Net neutrality

[HMWHC]

Good one.

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[HMWHC]

Why don't conservatives become academics anymore though? It's not because academics are horribly overworked! I think fear of a hostile work environment, and fear of career progression being suppressed through publication refusal etc, is a factor. Or softer than that - from what I see as an academic myself, the Postmodernists (who are cultural Marxists) have their journals where they can publish endless articles that are essentially devoid of content, but great for promotion, whereas writing stuff that actually means something is hard. So it's much harder to be a Classical Liberal than a Postmodernist if you want to advance.

^ This

I work at a University in their Education dept (not an Instructor) and the stuff I hear on a day to day basis from the Instructors, let alone the students, as a fly on the wall makes my Conservatarian blood curdle. God forbid a student pipes up to question said progressive (Cultural Marxist) teaching theory/models.

Anecdotal evidence, perhaps. But my Spidey-sense tells me it's the norm across academia in the west, not the exception.

[jhkim]

Why don't conservatives become academics anymore though? It's not because academics are horribly overworked! I think fear of a hostile work environment, and fear of career progression being suppressed through publication refusal etc, is a factor. Or softer than that - from what I see as an academic myself, the Postmodernists (who are cultural Marxists) have their journals where they can publish endless articles that are essentially devoid of content, but great for promotion, whereas writing stuff that actually means something is hard. So it's much harder to be a Classical Liberal than a Postmodernist if you want to advance.

For academic positions in the humanities and social sciences, I'm not sure.  What you say sounds believable.

I have a PhD in physics but also a Master's in education, which is sort of a social science - but I'm not an academic. Personally, I'm partial to a number of postmodernists. I know that other science folks get bent out of shape over Paul Feyerabend, for example, and to a lesser degree Thomas Kuhn. However, I think they're both very meaningful and interesting. I'd agree that there's a lot of content-free bullshit that gets published in academics, but as far as I can tell, that has always been true. That is, 1950s academics still had tons of bullshit published, and to my eye the modernist bullshit was even worse than the postmodernist.

[jhkim]

Would you concede though that at the majority of Teaching programs across academia in the West (if not the USA) that the number of Conservative leaning instructors is outweighed by Liberal leaning ones?

I'm pretty sure a strong minded conservative who expressed their opinions in a typical modern Education Dept program would soon find their grades suffering. Guess they always have the Jesuit Colleges to turn too.

From my experience, yes, I'd agree that instructors are mostly liberal. However, I don't think that within teacher education that grades are based on politics. I had several conservative classmates in my teacher education program, and they didn't seem have any particular problems. They were outnumbered, but they did fine in their classes.

It may well be different in academic positions, but in K-12 teaching programs, I don't think that grading was a factor. Now, they will have to deal with a lot of liberal-leaning principals, administration, and unions when they go on to teaching - but I think those are lesser issues compared to simply dealing with the kids every day. Most teachers burn out simply from the stress of classroom management.

[Schwartzwald]

I'm an old timey user as well. I remember when Goggle came on the scene and it was like it was reading my frikin mind it was so good with it's searches. After a decade? of google just used to it.

Bitches please.  I used Netscape navigator and neoplanet as browsers and hotbot as a search engine.

[S'mon]

For academic positions in the humanities and social sciences, I'm not sure.  What you say sounds believable.

I'm in the 'Social Sciences & Humanities' School, yup. I'm sure it's still somewhat different in some of the hard sciences.

[-E.]

Would you agree there is a war for "Culture" in the "West" though? A war to decide where the culture of the west will head in the future? I know the "Culture War" term has been oft used but I do think it's valid.

And that war eventually drips down from the high hanging fruit (Academia, Movies, Politics) to the low hanging fruit (Video-Games, Pen & Paper RPG's, Board Games).

Is EVERYONE involved in making Tabletop RPG's a Culture Warrior? no of course not. Are there Culture Warriors involved in making/playing/discussing RPG's? Absolutely.

No subject has been left untouched by the Culture War, I can't think of anything that hasn't at least had the eye of Critical Theory glance it's way.

1) Lots of responses here, that I'm going to take some time to get to

2) I wanted to do this one because I think it's relevant across a bunch of different topics and (like I said) I think it explains a lot of otherwise-inexplicable behavior

I put my big post on Culture war over in the Western Civilization thread -- it's a slightly more structured version of the post here.

But in-short

Culture Warriors
There are -- without question -- people who want to drive culture in a certain direction. And a lot of different approaches to doing it. Using marches, legislation, online-mobs, memes, etc.

Some of these people have a lot of money and resources and are certainly capable of funding grand projects.

