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Was there ever a number given for how many Sardaukar there were before Paul? It just seems like what we see in the book is nowhere near enough to rule a galactic empire. No other Great House even seems to have a military worth writing home about (The Atreides even getting moderately close to having one is enough to get them killed) so you'd think the galaxy would be in constant rebellion as there are too many places for the Sardaukar to be at once. I'd imagine they'd get worn down constantly moving from brushfire to brushfire until they're no longer strong enough to stop a great house from militarizing and then the whole balance of power that keeps the empire together collapses.
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Jun 27, 2019 06:14
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Phil Moscowitz posted:So how are the ways "no computers/AI" and "no nukes" affect ability to genocide? Well we actually know they have Nukes since "The Family Atomics" are repeatedly mentioned and treated as an important resource that even families in exile won't give up. So Nuking people is presumably still on the table, though I assume you toss it out of an Ornithopter Enola Gay style.
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Jun 28, 2019 06:42
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I don’t recall them ever actually saying what “Suk Conditioning” actually entails. I mean it can’t be that extreme if all it takes to break it is hostage taking 101.
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Jul 24, 2021 00:24
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Admiralty Flag posted:It's more like an act of love, the one thing the BG were absolutely blind to in their hubris. It seems odd this wasn't the standard rather than the exception really. This vast galactic conspiracy entirely dependent on absolutely no one at any point siding with their spouses or children over their boarding school.
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Jul 24, 2021 10:54
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The Worm Hybrid thing never sat right with me. I can't just cover myself in Puppies to become a Werewolf. That's not how biology works Frank. Yeah Yeah I know "Spice Magic" can be used to explain everything but that was so far beyond what we'd ever seen the Spice do previously. And It's not like Super-Presience, Living Forever, and the other God Emperor abilities that were important to the narrative couldn't have been written as the ultimate expression of Spice Mutation even beyond the kind of stuff Navigators get, or drinking the secret Mega-Ultra-Water-of-Life or something.
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Sep 16, 2021 10:10
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How exactly do the Fremen bribe the Guild with spice? They don’t have the fancy shmancy carryalls and giant mobile mining rigs. They can’t possibly just be grabbing handfuls of sand and waving them in front of navigators can they?
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Nov 3, 2021 11:19
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So crazy tinfoil hat theory I’ve had awhile. 1: We learn the worms were mysteriously introduced from another world by agents unknown. 2: The Spice is suspiciously convenient in all the things it provides to human biology. 3: A big theme of the books is the “Prescience Trap” where prescience inevitably leads to stagnation and extinction. 4: Spice is highly and lethally addictive so you can’t just stop even if you realize the prescience trap. Conclusion: the prescience trap is a literal trap. The Worms and Spice are a poison chalice designed by Leto II’s “great enemy” from his visions to lure in and cripple/kill species.
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Nov 3, 2021 23:46
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KakerMix posted:How did humanity (such that it is) find Arrakis in the first place? How did space travel work before? Is that never mentioned at all? So the spice isn’t the actual method they use to travel. They use standard sci-fi FTL/hyperdrive/warp/jump drives to do that. What spice lets you do, is get so high you can choose the future where you randomly happen to arrive at your intended destination instead of inside a star or something. Before spice they just used navicomputers like sensible people, but they had a big religious revolution thousands of years before the story where they banned all computers. That’s also what Thufir and the Barons creepy assistant are about when they do that weird blink. They use a combination of training, breeding, and drugs (drugs solve a lot of problems in Dune) to fulfill the role of Microsoft Excel since computers will get you burned at the stake. Also the logic behind why the compass Duncan gives Paul is stated to be “advanced clockwork”. And why Paul’s book is a fancy projector instead of a tablet like it would be in another setting.
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Nov 8, 2021 18:38
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Tree Bucket posted:Prequel? I believe that word is an English borrowing of the French for "almost," presque; it's a literary term for ideas that might almost have made it in to a series, but were wisely rejected by the author, and thus were never written down, anywhere, ever. The appendix about the Kynes is just a wonderful work of short fiction that can be enjoyed as it’s own self contained short story. Just this normal guy (compared to the duneverse) trying to explain advanced ecology to Klingons that only survives because the guy they send to kill him trips onto his own knife.
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Nov 9, 2021 12:24
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So is all the spice in their diet filtered into the thighpads with their poop? Can you get high on fremen poop?
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Nov 12, 2021 13:57
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Isn’t coffee a diarretic? That’s like the worst thing you could consume if your trying to to avoid usage of water.
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Nov 15, 2021 21:21
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Do we ever get any kind of quantifiable data on spice amounts? Like how much sand do you have to go through to get X grams of the stuff, how much is in the food in absolute terms, What’s the parts per million of the navigator gas?
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Nov 15, 2021 21:45
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Still wanna know the Sand to Spice and Spice to Cheeto Dust ratios. Like for how rare and expensive Spice is supposed to be compared to how casually and wastefully everyone uses it, it just doesn't add up.
