Media "Literacy"

The battle-whimper of the philistine

Liberals — leftists — as people who are characterized by their hatred of beauty; of intelligence; and of strength; are plagued by self-loathing borne of an enfeebled attachment to an infirm credentialism.

This is no new revelation, though I thought to highlight this with one smear-precis which these types are so often prone to. “Media literacy” as a retort by leftists is usually dismissed by Right Wingers as empty, frail posturing - and it is. However, the recent “Simple” Will debacle should cue a few people into what is really intended: that leftists, devoid of any historical literacy, can punch against their inferiority complex with some sort of veneer of “depth.” Normally this takes the form of limp-wristed moralizing, so as to poorly fill the void caused by a lack of any education or cogent thought - but sometimes, it takes the rarer (and funnier) form of the “media literacy” argument. Leftists, at bottom, derive their conclusions as they so please (or rather, are browbeaten into thinking they ought be pleased by) and attempt some sort of post hoc epistemic justification with the “credentials” of those figures who uplift their ideals.

By my estimation, approximately 99.8736% of all liberals have never read any of “the data” or engaged with “the science” or studied “the history” which they cite. Liberals fawn over invented concepts like “media literacy,” because media is the only thing that they are “literate” in - if we are so generous as to grant that they actually are media-literate. Liberals do not read Caesar; they don’t read Plato; nor Xenophon; nor Thucydides; nor Horace or Livy; and certainly not Augustine or Jerome. They read Harry Potter, Divergent, or maybe A Song of Ice and Fire if they’re feeling adventurous. Perhaps the (ever so slightly) more erudite among them might read The Catcher in the Rye. But leftist “media literacy” rarely involves any literacy; they watch schlocky movies, often Marvel films or equally worthless tripe. That’s not to say that mindless action has no place in media; Fury Road is a great movie, in its own right - but it can’t take the place of The Canterbury Tales or Beowulf. One must also remember that a liberal citing “media literacy” immediately restricts themselves to media made within (roughly) the last century - and in reality, often products which are far more recent. A liberal would have you believe that all “media” is political, and — even more absurdly — that it has always been so heavy-handed. This is primarily because leftists have to justify, within their own mind, the idea that they could engage with any facet of history or writing, if they so chose. But they do not choose to do so. Instead, leftists feign a sense of eminence by elevating media consumption to some sort of intellectual endeavor.

The consumption of stories is ultimately a good thing, and a fundamental part of the human experience. Tolkien — though using a religious rubric which may fall flat for some — argues this fluently.

Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man ascribe to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.¹

But this presupposes a good-faith engagement, and even more a desire to “understand;” which in turn necessitates education. Leftists, however, are incapable of either good-faith or education. Leftists treat the synthetic, disparate, and unmeaning media they consume as some sort of holistic mythos - a Lord of the Rings adjacent constructed universe; but built not out of marble and gold, but scrap metal from different broken machines. Authoritarianism is bad not because of some study they cite about stop-and-frisk — which they haven’t read — but because, if you press them hard enough, one of their favorite movies constructed a narrative implying so. More often than not, this is because they have been told that it does so; they are happy and content to merely accept that a piece of media fits their narrative. Their motivation is multifaceted: their mental illness and severe neuroses necessitate such an act, but it ultimately derives more from their ideological “learned helplessness” (in this case, self taught).

For a leftist to enjoy RoboCop requires some kind of dissonance; they can point to the liberal tendencies of Verhoeven and the “comical” violence, but this is merely in spite of the assumed premise of the movie: that violent over-policing can solve the propagation of crime (both corporate and impoverished). The most absurd example is one you’ve almost certainly seen made; Starship Troopers. If you are not obsessed with watching “cult classics” from almost 30 years ago, you’ve probably never watched it - which would put you in about the same boat as a leftist, who has never read the novel but was told by some soylennial podcaster (who also hasn’t read the novel) that it’s a critique of “fascism.” In disclosure, I hadn’t either; I’ve wasted a half a day doing a deep-dive on Starship Troopers to merely demonstrate my point about leftist imbecility and illiteracy.

