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Alright, lets talk about the LEGOs.
In case you have been living under a rock, here's the story so far:
Elderly man has $200,000 LEGO Star Wars collection.
Elderly man enters into a consignment agreement with the local Bricks and Minifigs franchise.
Said franchise undergoes a messy ownership change mediated by Bricks and Minifigs corporate. The new owners stop honoring the previous consignment agreement and refuse to give the LEGOs back.
Elderly man's son gets the runaround trying to get his father's LEGOs back. Corporate tells him to deal with the franchise owner. The franchise tells him to deal with corporate.
Frustrated, the elderly man's son turns to YouTuber Reckless Ben. The resulting video goes viral.
The situation escalates into a wild goose chase as Reckless Ben attempts to serve legal process onto the store owners, aggravated by encounters with the suspiciously hostile American Fork, Utah police department (oh yeah, both the new franchise owners and the Bricks and Minifigs CEO are Mormon)
All of this is complicated by the fact that Reckless Ben is, well, reckless. He wears hidden spy cameras. He uses false pretenses to get into situations and locations. At one point he gets arrested for stalking. Despite this, it's hard not to root for him. He seems to have the franchise owners dead to rights for conversion (aka stealing), and Bricks and Minifigs corporate seems at best lackadasical that one of their franchises is defrauding counterparties, and at worst complicit.
I don't see how Bricks and Minifigs survives this as a company. This story is everywhere and nobody is on their side. This is not a particularly lucrative buisiness to begin with, and right now their name is mud. They did, finally, two weeks later, sort of admit that they were wrong and that Brian will get his LEGOs back. It's been radio silence from the principles since that last message went out. I would be surprised if we've heard the end of this saga.
Hearing this is bizarre because I didn't even know that third party dealers specifically for Legos was even a viable business model. What the hell kind of Legos are worth 200k??
Star Wars ones that nobody bothered to remove the shrinkwrap from. I'll never understand the point of collecting something that you don't intend to use for its actual purpose. Jay Leno's car collection is worth a lot more than some old guy's toys, and he actually drives the cars. I collect records, and I'm glad that community is a little more level-headed. Sealed copies aren't necessarily worth more than ones that have been opened and played, because the records can be damaged anyway and there's no way of visually inspecting them or verifying that that there aren't any defects that will affect playback. Years ago, a record store in Pittsburgh ended up with a rare Robert Johnson 78 that was part of an auction lot of miscellaneous records. Did they put it under lucite? Sell it at auction for top dollar? No, the owner kept it in his personal collection and played it in the store every Saturday at 1 pm to create a reason for people to come in.
I agree with you about that, but I have been looking into this over the past 2 days and I think the situation in these is even more ridiculous. First of all, most of these really expensive collectibles aren't that old, they are from the 2000s. Second of all, Legos are mostly interchangable mass produced bricks. And anyone can 3d print anything Lego-like these days. I just can't believe that there's this ridiculous market that can support not only a business that pawns these, but that has 300 franchise locations!
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It would take a long time to verify that every piece is included in a 1000+ piece set. I can see a premium market for shrink-wrapped sets.
I understand what you're saying, but I doubt the people paying top dollar for these sets are doing so because they intend to build them.
Regardless of whether or not they intend to actually build them, I'd suspect that the people paying top dollar for these sets care just as much about the sets having every piece as an actual building hobbyist does, if not more.
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It just seems like they should have started a lawsuit and it's really suspicious that they didn't just start a lawsuit. They went down a lot of wacky schemes to avoid doing so and I have no earthly idea why the ceo bothered talking to them at all. Seemed like no one involved had any idea what they were supposed to do, probably because even if you dot your is and cross you ts people won't take you seriously if you're some obnoxious youtube personality doing skits interspersed with your legal challenges. The cops seemed to really fuck up at multiple points though.
Everyone In This LEGO Dispute Should Have Spoken To A Lawyer Earlier Than They Did says Techdirt and I’m inclined to agree.
I found that insight noteworthy. Simultaneously, this range of cases is not only legally/financially a bit of a crapshoot but usually these players are among the least sympathetic so they don’t really have strong advocates for reform
I think the police thing is in a certain sense a red herring and just rage bait especially since Mormons as a group are easily hateable and says more about policing than it does Utah specifically. Police being dicks is well known. Police jumping to conclusions and then defending them irrationally is well known. Police being tragically ignorant of laws is well known, and so is the fact that they have pretty idiosyncratic and often infuriating responses to “this is a civil matter”. Police occasionally defending a buddy is well known (but I’ve seen zero evidence beyond the bare basics circumstantial type to indicate this was the case).
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I'm going to give my rundown to those following along at home, tagging @Quantumfreakanomics, @The_Nybbler, @mr_bailey, and @gattsuru since this will include responses to your comments as well. I first want to disclose that I have not watched the Reckless Ben video, have no plans to watch it, and will be relying on the above summary for that side of the story. The day I spend 90 minutes watching outrage porn from a guy named Reckless Ben is the day that I ask anyone here to track me down and slit my throat because I'm obviously brain dead. With that out of the way I have read the relevant averments in the lawsuit against the son and Reckless Ben and the whole Reckless Ben crew, with the caveat that complaints are drafted to put the plaintiff in the best light possible and are accordingly not objective. That being said, there is a duty of candor involved, so I will assume that nothing contained therein is an outright lie.
