For context my husband and I have been together 10 years and we have 2 kids age 6&3. I don’t expect anything for any occasion, not Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas or even my birthday. I just choose not to have any expectations because I’m more of a giver than receiver and I just simply do not want to be disappointed. However, it’s been bothering me for 2 days that my husband didn’t wish me a Happy Mother’s Day. I’m not his mom obviously, so I didn’t mind until I saw he texted his sister a paragraph congratulating her on how awesome of a mom she is. I know comparison is the thief of joy but I literally have nothing to compare it to. He didn’t even hug, kiss or congratulate me for Mother’s Day. I’m not sure if I’m just being emotional and I shouldn’t care because my children did wish me a HMD and that should be all that matters. However, it’s not the first time this has happened. I have explained to him how important this holiday is for moms but he just shrugs it off and sees it as just any other day. I just feel like if he did truly see it that way he wouldn’t have wished anyone a HMD. How can I stop feeling this way?

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Descriptive writing uses sensory details to portray people, places, things, or experiences, making them come alive for the reader. It’s about more than just listing facts; it’s about weaving a tapestry of perception that immerses the reader in your world.
Key Techniques:

1. Sensory Details: Incorporate sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and textures to enrich your narrative.
2. Figurative Language: Use metaphors, similes, and personification to add depth and comparison.
3. Precise Language: Choose specific, expressive words that convey your exact meaning.
4. Emotional Connection: Evoke feelings and emotions through your description to connect with your audience.

Let’s put theory into practice! 🌟

• Choose an object in your surroundings.
• Now, write a short paragraph describing this object using at least three senses and one simile or metaphor.

Share your composed descriptions in the comments! This exercise is not just about observing, but about translating observation into an immersive narrative.
#SelfDiscovery #DescriptiveWriting

It’s on a book (tale of 2 cities) if would be beneficial if you are willing to read it:)! No AI!!! Ai = automatic end of agreement! Just try your best and A’s are the obviously goal! HMUUUU✨✨ (dm for payment info) These are Google doc worksheets! This is no essays but there are some paragraphs you need to write! Please guys ✌️🤗

So,basically it happened when I was in second semester.There was a girl who used to stare at me during lectures and there were various moments when we had a eye contact but I used to ignore that thing.Then things started to escalate when she started saying hello to me when I was with my friends.So, my friends suggested me to go and talk to her.So I gathered my confidence and approached her.She interacted with me but left very soon.Later that day she sent me Instagram request and we started having conversation about random things(politics, studies etc).
She knew I was good in academics so she asked for help and as a human being I helped her and then after this we were talking 1-1.5 hrs daily on phone and when I didn't saw her message she used to call me continuously(One time she called me 7 times in interval of 3-4 mins) and every time she would ask me that if I am okay or has she committed some mistake that is why I am ignoring her.She used to ask for my suggestions for every thing.
Then we started going to library,where I used to teach her on the expense of my own academics but I didn't cared.Things were going well. She became a support system for me.We used to go on walks etc. She appreciated my physique (I go to gym).
But things started going downhill on June 3rd,it was her birthday and she didn't invite me,I thought she might be busy with her friends but foolish me called her and asked that am I just for her academic support!She denied and said that she wanted to give me party alone and I said I don't want a party from you .Things were not going well, we didn't called each other much.
Fast forward to 16th June ,I was working on my project and it was around 3 in the morning and she texted me that his boyfriend is asking about you,My heart fell down and I just replied her it's your matter and you have to answer it but she insisted me to tell something to reply him.. Then I wrote a long paragraph in which I said I don't want to become a barrier between both of you.I trusted you but you betrayed me and used me. I wish you all the best and please don't try to text me again.. then she started spamming that sorry,I know it's my mistake. Don't leave me blah blah... I didn't reacted to her messages. Then I went to my bed and it was around 4:30 AM, I am having project submission at 9:00 AM and after 2 days I am having my end semester exams. I tried to sleep but after 1 hour, I woke up and was feeling heavy, I called my friend and told him that everything thing is over and I broke down. Then he and one more friend of mine came running to my room and took me to the balcony and consoled me and told me that don't be sad..
Then afterwards I gathered myself and went for the project evaluation,it went good but I was feeling a void. Then in the evening she texted me again asking me that If I am angry because of her.. my friends suggested me not to reply so I didn't reply.. But the night before the exams she texted me asking for the solutions of worksheets, I didn't send her.Then she called with a different number.But then again she started spamming. Then I texted her that I want to meet and want to end everything, she came and I gave her a short reality check and saw her tears rolling down her cheeks,I again said that please don't cry etc etc.... So I gave my exams and went home.
Again on July 2nd she texted me that I met with an accident and broke my hand. I replied take care. She said are you still angry with me,please give me a chance I want to normalise everything but I asked why should I give you a second chance which she didn't bother to reply.
Now fast forward to 4th semester, everything is going fine(My CG is 9.0) but now again she is staring at me and is trying to initiate a conversation but I ignore her completely but deep down I also want to initiate a conversation again. So what should I do? Kindly guide me!!
Thank You :⁠-⁠D

So,basically it happened when I was in second semester.There was a girl who used to stare at me during lectures and there were various moments when we had a eye contact but I used to ignore that thing.Then things started to escalate when she started saying hello to me when I was with my friends.So, my friends suggested me to go and talk to her.So I gathered my confidence and approached her.She interacted with me but left very soon.Later that day she sent me Instagram request and we started having conversation about random things(politics, studies etc). She knew I was good in academics so she asked for help and as a human being I helped her and then after this we were talking 1-1.5 hrs daily on phone and when I didn't saw her message she used to call me continuously(One time she called me 7 times in interval of 3-4 mins) and every time she would ask me that if I am okay or has she committed some mistake that is why I am ignoring her.She used to ask for my suggestions for every thing.Then we started going to library,where I used to teach her on the expense of my own academics but I didn't cared.Things were going well. She became a support system for me.We used to go on walks etc. She appreciated my physique (I go to gym).But things started going downhill on June 3rd,it was her birthday and she didn't invite me,I thought she might be busy with her friends but foolish me called her and asked that am I just for her academic support!She denied and said that she wanted to give me party alone and I said I don't want a party from you .Things were not going well, we didn't called each other much. Fast forward to 16th June ,I was working on my project and it was around 3 in the morning and she texted me that his boyfriend is asking about you,My heart fell down and I just replied her it's your matter and you have to answer it but she insisted me to tell something to reply him.. Then I wrote a long paragraph in which I said I don't want to become a barrier between both of you.I trusted you but you betrayed me and used me. I wish you all the best and please don't try to text me again.. then she started spamming that sorry,I know it's my mistake. Don't leave me blah blah... I didn't reacted to her messages. Then I went to my bed and it was around 4:30 AM, I am having project submission at 9:00 AM and after 2 days I am having my end semester exams. I tried to sleep but after 1 hour, I woke up and was feeling heavy, I called my friend and told him that everything thing is over and I broke down. Then he and one more friend of mine came running to my room and took me to the balcony and consoled me and told me that don't be sad.. Then afterwards I gathered myself and went for the project evaluation,it went good but I was feeling a void. Then in the evening she texted me again asking me that If I am angry because of her.. my friends suggested me not to reply so I didn't reply.. But the night before the exams she texted me asking for the solutions of worksheets, I didn't send her.Then she called with a different number.But then again she started spamming. Then I texted her that I want to meet and want to end everything, she came and I gave her a short reality check and saw her tears rolling down her cheeks,I again said that please don't cry etc etc.... So I gave my exams and went home. Again on July 2nd she texted me that I met with an accident and broke my hand. I replied take care. She said are you still angry with me,please give me a chance I want to normalise everything but I asked why should I give you a second chance which she didn't bother to reply. Now fast forward to 4th semester, everything is going fine(My CG is 9.0) but now again she is staring at me and is trying to initiate a conversation but I ignore her completely but deep down I also want to initiate a conversation again. So what should I do? Kindly guide me!! Thank You :⁠-⁠D

Hey so for my LEQ 4 (evaluate the relative importance of the effects of movements for social change from 1945-1980) I didn’t realize that it was a comparison essay, and instead I wrote about how the civil rights movement was greatly important in its effects to United States society by cultivating reform voiced and by leading to new legislature for equality. Would this still be fine? I had a lot of evidence showing that, I talked about MLK, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and in my second paragraph about Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.
Am I cooked, and if I am, how many points would I lose?

I am not The OOP, OOP is u/lolfuckno.
This post was originally posted to weddingshaming.
There was already a BoRU post by u/autochthonouschimera, which didn't include the last update yet.
TRIGGER WARNING: cheating, child neglect, extreme entitledness, talk of abortion
MOOD SPOILERS: infuriating, confusing, frustrating
The new update at the bottom of this post has been marked with --- ---
Original story was posted on December 7, 2021
Okay, so this girl I know from high school is getting married. We're both 22, for reference. In our senior year of high school she got pregnant, with baby daddy A who will be referred to as Adam. Her super conservative parents kicked her out and she ended up moving in with a friend's family. She barely graduated high school. The only reason she did were because of the generosity and support of our teachers and students who volunteered to help her, which is how we met. We were in the same law class in the morning and she had the worst morning sickness that really affected her ability to be in class. So, I took extra notes for her, tutored her, and brought her her stuff if she hadn't come back by the bell. I wasn't the only one who did stuff like this for her and I know she really appreciates all the assistance we gave her. She had the baby a month after we graduated.
She'd signed up for a 911 dispatcher course for after high school because where we live it's a good steady job, with opportunity for certificates and promotions. But she didn't realize how intensive the course would be and had to drop out. She started working at a grocery store bakery, just until she had a better plan. Adam started an apprenticeship while working part time at a hockey rink, and proposed to her literally the day of her eighteenth birthday, and brought up marriage because "it's the right thing to do" (I don't really agree with that but this isn't about me) and she was always refusing.
She started cheating on him after a while (we're all 19 now), and eventually leaves him for another guy because... She's pregnant again and it is far more likely that this guy, baby daddy B who will be referred to as Brad, is the father of the child. Neither of them can afford lawyers so getting any kind of custody agreement is a mess, and then their parents got involved and they did 50/50 split (still not made official). She has the baby, that does turn out to be Brad's, and everything is okay for about nine months, when she finds out Brad has been cheating on her with his TA. Brad decides to pay child support but doesn't really want contact with the kid, only around holidays and one weekend a month for his parents' sake.
She moves back in with her parents (we're all 20 now) who only accept her back because there's grandchildren around. On the plus side, (when she's 21) she gets to take that year long dispatcher course, and passes with flying colours!
After working as a dispatcher for a year (we're all 22 now) she meets a police officer we'll call Chad, who's 26 and married... And Adam's second (?) cousin (I can't remember how they're related, just that Adam and Chad are related somewhat distantly). She has an affair with him (infidelity is super common among cops apparently). She gets knocked up, his wife divorces him, Chad proposes because "it's the right thing to do", she accepts, and her parents kick her out again for being a [insert expletive here], she moves in with Chad with her two kids. They've started planning the wedding, which... Given the background is something akin to a dumpster fire. Adam is LIVID. He was desperately in love with this girl and hasn't really recovered from what she did to him, and while she rejected his proposals years ago, she's accepted one FROM HIS COUSIN WHO PROPSED FOR THE SAME REASON HE DID.
Adam has basically made a call for loyalty in the family, dividing everyone one who should go, who should give money, etc plus they're having trouble planning anything because of COVID. Her parents have outright said that they're not going, along with half of her family, and her younger sister has been going around and sabotaging what plans they can make.
She has asked me to be a bridesmaid, I said that I couldn't because I live in a different province now, but the truth is, I do not want to be wrapped up in that clusterfuck in any way . I'm just watching the arguments and events unfold on social media because this is quite honestly the most entertaining thing I've seen all year. It's weird to me that she even asked because we're not friends, we never have been. We were friendly strangers in high school, I just helped her out for one class because she needed help and I could give it to her. I was just being nice. But based on how she turned out I'm just sad for her. Three kids in four years, and she's alienated so much of her friends and family because if her actions, and I'm torn between feeling sorry for her and putting my head in my hands.
EDIT 1:
First off, all of your comments are hilarious. Second, I'm going to answer some of the common questions.
We're from a city with over 400,000 thousand people, she just comes from the neighbourhood that is made of either bible thumpers or white trash, with no in between. But the high school we went to was in a completely different neighbourhood than that.
Our school had a pretty good sex Ed course, and they gave out free condoms and had resources to help girls get birth control, and they had programs in place for if students ever got pregnant/were going to be teen parents (they also had one of those classes with the dolls for girls who were high risk at teen pregnancy but she wasn't high risk so she wasn't in that class) I don't if BC just didn't work for her, or if she never tried it.
She started alienating her friends after the affair with Chad came out, because people weren't exactly jumping for joy that she'd broken up a marriage (Chad and his ex didn't have any kids, thankfully, so there were less obstacles). When people weren't immediately ecstatic for her she started getting very snippy, rude, and was "calling the bitches out" on social media for not supporting her new relationship or pregnancy. (Tbh I'm really worried about her health because having this many babies so close together is just not good for her health, mental or physical.) People are also worried that Chad will cheat on her "if he'll cheat with you, he'll cheat on you" and think she should avoid marrying him so that she can just leave him if it happens.
I'll give you updates as they come out, but so far it's just a lot of yelling on social media (mostly from her), some relatives slut shaming her, and people who are just really worried about her because, as funny as this is, this doesn't seem like healthy behaviour.
EDIT 2:
First off, I realized I never gave this girl a name. For the sake of clarity we'll call her Beth. I realize that I didn't mention this before, but all of these are fake names.
Second, to everyone commenting that Chad is at fault for his marriage breaking up, believe me I'm well aware of that. It is his ex wife and her family/friends who solely blame Beth. Chad is also older than her and has more life experience, so I do believe that he could potentially be taking advantage of her naivete. However, she is also an adult who is capable of making her own decisions and has chosen to make poor ones in the past.
Third, people who are upset that I'm posting this story here, claiming I'm humiliating her. She has been posting about this mess on every social media platform she has since they got engaged in July. She put this out there long before I did except she did so in front of friends, family, employers, and coworkers, as well as internet randos.
Fourth, despite getting engaged in July and attempting to start planning then, I was only asked to be a bridesmaid three days ago. I knew that there was a mess going on but I didn't really pay attention to it until she asked me to be a bridesmaid. I tried to ask what was going on, I said that she should talk to someone, but when she completely brushed me off I checked her FB and Instagram and found out about all of... This.
Fifth, I realized that I didn't really talk about how disastrous the wedding planning has been going, see here you go:

• they've had to rebook three times because venues and vendors kept cancelling when infection numbers got worse even thought their wedding was months away
• Beth has been flipping between having the wedding while she's pregnant saying she's proud of her bump, and wanting to wait until they're born because she feels fat, which is unfortunate because she's been breaking down due her insecurity on a public platform
• Beth is currently seven months pregnant
• Beth's great aunt was going to give her her wedding dress to wear (after she gives birth) but Beth's mom freaked and stole the dress from said aunt before Beth could get it and is now keeping it, the great aunt says she's too old to get in a fight and has shrugged it off
• Chad's immediate family is paying for the wedding and has been cut off by the rest of their extended family for 'choosing Chad'
• Beth's wedding colours are pink and green, which is usually a nice combo but the specific shades don't go great together, they're her and Chad's favourite colours, which is fine but she literally made a video talking about these colours for 14 minutes on her insta and both of her kids are just full on bawling in the background and she's ignoring them and she's gotten some flack for that
• Adam is finally settled into his trade and has now hired a lawyer and is trying to get primary custody and not allow his daughter to go to the wedding
• she's planning a zoom baby showebachelorette party and has sent out a registry and she's asking for crazy expensive things
• she's also set up a go fund me to help pay for a honeymoon and is making a lot of posts about how no one loves her cause the fund only has $1267 of the $20k she wanted

