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The “fire in a crowded theater” metaphor, in addition to being more a legal myth than a legal principle, is not quite the right perspective to understand this ruling. That said, if we try to use that metaphor to understand this ruling, it is sort of like “a judge has ruled that the federal firefighting organization is no longer allowed to pressure movie theaters to bar entry to moviegoers whom the firefighters suspect will shout fire in the theater”. In this metaphor, the bulk of the ruling is an extensive documentation of the many instances of firefighters and government organizations with names like “Conflagration Interdiction Committee” sending names of specific people to major theaters with comments like “this person regularly posts charts of the flammability of upholstery, do something about it” and then that person gets barred from that theater days later.



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