Crossposting from Tumblr.
It's funny how some people think Cortés hates women or is misogynistic or toxic masculinity.
He's toxic masculinity in a sense that, he's super toxic and he's masculine. Which is funny to me.
He's not a misogynist or hates women, he refers to Ellen and Portia as "ladies" after all. He clearly has class and standards.

"Where are the two ladies? They're late."

"The two ladies here failed their task of getting the key, even though they were working together."
He attacks everyone there, no one is safe, not even Teneson, who outranks him. Which goes to show how he'll go for everyone. To him, everyone is the same.
Equal rights, equal fights.
It don't matter if you're a child, elderly or outclass him in rank, he'll still talk shit about you if you're lesser than him in his eyes.
He'll respect your gender or sexuality, but he'll find ways to personally get under your skin and pick a fight with you. He has standards and class yet still an asshole.
That's why I love him so much. Love me a man that will respectfully disrespect you at the same time. He's such a chad that he doesn't care what others lesser than him thinks.

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Im sick of hearing "primacy but not supremacy" its the same thing primacy is defined as "the fact of being primary, preeminent, or more important." and is even used in 1960s Catholic theology books. Affirming papal primacy doesn't go with eastern orthodox theology. Also eastern orthodox can cope with "First among equal!" or "Extra honor but no extra authority!" that's completely wrong to the early church and first among equals isnt a good term, if i were always first at something i would be more supreme then another. In regards to the early church Heres some references, Quoted in “Athanasius Quoted works” page 110 Pope Julius Letter to the eusebians at Antioch “And why is nothing said to us (The Apostolic see) concerning the Alexandrians in particular, are you ignorant that the custom has been for word to be written first to us and then for a just decision to be passed from this place” so he is saying in the matter of disputes matter should be brought to the see of Rome as to make a judgment and this is the east he is speaking to not just his patriarchal territories. Then he goes on and says “I beseech you readily bare with me what i write is for the common good, for what we have received from the Blessed apostle Peter that i signify unto you and i should have not written this as deeming that these things should be manifest unto all men had not these proceedings so disturbed us”
some might say this is peter syndrome where we get all giddy and excited when peter is mentioned and Rome is mentioned but i would like to say Pope Julius said he has received something from the Blessed apostle Peter that disputes in the east should be brought to his judgment to be settled.
Now from the writings of the early Church Historian sozomen source: Volume 2 of the nicene and post nicene fathers second series. Book 3 Chapter 10. Heres what he says about this whole affair of Pope Julius writing to the antiochians and what he ment in that segment “the bishops of Egypt having sent the declaration in writing, that these allegations were false and julius having been apprised (to give information to someone) that Athanasius was far from being in safety in egypt send for him to his own city he replied at the same time to the letter of the bishops who were convened at antioch (convened: to bring together a group of people for a meeting, or to meet for a meeting) for just then he happened to receive the epistle and accused them of having planned clandestinely(in a secretive and illicit way.) introduced innovations Contrary to the nicene dogmas and of having violated the laws of the church by neglecting to invite him to join their synod for he alleged that is a sacral Canon which declares that whatever is enacted contrary to the bishop of Rome is null."
Now from Nicea II Pope Hadrians Letter
‘Stand firm; for if you abide with perseverance in the orthodox Faith in which you have begun and so through you the sacred and venerable images are restored in those regions to their former state—just as the lord and emperor Constantine of pious memory and blessed Helena, who promulgated the orthodox Faith, raised up the holy, catholic, and apostolic church of Rome as your spiritual mother, and with the other orthodox emperors venerated it as the head of all the churches...'"
"...of all the churches... If, moreover, following the traditions of the orthodox faith, you embrace the judgment of the church of the blessed Peter prince of the apostles and, as the holy emperors your predecessors did of old, so you too venerate it with honor and love his vicar from the depths of your hearts, or rather if your rule granted by God follows their orthodox faith in accordance with our holy Roman church, the prince of the apostles, to whom was given by the Lord God the power to bind and to loose sins in heaven and on earth."https://orthodoxchurchfathers.com/fathers/npnf214/npnf2258.html
the blessed Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, says: "That we may remain members of our apostolic head, the throne of the Roman Pontiffs, of whom it is our duty to seek what we are to believe and what we are to hold, venerating him, beseeching him above others; for his it is to reprove, to correct, to appoint, to loose, and to bind in place of Him Who set up that very throne, and Who gave the fulness of His own to no other, but to him alone, to whom by divine right all bow the head, and the primates of the world are obedient as to our Lord Jesus Christ Himself.
St. Damasus, Pope of Rome (A.D. 304-384)
“Although the catholic churches diffused throughout the world are one bridal chamber of Christ, yet the holy Roman church has been preferred to all other churches, not by any synodical decrees, but has obtained the primacy by the voice of our Lord and Savior in the gospel, saying: ‘You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church, and the gates of hell will never prevail against it; and I will give to you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven…..Therefore, the first see of Peter the Apostles is that of the Roman church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing” (Decree of Damasus, Roman Synod 382. Patrologia Latina 13.374; Jalland, T.G. (1944). Church and Papacy. London: Morehouse-Gorham Co. p. 255-57)
“For in view of our office there is no freedom for us, on whom a zeal for the Christian religion is incumbent greater than on all others, to dissimulate or to be silent. We bear the burdens of all who are oppressed, or rather the blessed apostle Peter, who in all things protects and preserves us, the heirs, as we trust, of his administration, bears them in us…[proceeds to list a number of errors being promoted in Tarragona (Spain)]… it is also inappropriate henceforth for you to deviate from that path, if you do not wish to be separated from our company by synodal sentence….Enough error on this matter! All priests who do not wish to be torn from the solidity of the apostolic rock, upon which Christ built the universal Church, should now hold the aforementioned rule…[lists more errors]…let them know that they have been expelled by the authority of the apostolic see from every ecclesiastical office, which they used unworthily…[lists more errors]… there is freedom for no priest of the Lord to be ignorant of the statutes of the apostolic see and the venerable decrees of the canons…” (Pope Siricius to Bishop Himerius of Tarragona 385 AD, Epistle 1, Directa Ad Decessorem. Patrologia Latina 13.1132; Ed. Pierre Coustant, Epistolae Romanorum pontificum (Paris, 1721; reprint Farnborough, 1967), 623-638.)
St. Innocent, Pope of Rome (401-417)
The reply of Pope St. Innocent in 417 to the Africans concerning their appeal on the controversy of Pelagius/Celestius goes like this:
“In making inquiry with respect to those things that should be treated with all solicitude by bishops, and especially by a true and just and Catholic Council, by preserving, as you have done, the example of ancient tradition, and by being mindful of ecclesiastical discipline, you have truly strengthened the vigour of our Faith, no less now in consulting us than before in passing sentence. For you decided that it was proper to refer to our judgement, knowing what is due to the Apostolic See, since all we who are set in this place, desire to follow the Apostle (Peter) from whom the very episcopate and whole authority of this name is derived. Following in his steps, we know how to condemn the evil and to approve the good. So also, you have by your sacerdotal office preserved the customs of the Fathers, and have not spurned that which they decreed by a divine and not human sentence, that whatsoever is done, even though it be in distant provinces, should not be ended without being brought to the knowledge of this See, [39] that by its authority the whole just pronouncement should be strengthened, and that from it all other Churches (like waters flowing from their natal source and flowing through the different regions of the world, the pure streams of one incorrupt head), should receive what they ought to enjoin, whom they ought to wash, and whom that water, worthy of pure bodies, should avoid as defiled with uncleansable filth. I congratulate you, therefore, dearest brethren, that you have directed letters to us by our brother and fellow-bishop Julius, and that, while caring for the Churches which you rule, you also show your solicitude for the well-being of all, and that you ask for a decree that shall profit all the Churches of the world at once; [40] so that the Church being established in her rules and confirmed by this decree of just pronouncement against such errors, may be unable to fear those men, etc.” (Pope Innocent I, Epistle 29, to the Council of Carthage (In requirendis). Jan 27, 417 AD. Patrologia Latina 33.780)
Pope St. Zosimus (AD 417)
Innocent’s successor, Pope Zosimus, continued to write letters to Africa concerning the same Pelagian issue:
“Although the tradition of the Fathers has attributed such great authority to the Apostolic See that no one would dare to disagree wholly with its judgment, and it has always preserved this [judgment] by canons and rules, and current ecclesiastical discipline up to this time by its laws pays the reverence which is due to the name of Peter, from whom it has itself descended …; since therefore Peter the head is of such great authority and he has confirmed the subsequent endeavors of all our ancestors, so that the Roman Church is fortified … by human as well as by divine laws, and it does not escape you that we rule its place and also hold power of the name itself, nevertheless you know, dearest brethren, and as priests you ought to know, although we have such great authority that no one can dare to retract from our decision, yet we have done nothing which we have not voluntarily referred to your notice by letters … not because we did not know what ought to be done, or would do anything which by going against the advantage of the Church, would be displeasing.…(From the epistle (12) “Quamvis Patrum traditio” to the African bishops, March 21, 418. Patrologia Latina 20. 676; Denzinger, H., & Rahner, K. (Eds.). (1954). The sources of Catholic dogma. (R. J. Deferrari, Trans.) (p. 47). St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Co.)
MG 54.743. Jerome: "I keep the unity in communion with your Beatitude, that is, with Peter's chair. I know that the Church has been built upon that rock." (Epist. 15.1, to Pope Damasus, ML 22.355).
The Roman See is the "Apostolic Chair" or the "Apostolic See." Augustine: "The sovereignty of the Apostolic Chair was always in the Roman Church" (Epist. 43, ML 33.163); "Apostolic See" (Serm. 131.10, ML 38.734).
The Roman Church presides as a sovereign over all the other churches. Gregory of Nazianzus: "It presides over all" (Poems, 2.1.12, MG 37.1068); Theodoret of Cyrus: "That most holy see holds in many ways the sovereignty over the churches of the entire world, especially because it kept immune of heretical corruption, and never a dissenter sat in it, but everyone
The Roman See is the source of all rights in the Church. Ambrose: "From that See derive into all the rights of the venerable communion." (Epist. 11.4, ML 16.986).
"Rome has spoken, the case is closed" ("Roma locuta est, causa finita est"). This famous axiom derives from Augustine saying about the debate on Pelagian heresy: "Concerning this question two conciliar decisions have been sent to the Apostolic See: also rescripts came from there, hence the trial is over." (Serm. 131.10, ML 38.734).
The Roman Pontiffs themselves constantly asserted their primacy, as is shown in the following summary of their doctrine.
They apply to themselves Christ's words to Peter, Matt 16.18 ff.: "Thou art Peter..." and John 21.15-17: "Feed My lambs..." Thus Siricius, Boniface I, the "Decree of Gelasius," Hormisdas, Pelagius I, Nicholas I (Denz. 184, 234, 350, 383, 446, 640).
Sure, here is the transcription of the text from the third image:
The Roman Pontiff is Peter's moral person. Siricius: "[The Roman Pontiff is] the apostolic rock." (Denz. 184). Innocent I: "Whenever a question of faith is dealt with, all must refer only to Peter, that is, to the one who bears his name and his honor." (Denz. 218). Leo I: "The blessed Peter did not leave the government which he received... In his See [that is, the Roman] his power is alive and his authority is visible." (Serm. 32 f., ML 54.145 f.).
Peter remains in his successors. See Leo I, just quoted. Philip, apostolic legate to the Council of Ephesus: Peter "is always living in his successors." (Denz. 3056).
The Roman Pontiff is "Peter's heir" (Siricius, Denz. 181) and has "Peter's See" (Leo I, quoted above; Gelasius, quoted below).
The Roman Pontiff has "the care of all the churches." (Innocent I, Denz. 218; Leo I, Serm. 5.2 ML 54.153). He is "the head of all the churches" (Boniface I, Denz. 233; "Decree of Gelasius," Denz. 350; Pelagius I, Denz. 446, 640).
The honor of writing the last Latin manual of Scholastic theology truly belongs to Emmanuel Doronzo (1903-1976), the eminent sacramental theologian of Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.) in the mid-to-late 20th Century. He wrote a complete, traditional Scholastic, dogmatic manual in 1966, a year after the closing of Vatican II
The Science of Sacred Theology by Doronzo Emmanuel.
https://obrascatolicas.com/livros/Teologia/Doronzo%20The%20Science%20of%20Sacred%20Theology%20for%20Teacers%20Bk%204.pdf
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/davearmstrong/2018/02/papal-participation-in-the-first-seven-ecumenical-councils.html since i was reasearching constantinople I i had came across this: "This council also was convoked by an emperor, Theodosius I. [Ibid.] The language of his decree suggests he regarded the Roman see as a yardstick of Christian orthodoxy."
Pope Vigilius came to become Pope amid much turmoil in 537, as his predecessor, St Silverius, had been accused of treason, defrocked, and exiled by Belisarius, the general under Empress Theodora. Silverius had refused to re-instate the monophysite patriarch of Constantinople, whom Pope Agapetus had deposed — even here, a recognition of the canonical authority of Rome to depose and judge the other most prominent and important Sees of Christendom was something the Popes fought bitterly to maintain against the emperors.
Where was this canonical authority established? In fact, it was as old as the Church itself. When Athanasius had been exiled by a judgment of the Alexandrian Church, Pope Julius had written on his behalf (341): “Judgment ought to have been made, not as it was, but according to the ecclesiastical canon. It behoved you all to write us so that the justice of it might be seen as emanating from all.” Again: “Are you ignorant that the custom has been to write first to us and then for a just decision to be passed from this place [Rome]?” For Pope St Julius, the judgment of Athanasius which had not sought approval from Rome was a canonical novelty: “not thus are the constitutions of Paul, not thus the traditions of the Fathers. This is another form of procedure, and a novel practice.” However, the reference of judgment to the Apostolic See was something taught by the Apostle Peter: “For what we have heard from the Apostle Peter, these things I signify to you.”
Cope.