I'll update when I can but I'm still in school and while I do want to help her, she's refused help offered in the past and there's only so much of this I can take mentally right now.
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UPDATE:
Hey everyone, so some stuff has gone down, and it doesn't look like it's over yet. Sorry, I didn't update sooner, but Rona came back with a vengeance and totally messed up plans with uni and family. Anyway, onto the update.
From the last update - 16th - Lots of ranting and chaotic wedding planning on social media, she found a dress and has decided she will get married while pregnant, they found a local wedding venue that is very lovely, but I'm shocked she's still trying to book stuff with all of their previous venue cancellations.
December 16th - Her little sister unblocked her to call her a s*ut and tell her that all her wedding plans were stupid. This resulted in a petty and entertaining facebook war until the little sis blocked her again on the 17th.
December 18th - Beth went nuts on social media because Adam had "kidnapped" their daughter, what really happened is that because courts are moving at a snail's pace due to COVID and Adam had reason to believe that their daughter was not safe living with Beth he decided to just... Not give her back. They don't have a custody agreement, and when Beth tried to call the cops they couldn't do anything because he was kinda right. There were dozens of videos on her various social media accounts of her ignoring their daughter, yelling at her daughter for crying or doing other things that toddlers do, it turns out that everything she needed was bought by Adam, food, diapers, clothes, toys, daycare (while it was open) etc. on top of the unofficial child support he was paying every month (which turned out to be $500 a month, a number I find ridiculous because Adam was already paying for literally everything) because she refused to buy anything for her daughter and insisted it was Adam's responsibility. Additionally, after the immediate post-birth appointments, Beth never took baby A to a doctor's appointment, she always deferred that to Adam. Baby A's pediatrician has NEVER met Beth. Beth even tried to get Chad to push back or intimidate him or something, but the local police where we live are under one hell of a microscope after a bunch of dirty cops got busted a couple of years ago. Basically, the cops, and the social worker they ended up calling, ended up saying there was nothing she could do until they get to court. The social worker tried to get her to go to therapy and parenting classes, but Beth refused and went on a fifteen paragraph long rant on Facebook about how she doesn't need parenting classes or therapy (she really, really does though) and called the social worker some choice words.
December 19-24 - Just a bunch of ranting on social media, calling everyone who doesn't enable or justify her behaviour cuss words, slurs, and a whole bunch of other horribly creative things. Also, both she and Chad are under investigation at work now, but she has no idea why. I'm gonna take this time to remind everyone that 99% of this info is coming from her public social media pages where her coworkers are friends and place of employment is listed.
December 25 - I am officially embarrassed to know this woman. I didn't go on her FB page until the evening cause I didn't want to deal with drama, first thing in the morning, on Xmas. In the morning she put on a very beautiful blue maternity dress, got Chad in his police blues, and baby B in a purple romper, and then live-streamed her and her family going to the courthouse to get married on Christmas day. (According to her Twitter, part of this was because their newest venue cancelled on them after COVID numbers spiked) Overall, a pretty tacky thing in my opinion because she stated plain as day, several times, that she intended her wedding anniversary to eclipse Christmas for her children because it's just "so much more special, you know?" (I am so glad that Baby B's grandparents are filing for guardianship) But here's the thing... The courthouse isn't open. Because of COVID for one thing, but also because it's Xmas and Canada has a predominantly Christian history. She proceeded to have a full meltdown, and when Baby B cried because, y'know, the kid's mom was screaming up a storm and scaring her, Beth called her a c*nt. Yup. So done with this bitch.
December 28 - I ran into her at a vaccine clinic cause we were both getting our booster shots. She didn't recognize me at first but one of my old bosses (cause I used to work at the hospital the vaccine clinic was in) called my name and said hi, so she came up to me after my old boss had left. We talked a bit while we sat down for the mandatory waiting period after getting the shot. She asked how I was but didn't even wait for me to respond before she started ranting and complaining about her life. I was just going to sit there until the time was up and then just politely make my exit, but when she started talking shit about her kids something inside me snapped. I just said "Do you even like your kids? Do you like being a mom?" She got pretty quiet for a second and then said "no". Idk, her voice and demeanour completely changed and we just sat in silence until our time was up. I said goodbye but it was really awkward.
December 31st (today) - I just looked at her feed and, this is such a shocking what-the-actual-f*** moment. She's thinking about giving up her kids. She went on about how recently she was asked if she liked her kids or being a mom, and how she realized that she didn't. She hates her children and blames them for ruining her life, and how she doesn't want to be a mom. I mean, nothing is official yet, but what the hell?!
I'll update as stuff happens now that I have the time, but this whole thing has been a big giant mess. Also, sorry for any formatting or grammatical errors, I'm not used to using Reddit on my PC.
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UPDATE
Okay, so, some stuff has happened and most of it's good? Also, the TL:DR for this update will be at the bottom
Jan 4th - Beth (and Chad) stopped posting on all social media. I was actually a little worried she died, I mean this woman posts everything short of her trips to the bathroom on IG.
Oddly enough, this got people messaging or interacting with her social media pages because she was usually the one to start contact, and that contact was usually yelling. No one heard from them and some people started to be like "should we call the cops for a wellness check?" Until Chad posted a status saying that they're fine but are "busy, please stop trying to contact us right now". Everyone listened but it was weird.
Jan 11 - I got a notification that Beth and Chad are active on social media again, but I didn't feel like drama so I didn't check out any of their posts.
Jan 12 (today) - she messaged me on FB asking me to be her MOH. She also kept going on about the resort in Cancun that she and Chad were looking to have their wedding at... This coming February. Omnicrom is really bad where we are, so no one should be travelling anywhere. I've actually had to delay my trip back to the province where I go to university. No one should be travelling anywhere.
Beth also found out that Chad was cheating on her with one of her co-workers and called the woman a "homewrecker" on FB tagged her, and posted the texts she found on Chad's phone. But Chad is the "love of her life" so she's forgiven him, but not the other woman. Which I find very hypocritical, considering how she and Chad got together.
She also sent pics of possible bridesmaid dresses and they are the most hideous dresses I've ever seen. I know that some brides do that thing where they want to look a million times better by comparison but this was just ridiculous. One of them looked like a partially deflated balloon with feathers strapped to it. She also openly admitted that she expected everyone attending to pay 3k, 2k would go towards that guest's stay at the resort and 1k would go to her and Chad and they will expected wedding gifts, so that they could get their room for free. Apparently, she talked to someone at the resort and if she got enough people to book their rooms she and Chad would get theirs for free. She also wanted the money to be given to her instead of directly to the hotel so that people wouldn't realize that she was taking 1k of their money. Beth sent me a pic of the wedding dress she wanted, and it's definitely a clubbing dress. If that's what she wants that's fine (and for the record I do think she would look great in it, Beth's (current) dream wedding dress ) but she wants all the guests to be dressed black tie. And she's already sent a list of unreasonable requests. Such as;

• all women must wear heels (for a wedding in the beach???)
• no one is allowed to have a baby or be pregnant (really?)
• girls must have longer than shoulder length hair, boys must have very short hair, only and inch or two long
• no one is allowed to be skinnier than her
• she will be providing diets for everyone attending based on how she wants us to look
• she and Chad must get bachelor and bachelorette parties both in Canada and in Mexico that need to be "fit for a king and queen" and both must be paid for but anyone but the bride and groom "cause that's just tacky"
• no unnatural hair
• no tattoos (you have five tattoos, Beth, and in the dress you want all will be on full display)
• no one is allowed to talk to her directly, they must speak through the MOH and BM

Honestly there's a lot more but I didn't feel like typing all that out. She's posted the list on FB and IG and people are already calling her a bridezilla.
I was also just kinda weirded out because aside from the previous convo at the hospital and when she originally asked me to be a bridesmaid, we haven't spoken since high school. So I respectfully declined, stating that the virus and school were my top concerns right now. Then, I decided to check her socials to see if she'd posted anything. She had and everything was basically how it was before the hiatus... Except her kids are nowhere to be found. No "look at my cute baby" pics are kids crying in the background of her videos. Nothing. Though, based on her new pics of herself, she's given birth to baby C. I mean, she's definitely still recovering, but she also definitely had a baby and that baby is not on any of her socials, so when she responded to my decline with an attempt at guilting me to be her MOH, I asked her where her kids were. This was her response.
"Oh, I left them at the side of the road in our way home from the hospital those moochers could walk home lol"
I was like, please tell me you're not being serious (especially cause it looks like she had the baby days ago). And she replied "I was just joking you shouldn't be so serious all the time". Honey, you made a joke about child abandonment/abuse, you're not being serious enough. And then I finally got the update on the kids.

• Baby A is still with Adam, Beth signed away her rights
• Baby B and Baby C have been given to a mutual cousin of Adam and Chad who is infertile (tbh I didn't need that last tidbit of info or the three paragraph long rant about how God hates infertile women, I didn't even read all of it, I couldn't, and I didn't think that Beth could be so cruel to even think those things). I checked out the FB page of Baby B's grandparents and they're happy with their grandchild's new parents, it looks like the cousin and her husband and welcoming them to the family as another set of grandparents and will let them have access to B. So yay!
• One thing I do need to stress though is that because of COVID the courts in our areas are either moving at a snail's pace or closed, so none of this is "official" but Beth (and Chad) has signed paperwork and all that needs to happen now is presenting that to a judge.

And when I rejoined our convo she said the doc she had for baby C gave her brith control, and she was surprised cause after her first pregnancy she asked her doctor for it but he refused to give her any. She mentioned that her old doctor was also her mom's and sister's doctor, she ended up asking the doc who delivered baby C to be her new doctor, so I hope that works out.
After learning all this my convo with Beth started to go down hill...
Beth: wait, did you actually think I would just leave my kids at the side of the road! I just didn't want to be a mom, but I wasn't a bad one
Me: Beth, I think that you've been through a lot of trauma in the past few years, and that it's gotten to you mentally and that you should speak to a professional.
(Of course, Beth has been a bad mom, but she does need mental health help and I wasn't going to convince her to get it, or to not tell at me, if I said that )
Beth: what? You think I'm crazy?!
Me: no. I think that getting kicked out as a teen because of a pregnancy and having your family actively reject you and try to sabotage you must have been very painful. Plus, pregnancy puts a lot of mental stress on women and you've had three in such a short time span, I just want you to take care of yourself and get what you want in life, and I think that will start with you taking care of your mental health.
Beth: what I want... IS FOR YOU TO GO STRAIGHT TO HELL! Beth then calls me every cuss word, expletive, and derogatory word she can think of one of the words she called me was a derogatory word about people from my ethnicity and my blood is boiling that she thought it was okay to say that to me.
So, I'm now on her hit list. She's been blowing up my social media all day, on her last FB post where she called me a slur she said that she still expects a good wedding gift from me. Yeah, no. So I've blocked her on everything, and I've decided to completely cut off contact. This will be my last update.
TL:DR - Beth went on a social media blackout for a bit, had baby C. Gave up all her kids, baby A is still with Adam, Baby B and Baby C are with a mutual cousin of Adam and Chad and baby B's grandparents have access. Chad cheated on her and she forgave him, but she probably shouldn't have. She's decided to have her wedding in a little over a month in Cancun and is expecting unreasonable things of everyone already. She asked me to be MOH I respectfully declined. I also suggested that she talk to a mental health professional because she's been through a lot in the last few years and she cussed me out, she also called me a derogatory name directed at people of my ethnicity and that was the final nail in the coffin. I'm now on her hit list. But her kids are safe and I have no interest in going to wedding so I'm cutting contact completely and have already blocked her on all my socials. I'm refusing to be involved with her anymore and will not be updating on the situation.
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--- EDIT - NEW UPDATE --- - JANUARY 25, 2023 - TL:DR AT THE BOTTOM
Hi, everyone, I didn't think I would be making another update, but here I am. I don't know if anyone will even care but whatever. I saw a YouTuber, Charlotte Dobre, do an entire video about this post on Facebook (which was funny, she did it well), [editor's note: here's the video in question and also: check out Charlotte Dobre's subreddit !] and got so nervous that Beth was gonna see it. Turned out, she's seen it and does not give a single damn, because as I pointed out, the majority of the info in this post came from her public social media. She also doesn't know who posted it (more on that in the update). I am still no contact with Beth and have no plans to change that anytime soon, but we have mutual friends who have told and shown me what's happened.
First things first, she and Chad did get married, but they eloped. According to all sources they are completely and utterly miserable though. Chad has proven to be and overall lazy and unfaithful husband, and Beth has really gotten into feminism (with a focus on reproductive issues) after she started using birth control, and Roe v Wade getting overturned (even though we're in Canada) really caused tension in their marriage. As it turns out, Chad thinks that abortion is murder and God created women for the purpose of making babies.
Beth tried to argue that not all women want or should be mothers using herself as an example, and then Chad went ahead and used her as an example of why women should be forced to have kids, because in the end she gave kids to an infertile couple. She didn't take that well and said that her entire life and future was ripped away from her and destroyed the second she got pregnant with baby A. Adam was never slut shamed or demeaned like she was, both at home and at school (which is a fair point, myself and many others were helpful and supportive but there were a lot of people who judged the hell out of her and said really nasty stuff) and that if she hadn't gotten pregnant she would've gone to college or university because she lost the general and financial support of her family with that positive pregnancy test. Chad has made a Tinder account. Beth was informed but it doesn't seem like she gave a damn.
So basically you could cut the tension with a knife.
And with her family, her sister came out as gay and cut off/has been cut off from their parents. But she's got a partial scholarship so she's doing okay. She and Beth are NOT on good terms but have met up and acknowledged that their parents messed them up by being religious nuts and their parents encouraged them to be competitive with each other and sabotage each other. Apparently their dad's motto is "competition brings out the best in everyone" (ugh). But they've talked and that's good enough for now.
Neither Beth nor Chad have custody or visitation of their children, which Chad is starting to regret because he's suddenly getting more and more into the church and religion. Chad talked to Beth about getting baby C back but Beth shut that down hard and warned the cousin who adopted baby C (officially and legally btw).
Beth started going to therapy after she and Chad got married, which makes me very happy and excited for her.
There was a rumour going around that Chad has a mistress and it took me a while to confirm, but it's true. He's cheating on her with a paramedic and she knows. Beth is fully aware. Idk if she plans to do anything about it or just continue to ignore it, but I hope she leaves his ass. I'm still not gonna talk to her, she crossed so many lines, but she's grown and improved a lot and her life would be a lot better without that sac of scum in her life.
Now, I have given a few details in my post that should've revealed my identity to her, namely her asking me to be her MOH. I have found out that she actually asked around 15 girls (including myself) to be her MOH, without telling any of us about the others because she was trying to get money from all of us and because her mental health has just been very bad and she needed help. And of those 15, 8 have been going to school out of province and of those eight we all had basically the same classes in high school. And apparently doesn't remember our discussion at the vaccination clinic and had major blow up with everyone she asked to be MOH. So she knows it's one of 8 people and reportedly has no interest in trying to narrow that number down. (Chad did the same thing with his groomsmen, but idk any of the numbers)
TL:DR Beth and Chad got married (eloped), are miserable, have zero custody or visitation with any of their children, Chad's cheating and Beth doesn't appear to care, Chad is super sexist, Beth is a feminist now, Beth's sister is gay and they've talked but not reconciled, Beth asked too many girls to be MOH for money and doesn't know the ID of who made this post.
Dear "Beth", if this post gets forwarded to you or somehow graces your phone screen, leave Chad. He's trash and you'll be much better without him in your life. And though I'm not willing to talk to you again because of your words and actions, I do wish for you to have a wonderful and happy life.
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Please remember the NO BRIGADING RULE: do not comment on the original posts linked in BoRUs, see Rule 7. Doing so can result into a permanent ban from this sub and the other linked sub(s).
I'm not the OOP!

This analysis comes from Cults and Nonconventional Religious Groups: A Collection of Outstanding Dissertations and Monographs, "Shakubuku: A Study of the Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist Movement in America, 1960-1975", David A. Snow, 1993, pp. 171-179.
I'll try to shave it down, because it's a long section, but he masterfully dissects the manipulation and artifice involved in the "discussion meetings" of then-NSA (now SGI-USA). You'll recognize the fakery he identifies - this is the nature of the Dead-Ikeda-cult SGI, a completely dishonest and exploitative cult.

It is at these discussion meetings, then, that NSA gets on with the real work of promoting and securing nominal conversion, of attempting to get recruits to take the first major step toward conversion by agreeing to receive a Gohonzon and to give chanting a try.

In those days, the nohonzon was issued up front (for a fee, of course - cash on the barrelhead).

And since gaining converts is, in large part, what this movement is all about, "nothing is more basic to the activities of NSA," as noted in the Winter edition of the 1975 NSA Quarterly, "than the discussion meeting." Or, as one district leader emphasized when discussing the importance of these meetings: "Discussion meetings are indispensable to the spread of the practice and the attainment of Kosen-rufu."

