It's certainly true that the Democrats should work hard to try to appeal to the electorate as it is, but the connectiin between them not doing that and their performance this week is not well developed here.
I also loved Dune, it is one of my favorite books. But you liked the sequels too.....you crazy. I mean it was good up to children of dune but after that there was nothing even remotely interesting.
As you said, it's 2021 and media is different. I think what would have been interesting is if the Dune movie put some exposition dumps in the form of social media videos and all that out before the movie. To help people get into the world and add more content to follow. They could have partnered with Science Explainer Youtube channels to get people up to date on how the Dune universe works.
If Herberts son's hadn't gone rogue from my Uncles Book... The Dune Encyclopedia, then maybe it would be in print still, and we wouldn't need these explainers.
Yes, I am related to a long line of Nerds. My Grand Uncle Willis McNelly basically pioneered the acceptance of Science Fiction as a serious form of literature.
His sister, Mary McNelly (My Great Grandmother who I used to hang out with) worked for the OSS in DC during World War II.
Also, I wonder how long the movie version will take the Dune narrative. The latter books will be a challenge to translate onto screen.
I'm a little surprised that Democrats are surprised about the results of the latest elections.
My recommendations for them:
1. Get covid and mask restrictions done with quickly.
2. Accentuate American exceptionalism when talking about curriculum and history. The issue with talking about the bad parts of American history, only really rile people up when it meets the presence.
- America's history of racism was horrible, but even though we continue to make progress, we will succeed because we are the greatest country in the world.
vs
- America is a bad horrible racism place which you can see in our history of slavery.
These are examples of framing. Americans by and large are homers... we like being American, and its a turnoff when we get the feeling that people are saying America is bad.
3. Hope Trump runs again. (Trump is toxic... I am fairly conservatish, and I can't stand him).
I didn't read the books, but it's not crazy that Paul would be really good at real fighting. Two things that people do when they are training - they use protective gear and they train with constraints. The fremen don't have protective gear (shields) so they probably don't have as many reps with nearly killing someone as Paul does. What Paul learned to do in terms of getting through shields could be seen as being a different kind of fighting, but if you think of it as a harder kind of fighting (which it kind of is- controlling momentum to switch from fast to slow blade is harder than just staying fast) then he should be better at the easier, fremen, version.
As far as predicting the future in politics, especially 2022 and 2024, I'll make the prediction that education will be one of the salient issues for the next two cycles. I think that is one thing that will be durable from this year.
In my own neck of the woods, school board elections were a bigger deal than I've ever seen before and parents generally are becoming a lot more active and much less deferential to educational authorities, particularly administration and school boards. I think Democrats will be making a mistake if they did what McAuliffe did and be in thrall to teachers' unions and hostile to parental involvement in education.
Here in LA, School Board elections have been a big deal for awhile now. As of 2018, there was broad deference to teachers. But there are elections coming up.
We'd all like a post about Matt's income vs Milan's. A screen shot of their tax returns would be informative. If you don't try hard to make the world better, it's really hard to make it better. Quit now Milan; you're already in Yale and if you give Matt the Bronx cheer, Harvard may be in sight. Go man.
Part of the backstory is that humans exploring the universe in sub-light ships fairly quickly found substances on other worlds that interacted in _interesting_ ways with human biology. (A very sixties kind of idea. Explore the universe, find awesome new drugs!)
How do those floating, seemingly autonomous lights work? Obviously you don't need actual artificial intelligence to make things with motion detectors or whatever, but the prohibition on "thinking machines" seems to be broader than that.
What's really aggravating is that the Democrats already have a lot of policies that are good for the "electorate of white voters." Even over-50 non-college and rural whites! It's not as if they'd need to drastically alter their actual policy platform - certainly not the policies that are actually possible to enact. I mean, of course they're not going to win the white non-college demographic outright, but they do have sellable pitches. But they have to try to sell them.
I said this in the open thread yesterday, but Trump's outreach to POC voters in 2020 is very instructive. He didn't propose any new policies to win POCs over. He did stop talking about the wall, which is important. But the other big thing that distinguished 2020 Trump from pre-Trump Republicans was simply that he *asked POCs to vote for him* whereas most pre-Trump Republicans didn't bother, thinking it was pointless. High-info liberals scoffed at the cheesy tokenism at the RNC, but it sure didn't hurt him with POC voters.
