Introduction
Mid- 20s adult, living in house with yard in suburbs. Putting out prospective breed ideas now, it still would likely be around 2 years or so before I start seriously looking to get dog 😊
· Will this be your first dog? If not, what experience do you have owning/training dogs?
1. No, have had three dogs, who I still have, two Labrador Retrievers and a Pug. Trained all three dogs and have experience working with other dogs including in school and work (I am not a dog trainer). I have taken my dogs to multiple dog classes (beyond just puppy class) and have earned two titles on one dog. I also have general experience working and training animals so I am familiar with training styles
· Do you have a preference for rescuing a dog vs. going through a reputable breeder?
1. Breeder
· Describe your ideal dog.
1. Loyal, even-tempered (not aggressive), intelligent (enough), goofy, interested in training/learning/working but not high energy that they can’t also enjoy an afternoon on the couch (I’m not looking for border collie energy!), dependable (can generally count on temperament to be steady)
· What breeds or types of dogs are you interested in and why?
1. Curly-Coated Retriever – I’ve met two and thought they were sweet and owner said they were very trainable, graceful, and really loved being by owners side
2. Flat-Coated Retriever – have heard they are goofy, trainable, and safe, think they are beautiful
3. Clumber Spaniel – they are just so cute and I like the mellow/goofy vibe they have
4. Brittany – I’ve known multiple and they are all so sweet and kind but want to work.
· Breeds I’m not Interested In
1. I don’t think I have quite the energy for herding breeds so they aren’t really on my list.
· What sorts of things would you like to train your dog to do?
1. Leash walking, basic commands/obedience (sit, down, stay, leave it), but would also like to teach tricks or some kind of activity.
· Do you want to compete with your dog in a sport (e.g. agility, obedience, rally) or use your dog for a form of work (e.g. hunting, herding, livestock guarding)? If so, how much experience do you have with this work/sport?
1. Yes – I am someone who listens to their dog and what they like to do, but would love to do/get involved in in trick training, rally, dock-diving, etc. (Doesn’t have to be all of these, these are just sports I’m interested in). I have experience in tricks as one dog has two trick titles and working on further. I have had introductions to the other listed sports but have not seriously done these with my current dogs.
Care Commitments
7) How long do you want to devote to training, playing with, or otherwise interacting with your dog each day?
· Job is hybrid. My dogs are my life, so I plan to play/interact/train with my dog daily. I like to do training/activity (play/fetch) for at least 30-40 minutes a day and would also devote additional time to walking and multiple hours a day interacting as I like to hang at home with them.

· How long can you exercise your dog each day, on average? What sorts of exercise are you planning to give your dog regularly and does that include using a dog park?
1. I can exercise my dog for 40 minutes-2hours everyday, with more time on the weekends. I plan to exercise through walks, hikes, fetch (if they like it), and dog training/classes/sports. I have a fenced in yard so I don’t really use the dog park anymore, but there is one nearby, but that isn’t a set part of my exercise.
· How much regular brushing are you willing to do? Are you open to trimming hair, cleaning ears, or doing other grooming at home? If not, would you be willing to pay a professional to do it regularly?
1. I have some experience doing some light grooms and trims and am willing to learn and do those at home or take to a professional. I am willing to groom a few times a week.
Personal Preferences
10) What size dog are you looking for?
· Medium to Large (25 pounds – 100 pounds)
· How much shedding, barking, and slobber can you handle?
1. Shedding I don’t care about, I have three dogs who shed a ton and it doesn’t bother me a bit. Barks, I’d prefer less barking (barking to alert there are people at the dooif they see people walking by) but I just don’t want non-stop. Slobber, its fine, I don’t love the thick slobber but some drooking is okay.
· How important is being able to let your dog off-leash in an unfenced area?
1. Somewhat important – Its ideal and I would love it, but if some areas they are untrustworthy to have off-leash that is okay. I would work on off-leash skills.
Dog Personality and Behavior
13) Do you want a snuggly dog or one that prefers some personal space?
· A mix, I have both kinds of dogs and enjoy both, would enjoy someone to sit at my feet/next to me while I’m on the couch.
1. Would you prefer a dog that wants to do its own thing or one that’s more eager-to-please?
1. More eager to please, I want some challenge to train but not too much.
1. How would you prefer your dog to respond to someone knocking on the door or entering your yard? How would you prefer your dog to greet strangers or visitors?
1. Settling nicely and waiting to be acknowledged when entering yard, I am okay/fine with barking when someone knocks or passes yard. I’d prefer dog to be friendly/cordial to strangers/visitors, don’t need over the top but don’t want difficult to introduce (a little selectiveness with strangers is fine)
1. Are you willing to manage a dog that is aggressive to other dogs?
1. No
1. Are there any other behaviors you can’t deal with or want to avoid?
1. Aggression of any kind
Lifestyle
18) How often and how long will the dog be left alone?
· A few hours for work, but after work/weekends no more than an hour, hour and a half a day.
1. What are the dog-related preferences of other people in the house and what will be their involvement in caring for the dog?
1. They like dogs and will help with feeding/restroom breaks in special circumstances but majority/all of care will be on me.
1. Do you have other pets or are you planning on having other pets? What breed or type of animal are they?
· Three dogs (two labs and pug)
1. Will the dog be interacting with children regularly?
1. No, but occasionally will interact with kids so being safe is ideal.
1. Do you rent or plan to rent in the future? If applicable, what breed or weight restrictions are on your current lease?
· No restriction.
1. What city or country do you live in and are you aware of any laws banning certain breeds?
· USA, no breed bans where I live, nor are any of the dogs I am considering banned.
1. What is the average temperature of a typical summer and winter day where you live?
1. 70-90F in summer (sunny, humid-ish), winter 20-40 (can get cold and have snow)
Additional Information and Questions
25) Please provide any additional information you feel may be relevant.
· No additional information.
1. Feel free to ask any questions below.

Even before he really knew what it meant, Allen Wong wanted to be rich. As a kid, he didn’t yet equate the word with “luxury” or “status” or “expensive things.” He didn’t think wealth would bring him 85-inch televisions and Jacuzzis, a one-of-a-kind rose-gold Lamborghini in the garage, a wearable Iron Man suit that shoots lasers — though he does, actually, have all of that now. What “rich” seemed to dangle was something simpler, more elementary, more a feeling than anything else: freedom from pain.
Wong’s parents had fled poverty — at one point, his father used tennis balls as flotation devices to illicitly cross waters from Guangzhou into Hong Kong — in order to raise a family in a more opportune land. But growing up in New York City, Wong watched one parent peddle medicinal herbs all day long while the other toiled away in a Chinatown sweatshop. They barely had time to slough off one workday before trudging into the next.
“I didn’t want my life to end up like that,” he told me. “I didn’t want to be absent from my family and only show up a few hours each day after work. I didn’t want my life to be monotonous and stuck in a repeating loop until I die.”
Then, in 2008, right as he was graduating from college, the family convulsed. Wong’s father was ousted from his business, sank into a depression and committed suicide; his mother tripped down a spiral of mental illness. Suddenly, Wong’s entry-level computer programming job was the household’s only source of income, and there was a world financial crisis going on. He had always dreamed about digging out of the middle-class quagmire — striking gold, pulling in enough money from a one-off idea that he would never have to work the way his parents did. But it was now, as anxiety and medical bills piled up, that those idle daydreams began to feel urgent and necessary. So he turbocharged his ambitions. He started coding around the clock, tinkering on D.I.Y. software ideas whenever he wasn’t at work, barely sleeping. He doggedly pushed one project after another to the App Store, praying for something to take off.
Eventually, one did: an app that let users tune in to police scanners around the world. Then another. Their runaway success took even him by surprise. By the time his peers were splurging on their first West Elm sofas, he was a self-made multimillionaire.
Wong found his day job interesting enough, and he liked his colleagues. But submitting himself to a boss’s whims, spending his days trapped like a houseplant under corporate fluorescence, grated at him; it reminded him too much of his parents’ suffering. What, he wondered, could a so-called career really offer him if he had already secured enough money for a good life? The whole point of working was to get what he had just gotten. So, at 25, he bought a $250,000 sports car painted a shimmery lime green — it wasn’t so crazy a purchase, he reasoned, because his police-scanner app was by then generating that amount of revenue in a single month — and announced that he was retiring forever.
It was only after he bought a second exotic car, a five-bedroom house in Celebration, Fla., a dog and a Disney World annual pass for his mother that Wong learned that there was an entire online community of people seeking to do what he had just done. Wong had heard of the Financial Independence Retire Early (FIRE) movement before, but he didn’t think it really applied to him because of its focus on frugality. FIRE got its start in the early 2000s with a mantra of extreme saving — you may remember hearing about stoic ultraminimalists living off beans and friends’ couches — but it has since come to include all the people who would like to exit the work force on their own terms, at an age of their own choosing, rather than hustling for a paycheck all the way into their 60s. After Wong made a Reddit post sharing his story, it attracted such a flurry from FIRE adherents that he quickly became the quasi president of one of the group’s biggest online enclaves.
Some FIRE aspirants still get to early retirement by the traditional route of simply saving madly. Others, though, truffle-hunt for high-paying W-2s, tax loopholes, bold and risky market bets or big entrepreneurial ploys like Wong’s. The overarching credo of FIRE is that in today’s unpredictable financial landscape, 9-to-5s and decades-long careers have become bad investments: Old-school benefits like pensions and job security are a thing of the past, and wages aren’t even keeping up with the galloping pace of inflation. According to a 2023 survey, one-quarter of Americans would like to retire before age 50. After decades of tolerating workaholic culture as the norm, employees are tired, unafraid to show it and yearning to yank back control of their lives. To fed-up workers willing to do a little bit of math, FIRE offers a straightforward antidote: You can just leave it all behind.
Like Wong, and like so many other people who chase financial independence, I didn’t grow up with a lot of money — which might be why I became obsessed with it.
Long before “side hustle” became Merriam-Webster lingo, I was working Costco snack arbitrage on the elementary-school playground and hawking homemade bookmarks to my teachers. In adulthood, I moved on to online surveys, research studies, plasma donation, vintage resale, parts modeling and dog-sitting in other people’s homes in lieu of paying rent. I have left no income source unturned. I’ve trawled every page of NerdWallet and The Points Guy. I have made questionable margin calls. I have woken up at the crack of dawn to day-trade $NVDA, $TSLA, $TSM. I have “flipped”; I have “churned.” When I feel sad, I open my phone to check on the interest rates in the five-pronged CD ladder I’ve lovingly assembled in my Marcus account, like a tic, to feel better.
Come on, Kids. Let’s Grab Drinks. ImageWong in his Ironman suit standing next to the bathtub. Wong created a police-scanner app that was so popular that it allowed him to retire at 25.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times Is this all embarrassing to confess? Incredibly so. Would I characterize my relationship to money as “unhealthy”? Also yes. But I often wonder if anybody in this economy, in this country — where more than 60 percent of the work force lives paycheck to paycheck, where the average American is in five- to six-figure debt and often has only cursory knowledge of how he or she got there — has a healthy relationship to money. Simply learning to understand your own finances can feel, several FIRErs said to me, like acquiring a “secret weapon.”
The original FIRE doctrine revolves around delay of gratification. Save your money — ideally as much as 50 to 75 percent of each paycheck — instead of spending it immediately, and when you’ve amassed enough of a nest egg, quit your job and take the rest of your life for yourself. “It’s simple, because the main principles fit on a Post-it note,” Jacob Lund Fisker, a Danish former astrophysicist who is often thought of as the father of the FIRE movement, told me. “However, it is not easy, because everything the typical middle-class consumer has been raised and trained to believe goes against these principles. People have grown up associating success with money and spending money with happiness. They’ve been trained to sit still and perform repetitive work, first by a teacher, then by a manager. They’ve been educated to be specialists in a narrow field and never think outside that box.”
Fisker’s 2010 book, “Early Retirement Extreme” — written mostly while he lived out of an R.V. on $7,000 a year — is one seminal text for early retirees. Two others are “Your Money or Your Life,” a 1992 personal-finance bible written by Joseph R. Dominguez and Vicki Robin, and the blog Mr. Money Mustache, started in 2011 by Peter Adeney, who retired from his software-engineering job in 2005 at age 30 and figured out how to shrink his family’s expenses down to just $24,000 a year. The tao of all three tomes is that minimalist spending and anti-consumption can offer the keys to better living. (Adeney has professed to be “really just trying to get rich people to stop destroying the planet,” but his tens of thousands of monthly visitors tend to be more fixated on his other mantra: “Make you rich so you can retire early.”)
Conventional FIRE adherents are not necessarily big earners or genius mathematicians with incredible impulse control. Their superpower is their expert planning; it’s the ability to see the finish line from miles away that has allowed even some minimum-wage workers to achieve early retirement. One simple FIRE rule of thumb is to first calculate your target “FI number” by multiplying anticipated annual retirement expenses by at least 25, and then squirrel away as much as possible into interest-accruing or tax-advantaged buckets like 401(k)s, low-fee index funds, certificates of deposit, HSAs and Roth IRAs until you hit that number. As an example, if you bring home $150,000 a year, can save half of that and plan to spend $50,000 per year in retirement, then it will take only 16.5 years before you can kiss your job goodbye. For those who earn less or spend more, it will take longer — but for still others who can endure greater sacrifices, FIRE can be possible as early as their 30s.
From these plain origins, many offshoots of FIRE have sprouted up — some much more brazen than others. It’s rare to find anyone these days who actually wants to get to early retirement by living off beans; those people, with their stringent penny-pinching, are largely known in the community as LeanFIRE. A lot more people aim for CoastFIRE (a more measured approach that involves front-loading your retirement savings and “coasting” on compound interest and working lightly until you’re ready to quit) or BaristaFIRE (quitting your job but buttressing your retirement with a side gig, such as that of a part-time barista, to receive health-insurance benefits) or FatFIRE (a luxurious, no-sacrifice approach to retirement, the polar opposite of LeanFIRE — and the subset to which Wong belongs).
You might be tempted to regard early retirees as layabouts, soaking up sunshine while everyone else toils. But why not see them as brave maniacs, daring to build an entirely new vision of the world? Retirement has long been framed as a reward for a job well done — social reformers started pushing for mandatory post-work benefits in the early 20th century, and policies like Social Security later codified the tipping point between labor and leisure — but if FIRE’s incredible popularity of late (the Fire subreddit alone boasts nearly half a million members) is a defiant reaction to economic hardship, then it’s also a plea to re-evaluate the centrality of work to modern living. Maybe, the movement suggests, we should have always been in it for ourselves, and nobody else, from the start.
To my left was a woman who runs a phone-sex hotline; to my right, a cruise operator, a disaster-response volunteer, a kitchen-appliance entrepreneur, a public-school teacher and a former Off Broadway actor who now lives out of the back of an 18-wheeler and puts 70 percent of her weekly paycheck into index funds. It was a chilly spring weekend, and we had all flown to Cincinnati for EconoMe, an annual all-flavors-of-FIRE conference in which hundreds of people of all ages, from all over, bandy about tips on financial independence from dawn to dusk. The point of FIRE meetups — EconoMe is the largest, but others take place all over the world, some of them at a monthly clip — is only partly to give fiscal advice. Every person’s retirement plan is a highly individualized choreography, after all, so the manifold workshops and breakout groups are meant to offer only high-level ideas. The broader purpose of these get-togethers is more a sort of group therapy, geared to help people achieve their common goals and forge through their common struggles.
Much of the crowd was timid but curious — like Laura Rojo-Eddy, who decided on a whim to fly out from Texas. “My family doesn’t know anything about FIRE,” she told me. “I’ve been really shy talking about it. It’s hard to talk about finances with strangers, but in a way it’s even harder with people you love.” She chanced upon the movement in 2021 via a former colleague’s LinkedIn post, which made her consider for the first time that she may not have to work until the standard age of 65. The friend “posted she was retiring thanks to FIRE, and I was like: That’s really cool! But what the hell is she talking about? And, holy crap, this person’s my age — 40 — and what if I could do that? Should I do that?”
At EconoMe, bank-account totals were traded more freely than phone numbers. The conference’s organizer, Diania Merriam (retired at 33), introduced speakers like Jeremy Schneider (retired at 36), who spoke about how to pick a good financial adviser; the retired divorce lawyer Aaron Thomas, who evangelized the importance of prenups; the real estate tax strategist Natalie Kolodij, who discussed real estate investing and recommended employing your children starting from the age they are able to do household chores, which offers a double benefit of reducing a parent’s taxable income while building an investment-accruing tax shelter for the 7-year-old. Stephanie Zito’s two-hour seminar on the nitty-gritty of “travel hacking,” a.k.a. traversing the world through strategic deployment of credit-card points, had the crowd on the edge of their seats.
In one morning session, a brave volunteer named Krista put her life’s “balance sheet” up on a big screen so that 500 strangers could critique it for blind spots. She is 35, with four kids ages 16, 15, 9 and 7, and makes $32,000 working in a library in Wisconsin. Over the last seven years, since discovering FIRE, she and her husband had slowly paid off $200,000 in credit-card and home- and auto-loan debt. But she knew, she said, humbly dipping her head a bit, that she still had a long way to go, especially when compared with all the younger, already-retired millionaires in the room.
“Wait a second,” Frank Vasquez, one of the conference’s speakers, interrupted. “No. Do you all see this? Krista was a teenage mom who grew up in poverty. We are looking, right now, at a map of a hero’s journey.”
Jackie Cummings Koski of Dayton, Ohio, grew up on food stamps, learned about FIRE in her early 40s and retired at 49 with $1.3 million in savings.Credit...Brian Kaiser for The New York Times During a break, Jackie Cummings Koski, an Ohio local, shared her story with me: She grew up on food stamps and had a “wake-up call” with money after an acrimonious divorce left her a single mother. She learned about FIRE in her early 40s. Newly enlightened, she started saving 40 percent of the salary from her five-figure job, reached financial independence at 47 and pulled the trigger on retirement at 49, with $1.3 million in savings. “My corporate job had nothing to do with what I want to do,” Koski told me. “I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t love it.” She added: “While most FIRE people brag about having an old car with 200,000 miles or whatever, I drive a luxury car. But nobody’s going to chastise me, because I still retired early, even with that car, even with having made some mistakes!” Koski spends her time nowadays creating financial content and advocating for personal-finance classes to be added to high schools, and she recently wrote a “FIRE for Dummies” manual.
To my surprise, a sizable portion of the FIRE crowd at EconoMe was older. This wasn’t so surprising to Bill Yount, a 58-year-old retired physician who recently started up a podcast with Koski and another friend, Becky Heptig, that speaks to older demographics. “The average American is a late starter,” Yount told me. “That’s just who we are, living in this consumption society and not having the mentality of saving often or early.” And things are no longer “9-to-5, 40 years and a gold watch” the way they were for his parents’ generation: “I’m not in the gold-watch generation. Gen X got lost, got forgotten.”
Heptig, who is 68, found herself in dire financial straits in her 50s, when her husband’s small business faltered. “I got really scared, thinking we will never get out of this debt and we will never retire,” she says. They took a course from the financial-advice radio host Dave Ramsey, and her husband signed up for a W-2 job. After that, they started saving madly. “We were net-worth zero at 50 years old, and he retired at 63 — so for us, where we started from, we consider ourselves retiring early,” Heptig says. She had made the same wild discovery that everyone in FIRE does: that it can really take as little as a decade to hit early retirement, from the moment you learn about it and start planning. But as Yount put it to me: “You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t even know to go looking for it.”
Maybe it’s because I know too much about looking for money that I found myself, while reporting this article, especially drawn to the subculture of FatFIRE — and to the lavish, unapologetic, in-your-face money philosophy that Allen Wong and others of his ilk prefer. FatFIRE flies in the face of all the other variants of FIRE. It is anti-anticonsumption. Its typical benchmark is to accumulate enough wealth that you can comfortably spend at least $100,000 a year in retirement, but some highfliers aim for much, much bigger sums. It espouses an unbridled maximalism, a have-it-all abundance.
While most other FIRE communities steer toward the friendly and pragmatic, FatFIRE’s adherents tend to be jaded, brusque, laser-focused. They hunt for the “exit,” in the tech-world manner of speaking: a fast, lucrative way out. On the FatFIRE subreddit, aspirants ogle severance packages, geo-arbitrage, REIT, tax loopholes, high-risk options straddles and potential business moonshots. Successful FatFIRErs applaud one another for hitting double-digit-millions net worth, debate the merits of private jets versus second homes and agonize over how large a trust fund is ethical to set up for their kids. And just as Fisker and Adeney were beacons to early-era FIRE devotees, Allen Wong is FatFIRE’s mythic hero.
Wong is quiet and unassuming in person. When I finally met him this spring — three years after we first began chatting online — near his childhood home in Queens, he wore jeans, Asics and a wary self-consciousness. Now in his mid-30s, he has comfortably enjoyed nearly a decade of leisure; he spends the bulk of his days playing pickleball and counseling strangers online on how to follow in his footsteps. He’s not particularly interested in fame, so he posts, as the senior moderator of FatFIRE, under his app company’s name. For someone who is a living talisman against the tenets of conventional living, he speaks with a surprising calm — though his eyes flashed with a certain pride whenever we talked about his childhood or his father. Even though it sprouted up only seven years ago, FatFIRE is on the verge of overtaking FIRE in size, Wong told me. Membership doubled during the pandemic despite moderators’ intentionally hiding the forum from Reddit’s homepage, he said, showing me a graph, and he added that most of its members seem to be “early-career American men.”
This makes sense. Millennials may have been ushered into the work force with the encouragement to hustle, but we soon found ourselves jerked around by utterly unaffordable housing, pandemic layoffs, salaries that flopped flat while costs went stratosphere-high. Nearly half of young adults have “money dysphoria,” according to a recent survey from the personal-finance company Credit Karma. Online, trends like “quiet luxury” and “dupe culture” glorify totems of wealth while making it clear how depressingly inaccessible that echelon is for the average Joe. If the recent “antiwork” movement laid bare the disillusionment of the young work force, then FatFIRE represents those feelings put into action.
Some FatFIRE success stories are like Wong’s: a result of obsessive entrepreneurism. Just as many are a byproduct of grinding away at a regular, albeit high-earning, job for enough years. (Fisker, for one, argues that FatFIRE is just an aesthetic rebranding of the work-smart-not-hard ethos that has been woven throughout American history.) In San Francisco, Sam Dogen faithfully saved his finance-job paychecks for 13 years before retiring in 2012 to live off passive investment income. He initially budgeted $100,000 for him and his wife to spend per year, but they upped the target to $200,000 after having their first child, then to $300,000 after a second child — and recently again to $350,000 to account for the recent bout of unchecked inflation. “We choose to live in an expensive coastal city and choose to have two children,” Dogen told me. “But you look at the $300,000 budget I made for a family of four, and you’re like, This is a pretty middle-class lifestyle. FatFIRE is almost a necessity if you want to live in San Francisco.”
“I think more people should aim for FatFIRE, because even if you don’t hit it, you’ll be at regular FIRE,” Jeff Underwood, a San Diego-based FatFIRE aspirant who started chasing financial independence after he lost his house and sank $10,000 into debt, told me. “The idea of LeanFIRE makes me super nervous. Health care costs are going up. There are all these unknowns. You could really find yourself in trouble.” Through smart tips he picked up on financial-planning forums, Underwood’s net worth steadily climbed from $0 in 2011 to $1 million in 2023. He is drawn to FatFIRE’s cheeky energy and its emphasis on securing a big safety net: “I had spent so long in the survival mind-set,” he says. “My default position is to plan for the worst, because I’ve already been through the worst.”
Wong now splits most of his time between houses in Celebration, Fla., and in New York City. He wakes up early to play pickleball and can keep at it for hours if the weather is nice. Because he has so much free time to practice, he has gotten good enough to compete against elite players and coach novices. (He offered to teach me how to play, but it was a wind-whipped 35 degrees when we met up in early April, so we went to have soup dumplings instead.) Otherwise, he reads up on tech and cybersecurity news, plays video games and undertakes home-renovation projects. His houses have been burglarized three times, although he managed to halt the latest attempt with a self-programmed alarm system. He used to make videos about his exotic car collection on YouTube, a few of which went viral, but he grew tired of being a “content creator” because it felt too much like having a job. Plus, he had already done the whole rack-up-a-huge-number thing before — with money.
“It was as if I fast-forwarded through an entire movie, and the end credits are slowly rolling,” Wong told me recently, recalling his first, restless years in retirement. “There was nothing more to watch, and all my peers were still busy watching the movie that I already finished. After I traveled the world and had done just about every possible fun thing I could possibly do, I often found myself wondering, What now?”
Life after early retirement: the elephant in the room. What to do after the cruises, the skydiving, the teetering stack of books on the night stand? The main danger of FIRE is that you might be running hard away from something rather than toward it — that you’re propelled only by the too-nebulous idea of escape. And then, even for those who lay out a clear road map for decades of nirvana, the loneliness can eat at you.
That’s why some, like Merriam, EconoMe’s organizer, host regular social events in their local cities. The online community ChooseFI maintains a sprawling network of hundreds of local FIRE groups in cities around the world. Amy Minkley, who retired by working in Asia as a teacher and saving up to $90,000 of her salary each year, organizes an annual FIRE meetup in Bali as a way of keeping up the community that saved her from depression: “It just felt like someone had thrown me a life raft, and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel,” she told me.
A lot of other people go the Mr. Money Mustache route: They blog. Their posts about income spreadsheets and VTSAX returns then attract the like-minded, as potential friends or even lovers. Koski has heard of romances blossoming among fellow FIRErs — though many of them prefer the company of a FIRE Luddite. “A good chunk of my friends are on my phone,” Gwen Merz, who began saving up for FIRE when she discovered the Mustache blog at age 22 and reached CoastFIRE at age 32 with $400,000 in savings, told me.
A common worry is when to stop. How much is enough? Why not make more? Since there is an upper limit to money’s effect on joy — studies have shown that global happiness tops out at income levels of about $75,000 a year — chasing infinite wealth may be psychologically futile.
“I think people can accumulate money to the detriment of their health and happiness,” says Alan Donegan, who with his wife, Katie, lives a nomadic lifestyle and coaches FIRE newbies toward their resignation letters by “trying to show money is a tool to create your version of an extraordinary life.” There are also those like Oliver Truong, a 27-year-old who cares less about the dollars and cents of it all than about fulfilling a self-imposed challenge: “I think FIRE people are some of the most creative people I’ve ever met,” he told me at EconoMe. “At least for me, it was never about the money, honestly. It was more about just doing something I wanted on my own.”
For those who succeed at early retirement, especially at the FatFIRE level, a surprise depression can set in. “It’s quite alarming and sad to see how many people are lost after they do this,” Wong’s FatFIRE co-moderator, Mike Doehla, told me. Doehla himself thought he was prepared for the social segregation when he FatFIREd at 40 in 2022 through his nutrition-coaching business. He wasn’t. “It has been pretty isolating, and almost awkward at times,” he confessed. Based in a small town in upstate New York, Doehla doesn’t know anyone in real life who has retired early, and all his friends are still working. But, he told me, “I think I’m psychologically broken from ever working someone else’s schedule again,” and he is keen to discover who he is, as a person, outside of work. If the quest for happiness were a tangible metric, Doehla reckons he is about 60 percent of the way there: “I have this FOMO, this empty cup, regarding what is going around me that so many people have experienced, that I just want to taste a bit.”
At EconoMe, I met a 52-year-old architect who considers himself “FattishFIRE”; he and his wife spend about $8,000 a month in Boston and would like to keep up that lifestyle in retirement. But, he told me, “I pretend I have a lot less than I do.” He lives in a building where many of his neighbors “have very little money, live off government assistance and are critical of wealthy people. They don’t know we’re like ‘stealth wealth.’ Would they not like me anymore?” (For this reason, he asked not to be identified.) He has saved enough money to retire within two or three years if he wants to, but he worries about how he’ll be perceived within a field that takes pride in its workhorse culture: “I’d always thought ‘architect’ was my personality and was going to be until I died,” he said. “Am I being too nervous? Am I crazy? I’m still a little ashamed.”
Sam Dogen budgets $350,000 a year in expenses for his family of four: “FatFIRE is almost a necessity if you want to live in San Francisco,” he says.Credit...Maggie Shannon for The New York Times After a decade in retirement, Dogen, the San Francisco FatFIREr, recently did the unimaginable: He decided to go back to work. He doesn’t really need the money, but the endless leisure has begun to wear on him. “I can’t do pickleball all day,” Dogen told me. “So what’s the responsible thing to do? And the responsible thing to do is to find a job that has good purpose, good meaning, where you can work with some smart people and have a lot of camaraderie.” He added: “It just feels good to be part of something. I think it’s really important that we all feel like we’re part of something, contributing.” He took one gig but quit because it ate up too much time, and he is now looking for a less demanding part-time position.
Wong, these days, loves to volunteer. He donates to charities, serves on neighborhood boards and of course plays both chairman and soothsayer to the fraternity (for it is largely male) of FatFIRE. Wong doesn’t so much mind being solitary in real life — he considers himself a lone wolf and is often wary of making new friends for fear they will try to take financial advantage of him. He has been duped in the past by family members or acquaintances, including a friend who falsely claimed to need support for lifesaving heart surgeries. It’s not uncommon for him to get Venmo requests from strangers. (Many of his pickleball acquaintances learned about his wealth when a photographer showed up on the court to shoot him for this article.)
I asked him what he plans to do in his second decade of retirement — or his third or fourth or beyond. He doesn’t know yet. He told me he has been intrigued by the rise of A.I. and has flirted with the idea of a D.I.Y. project in that space. Ultimately, though, he hasn’t pursued it. He fears even self-employment would bring back the manic stresses he fought so hard to leave behind. “When I FatFIREd, I freed myself,” Wong told me. Inner peace, then, is the precious goal. He treasures all the time he has been able to spend with his mother and may one day share his wealth with children of his own. “Should I have worked more and made even more money? I’ve definitely left many millions of dollars on the table by stepping away from it all,” he told me. “But I always end up coming to the same conclusion: There’s no point in making so much money if you’re not going to be happy. I’d rather be free.”

Barred From Each Other: Why Normative Husbands Remain Married to Incarcerated Wives—An Exploratory Study – page 4
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The brilliant sun burns mercilessly bright and hot, and the desiccated earth below is dry and desolate from its searing radiation—a vast desert, a wide and open wasteland. It is utterly dead and lifeless, except for a solitary phoenix that soars precariously close to the brightly burning disc in the empty sky. Of the entire panorama, no signs of life can be espied. The searching phoenix, quick and agile in its element, busily surveys the surrounding landscape below with its binocular vision as it soars. It searches for any signs of tell-tale motion, any indication that it is not hopelessly alone or abandoned. The only motion it is able to detect with its powerful, focused eyes, however, is its shadowy silhouette that swiftly follows along the sandy, gritty ground. “Nothing in this direction,” the phoenix sadly reflects to itself, so it instinctively banks to the left, first by effortlessly shifting its center of gravity, then by facilely throwing its right wing-tip higher into the thin air than its left.
Nothing changes so far. The sun-scorched earth below is barren and waterless, and except for the intermittent colors of ashen gray and windswept dust, no color is visible. No amount of searching or looking can seem to find the slightest hint of life, sentient or otherwise. Moreover, there is not a single trace or manifestation that suggests that abundant life was supported here, much less existed once. The sole prominent features of this barren world, besides the uniform colorlessness in all visible directions, are the endless, desolate multitudes of sand dunes, canyons, and rocky crags. The shifting winds, it seems, formed the innumerable dunes, canyons, and lonely crags over countless eons. “Perhaps,” the phoenix laments, “this place has been like this since the beginning; and, perhaps, it will remain this way forever.” With that abject thought surging through its feathered head it gives a loud, shrieking call, as if to voice sadness and remorse over the shadow of what used to be, and of what might have been. The shrill call, however, is to no avail, for there is sadly no one else to answer it.
Forlorn and comfortless, the lonely, magnificent phoenix swiftly swings around and lightly descends onto the highest crag immediately situated in its unbroken line of sight. Using its outspread wings as natural brakes, it gracefully lands in a single bound. The statuesque phoenix, with the coarse wind blowing through its majestic feathers, then carefully regards the surrounding terrain. It is woefully empty and void all around. Except for the persistent sound of noisy gales of wind there is dead silence. Not surprisingly, the august phoenix begins to quickly feel extremely alone and isolated, forgotten and forsaken. The pensive phoenix is the only islet of life in a sea of lifelessness. As it sadly contemplates its solitary existence, far off, in the distance, a large, moving shadow begins to emerge. It steadily and inexorably moves in the wondering phoenix’s direction. Naturally confused, but nonetheless curious, the cautious phoenix pinpointedly fixes its powerful gaze on the advancing shadow. The traveling sliver of darkness appears to indiscriminately swallow the entire horizon in the retreating West. The hot and pitiless sun, as it eerily turns out, was becoming darkened. Throwing its disbelieving eyes heavenward, the ennobled phoenix correctly begins to realize that the pale, wafer-like moon was coming between the colorless earth and the imperious sun above. In fact, it is a solar eclipse, one so magnificent to the marveling phoenix that it is absolutely transfixed by the cosmic spectacle. In truth, the awestruck phoenix is so suspended emotionally by the celestial event that it momentarily forgets its own aloneness. The uplifted phoenix begins to feel a sense of gratitude to be able to witness such a beautiful cosmic occurrence. “Why this? Why now?” it ponders. Regardless, the questioning phoenix does not have the easy answers that it seeks.
As it stood in inexplicable awe of the entire event of the celestial phenomena, the distracted phoenix does not at first notice the suddenly increasing impacts of innumerable meteorites against the flat, featureless earth around him. The blazing meteorites eerily coincide with the unexpected advent of the solar eclipse. But regardless of his otherwise keen, all-enveloping senses, the seemingly uncaring phoenix remains motionless, like a great, marble sculpture completely absorbed by its admiration of one of Nature’s more majestic displays. As the waxing eclipse nears its imminent culmination, so does the seemingly endless torrent of iron-encrusted meteorites. Replacing the persistent sound of shifting winds are the thundering meteorite showers that violently pockmark virtually every square inch of unprotected earth under the aloof gaze of the sun. Only the rocky crag on which the lonely, immobile phoenix is poised upon is untouched by the relentless volley of fiery rock and iron from outer space.
The growing radioactive fires from the plummeting multitude of meteorites set the shell-shocked, traumatized, and exposed earth below ablaze. The progressing solar eclipse is at its peak by this time, completely darkening the mortified sun. Terra firma—planet Earth—is now a literal inferno! Furthermore, the motionless phoenix, much to its surprise and contradictory lack of concern, finds itself being rapidly consumed by the fiery bath of flames as well. After a quick, final look at its own burning form, the peacefully resigned phoenix throws a final glance heavenward and then sacrificially surrenders its lonely existence to its final fate.
Terra firma—planet Earth—is now a place out of Dante’s Inferno! The strengthening solar eclipse, moreover, freezes at its peak for a span of several minutes, as if to signify that it is the creative force behind the lifeless earth’s purging and baptism by fire. Even the thin and tenuous atmosphere, the very skies!, are ablaze. For the very first time since forgotten Creation, the listless moon is illuminated on both sides at once! At last the languid moon begins to leave its high and privileged position between the burning sun and the seething earth. Simultaneously, the frenzied flames begin to obediently subside with the waning eclipse.
The phoenix’s burning form soon afterwards begins to miraculously resolve itself into an anthropomorphic shape, which tentatively appears at first to be a magnificent illusion—a cruel, proverbial trick of the eye. But when the expiring flames sufficiently die out a human being is revealed—a man, the first ever in untold ages! Then the immediate area around him begins to transform. The humbled sun grows softer in appearance and in intensity, and the air grows moist, pregnant with moisture. The bristling grass begins to grow, lush and green, as if by preternatural means. Then amazingly follows more complex plant-life, like pollen-bearing flowers, wild berries, fruit-bearing trees, and even whole tracts of unspoiled forests. And what was previously dry, dense rock bursts into springs of water. Limpid pools form. Then, from the simplest to the most complex, living animal-life appears. First, anything creeping or crawling takes hold in the humous soil of the transmuting earth. Then the wide, over-arching sky, azure-blue, begins to teem with numerous, high-flying birds that also nests in the shade-bearing trees. And, as if by miracle or by magic, entire herds of cloven-footed mammals appear from out of nowhere , each moving en masse. All the new flora and fauna each spring fully alive and flourishing from the Earth’s baptism by fire. In short, the once-dead planet Earth is renewed with life again!
Now no longer a bird of myth, the confused and amazed phoenix examines his new alien, human form and the dramatic changes in the terrain and the Earth around him with his new, human eyes. Halfway through his amazement and disbelief, a brilliant column of light descends from the clear sky onto a wet, grassy clearing not far away from the crag with a thunderous peal. Both dazzling and galvanizing, its effect is like lightning! The once and former phoenix, now acting instinctively and with total disregard for himself, hurriedly races toward the open clearing to investigate. Although the clearing is in fact a limpid pool of water the dazzling column of light ignites it like an inflammable lake of gasoline set ablaze. Perplexed but yet intrigued, the human phoenix cautiously studies the supernatural event before him.
Then the impossible happens! The column of brilliant light resolves into a human form. Once fully formed, it then boldly approaches the now stunned and frozen phoenix. Unable to move or run, the awestruck phoenix is instinctively overwhelmed by fear and wonder, and yet he desires to comprehend the senses-reeling, almost god-like entity before him. “What are you? Who are you?” the fear-gripped phoenix begs the incandescent figure with his new, quivering human lips.
Then, with a booming voice that sounds like a thousand cascades, the god-like being rejoins, “I shall show you! From this day forward, you will be called Gabriel!” The electrifying avatar then wondrously surrounds the overwhelmed phoenix in its own living aura of light and energy. The phoenix’s psyche as a result spontaneously floods with a stream of near-infinite images in the scant space of an instant in time which seemed an eternity to the former bird of myth. The supernatural link between them reveals a wondrous and fearful paradox—that the irresistible avatar is him, the newly-christened Gabriel! After near countless eons of physical, mental, and spiritual evolution, it is he who arrives from his faraway, distant future to dramatically help set events in motion in the present and to begin anew his mission with his newly transmogrified self as the phoenix now turned avatar and godling.
© The Bipolar Bard. All rights reserved. 25 April 2011

1. Zionists claim that the Nakba was not an ethnic cleansing, and that the current assault on Gaza is not an ethnic cleansing.The united nations has described both as an ethnic cleansing. The definition of ethnic cleansing is forceful removal of a certain group from the land, which certainly describes the Nakba and Gaza. The Zionists commited several attacks on Palestenian villages and killed many people. This all played a role in their exit of the land.

Source on united nations describing both as ethnic cleansing: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/un-expert-warns-new-instance-mass-ethnic-cleansing-palestinians-calls
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/ethnic-cleansing.shtml
Sources for those who described the Nakba as an ethnic cleansing:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/11/03/israel-nakba-history-1948/
1. 2023, pp. 30, 65, 71, 81, 182, 193–194; Abu-Laban & Bakan 2022, p. 511; Manna 2022; Pappe 2022, pp. 33, 120–122, 126–132, 137, 239; Hasian Jr. 2020, pp. 77–109; Khalidi 2020, pp. 12, 73, 76, 231; Slater 2020, pp. 81–85; Shenhav 2019, pp. 49–50, 54, and 61; Bashir & Goldberg 2018, pp. 20 and 32 n.2; Confino 2018, p. 138; Masalha 2018, pp. 44, 52–54, 64, 319, 324, 376, 383; Nashef 2018, pp. 5–6, 52, 76; Auron 2017; Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury 2017, p. 393; Al-Hardan 2016, pp. 47–48; Natour 2016, p. 82; Rashed, Short & Docker 2014, pp. 3–4, 8–18; Masalha 2012; Wolfe 2012, pp. 153–154, 160–161; Khoury 2012, pp. 258, 263–265; Knopf-Newman 2011, pp. 4–5, 25–32, 109, 180–182; Lentin 2010, ch. 2; Milshtein 2009, p. 50; Ram 2009, p. 388; Shlaim 2009, pp. 55, 288; Esmeir 2007, pp. 249–250; Sa'di 2007, pp. 291–293, 298, 308; Pappe 2006; Schulz 2003, pp. 24, 31–32
The first prime minster of Israel even said that his goal was ethnic cleansing of the arabs:
https://www.progressiveisrael.org/ben-gurions-notorious-quotes-their-polemical-uses-abuses/

5 October 1937, Ben-Gurion wrote in a letter to his 16 year old son Amos: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places…. And, if we have to use force-not to dispossess the Arabs of the Negev and Transjordan, but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places- then we have force at our disposal.”

“We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. Allon repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population? ‘Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said ‘ Drive them out! ‘ “Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”

David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
In 1899 Zionists declared their goal to colonize palestine.
https://www.nytimes.com/1899/06/20/archives/conference-of-zionists-elect-delegates-at-their-meeting-in.html
​

1. ZIonists claim that arabs have equal rights to jews in the land, and that for them this proves it is not apartheid. This is a lie from the zionists. Jews have a special right called the right to return, the right to return allows jews from any nation to get a free citizenship easily, and it even gives them a palestenians home that the person is still living in, this is known as settlers. The settlers could be from any country, but they not only get a citizenship but they are allowed to violently displace palestenians from a home they currently live in. There are many cases of this happening. OCHA reported, from 1 January to 19 September 2023, Israeli settlers and forces killed 189 Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and wounded 8,192. This is not only legal but encouraged by the ISraeli government because it is meant to express their dominance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_settler_violence

1. Zionists claim that Hamas is the only one at fault when any Palestenians die in the conflict. No matter what happens Zionists will never ever take any responsibility for any issues in this conflict. Their goal is to depict themselves as the civilized peaceful people, while Palestenians are the savages who refuse peace. They often do this by blaming Hamas for everything. The reality that Zionists will not tell you is that Hamas was irrelevant until the mid 2000s. They were not founded until late 1980s, and the group that they came out of had no military power. Israel saw them as a non threat to their goals, and they even decided to fund them because they thought itd be a powerful tactic against the more powerful groups.

Sources on ISrael funding Hamas: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eus-borrell-says-israel-financed-creation-gaza-rulers-hamas-2024-01-19/
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/19/hamas-israel-palestine-conflict/
The times of Israel even describes hamas as Netanyahus project.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
Thats why the people on this subreddit who are paid money to defend israel (becaause nobody would do that for free), will often use Hamas as the excuse for everything. Because the people that pay them obviously use the same rhetoric foundation that Netanyahu built which is to blame everything on hamas. Even though Hamas is a bunch of irrelevant random people with random weapons. Even if Hamas didnt exist somebody would aquire weapons to fight against the IDF.
The reality is that there is no hamas presence in the west bank, yet the people there live under Israels checkpoints and bullying by their IDF. You can read about it here, and other sources. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/22/how-does-israels-occupation-of-palestine-work
Israel treats people a way in west bank, that will show you that this all has nothing do with Hamas. They treat people so poorly in the west bank that it shows that Hamas is clearly just an excuse to justify any action taken against Palestenians.
In fact Israel was fully aware of the attack coming on october 7th but chose to ignore it. This is likely because they wanted it to happen, and were happy to sacrifice their citizens for the sake of justifying a total destruction and ethnic cleansing of the people of Gaza.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html#:~:text=Israeli%20officials%20obtained%20Hamas's%20battle,for%20Hamas%20to%20carry%20out.
This is why their rhetoric after oct 7th was extremely aggressive, they thought that the attack would be easy to use to justify any actions against Gaza people. They thought western people would be very happy to support the destruction of Gaza because the october 7th. They were surpised to find that people did not like seeing babies and kids dying as a payback for this one attack.
Lastly its important to mention that Israel uses the Palestenians election of hamas to justify ethnic cleansing. Their argument is meant to conclude that because Palestenians support an evil group therefore they must all die. The problem is that this election took place almost 20 years ago, and a Majority of Palestenians alive today did not participate in this election!
5- Genocide, Zionists dont like this term, but the thing about a genocide is that there is a process. There are 10 recognized stages of genocide https://museeholocauste.ca/en/resources-training/ten-stages-genocide/. I will be using these descriptions below:

1. Classification

Groups in a position of power will categorize people according to ethnicity, race, religion or nationality employing an us versus them mentality
This is certainly happening. For example the Israeli government described Palestenians as animals, and Netanyahu compared them to Amalek who were genocided in the bible. The south Africa case against Israel included many of these sorts of statements, because they understand that Genocide begins with rhetoric, just like the Nazis started it that way. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/14/intent-in-the-genocide-case-against-israel-is-not-hard-to-prove
.
3. Discrimination
A dominant group uses laws, customs, and political power to deny the rights of other groups. The powerless group may not be granted full civil rights or even citizenship.
The right to return being an exclusively jewish right is an example of discrimination. This lists 7 laws that discriminate between Israelis and Arabs.
https://imeu.org/article/the-7-most-racist-israeli-laws

1. The Jewish Nation-State Law

One of Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. Stipulates that the right to self-determination in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories “is unique to the Jewish people” and encourages racial segregation and discrimination against Palestinians in housing by directing the state to promote the “development of Jewish settlement as a national value.”

1. The Law of “Return”

Gives Jews from anywhere in the world the right to immigrate to Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories and to automatically receive Israeli citizenship. At the same time, Israel denies indigenous Palestinians who were expelled during and after Israel’s establishment their legal right to return to their homeland because they aren’t Jewish and treats Palestinian citizens of the state, who comprise more than 20% of Israel’s population, as second-class citizens.

1. The Admissions Committee Law

Authorizes hundreds of smaller towns to set up “admissions committees” to reject applications from Palestinians, LGBTQ people, and others deemed undesirable using criteria such as being “unsuitable to the social life of the community… or the social and cultural fabric of the town.”

1. Absentee Property Law and Land Acquisition Law

Allows Israel’s government to expropriate land and other property belonging to Palestinians who were driven from their homes during the state’s establishment. The primary tool used by Israel to steal huge amounts of land and private property from Palestinians who were expelled and denied their right to return, including many internally displaced within Israel’s borders.

1. Israel Lands Law

Another of Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws. Stipulates that ownership of state lands can only be transferred between the government and quasi-governmental agencies like the Jewish National Fund, which only leases land to Jews. Ninety-three percent of the land in Israel is state owned. Israel's discriminatory land policies make it extremely difficult for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to gain access to land for residential, commercial, agricultural, or other uses.

1. The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law

Prevents Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who are married to Palestinian citizens of Israel from gaining residency or citizenship status, including those who were expelled from towns inside what became Israel in 1948. Forces thousands of Palestinian citizens of Israel to leave the country or live apart from their spouses and families.

