Notorious big autopsy pictures

my husband had a secret instagram account

2024.05.14 07:20 Top_Record8031 my husband had a secret instagram account

my husband and I have been married for 5 years and he was the first person I ever fully trusted, I truly believed we were the ideal couple. Honest, truthful, loving. sex was better than normal in my opinion. I was a very fit person before my daughter but I gained a little baby weight after I had her, I thought he was okay with how I looked because I was actively trying to lose it. I never thought weight gain would be a strain in our marriage. Long story short, he had to go out of town for a work thing and left our shared laptop. I used it occasionally for Netflix or just background noise while I did things around the house. on this particular day I wanted to go through our daughters new born pictures which we had stored on said laptop. I saw a strange screenshot of a instagram I had never seen before and my curiosity got the best of me. To save you from reading some boring details I comforted him about the ig immediately (my first mistake) I was certain there was an explanation as to how it wasn’t his instagram. He gave me a bunch of bs stories on how it wasn’t his, gaslit, TRIED to convince me. I had enough proof to know it was his but he just kept lying. I asked how long he had it for and he said a week and then I later found out he had it for over a year (or longer) he used that instagram to follow half naked instagram models, women he had previously slept with. one in particular which he knew I had an issue with. later on I also found out he followed my best friend (for context she’s a beautiful woman with a freshly done bbl). He used to actively criticize men who’d follow multiple ig models, who constantly liked women’s pictures while they were married and it drives me crazy to think how much of a hypocrite he was being. idk what I want to get out of this, maybe to vent or to see if anyone else has gone through this. what would you do? do you stay? Is it best to leave? I feel as if it’s not a big deal but I also lost any trust I had in him. The way I see it is, if you lie about a secret instagram, what else are you lying about?
submitted by Top_Record8031 to Marriage [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 07:16 32andgrandma Someone swore and yelled at my dog at Dolores

I know he's just a dog and he probably forgot all about it but I just can't help but feel sad and defensive for him. For context, my dog is a 95 pound large breed. However, he's very gentle - gets along with all the dogs at the park (small and big). In fact, he's so gentle that the fellow dog owners often call him a "gentle giant". We're normally on the right side of the park, the flatter side since it's an off leash area.
Today, this man was sitting on the grass with his reactive dog. When my dog stood around his dog (maybe about 5-10 feet), his dog started losing his mind and started barking at him. I'm assuming the other dog owner felt ashamed and started yelling at my dog like "f-ing go! f-ing get out of here! Go away!".
When I went up to him and asked him why he feels the need to yell at a dog that's not his when he could've controlled his dog and calmed his dog down, he proceeded to give me a sob story saying he got attacked by a similar looking dog and that if my "dog's feelings get hurt then that's his problem". Like wtf?
He started getting aggressive and I didn't feel like dealing with his craziness after a long work day anymore, so I left to let my dog join the other dogs. I could tell he was staring my way the entire time and after about 10 minutes of staring, he proceeded to leave with a middle finger in the air.
We never yell at him at home, so having him get yelled at in public was so upsetting for me. And for me to be gaslit into feeling like I'm overreacting because he "can't hurt a dog's feelings" is even more upsetting.
Has this happened to anyone before? Not going to post pictures of him and his dog because I want to respect his privacy but I've never had anyone yell at my dog or have ever yelled at another dog that wasn't mine before, so this is just mind boggling to me.
submitted by 32andgrandma to sanfrancisco [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 07:13 Comatse [CAN, BC] I'm looking for 3D printed Nintendo DS lite top shell / hinge fix [John Oliver]

[CAN, BC] I'm looking for 3D printed Nintendo DS lite top shell / hinge fix [John Oliver]
I know this is a big ask, but I'm looking for someone who has the time to design a replica of the entire 2 top shell pieces of the Nintendo DS lite. The hinge part is well known for breaking, leaving the entire top portion of the device unable to hold, leaving the screen flopping. The top portion of the DS lite is made of two plastic pieces which slide together and encase the top screen and internal hardware. Not my pictures, but below are two examples where the hinge is broken
Broken Shell
Broken Shell
The top shell is made up of two pieces that slide together
I have 2 broken hinge DSs lying around and I tried buying aftermarket shells to replace them and fix the hinge, but unfortunately, the quality of the shells just isn't there and accurate and I haven't found any 3D prints that solve this problem! I think so many of these devices could be saved!
I found this print from a fan, but it's a mod version. I'm wondering if anyone is able to further develop this and replicate the original DS lite design. https://www.reddit.com/NintendoDS/comments/tflil8/the_very_first_3d_printed_unhinged_ds_lite_free/
I know it's probably a lot of work to design the entire thing (If I had the skills, I think this could be such a great way to customize the DS with cool designs, just like a the special limited edition DS consoles! wow!)
So if anyone could print 2 sets of these https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5257423/comments I would be so grateful with that as well! or anyone able to answer these configurations so I can print it at a local shop. I'm not sure what configurations are optimal
https://preview.redd.it/pwjplrssrb0d1.png?width=495&format=png&auto=webp&s=595361c2c5794f461be09d9c3d2607c392cbb863
submitted by Comatse to 3Dprintmything [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 07:12 rdk67 Spring Day 55: Recording the Concrete

