Yes, the case of patronizing praise meant to manage and handle him, ideally before he loses his shit completely and does something even more reckless and irreparable. The same way Hermione or Dumbledore or anybody else really handles him. And the thing is that they are not wrong, it is exactly how they should treat him.
EDIT: By the way this is in strict contrast with Three Investigators, where boys are main heroes who often interact with adults, there is literally a trope where adults invite them to eat sandwiches and drink tea in similar context to what McGonagall did. But the boys treat these situation as adversarial social tests. Jupiter Jones uses his intellect to put adults off balance and get information that he needs, Bob uses his charm and boyish charisma to get special perks and information using his childish innocence and Pete who is muscle of the operation often uses that opportunity to scout the area or nick important item, and he also has his own moments of direct and no nonsense talk. If they are patronized, they understand it and treat it accordingly - mostly dismissing it as manipulation and maneuvering around. I think this is much more in line with experience of modern boys who are invited in teacher's office to be talked to.
I did right now, and as far as I understand this is what counts?
What most of us can’t do is lead men. Leading men is what counts. That’s the real job, but it comes with these other tasks.
So leadership is some je ne sais quoi, ability to get results via mysterious means? I think it can work from the outside, but it does not work in literature where you have access to internal monologue of main leader and his underlings. I actually think that people really underestimate how moronic Harry Potter was and how he was managed by everybody else. Here is one passage of angry Potter being called to professor McGonagall office after he had altercation with Umbridge:
“Well?” said Professor McGonagall, rounding on him. “Is this true?” “Is what true?” Harry asked, rather more aggressively than he had intended. “Professor?” he added in an attempt to sound more polite. “Is it true that you shouted at Professor Umbridge?” “Yes,” said Harry. “You called her a liar?” “Yes.” “You told her He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named is back?” “Yes.” Professor McGonagall sat down behind her desk, frowning at Harry. Then she said, “Have a biscuit, Potter.” “Have — what?” “Have a biscuit,” she repeated impatiently, indicating a tartan tin of cookies lying on top of one of the piles of papers on her desk.”
Calm down, have a biscuit and let me tell you what to do right now before I lose my patience with you. A classical treatment of ancient hero in sagas of old, right? Achilles was known for his ability to take shit from bureaucrats like that, sit down and sip his tea waiting to be berated about how awful he is.
At best, Harry was treated as a loose cannonball, a moron to be managed by everybody: Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hermione and the whole Order of Phoenix. Even Draco Malfoy. Otherwise he would fall flat on his head and die instantly. Potter is no backroom manager moving chess pieces or anything like that. At best, he is a brute field player who has to be managed by the likes of Granger or McGonagall, who are Willie Randolphs of the story.
Moreover Potter does not even work as a traditional reckless hero like Beowulf or Achilles. He is literal subversion. He lacks any agency in achieving Kleos/Glory, all his victories are result of pure luck, his blood chemistry through his mother or through administrative support of whole organization with private armies. He is not an individual hero like Beowulf who gets angry, sails across a sea to tear arms of Grendel by his bare hands. He is no Conan the Barbarian who stands proud in defiance of gods, wizards and the world with his honor, strength and good steel in his hand. Neither is he Odysseus using his guile and cunning, or Batman devising strategies, plans and gadgets to put him on even playing field with monstrous villains of his world - if there is any such hero in that story it is Hermione. Potter is damsel in distress, a MacGuffin to be protected by multi-billion operation, the best wizard who ever lived and literal Order.
He is not a leader. If that was the case, any moronic lottery winner who is managed by his mom would be voted as a president of the country. That is why Potter is no hero for boys and men. He is subversion of heroic archetype and no sophism and mythical leadership je ne sais quoi will save that fact.
georgioz
1d ago
He addresses it in a reply to one of the comments, but the reply is mostly “there are prejudices in older works that don’t matter because the conflicts no longer exist” (for instance, the Pharisees in the New Testament)
You could not be farther from truth. Pharisees specifically were the most powerful faction of Jews at the time, they formed the central religious authority of Sanhedrin and they formed the core of what later came as Rabbinic Judaism. Saint Paul himself was a learned Pharisee, taught by famous rabbi Gamaliel and many of his ideas actually reflect this reading of Old Testament. So in that sense Pharisees live to this day in a very literal, historical sense.
