HPMOR is making me rethink human nature—because of how people react to it.
The readers of HPMOR are likely an extremely biased sample of humanity, and I’d think particularly for this issue.
We like to let reality decide, and despite our general intellectual “confidence” in ourselves relative to others, we instinctively see that our inferences can and are likely to be wrong. We want to be less wrong, while others generally assume that their inferences are already right.
On the more speculative side, I think that there are many different motivations for accepting a belief as true, and compared to most other people, we are less motivated by hearsay evidence, even when it comes from the Voice of God. Fiction itself always implies some suspension of disbelief. For me, at least, the natural suspension includes the Voice of God and Rowling, which probably enhances the distrust of hearsay within in the story.
In the book, what we’ve seen of Quirrell has generally been positive, if not always cheery.
His one observable “crime” was killing Rita Skeeter, a crime for which I have a fair amount of sympathy, and would call overzealous justice more than criminality. She ruthlessly destroys lives with complete disregard for the truth to make a buck and amuse herself, and was destroyed in the act of such criminality, by one of her intended victims. The word I have for that is Justice. How many lives has she destroyed? How many lives did Quirrell save by destroying her? I don’t think I would have done the same, and wouldn’t have encouraged him to do so, but I wouldn’t hold it against Quirrell either.
She doesn’t destroy any lives. Who does the Inquirer destroy? She makes people embarrassed and the only effects we ever really see are schoolchildren making stupid assumptions about harry. Certainly nothing CLOSE to deserving the death penalty. Killing Skeeter was EVIL.
And so were a ton of people who read her article. She was pandering to her audience. Do you want to kill all of them too? Being biased is not worthy of capital punishment.
Well, when it means “written embarrassing things about people,” it tends to carry the additional meaning that those writings cost people their social standing and possibly their livelihoods, turning them into paraiahs and possibly landing them in prison.
In any case, accusing someone of being a Death Eater goes far beyond the territory of “embarrassing.” As we witnessed in the early chapters of the story, nearly everyone has traumatic experiences associated with the war. Death Eaters are The Hated Enemy from a war that still looms so large in the memories of the public that they’re afraid to say the name of their leader. On the face of it, this should be at least as weighty an accusation as accusing a schoolteacher of being a member of al-Qaeda.
1 no one has turned into a pariah or gotten into prison because of her tabloid, unless you count harry being slightly shunned by people who don’t matter.
2, Is accusing someone of being a secret Deatheater really that different than all the people that accuse Obama of being a secret muslim? It’s sensationalist nonsense that no reasonable person believes. No one ACTED on the belief that Quirrel is a secret deatheater, and I doubt anyone seriously believed it anyway.
3, Al Qaeda has no Lucius Malfoy. Being known to be a former Deatheater doesn’t seem to cause him that much trouble.
Slightly shunned? He essentially went from hero to outcast, and “people who don’t matter” consisted of the majority of the wizarding public, in school and out. If he hadn’t proven himself right about basically everything, that reputation could have followed him for the rest of his life. Do you think your livelihood wouldn’t be affected if most of your country thought you were, as she put it, “dangerously disturbed?”
And you’re arguing that “no one” was turned into a paraiah or imprisoned because of her, when our entire sample of people she’s smeared is a number we can count on our fingers, out of a career of more than a decade built on attacking people’s reputations.
Lucius is widely agreed to have been a Death Eater, at least by his political opponents, but he’s also been found innocent by the judicial system. O. J. Simpson is widely agreed to be a murderer, and it certainly affects how the public views him, but he’s not actually being punished for it. Both Lucius and O. J. have the advantage of already being rich, and not needing to hold down a job. Other characters, on the other hand, have been punished for being Death Eaters by life in Azkaban.
Rita accusing Quirrell of being a Death Eater is thus quite different from accusing Obama of being a secret Muslim, as being a Muslim isn’t actually illegal, and that allegation was only believed by people who had already formed their opinions on him, whereas Rita has an established record of changing people’s opinions, and creating them for people who haven’t already.