It's kind of ironic in a way that educated social liberals are all about "representation" being of paramount importance (sometimes even to the exclusion of tangibly benefiting underprivileged groups economically), but simultaneously can't imagine (or perhaps are averse to) even using empty representation to try to stop the bleeding with older non-college voters. Even if all they did was make it a point to consistently put older non-college people in ads and on the stage at events (including many white males, but of course not limited to) might help and wouldn't hurt. But you can't succeed if you don't try.
Totally. I used to complain about Republicans for not even attempting to win over Hispanic votes when they are mostly Christian blue collar types that should be inclined to vote conservative. That is mostly still the case, but more and more it feels like Democrats who aren't attempting to expand their voters.
To elaborate a little more on this, a common feature of ideologues of all stripes is that they don't see opposition voters as an audience to be won over, but as enemies to be defined out of relevance. Though it works out a little differently between the American Right and Left.
The Right sees low-info swing voters as marks to be fooled (which the Right does pretty effectively) while it sees liberals as "not real Americans" whose votes can freely be suppressed as they are not relevant to democratic legitimacy in the "real American" polity (although, apart from gerrymandering, the suppression efforts are not nearly as effective).
The Left obviously sees conservatives as the enemy, but it also sees many swing voters as enemies, and as people who are undeserving of sharing the same polity. As such, winning over these swing voters would be inconsistent with the objectives of the whole political project, like Native Americans trying to win over the colonist vote. The goal shouldn't be to live alongside those people but to be liberated *from* them. On the plus (?) side, the Left doesn't try to suppress anyone's vote or really take any action at all that would flow logically from these premises other than complain.
>As such, winning over these swing voters would be inconsistent with the objectives of the whole political project, like Native Americans trying to win over the colonist vote.
That's a very good analogy, considering how many leftoids on the local level, where nobody filters out the loonies, actually come out and just call everyone they don't like a *colonizer*.
"the Left doesn't try to suppress anyone's vote or really take any action at all that would flow logically from these premises"
You forget gerrymandering, which apparently, everyone is happy to do. Politicians choosing their voters, rather than the other way around, is undemocratic. And no, the standard "but the other guys do it more!" excuse is not acceptable, even if true, which I'm skeptical about.
"I mean, of course they're not going to win the white non-college demographic outright..."
Why not? The white non-college demographic was the backbone of the Democratic Party for decades. Maybe the balance of policies in the Democratic platform no longer ARE good for the white non-college demographic, so they're defecting in droves.
People actually poll non-college whites from time to time, and a majority of them will consistently say that they like some Democratic policies, even as they've grown to oppose the Party as a whole. Politics is fought at the margins and votes are fungible. Winning an outright majority of non-college whites is not necessary. But the polling shows that the Party has potential sales pitches that many non-college voters would like, so it should try to use those and at least attempt to lessen the Republicans' margin of victory with that demographic.
As someone who vaguely knew the story before seeing the movie, the stuff about guns, fighting without shields, and how to travel without spice didn't bug me.
What *did* bug me was the convoluted political machinations. Why were the Harkonnens removed from Arrakis and the Atreides given it, only to have Imperial soldiers than wipe the latter out to the benefit of the former. Maybe this will all be explained later, but huh? I mean, if the Harkonnens want to launch a sneak attack on their foes and wipe them out, why not just do it on Caladon in the first place?
Also, I never get the "unitary planet" thing in this -- and pretty much all of science fiction. It's like an entire planet can only be one thing and typically have a uniform people and a single ruler, most of the time. Based on the planet I know something about, that seems pretty simplistic. But even if you do in fact rule an entire planet, with all its resources at your disposal, one would think you would have better military capabilities to respond to a surprise attack than the Atreides displayed. What, you stripped Caladon of its 100 soldiers?
As for VA/NJ, the results confirmed all my priors and proved that the Democrats should promote my priorities if they want to win. (This would have been the same had the outcome been more favorable.)
What isn't being factored into your analysis is the guild monopoly on interstellar travel both leading to the incredibly high cost of space travel and the inability of the Imperials or Harkonnens to exclude the Atreides from accessing same.
The Imperial/Harkonnen force that attacked the Atreides on Arrakis was 10 legions - about 300,000 men. To transport this force was the equivalent of the Harkonnens profit on Arrakis for 50-60 years (depending on whose estimate you use)! Realistically, there was no way that the invasion force could have been materially larger.
A force of this size is enough to subdue the Atreides on Arrakis, where they were just settling in, were limited to the number of soldiers/equipment they could bring and were not entrenched with the local population. On Caladon, the people are not exchanging one foreign ruler for another - their homes are being invaded. The Atreides also have access to air and sea power to deter an attack force. It would have been very unlikely that the attackers could take Caladon.
