> The tables are behind the gates of the park’s Emerson Playground, which the signs in question state is off limits to adults unaccompanied by minors.
I keep rolling this around in my mind. It makes sense but at the some time it doesn't make sense at all. I'm sure it's intended to keep people from kidnapping kids or adults from destroying equipment but I fail to see how it would even be remotely effective at that.
Should we really be encouraging children to play chess?
Not only is it terribly violent it is rather anti-american. The monarchy, church and knights all in charge capturing and crushing the pawns to gain territory, not to mention that it pitches black against white.
I think there is an american version where a beige democrat side face a grey republican side and they both discuss the issues sensibly before devolving all power to the individual pawns
Personally it never even occurred to me to read that far into chess, so i honestly doubt a child would do it either, to me its just a game and probably an educational one.
Well since, in it's modern form, it's a Persian (ie Iranian) invention and was intended as a battle field simulation for training young warriors - I suppose playing it makes you a suspected terrorist.
For what it's worth, I was just making an observation, because it struck me as unlikely beyond all speaking off it that somebody would actually be issued a summons for playing chess in a park. That set my brain down the path of "What happens in parks that we don't arrest people for but don't want to encourage?" Oh yeah, that.
I could go either way on the justice/prudential aspect of it. On the one hand, there are a lot of laws that condemn the homeless to essentially permanent low-level conflict with the police. There are justice issues with that. ("The law, in all its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges.") On the other hand, I know of public spaces which welcome the homeless with open arms and I know of public spaces which I would enjoy spending time at, and those are disjoint sets. To the extent that the general public being able to enjoy parks is important (which is very, very low on my list of priorities), I (mildly) sympathize with their desires for them to not have homeless people in them.
In some places, such laws were enacted to keep drug addicts and other such delinquents from hanging out there after hours. No idea whether that was the motivation here.
I keep rolling this around in my mind. It makes sense but at the some time it doesn't make sense at all. I'm sure it's intended to keep people from kidnapping kids or adults from destroying equipment but I fail to see how it would even be remotely effective at that.