as small as a world and as large as alone, megachiropteran: youneedacat: ...

9:29am May 4, 2014

youneedacat:

megachiropteran:

punchbuggydragon:

cease-and-de-cis:

azurelimeade:

stoneandbloodandwater:

iincantatem:

Dumbledore, notorious for giving second chances Dumbledore, let Sirius rot in Azkaban for twelve years.

He must have known Sirius well due to his time in the Order, he must have known what James meant to Sirius. Dumbledore was a member of the freaking Wizengamot yet he didn’t fight the Ministry’s horrifying trial-optional policy.

This is a man who took back Death Eater!Snape at his word, shielded him from prison, and employed him at a school for children.

But he didn’t have a use for Sirius, so he didn’t care about him.

I got 99 problems with Dumbledore and his treatment of Sirius Black accounts for like 64 of them.

To be honest, Albus Dumbledore is one of the most disturbing, terrifying characters I’ve ever found in a book, because he thought he was a good guy and so did everyone else and the books don’t really challenge it either (given that Harry forgives him for everything he did), but when you look between the lines he was profoundly, profoundly immoral and unethical.

…oh… my god…

…I… oh.

Well shit.

i mean Dumbledore was best friends with a neo-nazi / essentially was one himself, until that friendship resulted in the accidental death of his disabled younger sister, i find it disturbing that people don’t realize he was a pretty sketchy guy.

IDK maybe it’s personal experience, but I have a hard time calling someone ‘sketchy’ because they did bad things as children/teenagers and then changed as they got older. I never did anything as bad as being a neo-Nazi, but I hate getting judged on what I did during adolescence, because I really wasn’t… all the way formed yet, and didn’t understand a lot of things about the world. It doesn’t excuse anything he’s done, but I do believe people can change and that if you do change, things you did before you changed don’t make you ‘sketchy’ forever. People can make mistakes, people can do awful things, and then turn their lives around and do really good things. And I don’t like a mentality that says that once a person has done an awful thing then they can’t ever be forgiven for it no matter what they do afterwards.

That said, some awful things take a serious amount of atoning to forgive for. I’ve been told I’m too unforgiving because I don’t trust Alison Tepper Singer, for instance — better known as the woman who made that video about wanting to drive off the George Washington Bridge with her autistic daughter, in front of her autistic daughter. And the reason I don’t trust her is not just because she made this awful video once. It’s because she refuses to understand the impact the video has had, she blames people who say there’s something wrong with the video, and she has done nothing to atone for her actions at all. If she were dedicating herself to teaching people why murder of disabled children (and anything that could possibly be used to promote it or sympathize with people who do it or etc.) is a terrible thing, and if she wrote about the way that she has played an indirect role in the deaths of many children (I remember the children who died the week the video came out), then I might forgive what she did in the video. But I’m not going to automatically say “Well it’s in the past, so there’s nothing wrong now.” She hasn’t really changed that much, she still describes the video in terms of being “suicidal” without acknowledging the homicidal part or the part about talking in front of her daughter, she still talks about her daughter in degrading ways, and she attacks autistic people who have a problem with the video. These are not the actions of someone who has changed.

But when someone does change, and I think Dumbledore did, and I think he did atone for what he did, then I don’t think he’s ‘sketchy’ forever. Not that I don’t have problems with other things he did. But I can’t judge a very long-lived person on his adolescence. I can’t be like Harry was in the last book and go “But we’re 17 and we’re not doing things like that,” because I remember what it was like to be a more-confused-than-the-average-confused-teenager teenager and to do things that people still judge me for as if I was fully cognizant of my actions. Not that I did anything near as bad as what he did, but the principle of judging someone who isn’t even an adult yet, or is barely an adult, still stands for me. If he’d continued to be a neo-Nazi, it would be one thing. Getting wrapped up in the wrong crowd of people during an impressionable period of your life, even if that crowd is really really evil… I have to judge someone like that on who they were later, not just who they were back then.

I mean I agree with you to a point… I did and said some shitty things as a teenager too and it would suck to be judged on that alone because I feel I’ve grown and my thinking has matured a lot, however..

If I’m remembering correctly, Dumbledore did not meet or hang out with his evil neo-nazi friend until after he had graduated Hogwarts, so he was effectively a young adult.

Dumbledore did not mature in his thinking until his sister was killed, meaning he did not think critically about what he was doing until it affected him personally.

As a professor and eventually headmaster—and after he was “enlightened” to the wrongness of those views—let students be part of an underground group bent on conducting a genocide of a group of people. In the books we never hear of him suspending or banning students from Hogwarts that engage in this behavior. Instead he lets it go on, knowing full well there’s an organized group of students who want to kill a large population of other students also in the school.

And as the OP mentions, he also lets a professor who literally abuses students EVERY DAY (Snape) teach at Hogwarts in order to protect him.

So I think he was at the very least a neo-nazi apologist still after the fact, and it’s evident in the way he conducted himself after severing ties with those lines of thinking.

That much makes sense. I have known a lot of people who were selfish assholes well into their twenties who turned their lives around (and sometimes it took affecting them personally before they’d do it, because that’s the definition of a selfish asshole), so I still don’t see that as a deal breaker with someone. But if they’re still doing all those things, then yeah there’s a problem.

(I actually know a guy who was always a selfish asshole, will always be a selfish asshole, but has this weird ability to convince people he’s changed, and then goes right on being a selfish asshole right under their noses. And I don’t give him second chances, ever. It’d take a miracle to convince me he’d ever become anything other than an asshole. I think the only reason people believe him is he knows how to give them what they want. He doesn’t have anything I want from him, so he has no power over my perception of him and it really bothers him. Meanwhile I know a guy who really hurt me when we were teenagers, who has completely changed since then and I have no ill will towards him at all. People get really confused about my attitude to the both of them, but it does boil down to “Is this person continuing to be an asshole?”)

I don’t know that much about some of the things you’re talking about, so I haven’t really formed an opinion overall. But I always saw him as having one of those things that’s a simultaneous strength and flaw, which is his desire to see the best in people, and that desire may well stem from knowing what a horrible person he’d been himself, and hoping against hope that other people would become less horrible as they got older. I don’t necessarily see that as an extension of his earlier fascist ideals, but more as an extension of his desire to see himself and others as able to change away from such ideals. I also think he had a tendency – and it showed up young, including in his dealings with Grindelwald, and continued for his whole life – to think that he knew better than anyone else what the big picture was, and to sacrifice things, and people, without their consent.

Notes: