Modern equivalent of carving my initials in a tree

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To anybody feeling hopeless and afraid about the future

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Quidditch and the Golden Snitch

    I was thinking about Quidditch and the snitch more than I ever really did when I read Harry Potter in school. 

    I think, like all sports, Quidditch can be interpreted as a metaphor for life. So maybe the idea with the snitch awarding 150 points and ending the game is that even when you're far behind and everything looks hopeless for your team, the one person who's watching for the one little important thing that everybody else doesn't see can still turn the tables and win it. 

    So it's interesting to me that the snitch awards points at all, as opposed to giving that team the automatic win, because it suggests that there does come a point when the opponent/enemy's lead is insurmountable and hope is genuinely lost. 

    Harry Potter has a reputation as a kid's story, and it is in some ways, but the implication is that it's simple and naive. But the more I dig into Harry Potter the more I see that Harry Potter and Rowling are anything but. 

    It reminds me of the biblical scene when the guy is asking god if he would still destroy the city if there are 40 good people in it and god says no. So the guy asks again but each time with a lower number, and god still says no. But the guy stops asking before he reaches the number ten or the number one for that matter. I always wondered why. But the answer to the number one seems sort of implied in Noah's story. 

    The snitch might also be a metaphor for the story's theme or ending. The one reader who's best paying attention to the story's metatextuality — watching how the story shapes the audience's attitudes toward it and then reconciling those attitudes with the textual mysteries — can win the interpretive game / predict the ending, and hopefully help other people understand the story. 

    But hopefully not too soon. Like with the snitch, if you catch on to the theme and ending too early then you're less the hero and more the jerk who ended the game too soon.

    It’s a great metaphor because in life, as in Quidditch, you can’t afford to have a lot of people devoted to finding the snitch. You need most of the team trying to win in the conventional way, because you don’t want to make it too easy for the other team to win in the conventional way due to much of your team searching for the snitch. You need formidable goalies and scorers and so on to make it safe enough for one person to engage in this highly specialized, important but unreliable sort of endeavor of finding and catching the snitch. But zero is the wrong number of seekers, too. You can’t afford to ignore the snitch entirely because it’s too valuable. All of that echoes the real world tensions between the sciences and the arts.

[dailynietzsche]

“The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §116.

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    First he’s dividing a person’s life into epochs. That’s easy to understand. We can all recognize childhood as an epoch, teenage years, early adulthood, adulthood, middle age and over-the-hill. Maybe you can break it up better than that, but you get the gist. Your life has stages, chapters, or acts if you prefer. Sometimes they’re marked by a big life change, or you reinvent yourself. 

The great epochs of our life come... when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us. 

    Then he says they come when we gain courage. But I’ll come back to courage later because first I need to know the courage to do what?

...when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

    Okay.  I know that sounds terrible at first. But Nietzsche speaks in riddles, so I have to really go deep if I want to understand what he means. 

    First, the term “our evil” supposes that we all have some evil within us. We all already kind of know that, so that’s easy to understand. Raise your hand if you think you’re a perfect saint so that the rest of us can throw tomatoes at you. 

    But the term also means that we all have some good within us, because when you say the word evil you’re inciting a concept so broad and archetypal that the only word that can be its counterpart is a word that is similarly broad and archetypal — that’s the word Good. So he’s supposing that we’re all part good and part evil, and he’s referring to the evil part. 

    Then he says that we rechristen our evil. Rechristen means to change the name. So we change the name of our evil to what is best in us, or our good, basically. We rename our evil good. Well that sounds terrible. But I think he means something deeper than that. 

    Imagine that at each epoch of your life, you’re guided by a philosophy. Now, if I were to ask you at any epoch of your life to tell me in your own words what your philosophy is, you might say something like “Carpe diem” or “Be yourself” or just stare at me blankly like I’m crazy and like you probably should. 

    But if you were to gather up all of your values, beliefs, opinions, and attitudes about life, and then distill them down and abstract them out to one grand unifying philosophy, imagine you could find out what your philosophy is. There’s no need to articulate something so profound, but just imagine that you could identify your philosophy that way. 

