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by bzbarsky 1982 days ago
> So, for example, it should be illegal to threaten somebody’s personal safety

Even this seemingly-simple example is complicated in practice: who decides whether safety is threatened? I have seen people claim to feel physically unsafe whenever someone raises the question of how specific women's sports should handle participation trans women, and I have seen other people claim to feel physically unsafe when someone suggests raising taxes to fund more public services (immediately reaching for comparisons to the USSR in the 1930s).

Is the test then whether someone feels unsafe as a result of the speech? Or whether a "reasonable person" would feel unsafe? And so on, and so forth.

There's really no good way to win completely here: either some people are going to feel unsafe, or you have to have _quite_ draconian speech restrictions to try to avoid that (and probably still fail). You might be able to do something that works for neurotypical-enough people, but that's the best I can see.