Furthermore, there are popular touchstones of culture like movies and video-games and so-on that seem seem like maybe, if you could control them you could steer culture a bit in one way or another... so culture warriors tend to aim, not at the huge, undefined masses of people (who are nearly impossible to identify and directly influence), but at these (often commercial) elements of popular culture.

The thinking goes, "He Who Controls The Video Games Controls Part Of The World... Maybe." Something like that.

But I think that's largely wrong.

The House Always Wins
I think people trying to control the culture through the control of consumable products (physical, artistic, etc.) are making a huge, fatal, and fundamental mistake. They don't understand the thinking behind investment of capital or how the market works. They're trying to control the tail, to make it wag the dog.

Market Forces
The Market is hugely more powerful people trying to decide where the culture of the west will head. Even if the SJWs gained complete editorial control of the big video game houses, they wouldn't control culture, or even video game culture. If they controlled the big studios, they wouldn't control movies or messages in any real sense.

What movies get made and what games get developed (and what songs get sung, and what RPGs get RPGed, and so on) is driven overwhelmingly by consumer demand.

If there's a demand for sexist shooters (and there is), there will be sexist shooters. If there's a demand for RPGs with girls with giant boobs on the cover, someone will make an RPG with giant boobs on the cover.

I promise you. And the howls of a million SJWs won't change that.

Capital Always Wins.

Control Is An Illusion
Market forces aren't the only things that make Culture Warring almost impossible to do effectively -- things like the Internet, self-publishing, the democratization of information, and social media create nearly uncontrollable and dynamic systems with emergent behavior. These are impossible to predict and even more impossible to drive reliably in any direction.

How do I know: I'm intimately familiar with multi-billion-dollar marketing engines and I work day-to-day with attempts to understand culture, and even influence it. That's billion-with-a-b. Some of the best people on the planet are trying to figure out how to drive culture. They have more at stake than any SJW. It's not even careers. It's empires (well business empires) at stake.

These people intimately study and understand the efforts of culture warriors and SJWs because they're relevant to our target market -- and the impact is negligible compared to other things.

In short, I think the people who see themselves as trying to drive the culture (or stop others), are deluding themselves or worse, indulging in a fantasy of significance that accomplishes little except getting people caught in the middle hurt.

Exceptions to the Rule
There are places where the market (and other macro forces) doesn't rule. Academia seems to be one of them -- I'm not in Academia, so I don't have first-hand experience here, but from the look of things, there the Academy is a place where ideas seem to have primacy over the broad external forces... but I bet that changes.

Another exception would be very small communities (like... RPG.net!) where the stakes are so incredibly low that capital is disinterested.

Steve Jobs (and other visionary designers and artists) can drive culture with a vision so powerful that it captures the market and creates its own value. These are astonishingly rare, and they're almost always opening the market, not restricting it.

A third would be government intrusion. The government can crush the market by installing totalitarian rule.

I'm extremely leery of expanding government powers for those reasons. I think that the government needs to stay out of culture and let the people and the markets take care of themselves.

Cheers,
-E.

[S'mon]

Exceptions to the Rule
There are places where the market (and other macro forces) doesn't rule. Academia seems to be one of them -- I'm not in Academia, so I don't have first-hand experience here, but from the look of things, there the Academy is a place where ideas seem to have primacy over the broad external forces... but I bet that changes.

Another exception would be very small communities (like... RPG.net!) where the stakes are so incredibly low that capital is disinterested.

By far the most important exception is Bureaucracies - government bureaucracies, but also the internal bureaucracies of large established corporations. Anywhere that market forces are weak. Eg most of the US military functions as a government bureaucracy, but there are some tip of spear elements that don't, they can't afford to or they're dead. So they have to maintain efficiency rather than Political Correctness.

[-E.]

By far the most important exception is Bureaucracies - government bureaucracies, but also the internal bureaucracies of large established corporations. Anywhere that market forces are weak. Eg most of the US military functions as a government bureaucracy, but there are some tip of spear elements that don't, they can't afford to or they're dead. So they have to maintain efficiency rather than Political Correctness.

Yeah, definitely.

And peace-time millitaries typically prioritize all kinds of things over unit effectiveness (we haven't had a long stretch of peace in awhile though)... way back when I was in basic training, I remember the drill sergeants being kind of pissy about the increase in education requirements and the view that the army wanted more educated soldiers... but couldn't compete with private industry (or to put it bluntly, all the smart people went elsewhere and we were a bunch of morons, unfit to wear the uniform).

But there were for-real market concerns in there, as someone with part of a college degree, I think I got a little extra-consideration in the infantry due to, basically economic realities.

My experience is that embedded bureaucracies tend to priorities petty authoritarianism over pretty much any other ideology. Even if they give it a coat of SJW paint or whatever, it's still more about some guy's little kingdom than any sort of coherent moral position.

But I'm thinking of things like school boards and city hall stuff. And like home owners associations.

Cheers,
-E.

[-E.]

Well there is the "Market of Ideas" though. I mean you could look at it through the lense of the market. That is Citizens are consumers of a Government's policies and services. They spend their money (votes) to purchase a product which a particular Party offers to it's consumers (voters).

I think Andrew Breitbart was right though that Politics is downstream from Culture. So that is a problem as the real power is not the government itself or the companies, but the people who shape our thoughts on culture and ourselves.

Culture (or the lack there of) is Destiny, just as much as Demography is. In fact it's when Demography is combined with Culture that the world really starts to change (and not necessarily for the better).

In a functional government, I agree -- The People (Culture) elect the Politicians who mostly manage The Market.

And The Market is also The People, so... it's all kind of integrated with the will of a free people (collectively, "the culture") driving everything.

In a dysfunctional government, though, all kinds of things can happen and if you get to the point where the people with all the guns are making the rules, you've got a problem.

I'm not implying that the west is anywhere near a totalitarian state, but I also think that the government tends to be less accountable and slower to react to changing market conditions than private industry.

For some things that's a VERY GOOD thing -- you don't want The Fed being driven by public opinion or even political ownership, and you don't want a military that run by some kind of popular opinion.

It just means that you have to be careful about what kinds of authorities you put in the government's hands... and, like vampires, once you've invited them in, it's really hard to get them to leave...

Cheers,
-E.

[Schwartzwald]

My view on western culture is fairly simple.  Western culture allowed religion (primarily juedo Christian)  to exist within it but housebroke it.  The some fact is the defining feature of western culture is we allowed freedom of religious belief and practice but we house broke  religion.

''Yes Timmy I know the Bible says 'suffer not a witch to live' and I know you believe it,  but sorry,  you can't go murder Ms . Sabrina because she practices Wicca and calls herself a witch.  She has rights too.  You can believe what you want and go to church but you can't violate other people's rights.''

So I'd say what's great about western culture is we don't impose a religion,  we don't persecute on religion,  we allow all religion but we insist it be housebroken,  I. E.  Willing and able to coexist with other religions.

[RPGPundit]

It's absurd to suggest that "market forces" are somehow dominant over culture. There is no such thing as "market forces" without culture, even in terms of all but the most essential products.  Even "marketing" is only a matter of the imposition of some kind of ideology.  If people in control of marketing couldn't convince the public to buy stuff, no one would own a fidget spinner. No one would listen to Justin Beiber.

So to suggest we don't have to worried about Ctrl-Left totalitarians taking over and deconstructing our civilization into oblivion because "market forces" will prevail is the statement of a retard who doesn't understand how markets work.  It's all about a tiny group of people convincing the general public that what they want should be decided by said tiny group (whether they know it or not).  

And if that wasn't true, certain smarmy little shits wouldn't be wasting their time on boards like this frantically trying to convince people not to look at the Totalitarian butchers waiting behind the curtain.

[-E.]

I am not saying this to slag you, but (mini-slag ahead) who decides which people are vulnerable and which are not? It can be perceived as patronizing. The "deplorables" are to stupid to vote in their own interest sort of thing. This is exactly the sort of thing (protecting them from wrong-think) authoritarian regimes do with media.

It's exactly these sorts of echo chamber unified media message outlets that have given rise to the "niche" media sources.

I'd say the answer isn't a return to the "Fairness Doctrine" (though that is certainly an option), but rather more centre right main stream media voices to balanced out the choir or centre left source already on the market. Right now there is only FOX and it arguably is moving closer to the centre every day as the Murdoch kids gain more and more influence and assert themselves.

Slag away, I say! Healthy debate thrives on disagreement!

Who gets to define "Vulnerable People?"
Everyone. I mean all of us get to decide who we think of as vulnerable. When I typed that, I was thinking of people I know who don't trust Mainstream Media and get all their information from alternative sources and are often legitimately confused about what the truth is. I'm also thinking of people who find current events very troubling and tend to seek out comforting lies rather than confront the truth -- people who essentially demand to be lied to.

But you might define it differently.

What I'm not saying is that the Government or any other agency should step in to protect these people.

I don't think that.

