Harry makes decisions and acts on them that risks what he could reasonably consider to be grounds for expulsion from Hogwarts in several places.
But of course, we know he won't get expelled, because he's HARRY BUTTHOLE POTTER and his parents are Lily Potter and... that dued. I'm sure G. W. Bush did a lot of things at Yale that people of lesser birth get expelled for (Coke, crappy grades, etc). Was he really risking anything? Naaw... to the administrators, he might as well have been Jesus Christ. Now really, can the Famous Mr. Potter do anything so that Dumbledore would expel him? Ha!
It is exactly for this reason that you probably liked *cough* *cough* Star Wars when you were small -- Luke Skywalker is exactly the same character and plays to the same wants and desires.
I think this is insightful. I agree. It is strange that humans naturally seem to think that a noble birth entitles them to privilidge. We know why this notion is woven into old fairy tales: they were written in a time when there really were patriachs who wanted to legitimize their role as rulers. You would think we would get over this in a "democracy." Then again, look at our president.
It's so strange that we so instincively think that patriarchy is just, that when it occurs in fiction, we have to think a bit before it even bothers us. It doesn't bother children at all. Somebody should do a study on this.
In any case, I think it should bother us that people born into privilige can get away with a lot more than people of lesser birth. You would think that in the real fantasy world, this wouldn't be the case. In Rowling's world, this effect seems to even be amplified compared to reality. Harry Potter gets more slack and more ass-kissing than even George Bush Jr. What's more, while in our world, we think that favoritism to GB because of his birth is unfair, the possibility that the favoritism lavished on Harry Potter due to his noble birth might be unfair is not even considered by Rowling. This makes her the nastiest sort of elitist possible. We should keep her from our children.
Look, I think the author's point could be made more simple. If you went to school with some rich kid who through fortune of birth is good at sport, and, through fortune of birth, has everyone calling him "The Famous Something Something," kissing his ass, and letting him get away with anything at all... well what would you do?
Yaay! You hit the nail on the head. I'd love the Harold Bloom reference. I certainly think he was right on this, though I disagree with him on many other matters.
I think the prototypical non-fradulent hero is Frodo Baggins (and Tom, Merry and Pippin). Frodo really was an ordinary but good person, who had to do a nearly impossible task ahead of him (with no "inherited" resources to help him). He had the good will to accept his mission and face almost inevitable death willingly. That he survived it was due to his incredible resolve and tenacity (and some luck). That makes him a hero, and there are other such heroes in fiction. Harry Potter is not one of these.
So you have to have super-parents, free reign from your teachers, and everybody swooning at your feet due to your noble birth in order to be a normal kid? Ah shit! I'm less normal than I thought!
Hermione is a normal (bright) kid. Ron Weasley is a normal kid. Harry Potter is "The Famous Harry Potter" who has, on his own merits, accomplished 100X less than Brittney Spears. If Harry Potter is a normal kid, I'm fucking Jesus Christ.
What I hate about Harry Potter is exactly the fact that he deserves nothing more than what the normal kid receives, but he gets the special treatment fit for some sort of boy-emperor. In fact, the parallels between Harry Potter and The Last Emperor go deep. Well, fuck that. Nobody will be my hero just because of their birth and inheritance. They just don't deserve it.
The problem with Tolkein's work is that what you are born is what you are.
Huh? I'm sorry but that's just stuuuupid. First of all, there a whole ton of stuff in Tolkien about individuals overcoming their racial dispositions (Hobbits are sedentary; humans are greedy; dwarves hate elves, elves trust only elves, etc.)
Whatever. You could be forgiven for not realizing this if you didn't read the books.
What shocks me is that HARRY BUTTHOLE POTTER is somehow superior in this regard. I find it shocking exactly because this "determinism by birth" is my single biggest problem with Harry Potter. Basically, Harry Potter, on his own merits, is a below-average student that breaks whatever rules he pleases, and gets away with it, and everybody still wants to kiss his ass... why... because of his PARENTS. Just because he has some fancy-ass parents, Harry Potter is some sort of living legend. He did nothing to deserve this honor. Hermione, for example, is a much more talented and diligent student, but why does nobody bow befor her? Because she doesn't have the right parents. And all the while, the movies encourage us to think that this is all OK. That we should think that the sun sets in Harry Potter's ass. Why? What the fuck did he ever do on his own merits?
