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Then for heaven's sake, Laurence, define your terms. Remember: Head Shop. Discussion. Not gainsaying. A chimpanzee can disagree.
You define social protection as "the culture insisting on implementation of those legal protections (against physical violence)", and legal protection as the overarching legal prohibitions against physical violence that protect everyone. Except they do not protect everyone, because the US (to take our test case) has not accepted the social imperative to apply those laws universally.
Therefore, which is rather what Disco said, in order to obtain actual redress before the law for having suffered physical violence (and why on Earth are we limiting ourselves to physical violence, by the way? Me no understand..) resources are required. The homeless person is very easy to attack and it is very hard for hir to obtain legal satisfaction due to social factors. The illegal immigrant, if attacked physically or otherwise within the borders of the US, cannot claim the legal protection to which ze is "entitled", because if he does so he will be deported. Therefore, functionally, ze is outside the protections of the law, regardless of hir geographical position.
To which one could reply that that person is already outside the law, and as such not entitled to the same legal protections. Which would be fair enough, but would knock a fairly sizable hole in the universal legal protection previously claimed as the property of every human being (and many domestic pets) within the geographical purview of the US.
Now, Disco, because he is a radical, might suggest that this is part of a policy to eliminate the financially non-viable, by acculturating a retreat of the protection of the law due to "social circumstances", and shrinking the entitlement of Americans to "safe space". This may be where Nick's "gated communities" come in - they are not inclusive but exclusive, that is to say they do not restrict the movement of their occupants, who have cars and alarm buttons and so on, but rather restrict the ingress of those who do not occupy them. Laurence would probably struggle to process this as a concept, and write it off as an insane conspiracy theory making a genocidal plot out of a simple social problem. In a sense, this is not an argument about safe spaces, but an argument about Capitalism, and as such if we could skip the snarking that will follow that procedure, we will no doubt all be a lot happier.
So, safe spaces. On brief examination there are three interesting possible positions:
1) Safe space is actually *negative* space - that is, small pockets in which the right of dominant groups to consider the world their safe space is suspended.
2) Safe space is a series of bubbles, where members of a group can gather for comfort and protection against other, hostile, groups.
3) Safe space is a place where people congregate in order to avoid criticism of their ideologies (although for my money the most savage critics of an ideology are those who agree with it in principle), that disengages from and as such has no impact upon the "unsafe" outside world.
Another question might be whether safe space can be absolute or relative. Babrelith, for example, is a relatively safe space, although perhaps not in a technical interpretation of the word. You may well find people disagreeing with you, but you are unlikely to be on the receiving end of racial, sexist or homophobic abuse, for example, and if you are others will generally close ranks around you. But it clearly isn't an absolutely Safe Space, if by that we mean a place where ideological dissent is not brooked. The only such space I can think of offhand is the suburbs... |
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