If you've ever felt confused at how sitting around someone's living room with the same bunch of losers month after month is doing anything toward the SGI's supposed goals of "world peace" or anything at all, actually, besides wasting the participants' time, I think what's described here will make it clearer what the original intent and purpose of these "discussion meetings" was, AND how far from that the current SGI "activities" have fallen.

The Character and Organization of These Meetings from a Sociological Standpoint
Given the purpose and importance of these discussion meetings, the question arises as to how they are organized and brought off in a strategic manner. In other words, what is the underlying strategy guiding this work of securing nominal conversion, and what are the kinds of tactical adjustments made at the line of scrimmage when the plan of attack does not appear to be advancing the group toward its goal of getting guests to agree to give chanting a try.

It's not enough that the "guests" say they'll try it; by the end of this ordeal, they'll say absolutely anything to get themselves to the other side of that door! What they really want is enough interest and desire on the part of those "guests" that they'll come back - and ideally become regularly attending members (as described in this indoctrinational creative writing fiction where a career Catholic priest is so entranced with the fictional (non)discussion meetings that he JOINS the SGI!! You'll notice that there is never any room within SGI to even mention one of THEIR SGI leaders who joins a Baptist church, for example, much less to celebrate such a stepping-out-of-line. But it's always FINE for other religions' leaders to see the obvious superiority of the SGI, knowmsayin?

In order to answer these question [sic] in a sociological manner, let us step out of the shoes of a guest and into those of a sociological [sic] with insiders' knowledge.
The Strategy of Theatrical Persuasion. Although members and the movement's literature like to characterize these meetings as being forums for free and open discussion and the spontaneous expression and flow of happiness and excitement, they are a far cry from gatherings characterized by spontaneity and unstructured discussion and interaction. Rather, they are meticulously planned and highly orchestrated meetings that can be best conceptualized, from a dramaturgical perspective, as theatrical-like presentations staged and conducted by a set of individuals (NSA members) who not only work together as a team but whose intimate cooperation is expected and required in order to foster and sustain a convincing impression or definition of the situation in the eyes of the audience (the recruits or guests).
Although the staged character of these meetings is seldom readily discernible to the unsuspecting guest, the appropriateness of conceptualizing these meetings in this way is suggested by the following considerations. First, the purpose of the meeting, as already indicated, is to sell guests on the idea of chanting, to so impress them that they feel compelled to give this practice call [sic] chanting a try.
Secondly, there is a division of labor such that all members have one or more roles to play. These various roles include the leadership role, the role of emcee, a general, overarching supportive role, and several more specific supportive roles, such as the role of giving an explanation of what NSA is all about, the role of a song leader, and the role of giving testimony. And even more significantly, members are provided with fairly detailed instructions, or, in the language of the theater, with scripts indicating what each role involves and how best to perform or play it.

There's a list of these roles. At the discussion meeting planning meeting, the attendees go down the list and simply plug different members' names into the worksheet.

The main leadership role, assumed by the district chief or, in his absence, the assistant district chief, includes, for example, the tasks of leading the chanting in a vigorous manner, conducting the question-and-answer session, meeting with each of the guests, and providing an inspirational role model for the other members. In performing these tasks, the leader is reminded that rather than putting on the air of a great sage, he should make a point of displaying great vitality, warmth, and compassion. Furthermore, he is expected "to be able to give clear explanations of the philosophy and practice," and is instructed to "always tailor his answers and encouragement to the audience."

Answers should always be tailored to the audience. If the guests are young, then the answers should include examples they can relate to. If the questions are too mystical or one-sided, the leader must have the wisdom to change the subject or break off the question-and-answer period diplomatically.

Blanche described how in her first district, the WD District leader instructed everyone that, if someone in the meeting was going on too long or rambling or whatever, that they should just start clapping wildly and shouting, "Congratulations!!" and then the MC would just move on to the next topic on the agenda. Reeeeal "spontaneous" there...

The emcee role is also regarded as particularly important, so much so that "the success of the meeting" is said to be contingent on how well it is performed. In fact, "so much depends on the emcee" that the discussion meeting is described for him as "a battleground in which he must struggle to bring victory to the members."

Barf. How far SGI has fallen! Now the goal is to see if there's some young teen in an SGI member's family who can be press-ganged to show up and read the agenda - their youth in and of itself is supposed to "encourage" everyone! Forget about all that "struggle" nonsense - they aren't gonna. This illustrates the SGI's current "form over function" approach, in which they just identify someone and pressure that person to do it, rather than the ideal candidate volunteering from a spirit of...oh, whatever - see above paragraph 🙄 Ideally, there would be SEVERAL young people positively brimming with passion and youthful energy who would be vying to be chosen: "Me! Let ME do it this time!" "No! ME!" "Choose ME!!" Instead, now it's just some tired old fart who agrees to do it, just to get this over with and there's no one else.

Specific responsibilities include setting "the gears fo the meeting in motion" and keeping the meeting going in a rhythmical and orderly manner.

You have to wonder just how crazy they envision these (non)discussion meetings might go - will a spontaneous rave break out if it isn't carefully controlled? An unpermitted parade? A frenzy of liturgical dance?? WHAT might happen??? Enquiring minds want to know!!

The emcee must develop the ability to keep the rhythm of the meeting going by making sure that there are no pauses or interruptions. If someone is causing a disorder, he should quiet the person in a polite manner. If a baby starts crying, he should see to it that either the mother or one of the young women at the meeting takes the child to another room to calm it down.

Gendered. Misogynist.

The emcee is also charged with being "the eyes and ears of the person leading the meeting."

Before and during the meeting, he should watch guests, be on the lookout for disruptions, and in general, be aware of everything that's happening. He should inform the person leading the meeting how many guests are present and whether they are young or old, so the leader can set the rhythm of the meeting accordingly.

Yeah. NO 😄 WOW but it's been a LONG TIME since any SGI sales pitch-based recruiting session - I mean discussion meeting - had any characteristics that would fit the above instructions. Just no way. Not now. Now, it's the same old handful of longhaulers dragging themselves in to go through the motions - as usual. By rote.

In addition, the emcee is expected to talk, act, and appear in a manner that displays or exudes strength, confidence, vitality and neatness.

The emcee must speak in a vigorous, strong and clear voice, but not screaming. The way he sits, stands up and moves the table must display confidence.

This was when a small table would be moved in in front of the person who led gongyo, who would turn around to face the group. This is of course a Japanese norm, completely foreign to Westerners. How many people outside of Japan even have a low table like that, designed for someone who's sitting on the floor??

In fact, he should stand up smartly whenever he is talking. As for appearance, he should reflect the image of NSA - clean and neat clothes and personal grooming.

It has been a LOOOOOOOONG time since ANY SGI district could insist on these requirements! Now they're just lucky if they can get anyone younger than retirement age to read the agenda off, and the agenda is often handed to them right there at the meeting itself - fuhgeddabout all this "advance preparation" nonsense. Nothing happens at the SGI discussion meetings, so nobody's going to go to this much trouble just because.

And finally, the emcee is instructed to have the details of the meeting worked out and the setting in order before the meeting begins.

...as opposed to showing up and being handed a printed agenda to read off as SGI does it now.

The emcee must have a plan for the meeting. He should write up a schedule showing who will give the explanation, what songs will be sung, who will give experiences and so on, and present it to the leader at least two days prior to the meeting. The emcee must prepare for the meeting. He should check to see if the meeting place is clean and neat, that all lights work and there is an appropriate meeting table. Most of all, he should do Shakubuku for the success of the meeting.

Oh, like any of that's gonna happen! 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Yes, things were VERY different back in the late 1960s-early 1970s, when the SGI organization in the US was still growing. As you can see, all this has been tossed right out the window.
A couple of items:

• "the leader" - this was when the leader of the local district organizational unit (typically the MEN's leader) would assume the leadership role for the "discussion meeting". This was replaced with a "central figure", an invited "SENIOR leader" who would agree to attend and serve this "leader" function. The invited SENIOR leader would typically lead gongyo and preside over the proceedings - that's more how these meetings are arranged now.
  
• that "Shakubuku" in the last sentence? It strikes me wrong somehow. Sure, that'd be great and all for EVERYONE to bring a "guest" (#SGIGOALZ of course) but I think that having the person CHANT for the success of the meeting would be a more reasonable assignment. Also, how could the MC properly shepherd their "guest" and STILL do all that MC stuff single-mindedly??
  

In fact, you can see a newly promoted leader doing exactly that, "chanting for the success of the meeting", here, from this same time period (early 1970s).
It's been a LONG time since any of this was happening, and you can clearly see in today's (non)discussion meetings how far things have deteriorated - and that's JUST the MC part! There's a bit about the demands on the members of the group - I'll skip to just this part:

As one district chief explained during a planning meeting for senior and junior leaders within the district and which I was invited to by one of my key informants:

Make sure to tell your members to chant in rhythm with the leaders. There shouldn't be any more than one rhythm. Everyone should be together so that there is unity. And remember to have them support the leader in whatever he says; the guests won't know whether he is right or wrong. So even if you don't agree with what is being said, act as if you do. this [sic] way there is unity at the meeting and the guests will be more impressed.

Wow, huh? It's completely dishonest and oriented entirely at flimflamming and bamboozling the "guests"!
Next there's a big section on "experiences", but I'm going to give that its own post because it's a WHOLE topic on its own. Hopefully today! But Ima skip ahead a bit, to p. 177:

A fourth indication of the staged character of discussion meetings is provided by the fact that planning meetings are held at both the district and chapter level for the purpose of discussing how to improve discussion meetings and make them more successful. Although rank-and-file members (those who have not attained that status of a junior or senior leader) are not normally invited to these planning meetings, I was able to attend several of them at the invitation of both my district chief and a junior leader who was one of my key informants.

SKULLDUGGERY!! 💀

It was during these planning meetings that I became deeply sensitized to the highly orchestrated and dramaturgical character of not only the discussion meetings but of NSA's overall operation.

At this point it's important to remember that "dramaturgical" means "relating to the art or the theory of writing and putting on plays, especially for the theater" - it's all putting on a show to manipulate the unwitting guests in order to trick them into transforming into new recruits. It's ALL fake - just a façade to fool the uninformed.

A fifth consideration suggesting that staged character of discussion meetings is the fact that much of what members do and say, both verbally and nonverbally, during the course of a meeting is to appear natural and spontaneous rather than artificial and contrived.

They try. Unconvincingly.

In other words, these meetings are not to appear as staged performances or as the product of dramaturgical cooperation. This concern is evidenced by the emphasis placed on exuding sincerity and responding to calls from the emcee and to what the leader says and does with alacrity and enthusiasm. It is also suggested by some of the rituals engaged in by the emcee, as when he scans the gathering after he has called for an experience so as to foster the impression that whom he calls is a spontaneous decision rather than one that has been pre-arranged, as indicated by the fact that those called on are already listed on his meeting agenda and by the fact that members frequently know beforehand whether they will be giving an experience.

This fakery apparently was dropped decades ago; in current SGI (non)discussion meetings, not only is the person acknowledged by name as delivering/"sharing" an "experience", but the person often has it written out on a piece of paper they semi-read off.

But none of this is evident to the guest.

Rather, what transpires - who gives the explanation, who gives testimonies, and so on - is staged in such a way that it all appears as if it is spontaneous and independent of prior planning, negotiation, and decision-making among the members. As a consequence, it seems reasonable to suggest that NSA in general and the district members in particular have something of the character of a secret society.

Only without any special perks or sexiness.

This is not particularly surprising, however, when considering the nature of theatrical-like teamwork. As Erving Goffman noted in his seminal discussion of this kind of work:

... if a performance is to be effective it will be likely that the extent of cooperation that makes this possible will be concealed and kept secret... The audience may appreciate, of course, that all members of the team are held together by a bond that no member of the audience shares ... But (the members of the team) form a secret society ... insofar as a secret is kept as to how they are cooperating together to maintain a particular definition of the situation.

This will all be very familiar to the people trying to recruit new suckers into MLM schemes/scams, too.

The sixth and final consideration suggesting the appropriateness of viewing these meetings from a dramaturgical perspective is the fact that they do not "go on" unless there is an audience, that is unless guests are in attendance.

Before Ikeda was excommunicated by Nichiren Shoshu and transformed the SGI into his own personal worship society, there was a certain "rhythm" to the year. February and August were "Shakubuku Months", and there was an "introductory meeting" scheduled every week. If it came to meeting start time and there was no "guest", the meeting was halted and everybody was sent out to try and find something with a pulse to drag in, at which point the meeting would proceed:

When I first discovered this I was somewhat startled, for I had assumed that these meetings were conducted in their entirety regardless of the presence or absence of a new face. But as I learned one evening, this is not the case. Following the chanting session on this particular evening, the leader emphasized that since these meetings were for guests and none were present, we would have to go out and round up one or two. So the members in attendance were divided into Shakubuku teams and sent out in search of prospects. Although three of the four teams returned empty-handed, one had managed to corral a single guest. But one is all that is needed; and so the formal meeting began as usual.

For "formal meeting" read "sales pitch". By the late-1980s, perhaps earlier, instead of being every discussion meeting, this format was restricted to the "introductory meetings" during the Shakubuku Months. However, he's describing something that happened every single time. No meeting unless a "guest" was present.

During my tenure as a member I saw this particular scenario re-enacted on four different occasions, and on one occasion we were sent back into the streets three times in succession. Around 8:30 p.m., after the third try and with one guest in hand, the show finally got on the road.

The author describes himself as "an active participant observer for nearly a year and a half".

Perhaps even more illustrative of the theatrical character of these meetings and the fact that they are staged for guests is the following course of events that transpired one evening during a meeting I attended:

Although no guests were present when the chanting began, a young couple came in toward the end of the chanting session and situated themselves on the floor at the back of the room. But apparently the emcee didn't notice them; for upon completion of the chanting session he didn't jump up and yell out: 'Welcome to a vigorous and happy meeting of the [name here] District of NSA!' But the district leader, who had apparently seen this couple come in, punched the emcee in the ribs and whispered that some guests were present. And so this member immediately assumed his role of the emcee and proceeded as usual by springing to his feet, putting on a big smile, and blurting out, 'Welcome to a vigorous and happy meeting of the [name here] District of NSA!'

"Vigorous and happy" 🤣

In light of the foregoing considerations and observations, there seems to be little question about the appropriateness of conceptualizing NSA discussion meetings as "shows" or presentations staged by the members, who constitute a performance team, before an audience composed of recruits or "guests".

This was what was going on BEFORE Dickeda swanned into the US in 1990 and "changed our direction" - because of what Sensei did, the bottom fell out of the discussion meetings. Instead of weekly meetings, Dickeata dictated that these meetings would only happen monthly from now on - and of COURSE Die-Sucky Scamsei's word is LAW in his own cult of personality, where the membership follows a PERSON instead of any "law". Post-excommunication, at the (non)discussion meetings I attended, there was at least one guest every single time, but they never came back. The ONLY person I saw join post-excommunication was a formerly homeless woman with two small children who had moved in with an SGI member (who had unethically selected her at the abused-women's shelter she was living at, where he volunteered computer classes for the residents). She was able to see it didn't work; she ended up quitting.
Now what SGI-USA is left with is an ever-shrinking membership of mostly Baby-Boom generation and older individuals who mostly joined during the time period described in this study. SGI has completely lost what vitality it once had; now it's simply waiting around for the grave - and oblivion.

