#SOMEONE SHOULD HAVE SAVED THEM. EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM EMBODIES SOME FORM OF SOCIETAL FAILING

[hella1975]

listened to american pie while thinking about the league of villains do NOT fucking talk to me

[slythergirlimagines]

Why Slytherin Should Not Be Used To Classify Every Bad Person

A think Piece by Me

(Before I begin please don’t take this too seriously, it is merely a bit of light hearted fun on my part. It’s only a half-serious discussion;) If you aren’t interested in this post, no offense taken, but if you like to be sorted into Hogwarts houses please scroll to the end for info!)

Why Slytherin Should Not Be Used To Classify Every Bad Person- A Think Piece by Me

It’s not uncommon in the world of the Harry Potter fandom to see Slytherin hurled as an insult to various members of the community or celebrities when they are seen as bad people. While it’s true that many of the traits embodied by the Slytherin House can lend themselves to evil acts, it’s not quite as simple as that. Hagrid tells Harry “There's not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin.” However, this statement is disproven by the existence of Peter Pettigrew (Gryffindor), Gilderoy Lockhart (Ravenclaw), and Professor Quirell (Ravenclaw).

Many of you have heard this before. It’s been stated and restated in a million different ways. I know some of you not in the Slytherin House are rolling your eyes. And yes, this is not an important matter considering all that’s going on in the world. You’ll hear no arguments from me there. However, I enjoy writing and I need something to distract myself, and also I’m sick and tired of reading Slytherin as an insult to every bad person in the world.

That being said, if you don’t want to read because you find this silly, then scroll on. I get it. But if you do want a bit of a distraction in the form of a light hearted tumblr post, then please continue reading.

1. Villains of the Harry Potter Universe

Hagrid’s statement to Harry about Slytherin, wasn’t completely true. Hagrid would not have been wrong had he amended his statement and said “The majority of bad witches and wizards come from Slytherin.” That statement would have been 100% true- a majority of Harry Potter villains do come from Slytherin.

“So what’s the big deal then?” You ask. “Why can’t we just keep calling people we view as villains, Slytherin?”

Well for starters, not every villain in Harry Potter was a Slytherin. As I mentioned previously, Petter Pettigrew was a Gryffindor, and Lockhart and Quirrell were both Ravenclaws. Why does that matter? Because....

2. People are not one dimensional

Before we launch into that, let’s discuss sorting. Sorting is a way for assigning individuals with certain personality traits a “house” where they can share a community with other similar individuals. Gryffindors are said to value courage, bravery, and chivalry. Ravenclaws value intelligence, learning, and wit. Hufflepuff value hard work, patience, and loyalty. Slytherins value ambition, determination, and cunning.

“Yes, we know.” You say, “Get on with it.”

I bring up the House traits and sorting for a reason. Most criminal or villainous acts have motives. Motives, like ogres and onions, have layers. Let’s look at an example.

A man rides into battle, and because he is such a great warrior, he is able to slaughter a hundred of his enemies. Is this a villainous act?

Your answer would most likely depend on what side you’re on. To the man’s side, he is a hero and just in his action. To his enemies’ side he is a monster, a murderer. What house would we sort him into?

Maybe you’ll say that he’s a Gryffindor for his courage in battle. Perhaps you’ll consider if this was a strategic, intelligent move and you’ll classify him as a Ravenclaw. Maybe you’ll consider if this man rode into battle for his loyalty, or the ideals of justice that would make him a Hufflepuff. Or maybe you’ll consider him a Slytherin for his determination and cunning strategy to defeat his enemies.

Human beings have depth. All Gryffindors are not only brave, just as Slytherins are not only ambitious. All of these traits make up human personalities, and all people at some time or another have utilized these traits. Slytherins have been hardworking and loyal, Gryffindors have been smart, Hufflepuffs have been cunning, and Ravenclaws have been brave. People are not just one thing.

“Yes we know this too. Why is that relevant?”

Because....

