Comment on England Trials Smartphone Rail Payment System with Real-Time Phone Location Tracking
muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com 1 week agoI didn’t realise jkr meant that interpretation but its definitely something to consider.
I’ve always believed one must separate art from the artist lest all works are reduced to nothing given enough time. People love to dismiss modern works based on the authors opinions yet everyone through history is bad by modern standards. We must judge people by the context of their time. For example both Churchill and Disney where famously antisemitic yet both are now praised for their efforts against the Nazis.
Haven’t read any Marcus Aurelius I’m reading Plato at the moment so I’ll add it to the list.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
I don’t think she consciously did, but HP definitely features abuse and misuse of authority left and right, main characters fighting and bypassing it, injustice, fascism, evil being attractive (at least in the first two books she deliberately makes the world of pure-blood wizards more “magical” than that of the rest, and Harry almost being accepted to it or thinking he would be, except that’s not so), public judgement being always wrong (talking to snakes, Harry being considered cuckoo, werewolves, and what not), evil being possibly all-poweful (the Taboo spell and such), one can go on and on.
And then Harry becoming an Auror, thus sort of a magical peeler, which is a common criticism - well, law enforcement is a necessary task. In a non-degenerate system that involves preventing murder, rape, stopping human trafficking operations.
It’s funny how people usually start with the HP world mechanics being bad, - unbalanced, arbitrary, calling spells out of thin air, - while that’s how our world works right now, except they teach very little magic here (BTW, Racket is very cool - I’m again stalling at what I’m trying to do, though, just no willpower at all). Also notice Umbridge in the book 5, in the real world fighting evil with something you always carry with yourself and only skill being important is not a thing usually, for most intents and purposes, except computers.