Honestly...do we really know that Grindelwald took the Muggle world to its knees? For that matter, Grindelwald's reign took place during World War II. Quite frankly, the Muggle world's war technology has skyrocketed since then, so while it's certainly possible that Grindelwald could have taken the Muggle world "to its knees" back in the 1940s, could they really do that now?

 

He could probably do it easier now, that is assuming that he had been controlling the minds of the Nazi's at the time, or whatever group. Should he do the same now with any country with a reasonable army and nukes and the world crumbles even faster than in WW2. After all, all that our improving technology would allow us to do is destroy ourselves faster.

 

Can somebody who believes that magic is a force (rather than an authority) explain to me why the fact that a protego cast to separate Ron from Hermione is proof that shield spells can stop everything from bullets to ICBMs?

The fact that a single Kleenex tissue is strong enough to stop the momentum of a goose feather doesn't make it a suitable replacement for Kevlar.

 

Two points:

First, Grindelwald's accomplishment in nearly crippling most of the Muggle world was through Hitler, who was working with - or, more accurately, given that we're considering a Dark Lord who focused on subjugating Muggles - working for Grindelwald. It's fair to say that Hitler likely lost the war because of a continuing refusal to listen to his generals than anything else. In this case, it would imply that Grindelwald didn't care about the Muggle war - letting his lackey screw it up - yet given his goals, conquest of the Muggles would be necessary. Thus, it follows that he would have thought himself capable of conquering the world - both Magical and Muggle - without aid from Hitler or other leaders. Dumbledore's earlier cooperation with Grindelwald seems to imply that he, too, thought the Muggle world to be able to be subjugated by two powerful wizards and their followers.

Second, I bring up - and this would be the third time now, which is frankly implying a level of what is perhaps deliberate ignorance of my point - the notion that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a corresponding technology. Would you claim that Muggles could survive an attack by, say, the Klingon Empire? There's little difference between the two, if the wizards so choose. Should I suppose that you are suffering from Independence Day Syndrome?

Narion

 

The problem is, the person who was arguing that is Taure, the person who does believe Magic is authority. Personally, I happen to agree with the belief that there can be spells of differing power; while I agree that it's certainly possible for the Protego to stop bullets, I'm under the impression that it would take a wizard of an extremely high caliber to pull it off (maybe even to such an extent as to require more skill than even Dumbledore and Voldemort possess).

I'm not that big a fan of science fiction, and have never been interested in Star Trek, so pardon me for being incapable of answering that question of yours.

EDIT: And here I thought I learned my lesson about getting involved in these god damned Magic vs. Muggle arguments. Curse my argumentative nature...

 

And the Wizard-Muggle debate arises from the dead!

Let's get started:

1st Taure, you still haven't answered Vorpal's critique of your magical theory.

2nd Meanwhile, I'll be happy to quote myself.

 

Wizards will always be greater than Muggles for a few, very simple reasons.

1. Magic is an entity that does not follow the rules of science and physics. It can destroy matter, it can turn something that's non-living into something that's living, it can create something out of nothing, etc. This means that no weapon or tool a Muggle uses, which follows the rules of science and physics, can beat something that doesn't.

2. Unplotability. How can you Nuke something when you can't find it on a map? Not even taking into account the fact that infrastructure is not nearly as important to wizards as it is to Muggles, if you can't find something you can't destroy. More to the point, and due to the fact that magic defies the laws of science, it's safe to assume that if you blew up that phone booth that is the guest entrance and looked down beneath it, you would not find the Ministry of Magic.

I myself have no idea where it would actually be, that would be purely conjecture, but think about Grimmauld Place and the Fidelius Charm. In the book, Harry looked and saw two houses - Eleven and Thirteen - with no space in between that could possibly hold anything else. Yet when he knew that it was there, suddenly their was a massive amount of matter appearing out of no where. This leads me to believe that you might not even be able to find these places in our actual dimension because it's scientifically impossible to have matter in a space already occupied by other matter. A plot hole Rowling left us with, yes, but it still proves the point that even if you did nuke London, it's quite possible you wouldn't affect the Ministry of Magic at all. While the same cannot be said for Hogwarts, muggle repelling charms and unplotability that makes it impossible for it to be found solves that problem.

