Tag: interesting

containthisoritwillgetgay:

You know, as much as I do love Hagrid sometimes I lay back and I think about how he bought Multiple Large Magical Creatures with a tendency to lash out when offended to a group of cocky 13 year old children when he wouldn’t be able to handle them all, he didn’t hammer in the dangers enough, didn’t keep an eye on them enough, and then proceeded to give the most temptemental and prideful one of the creatures to the child he knows has a tendency to be a little fuck.

And then when that child was injured by this magical creature that, whilst beautiful and helpful to those who know how to handle him, is portentously dangerous when handled wrong ( especially by children seeing it for the literal first time ) it is the child who is in the wrong for going to their father about a very real danger.

What I’m saying is that whilst yes Malfoy is a little shit, in this instance he was well, well within his right to demand something be done about buckbeak who harmed a child.

As a teacher hagrid has a duty of care, he endangered these students by letting them handle potentially dangerous beasts with no prior education or knowledge of them and without any safety precautions.

What I’m saying is, whilst Draco can be a little fuck, in this specific instance he was right to go to an adult about a very real danger after being genuinely hurt and you all treated him like a disgusting person for it.

Gotta concede the point on this. Keep in mind, Draco was TAKING Care of Magical Creatures despite hating the professor (canon says that you can drop classes), so he most likely wanted to do well in the class. And he got attacked by something that could have killed him. He was a little shit, but no child deserves that.

load-bearing

theunitofcaring:

Sometimes people hit a place in their life where things are going really well. They like their job and are able to be productive at it; they have energy after work to pursue the relationships and activities they enjoy; they’re taking good care of themselves and rarely get sick or have flareups of their chronic health problems; stuff is basically working out. Then a small thing about their routine changes and suddenly they’re barely keeping their head above water.

(This happens to me all the time; it’s approximately my dominant experience of working full-time.)

I think one thing that’s going on here is that there are a bunch of small parts of our daily routine which are doing really important work for our wellbeing. Our commute involves a ten-minute walk along the waterfront and the walking and fresh air are great for our wellbeing (or, alternately, our commute involves no walking and this makes it way more frictionless because walking sucks for us). Our water heater is really good and so we can take half-hour hot showers, which are a critical part of our decompression/recovery time. We sit with our back to the wall so we don’t have to worry about looking productive at work as long as the work all gets done. The store down the street is open really late so late runs for groceries are possible. Our roommate is a chef and so the kitchen is always clean and well-stocked.

It’s useful to think of these things as load-bearing. They’re not just nice – they’re part of your mental architecture, they’re part of what you’re using to thrive. And when they change, life can abruptly get much harder or sometimes just collapse on you entirely. And this is usually unexpected, because it’s hard to notice which parts of your environment and routine are load bearing. I often only notice in hindsight. “Oh,” I say to myself after months of fatigue, “having my own private space was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a scary drop in weight, “being able to keep nutrition shakes next to my bed and drink them in bed was load-bearing.” “Oh,” after a sudden struggle to maintain my work productivity, “a quiet corner with my back to the wall was load-bearing.”

When you know what’s important to you, you can fight for it, or at least be equipped to notice right away if it goes and some of your ability to thrive goes with it. When you don’t, or when you’re thinking of all these things as ‘nice things about my life’ rather than ‘load-bearing bits of my flourishing as a person’, you’re not likely to notice the strain created when they vanish until you’re really, really hurting. 

dancinbutterfly:

ashacrone replied to your post “Finally saw Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and my takeaways…”

What bugs the fuck out of me is the worldbuilding and the lack of rules concerning magic, along with no one, absolutely NO ONE, calling out that they have effectively mind-raped an entire city. I got to see up close and personal what happening to my grandmother when she had dementia- loss of memory is loss of self. And it happened without their permission. I hate, HATE how muggles are treated in this universe.

I’m going to devil’s advocate at you for a second. As a member of a persecuted community that a MUCH LARGER community thinks is DANGEROUS and tries, repeatedly, to murder individuals of, if not outright destroy – I get where the Wizarding World is coming from and I gotta say, I can’t argue with them. Here’s why:

So, the canon states that people seen as magical(whether that suspicion is founded or not) kinda have a history of being treated fucking horribly by non-magical people, it’s mentioned in the Harry Potter series and apparently is a bigger deal in the US because no matter how big the spell – 5 BILLION non-magical people with bombs and guns and mass force really can take on a tens or hundreds of thousands of magical people. As Jew, I’m a member of a group of people that has likewise been hunted and I get it. I for one am tired of being expelled. And imprisoned. And robbed. And tortured. And systematically raped. And having my relics and homes and buildings and businesses and possessions and texts destroyed. And tortured. And murdered.

So. If Jewish people could do what wizards can do, and hide so totally – make our homes and businesses and world completely invisible and inaccessible to gentiles? Holy shit. I would do it in a HEARTBEAT. If I could take away the memory of every gentile that Jews existed? I fucking would. If I could erase us from existence – and only be known to other Jews unless we CHOSE to be known to select members of society who could be trusted to keep us a secret? I fucking would. Because it’s exhausting and it’s terrifying – to know that people think that you are going to destroy their way of life and are therefore a threat (even if you’re really not). 

I agree that there should be regulations on what spells can be cast on non-magical people but in terms of the memory thing? Nope. I get it. And it seems like there ARE regulations. They aren’t allowed to wipe people’s whole lives. They aren’t allowed to change people’s identities. Shit like what happened with Neville’s parents are a fucking crime. But taking away a small period of time? Dude if you say you remember specifics of entire years of your life I’m going to call you a liar because the brain doesn’t work that way to begin with. The oblivate spell as used appropriately (and within the norms that I can see – and granted it has been a LONG TIME since I read the books – so I’m just going with what I can remember and FB&WTFT) takes away an incident, a few days, a few hours when an incident occurs that they weren’t given express consent by a wizard to experience (except with Kowalski which was a point that America is WRONG about the way they treat non-magical people who CAN be trusted by making it a blanket policy) and which therefore violates the regulation of secrecy as a safety measure.

While I get where you are coming from in terms of things like Harry casting that spell on Vernon’s sister needing regulation – things like the short-term memory erasure do not bother me. I don’t care about what is basically the same as an MiB neuralizer because the LIVES of entire community of men, women, children both human and creature, is infinitely more valuable than a few hours or days of time from the memory of millions. I approve. I think it’s smart. I think it’s awesome. I want to steal that power and take it as my own. I envy the safety they have with the fire of a thousand suns and honestly, I don’t give a fuck about how it was done. I really really don’t.

If taking away the memory if a few days or hours would save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives in our world? Like making China forget Tibet and Taiwan was there so that they could live independent, free, and un-harassed for example? Or Russia forget about the Ukraine and the Crimea? Or preventing the devastation of any indigenous community by Europeans ever? I think I’d be in favor of it too. 

I just hope I live in a tiny cabin in the middle of nowhere by then.

gearsmoke:

It drives me nutty how so many people think that poverty in North America is due to laziness and that -anyone- can make a good living if they just ‘work hard’ and ‘get a job’.  And that the harder you have to work to make ends meet, the more morally good you are???  Wah?

I guess it’s got a sort of simplistic childlike logic to it – if not putting any effort into taking care of yourself is bad, then putting the MOST effort is good!  But this kind of thinking is what’s leading to people in the lower and middle class being worked -literally to death- and thinking they’re noble for allowing it.

I read a report done by some people who know more about this sort of thing than I do, people with letters after their names, who, I admit, I do not know for a -fact- are correct, but they made a fairly convincing case for the idea that the workforce in our society is being made to produce 3-4 times as much of -everything- as we require -and wasting a good amount of it, too – solely to feed corporate greed.

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again:  The stock market is the ruination of our civilization.  From the outside it seems like an alright idea, especially in the cases of startup investments – but once a company is established, it’s not enough merely to turn a profit – they have to grow, and keep growing, and fulfill promises on projected growth.  ‘Growth’ in this case meaning a larger profit margin each year.  And after the natural growth of the business levels off, the only way to keep growing is via exploitation.
Overworking their employees, cutbacks, cutting down the quality and/or quantity of the product or service, manipulation tactics, dishonesty toward the customers… so you just accept the inflated prices, the shoddier work, the lackluster customer service, it’s just how things are.  And moreover, there’s no better alternative.

But this system cannot persist.  Eventually it’ll reach a critical point, and the failure will be massive.  I hope I survive it.

@wikdsushi