Harry Potter and the Nuclear launch codes
Harry Potter and the Nuclear launch codes
Harry Potter and the Military Industrial Complex
129 comments
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Wizards would be rounded up and experimented on to try and find out how to make it an injection to make super soldiers. There's absolutely no way wizards and magical beings wouldn't end up in test tubes.
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Well this was oddly nostalgic for me to read. You immediately reminded of FFVI
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I had trouble believing Harry Potter as a kid. The whole house elf thing seemed unrealistic. Then when I grew up, I realised English people really are that racist.
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I remember seeing a meme of Harry Potter, but I can't find it anymore. Basically a conversation between Harry and dumbledore.
Harry says to dumbledore:
We are wizards, we could cure cancer. Fix world hunger and end all wars. Why we don't do it?
Dumbledore says:
Harry you forgot the most important reason: we are British
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Found it - https://existentialcomics.com/comic/391
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My father grew up poor in the East End of London and got a scholarship to go to the sort of upper-class school that Hogwarts emulates. Apart from being proud of the achievement of doing so well academically there, he had very little good to say about it, especially the upper-class snobbery and, yes, the bigotry (he was Jewish) from both the students and the teachers. He told me that every morning just before school prayers, the headmaster made a big deal about excusing all the "Jews, Catholics and other heathens" (or something to that effect) to humiliate all of those kids. One of his only friends at the time was another kid there on scholarship.
Ironically, he said his favorite teacher at the school was the school's chaplain, who was a really kind and funny man that didn't care that my father wasn't an Anglican, just that he was a smart kid.
My wife loves Harry Potter but I could never get into it after hearing all of my dad's stories about his school when he was growing up.
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Harry Potter and the poorly-constructed magic ruleset.
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Harry Potter and the Mysterious Ticking Sound
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Harry Potter and the infrared Laser designator spot
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It's a pipe bomb!
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Voldemort Voldemort
Oooooh Voldy Voldemort
Voldemort!
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Imagine the IRA, except they can fly, go invisible, or simply step into a phone booth or fireplace and vanish, and had an entire other dimension they could disappear into where they could be self sufficient.
Technology means nothing if you don't even know who you enemy is.
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Heck, they can mind control people, wipe their memories, or take a potion and assume their identity. It would be like fighting the Face Dancers from Dune if they were all trained in The Voice.
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That's one of many many plot holes in Harry Potter.
There's really no depth to the world building beyond, "What if British public schools taught magic?"
It doesn't make sense in any context beyond that because the author never considered it from any context beyond that. Whenever you run into some crazy crap in HP and wonder, "Why TF would anyone do it that way?" The answer is almost always, "Because that's how they do it in British public schools.
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It's also a bit odd that the spell so dangerous it was the absolute peak of the Dark Arts was a spell that just killed one person, and not even reliably. Where are the spells to call down meteors and cause earthquakes?
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Finding plot holes in Harry Potter is like shooting fish in a barrel. There's no challenge to it.
Rowling took "a wizard did it" as far as it can go.
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It being based off of public schools is a bit odd given that Hogwarts is a boarding school.
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That's just the name.
In the UK, "public school" just means that admissions are generally open to the public. They're still very expensive, are often boarding schools, and tend to have a lot of castles on their campuses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
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True enough, the capabilities of Magic haven’t been explored enough canonically to disprove that - but if the government learned of Magic, the first thing they’d do is subvert some wizards to their side, who might be able to counteract them - in many ways, it’s a battle of statecraft as it is of actual power.
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The greatest problem you would have fighting the Wizarding World is there is no easy way to tell who your enemy is. You'd be fighting an insurgency that can just vanish into thin air, with some pretty potent abilities.
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The reason Hermione is sworn to secrecy about the wizarding world is that they know if muggles found out there was a deep state, the revolution would be swift.
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It comes down to how powerful static wards are, and how much technology just gets corrupted by magic. The real power of the wizards is memory and time manipulation. Close range is definitely in favor of wizards, you can't surprise them unless they are intentionally careless. They can always go back a few hours and ambush you back. Chaos would ensue if they deleted every memory before 5 of a handful of leaders.
