If getting right to repair passed requires justifying it via the military, I'm ok with that. I just hope they push to make it apply to civilians as well.
The requirement for a voting franchise was that one joined the Federal Service, of which the military was a very small part --- the protagonists best friend was working as a science researcher on Pluto and the young lady who joined at the same time might have become part of the Skywatch if she hadn't qualified as a pilot.
Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the premise of the book. One of the themes of the book (I wouldn't call it the premise, just one theme among them) was that to wield authority over others one must first demonstrate that they are capable of acting for the good of the whole even if it is not in his own personal best interest. Military service was one way, not the only way, to demonstrate that ability to act selflessly.
I think Heinlein actually has a very interesting point. To wield the power of the government (which is what voting is), it is important to be able to act selflessly. If someone can't do that, even for a couple of years of their life, why should they be able to wield that power over others? The universal franchise is not a religious dogma, it's good to ask these questions and think about whether our society could be better if we organized it differently. Unfortunately, a lot of people completely missed the point and just rounded it off to "Heinlein thinks the military should run society", which isn't at all true.
Heinlein isn't even saying anything completely new in starship troopers. It is in essence an evolution of the Active vs Passive Citizen distinction. Merely living in a society doesn't necessarily give all of the responsibilities of governing, aka voting. A citizen aught to have be an active citizen within the society to gain that privilege. The US Constitution was originally for only Land Owners (ignoring the other race and sex based stipulations). Heinlein is treating that active - passive distinction as being based on service instead of property.
> Nor was "you have to join the military to have basic rights" the premise of the book.
It was not even the premise of the film - only one right was conditioned on service, the right to vote (and possibly hold political office). I.e. actions that wield authority over others. I argue that is not "basic".
In the book it was said that if a blind deaf person in a wheelchair volunteered for service, the state would find something for them to do. Maybe tediously counting hairs on a caterpillar, or testing chairs in Antarctica.
Now for me the asspull from Starship Troopers that I still think about every now and then was the notion of mathematical proofs of morality at a high school level (or any academic level, for that matter). This was a society that somehow discovered provable objective morality, and I really wish that idea could have been fleshed out more by Heinlein.
It was one of his juveniles (what would now be a "young adult" novel). I don't think it was ever going to get fleshed out.
You see him put much more thought into political systems and economics in other books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, or For Us, the Living.
This [1] lays out pretty conclusively that even though the book plays lip service to "federal Service", the entire rest of the book makes clear that it is only military that get the right to vote, not "government workers".
I don't think that is correct at all. I read the book and it was very clear to me that it wasn't just lip service, you could do your federal service in many different ways.
I felt the opposite when I read it, which led me to looking around and finding that essay. It felt like he said you could do any federal service, but no federal service actual existed outside of the military. I personally think this is more of the case of the author intending one thing and writing another. Clearly Heinlein intended for it to be about Federal service, but over and over in the actual details, there just is not a Federal Service. It is only the military. That is my main issue with the book, it proposes one society, but it builds a different one. They tells us you can join Federal Service, but those people don’t exist anywhere in the text. Not current Federal workers or former ones, now citizens.
It's not great, but worth recognizing that it's a notion as old as democracy itself. See ancient Athens, Greece. Among the many other requirements that made voting exclusive, only men who had completed military service were granted the right to vote.
I think it would be interested if only those who had completed military service could vote to go to war since I think you'd def see less of them. That said, I don't see this actually happening.
Fracturing a population is a time honored way to maintain oppression.
For example, let’s say you want to prevent wealth redistribution, but there is lots of popular support for it. Then you give it to some, for example old people, and it removes wealth redistribution as a priority for them.
Now, you can more easily withhold the benefit from the remaining population. Or give them all various tiers, such as white collar and government workers with more employer subsidies, and lower paid workers with few or no subsidies.
At the end, the opposition group will waste a ton of energy trying to make their cause a priority, and will probably never achieve the full goal. The more politically important will get theirs, and the less politically important will suffer without. That stepping stone becomes a barrier.
In the example, you can change age to skin tone, gender, religious tribe, military status, and even arbitrary geographic boundary. See the recent tax benefits Alaskans received in exchange for their Senator’s vote.
That's not what's happening here. Being in the military won't magically give you a right to repair your iPhone. This law puts a requirement on DOD procurement (beyond what's already present, as I mentioned in another comment) to acquire tech data (or whatever's required) to make purchased systems maintainable by the military itself. So you buy a Generac for your house and you're in the military you get the same manuals the rest of us get. If the DOD buys a Generac for a facility, they can get more data.
I don't see any scenario where the rest of us would receive any benefits from this. I would imagine that mechanics in the military have access to everything they need to keep their Humvees running (I'm sure they're called something else now, I don't care). That doesn't mean that the software to fix a 2026 Mercedes won't cost thousands of dollars, if it's even available by a non-dealer at all.