Remedies -- I don't have any
I think that we, collectively, have a big problem with echo chambers and discretion in America. I think those issues create division (even more than we'd have otherwise) and leave people vulnerable to manipulation (scary advertising about FEMA concentration camps).

Traditionally the government has taken steps to moderate problems in this space -- the example that came to mind was the Fairness Doctrine -- but 1) I just don't think that would work today. It's impractical and 2) I think requiring alternative perspectives presents a free-speech issue; the same one that got it shot down.

The problem is especially pernicious because it's not just like False Advertising. Phenomena like #FakeNews are driven by consumer demand. People who desperately want to believe fantastical lies and are resistant to being disabused.

At some level, isn't it my right, as an American, to believe whatever I want? Even if it's batshit insane?

I think the answer has to be "yes" and that makes the problem even harder to resolve.

More Center Right Media -- Couldn't Hurt, But It Won't Solve The Problem
More and better center-right mainstream media outlets would certainly help, but the "vulnerable people" I'm thinking of probably wouldn't consider Fox credible. Too mainstream. Too controlled by rich people.

And it doesn't tell them the things they demand to hear (these are more Alex Jones/Prison Planet type people).

I think they'd just see other-foxes as "more of the same" and pass them by in their quest for sources to confirm their specialness, their purity, and their dark, apocalyptic visions of the future.

So I guess it's not a solution for everyone but more Foxes couldn't hurt.

Cheers,
-E.

[S'mon]

And it doesn't tell them the things they demand to hear (these are more Alex Jones/Prison Planet type people).

I think it's a lot easier to tell when Alex Jones is talking crap, than to tell when the mainstream media is lying. I can often pick up on their lies in areas I know well, especially since comparing BBC & Fox News on Hurricane Katrina taught me to be sceptical - in that case it was mostly the right-wing station talking crap, but the lessons I learned there stood me in good stead dealing with the BBC's subtler efforts, which had previously passed me by - like a good little liberal I believed what I was told. Eg I had believed, because they told me, that Serbs were evil and Bosniaks were good (truth: there were no good guys).

Maybe there are benefits in community cohesion of everyone believing the same lies - the community cohesion that existed when everyone clustered around the TV/radio to listen to the official narrative (not always the government narrative, eg Vietnam War). But I prefer having a diversity of media and the chance to uncover what are often some pretty shocking truths. Even with no space aliens.

[HMWHC]

They're trying to control the tail, to make it wag the dog.

Does Art create Culture though? or does Culture create Art? The Arts literally are cultural artifacts though. So having influence over what sort of Art is created I believe has a great impact on the values a Culture adopts.

Even if the SJWs gained complete editorial control of the big video game houses, they wouldn't control culture, or even video game culture. If they controlled the big studios, they wouldn't control movies or messages in any real sense.

SJW's have gained control of Google, Youtube, Twitter, GoDaddy, many many others, and have virtual (not total) monopolies on aspects of the internet. They have such a monopoly it has people on the Left or Right talking about if they should be designated as utilities and breaking them up or not. So I disagree that SJW's in charge of large companies do not "control" messaging in any real sense.

There are two ways to control "the message". Propagating your own counter message, or silencing the oppositions messaging. Doing one is effective enough, doing both is even more effective.

If there's a demand for sexist shooters (and there is), there will be sexist shooters. If there's a demand for RPGs with girls with giant boobs on the cover, someone will make an RPG with giant boobs on the cover.

I envy your optimism, but if it was against the law to make a shooter with girls sporting huge breasts, that would not entirely stamp out such shooters, but it certainly would put a damper on their production and distribution. Laws do have an impact.

I promise you. And the howls of a million SJWs won't change that.

What if the howls became those of 200 million, or 2 billion? When they become the majority then it's a problem. They will vote for people who will enshrine their ideology into law. And those laws will in turn change our society.

In short, I think the people who see themselves as trying to drive the culture (or stop others), are deluding themselves or worse, indulging in a fantasy of significance that accomplishes little except getting people caught in the middle hurt.

I agree with you in that "people" (as in 1 person) are deluding themselves, but, when enough people start to move in the same direction it becomes a majority. And that majority absolutely can accomplish things.

I'm extremely leery of expanding government powers for those reasons. I think that the government needs to stay out of culture and let the people and the markets take care of themselves.

This is what I like about you sir, and other commies like you. ;-). It's that your for erring on the side of less government rather than more government as the solution to any problem. A Libertarian Marxist is harmless (not saying that's you just kidding around a bit) as they would be against forcing anyone else to adopt their ideology. Their utopian commune would be 100% voluntary. And those are the lefties I can get behind.