-Today I got a message that my account has been credited with 15 lakh rupees.

• Over joyed me decided to visit the Capital of my district which happens to be the smart City of Dholera.
  
• I boarded the bullet train and left my house unlocked because we are living in Ram Rajya where criminals have no place except a certain political party.
  
• Reached there in minutes because the train was running faster than NM's mouth. A guy named Jaggu who looked like Paul Bearer was standing there with a bouquet to receive me.
  

-He asked me to get inside an Alto car but I refused and asked for a SUV because I don't consider myself lesser human than some dream girl.

• I was amazed to see that there were no pot holes and the road was smooth like the roads of Kyoto.
  
• When I reached the hotel, Some gujju girls welcomed me like I was some special guest like Pakistani cricketers.
  
• A Sikh boy named Teji took my luggage to the room. I got up to use the washroom but my flip flops(chappals) were missing, thank fully I had another pair.
  
• I called the room service and asked for the the best dish they have. I almost got a heart attack when they sent mushrooms costing 80k per piece, thank God I am living in a 5 trillion economy so I was able to afford them.
  
• I switched on the TV and stopped at a channel while channel hopping, where they were showing documentary of a destroyed country under rule of a self obsessed king.
  
• Women raped, children starving, protesters were beaten, Unemployed youth shouting religious slogans. That documentary broke my heart and I thanked God that I live in Amrit kaal under a democratic and accountable leader.
  
• I slept for good 5- 6 hours and stepped outside of my room for some fresh air. A 65+ uncle was waiting for me outside my room and he was fuming.
  
• I asked, What's the matter Sir? He said I have checked in the room next to you and you snore too loudly, I said sorry but he was not finished yet.
  
• He continued, how can you sleep for so long being a young guy, how will you work 70 hrs a week and contribute to desh hit?
  
• I was about to give him a befitting reply but suddenly a women in a simple saree and with cutlery in hand took him away and ended the matter.
  
• Feeling bored and irritated, I decided to play some sports. The hotel staff guided me to the nearest cricket academy.
  
• At the academy I met a coach who is a world class batsman in his time teaching young kids how to bat.
  
• I went upto him to have a chat and became a fan of his amazing verbal skills. He took me to his favourite students Virat and Rohit who revered their Joy sir, we played cricket for sometime and I learnt few new shots from joy sir.
  

-Hungry me went to a nearby restaurant and ordered my favourite daal, paneer,naan and onion salad.

• The waiter said we don't use onions in any way sir. I said I have a habit of eating onion salad in dinner so please do something.
  
• He said i can't do anything but you can talk to our manager. I said , ok then call your manager.A lady in saree came and arrogantly said , what's your problem?
  
• I asked that why don't you use onions? She yelled at me and said "kyonki mai pyaaz nahi khati" . I said that the way you treat your customers will harm economy of your restaurant.
  
• She replied, I don't give a damn about economy, threw the menu at my face and went away in anger. 😭😭
  

-Terrified by such behaviour I woke up from my dream.Share my dream with as many people as possible so they can wake up to reality.
Jai hind 🇮🇳🙏 (Not a writer of post)

RULES:

1. No stores or dealers selling on here. We won't stop stores from responding to sell posts with buy offers, though. At that point, it's up to the seller to accept or reject the offer.
   
2. Do not spam this thread. Your sell/trade offer(s) should be confined to one post per week. If you list multiple cards as separate orders, or multiple lots of cards as separate orders, do so in the same post with a clear delineation. As a seller, you may post whether you want offers within the thread or whether you want a private message. If you want to make this different for different listings, that's your prerogative. State what country you're shipping from and include shipping price+method for your own country. If you are willing to ship to other countries, say so.
   
3. No eBay posts.
   
4. If a card is sold/traded, edit your post and invalidate any pending offers for that card. "Short selling" is not acceptable here, since we're dealing in physical goods and shipping times may be an issue, especially if the buyer is a tournament player. Do not short sell cards.
   
5. Buyers: Post your offer directly underneath a sell listing, unless you are topping someone else's offer, in which case you should post directly underneath that offer.
   
6. Buyers: Feel free to post a "want" list.
   
7. For the sake of preventing identity theft and/or harassment, do NOT post identifying information (name, address, paypal info) in the thread.
   
8. No throwaway accounts.
   
9. Needless to say, we're Magic players. We don't necessarily have to pay in cash. It's entirely up to the seller whether to consider "2 Force of Will" as a highelower bid than $160.
   
10. There is also a deckbox.org trading area that can be used as well, at http://deckbox.org/communities/reddit_mtg_trades.
    

If you have any comments about the rules rather than about a particular auction, feel free to discuss them here.
PAYPAL FEE INFO: (Quoted from Paypal)
Free when the money comes from PayPal balance or bank account.
2.9% + $0.30 USD when the money comes from a debit or credit card or PayPal Credit
MAILING INFO: See USPS Link.
SCAMMER INFO: I will not link it directly here, but be sure to check out the scammer list on deckbox before doing any trading to ensure yourself to having a safe trade!
You probably can't mail off more than one toploader in a normal envelope+stamp due to it being too rigid; and you shouldn't do this for more than $10-20 worth of cards anyway since there's no tracking. Get a bubble mailer and get it tracked.

Caremark mail order is no longer covering certain GLP-1 meds (Zepbound was never carried in the first place, but they won't carry Wegovy and Mounjaro as of May 15th). They gave very little prior warning. I still don't have official communication from them about this change. I found out on these threads.
At the same time, I am finding a handful of CVS stores outright stating they are no longer going to even TRY to order Zep. Even the ones I have used before that still have active orders that are in process but out of stock. My refill for 7.5 was sitting at one CVS since 4/2. I called them yesterday to do my weekly check if it will be filled anytime soon and the once-pleasant pharmacist said: "major national backorder indefinitely -- call your dr for an alternate med. We are no longer ordering these."
I then went to another CVS where I have filled before that has been pretty decent and they said that they haven't heard anything impacting stores nationally so it must be a store-by-store decision as of now. But she said she wouldn't be surprised if more stores adopt this approach. And all the customers who used Caremark mail order now must fill at retail -- and many of their plans ONLY allow you to fill at CVS (like mine). So that means more traffic will flood the remaining CVS stores that are trying to order making it harder to claim the few boxes that come in here and there.
FWIW -- none of the CVS stores I spoke to were optimistic. It is unfortunate that this is the only pharmacy I can fill at per my plan.
Has anyone else had any issues with their local CVS stores starting to refuse to fill? Or is this just a temporary store-by-store thing?

The EXTREMELY detailed, mega-anxiety edition!!! Major events like consult and surgery day are labeled like this:
——— EVENT TITLE ———
Surgeon was Dr. David Whitehead and I saw him on Long Island (New Hyde)
Summarized list of major dates:
Consult: July 19 2023 Mental health letter acquired: August 9 Dates discussed: September 12 Pre-op appointment: December 18 Surgery day: January 8 2024 Post-op: January 17
November 11th 2022: Emailed northwell health for the first time, they emailed back saying to call. I was too anxious so I avoided it for a few months.
Called northwell a few months later but got too anxious talking to the person who picked up. They were being normal and talking normally, it was just personal anxiety on my part.
October 2022 - Early March 2023: Spent time talking to trans friends and family members about their timelines and processes for top surgery.
Looked into Penn medicine for a bit but wasn’t happy with the surgeons there, specifically as a nonbinary person. The patient navigational team however is lovely.
March 2: emailed Penn health patient navigation
March 3-10: correspondence and phone calls w patient navigation (absolutely wonderful people, some of the easiest phone calls I’ve ever had) Got lots of into on surgeons, things I’d need, processes etc.
Date unknown: phone call to Penn medicine asking about surgeons and possibly setting up as a patient (v long wait time on phone) Surgeon I had heard good things about only works w CHOP program and I’m was too old for that program. Other surgeons I was v iffy on.
March 23rd: Back to square 1. Called northwell again to set up an appointment. Everyone I spoke to was really nice. Could have set up an appointment within the week but decided to wait till the end of the semester. Scheduled a trans care and primary care appointment for May
Couple of calls In between for confirmations. Trans care appointment got moved around a bit and ended up being moved to a phone call.
May 8th: Trans care call: Basic preliminary questions like: Emergency contact, what you’re looking for, are you thinking of looking into hormones, experience w dysphoria or dysmorphia, mental health, and eating/nutritional concerns, things you might want doc to know, piercings or tattoos, do you do any drugs or drink often, etc. total call time was about 20 minutes. Doctor was incredibly kind, I still experienced a good deal of anxiety but the call was super easy, welcoming, and friendly. Got sent contact referrals for the surgeons, as well as trans-friendly therapists under my insurance.
May 9th: started looking at list of therapists and making respective emails and calls. Checking per session costs and double checking insurance. Most charge 100-150 per session. Got in contact w one.
May 10th: Called w first therapist talking about what I’m looking for, where I am in this process, if parents are supportive, and talking about costs. She was very friendly and affirming, wants to have a few sessions to get to know me and my situation before writing a letter. Understandable and expected, but frustrating.
May 15th: Primary care appointment: Went to northwell health primary care, parkinglot was a little scary (just a large lot with a lot of cars) but everyone working there’s is super kind. Office is incredibly affirming, pride flags and lgbtq+ art everywhere. Gave my insurance card, filled out some paper work, got called in pretty quickly. I have a needle phobia and medical trauma so I was panicking a bit in the office, nurse was good w me about it and doctor was very kind, I just requested to not have any blood work done that day and that was totally fine, so I could schedule that at a later date and go w a friend. Recommended to get blood work done before scheduling a consult w a surgeon. Also prescribed me a single dose anxiety med for the bloodwork which I was very happy about. I found over time that the anxiety meds unfortunately do little to nothing for my panic attacks personally when it comes to needles but regardless having a doctor acknowledge and respect that fear and listen to me was incredibly helpful and reassuring.
May 30th: Got blood work done in a different lab, went w a friend. Scheduling for that is super easy, I think I did it online actually I don’t entirely recall. they do take walk ins but I made an appointment to minimize complications and make sure I could prepare properly. Front desk/lobby area was a little spooky, but I think that is mainly just bc of my social anxiety. They take a urine sample, you give them your prescription, eventually they call you over for blood work. Quick and easy, tech was v nice and having a friend with me was incredibly helpful. Probably the best I’ve ever done with a needle despite the fact that I did still panic and get very lightheaded lol.
Got blood work results back within the next couple days, all looks a-okay! Neat :)
June 15th This day was incredibly difficult. I had my first session with a therapist to establish some ground knowledge around my dysphoria and the way that I view myself. Top surgery is something that I know from research and related experience Can be difficult and expensive to get and can take time, so much of my prep work has been on the understanding of taking things a step at a time and just knowing that the current way things are doesn’t have to be forever. It allowed me to be able to live with myself while prioritizing my health better. This read to the therapist as “not having the level of dysphoria [she’s] come to expect and look for in someone who is trans” and was largely based off the fact that I don’t want to go on hrt. Past that point I started to break down because now my method of learning to live with myself felt like it was actively going to work against me and prevent me from getting top surgery. I’m not good at talking about my dysphoria, I can’t imagine it’s easy for anyone, especially to a stranger I just met. It was rough, and I felt incredibly mentally drained after ending the session.
June 19th Called it quits with the first therapist, I felt incredibly disrespected and the one session we had put me in a mental spiral for days. It can feel some times in this process like the people you have to get permission from need you to be severely depressed and unable to wait another second for this procedure just in order to take you seriously.
After I left that therapist, I immediately got back to the list to find someone new. Spoke to a new therapist via email, but my insurance is kinda weird (Blue Cross Blue Shield out of state) so its off putting to some people. This therapist recommended I go through the office she started out at (Heart and Soul Counseling)
————- Time Skip ——————
IM BACK its time for some record keeping. Got super overwhelmed and lost the energy to document my process for some time so here goes.
HEART AND SOUL COUNSELING: My experience w/ this therapy office was mostly good. The person in charge, Jesse, was absolutely lovely and responsive. Never spoke in person, but any text/email interaction was prompt, respectful, and kind. The office is stellar with email/text communication, so I only ever had to call them once when I was initially inquiring about the office. This is something I wish all therapy/counseling centers did better, eliminated a ton of my anxiety and hesitation to speak to therapists.
I got set up w someone as quickly as possible and established what my goal was (to acquire letter document for my surgery team). I attended multiple session w the therapist, she was a kind lady but the sessions were unfortunately p miserable for me. We didn’t fit well, but I was willing to stick it out rather than backtrack on my process. She also did not invalidate me or accuse me of not being trans which was a major step up from my first therapy experience. Once I acquired my letter I did stop therapy there, I kindly explained to the therapist that it wasn’t a good match, but I may honestly explore my options at the office in the future. Receptionist there was also lovely and they had a cool fish tank.
———- CONSULT STARTS HERE —————
July 19th: CONSULT!!! My mama and I went to Dr. David Whiteheads office for a consult. Parking was a nightmare so I’m super glad I didn’t have to drive for this one (ty mama). Consult went really well, and the staff were all super friendly. Dr. Whitehead is cool, very chill energy and a bit intimidating, but I’m scared of everyone so that’s nothing new. First question he asked me is what I wanted/what he could do for me which caught me more off guard than it should have? I didn’t realize going into this process how many times people ask you what you’re having done even if it’s already written down, because there’s so much variety in what you can look for in the results.
We talked about the procedure, went through a slideshow n stuff, and discussed how I wanted a flat chest w/ no nipple preservation. They made sure to specify that my mental health professional letter had to include that I did not want nipple preservation because thats technically a “non-standard” appearance. Also had the first breast exam I’ve ever had in my life. Can’t say i’m a fan (not that I need to worry about that anymore!) Took pictures n measurements n such, and also discussed recovery supplies and care w me and my mom.
August 9th: After a plethora of painfully awkward therapy sessions, a decent amount of crying, and a couple breakdowns in friends cars/backyards, I got my therapist letter and sent it to the surgeons office. It ended up needing minor revisions to which I contacted Jesse from Heart and Soul and he got me the revised letter immediately. Unfortunately the surgical coordinator was out of office for the rest of the month the next day ;w;. Is how it be.
September 12th: Got a call from Surgical coordinator mid-painting class that I stepped out to take. Started discussing surgical dates!! She was kind enough to email the dates to me which was lovely because I was absolutely shaking/mind blank haha. There was an option for January 8th which felt like an absolute miracle the way it would work with my school schedule. It would give me a solid two weeks recovery time before spring semester began. Because it would be a couple months out, I was asked to contact her in the second week of October to submit documents to insurance.
(Timeline note: earliest date offered was in early December)
October 10th: Documents sent to insurance, predetermination started
October 30th: Received mail from my insurance approving my procedure as medically necessary (YAY) But! This is also where things get,,, fun! Dr Whitehead’s surgical coordinator, Alyssa, is a blessing and was very helpful and prompt with me despite the fact that I had to email her pretty constantly during this general time which I still feel bad about.
Around this time, my mom got diagnosed with breast cancer, which I reported to the surgical coordinator because it influences my family history (grandmother also had breast cancer). It was asked that I get genetic testing done because this could impact my surgical procedure. Now I’m handling the setup on this between helping my mom in her process setting up consults and considering her options because there of course is a lot of crossover to the steps I’ve already completed and am familiar with.
November 1st: Very kind person at cancer genetics calls me, sends me a family history questionnaire to fill out before I can be scheduled to see a genetic counselor. Filled out the questionnaire the same day.
November 8th: Called cancer genetics to check about scheduling, office was not open so left a message. Got a call back later in the day. I have a virtual appointment with a Genetic counselor Tuesday the 14th. Current plan is a mailed saliva genetic test but I’m going to ask if theres anything I can do to get results/materials quicker. If I can’t get results/feedback by December 8th my surgery date may get deferred.
Trying not to stress too much because there is little to nothing I can do about this, and I just don’t want to be sad. I’ve kept telling myself throughout this process to not get excited and not let myself believe anything is solid because something could happen at any time that might mess up my schedule or plan, and If I convince myself I’m in the clear, those changes will hurt a lot more. So far I think thats been a good move, because this really sucks.
My surgery date is still officially scheduled as of now as well as my first post-op. I will also ideally have pre-surgical testing done December 18th should I be cleared by genetics in time (Fingers crossed!)
ALSO! Def lean on friends if/when you can during this process. It can absolutely be challenging, and having a support system is incredibly important and helpful. I’m super lucky to have really lovely and supportive friends that are around to listen to me and send me pictures of stupid little animals.
November 9th: My mama is scheduled for her double mastectomy on December 4th
November 10th: Did some shopping with my mama for recovery supplies for double mastectomy/top surgery. Having watched a million and a half transition/top surgery videos and tiktoks and having read all the blogs and posts and tweets makes you a great support for someone suddenly faced with an upcoming double mastectomy! We might go shopping this weekend for some button ups and zip ups for her, clothes shopping is better done when you can try stuff on
November 14th: Meeting w genetic counselor: Victoria Webb, one of the loveliest medical care workers I’ve ever met. Had a virtual appointment with her to discuss and set up genetic testing. I explained to her about my situation w the proximity of my surgery and tight deadline as well as my willingness to do a blood test instead of a saliva kit to get results quicker. She was so incredibly kind and good with me, ended up being able to do a saliva kit and get results in time she deserves every good thing in life.
December 18th: pre-surgical testing: This was at the main hospital, everyone was really nice but I had a really bad panic attack despite being on Xanax.
The process is sort of like getting a physical. Measurements like weight and blood pressure get taken, lots of preliminary health questions. The people working with me were really kind and I was very open with them about my anxiety, it was visually apparent though anyway because I started crying the second we even started talking about the blood draw.
Once the equipment was actually brought into the room I started to panic. Both of the women working with me were really kind and helpful and tried to distract me and keep me talking the entire time, but I did still have a really horrible panic attack. Every muscle in my body locked up and I lost all my color, took a bit to get back to a spot where I could move and talk properly because my speech was affected too. It was a bit scary but funny to think about in post. Thanked the medical staff for being patient w me as always, a good portion of the anxiety is also guilt about making things harder for them. Got through it tho. Def eat before presurgical if allowed, I didn’t and that probably didn’t help!!
———- SURGERY DAY ————-
January 8th:
Ok so surgery day:
This day was very scary. Got my phone call the Friday prior for my surgery time which ended up being 1pm and I was asked to arrive around 11. Got there at 10 and went in at 10:30.
Called up to check in then in waiting room till someone brought me back to change. I told her right away about my anxiety with the iv bc that’s legit all I could think about. Got changed right after. I was generally shaky and a little disoriented the entire time because I was panicking but everyone was very patient with me. Clothes and belongings go in a bag in a locker and you get two gowns one that faces back and one that faces front. I was given underwear and a pad as well because lucky me I got my period a couple days before my surgery.
The pre-op area is a lot of little cubicles with curtain divider things, blue soft chairs, and medical equipment. Everyone I met and spoke to was very kind, but any time someone even suggested starting my iv I would panic. I was informed it would have to be placed in my hand and that terrified me, I’m especially anxious and sensitive about my hands and fingers. I think doctors and nurses tend to misunderstand exactly where my fear is with needles and ivs. It isn’t the pain that scares me, but the concept of veins and and anything being in them. Even writing this right now is horrible so I’m going to stop w any further detail. I spent the entire two-ish hours of pre-op absolutely terrified about this iv.
I wasn’t really keeping track of time but dr whitehead came in to do markings for surgery. They had cool rainbow socks on,big fan. Having your chest drawn on and just like, moved around n shit is such an experience. Felt bad because I kept losing my balance but doctor Whitehead is cool and I am 98% less scared about them now.
Probably my most favorite person I met during my entire hospital experience was the anesthesiologist. I know he told me what his name was but I couldn’t focus on or retain information at the time. He told me we could essentially put me to sleep with gas before putting the iv in and for the first time in probably a solid week I felt like I could calm down a little. He took a look at my hand and arm to check my veins which always does freak me out a bit but I’m more used to that kind of thing at this point and I know nothing bad is going to happen. One of the nurses came in with the iv equipment and he let her know that were going to wait till in the or which was also incredibly helpful because I absolutely panicked when I saw that little supply kit again.
V nice lady brought me into the or, I’d never been in one before it was cool. They had a little music speaker which was really cool. Took off blue jacket gown and they helped me onto the table. They put a warm blanket over my legs and my chest to help me calm down. Before long they gave me a mask w fun happy sleepy time gas, they let me keep my arms on my chest for a while which was really nice because I was still scared. I started getting loopy pretty fast but I still heard when someone mentioned where the iv equipment was and panicked a little because of that. I remember feeling them take my hand for that but never actually felt anything happen. Just some fear but the gas was v helpful obvi. Someone said they would see me in a little bit, and then I was groggily waking up in recovery.
Recovery was a little rough bc the iv was still there (fully wrapped up so I couldn’t see it though which was rad) but I was still really anxious about it until it was taken out and when it was taken out. For anyone that struggles w this i did not feel them remove it, just the tape. Everything was mentally much easier after that. After a while, going over instructions w parents, a cracker , some ginger ale and some juice, my dad helped me Get dressed and I was helped out to the car in a wheel chair. Ride was smooth bc of remaining numbness and meds except a few Bumps in the road
TOP SURGERY GOTTEN
My post op date was scheduled for Jan 17th and that’s the day I got my drains out followed by several post op check-ins. First week of recovery was miserable but things exponentially approved each day past that, and I went back to school in person two weeks post-op with driving and item-carrying assistance from friends!
Will upload recovery notes at a later date! Feel free to message me with any questions, more than happy to answer and give info! I’m a bit over four months out from surgery now and thriving 🥳

Intro

It’s not much of a stretch to say that violence is the primary form of interaction in video games. With a handful of exceptions, most video games involve guys whacking other guys, with varying degrees of brutality. Even chill games fall into this - Stardew Valley has sections with combat in them! Considering the pervasiveness of violence in video games, there has been a ton of amateur and academic commentary on the topic. However, while this is a well-established school of thought, I haven’t seen people try to apply this to Fire Emblem specifically.
So, let’s do that now! In this post, I’ll be exploring how violence in Fire Emblem is implemented - what limitations are placed on violence, how it warps wider game and narrative design, and what it implicitly says and does not say. I hope this post doesn’t come off as too early-2010s “makes you think”-y, but I do think there are multiple interesting things worth talking about here!
Despite the length of this post, "a brief discussion" is an appropriate title, as we won't be able to go into depth on everything. After all, video games are holistic works, so the attitude towards violence is relevant to every aspect of their design. However, I have managed to wrangle some of these threads into the following structure: first a discussion on the fundamental mode of interaction in Fire Emblem, then how stories are constructed with regards to violence, and ending with the aesthetics of violence and how they relate to characters. Also, as FE is a huge series, be aware that I am gonna be making some broad statements which may not apply to each individual plot point of every game. I actually planned to write 3 case studies around Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses (which have the most interesting attitudes to violence in the series IMO) which point out these deviations, but this post is way too long and full of tangents already. If people are interested, I’ll make a followup to this post which goes into them in more detail. Also also, because of the nature of this post, I’ll actually give a useful TL;DR for once:
TL;DR: Nintendo games must be fun mechanically, and they can’t be too uncomfortable narratively. If you try to provide a counterpoint by saying “oh this Kirby final boss is super dark it eats 100 morbillion galaxies”, you do not deserve rights. IntSys has to keep to this as a 2nd party publisher, but they also have to deal with the fact that their games are at least nominally about ‘war’ (or at least they put their toes into that particular thematic pool). This conflict between making a fun video game for children/teens and the wider framing of the narrative leads to interesting narrative and aesthetic tensions. also fun is cringe, misery is based

“Do you like hurting other people?” (or The Fundamental Mode of Interaction)

OK LISTEN I KNOW I LITERALLY JUST SAID THAT I DIDN’T WANT TO COME ACROSS AS A EARLY 2010s “VIOLENCE IN VIDYA BAD :O????” PERSON BUT I SWEAR I’M GOING SOMEWHERE WITH THIS
The best place to start when talking about violence in video games is to think about the primary form of interaction in said game. In the case of Fire Emblem, this is in the in-chapter gameplay. Sure, in objective terms the player moves arbitrary objects across a 2D grid which perform subtraction on arbitrary objects controlled by the computer, but this is always framed as controlling a squad of soldiers to engage in (typically lethal) combat with enemies (who are normally also soldiers). When you’re not doing this in-chapter gameplay, you are preparing for the next chapter of combat. This involves surveying the area of combat, preparing weapon loadouts, etc, however more recent entries also include light life-sim-esque elements. To summarize, Fire Emblem’s interactivity involves ordering violence as well as the preparations to order said violence.
For players, this strategic thinking is extremely fun and is the primary draw of the series! You have all these tier lists of who’s better at killing, discussion of the maps where you do the killing, complaints about the length of gameplay sections where you don’t do killing, etc. This is by design, as while I don’t know the core brand tenets of Nintendo, I imagine the Reggie quote “If it isn’t fun, why bother?” is carved into a solid gold statue of Mario in the office lobby. This then is enforced on all associated studios, including IntSys and so Fire Emblem. While I would disagree with that Reggie quote (especially the bit where he says “If it’s not a battle, where’s the fun?” which is a wild statement to make about an entire medium), this approach to making games is ultimately fine, and so IntSys tailored the strategic gameplay to be satisfying to your dopamine receptors. You could analyse what the normalisation of violence even in ‘just for fun’ games says about wider gaming culture, but I won’t get into that here. In any case, let’s dig into a few specifics of FE’s interactivity.
One thing that’s interesting with regard to strategy games is the detached perspective of the player. You order units and observe the resulting violence, but it’s not tactile, you don’t directly swing the sword or shoot the bow or cast the spell like with action games. This adds a layer of separation between the player and what fundamentally happens, at least within the framing that the game provides. It’s not like Call of Duty, where your relationship to the violence is very visceral, where you view everything down the barrel of a gun. OK, I probably shouldn’t use a series that I have very little personal experience with (I only listen to the supplementary lore material, so let’s talk about Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. While you’re not directly in the driver’s seat, John Sekiro reacts to your every input with extreme responsiveness, so overcoming the game’s challenges i.e. stabbing people is incredibly visceral and satisfying. While this violence is fantastical in nature, there is sufficient blood and explicit sword-action to clearly say “oh yeah you are violently killing all of those bozos with a katana”. Coming back to FE, not only are you far more detached from the violence, it is presented in an extremely cartoony manner… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, we’ll get to the aesthetics later. Point is, Fire Emblem gives the viewpoint of a stoic commander, who Does What Needs To Be Done™, and not the viewpoint of an actual soldier who has to do the actual killing.
Now let’s view the player’s perspective on violence from a different angle. Fire Emblem intends for its combat to be relatively relaxed on the player side of things - the turn-based nature allows the player to calmly think through all of their moves, and you typically have perfect information on the enemies. The only exceptions to this are Fog of WaSame Turn Reinforcements, which are rare and typically unpopular amongst the fanbase. This leans into ‘combat as sport’, where (going back to the Reggie quote) you have a fun time picking apart a puzzle with the tools you have, and we all collectively enjoy this! This is a valid way of designing strategy games, and I like what IntSys has done. However, it’s not the only way of making these games - for example, in Total War you have to juggle all your battalions in real time whilst the enemy is bearing down on you, and the XCOM games always have Fog of War and limited information on the enemies, with you never knowing what kind of awful new monster is going to suddenly charge at you. Don’t get me wrong, neither of these follow ‘combat as war’, the principle that violence should properly mimic the stress, tension and unfairness of actual conflict. Hell, neither of them are particularly mature either - Total War is the strategy game equivalent of smashing action figures together, and XCOM emulates a pulp sci-fi alien invasion story. However, the additional pressures these games have make them hew slightly closer to actual conflict, putting you more in that mindset in a way that the clean fun Fire Emblem doesn’t really do. Again, I want to say FE’s approach to violence in in-map gameplay is fine, but when all three of these franchises have an explicit narrative framing of ‘warfare’, it does make Fire Emblem’s narrative a little more… stretched.
Finally, I want to briefly mention the maps. To steal from a brilliant Jacob Geller video, these are Worlds Designed For Violence. At least outside of the Kaga games, the maps you fight on are primarily designed around how the player interacts with them, i.e. fights on them. While I imagine the narrative designers and artists at IntSys are involved throughout the map design process, the gameplay flow probably takes precedence most of the time. Maps are not designed to resemble realistic places that you have to fight through, they are instead designed primarily to provide fun gameplay experiences before being dressed up by the artists to look realistic/fit the specific story beat. This is a more consistently entertaining approach to map design - heaven knows we have a lot of Kaga castle assault maps which are as fun as actually assaulting an entrenched position IRL - but this lack of friction could potentially take the bite out of the intended vibe, neuter any commentary on violence throughout the story.
You may have noticed that we’ve only talked about the “in-map” gameplay for now, when there’s an entire second half of these games, i.e. all the gameplay between the maps. Don’t worry, we’ll get to all of that, but this may fit better in:

Something something “ludonarrative” something something (or Narrative Implications)

