…Puns aside, this seems to be a narrow variation on a rather extreme free speech argument where nothing anyone says actually matters, or even really means anything. Speakers have zero responsibility for any effect on other people their speech might have, because nobody can predict how anyone else might react to anything. So results/outcome never matters, only intent. But since no one truly knows what another person really means by anything they say, for practical purposes intent doesn’t matter either. On this level the argument is coherent but pretty ludicrous in both its premises and its conclusion; the vast majority of people aren’t that clueless and antisocial, and if we were, it’s questionable whether human language could even exist at all.
Virtually nobody makes the argument on that level, however. What they do is imply the premises above without directly stating them and use them to argue that people should police their personal behavior to be as if harassment, threats, verbal abuse, and red flags are meaningless. This is where it gets incoherent: if you can’t predict how your words might influence others, and they can’t determine any real reason why you might be telling them to self-police, why would you expect most people listen or care?
Meanwhile people who intentionally engage in harassment, threats, and/or verbal abuse do so because they’re hoping/expecting a specific reaction from the target(s). Someone who points a gun at someone else and says “gimme yer valuables or I shoot” isn’t expecting that the other person is going to ignore it, or debate the meaning of words, otherwise they’d just say nothing, ambush and grab stuff, then shoot only if the other person resists too much. Since no one is arguing that it works that way in the real world, what they really mean is that *other* people should assume nothing and butt out, it’s purely an issue between predator(s) and prey, and you’re not allowed to determine which is which. Aside from also not really following from the premises, it ignores the fact that very few people would actually want to live in a social environment where that was treated as universally true.
Which is why they also don’t propose that it should be universally true, or at least not on purpose (not thinking through the broader implications seems to be fairly common). Rather they attempt to carve out some limited space where the worst members of a certain subset of society are allowed to be horrible people consequence-free, so long as they do it only within that carved-out space. That may not necessarily be the intent in the case of the most hardcore free-speech fanatics or people who would rarely face abuse and lack the personal experience and empathy to understand how abuse affects others, but that’s still going to be the results regardless of intent. Also like hell they’re going to ignore any perceived dangers to themselves or people they like, even as some of them demand that others do so.
TL;DR and conclusion: Not how socialization or language works, but they expect people to pretend it does anyway. And even the most generous interpretation of their reasoning for why people should so pretend is based on a rather ludicrous argument and lack of understanding the broader implications of said argument.
