Leaving the current events alone, because I don’t think I can convince anyone who doesn’t already believe that Trump was at least partially responsible, I keep hearing people talk about the “cry fire in a crowded theater” line. This worries me because of its history. The phrase originally comes from the arguments from a Supreme Court case about WW1 pacifists, Schenk v United States, which ruled that Schenk’s distribution of anti-war literature was not protected by free speech. Not to mention that Holmes himself also argued in favor of eugenics, although I suppose that’s ad hominem. Needless to say, this is a very dangerous precedent, and was thankfully partially overturned.
The thing is, the “crowded theater” analogy doesn’t even apply in this instance, since Twitter is a private corporation. So I see some reason for worry when people talk about the “crowded theater” in needlessly returning to the Schenk doctrine which is both irrelevant and dangerous.
It’s a nursing home