From observing this sub for a while, I’ve noticed a common theme among the opinions of players: the economy sucks bad. I don’t disagree - but as an experienced mobile player I thought I’d put some information out there that PC only players may not be fully aware of.
I know many of you already know that there’s many maps missing from the PC version. But what does this actually mean?
What you might not know, is the loot economy of all maps is not equal. Some of the future map designs have significantly higher risk and difficulty, and thus will consistently offer much better rewards as loot. This is indisputably good balancing. I think we’d all agree that higher risk of dying = more money.
Farm is generally regarded as the beginner map. Normal mode especially so. You can safely expect the loot economy of normal farm to be the worst in the game. Lockdown will offer a bit better loot than normal modes, but on average it’s nothing compared to the loot economy future maps. On mobile, people only bring T5 and T6 to farm in the hopes of killing other players for $$$. Most don’t go there in good gear hoping to get rich off loot - they’ll play other maps for that.
For someone who has played this game a lot, I think it’s genuinely a good thing for how the economy works. Play hard maps: high risk, high reward. If they increased normal farm loot, then they’d have to increase lockdown loot even more… and then the difficult maps even more, to the point it’d certainly begin crashing the economy. I think the current PC loot economy is designed with the more advanced maps in mind, which is probably a bit of oversight since those maps are unavailable for the moment. This makes the economy and map options quite underwhelming.
Anyways, I’m not sharing this with the intent to quiet the discussion about the bad economy. If it sucks - complain! Make your voice heard. That’s the purpose of a beta test. What I am trying to say is: be patient. Don’t make conclusions about the economy as a whole and write the game off as unplayable yet. I’ve seen quite a few people say they’ve already given up on the game due to the economy. The economy of PC is especially bad because we only have the lowest economy maps available. I hope once they release the higher economy maps, players will be at least a bit more satisfied with the loot diversity and choice of risk vs. reward they’re able to make.

Before everyone comes at me 'NoT aLL MeN' yada yada yada yes some men are good fathers, good husbands ect. There are also women who aren't satisfactory spouses or parents and who abuse people. However my experience and the statistics themselves paint an abysmal picture of men and this is a thread about why women are choosing to avoid men and are increasingly choosing to be single and childfree. If you are one of the men who does the bare minimum I won't be patting you on the back. If you are one of the men who does the bare minimum then this thread wasn't created to complain about you. You can either back me up or move along.
I'm not going to go into too much detail about my personal life but I have kids. I enjoy being a mom, it's the best thing I have done and I don't regret my decision. I have always respected childfree people and their decision but I never understood why they felt that way, I just thought that they had no instinct to have kids and that might be the case for some of them, however I'm really starting to understand an even bigger elephant in the room and I would guess that a lot of it has to do with the state of men and the fact that women are increasingly walking away from relationships because they no longer want to be a maid, hooker, nanny and servant. Women want equality and equity and they aren't getting it. Women work more hours on average than men if you include family responsibilities and domestic tasks and not just paid employment. Women are also still being paid less. We haven't reached the degree of equity needed so that women can have multiple children and further her career. Women already have to work harder than men to achieve the same goals. Women still have to face systematic misogyny and becoming a mother inevitably increases the misogyny women are subjected to in the form of idealized motherhood. Women are held to higher moral standards than men and men get away with lackluster parenting because people expect them to be incompetent. If a man 'babysits' the child for a few hours over the weekend everyone pats him on the back. Men just have to do the bare minimum and they get a trophy. For the first time in history women finally have choices and more and more of them are opting out when it comes to having anything to do with men.
The statistics surrounding men paint a frightening picture. I will provide links here
Women Work Harder And More Intensively Than Men: Study
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ndtv.com/feature/women-work-harder-and-more-intensively-than-men-study-3679003/amp/1
Women are being bogged down with tasks that men don't want to do at work
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/10/women-are-more-productive-than-men-at-work-these-days/
It's official: women work nearly an hour longer than men every day
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/its-official-women-work-nearly-an-hour-longer-than-men-every-day/
research shows men often need a little more help than their partners when considering issues of influence, respect, and power
https://www.gottman.com/blog/manage-conflict-accepting-influence/#:~:text=Gottman%20suggests%20actively%20looking%20for,That's%20the%20secret.
The prevalence and seriousness of incestuous abuse: Stepfathers vs. biological fathers
According to this study a whopping 1 in 6 stepfathers are nonces and 1 in 40 women are sexually abused by their biological fathers. To make things even more shocking these numbers are underestimated, since the study only highlights women, it doesn't cover men who were sexually abused as boys by their male parental figure. Considering the fact that 1 in 6 boys is sexually abused by the age of 16 and some of those abusers are male parental figures, the numbers are even higher than this study suggests.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0145213484900450
https://1in6.org/statistic/
A third of male university students say they would rape a woman if there no were no consequences
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/a-third-of-male-university-students-say-they-would-rape-a-woman-if-there-no-were-no-consequences-9978052.html
Survey suggests 1 in 10 men admit that it's OK to hit a woman
https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/survey-suggests-1-in-10-men-think-it-s-ok-to-hit-a-woman-1.781324?referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F
Victims of sexual violence, statistics
On average, there are 463,634 victims (age 12 or older) of rape and sexual assault each year in the United States alone
https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence
Violence against women and girls – what the data tells us
https://liveprod.worldbank.org/en/data-stories/overview-of-gender-based-violence
Domestic violence perpetrators - women vs men
women’s violence usually occurs in the context of violence against them by their male partners; (b) in general, women and men perpetrate equivalent levels of physical and psychological aggression, but evidence suggests that men perpetrate sexual abuse, coercive control, and stalking more frequently than women and that women also are much more frequently injured during domestic violence incidents; (c) women and men are equally likely to initiate physical violence in relationships involving less serious “situational couple violence,” and in relationships in which serious and very violent “intimate terrorism” occurs, men are much more likely to be perpetrators and women victims; (d) women’s physical violence is more likely than men’s violence to be motivated by self-defense and fear, whereas men’s physical violence is more likely than women’s to be driven by control motives; (e) studies of couples in mutually violent relationships find more negative effects for women than for men
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2968709/
When you look at men as a whole group an unfortunate number of them do not make suitable husbands and fathers.
You can't blame women for 'picking wrong' when the statistics are this terrible. Now women have had the choice, they have had enough of men.
So what do you even suggest? Get all the 'good' men with emotional intelligence, kindness and integrity and allow them to take multiple wives? Make it easier for women to exist as single mothers? Because men as a group are failing women and children and enforced monogamy means that a high proportion of women and children will suffer abuse.
Because at this point, if I were a single woman, I would rather SHARE a husband that was a decent person or be single as opposed to having a pool of potential predators and abusers to choose from. That's how bad men are.