(To clarify, here I’m going to talk about the wider plots and narrative structure as opposed to characterisation, as that fits more into the aesthetics of the series)
It’s not bold to say that the narratives of games have to warp around the core gameplay structure. Especially in AAA video game production, the narrative designers usually have to take a back seat to the systems and level designers, at least outside of the initial rough outline they provide in the original game pitch. In this case, the job of the writer is to form vaguely coherent connective tissue between individual levels, setpieces and expensive pre-rendered cutscenes. This must be a very difficult job, and is probably the reason why most video game stories are the way they are. I am not privy to IntSys internal meetings, but I imagine they abide by this paradigm, trying to give a reason for why you fight 20 battles which roughly align with plot beats that were decided years ago.
Put another way, the writers of Fire Emblem must contrive a reason why the characters fight a vast number of violent battles in a strategic manner. This has a pretty easy solution - war! We have found something it’s good for, as whenever the gameplay designers decide that an extra map is required, the writers can just insert “oh no there’s a blockade of enemy soldiers in the way, guess you gotta kill them all”. This is the case for almost all the games and is a fair enough narrative choice, as it’s frankly one of the few scenarios where you could reasonably contrive so many battles, but it’s worth examining this in a bit more detail.
Even in the framing of warfare, there are still a lot of skirmishes, which sometimes the narrative or tone fails to support - or at least, their presence means that violence isn’t taken that seriously. Let’s take an example from early in Awakening: Emmeryn sends the Shepherds to negotiate an alliance with Regna Ferox. On the way, they are ambushed by Risen on the Northroad (1), have to fight the border guards who think Chrom is a bandit I think??? (2), and then after arriving they need to take part in Regna Ferox’s ritual combat to secure their alliance (3). These beats aren’t necessarily bad, and I actually think Awakening uses these opportunities quite well: the Risen are established as a constant threat to the world (except not really in the main story but that’s a whole other thing), “Marth'' gets more development, we set up Regna Ferox as fighty people who like to fight, and while the middle encounter is very tenuous it does set up a funny joke in Cynthia’s paralogue. However, I want to communicate that if the map/encounter designers need X maps between plot points A and B - in this case, needing low-stakes trials in the tutorial period - then there’s gonna be a fair bit of narrative filler. That is to say, there must be multiple combat encounters that kinda just happen, which makes violence a lot more casual in the narrative. See also the myriad examples of “oh shit random bandits attack!”, used to have a lower stakes map, with bandits appearing and vanishing as needed. This works fine enough in the context of ‘combat as sport’, allowing your favourite scrunglo to build up a triple-digit body count, but this casual attitude circumvents potentially interesting ideas with regards violence. Taking the example further, banditry and its causes are never seriously explored, as bandits are just treated as a filler enemy (except in Based As Hell Thracia 776).
Another narrative consequence of needing so many fights is that… you need to fight. That is to say, any anti-war sentiment or appeal to diplomacy in the series is fundamentally undercut by a) strategic combat being a core appeal of the series and b) narrative beats needing to be structured around fighting enemies. It’s a struggle to have moments of diplomacy and reconciliation when you had a fight within 3 minutes of said moment, lest some people start screaming that things are getting boring. This also makes any appeals to pacifism kinda moot. Xander’s quote about “war bad” in Conquest is utter bullshit, as a huge part of the marketing around that route focuses on the coolness of the tactical combat and its challenge. Eirika and Ephraim can never be equal, because Ephraim’s “fighting is fucken awesome” is encouraged by the gameplay, and Eirika can NEVER save 11037 because we need a final boss and no-one else fits the bill.
Speaking of, in video games it’s best practice to have a big bad guy you fight at the end of the story, the toughest mechanical challenge coinciding with the narrative climax. In Fire Emblem, you have one grand final battle which decides the fate of the war and/or world, before cutting to a brief wrap-up and then credits. This is an attempt to make these games satisfying, which is fine, but this is at odds with an anti-war message (which FE often gestures towards) - that is, actual wars tend to be deeply unsatisfying in a narrative sense! Oftentimes, after a decisive battle, things just kinda keep going for a little while afterwards with casualties continuing to pile up until peace terms are agreed. In the few cases where there is a final battle, it’s more of a formality as the decisive moment occurred months ago. See World War 1 and… World War 2 for examples of each, not to mention a whole host of war-related books and films. The problem with doing this in a video game is that it would require having multiple one-sided fights past the most climatic fight, which would be unfun, and we return to that fucking Reggie quote again. While video games can effectively explore this anti-war narrative space - This War of Mine is a fantastic example - it just doesn’t gel with the fun games that IntSys wants to make. I bring this up in the context of FE because Fire Emblem has such an aesthetic focus on warfare compared to other video games, so it sticks out even further. Even in FE6/FE9 where the war is effectively over in the final few maps, the enemies still remain extremely challenging, because if they didn’t things would be boring.
A few minor things that didn’t fit in above before we wrap up this section. First of all, in making an action packed story, Fire Emblem neglects an important aspect of army life in warfare - the “hurrying up and waiting”. In the majority of cases, the breaks between fights is under 10 minutes, it’s just glossed over. Fire Emblem Three Houses is the exception to this, but there it’s more framed as school life. Some people may say “what’s the point in having large amounts of timewasting where nothing happens in my game about war” and to that I would say fuck you, I want to play Jarhead Emblem. Next, Fire Emblem involves fighting people AND monsters, but these targets are typically given equal narrative weight, outside of maybe a funny line of dialogue about someone being afraid of monsters. In 99% of cases, enemy soldiers you fight have no more humanity than literal monsters. The death of any of your beloved soldiers is a tragedy with big sad death quotes, the death of those poor fuckers is quite literally a statistic which is proudly used to rank how well your guys have done at the end of the game. Finally, the limited scope of the violence the series can show limits the potential impact of scenes. In some cases, this is good as the implication is enough, e.g. the ‘Monica’ scene in Sacred Stones is wonderfully grim and would be weakened by anything explicit. However, a number of other scenes are neutered by the limitations on violence. This fundamentally relates to the aesthetics of the series:

insert prozd tweet/skit here (or Aesthetics, Tone, and Characters)

I’ve been talking a lot about ‘the violence committed’, and this might have seemed a bit weird to you. It’s a true statement, but because the violence is mostly cartoony and abstracted - bad guys disappear into nothingness, there’s no blood, etc - it’s hard to think of it in that way. It’s basically impossible to place Fire Emblem in the same artistic sphere as, say, All Quiet on the Western Front. This aesthetic sense was partially tech-limited in the early NES and SNES games, which was grandfathered into the more graphically complex titles, but it’s also related to how the aesthetics unavoidably warp the tone of the work. IntSys needs their games to be relatively lighthearted and unconcerned with the consequences of its violence, as one of the core appeals of these games is the charming cast of characters. As you would expect, it would be a lot harder to appreciate your goofy blorbos and their lighthearted chats about nothing if you could see the brutal consequences of their triple digit body counts. If violence was more realistic, there would be a lot less “ooh I like training and/or this one hyperspecific food” or “I like peace, but I guess violence may be possibly needed sometimes” and there would have to be a lot more trauma and dourness. There are also age rating concerns, as you can’t exactly sell Come And See Emblem to pre-teens. And once more, to clarify: Fire Emblem as it exists now is fine! I like the lighthearted tone of this series, and I like the characters that reside within it. However, a few problems do arise from IntSys’s approach to violence, as occasionally they brush up against darker ideas but (due to similar reasons to the above) they can never commit to them, which neuters their potential impact. This is especially troublesome with regards to characterisation, as the little dudes are a core appeal, so if something is off that could cause problems. In a sense, at points we have severe aesthetic tension.
A fairly useful case study to see how this affects characterisation is with Mozu in Fire Emblem Fates. Mozu is a charming character, a genial country bumpkin with a bit of an edge at times, who has fond memories of her hometown. This lines up with the lighthearted tone of her recruitment paralogue, where (checks notes) her entire village gets massacred by inhuman monsters, with her mother literally being murdered right in front of her, and she joins up with Corrin’s party because there is literally nothing left of her old life. I understand that people who experience extreme trauma do still manage to live meaningful lives, and that IntSys wouldn’t want to have a character who is a barely functional traumatised mess for 90% of the campaign. However, this doesn’t explain the sheer dissonance between the relatively normal and well-adjusted Mozu who quietly remembers her lost loved ones, and the fact that her village got My Lai’d a handful of weeks ago in the game’s timeline. IMO this would work a lot better if there were a few survivors (instead of literally everyone else dying), with Mozu actively choosing to leave her old life to help others instead of being forced to leave by circumstance. This reduction in scope would mitigate the dissonance between the character and what actually happens to her. This is by far the most extreme example in the series, however I’m sure you can think of others. My issue here is not with having ‘normal’ characters, or with them suffering tragedies, my issue is the dissonance between the two when viewing the scope of said tragedies. This is just one way the series wants to get into darker territory, then swiftly backing off instead of delving into the consequences.
This aesthetic restriction also affects the potential impact of dramatic scenes in the main story, limiting what the focus of these scenes can actually be. This little bit will involve heavy spoilers for Genealogy of the Holy War and Spec Ops: The Line (I KNOW THESE GAMES ARE VERY DIFFERENT WITH VERY DIFFERENT INTENDED DEMOGRAPHICS IN VERY DIFFERENT CULTURAL CONTEXTS, SHUT UP). Both have a very important narrative moment around their midpoints, involving fire magic/white phosphorus respectively. In each game, the deaths that occur are utterly horrific when you think about them. In FE4 the focus is on the drama of the plot twist and effects on the characters, with the actual effects of the violence being left to implication. We don’t know if this was the original intent of Kaga and the team, or if this was enforced by various tech- and publisher-related restrictions, but in either case we do not see anything explicit. In any case, in Spec Ops: The Line, the horror and graphic nature of the violence is completely inescapable, and therefore forms the core of the turning point of the story. The specifics of the violence itself are crucial - the game does not work if you don’t see the consequences of the white phosphorus - and it leads beautifully to the complete descent of its endgame. You may be saying “of course you couldn’t show that violence in FE, it’s a kids game” which is true, and in any case the scene in Genealogy is very good, even without showing the violence. I imagine if we get a remake in the year 202X we wouldn’t see anything explicit anyway, partially due to the publisher but also because the scene doesn’t necessarily need it. The point I am trying to make is that the aesthetics form a limitation on what Fire Emblem can explore, narrative space that the series fundamentally cannot reach.
One more thing, and this isn’t really about the games themselves but the impressions leading into them, and how the aesthetics can affect that. Do you guys remember when the intro cutscene of Three Houses was released a few weeks before release? I do, and I also remember the collective shock of the community when seeing the early previews. It was so drastically different to everything that had come before, and consequently was really intriguing - you can see a lot of speculation in the above comments. To clarify, I don’t want to pretend that 3H is some kind of super mature ultra gritty war story, or that blood = good game, but that beginning cutscene gave one hell of a first impression. Even though the game isn’t that much darker than any other FE game, the sheer unexpectedness put people off-kilter in a kinda awesome way. Does the game actually deliver? YMMV, but I think this (and some of the later cutscenes, such as the mid-game Dimitri one) work quite well. Sometimes, a little injection of harsher violence can go a long way.

Conclusion

Frankly I don’t really have a conclusion, sorry. As you can see, there are so many disparate strands, I can’t possibly make one grand thesis statement. Maybe the inherent contradictions of having warfare in a family friendly video game weakens the potential end result? I guess, but I don’t want to imply that what we have now is bad, as it is pretty good tbh. So, uhh…
…
OK, if I had to say something, it’s more about the process of making this. Having to try and think about how violence intersects with a video game you like takes you in a number of different directions. Ultimately, this process was really fulfilling for me, and I would recommend that you do the same (for FE or anything else)! Trying to analyse something you enjoy from a perspective not usually applied is pretty neat. If you guys have any thoughts (on the points above or your own), I’d be very interested to hear them!
Also, if people are interested, I’ll try to make a few case studies. I would focus on Thracia 776, Fates, and Three Houses, as (when thinking on this topic) I found that these games were consistently the most intriguing, with the most interesting relationships to violence. This would probably take a while though, as I am gonna be very busy in June, and I probably won’t have time this month either.

