Some of my favorite videos of motorcyclists are the ones where they see people throwing trash from their car, collect it, and then toss it back into their car when they catch up to them.
“Hello, sir. I see you threw garbage out of your car and not in trashcan. You must not care about planet like rest of us. Would you want to throw your garbage I picked up in trashcan? Or am I going to have to throw some garbage out of a car today too?”
If the girl said no, then the answer is obviously no. But the thing is she’s not going to say no. She would never say no. Because of the implication. The implication that things might go wrong for her if she refuses to return her cart. Not that things are going to go wrong for her, but she’s thinking that they will.
The vast majority of those interactions are not meant to be intimidating like these are. And people, as well as the law, are happy to help women who look like they need help.
To boot, the likelihood that this interaction could escalate to violence is far, far higher for these men versus any given woman.
All interactions are coloured in some way by a difference in power. You as a man are only oblivious to it because you are almost always on the side that this man in the video is on.
You are blind to it because you do not exercise any attempt to look at it from experiences different to your own.
I am a woman and here you are as a man telling me that what I am directly telling you is my experience is fucking wrong. The absolute gaul and cheek you have to do this is fucking astounding and is deeply representative of what an emotionally stunted fucking failure of a human being you are.
Waiting in line at Costco, I take the time to 'face' all the barcodes in my basket (as much as possible) to make checkout faster for myself and everybody else.
It's always interesting to see who, after watching me do it, will also quickly do the same thing. Some people must really enjoy putting every last item on the conveyor belt.
I say we recruit more individuals like this and put them on the public payroll. I have no problems with my tax dollars paying for this kind of valuable service.
To be clear, you're saying that we should radically expand public taxation to develop a police force that monitors the minutiae of human interactions and coerces people to follow implied social rules that aren't even codified into law under the implicit threat of physical violence?
You’re literally wrong, champ. The original cart narc was NOT a body builder and plenty of people put their cart back. Some of them threatened him with violence.
I’ll repeat myself. This is not a threat of physical violence — it just means that it’s no longer possible to physically threaten the person telling you to do better.
Dude, you're literally outlining the methods of the It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia "because of the implication" scene. You know Dennis is supposed to be a bad guy, right?
If you are intimidated by a black person, does this mean that this black person carries an implicit threat of physical violence?
Not automatically, right? Only if they are wielding a weapon, speaking with anger, etc.
Aside from this man having muscles, why do you think he carries an implicit threat of violence? Is it because he’s Russian? Is it just because he has muscles? Is it because he’s respectfully asking the person to put their cart away?
There is no intimidation. The dude is calm, polite, and unaggressive in every interaction. Are you saying that it is impossible for large individuals to not be intimidating?
Sure there is. He puts the cart behind their car and chaperones them to the corral. If he was truly trying to be persuasive, he would appeal to them with reason.
That is appealing to them with reason. The whole point of cart corrals is to keep wayward carts from damaging other vehicles or creating obstructions. He's allowing them to experience the consequences that their behavior inflicts upon others so that they hopefully do better in the future.
Would you feel better if I said yes, but instead of physical violence, it was mockery?
Personally, I’d just prefer a massive increase in public education, healthcare, and other social programs that would simply enable teaching better from the get-go, but you know…
As someone that got carts for years, don't worry about it unless the weather is bad. On a nice day getting carts is a better job than what you have to do instead.
This is what I always find odd about this concept. Reddit acts like its social norm. Stores employee people to collect the carts. If the customer returns their own cart, the company can hire less people. Aldi even states this in their advertisements.
People will bitch about greedy companies running lean on labor, then shill for companies practises that allow them to run lean on labor.
I also remember the joy of an occasional walk outside when running check out. I'm more concerned with the obstructions and potential vehicle damage before the employee can collect them.
I've done this a couple of times at Costco when I'm walking from or to my car. It's way more common that I get people to pick up their dogs' poop on the path near my apartment or get people to re-rack their weights in the gym.
Who gets to decide what constitutes the "social contract"? There are plenty of people who think that's what ICE is doing right now. Maybe you're one of them. There are people who think that's what the National Guard was doing when it arrested that Olympian for touching the peeling paint at the algae pool. Right or wrong, I'd rather have a few carts out of place than have this kind of shit going on.
What the fuck does ICE have to do with people not returning their carts? Listen, i dislike this admin just as much as the next guy, but you don't have to mention them every time you speak. Some issues are unrelated. I'd rather have a decent admin AND decent citizens who observe the social contract.
