I would care about aliens that I could get along with.
Do you not care about humans you can't get along with?
Think about what would happen if Dumbledore (strong wizard, has all sorts of authority) cast Finite Incantatem on his desk, and the spell doesn’t include a “do what I mean, not what I say” security feature.
There must be thousands of spells in that general area. Even if for some reason the desk wouldn’t be disenchanted (which probably it wouldn’t, else casting Finite on someone holding a filled magic pouch or near a magic trunk would be very dangerous, and someone would have mentioned that in MoR), it still probably has dozens if not hundreds of other spells, and can thousands of magic items due to recursive space folding. Even if many of those are protected against Finite, they are so many in total that it’s very likely that a lot aren’t.
Now that I think about it, casting Finite on something you don’t know about sounds just as dangerous as casting a spell you don’t know what it does. (Basically, Finite means casting the reverse of a spell.) Very exploitable unless something automagically checks for corner cases.)
Do we have an example of Finite being used to cancel anything other than transfigurations or first-year level spells (Somnium)?
Upon reading these past few chapters I think that Harry has invented a spell to download Hermiones brain state just before her death and this is what we are seeing with the whole soul explosion when she dies.
We have never seen this happen so far at all in HPMOR, and I would think if this is a common thing then when Dumbledore is trying to prove to Harry the existence of souls this is the evidence he would use to try and prove it to him. The fact that he did not and this only seems to have happened during this one particular incident suggests to me there is something going on.
Also it's been completely sidestepped afterwards Harry doesn't ask dumble does anything about it this chapter when speaking about Godric's sword which he would do if he didnt know anything about it. Dumbledore doesn't mention it because he doesn't know as he appeared after and he sent back instruments in time he didnt go himself so they didnt pick it up.
And when Harry is sitting outside the room with Hermione in there is a big paragraph where he ponders why magic works the way it does and why it requires a wand. This feels really out of place and I think is there to show Harry's thought process in making this discovery.
It's not unique, and Dumbledore did bring it up, actually:
"How can you not believe it? " said the Headmaster, looking completely flabbergasted. "Harry, you're a wizard! You've seen ghosts! "
"Ghosts," Harry said, his voice flat. "You mean those things like portraits, stored memories and behaviors with no awareness or life, accidentally impressed into the surrounding material by the burst of magic that accompanies the violent death of a wizard -"
[...]
I asked Hermione and she said that they were just afterimages, burned into the stone of the castle by the death of a wizard, like the silhouettes left on the walls of Hiroshima.
Compare:
For a moment it seemed like the outpouring of magic might hold, take root in the castle's stone; but then the outpouring ended and the magic faded, her body stopped moving and all motion halted as Hermione Jean Granger ceased to exist -
It is notoriously difficult to trail someone who is wearing the True Cloak of Invisibility, with added anti-detection charms because apparently the Deathly Hallow just wasn't enough.
I read that as being an excuse for the differences between Harry's Cloak and the one Neville's familiar with.
Well, I think Lucius probably made sure a long time ago that everyone knew what Dumbledore (supposedly) said to him. I didn't get the feeling from that scene in the Wizengamot that Dumbledore-killing-Narcissa was any kind of a secret idea that people were just then finding out about.
This does rather change my view of some of the peripheral details, though. Previously, one possibility I pictured was Dumbledore restraining Amelia from her vengeance until Aberforth died, then relenting. I knew Amelia Bones wasn't in the OotP, and I knew she felt distaste at Dumbledore's softness, but somehow I never completely drew the conclusion that she wouldn't care one whit about what Dumbledore said or thought, and therefore probably wouldn't have cared if he had tried to restrain her.
Perhaps more likely, then, is the other way I pictured it: that Amelia couldn't get to Narcissa by herself, and after Aberforth's death, Dumbledore actively approached Amelia and said "Okay, I'm ready to help. I'll be the ward-breaker, you do the deed."
Whoops, looks like you're right, the accusation was public knowledge:
Father's own allies didn't believe him after Dumbledore just denied everything in public
This was my thought as well, but Harry would have had to be unreasonably sure that Dumbledore didn't have some kind of "de-Transfigure everything in sight" spell to use on him.
It's called Finite Incantatem.
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Amelia Bones isn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix.
Emmeline wasn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix any more, they had disbanded after the end of the last war. And during the war, she'd known, they'd all known, that Director Crouch had quietly approved of their off-the-books battle.
Director Bones wasn't Crouch.
[...]
"That depends," Amelia said in a hard voice. "Are you here to help us catch criminals, or to protect them from the consequences of their actions?" Are you going to try to stop the killer of my brother from getting her well-deserved Kiss, old meddler? From what Amelia heard, Dumbledore had gotten smarter toward the end of the war, mostly due to Mad-Eye's nonstop nagging; but had relapsed into his foolish mercies the instant Voldemort's body was found.
One wonders why she would even know about it at all, if she had nothing to do with it.
A nice touch when Harry is fighting the troll: When he engages his killer instinct, from then on the troll is only referred to as the "enemy", in one case even with a capital E.
Interestingly, while Harry explicitly mentions "censors off" (concerning no more screening off of potential killing methods), that mode of thinking also engages other filters, dehumanizing (de-troll-izing) the creature he's fighting and only seeing it as "the Enemy".
Another nice touch: Quirrell's thoughts do the same.
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The Potters did not know that Voldemort was after their son specifically, only that they were in general danger from the Death Eaters by being opposed to them and also active members in the Order of the Phoenix. At this time, they were hidden by the fidelius charm, which is some pretty serious magics: "As long as the Secret Keeper refused to speak, You-Know-Who could search the village where Lily and James were staying for years and never find them, not even if he had his nose pressed against their sitting room window!"
Voldemort only went for their son after Snape told him of Trelawney's prophecy, which was immediately after it was spoken, making very little time for McGonagall to inform Dumbledore and for the OotP to react. (Even supposing they could decipher the prophecy instantly.)
Also, the note from Dumbledore specifically says that James left the cloak in Dumbledore's possession before he died. (Maybe to prevent it from getting into Voldemort's hands.) This explains why the cloak was not available when then Potters needed it the most.
Really late reply, but: the prophecy was made before Harry was born; Voldemort and Dumbledore found out about it at roughly the same time (almost immediately); and the attack came when Harry was fifteen months old. They knew about the prophecy while they were in hiding.