O. J. Simpson is widely agreed to be a murderer, and it certainly affects how the public views him, but he’s not actually being punished for it. Both Lucius and O. J. have the advantage of already being rich
This might have been true to some extent in 1997, but not so much today. By the end of the civil trial, O.J had spent most of his money on his defense, and he had to even give up prized possessions like his Heisman Trophy in order to pay the damages. He didn’t have enough property to pay all the damages, and the only reason he had anything left after that is that California law doesn’t allow taking pensions to pay for damages, so he still had his NFL retirement to support him. But right now, he’s serving a long prison sentence for armed robbery from trying to take back some of his football memorabilia—some of the folks he engaged in that offense with got away scot-free, since the prosecution was much more interested in taking down O.J. So yes, the public perception did affect him.
Despite being largely built from real-world prototypes, the Death Eaters don’t have any great real-world analogies that I’m very familiar with. As a violent political organization that gained substantial power and waged a full-blown civil war quite recently, they seem close to the IRA, but they don’t have the historical context that colored that conflict; the strong blood-purity emphasis puts them close in some ways to Klansmen or neo-Nazis, or the early Nazi Party before it dropped its revolutionary angle, but there doesn’t seem to be a strong nationalist component and the methodology is different.
Point is, I’d forbear from reasoning too far by analogy here; the situation’s too unusual. About the best we can do is look at the in-universe consequences of various people’s actions, and from that perspective the accusation looks pretty damned weighty. Especially for a schoolteacher.
It’s worth noting that, in canon, Rita’s writing results in Hermione receiving piles of hate mail including booby-trapped letters containing toxic chemicals. It also results in the Ministry, as represented by Fudge, taking a very dim view of Harry on the evidence of her articles alone (“having funny turns all over the place”).
Given the apparent gullibility and quickness to violence of the general population in the Potterverse (with no comment on how this may or may not resemble the real world), it is entirely plausible that Rita’s other victims were also the targets of such abuse, including risks to their health. And let’s not even get started on the possibility of vigilante justice (you don’t mess with Lucius Malfoy because he is, in fact, Lucius Malfoy, but what about less well-defended targets?), or the way key institutions such as the Wizengamot are easily swayed by rumour and rhetoric.
In light of the above, I assign a very low probability to the hypothesis that Rita Skeeter’s writing has not resulted in cases of bodily harm and miscarriage of justice (up to and including Azkaban and/or death).
no one has turned into a pariah [...] because of her tabloid, unless you count harry being slightly shunned by people who don’t matter.
I think you need to recheck the standard definitions of “pariah”. Most people, I think, would consider his experiences “being turned into a pariah”, and I am unsure what definition of “pariah” you are using. In canon, government officials considered him sufficiently unreliable to discount his eyewitness testimony that Lord Voldemort had returned. That’s quite a fall for “the boy who lived”. If Skeeter can do that much damage in a single article, imagine if she had chosen an already unpopular target.
She worked at a newspaper and punished gossip stories that would sell. was she any more “Paid” than any other employee at a biased newspaper? It’s been a while since I read the relevant book but I don’t recall her being bribed by or taking orders from Lucius.
She worked at a newspaper and punished gossip stories that would sell
Gossip stories that were weapons (used by one side to prosecute two separate wars with thousands of casaulties) and acknowledged as such by all well-informed players; or are we going to claim that Skeeter, investigative reporter par excellence, somehow missed that she was really working for Malfoy despite everyone else knowing?
Whether Lucius hands her a sack of gold or signs a check to the Daily Prophet makes no difference. It would be like asking whether Tokyo Rose was paid on an hourly basis or annual salary.
(Or if the payment method does make a difference, I will remember the particular corporate and moral niceties for if I ever hire an assassin.)
canon!Skeeter was a tool of Fudge. Thus, if Fudge was a tool of Malfoy, then Skeeter was a tool of Malfoy. But I’m not convinced that Fudge knew that he was a Malfoy tool. Certainly, his reactions amount to “doing worse than Neville Chamberlain when confronting an evil tyrant,” which was a very advantageous position for the Ministry of Magic to take, from Malfoy’s point of view.
Nonetheless, my impression from canon was that Fudge’s “la-la-la I’m not listening strategy” was a happy accident from Malfoy’s point of view, not a planned strategy. And if Fudge was not conspiring with Malfoy, then it seems reasonable that Skeeter (a knowing lackey of Fudge) would not think she was one of Malfoy’s tools.
Of course, a substantial amount of this impression is based on my belief that Rowling was a terrible world-builder and that the canon Potterverse contained essentially zero competent plotters. For example, Chamber of Secrets is an unintended consequence of Malfoy’s petty act against a bureaucratic rival. Voldemort received no benefit from Malfoy’s acts, and Malfoy should have know that. Heck, Malfoy himself received no benefit, and didn’t even seem to expect one. In short, he shouldn’t have used a powerful Voldemort artifact the way he did.
Edit: None of this should be read as disagreeing with the view that Skeeter knew that a natural consequence of her work was destroying people’s lives and this didn’t bother her one bit.
That’s the impression of the characters in book 5, but the end of book 4 pretty clearly shows that Fudge’s impressions of Harry were guided by Skeeter, not the other way around.
“You are prepared to believe that Lord Voldemort has returned, on the word of a lunatic murderer, and a boy who… well…”
Fudge shot Harry another look, and Harry suddenly understood.
“You’ve been reading Rita Skeeter, Mr. Fudge,” he said quietly.
...
Fudge reddened slightly, but a defiant and obstinate look came over his face.
“And if I have?” he said, looking at Dumbledore. “If I have discovered that you’ve been keeping certain facts about the boy very quiet? A Parselmouth, eh? And having funny turns all over the place—”
As for what you said about Lucius being a shoddy plotter—well, he did fail in CoS, so you could make an argument to that opinion. But look at it from another point of view.
Through an excessive amount of force—an admittedly stupid move which did get him kicked off of the Board eventually—he got Dumbledore removed as Headmaster, and if Harry hadn’t triumphed against ridiculous odds, it likely would have stuck.
If Ginny had been caught releasing the Basilisk, Arthur is discredited, which would reverse those irritating acts that he was (somehow) making into law.
If Ginny fails to be saved, then either she gets blamed for everything and Arthur is discredited or she is taken to be another victim; either way and she would be dead, which is icing on the Flawless Instrument of Death’s cake.
If Ginny is saved but people don’t believe her about the diary controlling her actions (remember, Dumbledore was supposed to be gone), then Arthur is discredited.
We don’t know too much about how much Lucius knew about the diary, but he might have known that it would have targeted Harry, which would have been quite the coup.
If the diary would have escaped, I would argue that Voldemort would get something out of it; perhaps the life stolen from Ginny could have been given to Voldemort’s shade?
None of this mentions the fact that many mudbloods were supposed to die, which he would consider to be a good thing, at least.
Lucius did not succeed in CoS—at all, really, besides temporarily removing the headmaster—but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t planning to get anything out of it.
Where are you getting this? All we know about her is she writes semi-accurate stories about Harry in the books and Quirrel says she is Lucius’ pawn. Where do we hear about her writing propaganda during the wizarding wars? Her behavior makes just as much sense if she’s just a sensationalist writer trying to sell papers to credulous idiots as if she’s a paid servant of Lucius.
Semi-accurate? She blatantly makes things up and spins things in order to smear her subjects. You could as well call an article “semi-accurate” which accuses someone of being a child molester, when the reality is that they do, in fact, spend time around children.
I think that’s exactly what Drethelin meant when s/he said “semi-accurate”. The point is that all Skeeter did was make up gossip and at the end of the day that’s not that bad. If you can point to an actual instance of someone dying or coming to great harm that stemmed from a Skeeter article, then… you can think of ONE bad thing she did. And your proposed solution is to kill her?
Hermione solves the Skeeter problem in Canon without shedding any blood, and even she goes overboard on the justice by trapping the woman inside a glass jar for hours/days. I can think of plenty of ways to stifle Skeeter without even using teleportation or invisibility or time travel—imagine what a mighty wizard like Quirrel could do. Quirrel even says that he’s going to crush her (turns out he meant that literally) just for the sheer enjoyment of it, and not because it’s what she deserves.
