. 3/4 of you will be dead in 10 years
Part II
Chapter 7, Bootcamp, meet Drill Instructor
Chapter 8, Bootcamp, dry fire exercise
Chapter 9, Battle the Consu
Chapter 10, Meet former diplomat, Meet Whaidans. Diplomacy fails.
Chapter 11, The horror of war is OK once you realize how brutal humans are
Chapter 12, CDF tries to take back Coral, entire fleet, 90,000 people, wiped out (except Perry)
Part III
Chapter 13, Perry talks about Jane, his wife.
Chapter 14, Perry meets Jane, his wife. She throws him against a wall
Chapter 15, Perry trains with Special Forces, talks with Jane, his wife.
Chapter 16, CDF delegates fight Consu in ceremony to ask questions
Chapter 17, CDF fight the Rraery on Coral destroy Skip detector
Chapter 18, Perry promoted to Captain, gets postcard from Jane, his wife.

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A Love Story?
—–

This is going to sound weird, but I think “Old Man’s War” is actually a love story, with a military, hard-sf backdrop. The reason I say that is because the story is defined by where the main character evolves. And the main character, John Perry, doesn’t evolve in the military. Quite a lot like the main character in “Starship Troopers”, Perry’s military trajectory is linear. There is no three act play with Perry’s military career.

But there is a three-act play with Perry’s relationship with his wife, Kathy. It starts out with a person, place, and problem. Perry 75 years old, at his wife’s grave, missing her and deciding to never come back because its too painful. Act I is saying goodbye, leaving the cemetery, then leaving Earth, then leaving his old body behind. Act II ends with Perry meeting the clone of his wife, a woman named Jane. Act III spends much of its time with Perry pursuing Jane and trying to get to know her and Jane trying to get to know about Kathy’s life. Act III ends with Jane sending Perry a postcard saying, in effect, lets plan on living happily ever after when we get out of the military.

There is another three-act play with the military, but the “character” that goes through that it the CDF military as a whole. They’re fighting aliens, they start winning. Then they get wiped out. Then they come back and win the day. But Perry doesn’t really follow the three-act play structure from a military standpoint. His progress through the military is fairly linear. He starts out as a private, gets promoted, gets promoted, gets promoted, the end.

Perry does go through the three-act play structure with his body. He starts out getting a brand new supercharged body. Act II has him nearly die in battle as his body is severely damaged. Act III has him come back and even be the first “born” person to serve with the Ghost Brigade special forces. But a body is just a special effect.

And readers don’t “care” about CDF as an organization.

So, it seems that “Old Man’s War” is a love story about Perry, coming to terms with his wife’s death, then meeting his cloned wife, then his cloned wife wants to live happily ever after with Perry, which seems to be the one thing that Perry consistently wants throughout the story, and finally gets in the last chapter.

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Starship Troopers Influence
—–

Even though its a love story, “Old Man’s War” clearly is heavily influenced by “Starship Troopers”.

Heinlein’s world denies voting rights to all but those who served in the miltary. Scalzi’s world has an earth where everyone gets to vote, but the CDF denies people of earth access to their technology and other colonial worlds unless they sign their life over to CDF. Literally sign their life over. People are legally declared dead once they take them in.

At first, I thought CDF was a government army, but then it became clear that CDF is not under any civilian authority. They answer to no one but themselves. So then I thought maybe they were some sort of private military corporation (PMC) like Blackwater (now called Xe). But they don’t seem to use their monopoly for monetary advantage. They could be selling all sorts of stuff to people of Earth, but they just don’t care about money. And they don’t really care about Earth people that much either. The technology CDF has would save, quite literally, billions of lives over just a few years, but they withold it.

Why?

Well, my guess is that part of the reason is it solves the problem of Caesar’s Palmtop. If Earth had the technology that the CDF had, it wouldn’t look anything like the earth we have now. But the Earth we see in “Old Man’s War” is very, very similar to today’s Earth. And the advantage to that is it gives a familiar place to start the reader at. Once we get introduced to a sleepy little town in Ohio where Perry lives, we get more and more serious “out of whack events”, up the space elevator, to space stations with artificial gravity, to starships with Skip drives, to total body replacement. Boom. Out. Of. Whack.

The other reason might just be that Scalzi acknowledged Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” as a heavy influence, and while Heinlein’s world was downright fascist, Scalzi’s world is at least severely libertarian. The CDF has basically “Gone Galt” on the world. When a government tries to regulate them, the CDF just leaves, the epitome of “going Galt”. They refuse any form of restriction or regulation. They refuse to reveal what happens to humans once they leave Earth. They have a complete and total monopoly over Earth and pretty much over all human colonies. And yet they’re not interested in power or money. They do not abuse their monopoly to gain themselves power or money. They are, in essence, a benevolent dictator who is only interested in their own complete and total freedom.

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A Libertarian Utopia
—–

The CDF is portrayed as an almost near-ideal of a libertarian utopia. Complete power. Complete freedom. Zero government interference. Interactions are limited strictly to contractual interactions. And magically, no abuse of power. And more important for libertarians to sustain the fantasy, all the John Galts leave Earth, and Earth is left in the dust. Earth is unable to replicate *any* of the technology that the CDF has.

This is extremely important for the Libertarian fantasy. This is the key to “Going Galt”. When libertarians talk of “Going Galt”, they are talking of taking their ball and going home, and the rest of us sheeple will rue the day we ever tried to regulate their behavior. Going Galt is in essence taking the idea of a boycott and imbuing it with magical powers. Libertarians love boycotts. They think boycotts will solve anything that regulation tries to solve, and boycotts will do it much better (as far as a Libertarian will tell you).

The CDF operates like a nearly perfect representation of the ideal Libertarian fantasy of Going Galt. They remove themselves from Earth’s population but because they are the masters of industry, their economy is astronomical, while the lazy folk left on earth, can’t seem to afford a single space elevator. Meanwhile, CDF not only has space elevators on every planet, they have hundreds and hundreds of *gigantic* starships. The economy of the universe that is “Old Man’s War” leaves a lot of unanswered questions as to how it works. But all the pieces are there for a Libertarian to pick it up and say “This is our Nirvana”.

This actually might explain why so many libertarians show up at Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. They read “Old Man’s War”. They see it as representing the ideal Libertarian fantasy. And they assume Scalzi is a flaming Libertarian. Turns out, Scalzi isn’t a flaming libertarian. Politically speaking, I believe he describes himself as moderately or slightly left of center.

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No Polemics
—–

I cannot stress this enough. Heinlein said he wrote “Starship Troopers” in response to SANE calling for an end to nuclear bomb testing. Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers” as a polemic to show that we needed the bomb to protect ourselves from the communist bugs. Two years after writing “Starship Troopers”, Heinlein told people at a sci-fi convention that nuclear war was coming soon, build a bomb shelter, stock up on food and unregistered guns, and go out in a blaze of glory.

Scalzi does not appear to have any political/military axe to grind here. He seems heavily influenced by “Starship Troopers” and seems to rack up a number of war handwavium points simply because he is following “Starship Troopers” in *form*. But “Old Man’s War” doesn’t make a point to make polemics or to justify a military worldview.

—–
200 Years of Constant Galatic War
—–

That said, “Old Man’s War” does present a very militaristic world. A class of one-thousand new recruits are told that three-quarters of them will be dead in ten years. If they have a new class of recruits every week, that’s fifty thousand recruits a year. And of those fifty-thousand recruits, thirty-seven thousand will be dead in ten years. But that means it also averages out to thirty-seven thousand dead every year. That’s not quite WW2 level of casualty rates. We are told this level of casualty rate has been going on for the last 200 years that CDF has been waging war.

It is difficult to fathom a universe that can support this amount of carnage for this long and yet have Earth look so familiar to today’s standing. WW2 was not something any country could have sustained for two centuries. I don’t know if it would be something that all the colonies could sustain or not.

I have a real hard time holding that this constant Galatic War is going on to this severe of a degree and yet Earth is essentially untouched by alien war. But “Starship Troopers” starts with the assumption of a constant Galatic War, so maybe “Old Mans War” follows it because that’s the form of the story.

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Straight Up Bug Hunt
—–

The wars being waged are straight-up bug hunts. The enemy is ugly, inhuman, alien. And for some reason, many of them love to eat human flesh. One alien invasion force even brought along their own celebrity chef to cook the humans they took prisoner. But that does have the advantage of making things pretty black and white.

“Starship Troopers” was a straight-up bug hunt. It was written by Heinlein who was a graduate of West Point but who never fought in combat and worked on radar while he was in the navy. And Heinlein’s portrayal of combat is, well, to borrow a phrase from one of the best science officers in Star Fleet, “He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.”

Heinlein’s portrayal of combat is two-dimensional thinking. Grunts running around the ground with guns. Powered armor be damned, you would still have gunships on close air support, bombers, artillery, mortars, and heavy armor like tanks or something. If power armor is armor, then a tank made of the same material will be a helluva a lot more armored. Battleships might have two feet of armor. Tanks might have half a foot of armor, plus reactive plates that explode. War is a combined arms exercise, not just a squad of infantry running around, standing up while being shot at.

The problem is that a combined arms exercise is hella difficult to write. You’ve got characters with completely different points of view affecting the field. Every single one of them operates differently. And if you do it poorly, having a battleship ten miles off shore (or somewhere in low orbit) provide a fire mission and save everyone’s bacon, can end up coming across as a deus ex machina. You can’t use Chekov’s Gun in act three unless you introduce it in Act 1. And there are a bajillion different Checkov’s Guns in war. It’s *hard* to write it accurately and readably.

I did notice that Scalzi’s characters seem to appreciate the value of cover and camouflage. Perry hugs the dirt a number of times. I don’t recall Heinlein’s characters ever using the ground as for ballistic protection.

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Strawmanning Nonviolent Solutions
—–

In “Starship Troopers”, there isn’t a single civilian character with any amount of “face time” that has anything good to say about the military. Father calls it a waste of money and calls people in federal service lazy. This happens with a number of civilian characters who show up. They are represented by Heinlein as know-nothing-do-gooders who are completely clueless about how the world really works. Since Heinlein was writing “Starship Troopers” as a pro-military polemic in response to civilians calling for a halt to nuclear weapons testing, this isn’t too surprising that Heinlein strawmanned all the civilians into ijiots.

Unfortunately, Scalzi seems to have followed “Starship Troopers” in form on this aspect. Diplomacy never works in the universe that is “Old Mans War”. Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender is introduced at the beginning of one chapter as a completely incompetent, know-nothing do-gooder who in his previous life as a human on Earth secured a peace treaty in Ireland. This failed to hold and diplomacy was declared to be useless. After the CDF spends most of the chapter blowing up and killing Whaidians, Bender walks up to several hundred Whaidians and attempts a strawman version of “diplomacy” and gets vaporized for it, thus demonstrating again the ineffectiveness of diplomacy. In that same chapter, Viveros says she’ll become an officer some day and change the orders and get peace. She gets killed two sentences later. Apparently even thinking about diplomacy will get you killed in “Old Man’s War” universe.

—–
The Horror? The Horror? Meh. Not so Much
—–

Around page 210, Perry steps on a lot of Covandu’s becoming “Godzilla”. It is at this time where Perry starts questioning the morality of his actions, and starts to confront the horror of endless war with no possibility for diplomacy. Perry wonders if he has become a monster.

By page 220, some humans kill one of Perry’s friends, Susan, effectively torturing her to death by fish (it’s kind of hard to explain). At the end of the page, Perry decides that he is no longer worried about becoming a monster or becoming “less human” as a result of war, because “humans can be as inhuman as any alien species”.

I don’t even know what to make of this.

Here on Earth, we have human serial killers. The existence of human serial killers should not lower the bar to the question as to whether or not you are acting like a monster or not. Serial killers are humans and are monsters. Their existence does not turn genocide and warcrimes into just another day on the job.

This was probably my biggest disappointment in “Old Man’s War”. I would rather have had Perry NOT face the horror of war than to face it and shrug it off with that kind of argument just a few pages later.

—–
Gary Stu?
—–

This doesn’t have anything to do with the War Handwavium score, but since I know a little bit about the author, John Scalzi, there were certain bits about the protagonist, John Perry, that raised some potential Gary Stu red flags.

First of all, there are the factual similarities between author and protagonist: both the author (John Scalzi) and protagonist (John Perry) have the same first name. They both live in a small town in Ohio. They both work as writers. They both are madly in love with their wives.

Then there are the things that the protagonist does that usually only a Mary Sue or Gary Stu could hope to accomplish.

page 137, Master Sergeant Ruiz makes a point to hate every individual in his platoon for individual reasons. Except for Perry, who saved Ruiz’s life through good advertising copy?

page 163, with apparently no tactical training whatsoever, an ad writer apparently is the smartest tactician in the brigade, defeating several other platoons in war games. This former ad writer demonstrates more tactical smarts than some former retired career military officers who are in his platoon and the other platoons.

page 165, Master Sergeant Ruiz (who hates everyone) tells Perry to say hi to his new commanding officer, Lieutenant Arthur Keyes, and to tell Keyes that Ruiz says that Perry is not nearly the dipshit his other graduates turned out to be.

Page 181, Perry gets a commendation for figuring out that after you shoot a Consu with a shield, they get up, so you have to shoot them a second time.

Page 249, 94,000 people killed in attack on Coral. Only three survive, one of them is Perry.

page 347, being promoted to captain and bringing in the schematics felt a little like piling it on.

page 350, any time a Special Forces Ghost Brigade person sees Perry, they ping him signifying respect, because Perry is the only “realborn” to serve with Special Forces. Ever. In 200 years of constant war, Perry was the first realborn to serve with Special Forces.

