Ordinary Bookclub: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Chapters 26-35)
Okay. Welcome to the Ordinary Bookclub. We’re reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Our kickoff post is here, we review Chapters 1-5 here, we review chapters 6-15 here, and we review chapters 16-25 here.
This week we resolved to read chapters 26-35. (These brief summaries are probably going to miss stuff and put emphasis on the wrong stuff and, probably, miss the point from time to time. When I’m wrong, please call me out in the comments.)
One of the things we have decided that we want to start doing is discussing the various puzzles the chapters throw up for us. When a major piece of information is withheld, it’s (usually) because it’s an opportunity for the reader to do some light detective work and figure out what is REALLY going on (for example, when we were asking “who left Harry the notes in chapter 13?” that was something that was revealed in chapter 14…). It can difficult to discuss some of the puzzles in this story without discussing major events happening in future chapters so if you want to discuss something with a major plot point: please rot13 it. That’s a simple encryption that will allow the folks who want to avoid spoilers (or premature answers to puzzles) to avoid them and allow the people who want to argue them to argue them.
Now that the boilerplate is out of the way, let’s get started.
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Chapter 26: We begin with a visit to Professor Quirrell’s office hours and he’s in a bad mood. We discuss whether Muggleborns require a quick lesson in the equivalent of Gun Safety. When we leave, he’s in a better mood. (There might be a puzzle in here, but it might only have been a puzzle in retrospect? I don’t know for sure, though.) We learn that The Daily Prophet has a problem with Fake News OR we learn that Harry is betrothed to Ginny Weasley. We have no idea how the Fake News was generated. (Wait, maybe that’s part of the puzzle. Or maybe it’s a different puzzle? I dunno.) We learn that our strength as a rationalist is our ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. This is where we first see one heck of an amazing formulation: “I notice that I’m still confused even after hearing your explanation.”
I notice that I am confused. Dang. That’s something, right there.
And then we figure out that it was the Weasley Twins. Of freakin’ course.
And then we have a nice meal in Mary’s Place and have a conversation about Rita Skeeter (and journalists in general). Quirrell has a dizzy spell. And Harry gets a book.
Chapter 27: We learn that the Weasley Twins were 100% behind the newspaper thing but they had no memory of what they’d done to get it to happen. (I like the detail about The Quibbler running a news story the next day about Harry being betrothed to Luna.) We learn that Rita Skeeter and her editor both vanished after her news story was proven to be fake. We get our first lesson in Occlumency. We learn that anything a Legilimens could understand, an Occlumens could pretend to be. We learn that Harry has a MAGIFICICENT ability to dissociate. We learn that the guy who is training Harry on how to be an Occlumens agreed to be mind-wiped after each lesson. We learn why.
We learn that Quidditch remains dumb.
Harry and Hermione run into Snape and Snape wants to have a conversation with Harry with Hermione present. Wait, maybe Quidditch isn’t so dumb after all. We learn that we had underestimated Snape something awful. Once again, we learn that common sense is often mistaken for Legilimency. And we learn how Harry feels about bullies. Neville has an amazing line: “So that’s how it is for you”.
And, yeah, we find out that vanquishing bullies doesn’t always fix the problems for the bullied. (Man, that scene with Lesath was ROUGH.)
And then we have another conversation with Snape. Hoo, doggies. Harry learns about his parents from an unreliable source.
(There’s also some dating advice, but it’s not very good.)
Chapter 28: At the start of this chapter, there’s a disclaimer that “views expressed by Severus Snape are not necessarily those of the author.” Ain’t that always the way? You put words into the mouth of a character and, next thing you know, people are jumping to conclusions about whether or not you’re a good person.
Anyway.
We start trying to figure out how to make various cures for various diseases using transfiguration and it doesn’t work that way.
Harry is still irritated that you not only have to know what something IS but what it is CALLED under Magic’s Weird Ruleset.
We learn about buckytubes. Hermione comes out and says that she feels like she missed something. (Wait! That’s a clue that there’s a puzzle! I would say that we have enough information to solve what Hermione (and Harry, for that matter) have missed. The hints are in Chapter 15.) Aaaaaand, by the middle of the chapter, we see Hermione remember what we learned in Chapter 15.
Ugh, and Harry figures out how Reality works. (This part had me irritated as heck. We see Yudkowsky’s finger on the scales all over and, yep, Harry’s eraser is one of those. “Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough”, my Aunt Fanny.)
