DUNE: For Want of Little Makers

[Veltigar]

2 minutes ago, polishgenius said:

In fairness, although I had to write the tweet again so the bit where I was more clear on this is no more, I think that sentiment was implicit in my suggestion that I don't think training centers worldwide are littered with dead gymnasts. 

Yes, my bad, I just really wanted to throw a knife fighting joke in there   I even looked up the names of the coaches and everything. I grew up in desolate surroundings you see, so that has really taught me to pour everything I have into my comedy. I hope I didn't interrupt the YouTube comment thing that was happening here 

[Luzifer's right hand]

I watched it again and I enjoyed it even more this time.

Unless the things get worse pandemic wise I might watch it a 3rd time in cinema.

[polishgenius]

21 minutes ago, Veltigar said:

I hope I didn't interrupt the YouTube comment thing that was happening here 

Fuck that stings

[Kalbear]

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Gymnasts are great, I've said often in the past that I consider it the most hard-core sport and Shun Fujimoto the most hard-core sportsperson, but they aren't usually trained in situations where they're incessantly pushed as hard as possible, by the environment and each other, until they break or die.

To be really clear this is almost 100% how gymnasts are trained at the highest levels and what biles and others have been speaking out about recently. The amount of abuse I've seen towards kids as young as 6 is pretty scary. 

[polishgenius]

2 hours ago, Kaligator said:

To be really clear this is almost 100% how gymnasts are trained at the highest levels and what biles and others have been speaking out about recently. The amount of abuse I've seen towards kids as young as 6 is pretty scary. 

Okay, point taken, but the two points I was originally apparently clumsily trying to make (and evidently got a bit distracted from) is that generally speaking they're not deprived in the sense that the Fremen/Sarduakar/Spartan stereotype makes out is a factor in success (and yes, I know many gymnasts and other sportspeople come from shitty backgrounds, the point being is that it isn't the background that makes them good at sport and generally speaking once they get to the level where they might be world class, they're given resources to get the rest of the way- which the Sarduakar are but the Fremen aren't)  and also I'd assume the common view is that probably isn't the best or only way to get the best gymnasts.

 

[Kalbear]

In gymnastics the athletes are often deprived of very basic things like food (to stay at certain weight/body type levels) and actual medical care. Ballet is the same too for that matter. The ones who can't deal with this are quickly drummed out and/or break. And this only gets worse at higher levels, not better. 

And that is absolutely the common view of how to get world-class gymnasts. That level of sacrifice and abuse is exactly the sort of thing that enabled Nassar and others to abuse for years and years - because they got results. 

So yeah, I don't see it as particularly different either.

[Clueless Northman]

Gymnasts are the closest real-life we have to what prana-bindu would actually be. So funnily they're not closer Sardaukar, they're Bene Gesserit-trained.

Kalbear is right about athletes, alas. At some point we assumed this was only what bad commies did to their kids; turns out Western teams and trainers aren't much behind when it comes to abuse and deprivation.

[Ran]

I do think that the trope of extreme brutality to create unstoppable warriors is an old one, but it is rooted in actual practice. Mamelukes and Janissaries were known for the exceptional hard discipline and punishments meted out for failing to maintain discipline or meet expected standards. Withholding food and water during training was the least of it. Even today, elite commandos and special forces the world over are put through rigorous training that includes deliberate exhaustion, starvation, and deprivation to prepare them to face all that and worse in the field. 

I do think that when you expect people to perform at the extreme end of human ability, that the push to get there will inevitably entail extreme efforts to achieve them. Whether it is ethical for children to be put through those regimens or not -- the answer, it seems to me, is no. But if you don't do it, one consequence is that those fields of endeavor will never be quite as impressive as they were, because some of these disciplines and fields genuinely need life-long intensive training to achieve the sort of excellence that we routinely see now.

[Lord Varys]

While harsh environmental conditions play a crucial role in the shaping of the Sardaukar and the Fremen, what really made them what they are is their ideology and training regimen. They are both fanatical believers in their respective (religious) ideologies. We don't learn much about the Sardaukar ideology, but more than enough about Fremen ideology.