I am sitting in one of the disused but quite beautiful parts of the neighborhood, waiting for it to rain.
The rain has already come and gone, a light rain that left traces of dampness on the pavement – the shade of the spring day darkens, becomes real, which is a comfort because that realness, that feeling of extra substance, comes from the water cycle working the way it's supposed to.
I feel it around my nostrils, on the cheeks of my face near the eyes, like I'm a frog looking up from its pond water, which is a pleasant feeling to sashay around town with. This is the spring we all know, the moisture appearing on my skin after driving miles above the earth ten minutes earlier –
an epic plunge is what we are walking through, but it's already rising again, and let's face it – we live in a cook pot set on media, I mean medium – medium is the setting on the cook pot, which notice is more than a crock. From the frog’s point of view, it is ideal.
From our point of view, standing in the chop of the water cycle, we are soaring in the air – then minutes from now, we might be walking in the clouds, and who knows after that, but this is the context for comings and goings this mid-afternoon – this potential for levitation.
I find a broad and elegant tree stump to sit on and record the concrete. Someday we'll all have concrete recorders but today, we just have me.
The stumps are not indigenous to the property, at least I don't think so, but I'm not exactly sure why I don't think that, given that the facility that occupies the block was once probably a forest with abundant marshy places. The forest went, then some infrastructural evolution played out that upcycled into a world-class performing arts center.
Given that my art, before it is anything, is performative – watch the monkey paint words with a stick – I'm hand-in-glove with the performance of the plaza.
I am sitting in a grove of tree stumps, which automatically brings to mind entropy – we all will die someday, become handsome all-weather furniture that slowly disintegrates – but then the overwhelming pleasantness of the day causes the thought to move on, and the stumps become a moment in time that is also a cross-section of full biography, which is quite a thing to be sitting on, waiting for the rain.
The forecast, which I predict would be one of the more impressive modern achievements to the humans who lived through the ice age – just an opinion. The forecast –
I picture their faces in stunned wonder as weather prediction after weather prediction comes true. The forecast
says there is a one-hundred percent chance of rain later this afternoon, time precise to the quarter hour, but with Doppler weather radar, one can make one's own data-driven prediction about when the rain will start to the nearest few minutes.
Someday we'll wear watches that are nothing but countdown clocks ’til the next time the forecast calls for rain – when the clock reaches the nearest minute, it switches to seconds.
This broad, elegant stump I'm sitting on sets on a bed of gravel which, when it rains, can convince me it is river gravel – pick up a few of the rounded stones, give them a close look for evidence of the past. I briefly imagine
finding the remains of a sauropod, each piece of gravel containing a tiny piece of a single sauropod, which together add up to the most complete sauropod skeleton yet discovered.
The stump is all take and no give, and yet I think I prefer it to popping open a lawn chair – the imperviousness of the stump being conducive to recording the concrete.
My backside is about eighty-years wide, which is older than my age, which inspires thoughts about backing into predestination, at least where just sitting around on a fine spring day is concerned. Like a bump on a log in a way, and let's face it – the concrete doesn't get much more concrete than that. A splashing sound
comes from the page. I scan the paper like it’s the sky, and I'm waiting for an aerial firework to open, then I find the spot of rain splashed across the phrase think so – think so, is the phrase – which is followed by a second raindrop, this one hitting the word water, causing the ink to run a little.
A one-hundred percent chance – does that even make sense? I picture a barrel of rain, rolling across the plains. Perhaps we should feel lucky for being visited by such a probability – possibly years before it rolls around again.
Rain will undoubtedly fall at this time, we say to our ice-age guests, and they will hold up the one hand like it's rain, hold up the other like it's time, weigh the two sides side-by-side maybe, maybe invent that gesture where the dancer holds both palms above their heads, lifts them up and down like they're raising the roof.
Still, I'm not sure they'll really understand all those computer models, wrapping themselves around big-data projects involving sensors and rain gauges deployed across the land, starting centuries ago. Science raised the roof, we might say, at least as far as weather prediction is concerned.
I sense the rain not exactly letting up, retreat to the interior of the performing arts center after taking a few notes.
Along part of the gravel is a long puddle of water from the overnight rain, and I would need but a few fish bones or raccoon tracks to believe the whole thing was situated beside a river, the sort of gravel bed surging with snow melt earlier in the season.
This being the Midwest, higher elevations are usually metaphorical, metaphorical before they are anything else, and I think about the campus surging with graduates this past weekend, the landscape of human potential, in all directions, inundated by them.
Inside now, I see a balloon bouquet along one wall of the concourse, with gold Mylar affirmation – The Best Is Yet to Come! – floating on the end of a ribbon.
A one-hundred percent chance of rain – imagine telling all those graduates, you have a one-hundred percent chance of finding love within a fortnight. Call it a graduation gift, then imagine all those rain gauges quivering in their brackets at the thought of measurements certain to be made, collated, used to improve the algorithms that animate the global gods of rain.
At the far end of the concourse, a lady is teaching a gentleman how to dance – they aren’t touching, aren’t even facing each other – side-by-side – and I hear her call out the moves, move-by-move.
Maybe he’s an actor and she’s going over a certain bit of choreography for an upcoming production. Maybe he’s a restless spirit, and she’s teaching him the art of haunting.
That ghost forest in the gravel outside is adjacent to one of the busiest intersections on campus, and yet, turn your back to it, and it becomes just another element in the stopping and starting of the cosmos.
I could see to either end of the block from that broad, elegant tree stump I was sitting on without really being seen from the street which, along with a lush stand of grass in a nearby raised garden bed, brings to mind the wide-open prairie from centuries past.
I picture deer bounding over golden rod. I picture foxes negotiating cone flowers.
The interior of the performing arts center is designed around the premise of potential – four theaters in league with the cardinal directions, plus a blindingly white amphitheater and a low stage in the concourse itself, where they hand out complimentary spliffs and pass around community bongs during free upbeat life-affirming musical programs, attended by folks after the workday is over, plus a helping of retirees.
Okay, not grass but alcohol, but you get the point – people enjoy shindigs now and then. The lady and gentleman are out of sight, but she’s still giving direction – I can hear their back and forth somewhere around the curve in the wall,
which might stand for the passing of time. I imagine myself performing the pasodoble – no, I take it back. I imagine myself performing the pasodoble – no, I take it back! For real this time! I imagine myself destroying the pasodoble – no, god, my boot heels! The planks on the floor! I take it back!
The sun returns, so I pick up my things, head back out to that secluded space, spend a few minutes admiring the resoundingly designed program of the building.
Preformed white concrete panels are suspended twelve feet off the ground to establish the roof of the entrance. Ninety-degree angles abundantly in evidence. Brick pixelates the angled outer walls with the stuff of the earth. Ultra-high resolution, they call it around the masonic lodge.
Someone in the amphitheater is having their photo taken by a professional – everyone loves to do photo shoots there. She is wearing dark knee socks, a navy jumper and a blue bowl haircut, or maybe it’s a wig – I can’t tell from here. I picture anime or promotional material for this fine spring day.
A squirrel bounds through the grass – then poses in front of me, paws together, as though summoning oration.
A robin alights on the stone cladding of the raised beds, begins to stand exclusively on its left leg. The leg is angled under the center of mass – it’s a practiced move.
No one knows why the American robin does this – maybe it’s like bird meditation, though the memory of the American robin is so specifically extraordinary when it comes to navigation and geospecific locations that effectively, at the sensual level on up, it is living in a reality separate from our own, so who knows what meditation might mean.
They can see the magnetic fields of the earth in their eyes using a protein called cryptochrome, which reacts to magnetism. Cryptochrome – like something from the Marvel universe.
Maybe when the American robin stands on its left leg, it’s spacing out to the daytime reality of solar storms, the whole environment all aflutter with a phenomenology of waves passing around the material world.
The robin and the squirrel go their separate ways, and I feel the temperature drop – ah, me! the pasodoble! – as the next part of the front crosses campus.
A peel of thunder indicates the breaking of the sound barrier by means of electromagnetism and the displacement of gasses. Electromagnetic properties experience disequilibrium as a kind of earthquake in the sky that causes the air to vibrate in an awe-inspiring way – the sound magnetic fields make when they rearrange themselves in a gaseous atmosphere.
We are fluid dwellers, through and through, we humans and mammals and reptiles and amphibians and lichen gnawing on patches of the plaza’s concrete. Maybe from the standpoint of the atmosphere, land is just one big coral reef.
When that perfect destiny began to drop rain, the sound at first was curious, expectant – an all-squinty-eyed-and-kissy-faced sort of rain began to fall that grew into a snowy hum that seemed to have a simple song playing inside it, like someone playing a ukulele in the room next door, singing along.
The gig carries on for twenty minutes or so – an opening act – before the rain begins to march double time through the streets – barely soldiers even when they were soldiers.
Less tactic and more matador, this rain storm, and its boot heel crashes down on the planking of the still-lovely spring day. These magnetic storms are not
for war making, nor fighting bulls, nor even for entertaining that cosmic bird called the American robin. What are they for then?
American robins also configure their flight by the stars, by remembering features on the land, by creating mental maps of it all.
And they swim with both grace and endurance, as they navigate this liquid world, this concrete way of life.
In the moment, they are roosting in a tree, observing the silver magnetic waves marching through the streets. Made of what? The pasodoble! Concrete.
submitted by rdk67 to MetaphysicalWeather [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 07:08 Smooth-Stomach8531 Opinions on what I should do

So I started dating my first love it’s gonna be 2 years in 3 months and I stuck on the past nd look at our memories and we started dating when I was in a fucked up space toxic rude asfc and he still wanted to be Wimmie nd I ended up breaking up with him Bcs I was going thru shii and my brother I grew up with moved far away from me nd he was all I had and I told him I can’t be with him nd I ran away from home buh he was hurt thay we broke up and I didn’t feel nothing not even bothered that he was hurt I was so nonchalant we got into a big argument 3 months later after the break up it was nasty a lot of hurtful stuff was said from both sides expect I did him worse nd hit under the belt and he had unfollowed me and months went by I gotten to grow as a person I changed a lot to the point were my frens always bring up how much I changed he seemed fined nd moved on around his birthday I got sad nd started to realize the way I treated was bad and shii and I regret it nd I needed the right closure form him I felt hurt and I felt like I got a delayed heartbreak I texted him hoping I could get the closure or even get back with him and how Munich I changed nd he didn’t wanna accept I changed he made me feel like shii he was saying how much he better with out me and he gots to be on drugs or fucked up in the head to get back with. Me and that he doing so much better nd he don’t wanna relive our memories and I was such a bad person and it was a mistake for us to get together nd that he should of believed his frens and how he met more guys that make him happy I was a bad person all I responed with ok I’m sorry das all I could say I’m sorry and I said I’m happy for you and proud your making a better life for yourself and shii nd he was a dick to me when I told him that ive grown and he told me hurtful stuff and i changed to a beautiful person and I wish I could love him again I later found out he got with one of my ex frens and not to mention I got on medication cus I didn’t wnana get off bed cus I rlly believed I was a bad person and I felt guilty and I would cry felt like shii I didn’t even eat buh I don’t mean to play victim cus I did treat him like shii when I was in a bad space I wished him nothing but the best in life and I look back at our pictures and I miss him and I start to cry cus I rlly fumbled a guy who was trying to give me the world while mine was falling my apart and I wish I could js get the proper closure from him buh he don’t wanna ever see nd tells me to move on
submitted by Smooth-Stomach8531 to Advice [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 07:06 eyoxa Hoarder neighbor with habit of leaving her own packages outside for years took mine

Hoarder neighbor with habit of leaving her own packages outside for years took mine
I live in a pretty social community of tiny houses, that is except for the neighbor next door. Since I moved in last year, I’ve probably spoken a dozen words to her, all initiated by me. This neighbor orders many packages, and but doesn’t take the large ones inside.
I have no idea what’a inside those two big boxes, but beside them is a rug and in front of them (not in the picture) is a large portable air conditioner that arrived two weeks ago and has stood in the same spot that UPS dropped it off in. Because of these packages it’s actually challenging to even get to her door… which I tried to do today….
Over the year I’ve lived here I’ve received a few of her packages. And as a decent person, I’ve always walked them over to her house anonymously.
The first time my package was delivered to her house was this past Saturday, when I wasn’t home for the weekend. Since she didn’t bring it over to my house I knocked on her door when I saw that she’d come home. There was no answer. I came back half an hour later and knocked again. I could see her reflection in the door. She ignored my knocking.
I’m angry and confused. She leaves her own packages outside to get rained and snowed on, but took my package inside. This isn’t a case of a nice neighbor keeping my package safe as this area where we live is very safe. The contents of my package could be medical (they’re not but still important for me) and it’s been two three days that she’s had it.
Since she won’t open her door I taped a note asking for my package. Let’s see if she will ignore it too….
submitted by eyoxa to mildlyinfuriating [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 07:01 figuringitout215 WIBTA for removing a roadside memorial?

