"girls didn't fight in WW1!" - More Battlefield 1 badhistory

I don't like that we reach immediately for "evil person" when there is a conceptual lack of comprehension of the other side's potential argument.

The way to understand this is to realize this is about modern politics instead of deep historical arguments. Essentially people perceive a modern political motive behind historical arguments for how works of culture are constructed in regards to vaguely groups politically defined alongside say a narrative of either persistent historical oppression or ongoing oppression in the modern day. If you reframe it a weak version of this claim isn't going to be very controversial (for example remember this stupid debate from this jokey article a few years ago?)

It's not accurate to create a binary between"attempting to explicitly dismantle a default white male cultural and historical assumption" and "racists and bigots who want to oppress women and minorities." People react against what they see as intentional choices to impart a specific political message for various reasons. They can oppose what use of generic cultural products to shape culture (for the same reason people reacted against the "very special episodes" of the 1990s). That may be wrongheaded but is it really bigoted? They can oppose what they see as badhistory weaponized for political ends (politics rises it above mere pedantry) on either grounds of badhistory as such or as opposite to the supposed political message imparted. What political message? Can people read this broad enough so that there are non bigoted rejections of the politics behind it? I like the abstracted penguin example because I think it illustrates that it is possible once you get beyond the stupid responses.

It seems to me the argument usually is "because of X historical stuff it's plausible that women or "persons of color" could be used in this situation and therefor you must/ought use them there because of... and it's that "because of" which can be fairly criticized in ways not touching on personal animus.

The field of politics and art/politics of art is incredibly complex to a degree people usually don't want to engage with. There isn't one viewpoint, one value system being debated there are multiple overlapping ones. If you don't realize that strawmen are easily created.

/r/badhistory Thread Parent