He could've closed the door in their faces and there would be nothing they could do about it. The company relied on theatrics and false threats to get back a legitimately purchased product.
Perhaps, but they could have broken it down, assaulted them, then claimed that they were violent. They get away with that kind of crap all the time, because mostly, they do this to criminals, and are friends with the local police. Sometimes they get caught, usually for things like shooting a dog that was chained and far out of reach, or because someone had it on video, but these thugs are the kind of people who got rejected from or fired from the police, so however incompetent, cowardly, and violent the cops are, these thugs are worse.
In the US, that would be an exceedingly bad idea on the part of the Pinkertons. They don't have the same protections law enforcement has: they are treated legally the same as anybody else, which means that in 38 US states they'd be justifying the homeowners use of deadly force.
I’m shocked the Pinkertons still exist. None of the bigger unions tried to pull strings to get them destroyed for past atrocities against the labor movement?
Yes, and had they continued to insist, showed their guns, and refused to leave he would have gotten away with getting a weapon and shooting them. But most homeowners are both unwilling and unable to take down a couple of armed thugs, assuming he even had a weapon at home that wasnt a fantasy sword replica.
Had he escalated and then drawn a weapon, odds are they would have shot him and may well have gotten away with it, claiming they were just asking questions and he immediately drew a weapon and tried to shoot them.
Remember that when some rednecks hunted down and killed a kid a while back for running while black(Ahmaud Arbery) the police initially wanted to drop the prosecution, and its quite possible that without the national attention of the Floyed case, and the murderers being dumb enough videotape themseles, they may well have gotten away with it. The simple fact that it was a discussion of if they would get convicted at all is just as telling. And police will generally back security companies more than rednecks in court.
You’re trying to assert that people making claims based on some knowledge are wrong because they don’t have every fact, while claiming that you have no facts whatsoever.
Do you not see how completely fucked up that is?
We don’t talk to each other this way here. We shouldn’t talk to each other this way at all. The “gotcha” structure of debate will be the death of public discourse and with it, democracy, and with that the rule of law. When we live in Idiocracy it will substantially be because of people trolling “prove it” because it gets them out of thinking about uncomfortable things.
But this response isn’t about you. Not even a little. It’s for the other people reading this tree of replies, for the next time someone is trying to shut down conversation.
If you want to go back to the Labor movement, the Pinkertons practically committed war crimes. When people say the police evolved from a misanthropic idea of keeping the peace, they are specifically thinking of the Pinkertons as an example. Hired thugs meant to keep those in power in power, not to protect the citizenry.
> I would like an example from within the last, say, 75 years. Regardless, you didn't even cite an example.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"In 2020, Matthew Dolloff, an unlicensed security guard contracted through Pinkerton, shot and killed Lee Keltner, a conservative protestor in Denver, Colorado."
Not exactly kicking down doors and assaulting the residents, I know, but hopefully we can agree that its adjacent.
Of course the premise is that "they get away with it all of the time." If such examples existed, citing them would be contrary to the act of getting away with it. I'm not saying that I know for a fact that the Pinkertons or other such similar organizations "get away with it." But I know the United States has produced numerous examples of police officers getting away with it, and in my mind it's very possible that detective agencies do all manner of reprehensible things, especially to people in poverty, and get away with it.
We're hearing about it in the case of a YouTuber because they have a platform.
I don’t know if the Pinkertons directly, but their competitors have caused a lot of problems during our eternal war in the Middle East. That’s a problem of using a private police force like an army, and while the US government and military paid the bills and made requests, the triggermen bear their share of the blame.
You’re trying to make an extraordinary claims play to deflect this part of the conversation and I’m not biting. If you don’t know the sordid history of private armies go do your own research. Don’t imply other people are wrong because they aren’t spoon feeding you facts that people who employ tactics like you won’t hear even if offered in earnest. As many people I’m the civil rights and LGBT community are now saying, it’s not my job to educate you for free.
Then you probably should not have responded to a question specifically asking for an example of Pinkerton kicking down doors. As you've clearly stated that you can't answer the question, but rather prefer to go off on some vaguely related tangent, then I will go on about my day.
Dude, your whole energy is trying to shut down conversation and I already told you that’s not going to work.
I only knew the Pinkertons still existed reading about problems in the second gulf war, in which they were listed amongst the problem children. I thought that name was retired a century ago, turns out not. What I don’t know is any role they played in Afghanistan. Bracketing your base of knowledge is not weakness, it’s disclosure.
Also they all hire the same kind of people. Just because BP had the Deep Water fiasco doesn’t mean we forget about Exxon Valdez. There are no “good ones” just short memories and willful lack of imagination.
This is not high school debate class. Act like a grownup.
Nothing that isn't stories by friends working for securitas (the main company for which pinkerton is a brand), or anecdotes. I am certain I could find a story like that just by googling for it, but real statistics are what are interesting, and I cant be bothered to research it. So let me instead ask, what evidence do you have that they are better than the police? because that is what you are arguing. In general you can become a security guard in a tiny fraction of the time it takes to become a police, and they have much lower requirements compared to becoming a police. Oh and by the way, most of them believe themselves to have the same powers and protections as police, that they do not does not matter much. The real shitheads get pruned pretty quickly, but the middling level assholes instead sometimes get shifted into one of the offbrands.
They're not arguing that they're better than police, they're saying that police have protections other people don't, and those protections are the only reason they feel comfortable kicking doors down. You're very, very unlikely to find some private security guy willing to kick a door down for some trading cards, because pretty much the first time they're wrong about it they're going to jail. You don't get qualified immunity as private security.
