Education as Currency: Feudalism and Oppression in Harry Potter.

By Sam

The world of Harry Potter is a strange place. I know it’s meant to be wondrous and magical and all that, but behind the glamour you really have to wonder what the ultimate goal of their education was.

At school the children learn to transform objects, perform telekinesis, open locks, fight dark wizards and play some retarded sport where two guys chase a golden testicle around and try to convince the other players that they actually matter. Who designed that education curriculum, and what were they trying to achieve?

Duh... potato?

Perhaps the founders of Hogwarts -- or the Ministry of Magic, or Dumbledore, or whoever set out the education system -- didn’t really have an end-goal in mind. There’s a pretty good case to be made that their train of thought didn’t go any further than “Magic is cool, therefore we should teach magic.” However, that sounds unlikely to me.

This is a society that’s run by a government with the organisational nuance to keep an entire civilization secret from the mundane world. You’d think they’d have pretty tight reigns on the education system. In fact, we know they do: in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix the Ministry of Magic disapproves of what Dumbledore is teaching and proceeds to step in to appoint a new teacher, Dolores Umbridge, all despite his protests. No consultation, no arguments. This is a private school, and yet the government has the power to hire and fire staff with relative impunity. With that level of control you have to wonder why the education system is so woefully inadequate.

Wait, you might be saying, for a magical world it’s a bit of an overstatement to say that an education in magic is "woefully inadequate".

The thing is, I’m not saying that the students shouldn’t be taught magic, but that by teaching magic to the exclusion of all other subjects Hogwarts is leaving its graduates hamstrung when it comes to social mobility.

Crucible of incompetence or pressure cooker of idiocy?

Why “nice guys finish last” is a pack of bitter lies.

By Sam

I'm a nice guy, and there are so many nice girls. Why won't any of them date me?

Based on my experiences with girls this is something I believed all through my teenage years:

Nice guys don’t get the girl.

Or possibly the reverse:

Awesome girls end up with douchebags.

Actually, come to think of it, I probably believed it well past my teenage years, but you can’t really blame me. If you’re a guy it seems to be irrefutably true on face value. We can all point to at least a couple of experiences. For me it was stretched across six months around the beginning of my final year of school. There was this girl. She was smart, she was beautiful, and she had a wicked sense of humor. I spent months listening to all the problems she was having in her life, especially the problems with her not-good-enough-for-her boyfriend. Eventually they broke up and she got a new boyfriend -- and yes, I got to hear about him too. Lucky me.

That was my own personal experience torn from the pages of my private life. So why does it sound like I just cut and pasted it from the comments section of any decent relationship website? Because it happens to a lot of guys, and I mean a lot of guys. It happens to a lot of guys to the point where I would say that, unless you're the god-king of seduction, the first time you’re the pathetic platonic friend to a girl is the when you truly become a man. It’s like a girl’s first period, only with less blood and more unfulfilled teenage angst.

I see girls who are with douchbags. I see nice guys who get no girls. This seems to be a fairly clear-cut phenomenon with plenty of evidence to support it.

As I was saying, for guys the “girls like douchbags” rule seems to be fulfilled everywhere you look. Go to any club on a decent Saturday night, pick the hottest girl there and see who her boyfriend is. Yup, he’s the guy in the muscle tee who appears to be simulating anal sex on his best friend. Wow, why do women always end up with guys like that?

But there’s a flaw in that thought process, it stems from the way we guys can ignore any aspect of a woman in favor of her physical attractiveness.

It’s not that women are attracted to dick guys. Stupid people are attracted to stupid people. However, more often than not stupid people are also incredibly, incredibly hot. Be honest here, when you see a mind bogglingly attractive girl you don’t give a crap about her as a person. You couldn’t care less if she was so evil she stomped on puppies and so stupid she couldn’t count to one on a banana. It’s natural. When a guy sees a toned body in a slinky skirt all those bits of his brain that do the thinking divert power to the boobies cortex. That’s just life right?

Well, sort of...

The thing you forget is that the reverse holds true for her view of you. I think it’s probably a safe bet that you’re not a tanned, muscular Adonis with rippling muscles and eyes as blue as the deep, deep ocean, so how do you expect to compete with her tanned, muscular, idiot boyfriend with washboard abs? With about as much hope as you’d have trying to wrestle a moving bullet train, that’s how. She doesn’t want you for the same reason you didn’t want her ugly friend: you didn’t tickle her man-boobies cortex. If you rate a woman’s overall attractiveness based on her physical appearance I’m not here to tell you’re wrong, whatever works for you, but you have to give women the same leeway to choose a man's physical attractiveness over all other factors. Anything else would make you a hypocritical bastard, which doesn’t really fit with the whole “nice guy” thing.

I may not be an Adonis, but I’m pretty good looking, and girls still don’t want me. They go for guys who're the same level of physical attractiveness and are dickheads. Surely that’s a pretty good indicator that it’s the dickness that’s doing it for them?