Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex
This is explored at length in the books. The wizard supremacists are an allegory for race supremacists, and it’s pointed out repeatedly that they’re delusional, broadly impotent, and small-minded. The death eaters believe so completely in their godhead and his divine right to rule that they neglect to consider even the most basic countermeasures or alternatives. There’s some “death of Stalin” paranoia but it’s overwhelmingly unforced incompetence.
Voldemort, likewise, blocks out even the potential for his lessers to outdo him. He is utterly infallible and his insecurities as an incest orphan to a fallen house will not allow him to feel any differently. Meanwhile, he’s been repeatedly circumvented and beaten by a group of teenagers, and his brewing plans will lead to the complete genocide of wizardkind upon reaching the world stage. It perfectly encapsulates the way race supremacists view the world and why they fail so frequently. The enemy is both strong and weak.
Darn shame rowling’s turned into what she hates. She wasn’t terrible at writing populism 101.
She just wrote what she actually believes and it ended up being biting satire by accident.
Fun fact: Rowling thinks Lolita is a beautiful and tragic love story
If wizard supremacists are an allegory for white supremacists, are normal wizards normal white people and muggles “people of color”?
That’s one interpretation, absolutely. Or you could say Han Chinese, racist Han Chinese, and Uighurs. Or Israelis, racist israelis, and Gazans. Or white Americans, white American racists, and native Americans. Or white Brits/Irish, straight/gay, seafaring Scandinavians/prey, etc…
In group vs out group, with perceived genetic/social differences.
I had trouble believing Harry Potter as a kid. The whole house elf thing seemed unrealistic. Then when I grew up, I realised English people really are that racist.
I remember seeing a meme of Harry Potter, but I can’t find it anymore. Basically a conversation between Harry and dumbledore.
Harry says to dumbledore:
We are wizards, we could cure cancer. Fix world hunger and end all wars. Why we don’t do it?
Dumbledore says:
Harry you forgot the most important reason: we are British
Found it - https://existentialcomics.com/comic/391
you don’t enjoy a little decorating decapitated slave heads for some wholesome Christmas joy?
Ok, WHAT?
That’s in the book. Grimmauld Place has the preserved heads of all the Black family elves hanging by the door. During book 7 when Harry and gang are hiding there, they put Santa hats and beards on the heads for Christmas.
These are supposed to be the good guys.
Yeah, there are parts of HP that are deeply fucked up, come to think of it. Thanks!
Shaun has a takedown of the entire series on his channel, and this is one of my favorite parts:
so our heroes decide to decorate their decapitated slave heads with little Christmas hats…
now I’m gonna need to hit pause here, next to the Christmas slave heads, and ask: what is happening right now… why are the Harry Potter books like this
not my absolute favorite quote either. long video but definitely recommend; even Shaun’s extremely dry delivery breaks at a couple points: https://youtu.be/-1iaJWSwUZs
My father grew up poor in the East End of London and got a scholarship to go to the sort of upper-class school that Hogwarts emulates. Apart from being proud of the achievement of doing so well academically there, he had very little good to say about it, especially the upper-class snobbery and, yes, the bigotry (he was Jewish) from both the students and the teachers. He told me that every morning just before school prayers, the headmaster made a big deal about excusing all the “Jews, Catholics and other heathens” (or something to that effect) to humiliate all of those kids. One of his only friends at the time was another kid there on scholarship.
Ironically, he said his favorite teacher at the school was the school’s chaplain, who was a really kind and funny man that didn’t care that my father wasn’t an Anglican, just that he was a smart kid.
My wife loves Harry Potter but I could never get into it after hearing all of my dad’s stories about his school when he was growing up.
Can you please stop stalking and harassing me?
I was agreeing with you. I don’t even know who you are.
At first I figured this was a joke about “flyingsquid be everwar, der” but… Maybe you had a nasty argument with this person in the past, and you don’t remember them, but because you are one of the more prominent lemmy users, they will always know who you are?
If that’s the case, it will probably happen again. Oh well.
Stay away from me.
I hope the bug with your block button gets resolved.
accidental gang stalking strikes again
You can block users.
This is such a weird non sequitur – what?
I have no clue. I literally have no idea who this person is.
