Disclaimers and Dragons

Products of our capitulation 

So my boys pointed me to an all too common story about the makers of Dungeons and Dragons going woke and including disclaimers on republished material. This is important in our modern era, in which we stoke our self-righteous embers by heaping endless contempt on those reprehensible reprobates who had the temerity of not existing in our current moment of 'superior to God righteousness.'

Apparently there was push back, especially among older fans of the game.  Youngsters, weened on the superiority of Communist totalitarianism and taught that freedom of speech and religious liberty are stealth Nazi concepts, were quite fine with such an apology from the new game wizards.  Nonetheless, those old timers warned that this would lead to slicing and dicing the materials and republishing them with changes to fit the morally superior wokeness of modern Dystopian liberalism.

Not so, laughed the youngsters (and some older ones who know the eternal infallibility of the dogma of progress).  No such thing would occur since, obviously, that would be rank censorship in a way to make Stalin blush.  All that would happen would be an addition of the obligatory disclaimer that those who came before us were simply inferior to our majestic awesomeness.

Well, that didn't take long.  Wizards of the Coast, the company that now owns the D&D material, has announced it will, in fact, be issuing heavily 'redacted' versions of the old sexist, racist, and generally Nazi infused material from those racists and sexists from TSR of old.  In a matter of weeks.  That's not bad.

Normally the lies of liberalism take some time to unfold.  It took about a decade after the first push for gay marriage, and the concerns that people could be punished for opposing it, before people began to be punished for opposing it.  It took about a decade and a half for those concerned that hate crime legislation could lead to a social mentality of censorship and thought crimes to be proven right.

But liberalism's eternal quest to live up to the slippery slope like nobody ever imagined was particularly speedy in this case.  Why Wizards of the Coast did this, I don't know.  Like so much of liberalism seems to be, was it lies meant to gain ground?  Or did they mean it when they said it wouldn't go there, but in doing so failed to fully appease the Twitter lynch mob and the dystopian fascists yearning for a new totalitarianism?  In which case Wizards buckled because the only thing that really matters is the bottom line.  I just can't say. Either way however, the results are the same.

Again, this was never my cup of tea.  I was not a fantasy fan when D&D was all the rage.  By the time I got interested in fantasy, the great Fantasy Renaissance as I called it, along with the D&D fad, had run their course.  Nonetheless, my sons are in it, and like so many things in our society, they are miffed at the fact that almost every day the Left seems to gain more ground in its quest to turn our country - if not the world - into more than Orwell ever dreamed of when imagining his dystopian nightmare.