1. The Nakba Law

Bans public funding for institutions and organizations involved in commemorating the violent expulsion of three quarters of all Palestinians during Israel’s establishment as a Jewish-majority state in 1948, known to Palestinians as the “Nakba” (“catastrophe”).
Researchers have identified 65 laws which discriminate against arabs in Israel
https://www.adalah.org/en/law/index
The settlers taking peoples land is enough to prove apartheid.
4. Dehumanisation
The diminished value of the discriminated group is communicated through propaganda. Parallels are drawn with animals, insects or diseases.
I have shown you an example of Palestenians being compared to a disease and animals in the rhetoric. Netanyahu also called Palestenian children the children of darkness. The South African case has brought many of these examples to the court.
6. Polarisation
Propaganda is employed to amplify the differences between groups. Interactions between groups are prohibited, and the moderate members of the group in power are killed.
There are examples of jews who oppose zionism and they are typically bullied by zionists.
9. Extermination
The massacres begin. The perpetrators see their actions as “extermination” since they do not consider their victims to be entirely human.
the indiscriminate bombing by israel
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html
https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-bomb-campaign-gaza-hamas-war-defense-army/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/13/world/middleeast/us-criticizes-israel-for-indiscriminate-bombing-in-gaza.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html#:~:text=Nearly%20half%20of%20the%20air,a%20new%20US%20intelligence%20assessment.
Zionists claim that Israel does not target civilians, but there is plenty of evidence of this happening. They almost excuseively target civilians. The United States themselves who fears Israel has critisized them for indiscriminate bombing. Meaning that they are not careful about who they are targeting.
Its important to note that there are some jews who were part of the Nazi army, and supported the Nazis. The idea that Arabi Israelis existence changes whether or not its genocide are apartheid is simply a debate tactic used by zionists.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-jew-who-worked-for-the-nazis-and-hunted-down-refugees-in-wwii-greece/
https://www.brandeis.edu/jewish-experience/history-culture/2023/february/holocaust-jewish-courts.html
Some jews even participated in Nazi army.

With these facts in mind, most accept as common knowledge today that persons of Jewish descent were the most endangered people under Htler, and when considering the Nazi definition of who was a “full Jew,” they would be right. Yet, what many do not know is that probably several thousand Jews—and more than 150,000 “partial” Jews—served in the Wehrmacht, Germany’s military.

https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/hitlers-jewish-soldiers/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-12-24-mn-12209-story.html
The michling were half jews, there were several that participated in the nazi party.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mischling
​
You can imagine a typical argument from nazis being "jews participated in the nazi army therefore it wasnt a genocide".
6- Claims that the muslims want to genocide all jews. First of all jews lived in the muslim lands for over 1000 years. They lived all over the muslim lands in various different countries. Sometimes there may have been issues between them but for the most part Zionists will try to exaggerate this to justfiy their own genocides.
For example Jews had a golden age of culture in islamic spain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age_of_Jewish_culture_in_Spain#:~:text=The%20golden%20age%20of%20Jewish,cultural%2C%20and%20economic%20life%20flourished.
SOme jews still live in the middle east today despite the fact that they could easily go live in Israel and take a palestenians home for free if they wanted, and get good benefits paid for by US tax payers.
In fact the Muslims were the ones who allowed the jews back into jerusalem. This is a fact that Zionists will never accept.
on page 71-72, The jewish historian gil Moshe, who wrote this history book in the 20th centruy says:
https://ia600703.us.archive.org/24/items/AHistoryOfPalestine/A%20History%20of%20Palestine.pdf
Similarly, his contemporary Salmon ben Yeru]:lim, in his Arabic commentary toPs. xxx: wrote' ... as we know, th**e temple remained in thehands of the Romans for more than 500 years and they did not succeed inenteringJerusalem; and anyone who did and was recognised [as a Jew] wasput to death. But when the Romans left it, by the mercy of the God ofIsrael, and the kingdom oflshmael was victorious, Israel was permitted tocome and to live ... '**72[84] Until now we have seen that the Karaite commentators confirmwhat we know from the Christian sources, that it was forbidden to Jews toenter Jerusalem, and they point out that the Muslims changed this situation when they captured the city. The author of the 'Mysteries of RabbiShimon Bar Yo}:lai' also writes: 'The second king who will rise fromIshmael [that is to say, 'Umar ibn al-Khattab] will be a lover oflsrael andwill repair their cracks and the cracks of the temple'. AJewish chronicle, afragment of which is preserved in the Cairo Geniza, also confirms that itwas 'Umar who gave permission to the Jews to settle in Jerusalem and onthe basis of his decision seventy Jewish families came from Tiberias andsettled there.
So the muslims are the ones who allowed the jews back into Jerusalem after 500 years of exile, if islams goal was to genocide all jews like the zionists claim, then they certainly wouldnt lift a ban on their entry into their most important city. You can read on all of the conflict between jews and christians, the romans and the jews. They were not treated well by them for a very long time. According to muslim historians from that period, the jews under roman occupation viewed the muslims as liberating them from the romans.
​
7- I want to address the claim that israel is just defending themselves.
The first prime minster of Israel said :
“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves … politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country. … Behind the terrorism [by the Arabs] is a movement, which though primitive is not devoid of idealism and self sacrifice.”
— David Ben Gurion. Quoted on pp 91-2 of Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle, which appears in Simha Flapan’s “Zionism and the Palestinians pp 141-2 citing a 1938 speech.
“We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return.”
David Ben-Gurion, in his diary, 18 July 1948, quoted in Michael Bar Zohar’s Ben-Gurion: the Armed Prophet, Prentice-Hall, 1967, p. 157.
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their country. Why would they accept that?”
David Ben-Gurion (the first Israeli Prime Minister): Quoted by Nahum Goldmann in Le Paraddoxe Juif (The Jewish Paradox), pp121.
Its clear that you cannot be a conquerer while being the victim defending yourself. Its not defense if you are conquering other people. If you look at the https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jewish-and-non-jewish-population-of-israel-palestine-1517-present population growth of jews in Palestenine it grows because of the exlusion from europe. This caused conflict, and even though jews were only 30 percent of the population the united nations offered them over 60 percent of the land. Therefore the arabs declined because they were 68 percent of the population, so they thought it wasnt a fair deal to only recieve around 35 percent of the land. The zionists often use the rejection of "peace" as a way to depict Palestenians as savages who cant be dealt with. The reality is that the land they inhabited was going to be taken away from them, and it was a vast majority of the land. Not a fair or peaceful deal from their perspective. This is why people today often view Israel as merely an extension of british colonialism, because they were allied .

1. last thing I want to refute is the notion that Israelis are exclusively indegenous to the land. The reality is that Palestenians dna is indegenous to the land. It is very possible that some Palestenians ancestors may have been jews who converted to islam. There are many sources which confirm that Palestenian dna is not from saudi arabia like the Zionists claim. Therefore the claim that Zionists are exclusively indiegnous to the land is false.

https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/2015-10-20/ty-article/palestinians-and-jews-share-genetic-roots/0000017f-dc0e-df9c-a17f-fe1e57730000
https://www.juancole.com/2023/05/palestinians-indigenous-palestinian.html
https://www.shavei.org/blog/2016/06/05/palestinians-jewish-roots/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/
9-Last thing I want to talk about is Israelis power over the united states. Users here try to claim that it has no power at all. First of all congress voted to censure tlaib and omar for being against israel.
https://apnews.com/article/congress-house-censure-resolution-tlaib-8085189047a4c40f2d44ada4604aa076
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/us/politics/ilhan-omar-genocide-jews-columbia.html
The fact that they all agreed to do this shows how powerful Israel is. We also see the govt making laws that would make it illegal to critisize Israel which breaks freedom of speech.,
Usa has given 300 billion in total to israel
https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts
In 1997 and 1999, a survey was conducted for us govt members and it concluded that AIpac was the 2nd strongest lobby in the usa. In 2001 ir ranked fifth, this is very significant because this was during the war on terror. It means that these wars may have been influenced by the Israeli lobby.
https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/11/18/fortune.25/index1.html
https://inthesetimes.com/article/poll-aipac-losing-influence
https://merip.org/2007/06/the-israel-lobby-in-perspective/
There are other Israeli lobbys such as jstreetpac. Many candidates today recieve funding from one of the Israeli lobbys. Trump said that Israel used to own congress, which means that they were certainly viewed as powerful for a long time.

Good day everyone! I would just like to inspire some of you regarding my pathway to USA.
I graduated nursing last 2011 and passed the boards right away but did not practice my profession. It was really hard to find a hospital that time so I tried different jobs. Fast forward to 2020, I noticed that my current work (Call center) has no merit for my lifelong dream of being financially stable and capable.
It has come to the point that I was only earning P3x,xxx monthly which was just enough to fund my basic needs. I thought to myself that I would not want to spend the rest of my life like that. I resigned from my job, applied to a private hospital with a starting salary of P2x,xxx (with OT) and after 2 years, I tried applying for Nclex.
After I passed, I immediately resigned from my job and tried to apply as a WFH case management nurse for an insurance company in the USA. Starting salary was P6x,xxx and the best part of it is that it's just a home job. It also came with a sign up bonus of P200,000 claimable in a span of 1 year. During this time, my application to USA was already being processed.
I got promoted after 1 year to a trainer which raised my salary to P8x,xxx - P1xx,xxx, still work from home. After my application to US got approved and had my visa, I resigned from my job which made me save up a lot of money to now try my luck in the US.
It all starts with a decision with yourself. Imagine if I did not make that decision way back because I was already comfortable with my job. You can ask me anything so I can guide you if you are interested. No private messages please, thank you and Godbless!

From the NL Igniter:
When Franc Gjergjaj of East Lyme was arrested in connection with the Feb. 17, 2021, shooting death of 17-year-old Ronde Ford in New London, he faced four criminal charges: carrying a pistol without a permit, having a weapon in a motor vehicle, tampering with physical evidence and interfering with an officer.
Police allege Gjergjaj, then 22, shot and killed Ford in the middle of Grand Street.
Gjergjaj and his two co-defendants never did face charges related to Ford’s killing. When Gjergjaj was sentenced on Aug. 23, 2023, he pleaded guilty to a single felony charge of illegal possession of a weapon in a motor vehicle and walked out of the courtroom without a prison sentence.
Of the hundreds of court cases that flow into the state courtrooms each year, the majority end with plea agreements between prosecutors and defense attorneys.
Gjergjaj’s case was no different.
Evidence showed he was likely the victim of a robbery by Ford and the two other men and that he shot Ford in self-defense during a struggle. He deserved no prison time, his lawyer William Gerace successfully argued.
Critics would point to it as one more example of the state’s gun laws not being enforced. Gjergjaj did, after all, have a gun and did not have a permit for that gun but was not prosecuted for it. His case was plea-bargained down to a charge that did not require a mandatory prison sentence.
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Statistics compiled annually by the Office of Legislative Research show that between 2011 and 2022 a high percentage of some of the most common gun-related offenses ended without a conviction. For example, of the 601 cases in 2022 where an individual was facing the charge of criminal possession of a firearm, ammunition or electronic device, 61% were either dismissed or not prosecuted, known as a nolle.
During the same year, the courts entered nolles or dismissals on 66%, or 428 of the 648 cases, of the charge of carrying a pistol without a permit.
The numbers are sometimes cited as evidence that the state ― which prides itself as having some of the strictest gun laws in the country ― is not using those laws.
Chief State’s Attorney Patrick Griffin disputes the argument that gun laws are not being prosecuted and said in reaching a disposition, prosecutors will seek conviction for the most serious and readily provable offense. The Division of Criminal Justice prosecutes “cases and not charges,” he said, a reference to the OLR statistics.
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If prosecutors choose to not prosecute an individual gun charge in, for instance, a first-degree robbery with a firearm case, it does not negate the gun charge built into the first-degree robbery statute, he said.
“That’s where the stats don’t reflect the facts,” Griffin said. “We are in fact vigorously prosecuting the the gun laws we have in the state of Connecticut.”
A study by the Division of Criminal Justice that looked at case outcomes shows that in an evaluation of 1,688 gun cases disposed of in 2021 and 2022, 77% resulted in a conviction and 71% in a felony conviction. Each of those cases involved people who had previously been convicted of felony offenses and were charged with criminal possession of a firearm, ammunition or electronic device and/or criminal possession of a pistol or revolver.
Individuals with a conviction of criminal possession of a firearm are 8,000% more likely than someone with no criminal history to be arrested for a shooting, DCJ statistics show.
State Rep. Greg Howard, R-Stonington, a Stonington police detective, said many of the gun-related crimes are committed by people who are committing other crimes or face other charges. Howard said he understands that during the plea bargaining process prosecutors will seek a conviction on the most serious crimes.
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That doesn’t, however, discount the fact that many of the gun-related crimes remain unprosecuted while his colleagues in the General Assembly push for more gun laws, Howard said.
Howard voted against the latest update to the state’s gun laws last year, in part citing laws on the books that were not prosecuted.
“Overwhelmingly, the gun crimes we have are committed by people who are not legal gun owners,” Howard said. “It doesn’t make sense to continue to regulate legal gun owners when they are not involved in gun crimes.”
A sampling of cases
The Day, in an unscientific survey of gun-related arrests in the region, found that many, but not all of the people charged with a gun-related offenses in 2021 were ultimately convicted of at least one gun-related offense. The outcomes vary by case but often the final disposition includes a nolle of some of the crimes and a “concurrent” sentence, in which a defendant with multiple convictions is sentenced on each charge but serves all of the sentences at the same time.
Here is a sampling of some recent cases:
Jevon Scholl, convicted in Rhode Island of carrying a pistol without a permit, was arrested on Nov. 28, 2022, in connection with an armed home invasion in Norwich. He was charged with three counts of risk of injury to a minor, home invasion, criminal possession of a firearm, illegal possession of a high-capacity magazine, illegal possession of an assault rifle and third-degree assault. On April 2, 2024, Scholl was sentenced to 10 years in prison after pleading guilty to home invasion and illegal possession of an assault weapon. The other charges were nolled. The home invasion carries a 10-year minimum mandatory sentence so the 5-year prison sentence on the gun charge runs concurrent to the home invasion charge.
On May 9, 2023, Jamir Johnson of New London was sentenced to 17 years in prison for shooting a man in the head at close range during an argument. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison for first-degree manslaughter with a firearm. The one-year sentence for carrying a pistol without a permit is running concurrent to the manslaughter charge.
Andrew Cook was arrested at a Norwich boarding house on Feb. 21, 2021. Police said he was in possession of pipe bombs, high capacity magazines, body armor and an AR-15-style rifle with the serial number removed and a parts of an AR-15 where in place of a serial number was a stamp of a person holding up a middle finger with the words, “Here’s your serial number.”
In March, Cook pleaded no contest to the charges of criminal possession of a firearm and illegal bomb manufacturing and pleaded guilty to interfering with police. Sentencing is set for June, when he is expected to get 12 years in prison.
Melissa Kane, the board chairman and interim executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, said the focus of the organization is reducing gun violence in the state. Kane said the group lobbies for state laws that aid in that mission. In 2019, the state had 181 firearm deaths, and 61% were suicides.
Prosecution of gun laws plays an important role in deterring gun crimes and deaths, Kane said.
While violent crimes committed with guns get a lot of attention, Kane said, the state’s laws pertaining to things such as safe gun storage and firearm permitting are equally important.
“When people store their guns safely, there’s less of a chance of those guns being stolen, used in a suicide or domestic violence situations,” Kane said. “When you’re talking about crimes involving firearms, I’m comfortable saying (prosecution of those crimes) is a deterrent.”
Every case is different
New London County State’s Attorney Paul Narducci said the decision on what to offer a defendant as part of a plea agreement is based on the circumstances of that case, and the details of each case differ. And while he declined to discuss the details of any individual case, Narducci said “all cases are fact dependent.”
While some larger judicial districts, which handle more gun crimes, have dedicated gun dockets, New London has one of its assistant state’s attorneys, Tom DeLillo, handle the bulk of the gun-related cases. Having one prosecutor deal with the majority of the gun crimes helps with consistency, Narducci said.
“One of the things that’s really difficult to get out to the general public, even though you want to be consistent with your dispositions, is every case is different and the variables are almost innumerable,” Narducci said.
For example, Narducci said if somebody committed an armed robbery and was carrying a pistol during the crime, that individual could be charged with some or all of the charges that include carrying a pistol without a permit, criminal possession of a firearm, weapon in a motor vehicle or carrying a dangerous weapon. There’s a lot of crossover, he said. The focus of the prosecution will be on the armed robbery, he said.
“We do try to pick the charges that are representative of the type of crime it is,” Narducci said.
A defendant with a long violent history is probably going to be charged with criminal possession of a firearm, which carries a mandatory minimum of two years in prison, versus carrying a pistol without a permit, which carries a mandatory minimum of one year, Narducci said. There are a host of other factors taken into account when negotiating a disposition, Narducci said.
If it is the offender’s first crime, that person may be eligible for a diversionary program. The charges, therefore, would ultimately get dismissed by the court if terms of the program are met.
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Prosecutors have some discretion if the only crime committed was something like a lack of a gun permit. If the person is not otherwise a criminal and had not used the gun during the commission of a crime, the charge might be substituted with a misdemeanor such as weapon in a motor vehicle, which does not have a mandatory prison term.
Other factors at play when making a plea offer are the strength of the case, the age of the defendant, whether there was a victim in the crime and whether the offender is “amenable to rehabilitation or is it somebody that’s been through the system many times,” Narducci said.
Prosecutors also pay attention to what the legislature has done in terms of laws addressing certain crimes. For example, a new “serious firearm offender” law recently passed by the legislature imposes more stringent release conditions for firearm offenders based based on previous convictions.
Michael Lawlor, a lawyer and former state representative who is a professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven, said the annual statistics from the Office of Legislative Research showing low conviction rates could be misleading.
Those stats are simply a snapshot of case outcomes in any given year but don’t differentiate between individual cases, only charges, he said.
“The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story since it is impossible to discern what an individual was charged with and what the person was convicted of or if a substitute charge replaced the original charge,” Lawlor said. “If the final plea is a substitute charge, the original charge may appear as a dismissal.
Narducci said many cases, not just gun crimes, result in changes based on the evidence developed during the prosecution and often lead to fewer charges during the final disposition.
Gerace, the attorney who represented Franc Gjergjaj in the gun case, said his was a unique case and even in the instance of the initial gun possession charge, said the state would have had a hard time proving its case if it had gone to trial. The negotiations that took place before is client’s plea included conversations about the “mitigating circumstances and weaknesses in the state’s case,“ he said.
g.smith@theday.com
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READER COMMENTS

KEITH J. ROBBINS

May 5, 2024 at 06:49Report
One more shining example, we do not need more laws we need the laws we have enforced……

CLAIRE RAMUS

May 5, 2024 at 06:41Report
Stop selling guns. Let’s see what happens.

Tim Dodd

May 5, 2024 at 06:16Report
Ask our progressive in our state legislature. They are the ones pushing for less police enforcement and letting repeat gun offenders out early. Search Senator Gary Winfield and repeat gun offenders. It’s astounding how repeat criminals are romanticized in progressive-run CT.

Richard Golden

May 5, 2024 at 03:23Report
Matthew- good question! The entire thing is stupid…myriads of gun laws, and most don’t prevent a thing other than cause an inconvenience to legal exercise of a constitutional right…criminals don’t abide by the laws and most laws broken are not prosecuted….but lets make some more laws.

Tim Dodd

May 4, 2024 at 21:50Report
Do you need a permit to have one at home? (constitutional right) Or when you want to carry?

Matthew Hiddemen

May 4, 2024 at 21:02Report
If guns are a Constitutional right, how is there such a thing as an non-legal gun owner? Sounds like a privilege in actual practice…

Tim Dodd

May 4, 2024 at 17:32Report
The democratic-led state legislature, in particular Senator Gary Winfield, is one of the biggest problems in getting crime under control in our state.
https://ctmirror.org/2023/03/07/ct-gun-bill-supported-by-city-mayors-runs-into-resistance/

Richard Golden

May 4, 2024 at 16:01Report
As is discussed over and over again in this article and over time…and Mr. Howard is 100000% correct! “Overwhelmingly, the gun crimes we have are committed by people who are not legal gun owners,” Howard said. “It doesn’t make sense to continue to regulate legal gun owners when they are not involved in gun crimes.” But that is what the public clamors for …. illegal gun, no permit, and no gun charge…

Vital Environmental Factors That Can Prevent Recovery From BPD:
If, as a result of childhood trauma, we have developed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or borderline personality disorder (BPD) our post-traumatic environment can have an extremely strong impact upon our chances of recovery. I list some particularly important factors below :
LACK OF SUPPORT FROM FRIENDS, FAMILY AND THE WIDER COMMUNITY / SOCIETY
If we are not provided with such support, but, instead, are shunned and ignored, it is highly likely that our feelings of worthlessness, vulnerability and isolation will be intensified.
Support needs to be non-judgmental, empathic and validating both of our emotional pain and also of our interpretation of how our adverse experiences have affected us.
Also, those providing the support need to be 'emotionally literate' (i.e. able and willing to discuss feelings and emotions in a compassionate and understanding manner)
NOT BEING BELIEVED
Obviously, if people we talk to about our traumatic experiences don't believe what we are saying or believe we are exaggerating the seriousness of what happened to us (or the seriousness of the effect it has had upon us) our psychological condition is likely to be severely aggravated: our lack of self-esteem, sense of despair, sense of worthlessness, sense of unlovability, feelings of isolation and any feelings of anger, bitterness and resentment we may have are all likely to be severely intensified.
SECONDARY VICTIMIZATION
We need to avoid those who would cause us secondary victimization. Secondary victimization occurs when those who ought to be helping us instead harm us further. Indeed, the example of not being believed (see above) is one such form of secondary victimization.
Other examples of secondary victimization include :

• having a doctor who minimizes/trivializes the seriousness of what has occurred to us and its effects
  
• being stigmatized by society for having developed a psychiatric condition
  
• being shunned and ostracized by friends/family due to our condition
  
• being made to feel ashamed in connection with what has happened to us and its effects
  
• having the vulnerable nature we have developed as a result of our mental condition exploited by an intimate partner (the risk of this is especially high as those who have suffered significant abuse in their early lives are frequently (on an unconscious level) driven to seek out intimate partners who are likely to abuse them further (this is sometimes referred to as a repetition compulsion).
  

On top of these problems, it can, too, be difficult to get professional support:
A recent study carried out by Proctor et al., 2020, has produced further evidence that BPD sufferers frequently find it highly problematic gaining access to effective treatment such as dialectical behaviour therapy, or DBT. (In relation to this problem, you may wish to read my previously published articles: How Malignant Alienation May Impoverish Care BPD Patients Receive.)
Whilst many professional used to believe BPD was typically unresponsive to treatment, this can no longer operate as a feasible excuse as there now exists an increasingly large and growing body of evidence that a substantial proportion of those who have been diagnosed with this extremely serious condition (which is closely linked to severe and protracted, interpersonal, childhood trauma) can be treated effectively, at least to the degree that they no longer fulfil the requisite criteria necessary for the diagnosis of BPD to continue to be applicable.
The authors of the study suggest that difficulty obtaining proper treatment is linked to the continued stigma attaching itself to a BPD diagnosis. However, as sufferers of the condition become increasingly knowledgeable about the illness and of the existence of evidence base therapies like DBT (see above), so too should their confidence assertively to request the opportunity to access such treatment. After all, about one in ten BPD sufferers eventually die by suicide, so the need for such individuals to be offered compassionate, non-judgmental, empathetic and non-discriminatory treatment can hardly be overstated. The treatment of extreme mental pain is just as much of an ethical imperative as is the treatment of extreme physical pain.
The Australian study surveyed 500 patients between 2011 and 2017 and found that those offered appropriate help often waited between a year and a year-and-a-half to receive it. The author of the study pointed out that this not only resulted in unnecessary suffering for the BPD sufferer but also placed extra strain on hospital emergency services (i.e. due to more BPD sufferers reaching crisis point, attempting suicide, self-medicating with dangerous levels of alcohol and/or narcotics, extreme self-harm such as self-cutting and self-burning etc.).
The researchers concluded by emphasizing the importance of health professionals applying NHMRC BPD guidelines in order to support front line services responsible for the welfare of BPD sufferers.