We recently purchased my husband’s grandparent’s home a few months ago. Around 1 year ago, there was a single car accident in front of the home involving two (drunk) teens. They crashed into a tree near the street on our property and the car burst into flames. One of their mothers lives on the same street and placed a memorial in front of that tree. It is a big cross (about 4ft) with a picture of the teens and has a spotlight and lights wrapped around it. We are renovating the property so we have not moved in yet, but we went to talk to the mother as we were having that tree trimmed and wanted to ask her to remove the items. We were hoping she would understand that we wanted the entire memorial removed, but she only removed fragile items. She revealed to us that she would not be removing the cross as it’s not going anywhere because she cemented it into the ground. I have never lost a child so I can’t possibly know the pain she’s in, but I don’t understand how she could feel so entitled to do that in front of someone else’s home. We’ve decided to cut down the whole tree since half is burnt which is costing us 1.5k out of our pockets. We’ve spoken to the county about it as we found out it’s technically on their easement and they have confirmed they do not allow roadside memorials but they do not take them down if there is one. However, they said we are able to remove it ourselves if we want. I plan on writing her a letter in hopes she will remove it herself, but I’m questioning if that’s even the right thing to do. I think i’d be the AH since she’s still a grieving mother and maybe this is how she’s able to deal with it. WIBTA for asking her to remove it, or removing the memorial myself if she doesn’t?
submitted by figuringitout215 to AmItheAsshole [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:53 shaneka69 CANCER ZODIAC - UNEXPECTED INCOME! TAROT READING MAY 2024

CANCER ZODIAC TAROT READING - UNEXPECTED INCOME MAY 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ5mIkLhCyY
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submitted by shaneka69 to mytarotreadings [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:50 xofspec Why do young queer people(or LGBTQ+ community) romanticize communism?

(Sorry to generalize btw)
I know a girl who is part of the lgbtq+ community I am not super close to her but I know her somewhat anyway she posted a picture with her partner and what caught my eye was the second picture of her post it had a USSR poster with two women, no big deal whatever but in her other stories she had made posts about the soviet union and other communist stuff in other words glorifying communism and its propaganda. She’ll sometimes quote Marx and what not.
Historically communistic rule has been horrible to lgbtq+ rights and to this day as well?
Btw shes young so I just brush it off as an edgy phase ? but me its no different than being a national socialist.
submitted by xofspec to TooAfraidToAsk [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:39 Former-Secretary-112 My sister's (24F) boyfriend's (25M) story doesn't add up. How do I get through to her without alienating her?

This is a really long story with lots of context so I'll do my best to organize it into current situation, then his backstory and hers. I'm also not using real names or specific locations for any of this to try and keep this private. This also has some contradicting stories and because of how their relationship is structured relies mostly on information I have gotten from my sister, so I'm telling you the story I got from her first and then adding in what I've found out. I'll try to tell this as unbiased as I can but it's been a huge issue in my family for a long time now and that's a little difficult for me to do.
My (20F) sister (Olivia, 24F) has been dating this guy (Trevor, 25M) since 2021. When they started dating, she talked about him fairly often, sent a few pictures of them, ect., but then after a month she stopped mentioning him/ was cagey when we (me and my mom mostly) asked how he was so we assumed it just hadn't worked out. Then two months later she insisted that my parents (54F and 56M) and I all come to visit her college to meet Trevor before he went into the Army (she lived several hours away from my parents and several hours from my college, so I had to get a bus ticket and my parents had to get a hotel room to do this. We only met him once for dinner). Now they've been dating long distance for three years after a three month in-person relationship. She is in nursing school and is planning on moving across the country (literally opposite corners of the map) to live with him and is not applying to any residency programs outside of the Army base area (limiting her choices a LOT from her original goals and narrowing employment opportunities).
Olivia met Trevor on several dating apps, matched with him, but didn't really want to go out with him. He was really persistent, so her friend convinced her to go out with him. She lied about the way they met to our parents and told them they met at the gym through a mutual friend (she lied to me about this at first too and told me the truth about 3 months after they started dating). At the time, Trevor was working as a used car salesman and living at home (~45 min. away from Olivia's school in a rural area) because his sports scholarship had been dropped before his Senior year due to covid at the college he had been attending out of state. The university was unaccredited (I later did some internet stalking and found out it was accredited), so his credits would not transfer and he would have to start over. He was saving up money to attend school in state at the large college Olivia attended so he could go back to school. **Our state has crazy low tuition costs in-state and a full-tuition scholarship program for good high school GPA and SAT scores. There was also a "feeder" community college that had half the cost per credit hour that a lot of people would go to before the larger university if they didn't get in straight out of high school.**
Olivia told me that Trevor had applied to her college and not gotten in (she later told me he HAD gotten in but been unable to afford tuition). Either way, he decided to join the Army because his father had been in the Army. The Army would take his credit hours and he would be able to finish his degree during his 5 year contract or use the GI bill once he got out. **She is comparing the situation to our father, who joined the Army directly out of high school and used the GI bill to go to college after his 2 year contract because his parents wouldn't pay for school. He was a medic in the military, worked as an EMT through college, and then went to nursing school.** The original plan was that Trevor would be a Green Beret (special forces), he completed basic training and and got several months through training and moved to the secondary base in NC before failing the running portion of a physical by about 10 seconds and being dropped from the selection process. He then decided that he wanted to be a Ranger (another elite position). He got sent back to GA, then to the Ranger school base in WA (it took a couple of months before he was sent to WA). Again, he got partway through the training before failing the running portion of a physical by a few seconds. He is now not sure if he will be continuing Ranger school (failing the physical means no, but commanders may pass him anyways if they think he should continue). For a while, Trevor told Olivia that he might not stay at the base in WA if he wasn't in Ranger school and there were a variety of different bases he could be sent to, including somewhere in Italy, so she wasn't sure where to look for jobs. In the past month, Trevor told Olivia that he would likely stay in WA regardless of the Ranger school results.
Through this all, Olivia has visited Trevor at the different military bases countless times, driving from as far as south FL to NC and putting over 30,000 miles on a brand new car over the course of the 1.5 years she's owned it. Before she had the car, she paid for plane tickets to see him and hotels whenever she visited. At the time, she told me that he was paying for all of these trips because he was unable to visit her, was making an income that wasn't being spent, and she was working to save for nursing school and later was living off of student loans and savings during nursing school. She later admitted to me that she had paid for almost all of the expenses except for food when they ate out together and part of a hotel room one weekend.
A few odd things (to me) between Olivia and Trevor over the course of their relationship:
About a month into their relationship, Trevor got Olivia an over $300 christmas gift. He has not gotten her anything nearly that expensive since, and hasn't sent flowers for things like her college graduation or a severe emergency surgery she had last year. I don't care about monetary value or sending flowers, but I do think it is odd that he spent so much before moving away when he ostensibly didn't have much money, but now that he has an income and military sign-on bonus, he has not spent that much again.
Trevor's father left Trevor, his siblings, and his mother, but Trevor has a hat that his father gave him that he wore often. The hat says "Red Man" across the top of a picture of a Native American man wearing a feathered headdress. He has worn this hat several times around Olivia's friends and they told him they didn't like it and that it was racist. They also asked him to not wear it when he was with them and he refused because it was special to him and his father gave it to him. Olivia then told him to stop wearing it and he eventually agreed (Olivia told me that he stopped wearing the hat after this). A few weeks after this, I facetimed Olivia and Trevor was with her. She turned the camera so I could say hello to him, and he was wearing the hat. I talked to Olivia about this later and she told me that that was the first time he'd worn the hat in a while and it wasn't a big deal. Olivia has always been liberal and never racist, and I am uncomfortable that she was okay with him not only wearing the hat, but being with him while he had it on.
They dated for a little over 3 months in person before he joined the military (recently, Olivia told me that they actually met several months before she told everyone about him and that they actually dated for 6 months before he left). For the next two months in basic training, he was only able to use the phone for 15 minutes total once a week to talk to family and her. Throughout the different training programs he has completed he had sporadic and limited access to phones to communicate, and only in the past 6 months he has had access to his phone to facetime, text, and call (but sometimes he goes for a week or two without phone access). Olivia told me that they wrote letters during the time he didn't have consistent phone access. **I don't think that this is odd, I understand the military limits phone usage, etc., but I don't think they have been able to have an "average" long-distance relationship**
Last year, Olivia drove to GA to visit Trevor the weekend before Valentine's day. He had plans for them to take a pottery class, go on a hike, and have dinner at a nice restaurant. The day she got there, Trevor's barracks had their off-base privileges revoked because one of the guys had contraband. She would still be able to visit him on base though. Somehow, Trevor was able to get off base for long periods of time to her hotel, but unable to do the other activities he had planned for them.
In the past year, Olivia told me that she and Trevor were going to immediately marry when she got to WA so that they could move in together because they had to be married to live together anywhere. I and our dad- who was in the military- told her several times that this was not true, but she insisted it was. Then, his barracks were given an allowance to live off base in apartments because the barracks were being renovated/ rebuilt, so she backed off on the idea of getting married immediately after several long conversations with me. She is still insistent on moving in with Trevor, who lives with a roommate, when she moves to WA.
Some background on Olivia:
Olivia has ADHD and anxiety, and struggled particularly badly with the anxiety/ some depression after being broken up with by the boyfriend she dated before Trevor (he broke it off very abruptly, told her he just didn't love her anymore with no previous indications). Olivia is very pretty (objectively, not just because she's my sister), but had bad acne that she ended up going on accutane for at the time she started dating Trevor and was very insecure about it. She had also decided to not go to medical school, and pursue nursing instead around the same time she met Trevor. This was a very upsetting decision for her because she had been taking very hard courses and was burnt out but had told everyone she was going to be a doctor and thought that she would be letting us down by switching paths. Also around the time she started seeing Trevor, Olivia began being very cruel towards our mother (our mother had been borderline emotionally abusive in the past, but Olivia and I were both in college by then and fixing our relationships with her. She has been much better recently and Olivia and I believe that she had some mental health struggles that went unchecked that contributed). Now, several years later, Olivia told our family that she had acted like that because she was rpd by a friend of her ex-boyfriend's after her ex broke up with her. This person also gave her an STD.
I always believe people who say they have been S A'd, and we believed Olivia when she first told us, but some things have come to light that make me and my family question that. Right after Olivia and her ex broke up, Olivia told our cousin that she had gone out with one of his friends and had revenge/ breakup sex with him because he had also been dumped recently. Once my cousin told me this, I remembered that Olivia had told me about a guy she had a one night stand with after she was dumped. She showed me a picture of him, talked about how cute he was, etc. (no distress whatsoever). I know sometimes people behave in ways you wouldn't expect when a traumatic event occurs to them, but I really don't understand how or why Olivia would brag about this guy if he really did S A her.
Three months ago, Olivia was arrested for stealing a set of sheets from Walmart (incidentally, right before Trevor came to visit her on leave). She used the self check-out and only bought a small $5 item and the sheets. She held both in one hand and scanned each side because she had a cut on the other hand and was holding her wallet with it. She saw a 5 in front of the total number and thought it looked right because the total should have been about $50, paid, didn't get a receipt, and walked out. An employee at the door asked to see a receipt, which Olivia didn't have, so she pulled up her transaction history on her phone to show she had paid. At this point, the employee called the police and took Olivia into an office, where she was questioned and charged with shoplifting. (Olivia can get very emotional and probably got upset when the police questioned her, which may have led them to believe she was lying). Luckily, Olivia has managed to get the charges expunged, but the process is still ongoing. Because of her ADHD, if anyone genuinely made this mistake, I would believe it from her, but Olivia has been improving a lot on organization and being more attentive recently. It is extremely uncharacteristic of her to steal- she was honest to a fault as kids- she would break down from guilt and admit things to our parents that we would have gotten away with if she hadn't said anything.
Right now, my parents have met Trevor twice in person, and I've met him once in person and several times in passing over facetime. I personally don't think that Trevor seems to keep up with my sister or that they make each other shine, and that opinion is shared with family friends and family that have met Trevor. Olivia doesn't mention Trevor in front of our parents often because his name has become a topic of contention and argument between them. My parents don't think Trevor is right for Olivia. She has almost 2 college degrees and plans to become a nurse practitioner in the future, and he hasn't finished college and doesn't seem to have any drive to do so. Olivia is also well traveled and enjoys going to museums, concerts, etc., while Trevor has lived in rural FL his whole life (this is not Trevor's fault, and I don't think he is a lesser person because of it, but I don't see a lot of common ground between them). Trevor has not seemed very well spoken when I have talked to him and I just don't see a lot of qualities in him that Olivia values.
If you've gotten this far, I just don't know what to do. Olivia and my parents have a huge rift in their relationship right now and any mention of Trevor, with her around or not, explodes into a huge argument, discussion, or just icy silence. I want Olivia to be able to talk to me about him, and we are able to discuss things much better than she is with our parents. My parents have also started asking me about Olivia and Trevor because they know Olivia shares more with me, and it makes me uncomfortable because I don't want to betray Olivia's trust, but I'm also very worried about her. I know I can't control her actions and I'm having a really hard time trying to balance supporting Olivia but not supporting the relationship (I'm not going to lie to her about how I feel, but I don't want her to feel alienated or unloved by our family, because that is NOT the case). I also think that Olivia is romanticizing the fact that our parents don't like him because my father's parents had a rift with him over our mother when we were very young (this is a whole other story, but basically, his parents always favored his sister, his sister got (I think) jealous when he did well for himself and married my mother, who his parents initially likes, and she made up rumors/lies about my mother that turned his parents against her (this was way before our mother's suspected mental health struggles, which occured when Olivia and I were in middle/high school).
Please share any thoughts you have on the situation (am I reading too into things, is this not as bad as I think it is?), and any advice you have on navigating the relationships.
Tl;dr My sister's boyfriend lied about the circumstances of him dropping out of college and joining the military. Now I think he's lying about not making it through training for two different special/ elite forces. My sister has significantly changed her behavior and I think she may have lied about a significant traumatic event to our family. Now she is planning on moving across the country to him and moving in immediately. Our entire family doesn't like him and we're worried about her. How do I support her but not her relationship?
submitted by Former-Secretary-112 to relationships [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:31 Anenome5 Society without a State

