It's posts like this that make me wish for a limited-access forum for discussing these issues, something along the lines of an Iconoclastic Conspiracy.

The set of topics too inflammatory for LW to talk about sanely seems pretty small (though not empty), but there's a considerably larger set of topics too politically sensitive for us to safely discuss without the site taking a serious status hit. This basically has nothing to do with our intra-group rationality: no matter how careful we are in our approach, taking (say) anarcho-primitivism seriously is going to alienate some potential audiences, and the more taboo subjects we broach the more alienation we'll get. This is true even if the presentation is entirely apolitical: I've talked to people who were so squicked by Torture vs. Dust Specks as to be permanently turned off the site. On the other hand (and perhaps more relevantly to the OP), as best I can tell there's nothing uniquely horrible about any particular taboo subject, and most that I can think of aren't terribly dangerous in isolation: it's volume that causes problems.

Now, it's tempting to say "fuck 'em if they can't take it", but this really is a bad thing from the waterline perspective: the more cavalier we get about sensitive or squicky examples, the higher we're setting the sanity bar for membership in our community. Set it high enough and we effectively turn ourselves into something analogous to a high-IQ society, with all the signaling and executive problems that that implies.

We'll never look completely benign to the public: it's hard to imagine decoupling weak transhumanism from our methodology, for example. But minimizing the public-facing exposure of the more inflammatory concepts we deal in does seem like a good idea if we're really interested in outreach.