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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Chapters 13-23

by Dan H

Wednesday, 01 August 2007In which Dan continues to self-harm with the final Harry Potter book.

Previously: I'm doing a chapter-by-chapter reaction to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

So far we've had a wedding, Harry has sat in Grimmauld place doing nothing and ... umm ... that's it.

Chapter Thirteen: The Muggle-Born Registration Commission

In which we have yet more of the Ministry pretending to be Nazis.

Let's face it: Harry Potter is an RPG with a crappy GM. This would explain why the Troika spend this chapter, and the next couple, acting like a stereotypical bunch of clueless player characters.

They've got into the Ministry, and they've realised that they have no fucking clue what to do once they get in, so they bugger about stumbling into subplots, and wind up having to fight their way out.

They also get the Horcrux, and rescue a bunch of people from the Muggle-Born Registration Commission.

It strikes me, incidentally, that much as I hate the chapters in which nothing happens at all, the chapters in which things actually do happen are in many ways worse. At least the event-free chapters have an excuse for being as boring as all hell. This chapter, which includes Dementors, show trials, and a running battle in the Ministry, is so tedious I can't even find a noteworthy quote.

I'll leave you with this, then, from Harry's brief glimpse at a copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore (okay, we get it, there's Dumbledore backplot, please stop now).

The boy who roared in silent amusement beside Dumbledore had a gleeful, wild look about him. His golden hair fell in curls to his shoulders.

I quote this not because I have anything to say about it, but so that you can join me in my disbelief when next chapter Harry has a vision of a familiar looking blonde man with a gleeful wild look, and hasn't got a clue where he's seen him before.

Chapter Fourteen: The Thief

In which the Potterites hide in a tent.

Our intrepid heroes can't go back to Grimmauld Place, because somebody was holding on to Hermione when she Apparated, and we all know that when you hold on to somebody who's teleporting, you teleport with them. It's, like, the rules.

So they go and sit in a tent. A magic tent. In some woods. And the realise that they don't know how to destroy the Horcrux. So tell us something we don't know.

Very, very little happens in this chapter. Most of it is taken up with Harry having a vision of Lord Voldemort finally killing that wand-maker he's been hunting down. Harry expresses surprise that Voldemort didn't grill the guy for wand-lore first. Because once again Harry Potter readers are too dumb to decide for themselves how they should react to plot twists and revelations.

Voldemort is looking for something, and he thinks Gregorovitch has it, but he doesn't because it was stolen from him. In a shocking display of convenience, Harry manages not only to read Voldemort's mind, but also the mind of the wandmaker, which presumably Voldemort was reading when their connection was open. So he gets a good look at the "thief".

Harry could still see the blond-haired youth's face, it was merry, wild.

Harry thinks it sounds familiar, but can't think from where.

Clue: it begins with "P" and ends with "Revious Chapter".

Chapter Fifteen: The Goblin's Revenge

In which we get yet another plot dump from some highly convenient Goblins.

Another thing you have to love about JK Rowling is the fact that she's not afraid to overhype her chapter titles. We constantly wind up with titles like "The Massively Significant Thing That Happens In A Huge And Important Way" and wind up with some guy breaking his spectacles. A fine example of this phenomenon was, of course, the first chapter of this very book: "The Dark Lord Ascending".

Indeed, one might almost suggest that the best way to appreciate JK Rolwing is to take her chapter titles and imagine for yourself what actually happens in them. Hmm ... I wonder if any fanfic communities have tried that: re-imagine Potter based only on the chapter headings.

I'm digressing again, but since this chapter is yet another useless waste of space with the protagonists sitting in a tent, I don't feel too bad about that.

Anyway, this chapter is called "The Goblin's Revenge" but could more accurately be called "The Goblin Didn't Mention That The Sword of Gryffindor That Got Put Into Gringotts Was Actually A Fake When He Possibly Could Have." As revenge goes, that's pretty lame.

So the Potteristas, safely ensconced in the Tent of Magically Protected Arse Sitting overhear Ted Tonks and a couple of Gringotts Goblins having a long, laboured discussion in which they painstakingly explain whatever bits of the plot Harry needs to know about next.

Which leads to this awful expository conversation between the Potteroids:

"The sword can destroy Horcruxes! Goblin-made blades imbibe only that which strengthens them - Harry, that sword's impregnated with Basilisk venom!" "Dumbledore didn't give it to me because he still needed it, he wanted to use it on the locket -" "- and he must have realised they wouldn't let you have it if he put it in his will -" "- so he made a copy -" "- and put a fake in the glass case -" "- and put the real one ... where?"

Okay, fine, so you've answered the "Why didn't Dumbeldore give them all this shit earlier" question, and guess what: it's a stupid answer. Why not say "Harry, in case anything happens to me, I want you to take the sword of Gryffindor. Keep it safe, because it can destroy Horcruxes on account of how it's impregnated with Basilisk venom. By the way, we'll need it to destroy that locket we're going after."

Furthermore, the whole reason for the sword being able to destroy Horcruxes rubs me up the wrong way. It's an artefact of one of the founders of Hogwarts: it's a puissant magical weapon of ancient goblin craftsmanship. Do we really need that tat about its being "impregnated with basilisk venom"? Hell, do we really need basilisk venom to be the thing that destroys Horcruxes.

I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, but it makes the wrong kind of sense. It makes the kind of juvenile sense you get amongst seventeen year old roleplayers who will argue your leg off about how a vampire's clothes should reflect in a mirror, even if the vampire doesn't. The Sword can't destroy the Horcruxes because it's a Symbolic Ultimate Good to defeat their Symbolic Ultimate Evil. It can destroy Horcruxes because it's soaked in Horcrux Destroying Juice. This presumably is manufactured by the same people who made the Dumbledore Killing Juice that featured in the final chapters of book six.

In the next part of the chapter, Ron scores major points with me, as he assumes the mantle of Voice of the Reader, and points out what a hopelessly, stupidly, unbearably pointless situation they are now in. They have one Horcrux, they have no idea where the others are. They found out purely by chance that the Sword of Gryffindor can destroy Horcruxes, but they don't know where it is or how to get it. In short, the only thing they can do is sit around like morons hoping to get a lucky break.

I always hate it when this sort of thing happens. You had exactly the same situation in the seventh season of Buffy. The Hero clearly hasn't got a fucking clue what they are doing, and one of their companions finally snaps (often as a result of having seen half their friends die, or having been forced to hide in a tent eating wild mushrooms as a result of the hero's blatant incompetence) and calls them on it. Then the hero is all "you've got to have faith, you've got to believe in what we're doing!" and the friend is all "but this is completely and totally stupid, the only hope we have is to be saved by authorial fiat." And then the hero says "well if you feel like that you'd better leave", then the friend leaves. Then authorial fiat comes along and presents the hero with all the answers which they were manifestly incapable of acquiring of their own accord, and the friend has to slink back and admit that the hero was right all along.

It's awful, and it's always awful. It's bad writers trying to excuse bad writing by pretending that their failure to give their characters adequate motivation to undertake a course of action is really their character having Faith in something Greater Than Themselves.

So Ron Disapparates out of the Tent Of Pointlessness, and I sincerely wish I could go with him.

Chapter Sixteen: Godric's Hollow

In which Potter very briefly gets off his arse.

Ron has left. Harry is all cut up about this. Hermione is even more cut up about it because she is worried that if he doesn't get back they won't be able to get married and give their children stupid names.

Early on in this chapter, I had to wonder whether JK was actually taking the piss, when I stumbled across the following:

He was staggered, now, to think of his own presumption in accepting his friends' offers to accompany him on this meandering, pointless journey.

I mean, seriously. That's a joke, right. That's JK Rowling tacitly admitting that the first two hundred and fifty seven pages of her book have been a complete waste of everybody's time and energy.

Finally, they seize on the nearest thing they have to a clue, which is to go to Godric's Hollow in the hope that they can meet somebody who can point them in the right direction.

They spend approximately a month planning this little jaunt, collecting the hair of random strangers so that they can Polyjuice themselves again, and learning to Apparate together under the invisibility cloak. Much as I appreciate these little details, I'd be completely happy to take them as read.

So they piffle around looking at graves, and we finally get to see where James and Lily are buried. There's also an honest-to-God Potter statue in the middle of the square, and we find that the former Potter residence has been preserved as a shrine for all eternity so that nobody forgets what happened there.

I really wanted to find those scenes touching. Honestly I did. But it's book seven for crying out loud, and Harry has only just gone back to Godric's Hollow? On top of this, the whole thing contributes to the massively mixed messages we get about the Wizarding World's attitude towards Harry. We've spent the past three books having pretty much the whole of wizarding society shun Harry on a variety of ropey pretexts (the latest being "the Daily Prophet says he killed Dumbledore"), so to have this vast memorial to his triumph and his parents' sacrifice is actually rather jarring.

Anyway, the ... well Duo, I suppose they are now ... dick around in Godric's hollow for a bit. In the next chapter they meet Bathilda Bagshot.

Chapter Seventeen: Bathilda's Secret

In which we find out no information of any importance.