The complicating factor here is that the son (Bryan) has potential claims against three parties: The franchisee with whom he entered the agreement (Chrystal), the franchisor (BAM), and the new franchisees (Josh [there's also Brandon but I'll keep things simple]). The correct way to go about this would be to sue all three entities and let the chips fall where they may, with the plaintiff being fully prepared to let parties out of the suit once information becomes available that shows they aren't liable. It's highly likely that the latter two parties would have been voluntarily dismissed once depositions had taken place, though it's possible BAM could be held in under a theory of principle-agent liability.
To recap the facts as they're presented in the suit, Bryan went to the BAM franchise owned by Crystal to sell his father's Star Wars Legos, which at the time were valued at $80,000, though this was later adjusted to $60,000. I don't know where the later $200,000 claim came from. There was supposedly a consignment agreement, though nobody has to date produced a signed copy, and he was told that the items would be stored off-site. After Chrystal violated her franchise agreement with BAM a cursory audit was done, showing that there was about $38,000 in inventory at the store, about $5,000 of which was Star Wars-related. Josh entered into a new franchise agreement to take over operation of the store.
Shortly after taking over, Bryan entered the store and confronted Josh about the consigned goods, and presented him with an unsigned copy of the agreement and an incomplete inventory list. Josh said that he wasn't aware of anything being held on consignment, but he was free to look through the Star Wars-related inventory and see if he recognized anything. At his point, Bryan became argumentative and started demanding payment of $80,000. Josh checked the back room for any inventory he might have missed and asked store employees if they knew anything about the consignment agreement or the subject goods, but they did not, and Bryan became irate when learning this, and accused Josh of theft. He came back later with police and ask that the store owners be arrested, but the police told him that it was a civil matter and escorted him from the premises when he became belligerent. He then began privately harassing the store. He contacted Chrystal and demanded payment, but she told him she had no money to pay him.
After the the sale of the franchise was formally completed, Josh gained access to the POS system, which showed sales of approximately $60,000 of Star Wars-related items, though there wasn't enough information to specifically identify the items or whether they were sold under consignment. It should be noted that, upon abandoning the store, Chrystal refused to provide any accounting, inventory, or other records to BAM. At some point after the Reckless Ben harassment campaign began, Josh discovered Star Wars-related items in a locked cupboard and told Bryan that he could look at them and see if he recognized them. Bryan said he wasn't interested in talking unless they were planning on paying the full amount. As a weird twist, Chrystal was also evidently in cahoots with Reckless Ben's campaign, claiming that BAM took her store from her in bad faith.
The_Nybbler writes about the UCC provisions regarding consignments, and while I don't want to get too in the weeds on that, I don't think that they really matter here. There are questions as to whether the UCC would apply to a consumer transaction like this, how Bryan would have been able to intervene in a non-judicial foreclosure, whether or not he can intervene after the sale, whether the law allows recovery from a creditor or bona fide third party purchaser, etc. But assuming all three parties are indeed independent, common law rules wouldn't save his case. Indeed, had he actually made the proper UCC filing it wouldn't save his case. The contention here isn't that BAM is entitled to the consigned items because they were unaware of any lien, but that the items were never in their possession. It looks to me like Chrystal sold the items, kept the money, and didn't bother telling Bryan about it, eventually just abandoning the franchise and moving overseas. Meanwhile, she has every incentive to tell Bryan that she's also the victim here and has no money besides, so he'll direct his anger elsewhere.
Would suing be worth it? Gattsuru writes:
Which is true if you believe what's in the complaint, i.e. that the prior franchisee sold the goods and absconded with the money, and that neither BAM nor the current franchisees have possession of the goods or knowledge of what actually happened. The problem is that this scenario doesn't justify any self-help remedies being taken against either of those parties. If Bryan has a justifiable, good-faith belief that the items are worth $200,000 and that BAM is responsible for their loss, then it's worth filing suit. Hell, attorneys take suits on contingency that are worth a lot less. It seems to me, though, that what he wants is for BAM to take him at his word and accept responsibility for something they have no responsibility over. Any way you see it, his actions are unjustified. In any event, they're going to cost him a lot more now than if he had just kept his mouth shut.
From Coffeezilla's video, the $200,000 valuation came from a press release Crystal released.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/local/2026/03/21/sign-on-closed-keizer-oregon-business-accuses-lego-resale-store-of-theft/89138490007/
This article quotes from the press release.
If there's one thing I'm reminded of it's that many small businesses have absolutely abysmal record keeping!
From Coffeezilla's review of the PoS data he seems to find that most of the collection was sold or layawayed and the proper records for the lawaways weren't passesld with the freanchise sale.
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I'm... skeptical about crediting the duty of candor to the court too heavily. There's a lot of things that courts seem perfectly fine with that normal people would call lies, and a lot more than can be done by implication.
In particular, specifics like a lock able rather than locked cabinet, or Chrystal supposedly using parentheticals in a phone call that BAM quotes (and, while not as prohibitive, referring to themselves as "they"), or the 80k-no-60k-no-30k valuation, are not the sort of things that make me trust the complaint as being deeply honest. Doubly so where these are core to the claim, rather than incidental. The parenthetical in particular is very much core to bringing the RICO claim, bolded, and afaik, not written as an insertion by the transcription, and just not a believable thing for even a pretty dumb criminal to say.