Hi all many thanks for reading and responding! We are a couple living in the midwest in an apartment who have been interested in getting a dog for the first time. We want to do it right and not go willy nilly into getting a breed who might be wrong for our lifestyle.
1) Will this be your first dog? If not, what experience do you have owning/training dogs?
This will be my husband's first time owning a dog and my first time as a primary owner. I grew up with dogs in a rural area so I have some experience, but was not the primary trainer or caretaker and our dogs were more farm dogs and less formally trained. I feel moderate in my knowledge and experience with dogs. We would be interested in puppy training/dog training classes from our local shelters/dog trainers.
2) Do you have a preference for rescuing a dog vs. going through a reputable breeder?
We would be slightly more interested in an ethical breeder for our first dog and have friends that are connected to breeders (although most are hunting dog breeders and we don't know the breeders personally). We are open to rescuing if the dog is youngepuppy and able to adjust or a breed that might be trainable. We're hesitant to rescue due to our lack of dog owning/training experience and dealing with serious behavioral issues.
3) Describe your ideal dog.
We would ideally love a medium/medium-small dog who isn't a barker since we currently live in an apartment. We like the idea of an intelligent dog who enjoys being trained. We are fairly active and go for walks most days and hikes on a nice weekend so having a dog with us for that would be great, but we aren't runners and we don't have a yard. We do have access to green spaces and dog parks. We have a cat so we would want a dog who can do well with her. We would want more of a cuddly/loyal dog who loves being with us.
4) What breeds or types of dogs are you interested in and why?
Open to any - we recently came across the opportunity to buy springer spaniel puppies that our friend's breeder connection has, but have heard that they may be too high energy for apartment living. We really loved them though.
5) What sorts of things would you like to train your dog to do?
The basics - sit and stay, down and drop and lay and come, maybe a little more. Leash and potty trained. We're fine with our dog not being the most "trained dog", but do want one that will be obedient behaviorally and will play well/get along with humans and other dogs/won't be outrageously naughty.
6) Do you want to compete with your dog in a sport (e.g. agility, obedience, rally) or use your dog for a form of work (e.g. hunting, herding, livestock guarding)? If so, how much experience do you have with this work/sport?
No. We're imagining a happy dog who likes to play and be active, but is a companion to us.
Care Commitments
7) How long do you want to devote to training, playing with, or otherwise interacting with your dog each day?
4 hours of active time? This is a little hard to gauge. We would play and walk mornings and evenings and lunches if working from home. We would like to take our dog with us to places and travel with them. We would play in home as much as spatially possible.
8) How long can you exercise your dog each day, on average? What sorts of exercise are you planning to give your dog regularly and does that include using a dog park?
2-3 hours between both of us - including walks and running at the dog park playing/throwing a ball or frisbee and socializing with dogs. We could do some mental stimulation at our apartment, but it is a smaller space.
9) How much regular brushing are you willing to do? Are you open to trimming hair, cleaning ears, or doing other grooming at home? If not, would you be willing to pay a professional to do it regularly?
Not every day - maybe once a week? We would be willing to learn how to trim and groom at home but if it's out of our depth we would be willing you take to a groomer once a month. We don't really have a good gauge of how often this is needed though.
Personal Preferences
10) What size dog are you looking for?
Medium to medium-small (50 pounds or less)
11) How much shedding, barking, and slobber can you handle?
We really can't do a lot of barking with our apartment or sanity. Ideally low slobber content and less shedding is always good, but we have a cat whose hair is on every article of clothing we own and pukes hairballs so we know how it goes.
12) How important is being able to let your dog off-leash in an unfenced area?
We would like to trust our dog to be okay in an unfenced area. We live in a city and expect to always leash our dog except at dog parks, but we have many close family and friends with wide open spaces where we would love to let our dog run free and play with other dogs without fear of them running away or doing something unexpected.
Dog Personality and Behavior
13) Do you want a snuggly dog or one that prefers some personal space?
Would love a snuggly dog but one that doesn't constantly need attention and can be independent.
14) Would you prefer a dog that wants to do its own thing or one that’s more eager-to-please?
A happy medium - loyal and likes being around us but does well socializing/being in their own.
15) How would you prefer your dog to respond to someone knocking on the door or entering your yard? How would you prefer your dog to greet strangers or visitors?
Friendly but polite to visitors and strangers. Little jumping up on them after the training phase.
16) Are you willing to manage a dog that is aggressive to other dogs?
Not really - we understand dogs are animals but are looking for a more mellow temperament.
17) Are there any other behaviors you can’t deal with or want to avoid?
Biting/constant nipping if that's something dogs are prone to, constant barking is a big one with us that we can't deal with, inability to potty train, chewing on belongings (beyond toys/puppy phase)
Lifestyle
18) How often and how long will the dog be left alone?
Up to 7 hours, 2-3 times a week. My husband and I both work regular hours. I am able to and would work from home 2-3 times a week and be home with the dog. I also have a dog-friendly office and would be able to bring in my dog to the office if they are well trained enough (they would be in an open office space with up to 12 other coworkers there). There would be some work days where the dog would be home alone/with our cat for a full work day from 8:30ish to 5pm. I could possibly come home at lunch to let them out, but that's not consistent.
19) What are the dog-related preferences of other people in the house and what will be their involvement in caring for the dog?
We are a couple and would split care pretty evenly. We share the preferences listed.
20) Do you have other pets or are you planning on having other pets? What breed or type of animal are they?
We have an 8-year old cat who was around dogs when she was a kitten 1-2 years old. We think she would be amenable to having a dog around after adjusting.
21) Will the dog be interacting with children regularly?
Not regularly, although there are young kids in our family they would be around at gatherings. There would be other family pets (boxer mix dog, shepherd mix, cats) they would be around at those gatherings too.
22) Do you rent or plan to rent in the future? If applicable, what breed or weight restrictions are on your current lease?
We rent and have a 75lb limit. No pit bulls, german shepherd, rottweiler, wolf dog or any mix allowed. Hoping to have a home or larger condo with a small yard in the next 2-3 years, economy allowing. At the least, a larger apartment.
23) What city or country do you live in and are you aware of any laws banning certain breeds?
Not that I'm aware of.
24) What is the average temperature of a typical summer and winter day where you live?
We live in Madison, WI which can get extremely cold in the winter (average 28 F) and extremely hot (average 82 F).
Additional Information and Questions
25) Please provide any additional information you feel may be relevant.

• No additional information.

26) Feel free to ask any questions below.
Feel free to share advice for our situation as well! Thanks so much!

Brief note: I will be linking to relevant articles and sources throughout this *long* effort post, some of which will take you to McCarthy’s own webpage, some of which might be behind paywalls - depending on how interesting you find all this, you might like to follow these links to get a glimpse of the ‘primary texts’ themselves!
Sooo: take a seat - get some snacks - and get ready. This is the story of one man’s obsessive 20-year quest to convince the world that the ‘real genius’ behind Shakespeare’s plays was an Elizabethan translator called Sir Thomas North.
First things first! I studied literature for my undergraduate degree, and I have a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science: basically, my interests intersect perfectly with the ‘Shakespeare Authorship Question’, given that it is a) all about *probably* the greatest literary figure in English, maybe western, art, and b) it is of course a realm full of spurious thinking, logical fallacies and grasping at radical conclusions without any evidence.
I’ve been interested in the topic since before my undergrad degree over a decade ago, and have read all the arguments about all the usual suspects: from Edward de Vere (he of little poetic talent), to Christopher Marlowe (he at least could write well); all the way to Sir Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh. Honestly, it sometimes seems like everybody in 16th century England has been put forward as the playwright by someone at some point.
But the subject of this post is one Dennis McCarthy, an American independent researcher who has previously published papers on biology, and since the late 00s, almost exclusively (when journals will accept his papers that is…) on Shakespeare. In some ways McCarthy is clearly a tier above the usual conspiracy theorist/anti-Stratfordian (don't bother clicking this link - it's just an example of craziness). He’s not just looking at a random line in a sonnet, and extrapolating that into a huge, elaborate story about how ‘Shax-pere’ (as these sorts love to pointedly call Will) was actually a front for the Earl of Oxford’s plays, and he does do some research that takes him out of his house and off the internet; but he still ends up falling prey to the same old problems all anti-Stratfordians fall into, which I will get to below.
Now, if anti-Stratfordians were capable of thinking critically, the failure of McCarthy to convince anyone should really be the end of their mind-numbing nonsense - but of course it won’t be. My point being, that even the best intentioned, and most ingenious anti-Stratfordians eventually have to contend with reality: and it is at that point they fall flat on their face.
So, what makes this story any different? And why should anyone be interested in another pretender to the throne? Honestly, it’s mostly because my aunt bought me his book (Thomas North: The Original Author of Shakespeare's Plays) for Christmas, knowing my interest in the topic. Since I’ve recently finished it, I thought you should all go through what I went through 🙂
But McCarthy’s story is also interesting in and of itself. As far as I see it, it is an almost Shakespearean (or should that be ‘Northern’...?) tale of hubris. Full of intellectual arrogance, confirmation bias on a grand scale, and (independent) scholarly folly of grand proportions.
I think it’s also just genuinely interesting to see Thomas North of all people put forward as ‘the real Shakespeare’, because he is not at all a mainstream contender - whatever one might like to say about McCarthy, he certainly hasn’t made this easy on himself. And given the short shrift he’s been getting on the fringes of social media that pay attention to him, it’s fair to say he’s not a people pleaser. I almost admire his tenacity chasing this lost cause.
You see, Thomas North is seemingly the last literate male in Elizabethan England to be put forward as the ‘real’ playwright. Even some Italian and French writers were suggested decades before poor Thomas North was. Given that this translator, soldier, lawyer and son-of-Henry-VIII’s-main-man-when-it-came-to-the-dissolution-of-the-monasteries did actually have a real link with Shakespeare’s plays, it’s genuinely amazing that he’s only just now been put forwards: you see, it was his translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1590) that Shakespeare used as the source for his 3 Roman Plays. Those are Corialanus, Antony and Cleopatra, and Julius Caesar.
Now, anyone who knows anything about Shakespeare’s sources will know what I’m about to say, and it has been known by critics since at least the late 18th century. North’s Plutarch is not only one of Shakespeare’s most important sources, up there with Holinshed’s Chronicles and Ovid, it is the only one of Shakespeare’s sources that the Bard seemed to think didn’t need that much work to get good enough for the Elizabethan stage. You can check out Dennis’ webpage to see the common language between, say, Antony and Cleopatra, and North’s translation.
Worth pointing out here that McCarthy’s actually completely right on this point, but it’s a rather trivial point that everyone already agrees with: it’s with his novel arguments where he falters.
So with that, let’s get back to Dennis, and his story. His first venture into the world of literature was nearly 20 years ago - and here comes the hubris bit: like all STEM-lords he wanted to apply ideas and methodologies from the sciences to the arts. And, as he writes in the opening chapter to his self-published book, he started this part of his journey by asking himself: ‘what’s the single greatest, most important literary work in the western canon?’. This led him to think about Hamlet as not just a work of imagination and creativity, but as something that evolved into its final state that we all know today.
This is not, of course, completely insane - in fact, this is precisely what academics have done already. We know that the ultimate source of Hamlet is a Danish myth, that - over the course of a few hundred years - migrated to Elizabethan England via a French translation. McCarthy, undaunted by the fact that better minds have already worked out all there is to know about this, set himself the task of answering it his own way.
So he started by looking at contemporary references to Hamlet and Shakespeare. As any student of Elizabethan literature is likely to already know, the earliest reference to Hamlet can be found in Thomas Nashe’s preface to Greene’s translation of Menaphon, 13 years before the earliest publication of Shakespeare’s play. Nashe writes of someone who, ‘if you entreat him fair in a frosty morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I should say handfuls, of tragical speeches’. Given that Nashe then says that his followers are like the ‘Kid’ in Aesop, it is often assumed that Nashe is implying Thomas Kyd wrote this early Hamlet.
But we don’t really know who wrote this early Hamlet, often known as the 'ur-Hamlet': some suggest it may have simply been Shakespeare himself rather than Kyd, and it was merely an early iteration of the play he went on to perfect over the coming decade. McCarthy, always dissenting, reckons Nashe was referring to Thomas North as the author (of course!).
Now, to be fair to McCarthy - and this is as fair to him as I will ever be - this bit isn’t the whacky part, at least prima facie. After all, given that we don’t really know who Nashe was obliquely implying was the author, and the scant details in the text could be interpreted any number of different ways, McCarthy’s suggestion that it might have been North is in and of itself OK.
It’s more the fact that this one little inference became the basis of his multi-decade obsession with his North-Shakespeare hypothesis.
You see, what followed that first supposition was a classic case of confirmation bias. I say a classic case, but actually it is of course a rather extreme case. McCarthy has since published articles on:
Thomas North and Titus Andronicus
Ben Jonson’s Satires (and how they supposedly point to North as the writer of Shakespeare’s plays)
The claimed linguistic parallels between Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy and North’s first translation, the Diall of Princes
He’s also managed to unearth, and sometimes successfully publish books and/or articles on: Thomas’ handwritten marginalia in his personal books, that he thinks are connected to Shakespeare’s works; an unpublished travel journal, again by Thomas North, again thought by McCarthy to be connected to the plays; a copy of a book on politics, by George North, presumed to be Thomas’ cousin and yet again argued be the basis of certain scenes and phrases in the plays; payments that are assumed to be for putting on plays or revels, in the North family accounts; and finally, numerous (but of course coincidental) biographical connections between Thomas and Shakespeare’s plays (you'd have to read his book for those details).
Anyway, some of McCarthy’s discoveries are genuinely interesting in and of themselves, and certainly of historical interest to anyone who is a nerd for Elizabethan stuff, but where McCarthy sees endless corroboration and proof for his conclusions, I see confirmation biases on a scale rarely seen outside of QANON forums.
After all, where Dennis is likely to ask ‘what are the chances that everything Thomas North is known to have written and done can be directly linked to the Bard’s plays?’, I am inclined to answer ‘very likely, if that is what you’re looking for’. It’s just typical conspiracy thinking, isn’t it?
Let’s look at some specific examples of his arguments and so-called ‘evidence’, if you’re not too queasy-stomached with this journey so far.
At some point over the last decade, McCarthy has managed to get journalist Michael Blanding, and (presumably formerly) respected Shakespearean June Schlueter on board with his silliness, and together they’ve unearthed books from the North family library, some of which has marginalia in what they reckon is Thomas North’s handwriting (mentioned above).
You can click here to read a bit about it if you like (honestly, don’t bother), but the gist is simple: McCarthy thinks that North’s marginalia shows North’s process of writing some of the plays, and points in particular to his underlining of supposed ‘key plot points’ in Cymbeline, such as giving tribute to Rome, the slaying of a certain king, and the Roman invasion of Britain. He also loves to bang on about the fact that Shakespeare and North seemingly misspell a character’s name the same way, which he repeatedly asserts in his book is ‘highly unlikely’.
The main problem here is that we already know that Shakespeare used Fabyan’s chronicles as a source, so it’s hard to work out what these marginalia are meant to prove: the connection is already known. The fact that Shakespeare and North misspell ‘Cassibellan’ in the same way (‘Cassibulan’) means little when you remember that publishers would have the final say in how word were spelled, rather than working precisely to what was written in the manuscript: why assume it was Shakespeare who was misspelling the Roman name the same way as North? Clearly another reach by McCarthy, but of course he sees nothing but further confirmation of his theory.
And the fact that North underlined many of the ‘salient’ plot points and bits of phrasing that appear in Cymbeline needn’t suggest anything more than the translator saw Shakespeare’s play (or had a physical copy) and underlined those passages based on that. And that’s only one of any number of possible alternatives!
Anyway, in the early 2010s, he got his hands on some plagiarism software - WCopyfind - and of course applied his newest toy to his singular obsession. His findings from using the tool comprise the bulk of his book’s argument. It will surprise none of you, I’m sure, to hear that - shock, horror - he found exactly what he was looking for. I’m not going to go into detail here about all of the collocations he thinks he’s found, just check out his website for a run down, if you’re really that much of a masochist. (There are times looking into all of this that I’ve had to question both his and my soundness of mind…)
So, I’ll just stick to one example, possibly the single biggest reach I think I found in all his work:the claimed commonalities between Shakespeare’s writing, North, and North’s sources, and the argument that these are evidence for North’s authorship of the plays. For example, he reckons bits of King Lear are taken from one of Thom’s translations. I can happily accept that these connections might be real, to be fair, and that Shakespeare may have read North more widely than Plutarch’s Lives, but McCarthy of course has to go one step further: he asserts that the playwright must also have read North’s non-English source (one Simon Goulart), because EdgaPoor Tom uses the word ‘esperance’, which appears in Goulart’s French text in the same passage McCarthy thinks King Lear is borrowing from, via North.
Exhausting isn’t it?
His argument isn’t just that Shakespeare is borrowing from both North’s translation, and Goulart’s original, of course, but that North wrote King Lear and at some point sold the play to Shakespeare, and so he would have had access to his own translation and the original already when he was writing the play. Just read his webpage for a full breakdown of his warped thought process. As far as I’m concerned, this actually proves nothing. After all, 'esperance' was already an extant word in English by the late 16th century, being first recorded in 1430, so there’s no reason to assume Shakespeare got it from Goulart. And after all, coincidences do happen, but try convincing a conspiracy theorist of that.
It’s also not impossible - if we want to give McCarthy some leeway with his ideas - to believe that Shakespeare may have read both Goulart and North in parallel while writing King Lear. There’s good reason to believe he spoke French quite well, and it’s certainly not unheard of to work this way, even today. But McCarthy of course sees literally everything as confirmation of his theories.
Ultimately, it’s a shame that he had to wrap his research and discoveries up in this anti-Stratfordian nonsense. Had he simply stuck to the more reasonable and conventional view, that mainstream academia has accepted for hundreds of year - i.e. that actually, yes, the Man from Stratford wrote the plays we think he wrote - he could have contributed something useful to the field of Shakespeare’s sources or Elizabethan literature and history more broadly.
By all accounts, this Thomas North chap clearly led an interesting life. He certainly had some influence on Shakespeare’s writing, at least when it came to the three Roman Plays. And you know what, he may even have been used as a source for more of the canon than we had previously thought, if the collocations McCarthy talks about are anything to go by! But because McCarthy is far too fast to assume that nothing could be coincidental, or trivial - when in fact, actually, many things are - he’s put himself in a position where his work will forever be relegated to the fringes of academic study.
Elizabethan manuscript culture is well attested to and well discussed in the literature, and there’s no reason to think that Shakespeare couldn’t have read North’s unpublished journal, probably McCarthy’s favourite widdlle discoveries that he’s endlessly blathering about. Why should we assume that every single verbal parallel found between Shakespeare’s plays and North’s translations means Shakespeare must have been using the older writer as a direct source? And Just because Thomas North was Alice Arden’s half-sister (something else he goes on about a lot!), doesn’t mean he must have written Arden of Feversham, part of the ‘Shakespeare Apocrypha’. After all, we know that William himself had a distant relative on his mother’s side called ‘Thomas Arden’: does that not also, taking this line of argument, corroborate the Shakespeare-as-author case?
Well, there’s good reason to believe that Shakespeare did co-write at least some of Arden, based on robust stylometric analyses, so that is something of a rhetorical question. The point is, again, that McCarthy unfortunately sees everything as evidence for North’s authorship of the canon, and seems to think that because he can link every known biographical tidbit about Thomas North with Shakespeare’s plays, and because he squints his eyes and sees verbal parallels everywhere, and because North’s marginalia happens to misspell something the same way as Cymbeline - and honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg… well, this is the very definition of delusional monomania, right?
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little portrait of a man besotted by his own theories, and you’ve not simply spent the time reading it groaning in agony and despair over the fact that it’s 2024, and these baseless ideas keep popping up. I find something fascinating in all this, even if I also find it all a bit crazy.
Citations - I've tried to link to anything I really need to cite, but I also read/consulted
Shapiro, James - Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?, 2011
Blanding, Michael - In Shakespeare's Shadow: A Rogue Scholar's Quest to Reveal the True Source Behind the World's Greatest Plays, 2022
My go to version of Shakespeare's works is The Arden Shakespeare, which also includes lots of notes on specific plays, and their sources, dates etc. I also use The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works

Ambivalent Classism: The Importance of Assessing Hostile and Benevolent Ideologies about Poor People
Part 1
Cart before the horse thinking is seen on the financially abusive wealthy. For instance, you may see clean and sober homeless being accused of drinking or doing drugs to feel better about their willful negligence. However, it is clear they need their financial superiority to not feel inferior, often times to these very poor for other merits like attractiveness or strength of body.
" Negative stereo-types legitimize the lower status of subordinate groups by portraying them as lacking qualities associated with status and power (Pratto & Pitpitan, 2008), and by threatening punishment for insubordination, status-seeking, or attempts to upend the hierarchy (Glick &Fiske, 2001)."
Those who have wealth to assuage feelings of inferiority use financial difference in their favor to, with hostility, subordinate to drive down the differences as to highlight them mostly to assuage their feelings of inferiority. The greater the difference required to assuage these issues, the greater the feeling of deep inferiority. When, rather, social disruption is feared, these same people may pretend to be of support to the impoverished to feel like they're the "good guy" when the books clearly say they did the equivalent of nothing and should be treated like they did nothing as they only did a crumb to get out of being held with those who did nothing.
" From the perspective of high-status group members, hostile stereotypes of subordinate groups offer empowerment, while benevolent stereotypes offer comfort against fears of social disruption."
False disclosures, false data, and false fixes are quick ways for the economically abusive rich to try to convince those subordinated identities they predate (in this case women) that they are cared for. Upon actually rigorous analysis, their disclosures, data, and fixes have no foundation whatsoever and are violating in nature, including even the abuse of this research, disgustingly enough.
" Thus, it benefits high-status groups to convince low-status groups they are liked and cared for because doing so elicits allegiance and discourages revolt (Foels & Pratto, 2015; Jackman,1994). Indeed, when women are reminded of flattering but patronizing stereotypes of women, they report less motivation to take collective action against patriarchal control (Becker & Wright, 2011), and less intention to pursue a major in male-dominated STEM domains(Kuchynka et al., 2018)"
Sophistry (cart before the horse) versus logic is the key technique of rationalizing classism. Sophistry is long dead as a broken tool, showing classists are maladapted and behind.
" Sure enough, as income inequality increases, so too do positive stereotypes of poor people’s warmth, to offset the negative stereotypes that justify their disadvantages (Durante & Fiske, 2017; Durante et al., 2013).
Rationalization has a market; as inequities grow, rationalizing increases. Rationalization will not be seen where it doesn't have a market. A market for rationalization often operates in tandem with extremely high corruption scores, such as in the state of California and now the state of Washington as Washington becomes infested by the same forces.
"This suggests that as social inequities grow, people meet their need for fairness by doubling down on ambivalence toward disadvantaged groups."
Dominative abuse is the sign of a classist, especially if they are a whole different face to someone with wealth.
" incompetent, untrustworthy, and needful of dominative control (hostile classism), yet simultaneously friendly, humble, and needful of paternalistic assistance (benevolent classism."
The use of insubordinate used in excess, with someone with wealth trying to the extreme to rationalize by hyperfocusing on everything the poor do to try to spin anything as insubordination, is a huge red flag of classism, which is pathological as it includes greed and unlawful ownership of funds when this fixation is present (entrapment, making criminal matters civil is a huge sign of California type corruption infesting up to Washington, especially to cover up crimes that happened in that corrupt state)
"Dominative paternalism is the hostile belief that people with resources should control poor people, as the latter are insubordinate."
Not allowing for oversight committees of police or not allowing clientele on advisory boards are all signs of corrupt classism of the rich.
" In a survey of 76 nonprofits, fewer than half asked their clientele to participate on advisory boards, especially when there was no government-funder mandating client involvement (LeRoux, 2009)"
More sophistry; without even looking at qualifications, evidence shows that if someone is poor, they assume they are unskilled and assign them tasks that are extremely underemployed, showing economic incompetence through underemployment. In addition, no investment of emerging skills is seen for the poor in classists, they are seen as being only good for underpaid jobs that if they (the classist) were in the same position for, they would be as angry as anyone would be to be in that situation.
" In a more directly exploitative manner, non-poor people benefit from poor people’s labor at essen-tial but undesirable jobs that are underpaid, dirty, menial, and dangerous (Gans, 1971)."
Classists struggle with democracy and therefore tend to flunk government; their government is full of constant failures and screw ups due to not responding and listening due to classism.
" For instance, the exclusion of social service clients from par-ticipation in their own governance—reflecting protective paternalism—predicts worse client outcomes and under-mines program effectiveness (Benjamin & Campbell,2015). "

DISCLAIMER: This post does NOT condone violence or crime, nor does it say that sexism is a good thing, but explains that it is not caused by patriarchy. It is not sociogenic, but part of nature. This does not mean it is good, but that it is not sociogenic, even if feminists say it is.
Feminists argue it was the "patriarchy" or men who created gender inequality or gender roles, and gender roles are often portrayed as evil and oppressive, but feminists reinforce them all the time in a subtle manner. It's actually evolution that caused gender inequality.
Gender equality doesn't necessarily create more happiness.
First, although there is evidence of gender equality bringing happiness, there's no consistent evidence that gender equality causes wellbeing in men or women. One study wrote: "greater gender equality has few significant effects on overall subjective well-being (males and females combined), except for a slight association of more female (relative to male) education with higher well-being." They elaborated:

Most of the gender equality measures do not predict differences between male and female subjective well-being, neither when considering zero-order correlations (Table 1) nor in regression models that control for plausible covariates (Tables 5, 6). Therefore we can confirm the conclusion of Vieira Lima (2011) that greater gender equality or higher female status does not usually benefit women more than men. For example, a higher proportion of women in high-status occupations does not raise the average subjective well- being of all women, although it is likely to do so for the minority of highly ambitious women competing for these positions. High female labor force participation and non- agricultural employment emerge as conditions that appear to reduce female relative to male (or raise male relative to female) well-being (Tables 5, 6). This result confirms and extends the observation of Tesch-Ro ̈mer et al. (2008) of a predominantly negative rela- tionship between relative female life satisfaction and relative female economic activity rate. One possible explanation is that in many (though not necessarily all) countries, the disutility of work is greater for women than men. In other words, women dislike gainful work in a modern economy more than men do.