The title of this chapter is "Bathilda's Secret". Now I had vainly hoped that "Bathilda's Secret" would be some of this goddamned Dumbledore backplot which JK has been waving in my face for the past two hundred and seventy pages. No such luck.

Bathilda's Secret, in case you were wondering is "she's dead, and there's a gigantic fucking snake living in her animated corpse."

There's actually precious little to say about this chapter. H&H meet Bathilda Bagshot, she acts really, really, really creepy. Like she's an animated corpse with a giant snake inside her, in fact. She lures them into her home, which smells of piss and dead women with snakes inside them. Then she lures Harry upstairs, where she turns into Nagini and tries to kill him.

Or rather, not to kill him, but to hold him until Voldemort shows up, so that the Dark Lord can kill him personally.

I'm going to go off on another tangent now, and rant for a bit about how utterly fucking annoying this is. Voldemort would have won his war in eight seconds flat, bent the Wizarding world to his will, triumphed over all resistance, danced on the grave of Albus Dumbledore, achieved immortality and subjugated mugglekind with ease if he had just been willing to let go of the whole "I have to be the one to kill Harry Potter" thing.

I wouldn't mind so much, but there is absolutely no reason given for Voldemort's stubborn insistence that he "has to be the one" to kill Potter or, for that matter, Potter's stubborn insistence that he "has to be the one" to defeat Voldemort. Everybody just seems to take it for granted that only Harry can beat Voldemort, only Voldemort can beat Harry. And I know that there's the "prophecy" but for fuck's sake. Prophecies are cool when people hear them, set out to defy them, and fail. They are not cool when people hear the prophecy and say: "Oh my god! A Prophecy! I must immediately and unthinkingly do exactly what it says! Which also just happens to be the thing which most directly furthers the hackneyed plot of the quest the author has decided I'm supposed to be on."

Voldemort gets closer, and Harry starts seeing into his mind again, but now Voldemort is reliving his murder of Harry's parents. This flashback takes three pages and tells us literally nothing that we do not already know. It does, however, give us some insights into Voldemort's mono-dimensional non-personality, with lines like:

...how stupid they were, and how trusting, thinking that their secret lay in friends, that weapons could be discarded even for moments...

Do you see. Because Voldemort can't understand love. Because he's completely incapable of any human feeling whatsoever. Another thing that hacks me off about Voldemort is the fact that JK seems on the one hand to want us to view him as something utterly inhuman, a creature devoid of compassion or emotion, a heartless monster that kills at random, but on the other hand wants us to view him as somehow similar to Harry, the hero with whom we are supposed to sympathise. She shows us that he and Harry have vaguely similar personal histories, that they are connected on a variety of levels, and keeps having Dumbledore say things like "It is our choices, Harry, which define us". But Voldemort never makes a "choice" to do evil, or at least not a meaningful choice. Voldemort does evil because if he did not, there would be no book. He walks on stage a psychopath, and he dies a psychopath. His actions gain him nothing, and cost him everything. He plays the villain because Rowling wants him to. He has no personality, no identity, no goals beyond those dictated by the plot. All the effort Rowling puts into "developing" his "character" in books six and seven only highlights this fact.

So Voldemort shows up and fails to kill Harry Potter. Again.

Shoot me. Shoot me now.

Chapter Eighteen: The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore

In which we are expected to give a shit about Dumbledore's lame-ass backstory.

While Godric's Hollow turned out to be a bust, Hermione did manage to swipe a copy of The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore, Rita-Skeeter's tell-all biography of the lovable old plot device.

Blah blah dark past blah blah Grindelwald blah blah world conquest blah blah greater good.

Long story short: Dumbledore spent approximately three months on good terms with the Dark Wizard Grindelwald, during which time they concocted some typically teenage plans about how it would ... like ... be totally radical if ... like ... Wizards took over the world because ... like ... look at how fake and commercial everything was. Or something. It's cheap and unconvincing and really not that shocking at all. It's sort of like discovering that Churchill once met Hitler at a party in 1921.

What makes all of this even more risible is the timeline involved. According to the information provided by JK Rowling, Dumbledore is about 150 when the books take place. Given that he met Grindelwald when they were both eighteen, this puts their Summer O' Evil at around eighteen fifty-something. Dumbledore, of course, eventually defeated Grindelwald in nineteen forty-five. Nearly a hundred years later. Either Grindelwald was in power for a really long time, or else he didn't come to power for nearly a century after he met old Albus. Either way, it seems a bit pointless to hold Dumbledore responsible for the actions taken in 1940 by a man he met in 1860.

Harry, of course goes off the deep end, and Hermione, of course, tries to point out that things aren't as awful as they seem.

"He changed, Harry, he changed! It's as simple as that! Maybe he did believe those things when he was seventeen, but the whole of the rest of his life was devoted to fighting the Dark Arts!"

Harry doesn't seem to be able to get his head around this idea, and for once I can't entirely blame him for it. After all, there isn't one single character in the entire Harry Potter series who has shown any meaningful development between their arrival at Hogwarts and their death. Riddle was always a psycho, Sirius was always a wild card, Lily was always an angel and so on. So Harry can, in fact, be entirely forgiven for assuming that Dumbledore's personality was set in stone by the age of eighteen.

I wish I could say that we had now finally got the Dumbledore backstory out of the way. But no.

Chapter Nineteen: The Silver Doe

In which it turns out that Ron's attack of sanity was really black magic.

For some reason, we are supposed to associate the "Silver Doe" with Lily Potter. I'm not sure why. Okay, so James was a stag. Does Lily have no identity of her own?

Oh wait. Never mind then.

Anyway, Harry and Hermione are still sitting in the Procrastination Tent. Harry, keeping watch, thinks he hears something outside. Then he catches a glimpse of the Silver Doe of the title, and decides to dash off into the dark after it.

Now even JK Rowling, who usually doesn't bother to justify her characters' moronic decisions, seems to have realised that dashing out into the night, away from their magically protected tent and into an unknown darkness where absolutely anything could be waiting for them, so she gives us another one of her trademark "no this totally makes sense" lines:

Caution murmured: it could be a trick, a lure, a trap. But instinct, overwhelming instinct, told him that this was not Dark Magic.

So that's okay then. If you know something might be a trap, it's okay to walk blindly into it.

The Silver Doe (which we are supposed to associate with Lily Potter because she was nothing more than James Potter's woman) leads Harry to a lake, which has the Sword of Gryffindor at the bottom. I shit you not.

I've seen people on the internet actually praising Rowling for the "symbolism" of this scene. Newsflash kids: ripping scenes off from famous myths isn't symbolism, it's just lazy. It's a sword in a lake, which is only there because somebody sent it to Harry, because the little fucktard would otherwise be completely incapable of destroying any of the damned Horcruxes.

So Harry takes off all of his clothes and dives into the frozen lake, but the Horcrux around his neck tries to strangle him (which it should really have done earlier, thinking about it). He is rescued by the timely re-arrival of Ron, who saves Harry, retrieves the Sword of Gryffindor, and then explains that he was only making consistent, cogent points about how completely fucked they all were, and how Harry didn't know what the hell he was doing, because the Horcrux was doing a One Ring on him.

So they're all reconciled, and Harry tells Ron that he is supposed to be the one to destroy the locket. Seriously, everybody in this entire book should just get the hell over all the "supposed to be" shit. Voldemort won't let his minions kill Harry, because he's "supposed" to do it, Harry can't ask for help defeating Voldemort because he's "supposed" to do it himself, and now apparently Ron is "supposed" to destroy the locket. What. The. Fuck?

So Harry opens the locket by speaking Parseltongue, and in one of the book's three moments of almost possessing merit, we see that Tom Riddle's original eyes are staring out of the two halves of the locket (I like to think that the Cup of Helga Hufflepuff contains his original nose).

Then the locket starts pulling a bunch of annoying "Hermione doesn't love you" shit to freak Ron out, which would be somewhat more effective if JK Rowling had made Ron/Hermione (or indeed any romantic relationship, or indeed any relationship at all) remotely convincing. Ron stabs the locket in they eyes, and they all go home.

They get back to the Inactivity Tent, and Hermione's all like "Ron, you absolute bastard, I'm going to kick the shit out of you and then bang your brains out." Then Ron explains that he managed to find them because the Deluminator, as well as being able to switch lights out, also lets you find your way back to your friends after you ditch them in the middle of their epic quest.

Say it with me now: What the fuck?

You see, it's shit like this that led a small number of people to believe that Dumbledore had to be from the future. I mean foresight is one thing, but are you seriously telling me that when he created the Deluminator, however many decades ago that was, he thought to himself "hey, I'd better install a 'be able to find your way back to your friends for no readily explicable reason' function as well, because one day in the next century, three young wizards might be on a quest to destroy Voldemort's Horcruxes, and one of them might leave, and need to find his way back."

And it's shit like this that makes me really hate JKR's attempt to make Dumbledore into a "complex" character in this book. You simply can't have it both ways. Either he's a real human person who makes mistakes, or he's the infallible plot god who is so wise, so possessed of absolute foresight, that he manages to predict correctly that Ron will fall under the influence of the Locket Horcrux, leave the quest, want to return, and be unable to do so because Harry and Hermione are travelling the country in a magically protected tent.