In Starship Troopers, duty is paramount; a citizen cannot vote without military service, and nobody can interfere with the decision to enlist. Though Heinlein made his main character and narrator a filipino, the novel is still significantly less shitlibby than the movie. Critics pointed out that it was too “violent” and authoritarian. Norman Spinrad described it as a military wet-dream [fantasy] … in which righteous ingenues guiltlessly slaughter faceless gunfodder.² And further:

A further complaint is that while science fiction authors may be very adventurous and imaginative when it comes to technology and undiscovered worlds, their view of social interaction is at best conservative and at times downright reactionary. Heinlein’s Starship Trooper seems to advocate corporal punishment and capital punishment to the point of making this the theme of the story.³

A necessary premise to understand is that the whole story is centered around a war against aliens, or “bugs.” The “bugs” attacked the humans first; the war is defensive, and Heinlein portrays anti-war liberals as hysterical and nonsensical freaks.

It was Operation Bughouse, the First Battle of Klendathu in the history books, soon after Buenos Aires was smeared. It took the loss of B. A. to make the groundhogs realize that anything was going on, because people who haven’t been out don’t really believe in other planets, not down deep where it counts. I know I hadn’t and I had been space-happy since I was a pup.

But B. A. really stirred up the civilians and inspired loud screams to bring all our forces home, from everywhere — orbit them around the planet practically shoulder to shoulder and interdict the space Terra occupies. This is silly, of course; you don’t win a war by defense but by attack — no "Department of Defense" ever won a war; see the histories. But it seems to be a standard civilian reaction to scream for defensive tactics as soon as they do notice a war. They then want to run the war — like a passenger trying to grab the controls away from the pilot in an emergency.⁴

The main character proceeds to defend the honor of a general who sacrificed himself to save a platoon - and then further explains that glassing the entire home planet of the bugs is only unacceptable because it mightn’t wipe them out sufficiently. The way in which he describes the hivemind of the bugs is strikingly similar to a Western conception of a communist country.

I am not criticizing General Diennes. I don’t know whether it’s true that he demanded more troops and more support and allowed himself to be overruled by the Sky Marshal-in-Chief — or not. Nor was it any of my business. Furthermore I doubt if some of the smart second-guessers know all the facts.

What I do know is that the General dropped with us and commanded us on the ground and, when the situation became impossible, he personally led the diversionary attack that allowed quite a few of us (including me) to be retrieved — and, in so doing, bought his farm. He’s radioactive debris on Klendathu and it’s much too late to court-martial him, so why talk about it?

I do have one comment to make to any armchair strategist who has never made a drop. Yes, I agree that the Bugs’ planet possibly could have been plastered with H-bombs until it was surfaced with radioactive glass. But would that have won the war? The Bugs are not like us. The Pseudo-Arachnids aren’t even like spiders. They are arthropods who happen to look like a madman’s conception of a giant, intelligent spider, but their organization, psychological and economic, is more like that of ants or termites; they are communal entities, the ultimate dictatorship of the hive. […]

If they absorbed the punishment and didn’t surrender, the war was still on.

If they can surrender —

Their soldiers can’t. Their workers can’t fight (and you can waste a lot of time and ammo shooting up workers who wouldn’t say boo!) and their soldier caste can’t surrender.⁵

In fact, Heinlein makes it even clearer a few pages later, to ensure that no whining critic could misconstrue his message:

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commissars didn’t care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with “lessons from history” is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.⁶

This is not a “deep” and/or “nuanced” examination of how fascism otherizes opponents; let’s not forget that the chapter opens with Jefferson’s The Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots. In Heinlein’s Expanded Universe he argues that military service in S.T. is largely non-combat.

“Veteran” does not mean in English dictionaries or in this novel solely a person who has served in military forces. I concede that in commonest usage today it means a war veteran... but no one hesitates to speak of a veteran fireman or veteran school teacher. In STARSHIP TROOPERS it is stated flatly and more than once that nineteen out of twenty veterans are not military veterans. Instead, 95% of voters are what we call today “former members of federal civil service.”⁷

But I alluded to the arguably communist-referencing depiction of the bugs earlier; let us not forget that Starship Troopers was written during the height of the Cold War, and as the irate Heinlein’s response to Eisenhower’s decision to suspend the U.S.’s nuclear testing program. When the decision was announced, Heinlein wrote an essay entitled Who Are the Heirs of Patrick Henry?, which he opens with Henry’s Give me liberty or give me death!