BUT, even if they could there is another problem. The Imperial involvement had to be kept a secret (otherwise, the other great houses would unite against the Emperor, as the Imperials picking them off one by one was their greatest fear). Imperial soldiers are worth, according to the book, 10 of any normal solider. So there was no alternative the use of Imperial troops (given how it was already too expensive to transport the invasion force). Remember, the Imperials/Harkonnens cannot exclude anyone from traveling on a spaceship. On Arrakis, there were more chokepoints to keep people from going off world to tell the story of Imperial involvement - but even there they needed to keep hostages from the lesser houses from spreading stories. On Caladon there is no way they could keep every single Atreides from traveling to a guild ship - and once there they could reveal the Imperial involvement.
Dune has extensive discussion of the ecology of Arrakis, including an 8 page appendix, its unfair to dismiss it as simplistic.
This movie works best for people who read the book, unfortunately. The political intrigue is front and center in the book. The action scenes are mostly an afterthought -most of them don't even take place in the present tense in the novel (the attack by the Harkonnens, for example, is largely - and only briefly - described after the fact).
So everything in your second paragraph is explained. It's actually the whole POINT of the book, really - it's one of the central mysteries, and it drives the plot. Your third paragraph, though, is... not explained. It's a problem. The "one guy rules an entire planet" is never adequately explored, and the "one resource can only be found on one planet which has only one ecosystem and is the most important resource in the entire universe" requires a lot of mental hand-waving to accept.
Everyone who has read and enjoyed Dune wanted to see it on the big screen, but honestly it is a story that will never be successfully filmed. There's too much going on.
The David Lynch version was a clusterfuck; I saw a few minutes of one episode of the miniseries, and it looked a lot more like the book than the Lynch movie did; and I will never see the 2021 version.
thanks for the explainer, this was really helpful
LOL it doesn't matter but the sequels are written by Kevin J Anderson with Herbert's son Brian Herbert, not Brian J Anderson
It's certainly true that the Democrats should work hard to try to appeal to the electorate as it is, but the connectiin between them not doing that and their performance this week is not well developed here.
I also loved Dune, it is one of my favorite books. But you liked the sequels too.....you crazy. I mean it was good up to children of dune but after that there was nothing even remotely interesting.
This was really helpful. Thank you!
As you said, it's 2021 and media is different. I think what would have been interesting is if the Dune movie put some exposition dumps in the form of social media videos and all that out before the movie. To help people get into the world and add more content to follow. They could have partnered with Science Explainer Youtube channels to get people up to date on how the Dune universe works.
Matt, if we start a patreon for "Yglesias Media Explainers" what would be a good number to hit for a monthly article like this one?
If Herberts son's hadn't gone rogue from my Uncles Book... The Dune Encyclopedia, then maybe it would be in print still, and we wouldn't need these explainers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dune_Encyclopedia
Yes, I am related to a long line of Nerds. My Grand Uncle Willis McNelly basically pioneered the acceptance of Science Fiction as a serious form of literature.
His sister, Mary McNelly (My Great Grandmother who I used to hang out with) worked for the OSS in DC during World War II.
Also, I wonder how long the movie version will take the Dune narrative. The latter books will be a challenge to translate onto screen.
I'm a little surprised that Democrats are surprised about the results of the latest elections.
My recommendations for them:
1. Get covid and mask restrictions done with quickly.
2. Accentuate American exceptionalism when talking about curriculum and history. The issue with talking about the bad parts of American history, only really rile people up when it meets the presence.
- America's history of racism was horrible, but even though we continue to make progress, we will succeed because we are the greatest country in the world.
vs
- America is a bad horrible racism place which you can see in our history of slavery.
These are examples of framing. Americans by and large are homers... we like being American, and its a turnoff when we get the feeling that people are saying America is bad.
3. Hope Trump runs again. (Trump is toxic... I am fairly conservatish, and I can't stand him).
I didn't read the books, but it's not crazy that Paul would be really good at real fighting. Two things that people do when they are training - they use protective gear and they train with constraints. The fremen don't have protective gear (shields) so they probably don't have as many reps with nearly killing someone as Paul does. What Paul learned to do in terms of getting through shields could be seen as being a different kind of fighting, but if you think of it as a harder kind of fighting (which it kind of is- controlling momentum to switch from fast to slow blade is harder than just staying fast) then he should be better at the easier, fremen, version.
As far as predicting the future in politics, especially 2022 and 2024, I'll make the prediction that education will be one of the salient issues for the next two cycles. I think that is one thing that will be durable from this year.