3. Imperius curse. What can you do if your entire political structure is filled with cursed individuals who follow the orders of your enemy? Curse the generals, the presidents, the politicians, even regular soldiers. Have their own people assassinate their leaders, cause mayhem between the countries, and sit back and watch the nuclear fireworks.

4. Dementors and other dark creatures. What can you do against an enemy that is invisible, only magic can fight against, and can take your soul with ease? They hunger eternally for souls and they now have nearly 6 billion of them to feed on. Their's no capturing one and studying them if you can't even sense them.

5. Wizards live within the Muggle population. It's not like wizards are grouped specifically at Hogwarts, the Ministry, and The Burrow. You can't fight an enemy and defeat them when they are living among you, as you should see from the war in Iraq. Terrorist cells can be destroyed, if found, but that's made moot by the fact that they are also unplottable.

Throw me your other arguments, please, so I can shatter them, too. Wizards will always win, plain and simple.

 

The problem with the shield spell stopping everything from a bullet to an ICBM is this. The Shield spell is not all encompassing.


Let's say you have a magical disk of metal, it can absorb impacts of any size but is 1' across.
That'd work just SPIFFY against anything that is a solid projectile that hits it dead on.

But let's say it's a canister round that saturates the area covering your whole body. Your spiffy little 1' across shield is great for stopping the shots that might have hit your head... too bad you got hit in your torso, your arms, your legs, and your groin to the tune of your body being turned into a fine red and white mist.

Wizards shields DO NOT COVER THEIR WHOLE BODY according to canon. Even fucking Voldemort's Bonging shield that could block powerful spells from dumbledore didn't cover him completely... and if Voldemort can't do it... tough noogies... it can't be done because it's not canon.

Gas weapons that enter through exposed skin... area effect weapons. Sonic weapons like flash bang grenades.

Hit them with an sort of area effect weapon... they're hosed... pure and simple.

The problem is, hitting them. Apparition is a tough nut to crack.

Hell, even the imperious could be detected... The human brain under extreme stimulus of pleasure (such as that caused by Imperious on a continuous basis) causes detectable physiological effects that could be detected with a polygraph. Simply have people in authority submit to daily polygraph exams.

 

Be more specific. Yes, it can do all those things, but how is it used in a war?

First off, read Garrett P.I.'s post. Secondly, just because it's hidden, does not mean it's not there.

Two things:

1) Access; how are they going to get at the individuals to curse them? Assuming that both sides know they're in a war, these people will be on guard, and high ranking people will have subordinates around to kill strange people.

2) Force of will. It's been proven through canon that, with sufficient force of will, the Imperius curse can be thrown off.

I forget whose post it was, but someone covered this, too. If I remember the gist of the argument well enough, it basically says: use Infrared goggles and you can see them.

But yeah, this argument really isn't for me. I've put in my two cents, now it's time for me to back off again, because really, I don't care enough about "Magic vs Muggle" to try and do it again. The only thing that keeps drawing me in is the fact that I'm naturally argumentative...a facet of my personality that's really starting to get on my nerves.

EDIT: I must applaud Belerdorhan and Garret P.I. Fantastic arguments, guys.

 

I will beat Kolskit's arguments without making a single new response.

Response: Quote by Vorpal

Response:

Response:

Response: Quote by Warlocke

Response:

And finally:

Edit: Fuck this, I quit this debate. See ya'll.

 

Magic is an entity? Where are you getting this?
That sounds like some serious fanfiction bullpucky to me.

Furthermore, just because it doesn't follow the same rules does not mean that it automatically is a trump card. Turning a rat into a water goblet is not exactly anything that'll stop a .404 round to the skull.

You're making a leap of logic that is not in evidence regarding the efficacy of magic.

I could just as easily point out that electronics that use vacuum tubes is not effected by things that would short out integrated circuit designs like EMP. However, that does not mean that vacuum tubes are better, just that they work differently and are susceptible to different things.