I can tell you, if I were at a school and one of my fellow students was automatically the pet of the whole faculty (especially the dictatorial director), and it was all because of who his parents were... well, I would kick his ass every single day and take his lunch money. Especially if I saw that I was a much better student while nobody noticed and kept talking about how "golden child" is like some fucking baby Jesus. Well, fuck that. I mean, some of us might even remember kids who were treated this way by your schoolteachers. Their glasses were "mysteriously" broken at least once a week. Because even children understand what justice demands! Well, except in Hogwarts, apparently. That really pissed me off. I wanted to like Harry Potter, but I found myself only feeling this burning sense of injustice about how he doesn't get his comeuppance. So I wanted to punch him, maybe give him a swift kick in the balls, just so he maintains his perspective amid all the "so this is The Famous Mr. Potter" swooning.
Alas, this is only in my fantasy, so consider this post to be my first work of Harry-Potter-Related Fan Fiction.
You know, with just about every increase in productivity, we lose. It means that we are doing more work in the same amount of time as before, and while some of that is due to more management efficiency and technology, most of it is just making the wage-slaves work faster and goof off less. Isn't anybody angry? I mean, this really sucks.
It seems to me that a high quality of life is incompatible with high productivity, that all this productivity crap is making us lose our humanity. We are expected to be pleased that productivity is constantly increasing, but I'm not. Anthropologists claim that hunter-gatherers spent four hours a day "working" and the rest of the time they were goofing off, telling stories, having sex, etc. Oh, how far we have fallen from those days!
The problem isn't only the landfill space. It's also the dirtyness of DVD production. Remember that the dyes are expensive, and that the plastic is made from oil in a way that generates some nasty by-products.
Anyway, this is a totally pointless and wasteful exercise in an age when we could just use the internet to transmit the data.
What I'm wondering now is whether this process could be accelerated artificially. I mean, bacterial life cycles are so short, one can imagine growing them in a petrie dish and putting in small doses of antibiotics, not enough to kill the colony but to privilidge the more resistant ones. Then, slowly increase the antibiotic concentration... until you have resistance. Repeat the same procedure on the resulting colony using all the other available antibiotics, and you get a perfectly resistant strain of bacteria.
Now, all that's left is for you to culture them, bottle them and distribute them to pimply hamburger-flipping terrorists who pour a vial into the secret sauce that goes into every McDonalds hamburger. Because strep is contageous, this would infect not only McD customers but their families and coworkers. Since the bacterium would be basically untreatable, it would get a lot more chances to infect others than ordinary strep, basically because you are infectious for much longer (however long it takes to die).
I can't think of a better way to terrorize American society than this. Parents would refuse to send kids to school, we would shun each other and view every sneeze with grave suspicion... in general, there would be great fear and a much lower quality of life.
Anyway, I hope the CDC is working on a way to prevent this nightmare scenario. If this were to happen, could we make a vaccine to prevent infection? Anyway, I would hope we'd have some line of defense, though it seems to me that if the bacterium breeders did their job well, they could design the bacteria to be resistant to whatever they want.
Naaw, if this were deliberate, they would not have leaked Harry Potter 2 and Clones--Two movies that stink so badly that nobody could possibly want to see them in the theater after seeing the downloaded copies. Make no mistake--this is costing them, but that's only because the movies suck shit. The MPAA's real problem is that 90% of their productions have 0 talent.
I will not see a Harry Potter sequel ever again unless it's called "Harry Potter Gets His Annoying Ass Kicked In Various Ways By Classmates Annoyed With His Bullshit."
Cool! The only part that really sounds hard is the clock synching, and the software. So why not really go for it and use the AGP slot? Shouldn't that give you higher throughput and even less latency? This looks like it would be an awesome geek project.
Wouldn't they have bus timing issues? There must be some extra piece of hardware involved... If that's the case isn't it basically just a new kind of NIC?
I don't know much about this type of stuff, but wouldn't it be awesome if the way they made it work is through software? If they did, Linux/Beowulfing would be about to take a huge leap forward.
Anyway, maybe this is not the sort of thing you can solve with software. Whatever they're using to connect the computers sounds very practical though, not just for supercomputers but for general fast networking. When can we do this at home?