3. You must consider the motives

Bad or villainous acts are definitely perspective based, but if we’re going to look at someone we’ve determined to be a villain, we must examine their motives. Arguably, yes, on the surface Slytherin House traits seem to lend themselves towards more villainous acts if you focus on the negative connotations of their valued traits. Someone who is power hungry would use cunning and ambition to climb to the top, but they would also be hard working, intelligent, and brave.

So yes, these are personality traits, but they aren’t motives. Why am I hammering this in? Let’s take a look at our non-Slytherin villains.

Peter Pettigrew is a Gryffindor coward. He does what he does because of this cowardice. But none of the houses value cowardice, and his own house is the antithesis of cowardice. So if Pettigrew is a coward, why is he in Gryffindor? You could argue that it’s because he values bravery the most. Perhaps because he never had it, he covets it more than anything, and places bravery on a pedestal. The truth of it is, it doesn’t matter what his house is. Pettigrew is a coward, which leads him to team up with the bad guy and commit crimes out of fear. He’s a villain not because of his house, but because of his crime. Because of his motives.

Lockhart is a Ravenclaw who takes other people’s knowledge and achievements for himself so he can have fame and fortune. He isn’t capable of doing these things himself mentally or physically, so he steals the work of others. He utilized his intelligence to get away with this crime, cunning to figure out plans, hard work to maintain his lies, and one could argue courage to do something so risky. Villain? Yes. Slytherin? No.

Quirrell is also a Ravenclaw. He hides himself behind an unthreatening facade to do his master’s evil bidding. It can be assumed that he shares Voldemort’s ideals and wants the power promised to him from his service. Again, you would find that he would have to utilize a multitude of various house traits to pull this off, but he’s still not a Slytherin.

See what I mean? Traits are the how. They are the reason something gets done. They are utilized to carry out an action. But motives are the reason why. Motives defy Hogwarts House classification, not only because they are so layered, but because......

4. Traits have no moral alignment

Ambition is not inherently good or bad. Neither is cunning. Determination is hardly ever classified as something negative. Ambition is an environmentalist saving the environment, a black politician climbing the ranks to bring change to their community, or women banding together to demand change. Cunning is figuring out the best way to distribute funds various organizations, deciding on the best strategy to implement free birth control, or solving the water crisis through vigorous strategy. Determination is fighting constantly for these changes, it’s grit, never giving up on what you know is right.

Any personality trait or ideal can become negative and can be abused. Intelligence can be used to keep a group of people in poverty. Bravery can be someone running into a crowd with a gun. Justice can be a murder. Villains do not think that their actions are wrong. They idealize them, thinking that killing someone of a different race is justice just because they could have harmed that person. Racists often believe they are just for hating people of a different race.

Traits are not good or bad, nor are they defining of a person. Our above mentioned villains often utilized traits that were not valued by their house to commit their acts, but that didn’t make them belong any less to the house they were sorted into.

Again.....

5. Defining an act as good or bad is more complicated than that

Evil is a hard thing to define in the world. There is so much that goes into determining if something is evil or if someone is bad. Motives, societal moral belief, and personal ideals are just a few concepts that shape what we determine to be good or bad. That’s not to say people don’t have set things they believe are evil. I have those too. However, it would be impossible to settle on a universal definition of an evil act that everyone agreed with.

As I stated earlier, perspective is a huge factor in determining the moral impact of an action. Our enemies think our acts evil, while our friends agree that our acts are good. These acts themselves defy Hogwarts House classification. It is the person’s personality and beliefs that should classify them in a house. Not just whether they are a villain or hero in our eyes.

So why is this whole argument relevant?

Because it’s annoying as a Slytherin to see every bad person sorted by people into your house. Yes it’s a stupid thing to be annoyed with, but for a lot of Harry Potter fans, a huge source of enjoyment comes from the community of your house. Being able to identify and bond with others over your shared house creates a sense of community. It also helps many people understand themselves, just as personality quizzes do. Sure it may be meaningless in the “real world,” but it helps you learn about yourself and have fun.

