Why do they need to tend land? Let the magical forests regrow, and dragons roam free! As it has been said numerous times in the thread, wizards have a much smaller population than muggles, and are already well established in those areas. Supposing they won the war, why would wizards need to make farm lands?

On the topic of winning the war, its doubtful that an average wizard would know anything about technology, even famous things like nukes. I'd say its more likely that a wizard would accidentally start a nuclear holocaust by making the Prime Minister/Leader to strike at so and so country with all his/her force.

Also, quick question, what makes the Killing Curse so special, aside from being unblockable? Why is it so feared, when there are other curses which could do just has much, if not more damage?

 

Because while small they still require food, and it would not be viable solution to revert to hunter gathering.
As for the AK, because Rowling the Weasly Lover said so.

 

You know, if wizards started to show aggression, then chances are, world leaders would have a much more secure secuirity system.

 

To true, but if you actually have been to a location to apparate safely then a top secret bunker is pretty secure.

 

I honestly love how this is supposed to be a wizard vs. muggle thread, yet the only people I've seen make any valid comments in reference to canon are Taure, Belerdorhan, Garret P.I., and Demon_Vigilante. The wild tangents flying around everywhere else, while amusing, just say the same thing you have all iterated over and over and over and over again in different ways. Let's just drop the entire thread because the quality of the discussion is deteriorating rapidly.

 

Yeah, it has probably can down in rate. Lets make another thread, It will be better and smarter and you must have at least 3 points with every post.

 

...Making a new thread would completely defeat the purpose of closing this one in the first place. On that note, moderation like that would be rather silly, and probably too much work for the mods/admins to actually do.

 

So we do what then?

 

I was mostly joking about that to tell you the truth.

 

I would imagine that the wizards would have sometype of food industry...
Never mind.
I don't believe that they have a food industry at all besides sweets. Because I don't remember a mention of any convinance stores or super markets, just resturants/pubs. Hogwarts gets it's food from house-elves. right? Houselves just magicly have the raw matirials. righhtt? I guess this can just be attributed to one of those things that weren't expidiant to Cannon.
AK is special because its only purpose is to kill and there isn't anyway to magicaly block it. If you see that coming and you cant defend it, there's no chance. Reductor could be off a little and blow off a hand instead of your head, but barring HP, no one has ever been touched with an Ak and lived.

The ONLY way that I could see the wizards winning is if they actualy made a plan for this extermination/genocide and kept it from all the muggleborns in the goverment so they wouldn't go and get all patriotic and tell the muggle goverments that they were about to be destroyed.(muggles have no problem with pre-emptive strikes).

But realy, I just don't see wizards unifying for the common goal of killing the majority of the population on earth succesfuly because all it would take is 1 particulary oppressed muggle-born to let the cat out the bag.

There is no good reason for the Wizards not to dominate if they could. What, there morals keep them from doing it? Look at Voldemort, He's supposedly the most powerful, brightest,Ambitous Wizard and he pansy footed around for a long time doing dark ritauls and stuff just to get power and followers and then do what? Use guerilla warfare and Still not take over the world. He killed a couple hundred of people, so what. Stalin Killed what? 20, 25 million of his own. Whom would you consider more evil , more ruthless.
Sorry bout the rant. lol

edit-hmm by the time i wrote this ya'll posted another 5 comments. darn

 

Honestly, all you have to do is read through this thread and the previous ones to find exactly what the two sides points are. They haven't changed. Look for Taure, Half-Blood Prince, me, Belerdorhan, Mordecai, and a few others and you'll pretty much have the entire fight from what I can remember of it.

 

Actually I think Hogwarts likely imports it's food from the muggle world as it is revealed magic can not create food.

 

yeah probaby. The food wan't magic or anything, just prepared by house elves. hmm

 

Hey, we all know in every community, there are nutjobs, right. Well, maybe there could be a couple on the muggle side believing that wizards are actually a divine race. If done right, the wizarding world could use them as suicide bombers, you don't even need nutjobs, you could Imperio a couple dozen and use them to bomb a couple locations.

 

Now that I like course mainly because I am wait for some one to write a fundamentalist Harry fic.
The problem with that is however the declaring of shoot first ask questions later orders.

