Did you not read this Thread?

 

Not all of it like I said. If I did I would still be typing .

 

Now, Xiph0, I'm not sure if you'd read what I wrote directly what you quoted, but I'd said:

It's not that they're hiding. Like The Heir is trying to say, they just don't want to deal with the Muggles - even in canon, Muggles are beneath the notice of even the most unfortunate of Squibs in the eyes of wizarding society; not worthy of their time.

They're not hiding - they're ignoring the Muggles as a threat.

----------

And Spira, yes, thank you for rehashing every single point catering to the whole argument of "Wizard vs. Muggles 2: Electric Boogaloo" in a completely original post.

 

This whole post is @Spira since you seem to be too lazy to read the thread I've condensed a lot of it for you.

If you did then you would have noted several things such as the fact that wizards can start fires that can only be stopped by magic, they could control the head of every major country in the matter of a few minutes (locating spells+apparate+invisability+impero or memory charm or they could just kill all the important people that way), they could simply apparate to every military base/bomb shelter cause an explosive chain reaction and leave, electronics do not work in a magically saturated area therefore all of those electronics would fail in a magical area, muggles have no way to stop spells but wizards have shield charms that stop physical attacks and dragon hide which would easily stop a bullet, muggles can't even locate wizards and muggle repelling charms make them forget why they even wanted to get into a place when they get close to it, the reason wizards haven't taken over the muggle world is because other wizards have stopped them, and if you want I can pm you a list of even more reasons why muggles wouldn't stand a chance against wizards. Assuming that this list combined with how easily wizards control the heads of muggle countries in cannon aren't enough proof for one such as yourself.

Also, this is the dumbest thing I've read to date.

The fidelius hides things completely. You can literally know where the house is and stand outside of it, but you can't see it with magical or physical means plus if you throw spells at the place where it is located they will not harm it.

@your point about nuclear weapons.
Also, as I said in my previous post all it would take is the turning of a nuclear bomb into a portkey or banishing a portkey into a nuclear bomb to either disable it due to technology's reaction to magic or to get it to go elsewhere and blow up a huge muggle population. The demoralization from that single act would be far reaching.

 

Spira, you, sir, are a fucking idiot- like the rest of the jackass punks that come onto this thread without reading anything and spit out 'WEY GOTZ TEH NUKZ!!!' And I am not saying that just because you can't write whatsoever and I am infinitely surprised that you have survived on this board as long as you have.

Did you read what I said? Did you read what anyone else said?

I'm going to make this nice and clear for you, as you obviously need it:

Muggles can't nuke themselves. They also can't nuke what they can't find or target on a map (i.e. for the idiot: Fidelius/muggle repelers and unplottable wards). Therefore, your two words are rather pointless.

Now, explain to me in the foolish response you will undoubtedly post how technology is going to win out against the obliviate spell, the disillusionment charm, apparation, the killing curse, the imperius, and all the other countless spells.

For now, I'll give you a few little scenes, more to amuse myself as I am bored than to do anything else:

Johny the Übermensch muggle, who can kick the crap out of ANY bad guy in the world, is the Prime Minister's body guard. He is wearing countless weapons, he has men stationed in prime positions so that NO ONE can get in, and there are movement sensors every where.

There are a few ways this can go down.

FIRST: Two cracks are heard in the room. Johny nearly slaps himself. All the defensive measures are utterly wasted due to the fact that wizards can apparate! How did he not remember that?!?

Johny turns around, his superman skills giving him an inhuman reaction speed even through his surprise. He knows that no other muggle would even have time to react.

Sadly, the bullets he fires into the first man are blocked by a blue shield that appears instantly. He doesn't know that Fred and George Weasley, who gained only a few OWLs collectively, made these cool hats that instantly put up the protego charm, which does block physical objects.

Johny is too surprised to block the next spell that comes at him. It's bright red, and he falls over, stunned.

While this is happening, the second man has already stunned the PM.

Twenty seconds later, a few guards- who had to go through all the fancy security measures- storm into the room.

Johny is standing there, looking somewhat annoyed.

"Sorry mates," he says with a sigh. "My gun discharged... damn government models."

The men laugh and walk back out of the room, looking relieved.

