McG / DD / Re: Why should Harry be expected to listen to anyone at H...

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 123006


--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "dungrollin" 
<spotthedungbeetle at h...> wrote:
> 
> <SNIP> 
> 
> Lupinlore replied:
> > This comment is so flabbergastingly out of line and downright 
> immoral that I choose to believe you did not intend to make it.  
> Kindly review what you have said and be more careful.
> 
> 
> Dungrollin interjects:
> 
> Stick to your guns, Gerry!
> I am of exactly the same opinion - and I agree with McGonagall, 
too. 
> If someone is in a position of power and authority and is bent on 
> making your life hell, giving them extra incentive to do it is 
> foolhardy. Nobody is defending Umbridge's actions in those 
> detentions, nor anywhere else. But Harry clearly wasn't listening 
to 
> McGonagall because he went and did the same thing again almost 
> immediately afterwards. 
> 
> Using his brain, listening to Hermione and McGonagall, and 
resisting 
> Umbridge's reign *in secret* was the sensible thing to do, and was 
> what he ended up doing anyway. But it appears that he wouldn't 
> consider that anybody else has a better understanding of the 
> situation than he, and has to go through the whole horrible week's-
> worth of detentions again, before finally he learns to keep his 
head 
> down. Evidently he needed two weeks of hellish detentions to make 
> him take Umbridge seriously, because explaining it to him didn't 
> work. What's immoral about that?
> 
> And, out of interest, if Gerry's suggestion that a fictional 
> detention may have been a good thing is immoral, is JKR not more 
> immoral for having written that fictional detention in the first 
> place?

But actually, the way Gerry spoke *does* defend Umbridge and her 
detentions, e.g.  the detentions were a "good thing."  It makes no 
sense to say something is a "good thing" and then turn around and 
say, "but of course it is horrible and I condemn it."

What DOES make sense is to say, "this is a horrible thing but at 
least Harry learned something from it, and in that sense some good 
came out of an evil thing."  Fine.  I have absolutely no objection to 
that and agree with it wholeheartedly.  But that is far from making 
the astounding statement that the detentions "were a good thing."

It is my hope that Gerry actually meant to say something closer to 
the second meaning and not the first.  Thus, as I said, I choose to 
believe that he did not mean what he actually said, and request that 
he be much more careful in the future.

Lupinlore