Maybe those are all real and supported with strong evidence, or maybe they're the client's claims rather than the lawyer. But they're not written like it.
And there's some weird errors. Did Brandon start the 300k USD valuation in February of 2026, or in "early 2025"? One of these is a factual claim (90) and one is a legal predicate (172), and they seem to both be talking about the same incident. [EDIT: actually, it's weirder than that. One is tied to "Chrystal and Benjamin", while the other is tied to "Bryan (Mansell) and Chrystal"; I'd assumed the 2025 was just a typo since it's logically inconsistent with BAM's larger timeline, but bringing in different names?]
Similarly, the >$200k USD number seems to have come from previous marketing material from the store, and while some of that's probably puffery and none of it can attribute to either BAM or Josh, it also seems to be matched by third-party estimates of the value of the whole original consignment. Some of the disparity comes because the majority of the value was in the minifigs, not the sets, which the pleading very carefully occludes in the valuations even though it highlights Chrystal's alleged taking (but not theft?) of a Boba Fett figure. (no, I don't know why people pay so much for the minifigs)
It's possible that Chrystal/Gorman sold a large portion (or even Brandon took it back without notice to BAM/Josh) and Brandon's just doing a scam artist routine, although BAM having access to the POS system this long and not knowing or providing evidence one direction or the other raises serious doubts that direction.
That doesn't make Chrystal, Gorman, and Bryan in the right: this very much looks like a 'pox on all their houses' situation.
Yeah, if BAM's version is true, BAM was either blameless and legally not-at-fault or at worst ethically negligent about management, and Bryan was screwed. Even more so than the BAM pleadings admit -- Chrystal's partner dirtbag-left'd his way out of the country and near-certainly would have most of the money, in a way that would make recovering funds even more impossible than the normal judgement proof version -- so there's even a good explanation why Bryan might have felt like he had no option but to team up with Chrystal in the hope of getting some questionable settlement from an innocent part to get him to go away.
It would be really weird if Chrystal had control of the consignment for nearly a year and didn't sell anything from it.
But honestly, I think it's pretty serious risk even if the current franchisees did have possession of (a large portion of) the goods when they took the store and sold them, either not knowing or not caring about the complicated ownership. It's not the most likely situation, but it's not impossible or improbable one. Still, shops like this aren't going to have a ton of cash-on-hand, they'll liquidate the value of property trying to fight the case, and they've got logical reasons to fight rather than give a token settlement because of the tight financial situation to start with. BAM is a more tempting legal target, but in turn it has a ton of (legitimate!) doubts about actual liability.
There's a bit of a survivorship bias, here. Attorneys also refuse to take suits on contingency that are worth a lot more, either because the defendants are judgement proof, they think the odds are low, or just because it'll take so long that any victory won't be worth the sauce.
To be clear, I don't credit it that heavily, just more than somebody yammering away on YouTube. I've since learned more about this case and it's clear that the facts alleged in the complaint are selective at the very least, but that's to be expected. It's also clear that both Bam and the new franchisees aren't entirely free from blame in terms of how they handled themselves, but I'm still skeptical as to whether they actually had as much of the inventory as Bryan claims they did.
Apparently about half the collection was sold at the time of the takeover. This is why even if the collection was correctly valued at $200k, making a demand for that much is ridiculous. Bryan was entitled to 65% of the sale price, and with $100k of inventory presumably remaining, his damages would be in the neighborhood of $65k, which is nothing to sneeze at but well under half of what he's alleging was stolen. Anyway, Chrystal was supposed to pay Bryan monthly and provide some kind of sales statement. Apparently there's some dispute over the amount he was actually paid, and I don't know if these statements were itemized or if they just listed the dollar amount. One of the few advantages of litigation is that it forces you to put the evidence on the record or shut up about it.
So there are two possibilities here. The first is that Chrystal either stole the product or sold it and underreported the sales to Bryan. She did suddenly discover some of it at her house a year after the dispute started. I agree that if this is the case, then a lawsuit isn't likely to accomplish anything. I still think it would have been worth going after BAM, though, because from what I've since learned, even if they didn't do anything, they certainly didn't act in a way that would suggest they did nothing wrong. Chrystal claims that the product was in the store when corporate evicted her. Video evidence shows what appears to be some of it on the shelves the night she gets kicked out, and she's telling them about the consigned merchandise and the new operators don't seem to care. When Bryan went to the store to ask about it, he was given the bum's rush, and Josh and Brandon took the position that since they weren't a party to the consignment agreement, we don't owe you anything and get off our property. I saw enough of the video that it's clear that these guys are assholes in general.
And from what I've seen there's probably enough to keep BAM in the case. What one would normally expect after a franchise foreclosure would be for corporate to run the store while a new buyer is found, and then transfer the store to the new franchisee at a later date. From November 2024 to March 2025, the BAM location in question was in a sort of limbo where the successor franshisees were operating the store but didn't actually have the franchise yet. If any of the items were sold during this period, then BAM is responsible. But it gets better. The new franchisees were running the store beginning the night of the foreclosure, and continued to run it while it was legally owned by corporate. The goods were the subject of a dispute throughout the entire period in question. The nature of the arrangement creates a legitimate question as to whether the franchisees were acting as an agent of BAM corporate, which if proved, would expose corporate to liability even after the new franchise agreement went into place. There are enough factual questions involved here that BAM isn't going to get out on an MSJ, which means settlement is a real possibility. And if they stick by their story blaming Chrystal they'd have to make a case against her for conversion, which is a tall order.