Chapter 7 - Mice
The messenger from Chapter 2, Townsend, arrives, asking if Tenar is going to sell the goats now that Ogion is gone. Maybe... she was wondering, if she stayed, how she would live. Ogion would often have too much, gifts to the sorcerer providing his services. Tenar needed to live and really left Flint's unprepared. She tells him to look at the whole lot and he agrees to.
But oddly he doesn't move to. Then Townsend mentions if she's seen the great ship that has arrived last evening, as it was possible to see Gont Port from Re Albi village. Maybe a bargaining gambit, but "something in the words, 'the great ship,' troubled or alarmed her, she did not know why". During and odd almost automatic conversation, Townsend mentions the Havnor king, that it might be good in "'[keeping] the foreign riffraff out'" (ignoring Tenar is essentially a foreigner), and that many in Gont won't be pleased since actually there are great pirates here that have had increasing prosperity as of late. Even Tenar's son, Spark, might be a pirate, and may even be safer from harm than if he was a sea merchant ("Better shark than herring, as they said."). She has decided, maybe Townsend's fault maybe not, that she does not like him, and although offers to show the goats she will not sell to him. She also realized in discussion she slipped "we", including Sparrowhawk, which complicates things. Tenar is unsure what they think of Sparrowhawk, who insofar had "avoided the village as surely as Therru." Mostly wizards and their servants were too strange, too non-worldly, and were left alone.
Tenar meets Ged on his return. At the mention of the ship from Havnor he visibly flinches... she is aghast at this. Ged tells her, with abject terror, that he can't possibly meet the men of the King. She feels many things about him (pity and embarrassment for, anger towards) but settles on an old saying from Lark: "If they come prying they can leave curious." Therru is catching frogs with Heather. Tenear shows many kindnesses to Ged (babbling for space, wine), giving him time to collect himself.
Ged announces that he should leave, wandering in the mountains much like Ogion did. When asked if he could perform slight sorcery (weatherworking, finding) he shakes his head and says no. She can't really understand that, and Ged falls back on the previous metaphor of his power (and, really, himself) being a cup of water that was poured out onto a dry lakebed. Similar to what Tenar thought about the witch women not letting Therru die, Ged says, "'What I don’t understand is why he brought me back. The kindness of the young is cruelty.... So I'm here, I have to get on with it, till I can go back.'" He doesn't explain what he means [ed: Is he being literal? By going back does he just mean dying?], although Tenar stiffly says it was Kalessin that brought him there (and not, or not just, youthful naivety).
Ged says he'll "go across the mountain, to Armouth and the East Forest country, where I came from. They’ll be making hay. There’s always work at haying and harvest." He doesn't seem to understand that he's sickly and liable to be taken advantage of, besides that (like mentioned before and even by Townsend) gangs and the like have been on the rise for awhile. She realizes how it must be to live with power, never having to think of these things. Ged says that Ogion risked this--and then comes to a quick, jarring understanding that Ogion was a mage.
Tenar says that perhaps he can be a herder in the south, but why would he want to go? He answer it's because Ogion's home will be the first place they will look for him, and she asks what would they would want of him. "'To be what I was.' The desolation of his voice chilled her." Tenar is instantly drawn back in her memory of being "the Eaten One, the One Priestess of the Tombs of Atuan" and then throwing that away to become herself. Of having been a women in the prime of her life and then being now basically a powerless widow. She's used to shame as a woman, but perhaps something in being a man doesn't quite draw an applicable comparison. She thinks of Aunty Moss's metaphor about an empty nut.
But Tenar chews on this for awhile, especially about both of their pasts. On her wedding day she thought about how this would make Ged angry, her turning away more or less from being Ogion's apprentice. He says he was, well, disappointed. She clarifies for him: he was angry, and he relents. "You shone, in that terrible place, the Labyrinth, that darkness." She challenges him on the assumption that the "knowledge" is just exactly how the wizards use it. She herself had found the Old Speech easy and natural, "[b]ut the rest--the lore, the runes of power, the spells, the rules, the raising of the forces--that was all dead to me. Somebody else's language." Only part of Ogion's knowledge was natural to her (and not natural in a way that just means easy).
Tenar tells Ged about how and why Ogion accepted her (many because of Ged, and honestly mainly as a daughter rather than as an apprentice). Tenar also says this (Tenar's situation) wasn't what Ogion saw in relation to Therru, and here she relates Ogion's final messages of teaching her (not Roke) and that "they" would fear her. She tells Ged he hoped when he came that he would know what to do, but Ged tells her he can't, that all he sees now is that, "'In the child I see only--the wrong done. The evil.' He drank off his wine. 'I have nothing to give her,' he said."
A sound at the door and Ged practically bolts. Instead it is Aunty Moss, bringing news of the ship and of the men looking for the Archmage. Ged and Aunty Moss aren't exactly cordial (when she eyeballs him, I'm imagining like she's eyeballing a doppleganger), but both plainly ignoring Tenar's suggestion that as the Archmage he could just send them away, Aunty Moss invites Ged to her house, where surely nobody would freely enter. Heather and Therru come back from their frog hunting trip and as Tenar finishes making it the men from the port arrive. They are bade to enter. In blind intuition she sees what they see, and it's quite a sight all together [ed: this paragraph is great]. The men ask of where Ged is, invited to the coronation, but of course Tenar can't say. She really loses her fear, inborn by Ged's own fear, of them: "...she knew well enough why Ogion had never been afraid of great people." Plainly she offers them the wine (like, literally, out of the used cups and some extra mugs and the like), and of course it's near the best they've ever had. This is Ogion's house. She flubs a bit but makes it clear that if Ged wanted to be found he would be so. They were to send a message, and also a reply: they will be there in the Lord of Re Abli's house for a few days. For no apparent reason, Tenar feels this like a trap. Tenar also understands that she (despite appearances: Tenar of the Ring, known or soon to be known) is kind of the weakest link here in keeping Ged to his own wishes, but they do finally leave. Heather is aghast (in a satisfied way) and also leaves soon after.
Therru had been hiding behind the door, behind the staves even, and comes out after they leave. Tenar says they would not hurt her, and even that she wouldn't let them back in if Therru wished it so. Therru "[lets] Tenar hold her like a block of wood" and asks what they would do to Sparrowhawk. "'Nothing,' Tenar said. 'No harm! They come--they mean to do him honor.' But she had begun to see what their attempt to do him honor would do to him--denying his loss, denying him his grief for what he had lost, forcing him to act the part of what he was no longer." There's probably a parallel or two here with Tenar's past, too, of men giving her power but only in the exact way the powerful see as meaningful. Therru fetches Ogion's broom and quickly sweeps away any traces of the men. Tenar sees this and her mind is set. She rips out an endpage from one of Ogion's three great books, specifically the Book of Runes, and, very out of practice, writes a note to Ged: "go aok farm in midl valy to clerbrook -- say goha sent to look to garden & sheep -- to-night". In case the men are watching, Goha wants Therru to give it to Heather to send, but Therru steadfastly says she'll go herself (even though it's past the village). "Tenar tucked the paper into the child's pocket, held her, kissed her, let her go. Therru went, not crouching and sidling now but running freely, flying, Tenar thought, seeing her vanish in the evening light beyond the dark door-frame, flying like a bird, a dragon, a child, free."

(Excerpt from "Nature Medicine". Official study title: "The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascular even trisk".)
There's been a lot of discussion recently regarding the potentially unsafe use of a very popular artificial sweetener known as "Erythritol". As humans, we typically dislike any information which may require us to change our habits/behaviors or stop using products we enjoy. As a result, it is very common to immediately dismiss a report containing negative or dangerous findings about the use of such products. When it was announced that tobacco may be causing heart attacks/strokes/artery disease, MILLIONS of people refused the results because they really enjoyed smoking (myself included). I have been using Erythritol for a few years. I love how potent it is, how it tastes, and how it has no effect on diabetes-related issues. To stop using Erythritol would be a major inconvenience for me, so I do not enjoy discovering the product may actually be very dangerous. I've provided the opening paragraph to the ACTUAL study that was recently conducted on the effects of Erythritol. PLEASE -- disregard the incredibly irresponsible reports that the study only consisted of 8 people or that it only included obese, old men. There were a few thousand participants involved in the study of all ages and body types/status. The full article could not be published here but seems to be available through various sites (the actual article requires access to "nature medicine", and the official name of the study is "The artificial sweetener erythritol and cardiovascular event risk". It's a long, boring read, but it contains the actual facts of the study. The main point of the finding is: Our bodies reaction to the product Erythritol is causing SUBSTANTIALLY increased platelet production (blood clots).These clots are flowing to the brain/heart and immediately triggering a stroke or heart attack. These reactions are NOT a result of age or physical condition. Anyone at any age with narrow arteries/capillaries or a reduced circulatory system can suffer one of these clots. It is a fact that, those in poor physical condition or those individuals over the age of 50 are more likely to experience adverse reactions to blood clots. However, not every blood clot results in a stroke or heart attack. Young people with poor eating habits or pre-diabetes (1 in 3 Americans) can simply suffer a loss of circulation to a limb or organ. At any rate, blood clots are very dangerous and deserve our attention.
(Abbreviated using "...." for length only)
"Artificial sweeteners are widely used sugar substitutes, but little is known about their long-term effects on cardiometabolic disease risks. Here we examined the commonly used sugar substitute erythritol and atherothrombotic disease risk. In initial....studies in patients undergoing cardiac risk assessment (1,157) circulating levels of multiple polyol sweeteners, especially erythritol, were associated with incident (3 year) risk for major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE; includes death or nonfatal myocardial infarction or stroke). Subsequent targeted metabolomics analyses in independent US (2,149) and European (833) validation cohorts of stable patients undergoing elective cardiac evaluation confirmed this association......(with 95% confidence). At physiological levels, erythritol enhances platelet reactivity.....blood clotting. Finally, in a prospective pilot intervention study..... erythritol ingestion in healthy volunteers (8) induced marked and sustained (>2 d) increases in plasma erythritol levels well above thresholds associated with heightened platelet reactivity and thrombosis potential in in vitro and in vivo studies. <---(This is the group of "8" people which are constantly being mentioned---it was just an "on the way out the door" test to quickly study one final means of comparison, but is obviously NOT a significant part of the study) Our findings reveal that erythritol is both associated with incident Major Adverse Cardiac Event risk and fosters enhanced.... thrombosis (blood clotting). Studies assessing the long-term safety of Erythritol are warranted".

https://twitter.com/isSCS4me/status/1739657698612850950
The publications are about the opioid prescription history of SCS patients.
The first publication reviews failed back surgery syndrome SCS patients
opioid prescription history, by Vu et al. It was a large study.
Failed Back Surgery Syndrome(FBSS) is also called Postlaminectomy Syndrome(PLS).
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2788495
"
Association of Spinal Cord Stimulator Implantation With Persistent Opioid Use
in Patients With Postlaminectomy Syndrome
...
OBJECTIVE To determine the association between SCS and long-term opioid
therapy (LOT) for PLS.
...
MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The main outcome was cessation of opioid use among
patients receiving LOT or abstinence from opioids among opioid-naive patients.
Opioid-naive patients were defined as those receiving at most 2 opioid
prescriptions per year, and patients on LOT were those receiving at least 6
opioid prescriptions per year.
...
CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE These findings suggest that under real-life
conditions, SCS was associated with small, clinically questionable associations
with opioid discontinuation and not starting opioids in the context of PLS.
...
Conclusions
In summary, among all patients, SCS for PLS resulted in statistically
significant reductions in the number of opioid prescriptions in some
comparisons, but the reduction was small and its clinical relevance is
questionable. However, SCS was associated with a lower rate of new opioid use
in patients who were previously opioid-naive. Since one of the motivations to
offer SCS to patients with PLS is to decrease or discontinue opioid use, further
study is needed to evaluate this objective outcome measurement.
"
I speculate that opioid-naive SCS patients had partial success in their back
surgeries. Other factors for opioid-naive are some patients who have abdominal
issues with opioids, a patient fearing opioid addiction, over-the-counter(OTC)
pain medication effectiveness is variable for patients, etc. Opioid medication
has variable efficacy. Those opioid-naive patients increasing their opioid
prescription usage lost their "placebo" effect, or their condition deteriorated.
The experiments to conclusively prove the benefit of pain medication control
from SCS is "placebo" trials of SCS for opioid-naive SCS patients.
Some PM researchers and PM MDs would speculate that LOT SCS patients developed
a dependence on opioids, plausible but inconclusive.
The word "propitious" means promising.
"
Comparison With Other Studies
...
Our results are less propitious than those of Pollard et al. 11 who found
a large opioid-sparing effect among patients on preimplant opioids in a
meta-analysis involving 5 studies (n = 498), 4 of which were industry sponsored.
"
I have previously reviewed the Pollard et al. study and declared it biased.
It required fifteen, eight, eight, and seven years to discover these doubts for
these industry-sponsored studies.
Radiculopathy is a pinched nerve. Lumbago is low back pain. Comorbidity is the
simultaneous presence of two or more conditions.
"
However, they are more favorable than a database review involving 2374 patients
who underwent SCS paddle lead placement for a variety of different indications
including PLS, radiculopathy, and lumbago, that actually reported an increase
in post-implant opioid consumption in 5 of the 8 years analyzed (with no
statistical difference in the other 3 years).20 In this study, no pain
comorbidity was significantly associated with a greater likelihood of reducing
opioid consumption, and the criteria for defining pre- and postsurgical opioid
consumption were more liberal than ours.
...
"
The preceding quoted paragraph is data from Labaran et al. and is shared below.
"
...
"
The Labaran et al. study included patients with indications other than FBSS,
e.g., radiculopathy and lumbago. The study examined the opioid prescription
history of SCS patients.
https://www.e-neurospine.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.14245/ns.1938308.154
"
Opioids and Spinal Cord Stimulators: Pre- and Postoperative Opioid Use Patterns
and Predictors of Prolonged Postoperative Opioid Use
...
DISCUSSION
...
Upon examination of 2,374 patients who underwent implantation of a paddle lead
SCS via a laminectomy, we observed that patients with greater number of
preoperative opioid prescriptions were more likely have prolonged opioid use
postoperatively. Approximately 39.1% of patients with no opioid use
preoperatively went on to have prolonged postoperative narcotic use. This is
in contrast to SCS patients with any preoperative opioid use, where 91.97% of
patients developed prolonged postoperative opioid use. Subgroup analysis of
this population found the highest rates of prolonged postoperative narcotic
use was among patients with 4 or more preoperative narcotic prescriptions
(97.82%).
...
CONCLUSION
Utilizing perioperative opioid prescription history as a marker for patient’s
pain status, our results show that the effectiveness of SCS on patients with
preoperative opioid use remains questionable. Our findings imply that patients
with greater number of preoperative opioid prescriptions prior to SCS
implantation may not attain the same benefit from the intervention as patients
with less opioid use. These patients may benefit from additional counselling
to set appropriate expectations prior to SCS placement.
"
Again, SCS "placebo" trials are required because those patients with no opioid
usage transitioning to long-term opioid usage raise SCS efficacy questions. Did
the transitioning to long-term opioid usage SCS patients lose their "placebo"
effect?
We have two not-industry-sponsored database reviews with de-identified SCS
patient data with confounding data for SCS effectiveness for pain medication
control. The results are confusing, so we require not-industry-sponsored
multi-center studies with "placebo" trials.
I shared the Vu et al. and Labaran et al. publications with four research
groups whose research is not industry-sponsored. Let us hope for improved
studies.
I recommend reading the publications.

Disclaimer:

Despite how the title and intro may look, I am not here to dunk on feminism. If you came looking for a post that said, "Feminist Soy! Am i rite?" Sorry, got to disappoint. Conversely, this isn't a sermon about why you should convert. Believe whatever you want to believe bro. Also, Not a Christian, but I do like Wendigoon talking about it. Finally, Mods plz don't nuke my post this isn't about religion but about the mythology around the figure.

Why Post This Here:

Lilith has been involved in literary discourse for a while as well as being seen as a Feminist Icon in literature. This post is meant to debunk these claims and misreading of the Abrahamic Myths.

Intro:

This really isn't a specific work of fiction, but rather, a general fictional trope I guess., Ever since the release of Hazbin Hotel, discussion has increased on Lilith being a sympathetic/feminist icon, and this is the most laughable idea to me as a guy who is currently studying Christian Mythology for a project. Today, I am going to debunk this claim of Lilith being sympathetic or any sort of feminist girlboss or even being anyway relevant to the Abrahamic Mythos. I'll try source all my arguments, so it doesn't look like I am talk out of my ass.

In The Bible:

Ah, the Bible. It is amazing how such a small book can cause so much violence, but we are not here for a religious debate (well not really). We are here to discuss Lilith. For context, I am going to be used the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) & English Standard Version (ESV). This is because NSRV and ESV and considered the most popular when it comes to the Bible Versions.
Let's start with NRSV, and Lilith shows up...once? Hell, she doesn't even show up. She's just mentioned.

Isaiah 34:14: "Wildcats shall meet with hyenas, goat-demons shall call to each other; there too Lilith shall repose,"

You can read the full chapter here, but the full chapter really doesn't change much. From what I could gleam (admittedly I ain't a theologian so I could be missing stuff), the dude in this chapter is talking about God's Judgment and is more focused on the natural disasters that would happen. Lilith isn't even really that important. She seems to be at best a higher demon with some power, but this same chapter says an undead apocalypse will happen. She is a footnote at best.
Okay what about ESV? It is even worse there. She doesn't even show up.