    So now you have your philosophy, and it’s pretty cool and you’re happy with it. But it’s going to change some day. And I mean big change. The centerpieces of it now will be little more than footnotes in a much more intricate philosophy when you’re older. Unless you think you’re not gonna get wiser as you get older. But that almost never happens because it’s pretty hard to get less wise. Have you ever tried to unlearn something that’s true? It’s impossible.

    The thing about philosophies, though, is that none of them are perfect. It’s pretty hard to come up with a value statement that encompasses everything about life. So every philosophy is doomed to fail in some way. And the nature of your philosophy’s imperfections characterizes that epoch of your life. You’ll remember that epoch as the time before I learned the value of work, or the time before I learned to stop being emotionally dependent in a relationship. You’ll have learned a lot of things from an epoch, but maybe those are two of them. Sure, why not?

    That means that even after you’ve developed a new and better philosophy and come upon a new epoch of your life, the philosophy still won’t be perfect. Because it never can be. It can only be better than the last one. And we have to learn to be okay with that, because that’s what life is like. 

    And I think Nietzsche is saying that, when you come into a new epoch of your life, the way in which your new philosophy is imperfect is always a product of the parts in you that are still evil. And he’s pointing out that mostly what you’ve done is you’ve merely renamed some evil parts of you good, and that’s the real reason your imperfect new philosophy can appear perfect to you at the time. 

    Nietzsche is saying that it takes courage to do that. To know that your new values are still flawed, and that you’re still part evil, and to be at peace with being the sort of creature that is destined to always exist as a flawed version of yourself yet struggling toward a better version the best you can anyway. 

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World of Warcraft Classic

B: So I've been doing a bit if research and apparently classic wow is dead anyway. It was okay for about a year but ended up a total failure. They merged all the servers down to just a handful and even those have only a few hundred active players at any given time.

So maybe these companies are right after all? No one actually wanted to play classic and they all went on for a nostalgic trip but ended up leaving because it's not what they wanted?

K: yeah i didnt know that happened to classic wow but it makes sense to me there has been a long era in which blizz went too far with thinking they can afford to ignore the fans, the whole "blizz knows best" attitude then there has been a counter response in the audience to bash blizz that's still going but now we've reached a point where the counter response is exposing itself as an overcorrection the blizz audience overstepped reasonable criticism and went into absurd criticism all the while continuing to buy and play blizz games the infamous comment from blizz is "you think you do but you dont" in reference to a fan who said he wants classic wow and asked when we're gonna get it the massive response to classic was was proof of the parts of the fan's attitude that were legitimate, and the quick dying off of classic wow is proof of the parts of blizz's attitude that were legitimate if anybody thought a generation of 25-35s were gonna longterm trade their real lives for WoW like they did in school they were delusional but i think the portion of the audience who did expect and want that is scarily bigger than we might have thought throughout the mounting hype for classic WoW there was an unmistakable unhappiness with the person's current life situation and a desire to return to a time and place where things were simpler and he was more successful i got a good sense of it on youtube and reddit and it makes sense because WoW was the biggest game for such a long period of time and it's such a time sink so if any game was gonna have a large community of sad adults who want nothing more than to escape into it then it was gonna be WoW

B: Yeah i think your right about the WoW thing mostly, but i think the price was too high too. $12 is fine but adults dont have nearly as much time as when they were kids to play wow. A few hours a week to hop on and be nostalgic would probably have suited many people. But at $12 a month its not worth a couple hours here and there. If it was $5 i bet 5x as many people would have kept playing which keeps the server pop up which keeps the people who left because dead server lawl wouldnt be a thing. So i guess they released "vanilla" which is what we played? Then a year later they released the burning crusade, but they gave players an option to stay on a purely base server that will forever be unchanged with no expansion added or to progress to a server that would have the expansion added. So idk the percent that made each decision but they basically cut the already lowering server population in half. So it made servers feel dead and a lot of people left shortly after that split happened Now they are gearing up to release wraith of the lich king this summer. But they are not splitting servers. The progression servers will get the expo and the still vanilla servers will remain vanilla. However they are giving people an option to clone their chars to the other server if they want to try to expo or want to go back to vanilla. People are expecting a huge influx to try out the expo but the servers are all merged now so their might be hours long wait times to get on the server and people are predicting a disaster