Books 2-4 very much deal how changed living conditions brought about by wealth and power affect Fremen life, both how their toughness as fighters are concerned and how their rigid societal rules are simply no longer adequate ways to deal with the new realities.

[polishgenius]

31 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

In gymnastics the athletes are often deprived of very basic things like food (to stay at certain weight/body type levels) and actual medical care. Ballet is the same too for that matter. The ones who can't deal with this are quickly drummed out and/or break. And this only gets worse at higher levels, not better. 

Well that sucks.

Okay, I'll take the L on this one. That said, I'll add that if that's why people like Nassar got away with it then there's a whole cultural problem in the entirety of gymnastics, coz I mean, think about it, that just doesn't make sense. To expand:

 

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

I do think that when you expect people to perform at the extreme end of human ability, that the push to get there will inevitably entail extreme efforts to achieve them. Whether it is ethical for children to be put through those regimens or not -- the answer, it seems to me, is no. But if you don't do it, one consequence is that those fields of endeavor will never be quite as impressive as they were, because some of these disciplines and fields genuinely need life-long intensive training to achieve the sort of excellence that we routinely see now.

 

But there are plenty of athletics disciplines where, although hiring/talent scouting processes are often unfair, children aren't apparently abused as routine to get them to top level. No-one thinks Ronaldo and Messi would have been better players if they'd been run into the ground as children, even though they undoubtedly worked very hard. Even in MMA, where I started my point off from, that 'push yourself till you nearly die' mentality has been fairly standard in American and other 'Western' camps but it's starting to change in the face of, in part, former-Soviet-bloc fighters coming over who have not, despite extremely hard work, trained themselves that way, and having a lot of success (part of the point my guy makes in the podcast I linked actually)- and also as MMA coaching gets more scientific and it becomes clear that being consistently exhausted and suffering the effects of hard knocks from hard sparring just doesn't get you the best results come fight night. That's true of any sport, and indeed any discipline- you get to be the best by practicing very very hard even when you don't want to, yes, and in sports and fighting you need to practice doing it when you're exhausted coz there will be a time doing the real shit where you are and still need to have the reflexes- but no-one gets to be the best level they can be if they're constantly drained or working through injury or whatever. And also not if they have to share time between learning how to git good and finding enough food and water to stay alive, to link back to the fiction. 

I suppose gymnastics, particularly women's, might have evolved a different mindset in part because the nature of the game means it's better to be small, so the physical flameout of working that hard from that young coincides with when they'd have been forced out anyway so no-one cared? I'm spitballing there though, I clearly know meh about gymnastics. 

[HoodedCrow]

I know a gymnast who trained so hard that they broke their spine in multiple places. Nasser, though, used a lot of cultural biases to get away with crime.

[Zorral]

In the end the most effective military groups who actually fight battles with other military groups have the most militarily intelligent commanders, who 'command' talent for leadership and inspiration which creates the essential cohesion, have deep grasp of tactics and strategies and geography, great sense of who promote and put in charge of the vast number of matters that make up an army, particularly one on campaign, and who can fool and outsmart his opponents. Julius Caesar possessed all of them, for instance, and he himself was on the battlefield, swinging, certainly earlier in his career. Not to mention Alexander, or Hannibal.  Or another example, with terrific cohesion as well as some gifted leadership, were the armies that came out of the Arabian Peninsula in the late 6th-7th-eariler 8th centuries.  They may all have -- actually yes they commit brutal atrocities -- but it wasn't the brutality that made them successful against equal foes. Fer pete's sake the most fleabitten mobs commit atrocities, and will do so on the greatest scale they can get away with.

It's not brutality of training -- though it may be present -- or sociopathy (which in an organized army must be kept in check to keep from disintegration). Mostly (not always) it seems to me in history readings so many who were very successful brutes like mercenaries often or even seldom (but not always, and when they did, the blood baths were oceanic for them as well as their opponents) didn't face opponents of equality, but cut down more peaceful, unarmed, poor, ill-nourished , and less trained and supplied others. 

Another reason Wellington and Caesar both believed an army was its stomach!

It always seemed to be that much of what is recognized as laudatory as military commanders in those like Caesar, was also present in Paul Atreides, at least in Dune.  

[Kalbear]

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

But there are plenty of athletics disciplines where, although hiring/talent scouting processes are often unfair, children aren't apparently abused as routine to get them to top level. No-one thinks Ronaldo and Messi would have been better players if they'd been run into the ground as children, even though they undoubtedly worked very hard.

Tiger Woods probably would have been a worse player if he didn't have his dad starting him out so fucking early. Venus and Serena William's dad routinely had them called racial slurs to get them used to it. Depends a lot on the sport and the background, I think, on what you're willing to deal with. 

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Even in MMA, where I started my point off from, that 'push yourself till you nearly die' mentality has been fairly standard in American and other 'Western' camps but it's starting to change in the face of, in part, former-Soviet-bloc fighters coming over who have not, despite extremely hard work, trained themselves that way, and having a lot of success (part of the point my guy makes in the podcast I linked actually)- and also as MMA coaching gets more scientific and it becomes clear that being consistently exhausted and suffering the effects of hard knocks from hard sparring just doesn't get you the best results come fight night. That's true of any sport, and indeed any discipline- you get to be the best by practicing very very hard even when you don't want to, yes, and in sports and fighting you need to practice doing it when you're exhausted coz there will be a time doing the real shit where you are and still need to have the reflexes- but no-one gets to be the best level they can be if they're constantly drained or working through injury or whatever. And also not if they have to share time between learning how to git good and finding enough food and water to stay alive, to link back to the fiction. 

I think if we trained men like we've trained women routinely in some of these things we would see people who are absolutely superhuman by comparison to what we're seeing now, and the reason we don't is because we routinely are happy to commit atrocities to women that we would never accept on men, and women have been largely ignored when they've talked about said atrocities. Also, in gymnastics you basically have one shot to do something. Most sports aren't like that - you have play after play after play, and some of them you can be great on and others you can be kind of fine on, and that's okay. 

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

I suppose gymnastics, particularly women's, might have evolved a different mindset in part because the nature of the game means it's better to be small,

To be clear, that's not really accurate either - Men's gymnastic folks are often absurdly swole (especially if they specialize on rings). Depends on the sport or discipline, really. The notion that you have to do stupid things to get your body exactly right isn't just about gymnastics - boxing and wrestling often have stupid cut weights (especially wrestling), weightlifting competitions do similar things. 

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

so the physical flameout of working that hard from that young coincides with when they'd have been forced out anyway so no-one cared? I'm spitballing there though, I clearly know meh about gymnastics. 

I think it very much depends on the culture of being judged. The closer you are to having every single thing about you evaluated for perfection, the more likely it is that you're going to have this high degree of scrutiny on you and a level of performance on every little thing that is not the same as in other disciplines. 

 

[Zorral]

58 minutes ago, Kaligator said:

I think if we trained men like we've trained women routinely in some of these things we would see people who are absolutely superhuman by comparison to what we're seeing now, and the reason we don't is because we routinely are happy to commit atrocities to women that we would never accept on men, and women have been largely ignored when they've talked about said atrocities

Just to start with: women bearing children.  That alone is an atrocity that has been accepted since history as normal. And now in our age a massive push back to put women in that condition again.

But in the meantime massive numbers of women fought, and led armies and commanded resistance, such as even the most well known women such as Empress Matilda / Maude, mother of Henry II, and even Henry II's wife, Eleanor -- who was pregnant over 10 times in less than 20 years, and delivered all living children.

But! these are women who had the best of nourishment and care that women could get in those ages.  Mostly women were deprived of nourishment so that husbands and sons could have it -- which goes on still all over the world -- and which means their life expectancy, and survival of pregnancy, labor, and FEEDING OUT OF THEIR OWN BODIES WITHOUT NOURISHMENT is very low.  But the men still get all the food and blame the women because they and the infants die.

You wanna talk about being brought up in the most extreme conditions of brutality and deprivation making one the strongest there ever was -- think about all these conditions.