 

* considering the possibility of some muggle with an itchy trigger finger pushing the wrong button in response to the SuperPlague *

I don't know much about epidemiology, but what if we engineered a two-step plague weapon?

first, a highly contagious But Not Lethal outbreak (kind of like the cold that's going around now. They're calling it the "Ebola Reston cold," by the way (and if you don't know HOW frightening that designation is, Google it - it's one of the scariest outbreaks ever.)) Everyone is getting it - and it's persistent and can be reinfected several times. The best part is that you aren't miserable enough to stay home. People are going to work and continuing their ordinary lives.

second, after the disease has hit everyone it can (and we can do things to ensure saturation well beyond what would work in nature,) then release a second disease. This one will kill fast - one or two days, at most. The Spanish Flu (1917-1919) outbreak was literally dropping people in the street. Design superbug1 to make the victims highly vulnerable to superbug2.

The nice thing about my plan is that it can be implemented with a small group of dedicated wizards. Smart, tough people who will never reveal, by the smallest hint, that the disaster was caused by the wizarding population.

 

Actually, that leads to a possible scenario where you don't have to kill all the muggles.

Rather then design a disease that kills everyone without the magic gene (which, IMO, would be really fucking hard to do), design a disease that kills everyone over puberty.

Then call it.... The Big Death.

Sure, you'd have to keep the adults in sectioned off conclaves to prevent exposure, but really, a full body bubblehead charm should work well enough to go out in public. Then the wizards can raise all the muggle children as their own, albeit with carefully placed notions of inferiority and the idea that the wizards are the Master Race.

Not that I believe for a second that the wizards could pull such a thing off.



On another, somewhat related note. I think the main reason why we've had such bloody trouble quantifying potterverse magic is due to two specific reasons.

1. The insistence of people like Taure that magic is God.

2. The insistence on calling it 'magic', and thus ascribing all magic IRL to fall under it's potential purvey.


So, in HP proper, yes, they call what they can do magic. But for the purposes of analyzing it, we need to call it something else.

And just an example of what I mean, using what I imagine the arguements would look like.


"There's a guy who can use an inherent resevoir of power to throw things really far, or pull them towards him. We've seen that there are limits on speed, and range, though these are varied depending on the mood, the will power, and the skill of this guy who can do this." "Well obviously we need to quantify what those limits are seen to be, so we can establish a baseline of what the common use of this inherent power would be in a population that can all do the same thing."

And now, the way it's currently happening.

"There's a guy with magic powers that let him send things flying away or pull them towards him" "OMGRARBLAERGMAGICISGOD he can do anything because it's magic, and magic is inifinite authority and god and rarblaer-"

Yeah....

Well, okay, the second would still be presented in clean and concise terms, at least coming from Taure, but it would still amount to the same thing. When I think of HP magic, I treat it as an inherent power and only ascribe to it what I've seen. When those others look at it, they, whether subconsciously or actively, read magic and automotatically (yes, I'm aware of how I spelled that) add a sort of mental clause that goes 'magic = all things/God'

And that's wrong, because it quite clearly isn't the case. There are limits. And Taure? If magic were truly infinite as you ascribe, then limitations on the casters wouldn't matter. You take a five score slice of infinite, and you're left with infinity. Hence the problems.


There's also the fact that the Centaurs, who arguably have no magic of their own, were a real threat to Umbridge. Not to mention Grawp, who again doesn't seem to have any magic of his own. Well, aside from the stuff that lets him break physics and actually not collapse under his own weight, but that seems all internal.

 

My main post containing the rebuttal of various points on the Muggle side will appear sometime this weekend, but for the meantime...

On the topic of food:

Remember that though wizards cannot conjure food, they can transfigure and charm it. So you get one apple, engorge it to be super-sized. When you've eaten it down, engorge it again. Or, alternatively, take the apple and duplicate it hundreds of times. And yes, we know that engorgement works on food, since Hagrid used it on his pumpkins.

Just to be clear, I never said this. The quote of me saying "Magic = pantheist God" was a response to another person's post, summarising their theory that magic was everything. Not my theory, theirs. My theory is that it's Authority, or anti-reality.

You're misinterpreting the theory, mixing it with your ideas of magic. In doing so you have made a category mistake. Yes, if magic were infinite under the way you think of magic, this is true. This is because you think of magic as some sort of force or energy floating around that wizards and access and siphon, and then use. But with my way of thinking about magic this is not true. It is not that magic is infinite - though this is at times a good way of representing it - it is that it is unquantifiable, even as infinity, just as love or music or bravery or charisma or anything like that is unquantifiable. It is not a force or energy that is infinite. It is something completely different. Magic, in fact.