In March, my fiancés ex randomly called us and told us that she would be moving with their child, as well as her boyfriend and soon to be born child, to South Carolina and that his visitation would change to every other month for 1.5 weeks. Obviously, we were very shocked, angry and just confused. (Side note: she posted about her boyfriend cheating again and having to figure things out as a single mom in January so that’s why we were so confused). I’ve been with my fiancé since his daughter was 7 months old and throughout that time the custody schedule has shifted to what’s best for her age, but we have always seen her consistently throughout the week every week. My fiancé has also consistently paid an agreed upon amount of $400 monthly. I know that may seem small but neither us nor her are making more than 3k a month. With that said, none of this has been through the courts so there was technically nothing stopping her from moving. I should note he has established paternity by signing a VDOP at SD birth since him and BM were never married. The actual time share has gone between 20-35ish % throughout the last 3 years (SD is 3 currently), and currently she has reduced him back down to 20% (since we served her court papers she won’t let us have any more time). The reason being was because she became a stay at home mom so she felt the time where SD was only with me was no longer necessary (which I get). This shift for her happened around the time my fiance started a new job and was working a lot so we didn’t fight it cause any extra time we would get, SD would just be with me since my fiance was working so much. Eventually, he was able to put himself into a position to be able to have his daughter more cause he no longer had to work the same hours he was when he first started. We were planning on approaching her to change the schedule to increase our time with SD since work schedule was better and we felt she was old enough that spending longer periods at each house was best for her, however that’s when BM told us her plan to move. After she told us her plan to move, we tried to have a few conversations to try to get things figured out without court, but everything just came down to money when it came to BM. She claims that they’re moving because they can’t afford to raise 2 kids in CA ( living off of only her boyfriend’s income cause she plans to be a SAHM). Our response was we want more time with her any way and if it’s too expensive for you to have 2, then us having her more time will help alleviate that. Her response was if you want more time then you need to pay me more. We also feel frustrated cause it feels like how she treats him as a father is completely dependent on her relationship status. When this boyfriend cheated on her last year she was in full support and thought it was best for SD to have pretty much equal time between homes and get to grow up with both of her parents and for them to coparent, however when her and boyfriend are good and she gets pregnant it changes to he’s a terrible father and doesn’t do anything so she has more authority. It’s been kinda rough that SD was so young when they split cause it felt inevitable that she would need to be with mom more since she was breastfeeding, sleep training etc. After these recent conversations, we felt like there was no other option than to take it to court not only in order to try and prevent her from moving, but regardless to get more time since she will not respond to making a new schedule with more equal time share. We’ve all always avoided it because we know it’s ugly and just felt like we could all figure it out, but at this point that feels impossible.
I guess my question is, what are the odds of us getting more custody and what are the odds of her being able to move away? At the end of the day our focus isn’t on child support, however with her not working and solely relying on her bfs income, how would that affect it? I know that it really looks bad that on paper he has her 20%, however he is a very present and loving father and it really hurts my heart to think that my SD could end up having to grow up with her parents living across the country from one another, and inevitably having daddy issues. Seeing her relationship with her dad, I know the hurt and confusion it would cause her to go from seeing him every couple days to every 2 months.
Please no judgement. I’m posting this cause I could use some positive words and some insight. Thank you!

Today I told my parents about how I was considering moving in with my friend (for context him and i have lived together in the past in a dorm room and then sharing a apartment which multiple friends, but it would just be him and I now). I am very much straight, and he has a mono bf, and nothing sexual has ever occurred between us. When I told my very christian parents I was considering moving to a new city with him they both freaked out, and made very homophobic comments that left me disgusted to call them my parents.
While I understand their hesitation (due to other factors in my life) for me moving to a new city. It is their focus on living with my best friend that most horrify/hurt me. and even though I have told them the classic all sins are equal in gods eyes and all sins are treated equal in gods eyes quotes. It has not helped how they feel.
I am looking for biblically supported scripture to defend my friend and "his lifestyle"(their words not mine. As I know because I was there for him coming out of gay it is not a choice in life).
To 100% clarify I am not looking for hate comments for my parents. I am looking for real points to bring to my parents to hopefully change how they see my best friend and his "lifestyle"(their quote not mine).
He is my closest friend and I want them to see who he is past his sexuality.
Please help

Today I told my parents about how I was considering moving in with my friend (for context him and i have lived together in the past in a dorm room and then sharing a apartment which multiple friends, but it would just be him and I now). I am very much straight, and he has a mono bf, and nothing sexual has ever occurred between us. When I told my very christian parents I was considering moving to a new city with him they both freaked out, and made very homophobic comments that left me disgusted to call them my parents.
While I understand their hesitation (due to other factors in my life) for me moving to a new city. It is their focus on living with my best friend that most horrify/hurt me. and even though I have told them the classic all sins are equal in gods eyes and all sins are treated equal in gods eyes quotes. It has not helped how they feel.
I am looking for biblically supported scripture to defend my friend and "his lifestyle"(their words not mine. As I know because I was there for him coming out of gay it is not a choice in life).
To 100% clarify I am not looking for hate comments for my parents. I am looking for real points to bring to my parents to hopefully change how they see my best friend and his "lifestyle"(their quote not mine).
He is my closest friend and I want them to see who he is past his sexuality.
Please help

Hey all,
I don't expect anybody to read this but want to post what has led me here as a form of journaling and helping keep myself accountable.
I'm 31M based near Boston, MA; married for 3 years and together with my now wife for 12 years. We just welcomed our first daughter earlier this year.
As we were preparing for the arrival of our baby girl I went to apply for a life insurance policy and was denied due to elevated GGT (gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase) which can be caused by excessive alcohol use. My PCP isn't overly concerned but don't love the idea of an insurance company being there have to pay out on a 30 year policy. I want to spend so much more than 30 years with my loved ones.
As I'm sure we're all aware while that should be a wake up call and the motivation to stop drinking alcohol dependency isn't so cut and dry. I've had day 0s before the most serious of which a year and a half so after a mental breakdown from work related stress and toxic treatment from my direct manager. There were thoughts of rehab and looking into local resource groups. Lack of programs for people who aren't yet sober, groups with heavy religious undertones, and challenges interviewing effectively potential therapists were all the primary reasons I didn't truly start this journey then. Life and work then got in the way and while I made it 30 days I'm here again. Pretty sure my family has undiagnosed alcoholism on one side so yay for genetics making me more susceptible.
Had an appointment with my PCP today and got prescribed an anti anxiety med on top of my anti depressant that hopefully will help combat the driver of my drinking urges.
I could drink a 4 pack of high ABV 16 oz NE IPAs each night or try and hide the alcohol in a Jameson and Coke from my wife. She'd find beer cans behind the couch cushions from the night before. Ever since we repurposed my beer fridge to a milk fridge I've been storing / stashing my beer unrefrigerated in the garage in the summer here in the northern hemisphere. Last night I was super tired, stressed from being yelled at by a newborn all day and a bit drunk and told my wife that she's treating me like a night nurse for the baby instead of equal partners. Which even if was true how I was feeling was a pretty shitty thing to say the way I did especially to someone I love and who is so recently post partum.
Today sucked felt super numb to both highs and lows but I got through it. Hope that as some people have mentioned emotions come back after abstinence since starting down this journey it feels like I'll never know the endorphin high of that first sip again.
This time I'm leveraging medicine and work with my PCP to find a therapist and support groups. Hopefully that and being open about my intention with others and myself I can be successful.

Bit of a strange question, but this is regarding volumetric measuring and for purely economic reasons, I am considering to buy the 20 mg box. The pills aren’t scored, and therefore equal distribution of active ingredient can’t be guaranteed, nor can equal quarter cuts, so I can’t know how much I’m getting every time. Vortioxetine is slightly soluble in water. I’m wondering if anyone can provide more info from TDS regarding solubility in ethanol/water mixture, say 37,5 : 62,5 (or like, Vodka).
Thank you in advance!

Bit of a strange question, but this is regarding volumetric measuring and for purely economic reasons, I am considering to buy the 20 mg box. The pills aren’t scored, and therefore equal distribution of active ingredient can’t be guaranteed, nor can equal quarter cuts, so I can’t know how much I’m getting every time. Vortioxetine is slightly soluble in water. I’m wondering if anyone can provide more info from TDS regarding solubility in ethanol/water mixture, say 37,5 : 62,5 (or like, Vodka).
Thank you in advance!

The Kitazawa clan is a minor clan of the Jujutsu society. Their philosophies lies in the principle of "The Jujutsu Should Support The Blade" emphasising on swordsmanship to win. As such, the inherited tecniques of the clan lies around an equal fight with the blade. To follow this principle, the clan not only created a fuck ton of cursed tools, but also learnable techniques to be used with the sword. The techniques would only grow as the Kitazawa family for generations had a shortage of sorcerers with innate techniques. However these techniques uses a lot of cursed energy.
The Swaying Wind Aura
An old technique to counter domain's sure hit effect. An aura of CE is released all around the sorcerer similar to falling blossom emotion. However they can be used offensively as the sorcerer is able to send out the aura all around them. This could be used in an attempt to break the domain's barrier or just to simply use it for attacking.
The Horizon's Edge
Imbuing too much CE to a weapon may make them break. So the technique have them quickly be drawn in and released. One way to release it is with this technique. This technique will send out a wave of CE for a long ranged slash attack.
The Blossoming Sword
Similar to how divergent fist works, the technique will see the sword hitting the enemy and then having a burst of cursed energy be released which can worsen an injury caused by the sword.
The Whirling Storm
By releasing a significant amount of cursed energy, the user's swing will be faster as they spin multiple times in a second. Effective to deal multiple blows at once.
The Blue Sea
This technique will allow the user to manipulate their weapons using cursed energy, such as making it stronger or weaker or using cursed energy to repair weapons and change their shape by a bit.

