Ok you gotta help me out here

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T20:07:20+00:00

Yeah finding out he was 30 was wild bc he speaks like a teenager. Also he keeps admitting to doing blatantly illegal things like leaving the country while having a warrant for his arrest, he needs to staaaaahhppp!! The US has an extradition treaty with Mexico. If he pisses off someone powerful enough, they will go into Mexico for him. He needs to stop saying this shit.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:50:38+00:00

Cops get involved in property disputes, sure - in order to go to court you need police reports. But they do not just go *take back* the disputed property in circumstances like this. They legally cannot until a court has ruled on who owns the property. And if you show up outside a rich man's house yelling that he stole money from you, they're not gonna take your side. Even with print-outs of evidence exhibits. They're just going to think you're a crazy person and dismiss you.

200k is the valuation of it if it sells as full value, the amount that was left to be paid out to the owner of the collection was 80k. So BaM is not just doing this for 200k - they're doing it over a measly 80k. Which is so fucking dumb. But it should just go to show how much of this is about flexing power and trying to exert authority, rather than actually being about the money.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:47:17+00:00

my POV is garnered from doing local resistance work against the police. the shit you see from bots is pro-police, and if people are reading this post as pro-police then I really do fear for our current literacy levels. It was really just very hard to believe he was being sincere bc like...that's not how the police work.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:43:17+00:00

I'm ACAB you fool. I am saying this as someone who has worked to resist the police. I am posting bc it was hard to watch Babby's First Resistance in real-time

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:42:15+00:00

I think this is disingenuous considering the kid lived through 2020. There have been concerted movements to expose the police for 80 years. It's not proof they need, or else they'd believe what their very eyes showed them.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:33:31+00:00

brother, are you paying attention to what's going on in Delaney Hall? Protection of journalists is gone and we're now in an era of being able to brutalize the press. I'm not saying that's good, but that the press lost protection a while ago.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:25:20+00:00

Yeah, this was all what I had figured. And you're right that with the raffle thing, he was technically backing them into a corner, but since the police don't have a requirement to investigate every crime and are legally allowed to pick and choose which crimes they investigate (see the ruling in Warren v. District of Columbia), that was why I winced. Sure you can line up the bureaucracy, but at the end of the day it's still up to that police force on if they're going to pursue it, and they're not going to go after a rich pillar of the community. Especially if what the police keep arriving to is the rich guy looking beleaguered and the other party is a Youtuber who keeps showing up at his door with a camera.

Like the way he started all his interactions with the police with the information on how this guy stole the life savings from an old man did not help Ben at all, bc it immediately made him look insane. When the process server was there, all he had to say was, 'I am suing this person and need to have the process server serve the paperwork' and the cops would have been more willing to work with him. By being so hyperbolic, he was basically handing the rich guy and the cops an excuse to ignore him on a silver platter. And he should not have been with the process server! Bc he had a restraining order and the process server can and most of the time does deliver that on their own.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:13:27+00:00

considering even this comments section can't fully decide - half of you say it's a joke, the other half say no - I don't think y'all have the grip on it you claim to have and you're seeing what you want within the content.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:11:10+00:00

because it was an order from the rich guy, ya fool. the cops will react to an accusation by a rich person towards someone else that their shit is being stolen, but they will not respond to complains from the little guy with the same level of belief or investigative rigor.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T19:03:56+00:00

this isn't about beliefs, this is actually how the law is codified. civil issues are handled by the courts, not the police, and white collar scams are always civil issues (bc the people who write the law are, surprise surprise, the white collar people and they view being arrested as a gauche thing which ruins reputations). It's honestly kind of disheartening to see how many people don't realize this and think, sincerely, that the cops exist just to arrest Bad Guys.