You know, it wouldn't be stupid of Apple to try to build in some code for arbitrarily large clusters into Darwin. It would really be a prestige coup if a mac cluster became a top-500 computer.
Do I understand correctly that they just wired PCI slots from different motherboards together, instead of running the data around over ethernet (which probably would have been plugged into a PCI slot anyway)? If so, I mean, if there's nothing more to it than that, it seems like this will be a kickass way of clustering. But there must be something more to it than I realize, because if there wasn't, there wouldn't be so many ethernet-based beowulf systems.
So please explain this. I mean, I have two linux boxes in my room and each has a free PCI slot. What do I need to to to network them over directly over PCI?
I think you are totally right in your post. Nobody should pay for recordings, not even micropay. Recordings are ads for bands. They should be treated that way. Live performances alone have paid for the greatest music in human history (everything pre 1930's, which is a lot!). Before there ever was a "recording industry" there was a golden age of music. We must take it back. Death to the RIAA!
Fine, but why pay? I think the solution for the recording industry would be: execution. The sort of solution you describe would be better if it were free. Let the recording industry die, and bring us back to the era of Great Music (tm) which thrived before they reared their ugly gramophone heads.
Seriously, I love music a lot, but I never forget that for centuries, music has thrived without the existence of anything like a recording industry, or recording in general.
I think there would be no problem at all if those times returned. In fact, some of the greatest music ever made was from those times. Maybe the destruction of the repressive recording industry would be the dawn of a new age of great music. This is especially probable given the current state of the RIAA.
This is a very good point, and here's how I expect it to be resolved: Future DVD-ROM drives in living room devices will have a autodetect mechanism which lets them go into "stupid CD reader" emulation mode. Of course, once these drives become available for your computer, copy protection will become a joke.
Technologically, it would not be hard to do; all that's necessary is for some hardware company to get sufficiently pissed off. Will this happen? Oh yes.
Look, I'm sad about Farscape and SG, but there is one huge consolation in all of this: FOX's show Firefly. I must say that the worst Firefly episode so far has been better than the best episode in any other SciFi show ever. And I'm including Dr Who, all the Star Treks, B5...
I know this reads like a troll, and I'm shocked I feel this way, because I really loved so many Sci-Fi shows in my life. Still, I think Firefly just has the best writers, hands down. I guess it's not the show for people who like plots about time travel, holograms and other mishandled philosophical issues. Firefly is more like the chronicles of a D&D adventure group. Whatever. It really kicks ass.... Well, that's enough of my gushing; I'm glad I got that off my chest.
I see... so do the investors get to "write off" these losses at tax time? Anyway, I find it shocking that WorldCom's investors are still a going concern. I mean, if the WorldCom investment did not bankrupt these investors, they must really be made of money! What do they say when they go home? Aw, honey, we we kinda took a hit here with our WorldCom investment... about 10 Billion dollars, maybe a bit more... now we have to bankroll their incompetent executives with $25Mil of bonuses. Boy, we're not very good investors... but then again, we can't be so bad, since we can pay this off...
So being under bankrupcy protection, does this mean that the money is coming from the government i.e. taxes? Hmm...
I know this isn't a political decision but a legal one, but this sort of thing still pisses me off. Let someone buy the remains of the company, and if they want, pay for their own "recovery team" out of their own pockets. I don't get mad when my taxes go to good causes like science or welfare or public services, but I see no reason to bankroll sleazy and incompetent executives.
Of course, this may not be what's happening--I don't really understand bankrupcy law.
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Come on. A member of Iggy Pop's band not drinking? In 1975? Surely they could have made up something more plausible.
It's OK to break unjust laws.
But of course, we know he won't get expelled, because he's HARRY BUTTHOLE POTTER and his parents are Lily Potter and ... that dued. I'm sure G. W. Bush did a lot of things at Yale that people of lesser birth get expelled for (Coke, crappy grades, etc). Was he really risking anything? Naaw... to the administrators, he might as well have been Jesus Christ. Now really, can the Famous Mr. Potter do anything so that Dumbledore would expel him? Ha!