The tech killing thing is poorly defined, but hogwarts seems to disable electronic devices within a radius. If it's similar to an emp, it may have countermeasures, but it's hard to say they also work on magic. Operating within the radius of somewhere like that would be difficult.
There's also the animagus issue. Every dog, cat, bird, or bug is a potential spy or assassin that is practically undetectable.
The big question is can spells stop a large bomb/nuke. Even if they couldn't, it would be possible for wizards to escape the blast zone pretty easily, unless they couldn't detect the attack.
I think the big weakness would be sniper fire that may be fast enough to prevent reactions at the borders of wards.
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Ah yes, the good old solution of every contemporary fantasy world.
"modern technology just doesn't work"
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I mean, depending on the book, you have already accepted a number of ridiculous premises by real-world standards. It's surprising to me that "and by the way, it interferes with or can be used to disable various kinds of technology" is where you would decide to roll your eyes.
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Yes, Rowling was pretty lazy about the edges of world building that weren't directly related to her story.
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I feel like there are actually multiple counter-examples to this, but they're all much better realised worlds than Harry Potter
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More like: they know how modern technology works and have designed spells dedicated to preventing them from functioning.
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I cast ICBM
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of course muggles would win a war against wizarding folk, that is why they made the international statue of secrecy (also cause jkr is a hack who never wants to bother extrapolating from the consequences of her own worldbuilding)
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This is not clear cut. One teleport into a nuke silo + a brainwash spell = big problems
Edit (yes maybe one or two other brainwashes to get the proper codes forwarded)
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Who’s to say some governments aren’t keenly aware of the wizarding world and they have their own protections and wizards
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that'd be an issue, though nukes are pretty indiscriminate, and wizarding folk generally live among muggles, not in one isolated wizard country, which limits their usefulness. they can't exactly nuke london without destroying diagon alley, and vice versa. plus, you need to know your destination pretty well to apparate, so there'd need to be some more involved infiltration beforehand.
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If wizards were incapable of shielding against fast moving projectiles, they would have more spells dedicated to creating fast moving projectiles against their opponents.
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I think part of the subtext of the wizarding world is its parallels to British sensibility. You do things the way they've always been done because that's just the way of it. You don't come up with new spells, you rely on the tried and true spells that have been around for centuries.
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Absolutely every genius or inventor is tarred with the crazy eccentric brush
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I'm not much of a harry potter fan but wasn't that the whole point of being in hiding
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They were being killed by muggles left and right, and this was way before the invention of guns, so, yeah, they weren't winning that war in any case.
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That's a good point
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Actually, at some point in the books they talk about this, and somebody comments how Muggles seldom would actually catch a real witch or wizard. And if they did, the witch or wizard would cast a spell to shield themselves from the fire and pretend to be in pain.
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There’s a WP. Voldemort succeeds and then gets drunk on his own power and attempts to take over the muggle world (pure blood and all that) and he promptly gets his ass handed to him by the military.
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Nah he opens a portal that goes directly to Skid Row, he is instantly stabbed, robed and killed.
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Expecto AGM-114
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WP ?
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Writing Prompt
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As nonsensical as it is, giving the limit of the suspension of believe necessary to keep the world reasonably coherent, the wizard world has a solid grasp on the non-magical world while it's a given (literally a given, it makes no sense otherwise) that the people from the normal world have no idea magic exists, other than what is leaked and relegated to fairy tales (it's our world).
Wizards, their institution and governments, their own citizen are aware of what weapons are. Harry himself of course knows what a gun is and could potentially grab a number of them to prepare for war.
So it's an implied obvious implicit answer that even a limited mastery of magic vastly overpowers weapons. Which is obvious if you consider that in the magical world they are aware of the "laws" of physics AND the extra laws of magic.
They just know more about how the world works, how to inflict death and how to protect against harm.
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But IIRC that is never implied in the books and it is shown a couple of times that they know very little about technology and being very surprised by stuff like television. Which is very weird given that a non insignificant part of the wizards are from muggle families and lives among muggles.