Seriously, if the guy is smart enough to do that, why the hell wasn't he smart enough to - say - track down Voldemort's Horcruxes during the ten years in which he was incorporeal, or to twig much sooner that Grindelwald was probably evil, or to not get horribly cursed trying to use the Resurrection Stone (of which more later).

Dumbledore is infallible when he needs to do something amazing to advance the plot, but All Too Human when Rowling wants to impress us with how layered and complex her characters are.

I've used the phrase "fucking hack" before, haven't I.

Chapter Twenty: Xenophilius Lovegood

In which we miss Luna Lovegood like crazy.

Here Hermione basically turns into a D&D player again, and spins out a line of logic which boils down to "hey, when we were at the wedding, the GM told us that Xenophilius Lovegood was wearing this symbol on his chest. He wouldn't have told us that if it wasn't important, right, we should totally go investigate this Xeno guy."

So they do.

They arrive at Chez Lovegood, and Ron is all "oh no, I am near my home but am not going there" and Harry is all "oh no, I am near Ginny but have no chance of getting a decent blow job".

It takes them fucking ages to ask Xenophilus about the symbol on his chest, and then Rowling does that gimmicky "end the chapter on the sentence you should probably have started the damned thing on" trick with:

"Are you referring to the sign of the Deathly Hallows?"

We're on page 328. For comparative purposes, the original Philosopher's Stone (UK Edition) ended on page 223, Chamber of Secrets on 251, and Prisoner of Azkaban on page 317. So you could read the whole of the first book and half of the second in the time it's taken us to get to the goddamned title of this one.

Chapter Twenty-One: The Tale of the Three Brothers

In which JK apes fairy-tales and fails.

So there are these three brothers who meet Death, and he offers each of them a gift, but really he's trying to fuck them over. So the first one asks for an unbeatable wand, and gets himself killed. The second one asks for a stone that can raise the dead, and drives himself to suicide. The third one, realising that Death is probably a fuck, asks for a way to get the hell out of there without Death following him, so he gets an invisibility cloak.

That's the story of the three brothers, and the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Invisibility Cloak together comprise the Deathly Hallows. Which is a stupid, stupid, stupid name for them. I mean seriously: "Hallows"? It's almost as bad as the "younglings" in Revenge of the Sith.

So anyway, Harry is all "these things totally exist, we should totally ditch our current quest to go look for them" and Hermione is all "these things totally don't exist, we should totally not ditch our current quest to go look for them" and Ron is all "these things might or might not exist, and I don't know whether we should ditch our current quest to go look for them or not."

Bets on the Hallows being real, everybody?

Anyway, the story of the Three Brothers is quite nice stylistically, but the actual content bugs me. As ever, my new favourite character Ron says it best:

"Nah, that story's just one of those things you tell kids to teach them lessons, isn't it? 'Don't go looking for trouble, don't pick fights, don't go messing around with stuff that's best left alone! Just keep your head down and mind your own business and you'll be OK."

In the "Tale of the Three Brothers," the ones who wind up dead are the ones who try to actually achieve something with their "Hallows". The last brother, the one who makes it through, the one we are supposed to admire, is the one who spends his entire life sitting under an invisibility cloak doing nothing.

I've already pointed out how passive Harry is, how he just reacts to things, how he doesn't have a consistent plan. I've complained about the fact that he's basically spent this entire book sitting in a tent doing nothing, but it becomes increasingly apparent through the book that JK Rowling views inactivity as a virtue and ambition as a sin. The implied morality of all this makes me genuinely uncomfortable, but I think I'll come back to that after I've finished the main article.

Anyway, having had the plot dump, it transpires that the Death Eaters have captured Luna, and that her father has bargained Potter to them for her return. Everybody panics, but our happy band manage to escape because - as Xeno seems to have failed to realise - they can fucking teleport.

The final thing I want to mention in this chapter touches on JK Rowling's dubious morality once again.

During the getaway, they make a big thing about how Hermione puts Ron under the invisibility cloak, not Harry. The idea here is that she wants the Death Eaters to see that Harry really was there, so that they don't think Xeno Lovegood was betraying them.

That's actually really nice, but it's spoiled by this little sequence:

Xenophilius' paper-white face appeared over the top of the sideboard. "Obliviate!" cried Hermione.

So she's gone to all that trouble to stop the Death Eaters hurting him, only to erase his brain anyway. Nice.

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Deathly Hallows

In which we are: Still. Sitting. In. A. Fucking. Tent.

Abso-fucking-lutely nothing-at-fucking-all happens in this chapter.

Seriously.

Harry gets obsessed with the Hallows, he realises that Voldemort is probably after the Elder wand, and they listen to a completely pointless radio broadcast.

They have no plan, no idea what to do or where to go.

Gee, wouldn't it be convenient if they got captured so that the Death Eaters could accidentally let slip the location of one of the Horcruxes.

What's that you say, JK? Harry said Voldemort's name, even though he knows that it will bring the wrath of the Dark Lord down upon him? And they've been captured? And they're going to Malfoy Manor?

No shit.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Malfoy Manor

In which Harry survives by dumb luck yet again.

So after Harry totally fucked up for about the millionth time in his career, and the Trio get captured by a band of "snatchers", one of which is Fenrir Greyback.

Hermione, in a flash of competence otherwise unheard of in this series, blasts Harry with a spell to make his face swell up so the Snatchers won't recognise him. Shame about that massively distinctive scar really, isn't it.

Incidentally, part of me wonders why the Voldemort-Taboo spell, supposedly implemented by Death Eater Central, is alerting random bands of snatchers instead of genuine Death Eaters. Fenrir might wear the robes, but he isn't allowed the Mark, because he's a filthy half-breed, so they have to haul Harry and Co back to Malfoy Manor in order to deliver him to the Dark Lord personally. Of course the Dark Lord isn't there, he's in - like - Albania or somewhere looking for the Elder Wang.

So our heroes, such as they are, get taken back to Malfoy Manor, and introduced to the Malfoy family, in the various persons of Narcissa, Bellatrix, and Draco (who shows a rather touching moment of being not-totally-evil when he is reluctant to formally identify Team Potter).

Bellatrix - again proving herself to be the only Death Eater with half a brain or any balls - recognises the Sword of Gryffindor, which she of course believes to be still in her family Vault. She totally freaks out at this, and thereby tips off Harry to the possibility of one of the other Horcruxes being in the vault. This is actually well done. Bellatrix reacts reasonably and sensibly, and Harry draws a logical conclusion, without having somebody else spell things out for him.

Anyway, Bellatrix decides to torture Hermione to find out what the Potterites know (again, the only Death Eater with any balls or half a brain), then she throws Harry into the World's Most Pathetic Dungeon.

In the World's Most Pathetic Dungeon we find Luna, Ollivander, and some other minor characters who I'm too bored to mention right now. Harry is tied up, but fortunately they have an old piece of nail, which makes short work of any pesky ropes you might happen to have lying around.

So while Hermione is being tortured (incidentally: bets on this hideous torment having any influence on her personality whatsoever? Bingo) Harry escapes his bonds through Luna's broken-nail-fu. He digs through the mokeskin bag which Hagrid gave him (it was a birthday present, nobody can take things out of it except the owner. Why nobody just took it off him I don't know). Fortunately, he remembered to pack the sliver of broken glass from that mirror thing that Sirius gave him. Good thing that. He has a flash of Dumbledore's eye, and calls for help.

He's a man of action, that Harry Potter.

So Dobby the house-elf shows up to rescue him. It really is a fucking curtain-call isn't it. Dobby Appartes out with Luna, Ollivander, and some other minor character, but the commotion caused by all this has attracted the attention of the Death Eaters, who send Peter Pettigrew (who for some reason everybody now calls by his boyhood nickname of "Wormtail") down to investigate).

Ron and Harry jump Pettigrew, who fights back like a good'un, using his Evil Silver Hand to throttle the life out of Harry. Harry reminds Peter that he (Harry) saved his (Pettigrew's) life back in book three, and wasn't it time for some payback. So, in a sequence that makes no sense, Wormtail's silver hand releases Harry, and then turns on its owner, choking him to death. Now I think the implication here is that the Silver Hand, being Totally Evil, was punishing Pettigrew for showing mercy, but that seems a little harsh, since the Death Eaters are all under explicit instructions not to kill Potter anyway.

So Ron and Harry burst upstairs to rescue Hermione. The battle goes exactly the same way as every other fight between hardened Dark Wizards and underage schoolchildren.

During this scuffle, Harry yanks a bunch of wands out of Draco's hand. This is an act of Profound Mystical Significance, for reasons which will be explained later.

Anyway, they fight, they bite, they fight they fight they bite, and then Dobby shows up for the final rescue. Now he should have been able to manage that in about eight seconds flat. He's a house elf, he can teleport even inside Hogwarts. He's got magic the like of which the Death Eaters cannot comprehend.

But this is the final book, and JK Rowling is a serious author who is sending a real message about death and the importance of being a passive whiny bitch, so of course Dobby can't do that. Instead he has to stand around making a speech for exactly long enough for Bellatrix to shove her dagger through his skinny little chest.