Isaiah 34:14: "And wild animals shall meet with hyenas; the wild goat shall cry to his fellow; indeed, there the night bird settles and finds for herself a resting place" (Source)

Okay, but I am clearly cherry-picking though right? What about the other versions? Well, it get even more nebulous. In certain version, it isn't even Lilith but an unnamed night-demon (Source). In others, it isn't even a demon but just a creature of the night/ animals of the night (Source). Hell one of them there are no demons instead an unnamed ogress (Source).
You'd think that Lilith, being the first woman and rebelling against Big G himself, should get more than one very sketchy mention. I mean Eve the mother of humanity is mentioned between 2,000 -2,500 times (Source), Mary the mother of Jesus Motherfucking Christ himself gets around 40 times (Source), hell Queen Sheba, whose existence I only know because a sword in KCD is name after her, is mentioned nearly 70 times (Source)(obviously this varies on which version you take as some books are just removed but the point stands). You mean to tell me a fucking side character is mentioned more than literally Female Satan. Funnily enough, Satan is only mention like 30 times in the Bible (Source).
Okay, so already the foundations of Lilith are shaky, but what do the other Abrahamic Religions say?

In The Quran/The Tanakh (IMPORTANT):

The Quran. She never shows up. Weird since both Eve and Mary get mentioned.
Okay, but what about The Tanakh? (For those who don't know the Tanakh is the "Hebrew Bible". A lot of people say that's the Torah, but the Torah is just the compilation of the first five books of the Tanakh.) Well, yes.

Otzar Midrashim, The Aleph Bet of ben Sira, The Alphabet of ben Sira, (alternative version) 34 - He said to him, "The angels appointed for healing: Sanoy, Sansanoy, Semangalof. When the Holy Blessed One created the first Adam alone, They said, (Genesis 2:18) 'It is not good for this Adam to be alone.' They created for him a wife out of the Earth like he had been, and called her Lilith. Immediately they began to challenge each other. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one…

So case closed - STOP. I ain't done cooking yet. See, I got to apologize a bit to you reader. I kind of lied, but to understand how I lied. You got to understand the Jewish Faith first, specifically their holy texts.
Okay, all Holy Jewish Texts fall under Sifrei Kodesh (aka Holy Books). . Within the Siferi Kodesh, there are two main categories texts fall into Tankah and Rabbinic. The Tankah is The Hebrew Bible. It is the considered the canonical collection of Hebrew scriptures and is comprisied of the Torah, the Nevi'im, and the Ketuvim. (Source and Source). Meanwhile, the Rabbinic is Jewish Rabbis studying and interpreting the Tankah (Source, Source, Source). The Alphabet of Ben Sira is squarely in the Rabbinic.
Most of you have already seen a problem, but for those of who didn't, let me spell it out. When you are quoting this passage, you are not quoting from the Tankah. You are quoting a Rabbi's interpretation of the Tankah. This would be equivalent to me using My Immortal to critique Harry Potter (No offense to any Jewish Rabbis. This comparison is meant to be extreme).
Ah, but ain't done yet reader, I have saved the biggest bombshell for last.
The Alphabet of Ben Sira is a shitpost. It a satire. It isn't real.
The reasoning is several. This reddit comment sums it up. And This. Also This
From The Jewish Virtual Library:

There is no reason to doubt the unity of the work as a whole, despite the fragmentary character of the different versions. All the versions share a special, satirical, and even heretical, character, and this indicates that they all were written by a single hand. They seem to reflect varying degrees of censorship on the part of editors and copyists. The complete work contains four parts. The first part is the biography of Ben Sira from his conception until the age of one year. This story, omitted in many editions, explains how Jeremiah, the prophet, was simultaneously Ben Sira's father (the numerical value of Ben Sira's name equals that of Jeremiah), and grandfather. Ben Sira's mother was Jeremiah's daughter. The old prophet was forced to an act of onanism by wicked men, and his daughter conceived from his emissions when she came to bathe. The form of this story is based on a biblical verse that tells the glories and wonders of God's deeds; thus the story satirizes not only Jeremiah, but God's deeds as well.
The second part is more sophisticated in form. It tells how Ben Sira, now one year old, meets with his teacher, who tries to teach him the alphabet. Instead of repeating each letter of the alphabet after his teacher, Ben Sira responds with an epigram beginning with that letter. The epigrams lead the teacher to tell the story of his life. It may be assumed that the original structure of this part was 22 + 12 paragraphs, each containing a letter, an epigram, and a part of the story.
The third part is the longest and contains most of the narrative material in this work. It recounts the story of Ben Sira's life and adventures in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylonia. It also includes stories told by Ben Sira himself as answers to the king's questions. These stories often include pornographic elements, as well as derogatory descriptions of biblical figures, like King Solomon or Joshua. Some of the stories in this section contain motifs from international folklore and may be based on folktales, but they were adapted to the special framework of the work and satirical elements were added to them. Examination of the various versions indicates that here, too, there were 22 stories, arranged according to the letters of the alphabet, to which 12 other stories were added.
The fourth part, which is found in most versions and gave the work its name, contains 22 alphabetically arranged epigrams attributed to Ben Sira that serve as material for discussion and interpretation by Ben Sira's son, Uzziel, and his grandson, Joseph b. Uzziel. The contents are satirical and even heretical. It may be assumed that this part was constructed in the same manner as the two previous ones – 22 + 12 sections. The work, therefore, displays elements of unity both in structure and in its ideological aims. It is all but impossible, however, to discover the background upon which such a work could have been written. Some scholars (L. Ginzberg and others) believe that it aimed at ridiculing the story of Jesus' birth; but the basis for such a conclusion may be found only in the first part, and even this is not very clear, for the irony seems to be directed more against God than against Jesus. It is hardly possible that the author was a Karaite, as some of the abusive stories are directed against biblical figures, and not only against the Talmud and Midrash. It seems likely that the author did not belong to any organized group or definable ideological movement, but was merely a writer with an anarchistic tendency who used satire to ridicule all the institutions of established religion in his day.
Another difficult problem is the relationship between this pseudepigraphal work and the original proverbs of Ben Sira. Some of the proverbs and epigrams included in the work are originally in the work of Ben Sira, but many such proverbs are found in talmudic literature, and the author probably took them from there. The author of the pseudepigraphal work did not even know Ben Sira's first name. There is only one slight connection that might be accidental: the Wisdom of *Ben Sira has a preface written by the author's grandson, who edited the work, and in the pseudepigraphal work the figure of a grandson is also present.

Buh buh But thats just a reddit comment and some random websites. Whu Whu What are you gonna do OP? Analyze the entire text to prove its a shitpost.
Yes.
Mods turn the music on.

Analysis Of Alphabet of Sirach/The Alphabet Of Ben Sira:

The text we will be using.
We are going to skip most of it and just jump straight into the section with Lilith, but if you do chose to read it, have a good time. Shit is funny as hell. Let's start of with Lillith's Birth. Many like to potray Adam and Lilith's first interaction like this.
1, 2, 3
It is often either stated or implied Adam either tried to force Lilith into a s*x position she didn't want or that he he stated that she was inferior to him and she spit back. While this nicely fits into the "yas Queen SLAYYY" interpretation, its not the truth...mostly.
Here is the actual text:

When the Holy Blessed One created the first Adam alone, They said, (Genesis 2:18) 'It is not good for this Adam to be alone.' They created for him a wife out of the Earth like he had been, and called her Lilith. Immediately they began to challenge each other. She said, 'I will not lie below,' and he said, 'I will not lie beneath you, but only on top. For you are fit only to be in the bottom position, while I am to be the superior one.' Lilith responded, 'We are equal to each other inasmuch as we were both created from the Earth.' But they would not listen to one another. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced the Ineffable Name and flew away into the world's air.

So first, no she wasn't going to be sexually assaulted. Secondly, it was just a couple arguing with each other. Yes, Adam shouldn't have said that about Lilith, but we shouldn't take a statement said by an angry man as gospel for the religion. Plus, how on earth is blaspheming your Father and then running away from an argument an appropriate reaction to the situation? God didn't do anything wrong. Why you picking a fight with him? We will discuss this more, but lets continue.

The Holy Blessed One said to Adam, 'If she agrees to come back, good. If not, she must permit one hundred of her children to die every day.' They departed and pursued her, and overtook her in the midst of the sea, in the mighty waters wherein the Egyptians would ultimately drown. They told her God's word, but she did not wish to return. The angels said, 'We shall drown you in the sea.' She said to them, 'Let me be. I was created only to cause illness to infants. I have dominion over them for eight days after birth if they are male, and if female, after birth for twenty days.' When the angels heard Lilith's words, they insisted on taking her. But she swore to them by the name of the living and eternal God, 'Whenever I see you or your names or your forms in an amulet, I will have no power over that infant.' She also agreed to have one hundred of her children die every day.

There is much to go over here. First, WHERE ARE THE HUNDRED CHILDREN COMING FROM! These are the first man and woman. THERE ARE NO CHILDREN. Who is he talking about? And don't give me that bullshit that he mad a mistake. HE IS GOD. IN THE TORAH, HE IS OMNISCIENT. This makes no sense.
"I was created only to cause illness to infants. I have dominion over them for eight days after birth if they are male, and if female, after birth for twenty days." I am sorry fucking what? Who said that? God? No. Adam? No. The Angels? Definitely not. No one told Lilith she had to cause illness. She is just being a toxic bitch and offloading her problems. What the fuck?
Finally, "She also agreed to have one hundred of her children die every day." At this point, who has sympathy for Lilith? Lets objectively look at Adam's sin. Yes, he was sexist. Yes, that was wrong. Can't Lilith convince him to change? We know it is possible for a woman to convince Adam because EVE CONVINCED HIM TO EAT THE APPLE. So, clearly the man can develop his thoughts. Instead, Lilith just runs away from her problem, knowing that a hundred innocent children (HER CHILDREN BY THE WAY- hang on does that mean she fucked Adam and Eve's Sons. Isn't she like their aunt? I am pretty sure that's still incest) will die. Yes, God is partly to blame as well, but if I had to choose between a Misandrist Wife or dead innocents, I will go with the Misandrist Wife. Nothing shows Adam as violent just a dick, and she clearly has access to powers he doesn't cuz he can't fly.

Accordingly, every day one hundred demons perish, and for the same reason, we write their names on the amulets of young children, and she sees them, she remembers her oath, and the child is healed

I guess that's nice? But does she even really heal them? She just takes away an illness she caused. This is like saying I put out the fire, but I am the arsonist who started it. There wouldn't be a problem if I didn't create one. And that's how the story ends. Seriously.
There is more, but it doesn't really matter. Ben Sira cures a girl of farting everywhere, talks about hair follicles, slanders David, explains why Donkey Urine is important, and ends with a raven cucking an eagle. Its pretty funny.

In Conclusion:

So, TL;DR: Lilith's entire existence is based on a shitpost. In said shitpost, she isn't even that great of a person and isn't even a feminist.
So yeah, that's all I got. There is more to this Rabbit Hole if you are willing to go down, but that is the gist of it. I don't see how a woman who runs away from responsibilities, blames others for her failures, and would rather kill babies than do something hard is a feminist icon, but here we are. I don't really know how to end this. Uh, were you entertained?
Addendum: If you are of the Christian, Muslim, or Jewish Faith please comment below and clear up any misconceptions I wrote in this post. I will try to edit it to make it better. Feminists please try to be respectful in the comments. Sup Mods. Uh yeah, cool.

Addendum #2 - Mesopotamian Lilith:

Some people have been saying that I should analyze Lilith from Mesopotamian Origins as this would give her a more sympathetic view. Very well. There are three main sources: Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Burney Relief, Arslan Tash amulets
Tablet XII of the Epic of Gilgamesh (Text we'll use): Lilith, a snake, and a bird steal a tree from a goddess and squat in it. Gilgamesh comes around kills the snake. The Bird flees. Lilith chimps out, destroys her home, and runs. Tbf, this is Gilgamesh, so I guess Lillith W?

The dyer (?) had not dyed his leather with it (?)
At its root the serpent, 'that knew not silence (?)' had made its nest
At its top the storm-bird (Zû) had put his young
In its midst Lilith had built a house
The shrieking maid the joyful
The bright Queen of Heaven tears for them (?) wept
His lady said a word to him
'Warrior Gilgamesh, its .... will thee'
The ibbaru garment that was of 50 minas from his loins he removed
What was 50 minas 30 ... . he made
His (?) brazen axe a road (?) his ....
1 talent 50 minas his in his hand he seized
At its root the serpent ' that knew not silence (?) ' he slew
At its top the storm-bird (Zû)
took his young (and) went away to the mountain
In its midst Lilith destroys (her) house

Burney Relief (Source): Yeah no

Even so, the possibility that the Queen of the Night plaque, with its high degree of skill in craftsmanship and attention to detail would be a representation of a lilitu is highly unlikely. According to the Hebrew tradition, Lilith was the first woman made by God who refused to submit to Adam's sexual demands and flew away, thus rebelling against God and his plans for human beings. She was thought to have then occupied the wastelands and, like the lilitu, to have preyed on unsuspecting men ever since. In either tradition, the lilitu was not a popular enough figure to have been portrayed on a plaque such as the Queen of the Night. Dr. Black notes, “Evil gods and demons are only very rarely depicted in art, perhaps because it was thought that their images might endanger people” (62). The mountain range depicted at the bottom of the relief is also thought to suggest lilitu identification in representing the wilderness the spirit inhabits but the headdress, the necklace, the rod-and-ring symbols and the significance of the plaque all go to argue against Lilith as a possibility.

Arslan Tash amulet (Source):

Whispering-incantation against the Flying-one, the oath of Sasam, son of Pidrišiša, god, and against the Strangler of the lamb: “The house I enter, you shall not enter And the court I tread, you shall not tread!He has made an eternal contract with us. Assur made a pact with us, all the sons of El,, and the great council of all the holy ones,With the oath of heaven and earth With the oath of Baal, lord of the earth With the oath of Horon, whose utterance is true,His seven concubines and the eight wives of Baal Qudš”[Written around and between the images] Oh Flying one, from the dark room pass away!Now! Now, night demons! [Written on the Sphinx figure] From my house, O crushers, go away! [Written on the wolf-like figure] Oh Sasam, let it not be opened for him And let him not come down to the door-posts The sun is rising for Sasam. Disappear, and fly away home.[Written on the axe-wielding figure](modified from Cross and Saley 1970 and Berlejung 2010).

So where the fuck is Lilith? Well the text in its original language features lly- which if you add a "t" could be llyt [Lilith], but it also can be ll wyn which means "night and day." So, yeah not exactly a Lilith W. And that's it. I don't know how this makes her sympathetic, but to each their own.

Addendum #3 - Lilith R*ped Adam?

u/howhow326 said that there was a tale about Lilith raping Adam and being thrown out of Eden. This intrigued me to search for it, but unfortunately, I can't find a source for this anywhere. The closest I get is this Blogpost, but this seems to be more of a hypothetical than anything. Frankly, I don't think this should be part of the debate.
Edit 1: Originally, there was a line that said : "Hell fucking Jesus gets mentioned the prophet of the ENEMY, but not Lilith." I have since been informed that this is a gross misrepresentation of the Muslim Faith, and it has been removed.
Edit 2: Spelling and Formatting Errors Corrected
Edit 3: Mesopotamian Lilith added. Lilith's Rape Accusations.

Hello everyone, I will be very grateful if you guys can review this,
So Earlier it was just "cores" but now that e cores have been added, it has bought a lot of confusion to everyone.
Yesterday I wanted to find a way to simplify it and searched for a way to somehow convert e cores to p cores in multicore performance. Basically, I wanted to find out how much e core equal 1 p core
Thankfully I found this post: https://www.reddit.com/intel/comments/yv3uan/performance\_pcores\_vs\_ecores/#:\~:text=Just%20an%20interesting%20thought%3A%20although,1%20P%2Dcore%20with%20hyperthreading.
This guy came to the conclusion that
1p=2.5e (with multithreading enabled in p)
1p=1.8e (multithreading disabled)
Its apparent that multithreading increases the performance of p core, and a side note is that e cores don't have multithreading as I'm writing this.
With this info I deduced 4 most common conversion:
4e= 1.6p
8e= 3.2p
12e= 4.8p
16e= 6.4p
Remember, these are for multithreaded performance. (i.e. derived using 1p=2.5e)
So, before you buy a laptop or cpu for work that requires multiprocessing power, go to this website which details all the intel cpus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_processors
then select a cpu and convert e cores to p core, for example,
lets select 14900K, it has 8p and 16e. Using the conversion above 16e=6.4p,
14900K has a "total core" of 14.4p(8p+6.4p)
See how I eliminated e cores. I had doubts at first but but then I tested cpus that had similar "total cores" with different p&e combination and they all gave similar multicore performance result with little difference here and there. For anyone wondering, I compared the cpus in Nano review(here https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare).
One comparison I did was 13420H 5.6p(4p+4e) vs 1365U 5.2p(2p+8e). Notice 13420H has 0.4 more total core so when I did the comparison, sure it was little a better than the 1365U in multi-performance as I predicted. So overall, I think that I can trust the experiment that guy did and you can also trust these conversion values.
I also thought of making a worksheet to show the total cores of all cpus from intel 12th gen up. But then I thought that I should share it here first, in case there's any mistakes.