I just think that the people who support killing Rita Skeeter probably decided that it was a good idea because they hated her, and then cast around for justifications that sounded better than that.
If you can point to an actual instance of someone dying or coming to great harm that stemmed from a Skeeter article, then… you can think of ONE bad thing she did.
If you dredged through canon, you would probably only come up with 20-30 deaths unequivocally and specifically at Voldemort’s hand as opposed to random Death Eaters, mysterious deaths, deaths inferred but not actually known to have been Voldemort’s doing, general carnage implied but not stated etc. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all!
Demanding specific incidents is like demanding specific incidents of lung cancer before you can discuss the moral guilt of tobacco executives. ‘Ah, but how do you know that lung cancer was thanks to their tobacco smoking? Lung cancer is pretty common, you know!’ Or power plants or...
(‘How do you know Skeeter’s articles helped kill this particular person during Voldemort’s ignored rise to power in canon, or helped him kill people during his first war? Can you prove that Skeeter’s article was either necessary or sufficient to keep the population apathetic and let people like Cedric Diggory die?’)
In the real world, we have the luxury of investigating propagandists like Anwar Al-Awlaki or Goebbels, and can even nail them all the way down to specific deaths—this Somali kid in Minneasota decided to become a jihadi, killing himself and 4 others, that sort of thing.
In the fictional world, alas, short of someone asking Rowling whether Skeeter’s articles contributed to any deaths, we cannot know. There’s no fact of the matter about it. It’s fake, it’s not real, it never happened.
In the real world, however, being the top reporter on a government propaganda rag… What sort of blood-guilt do you think a comparable North Korean reporter or news anchor (eg. Ri Chun Hee) bears?
If you dredged through canon, you would probably only come up with 20-30 deaths unequivocally and specifically at Voldemort’s hand as opposed to random Death Eaters, mysterious deaths, deaths inferred but not actually known to have been Voldemort’s doing, general carnage implied but not stated etc. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all!
But you’ve moved the goalposts. I didn’t ask for deaths that were unequivocally and specifically at Skeeter’s hand—there definitely aren’t ANY of those, so if that was our condition of guilt she’d be good and Voldemort would be bad. All I asked for were ones that could be traced back to one of her articles—perhaps there are one or two of those, but if we’re allowing that as our condition of guilt then Voldemort shares responsibility for just about every death we hear about in canon so he has hundreds if not thousands of deaths on his hands.
Either way, my point was that in order to argue that Skeeter’s death was justified on utilitarian grounds, one has to prove that killing her would save lives. Killing her definitely costs one life. Stopping her from publishing costs no lives. I’m not trying to argue that Skeeter is a good person, I’m just pointing out that in the grand scheme of things she’s not that bad, and that there are plenty of ways to eliminate her as a threat without getting blood on one’s hands.
Your example about the tobacco executives is misleading. We DO require evidence that tobacco kills in order to condemn tobacco executives as being morally bankrupt. Luckily, we have that evidence. I’m asking for evidence that Skeeter articles kill, because one of the main arguments of the Kill Skeeter camp seems to be that they do kill. If you can bring me that evidence I’ll continue to agree that Skeeter needs to be stopped but I still won’t agree that she should have been killed, any more than I want to kill tobacco executives.
I’m going to repeat that for the sake of clarity. My argument is not:
“Skeeter never hurt anyone so she should be spared.”
My argument is:
“Well, I don’t agree that Skeeter definitely did kill anyone—I want to hear more evidence. Even if she did, though, we don’t need to kill her to save lives, so we shouldn’t do that. Therefore, Quirrel did a bad thing.”
When did I ever propose killing her? Quirrell is evil, but just because Rita got herself killed by someone more evil than she was doesn’t mean she wasn’t a pretty terrible person.
Folks seem to be waving their hands at whether there’s anything definitive written about Rita causing real harm, so...
In canon, Rita was not portrayed as explicitly on anyone’s side, and probably the worst direct consequence of anything she wrote, that was explicitly mentioned, was Hermione receiving hate mail after being accused of using love potions. relevant HP wiki article
In HPMOR, If we take Quirrell at his word in Chapter 26, Rita was trying to destroy Harry’s reputation, which is a real harm. In chapter 22, Draco thinks “The Daily Prophet was one of Father’s primary tools, he used it like a wizard’s wand.”—and we all know the sorts of things Lucius gets up to with a wizard’s wand. In chapter 80, the Prophet printed stories directly accusing Hermione of trying to kill Draco, before her trial.