This would have been kind of touching, but seriously, all Dobby had to do was to get in, get out, and not bother with the big "you must not hurt Harry Potter" routine and he would have been fine.

So Dobby dies. His actual death is one of the most godawfully crappy bits of writing I've read since, well, since last chapter I suppose.

The elf's eyes found him, and his lips trembled with the effort to form words. "Harry ... Potter ..." And then with a little shudder the elf became quite still, and his eyes were nothing more than great, glassy orbs sprinkled with light from the stars they could not see.

Get your Great Glassy Orbs off me you damn dirty house elf!

On a side note, deaths so far: Charity Burbage, Hedwig, Mad-Eye, Dobby, Ted Tonks.

So of five fatalities, that's two completely unimportant characters, and three utter cheap shots. Way to go you cold, callous killer you.

Next: The exciting conclusion. The fucking awful epilogue.

Themes:

J.K. Rowling

Books

Young Adult / Children

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Arthur B

at 15:03 on 2007-08-01She's gone on record as saying that the fairy tale is based on the Pardoner's Tale, hasn't she?

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http://carojen.livejournal.com/

at 16:42 on 2009-07-10I agree with most of what you have written; pointing out the few instances of good writing really makes the rest look bad in comparision.

it becomes increasingly apparent through the book that JK Rowling views inactivity as a virtue and ambition as a sin.

Not to mention that it is Slytherin, the house of _ambition_, that is portrayed as evil throughout the series. At least she doesn't give us conflicting messages. :meh

By the way, Dumbledore was born in 1881, according to Word of God, but that revelation was probably after this was written.

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Dan H

at 22:51 on 2009-07-10At time of writing, I'm pretty sure the WoG on Dumbledore's age was "about a hundred and fifty".

Assuming he was hanging out with Grindelwald in his school days, that still puts his Nazi era more than a hundred years before the present day of the Potterverse, and a clear forty-year gap between the Grindelwald Reich and the Summer of Evil.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/tjLTVHEducFb4rKDHU5DukBHtQcCbTVMEEq55v0CxV4-#5e156

at 20:24 on 2009-07-29Very good idea about fanfiction challenges, especially with regards to chapter one. Why does JKR through Ron draw meticulous attention to how badly written the book is? I suppose because her fortune had already been made. And she does send out some massively mixed messages doesn't she? So it's OK by her to zombify your parents and friend's parents without a second thought...

#Ferretbrain #Harry Potter #Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows #J.K. Rowling #Dan H

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xtruss · 3 years

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Are You Ready and Willing to Be Free Again?

“Care what other people think of you and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

— By Stacey Rudin | September 16, 2021

The modern West’s sudden and near universal acceptance of “lockdowns” — a novel concept of government-enforced house arrest — signifies a far-reaching and sinister shift away from bedrock democratic values. When fear was injected into the atmosphere by the media, the West was a sitting duck, ready to accept any lifeline offered by any politician — even the communist dictator — in a stunning reversal of our nation’s founding principles.

“Give me liberty or give me death” was our original rallying cry. Oppressed by British rule, Americans rebelled. They fought for independence, for the right to live their own lives in their own way. This passion for liberty created the most successful republic in history, a nation to be proud of — a beacon of hope and prosperity for people of all nations.

Today’s Americans behave in a diametrically opposed manner, trusting the government with blind allegiance and giving it full and total control over their wellbeing. Even personal health decisions like whether or not to receive a quickly-developed vaccination are entrusted to politicians to mandate. Any neighbor who disagrees is marginalized and rejected: “She’s an antivaxxer; she must be an ignorant Trump supporter.”

You cannot betray the concept of “give me liberty or give me death” any further than by adopting the premise that no one can disagree with you and still be a reasonable person. When you are on board with a plan that includes subverting your neighbors’ autonomy and violating their bodies as you deem necessary to satisfy the people on TV, you’ve rejected the American experiment. You’re a collectivist, and I wonder: have you looked into how well collectivist systems have worked out for regular people lately?

It is shocking how many people appear to want to live in a world where everyone thinks just like they do. The average person quickly distances himself even from political opponents, as if it would be desirable to have just one political party that everyone votes for. Yet in 2021, in affluent coastal communities, republicans have to pretend to be democrats, and they actually do it. When even this commonplace difference of opinion cannot be accepted and dealt with, it’s clear we’ve moved far away from prizing eccentricity as John Stuart Mill did in 1859, back when Liberty was cool:

“[T]he mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”

“The mind-bending part of conformist behavior is this: we all know the truth. We know. We just aren’t saying or doing it”

This fear of eccentricity — which I’d argue is tantamount to freedom — was laid bare in March 2020. Even when the “deadly disease” propaganda out of China was thickest, the average person really did not want to lock herself at home and pull her children out of school, let alone force people out of work. Yet it was only the very rare person who made this desire public. Everyone else pretended to agree — they decided to “go along to get along.” They put the “stay home, save lives” sticker on their Facebook profiles. They did drive-by birthday parades (my God.) And now that the failure of lockdowns is irrefutable, they refuse to admit they were wrong, afraid to face the damage they helped to cause.

To summarize, the appearance of universal agreement with lockdown was just that: an appearance. Agreement was depicted because most people do “what’s cool,” and because mass media is everywhere, and because social media astroturf propaganda efforts are very effective. A society that wants to “be cool” is very easy to manipulate. The dissenters will betray themselves to stay cool, so just make something appear cool, and the conformists will jump on board.

To today’s Americans, appearances are everything — we are afraid to be different, lest it make our friends uncomfortable (maybe we will lose one, whatever will we do?!) We have ceased caring about truth and authenticity entirely. We have tacitly agreed as a society that true things should be hidden whenever they conflict with what is “popular”; with what everyone “smart” and “cool” is doing. Anyone acting outside of these boundaries — the “eccentrics” of centuries past, considered by Mill to be geniuses — are today’s untouchables.

In a nation founded by rebels, somehow it has become cool to be a conformist.

Thanks to lockdowns, we know that people want to “stay cool” more than they want they want their kids educated, more than they want to open their businesses, and more than they want to breathe freely. They will even accept open-ended vaccine dosages for an illness that poses less risk to them than driving a car — anything to “stay cool.” Disagreeing with someone is too much for Americans today. Confrontation is so scary that we’d rather let society dictate who we are; that way, everyone else will feel comfortable.

“Care what other people think of you and you will always be their prisoner.” — Lao Tzu

This is how the West sacrificed freedom before lockdowns were ever imposed. We care far too much what other people think of us. We fear freedom. Freedom is truth and authenticity and acting in your own interest, as your own person, even when — especially when — it makes other people uncomfortable. Why would you want a bunch of fake “friends” who only like the image you’re projecting? They will leave you the second your social power is tarnished. If you’ve never burned a bridge in your life, these are the people you’re surrounded by, guaranteed.

Speaking the truth, even when it burns bridges, will dissatisfy just the people you want to be rid of: the people who want you in a box, who resent having to follow onerous rules themselves, and mean to force you to do the same. The only power they have is the power to reject you, and once you don’t care about that, you’re free. You say the truth, accept the results, walk away from the wrong people and end up with the right ones.

Trade truth for popularity, by contrast, and you kill yourself in a sense. All that’s left of “you” is what society finds acceptable, which isn’t “you” at all. It’s completely external to you and has nothing to do with you. By conforming, you betray yourself by accepting the premise that there is something wrong with the real you. Maybe you’re so bent on being perfect (as defined by others) that you don’t even know what “you” is. That would make you the perfect cog in a machine, but as for your personal well-being, there is nothing worse. You will suffer.

“We defraud ourselves out of what is actually useful to us in order to make appearances conform to common opinion. We care less about the real truth of our inner selves than about how we are known to the public.” — Montaigne

The mind-bending part of conformist behavior is this: we all know the truth. We know. We just aren’t saying or doing it. There are dozens, hundreds of people who email me thanking me for opposing lockdowns and for standing up for medical choice and privacy. So why aren’t they doing this themselves, if they admire it so much, and know it needs to be done? If everyone did it, there could be no repercussions for any of us. Yet it isn’t happening because we are scared of telling the truth, which means we fear freedom. Far too many of us fear freedom.

We fear freedom and authentic humanity so much that we pretend people are robots. One glimpse of human frailty and a person can be blacklisted without a trial. Humanity is barbaric at present, demanding a certain perfect image and absolute cooperation with majority rule or social death. It isn’t hard to understand why people eventually crack in such a system, or develop severe anxiety disorders. Consider one of my favorite passages of literature from modern philosopher Karl Ove Knausgaard, discussing how he was banished by his family for simply telling the truth in his epic autobiographical novel:

“The social dimension is what keeps us in our places, which makes it possible for us to live together; the individual dimension is what ensures that we don’t merge into each other. The social dimension is based on taking one another into consideration. We also do this by hiding our feelings, not saying what we think, if what we feel or think affects others. The social dimension is also based on showing some things and hiding others. What should be shown and what should be hidden are not subject to disagreement . . . the regulatory mechanism is shame. One of the questions this book raised for me when I was writing it was what was there to gain by contravening social norms, by describing what no one wants to be described, in other words, the secret and the hidden. Let me put it another way: what value is there in not taking others into account? The social dimension is the world as it should be. Everything that is not as it should be is hidden. My father drank himself to death, that is not how it should be, that has to be hidden. My heart yearned for another woman, that is not how it should be, it must be hidden. But he was my father and it was my heart.”

