naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
The carrots are not working
The carrots are a big part of the problem.
I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.
The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.
so there should be sticks implemented
The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."
EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:
He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Given
only pairing specific toppings with specific ice cream flavors
And this
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors.
It looks like you're trying to say that if Flavor1 goes with Topping1, a two-flavor combo should not include a Flavor2 that also goes with Topping1, and also Flavor2 should not have Topping2 that could be paired with Flavor1. You have presented the following combinations as permissible:
- Vanilla: ChocChip & WhipCream*
- Mint: ChocChip
- Caramel: ChocChip**
- Strawberry: ChocChip**
- Coffee: WhipCream
It's not clear whether "ChocChip & WhipCream" is considered a single topping, or two separate toppings, or a distinct topping from ChocChip or WhipCream alone. The precise details of Caramel and Strawberry are also vague: is it only Strawberry that only gets ChocChip topping in "more specific combinations," or also Caramel? The "only in some more specific combinations" also seems to strengthen the idea that one legitimate topping is "ChocChip & WhipCream" as distinct from either ChocChip or WhipCream alone, such that there does not appear to be any way to know for certain what constitutes a permissible topping combination for Strawberry (and, maybe Caramel).
My inclination is to agree with @PutAHelmetOn that Vanilla can be eliminated, since the two toppings you've mentioned both go on Vanilla, so adding a different flavor to vanilla doesn't add any topping possibilities--assuming the only two toppings are whipped cream and chocolate chips, which seems unlikely (and is never stated by you) but there's no further information given on the matter. This appears to hold true even if "ChocChip & WhipCream" is a distinct topping from either ChocChip or WhipCream alone, since presumably adding ChocChip to "ChochChip & WhipCream" won't count as adding a topping by adding a flavor.
Since Mint, Caramel, and Strawberry are all identified as ChocChip (with some asterisks), the obvious thing to do is combine one of them with Coffee, identified as WhipCream. Mint-Coffee would most easily and obviously fit the bill, but it's not on the list. Of the two non-vanilla options, Mint-Caramel and Caramel-Coffee, Caramel-Coffee seems to be the easiest fit, assuming Caramel is not part of the "latter" flavors intended to include ChocChip "only in some more specific combinations." If so, Mint-Caramel has the same presumptive problem as Vanilla: both flavors take ChocChip topping, even if some further combination requires it.
And all this depending somewhat on what the "more specific combinations" actually are, of course, but that information isn't provided, but... the way you've written the problem, Caramel-Coffee appears to be the only plausible answer. It's just that the whole rest of the problem seems to hint at the existence of further helpful information which you have for some reason neglected to provide, which anyone actually applying for an apprenticeship would certainly make it a point to know. For example, if Strawberry only gets ChocChip in combination with Banana topping, then Vanilla-Strawberry would work despite the ChocChip overlap--but this is also moot given the possible answers, since none of items A-E include Strawberry at all. But this reasoning also works for item B, Vanilla-Caramel, if Caramel is indeed among the "latter" flavors in that sentence and the combination in question includes some third unmentioned topping.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Dissident right loooves hbd but not when believing in it would stop you from feeling good about yourself.
If I've understood your comment correctly, you seem to be making a permissible and even potentially interesting point. But your approach brings a bit too much heat and not enough effort. Less of this, please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
That's how I tend to feel whenever people make a political argument from... well, biorealism, race realism, HBD, whatever you want to call it. Even if we grant that Group X are on average 10% or 20% dumber than Group Y, it does not follow that Group X will be better off being governed by Group Y.
Those are two very different arguments, though. One is about how people are. The other is about what we should do about it. (A similar problem is often seen with climate change debates--agreement on facts about climate is not the same as agreement about political responses, and rejecting proposals regarding the latter should not be assumed to constitute substantive disagreement on the former.)
My own take on HBD has long been very straightforward: we need to stop trying to "uplift" people. It is my view that the correct conclusion from HBD is not "X should rule Y," it's "government actors should stop giving special treatment to any X or Y by virtue of their X- or Y-ness: it doesn't do what you seem to think it will do."
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
It feels rather Singerian to me, in a sense?
I would say it's in approximately the sense that he wrote a book called The Darwinian Left.