We have a conversation with McGonnagal and Dumbledore about how Reality works. And we see Dumbledore swear Harry to secrecy about how Reality works after he proves that he was able to overcome a conceptual limitation that nobody else in wizarding history has ever before been able to overcome. Why? Because if he talks about it, people will say “no, you can’t” and then Harry will say “yes, I can” and then… ugh. Oh, and because it’s a power that Voldemort doesn’t know.
And Harry actually apologizes to Hermione.
(And, apparently, people write self-insert erotic fanfic with Snape, even in self-insert non-erotic fanfics.)
Chapter 29: We get into Dating Theory. Hoo boy. I don’t mind if the conversations about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality wander into Religion or Politics. If they wander into Dating Theory? Hoo boy. We also get into Protagonist Theory. Protagonist Theory is probably less likely to leave a smoking crater.
Anyway, Hermione loses a Quirrell point.
We figure out that Harry and Hermione had a plan where they’d go through the library and just read the book titles and tables of contents in order to cast a wide a net as possible to find books that might help and, of course, they made it, like, halfway down the first aisle before finding stuff they had to read Right Friggin’ Now.
Which is the most realistic thing that has happened in the fanfic so far.
We learn about why you shouldn’t ask about the Weasley’s Family Rat. We see Hermione help some Hufflepuffs. And we see that Hermione, being the sort to help Hufflepuffs, thinks that Quirrell is evil instead of just being good at being a Slytherin professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher. We learn a little bit about the upcoming Quirrell Armies thing. And Harry wants Hermione to be in his army and not in Draco’s.
And we get into Applied Protagonist Theory with the whole Generals thing. That was a fun conversation between Harry and Draco and Quirrell.
And the conversation between Draco and Harry was fun too.
And the conversation between Hermione and Draco was fun.
See? The story can be fun too! Not just irritating when Harry knows friggin’ everything.
And we learn that Harry isn’t doing anything for what used to be Halloween.
Chapter 30: We have the first battle of the three Quirrell Armies. The Dragon Army. The Chaos Legion. The Sunshine Regiment. No Houses. Just students in their own little version of the Robbers Cave study.
Seriously, the Robbers Cave study is pretty cool.
Anyway, we see Harry prep for battle. We see Draco prep for battle. We don’t see Hermione prep for battle? Maybe that’s because there’s a surprise (if not a puzzle) to be sprung on us. We have a conversation with Neville. We see a car battery?!? What the heck. This bag of holding having whatever Harry happens to need B.S. sucks.
And we see why the information about Hermione was withheld. (Fun chapter.)
Chapter 31: Battles count for a lot of Quirrell points. See? Harry doesn’t care about House Points and how Quidditch scores add to House Scores but, jeez, offer him Quirrell points and he’s suddenly a mixture between a junkie and a hoarder.
Draco said out loud, “I notice that I am confused.” (Oh, how I laughed when I read that.)
And we learn that Hermione is a good general because she doesn’t try to do everything herself and trusts her friends to have good ideas too.
Chapter 32: Harry is forbidden access to his gold stores. Which makes sense to everybody in the world except Harry. We go shopping for Christmas presents anyway. “A friend isn’t someone you use once and then throw away, a friend is someone you use over and over again.”
Chapter 33: The Robbers Cave thing infects the regular houses too. Kids walking around with their house crest on their chest and their army preference on their arm. And that’s creating all sorts of tension. But we see that both McGonagall and Dumbledore acknowledge that Quirrell’s teaching is, let me quote this, “remedying years of neglect in months”. We learn that allowing traitors in the armies allows for all sorts of crazy things to happen. Zero-sum games, man. Zero-sum games.
And if you called the name of an army, cried “For Sunshine!” or “For Chaos!” or “For Dragon!”, it switched your allegiance to that army…
We have a conversation about The Prisoner’s Dilemma. And Pansy Parkinson.
We see that Dumbledore has a conversation with Hermione, but not about its contents. Well, he hints at the contents but we all know that the conversation is going to go every which way.
And we prepare for the underwater battle. And then we have the underwater battle. And then we see that Blaise Zabini is the only one in the three armies that knows how to have fun.
Chapter 34: We see Draco and Hermione finally willing to work together. We see Harry unwilling to work together.
And we see Professor Quirrell give a SPEECH. Seriously, this speech is one of the reasons to read the fanfic. This is some QUALITY political theory.
