On the other hand, giving away or destroying a $5000 object is not really reasonable for most people.

Your post seems more like accusations rather than honest questions.

This points out that a person's nobility has its price. That's what I got from the other fellow's post. That he was pointing out how people afford the positions they take, being sensitive to their own personal cost of taking the positions they take. Or maybe I'm reading more into his opinion because it is my opinion as well. People silently think first of what they can afford to say, then they say it. Nobility is financial. Morality is the level we choose to pay for it. I debated what the cost might be to me for posting this message you are reading.

Let's say that three people own the same pinball machine, a machine that is tangentially connected to this issue.

Person "A" has tons of money and would not take a hit at 5K. Such a person could destroy the game and let everyone know he will have no part of owning such games. He afforded his morality. (Likely, though, he got rich by being savvy, so he puts the game in hiding for several years to wait it out.)

Person "B" is not rich and he cannot afford the decisive and expensive morality of Person "A" but finds it distasteful to look at the game in his game room right now and would rather not look at it, but not at the expense of destroying it. He figures, though, that he can sell the game at no particular financial sacrifice, if not a profit. He announces that he looks to sell the game. This is what he can afford to do. He negotiated with himself what he could afford to do. In the process, he passes along to someone else that which he finds despicable, and takes his cash. How far away is that idea in concept from someone selling other despicable items?

Person "C" is not rich and deep down really likes the game and hates that this issue has been thrust upon his awareness. He cannot be like "A" and doesn't want to be like "B" and so he appreciates the idea of de-emphasizing the designer as just one of many factors in the overall manufacture, and that is when we may see this rationale from him. He keeps the machine. He negotiated with himself his solution.

When can we know if a person already had their stated morality about their tangential game, or had first negotiated the cost of it?

These few motivations I write are not pretty or nice, nor are they ubiquitous, but they happen in human nature.

If you (a non-specific, general "you") do not own one of these distressed games then your cost in the above exercise is practically nil so I would expect any outrage you have with what I say to be given at great lack of expense to you. If you are one of these owners who are agonizing over what to do, then at least your character is alive in you and if you choose to be transparent about it here then this is good to see, thank you for sharing it.

It would be refreshing if the powerful vehemence shown by society against CP were also applied towards the taking of human life (aka murder). Instead, we arguably celebrate and normalize murder when we buy books, watch movies, and allow other expressions of killing to entertain us regularly. Who will defend this popular practice without acknowledging that we simply cannot or will not collectively pay the price to censure it?

It would also be refreshing if more people imagined in their fact-less condemnations the difference between pedophilia and ephebophilia. But, a nuanced reaction has less force to it, I suppose.

As we speak, child beauty pageants are still quite legal in America. Twerking was made a thing and given its own term and made public. Women model it to young girls. Beyonce dances like a stripper in front of our young and is richly rewarded. Should I repeat here the lyrics that Ariana Grande sang to little girls in her make-up concert in Manchester, or shall I show you on youtube (if I can still find it) where you can watch for yourself and sing along with these little girls? Last week, my friend showed me a picture taken at a recent Jennifer Lopez concert from the front row, showing Lopez clad in a thong-like garment and bent over at the waist, facing away from the public audience, showing them what men of forty years ago used to have to go into smoky windowless rooms to see.

Some of this acceptance is selective hypnosis. Some if it is indifference. Maybe some of it is the recognition of futility of taking action.

I took that fellow's post as a challenge to the intellectual honesty of some folks' stated positions.

I worked for a large company for many years. Every now and then, you'd come to work in the morning to whispered gossip that some (reasonably well-liked) person in another department was fired the night before but that's all we'd know. We never would be formally told why as it was always deemed a "need to know" basis. There might be some gossip for awhile but no group demands for accountability were made of our employer as there was a labor union and a process and in that process is where the justice would be found.

Over the years, many of us employees each took our turn at being character-assassinated at the hands of fellow employees who interpreted situations in which they did not have first-hand knowledge. It was never good and never helpful and we were just stuck with enduring the scarlet letter placed upon us, until the winds of boredom blew their attention to the next new shiny bauble. Because I am not a socially needy person, I was an occasional target for others who were. In one experience, I worked hard to save my job from layoff which meant concurrently saving the jobs of 17 other people while several of them in their low character made my work situation so untenable with their harassment that I had to invoke the EEOC to get the employer to get those folks to back off. I was successful in both things and, to this day, those hillbillies cannot acknowledge that I saved their jobs.

I bother you with this story because of these 800 posts. The single event of this arrest has garnered a mythology of sorts, and people look to the pinball manufacturer to say something... anything... to participate in the script of this mythology probably because that is the choreography to which we have been accustomed. The podcasters and other such clarions have something with which to fill another day's broadcast and may run it out, getting their pound of flesh, until their cost exceeds their benefits. This single event, with no other facts, creates all this mastication. JT becomes the excuse for many people to do what they are apt to do anyway. I have been that excuse enough times.

I know Steve Ritchie well enough that what he is reported to have said was not an endorsement of the behavior in question nor was it to minimize what the behavior is. Nobody goes online to defend this crime. Even if I did not know him at all, I would not play it like he meant those things. I mean that would be just too drama queen for me. I have enough life experience to understand people and to know it is best to give people the benefit of the doubt in things that they say. Especially when he is as peripheral to what happened as are you and me. I would have hoped that some people would have brought their life experience to this in lieu of demanding the choreography of an apology.

I see it as his plea to not contribute to the very mythology that is happening because, in time, I predict more people will tire and start to join him in wishing the topic would go away. Steve has a misunderstood prescience. We adore him for this quality when he designs games and we should remember it at times like this.

Thank you.

And, coincidentally, that is the battle cry of 4th wave feminism which rejects the justice of law and replaces it in the judicial system with a pernicious bias masquerading as equality. But, I digressed.

I have no idea what you are talking about, sorry.

You didn't like that I said that. You could have distinguished yourself from it. I called it a coincidence, remember, which does not attach it to you. It's not you I'm interested in but rather the interesting parallel of concept that you brought. That should have pleased you intellectually, I had hoped. Now I will never know because you have made it personal, unless you decide to pull back.

You have a selective view of freedom. To quote you, "feel free to say whatever the heck you want. It's a free country."

So I did.

Yes, I criticized 4th wave feminism. I did not attack you and you seem to acknowledge this. To you it was out of nowhere as you heard with only your ears what you were saying. I understand why you responded the way you did. But you were never the point.

I caught you trying to enforce limits upon me when it has been you in this thread who has defied others' attempts to force limits upon you.

Go ahead, deny that.