Safe Spaces

Safe Spaces belie a movement that will kill and obliviate free speech, but especially the ability to address or solve important societal problems through debate.

Safe Spaces will cause important problems never to be raised/discussed let alone solved or even understood.

Safe Spaces will kill all discussion and all speech, if left unchecked.

Safe Spaces come from the same movement that brought you Micro-Agressions, Trigger Warnings, Anti-Patriarchy, Toxic Masculinity and other Millenial, Gen Y and Z fads.







WHAT IS A SAFE SPACE?

A Safe Space is a place where people can congregate to debate or discuss important issues with the assurance that participants will not be subject to emotional harm caused by other participants, as saying anything harmful is forbidden.

Harm means experiencing unwanted negative emotions attributed by an external actor's words.

But debate on serious controversial issues is exepected to cause this harm. It's a debate!

So the concept behind Safe Space is contrary to free speech and contrary to free discourse.

A Safe Space is not a special place you go to, a special room. Any venue for debate or discourse is turned into, transformed into, a Safe Space, by the imposition of ground rules before discussion commences.

Safe Spaces are imposed upon venues, in meetings, in classrooms, university lecture halls and tutorials, panel debates in auditoriums.

Safe Spaces are imposed on existing discussion platforms. These platforms must therefore have been Unsafe or harmful beforehand.

The fundamental intent behind Safe Spaces is to preserve the feelings of participants, and to do this by compelling participants to refrain from speaking harmfully or raising harmful issues.


REDUNDANT CONCEPTS

A lot of the concepts behind Safe Space are redundant; we already address them.

If Safe Space is about Respectful dialogue, then we already have this concept and practices that promote it. Safe Space in this sense is redundant. Being respectful is already a social norm.

If Safe Space is about avoiding harrassment and negative discrimination, then we also already have these and they are enshrined in law. There is in most societies legislation against unlawful harrassment and discrimination.

So what is left from the concept of Safe Space? Not much. The remainder is merely about hurt feelings and hurt ego. A Safe Space is a discussion venue that forbids hurtful speech and emotional harm. But, these hurts and harms can and usually do occur in criticism. So a Safe Space denies criticism when it harms or hurts.

In intellectual discussion we have the falacy of ad hominem, when we attack the person in debate, rather than their argument. So any attack on the person in debate is already covered by the status and establishment of this falacy and where ad hominem occurs, it will be argued against by those familiar with the falacy. If Safe Space is about attacking the individual, it is redundant.



CRITICISM HARMS

Safe Spaces shoot down harmful or hurtful criticism.

But criticism is by nature and definition harmful, especially to the ego and to closely held cherished values and beliefs. The goal of criticism is truth and understanding.

So what use is a serious intellectual discussion to address an important issue without criticism?


THE TERM SAFE

The term Safe is a poor choice that distracts from the intent by connotation.

Safety is a concept that relates to physical wellbeing, not emotional. So again we see a commonly understood and consistently used term perverted to cover things previously precluded.

Unsafe spaces are connoted with physical harm, hazards and risks to health.

A better term than Safe Space is Space Free of Criticism.


A NEW CONCEPT?

So, the concept of being respectful towards people is not new. Nor is the concept of being hurt emotionally by criticism during discourse.

But SJWs believe it is a brand new phenomenon. And they have decided they are the best tribe in society to define it, and to enforce it, and to defend it with attack against any contrarian.

SJWs invented the term Safe Space as a solution to being argued against, claiming their intellectual opponent is being disrespectful, using harmful behaviour in contradicting them, and hurting their feelings and ego.

SJWs often have their feelings hurt only after they have been contradicted. They would say:

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words harm me more than anything.


IDENTITY

Identity is the real subject in Safe Spaces, rather than individuals.

That which is being offended is a member who identifies as a X. Offenders are accused of vilifying or upsetting a group of people who identify as members of X.

The fundamental group with which they belong, to which all Xs belong, is the minority.

A newish modernism is the rise of minorities: by number of minorities, by activity of minorities, the voice of minorities, the consolidation of minority members, and by the fragility of minorities.

All these qualities of minorities have risen to levels never before seen in society. This growth is mostly due to Political Correctness and the Internet. These are the tools that empower all minority groups.

Their development has lead to the Identity Politics phenomenon.


VICTIMISM

We live in the era of the victim.

There have always been victims of harm caused by the words of others. But today, being a victim is a status symbol. It used to be embarrassing to be a victim. A weakness. Now it is treasured and sought after. Now being a victim is a strength. Being a victim is a goal and when it is acheived it is protected and sustained.

Why the urge to be and to remain a victim?

Because today victims get attention, special treatment, comfort and protection never seen before.

Victims also have political power now and power of numbers. Thanks Internet!

People want to be victims because of all the benefits. As a victim you can win arguments, stop opponents to your view, cease all discussion or prevent it, defeat powerful opponents, force people to agree with you and make accommodations for you.

It is good to be a victim.

THE TRUE INTENT BEHIND SAFE SPACES

The true intent behind Safe Spaces is to ensure the current leftist SJW agenda is promoted, established, developed, legitimised, legislated and protected from anyone in opposition to their ideology.

The leftist SJW ideology aims to ban all badness in the world, which will reveal the beautiful wonderful true world of endless goodness, rainbows and unicorns, where everyone is lovely and perfect and happiness reigns.

To acheive this aim, the first thing to do is rid the world of bad words, then bad people, by silencing them and forcing everyone only to be nice and say nice things.

This ideological world view is a fantasy, posing as objective reality.


SUBJECTIVITY

The problem for Safe Space advocates is its subjectivity. What one person thinks is offensive, another will not. Offense is subjective. What is offensive is in the eye of the beholder.

Safe Space advocates want offense to be objective, but it is not.

They want someone to be blamed for being offensive, but being offended is subjective. So you being offended are to blame for your feelings. Own them!

So there is no offender, only an offendee.

Safe Space implies that offense is objectively true. But it is not. Offense is a subjective perception.

It is not the person saying something who is the cause of offense, it is the person listening.

A truly Safe Space is a place where you feel safe to say anything you want free of censorship or intimidation. But is being Safe a good thing?

UNSAFE IS GOOD

We don't actually want people to be safe in the terms above. We want people to be unsafe.

We want to be exposed to all the views in the world, so we can talk about them, analyse and critique them.

The goal of Safe Spaces is to protect people from this exposure, because sometimes it hurts our emotions.

But free speech in discussion is the only way we develop and solve and progress and learn.

Knowledge, solution, understanding, progress, resilience, all require emotional and ego harm.

If you have something to say, some belief or argument you hold dear, you are well to have it pulled apart and criticised no matter how much it hurts. The goal is truth and understanding.


If you can't handle free debate, get out of the debate. Do some needlecraft or yoga.