The notion is recurrent--sufficiently recurrent that the most basic response was penned no later than 1788:
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Biorealism is usually invoked to explain why certain people would be better off with more government rather than less. Rarely do the people invoking it apply that biorealism to the people doing the governing. This was a key insight of the founders of the United States, and we (well, the governing elite) have substantially discarded it. When you give some people power over other people, however so benevolent, people in power will in short order set about fucking (literally or figuratively) the people who lack power, because that, too, is biorealism.
This can apparently be mitigated, somewhat, through checks and balances and rights-protecting arrangements of various kinds, but of course that is why people so often chafe at checks and balances and rights-protecting arrangements. "But think of all the good we could do!"
Yes, indeed. And all the deliciously enjoyable rewards we could reap along the way--after all, surely those who make the world a better place deserve some credit for that? What could be more natural?
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
It wasn't my intention to annoy
I think you've done a fine job, and clearly an effortful one. Don't let grumpy comments dissuade you from this sort of thing.
Here is the origin of quokka discourse.
The origins are not complimentary. But the quokka pictured in "The Motte Needs You!" is a deliberate inversion of the origin: we want quokkas here, because that is the world we'd like to build.
You might also add that "tradfem" is kind of a play on "radfem," or "radical feminist"--the other side of the "libfem" coin. Liberal feminists tend to be more gender-eliminativist (they are big on equality) while radfems see at minimum a place for special consideration of the female role in reproduction and how that impacts their intersectional identity. This is also why the term (or, perhaps, slur) "TERF" (trans-exclusionary radical feminist) exists; libfems tend to be blandly supportive of trans-women (while criticizing, at times, their gender essentialism), while radfems are much more skeptical of trans-women invading female spaces. In my experience, ironically, trans-women tend to speak more like radfems in their opinions of e.g. revolution against "the patriarchy," which if anything seems to make the radfems more upset, in a "but you are the patriarchy!" sort of way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread. You'll also want to write some discussion about why this 6-year-old article is worth reading today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Coming from a new user account with no posting history, this post is too smug by half.
However, rather than consign it to the spam bin, I'll go ahead and approve it: this place can't be a place to test shady thinking if we simply ban shady thinking.
Substantively, I will simply point out that your point seems to be just what Aristotle was writing about in the Analytica Posteriora:
Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premisses by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I was saving it for Transnational Thursday!
You could at least provide me with links. *pouts*
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
This past week I was surprised to encounter vast quantities of weapons-grade op-ed copium in the form of media "explainers" telling me why the Irish referendums "modernizing" the government's approach to women and family, to everyone's utter shock, failed by the widest margins in Irish referendum history.
Of course, I had never even heard of these referendums. Which shouldn't be too surprising, I'm not Irish (nationally or by heritage) and I don't spend a lot of time reading international news or watching international elections. But also apparently "everyone" (by which I mean: leftist journalists and politicians) was so completely certain this particular bit of de-Catholicization of the Irish legal system would sail through easily, just like same-sex marriage and abortion did in 2015 and 2018, no one felt the need to belabor it.
"All politics is local" surely applies; apparently even many groups that supported the referendums did so with noses firmly held, while some groups one might think naturally aligned with the proposals opposed them on the grounds of technical issues rather than supporting them for having the right "vibe." Everything I've read so far seemed quite anxious to assure me that this is definitely not a conservative backlash and in fact purely a problem with language, which leads me to believe the government has already decided it will simply re-tool and try again until the voters fall into line. (As seems to be the way with political movements everywhere--though it still makes me smile to ruminate on the way Brexit happened despite repeated attempts to get the voters to recant, it seems a keen exception to the rule.)
I would be interested to hear from others closer to the situation, of course. Were these referendums just another symptom of woke America's cultural colonization of Ireland? Or are there perhaps real, specific legal problems being caused by the current language, which the government hoped to solve through these failed proposals? I have not been able to find any news stories detailing any positive case for the referendums beyond "this is so old-fashioned and sexist." Which to my mind explains the failure of the referendums entirely: cui bono? If your only argument is "I'm bothered by the language," then it's easy to think the government probably has better things to focus on...
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
It’s a boring semantic debate.