So the day before Mother's Day, my husband (M34) tells me (F35) we are going to do a day trip with our toddler (age 4) to local city and I am so excited but I realize I am also so behind in house chores due to my stressful job and lack of consistent help from my husband.
So I tell him thank you but no trip and that we need to stay home and clean. He says he needs to leave that morning which I already know means he is going to go get flowers. So I offer to make breakfast because I woke up in a great mood.
He comes home with flowers in okay condition, some are wilted and gives me a sweater that he says I asked him to buy me for Mother's Day which I do love the sweater.
So I make pancakes for the family, pancakes with bananas, peanut butter drizzle and whipped cream and I don't have any due to dieting.
My husband asks me what the plans are today and I said I would love for us to get some things done around the house, he has had the ladder out for a couple days so I asked him to take down the Christmas decorations and pick up and also put ladder away and watch our toddler because I would be upstairs with the power tools dismantling our shelves to add in some different shelving and organizing the closet.
All the while I am talking he is working on a 3d print for his friends birthday in a few days.
I go upstairs and 30 minutes in, my toddler is climbing on me and I wait for my husband to collect him and... nothing
So I figure maybe he sent him because ladder plus toddler is not the best combo so I put the power tool away and just organize clothes and he never comes back up to get him, so I call him and he goes "oh yeah just send him down" and I ask if he can just come and get him and he does.
So two hours pass and I go downstairs to check on them and ask about lunch for them and they are watching TV and nothing is done, no dishes from this morning cleaned, no Xmas decorations taken down and I make my toddler a snack and go back upstairs to calm down before calling my husband and asked him why he hasn't cleaned. He said because he thought we stayed home so I could clean and not him. And alI I am doing is working on a room, we don't even use (It's a walk in closet in our bedroom)
I reminded him I said we and asked him to do several things this morning which he said "Oh, I thought that was something you asked me to do a couple weeks ago"
At this point I am just disappointed with the day and over it.
He does do the dishes, takes down the Xmas decorations and cleaned up and now we have to go see my family for dinner which I do not want to because they are very blunt and will want to know why I am such a sad state.
Luckily the toddler falls asleep in the car, so I have the great idea after we find out he is asleep to just give gifts since we are already hour late for dinner and leave and pick up food for the toddler after.
So I drop off the gifts, we leave to go another place to order food and I asked my husband if he can go in and get food and he says no and I ask him he wants anything and he says "No just go just go " I told him I rather not because it's very rude for him to rush me to leave and he says he was only doing that because he had to sneeze....okay....so I said "Just go home please, we can make something there"
So now he is pissy and accuses me of using him as a taxi driver and I just go off...
"This is supposed to be Mother's Day, the one day you treat me special and loved and show me you appreciate me. You got me some wilted flowers and a sweater. Thank you but it's Day, not two gifts Mother stuff"
Now he is pissed and saying I am ungrateful and he shouldn't have gotten me shit and I am the problem and I don't do shit for him. All day he watched our son and cleaned. He also said he didn't know how to make me feel special.
He normally does not curse at me so I said this not you talking. This your dad talking to your mother. (Not my best moment and I will admit it)
Welp that got him all riled up and we didn't talk the rest of the night or next day.
When I finally said I was still upset about yesterday, he goes "Of course, you are." and walks away.
When we finally do talk, he says that he was offended I would rather stay home then do his idea of a day trip to local city and I said the flowers were wilted and he got me a sweater and he cleaned after I told him too. He also said he felt ignored and like I didn't wanna hang out with him because I was organizing the closet. He said he felt unloved.
So am I the asshole?
Quick Q&A
Married for 12 years and together for 15 years
We have had issues with all holidays but even more since our son was born so couple years ago I gave him a list of my likes, links to things to do for your wife for birthday,and things you can do for free to make your spouse happy (he makes six figures but I think gifts can be acts of service as well) but he still says he doesn't know how
We are currently in couples therapy but he seems to try to manipulate the sessions?
Example, he wanted to go on a trip to buy video games stuff and we had already gone out of town the day before to buy video games stuff so I said Our grass at both houses need to be mowed, I think that needs our attention and if he isn't something he can do the he needs to hire help to which he replied That why can't I help him and I don't do anything to help him ever but to the therapist he goes oh I just didn't wanna do the lawn because it had rain the day before and the grass was wet and it was early. I asked him why he wasn't able to tell me that in the moment or revisit for the whole week and half after because I didn't know that and he was still able to mow later that day but only one house. He said he didn't know why he didn't tell me and it was dumb to argue about the lawn but I said the lawn is just a symptom of the greater issue which is lack of communication on both of our parts
Fathers Day and Birthday I used to go all out but I realized I wasn't getting the same energy so I stopped 1st Father Day I asked him what he wanted to do and he said spend the day together I got him and our son matching shirts, classic car pint glasses, socks with our son's face on them, a photo book of them of the photos during the year of them I had taken and I made this favorite foods all day 2nd Father's Day I asked him what he wanted to do and he was spend the day together but he had to work so when he got home from work, I had his favorite pizza, favorite pop, matching shirts with our son, pizza cutter and pizza pan because he had mentioned we didn't have one and photo album of pictures from the last year of him and our son
When I had another disappointing Mothers Day ( I had asked to have 3 hours alone and sent him a link to some earrings and I got no time alone and no earrings but he did get me beautiful flowers and chocolate covered strawberries. We went to the lunch with my family and I asked him to only pay for us and my mom and he ended up dropping like $275 on my whole family for brunch very nice but we had conversations about how he was able to do that but get me no gifts) I think his heart is the right place because he is a good guy
3rd Father's Day I got him a card, beer and a some jerky and he said he didn't feel loved because it wasn't as nice all the other Father's Days he had in the past and he doesn't know how to make sure I have a nice Mother's Day and I asked him he could use the list I gave him or just mimic what I do and customize it to fit his style. He said he would try and that led us to this Mother's Day.

The story about me (36f) and my sister (38f) is long and complicated, so I’ll try to summarise as short as possible, which is long anyway. (English is not my first language - sorry for grammar!)
Sister has some kind of psychological issues she refuse to deal with properly. I suspect BPD, but I may be very wrong. Mom mentioned she may have gotten a diagnosis lately, but didn’t remember if it’s ADHD or Autism. She’s a very extrovert person who thrives when being around people. She only has two moods: ecstatic or depressed. She absolutely worships people, until one day when she cast them down to the status of a devil. Nothing in between.
Her life is cyclical. It starts with finding a new area of interest that she dives head first into. She meets people doing this thing she’s interested in and idolise them. She says it’s her calling in life, and credits her new-found mental wellbeing to this new calling. She invests everything she has into the new thing - time and money, even starts working in the field. Then comes the depression. Every time she claims she has never felt like this before. The people she worshipped are discarded and branded “bad” or “crazy”. She relies on family to get her back on her feet, then find a new area of interest that “saves her”, and the cycle starts anew. Over and over again.
I broke with her almost 5 years ago. She was depressed and lived with our parents again at that time. I was back to school to get a new career after first being burnt out, then losing my job. My daughter was 3 years old. At that time, I realised my marriage was a huge cause of my own depression and that he was cruel to out child and decided to get a divorce. My ex was very abusive, so I was facing the threat of being homeless, jobless and lose custody. My sister ripped me to shreds and told me that my problems were nothing compared to hers, and that my situation did not excuse not being there for her. For context - she called me every day while I was in school and made me “talk her out of” doing things to herself for 2 hours - every day for weeks while refusing therapy or medication. I lost it.
We went NC about 1 year, then to very LC the last 3 years. It’s working kinda good! As long as I don’t get close to her, we can even see each other without drama. The times I’ve slipped up and allowed too much contact has been a disaster, she becomes possessive straight away and demand I apologise to her for what I did.
My daughter (8f) is the only child in the family. Thank goodness my sister hasn’t had any, and doesn’t plan to either. My sister instantly fell in love with her, before she was even born. While she seems to forget daughter’s existence from time to time, she also adores her from time to time. She showers daughter in gifts and attention. When they last hung out, Sister even pretended to love the very same things as Daughter, which at the time was rainbows and unicorns.
Since I broke with Sister, she has met Daughter 3 times. Once overnight 3 years ago, the other 2 times just a couple of hours outside of home. I do invite her here from time to time and say she’s always welcome, but she never does. She doesn’t bother coming here even if she’s in the area. She lives 4 hours away with car, and now claims she can’t travel here because her horse needs her. Good for us, I thought. Less drama.
But last week I found a package in the mail, addressed to Daughter. In it were the gifts Sister missed giving her - Christmas, Birthday and Easter. There was also a card, in which Sister writes how much she loves Daughter. Boxed in with a green marker, she writes that it’s her biggest dream to have Daughter visiting her for a weekend, and that she’s willing to meet us halfway to pick her up. She asked me a year or so ago, but I haven’t heard a word from her this year.
Yesterday, my mom said Sister has been in touch with her too, asking her to bring Daughter to her. No one asked me. Sister still sends Daughter unicorns and rainbows, even though Daughter hasn’t been into them for more than two years. She does not know my Daughter anymore.
Daughter loves her aunt, and often talk about her and makes her drawings and jewelary. She doesn’t know the issues my Sister has. She does not know she is forgotten for weeks, maybe months at a time. I’m scared my Sister will break her heart, or mess her up. I have not asked Daughter if she wants to go, and she didn’t say anything when reading the card either.
I told mom that Sister is always welcome to come here, and that I want her to come and see Daughter at least twice before I’m ok with Daughter going there (with my parents - not alone. Even mom agrees whole heartedly that Daughter should not go there alone). Mom thinks it’s unreasonable, because Sister is afraid of me and won’t come. I have never raised my voice to her. Never said harsh words. Just refused to do what she wants, so I feel it’s unfair to blame me.
What is your take on this? Am I being unreasonable to “force” my sister to come visit us in order to see my daughter?

My mom got scammed by a pro squatter.
He offered to rehab and update one of her apt in exchange for below market rent.
His proof of income on the lease application on was his SSID statement. She did not ask the nature of his disability, but he mentioned a hx of alcohol abuse and rehab- so given his off of intense physical labor and the steep 2nd story apt stairs, she simply assumed it was perhaps a serious health issue related to his liver or stomach due the previous long term alcohol abuse.
Nope! He told the other tenant is was for a knee issue.
When he failed the req background and credit checks, we discovered he had used the key he was provided to determine if the repairs were within his skill set and measure for materials cost estimates to move himself right in!
When he was told he had no lease and wasn’t given authorization to move in and that he needed to vacate immediately he claimed he was too disabled to do that and that his brother had to fly in from across the country to help him move in. The other tenant advised there was no one else present during the move in, and that he was the only person who helped him- and that even than he only helped him with the opposite end of piece of large awkward furniture. Squatter managed to move the rest of his abundant possessions into the apt solo in just a day! Up and and down a flight of stairs dozens of times that my mother can’t even navigate on a good below average pain day, it requires a very rare amazing almost no pain day for her to do the stairs just once. I’m young and reasonably healthy- and it took the help of three friends to help me move out of a similar apt in grad school in the same time frame!
Clearly he’s committing fraud, and even worse, I suspect if my mom has knowingly hired him while he was receiving benefits for being too disabled to work, compensating him with the reduced below market rent- she could have potentially been charged with aiding and abetting his SSID fraud, wage fraud, and tax fraud- because you know a pro squatter would absolutely black mail with reporting her and somehow gaslighting her into believing he was in the clear but she’d go to jail or pay huge fines.

I have appalling neigbours. They are 2 polish people. They came to Australia posing as a couple. Hes 59 shes 50. She also had a daughter from another man, and they had 1 son together. He is never happy, always miserable. Shes the same. So, when tbey first moved in. They were okay.. Well, they were nice to us. So, When he first moved in. She asked if I wanted to go over to gt to know them. I was like okay, sure. I took around a bottle of wine as a gift. And everything was fine. After the guy had a couple drinks. He started acting passive agressive. And soon I found out, that he was in fact a full blown alcoholic. Now, i didnt find that out right away. But,, only, days later. She approached me and said, thanks for the wine. But can you please not buy him any alcohol,? I said oh.. sorry, my bad. Why is he bad on it? She looked at me and said yeah, he hits me. And I cant handle him when hes drunk, he gets all agressive. And acts silly. I apolagised and, with that. I decided to just keep my distance from them. Some tine passed, I was very generous toward them. Even at christmas, they had told me they love football, and tokd ne their favirite football team, so at christmas I bought them a scarf each. She was so thankful she returned the favor with chocolates. Things were fine. Buy, It was clear from the more occuring arguments they were having more issues at home than they made out. As mentioned above, They also had a daughter. She wouod scream all the tine every day at around dinner tine "DONT TOUCH ME" STOP!! She woukd yell. Everyday, it was awful eventually 1 day I heard her crying, "stop touching me" she said sobbingly. I knocked on the door. No answer. I knew they had a problem, but, I didnt kmow it was this bad. He was the 1 with the main issue. Always abusing them. I knew he was probably molesting the daughter. And hitting his partner. Fast forward to about 1 year ago. At thos point. I know for a fact he is an alcoholic. He quit/lost his job. Stopped going to work. She started going and staying out all day. The daughter moved out, And, slowly, he has gotten worse. So, About 6 months ago. He got really angry, mainly because we stopped talking to them. He expressed his anger, but he was hitting her again now . We just ignored it. So, he started yelling anytime we were outside.me, My elderly mother, an amazon delivery, its gotten really bad now. just last week, traffic on our street was banked up, a car tooted thier horn. "SHUT THE F UP!!" He yelled. He must have thought it was us. Again, I even have him screaming on camera, and you can clearly see there was a car eho cut off another out in the street. We would have visitors pull up for holidays etc. Oh f this f that he would shout in polish. Keep in mind, hes screaming around my 80 year old mother ll, our other neigbour whos elderly, the kids behind them. Its like really bad. Now, she has begun wearing sunglasses all the time. The other day while checking the mail, i saw her he really must have hit her hard cos she had a black eye. So, after I left to go out. He walked over to my mother while she was in her garden. And he started dribbling nonsense. And said something to the effect of you stay there, never come to my siide. My mother said I never in my life have come there. Can you just leave me alone? And the whole thing was caught on my survielance camera. Which by the way, I had to get because of him. He was quite aggressive, and my mother being elderly and a survivor of Domestic Violence herself, she git scared and had to go inside. She said, I cant go out there.. keep in mind my mothers garden is her peaceful, safe place.. She doesnt need that. I was LIVID watching this playback too. Cos he waited for me to leave. Soon as I left, he siezed the opportunity like a true coward. But recently things got worse.. his 'partner' who was being abused, has trued to divert his behaviour toward us. She has told him to make noise while we sleep. I know this as I captured her saying it after getting in the car, in english. She said slam the door harder wake them up. Then when they reversed. He yelled like a high schooler some jobberish in our direction. We werent even outside. But NOW, He has now started banging on our fence really loud at 530am every single day. He also dumps the alcohol containers in the recycle bin at the same time. For a while. I could ignore it. I am the son if a veteren. However, My nerves are pretty bad, and i suffer anxiety as my dad was exposed to a nerve agent called agent orange or something. But really, Im really suffering here now. And, I did have cancer. I had to endure all this during my treatment. severe health issues like this need rest and less stress. I have other issues that prevent me from stopping him if things got physical, not to mention hes bigger than me. And I am not the violent type.. and, He is far too unpredictable. So. Can someone please help me? I am worried he will upset my mother to the ppint of a heart attack. Or me. Im a peaceful guy. I never retaliate, i am also a believer in karma. My mother has a bad heart. And heart problems runs in our family. My anxiety was so bad once, i couldnt sleep for 17 days. I swear it was hell on earth. It nearly drove me crazy, literally. But I really need someones advice. I cannot afford to move. If i had $ id move 100%. But I cant even afford to rent somewhere else. And get away from here. I also am a cancer survivor. Id really like to take my drs orders and remIn stress free. But its extrenely hard. If anyone out there has a sollution. I would be indebted to you forever. I just want him to stop.

