I don’t think we’ve seen evidence that normal minors can make and enter contracts—I think Harry’s just been implicitly granted an exception to all the rules of normal minors because he’s the Chosen One. But the bad thing about implicit agreements is that the ones with official power can revoke them when convenient and the other party has no recourse.
OnTheOtherHandle
Karma: 730
Wait, even if he did write it in the meeting room, can’t the Eye of Vance see through walls?
Now I want to know what exactly the limit of Moody’s superpower is. How far can the Eye see in every direction? How many barriers can it see through? How far can it “zoom”, if at all? To what resolution? Can the Eye read fine print from 1000 feet away?
I think you misunderstood. I wasn’t claiming to be offended myself, I was trying to get at the cause of people’s emotional reactions. Whether or not you believe those emotions are justified, they are almost always triggered by something.
I also specified that HPMOR values wit and scheming on its surface—that is, the scheming is what provides almost all the entertainment value and keeps people in their chairs long enough to hear the deeper ideology. What do we want from characters in a story at their most basic level? We want to have fun watching them. That’s why most people read stories, and it’s why most people read HPMOR. And the ones who are the most fun to watch are the male characters.
I didn’t claim this was intentional, nor that it was wrong, just that it was probably the cause of feminist complaints. It was in part an answer to “But the female characters are good people”. Being a good person is not always the same as being good in the story. In Disney movies, you have to be a wide-eyed dreamer. In Tarantino movies you have to be a stone-cold killing machine. In HPMOR (and Death Note) you have to be a hyperintelligent byzantine plotter. And then comes the ideology.
Yes, but “The Defense Professor” and “anyone else who can rig the wards” shouldn’t have the same probability in his mind. What with all the rest of Quirrell’s strange behavior and the curse on the position, “The Defense Professor” should be allotted a massive probability, with a comparatively smaller piece left for “whoever else has the ability to do this.” He should be suspect number one by far.
That’s true, and in this context it doesn’t seem like Harry was being entirely fair. I liked that line better the first time around, when Harry applied it to how Quirrell used him. He was wrong, but I thought it was interesting that he chose to view it in that light.
I don’t know about the parent, but personally I liked this line because it debunks the cached thought that “using” someone is always wrong. Humans use one another all the time for all sorts of things, from a grad student using his mentor to advance his career to an overworked executive using her goofy laid-back friends to keep her blood pressure down. People tend to only consider one very narrow and destructive meaning of the word “use”, and then come to the conclusion that you can’t have a genuine caring relationship with someone if you pursue it for personal benefit. The grad student can still admire and love his mentor even though the main point of that relationship is so he can get a PhD. If you do care about the person, you’d try to arrange it so that your use will help them too.
I would have loved to read a counterfactual HPMOR with Bones in the role of McGonagall (or McGonagall with the personality of Bones). It’s true that her personality makes more sense in an Auror than a teacher, and that means we don’t get to see her very much. But then again, virtually every major male authority figure in Hogwarts looks like he should belong in an elite war chamber rather than a classroom. Seriously, what are these people doing running a boarding school?
I’m concerned if, this late in the game, Harry’s only reason for suspecting the Defense Professor is “just because he’s the Defense Professor.” It would seem that he has way too many excellent reasons to suspect Quirrell no matter what his title. The sense of doom. The fact that he was able to cast Avada Kedavra on a random guard. The fact that he carried Harry off on a disastrous plot to free Bellatrix Black. The fact that he happened to be there on time to save Draco’s life when the wards were disabled. The fact that he is one of only a handful of wizards with the ability to disable Hogwarts’ wards. The impassioned speech advocating benevolent fascism. The fact that no one knows who he really is and Harry can think of at least three different identities he’s taken on. The weird zombie mode that seems to roughly correlate with Bad Things happening. The excessively harsh and sometimes downright abusive way he runs his class. The lack of empathy and inability to accept or even understand love.
My question is, do you think Harry has realized all this and is really strongly suspecting Quirrell for other reasons, and he only told Lucius that the only reason was the curse on the Defense Professor’s position? Or do you think Harry is still reluctant to seriously entertain the possibility that it was Quirrell?
I think this is the heart of feminist complaints about this story. Yes, the female characters are honest, and levelheaded, and moral, and quite a bit more realistic than male characters. Yes, the male characters have massive, gaping flaws in their character, and if you tried to have a conversation with them in the real world they would appear unbearably pompous. Yes, clever repartee does not replace genuine kindness. I agree with all that.
But the thing is, this fic (on its surface) doesn’t value kindness and morality nearly as much as suave, articulate word-poker and beautifully intricate schemes and counter-schemes and “I know that you know that I know...” insanity. I think you’re going to get people accusing you of sexism even if you provide your female characters with traits that are valued and truly matter in the real world, as long as you still hold back the traits that are valued in-story.
In the original Harry Potter, Hermione was quite a bit more immature in her first year than in HPMOR—but the backbone of HP was bold derring-do and wandsmanship and remembering the right spell, and she (and McGonagall and Ginny) was essential in that environment. Intricate conversations and ingenious plots like this are the backbone of HPMOR, and we don’t see any women involved there. That’s what people are complaining about, I think.
