"This happened just a few miles from me, so perhaps I've paid closer attention than you have. T-shirt man wasn't merely minding his own business while wearing an offensive shirt. He was stepping in front of people and haranguing them in front of a large anchor store in the mall. After a while he was asked to leave by a store employee, so he took himself to the food court and repeated the procedure. After complaints from several mall patrons, a security guard asked T-shirt man to either knock it off or leave." Well I haven't heard the story told this way before. If this were the case, he should be removed no matter what T-shirt he was wearing. As for the "private property" issues, I'm still not convinced they're cut-and-dry (though in some cases maybe they are). If nothing else, the demonstration the following morning lets the local thugs know that consensus reality these days does not equate benevolence with US foreign policy. Thus, the barely-made-it-out-of-high-school managers of the Mall's Security will know that anti-war T-shirts may not be any more controversial than pro-war t-shirts, despite what the TV has instructed them. -TD

From: Steve Furlong <sfurlong@acmenet.net> To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Jerk with a t-shirt Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 06:42:24 -0400

On Wednesday 23 July 2003 09:18, Tyler Durden wrote:

...

But it sounds like a rehash of the mall incident

You don't know what you're talking about. This happened just a few miles from me, so perhaps I've paid closer attention than you have. T-shirt man wasn't merely minding his own business while wearing an offensive shirt. He was stepping in front of people and haranguing them in front of a large anchor store in the mall. After a while he was asked to leave by a store employee, so he took himself to the food court and repeated the procedure. After complaints from several mall patrons, a security guard asked T-shirt man to either knock it off or leave. T-shirt man refused, growing more and more aggressive, and eventually the local cops came along and arrested him. (I may have fudged some details, as I'm working from memory, but I don't think I screwed up anything important.)

OK, so far it could be the spontaneous actions of one guy. But, even though the story wasn't reported until the late news that evening, there was a large (hundreds, IIRC) crowd of protesters when the mall opened the next morning. This might not sound like much to someone used to NYC crowds, but by the standards of this area that was a huge crowd. I guess it _could_ have been a spontaneous rising of a populace fed up with jack-booted thug harrassment of dissenting opinion. But the more I hear about it, the more this sounds like a planned operation.

-- Steve Furlong Computer Condottiere Have GNU, Will Travel

"If someone is so fearful that, that they're going to start using their weapons to protect their rights, makes me very nervous that these people have these weapons at all!" -- Rep. Henry Waxman

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