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BlankSystemDaemon posted:One way to read this is that Idaho came from a time so stagnant, that even the gentrification of the Fremen that Leto II forces on them is over thousands of years is seen as more change than he's capable of dealing with. From Leto II's perspective Duncan Idaho is basically his wacky uncle, so probably. Samuel L. Hacksaw posted:Side question, how do the fremen get maker teeth? Ride them until they're tired and rip out a few? I get the feeling like a lot of animals, sandworms probably shed their teeth pretty often and if you hang out in the desert long enough you're likely to come across a few, especially if you interact with worms regularly.
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Apr 22, 2024 16:39
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Halloween Jack posted:I have Thoughts on the Spice Diver cut of Lynch's Dune. Is that better posted here or in the DUNC thread?  Herbert was not a Victorian but he did serve in WW2, which involved some of the largest organized population movements of all time and was followed by yet more violent displacements that are directly cogent to Dune’s interests. like the Palestinian diaspora for example. I don’t really think there’s any counter argument to the idea that mass warfare involves a lot of people going places they wouldn’t normally go even in real life. Doubly so in Herb’s feudal space empire, where interplanetary transport is explicitly shown to go from being so ruinously expensive that even planetary rulers aren’t supposed to be able to do more than play elaborate games of Spy vs Spy, to “you will transport my million man army across the stars to wreak havoc, or drown in my limitless ocean of piss” The Fremen population in itself isn’t big enough that it should really have any effect on the gene pool of the galaxy unless they all get 1000 wives like Genghis Khan, mind. But that’s a different problem skasion fucked around with this message at 17:27 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 17:23
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skasion posted:I don’t really think there’s any counter argument to the idea that mass warfare involves a lot of people going places they wouldn’t normally go even in real life. quote:Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my child-hood’s gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys who have been picked for their height and consequently look like hop-poles in overcoats—the truth being that in modern England a man over six feet high is usually skin and bone and not much else. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed.
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Apr 22, 2024 17:31
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Is the western front of WW1 really an appropriate model here though? This isn’t years of pointless bloodletting stalemate between Westphalian-defined great powers at technological parity and failure of strategic imagination. It’s an unexpected explosion of imperial conquest that completely blows away those at a disadvantage. It reads as inspired by Mongols, the Rashidun caliphs, ancient Macedonia—in Messiah, it especially scans as a bitter commentary on American empire building. All of which propagated their culture and sometimes their literal lines of descent ridiculous distances from where they started out.
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Apr 22, 2024 17:38
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What's the straight-across comparison from real-world history for an intergalactic war of spaceships, lasers, nukes, and kung fu on sand dunes? There's no such thing as a collective unconscious, let alone one that secretly yearns for unbridled war. I can think of a few populations whose ability to propagate themselves wasn't helped along by WWII.
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Apr 22, 2024 17:56
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Halloween Jack posted:What's the straight-across comparison from real-world history for an intergalactic war of spaceships, lasers, nukes, and kung fu on sand dunes? There's no such thing as a collective unconscious, let alone one that secretly yearns for unbridled war. It’s all fiction, Halloween Jack. The fiction is described using real-world referents like, for example, the Islamic conquests of the Byzantine and Persian empires, so that Herbert can communicate something he considered to be important. He doesn’t, for example, describe a situation in which the forces of the Atreides and Corrinos squat across from each other in planet-wide defensive lines for decades dying of trench foot. Instead he constructs a scenario to argue that warfare is driven by a population-level aggregation of individual evolutionary drives that tell males to organize, go outside their community, and ideally find strange new women to reproduce