K: And maybe some of the motivation at blizz regarding the $12 fee and server split was a latent desire to see classic wow fail in order to spite the millions of angry ungrateful nerds who've taken to blizzbashing in recent years

B: Wouldnt surprise me But now theres a tiny population of people who think microsoft is going to save the entire classic wow thing, and they have some reason to believe that Microsoft owns age of empires and i guess when the whole D2 and warcraft 3 rereleases flopped huge but microsoft rereleased age of empires 2 and it was a huge success. Everyone pointed to microsoft doing it right and taking the time to understand what the players wanted changed and what they wanted the same. Same with minecraft when they bought it people were worried they would ruin it but they pumped a ton of money into it, made bedrock so cross platform play was possible but they also kept the java version which is easy for the mod community and also has really unit bugs and glitches that players have come to love. It showcases to a lot of people microsft actually listens to their players and cares what they think and takes their advice. Every minecraft update they bring it the biggest youtubers and consult with them for months on changes they are going to make. WoW is still one of the most profitable video games and people are expecting microsoft to talk to players to fix the problems and give players what they want I guess thats been the meme for years too the PS franchise has all the good games but doesnt give a fuck about their customers and the xbox franchise always gives the players what they want and tries to keep backwards compatible as much as it can. 

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Hereafter (2010)

matt damon can talk to the dead in visions in his head whenever he touches somebody but it's the dead people from the life of the person hes touching not from his own life and he got the ability from a childhood head injury and surgery but there are 3 separate stories running throughout the movie, all disconnected from each other until over halfway through it 1 is a beautiful french model woman overseas who hits her head during a tsunami 1 is a 10 y/o boy and his twin brother, the twin gets hit by a car and killed what they have in common is an experience with death, so they're obviously supposed to meet matt damon so they can talk to their dead person / talk about death in the woman's case but the movie takes too long before those 3 stories finally intersect, sheesh matt damon used to do psychic work but he quit because he considers his gift a curse, doesnt want all the attention, doesnt wanna deal with the madness you might expect from people when they find out there's somebody who can let htem talk to their dead person matt damons friend thinks he has a duty to use his gift and he obviously wants to profit from it too and be his partner that whole thread is interesting but it's dropped and never resolved lmao matt lives alone and takes a cooking class to meet people, he meets a girl who's super into him, but she finds out about his gift and pressures him to give her a reading and matt refuses but eventually does it she's freaked out because her dead dad apologized for sexual abuse he did to her when she was a kid she says matt was right this was a bad idea lmao that was an interesting thread too how would a relationship with a real medium work out? but it gets dropped, the girl never shows up again lmao instead matt meets the girl who hit her head in the tsunami when he touches her he realizes that he doesnt get visions of her dead family the implication being that when she hit her head in the tsunami at the beginning of the movie, she got immunized to his medium ability roll credits so i guess it's a happy ending in a way because the guy finally found a romance that cant be corrupted by his gift but it makes for a lame movie becuase the biggest intrigues in it were 1. how would a relationship with a medium work out? we never get to see it play out 2. how does the duty thing resolve? apparently he just ignores his duty to society, represses his gift and lives happily ever after it just rings false i think in reality he would regret not using his gift maybe even be killed as a long and convoluted consequence of not helping somebody who needed his help

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Roe v Wade

After watching the pro-choice side of the abortion argument try and fail for decades to soundly rationalize why a fetus is not a life, it’s no surprise why they’ve finally settled on “My Body My Choice”. It disguises the issue of life versus death as something else entirely. 