Johny takes his position, unknowing that the man behind him isn't the PM, but a wizard under polyjuice. He also doesn't know that he has been obliviated.

Three days later, the PM calls for an end to all hostilities. The wizards graciously agree.

SECOND: Johny, who is finally alone with the minister, turns around and unloads two bullets into the man's forehead. His eyes are slightly glazed over, a sign of the imperius curse. He walks over to the panel housing all the controls to the defense measures. He presses a few buttons, releasing sleeping gas into the rest of the compound. It was supposed to be a final defense if they were attacked by a large number.

He walks out of the room, gun in hand.

THIRD: Johny's eyes widen as the sensors go off well within the compound. He looks at the cameras and watches as more and more strange, large cat like creatures appear. Ten appear in the end.

His men storm into the room the animals arrive in, their weapons already firing. The skin of the large cats is not even broken.

Out of the cats' mouths, a green gas pours. His men put on gas masks, but most have already breathed in. They slowly start to shake before falling over, the Nundu plague killing them.

He is so caught up in what he is seeing that he doesn't notice the small sounds of struggle from behind him.

A shadow looms, and Johny turns, only to be engulfed. The lethifold, which had been portkeyed in, had already taken out the PM.

.........

I could go on all day, mate. Any technology is useless.

 

The second one won't happen, Heir! If he's the "Übermensch muggle," he has enough willpower to throw off the imperius.

I'm not about to attempt to argue against the wizard's blatant superiority, because it's pointless, but that much is obvious.

 

SECOND: Johny, who is finally alone with the minister, turns around and unloads two bullets into the man's forehead. He walks over to the panel housing all the controls to the defense measures. He presses a few buttons, releasing sleeping gas into the rest of the compound. It was supposed to be a final defense if they were attacked by a large number.

Nymphadora Tonks grins as she changes form. She loved her job.

Wondering how many she'd be able to kill, she walks out of the room, gun in hand. She'd get them for taking Remus.

Fixed... and the fact that he was the Übermensch only really mattered in the first one. It was to show that only he would have even been able to turn around and shoot that fast when ambushed. A normal muggle would have been stunned for half a second, and any trained wizard would have easily tagged him.

 

Well, I've tried the civil approach in the past, and while perhaps I didn't submit as full an argument as possible, I'll go ahead and try the rude approach, just in case that's the issue. You're a bunch of idiots.

There. That probably got your attention, despite the fact that I don't honestly mean it. Well, not about all of you, anyway.

People are being too unimaginative - even obstinately ignorant - in these discussions, if they can even be called that. This isn't about what Harry Potter and his gang of half-wits could do in a war with Muggles. This is a discussion of whether the magical world, as a whole, could take on the non-magical world, as a whole. None of us can be so ignorant as to think that the other sapient species wouldn't involve themselves on their respective sides - though, in all fairness, the only non-human sapient species are purely magical.

To begin with, magic is pervasive. It is more or less everywhere, whatever it is exactly, despite the fact that it might perhaps occur in stronger concentrations in some places than in others. I'm reasonably sure that you haven't considered, for example, that dragons can only fly because of magic. Their wings are by no means strong enough to support them naturally, and it's likely that the method of creating flying carpets and brooms was derived from observations of dragons or similar flying creatures.

Next, magic is flexible. We've seen quite clearly that it can do just about anything that we can think of, and several of the concrete limitations seem to be arbitrary and not a natural limitation so much as one of knowledge - though, for the purposes of this discussion, the difference isn't exactly relevant. Ultimately, though, it can be said that magic can alter just about anything, in just about any manner. Whether this is a map in the abstract sense of all maps of the same region - by making something unplottable or subjecting it to the Fidelus Charm - or something concrete like a chair, by transfiguring it into something else, alteration is a fundamental aspect of what magic does.

Indeed, I'm more or less certain that all magic can be reduced to two basic disciplines: alteration and manipulation. The latter is the term that I've chosen to represent what is essentially an application of force - moving an object around by magic.

Manipulation is simple. You make something go. More accurately, you apply a force, which accelerates the object in question, which then goes. This is the least-used branch of magic, as I'm sure you'll agree, but the branch that is easiest to transform into a weapon, as it provides the clearest method of applying a destructive force.

