HereAndGone
4mo ago
It's all tangled up, though, with Prince Andrew (who is losing everything over allegations that he may have had legal-in-Britain sex with her) and the overall media presentation that Epstein was providing 13 year olds for his rich and famous clients to fuck on his private island. "Okay I said I was a teen sex slave for Epstein, but that particular client nothing happened" is too fine a distinction for the current meat-grinder to make (particularly since Giuffre is now dead so we can't get her version of what did or didn't happen, or if she would change her mind and suddenly remember 'oh hold on, yeah I blocked it out because it was too traumatic but now I remember that Trump did rape me' like E. Jean Carroll).
HereAndGone
4mo ago
I gave up on the Piers Anthony series because it got too uncomfortable for me, but the scene in "It" was still just too much. Like you say, I understand what he was trying to get at, but it still reads very badly (particularly when the girl's father is abusive, and may be going to be sexually abusive once under the influence of Pennywise, and her husband later on is physically abusive to her because he gets a sexual thrill out of it). Group hug surely would have been enough?
HereAndGone
4mo ago
you never get a picture of these huddled masses because people don't process bearded males as "children".
Ironically in this context, there's a current murder investigation about asylum seekers as "unaccompanied children" who were put in emergency accommodation meant for minors, and it now turns out one of the "minors" may in fact have been a legal adult.
Vadym Davydenko (17) died following a serious incident at an apartment complex in Grattan Wood, Donaghmede, on October 15.
He had been in Ireland for four days and was staying at a Tusla facility for juvenile international protection applicants separated from their parents.
A suspect was later arrested as part of the investigation and charged with Vadym’s murder.
The male was also residing at the juvenile care facility at the time of the incident. His age was given as 17 in his first court appearance with his case last heard before the Children’s Court last month.
The Irish Independent has now learnt that inquiries have led investigating gardaí to believe that the suspect is in fact an adult male and not a juvenile.
Examinations into his background, including procuring a birth certificate from relatives, have indicated that he was over the age of 18 at the time of the incident.
Gaming the asylum system, you say? Surely not!
HereAndGone
4mo ago
If the USA keeps importing the "best and the brightest" it will eventually turn into the country you are so desperate to run away from in order to get to the USA.
Or I am mistaking you for some other Indian commentator who constantly goes on about how they want to get to the USA for the big bucks and freedom of opportunity, are instead stuck in the UK which doesn't pay half as well, and there's a snowball in Hell's chance you'll go back to your native country because it's too poor and full of not-the-best-and-brightest?
HereAndGone
4mo ago
a Zen-like deepity bamboozle
You have beautifully and perfectly summed up my feelings about these kinds of logic puzzles. My reaction is "I don't know, I don't care, and if this problem has any application in reality go apply it there instead of trying to make me guess what Alice does if she wakes up with her memory wiped (try to slaughter the scientists instead of playing along with the dumb 'is it Tues or Weds?' game)".
They're all variations on The Lady or the Tiger which in the end comes down to "what's your view of a jealous woman? or indeed women in general?" and not "there's a mathematical formula to find the right precise exact only answer".
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Rowling was writing twelve year olds for twelve year old readers. Writing twelve year old characters for adult readers is a different thing (particularly if you're using those characters as didactic puppets to get your message across). That is where the "A and B are supposed to be twelve but talk and behave like they're twenty-two year old college students" does get uncomfortable (ranging from "these are not kids and this is bad writing" to "uh yeah no Stephen I didn't really need a pre-teen orgy in the middle of a good scary horror novel").
HereAndGone
4mo ago
If they were 13, they'd have said 13.
That's what I'm getting at: they can't say "the girls were 13" because they weren't ('Katie Johnson' aside), but if it's "yeah he foozled around with hot 17 year olds" that's nothing really. It might be grubby, but if it's generally considered that 14 year olds can be mature enough to decide to have sex and go on birth control, it's tough to argue that 17 year old is too young to have sex.
But the insinuation that "Epstein liked 'em very very young, and Trump was a big best pal of Epstein's and liked to party with him, so you know what that means" is what they're going for to do the damage.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
I don't think he wants to be a hero for the sake of "lookit me the big damn hero", it's because of the crushing weight of expectations. He's the Boy Who Lived, but that's because his parents sacrificed themselves for him. How can you repay that? You have to justify your existence somehow by being extra-special, and if you haven't earned the attention and praise you are getting, then you have to go out and be that big damn hero in order to deserve the deaths that spared you.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Draco talks frankly about rape in his introduction.
I am even more relieved that I noped out before I got to that little gem.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Thank you for this, it makes sense. So good in college but not got the talent for the big leagues, which annoyed the fans (why the hell are we over-paying this loser who is dragging down the team?) and for those who didn't care a rap about football, the overt Christianity was the red rag to the bull.
If he just stuck to drinking, gambling, dog-fighting, and slapping his girlfriend around like the rest of the ordinary sports millionaires, it would all have been okay! 🤣
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Isn't it a witch keeping her locked up in a tower?