Yes there is no Hogwarts, and the houses don’t mean anything in real life. But they do in our community and fandom. It’s time for us to intellectually grow and start to discuss people and villains in terms of overarching personality. You won’t hear me arguing that a majority of them may come from Slytherin. However, it’s time for us to take back our house, and it’s time for Slytherins to be given respect.

We are not all evil, we are not all bad. Our valued traits can be used for as much good as any other house traits. Evil people and evil acts do not just have to be Slytherins by default. It’s 2020 and Slytherin is no longer a bad word. We are ambitious as hell, ferocious, and badass. But we are not villains.

Thank you for listening to my Slytherin-positive rants, I really needed to write something out today. Nobody take this too seriously, it’s just a think piece. I hope that you all are and continue to be well:)

On the sorting that I do: If you would like to be sorted, all you have to do is message me and say you’re interested. I don’t require any information other than “I want to be sorted.” I will send you a questionnaire, and you will message me back your answers. I really like to do in-depth sorting, so most of them will be long. I do people of all ages. I don’t post results of sorting, they are kept between us in private messages, so you can be brutally honest about your answers. However, if you’d like me to make a post, I will with an edited version that removes anything private. I love to do sorting and I hope to hear from you guys soon.

On the writing that I do: I also love to write. I will take fanfic requests, questions, and think piece topics. If you have any questions about which fandoms I write for check my bio for a short list, or just send me a message! Chances are I’ve probably watched or read whatever it is enough to write about it!

[republicstandard]

Racial Profiles: Borzoi Boskovic, Host of The Poz Button

In ten words or less, describe your political persuasion.

Racist trade-unionism with nationalist characteristics.

How and when did you become “red pilled”?

Trayvon, etc. It's not really an interesting story. Most "redpill" stories aren't, to be honest.

What (or who) is the single biggest threat to the continued existence of Western civilization?

Liberal and decadent bourgeois whites. There's nothing to save if people don't want to save themselves.

What figure has been the greatest influence on the development of your political/ideological beliefs?

Probably Ted Kaczynski's writings, but it was never something I really took seriously or developed as you don't want to be known as the guy who said he was influenced by the Unabomber Manifesto. I grew up in a committed non-religious family so naturally, my mind became obsessed with death and by extension, it became obsessed with eschatology and the end of all things. Just normal teenage stuff, right? I got really into reading all about post-apocalyptic societies and the different end scenarios for all things, and thus that led to me discovering the grey goo scenario (spoiler: nanomachines go out of control and devour the world). Interest in that led to me reading, in college, the famous Wired article Why The Future Doesn't Need Us. Kaczynski was never anything more than just a whack-a-doodle bomber whose artist's sketch terrified me as a child, someone whom I was told as a teen that my nascent libertarianism at the time would inevitably lead towards, but that article gave me exposure to his ideas for the first time and I became obsessed with the possible futures that Kaczynski outlined. I wish he'd never committed the heinous and horrific crimes he committed, as we lost such a brilliant mind to system but I suppose that was inevitable when your professor is Henry Murray, the OSS's guy who pioneered the techniques for MK-ULTRA.

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Now here I am, actually influenced in my thinking by his writings on technological society and not entirely sure we can avoid the TechnoGay PissEarth future he outlined for us.

I guess they were right to warn me after all.

What are some other influences on you personally but perhaps not politically?

G.K. Chesterton is still a massive influence on me in terms of attitude and spiritual character. Satan fell by the force of his own gravity. It's important to be able to have a sense of humor about yourself and the world and to still have a mirthful character even when you're staring down at the possibility of PissEarth 2025. I'm a dour and melancholic person by nature; Chesterton's works have always managed to give me a counterbalance to that attitude. My thoughts these days are turning toward Houllebecq these days though, so I guess we'll see how long that attitude holds out. With Lauritz on vacation from The Third Rail, someone needs to embody his well-spring of boundless optimism.

What does your perfect America look like?

I don't know. I don't think I even have one. Non-whites who know my politics have quizzed me on this before, concerned about where my politics will lead to for them. I've said before that I would be perfectly content with a stricter Singaporean system. I don't run around talking about ethnostates or the like though because it's basically pointless. Here's some hard to swallow pills for people:

We aren't going back to the way things were, and we couldn't even if we wanted to.