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that
Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,
It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:
If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:
Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]
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2024.05.14 06:30 Anenome5 Society without a State - Rothbard

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that
Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,
It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:
If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:
Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]
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2024.05.14 06:28 Former-Secretary-112 My sister's (24F) boyfriend's (25M) story doesn't add up. How do I get through to her without alienating her?

This is a really long story with lots of context so I'll do my best to organize it into current situation, then his backstory and hers. I'm also not using real names or specific locations for any of this to try and keep this private. This also has some contradicting stories and because of how their relationship is structured relies mostly on information I have gotten from my sister, so I'm telling you the story I got from her first and then adding in what I've found out. I'll try to tell this as unbiased as I can but it's been a huge issue in my family for a long time now and that's a little difficult for me to do.
My(20F) sister (Olivia, 24F) has been dating this guy (Trevor, 25M) since 2021. When they started dating, she talked about him fairly often, sent a few pictures of them, ect., but then after a month she stopped mentioning him/ was cagey when we (me and my mom mostly) asked how he was so we assumed it just hadn't worked out. Then two months later she insisted that my parents (54F and 56M) and I all come to visit her college to meet Trevor before he went into the Army (she lived several hours away from my parents and several hours from my college, so I had to get a bus ticket and my parents had to get a hotel room to do this. We only met him once for dinner). Now they've been dating long distance for three years after a three month in-person relationship. She is in nursing school and is planning on moving across the country (literally opposite corners of the map) to live with him and is not applying to any residency programs outside of the Army base area (limiting her choices a LOT from her original goals and narrowing employment opportunities).
Olivia met Trevor on several dating apps, matched with him, but didn't really want to go out with him. He was really persistent, so her friend convinced her to go out with him. She lied about the way they met to our parents and told them they met at the gym through a mutual friend (she lied to me about this at first too and told me the truth about 3 months after they started dating). At the time, Trevor was working as a used car salesman and living at home (~45 min. away from Olivia's school in a rural area) because his sports scholarship had been dropped before his Senior year due to covid at the college he had been attending out of state. The university was unaccredited (I later did some internet stalking and found out it was accredited), so his credits would not transfer and he would have to start over. He was saving up money to attend school in state at the large college Olivia attended so he could go back to school. **Our state has crazy low tuition costs in-state and a full-tuition scholarship program for good high school GPA and SAT scores. There was also a "feeder" community college that had half the cost per credit hour that a lot of people would go to before the larger university if they didn't get in straight out of high school.**
Olivia told me that Trevor had applied to her college and not gotten in (she later told me he HAD gotten in but been unable to afford tuition). Either way, he decided to join the Army because his father had been in the Army. The Army would take his credit hours and he would be able to finish his degree during his 5 year contract or use the GI bill once he got out. **She is comparing the situation to our father, who joined the Army directly out of high school and used the GI bill to go to college after his 2 year contract because his parents wouldn't pay for school. He was a medic in the military, worked as an EMT through college, and then went to nursing school.** The original plan was that Trevor would be a Green Beret (special forces, linking the training pipeline here: https://www.reddit.com/greenberets/comments/xwdbta/current_sf_pipeline_correct_me_if_im_wrong/ ), he completed basic training and and got several months through the NC training before failing the running portion of a physical by about 10 seconds and being dropped from the selection process. He then decided that he wanted to be a Ranger (another elite position). He got sent back to GA, then to the Ranger school base in WA (it took a couple of months before he was sent to WA). Again, he got partway through the training before failing the running portion of a physical by a few seconds. He is now not sure if he will be continuing Ranger school (failing the physical means no, but commanders may pass him anyways if they think he should continue). For a while, Trevor told Olivia that he might not stay at the base in WA if he wasn't in Ranger school and there were a variety of different bases he could be sent to, including somewhere in Italy, so she wasn't sure where to look for jobs. In the past month, Trevor told Olivia that he would likely stay in WA regardless of the Ranger school results.
Through this all, Olivia has visited Trevor at the different military bases countless times, driving from as far as south FL to NC and putting over 30,000 miles on a brand new car over the course of the 1.5 years she's owned it. Before she had the car, she paid for plane tickets to see him and hotels whenever she visited. At the time, she told me that he was paying for all of these trips because he was unable to visit her, was making an income that wasn't being spent, and she was working to save for nursing school and later was living off of student loans and savings during nursing school. She later admitted to me that she had paid for almost all of the expenses except for food when they ate out together and part of a hotel room one weekend.
A few odd things (to me) between Olivia and Trevor over the course of their relationship:
About a month into their relationship, Trevor got Olivia an over $300 christmas gift. He has not gotten her anything nearly that expensive since, and hasn't sent flowers for things like her college graduation or a severe emergency surgery she had last year. I don't care about monetary value or sending flowers, but I do think it is odd that he spent so much before moving away when he ostensibly didn't have much money, but now that he has an income and military sign-on bonus, he has not spent that much again.
Trevor's father left Trevor, his siblings, and his mother, but Trevor has a hat that his father gave him that he wore often. The hat says "Red Man" across the top of a picture of a Native American man wearing a feathered headdress. He has worn this hat several times around Olivia's friends and they told him they didn't like it and that it was racist. They also asked him to not wear it when he was with them and he refused because it was special to him and his father gave it to him. Olivia then told him to stop wearing it and he eventually agreed (Olivia told me that he stopped wearing the hat after this). A few weeks after this, I facetimed Olivia and Trevor was with her. She turned the camera so I could say hello to him, and he was wearing the hat. I talked to Olivia about this later and she told me that that was the first time he'd worn the hat in a while and it wasn't a big deal. Olivia has always been liberal and never racist, and I am uncomfortable that she was okay with him not only wearing the hat, but being with him while he had it on.
They dated for a little over 3 months in person before he joined the military (recently, Olivia told me that they actually met several months before she told everyone about him and that they actually dated for 6 months before he left). For the next two months in basic training, he was only able to use the phone for 15 minutes total once a week to talk to family and her. Throughout the different training programs he has completed he had sporadic and limited access to phones to communicate, and only in the past 6 months he has had access to his phone to facetime, text, and call (but sometimes he goes for a week or two without phone access). Olivia told me that they wrote letters during the time he didn't have consistent phone access. **I don't think that this is odd, I understand the military limits phone usage, etc., but I don't think they have been able to have an "average" long-distance relationship**
Last year, Olivia drove to GA to visit Trevor the weekend before Valentine's day. He had plans for them to take a pottery class, go on a hike, and have dinner at a nice restaurant. The day she got there, Trevor's barracks had their off-base privileges revoked because one of the guys had contraband. She would still be able to visit him on base though. Somehow, Trevor was able to get off base for long periods of time to her hotel, but unable to do the other activities he had planned for them.
In the past year, Olivia told me that she and Trevor were going to immediately marry when she got to WA so that they could move in together because they had to be married to live together anywhere. I and our dad- who was in the military- told her several times that this was not true, but she insisted it was. Then, his barracks were given an allowance to live off base in apartments because the barracks were being renovated/ rebuilt, so she backed off on the idea of getting married immediately after several long conversations with me. She is still insistent on moving in with Trevor, who lives with a roommate, when she moves to WA.
Some background on Olivia:
Olivia has ADHD and anxiety, and struggled particularly badly with the anxiety/ some depression after being broken up with by the boyfriend she dated before Trevor (he broke it off very abruptly, told her he just didn't love her anymore with no previous indications). Olivia is very pretty (objectively, not just because she's my sister), but had bad acne that she ended up going on accutane for at the time she started dating Trevor and was very insecure about it. She had also decided to not go to medical school, and pursue nursing instead around the same time she met Trevor. This was a very upsetting decision for her because she had been taking very hard courses and was burnt out but had told everyone she was going to be a doctor and thought that she would be letting us down by switching paths. Also around the time she started seeing Trevor, Olivia began being very cruel towards our mother (our mother had been borderline emotionally abusive in the past, but Olivia and I were both in college by then and fixing our relationships with her. She has been much better recently and Olivia and I believe that she had some mental health struggles that went unchecked that contributed). Now, several years later, Olivia told our family that she had acted like that because she was rpd by a friend of her ex-boyfriend's after her ex broke up with her. This person also gave her an STD.
I always believe people who say they have been S A'd, and we believed Olivia when she first told us, but some things have come to light that make me and my family question that. Right after Olivia and her ex broke up, Olivia told our cousin that she had gone out with one of his friends and had revenge/ breakup sex with him because he had also been dumped recently. Once my cousin told me this, I remembered that Olivia had told me about a guy she had a one night stand with after she was dumped. She showed me a picture of him, talked about how cute he was, etc. (no distress whatsoever). I know sometimes people behave in ways you wouldn't expect when a traumatic event occurs to them, but I really don't understand how or why Olivia would brag about this guy if he really did S A her.
Three months ago, Olivia was arrested for stealing a set of sheets from Walmart (incidentally, right before Trevor came to visit her on leave). She used the self check-out and only bought a small $5 item and the sheets. She held both in one hand and scanned each side because she had a cut on the other hand and was holding her wallet with it. She saw a 5 in front of the total number and thought it looked right because the total should have been about $50, paid, didn't get a receipt, and walked out. An employee at the door asked to see a receipt, which Olivia didn't have, so she pulled up her transaction history on her phone to show she had paid. At this point, the employee called the police and took Olivia into an office, where she was questioned and charged with shoplifting. (Olivia can get very emotional and probably got upset when the police questioned her, which may have led them to believe she was lying). Luckily, Olivia has managed to get the charges expunged, but the process is still ongoing. Because of her ADHD, if anyone genuinely made this mistake, I would believe it from her, but Olivia has been improving a lot on organization and being more attentive recently. It is extremely uncharacteristic of her to steal- she was honest to a fault as kids- she would break down from guilt and admit things to our parents that we would have gotten away with if she hadn't said anything.
Right now, my parents have met Trevor twice in person, and I've met him once in person and several times in passing over facetime. I personally don't think that Trevor seems to keep up with my sister or that they make each other shine, and that opinion is shared with family friends and family that have met Trevor. Olivia doesn't mention Trevor in front of our parents often because his name has become a topic of contention and argument between them. My parents don't think Trevor is right for Olivia. She has almost 2 college degrees and plans to become a nurse practitioner in the future, and he hasn't finished college and doesn't seem to have any drive to do so. Olivia is also well traveled and enjoys going to museums, concerts, etc., while Trevor has lived in rural FL his whole life (this is not Trevor's fault, and I don't think he is a lesser person because of it, but I don't see a lot of common ground between them). Trevor has not seemed very well spoken when I have talked to him and I just don't see a lot of qualities in him that Olivia values.
If you've gotten this far, I just don't know what to do. Olivia and my parents have a huge rift in their relationship right now and any mention of Trevor, with her around or not, explodes into a huge argument, discussion, or just icy silence. I want Olivia to be able to talk to me about him, and we are able to discuss things much better than she is with our parents. My parents have also started asking me about Olivia and Trevor because they know Olivia shares more with me, and it makes me uncomfortable because I don't want to betray Olivia's trust, but I'm also very worried about her. I know I can't control her actions and I'm having a really hard time trying to balance supporting Olivia but not supporting the relationship (I'm not going to lie to her about how I feel, but I don't want her to feel alienated or unloved by our family, because that is NOT the case). I also think that Olivia is romanticizing the fact that our parents don't like him because my father's parents had a rift with him over our mother when we were very young (this is a whole other story, but basically, his parents always favored his sister, his sister got (I think) jealous when he did well for himself and married my mother, who his parents initially likes, and she made up rumors/lies about my mother that turned his parents against her (this was way before our mother's suspected mental health struggles, which occured when Olivia and I were in middle/high school).
Please share any thoughts you have on the situation (am I reading too into things, is this not as bad as I think it is?), and any advice you have on navigating the relationships.
submitted by Former-Secretary-112 to relationship_advice [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:27 AlgyToph The big picture.