And we see the Generals give their wishes for what Quirrell can give them. Sadly, there are only but so many things in his power to give. And we see Quirrell burn Harry’s request without telling us, the audience, what it was.
And Harry starts a riot. Because Quidditch is dumb.
Chapter 35: A fun discussion of Political Theory. We compare Democracy to Quidditch. Kinda hard to believe that this was written all the way back in 2010 or 2011, huh? Anyway, we find out why Blaise Zabini pulled that crap. (Is he a reliable narrator? Probably…) We learn that Quirrell is not dumb and yet Harry Potter is dumb enough to think that nobody else could possibly be as clever as Harry Potter. You’d think that having Quirrell point out how low of an opinion that Harry has of everybody else’s intelligence keeps biting Harry in the butt would, eventually, sink in.
And then we’ve got Harry being all noble and crap.
And then we meet Mr. Hat and Cloak (Ooooh! This is another puzzle to play!) and then we have a moment with Hermione and Professor McGonagall and THEN we have a moment with Draco and Harry and we find out what Harry’s wish for Professor Quirrell was.
And that is the last thing that happens before the next Chapter that begins with Harry going back home to spend Christmas break with his parents.
And that’s our first thirty-five chapters.
Next Sunday, we’ll cover chapters 36-46 (no, not 45. 46. That takes us to the end of a story arc) which should take us from Christmas all the way up to Hermione falling off of the roof to the aftermath of meeting a Dementor up close and personal.
So… What do you think?
(Featured image is Foucault’s Pendulum by Sylvar. Used under a creative commons license.)
Here’s a solution that would have bugged me less about chapter 28.
I remember one of the Xanth novels where two characters traded magic abilities. The one guy ended up with the ability to shapeshift. The previous owner of the magic ability thought that he could only transform his whole body. Like, if he wanted to shift into a crab, he could, but he couldn’t just give himself a claw for a hand. He had to turn entirely into a crab or remain entirely human. Well, the guy with the new power wondered “could I transform my whole body into the body of a guy who has a claw for a hand?”
And, wouldn’t you know it, he could.
Anyway, Chapter 28 *STILL* bugs me. Jeez Louise, Yudkowsky.Report
I don’t know that what you describe would have been satisfying – the restriction on transfiguration gets to our own arbitrary mental boundaries as to what is part of a thing, and what is part of another adjacent thing. Solving it by letting Harry still transform whole things into hybrid things wouldn’t address that limit, and it would surely be something that other wizards, without any notion of particle theory, would have tried already. It would come back to “It’s not that Harry is really smart, it’s that no other wizards through history have been particularly bright at all.”
I seem to recall the experimental design in Dumbledore’s office takes that into account – they give Harry the steel sphere and calculate, based on its mass and Harry’s skill at transfiguring, it would take him about half an hour to transfigure the whole steel sphere into a similar steel sphere with a little glass bit. When he transfigures a little bit of steel into glass in just a few minutes, they conclude he did transfigure part of a thing.
So now if he again finds himself locked in a dungeon the way Draco did to him, he can transfigure just a little bit of the wall into loose sand, when before he couldn’t because it would have taken transfiguring the whole wall into a wall with a little hole full of sand in it.Report
I’m not sure it’d have been satisfying either.
That said, the whole “Oh, Harry is sooooooooooo insightful and he understands reality in a way that wizards never could because he’s read Hawking and Feynman!” that gets me to yell at the monitor.
It’s a good thing the rest of the story is so good.Report
I agree with dragonfrog, the solution you proposed would imply wizards are much dumber than the one Yudkowsy comes up with. In any case, the hybrid transformation is something McGonagal mentions in that same chapter – that is a technique wizards already know about.
The “timeless physics” is an indulgence on Yudkowsky’s part, but even if he had stopped at quantum physics, how many wizards would know about quantum physics in 1991? How many of them are expert enough to try experimenting with transfiguration – a dangerous form of magic?
Harry has more insight than other wizards, in certain very limited ways. After all, shouldn’t knowing physics improve your ability to manipulate matter? Harry is right that there can’t be any way transfiguration is object based, because objects don’t really exist so someone would have had to give magic a complete list of all objects that could exist to allow it to figure out what an object is. The sheer versatility of transfiguration implies it works at a level below our conception of “objects”, but that requires knowing more about physics than the vast majority of people do, especially wizards who don’t typically receive a muggle education past the age of 11.Report
I don’t mind wizards being dumb, necessarily. Hey. We’ve all been there.
