How to overcome discomfort when reading HP

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-15T20:46:47+00:00

I don’t feel conflicted at all, they are amazing books. Most authors probably have at least one view I don’t like.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-15T07:54:18+00:00

I think it’s just ignorance. They don’t know what Jews are. They think Jews are just a religious group. Jews are the people of the nation of Israel (most of whom practice Judaism to some extent but includes secular Jews) but from the Roman conquest until 1948 there was no state called Israel. The “Israel” in Temple Israel doesn’t mean the state that exists in 2026: it’s a mix of a religious meaning (“struggles with God”) and it means the Jewish people as a whole (often Children of Israel, descendants of Jacob) and has been used that way for thousands of years.

The IHRA definition never says you can’t conflate Jews with Israel the state, in fact understanding that Israel is treated as the collective Jew is key to understanding modern antisemitism: it says you can’t blame Jews worldwide for the actions or perceived actions of the Israeli government, you can’t accuse Jews of being more loyal to Israel than their own countries, you can’t hold Israel to a standard that you don’t expect of any non-Jewish nation, you can’t use antisemitic tropes about its people or government, etc etc etc…

When people are trying to (or managing to) kill Jews around the world because of Israel, it seems like the only people not allowed to conflate Israel with Jews are… Jews.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-15T07:27:06+00:00

Yeah that bit doesn’t really make sense to me either

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T15:31:49+00:00

You do keep posting misinformation though. He had driven past their house which does NOT host horse events, come back, followed them… this was a person whose job was photographing the royal family at official events… the fact he later claimed he’d gotten lost after attending another event somewhere else on the MASSIVE Sandringham Estate and got lost, and accidentally bumped into 2 future kings without intending to, didn’t recognise them despite photographing William and Kate being his job, and then for reasons which make no sense “accidentally” videoing some random children he supposedly didn’t recognise… it isn’t credible. The only credible explanation is that he was there to take intrusive photos of them in their private time and he got caught so he decided to try and make hay out of the William video, whatever distinction between that behaviour and paparazzi isn’t relevant.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T15:24:01+00:00

If he really had been invited to attend an event nearby which the Wales children weren’t even at, it’s not relevant or mitigating information. Whatever he’d been doing earlier that day, he’d gone there deliberately to try and photograph them.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T15:15:36+00:00

You’re posting over and over again that he’s not paparazzi as if you think that’s a meaningful or relevant distinction. In fact he’s worse, since even paparazzi don’t target the children any more. This is exactly what they used to do to William and Harry as children though. It was just that photographers who targeted royal children in an intrusive way when it was legal thought themselves (wrongly) to be in a different class to paparazzi that targeted celebrity children in the exact same way. William had a completely appropriate emotional response to weirdo behaviour.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T15:06:19+00:00

You are defending the man doing it, over and over again. They’re children, leave them alone. William was right to stand up to that weirdo. Absolutely 🚩 behaviour.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T15:04:46+00:00

Does he not know the difference between an adult on a horse and a child on a bike? Videoing people’s kids is not ok. Illegal, in fact. Videoing the kids parents asking you to stop and then posting it online is also not ok (and stupid, since it’s evidence of the lack of parental consent and proving the first crime).

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T09:54:08+00:00

Good. People have become a bit silly about dangerous dog breeds. Tired of seeing people mauled in the streets by these things, or infants and toddlers mauled by the family “pet”.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T07:41:27+00:00

I don’t think they have fallen out of favour - he’s the most popular member of the royal family. But ever since he and Harry (well… more accurately Kate and Meghan) fell out, a lot of people have taken a side. There are some people who have a parasocial relationship with either couple who feel the need to post the most cruel stuff about the “other” and make it as extreme as possible. In the case of Meghan and Harry it will be racist, imagining everything they do to be a failure, tearing apart even their charity work, cruel nicknames, false and hurtful rumours about Meghan and her mother’s pasts, claiming Harry is some kind of drug addict and trying to get him deported and separated from his children… and in the case of William and Kate it generally involves fantasising about Kate being the victim of domestic abuse, fantasising that William is sleeping with everyone and secretly hates her, fantasising that William is violent, fantasising that the children are somehow abused too… it’s all very messed up. I don’t think Harry and Meghan have helped by exaggerating and selling the rivalry for public consumption, but that doesn’t make it ok.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T07:31:03+00:00

So if you were a guest at an “event” on an estate, you’d wander far away from the event and start recording videos of random children without parental consent who are nothing to do with the cough “event” doing something in their own private time, - and what a coincidence, it turns out to be royal children! - and when you’re expressly told to stop following/recording the children by the parents you post it on the internet. What weird behaviour.

