comelately

Wild Horses
I've made one very simple, very modest argument, consistently, and you've yet to engage with it in any substantive way. Instead you've identified safe spaces as spaces designed to lock out people like you. But anyone trying to lock out a Reasonable Man must, by definition, be unreasonable. It's a threat to free speech. It's an emotional response, exactly the response the stories you read are designed to trigger.

I pointed out that Tea's rhetoric had basically become a set of Breitbart talking points, and he responded with something like 'Yeah, I am basically Hitler' - which is another stock Alt-Right response. I mean yeah, his schtick is probably more Toby Young than Milo but it's a slippery slope - https://www.theguardian.com/comment...got-sam-harris-milo-yiannopoulos-islamophobia
 

firefinga

Well-known member
That "no platform" thing again is very easy to understand. Let's say you organise a (panel) debate on some "controversial" topic, and bill that as an "open debate" - then you'd better invite some people who will have differing opinions, and those opinions being somewhat backed by facts/arguments etc. If you invite a bunch of people who agree on everything anyways, there's no "open debate" of course.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
I didn't mean to imply that there are infact no examples of "no platforming (being) used and justified in this way", but I think it is much better form to point out the specifics rather than indulge in dishonest lost performatives and universal quantifiers like "The *entire* reasoning behind no-platforming is *supposedly* to make the whole university a safe space at all times", and statements like "I honestly don't think *this* is really about safe spaces and free speech" aren't that much better. I don't really see a lot of evidence on any side that people are particularly interested in having "honest debates", though I think it would be good to understand what people think honest debating actually looks like.

Ok, I think the question of what an honest debate actually looks like is a good one.

To clarify a little what I meant, when I said 'this' I suppose I was really referring to the debates and issues affecting women we were talking about (Greer, Bindle etc), where I suspect structural sexism is the (often ignored) underlying factor that our concepts of 'safe spaces' and 'free speech' are actually built on, and which makes the possibility of an 'honest' debate pretty remote. And excluding from debates feminists, the very people who are most likely to recognise and talk about this structural oppression, makes that possibility even more remote.

When Luka mentioned female-only groups as safe spaces near the beginning of this conversation it made me think, yes, this is fine and necessary. But to make any profound structural change, to build an effective political movement, at some point the ideas that come from these groups have to be carried over into the wider world. And this is where the problems begin. Subsumed into larger umbrella groups like LGBT their voices get drowned out, they get talked over by men (because anyone pretending that the LGBT isn't also dominated by male voices is very naive) and they even end up participating in excluding/no platforming feminists from the outside who could actually help their cause.

Similarly, 'free speech', in reality, often just means free speech for men.

Maybe, just maybe, if this structural oppression didn't exist then a truly honest debate might be possible. But until then, I think fighting to include feminists in debates at universities is a noble cause, even if you don't think that constitutes being interested in an 'honest' debate. You may think that being no platformed doesn't really matter, that they still have a voice that they can express elsewhere. But I think any advance in this area can only be a positive thing and is worth fighting for. Feminist women shouldn't be told that they might as well give up and go elsewhere, back to their little bubbles or media echo chambers.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
So this safe space thing is just about joining a club for minority groups and talking about things with other people from that group? Don't see a problem with that. That's what student clubs do anyway, surely? And what people do in general, in fact.

People really don't like to have their beliefs challenged, still less to give up those beliefs. It's interesting, actually, in the context of this thread to consider how people's instinctive, unexamined opinions and instincts are the foundation upon which various supportive structures are erected.

At the risk of pissing off Craner I read this by John Gray today, a review of a book about communists/lefties who became righties: http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/04/left-wing-firebrands-who-turned-right Interesting (and bound to be disputed/disproved by someone on here) point about former zealous leftists taking their zealotry with them and applying it to conservatism.
 
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firefinga

Well-known member
So this safe space thing is just about joining a club for minority groups and talking about things with other people from that group? Don't see a problem with that.
It goes way further, bc pretty much everything in those groups seems to revovle around that "minority" status, thus mirror-imaging the stigma - or often imagined stigma.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Do you mean that because these groups are identifying themselves as requiring a safe space, they are only further marginalising themselves?

Are opinions censored within these safe spaces, or are you okay so long as you belong to the particular group?
 

firefinga

Well-known member
Do you mean that because these groups are identifying themselves as requiring a safe space, they are only further marginalising themselves?
To a great extent, yes.

