A couple of thoughts

I've been keeping an eye on the community lately and beyond the discussion of weather or not the developers should or should not make changes on (some very specific) civs, the reaction to people who criticize, has really disappointed me and even worries me.

There seems to be an enormous amount of ignorance regarding history and people are just willing to jump into the train, call things offensive left and right, downvoting and eating everything Microsoft is throwing at them because ''they got an expert''. Beyond questioning the credentials of a linguist (who was consulted because he is a celebrity token) or a consultant that does not has his studies named anywhere in the interviews/ blogs, being not quite the native historian one might have assumed at first glance, I think that the eagerness of people to believe everything a corporation tells them, is problematic.

With this I want to zoom in on the the fire pit being removed by the community plaza. Besides any esthetic issues I may have with it (mainly that it is entirely generic and boring looking; they might have as well gone with a personalized council for each civ if they had done their homework), what shocks me is that people are so ready to assume that having natives dancing in the game, is offensive.

My opinion is, that having the preconception that dancing is tribal and in some way lesser (hence the offense I'm guessing), is incredibly ignorant, Eurocentric, actually offensive and willingfully blinded to see some incredibly beautiful cultural expressions of humanity.

So here are some examples of what we've been missing:

Haudenosaunee dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22uBV7dJbP4

Inca dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRlqp1pWOks

Aztec dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wsLw5jm9Zrc

Lakota dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN4BwM1FDwI&t=264s

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Yes I have a lot of free time in my hands and this is mainly a rant to blow off steam from my frustration on a lot of members of the community, I'm not expecting much out of it other than that. If it makes you reconsider history and the biases we as humans in the midst of modernity, value and look down upon then cool too.