The Gary Stu stuff was slightly distracting when it showed up, but it didn’t really detract too much from the overall story.

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War Handwavium score: +324
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-10, page 118, in ten years three-quarters of the recruits will be dead.

+10, page 120, Colonization is the key to our race’s survival

+10, page 120, Civil Defense Force becomes an invading force

+3, page 129, video showing a man killed in combat by aliens

-5, page 146, recruits were failing and failing for … a lack of nerve

+10, page 154, Ruiz knocks McCain out with a rifle. Training violence.

+10, page 155, Ruiz points rifle at McCain and pulls trigger. Faked execution.

+10, page 157, Aliens called Salong set up human meat farm.

+10, page 162, Perry, Alan, and Martin give “administrative discipline” to a recruit (no name?) dangling him from a stolen hovercar. How they managed to steal a hovercar when the rifles can’t fire without authorization eludes me.

+5, page 163, paralyzing pain and collapse if “shot”. training violence.

-10, page 169, Consu blasted a human colony to let us know they were looking for action

+10, page 170, Consu are extremely advanced technology alien race (they enclosed an entire pulsar to extract its energy) and yet they’re backward to the point of viewing war as a religious experience. (die in combat to go to heaven, and get 72 virgins, one imagines)

+6, page 175, Perry figures out the double-shot to kill Consu and kills at least 2 on this page.

+9, page 176, 3 consu are killed

+9, page 177, 3 consu are killed

-3, page 177, Watson is killed

+10, page 178, double-tap thins out Consu herd

+10, page 178, Consu squad commit ritual suicide

-6, page 178, 2 cdf dead

-8, page 178, 4 cdf wounded

-10, page 178, Consu armored hovercraft take out 16 cdf at once.

+3, page 179, Perry shoots scavenger

-3, page 183, Maggie dies, writes a haiku

+10, page 187, Private Senator Ambassador Secretary Bender: politicians are stupid

+10, page 191, Bender got a peace treaty, then violence erupts. Peace treaties don’t work.

+10, page 191, Damn real live people getting in the way of your peace treaty. (treaties don’t work)

+10, page 195, Perry shoots missiles at several Whaidians

+9, page 195, Perry kills 2, Bender kills 1

+18, page 196, Perry kills 6 on rooftops

+5, page 196, Perry gives a “love tap”

+5, page 196, Bender and Perry open fire first on group of aliens

+12, page 198, Perry and Bender blast 4 aliens through a wall

+10, page 201, Bender attempts peaceful contact, fails. Peace is for idiots.

-3, page 201, Bender is killed

+15, page 202, Several hundred Whaidian’s are killed in a turkey shoot.

+10, page 203, damn real lives getting in the way of peaceful ideas. (strawmanning peaceful ideas)

+10, page 203, Viveros says she’ll become an officer some day and change the orders. Gets killed two sentences later. (strawmanning peacefule ideas)

-3, page 205, Thomas killed

-18, page 208, 6 platoon mates killed

+15, page 209, Perry ambush’s Gindalian soldiers

+3, page 210, Perry steps on Covandu

+10, page 211, Perry steps on a lot of Covandu’s becoming “Godzilla”.

+3, page 211, Perry flings a Covandu into a wall.

+10, page 214, Stomping a bunch of Covandu’s

+10, page 215, Perry’s horror of war becomes nostalgia for his wife?

-3, page 218, Susan killed

+15, page 219, dozens of ringleaders executed. Some fed to fish while alive. (mass killings plus torture)

+10, page 220, Perry started out realizing the horror of war, decides he’s no longer worried about becoming “less human than he was before”. Because humans murder. So it’s OK if that’s what he’s doing.

+10, page 227, Rraey’s bring a celebrity chef to cook humans.

-10, page 238, main ship, Medesto, destroyed

-10, page 238, the shuttle crew and passengers killed.

-3, page 238, Fiona’s head decapitated

-3, page 239, Alan dies

-10, page 249, 90,000 people died in previous scene

+10, page 293, Rraey ate a third of the trade delegates (diplomacy doesn’t work)

+3, page 308, Mendel kills Consu

+3, page 308, Goodall kills Consu

+3, page 309, Aquainis kills Consu

-3, page 310, Sgt Hawking decapitated

+3, page 311, Jane kills Consu

+3, page 313, Consu says “Now I go to my death” because he spoke to humans

+10, page 331, Rraey personel killed from above

+9, page 331, Perry kills 3 Rraey

+10, page 331, Rraey personel killed in foxholes and trenches

+10, page 331, Rraey picked off in the open

+9, page 332, Perry shoots Rraey in leg, one center mass, one running away

+3, page 333, Jane grenades Rraey in shed

+12, page 338, Perry shoots Rraey with rocket, in the head, with a grenade, and a second grenade

+6, page 340, Perry kills two Rraey with automatic fire

+6, page 340, Rraery aircraft shot down

2012 04 11

Comments (2)

Starship Troopers novel

(Notice: this is a work in progress. It is taking way longer than I thought to write this, so until it is finished, text is subject to change without notice. I may edit/add/delete large chunks of text without warning.)

This is the war handwavium score for “Starship Troopers” the novel by Robert Heinlein.

Total score: +343 points

http://www.enter.net/~torve/critics/HeinleinRoP/rahrop5.htm

!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!

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The Plot, such as it is, of Starship Troopers
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Looking at “Starship Troopers” purely from the point of view of storytelling, it isn’t a novel so much as a magazine serial that was put between two covers. There is no three-act plot that gives bones to the story. There is no initial ‘person, place, problem’ that is established within the first act of a novel. It was originally written as a magazine serial, and it reads like one.

The first chapter (and I assume the first serial in the magazine) jumps into the middle of the timeline with the main character, Johnny, in combat. I assume this was an attempt to start the story off at what Heinlein thought would be a more interesting point. Chapter two jumps back in time to when Johnny was in High School, and the remaining chapters follow chronological order after that.

The chapters show Johnny enlist, go to bootcamp, train as a Mobile Infantryman (M.I.), get assigned to a ship, go to Officer Candidate School, become a lieutenant in training and in combat, and then become an officer. Of the fourteen chapters, only two are wholly dedicated to combat scenes.

There is no up-down-up of the three-act play. Johnny is the person, in a place, but he doesn’t really have a problem. And nothing is resolved by the end of the story. The plot is entirely linear. Johnny’s development is entirely linear. Actually, that might be saying a bit more than Johnny deserves. Johnny doesn’t actually develop. Other than chapter two with a scene in high school, Johnny is going through some phase of military training. The only moment that might really qualify as “development” is on page 121, when Johnny is in boot camp and gets a letter from Mr. Dubois. At that point, Johnny realizes he’s gotten through the “hump”, the hard part, of bootcamp.

This lack of story telling structure would generally indicate bad story telling, but then Heinlein didn’t write “Starship Troopers” to tell a story. He wrote “Starship Troopers” as a polemic.

From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_Troopers

“According to Heinlein, his desire to write Starship Troopers was sparked by the publication of a newspaper advertisement placed by the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy on April 5, 1958 calling for a unilateral suspension of nuclear weapon testing by the United States. In response, Robert and Virginia Heinlein created the small “Patrick Henry League” in an attempt to create support for the U.S. nuclear testing program. During the unsuccessful campaign, Heinlein found himself under attack both from within and outside the science fiction community for his views. Starship Troopers may therefore be viewed as Heinlein both clarifying and defending his military and political views of the time.”

Two years after Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers”, this happened:

In 1961, as Guest of Honor at the Nineteenth World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle, Heinlein would declare that with a certainty of 90% the future held just three possibilities: Russia would destroy us in a war; we would collapse internally and surrender to the Russians; or we and Russia would destroy each other, and China would be the victor. Whichever was the case, one-third of us would die. Heinlein advised his audience to build fallout shelters, stock unregistered weapons, and die gloriously.

Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers” at a time when he thought with near certainty that the world as he knew it was about to end. He was so concerned with the coming apocalypse that he built a bomb shelter stocked with supplies and armed himself with weapons. It isn’t too outrageous to view “Starship Troopers” as a last ditch attempt to “straighten out” those peaceniks and prevent or at least delay nuclear armageddon.

When you dissect the book into its component parts, it becomes fairly clear that the point of “Starship Troopers” was the polemic. Below is a list of the fifteen chapters in “Starship Troopers”, and roughly what happens in that chapter. If the characters go off on long tangental conversations about politics for a length of time, it is indicated below with the word “polemic”.

Here is a chapter by chapter breakdown of the novel’s contents:

Chapter 1: flash forward to Johnny in combat
Chapter 2: Johnny kid in High School, polemic, enlists.
Chapter 3: Johnny’s first day of bootcamp
Chapter 4: Johnny at training
Chapter 5: Hendrick’s flogged and bad conduct discharge
Chapter 6: Johnny gets mail, polemics
Chapter 7: Johnny gets flogged
chapter 8: polemic. beat your puppy to train him.
chapter 9: Johnny gets in a fight on R&R, graduate
chapter 10: Johnny assigned a ship, Beunus Aries destroyed
chapter 11: Johnny signs up for OCS.
chapter 12: Johnny sees his Dad. Polemics.
Chapter 13: Johnny is a third lieutenant. Combat.
Chapter 14: Johnny is an officer. preparing to drop.

Of 14 chapters, 4 are dedicated almost entirely to providing a soapbox for Heinlein’s political polemics: talking *about* his worldview, why the world is the way Heinlein says it is, and why we must behave the way Heinlein says we must behave if we are to succeed in his world.

The remaining chapters split into two categories. Either they show Johnny going through military training preparing to operate in Heinlein’s worldview. Or the chapters show Johnny in combat against communist bugs which is Heinlein’s worldview given a narrative. Heinlein provides a mouthpiece for his worldview, and the rest of the story is provided as “proof” to reinforce that worldview.

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And what is Heinlein’s worldview?
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Heinlein’s worldview can be summed up with three statements, and every one of them is completely wrong.

First, Heinlein asserts that Federal Service is an indicator of moral character of the veteran, to the point that a former veteran can be trusted with the power to vote and the power to hold office, and their former veteran status is an indicator that they will not abuse or misuse that power.

Second, Heinlein asserts that spanking, flogging, and hanging will lead to good moral citizens. His “proof” for this is another assertion that you have to spank a puppy to house train them. Except you don’t. And countries that use harsh punishment don’t create good citizens, they create obediant citizens. There is a major difference between the two.

Third, Heinlein asserts “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. This reflects a worldview of scarcity. That the only way to get something is to sacrifice something. This scarcity view is probably why he nearly deifies the idea of sacrifice and duty. According to Heinlein, the only way to make the world a better place is through sacrifice. And this is just plain wrong.

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Mr Dubois, or, “Heinlein’s Mouthpiece”
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By Chapter 2, thirty pages into the novel, we meet Lt. Col. Jean V. Dubois, Rico’s school instructor in “History and Moral Philosophy,” who tells us: (page 33) “Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than any other factor.” He then goes on to base his entire worldview on this point.

Heinlein’s mistake appears to be that he assumes that since someone could always pull us down to the level of animals, that we can be no better than animals.

(page 238) “Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive… Correct morals arise from knowing what man *is*, not what do-gooders and well-meaning old Aunt Nellies would like him to be.”

Heinlein has committed the fallacy of mediocrity. This is the fallacy that assumes that any given member of a set must be limited to the attributes that are held in common with all the other members of the set. Example: “Humans are just animals, so we should not concern ourselves with justice; we should just obey the law of the jungle.”

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html#composition

Back to Heinlein, (page 32) “Anyone who clings to the historically untrue – and thoroughly immoral – doctrine that ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and of the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee,”

Heinlein seems to look at the worst of humanity and argue that humanity can be no better than its worst. Heinlein sees Hitler and says we can never be better than Hitler.

Or, at the very least, Heinlein says we must always be prepared for the next Hitler. The thing is, according to Heinlein, there is always another Hitler waiting. We must always be at war. Always.

(page 126) “Maybe someday they’ll get everything nice and tidy and we’ll have that thing we sing about, when “we ain’t gonna study war no more.” Maybe. Maybe the same day the leopard will take off its spots and get a job as a Jersey cow, too.”

Peace, according to Heinlein, is impossible. So we must always be prepared for war. And when do we go to war? Heinlein ponders this question as well, and it seems that Heinlein does not agree with the “Just War Theory”:

(page 228) “is one prisoner, unreleased by the enemy, enough reason to start or resume a war? … Yes, sir! … It doesn’t matter whether it’s a thousand or just one, sir. You fight.”

His informal “proof” of this is “Men are not potatoes”. He might as well have concluded with “San Dimas High School football rules!” He then leaves it up to Johnny as a homework assignment to prove it formally, which is convenient handwaving.

From a psychological point of view, Heinlein’s assertion that it is morally acceptable to thrust two whole nations into all out war over a single man appear to be nothing more than a worldview based on a hierarchy of power. And the enemy, according to Heinlein, is not allowed to have any power over you. And holding even a single prisoner is holding power over the other nation, and cannot be tolerated.

Heinlein again takes the fallacy of mediocrity, the law of the jungle, and applies it to his “moral code”:

(page 149) “man has no moral instinct. … We acquire moral sense…. What is moral sense? It is an elaboration of the instinct to survive…”

This is nothing more than “survival of the fittest” turned into a morality. We should obey the law of the jungle. To survive is to be right.

(page 238) “does Man have any ‘right’ to spread throughout the universe? …. The universe will let us know – later – whether or not Man has any ‘right’ to expand through it.”