But that's really neither here nor there, because my ultimate point is that this guy had better options than running his harassment campaign, and this isn't some justified act of vigilante justice to protect the little guy when the legal system is inadequate and expensive. The consignment agreement required that the collection be insured. The guy would be nuts for not obtaining his own policy, but it looks like someone was paying for insurance on these items, and it looks like Chrystal was cooperating with him, so the proper thing to do would be to file a claim, the same as you would if someone had broken into the store or if the collection had been destroyed by fire. This is why you get insurance. The claims handler is certainly going to question the circumstances of the loss, and if they think that BAM or the successor franchisees are liable, then they would be able to file a subrogation claim against them, but Bryan would get paid, Chrystal would get paid (though possibly sued if BAM claimed they were entitled to the commission), and neither would care if the insurance company was reimbursed. The claim could, of course, be denied, but if that happens you're back where you started in terms of having to litigate, except it's a lot easier this time. An insurance bad faith claim is a lot easier than the conversion claim they were dealing with, as there's only one party, the facts are a lot simpler, and you know the money's there.
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Uh yeah. When I do expert witness stuff the shit that the lawyers and less ethical expert witnesses do is absolutely bananas.
Just because you can understand something to be "nothing but the truth" doesn't mean it's not wildly misleading.
On a more silly note: my daughter ran across a recommendation for "The Best Policy", a 1950s SF short story by Randall Garrett, and we quickly found a copy online a couple nights ago. It's one of the funniest illustrations of this trope I've ever read.
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Isn't this what the "whole truth" clause is supposed to be for? If I testify that you have never denied being the serial killer known as the "Scranton Strangler" then I have said nothing but the truth, but if I fail to add that this is because you have never been accused of being the Scranton Strangler then I have not said the whole truth.
How you ask a question matters a whole lot. "Did Dr. Smith make the right decision?" "What would you have done treating the patient with the information available at the time?" can easily point in opposite directions.
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That language is more convention than anything else. The FRCP, along with a lot of state rules, only specify that:
A witness is certainly under no obligation to volunteer information that isn't asked of him. Witness prep 101 is that the witness should answer the question asked and only the question asked, and to limit answers to yes, no, I don't know, and I can't remember wherever possible. In other words, if the attorney asks if the witness knows the time, the preferred answer is "yes", not "4:00". There are obviously exceptions for responses that require additional clarification, though in my experience witnesses generally volunteer too much information as it is, and I've been in too many depositions that took longer than they should have because the witness couldn't answer a question without going off an an irrelevant tangent.
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The law is on the store's side, as I described below. They only have a valid lawsuit against the original storeowner, if he hasn't actually declared bankruptcy, and he's likely insolvent even if he hasn't. The law allows a consignors goods to be lawfully taken by the lender/repossessor in this case. So extralegal measures are all he has.
Having looked at the case further since posting and seen what legal commentators are saying, they all seem to believe that the UCC filing requirement wouldn't apply in this case. The purpose of the filing requirement is to protect creditors from finding out after a default that the property in which they have a security interest isn't actually owned by the debtor. Hence the requirement that the debtor business not be known to its creditors as typically selling consigned merchandise. It would be difficult to argue that a store dealing primarily in used and resale items wouldn't fall into this category, especially when the creditor in question executed a franchise agreement that explicitly contemplates consignments. Furthermore, courts have proposed a cutoff of 20% of inventory value, and the value of the consigned product in this case was allegedly 50% of total inventory value. There's also the possible consumer goods exception, though this is a weaker argument because the Legos in question were in sealed boxes that had arguably been held for resale and not purchased with the intention of using them for normal consumer purposes.
Honestly it's an outdated rule that should be nixed entirely, since no banks are extending credit based on a visual inspection of the store's inventory. At the very least, they're looking at the average running value of inventory on the books, which would exclude anything held on consignment. But I don't think BAM has a credible argument that they had no idea that the store might accept goods on consignment, which would defeat any argument over a UCC filing. I also don't have much sympathy for Mansell for not making such a filing. I understand the argument that Joe Consumer isn't going to be sophisticated enough to make a UCC filing, but Joe Consumer doesn't generally consign $200,000 worth of goods. I know lawyers have a reputation for saying "should have talked to an attorney" in situations when no normal person would, but I don't think I'm out of line to suggest that when you're entering a complicated transaction that involves entrusting property worth as much as a house to a stranger, it might be worth spending a couple hundred bucks to make sure you don't get taken advantage of.
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A lawsuit would be expensive relative to the value of the goods and they might not win it (the law here is fairly involved, under commercial law it's not clear that he isn't just another creditor against the bankrupt franchisee as other suppliers supplying goods on credit would be). Morally and in the court of public opinion he has a much stronger case.
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Unfortunately, this is the sort of lawsuit that takes ten thousand bucks for a trivial chance of actually being made whole (and mostly in a settlement), a large chance of getting a useless judgment on a defunct or judgment proof target, and a larger chance of just never having a conclusion that’s mostly a shrug.
Doesn’t make the Reckless Ben response good…
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A few hours ago Ben posted a video claiming he's been served with a gag order.
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I feel in two ways about this story.