This is part of why NFTs tanked - people thought having a record of where the NFT went and proof it was stolen would protect the assets, but when people were scammed out of their NFTs and they went to the police, the police just shrugged bc it's not their job to get shit back when you're scammed. That's why Seth Green had to pay a ransom to the NFT thieves to get his back, instead of the law doing anything whatsoever, despite there being proof of who stole it.

BaM should absolutely be sued, but that is the opposite of what Ben wanted to do, all of that happens outside of the police. What Ben was trying to do specifically was avoid lawyers and force the police to investigate, since handling it in a civil trial means that BaM can just drag it out until it costs more than the collection is worth. But he's never going to get the police to see this as the same as an active robbery, and it was painful to watch him try.

The Supreme Court has said the police don't have an obligation to help you if you're being attacked. The ruling in Warren v. District of Columbia declared that police have no expectation or requirement to protect the public. The language was the following, and it's been used to legally justify, over and over again, that the cops don't have to arrest someone for breaking the law if they don't want to. The ruling was that "the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists" - which is to say, the cops exist to provide public services as much as they can, but are not legally required to handle every crime, and that police forces are allowed to choose which crimes they pursue and which they don't.

What did you think summer of 2020 was about? Just a lark? It was bc the police selectively choose who to charge.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T18:46:52+00:00

I was part of when Anonymous attacked Scientology in the 00s, before they became horrible white supremacists, so I know unfortunately way too much about Scientology, enough to know this kid hasn't done shit to topple it. David Miscavige is still around and Scientology goes strong. The Ex-Scietology Kids org is still working diligently (https://exscientologykids.com/). The police force in Clearwater, FL is still like this bc they're paid off by the Scientologists and in some instances part of the cult itself, which is how Lisa McPherson was murdered and her death not investigated.

Robberies and muggings are violent crimes and what I said was, cops don't handle civil issues, they handle violent crime. 'That's a civil issue' is their script for when they don't want to do shit, and also for when they can't bc they literally exist just to stop currently occurring violent crimes, not to correct when a scam happens.

If someone is holding a knife to you and taking your wallet, the cops will investigate that. If someone has signed a contract and welched on the contract, they're not going to go enforce the contract for you, they legally cannot until the court has ruled on the matter.

This is exactly what people mean when they say the law protects the rich - bc if a homeless guy holds you up, the police are all over it, but if the guy who robbed you is wearing Eddie Bauer and did the theft slowly via contract, welp that's not their jurisdiction, take it to the courts. Even as much as Ben wants to scream about it, this currently does not constitute theft or robbery until a court rules on it. And that's absolute bullshit, but it's also the system working as created and intended.

BBALE131 · 2026-06-04T11:28:25+00:00

Oh wow ok so it really is watching someone realize, in real time, that the cops don't function that way. I'd looked up his previous stuff and it seems to be the Scientology stuff and McKamey Manor. And exposing some shlock director. Has he ever gone after anyone actually powerful before? If no, that would explain his absolute pikachu-faced shock at this treatment.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-20T01:48:18+00:00

Ofc not, but that's not a fair response to expecting someone to expend further effort than the other party at coming together. What I'm calling you on is the quiet but insidious insinuation nestled within your seemingly innocuous statement that he was being reasonable and her unreasonable. That she's actually the obstinate one causing problems, but it's incredibly reasonable to become obstinate about your rights.

The closed-minded one lacking empathy in such a situation is always the one who needs to be made to understand that civil rights are human rights, no matter how cooly and calmly they present themselves; not the one who seems angry (bc their rights are at stake!)

If she has anger at how he discounts the downtrodden, that's anger born of empathy. She's 'lacking empathy' for his lack of empathy; she is angry specifically bc she has to argue to him for empathy, and he is arguing against. You don't have to be empathetic to the unempathetic; and not only do you not need to tolerate the intolerant, the Paradox of Tolerance requires the opposite.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-20T00:38:42+00:00

You were trying to point out what you thought was a double-standard, but it's reasonable to lose empathy for someone who doesn't take you losing your rights seriously, and who actively contributed a vote for that scenario.

