"Also, philosophically speaking, what is the difference between a city being burned down and not? When you think about it, not much..."

As a rule of thumb, if the language of magic in a fantasy novel is based on Latin, they are just doing science. If the language based on the language spoken by the river, the sea, and the creatures which walked the Earth before the Sun and Moon first shone, then you might be on to something.

Arthur C. Clarke famously said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", but you can easily reverse it and say that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from science and technology. This is particularly obvious in cases like Harry Potter were the rules are so formal and repeatable, and are even taught in school exactly like how we teach science. If magic actually exists, after all, you would just do normal science on it and there would be no reason to distinguish it from science. More sophisticated authors like J.R.R. Tolkien even recognized this, with elves like Galadriel saying she didn't even know what humans meant by the word "magic", since they merely thought of it as an extension of craftsmanship, i.e. technology. The humans called her a witch, but the Noldor elves are students of Aulë, the God of Craft, and what they were doing was more like knowledge in the normal sense.
There is good reason to think people thought this way too back when we believed in magic, Aristotle even wrote a book on magic (which was lost). It seems he thought magic was just another part of natural philosophy. After all if a magic potion works, it is really just medicine. Not only that but if you don't understand science fully, it's reasonable to think you are observing magic in day to day life, even in mundane events like lightning storms. It really wasn't until Christianity try to exorcise magic from the world, claiming it was part of Paganism, that we started to really distinguish it sharply from nature.

Little known scientific fact: if your life doesn't move the p-value in a peer reviewed study, it was meaningless by definition.

actually when you get down to it Godzilla is probably just a metaphor for an even bigger lizard.

Also I have the concept of moving capital from the unproductive landed gentry class into the hands of the industrialists who will use the surplus value to improve production, if you are interested. It mostly involves getting rid of people like you...

The Cotton Looms get all the press in the early industrial revolution, but the Threshing Machine really might be the biggest jump in productive capacity in the history of the world. It cut out so much manual labor (people used to have to bash flails against the grain for hours and hours to separate the seeds) that there were riots all over because it caused so much unemployment and social upheaval. The famous Luddites, who people think of as being opposed to all technology, were mostly mad about threshing machines, and their consequences on society. They even went so far as destroying the threshing machines. They weren't just backwards thinking technology haters though, but rational people who noticed that there was something deeply wrong with how society was organized that a machine which improved farming efficiency so much was causing poverty and even starvation among farm workers. It wasn't the Luddites who were irrational, but the structure of society itself. After all it should be the people doing back breaking work who are most happy about a machine replacing them, but because all efficiency gains go to the owners, those people are simply out of a job. We've seen this time and time again under capitalism, and is even going on right now with AI.
The dragon is based on Adam Smith, who noticed these kind of improvements in production were the key to increasing the wealth of a given society, and that reorganization of society from feudal lords, who largely spent their money on luxuries, to industrial capitalists, who spent a lot of their money on "research and development", i.e. improving the efficiency of their factories, was causing economic growth and ever increasing wealth. In order to modernize, societies essentially had to get rid of the feudal lords put all of their money into the hands of capitalists as much as possible, to kick start this kind of economic growth.

The Cotton Looms get all the press in the early industrial revolution, but the Threshing Machine really might be the biggest jump in productive capacity in the history of the world. It cut out so much manual labor (people used to have to bash flails against the grain for hours and hours to separate the seeds) that there were riots all over because it caused so much unemployment and social upheaval. The famous Luddites, who people think of as being opposed to all technology, were mostly mad about automated cotton looms, and their consequences on society. They even went so far as destroying the looms (and other similar movements destroyed threshing machines). They weren't just backwards thinking technology haters though, but rational people who noticed that there was something deeply wrong with how society was organized that a machine which improved efficiency so much was causing poverty and even starvation among the very workers who it should have benefited. It wasn't the Luddites who were irrational, but the structure of society itself. After all it should be the people doing back breaking work who are most happy about a machine replacing them, but because all efficiency gains go to the owners, those people are simply out of a job. We've seen this time and time again under capitalism, and is even going on right now with AI.
The dragon is based on Adam Smith, who noticed these kind of improvements in production were the key to increasing the wealth of a given society, and that reorganization of society from feudal lords, who largely spent their money on luxuries, to industrial capitalists, who spent a lot of their money on "research and development", i.e. improving the efficiency of their factories, was causing economic growth and ever increasing wealth. In order to modernize, societies essentially had to get rid of the feudal lords put all of their money into the hands of capitalists as much as possible, to kick start this kind of economic growth.

As an aside the wikipedia page for "list of french stereotypes" was pretty disappointing, people really need to get in there and expand it, because I feel like there must be more there.