Killing-field fraternities, like massive numbers of big guns in the hands of people like Stephen Paddock, are simply part of the wonderful world of many American males, and nobody gets to mess with frats or guns.

Mr. Horras, quoted in this post’s headline, is charged with defending frats in the wake of yet more torture and slaughter, but, as Caitlin Flanagan notes, he’d do a better job if he, like, knew anything about what he was defending.

Yet why bother checking the narrative – straight out of the Marquis de Sade – of Tim Piazza’s death, when Horras knows that no one will ever do anything about sadistic, homicidal, fraternities in American universities? It’s like asking how many ten minute long massacres of scores of people the country can tolerate before it enacts gun restrictions. Answer: There is no upper limit.

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university [the drenched-in-shame Penn State] that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

… who, when UL president, allegedly speculated away up to $100 million of school money. He will be sued; he will have to spend the rest of his life paying lawyers to draw out the suits against him until he expires in sunny splendor in one of his Florida mcmansions.

Meanwhile, though, the school ain’t got much money left over for anything but what matters most to it – football – and as a result, it’s no longer able to provide much-needed advertising revenue to the local student newspaper.

The withdrawal of those advertising dollars threatens the existence of the paper, which is why UD just gave it some money. You might consider making a donation as well.

The controversial poem titled “avenidas” can be translated as following: “Avenues / Avenues and flowers / Flowers / Flowers and women / Avenues / Avenues and women / Avenues and flowers and women and an admirer.”

… The Berlin college Alice Salomon Hochschule … painted [the poem] in large lettering on the south facade of the college …

… In April 2016, the general student committee (AStA) wrote an open letter to the rectorate of the college, criticizing the prominent position of the poem.

“A man who looks out into the streets and admires flowers and women,” wrote the students. “This poem not only reproduces a classic patriarchal art tradition in which women are exclusively the beautiful muses that inspire masculine artists to creative acts, it is also reminiscent of sexual harassment, which women are exposed to every day.”

The controversial lines will soon be painted over.

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One German observer argues that a school which cannot recognize how a lyric poem works “should cease to award a poetry prize.”

UD agrees. You have to think prophylactically. The chance of any future poem chosen for the prize being a species of sexual harassment is very high. Better avoid the problem altogether.

Scott Karsten, who represented the [Wesleyan] fraternity in …negotiations [toward going co-ed], testified this week that the chapter was at a disadvantage in complying because Wesleyan provided only vague descriptions of what it meant by coeducation and never specifically defined its expectations.

[The president of Wesleyan] said he never felt an explicit definition was necessary.

It’s the details that get to you. One of the Penn State students on trial for manslaughter and a bunch of other stuff tried, at one time, to leave the deadly fraternity he had just joined. He was, one assumes, disgusted and humiliated by the hazing he’d undergone.

The president of the fraternity – himself facing the same array of charges in the long squalid death under his care of pledge Timothy Piazza – talks him out of it.

Too bad. The guy shoulda gone with his gut and gotten out. Now Gary DiBileo gets to have his life ruined, along with his frat brothers.

… as well they should, since it’s not every day that a fraternity enters a national forest with a gun and hatchets and starts chopping (shooting?) it down.

The lads continue to try to lie their way out of it, but the evidence against them seems to be overwhelming.

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A good lawyer, though, might say something like this to the court.

Your honor: This was Chico State. This was a fraternity. These people had firearms and hatchets. Did they use the secrecy of tree cover to murder and behead their pledges? They certainly could have. Others might have. But these young men held back, instead channeling their aggression into the far less anti-social flattening of a forest.

An investigation by the [University of Arizona] alleges members [of a fraternity kicked off campus and seeking recertification] hazed pledges by blindfolding them and forcing them to drink alcohol at an event at the off-campus fraternity house on March 23.

One pledge was shoved into a pillar as he made his way down the hallway at the fraternity house, according to the UA’s investigation.

He was later seen hunched over, complaining of stomach pains and was taken to the hospital. The student required “long-term hospitalization,” UA officials said.

…

In a letter to the fraternity, the Dean of Students Office said they talked with witnesses who feared retaliation. “A witness was allegedly told by members of the fraternity the night of the assault that ‘we kill rats.'”

MEETING AGENDA!!!

doodlydoo doodlydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo doodlydoodoodydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo
doodlydoo doodlydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo doodlydoodoodydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo
doodlydoo doodlydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo doodlydoodoodydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo
doodlydoo doodlydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo doodlydoodoodydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo
doodlydoo doodlydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo doodlydoodoodydoo rahrahrahrah doodlydoodoodlydoo

Abolition is the only answer. All social fraternities — alongside the sycophantic sorority life that they exploit — must go. They must go permanently and forever, at Penn [State] and everywhere else. Reform is simply not possible.

… Reform is not possible because the old-line, historically white social fraternities have been synonymous with risk-taking and defiance from their very inception. They are a brotherhood born in mutiny and forged in the fire of rebellion. These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection.

They cannot reform.

Abolition is “… impossible,” [people] say, their [incredulous] faces a testament to the power fraternity men still wield.

Fraternities may no longer decide who’s in the yearbook, but they still exert control. The proof is in the knee-jerk insistence that they are too formidable to fight. But we must push through this sense of impossibility. What happened to Timothy Piazza was a predictable tragedy, and there will be more unless we end Greek life for good. I make no claims that it will be easy. Fraternities have dominated campuses, defied authorities and rebuffed efforts at suppression for nearly 200 years. But in that time we have ended slavery, given women the vote and put men on the moon. Of course we can get rid of fraternities. College presidents, administrators and trustees just have to muster the will to do it. As for the rest of us, we need to keep pressure on them to do so, and keep counting the bodies until they act.

