Anyway, modern Muslims would regard the Fremen as apostate either for altering the religion or for allowing outsiders to alter it.

There are no book bans in the US. Individual libraries can be and are selective about what books they stock, and libraries for children justifiably avoid specific topics. The government has not actually banned any books lately.

The White House has not restricted reporting, it has merely denied entry to it’s press releases to specific parties. Those parties can still report on the facts (or make them up, as they are wont to do), they just cannot attend the White House’s press releases. Since attendance at press releases is by invitation in any case, this is definitely not censorship.

Supporting public broadcasting is not an antidote to censorship, and ending that support is not a form of censorship either. PBS was notorious for supporting only one political viewpoint, and there was just no need to waste taxpayer money on it. You would cry foul if taxpayer money were spent to advocate for political viewpoints that you don’t agree with.

Jimmy Kimmel’s “gags” were praising a murderer for the murder he committed. That’s incitement to violence, which is not protected speech.

The US’s sanctions of Cuba are not related to speech in any way.

If you really want to cite American double standards, how about American banks denying service to Americans based on their stated political and religious beliefs? <https://www.occ.gov/news-issuances/news-releases/2026/nr-occ...>

Or how about the FBI declaring that parents at PTA meetings as “domestic terrorists”? Or targeting the Catholic church as an “extremist organization”?

But that’s not really important. Science fiction is allowed to make things up that aren’t perfectly realistic. Campbell surmised that a good science fiction author would pick just one unrealistic thing, such as FTL space travel, for every story, and the reader would oblige by suspending their disbelief. Frank Herbert might have stretched that a bit but I still think he wrote a good story. I don’t hold it against him.

Of course the book mostly takes place on a world with so little infrastructure that most of the goods are made offworld and imported. The native Freemen population makes plenty of stuff out of local resources, but they want to or have to stay hidden from the rest of society and so they don’t have any factories. The stillsuits they wear are hand made, but are exquisitely high–tech and display an ethos of perfectionism in their construction.

Also you might not have picked up that anyone able to afford a small amount of spice in their diet can live for much longer than anyone does today, and even the average person enjoys a wealth of products from hundreds of planets. House Atreides made their fortune harvesting whale fur and selling the clothes and other products made from it. At some point in history they became a Great House by arming themselves with nuclear weapons. There’s a form of personal wealth that doesn’t quite exist today! :)

For one thing, the guild navigators are prescient and guide their ships across interstellar (and even intergalactic) distances faster than the speed of light. They use their prescience to pick routes where the ship arrives safely instead of plowing through a stray planet. They also use it in a less obvious fashion to maintain the political status quo. They try to avert political crises because they like their position in society and don’t want anyone changing things (which explains the long stasis of the Empire). People did at one point use computers for safe navigation, but they were slower and they weren’t prescient. The possibility that prescient machines might one day be built is the entire reason why Leto II spends so much time breeding humans in “God Emperor of Dune”. He’s looking for anything that can be an edge against the machines, and he hits the jackpot when he discovers that one of his descendants is not prescient, but is invisible to prescients. She and her actions cannot be seen in future he predicts. She and her descendants can safeguard humanity against any form of hostile prescience, machine or alien or otherwise.

Synthesis of spice was a long–term plot element in the series. The Tleilaxu eventually master it. Keep in mind that it isn’t a small–molecule drug either; it’s an alien life form.

Mentats were intended to be a replacement for computers and databases. They were frequently administrators and advisors, and often used their capabilities to convince people. But that wasn’t the goal of their training.

The Bene Gesserit have eidetic access to every memory of every one of their female ancestors. That is actually very impressive; most people don’t even have eidetic access to their _own_ memories, let alone the ability to easily recall secret information known only to their ancestors (such as the password to a safe). The Reverend Mothers can transfer all of their ancestral memories to another, so that the new Reverend Mother has access to the memories of both sets of ancestors. Long chains of Reverend Mothers gifting their memories to each successive Reverend Mother results in the Bene Gesserit having access to the ancestral memories of virtually every race or group of people that ever existed (except the Jewish, who successfully hid themselves even from the Bene Gesserit but otherwise still exist, which is a plot point in one of the later novels).

They can also command people to act. By a trained effort of will they can tell you to get up and dance a jig, or to slit your own throat, and you’d do it. That’s an ability worth respecting, which explains why the Baron Harkonnen took care to put a deaf guard in charge of a Bene Gesserit prisoner.

> So the Butlerian Jihad exists only in a plot-armored world specifically designed to make it work.

Ultimately, however, none of that matters because this statement is what you’re really intending to argue. It’s overly reductive, and it can apply to any work of fiction. Authors naturally build or select a setting where their story makes sense. Frank Herbert (and a few others like Tolkien), went further than that and invented world–building. This excited a lot of people and sold a lot of books, and now you’re cynically dismissing it by calling it “plot armor”.

Ultimately Herbert’s point was that people should strive to be humans, not animals or machines or slaves to people with superpowers. You can’t dismiss this philosophical stance merely because he used a fictional world to illustrate it. It can be true in the real world just as it is in his books, so to refute it you will have to be more clever than that. More human, perhaps he would say.