It's possible that this perception of undifferentiated gossiping masses may be affected by bias in what the named characters listen to. The male population of Hogwarts might well seem like an undifferentiated Quidditch-loving mass if it weren't for Harry's tendency to fling Quieting Charms around when he wants to get out of conversation. (And, as a more literary reason, the girls' gossip is often plot-relevant whereas Quidditch jabberings wouldn't be.)
So, by this law, Harry and the Weasley twins disturbing Neville outside the Hogwarts Express on the first day was the objectively right thing to do?
It's possible that Quirrell's ongoing issues with fine motor control have been with him for long enough to become known. He's not going to be able to make the Philosopher's Stone that way.
Cross-posted from the TVTropes forum. (There's more to the post there, but I didn't think it all needed to be repeated.)
Why would this important? Well, obviously, this memory represents a huge turning point for Harry. This is when he started to turn against Dumbledore. It suggested to him an interpretation of his parents' death in which Dumbledore deliberately set them up for it. This interpretation of events is itself a bit suspect; Harry thinks (Ch. 46) he came to it sometime during or immediately after the period of his Dementation, but he can't quite p...
Remember that, in canon, Voldemort does indeed take over the Ministry with a few Imperiuses and a few assassinations.
I think this is more Eliezer once again obliquely making fun of how shallowly Rowling imagined her own universe, that its government could be broken by essentially any individual wizard of moderate power.
Remember that Harry had also learned that Quirrell had successfully used Avada Kedavra on two Death Eaters. Moody says that it isn't hard to cast AK for a second time, and Harry already knows that this time would have been at least Quirrell's third.
It's not actually required that children say it; it would, in fact, violate the Constitution to mandate political speech, even from students. But it's expected that students recite the Pledge, and most do.
Replies are not necessarily as good or worse than their parents. A lot of the Sequences on this site might be construed as "replies" to more mainstream statistics, philosophy, or science, and yet I would certainly hope that the Sequence entries would get more upvotes than their parents.
Perhaps a way to make this work would be to automatically unhide downstream comments whose upvotes are greater than the sum of the downvotes of all its negative-karma parents? In that way, a good (ie. high-karma) discussion can't be killed by a low-karma parent thread so easily.
They're not quite the same. The association fallacy takes the form "A is a C and A is a B therefore all B are C," whereas this argument takes the form "A is arguably a B and Bs are often C therefore if I call A a B I can implicitly accuse it of being C without having to justify it." It's not a standard logical fallacy in the sense that it relies a lot on fuzzy, human definitions of things.
I'm not really loving the way you're inventing two Title-Cased Important Concepts in this version of the essay; you're title-casing both "The Worst Argument In The World" and "Guilt by Association." In general, I don't love the "filled with buzzwords" feel, and you definitely don't need the redundancy, but there are also some specific reasons why "Guilt by Association" is a poorer choice to title-case.
I could swallow title-casing just "The Worst Argument In The World" in the first version of the essay, as i...
So, according to Moldbug, political changes over time aren't due to different movements waxing and waning in power and support, but rather due to one grand movement changing its mind? He seems to be a shockingly vanilla conspiracy theorist, given what I've heard of him. I'm surprised that LWers put up with him...