The defense and the prosecution today made their closing statements in the New York criminal case against Trump for falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 payment to adult film actress Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels. The payment was intended to stop her account of her sexual encounter with Trump from becoming public in the days before the 2016 election, when the Trump campaign was already reeling from the Access Hollywood tape showing Trump boasting of sexual assault.
The Biden-Harris campaign showed up at the trial today with veteran actor Robert DeNiro and former police officers Michael Fanone and Harry Dunn, who protected the U.S. Capitol and members of Congress from rioters on January 6, 2021. In words seemingly calculated to get under Trump’s skin, DeNiro said, “We New Yorkers used to tolerate him when he was just another grubby real estate hustler masquerading as a big shot,” and called him a coward.
When Robert Costa of CBS News asked campaign spokesperson Michael Tyler why they had shown up at the trial, Tyler answered: “Because you all are here. You’ve been incessantly covering this day in and day out, and we want to remind the American people ahead of the…first debate on June 27 of the unique, persistent, and growing threat that Donald Trump poses to the American people and to our democracy. So since you all are here, we’re here communicating that message.”
Yesterday, in remarks at Arlington National Cemetery in observance of Memorial Day, President Joe Biden honored “the sacrifice of the hundreds of thousands of women and men who’ve given their lives for this nation. Each one…a link in the chain of honor stretching back to our founding days. Each one bound by common commitment—not to a place, not to a person, not to a President, but to an idea unlike any idea in human history: the idea of the United States of America.”
“[F]reedom has never been guaranteed,” Biden said. “Every generation has to earn it; fight for it; defend it in battle between autocracy and democracy, between the greed of a few and the rights of many…. And just as our fallen heroes have kept the ultimate faith with our country and our democracy, we must keep faith with them,” he said.
His speech at Arlington echoed the message he delivered to this year’s graduating class at the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he urged the graduates to hold fast to their oaths. “On your very first day at West Point, you raised your right hands and took an oath—not to a political party, not to a president, but to the Constitution of the United States of America—against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” he said to applause. Soldiers “have given their lives for that Constitution. They have fought to defend the freedoms that it protects: the right to vote, the right to worship, the right to raise your voice in protest. They have saved and sacrificed to ensure, as President Lincoln said, a ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.’”
“[N]othing is guaranteed about our democracy in America. Every generation has an obligation to defend it, to protect it, to preserve it, to choose it,” he said. “Now, it’s your turn.” Biden spent more than an hour saluting and shaking the hand of each graduate.
In contrast, Trump ushered in Memorial Day with a post on his social media company, saying: “Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.” He then continued to attack E. Jean Carroll, the writer who successfully sued him for defamation, before turning to attack Judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over the civil case of Trump and the Trump Organization falsifying documents, and Judge Juan Merchan, who is presiding over the current criminal case in New York.
The message behind this extraordinary post was twofold: Trump can think of nothing but himself…and he appears to be terrified.
On Saturday, May 25, Trump had an experience quite different from his usual reception at rallies of hand-picked supporters. He was resoundingly booed at the national convention of the Libertarian Party in Washington, D.C., where Secret Service agents confiscated squeaky rubber chickens before his speech. Attendees jeered Trump’s order, “You have to combine with us,” even when he reminded them of his libertarian credentials—tax cuts and defunding of federal equality programs—and promised to pardon the January 6 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol.
Trump also promised to pardon Ross Ulbricht, who founded and from January 2011 to October 2013 ran an online criminal marketplace called Silk Road, where more than $200 million in illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services, such as computer hacking, were bought and sold. Most of the sales were of drugs, with the Silk Road home page listing nearly 13,000 options, including heroin, cocaine, ecstasy, and LSD. The wares were linked to at least six deaths from overdose around the world. In May 2015, Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison and was ordered to forfeit more than $180 million.
Libertarians want Ulbricht released because they support drug legalization on the grounds that people should be able to make their own choices and they see Ulbricht’s sentence as government overreach. Trump has repeatedly called for the death penalty for drug dealers, making his promise to pardon Ulbricht an illustration of just how badly he thinks he needs the support of Libertarian voters. But they refused to endorse him.
Trump appeared angry, and on Sunday, as Greg Sargent reported in The New Republic, he reposted a video of a man raging at MSNBC host Joe Scarborough. In it, the man says that when Trump is reelected: “He’ll get rid of all you f*cking liberals. You liberals are gone when he f*cking wins. You f*cking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you f*cking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the f*ck out of here, you scumbag.”
Trump’s elevation of this video, Sargent notes, is a dangerous escalation of his already violent rhetoric, and yet it has gotten very little media attention.
Last November, Matt Gertz of Media Matters reported that ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News provided 18 times more coverage of 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s comment at a fundraising event that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables” who are “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic,” than they provided of Trump’s November 2023 promise to “root out the communist, Marxist, fascist and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
CNN, the Fox News Channel, and MSNBC mentioned the “deplorables” comment nearly 9 times more than Trump’s “vermin” language. The ratio for the five highest-circulating U.S. newspapers was 29:1.
Clinton’s statement was consistent with polling, and she added that the rest of Trump’s supporters were “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.” She said: “Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”
Sargent noted that news stories require context and that Trump’s elevation of the violent video should be placed alongside his many threats to prosecute his enemies. While there is often concern over disrespect toward right-wing voters, Sargent writes, there has been very little attention to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s posting of “a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans ‘done’ and ‘gone’ if he is elected.”
Scott MacFarlane of CBS News reported yesterday that Republicans have ignored a law passed in March 2022 requiring the placement of a small plaque honoring police officers who protected the U.S. Capitol and the lawmakers and staffers there on January 6, 2021. It was supposed to be in place by March 2023 but has not gone up. A spokesperson for House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) says his office is working on it. Kayla Tausche of CNN reported today that three of the police officers at the Capitol that day—Sergeant Aquilino Gonell and Officer Harry Dunn, both retired, and Officer Daniel Hodges, who is still with the Washington, D.C., metropolitan police—will be traveling to swing states for the Biden campaign to tell voters that Trump threatens Americans’ fundamental rights.
Finally, today, Melinda French Gates, co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, announced $1 billion in new spending over the next two years “for people and organizations working on behalf of women and families around the world, including on reproductive rights in the United States.” Only 2% of charitable giving in the U.S. goes to these organizations, she wrote the New York Times, and “[f]or too long, a lack of money has forced organizations fighting for women's rights into a defensive posture while the enemies of progress play offense. I want to help even the match.”
—
Notes:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/26/libertarians-reject-trump-rfk-chase-oliver-presidential-nominee-00160040
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/05/27/remarks-by-president-biden-at-the-156th-national-memorial-day-observance-arlington-va/
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/05/25/remarks-by-president-biden-in-commencement-address-to-the-united-states-military-academy-at-west-point-west-point-ny/
https://newrepublic.com/article/181973/trump-media-attacks-media-dangerous-turn
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/congress-fails-to-install-plaque-honoring-jan-6-police-officers/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/politics/biden-campaign-january-6-officers/index.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c722qy5dzlgo
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/25/trump-commute-ross-ulbricht-sentence-libertarian-convention-00160025
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ross-ulbricht-aka-dread-pirate-roberts-sentenced-life-federal-prison-creating
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-is-spotlighting-ross-ulbricht-silk-road-appeal-to-libertarians-2024
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4305566-trump-doubles-down-death-penalty-for-drug-dealers/
https://www.mediamatters.org/donald-trump/major-news-outlets-gave-much-less-coverage-trumps-vermin-attack-then-they-did-clintons
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4687060-donald-trump-squeaky-chicken-libertarian-controversy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/opinion/melinda-french-gates-reproductive-rights.html
The Dworkin ReportDe Niro and Jan 6 Heroes Unload on Trump Outside NY TrialRobert De Niro just showed up outside the New York City courthouse, where Trump is facing 34 felony counts. Rightwing lunatics are already trying to start conspiracy theories lying and saying that thi…Read more8 hours ago · 765 likes · 132 comments · Scott Dworkin
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https://crookedmarquee.com/a-movies-got-to-know-its-limitations-50-years-of-dirty-harry/
I just recently re-watched all these, and while it would be impossible to watch them in any time period without noticing the elements of Right Wing fantasy at work, the fantasy has only become more awkward in the 5 to 10 years. I was curious about how the politics of the films were perceived in their time, and some cursory research shows that even back then they were pretty divisive. But I think certainly after events like George Floyd's murder, the larger national dialog about misuse of police force, and the 'thin blue line' rhetoric that emerged as a reaction to it, if anything I think the films have gotten harder to watch.
Of course the first reaction you'll encounter when discussing the politics of this series is the typical "but they're just movies" type sentiment. And of course they are. But I'd argue that no one could be even halfway paying attention while watching these and fail to see the agenda. There are just too many heavy-handed clues - these might be some of the least subtle scripts ever written. There's one scene in the first film where the DA literally has to explain to Harry (a detective) how evidence works. The audience is expected to believe that Harry would be genuinely perplexed as to why his actions ruined the prosecution's case, and we're clearly meant to share his feelings that our justice system is stupid for having these protections in place. It's impossible to imagine a non-political justification for such a scene.
But what I do find interesting about the series is that there are also plenty of moments where the politics get blurry. At times it feels like the films become aware of the message they're spinning and try to talk their way out of it. The first unmistakable example in the series is probably where Harry is asked how he feels about Mexicans, after one of his co-workers (in a slur-laden line) lists all the ethnicities that Harry supposedly hates equally, to which Harry replies with a wink "especially spics." It's these moments I find the most interesting, because it becomes less clear how we're supposed to take them. The wink itself saves the scene, because it at least validates the possible interpretation that Harry isn't really a racist, that he's not the kind of guy who would use the term "spic" unironically. On the other hand, this idea of "hating everyone equally" is a concept I don't know if the film invented or has since been thoroughly co-opted by real life racists who confuse their own racism for bonafide misanthropy, or at least when it's convenient.
Suffice it to say, the series is littered with such moments, and I found myself sort of enjoying how clumsily it plays with moral ambiguity. Sometimes we veer more satisfyingly into a position where we can interpret this as character complexity on Harry's part. For example, in the second film, he comes up against a group of vigilante biker cops and we find that he's actually not as sympathetic to their methods as they (and we) might have thought. Other times we get the genuine sense that the script really is at odds with itself. The article I link to above does a pretty good job of summarizing the contradictions at work in the series, and I like the observation that the series itself seems to be uncomfortable with its own politics, because I think it was something that nagged at me during this most recent viewing but I hadn't myself put that fine of a point on it.
At this point I'll conclude by saying that I actually do enjoy these movies and Eastwood's performance. In a way I think Sudden Impact is the best film of the series, although it's hard to argue with how much of a classic the first film is. While there are moments in some of them that are legit cringe-worthy for reasons already mentioned, they're solidly entertaining and I enjoy re-watching them every so often. The soundtracks are also bangers.

