There is no happy medium here, particularly since those seeking to offend and to wolfwhistle to signal their allegiance to other people who hate your race (for example) will try to couch their terms to hide within the shadows of plausible deniability unless they feel completely safe.
It's more a question of how many false positives and false negatives your culture is prepared to tolerate.
I certainly agree with your final conclusion: it depends on what society is willing to tolerate in terms of false positives and in terms of false negatives. And particularly, the balance between those two kinds of errors.
Not to say that there isn't anything wrong with how people have been increasingly incensed in the last few decades, but that's basically what it was like in the 90s and before. Someone was like, "whoa dude what you said wasn't cool" was met with "it was just a joke".
Your reasoning cuts both ways I think.
If you want to be a global publisher of your opinions, you’re going to receive a global response, from people across the political and social gamut — the larger your audience, and the more political/ideological your speech, the more substantial a response.
My dictionary’s definition of “Faustian” has this usage example:
> Modern celebrities enter into a Faustian pact with the general public.
What people seem to want is the ability to enforce a one-sided bargain with the public, under which their own toxicity, opinions, and any public affirmations should never be censored, as long as their opinions are the politically correct ones.
So, give hard core racists the benefit of the doubt when they wolf whistle each other?
Can't see any historical precedent for that going disastrously wrong.
>What people seem to want is ... their own toxicity, opinions, and any public affirmations should never be censored
Some people are hypocrites. News at 11.
Some people also want anti-han Chinese racism to be treated equivalently to anti-Uyghur racism because they choose to be blind to the inherent power differential.
I remember reading a story of the Hutus and the Tutsis. The genocide began with the radio - shows that very deliberate but cautious (& deniable) dehumanization of the other that ramped up over time. Nobody policed these deliberately aggravated ethnic tensions. By the time they were consistently obvious it was a little on the late side.
On the other hand, I've been falsely accused of being a racist before and it undeniably hurt my feelings a little bit.