Also, if you didn't realize by book 7 that wizarding Britain is actually a pretty terrible place, you weren't paying much attention.
Wizarding Britain is a pretty terrible place - my contention is that I don't think Rowling realised how terrible it was when she was writing the books.
What's wrong with disintegrating kittens? They're not much different than chickens, and we slaughter a billion of those(literally) every week.
Actually, as an ethical vegetarian, I find plenty wrong with that too. But that's besides the point. The point is that, in our world, the slaughtering is still done
The average teenager does not kill animals unless they've been brought up on a farm or in a context in which certain species have been firmly categorised as pests/vermin in their minds. They especially do not kill animals they categorise as pets unless they are psychologically disturbed.
Here we have a classroom of average teenagers who unhesitatingly follow instructions to kill kittens, in spite of the fact that some of them have pet cats and that there is no higher purpose for doing so (the goal is apparently to be able to Vanish higher-level animals still). Not one of them is described as objecting or showing distress (which even Milgram's subjects did).
There is no way that any citizen of a modern democracy could have written the courtroom scene in Order of the Phoenix and thought well of the society that produced it. That's when I started to really see how rotten the country was. Similarly, look at the utter incompetence of the politicians - they're worse than ours, and that takes some doing. There's enough other examples scattered throughout that I cannot believe that they were placed there unconsciously.
And yes, slaughtering is done in slaughterhouses...because it's messy, smelly, and requires some pr...
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: