The characters in ST generally regard corporal punishment as effective but it's not described as in any way enjoyable, and the flogging is described as viscerally unpleasant.
Sure, I'm talking more about the way the writer himself seems enthusiastic about it, eager to engage with it, voyeuristic even. Whereas he elides many other events. He's specifically promoting it, too. I'm aware he was later into incest and so on.
The bugs are the ones coded as communists in ST. The text relating to genocide in ST is all in relation to the bugs (though the principle universalized a bit) and of the "if it has to come down to us or them, I choose us", but with no assumption that it necessarily has to. Certainly not in relation to the Skinnies. ST doesn't really discuss genocide or dig into those implications anywhere near to the level that, say, Card's Ender books do, but there's much more of an undercurrent of fundamental incompatibility between bugs and humans, which is part of the coding, as it's deeply steeped in Cold War context.
I agree he doesn't dig into it or think about it seriously. He doesn't think about anything seriously in the whole of ST. It's just a string of unconsidered ideas strung together loosely linked by totalitarian ideology and absolutely in a Cold War context, but what's problematic is, he's an SF writer - he's supposed to be capable of envisioning a different world, but he's basically just making the Koreans into the Skinnies and the Chinese into the Bugs. The attitude is absolutely "them or us", which is, fundamentally a genocidal one in the way it's expressed. He's very clear too that the human military-based totalitarian government basically needs to be continually at war, which absolutely hilariously undermines the notion that humans are the victims here - such a government would clearly constantly be looking for any excuse or
casus belli, even manufacturing them. This is obviously what Verhoeven later took from it, I note.
Even the power armour it's famous for isn't particularly thought through in the way power armour and mecha often later were. It's just another idea that took Heinlein's fancy and he incorporated it (albeit a more original and prescient one), but didn't really dwell on it. Thus I've always found criticisms of Verhoeven's movie that involved "He missed out the power armour!" to be very superficial - the power armour isn't given a particularly in-depth or plot-critical treatment in the book.
It's fascinating on one level because it's sort of the anti-thesis to Ike Eisenhower's famous "Military-industrial complex" speech (a man who actually fought, unlike Heinlein). Eisenhower tried to warn us about the dangers of governments becoming essentially the thralls of politicians, people and businesses who benefited from war and militarization (history suggests this warning was of limited success), whereas Heinlein is essentially saying "The military-industrial complex is good, actually, but not nearly extreme enough!".
