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Kaj_Sotala comments on New censorship: against hypothetical violence against identifiable people - Less Wrong
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I also agree with this policy, and feel that many of the raised or implied criticisms of it are mostly motivated from an emotional reaction against censorship. The points do have some merit, but their significance is vastly overstated. (Yes, explicit censorship of some topics does shift the Schelling fence somewhat, but suggesting that violence is such a slippery topic that next we'll be banning discussion about gun control and taxes? That's just being silly.)
You may think it's silly, others do not. Even if Eliezar has no intention of interpeting "violence" that way, how do we know that? Ambiguity about what is and is not allowed results in chilling far more speech than may have been originally intended by the policy author.
Also, the policy is not limited to only violence, but to anything illegal (and commonly enforced on middle class people). What the hell does that even mean? Illegal according to whom? Under what jurisdiction? What about conflicts between state/federal/constitutional law? I mean, don't get me wrong, I think I have a pretty good idea what Eliezar meant by that, but I could well be wrong, and other people will likely have different ideas of what he meant. Again, ambiguity is what ends up chilling speech, far more broadly than the original policy author may have actually intended.
And I will again reiterate what I consider to be the most slam-dunk argument against this policy: in the incident that provoked this policy change, the author of the offending post voluntarily removed it, after discussion convinced him it was a bad idea. Self-policing worked! So what exactly is the necessity for any new policy at all?
I agree that your points about ambiguity have some merit, but I don't think there's much of a risk of free speech being chilled more than was intended, because there will be people who test these limits. Some of their posts will be deleted, some of them will not. And then people can see directly roughly where the intended line goes. The chilling effect of censorship would be a more worrying factor if the punishment for transgressing was harsher: but so far Eliezer has only indicated that at worst, he will have the offending post deleted. That's mild enough that plenty of people will have the courage to test the limits, as they tested the limits in the basilisk case.
As for self-policing, well, it worked once. But we've already had trolls in the past, and the userbase of this site is notoriously contrarian, so you can't expect it to always work - if we could just rely on self-policing, we wouldn't need moderators in the first place.
What about gasp whole other countries outside the US?
Yes, that was covered by the previous question: "Under what jurisdiction?"