The universe will let us ‘know’ if we have that right by killing us all off or letting us live. This is pure animalistic notions of morality. Law of the jungle. Those who survive are “right”.

—————————————-
An Infatuation with Hierarchy of Power
—————————————-

So Heinlein embraces this law of the jungle in what I would call an infatuation of the hierarchy of power.

Infatuation is defined as “to inspire or possess with a foolish or unreasoning passion”. And Heinlein is infatuated with hierarchy of power because he forwards the idea of a military utopia, a world where only people who have served in the military can vote or hold office and in Heinlein’s world, this results in utopia.

—————————————–
Federal Service is Military Service
—————————————–

In “Starship Troopers”, Heinlein refers to “Federal Service”, which primarily refers to military service.

When Johnny tells his father he is going to sign up for “just a term of service” (page 28) and “certainly not the infantry” (page 27), Father says the following:

(page 30) “We’ve outgrown wars. This planet is now peaceful and happy and we enjoy good enough relations with other planets. So what is this ‘Federal Service’? Parasitism, pure and simple. A functionless organism, utterly obsolete, living on the tax-payers.”

If we’ve outgrown wars, and “Federal Service” includes jobs like firemen and mailmen, then Father’s argument is complete nonsense. But if Federal Service is primarily a military job, then the fact that there are no wars would question the need for a military.

To get to vote, you must wager your life in defense of the state.

(page 235) “We ensure that all who wield [sovereign franchise] accept the ultimate in social responsibility—we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life—and lose it, if need be—to save the life of the state.”

The mailman doesn’t wager his life, the garbage man doesn’t wager his life.

(page 266) “But all “soft, safe” jobs are filled by civilians”

Mailman and garbageman qualify as “soft, safe” jobs.

(page 231) “And you have forgotten that in peacetime most veterans come from non-combatant auxiliary services and have not been subjected to the full rigors of military discipline; they have merely been harried, overworked and endangered—yet their votes count.”

Read that carefully. In *peacetime*, most veterans come from non-combat personel. That language implies that in times of *war*, most veterans come from combat personel.

The words of “Starship Troopers” are tightly bound to “Federal Service” being strictly limited to military service.

There’s an entire paper that goes over the argument as to whether Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” says that Federal Service required to get the right to vote meant military service or just any kind of civilian service like being a mailman. If you think Heinlein included mailmen, go read this:

http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/ftp/fedrlsvc.pdf

In summary, Federal Service refers to military service. And in the military, there are jobs that Johnny’s friend Carl will get to work with electronics. But that would be something like aircraft maintenance or missile maintenance or something like that: working on electronics that is for military hardware. And in all likelihood, Carl went to some form of military bootcamp and had at least minimal training with some weapons.

In the United States Marine Corp, there is a saying “every marine is a rifleman”. It doesn’t matter what you do in the Marine Corps, whether it be electronics or cook or barber or mailman or fireman or whatever. A marine is first and foremost a rifleman. And a marine cook is trained in the same bootcamp that a marine rifleman is trained in.

Heinlein himself was a graduate of Annapolis and worked in the Navy as an officer… in electronics. He worked on early radar systems. While an officer in the navy. So, Heinlein knew Carl would be *in* the military even if Carl was working on electronics.

Everything in “Starship Troopers” points to military service being the measure of citizenship not civilian service in non-military jobs. While some jobs in the military are not combat, all jobs in the military require the person to be trained in weapons and combat so if things really go bad, they can pick up a rifle and “wager their life” to “save the life of the state”.

Now, some of you are going to *insist* that Heinlein meant that Federal Service included mailmen and firemen and various other civilian jobs. And most likely you are insisting that because you agree with other aspects of what Heinlein suggested and don’t want the ugliness of a military-only citizenship to spoil the view.

But here’s the thing: whether Federal Service refers to military or military/civilian service, Heinlein still gets it all wrong, on the deepest and most fundamental level.

More on this in a moment.

——————————————————
Military Utopia
——————————————————

So, Heinlein presents a military utopia. A world where former military veterans are the only people who have the right to vote or serve in office. And this design, according to Heinlein, results in what we would call Utopia:

(page 232) “Our system works quite well… personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb.”

Heinlein does not like full democracy where all are created equal and all have a right to vote.

(page 232) “I have never been able to see how a thirty-year-old moron can vote more wisely than a fifteen-year-old genius… but that was the age of the ‘divine right of the common man.’ Never mind, they paid for their folly.”

They paid for their folly, because in Heinlein’s future history, the democracies of the 20th century all collapse. All of them.

(page 143) “Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the XXth century. … The Terror had not been just in North America- Russia and the British Isles had it, too, as well as other places. But it reached its peak in North America shortly before things went to pieces.”

Heinlein takes “All men are created equal” and turns it into the insult that is the “divine right” of the common man. And he thinks that Democracy based on all are equal must neccessarily collapse.

But Heinlein just so happens to have a solution which just so happens to line up with someone who just so happens to have an infatuation with hierarchy of power. Only former military people can vote.

(page 233) “Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage.”

The page before this, Heinlein is insulting Plato’s Republic.

(page 232) “some weird in the extreme such as the antlike communism urged by Plato under the misleading title “The Republic”.”

This is actually one of the funniest bits of accidental irony I’ve read in a book. Plato was in military service from 409 BC to 404 BC. When the Peloponnesian War ended in 404 BC Plato joined the Athenian oligarchy of the Thirty Tyrants.

So, Plato volunteered to military service, yet Plato proposed a form of government that Heinlein found to be weird, antlike, communism. And just for extra giggles, if you’ve actually read the Republic, it’s got quite a bit in common with Heinlein’s worldview that is a hierarchy of power.

Both Plato and Heinlein propose hierarchical power structures as the basis of government. Only some people get to vote, only some people get to hold power. For Plato, it is “philosopher kings” at the top, then warriors, then everyone else. For Heinlein, it is Warriors at the top, then everyone else.

And yet, just one page after Heinlein puts down Plato’s form of government, Heinlein argues that voluntary military service is what keeps his military utopia tracking to the best possible outcome for everyone, even people without the right to vote. And yet, Plato’s military service didn’t prevent him from proposing the Republic, which Heinlein found abhorant.

The basic problem here is Heinlein asserts that the reason his form of government manages to produce a utopia is because the rulers and voters are all ex volunteer military, and this according to Heinlein proves they put the good of the people over their own selfish desires. But his criticism of Plato should have immediately showed him that his assertion was disproven by example. Plato volunteered for military service and came up with a form of government Heinlein thought was terrible. So there is no reason to believe that former military folks in his utopia couldn’t end up with something terrible.

The reason Heinlein’s government achieves utopia is because “Starship Trooper” is a *polemic* piece of fiction. And Heinlein wants his fiction to prove by example. Except a fictional example isn’t actually an example. It proves nothing.

Military service does not guarantee anything about the quality of character of the person serving.

Read that again. That is the first fundamental error that Heinlein commits. And it doesn’t matter if Federal Service is military only (which is how he presents it in the novel) and it doesn’t matter if Federal Service includes mailmen, firemen, and other civilian jobs. Heinlein gets it wrong because Heinlein asserts that Utopia is achieved because prior Federal Service somehow magically reveals something about the character of the person who served. But it doesn’t.

Prior Federal Service reveals nothing about the quality of character of the person who served. Heinlein asserts that prior service is a litmus test that proves something about the person, proves that he can be trusted with the power to vote, proves that he can be trusted with the power of political office.

Ronald Reagen was in the army. Jimmy Carter served in the Navy. Completely opposite political views. George H.W. Bush served in the Navy. George W. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard. John Kerry served in the Navy. John McCain served in the Navy. All these politicians had prior military service, and they cover every extreme of the political spectrum, they often ran in complete opposition to each other.

And if that isn’t enough to show you that military service is no guarantee of political utopia, then how about this:

Richard Nixon was a Lieutenant commander in the navy during World War 2. And Nixon’s time in office certainly isn’t remembered as bringing us closer to Heinlein’s utopia.

And if that still doesn’t disprove Heinlein’s assertion of military service as a litmus test of character, then here’s an article from 2007 saying that the US military is allowing more recruits with criminal records to enlist to make up for dwindling volunteers during wartime.

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-2474041.html

The Army granted more than double the number of waivers for felonies and misdemeanors in 2006 than it did in 2003.

This doesn’t mean people in the military must be bad. But Heinlein is trying to say people in the military can be trusted to vote and wield political office and do so in such a way as to *cause* utopia to occur. And that is just flat out wrong.

——————————————-
A Historical Example of Heinlein’s Utopia
——————————————-

In describing how Heinlein’s Utopian “Federation” came about, he says (page 229) “with national governments in collapse at the end of the XXth century, something had to fill the vacuum, and in many cases it was returned veterans.”

Then he gives a specific example of the future history of how we transitioned from a collapsed government to a utopian federation.

(path 229) “The first known case, in Aberdeen, Scotland, was typical. Some veterans got together as vigilantes to stop rioting and looting, hanged a few people (including two veterans) and decided not to let anyone but veterans on their committee.”

This specific fictional sequence actually has an example in real world history:

A government collapsed leaving a power vacuum. Criminals ran rampant. War lords fought for power. Foreign countries supported various war lords and encouraged more fighting for their own nationalist gains. The country, what was left of it, was being destroyed.

A local political leader was abusing his power. He had some women kidnapped and was holding them captive and raping them.

A veteran who had fought for the country against a foreign invader years before it collapsed got some of his fellow veterans together. They went after the local politician, freed the women, and hung the politician. The veteran decided that he and other people with his views should rule the area.

This story actually happened in history.

It is the story of how the Taliban started.

And that is what hierarchy of power can look like. Might makes right. Survival makes right.

Mullah Mohammed Omar had fought against the Soviet Union for eight years in Afghanistan. He went on to form the Taliban.

Heinlein asserts that veterans becoming vigilantes against horrible criminals results in the Federation that he envisions as utopia. But what he describes are on many levels exactly the same steps followed by the Taliban, which resulted in one of the most brutal political groups in the world, recognized diplomatically by only three nations on the planet.

Or more succinctly, having a military is neccessary, but not sufficient, to create a utopia.

You need more than military force, you need more than the law of the jungle, you need more than might makes right.

You need human rights. Rights which Heinlein dismisses as nonsense. Rights which Heinlein says is the cause of the fall of the governments of the 20th century.

(page 151) “a human being has no natural rights of any nature.”

—————————————-
You must beat your puppy to train him
—————————————-

Heinlein spends almost an entire chapter of the novel forwarding the worldview that extreme punishment results in (page 232) “personal freedom for all is greatest in history, laws are few, taxes are low, living standards are as high as productivity permits, crime is at its lowest ebb.”

Chapter 8 is almost entirely polemic on why flogging and hanging will result in utopia, and why prison and attempting to reform criminals will cause the downfall of society.

(page 147) “Back to these young criminals- They probably were not spanked as babies; they certainly were not flogged for their crimes. … no punishment save rare dull-but-comfortable confinements. Then suddenly… this so-called ‘juvenile delinqunt’ becomes an adult criminal-and sometimes wound up in only weeks or months in a death cell awaiting execution for murder.”

This resulted in “wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons” who would roam around and commit robbery, murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism.

Heinlein’s utopia knew better how to stop crime.

(page 143) “If a boy in our city had done anything half that bad… well, he and his father would have been flogged side by side. But such thing just didn’t happen.”

Mr. Dubois then goes on to explain why flogging is the morally right thing to do: because that’s how you train puppies.

(page 144) “When your puppy made mistakes, where you angry?” …. “He didn’t know any better.” … “What did you do?” … “scolded him and rubbed his nose in it and paddled him.” … “how could you be so cruel as to spank him? You said the poor beastie didn’t know that he was doing wrong. Yet you inflicted pain. Justify yourself! Or are you a sadist?”

Johnny gets very upset at this:

(page 145) “You *have* to! … you paddle him so that he darn well won’t do it again– and you have to do it right away! Even so, he won’t learn from one lesson, so you watch and catch him again and paddle hime still harder. Pretty soon he learns. But it’s a waste of breath just to scold him.”

The above is a fallacy called hasty generalization. Johnny and Mister Dubois assume that since *they* always trained puppies by spanking them that you must *always* spank them.

Turns out, Heinlein’s notion of puppy training is flat out wrong. It may have been accepted theory back in the 1950′s but dog training experts today say spanking your dog for mistakes can make things worse and that you can train your dog without spanking them.

http://www.cesarsway.com/tips/puppytips/Housebreaking

“Don’t punish your puppy for an accident or do anything to create a negative association with her bodily functions. Stay calm and assertive and quietly remove the puppy to the place where you want him to go.”

Heinlein proposes a utopian society is available if we just beat our children as soon as they make any mistakes. His “proof” for this is that we must spank our puppies to train them properly. But turns out puppy training doesn’t require spanking. Therefore, what exactly does Heinlein have to “prove” that you must beat children?

Nothing. The thing is, Heinlein *never* proved you could spank children to reduce crime. He simply asserted it, and handwaved a proof by way of a comparison to a flawed asssertion about how you must train your puppy.

This is Heinlein’s second fundamental error. He asserts that spanking, flogging, and hanging will lead to low crime rates that are part of his military utopia. He “proves” that harsh punishment leads to good citizenry by comparing it to how we must train puppies, which is to spank them. Heinlein spends an entire chapter talking about puppy training with spanking. And every word of it is wrong.

What harsh punishment leads to isn’t good citizens, but *obediant* citizens, *compliant* citizens. All we have to do is look at some of the harshest and strictest tyrannies in the world today and we will find that tyrants with total military control of their population use fear of death to force the population into submission. That doesn’t generate good citizens, it generates obediance.

