magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
As for Priori Incantatem it also not works. It is established in the book lore that Harry didn't know what Priori Incantatem was, he didn't plan for it, and he didn't trigger it intentionally. He cast a his expiliarmus gimmick out of desperation, and the universe stepped in with a technical glitch of shared cores that saved his life. Harry was not a leader contesting enemy general, he was a drowning person randomly getting ahold of floating beam that fate put there. Relying on your opponent's gun jamming is not a display of heroic military leadership. There was not contest of will like Achilles vs Hector.
Um, yes, there is a contest of wills.
Like, seriously, go reread the scene. They cast, the effect goes off, and they're stuck in a contest of wills with beads of light moving between them. Harry forces the beads into Voldemort's wand, and it makes ghosts of the most recent people Voldemort killed, who then harass Voldemort long enough for Harry to get away (the Death Eaters are also IIRC thrown off-balance by seeing Voldemort lose at anything). If Harry hadn't won the contest of wills, he would not have been able to get away and Voldemort or a Death Eater would have killed him. If Harry hadn't befriended Cedric, Cedric's ghost would have been less willing to go along with it.
The whole DA is laughable.
No, it wasn't. The DA turned out to be critical. There are pitched battles at the end of HBP and DH in which the Hogwarts students are the main fighting force. The DA built camaraderie and at least a decent chain of command; you need that for effective cohesion under fire and without that experience they'd likely have broken and been slaughtered.
You keep noting that Harry is lousy at planning. Sure, he's lousy at it. So is the coach Leaders of Men is about. Harry's strength is not his brains; it's his character. Yes, Harry without Hermione fails. But Hermione without Harry also fails. Character matters, both mundanely and, in HP, magically. This is the whole point of Leaders of Men, which you seem to have missed. Planning helps. It is not the only thing that helps. Unity and morale help. Emotional resonance helps. Harry's open defiance of Umbridge, the very thing you lambast him for, is key to the DA working; he is visibly and expensively committed to the cause, and people want to live up to that.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
McGonagall is all for reckless/hardheaded displays of main character aura heroism
I mean, if she weren't, she would presumably have gone insane or turned into Umbridge approximately two weeks after becoming Head of Gryffindor.
magic9mushroom
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2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
Okay, so what I was pointing at is that character matters, IRL, and most of the magical feats you call "gimmicks" are a case of character mattering in HP magic as well.
He wins in Chamber of Secrets because of his faith in Dumbledore (summoning Fawkes) and his bravery (allowing him to pull the sword out of the hat) - and while you claim that Hermione's just as brave as he is, the very fact that you also lament his foolhardiness puts the lie to that, because foolhardiness literally is just excessive bravery. He escapes in Goblet of Fire because of his strong will (Priori Incantatem wouldn't have saved him if Voldemort had managed to make Harry's wand reverse itself instead), and to some extent his ability to be a fair winner with Cedric. He's able to kill the Horcrux and come back for much the same reasons as in CoS.
And aside from magic being character-based, his character is also more mundanely what let him run the DA in Order of the Phoenix; Hermione couldn't have done that, because the sort of person who trusts no-one and springs surprise Dark Arts on allies is not the sort of person people follow. As noted in Leaders of Men, you want someone who makes Hermione's decisions and has Harry's character, but someone with Harry's character doesn't make Hermione's decisions.
You might disagree with the character traits Harry is rewarded for actually being good. You might not like, on a stylistic level, character mattering like this. (I'm a Hermione fan too!) But they're not "pure gimmicks"; there is a theme going on here, much the same theme that's hammered in time and again that it's choices, not abilities, that make Voldemort a bad guy.
EDIT: Another Zvi post; will quote the relevant parts this time.
It is a weird and potentially incoherent sentence to say that if I were Putin or Trump I would have been able to make importantly much better decisions. But put me in their shoes and I couldn’t actually play their part at all. No chance. My ability to see that many of their decisions are dumb goes hand in hand with not being able to mimic their general ways of being.
And of course a lot of this has been driving home that character is fate. These things are difficult to fake, so one must choose character and then accept the resulting fate – there mostly is no ‘present as having the X nature and do X-style things when it’s good but secretly have the Y nature instead and use Y-based processes that are better. [sic]
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
No offense intended, but am I supposed to be impressed by the fact that you were able to recognise an extremely popular YouTuber?
Those two videos were literally the only times I'd ever seen her. I don't watch YouTube (except when linked to specific videos on fora like this one) or participate in the big social media sites (that's why I only showed up here when theMotte left Reddit).
It is also my impression that most people don't remember exactly which random Internet conversations they have open IOU-a-sauce for over timespans of years.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
You can defend the bailey that people will not lose literally all interest in a novel simply because it is old, but cannot defend the motte that a novel's age has literally no relationship to the amount of interest people have in it.
You have reversed the positions of motte and bailey. The motte is the more defensible claim, as the literal motte was the stronger fortification to retreat to if the literal bailey fell.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
You can discuss Worm right now very easily by going on Reddit or various Discord servers.
