The first four books are decent kids literature. “Monster of the week” stories are fun. Hogwarts is very appealing for escapism, the castle and the food are the kinds of place your imagination (and the marketing) can fill in where Joanne can’t.

I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t have a great fucking time when I went to Universal (this was pre COVID, I think she was a bit anti trans then but someone else was paying anyway). I would love to be a Ravenclaw - I can picture myself making a case that I should be allowed in the Restricted Section of the library, or borrowing a Time Turner to take multiple classes at once, or just the feasts (the unofficial cookbook can’t make it real, unfortunately. Most butter beers are fine enough.)

It works when we aren’t thinking too hard. When the characters can be stock, never grow and everything resets at the end. (I started the series with Book 2 as a child, and it had zero impact.)

She just can’t think about larger picture things. Her worldbuilding is ad hoc, based on whatever seems fun at the time. This is very fun when it’s a series of loosely connected one offs. It just doesn’t cohere as a story though.

It’s like The Boxcar Children or Junie B Jones or whatever the one that has like the time traveling tree house or whatever.

Like, I remember being excited to get Order of the Phoenix. I was the kind of Harry Potter fan that showed up to the last two book’s midnight releases, as well as the film. I have been “sorted” in costume. I don’t even feel cringe about this because it was fun. The fandom has made the series much cooler than it actually was. (HP famously got kids to read; playing Quidditch in gym was probably the only moment that class was not pure dhukka for me.) I say on this to make the point that my critique of her writing goes with a general appreciation of the series.

She’s a DM with ADHD. What the story is doing doesn’t matter, we’re just vibing. Some of the ideas are so fun and compelling that we’re bound to explore them further (there is some really compelling Left Behind fan fiction.)

The last three books just drop off in quality immensely. I wonder if some aspects of Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows are due to “George Lucas” syndrome - the editor can’t say “no” anymore. You can tell she’s trying very hard to make it seem like it was planned - “oh Tom Riddle’s diary was a part of this! Time to come up with a bunch of other McGuffins!”

Harry Potter doesn’t have any overarching narrative in the same ways that Warrior Cats, The Dark is Rising, Deltora Quest, or The Hunger Games series do. I guess you can include Chronicles of Narnia but that “overarching narrative” is literally a metaphor for C S Lewis’s beliefs about world history and religion. (A Horse and His Boy is a book I loathe the the point I seldom engage with the series.)

Voldemort is just a poorly characterized villain. The narrative falls apart because there’s no reason for him to do what he does. This is fine in silly “monster of the week” stories, not overarching narrative stories.

The motivation in the first four books is that he wants to live forever, because everyone kinda does, but he’ll do fucked up and evil things to get there. We can have stories where he is trying to come back but isn’t really a threat, everything is very low stakes.

The last three books try to steer us into the “overarching narrative” course. The big reveals as far as his true character tell us he’s cursed and evil essentially because he’s a mixed race baby, conceived in a rape by someone analogous to “white trash.” He’s insecure of his mixed race status, so he creates a fascistic cult and wants to institute a supremacist authoritarian government.

That is a very fascinating and interesting character, but unfortunately Joanne does not understand race at the level of complexity writing that kind of villain requires. She also does not have the kind of grace and empathy for human beings that are required to write such stories. It’s also not what the series was, so the tonal shift comes across as awkward as the time I used a racial slur in a short fiction piece in high school to come across as a serious author.

And when you compare her work to the standards of adult writing: she had to drop the pseudonym on her mystery novel when it wasn’t selling well. Remember how King did that with some pretty good work? Wonder where she got the idea from. She’s not a fan (anymore…)

She’s not a good writer, and I am saying this as someone who likes* the series.

She’s not really a great author? She’s an okay children’s author, who a lot of us have a tie to because we grew up with the series - but a great deal was tied into shred marketing. Scholastic and Warner Bros have a good deal of responsibility in making the series what it was.

The Deadly Hallows and the Horcruxes are both the most massive ass pulls in history. Cut most of books 5, 6, and 7; make the prophecy true but applicable to Neville; have Harry die at the end. Infinitely better.

I am fairly confident (as are my therapists) that I am somewhere on some sort of spectrum. However, when I looked at the process of getting a formal diagnosis, it was several thousand dollars which would not be covered by insurance and would be a full year at least on a waiting list. (I believe they also want to talk to your family…)

The average age of diagnosis for AFAB folks is around 30. Clinicians are not trained in recognizing the way that ASD presents in girls, and are to this day often taught that it doesn’t really present in girls at all (a current gig is tutoring intro psych - this was in a students textbook!)

Self-diagnosis is problematic, but you also must acknowledge that accessing resources to even get evaluated are often completely out of reach.

Insurance as a whole should be a sort of “public union” thing. No profit motive, everyone who participates in something like driving has to pay some fee for insurance, maybe along with things like registration. Ideally along with massive improvements to public transit.

The concept of private insurance under capitalism seems at odds with itself. You have to pay out a good chunk less then you take in to turn a profit, and the best way to do that is be useless and fuck over your customers. (With health - Cigna was supposed to cover my top surgery. Pay for it up front be reimbursed reimbursed later. Then, later, it turns out that my employer specifically included a rider that excluded it. I’ve talked elsewhere about how I’ve paid CareCredit back.)