In my own neck of the woods, school board elections were a bigger deal than I've ever seen before and parents generally are becoming a lot more active and much less deferential to educational authorities, particularly administration and school boards. I think Democrats will be making a mistake if they did what McAuliffe did and be in thrall to teachers' unions and hostile to parental involvement in education.
Here in LA, School Board elections have been a big deal for awhile now. As of 2018, there was broad deference to teachers. But there are elections coming up.
We'd all like a post about Matt's income vs Milan's. A screen shot of their tax returns would be informative. If you don't try hard to make the world better, it's really hard to make it better. Quit now Milan; you're already in Yale and if you give Matt the Bronx cheer, Harvard may be in sight. Go man.
Correction: Mentats don't use the spice, they use sapho juice.
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Sapho
Part of the backstory is that humans exploring the universe in sub-light ships fairly quickly found substances on other worlds that interacted in _interesting_ ways with human biology. (A very sixties kind of idea. Explore the universe, find awesome new drugs!)
"Why is everyone fighting with swords?"
Very informative.
Now could you explain why everybody was kung-fu fighting?
This has been puzzling me for several decades now. Not just puzzling: it's a little bit frightening, as well.
How do those floating, seemingly autonomous lights work? Obviously you don't need actual artificial intelligence to make things with motion detectors or whatever, but the prohibition on "thinking machines" seems to be broader than that.
What's really aggravating is that the Democrats already have a lot of policies that are good for the "electorate of white voters." Even over-50 non-college and rural whites! It's not as if they'd need to drastically alter their actual policy platform - certainly not the policies that are actually possible to enact. I mean, of course they're not going to win the white non-college demographic outright, but they do have sellable pitches. But they have to try to sell them.
I said this in the open thread yesterday, but Trump's outreach to POC voters in 2020 is very instructive. He didn't propose any new policies to win POCs over. He did stop talking about the wall, which is important. But the other big thing that distinguished 2020 Trump from pre-Trump Republicans was simply that he *asked POCs to vote for him* whereas most pre-Trump Republicans didn't bother, thinking it was pointless. High-info liberals scoffed at the cheesy tokenism at the RNC, but it sure didn't hurt him with POC voters.
It's kind of ironic in a way that educated social liberals are all about "representation" being of paramount importance (sometimes even to the exclusion of tangibly benefiting underprivileged groups economically), but simultaneously can't imagine (or perhaps are averse to) even using empty representation to try to stop the bleeding with older non-college voters. Even if all they did was make it a point to consistently put older non-college people in ads and on the stage at events (including many white males, but of course not limited to) might help and wouldn't hurt. But you can't succeed if you don't try.
Totally. I used to complain about Republicans for not even attempting to win over Hispanic votes when they are mostly Christian blue collar types that should be inclined to vote conservative. That is mostly still the case, but more and more it feels like Democrats who aren't attempting to expand their voters.
To elaborate a little more on this, a common feature of ideologues of all stripes is that they don't see opposition voters as an audience to be won over, but as enemies to be defined out of relevance. Though it works out a little differently between the American Right and Left.
The Right sees low-info swing voters as marks to be fooled (which the Right does pretty effectively) while it sees liberals as "not real Americans" whose votes can freely be suppressed as they are not relevant to democratic legitimacy in the "real American" polity (although, apart from gerrymandering, the suppression efforts are not nearly as effective).
The Left obviously sees conservatives as the enemy, but it also sees many swing voters as enemies, and as people who are undeserving of sharing the same polity. As such, winning over these swing voters would be inconsistent with the objectives of the whole political project, like Native Americans trying to win over the colonist vote. The goal shouldn't be to live alongside those people but to be liberated *from* them. On the plus (?) side, the Left doesn't try to suppress anyone's vote or really take any action at all that would flow logically from these premises other than complain.
>As such, winning over these swing voters would be inconsistent with the objectives of the whole political project, like Native Americans trying to win over the colonist vote.
That's a very good analogy, considering how many leftoids on the local level, where nobody filters out the loonies, actually come out and just call everyone they don't like a *colonizer*.
"the Left doesn't try to suppress anyone's vote or really take any action at all that would flow logically from these premises"
You forget gerrymandering, which apparently, everyone is happy to do. Politicians choosing their voters, rather than the other way around, is undemocratic. And no, the standard "but the other guys do it more!" excuse is not acceptable, even if true, which I'm skeptical about.
Just to further this point ... the updated IL districts should pick-up two GOP house seats. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project gave it an 'F'.