Deep down, every woman has access to a depth of understanding about the issue that I think men can never have or entirely appreciate because we do lack the instinct for motherhood. A woman knows that abortion is the ultimate evil that she can commit. That’s why despite the popularity of pro-choice allyship, the vast majority of women who defend abortion have never and will never get one themselves. The strength of the pro-choice movement always resided in the ignorance and cowardice of their allies, so that strength recedes with the darkness as the issue comes to the foreground.

Nietzsche thought that women are not capable of friendship, because in order to be a friend to someone you have to be willing to wage war against them, to help the best parts of their nature win the struggle against the worst parts of their nature. Well, Nietzsche was kind of an asshole. But at least the second part of that is exactly right. 

If we love our friends who had an abortion, it’s time for us as a country to stop being cowards and declare war against the worst parts of their nature by quietly phasing out the right to kill — a right that no true friend would have ever wished upon a friend to begin with. 

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Depp v Heard

“It’s only a DEFAMATION trial! NOT abuse!” “How sick is our society that domestic problems are entertainment?”

As usual, the toxic women of Tumblr can’t get their narrative straight.

I think it was Strom who said that if you ever want to find out who the true ruler is of any society, all you have to do is find out who you’re not allowed to criticize. So thank you Johnny Depp for publicizing this trial and giving Americans a glimpse of our hideous Queens, and helping us sort them out from our beautiful commons.

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Britney Spears

I came across a Rolling Stone article where the writer ranked all of Britney’s songs. She has way more songs than I knew, somewhere around 200. There’s no way I have listened to all of them. But when I read the title I just had to see for myself how wrong it was. Hahahaha! 

The writer had Toxic at number one. Not a bad choice at all. For me, though, the ranks go like this.

1. Sometimes 2. I Will Be There 3. Everything else, and it’s not even close.

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part time work

[K] im laying here eating m&m's

[K] i was about to put one in my mouth when i saw that it has a 3 on it

[K] i thought that was funny, so i turned it a little bit to make it an m

[K] i thought that was funny too so i turned it a little bit more to make it an E

[K] and that was REALLy funny so i turned it a little more to make it a W

[K] and then i thought wow, that's amazing

[K] and then i ate it

[K] if the pokemon franchise ever makes a mew 3 they'll have a great advertising opportunity with m&m's

[B] i think

[B] you need to get back to work full time asap

[K] calm down, they already have mew 2 so im sure they'll think of mew 3 without me

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Starship Troopers (1997)

    As I was lollygagging around the internet I stumbled upon some intriguing arguments about an old movie from my childhood called Starship Troopers. So I rewatched it for the first time in probably 20 years. It was a blast from start to finish. One of the best guy movies of all time. 

    The effects stood the test of time pretty well, too, but I was never one to get hung up on that kind of stuff to begin with. I’m in it for the story and themes. 

    From what I gather reading the arguments, the movie was based on a book, except the director was parodying the book because he disagreed with its political themes. The far left side of the argument says the movie was absolutely meant to be a parody of the book’s political themes which the director and people on this side of the argument consider fascistic. The far right side of the argument says the movie was absolutely not a parody because the political themes are obviously good and right. Naturally the left side is appalled that the right side are openly blind to the obvious fascistic ideals portrayed in the story. The right side are appalled that the left side are openly blind to the obvious fascistic ideals implicit in their opinion that the ideals portrayed in the story are fascistic. 

    After watching it fresh I now understand why so many people in the comments are calling it a parody of fascism. The story is full of young adults taking on big responsibilities to defend their nation and developing as characters because of it.  What a bunch of Nazis huh? 

    To be fair though, I do think the movie was meant to be a parody. Of what, I’m not sure, but the parodic humor is thick enough to make the intentions of the director clear to me in that regard. So because of that, I have to break my position on it into as many parts as there are possibilities. 

A Parody of the Book

    The director is parodying the political themes and theories portrayed in the book. If it’s true that the director admitted to only reading the first two chapters of the book, I think this is the most likely possibility. He tried to parody it but it unintentionally came out looking more like a parody of a parody to people who genuinely have accumulated some wisdom about civics and political theory.

