Going against the grain: people don’t steal candy bowls because of poverty. The majority of trick or treaters will live in the same neighborhood and therefore also live in McMansions.
The video is mostly for fun, being derivative of his larger series where he pranks porch pirates with glitter/stink bombs. Porch pirates affect everyone, not just McMansion grillpilled people, it happens in poorer neighborhoods too.
This same guy also has a series where he helped bust a scam call center in India that was duping elderly Americans of their savings. I’m sure there will be Hexbears who say “the Americans deserved it and the Indians needed the money more” but I don’t think scamming working class grandparents is the bleeding edge of revolutionary action.
Saw something that actually pissed me off this Halloween. Walking around, there was this house of teenagers with their light on and a paper sign saying they weren’t handing out candy. Okay, that’s fine. But then their friend’s car keeps speeding up and down the road, where they’re literally just dumping people’s bowls into their bags and bringing it into the house. These teenage assholes were essentially ruining trick or treating in the neighborhood because everybody’s “take 1” bowl was being emptied for this house party where the only thing I heard at the door was “PICKLE RIIIICK”. IDK, I just think it’s a real dick move to purposefully try to steal every open bowl in the neighborhood for a house party of teenagers/adults acting like children. I got pissed when my kids came across 4 empty bowls in a row super early in the night. Like it’s trying to ruin a holiday for kids. Don’t mean to sound like a chud, but if people widespread can’t even honor how something as relatively meaningless as the candy bowl is for everybody, how do we expect a society built on communal ownership and looking out for each other to work?
Yes, candy theft is that serious on Halloween. It is meaningless, but that’s also like why would you take something meaningless from literal children. If you live in a neighborhood of mostly parents, stealing people’s bowl is the equivalent of stealing Christmas from a bunch of kids. There are plenty of conversations to be had about Christmas, just like Halloween, but even if you steal from the richest houses in the area, stealing candy or Christmas gifts from kids is literally an idiom for a dick move, literally Grinch shit. Plus, it’s “trick or treat”. People love a good prank for Halloween. When someone’s hand comes out of a bowl from seemingly nowhere on Halloween, it’s cool special effects. As a kid, I’d still be willing to give some candy to someone else’s bowl for a good trick instead of a treat, regardless of whether or not I was a thief.
it’s antisocial behaviour
This same guy also has a series where he helped bust a scam call center in India that was duping elderly Americans of their savings.
Was this the one where he once again deployed stink bombs to choke out an office full of people?
For some reason, all of these videos seem to have a theme. The goal is to make one particular person as miserable as possible, on camera. And the pretext always seems to be “who can I find that I can justify doing this to?”
It’s all just spectacle. And the targets are, incidentally, almost always
for some crazy reason.I won’t argue that it is spectacle. It clearly is for entertainment purposes—basically justice porn without involving the police, excluding the call center case.
I never got the vibe he was specifically targeting minorities or even poor people. I mean yeah if you’re in poverty then you might be more likely to steal, but stealing from other people in your neighborhood (ie same class) makes everyone hate them. You might be onto something with him though, maybe a general NIMBYism, but I think many people can relate to the frustration of having their package stolen, and I struggle to equate that frustration with some sort of class warfare when it impacts everybody who shops online.
The goal is to make one particular person as miserable as possible, on camera
The mantra on Hexbear is that bullying works. People are group shamed in the comments here with the aim of forcing reflection on actions/opinions. It’s fair game as long as the misery is kept in proportion, which IMO is true for a glitter bomb.
The mantra on Hexbear is that bullying works.
We’ve also got a strong “shoplifting is cool” sentiment and a long-standing “crime wave politics is media bullshit” standing view.
The fetishization of porch piracy cuts across both. It fuels the hysteria and paranoia of suburban life. It villainizes poor people, particularly people of color, who always feature prominently in these series - whether they’re indian call center workers or black porch pirates. And the “pranks” grow increasingly vindictive over time - escalating from honking horns to glitter bombs to stink bombs and even on to pepper spray and fireworks in some more extreme examples. There’s no sense of retributive justice or proportional response, its just an escalating game. And in an era of people just firing shotguns through their front doors at strangers, I shouldn’t need to explain why this shit has a corrosive effect on public opinion.
it’s revenge porn not justice the fantasy is of retaliation.
bullying works I disagree with but the concept is more based around social ostrasisation for certain behaviours not just mean pranks
Like those videos where the youtuber leaves a tethered down bike and waits for someone to steal it and face plant while riding off. They always set them up in low-income neighborhoods.