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Nov 16, 2021 05:08
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Vampire Panties posted:Thufir Hawat says it costs 1.4m solarii to drag 3 guild navigators and retinue out to Caladan. I dont have the book in front of me, but google says 10g of primo spice could go for up to 620k solarii. Yeah that's what always bugged me. Like the stuff is just too expensive for characters to treat it so casually. If a literal handful can buy you a planet it's impossible for it to be used in such massive quantities by individuals. Even the turbo-rich couldn't afford to just salt their food with it like they supposedly do. At that price/rarity no one but the a governmental entity (which the guild essentially is) could actually afford to have stockpiles of it. The microscopic amounts private actors, even Great Houses, could afford would be used up in an afternoon. Someone call up Frank Herbert I've got to tell him his math is wrong.
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Nov 16, 2021 06:24
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the Fremen are the wildcat miners. They smuggle that poo poo off world to the Spacing Guild. I wonder how much spice the Guild actually hauls out of there, because those dudes walking around in their freebase helmets have a street value in the billions.
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Roblo posted:I did feel the Sardukar armour could have been a bit more impressive. The Atredies stuff looked loving awesome. Sardukar seemed a bit plain and spacesuit-y in comparison. Saw DUNC, loved it, think it’s a great adaptation that captures the original work, but I still maintain my criticism of a lot of the costumes and such being too banal and generic. The Sarduakar have that same “Motorcycle helmet with paintball gear” look that all “future armor” has had since 2000.
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Nov 21, 2021 00:50
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I love DUNC but if you can’t use the internet to insult peoples taste and proclaim yourself the one true arbitrator of quality then what good is it?
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Nov 23, 2021 19:01
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The Sarduakar are intentionally a direct analogue of the real life Jannisaries. Both being an Emperors personal slave soldiers he uses to intimidate his empires great houses. Where both of them started out as the world/universes most elite fighting force, then spent centuries sitting on their asses coasting on reputation before getting humiliated.
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Nov 25, 2021 22:20
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ChubbyChecker posted:huh, never thought about that before The setting of the first book is extremely tied to the “Muslims in Space” theme. Besides the aforementioned Sarduakar/Jannisaries connection there are several other examples such as: Padishah is a Persian word for emperor used by many Islamic rulers, which makes “Padishah Emperor” a redundancy. The Fremen/Bedouin Arab connection, which connects both to the Muslim conquests of the 600’s over a Padishah that installed a new theocratic state in a jihad, but also to something that would have been current events to Herbert, the Arab revolt of WW1 where Bedouin Arabs helped destroy the Ottoman Empire of Jannisary/Sarduakar fame (though the Jannisaries had long been disbanded after a previous Dune esc defeat). Nobility/Great Houses being moved around and reassigned fiefs instead of being tied to them like in European feudalism. Which was a common trait of the Middle East from the Ottomans all the way back to the Achaemenid’s. Just the general use of Islamic terminology in general, People like to joke about the series various Jihad’s, but you’ve also got Mahdi being a huge part of Muslim end-times theology.
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Nov 26, 2021 03:08
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BlankSystemDaemon posted:I think I've mentioned this before, it's not just Muslims - it's a mix of many religions. Frank Herbert was a practicing Zen Buddhist, and was always fascinated with religion in general (it stands out in some of his other books, too). Besides the word ZenSunni getting thrown around a few times that stuff mostly comes from the philosophical monologues or the sequels though. The first books actual physical setting is full on Space Muslim.
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Nov 26, 2021 04:41
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What’s the motivation for Harkonnen guy encased in the wall with the hunter seeker? What’s his thought process? Either he was so devoted to the Harkonnen ideals of, being fat?, that he volunteered to buried alive with no food or water with no way to carve his way out so even if he succeeds he dies a horrible death. Or he was forced to do it in which case he still carries out his mission instead of just shouting for help so the Atreides will dig him out and he can sell out the Harkonnen’s.
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Dec 2, 2021 01:21
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I think that one of the biggest weakness’s of the setting is the just absolute dismissal of the masses. Not in-story by the aristocracy, that makes sense, but by the story and author. The Harkonnen’s can just be so comically murderous to their own people and no one is ever mad enough to revolt or even just not be zealous in their devotion, and you can’t even use self-preservation or “they’ll kill my family” as an excuse because they’ll kill you and your family if you don’t revolt. But Dune mostly just treats people as robots who follow whatever inputs the nobles give them without question.
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Dec 2, 2021 05:34
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Ingmar terdman posted:I mean Pop culture gives us this image of the lower classes just meekly submitting to any and all inequities but that’s really not what happened historically. And things like “Prima Noctis” were pure fantasy made up in the modern era. The truth is that they were revolting near constantly or at least agitating for a bigger slice of the pie, and definitely not willing to become “suicide troops” en masse like the Harkonnens are. Now yes these revolts would fail 9 times out of 10, but they never stopped. And even if they didn’t succeed and install a new king or emperor, The cost of suppressing them was astronomical. You can’t demand the peasants give you their crops when you’ve had to kill all the peasants and burn all their crops after all. Aristocrats had to constantly thread the needle of keeping the common people happy because every tax increase or demand for service would be met with a “what’s in it for us?”. And while you can kill a non-compliant individual, killing all of them destroys your economy and tax base to the degree you might be too weak to fight off your rivals.