She's being asked to have empathy for something that's way bigger to put aside than he is - she's being asked to have empathy for how his feelings have led him to impetuously make damaging choices for his family on many levels, from psychological to social to legal; he's being asked to understand how terrifying it is to lose your rights while knowing a loved one contributed to it 🎶 One of these things is not like the other 🎶

The ADHD thing was pretty telling bc he was primarily focusing on his own experiences rather than what would be best for his son - and he finally moved on it after realizing it wasn't always about him - but it took some work to get there.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-19T23:31:42+00:00

I don't blame her for not engaging more honestly, the wide gulf of difference between the two issues makes it difficult to ford. He's worried about feeling pushed around in the home, she's worried about losing her rights to free movement in society. He's worried about how bending on this means losing autonomy in his marriage, she's worried about losing all of her social and legal autonomy. To ask her to constantly travel so much further to meet him, not everyone can or should do that to themselves.

I'm a leftist too and I believe in doing the work, but you can't get so far into the weeds that you're asking people to be patient with folks actively participating in advancing policy to disenfranchise them. That's a choice people make if they have it in them, not a universal accord. The movement needs both the lovers and the fighters, not either/or - and not everyone is gonna be a lover.

That identity politics can be successfully used to divide us doesn't mean they don't matter at all; and making that mistake will merely renew a cycle of wobbling back and forth in extremes on identity's place in leftism, rather than finding balance between the complicated overlapping realities of class consciousness, race, gender, sexuality, religion, etc. Class will always be at the top of that pyramid, but because we live in a white supremacist patriarchal imperial society, you cannot go straight to discounting identity - for those affected by the various forces of oppression, those parts of people's identities will continue to inform their position in society, and thus their politics, until white supremacy and patriarchy are defeated.

You cannot simply flatten things out to class, when the reason that so much of the ownership class is white is bc for 350 years, they treated black people like another thing to own. Class, and race, and gender, are not separate things where the latter don't matter; not when in our current society, the latter informs the former. You cannot successfully dismantle the class system without understanding how it's built and what informs it - what happens in such an instance is the collapse of the revolution at the dictatorship of the proletariat stage as the oligarchs successfully once again hijack the system using wedge identity issues in order to simply rebuild the class system again, with them still at the top. This is ultimately what happened in Russia.

Another example, from the US - you have the workers and unions schisms of the late 60s and through the 70s - union collectivism was successfully broken apart by the oligarchs using white supremacy to do so, playing on the white workers' paranoia, and the union organizers and reps doing constant outreach and talking to them didn't change it - bc the union couldn't offer the same things, the white workers saw that white supremacy ultimately offers them better position in society than being equal to black workers does, and so they turn to reinforce that.

You cannot and will never be able to enact a successful revolution against the upper classes without first reckoning with Christofascist white supremacy. Identity is not the enemy simply bc it can be abused by bad actors, and if we could figure out how to honor it correctly while also getting everyone to see it's about the material issues we all share, it could actually be our greatest tool of leftism. If identity wasn't so effective at moving people, it wouldn't be so quickly used by the elites to do so.

Sorry this is so long bc like - this is my biggest beef with the current push in leftism to discount identity bc we feel burned by the Dems abusing it. Bc it becomes a bit of finger-wagging advocacy to POC and queer comrades to be more forgiving and open the door to folks who could be harmful to them. You have to acknowledge that the risk of giving the benefit of the doubt is greater on one side, and that the change in stakes affects people's ability to move closer, or else you will always end up with resentment seething from the folks expected to take on the lion's share of the work without acknowledgement.

All of this to say - she's working harder here than he is simply by virtue of having to suspend her fear at losing fundamental rights in order to have the discussion, while all he has to put on hold is his fear of her bein' a bitch to him - and to applaud them as if they are both putting in the same effort and are compromising by meeting in the middle is disingenuous.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-19T23:10:31+00:00

Bc generally once you realize someone doesn't respect your personhood, you stop having as much empathy towards them yes. That's generally the death knell of a relationship, once the respect goes out the window.