In english lit can you use 2 quotes for comparison, for example in a christmas carol for the themes redemption and greed vs redemption can i use two different quotes from different parts of the play to compare them? If not how would i structure an answer tho these questions

DISCLAIMER: I'd like to note that I do not consider myself an expert on many of the topics he talks about or even economics in general but a lot of what I'm about to say is pretty easily verifiable and basic, and I'll try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so. Given my lack of expertise, none of what I say here should be considered as the final authority on these topics, it's a reddit post for fucks sake, I encourage everyone to search up the relevant data and information on the topics they are interested in or claims they find dubious. It's really not that hard and all the links and data I'm gonna cite here took me less than five minutes to find for each piece of information. If you're not familiar with where to find this data it might take you longer but I promise that anyone with access to the internet can do the same thing I'm doing. Finally, for those looking for some opinionless, academic argument, that's not what this is, this is gonna sound like a rant because it is, I'm posting this for nothing more than my own satisfaction, take from it what you will.
Ok I'm writing this after I finished the whole thing and I said that I'd try to be clear that I'm expressing my opinion and not fact when I'm doing so and the basically entire second half of this is my opinion and I don't make that very clear so sorry about that.
Honestly I'd love to be wrong because I really do think that younger people are at a disadvantage compared to previous generations at the same age but the arguments he makes and the data he uses throughout his talk just sound like such bullshit to me.
https://www.ted.com/talks/scott\_galloway\_how\_the\_us\_is\_destroying\_young\_people\_s\_future?
https://www.profgalloway.com/war-on-the-young/
Scott Galloway recently did a Ted talk titled "How the US is destroying young people's future", as well as an accompanying blog post. He's made some fair points about how young people have been put at an inherent disadvantage and that they have it harder than previous generations. That's most likely true and I personally support that point of view, but the a lot data and numbers he makes this argument with seem to be cherry picked, misleading, or just straight up wrong. So let's break his talk down. u/JustTaxLandLol made a pretty good post about him comparing median wages to the S&P500 (https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott\_galloway\_compares\_median\_wage\_to\_sp500/) but I think that Galloway's mistakes are much more comprehensive than just that particular slide.
The first slide with data makes a claim about how pre-tax income, adjusted for inflation, has decreased across generations from grandparents to parents to kids, and that cost of public colleges and home prices have increased significantly across generations too. First of all, categorising generations by whether they have children or grandchildren is kinda nuts. That's a very wide, overlapping, range of ages. If he has actually fixed age ranges for each generation that don't overlap and just made these categorisations for the sake of understandability to a nonacademic audience, I still think that's the wrong choice but fine. However, his claim that real income has decreased across generations is weak at best. This working paper (https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2024007pap.pdf) from the Fed Reserve was published February 2024, and from the figures that start at page 35, shows that by almost every categorisation they could think of, GenZ earns more at the same age than every previous generation before them. There's some conflict here with Raj Chetty's work but I don't have the time or knowledge to reconcile the two perspectives but at best, the pre-tax income numbers Galloway presents are questionable at best. Furthermore, he doesn't provide anyone a chance at even checking the sources he gets this information from. Not once in his entire talk does he cite a single source. He couldn't even have some tiny text at the bottom of his tables or diagrams saying what organisation he got this data from. Ok so that crossed out bit is wrong, he does have sources they're just very very faint and you can see them if you squint hard enough at the bottom left corner of his graphs. But the source he gives for this slide is a joke. Here's the link https://www.profgalloway.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Table-01.png
His "source" is his own analysis. Ok so by his analysis, the average cost of public college is 56000*0.43 = 24080. I'm gonna use numbers from this US News page (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/paying-for-college-infographic), which might not be the most reliable source in the world, but it's probably somewhere in the ballpark. So according to US News, average tuition for the 2023-2024 school year for out of state students going to a public school is 23,630 and 10,662 for in state students. If these numbers are anywhere near accurate, the only conclusion I can draw is that Galloway has cherry-picked his data by only including the cost for out of state students in his analysis. First of all, public schools in the US are there to provide affordable access to higher education FOR RESIDENTS OF ITS STATE. Using only out of state numbers is absolutely ridiculous. Secondly, even if he used only the in state numbers, 10662/56000 is approximately equal to 19%. So if I use his very very questionable pre-tax income numbers, cost of public college for in state students has still increased across his categorisation of generations. It's not like his point would have been invalidated if he had used the in-state numbers, a trend of tuition increasing as a percentage of real income across multiple generations is still very bad. This is my opinion but I guess that he just wanted to find a nice shocking number. I didn't catch this but in their post, u/JustTaxLandLol notes that later on Galloway says "real median income from labor is up 40% since 1974" so he's also contradicting himself in the same talk.
I couldn't be bothered to look into the house price to income column he has so I don't have any comments on that.
His next slide is a point about how the percentage of 30 year olds earning more than their parents did at 30 has been decreasing very significantly over time. This is from a paper in 2016 by Raj Chetty (link: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aal4617). I've seen some counterarguments about the methods used in the paper but there are counterarguments for basically every inequality paper in existence so I'd take them with a grain of salt. Those points are more complex than the scope of this post and I lack the expertise to be making them anyways so I believe this slide. I'll admit that Galloway makes a good argument for this slide.
Right after this slide he says "As a result, people over the age of 55 feel pretty good about America, but less than one in five people under the age of 34 feel very good about America. This creates an incendiary, righteous movement...". He supports this with data on the percentage of US adults who feel "extremely proud" to be American.
Before I talk about the data on this slide, I'd like to be a little anal about things and pick apart his wording and causal claims he makes. When Galloway says "as a result" he's making a causal claim about the relationship between a young person's earning ability and their national pride. Leaving aside the econometric issues of making random causal claims, this is a ridiculous marginalisation of all the other critically important issues in the US. It seems pretty clear to me that reduced national pride amongst younger individuals is a combination of a lack of social mobility (or however you want to word your version of the fading American dream), the continued existence of systematic racism and sexism, US response to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, bodily autonomy (abortion), and many other issues. Not to say that the economic disadvantages of young people doesn't play a role in causing this lack of national pride but come on. He also says "this creates an incendiary righteous movement...". Ok if the "as a result" from the last sentence could be interpreted as the economic disadvantages of young people play some part in their dissatisfaction with the government, it should be obvious to anyone not living under a rock that many of the political conflicts and movements that have erupted in the US over the past few years have little, if anything, to do with earning ability. In the slide after the poll data he shows three photos, one of a MeToo protest, one of a BLM protest, and another of a pro-Palestine protest. I can only interpret this as him making the claim that the younger generations economic difficulties are causally linked to those movements, which is totally bananas.
Now lets talk about the data. He got this from the Gallup polls (link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/394202/record-low-extremely-proud-american.aspx, there's a link to download the pdf with the poll numbers at the end of this article). There are 5 options for the Gallup poll: "Extremely proud"; "Very proud"; "Moderately proud"; "Only a little proud"; or "Not at all proud". So Galloway is cherry-picking again. To be fair, it's true that even including the rest of the answers, a quick glance at the data suggests (very strongly) that young people are less proud than older people. There are also more young people who choose "Not at all proud" (11% for 18-34 and 1% for 55+). Though there is probably some argument to be made about whether "extreme" pride is a good thing. Furthermore, "pretty good" and "very good" do not reflect the extremity of choosing, well, the most extreme option.
As an introduction to his next slide he says that "a decent proxy for how much we value youth labor is minimum wage". I've never heard of this before and am very very skeptical but I'm willing to attribute this to my own ignorance so I'll leave that sentence alone. So on this slide there's a graph with two lines, one is minimum wage across time adjusted for inflation, the other is whats supposed to be minimum wage if adjusted for productivity (also adjusted to inflation I assume). Galloway got this data form the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) (https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/), which shows that this gap between productivity began around 1979. This was when Carter was president and right before the Reagan administration. Those who know about the economic history of this time probably won't be surprised since a lot of the policies of this time were rather inegalitarian and heavily favoured the wealthy. I agree that many of the policies of the time contributed heavily to the inequality America faces today and though I haven't read any studies about how this affects minimum wage workers, I believe that minimum wage workers or low income workers in general today have significantly lower purchasing power relative to a few decades ago.
What I have a problem with here is the idea that productivity and minimum wage should increase in tandem. According to the EPI, "Productivity measures how much total economywide income is generated (i.e., for workers, business owners, landlords, and everybody else together) in an average hour of work" and "pay is defined as the average compensation (wages and benefits) of production and nonsupervisory workers. The pay for this group is one appropriate benchmark for 'typical worker pay' because production and nonsupervisory workers have made up roughly 80% of the U.S. workforce over the entire period shown in the figure and because the data for production and nonsupervisory workers exclude extremely highly paid managerial workers like CEOs and other corporate executives". Before I try to break down my complaints with the measures used, my immediate reaction when I saw this was that it seems rather stupid to compare the relationship between average productivity and minimum wage in an industrial economy against the same relationship in a service oriented one. There are just more jobs now that let you make an impact on the economy far beyond what you are paid and it is so so difficult to quantify this change. Using a similar argument, I really have no clue how macro people make models or do estimates for things like productivity but I'm quite skeptical about the reliability of using such a measure of productivity because of the increased prevalence of second, third, or n-th order effects that would be present in a measure of something like total gdp but pretty much impossible to identify for any employer. For those who want to read more about this difference between productivity and compensation I think this is the most relevant paper from EPI (https://files.epi.org/2015/understanding-productivity-pay-divergence-final.pdf). There are some points I'm not satisfied with in this paper like them attributing the entirety of the difference between median hourly compensation to average consumer hourly compensation but that would take more time than I want to spend on this.
Now we're still on the same slide. Galloway says "we've kept it [minimum wage] purposely pretty low" twice in three sentences. Now he's suggesting that there's some collective out there that has the political power and desire to keep minimum wage low. By "we" I think he means to suggest that the old-timers have banded together to screw the young people over. Ok buddy. I'm stepping outside the bounds of what's considered strictly economics here a little but pinning the injustices of society on some ethereal enemy whose existence can never be disproven is the same as taking "advantage of the flaws in our species with medieval institutions, Paleolithic instincts, and godlike technology" (Galloway's words, same TED talk) to me. Maybe there really is some cabal of scheming geezers out there who have some twisted desire to keep the minimum wage low, but I'm more inclined to believe that a lot of these "injustices" are a result of our existing political and societal institutions being poor and inefficient aggregators of our desires as a society, rewarding selfishness instead of cooperation. This certainly makes the problem harder to solve than if there were just some evil 'others' we could get rid of and be done with. Having a target to direct our outrage at, believing that I am good and they are bad, is easier than facing the reality that everyone is born with the selfishness that creates the injustices we live with but that's not gonna make people more agreeable. As an economist, I study the theory of incentives to use the same human selfishness that creates all the problems Galloway talks about to create solutions that hopefully improve our quality of life. This is what I believe is the beauty of being human, all the good and bad that happens stem from the same desires, it is our job to create institutions and systems that allow us to channel our desires in a way that benefits everyone, but I digress. The point is, this enemy that Galloway creates is an effective tactic at convincing people of his argument, but I don't believe such a perspective benefits society at all. Mistakes should be corrected, that doesn't mean they're always the result of ill intentions.
His next slide compares the difference between percentage increase in median household income against percentage increase in median home price, as well as a comparison of the median monthly mortgage between 2019 and 2024. I have nothing to say about the graph, I agree that over time, home prices have increased to an unacceptable level. The Fed funds rate went from 2.4 percent in Feb 2019 to 5.33 percent in Feb 2024 (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/fedfunds). To his credit, Galloway does attribute this increase in mortgage payments to "an acceleration in interest rates" but what's the alternative? Don't increase interest rates? Then if I was Galloway I'd make the same TED talk and talk about how the continued low interest rates contributed to rampant inflation that made all the poor people even poorer. It seems like he's decided to take whatever bad economic event that seems somewhat relevant and made it to be the result of some group's dogged determination to keep the younger generation down. Why is the increase from pre- to post-covid prices on anything surprising. I'd like to meet the genius who saw covid coming and intentionally created this increase in home prices.
He also says "the most expensive homes in the world, based on this metric, are number three, Vancouver. Why? Because 60 percent of the cost of building a home goes to permits...". I have no idea what point he's making here. Based on what metric, median home price? Monthly mortgage payments? Why do I care about Vancouver, a Canadian city, being number three? Then he talks about how "the incumbents that own assets have weaponized government". Either he's switched to talking about oligopolistic lobbyists in general without saying so or he's still talking about Canada. I dunno. Someone please explain. Then he says "this is the transfer I'm going to be speaking about". Also, everything he just said is talking about how there exists a group of people trying to PREVENT transfers of wealth to new entrants. And there was huge applause after that sentence. Nutsos, all of them.
Ok next slide. Galloway presents two pie charts, comparing the share of household wealth by age in 1989 to 2023. So he's talking directly about inequality in wealth now. Inequality in the US is really really bad, that's a fact. I'm a big fan of the work of Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, and Thomas Piketty. These people have been at the forefront of research on inequality for many years now and though their work is not flawless, I'm convinced by the data they present and the methods by which they have aggregated the data and what they show is that inequality is worse than even what the pie charts Galloway presents suggest. However, this is not to say that Galloway makes a valid argument. Please note the grey bits in the pie chart. If Galloway has shown the numbers for everyone under 40 and above 70, the group that's excluded are those between 40 and 70. So those in the age range of 40-70 owned 100 - 19 - 12 = 69% of household wealth in 1989 and 100 - 30 - 7 = 63% in 2023. I could probably go and find how the age demographics of the population have changed over time and I think that with declining birth rates, the percentage change in age demographics would be pretty close to the percentage change in household wealth but I'm tired of beating every slide to death so I'll leave that to someone else if anyone's motivated enough to do that (if my hypothesis is wrong here just comment and I'll make that change). My first thought when I saw this though was again, this guy has paid no regard to structural change in society. Given the increased accessibility of buying stocks over the past three decades is it really that surprising that older people who have had more time and cash at the start of the digital age to invest in companies that are now massive mega-corporations have experienced a higher return on their capital. This is not to say that none of this change in the share of wealth held by those under 40 is due to some inherent unfairness in our society and I have neither the time nor knowledge to separate these effects out but to say that this was a "purposeful" effort to cut their wealth in half is complete and utter bullshit. Also, this guy makes another causal claim WITH NOTHING BUT A CHANGE IN SHARE OF HOUSEHOLD WEALTH. Congratulations everyone Scott Galloway has just made every econometrician in the world redundant, I always knew my professors were just trying to confuse me with funny symbols and Greek letters, someone get this guy a Nobel Prize.