On one hand, having annoying YouTubers run around doing generally obnoxious picketing, harassment and even actual federal crimes is not something society should tolerate.
On the other hand, the victim has been clearly stolen from, and because he didn't file a form nobody knows about he's out of legal recourses and his only option is essentially to make such a stir that his story becomes a public relations disaster and the thieves have to pay him his money back even as they made themselves immune to lawsuits. And that can only be achieved through annoying YouTuber stunt shenanigans.
Sometimes reasonable men must do unreasonable things.
It is Afroman all over again. He has no legal ability to get the police to give him his money back or in any way face legal consequences. So instead he makes a dramatic fuss on youtube calling them fat and gay. He can't sue them, but he can shame them.
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Yes.
Which is why I don't cry too much when the occasional streamer gets shot or run over. If the law doesn't provide sufficient deterrence, some level of vigilantism becomes useful.
Unironically, we need to apply the same standards as South Korea.
Also yes.
Because again, the legal system isn't adequate to the task of bringing certain parties' behavior to heel given how slow and 'intentionially' it works... and often favors the better-resourced party.
Its not the core case for it, but fundamentally that's why I keep bemoaning lack of skin in the game. 'Asymetric' behaviors allow miscreants to get away with antisocial activities that impose a significant cost on others because any response is usually too expensive or maybe even criminal.
Streamers going around committing low level civil infractions b/c they know they can pay any fines with the payouts their audience gives them, and if any annoyed party tries to physically accost them then the law will punish that party. There is no coordinated way for bystanders to express displeasure with or punish streamer behavior directly, whilst the streamer's audience is coordinated around egging the streamer on. The rewards almost inevitably flow to the streamer, even as they are sucking utility out of everyone in their environment.
The reason we end up tolerating the youtuber's behavior in the Lego situation, is he TARGETED IT towards an arguably deserving party. Rather than create a generalized nuisance, he became a nuisance to someone who was already inflicting pain on others. Rewarding THAT behavior is generally, on net, pro-social.
Anyhow, BRING BACK DUELING..
Team America philosophy of life lives on:
We're basically forming an informal bounty system on scamsters and unethical businesses, where youtubers able to make effective exposés get financially rewarded for their efforts, so there's some incentive to identify such businesses and create a case against them.
Now, the part about actually shutting them down is usually up to gov't actors.
For what it's worth, I think this is an evolution of journalism, paparazzi's and stringers are a thing after all. Media platforms like YouTube just allows such people to reach a mass audience without an editorial veil.
Yes, like many other things the reduction in friction, like with porn, gambling, and drugs, has allowed the worst elements of those vices to proliferate.
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I think it should be legal to punch someone who is filming you without your consent. It's a similar violation of bodily integrity.
Go punch all software/firmware devs who spy on your phone.
wtf I hate freedom of speech now?
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Bodily integrity? Maybe if you think that photographs steal your soul.
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I can't go with a flat ban on filming people in public, nor punching people who are just recording generally.
However, if they are actually obstructing your attempts to just do your activities, or they are doing that silly "I'm not touching you!" game, then yeah, a physical response seems eminently 'reasonable.'
For places where this is a regular issue, I'd say Allow police officers to inflict corporal punishment as a summary procedure.
I'm watching a lot of youtubes of (US) police bodycams and man it's hard to argue otherwise. Of course, it's a biaised sample, but man does it seem unreasonably annoying to have to deal with someone who believes they are going to argue, refuse to comply their way out of a ticket and then physically resist and yell and twist their way out of an arrest. I think there might be some people who'd become more reasonable if they were clearly told by the police "if you do not shut up and comply, I am empowered to beat your ass".
There are also of course, police officers who seem to jump to every opportunity to claim battery on a law enforcement officer. I get that anything that can discourage resisting is probably good in the end, but resisting is already its own charge, it makes me lose some respect for the officers if they feel like a suspect lightly pushing back on them while resisting is them being "battered".
I'm also confused by how many people in the US seem to be driving without their license on them; what the fuck?
Yep.
A) Cops are apparently a lot more restrained than you might think given the stressors they often face. The exceptions are out there, of course.
B) We already trust cops with proper escalation of force, and they do an okay job at it. I don't see much reason to let them use their discretion to tase people vs. letting them just inflict a few strikes with the cane, following a modicum of process.
C) I think a lot of suspects might actually agree to take a beating on the spot vs. going through the full system's process where jail time would be on the table.
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Eh... I'm in favor of corporal punishment, but I think it needs to be adjudged, like all other forms of punishment. If you give that power to cops directly, you can be almost certain they'll get drunk on it.
It's not a big deal in Europe. You get fined, and you're adding an extra half hour to your detainment as they verify that you do, in fact, have a license, but otherwise it's not a problem.
That's how it is in most US states too. I've been pulled over for speeding and didnt have my license on me for some reason. The stop went exactly like any other traffic stop, except it took a few minutes for the cop to verify I did, in fact, have a valid license. He gave me my speeding ticket and a warning to not forget my license next time.
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In New Jersey if you don't have your paperwork (especially insurance), the cops tow your car and leave you by the side of the road, any time, day or night. They did this even before cell phones were common.