Alteration is far more commonly used by wizards than manipulation. These aren't people casting spectacular elemental spells, which would generally be manipulation, perhaps with a bit of alteration thrown in. Just about every spell we see that doesn't move something is alteration. I'm sure we can all agree that the ability to simply make something change is a very useful power, but, despite this, I will not be focusing much on alteration in this argument, except as a means to further manipulation-based weaponry, as, based on the rest of this discussion, I doubt many of you are able - more likely, though, you're simply unwilling - to sufficiently understand the sheer insidious power of alteration at its most fundamental level.

Before I go further, let me clarify an underlying assumption about magic. There is a finite amount of magical energy in the world, but there is far too much energy to consume, barring a catastrophic event, just as there is too much water in the oceans to consume, barring a similar event. The limit, then, to magic, is the rate at which it is channeled. We don't know this limit, so I am compelled to find a way around it so as not to base my argument on some arbitrary and unknown quantity.


So, for the purposes of this exercise, we will be constructing a floating, mobile castle, capable of firing physical projectiles with mass and size between that of a bullet and that of an 18-wheel truck, at any speed less than the escape velocity of the Earth. The magical effects will be produced via a ward system, as wards are really nothing less than automated spells with a channeling rate that, while unknown, is sufficiently high that the entirety of Voldemort's Death Eaters were unable to lay siege to the ones that we've seen. As this magic will only be used for the purpose of controlling and directing the energy used by the castle, this is reasonably sufficient.

First, we must locate a source of energy, as we cannot draw from magic and know it to work. We therefore turn to the most abundantly available source of energy on Earth: mass. Mass energy is readily available everywhere, and, with simple alteration magic - nothing more than a vanishing spell - easily transformed to usable magical energy.

This energy will be used to provide lift and thrust to the castle, as well as provide both mass and momentum for the "cannons", and power the assorted defenses - decelerators for projectile weapons, flame-freezing charms or something analogous for heat-based weaponry, and assorted barriers for chemical and biological agents, as well as pressure waves. Nuclear weaponry can be considered a non-threat, as the decelerators could be easily calibrated to make sure to send them far enough away to make them harmless to the castle - and between the barriers and flame-freezing charms, the castle could probable take a point-blank detonation anyway. The actual setup would be slightly more complex, but I've no desire to go into the question of whether life-support systems would be needed, and so on. Wizards can handle that sort of thing easily enough.

Barring periods during which the cannons are being fired, the mass consumption of these systems would be so low that one could reasonably stand directly underneath the castle (the most logical place to setup the mass-converters) for several minutes, and receive nothing more than the removal of some of the epidermis and a bit of clothing damage.

This castle would be an invincible flying fortress capable of immense destruction as far as Muggles are concerned, even if it isn't much of a threat to magical beings. More to the point, it only takes one wizard to have this idea, and is based on very simple and easily-known principles.

And that's all assuming that a wizard can't simply conjure a block of antimatter in the middle of a city, which is really a rather reasonable application of conjuration.


I'm sure you've all noticed dangling points here and there - for instance, why mention the other magical species if the only one with the slightest bit of relevance is the dragon, and only then for their magic-powered flight?

That's because this is only one way to win such a war, and even then, only the very most direct one. Magic is not limited by power; rather, it is limited by the creativity of its wielders. Between every sapient magical species, there will be several, if not dozens, of entirely feasible and more or less reliable methods of defeating the entire non-magical sapient population of the Earth, most of which could be employed simultaneously. Certainly, the flying fortress of doom that I've suggested is by no means exclusive of other methods.

Forgive me, please, if I've been too overbearing, arrogant, or just generally unpleasant about this - even if such a sentiment is unusual for DLP. It's just that I've long since grown tired of human arrogance. This sort of self-righteous idiocy isn't limited to wizards vs. muggles, it appears in, say, humans vs. aliens, as well. Being "the good guys", "our side", or even just humans aren't guarantees - or even suggestions - of victory. If we're facing an opponent with an inherently superior ability, whether it's interstellar travel or magic, we're going to lose, and it's that simple.

Narion

 

The flying castle of DOOM is a rather ridiculous idea, but it works, I guess.