We are never going to be left alone. There will be no country with giant walls that we get to live our lives peacefully isolated inside.

Every possible good future still ends with us fighting the Chinese.

Our fight is ultimately a global one, and not just because our European brothers are fighting for their countries too. If our enemies succeed, what will happen to many of our most talented people is that they will become a diaspora people serving the Asians and their projects. It's already happening, just look into what's going on with shipbuilding in South Korea and China. If we succeed, well, we still have to oppose the Asian sphere who will do everything they can to hobble us while they expand their soft empires.

These are big geopolitical ideas, I understand. For the regular, average Amerikaner, I just want them to have intact and crime-free communities they can raise their children in without the societal wrecking balls that neoliberal policies smash them up with.

Your critiques of literature and especially film are something the Right has been sorely lacking minus a few exceptions like Trevor Lynch. What got you interested in cinema in particular and what impelled you to begin producing The Poz Button?

I only started the show because I was fascinated by Eyes Wide Shut and the depths of it and wanted to do a podcast about movies I liked. If you listen to the first episodes of the show, it's pretty obvious I had no idea what I was doing. I still don't know what I'm doing with it, but in hindsight it was pretty obvious it would get to this point due to my obsession with Metal Gear Solid 2 and the ideas it introduced to many new audiences about how to program a human being, meme theory, and the creation of new contexts in which to manipulate a person, the core purpose of mass media.

The reality is that people believe movies to be reality. How many people have you known who base their opinions and understanding of history with "But, bro, have you seen Schindlers List/Glory/Hidden Figures?" and so on and so forth. The key phrase in the opening song is from Videodrome: "Television is reality, but reality is less than television". These were ideas that George W.S. Trow was touching on in his peculiar work Within the Context of No Context, and these ideas were at the core of Marshall McLuhan's body of work, which was the inspiration for the Brian O'Blivion character in Videodrome. These are the ideas that are at the core of Edward Bernays' incisive understanding of propaganda. You are not immune to propaganda. The most incisive meme against the internet right has been mocking them for their obsession with movies like Bladerunner 2049 and Drive. You are just as bad as the people as you mock, and without understanding this aspect of yourself and your relationship to media, you will be just as cowed and controlled as everyone else. The ultimate form of controlled opposition, really.

There's this very incorrect notion floating around that I'm a cinephile, something which I don't do much to dissuade people from believing due to my enjoyment of fruity foreign and art films. I'm really not though. Every conversation about movies I have with Nick Mason, a true cinephile, always goes like this:

Nick: Have you seen X?

Borzoi: No.

If you've listened to my show consistently then you've likely noticed I don't actually talk about the movie in question much and I almost never talk about actual film techniques, get deep into the cinematography, or really anything that they'd teach you in film school about film. That's because I'm more interested in what Trow was warning against in his short work Within the Context of No Context, that media (but television in particular) was creating a landscape where people completely have no context for understanding reality because of the contextless reality that media provides for you. To put it more simply, Sven once brought up how since the age of the internet, everything culturally fracturing more and more and there's no 'culture' in the way there was a 70s culture, an 80s culture, a 90s culture, and so on and so forth. That's living without context, and that leaves you utterly atomized.

My background is in literature. I'm a writer at heart. I find movies and television to be mostly frivolous. Films are a static medium and force you to always be a passive viewer. They don't have the collaborative, dynamic, or spontaneity that come from other art forms or even hobbies. I'm only interested in it because people watch movies more than they read books or watch plays, so in order to understand what's truly going on in the world and the culture at large you have to meet people at their level. Almost no one outside of our niche circles is reading Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, but millions of people are watching Game of Thrones. There's no value except for its own sake to do a podcast on the former instead of one on the latter.

What are some films you would say are “required viewing” and why?

