Ally or not probably best not to go Zapp Brannigan on people for being Neutral or you might end up with more enemies
Hogwarts Legacy - Whimsical Wizardry
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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A quick trip to Wikipedia suggests: "Skinhead" is often used interchangeably with "neo-Nazi", even though it you look at the subculture there are plenty of groupings that are most certainly not racists nor Neo-Nazis.
Not all Skinheads are racist, not even in the US. Hell, the largest group/'organisation' of anti-racist Skinheads, SHARP (SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice) was started in in NYC in the late 80s.
Yeah, I know, there always seem to be a lot of skinheads who are of the neo-nazi dickbag variety. Fucken idiots, back when Skinheads started out they were massively influenced by Jamaican Rude Boy culture.
?????????????? When did I claim I was? WTF gaslighting is this?
Mysterious kept trying to make my criticism of the harassers out to be me hating trans people and Terminal made THIS demand.
Let's not memory hole this stuff quite yet.
I've already listed the analogues to the house elves. To go down the "house elves are slaves" argument is to deliberately ignore the analogues being used, and conjure up new analogues.
News to me.
I mean, I left out milk and cookies for Santa, I never thought that Santa wouldn't deliver my presents if I didn't.
From 'The Elves and the Shoemaker' to the Daisy Meadows fairy series, fey creatures helping people "just because" is fairly common. So's the opposite, but that's usually down to malign intent rather than lack of repayment.
But it's beside the point. The most likely real-world inspirations for house elves are brownies and farfadets. The former would take food and drink, but would depart, insulted, if offered coin. The latter would depart if their master offered them clothes, insulted at the idea that their clothes needed replacing.
That's part of what really gets me with this. I know the phrase "we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are" is probably true, but the whole "house elves are slaves" thing, in the context of real-world analogues, requires people to ignore the real-world analogues and latch onto other analogues. Namely, an analogue in a world where human slavery is a thing, elf slavery isn't.
At least you're not hiding the fact that you don't give a shit about others. Moving right along.
So I ask again: what would you call a system that keeps an entire species in bondage with no cop on the beat to prevent abuse?
Me pointing out a double standard doesn't automatically mean I think you hate trans people. Though I've apparently made tens of thousands of new enemies for trans people in doing so.
I mean, most of us are just latching on to the source media, which calls house elves slaves.
One thing I've learned from my own experience is that antisemitism is way, way more common than people tend to believe, but also tends to be extremely well-hidden. People, even people who are pretty open about other forms of racism, don't tend to advertise that they are anti-Semites, but they often are.
And that's because antisemitism serves a very important role in the racist worldview. It solves an obvious problem with the logic of racism. If you believe that certain races are inferior, that they just aren't as smart or competent as people like you, then why are you losing? Because in the grand scheme of things racists are losing. Most people, I think, are still racist to one degree or another, but things like scientific racism (which everyone used to accept as basically unquestioned truth) have been basically banished from serious research or discussion, and outspoken displays of racism are much, much less tolerated.
So who is responsible? Obviously, in a world where ideas were judged on merit racism should be winning, and that means someone has to be preventing that. There needs to be some active, countervailing force. It can't be the inferior races because, if they were winning, they wouldn't be inferior.
And this is where Jews come in. Persecution against Jews has never required them to be intellectually inferior, in fact many racial stereotypes hinge on the idea that Jews are unusually intelligent and cunning. The imagined inferiority of Jews is moral and spiritual, not intellectual. Jews are imagined to be capable of infiltrating and manipulating societies in a way inferior races wouldn't be. Jews, of course, would want to discredit the idea of racism, they would want inferior races and superior races to mix, because they stand to benefit from the weakening of those superior races through race-mixing. They provide the role of an intelligent, organized antagonist.
Anti-semitism explains why white people don't seem to work in what racists see as their own interests. Without it, the whole theory starts to fall apart.
This was post #454, roughly half this thread ago. Hrm.
Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations.
I never said nor implied. I do know about the rest that you are talking about. Still an issue with the ones that are racist.
I know.
Newsflash, those cultures enslaved other humans. We know how humans work, because we're all humans, and it's safe to assume that our human relatives didn't like being enslaved either.
House elves (yes, I'm sick of repeating this) aren't human. So it's silly to transplant human concepts of slavery onto a species that doesn't consider their situation as such.
Also, as for Ron and Hagrid, while they do have blindspots, first, they're not unopposed to prejudice (see their reactions to Malfoy's mudblood insult), second, they're arguably beside the point. Hermione tries to 'free' the house elves, regardless of their own wishes. After the series proper, she does go onto help house elves, but in a way that's respectful to what they actually want. I'm not sure how that's a bad moral.
And how many house elves are constantly trying to escape? How many house elves willingly take the 'outs' Hermione gives them?
If she's "right," then the book is presenting us false information.
Well that's incredibly arrogant.