“He was my father and it was my heart.” What is there to gain by calling Knausgaard a freak and rejecting him, when we know these things happen all the time — alcoholism and infidelity? Shouldn’t we revere him for his brave example, for his confidence? I find his display of human vulnerability incredibly attractive, perhaps because I see so little of it in my daily life. I’m tired of the display of perfect people with perfect lives and perfectly-scheduled, perfect kids on the path to Harvard. I want the mess, and I want to show my mess and still be accepted and loved.

Knausgaard, I guess, is the rare modern eccentric. He puts it all out there. Here he is again, discussing the purpose of publishing a novel so true that he lost family members over it:

“I was there, turning 40. I had a beautiful wife, three beautiful kids, I loved them all. But still I wasn’t truly happy. It’s not necessarily the curse of the writer, this. But maybe it’s the curse of the writer to be aware of it, to ask: why is all this, all I’ve got, not enough? That’s really what I’m searching for, in this whole thing, an answer to that question.”

Maybe that’s the heart of it all — even the heart of the current crisis. We are all so empty despite “having it all,” because “it all” has been defined by something other than us. Hollywood, the media, popular politicians — they are telling us what to be, and we have listened, and we are miserable. We are lying, pretending, putting on a show; hiding our pain with drugs, drink, porn, overspending. Things that they sell us.

The end result of this entire exercise in anti-self-development is lockdowns and forced perpetual vaccinations, a segregated society with everyone suspicious of everyone else, and technological apartheid on the horizon. Slavery. If we had all defined ourselves, instead of turning into a mass with one hive mind, afraid of any differences — of freedom — would we be here? I don’t think so. We’d be happy, healthy, and free.

“To be satiated with the ‘necessities’ of external success is no doubt an inestimable source of happiness, yet the inner man continues to raise his claim, and this can be satisfied by no outward possessions. And the less this voice is heard in the chase after the brilliant things of this world, the more the inner man becomes a source of inexplicable misfortune and uncomprehended unhappiness.” — Carl Jung

We’ve neglected individuality in pursuit of perfect conformity, and as a result we’ve become a miserable society filled with miserable people who will never feel safe enough. There is no boundary they will not cross in pursuit of perfect compliance with the rules, doing anything and everything that’s needed to “be cool” today, as defined by The Today Show. “Come to our all-vaccinated wedding!” “I won’t play tennis with ‘the unvaccinated,’ regardless of the fact that I took my own vaccine and stand 40 feet away.”

This is what we’ve become.

We simply must revisit truth and authenticity sometime very soon. We urgently need to find what’s real in all of this fake, and that can’t be done without individual human voices. If you care about liberty, you must do this one scary thing: embrace it. Be free. “But to be free, you have to be inconsiderate.” Yes. Inconsiderate to others, but considerate to yourself. Speak now or forever hold your peace.

— Stacey Rudin is an attorney and writer in New Jersey, USA

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businessliveme · 5 years

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Facebook headed for a breakup?

(Bloomberg) — Chris Hughes, who co-founded Facebook Inc. with Mark Zuckerberg from their Harvard dorm room, said the company has become too powerful and influential and should be broken up.

“Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” Hughes wrote Thursday in an opinion piece in the New York Times. “It is time to break up Facebook.”

Hughes, who hasn’t worked at the social media company in more than 10 years, said Zuckerberg’s influence “is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government,” and his focus on growth led the chief executive officer to “sacrifice security and civility for clicks.”

Facebook and other giant technology companies have come under increasing scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe for the sheer volume of personal data they have collected on people using their platforms. Recent controversies have focused on their vulnerability to manipulation and spreading “fake news,” as well as their use as forums for hate speech and fomenting violence.

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a presidential candidate, has already called for breaking up Facebook, Amazon.com Inc., and Alphabet Inc., calling them anti-competitive behemoths that crowd out competition. Her proposal, released in March, is supported by Senator Amy Klobuchar, another Democratic presidential candidate, who said the U.S. has “a major monopoly problem.”

Warren’s plan calls for legislation that would designate the companies as “platform utilities,” and proposed that some of the mergers, including Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram, be unwound, a move Hughes agreed with.

In a statement, Facebook said breaking up a successful company won’t enforce accountability, and instead repeated calls for new regulations, which Zuckerberg argued for in his own opinion piece in the Washington Post in March.

“Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability,” Nick Clegg, the company’s vice president of global affairs and communication, said in the statement. “Accountability of tech companies can only be achieved through the painstaking introduction of new rules for the internet.” He said Zuckerberg is meeting with government leaders this week to work on developing such rules.

In his opinion piece, Hughes also proposed creating a new government agency to regulate technology and protect privacy. The Federal Trade Commission, which has some oversight, is expected to slap Facebook with a fine of as much as $5 billion soon as part of a settlement over privacy violations stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal last year.

Since Zuckerberg controls most of Facebook’s voting shares, the board works “more like an advisory committee,” Hughes wrote, leaving it up to Zuckerberg alone to decide the algorithms behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Zuckerberg has testified several times before Congress on issues of privacy and election meddling and spent much of last year apologizing and vowing to restore trust with Facebook’s more than 2 billion users worldwide.

Hughes served as a spokesman for Facebook in its early days and left in 2007 to volunteer for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. He and other early Facebook founders didn’t foresee how the News Feed algorithm “could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders,” he wrote. But now he said he feels “a sense of anger and responsibility.”

The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Zuckerberg’s “unilateral control over speech,” Hughes said. “There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.”

Part of the problem is that there aren’t any real alternatives to Facebook. No major social media company has been founded since the fall of 2011, Hughes noted. “The company’s strategy was to beat every competitor in plain view, and regulators and the government tacitly — and at times explicitly — approved.”

U.S. lawmakers who have advocated a Facebook breakup in the past quickly echoed Hughes’s sentiment. Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, said Facebook should be broken up and the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp should be undone. He argued that the company deserves greater antitrust scrutiny, along the lines of past inquiries on telephone companies or Microsoft Corp.

“Being big is not illegal,” Blumenthal said in an interview on CNBC. “It’s the misuse of that bigness and market dominance such as Facebook has been doing by acquiring innovative companies before they can really reach majority and also copying new technologies so as to stifle competition and innovation.” He said the FTC should penalize Facebook for violations of the 2011 consent decree with remedies that include increased privacy protections, on top of any monetary fine.

The post Facebook headed for a breakup? appeared first on Businessliveme.com.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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At two occasionally tense congressional hearings Wednesday, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Congressional Committee for Energy and Commerce grilled Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey on a broad range of topics, from concern over the proliferation of bots on Twitter to how the platform deals with hate speech.

But again and again, concerned members of Congress kept returning to one topic: shadow-banning, and the question of whether Twitter is engaging in the practice with regard to conservative voices on the site.

The basic definition of shadow-banning is simple: A member of a given internet community is tacitly blocked or muted to the rest of the community without their knowledge, so that only they can see what they’re posting. Shadow-banning has been around for years — it dates back to early internet forums — but the term has been catapulted into the news this year thanks to a persistent conspiracy theory that Twitter has pointedly and purposefully shadow-banned Republicans who use the site.

The conspiracy theory took root after Twitter made a change to its algorithm that effectively prevented hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts from being auto-suggested when people used the site’s search function. The change turned out to affect the accounts of many conservative and Republican politicians.

Once this outcome was discovered, in July, Twitter once again changed its algorithm so that the affected accounts displayed normally. But the incident prompted a wave of rumors, right-wing cries about a liberal conspiracy to silence conservatives, and one inflammatory (and false) tweet from President Donald Trump.

And ultimately, outrage over the perceived shadow-banning of conservatives led members of Congress to summon Dorsey to Capitol Hill.

On Wednesday, Republican members of Congress seemed fixated on the idea that Twitter has long displayed unnecessary bias against Republicans through the nebulous practice. During the morning’s Senate hearing, where Dorsey appeared alongside Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and then again during a four-hour afternoon hearing in the House, they repeatedly interrogated Dorsey about whether Twitter’s algorithms have developed inherent biases against conservative users and conservative content.

In response, Dorsey repeatedly explained that the algorithm had no inherent political bias and was simply sorting Twitter content on the basis of numerous behavior signals from the accounts it was reviewing.

Meanwhile, multiple Democrats on the Energy Committee described the proceedings as a waste of time. After outlining the facts around the alleged shadow-banning incident, Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA) absolved Twitter and Dorsey of any wrongdoing and called the entire exercise of the hearing “a load of crap.” Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ) stated that “this hearing appears to be just one more mechanism to raise money and generate outrage. It appears Republicans are desperately trying to rally their base by fabricating a problem that simply does not exist.”

Rep. Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania just called the whole premise of the Twitter hearing “a load of crap,” and it might be the truest thing said all day. pic.twitter.com/8tjg2vVoJr

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) September 5, 2018

So how did we get here? Is shadow-banning real and has Twitter actually done it? And how did the belief in shadow-banning spur an all-day congressional firing squad?

