February 13, 2012

ON SHOUTING FIRE IN A CROWDED THEATER

From a comment by bky1701 on slashdot.org
I am pretty much tired of hearing about shouting fire, and how that is a legitimate reason to support censorship. There are two major issues with this. First, yelling fire causes a rather urgent problem. If there really is a fire, there is no proper time to go and question the matter. This does not apply to slander and libel. Slander and libel laws are violations of free speech. Please do not use the analogy to support those (many, many people have... and been wrong).
Second problem: why is it never the fault of the people trampling others, or the organizers who set the situation up to be dangerous to begin with? Of course, it would be quite annoying if people constantly were yelling fire... yet, false fire alarms are actually pretty common. False security lock downs, too. Essentially, at what point is it the fault of the people listening to the guy yelling fire and trampling someone? I'd say, from the moment it happens. Consider if there actually was a fire - how does the situation change? Where does the fault go for someone being trampled if it was really a fire and it happened? If it can't rest with the person raising the alarm, where is it? Was it there all along?
Your idiotic rhetoric about some speech not being protected is why, lo and behold, less and less speech is being protected, despite nearly every developed country recognizing free speech as a human right.