I think this is insightful. I agree. It is strange that humans naturally seem to think that a noble birth entitles them to privilidge. We know why this notion is woven into old fairy tales: they were written in a time when there really were patriachs who wanted to legitimize their role as rulers. You would think we would get over this in a "democracy." Then again, look at our president.
It's so strange that we so instincively think that patriarchy is just, that when it occurs in fiction, we have to think a bit before it even bothers us. It doesn't bother children at all. Somebody should do a study on this.
In any case, I think it should bother us that people born into privilige can get away with a lot more than people of lesser birth. You would think that in the real fantasy world, this wouldn't be the case. In Rowling's world, this effect seems to even be amplified compared to reality. Harry Potter gets more slack and more ass-kissing than even George Bush Jr. What's more, while in our world, we think that favoritism to GB because of his birth is unfair, the possibility that the favoritism lavished on Harry Potter due to his noble birth might be unfair is not even considered by Rowling. This makes her the nastiest sort of elitist possible. We should keep her from our children.
Not beat him up?
Yaay! You hit the nail on the head. I'd love the Harold Bloom reference. I certainly think he was right on this, though I disagree with him on many other matters.
I think the prototypical non-fradulent hero is Frodo Baggins (and Tom, Merry and Pippin). Frodo really was an ordinary but good person, who had to do a nearly impossible task ahead of him (with no "inherited" resources to help him). He had the good will to accept his mission and face almost inevitable death willingly. That he survived it was due to his incredible resolve and tenacity (and some luck). That makes him a hero, and there are other such heroes in fiction. Harry Potter is not one of these.
Hermione is a normal (bright) kid. Ron Weasley is a normal kid. Harry Potter is "The Famous Harry Potter" who has, on his own merits, accomplished 100X less than Brittney Spears. If Harry Potter is a normal kid, I'm fucking Jesus Christ.
What I hate about Harry Potter is exactly the fact that he deserves nothing more than what the normal kid receives, but he gets the special treatment fit for some sort of boy-emperor. In fact, the parallels between Harry Potter and The Last Emperor go deep. Well, fuck that. Nobody will be my hero just because of their birth and inheritance. They just don't deserve it.
Huh? I'm sorry but that's just stuuuupid. First of all, there a whole ton of stuff in Tolkien about individuals overcoming their racial dispositions (Hobbits are sedentary; humans are greedy; dwarves hate elves, elves trust only elves, etc.)
Whatever. You could be forgiven for not realizing this if you didn't read the books.
What shocks me is that HARRY BUTTHOLE POTTER is somehow superior in this regard. I find it shocking exactly because this "determinism by birth" is my single biggest problem with Harry Potter. Basically, Harry Potter, on his own merits, is a below-average student that breaks whatever rules he pleases, and gets away with it, and everybody still wants to kiss his ass... why... because of his PARENTS. Just because he has some fancy-ass parents, Harry Potter is some sort of living legend. He did nothing to deserve this honor. Hermione, for example, is a much more talented and diligent student, but why does nobody bow befor her? Because she doesn't have the right parents. And all the while, the movies encourage us to think that this is all OK. That we should think that the sun sets in Harry Potter's ass. Why? What the fuck did he ever do on his own merits?
I can tell you, if I were at a school and one of my fellow students was automatically the pet of the whole faculty (especially the dictatorial director), and it was all because of who his parents were... well, I would kick his ass every single day and take his lunch money. Especially if I saw that I was a much better student while nobody noticed and kept talking about how "golden child" is like some fucking baby Jesus. Well, fuck that. I mean, some of us might even remember kids who were treated this way by your schoolteachers. Their glasses were "mysteriously" broken at least once a week. Because even children understand what justice demands! Well, except in Hogwarts, apparently. That really pissed me off. I wanted to like Harry Potter, but I found myself only feeling this burning sense of injustice about how he doesn't get his comeuppance. So I wanted to punch him, maybe give him a swift kick in the balls, just so he maintains his perspective amid all the "so this is The Famous Mr. Potter" swooning.
Alas, this is only in my fantasy, so consider this post to be my first work of Harry-Potter-Related Fan Fiction.
It seems to me that a high quality of life is incompatible with high productivity, that all this productivity crap is making us lose our humanity. We are expected to be pleased that productivity is constantly increasing, but I'm not. Anthropologists claim that hunter-gatherers spent four hours a day "working" and the rest of the time they were goofing off, telling stories, having sex, etc. Oh, how far we have fallen from those days!