In fact, the research found that women are happier or more satisfied with life than men in Muslim countries, countries with less Catholic people, and countries without "communist" history. Furthermore, they found that female life satisfaction is higher in countries with more old-school gender roles:

One possibility is that higher female life satisfaction in countries with traditional gender roles is caused by lower female expectations. However, in this case we would expect that traditional gender roles favor higher self-reported female life satisfaction but not neces- sarily happiness. Inspection of Fig. 1 shows this not to be the case.

Additionally, gender equality was not associated with more happiness/life satisfaction, and more female employment, or socializing it, actually reduces wellbeing for women.

The present study is strictly cross-sectional. However, it shows that greater gender equality is not associated with higher subjective well-being of women relative to men. It even suggests that high rates of female employment, or possibly a value system that insists on female employment, have the potential to reduce female well-being. Therefore we need to be aware of the possibility that continued efforts at educating women out of traditional female roles and into traditional male roles can reduce female subjective well-being, as has happened in the communist and ex-communist countries. But is this really surprising? Men would not be happy and satisfied either if they were forced out of traditional male roles and into traditional female roles. Perhaps the implicit belief among many social scientists that male-typical preferences, values and social roles are in some way superior to traditional female ones needs to be re-evaluated.

They concluded this explains why wellbeing for women in the United States has declined in the past few decades as women entered the workforce more. This study found that although gender equality promoted happiness in both developed and developing countries, the effect was stronger in democratic or high income countries compared to nondemocratic or low income countries.
This study, which is far more well-researched than others, shows a nuanced pattern across many countries. When it came to happiness, people in "gender equal" countries were more likely to simply happy but people in "gender unequal" countries are more likely to be very happy. People in "gender equal" countries were more likely to be simply satisfied with life but in "gender unequal" countries, people were more likely to be very satisfied with life. Being simply unhappy or unsatisfied did not differ between countries but being very unhappy/unsatisfied was slightly more common in "gender unequal" countries, but the percentage who were very unhappy/satisfied was minuscule. The vast majority of people in both kinds of countries were at least happy/satisfied with life. Increasing gender equality was mixed in its results:

In gender equal countries, it was seen that increasing levels of gender egalitarianism tend to improve a person’s likelihood to be either very unhappy or at higher levels of happiness than unhappy.

Increasing gender equality in the "egalitarian" countries decreased unhappiness, very slightly increased being very unhappy (very minuscule change), very slightly increased (minuscule change) being very happy and increased being simply happy. In the "unequal" countries, increasing gender equality decreased being very happy, increased being simply happy, somewhat increased being unhappy and made a minuscule decrease in being very unhappy. With life satisfaction, it decreased being unsatisfied or very unsatisfied in both kinds of countries but only made a noteworthy increase in being satisfied or being very satisfied in "unequal" countries and "equal" countries, respectively. Either way, the authors concluded that their research "demonstrates that levels of happiness and life satisfaction have a similar distribution in gender equal and unequal countries overall", and "while the impact of demographic components on happiness and life satisfaction does not vary in gender equal and unequal countries, gender egalitarianism demonstrates diversified patterns of happiness".
Sexism and gender inequality has evolutionary roots.
This is a highly controversial point, but it is true. There's a lot of talk lately about how the hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, but this is false (a myth promoted by both the far left and feminists), and women did not hunt as much as men, but that idea was "proven" by research with high amounts of methodological bias.
A study called "An evolutionary life history explanation of sexism and gender inequality" by Nan Zhu and Lei Chang shows that sexism/gender inequality is indeed evolutionary. Contrary to popular belief, sexism was more based on discriminating against men or women or singling them out due to gender roles, and gender roles were important for the success of our species and survival. It wasn't about punishing a gender for their gender. Here's the abstract:

Predisposed to differences in parental investment, men and women are expected to enact different reproduction-oriented, accelerated life-history strategies when facing high extrinsic risks or resource insecurity. Sexual selection processes would strengthen the sex differences in support of such accelerated life-history strategy, causing women to divert more time and energy to reproductive activities and depend more on men's economic provisioning and therefore enforcing sexist attitudes and gender inequality. This paper provides empirical support for this life-history explanation of sexism based on data from the World Values Survey and four United Nations sources. The results generally support our explanation in the following manners: (1) Societal-level extrinsic risks (worries over intergroup violence) were associated with higher sexism. (2) Men were more sexist, and the association between individual-level resource insecurity and sexism was more moderate in countries and regions with greater society-level extrinsic risks. (3) Societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility.

They also cite evidence for how environment affects reproductive outcomes and general behavior:

Resource insecurity, which is related to higher exposure to morbi- dity–mortality risks for offspring in almost all human forager societies (Marlowe, 2000), has been demonstrated to be associated with parental harshness and insecure attachment, which, in turn, are linked to traits of accelerated life-history strategies. These traits include earlier sexual debut and higher sexual activities during adolescence, which are pre- dicted by earlier pubertal development (Belsky, Houts & Fearon, 2010; (Belsky et al., 2010b)). In a longitudinal study, Belsky, Schlomer and Ellis (2012) found that lower income-to-needs ratio experienced during the early years was indirectly associated with higher adolescent sexuality through lower maternal parenting quality in childhood. By con- trast, Ellis and Essex (2007) observed that fewer marital conflicts, higher quality parental care, and higher socioeconomic status predicted later sexual development in girls. Overall, accelerated life-history strategies are in accordance with increased reproductive efforts at an earlier age, which are adaptive to stressful environments that reduce the chance of offspring surviving to maturity, but less so in stable and competitive environments (Del Giudice et al., 2015).

Across countries, men scored higher on beliefs about old-school gender roles (or as the authors described, more sexist) than women. It wasn't because they're the "patriarchy" or "oppressors", but this difference in beliefs was higher in countries with higher extrinsic risks like intergroup violence (e.g.: war).

We found that males exhibited higher sexism than did females and that this trend was stronger in societies facing greater intergroup violence. This is consistent with our extrapolation that the traditional, sexist “protective males” stereotype is more advocated in societies facing an elevated danger of intergroup conflicts. Moreover, given that males have more incentives to escape parenting duties to focus on mating compared with females, males likely gain more reproductive success from sexist gender roles than females do when enacting accelerated life-history strategies. This might explain why the sex difference in sexism was greater in societies with higher extrinsic risks.

Extrinsic risks were associated with accelerated life history strategies (e.g.: having children), which, in turn, is associated with gender inequality. Societal level extrinsic risks (like intergroup violence) were associated with more sexism, and "societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility." Individual-level resource insecurity and societal intergroup violence both predicted more sexism or beliefs endorsing old-school gender roles, but: "society-level intergroup violence may have overshadowed individual-level resource insecurity such that the detrimental effect of resource insecurity was less severe in societies with high intergroup violence".
Rape and intimate partner violence are not caused by patriarchy, but are evolutionary tactics (despite being immoral and evolution/nature being amoral).
This is just like how men committing crimes against men (which is far more common) is also an evolutionary tactic. Nature is amoral and humans are, to an extent, a barbaric species (like any other species). This thread of mine talks about how not only is most sexism towards women benevolent sexism, but actual misogyny is rare among men, and those men were simply full of dark triad traits, and dark triad men and misogynistic men or rapists were two sides of the same coin. Dark triad traits are an evolutionary adaptation to have lots of casual sex, and they caused men to be interested in as many sex partners as possible. When these men have unusually high aspirations about how sexually active they must be, they tend to become misogynistic because they believe they are unattractive to women when they aren't, yet engage in a lot of promiscuity. As a result, these men have committed rape to get sex, but they also have a high amount of consensual sex partners. As a result, rape was found to be an evolutionary mating strategy from dark triad traits, which I elaborated on in that thread (no, it doesn't condone or defend sexual violence).
It is also possible countries with less gender equality, which have more intergroup violence or lack of resource security (which is what causes old-school gender roles and less gender equality), have more dark triad men, and the gender difference in dark triad traits between men and women is bigger. It's not patriarchy that causes dark triad traits in these countries, but intergroup violence and lack of resource security that causes these traits there. It could be intimate partner violence might be more common in these countries and it could be for evolutionary reasons and for the same reasons these countries have gender inequality or old-school gender roles more: the environment.
Although intimate partner violence is a gender symmetrical crime, I don't know if there's evolutionary reasons for why women commit intimate partner violence. There could be, but it has probably less research because society ignores male domestic violence victims. Among men who commit the crime, there are evolutionary reasons or hardwired instincts that cause it. For example, women with boyfriends/husbands who had children from previous partners are far more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence or homicide, whereas stepfather are more likely to be abusive. This is potentially due to sexual jealousy or resentment of the actual father due to knowing their children are not biologically their children. Even other species had intimate partner violence among both males and females:

These cases demonstrate that intimate partner violence is neither exclusive to humans nor exclusive to males. Intimate partner violence is the result of a natural process—Darwinian selection. These cases also call into question the default hypothesis that physical violence between pair-bonded individuals is caused by socialization. Proponents of the socialization hypothesis would not argue that burying beetles and razorbills are socialized to inflict partner-directed violence, and it may be erroneous to assume this default position for human intimate partner violence. In every species studied to date (including humans), intimate partner violence occurs when the actions of one partner (either male or female) threaten the survival or reproduction of the other.

Men also mate guard (guard their partner from other men) when she has high reproductive value or attractiveness, is ovulating, is around other men, or has other traits making her more prone to infidelity. Men's mate retention behaviors and mate guarding about making sure where she was or knowing who she talks to was associated with intimate partner violence perpetration against her. The relationship between accusations of female infidelity and female-directed violence was mediated by non-violent direct guarding behaviors. When it comes to marital sexual aggression, women's risk of sexual coercion by their partner was not related to power in the relationship, like who controls the decision making, and thus, women with a man with the dominant position in the relationship don't experience more sexual coercion from their husbands. A lot of evidence shows that sexual coercion in marriage might be due to paternity uncertainty or worrying the wife is cheating:

Sexual coercion in response to cues of his partner's sexual infidelity might function to introduce a male's sperm into his partner's reproductive tract at a time when there is a high risk of cuckoldry (i.e., when his partner has recently been inseminated by a rival male). This sperm competition hypothesis was proposed following recognition that forced in-pair copulation (i.e., partner rape) in nonhuman species followed female extra-pair copulations and that sexual coercion and rape in human intimate relationships often followed accusations of female infidelity.

Forced in-pair copulation, unlike general forced copulation, is rare in the animal kingdom because many species don't have long-term pair bonding, which is why it cannot occur. Many avian species have long-term pair bonds, as it exists in many of these species. It does not exist randomly, and happens immediately after extra-pair copulations, intrusions by rival males, and female species in some of these species, which leads to male-favoring sex ratio. Forced in-pair copulation right after suspected or confirmed extra-pair copulation in these species is a sign of a sperm competition tactic. Some ancestral women have mated with multiple men within short periods of time so sperm from more than 1 man can enter her reproductive tract. This explains why women are hardwired to cheat or get sexually bored quicker in relationships compared to men. Men who physically abuse or rape their wives had higher scores on sexual jealousy. Women who are victims of marital rape also are more likely to have been unfaithful. If they weren't, they were perceived that way. Because women can't be cuckolded given that they know which child is theirs and men would not bring an illegitimate child into the marriage, but outside the marriage, sexual jealousy and risk of being cheated on was not linked to women committing sexual coercion, but men who worried about sexual infidelity, had a partner who was at risk of cheating or who had a partner who did cheat, engaged in more sexual coercion, and many convicted partner rapists disproportionately had wives who cheated on them. Men's sexual coercion was consistently predicted by female infidelity and this held true even when controlling for men's personalities and controlling behavior (which can amplify the risk under these circumstances). Additionally, this explains why abusive relationships have more sex, and this is true for mates in various species close to humans, including gorillas, baboons, macaques, and chimpanzees.
Obviously, most men won't do these things, but obviously personality traits can still increase the risk along with evolutionary instincts, and so can attachment anxiety. There's also other factors for intimate partner violence and homicide, such as the fact that these offenders often tend to be generally violent criminals and have violent criminal records. There's obviously antisocial men who do tend to be violent in relationships because they're generally violent, but this is talking more about at least situation partner violence/homicide. Not all women killed by their partners were abused by them, even if it's true for most, but it's even more common for them to notice their partners' sexual jealousy or worries about infidelity, which the vast majority noticed for concerns their partner had. Additonally, this thread is NOT condoning violence against women, just like how acknowledging how violence against men is evolutionary does not condone it. Most male criminals harm men, and men usually restrict violence against women to when they commit sexual violence or intimate partner violence, and evolution explains all of this. Men have less evolutionary benefits to committing non-sexual crimes against women outside their relationship, unlike when they commit the same crimes against men.
There's also evidence showing that when the sex ratio has more women (more women than men in a population), men mated with more women than sexual aggression against women declined (rapists do tend to be promiscuous, but they have dark triad traits that make them more promiscuous as an adaptation, especially if women are less available to mate with, like polygamous societies). When there were more men than women, sexual aggression by men against women increased. Another study found that a sex ratio of more men than women increases men's intimate partner violence against women, and even more so when more women are working. They explain the evolutionary reason behind it:

Multivariate regression results furnish evidence supporting evolutionary psychology by demonstrating that a high sex ratio increases male-on-female intimate partner violence. Results also show that male-on-female intimate partner violence is higher in cities where more women work. Such a finding further buttresses the logic associated with evolutionary psychology because participation in the workforce is theorized to afford a woman a greater opportunity to meet and interact with men other than her husband or boyfriend.

Conclusion
There is a lot of evidence that gender inequality or sexism comes from evolution, and as society becomes more economically successful, has less intergroup violence, and becomes more convenient as a whole, this issue in society lessens. There's also evidence that men are evolutionarily hardwired to be more likely than women to endorse old-school gender roles, or sexism, about men and women.
This is in line with my post, which cites a lot of evidence to back its statements up, about how the changes in gender roles, ages of marriage, fertility, etc. were due to changes in environment, and that feminism played no role in it.

DISCLAIMER: This post does NOT condone violence or crime, nor does it say that sexism is a good thing, but explains that it is not caused by patriarchy. It is not sociogenic, but part of nature. This does not mean it is good, but that it is not sociogenic, even if feminists say it is.
Feminists argue it was the "patriarchy" or men who created gender inequality or gender roles, and gender roles are often portrayed as evil and oppressive, but feminists reinforce them all the time in a subtle manner. It's actually evolution that caused gender inequality.
Gender equality doesn't necessarily create more happiness.
First, although there is evidence of gender equality bringing happiness, there's no consistent evidence that gender equality causes wellbeing in men or women. One study wrote: "greater gender equality has few significant effects on overall subjective well-being (males and females combined), except for a slight association of more female (relative to male) education with higher well-being." They elaborated:

Most of the gender equality measures do not predict differences between male and female subjective well-being, neither when considering zero-order correlations (Table 1) nor in regression models that control for plausible covariates (Tables 5, 6). Therefore we can confirm the conclusion of Vieira Lima (2011) that greater gender equality or higher female status does not usually benefit women more than men. For example, a higher proportion of women in high-status occupations does not raise the average subjective well- being of all women, although it is likely to do so for the minority of highly ambitious women competing for these positions. High female labor force participation and non- agricultural employment emerge as conditions that appear to reduce female relative to male (or raise male relative to female) well-being (Tables 5, 6). This result confirms and extends the observation of Tesch-Ro ̈mer et al. (2008) of a predominantly negative rela- tionship between relative female life satisfaction and relative female economic activity rate. One possible explanation is that in many (though not necessarily all) countries, the disutility of work is greater for women than men. In other words, women dislike gainful work in a modern economy more than men do.

In fact, the research found that women are happier or more satisfied with life than men in Muslim countries, countries with less Catholic people, and countries without "communist" history. Furthermore, they found that female life satisfaction is higher in countries with more old-school gender roles:

One possibility is that higher female life satisfaction in countries with traditional gender roles is caused by lower female expectations. However, in this case we would expect that traditional gender roles favor higher self-reported female life satisfaction but not neces- sarily happiness. Inspection of Fig. 1 shows this not to be the case.

Additionally, gender equality was not associated with more happiness/life satisfaction, and more female employment, or socializing it, actually reduces wellbeing for women.

The present study is strictly cross-sectional. However, it shows that greater gender equality is not associated with higher subjective well-being of women relative to men. It even suggests that high rates of female employment, or possibly a value system that insists on female employment, have the potential to reduce female well-being. Therefore we need to be aware of the possibility that continued efforts at educating women out of traditional female roles and into traditional male roles can reduce female subjective well-being, as has happened in the communist and ex-communist countries. But is this really surprising? Men would not be happy and satisfied either if they were forced out of traditional male roles and into traditional female roles. Perhaps the implicit belief among many social scientists that male-typical preferences, values and social roles are in some way superior to traditional female ones needs to be re-evaluated.

They concluded this explains why wellbeing for women in the United States has declined in the past few decades as women entered the workforce more. This study found that although gender equality promoted happiness in both developed and developing countries, the effect was stronger in democratic or high income countries compared to nondemocratic or low income countries.
This study, which is far more well-researched than others, shows a nuanced pattern across many countries. When it came to happiness, people in "gender equal" countries were more likely to simply happy but people in "gender unequal" countries are more likely to be very happy. People in "gender equal" countries were more likely to be simply satisfied with life but in "gender unequal" countries, people were more likely to be very satisfied with life. Being simply unhappy or unsatisfied did not differ between countries but being very unhappy/unsatisfied was slightly more common in "gender unequal" countries, but the percentage who were very unhappy/satisfied was minuscule. The vast majority of people in both kinds of countries were at least happy/satisfied with life. Increasing gender equality was mixed in its results:

In gender equal countries, it was seen that increasing levels of gender egalitarianism tend to improve a person’s likelihood to be either very unhappy or at higher levels of happiness than unhappy.

Increasing gender equality in the "egalitarian" countries decreased unhappiness, very slightly increased being very unhappy (very minuscule change), very slightly increased (minuscule change) being very happy and increased being simply happy. In the "unequal" countries, increasing gender equality decreased being very happy, increased being simply happy, somewhat increased being unhappy and made a minuscule decrease in being very unhappy. With life satisfaction, it decreased being unsatisfied or very unsatisfied in both kinds of countries but only made a noteworthy increase in being satisfied or being very satisfied in "unequal" countries and "equal" countries, respectively. Either way, the authors concluded that their research "demonstrates that levels of happiness and life satisfaction have a similar distribution in gender equal and unequal countries overall", and "while the impact of demographic components on happiness and life satisfaction does not vary in gender equal and unequal countries, gender egalitarianism demonstrates diversified patterns of happiness".
Sexism and gender inequality has evolutionary roots.
This is a highly controversial point, but it is true. There's a lot of talk lately about how the hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, but this is false (a myth promoted by both the far left and feminists), and women did not hunt as much as men, but that idea was "proven" by research with high amounts of methodological bias.
A study called "An evolutionary life history explanation of sexism and gender inequality" by Nan Zhu and Lei Chang shows that sexism/gender inequality is indeed evolutionary. Contrary to popular belief, sexism was more based on discriminating against men or women or singling them out due to gender roles, and gender roles were important for the success of our species and survival. It wasn't about punishing a gender for their gender. Here's the abstract:

Predisposed to differences in parental investment, men and women are expected to enact different reproduction-oriented, accelerated life-history strategies when facing high extrinsic risks or resource insecurity. Sexual selection processes would strengthen the sex differences in support of such accelerated life-history strategy, causing women to divert more time and energy to reproductive activities and depend more on men's economic provisioning and therefore enforcing sexist attitudes and gender inequality. This paper provides empirical support for this life-history explanation of sexism based on data from the World Values Survey and four United Nations sources. The results generally support our explanation in the following manners: (1) Societal-level extrinsic risks (worries over intergroup violence) were associated with higher sexism. (2) Men were more sexist, and the association between individual-level resource insecurity and sexism was more moderate in countries and regions with greater society-level extrinsic risks. (3) Societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility.

They also cite evidence for how environment affects reproductive outcomes and general behavior:

Resource insecurity, which is related to higher exposure to morbi- dity–mortality risks for offspring in almost all human forager societies (Marlowe, 2000), has been demonstrated to be associated with parental harshness and insecure attachment, which, in turn, are linked to traits of accelerated life-history strategies. These traits include earlier sexual debut and higher sexual activities during adolescence, which are pre- dicted by earlier pubertal development (Belsky, Houts & Fearon, 2010; (Belsky et al., 2010b)). In a longitudinal study, Belsky, Schlomer and Ellis (2012) found that lower income-to-needs ratio experienced during the early years was indirectly associated with higher adolescent sexuality through lower maternal parenting quality in childhood. By con- trast, Ellis and Essex (2007) observed that fewer marital conflicts, higher quality parental care, and higher socioeconomic status predicted later sexual development in girls. Overall, accelerated life-history strategies are in accordance with increased reproductive efforts at an earlier age, which are adaptive to stressful environments that reduce the chance of offspring surviving to maturity, but less so in stable and competitive environments (Del Giudice et al., 2015).