The big picture.
I've been playing afkJ since April 1st and can confidently say I've spent a good deal in both time and money. Im a VIP12 so not really a whale but spent enough that I was comfortable with change.
From the beginning I knew that this game would be a costly game for me as I lack patience. I went into this game knowing I'd probably spend more money than I usually would but I was ok with it because it was new and I felt the development team was experienced so I trusted them to make a game id enjoy for years to come. I actually enjoyed many of the decisions that Lilith made and I thought giving heroes abilities that would make them pop out more was a great idea. But they screwed up BIG time. Here are my thoughts.
Marilee and Korin: the first big mistake they made was nerfing the two characters that for weeks after global launch were praised as a safe bet for people to invest their hard earned resources into. Long term they could steadily make back investments in the form of Temporal and Tidal essense which became the clear backbone to any growing account. The argument against this is that the characters themselves were not nerfed but the bosses were simply changed to even the playing field against true damage being the dominant force in dream realm. This is complete bullshit, marilee has no place outside of dream realm and is niche at best in afk stages. Lilith has screwed over people who were building marilee as a main focus for a long term investment to boost the usage of Odie who is already a great unit in Arena, Afk levels, BOSSES, and essentially all content in the game. As a result of this Marilee has absolutely 0 reason to be built besides possibly working well with Necrodrakon or cleaning early boss levels with Vala. We knew characters would be getting buffs and seasonal abilities but we had no idea that bosses would be operating differently and this was Liliths fault for not clarifying. Had we known we would have been more careful or at least been more prepared for the absolute backhand. Korin on the other hand is maybe less of an issue as he has niche success in afk stages if you are pushing LB. he's only really great for necrodrakon as everywhere else maulers have taken more priority.
It's clear that this is obviously a seasonal change and isn't permanent but this season is 4 months long so how are we expected to build up for a new meta just for it to completely change next season to somethinf completely different? I was ok with power creep but unlike completely rolling over the entire functionality of a game mode I was expecting the heroes ive had to still work as intended and to simply save up until I feel I've got enough to cover whatever new hero is coming out to play with after a few releases. That's one of the great things about games like this is the consistency and ability to predict, this is not the case and we are at the mercy of whatever the devs feel will make the game more successful and profitable(which is completely reasonable but not at the expense of your players).
There are many other issues like the clear as day inflation of important resources from the noble path, or the "bountiful resources" from the season areas but those don't bother me nearly as much as the overhaul to dreamrealm which I always stated to everyone was easily the most important thing to invest in early on or the clear drop in summons if you dont spend here and there.
I know this company is a company at the end of the day but that doesn't excuse cutting corners for profits at our expense. Don't kiss a company's ass that bragged about making $2.5M their first week. Don't forget that at the end of the day your money belongs to you and if you feel cheated you have every right to try and make a stance against greed. Stop feeling bad for multimillion dollar companies and start treating your dollars like they matter.
Goodbye and good riddance AFKJ
submitted by AlgyToph to AFKJourney [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:26 Former-Secretary-112 My sister's (24F) boyfriend's (25M) story doesn't add up. How do I get through to her without alienating her?

This is a really long story with lots of context so I'll do my best to organize it into current situation, then his backstory and hers. I'm also not using real names or specific locations for any of this to try and keep this private. This also has some contradicting stories and because of how their relationship is structured relies mostly on information I have gotten from my sister, so I'm telling you the story I got from her first and then adding in what I've found out. I'll try to tell this as unbiased as I can but it's been a huge issue in my family for a long time now and that's a little difficult for me to do.
My sister (Olivia, 24F) has been dating this guy (Trevor, 25M) since 2021. When they started dating, she talked about him fairly often, sent a few pictures of them, ect., but then after a month she stopped mentioning him/ was cagey when we (me and my mom mostly) asked how he was so we assumed it just hadn't worked out. Then two months later she insisted that my parents and I all come to visit her college to meet Trevor before he went into the Army (she lived several hours away from my parents and several hours from my college, so I had to get a bus ticket and my parents had to get a hotel room to do this. We only met him once for dinner). Now they've been dating long distance for three years after a three month in-person relationship. She is in nursing school and is planning on moving across the country (literally opposite corners of the map) to live with him and is not applying to any residency programs outside of the Army base area (limiting her choices a LOT from her original goals and narrowing employment opportunities).
Olivia met Trevor on several dating apps, matched with him, but didn't really want to go out with him. He was really persistent, so her friend convinced her to go out with him. She lied about the way they met to our parents and told them they met at the gym through a mutual friend (she lied to me about this at first too and told me the truth about 3 months after they started dating). At the time, Trevor was working as a used car salesman and living at home (~45 min. away from Olivia's school in a rural area) because his sports scholarship had been dropped before his Senior year due to covid at the college he had been attending out of state. The university was unaccredited (I later did some internet stalking and found out it was accredited), so his credits would not transfer and he would have to start over. He was saving up money to attend school in state at the large college Olivia attended so he could go back to school. **Our state has crazy low tuition costs in-state and a full-tuition scholarship program for good high school GPA and SAT scores. There was also a "feeder" community college that had half the cost per credit hour that a lot of people would go to before the larger university if they didn't get in straight out of high school.**
Olivia told me that Trevor had applied to her college and not gotten in (she later told me he HAD gotten in but been unable to afford tuition). Either way, he decided to join the Army because his father had been in the Army. The Army would take his credit hours and he would be able to finish his degree during his 5 year contract or use the GI bill once he got out. **She is comparing the situation to our father, who joined the Army directly out of high school and used the GI bill to go to college after his 2 year contract because his parents wouldn't pay for school. He was a medic in the military, worked as an EMT through college, and then went to nursing school.** The original plan was that Trevor would be a Green Beret (special forces, linking the training pipeline here: https://www.reddit.com/greenberets/comments/xwdbta/current_sf_pipeline_correct_me_if_im_wrong/ ), he completed basic training and and got several months through the NC training before failing the running portion of a physical by about 10 seconds and being dropped from the selection process. He then decided that he wanted to be a Ranger (another elite position). He got sent back to GA, then to the Ranger school base in WA (it took a couple of months before he was sent to WA). Again, he got partway through the training before failing the running portion of a physical by a few seconds. He is now not sure if he will be continuing Ranger school (failing the physical means no, but commanders may pass him anyways if they think he should continue). For a while, Trevor told Olivia that he might not stay at the base in WA if he wasn't in Ranger school and there were a variety of different bases he could be sent to, including somewhere in Italy, so she wasn't sure where to look for jobs. In the past month, Trevor told Olivia that he would likely stay in WA regardless of the Ranger school results.
Through this all, Olivia has visited Trevor at the different military bases countless times, driving from as far as south FL to NC and putting over 30,000 miles on a brand new car over the course of the 1.5 years she's owned it. Before she had the car, she paid for plane tickets to see him and hotels whenever she visited. At the time, she told me that he was paying for all of these trips because he was unable to visit her, was making an income that wasn't being spent, and she was working to save for nursing school and later was living off of student loans and savings during nursing school. She later admitted to me that she had paid for almost all of the expenses except for food when they ate out together and part of a hotel room one weekend.
A few odd things (to me) between Olivia and Trevor over the course of their relationship:
About a month into their relationship, Trevor got Olivia an over $300 christmas gift. He has not gotten her anything nearly that expensive since, and hasn't sent flowers for things like her college graduation or a severe emergency surgery she had last year. I don't care about monetary value or sending flowers, but I do think it is odd that he spent so much before moving away when he ostensibly didn't have much money, but now that he has an income and military sign-on bonus, he has not spent that much again.
Trevor's father left Trevor, his siblings, and his mother, but Trevor has a hat that his father gave him that he wore often. The hat says "Red Man" across the top of a picture of a Native American man wearing a feathered headdress. He has worn this hat several times around Olivia's friends and they told him they didn't like it and that it was racist. They also asked him to not wear it when he was with them and he refused because it was special to him and his father gave it to him. Olivia then told him to stop wearing it and he eventually agreed (Olivia told me that he stopped wearing the hat after this). A few weeks after this, I facetimed Olivia and Trevor was with her. She turned the camera so I could say hello to him, and he was wearing the hat. I talked to Olivia about this later and she told me that that was the first time he'd worn the hat in a while and it wasn't a big deal. Olivia has always been liberal and never racist, and I am uncomfortable that she was okay with him not only wearing the hat, but being with him while he had it on.
They dated for a little over 3 months in person before he joined the military (recently, Olivia told me that they actually met several months before she told everyone about him and that they actually dated for 6 months before he left). For the next two months in basic training, he was only able to use the phone for 15 minutes total once a week to talk to family and her. Throughout the different training programs he has completed he had sporadic and limited access to phones to communicate, and only in the past 6 months he has had access to his phone to facetime, text, and call (but sometimes he goes for a week or two without phone access). Olivia told me that they wrote letters during the time he didn't have consistent phone access. **I don't think that this is odd, I understand the military limits phone usage, etc., but I don't think they have been able to have an "average" long-distance relationship**
Last year, Olivia drove to GA to visit Trevor the weekend before Valentine's day. He had plans for them to take a pottery class, go on a hike, and have dinner at a nice restaurant. The day she got there, Trevor's barracks had their off-base privileges revoked because one of the guys had contraband. She would still be able to visit him on base though. Somehow, Trevor was able to get off base for long periods of time to her hotel, but unable to do the other activities he had planned for them.
In the past year, Olivia told me that she and Trevor were going to immediately marry when she got to WA so that they could move in together because they had to be married to live together anywhere. I and our dad- who was in the military- told her several times that this was not true, but she insisted it was. Then, his barracks were given an allowance to live off base in apartments because the barracks were being renovated/ rebuilt, so she backed off on the idea of getting married immediately after several long conversations with me. She is still insistent on moving in with Trevor, who lives with a roommate, when she moves to WA.
Some background on Olivia:
Olivia has ADHD and anxiety, and struggled particularly badly with the anxiety/ some depression after being broken up with by the boyfriend she dated before Trevor (he broke it off very abruptly, told her he just didn't love her anymore with no previous indications). Olivia is very pretty (objectively, not just because she's my sister), but had bad acne that she ended up going on accutane for at the time she started dating Trevor and was very insecure about it. She had also decided to not go to medical school, and pursue nursing instead around the same time she met Trevor. This was a very upsetting decision for her because she had been taking very hard courses and was burnt out but had told everyone she was going to be a doctor and thought that she would be letting us down by switching paths. Also around the time she started seeing Trevor, Olivia began being very cruel towards our mother (our mother had been borderline emotionally abusive in the past, but Olivia and I were both in college by then and fixing our relationships with her. She has been much better recently and Olivia and I believe that she had some mental health struggles that went unchecked that contributed). Now, several years later, Olivia told our family that she had acted like that because she was raped by a friend of her ex-boyfriend's after her ex broke up with her. This person also gave her an STD.
I always believe people who say they have been sexually assaulted, abused, or harassed, and we believed Olivia when she first told us, but some things have come to light that make me and my family question that. Right after Olivia and her ex broke up, Olivia told our cousin that she had gone out with one of his friends and had revenge/ breakup sex with him because he had also been dumped recently. Once my cousin told me this, I remembered that Olivia had told me about a guy she had a one night stand with after she was dumped. She showed me a picture of him, talked about how cute he was, etc. (no distress whatsoever). I know sometimes people behave in ways you wouldn't expect when a traumatic event occurs to them, but I really don't understand how or why Olivia would brag about this guy if he really did sexually assault her.
Three months ago, Olivia was arrested for stealing a set of sheets from Walmart. She used the self check-out and only bought a small $5 item and the sheets. She held both in one hand and scanned each side because she had a cut on the other hand and was holding her wallet with it. She saw a 5 in front of the total number and thought it looked right because the total should have been about $50, paid, didn't get a receipt, and walked out. An employee at the door asked to see a receipt, which Olivia didn't have, so she pulled up her transaction history on her phone to show she had paid. At this point, the employee called the police and took Olivia into an office, where she was questioned and charged with shoplifting. (Olivia can get very emotional and probably got upset when the police questioned her, which may have led them to believe she was lying). Luckily, Olivia has managed to get the charges expunged, but the process is still ongoing. Because of her ADHD, if anyone genuinely made this mistake, I would believe it from her, but Olivia has been improving a lot on organization and being more attentive recently. It is extremely uncharacteristic of her to steal- she was honest to a fault as kids- she would break down from guilt and admit things to our parents that we would have gotten away with if she hadn't said anything.
Right now, my parents have met Trevor twice in person, and I've met him once in person and several times in passing over facetime. I personally don't think that Trevor seems to keep up with my sister or that they make each other shine, and that opinion is shared with family friends and family that have met Trevor. Olivia doesn't mention Trevor in front of our parents often because his name has become a topic of contention and argument between them. My parents don't think Trevor is right for Olivia. She has almost 2 college degrees and plans to become a nurse practitioner in the future, and he hasn't finished college and doesn't seem to have any drive to do so. Olivia is also well traveled and enjoys going to museums, concerts, etc., while Trevor has lived in rural FL his whole life (this is not Trevor's fault, and I don't think he is a lesser person because of it, but I don't see a lot of common ground between them). Trevor has not seemed very well spoken when I have talked to him and I just don't see a lot of qualities in him that Olivia values.
If you've gotten this far, I just don't know what to do. Olivia and my parents have a huge rift in their relationship right now and any mention of Trevor, with her around or not, explodes into a huge argument, discussion, or just icy silence. I want Olivia to be able to talk to me about him, and we are able to discuss things much better than she is with our parents. My parents have also started asking me about Olivia and Trevor because they know Olivia shares more with me, and it makes me uncomfortable because I don't want to betray Olivia's trust, but I'm also very worried about her. I know I can't control her actions and I'm having a really hard time trying to balance supporting Olivia but not supporting the relationship (I'm not going to lie to her about how I feel, but I don't want her to feel alienated or unloved by our family, because that is NOT the case). I also think that Olivia is romanticizing the fact that our parents don't like him because my father's parents had a rift with him over our mother when we were very young (this is a whole other story, but basically, his parents always favored his sister, his sister got (I think) jealous when he did well for himself and married my mother, who his parents initially likes, and she made up rumors/lies about my mother that turned his parents against her (this was way before our mother's suspected mental health struggles, which occured when Olivia and I were in middle/high school).
Please share any thoughts you have on the situation (am I reading too into things, is this not as bad as I think it is?), and any advice you have on navigating the relationships.
submitted by Former-Secretary-112 to relationship_advice [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:21 bman_16 So I've recently rewatched all of the series up to present point. Here are my thoughts/rankings. Pt 5 - Season 5