Then while introducing his next slide Galloway says that his analyst's presence in the audience "brings the average age of the entire conference down in 11 days". So he's saying that TED knows exactly who's showing up to their event before it happens and that they have the exact birthdates of everyone in the audience too and that they've given this information to one of their speakers. A friend of mine has told me he's just making a joke and that I should let this point go because I'm being too anal about things but yeah I become anal about things when someone suggests sweeping institutional changes in a talk viewed by millions of people so thought I'd include it anyways just as another example of the bullshit this guy has been spewing.
When he moves on to the actual content in the slide the first point he makes is about lower acceptance rates in schools. So I don't have data on this because I couldn't be bothered to go find any so again, I'll change my statement if anyone has reliable data indicating otherwise but I think its pretty safe to say that way less people used to apply than before and combined with an increase in international student applications and enrollments the competition is just way higher than before. The most obvious explanation would be that higher education institutions have made the mistake of not increasing enrollments at a rate quick enough to meet demand. However, according to US News (https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/articles/how-many-universities-are-in-the-us-and-why-that-number-is-changing) there were 3982 degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the US. and UCLA is ranked 15th in national universities. So why is it surprising now that university education is becoming more popular that higher ranked universities are harder to get into. So instead of expanding enrollment I think that a well thought out plan of affirmative action would be a much better option of giving "unremarkable kids and giving them a shot at being remarkable" (what this well thought out plan may be I don't know, I honestly didn't even search up any statistics about affirmative action this was just the first solution I thought of that didn't involve ignoring the crowning achievement of statistics). To his credit, Galloway does include a point about income-based affirmative action at the end of his talk, though he overwhelmingly emphasises increasing enrollment in schools. I don't have any data about that but I think that class sizes at public universities are large enough as it is.
The rest of the slide gives numbers on college debt of house price compared to first year income. College debt is ridiculously high and many people struggle because of it. I don't have the solution and neither does Galloway because he doesn't really mention it. I think that house price-to-first year income is a poor comparison because it doesn't take into account average rate of income increase and no normal person from any generation is looking to buy a house with first year income but there's probably a more appropriate metric out there that shows a similar change anyways so I'm ok with that.
Then he talks about him and his "colleagues" who "artificially constrain supply to create aspiration and scarcity". I would like to meet the professors who have control over enrollment rates because none of mine did. Then he says "to my colleagues in higher ed: we're public servants, not fucking Chanel bags". The marketing professor from NYU says he's a public servant...ok.
The slide after that compares Harvard's increase in endowment compared to their increase in enrollment and he calls them a "hedge fund offering classes". I see no issue with this point, he made a great argument, can't really criticise anything here.
Don't worry though he makes up for it by immediately making one of the most egregious statements in this whole talk. We're looking at his next slide, the one titled "Grand Bargain" now. He says that the government should take some of the money that's supposed to be used to forgive existing loans to about 500 of the top public universities to reduce tuition by 2% and year, expand enrollments by 6% a year, and increase vocational programs to 20% of the degrees granted. Then the slide after that, claims this will double freshman seats and cut costs in half in just 10 years. Ok so he thinks that most of the money "earmarked to bail out the one third of people that got to go to college on the backs of the two thirds that didn't" should go to future students instead because, I assume from the tone of his words, he doesn't think they need or deserve all that loan forgiveness. So why bring up the increase in college debt previously (the slide I talked about three paragraphs ago)? Anyways that's not the crazy thing. Let's see what happens if you reduce tuition by 2% a year for 10 years. So the calculation goes like this 0.98^{10} is approximately equal to 0.81. So with the number he puts up, tuition decreases by 19% in ten years. If everything before this slide could be attributed to cherry-picking, stupidity, or lack of good data, then fine he's just ignorant even though he shouldn't have been if he went up there to make that talk. But now this is just a FUCKING BAREFACED LIE. I cannot think of a greater insult to the audience's intelligence than the fact that this guy didn't think anyone would pull out a fucking calculator and do the calculation themselves. I won't blame the audience for not saying anything because I'm not sure I would have wanted to do that either but at least from youtube and reddit comments there are a decent number of people who didn't realise this. A similar calculation shows that expanding enrollment by 6% per year increases seats by about 80% total (1.06^{10}). Not sure how that translates in terms of freshman seats but at least this is closer than the tuition claim.
Then his next slide compares wages to the s&p500. This is the point of u/JustTaxLandLol's post and I think his post and the discussion in the comments covers most if not all of my thoughts so you can just read that. https://www.reddit.com/badeconomics/comments/1cc3rs8/scott_galloway_compares_median_wage_to_sp500/
Ok next slide, "The Transfer: Purposeful". Oh yay he's about to make another causal claim with nothing but a graph on the change in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals. And if we skip ahead to the next slide we'll realise that this claim is that the gradual decrease in top marginal tax rates for corporations and individuals results in lowered senior poverty and child poverty either remains constant or increases. Yes everybody the newest advancement in economic research has just been released. Lowering top tax rates decreases senior poverty and increases child poverty. And Scott Galloway made that argument in 24 seconds (transcript on TED website has time markers).
Man I really set out with the intention to keep the tone of this post as neutral as I could but I'm just writing out my internal dialogue with less swearing now. I apologise to those who would have preferred a more careful and less emotional knee-jerk response of an analysis but this is a reddit post, its not like there are standards.
Now he moves on to talking about social security. Galloway says "it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit. But that gets stripped out of the infrastructure bill". So zero explanation about why it would cost 11 billion dollars to expand the child tax credit, why not more or less, no comment about how many children it would affect, how much money it would mean for each child or family, just some number that you have to accept. Most of the time there's no why to the amount of funding that the government allocates to policies but at least there's some breakdown to how its going to be used, Galloway doesn't even have that. This is before we even consider the fact that child tax credit was expanded this year (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/child-tax-credit-2024-who-qualifies/). Maybe he's talking about some other issue that I'm not aware of but I don't think so. He says he got the social security spending data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, which is a think tank. I don't want to sort through their website to fact check so I'll accept it as the truth but as far as I know the actual social security administration releases their facts and figures for the year August of next year so I'm not sure why he didn't just use the 2022 numbers from a more reliable source.
His next few couple slides are about the increasing age of politicians. I think this is a great point but he probably should have used a better example of a younger politician than Justin Trudeau.
Then at around the 10 minute mark, using his slide titled "Generational Theft", Galloway claims that "we pumped the economy" during covid so that the Nasdaq would gain value, causing "intergenerational theft". I don't know if he thinks it was intentional or not but how is he going to completely ignore the fact that the stimulus checks were primarily for households that were struggling due to the greatest unemployment rate we have seen in our lifetime (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/11/unemployment-rose-higher-in-three-months-of-covid-19-than-it-did-in-two-years-of-the-great-recession/). I'm really kind of tired of this so I'll let those at the CBR make my argument for me. "Within the first 10 days, households spent an average of 29 cents from every dollar received. The bulk of this spending was on food, rent, and bills" (https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/how-effective-were-stimulus-checks-us). Damn so turns out struggling families did need these stimulus checks pretty urgently. Shocker. I also think that most people in finance would agree that tech stocks surged over covid because people needed fucking technology... People built PCs to play video games, used online shopping services because they couldn't go to malls, all that.
The next slide is supposed to support his point that the increase in stock prices doesn't allow young people to find "disruption". What. The only thing that matters to any investor is the percentage increase in value of the stock price after you've invested. It doesn't matter if 7 dollars is 1 share of apple or 0.04 of a share of apple. Its stock price going up by 100% means you get 14 dollars either way. I think this guy's arguments are getting dumber as the talk goes on, I actually had to go and find data to refute his points earlier on. Now arithmetic does the work for me, I should have hired a grade schooler to do my analysis.
His next point is about how algorithmic content selection is bad. Yeah its bad. Its bad for everyone, turns everyone into psychos. Though I think there's a very good argument to be made about how such content could affect developing brains. He makes a point about age-gating social media at the end of the talk. This is actually the only drastic measure he proposes that I agree with so I'll leave this alone too.
After a couple slides about Zuckerberg and TikTok (which I agree with, though I think Zuckerberg's damage probably leans more towards older people than young now), he gives a bunch of graphs showing upward trends in all sorts of terrible things happening to young people. Every single one is an issue of critical importance in the US, but importantly, no comparison to older people. For all we know, the trend on every graph could be the same or even worse for older generations. If I had written about this first then I'd go and find the data for it but at this point I just want to be done with this but can't stop without getting to the end so I'm just gonna slap this slide with lack of comparisons and move on.
His next slide shows the difference in 30 to 34 year olds who have at least one child, some of that is probably due to family planning but I still think its a great indicator of people not wanting to have children because its not affordable. Great point, I believe in it.
Next slide, oh god it's a happiness report. I think happiness reports are a fun conversational tidbit but I see no way for it to be reliable enough to be used as an argument in any semi-serious setting. That said, I have no idea how they do these measurements so maybe I'm wrong.
As if the happiness report wasn't bad enough, Galloway is gonna compare the biggest one-day market cap gain (in an unspecified time frame) to the budget of several policies implemented by the government. Oh man. This is too stupid, there's so many things to pick from it'd take too much effort to sort through them. Someone else please make the argument for me.
Then he says universal basic income should have been called negative income tax. Wow the frequency of good points is going up, though I think this is accompanied by an increase in the frequency of absolutely idiotic arguments.
Then he says we should eliminate capital gains tax deduction. The issue of taxing capital gains is a very serious one, but I don't think it actually matters that much how much we tax realised capital gains. Again, not an expert but here's my understanding. If you have a high net worth with a lot of it in stocks and you need cash, you don't have to sell them and get taxed on the realised gains. You go to the bank and say I want to borrow money, I'm going to put these stocks up as collateral so if I can't pay you back you can take these stocks which are somewhere around the value of the principal amount plus total interest over the course of this loan. Because the bank is now convinced they'll get the money back regardless of if you make the payments or not, they say ok here's the money you asked for at a nice low interest rate. Then you take the money, you keep your stocks, which will probably gain value at a rate that exceeds the interest rate by a pretty decent margin, and you can probably make your interest payments pretty easily because hey, you were rich to begin with. If you're really strapped for cash a couple years down the line, you can sell some of the stocks that are now worth more than they were before and cover your payments and not have to pay taxes on the rest that you don't have to sell. Free money. There's plenty more ways to avoid taxes if you're rich but you get my point by now. Now that's a lot of problems without a solution. Luckily we have some economists far more skilled than I am who work very hard to find solutions to these problems. Here's one example of a policy that may help (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/03/opinion/global-billionaires-tax.html). This is an opinion piece written by Gabriel Zucman (famous economist), for the New York Times. If you don't have an NYT subscription, sorry for giving a link you can't read but if you search Gabriel Zucman billionaire tax, you could probably get a decent idea of what this talks about. Here's Zucman tweeting his proposal for his suggestion (https://twitter.com/gabriel\_zucman/status/1763253132572729623). It probably requires a little more thinking than the NYT article but he did present this at the G20 so that might sound more exciting to you than some news article.
Then Galloway says "we need to remove 230 protection for all algorithmically-elevated content". Zero mention on what 230 protection is so here's an explanation (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230). Basically that was a fancy way of saying that companies should be held accountable of the content on their platform, even if it's posted by an unrelated third party. I'm not sure getting rid of it in its entirety is a great idea (though I have no arguments against that except Orwellian ones) but I certainly agree that most if not all social media platforms have abused this protection and it should be at the very least restricted. To what extent? Again, I have no clue.
Then he goes "break up Big Tech". That's the whole suggestion. This is a terrible idea but the fact that he doesn't elaborate more on how to do this, the ramifications of doing so, or really provide any explanation at all makes me automatically ignore this. Then he makes his point about age-gating social media, like I said before, I agree with it.
His next suggestions are universal pre-K, great idea, then "reinstate the expanded child-tax credit". Not sure what he's going on about here, child tax credit exists and like I said before, was just expanded. Then it's income-based affirmative action. I don't know what kind of affirmative action is best and that sounds like an interesting idea so I won't criticise it. I think the rest of his suggestions are pretty normative arguments so I'll leave those alone too.
Don't get me wrong, I wholeheartedly agree with the overall theme of his talk. I believe that young people in the US (and many places worldwide) are at a massive disadvantage when it comes to accumulating wealth, buying homes, inter-generational transfers, etc. But you cannot go up on a popular platform like this, make claims as sweeping as he has, and make suggestions as radical and drastic as he has, with garbage arguments and data like this. Saying the right things for the wrong reasons is arguably worse than just saying the wrong thing because it makes it easy for those who want the status quo to remain to make counterarguments. Given how divisive opinions have become over the past decade or so I guess I shouldn't be surprised at how many people are eating this up but it kinda scares me how easily people will eat up this shit as long as its for a cause that sounds like its going for some kind of radical change for the good of all and has some imaginary "them" as the common enemy to everyone.
So that's it, I've finally covered all his points. I'm free, thank fuck. I should really proofread this but this has been my past eight hours and my back is breaking from all this sitting, I'm just gonna post this and read it over tomorrow. Maybe do a tl;dr, fix some formatting.
EDIT: As u/myphriendmike and u/Mordoci have pointed out, my dummy corp example was just tax fraud, that's illegal and so it's a bad example, I've removed it. Zucman has some estimates on the "real" tax rate wealthy people (mostly billionaires) pay, maybe I'll include that at some point.
I also corrected my wording in some places.

