The people who were tried and executed as witches in North America weren’t actually witches, though. They were persecuted by an unjust religiously intolerant system in a climate of fear. The conflation of those events with JKR’s fantasy wizards is distasteful, to say the least. It implies that the authorities were…

If this wasn’t a representative selection of JKR’s take, why would they have included it? And if you scroll down, you’ll see that she continually falls into the pit of trying to ground her story in the past, but without acknowledging the uncomfortable ramifications of grafting a fantasy world onto the real one.... If…

they grow up so fast!

I still don’t think you’re comparing like with like — I would be skeptical of a statistic claiming that the Indian population of BNA was 1 million in 1700. Russell Thornton’s work suggests that around 1.5 million Native Americans lived in the entirety of what’s now the USA, but that’s a lot larger than the 13…

Right, but that’s the population for all of British North America in 1700. If you’re arguing that JKR’s approach is correct, based on the specific demographics, you also have to consider that things weren’t uniform across the colonies. In particular, you mention the Salem Witch Trials — but New England had just…

You can’t have it both ways. If you want to talk specifically about the Salem Witch Trials, those statistics don’t apply; you’re referring to the total population of BNA. This is post-King Philip’s War, a conflict that completely shattered the entire social fabric of interactions in New England between colonists and…

You don’t see the irony of writing a story about the colonization of the Americas where white people are the persecuted ones? And where there’s absolutely no mention made of how any of these white European wizards reacted to the conquest and genocide of native populations?

Nope, sorry, writing the historical conquest and genocide of Native American peoples as primarily a story of white-on-white persecution is super shady.

There’s also this mess:

Yup!

Yeah, the closest thing to a drill we have is the police offered to fire some blanks in the front office, so we could all see how gunshots would echo in the building and thus make any warning system “unnecessary.”

“Eyebrow thread.” Sure.

As a grad student in one of the largest universities in the country, the most disturbing lecture I’ve ever attended was the information session about how to prepare for a school shooting. It was very clear that academia, and society as a whole, has decided to pass the social costs of unregulated gun ownership onto…

Taxpayers aren’t the stakeholders of our government; citizens are.

I’m not saying I think we should send the 101st Airborne in there to “liberate” Syria or anything like it. The case for intervention remains dubious, and certainly any intervention that doesn’t reflect upon the history of US involvement in the region is guaranteed to do more harm than good.

Wait, you mean this RFK, Jr.? What credentials does he have to write about Middle Eastern policy?

Just here to say, as an Italian and American dual citizen, that “basically about as close to the third world as a first world country can get” really does cover it far, far too well.

Right, but you can still use it to let someone into the system if you’re leaving the station — which is what I do.

This is why I always swipe people through, when I’ve got an unlimited card. Doing otherwise is a dick move.

The Puritan Backroom is also the name of my Salem Witch Hunt-themed gay sex dungeon.