Anyway, this is a totally pointless and wasteful exercise in an age when we could just use the internet to transmit the data.
Now, all that's left is for you to culture them, bottle them and distribute them to pimply hamburger-flipping terrorists who pour a vial into the secret sauce that goes into every McDonalds hamburger. Because strep is contageous, this would infect not only McD customers but their families and coworkers. Since the bacterium would be basically untreatable, it would get a lot more chances to infect others than ordinary strep, basically because you are infectious for much longer (however long it takes to die).
I can't think of a better way to terrorize American society than this. Parents would refuse to send kids to school, we would shun each other and view every sneeze with grave suspicion... in general, there would be great fear and a much lower quality of life.
Anyway, I hope the CDC is working on a way to prevent this nightmare scenario. If this were to happen, could we make a vaccine to prevent infection? Anyway, I would hope we'd have some line of defense, though it seems to me that if the bacterium breeders did their job well, they could design the bacteria to be resistant to whatever they want.
I will not see a Harry Potter sequel ever again unless it's called "Harry Potter Gets His Annoying Ass Kicked In Various Ways By Classmates Annoyed With His Bullshit."
Cool! The only part that really sounds hard is the clock synching, and the software. So why not really go for it and use the AGP slot? Shouldn't that give you higher throughput and even less latency? This looks like it would be an awesome geek project.
I don't know much about this type of stuff, but wouldn't it be awesome if the way they made it work is through software? If they did, Linux/Beowulfing would be about to take a huge leap forward.
Anyway, maybe this is not the sort of thing you can solve with software. Whatever they're using to connect the computers sounds very practical though, not just for supercomputers but for general fast networking. When can we do this at home?
You know, it wouldn't be stupid of Apple to try to build in some code for arbitrarily large clusters into Darwin. It would really be a prestige coup if a mac cluster became a top-500 computer.
So please explain this. I mean, I have two linux boxes in my room and each has a free PCI slot. What do I need to to to network them over directly over PCI?
I think you are totally right in your post. Nobody should pay for recordings, not even micropay. Recordings are ads for bands. They should be treated that way. Live performances alone have paid for the greatest music in human history (everything pre 1930's, which is a lot!). Before there ever was a "recording industry" there was a golden age of music. We must take it back. Death to the RIAA!
Not me!
Fine, but why pay? I think the solution for the recording industry would be: execution. The sort of solution you describe would be better if it were free. Let the recording industry die, and bring us back to the era of Great Music (tm) which thrived before they reared their ugly gramophone heads.
I think there would be no problem at all if those times returned. In fact, some of the greatest music ever made was from those times. Maybe the destruction of the repressive recording industry would be the dawn of a new age of great music. This is especially probable given the current state of the RIAA.
Technologically, it would not be hard to do; all that's necessary is for some hardware company to get sufficiently pissed off. Will this happen? Oh yes.
I know this reads like a troll, and I'm shocked I feel this way, because I really loved so many Sci-Fi shows in my life. Still, I think Firefly just has the best writers, hands down. I guess it's not the show for people who like plots about time travel, holograms and other mishandled philosophical issues. Firefly is more like the chronicles of a D&D adventure group. Whatever. It really kicks ass. ... Well, that's enough of my gushing; I'm glad I got that off my chest.
I see... so do the investors get to "write off" these losses at tax time? Anyway, I find it shocking that WorldCom's investors are still a going concern. I mean, if the WorldCom investment did not bankrupt these investors, they must really be made of money! What do they say when they go home? Aw, honey, we we kinda took a hit here with our WorldCom investment... about 10 Billion dollars, maybe a bit more... now we have to bankroll their incompetent executives with $25Mil of bonuses. Boy, we're not very good investors... but then again, we can't be so bad, since we can pay this off...
I know this isn't a political decision but a legal one, but this sort of thing still pisses me off. Let someone buy the remains of the company, and if they want, pay for their own "recovery team" out of their own pockets. I don't get mad when my taxes go to good causes like science or welfare or public services, but I see no reason to bankroll sleazy and incompetent executives.
Of course, this may not be what's happening--I don't really understand bankrupcy law.