Not a Parody of the Book

    The director is portraying the political themes and theories from the book as unironically as he can. This possibility has little to no credibiliy to me, despite that I think the themes are spot-on correct. The layer of parodic humor is too heavy too frequently to suppose that the director was trying to play the story straight. 

    One of the propaganda clips in particular pushes the needle off the scale in a way that’s so absurd and funny that I laugh every time I think of it. It’s the one where the children are “doing their part” in the intergalactic war against the giant bugs by stomping on cochroaches on earth. The woman’s reaction cracks me up. 

    It’s almost conceivable that it’s serious insofar as encouraging kids to kill bugs from a young age will prepare them for their role in the war as adults or nudge them toward military service, but then I remember that they’re fucking bugs! Nobody has sympathy for bugs to begin with. They’re super easy to hate and want to kill. But even granting that absurd possibility, the woman’s reaction kills it completely anyway.

A Parody of Parody

    The director is portraying the political themes and theories from the book unironically, but in a way that will trick a portion of the audience to think they’re being portrayed ironically. This seems like the least likely possibility to me to explain the director’s intentions, but regardless of his intentions it was the result of his directing. And it’s awesome.

    The whole argument itself proves that the only thing you have to do to trick some people into believing good ideas are bad ones is to deliver them in propaganda wrapping paper. It's like, no, saying something true in an ironic way doesn't magically make it false. That is how people who are not knowledgeable about the subject they’re talking about convince others that they’re experts. They substitute substance and expertise with attitude or charisma. 

    On balance, though, I think even many of the articulations of the political themes in the story I agree with are still only half true. Personal responsibility is crucial, but when taken too far it becomes just as fascistic as any philosophy does when taken too far. Extreme adherence to philosophy is always a sure pathway to misery, because philosophy is an abstraction and we’re not abstract creatures. We’re embodied. A story that explores this really well is BioShock 1.

Love Triangle - Rico, Carmen and Dizzy

    Ah, now for the real reason I rewatched this movie. The love triangle! 

    Rico is a rich handsome noble brave hypercompetent jock who has everything going for him. 

    Carmen is his sultry tease girlfriend who’s an otherworldly beauty but still playing the field and wants to pursue a military career instead of settling down. 

    Dizzy is a funloving rowdy classic beauty who wants nothing more from life than to devote herself to Rico. 

    When I put it that way, Rico’s choice seems easy. Dizzy all the way. But I think the choice is only obvious to me now that I’m older. I think Carmen is a little more beautiful than Dizzy, but if it were my choice I would choose Dizzy without hesitation. Beauty has lost some of its influence over me with age. 

    Someone once told me, don’t marry the one you want, marry the one who wants you. I think it’s good advice that has the same half true quality as before. It could be bad advice if given to somebody else or applied to an extreme. But I think for me in particular it may be more good than bad. 

    I’ve heard it said, too, that attention is the most attractive quality. The person whose attention I have will tend to be more attractive to me than the person whose attention I don’t have. The effect won’t cause me to prefer Kristen Stewart over Scarlett Johansson but Carmen and Dizzy are close enough in beauty that Dizzy’s attention tips the scale in her favor. 

    I heard also that Carmen was whitewashed a bit because a scene was removed that showed more clearly that Carmen was playing the field. I tried not to let that influence me though.

    Regarding attraction, there’s also a tension at work in me that I don’t understand yet but I think about it a lot. On one hand I’m attracted to a woman who is honest, direct, knows what she wants and doesn’t play hard to get. On the other hand I’m attracted to a woman who is hard to get, indirect, uncertain about what she wants and maybe even dishonest about it. 

    Well, I noticed that those two sets of characteristics are complete opposites. So what the heck is going on in me huh? 

    I think Camille Paglia hit the nail on the head in an interview she did one time when she said that mens’ instinct to pursue an attractive woman is tied together with his instinct to hunt prey. They’re the same instinct at work, just aimed at different needs. I thought, yeah, something about that seems right. Because it maps onto both situations on a lot of dimensions. 

