promethea.incorporated
Month
Someone tell these guys I am consciously taking aesthetic inspiration from Justine Tunney et al.
Or maybe not, it’s more funny when they think I’m completely unaware of the thing I’m actually doing deliberately.
Gee, what an astute observation that when you take such things and change some words it sounds like such a thing with some words changed. I mean, those guys must be geniuses to recognize the influences.
(also “shitlibs”; kek)
do you have a “religion” class in your school system
germany:
youp, though it becomes nonmandatory at some point pretty early on (i wouldn’t know when because i went to a catholic school with religion classes all the way) and you can elect sth like “ethics” or “philosophy” instead.In Bavaria it’s mandatory until you graduate. There’s an “ethics” class if you’re not catholic or protestant and some schools offer an islam class as well.
Well, it is the same here, it is also ethics/philosophy or catholic/protestant/sometimes muslim religious classes, you have to go to one of these.
Yes. Belgium has this. Technically not mandatory, but I went to a Catholic school that offered no other options.
Nope to American public schools. Not even as an elective for my (poor, small, and rural) school.
Public schools (usually the wealthier ones) will occasionally have religious studies/history of religion classes, but the law frowns pretty seriously on anything that appears to be favoring or attacking any particular religion. In private schools it’s pretty much anything goes as long as they meet certain basic educational standards.
I had one in Denmark. It was mostly Protestant, IIRC? I was in the 6th whatever and it seemed mandatory.
Finland, yes, it’s either religion or ethics and members of the Church aren’t allowed to take ethics instead of religion even though it’s way more Actually Useful.
In addition, iirc they’re going to make it so that in high school the only class of a certain category that must be offered to people is religion; everything else is optional. Yes, screw things like history, psychology, economics and government, etc. because ~religion~ is the one that’s vital to know!
listen. i know jk rowling knows absolutely nothing about america but for the entire country to only have a single wizarding school there must be either 200 professors working at this place or you get to your first potions class and it’s held in a fucking baseball stadium.
#[megaphone voice] and now-now-now put your hands together for the DRAUGHT OF LIVING DEATH-eath-eath#[sound of a crowd screaming]#[fireworks]#[indistinct question from the eighty-third row]#[megaphone voice] YES THIS WILL BE ON THE TEST (via transhansolo)
SO A FRIEND AND I ACTUALLY JUST DID THE MATH ON THIS.
Between 1972-1979 there were 5,802,282 live births in the United Kingdom. These live births account for the roughly 600 Hogwarts students during Harry’s first year, and would make the birth rate of Wizards approximately 0.01% of the population.
The population of the United States in 2014 was 318.9 million - 23.1% of which were children 0-17. That would mean there were 73,665,900 children in 2014. Checking live births from a time period of 1997-2003 (which would account for children aged 11-17) gives us 27,978,287 children. If 0.01% of them were magical, we’re left with 27,978 school age magical children in the United States in 2014.
If we wanted school sizes similar to Hogwarts - 600 children to a school - we would need at minimum 47 magical schools. If we wanted it more comparable to our own schooling - with an average student body size of roughly 1,430 students combined between middle school and high school during the 2009-2010 school years - we’re down to a minimum of 20 magical schools.
So, long story short. It is statistically impossible for there to be a single magical school in the United States.
It’s far more likely there is at least one school in each state, possibly more than one in much larger states like Alaska, Texas, and California while a single school could feasibly serve the clustered smaller states like Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
HUNDREDS OF WIZARDING SCHOOLS IN THE VAST STRETCHES OF UNPOPULATED WESTERN AMERICAN WILDERNESS
PUT THEM ALL IN ALASKA! THEY’D FIT!!!!
Magic is heritable. While spontaneous Muggleborns might have the same prevalence everywhere, I see no reason why that would hold for other wizard types.
Off by an order of magnitude, even if assuming the same prevalence of magic (although, by historical patterns, one could argue that magic-users could be extra-likely to emigrate to the colony/country that isn’t chock full of nosy muggles poking into things they shouldn’t be poking into, and thus the prevalence of magic would be, if anything, higher in the US (especially if muggleborns were to flee discrimination to the frontier, knowing that it’s the place where magic-users are disproportionately other muggleborns and even the purerbloods would be less likely to have a stick in their posterior)).
