(Appropriately enough, his last comment was about suggesting that someone who is losing mental ground to their model of HPMOR!Quirrell talk to him to get the decision procedures from the source.)
If we’re going to play this frankly puerile game of bringing up who partially inspired what fictional characters, do I at least get to bring up “The Sword of Good”?
The Lord of Dark stared at Hirou as though he were the crazy one. “The Choice between Good and Bad,” said the Lord of Dark in a slow, careful voice, as though explaining something to a child, “is not a matter of saying ‘Good!’ It is about deciding which is which.”
Dolf uttered a single bark of laughter. “You’re mad!” his voice boomed. “Can you truly not know that you are evil? You, the Lord of Dark?”
“Names,” said the Lord of Dark quietly.
[...]
Hirou staggered, and was distantly aware of the Lord of Dark catching him as he fell, to lay him gently on the ground.
In a whisper, Hirou said “Thank you—” and paused.
“My name is Vhazhar.”
“You didn’t trust yourself,” Hirou whispered. “That’s why you had to touch the Sword of Good.”
Hirou felt Vhazhar’s nod, more than seeing it.
The air was darkening, or rather Hirou’s vision was darkening, but there was something terribly important left to say. “The Sword only tests good intentions,” Hirou whispered. “It doesn’t guide your steps. That which empowers a hero does not make us wise—desperation strengthens your hand, but it strikes with equal force in any direction—”
“I’ll be careful,” said the Lord of Dark, the one who had mastered and turned back the darkness. “I won’t trust myself.”
“You are—” Hirou murmured. “Than me, you are—”
I should have known. I should have known from the beginning. I was raised in another world. A world where royal blood is not a license to rule, a world whose wizards do more than sneer from their high towers, a world where life is not so cheap, where justice does not come as a knife in the night, a world where we know that the texture of a race’s skin shouldn’t matter—
And yet for you, born in this world, to question what others took for granted; for you, without ever touching the Sword, to hear the scream that had to be stopped at all costs—
“I don’t trust you either,” Hirou whispered, “but I don’t expect there’s anyone better,” and he closed his eyes until the end of the world.
I confess I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. I have a few vague hypotheses, but none that stand out as particularly likely based on either the quoted text or the context. (E.g. one of them is “remember that something that looks/is called evil, may not be”; but only a small part of the text deals with that, and even if you’d said it explicitly I wouldn’t know why you’d said it. The rest are all on about that level.)
Vaniver mentioned that Michael Vassar was one of the partial inspirations for a supervillain in one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s works of fiction. I’m saying that, firstly, I don’t think that’s germane in a discussion of moderation policies that aspires to impartiality, even as a playful “Appropriately enough [...]” parenthetical. But secondly, if such things are somehow considered to be relevant, then I want to note that Michael was also the explicit namesake of a morally-good fictional character (“Vhazhar”) in another one of Yudkowsky’s stories.
The fact that the latter story is also about the importance of judging things on their true merits rather than being misled by shallow pattern-matching (e.g., figuing that a “Lord of Dark” must be evil, or using someone’s association with a fictional character to support the idea that they might be worth banning) made it seem worth quoting at length.
You know, this is a really lame cheap shot—
If we’re going to play this frankly puerile game of bringing up who partially inspired what fictional characters, do I at least get to bring up “The Sword of Good”?
I confess I don’t know what you’re trying to say here. I have a few vague hypotheses, but none that stand out as particularly likely based on either the quoted text or the context. (E.g. one of them is “remember that something that looks/is called evil, may not be”; but only a small part of the text deals with that, and even if you’d said it explicitly I wouldn’t know why you’d said it. The rest are all on about that level.)
Vaniver mentioned that Michael Vassar was one of the partial inspirations for a supervillain in one of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s works of fiction. I’m saying that, firstly, I don’t think that’s germane in a discussion of moderation policies that aspires to impartiality, even as a playful “Appropriately enough [...]” parenthetical. But secondly, if such things are somehow considered to be relevant, then I want to note that Michael was also the explicit namesake of a morally-good fictional character (“Vhazhar”) in another one of Yudkowsky’s stories.
The fact that the latter story is also about the importance of judging things on their true merits rather than being misled by shallow pattern-matching (e.g., figuing that a “Lord of Dark” must be evil, or using someone’s association with a fictional character to support the idea that they might be worth banning) made it seem worth quoting at length.