Wizards would be rounded up and experimented on to try and find out how to make it an injection to make super soldiers. There’s absolutely no way wizards and magical beings wouldn’t end up in test tubes.
Well this was oddly nostalgic for me to read. You immediately reminded of FFVI
Harry Potter and the poorly-constructed magic ruleset.
Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Sound
Harry Potter and the infrared Laser designator spot
It’s a pipe bomb!
Voldemort Voldemort
Oooooh Voldy Voldemort
Voldemort!
Imagine the IRA, except they can fly, go invisible, or simply step into a phone booth or fireplace and vanish, and had an entire other dimension they could disappear into where they could be self sufficient.
Technology means nothing if you don’t even know who you enemy is.
Heck, they can mind control people, wipe their memories, or take a potion and assume their identity. It would be like fighting the Face Dancers from Dune if they were all trained in The Voice.
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True enough, the capabilities of Magic haven’t been explored enough canonically to disprove that - but if the government learned of Magic, the first thing they’d do is subvert some wizards to their side, who might be able to counteract them - in many ways, it’s a battle of statecraft as it is of actual power.
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But they were able to setup the core of their commercial and governance infrastructure in the middle of London, with no particular notice from muggles - not to mention, we know that the government already knows about wizards (MoM liaises with the PM). So there must be a quid pro quo already in place, with the government tolerating and aiding in the existence of a semi-independent polity in their heartlands in return for unspecified benefits, probably defence against foreign wizards.
Magneto is uniquely capable of stoping most weapons. I don’t think that is a good comparison.
Magnetism’s just magic anyway. Who can explain that shit?
Easy. Just imagine a ball of uniform charge distribution that’s spinning, and add relativity. Except it’s not a ball, isn’t spinning, and doesn’t really have a defined location or speed so good luck with the relativity bit.
Me, but it’s a secret.
The greatest problem you would have fighting the Wizarding World is there is no easy way to tell who your enemy is. You’d be fighting an insurgency that can just vanish into thin air, with some pretty potent abilities.
That’s one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.
There’s really no depth to the world building beyond, “What if British public schools taught magic?”
It doesn’t make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, “Why TF would anyone do it that way?” The answer is almost always, "Because that’s how they do it in British public schools.
It’s also a bit odd that the spell so dangerous it was the absolute peak of the Dark Arts was a spell that just killed one person, and not even reliably. Where are the spells to call down meteors and cause earthquakes?
Finding plot holes in Harry Potter is like shooting fish in a barrel. There’s no challenge to it.
Rowling took “a wizard did it” as far as it can go.
It being based off of public schools is a bit odd given that Hogwarts is a boarding school.
That’s just the name.
In the UK, “public school” just means that admissions are generally open to the public. They’re still very expensive, are often boarding schools, and tend to have a lot of castles on their campuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
Huh I was not aware of that. Very different from how that term is used in the US.
Yeah. It confused me at first too.
It’s not too bad when they use some word that we never use at all. I had no trouble figuring out what a “bellend” is.
It’s more of an issue when they use a word differently.
Me: “Yo blondie, that’s not how you’re supposed to wear condoms.”
Nigel Covington III: “You git, I most certainly do wear rubbers on my feet.”I thought “rubber” meant “eraser.”
“Fanny” is my favorite. Both referring to anatomy, but one is on the back and everyone has one while the other is on the front and only one sex has one.
I almost forgot “pants”.
The reason Hermione is sworn to secrecy about the wizarding world is that they know if muggles found out there was a deep state, the revolution would be swift.
It comes down to how powerful static wards are, and how much technology just gets corrupted by magic. The real power of the wizards is memory and time manipulation. Close range is definitely in favor of wizards, you can’t surprise them unless they are intentionally careless. They can always go back a few hours and ambush you back. Chaos would ensue if they deleted every memory before 5 of a handful of leaders.
The tech killing thing is poorly defined, but hogwarts seems to disable electronic devices within a radius. If it’s similar to an emp, it may have countermeasures, but it’s hard to say they also work on magic. Operating within the radius of somewhere like that would be difficult.
There’s also the animagus issue. Every dog, cat, bird, or bug is a potential spy or assassin that is practically undetectable.