This is Heinlein’s second major error in his worldview.

———————————————-
Sacrifice and Scarcity, or, The Fallacy within Libertarianism
———————————————-

Heinlein’s worldview at its core is one of sacrifice and scarcity.

(page 119) “the best things in life are beyond money; their price is agony, and sweat, and devotion… and the price demanded for the most precious of all things in life is life itself-ultimate cost for perfect value.”

(page 207) “That the part should be humbly proud to sacrifice itself that the whole may live.”

(page 151) “The heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to *buy* liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it ALWAYS vanishes.”

The problem with Heinlein’s relationship to sacrifice is that it seems to be tied to his scarcity-based view of reality. And his scarcity-based view of reality is flawed.

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch” is a saying that came up in the 1930′s. Heinlein popularized this saying in another novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. But he invokes the idea in “Starship Troopers” as well.

(page 118) “Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain… If you boys and girls had to sweat for your toys the way a newly born baby has to struggle to live you would be happier… and much richer.”

Reading this might invoke C3P0′s “We seem to be made to suffer, it’s our lot in life.” Or it might invoke an image of some old man saying how they had to walk to school in the snow, uphill, both ways.

Certainly, there are times when people sacrifice for others, but Heinlein’s view seems to go back to the law of the jungle.

Or more specifically, the law of thermodynamics. The law of thermodynamics says how the energy of a closed system is constant, and how objects tend towards thermal equilibrium, and so on.

But put more coloquially, the law of thermodynamics says: You can’t win. You can’t break even. And you can’t get out of the game.

If you were to look at a single molecule of refrigerant in a closed system in a vacuum, that molecule cannot speed up without losing energy somewhere else. To gain one thing, it must sacrifice something else. If we were to look at the molecule as a metaphor for an individual man, then that man can gain nothing for himself without sacrificing somewhere else. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

But if you put many refrigerant molecules together and make them part of a system, then you can do things with that system that no single molecule in a closed system could ever do. You can, for example, build a refrigerator, which is impossible with just a single molecule. If you put a large number of people together and put structures in place to organize them, they can form a system that no individual man can accomplish. They can form a society, an economy, a state.

The laws of thermodynamics are sometimes cited as a reason why evolution is impossible. The argument says that evolution and the creation of life would be a decrease in entropy, which violates the laws of thermodynamics. But the earth is not a closed system by itself. The sun is constantly adding energy. Therefore evolution doesn’t violate the law of thermodynamics. The problem is people attempt to constrain the system to be smaller than it actually is, and demand the laws of physics must hold true to that smaller system.

Put another way, it’s not entirely unlike saying that the laws of aerodynamics can’t explain how bees fly, therefore, bees can’t fly. The problem isn’t with the bees. The problem is with the person trying to insist that his limited understanding must somehow limit the real world. And it doesn’t work that way.

Heinlein seems to take the law of thermodynamics and similarly apply it to individual human beings and relate to them as separate closed systems. But this is similar to the mistake of looking at earth as a closed system and ignoring the sun. it is a failure of scale or perspective.

Heinlein zooms in on the individual, relates to them as a closed system, and then asserts that the only way for an individual to *gain* anything is if they *sacrifice* something.

This might be true of a single individual held in isolation. But this isn’t actually true in social systems. In social systems, there are scenarios that fall into a category known as “win-win”. If everyone does something minor, then everyone is better off than the minor effort. The simplest example is to take a planet populated by nothing but indivudal, self-sufficient farmers. You grow all your own food, make all your own bread, make your own clothes, make the oven which you use to bake your bread, make the steel which you will use to make the oven, perform surgury on yourself when you have an appendicitis, and so on. You are your own person, free and clear.

You’re also likely to be living in conditions comparable to lower class income or poverty level incomes compared to our current civilization. Simply by having people specialize, everyone wins. This is the inherent benefit of society itself. Society is a win-win scenario compared to independent and unconnected self sufficient farmers.

It isn’t magical thinking. Whether everyone is self-sufficient farmers or whether they are part of a collective society working together, they have 8 hours of labor they can work with. The difference is that if people work together in a society, they can specialize. And if people specialize, then 8 hours spent on a specialization can result in advantages that 8 hours as a self-sufficient and isolated farmer will never see.

But Heinlein’s worldview is focused on the individual. His worldview doesn’t see society as a whole, rather he only sees individuals who happen to be next to one another. To borrow another phrase, Heinlein can see the individual trees, but he is unable to see the advantage they have when they live together as a forest and an ecosystem.

There is such a thing as a free lunch, and the simplest example is society itself.

This is Heinlein’s third fundamental error in his worldview.

——————————————
Military versus Civilian snobbery
——————————————

Heinlein graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis in 1929, and served as an officer in the United States Navy. He was assigned to an aircraft carrier USS Lexington in 1931, where he worked on radio communications. His brother, Lawrence Heinlein, served in the Army, the Air Force, and the Missouri National Guard and rose to the rank of Major General.

Whether or not this military background instilled in Heinlein a sense of being better than the civilians around him, “Starship Troopers” presents quite a bit of animosity between military and civilians. In Starship Troopers, military people keep saying things that reflect an attitude that they’re better than civilians, and civilians quite often reflect an attitude that they’re better than being in the military.

The subtle difference seems to be that Heinlein seems to make sure that the military folks are often *demonstrably* better than civilians in his fictional world, whereas when civilians try to put down the military, they’re usually shown in Heinlein’s fictional world to be exercising an undeserved privilege, or a result of cluelessness, or both.

(page 29) Johnny’s father is trying to talk Johnny out of joining the military. Father is a successful businessman and offers Johnny a future in the family business. “you’re going to study business at Harvard; you know that… Then you’ll come home and go to work. You’ll start with the usual menial job, stock clerk or something, just for form’s sake – but you’ll be an executive before you can catch your breath… How does that strike you as a program? As compared with wasting two years of your life?”

Johnny is presented with either a life of a silver spoon or the military. In real life, people often join the military because they can’t afford to go to college on their own, or they just need a job. Heinlein presents a rigged choice to make the “civilian” choice for Johnny look like an undeserved silver spoon. On the next page, Father really lets Johnny know what he thinks about the military.

(page 30) “So what is this so-called ‘Federal Service’? Parasitism, pure and simple. A functionless organ, utterly obsolete, living on the taxpayers. A decidedly expensive way for inferior people who otherwise would be unemployed to live at public expense for a term of years, then give themselves airs for the rest of their lives.”

Within months of saying this, Earth is in all out war with the Bugs, showing Father the civilian to be clueless and naive. But it’s Heinlein’s world, and he can build up strawmen versions of civilians like Father, then build up a completely idealized version of the military, and let the reader decide that the civilians are clueless and naive. The problem is, again, Heinlein is using “Starship Troopers” as a polemic, as a way to make his argument. And one way he makes his argument, over and over, is to show civilians as clueless idiots and show the military as really knowing what’s the score. Real life has clueless military people as well as having civilians who really know the score.

In short, Heinlein always has the best versions of military characters represent his worldview and the worst versions of civilian characters represent the worldviews that oppose him. It is not a fair representation of both worldviews. It is propaganda for his worldview. And within a couple of pages, we see Heinlein idealize the military path.

(page 32) “What is the moral difference, if any, between soldier and civilian? The difference… lies in the field of civic virtue. A soldier accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic of which he is a member, defending it, if need be, with his life. The civilian does not.”

This idealized presentation of military service and completely strawmanned version of civilians essentially arises out of Heinlein’s worldview of sacrifice and scarcity. If we view the world through individual scarcity, we can only make the world better through individual sacrifice. And so Heinlein has an infatuated relationship with the idea of sacrifice. He holds sacrifice as ultimate. More importantly, he asserts that those who follow *his* worldview of scarcity and sacrifice are more virtuous than anyone else. If you don’t subscribe to the scarcity/sacrifice worldview, if you can see win-win situations where society can improve itself without individuals sacrificing, then Heinlein says you are not as good as his ideal. You have no civic virtue.

This gets into interesting territory a few pages later.

(page 36) “Because it has become stylish, with some people-too many people-to serve a term and earn a franchise and be able to wear a ribbon in your lapel which says that you’re a veteran whether you’ve ever seen combat or not”.

Heinlein graduated from the naval academy and was an officer on an aircraft carrier, but he never saw combat. I hope he kept his ribbons hidden.

(page 40) Johnny is talking to a civilian doctor and the doctor says to Johnny “military service is for ants.” this is another example of civilians lookign down on military service.

(page 109) More civilian snobbery looking down on military. “The only thing we lacked was citizenship and Father regarded that as no real honor, a vain and useless thing”

While Heinlein likes to show civilians looking down on miltiary folks and military folks looking down on civilians, Heinlein’s future history shows that it is the military worldview that is the correct worldview. This isn’t terribly surprising if one assumes that Heinlein endorses the military worldview and thinks the civilian worldview is rubbish.

(page 150) “These juvienile criminals hit a low level. Born with only the instinct for survival, the highest morality they achieved was a shaky loyalty to a peer group, a street gang. But the DO-GOODERS attempted to ‘appeal to their better natures’ to ‘reach them’ to ‘spark their moral sense’. TOSH! They had no better natures. The puppy never got his spanking therefore what he did with pleasure and success must be ‘moral’.”

Civilians, in Heinlein’s story, are ineffective do-gooders who bring about the fall of our democracies. And after the fall, when the veterans step in to save the world and restore order, the only civilians around apparently are really bad civilians:

(page 230) “Probably those Scottish veterans… decided that… they weren’t going to let any… profiteering, black-market, double-time-for-overtime, army-dodging, civilians have any say about it… and historians agree that antagonism between civilians and returned soldiers was more intense than we can imagine today.”

To quote Han Solo, “I don’t know… I can imagine a lot.”

But the point is, the reason the military utopia federation ends up with the rule that only veterans can serve and only veterans can vote is because when those Scottish vets start restoring order after the collapse of democracy, as far as they can see, every civilian they see is a profiteering, black-market, overcharging, army dodging civilian, and therefore, NO CIVILIAN would be allowed to vote or rule.

While the story shows military folk and civilian folk both thinking they are better than the other, Heinlein makes sure that his fictional future history that he created as a backdrop for this story showed that the military folk spoke the truth. In the future history of “Starship Troopers” as written by Heinlein, it is the failure of civilians that brings about the fall of twentieth century democracies. In the future history of “Starship Troopers” as written by Heinlein, it is the former veterans who pull the world out of chaos and establish the best society the world has ever seen.

So, while at first glance, it might seem that Heinlein presents a world where military folks are snobbish to civilians and civilians are snobbish to military folks and therefore it all balances out somehow, that’s only first glance. When looked at in detail, it becomes clear that Heinlein is presenting strawmen versions of civilian arguments while presenting military people cast in stories that Heinlein makes up to prove that they are correct.

This animosity makes perfect sense when “Starship Troopers” is put into historical context. Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers” in response to an ad he saw calling for a unilateral suspension of nuclear weapon testing by the United States. Heinlein wanted to keep testing nukes. Heinlein *liked* nuclear weapons.

In “Starship Troopers” nuclear weapons are used repeatedly.

(page 14) “then my first rocket hit – that unmistakable (if you’ve seen one) brilliance of an atomic explosion. It was just a peewee, of course, less than two kilotons nominal yield.”

(page 19) “I let the rocket see it” (Johnny’s rockets are all tipped with tactical nukes.)

page 293, Johnny is on the surface of a planet with a “scale six” crater from a nuclear weapon. I’m not sure how big “scale six” is, but apparently its large enough to hold a spaceship.

(page 286) “The navy had plastered the islands and that unoccupied part of the continent until they were a radioactive glaze. We could tackle the bugs with no worries about our rear.”

And what kind of bugs was Johnny fighting? Well, they were big, ugly, and nasty. They gave Johnny the willies when he first saw them. They made the neodogs in the K9 units commit suicide the first time they saw them. And, they happen to be communists.

(page 194) “We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be… The Bug commisars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo.”

By page 116, Heinlein is mentioning “Das Kapital” and Karl Marx, just to tell us how wrong it is.

Given Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers” in 1959, when the Cold War was itching to go hot at the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs invasion (the Cuban missile crisis would be only two years later in 1961), and given Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers” in response to a call to stop above ground nuclear testing, it isn’t terribly surprising that Heinlein shows nukes as handy as grenades, and the bug enemy as a swarming mass of communists.

And given that Heinlein wrote “Starship Troopers” as a response to the civilian call to limit nuclear weapons, it isn’t surprising that Heinlein shows the civilians in “Starship Troopers” as clueless and shows military folks as knowing what’s really going on.

—————————————–
Thomas Jefferson Spinning in his Grave
—————————————–

Heinlein’s utopia is a society that has direct military rule. Only former veterans can vote. Only former veterans can hold political office. According to Heinlein, veterans have shown they have proper virtue.

Heinlein mocks the idea of civilian oversight, civilian control, over the military force. Civilians don’t know how to run a war according to Heinlein, and giving them such control will lead to a tragic end for all.

(page 159) Civilians “want to run the war–like a passenger trying to grab the controls away from the pilot in an emergency”.

I’m not sure if Heinlein is familiar with the history of Ancient Rome. But Ancient Roman history is pretty well known for having powerful Roman generals cross the Rubicon, march on Rome, and sieze power from the civilians, then declare himself emporer. It got to be so common that the Roman Senate passed a law making it illegal for a Roman general to cross the Rubicon river with his army. The river marked the boundary of Italy, and any Roman general bringing his army into Italy and towards Rome was generaly understood to be making a grab for power.

