Things the Right get right

[Benny Bunter]

Me too, which is why I've avoided your attempts to do so

Eh? If you look at my post i didnt say anything against safe spaces. In fact i said they were essential! I was talking about no platforming because someone else brought it up. Sheesh...

 

[baboon2004]

This idea of a 'debate' where opposing ideas are sincerely engaged with has pretty much always been a fantastical notion, which, as suggested earlier in the thread, is something the Right generally understand perfectly well.

This is the key point for me.

The media furore about no-platforming and safe spaces is largely just a diversionary tactic - the wider picture clearly shows that universities are becoming more exclusionary, and changing beyond all recognition into businesses by right-wing models. That's the real, large-scale threat to ideas and debate, not these media-led frenzies about a handful of debates at Goldsmiths or whatever. Same old 'PC gone mad' arguments recycled over and over.

Side point - the 'safe spaces are infantilising' argument doesn't wash in a society largely dedicated to the ongoing infantilisation of people by making them too scared to speak any kind of truth to anyone more powerful than them for fear of losing their job, house, liberty etc.

 

[luka]

You did say that it's true but because you put that one the one hand it made me feel you were conflating the two

 

[Benny Bunter]

You did say that it's true but because you put that one the one hand it made me feel you were conflating the two

thought youd know me better than that by now luka

 

[luka]

Fair enough. I apologise.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I think its important not to conflate safe spaces and no platforming. The former is (or should) be about letting everyones voices be heard, the latter clearly isn't.

In theory a safe space is somewhere everyone's voice can be heard. In practice it means anyone can say anything they like as long as it isn't perceived to contravene a rather narrow range of opinions that have become an orthodoxy over the last couple of decades. Any dissenting opinion is liable to give offence and be seen as attack on someone else, and moreover on the sort of person they are, and is thus absolutely taboo.

Further, because offence is entirely in the eye of the offendee, that means I can 'call you out' (force you to shut up) pretty much for no reason other than I don't like the tone of your voice. Especially if you happen to be a white male and I'm not.

 

[luka]

Surely all of us are too old to have direct experience of a safe space?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Also it's rather disingenuous to treat safe spaces and no-platforming as two separate phenomena. The entire reasoning behind no-platforming is supposedly to make the whole university a safe space at all times - the implication being that universities are unacceptably dangerous places if people with views that dissent from the orthodoxy are allowed to speak, or in some instances even to be physically allowed on the campus. And yes, this is often phrased in terms of physical danger.

 

[luka]

How many safe spaces have you been in?

 

[Mr. Tea]

Surely all of us are too old to have direct experience of a safe space?

But that's just the thing - the cloisters of UCL weren't exactly south-central LA when I went up waaay back in 1999. There were plenty of safe spaces already - a Women's Society and an LGBT Society and an Asian Society and societies for followers of every religion going. It just wasn't a widely used term in those days. And somehow people weren't committing suicide all over the place just because there was also a Conservative Society and a Friends of Israel society.

 

[luka]

Why don't you address the points I've made? Why do you keep shifting terrain? It's slimy.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Im not saying the two phenomena are totally unrelated, and i agree the safe space concept has been corrupted to some extent resulting in no platforming as an extreme manifestation of it. But like luka said, the original concept is valid i think.

 

[Mr. Tea]

How many safe spaces have you been in?

Well I'm a straight white non-religious British male, just like you, so I have no need of a safe space and would very likely be highly unwelcome in one anyway.

But as I said, the no-platforming thing comes from an insistence that the whole institution must remain free from 'dangerous' ideas at all times.

 

[luka]

It's just yiu seem so knowledgeable about how they work in practice

 

[luka]

I find that peculiar. It raises an eyebrow.

 

[baboon2004]

In theory a safe space is somewhere everyone's voice can be heard. In practice it means anyone can say anything they like as long as it isn't perceived to contravene a rather narrow range of opinions that have become an orthodoxy over the last couple of decades.

Sounds a bit like Western liberal democracy when you put it that way.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It's just yiu seem so knowledgeable about how they work in practice

I've read plenty about them, and much of it written by intelligent people with good progressive credentials. News stories in publications generally sympathetic to feminism, anti-colonialism, identity politics generally. I have friends who are students or academics.

 

[firefinga]

Further, because offence is entirely in the eye of the offendee

Being "offended" by whatever is already a self fulfilling self-victimisation.

 

[luka]

I'm saying that safe spaces are an honest and not entirely stupid attempt to address a really existing social/political problem. You, it seems to me, are denying there's a problem in the first place.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Being "offended" by whatever is already a self fulfilling self-victimisation.

I think there is a valid conversation to be had about identity politics, 'special snowflakes' who like to take offence at everything and self victimisation etc. But as it stands you just sound smug and cruel