Hogwarts gets Owned!

I loved the Harry Potter books when I was little and they're still somewhat entertaining but unfortunately nowhere near the 'WOW' factor that they used to have. There are a number of behaviours which don't make sense, such as the fact that people keep saying that Albus Dumbledore is the greatest headmaster Hogwarts ever had while it's perfectly clear that the school is run terribly.
Here are some adjustments the school should make.

1. Eliminate Slytherine house as an option.

If we know Salazaar Slytherine was a racist murderer then why does he have his own house?
In the second Harry Potter book we discover that Slytherine House's founder built a secret chamber with a monster in it that would kill wizards born in non-wizarding families on command. Once this was established, Slytherine house should have been dissolved. They now know that Slytherine was a racist murderer and yet they continue to prize the values of a racist murderer so much that they keep this house as an option. Why?
That's appalling. Putting a student in Slytherine house to learn racist propaganda off each other has gotta be close to child abuse.

2. Fire Proffessor Trelawney, the Divination teacher.

I don't get why she doesn't get fired when Dumbledore knows full well that she's a fraud. She's teaching all the students bullshit! Dumbledore's meant to be the best headmaster even, yet he deliberately hires a fraud to teach bullshit? What the hell were the other Hogwarts Headmasters doing?
Not only is she indefensible in principle, but she's a sicko. In the third Harry Potter book, she told Harry, who she knew had a dark wizard currently trying to kill him, that he was going to die soon.
That has potential to seriously mess a person up psychologically.
How does she keep her job? How?

3. Expel Peeves the poltergeist.

Filch, the caretaker is constantly trying to have Peeves expelled. Why on God's green earth hasn't he succeeded? What is the argument for keeping him? He doesn't do anything useful! All he does is play dangerous, irresponsible jokes on people. It's hard to tell who's more useless, him or Professor Trelawney.
It's pretty obvious that Peeves is only written into the stories for comic relief, and that the school can't lose him because it would lose it's comic buffoon, that the reader can laugh at. But he has no practical use at Hogwarts.

4. Fire Professor Snape, the Potions Master.

Snape uses WAY too much negative reinforcement in his teaching methods. In book three he actually threatens to poison a struggling, frightened student's pet toad if he doesn't perform at a higher academic level. That is a firing offense in itself.
I'll say this in his favour. You'd DEFINATELY take your schoolwork seriously if your teacher threatened to kill your pet.

5. Fire Professor Hagrid, the Care of Magical Creatures teacher.

Hagrid is an incompetent, bigoted arse-clown.
In book three when Buckbeak the Hippogryff gored Malfoy it WAS his fault. When you're explaining to your class how to not get gored by a wild animal it is absolutely essential to be certain sure all the students are listening. He did not do that.
It's also illegal to cross-breed different types of magical creatures and smuggle dragons into your house. He doesn't learn. He keeps doing this stupid shit.
He's also the most bigoted of all the protagonist characters. He shows that he apparently finds all muggles disgusting when he tells Vernon Dursley 'I'd like to see a great muggle like you stop him', states in book two that the reason the Malfoys aren't worth listening to is that they have 'bad blood' and tells Harry in book four (in relation to Madame Maxime) 'these foriegners, you can't trust any of them.' All of these bigoted statements were in front of young students.
What's more when Hagrid is busy and can't teach, it's pretty clear that his substitute is much more competent, as she doesn't cross-breed dangerous creatures and introduce them to animals that might gore them to death.
We're supposed to hope that Hagrid keeps his job because he's a friend of the Harry, Ron, Hermione and Dumbledore and because everyone who tries to get him fired such as Malfoy and Umbridge do it for stupid, biased, bigoted reasons. I do NOT hope he keeps his job. I believe quite objectively that he is an incompetent boob and that Harry, Ron, Hermione and Dumbledore are recklessly endangering the educations of their fellow students, because they don't want big baby Hagrid to start crying because he lost his job.

6. Fire Filch, the caretaker.

If you hate children it's a bad idea to work in a school. Uh-Duuuuuh!

7. Teach Professor Flitwick, the charms teacher common sense.

Professor Flitwick did a terrible job defending the Philosopher's Stone in the first book. Flitwick charmed keys to fly around, AND LEFT RACING BROOMS RIGHT THERE IN THE ROOM SO THE BURGLERS WOULD HAVE A CHANCE OF CATCHING ONE! Why would you do that? They're BURGLERS! You're meant to keep them AWAY from the stone... IDIOT!

8. Fire Professor Binns, the History of Magic teacher.

He's dead already. He's a ghost. And he was a boring, shit teacher when he was alive. He puts all his students to sleep. Fire him!

9. Fire Dumbledore, the Headmaster.

For making, many, many, many terrible, biased and downright inexplicable staff appointments, and running a school which keeps a house known to be founded by a racist murderer.

