The Overarching message - Caning

[pippin_999]

No: HPFGUIDX 191704


> 
> Otto Says in response.
> Do not equivocate. You ARE making perfect sense, in fact too much sense for many because you are saying simply "My eyes see what they see, my ears hear what they hear" and no amount of linguistic legerdemain or subtle argument is going to convince me that I am a fool and reality must be "reinterpreted," "redefined," or "reconstructed" for my poor mentally challenged condition." Therefore for the many you are refuting "the party line" which tries to tell you your eyes do not see what they see or your ears hear what they hear. That is, that you are incapable of evaluating reality on your own. <massive snip>

Pippin:
I agree with a lot of your post, but this bit just made me smile. I am a trained visual artist and a licensed private pilot. In both of those fields, one of the first things the new student is taught is that we don't "see what we see". 

Our eyes do fool us and artists since the dawn of time have taken advantage of this fact.  There is a cave painting in which the flickering light of a torch makes the painted animal appear to move -- the distant ancestor of movies, television and animated cartoons.

 The Parthenon would appear curved and tilted were its members not deliberately curved and tilted in the opposite direction so that they would look straight. 

DaVinci pioneered what is called "aerial perspective" -- objects which are further away from us seem bluer and fainter than they really are. 

This same illusion can fool a pilot on a hazy day into thinking the runway is further away than it looks.  

And if you should fly into clouds and lose sight of the horizon, you had better know how to disregard what your senses are telling you and trust your instruments. Otherwise, you won't have long to regret it.  You won't know which way is up, your inner ears will convince your brain that you are turning when you are going straight, your brain will produce the sensation that you are turning and rising and you will attempt to correct the turn and return to level flight. The effect of this is usually   what is called with good reason a graveyard spiral. 

Survival time for an untrained pilot in instrument conditions is about two minutes. 

Are there moral illusions? Possibly. I imagine that a Victorian who took one look at our California beaches would be shocked silly at the sight of children exposed to the sight of nearly naked adults of both sexes and would think us lost to depravity.

 We in our turn find it hard to imagine that Victorians took and collected photos of nude little girls as an innocent hobby, but all the literature suggests they thought this was not only respectable but morally elevating. 

I would think that to discover whether either of these activities was actually immoral, we would have to disregard the instantaneous reaction of the shocked observer and try to find out  whether anyone was actually suffering harm. 

In the Potter books, the Muggles decided witchcraft was immoral and had to be stamped out, while the  witches and wizards thought immorality lay not in witchcraft itself but how it was used.

 Meanwhile in  the real world King James I banned The Discoverie of Witchcraft, which was a text explaining how  magic was performed  by illusion without supernatural aid, because  James believed witchcraft was real. 

We're all talking about mind invasion as if it's a complete fantasy. Meanwhile over fifty million prescriptions for ADHD medications were written in 2010. They weren't all for children, of course.  Still, we seem to have decided as a society that if a child's mind isn't working the way  it should, it's okay to go in and make it work differently. Western civilization has so far survived. <g> 

I'm not against this, BTW, and don't mean to suggest it is being done lightly.  I'm just making a point that when a child needs help many people think that concern about the sacred inviolability of the mind is hardly the issue. 

Die Gedanke ain't free in the wizarding world, and I agree this is one of the disturbing things about it.  Souls are split, devoured and shared, memories can be altered, destroyed or totally fabricated, and at Weasley's Wizard Wheezes, you can purchase the hallucination, erm, I mean, the day-dream, of your choice. If all this seems as unnatural to Muggles as it does to us, it's no wonder they are horribly afraid of wizards. 

You say, if I understand you, that no  words need to be invented or redefined, that we already know what crime is and everybody knows what child abuse is. 

Yet "child abuse" as a separate category of crime did not come into being until the 20th century.  New words need to be invented or or old ones redefined when the words we have aren't doing the job we need. 

When the same children kept showing up at the emergency room with bruises and x-rays showed previously broken bones but there were no competent witnesses to say how they were being injured, that's when "the battered child syndrome" came to be recognized, so that the legal system could intervene without having to meet the legal standards for assault and battery. It was enough to be able to show that if conditions continued, the child would be permanently harmed. Emotional abuse wasn't recognized until the 1980's and 1990's. 

Yes, people know when they are in pain and when they are being hurt. But they often do not know who is responsible. If Snape blames himself for the emotional damage he suffered from verbal abuse by his father and James (as victims often do) how is he to know if he is causing damage to Harry? 

I think the likelihood of permanent harm is a good standard for judging when intervention is justified. By their fruits you shall know them, exactly.

Pippin