georgioz
9hr ago
A lot of platitudes about the ideals of democracy completely gloss over the "two wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner" part. If your electorate is sufficiently homogeneous (all sheep, or even all wolves) this isn't an issue, but in practice a heterogeneous democracy really depends on a shared sense of liberal civic values: voters need to accept that nobody gets blasphemy laws, or they'll keep voting for them.
There always were blasphemy laws in place, in fact we probably live in an era of highest moral panic of hate speech, where saying magic words such as f-word or n-word in recent case can get you to jail. Not to even talk about bans on social media platforms, getting fired from work etc. It is arguably stronger than being told you are commie during Cold War or actually blaspheming against God before then.
And worse, there isn't even broad agreement on what "a shared sense of liberal civic values" should be.
Yes. I recently argued that Culture War is in fact a religious war. There is no sense of liberal civic values, because there is huge disagreement about values, which is domain of axiology and theology. And so we live through culture war raging religious conflict of highly incompatible religions and ideologies.
On the other hand, this seems like a slippery slope that draws into question what citizenship even is. Making it possible to kick out people recognized as citizens seems like a dangerous Chesterton's fence to tear down. For one, it gives the government the ultimate power to kick out citizens it dislikes. This seems like a real danger to a democracy where people are supposed to have disagreements and come to agreements through dialogue. It also draws into question what it even means to be German in the first place. Would anyone be safe if such a law was allowed?
You do not have to pose this as some theoretical thing. There are precedents, including my own motherland where I was born: Czechoslovakia. After the war in 1945 then president Edvard Beneš promulgated decrees that did as follows:
- Decree No. 12 in June 1945: stripped all Germans, Hunagrians and traitors of the nation of their agricultural land
- Decree No. 33 in August 1945: automatically stripped citizenship from Germans and Hungarians, except for those who could prove that they remained loyal to Czechoslovakia during war.
- Decree No. 108 in October 1945: stripped the above of all property without compensation.
And just to remind you, this was exiled allied antifascist democratic government prior to 1948 communist coup. This was all done in the middle of ethnic cleansing and remigration of over 3 million of Germans and 100,000 Hungarians from Czechoslovakia (around 20% of the population), many families lived in these lands 500 years+. To this day these decrees are nonegotiable pillars of Slovak and Czech law including Amnesty law 115/1946, which established that any atrocities or crimes during expulsion were pardoned. All of them were reaffirmed by Czech and Slovak judiciary and parliamentary powers as late as 2000s as untouchable. Both countries still exist, they are part of EU and NATO although these decrees were in contention by Austria, Hungary and Germany during admission process. And EU obliged and put their legal experts on it and declared that nations have sovereignity over citizenship and that basically bygones should remain bygones for political expediency. Maybe you may have visited Prague and stayed in expropriated house from some unfortunate German family, while some nice local Czech tour guide gave you lecture history of Czechs and their famous beer introduced by Bavarian brewmasters who are now long ethnically cleansed from the country. The End of story.
I think remigration and denaturalization can be done no problem even if it seems insane now. In fact, the blueprint is there from COVID era - all it takes is for a country to declare sufficiently supported state of emergency and universal human rights, civil rights, constitutional protections, international law and everything else stops mattering. I am not saying that it is likely or something like that, but in current day and age I do not think it is outside of realm of possibilities. For instance you have countries like South Africa who do the same but in silent mode - expropriating property, open racial and ethnic discrimination and you barely read about it. Apparently South Africa us upstanding member of UN, WTO and international community. Another tolerated genocide and ethnic cleansing is that of Serbians from Croatia during allied supported 1995 Operation Storm in context of Yugoslav wars despite Geneva Conventions, international law, human rights and all the rest.
Having something like that is not a totally outlandish thing to imagine. And it does not necessarily have to have any domino effect even 80 years later down the road.
Technically this is of course possible. For instance Hamas won 44% in 2006 elections in Gaza, the coalition around Hezbollah won 40% in 2022 Lebanon elections.
Of course this only shows the fragility of the our democracy™ sometimes also known as liberal democracy. It is always appeal to majority but with the caveats of human rights. Majority builds legitimacy - e.g. here they will say 55% are not AfD. While human rights are there as a grounding for moral argument for unpopular policies. So trans and naturalization of immigrants are human rights, and thus part of our democracy™. If unelected EU bureaucrats rule by fiat, it is under the veneer of human rights or sometimes science etc. - even if they literally subvert democratic norms, try to ban opposition parties etc. It is democratic from where they stand in their worldview.