What I mind is Harry having a special insight into the Nature of Reality granted him by his Protagonist Powers that allows him to do stuff that Nobody Has Ever Done Before.
I mean, Jeez Louise, even in the Canonical First Book, Harry wouldn’t have succeeded without his friends. Every single “friend” that MORHarry has is a dang foil. He doesn’t learn from them, he just teaches them or is disappointed by them. Even the adults are disappointments. Well, not Quirrell. He’s just a reactionary who fails to see how good Democracy is.
Or would have been, had Hillary won.Report
He has special insight into reality because he has read a lot of very advanced physics books that provided with that insight, that’s the opposite of Protagonist Powers.Report
So what we, as a society, need is more 11 year-olds reading advanced, nay, *VERY* advanced physics books?Report
The muggle world has plenty of people who have an advanced understanding of physics. The wizarding world has one. That’s why one 11-year old boy with an unusually advanced physics education can make such a difference. The point isn’t that Harry Potter is very important, it’s that understanding how the world works is very important.Report
And the ones who might have read the books are likely to be rule-followers?Report
Considering that:
1) Quantum mechanics was only about 70 years old in 1991.
2) It would have been accessible outside of academic literature for less time than that.
3) Wizards aren’t educated in physics unless they were muggle-raised, and even then only to the age of 11.
4) The entire population of magical Britain isn’t that large, in the order of tens of thousands.
It is plausible that no one in magical Britain has had this level of physics knowledge before. In fact, I suspect Snape is one of the most scientifically-knowledgeable wizards because he knows what an orbital is.Report
And no Wizard since the Interdict of Merlin has been able to feel what sub-molecules are like just by putting their mind down to that level and walking around? No one has had that level of intuition?
It merely took someone really smart to do it rather than someone who had spent their life saying “I should be able to just turn this corner into something else…”?Report
I think we’ve established that magic on its own isn’t that good at discovering new knowledge.
Saying the right words without knowing that the spell conjures flapping green bats doesn’t do anything.
You can’t make a cure for Alzheimer’s without knowing its formula.
You can’t apparate to the moon because you first have to gain knowledge of the place by conventional travel.
You can magically use knowledge you have, but in broad strokes your magical abilities can’t outstrip what you already know.
Which is handy, if as an author you want to juxtapose magic thinking that works against the scientific methodReport
I think we’ve established that magic on its own isn’t that good at discovering new knowledge.
Look at the replication crisis happening in academia.
I’m not sure that science is that good at discovering new knowledge*.
*some notable exceptions exist, I’ll grant. Almost all of them are from previous generations.Report
I’m not sure that science is that good at discovering new knowledge…
To pick one example, today there are dozens of drugs to control high blood pressure that didn’t exist 25 years ago. They work in different ways, have different side effects in different people, but the wide selection means that for almost everyone there’s at least one drug that works effectively and without problems.
Science (and engineering) identified the mechanisms involved in high blood pressure. Some drugs were identified by trial-and-error, but now we’ve reached the point that some of the molecules were designed.
I have no idea how magic would approach the problem of high blood pressure.Report
Leeches.Report
No, that’s how a barber deals with high blood pressure. How does magic address high blood pressure? Are there some pseudo-Latin words that, invoked over a mixture of herbs and newt eyes, produce an alpha blocker? How would you stumble across them without knowing the underlying mechanisms? Why pseudo-Latin instead of Old High German?Report
“These are *BLOOD* leeches. They magically drain excess blood from the body and have a magic saliva that makes blood magically less likely to clot.”Report
I loved the whole three army sequence, read those chapters all in a go. Still not sure I entirely followed all the twists and turns of subterfuge. Which I guess is the point.
Who Mr. Hat and Cloak is, I’ve got nothing. I’d guess it’s the same one who helped the Weasleys fake out Rita Skeeter. So, someone with a considerable budget. I notice Quirrell headed off in the same direction as Zabini before Zabini’s encounter with Hat & Cloak. So maybe it’s Voldemort in the back of Quirrell’s head. Or maybe Dumbledore…Report
Oh, so now, thinking about it, I’m working with: Hat and Cloak is the same person who
– gave Harry the invisibility cloak with the note telling him he should deceive Dumbledore about it
– made the trick on Rita Skeeter work and then obliviated the Weasleys
– got Zabini to report to Quirrell on Dumbledore’s tactics in a way that will make Quirrell mistrust and dislike Dumbledore
So, the overarching theme is that (assuming they’re the same person) Cloak and Hat is working to sow mistrust in institutions, particularly in Dumbledore (who concentrates on himself the symbolic trust in three separate powerful institutions).