But fine, they can make a chair turn into a tiger... whoop de fucking do. I can shoot that tiger with my 50 cal and its now a DEAD tiger.
Furthermore while he's casting that spell I can lob a flashbang grenade at him, and when it goes off, (after he makes the tiger) he's fucking out of commission immediately, him and his fucking tiger. The grenade doesn't hurt them... it just stuns the living fuck out of them and the wizard is completely unable to hear, see, or even walk straight. And while he can't control his shield spell I put a tracer round in his skull. Poof end of wizard.

I'll let pictures do my talking for me.


If someone were to drop a nuke on London... It would sure as FUCK hit and destroy Diagon Alley. It would NOT escape the firestorm, it would not escape the shockwave, and it would not escape the radiation. Same goes for any other enclave of Wizards. Hogwarts... drop a Nuke within say... 3 miles... it's gone. The shockwave alone would obliterate it and Hogsmeade with it.
These are NOT precision munitions. They are for taking out fucking CITIES. Learn it,live it, love it. That's how nukes are. Lucious Malfoy might not be able to have his house targeted... but if the muggles have an approximate location, they can sure as hell target his NEXT DOOR NEIGHBOR. and still have Malfoy manner be in the ground zero crater that stretches 2 km across.

You seem to think that you have to see something to hit it. This is a thoroughly uninformed viewpoint. FAE (fuel air explosives) can be dropped to cover an area to completely canvas it all. The targets may be under a fidelus charm... but that air inside the fidelus house comes from outside... and when that aerosol mixes with that air... baby... no fucking fidelus is going to prevent the firestorm that will kill everyone in that fidelused house and sweeping it away.

You're drawing a conclusion that is not in fact factual.

She also explained that it only HIDES it. It doesn't move it to another universe... otherwise where would the fresh air come from? The gravity? The ability to look out the window.

It's an illusion, no different than notice me not charms. It hides it... it does not move it.

The Imperius charm follows rules... it creates feelings of intense pleasure. A ploygraph can detect feelings of intense pain or pleasure very easily. Daily polygraph tests would detect all imperiused people and therefore the Imperius loses much of it's ability to do much of anything except force leaders to go into seclusion and be heavily guarded and have to decentralize command and control. This was the reason the internet was created. To decentralize command and control and provide a communications network that could not be easily taken out.

Invisible... but they do appear to affect their surroundings. They generate intense cold. Simply use a Infrared flood light coupled with a FLIR headset... you can see where the effects of heat drain are coming from.
Now you can see cold spots (dementors) clearly and could target them. As it's been said in the past... if you can't blow something up.. you aren't using enough explosive.

Now, If it's a matter of capturing them... They've shown NO ability to become untouchable... therefore a weapon such as this.
could be used to capture them.

They live in society but are not part of it nor understand muggle society well. Making them all the more vulnerable to people turning them in. If it came to a war, Wizards, by virtue of their unfamiliarity with Muggle life would be quickly identified.
Furthermore, unplottable means jack shit when you have weapons like FAE that can hit whole areas equally.

Wizards in the JKR world are intellectually lazy, and scientifically ignorant... and that ignorance would be their undoing. Because they have no knowledge of the attack vectors that could be used on them... they would die in droves.

 

Before I go further with this piece of the argument, I must make the point that my talk about magic/physics is still valid in the case of muggles who, despite everything you say, cannot beat something that does not follow their own physical laws and rules. They may follow their own laws, which I believe is questionable, but these laws are much more versatile and vague in comparison to non-magical laws.

Having said that, I counter your argument by pointing out the fact that everything you call quantifiable is defined by the will and ability of the caster. If one wizard, with more ability and skill, casts a spell against another, weaker spell, the stronger one will triumph. Magic is only quantifiable in how much of it a wizard can use. Dumbledore and Voldemort, both powerful magic users, can utilize and shape magic much better than a common wizard, so their spells will be able to overcome other spells. That does not mean that you can take magic, store it, measure it, or count it.

