I love your $0.02 as always. Eventually between the pair of us depositing our $0.02 on each other’s writing, we’ll have enough for a house.
My comment on ‘safe spaces’ was meant independently of the ‘safe space’ movement on college campuses — that’s a whole other can of worms. It was more about the concepts that are inherent in forming laws and guidelines by liberal agendas.
Ultimately if you create a series of rules based on the feelings of one group of people, whoever they may be, you open yourself up to the challenge of needing to do it for everyone. That’s the difference between ‘feeling safe’ and ‘being safe’. Liberalism at its core wants everyone to grow up feeling safe — this is counter productive, because you can’t have objective law making on subjective feelings.
Instead you’ll sow the seeds of discord, type of people (X) are allowed to re-write the social contract to suit them, as an individual (Y) I must also be allowed to re-write the social contract. And in an equal and individualistic society, this will always play out.
And that’s why I wrote this article — not because I think Robert Foster has a real need for a chaperone (because I don’t think he does). I think the Billy Graham rule is insane…. but that creating a world where subjective feelings around personal safety outweigh the objective dangers presented is a dangerous road to go down.
And yes, feminism can argue that no woman should be put into a place where they feel like their life is in danger — but the outcome of running the social contract in that way is acceptance of the Billy Graham rule too. That rule can (and will be) used to exclude women — the curated article I wrote this piece in response to highlighted that.
The more unpopular (and hardly ever curated) position is one that sees both the rise of the right and the left as infantilisation of the discourse. The idea that there are goodies and badies, right and wrong, that with enough will power we can do away with complexity and nuance. We can’t and we’ll just find ourselves mired in infinitely more simplistic and divisive positions.