I haven’t been able to find any reference that Skeeter or the Prophet were aiding Voldemort during the War, in canon or MoR.
The readers of HPMOR are likely an extremely biased sample of humanity, and I’d think particularly for this issue.
We like to let reality decide, and despite our general intellectual “confidence” in ourselves relative to others, we instinctively see that our inferences can and are likely to be wrong. We want to be less wrong, while others generally assume that their inferences are already right.
On the more speculative side, I think that there are many different motivations for accepting a belief as true, and compared to most other people, we are less motivated by hearsay evidence, even when it comes from the Voice of God. Fiction itself always implies some suspension of disbelief. For me, at least, the natural suspension includes the Voice of God and Rowling, which probably enhances the distrust of hearsay within in the story.
In the book, what we’ve seen of Quirrell has generally been positive, if not always cheery.
His one observable “crime” was killing Rita Skeeter, a crime for which I have a fair amount of sympathy, and would call overzealous justice more than criminality. She ruthlessly destroys lives with complete disregard for the truth to make a buck and amuse herself, and was destroyed in the act of such criminality, by one of her intended victims. The word I have for that is Justice. How many lives has she destroyed? How many lives did Quirrell save by destroying her? I don’t think I would have done the same, and wouldn’t have encouraged him to do so, but I wouldn’t hold it against Quirrell either.
She doesn’t destroy any lives. Who does the Inquirer destroy? She makes people embarrassed and the only effects we ever really see are schoolchildren making stupid assumptions about harry. Certainly nothing CLOSE to deserving the death penalty. Killing Skeeter was EVIL.
Skeeter was a paid witting propagandizing accomplice for a Death Eater in both MoR and canon.
And she was perfectly willing to tar a Hogwarts Professor as a death eater, and tar Harry as a Dark Lord in training.
And so were a ton of people who read her article. She was pandering to her audience. Do you want to kill all of them too? Being biased is not worthy of capital punishment.
Whether or not being biased is worthy of capital punishment is a completely different issue than whether she has in fact destroyed people’s lives.
“Destroyed people’s lives” is an odd expression.
It can sometimes mean “kidnapped people, held them in prisons, and tortured them to death.”
And it can sometimes mean “written embarrassing things about people.”
Well, when it means “written embarrassing things about people,” it tends to carry the additional meaning that those writings cost people their social standing and possibly their livelihoods, turning them into paraiahs and possibly landing them in prison.
In any case, accusing someone of being a Death Eater goes far beyond the territory of “embarrassing.” As we witnessed in the early chapters of the story, nearly everyone has traumatic experiences associated with the war. Death Eaters are The Hated Enemy from a war that still looms so large in the memories of the public that they’re afraid to say the name of their leader. On the face of it, this should be at least as weighty an accusation as accusing a schoolteacher of being a member of al-Qaeda.
Several problems with this:
1 no one has turned into a pariah or gotten into prison because of her tabloid, unless you count harry being slightly shunned by people who don’t matter.
2, Is accusing someone of being a secret Deatheater really that different than all the people that accuse Obama of being a secret muslim? It’s sensationalist nonsense that no reasonable person believes. No one ACTED on the belief that Quirrel is a secret deatheater, and I doubt anyone seriously believed it anyway.
3, Al Qaeda has no Lucius Malfoy. Being known to be a former Deatheater doesn’t seem to cause him that much trouble.
Slightly shunned? He essentially went from hero to outcast, and “people who don’t matter” consisted of the majority of the wizarding public, in school and out. If he hadn’t proven himself right about basically everything, that reputation could have followed him for the rest of his life. Do you think your livelihood wouldn’t be affected if most of your country thought you were, as she put it, “dangerously disturbed?”
And you’re arguing that “no one” was turned into a paraiah or imprisoned because of her, when our entire sample of people she’s smeared is a number we can count on our fingers, out of a career of more than a decade built on attacking people’s reputations.