The big question is can spells stop a large bomb/nuke. Even if they couldn’t, it would be possible for wizards to escape the blast zone pretty easily, unless they couldn’t detect the attack.
I think the big weakness would be sniper fire that may be fast enough to prevent reactions at the borders of wards.
Ah yes, the good old solution of every contemporary fantasy world.
“modern technology just doesn’t work”
I mean, depending on the book, you have already accepted a number of ridiculous premises by real-world standards. It’s surprising to me that “and by the way, it interferes with or can be used to disable various kinds of technology” is where you would decide to roll your eyes.
Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well. It’s the difference between a world that feels real, messy and casual, and some hypothetical scenario you made to tell your story.
Harry potter isn’t the worst world for sure. Like Rowling does a pretty good job in explaining how wizards stay invisible from regular society, with the ministry of magic, their memory erasing and multiple incidents that all make it feel very real. But for technology we get little beyond Arthur weasly having a interest in collecting electric plugs or something.
There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will? It prevents any conflict that has technology involved from having stakes because you don’t have limits or an idea of what’s dangerous/important
There’s also no good logic or intuition about what technology does or doesn’t work. An electric kettle won’t work but a whole ass car will?
Sometimes the answer could be “hey, we don’t know everything there is to know about our magic. Sure would be nice to know why some kinds of tech are more affected than others, but our level of understanding isn’t there yet.”
Because it’s a cop out. You’re not putting any thought into how your systems would interact with modern tech. Even if you really need a modern setting with no technology, at least be imaginative with why that happens and maybe let that reason affect your setting in some other ways as well.
But maybe it doesn’t matter to the story. HP isn’t a role playing game (there probably is one now, but at the time it was created). There’s all kinds of things we didn’t and/or don’t fully understand about our real world. If they had defined the “rules” of HP magic in a way that satisfies the concern in your example, I don’t see how it would have impacted the story much. If anything it might have killed some of the fantastical bits of the storytelling. It’s not that sort of magic - I’d call it a “soft-ish” magic system if we’re going to define things that way. Muggle tech is unreliable around it - and Weasley had apparently done some kind of tinkering to kind of get the car to work because he was a geek like that. Works for me.
I get your points, I’m not trying to say you are wrong, I’m just saying the importance of that sort of detail can be kind of subjective. What I enjoy about the HP universe isn’t the slightest bit ruffled by that little bit of ambiguity. In a universe where the author really tried to keep things real feeling, I probably would be bothered, but there is so much more to criticize about HP before you get to muggle tech for someone who wants magical realism that it just seems like a weird stopping point to me.
Maybe you just prefer a hard magic system which is totally valid, but IMO that’s a matter of personal preference, not “correctness” if that makes any sense.
Yes, Rowling was pretty lazy about the edges of world building that weren’t directly related to her story.
I feel like there are actually multiple counter-examples to this, but they’re all much better realised worlds than Harry Potter
More like: they know how modern technology works and have designed spells dedicated to preventing them from functioning.
of course muggles would win a war against wizarding folk, that is why they made the international statue of secrecy (also cause jkr is a hack who never wants to bother extrapolating from the consequences of her own worldbuilding)
I cast ICBM
If wizards were incapable of shielding against fast moving projectiles, they would have more spells dedicated to creating fast moving projectiles against their opponents.
I think part of the subtext of the wizarding world is its parallels to British sensibility. You do things the way they’ve always been done because that’s just the way of it. You don’t come up with new spells, you rely on the tried and true spells that have been around for centuries.
Absolutely every genius or inventor is tarred with the crazy eccentric brush
I’m not much of a harry potter fan but wasn’t that the whole point of being in hiding
They were being killed by muggles left and right, and this was way before the invention of guns, so, yeah, they weren’t winning that war in any case.
Actually, at some point in the books they talk about this, and somebody comments how Muggles seldom would actually catch a real witch or wizard. And if they did, the witch or wizard would cast a spell to shield themselves from the fire and pretend to be in pain.
As nonsensical as it is, giving the limit of the suspension of believe necessary to keep the world reasonably coherent, the wizard world has a solid grasp on the non-magical world while it’s a given (literally a given, it makes no sense otherwise) that the people from the normal world have no idea magic exists, other than what is leaked and relegated to fairy tales (it’s our world).