Yes, Harry Potter acts sort of like you'd expect a kid like him to act: he goes from being the neglected unwanted encumbrance to a world where he's special and famous and treated as exceptional. It's be a very rare person whose head wasn't turned by that! Also, the rule-breaking makes sense given the way he was raised under arbitrary and unfair rules; he has no reason to think the adult authorities in his new life have his interests at heart, and it's obvious from the start that at least one of them (Snape) is actively out to get him even if that means abusing his authority. He wants to be a hero, to soak up all this adulation and special treatment that he's been craving all his life, and it's down to him being basically a decent kid and making the right friends that manages to steer him along the right path. He probably also doesn't have a deeply-felt belief in the dangers of the magical world being real; he's spent the first twelve years of his life with "magic isn't real" so it's hard to break that conditioning, deep down he won't really feel like "this is real and this is dangerous" until he gets more experience of living in that world. He can do magic so that will save him, right?
He grows up during the series, and being an obnoxious teenage boy is a natural part of that. EY's version, however, was Big Special from the start, indulged by his guardians (when a clip round the ear was what was needed), and an obnoxious brat due to his belief in his own genius and that he knew everything so magic couldn't be right and if it did exist then it had to run on what he deemed to be the rules. What everyone else told him was wrong, because it just was, because they weren't smart like him and didn't know Science like him. If he could have been toasted to a crisp by a salamander within ten minutes of arriving at Hogwarts in that world, I'd have cheered. Maybe he got some of the arrogance knocked out of him in later chapters, but I loathed him in the early ones so much, I wasn't going to stick around for more lectures on Rationalist principles from the author insert.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
But there doesn't seem to have been any pregnancy with the stepmother. if she had been pregnant/had a new baby of her own, it would make grotesque sense, but she has no children and Dad doesn't seem to have been trying for a baby with her. It's hard to know, since a lot of details haven't been revealed, but there was no replacement child in the picture.
This was his only child, and a son, and he just shrugged off the lunatic he was shacked up with abusing him to death.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Research seems to be further along than I would have thought, even if we're still talking "probably decades away".
Womb transplants are now functional, which surprised me as I expected this not to be feasible yet.
Is there any clarification on "by underage we mean 17" or "we mean 13"? Because I've seen plenty of online 'it's true he's a pedo he raped 13 year old sex slaves' stuff but nothing concrete (the Katie Johnson case seems to be smoke and I have no idea what exactly Virginia Giuffre was claiming happened. If I go by Wikipedia, she was allegedly 17 when Maxwell and Epstein approached her, which is not at all the same as 13 year old).
In one way, I think the very murkiness of the term "underage girls" works for those who want to get Trump; it's easier to convey an impression that this means "13 or 14" and not "17 or just under 18 or even that legally a minor is under 21 in some states". See The Onion; yes this is satire, but they're making it satire on "fucking a 13 year old" and not "fucking a 16 year old":
“Epstein was no friend of mine, and I never drew us becoming knights and competing at a joust for the virginity of a 13-year-old Eleanor of Aquitaine,” Trump said when asked about Time Pedophiles by a reporter, suggesting that someone else could have written, inked, and lettered the series before falsely signing his name. “Anyone who knows me knows I wouldn’t draw myself in a covered wagon picking up minors on the Oregon Trail, nor would I write a story arc about going back into prehistory, long before humans invented the age of consent, to hit on Cro-Magnon girls. Sorry to disappoint, but the fact is, I don’t draw cavemen.”
...The storylines in the series are largely driven by the reliance of Epstein’s time machine on Enigmium, a mysterious substance that “never ages” and can only be obtained via sexual encounters with girls between the ages of 12 and 17.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Aren't the transhumanist wing of the Tough Minded Rationalists the ones who wish to defy nature taking its course? So why be surprised they want to go against the tide of falling birth rates of the intelligent high human capital elite?
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Yeah, but it was a four year old kid. Dad broke up with biological mom and got charge of the child because the mother had mental health issues. Then he takes up with this bitch and seems to have passively let her beat his child to death over a prolonged period. That's what I don't understand. He saw the child black and blue with bruises. He made up excuses (or maybe just pretended to believe her excuses) about 'he ran into a door, he fell, he's clumsy'. Every day he went off to work and came back home, and the child was being hit, isolated, refused food and treats, kept apart from family visitors, and clearly the stepmother hated the kid, and he did - nothing.
For all the talk on here about men wanting their own biological children and wanting sons to carry on the name and heritage, that didn't seem to hold true here.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
As I said, I know little about them beyond the name, so a fuller account of "the rise and fall" would be better to read than a mere "this sad bunch". Let me add my voice to the chorus asking OP for a longer post!
No, no more than I want to see the version where Gandalf takes it. They both are aware of the dangers there, of the seduction of power, of starting out with good intentions (or what they think are good intentions) and how the Ring would warp those:
‘No!’ cried Gandalf, springing to his feet. ‘With that power I should have power too great and terrible. And over me the Ring would gain a power still greater and more deadly.’ His eyes flashed and his face was lit as by a fire within. ‘Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.’
