Balerion

I don't know why you're so willing to die on the hill of invalidating others' relationships.

Right, but there are degrees of abusable. There's a difference between "yes, you could abuse this thing" and "this thing will inevitably be abused." In my opinion, hate speech laws fall into the latter category. I know of too many cases of them being abused... and worse, they don't even seem to do much to prevent hatred. See this article.

Say what you like, but I just can't think of any way to write hate speech laws that isn't incredibly abusable. Handing the government an excuse to punish to people is inherently dangerous. While it's certainly necessary in some instances, I think we should be very, very careful about adding to the list of things you can get thrown in prison for.

You claim these laws aren't a problem, then mention that governments are in fact abusing them literally right now.

There are people whom I met online but transitioned into having an in-person relationship with. My experiences of them online were not inaccurate or even incomplete. Again, fucking skill issue.

This sounds like OCD. You might want to seek psychiatric help.

I think speech that depicts a real person being abused--e.g CSEM, revenge porn--should be prohibited. Credible threats should also be illegal. Otherwise, I don't think there should be many state-enforced restrictions on speech. I think hate speech laws are a pretty bad idea, because the people in power will inevitably use them against marginalized people. Laws intended to protect the vulnerable can easily be used to oppress them further. We're seeing this with pro-Palestinian groups being labeled hate groups right now in the name of "protecting" people from "antisemitism." (Antisemitism is a real problem, don't get me wrong, but a lot of people who get prosecuted for it haven't actually done anything except support Palestine.)

I do think that communities should enforce their own speech prohibitions, though. For example, social media platforms shouldn't tolerate racism. Even if you think racists have a moral right to spread their racism (they shouldn't), you have to understand that some forms of speech inherently suppress others. If you've got a neo-nazi screaming racial slurs at an event, obviously the people of color there will not feel safe to speak up, and their voices will not be heard. You have to decide whose speech you want to protect.

Heads-up: You can disable the LLM response by typing -ai at the end of your searches.

Whatever, dude. If you can't experience someone's full humanity via the internet, that's a you problem.

If you can't maintain a deep relationship online, that's an absolute skill issue on your part. People are, if anything, more their real selves online than in-person. All the best relationships I've had--romantic or otherwise--have been primarily online, and not because I don't have any relationships IRL.

No.

They've had 10 years of leftists explaining to them that Trump is a nazi and a child rapist. They always knew. They made their choice.

If they've had a genuine change of heart, I suppose that's one thing. But most of them have not. They still believe all the same horrible shit they did before, they've just stopped liking Trump as much. And even if they HAVE had a change of heart, they need to atone for all the suffering they've caused before they can expect to be accepted on the left.

You're acting like this person can't possibly have put their money where their mouth is, but many of us have in fact done that. Lots of people fight fascists, often in the most literal sense. You're just a coward.