I assure you that it is much easier to get through to someone about the power of magic when you use real spells that have been shown in canon rather than something more abstract like your castle.

I also think that you are ignoring the simple quality of a spell with this castle idea. By making this castle, you are fighting in the way a muggle would. You are attacking a certain target at a certain point with physical weaponry.

My point is that wizards don't need all that. They could simply apparate in, take the place of your leader, and the country is fighting against itself. The wizards don't need to ever get in a real fight, because muggles could never find them and would soon forget them again.

 

Might I ask what you base that rather strange assumption, and thus the rest of your arguement, on?

 

Oh yes, I agree. But it's the easiest way to illustrate the superiority of magic. It's harder to compare unlike things than it is to compare like things.

Oh, and who was that comment directed at, Mordecai? More to the point, what was it directed at?

Narion

 

Wow.
Now this thread is starting to get more inane.

Not only have we all repeatedly rehashed the pros/cons and advantages/disadvantages and scientific/psuedoscientific principles of wizarding-kind vs. Muggle-kind for fucking forever and ever, people continue to storm into the thread without reading previous posts and putting up more inane shit about things that have been discussed and put down pages and pages and pages ago.

We'd already established more than several posts ago that Wizarding kind could smack down the Muggles, and that the Muggles could smack down magic, if they were only given the right set of circumstances.

Whatever - it's old now. Get over it.

Move on to the more subtler aspects that don't deal with "ZOMG MINDLESS COMBAT," like societal ethics and intentions, or just lock this thread and be done with the whole deal.

 

They are segregated. Because they view the muggle world as inferior. This does not mean that they are not in control of muggles. Wizards use muggle lands, wizards abduct muggleborn children (who are muggle citizens), wizards obliviate muggles when they see things they don't want them to see.

Wizards obliviate head of states when they don't want to wait 5 minutes for the PM to finish his phone call. Wizards assign security detail for the PM without his consent (which could have easily been an assassin if they were so inclined).

Wizards are the one in charge here. If the muggles went to war with wizards it wouldn't be called a war. It would be called a rebellion.

 

Yeah, wizards already have nice and firm power from shadows. Those like Grindelwald and Voldemort want muggles bow to them only to satisfy their own vast ego. Rational people, however, in wizarding goverment see that placing wizards on visible pedestal is not going to bring any advantages to them - they already have all that they want.

 

That's why the whites in Apartheid South Africa just went into hiding, right? Because the blacks were just beneath their notice...

 

Not analogous. The wizards were never threatened by Muggles - especially not at the time they went into "hiding". You will remember from PoA that the Muggles did not succeed in burning a real witch.

 

/me facepalms

I can't believe this is still an ongoing thread. We really have nothing better to talk about? rofl. HP wizards = 99% fail most couldn't do jack, not to mention being so ignorant of muggle tech they couldn't stop it in the first place.

Muggleborn wizard taking the spells from canon and actually doing something right with them, and the will to us them? Win.

 

Narion, it was directed at you and your assumption that magic is an all pervasive field of which there is a limited amount. Does this mean that if by random chance half the wizards in the world each cast a spell at the exact same instant they would all fail? Or what exactly. It seems an awfully limiting hypothesis to come up with without any canon evidence at all.

 

Er... actually, of all the assumptions, that's probably the most canonical. Pervasive as in magic is located everywhere, though this isn't really an assumption as much as a derivation of the fact that magic has been around for thousands of years and hasn't ever spontaneously stopped working. Since the Earth is not only rotating, but moving through space in a winding path around the sun*, we're no longer where we once were, which suggests that magic is either a field generated by the planet, rather like the magnetic field, or a field that extends throughout this region of space, at minimum. Magic is limited in that there's got to be a finite amount**, but since we've never seen any evidence of it, we can assume the limit to be rather high (in the same sense that the oceans are rather large, and that the sun is rather hot) and thus not particularly relevant, as we could never reach it naturally.

I did explain this, you know.

Narion

*This is the result of the fact that the sun itself is a moving object. To see an example, take a compass, put its anchor on something that can move, and rotate it as you move the anchor in a constant direction. Or you could just look it up.

**Yes, there has to be. Energy is finite, and entropy is an inevitable truth.