Across countries, men scored higher on beliefs about old-school gender roles (or as the authors described, more sexist) than women. It wasn't because they're the "patriarchy" or "oppressors", but this difference in beliefs was higher in countries with higher extrinsic risks like intergroup violence (e.g.: war).

We found that males exhibited higher sexism than did females and that this trend was stronger in societies facing greater intergroup violence. This is consistent with our extrapolation that the traditional, sexist “protective males” stereotype is more advocated in societies facing an elevated danger of intergroup conflicts. Moreover, given that males have more incentives to escape parenting duties to focus on mating compared with females, males likely gain more reproductive success from sexist gender roles than females do when enacting accelerated life-history strategies. This might explain why the sex difference in sexism was greater in societies with higher extrinsic risks.

Extrinsic risks were associated with accelerated life history strategies (e.g.: having children), which, in turn, is associated with gender inequality. Societal level extrinsic risks (like intergroup violence) were associated with more sexism, and "societal-level extrinsic risks (adult mortality) and resource availability were associated with higher and lower gender inequality, respectively, through the mediating effects of accelerated life-history strategies, indicated by adolescent birth rates and total fertility." Individual-level resource insecurity and societal intergroup violence both predicted more sexism or beliefs endorsing old-school gender roles, but: "society-level intergroup violence may have overshadowed individual-level resource insecurity such that the detrimental effect of resource insecurity was less severe in societies with high intergroup violence".
Rape and intimate partner violence are not caused by patriarchy, but are evolutionary tactics (despite being immoral and evolution/nature being amoral).
This is just like how men committing crimes against men (which is far more common) is also an evolutionary tactic. Nature is amoral and humans are, to an extent, a barbaric species (like any other species). This thread of mine talks about how not only is most sexism towards women benevolent sexism, but actual misogyny is rare among men, and those men were simply full of dark triad traits, and dark triad men and misogynistic men or rapists were two sides of the same coin. Dark triad traits are an evolutionary adaptation to have lots of casual sex, and they caused men to be interested in as many sex partners as possible. When these men have unusually high aspirations about how sexually active they must be, they tend to become misogynistic because they believe they are unattractive to women when they aren't, yet engage in a lot of promiscuity. As a result, these men have committed rape to get sex, but they also have a high amount of consensual sex partners. As a result, rape was found to be an evolutionary mating strategy from dark triad traits, which I elaborated on in that thread (no, it doesn't condone or defend sexual violence).
It is also possible countries with less gender equality, which have more intergroup violence or lack of resource security (which is what causes old-school gender roles and less gender equality), have more dark triad men, and the gender difference in dark triad traits between men and women is bigger. It's not patriarchy that causes dark triad traits in these countries, but intergroup violence and lack of resource security that causes these traits there. It could be intimate partner violence might be more common in these countries and it could be for evolutionary reasons and for the same reasons these countries have gender inequality or old-school gender roles more: the environment.
Although intimate partner violence is a gender symmetrical crime, I don't know if there's evolutionary reasons for why women commit intimate partner violence. There could be, but it has probably less research because society ignores male domestic violence victims. Among men who commit the crime, there are evolutionary reasons or hardwired instincts that cause it. For example, women with boyfriends/husbands who had children from previous partners are far more likely to be victims of intimate partner violence or homicide, whereas stepfather are more likely to be abusive. This is potentially due to sexual jealousy or resentment of the actual father due to knowing their children are not biologically their children. Even other species had intimate partner violence among both males and females:

These cases demonstrate that intimate partner violence is neither exclusive to humans nor exclusive to males. Intimate partner violence is the result of a natural process—Darwinian selection. These cases also call into question the default hypothesis that physical violence between pair-bonded individuals is caused by socialization. Proponents of the socialization hypothesis would not argue that burying beetles and razorbills are socialized to inflict partner-directed violence, and it may be erroneous to assume this default position for human intimate partner violence. In every species studied to date (including humans), intimate partner violence occurs when the actions of one partner (either male or female) threaten the survival or reproduction of the other.

Men also mate guard (guard their partner from other men) when she has high reproductive value or attractiveness, is ovulating, is around other men, or has other traits making her more prone to infidelity. Men's mate retention behaviors and mate guarding about making sure where she was or knowing who she talks to was associated with intimate partner violence perpetration against her. The relationship between accusations of female infidelity and female-directed violence was mediated by non-violent direct guarding behaviors. When it comes to marital sexual aggression, women's risk of sexual coercion by their partner was not related to power in the relationship, like who controls the decision making, and thus, women with a man with the dominant position in the relationship don't experience more sexual coercion from their husbands. A lot of evidence shows that sexual coercion in marriage might be due to paternity uncertainty or worrying the wife is cheating:

Sexual coercion in response to cues of his partner's sexual infidelity might function to introduce a male's sperm into his partner's reproductive tract at a time when there is a high risk of cuckoldry (i.e., when his partner has recently been inseminated by a rival male). This sperm competition hypothesis was proposed following recognition that forced in-pair copulation (i.e., partner rape) in nonhuman species followed female extra-pair copulations and that sexual coercion and rape in human intimate relationships often followed accusations of female infidelity.

Forced in-pair copulation, unlike general forced copulation, is rare in the animal kingdom because many species don't have long-term pair bonding, which is why it cannot occur. Many avian species have long-term pair bonds, as it exists in many of these species. It does not exist randomly, and happens immediately after extra-pair copulations, intrusions by rival males, and female species in some of these species, which leads to male-favoring sex ratio. Forced in-pair copulation right after suspected or confirmed extra-pair copulation in these species is a sign of a sperm competition tactic. Some ancestral women have mated with multiple men within short periods of time so sperm from more than 1 man can enter her reproductive tract. This explains why women are hardwired to cheat or get sexually bored quicker in relationships compared to men. Men who physically abuse or rape their wives had higher scores on sexual jealousy. Women who are victims of marital rape also are more likely to have been unfaithful. If they weren't, they were perceived that way. Because women can't be cuckolded given that they know which child is theirs and men would not bring an illegitimate child into the marriage, but outside the marriage, sexual jealousy and risk of being cheated on was not linked to women committing sexual coercion, but men who worried about sexual infidelity, had a partner who was at risk of cheating or who had a partner who did cheat, engaged in more sexual coercion, and many convicted partner rapists disproportionately had wives who cheated on them. Men's sexual coercion was consistently predicted by female infidelity and this held true even when controlling for men's personalities and controlling behavior (which can amplify the risk under these circumstances). Additionally, this explains why abusive relationships have more sex, and this is true for mates in various species close to humans, including gorillas, baboons, macaques, and chimpanzees.
Obviously, most men won't do these things, but obviously personality traits can still increase the risk along with evolutionary instincts, and so can attachment anxiety. There's also other factors for intimate partner violence and homicide, such as the fact that these offenders often tend to be generally violent criminals and have violent criminal records. There's obviously antisocial men who do tend to be violent in relationships because they're generally violent, but this is talking more about at least situation partner violence/homicide. Not all women killed by their partners were abused by them, even if it's true for most, but it's even more common for them to notice their partners' sexual jealousy or worries about infidelity, which the vast majority noticed for concerns their partner had. Additonally, this thread is NOT condoning violence against women, just like how acknowledging how violence against men is evolutionary does not condone it. Most male criminals harm men, and men usually restrict violence against women to when they commit sexual violence or intimate partner violence, and evolution explains all of this. Men have less evolutionary benefits to committing non-sexual crimes against women outside their relationship, unlike when they commit the same crimes against men.
There's also evidence showing that when the sex ratio has more women (more women than men in a population), men mated with more women than sexual aggression against women declined (rapists do tend to be promiscuous, but they have dark triad traits that make them more promiscuous as an adaptation, especially if women are less available to mate with, like polygamous societies). When there were more men than women, sexual aggression by men against women increased. Another study found that a sex ratio of more men than women increases men's intimate partner violence against women, and even more so when more women are working. They explain the evolutionary reason behind it:

Multivariate regression results furnish evidence supporting evolutionary psychology by demonstrating that a high sex ratio increases male-on-female intimate partner violence. Results also show that male-on-female intimate partner violence is higher in cities where more women work. Such a finding further buttresses the logic associated with evolutionary psychology because participation in the workforce is theorized to afford a woman a greater opportunity to meet and interact with men other than her husband or boyfriend.

Conclusion
There is a lot of evidence that gender inequality or sexism comes from evolution, and as society becomes more economically successful, has less intergroup violence, and becomes more convenient as a whole, this issue in society lessens. There's also evidence that men are evolutionarily hardwired to be more likely than women to endorse old-school gender roles, or sexism, about men and women.
This is in line with my post, which cites a lot of evidence to back its statements up, about how the changes in gender roles, ages of marriage, fertility, etc. were due to changes in environment, and that feminism played no role in it.

I'm sure many of you have seen some variant of this question of would you rather be alone in the woods at night with a man or a bear over the last week and the seemingly endless amount of debate that comes with it. However, the popular image of a man squatting in the bushes waiting to ambush and rape a young woman has no basis in reality.
To start despite common misconceptions and a greater unwillingness to report it men and women are victims of sexual assault at basically the same rates (in 2011 a survey found 1.270 million women and 1.267 million men victims respectively https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4062022/). And the vast majority of these incidents are committed by acquaintances (about 72%) while out of the remaining 28% that are perpetrated by strangers men are slightly more likely to be victims (13.8 percent for female victims and 15.1 percent for male https://slate.com/human-interest/2017/01/nypd-captain-majority-of-rapes-are-not-total-abomination-rapes-committed-by-strangers.html) .
Now this is not intended to invalidate the claims of anyone who has experienced sexual assault in their lives but I do want to break up this archaic assumption that rape and sexual assault issues are born out of sexism. Peoples view of how likely they are to be a victim of these crimes is divorced from reality should probably be chalked up to pre-conceived assumptions and biases. Just because your male friends have never told you about their experiences with sexual assault doesn't mean it hasn't happened and the people who continue framing this question as the plight of women are doing a disservice to society.
(Disclaimer this post in its current form is only applicable to the United States)

Thank you to everyone who responded to the survey posted here two months ago! I got way more results than I expected so it did take a little time. I wanted to have some fun with the results and dissect them in different ways but that'll take some time so for now, here's the first part of the results. Starting with this sub's demographic.

Demographic

Age Group:

1. 16 - 20 : 30.5%
2. 21 - 25: 24.1%
3. 26 - 30: 15.5%
4. 11 - 15: 15.0%
5. 31 - 35: 7.3%
6. 36 - 40: 4.5%
7. 46 - 50: 1.4%

Top 5 characters of each age group (in order)

Age Group	Top 5	Notes
11 - 15	Santana, Brittany, Kurt, Quinn, Blaine, Mercedes	Blaine and Mercedes are tied
16 - 20	Santana, Brittany, Kurt, Quinn, Mercedes
21 - 25	Santana, Quinn, Blaine, Finn, Kurt	Finn and Kurt are tied
26 - 30	Santana, Blaine, Kurt, Mercedes, Quinn	Mercedes and Quinn are tied
31 - 35	Santana, Rachel, Blaine, Brittany, Kurt	Blaine and Brittany are tied
36 - 40	Santana, Quinn, Blaine, Kitty, Puck, Rachel	Blaine, Kitty, Puck, Rachel are tied
46 - 50	Jane, Mercedes, Unique	All tied

Gender Identity

1. Female: 77.3%
2. Male: 15.9%
3. Prefer not to say: 2.7%
4. Non-binary: 1.4%

Sexual Orientation

1. Heterosexual: 35.5%
2. Bisexual: 18.2%
3. Lesbian: 17.7%
4. Questioning: 6.8%
5. Asexual: 6.4%
6. Gay: 5.9%
7. Pansexual: 5.0%
8. Prefer not to say: 4.5%

Sexual Orientation	Top 5	Notes
Heterosexual	Santana, Quinn, Blaine, Brittany, Sam	Sam and Brittany are tied
Bisexual	Santana, Blaine, Quinn, Kurt, Finn
Lesbian	Santana, Brittany, Quinn, Kurt, Blaine, Mercedes	Blaine and Mercedes are tied
Questioning	Santana, Kurt, Blaine, Brittany, Mercedes	Brittany and Mercedes are tied
Asexual	Blaine, Kurt, Brittany, Finn, Quinn, Rachel, Tina	Finn, Quinn, Rachel, Tina are tied
Gay	Santana, Kurt, Mercedes, Blaine Brittany	Blaine and Brittany are tied
Pansexual	Santana, Mercedes, Kurt, Blaine, Brittany	Kurt, Blaine, Brittany are tied

Where are you from?

1. North America: 62.7 %
2. Western Europe: 19.1%
3. Oceania: 8.6%
4. Central Europe: 3.6%
5. Eastern Europe: 1.8%
6. South East Asia: 0.9%
7. East Asia: 0.9%

Did you ever attend Glee Live! In Concert tour?

1. No :( : 94.5%
2. Don't know what that is :O : 2.8%
3. Yes! : 2.7%

Can the 6 people who did attend the tour please share your experience? I'm very interested in hearing about it!
Do you participate in the fandom in any other ways?

1. And That's What You Really Missed Podcast listeners: 45%
2. Fanfiction writers/readers: 43%
3. No: 28%
4. Edits: 26%
5. Fan art: 7%

I should've asked about people who do Glee rps because I know there's a few out there. If you read or write or create any fanfictions/fan art, please feel free to share them in the comments!
When did you first watch Glee?

1. 2021 - 2024 (Glee Tiktok Revival): 25.9%
2. 2009 (first premiere): 22.3%
3. 2016 - 2018 (post-Glee): 17.7%
4. 2019 - 2020 (Glee pandemic revival): 12.7%
5. 2010 (season 2 premiere): 6.4%
6. 2011 (season 3 premiere): 5.9%
7. 2015 (season 6 premiere): 3.6%
8. 2013 ( season 5 premiere): 2.7%
9. 2012 (season 4 premiere): 2.7%

56.3% poll answers are from people who started the show after it ended. 43.7% watched the show when it was still airing. Here are the characters with the biggest difference in popularity between Post Glee viewers and During Glee viewers.
Favourite Difference

1. Brittany 46% of the Post Glee viewers vote Brittany as their favorite while only 23% During Glee viewers voted for her.
2. Kurt: 41% of Post Glee viewers and 30% of During Glee viewers like him
3. Mercedes: 35% of Post Glee viewers and 24% of During Glee viewers like her
4. Marley: 15% of Post Glee viewers and 6% of During Glee viewers like her
5. Tina: 25% of Post Glee viewers and 11% of During Glee viewers like her

Interestingly, Blaine, Rachel, and Santana are the only three characters who are more popular with During Glee viewers than Post Glee viewers even though the differences are only of 1-3%.
Least Favourite Differences

1. Marley Only 5% of Post Glee viewers voted Marley as their least favorite while 15% of During Glee viewers voted for her
2. Brittany 1% of Post Glee viewers and 8% of During Glee viewers dislike her
3. Unique 13% of Post Glee viewers and 5% of During Glee viewers dislike her
4. Kitty 19% of Post Glee viewers and 13% of During Glee viewers dislike her

Characters

Favorite New Direction members

1. Santana: 15%
2. Blaine: 10%
3. Kurt: 9%
4. Brittany: 8%
5. Quinn: 8%
6. Rachel: 5%
7. Sam: 5%
8. Finn: 5%
9. Mercedes: 4%
10. Tina: 3%

Important to note that both Ryder and Alistair are the only two characters with 0 like.
Favorite S4 New Direction newbies:

1. Kitty: 35%
2. Marley: 33%
3. Unique: 23%
4. Jake: 9%
5. Ryder: 0%

Favorite S6 New Direction newbies

1. Roderick: 30%
2. Jane: 22%
3. Madison: 19%
4. Mason: 19%
5. Spencer: 8%
6. Myron: 3%
7. Alistair: 0%

Least Favorite New Direction members:

1. Ryder: 11%
2. Rachel: 9%
3. Myron: 8%
4. Puck: 8%
5. Kitty: 6%

Most Controversial New Direction members: This is calculated by selecting members with more than 30 votes with the smallest difference between the percentage of their least favorite and favorite votes.

1. Lauren
2. Rachel
3. Unique
4. Marley
5. Kitty

And that concludes the first part of the poll results which are about the characters and you! The next part should be about the performances and the ships. I will try to get it out soon but enjoy this for now!

Abstract: This article provides an analysis of “teaming,” or allying with a competitor, in battle-royale video games. Allying with a competitor is a normal strategy in social-deduction games, but it is often considered to be cheating in battle royale. Persistent complaints about teaming can be seen across a variety of social media platforms. This article surveys the controversy and outlines the major attempts to address such problems, including developer changes to matchmaking systems, automated moderation and opposition to stream sniping. These approaches are substantially successful, and yet there appear to be social and ludic conditions that make teaming an intractable problem. This article appeals to established economic and typological analyses of game goals to rethink the social dilemma of teaming in battle royale. The thesis argues that the major attempts to address the problem of teaming typically assume teaming is necessarily an unskilled strategy that circumvents the game goal of having a sporting contest of skills, but a comprehensive analysis of teaming allows us to recognize that it is conceptually possible to design regulatory mechanisms for teaming such that teaming requires skill. The conclusion begins to chart future research on sporting designs for regulating teaming.

Introduction

“Cross-teaming” or simply “teaming” in competitive multiplayer games is a strategy wherein a competitor temporarily cooperates with another competitor. Teaming is a central feature of social-deduction games centered on cunning negotiations, alliances and betrayals, for example the boardgame Diplomacy (Wizards of the Coast, 1954), the party game Mafia (Davidoff, 1986), the card game Are You a Werewolf? (Looney Labs, 1997) and the video game Among Us (Innersloth, 2018). In battle-royale video games, however, teaming has been a popular form of cheating. Battle-royale games are competitive, multiplayer survival games in which the last competitor alive wins the game. A match of battle royale typically has a large number of competitors in an arena with a variety of weapons. There are various game mechanics to decrease hiding/ camping and increase encounters between competitors, for example shrinking the arena area over time. Teaming in battle royale can provide a major advantage by allowing two competitors to outnumber a third competitor.

The analysis in this article begins with a brief history of battle royale and the crux of the problem with teaming. Teaming is a volatile practice that is randomized by the whims of other competitors, so teaming appears to provide an advantage based on luck within an otherwise sporting contest of skills. Players of battle royale use social media to complain about teaming, and game designers have addressed this problem in a variety of innovative ways inspired by both popular and academic conversations. However, illicit teaming remains a significant problem for the gaming community. How can we complicate our understanding of this problem and address it in new ways?

There are nuanced theoretical frameworks for unpacking the dynamics of teaming. The analysis in this article introduces and combines existing scholarship on the economics and typology of game goals. Jonas Heide Smith (2007) argues that cheating in online video games gives rise to a social dilemma, and I show how Smith’s economic framework can be extended to illicit teaming. Debus, Zagal and Cardona-Rivera (2020) argue that the goals of video games can be deeply equivocal, and I extend their analysis to consider alternate ways of framing the social dilemma of teaming. I argue that in the case of battle-royale video games, game developers have been largely prohibitive of teaming, but combining Smith with Debus et al. allows us to recognize that there can also be permissive and regulativeapproaches to teaming that substantially address the social dilemma. The major attempts to address the problem of teaming typically assume teaming is necessarily an unskilled strategy that circumvents the game goal of having a sporting contest of skills, but a comprehensive analysis of teaming allows us to recognize that it is conceptually possible to design regulatory mechanisms for teaming such that teaming requires skill. This article concludes by gesturing toward skillful regulatory mechanisms for addressing the social dilemma of teaming, including the innovative mechanism of “assimilation” in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2022).

Battle Royale and Illicit Teaming

Teaming has been a part of battle royale since its inception. According to Teemu Pesonen’s article “The History of Battle Royale Esports” (2023), the Japanese film Battle Royale (Fukasaku, 2000) inspired the video-game genre. The plot of the film includes a government forcing students to fight each other to the death on an island, where only the last student alive may leave the island. The film also clearly includes cunning betrayals and alliances between competitors.

The genre of battle royale was further popularized by the American film The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012). Pesonen tells us that The Hunger Games directly inspired the first battle-royale modification for the video game Minecraft(Mojang Studios, 2011). In 2013 Brendan Greene, also known as “PlayerUnknown,” developed a mod called “DayZ: Battle Royale,” a battle-royale modification for the video game Arma II (Bohemia Interactive, 2012). Greene was inspired by other Arma II mods like Brian Hicks’ and Jordan Taylor’s mod for Arma II, “DayZ: Survivor Gamez” (McCarthy, 2017), and Green introduced to the battle-royale genre “items and weapons that were randomly spread across the map” (Pesonen, 2023). The first battle-royale video game to be officially published was PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (Krafton, 2017). The collaborative, online, multiplayer-vs-environment, survival video game Fortnite (Epic Games, 2017) added a dedicated mode for battle royale within a year of its release, contributing to the battle-royale genre both in-game building mechanics and cross-platform play.

Other major battle-royale games include Vigor (Bohemia Interactive, 2018), Apex Legends (Respawn Entertainment, 2019) and Call of Duty: Warzone (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2020), but I will foreground Fortnite for illustration. Fortnite debuted right when teaming was exploding in popularity in PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, but unlike Battlegrounds, Fortnite was initially designed to be a cooperative game, and elements of this cooperative spirit made it into the battle-royale mode, including the ability to communicate with others by dancing with them and expressing emotions. Fortnite’s battle-royale mode also implicitly encourages teaming insofar as it regularly awards prizes like virtual clothing and accessories to competitors who complete non-competitive challenges (for example, Dance on a Giant Cup of Coffee), which often leads to competitors cooperating until they can complete the challenge.

The most common, overt way to initiate teaming in Fortnite is to stop fighting and start dancing. If the dancing is reciprocated, the two competitors have indicated to one another that they want to cooperate temporarily. Other overt ways to initiate teaming include disarming yourself in front of a competitor, dropping healing items, building heart-shaped constructs and rapidly switching between ducking and standing stances. Subtle ways to initiate teaming can include pretending not to see someone, running away instead of attacking and defensively “boxing up” (hiding in your own building) without taking opportunities to attack. In each of these cases the initiation procedures take place during a match. However, teaming can also occur prior to a match when two or more people communicate their intention to first enter a match as competitors and then cooperate by identifying one another via coded behavior, for example meeting at a certain location or using peculiar virtual clothing.

Unlike a sporting contest of skills, teaming in battle royale currently has deeply random elements from beginning to end. The tension between a sporting contest of skills and random game elements goes to the heart of the controversy around teaming. Attempting to initiate teaming is a gamble. Dancing, disarming or deliberately passing up opportunities to attack exposes vulnerabilities. Competitors have short-term incentive to eliminate anyone who is initiating teaming because the initiator’s defenses are down. Not everyone has an equal opportunity to team because reciprocation relies on the whims of others. Even when there is an established collusion, there is still an incentive to be the first to betray the other, which makes the long-term benefits of teaming precarious. If teamers are the last competitors in a match, a competitor may betray the other, eliminate themselves or wait until environmental damage randomly decides who wins. Ultimately, teaming introduces a volatile element of luck into a sporting competition of skill.

Controversies and Proposed Solutions

I searched for and surveyed comments about the teaming controversy on live-streams, blog archives, developer patch notes and game-specific discussion forums, including twitch.com, youtube.com, bohemia.net, hypixel.net and reddit.com. This article only cites about two dozen posts and forums, but I believe these sources on teaming are representative of the thousands of ephemeral commentaries I have seen across a variety of platforms. The arguments both for and against teaming display strong emotion (sleaches, 2020; Seahawks12, 2022; ThatOneRedditBro, 2022; Clix, 2023). In my assessment there is a general trend in the dispute. Across the major battle-royale games, game players have complained about teaming for being an unfair advantage and, usually, against the official rules. Posts that defend teaming may be dismissive of the seriousness of casual teaming, but these defenses can also be passionate appeals to the enjoyability of cunning alliances and betrayals (successXX, 2016; Emble12, 2021; SzzzMK47, 2021). Fans who defend teaming have been insultingly dismissed as unskilled competitors who can only win by cheating. The controversy over teaming has led game designers to propose a number of creative solutions, but the persistence of teaming despite these innovations speaks to the practical intractability of this problem.