Let’s break it down — hopefully with more clarity than anyone managed to do on Capitol Hill.

Shadow-banning is an established internet moderator practice in which a user’s posts are muted or hidden without their knowledge, usually because they’re being disruptive in some way. So they get to “participate,” but other people typically can’t see or interact with their posts. The idea is that by shadow-banning someone who’s causing a problem, you avoid riling the person with overt attempts to discipline or restrict them, while also preventing them from bothering others.

The practice used to be quite common, particularly when the internet was mostly comprised of forums and bulletin boards. The term “shadow ban” was reportedly first coined on the seminal forum SomethingAwful way back in 2001, but even before that, forums and bulletin boards across the web gave moderators the power to flag certain users for heightened moderation, or to put them in time-out if they posted too much, too frequently. On mailing lists, moderators would often quietly ban users after fielding multiple complaints about them, or flag certain individuals so their messages would have to be approved by a moderator before they went out to the general populace.

The current understanding of the concept of shadow-banning has been made widely known through Reddit, where it has long been an acceptable method for minimizing bots, spam, trolls, and unfriendly or disruptive users. The modern-day, Reddit-codified version of shadow-banning is to mute a user to the rest of the community without their knowledge.

In the era of social media, however, the old ways born of localized, interpersonal moderation have not only been lost; they’ve also become largely impossible to replicate or maintain on such a large scale. Twitter’s shadow-banning woes sprang from an attempt by the platform to essentially algorithmically replicate that kind of personal moderated space. And like most attempts to algorithmically curate social media these days, this one was destined to encounter a whole lot of problems.

In mid-May, Twitter rolled out several changes to its platform as part of its ongoing quest to “ban the Nazis” and curb site-wide harassment. These changes were specifically designed to combat “troll-like behavior,” meaning that the intended targets were accounts which engage in harassment and “distort” the overall tenor of conversation across the site. Twitter explained this effort, which it pitched as an important step toward “serving healthy conversation,” as follows:

There are many new signals we’re taking in, most of which are not visible externally. Just a few examples include if an account has not confirmed their email address, if the same person signs up for multiple accounts simultaneously, accounts that repeatedly Tweet and mention accounts that don’t follow them, or behavior that might indicate a coordinated attack. We’re also looking at how accounts are connected to those that violate our rules and how they interact with each other.

After the changes, accounts which were algorithmically determined to be exhibiting these and other traits were still viewable on the site — but to see them, you had to search for them and then specifically choose to see hidden results.

In other words, unlike a traditional shadow ban, where you usually can’t access the shadow-banned user’s content at all, Twitter’s version de-listed some accounts and their content from displaying automatically.

This sounds like a pretty useful tool, in theory. But in practice, when Twitter deployed it, the algorithm filtered many accounts belonging to conservative Twitter users. The overall number of affected accounts, which Dorsey announced during Wednesday’s hearing, totaled around 600,000. What caused many observers to balk was that the proportion of conservative accounts that were affected seemed to be very high, and some of the affected accounts belonged to Republican members of Congress.

Here’s how Dorsey explained the mishap in his remarks to the House, which he also tweeted out:

In the spirit of accountability and transparency: recently we failed our intended impartiality. Our algorithms were unfairly filtering 600,000 accounts, including some members of Congress, from our search auto-complete and latest results. We fixed it. But how did it happen?

— jack (@jack) September 5, 2018

Our technology was using a decision making criteria that considers the behavior of people following these accounts. We decided that wasn’t fair, and corrected. We‘ll always improve our technology and algorithms to drive healthier usage, and measure the impartiality of outcomes.

— jack (@jack) September 5, 2018

Put simply, Twitter, intending to minimize “troll-like behavior,” wound up inadvertently hiding several Republican-affiliated accounts from the auto-suggest feature in its search function. Many people perceived this event as a concerted attempt by Twitter to silence conservative voices and views on the platform, and reacted with outrage.

In Twitter’s attempt to algorithmically “serve healthy conversation,” it aimed to identify accounts that were potentially harassing others by “repeatedly Tweet[ing] and mention[ing] accounts that don’t follow them”; accounts that were one of many created by the same user; accounts that were participating in coordinated attacks on other users; and accounts that were following users who were doing all of those things. In the process, it appears that Twitter’s algorithm unearthed a rather uncomfortable truth about the way Twitter users connect, and the overlap between trolls and non-trolls on social media.

Users who were affected by the new filter were algorithmically identified as exhibiting the “troll” behavior the algorithm was hunting for, or as engaging — via likes, replies, and follows — with accounts that were exhibiting this behavior. As Dorsey explained on Wednesday, the algorithm also looked at whether an account was followed by a high number of accounts that were exhibiting this behavior. That follower gauge is apparently what led to the accounts of Republican members of Congress not being auto-suggested by Twitter’s search function, which subsequently led Twitter to eventually decide it “wasn’t fair.”

The blunt truth is that in 2018, many of the Twitter accounts that follow and interact with conservative politicians and personalities — including none-the-wiser Republican politicians — are also linked to extremist, racist, and/or white nationalist ideology and have a tendency to engage in abusive and “troll-like” behavior. Thus, Twitter’s algorithm, in its hunt for behavioral patterns, wound up filtering a broad range of users, from fringe extremists and trolls to mainstream Republicans.

Twitter ultimately tweaked its algorithm to restore many of the prominent filtered accounts — while its staff reiterated that those accounts had been affected because of their own behaviors and the behavior of their followers, not because of any inherent political bias.

To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets. We recently publicly testified to Congress on this topic https://t.co/Zk4DL7Q3hq

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

On 2) Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.

— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 25, 2018

Despite the explanations, and despite Twitter dialing back the algorithm, the accusations of liberal bias continued to rage. Dorsey wound up fielding questions about the incident from conservative-leaning media and other outlets, and he became the target of outrage from sources ranging from Fox News to Sean Hannity to the well-known conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Twitter seemed unable to satisfactorily answer congressional concerns, and so Dorsey agreed to meet with the House Energy Committee specifically to address the shadow-ban question and the broader issue of platform bias.

Throughout Wednesday’s hearing, Dorsey referred vaguely to the “behavior signals” that caused the algorithm to affect conservative Twitter. At one point, he described them as “a thousand decision-making criteria that the algorithms use.”

But he didn’t spell out these criteria in terms of the reality that current Republican politics, as embodied by Trump’s own Twitter use, have inevitably become entangled with a lot of horrible, troll-like behavior on social media. (In fact, the hearing itself was attended by a strange coterie of right-wing internet trolls who attempted to troll the session in real life.)

Instead, Dorsey (along with Sandberg during the morning hearing) used a variety of nebulous language throughout the day, which often seemed to frustrate both Republicans and Democrats. Pressed again and again to admit to Twitter showing some type of bias, either systemic or personal, Dorsey consistently demurred. At one point, he sidestepped giving information, when challenged, about whether his own personal political leanings are liberal; at another, he refused to concede that President Trump’s Twitter account might be in violation of Twitter’s general content policies. “We believe strongly in being impartial,” Dorsey said, “and we strive to enforce our rules impartially.”

Members of Congress, in turn, spoke vaguely about instituting government regulations to rein in social media — again, without clarifying what such regulation might look like.

What was made explicitly clear by the end of the very long day was that the entire exercise was something of a wash. Republicans who’d refused to accept Twitter’s initial, consistent explanation of the “shadow ban” appeared no more satisfied at the end of the hearing than they were at the beginning. But Dorsey, the man who has allowed prominent alt-right figures to voice their views on his platform unchecked, was surely not going to stridently defend the downranking of conservative viewpoints, so anyone hoping for that was equally disappointed.

All in all, Dorsey’s day on Capitol Hill offered greater insight into political partisanship than it offered into the inner workings of social media companies. In a cultural moment where the mysterious ways of algorithms are becoming more broadly distrusted by society at large, Twitter’s filtering algorithm seems to have become the latest political football in a game with no winners, and little to show for it other than bruising all around.

Original Source -> How hysteria over Twitter shadow-banning led to a bizarre congressional hearing

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benrleeusa · 6 years

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[Orin Kerr] Suspect Can Be Compelled to Decrypt Devices If Government Proves He Has The Ability To Do So, Court Rules

Regular readers know my longstanding interest in the correct Fifth Amendment standard for compelling a suspect to decrypt an encrypted device. The Eleventh Circuit adopted one standard in 2012, but I have argued that standard was wrong. Given my interest, I thought I would flag a new decision by District Judge Charles Breyer, United States v. Spencer, that adopts what I have argued is the correct approach. It cites one my Volokh Conspiracy posts, too, making it a brilliant opinion.

The relevant facts of the case are simple. The government searched Spencer's home with a warrant to find child pornography. They seized several devices, but some were encrypted. The government is now seeking an All Writs Act order compellilng Spencer to decrypt three devices -- phone, a laptop, and an external hard drive -- in suport of the warrant. Spencer has responded that he cannot be ordered to decrypt the devices in light of his Fifth Amendment privilege.

The opinion rejecting Spencer's argument is short, and in my view quite good, so I thought I would include the full analysis here. (I have put the two footnotes in brackets, and then for readability added a paragraph break after them. Otherwise this is the entire analysis and discussion.)

