"But by the end of the story the mysterious old wizard mask has moved from Dumbledore to Harry, and Harry's brash young hero mask has moved to Hermione. (Hermione's mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.)"
Just imagine: thousands of years later, Dumbledore is pulled out of the mirror and finds himself in a completely alien transhumanist future built by Harry. Young (only a hundred years old!), inexperienced, armed with principles and ideas about reality that are completely inappropriate for this world and society... Just like Hermione at the beginning of the story, isn't it?
The way you describe the consequences of the invention of the Duplicator completely ignores ordinary human qualities. First of all, human ambitions. If you copy a brilliant CEO to replace all middle managers with him, then none of these copies will want to be a middle manager. Or you will have to change their brains so that they are happy with their subordinate position (which is doubtful from the moral side... like this idea in general). If you copy the brilliant president who ruled the country, then the copy discovers that her personal ambitions are not satisfied - he is no longer ruling the country. Similarly with all other options.
Written with the help of an online translator, there may be errors.
"For spreading false information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation under the guise of reliable reports, a fine of 700 thousand to 1.5 million rubles or a penalty of up to three years in prison is provided.
For spreading a fake using one's official position, by a group of persons or by a group of persons with artificial creation of evidence of the prosecution, the penalty will be from five to 10 years in prison. If deliberately false information entailed serious consequences, a penalty of 10 to 15 years in prison is provided."
I was talking about the war in Cyprus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus
As far as I remember, Turkey and Greece, NATO members, were at war with each other.
After studying the situation of Ukraine's economy after 1991 in recent days, I am not surprised by those who think so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Ukraine
Yes, a nuclear war would not destroy humanity completely. This is not relevant to this issue. From the fact that there was no nuclear war, we cannot deduce in any way what its probability was. The probability can be deduced only from a thorough assessment of the incidents themselves (the Caribbean crisis and 1983 and other examples) and the possibilities of other incidents.
I hope the translator translated it correctly...
I will add that we do not know what the probability of nuclear escalation was during the Cold War. Perhaps there was a 50 or 90 percent risk of war. Survivorship bias.
Crimea was also an autonomy, but its independence and the referendum on joining the Russian Federation was not recognized in the world.
About the magical chromosome. I once wrote a critical note about this on the Russian analogue of TVtropes (paragraphs one and three, marked 1, remark 2 from another person). I still don't understand how the appearance of wizards from the connection of a wizard and an unambiguous Muggle should work.
"1 And again, genetics. In fact, the author's error in the genetic part is much more critical: it follows directly from the text that a wizard is only a person who has inherited the "magic gene" from both his father and mother. That is, a wizard can only be born to the following couples: two wizards, a wizard and a squib, two squibs. A wizard and a muggle will have children who are squibs in one hundred percent of cases, because they cannot inherit the second "magic gene". And this excludes the possibility of the existence of both Voldemort and Snape, whose fathers were muggles - or they actually turn out to be squibs (what is the probability of such a coincidence?). And many other half-bloods, in whom one of the parents was a wizard and the other was a muggle. Moreover, if wizard-Muggle marriages resulted in Squibs in 99% of cases (let's take the probability of a Squib turning up as 1%), this would be a cast-iron foundation for the Death Eaters' ideology - "damned Muggles are depriving us of magic, here's the proof, here's a bunch of examples", and this would have been obvious to everyone many centuries ago, and the very idea of a wizard-Muggle marriage would not have been seriously considered by anyone who did not want a Squib child to be born.
Therefore, the theory of "genetic inheritance of magic" as Harry suggested it is almost completely untenable.
2 The author of the previous edit proceeds from the unproven premise that Squibs make up 1% of those who consider themselves Muggles. But this may not be true and, most likely, is not true. As far as we know from canon, Squibs are not invited to Hogwarts, and it is quite logical to assume that Squibs do not tell their descendants about magic (because there is no need, they will not be able to use it anyway), and their children grow up as Muggles, while being Squibs. Rather, 1% is the probability that a Squib will find out that he is actually a Squib, and not a Muggle, and not at all the probability that a person who considers himself a Muggle is actually a Squib. So Harry's theory has a right to exist.
1 Clarification from the author of the previous edit: the mass birth of Squib children by wizard-Muggle couples would be noticeable and obvious to everyone (and, I repeat, there were MANY such couples in canon), which would give a cast-iron argument to the propaganda of the advocates of "blood purity" (they would simply be 100% right). But this is not observed. Somehow you are reading very inattentively. If Squibs were really extremely common, then the number of Muggle-borns would be orders of magnitude higher. In fact, even if Squibs are only 1%, then we get that every ten-thousandth couple in Muggle Britain is a Squib + Squib couple. That is, out of about 750 thousand births per year at that time in Britain, we get about 75 children born in a Squib + Squib couple, and if Harry's theory is correct, then they will have an average of 18.75 Muggle-borns annually (which is even slightly more than observed - about ten per year). And even with such a number, the probability that a wizard and a Muggle will have a wizard tends to zero (about 0.5%, or more precisely - 1%, that a Squib will be found, and 50% of a percent that the right chromosome will turn up). It would be impossible not to notice this."
(translated from Russian by Google Translate)