More generally, Pharisees represent the legalistic tendency of any moral philosophy. They have parallels everywhere, the age old "letter of law" vs "spirit of law" conflict. You see it in discussions such as Originalism vs Living Constitution interpretation of constitutional law. You see it in day-to-day adherence to your local HR decrees in your company etc. It may be one of the most important and impactful conflict today.
They were not asking about the capacity to make factual generalizations, but specifically about ascribing moral responsibility for an individual's actions to a demographic group they belong to.
Yes, people put moral responsibility and duties based on group characteristics. I have a duty to pay taxes and adhere to some regulations etc. You as well as OP operate under certain moral system, maybe utilitarianism or harm reductionism and you use them to impose moral duties on other people based on group characteristics. That is why I used women or SNAP recipients as an example. Women can get pregnant, therefore you have moral duty to accommodate them in various ways. What seems just like logical and descriptive term bleeds into moral categories and duties.
You can, I suppose, argue that being a bigot is good and/or rational, but you can't really argue that assigning collective moral responsibility to a demographic group on account of the actions of a specific member of that group is not bigoted.
Yes, for example some lunatic shoots up a school and now millions of individuals get their second amendment right curtailed for it. Again, we will evaluate a complex individual to a few characteristics such as "gun owner" which paints him morally as potential gun shooter and thus he has to have moral duties. And if you defend your right to own a gun as an individual, you are blamed as supporter of gun shooters in a very normative way. All policies paint a broad brush, evaluate individuals based on limited attributes and ascribes moral duties. It is just that policies the OP thinks of as good/rational are exempt of that, because they are good and rational while other bigots who have different way of evaluating the same are "bigoted" in pejorative way. It is pure Russel's conjugation.
You're confusing different kinds of things (see the normative/positive confusion above as well). "SNAP supporters" and "women" are both groups in the sense that they refer to multiple people, but they are different kinds of category.
They are all group characteristics that are basis on moral duties for other people. That is the category. Women get special treatment in all kinds of situations just because they are women and you are assigned moral duty to accommodate. SNAP recipients are evaluated by narrow criteria such as their gross income and some asset classes and if they pass, you have moral duty to pay taxes and literally feed them no matter if they are drug addicts or if they hide their income or assets etc. They are of the same category despite being millions of individual people with individual stories, and all of them are evaluated on narrow criteria, which then serve as a basis for you to have moral duties even if you never met them and if you live thousands of miles away.
I just have to reiterate that all the above categories, moral evaluations of groups and moral duties are put onto individuals are based on a very specific moral framework. You even put blame on people such as tax evader, gun control law criminal etc. It is seen as objectively bad and even punishable by law. But that punishment is based on prior narrow characteristics: you are a bad person because you own a banned gun, and the gun is banned because it causes school shootings.
And I can even grant you the definition of a bigot. Somebody is a bigot because he holds all Muslims as morally culpable for promoting Islamism that leads to terrorism. Another person is a bigot because he holds all gun owners and their defense of 2nd amendment as morally culpable for school shootings. But then if everybody is a bigot, the word loses its differentiating power and becomes an empty word.
The phenomenon you are describing is just plain old bigotry.
It is interesting to start your argument with moral appeal, with ethos. It really has to rely on a very specific definition of bigotry, which usually just goes into equivocation. I can use two examples: the first one being a literal group characteristic. For instance only women can get pregnant. It is a factual claim over billions of people. It attributes a characteristic to just that one group. Then there is the other angle, where suddenly some group characteristics do not have the same moral weight. E.g. everybody who supports any group wide policy such as Affirmative Action or SNAP is a bigot.
So no, the true steelman is that people use selective definition, equivocation, rhetoric and other underhanded tactics to selectively manipulate ungrounded morality to paint somebody as a bigot, while they put themselves outside of the same examination that would position them as bigots. Mostly utilizing weakly grounded and unspecified moral rules - e.g. some form of harm reductionism or utilitarianism, which again just collectivizes individual experience such as harm or utility, relying on the same ethos that enabled them to mark other people as bigots. Everybody evaluates other people on some group characteristics, it is not just some "availability heuristics".
