Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. I’d rather encounter the occasional negative comment than have people treat me like an alien because they’re afraid of legal consequences.

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can also hurt me. Stones and sticks break only skin, while words are ghosts that haunt me. Slant and curved the word-swords fall, it pierces and sticks inside me. Bats and bricks may ache through bones, but words can mortify me. Pain from words has left its' scar, on mind and hear that's tender. Cuts and bruises have not healed, it's words that I remember.

Exactly, the ‘freedom’ to know what other people actually think about you is essential.

By silencing others you’re simply depriving yourself of your own right to hear them out.

To what end? Say that they tell me that they hate my kind, now what? Am I allowed to mail them because they’re a bigot? I expect you would say no to that. So then, to what end? So I can ban them from my private property?

You would rather not be able to tell who is and isn’t racist in your society?

If someone is prone to racist remarks that should be noticed and their thought process/moral failings should be addressed. If you simply threaten reprisal in advance you not only don’t address their core issue, but you also hide it from sight!

>By silencing others you’re simply depriving yourself of your own right to hear them out.

Why do we need to hear racists and bigots out? Their garbage opinions are neither novel nor of value to society, and the groups they target are well aware of the prejudice exists against them.

What is “racist” or “bigoted?” My family is Bangladeshi on both sides going back to time immemorial. But white people would consider much of what my mom would have to say about Bangladeshi culture “racist.” In the last decade, I’ve watched white people’s fear of being called racist force them to adopt basically a “noble savage” view of developing countries and as indigenous communities, where they’re forced to think of every problem in those societies as being caused by white people, because it’s taboo to talk about those societies’ flaws. That has real world negative effects—it chills honest discussion and empowers opportunists who realize they can amass more power railing against British colonialism than fixing social and cultural problems.

As someone from the developing world, the most important question to me is how did Britain colonize Bangladesh instead of the other way around—despite our head start? What are the things that make a people prosperous? You can’t have these conversations anymore. As a result the entire field of social sciences academia has been overtaken by ideas like “decolonization” instead of thinking about cultural innovation.

Would you run a startup that way? Trying to remove Apple or Google cultural influences from your organization?

I’ll decide what’s ‘novel’ and ‘of value’ for myself thanks. Which will require the right of ppl to express their conscience. Don’t need Boris Johnson’s (or anyone else’s) govt deciding this for me under threat of jail time.