with so that their genes will live on. How they do this and how they justify it, he suggests, is subject to all the usual political, religious, cultural and economic factors, but nonetheless they keep on doing it, from archetypal caveman to WW2 and beyond. Within the fictional framework of the story, Paul is supposed to be sensitive to this drive as a genetic memory that speaks within him. We don’t need to believe this exists in real life, any more than sand worms or pussy magic, to understand the speculative point that is being raised here. If you don’t find “war and colonialism happen, crushing countless lives, because men have an uncontrollable urge to go out and gently caress foreign women” to be an appealing worldview, I agree that it is not. However, I don’t think it’s meant to be. Things like this would have been more cutting-edge to say in the 60s, when white Americans unironically accepted JFK and Christopher Columbus as heroic figures, than it is now. This was a period in which there was a lot of reassessment of what evolutionary theory says about human behavior (the learned aversion to Nazi racial ideology probably played a role here!), and the idea that human evolution was driven by violence and sexual urges instead of a progression towards a future age of reason was exactly the sort of idea an ambitious sci fi writer might take on. The best exemplar besides Dune is probably the opening scene of 2001ASO, which essentially implies that the Cold War is a direct consequence of alien gods inspiring a monkey to kill. This was also around the time of the broader “killer ape theory” and (for example) Robert Ardrey’s “African Genesis” and “Territorial Imperative” which were hugely popular and are similarly impossible to read without understanding that the author was trying to make sense of the grand Darwinian narrative in the age of genocide and world war. Nowadays this theory is generally considered superseded and overly schematic, and Herbert obviously doesn’t find it too appealing a prospect either. He introduces the idea of “terrible purpose” chiefly to have Paul beat himself up about how awful it is that this is what he’s contributing to by surviving, and how many people are going to die so he can help satisfy this blatantly sexual urge. He isn’t unironically prescribing war and genocide. Neither the author, nor the character, is blind to the idea that there are going to be multitudes here who will die in untold human misery as a result of Paul’s “race consciousness” and “terrible purpose”. But note that Paul follows up his moral agonizing by surviving his war and having kids with a foreign woman anyway, all the while melting down about how billions of people are dead and it’s his fault. As a result of one kid’s unwillingness to die in the desert, thousands of years later the universe ends up in the hands of a whole society of eugenicist nut bars all of whom are directly descended from him.
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Apr 22, 2024 19:41
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You seem to be taking several points I've already made about Frank Herbert and his writing and explaining them to me. I don't know why.
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Apr 22, 2024 19:45
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Halloween Jack posted:You seem to be taking several points I've already made about Frank Herbert and his writing and explaining them to me. I don't know why. You posted about Herbert having“Victorian notions”. I don’t think they are! I think they are much more modern than that. and I’m trying to explore the actual contemporary context of Herbert’s life and which historical models informed his thought so that he ended up writing things like “Paul kept having visions of his army storming the entire universe looking for men to exterminate and women to molest. yikes! he said to himself. but then he kept thinking about it.”
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Apr 22, 2024 19:54
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Isn't there something in the first book about how the Guild encourages each planet to specialize in a single export for ease of shipping, creating planetary mono-cultures? I don't personally think that's how economics (or genetic diversity for that matter) works, but if Herbert established that as part of the setting then, yeah, I could see Paul presciently seeing a future where things continue as they are and everyone is incentivized to stagnate into uniformity. Does make me wonder how much space travel an average galactic citizen might encounter. I know there's a bit in the books where Leto sends Gurney to try and negotiate with the spice harvesters to stay on for an extended contract and keep them on Arrakis a little longer, so there's some mobility of labor between planets, but I'm not sure if that's due to the unique nature of Arrakis and the spice mining industry.
