Comment by Mistletoe
Comment by Mistletoe 15 hours ago
Will the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?
Comment by Mistletoe 15 hours ago
Will the Butlerian Jihad find all the vapes?
This is an exceedingly strange comment -- you made up a silly thing to get upset about, and are making fun of people who aren't upset about the thing, because you think it's the sort of thing they would be upset about, even though it isn't and you say as much?
This feels like a whole new category of straw man.
The word "jihad" has a wider meaning than "holy war". It would better be translated into "worthy struggle" — with "worthy" being very subjective.
Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation.
I think the current estimate is that there are almost a half a billion more Christians than Muslims (in 2025.)
One reason is that the number of Christians in Sub-Saharan Africa is growing. But extrapolating the trends, yes Islam will probably become the largest religion in the coming decades.
Or at least maybe - looking at birth rates, it seems as second generation muslim immigrants to Western countries have even lower birth rates than the native population. That might happen also in regions say like Pakistan and Indonesia and other fast growing regions, depending on economical or other changes.
> Islam is in fact the largest religion (by worshippers) in the world today, so Frank Herbert's assumption that a culture derived from it would be dominant in a future society is just extrapolation
Fyi,
> Dune is a 1965 epic science fiction novel by American author Frank Herber
The distinction you're making wrt Jihad is also super modern and did not apply back then
There are many discussions on this exact topic online.
TL;DR: while Dune has many references to various concepts coming from Islamic societies throughout, the Fremen are the obvious stand-in for Arabs specifically, and so get the most attention. And, in the context of the first book at least, Fremen are the "good guys" in many ways - if you reframe it in modern terms, they are the natives fighting against a colonial empire that subjugates them in order to extract a valuable resource from their lands, and then on top of that there's also the more subtle ecological angle.
not really, pretty old overview on it - but kept up to date it seems (current references to interviews)
https://baheyeldin.com/literature/arabic-and-islamic-themes-...
its true that the concept of a _holy war_ isnt unique to the muslim faith though. I never claimed that either however.
It's slightly surprising to me how few people seem to be aware of that in HN. Was expecting the general readership here to be a little less obsessively righteous and uninformed on a topic like this, but ymmv I guess
At least partly because ["woke"] sadly doesn't even remotely mean what it used to mean anymore. It's been "stolen" and abused by those who vehemently hate everything that any part of it has ever stood for.
[woke @ wikipedia]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
> Because most "woke" stuff is made up or blown out of proportion by people on the internet.
I think you are misinterpreting the issue. I'll explain why.
There are attention-seekers which were given access to platforms with unprecedented reach. Some of these types tap into outrage culture as their engagement mechanism. This creates a vicious cycle of outrage which feeds on outputting outrageous claims and taking the resulting outrage as input to further double down on outputting outrageous claims. You then end up with opposing outrage camps of whatever subject you can think of which exist to generate a larger volume of outrage than the opposing camp.
The problem is that the terminally-online types confuse this sort of discourse with reality, and the outrageous claims as representative of what happens in real life. That's how you end up with people outraged with outrageous claims that are so outrageous to the point they are unthinkable.
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