First off, you completely didn't take into account my point on the probability that the Ministry of Magic and Diagon Alley can't even be accessed through regular means. Every entrance into these places is either through some sort of portal (i.e. the brick wall behind The Leaky Cauldron, the phone booth) or by magical transportation. If you flew over Diagon Alley, would you see a miniature alleyway in the space between the back yard of the Leaky Cauldron and the building right behind it? I think not. You could not bomb these places, even with the held of Muggle Borns. You might be able to get troops there, but muggle repelling charms are there for a reason. You only have a few ways to get to these places and once you are there you are faced with wards and hundreds upon hundreds of wizards with families they are seeing being torn apart.

Though you were concentrating on one quote, I'll reply to the entire argument. First off, your entire point about wizarding ignorance is moot when muggles are just now finding out about wizards. They will be terrified of the prospect of mystical beings with unknown powers that can do conceivably anything they desire. They are the ignorant ones, in reality. While the wizards do not understand how the infrastructure of muggle society works, they have a rudimentary understand, as can be seen in canon by ministry workers driving cars. Muggles only have their imaginations.

You have no case for saying that wizards won't be able to Imperio the muggles. Who the bloody hell are the muggles going to fight? Wizards are hiding for a reason. They understand that they are direly outnumbered. No one is stupid enough to pull a Civil War and do a "let's shoot at each other" line up. Come on, be realistic.

Your point about them having no understanding of Muggle government is destroyed by Deathly Hallows. Kingsley Shacklebolt is working covertly in the muggle government, something that the Prime Minister has no idea about. This shows that wizards have people within muggle government who can make changes, especially if they aren't afraid to use the Unforgivables. Besides this, you seem to believe that wizards are completely asinine and child-like in their mental complexity. They understand how a system of government works, have one themselves shown in OotP, and know exactly how to topple one, as shown in Deathly Hallows on the Ministry itself. It could easily be done on a Muggle government.

Yet you will easily believe that a government will bomb its own major city, destroying its own history and people? The wizards would gladly let the Dementors out on the Muggles if it meant winning. You evacuate the city of any Wizards and let the Dementors go to town. They went with Voldemort because he gave them a better diet range, not for anything else. He said that they could feed from millions, Fudge said they could feed from a small amount of prisoners. They picked Voldemort for that simple reason alone, nothing else.

Your words about 'Chained Attack-Dementors,' while not only just mocking and childish, also is disproven by Fudge having enough control to order the Dementors to Hogwarts to guard the gates. While their were mishaps along the way, they were given orders and obeyed them, most probably with the soul of Sirius Black as a reward.

And for my Fifth point, which you used the same argument to try and fault, it's as easy as this. Do you know every house of every one of your friends and exactly how to get there? No, you don't, and Muggle-borns will not know hide nor hair about where the other wizards live. Most of them are within their own towns, as is shown with the Weasleys and the Lovegoods who live in an area populated almost entirely by muggles. That's how it is for most wizarding families, probably even the Purebloods, though I have no doubt that many have manor homes in secluded areas. And I'm just positive that any run-of-the-mill muggleborn is going to know just where those are, when they probably are unplottable so their coordinates can't be written down.

Yet again you act like wizards are all barbarians who want world domination. As said in earlier threads and in earlier pages of this thread, generally wizards in canon are supportive of muggles, only extremist purebloods want domination over muggles. And if you are going to use Dumbledore as an example, he comes from a well known pureblood family with a lot of power so he also fits into the extremist pureblood category.

The word entity was used for lack of a better term. Don't pull the word usage card on me, here.

... yes, it does. Having the ability to break every law of nature known to man, even death and life, is quite a trump card.

Yet when shall this .404 cal round find its way into a wizard's head? You can't find the wizard to shoot him, you can't shoot him. As simple as that. A protego, as said by Taure before, can stop something small going at a slow speed so, due to the fact that magic isn't controlled by the laws of science and physics, it should be able to stop something going a much faster speed with the same sort of ease. This is not to say that if a man pulls the trigger of his gun, a wizard will have the chance to cast his spell. He will die. But very few wizards will let themselves get into that sort of situation.

My logic is not exactly a leap. It's actually quite simple.

Yet both are held under the laws of science so, yes, magic is better.

