Pfizer hid a lot of the damage done as did the others. A lot of people can die by the time books come out. [1] That's one of the many reasons I held off and glad I did.
Not every book that gets published is accurate, especially print on demand Amazon books with forwards by men like Bannon.
You know how many excess deaths there have been among the vaccinated? Now compare that to the unavaccinated for the same period. Make the same comparison with disability if you'd like.
Shouting "fire" in a crowded theater being illegal was used to make it illegal to oppose the draft (Schenck v. United States). So actually, since opposing the draft is legal, shouting "fire" in a crowded theater is legal too.
You would be charged with inciting a riot, reckless homicide, etc regardless of the actual words you shouted to cause the deaths, but I see your point.
"Shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" being used as an excuse for censorship is the surest way to know you are talking to someone who hasn't even started doing the reading. Even worse, they often (over the past very few years) self-identify as socialists or anti-war, and the decision was in order to prosecute anti-war socialists for passing out pamphlets.
If somebody says it, they not only don't care about free speech, they don't even care about having a good faith conversation about free speech. They've probably been told this before, and didn't bother to look it up, just repeated it again. Wasting good people's time.
The current law is dictated by the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision, and it's explicit that shouting fire in a crowded theater is very much one of the only kinds of speech that IS restricted. They literally use that example in the decision.
So.... I think you might be the one who didn't do the research. Thank you for attending my TED talk.
> To me and most folks that I know its a figure of speech, not a reference to the actual 1919 supreme court case.
A figure of speech meaning what? Most people, AFAICT, that use it use it as an widely-perceived authoritative example of something specific that is accepted to be outside of the protection of free speech, a use that derives from and its use in the Schenk v. U.S. decision (it is sometimes explicitly described as something the Supreme Court has declared as outside of the protection of the 1st Amendment, which clearly derives from that origin.)
Of course, reliance on it for that purpose has problems because (1) it was dicta, not part of the ruling, in Schenk, and (2) Schenk is a notoriously bad decision impinging on core political speech in its specific application, and whose general rule is also no longer valid.
I have no idea what it would communicate as “a figure of speech”, and if it is actually used by some people as a figure of speech meaning something other than what it literally says being an example of unprotected speech (including, though I can see how this use would have some logic, as a figure of speech meaning “a persistently popular, despite being notoriously wrong, understanding of a legal rule”) it is one that impedes rather than promotes communication.
> it is one that impedes rather than promotes communication.
Maybe it does, but the simple truth is that the vast majority of people who use the phrase have never even heard of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. or his fabulous mustache and probably have no idea that it ever even went to the supreme court.
> A figure of speech meaning what?
People typically use it as a stand in for any language that might be dangerous enough to others to be curtailed. IE - Inciting a riot, or instigating a stampede that gets others killed. To use the legal phrasing from Brandenburg v. Ohio - they use it to describe language that would instigate "imminent lawless action" which WOULD still be curtailed under current law.
> Schenk is a notoriously bad decision impinging on core political speech in its specific application, and whose general rule is also no longer valid.
Schenk was mostly overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio and in that decision justice Douglas actually specifically talks about falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater as "probably the only sort of case in which a person could be prosecuted for speech."
This is inaccurate. Brandenburg v. Ohio explicitly states the opposite.
Justice Douglas specifically talks about the "fire in a crowded theater" issue being one of the few types of language that is specifically illegal beginning on the bottom of page 456 below. It's a PDF file of the original decision.
"The example usually given by those who would punish
speech is the case of one who falsely shouts fire in a
crowded theatre.
This is, however, a classic case where speech is brigaded
with action. See Speiser v. Randall, 357 U. S. 513, 536-
537 (DOUGLAS, J., concurring). They are indeed insep-
arable and a prosecution can be launched for the overt
acts actually caused. Apart from rare instances of that
kind, speech is, I think, immune from prosecution. "
