Compassionate hero (WAS Re: Appeal of the story to the reader)

[nrenka]

No: HPFGUIDX 175958

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "horridporrid03"
<horridporrid03 at ...> wrote:

<snipping powers: activation>

> Betsy Hp:
> 
> But two things stood out to me here:  First of all, Slytherin exists 
> because they're allowed to exist.  Their house founder left the 
> school and the house was kept around.  Why?  As was pointed out in 
> another thread, Germany no longer has a Nazi party.  So why did 
> Hogwarts keep their racist house?  Why do they encourage small 
> children to embrace an ideology the school does not support?

Because it's a cancer deeply rooted in wizarding society?  Because
there's always been a portion of people who agree with those
principles, and help keep the house's ideology oriented towards that
principle laid down instead of reorienting it towards different values?

Doing things by fiat in an institution as deeply important to a
society as Hogwarts is doesn't seem very likely to me, thinking about
loose RL comparisons (like the howls of how co-education was going to
destroy any number of previously all-male institutions--it hasn't, but
you wouldn't have thought so from the outcry from alumni, and an
action like that was only possible after societal attitudes in general
had shifted.)

Canon showed us that with Voldemort in the Ministry, some people were
scared/somewhat offended but they went along with things like
Muggleborn registration.  We have the canonical attitude of most
members of the House of Black, and the Malfoys.  And so long as those
remain societally acceptable because enough people with enough power
hold them, there remains a place where those who have been inculcated
in those ideas can go and be with the like-minded.  Rather like
attitudes towards race in the American South, it takes a critical mass
to make something unacceptable instead of just disapproved of.

> Also, there are no such thing as Dark Arts.  JKR established that by 
> making the use of them a non-issue.  So any attempt to judge someone 
> by the magic they use has become an exercise in hypocrisy.

She did?  I guess I did miss the memo where the three Unforgiveables
were explicitly labeled as the Dark Arts.  I suppose having used any
of them even once is morally equivalent to going around learning about
and making things like Horcruxes.  I do love a good slippery slope
argument!

(I think there's a difference between a few uses and habitual, and it
strengthens an argument (as opposed to a flashy rhetorical position)
to work with that distinction.)

-Nora mumbles something about cloudy day weather