6 ms·

While I agree that there should be some places that are safe spaces, especially for people at risk of harassment/worse, it's become a tool for silencing dissent

While I agree that there should be some places that are safe spaces, especially for people at risk of harassment/worse, it's become a tool for silencing dissenting opinions on the worst campuses, and simply overused in general. Trigger warning are absolute BS. If half as many of these kids that think they have it actually have PTSD then we are doing something VERY wrong to our kids. PTSD is the new ADHD. The problem is that that they have not been taught that you can at your core hate what someone is saying, and want to disagree violently, and still have a debate or discussion continue without shutting down. They have been taught from early on that just because they have a thought, it must be their truth- so everyone is running around following their own religion. Life doesn't have warning labels, shit happens, a parent's job is to raise a child who can handle life's trials (mostly) on their own. Parents are mistaking their kids for friends and doing none of the hard work of getting a child in control of their thoughts and emotions. My 3 year old when angry/upset/injured generally resets by stopping, taking a deep breath, and gathering himself mentally. He does this on his own without prompting most of the time. My 18 month old does the same with prompting. It wasn't easy or fun to take a wailing baby and coach them through calming themselves down, but now they can do it- and when life hits my 3 year old in the face, often literally, he practices tools to calm himself down and regroup that these 'adults' can't even manage.