Hello everyone,
While I was assigned male at birth, I have recently found myself deeply interested in feminism. Maximizing freedom and human dignity is one of my key values, and these conditions cannot be realized if they do not first and foremost apply to women. Therefore, during my current time in college, I decided to educate myself further and take more courses on women's history. For a course in Women and Gender in U.S. History, I wrote the piece I am sharing today.
I am posting it here because I don't know where else to post and am planning to publish this work as a zine and am seeking any preliminary feedback, constructive criticism, or thoughts and suggestions on rewriting the piece to communicate more effectively. I hope you enjoy the read and find it interesting.
Thank you!
A Grand Domestic Revolution.
The American Material Feminist Movement of 1860s – 1930s and Their Strategy to Abolish the Second Burden.
Introduction.
In her 1981 book 'Grand Domestic Revolution', Dolores Hayden coined the term 'material feminism' to describe a branch of feminist thought and practice that emerged within the first wave of feminism in the United States. Material feminists were activist women who were the first to articulate the dependence of the society on unpaid women’s reproductive labor, in turn demanding economic and social justice for their sex. Their ideas and practice centered around a call to women that to become truly equal and thriving members of society, they must work together to alter their material conditions through creation of feminist cooperative economic institutions, homes, neighborhoods and cities that are designed to socialize housework, eliminating the ‘double burden’.
Despite being overlooked by the public and even contemporary feminist scholarship, the material feminist movement played a crucial role and influenced not only feminism but also other progressive and egalitarian movements of its time, lasted between 1860s and 1930s. Although the material feminists movement ceased to exist over a century ago, the social critiques and proposed solutions it put forth remain more than relevant to this day. This essay aims to provide an overview of some of the participants of the movement, their theory and practice as well as influence on the feminist and other movements.
Context of the time.
Although the practice of the movement can be formally seen to have begun with the founding of the Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society by Melusina Fay Peirce in 1869 (to be discussed in detail below) the critique of the traditional domestic life in America traces to the beginning of the century with the utopian socialist movement. Members and practitioners of the movement engaged in construction of ideal communities, “building new world in the shell of the old” as a saying of the time went, believing that the power of example would lead to larger transformation of society. Emancipation of women being one of the goals of the movement, Charles Fourier, French philosopher and socialist thinker, argued that “the degree of emancipation of women is the natural measure of general emancipation” and that a society where women enjoyed economic independence was superior to one where they were condemned to domestic drudgery[[1]](#_ftn1). Followers of the movement thus worked to build close knit communities with socialized childcare, laundry and cooking.
Religious communities too contributed to the rise of the movement. Between 1774 and 1826 the Shakers, an offshoot of The Society of Friends, built over 19 settlements in northeastern US, [[SK1]](#_msocom_1) although utopian communities would thrive well until the Civil War[[2]](#_ftn2). In her Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790 – 1975, Dolores Hayden counted over 130 separate communities, most of them situated in the New England and Midwest regions[[3]](#_ftn3). In such communities’ domestic work was treated equally as important as agriculture or production, with men and women equally being required to participate in agriculture as well as social reproduction. Domestic chores became social labor, with the people singing songs while they worked. Communal kitchens were the “dynamic centers of the village”[[4]](#_ftn4).
It was such communities that Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an aspiring suffragette, came to encounter in 1847 when she moved to Seneca Falls, New York. At the time, the community housed two Shaker villages and at least eight Fourierist Phalanxes[[5]](#_ftn5). The following year at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention she would give a rousing speech in support of co-operative living and against isolated home:[[6]](#_ftn6)
“my duties were too numerous and varied, and none sufficiently exhilarating or intellectual to bring into play my higher faculties. I suffered with mental hunger. . . . I now fully understood the practical difficulties most women had to contend with in the isolated household, and the impossibility of woman’s best development if in contact, the chief part of her life, with servants and children. Fourier’s Phalansterie community life and co-operative households had new significance for me.”
Some 50 years later in 1899 at the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association, she would urge Susan B. Anthony to add cooperative [[SK2]](#_msocom_2) housekeeping to the organization’s agenda[[7]](#_ftn7).
After conclusion of the civil war, Americans were witnessing a drastic change of their nation as industrialization was picking up steam. More and more people were moving into ever denser towns and cities, where row houses gave way to apartment hotels and horses beginning to give way to street cars and trains. Alongside industrial factories, commercial laundries and large-scale restaurants were mushrooming. In such context, housework began to change as well.
First Practical Experiments.
In 1864, Melusina Fay Peirce (1836-1923), published an article in The World magazine, where she first imagined housekeeping cooperatives – women’s associations where housewives and former servants would work together to produce clean laundry, mended clothing and cooked food which would be delivered to husbands for cash on delivery[[8]](#_ftn8).
Melusina Fay Peirce was one of nine children, born in 1836 to a Vermont clergyman father and a severely overworked housewife mother, Emily Hopkins Fray (1817-1856). Emily died at the age of 39, and the toil that plagued and cut short her life instilled in Peirce an ardent desire to improve the lives of housewives. Despite coming down in the annals of herstory as originating the theory of co-operative housekeeping, she must have gotten inspiration from her great aunt Caroline Howard Gilman (1794-1888), who advocated for creation of municipal cooked food services, and professionalization of housekeeping services in her 1834 book Recollections of a Housekeeper[[9]](#_ftn9). Majority of Melusina’s cooperative theorizing would come out in a series of articles published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1868 and 1869 where she developed her critique of women’s economic position in industrial society[[10]](#_ftn10):
“It is one of the cherished dogmas of the modem lady, that she must not do anything for pay; and this miserable prejudice of senseless conventionality is at this moment the worst obstacle in the way of feminine talent and energy. Let the cooperative housekeepers demolish it forever, by declaring that it is just as necessary and just as honorable for a wife to earn money as it is for her husband”.
Peirce preceded many feminists who viewed unpaid domestic labor as the source of women’s oppression, both economic and intellectual. She argued that women’s intellectual talents suffer a “costly and unnatural sacrifice” to “the dusty drudgery of house ordering” [[11]](#_ftn11). Since women's economic dependency on men was identified as the root cause of their inequality, she and other reformers aimed to create new women's public institutions and professions to foster women's economic independence. The professionalization of women’s household chores was to be done with scientifically planned equipment, built environments, and training by professional female teachers. She aimed to transform household chores into public businesses and in turn create female professions of equivalent status to that of men[[12]](#_ftn12). Even if not explicitly organized under cooperative structures, this ethos would be central to the material feminist movement. However, cooperative form of organizing became the dominant model of organization for in cooperation these women were able to carve out oases of female-dominated and -controlled space, resisting male dominated, hierarchically organized, household and the firm[[13]](#_ftn13) – in other words:
“Cooperatives were the material embodiments of changes the reformers created in gender and class power dynamics involved in the performance of household chores.[[14]](#_ftn14)”
For domestic servants turned employees, cooperative environments offered a more pleasant working experience compared to individual households. The collaborative nature of cooperative labor made tasks lighter and more manageable. Cooperatives often had access to more modern equipment, which facilitated easier completion of tasks. By working in cooperatives rather than individual households, servants were freed from the vulnerabilities associated with being employed in private residences, such as the risk of sexual assault or social isolation. Moreover, participation in cooperatives elevated the status of servants to that of higher-status and higher paid wage laborers, allowing them the opportunity to marry and establish their own independent households. From the perspective of housewives, joining cooperative environments provided a reprieve from the constant supervision of servants. Many housewives utilized this newfound free time to engage in domestic reform organizations or self actualization[[15]](#_ftn15).
On May 6^th, 1896 Peirce’s famous Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society (CCHS) located in Cambridge, Massachusetts would hold its first meeting. The experiment was partially successful but would last only until 1872. Since women had to have permission of their husbands to participate in the co-operative, Melusina decided that the board of CCHS would be overseen by a Council of Gentlemen, a board made of husbands of the members. Although praising Peirce’s scheme overall, a feminist paper The Revolution run by the Elizabeth Cady Stanton, labelled establishing the Council of Gentlemen as “licking of the male boot”[[16]](#_ftn16). Indeed, the Council of Gentlemen would be its downfall. At the beginning of the experiment, the Council consciously altered the original constitution developed by the women to hinder the experiment and restrict their wives’ labor to the household[[17]](#_ftn17). In the original constitution, each department—a grocery store, a bakery, a kitchen, and a laundry—was to be directed by four directresses answerable to a thirteen-member executive committee. This structure ensured that “the responsibility would have been so shared that it would not have fallen too heavily upon any, and the decisions arrived at in a number of cases would have been wiser”[[18]](#_ftn18). However, the new structure made Peirce an "active and responsible agent for the whole [enterprise], as in a manufacturing company," quickly overwhelming her with all the supervisory work and eventually leading to her complete burnout.
The society first opened a laundry since it was needed the most by the community. Women working in the laundry were paid higher wages than at any other industrial laundries[[19]](#_ftn19). However, despite collective efforts, the laundry could not turn a profit since the volume of the laundry being processed was a quarter of the size for which machinery had been installed[[20]](#_ftn20). On July 1870 the society opened a cooperative grocery store which Melusina expected to manage, something she could not meaningfully do due to her involvement with the laundry. Because of what Melusina would label Husband – Power, only 10-12 members patronized the society, not nearly enough for the society to break even. Indeed, many board members, managers and the president would avoid the CCHS due to opposition of their husbands. To cite one example among many, the president was made to resign because her husband expressed dissatisfaction with the frequent visits of the directors to their home for meetings. He was particularly furious when he had to wait for his wife to finish a meeting before she could sew a button for him[[21]](#_ftn21). As Peirce describes him, a famous Cambridge abolitionist would exclaim “What! My wife cooperate to make other men comfortable? No indeed![[22]](#_ftn22)” The Council of Gentlemen would vote to close the operation on April 1^st, 1871[[23]](#_ftn23).
Despite failure of the experiment, Peirce remained a respected theoretician. Her articles would remain in global print from Colorado to London UK[[24]](#_ftn24). Peirce would go on long traveling tours, first domestically then abroad to Europe where the cooperative movement was much more developed. Many of her ideas and practices would ultimately manifest themselves in those regions[[25]](#_ftn25). In 1884 she would publish her famous book Co-Operative Housekeeping; How Not to Do It and How to Do It. A Study in Sociology which summarizes and organized all her experiences so far. In the work, her feminism was sharp. She wrote that:
“No despotism of man over man that was ever recorded was at once so absolute as the despotism — the dominion of men over women. It covers not only the political area. It owns not only the bodies of its subjects. Its hand lies heavily on their inner most personality, and its power is so tremendous that whatever they are, it is because these absolute lords have willed it.” [[26]](#_ftn26)
Although brief, Perice’s experiment would ripple through the ages and continents, sparking constant attempts at the Grand Domestic Revolution.

Growth of a Movement
The movement was diverse in both class and political ideology. In 1880s Kate Field, a New York socialite, started a Cooperative Dress Association which only hired women and specialised in “healthful clothing for women”. A neat feature of the operation was that all the employees, whether seamstresses or clerks, all were provided with comfortable seating[[27]](#_ftn27). In 1885, Marie Howland (1836-1921), a New York editor and writer, fierce advocate of free love, anarchism and trade unionism, would publish extensive plans for co-operative housekeeping. Howland came to the movement when in the 1860s she lived for a year at the at the Familistere or Social Palace established by Fourierists in Guise, France. It was a vast complex of buildings which contained centrally heated apartments, day care facilities and cooked food service for 350 iron foundry workers and their families[[28]](#_ftn28). Howland would later expand the agenda of cooperative housekeeping to include collective childcare. As an urban planner, she designed and built neighborhoods with central kitchens and kitchenless houses, catering to socialists who established communities in California and Louisiana.[[29]](#_ftn29).
In 1874 Marie Howland wrote Papa’s Own Girl, a utopian novel inspired by her experience in France. The material feminist movement would inspire a whole genre of utopian literature[[30]](#_ftn30). 1887 Edward Bellamy published Looking Backwards, a utopian socialist novel set in Boston in the year 2000. In the city of the future all the cooking is done in public kitchens while washing is done at public laundries. This work became an instant success and only accelerated the movement, spreading the ideas of material feminism to the larger socialist movement.
In 1873, Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) achieved the milestone of becoming the first woman to receive a Bachelor of Science from MIT. Two years later, she made history once again by becoming the first woman appointed to its faculty. In her role, she headed a "Woman's Laboratory," which was the world's first laboratory dedicated to teaching science specifically to women.[[31]](#_ftn31) In 1892 she coins the term “oekology” as a science of consumption and social reproduction, in the future the science would lose its political rigor and would come to be known as ‘home economics’. In 1890, she established a New England Kitchen, a community kitchen that provided affordable, ready-cooked, and nutritious meals. The Kitchen was particularly geared for working classes who had to summon the energy to prepare meals at home after spending ten or more hours each day laboring in factories and mills. Her first Boston location was country's first health food restaurant, as well as its first large-scale nutrition laboratory or a “household experiment station”[[32]](#_ftn32). These Kitchens were established in cities across New York, Rhode Island, Boston, Chicago, and Hull House, and were run by well-paid women scientists nutritionists[[33]](#_ftn33).
In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman(1860-1935), daughter of an impoverished single mother, published her seminal work Women and Economics: The Economic Factor Between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution. In the work Gilman asserted that patriarchy was impeding human evolution by confining women to the domestic sphere. She believed that human progress could be accelerated by relieving women of domestic duties and childcare responsibilities, enabling them to pursue both motherhood and paid employment, thus granting women economic independence from men. It was her original contribution that the advancement of socialism would be facilitated by the establishment of socialized domestic work and the creation of new domestic environments, not the other way round as was traditionally thought[[34]](#_ftn34). Thus, Hayden suggests that Gilman effectively developed “a solution with-out a name to what Betty Friedan was later to call 'the problem with no name'.[[35]](#_ftn35)” Harriet Stanton Blatch, suffragist and member of the Socialist Party, saw Gilman’s work as her “Bible”, while NAWSA’s[[36]](#_ftn36) leader, Carrie Chapman Catt considered Gilman to be the greatest living American feminist [[37]](#_ftn37).
By the turn of the 20^th century collective housekeeping became a recognizable solution by the feminist movement to the problem of domestic drudgery. To some examples of many, in 1907 Carthage Missouri, local suffrage group organized a community kitchen and dinning hall to furnish which all the members of the community brought their dinner tables. Having freed themselves from constant need to cook, the suffragists converted their old dinning rooms into offices for their cause[[38]](#_ftn38). Along side Carthage, countless other community kitchens, dinning halls and cooked food delivery services would be organized across the country[[39]](#_ftn39). In 1915 Henrietta Rodman and her Radical Feminist Alliance in NYC organized a feminist apartment house in Greenwich Village[[40]](#_ftn40). In September 1918 Zona Gale published an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal, stating that “The private kitchen must go the way of the spinning wheel, of which it is the contemporary.[[41]](#_ftn41)”