 

We got completely away from my original post (which WAS different from the Magic vs Muggle - who would win? threads.) I'm not interested in an all-out war, or even a pitched battle, any more than I'd want a nuclear exchange. I'm trying to treat the problem at its source. Mundanes have vastly out-populated the magical people. I want to reverse that. The way I remember it, Pepper-Up is the sovereign cure for the common cold - it's cheap, easy to make, and the recipe is well known. Stockpile VAST amounts (use the first superbug as an excuse to keep it on hand. Have governments and medical staff recommend that everyone keep a dose in their pantry.) As wizarding people go symptomatic with bug2, they would automatically reach for the cure.
Only people with ties to the Wizarding world would have access to the potion.

If, as I believe, there ARE NO Muggle-born children, just magical people born into squib lines, then we can reinforce the magical "genetic traits," if we act carefully and intelligently (and ruthlessly,) to the point that the entire population will eventually have SOME talent.

Guys - please don't cringe, but men who have been Kissed would be a fine source of genetic material. *clears throat* It isn't a job that I'd want, but stud animals are routinely ... umm... milked, and their sperm is transported worldwide to improve the breed.
I try hard not to consider that mechanics of that.
I suspect that women who have been Kissed would be much less useful, unless there is some way to ensure healthy pregnancies from catatonic mothers.

 

Well that explains it to a degree. Still, your use of the whole 'The Authority' shebang does song like you're calling it God.

In any case, your further explanation does give me some good points. To this end, I would submit a theory that aligns with your own to a degree.


Magic is not a force. It is not like the weak or strong nuclear forces in physics, nor is it some mysterious energy that hangs around everything.

Rather, magic is the ability to interact with reality in a way that mundanes are unable to. To use the Discworld explanation of Death with the whole 'more real' thing.

Mundanes are three dimensional life forms. Where a two dimensional man would be constrained by a circle, a three dimensional man would be constrained by a sphere. However wizards in many ways appear to have access to a fourth dimension. While a sphere would contain a muggle, it would in fact take a hypersphere to contain a wizard (capable of apparation, anyways)

I would submit that magic, in the context that it is used in HP IS quantifiable, however, it requires the use of advanced physics.

Now, take careful note. What gives wizards the ability to manipulate this inherent ability? who knows. How they manipulate it is also iffy, we don't know. We just label that talent magic, because we can't understand how a wand movement produces an anti gravity field of some sort. However, that's not to say we can't explain the end result, and I fear this has been where we've been getting confused.


What I talked about several pages ago was the belief that successful spells are produced through two major points. Skill and Power. Taure, here, has insisted that it is only skill, and power is an illusion.


However, if we assume that Thermodynamics actually works, regardless of what Wizards do, then we can explain spells.

And on that note, um, assorted fanfiction aside, the universe in HP does appear to be a closed system. Harry traveled back in time because he had always traveled back in time, and always will.

Which presumably explains why people aren't using time turners to change the past left and right.


In any case, we're back to the issue of power. Does it exist?

Now, when I'm talking about power, what I really mean is energy. What fuels wizards interactions with reality, it has to come from somewhere. Personally, I would suggest that it is an internal thing. Wizard bodies seem to be more efficient then muggles, due to the presence of the skill to manipulate reality. They live longer, take heavier injuries, and are all together hardier then muggles.

However, their immune systems aren't perfect, their digestive systems aren't either (given that they still poop), and they're obviously not done evolving.

I would posit that whatever energy they use to fuel their spells is siphoned off from the energy they take in from food, and drink. This hypothesis would be supported by the fact that things like pepperup potion exist, and have to be ingested.


Now, one could presume that this internal resevoir of energy would be something like, oh, your stomach. You eat, and it fills up. When it's full, but not overfull, you're at your so called peak performance. Consider the energy resevoir to function in a similar manner. It siphons energy that your body doesn't need (being more efficient), and stores it. When it's near full or full, wizards are at the top of their game. When it's empty, wizards suffer from exhaustion and are unable to manipulate reality properly. Regardless of the fact that they're at least partially in contact with higher dimensions, wizards are /still/ human, and still have human failings.

In any case, this resevoir, and the ability to manipulate reality would be, as Taure mentioned before, like a muscle. The more you use it, the more it can hold and manipulate at any one time. However, just like a muscle, if you over use it, you will suffer from exhaustion and other negative side effects. And as with your stomach, when it's completely empty, you're nearly out of energy. Sure you can still move, using the residual energy that's left, and the stuff that's floating around in your fat, but everything you do is at a lower efficiency. And if you don't eat, you will die.

.... and I'm not sure where I was going with this so I'm going to head off to class now.