Heinlein’s military utopia of miltary rule by military veterans seems to do nothing but wish for a return to the Roman Empire, without the law against crossing the Rubicon. Not only is the power to vote in Heinlein’s utopia restricted to former veterans, the power to rule, to hold political office, is restricted to former veterans as well. Not only does the military in Heinlein’s utopia have no civil authority over them, Heinlein makes a point to *mock* the idea of civilians controlling the military as ludicrous and dangerous as a passenger trying to grab the controls of an airplane during an emergency.

And while Heinlein seems willing to invoke Jefferson when it fits his militaristic worldview:

(page 151) “Liberty is never inalienable. It must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots”

Or quote him directly:

(page 165) “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. –Thomas Jefferson 1787″

Heinlein doesn’t mention that Jefferson was a stern advocate that the military be subordinate to civilian authority.

“The supremacy of the civil over the military authority I deem [one of] the essential principles of our Government, and consequently [one of] those which ought to shape its administration.” –Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801.

“No military commander should be so placed as to have no civil superior.” –Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Smith, 1801. FE 8:29

“Instead of subjecting the military to the civil power, [a tyrant will make] the civil subordinate to the military. But can [he] thus put down all law under his feet? Can he erect a power superior to that which erected himself? He [can do] it indeed by force, but let him remember that force cannot give right.” –Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774.(*) ME 1:209, Papers 1:134

It is no coincidence that the United States Constitution submits the military to civil authority. Jefferson saw the danger of direct military rule as advocated by Heinlein. History shows that military rule ends in brutal tyranny, not the utopia proposed by Heinlein.

———————————————–
Sexism?
———————————————–

Heinlein’s marriages:
Eleanor Curry, married 1929, divorced 1930
Leslyn McDonald married 1932, divorced 1947
Virginia Doris Gerstenfeld, married 1948

“Starship Trooper” was written in 1959.

The sexism in “Starship Troopers” is… I’m not sure what the right word is but “odd” comes close. Heinlein bucked the rigid rules of sexuality of the 1950′s. But sex is not gender. The way his female characters show up, and the way men relate to those characters, shows something that might be construed as a gender bias in Heinlein’s writing.

Starship Troopers says that most ship’s captains were women because their reactions were faster and they could tolerate higher gravity pressure.

Going outside of “Starship Troopers” and looking at other works by Heinlein, we find that in “Expanded Universe” Heinlein calls for a society where all lawyers and politicians are women, essentially on the grounds that they possess a mysterious feminine practicality that men cannot duplicate.”

Heinlein seems to subscribe to the notion that women have a certain ‘je ne sais quoi’ but he doesn’t know what it is. One thing Heinlein seems to think women are for, is for looking at:

When Johnny meets a beautiful female classmate of his and she’s joining the military hoping to be a pilot, Johnny says to himself:

(page 34) “little Carmen was so ornamental that you just never thought about her being useful”

Later on, Johnny gets some R&R and monologues in his head about women.

(page 159) “Girls are simply wonderful. Just to stand on a corner and watch them going past is delightful. They don’t walk. At least not what we do when we walk. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s much more complex and utterly delightful. They don’t move just their feet; everything moves and in different directions… and all of it graceful.”

(page 180) “guard duty was a privilege… always warmly aware that any moment you might see a feminine creature”

(page 188) “after that masterful (or should it be ‘mistressful’?)… To *hot* pilot Yvette Deladrier”

Yvette saved their lives with her piloting skills and courage under fire and they refer to her a “mistress” and tell her she’s “hot”. They present her with a gift which causes her to cry and kiss the men.

And the men act rather young around women, even a career sergeant who presumably has been around the block a few times.

(page 188) “She got tears and kissed him-and kissed Jelly as well and he turned purple.”

(page 201) “it’s good to know that the ultimate reason you are fighting (women) actually exists and they are not just a figment of the imagination.”

Johnny’s father understands why Johnny joined the military. His mother, according to Father, could not understand.

(page 217) “I always understood what you were doing better than your mother did-don’t blame her; she never had a chance to know, any more than a bird can understand swimming.”

Apparently Heinlein is unfamiliar with waterfowl. And it would seem Heinlein thinks that women can’t understand Johnny joining the military by virtue of being women.

Women who open their mouths are generally clueless about the ways of the world.

(page 218) “Madame Ruitman… she chattered away and said ‘So, you’re really going out? Well, if you reach Faraway, you really must look up my dear friends the Regatos. I told her, as gently as I could that it seemed unlikely,since the Arachnids had occupied Faraway. It didn’t faze her in the least. She said ‘Oh, that’s all right-they’re civilians!’”

When Johnny’s father explains why he (Father) joined the military he says:

(page 219) “I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal… but a man.”

Women are better at piloting, but we never quite get explained to us why they go into the military. If men do it to prove they are a “man”, then why do women do it?

One of the few women where Heinlein shows us her doing something (rather than just having Heinlein *tell* us what she does) turns out to be just a secretary.

(page 241) “I would have trouble running this place without Miss Kendrick. Her head is a rapid-access file to everything that happens around here.”

But we quickly find out where Miss Kendrick fits in the hierarchy of power that Heinlein constructs:

(page 242) “She is not in the line of command and has no authority.”

Heinlein *tells* us that women are more dextorous than men.

(page 260) “Besides the obvious fact that drop & retrieval require the best pilots (i.e. female)”

But he doesn’t *show* a woman pilot doing her piloting thing. Instead immediately after telling us women are the best pilots, Heinlein reverts to women’s je ne sais quoi.

(page 260) “there is a very strong reason why female Naval officers are assigned to transports: it is good for trooper morale…” Women keep the troopers “constantly reminded that the only good reason why men fight” (i.e. women themselves) really do exist.

(taking longer than I thought. Saving. Will finish later)

Chapter 1: flash forward to Johnny in combat

+1, page 14: shoot atomic rocket, 2kiloton
+1, page 14: flame thrower against a building
+1, page 14: two high explosive bombs
+3, page 15: killed “skinny” with flame thrower
+18, page 16: drop “fire pills” on half a dozen skinnies
+1, page 17: random/automatic y-rack bombing
+1, page 17: nuke a building
+10, page 19: twice, land in a group and flame them
+1, page 19: rocket a building
+10, page 20: talking bomb in a room full of skinnies
+1, page 21: much of the city was burning
+3, page 22: bomb a skinny
+6, page 23: a couple of skinnies flamed down
-3, page 23: “Dizzy” Flores died on the way up
—
54 total for chapter

Chapter 2: Johnny kid in High School, polemic, enlists.

+10, page 26: “ten lashes in the public square” endorses flogging
+10, page 33: moral difference between soldiers and civilians
+1, page 51: Johnny threatens “You want a mouthful of knuckles?”
—
21 total for chapter

Chapter 3: Johnny’s first day of bootcamp
“beat puppy” refers to beating a puppy to train them.
You don’t have to beat a puppy to house train them,
but Heinlein’s worldview and all of chapter 8
rests on the notion that you MUST beat a puppy to train it.
And therefore, any time a recruit is hurt in training,
it is Heinlein showing the puppies getting beaten to
be trained.
+2, page 56: Zim breaks Breckinbridge’s arm. (beat puppy)
+4, page 59: Zim knocks out two german boys (beats puppies)
—
6 total for chapter

Chapter 4: Johnny at training fatalities

+6, page 73: two boys died in bootcamp
—-
6 total for chapter

Chapter 5: Hendrick’s flogged and bad conduct discharge

+3, page 81: recruit grazed by a live round (beat puppy)
+3, page 82: one boy broke his neck (beat puppy)
+10, page 95: Hendrick’s gets flogged with 10 lashes (beat puppy)
—
16 total for chapter

Chapter 6: Johnny gets mail, polemics
+10, page 118: polemics “nothing of value is free”
+10, page 119: price demanded of the most precious thing is life itself
—
20 total for chapter

Chapter 7: Johnny gets flogged

+10, page 126: peace will happen when the leopard becomes a jersy cow (never)
+5, page 136: Johnny gets flogged with 5 lashes (beat puppy)
—
15 total for chapter

chapter 8: polemic. beat your puppy to train him.

+10, page 140: Dillenger hung at the gallows
+1, page 141: Johnny asks someone if they’d like a set of lumps
+10, page 145: polemic, must beat puppy to house train him.
+10, page 147: polemic, must spank children to discipline them
+10, page 151: human beings have no natural rights
—
41 total for chapter

chapter 9: Johnny gets in a fight on R&R, graduate

+9, page 156: two killed in training, one medical retirement
+3, page 161: Johnny and friends take out 4 civilians
—
12 total for chapter

chapter 10: Johnny assigned a ship, Beunus Aries destroyed

+10, page 169: polemic, civilian oversight of military is dangerous
-3, page 175: Dutch killed
+3, page 175: Johnny flames bug
-3, page 177: Kitten killed in launch
+1, page 180: Jelly gives Johnny set of lumps (beat puppy)
-3, page 182: Johnny’s mother killed in Buenoes Aries
-20, page 182: Bueneos Aries wiped out.
-4, page 183: two men wounded
-3, page 184: lieutenant killed
—
-22 total for chapter

chapter 11: Johnny signs up for OCS.

+10, page 192: Johnny has a fight with Ace
+20, page 195: Bug colony on Sheol wiped out
+5, page 202: marine/navy fight
+10, page 207: “sacrifice” polemic, have to be former veteran to vote
—
45 total for chapter

chapter 12: Johnny sees his Dad. Polemics.

-3, page 212: Al Jenkins killed
-3, page 223: Carl (Johnny’s high school friend) killed
+10, page 228: polemic Engulf two nations in war for one man
+10, page 231: military utopia polemic
+10, page 232: modern day democracies crashed because too democratic
+10, page 236: all morals derive from instinct to survive
+10, page 238: man is a wild animal polemic
-3, page 257: Birdie killed
—
41 total for chapter

Chapter 13: Johnny is a third lieutenant. Combat.

+20, page 286: radioactive glaze
-6, page 292: 2 officers killed (Captain Chang’s)
+10, page 316: Johnny flames a bunch of workers
+10, page 316: Hughes flames a bunch of workers
+3, page 319: Johnny kills warrior bug “I got him”
-9, page 319: I’ve lost three men
+9, page 319: Johnny grenades 3 bugs
+18, page 319: Johnny gets half a dozen bugs
-10, page 319: 2 dead, 2 hurt
+20, page 325: bugs were everywhere, then no more bugs (killed)
-12, page 325: 4 cap troopers down
+20, page 326: we hit them from behind (lots of bugs)
-3, page 326: roof falls on Johnny, taking him out
+18, page 327: three bug brains killed
—
88 total for chapter

Chapter 14: Johnny is an officer. preparing to drop.

2012 02 26

Comments (9)

Call of Duty (6): Modern Warfare 2: Multiplayer (video game)

!!!!! SPOILER ALERT !!!!!!

This is the War Handwavium score for the PS3 video game “Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2″ (Mw2), specifically the online multiplayer game.

Approximate score: 1 million points

MW2 has two different modes, single player and multiplayer.

In single player, the player plays against AI’s run by the computer and the player progresses through different challenges with a thin backdrop of a “storyline”. The story is pretty thin, and pretty outrageous, and by itself would score pretty high on the War Handwavium scale. For example, in one chapter in the game, Russians have invaded the US in a sneak attack and the player must fight them in the streets of an American suburb. That chapter is titled “Wolverines” in reference to the movie “Red Dawn”. And both the game and the movie are pretty outrageous.

In multiplayer mode, the player must connect their game system to the internet and play against other human beings. There isn’t any “story” backdrop between games like there is single player mode. There are a bunch of different maps upon which the multiplayer games take place. And in multiplayer, you get to choose your character “class”, choosing what weapons you want to carry, what “perks” you want, and so on, compared to the single-player game where you’re cast into a fixed character depending on where you are in the game.

Although the multiplayer games don’t have an overlying story between games like single-player, the multiplayer games do have different mission goals depending on which game you decide to play. In “Team Deathmatch”, you and your team must kill the other players as often as possible. I say “as often as possible” because once you kill an opponent, the computer recycles that player to a new location and enters the game again. To win the game, your team must kill the other team players more than the other team kills your team players. Other games include “Domination” which is a capture the flag game. Your team wins the game by maintaining ownership of three flags on the map. The only way to gain control of a flag, though, is to sit on it for ten seconds, which means the opposing team will try to kill you while you’re a sitting duck on the flag, which means, in the end, even “Domination” ends up having as its ultimate goal to kill as many opponents as possible.

There is no storyline in multiplayer to interconnect the individual games. Instead, the player gets to “level up” as they accumulate more experience points. The higher up in levels you are, the more weapons and perks that are available to you as a player. There are 70 levels in MW2. And once you reach 70, you can enter “prestige mode” and reset back to level 1. Entering prestige mode means you lose all your level weapons and perks and start at level 1 again. But you get to keep any “accolades” and titles and medals you received. The only functional advantage of Prestige mode is that you get to create an extra character class for every 2 levels of prestige that you complete. There are a total of 10 prestige levels in MW2.

I originally planned on scoring MW2 multiplayer by going all the way to prestige level 10, but I realized that it was taking far too long to get there and by the time I hit prestige 5, the game had grown stale for me and I believe all the war handwavium relating to the game had become apparent to me (more on this later). So, I got to level 70, prestige 5 (halfway through the game) and decided that was a good point to approximate what it would take to get to level 70, prestige 10.

