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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • It’s probably my favorite sci-fi series as well, yet I got a completely different read from it.

    In-universe the Jihad was generally seen as a necessity. No one was really against it politically, even if they skirted around or violated it in actuality.

    Leto II said: “The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines. Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

    With all his prescience he saw humankind dying out unless he followed the Golden Path. That is a kind of tragedy, to be very nearly all-powerful and all-knowing, to know right from wrong, and to have tyranny be the only way forward.

    I don’t for a second believe that Frank made the jihad as a reference to Samuel Butler because he thought it was a bad idea. If the book had wanted to communicate that it was a bad idea, it would have been presented as one at some point.