mfringel 10y ago
So you agree that some places should be safe spaces?
- mschuster91 10y ago
  Some places (e.g. shelters for abused people) must be "safe spaces" to protect their occupants. Common public places however must remain open for debate and free speech (of course limited by laws prohibiting libel, Holocaust denial etc).
  - DanBC 10y ago
    > of course limited by laws prohibiting libel, Holocaust denial etc). And here we see the really tricky cultural clash problem. Some Americans and most Europeans will say that there are obvious limits to free speech - holocaust denial, hate speech, fighting words, etc. But there's a sizable number of Americans (and probably a smaller number of Europeans) who'll say there should be almost no limits to freedom of speech. (Maybe a ban on distributing images of child sexual abuse, but just about everything else is fair game). Here's an English politician - Luciana Berger, showing a sample of the anti-semitic hate speech she regularly receives. Some people say that's clearly not acceptable and that Twitter should ban those users (I tend to agree with them). But a sizable number of people say it's fair enough - she's a politician, she's in the public eye, she can just block those users herself, she should put up with it, she should grow a thicker skin, etc. https://twitter.com/lucianaberger/status/725635171295330304/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/lucianaberger/status/725635171295330304/... Working out which laws are useful to follow, and which are probably a bit too restrictive, would probably be helpful. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-court-idUSKCN0PA14120150630 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-court-idUSKCN0PA1... Or insult my old employer, even if I'm not in the country when I do so? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/unitedarabemirates/11453658/American-arrested-in-UAE-after-criticising-employer-on-Facebook.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/uniteda...
    - manyxcxi 10y ago
      This is why I think it's both important that there are places people can go to avoid free speech (safe spaces), and also why we shouldn't just blanket label entire buildings/campuses/cities as safe spaces. If you were, say, a 20 year old female rape survivor it would be reasonable to expect that the campus Women's Center, which has been labeled a safe space for the purpose of my argument (and hopefully in real life), and expect that you wouldn't be confronted with someone standing at a pulpit declaring all the virtues of rape. Or denying rape, etc. etc. There should be buildings like this that are accessible to everyone. There should be support systems in place in society (college campuses included) that would allow someone to work through this, meet with similar individuals, and get proper help. However, if there is a speaker in an auditorium who has been invited to discuss his new book detailing how a rape culture has propelled industrialized society forward, he should be allowed to present his argument in that space. You, and anyone else that wants to join you, should be free to protest the living hell out of that outside the auditorium. However crazy his argument may be, we have buildings and spaces that were designed to present them. On a college campus, there's probably 50 spaces to do this. At least in the states, it's still really important to a lot of people that we can have 'crazy' people say 'crazy' things. If we want to keep that, it is important for people to be available to seek shelter from those crazy things, but we can't make the whole world a shelter.
- lsadam0 10y ago
  That's literally the opening line of the response. You conveniently ignored the meat of a well constructed point in an attempt to quickly show that OP agrees with you. OP has correctly exemplified the idea of 'safe spaces' being used to silence debate and discussion. Thus allowing every individual to possess their own subjective truth, and conveniently dispose with hard realities when their beliefs are in conflict with said realities. This is exactly the same as the far right in America conveniently ignoring the reality of climate change. I'm all for oppressed groups having a safe space and living their lives freely, but the danger here is individuals retreating to a 'safe space' every time life hands them lemons. We didn't progress this far in human culture by tip toeing around beliefs.
  - mfringel 10y ago
    I did not ignore the rest of the argument at all. I was indirectly pointing out that the OP had used the first line, not as a statement of belief, but as a token so that they could say the rest of what they actually believe. Similarly, you say "I'm all for oppressed groups having a safe space and living their lives freely", followed by "but", followed by what you seem to actually believe. Which one of your statements is true?
    - lsadam0 10y ago
      You fail to understand that this issue is not binary. It is not required to be either fully supportive or fully against safe spaces. Safe spaces can be valuable. The original article, OP, and myself are showing a concern at the usage of safe spaces to silence debate. We shouldn't train people to retreat when their beliefs are challenged. We shouldn't train people to hold their opinions as some strange mix of subjective absolute truth. We are all wrong sometimes, and we all need to be challenged.
      - mfringel 10y ago
        I appreciate your concern. I'm also very interested in hearing your opinion on what the role of safe spaces should be, and where they are proper.
- april1stislame 10y ago
  Safe spaces are children moves...
kaitai 10y ago
Part of the problem, though, is on the other side: if a student says, "This (action) causes harm to members of these groups in this way," that student is using words to start a discussion about the topic at hand. It seems that many people find this discussion itself offensive -- polite people don't talk about racism, sexism, etc., because calling out someone's bad manners is worse than having bad manners in the first place. (That is what my grandfather taught me.) A lot of the students decried in articles like the original are using calm, controlled, verbal arguments to represent their point of view -- but then that's represented as silencing. I guess I do see a generational gap. Young people say, "What you said is an example of a microaggression." Old people hear, "You're a racist so you can't talk, and mentioning this microaggression means I'm so afraid of conflict I can't compete with China in the new world economy, except I just started a conflict by stating the truth as I see it instead of shutting up and rolling over like I would have in the old days, so maybe I can compete with China...?."
- egjerlow 10y ago