First the numbers. At the point I reached level 70, prestige 5, I had the following statistics:

experience points 2.5 million
rank: commander
Number of players I killed: 30,000
longest kill streak: 24
times I died: 33,000
time played: 14 days

Luckily the game counted all the stats for me. And time played of 14 days was actual playing time at the controls, not how long I had the game installed on my PS3. So, 14 days means I was playing the game for 20,000 minutes.

The things I do for my readers.

So, the first question is, how do I calculate the war handwavium score from these statistics?

Paper targets: I killed 30,000 opponents, which translates into a score of +90,000. And the times I died? The interesting thing about MW2 is that while almost all your rewards are based off of killing opponents, there are almost no negative consequences for dying. When you die, just hit a button and you start playing in the same game with full ammo and full health. The only thing is the location where you’ll start is random. But even that isn’t entirely true because at a certain level, you can start using something called “Tactical insertion” which allows you to light a flare and place it where you want to respawn if you die.

When you create a character class, you start off with a small selection of weapons. An M4 assault rifle, for example. The rifle has a bunch of possible attachements, such as a grenade launcher, thermal scope, etc. But you can’t get any of those attachments at first. The only way to get a grenade launcher attachment for your M4 is to use the M4 in a game and kill 10 opponents with the weapon. The only way to get an ACOG sight for your M4 is to use the M4 in a game and kill 150 opponents.

The attachments you win are specific to the weapon you win them for. Once you have a thermal sight for your M4, you can’t mount the thermal sight on any other weapon. It only mounts on your M4. If you want a thermal sight on another weapon, say, an M16, then you have to use the M16 and kill 170 opponents with the M16.

But the important point is this: Killing opponents directly correlates to player rewards. Dying has almost no disadvantages.

White hat deaths: Dying in MW2 multiplayer has almost no disadvantages.

Dying takes no advantages away from the player. You get experience points for killing opponents. You don’t lose any experience points when you die. You get weapon attachments when you kill opponents. You don’t lose any of those attachments because you died too many times.

This actually affects game play in fundamental ways.

Since there is almost no cost to dying, players often charge around out in the open, spraying and praying, hoping to rack up some kills to unlock weapons and get experience points, and these people suffer no consequences when their characters die.

Put real people in the same situation where real guns are involved and getting shot means you’re dead and not respawning somewhere, and those real people will act much more differently. They’ll keep their head down. They’ll stay behind cover. They’ll try to remain concealed. They won’t go charging out into the open when they don’t know where the opponents are.

There is a concept of “killstreak” in MW2 multiplayer. If you can kill a certain number of opponents without dying, then you can call in various killstreak rewards. This includes stuff like airstrikes and attack helicopters, among others. So, dying means you don’t get a killstreak reward, but the only way to get a killstreak reward is to kill without dying, so again, it rewards and reinforces the notion of war without cost. Kill 25 people without dying and you get to call in a tactical nuke that kills everyone and you and your team *win* the game.

Because there is no significant cost to dying in MW2, there is no reason that player deaths should count as negative points against the War Handwavium score.

Also, I feel I should note that I played MW2 with a goal of getting through the levels as quickly as possible. Therefore, I usually tried to gain experience points not just by killing opposing players but by getting experience points by unlocking weapon attachments and perks and other features. I seldom played MW2 with a weapon that had all the weapon attachments unlocked. Once I unlocked all of a weapons attachments, I’d start using another weapon. Sometimes this meant I’d stop using a “good” weapon and start using a not-so-good weapon. But the goal was experience points and gaining levels.

Someone playing the game simply for play might stick with the same weapon even after all the attachments were unlocked, at which point, they’d have to kill more opposing players to gain the same number of levels. Which is a long winded way of saying that my kill count of 90k is probably a minimum count. If you played without focusing on achieving levels, by the time you reached Prestige 5, you might have a lot more kills than I did.

There are some other parts to MW2 that affect its score:

No Friendly Fire: Most games in MW2 multiplayer do not have friendly fire. There are a couple, called “Hardcore”, which do have friendly fire, but players are not compelled to play hardcore for any reason. All levels and weapons and equipment, basically all player *rewards*, can be achieved without playing hardcore. You can get medals and titles and badges by playing hardcore, but those don’t directly affect game play in any functional way.

Because players never have to deal with friendly fire, I’m adjusting the War Handwavium score with a multiplier of 1.5

No Civilians: There are 16 maps in the MW2 game (4 additional maps are available in a “pack” that players can purchase for extra money). Out of the 16 maps, 14 of them take place in setting one would normally expect civilians. (the two maps that would not expect civilians are “Wasteland” (an area that features trenches and bunkers) and “Sub Base” (a submarine base). A number of maps are placed in urban or suburban areas (Favela, Highrise, Invasion, Karachi, Rundown, Skidrow, Terminal, Underpass). A couple take place at industrial sites that would normally have civilian workers (Derail, Quarry, Rust, Scrapyard).

Yet for all these urban, suburban, and industrial locations, there are zero civilians in the multiplayer game.

In the single-player game there are a couple of challenges which involve shooting bad guys while there are civilians running around in the same area. But there are no civilians AI’s in multiplayer.

As a player, if you get enough kills without dying you can call in a B2 airstrike that can pretty much wipe out every opponent on the map. But most of the maps you’re bombing are civilian areas. And there are no civilian AI’s in these areas. So, you don’t have to worry about your bombs hitting civilians. This is a major concern for real military operations. It is nonexistent for MW2 multplayer.

Because there are no civilian AI’s in MW2, but 14 of 16 maps are civilian maps, I’m adjusting the War Handwavium score by a multiplier of 1.5.

Wolverine Level Healing Powers: If you get injured in MW2 but don’t die, you will automatically start healing yourself. I’m not sure about the exact time frame, but I think if you were down to one-percent health, I would guess that you could be fully healed again in maybe 30 seconds or less. No medics, no first aid, no bandages, no surgery, no nothing. You just magically heal.

I’m sure it was done for game-play, to make the game more fun, to allow people to keep playing. But it reinforces the idea of War Handwavium myth of war: That war isn’t dangerous.

For Wolverine healing powers, I’m adjusting the War Handwavium score by 1.25.

Nerf weapons: Once you play MW2 long enough, and once you start playing with all the different weapons available, you start noticing that all the weapons in MW2 basically do the same approximate amount of damage. Almost all weapons require at least two shots to kill a player. Even a Barett fifty caliber sniper rifle, which in real life is used by the Coast Guard to stop boat, and can take out an engine block with a single shot, can penetrate most brick and cinder block walls and still kill a person behind it, in MW2, you’ve got to shoot someone twice with a basic Barett .50 to kill them. True, you can get one shot kills in MW2 if you use “stopping power” or if you get a headshot, but a 50 cal round to the torso would kill any human being, and a 50 cal round to an appendage would amputate the appendage.

Another example of nerf weapons is MW2 version of claymore mines. Real claymore mines have an effective range of 50 meters. (meaning they can be expected to kill any human within 50 meters of the mine) In the MW2 game, claymores are a joke. They have an effective range that I would estimate to be something like 2 yards. Any further away and you live.

I can understand why the makers of MW2 did this: It makes the game easier to play. People can run around and get shot and keep playing, rather than have to die and deal with all the sucky negative consequences of dying.

And MW2 multiplayer does have more realistic weapon effects when you play “Hardcore” modes, but you can get all the level advancements you want without playing hardcore.

For nerf weapons, I’m adjusting the war handwavium score by 1.25.

Absurd Marksmanship: MW2 multiplayer has some absurd marksmanship models. weapons in MW2 do have different accuracy models based of of their mechanical abilities. For example, the AK47 is less accurate than the M16. The effect player actions has on marksmanship makes me wonder if the people who designed the game ever fired a real weapon in their lives.

In the center of the screen is a crosshair suspended in midair. The size of the crosshair reflects the general level of accuracy you have at that particular moment. If you are walking fast, the crosshairs are big, because the bullets can go all over the place if you try shooting while running. If you are walking slow, the crosshairs will be smaller. And if you are standing still, the crosshairs will be even smaller, and their size will be controlled by the mechanical accuracy of the weapon. My issue is that the size of the crosshairs appears to be no different whether you’re standing still, kneeling, or shooting prone. Military marksmenship tests generally different shooting positions for different target ranges: standing at 200 yards, kneeling or sitting at 300 yards, prone at 500 yards. In MWw, the size of the crosshair is a function of the weapon and how fast you’re moving. There doesn’t appear to be any significant change in accuracy between standing, kneeling, or prone. And there doesn’t appear to be any concept of shooting from a position where your weapon is resting on something stationary, like, for example, a window sill.

By itself this wouldn’t seem to be a big deal, but it has an effect on game play if you look for it: players often run around the map, looking for opponents, and when they see an opponent, they stop dead in their tracks, the size of their crosshair drops, they shoot, they kill, and then they start running again. In real life, someone prone has a major accuracy advantage over someone shooting while standing. Which means that you have an accuracy advantage for standing still. But a lot of scenes in MW2 play out with everyone running around full speed, stopping when they see somene, shooting them, and then sprinting back to full speed again.

As part of “absurd marksmenship” there is also the issue that transitioning from standing to kneeling to prone to kneeling to standing doesn’t make your crosshairs go away. You can shoot anytime as you transition. As you transition from standing to kneeling, the size of your crosshairs should jump, once you’re kneeling, they should be smaller than they were when standing. As you transition from kneeling to prone, the crosshairs should disappear completely for a moment. You cannot shoot with any accuracy while you’re moving your body to lie down on your belly. Once on your belly, the crosshairs should be extremely small because you’ve got a lot of accuracy when prone. But body transitions, changing from one shooting position to another, should decrease accuracy during transition or make shooting impossible altogether.

I’m not sure if MW2 has absurd marksmanship models on purpose, if it makes the game more playable, or if it’s just a result of the fact that maybe the designers never fired a real weapon before in their lives.

Either way, because of the Absurd Marksmanship models in MW2, I’m adjusting the War Handwavium score by 1.25.

Absurd Hand to Hand combat:

In MW2, hand to hand combat is always a single knife attack kills the target. Always. The only way an attack doesn’t kill is if you miss the target. If you hit, they die. And in MW2, players often sprint around the field, looking for bad guys, and it can take time to stop sprinting, shoulder a weapon, aim, and fire. So, instead, what happens is the player sprints around the field, and if they encounter a bad guy at close range, they knife them and kill them in a single attack.

Compare this to the bloody reality that would be close combat using fixed bayonets, and MW becomes laughable.

Absurd hand-to-hand combat is another 1.25 multiplier.

No prisoners: The game doesn’t even support the notion of prisoners of war. You have to kill the opponents to make any progress.

Mulitpler 1.25

Paper targets: 30,000 kills => 90,000 points
White hat deaths: no negative effects, therefore no points
no friendly fire: x1.5
no civilians: x1.5
wolverine healing powers: x1.25
nerf weapons: x1.25
absurd marksmanship models: x1.25
absurd hand to hand: 1.25

That results in 90k points and a multiplier of 5.5* for a grand total of 494,384 points. Or, roughly, 500k points.

And this is for playing halfway through the prestige levels, only prestige 5 out of 10. So, estimating that the number of kills will be double that, the the final war handwavium score for playing Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2, in Multiplayer mode, from beginning to prestige 10, is roughly one million points.

Final War Handwavium Score for Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 2, multiplayer mode: One Million points.

If the makers of Call of Duty, Modern Warfare were interested in lowering their score and making the game more realistic, here are a few comments:

The majority of the score comes from the high kill count. This could be compensated against if dying actually had some negative consequences, then I could justify counting the number of times I died against the score. But since dying has no negative consequences in the game, I’m not counting it.

Make friendly fire required for all games.

Add civilians, make killing a civilian cost experience points. Make B2 bombing runs have to worry about civilian casualties.

Get rid of the Wolverine-style healing powers. Make getting wounded an issue that has to be dealt with. Maybe have AI medics or have another player get experience points for giving first aid.

Get rid of the nerf weapons. If you don’t want the game to get lopsided because a Barett 50 in the game would grossly tilt the game in favore of whoever has a Barett 50, then remove the Barett 50 from the choice of weapons.

Make the marksmanship models more realistic. The run-and-gun playing style just reinforces the unrealistic view of war.

Absurd hand-to-hand. I don’t even know what to tell you. Drop it.

Add support for capturing prisoners. Hand to hand should not be instant kill, but a button could attempt instant prisoner. Opposing player cannot choose to not surrender. Something. But make it a player option to choose to do hand-to-hand (and not be instant death) or choose to take prisoner (and be instant prisoner).

Maybe if you try to take a prisoner and the person is wounded, then they must surrender. This might work if you didn’t have wolverine healing powers. If being wounded was a real issue then when confronted with hand to hand while wounded, you’d be more likely to surrender.

2010 04 03

Avatar (movie) – initial impressions

Just saw “Avatar” the movie with blue aliens. Here are my initial impressions of its war handwavium score (not the actual score, just a gut check)

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

It’s hard to tell, but I think the combat scenes show a fairly even mix of good guys (blue aliens) and bad guys (conquering earthlings) getting killed on screen. I’d have to get the DVD and count each one to get the real tally, but just from a gut reaction watching the movie on the big screen, it seems fairly even. There are lots of killing scenes, but I think it’s a balance of black hats and white hats, so the final score would be near zero for that aspect of it.

I believe I am going to have to invent a new item for scoring fiction that Avatar made me aware of: military victory delivered by god.

The main character, Sully, decides to fight the big, bad, fully mechanized invading military. And he decides to fight this military using nothing more than soft, fleshy, twelve-foot tall blue people riding soft fleshy horses and soft fleshy pteradactyls.