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that "No person...shall be Compelled in any criminal case to be a Witness against himself." It applies "only when the accused is compelled to make a Testimonial Communication that is incriminating." Fisher v. United States, 425 U.S. 391, 408 (1976). Accordingly, the Fifth Amendment is not violated whenever the government compels a person to turn over incriminating evidence. Id. at 409. Instead, it is only implicated when the act of production itself is both "testimonial" and "incriminating." Id. at 410.

The act of production is neither testimonial nor incriminating when the concession implied by the act "adds little or nothing to the sum total of the Government's information by conceding that he in fact has the [evidence]"—that is, where the information conveyed by the act of production is a "foregone conclusion." Id. at 411. It is important to stress the limited scope of the "foregone conclusion" rule. It only applies where the testimony at issue is an implied statement inhering in the act of production itself. See United States v. Apple MacPro Computer, 851 F.3d 238, 247 (3d Cir. 2017). Otherwise, the government cannot compel a self-incriminating statement, regardless of whether the contents of the statement are a "foregone conclusion." See Fisher, 425 U.S. at 429 (Brennan, J., concurring) (whether testimony is considered incriminating under the Fifth Amendment does not "turn on the strength of the Government's case").

For instance, the government could not compel Spencer to state the password itself, whether orally or in writing. [FN1: See Doe v. United States, 487 U.S. 201, 210 n.9 (1988) (stating in dicta that compelling someone to reveal the combination to his wall safe is testimonial for purposes of the Fifth Amendment); Wayne R. LaFave et al., 3 Criminal Procedure § 8.13(a) (4th ed. 2017) ("[R]equiring the subpoenaed party to reveal a passcode that would allow [the government] to perform the decryption...would require a testimonial communication standing apart from the act of production, and therefore make unavailable the foregone conclusion doctrine."); accord, United States v. Kirschner, 823 F. Supp. 2d 665, 668-69 (E.D. Mich. 2010); In re Boucher, No. 2:06-mj-91, 2007 WL 4246473, at *3-4 (D. Vt. Nov. 29, 2007), overruled in part on other grounds, No. 2:06-mj-91, 2009 WL 424718 (D. Vt. Feb. 19, 2009); Com. Of Virginia v. Baust, No. CR14-1439, 2014 WL 6709960, at *3.]

But the government is not seeking the actual passcode. Rather, it seeks the decrypted devices. Spencer argues that production of the devices would not fall within the act-of-production doctrine because producing the devices would require him to enter the decryption password. In other words, Spencer argues that because the government cannot compel him to state the passwords to the devices, it cannot compel him to decrypt the devices using the passwords, either. This argument has some superficial appeal, and finds support in a dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens, who once contended that a defendant could "not...be compelled to reveal the combination to his wall safe" either "by word or deed." Doe, 487 U.S. at 219 (Stevens, J., dissenting) (emphasis added). While the analogy is not perfect, we may assume that storing evidence in encrypted devices is equivalent to securing items in a safe protected by a combination, and that Justice Stevens' reasoning applies equally to the situation at hand. See In re Grand Jury Subpoena Duces Tecum Dated March 25, 2011, 670 F.3d 1335, 1346 (11th Cir. 2012).

But a rule that the government can never compel decryption of a password-protected device would lead to absurd results. Whether a defendant would be required to produce a decrypted drive would hinge on whether he protected that drive using a fingerprint key or a password composed of symbols. See New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649, 671 (1984). Similarly, accepting the analogy to the combination-protected safe, whether a person who receives a subpoena for documents may invoke the Fifth Amendment would hinge on whether he kept the documents at issue in a combination safe or a key safe. See Doe, 487 U.S. at 210 n.9. But this should make no difference, because opening the safe does not require producing the combination to the government. Whether turning over material, either in the form of documents or bits, implicates the Fifth Amendment should not turn on the manner in which the defendant stores the material.

So: the government's request for the decrypted devices requires an act of production. Nevertheless, this act may represent incriminating testimony within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment because it would amount to a representation that Spencer has the ability to decrypt the devices. See Fisher, 425 U.S. at 410. Such a statement would potentially be incriminating because having that ability makes it more likely that Spencer encrypted the devices, which in turn makes it more likely that he himself put the sought-after material on the devices.

The next question is whether the foregone conclusion rule applies. There is some confusion in the case law regarding what exactly the relevant "foregone conclusion" must be where the government seeks decryption of hard drives. The Eleventh Circuit has held that the government must show that it is a foregone conclusion not only that the defendant has the ability to decrypt the device(s), but also that certain files are on the device(s). In re Grand Jury Subpoena, 670 F.3d at 1347. The In re Grand Jury Subpoena court denied the government's attempt to compel the defendant to decrypt the device at issue in that case because it " 'ha[d] not shown that it had any prior knowledge of either the existence or the whereabouts of the [files]' " on the device. Id. (alterations in original).

The Eleventh Circuit was relying on precedent in which the government requested specific documents from a defendant pursuant to subpoena. See Fisher, 425 U.S. at 410. In Fisher, "Compliance with the subpoena tacitly concede[d] the existence of the papers demanded and their possession or control" by the defendant. Id. Not so in cases like the one at hand, in which the government seeks entire hard drives. Turning over the decrypted devices would not be tantamount to an admission that specific files, or any files for that matter, are stored on the devices, because the government has not asked for any specific files. Accordingly, the government need only show it is a foregone conclusion that Spencer has the ability to decrypt the devices. [FN2: 2 See Orin Kerr, Fifth Amendment protects passcode on smartphones, court holds, Wash. Post (Sept. 24, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh- conspiracy/wp/2015/09/24/fifth-amendment-protects-passcode-on-smartphones-court- holds/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.92228f257a5d ("The details of what records are on the phone should be irrelevant to whether the foregone conclusion doctrine applies because access to the phone is independent of what records are stored inside it. Handing over the passcode has the same testimonial aspect regardless of what is on the phone."); Apple MacPro Computer, 851 F.3d at 248 n.7; In re Search of a Residence in Aptos, Calif. 95003, 2018 WL 1400401, at *6 n.10.]

That the government may have access to more materials where it seeks a hard drive through a search warrant than it would have had if it sought specific files through subpoena is simply a matter of the legal tool the government uses to seek access. To the extent Spencer contends that the government has not adequately identified the files it seeks, that is an issue properly raised under the Fourth Amendment, not the Fifth.

The only remaining question insofar as the applicable legal framework goes is what standard the Court must apply in evaluating whether Spencer's knowledge of the passwords is a "foregone conclusion." In the context of requests for specific documents, the government is required to establish independent knowledge "of the existence, possession, and authenticity of subpoenaed documents with 'reasonable particularity' before the communication inherent in the act of production can be considered a foregone conclusion." United States v. Hubbell, 167 F.3d 552, 579 (D.C. Cir. 1999), aff'd, 530 U.S. 27 (2000). The "reasonable particularity" standard appears to have been derived from the standard courts use to evaluate whether a warrant is sufficiently specific under the Fourth Amendment. See Stanford v. State of Tex., 379 U.S. 476, 485 (1965).

Courts have continued to apply that standard to cases involving compelled decryption under the Fifth Amendment. See, e.g., In re Grand Jury Subpoena, 670 F.3d at 1349; Apple MacPro Computer, 851 F.3d at 247. But it is nonsensical to ask whether the government has established with "reasonable particularity" that the defendant is able to decrypt a device. While physical evidence may be described with more or less specificity with respect to both appearance and location, a defendant's ability to decrypt is not subject to the same sliding scale. He is either able to do so, or he is not. Accordingly, the reasonable particularity standard cannot apply to a defendant's ability to decrypt a device. (In any event, "reasonable particularity" is not really an evidentiary standard at all. It is better viewed as a substantive standard that helps to ensure that any testimony at issue really is a "foregone conclusion.")

The appropriate standard is instead clear and convincing evidence. This places a high burden on the government to demonstrate that the defendant's ability to decrypt the device at issue is a foregone conclusion. But a high burden is appropriate given that the "foregone conclusion" rule is an exception to the Fifth Amendment's otherwise jealous protection of the privilege against giving self-incriminating testimony. See Fisher, 425 U.S. at 429 (Brennan, J., concurring).

The question, accordingly, is whether the government has shown by clear and convincing evidence that Spencer's ability to decrypt the three devices is a foregone conclusion. It has. All three devices were found in Spencer's residence. Spencer has conceded that he owns the phone and laptop, and has provided the login passwords to both. Moreover, he has conceded that he purchased and encrypted an external hard drive matching the description of the one found by the government. This is sufficient for the government to meet its evidentiary burden. The government may therefore compel Spencer to decrypt the devices. Once Spencer decrypts the devices, however, the government may not make direct use of the evidence that he has done so. See Robert P. Mosteller, Simplifying Subpoena Law: Taking the Fifth Amendment Seriously, 73 Va. L. Rev. 1, 110 n.108 (1987). If it really is a foregone conclusion that he has the ability to do so, such that his decryption of the device is not testimonial, then the government of course should have no use for evidence of the act of production itself.

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suzannemcappsca · 8 years

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Game Theory and Mediation: Adding Real Value?