And that's an awfully long paragraph when "no" would have sufficed just fine.
Those protections are not the only reason the police are comfortable doing things like that, those protections are there, because the justice system could not get police to stop doing that regardless, and in extraordinarily rare cases its justified.
Its called fait accompli. If I go to someone who stole my bike, beat them and take the bike back, yeah I do get to keep the loot, even if they prosecute me, which is unlikely, and even if they succeed in prosecuting me which is also unlikely, I still get to keep the loot. Its not the way the legal system or the law is supposed to apply, but in reality the idea or intent of law is irrelevant, its its practical application that matters. It is why I explicitly say they get away with it because they mostly do it to criminals.
No one in their sane mind think the law is intended to allow the threats they made etc, or that they had the rights to do what they did, but they did it anyways, and as the story shows, they got away with it. Think about that again, they did this to some rich white geek with a platform and they got away with it. What do you think they would get away with against a known criminal...
Fait accompli is not a legal defence, it's a description of something that is now irreversible. And taking things entirely reversible.
This is not the same as taking back stolen property from a thief. If you want to stretch analogies, it's like beating up the kid that bought your stolen [still disputed] bike from a bike shop. The kid here didn't do anything wrong. If the goods were stolen, there might be an argument for a civil process to get them back to their owner, but if you commit a crime in the act of repatriating stolen goods, you could lose you right to them.
In this case they "got away with it" because this kid didn't know his rights, fell for the threats and let them taken the goods. It's nasty but a hundred million miles away from the felony B&E, assault and theft being described as acceptable a few posts up.
Could've, but theatrics are used because it's effective. A surprise morning visit by professional intimidators arguing that you "do what we say or you might spend the next decade in jail" can override a lot of logical reasoning.
It is but we also have PI’s. Usually ex-cops or ex-military members with an intelligence angle. These are intimidating people by design. If you had a squad of paramilitary at your door, and you were the typical magic player, you’d give them the keys if they asked.
"By design?" Let's dig into that. Their CV, or non-LEO uniform, or physical size does not give them license to walk into peoples' houses or to threaten to do so. Everyone knows that. Which means they probably made a threat, and if that threat in any way suggested that they represented law enforcement, it should absolutely be illegal and they should be locked up for impersonation.
If they used their physique and mentality to suggest that that they were affiliated with law enforcement, that's a problem. If they used their physique and mentality to threaten extrajudicial violence, that's a problem. If they were crystal clear that they didn't represent law enforcement and that they weren't threatening extrajudicial violence, cool.
Society has an interest in ensuring that goons can't bluff their way into LEO privileges, so if that's what they did, we have a problem.
> If you had a squad of paramilitary at your door, and you were the typical magic player, you’d give them the keys if they asked
I haven't played MtG since the 90s, so I'm maybe not clued in on what a "typical magic player" is, but I would expect them to be pretty rules-lawyer-y (both on and off the table) and would stand their ground on principle.
I think most rules-lawyers tend to lose their confidence in the power of those rules when you flip the table and leave… or when you threaten to hit them with a wrench.
Or threaten a 13 year old girl who happens to beat you in round 1 of FNM with her black deck. It’s all fun and games until someone flips a table or punches a child or says some really awful things that make said 13 year old give all her magic cards away.
If real law enforcement (or Pinkertons) showed any sense of legitimacy, the typical MtG player would bow to the authority. Whether it’s in the rule book or “unspoken rules by the venue”.
I guess it depends what you mean by "impersonate." Are you asking whether they literally claimed to be a police officer? If so, they almost certainly did not. But they probably showed up with a uniform and a brass badge with words like "sergeant" and "national" and "service" on it next to maybe an eagle and a flag, and they probably talked about how the homeowner was in trouble with the law.
These types flash a badge, mumble the words "detective" and "agency" in the same sentence, then immediately pivot to babbling about fines and jailtime before you have a chance to question their authority. It's a high-pressure sales tactic masquerading as law enforcement, without crossing the line of impersonation.
To those ends, they back down quickly when you poke back with childish questions like "wait, so you're not the police?" (If they say yes, they're in trouble.)
Particularly when your SO is becoming upset about it. What's more important, some cards that you hadn't intended to purchase in the first place, or the mental well-being of your wife?
This is the naive approach you would do 15+ years ago.
Then things got way better with real browser engines like Webkit that could understand Javascript. That was something that I've personally hacked together as a contractor for an anti-piracy customer using Python, Webkit and Qt framework (PyQt) in around 2009. Shortly after some nice libraries in node/js came out like Phantom.js which would make this much better.
There is no reason questions seeking the truth should ever be censored/shunned. The truth is a lot of users here likely took it, and don't want to even consider the possibility of side effects. Its disappointing but easy to understand the human nature behind it.
Will VLC ever have a native dark skin? I love the software and have been using it for well over a decade, but the 3rd party skins out there range from mediocre to terrible. I think a lot of people would find this very valuable, thank you.
Content marketers in the digital marketing space commonly put blog posts through "spinners" that take your text and modify it through replacing words/phrases with similar equivalents. This lets you take one article and turning it into 5-10+ unique ones, even though they still discuss the same things. It would be a shame if a service like this was marketed towards those interested in privacy, it would probably break this entire system...
I’ve found plenty of articles that seem to be run through these spinners, but hand made corrections are likely to be necessary (unless it can be automated with ML for example) as you can almost always tell that something is odd based on context lacking word choices
And thats exactly what newer programs do, look at AppSumo and its practically all of them. The older gen simply used a giant dictionary, then picked a random option from the list of acceptable choices.