Needless to say, Sully and his band of spear-throwing, bow-and-arrow shooting warriors get their asses handed to them by heavily armored vehicles firing projectile weapons with a range of a kilometer and a rate of fire measured in the hundreds of rounds a minute.

But when all seems lost, the cavalry comes in and saves the day. The ending is a deus ex machina. God from the machine. The aliens worship a diety that they describe as the planet itself and all the life that lives on it. And towards the end of teh movie, it is revealed that the planet is actually some sort of biologically networked organism that stores people’s memories and their “souls”.

But, this turns out to be only part of the planet-god’s powers. When Sully and his band of warriors are about to be exterminated, the planet itself decides to send in the cavalry, in the form of wave after wave of animal to fight the heavily armored humans with guns.

Sully had no strategy, and the planet-god appears to have little strategy either, other than “war of attrition”.

But Sully goes to war with no planning, no strategy, no tactics, with not enough manpower, not enough weapons, and not enough armor, and really little more than the gut feeling that his fight is the noble fight and somehow it’ll all work out.

And that doesn’t really comply with the “just war” concept. In a “just war”, you must have a good probability for winning before you start the war. If you can’t win, then you’re just going to kill a lot of people, and end up losing anyway.

Sully, who used to be a member of marine recon, should have had some notion of what his odds of spear chuckers versus machine guns would be. Even an idiot should have some notion of what the odds would be. And the odds would be slim to no chance of victory.

But Sully launches the war anyway, and gets a lot of people killed. And he would have lost the war had it gone by his own planning, but victory was delivered by God, because their fight was the just fight, the noble fight. At one point, the spiritual second-in-command of the tribe said the planet-god doesn’t take sides, only maintains the balance. But apparently, the planet-god decided things were so unbalanced that it took sides and stepped in.

For that, Avatar gets an additional 20 points to whatever other points it may end up accumulating.

Overall, I’d say the movie was worth the full evening price, an A-. But that’s because the story of Sully coming of age in the Na’vi tribe seems to be the main story, and the stupid deus ex machina military victory at the end was sort of a sub-plot I can somewhat overlook.

I think the scene where Sully is doing a voice over talking about how they went around to all the tribes and got the warriors to help them fight would have been a good spot to insert a scene where they show Sully talking with the warriors about strategies. They wouldn’t need dialogue, they could have had Sully continue his voiceover so no dialogue would be needed. And then they could have implemented some tribal strategies. Throw some big boulders off the tops of those flying mountains onto the helicopters below. Some punji sticks for the troops on the ground. Maybe the Na’vi don’t use traps for animals, but I don’t think they would be unaware of how to make animal traps. Anything that resembled a plan could have evened out the fight a little bit rather than have a massacre.

But I think the writer, James Cameron, was going for the big surprise at the end. When all seems lost and so many warriors have died, surprise, the empathic planet will help you if you are fighting the good fight.

Ugh.

2009 12 20

Call of Duty 4 (video game)

This is the War Handwavium score for “Call of Duty 4″, a video game. The specific version used was for the PS3.

+3,500 points total score

!!!!SPOILERS!!!!

All levels were played from start to finish on “novice” level. All “kills” were counted once. If while playing the game, I died and had to restart a level, I didn’t count the kills twice. I’ve played through the game on Veteran difficulty through all levels, and I’ve gotten all the “laptops” so I was able to active the slow motion cheat code, infinite ammo cheat mode, and super grenades. Using these cheat modes made it easier to count while playing (slow motion) and it allowed me to go through all the levels as quickly as possible. I tried to avoid any “excessive” killing. There are spots in the game where bad guys will keep coming out of certain locations and you can just sit there and rack up your body count. I tried to avoid anything like that that would overinflate the body count beyond what would be required for someone to play the game normally.

I didn’t count bodies killed by Artificial Intelligence characters. I only counted the ones that I, as the player, killed. I didn’t distinguish between how the bad guy was killed. Various ways include using a knife, a firearm of some kind, hand grenades, and an M203 grenade launcher, among others. I avoided using RPG’s and such to kill bad guys, just to make it easier to count the bodies. I didn’t count the bodies that might have been killed by me calling in an airstrike. Just the ones that I had to directly kill.

The game has a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue. The three acts are broken up into several levels, each with a name. What I’ve done below is list each level and the number of bad guys killed on that level by the player character.

Prologue

33 “Crew Expendable”

Act 1

75 “Blackout”
89 “Charlie Don’t Surf”
88 “The Bog”
81 “Hunted”
125 “Death From Above”
68 “War Pig”
111 “Shock and Awe”
0 “Aftermath”

Act 2

76 “Safehouse”
14 “All Ghillied Up”
92 “One Shot, One Kill”
100 “Heat”
40 “Sins of the Father”

Act 3

62 “Ultimatum”
33 “All In”
72 “No Fighting in the War Room”
57 “Game Over”

Epilogue

33 “Mile High Club”

The total number of bad guys I killed playing the game from start to finish was 1,249. I’m going to round that to 1,250. 1,250 paper targets is (multiply times three) 3,750 points.

In addition to the straight up body count, there is at least one scene during the game where the commander of your team executes a prisoner, for an additional 10 points (not that ten points matters that much).

Also, during game play, members of your team occaissionally die. These are somewhat harder to count because the death of a teammate has zero effect on the game, and the ground is littered with bodies here and there. So, you as the player, are functionally apathetic about your teammates dying. It doesn’t make any difference to you. So I didn’t count them unless it mattered in some way to the player.

In one level, “All Ghillied Up”, you are with one other teammate, and if he dies, the game ends and you have to restart at the last checkpoint. So, that one counts as a -3 points.

At the end of “Shock and Awe”, something interesting happens. You and your entire team all die. You watch as 7 of your helicopters are destroyed. You watch a man fall out of your helicopter. Then you watch your helicopter crash. After the crash, you are mortally wounded and get to struggle around for a little while with burning wreckage everywhere, and then you die.

7 choppers plus the 10 or so people in your chopper dying, that’s a total of -51 points.

At the end of “Game Over”, everyone on your team dies except you. Griggs tries to rescue you, but you watch him shot down. You then watch three of your teammates executed. And when the medics arrive, you watch one of them doing CPR on your commanding officer, and then pounding his fist on his chest (I assume the CO dies). You are left seriously wounded.

5 teammates dead is -15 points. You seriously wounded is -3 points.

Subtracting the points for teammate deaths, gives a total of 3,688 points.

Just because I’m feeling generous, I’m going to take off an additional 188 points, which would account for an additional 60 white hat deaths.

Leaving a total War Handwavium score of 3,500 points.

Summary:

“Call of Duty 4″ is clearly a game where the entertainment is the killing. The counts above are based on how I played after I had mastered the game sufficiently to know where to go and what to do. Someone playing the game for the first time will probably end up having a slightly skewed count because they’d be going through the same levels more than once, so they’d experience killing bad guys a lot more than the numbers above reflect. Also, once you start playing more difficult levels, the number of bad guys goes up. So, this body count listed above (1,250) is really just a baseline. The actual body count that someone playing the game multiple times and different difficulties would be higher.

One of the interesting things in the game is you play different characters. Most of the levels are played as “Soap” a member of the British SAS. But a few levels are played as “Jackson” a US Marine.

Jackson is only in Act 1 because he dies at the end of Act 1. Jackson plays during the levels “Charlie Don’t Surf”, “The Bog”, “War Pig”, and “Shock and Awe” (he dies in Shock in Awe).

An unnamed character plays an airman manning the guns in a C-130 gunship in the level “Death from Above”.

In the Epilogue level “Mile High Club”, Captain Price and Gaz, who had died in Act 3, “Game Over”, are somehow magically back for another level, so I’ll assume the player character is Soap for that level. I almost want to add a few points for reserrecting Price and Gaz after watching them die, but unless it’s a hundred points, it’s really lost in the noise.

Anyway, this means that the various characters in the game have the following individual body counts:

880 : Soap

245: Jackon

125: Airman (C130 operator)

Which I think is a little high for what a special ops person might experience.

Last but not least, most of the levels have absolutely no civilians, even though many levels are played in urban areas. In “Death From Above”, you’re the gunner on a C-130 gunship, and there are two civilians that come out of the commendeered vehicles. There is also a church that you can’t target. Everything else, an entire town, is open game. In “Hunted”, there is one civilian who you are supposed to save from the bad guys. He walks out of some farmhouse and the bad guys come up to him. You’re supposed to shoot the bad guys and he runs into his farmhouse. But many of the levels take place in urban areas, and you have to go door-to-door to sweep out the bad guys. But there are never any unarmed civilians anywhere. If you kill one of your own people, the level restarts at your last checkpoint. There should be some unarmed civilians in the urban areas, and killing them should also restart you at a checkpoint. When you burst into a room, there should be some civilians in there, maybe sometimes the run out and get in your way. Oh, and if you play on veteran difficulty, sometimes the room has bad guys, sometimes it has civilians. It’s different every time you play.

2009 09 03

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053183/

Pork Chop Hill (movie)

This is the War Handwavium score for “Pork Chop Hill”, the 1959 movie starring Gregory Peck.

Gregory Peck plays Lt. Joe Clemons, a company commander in the Korean War.

Actor Rip Torn plays Lt. Walter Russel. George Peppard plays Cpl. Chuck Fedderson. Robert Blake plays Pvt. Velie. Martin Landau plays Lt. Marshall. Gavin MacLeod plays Pvt. Saxon.

“This is a true story based on the book by Brig Gen S.L.A.Marshall, USAR. In most cases not even the names have been changed. We are deeply grateful for the cooperation of the United States Army.”

Technical Adviser Captain Joseph Clemons Jr, Infantry, USA.

Total Score: -94 points.

Note: !!!!!!SPOILERS!!!!!!

-3 points: GI (name of Forstman) complains to Clemons that he’s got his points to rotate out. Army says he is one point short. Showing sacrifice due to bureacratic indifference.

-57 points: Initial operation storming the base of Pork Chop Hill, 19 American GI’s shown killed.

+3 points: Americans storm first trench. 1 Chinese shown killed.

28 minute mark: Chinese bugle sounds.

+6 points: 2 Chinese killed.

-3 points: 1 American with Suki killed.

+1 point: 32 minutes: American runner going from Suki to Clemons crosses a chinese machine gun nest. Throws grenade, misses, injures himself. Throws another grenade, takes out gunner. -2 points for injury. +3 points for killing chinese.

+3 points: 1 Chinese killed

-3 points: 1 American killed.

-6 points: 41 minutes: Love company shows up. 12 men left out of 150. Artillery shell kills 2 men.

-3 points: Wounded GI being carried on stretcher with foot blown off.

+9 points: three Chinese are killed as Americans take bunker.

-36 points: Americans take command post. Artillery shells their position. A dozen men shown in wreckage.

Possibly friendly fire incident. Men are angry. Clemons talks them down.

+12 points, -12 points: Bayonet charge over the hill and into the trenches. 4 Chinese killed. 4 Americans killed.

Take crest of hill and trenches.

-3 points: American (Chuck the machine gunner) is killed.

-6 points: Radio man (Sam) and GI eating beans are found dead by Clemons.

Lieutenant from Public Relations comes up hill to take pictures of “successful” operation.

George company leaves the hill

Franklin points gun at Clemons. Says he doesn’t want to die for Korea. Clemons talks him down. Franklin joins him.

Chinese propaganda officer says they have 45 minutes to surrender or there will be a massive attack. Plays orchestra music.

Division finally contacts on radio. Can’t reinforce. Can’t withdraw.

At peace conference, chinese refuse to negotiate over Pork Chop Hill. Americans think Chinese know they aren’t going to reinforce the hill, and know Chinese intend to attack in an hour to take it. American General thinks Chinese picked the hill because it is worthless and they’re willing to die for it, and it’s a test to see if Americans are willing to die for a worthless hill too.

Attack begins.

-2 points: Suki is wounded.

Americans pull back into bunker. Chinese flamethrower attacks them.

American reinforcements show up.

+6 points: 2 chinese are killed.

The hill is won.

Summary:

I was flipping through the channels when I caught a part of this movie. I was intriqued by the fact that it kept showing Americans getting killed, but not the enemy. So I scheduled it to be recorded on DVR and scored it.

This movie really contrasts the differences between a realistic portrayal of war and a fantasy war-handwavium portrayal of war. The movie focuses on the sacrifices American GI’s made. Compare this to some modern day Rambo movie that focuses on creating an enjoyable gladiator fight in the colosseum where we are encouraged to enjoy the sight of killing.

There is one scene in the movie where the radio guy, Sam, sees some Chinese prisoners, and he exclaims, “That’s what they look like? That’s what I”m afraid of?” Compare this to the demonization of the enemy that a movie like “300″ employed to make the bad guys seem nonhuman.

We’re not meant to watch this movie and enjoy the killing of the enemy. We’re meant to watch this movie and see the sacrifices that Americans made in war.

This movie is the antithesis of the war handwavium flick. And the massive negative score reflects that.

From wikipedia:

The Battle of Pork Chop Hill comprises a pair of related Korean War infantry battles during the spring and summer of 1953. These were fought while the U.S. and the Communist Chinese and Koreans negotiated an armistice. In the U.S., they were controversial because of the many soldiers killed for terrain of no strategic or tactical value. The first battle was described in the eponymous history Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, Korea, Spring 1953, by S.L.A. Marshall, from which the film Pork Chop Hill was drawn.

The United Nations, primarily supported by the United States, won the first battle when the Chinese broke contact and withdrew after two days of fighting. The second battle involved many more troops on both sides and was bitterly contested for five days before United Nations Command conceded the hill to the Chinese forces by withdrawing behind the main battle line.

