farla: (Default)
[personal profile] farla
So I just checked.

Nazi Germany's worst instance of collective punishment listed at Wikipedia, where one German soldier was worth X civilians, is 642. Currently only about 1,200,000 civilian Iraqis are dead for 3,000 American dead on 9/11, a mere 400 to 1 ratio. Therefore, we're only about 2/3 Nazi Germany's worst retaliation. As long as the number stays below 1,926,000, we're marginally better than Nazis! As long as you don't count Afghanistan, of course, that puts us over. Also, Nazi Germany started off at much lower ratios of 1:5, 1:10, etc, so on average they actually killed far fewer in reprisals. But if we ignore that, and Afghanistan, then we're currently not quite as bad as the actual Nazis.

Yay.

Date: 2008-02-11 04:23 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kddreams.livejournal.com
I'm sure that even if we the ratio increased for us, we'd never beat Stalin.

Date: 2008-02-12 02:41 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ember-reignited.livejournal.com
Speaking of Stalin, do you know if there's any truth at all to the rumors that he may be played by Johnny Depp in an upcoming film? Because that? Would be bad. Joseph Stalin Mary Sues are one of those things that just shouldn't exist in a rational universe. I'm afraid they might cause an implosion of some sort.

Date: 2008-02-13 04:58 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
...Should that be true, I would take it as proof of the existence of God.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Date: 2008-02-14 03:29 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ember-reignited.livejournal.com
I looked it up. Apparently, there is a guy making a Stalin movie who wants Depp to star in it. From what I can tell, though, he seems like a pretty small fish, and I think JD may be a bit "disinclined to acquiesce to his request."

The way things are headed, though, I'm beginning to think it's inevitable that someday an unfortunate casting decision will lead to the fandom woobification of one of history's great monsters. Fangirls have already demonstrated that they aren't turned off by mass murder (c.f. Sweeney fen, "But the judge was so mean to him!") or even ethnic cleansing (c.f. Slytherfen, "The Purebloods are more cultured than those Mudblood swine! They're just trying to protect their heritage!"). They also seem unable to grasp the difference between fiction and reality (c.f. Severus Snape, women married to). You could even make the argument that Slytherfen already are woobifying Hitler (c.f. JKR, complete lack of subtlety).

Date: 2008-02-14 04:07 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
In fairness with Harry Potter, I'm inclined to think that's mainly because she's such a bad writer.

Take the "for their own good" bit. We're supposed to hear this and be horrified, yet the main thrust of the books is "look how TOTALLY AWESOME it is to live in the wizarding world. Look how TOTALLY AWESOME the things they can do are. Look how TOTALLY AWESOME everything around them is. Look how TOTALLY AWESOME it would be just to eat their candy." Even if you're just a squib, your life is so much better than it is as a muggle.

And the thing is, on a very basic level, the wizards are superior. This isn't like someone saying black people are dumber than white and need protection. This is a matter of one person being able to call lightning out of a clear sky upon their enemies. It's a matter of being able to raise the dead as an army, to kill with a word, to heal broken bones in seconds and grow trees in minutes. The wizards are objectively superior to baseline humanity - they have an ability we lack. Honestly, the whole argument she made gives me flashbacks to that horrible D&D movie that ended with the main character making nonmages equal to mages and me screaming BUT THEY AREN'T EQUAL ONE CAN DO STUFF AND THE OTHER CAN DO ALL THAT STUFF AND ALSO MAGIC YOU CANNOT HAVE EQUALITY ONE IS OBJECTIVELY BETTER ONE IS EXACTLY THE SAME EXCEPT HAVING AN EXTRA ABILITY THAT IS WHAT SUPERIOR MEANS DO I HAVE TO SHOW YOU A STAT LAYOUT OR SOMETHING and anything that makes me remember that movie is clearly bad.

This isn't to say that there isn't a long streak of crazy there, but when you look at the mixed messages and how the stated intent (Wizard Hitler!) often conflicts with the basic situation (letting muggles into the wizarding world! Letting them know about dragons and unicorns and magical healing potions!)...Well, it's less a matter of siding with Wizard Hitler and more arguing that he wasn't Hitler and her borrowing of retoric was a cheap way to block actually considering his points.

There's also that the Slytherin are very much the underdogs even though she meant them to be privilaged. And the thing is, a lot of people want to side with the underdog, so when a writer so completely screws up the dynamic like this, a lot of kids seem themselves in Slytherin. And when she hamhandedly tries to paint the traits they identify with as the source of all evil, they react with denial, that it's not really that way but everything's slanted against them. It's worse with the series like this because a lot of people initially identified around book two or three, so they view the new information as an attack.

As to Snape's wives...I got nothing.

Date: 2008-02-14 04:34 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ember-reignited.livejournal.com
But Wizarding society is backwards in a lot of ways as well. The talking-head-in-the-fireplace thing is great and all, but they don't really have anything that can compare to the internet in terms of communication or distribution of information. And after the age of eleven, their children don't learn anything but magic – no reading, no writing, no math, no art, nothing. (I'll grant that science is a bit of a moot point.) Muggle Studies – which presumably includes the history, geography, and sociology of the vast majority of the world – is an elective. Rita Skeeters is a thoroughly terrible writer, but, given the state of the education system, she may very well be the best that the Wizarding world has to offer. And let's not even get into their government, especially the justice system...