Is “fall-out” dangerous? Of course it is! The risk to life and posterity has been willfully distorted by these Communist-line propagandists—but if it were a hundred times as great we still would choose it to the dead certainty of Communist enslavement. If atomic war comes, will it kill off the entire human race? Possibly—almost certainly so if the Masters of the Kremlin choose to use cobalt bombs on us. Their command of science in these matters seems equal to ours, they appear to be some years ahead of us in the art of rocketry; they almost certainly have the power to destroy the human race.

If it comes to atomic war, the best we can hope for is tens of millions of American dead—perhaps more than half our population wiped out in the first few minutes.

These are the risks. The alternative is surrender. We accept the risks.⁸

But even more: the parallels between the histrionic liberals described above and the Cold War pacifist liberals is palpable in Heinlein’s mind.

4. Criticism: “The government in STARSHIP TROOPERS is militaristic.” “Militaristic” is the adjective for the noun “militarism,” a word of several definitions but not one of them can be correctly applied to the government described in this novel. No military or civil servant can vote or hold office until after he is discharged and is again a civilian. The military tend to be despised by most civilians and this is made explicit. A career military man is most unlikely ever to vote or hold office; he is more likely to be dead—and if he does live through it, he’ll vote for the first time at 40 or older.⁹

But he continues even more explicitly. Heinlein was the exact imperialist — “fascist” — that liberals have deluded themselves into believing S.T. “criticizes.”

“That book glorifies the military!” Now we are getting somewhere. It does indeed. Specifically the P.B.I., the Poor Bloody Infantry, the mudfoot who places his frail body between his loved home and the war’s desolation — but is rarely appreciated. “It's Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out, the brute! — but it’s ‘thin red line of heroes when the guns begin to shoot.’”

My own service usually doesn’t have too bad a time of it. Save for very special situations such as the rivers in Nam, a Navy man can get killed but he is unlikely to be wounded ... and if he is killed, it is with hot food in his belly, clean clothes on his body, a recent hot bath, and sack time in a comfortable bunk not more than 24 hours earlier. The Air Force leads a comparable life. But think of Korea, of Guadalcanal, of Belleau Wood, of Viet Nam. The H-bomb did not abolish the infantryman; it made him essential... and he has the toughest job of all and should be honored.

Glorify the military? Would I have picked it for my profession and stayed on the rolls the past 56 years were I not proud of it?

I think I know what offends most of my critics the most about STARSHIP TROOPERS: It is the dismaying idea that a voice in governing the state should be earned instead of being handed to anyone who is 18 years old and has a body temperature near 37°C.¹⁰

But let us not pretend that this is isolated, or has only to do with those movies which leftists flock to in a poor attempt at carving an intellectual high-road; S.T. I have chosen merely as a sort of defeater to almost every leftist’s claims about their own media literacy. It is, in some ways, emblematic of the entire leftist worldview. Leftists will never hesitate to flaunt the historical knowledge which has been passed onto them by some half-baked academic piece, written by someone marginally smarter and far more cunning than they. An African tribe who castrated, feminized, and then procedurally raped young boys? This will be distilled down by a leftist “intellectual” or “academic” (liar) to something resembling transgenderism. That Alexander “loved” his friend? Distilled to homosexuality. Et cetera. We’re all familiar with the type who buys into these narratives - Will Menaker types. The same who happily receive the idea that Australian aborigines shocked European settlers with their stunningly advanced water irrigation; while Northern Europeans were living in mud-huts only a millennium before, nauseating the Romans. They’re happy to accept that IQ is wholly environmental, and that race does not exist as a meaningful categorization; while adopting blood and soil arguments for the sake of indian “land back” arguments.

I have chosen S.T. in part because its film adaptation gives us an enlightening glimpse into the mind of a liberal. Liberals are not merely wrong, but they are so because they are afraid - because they are terrified to their core. Bukele’s regime, for example, is not merely a repudiation of their ideas; but a threat to their very mental integrity. To see clean streets and low crime rates is, more than anything else, a forcible recognition: that all which they have allowed themselves to be browbeaten into is paltry suicidal ideation.

One can leave an adaptation to Verhoeven and be certain of its demise; yet even within the confines of the film, the premises are made transparently realistic. The director’s cut has Verhoeven spoon-feeding the audience his inane ideological drivel, saying things like So, whenever you see something that you think is fascist, you should know that the makers coincide with your opinion thinking that it is not good. That it is not a good statement, and this is not good politics. And if you see a black uniform, you should also know: bad bad bad! And yet we’re presented a clean, civil, and advanced society which was created upon veterans seizing control of society. The novel, thoughever, is much more informative in its insight.