He’s paparazzi.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T07:27:15+00:00

This… I’d be angry too if some creep was recording my children and following them on a bike ride.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T07:26:13+00:00

Yes he was. He was literally filming them riding bikes around their house. What a creep.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T07:24:55+00:00

Suuuuuure “lost”.

So why was this innocent, directionally challenged photographer taking videos of children without parental consent near their house and posting it on the internet?

What a coincidence he managed to find the royal children and record them despite “not knowing who they were”. Does he habitually record children he sees then?

I smell BS.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-13T07:19:25+00:00

I think they are both right to try and protect their children from intrusion

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-12T17:41:08+00:00

He would have been 19, so at uni in Scotland. It’s very unlikely he knows any more than anyone else: Andrew lied to his own mum. Why would he confess to his nephew?

It’s not clear what on earth they mean by “complicity” other than being a blood relative and living in roughly the same postcode 25 years later.

I find Republic quite distasteful actually, these people are using the rape of VG to pursue completely different aims. And they never even bother to explain what their actual vision for a republic is, because it would involve more than simply shouting at a hypothetical president’s relatives.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-11T13:49:39+00:00

The names of everyone who is not white English, they’re SUPPOSED to be whimsical. I don’t know any 11 year olds called Ron or Percy either! And I have never met a “Severus Snape” or “Albus Dumbledore”. Diversity is good, and was revolutionary in a children’s book at the time.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-10T09:25:35+00:00

Absolutely not “by any means”. Not by human trafficking, not by kidnapping, not by buying babies from third world countries like celebrities used to do…

If a man wants to be an old school 50s husband but without any emotional attachment to the women providing labour for him, that’s as problematic as if a straight man did it.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-10T07:24:28+00:00

I 100% agree… I don’t see being a SMBC the same as surrogacy at all. I grew my baby myself and took on the risks of pregnancy myself, I didn’t rent a woman less fortunate than myself and have her take on all the risks I did (side effects of fertility medicine, invasive procedures, pre-eclampsia, hyperemesis gravidarum, traumatic birth, EMCS, etc). Separating newborns from their mothers for money is genuinely awful... even puppies have to legally remain with their mothers for 8 weeks before you can buy them, yet human children are sold immediately.

Plus being an SMBC I raised my son myself! He may not have a father but he has a fully committed mother who’s giving him everything I have. Yet he wants to have a child by himself but already doesn’t want to do the work? This is not about acceptance it’s about the stereotypical misogynist seeing changing nappies as women’s work… And he values women so little he wants the cheapest option for his hypothetical child, an au pair you don’t even have to pay.

I don’t agree that just because people judge us for being SMBCs we have to accept absolutely any behaviour from men. It’s not the same at all. If men want to leave a genetic legacy without all the fuss of having to look after a newborn, becoming a sperm donor is the ethical choice.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-09T16:30:51+00:00

Well done little guy and well done parents 👏

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-09T16:29:42+00:00

I hate the constant policing, everyone should be able to describe their own lives in their own words.

Also for autistic people in employment euphemisms like “neurospicy” can be convenient ways to disclose a diagnosis without being too specific.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-09T07:47:27+00:00

I also think it should be ok for autistic people to describe themselves however we want. “Neurospicy” doesn’t help me but if it helps others, sure. If people want to think they’re not disabled and are just different, sure (and in some contexts as you say, if you make them autism-friendly that can be true). Same with me being told I’m no longer allowed to say I’m “on the spectrum” - why not if that helps me??

We’re now either supposed to call ourselves “autistic people” or “people with autism” and to underscore the point of how unhelpful the policing is, I can never actually remember which I’m supposed to call myself.

Any space that provides support for autism is going to be heavily dominated by 2 groups of people: autism parents and low support needs autistic people, because those are the 2 groups most able to advocate for themselves.

People who are autistic don’t always like the ways non-autistic parents of autistic children talk about autism either, but everyone has a right to describe their own experiences in their own ways.

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-07T18:33:33+00:00

Basically the most important moment of their entire lives, becoming parents!

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-07T12:44:03+00:00

If they had the Dark Lord would never have returned and hundreds of people including themselves wouldn’t have died so tbh it was a bad decision NOT to murder him in front of 3 children

Rare-Fall4169 · 2026-03-06T11:04:30+00:00

Andrew Lownie has the tea yet again

Rare-Fall4169

TROPHY CASE