Going out on a limb, that same person might have subtly steered Quirrell to make the speech extolling benevolent totalitarianism, because that’s the way they’re trying to steer wizarding society.Report
Yeah, the three army thing was a fun nod to the good parts of Ender’s Game.
(I spent a lot of time wondering if Mr. Hat and Cloak was Sirius Black.)Report
I’ve read chapter 35 a few times now, and I’ve been developing an idea of why democracy seems to work much better for us than it seems to for the wizards, because while I think Quirrell is wrong about democracy being as arbitrary as Quidditch (it is impossible to overlook that modern governments function a lot better than Feudal Europe or even classical Rome did), he is also right that the magical government of Britain appears to be prone to instability.
What makes a wizard powerful? We know it’s not genetics, the answer appears to be intelligence and studiousness. For wizards, knowledge is literally power, which is why Hermione is such an accomplished witch already. By contrast, knowledge really doesn’t translate into power for us muggles. The closest thing we have to Dark Rituals is the knowledge needed to construct nuclear weapons but it takes thousands of people to construct a nuclear weapons, and very few of them need to understand their construction. This is true of technical innovations in general, modern technology generally requires large numbers of people working together to work.
That means that what makes a muggle powerful is the ability to mobilise large numbers of people and persuade them to cooperate with you. Since elections campaigns are competitions in persuading people, electoral politics is a better fit for stable societies for us than it is for wizards.Report
Okay. Trying again: If there had been a handful of wizards in the past who figured it out, maybe it’d bug me less.
A Hufflepuff from the 17th Century, a fine healer, was the first documented to prove he could transfigure a corner of a cube from glass to steel spoke about there being “marrow in the bones of the world”. A great Gryffondor in the 18th Century spoke of the leaves on the trees in the forest of the world.
You know the guy who explained the internet to Ted Stevens? Have him come up with an explanation for Quantum Physics that Ted Stevens could go on to quote in a speech. Then put those words into the mouth of a Ravenclaw from the 19th century who also pulled it off before being taken to St. Mungo’s.
We don’t have to change the physics, necessarily.
We need to change “Harry Potter is spectacularly special”.
Nyfb, vs V erpnyy pbeerpgyl, guvf qvfpbirel bs Uneel’f vfa’g rira hfrq gb erfbyir n cybg cbvag va gur shgher. (Vf vg?) Vs vg’f abg, naq V’z guvaxvat vg’f abg, gura vg’f whfg gur nhgube qbvat qbahgf va gur cnexvat ybg.Report
Bu, Vg vf, vg irel zhpu vf.
How would a wizard have worked this out? It took muggles until the 20th Century, there are a lot more muggles than wizards and wizards don’t practice science. Only a quantum physicist, or someone who had read a lot of quantum physics could have done what Harry did, and wizards don’t read quantum physics.
Seriously, this is in no way a case of Harry having Protagonist Powers. Yudkowksy goes to considerable lengths to explain why Harry was the one who made this discovery, unless your thesis is that Harry should be utterly unremarkable in every way, I really can’t understand what your problem is here.Report
Gur pneoba anabghor jnfa’g n arj guvat gung unq arire orra qbar orsber, gubhtu.
How would a wizard have worked this out?
Magic.
I really can’t understand what your problem is here.
“An 11 year old kid changes everything.”Report
That’s not what I’m talking about. Cnegvny Genafsvthengvba cynlf n znffvir ebyr va UCZBE.
I think the trouble you are having here is that you either don’t get what Yudkowsky is doing, or you do get it, but don’t like it. Harry Potter is not the hero of HPMOR, but the Methods of Rationality are. One of HPMOR’s central theses is that your ability to achieve things depends on knowledge, and the ability to think rationally about the problems before you. Harry achieves things in proportion to his knowledge and his rationality. He makes mistakes (often terrible ones) in proportion to his ignorance and his irrationality. And it’s not unique to Harry, multiple other characters show this same dynamic over the course of the story.