British empire was historically surprisingly insular, especially when it comes to colonies. In 1841 there were only 0.25% of foreign born people in UK, in 1901 it increased to 1.5% - and vast majority of those were French, German as well as Russian Jews etc. The total African/Indian population of UK could be of around 10,000 people. By the way the same goes the other way around. British ruled with a very small bureaucratic elite, the whole Indian Civil Service never exceeded much beyond 1,000 people. Pre rebellion in 1856, the whole white military in India was around 40,000 people for the population of over 200 million in Raj and even post-rebellion the numbers were never too outrageous - it only doubled. Brits took the divide and conquer tactics very seriously, majority of military as well as administration was actually local population.
It was not until after WW2 and especially after de facto dissolution of the empire that the immigration really picked up pace. It is a very new phenomenon for Britain. I know it looks different with constant propaganda about black people in historical dramas, but it is just that - a new myth for new multicultural UK.
Let us assume HBD is correct.
That does not make it acceptable to enslave, discriminate, oppress, or demean a race of people - all people deserve a baseline of dignity and respect.
How do you measure oppression? On the face of it in terms of basic rights, this situation is solved. Universal suffrage and all that, the baseline of dignity achieved. Right? Except there is always more to that baseline and in that case the only measure of discrimination, oppression and the rest of it is outcomes. If outcomes are unequal, then oppression had to take place. For some times classical liberals talked about "equality of opportunity". Which is again an interesting concept - but how do you measure if access to opportunity is truly equal except of outcomes?
HBD means nuking tabula rasa, which is the basic dogma for most versions of humanist movements. Be happy with basic constitutional rights, everything else is free for all - so there will be various castes, classes and groups, some of them in hereditary worse situation when it comes to outcomes. This is a very, very hard pill to swallow in the current equality/equity obsessed society. Hence the vehement resistance to the whole concept of HBD.
georgioz
13d ago
Neither party has done either. I’ll accept we’re in some sort of emergency (crazy politicians, Gen Z apathy, climate change and TFR collapse). I’m not remotely convinced a leader of any major party can lead us out.
You just brushed with a specific concept that emerged from Davos crowd in 2016, the specific term is polycrisis and they are in love with it since then. Like you mentioned, we have demographic crisis, climate crisis, mental health crisis and everything in between and more. It is a feature, not a bug - some of these like climate crisis or demographic crisis are just new fact of life that will stay with us for our lifetimes.
Moreover there are micro panics, this week it is the wife that strangled her three kids, and it seems that 10% of the world knows about it. Next week it will be something else. It is just a constant barrage of various issues, sense of endless anxiety that triggers basic psychological programming.
georgioz
15d ago
Of course, this is the model that I also have. Just because you are a good manager does not mean that you are good at everything - from repairing stuff or soldiering through to philosophy or even things such as being a good father. In fact good managers are perfectly aware of this fact and they are good at matching various people with capital in order to get the best result - they would be the first to tell you they themselves are not best at repairing broken ship motor, while organizing everybody to either help or at least get out of the hair of somebody with such a skill needed for occasion.
georgioz
16d ago
So they ended up hiring a mentally ill con man who was good at not saying anything that would ruffle the wrong feathers.
I'd argue that they wanted a con man and ended up with a person with pseudologia fantastica. It is different from con man, as con men try to be rational and persuasive, they do not invent completely out-there story as their objective is to get some financial or other reward. So they keep their con believable. Pathological liars are completely opposite, they draw pleasure if somebody validates their fantasies and they will push the boundaries to get a new high.
Of course the whole Critical Justice/DEI framework is especially vulnerable to these pathological liars, as first the claims themselves are unhinged, where inventing new ways of how one was oppressed while sitting on a bench is matter of course - you know the genre of X is racist (knitting, hiking etc.). Second, the whole field uses standpoint epistemology, basically "believe X" where X is somebody oppressed. So it is not your place to disbelieve and especially criticize people of color, especially if you are white.