So I've recently rewatched all of the series up to present point. Here are my thoughts/rankings. Pt 5 - Season 5
NOTE: All of these are just my opinion. Feel free to disagree.
Ratings:
The Bad
  • 1/10 - The Worst: Episodes that I despise
  • 2/10 - Awful: Epsiodes I hate
  • 3/10 - Bad: Episodes I think are bad
The Mediocre
  • 4/10 - Not Very Good: Episodes I don't like but have good parts in them
  • 5/10 - Alright: Episodes I think are ok/don't care much for
  • 6/10 - Decent: Episodes I like but aren't crazy about
The Good
  • 7/10 - Good: Episodes I like
  • 8/10 - Great: Episodes I really like
  • 9/10 - Amazing: Episodes I love
  • 10/10 - The Best: Episodes I adore
Episode Ranking (From best to worst):
  1. Roller Cowards - 9/10: With a premise we can all relate to from our childhood and great jokes throughout, I think this is the best episode of the season
  2. Spy Buddies - 9/10: Like 'Clams' from Season 3, this episode is a fantastic parody with all the SpongeBob absurdity you could ask for
  3. Krabs a La Mode - 8/10: This one has a great story, a nice ice aesthetic, and is both funny and creative with its concept
  4. SpongeBob VS the Patty Gadget - 8/10: The best short of the season, I like the message and the unique storytelling style
  5. The Battle of Bikini Bottom - 8/10: A really silly premise but pulled off well with great humour and gross-out that works
  6. The Krusty Plate - 8/10: A fun short full of great humour and absurdity
  7. Picture Day - 7/10: This season's biggest surprise gem
  8. Mermaid Man VS SpongeBob - 7/10: A great blend of a Plankton and a Mermaid Man episode
  9. The Donut of Shame - 7/10: In an era where Patrick was characterised as a bratish idiot, episodes like this are nice examples that all is not lost
  10. Blackened Sponge - 7/10: Another surprising gem, this episode feels very in character for SpongeBob and is quite a funny episode overall
  11. The Krusty Sponge - 7/10: A nice jab towards the show's marketing, but I feel Mr Krabs should've been punished at the end
  12. The Two Faces of Squidward - 7/10: Squidward getting a taste of 'be careful what you wish for' is a great premise and leads to a really good episode
  13. Money Talks - 7/10: This episode should've been a full eleven-minute one instead of a short
  14. To Save a Squirrel - 7/10: I like this one, though Sandy's plan is oddly complicated and confusing
  15. New Digs - 6/10: A premise like this feels very in character for SpongeBob. However, I do wish this one was funnier
  16. Slimy Dancing - 6/10: The epilogue at the end was unnecessary. Other than that, this one's fine
  17. 20,000 Patties Under the Seas - 6/10: This one has some decent jokes and a good premise, although the ending joke is kind of stupid
  18. The Inmates of Summer - 6/10: Don't find this one particularly interesting or humourous, although the play near the end is a joy
  19. Friend or Foe - 6/10: I like the lore of this one, I just don't find it particularly hilarious
  20. Pest of the West - 5/10: The cowboy premise is nice, though I feel they don't do much fun or unique with it compared to the spy stuff in 'Spy Buddies'
  21. The Original Fry Cook - 6/10: Same as 'Friend or Foe'. I like the lore, just don't find it very funny
  22. Blackjack - 5/10: I would've preferred that they had focused on the mystery aspect of the story
  23. A Flea in Her Dome - 5/10: It's ok, I just wish it was creative with its premise and had an ending that doesn't feel like it just gives up
  24. Sing a Song of Patrick - 5/10: The most mixed I've been on a SpongeBob episode
  25. Le Big Switch - 5/10: I find this episode extremely boring and unfunny
  26. Night Light - 5/10: I love the freezer scene and the creepy aesthetic during the first half, but why does it turn into a Mermaid Man episode during the second half?
  27. Stanley S. SquarePants - 5/10: I like seeing more of SpongeBob's family, though this episode feels gimmicky than fun or interesting
  28. Bucket Sweet Bucket - 5/10: Aside from the "Exposition!" joke, nothing memorable or funny happens here
  29. Good Ol' Whatshisname - 5/10: I don't find it the worst, but there's so little to say about this one
  30. Rise and Shine - 5/10: Quite an uninteresting premise for an episode but the episode is at least tolerable
  31. Banned in Bikini Bottom - 4/10: This episode is so boring I have nothing interesting to say about it
  32. Fungus Among Us - 4/10: I don't find this episode as gross as others do, but the story and characters let it down regardless
  33. To Love a Patty - 4/10: SpongeBob gets romantic with a sandwich, do I need to say anything more?
  34. Breath of Fresh Squidward - 4/10: The concept is really good, execution is not so much
  35. Pat No Pay - 4/10: Sad how two of the three Patrick shorts this season are either uninteresting or unfunny
  36. Goo Goo Gas - 4/10: This episode is mostly baby jokes and none of them are funny
  37. Boat Smarts - 4/10: It's the 'Krusty Krab Training Video' except it forgot to be consistently funny
  38. SpongeHenge - 4/10: This episode confuses me more than anything
  39. Waiting - 3/10: I've never seen an episode of any show that actively tries to prevent anything interesting from happening. At least it's a short
  40. Atlantis SquarePantis - 3/10: The show's first TV movie and hardly anything exciting or interesting happens. Not even the songs are that good
  41. Whatever Happened to SpongeBob - 2/10: If you have to make your characters uncharacteristically mean to get the story going, you're doing something wrong. This should've just stuck with the memory loss plot
Season Overall - 5/10: On one hand, the best episodes of the season are better than the best of Season 4. On the other, the worst episodes are much worse compared to what Season 4 had to offer. All in all, Season 5 is yet another season I find underwhelming overall
Tier List:
https://preview.redd.it/m0oxbps2ib0d1.png?width=1140&format=png&auto=webp&s=fcd9c115398e95d99b8cec9896acd8a1feb5650b
submitted by bman_16 to spongebob [link] [comments]