[polishgenius]

6 hours ago, Kaligator said:

boxing and wrestling often have stupid cut weights (especially wrestling),

 

Oh for sure (MMA has inherited wrestling style weight cuts, although interestingly that does seem to be another area where slowly adjustments are being made), but while not good for you either especially if you're getting punched in the head or slammed around, they usually rely heavily on last-minute water cuts rather than starving themselves for extended periods of time, and they don't require children to be considering how much they're gonna weigh in a few years, coz if they do get bigger they move up.

 

6 hours ago, Kaligator said:

to be clear, that's not really accurate either - Men's gymnastic folks

In fairness I did specify women's for this point. I'm not that out of touch.

 

6 hours ago, Kaligator said:

Tiger Woods probably would have been a worse player if he didn't have his dad starting him out so fucking early. Venus and Serena William's dad routinely had them called racial slurs to get them used to it.

For clarity I am not suggesting either that it's not useful in sports to start young (the same is true of many things, eg music) nor that no-one who gets far in some of these sports or other disciplines was ever abused (though from my understanding of the Williams sisters and their dad it would be extremely inaccurate to compare him in any way to Nassar, even aside from the sexual abuse which Williams obviously didn't do). You do have to work hard, and you certainly can ask questions if it's ethical to make kids work that hard at something they might not necessarily want to, but that's a different conversation to whether anything about real life suggests the way Herbert depicted the Sardaukar and Fremen would usefully create the most elite forces.

Like I say, my ultimate point is supposed to be about the environment they live in and it being a constant battle for literal survival, and how even in less-extreme real-life circumstances perfectly good candidates for being good at something drop away because either they physically couldn't, or couldn't afford to, push through circumstances that at best only tangenially and often not at all have to do with actually being good at said thing.

[Myrddin]

Look at how militaries around the world train their elite special forces. SEAL training has an insane drop out rate from people not being able to withstand the grueling nature of the program.

Spartan inspired or not, it's how modern elite soldiers are shaped.

[polishgenius]

Okay I know I'm not always clear but I don't think that my point is that hard to grasp? SEAL training also doesn't have people wondering if they're going to die of thirst or starvation this week and they don't have to worry about being challenged to a duel to the death to be sergeant. They are focused entirely on combat and combat-relevant training (which does include survival training but that isn't meant to be an actual survival scenario and when someone does die that is a problem, not a feature) that is the whole point. They have the full resources of the greatest superpower in the history of the world. The Fremen do not have that luxury. 

And like Veltigar pointed out, in Fremen culture when they are knife-fighting it's not the weakest dropping away, it's the until-then best fighter in the group. 

[Veltigar]

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

Okay I know I'm not always clear but I don't think that my point is that hard to grasp? SEAL training also doesn't have people wondering if they're going to die of thirst or starvation this week and they don't have to worry about being challenged to a duel to the death to be sergeant. They are focused entirely on combat and combat-relevant training (which does include survival training but that isn't meant to be an actual survival scenario and when someone does die that is a problem, not a feature) that is the whole point. They have the full resources of the greatest superpower in the history of the world. The Fremen do not have that luxury. 
 

Unfortunately, I do think the point is hard to grasp. It has nothing to do with your arguments, but there is just a weight of erroneous thinking we're having to push back against here. From the myth about Spartan excellence, to the pages of Dune and in many other pieces of entertainment and historic myth making we are presented with this idea - which intuitively feels right - that hard times create hard men in the ways that count in the quest for military glory.  

I think you are nailing it here in this last paragraph though. Any advanced military in the world will put its soldiers (and certainly their special forces) through rigorous training exercises to boost their resilience and combat effectiveness. The deprivation in those cases is planned, monitored and evaluated to ensure it reaches a desirable goal. The recruits who achieve the training benefit from it, but even the ones that don't make it are not wasted. Perhaps someone doesn't e.g. make it into the Seals in year x, but they might make it in year y or just remain damn fine soldiers in a regular unit.

With the Fremen however, deprivation is random and final. The weak die, but also the unlucky strong. The survivors of these circumstances are further bonded together through deadly violence. If a man covets another man's woman, his water or his place of rank in the tribe he can just kill him to get them. They live in a zero-sum society, with little room for de-escalation.  I'd challenge anyone claiming that this is a good way to run an organized fighting force to give me examples of real-life successful militaries that worked like this.