  I think what is troubling, if anything, to the 'old people' (and probably not just those), is that when arguments such as this starts getting validity beyond being appeals to civility - i.e. when someone is effectively able to stop discussion of a subject because they claim to be 'harmed' by it - it completely changes the context of the discussion and IMO, hinders constructive discourse. So, if safe spaces are to be a 'thing', then we have to be very clear that they must have a very well-defined limit, beyond which regular discourse can continue.
  - kaitai 10y ago
    Agreed!
- talmand 10y ago
  It's not that "old people" think they hear such things, in some cases those things are actually stated. That's the problem as I see it, the people who use calm, controlled, verbal arguments are drowned out by the idiots who think shutting down opposing viewpoints is justified. These idiots exist in all spectrums of discussion of any topic, some are just louder than others. The calm ones tend to, unfortunately, get lumped into that crowd.
doki_pen 10y ago
You have no idea what you are talking about and are projecting your own life experience on the many people who have actually experienced trauma.It's not something that can't be measured. It's very real and has clear cut physiological risks. http://advocatingopportunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ACE-Score-Tied-to-HT-.pdf http://advocatingopportunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/...
- manyxcxi 10y ago
  The thing is, you have no idea what I've experienced- nor am I going to start comparing life stories. Nor do I know what you have experienced. You are assuming that everyone has actually experienced trauma, I'm saying that what a lot of these people feel is traumatic because they weren't equipped with the tools to deal with it in the first place. If you get in a head on collision in a 50 year old car with no seat belt, you will likely die at most speeds. If you do the same in a brand new car with all the safety tools necessary you can walk away completely unscathed. Or somewhere in between- each collision happens in it's own way. We're taking our kids today and stripping out their air bags. I'm saying that if a discussion, even if heated, renders you generally traumatized AND you weren't a victim of some abuse or 'real' trauma, it's because the people who had a hand in raising you completely failed you. I'm not saying you're not traumatized, I'm saying you wouldn't have been if your parents, educators, and elders did their damn job.
  - doki_pen 10y ago
    It sounds like you are coming from a place of extreme privilege. Many many many people have terrible parents.
    - manyxcxi 10y ago
      I was extremely privileged to have good parents. My parents were very young when they had me and I got the privilege of living in a war zone as a child just old enough to remember it. My privilege is that I experienced life events that many of these kids will never face anywhere near and my parents did their job raising me to be able to handle it. So yeah, I had good parents that loved me, showed me that, and made sure I knew how to take care of myself and I was extremely privileged compared to the zombie parents 'raising' kids today.
paulcole 10y ago
>Life doesn't have warning labels Yes, it does. They're call trigger warnings and when used appropriately quite effective.
- luckroy 10y ago
  Do you have any supporting evidence for this? Not trolling here; I'm genuinely curious.
burkaman 10y ago
> If half as many of these kids that think they have it actually have PTSD then we are doing something VERY wrong to our kids. Yes, people who were raped or abused or assaulted could have PTSD, and yes it does mean we're doing something VERY wrong to them. > Life doesn't have warning labels Well, it could, right? Life didn't have a safety net until we created welfare and social security. Life didn't have training wheels until we created a robust schooling system. Your kids sound great, but I think you're arguing against a particular subset of trigger warnings that everyone here would agree is dumb. There are uses that do much more good than harm.
- hashkb 10y ago
  > that everyone here would agree is dumb Trigger warning: I don't agree. And I think your tone is a bit aggressive.
  - burkaman 10y ago
    Yeah, this doesn't really seem like a big deal. If people don't want to engage with you, don't engage with them. It's not like you would have had a meaningful conversation if trigger warnings didn't exist, they still would have ignored whatever you said.
- manyxcxi 10y ago
  > Yes, people who were raped or abused or assaulted could have PTSD, and yes it does mean we're doing something VERY wrong to them. Yeah, I would expect some of the worst possible things that could happen to someone would leave a mental mark on the victim. I think most people would. These aren't the people I'm talking about and you know that. >> Life doesn't have warning labels > Well, it could, right? Life didn't have a safety net until we created welfare and social security. Life didn't have training wheels until we created a robust schooling system. The more you hold someone's hand through life, the less they are able to do for themselves as adults. Research is continuing to prove this out, how helicopter parenting is destroying kids emotional IQ. They don't know how to deal with life, mom does that for them. Things like outlawing two hand touch football, dodgeball, even tag and king of the hill at school in order to keep kids safe are rendering them unable to navigate social constructs on their own. Free play allows kids to participate in rule making and enforcing on their own, generating their own social constructs, and dealing with the consequences all their own. Think about all the shouting matches of "I tagged you, your out!" and "No you didn't!". These are all ridiculously important to the development of kids and it's the thing schools at all levels are cutting the most. Recess and PE are essentially gone from schools. PE teachers have been axed and the regular teachers, with no interest in or time to study PE now teach the classes. If kids start playing tag, they're suspended for aggressive anti-social behavior. It's possibly the most social thing they could ever do at a young age. The notion that everyone should be coddled so that no one may suffer is not only belittling to everyone in society, basically affirming you believe that no one is capable of handling their own affairs without help at every step, but it leads to a bunch of people with their brains half turned off and under developed. You want Idiocracy to come true? Don't worry about Trump, keep up with the safe spaces and trigger warnings. Keep screaming at your kid's teacher until they get that A instead of a C-. Keep letting your kid think that the world should be smooth sailing and if it's not you should give up. Keep that up and we'll have it during my kids' generation.