In the end I think this liberal consensus is nonsense from their own standpoint, especially if they lose both legs. If they lose majority, they lose legitimacy. However the rights discourse is also based on the very same pilar. Slogan housing is human right or even asylum is human right depends on enough people shouting and more importantly enforcing it. There is no objective grounding, it is not as if such a right was found on an asteroid floating around Jupiter or whatnot. As soon as people start mocking it and refuse to uphold it, it stops being a right. In fact the same erosion happened to article 12 of Universal Declaration of Human rights (right to privacy of correspondence) and now every state and their underling browses through your correspondence for fun. So why not article 14 about asylum - just give the same caveat that asylum is technically there, but it only covers airplane ticket to Rwanda or French Guayana or whatnot.
In a reverse, ban on mocking The Prophet is nowhere near universal human right, but it practically became one by virtue of threat of violence if broken despite it never being marked as such. In a very same secular logic, human right is just a strongly worded law or custom with accompanied attempts to convince or shame and blame or even threaten people into accepting it.
This is not how it works in practice in multi-party parliamentary democracy:
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There are long-standing political norms of giving opposition posts related to control of power. They are lead various oversight or budget comitees, there are constitutional provisions where substantial minority of MP can start procedures such as compel investigations, summon ministers to explain stuff etc. There is considerable power given to opposition - doing away with it is exactly in line with what is usually called as tyranny and Trumpian norm-breaking. This is BTW already happening, which creates interesting and dangerous precedent including constitutional court rulings etc.
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Voting is nowhere near unanimous. MPs travel, they get sick. Many laws come not from EU and not from state government, there are procedures of how to introduce votes for amendments to laws etc. In practice, many laws require much more than just agreement inside coalition.
In practice such a rainbow coalition is hell to manage - you have to have coalition of greens (Die Grünen), literal commies (Die Linke), pro-business libertarian party (FDP) as well as Christian democrats (CDU/CSU). It is vastly different from US, where each House Member or Senator has to have 50%+ votes. In Europe the most radical lunatics can get 5% and get into parliament. They are structurally not dependent on some governing body like DNC or RNC, they are dependent on their own donors and voters.
If you construct such a coalition, they have hardly any overlap, they have vastly different opinions on things like budget, taxes, regulation and literally everything. It is impossible to present a program that would not cross some red line of some party. So even if they are disciplined, they don't get anything done and it increases power of opposition. If they get together and get something done, it then crosses red line of some party thus angering the party base and voters. It is lose lose situation.
georgioz
4d ago
I agree this is a hard pill to swallow for society which desperately wants to believe in tabula rasa, but that doesn't mean it becomes acceptable to treat individuals as their racial averages is their destiny.
I mean how could you not do that? You will always evaluate individuals based on some standard: you are a good student - for an inner city black man. You are an excellent basketball player - for 5'3'' Asian. The baseline of average is always there and tabula rasa nukes the universal baseline from orbit.
In a sense the DEI crowd is more honest here. They at least know that there are these huge disparities and they want to equalize them here and now with hope that power of representation and reeducation will erase them in the future. It is classical liberal position that is unattainable - even 150 years after emancipation the blacks are not doing well. Heck, it may take another 150 years of access to equal opportunity to fix it, nothing else to see here. That is why the liberal consensus was so easily hacked by Social Justice crowd - it plays on their hidden assumptions.
georgioz
4d ago
I believe it was the famous The Control Group Is Out of Control where he compares quality of psychology and parapsychology papers - where parapsychology studies phenomena like telepathy etc. He deliberately used parapsychology as a control group, as the modern papers use the same methodology as psychology papers. And unsurprisingly, parapsychology fares quite well. If it was not for the fact that parapsychology is so suspicious of a field, these papers would be part of our scientific arsenal and would inform host of policies and self-improvement programs as the psychology does.
georgioz
4d ago
All 3 of those stances are, in some sense, political. They're political positions. However, I feel like there's a big difference between the first two things and the third; in the first two, my private life gets constrained. Maybe I don't mind if I'm going (/not going) to church already. But, in the first two cases, I'm clearly losing some freedom that I'd already have today.