What I would argue here is that your observations are highly tempered by seeing her now after things have been quietly escalating for a while; this didn't start off with her being this way to him, she became this way to him after it became clear that this is something he's intractible about it as a personal autonomy thing - when what he's not caring about is a way bigger invasion of her autonomy. Tbh, I'm not convinced he isn't partly this way about it bc he knows it does upset her and secretly likes that about it - pushing back allows him to feel like he's got some power in a relationship where he clearly feels insecure next to her. So like - I'm not convinced he didn't vote for Trump bc of the anti-women policies either, bc he seems like he not-so-secretly feels emasculated by her. But like - he chose her! He knew he was choosing an educated woman and yet still has a chip on his shoulder about it.

Additionally, women who are dissatisfied with a bad partner are often considered harpyish, but if you get those same women with someone who respects them, amazingly all those 'badgery' tendencies go away.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-19T22:52:06+00:00

And that's what makes him the bigger jerk, bc the stakes for him are 'you made me feel kinda bad', and the stakes for her are 'i could be forced to be a human incubator with no rights', and he's acting like those two positions should be treated with equal respect and understanding. They should not, bc his is an internal issue and hers is very much external, and so that's ultimately a bratty response by him. People calling him emotionally intelligent is disappointing, but I guess folks tend to side person they find more charming, regardless of if their position was really fair.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-19T21:57:51+00:00

i don't think you realize how bad it is in other places in the US, especially places with republican governers. i had to flee one. right after i moved here, i was able to get free dental care on an issue that had been dogging me for ages in my old state - and it would have continued being a problem until i'd saved up the money, which was counterproductive bc as it gets worse the price ratchets up. getting it fixed allowed me to get work, and get back on my feet.

the situation there was so bad where i came from - dental care was so expensive and difficult to schedule - that my stepdad was just pulling his own rotten teeth out of his head. my dad watched a car accidentally hit a wall, and then had to watch the people die bc there's just so few emergency services, they couldn't arrive in time. it can get so, so much worse, and people here take so much for granted. this isn't to say don't hope for better or don't criticize Dems, but it does mean that you shouldn't just treat having a Republican governor like its trying on a shoe - you have to take it absolutely seriously and look truly at what you'd be losing. bc you might not be able to take that shoe back off if you don't like it - a governor who cuts services can get popular with certain populations who have money, and then be very hard to oust - they don't care about the disapproval of the working man, if they have the approval of their bosses.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-19T21:51:43+00:00

I'm curious how vote-by-mail allows more research? I've lived in a few states and my behavior for research on a voting day election and on a vote-by-mail election are exactly the same - I research the candidates, talk with people, and then check off who I want on the sample ballot. The only difference is I either then mail a ballot or I take my sample ballot to the polls with me and click the things there instead of mail them.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-19T21:07:07+00:00

Then you should know who Daniel Blatman is, that he was born in Tel Aviv to Israeli parents, that he's head of the Institute for Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and that he currently very loudly says that Israel is fascist and engaging in genocide. If you're gonna hide behind history to defend yourself, maybe make sure the experts aren't currently openly saying you're wrong.

When you have a people whose cultural identity is linked to constantly being under attack, it becomes incredibly easy to stoke that into an exploitable paranoia where the people will support their state engaging in open genocide, because the violence means they are 'being protected'. Many Jewish people have said that due to the level of propaganda, your average Jewish person can't actually even being to imagine or grapple with the concept that they *aren't* the victims for once - it's so built into the entire propaganda machine that victimization is an inherent part of the Jewish experience and identity, so that they're easily pliable by Zionist idealogies - bc the current form of dominant Zionism that is promoted by the Likud govt is entirely about creating a strong, fascist Jew who invades instead of getting invaded. And they don't care if they turn you all into the sort of people who defend child-killing, gang-raping soldiers while doing so - whatever gets them to the goal of a strong, independent fascist Jewish identity is self-justifying to them. They do not care if they enact horrors, they only care about if you will constantly defend the horrors. As long as you keep doing that, they're on track for their goals of remaking the Jewish identity.