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/chicago-politics/illinois-dems-embrace-gerrymandering-in-fight-for-us-house/2661040/
Paywalled: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/15/us/politics/illinois-democrats-gerrymander.html
"I mean, of course they're not going to win the white non-college demographic outright..."
Why not? The white non-college demographic was the backbone of the Democratic Party for decades. Maybe the balance of policies in the Democratic platform no longer ARE good for the white non-college demographic, so they're defecting in droves.
People actually poll non-college whites from time to time, and a majority of them will consistently say that they like some Democratic policies, even as they've grown to oppose the Party as a whole. Politics is fought at the margins and votes are fungible. Winning an outright majority of non-college whites is not necessary. But the polling shows that the Party has potential sales pitches that many non-college voters would like, so it should try to use those and at least attempt to lessen the Republicans' margin of victory with that demographic.
As someone who vaguely knew the story before seeing the movie, the stuff about guns, fighting without shields, and how to travel without spice didn't bug me.
What *did* bug me was the convoluted political machinations. Why were the Harkonnens removed from Arrakis and the Atreides given it, only to have Imperial soldiers than wipe the latter out to the benefit of the former. Maybe this will all be explained later, but huh? I mean, if the Harkonnens want to launch a sneak attack on their foes and wipe them out, why not just do it on Caladon in the first place?
Also, I never get the "unitary planet" thing in this -- and pretty much all of science fiction. It's like an entire planet can only be one thing and typically have a uniform people and a single ruler, most of the time. Based on the planet I know something about, that seems pretty simplistic. But even if you do in fact rule an entire planet, with all its resources at your disposal, one would think you would have better military capabilities to respond to a surprise attack than the Atreides displayed. What, you stripped Caladon of its 100 soldiers?
As for VA/NJ, the results confirmed all my priors and proved that the Democrats should promote my priorities if they want to win. (This would have been the same had the outcome been more favorable.)
What isn't being factored into your analysis is the guild monopoly on interstellar travel both leading to the incredibly high cost of space travel and the inability of the Imperials or Harkonnens to exclude the Atreides from accessing same.
The Imperial/Harkonnen force that attacked the Atreides on Arrakis was 10 legions - about 300,000 men. To transport this force was the equivalent of the Harkonnens profit on Arrakis for 50-60 years (depending on whose estimate you use)! Realistically, there was no way that the invasion force could have been materially larger.
A force of this size is enough to subdue the Atreides on Arrakis, where they were just settling in, were limited to the number of soldiers/equipment they could bring and were not entrenched with the local population. On Caladon, the people are not exchanging one foreign ruler for another - their homes are being invaded. The Atreides also have access to air and sea power to deter an attack force. It would have been very unlikely that the attackers could take Caladon.
BUT, even if they could there is another problem. The Imperial involvement had to be kept a secret (otherwise, the other great houses would unite against the Emperor, as the Imperials picking them off one by one was their greatest fear). Imperial soldiers are worth, according to the book, 10 of any normal solider. So there was no alternative the use of Imperial troops (given how it was already too expensive to transport the invasion force). Remember, the Imperials/Harkonnens cannot exclude anyone from traveling on a spaceship. On Arrakis, there were more chokepoints to keep people from going off world to tell the story of Imperial involvement - but even there they needed to keep hostages from the lesser houses from spreading stories. On Caladon there is no way they could keep every single Atreides from traveling to a guild ship - and once there they could reveal the Imperial involvement.
Dune has extensive discussion of the ecology of Arrakis, including an 8 page appendix, its unfair to dismiss it as simplistic.
As Job said at the end of his chat with God, "Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know."
As he wisely concluded, I too "despise myself and repent in dust and ashes."
This movie works best for people who read the book, unfortunately. The political intrigue is front and center in the book. The action scenes are mostly an afterthought -most of them don't even take place in the present tense in the novel (the attack by the Harkonnens, for example, is largely - and only briefly - described after the fact).
So everything in your second paragraph is explained. It's actually the whole POINT of the book, really - it's one of the central mysteries, and it drives the plot. Your third paragraph, though, is... not explained. It's a problem. The "one guy rules an entire planet" is never adequately explored, and the "one resource can only be found on one planet which has only one ecosystem and is the most important resource in the entire universe" requires a lot of mental hand-waving to accept.
Everyone who has read and enjoyed Dune wanted to see it on the big screen, but honestly it is a story that will never be successfully filmed. There's too much going on.
The David Lynch version was a clusterfuck; I saw a few minutes of one episode of the miniseries, and it looked a lot more like the book than the Lynch movie did; and I will never see the 2021 version.