So yes, they made the bed that they are now sleeping in, and it is not easy to unmake. The vulnerability is deeply ingrained in the fields it affects.
I actually think that @Corvos has a point. Imagine that you are a modern self-employed digger without any boss. You probably utilize some sort of capital in form of excavator, that in turn utilizes labor of probably millions of people from iron ore processing to electronics. You are only good at operating this highly specific piece of machine, you would be nothing without it, you are "parasite" on labor of all those workers that produced the capital you now use. CEO like Elon Musk is just high-tier version of this digger. He is good not at operating a single machine, but at operation of huge gigafactories and software houses. That is his level of expertise, these companies are his capital and he is best in the world operating them.
Moreover, there is no world where position like that does not exist. You could be in Soviet Russia and you will have a local party boss managing the factory, who is subject to some planning committee that collectively represent Elon Musk on steroid as they produce 5 year plan for the whole economy.
What LLMs do specifically, is that they are just another vector of showing how intellectual property is nonsensical category. The solution is easy, the intellectual property belongs to the person who was first and fulfills any number of invented arbitrary rules for intellectual property (e.g. that it cannot be mathematical formula etc.). If it does not fulfill these criteria, then this app is freeware just as if you xittered some new mathematical formula. If it does fulfill these criteria then the app is his by virtue of being first and everybody else is plagiarizing his work. And it does not matter if it is an app or music or whatever.
You are missing a middle bullet point: Humanity inherits the guilt of their ancestor Adam.
That is definitely not the only or even predominant Christian view outside of Calvinists and related sects. For instance Catholics do not view original sin through prism of guilt, original sin is contracted, not committed. Orthodox Christians actually use different vocabulary, they call it Ancestral Sin.
"Humans must navigate this fact" Humans must actively seek redemption and grace
Yes, seeking redemption is the way how you do it. I did not want to go into details of soteriology as there are even more profound differences in as with what is the nature of grace, what is the nature of justification, sanctification and glorification etc.
As for the rest you are also too hung up on details here, which is strange as as you have no problem saying that Communism and Wokeism “borrowed” this concept. You defined Original Sin narrowly toward Calvinist tradition yet at the same time Marxist share it? Of course you will find out that it is unique. I framed Original Sin as more general concept specifically related to nature of the world and human. Of course various religions or even specific heresies will differ on specifics of cosmology and related human ontology and harmatiology - including Communism and Wokism.
Incorrect partially, the race you are born to gives you your sinful status at birth. Being born white means you inherit the racial sins of your ancestors and must seek redemption through atonement in the woke belief system.
Incorrect partially. You were born with white privilege - but this privilege is bestowed upon you by oppressive system of white supremacy, it is not inside your ontological nature. It is the system that is corrupt. You have to of course do proper progressive work, accept and profess your privilege, listen to people of color as they posses superior standpoint epistemological position etc. But this work is related to dismantling the oppressive system, so that future whites are no longer corrupted and we live in true and voluntary equity. I'd argue that there is no true personal atonement in progressivism, you are shaped by material conditions of the systems of opression, to “atone” is to change and ideally abolish these systems, so you and future generations will be shaped differently. There is just endless work in Theory-Praxis cycle for everybody, as we all possess some kind of privilege even black women can be cis etc.
From a Malaysian, currently living in Australia: I usually don't really think about Canada all too much since pretty little of what it does affects me. I have been over there, and kind of have to agree with @OliveTapenade in that I think of it as being like a less belligerent and less polarised US with more legacy allegiance to Britain, with the (sort of hilarious) quirk that the nation's self-conception is largely defined around not being the US despite sharing a very large number of cultural characteristics with their more powerful neighbour. Perhaps the differences may seem large if all you know is the North American cultural sphere, but to the rest of the world the distinction is not that clear. Canada is really just not all that distinctive internationally nor is it that prominent when it comes to foreign affairs.
I think this is the general identity crisis in the whole Commonwealth ruled by the king, including Australia and New Zealand. As the British Empire collapsed, so did the overall identity of these countries as having the "civilizing mission" where it was their burden to uplift the world in line with projects such as ending slavery, saving artifacts in Imperial museums, spreading literacy etc. What they came up with was alignment with post WW2 liberal consensus of building multicultural societies, while other countries of commonwealth such as those in Caribbean took upon the identity as anticolonial crusaders.
