Bloom County's Take on "Safe Spaces" (so far)

[maarsen]

There is a bit of oppression in any extreme position, left or right. I am sure somewhere these is an extremist moderate. Moderation in everything, OR ELSE!

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

There is a bit of oppression in any extreme position, left or right. I am sure somewhere these is an extremist moderate. Moderation in everything, OR ELSE!

SO MUCH THIS. The strip just illustrates how the position can be taken to an unreasonable extreme. It's not like you're going to allow your child to stay home from school because they feel that they are teaching them "White Guilt". Or allow them to curtail the discussion about bad grades because they are in their room which they've declared a "Safe Space". 

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

I see people older than me kick and scream at the idea of treating the younger work force in any way different than they were treated by their post Vietnam mentors and supervisors.  But to actually get the job done, you have to respect that the workforce they are presented has, as a whole, accepted that they want to be talks to and treated in a manner that doesn't really line up with their perceived reality.  

 

I see this trend changing the way I have to approach the folks that are coming into the world, and I'm not sure if it scares the shit out of me, or if it's just something I should get used to. 

 

eta:  and what is this 'real world' you live in?  I'm in one of the most ball busting, alpha male, savage working career fields in the world, and we still have to adapt to the folks cycling out of school. 

Let's face it, those folks are fossils who are not likely to survive the next wave if they don't adapt. The workplace is a "Safe Place" for all intents and purposes in this day and age. If your job has an HR department, you sure as hell better know your audience before you bust balls in any sort of inappropriate way. 

 I thought you mentioned before that you work out of your home more often than not. 

[ThePrunesThatWasPromised]

Safe space takes the idea of an equal opportunity employer which has existed for like 40 years already; then acts like its the employers job to make their employees feel 'comfortable'.

Employees who refuse to take criticism are fired frequently at any successful private enterprise, particularly those involving customer service

Where do you work that you can behave like one of these petulant babies from Yale or Missouri?

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

Safe space takes the idea of an equal opportunity employer which has existed for like 40 years already; then acts like its the employers job to make their employees feel 'comfortable'.

 

Employees who refuse to take criticism are fired frequently at any successful private enterprise, particularly those involving customer service.

Well yeah, it's not practical in that sense, but there is a time and place for everything. You're not going to dress a trainee down in front of customers. (a good manager isn't even going to do this in front of other employees) But yeah, if you can't take constructive criticism, good luck learning how to do the job right and hanging onto your job. 

[ThePrunesThatWasPromised]

There's a line between criticism and harassment/ abuse and it's nowhere near where safe spacers draw it.

As such, humoring the notion that the workplace will be a safe space (insofar as its dopey advocates wish to define it) ought to be avoided. It's incompatible with productivity and it does these stupid kids no favors, not that I owe them any.

OTOH, I would delight at the opportunity to shitcan the first hipster who told me I was being toxic because I didn't let him fuck around on Instagram all day.

[peterbound]

Let's face it, those folks are fossils who are not likely to survive the next wave if they don't adapt. The workplace is a "Safe Place" for all intents and purposes in this day and age. If your job has an HR department, you sure as hell better know your audience before you bust balls in any sort of inappropriate way. 

 I thought you mentioned before that you work out of your home more often than not. 

I'm a professional fire fighter for a large metropolitan department.

I'm home a lot, but that's only because I only work 2 days a week.

[Manhole Eunuchsbane]

I'm a professional fire fighter for a large metropolitan department.

 

I'm home a lot, but that's only because I only work 2 days a week.

Ah okay, my dad was a fireman. Very cool. That was my dream job growing up. My dad always had some sort of lucrative sideline going on due to the time off you mentioned. That is a job where you have to put some serious trust in your co-workers for sure, so I can definitely see your point. And those guys would bust some serious balls. His station house was an absolute blast to hangout in. Bunch of really funny, close-knit guys.

[jarl the climber]

Safe spaces are bullshit. I'm sure the folks at Planned Parenthood ,in San Bernadino and the college in Oregon thought they were safe. They promote a disconnect with reality in my mind. At a certain point you have to live your and not go through life being paranoid. At the same time if you treat people like human beings, even if you find a lot of their beliefs objectionable, it usually does the trick. 

[TrackerNeil]

Safe spaces are bullshit. I'm sure the folks at Planned Parenthood ,in San Bernadino and the college in Oregon thought they were safe. They promote a disconnect with reality in my mind. At a certain point you have to live your and not go through life being paranoid. At the same time if you treat people like human beings, even if you find a lot of their beliefs objectionable, it usually does the trick. 

I feel as though this comment does not necessarily reflect what a safe space is. I don't think many people feel as though a safe space is a haven from all conceivable dangers like mass shootings or earthquakes or whatever. Instead, these are places where traditionally marginalized viewpoints are instead the accepted framework, and thus are welcoming to people who hold those viewpoints. I used to attend a group for young gay men (back when I was young), and believe me none of us were confused about what was going on there. We knew that outside (or even inside) that room we were just as vulnerable to gay-bashing as we ever were. Mathew Shepard was murdered at that time, and you'd better believe the horror of that incident was not lost on any of us. (BTW, I'll warrant that Shepard treated most folks like human beings, and yet all the same he wound up beaten and left to die.)

What that room did offer was a place where our concerns were not strange, or weird, or would be met with groans or gasps. We could talk about the things that mattered to us without hearing "ewww gay" or the thousand other slights and insults we'd find most anywhere else. It was refreshing, liberating, and an experience I looked forward to every single week. In my view, that was anything but "bullshit." 

[Lord Mord]

The boy is perverting the notion of safe space and the father is abdicating his responsibility for drawing any distinctions.  If the author's point is to make fun of the very idea of safe zones, then he's failing, because it reads to me as a critique of our failure to engage micro-aggressions seriously.  What I read is that in this country, as observers of this phenomenon, we assume the role of the father, in that we're choosing to frame this as either/or.  Either everybody can claim safety from some form of micro-aggression, to the point that we turn the very notion of responsibility itself into a micro-aggression, or else we have to disregard any talk of zones and trample on everyone's safety.  Since the latter choice carries the greater opprobrium, the father chooses the former, when, of course, the truth is that we don't have to choose between these exaggerated concepts at all.

If the author wants to actually tear down the very idea of safe zones, he'll have to be smarter about it.

[karaddin]

The notion of safe spaces most of the responses in this thread are responding to seems to go beyond strawman into caricature.  As a few of the more recent posters have mentioned, there is more than a little room between the extreme positions and that is where most safe spaces fall.  I just love the idea, that comes up time and time again, that minorities could ever actually hide from the dominant view point and forget what the real world is like.  I also love the rather off topic complaint about young people these days and entitlement, because understanding that your employer has no loyalty to you and seeking an even exchange in the agreement instead of being filled with gratitude to an employer that exploits your labour for their profit is entitlement.

[sologdin]

less caricature than adherence to fascistic monologic imperatives.  fuck 'em.

[peterbound]

The notion of safe spaces most of the responses in this thread are responding to seems to go beyond strawman into caricature.  As a few of the more recent posters have mentioned, there is more than a little room between the extreme positions and that is where most safe spaces fall.  I just love the idea, that comes up time and time again, that minorities could ever actually hide from the dominant view point and forget what the real world is like.  I also love the rather off topic complaint about young people these days and entitlement, because understanding that your employer has no loyalty to you and seeking an even exchange in the agreement instead of being filled with gratitude to an employer that exploits your labour for their profit is entitlement.

I work for the government....at their cost.

I produce almost no income for the state and am one of the largest payroll budgets they have to fill.

And I think you misread my post. I don't care that they are entitled (although they are). What I care about is how much I'm (and by extension my coworkers) will have to adapt to the new norm when they dominate the work force. It's going to happen, and I'm not fighting it, just pointing out that there is a change.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

less caricature than adherence to fascistic monologic imperatives.  fuck 'em.

I prefer the use of Monological Imperatives in Dick and Jane.  It would be a great subject with which to study the dynamics of interbeing along with psychic transrelational gender modes.  (thank you Bill Watterson)

[Altherion]

What happens when the majority of individuals think that safe spaces are a reality and that we should respect them?  I know that it seems as if the idea of safe spaces, trigger words, and all that jazz don't really jive with the reality that I live in, but like entitlement with the current generation, we need to accept that this will indeed be a reality in 10-15 years.  Do we need to adapt to their standards, or will they be forced to adapt to theirs?

There will be some melding of the two, but my best guess is that they will have to adapt to ours more than we have to adapt to theirs. The reason is that all of these new politically correct ideas (safe spaces, microagressions, etc.) impose a non-trivial cost. They can be useful as a therapeutic tool for a small number of individuals who are genuinely damaged enough for their productivity to be impaired, but rolling them out system-wide will be quite expensive.

Let's take the safe space as an example. The obvious part is that you will need a physical space reserved for a certain amount of time. However, this is not all -- there are several questions that require somebody making executive decisions. For example, which groups are entitled to a safe space? Such spaces are by nature exclusionary (ideas which are "safe" to one group can be hostile to another) so you can't just have one, but it's clearly impractical to have one of them for every individual. Furthermore, what constitutes a transgression against the "safety"? There are differences on what is a safe topic within nearly every group. Who gets to make that call? What are the consequences of such a violation? Does the alleged violator get to appeal to yet another authority?

In other words, the implementation of such ideas requires both social and physical infrastructure and this will cost money. It is possible on academic campuses because colleges have been able to increase their prices far in excess of inflation and part of that money went towards developing such an infrastructure (i.e. there are already "diversity officers" and the like). In addition, colleges are dealing with students, not co-workers. This matters because the students usually don't need to work as a coherent unit and most of them are not even aware of what resources have been dedicated to specific groups whereas in a workplace, resource allocation matters a great deal more.

To be honest, I'm not sure that these concepts will survive another 10-15 years even in academia. First, they are antithetical to the fundamental ideas of academia, regardless of which set of ideas one takes to be fundamental. They deliberately restrict the free expression of ideas and thus inhibit learning and growth. They're also not useful as far as getting and keeping a job goes and may actually prove detrimental (your reaction is not unique). Second, they've created a bureaucracy which is currently trying to metastasize into an even bigger bureaucracy. If you look carefully at the recent wave of protests, you may have notice that many of the demands made by the protesters are actually for even more "diversity officers" and faculty in departments which serve the same purpose (i.e. AggrievedGroupX Studies). Here's a nice article about this.

Third and perhaps most importantly, the money that provides support for all of this is not unlimited. The main reason universities have been able to increase costs so much is because of federal loans (link to PDF). This makes them effectively immune to the natural efficiency of market forces, but at the price of depending on the government... and the government is fickle. Academia leans strongly to the left and conservatives have been at odds with it for a long time, but they may soon be in a position where they can actually do something about it. College has never been as expensive and it's not obvious that this extra cost has translated to any value. Worse, the student loans just keep growing and growing (take a look at the first graph here -- it's pretty much a linear increase). Eventually, somebody is going to have to do something about this and depending on who gets to do it, the grievance bureaucracy may be in for a very hard fall.

[ThePrunesThatWasPromised]

"This also gives us an answer to the question of what will happen when the student protesters leave the coddled confines of the university and go out into a world where everyone will not walk on eggshells around them. The answer is that some of them never intend to leave. They hope to occupy some of those faculty and administrative offices and to be campus protesters forever—but with salaries and benefits provided by the very institutions they protest."

Not sure this is true; since safespace cadets seem to have every intention of forcing this ridiculousness on society at large.

Still, the author's heart was in the right place.

No straw man or caricature. These are real demands being made by the apparent leadership of this movement. The straw man being set up is that anyone who opposes this bullshit must be a racist or homophobe or whatever euphemistic nomenclature has replaced those ad hominem attacks in the pseudo sociologist's lexicon.

[TrackerNeil]

There will be some melding of the two, but my best guess is that they will have to adapt to ours more than we have to adapt to theirs. The reason is that all of these new politically correct ideas (safe spaces, microagressions, etc.) impose a non-trivial cost.

I don't want to speak for other minorities, but I can assure you that every gay man in the world is used to adapting to a model that doesn't well suit him.