To some extent I'm sorry I mentioned it, because I don't seem to have communicated what I was thinking with sufficient clarity. It is kind of like the debates about homophobia not being about fear, insofar as both words often misdiagnose the problem at hand, sometimes in ways that result in exactly the kind of fumbling non-solutions under discussion. What you and Mandalay are describing really is more like "gynephobia," particularly with some of the gay men I've known over the years. And what makes that more than a "boring semantic debate" is that you don't see gay men going on misogynistic murder sprees, so using the same word to describe the disdainful gay man and the seething incel looks like more than a merely semantic mistake.
This is where I probably should have said more: I don't object to the word "misogyny" in the sense that I don't think many of these men do hate women, such that the word is semantically appropriate. I was only trying to note that it is the kind of hate that is born of desire, not the kind of hate that is born of disdain--because once you notice that, you realize that you can't stop incel-style misogyny by teaching them to like women more. That's not the problem! The problem is that they do like women! If they didn't like women, they wouldn't hate women.
The contempt you describe is, I think, mostly separate from either the gynephobia of certain gay men or the misogyny of the isolated and unloved. Such men seem to follow the old Aristotelian style of viewing women and children as simply less than human (I can't think of a single example of the kind of man you describe who was contemptuous of women but not children--YMMV!). I don't think it would be a mistake to think of this as a species of sexism, but neither do I think it is merely a "boring semantic debate" to suggest that misogyny doesn't capture the phenomenon as well.
But, maybe it is just a boring semantic debate, and attempting to use different words to describe the different kinds of problems individual men have with women generally is a distraction. Certainly it was not the substance of my point; what I was mostly interested in pointing out is that gender eliminativists aren't in a position to provide "masculine" role models to anyone.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I'm not so sure that the progressive agenda is to remove gender.
I mean, you're not obligated to agree with me, but I did provide a fair bit of evidence you don't appear to have actually gone over.
There is a lot of progressive effort to promote female role models and that doesn't seem consistent with removing gender unless the goal was to promote female role models that would influence women to act more like men.
Female role models, yes. Feminine role models, no, at least not qua feminine role models.
I included the links I did quite deliberately; the Louise Antony interview concludes with her commentary that she supports the transsexual movement to the extent that it undermines the gender binary. To add to that, Sally Haslanger has written that "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." Any time you see the phrase "eliminate gender inequality" you are looking at words that mean "eliminate gender differences" which is functionally equivalent to "eliminate gender"--because if all genders are identical, then there is only one gender, and since gender exists to distinguish different things, collapsing gender into socially identical constructs collapses gender entirely.
I also found this blog which agrees that
Gender, or some forms thereof, is seen by the vast majority of feminists as undesirable in many ways
The article goes on to note that some feminists think that gender can't be abolished in every possible way, but even this is marked as "unfortunate":
One can wish to abolish gender roles and gender stereotypes, but preserve gender identity and gender norms as unfortunately inevitable in some way.
Feminism, as I said, has been broadly gender eliminativist for more than a century, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. It's not a selling point! It's not something you're likely to hear from a Democrat politician any time soon--any more than you will hear them say "abolish the family." But it is one of the core values of the whole movement, something that informs every other action, even actions by people (most people!) who have no idea that the point and purpose of their activism was written long ago. As Keynes observed:
The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas. Not, indeed, immediately, but after a certain interval; for in the field of economic and political philosophy there are not many who are influenced by new theories after they are twenty-five or thirty years of age, so that the ideas which civil servants and politicians and even agitators apply to current events are not likely to be the newest. But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I think that permabans for longterm users should become 6-month and rarely year-long bans.
For whatever its worth, my suggestion for Hlynka's ban was "a year and a day," which was what we temporarily replaced permabans with back on the subreddit.
But I didn't argue strongly for it, because after we'd been doing 366 day bans for a little over a year, people started coming back... and they weren't any better than they'd been before. One theory had been that sometimes people get too caught up in whatever the $CURRENT_THING is, and we want to allow people to grow, and... to the best of my recollection, it has not ever worked out that way in the history of this community. People who did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans came back and... immediately did things to earn 6 month or 1 year bans.
Permabans are not great, especially when we're actively looking for ways to grow the community (productively) rather than shrink it. But allowing long-time community members to actively degrade the discourse is, unfortunately, worse.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Yeah, sorry, @ArjinFerman is correct, though I've certainly seen both versions. "Magic dirt" is a shorthand way of criticizing arguments that seem to be about places when they should be about people, on account of there being nothing magical about the specific dirt people live on.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Maybe I'll check it out. I think the first thing I saw her in was that Black Widow movie, where she came across as Disney's "we have Scarlett Johannson at home."