She’s right that abolition is the only answer. With some exceptions, frats are utterly lawless and defiant and cannot be controlled.

But I’m afraid she’s wrong that we can push through and make presidents, administrators and trustees — many of them rah-rah frat/sorority people — shut them down. First of all, there are large swathes of universities in this country – many of them our big public institutions – that are little more than fraternities and variations on fraternities (athletes are of course one of the variations; as are still almost entirely male groups of trustees, etc., etc.). On-campus or off, formal or informal, male cults and the – what was the word? – sycophantic sororities they exploit are these universities. Abolish the raison d’être of your institution and watch everyone apply to another school.

The second reason is one I noted in an earlier post. The character formation generated by fraternities – cynical, hypocritical, conscienceless, sadistic, status-obsessed, rigidly loyal to the group – is precisely tailored to the American hedge fund. We couldn’t have Bernard Madoff, Dick Fuld, T. Boone Pickens, and Steve Cohen without them.

Veteran UD readers know that UD finds in her favorite play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, many lines and sentiments applicable to current university events, and that one up there, about abomination awards, went through my mind when I read of the latest exploits of that most abominable American campus, Chico State.

One of its fraternities went to a national forest and as part of its hazing procedure cut down 32 trees.

This is the sort of thing that raises everyone’s game. Any fraternity can make a vulnerable young person, eager for acceptance, drink himself to death. It takes genius to realize that there’s a whole world of vulnerable nature out there too.

Animals? Fraternities have been torturing animals since forever. But unless UD is mistaken, chopping down a national forest is – well – the cutting edge.

When new campus abomination awards are handed out, Chico State University almost always gets them.

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Sustainable Chico! Making room for new trees in our national forests!

So say lots of people today, with the double whammy of the Baruch College and the Penn State death squads. Turns out “fraternities … embody some of the worst behaviors of American men.”

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Nothing like ridding ourselves of them will happen. Ever. Nothing remotely like ridding ourselves of them will happen. Fraternities are structural to American capitalism. Fraternities are where boys get psychopathologized in ways useful to Goldman Sachs. Frats are where youthful “superficial charm, conning, and manipulative behavior, lack of empathy and remorse, and a willingness to take risks” is matured and deepened in a communal setting. Watch Last Days of Lehman Brothers. (That’s brothers, see.). Crash Kappa Beta Phi’s drag show. Frat culture’s ultimate reward, in our time, is the American presidency. We won’t get rid of fraternities because fraternities is us.

All-male, highly secretive cells, sustained by sadistic initiation rites intended to prove absolute loyalty to the cell – this describes the mafia, Hell’s Angels, and American academia’s extensive system of fraternities.

I’m sure it’s possible to have all of the elements you need to create a criminal conspiracy and not create a criminal conspiracy; but this would mean exhibiting the impulse control one does not associate with bands of young men hidden without supervision behind high walls.

Fraternities have it one better than the mafia and outlaw biker gangs: Everyone thinks they’re cute. No one thinks the mafia is cute, but everyone thinks bonny frat boys with their local good works and character-building by-laws are adorable. I mean, they’re just kids. Plus they’re going to graduate from college and all.

So no one’s looking because these young college men are serious and clean-cut and appealing. They are a tight band of brothers enjoying almost total secrecy inside a nice large private residence, and they can be counted on to keep silent about any and all activities within the house.

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What UD‘s trying to suggest in all this is that you’d almost have to be dumb, unambitious, unable to grasp life’s opportunities, to be existing under utopian criminal conspiracy conditions and not become a criminal conspiracy of some sort. Imagine a biker gang without a meth distribution business sounds like one of those conceptual challenges your professor poses in Intro Logic. So of course not all but a lot of frats are – on a small scale, of course, most of them – criminal conspiracies …

Too often fraternities function as unlicensed alcohol serving establishments on college campuses: a place where underage people, and those who are already intoxicated, can easily get alcohol. These practices are illegal in most states.

That sort of thing. (Drug distribution can become a seriously big deal at American fraternities.) You tell your stupid or indifferent or afraid university that you’re a dry frat, and your cover is complete: Your organization represents one big ol’ cynical lie, and the choirboy/gangster bit probably looks pretty amusing from inside the frat.

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And so Greek life grinds on at our universities, dropping the odd rape or overdose or assault (lots of drunken fights break out in and around frats) here and there without attracting too much attention; but then you beat one of your eager-to-please initiates to death, or give drugs and alcohol to a coed who fatally overdoses. Something like that. Something that’s death.

This will finally attract some attention to your cell, especially if, like the guys at Penn State, the circumstances of the death are particularly depraved. And filmed. And if they happen at a campus already deep in blood and sex and gore via the frats and the athletic department. (Frats and sports: Hell of a synergy there: “[T]he secret to long service in a large public land-grant institution [is] ‘never messing with athletics or fraternities.‘”) You’ve now made it impossible to look away, impossible not to think about why so many fraternities are so disgusting, and why they’re part of universities.

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Reflections on fraternities.

1. Penn State hazing death

2. Johns Hopkins University students overdose on opioids at fraternity party

3. University of Arizona fraternity removed from campus after alcohol, hazing, assault

4. Drexel University suspends fraternity – sexual assault

5. A [Hanover New Hampshire] petition warrant article to allow fraternities [which have been permanently barred from Dartmouth for violations] to operate [in the community] without a connection to Dartmouth College or another institution failed

...out.

A recent history of sadistic cultists who kill people at one American university.