I don’t know if we should nationalize auto insurance without doing health insurance first though. Would the government be negotiating deals with mechanics? I think hospitals have structures that are easier to unionize and generally smarter/kinder folks than the general population. Mechanics tend to skew the type that’d get upset over navigating fender bender payouts with Uncle Sam, probably going to be harder to get to understand that their labor rights are good things.

Yeah - the real freaks left because moot dated like Brianna Wu or something stupid and weird like that. 8chan was the place for a bit.

4chan is owned by an anime figma company at the moment - i think Nendroid?

I think the argument is more about the impact on others. If you aren’t wearing a seatbelt, you become a projectile that can harm others - both in your car and outside of your car.

In general, I agree that ideologically it’s a little uncomfortable to dictate personal choices, but when it comes to road safety I think the government has reasonable grounds to enforce certain expectations (same with things like insurance.)

It is uncomfortable to give police more pretenses to stop people but road safety perhaps is one of those things we could have a hypothetical “good police force” take care of.

Required as of 2015 looks like.

“There are 30,000 people that have been killed with seat belts, where they’ve gotten into accidents, the cars were on fire, they’ve been knocked out, they haven’t been able to get out of the vehicle,” he said. “My point is, even if the majority of people are saved, why do we keep forcing people to do things that they feel it’s their own individual right to make a decision?”

Rhode Island state rep, 2011.

I’m in a comment war with a nicotine denialist on here now!

In the 90s, there were still tons of people angry about seat belt laws. It’s every American’s God Given Right to fly out of the windshield and probably kill someone else.

No, it’s his wife, who has collaborated in a bunch of his fucked up endeavors, likely including helping with sex trafficking.

I think most humans are at least somewhat bisexual. I think for some homophobes (and transphobes), it’s “I have these feelings too, I’m just superior because I’m suppressing it” - at least internally.

“Spiritual warfare” is “I thought about what sucking that guy’s dick would be like for a few seconds, and was able to ‘win’ by not submitting.”

I’m not really seeing connections being drawn here at all, other than the reflexive USSR bashing that happens any time Soviet history comes up?

Is the argument the Spartans and the Soviets were similar in that they were both bad? Can we pick eras we want to compare at least?

Might as well dump some A1 on every IEP in a state on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon line…. (and lord knows that ‘AI’ is already involved)

I really don’t think that works. Basically any human system of government is going to group people and have hierarchies. Same with mass movements.

Sparta was basically an aristocratic oligarchy/monarchy. This series of articles is an amazing breakdown of the history of Sparta and the way its government was organized.

When we talk about “Spartans” we are referring to a very small group of men who held held a form of aristocratic status. Sparta was a slave society - the vast majority of those living in Sparta were helots, slaves, who had little rights or recourse against the Spartans.

I don’t think there was really anything analogous to a soviet. Society wasn’t really organized around economic production. I don’t think you can really compare the education systems either - Spartans had little internet in creating poets, artists or engineers.

Really, the goal of the Spartans was to be lazy aristocratic fucks who played soldier while the helots did the work. They were pretty shit at it too. But all about warriors and honor, “return with your shield or on it” at least in theory. Terrorize the helots every once in a while to keep them in line and make your dick feel big.

The goal of the Soviet project was rapid industrial development to set up the conditions necessary for the abolishment of the state/“true communism.” Stalin was an autocratic fuckwad that quickly gave up on anything resembling values in part because Jews and gays are icky, and steered that project straight into a wall.

I guess one commonality is the the USSR was one of the first states to legalize same sex intercourse, and the Spartans were all about mansex.

Can we play Warrior Cats instead? I get to be Fireheart, you have to be Tigerclaw.

God it was so fucking obnoxious to play Power Rangers in kindergarten. “You’re a giiiiirrrrlll, so you have to be the pink ranger.”

Also the real world attempt at Spartan values (in philosophy) was the USSR

???

You are going to really have to expand on the argument there.

Remember when Sean Spicer claimed that the Nazis didn’t use chemical weapons? Or how conspicuously absent Jews were from the 2017 International Holocaust Remembrance Day statement?

Holocaust denial is a tricky beast too. The biggest proponents of it don’t believe what they are saying - it works as their “Big Lie.” Once someone swallows the idea that millions didn’t die, for some reason it’s easy to get them to believe that millions must die. (And that specific phrase is a meme for the hardcore - “millions must die.”)

But in “mainstream” politics they’re duplicitous fuckers that are just blowing on the dog whistles, trying to keep the plausible deniability.

Google automatically gives me ai search results that are piss poor.

And these results are taken at face value by a shocking number of people. I’ve gotten into niche academic arguments where someone just copy and pasted the AIs completed hallucinated response as “evidence.”

I experimented with using AI to generate basic quizzes for students on concepts like atomic theory or conservation of energy, but maybe 2/20 questions it came up with were any form of accurate/useful. Even when it’s not making shit up entirely, the information is so shallow as to be useless.

The horrible cruelty regarding Cambodia you say?