I've had a shared hosting account with A Small Orange for years. I have a very modest professional blog/portfolio. I've used the email and calendar connected to my domain for professional communications, such as discussing career opportunities, talking to clients, and keeping appointments/calls. I noticed recently that I can no longer interact with my calendar via my local calendar clients (Apple Calendar on Mac or iPhone).
I poked around cPanel, and it seems my calendar was migrated from Horde to Roundcube, as per this message at the top of cPanel:
https://privatebin.support-tools.com/?a2a49ac45405c416#BUeCq7WQmM4H8JMSNtx1S1Sx1tMfdxV5QhGKJsBKM7CD
The cPanel Deprecation Plan documentation says of calendars to: "Use the cpdavd service for CalDAV (calendars) and CardDAV (contacts). During the upgrade to cPanel & WHM version 120, servers that use the CCS plugin will automatically migrate all CCS data to a format compatible with the cpdavd service.”
https://privatebin.support-tools.com/?600eab75cf5bbea0#8dKx7HAZDEEhxijqdNDKrDorxyK61DGse4YjDt5winhQ
The documentation goes on to say: "We strongly recommend that your users only add or delete collections in one of the following interfaces: • cPanel’s Calendars and Contacts Management interface (cPanel » Home » Email » Calendars and Contacts Management) • Webmail’s Calendars and Contacts Management interface (Webmail » Calendars and Contacts Management)”
https://privatebin.support-tools.com/?1e99d5602dbda70c#Ea4J4meCRKFuegAVKb8APcyev29pVWQ3yQFtpmVDWYCj
But when I go to cPanel >> Home >> Email, there is no “Calendars and Contacts Management” option:
https://privatebin.support-tools.com/?9f2423f853b3989e#HPFAeBAQ3J8M6JVLwM5iqV3jUfn3qJEW4FeUieDys7Sc
There is no such option in webmail (Roundcube) either:
https://privatebin.support-tools.com/?89a8d47f30f754ad#tEvPrwDmtoZetL9xmb7nMAESdCCwUoXitWbqYjb3isB
"Calendars and Contacts Management" is supposed to show me the CalDav information I need to set up my calendar on a device:
https://privatebin.support-tools.com/?4fda842a8ac79cb6#7x3enaG5ruJh1dbw4ho9sqMeNWTARU4TofQS5vzWKCun
I've asked A Small Orange support how to set up my calendar on my devices, and they said:

From the case details, I understand your concern regarding the calendar query. However, I would like to inform you that the calendar invite will not work on shared server which is causing the issue.
Heads up, you will need to opt for VPS Hosting plan in order to make use of calendar invite feature. Here is the link to check the VPS Hosting plans: https://customers.asmallorange.com/index.php?rp=/store/fully-managed-vps
Please let us know if you have further questions or queries. We are happy to help!

Seems like they've removed the functionality I've had for years that allowed me to use local calendar clients to manage my calendar. Does anyone know if there's a work-around that I'm missing to get it to work without having to pay more for a private server, or if I were to migrate my website over to another shared hosting service, can I expect to be able to manage my calendar on local clients like Apple Mail?
It seems so trivial — and web hosting services don't really talk about their calendar features — but I'd like to have basic calendar functionality (accept meeting invites, check my agenda, etc) from the comfort of my local calendar client (rather than only through the Roundcube webmail client), as I have for years.
Any help is appreciated!

Album / Proof
For your consideration an assortment of premium wares. Only the finest metals on the market. There's gold & silver big and small, even one with all of the above! Shiny things in exchange for coin of the realm, or crypto #debanked.

• Platinum 5 oz fortuna (2) $6,000
• Palladium 1 oz fortuna $1,170
• Athena & Pegasus $1,700
• 2008 Aztec Calendar Kilo 2nd year 1,000 mintage $2,000
• 2020 Aztec Calendar Kilo low 250 mintage $2,100
• Britannia 10 oz bar lower corner toning in capsule 290
• Fortuna Silver Kilo $1,090
• Ukraine Mint Eneida 1200 mintage gold gilding $2,200
• 1921 MS63 NGC gold Centenario first year issue 180,000 mintage $6,300
• Cthulhu Silver Rounds 1 OZ(8) Apmex packaging and capsule $44/per
• Singapore Mint Merlion 8,000 mintage 1 OZ $170
• Fortuna 10oz silver bar $375
• Covid Bar (1) $310 only mask remains
• Antique Sterling Royal Carriage Hallmarked $500 very cool as coach bag charm
• BMW Master Mechanic Ring 30 year service 10kt $650 15g
• Taxco Hector Aguilar Coro Antique Bracelet 7in Taller Borda $400
• Elephant pendant sterling silver $50
• Siam Bracelet 7in large links sterling $40
• Mexican Silver Coins Ley .72 122 grams $95 or trade for Barbers, walking liberty etc. photos in album
• Assorted US 90% 48 grams plus war nickels $50 or trade for half dollars, Morgan liberty head etc.

Details: Located in Socal area, feedback available on other seller platforms; will verify IRL ID. Like something; PM me. Prices in USD accurate for 48 hrs. Item available until [SOLD]. May meet in person. Ask for photos/information. Prices compared to sold listings, do let me know if you have better information.
Shipping: Shipping and insurance at buyers cost, I will will get you a quote for UPS or USPS through Pirateship. First class mail and padded flat rate envelope would be most inexpensive $5-$10. One business day for shipping, I will get your package out as soon as possible contingent on payment method used. I assume responsibility for item until handed to shipper. Shipping options arrangements dependent on feedback. Tracking only provided for conflict resolution or at delivery; do message me if you'd like a shipping update.
Payment: (No notes / or comments) Zelle, Paypal FF, Wire, ACH, Check, Money Order, Cashiers Check, Crypto from CEX. Open to using middleman at buyers expense.

Good morning.
TL;DR: I paid a contractor £1982.25 to handle property maintenance and gardening work on a rental property. The contractor repeatedly assured me that the work was complete or nearly complete, but property inspections and subsequent photo evidence contradicted these claims. Despite multiple excuses from the contractor, ranging from personal injuries to subcontractor issues, the work was never completed. After attempting various methods of communication without success, the contractor has become unresponsive. He has not finished the work, yet still holds my money, and I am now considering my options for recourse.
I have used a guy ("L") to do some garden works. Recommended by a work colleague he was personable and punctual when I used him for some gardening work when I had COVID. Since he told me that he did property maintenance and gardening and I was pleased with his work thus far, I booked him to do some work on my old house which I now rent out in Surrey; repainting some old water damage after a repair and replace an old brown wooden back door showing signs of wear and rot for a new uPVC one. He said yes and needed money for the work as the door was a large lump of the cost. As it was March 2023 I gladly paid him the whole sum (£1982.25) and on the 26th July he said that all the works had been done and just needed to finish the door but was having access issues with tenent but due to complete the works on the Saturday. All good. I asked him about the £300 of gardening, he said he would come over in August. Fine.
L then said that he was having mechanical issues with his van and could not attend the gardening. Me, being understanding, said get the van fixed and let's sort another date when he's back on the road. The property inspection report done by the estate agent came through on 23rd August and my wife noticed that in the photos the back door had not been completed. In fact, there was no evidence of any of the work having been done. I was suspicious that the works had not in fact been done.
I asked my property management company and they suggested that it was unlikely to show his work in the photos, since the inspection happened in June/early July time because the works were done after the date of the property report. It was possible, they suggested, that the report was sent was after the works had been completed but the inspection was done before that was why the photos didn't match what I was being told. Probably.
The property management company / estate agent I pay for my fully managed property confirmed this might have been the case but I was still suspicious myself and unsure. I attempted to reach out to him using WhatsApp on the 22nd January, our usual line of communication, but no response.
I learnt on 4th February from the cleaner at work who knows him and recommended him in the first place that he had been caught cheating on his girlfriend on Christmas day and was attacked by her with a broken bottle and now has an arm injury preventing him from working again. It was all in the news. There is an article in the newspaper about the event. She also told me that he had a new phone number which she gave me. She also told me that he had also been drinking heavily since his mother had been diagnosed with cancer last year and she was worried the he had turned into "a bit of a deadbeat". I was concerned so messaged him on both numbers I now had.
He responded on the same day on the new number only, saying that he had been embarrassed to tell me that he had not completed.
He said he was sorry and could we book in the work to get done. I replied that, as long as the work gets done on my rented house which is my main concern (as someone else is living there and paying for the house to be kept in good order), we can then talk about the £300 of gardening afterwards but I also asked for photos of the work when it was finally completed.
On 5th February we agreed for him to complete the work on the 14th February.
My cleaner friend, now mortified with him too, called him and he assured her that all the work had been done. I messaged him the following week to say I was thrilled and asked for the photos. Of course I trusted but wanted to verify for myself.
I asked for the photos on the 19th February of the works that had taken place; he replied that he had gotten sepsis and had been in hospital and just got home and he had just called "the guy" he sent out to do the works and he had not done it and he was "fuming". That he had "seized trading" [sic] but wanted to make sure "this was all sorted" and "all I can do is apologise" and hope that I would understand and had booked in Saturday to give him recovery time, and then told me Tuesday, which then became the following Saturday.
He assured me that "his guy" was now rebooked the Sunday 25th February 12pm and he would personally make sure it was done. I said this would have to be the last time as I need the work done and he had now had enough time and chances and was not telling me every time he had failed to get the work done. I asked for the photos on the 26th. He replied that the guy he sent to do the works didn't show up and "he was fuming" and was going to personally oversee that the work was done. He was now appearing to me to be simply more than just unlucky. He assured me that the Sunday he would get the work done. This would be 4th March.
I chased for photos 4th March. No response. I chased on 6th March via WhatsApp. No response. The next property inspection report was sent to me on the 8th March it is clear that there has been no works done in the photos and I had reason to believe that he has not completed any of the work and still has my money. In fact, I suspect that he has no intention of doing the work at all and simply keeping the money.
On the 14th March I asked for his contact details to write to him formally within 7 days. No response.
On March 20th I looked up his email which had the original quote on it and wrote him a letter and sent that, with his original quote asking for my money back plus 8% per annum calculated to 29th March 2024 for £2140.83 for additional inconvenience and expenses I have incurred in chasing for my money back for a year now. I also sent a hard copy of the letter to his address by recorded post (which got signed for) asking for the same and needed a response by 2nd April.
No response.
I don't know what to do now. I hear from my cleaner friend that he's moved house and ghosted everyone. I checked his invoice, he is not a LTD. He's in the wind. He's not responding to letters or emails or WhatsApps and he has around £2000 of my money and simply kept it.
I've tried renegotiating the works multiple times over the last year, I've tried contacting him and now he's just stopped replying. I think I've been reasonable and tried my hardest to make it work out and keep in touch but I just want my money back.
Have I lost my money or is there anything else I can do now? What are my next steps?