Or the SpaceBattles diaspora fora.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
I mean, the alt-right has the "alt-" in its name for a reason.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Autistic savants are exceptionally rare
AIUI eidetic memory is quite common among the autistic, though admittedly not universal. Eidetic memory is actually, legitimately good, not in the kind of jackass-genie way you're using. I can pull off shit like this; while I'm given to understand that my memory is unusually good even by autistic standards, according to everything I've seen it's bullshit-tier by neurotypical standards.
not a central example of how the term "differently abled" tends to be used.
It's a motte on an exceedingly-large and ridiculous bailey, but the motte is what allows the bailey to be claimed. Note how "neurodiversity" started with autism.
magic9mushroom
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3d ago
Pornography, by definition, is produced with the consent of those depicted; children definitionally cannot consent to being sexually exploited; ergo, sexually explicit videos featuring children cannot be pornography.
We're literally discussing teens sending nudes to each other right now; who is doing the abuse or exploitation? The non-US Anglosphere and IIRC decent chunks of Europe legally consider loli hentai to be "child sexual abuse material"/"child exploitation material" despite the complete lack of children sexually abused or exploited (even the Japanese products with voices use adult actors). Yes, it's a dysphemism.
(Also, I agree with @Crowstep, that's not part of the definition of pornography. It's part of the definition of pornography that's legal.)
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
Have you read Leaders of Men? I think it gestures at some of what you're eliding as "gimmicks".
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
There is no "differently abled"
Autistic savants are the obvious case of a package deal with good and bad qualities.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
IIRC, that wasn't the result of the SPEW episode; Dumbledore had already been paying Dobby (and presumably would have been willing to pay the rest if they'd actually wanted to be paid) before Hermione even learned about Hogwarts having house-elves.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end"
This is not very relevant, but I will note that one can hold the position "Pride Month celebrations should end" without actually supporting crushing them by force.
Like, I think Pride Month celebrations should end, in the sense that it would be good if people were less attached to the idea and didn't run/join Pride Month celebrations. I would petition the webforums I go to that run Pride Month celebrations to stop doing so, attempting to convince them of this, but all the forums I'm a member of which run such celebrations have also threatened to ban me for blasphemy against SJ.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
AIUI essentially all of the Anglosphere legally considers under-18s sexting to be CP, which is usually given some dysphemism like the one you're using (Australia's is "child exploitation material").
As I also understand it, they don't generally come after people for the "teen sexting" case unless somebody makes a fuss (e.g. girl asks boy to delete her sexts, he refuses, she complains; boy dumps girl, girl posts boy's sexts online; etc.).
IANAL, though.
magic9mushroom
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4d ago
I know the Idiot's Guide to Latin has sidebars called "Hysteria's Herstory". I'm not sure if it explicitly says or merely implies the false etymology.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
#1 is not how Scott phrased it. He phrased it thusly (as his #2, but that's not important):
"Definition By Belief: A belief that some race has negative qualities or is inferior, especially if this is innate/genetic."
The "inferior" option, with the relevant substitutions, threads between your Scylla and Charybdis; it doesn't require actively wishing harm, and it's not plainly true (it is a moral judgement).
I won't deny that there's equivocation going on, though.
magic9mushroom
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6d ago
Was legitimately wrong (I think I was taught this wrongly by feminists who saw it as androcentric); thanks.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Okay, but the OP said "most of human history", not "most of the existence of humans". Thus, your "correction" was spurious. Hypercorrection is a pet peeve of mine.
magic9mushroom
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7d ago
Most of human history was spent as hunter-gatherers.
No, because that's prehistory. History is generally considered to start when writing is discovered, and thus when we get access to his story without dozens of layers of potentially-inaccurate retelling. Hunter-gatherers basically don't write to us; steppe pastoralists don't write to us very much either.
magic9mushroom
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9d ago
Guess I didn't RC.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
IIRC Japan's basically the only Western country to have actually raised the age of consent in the last 100 years, although I could be wrong.
Victorian prudishness is, of course, legendary.
Oh, and I forgot, there's the "overprotective parent" voting bloc opposing lowering the AoC.
magic9mushroom
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10d ago
we live in a democracy, but people secretly disagree with the law, but they don't vote it out because ... groupthink. no further mechanics given, just somehow a minority can mind control a majority.
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Kohlberg IV is a thing, and a thing most people never move past. Kohlberg IV morality is based on the law, in a direct inversion of the correct relation that the law is based on morality. This makes removing unjust laws really hard, because the Kohlberg-IV people will defend the law because it's the law.
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Most people are icebergs. What you see is the most socially-desirable part of them. If they see that you have a larger amount of stuff showing than they do, they usually conclude not that you are made of styrofoam instead (that you are more honest), but that your iceberg is much larger (that you have far-worse stuff that you're not sharing).
I'm sure you can sketch out how both of these relate to the difficulty of rolling back age of consent laws, particularly since a politician has to publically propose lowering them.
magic9mushroom
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12d ago
My general feel - admittedly without having played 1 or 2 - was that Reign of Chaos' story was pretty good, but Frozen Throne's story sucked. I think it's a mistake to group them together as "Warcraft 3".
Uhhhh... what? Outplanning each other is a contest of wits, not wills. Yes, absolutely, will is determination.
This... seems like a non sequitur? Running logistics is the quartermaster's job, not the leader's. The leader's job is to get everyone pointed in the same direction and giving 110%. Harry is hilariously better at that than Hermione.
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