Basically, in the event that Wizarding society were integrated into Muggle society, both sides would stand to have something to gain. The magical world isn't really in any position to be storming in and civilizing us savages.

(Besides, the Slytherfen I was speaking of were followers of Voldemort rather than Grindlewald. They seemed to be in favor of making Wizarding society more insular, not less. "Protecting their heritage" and all that.)

As to Snape's wives...I got nothing.

I think they have that effect on everyone.

Date: 2008-02-14 08:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
Oh, true. But if we're looking strictly at what Harry's supposedly learning in school, it's pretty clear that wizarding society flat out can't function. He's not learning the sort of skills that translate into a job. Consider - Molly is repeatedly shown using magic in a practical manner. Harry and co never learn any of these spells. And then there's the "no magic during break" which is nonsense when you see that magic is used even for mundane tasks - in that society, saying no magic over break is like telling people they can't use their hands during the summer and will have use their feet for everything. The ability to manually peel a potato is obsolete in their world - hell, they shouldn't even know how to do it, because anyone old enough to have children is too old to be banned from magic, and so has no reason to ever demonstrate it to their kids.

I mean, screw the internet. They don't even have a card catalog in their library. They deal with the idea bad people are using bad spells by hiding them so the good guys can't even identify it. They somehow live in between the normal world and have to travel through it to get from one place or another, yet have absolutely no experience with it - and despite a steady influx of muggleborns making up the majority of wizard children, people like Ron's father are the closest thing to experts on muggles.

Date: 2008-02-14 04:42 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ember-reignited.livejournal.com
Also note that while in some ways Wizards are objectively superior to Muggles, Purebloods are still in no way objectively superior to Muggleborns. Which is another thing Slytherfen don't seem to grasp.

Date: 2008-02-14 08:46 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
Actually, JK "Mixed messages are awesome" Rowling stated that magic ability is genetic, and the children of mixed parentage are more likely to be non-magic or weak. So the purebloods are actually right.

The praise Hermione gets, in other words, is basically like holding up a black person as a "credit to their race", the exception that proves the rule. Her message of egalitarianism is not that muggleborn aren't generally inferior, just that some that work very hard may be the equals of the average pureblood so they should get the chance to prove themselves.

Date: 2008-02-14 05:41 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] charizamdc.livejournal.com
To be fair, Wizards in HP have such weak destructive magic it's laughable. A curse that kills one guy is considered a huge deal, and a guy that was thought to have blown up himself and taken 20 with him was considered incredibly powerful for it.

All they have going for them is jedi mind tricks and healing, really. That and cultural retardation.

Date: 2008-02-14 08:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
Again, bad writing. As demonstrated in the sixth book, wizards are apparently incompetent at fighting. A bunch of school children, improvising with prank items and a potion normally used for partying, manage to singlehandedly render the entire existing population of adult wizards obsolete. Draco is the first person to think a powder that makes impenetrable darkness might be some sort of practical application? Ginny is the only one to realize that a potion bestowing super ultra unbeatable luck would maybe give you a bit of an edge in battle? I mean, you could use a portkey to mass teleport people into a volcano if you wanted to! They have invisible-to-muggles soul-sucking monsters they can sic on people! They can raise armies of the dead! They have fucking dragons! If they have trouble taking down twenty people, it's because they're morons.

Date: 2008-02-13 04:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
To my understanding, we already have. Stalin mainly killed his own people for personal power. He wasn't big on retaliating for deaths.

Date: 2008-02-13 01:17 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kddreams.livejournal.com
But Stalin killed more of his own people, than the Nazis killed Jews/non-Germans/etc. in WW2.

Date: 2008-02-13 06:04 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
Certainly, but this comparison was our willingness to punish other people as a group for the actions of individuals, and to have a scale where our lives are worth more than theirs - justifying a million dead with "Nine eleven!" is doing that.

Date: 2008-02-14 05:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] charizamdc.livejournal.com
The Purges were kind of kicked off by a murder that he may or may not have ordered himself (just as 9/11 may or may not have been ordered by Bush, or the Reichstag fire may or may not have been ordered by Hitler). it's the same principle - justifying slaughter by "retaliating" against the agressors. It was internal, of course, but still.



Date: 2008-02-14 09:00 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] farla.livejournal.com
The purges weren't indiscriminate, and they weren't justified by the idea that the lives of civilians in a particular country are worth more than the lives of civilians in occupied territory, which is really the key point. Stalin was acting unilaterally, and he was killing people as individuals, which is different from the military dropping white phosphorous bombs on neighborhoods because a soldier was killed in a car bomb.

E. E. Cummings says it better than I could.

Date: 2008-02-12 02:35 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] ember-reignited.livejournal.com
so rah-rah-rah democracy
let's all be thankful as hell
and bury the statue of liberty
(because it begins to smell)

Profile

farla: (Default)
farla

April 2022

S M T W T F S
     12
3456789
10111213 141516
17181920212223
24252627282930

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 29th, 2025 03:23 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios