I really don&#x27;t understand what you&#x27;re saying in the first two paragraphs. What&#x27;s interesting is I don&#x27;t think the goal of these &quot;safe spaces&quot; is at all to foster &quot;free discussion&quot; or &quot;open development of ideas&quot;. What you see people rallying against is that the SJWs are shutting down any free discussion through these tactics.<p>For example, these &quot;safe spaces&quot; apparently are to protect against &quot;micro-aggressions&quot; (a term I only recently learned) which if I understand correctly means to &quot;take offense where none was given&quot; aka to put words into someone&#x27;s mouth? So now it&#x27;s not even what someone is saying but how someone in the audience might feel, because of their own personal history, indirectly because a word the speaker used. And this is the speaker&#x27;s responsibility now that someone in the audience was made to feel this way because they were confronted with a disagreeing opinion?<p>I think this is where the accusations of mollycoddling come in. It sounds like these kids aren&#x27;t ready for serious academic discourse. They&#x27;re stuck in a world where there is only one &quot;right&quot; and they paint caractures of their racist and bigoted antagonists to support their view.<p>What I find noxious is warfangle&#x27;s claim that we must all be sexist and bigots to raise questions around academic freedom and censorship in colleges &#x2F; universities... I think this is a typical parlor trick to try to shut down productive discussion. Frankly I would have liked to see a rebuke from dang in response. Why is it ok to attack a group saying a viewpoint is &quot;disgustingly indicative of the inherent sexism and flat-out hatred that worms its way through developer culture.&quot; All the same, I&#x27;ll let warfangle speak for themself and I don&#x27;t expect HN to be free from dissenting opinions or even vitriol. Because in an attempt to shut down a &quot;narrow and combative approach&quot; it&#x27;s impossible not to have a chilling effect on the overall discussion. In your safe spaces you might be spared from some of the bad, but it comes at a significant cost to others around you who aren&#x27;t triggered and are capable of having adult conversations on difficult topics.<p>Frankly I&#x27;ve been waiting for an article like this to hit the front page because I am very interested in seeing the varying perspectives and actually having a chance at productive conversation on HN, which you won&#x27;t find in the comments anywhere else that&#x27;s for sure!