2024.05.14 06:20 FluffyKillah being off my meds has been awful

this post is going to be all over the place . i apologize in advance lol . need to let out my stream of consciousness before i lose it .
today everything has felt wrong . i don't know how else to explain it besides that . i feel bad for staying in bed for slightly too long . i feel bad for not immediately going to my girlfriend and try to spend time with her . i shame myself for wanting time to myself because i've felt burnt out from everyone recently . i feel so guilty for wanting to be alone so much . even talking about how i feel doesn't help because i feel like i have no right to complain . or even that i'm being sensitive or overreacting to something . my girlfriend has to reassure me that these things aren't true and aren't our reality . i feel bad for her having to reassure me in the first place . a normal person wouldn't have to be told what's real and what's in their head . i try to go outside on walks , listen to music , and try to take my mind off of things . the moment i get back , it's as if i never left and i'm right back at square one . i haven't had my medication in a month or two now . not by choice really . my insurance was cut off and i don't have any money to pay for it out of pocket . it feel as if i've lost all the progress i had made in the months i had been taking my meds . i feel like how i did before starting them and it's makes me not want to try to get better anymore . i get so mad at the smallest of things . at times i feel like screaming and crying all at once , but moments later , i'll feel completely fine and see how irrational my thinking had been . sometimes i get so red hot with rage that i can't even picture a reality where im not upset . but moments later , having calmed down and trying to regain my composure , i fall right back into my emotions again . it's all so overwhelming . i catch myself staring out into nothingness a lot of the time now . thinking about so many negatives that feel impossible and pointless to put into words without sounding crazy . i'm so good at finding the negatives in any situation . i don't know if this is more ocd than bpd , but i have a big problem with staring at myself in the mirror . sometimes for hours on end . looking for any imperfections to fix . hating the person that stares back at me . i know im not crazy but that's still how i feel most of the time . no matter how i try and go about things , i always end up in the same spot that ive been trying so hard to get away from . i feel such a great deal of shame for even existing . for my loved ones having to simply be around me . i wish i didn't feel this way , but i do . the only solace i can seem to find is smoking weed with my girlfriend , but even that is short lived . i can only seem to focus on the negatives . they always completely outweigh and overshadow any positives there are in my life . all i want to do is curl up into a ball under my covers and stay shrouded in the darkness forever .
tldr ; bpd makes my brain go brrrrrrrrr
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2024.05.14 06:19 LIKE_A_BOSS_685_ I (M21) just ended things for good with my ex (F22) who cheated on me and lied to me for months. What do I do now?

I'll condense the situation as best as I can.
Me and her were together for 5 years. We lived together most of that time moving in with eachother at about a year in.
Things were amazing for so long I realized I didn't want to spend my life without her so I proposed about 11 months ago. She said yes we were both very happy with the situation. As far as I knew.
Around 6 months ago things started to feel off. She fell asleep on her phone one night I went to put it on the charger and take off her glasses when I noticed snapchats from guys I didn't know.
I saw compliments going both ways and flirty behavior and messages. I confronted her about them that night. She got angry with me for it and promised we'd talk in the morning. She ended up blowing it off saying she didn't know he was flirting. Blocked him and said that was the end of it.
A week goes by I still am worried but she assures me it was done. I end up seeing worse things on her phone.
She grew more distant started going out to clubs more. Spending less time on us. Getting mad at me and blaming for starting fights about the topic.
It got worse it turned into pictures and more lies. She'd tell me she'd change and it would never happen again and I kept believing it cause I wanted it so badly to be true. Things got worse.
5 months of lies and I finally couldn't take it anymore. I got tired of sharing my fears and concerns to her about it because she never changed or did anything to stop it or truly comfort me or be a partner like we were for so long.
There was a lot of bad times. She manipulated me. Made me out to the problem. Lashed out at me when I had a shred of doubt in her words or actions.
She ended up talking sending explicit pictures to my uncle. Co workers. Many different people in my small town and surrounding areas.
I finally realized I couldn't trust her. I finally ended it all for good after the 10th or so time she told me she had changed and wanted her life back.
Now I am single. She is living with the first guy she cheated on me with. I just saw them together today at Walmart on her lunch break when I just went there for some groceries.
I'm lost. After being gaslight and manipulated for so long, being lied to and never knowing the truth has taken it's toll on me. I don't know how to move forward with my life. I said what I needed to say to her. Though I know I will never get the answers from her I still crave contact with her but I know it will just end up getting me hurt.
Nonstop lies, manipulation and living with who I now know to be a narcissist has left me rattled, lost, scared, and confused.
Any advice or insight would be appreciated. Maybe just someone who's went through something similar to share the finer details of the situation with would be much appreciated.
Haven't posted much on here. Any big questions or things I may have left out I can answer in DMS or in the comments.
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2024.05.14 06:07 Whattheheckinfosec I'm looking for a specific kind of puzzle that has multiple, but not necessarily related, parts.

I've played a lot of the HOP's over the last few years, but they're not just that. I like games that have different sorts of puzzles aside from hidden objects. Some of my favorites have been the games that have a mini game where the puzzle has multiple parts to it and the parts aren't related beyond being part of the same mini-game. I hope I'm explaining it well enough. You start the minigame and you have to solve some thing - rings of a picture placed correctly, then nothing in more than one row and column, and then pipes or electrical circuits, etc. But all of them happen within the same minigame. I almost feel like it's one of those Playskool things that you buy for little baby's where it's all the same thing, but it also has discrete sections.
Again, I'm hoping this translates. I know about Big Fish, Artifex Mundi and some developer who has 5 in the name.
I want more of those games. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?
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2024.05.14 06:06 No_Ingenuity_4990 The Fabwelt Experience: Gaming Made Awesome

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2024.05.14 06:05 kimple_john WTS/WTT: S Layers 28/XS Bottoms WTB: XS/S/M Shirts/Layers, S/M (bottoms) shorts, 28/29 bottoms

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Thanks for looking. Happy to send pictures/measurements if needed
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2024.05.14 06:02 AutoModerator Daily Discussion - 14 May 2024

**Welcome to our Daily Discussion thread, where you can talk about anything Peloton related in a fast-paced, laid back environment with friends!**1
Do: Tell stories, share feelings on your upcoming delivery, how a recent class made you feel, maybe an upcoming class you're eager to take, some sweet new apparel that's quickly becoming your favorite shirt. You get the picture. Anything big or little. We just ask you abide by the subreddit rules, click "report" on rule-breaking comments/posts, and remember why we're all here - to get the most out of our Peloton subscriptions.
\1] Note: Based on broad feedback we've combined the Daily Discussion + Daily Training threads. If you previously were active in either, yes you're now/still in the right place!)
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