Unless you think a series of "Galadriel commits atrocities and war crimes and ends up the despotic ruler of a world of mind-controlled slaves" would be jolly good fun, I don't want to watch that.
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Harry is kind despite all of that, or maybe because of all that, because Harry has been the boy shoved into a closet and worse
Yeah. See his dad when he was Harry's age, and how he and his gang of friends bullied Snape. That's perfectly understandable! Kids that age do pick on outsiders and are little monsters, this is why school and society have to socialise and civilise them. James and his gang are not bad or wicked or evil, but they are jerks and they do need to learn the consequences of their actions.
Harry without the experiences of being the unwanted orphan, especially with the mythos of being The Boy Who Lived, could have been like that. He could have palled up with Draco at the start. He could have bullied Neville. But the crucial difference is that he had those early experiences and chose to be kind when he had the choice to make.
There is a reason why Yud was pissed or let's say motivated enough, to create a non-moronic version of Harry in his own fanfic.
You think Harry Threenames is non-moronic? The little I read that was quoted about how great this new version was and everyone should read it made me want to slap the face off him and hope that he'd be eaten by a magical creature the second he did his "haw haw, I am Big Brains Know It All" performance about knowing magic better than adult wizards and witches despite never hearing of it until ten minutes beforehand.
EDIT: I know, I know: everyone says it gets better in the later chapters, Harry stops being such a brat, and EY deliberately wrote him like that at the start. I doubt that part, I think EY was writing Haroldus Potterus-Evansus-Verresus as a self-insert about being a boy genius autodidact whom adults didn't understand and so feared and bullied him and that's why it's okay if he bites his teacher during a meltdown while his legal guardians only laugh it off, and only due to reaction while writing the webserial about "Hey, Haroldus The Magnificent And Always Perfectly Correct is a pain in the you-know-what" did he tone it down. Like ST Enterprise etc., 'it gets better later, trust me' was too late, it had lost me by then.
Harry Potter is written in the traditional British children's fantasy fiction mould. So of course he's the gender-swapped Cinderella at the start. Of course he and a small band of friends go off adventuring despite the grown-ups trying to keep them out of trouble and abiding by the rules. For the non-magical version, see The Famous Five by Enid Blyton (an astoundingly popular British children's author of yore, during the 30s-50s) and the various boarding school stories for both boys and girls.
For the fantasy version, nearly too many to mention, from E. Nesbit to Alan Garner onwards, plus all kinds of TV shows (e.g. The Worst Witch based on a novel series first published in the 70s). Rowling isn't unique or novel, she's writing in a well-established tradition, but she successfully cracked the global fame formula.
The books in the series all focus on Mildred Hubble, a young witch who attends Miss Cackle's Academy for Witches, a school of magic. Although well-intentioned, Mildred's clumsy personality leads the girl to disastrous situations, and she is thus considered the worst student in the school. The benevolent headmistress, Miss Cackle, is generally understanding, whereas Mildred's form teacher Miss Hardbroom thinks she just is not trying hard enough. Mildred's friends include Maud Spellbody, a rotund, sensible girl who is always trying to avoid confusion, and Enid Nightshade, a practical joker who is more likely than Mildred to get them all into trouble. The three girls have a strong rivalry with Ethel Hallow, a high-born, snobbish and vindictive classmate.
I find it sort of an interesting window into our culture's soul why people would seem to prefer it if Tebow didn't live up to his values.
Deemed to be the wrong sort of values, though. Isn't that the problem? If they can catch him out saying one thing and doing another, then he's a hypocrite and can be safely scorned. If he turns around and says "I am leaving all that, it's Problematic and I have converted to being a good liberal Democrat", then he's a brand snatched from the burning and can be held up as an example that you, too, can leave toxic masculinity behind. If he remains as is and keeps living out his values, that's very uncomfortable for the rest of us and since that makes us feel judged, we can only mumble about how he is bad and that is bad and it's all bad and he should stop trying to impose the white supremacist theocracy on us.
Speaking of former sports controversial figures, whatever happened to Colin Kaepernick?
HereAndGone
4mo ago
Vaguely heard of them, no idea why you are calling them a "sad bunch". Tell us more about what they did or didn't do, or who they are, to be called sad?
HereAndGone
4mo ago
It's all fantasy, and trying to fill in the holes in continuity is more of a game than anything. Someone as notorious as "James Bond" is going to be found out, so the idea of him doing undercover work just doesn't fly from the start.
Apparently they also race-swapped Théoden (while retaining the Rohirric elements) which made me go "what the what?" But this was all back in 2023, I think?
If you're gonna go "Théoden is a proud Anglo-Saxon-African", then why not give him other African cultural elements? This is just "how can we squeeze some more coin out of the consumers?" and not anything more deep than that.
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