Reaction and redbaiting.
Despite all this context, a pertinent question arises: what happened to this movement, and why does the second burden persist over a century later, despite attempts to address it? The answer to that question can be summarized as follows: forces of reaction. Not just the Material Feminist, but the larger feminist activist movement fell under heavy and sustained attack that came with the Red Scare starting in the 1919. Henry Ford’s Dearborn Independent represented countless women’s civic organizations as being part of a “red web” answerable to Alexandra Kollontai, the head of Zhenotdel (Women’s Department) in the nascent Soviet Union[[42]](#_ftn42). Adjacent organizations were set up like the Woman Patriot which was “dedicated to the Defense of the Family and the State AGAINST Feminism and Socialism”[[43]](#_ftn43). Fears ignited by waves of labor strikes and demonstrations domestically, coupled with revolutions abroad, prompted captains of industry in the US to contemplate a variety of strategies to mitigate conflict between labor and capital. One of the results was the 1919 campaign by the Industrial Housing Associates, stating that – “Good Homes Make Contented Workers”[[44]](#_ftn44). This would be the root of the famous Levitt Towns and the modern suburbia. As Levitt himself would say in 1948: "No man who owns his house and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do"[[45]](#_ftn45).
Among countless other contributors, in 1928 American anti-feminist Christine Frederick, would publish a book that still defines the consumer economy to this day: Selling Mrs. Consumer. She dedicated the book to Herbert Hoover, American industry, and advertising executives. In her words, advertising was to be aimed at women’s “inferiority complexes”[[46]](#_ftn46), while the industry was to flood the market with labor saving devices but implement “progressive obsolescence”[[47]](#_ftn47) to insure steady consumption.[[SK3]](#_msocom_3)

Conclusion.
Even though the American material feminist movement was not led by Alexander Kalantai, it held significant potential for sparking a genuine domestic revolution. By establishing economic institutions rooted in feminist and mutual aid principles, reformers were effectively engaging in economic direct action. They were, as the saying of the time went, "building a new world in the shell of the old," one neighborhood, town, or city at a time.
Despite losing to the forces of reaction, the movement can never completely die because the fundamental critique of the Material Feminist movement remains valid: social reproductive labor is still predominantly performed by women, unpaid, which keeps them economically dependent on men.
The hegemonic consumerist ethos made the home nothing more than a box to be filled with commodities. Incapable of addressing the multitude of crises that such an ethos created, its only response is to silence and medicate dissent. In a true capitalist realist fashion, a 1978 advertisement for Valium and Librium—drugs mass-prescribed to housewives suffering from myriad mental health problems caused by this ethos—read, "You can't change her environment, but you can change her mood."
This is the central insight of the Material Feminist School of Thought: the material environment can be changed through reason and collective action, leading to an improvement in women's lives and a deeper independence, both personal and economic. In the current crisis of imagination regarding a meaningful future, bold experiments like those undertaken by activists in previous centuries are essential to demonstrate that a better order is not only possible but preferable. As David Graeber points out, "revolution happens when there is a change in common sense of what is possible." By projecting their imagination and reason into the polit–economic realm, material feminists provided working examples of a better order, offering hope and instructions of a liberated future. Hence, the movement faced such strong opposition, because it presented a viable alternative to the hegemonic patriarchal order.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Frederick, Christine.1929. Selling Mrs. Consumer.
Peirce, Melusina. 1884. Co-Operative Housekeeping; How Not to Do It and How to Do It. A Study in Sociology.
Peirce, "Cooperative Housekeeping II,” Atlantic Monthly 22 (December 1868)
Zona Gale, “Shall the Kitchen in Our Home Go?,” Ladies' Home Journal, 36 (March 1919).
Secondary Sources
Albinski, Nan B. 1988. “Utopia Reconsidered: Women Novelists and Nineteenth-Century Utopian Visions.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (4): 830–41.
Hayden, Dolores. 1979. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790 – 1975. MIT Press.
Hayden, Dolores. “Melusina Fay Peirce and Cooperative Housekeeping*.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2, no. 1–3 (March 12, 1978):
Hayden, Dolores. 1981. The Grand Domestic Revolution: a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. MIT Press.
Hayden, Dolores. 1984. Redesigning the American Dream: the Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. W.W. Norton.
Spencer-Wood, Suzanne. 2004. A historic pay-for-housework community household: The Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society.
Stanley, Autumn. “Scribbling Women as Entrepreneurs: Kate Field (1838-96) and Charlotte Smith (1840-1917).” Business and Economic History 21 (1992)
Swallow, Pamela Curtis. The remarkable life and career of Ellen Swallow Richards: Pioneer in science and Technology. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2014.
End-notes.
[[1]](#_ftnref1) Hayden, Dolores. 1981. The Grand Domestic Revolution: a History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. MIT Press. p. 35.
[[2]](#_ftnref2) Ibid, p. 39.
[[3]](#_ftnref3) Hayden, Dolores. 1979. Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790 – 1975. MIT Press. p. 362-366.
[[4]](#_ftnref4) Ibid.
[[5]](#_ftnref5) Ibid, p.51.
[[6]](#_ftnref6) Ibid.
[[7]](#_ftnref7) Ibid.
[[8]](#_ftnref8) Spencer-Wood, Suzanne. 2004. A historic pay-for-housework community household: The Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society. P. 142.
[[9]](#_ftnref9) Ibid; Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 78.
[[10]](#_ftnref10) Peirce, "Cooperative Housekeeping II,” Atlantic Monthly 22 (December 1868), p. 684.
[[11]](#_ftnref11) Peirce. Co-Operative Housekeeping; How Not to Do It and How to Do It. A Study in Sociology. Massachusetts: J. R. Osgood and company, 1884. p. 181
[[12]](#_ftnref12) Spencer-Wood. The Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society. p.138.
[[13]](#_ftnref13) Peirce, "Cooperative Housekeeping II,” Atlantic Monthly 22 (December 1868), p. 691.
[[14]](#_ftnref14) Ibid, p. 142.
[[15]](#_ftnref15) Ibid.
[[16]](#_ftnref16) Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 79.
[[17]](#_ftnref17) Ibid.
[[18]](#_ftnref18)Spencer-Wood. The Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society. p.150.
[[19]](#_ftnref19) Ibid. p.147.
[[20]](#_ftnref20) Ibid.
[[21]](#_ftnref21) Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 81: Peirce. Co-Operative Housekeeping. p. 107-109.
[[22]](#_ftnref22) Peirce. Co-Operative Housekeeping. p. 108.
[[23]](#_ftnref23) Spencer-Wood. The Cambridge Cooperative Housekeeping Society. p.150.
[[24]](#_ftnref24) Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 82.
[[25]](#_ftnref25) Pearson, Lynn. The architectural and social history of Cooperative Living. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
[[26]](#_ftnref26) Peirce. Co-Operative Housekeeping. p. 184.
[[27]](#_ftnref27) Stanley, Autumn. “Scribbling Women as Entrepreneurs: Kate Field (1838-96) and Charlotte Smith (1840-1917).” Business and Economic History 21 (1992): 76.
[[28]](#_ftnref28) Hayden, Dolores. 1978. “Two Utopian Feminists and Their Campaigns for Kitchenless Houses.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4 (2): p. 277.
[[29]](#_ftnref29) Ibid. Architectural & social history of cooperative living. 242
[[30]](#_ftnref30) Albinski, Nan B. 1988. “Utopia Reconsidered: Women Novelists and Nineteenth-Century Utopian Visions.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13 (4): 830–41. Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 137-147.
[[31]](#_ftnref31) Swallow, Pamela Curtis. The remarkable life and career of Ellen Swallow Richards: Pioneer in science and Technology. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2014. c.12.
[[32]](#_ftnref32) Ibid. p.103.
[[33]](#_ftnref33) Ibid. c.19.
[[34]](#_ftnref34) Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 184.
[[35]](#_ftnref35) Hayden, Dolores. “Melusina Fay Peirce and Cooperative Housekeeping*.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 2, no. 1–3 (March 12, 1978): p. 415.
[[36]](#_ftnref36) National American Woman Suffrage Association – One of the main women’s suffrage organizations in United States. Existed from 1890 to 1920.
[[37]](#_ftnref37) Ibid, p. 5.
[[38]](#_ftnref38) Hayden. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 207-208.
[[39]](#_ftnref39) Ibid. Chapter 10.
[[40]](#_ftnref40) Hayden. Utopian Feminists. p. 282.
[[41]](#_ftnref41) Zona Gale, “Shall the Kitchen in Our Home Go?,” Ladies' Home Journal, 36 (March 1919).
[[42]](#_ftnref42) Such organizations included General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Young Women’s Christian Association, the American Home Economics Association, the American Association of University Women, the League of Women Voters. Dolores. Grand Domestic Revolution. p. 281-282.
[[43]](#_ftnref43) Ibid.
[[44]](#_ftnref44) Ibid. p. 283.
[[45]](#_ftnref45) Hayden, Dolores. 1984. Redesigning the American Dream: the Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life. W.W. Norton. p. 8.
[[46]](#_ftnref46) Frederick, Christine.1929. Selling Mrs. Consumer. p. 43-54.
[[47]](#_ftnref47) Ibid. p. 245-255.