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Apr 22, 2024 20:27
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I think the overwhelming majority of people in the Imperium never leave their home planet. I assume that spice miners are like nuclear divers, not at all representative of the working class in general.skasion posted:You posted about Herbert having“Victorian notions”. I don’t think they are! I think they are much more modern than that. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Apr 22, 2024 |
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Apr 22, 2024 20:31
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Precambrian posted:Isn't there something in the first book about how the Guild encourages each planet to specialize in a single export for ease of shipping, creating planetary mono-cultures? I don't personally think that's how economics (or genetic diversity for that matter) works, but if Herbert established that as part of the setting then, yeah, I could see Paul presciently seeing a future where things continue as they are and everyone is incentivized to stagnate into uniformity. This might have been said during the scene with Gurney you mentioned, though I think i remember it being in a scene between the Baron and Piter? Anyway, they talk about wildcat spice workers/smugglers and how they think they’re oh so special because they have escaped the caste system. And then belittles them for having no grander dreams/goals beyond having escaped said caste system. So that definitely implies that the vast majority of the galaxy who aren’t in spice jobs are locked in place and location much like a serf. Otherwise why would Spicers be notable for their “freedom”
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Apr 23, 2024 02:00
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not gonna lie, if i had a relatively decent smuggling gig in that universe, i'd probably prefer that life to even that of nobility, who thanks to the war of assassins are more or less in constant danger from birth to death not that smugglers necessary wouldn't be, but it feels like a less alien, less anxiety/paranoia disorder inducing lifestyle
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Apr 23, 2024 03:25
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Serfdom can be defined as a system of land-based indentured servitude. Surfdom can be defined as when you make happy noises after a muscular beach bully kicks sand in your face. Anyway. There's the faufreluches system, or however you spell it; a place for every man and every man in his place. It makes me wonder if the Harkonnen tendency to murder their followers more or less randomly is seen as an aberration in the Dune universe, or just The Way Things Are. Similarly, in Dune 2, Harkonnen officers often give Rabban unsolicited advice- does this indicate that his habit of murdering people who tell him to take a nap is an unusual recent developmen, or are Hark officers just conditioned to be suicidally honest? e: Riot Bimbo posted:not gonna lie, if i had a relatively decent smuggling gig in that universe, i'd probably prefer that life to even that of nobility, who thanks to the war of assassins are more or less in constant danger from birth to death That's the thing that made the book finally click into place for me. The Fremen might be drinking recycled spice poop, but the aristocrats are stuck in an equally joyless unremitting struggle (albeit without thigh pads.) And the peons are in a tough spot too. Is anyone happy in Dune? Who's benefiting from all these systems?? Tree Bucket fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Apr 23, 2024 |
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Apr 23, 2024 03:26
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Tree Bucket posted:Similarly, in Dune 2, Harkonnen officers often give Rabban unsolicited advice- does this indicate that his habit of murdering people who tell him to take a nap is an unusual recent developmen, or are Hark officers just conditioned to be suicidally honest? I got the impression that the primary job of Harkonnen middle-management was to kiss the rear end above them. When times are going well, and it sounds like they were before the events of Dunc, it probably paid off to tell Rabban to take a nap, visit with his concubines, squeeze out some refreshing squoog juice, and just let the troops do their jobs. But by the events of Dunc 2, Rabban actually wants to be actively involved and call the shots, and his sycophants aren't actually good at their jobs.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:16
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Tree Bucket posted:Serfdom can be defined as a system of land-based indentured servitude. Surfdom can be defined as when you make happy noises after a muscular beach bully kicks sand in your face. I imagine the spacing guild was rather pleased floating around high all the time. Their attempts to kill Paul come across as an attempt to return to a comfortable status quo ante bellum.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:19
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Who benefits from it all? The memory-ghost of LORD CYBERTREX is in metahell, and he can see you, and he's laughing. He's been laughing for the last 10,000 generations and he'll laugh for 10,000 more, until finally, the last piece clicks into place.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:28
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I can't remember, is LORD CYBERTREX a failson invention, or a thread creation making fun of failson inventions?
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Apr 23, 2024 04:31
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YoursTruly posted:I got the impression that the primary job of Harkonnen middle-management was to kiss the rear end above them. When times are going well, and it sounds like they were before the events of Dunc, it probably paid off to tell Rabban to take a nap, visit with his concubines, squeeze out some refreshing squoog juice, and just let the troops do their jobs. But by the events of Dunc 2, Rabban actually wants to be actively involved and call the shots, and his sycophants aren't actually good at their jobs. That makes a lot of sense. Also remember the Harkonnens have until very recently been sitting pretty on the most coveted fief in the galaxy, making money hand over fist.
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Apr 23, 2024 04:42
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I gotta imagine that NOT giving Rabban advice also doesn't go very well when he's that pissed off. Anything they do is a gamble.
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Apr 23, 2024 05:40
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The modern life allegories and class structure conversations got me wondering: can a stillsuit process a solid turd log "dry", or does it need piss to help get things broken down and liquefied first?