Lucius is widely agreed to have been a Death Eater, at least by his political opponents, but he’s also been found innocent by the judicial system. O. J. Simpson is widely agreed to be a murderer, and it certainly affects how the public views him, but he’s not actually being punished for it. Both Lucius and O. J. have the advantage of already being rich, and not needing to hold down a job. Other characters, on the other hand, have been punished for being Death Eaters by life in Azkaban.
Rita accusing Quirrell of being a Death Eater is thus quite different from accusing Obama of being a secret Muslim, as being a Muslim isn’t actually illegal, and that allegation was only believed by people who had already formed their opinions on him, whereas Rita has an established record of changing people’s opinions, and creating them for people who haven’t already.
This might have been true to some extent in 1997, but not so much today. By the end of the civil trial, O.J had spent most of his money on his defense, and he had to even give up prized possessions like his Heisman Trophy in order to pay the damages. He didn’t have enough property to pay all the damages, and the only reason he had anything left after that is that California law doesn’t allow taking pensions to pay for damages, so he still had his NFL retirement to support him. But right now, he’s serving a long prison sentence for armed robbery from trying to take back some of his football memorabilia—some of the folks he engaged in that offense with got away scot-free, since the prosecution was much more interested in taking down O.J. So yes, the public perception did affect him.
Despite being largely built from real-world prototypes, the Death Eaters don’t have any great real-world analogies that I’m very familiar with. As a violent political organization that gained substantial power and waged a full-blown civil war quite recently, they seem close to the IRA, but they don’t have the historical context that colored that conflict; the strong blood-purity emphasis puts them close in some ways to Klansmen or neo-Nazis, or the early Nazi Party before it dropped its revolutionary angle, but there doesn’t seem to be a strong nationalist component and the methodology is different.
Point is, I’d forbear from reasoning too far by analogy here; the situation’s too unusual. About the best we can do is look at the in-universe consequences of various people’s actions, and from that perspective the accusation looks pretty damned weighty. Especially for a schoolteacher.
It’s worth noting that, in canon, Rita’s writing results in Hermione receiving piles of hate mail including booby-trapped letters containing toxic chemicals. It also results in the Ministry, as represented by Fudge, taking a very dim view of Harry on the evidence of her articles alone (“having funny turns all over the place”).
Given the apparent gullibility and quickness to violence of the general population in the Potterverse (with no comment on how this may or may not resemble the real world), it is entirely plausible that Rita’s other victims were also the targets of such abuse, including risks to their health. And let’s not even get started on the possibility of vigilante justice (you don’t mess with Lucius Malfoy because he is, in fact, Lucius Malfoy, but what about less well-defended targets?), or the way key institutions such as the Wizengamot are easily swayed by rumour and rhetoric.
In light of the above, I assign a very low probability to the hypothesis that Rita Skeeter’s writing has not resulted in cases of bodily harm and miscarriage of justice (up to and including Azkaban and/or death).
I think you need to recheck the standard definitions of “pariah”. Most people, I think, would consider his experiences “being turned into a pariah”, and I am unsure what definition of “pariah” you are using. In canon, government officials considered him sufficiently unreliable to discount his eyewitness testimony that Lord Voldemort had returned. That’s quite a fall for “the boy who lived”. If Skeeter can do that much damage in a single article, imagine if she had chosen an already unpopular target.
That said, she certainly didn’t “deserve” death.
She worked at a newspaper and punished gossip stories that would sell. was she any more “Paid” than any other employee at a biased newspaper? It’s been a while since I read the relevant book but I don’t recall her being bribed by or taking orders from Lucius.
Gossip stories that were weapons (used by one side to prosecute two separate wars with thousands of casaulties) and acknowledged as such by all well-informed players; or are we going to claim that Skeeter, investigative reporter par excellence, somehow missed that she was really working for Malfoy despite everyone else knowing?
Whether Lucius hands her a sack of gold or signs a check to the Daily Prophet makes no difference. It would be like asking whether Tokyo Rose was paid on an hourly basis or annual salary.