I don't really no where to start. I feel I've lost myself, consumed with anxiety and guilt and fear and regret and I fear, this new fear, that it's going to be the end of me if I don't start to get it out in some way, shape or form.
I guess I'll begin at the beginning...
​
I had a difficult childhood with fairly neglectful parents. A mother who openly expressed she never felt she really stepped into her mom shoes until she gave birth to my younger sister, who is three years younger than me. She is my only sibling. My mother told me when I was a kid that she "had to love me", but when my sister came around "she was finally a mother and over the moon", or simply "I always always wanted a girl". I'm not sure if this could be attributed to Post-partum depression, not that she ever researched that or was daignosed with it. That's probably just me trying to pardon my mother or something to the effect. She was 17 when she had me and I'm sure times were different then, my parents both were raised religious, father christian, mother mormon. Maybe their guilt. I ask myself why they brought me into this world if I wasn't wanted to begin with. Or, give me up for adoption to a set of guardians that would have loved me better. I know I was an accident and that's not what gets me down, I get that life be lifing and what happened happened. My difficulties stem from the feeling that my presence never gave my mother any sense of purpose, responsibility or love, or concern. She was emotionally unavailable to me virtually my entire life and I feel like that caused many issues later in my life and how I perceive myself and what I deserve. Coupled with the fact that my neglect met such extremes that I am frankly shocked that I was never picked up by child care services, maybe things were different in the 90's. I'm not sure, I was just a child then.
Much of my upbringing I didn't receive a lot of the things most people would consider essential. As a baby my crib was the sock drawer, then I grew large enough to have a closet, then slept on the floor of a walk-in closet, then I had a single bed from what I recall for maybe a year or maybe two years and I remember feeling metal springs poke me in the my ribs and I recall it being uncomfortable enough for me to move back to sleeping on the floor next to the ratty old used mattress my father found from who knows where. I remember feeling like I had to keep that secret, that the mattress they gave me was uncomfortable enough for me to sneak sleeping on the floor next to it. I think I was really afraid as coming across as ungrateful. My father came from a third world country, so the "gratefullness issue" was address frequently by my mom because "I don't have it even half as bad as what my father had to endure. And she was probably right. But it just silenced me ultimately, didn't put things into a mature context for me. I just learned that I can't complain about anything ever. Anyway, that trend didn't really change when I grew older. grade 9-10 I was sleeping on the living room couch so my sister could have privacy and a bedroom to exist in for herself - which I realize is important for an individual so I encouraged her to have the bedroom. Although I figured my parents expected me to do this for my sister regardless. I was okay with making sacrfices for those I love, it was instilled in me from a very very young age.
I do feel like my father took advantage of me in the form of labour as well, having to do custodial work with my father from 10pm to 3am, at two highschools I believe he was contracted, at that young age I honestly enjoyed just spending time with my father I think, working alongside him. When I was in grade 2 and 3 I had garbage bag duty for all the students bathrooms, and I remember loving snapping the bags open by rushing air into the bag and making it blow up like a baloon. I remember the scary unlit shadowy hallways that I couldn't perceive the ends of. No bodies to see, it felt eerie but exciting in a way - like it was a whole different world.
School was a different experience for me. It was very stressful, my parents had to move a few times a year because they would dodge rent or just generally be selfish with their dual income. They loved to party hard on the weekends. I remember wondering why my father did this to himself all the time. Hoping that we could spend quality time on a saturday, but he wouldnt get out of bed until just before dinner. I didn't really understand hangovers or alcoholism and how it meant our plans would get cancelled. I think I remember trying to wrap my head around willful self-poisoning for entertainment and how could that be more enjoyable then spending time with your son? I couldn't tell my mother why I was so sad about it. Why I didn't want to move again and again and again. Why I found it so difficult to make new friends everytime I had to switch schools. Why I couldn't just do one single full school year with one class of students. It was so hard and at the time, I didn't know anything different. It was so hard to make friends and I think it created this approach to making a "new family" of friends when I became a teenager and young adult.
​
I remember always wanting to be a "good kid". The "best kid" for my parents. I feel like my parents attached this moniker to me that made things harder for me to mature into a rounded adult later in life. My parents always flaunted me as this point of accomplishment, the accomplishment that I was "so extremely well behaved". I would strive to be super polite, and a good host, try to help out when my parents had their friends over, literally fill their cups when the opportunity presented themselves. I think I did this because I must have made the conclusion that if I was quiet, super polite, helpful and useful then I had value. That I could be loved. That I could earn this love from my parents through acts of service.
I remember feeling like my sister and I had extremely different experiences growing up. When my parents were at work I took care of her, cleaned and cooked. one time my sister told my mom to eff off when she was 5 and I was 8. My mind was blown. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that she had the bravery and courage to defy my mother. Looking back, my sister was just mirroring the language she learned from my parents from whenever they fought. I remembering seriously worrying and getting scared that my father was going to belt her, or use the coat hanger, which was his preference with me. I feel like my mom was always checked out and I'm hurt that she allowed my father to take his rage out on me. That my mom could care less about me being beat, but never my sibling. It was very confusing and difficult for me to process. Not that I really processed it much as a kid. I honestly just wanted to be loved and be the best child possible. Honestly though, 'm seriously so glad that my sister was spared all of that complete non-sense. I don't wish that on anyone in the world. There were some punishments where he would walk in and tell me to pull my pants down without explanation. I have memories of tearing up and saying I didn't know why this was happening, asking what I did wrong and he would just remind me that if I resisted then I would get it worse and to hurry up and get ready. My father has since apologized. I think it is how he was raised. I didn't know what to say in response, but I told him I loved him and it's in the past. But I don't know if I was being honest when I said that. My mother would still gaslight me to this day if any of this became topic of discussion, not that I'm guessing. A year ago she told me that much of my pained memories were false and this never happened. My father on the other hand typically stays pensive and unchallenging.
It seems so damned crazy writing all of this out, it feels like a heartbreaking novel and not my life at all. But it was and is my life. I have difficulties opening up and expressing my feelings and advocating for myself when the moments are true and appropriate to do so. I know it's the healthier way to communicate, but I was literally taught to stay quiet and be useful. Fast forward 20-25 years and I'm going to be 35 and I feel like just ending it all. Every year my birthday passes and I'll get a text from my family happy birthday. But they know I'm in a difficult place, they know I miss them, they know I love them and forgive them, I try the high road whenever I can but I just don't see the point anymore. they won't celebrate my life and existence, but they'll throw family gatherings for each other, birthdays, christmas, fathers day and mothers day.
On that note, another mother's day has recently passed and my mother never invited me over, I texted my father three weeks in advance in hopes of securing a time to come over and celebrate my mothers life with my family as a family. I felt particularly stung this mother's day when they celebrated and didn't text or call to invite me over. I live in the same small town so it's easy to hop over. I literally live three blocks away.
Anyway, my mother was diagnosed with cancer over christmas this year and I have been worrying for my mother ever since and thinking about my life with her and the mortal coil and the finite mount of time I may have with her. I feel like there is a large empty part in my heart that wishes my mother and I could go grab a coffee together. She can show me her ipad app art that she has been really excited about for a couple years now. She loves showing off her digital art and I love seeing her joy and how proud she is about her art. I just don't know why she couldn't feel the same for me, her only son. Maybe I'm just a her dissapointment.
I dropped out of highschool and left the family home when I was 16. I just couldn't work for my dad during the night AND go to highschool AND socialize. Something had to give. Unfortunately it was highschool and my parents didn't really care about that at all. They were just... fine with it. they supported my sister through college and she was fortunately able to graduate with a veterinary degree of sorts. she still lives with them now as she pays off her student debt, but I left and travelled and worked on music for over a decade so I admit that I was entirely out of the family picture for some time. But as I get older, not wanting to repeat the mistakes of my parents I fear that that is precisely what's been creeping up in my life.
five years ago I met the absolute most wonderful human being and I am so lucky to have my partner in my life. She and I are engaged now and set to be married. I hoped that the news would overwhelm my parents with excitement and joy. Maybe a facebook post about their son, share some family pictures or something. But they did nothing at all. I think they showed off pictures of the trip to Mexico that week instead.
I just don't really understand how I'm this unworthy of their love and unfortunately now I'm realizing that illusion that I am unworthy has infected my relationship with my fiance. I love her so much but when I can't fix everything in her life I feel like I am the failure and the guilt overhelms me so much and the guilt is such a strong motivator for me, and it usually motivates me into becoming the biggest doormat in the world. I've never worked harder for a relationship or invested this much energy. I feel she deserves it. But I don't advocate for myself. So I build up resentment. Like I clean the house constantly and work and help bail out of her bad spending habits and cover her rent without question and this and that. To be clear, she doesn't take advantage of me and that's not how I feel about it. But I do let this annoyance build up inside of me because I don't know how to communicate my feelings in a healthy way. I'm scared I'll lose the person if I speak up, or I'll be gaslit. Again, that's not my partner that gaslights. That's just generally how I feel I'll be treated if I open up with people. It all goes back to my childhood. It's affected every friendship and work relationship I've had since.
When I was 20-ish, 15 years years ago I did the classic, "seek the relationship that most comfortably fits into the patterns you experienced with your parents". And so I trapped myself in a horrific and extremely damaging relationship with a girl I'll call K. She has undiagnosed bipolaBPD, she would never seek help but self-medicate. She ended up in the hospital maybe four times for self-harming and this where she was considered to have these diseases by a few doctors on different occasions. Anway, it turned into a relationship of abuse and it wasn't exactly new territory for me. I was ashamed in that 8 year relationship. I wanted out so bad, but she would threaten to unalive everytime I tried to get away. Of course, some weeks would go by and i would get my hair pulled out of my scalp, a knife waving in the air in front of my face, spat in the face, kicked, punched, bit, a pot of freshly boiled ramen soup thrown in my face and eyes. What's worse is that I seeked police intervention on multiple occasions. Every single time the police visited, they talked me out of pressing charges, asking me " well if she doesn't have any place to go, then do you have a place you can stay at, or the shelter?". twice they talked me out of a restraining order, that legal proceedings would take forever. Adn de-escalting me from wanting to take measures to ensure my safety because she may end up on the street as a result. To this day, I absolutely wish I advocated for myself here and pushed for a restraining order. I'm so mad at myself for not doing so.
Unfortunately, fast forward a couple years into that relationship and one evening everything would finally hit the fan. I told her to never touch me again and I absolutely meant it. she had just yanked out the largest chunk of my hair to date, to the point where my scalp was bleeding and I could even see epidermal matter still attached to the folicle ends that were in her clenched fingers. My head bled a bit and I pushed her off of me. Telling her that I needed to leave, that I was walking to my secure jam space just a 10 minute walk away. It had a leather couch in a cold concrete basement, but hey at least I would be safe for the night and I could play my drums and try and blow off this anxiety and fear in a way that was safe albeit very noisy.
She hated that I wanted to leave and convinced herself I would never return. To be fair, that was the energy I had. I never wanted to see her face again and have her name on my lips after that night. So her tactic was simple, to threaten me with calling the cops and tell them that I violently pushed her. I called her bluff and said "go ahead and I will just tell them everything you've done - yet again. All I am doing is going to the space to sleep, I said, maybe play drums." She called the cops and told them she was pushed into a wall, and she felt very unsafe. Which yes, I did push her off me when she attacked me. In the past, I tried various tactics, to run away didn't work, she just always chased me down. Or sometimes I would just sit there while she was violent against me and I just "dissapeared" kind of like how I would when my dad used his coat hanger. This time, I just pushed her off of me, I was done with the relationship at that point and we both knew it. Anyway, she called the police, they arrived and when questioned I told them that I pushed her off of me in self-defence. I was drinking that night and it didn't help my case as I was arrested without question that evening and I was charged on the spot without question with domestic assault. It devasted me. I asked the police how this could happen lawfully. That she is an abuser and there is a history of this multiple times. That I've requested a restraining order. They explained that in quebec the laws are a little different and in the case domestic cases, if there is a male aggressor against a female, then the male is automatically charged to the fullest extent. I was absolutelyu devasted by this. I can't tell you the amount of fear and anger I felt in that jail cell that night.
I feel so incredibly betrayed by the justice system, keep in mind, this is law that from what I understand is only in Quebec, I was there for music at the time with an old friend whom I am no longer in contact with. I don't think the rest of the country operates under law in this way. Now I appreciate that they are vigilant about woman abuse victims, but the law shouldn't be this absurdly biased. It just doesnt feel just and fair to me. Covert abusers shouldn't be able to take advantage of the justice system in this way, but it happens.
It was an awful experience, I was homeless for a couple months afterward, not allowed to retrieve my belongings, so I lost all of my life "crap" that I had built up, years of hardwork and investment. I mention this because I realize later in life that I have intense collecting behaviour. maybe as a self-soothing behaviour. But I love building up collections of my hobby stuff as I have many and I feel they keep me regulated and it's a form of therapy for me. In any case, I lost everything when I left that whole situation. It sucks, although ultimately it's clearly best that I got out of that dreadful circumstance. I flew across the country to my hometown and to be closer to my family and old friends from highschool. It's quite a small town mind you.
Unfortunately, my classic tendency to hide and not advocate for myself created an opportunity for my abusive ex. A year following those events, despite me assuring her that I had to block her because I flew away to start a new life provinces away. That I wished her the best. That I even promised I would never tell a soul what she did to me. Not to mention that unfortunately we live in a society where nobody really has an ounce of sympathy for a male abuse victim. I had every intention to keep that promise, but she couldn't trust me ultimately. I think her logic was maybe to just beat her ex to "the punch". Kill or be killed or something like that. I don't live my life like that so I don't really know what her plan was. But she made a bunch of posts on various social media platforms for all of our mutual friends, music friends, coworkers etc. that the relationship was over and she was free. That she got out of a cycle of abuse and she was ready to start a new chapter of her life. She never used my name, just that she was glad she got away from her toxic and abusive ex once and for all.
It was exactly like that night a year prior, she threatened me with this outcome she could design for me, and I called her on her bluff by saying I was still going to block her and I can't control what she does with her life or how she conducts herself, but that I was out and to never contact me ever again. She made me regret that decision.
The posts she made that day got so many likes and support from so many of our mutual friends, even musician mates that were closer to me than her, and it absolutely destroyed me, not just internally but socially. I no longer make music anymore and it hurts to go outside into the world because it feels like everybody sees me as this monster. And still I don't have a voice to inform anyone otherwise - except my family and my fiance. I have no friends anymore. They all left my life with the belief that I did all of these horrible and awful things.
I just don't trust people anymore as a result and it's just caused me to become extremely bitter and depressed. I ruminate on the past, maybe in attempts to fix the past so I can move on. So I could do better, so I don't have to punish myself for my mistakes in the past. But it just reopens every emotional wound I have and they never get a chance to heal. That was maybe 7 years ago now and I'm still replaying these events in my head every single morning for about 1 - 2 hrs. Then I go completely numb for the majority of the rest of the day, shallow breathing, and the mildest sadness that mascarades as fatigue and disinterest.
There are some days where I seriously fear for the future and I just feel like every cruel soul will inherit this earth and that's the future, they built this world of suffering and they deserve to inherit it. Their toxic flag staked so deep into the earth in reclamation. The future isn't holding any seats for people like us. I'm so heartbroken and defeated. I feel like white-wolfing my fiance because she deserves better than this traumatized person that hides from the world. I feel like giving her my collection of collections so she can sell it all off and pay off her 10k of credit debt, then with this act of kindness I can go out not feeling like a guilt-ridden defeated loser. And leave on a high note.
When I'm alone, I get trapped in these ruminating cycles and it's the angriest I ever get. It's reached the point where I feel like I am actually reliving all this past trauma every morning and I can't do it anymore. I just feel like I am so at the end of whatever this ride was.
I don't have any friends anymore and everyone but my fiance thinks I am a monster and it's just unbearable.
I just don't even know. I am even afraid that someone will read this post and suss through all of this and make the connection. Then I'll get another new email or random throwaway account with an insta message that says "I told you you would never be able to get over me. You can move on, but you will never be able to erase the past. Never truly. You know where to find me."
It's haunting and it's poisonous. I just feel haunted and poisoned and I don't know if there is a snake oil potent enough or antitode true enough to get me back to the generous, lighthearted, energetic kid I once was.
To whoever was willing to read through all of this, thank you for hearing me out. I don't know what advice I am even asking for here. I'm hoping just speaking this out into the world in some way can alleviate this misery. I don't know.

So here’s a breakdown for an interesting scenario I find myself in:
My business signed an agreement for a large shipping company to ship goods. This was during Covid (2021) and was for a decent amount of money (~$12k).
I paid the bill as agreed via wire transfer. A few days later, the company debited my account (I did not authorize this second debit, but they had my info on file presumably from the first). I reach out about the matter and they say it as an error via accounting on their part and they send an electronic refund a week or so later.
Fast forward 2 years to 2023. I’m contacted by the company saying I still owe the $12k bill. I send them the email thread and go back and forth multiple times as they look at the email thread history. Finally they ageee it was paid twice, but then they say they actually refunded me twice- the second time with a check that was cashed 6 months after the debt was paid (I did verify this amount was indeed cashed via a check from the company at that time, but I had assumed it was for something else- there are a lot of transactions in my business).
I say hey, first off I don’t agree that’s what happened/how do I know it’s for that invoice?Second; the money is spent and i don’t have it anymore anyways. Third: you can’t send someone money then ask for it back years later, and Fourth: if you do, you certainly can’t use that as a way to reopen a paid invoice from years ago, right? For example: Even if what they say is true and the money is legally due, it’s not due as part of an unpaid invoice, right? (ie it’s not a collections issue for a bad debt, it’s a banking error involving different laws altogether, right?).
After a few emails, the company passes this issue off to several higher ups within their company. I keep the communication open with them and always respond (I have perfect credit and value it).
It takes literally months of back and forth. Finally I get an email essentially saying they’ve passed the issue off to their internal legal team and will let me know how they proceed and if I owe anything.
More months go by. Get one more email from a new contact at the company and I forward the last thread to this new contact about how it’s been sent to legal. No response.
Few more months go by and I’m contacted by an outside collections agency for the full $12k citing an unpaid invoice.
A few questions: 1) What are my chances of avoiding this payment? 2) Is it legal for them to reopen a paid invoice and send it to collections by wrongly issuing a refund check?
FWIW im in CA, but I’d have to go back and read the contract to see what State it’s enforceable in. Original invoice was Jan 2021 and I have sent via certified mail that I do not ageee with the debt and that it was paid (along with proof of the original wire transfer and written confirmation of the receipt of funds from the accountant at the company).
Thanks for any help or insights you have!
TLDR: -Paid a bill for $12k to a company. -Company then debited me an additional 12k on accident. -company refunded me $12k a week later - months after this, the company claims they refunded me another $12k via mailing a check to me (I have not confirmed this to them, but the money is in my account) - they are now sending me to collections for the original invoice