6 hours ago, polishgenius said:

And like Veltigar pointed out, in Fremen culture when they are knife-fighting it's not the weakest dropping away, it's the until-then best fighter in the group. 

Not to mention that a tribe might loose both combatants as well. Or that, if a leader was killed by an external party or accident, everyone wanting to take up the mantel would have to start fighting for the top spot. It's impossible to set up a proper chain of command like this. 

[Leofric]

It has been a while since I last read Dune, and even longer since I read the sequels, but I was never under the impression that Fremen were on the edge of starvation or suffering from deprivation, except for those being abused by the Harkonen near the main city.  The Fremen of the Deep Desert seemed to thriving, in fact most of the off-worlders were surprised in the end by how many Fremen there actually were living in the Deep Deserts.    The Fremen lived in a harsh environment that required all of their people, men, women and children, to be in peak physical condition and to maintain strict discipline (water discipline and obedience) in every aspect of their life, as any mistake could lead to death.  And their leaders needed to be strong, their best, to enforce and maintain that discipline.   So their daily conditioning and culture of discipline gave them a strong basis for being exceptional soldiers.

[Clueless Northman]

So after nearly 2 years, I was back in a theatre. The movie was good. I'll need to see it a second time to have a better opinion of it, and most importantly, I'll need to see Part 2, in a few years. As others said, it's to an extent a setup for future movie(s), broad presentation of some of the actors and powers of the known universe, you learn the stakes.

I really like that it spends quite some time on Caladan (at least 1 hour, I'd say), and that the planet is either big seas or grey clouds and near constant rain, makes a great contrast with Arrakis. Acting is decent to good, no bad acting thankfully; I had my doubts about Momoa as Duncan Idaho but it goes better than I feared, and since he's not half-naked like Drogo or Aquaman, but in military fatigues, it fits better with my own image of Idaho from the books. I also like the shields, that's nicely done. Love the design of the ornithopters as well. Like how the guild's massive transport ships are portrayed and how they seem to work. Good planets design, I'd say. Good overall ships design. Can't wait to see more completely the sand worms, though we already get some nice views. Zimmer music is interesting, quite a departure from Pirates of the Caribbean or Nolan movies, but the guy's got some range, as seen in previous soundtrack like Thin Red Line and Interstellar; though music was way too loud at times, compared to dialogue and other sounds.

Considering where the movie ends, it has covered at least 55% of the book. Obviously, a Part 2 will end the original book's story; a Part 3 would be Dune Messiah. It also ended more or less where I expected them to end a 1st part - maybe a couple of chapters later than I would've guessed even. All in all, this explains why the movie is 2h45 long, which is longer than Lynch's theatrical release. It shows, the movie follows quite well the book, though a few scenes/chapters have been cut. Obviously it's way more faithful and detailed than Lynch's.

I also really liked at the end the various appearances of the desert mouse - I was wondering if Paul would take the Muad'Dib name already, but it's been left for Part 2. Even though they dropped the explicit "Jihad" and opted for "religious war", there are other Arabic sounding references and Paul is actually suspected to be the "Mahdi", so even if Jihad is fully dropped, I'm glad and confident they'll use Muad'Dib eventually, and won't worry about how the name sounds.

That said, I'm also aware I liked it as a fan of the books (the real ones, not the son's fan-fiction), and that it might not work that well with people who never read them nor even saw the Lynch movie or the TV series. Some guys next to me at the end were "I don't think I've understood everything that was going on". I wouldn't be surprised if some people feel it drags a bit too long as well, I was surprised at how long it went on (maybe 45 min) after shit happens (though the same goes with the book of course). I hope the movie is reasonably successful, despite the incoming Bond behemoth so that we can get Part 2 at least - after all, it's the one with the most action, with big pieces, which would sell better.

Funny tidbits: Bardem as Stilgar looks exactly like a Spanish friend, and Rebecca Ferguson reminds me a lot of our accountant at the office. I'll have to tell them to go and see it :p