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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 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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