mfringel 10y ago

So you agree that some places should be safe spaces?

mschuster91 10y ago
Some places (e.g. shelters for abused people) must be "safe spaces" to protect their occupants. Common public places however must remain open for debate and free speech (of course limited by laws prohibiting libel, Holocaust denial etc).
- DanBC 10y ago
  > of course limited by laws prohibiting libel, Holocaust denial etc). And here we see the really tricky cultural clash problem. Some Americans and most Europeans will say that there are obvious limits to free speech - holocaust denial, hate speech, fighting words, etc. But there's a sizable number of Americans (and probably a smaller number of Europeans) who'll say there should be almost no limits to freedom of speech. (Maybe a ban on distributing images of child sexual abuse, but just about everything else is fair game). Here's an English politician - Luciana Berger, showing a sample of the anti-semitic hate speech she regularly receives. Some people say that's clearly not acceptable and that Twitter should ban those users (I tend to agree with them). But a sizable number of people say it's fair enough - she's a politician, she's in the public eye, she can just block those users herself, she should put up with it, she should grow a thicker skin, etc. https://twitter.com/lucianaberger/status/725635171295330304/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw https://twitter.com/lucianaberger/status/725635171295330304/... Working out which laws are useful to follow, and which are probably a bit too restrictive, would probably be helpful. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-court-idUSKCN0PA14120150630 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-emirates-court-idUSKCN0PA1... Or insult my old employer, even if I'm not in the country when I do so? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/unitedarabemirates/11453658/American-arrested-in-UAE-after-criticising-employer-on-Facebook.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/uniteda...
  - manyxcxi 10y ago
    This is why I think it's both important that there are places people can go to avoid free speech (safe spaces), and also why we shouldn't just blanket label entire buildings/campuses/cities as safe spaces. If you were, say, a 20 year old female rape survivor it would be reasonable to expect that the campus Women's Center, which has been labeled a safe space for the purpose of my argument (and hopefully in real life), and expect that you wouldn't be confronted with someone standing at a pulpit declaring all the virtues of rape. Or denying rape, etc. etc. There should be buildings like this that are accessible to everyone. There should be support systems in place in society (college campuses included) that would allow someone to work through this, meet with similar individuals, and get proper help. However, if there is a speaker in an auditorium who has been invited to discuss his new book detailing how a rape culture has propelled industrialized society forward, he should be allowed to present his argument in that space. You, and anyone else that wants to join you, should be free to protest the living hell out of that outside the auditorium. However crazy his argument may be, we have buildings and spaces that were designed to present them. On a college campus, there's probably 50 spaces to do this. At least in the states, it's still really important to a lot of people that we can have 'crazy' people say 'crazy' things. If we want to keep that, it is important for people to be available to seek shelter from those crazy things, but we can't make the whole world a shelter.
lsadam0 10y ago
That's literally the opening line of the response. You conveniently ignored the meat of a well constructed point in an attempt to quickly show that OP agrees with you. OP has correctly exemplified the idea of 'safe spaces' being used to silence debate and discussion. Thus allowing every individual to possess their own subjective truth, and conveniently dispose with hard realities when their beliefs are in conflict with said realities. This is exactly the same as the far right in America conveniently ignoring the reality of climate change. I'm all for oppressed groups having a safe space and living their lives freely, but the danger here is individuals retreating to a 'safe space' every time life hands them lemons. We didn't progress this far in human culture by tip toeing around beliefs.
- mfringel 10y ago
  I did not ignore the rest of the argument at all. I was indirectly pointing out that the OP had used the first line, not as a statement of belief, but as a token so that they could say the rest of what they actually believe. Similarly, you say "I'm all for oppressed groups having a safe space and living their lives freely", followed by "but", followed by what you seem to actually believe. Which one of your statements is true?
  - lsadam0 10y ago
    You fail to understand that this issue is not binary. It is not required to be either fully supportive or fully against safe spaces. Safe spaces can be valuable. The original article, OP, and myself are showing a concern at the usage of safe spaces to silence debate. We shouldn't train people to retreat when their beliefs are challenged. We shouldn't train people to hold their opinions as some strange mix of subjective absolute truth. We are all wrong sometimes, and we all need to be challenged.
    - mfringel 10y ago
      I appreciate your concern. I'm also very interested in hearing your opinion on what the role of safe spaces should be, and where they are proper.
april1stislame 10y ago
Safe spaces are children moves...

kaitai 10y ago

Part of the problem, though, is on the other side: if a student says, "This (action) causes harm to members of these groups in this way," that student is using words to start a discussion about the topic at hand. It seems that many people find this discussion itself offensive -- polite people don't talk about racism, sexism, etc., because calling out someone's bad manners is worse than having bad manners in the first place. (That is what my grandfather taught me.) A lot of the students decried in articles like the original are using calm, controlled, verbal arguments to represent their point of view -- but then that's represented as silencing. I guess I do see a generational gap. Young people say, "What you said is an example of a microaggression." Old people hear, "You're a racist so you can't talk, and mentioning this microaggression means I'm so afraid of conflict I can't compete with China in the new world economy, except I just started a conflict by stating the truth as I see it instead of shutting up and rolling over like I would have in the old days, so maybe I can compete with China...?."

egjerlow 10y ago
I think what is troubling, if anything, to the 'old people' (and probably not just those), is that when arguments such as this starts getting validity beyond being appeals to civility - i.e. when someone is effectively able to stop discussion of a subject because they claim to be 'harmed' by it - it completely changes the context of the discussion and IMO, hinders constructive discourse. So, if safe spaces are to be a 'thing', then we have to be very clear that they must have a very well-defined limit, beyond which regular discourse can continue.
- kaitai 10y ago
  Agreed!
talmand 10y ago
It's not that "old people" think they hear such things, in some cases those things are actually stated. That's the problem as I see it, the people who use calm, controlled, verbal arguments are drowned out by the idiots who think shutting down opposing viewpoints is justified. These idiots exist in all spectrums of discussion of any topic, some are just louder than others. The calm ones tend to, unfortunately, get lumped into that crowd.