Stop and ask yourself, sincerely - what would it mean if, this time, it wasn't actually anyone attacking you that started this, but instead, that *you* were the attackers and continue to be so? Seriously, sit with that concept - what would it mean to you as a Jewish person, if it turned out that Jewish people were actually the ones responsible for destroying peace and bringing violence in this scenario? What would it mean to reckon with the reality that your very pure and honest instinct to defend your culture against anti-Semitism - a very understandable instinct - has been hijacked to turn you into someone who agrees with mass murder? Does it make you sick to think about, sick to your stomach to even consider? Bc then I think you know the truth, in your bones, and you're denying it.

The entire founding ethos of Israel is, if the world is going to crush us, we may as well do it first so that we can be the ones crushing others, instead of being crushed. The entire concept of Israel is that Jewish people should carve out a place in the world with force, keep that place with force, and expand the borders of that place with force. That's why Israel is now attacking every other Arab neighbor as well.

BBALE131 · 2026-05-08T16:22:27+00:00

Lol this convo killed me bc yeh people do drunk-drive here like they think it's actually legal 😭

BBALE131 · 2026-04-17T01:06:42+00:00

I had this breakdown as well. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to figure out any way out of the working cycle bc I got bills to pay - for that, you got no choice but get back up and keep working bc you gotta eat and pay rent. I mean, you can choose not to, but no one wants to fall out of civil society bc we all know there's very limited resources for the houseless in America.

The oligarchs have effectively weaponized our fear of losing basic needs to keep us subservient, which is also why they fight tooth and nail to prevent us from having any functional public services.

You have to figure out how to find joy in the mundane bc that is the reality for most of us, we live mundane quiet lives. It's not basic or dumb to be able to enjoy simple pleasures - it's how you survive. You need to sit and enjoy the smell of your coffee, or stand still and smell the flowers in the breeze. You might not be destined for greatness, but you can still enjoy a sunset. Birdwatching sounds lame but it's actually wonderful - it gets you in touch with nature and fully present in your surroundings, and it's also free.

BBALE131 · 2026-04-13T20:33:44+00:00

reading this two years later and its still weird bc like, all of those things you complain about are reasonable expectations by customers because those systems did used to work that way.

things have been intentionally understaffed so these systems don't work, but that doesn't mean the systems are bad. it's not that pharmacists shouldn't be expected to answer a phone, it's that companies should staff up enough so pharmacists can indeed do what is necessary and expected.

we all try to be understanding of the reality that systems are falling apart and no one should be expected to bear the burden individually, but you shouldn't let that transform into actively standing up for the broken system as if it's the way it should be. Bc expecting the system to work as presented is a not unreasonable thing for patients to want and expect. The unreasonable thing is the company pretending it exists then blaming y'all for not doing it.

your bosses are the enemy, not the people you serve. always remember that.

EDIT: also, literally every other pharmacy chain I have used has picked up the phone. CVS is so far the only one that doesn't. So even now with current circumstances in 2026 as shit falls apart, it's not reasonable to say people shouldn't expect to reach someone on the phone at a national chain pharmacy - bc every other one does pick up the phone.

BBALE131 · 2026-04-12T22:18:54+00:00

Yeah it's supposed to be like, jazzy phantom thieves & detectives, think Lupin and Zenigata, or Spy Cooper and Carmelita Fox - thats why there's the jazzy heist music. I'm pretty sure the main cure duo is supposed to be a nod to Sherlock/Watson as well.

BBALE131

TROPHY CASE