Do all these thing and this train-wreck of a school will be on the road to recovery.

The movie 'Dragonheart' is pro-genocide

Dragonheart is a 1996 fantasy adventure film and it's storyline is completely psycho. I could not believe it when I saw it. In some university subjects it's taught to be wary of biases in movies which cause them to be racist, sexist, classist or homophobic. THIS movie should be the blueprint. It's rare to find a movie where the bias is so extreme that the plot makes no sense at all. The movie looks as though it were written and directed by a Nazi with down syndrome who needs to lay off the sugar and take his medication! It was like watching a car crash. Hideous and yet I couldn't look away.
I actually wonder what was going through the minds of the actors as they were starring in this movie. Were they thinking 'Yes! We're nailing it! This is a really great movie!'? Could anyone think that? I sure hope not.
Here are the aspects of Dragonheart which make it so painful to watch.



1. The Racism
The way dragons are treated in the movies by the hero and protagonist Bowen (Dennis Quaid) is racist in principle.
We only know of one dragon in this movie, Draco, voiced by Sean Connery. As Draco can speak and has human intelligence, we can infer that all dragons in this world can speak and have human intelligence. This essentially makes them human in every meaningful way. Yet Bowen commits murderous genocide against every dragon in the world except Draco. And he's meant to be the GOOD guy. The good guy is Hitler, in principle.
The reason for Bowen hunting down and killing all dragons is that he believed that Draco had tricked him and turned his friend into a brute. He felt this entitled him to murder ALL dragons in retaliation for the action of this one dragon. What's more, Bowen's belief that Draco tricked him, turned out to be completely wrong later in the movie. Whoops! He committed that murderous genocide for nothing!
Also when I say he doesn't kill Draco, that isn't for lack of trying. When Bowen confronts Draco, Draco tell him that he is the last dragon and Bowen has now killed every other dragon in the world. He also knows that Bowen has been getting money for his dragon hunting. Bowen responds (to paraphrase here) - 'I don't kill your kind for the money. I do it for the pleasure!'
Hence, the hero is not only racist, mass-murdering and genocidal but also sadistic. But it gets worse.
Bowen fails to kill Draco, who wins the fight and pins Bowen to the ground. Bowen admits defeat and tells Draco that he may kill him now. BUT... Draco doesn't WANT to kill Bowen at all. Draco holds no grudge whatsoever for the fact that every single one of his people other than him has been murdered by Bowen. Draco is the sweetest, most demure, submissive, subservient, boot-licking house-dragon in the world and all he wants is to be Bowen's friend....WHAT???
Replace the word dragon with black guy. Are you offended yet? This is unbelievable. By having the movie heroes behave in this way they're promoting that this is how things are supposed to work. That the white status-quo can commit genocide and minorities are supposed to say 'Yes massa! Commit all the  genocide you want massa! I loves you massa! Can I lick the cyanide off your boots massa?'
I don't even understand how anyone can defend  or positively spin this. It's like this movie has just dumped a whole massive pile of shit down in front of me and expected me to be pleased about it. And I'm sitting there bewildered, wondering why I'm supposed to be pleased about this.
Take the shit away! It's awful! What wrong with you?

2. The Homophobia and Classism.
The villain of this movie is King Einon (David Thewlis). Like a lot of movie villains, Einon is 'queered' by being  much more effeminate in appearance in contrast with Bowen. Einon is much slimmer.
Now admittedly that vague stereotype is not a LOT to go on to claim Einon is meant to be gay (or a bit gay). Possibly the reason we're supposed to hate Einon is more a classist prejudice, as Einon is a rich King in the movie. Or it may be a combination of homophobia and classism. Whatever the reason, the movie attempts to give the viewer a grotesquely unjust opinion of King Einon's character.
Unlike most villains, Einon does not actually do anything villainous. Yet he gets called 'evil' by the main characters who insist that they won't be safe until he is killed again and again and again. Probably dozens of times. I was utterly confused by this. I didn't see Einon commit a single evil act throughout the entire movie. I remembered wishing I could turn my brain off and just enjoy the gung-ho fighting action, but I couldn't stop myself from thinking WHY? Why does Einon need to die? What the hell did he do that was so bad? Do the makers of this movie realize that villain are villains because of their ACTIONS? You can't just play creepy, dramatic music while a poofter floats around the room and expect the audience to think 'ooh! He's so evil! I'm scared!' That's basically all this movie did!

It's King Nancy-boy!

