The Overarching message - Caning + Mind Reading, of sorts

[sigurd at eclipse.net]

No: HPFGUIDX 191686

Dear Geoff

I can agree, but I think you miss my point. 

All the fantasy is fine, be it in Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, but the problem comes when you are going to extrapolate BACK from that world real-life lessions into this world. That's where people get into trouble and begin to think they are dealing with real life. 

They aren't. 

You are dealing with a fictional construct where the authors are the puppetteers and can push their characters, AND events around as they like and therefore drawing real-life conclusions from them is highly dangerous. That was my point. We are all muggles in a muggle world and there is no magical world and therefore drawing real-life conclusions from a mythical world is dangerous. 

Therefore your personal escapism is fine, but just don't expect that conclusions you draw in the escapist world are valid here in this one, and this one is the only one we have. That leads to terrible results like some kid coming to school in a black sheet worn as a poncho with a piece of dowel he got from a hardware store and declaiming "stupify" to the bullies advancing on him to do him bodily harm.

Much the same all the justifications of this or that, or explaining of actions in the magical world have no meaning in the muggle. Thus attempting in any sense to define ANY actions of Slytherin as "moral" is merely a further leap of escapism. Perhaps to magicks in the magic world Slytherin's actions in the book can seem justified, but assuming that we can do slytherin like things here in this world and escape opprobium and expect honor, is like the kid above dancing with his dowel.


That's my point. All of this is nice, but only as a stage against which the actions of moral actors are played out-- that is, in the struggle of good against evil, what acts are good, and what acts are evil, what predispositions or philosophies tend to good, and what predispositions and philosophies tend to evil. The existence of such alternative realites can be justified ONLY by that question when it is brought back into this world. 

Otto