Good to know. I've almost never had a non-expired insurance card on me in the car when pulled over (it's usually sitting in an opened envelope on my desk for months as I forget to replace the card), and I've alwayd gotten off with a warning. Though I admit I have always had unusually good luck/rapport with police officers who pull me over--immediately taking full responsibility for breaking the law, apologizing profusely for not having your documents organized, and making polite small talk goes a long way. (all of these stops would have been in Western states btw)
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In most parts of the US, not driving is simply not an option. If you can’t get a license, then you just have to deal with your entire life being a continuous string of misdemeanor offenses.
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Certainly not, and it's ridiculous to say so. Capturing a few of the photons bouncing off your body and clothes does not affect your bodily integrity in the slightest; if you have a reasonable objection to being filmed (in public), it must be something else.
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This echos the dual conversations on twitter lately around the random Boomer trying to drown somebody in the lake and Karmelo Anthony. I've gotten to the point where I feel like anybody who's on the pro-Karmelo side has to be either engagement farming, genuinely some sort of troll bot or simply parsing it on purely racial lines with no attempt to inform themselves. I simply cannot conceive of a situation where I'd consider Karmelo's behavior legitimate.
Then Boomerdrowninggate hits twitter in which I found a certain subsection of people also supported the boomer attempting murder on somebody for 'running their mouth' and potentially trespass to swim in a lake. I'm not against the boomer slapping the guy (though the fact he was on crutches makes it a bit of a dick move) but the escalation to lethal means strikes me as totally incompatible with polite society. I'd consider myself capable of beating the vast majority of people in a 1v1 melee altercation due to spending a hell of a lot of time doing jiujitsu, but I've got essentially zero interest in getting into an altercation due to all the potential ways it could go south both legally and physically. Meanwhile some subset of people (who I feel generally correlate with those least experienced with violence) want to just slap people in the streets willynilly.
If I got into a self-defense situation where I needed to use my skills I'd honestly be pretty damned concerned about getting sued if I potentially choked somebody out or broke something whilst in a dominant position on them. I feel no real need for spontaneous fisticuffs.
The part of the prior sentence I quoted is the explanation for a good chunk of them, I'd wager. Identity politics/social justice/woke-ism/the ideology that refuses to be named/etc. which still dominates the American left right now, demands that all interactions between anyone be analyzed on identity-based oppression-based frameworks, doubly so when it comes to altercations between white people and black people, due to the rather storied and violent history of such things in the United States. In practice, this means that, since black people belong to the "oppressed" category and white to the "oppressor," the evidence and reasoning must be twisted to whatever extent necessary to show that the black person was in the right (a somewhat-common example of this in the man/woman oppressor/oppressed dichotomy is the mantra "believe all women" which got laundered into "believe women" when the fallacious nature of such a statement got too embarrassing). For most people, when the evidence is this stark, the level of twisting required is simply too much and they step off the ride using one of many tools to alleviate cognitive dissonance, but there are plenty others who ride their true belief in their ideology all the way off the cliff.
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If we want to take a middle position, maybe set up certain public areas as designated "PvP" zones where physical violence (excluding deadly weapons) is permitted.
Ban streamers from operating anywhere else.
Quadruple the punishment for getting in fights outside these zones.
Straight up Runescape style "Meet me in Wildy."
We already have a PvP zone. It's called Washington.
Huh. So it is. Also LA. Not coincidentally both places that had public service announcements explaining that smoking fentanyl on public transportation is actually not a health risk to bystanders. Denying the possibility of second hand smoke concerns, but only for the very hardest of drugs. My google search about this panicked google and it thinks I'm on the verge of killing myself. Multilingual crisis counselors are avaliable 24/7.
Once in my life I told a cop a homeless man was on verge of attacking people. He told me he has "a patrol to do" and would be back later to check up on the insane homeless guy lunging at people. He drove away. They just don't feel like helping; so they don't.
Just don't fight back if the guy does attack you, unless you think you can defend yourself in jail as well. As Chief Wiggum once said, the police are powerless to help you, not to harm you.
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I think the specific lies that people online were spreading in the immediate aftermath - e.g. that Austin Metcalf and other players jumped Karmelo - are a pretty clear sign of a guilty mind. Even with the massive, obvious in-group bias it seems a lot of people understand that you need something like that.
Some people are just stupid/antisocial enough to believe that "touch me and see what happens" constitutes a legal/moral defense for murder but it's telling that wasn't the line at the start.
Even if Metcalf 'jumped' Karmelo it's pretty hard to see a situation where lethal force escalation would ever be justified unless Metcalf and his multiracial teammates were about to lynch Karmelo for trespassing.
I'd argue Digwa had a slightly more legitimate case for deploying his weapon than Karmelo if only since it was a 1v1 situation on a dark night with an intoxicated person. I can imagine a hypothetical situation in which that could have gone awry enough to justify lethal force self defense. Karmelo Anthony was in full public with 20 witnesses.
Eh, there is a certain level of jumping where one can fear for their lives.
In any case, these people are like defense attorneys: they have the client they have. The lies told - he was jumped, he knew them as bullies - were the best fig leaves they had. Surely it would have been better if they could claim Metcalf and his friends inflicted some grievous injury but, well, we saw his mugshot.
To me the rapidity and totality of the lying happened precisely because the case as it stood was just indefensible and incredibly stereotypical (it seems demented but the mindset of a tribalist seems to be "we need to get there with our own story first", similar to the Digwa case* even though it shouldn't make any difference in the long run). In the Rick Chow situation people could at least try to argue that he should never have chased the kid or that Chow was lying as a way to say it was still an injustice. Here, you have to make shit up.