That’s pretty funny lol. Fuck bike thieves. I don’t care if you’re poorer than the poor guy next to you. That shit is literally how many people survive in this hell world
Nah, stealing amazon packages is almost always a victimless crime. Amazon insures the packages which is why they are doing a psyop to make us care when they lose a small amount of monry
even if I’m not financially impacted, I still care if someone steals my package. I think anyone would. It’s a hassle to get the merchant to rectify the situation, and sometimes that isn’t possible if the item was limited or sold out. That doesn’t even get to situations where someone really needs their package timely, like medication.
Looting from big box stores doesn’t bother me, but it’s not as harmless to take things from regular people’s doorsteps even if they might be made whole after arguing with customer support.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. Petty theft is bad, but it’s a fraction of wage theft, which is a fraction of the surplus value/rent. This type of media is fucked because it ultimately promotes policies of over-policing and harsher sentences than the more harmful forms of theft.
Yeah but in poorer neighborhoods you can use that to your advantage, my friend got a free xbox series x from Microsoft by claiming the first one they sent him got stolen off his porch then returning one of them
…I wonder if Sony has a similar policy.
Amazon didn’t make him file a police report? Not doubting your story, but they’ve started checking for police reports in my area
Most of the time they don’t. Just act irritated and they’ll eventually say alright we’ll get you a new one. Or if you find the right rep, you can just claim it came all defective and you’re too busy and annoyed to waste time returning it and they’ll just refund you the money without having to return stuff
they’ll just refund you the money without having to return stuff
This is more likely to work during the holiday season, when shipping is more expensive and takes longer
Yeah Mark Rober is a bit of a cringe lib but his content’s fine. He only targets people who are being assholes and the ones who are being mild assholes only get a mild punishment. I mean the video in the OP is just about mild pranks, the kinds of things it would be acceptable to do to trick-or-treaters who hadn’t even been jerks
Lmao. He once rigged a package to blow up a drink bomb after a random black guy picked it up. Turns out he was the landlord that the porch pirates rented from briefly then he called 911. Him being a landlord aside, it’s almost as if random vigilante justice is already dumb and poorly thought out and made dumber when it’s petty suburban nonsense.
I agree that package thieves deserve to have their asses kicked because they don’t have X-ray vision, but defending engineer brained retaliation is just goofy
Do crackers have anything better to do than […]
no
Just don’t put out candy wtf
That doesn’t work though. Like if I take my kids around the neighborhood and have them take everybody else’s candy, it’s kind of a dick move not to put out some candy for other children.
aren’t they supposed to knock on the door and ask for candy
Oftentimes, those people have kids and they’re taking them out trick or treating, so they aren’t home.
yes.
lmfao “candy thieves” this reads like a
The tragedy of the commons.
To be fair, hoarding a communal good for yourself is a dick move, especially if you’re older. I encountered this as a little kid-- watching the teenage Goliath in front of me dump the whole bowl in his bag low-key broke me.
Youre a piece of shit if you booby trap a bowl though.
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If you don’t want all the candy stolen, hand it out a piece at a time. Everyone knows that if you leave it out, it’s going to probably get stolen. In fact, there’s a legal terminology that has been used to go after people who do these types of things, it’s called an “attractive nuisance.”
You don’t get to create a situation that a reaosnable person knew would lead to theft and then act like you’re not in the wrong. Same with shitty drivers, you tailgate someone and they slow down to stop to make a turn, you run into them, that’s on you.
🧠 : going trick-or-treating
: Calling the cops on people for giving people free food on Halloween
I’m gonna be a total contrarian here and say it’s just a harmless prank, a halloween tradition.
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gorillion
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I mean it’s pretty easy to come up with a fictitious “-illion” number of your own
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Okay but if you actually steal the entire bowl of candy you are an asshole and deserve the prank. Any amount of dickish-ness from the prank is offset entirely by the dickish-ness of the person stealing the candy.
Doesn’t this guy stage the vids like this (and he also ran a fundraiser for a sham “autism AwArEnEsS” org too)
A better example would’ve been literally any of his package thief videos.