I am currently filling out a claim on the jobs4TN.gov site, and just reached this "Voluntary Disclosure" section - although the description at the top states that "These questions are for reporting purposes only and do not impact your eligibility", in actuality, would any of the questions in this section have any sort of impact on how much benefits payment I would be eligible to receive? (based in Tennessee, that is?)
These relevant questions include:
1: "What is your gender?"
2: "What is your race?"
3: "What is your ethnicity?"
4: "Are you a veteran?"
5: "Are you disabled?"
6: "Are you currently homeless?" (only Yes/No options)
"Have you been arrested/convicted of a crime? If so, you may be eligible for additional support services and programs."
"Have you registered for Selective Service?" (only Yes/No/Documented Exemption options)
If I was to answer Male, White, & Not Hispanic or Latino for the first 3 questions, would this have any kind of potentially negative impact on how much compensation I am to receive (at least when compared to if I selected a different answer besides "White" , and/or selecting "Hispanic or Latino", for instance) and how much financial compensation I would be eligible to receive?
Would choosing "I do not wish to answer" for these questions (at least the first 3) instead be a better option? And what is the importance of each question in regards to this section's impact on my potential benefits compensation? (Or do they all matter equally, or not matter much at all, really..?)
But overall, would there be any potential for a difference in payout based on one's answers here, given the current political climate, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)-conscious businesses/corporations/departments, etc. that would result in higher compensation perhaps if I didn't truthfully answer to being a "White Male" so to speak? Lol.
Ultimately, I am just trying to find out if I should provide the answers Male, White, Not Hispanic or Latino, No (not a veteran), No (not disabled), No (arrested/convicted of a crime), Yes (registered for Selective Service),
OR if I should use the "I do not wish to answer" option instead, and on what questions would this be BEST to use this answer as a substitute?
Should I maybe just say "I do not wish to answer” for those first 3 questions regarding GendeRace/Ethnicity, and more accurately answer "No" for the veteran and disabled questions? Would selecting "I do not wish to answer" be more beneficial of a selected answer on these first 3 questions - would they have any positive impact on how much compensation I’d receive? Do you think using this answer matters less on the next questions asking if I'm a veteran, disabled, or convicted criminal?
Regarding the "Have you ever been arrested/convicted of a crime" question, what would be the optimal choice? You would assume "No" would clearly be the best answer if applicable, but the statement next to the question saying "If so, you may be eligible for additional support services and programs" makes me think otherwise perhaps...
And I have a rather unique situation regarding this one.
Basically, I was convicted several years ago for marijuana / paraphernalia possession charges, and have since had these charges expunged from my now-clean record back in February; so they technically should not be on my record anymore, and I can now lawfully answer "No" now for any "past convictions/arrests" questions I encounter, like this one here in this claim. Wondering what the best answer to choose is for this one: Yes, No, or I do not wish to answer?
My apologies for the lengthiness of this post; but any and all input - advice, comments, suggestions, even warnings, all is appreciated!!

Wall of text warning: I was writing a comment on another post but I figured I'd just make my own topic on it with my full thoughts on each faction and their skills, balancing, etc, after about 20 hours of playing (enough to get a decent idea). Personally I don't feel like any particular faction is especially strong currently and I think the balance of the factions is actually pretty decent overall.
Cleaners are the weakest by far (not very far, though) and seem to suffer from some confused design choices. The Firebomb is great for punishing bunched enemies or denying area but this is a ranged game at the core so it often is completely useless on many maps or just makes you vulnerable if you try to use it aggressively, and particularly in mobile modes like Escort where there is high kill turnover and less opportunity for anyone to keep a strong foothold. The Incendiary Drone is decent, does what it should, not a lot to say about it. Strong alternative skill to Firebomb for mobile modes. Their Incendiary Ammo is a bit useless in a vacuum due to the nature of the TTK because most of the time it will not result in a kill you wouldn't have already gotten and it doesn't deal enough damage on its own to really speed up the TTK in any meaningful way. You still have to shoot someone the same number of times to get a kill and if you stop shooting to let the DOT tick instead you'll just die. On top of that, Incendiary Ammo actually reduces your weapon optimal range, and as mentioned before, this is typically a ranged game. The Incendiary Ammo shines more in situations where someone is running away and a teammate can finish them off instead since then it may have done enough damage or canceled their regen enough. It seems as though the Incendiary Ammo might be meant to offer a counter to Libertad's healing-oriented skills but it usually doesn't make a great deal of difference even there. Weirdly, the best weapons for taking advantage of Incendiary Ammo are snipers since it more or less guarantees a kill no matter where you hit someone with the Tac-50 even if it's a leg or arm shot, and guarantees a kill with the M44 in the body, in spite of the "reduced range". Personally the times I've seen Incendiary Ammo end up killing me is right after I had already killed them first anyways, so it was more of a kill guarantee after death than a true advantage in the fight itself. The Cleaners are still playable, just kinda why would you choose them over anything else if you aren't playing them because you like them. Also the Cleaner ultra is ridiculous if you get in a good spot to use it because it instantly kills anyone you hit but again its range makes you vulnerable. The Cleaners biggest strength at the moment seems to be that they have messed up hitboxes, honestly. I think that the Cleaners really need some kind of help on their skills as they are now, they are weirdly situational and difficult to safely employ, but I suppose that is the real philosophy of the Cleaners as it is, they run around with explosive tanks on their backs that instantly kill them in The Division so an exploding flaming firebomber that may or may not live through their skill is oddly appropriate.
Echelon is strong by nature of being a crutch. Intel Suit lets the enemy team know you're nearby and can see them thanks to the notification, smart/skilled players will just listen for you and it's not a huge advantage against them, below average players won't pay attention to it though and it's quite strong against players that don't have good audio or are unaware of where their flanks are. However, the main advantage of the Intel Suit is that it reveals the enemies for your whole team no matter where they are. While you have to be in closer range to detect enemies with it, your teammates can be on the opposite side of the map and still see exactly where the enemy is which is a massive advantage. Digital Ghillie Suit is honestly a pretty balanced skill, someone paying attention will still notice you and Intel Suit counters it (weirdly, same faction counter) but it has a lot of outplay potential and lets you reposition or get into weird spots that the enemy team might not expect if they are distracted. It offers a similar advantage that Phantoms skills do in that it can easily be used to disengage a losing gunfight back into your advantage for a kill instead. Not much wrong with it, it's a well designed skill-expression skill. Echelon passive is kind of whatever, I don't feel like it's a great advantage because it gives you no direct benefit in a gunfight or even while traversing the map most of the time, it's another thing that is strong against unaware or distracted players. The Echelon ultra is of course quite strong in even an average-skilled players hands thanks to real-time wallhacks and a Golden Gun, although the sound it makes and sonar waves effects do put a bit of a target on you and sometimes the OHK gun doesn't actually get a OHK (somehow) but even being guaranteed just 2-3 kills for the duration is still enough to wipe an objective and some players will even try to hide from it. Echelon is overall a strong faction to use against players that are worse than you (likely why it is the most popular faction seemingly at the moment) but it doesn't provide any major meaningful advantage against equal or more skilled players since that will come down to your more practical gunfighting skills instead the majority of the time. Digital Ghillie offers some potential to outplay even skilled opponents but aside from that their skills heavily depend on their opponents being distracted to take advantage of them fully. Given that, the faction is pretty well balanced even with multiple players spamming Intel Suits on one team, since it only offers opportunities, it doesn't exploit them for you.
Phantoms are my personal favorite faction because I feel as though they have the widest degree of skill expression over any of the others. Mag Barrier used smartly can completely turn a lost gunfight around in your favor, especially if there is a choke point or corner you can use to make enemies chase you. Mag Barrier is one of the few skills in the game that is actually a punish skill when you use it correctly by letting an enemy get caught out if they try to ego on you or think they are winning the fight. That's on top of everything else it does. The EMP grenade is only a "counter" to it if someone is mindlessly spamming it because when used correctly you don't have time to throw an EMP grenade. You would have to pre-emptively EMP the Phantom player for every encounter if they use it well and that's not very feasible in a dynamic scenario. That said, Mag Barrier is fairly weak in terms of pure cover and a determined player can chew through it in a few seconds if you carelessly use it without exploiting the advantage it gives, or grenades can be thrown around it, enemies can run through it, its strength comes down entirely to the user. Blitz Shield is also a strong punish skill but currently the way player collision works makes it difficult to use against anyone that is experienced or skilled because no enemy player collision means they can jump through you. You can't really use the shield to turtle 1v1s since enemies can just run through and behind you, even if you're in a corner. Most players won't do this or know it's possible, so it can be a bit of a crutch against less skilled players at least. The Blitz Shield is mainly strong for punishing around corners if someone chases you since you can typically swap to it fast enough to surprise them before they get around the corner. It's also good for absorbing damage at range or aggressively disrupting enemy players on an objective for your team to pick off but that depends a lot on how good your team is and less on the shield itself. Phantoms passive is honestly extremely strong, and IMO the best passive in the game currently. Having 20 more health is massive when 110 damage OHK body shots exist since it allows you to survive hits no other faction can and combined with the other skills it offers retaliation and outplay potential no other faction has. The Phantom ultra is a bit mediocre in terms of kill potential, due to lack of range or mobility, vulnerable to grenades, and various other problems that come with moving slow and telegraphing yourself to the entire map as a giant target. The ultra's primary purpose is of course simply being a big shield to deny area to the enemy team or offer your team a safe place to stand on objectives for pushes. The Phantoms are a well-balanced and strong faction currently that offers a lot to players that know how to take advantage of their skills properly.
Libertad is probably the most well-balanced faction in the game at the moment. It's very straightforward and easy to grasp for players of all skill levels and doesn't depend on a lot of gun skill, map knowledge, or general experience to perform decently. Since none of their skills are directly offensive, they are easy to employ in a variety of situations, like fortifying an objective or pre-emptively giving your teammates an advantage for a push, refreshing a teammate after a close gunfight, using mid-gunfight for a surprise comeback, etc. El Remedio is such a strong heal that it can greatly increase your EHP in a straight gunfight to the point you need multiple extra hits to kill if the enemy misses any shots, and if you manage to break contact with them briefly you can set up the heal on yourself for a surprise punish similar to the Phantom Mag Barrier. It forces the enemy to decide if they try to kill you or break the canister first and assuming you are equally skilled, you will usually end up winning the 1v1. The main downside to El Remedio is its fairly long cooldown so you have to use it smartly or else you won't have it for major moments when your team might have needed it. It's strong and has some skill expression to it in a variety of ways. BioVida Boost is one-time instant version of El Remedio with similar uses, but it works much better with a unified team push and has a shorter cooldown which makes it much more useful for a more mobile style of play. Not only that but its heal is essentially instant, again being very strong if you manage to break contact for a moment in a gunfight to come back with full health before the enemy got their natural regen. Libertad's passive has no strings attached, simply natural regen with no downtime for you and any teammates near you, doesn't require you to do anything and is always active which makes it great for people of all skill levels since it's always being taken advantage of. The Libertad ultra is literally just an even bigger version of El Remedio that also increases your and teammates max HP massively, it can guarantee a last second payload push or let you lock down a critical objective to break out a losing zone match. Libertad is generally the best faction for anyone that's really new or isn't that great at FPS games since it doesn't depend on your technical skill too much aside from simply staying alive to give your team a constant advantage. Another nice thing about Libertad is they synergize incredibly well with the Phantoms' huge health pool. The only outstanding weakness of Libertad is the old classic: your teammates. It has very little potential to actually carry and under focused fire their healing is pretty irrelevant so you're not exactly going to go tank a payload by yourself. Even with the ultra on, a single person can chew through it and kill you if you give them long enough (not very long).
I've not gotten to play around a ton with DedSec yet but my initial impression is that they are very similar to Phantoms in terms of skill expression and offer a ton of flexibility that other factions don't have through being able to hack enemy deployables and regenerating devices. I would not call them imbalanced, but I do think they are the one faction that currently does lean the most into that because they counter every single other faction. Being able to shut off enemy skills and ultras is huge, even if it takes their own ultra to do it. But you are effectively turning everyone on the enemy team into the Rookie from Rainbow Six Siege temporarily while all the players on your team get to keep their skills. If you have multiple DedSec players on your team and properly chain the ultras then you are looking at a free objective push every single time. The Spiderbot is fairly alright, but it's currently bugged and sometimes enemy players can't destroy it properly which makes it stronger than it actually is, and that's on top of it taking more than one hit to kill anyways which I personally think shouldn't be a thing either. In its current state it is basically a guaranteed kill on anyone you hit with it if you use it aggressively, though, and I do think it should be adjusted in some way after they fix the desync issues with it. Hijack isn't always super relevant because at the moment deployables aren't very long-lived or common, but being able to flip a Phantom Mag Barrier is wildly strong and is the only counter play to a choke point punish in that it punishes the punish. Hijack is fairly useless though if the enemy team all happen to pick Echelon or Cleaners (which is a fair possibility). I think the skill is still a good skill expression skill and fine, though. The DedSec passive is unsurprisingly very strong because being able to throw two proximity mines on an objective or get multiple uses of grenades is obviously something no other faction can do and those things are one per life for a reason. The passive doesn't benefit if you don't live long enough to use it, though, so it can be kinda useless depending on the situation: if you never throw your grenade or mine, the passive literally does nothing. DedSec is currently in a very strong state overall, while I wouldn't say it's imbalanced, it's definitely one of the better factions if only for the fact it can shut off every enemy skill and ultra and has a way to essentially guarantee a kill.
If I had to "tier" each faction in terms of their effectiveness in a vacuum regardless of skill, I'd probably rank them (from best to worst): DedSec > Phantoms/Echelon > Libertad > Cleaners. But that is a very shallow slope with all factions being very much viable to play and do well with.
All of this is also given without thought to the current state of weapon balance generally speaking, while I do feel that Phantoms have a particular advantage currently due to the prevalence of Tac-50s. Echelon's Digital Ghillie also helps them get in close to employ some of the better weapons in the game currently like the MP7 or double barrel. DedSec's spiderbot sets them up for kills with all kinds of weapons, particularly the Tac-50. I don't see any of these skills being worse off without the existence of those weapons, however.
If I were to speculate on any adjustments that should be made: Spiderbots need to be fixed ASAP so they always properly appear on the targets screen to destroy them (not really an "adjustment", a bug fix). Libertad needs some kind of light buff in my opinion, maybe a bonus effect on a skill like slightly increasing max HP (good to help deal with prevalence of OHK snipers) or an alternate mode that poisons or debuffs enemies (Viviro would make sense because it's the chemical weapon made by the same company in Far Cry 6). Cleaners need a little bit of help, maybe allow them to also select Molotov cocktails as grenades that make small fire puddles that aren't quite as strong as their skills as a form of area denial to sort of solidify their "stay the fuck away from me" presence as a faction. The big one people talk about is the Intel Suit for Echelon but I honestly don't see much issue with this. The game literally highlights enemies for you already as it is, seeing them through walls briefly isn't a huge stretch when you can already hear people running around anyways since (thank god) we don't have anything like Dead Silence/Ninja/Covert Sneakers in this game. Echelon is a noob stomping faction and that's why it's generally popular right now but I think once more people get access to DedSec we will start to see more of them instead.
Anyways, that's all for today. I do really hope Ubi upkeeps this game well and makes smart balancing decisions that keep the game fun and engaging without oversimplifying or nerfing anything for the sake of salty people. If it were up to me, they'd reduce the TTK to 4 body shots max like original COD4 and then we'd really be cooking (after they fix the netcode, that is). Also hoping for The Division themselves to be introduced as a playable faction with deployable drones or even seeker mines...

