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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.
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.
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..
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.
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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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