If you dislike the idea that knowledge and rationality can overcome age and magic, then this story is going to be a parade of frustration for you.Report
One criticism of MOR I saw was that it was r/IAmVerySmart the fanfic.
That is, indeed, how it comes across at a lot of points. There’s some awesome stuff in there. I learned a lot and was even able to add an important tool to my toolkit.
But, damn. Harry grates.Report
Harry is a damn fool quite a lot of the time, and the story isn’t shy about making that clear, though it sometimes takes it time before it reveals the depth of his folly. But Harry is not a complete idiot – he does have valuable skills and the story lets him use those skills to great effect.Report
I thought MORHarry was supposed to grate.Report
Yudkowsky ought to be delighted at how fully he succeeded at his goal.Report
Do you like the original Harry Potter series? Because that was kind of my beef with it too…Report
The original Harry Potter series has the benefit of ramping up. What does he do in the first book? He goes down the forbidden hallway with the help of his friends Ron and Hermione, thwarts (not defeats) Voldemort, and wins a game of Quidditch.
Over the course of seven books, he becomes an 18-year old who manages to defeat Voldemort.
While he was the Hero Protagonist, he didn’t start changing everything until, oh, the Goblet of Fire or so. And he leans ever so heavily on his friends in every single book (and they do an *AWESOME* job of leaning on him).Report
It’s true, they do a pretty darn good job of having them work well as a crew most of the time – whether they’re well or ill advised in their particular tactics, they stick together.
But this is a story about a Harry Potter who’s socially clueless and really annoying to deal with, so he doesn’t really get a crew.Report
He kinda does. It’s Draco.
Who, let me point out, has flaws that Ron didn’t have.Report
I recall Yudkowsky poitning out that he had Hermione chose Ron as one of her generals – that HPMOR Harry couldn’t see the merits of Ron is more of a comment on Harry than on Ron.Report
I have been reading ahead and hit the “self actualization” chapters. I think I had read this so long ago that I forgot why I stopped reading it and the self actualization chapters were it- not the battles (though I found the battles somewhat tedious). I’m struggling to force my way through them and it looks like they go from insipid boring and annoying to ridiculously escalating the plot and stakes. Ugh, I’m gonna have to force my way through this too. Please tell me the clusterfish of the self actualization chapters sorts itself out?
Regarding these chapters; yeah Harry Potter’s character really grates a lot. I did enjoy the portrayal of Snape. As they story has proceeded it’s definitely keeping me guessing about Snape which is quite well done considering that the original story has spoiled me and I should be anticipating how it turns out.Report
Without offering spoilers, I will say that the self-actualisation arc has more to do with the point of HPMOR than it appears to when you’re reading it.Report
Ugh… it just goes on and on… chapter and chapter of it… yes bullies are bad… how fast can I skim this… oh god(ess?) they’re still at it… okay you’re writing all twee and silly. Still at it… skim faster.. wait I wonder if this is some kind of jab at feminism… try reading more and then OMG they’re at Wizard parliament and she’s about to get sent to hell-jail?!?!? WTF!!?
I think I need to read further or stop reading but the section I’m at is just awful.Report
Huh. I thought the self-actualization part was pretty good.
(My first thought was that “oh, North is complaining about the Dementor thing. I AGREE WITH HIM!” but you’re further along than that.)Report
The Dementor thing is very… uh…. Gary Sue ish, yes… but… But!… BUT…. it’s very much the kind of core message of the whole fan fic. So if you aren’t on board with the Dementor thing (even if you roll your eyes hard) I wonder if you can really buy into the core premise of the entire fic.Report
I see the methods of rationality (as opposed to the Harry Potter And The version of them) as similar to Communism or Neoreaction.
There are some fabulously awesome critical tools to be found in there. There are some amazing perspectives that can help you understand the world, understand yourself, and understand history.
It’s when the stuff turns into “therefore you must have the following opinions and believe in the following solutions to the various problems we’ve outlined” that I hold my hands up and say “Audi 5000.”Report
Okay, we can talk about this now. In chapter 26, the Rita Skeeter story gets resolved.
Vg trgf erfbyirq jura Dhveeryy xvyyf Evgn Fxrrgre, jura fur’f va navznthf sbez naq gelvat gb eha bhg bs Znel’f cynpr nf snfg nf fur cbffvoyl pna nsgre urnevat Uneel ercrng jung Dhveeryy unf uvz ercrng.
I didn’t catch that *AT ALL* on my first read-through.Report