If you intend to protest the assessed value on your property, here are some notes that may be helpful. These notes are focused for residences; for commercial or rental properties, there may be additional tips such as presenting an income analysis for the property.
If you had a large adjustment, be mindful of two things. First, the property values may be appreciating. The Omaha MLS showed median home prices up 9.8% from 2023-2024. The other issue is perhaps the assessed value hasn't kept pace with market trends the last few years, so the Assessor has to do a big catch-up. It's sticker shock, I know, but the flip is that you got a good deal the last few years.
Things that will not help.

• Saying how much the increase is "even though we didn't make any changes." It doesn't really show that your value is too high.
• Saying how much more your increase is than your neighbors. It doesn't really show that your value is too high.
• Saying "The Assessor has my property rated in good condition, but really it's average." That's really all relative to what other properties were rated. Now, if you can show photos or such to demonstrate the difference, that could be a different story.
• Complaining about the government.

Now, some tips to give yourself a stronger case.
Data. It drives any successful protest. Honest, applicable, data. No side stories, no complaining, just subject and market data.
For residential properties, the value is typically analyzed based on sales of other properties. Find sales of similar properties; there's no formula, but look for sales that are recent, nearby, and similar design. In short, sales that a typical buyer might look at when trying to figure out a fair price to pay for your property. Try to find sales near or before January 1 of this year.
The more detail you know about them, the better. Put them in a table that makes it easy for the referee to see how your property matches-up with those sales. Don't list every detail, but probably the main items like sale date, price, size, year built, amenities, etc.
Some protesters bring just the lowest-priced sales rather than the most similar sales. If the referee sorts that you're being manipulative rather than honest and transparent, it'll really hurt your case. Referees often run their own searches after the hearing, so it's best to be straightforward. Also be mindful that no one sale sets the value; the key is the broader market data.
There is one other way to protest based called equalization: demonstrate that you are being over-assessed relative to comparable properties. For example, if 3 other properties are just like yours but assessed less, then that can support an adjustment even if the value is not over market level. This one is a little tricky - the comparables have to have the same use classification, in the same county, and reasonably compete with your property. And it's not just that they have a lower assessed value, but that they have a lower assessment compared to their true value (the ratio is what's important). It can work, but doesn't have a very high success rate because protesters usually miss one of the requirements.
Let's see... what else... It doesn't really matter if you meet in-person, by phone, or not at all with the referee. The key is to provide data, which you can typically upload or email to the County. Also, nobody with the County or the referees are out to get you or pushing for high values; they're just reviewing the data.

Let's talk about the recently issued ultra-long-term special government bonds in China.
To systematically strengthen funding for major projects in the construction of a strong country and the great rejuvenation of the nation, China plans to issue ultra-long-term special government bonds for several consecutive years starting this year. These bonds will be specifically used for the implementation of major national strategies and the construction of security capabilities in key areas. This year, the issuance will start with 1 trillion yuan.
First, let me help everyone understand what bonds are, especially the uses of long-term bonds.
The main issue in bond issuance is: how exactly are government bonds “sold”?
The answer is:
They are auctioned by the Ministry of Finance to primary dealers nationwide.
A "primary dealer" refers to an institution with certain qualifications that can directly trade with the Ministry of Finance and the central bank. These generally include commercial banks and securities companies with strong financial capabilities. Their qualifications are reviewed and evaluated annually by the central bank.
For example, the People's Bank of China announced that there are 51 primary dealers for 2023. Among them, the top 10 include the six major state-owned commercial banks (Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of Communications, Postal Savings Bank of China), three policy banks, and China Merchants Bank. Additionally, there are 38 other joint-stock commercial banks, two securities companies (CITIC Securities and China International Capital Corporation), and one investment company named "China Bond Insurance Investment Co., Ltd."
This means the Ministry of Finance sends invitations to these 51 primary dealers, allowing them to bid on the purchase of government bonds. The bidding documents need to clarify two key points:

1. Subscription amount;
   
2. Bidding interest rate.
   

Regarding the amount, the Ministry of Finance likely communicates in advance who should subscribe roughly how much. The key factor is the bidding interest rate.
This process is similar to engineering tenders. Many people may know that in many engineering tenders, as long as the relevant conditions are met, many are awarded based on the "lowest bid wins" principle. In government bond auctions, the lowest bid wins is usually adopted as well, meaning the dealer with the lowest bidding interest rate wins (corresponding to the highest bond price).
More importantly, once the auction interest rate is determined, the bond quota allocated to all other bidders is calculated at this interest rate.
Thus, the government bond is sold in the primary market.
Next, those primary dealers who have purchased a certain amount of government bonds can:

1. Choose to hold these bonds themselves, as government bonds are considered Tier 1 capital under the Basel III Accord;
   
2. Choose to sell these bonds to their clients based on the market bond prices (ordinary people and enterprises with accounts in commercial banks are clients of these banks);
   
3. Lend them to certain individuals or institutions to engage in related long or short operations in the government bond futures market or securities exchange;
   
4. Sell them to the central bank or use them as collateral to obtain cash from the central bank in various open market operations.
   

These four choices constitute the secondary market for government bonds.
The first three are normal market transactions and do not involve monetary issuance issues, but the fourth option is an important way for the central bank to issue base money. Therefore, some might ask if the large-scale issuance of government bonds means a loose financial environment, i.e., printing money.
This is not necessarily the case. No matter how large the issuance of government bonds is, as long as they are not sold to or pledged to the central bank, it theoretically has nothing to do with printing money and does not mean a loose financial environment. If the central bank does not purchase additional government bonds, the large issuance of government bonds could absorb market funds in the short term and cause a tightening effect in the financial market before the Ministry of Finance spends this money.
Even if the central bank engages in large-scale buying and selling of government bonds in future open market operations, this is unrelated to the current issuance by the Ministry of Finance. The issuance by the Ministry of Finance is merely a matter of fund allocation in the market.
After understanding the basics of bond issuance, let's discuss the impact of issuing ultra-long-term bonds. What does “ultra-long-term” in government bonds mean?
People often joke that 30-year or 50-year government bonds are about dedicating youth to future generations. Thirty years ago, in 1994, China was still relatively underdeveloped. Fifty years ago, in 1974, we were still in the midst of the Cultural Revolution!
Issuing 30-year or 50-year government bonds gives the impression that repayment might seem like a distant future.
On the other hand, many people still understand government bonds as “short-term bonds” or “fixed-rate deposits,” with minimal price fluctuations even in the face of significant interest rate changes.
In reality, this is not the case. To some extent, the price fluctuations of ultra-long-term government bonds are more similar to stocks.
If the yield (yield to maturity) decreases by 1%, the bond price can change significantly. For example, consider a bond with 30 years until maturity:

• If the yield decreases from 6% by 1%, the bond price increases by 15%;
  
• If the yield decreases from 3% by 1%, the bond price increases by 22%;
  
• If the yield decreases from 1% by 1%, the bond price increases by 28%;
  
• If the yield decreases from 0% by 1%, the bond price increases by 33%;
  
• If the yield decreases from -1% by 1%, the bond price increases by 40%.
  

If the yield to maturity decreases from 3% to 0, how much will the 30-year bond price increase?
The answer is—almost double!
Conversely, if the yield increases, the impact on bond prices is equally significant. If the yield of a 30-year government bond rises from 0 to 3%, the bond price will nearly halve.
Note that this is just for a 30-year bond. For a 50-year bond or perpetual bond, the impact of yield changes on bond prices will be even more significant.