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Apr 23, 2024 05:45
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Pneub posted:The modern life allegories and class structure conversations got me wondering: can a stillsuit process a solid turd log "dry", or does it need piss to help get things broken down and liquefied first? Maybe everyone on spice has constant diarrhea so nothing to worry about.
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Apr 23, 2024 05:58
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Spice helps you maintain water discipline. If you’ve ever seen Instagram reels of unearthing crystals from shale I imagine that’s what it’s like going on in a Freman nether regions.
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Apr 23, 2024 09:11
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I've said before half-seriously that I'm pretty sure Spice is basically one of the few things that makes Fremen life bearable.
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Apr 23, 2024 09:20
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Tree Bucket posted:I can't remember, is LORD CYBERTREX a failson invention, or a thread creation making fun of failson inventions? LORD CYBERTREX is real and he is my friend it's half and half, there is a stupid robot overlord in the mad ravings of the failson but it's called omnius
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Apr 23, 2024 09:35
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kdrudy posted:Maybe everyone on spice has constant diarrhea so nothing to worry about. Ghost Leviathan posted:I've said before half-seriously that I'm pretty sure Spice is basically one of the few things that makes Fremen life bearable. Spice hasten's the transfer and sharing of water! It all makes sense now!
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Apr 23, 2024 09:35
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Bubblyblubber posted:omnius That's worse. How is it worse!? Ghost Leviathan posted:I've said before half-seriously that I'm pretty sure Spice is basically one of the few things that makes Fremen life bearable. The book says that too, doesn't it? Something about the reverend mother commenting on spice orgies. The worst-smelling thing it is possible to imagine
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Apr 23, 2024 09:53
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Tree Bucket posted:That's worse. How is it worse!? hey hey tree bucket down here hey ghola paolo
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Apr 23, 2024 10:33
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All Frank needed was one paragraph about Paul and company walking through a steam blaster that maintains 99% of moisture but managed to somewhat clean the Fremen when entering the sietch and none of us would have to imagine the smell of a sietch orgy.
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Apr 23, 2024 16:10
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wudu with water is for tribes with weak asabiyyah, ok?
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Apr 23, 2024 16:15
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Tree Bucket posted:I can't remember, is LORD CYBERTREX a failson invention, or a thread creation making fun of failson inventions? Look into your heart, you already know the truth of this.
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Apr 23, 2024 19:03
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Halloween Jack posted:What's the straight-across comparison from real-world history for an intergalactic war of spaceships, lasers, nukes, and kung fu on sand dunes? There's no such thing as a collective unconscious, let alone one that secretly yearns for unbridled war. The Fremen jihad seem to be based on the Arab conquest of the Middle-East/North Africa in the 7-8th century rather than recent 20th century wars quite a few Arabic tribemen would end up in places like Al-Andalus (Spain), a place which they probably wouldn't even know about if not for participating in a war of conquest
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Apr 23, 2024 19:27
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the fremen basically always win militarily, which is not frankly a true statement for 20th century arab wars
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Apr 23, 2024 19:28
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Cyber T-Rex was a boss enemy in Turok, I don't see what it has to do with Dune.
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Apr 24, 2024 02:39
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Considering an evil cowboy riding a t rex is v much the logical final boss for a native american badass who kills dinosaurs it's impressive they managed to gently caress that up
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Apr 24, 2024 02:51
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Wingnut Ninja posted:Cyber T-Rex was a boss enemy in Turok, I don't see what it has to do with Dune. 
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Apr 24, 2024 02:57
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Wingnut Ninja posted:Cyber T-Rex was a boss enemy in Turok, I don't see what it has to do with Dune. not reading the thread used to get people probed  smdh(joking)
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Apr 24, 2024 03:18
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Bubblyblubber posted:hey SHUT UUUUUP
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Apr 24, 2024 03:22
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Is this legit art from the failson books? Bionicle-rear end omnipotent AI.
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Apr 24, 2024 03:29
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Please don't slander Bionicle.
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Apr 24, 2024 03:45
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Mister Speaker posted:Is this legit art from the failson books? Bionicle-rear end omnipotent AI. HEHEHEH 
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