Now as the mutliculturalism collapses, there is new profound identity crisis. So what is left is pretending to be more sophisticated opposition toward uncouth Americans - this is by the way also the identity of many EU nations as they also see their mutlicutural projects collapsing together with prestige be it economic, scientific, diplomatic or technological.
The whole dynamics reminds me actually of late Austrian empire and its identity as opposition toward militaristic unsophisticated Piefke "Reichsdeutschen" Germans, while at the same time being jealous of German economic dynamism and rise to power. The comparison is uncanny right down to failure of multicultural project as ethnic tensions increased down to bureaucratic paralysis and anemic economy and science as well as tension being supposedly culturally superior while relying on supposedly civilizationally inferior power for protection and growth.
While I agree, there is something interesting going on. Euthanasia is similar to surrogacy. It just silently becames a thing and it was barely even discussed. When I opened this topic with my friends, there were quite some differences ranging from this is legalized human trafficking and slavery to nothingburger and hugely beneficial thing. These were opinions of a husband and a wife, and it also surprised them how their view differed on this under the hood change of reality.
Things like these are pushed and normalized constantly, it is akin to gish-galop of policies and regulations - many just pass bellow the radar only to pop-up when they actually cause massive problems. Sometimes these things silently work the other way around, for instance how introduction of body cams for US police officers basically demolished the argument of excess policing. These videos basically replaced Law&Order TV shows and reality shows in one.
There are numerous pre-Christian religions/theologies, that developed outside if Christianity (e.g. in Americas) that share the Original/Ancestral sin framework. For that, the main two attributes of the original sin is as follows:
- The world was created as good but it has fallen.
- The human is born broken, he is prone to sin and evil and his duty is to navigate this fact.
Here, Buddhism is a direct comparison. The universe is orderly and good, while human is born broken often ridden with karmic debt. The Pythagoreans had similar concepts as do Hindus with doctrine of Ṛṇa or Popol Vuh of Mayans. Of course there are quite an important details that completely subvert the Christian story, but so does Progressive religion.
Progressives believe in subverted story of original sin - individuals are born as perfect innocent tabula rasa individuals, it is the world that is evil and poisons them through systems of oppression into various sins such as racism etc. You have to become woke to these sinful poisonous systems out there, and do the work to perfect yourself and the world in order to build eschatological progressive heaven on Earth in form of ultimate Social Justice, thus liberating future perfect newborn beings from these negative influences. Progressive hamartiology has more overlap with let's say Gnostic view of Original Sin as opposed to mainstream Christianity - and it is not a coincidence.
I'd like Christians to stop pretending Wokeism is not their child and not following similar behavioral patterns as it's memetic ancestors.
I do not think anybody is pretending, for instance I as a Catholic can say that traditional Satanists who believe in existence of demonic entity of Satan are "children of Christianity" in a very narrow sense that they probably could not exist without Christianity and its system. I can even accept Wokeism as a religion that subverts Christianity - heck, they literally celebrate the most heinous mortal sin of pride connected to sexual depravity. Many Christians see it as a work of The Enemy and indirect proof of their own faith.
I know many people on the right like to categorize Wokeism as a theological/religious movement but then they immediately balk when you ask what base theology did Wokeism form from.
I will not balk, it is a Hegelian "religion", same as OG Marxism etc, which in turn was informed by other religions and traditions such as Christianity, Hermeticism, enlightenment philosophy etc. They developed their own philosophical system answering question for instance of ontology (what is a man), sociology (how should society organize itself) etc. And they do not even deny it, they have a process for it inside their own religious tradition - Hegelian dialectic. Just one example, the concept of abolish has Hegelian roots, it is the concept of aufheben - it is to resolve the contradiction by dissolving it in higher truth.
There are many such words, even the word oppression is based on Hegelian Master-Slave (or more precise Lordship-Bondage) framework developed in his Phenomenology of Spirit way back in 1807. It is interesting because to explain this concept, Hegel framed it as clash of Will where the weaker will submits to the stronger one, thus forging the relationship. He introduced a new form of social and historical will as result of clash for power, which is quite distinct to let's say Augustinian concept of free will as a gift from God. There are stark differences in theology of philosophical systems that borrow from different traditions.