You are just assuming your position. You are throwing moral and metaphysical words such as "private life" or "freedom". What are they, how are they justified, why are they valuble, why should they be protected and elevated? I will give a steelman of somebody from either camp:
- Pro-Church: "Everyone must become Catholic; tithes will get taken out of paychecks with other taxes; people get fined for missing church."
- Anti-Church: "Religion is banned; there's an excise tax on Church donations and we'll pass regulations to prevent services from happening."
- Small Government: "Everybody must become libertarian, we must enshrine moral value of "liberty" and "private life" in our law as the the highest policy. Government has to care whenever any of these things are in danger and ban tithes or various taxes.
When I read the NPR Article I'm seeing the title: "The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism And The War On Democracy" and I find myself looking for a satisfying answer to what, precisely, does the the Nerd Reich wants to mandate / prohibit me from doing in my actual day-to-day life?.
You just need to read the article, which basically boils down to the "our democracy" rhetoric of The New Left. The way their democracy is endangered is as follows:
- More power to CEOs and corporation to establishes special economic zones etc.
- Dismantling federal regulation and bureocracy via activities like DOGE. Dismantling various policies and structures such as US AID.
- Promote cryptocurrency and other ways of evading government ability to follow money trace, excise taxes etc.
- Create political coalition among Gray and Red tribe to purge Blues from position of power in order to enable their prefered policy.
The thing is that when the new left talks about democracy, they are not talking about some technicalities. They mean that true democracy is only achieved if their preferred policies are implemented. Therefore any pushback against their policy big and small are dangerous - be it political defeat of Democrats in San Francisco, dismantling of US AID up to dismantling the Federal bureaucracy. That is all.
Sure, I got all that. But in the end the father was inconsequential unlike Harry's mother who was key to the whole story. And even the stepfathers had their own agenda. Dumbledore literally had plan to martyr him, Snape had his own issues, Black was more like an uncle etc.
Harry is an orphan. It's hard to parent from beyond the grave.
Lily managed to do that: via memories and her protective spell fueled by motherly love. Harry's father was ultimately a disappointment and his best qualities were to correct his boyish toxic masculine ways, marry Lily and then leave the story.
Voldemort is turned villain by his mother, with it implied that her using magical rape on her lover combined with her weak abandonment of her child caused Voldemort to be born without the ability to love. Voldemort murdered his father out of disappointment with his legacy, not because his father was a bad man (he wasn't very nice but that's because Rowling has trouble with aristocrats, not men).
As for Voldemort's mother Merope, this is absolute twisting of her story in the books. She is a victim, abused by her cruel father Marvolo, impoverished and left alone by everybody dying in childbirth giving life to Voldemort. She is no evil slave owner who loves to torture people, including let's say poisoning her naive husband who loved and nurtured Riddle to take his money, and who created Voldemort by wizard superiority Nazi indoctrination or whatnot. That would be the twist I am looking for.
Instead, she is of course a victim, she was shunned by Riddle's aristocratic muggle father, who saw her and his son as an embarrassing mistake - literally mocking her and telling her she is a tramp - and who let her and Riddle die, not even knowing that he has a son. It is Voldemort's father who is behind Voldemort's hatred of muggles, why he literally uses the ritual to purge his half-blood away and why he has such a boner to create pure blood society. Voldemort's mother conveniently died after his father abandoned her in order for Voldemort to become a villain, he did not get the dose of Lily-like motherly love because of his deadbeat father. In fact the act of patricide of hated father and grandparents, reneging on his patrimony at 16 was the first instance when Voldemort created his first Horcrux out of the family ring. Absence of his mother also led him to not exactly hate her, but disrespect her for "muggle weakness" where he was flabbergasted how a witch could succumb to such a ploy. But it was not exactly hatred like he held toward his father, it was just disrespect created by absence of corrective motherly love exacerbated by systemic abuse in orphanage - not in terms of actual physical abuse by wicked female staff who would give him to child molesters or whatnot - they were just overworked and underfunded, so any emotional damage on Riddle was there by virtue of being isolated from nurturing motherly love.
I'm deeply non-feminist but even then you seem to me to have this very shallow idea of what men are allowed to be and do, and what constitutes character and virtue. That might be a feminist trope but even broken clocks are right twice a day.