"You, Frieza, get off the screen now and stop talking about videogames! I...what? No, I don't care what you have to say, I don't care if reading/gaming makes you happy, I know better than you! Go! Scat!"
Yes, there are real-world analogues to what you've said (e.g. domestic abuse), but imagine applying this to, I dunno, religion. Frankly, I think people are wasting their lives believing in supernatural entities, but if your Sunday mass (or equivalent) makes you happy, if it gives you a sense of community, if you derive genuine fulfillment from your belief and aren't hurting others, why should I stop you from doing that?
That's a contortion though.
Well first, none of what you've cited is what the books can be said to support - any attempts at murder, rape, genocide, are framed as bad.
Second, "slavery is right." Again, you're transplating real-world slavery into a situation with a fictional species that don't consider it slavery. By this logic, Pokemon is slavery, because regardless of how a pokemon might feel about the situation (pokemon can develop bonds with their trainers, and working with trainers makes them develop faster than if they were on their own), regardless of any in-universe context, the situation is bad.
If the house elves were humans, then yes, maybe you'd have a leg to stand on, but they're not, and operate by their own principles and values, so really, you're being just like Hermione in this case.
Then we're at a crossroads, because everything you've said is a convolution of what's actually presented.
Yes, we see individual house elves where all of this applies, and see examples of house elves where this isn't the case as well.
By the end of the series, we can safely conclude that:
1: House elves are happy in their station, in general, and don't desire freedom.
2: Because of their nature, this leaves them open to the whims of their masters.
3: As what actually happens, the best thing to do is to respect the wishes of the house elves, while also giving them as many safeguards as possible.
Contradicts what? We see Dobby in Book 2, see the house elves in book 4, where it's established that Dobby is the exception. Where the potential for abuse is there (see Winky), but as a whole, the house elves are fine, and don't want Hermione interfering with them.
How is any of what I just said a contradiction?
Really? You're playing semantics?
Fine.
1: Far as I'm concerned, all religious texts are fiction.
2: People have used religious texts to justify attrocities.
3: The people doing so believe the religious texts to be true.
4: In contrast, everyone on planet Earth knows that Harry Potter is fiction, that house elves aren't real, that slavery in the real world is bad.
You're basically coming at this from a similar perspective to those who claimed the HP books would turn kids into witches/wizards.
That's one hell of a stretch. Even if the house elves were meant to be a slavery analogy, that's really stretching things making it like the Underground Railroad. FFS, it's not even taking place in the same country.
And I disagree, the SPEW plot is an example of Hermione's arrogance getting the better of her.
Dude, I have no idea what the heck you're talking about. That, what? People intentionally misinterpret media to suit their own ends/views? Because if that's the case, you understand that's what the "house elves are slaves" argument is doing, right?
Under normal circumstances? Slavery.
What would you call a situation where a species doesn't consider the situation slavery, where they find fulfillment in their circumstances, and where they resist any attempts to change their circumstances?
Yes, you're right - if Hedwig demanded freedom, Harry should free her. If Dobby wanted freedom, the Malfoys should have freed him.
However, by your own statement, house elves can think for themselves, are sapient, and are, conspicuously, not doing anything like what you've not described. If people aren't asking for X, and reject my offers of X, why should I force X on them?
And the slaves in Gone with the Wind were portrayed as happy as well. Just because an author writes something does not make it good.
And that somehow makes exploitation okay? As long as the being you're exploiting isn't a human?
I've already cited the real-world analogues and parallels. The whole slavery argument requires ignoring those parallels, or at least, insisting that those parallels are academic.
That's highly debatable. It's like saying "slavery is an analogy for slavery" or "war is an analogy for war," or more broadly, anything in a work of fiction is, by definition, an analogy for something in the real world.
But again, let's look at the house elves. For them to be an analogy, you'd have to find a group of humans who liked being in servitude, and ignored all attempts to free themselves. I can't think of anything where that's the case.
Um, I'm assuming this is the royal "we," because no, I don't see the Morning War as a parallel for slavery. The Morning War is a parallel to concerns about AI overcoming their creators, which is a trope as old as time, but a trope nonetheless, and one that's important to the Mass Effect trilogy as a whole considering that the entire in-universe crux for the Reapers is the belief that synthetics will always turn on organics.
Can you use an AI uprising as an analogy for slavery? Absolutely. Is an AI uprising an analogy for slavery ipso facto? Hell no.
All true, but "slavery" doesn't really fit the house elves either. It's like saying ants are "enslaved" to their queen, for instance.
I already knew what I was talking about. I don't know what you are going on about. I think we're both went to the same conclusion, just said it in different ways. Leave it at that, cuz I am not doing this back and forth again.
Well, actually .... [we've got a thread for that somewhere]
What you did write could be taken otherwise but no blood, no foul.
Everyone should have an issue with racists regardless of what subculture they identify with.