(Or if the payment method does make a difference, I will remember the particular corporate and moral niceties for if I ever hire an assassin.)
canon!Skeeter was a tool of Fudge. Thus, if Fudge was a tool of Malfoy, then Skeeter was a tool of Malfoy. But I’m not convinced that Fudge knew that he was a Malfoy tool. Certainly, his reactions amount to “doing worse than Neville Chamberlain when confronting an evil tyrant,” which was a very advantageous position for the Ministry of Magic to take, from Malfoy’s point of view.
Nonetheless, my impression from canon was that Fudge’s “la-la-la I’m not listening strategy” was a happy accident from Malfoy’s point of view, not a planned strategy. And if Fudge was not conspiring with Malfoy, then it seems reasonable that Skeeter (a knowing lackey of Fudge) would not think she was one of Malfoy’s tools.
Of course, a substantial amount of this impression is based on my belief that Rowling was a terrible world-builder and that the canon Potterverse contained essentially zero competent plotters. For example, Chamber of Secrets is an unintended consequence of Malfoy’s petty act against a bureaucratic rival. Voldemort received no benefit from Malfoy’s acts, and Malfoy should have know that. Heck, Malfoy himself received no benefit, and didn’t even seem to expect one. In short, he shouldn’t have used a powerful Voldemort artifact the way he did.
Edit: None of this should be read as disagreeing with the view that Skeeter knew that a natural consequence of her work was destroying people’s lives and this didn’t bother her one bit.
That’s the impression of the characters in book 5, but the end of book 4 pretty clearly shows that Fudge’s impressions of Harry were guided by Skeeter, not the other way around.
As for what you said about Lucius being a shoddy plotter—well, he did fail in CoS, so you could make an argument to that opinion. But look at it from another point of view.
Through an excessive amount of force—an admittedly stupid move which did get him kicked off of the Board eventually—he got Dumbledore removed as Headmaster, and if Harry hadn’t triumphed against ridiculous odds, it likely would have stuck.
If Ginny had been caught releasing the Basilisk, Arthur is discredited, which would reverse those irritating acts that he was (somehow) making into law.
If Ginny fails to be saved, then either she gets blamed for everything and Arthur is discredited or she is taken to be another victim; either way and she would be dead, which is icing on the Flawless Instrument of Death’s cake.
If Ginny is saved but people don’t believe her about the diary controlling her actions (remember, Dumbledore was supposed to be gone), then Arthur is discredited.
We don’t know too much about how much Lucius knew about the diary, but he might have known that it would have targeted Harry, which would have been quite the coup.
If the diary would have escaped, I would argue that Voldemort would get something out of it; perhaps the life stolen from Ginny could have been given to Voldemort’s shade?
None of this mentions the fact that many mudbloods were supposed to die, which he would consider to be a good thing, at least.
Lucius did not succeed in CoS—at all, really, besides temporarily removing the headmaster—but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t planning to get anything out of it.
Where are you getting this? All we know about her is she writes semi-accurate stories about Harry in the books and Quirrel says she is Lucius’ pawn. Where do we hear about her writing propaganda during the wizarding wars? Her behavior makes just as much sense if she’s just a sensationalist writer trying to sell papers to credulous idiots as if she’s a paid servant of Lucius.
Semi-accurate? She blatantly makes things up and spins things in order to smear her subjects. You could as well call an article “semi-accurate” which accuses someone of being a child molester, when the reality is that they do, in fact, spend time around children.
Setting aside that incredibly weighted analogy…
I think that’s exactly what Drethelin meant when s/he said “semi-accurate”. The point is that all Skeeter did was make up gossip and at the end of the day that’s not that bad. If you can point to an actual instance of someone dying or coming to great harm that stemmed from a Skeeter article, then… you can think of ONE bad thing she did. And your proposed solution is to kill her?
Hermione solves the Skeeter problem in Canon without shedding any blood, and even she goes overboard on the justice by trapping the woman inside a glass jar for hours/days. I can think of plenty of ways to stifle Skeeter without even using teleportation or invisibility or time travel—imagine what a mighty wizard like Quirrel could do. Quirrel even says that he’s going to crush her (turns out he meant that literally) just for the sheer enjoyment of it, and not because it’s what she deserves.