I am non-feminist and moreover I am a Catholic. I ascribe to virtue ethics that are the same for men and women in full, be it seven heavenly virtues or their counterpart of seven deadly sins. I hold men and women to be of the same ontological value and dignity and all the virtues and sins apply to them both. However men and women are not interchangeable due to physical nature, I'd say that ranking of the virtues is different for men and women.
What feminist and even broadly modern literature does is either explicitly or implicitly is ascribing to feminist power structure story, standpoint epistemology stemming from hierarchy of oppression where virtue and sin is not decided on personal agency, but on systemic effects. So women being nasty and nagging is okay, because it is just giving valuable piece of information to men from superior standpoint of female lived experience. This is especially jarring as in most fantasy and sci-fi setting they are supposed to be equal in power of violence either through magic, stat points etc. But they still retain their oppressed nature and men still have the privilege to be put down. To tie it to my previous examples - Hermione preparing her plans and then grabbing Ron and Harry to teleport them without their consent or knowledge is okay. If it was the other way around, it would be seen as problematic stripping of agency.
As I said, it is a very disruptive element for boy or male stories. As soon as there is even some powerful and competent female character, it changes the interpersonal dynamics. Even if she is 100 times more powerful, she still glares at men, and has no problem to punch down. Even if the female character is equal or even weaker, she engages at tone policing, as it is implicitly assumed that men have to walk on eggshells when expressing their points. Suddenly orders have to go through committee making sure nobody was emotionally hurt, either before the decision or there will be talking about it afterwards. You will never see a true banter such as if a female character rolls her eyes with some snarky comment and hero would shut her down. Or even mildly "offensive" comment such as Harry saying "Shut up Hermione and do as you are told". There is inherent tension there, even in Harry Potter if he tells both Ron and Hermione to shut up, there is immediately some internal monologue about his guilt of how he almost made her cry or some such nonsense.
Which is completely lacking in boy/male literature where the hierarchy is much more defined, it changes via action, and banter is really there for play and tension relief not for psychotherapy session afterwards. As I said previously, in modern literature it easier to follow a format where you write character such as Conan with all his lines and just turn him female. Suddenly (s)he can berate a rescued princess for being childish dork, tie and gag her if she is annoying etc. The Ellen Ripley treatment who was originally written for male named Martin Roby, and they changed him to Ripley specifically for subversion points without rewriting any line. That is the "non-feminist" things that I notice.
The fact that this is so ingrained in all modern writing, television and movies is the main point. It is definitely not so even in literature as late as 1960s. That is why some commenter above accused me of not wanting women in the books. It is not that I do not want women there, but it is exactly because in modern writing the authors cannot help themselves and bring about all these themes that are hard to unsee.
By the way to me it seems interesting how many people have such a different understanding of the books like here with Voldemort. It is really fascinating.
Sure, there is a lot of that. Just compare how Harry's mother Lily and her love is key to everything and protects him and the whole Hogwarts up until the end, while his father is idolized, then portrayed as arrogant bully in some memories never to have any other impact on the story, being replaced by stepfathers such as Dumbledore, Black etc. Also Voldemort is turned villain of course because of his father, the same for Malfoy, Barty Crouch. The same for Snape, he also is turned to Death Eaters due to his abusive father.
So if mother is bad, father is even worse and probably the reason everything turns to shit. If father is good, it has to be reflection of his wife who tamed him or somehow corrected him, be it Harry's father or Arthur Weasley or even Malfoy senior who changed his ways after he relinquished his control and followed his wife Narcissa, who took the rein of the family focusing on saving Draco. I agree, it is fundamentally feminist telling of a story, it has nothing to do with ancient sagas of male heroes, not to even talk about modern 20th century counterparts I mentioned before, be it Tolkiens heroes, Conan or even comic book heroes such as Batman or Superman who all had phenomenal fathers.
Also I do not want to put it just on Rowling being a woman. Men as authors are as prone to this type of characterization, need to introduce these themes as women are. In fact, reading some pure women stories is sometimes even liberating, as it at least makes sense in terms of virtues and the whole story.
The scene in the forest where Harry turned into shaheed relied on power of blood that Voldemort used to reconstruct his body way back. Blood from Harry's mother Lily that protected him from death in the first place, which yet again anchored Harry to survive the killing curse the second time while Voldemort killed horcrux instead of Potter. Just to reiterate, Potter did not know about any of that mind you. Him martyring himself made the killing curse work on him, as it was taken by Elder Wand as suicidal sacrifice, so it made the Avada Kedavra take effect on horcrux and even protected the student body from further spells.