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
I disagree with Nara's complaints about Fayed Rutha, wanting a fair fight (or a minimally unfair fight) feels very in character as a major motivation of his in the books is wanting to prove that he his better than everyone else
In the book in his duel with Paul, he's got a drugged blade and a hidden poison needle. He also accuses Paul of "treachery" when he realizes that Paul's crysknife is naturally acidic--to which Paul responds dryly, "Only a little acid to counter the soporific on the Emperor's blade." Feyd-Rautha's response is rage:
Feyd-Rautha matched Paul's cold smile, lifted blade in left hand for a mock salute. His eyes glared rage behind the knife.
Feyd-Rautha doesn't seem to want fair fights, even minimally. He just wants to prove that he's better than everyone else, by winning by whatever means necessary. He even gloats about it (quietly) to Paul during the fight:
"You see it there on my hip?" Feyd-Rautha whispered. "Your death, fool." And he began twisting himself around, forcing the poisoned needle closer and closer. "It'll stop your muscles and my knife will finish you. There'll be never a trace left to detect!"
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal
They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.
I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon"
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down
Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: "We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me."
Paul cleared his throat, said: "We were speaking of the throne, Majesty."
The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. "I sit on the throne!" he barked.
An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.
I don't understand the point about Irulan.
Irulan is described thusly:
Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated.
I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Paul's humanitarian preoccupations drain his will-to-power, whereas in Nietzsche's conception those things are overcome by the Ubermensch. Leto II becomes that ultra-aristocratic figure who transcends morals and directs the evolution of mankind at his will. Paul embodies the humanitarian Messiah, Leto II is the ultra-aristocratic God Emperor.
Yeah, you've definitely got it exactly backward. Remember, the Übermensch is the "man of tolerance, not from weakness but from strength." Paul is undoubtedly strong, but he is ultimately self-regarding; he doesn't want to be the one to save humanity, he doesn't want to pay the price, so--he doesn't. Leto II does direct the evolution of mankind "at his will," he doggedly (one might say "slavishly") pursues the Golden Path, which is not his choice but merely the product of perfect prescience. Leto II us ultimately unfree. Arguably this is also by choice, so you could argue that he is also a kind of Übermensch, and I'd maybe buy it. But to say Paul had "humanitarian preoccupations" seems like a mistake; Leto II was the one who framed his own death as a gift to his species.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
So I have to ask, which do you think was better, David Lynch's Dune or the new ones?
Lynch, I suppose. It's pretty campy but I agree that its commitment to the foreignness of the Duniverse is appreciated.
I can honestly say I never picked up on the themes than Paul is a villain or a cautionary tale at all. That's all anyone seems to talk about now on the youtubes.
I don't think it's fair to call him a villain, and I don't think Herbert ever did so (though I could be wrong about that!). I seem to remember Herbert suggesting that Paul is an anti-hero, and that Dune Messiah was intended to bring that out a bit more clearly. Paul is solving some very big problems, but he's doing it by throwing a lot of bodies into the meat grinder of war. Far, far better to be ruled by Paul than by the Harkonnens! And yet. The brutality of nature is one of the biggest themes of the texts, along with the threat of predation. It's a deeply Darwinian story, and these days people are nervous about thinking too hard about Darwinism as it continues to apply to human evolution.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Paul is not a failed Messiah, he's a failed Übermensch in the Nietzschean sense. There's an important distinction and I do think Huber was influenced by Nietzsche.
I don't know. If anything, Paul succeeds at being the Übermensch, insofar as he eventually decides to act in accordance with his own desires, rather than in accordance with his visions. He refuses to become a slave to the survival of humanity. His apparent ability to see the Golden Path means that he knows someone has to become God Emperor. He decides to not do that. Leto II steps up to the task; to dedicate one's own vast superhuman lifespan to the good of mankind is Messianic, not Übermenschian.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3mo ago
Hard disagree.
The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.
-
St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.
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The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?
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The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.
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In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.
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Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.
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Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.
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Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.
Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.
Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.
I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.
This is probably related to what you're talking about here.
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