Doubledee

For sure, there's an unhealthy internet thing of just hating stuff, I hope it's obvious I'm not doing that. I actually think the books for younger kids are overall better and a lot of the worst stuff could have been avoided if she just stuck to writing fun mysteries for children. She was pretty good at snarky irreverent kid stuff.

The biggest fans in my life hate the epilogue too, so you're in good company there.

It's literally in the book. Harry becomes a wizard CIA agent. They still have slaves at the end. The book ends with Harry wondering if his chattel slave will bring him food. They don't help the muggles, they don't rectify the injustice of their tiered society.

I think the anti fascist angle is a nice thing to get from it but it's not really supported by the text. Riddle is ontologically evil for no reason, he's bad Dumbledore. Dumbledore controls the entire society and can act with impunity. I don't even think all this stuff is intentional. It's just not that deep.

No her issue is with those people because they aren't competent. None of the issues that make the ministry an evil neo liberal monstrosity are fixed by the heroes who enter the government and maintain it. The books suck as political texts.

Hey I know you're getting a bunch of responses so I don't want to be unhelpful and pile on, but I am curious if you actually dispute either of the claims this meme makes (Churchill blaming the famine on India, Mao personally taking steps to cut his consumption during a famine and being critical of his own policy). Because if you don't think it's wrong I'm not sure why you are posting this response. The Chinese don't care if you vote for Churchill or Mao, neither are even candidates for election in the United States. This could not be less about what you've posted.

The function of a ratchet is to make an object go in one direction more easily. Democrats fulfill a function in propeling the country rightward. This was arguably not true 80 years ago but post-Reagan they are part of a process of rightward movement. Voting for and legitimizing them is moving the country right and making things worse.

Whenever I find out about the next movie Disney is doing it feels like they're just dabbing on their fans. I quit following this shit years ago and have adblocked my life pretty thoroughly so I don't usually know what's going on, but every time I get a glimpse I feel vindicated for checking out.

The postal service runs functionally craft unions that don't negotiate together, Rural Carriers bargain separately from City Carriers, who also are separate from the APWU which covers clerks and maintenance folks. There are upsides to this, for Rural Carriers specifically it let them get certain contract items that would be a huge ask to get for other carriers due to the specificity of their job requirements, but it's led to a problem where regular rural carriers are in a pretty unique bargaining position relative to virtually everyone else. Importantly, they're also divided into full time regulars and part time RCAs, which I think creates an engagement problem. When I was an RCA I paid dues, but I rarely interacted with or cared about the union because it was pretty clear pretty quickly that the union was mostly concerned with the regulars who had been there a long time. It was likely to be upwards of 5 years before I became a regular (I knew people who had been working part time for 7 years) and almost all the perks and benefits were negotiated to benefit the regular carriers.

I think over time new regulars are becoming less engaged, especially since there have been recent changes to the craft that undermine a lot of the promises that were ostensibly the reason you waited in line to become a regular in the first place. So the leadership is getting increasingly detached from the actual workforce, and the union is already one of the smaller and weaker ones to begin with.

EDIT: A bigger problem which I probably should have mentioned to begin with is that all postal workers are legally barred from taking a strike. So the unions have something of a more collegial relationship with management than you'd like, because you can only play hardball so far before you run into legal trouble.