The movie portrays the first battle for Pork Chop Hill, when the Americans won, rather than showing the second battle, which the Americans lost.

Wikipedia reports that during the first battle, company K and L attack the hill, suffering 50% initial casualties, later helped by Company G. Due to miscommunication, and not realizing the number of castualties suffered, command orders Company G to withdraw. By the time command realized the true situation, K and L companies were down to 25 men. Command sent reinforcements in the form of several additional companies.

In this respect, the movie is fairly accurate in the window of time it represents. Two companies (about 200-300 men total) start the attack and are reduced to 25 men before reinforcements arrive.

The French premiere was received with criticism on grounds of racism, as the character played by Woody Strode, an African American, was shown to be a coward during the initial attack on the Chinese position. I would have to say the fact that the film has only one African American character, and that character is a coward, is a bit suspect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Pork_Chop_Hill

2009 08 12

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119116/

“The Fifth Element” (movie)

This is the War Handwavium score for “The Fifth Element”, the 1997 movie staring Bruce Willis.

Total score: +201 points

Note: !!!!!SPOILERS!!!!!

Times are approximate, based on DVR recording.

+5 points: entire movie: Inexplicable ball of evil shows up every few thousand years to destroy earth. If that isn’t “othering”, I don’t know what is.

-5 points: 15 minutes: Cocksure General shoots missiles at unexplainable ball of fire in space. Gets his ship blown up.

-2 points: 20 minutes: punk next door tries to rob Korben Dallas. Dallas disarms him without violence.

+10 points: 23 minutes: we meet the Mangalores, a race of trolls. Complete othering of bad guys for easier, guilt-free killing.

-9 points: 23 minutes: Mangalores shoot down the Mondoshawans ship. Three are killed.

+5 points: 29 minutes: General taunts Leeloo in glass chamber. pointless. But it allows Leeloo to punch through the chamber and punch the General.

+2 points: 36 minutes: cops crash into McDonalds truck.

+10 points: 47 minutes: We meet the bad guy, Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg. Zorg has half a shaven head, has a plastic thingy for a hat, weird clothes, a goatee, a funny accent, and walks with a limp. Outrageous othering.

+5 points: 47 minutes: Zorg fires 1 million employess when assistant says he only needed to fire half a million. Pointless display of evil.

+5 points: 48 minutes: Zorg’s minions are bald, have weird plastic hats, and wear tight leather pants. Othering.

+5 points: 1:05 minutes: Cops bag wrong bad guy. Bureaucracy fails.

+9 points: 1:05 minutes: Trolls kill 3 cops to capture bag from cops.

-2 points: 1:07 minutes: Father Vito Cornelius knocks Dallas on head with trophy, steals his tickets.

+12 points: 1:11 minutes: 2 trolls disquised as punks kill 4 cops and then hide in garbage at airport.

+5 points: 1:19 minutes: Zorg blows up his own minion by exploding cell phone for failing. Pointless display of evil.

+6 points: 1:30 minutes: Trolls go into Diva’s room and kill 2 entourage members.

+30 points: 1:31 minutes: Leeloo beats up 15 trolls.

-2 points: 1:33 minutes: Zorg shoots Leeloo in ventilator shaft

+9 points: 1:34 minutes: Trolls take over ships control room. Kill 3 sailors.

+9 points: 1:34 minutes: trolls attack theater. Kill 2 sailors and the Diva.

+2 points: 1:37 minutes: Dallas flips troll, takes his gun, and pins him.

+5 points: 1:38 minuts: Ruby Rohd kills troll by accident. Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine.

+27 points: 1:38 minutes: Dallas starts killing trolls. 9 killed.

+20 points: 1:39 minutes: Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine. Dallas jumps on lever, troll goes into ceiling. Head is stuck. His rifle fires and he kills 4 other trolls.

+18 points: 1:42 minutes: Dallas shoots 2 trolls behind tripod gun and kills 4 trolls with a grenade.

+21 points: 1:43 minutes: Dallas goes to control room. Kills 6 trolls in one sweep. Then walks in and shoots the leader in the head.

-12 points: 1:46 points: Zorg lands on cruise ship for second time, kills 4 sailors.

+10 points: 1:48 minutes: trolls set of their own self-destruct device. Kill Zorg, kill trolls. Lethal Rube Goldberg Machine.

+3 points: 1:59 minutes: Leeloo activates the weapon, destroys giant ball of evil.

Summary: “The Fifth Element” is a comedy, action, sci-fi story that is cartoonish in its portrayal of good and evil and its portrayal of violence. Evil is evil because it’s evil. And good (leeloo) exists just because evil exists. The battle lines are nice and clean. Then we meet the actual bad guys and discover that it’s an army of trolls hired by a weird, balding, funny accented, funny dressed, funny walking, guy with a weird hat, and a penchant for useless displays of evil. And the supreme being happens to be Leeloo, played by super-model Milla Jovovich, who spends a good chunk of the movie running around in tiny bandages, and has a tendancy to take off her top when men are looking.

It’s so, good=beauty, evil=ugly, that it’s silly.

The final war handwavium is moderately high, reflecting this ultra black-versus-white portrayal, and reflecting that the bad guys are othered to teh point that we don’t feel anything when they’re killed.

For me personally, I enjoyed “The Fifth Element”. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time. But it’s a movie I enjoy not for the violence, but for the extremely well written script. It’s a damn funny movie. And the movie seems to focus more on being a comedy-action movie (like “Big Trouble in Little China”) than on trying to be an action-comedy (like “Beverly Hills Cop”). So I can personally overlook the high war handwavium score enough to like the movie and put it on my favorites list.

It is interesting that when you disect the movie it does land on a fairly high end of the scale. But then “The Fifth Element” was written and directed by Luc Besson. Some of Luc Besson’s other works include “La Femme Nikita” and “The Transporter”. “The Fifth Element” seems like a comedy cousin version of “La Femme Nikita”, and I’d probably not like “The Fifth Element” as much if it had tried to be serious like “La Femme Nikita”.

Basically, the cartoonish aspect of the movie allowed me to watch the war handwavium as not to be taken too seriously. And the fact that the movie is an extremely well written comedy meant that there was much to enjoy even ignoring the war handwavium violence. If “The Fifth Element” had tried to take itself too seriously, or if it hadn’t had an extremely funny script, then the violence would probably have been enough of a turn off that I wouldn’t like the movie overall.

As it is, it is in fact one of my favorites. Being an extremely well-quotable movie helps. I can’t not think “Chicken, good” anytime I pop something in the microwave.

2009 08 10

Comments (2)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105695/

Unforgiven (movie)

This is the War Handwavium score for “Unforgiven”, the 1992 movie starring Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman.

Total War Handwavium Score: +7 points

NOTE: !!!!SPOILERS!!!!

No times are given. Didn’t have a DVD. The amount of violence is small enough that it’s pretty easy to track.

+2 points: The movie starts with two men Quick Mike and Davey Bunting, in a brothel. Quick Mike starts cutting up a prostitute’s face, Delilah Fitzgerald, because she “gave a giggle” when she saw how small his penis is. Davey Bunting hears yelling, comes into the room, and tries to stop Quick Mike. The owner of the brothel, Skinny Dubois, comes in and puts an end to it by brandishing a pistol.

The Sheriff, Little Bill Daggett, gives the men a fine. They are to provide the owner of the brothel with 7 ponies next spring. The prostitutes want them hanged, or at least whipped. The prostitutes decide to come up with a thousand dollar reward to anyone who will kill Quick Mike and Davey Bunting.

The first to attempt to collect is English Bob. He comes into town. The sheriff knows him and he and his posse surround English Bob and force him to surrender his guns. Then Sheriff Little Bob Dagget beats English Bob bloody and unconscious.

+5 pointless display of evil. Sheriff’s beating of English Bob.

The Schofield Kid, William Munny, and Ned Logan show up in town to collect the reward. The Sheriff confronts William Munny in the bar, beats him up, and kicks him out of town.

-2 William gets beaten by Sheriff.

William, Ned, and the kid go after Davey. Ned shoots at him, but misses and hits horse. Davey’s leg is crushed. Ned can’t finish him off. William takes the rifle and shoots Davey.

+3 William shoots Davey.

Ned realizes he can’t go through with it and rides out of town. William and the kid stay to go after the second cowboy and collect the reward. Friends of Davey catch Ned and we are told they beat him up, and then they turn him over to the sheriff.

Sheriff Dagget whips Ned in jail. Tries to get information, such as the name of his two accomplices. Dagget shows that he is whipping Ned more out of sadism than anything else. Ned gives false information.

-10 realistic portrayal of torture.

William and the Kid keep an eye on where Quick Mike is hiding. They wait till he goes out to to go the outhouse. The kid shoots Quick Mike.

+3 the Kid shoots Quick Mike.

The Kid then tells William that it was the first time he ever killed anyone. The Kid had been talking trash the whole movie up to this point. Now that he’s actually killed a man, he’s got the shakes, and got a pile of regret.

William and the Kid collect the reward.

We’re told that the Sheriff heard that Quick Mike is dead, and that he tortured Ned to death, not because the information would have done any good, but out of vengeance. As William put it, the Sheriff killed Ned for what William and the Kid did.

-10 realistic portrayal of torture.

William rides back into town. Ned’s body is on display in a coffin in front of the brothel. William kills the owner of the brothel for using Ned’s body as decoration. William then kills Sheriff Little Bill and 4 other men.

+18 William kills 6 men

summary:

When “Unforgiven” came out, it was hailed as being a realistic portrayal of violence and killing. The score, in my opinion, essentially reflects that accuracy. It shows torture being used not for information, but for vengeance. It shows gunmen English Bob and Sheriff Little Bill Dagget as being legends in their own minds, both of them lie to the writer W.W. Beauchamp.

Of all the main characters, none are searching for justice. The prostitutes want vengeance. The sheriff wants peace through visciousness. And William gets that he’s just killing for money and that ‘we all got it coming’.

Clint Eastwood preaches a moral of the failings of violence with this movie. And he walks the walk, not just talks the talk. The movie doesn’t preach against violence while glorifying violence. The movie preaches against violence while showing violence without any handwavium to pretty it up. Torture is shown honestly, brutally. The movie has a total body count of less than 10.

While something like “Watchmen” tries to have a moral to the story of the pointlessness of violence, it tells that moral while showing us a world where torture repeatedly works, where Rorsharch never kills an innocent man, and where vigilantes get to beat up black hat paper targets in dark alleyways.

Contrast this to “Unforgiven” where the movie “tells” us that violence is pointless at the same time it “shows” us a world in which violence is not some guiltfree indulgence.

“Unforgiven” won Oscars for best picture, best director, best supporting actor, and best editing. It also had nominations for best actor, best cinematography, and best original screenplay.

The movie itself has some issues, mainly that it’s longer than it needs be. At 2 hours and 11 minutes, the movie suffered from needless characters, namely the whole thing with the writer Beauchamp wasn’t needed for the plot, and some scenes could have been shortened, and all together, that probably could have cut the movie down to an hour and a half.

I don’t think “Unforgiven” won all those awards and nominations strictly for being the best movie. I think “Unforgiven” won all those awards and nominations because people recognized on some level that “Unforgiven” was showing us and telling us an honest story about the realities of violence.

Whatever the reason for the awards, “Unforgiven” is one of the lowest scoring “War Handwavium” stories that centers around violence that I’ve done. And I think that score reflects that the movie not only talked the talk about violence, but walked the walked. It told us and it showed us violence for what it is.

2009 08 10

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0465602/

Shoot Em Up (movie)

This is the War Handwavium score for “Shoot Em Up”, a movie released in 2007.

+384 points

!!!SPOILERS!!!

All times are relative from the start of the movie, as recorded by a DVR.

+3 points, 0:02, Smith kills thug with carrot

+33 points, 0:03, Smith shoots 11 thugs

+5 points, 0:04, Hertz shoots wounded thug to stop him from squirming

+2 points, 0:07, Smith knocks out thug with gun

+5 points, 0:09, Hertz shoots his own guy in rear

+2 points, 0:12, Smith beats up Secret Service guy

+3 points, 0:15, Hertz kills bystander

+12 points, 0:23, Audience is shown 4 thugs killed by Smith.

-2 points, 0:28, Smith smashes finger of “John” by accident. (poor targeting)

+129 points, 0:33, Smith kills 23 thugs as they invade. Kills another 20 rappelling down stairwell.

+3 points, 0:41, Smith kills Secret Service guy with carrot

+24 points, 0:47, Smith kills 8 guys while he’s having sex.

+2 points, 0:50, Smith spanks Mom

+66 points, 0:54, Smith kills 22 guards at Hammerson factory

+27 points, 0:59, Smith kills 9 thugs in car chase

+3 points, 1:07, Smith killls Senator

+24 points, 1:08, Smith kills 8 thugs while skydiving

+24 points, 1:09, Smith sees a total of 14 dead skydivers on ground, an additional 6 kills

-5 points, 1:12, Smith is tortured.

+12 points, 1:13, Smith escapes torture from Hertz, kills 4 thugs

+3 points, 1:17, Smith kills Hertz

+9 points, 1:18, Smith shoots three punks during holdup.

There isn’t much plot to this movie. Well, there is, and it’s all really convoluted. The short version is that the MacGuffin of the movie is a baby. Bad guys want the baby dead. Good guys want baby alive. Carnage ensues.

There are 2 “good” guys in this movie, Smith and Donna. There is basically 1 bad guy, Hertz, and a whole bunch of cannon fodder. By the end of the movie, Smith has killed 115 black hats.

It was visually interesting at times, but the plot was spaghetti and the dialogue was pretty stiff.

2009 05 27