John Sturrock

Core Solutions Group

John and David Sturrock

1. Introduction

Several years ago, while travelling back with my son David to Oxford where he was studying as an undergraduate, we discussed my work as a mediator and his study of economics, particularly the learning for us both from Game Theory.

I (John) had been familiar with The Prisoners’ Dilemma for a number of years, probably dating back to the Oil Pricing Exercise with which I recall commencing Harvard’s Program on Negotiation course many years previously (1996!). We use a developed version of The Prisoners’ Dilemma (‘The Gain Game’) in our training courses. Over the years, that Gain Game has become more sophisticated as we have uncovered new dimensions. We have reflected on the work of Robert Axelrod (The Evolution of Cooperation) and Martin Nowak (Super Cooperators) and my own awareness of Game Theory has expanded. David presented me one birthday with the book Game Theory and the Humanities: Bridging Two Worlds, by Steven Brams.

My particular interest is in how we might show that mediation adds value in an economically measurable way. We know that mediators can help protagonists to reach resolution in disputes which have reached impasse. That is, in itself, a form of added value. But is there more? If we can demonstrate that there is, the arguments in favour of using mediation would be strengthened for those who might otherwise be sceptical or resistant.

Our conversations continued over the years. David’s academic study of economics has developed to a more rarefied, Masters, level. My (John’s) experience has increased. In mid-2015, I invited David to lead a short session at a seminar I had organised on the theme of Collaborating for a Better Scotland. David’s title was straightforward: “Game Theory and Mediation”.

I also recall an earlier blog celebrating the life of John Nash, one of the founding fathers of game theory, in which I trailed this discussion in some detail. And just recently another pioneer of game theory passed away: Thomas Schelling, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (with Robert Aumann) for “having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis” – and who is known for the focal point (also called the Schelling point), a solution that people will tend to use in the absence of communication.

This paper, started back in 2015, is an attempt to bring some of our thinking together, in a very provisional way. It is designed to provoke responses and further thought. We are aware that there are many books and articles written about game theory and conflict and that we will be traversing ground which may be more familiar to some others. It will be good to view this as the start of a discussion.

2. Simply by way of introduction, mediation is a process in which an impartial third party seeks to help two or more disputants or negotiating parties to reach agreement. This is usually done by hosting a meeting or meetings, with combinations of discussions to explore the real underlying issues between them, to build proper understanding and to encourage the exchange of information between them. After that, the parties can identify and assess their options and alternative courses of action before reaching a mutually acceptable agreement – or ending negotiations. Experienced negotiators will help parties to measure options and consider proposals for reaching agreement against objective standards, often called best (or worst) alternatives to negotiated agreement (BATNAS or WATNAS).

Mediation tends to be a speedy and relatively cost effective process for those involved, certainly in commercial matters. The process is usually confidential and the mediator may not without permission disclose to one party information given to him or her by another party. The whole process is usually designed to be private and “without prejudice” so that, in principle, no-one may use in another forum information received within mediation and no rights or remedies are varied or waived unless and until the parties agree to do so, usually in writing.

3. Game theory is an area of study that deals with interactions where the choices of one ‘agent’ influence the outcome for the other, and vice versa, according to some fixed rules. Game theory attempts to predict, understand and explain activities as diverse as pricing strategies of firms, lobbying of political parties, and a couple’s choice of evening entertainment. Applied initially to economics, but now prevalent throughout the social sciences and in evolutionary biology, work in this field is characterised by its abstract and mathematical approaches and its emphasis on finding common structures among diverse social phenomena.

4. Discussion

We believe that the focus of much analysis of the value of mediation is on the ability of the mediator, and the mediation process, to enable parties to come closer to what a calm, reflective, ‘rational’, negotiator would achieve. That is, the process helps parties (for example) to separate people from the problem and to overcome cognitive biases such as reactive devaluation and attribution error which so often plague, and may be unavoidable in, traditional negotiation, where parties are motivated to protect positions and reduce the risk of making unnecessary concessions. (In mediations with a largely monetary focus, I (John) will often say that my job is to help a party be sure that it is not paying a penny more than it needs to and, conversely, in another room, not to accept a penny less than it can get.) Doubtless, mediation adds a huge amount of value in this dimension by helping parties communicate more effectively, avoid protracted negotiations or costly court procedures, and maintain (or even enhance) personal and commercial relationships in the process.

However, game theory suggests that mediation could add value compared to pure negotiation, even when the parties are supremely rational, wholly self-interested agents, subject to none of the cognitive biases and other such psychological (or apparently irrational) impediments to negotiation that permeate everyday life. We believe that this aspect of mediation’s value is relatively underplayed and under-discussed, at least in some forums. We think it is a fruitful area for mediators and those interested in mediation to explore. The experiences of mediators could be brought together with more theoretical approaches to give richer understanding of this side of mediation.

A range of literature in the rational-actor paradigm of traditional game theory has asked the question: ‘How is it that mediation can add value?’. To many, this would appear to be an odd question to ask. But to the game theorist, it is natural. In this context of supreme rationality, why couldn’t any offer that a mediator communicates on behalf of a party be equally well communicated by the party directly? And, if there is no role for the mediator to help the super-rational parties explore all the options, weigh costs and benefits, and avoid cognitive traps, what then can the mediator add? Why not dispense with the mediator altogether?

The answer to this question has proved to be more complex than some game theorists first supposed. Actually, research predicts that a mediator can add value relative to a pure negotiation process between rational actors by helping parties to overcome one of the fundamental challenges in negotiation: generally, by applying the ‘BATNA’ yardstick, parties know what they would be willing to settle on, but they don’t know what the ‘BATNA’ is for their negotiating counterpart. This is the origin of the incentive to disguise one’s own true negotiating position and to resist making concessions as far as possible. This can lead to the parties failing to reach a settlement, even when there are potential agreements that would give both a better outcome than their ‘BATNA’.

One way mediators can, in theory, help disputants overcome this possible barrier is by taking some information from parties but transmitting only some of this to the ‘other side’. For example, if a mediator commits to using his or her first exchanges with parties to establish only whether agreement might be possible (i.e. the fact that a ‘zone of agreement’ exists between the parties) and to break-off negotiation if it is not, but not to tell the parties the specifics of what has been disclosed to the mediator, the incentive for parties to be strategic and ‘bid up’ or ‘down’ their offers is much reduced as they risk losing a deal by overplaying their respective hands.

A mediator can also help by administering a pre-agreed process to which parties could not rationally adhere, if negotiating on their own. For example, an arrangement could be made to place a time limit on the mediation process. A mediator who stands neither to gain nor lose by implementing this arrangement would be committed to doing so (and the parties would know this) even when one or both negotiating parties (negotiating on their own) might be prepared to modify the time limit in order to try to drive a harder bargain.1)For analysis see: Brown, J.G., and Ayres, I. (1994), Economic Rationales for Mediation. Virginia Law Review

Professional mediators see dynamics of this sort playing out regularly in reality. First hand, I (John) have seen that when parties know the mediator will place limits on unhelpful engagement and threaten not to continue if the parties seek to game play, this can act as a deterrent to apparently ‘selfish’ behaviour. In a sense, the parties ‘perform’ for the mediator and act more reasonably by virtue of his or her presence.

5. Conclusion

We think that game theory can help us better analyse aspects of the role of mediator, hitherto perhaps understood tacitly and pursued on instinct and experience. As theory and practical experience accumulate, there is surely much to gain from bringing together the findings of the game theoretic literature and the insights of practitioners of mediation.

We confess that we would rather have carried out more research before publishing this. But the quest for betterment has already kept this on the unpublished stocks for months. It’s time to open up a conversation!

(Postscript from John: I understand that one of the great thinkers in our field, Ken Cloke, may publish some thoughts on the use of mathematics in our understanding of conflict. That will be interesting!)

(Postscript from David: in addition to the personal experiences of mediators, some broad-scale analysis of the value of mediation corroborates theoretical predictions. In 2009, for example, three judicial areas in Florida trialled a programme of mandatory mediation of mortgage foreclosures. Compared to cases where mediation was not mandated, lenders and borrowers were more likely to reach a re-negotiation of the terms of the mortgage, and subsequent default rates were reduced.2)Collins, J. M., and Urban, C. (2015), Mandatory Mediation and the Renegotiation of Mortgage Contracts. The Economic Journal This analysis presents encouraging evidence of the potential fruits of greater use of mediation. But is also takes us to a more controversial and challenging point. Theory (and practice) suggests that mediation can, in many cases, increase the size of the economic pie by helping parties create value and reach agreements where otherwise they would not. But sometimes those in a strong bargaining position will do better in traditional negotiation because it allows them to take a larger share of the pie, even if that pie is smaller. This could lead to a conclusion that mediation, on one measurement, may only be at its most effective when it is mandatory, and that is an interesting point to ponder!)

References [ + ]

1. ↑ For analysis see: Brown, J.G., and Ayres, I. (1994), Economic Rationales for Mediation. Virginia Law Review 2. ↑ Collins, J. M., and Urban, C. (2015), Mandatory Mediation and the Renegotiation of Mortgage Contracts. The Economic Journal