Yet before that flash bang goes off, it is easily banished back at you and now you are quite fucked with a pissed off tiger and magic user at your hands. Or better yet, you throw it, it's banished back, and your gun is transfigured into a cobra. Have fun, mate.


I'll let pictures do my talking for me.

Problem is, mate, that you can't figure out just who is next door neighbor is as that requires knowing his location in the first place. Yes you could find the information out from the source, but I highly doubt a pureblood -the only person I see living close to Lucius Malfoy- walking into the muggle HQ and telling them where his house is so they could blow it up.

Also, on the point of Diagon Alley, if you looked down at London you sure as hell wouldn't see it on the map. So how would the fire get to it? Or the explosion? If it's not there, you can't touch it. It's not just some fancy hiding spell that is making it invisible, this is actually a large mass of matter held within another mass of matter, a scientific impossibility. It's quite probable that your bomb would never even be noticed until they walked back out into muggle london, through the portal that led them into Diagon Alley (i.e. the brick wall).

The only time we see any sort of intense pleasure is in the initial stages when the control is just being placed over the victim. They are not always in some strange state of euphoria, shown by Barty Crouch Jr. and how much he hated being under the curse. He wouldn't have hated it if he felt orgasmic 24/7.

Do you remember Dudley in OotP? A Dementor makes it damn near impossible to do anything. You would not have the chance to be prepared with high-tech gadgets and devices.

On your point of explosives, don't you think every spell in existence hasn't been tried to see if they could be destroyed by physical means? You can't, it's impossible. She made that quite clear in PoA.

If no spell in the world can capture or subdue a Dementor, technology such as that could not and would not be able to hold them.

Yet they live among them every day of their lives with little to no problem..... I don't understand your reasoning on this one. At least your other points were valid, though incorrect.

 

Fucking hell. The war of TL;DR attrition has begun. This isn't an argument over who's right, it's an argument over who can write enough to bash their opponents into submission. My 4000 word posts pale in comparison to the 13k words on this page alone.

Nevertheless, I shall respond to all your points Bel, and Garret. It might just take a bit of time to put together, considering the quantity of points involved, and the fact that writing 10,000 words of Harry Potter commentary takes second place to coursework due in 3 days.

 

To put it blantly, that's just because JKR doesn't understand genetics. That said, even if you go with that, even if the gene has some special rules of transmission, it's still a gene, and thus creates effects on cells. The rest of the point is thus still valid. Heck, instead of killing all wizards through a virus as I proposed in that scenario, they could just use a Gene silencing technique with a viral vector to disable their magic--much more humane, and still works without firing a single shot.



On an unrelated note, even granting that the wizards would get all muggleborns, muggles would then get the Squibs, so I'd say there's still something there.

 

As I said before in the Wizard vs. Muggle thread, they don't even have to find out where they're hiding. They just have to engineer a virus that kills only wizards, from muggleborn tissue samples obtained under the guise of some unrelated research project while they were back home for school holidays, and then spray it allover the country through strategic bombers--we win without firing a single shot.

 

Right. This proves my point!
WE must strike first - the muggles are a clear and ongoing danger. We can't leave our defenseless children at risk.

Implement Phase I immediately!

 

Dementors, can please fucking make up our minds whether or fucking not this is Wizards versus Muggles, or are creatures are allowed in this.
I doubt Dementors are indetructible, that said they can be detected by ambient temperature differences, and then captured, after which bury them in the antartic.

 

I have to agree with Helltanz98, This is a wizard vs Muggle thread, not a Muggle vs Wizard/Dementor/Vampire/Giants/Veela/Werewolf etc.

Since the fidelus only hides and wipes the place from memory, it does still exist, sonar can solve this. Something unplotable, still exists, it does not become impossible to shoot or target.

PS I know I surrendered a while ago, so my opinion probably doesn't matter any more, but whatever.

 

Dark Belra's point on detecting stuff is still valid, any way random carpet bombing is fun. BOOM! Sorry about that.
Any way Muggles are the people who make all the food, remember, the muggles can win by starving the wizards.

 

Anyway, when did this thread get back up, I thought it was dead except for the few people putting a couple more points?