* Though there are reports that the police tried to downplay the Nowak situation so maybe it's more rational than I give it credit for.
I mean if a justified self-defense in my eyes is like a 8/10 I'd give Digwa like a 0.3/10 for it being dark solo encounter with more scope for escalation and Karmelo like a 0.1/10 since even if it were a 'jumping' it was at a school event with considerable witnesses. I just can't see how anybody can be in the Karmelo camp if they've done anything to educate themselves on the facts at all.
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I see no reason why streaming antisocial behavior like Johnny Somali didn't shouldn't count as an aggravating factor that gets you more time. Antisociality is contagious, mainstreaming it (potentially to kids) shouldn't be treated as the same act without the exhibitionist element. Just tack on a 20% bonus.
Objectively speaking, from a pure theory of punishment perspective, the punishment should be weighted to counterbalance the fact that the streaming encourages the behavior and thus overcomes the deterrent effect of the punishment.
The law hasn't adapted to the fact that streaming is encouraging these behaviors, which by definition degrades the deterrent effect of the punishment. So if you were 'goaded' into doing something by your streamer audience, yes, enhance the punishment so, next time, you remember the punishment and it has a chance of making you go "nah chat, last time I did [X] I couldn't sit for a week."
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It's the vigilantism debate, just with a kind of vigilantism that doesn't involve violence. Would it be good for society if a skilled marksman went around shooting muggers? A good case can be made for yes. Would real-life vigilantism play out like an action movie, where the hero never accidentally shoots an innocent person? No. Would vigilantes shoot more innocent people on average than the cops do? Almost certainly.
When normal pro-social mechanisms fail to ensure justice, something must be done. Ideally, fixing the mechanisms. But if that doesn't happen, people will create their own mechanisms, both for good and for bad.
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Remember to SMASH that subscribe button like I smashed city hall with my custom built killdozer!
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I don’t see how the company fails because of one unusual incident like this. There aren’t that many options in lots of markets for LEGO buy/sell/trade, and few people are trading in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of sets.
That said, I always got the sense that BAM was on the low-end of third-party LEGO retailers and most of their smaller competitors are more liked in their particular markets.
I found out last weekend that I apparently have a personal connection of sorts. My aunt, wheelchair bound with a rare and extremely limiting disease, has for years built LEGO sets as her main hobby. I mean hundreds if not thousands of sets. Her dad, my grandfather, died recently, and life is tough. She apparently also does consignment in a local BaM store (franchised) with lovely local owners to resell them after she builds them, which is part of what makes the hobby work. If BaM go under, or even if the bad business reputation spreads, her main hobby might die. Pretty sad. I’m sure there are lots of franchisees that are pissed about corporate’s handling of everything.
But yeah, I think a lot of commentators are projecting. BaM is not some evil mega conglomerate. It’s still basically a mediumish business. And what really gets me about the whole thing is that the GoFundMe for the dude raised probably double what the legos were actually worth, yet the internet mob continued without pausing for even a second to assess things from multiple POVs.
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Would you sell them any collectible now? They may not lose all their buyers, but their sellers surely have been given a massive concern. It's going to be tough to replace inventory with this now the most prominent thing associated with their name.
BAM claims in court filings that they only allow consignment with express written consent, and while they seem to be overstating the degree it's explicitly prohibited by their franchise agreement, it seems pretty plausible in practice. Consignment is a weird model for a lot of this class of shops, and the threat goes away for sales that are cash-on-hand.
((Conversely, reading between the lines, BAM's management of franchisees seems somewhere between 'poor' and 'actively promoting bad practices', so that could scare people off more than the sale risk. "We couldn't get into the POS system for a franchisee for over a year" is the sort of thing that should have you running for the hills.))
Thanks for the court documents. I hadn’t seen that before. It looks like Bricks and Minifigs’s entire argument hinges on the claim that they were a bona fide purchaser to the entire store and inventory. I’m not sure how well that will hold up given that
a.) They didn’t purchase the store. They repossessed it, and
b.) The previous owner told them about a consignment agreement on the day they repossessed the store.
The repossession makes their case stronger; they repossessed the store, which extinguished the junior security interest of the consignor, because he didn't file a UCC-1.
Irrelevant here and corporate was informed of the cosigned inventory during their repossession of the store.
That's too late; they had to know of the consignment agreement when they made the loan, or when the consignment agreement was made, for actual knowledge to matter.
Are you a lawyer? UCC, again, does not matter. The franchisee never owned the consigned LEGO.
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This is why sovereign citizens exist. A system so opaque and arbitrary that the cargo cult alternative to it is hardly more silly. Not in general, but for a few outlier examples like this.
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It wouldn't shock me if the repossession also came with a strong mandate to try and realize as much value as possible out of the store's current inventory. Which I assume a 200k collection would comprise a significant element. An overzealous manager could easily try running with that harder than they really should
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Since BAM is just a franchise and doesn't own many stores, there's a possibility that a large number of their franchisees go indie. Or a competitor brand comes up to try to capitalize on this event and sign on former BAM stores to their brand.
Not saying this will happen, but I guess if they screwed up their handling of it maximally it could be the start of something bigger.
My pronostic is they'll just do a rebranding once this thing blows over.