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Dec 2, 2021 09:32
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sebmojo posted:who are the suicide troops? When the Atreides arrived on Arrakis they mention the Harkonnen’s left a bunch of “Suicide Troops” behind to fight the Atreides and they’ll have to root them out. It’s misdirection by the Baron to make them not realize the scale of the trap. And they say “Suicide Troops” like it’s this proper noun like it’s just something militaries do.
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Dec 2, 2021 10:00
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Lynch if nothing else gave us a ton of good quotes, some original, some from the books but given dramatic whispers or context. My name is a killing word. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. THE PAIN! I didn’t say this, I was not here. Many machines on Ix… I must conquer the worm. Etc
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Jan 6, 2022 00:40
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skasion posted:One of the appendices to the first book is a short story about how that worked. I love that story. “Man trips and falls on his own knife, becoming founding martyr of new religious movement” is just peak Dune.
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Jan 27, 2022 08:13
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I keep telling ya, Broadway musical. I hate every Fremen that I see From A-treides to Atreideez You’ll never make a chair dog out of meeee *Giant stone head from cover of Dune: Messiah appears in background* Oh my god, I was wrong. Maud’dib was Paul all along. Yes you’ve finally made a Chair Dog Yes we’ve finally made a chair dog Yes you’ve finally made a chair dog out of meeeeeeeee!!! I love you Dr. Yueh!
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Feb 14, 2022 01:56
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The Sietch Tabr uses only the finest spit. True Fremen coffee, for true Fremen.
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Jun 4, 2022 20:44
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Beefswelling Wellington edit: Wait no, Beef Swellington galagazombie fucked around with this message at 11:16 on Jan 1, 2023 |
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Jan 1, 2023 11:12
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The thing is the Fremen are far from being the only Islamic thing in Dune. The Sarduakar, Padishah Emperor, and a thousand other things are inspired by or otherwise based on Islamic cultures. The book is positively thick with it.
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Jul 3, 2023 00:28
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Ahem Duke outranks Baron thus attacking the Atreides is not allowed. Someone better tell Vlad before he makes a fool of himself in front of everyone. (The real reason is Herbert probably just used whatever term sounded better with each name without caring about real life hierarchy)
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Jul 3, 2023 09:42
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Oompahs within Loompahs Doopity’s within Dee’s Willy Wonka Of House Atreides.
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Jul 11, 2023 19:22
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My Desert, My Arrakis, My Gloop. *ominously floats up in air, gets stuck in tube*
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Jul 12, 2023 19:12
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Say what you will about the Golden Path man, at least it’s an ethos.
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Nov 12, 2023 00:50
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raspurtin posted:Dunc2 was great, but the volume was TOO LOUD. probably should see it again not in IMAX. Just saw it in a normal theater and I legit think the movie has given me tinnitus.
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Mar 17, 2024 05:22
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OPAONI posted:This bothers me so much. They named the third
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Mar 26, 2024 23:00
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Vampire Panties posted:may thy cumsock chip and shatter May thy condom rip and splatter.
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Mar 28, 2024 04:25
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I know the Harkonnen’s are evil and all but really how are they not running out of servants? Paul could have just waited and they’d probably depopulate Geidi Prime themselves with the rate they kill them. Darth Vader is a safer boss, at least he only killed you when you screwed up.
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Mar 30, 2024 06:31
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I wanna see this movie about the working stiffs whose job it is to blow up planets.
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Mar 31, 2024 18:18
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I always felt an intentional irony is that they supposedly banned computers to stop 'machine thinking' but ended up being much worse with just turning people into machines instead. Related to this, I always got the impression that the butlerian jihad was meant to be a human vs human conflict, and that it specifically a some sort of reactionary anti capitalist movement. The motto of the caste system having “A place for every man”, the phrase “man shall not be replaced”, the slide back into pre-industrial social structures. It all speaks to me of a civilization where the robots literally took everyone’s jobs and made the working poor “obsolete”. I’m imagining a version of the society from Soylent Green basically. It’s not hard to imagine such a people being whipped into a religious frenzy of Luddism. Peoples identities in the imperium being almost entirely dependent upon their “task” as you pointed out, makes it seem like they designed their society specifically to be kind of frozen in time so nothing would ever have to worry about being traded in for the next years model.
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Apr 1, 2024 05:44
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Elukka posted:Near the beginning of the book Mohiam explains, "Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them." Yea exactly. It seems to me like a rebellion more against the people and social systems that owned and enabled the robots than against the robots themselves. There’s a quote in the appendix that mentions that the Butlerians slaughtered billions of people, and I somehow doubt they counted robots as people.
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Apr 1, 2024 07:48
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