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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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Well except this is the same "you value property above people?" arguments made in the riots from antifa to BLM, and who has to clean up the mess after the glass-smashing? The ordinary people that the glass-smashers claim to be representing.

Fair... except that destroying the Mona Lisa isn't directly demolishing the livelihoods of your fellow citizen.

Likewise, the glass-smashers weren't acting out in a response to a harm that was inflicted on THEM PERSONALLY. So there's a much tighter justification available to Helen.

Helen is motivated by the same basic, instinctual drives that caused Bad Guy to do what he did, and nobody comes out of this looking like the better person.

Right, but in the circumstances that Johnson managed to contrive, her position was basically "let the villain not just get away with murder, but thrive for his complete theft of wealth that was properly Andi's... and that he committed murder to maintain... or force him into a position that he can't readily wiggle out of."

Indeed, there's perhaps an argument that if Andi was the true genius behind Alpha's success, and thus the Billions of dollars in wealth at issue would have, by law, passed to Andi's only surviving heir Helen, that her actions at the end were her own attempted reclamation of wealth that she would have received anyway had it not been for the thief's actions.

If we accept the premise that Helen would have been rightfully entitled to everything Andi rightfully owned after Andi wrongfully died, then her act of destruction at the end was really only destroying things that were hers by right anyway. A way of preventing the thief from keeping the benefit of his ill-gotten gains, which historically has been an oft-used tactic ("If I can't have it then you can't either"), and destroying the Mona Lisa was her way of making it stick.

What was her other option? Go for a long-shot legal solution (that had already failed Andi) and then accept the eventual loss and ignore that her family's entire legacy was stolen out from under her?

Likewise, the glass-smashers weren't acting out in a response to a harm that was inflicted on THEM PERSONALLY.

Exactly. It's hairless apes turning on the fallen alpha and they all of them are not any better than he is, in the end. And Helen gets some excuse for wanting vengeance for her sister, but is it really worth burning the world down for that?

then her act of destruction at the end was really only destroying things that were hers by right anyway

Nope. Destroying things that don't belong to you (and if I'm correct, the Mona Lisa was on loan, not permanently owned by Bad Guy) is not justified in this case, because it makes Helen as greedy as the rest of them: this should have been my sister's and so it should have been mine!

She put herself in the wrong, because in reality all Bad Guy has to do is call his private security, or the local cops, about "Hi, there's this crazy woman smashing things up in my house, yes thanks please come quickly". Even afterwards - she burned his house down, that's attempted murder on her part (if his lawyers are anyway competent) as well as "Your Honour, would my client have his own home powered by this new energy source if he really knew or believed it was dangerous?"

Well, it's a silly movie that is meant to be a piece of stylised fun, not anything deeper. But I don't think smashing shit up is goign to achieve anything, except leave you all walking with splinters in your feet.