    If a woman is too much of a tease and too hard to get then I lose interest. It shows me that she’s not into me enough, which is a red flag for all sorts of problems in the future. I don’t want somebody who doesn’t want me just as much, no matter how attractive she is. But there’s something undeniably attractive about a woman who makes you chase her before you can get what you want. On the other hand, if a woman is too easy and available then I lose interest too. It isn’t a red flag but it stops being fun because there’s no tension. If there’s no tension in the relationship then there’s no life in it either. I think people all crave resistance to overcome and contend with, even if it’s only playful. 

    The same sort of tensions emerge in all the non-woman things that motivate men, like the call to adventure, the hunt, and overcoming challenges. Nobody really wants to have success simply handed to them for free. Some people think they do. But people want to earn their success specifically so they know that they earned it. Few things in life are more rewarding than that. People generally don’t understand that anymore. They think they want things to be given to them. They don’t realize that by accepting or demanding that things be given to them they’re robbing themselves of a massive amount of the meaning that’s available in their lives. Would you want to die rich and old not knowing if you really deserve what you have? It seems like a miserable conclusion to life to me, because it’s too late to do things differently at that point. And I would be trapped in the lie I had been telling myself all along that I in some way earned what was given to me. And the lie that I realized my potential. 

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lmao

“too many new voices are anti-left! quick, what do we do?”

“uhhh make videos from new popular voices unavailable so they don't reach a broad audience”

“but how do we hide what we’re really doing?”

“you idiot! recommend subscribing so that they might reach a broader audience!”

[blackexcellence]

Today in Black Excellence: Shirley Chisholm, the first African American—and the first woman—to seek nomination for President.

“I want history to remember me... not as the first black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of The United States, but as a black woman who lived in the 20th century and who dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.”

—Shirley Chisholm

Chisholm wanted to be remembered as a “catalyst for change.” What did she do?

Shirley Anita Chisholm was a politician, educator, and writer. There would be no Barack Obama or Kamala Harris without her—she was a trailblazer in every sense of the word.

Citing her “double-handicap” of being a Black woman, Chisholm initially rejected a political career but became increasingly engaged in fighting racial and gender inequality. She eventually joined the Democratic Party in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, winning a seat in the United States Congress in 1968, and becoming the first Black woman to do so.

What did she achieve in politics?

With a seat at the table, “Fighting Shirley” introduced over 50 pieces of legislation on behalf of the poor, protesting racial and gender inequality. She became a fierce critic of the Vietnam War when opposition to the war was considered radical. Her outspoken assault on injustice earned her few friends in the white political establishment.

While campaigning for the 1972 primaries, Chisholm was allowed only one speech in televised debates and was otherwise blocked from participation. Despite this, students, women, and minorities proved loyal supporters: In 12 primaries, she garnered 152 (10%) of delegates’ votes, despite a poorly financed campaign and widespread political hostility.

The 1972 primaries also displayed her remarkable character, when she chose to visit racist and segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama in hospital after a failed assassination attempt.

After retiring from Congress in 1983, Chisholm taught at Mount Holyoke College and co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women.

Original portrait by Tumblr Creatr @banana-peppers

“It was an honor to create a piece celebrating Shirley Chisholm. She was the first Black woman elected to Congress and to seek a major party nomination for presidency. Her trailblazing career is truly inspiring and I wanted to capture her power, her bravery and her magic. Her motto Unbought and Unbossed implores us to forge our own path no matter what obstacles try to stand in our way."

—@banana-peppers

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Imagine being the kind of person who actually feels a compulsion to meticulously capitalize the color of somebody’s skin. That is some capital C Creepy shit.

Black history month is racist against both blacks and whites, and it always has been. The history of black people, white people and people of all colors in America are all together The History Of America. If courage rode on the surface like skin color then human beings wouldn’t need history at all. 

What would be awesome to see in my lifetime is if Americans of all colors co-opted black history month and transformed it into American history month. It would be the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the hard-racist conservative extremists and soft-racist liberal extremists alike, by showing them what Americans do to things that work to divide us. A boy can dream, anyway.

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Why Did J.K. Rowling Make All Slytherins Bad?