The same for words like alienation or consciousness in a sense of let's say class consciousness or false consciousness. These are religiously supercharged terms, talking about false consciousness requires you to accept the whole baggage in this religious system and its theology, it is completely different meaning from regular usage of let's say falling unconscious after hitting your head.
Just for instance look at the topic of "human rights". What are they, how they come to be, who has authority to arbitrate between them in terms of hierarchy, how do we amend or suspend or cancel them. These are all highly metaphysical questions for which there is no simple answer.
The very fact that they refuse to categorize it as a religion is part of the culture war, they want to posit their religious dogma and doctrine informing how law and morality is enforced as some "universal" system outside of any critique. They presuppose that their religion is correct and invite you to only discuss the issue on their own terms.
georgioz
20d ago
Well, modern Christian statements about love seem “extremely false and feigned”. There’s not a lot of love in churches. There’s more love at a Juggalo gathering or a Grateful Dead parking lot. That is my read on it, at least.
That is true, however I do not think that church is the best place to create brotherly bonds. At least men create them shoulder-to-shoulder, doing specific activities and not just visiting church during mass. At the end of each mass priest invites people to various activities from pilgrimages, charity events, outdoor masses with live music and anything in between. This is where you have to step up. Or you can even join international fraternities such as Knights of Columbus.
Sure, I do not even deny it, the point being that it is not some conscious choice, but slow changing of culture. For instance silent generation grew up in schools where crosses, framed ten commandments or morning prayers were the norm even if not many of them consciously thought of it. Now those are often outright banned by the very same silent generation, but there are progress flags and Earth Day and other such things in schools instead. It is change in culture and ethos.
I like the way James Lindsay explains it in the form of various philosophical systems where theology is the grounding pilar, it is fundamental meta-narrative that determines the ultimate nature of reality, truth, and human purpose. Theology synthetizes other particular philosophies such as cosmology, epistemology, anthropology, sociology, axiology, hamartiology etc. So for instance Christians have God at the center of their theology, this informs epistemology through divine revelation and empirical observation of God's creation, man is created in image of God, Christian virtue ethics is objective morality based on God's commandments. I think he compared it to Marxism which views Man (species being) at the center, epistemology is based on your standpoint in class and other hierarchies providing you with unique insights, nature of man is as social being that is entirely shaped by material conditions etc. These are incompatible philosophical systems.
Using Scott Alexander's language, Culture War is Conflict Theory all the way down especially with such radical differences on basic things like ontology, epistemology or ideas of how society should function. Somebody will be in charge, if not you then somebody else that may have vastly different philosophical system which will seep into culture and ultimately politics. Mistatke theroy is just camouflage, you take the dominant theological/philosophical system as given, an then argue as if progressives and classical liberals or Christian nationalists or Islamists are just mistaken in how their policy proposal will bring about "greater good". But in reality you are just theocrat for your own system and view other competing systems through that prism. Mistake theory is luxury to be indulged for debates inside this philosophical system where people are theologically aligned.
georgioz
20d ago
Sure, the thing is that it is generic modern environmental hazard. Instead of zombies and hostile cannibals it could be local criminals and gals from HR. The structure is completely off and it should be apparent to anybody who reads let's say some war memoires of soldiers or other people in extreme circumstances and how people actually behave.
The Culture War is so toxic because everyone is a theocrat. An old classmate of mine who was ordained and kicked out of the denomination rails to his hundreds of thousands of followers about “CHRISTIAN NATIONALISM!” while preaching the enforcement of his own version of Christian morality with the dog-whistle: "Jesus says love thy neighbor." By which he means state-enforced welfare and socialism.
