I’m afraid of Americans
Time for the weekly USA bashing.
RSS: Wear a peace T-shirt, go to jail → Lawyer Arrested for Wearing a ‘Peace’ T-Shirt. Now this is just sick. The guy bought a t-shirt in a mall, and then got jumped by the mall security who wanted him to either take the t-shirt off or leave the mall. He refused, and got hauled away by the boys in blue. He got charged for trespassing, and may face up to a year in prison.
Long live the land of the free!
That wording, “land of the free,” has bothered me for a long time. If your country really is free, do you really need to be reminded that you live in the land of the free all the time? Is anyone afraid you might forget or have doubts about it? Fear not, citizen! Your friendly government is there to remind you, should you ever forget how free you are.
RSS: Censor like it’s 1760 → Library restrictions borrow from colonial-era abuses. Library censoring again. Censoring programs that still don’t work. Eddy, an aquaintance of mine, can tell you about it in thorough detail. Also, Austraila has come to the conclusion that web filters don’t work.
And now I feel a minor disclaimer is needed: I’m not gunning for every American alive, it’s just the American government I think needs a brain transplant. I’m having very interesting discussions with a whole bunch of Americans and other people from around the globe on various discussion forums. At least the Americans I’ve encountered there are well-informed and can at least understand the European point of view, if not always agreeing with it.
Update: Metafilter has caught on (Wooh! I scooped them!): “For some reason I think loads of people will show up at this mall wearing peace T-shirts over the next few days.”
Yes, it’s true that the mall is private property according to American law and the owners get to decide who can stay there — not leaving when told to equals trespassing. But threatening to throw a guy out and charging him with trespassing after buying a t-shirt in a store in their own mall is hypocrisy taken to the next level.
Anyway, read the comments in the MeFi post. Sheds some more light on the story.
March 5th, 2003 at 15:11
Freedom does not entail the right to do whatever you want on someone else’s property.
March 5th, 2003 at 15:30
Freedom does, however, entail not getting arrested while in a public place (for trespassing, at that) because a message of peace on your t-shirt doesn’t agree with the view of the mall security.
March 5th, 2003 at 15:41
Nor does it entail the right as a mallowner to discriminate against people whose views/colour/sexual orientation does not fit your taste.
March 5th, 2003 at 17:27
An article on the subject might be something to write in the future. For now I’ll limit myself to reminding you that rights are absolutes, they are moral principles defining and sanctioning an individual’s freedom of action in a social context. A right is a sanction to independent action.
Rights are also interdependent and non-contradictionary. You perceive a contradiction between the right to property and the right to liberty where there is none. Rights are a whole.
You have the right to speak your mind, but you don’t have the right to utilizing or entering someone else’s property – only when the proprietor has granted this can you use your rights without infringing on his; and when asked to leave your only choice is to comply.
Or as Rand said:
Just as a man can’t exist without his body, so no rights can exist without the right to translate one’s rights into reality – to think, to work and to keep the result – which means: the right to property. ***The modern mystics of muscle who offer you the fraudulent alternative of “human rights” versus “property rights”, as if one could exist without the other***, are making a last, grotesque attempt to revive the doctrine of soul versus body. Only a ghost can exist without material property [...]
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I.e. your right to your property takes presedence over other individual’s rights. I also oppose the notion that private property can become “public” just because you happen to sell something over counter.
This is my understanding of the issue, I’ll probably return to it though – the field of seemingly clashing rights is an interesting one, and some more pondering would be in order.
March 5th, 2003 at 17:46
BTW - the fact, which I at first was unaware of, that he bought the t-shirt in a store in the mall does make for good irony – i.e. the mall owner won’t allow anti-war people to state their opinion in his mall, but he’s happy as a clam about renting store space to a store that sells such products.
He gets no sympathy from me.
However, facts and rights remain – the mall security were still in their right to ask the man to leave the mall.