Then after that scene, Harry got the info dump from Dumbledore ghost in a limbo, which is crucial for him to figure out Elder Wand EULA and its properties, figuring out and using the loophole of how he took it from Malfoy and thus giving him another angle on Voldemort. Also before the forest scene Harry told Neville to kill the snake, who promptly repeated the trick of pulling sword out of the hat doing just that unceremoniously. Then Harry stood still, perfectly explained to Voldemort the meaning of EULA and how Voldemort is about to kill himself. Mind you there was no strategy behind, some double bluff or anything. Potter just relied on his luck of a moron that served him so well so far, and it worked. Voldemort obliged and killed himself. Harry lived through power of motherly love, main villain killed himself by power of his own arrogance, while the hero is there just like a vessel explaining these realities to characters in this world, not taking any action, quite in line with the rest of the books. The End.
What a hero journey, all men and boys are rejoicing in genius of Harry Potter, the boy who lived.
When Harry learned of Dumbledore's plan and decided to turn himself into a shaheed, there was a horcrux out there. So if there was not yet another glitch/blood vulnerability, Potter would be dead and Voldemort would still be a threat for Hermione to deal with. In fact the last horcrux in form of Voldemort's snake was killed by Neville minutes before, when he pulled the sword from the hat and independently got rid of it. The EULA wand glitch however was the true defeat, as the last soul fragment lived inside Voldemort, so it was the final destruction of his soul.
Uhhhh... what? Outplanning each other is a contest of wits, not wills. Yes, absolutely, will is determination.
I specifically used contest of heroes like Achilles and Hector. Their will is not about some specific scene where Achilles and Hector bash their shields in contest of who pushes harder - until Hector gets distracted and slips on a banana peel proving his inferior will. It is everything that surrounds it, how their motivations and actions brought them in front of the walls of Troy, how their preparations pan out and what impact it will have on the war.
Harry Potter is nowhere near that, he was dragged there literally against his agency, with no preparation and no plan - in fact he was the one manipulated throughout everything like a puppet by shadowy play of Voldermort's spies against Dumbledore and his allies from behind. From Voldemort gathering intelligence from ministry employee, through mysterious evasion of age restriction to activation of portkey; it was all orchestrated play. Potter could have been a wooden puppet that exploded in Voldemort face when he used a flawed wand. I am not sure if you get what I want to say.
his... 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.
It was not just logistics. Hermione identified the threat. She strategized and came up with a plan of DA. She selected and vetted its members. On top of that she handled logistics, OpSec and everything. She even hired local celebrity as Brand ambassador and mascot in form of Potter. When there is any decision to be made about what to do next, Potter immediately defers to Hermione ranging from where to meet, what are supposed to be terms in contract - he literally just signs on the dotted line without even knowing that it is hexed. He lacks any knowledge about anything, because he ultimately does not matter as he is not the one making decisions - Hermione is.
This lack of decision making goes even beyond that. As an example, when the ministry falls, Potter does not strategize, select best course of action or anything like that. Hermione just grabs him and Ron without asking, and teleports them into pre-prepared backup base she arranged and of which Potter did not even have a clue about. What a masterful Leader of Men. And by the way, Hermione could do that, because of course she is apparition genius and knows the spell to such a level that she is certified teleporter.
Moreover Potter himself agrees with me here, he explicitly says that he is just an instructor and even gets aggressive if praised, admitting that he only lives thanks to dumb luck and immense help. Of course his bursts of rage, self-pitying etc. have to be managed by Hermione before impacting morale. Hermione shows excellent interpersonal and conflict resolution skills of true leader, managing such an unstable asset in her team by reframing his behavior as modesty. We have access to his internal monologue and we know exactly what happened, why it happened, who made decision and everything. There is no leadership mystery to uncover here.
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.
It is not true contest of wills in terms of planning, execution etc. The whole thing is manufactured by cosmic accident with some sparks flying around, some ghosts chiming in and so forth. By the same account Potter possesses "strong will" when he braves through quidditch injury etc. And I am not saying that he is not brave and stubborn, but at best he is weak version Dr. Watson from Sherlock Holmes - a brave veteran, fine gentlemen and in some ways more suited for tasks than Holmes. But he is not the hero.
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.
Potter lacks even the basic motivation and prerequisite of being a leader. He literally had to be tricked to "lead" DA that was organized, equipped and constructed by Hermione. It goes beyond just planning. You are constantly eluding to Leaders of Men. I have to use the same argument - we are not talking about Putin or Trump where we can speculate about invisible variables and mystical juice of leadership. We literally have access to internal monologue and all circumstances of the characters in the books. And we see that Potter is a moron.
As for your examples, Harry pulled the sword not based on his grit, his will or anything like that. He matched the criteria of "Gryffindor in need" and it was pulled. It could have been Ron or Hermione or even Neville if he was there, the result is the same. In fact Neville pulled that sword later in the books. 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.
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.
The whole DA is laughable. People followed him because he was a celebrity and Harry was very self aware of how unprepared he was for the role. Heck, they had to persuade him to do it. At the beginning of the book Harry as usual was his whiney self, lacking any internal agency, motivation, need for glory or revenge. He was as usual reluctant moron manipulated into a situation well above his head by Hermione who strategized about threat Ministry of Magic posed, who ultimately came up with the idea of DA as a valid strategy, called the first meeting, lied to people and used that lie and emotional manipulation to make Harry take the role as a figurehead. And Harry was right, he was just a brand ambassador and way of his league, Hermione was CEO and leader. She ran the operation smoothly from communications through magic artifacts she created, OpSec including Sneak Jinx that caught defectors, member vetting, base establishment etc. She did it all. Furthermore, Harry's lack of strategic caution is exactly what doomed the DA—he failed to master Occlumency, fell for Voldemort’s blatant psychic trap, and led his friends into a catastrophic ambush at the Ministry of Magic.
EDIT: Another Zvi post; will quote the relevant parts this time.
I already said that these Zvi posts do not work here. We have access to Harry's internal monologue, we have perfect information of lore, actions of villains and allies. There are no unknown unknowns, no leadership mystery. We can evaluate everything coldly based on basic criteria. Be it hero journey, leadership and managerial skills as with Kotler Management Matrix or whatever.
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.
It is not what I like or dislike, I actually liked the books but I do consider Harry Potter as a subversion of hero. He is dumb, moronic Chosen one, who has to rely on systems, his professors, more capable people and dumb luck to navigate situation that is well over his head from start to finish - even his win against Voldemort is quirk of the Elder wand, a convoluted license agreements/EULA failure, that was tracked internally by the wand, and who nobody was really aware of including Voldemort and Potter. It is one of the most anticlimactic defeats out there, a repeat of wand glitch from cemetery scene and perfect encapsulation of Potter's status as "the hero who lucked out" and lived. He is less of a protagonist and more of a vessel through which we can watch prearranged events unfold - events orchestrated by real heroes. I used this comparison elsewhere - at best he is Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes of Hermione, Dumbledore, Snape and rest of the cast. An admirable, brave and likeable character, but no hero of the story.
I specifically consider Potter as subversion of hero, because he is antithesis of what boys and men usually wanted to see for millennia. They want to see Achilles and Beowulf. They want to be Wyatt Erp or Conan The Barbarian - not a moron like Potter, who is constantly talked down, whines and more importantly lacks almost any agency over his actions. Actually correction, there is one area where he really deserves his accolades - his quidditch success. There was no Dumbledore manipulating the snitch, no mommy blood navigating him toward a goal or defensive play. It was all result of his talent, training and dedication. Moreover Potter actually has internal motivation to become a good player and be famous not for his scar but for something that he has control over. If this was a story of how Potter became the best Quidditch player of his generation, it would be a fine boy story along the lines of Karate Kid or Inazuma Eleven. But it was not meant to be, Potter will be remembered as the boy who lived.
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.
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
7d 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
19d 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
21d 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.
It is much worse than age old Christian Democrats vs Social Democrats duopoly, in which the losing party would hold these positions to control power. It was designed to give the government legitimacy, to appease to voters voting for losing party so they viewed the system as legitimate and at least somewhat under control, it fostered participation at least in this form of oversight.
The current Brandmauer system is banana republic "winner takes all" democracy. It is much more dangerous than just simple duopoly, even more dangerous than what is now seen in US.
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