     I only read the series all the way through one time and a long time ago, so I could be wrong, but it seems like Rowling's mistake with Slytherin (if she made one) was less that she made all Slytherins unlikeable blood supremacists, and more that she didn't give pure wizard blood a significant advantage in power over impure blooded wizards.

     Or if she did, then she didn't portray that seriously enough. Or if she did, then I just don't remember or haven't thought about it enough.

     That nugget of validity to pure-blood-ism would explain why pure-blood-ism persists as a value. It would open the uncomfortable but truer-to-life discussions about good being unable to exist without evil to compare it to, and about how too much of a good thing (inclusion) can be a bad thing (diluting mankind's magical affinity). It would explain why evil always crops up again eventually, why victory against evil is always only temporary, why forces for good have to stay vigilant, and why good is always a choice you have to make in spite of knowing that good to the extreme maximizes the incentives for evil, because selfishness is maximally rewarding in an environment full of altruists.

     If the story doesn't contain a hint of validity to purebloodism as a path to power, and rooted in the world's very nature, then I must consider the Harry Potter saga a fundamentally naive representation of good and evil.

     However, purebloodism's validity may be implied by Slytherin's characteristic values, because it occurs to me that there's a common thread running through the words cunning, ambition, resourcefulness, fraternity, pride, leadership, and self-preservation. The list of words are like a veil covering Slytherin's real core values. The identity of Slytherin's real core values will be found by following the shape outlined by the veil, to deduce what values are hidden beneath it. What virtues or vices are missing from every word on the list?

     Cunning is intellect aimed at advantaging oneself. Ambition is a pursuit for something, with a connotation of power. Resourcefulness is making the most of what is available, with a self-interested connotation. Fraternity is brotherhood, with a self-interested connotation for the in-group to the exclusion of the out-group. Pride, Leadership, Self-preservation and in fact all of the words on the list are ambivalent, accommodating both positive and negative connotations, but never connotating self-lessness or powerlessness. So Slytherin's real core values are selfishness and power.

     Contrast the ambivalence in Slytherin's characteristic values with the definitively not malicious words from other houses, like Gryffindor's brave and Ravenclaw's smart, and the implication is clear. Slytherin is the only house that warrants the side-eye.

     House Slytherin is the crack in the wall of the Garden of Eden through which a snake can enter. That's another way of thinking about it. The name is literally "Slither in". It implies that no matter how good you build your walls, whether you're building a garden or a school for wizards, evil can always find a way in. And that implies that evil is a permanent part of human existence.

     In this way, the story may lend Slytherin's pure-blood-ism genuine validity and power, it being at least one ingredient in the recipe of values, if not the premiere ingredient, that has characterized Slytherin since its creation and characterized the wizarding world since before even Hogwarts was built.

     This fixes the problem of all the members of Slytherin being unsympathetic, not by making them act nicer, but by showing that the value for which the audience reviles Slytherin emerged because of the way reality is, rather than or as much as the way Slytherin people are. And it gives us a deeper understanding about why the sorting hat continues to doom still-mostly-innocent children to Slytherin, and why Harry Potter himself was almost placed in Slytherin.

     The moral of the story changes from ‘Slytherins are plain evil’ to... ‘You think Slytherins are the way they are because they’re plain evil? No, they’re right about something. Something deep. And yeah it’s an uncomfortable truth and you understandably don’t want to look at it. But you better. Because your naivety about the truths that Slytherins know already characterizes your own path to evil, whether you know it or not.’

     I also like that Harry's desire not to be in Slytherin is taken into account by the sorting hat, not in order to give Harry what he wants, but as a deeper insight into Harry's nature and character. In that moment, Harry was guaranteed power if he didn't reject Slytherin, yet he chose Gryffindor anyway believing there are things more important than power. Likewise, Dumbledore's comment about sorting too soon suggests that the sorting result can be different if the person is allowed to develop more, therefore the sorting is not determined by a person's nature alone. Nurture plays a role too. In other words, nobody is destined to be evil based on their nature because people can change and grow. But they do have to want it a lot, like Harry did.

[goldingoldout8]