"Everybody is theocrat" is something that many people only recently realized. Everybody knows that politics is downstream of culture, but culture is downstream of of theology. If it will not be a Christian theology that is going to be informing the culture, then it will be something else. There is no "separation of state and religion", all policies are based on morality and ideology of decision makers. Everybody was culture warrior even before, even if they did not think it was so. They were like fish that were not aware of the water they swim in. Your regular grandma did not read Augustine, she probably could not formulate elaborate theological arguments, but she knew what is a man a woman or what is marriage based on age old culture influenced by specific ethos. Not in her wildest dreams did she imagine that this could ever become a question, nobody was prepared to defend such a basic thing. Not anymore, people are no longer seeped in the same water and we see this interaction real time - at home, at work and also in church.
However there is a huge shift even with your friend. No matter what his supposedly heretic theology is, he can just go out there and say that whatever policy he prefers is purely because Christians like him want it. This claim itself fries brain of many secular people - no, there is no need to couche this argument in some secular language that by itself is seeped in utilitarianism or harm reductionism or some other type of moral philosophy. No, my Christian sect wants this and we want it because it is our moral preference. It is the only justification (in scripture, tradition or whatever) that is fully sufficient for us to pursue this specific policy.
By the way the genie is already out of the bottle even on religious front - even discounting the fact that progressives moved the needle for society to accept their religious doctrine, such as let's say that a man is a woman as state policy. This is however more visible as they embraced Muslims into their coalition. For example schools should have halal food. Not because it is good for environment or that it is cheap or anything like that. Our Muslim voters want it, and that is why we will deliver it. It is purely formed by their preference informed by their religion and no other tortured secular justification needs to be done anymore. But this was always so, we only pretended that these utilitarian justifications were morally and theologically neutral, as if history ended and secularists were just independent arbiters in safari full of religious animals. This veneer was already broken, especially by progressives who were able to smuggle increasingly insane moral prescriptions under secularist or "liberal" framework. This only shows that secularists have no better justification for "good" or "bad" policy than any other group, because what is good and bad is subject to moral philosophy and theology. Secular liberalism, intersectional progressivism, Christian socialism, political Islam - it is all just ideologies based on specific moral and theological framework that fight for influence and power.
In contrast Margaret Qualley looks like she’s literally having a seizure.
That's one way to put it. Have Qualley get some weight, give her baseball hat and sweatpants and you get this. But I still thing that Qualley has some je ne sais quoi of craziness at least in my eyes, Raygun is actually funny although unintentionally.
However there is something else going on with Qualley. She is a professional dancer and ballerina, those moves are controlled and the more they look erratic, the more you are drawn into the manipulation, the more you experience the whiplash. It is nowhere near goofy, it is precise and intentional, it is meta level madness here - it looks like random seizure but it is precise and methodical. It is that exact whiplash that may be subconsciously attractive. Like Candance Owens, mother in her late 30ies looking like a girl with perfect skin and delivering slightly threatening rant. It is the juxtaposition that many men find attractive.
georgioz
21d ago
As any healthy man should, but it was a thing for a while. Just peruse the comment section, it became a meme with other reactions.
I agree that the structure of the book is Harry centered. We only have access to his internal monologue and his perspective and we do not have access to Hermione. But there is a long tradition of such a story, even in English literature: the Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson dynamics.
In fact it fits quite well. Potter similarly to Watson is the brave one, somebody who acts, who goes wand in hand to brave dangers and who is center of the perspective and action. Holmes similarly to Hermione is the hidden genius who comes and goes with solutions, he is the central figure who solves thing behind the scenes and which are to be often utilized by Watson. Crucially, not having access to Holmes internal monologue makes him more of a mysterious figure, which makes him less of a Mary Sue. And he is undisputed main character of the story.
In Harry Potter it is of course not as explicit as Watson's subservience and worship of Holmes. Plus Hermione is only one of many such characters, where Holmes is the ensemble of the system: Hermione, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Snape, Moody, Order of Phoenix etc. who do the heavy lifting behind the scenes: plotting, planning, protecting, building structures which Potter then visits as a curated explorer exactly how Watson has his own adventures that were sanitized by Holmes genius.
In the end I do not "identify" with Potter. He is not a leader, or a hero. He is brave and he possesses good qualities, but his victories are result of luck and/or insane work of much more important people behind the scenes. If anything, Hermione is the one who really is the hero as she shares enough of the "view time" from the story perspective with constant input into various plans. That would be my argument.
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