doki_pen 10y ago

You have no idea what you are talking about and are projecting your own life experience on the many people who have actually experienced trauma.It's not something that can't be measured. It's very real and has clear cut physiological risks. http://advocatingopportunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ACE-Score-Tied-to-HT-.pdf http://advocatingopportunity.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/...

manyxcxi 10y ago
The thing is, you have no idea what I've experienced- nor am I going to start comparing life stories. Nor do I know what you have experienced. You are assuming that everyone has actually experienced trauma, I'm saying that what a lot of these people feel is traumatic because they weren't equipped with the tools to deal with it in the first place. If you get in a head on collision in a 50 year old car with no seat belt, you will likely die at most speeds. If you do the same in a brand new car with all the safety tools necessary you can walk away completely unscathed. Or somewhere in between- each collision happens in it's own way. We're taking our kids today and stripping out their air bags. I'm saying that if a discussion, even if heated, renders you generally traumatized AND you weren't a victim of some abuse or 'real' trauma, it's because the people who had a hand in raising you completely failed you. I'm not saying you're not traumatized, I'm saying you wouldn't have been if your parents, educators, and elders did their damn job.
- doki_pen 10y ago
  It sounds like you are coming from a place of extreme privilege. Many many many people have terrible parents.
  - manyxcxi 10y ago
    I was extremely privileged to have good parents. My parents were very young when they had me and I got the privilege of living in a war zone as a child just old enough to remember it. My privilege is that I experienced life events that many of these kids will never face anywhere near and my parents did their job raising me to be able to handle it. So yeah, I had good parents that loved me, showed me that, and made sure I knew how to take care of myself and I was extremely privileged compared to the zombie parents 'raising' kids today.

paulcole 10y ago

>Life doesn't have warning labels Yes, it does. They're call trigger warnings and when used appropriately quite effective.

luckroy 10y ago
Do you have any supporting evidence for this? Not trolling here; I'm genuinely curious.

burkaman 10y ago

> If half as many of these kids that think they have it actually have PTSD then we are doing something VERY wrong to our kids. Yes, people who were raped or abused or assaulted could have PTSD, and yes it does mean we're doing something VERY wrong to them. > Life doesn't have warning labels Well, it could, right? Life didn't have a safety net until we created welfare and social security. Life didn't have training wheels until we created a robust schooling system. Your kids sound great, but I think you're arguing against a particular subset of trigger warnings that everyone here would agree is dumb. There are uses that do much more good than harm.

hashkb 10y ago
> that everyone here would agree is dumb Trigger warning: I don't agree. And I think your tone is a bit aggressive.
- burkaman 10y ago
  Yeah, this doesn't really seem like a big deal. If people don't want to engage with you, don't engage with them. It's not like you would have had a meaningful conversation if trigger warnings didn't exist, they still would have ignored whatever you said.
manyxcxi 10y ago
> Yes, people who were raped or abused or assaulted could have PTSD, and yes it does mean we're doing something VERY wrong to them. Yeah, I would expect some of the worst possible things that could happen to someone would leave a mental mark on the victim. I think most people would. These aren't the people I'm talking about and you know that. >> Life doesn't have warning labels > Well, it could, right? Life didn't have a safety net until we created welfare and social security. Life didn't have training wheels until we created a robust schooling system. The more you hold someone's hand through life, the less they are able to do for themselves as adults. Research is continuing to prove this out, how helicopter parenting is destroying kids emotional IQ. They don't know how to deal with life, mom does that for them. Things like outlawing two hand touch football, dodgeball, even tag and king of the hill at school in order to keep kids safe are rendering them unable to navigate social constructs on their own. Free play allows kids to participate in rule making and enforcing on their own, generating their own social constructs, and dealing with the consequences all their own. Think about all the shouting matches of "I tagged you, your out!" and "No you didn't!". These are all ridiculously important to the development of kids and it's the thing schools at all levels are cutting the most. Recess and PE are essentially gone from schools. PE teachers have been axed and the regular teachers, with no interest in or time to study PE now teach the classes. If kids start playing tag, they're suspended for aggressive anti-social behavior. It's possibly the most social thing they could ever do at a young age. The notion that everyone should be coddled so that no one may suffer is not only belittling to everyone in society, basically affirming you believe that no one is capable of handling their own affairs without help at every step, but it leads to a bunch of people with their brains half turned off and under developed. You want Idiocracy to come true? Don't worry about Trump, keep up with the safe spaces and trigger warnings. Keep screaming at your kid's teacher until they get that A instead of a C-. Keep letting your kid think that the world should be smooth sailing and if it's not you should give up. Keep that up and we'll have it during my kids' generation.