Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8944511" data-attributes="member: 6790260">How about Birth of a Nation? It does have historical significance in a rather technical way (it is the very first feature-length film to use a large number of techniques we consider to be fundamental to movie-making today, like having a fixed film score, using close-ups and panoramic shots, certain kinds of transitions, etc.) But it's also horrible in terms of content, given it's based on a book ("The Clansman") literally written by early Ku Klux Klan members, and became a massive recruitment pitch for the KKK and thus literally did contribute to actual racial violence. You can't edit out the racist garbage of it, because it's literally racist garbage to its very core. Yet it remains very important as part of art history...and yet art history isn't that relevant to most people (there's a reason you usually won't see the film unless you're studying art history. Despite all that, it isn't like it's banned or anything, you can totally find it online both in DVD and stream form.Early D&D books seem to me to be more similar to this than they are to Mein Kampf, which as you say is preserved as an example of unacceptable moral-ethical beliefs, not as a foundational work riddled with concerning elements. By comparison, the early works of the D&D canon set the stage and format and design ideas for the products that would follow, and in many ways we are still living in a world that is "D&D-alikes" and metaphorically "all the rest" (which often define themselves, or are forced to define themselves, in opposition to D&D.) We haven't really seen that paradigm break yet, where it becomes more important than whether something is or isn't like D&D. (For comparison, MMOs settled on EverQuest for a few years, until WoW took over and became THE hegemonic game everyone defined themselves through, either by imitation or by opposition; we are only just now getting into a "post-WoW" world, something like 18 years later.)When the early works have historical significance because they set the stage for what would follow...but they're also riddled with things we repudiate today...it is reasonable to ask whether we should preserve those works in their entirety, eschew them and bury them, or try to filter out things we don't approve of. I, personally, think it is unwise to edit the works of the past to clean them up. If they contain both worthy and unworthy content, let us bury them not with censorship (whether it be "updating" them or banning them), but with new content that actually outshines the old. Then we can rightly see these things as flawed stepping stones, the necessary result of humans gaining greater moral, empirical, and formal knowledge over time.I'm not entirely sure I understand the phrase as used.</blockquote>

Verification