You always have remember that MoM is hyper corrupt... which probably explains most of the oddities... it is also old. I'm pretty sure the operating principles work like this in canon.
The first thing you can extract is the books is that 'Dark' is a major legal term. The Darkness of an object or spell is voted on by the MoM's Congressional equivelent. and those are all apparently herditary seats. Once the 'Darkness Value' has been assigned it is compared to the target's GPP number. GPP is of course 'Generations Provably Pureblood. If your GPP number is less than required by the ojects/spells' DV your to be (in terms of severity) Verbally reprimanded/ Fined/ Imprisoned/ Have your wand snapped/ Fed to dementors. The severity of this punishment is determined by the size of the number. It can even go into negatives... meaning you get rewarded for having less Dark Dark items sitting around the place... you now get paid to 'contain them'.
This seems a dubious system... until you remember that they are called 'Wizards'... the wise ones.. They literally call themselves 'those that actually know what they are doing'. Pre-founding of Hogwarts with the apprentise system at best, this was the only way to avoid magical idiots from killing themselves spectacularly. After Hogwarts, which was prohibitably expensive, you had magic users trained and educated magic users wandering around. Large knowledge stores, libraries if you will, started popping up in the hands of the literate by default graduates. Poorer magic user trained under the Hogwarts educated ones. Wizard/witch was an earned title for the wise ones.
Muggles on the otherhand were illiterate morons for the most part outside the upper classes. Muggle probably started off as meaning, 'Those illiterate morons'. The Renaissance happened and then Industrial Revolution... eventual the non magicals ended up in their own reading is basically mandatory society. Things would have updated except the 'Muggles' invented new forms of war. we know this as wizards got directly involved up to WW2. I personally blame cannons.
See a cannon or other altilery can pick you off from outside of line of sight. This mean home defense went from activate the heavy defenses during attacks to on all the time. This means hiding from sight in the first place.. so you can't get targeted without magical people being involved. Magical people started becoming myths and legends when cannons came around. By the time of Napoleon entire wizarding families could get wiped out near instantly if they could be found. Death from above and all.
As the number of people with high GPP numbers dropped the remainder got more paraniod. The seats on the ruling group started to empty out. Come the turn of the 1900s and the eugenics movement (Go pure blood power!) was making its rounds. Come WW2 and culling none purebloods gets in vouge. Over half the GPP big numbers are gone and middle class twits become upper class twits. By this point offing relatives becomes in style.. and this led to removing the spare from the heir and a spare equasion... come HP books your looking at a society that needs a public enemy to funstion. The Dark Lords, Harry Potter, Muggles, Muggle Borns (a GPP number of 0 and raised by those stupid evil Muggles.)
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We know that the ministry has a global enchantment that effects the entire British Isles... the entire say 'Voldemorte' and get a strike team preceded on an antimagic shock wave of doom. If they set it to the words for the Unforgivables... it would have nuked the Death Eaters from existance in a month. Thus I'm guessing the use of this enchantment was 'legally' considered 'Dark' for dubious reasons. That and the bit about the ones using said Unforgivables were the people regulating such things.
The first thing you can extract is the books is that 'Dark' is a major legal term. The Darkness of an object or spell is voted on by the MoM's Congressional equivelent. and those are all apparently herditary seats. Once the 'Darkness Value' has been assigned it is compared to the target's GPP number. GPP is of course 'Generations Provably Pureblood. If your GPP number is less than required by the ojects/spells' DV your to be (in terms of severity) Verbally reprimanded/ Fined/ Imprisoned/ Have your wand snapped/ Fed to dementors. The severity of this punishment is determined by the size of the number. It can even go into negatives... meaning you get rewarded for having less Dark Dark items sitting around the place... you now get paid to 'contain them'.
This seems a dubious system... until you remember that they are called 'Wizards'... the wise ones.. They literally call themselves 'those that actually know what they are doing'. Pre-founding of Hogwarts with the apprentise system at best, this was the only way to avoid magical idiots from killing themselves spectacularly. After Hogwarts, which was prohibitably expensive, you had magic users trained and educated magic users wandering around. Large knowledge stores, libraries if you will, started popping up in the hands of the literate by default graduates. Poorer magic user trained under the Hogwarts educated ones. Wizard/witch was an earned title for the wise ones.
Muggles on the otherhand were illiterate morons for the most part outside the upper classes. Muggle probably started off as meaning, 'Those illiterate morons'. The Renaissance happened and then Industrial Revolution... eventual the non magicals ended up in their own reading is basically mandatory society. Things would have updated except the 'Muggles' invented new forms of war. we know this as wizards got directly involved up to WW2. I personally blame cannons.
See a cannon or other altilery can pick you off from outside of line of sight. This mean home defense went from activate the heavy defenses during attacks to on all the time. This means hiding from sight in the first place.. so you can't get targeted without magical people being involved. Magical people started becoming myths and legends when cannons came around. By the time of Napoleon entire wizarding families could get wiped out near instantly if they could be found. Death from above and all.
As the number of people with high GPP numbers dropped the remainder got more paraniod. The seats on the ruling group started to empty out. Come the turn of the 1900s and the eugenics movement (Go pure blood power!) was making its rounds. Come WW2 and culling none purebloods gets in vouge. Over half the GPP big numbers are gone and middle class twits become upper class twits. By this point offing relatives becomes in style.. and this led to removing the spare from the heir and a spare equasion... come HP books your looking at a society that needs a public enemy to funstion. The Dark Lords, Harry Potter, Muggles, Muggle Borns (a GPP number of 0 and raised by those stupid evil Muggles.)
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We know that the ministry has a global enchantment that effects the entire British Isles... the entire say 'Voldemorte' and get a strike team preceded on an antimagic shock wave of doom. If they set it to the words for the Unforgivables... it would have nuked the Death Eaters from existance in a month. Thus I'm guessing the use of this enchantment was 'legally' considered 'Dark' for dubious reasons. That and the bit about the ones using said Unforgivables were the people regulating such things.