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Review, kinda 
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Joined: Mon Feb 28, 2011 9:53 am
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Post Review, kinda
Not sure if this belongs here, but if it belongs somewhere else, please move it:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/ ... se-wooster


Sat Nov 19, 2011 5:33 pm
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Good catch, sir.


Sat Nov 19, 2011 5:51 pm
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Sat Nov 19, 2011 7:01 pm
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In a positive way, I believe. Interesting review. I did some searching a few months back and found several reviews but not this one. Thanks for pointing it out.

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Sun Nov 20, 2011 11:09 am
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*sigh* Same canned, programmatic and ronngg analysis of RAH that's been spouted for years, now new and improved. See, Heinlein wasn't actually a liberal in his early days... he just "thought of himself as" one. And then swung over/changed/came out of the closet because he married a right-thinking woman.

Wake me when there's something new, in either mainstream comments about Heinlein or conservative punditry in the foxblock era.

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Sun Nov 20, 2011 11:13 am
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I believe Katherine Hepburn said that she didn't care what the press printed about her as long as it wasn't true. So in one sense any mention of Bob is a plus.


Sun Nov 20, 2011 5:10 pm
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Sun Nov 20, 2011 6:28 pm
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Love it, James. I posted the link because I knew it would spark discussion.
So what was the old boy? Socialist, libertarian, what? The only thing we know for sure was that he was Republican, because he said so. (Hum, just set myself up, having called Republicans liars. But RAH never held office.)


Sun Nov 20, 2011 8:36 pm
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You've been around here long enough that you should know the answer - at least, better than to ask such a generically-phrased question.

The very short answer is that Heinlein's political philosophy appears to have remained remarkably consistent throughout his adult life. His compass was steady; it was the winds that changed around him. For this to make sense, you have to have a grasp of the fact that terms like "liberal," "conservative," "Republican" and "Democrat" (not to mention "socialist" and the Scottish Political Orientation) change meaning over time, sometimes radically. There is far less difference between Heinlein the 1930s "social democrat" and Heinlein the 1970s "libertarian" than there is in the meaning and interpretation of those labels over that time span. You have to keep in mind that when you're talking about "what Heinlein was" you're talking about a mercurial and hard to interpret figure over some 50 years of his life and during one of the most tumultuous eras - or several of them - in our history. There is no simple, one-label, meaningful answer because the labels and the context shifted several times in that span.

But no, lazy idiotlogues fumbling for a convenient metaphor to bolster their limited concepts keep reaching for that old, dull "RAH was liberal until he growed up and/or his second wife warped/shamed him into being a reactionary" saw. Even when the big, fat book they supposedly just read makes the real case clear.

Just proves that being able to write at the National Review level doesn't indicate an ability to read past sixth grade level.

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Mon Nov 21, 2011 5:28 am
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This National Review piece says more about NR's own decline than about anything else. I'm a liberal myself but still recognize that when Wm. F. Buckley was around, the magazine was primarily about ideas and justified its own existence. But something like this - "Hm, let's see whether we can tag a well-known writer as a conservative, so that he can be made a Member of the Tribe, at least in retrospect" - is spurious on its face.

I would also note here that Isaac Asimov, not easily characterizable as a "lazy ideologue," said the same thing about the influence of Virginia: "Robert Heinlein, however, who was a burning liberal during the war, became a burning conservative afterward, the change coming at about the time he swapped wives from the liberal Leslyn to the conservative Virginia." (I. Asimov, p. 311 of the paperback; the next sentence is "I doubt that Heinlein would call himself a conservative, of course.")


Mon Nov 21, 2011 11:20 am
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I'm familiar with the Asimov comment. It's not clear whether he is making a statement from first-hand knowledge and experience or repeating a trope he no doubt heard throughout fandom. The canned nature of the comment makes me think it's the latter. It may even be a retcon - late 1980s thinking assigned to an earlier recollection.

Asimov was also only slightly less politically naive than Einstein. I can't see him being able to construct a political assessment that specific without outside input. That comment also became, when published in 1994, fuel for yet another round of ignorant yammering on the forums etc. (At least there was some justification for the ignorance, since the only references at the time were Stover and Franklin. I can't say I knew much better until a few years after that; I think I accepted the liberal-into-conservative model then. Honestly can't recall.)

But in 2011, after having supposedly read an exhaustive biography, it's sheer laziness and calcification of the frontal lobes.


Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:18 pm
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Mon Nov 21, 2011 1:56 pm
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Robert, forgive me if I'm too harsh here, but I don't see that you've done more than restate what I said, at much greater length, and then worked to justify the NR author's claims, which I think are simplistic and ignorant of the facts no matter how much "...he really meant..." you add in. In the end, you're making just as much thin stew from just as few scrawny oysters as he is. I don't think his "review" is defensible on any level, due to his insistence on sheer bullheaded willful ignorance. There's no real point in trying to ferret out nuances.

Terms like "liberal" and "conservative" are, and should be, minor political descriptives, not one-word definitions of an individual's entire political orientation and mindset. Saying "Heinlein was a liberal/conservative" is vague hand-waving, no matter how many qualifiers you throw in or how long and hard you labor to assign derived meaning to those terms. Any person who is politically aware and active is much more complex than any combination of one-word labels can represent, even among knowledgeable peers. Heinlein was an extremely complex individual in this regard and simple terms, and simple statements of his position over time, are even less adequate than they are for vaguely political Joe T. Voter. Especially when considering the shifts in political terminology and alignment over the span of his life; we are talking about several bygone sociopolitical eras, each of which would baffle most present-day observers.

Much of the problem is that we have "shifted" into an era where no political discussion gets past a very limited number of one-word descriptives. I can't think of a politically active figure who is judged for his or her ideas, ideology, stance on a spectrum of issues or integrity. We've reduced the game to a simplistic rubber-stamp assessment of the scent of their political buttcrack, and no two groups share any sense of "Hey, that smells pretty good!"

Too many commentors are eager, if not frantic, to ensure that Heinlein's attar-of-roses buttcrack emanation is understood to be Liberal or Conservative or Libertarian [bang hole in paper with the period key here]

What nonsense. I keep hoping for better, overall. I really expect better in discussing Heinlein, and while I don't agree with much on the NR end of the spectrum, it saddens me to see therein such a naive, ignorant piece so evidently twisted to suit the author's preconceived ends... especially as it's nominally a review of the book that should have larn't him better.


Mon Nov 21, 2011 2:44 pm
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There is no such thing as "too harsh." ;)

I was attempting some "nuance" regrading this specific piece. The writer seems to be saying that RAH was a "conservative" as defined by the National Review circa 2010. He just didn't state it that clearly, which would have made his "review" more cogent.

I think the whole political dimension of RAH and his work is fascinating, since he was a real politician rather than just an armchair theorist like most writers. That is why I did go on at length--I may inflict a longer essay on the forum about it some day.

From the day I read my first page of Heinlein I sensed a kindred spirit, like many here. An individualist, a pragmatist and, in the end, an optimist about where humanity is going. These things are obviously more important than superficial "liberal/conservative" labels.

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Mon Nov 21, 2011 3:55 pm
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Mon Nov 21, 2011 5:55 pm
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Mon Nov 21, 2011 7:29 pm
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I think the Heinlein of 1980 might have *wished* for an economic model where work could be optional because a dividend would suffice. But, unlike too many people, Heinlein didn't quit learning after he left school. I think he came to believe that the social credit system that he favored in the 1930s would not work. That doesn't mean that he quit thinking of chronic long-term widespread poverty as a problem in need of a solution, or that he quit wanting to fix repairable injustices in distribution of wealth.

However, he was too much a believer in human free will to see human beings as passive responders to external stimuli. Add a good dose of pragmatism and a desire to see any theory demonstrated to work in the real world, and he simply wasn't a good candidate for ideologue no matter what ideology. Freud, Jung, and modern psychology? He'd be leery. IMHO he was an even worse candidate for belief in a strong central government, and not just the types of strong central government that are obviously tyrannical (Marxism-Leninism, Fascism, Naziism, etc.) Personally, if he were alive today, I think he'd be horrified by the trend of the U.S. government towards ever-stronger, more monolithic power -- and would see that trend accelerating both through the previous Bush administration ("Patriot" act, etc.) and the current Obama administration (continued growth in security apparatus, huge new healthcare programs, etc.)

A person with clear eyes and a clear mind can see a coherent, thinking approach to politics and life in this. But I defy anybody to make a good case for matching this with either "conservative" or "liberal" as those terms are used in common discussion today.

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Thu Nov 24, 2011 9:38 am
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"Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders." - Luther
In the end, I found Heinlein is finite. Thus, finite analysis is needed.


Thu Nov 24, 2011 12:11 pm
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