I found myself mulling over a discussion in our class in History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois was talking about the disorders that preceded the breakup of the North American republic, back in the XXth century. According to him, there was a time just before they went down the drain when such crimes as Dillinger’s [desertion, kidnapping, and murder] were as common as dogfights. 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

“Law-abiding people,” Dubois had told us, “hardly dared go into a public park at night. To do so was to risk attack by wolf packs of children, armed with chains, knives, homemade guns, bludgeons... to be hurt at least, robbed most certainly, injured for life probably — or even killed. This went on for years, right up to the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony. Murder, drug addiction, larceny, assault, and vandalism were commonplace. Nor were parks the only places — these things happened also on the streets in daylight, on school grounds, even inside school buildings. But parks were so notoriously unsafe that honest people stayed clear of them after dark.”

I had tried to imagine such things happening in our schools. I simply couldn’t. Nor in our parks. A park was a place for fun, not for getting hurt. As for getting killed in one — "Mr. Dubois, didn’t they have police? Or courts?"

"They had many more police than we have. And more courts. All overworked."¹¹

The chapter continues to give a long discourse over how one would train a puppy — or a child — without corporal punishment, so as to instill no fear of punishment. Heinlein even goes so far as to talk about the continually-allowed freedom of juvenile criminals - parole after parole, until they develop into murderers roaming the streets freely (quite an insightful prediction). In the film, we are shown but a brief skim of a class on history. Verhoeven is at pains to emphasize the fact that only veterans are considered citizens (and therefore can vote). He does retain one relevant quote: 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. And yet Verhoeven is incapable of drawing the connexion. The teacher proceeds to explain that all authority derives from force; and Verhoeven inserts commentary explaining that this (and the rest of the movie, so he says) are a narrative about American politics. The connexion between an orderly, successful society and its use of violence is evidently lost on Verhoeven (and leftist audiences). The leftist mind is incapable of making a critique which does not rely on schoolmarmery and moralizing: pointing at America’s success — and similarly successful actually fascist societies — and using exposition to tell he who hears that it is bad for inexplicable reasons. The emblem of any liberal is to dismiss all desirable things by intimidating you with moral condemnation.

It is quite telling that Verhoeven chose to turn Juan “Johnny” Rico from a Tagalog-speaking filipino into a football star who is a tall, pale-eyed, blonde from Argentina. Though this is doubtless an attempt to indict Nazi escapees to South America, Verhoeven reveals to us his perception of exactly what the enforcer of an efficient, law-based society would look like. Not insignificant in revealing Verhoeven’s biases, a small subplot about Mormon extremists is inserted. Though this is all to say nothing of the xenophilia which leftists bear as a permanent mark of their inferiority complex; which is a topic deserving of its own coverage.

As I argued before: many leftists do not possess the requisite psychosis to truly hold their beliefs with conviction. They are more typically just weak-willed and feeble-minded pushovers who have allowed themselves to be berated out of those impulses which stem from the obvious conclusions of reality. Their figureheads are liars - but they are nothing more than the exact type of mindless brute which they believe Starship Troopers to demonize.

The junior hoodlums who roamed their streets were symptoms of a greater sickness; their citizens (all of them counted as such) glorified their mythology of ‘rights’... and lost track of their duties. No nation, so constituted, can endure.¹²

https://archive.org/details/tolkienbiography0000carp/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/sciencefictionin0000spin/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofli0029unse/mode/2up

https://ludlownuames.weebly.com/uploads/3/8/1/1/38112367/starship_troopers_-_robert_heinlein.pdf

https://archive.org/details/expandeduniverse0000hein_q5c6/mode/2up

1. Tolkien: A Biography, pg. 147

2. Science Fiction in the Real World, p. 144

3. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (Vol. 29), p. 151

4. Starship Troopers, Chapter 10, p. 76

5. Ibid., p. 77

6. Ibid., p. 87

7. Expanded Universe, p. 397

8. Ibid., p. 393

9. Ibid., p. 398

10. Cont. 6

11. Starship Troopers, Chapter 8, p. 66

12. Ibid., p. 69