Whilst I loved the books, as I read I always had this question in my mind about what if the wizards approached magic with a more scientific method and if they integrated with the scientific advancements of the human world.
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In that world, magic is a part of science because it's part of the natural world. It just hasn't been discovered by that world's scientists yet.
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Given that there are governmental departments for interacting with muggles, and qualifications taught at Hogwarts, my assumption was that it was like many other fields of study typical members of the public did know little, but plenty of research exists. How much does the typical person know about nuclear thermodynamics? Not much, and they don't really need to, but that doesn't mean all of humanity knows nothing. Hermione states pretty regularly that the spells protecting Hogwarts protect it from being discovered and prevent electrical communications from functioning.
I would think that, in a war with muggles, any wizard signing up to fight would be given training (by those few governmental and academic experts) in muggle warfare, weaponry, and relevant defensive spells needed for such a conflict.
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Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, though they do kinda turn him into a demigod
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Yeah, though it's not the best of movies, Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice did a really good job of treating that barrier between science and magic with a degree of reason and accountability. And in my own head canon those ideas are part of the Harry Potter universe and it's magic.
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and its* magic
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I mean they don’t really get taught anything about the outside world. I don’t remember seeing physics or social studies or any other “normal” class on Harry Potter’s class list.
My understanding is that they used wards to prevent technology from working near them.
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Obligatory Harry Potter With Guns trailer
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This made me realize two things about Harry Potter. 1: why do the wizards not simply use magic AND guns? 2: oculus repairo is a stupid fucking spell. You're telling me there's a specific spell just for repairing glasses? That's just bad writing.
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You've never watched a teleshopping channel, have you? Reality is what's bad writing.
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Harry got tired of drinking tea
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I dled the whole thing. It's awesome.
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Watching this on 1.5g of mushrooms was wild, would recommend
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I cast "A belly full of lead".
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Once the intestines are done digesting that, you better stay clear of the person's rear
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*most powerful spell kills upon striking
*is also clearly visible, dodgeable, and deflectable
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It's not the most powerful, it's the most illegal. It doesn't get used at all when Dumbledore and Voldemort duel, because they're both too powerful to lose to it.
What am I doing defending these books? I hate them! Alright, lemme mention that Cho Chang is a racist nonsense name to balance my defence out.
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I think the guns would help against wizards as much as they help against oppression. They are a helpful tool, for sure, but the ability to communicate and form plans is massively superior. And wizards, like modern tech giants, can impede that.
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Three words: Close Air Support.
1 GBU-39 would dust that steam engine wiping out whole generations of wizards. AIM-9 Sidewinders piloted by someone with confirmed kills for those weird skeleton death birds. Ezpz.
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First, they'd have to find the steam engine, though. Seems like it's hidden even from radar.
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I've never read the books, but I'm curious what the point even is of going to Hogwarts to hone your magic in secrecy. What is the magic applied to long-term? What do you do with it after you've graduated?
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They used it to create potions and spells that are equivalent to the medical industry, as well as the beauty industry, sports, frivolous things like that.
It's implied serious research goes on, but never really shown.
There's also wizard versions of cops, and government officials, naturally.
Magical knowledge replaces engineering and math as well. A civil engineer's building design equivalent would be a series of complicated spells put on a small building to make it a massive one inside.
Also in the books, Hogwarts was really only secret to the muggles, every wizard in Britain knows where it is.
But imagine all the high schoolers who complain "why do I need to learn algebra, I won't even need it in [job]. It's like that. Some won't need it, but it's still a useful skill.
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Lol I don't think it's ever really explained beyond "improve the lives of secret magic people." But I think a common trope of a lot of fantasy media with mages is that they get so caught up in the magic, they tend to ignore everything else going on around them, which often leads to either a clash with non-magic people, or a reluctant alliance.
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Ivy league College in a nutshell
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Haven't read the books either, but I have seen some of the movies.
Basically everything in the Wizarding world is done with magic. Travel, communication, cooking, dishes, the lot. You can't even enter the world without either magical knowledge or someone showing you how, even Harry Potter himself needed someone to guide him through.