Wizards, their institution and governments, their own citizen are aware of what weapons are. Harry himself of course knows what a gun is and could potentially grab a number of them to prepare for war.
So it’s an implied obvious implicit answer that even a limited mastery of magic vastly overpowers weapons. Which is obvious if you consider that in the magical world they are aware of the “laws” of physics AND the extra laws of magic.
They just know more about how the world works, how to inflict death and how to protect against harm.
But IIRC that is never implied in the books and it is shown a couple of times that they know very little about technology and being very surprised by stuff like television. Which is very weird given that a non insignificant part of the wizards are from muggle families and lives among muggles.
Whilst I loved the books, as I read I always had this question in my mind about what if the wizards approached magic with a more scientific method and if they integrated with the scientific advancements of the human world.
In that world, magic is a part of science because it’s part of the natural world. It just hasn’t been discovered by that world’s scientists yet.
Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, though they do kinda turn him into a demigod
Given that there are governmental departments for interacting with muggles, and qualifications taught at Hogwarts, my assumption was that it was like many other fields of study typical members of the public did know little, but plenty of research exists. How much does the typical person know about nuclear thermodynamics? Not much, and they don’t really need to, but that doesn’t mean all of humanity knows nothing. Hermione states pretty regularly that the spells protecting Hogwarts protect it from being discovered and prevent electrical communications from functioning.
I would think that, in a war with muggles, any wizard signing up to fight would be given training (by those few governmental and academic experts) in muggle warfare, weaponry, and relevant defensive spells needed for such a conflict.
Yeah, though it’s not the best of movies, Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice did a really good job of treating that barrier between science and magic with a degree of reason and accountability. And in my own head canon those ideas are part of the Harry Potter universe and it’s magic.
and its* magic
I mean they don’t really get taught anything about the outside world. I don’t remember seeing physics or social studies or any other “normal” class on Harry Potter’s class list.
My understanding is that they used wards to prevent technology from working near them.
So in your “canon” no mage ever asks itself why rocks fall to the ground?
I mean it’s a possible angle, overreliance on rituals and magic that sapped those people of any critical approach to reality…
I mean it took them forever to get indoor plumbing. The Romans had indoor plumbing.
Harry Potter wizards use magic instead of technology, they don’t really seem to be interested in using both together. So I believe that they don’t go out of their way to understand technology or the physics behind it.
Many magical things defy physics in that world. I think wizards in that universe see science as an obstacle and not a valuable method for understanding reality. Because their reality defies understanding by scientific process. It’s all ritual based. The pronunciation of a spell changes its effect.
It’s not a lack of critical thinking that makes them avoid science. It’s the fact that what they do is more immediately effective than science.
Their reality doesn’t defy understanding by the scientific process. It has reliable, repeatable results, and therefore can be studied and empirically catalogued. The only way something could not be studied by science is if it’s totally random, if actions do not correlate, even slightly, with results. Of course, such behavior would make it completely useless as a tool, because one could never get desired results from it. Magic in the setting is very reliable and repatable, and as long as you do it right, results can be studied, so it’s easily catalogued by the scientific method.
Science as a methodology began developing in the real world during the renaissance. Prior to that people had methodologies that provided moderately accurate models of reality but often included superstition, unsupported metaphysics, or religious dogmas. These other inclusions are what we call magic: Alchemy, astrology, geomancy, thaumatergy etc.
Assuming Harry Potter’s world developed similarly to ours, the muggles would have taken a scientific view of reality beginning around the 1500s. But magic was real and wizards kept their magical methodology and metaphysics.
They clearly have learned a lot about magic because they no longer call on demons or need the moon to be in a particular phase, but they aren’t using the scientific method to do that.
They aren’t using it, no, but that doesn’t mean the scientific method can’t study what they do and come to an understanding of it - probably a better understanding of it than they have, since as you say, they aren’t using it. It’d just take a few decades of study probably to have a much stronger understanding of how it works.
My point is just that people draw this weird line between ‘science’ and ‘magic’ as though they were incompatible. In a world in which magic is real and useful, science can study it.
