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Pastimes : The Boxing Ring Revived -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rock_nj who wrote (5176)	3/6/2003 1:34:17 PM
From: The Philosopher	Respond to of 7720

Where are you getting this from that the two guys wearing PEACE tee-shirts were harassing other customers? Did you just make it up or convince yourself that it happened that way? Care to provide some backup documentation to confirm your understanding of the events surrounding the harassment and arrest of two Americans eating at a mall, while wearing a tee-shirt? Calm your hormones, guy. You're committing the same offense you're accusing me of -- hypothesizing without facts. I gave you the link in my response to your last post. Read those four pages, then we can talk. Don't you understand that there is a principle at stake here? I understand that there are SEVERAL principles at work here. One is the right to express your opinions. Another is the right of the owner of private property to prevent people from using their property not for the purpose for which they were invited onto it (to shop) but to abuse that privilege to make their points and interfere with the right of others to shop without harassment. These principles at some point become competing principles. They have to co-exist in our society. It takes some rationality and reflection to work out the right balance between them. Raging without facts doesn't help that process. All of our rights are threatened when someone's right to free speech is taken away by the government. First, this wasn't the government acting, it was private mall security, at least up to the point where the police were called to arrest the dad for trespass. If you invite me to a party at your house (not that I would come, but suppose for some reason I did) and in the middle I started hassling your guests to try to persuade them of some belief of mine and nobody could be having a good time any more, and you asked me to leave and I refused and you called the cops to get me out of there so the party could go on, would you consider yourself to have violated the Constitution? I didn't think so. There are lots of ways and places to protest against the war. The papers are full of such opportunities and such legal and appropriate demonstrations. Nobody is trying to stifle the folks who are against the war. But they have to use the right means to get their views across. Welcome to this thread, by the way, but at the same time please be respectful of the intelligence and honesty of the thread. Your first post was fine -- it calmly asked me to document what I had posted. That was fair enough. Your second post wasn't. Before you had yourself investigated the facts you flew off the handle and implicitly accused me of all sorts of nefarious beliefs. When in fact the fault was yours for not waiting for my response and not looking yourself to become fully informed about the situation. Of course, it's possible that the statements of the security guards are a tissue of lies. But given that those statements were made under penalty of perjury, and so far the Dowds haven't made as far as I know any contrary statements under penalty of perjury, and given that malls generally don't hassle people who really are just walking around shopping, frankly I tend, until there is evidence to the contrary, to put more faith in the written statements of the security officers. And IMO, any responsible newspaper reporter would have tried to interview other mall patrons or employees who might have witnessed any of the incident. Now, I suggest you calm down and we discuss this rationally. Okay?