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The real villain here is the Universal Commercial Code. It turns out that a consignment agreement isn't a consignment agreement. If you attempt to enter into one, what you have actually done is transferred title of the goods to the consignee and retained only a security interest in them. So if the consignee then loses his inventory to a creditor, the creditor gets the consignor's goods free and clear and the consignor has only a worthless debt owed by the bankrupt consignee. All 100% legal. You can avoid this, if you're a commercial lawyer, by filing a form (UCC-1) which declares your interest in the goods; this gives you a security interest superior to the other creditors. Of course, random people doing a one-time sale of whatever would never know to do this. Presumably this law was written by banks or other creditors.
This doesn't seem right:
This case likely fails on Aiii and C. It seems like the ucc rules are in general meant to apply to b2b suppliers consigning inventory, and not random people consigning their collections of shit.
The courts are apparently very reluctant to consider A(iii).
ETA: I expect that since the guy who sold them was a "collector", the goods were not considered "consumer goods", thus failing on (C).
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I don't think people realize how risky mom-and-pop shops are as counterparties. FinnaSkipTown LLC can just shut down and not give you your money, stuff, or services at any time.
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I would expect Lego sets to fall under the "consumer goods" exception, though.
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I was so onboard with this whole thing until I got to the part with the youtuber running around comitting crimes and being obnoxious while trying to "help." With friends like these, who needs enemies?
Orders of magnitude. There's a world difference between being reckless and loose with the law and committing a couple of misdemeanors to make a more interesting video, versus stealing a few hundred thousand dollars and siccing corrupt police on anyone who tries to stop you. On a legal/moral framework the youtuber's case would be stronger if he actually followed the law the entire time. On a pragmatic level nobody would have noticed or cared if he wasn't a memer who makes viral videos that millions of people want to watch.
This strategy dates back to (at least) the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement (which was tremendously successful).
Basically, you want to be a nuisance. Public attention thrives on controversy. If you are standing peacefully in your assigned corner protesting whatever, people will just ignore you.
Ideally, the state will react widely out of proportion, thereby generating sympathy for your cause.
Ideally though, the cause comes first, and the civil disobedience comes later. I do not watch much Youtube, but I suppose for a lot of youtubers it is the other way round -- the recklessness is their brand, and they are happy to put it in the service of whatever cause.
Civil disobedience does not mean running around being a nuisance until the powers that be are so annoyed they just give in to get you to go away. Civil disobedience is about violating an obviously unjust law and willingly accepting the punishment, stoking public outrage at the clear disconnect between the law and their own morality. You're removing the government's ability to hide its oppression behind selective enforcement by daring them to arrest popular people of unimpeachable character for something most people do not believe, in their hearts, to be wrong.
Reckless Ben is not engaging in civil disobedience. At best, he's a vigilante, but that's far too cool a label for a YouTube "pranker."
That trick only worked once. Now the penalties are so high that unless the government is already on your side, you simply get buried under the jail if you try this. All modern civil disobedience is either counterproductive or theatrical.
I think that's more a product of all the good moral crusades already being taken. The low hanging fruit has been plucked, and the sort of stark injustices capable of motivating large swathes of normies to force political change merely by their public enforcement simply don't exist anymore in western countries. The oppressions are more subtle, better targeted, better cloaked within layers of bureaucratic plausible deniability, such that enforcing them on charismatic protesters isn't enough, standing alone, to provoke the public to action. Nothing modern protesters are fighting for has the kind of broad appeal necessary for civil disobedience to work.
Moreover, governments have cottoned on to the PR trick, and have figured out it's more effective to just let the attractive college kids tucker themselves out and go home rather than allow them to make sympathetic spectacles of themselves getting roughed up by burly state troopers. No one's stupid enough to break up peaceful protests with firehoses and german shepherds anymore.
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Obligatory note that "LEGO" is not supposed to be pluralized
Not only am I going to continue calling them Legos but also I'm going to call other plastic brick toys lego as well, in a fully generic way. Screw lego and their trademark.
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Interestingly, standard British usage is that "Lego" is a mass noun (like "water") - it is always used in the grammatical singular with non-counting quantifiers like "some Lego" or "$1000 worth of Lego" or no quantifier as in "models built of Lego". We would never say "Legos" and a single brick would be a "piece of Lego" or a "Lego brick". Whereas standard US usage is as a countable noun (like "coin") with each brick being an individual Lego.
Lego Corp want Lego to be an adjective because that makes it easier to protect their trademark. Like Rollerblade wanting their inline skates to be called "Rollerblade skates" and not "Rollerblades", and with about as much chance of success.
I have no idea why BrE and AmE diverge on this point, particularly as neither is following the Lego Corp position.
American english doesn't use lego in the singular. 'He has legos' 'oh how many' 'one brick'.
I think I've seen Americans talking about "stepping on a lego in the night"
But if you are right, "Legos" as a plural-formed mass noun is a weird usage. There are other examples ("clothes" is the most obvious, some people use "cattle" in this way) but they are rare.
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I don't give a damn what their lawyers say. It's Legos, and they can go pound sand with their trademark.
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If a Danish company wants to tell me how to use English plurals, they are welcome to put their flag on the moon whenever they want.
Best they can do is Hans Island
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If I had any inclination at all to care what Lego thinks about the proper usage of their trademark, I lost it when they canceled Bionicle.
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