I don't know. Again, I'm not a cinephile. But you can't go wrong with watching Stanley Kubrick's films. He's the most important filmmaker of the 20th century for a reason. If anything though people should watch documentaries and study their manipulative techniques. Fictional movies have actually exhausted themselves quite a bit and are on a downturn. People want reality but they want it in a digestible form that mimics the structure of storytelling. A lot of this is due to, again, living within the context of no context and thus documentaries not only provide that but also give them a seemingly true reality they can point to for their political and societal views since the democratic society requires that everyone be constantly engaged in it and at the ready to justify themselves and their views.

The reason for the rise of television isn't just because they got better at making it, but because they're able to be more niche instead of going for the lowest common denominator, which movies are required to do in order to justify their budgets, is because it gives you that hit you need for consistently rising and falling action and twists and turns. Why is the twist so ubiquitous and why is it so essential to television series nowadays? Because the human brain is so fried from the media it constantly consumes that it needs novelty in order to keep that high going. People are chasing the dragon when it comes to storytelling. It's the same reason why soap operas and professional wrestling are still so massively popular. It's the twists and turns that keep people coming. Television just promises you twists that are seemingly less ridiculous than soap plot twists.

What do you like to do in your free time? Do you have any future projects in the works?

My free time is mostly spent working out, shitposting, reading articles, playing tabletop games, socializing with average people, and chatting with friends. Like I said before, I don't really watch television and movies. I'm working on writing and expanding my show, but I work a pretty hectic job so I get done what I can get done for now.

How do you define success, both personally and in terms of your political and social aims/beliefs?

The only success that will matter is if the Right and the average person takes the threat and the power of the Left seriously. Currently, they do not. Their mindset is stuck in the 1980s. Look at the obsession with 80s-style music and 80s aesthetic and nostalgia for how much nicer things were in the 80s. What these people don't seem to remember though was that the 1980s were a large product of the feeling that nuclear war could occur at any moment, at the madness of these two massive superpowers that they couldn't just put the missiles down and talk to each other. That fueled the 80s, and at the core of it was escaping to frivolousness and the good times because of the madness going on outside. And despite all that nostalgia for this time period, the Right and the average cannot and will not acknowledge the Left for the threat they actually are.

I'm a guy who doesn't care about the long-term goals if you can't even get the simplest step done. That's success to me. If we can't even get these people to take the most immediate threat seriously, then how are you going to accomplish anything else?

How do you see this ending? Is the United States doomed?

The United States as an entity is definitely doomed. The best option for racially conscious whites is to simply band together and check out from the system once it becomes demographically impossible to affect change and let everyone else have the system. Don't try to stop it from collapsing, just let them run it into the ground. The only way that can work though is through true consciousness being achieved, otherwise, you'll just have Brazil with bold men like Bolsonaro doing everything they can to make that shell of a nation still work. But the American people, the Amerikaner as I call it, they'll persist. There are millions of us. But they'll have to determine the future they want to forge, if it will be a separatist one that they can rally around and slowly retake land or if they'll find another way forward. The best case for us presently is to buy as much time as possible so that serious people can emerge that can develop a bold vision for the future of our people.

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What about the West in general?

Every institution of the West is either dead or dying. Like I said before, we're not going back to the way things were. We couldn't even if we wanted to. What remains then is to take what worked and prepare it for the new ways, with a bold and dynamic vision for the future to come. To quote Guillaume Faye's Archeofuturism: “When this dream has faded, another will emerge.”

The choice the West is staring down, and no amount of fantasy will make this any different, is death-and-rebirth envisioned by our most optimistic thinkers or the maximal total war scenario that Linkola warns about in Can Life Prevail.

I say this so often that it's a cliché, but you need to have a mind for marathon running, and if you don't then it is better to just go and live life as a woke normal person.

I find it very strange sometimes that people ask someone like me for my perspective on things, but the reality is people do so it's important to me that I do not sugarcoat things for people but at the same time outline a workable vision of the future. Circumstances change constantly and you adapt to those circumstances. Once you understand that things will never be the way they once were, it frees you up to make what happens next work and work towards a vision of the future you'd like for your own.

This fight is not over. It never will be.

Follow Borzoi on Twitter.

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