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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Snarf Zagyg" data-source="post: 8031065" data-attributes="member: 7023840">Great question. I would answer this by saying that I think of this in terms of a two-part approach.1. But What if We're Wrong? This is the name of a Chuck Klosterman book from 2016; I don't want to oversell this, but it's a neat little pop-culture approach that's basically a rehash of undergrad 101 concepts like Rawl's Veil of Ignorance and Holmes's Council of Guardians. The long and the short of it is that, well, looking at history (in all fields), people were always wrong. So very wrong. Which means that we are likely to be wrong right now. I've always had that approach when it came to most things; more likely than not, our ideas are going to be wrong, in whole or in part. And the only way forward was to continue to shine a light on what we are thinking, to discuss it openly, and to allow better ideas to thrive and worse ideas to (hopefully, eventually) be discarded.More concretely, I believe that my positions and assertions are correct. I believe bigotry and racism are wrong. I believe that some books are better than others. I believe that some art is better than other art. I believe that some music is great, and other music is noise. But I do not appoint myself the arbiter of those decisions; I do not allow my self the luxury of thinking that this is the end of history, and I will be correct. And because I don't trust myself to make those decisions, I don't trust anyone else to either. As a fundamental belief and process, my worry that I might be wrong requires that I defend the rights of other people to speak opinions that I disagree with.2. Even so, racism is bad, but the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. So on the second part of the analysis, let us assume for a second that I have lifted completely any veil of ignorance. I have become omniscient, and I can extrapolate perfectly that my beliefs today are the correct ones always and forever (something I wish I had when I was getting tattoos). I believe racism and bigotry are bad. I believe slavery is bad. That's pretty unobjectionable, right? Here's the problem- racism, bigotry, and (yes) slavery ... those things happened. A lot. In history. How do I start making those choices? Is it about the creators' issues? I mean, that takes out most of the founding fathers, but also most of the Greeks and Romans. Is it about the text? If we are looking at works that reflect some aspects of bigotry, or misogyny, or racism, or colonialism, or slavery, homophobia, or denigration of religions, or transphobia, or any one of a number of things that I find objectionable, there won't be anything to read, because the works of the past reflect the past, which doesn't have the luxury of the knowledge of the present.It's a mug's game. The past will always be offensive if we are looking to be offended, because the past should be offensive! We should be able to look at it critically, and understand what it is and what it represents, but if our method of engaging with the past is to shut our eyes and pretend it didn't exist, that's not critically engaging with it.Now, I would further specify that, pace (1), I continually question my commitment to the values of free speech (which probably have been tried more in the past three years than ever before). What if I'm wrong? Things are, in fact, different now. Another poster in another thread ( [USER=6920677]@Todd Roybark[/USER] ) had an excellent and thoughtful post detailing some of the pain that he has dealt with, and that is not something I ignore. Social media and the internet's ubiquity may have made things different. I do not doubt that speech can cause real, measurable, pain. I just have seen, in my own lifetime, the immeasurable progress and benefits that have been gained, sometimes in fits and starts, from this commitment to this principle.Moving it back to the issue of TTRPGs, I have no objection to people pressuring WoTC to do better; I want them to. I have no objection to people pressuring WoTC to not profit from objectionable material (or to provide the proceeds of said material to a charity, etc.). I have no objection to people pressuring WoTC to providing additional context to historical objectionable material. But as a matter of principle, for me, I strongly object to attempt to permanently remove that historical material, especially given that OA is not even the most objectionable content from the early period ('74 - '89), and was, for its time, much better than most depictions (see also, 16 Candles).</blockquote>

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