Hi relationship_advice,
Some key points before you read; I moved to Orlando, FL from Washington state in February of 2023. It was closer to family and I had a lot of friends here. I truly love it here. I’m convinced there is something mentally not-okay with my mother and we’ve had a hot/cold relationship for years. My dad divorced her and got re-married to her and these days just puts up with it. We used to have a significantly better relationship but this has frankly tarnished all of that and he just puts up with it. My parents are real-estate investors in the Orlando area and generally buy some of terrible homes in even worse areas and somehow find renters. They act like they’re mansions but they truly are terrible. I’m 28 years old.
When I initially moved here, I got my own apartment in a great suburb of Orlando. My parents helped me move and were really excited for me to get back on this coast. At some point during my residency, my parents brought up a notion to attempt to “help” me by buying me a house. My credit is shot and there is no way I qualify for a conventional mortgage. Maybe before the big short but certainly not in today’s housing climate. I didn’t actively reach out to them for this sort of assistance but I toyed with the idea.
Given the fact that they are real-estate investors, their interest rate was going to be somewhere in the realm of 7%. That left me with a max value of about a $400,000 house in order to be comfortable with the payment. Daily my mom would send me listings to some of the shittiest homes I’ve ever seen and get upset when I say I don’t like it. That would generally be when I would cut off the conversation after I’m told I’m “ungrateful”. Mind you they haven’t even done anything yet.
Months pass and I find a decent townhome in a location that I’ve always wanted to live in. It’s a townhome that has 2beds, 2baths and was about $380K. In an effort to make my parents happy and not be so “ungrateful” I agreed that they can put an offer on it. Mind you this house is one that I would likely never buy with my own money, but given the interest rate I sort of had to stick with it.
The agreement was that they would put down $100K for the house, I pay the full escrow (mortgage payment, PMI, taxes and HOA dues) and, when it comes time to sell, I would get every dollar above the selling price. It was an enticing deal to get some equity that I otherwise wouldn’t get living in an apartment complex. This was all something that was verbally discussed and I can’t find any physical copy of this being said either over text or another medium. I very well could not see a dime out of this and have no recourse in the eyes of the law as far as I know.
I broke my least and move in came in October of 2023 which also happened to be when I met my beautiful and loving girlfriend who I am extremely happy with. My parents came over in December for Christmas and I actually had my girlfriend stay in my house while my parents were in town so we can all do stuff together. I thought it went well. My parents met her family, my friends and we generally had a great time.
That apparently wasn’t their idea of the week and they are super upset that my girlfriend basically lives here. Text exchanges with my mother generally result in me being called a disgrace, ungrateful, disrespectful, etc.
At the end of the day this is all stemming from the fact that I got a girlfriend, they apparently don’t like her, are losing control of me and now we’re both suffering navigating business and family. It’s taking a huge toll on me to the point where I woke up today and cried after receiving another demeaning text from my mother. That same person they hate was there to comfort me.
How should I navigate this? Every time I try to talk about it it just turns into an attack where she says some terrible things about me and my partner. Is it healthier for me to just cut ties? I’m at a loss. Being worried about my living situation everyday is really taking a toll at this point and I don’t have it in me to start another argument. Almost daily now I get random texts at random hours of the day with her picking a fight. There is no clear path to a cordial conversation.
Your guidance is appreciated.

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

I am not one for negative reviews as I typically feel if I have a bad experience, it is just a bad day. However, this company has shown a pattern of poor care for its customers as well as lack of support in general. I opened my first checking account with them when I was 14 years old, and am now 26. I have had a personal checking and savings account with them for the last 10 years and opened a credit card with them 2 years ago. I have since decided that this is not the bank for me mainly due to a complete lack of customer service.
First of all, this bank began charging me maintenance fees on my checking account of nowhere a few months ago, so I tried to call. I sat on the phone punching #s for hours trying to get a human on the phone to see why this was. Not possible. So I visited a branch and they treated me like I was unimportant and could figure out my problems myself and was told to “go find the answer on google.” Eventually a banker met with me who said that since I was no longer a “student” I would be charged maintenance fees. Understandable, except I am a student. I pulled up my transcript and everything for this guy and he continued to tell me his hands were tied and he could not help. Fine, but kind of annoying.
So I get a credit card with bank of america, my first credit card mind you, and I’m enjoying earning rewards on my card and gaining cash back. I am person who prefers simplicity so I immediately set up autodraft/autopay to pay the statement balance each month. However for my first payment they drafted the statement amount twice from my BofA checking account. Not cool. I did not have that much in my checking account. Overdraft fee. I try calling to get help, again on the phone for multiple hours and unable to speak with a human. I go to a branch (different than the one in my last experience) where I am again told to call customer service or “use Erica, their AI chatbot,” so I leave and go to a different branch where someone finally helps me, but still is unable to refund the double charge OR the overdraft fee. They said, “it will just remain on your credit card as a statement credit so you won’t have to pay the next one.” Fine, but really annoying.
So Im a few months out from this I am getting married and we decided to bank with Chase (who is amazing on the customer service side by the way). I now have a checking account with Chase that is my main account, so I want to autodraft/autopay my BofA credit card with my chase checking account. Well, BofA makes that nearly impossible. I cannot figure out how to have BofA draft the exact statement balance due each month from my checking account automatically. I spend a few hours on google/reddit/etc trying to figure it out, which should not be hard considering I work with computers every day. However, I do not find a solution so I travel to a new BofA branch (not one I have been to before) and explain the situation that I would like to set up autodraft from a Chase checking acct. They tell me they cannot help with credit cards in the bank and I need to call customer service. Not falling for that again. So I go to ANOTHER new BofA branch that I have never been to and ask the same question. One lady does help me and says all I have to do is go to Chase bank to have them set this up because it is a problem on their end. So I do that. And Chase tells me that BofA will not share info with other banks to allow them to see amount due through the Chase bill pay feature. So I give up
A month later I have some free time and I am in a different city so I schedule an appointment with a BofA banker to see if we can revisit the credit card issue. I am helped! He calls customer service himself with me there, somehow gets a human on the line in only 5 minutes, and they send me an email how to setup my Chase checking acct as a “pay from account.” However these instructions do not work because for some reason my account is not eligible to be set up online and I must mail a voided check to bank of america headquarters before they can consider my account for enrollment. So I ask the banker if I have to use this BofA credit card to maintain it and he tells me he’s pretty sure I will receive notice prior to an closing of my credit cards, contrary to what redditors have shared, so I take his word for it and try to set up Autopay. Well I give up again.
So a few days later I am tired of this bank and decide to close my accounts and switch everything to chase. I made an appointment at ANOTHER new branch, so I am well travelled to the Bank of America Branches within South Carolina/North Carolina. I tell the banker I am closing and leaving BofA, she asks why, I tell her that their customer service is not very good and that bankers have little-to-no power to help with hardly anything an everyday customer may need. She tries to convince me to stay. I say no. I get her to close my checking and savings account and she tells me they can give me cash (the remaining balances in these accounts). I run my credit card scenario by her in a last ditch effort to get it figured out, but she cant help, and another banker overhears us talking, says “I am really good with credit card stuff, let me help you.” So I go to his office, explain everything, and he says he cant help me. Shocker. So I take my account closure statements across the foyer of the BofA branch and hand them to the teller to finally cash out and leave this place forever. He cannot accept my withdrawal. Somehow in the time between my talks with the first banker and the time I reach the teller 15 feet away their computer system has gone down. The teller informs me that the accounts have already been closed so there is no way to get the money out at the moment. All 4 branch bankers are behind the counter with him running through how they can service me and you know what their solution was? “Give us a call back every few hours to see if we have figured out a solution.” NO. I will NOT ever try to call BofA again. I am giving you my phone number to call ME once you have a solution. So I leave, and receive a call later that day because the teller tells me they are closing soon and he needs me to return to discuss my options. I drive back to the branch. He tells me I have 2 options: 1) have the checks mailed to me once BofA figures out how to solve this issue Or 2) come back first thing in the morning to follow up and hopefully figure it out. I am not going to trust BofA to figure out anything at this point so I decide I am going to return in the morning, and every day after until they fix this . At the moment they have no solutions, so I will see if they dreamt some up overnight tomorrow! I will update again as the story unfolds
TLDR: Bank of America is absolute Trash

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]

https://mises.org/mises-daily/society-without-state
In attempting to outline how a “society without a state” — that is, an anarchist society — might function successfully, I would first like to defuse two common but mistaken criticisms of this approach. First, is the argument that in providing for such defense or protection services as courts, police, or even law itself, I am simply smuggling the state back into society in another form, and that therefore the system I am both analyzing and advocating is not “really” anarchism. This sort of criticism can only involve us in an endless and arid dispute over semantics. Let me say from the beginning that I define the state as that institution which possesses one or both (almost always both) of the following properties: (1) it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as “taxation”; and (2) it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service (police and courts) over a given territorial area. An institution not possessing either of these properties is not and cannot be, in accordance with my definition, a state. On the other hand, I define anarchist society as one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
Nor is our definition of the state arbitrary, for these two characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion, has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state. To be opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either (1) through the voluntary sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or (2) through voluntary gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so; only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way “coercive.” Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term “coercion” can simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it “physical violence or the threat thereof,” with the only loss being in literary style rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do, then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution of aggressive coercion.
It need hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In short, the state, in the words of Albert Jay Nock, “claims and exercises a monopoly of crime” over its territorial area.
The second criticism I would like to defuse before beginning the main body of the paper is the common charge that anarchists “assume that all people are good” and that without the state no crime would be committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so that no problem of crime will then plague the society. I confess that I do not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of anarchism profess — and I do not believe that they are open to the charge — I certainly do not adopt this view. I assume with most observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and criminal tendencies. In my view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated channel for all manner of antisocial crime — theft, oppression, mass murder — on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
A further point: in a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are “good” in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos. Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection. The anarchist view holds that, given the “nature of man,” given the degree of goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only further point that need be made is that by eliminating the living example and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state, anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the public.
We cannot of course deal here with the numerous arguments in favor of anarchism or against the state, moral, political, and economic. Nor can we take up the various goods and services now provided by the state and show how private individuals and groups will be able to supply them far more efficiently on the free market. Here we can only deal with perhaps the most difficult area, the area where it is almost universally assumed that the state must exist and act, even if it is only a “necessary evil” instead of a positive good: the vital realm of defense or protection of person and property against aggression. Surely, it is universally asserted, the state is at least vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the law itself that is to be enforced. My contention is that all of these admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One important caveat before we begin the body of this paper: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection. We cannot here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of private marauders can possibly begin to match the state’s unremitting record of theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens, and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
This point can be made more philosophically: it is illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt. And suppose then that someone suggested: “We are all bound to suffer from those of us who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family will be able to protect each of us from each other.” I submit that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the existence of the state. When we start from the zero point, as in the case of the Jones family, the question of “who will guard the guardians?” becomes not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming barrier to its existence.
A final caveat: the anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services, on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on? Obviously, such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist society.
One important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light. Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned on for those ships which had paid for the service.
Let us turn now to the problem of how disputes — in particular disputes over alleged violations of person and property — would be resolved in an anarchist society. First, it should be noted that all disputes involve two parties: the plaintiff, the alleged victim of the crime or tort and the defendant, the alleged aggressor. In many cases of broken contract, of course, each of the two parties alleging that the other is the culprit is at the same time a plaintiff and a defendant.
An important point to remember is that any society, be it statist or anarchist, has to have some way of resolving disputes that will gain a majority consensus in society. There would be no need for courts or arbitrators if everyone were omniscient and knew instantaneously which persons were guilty of any given crime or violation of contract. Since none of us is omniscient, there has to be some method of deciding who is the criminal or lawbreaker which will gain legitimacy; in short, whose decision will be accepted by the great majority of the public.
In the first place, a dispute may be resolved voluntarily between the two parties themselves, either unaided or with the help of a third mediator. This poses no problem, and will automatically be accepted by society at large. It is so accepted even now, much less in a society imbued with the anarchistic values of peaceful cooperation and agreement. Secondly and similarly, the two parties, unable to reach agreement, may decide to submit voluntarily to the decision of an arbitrator. This agreement may arise either after a dispute has arisen, or be provided for in advance in the original contract. Again, there is no problem in such an arrangement gaining legitimacy. Even in the present statist era, the notorious inefficiency and coercive and cumbersome procedures of the politically run government courts has led increasing numbers of citizens to turn to voluntary and expert arbitration for a speedy and harmonious settling of disputes.
Thus, William C. Wooldridge has written that

Wooldridge adds the important point that, in addition to the speed of arbitration procedures vis-à-vis the courts, the arbitrators can proceed as experts in disregard of the official government law; in a profound sense, then, they serve to create a voluntary body of private law. “In other words,” states Wooldridge, “the system of extralegal, voluntary courts has progressed hand in hand with a body of private law; the rules of the state are circumvented by the same process that circumvents the forums established for the settlement of disputes over those rules…. In short, a private agreement between two people, a bilateral “law,” has supplanted the official law. The writ of the sovereign has cease to run, and for it is substituted a rule tacitly or explicitly agreed to by the parties. Wooldridge concludes that “if an arbitrator can choose to ignore a penal damage rule or the statute of limitations applicable to the claim before him (and it is generally conceded that he has that power), arbitration can be viewed as a practically revolutionary instrument for self-liberation from the law….”2
It may be objected that arbitration only works successfully because the courts enforce the award of the arbitrator. Wooldridge points out, however, that arbitration was unenforceable in the American courts before 1920, but that this did not prevent voluntary arbitration from being successful and expanding in the United States and in England. He points, furthermore, to the successful operations of merchant courts since the Middle Ages, those courts which successfully developed the entire body of the law merchant. None of those courts possessed the power of enforcement. He might have added the private courts of shippers which developed the body of admiralty law in a similar way.
How then did these private, “anarchistic,” and voluntary courts ensure the acceptance of their decisions? By the method of social ostracism, and by the refusal to deal any further with the offending merchant. This method of voluntary “enforcement,” indeed proved highly successful. Wooldridge writes that “the merchants’ courts were voluntary, and if a man ignored their judgment, he could not be sent to jail…. Nevertheless, it is apparent that … [their] decisions were generally respected even by the losers; otherwise people would never have used them in the first place…. Merchants made their courts work simply by agreeing to abide by the results. The merchant who broke the understanding would not be sent to jail, to be sure, but neither would he long continue to be a merchant, for the compliance exacted by his fellows … proved if anything more effective than physical coercion.”3 Nor did this voluntary method fail to work in modern times. Wooldridge writes that it was precisely in the years before 1920, when arbitration awards could not be enforced in the courts,

It should also be pointed out that modern technology makes even more feasible the collection and dissemination of information about people’s credit ratings and records of keeping or violating their contracts or arbitration agreements. Presumably, an anarchist society would see the expansion of this sort of dissemination of data and thereby facilitate the ostracism or boycotting of contract and arbitration violators.
How would arbitrators be selected in an anarchist society? In the same way as they are chosen now, and as they were chosen in the days of strictly voluntary arbitration: the arbitrators with the best reputation for efficiency and probity would be chosen by the various parties on the market. As in other processes of the market, the arbitrators with the best record in settling disputes will come to gain an increasing amount of business, and those with poor records will no longer enjoy clients and will have to shift to another line of endeavor. Here it must be emphasized that parties in dispute will seek out those arbitrators with the best reputation for both expertise and impartiality and that inefficient or biased arbitrators will rapidly have to find another occupation.
Thus, the Tannehills emphasize:

If desired, furthermore, the contracting parties could provide in advance for a series of arbitrators:

Arbitration, then, poses little difficulty for a portrayal of the free society. But what of torts or crimes of aggression where there has been no contract? Or suppose that the breaker of a contract defies the arbitration award? Is ostracism enough? In short, how can courts develop in the free-market anarchist society which will have the power to enforce judgments against criminals or contract breakers?
In the wide sense, defense service consists of guards or police who use force in defending person and property against attack, and judges or courts whose role is to use socially accepted procedures to determine who the criminals or tortfeasors are, as well as to enforce judicial awards, such as damages or the keeping of contracts. On the free market, many scenarios are possible on the relationship between the private courts and the police; they may be “vertically integrated,” for example, or their services may be supplied by separate firms. Furthermore, it seems likely that police service will be supplied by insurance companies who will provide crime insurance to their clients. In that case, insurance companies will pay off the victims of crime or the breaking of contracts or arbitration awards and then pursue the aggressors in court to recoup their losses. There is a natural market connection between insurance companies and defense service, since they need pay out less benefits in proportion as they are able to keep down the rate of crime.
Courts might either charge fees for their services, with the losers of cases obliged to pay court costs, or else they may subsist on monthly or yearly premiums by their clients, who may be either individuals or the police or insurance agencies. Suppose, for example, that Smith is an aggrieved party, either because he has been assaulted or robbed, or because an arbitration award in his favor has not been honored. Smith believes that Jones is the party guilty of the crime. Smith then goes to a court, Court A, of which he is a client, and brings charges against Jones as a defendant. In my view, the hallmark of an anarchist society is one where no man may legally compel someone who is not a convicted criminal to do anything, since that would be aggression against an innocent man’s person or property. Therefore, Court A can only invite rather than subpoena Jones to attend his trial. Of course, if Jones refused to appear or send a representative, his side of the case will not be heard. The trial of Jones proceeds. Suppose that Court A finds Jones innocent. In my view, part of the generally accepted law code of the anarchist society (on which see further below) is that this must end the matter unless Smith can prove charges of gross incompetence or bias on the part of the court.
Suppose, next, that Court A finds Jones guilty. Jones might accept the verdict, because he too is a client of the same court, because he knows he is guilty, or for some other reason. In that case, Court A proceeds to exercise judgment against Jones. Neither of these instances poses very difficult problems for our picture of the anarchist society. But suppose, instead, that Jones contests the decision; he then goes to his court, Court B, and the case is retried there. Suppose that Court B, too, finds Jones guilty. Again, it seems to me that the accepted law code of the anarchist society will assert that this ends the matter; both parties have had their say in courts which each has selected, and the decision for guilt is unanimous.
Suppose, however, the most difficult case: that Court B finds Jones innocent. The two courts, each subscribed to by one of the two parties, have split their verdicts. In that case, the two courts will submit the case to an appeals court, or arbitrator, which the two courts agree upon. There seems to be no real difficulty about the concept of an appeals court. As in the case of arbitration contracts, it seems very likely that the various private courts in the society will have prior agreements to submit their disputes to a particular appeals court. How will the appeals judges be chosen? Again, as in the case of arbitrators or of the first judges on the free market, they will be chosen for their expertise and their reputation for efficiency, honesty, and integrity. Obviously, appeals judges who are inefficient or biased will scarcely be chosen by courts who will have a dispute. The point here is that there is no need for a legally established or institutionalized single, monopoly appeals court system, as states now provide. There is no reason why there cannot arise a multitude of efficient and honest appeals judges who will be selected by the disputant courts, just as there are numerous private arbitrators on the market today. The appeals court renders its decision, and the courts proceed to enforce it if, in our example, Jones is considered guilty — unless, of course, Jones can prove bias in some other court proceedings.
No society can have unlimited judicial appeals, for in that case there would be no point to having judges or courts at all. Therefore, every society, whether statist or anarchist, will have to have some socially accepted cutoff point for trials and appeals. My suggestion is the rule that the agreement of any two courts, be decisive. “Two” is not an arbitrary figure, for it reflects the fact that there are two parties, the plaintiff and the defendant, to any alleged crime or contract dispute.
If the courts are to be empowered to enforce decision against guilty parties, does this not bring back the state in another form and thereby negate anarchism? No, for at the beginning of this paper I explicitly defined anarchism in such a way as not to rule out the use of defensive force — force in defense of person and property — by privately supported agencies. In the same way, it is not bringing back the state to allow persons to use force to defend themselves against aggression, or to hire guards or police agencies to defend them.
It should be noted, however, that in the anarchist society there will be no “district attorney” to press charges on behalf of “society.” Only the victims will press charges as the plaintiffs. If, then, these victims should happen to be absolute pacifists who are opposed even to defensive force, then they will simply not press charges in the courts or otherwise retaliate against those who have aggressed against them. In a free society that would be their right. If the victim should suffer from murder, then his heir would have the right to press the charges.
What of the Hatfield-and-McCoy problem? Suppose that a Hatfield kills a McCoy, and that McCoy’s heir does not belong to a private insurance, police agency, or court, and decides to retaliate himself? Since under anarchism there can be no coercion of the noncriminal, McCoy would have the perfect right to do so. No one may be compelled to bring his case to a court. Indeed, since the right to hire police or courts flows from the right of self-defense against aggression, it would be inconsistent and in contradiction to the very basis of the free society to institute such compulsion.
Suppose, then, that the surviving McCoy finds what he believes to be the guilty Hatfield and kills him in turn? What then? This is fine, except that McCoy may have to worry about charges being brought against him by a surviving Hatfield. Here it must be emphasized that in the law of the anarchist society based on defense against aggression, the courts would not be able to proceed against McCoy if in fact he killed the right Hatfield. His problem would arise if the courts should find that he made a grievous mistake and killed the wrong man; in that case, he in turn would be found guilty of murder. Surely, in most instances, individuals will wish to obviate such problems by taking their case to a court and thereby gain social acceptability for their defensive retaliation — not for the act of retaliation but for the correctness of deciding who the criminal in any given case might be. The purpose of the judicial process, indeed, is to find a way of general agreement on who might be the criminal or contract breaker in any given case. The judicial process is not a good in itself; thus, in the case of an assassination, such as Jack Ruby’s murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, on public television, there is no need for a complex judicial process, since the name of the murderer is evident to all.
Will not the possibility exist of a private court that may turn venal and dishonest, or of a private police force that turns criminal and extorts money by coercion? Of course such an event may occur, given the propensities of human nature. Anarchism is not a moral cure-all. But the important point is that market forces exist to place severe checks on such possibilities, especially in contrast to a society where a state exists. For, in the first place, judges, like arbitrators, will prosper on the market in proportion to their reputation for efficiency and impartiality. Secondly, on the free market important checks and balances exist against venal courts or criminal police forces. Namely, that there are competing courts and police agencies to whom victims may turn for redress. If the “Prudential Police Agency” should turn outlaw and extract revenue from victims by coercion, the latter would have the option of turning to the “Mutual” or “Equitable” Police Agency for defense and for pressing charges against Prudential. These are the genuine “checks and balances” of the free market, genuine in contrast to the phony check and balances of a state system, where all the alleged “balancing” agencies are in the hands of one monopoly government. Indeed, given the monopoly “protection service” of a state, what is there to prevent a state from using its monopoly channels of coercion to extort money from the public? What are the checks and limits of the state? None, except for the extremely difficult course of revolution against a power with all of the guns in its hands. In fact, the state provides an easy, legitimated channel for crime and aggression, since it has its very being in the crime of tax theft, and the coerced monopoly of “protection.” It is the state, indeed, that functions as a mighty “protection racket” on a giant and massive scale. It is the state that says: “Pay us for your ‘protection’ or else.” In the light of the massive and inherent activities of the state, the danger of a “protection racket” emerging from one or more private police agencies is relatively small indeed.
Moreover, it must be emphasized that a crucial element in the power of the state is its legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the public, the fact that after centuries of propaganda, the depredations of the state are looked upon rather as benevolent services. Taxation is generally not seen as theft, nor war as mass murder, nor conscription as slavery. Should a private police agency turn outlaw, should “Prudential” become a protection racket, it would then lack the social legitimacy which the state has managed to accrue to itself over the centuries. “Prudential” would be seen by all as bandits, rather than as legitimate or divinely appointed “sovereigns” bent on promoting the “common good” or the “general welfare.” And lacking such legitimacy, “Prudential” would have to face the wrath of the public and the defense and retaliation of the other private defense agencies, the police and courts, on the free market. Given these inherent checks and limits, a successful transformation from a free society to bandit rule becomes most unlikely. Indeed, historically, it has been very difficult for a state to arise to supplant a stateless society; usually, it has come about through external conquest rather than by evolution from within a society.
Within the anarchist camp, there has been much dispute on whether the private courts would have to be bound by a basic, common law code. Ingenious attempts have been made to work out a system where the laws or standards of decision-making by the courts would differ completely from one to another.7 But in my view all would have to abide by the basic law code, in particular, prohibition of aggression against person and property, in order to fulfill our definition of anarchism as a system which provides no legal sanction for such aggression. Suppose, for example, that one group of people in society holds that all redheads are demons who deserve to be shot on sight. Suppose that Jones, one of this group, shoots Smith, a redhead. Suppose that Smith or his heir presses charges in a court, but that Jones’s court, in philosophic agreement with Jones, finds him innocent therefore. It seems to me that in order to be considered legitimate, any court would have to follow the basic libertarian law code of the inviolate right of person and property. For otherwise, courts might legally subscribe to a code which sanctions such aggression in various cases, and which to that extent would violate the definition of anarchism and introduce, if not the state, then a strong element of statishness or legalized aggression into the society.
But again I see no insuperable difficulties here. For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.
In contrast to the general law code, other aspects of court decisions could legitimately vary in accordance with the market or the wishes of the clients; for example, the language the cases will be conducted in, the number of judges to be involved, and so on.
There are other problems of the basic law code which there is no time to go into here: for example, the definition of just property titles or the question of legitimate punishment of convicted offenders — though the latter problem of course exists in statist legal systems as well.8 The basic point, however, is that the state is not needed to arrive at legal principles or their elaboration: indeed, much of the common law, the law merchant, admiralty law, and private law in general, grew up apart from the state, by judges not making the law but finding it on the basis of agreed-upon principles derived either from custom or reason.9 The idea that the state is needed to make law is as much a myth as that the state is needed to supply postal or police services.
Enough has been said here, I believe, to indicate that an anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.

[Murray Rothbard delivered this talk 32 years ago today at the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy (ASPLP), Washington, DC: December 28, 1974. It was first published in The Libertarian Forum, volume 7.1, January 1975, available in PDF and ePub.]

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

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

Hi legaladvice,
I (28M) think this is more for relationships but this is really more pressing.
Some key points before you read; I moved to Orlando, FL from Washington state in February of 2023. It was closer to family and I had a lot of friends here. I truly love it here. I’m convinced there is something mentally not-okay with my mother and we’ve had a hot/cold relationship for years. My dad divorced her and got re-married to her and these days just puts up with it. We used to have a significantly better relationship but this has frankly tarnished all of that and he just puts up with it. My parents are real-estate investors in the Orlando area and generally buy some of terrible homes in even worse areas and somehow find renters. They act like they’re mansions but they truly are terrible. I’m 28 years old.
When I initially moved here, I got my own apartment in a great suburb of Orlando. My parents helped me move and were really excited for me to get back on this coast. At some point during my residency, my parents brought up a notion to attempt to “help” me by buying me a house. My credit is shot and there is no way I qualify for a conventional mortgage. Maybe before the big short but certainly not in today’s housing climate. I didn’t actively reach out to them for this sort of assistance but I toyed with the idea.
Given the fact that they are real-estate investors, their interest rate was going to be somewhere in the realm of 7%. That left me with a max value of about a $400,000 house in order to be comfortable with the payment. Daily my mom would send me listings to some of the shittiest homes I’ve ever seen and get upset when I say I don’t like it. That would generally be when I would cut off the conversation after I’m told I’m “ungrateful”. Mind you they haven’t even done anything yet.
Months pass and I find a decent townhome in a location that I’ve always wanted to live in. It’s a townhome that has 2beds, 2baths and was about $380K. In an effort to make my parents happy and not be so “ungrateful” I agreed that they can put an offer on it. Mind you this house is one that I would likely never buy with my own money, but given the interest rate I sort of had to stick with it.
The agreement was that they would put down $100K for the house, I pay the full escrow (mortgage payment, PMI, taxes and HOA dues) and, when it comes time to sell, I would get every dollar above the selling price. It was an enticing deal to get some equity that I otherwise wouldn’t get living in an apartment complex. This was all something that was verbally discussed and I can’t find any physical copy of this being said either over text or another medium.
I broke my least and move in came in October of 2023 which also happened to be when I met my beautiful and loving girlfriend who I am extremely happy with. My parents came over in December for Christmas and I actually had my girlfriend stay in my house while my parents were in town so we can all do stuff together. I thought it went well. My parents met her family, my friends and we generally had a great time.
That apparently wasn’t their idea of the week and they are super upset that my girlfriend basically lives here. Text exchanges with my mother generally result in me being called a disgrace, ungrateful, disrespectful, etc. I would bore you with the text threads but I’ll probably share that when I post this to relationships.
I’m not looking for advice on the relationship piece, but at the end of the day this is all stemming from the fact that I got a girlfriend, they apparently don’t like her, are losing control of me and now we’re both suffering navigating business and family. It’s taking a huge toll on me to the point where I woke up today and cried after receiving another demeaning text from my mother. That same person they hate was there to comfort me.
This is where y’all come in. I’m really worried about the integrity of this “deal”. At this point I don’t think I will get any equity and my parents will just cut ties. When I brought up that I’m concerned about this, my mother always skirts the conversation over text, starts attacking me and they scoff when I bring up the idea of signing some sort of agreement. This house is riddled with issues because the inspector, the real-estate agents friend, missed so many things. I would love to get them fixed but not if I never have the opportunity to see the money again. The dishwasher is loose, the fridge is broken, the breaker panel is buzzing, the toilets are leaking and the air conditioning sounds like a car from the 1930s. I’m paying $2800/month for this house and while my payment at this stage goes almost all to interest, the property value did rise.
What I’m also more and more concerned about is my rights as a “tenant”. I have no formal lease agreement and just have electricity bills and other documentation to show that I live here but I could just as easily be kicked out on the street, correct? What should I be doing here to protect myself?
Your guidance is so appreciated.