I often have the impression that this lamenting "My voice don't get heard, and that's bc I am a minority" is neglecting the contents. Maybe people chose NOT to listen to you not bc you are memeber from a minority group, but possibly what you talk is basically rubbish.
 
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comelately

Wild Horses
But I think any advance in this area can only be a positive thing and is worth fighting for.

Fair enough I suppose, but I can't really get behind such an extreme line of thinking, and find it really hard to imagine wanting to fight for it.

So this safe space thing is just about joining a club for minority groups and talking about things with other people from that group? Don't see a problem with that. That's what student clubs do anyway, surely? And what people do in general, in fact.

And no platforming is a form of deciding who you don't want that group. This is the thing I find weird. Apparently you have to be against free association to be for free speech now; it's not that I have a problem with that per se, it's more the contortions required to dress it up as some kind of libertarian, or even 'classical liberal' position, rather than something much more structuralist, that I have a problem with.

People really don't like to have their beliefs challenged, still less to give up those beliefs. It's interesting, actually, in the context of this thread to consider how people's instinctive, unexamined opinions and instincts are the foundation upon which various supportive structures are erected.

Quite so. NLP is one of those things that is a bit like tantric sex, pretty much entirely the wrong people do it for pretty much entirely the wrong reasons - and that includes most of the trainers. But when you come to understand the meta-model as a listening tool, and develop an ear for how people distort, delete and generalise in order to form their beliefs, well it really is quite eye opening.
 
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Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I guess it can sometimes be used as an excuse, but I don't doubt that in certain environments it's white men who speak with the most confidence, and are listened to most attentively.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I pointed out that Tea's rhetoric had basically become a set of Breitbart talking points, and he responded with something like 'Yeah, I am basically Hitler' - which is another stock Alt-Right response. I mean yeah, his schtick is probably more Toby Young than Milo but it's a slippery slope - https://www.theguardian.com/comment...got-sam-harris-milo-yiannopoulos-islamophobia

Good god, man. Talk about a stuck record. I'm an 'Islamophobe' now as well? Lol, if you insist.

I see you wrote a thousand-word thinkpiece in response to one of my posts a page or two back. I'm afraid it was a wasted effort as I'm not going to read it, because I know it'll begin, continue and end with a studied mischaracterization of my position.
 
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luka

Well-known member
not everything has to or should revolve around debate as zero sum blood sport. a group can form to hash out a common position and strategy for action. if our goal as a group is to foment communist revolution i don't see any value in inviting a Randian libertarian-capitalist to participate. If we are constantly having to squabble over first principles it's impossible to make any headway at all. excluding people who's agenda doesn't go beyond point scoring and kneejerk dissent is just common sense.
 

luka

Well-known member
there's all sorts of reasons to join groups and groups always exclude people by accident or design. i mean, this is a m0ron discussion at this point.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
You don't have positions you have emotional reactions to stories in the media which are designed to provoke emotional reactions. Primary school teacher in Kidderminster bans baa baa black sheep. Pc gone mental. Your brain can't go beyond basic harrumphing and world gone madding.

I made an assertion - that the current culture of safe spaces and no-platforming is having a psychologically and intellectually unhealthy effect on universities. I posted an example that I think illustrates my point. You could have said "No Tea, you're wrong, because..." and then explained why my position was mistaken. But instead you just claimed that the events described never happened and casually dropped the New York Times into the same category of journalistic integrity as The Sun (!), and since then all you've done is try to paint me as some swivel-eyed loon of the sort who fulminates about straight bananas and the war on Christmas.

And on your side, all you do is make a load of bald assertions and declare that you've "won" the thread, whatever that means.
 

droid

Well-known member
Genuinely not meant as a personal attack - but in the context of this discussion, I do wonder how many pages of Dissensus have been dedicated to attempts to escape Tea's rhetorical doldrums.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
there's all sorts of reasons to join groups and groups always exclude people by accident or design. i mean, this is a m0ron discussion at this point.

Yeah, I get that, of course. If the debate is about the best way to tackle climate change, it makes perfect sense no invite a speaker who claims it's not even real. The problem arises when a dishonest definition of 'hate speech' is used in such a way as to define it as 'anything I disagree with'.
 

luka

Well-known member
Genuinely not meant as a personal attack - but in the context of this discussion, I do wonder how many pages of Dissensus have been dedicated to attempts to escape Tea's rhetorical doldrums.

he ruins discussions. hes an obstructionist. on any other forum he would have been marked down as a shill or a narc. its only our tiny size and our insignificance that makes that seem so unlikely. Genuinely not meant as a personal attack, but also true.
 
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