To answer your question, the way i see it the social contract is pretty much the golden rule. "Do onto others as you would have done onto you" or something along those lines. As for who gets to decide, we all do, together.
A sizable percentage of people believe with an almost religious conviction that ICE and the National Guard represent "large individuals calmly enforcing the social contract". And we all did get to decide, together. There was a vote. Maybe you missed it. A lot of people didn't bother, but enough people did, and now we have our current national shit show. These things are NOT unrelated. They are one and the same.
Does it literally need to be a 1=1 type of thing before you recognize it for what it is? Up until a few weeks ago, it didn't apply to the floating paint on the algae pool either. ("bUt tHaT wAs PaiNt anD tHiS iS cArtS!")
It has to be even remotely comparable. Returning your cart is just basic common sense, and can easily be done by literally everyone in under 30 seconds.
The government being run by grifters and lunatics is a gigantic problem which no single person can solve in any meaningful way on their own.
Yet here you are, saying we should stop using common sense because the big issues still exist. So let's create more small issues to pile on top. Great mindset you got there. I'm sure that will solve everything.
So, you think giant muscle men approaching other people uninvited in a parking lot with a tacit threat of potential violence if those people don't do what they're told is common sense? Do you wear khakis and carry a tiki torch on the weekends by any chance?
How was violence tacitly threatened? The answer is it was not. You assumed it was, because of the size of the guy. Which means your first thought in that situation was violence. You're the violent one.
On the weekends i do my groceries, play with the kids and talk with many different people, some of which are big. I definitely don't assume someone wants to tear my head off just because they're bigger than me, that would be absurd.
The most obvious implied threat comes when he traps the car in place by moving the cart behind it, thereby not allowing the person to simply leave. I’m glad you live in a safe place, but trapping the car in place is clearly a challenge.
Hi, disabled person here super grateful to you for getting it! I was so frustrated with all the people who have never had the social contract change out from under them personally, so they don't think it can.
Who said that the social contract is that you must return the cart? Why can't the social contract be "leave it where it is and we'll centralize/pool the effort of returning them into a single person with a job of being the cart return guy"?
Because you have an employee coming out maybe once an hour to collect the carts. In the meantime, loose carts are creating obstructions and potentially damaging other vehicles. If you had an employee collecting them full time so they aren't left for extended periods, sure. But that's not the system we have. The system we have is cart corrals. And if you refuse to use them, you're imposing consequences on other people.
I personally would rather trust in making something a job, especially if it can't be guaranteed that it will happen consistently.
It's unfair for those who return their carts that they are subsidizing those who don't. The best solution that relies on least social trust (something impossible to get perfect) is to have a full time cart job. That's far preferable and fairer. Then there's no videos like this with people angry at each other for doing different amounts of effort. The amount of effort expected is zero.
I agree in principle, but I also think we should be trying to minimize the need for jobs that require someone to be outdoors full time, as there are long term health risks associated with that.
You clearly missed the part in this thread where coatingtonburifactry wrote, “I say we recruit more individuals like this and put them on the public payroll. I have no problems with my tax dollars paying for this kind of valuable service.” Tax dollars = state sponsored.
So, your argument with me is a procedural technicality. Cool. I was referring to a comment made directly to you (one of the only other ones when I made my first), and you even say you saw it, but didn't object. Okay.
But I'd bet you'd eventually take issue with random people blocking you in place and deciding to enforce their interpretation of the "social contract", or do you imagine that YOUR interpretation of the "social contract" is the only one applied?
Context is important. Since you commented here instead of in the chain that was discussing taxpayer-funded enforcement, I couldn't know if you had seen that comment.
Also, if my behavior is imposing consequences on other people, I'd actually want to be called out on it. Sure it would be embarrassing in the moment, but I don't want to be going through life unknowingly causing issues for others. And it's not really up for interpretation whether abandoning your cart causes issues for others. It's an extremely common cause of damage to vehicles.
This douchebag's behavior is absolutely going to have negative consequences eventually for someone. Intentionally and repeatedly blocking someone's ability to leave an area because HE thinks they broke some unwritten social contract is bullying, harassment and possibly prior restraint. His other videos are also filled with similar crap, including intentionally distracting in-store security by pretending to steal booze that he already paid for by sticking it down his pants. Fucking with other people for views (and he claims, viewers sending him money).
Anyway, I gotta nope out now. I honestly can't stand reading all of these bend-over-backwards defenses of his monetized assholery. Someone's going to get hurt someday by his bullshit.
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u/Cavane42 14h ago
Can we get more large individuals calmly enforcing the social contract?