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Started reading that once. I think it was fairly newish then, but I'm not sure. It irritated how they did my boy Ronald. Movie Ron was a box of hair with a broken wand, but book Ron was clever and inventive and generally very good at creative problem solving.
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Loved it. Way better than the original.
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I personally think it depends on exactly what the limits of Magic are - it could be anything from Muggles eradicating Wizards, to the opposite, all very plausibly. To me, it comes down to the power of modern surveillance vs. the power of notice-me-not + space-expansion + anti-detection spells. Plus there’s a whole bunch of other powerful spells and devices (time turners, for example), but the muggles have a while fuckton of gold and other valuables to recruit these capabilities to their side as well.
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I would also consider the logistics of war. There's a military saying: novices study tactics, experts study logistics.
How long would it take to train a wizard to get to that level vs. a muggle with a gun? It feels like the classic knight vs. armed peasant situation.
That plus being able to cut off food supplies or infrastructure- just saying the US military was able to take out sadams military capabilities faster than he could react.
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But the inverse also applies - there’s not much stopping wizards from portkeying/apparating into the Oval Office or the pentagon and magibombing them, or Avada-ing key targets. Wizards are probably the worst kind of guerrilla fighters - ones unchecked by range. And as far as food is concerned, food multiplication is a thing. I personally believe that in the long term, the way muggles would win would be through subverting wizards, not by pure overwhelming force.
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Wizards win logistics, they can enchant a car to hold as much as a 747. They can teleport, fly, levitate, and banish things. Their biggest problem is raw numbers.
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Are you ready to meet frog?
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Alakablam!
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I've been reading the mangas Japan Summons and Gate. I'd love to see a comic of a Western military curbstomping some magic beings
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Well, I cannot imagine wizard dieing to a nuke. You would have to surprise them I suppose. I mean, what if they teleport the nuke to some other place?
Even if all the tech kept working, I imagine the only way you could beat a wizard as a Muggle is if they don't see it coming.
If they see a gun, sure, the first wizard may be surprised and die, but it will not take long to find a spell that shields them. Rockets? Same story. Sure you can destroy stuff, even kill a bunch. The rest will be back though, and they can teleport, change memories, actually turn into another person or animal, turn you into an animal and whatever else.
The one plot hole in HP that always annoyed me is how Avada Kedavra is supposed to be the worst spell. In the books it is mentioned how Peter Pippeling blew up a whole street with a bunch of muggles in it. That seems way more dangerous...
129 comments
This is explored at length in the books. The wizard supremacists are an allegory for race supremacists, and it’s pointed out repeatedly that they’re delusional, broadly impotent, and small-minded. The death eaters believe so completely in their godhead and his divine right to rule that they neglect to consider even the most basic countermeasures or alternatives. There’s some “death of Stalin” paranoia but it’s overwhelmingly unforced incompetence.
Voldemort, likewise, blocks out even the potential for his lessers to outdo him. He is utterly infallible and his insecurities as an incest orphan to a fallen house will not allow him to feel any differently. Meanwhile, he’s been repeatedly circumvented and beaten by a group of teenagers, and his brewing plans will lead to the complete genocide of wizardkind upon reaching the world stage. It perfectly encapsulates the way race supremacists view the world and why they fail so frequently. The enemy is both strong and weak.
Darn shame rowling’s turned into what she hates. She wasn’t terrible at writing populism 101.
She just wrote what she actually believes and it ended up being biting satire by accident.
Fun fact: Rowling thinks Lolita is a beautiful and tragic love story
My god
If wizard supremacists are an allegory for white supremacists, are normal wizards normal white people and muggles "people of color"?
That’s one interpretation, absolutely. Or you could say Han Chinese, racist Han Chinese, and Uighurs. Or Israelis, racist israelis, and Gazans. Or white Americans, white American racists, and native Americans. Or white Brits/Irish, straight/gay, seafaring Scandinavians/prey, etc..
In group vs out group, with perceived genetic/social differences.