I just think that the people who support killing Rita Skeeter probably decided that it was a good idea because they hated her, and then cast around for justifications that sounded better than that.
If you dredged through canon, you would probably only come up with 20-30 deaths unequivocally and specifically at Voldemort’s hand as opposed to random Death Eaters, mysterious deaths, deaths inferred but not actually known to have been Voldemort’s doing, general carnage implied but not stated etc. Maybe he’s not such a bad guy after all!
Demanding specific incidents is like demanding specific incidents of lung cancer before you can discuss the moral guilt of tobacco executives. ‘Ah, but how do you know that lung cancer was thanks to their tobacco smoking? Lung cancer is pretty common, you know!’ Or power plants or...
(‘How do you know Skeeter’s articles helped kill this particular person during Voldemort’s ignored rise to power in canon, or helped him kill people during his first war? Can you prove that Skeeter’s article was either necessary or sufficient to keep the population apathetic and let people like Cedric Diggory die?’)
In the real world, we have the luxury of investigating propagandists like Anwar Al-Awlaki or Goebbels, and can even nail them all the way down to specific deaths—this Somali kid in Minneasota decided to become a jihadi, killing himself and 4 others, that sort of thing.
In the fictional world, alas, short of someone asking Rowling whether Skeeter’s articles contributed to any deaths, we cannot know. There’s no fact of the matter about it. It’s fake, it’s not real, it never happened.
In the real world, however, being the top reporter on a government propaganda rag… What sort of blood-guilt do you think a comparable North Korean reporter or news anchor (eg. Ri Chun Hee) bears?
But you’ve moved the goalposts. I didn’t ask for deaths that were unequivocally and specifically at Skeeter’s hand—there definitely aren’t ANY of those, so if that was our condition of guilt she’d be good and Voldemort would be bad. All I asked for were ones that could be traced back to one of her articles—perhaps there are one or two of those, but if we’re allowing that as our condition of guilt then Voldemort shares responsibility for just about every death we hear about in canon so he has hundreds if not thousands of deaths on his hands.
Either way, my point was that in order to argue that Skeeter’s death was justified on utilitarian grounds, one has to prove that killing her would save lives. Killing her definitely costs one life. Stopping her from publishing costs no lives. I’m not trying to argue that Skeeter is a good person, I’m just pointing out that in the grand scheme of things she’s not that bad, and that there are plenty of ways to eliminate her as a threat without getting blood on one’s hands.
Your example about the tobacco executives is misleading. We DO require evidence that tobacco kills in order to condemn tobacco executives as being morally bankrupt. Luckily, we have that evidence. I’m asking for evidence that Skeeter articles kill, because one of the main arguments of the Kill Skeeter camp seems to be that they do kill. If you can bring me that evidence I’ll continue to agree that Skeeter needs to be stopped but I still won’t agree that she should have been killed, any more than I want to kill tobacco executives.
I’m going to repeat that for the sake of clarity. My argument is not:
My argument is:
When did I ever propose killing her? Quirrell is evil, but just because Rita got herself killed by someone more evil than she was doesn’t mean she wasn’t a pretty terrible person.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to point the finger at you specifically. I should more correctly have written, “the proposed solution,” or something.
Folks seem to be waving their hands at whether there’s anything definitive written about Rita causing real harm, so...
In canon, Rita was not portrayed as explicitly on anyone’s side, and probably the worst direct consequence of anything she wrote, that was explicitly mentioned, was Hermione receiving hate mail after being accused of using love potions. relevant HP wiki article
In HPMOR, If we take Quirrell at his word in Chapter 26, Rita was trying to destroy Harry’s reputation, which is a real harm. In chapter 22, Draco thinks “The Daily Prophet was one of Father’s primary tools, he used it like a wizard’s wand.”—and we all know the sorts of things Lucius gets up to with a wizard’s wand. In chapter 80, the Prophet printed stories directly accusing Hermione of trying to kill Draco, before her trial.
I haven’t been able to find any reference that Skeeter or the Prophet were aiding Voldemort during the War, in canon or MoR.