Certain solutions to illicit teaming speak to the perceived motivations of teaming. Early in the teaming controversy, developers discerned in teaming a simple desire on the part of solo competitors to compete in teams, and the result has been optional game modes for legitimate team-based battle royale, namely Duos, Trios or Quads. However, illicit teaming continued to be common in Solos as well as team-based modes. Another widespread interpretation of teaming is that it is used by unskilled competitors who simply want a sporting chance against vastly higher-skilled players, and the result has been skill-based matchmaking, wherein competitors are matched equally according to an automated index of their perceived skill. Teaming remained common.

Game designers have attempted to prevent teaming by addressing the tools used for teaming. Competitors who can communicate prior to joining the matchmaking queue may conspire to join the queue at the exact same time, which increases the odds of getting into the same match and allows the competitors to find one another to team. This problem led game designers to implement a randomized matchmaking time-delay so that it does not matter when someone joins the queue (swapode, 2017). Game designers may also use a filter to prevent competitors from entering the same match if they are one another’s “Friends” list. Streamers have proposed anonymizing competitor names and appearances to prevent this kind of teaming (Amos, 2019). These approaches have been effective, but teaming remained a substantial problem.

Matches can also contain automated moderators that help gaming communities police teaming. In the article “Collusion Detection in Team-Based Multiplayer Games” the authors Laura Greige, Fernando De Mesentier Silva, Meredith Trotter, Chris Lawrence, Peter Chin and Dilip Varadarajan explain how automatic moderation works to help catch teamers in tournaments (Greige et al., 2022). Competitors who use teaming to climb the ranks of a tournament show an improbable consistency in their respective match rankings over time. Therefore, automated moderators compare gameplay data over several matches to identify these improbable correlations and flag competitors. The moderator assigns to a pair of competitors a higher index of teaming the more frequently that those two competitors begin a match close to one another, stay close to one another and end a match with similar ranking. The goal of automatic moderation is to select cases for further review by human moderators. A majority (but not all) of the cases flagged by the automated moderator were confirmed by human moderators to be genuine cases of teaming, so the system is largely effective. However, automatic moderation does not necessarily aspire to perfection or even to identify collusion itself. Rather, automatic moderation works by identifying the probability that two competitors are colluding, “Hence, human intervention is still essential and further investigation by human experts is required before taking any enforcement action against the potential colluders flagged by our model” (Greige et al., 2022, p. 13).

Human moderators may observe or review matches in order to remove competitors who act like teamers, that is, competitors who are in proximity, do not attack one another and/ or simultaneously attack a third party. Unfortunately, these are also the behaviors of legitimate competitors who are camping, stealthy, short on resources (if not empty), low on health and/ or ambushing ongoing fights, namely “third-partying.” Complaints about people who ambush ongoing fights consider this tactic to be unsporting, but it would make no sense to demand that such an integral strategy should be banned from battle royale simply due to its affinity with teaming. It is not possible to entirely prevent the appearance of teaming because teaming is an implied product of games where players must be selective about which competitors they move against. When competitors in the end game must be selective about which other two competitors they move against, two competitors can have a legitimate ceasefire and mutual third target without any intention to team. Competitors complain about being removed from matches or even banned due to moderators mistaking their legitimate behavior for teaming (simon-whitehead, 2020). The intention to team can be difficult to discern even for human moderators.

One curious case of persistent, illicit teaming is one-way teaming. This occurs when a competitor helps another competitor without their consent. This typically happens when a fan of a streamer gets into the same match as the streamer, and the fan (while watching the live-stream) does whatever they can to benefit the streamer--leaving resources in their path, healing them from a distance (for example, with health splashes), or intentionally getting eliminated by the streamer (thus awarding the streamer loot and credit for the elimination). Sometimes this is benign, like when fans enter a streamer’s match only to build heart-shaped constructs for them to see, but this form of teaming can cause significant social friction.

In April of 2023, Epic Games banned the Fortnite streamer Cody “Clix” Conrod for two weeks due to illicit teaming (Gan, 2023). This meant that Clix was also effectively banned for the following lucrative Fortnite Championship Series tournaments. The teaming occurred due to the actions of a stream sniper who healed and supplied Clix largely without Clix’s consent (Gan, 2023). Stream sniping refers to a competitor watching another competitor’s live stream to see what their competitor sees. In this case the stream sniper was a malevolent troll with an account named “N1 Clix Hater,” and the troll was likely deliberately trying to get Clix banned (Clix, 2023). However, the penalties would be the same if the one-way teaming was from a benevolent fan. Clix admits some responsibility for teaming because Clix solicited certain helpful behavior from the stream sniper over the live stream, although this solicitation was solely to catch the sniper in the act of stream sniping, that is, to get them banned (Clix, 2023).

One-way teaming had a lasting impact on Clix. Following the end of the two-week ban, Clix streamed his first match, and a competitor began healing him with the same splash items that “N1 Clix Hater” used. For fear of being banned again, Clix started screaming out loud and running from the one-way teamer to avoid the appearance of receiving a competitor’s beneficial items (again), then Clix abruptly backtracked to aggressively attack the one-way teamer for fear of appearing to be too non-confrontational or even intentionally leading the teamer. Audience members joked that Clix had a flashback from the PTSD of being banned, but Clix has made it clear to his viewers that being banned from the tournament really was a deeply serious, extremely stressful event for him (Clix, 2023). It was a serious threat to his career and reputation, and more generally it highlights the way in which streamers have a real burden of altering their gameplay to avoid the appearance of benefiting from one-way teamers.

These cases suggest that despite the attempts to address the controversy over teaming by appealing to competitors’ desires behind teaming, by moderating matches and by avoiding stream snipers, teaming remains an intractable problem for the battle-royale community. The teaming controversy lies in a tension between competitors’ desire for a sporting contest of skills in a battle-royale format on one hand, and on the other hand the fact that battle royale is basically, structurally permissive of nonsporting conditions like the volatile dynamics of teaming or third-partying. The basic setup of the battle royale genre seems to make teaming--however impermissible--always theoretically possible.

Collective Action Theory and Social Dilemmas

In the article “Tragedies of the Ludic Commons--Understanding Cooperation in Multiplayer Games,” the author Jonas Heide Smith uses collective action theory to understand how competitive games have cooperative aspects that give rise to social dilemmas (Smith, 2007). Understanding how these social dilemmas work is important for addressing social problems like cheating in online multiplayer games, including illicit teaming. Collective action theory is an economic lens that identifies the individualistic and cooperative forces in the production of collective goods. Individuals may have an incentive to enjoy the benefits of a collective good without contributing to its production, but without enough individuals cooperatively contributing, no individual could enjoy the benefits of a collective good. In this case there is a social dilemma, that is, when the individual and collective incentives are at odds in the production of a collective good.

An illustrative social dilemma is the problem of commons. This problem occurs when a collective good like global, environmental stability requires cooperation in, for example, not exterminating the last of any rare resource (like an endangered species), but the rarer a resource is, the more individuals are incentivized to capitalize on the resource. Social dilemmas are conflicts between a group and its individual members where individual members can benefit from “free-riding” so long as not so many members “free-ride” that the good of the group collapses, in which case there would be no benefit for any members. What counts as “free-riding” can vary greatly--Smith mentions cheating, griefing and irresponsible play (Smith, 2007). Here I am concerned with cheating as a social dilemma to better understand teaming.

On my reading of Smith’s analysis, cheating is a form of free-riding in a social dilemma insofar as cheating allows a competitor to gain a good--winning--at the cost of a greater collective good--having a sporting contest of skills. To clarify, team-based games normatively require cooperation between the members of a given team for the collective good of a team, namely winning. However, Smith points out that there is also a normative cooperation between otherwise competing teams because the greater collective good is a sporting contest of skills. Competitors cooperatively agree not to cheat to win, and this preserves the greater good of having sporting contest of skills. The collective good of a sporting contest of skills is greater than simply winning in the sense that a sporting contest can be enjoyed by all competitors, even losing teams. If players cheat, the contest is no longer about skills, so the remaining good is winning, and the collective good of a sporting contest of skills entirely collapses.

The use of a social-dilemma framework to address the problem of teaming has already been started by Rheem, Cho and Verma (Rheem et al., 2019). Here we have the idea that teaming can be prevented by interrupting the communication between teamers. For example, if competitors typically spin in place or rapidly duck and stand to initiate teaming, then perhaps matches could include bots (artificially intelligent competitors) who imitate this behavior but do not follow through on teaming. This would confuse competitors about which attempts to team are genuine, ultimately dissuading competitors from teaming. Other ideas from Rheem et al. include rushing competitors, separating competitors at the beginning of a match and separating competitors who have been previously flagged for teaming. Ultimately, it is important to dissuade teaming by altering the conditions of initial contact between competitors. I think Rheem et al.’s work can be extended further if we combine it with Smith’s analysis of collective goods and cheating in social dilemmas.

Illicit teaming, as a form of cheating, is a form of free-riding, and we might address teaming by applying Smith’s solutions. Smith first considers government as a solution to social dilemmas. Government would be parallel to the moderators of a match, that is, catching and banning teamers. However, we have seen above that teaming is a problem for even human moderators because teaming can appear identical to legitimate strategies at the end of a match. I would argue that Smith’s conceptual parallel for this problem is offensive-language censorship in online games, wherein Smith argues that moderators do not have a perfect way of determining what is sufficiently offensive to warrant censorship.

Smith also considers how “a group of principals can organize themselves voluntarily to retain the residuals of their own efforts” (Elinor Ostrom quoted in Smith, 2007). This solution primarily works when there is “a certain degree of permanence, the possibilities of monitoring the actions of other community members, and the prospect of future interaction” (Smith, 2007). In other words, like real marketplaces, cooperation is often obtained through systems of accountable reputation over time, for example, rating systems for online vendors/ buyers or for ride-share drivers/ passengers. Someone’s reputation for teaming may lead to their exclusion from a private clan, guild or association of battle-royale gamers.

Smith’s variety of solutions can be synthesized and extended to a wider, public base of players if competitors were to rate each over time in conjunction with automated moderators, perhaps leading to a reputation-based matchmaking system that parallels skill-based matchmaking. Reputation-based matchmaking could reward honest competitors by systematically matching them with other honest competitors and vice versa. Competitors who are repeatedly flagged for teaming might be matched more frequently with others who are flagged for teaming (as opposed to banning them). Of course, there would be disingenuous raters, but another system could filter out raters with anomalous behavior. Another difficulty would be applying such matchmaking to any game with anonymous competitors who can create new accounts to avoid the consequences of their reputation, but battle-royale games could require everyone to submit a verifiable personal identification to decrease the abuse of such fraudulent sock-puppet accounts. This is an extreme but not implausible solution to illicit teaming.

The Typology of Game Goals

Extending Smith’s economic framework to battle royale allowed us to imagine the extreme limits of solutions to illicit teaming as a social dilemma. One way to go beyond these limits is to rethink our implicit assumptions about the split goal of battle royale, namely winning and competing in a sporting contest of skills. What counts as a sporting contest of skills? Or, what counts as an even battlefield? To address this issue, we can begin with a broader theoretical examination of goals in games.

In the article “A Typology of Imperative Game Goals,” the authors Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal and Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera unpack the theoretical problem of what counts as the goal of a game (Debus et al., 2020). It can be easy to confuse a game’s goal with its end, with preventing its end, with getting points, with winning, with improving skills or with having a sporting contest of skills--these are very different things. There can exist a typology of game goals, but it must account for equivocations in casually framed goals. The authors note that the goal to “survive” or win in “the context of battle royale games” can be conceptually split between avoiding elimination and eliminating others, whether aggressively or passively (Debus et al., 2020).

Debus et al.’s analysis of surviving or winning can be extended to the goal of having a sporting contest of skills. I argue that it is important to recognize that a sporting contest of skills is conceptually split between a contest of skills where no competitor has an advantage on one hand and a contest where competitors use skills (not random conditions) to obtain an advantage on the other hand. This distinction allows us to recognize that the prohibition against teaming as “unfair” relies almost entirely on the first sense of a sporting contest of skills, that is, a contest where no competitor has an advantage. An extension of Debus et al.’s analysis allows us to see that this popular objection to teaming is not necessarily valid. If competitors must use skills to obtain an advantageous position, then it can be entirely sporting for one competitor to have an advantage over the other. Of course, the prohibition against teaming assumes that it takes no skill to obtain a cooperating competitor because the opportunity to team is randomly decided by the whims of competitors. But is this assumption valid? If we put Debus et al. together with Smith, we can raise the important question, is there a way to design battle royale such that skills are required for teaming?

Skillfully Regulating Teaming in Battle Royale

There are battle-royale video games that prohibit most forms of teaming yet permit teaming under specific conditions, and these games can contain mechanisms for skillfully regulating teaming to preserve a sporting contest of skills. For example, in 2020 the battle-royale mod of Fortnite added a recruiting mechanism that enables an artificially intelligent, Non-player character (NPC) to be hired to cooperate for the duration of the match (Çakir, 2021). These AI-controlled NPCs are not necessarily competitors, but they are potential competitors insofar as anyone can hire them to fight on their team. This mechanism satisfies the desire to recruit without entirely spoiling a contest of skills in Fortnite because the skill level of NPCs is artificially kept quite low. NPCs often clumsily expose the location of whoever hired them, which balances out the advantage they provide. Further, anyone may hire an NPC, so there is an equal opportunity to team. However, the number of hirable NPCs in a given location is limited, which makes the opportunity to team with an NPC somewhat precarious. This NPC-recruiting mechanism has the effect of making each match into a race to hire the only NPC in a given location, which then significantly skews the following fights. Yet, there is significant skill involved in a race to hire an NPC. In Fortnite this race looks like competitors skillfully timing their jump from a moving starting point (a flying autobus) and skillfully timing their deployment of a paraglider to get to a location as efficiently as possible. The NPC-recruiting mechanism is a small but not insignificant step toward regulating teaming such that obtaining a cooperative competitor requires skill, namely the skill of racing to a location as efficiently as possible. Nevertheless, there remain substantial concerns that hired NPCs ruin the fairness of the game (IMainSpyAndImNoWeeb, 2023; emotx, 2023).

The battle-royale video game Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0 (Raven Software and Infinity Ward, 2022) introduced a skillful regulatory mechanism for teaming called “assimilation” (Rain et al., 2022). There are four regulatory features of the assimilation mechanism. First, there is a communication option to explicitly invite a competitor to one’s team. The invited person can explicitly accept or reject the invitation to join the team. Second, the game prevents members of a team from damaging their teammates, and this mutual immunity extends to assimilated competitors. Third, assimilation is limited to teams that have lost a teammate. A player can assimilate as many competitors as teammates they have lost and no more. This also means that assimilation does not work in Solo competition modes. This mechanism prevents teaming from spoiling the contest of skills by keeping the maximum size of official teams consistent. Of course, it is still random whether or not a competitor accepts an invitation to team. Even when faced with the choice to be eliminated or cooperate with a competitor, players may simply choose to be eliminated, for example in order to spite an enemy or in order to begin a new match with the friends they had been playing with. A fourth feature of assimilation is that an assimilated competitor can choose to leave their team at any time. This is problematic for a sporting contest of skills insofar as it unevenly enables cunning betrayals through surprise defection. Of course, these regulatory mechanisms do not prevent unofficial, illicit teaming over the maximum size-permitted limit, but such illicit teaming would not have the protection of mutual immunity.

In November and December of 2022, Warzone 2.0 contained a Trios mode named “Unhinged” wherein the assimilation feature was no longer limited to a three-person team but a six-person team, meaning double the capacity of initial team sizes (Morton, 2022). In my view of player responses on reddit.com, Unhinged was polarizing for the Warzone fanbase (Boynus, 2022; Handbrake55, 2022; Infinitely_Infinity, 2022; Pmmeyourrocks, 2022; u/[deleted], 2022; C4ptainchr0nic, 2023). Defenders of Unhinged typically appealed to the fun of cunning alliances and betrayals, while others gave the usual complaints about teaming as an unskilled strategy.

Why was Unhinged removed from Warzone 2.0 on 14 December 2022? Fans of Unhinged wondered why they could not have an Unhinged mode while the complainers play a different mode more to their liking. We can make educated guesses about what happened based on player complaints. Unhinged had a problematic social and gameplay dynamic. First, players reported an increase in toxic communication (ThatOneRedditBro, 2022). Warzone 2.0 contains a mechanism called proximity chat wherein competitors can talk with one another if they are close enough to each other. This mechanism can be turned off, but proximity chat provides an advantage for inviting a competitor to team up, so Unhinged included more use of proximity chat relative to other game modes (SirDankz, 2022). The dynamics of competition and moreover betrayal seems to have encouraged toxic proximity chat between competitors. Complaints include the use of racial slurs. This made Unhinged extra problematic for popular streaming platforms that prohibited racist content. It is easy to imagine that the Unhinged mode was a liability in this sense, and I think proximity chat ultimately stifled the potential for Unhinged to further develop its explorations of regulated teaming via assimilation.

In terms of gameplay dynamics, players complained that the teaming dynamic in Unhinged effectively requires competitors to race to find a cooperative competitor if they are going to last to the end game, but not everyone can equally find a competitor. Competitors are incentivized to refuse cooperation in favor of betrayal to obtain the short-term benefits. Unlike Fortnite’s race to hire an NPC using a skillfully timed deployment, there was no parallel skill for racing to team up with another human competitor in Unhinged.

Conclusion

Further explorations in regulatory mechanisms for teaming can be developed on the basis of each element of teaming that would make it unskilled. Teaming is randomized or made unskilled by a number of things we can identify from the preceding analysis. We have seen that there has been randomness through an ambiguity in the communication of invitations to team, and the explicit invite function of assimilation resolves this issue. We have seen randomness in the whims of a teamer’s betrayal, and assimilation addresses this issue with mutual immunity to damage for competitors who accept an explicit invitation. Although assimilation currently allows teamers to defect at any time, which reintroduces the randomness of whimsical betrayals, it would be interesting to explore a mechanism that regulates defection by requiring a defection to be announced well ahead of time, say a thirty-second countdown until there is no more mutual immunity to damage. A defection countdown would eliminate the surprise element of defection.

Assimilation’s mechanism of explicit invitations currently does not address the randomness of the whims of competitor’s acceptance or rejection of an explicit invitation to team. However, the NPC-recruiting mechanism in Fortnite circumvents this randomness by forcing NPCs to accept the first invitation to team that they receive. We can easily imagine that assimilation can address the issue with human competitors similarly. When a competitor sends an explicit invitation to another competitor, a mechanism can make this invitation automatically accepted, immediately establishing damage immunity between the two competitors. Explicit invites would then be coercive invites, and the whims of the competitor’s interests in teaming no longer affect the opportunity to team.

I would argue that one current feature of assimilation is unnecessary to preserve a sporting contest of skills, namely a size cap on teams (inclusive of assimilated members). The idea of capping or limiting the combined size of a team is clearly meant to make the competition more even, but we have seen that a competition between unevenly sized teams can be sporting if teams use skills to retain teammates. Exploring the effects of different size caps for teaming would be interesting for future research, but a size cap is not necessarily needed to preserve a sporting contest of skills.

Given this robust revision of assimilation--coercive invitations, mutual immunity and a defection countdown but not necessarily with a size cap--the major randomizing elements of teaming are reduced, and skillful competition is preserved. However, new sets of issues emerge for the dynamics of teaming in battle royale, and game designers can benefit from exploring these new issues. I consider here a few questions for future research on the effects of skillful regulations of teaming in battle royale. What are different ways of regulating the duration of a coercive assimilation? What is the effect of implementing an indefinite duration until one member announces their defection? What is the effect of implementing a forced automatic defection of any assimilated members at the end of a match? What is the effect of establishing a determinate, short amount of time before auto-defection? What happens if competitors are given one or more options to renew their alliance? How can the ability to send a coercive invitation be distributed among players? What is the effect of giving players one or multiple chances to extend a coercive invitation at the beginning of the match? What happens if the ability to send a coercive invitation is regulated by possessing an in-game item to be found in the arena? What impact does the number of such items available make? How might the race to such items be regulated to require skills? What happens if an assimilated member can send a coercive invitation to a third party, and how might damage immunity be distributed in such a chain of assimilation? That is, if a first competitor coercively invites a second competitor, and the second competitor coercively invites a third competitor, do the first and third competitors have mutual immunity for the duration of the first assimilation? How can cooperation be encouraged between a coercive inviter and an assimilated member? What happens if teaming competitors receive bonuses by remaining proximate to one another? What happens if they receive penalties for straying too far from their teammates?