The US would actually need only 5 Hogwartses or 2 average-sized schools, or one which is way smaller than a reasonably-sized university.
Assuming 2 times higher number of wizards per capita because immigrants, that would be one school ten times the size of Hogwarts which is only implausible culturally, not demographically. The problem is not that there would be too many people, but that the people would be scattered all over.
I find it utterly absurd that a single institution would be able to monopolize everything. Sure, The Big School would be bigger than Hogwarts, but the ~american way~ would be to also have numerous small schools scattered all around, people teaching their children, etc. (I’m assuming no Federal Agency of Magic tracking unauthorized sorcery either, stuff being dealt with in a far more ad hoc fashion when something actually comes up) and probably entire communities with their own culturally distinct traditions and knowledge.
*blushes*
As a token of our gratitude for such loyalty, your home country shall be destroyed first. Or last; you get to choose.
If I were officially made Queen of Social Engineering tomorrow I would designate one accessory that men aren’t allowed to wear (ribbons in hair?) and one that women aren’t allowed to wear (skullcaps?) and make it very clear that violating the rule is not done and basically amounts to forfeiting your gender.
Then I would walk around in public with hair ties and everyone would unambiguously read me as female.
petition: can you add one that only nonbinary people are allowed to wear
maybe we can be the only ones allowed to have undercuts?
Well, actually this would end up being freedom-maximizing in the pragmatic sense because the outcome of having one quite thoroughly consensual and relatively strongly gender-correlating signal would be objectively far less bullshitty than the current state of affairs where people care about gender a lot but refuse to have an unambiguous protocol for positioning oneself within it and thus end up having massive systems of bullshit instead.
It’d be very effective gender harm-reduction.
(Also, is wearing a skullcap with ribbons in your undercut the one which you use to signal “agender” because you’d be forfeiting all genders?)
It was as I was doing these four interviews that I realised how professional politicians and celebrities do it. As you get the same questions all of the time, you develop your patter to tell anecdotes with certain soundbites and phrases. Everyone does this. If you watch multiple interviews with a film star plugging the same film, they’ll tell the same stories every time. If you watch any interviews with the Leave campaign from before the referendum, they’d relentlessly repeat the phrase “Take Back Control”, to make their point.
I ended up doing the same. When asked if I really thought London should be independent, I’d always joke that I can’t envisage passport control on the M25. And if the broadcaster were an international broadcaster, I’d then add “ - that’s the road that rings London” to make sure everyone understood.
…
I wasn’t feeling very nervous as by this point I’d given approximately a million interviews, which more or less all had same fairly soft questions. But with about ten seconds to go before we went live on air the presenter said to me “So the first question is going to be asking why you want to overturn a democratic decision”. Wait, what? Agh! I just started a jokey petition and now I was plotting against democracy?! Had my revolution gone too far?
Amazingly, it was at this point I realised that all of these interviews had trained me for this exact sort of hostile questioning, and I had learned another trick the real politicians use: the pivot. This is where politicians take a question and somehow end up answering a very different question - the question they would have preferred to have been asked.
…
Though I’ve enjoyed the media attention this week, there is one niggling problem: I’ve now started this thing that is now beyond my control, and there are now thousands of people looking to me to tell them what to do next. It feels inevitable that I’m going to end up disappointing them.
Over the last week I’ve learned a lot. I’ve become the accidental leader of an independence movement, I’ve accidentally trained myself to become a savvy political operative, and I’ve accidentally won the genuine support of a surprisingly large number of people for a cause that might actually be quite unwise.
Honestly I think I support their idea more seriously than they do. I mean, it’s worth a try, and separate residency rules and citizenship and market access and maybe even other laws for London vs the rest of the UK might actually work well even if the two stayed heavily bound together.
Downside: I’d have to move to London, which would be damned expensive.
Well I for one am certainly available for the position of the leader of the Londependence movement if nobody else wants it…