Although there are a number of scenes that are supposed to make us shocked by Einon's behavior,  these scenes are only effective if the viewer lacks the empathy to put themselves in Einon's shoes.
For example, at the beginning of the movie, Einon orders a man's eyes burned out. However, this cannot be called 'evil' as this man has murdered Einon's father and mocked him about it only moments beforehand. Bowen does not agree with this order of physical disfigurement and is upset that Einon has appeared to disregard 'the old code' that Bowen taught Einon growing up. (However as Bowen's code apparently says it's okay to wipe out a whole race of people if one of them pisses you off, I don't fault Einon for disregarding Bowen's code.)
Bowen then points to a castle that Einon is ordering built and is unhappy with the work conditions of the peasants. Bowen's analysis is 'it's madness.' However, when the camera shows us the workers we actually see no suffering at all, leaving me surer than ever that the protagonist characters who I'm supposed to root for, are a deluded lunatics. This makes me hesitant to believe the claims that I hear through the movie that Einon treats peasants and workers appallingly in his kingdom as did his father before him (which is why Einon's father had to be killed) which makes his death essential. We never actually SEE this dreadful, sadistic, tyranny in the movie and the people who assert this to be true, appear to be complete Neanderthals with rocks in their heads!
He also later on kills the man who he blinded. Not that it's morally defensible to kill a blind man, but I do need more than this to hate Einon or think of him as evil like I'm supposed to. These are the only times in the whole movie that shows Einon being a tyrant, and it involves blinding and killing the man who KILLED HIS FATHER and bragged about it. The female lead Kara (Dina Meyer) who is the man's daughter, responds by attempting to assassinate Einon. Einon throws her in prison for this but does not have her killed. Again, not very evil.
When Bowen is going to storm Einon's castle and kill him, Einon begins to get understandably anxious. Then one of the upper-class lords flippantly remarks to Einon that there's nothing to worry about as 'any one of us is worth 100 of them (peasants).' Einon grabs him and slams his head on the table. Confusingly, creepy music then plays as though to indicate that I am now supposed to be shocked by the brutality. I'm not. He said something stupid about a serious situation and got whumped! He deserved it.
At the end we discover that since Draco transplanted one of his hearts into Einon's body to save his life, that Draco will now have to die for Einon to be killed. (Which of course makes perfect medical sense.) Einon sadly catches his own mother Queen Aislinn (Julie Christie) hiring dragon hunters so that Einon will be killed. When he confronts her about this she tells him 'I'm correcting the mistake I made years ago when I saved the life of a creature that didn't deserve to live!' Einon responds by... Doing nothing. This is supposed to be the vicious evil bad guy and he's so passive, that he won't harm someone who just tried to kill him!
Basically, I'm supposed to take the word of a genocidal racist and his supporters, and ignore the evidence of my own eyes which tell me that Einon is a gentle pacifist who's just defending himself. Well, no sale Dragonheart!
Despite the fact that the movie has provided us with no solid evidence of any tyranny from Einon  other than the one exception against the man who killed his father, Draco begins screaming at Bowen to kill him so that Einon can die! Bowen is reluctant to kill a friend, but eventually realizes that it's worth it based on some utterly bewildering rationalization (maybe he just wanted Draco to shut up), and runs his sword right through Draco, killing both Draco and Einon.
As I cannot see any substance which would lead me to conclude that Einon deserves to die, I can only conclude that the message here is that it's worth killing your friend to commit a murderous hate crime against a rich homosexual.


3. Sexism
At one stage of the movie  Bowen is still dragon hunting only now he's just pretending to kill Draco over and over. Together him and Draco are scamming villagers out of their gold. When Draco comes along to terrorize a village Bowen throws a spear at him and Draco pretends to die. Bowen collects his payment.
Again, Bowen's the GOOD GUY here.
Kara tries to warn the villagers who Bowen and Draco are scamming, by yelling 'Don't you understand? He's in league with the dragon!' Bowen then gives them a cocky, smarmy look that clearly says 'see - she's crazy'. Kara is effectively laughed into a low-status position. Even though she was just telling the truth. Seems like a most sexist way for a 'good guy' to resolve an issue, akin to the methods in Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew.'
This is actual the mildest of the three prejudices that Dragonheart pushes, because even though I don't think the movie writers should have written the movie in this style where Kara attempts to gain more status than Bowen through truth-telling and has to be knocked down, it can at least be somewhat defended in the context of the movie. Bowen was put on the spot and had to think fast. The racism and homophobia/classism leave me thinking what... the... fuck? Why god, Why?
Bowen is also extremely rude to Kara as she tries to rally the peasants against Einon, seemingly for no reason at all.

In summary, Dragonheart has taught me that if a minority upsets me, that I should go on a mass killing spree that wipes out his whole race, that women should be kept in line through humiliation and berating their self-esteem and uppity, rich queers should be killed even if your own friends die in the process! Genocide = good. Peace = bad. And there's nothing that can't be solved by running your sword through someone! Violence - It's what's for dinner! Dragonheart for the win!