I predict that if Hermione’s death had come at the end of a long, complicated plot/investigation carried out by her, there would be far fewer complaints. As it is, she did not win anything other than Harry’s increased resolve—didn’t reveal any schemes, didn’t execute any of her own, didn’t discover any MacGuffins (as far as I know).
That line confused me—I think we were expected to draw a lot of subtle inferences to figure out why it would make sense in this context.
On a side note, it is really jarring not to know everything Harry knows this late in the game. I always just read the third-person point of view as a matter of convenience, and accepted that we were fully immersed into the head of the current speaker. This distant outsiders’ perspective (“I’ve done some research”, “I have a plan”) is making it really hard for me to draw conclusions.
It’s also showing me just how much I relied on Harry running me through all the steps of some ridiculously complicated deduction. I wonder—does having a character who is both very intelligent and very honest mean that the reader has to be significantly less intelligent and active to follow along?
I think for the time being Malfoy wants this to happen and chose to accept Harry’s right to enter an agreement...but if something goes wrong, I wouldn’t put it past Lucius to spin this into an invalid contract due to Harry’s age. Or maybe Harry has done so many crazily adult things so far this actually feels perfectly normal, not only to the readers, but the characters.
Thanks! I think I missed when Harry paid off the 40,000. Did he empty his vaults and give Lucius a 40,000 lump sum, leaving him with 60,000 to pay off over a few years?
Edit: I remember, that is what he did, which is why it was such a huge deal and Harry is broke on top of being in debt.
I’m confused: why does the amount owed to the Malfoys seem to keep changing? I read first 58,203, then 100,000, then 40,000 Galleons.
Thanks, I completely forgot that Apple has the “File” button the menu bar instead of on the application itself.
Are there any users of the spaced repetition software Mnemosyne that could help me with a technical issue? I just got the software for my Mac, and I’ve read in multiple places that you can import plain text files as a card deck. But on my version of Mnemosyne, I see no button saying “import files,” and in fact no way at all to add more than one flashcard at a time.
My text editor is Word, and while I can save my vocabulary as a .txt file with Unicode encoding, I don’t see any way to export it to Mnemosyne from there. Just to test if I understood the download/import concept at all, I tried downloading one of the free flashcard decks on the site, chose Mnemosyne as the application to open it with, and just got an error message. What am I missing here? Do I need to download a plug-in for importing to work?
But they don’t need to be. The point of starting off very small is that the damage they can do is proportionally small. When we let teens learn to drive, we expect them to be significantly worse than the average driver, and they are, but they have to start at some point.
There’s actually a gradualist solution that never occurred to me before, and probably wouldn’t destroy the Schelling point. It may or may not work, but why not treat voting like driving, and dispense the rights piecemeal?
Say when you enter high school you get the option to vote for school board elections, provided you attend a school board meeting first and read the candidate bios. Then maybe a year later you can vote for mayor if you choose to attend a city council meeting. A year after that, representatives, and then senators, and perhaps each milestone could come with an associated requirement like shadowing an aide or something.
The key to these prerequisites IMO, is that they cannot involve passing any test designed by anyone—they must simply involve experience. Reading something, going somewhere—no one is evaluating you to see if you gained the “right” opinions from that experience.
When they’re 18 they get full voting rights. Those people who chose not to go through this “voter training” process also get full voting rights at 18, no questions asked—kind of like how getting a driver’s license at 16 is a longer process than getting one at 18 starting from the same driving experience.
This way, only the most motivated teens would get voting rights early, and everyone else would get them guaranteed at 18. There is likely potential for abuse that I may not have considered, but I believe with this system any prejudices or biases introduced in teens would be local, rather than the potentially national-scale abuses possible with standardized voter-testing.
One relatively simple (but also easily gameable) criteria is education and/or intelligence. Only 18-year-olds with a high school/college/postgraduate degree, only 18-year-olds with an IQ score/SAT score >= X, etc. We don’t want to try that because we know how quickly the tests and measurements would be twisted with ideology, and we worry that we would end up systematically discriminating against a class of people based on some hidden criterion other than intelligence/education, such as political views.
The supposed reason for the 21 year old drinking age is that the prefrontal cortex, which is in charge of impulse control, doesn’t fully mature until the early twenties, and therefore alcohol use before 21 would a) result in more mishaps like car accidents than alcohol use after 21, and b) harm brain development during a critical period. Which would be perfectly sound reasoning if it applied to voting, military service, cigarettes, lottery tickets, etc. If alcohol use is too risky because of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, then surely voting is too? But if you raised the voting age to 21 you’d have to raise the draft age, too, because it would be barbaric to send people off to die without even a nominal say in the decision to go to war. It’s far more practical to lower the drinking age.
...That’s a very Harry-like exclamation. But I don’t think even HJPEV could manage to replace Mad-Eye Moody with a Polyjuiced and Time-Turned version of himself. But then again, this whole chapter was in distant third person, and we don’t know what Harry knows or how he knows it...