Finally, I want to note that robust mechanisms for skillfully regulating teaming can exist alongside prohibitions against teaming outside of these mechanisms, and in such a case skillfully regulating teaming would not really solve the intractable problem of illicit teaming. However, perhaps a well-regulated avenue for teaming would satisfy much of the desire to team, and there might be less incentive to team illicitly when official teaming offers sufficient protection against random betrayals. It remains to be seen how regulating the outlet of players’ drive to team will affect players’ engagement with prohibitive teaming.
References [Cut for Reddit Post Limit on Characters]

DISCLAIMER: this post will be heavy. We are dealing with themes of racism, neo-nazi imagery, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and things of that sort. It would be not explained in details, but i will link articles talking about it in lenght. Please be careful while browsing!
Hello again people of Hobbydrama. This time my introduction will be brief since the post will probably be very long, just wanted to say: thank you for sticking with me. Remember to read the disclaimer and also be aware that this post might contain spoilers, particularly for Life Is Strange 1 and 3!
What the hell is Life Is Strange?
“Ready for the mosh pit, shaka brah”
Life Is Strange is a series of adventure games published by Square Enix’s External Studios. Created by Dontnod Entertainment, the series debuted with its first installment which was released in five episodes throughout 2015 on PS3, PS4, XBOX 360, PC, iOS and Android. It also recived a remastered version for the Nintendo Switch in 2021. Which was…not very good tbh, but we don’t talk about that. The story of the first game revolves around Max Caulfield, a girl who discovers that she has the ability to rewind time at any moment, causing each of her choices to make events unfold differently. After predicting the arrival of a giant storm, Max will have to use her powers to try to save her city, Arcadia Bay. She starts this by saving her former best friend (and future love interest) Chloe Price by dying in a bathroom stall. Since that, the plot will also focus on the search of Rachel Amber, a girl who misteriously disappeared without leaving trace. The player’s actions will affect the game’s story, which can be rewritten once they are able to rewind time. The introduction of the possibility of rewinding time allows to go back and do any action differently from the one first done in certain narrative checkpoints. This structure also offers a polarity system: choices made modify and influence the story through short- or long-term consequences. I mean, technically is not really like that because the game has only two possible endings and the choices you make can’t change it, but they affect the way other characters see you and interact with you. Dialogue scenes can also be rewound by choosing a different response option. Once an event is restored the previously provided data can also be used in the future: for example objects found in the future will be preserved after rewinding time. This, as you can imagine, offers a lot of possibilities for puzzle mechanics and things of that sort.
The game was a massive success, winning a shiton of awards in the following years and gaining an immense fanbase. This was due to its emotionally raw plot dealing with themes such as depression and suicide, bullying, fear of abandonment, LGBTQ+ representation, growing up and of course time shenaningans that subjects the main character to an unbelivable amount of trauma! Yay! Jokes aside, the game was so succesfull that it spawned an entire franchise: a prequel with Chloe Price as a protagonist came out in 2017 and a comic spin-off) was published in 2018.
Also: Life Is Strange 2 and Life Is Strange 3 were made, but they are different stories with totally different characters not related with Max and Chloe in any means, besides some minor easter eggs. For the context of this post, is important to know that when Lis became a franchise, they started to explore different stories with different characters: the only one thing in common is that in this world some people have some kinds of superpowers for…reasons that are never really fully explained. Max had time-rewind, it’s heavily implied in the prequel that Rachel Amber had some kind of fire powers or, in alternative, powers very similar to Max’s based on what some characters says about her, Sean’s brother has telekinesis and Alex has an “emotional aura” reading ability
There are also rumors going on about an Amazon Prime series adapting the story of the first game, but nothing has came out of it at the time of writing this.
With that being said, let’s move on.
The weird dynamics between Dontnod and Square Enix
Now, before we focus on the gist of the drama, it’s important to clarify one thing: Dontnod no longer holds any ownership of the Life Is Strange franchise and doesn’t work on the series anymore, only SquareEnix and Deck Nine are in charge now. To explain why this happened we need to go on a tangent here.
Development of the first Life Is Strange began in April 2013: the idea of developing it in episodes was due to creative, marketing and, above all, financial reasons. Mind you, at the time Dontnod was a little french indie game developing company. Their debut title was Remember Me), which at first they wanted it to be a PlayStation 3-exclusive role-playing game, but was dropped by publisher Sony Interactive Entertainment in 2011 on account of cuts in funding. It was presented at Gamescom the same year to attract another publishing deal. The following year, Capcom Europe acquired the rights and reimagined it as an action-adventure game.
In 2013, Dontnod was the most subsidised studio with 600 000€ aid by the French agency Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC), including aid for a new intellectual property project codenamed “What if?” (later retitled to Life is Strange to avoid confusion with the film of the same name.) for something like 200 000 euros. On 28 January 2014, Dontnod filed for rjudicial reorganisation, a form of receivership in France. The proceeding filing was discovered by Factornews and some media outlets like Polygon reported it as Dontnod filing for bankruptcy as a result of the poor sales of Remember Me. However, Dontnod responded to these reports explaining that they were in the process of “judicial reorganisation” to resize the company and denying bankruptcy..
In June 2014, Dontnod announced that they were working with Square Enix Europe on a new game, which was announced as Life Is Strange that year and released in 2015 over the course of five instalments, like i said earlier. The critical and commercial success of Life Is Strange caused Dontnod to be solicited by publishers, whereas they previously had to pursue publishers themselves. Is also important to note that Life Is Strange received attention for the choice to include a female protagonist in the game. Before signing the collaboration with Square Enix, Dontnod had in fact encountered distrust from the curators of the project, who had attempted to insert a male protagonist in Max’s place. Baiscally, Square Enix was the only company that was willing to publish them without questioning the gender of the main character. Remember this, because it will be important later.
Following the release and success of the first Life is Strange, publisher Square Enix chose American developer Deck Nine to develop a prequel game focusing on the life of Chloe Price, while the Dontnod team began developing a direct sequel. Development on the prequel began in 2016 with assistance from Square Enix’ London Studios. Ashly Burch, who voiced Chloe in Life Is Strange, was replaced by Rhianna DeVries due to the SAG-AFTRA strike. However, Burch and Hannah Telle (Max’s VA) both reprised their roles for the bonus episode “Farewell.” The script for the game was over 1,500 pages, written by lead writer Zak Garriss and a writers’ room. Remember this name because it will come up again.
Prior to its official announcement, images had leaked online indicating that a prequel to Life Is Strange was in development. Finally, Square Enix revealed Life Is Strange: Before the Storm on 11 June during Microsoft’s E3 2017 presentation. At that time, Dontnod had declared that prospective follow-ups to Life Is Strange would feature new characters and locations to the original, with the developers feeling that Max and Chloe’s story had run its course over the first two games. Game co-director Raoul Barbet explained that

“It’s a question we asked ourselves at the beginning. Is it Max and Chloe, Arcadia Bay? No, it’s about everyday characters, relatable characters with stories you can involve yourself in, because it reflects your own experiences. With some supernatural stuff on the top.”

Michel Koch added that

“everyone loved Max, Chloe, Rachel. But their story…it’s done. We have nothing more to tell. We don’t want to. Other people will do it, and it’s okay. But for us, we have nothing more to do. Take them and do whatever you want.”

You can read the full interview here
However this would turn out to not be entirely true follwing recent events, but let’s leave this information for later.
Development on Life Is Strange 2 began in early 2016 as the first game shipped its physical edition. Michel Koch and Raoul Barbet returned to direct the sequel, with Christian Divine and Jean-Luc Cano reprising their roles as co-writers.. The game, despite its very heavy advertising campaign, recived a mixed reception from the audience if not downright negative. The main criticism, besides problems with the writing, the characters and the story, was that people…simply didn’t really care about a new cast, to be honest. Particularly when they are not written as good as the character from the first game. They would have much preferred a sequel with Max and Chloe. Keep this also in mind, because it will be important in a bit.
At the same time, Deck Nine began working on True Colors after completing Before the Storm in 2017. You can probably notice that for this new chapter they decided to return to an episodic format (Life Is Strange Before The Storm was released all in once, for context I was wrong, it was relased episodically, the difference is that there was a "complete season" version earlier than the first game! It was also the first Lis game to contain a DLC), just like the first game and Lis 2, both made by Dontnod.
Now, it’s also important to specify that Before The Storm was also recived lukewarmly, mainly because the plot felt rushed and a lot of very important lore bits of the first game weren’t even addressed, like how the fuck Rachel ended up in the dark room. You know…it was just the main reasons people were exited to play the prequel in the first place.
For context, in Lis 1 there are many moments where it is hinted that Rachel tried to deceive and manipulate Chloe, all so she could escape Arcadia Bay without her. In short: Rachel is not depicted as a good person in this game. There is even an entire section where Max finds out that Rachel was cheating on Chloe with her drug dealer. People were intrigued by this and wanted to know what Rachel’s deal was: was she a good person? Was she evil? How did she die? Did she also had powers? Did she caused the tornado? Is she the tornado? Did she passed down her powers to Max?
When the prequel was announced everyone went ballistic. Are we finally going to play as her? Well, no. Instead we got a story centered around Chloe (which we already knew well thanks to the first game), no powers, weird gameplay based on literally insulting npcs and very little of Rachel. Additionally she was depicted as a strangely different character, way more nicer than the first game made by the original developers probably intended. Her entire affair with the drug dealer was…simply not mentioned at all despite being a crucial point to the lore? Plus we got this post credits scene that literally explained nothing and in fact raised even more questions that would never be answered. Thanks!
Back to the point: when Life Is Strange 3 came out it was recived equally lukewarmly in some points. (clarification needed: it was COMMERCIALLY recived better than Lis 1 and 2, it won a shiton of awards too. I'm talking mainly about a section of the fanbase. Obviously there were also people who liked it, however the point is another here.) Many people pointed out that it’s so similar to the first game in terms or plot, general vibe and characters that it feels almost like a blatant copy. The protagonist is a socially awkard, introverted nerdy bisexual girl with a loudmouth, reckless, secretly nerdy lesbian punk-girl love interest and the plot concerns a disapperance of a person, that Alex and Steph need to investigate onto. Sounds familiar yet?
Also, people argued that Alex and Max share a very similar name, they make the literal same pose on the cover of their respective games and Steph was redesigned to look very similar to Chloe, hat and all..
For some people, it was pretty evident that after the lukewarm reception of BtS and Lis 2 and the complaints about it being too different from the established formula, Square Enix wanted to win back the love of former fans who liked the ideas of the original game. The problem is that they didn’t quite understood why the Dontond game had that impact on people, and borrowed from it only the most superficial aspects. The point is that people liked the first game because the characters were alive, with motivations, they were original and capable of making you really empathize with them. The plot was engaging and the mechanics were something new never seen in the video game industry (at that time). People liked the way the story was written and the way the game played, not necessarily the presence of Max and Chloe. People just wanted new protagonists that were written at least as good as them, basically.
So basically the way of thinking in some parts of the fandom was on the line of: rather than trying to poorly imitate Max and Chloe in a new game with an “original story” (do not steal) in a desperate attempt to regain the fans’ admiration, making a direct sequel to the first game with those characters would have been a better choice.
The comic spin-off with Max and Chloe wasn’t doing that good either. Well, it was a commercial success but the fanbase didn’t really liked it that much.. For context: it was not published by Dontnod or Square Enix, the people behind it were from Titan Comics. The series is set one year after the events of the original Life is Strange, and is a continuation to one of two of the games possible endings, known as the “Sacrifice Arcadia Bay” ending. It is written by Emma Vieceli, with interior art by Claudia Leonardi and coloring by Andrea Izzo. In fact the team behind it is entirely italian, which i find very cool as an italian myself. However, the problems were the same as said before: weird plot, character assasinations, introducing new powers for Max that make absolutely no sense, (now she is able to have “visions” of a different timeline and mess with the literal course of time without any real explanation or sensible motivation for WHY she is capable to do this all of a sudden) and in general they read a lot like a bad fanfiction.
Also i think it’s important to mention that the comics gave us a timeline in which Rachel is alive and she is in a romantic relationship with Chloe, while Max is their third wheel friend. I find this extremely hilarious so take this pic. It fucking kills me everytime.
So, to sum up all this mess before going on: Dontnod doesn’t own the intellectual property of Life Is Strange anymore. This happened after Lis 2, for reasons not yet disclosed. Square Enix and Deck Nine are now the heads of the entire franchise and they are not the best at managing it. In a desperate attempt to reach Dontnod success following the bad reception of BtS and Lis 2, they basically copied and pasted the entire plot of the first game (or at least borrowed a lot of context from it) for Lis 3, causing a sensible distaste in some parts of the fanbase.
The hidden hate imagery and the abuse scandal
Ok. Now we are quitting being funny and silly. This is the section were it starts to get REALLY dark REALLY suddenly. So please, keep in mind that i’m hovering a gigantic trigger warning over your head. All the links in this section can be extremely triggering for some people. Read the disclaimer, please. Are we good? Good. Now we can talk about the more recent news that literally throwed the fandom in a maniacal frenzy.
An article (GIGANTIC TRIGGER WARNING FOR THIS ONE) was published by IGN the 5th April 2024, in which it’s described a very strange and disturbing episode that happened in the Deck Nine offices.
IMPORTANT INFO SINCE SOME PEOPLE WERE CONFUSED: I report the article as faithfully as possible given that in its entirety it could be considered uncomfortable by some people. Please be aware that I have copy pasted parts. This is not to plagiarize, I'm not saying that the contents of this article or the points of this speech are my own words. Keep in mind that it is only to give everyone a fair perspective, especially for people who may not like the mentions of certain things in the original article. However excuse me, i should have clarified this earlier. Thanks for everyone that spoke on this.
To put it simply since the article is very long, during the development of the fourth Life Is Strange game near the end of 2022, a few developers stumbled upon hate symbols hidden in the textures. They initially noticed a reference to the number 88, but they simply tought it was an unfortunate coincidence. It was just a number, right? Maybe their boss didn’t knew the implications of it. But then they quickly started to find more problematic and inequivocable signs, such as references to a racist meme, the number 18, and the Hagal rune.. It was definetly not a mistake: someone was putting those simbols there on purpose.
The weirdest thing is that weeks went by, then months, and management remained strangely silent about this. The incriminated assets remained in the game and people started to get really nervous for obvious reasons. At the end, they removed the symbols but the culprit was never discovered. Again, very strange. The company was behaving almost as if they were trying to defend however was behind this attack. This issue however, literally opened the fucking Pandora’s box.
According to current and former employees across several departments, most of whom have chosen to remain anonymus, Deck Nine’s management has caused a very toxic work culture. They claim the C-suite has protected multiple abusive leaders, encouraged crunch, and allowed bullying of individuals advocating internally for more authentic representation in Life Is Strange. Yeah, you heard that right.
Square Enix in particular was another whole can of worms: the employees said that the company was way too “defensive” of the script of True Colors. In the sense that they seemed oddly reluctant or outright hostile to the diverse themes and ideas that Life Is Strange has always explored. For instance, multiple people recalled an incident during True Colors development where Square Enix told multiple developers they didn’t want Life Is Strange to be thought of as the “gay game.” Which…you know, it’s very weird coming from a franchise that, when under Dontnod management, was always pretty open about its bisexual protagonists.
Well, theoretically Max and Sean are driven entirely by the choice of the player, so they are “playersexual”. You can choose what gender to romance in both games, in theory. However, Max is way more implied to be canonically bi or at least to have a crush on Chloe indipendetly by your choice in the original game, while Sean is more “open” in that sense. However, the main point is not really that. Is that Lis as a franchise always explored queer themes, so this kind of reaction by Square Enix is pretty odd. They knew what they were working with, right? Mallory Littleton, a narrative designer who worked on Life Is Strange under Deck Nine, even said that

”There’s a lot of press out there praising True Colors for having the first bisexual lead in a Life Is Strange game, even if in our press guides from Square Enix, all the way up until review copies were out, we were not to say anything about Alex’s sexuality, period, at all. And then they did the advance copies, and all of these reviews came out saying how amazing it was to finally see an explicitly bi protagonist, and after that, Square was like, just kidding, Alex is absolutely, canonically, 100% bisexual.”

Additionally, multiple sources gave the impression that Deck Nine’s relationship with Square Enix for Life Is Strange was one of money convenience rather than a deep appreciation for the series. Square Enix liked that Deck Nine was willing to do the game for a lower budget than other studios, while Deck Nine needed a good IP, so the deal was born solely for economical convenience However, many developers said that the people in charge of Deck Nine seemed seriously unprepared for dealing with a game with “serious” themes, especially when it came to thoughtful portrayals of diverse individuals. And this is when the real shit started. I won’t go into much detail (read the article if you are curious) but people reported a SHITON of accounts of sexual harassment, bullying and transphobia.
Remember Zack Garris? Well, sources say that he began forming close relationships with a number of younger women, often in situations where he had some mentorship or power over them. He was basically love bombing them, staying late at the studio talking to them, inviting them to lunch, dinner, movies or even to his house. He would also instigate personal conversations and text some of this women after work hours about personal topics. If you want more info about his (frankly disgusting) shenaningans, once again read the article.
It doesn’t stop here however.
In short: nobody, male or female, was able to tell him “no” when he crossed personal boundaries due to his status. This feeling only increased over time, with several people reporting incidents of him lashing out against those who disagreed with his decisions. This was especially true with people fighting for more sensitive portrayals of diverse characters. A woman named Tate Littleton, for instance, recalled being formally reprimanded for criticizing Garriss’ reluctance to allow women in his scripts to express anger. Basically he didn’t think representation mattered because “he didn’t necessarily identify with every white man protagonist, and so other people shouldn’t identify with characters because they look the same.”
The main episode that made this entire thing knew in the first place was the removal of a transgender character from True Colors that took place very late in development. Which, again, sounds really unusual considering the type of media Lis has always been. Additionally, two anonymous employees declared that in 2020 Garriss called BLM a hate group when the team at Deck Nine wanted to post something for the protests that were happening in America. In another example he fought weirdly hard for a twist on True Colors’ final choice that a number of writers pointed out included a problematic portrayal of migrant workers (it eventually was removed, so at least we have that i guess). He would also go daily on rants about how everyone was being “too political”. There was also another instance of a scene Garriss wrote for True Colors that the writers felt they had to fight him excessively to change. For those who don’t know, in the final script of True Colors the main character Alex is taken into the woods by Jed, who she view as a friend at this point of the story. He betrays her, shooting her and missing, causing her to fall into an abandoned mine shaft. However, in Garriss’ original version, Jed spikes her drink at a bar and takes her out to the woods for an attempted murder. When they saw this version of the scene, a number of people pushed back, arguing that the scene would unintentionally cause associations with date rape. Multiple individuals had to fight extensively with Garriss about this scene before it was eventually changed.
Additionally, Garris distanced himself from his team of writers. He and another lead would make most of the story decisions, rewriting work from other writers without allowing them the opportunity to give feedback, even on stories centering marginalized characters. Toward the end of True Colors development, Deck Nine implemented a new, anonymous performance evaluation tool: this is what caused all of this to surface recently, mind you, we would have never known if it wasn’t for this. Some time time later, Garriss quit the team voluntarily. But this wasn’t the end: True Colors launched to critical acclaim, and following the wave of its commercial success, Deck Nine parared immediatly the development of another Lis game. But it was struggling with one plot point apperently, and the leadership suggested to bring Garriss back to fix it. As you can probably imagined, the narrative team went insane. Everyone begged them not to bring him back in a series of meetings, messages, emails, everything. HR was even involved at some point and they even suggested that Deck Nine would be legally liable for Garriss’ behavior if they invited him back after the shiton of reports. When the company CEO and CFO persisted in arguing that they needed Garriss, multiple writers handed in resignations. Finally, management relented and the man did not return.
You probably get the vibe at this point. It was a mess. However, Garris later tried to defend himself against the accusations, but he was ultimately never called back again. At least not officially. Because he then landed at Telltale Games, which was working on a project in close partnership with Deck Nine at the time. Only a few months after his departure, several of those who had protested his return were told that a few narrative team members had been holding story breaking sessions at Garriss’ home. So…ok i guess?
However, this is not even the main tea. Remember when i said that Dontnod abandoned the franchise after the second chapter and it was never clarified why? Well, it’s theorized that the main reason why they went away it’s because Square Enix wasn’t willing to make them publish what they wanted in Life Is Strange. Which is incredibly sad and ironic considering the development issues the first game had. The main proof people point over this is another game made by Dontnod in 2020 called “Tell Me Why”, which stars a trans male protagonists and is objectively very similar to a Lis game without being really a Lis game. The main character has supernatural powers, the gameplay is identical, the story has a very similar vibe, you get the gist. The analogies were…a little bit too close for some people. Now, it’s important to remember that this are only speculations and nothing is being officially confirmed, but judging by the time coincidence and what surfaced recently, some people started to think that Dontnod published this game indipendently because Deck Nine and Square Enix didn’t want the main character to be trans. Which honestly kinda makes sense. However, another thing happened that fueled the speculations even more: Dontnod has recently annuced their new game, “Lost Records”, which they directly called a “spiritual successor to Life Is Strange”. They even stated that in this game they will insert ideas that they would have liked to explore with Max and Chloe in Lis sequels, which they can no longer produce since the franchise and those characters are no longer in their hands. Quoting from this article:

”When we started to work on the very first Life Is Strange a long time ago, we had no publishers. We didn’t know exactly where we would sell the game or…if we would even sell it. […] At this time, we were in need of publishing, and Square was interested in buying the games; they bought the rights for it, and they bought the franchise. […] But since they bought the franchise, our hands were tied. We couldn’t really work as we wanted on what paths the character should go, what kind of game we could make, and how we would like to make the franchise evolve.”

Which in retrospect many tought all of this sounded really weird. Didn’t they said years ago that their vision of the series was always to make stories with different characters and that Chloe and Max’s story was “over”? Many people tought this was a weird claim and so speculations started.
Many belive that the initial plan was to have at least a proper sequel to Lis 1 under their management, but the idea went to shit when Deck Nine and Square Enix acquired the IP for BtS, gaining effective ownership to the franchise and to Max and Chloe. Dontnod could not effectively use those character anymore and so they were obligated to create something new.
This theory gains credibility when we take into consideration the fact that recently a leak about a supposed sequel to the first game with Max and Chloe surfaced. Is important to note that in 2021 there was also another leak in which a person predicted very specific details about True Colors when it was still codenamed “Siren”, basically describing correctly the plot, the final title, the name of the protagonist and her powers. They even predicted the remastered of the first game! Additionally, at the end of the post they mention that the team was looking to make a Lis 1 follow up game with Max and Chloe, so the more recent leak was lining up almost scarily with the former. Another thing that adds fuel to the fire is the fact that the leaker mentioned to have saw an initial concept of this idea in 2022 during a survey in which they showed some future Lis content and apparently there was also an NDA involved. However, since this idea (mainly the bit when they describe Max being able to jump into different timelines) is very similar to what ended up happenning in the comics, some people tought it was simply a scrapped idea that they later reworked into the spin-off. Others instead think that the comics served to introduce us to this very concept and that they are still working on this supposed game. At this point in time we don’t know what the future olds, but it’s confirmed thanks to the article concerning the hate symbols scandal, that a fourth Lis game is currently being worked on. However, we don’t know if it’s that sequel the leaker mentioned or an entire different thing.
The aftermath
So…yeah. As you can probably guess, this situation is a total mess. The fandom is still trying to process what happened, and many are unsure whether to continue supporting the series or not, given everything that happened behind the scenes. It created a bit of a Blizzard situation, if you know what I’m talking about.
Personally, I’m a huge fan of the first Life Is Strange and it played a huge part in my growth. The other games didn’t fascinate me as much as the first tbh, but I loved Arcadia Bay and its world, Max and Chloe, the mystery, the characters, the story, the emotions. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it was the game that changed my life and helped me come to terms with my sexuality. Seeing two girls get together romantically like this in a video game really triggered something in me. It helped me understand that my feelings weren’t wrong. That I wasn’t alone. That i wasn’t broken. I know that probably sounds very cheesy and cringe, but it’s the way it is and I can’t help it. You can imagine what my reaction was when I witnessed this mess unfold irl. In a way I felt hurt. It’s strange to think that a saga that has done so much for me is being run by people who would like to see me dead. Or at the very least, people who were not that open as they liked to present themselves. And I don’t have an answer to the question “should we still support this video game?” Honestly I do not know. On one hand I feel sorry for all the creatives who desperately tried to make Life Is Strange something special despite everything, but at the same time… my god. What the fuck.
I can’t help but wonder how Life Is Strange could have been if it remained under Dontnod’s creative control: what kind of stories they would tell, what future they would invent for Max and Chloe, what adventures they would get into. But maybe it’s better this way. Those girls have grown up, they went trought a lot, and maybe we just need to learn to let them go. After all, isn’t it the entire point of the game? Learning to grow? As for me, I will continue to replay Life Is Strange 1 periodically, I will continue to be part of the frankly amazing community that is the Lis fandom, I will continue to read fanfictions and support fan creations, being it fangames or fanarts. Because they can never take it away from me. They can’t take it away from us. Never.
Thank you for reading this far, i hope it was interesting and that you learned something new.
That being said…quit with the sad bullshit! I want to use this section to shoutout a fellow creator that is currently working on a fan-made sequel of the first game: Life Is Strange After the Storm. If you like this kind of stuffs, make sure to follow him on twitter and to support the project!
Ok now i’m really over. See ya!
EDIT: added clarifictions in the True Colors section. Changed a link in there too (i realized i put the wrong thing). Corrected some BtS informations. Added a clarification in the article section. Edited some formatting and corrected grammatical errors. Added a link in the Hagal rune section. Uncensored the word "nazi", since a person wrote me in private to make me know that my post would not be put down now that it's approved. Rephrased some words to not make them sounds hostile, since a lot of people were getting on my troath for this. I would also like to clarify while i'm here that i don't hate Lis 3 in its entirety nor i'm alluding that Lis 1 has not recived any valid criticism, since people are putting words in my mouth that i did, in fact, not say.
ALSO IMPORTANT CAVIAT: you are not in the wrong if you liked True Colors! It's ok! The game has it's moments and can absolutely be good. In fact, i personally liked some of its plot points and ideas. A good amount of people recived it very well. In this post i'm talking about general negative fan reception to explain why many people are growing disillusioned with the series and to make clear why people criticize it more than the first game, i'm not saying your tastes are bad/you are in the wrong. It's ok to like different things.