EDIT 1: Adding a TLDR and disclaimer about the writing as some people seem frustrated with the length and the level of editorializing I've done. I also saw it pointed out a spoiler about Dragon Heist and I have edited the post accordingly.
EDIT 2: After some thought, I'm actually going to delete the entire list of "miscellaneous red flags" as they aren't incredibly relevant to the story at hand and considering the length of the story I probably should have pared it down a little before posting.
TLDR: A member of this dnd group was extremely micromanagey and two-faced while the dungeon master could not bring themselves to communicate their issues with my character. They, as well as the server owner, came to the conclusion I was some sort of predator for having done what they refer to as 'rrp' with an 18 year old when I was 21. They deleted the server and blocked me.
DISCLAIMER FOR EVERYTHING BELOW: This horror story is extremely fresh for me as it just happened this week, so I won't lie- I do a lot of venting and editorializing in this post. If that's not something that you want to read, then this post is not for you. Mods, if that is not allowed, please feel free to delete this post or whatever. The catharsis of posting was enough for me.
This was my first time playing DND. The fallout just happened this week, so it's all pretty fresh still for me.
Here is the cast of people in this saga. There are two campaigns that will be mentioned so I’ve provided information on both, though the player characters are not as important as the players themselves- save for one of my own. (Names have been changed to protect the identities of all involved.)
Myself
I am your narrator.
Dragon Heist Campaign: I played a half-elf cleric
Call of the Deep Campaign: I created a water genasi bard.
Maddie
They are my friend and co-narrator.
Dragon Heist Campaign: they played a drow monk
Call of the Deep Campaign: they played an elf warlock
Jesse
They took an active part in this horror story.
Dragon Heist Campaign: They played a half-goliath dhampir hemomancy wizard
Call of the Deep Campaign: Jesse was the DM for this campaign.
Kane
They took a semi-active part in this horror story.
Dragon Heist Campaign: Kane was the DM for this campaign.
Call of the Deep Campaign: They played a hobgoblin rogue
Cassidy
They took a semi-active part in this horror story.
Dragon Heist Campaign: they played a tiefling bard
Call of the Deep Campaign: they played a “fiend-touched aasimar” warlock
Anita
They are not an active participant and will not come up very much.
Dragon Heist Campaign: They played a tiefling artificer
Call of the Deep Campaign: They did not participate in this campaign.
Mandy
They were kicked early in the Dragon Heist campaign due to compatibility issues.
Dragon Heist Campaign: They played a fire genasi Cleric of Helm
Call of the Deep Campaign: They did not participate in this campaign.
Penny
They are not an active participant and will not come up very much.
Dragon Heist Campaign: They played an aasimar paladin
Call of the Deep Campaign: they played a sea dragon?? I actually wasn't completely sure what their character’s race and class was.
I responded to a post Cassidy had made on lfg. They created a discord server and invited myself, Kane, Jesse, Mandy, and Anita. Kane was going to DM a module- dragon heist. Great. We go into character creation. This is my first time doing all of this, but I've listened to enough DND media to know (or rather, to think) that a lot of backstory is good. So, I took a pre-existing OC of mine and I created a backstory for her in faerun.
I wrote, altogether, 19 pages of backstory. I understand now that this was not good, though at the time I received a lot of very positive feedback from Kane as well as Jesse- who was a very close friend of Kane's and seemed to be helping them get things set up.
In my character's backstory, I gave her a plot hook with a missing wife. This wife character was not originally my character- they were my friend, Maddie's character. I got Maddie's permission to use her OC in my character's backstory, and didn't consider doing anything more. This wife character’s backstory was a part of that 19 pages of backstory, as was a lot of other stuff. This was a mistake for so many reasons and I cannot overstate my regret in having done this. I genuinely did not think anything of it, at the time. Again, I got good feedback from the DM and their friend. I got permission from my friend to use their character and didn’t think to put a disclaimer that this character wasn’t mine. This was so stupid of me, and it is relevant later down the line.
What will also be relevant later down the line is my age, and Maddie’s age. I am 25 and Maddie is 22. We met in a community discord server for a less known anime, at which point they had just turned 18 and I was 21. In this public discord server is where we began to ship our OCs together and rp them as a couple. Does that information not seem super relevant? Just keep it in the back of your mind.
Anyway, we get past character creation. I connect my half-elf cleric to Cassidy’s tiefling Bard and we intertwine their backstories. I am a rather shy person, and am a little excited to have made a friend. Everyone was incredibly nice and I was really excited for my first ever DND campaign.
Session 0 happens and we go over expectations. Everyone seems to be on the same page, we do some practice combat- it’s great. Session 1 happens, and Mandy has her cleric of helm murder a person in broad daylight. They also flirted with Jesse’ wizard and then seemingly the straw that broke the camel’s back was that they also provided the DM with only one paragraph of backstory after two weeks of being asked for character backstory, and were thus summarily kicked from the server and blocked by Kane, Jesse, and Cassidy.
Kane decides they want to redo session 1 and invite 2 new people, for a total of 6 players. I ask if my friend Maddie can join, because at this point I was feeling incredibly anxious and wanted somebody I knew in the group. They said that Maddie could join, and they brought in another person from the LFG reddit. This person did not last 24 hours in the server before Kane kicked and blocked them for not being “communicative enough.”
Thus, Penny was brought in. As far as I could tell, Penny was Kane’s friend. Jesse was pretty mean and condescending to them in my opinion but that’s none of my business, just my opinion.
Scheduling conflicts begin happening for the Dragon Heist Campaign. People in the server would communicate pretty regularly, and it was in these conversations that it came out that my Selunite’s missing wife was Maddie’s character. Nothing is said to me or Maddie about it; nothing to indicate that this was any cause for pause or discomfort in Kane, Cassidy, Jesse, Penny, or Anita.
During this time Jesse decides they want to run their own campaign- Call of the Deep. They prove themselves to be incredibly difficult to collaborate with. I don’t know how to describe character creation with them other than I felt like I was trying really hard to tell them what they wanted to hear about my character and it felt like I kept coming up short. For this Call of the Deep Campaign, I wanted to have a water genasi cleric of umberlee who was delusionally and utterly devoted to and in love with Umberlee. I made it incredibly clear that I did not expect Umberlee to return her affections. She was supposed to be a little whimsical; a little off her rocker. Jesse wants her to transform into an aberration of some kind- I agree, I think that sounds cool. They suggest she be a child of prophecy, and then when I tried to run with that they immediately backtrack and say that wouldn’t work, umberlee wouldn’t be a large part of this campaign, and my character couldn’t be a child of prophecy for any cults because there wasn’t any cults in the material that have to do with the water (This is verbatim, I don’t have access to our conversations anymore as I now have Jesse blocked. I can’t promise that this is 100% a faithful representation but I am doing my best to relay this as best I can from memory.)
At one point they try to convince me to make my character’s deity Valkur instead. I let them know that I didn’t really vibe with Valkur as her patron deity, and they get pissy about it and tell me to just “choose a God” or “They can choose a God for me.” I really don’t want my character to be connected with religion anymore, since it seemed to be an issue.
So I make my character a bard with commitment issues. They nitpick little details of her backstory- “why is she from cormyr? Don’t you know that’s landlocked?” (She grew up in Cormyr, left at around 19, and has lived near the water since.) “What is her connection to the water?” (Her whole thing is literally that she’s a free spirit who can’t be tamed, just like the ocean. She left home to be around the ocean.) “Do you really want her to be friends with XYZ character? They’re explicitly not connected to the plot” (They’re a player character, so they’re about as connected to the plot as I am. Yes, I want them to be friends.) After a lot of not-super-fun character creation with Jesse I have a character with a bland backstory, no plothooks of her own, and no personal goals or desire or anything beside “be adventurer, make money.” She was just going to turn into an aberration and eventually fuck off to the bottom of the ocean. (I was explicitly told by Jesse that was what was going to happen once I reached a certain level/stage of her transformation.) Yay.
We go through Jesse’ session 0, during which they yell at Penny and completely shut down ideas she proposed for her character. What they allow in their game is obviously their prerogative, but they literally raised their voice at this person in this session 0 voice call and was altogether rather rude about shutting down their suggestions. I quit their campaign the next day due to a scheduling conflict that came up on the day they wanted to play. They message Maddie to ensure that she would still play if I’m not there. She said she would.
We do session 1 for the Dragon Heist Campaign. It’s fun! Kane is a genuinely talented DM. They even put a story hook for my character’s wife! That was not something I had expected and it made me really happy. Jesse hogged a lot of RP moments and derailed the party from the task at hand (talking to an NPC so we could meet a crime lord of some kind) so they could question and interrogate an NPC that had already been questioned and interrogated, but it was good. I was so inspired and excited I wrote a diary entry from my character's point of view referencing characters in her backstory and her wife and her feelings on the things that just occurred. I share this with the group.
That brings us to this week. The following account is from Maddie herself, as I was not a part of the following conversation.
“What started as a normal conversation- discussing my character with Jesse in DMs for the Call of the Deep campaign, and the possibility of her death within the campaign. I’d mentioned, then, having a backup character that could fit with the module, adding offhand that she was a character I’d played before in another campaign. Jesse completely flipped their lid over this- saying in a LOT of words and paragraphs that they thought it was borderline disrespectful to recycle a character from one campaign to the next or to bring in a premade character with a pre-thought up backstory, that it completely takes out the DMs agency in character creation. I have every screenshot from the conversation if you’re feeling nosy, in which I politely stated that I’d never heard that perspective before and I was sorry for not knowing.
Jesse went on and on about how bringing in pre-existing characters is an awful thing to do to a DM since it *forces* the DM to change the setting to fit the character- leaving very little room for me to even reply. Then, they went on to bring up, in a nasty way, about the 19 pages of backstory that had been written for my friend’s character in the other campaign and how they’d absolutely hate it if a player did that to them as a DM, especially taking issue with the ‘missing wife’ plothook in the character’s backstory, saying that they’re so annoyed because it's going to derail the rest of the campaign and it doesn’t fit with the plot at all. I responded that if they have so much of an issue with it then bring it up to the DM, and I stated that I didn’t feel comfortable with them talking about my friend that way.
This, of course, caused Jesse to backpedal HARD, apologizing profusely to the point of very obviously trying to make me feel bad for setting that boundary, and even going to far as to message my friend and apologize even more profusely- even though I’d never given any indication that I had shared this private message with my friend. “I don’t want it to seem like I don’t like having either of you in my game or Kane’s”, they’d said, despite having never said anything nice about my friend or either of her characters. Anything.”
As Maddie mentioned, following their conversation with her, Jesse reached out to me regarding their conversation. I also have screenshots of what they said to me which I can provide upon request. I will provide direct quotes here:
“can i please preface what i'm about to tell you by saying i 100% support you playing [my character’s name].
[Maddie] and i got into a discussion? slash argument? earlier about using pre-existing characters in a setting that didn't fit and I brought [my character’s name] into it as an example of bringing a ton of backstory that forces the dm to write those characters in without thinking that might make her uncomfortable and seem kind of underhanded
I did not mean to imply I have any issue with your character or what you are planning to do, and that example was meant purely to explain to her what my viewpoint on the matter was, but I lost the plot on it and made her uncomfortable, but if you hear about it I want to have told you already that I really like [my character’s name] and I fully support her in her endeavours
I would be happy to explain my stance on it to give that discussion context also, since I have been half dreading writing this message/ messages since i did NOT know how to word it
Basically I (mostly accidentally) implied that [my character’s name] was a character that brought too much from an existing canon when I was meaning to use her as an example to compare against [Maddie’s character’s name](who adopted mannerisms and vibes tm but not a ton of backstory elements) and I was not fully clear on what the comparison was for or to what extent, so I'm sorry about that. I don't want to seem like i was talking about you behind your back and I certainly do not want you to think I have a problem with you playing her.
i was not trying to make it seem like [my character’s name] was an issue
i was trying to compare her to [Maddie’s character’s name] in order to explain where on that spectrum of Bring Personality to Bring Everything i preferred”
I was aware of the argument they had had prior to receiving these messages from Jesse. I wasn’t aware to what extent they had bashed my character, though I was aware my character had come up. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I speculate that was what Jesse was banking on and took advantage of my ignorance to the situation as a way to “get in front” of the coming implosion. They sent these messages to me Tuesday May 7th at 11pm and I did not see them until the following morning. I notice they are in vc with Kane- not something strange in and of itself as people were often on voice call with each other, except for the fact it was before 11am on a wednesday.
I would also directly post my response to them, but again, I have blocked this person on discord and deleted our dms. The screenshots I had taken were to assure Maddie that the matter looked to be at rest. That all said, I accepted their apology and assured them that “everyone puts their foot in their mouth sometimes” and that I do not hold anything they may or may not have said in relation to my character against them.
They assure me that they never meant to make me or Maddie unwelcome and that they love me and they love Maddie and consider us friends even though we’ve only known each other a short while; that they appreciated my response.
I go to work. I occasionally check my phone (as one does) and notice that they are still in vc with Kane. I still think it’s weird to be on voice call for hours during the morning and day hours during the weekdays but quite frankly I had other things to focus on and didn’t think much of it.
Then, a message is put in the “Call of Deep” category of the discord server. Jesse informed the group that “things had come up and they no longer felt comfortable dming this campaign”.
I see this message, and then several minutes later and I am no longer able to see that category. At first I thought it was deleted, but upon clicking on Jesse and Kane’s profiles in the discord server I could still see that they were in the ‘call of the deep’ voice call channel. I figure they wanted a private conversation and I left it to rest. Maddie was distressed because she thought it was all her fault that they canceled the campaign; that setting a boundary with them had elicited this response from Jesse. I reached out to them to poke around and see if that was the case and they assured me in no uncertain terms that it was not. “Hey, it’s not actually related to that! It’s something else I don’t feel super at liberty to talk about rn”
That “thing” they weren’t “super at liberty” to talk about right now, in hindsight, was me! I obviously didn’t know that at the time. I accepted that answer and went about my day.
Later in said day, I want to say around 3-4pm, I notice that the entire server is gone. I try to reach out to Cassidy (server owner): blocked. I try to contact Kane: wouldn’t you know it, I’m blocked! Lastly, already knowing what is about to happen, I try to contact my dear friend, Jesse. I’m so sure you can guess what happened: I found that I was blocked.
I am sure I do not need to state to you all how utterly blindsided I was by this. I did DM Cassidy on her reddit account in my panic, but ended up blocking her after sending the message. (It was something along the lines of “Hey what on earth happened?” Followed by “Jesus, I actually don’t care” before I blocked her account.) I went through and blocked them all back on discord and closed our DMs so I didn’t have to see it. I also blocked Anita and Penny for good measure. Maddie was just as confused as I was- to us at the moment, it seemed like Jesse had twisted our words or told Kane and Cassidy some made up story about the argument they’d had with Maddie and got us both kicked from the server as a result. It was an incredibly upsetting thing to have happened- and incredibly confusing, considering both our conversations with this person ended on a civil (if not positive) note.
It was only going to get more upsetting. Maddie eventually discovered that she was not blocked by Jesse and, of course, asked what had happened. Again, this was not a conversation I participated in (obviously) so I will leave it to Maddie to recount this conversation as well.
“Quote: “Kane did the math and decided they weren’t comfortable roleplaying your romance rp character [friend’s character’s wife], that you were doing, at minimum, RRP with right when you turned 18. The whole thing reeked of like, children being involved in rp stuff and then shoving that character onto Kane, we talked about it and decided that the lack of honesty was unfair to Kane and to the rest of the group and then Kane decided that the game wouldn’t continue. The server was deleted and they decided it was prudent not to give you a means to communicate.
“I didn’t block you because i have no beef and i wanted to give you the chance to reach out and get some explanation, but we were al kinda sketched by the fact that you had romance rp stuff going on between a fresh 18 year old and a 22 year old”
The conversation wrapped up civilly from there, with Jesse stating that ‘ghosting was the least mad i could get them’.”
I was not 22 years old when we started shipping our characters. I was 21. I was 4-5 months from turning 22, if that fucking matters. I don’t see why it should. I wouldn’t even call what we were doing at the time ‘rrp’ (which is such a dumb fucking phrase, by the way) as I feel that phrase implies that our rp interactions were specifically to fulfill some kind of romantic fulfillment. It wasn’t- it was a shared story arc in a public group rp on a community discord server.- that, by the way, was incredibly well-moderated for the safety of the members as there were actual minors in the server. Everything was family friendly, SFW- whatever you want to call it. Our characters had closer relationships with other characters in this group rp as well. It wasn’t not a specific ‘romance’ thing. Both Maddie and I have clear boundaries between ourselves and our characters and just wanted to collaborate to tell a story. (Something this group would have known if they had bothered to ask before assuming.)
As an side, however, Maddie was 18 fucking years old. She could gamble, enlist in the military, rent her own apartment, move across- or out of- the country, smoke, etc. She was a high school graduate and enrolled in college. She was not a child and she could have dated other 21, 22, 23 year olds at her campus. I agree that it would have been creepy for me to have formed a friendship with Maddie if I had been like, 35. At the age of 25 I wouldn’t reach out to form a friendship with an 18 year old girl over the internet. However, I was 21. Neither of us before this incident have ever given any thought to our ages.
This was also literally 4 years ago- she’s 22 years old now. The fact they took it upon themselves to “do the math” on our friendship is so incredibly invasive and such an overstep that the fact they saw me as “icky” or “sketchy” for having formed a friendship and done “rrp” with Maddie is actually laughable.
This is also shared with her explicit permission, but Maddie is a twice over victim of online grooming, as a much younger teenager by much older people. They feel both disgusted and disrespected by the trivialization of their actual lived experience by making the implication that there was any sort of predatory or grooming aspect to our friendship.
I personally am appalled that, after being as kind as I could to these people, that they would make such heinous evaluations of my character and put so many implications on my friendship with Maddie. Did they think we were in some way romantically involved? Did they think I sought Maddie out as a minor specifically to groom them for romantic and sexual roleplay scenarios, and then wanted to recreate that with Kane for my own romantic fulfillment? I’ve spent the past 48 hours feeling genuinely sick.
For my part, however, I am so sad to have made Kane uncomfortable and I realize why they would have been. It would have been incredibly easy for them to just TELL ME they were uncomfortable with or disliked certain aspects of my character’s backstory. I would have been more than happy to change things, omit the “wife” plothook- whatever. The fact they could not directly communicate their feelings is A) not my problem B) a skill issue on their part. I want to clarify the wife plothook was included to A) give my character a motivation relating to her backstory B) keep others from trying to form a romance with my character (as I did not want to do arcs involving romance during my first dnd campaign, despite what they evidently thought- I guess that this was a poor way of trying to achieve that goal, though.) C) just because I liked the fucking character. Having Maddie’s character in my character’s backstory was not a “deal breaker” for me at ALL. Not to mention all of this was so new to me. My only other dnd experience was a jokey new years eve oneshot when I was 19. I wanted to be a good player so badly and would have welcomed any feedback or criticism.
I don’t know if they’ll see this post. I went through and blocked at least two of these people on every social of theirs that I knew of, as I quite frankly do not ever want to encounter them again, but this is a throwaway, so who knows. If they do see this, however, I have this to say directly to them:
You specifically did not want to give me the chance to defend myself against the disgusting and baseless things you said about me, but that’s not a call you get to make. I couldn’t do so in a private conversation with any of you, so I’m going to air it all out here in a public forum instead. You’re apparently so concerned for Maddie and I’s friendship that you would go so far as to delete the campaign and tell her how ‘ick’ and ‘sketch’ it was that we starting shipping our characters at 18 and 21 (you said 22, I’d like to inform you that your math was off, bestie!) but you put my supposed ‘victim’ in a situation where they had to defend me, the supposed ‘predator’? If any of your accusations were actually true, that would be so incredibly sick. It’s already actually pretty messed up to have put Maddie in that situation multiple times even without the context of your accusations against me. I seriously hope you self-reflect and get the help that all three of you clearly need. Please take a break from your computer (You especially, Jesse!) and go touch some grass. Love you besties xo xo!!!
Anyway, I hope that the interpersonal dnd drama bullshit that has consumed the past week of my life has entertained you all. I did see on lfg that they’re recruiting for a new campaign, so I hope my experience isn't repeated by someone else. Again, the screenshots that Maddie and I have are available upon request. You all can think whatever you want about me. I know where I went wrong and I know I am not perfect nor am I blameless here; I genuinely feel terrible that I made Kane so uncomfortable with my character and her backstory. I just wish they had told me so I could have fixed it. In my opinion, this pales however to the way they immediately jumped to the worst conclusions about me as a person when I had been nothing but kind to them all. I will not be playing another ttrpg for a very long time. This is not an experience I care to repeat.