It’s true that we’ve had a field day with lacrosse and sadism on this blog. Far as I can figure, the deep alcoholism endemic to the sport, its privileged-folk provenance, and the near-universal tendency toward hazing in high school and college athletics, produces extreme specimens like George Huguely, and less extreme but still very dangerous people like the guys on the Syracuse high school team.
Huguely, currently rotting in jail, was a U Va lacrosse player who got drunk and beat his girlfriend to death:
In truth, there are many places in [lacrosse’s] culture where nights like the one Huguely had at Washington and Lee University in November 2008 – when he was Tasered after resisting arrest and shouting slurs at a black, female officer who had found him stumbling into oncoming traffic – garner acceptance and credibility. As with other sports teams and fraternities, stories like these are traded like war stories among lacrosse players; they’re the battle ribbons of a culture that enjoys hard-drinking and recklessness. They’re a kind of proof of one’s weekend warrior bona fides.
One thing to remember, as we talk a bit more about the latest degeneracy, is that the lads have guns now. When you add guns to alcoholism, entitlement, and sadism, you get what people refer to as extreme hazing, which is simply extreme sadism. Among the very young. Sixteen. Fifteen.
Aggression and alcohol abuse, of course, are hardly the province of lacrosse alone when it comes to men’s [high school and] college athletics. But, when it comes alongside lacrosse, there’s an implied element of absolute indifference and arrogance as well.
We’re into group psychopathy at this point, an unbounded Lord of the Flies viciousness. As a team you derive splendid new forms of human abuse and let their effects amuse you as you film your victims in order to share their agony with other sadists. (Sadism, you know, is very common.) Or just to watch your weeping pleading shrieking victims over and over in your bedroom. Lots of hazing – fraternity as well as sports – now involves threats with guns; but we can certainly anticipate actual killing with guns in the hazing setting quite soon.
Complaints about shooting and violence are nothing new in downtown Myrtle Beach. In 2017, a shooting on Ocean Boulevard on Father’s Day injured six people and brought much attention to Myrtle Beach because a tourist happened to livestream the incident on Facebook.
In 2018, an off-duty employee of RidTydz on North Ocean Boulevard was shot inside the establishment and died. A lawsuit filed by the man’s family said that the popular tourist spot “was becoming known as a problem area for increasing incidents of violence, shootings and murders to the extent that Myrtle Beach had been infamously nicknamed ‘Murder Beach.’”
In 2020, then-Myrtle Beach City Councilman John Krajc told ABC 15 News that the violence had to end. “If we stop making ourselves the ‘discount beach,’ over time that culture can change,” he said. “We have to remember this is Myrtle Beach, not ‘Murder Beach,’ not ‘Dirty Myrtle.’” …
[The mayor complained about] “hotels who choose not to clean themselves up, and offer rooms at $40-$45 a night” and businesses along Ocean Boulevard that cater to the wrong crowd by selling “graphic” T-shirts, drug paraphernalia and “things that are not welcoming to families.”
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Murder Beach isn’t working class; it’s sub-proletarian. It’s dirt cheap, ugly, porny, druggy, boozy, gunny. Its clubs are loud, extremely gross, and feature really cheap alcohol. Outside the clubs, squatted trucks and hordes of motorbikes screech by. “The last time I was in Myrtle my Uber driver had a gun between his knees because he was worried about getting robbed again.”
And Myrtle Beach is wall to wall gun ranges, so don’t forget your own guns!
All wrapped up in South Carolina itself, Murdaughville!
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I mean, yeah, this might appeal to a few… non-standard… families, but I’m thinking all of that plus a pretty constant atmosphere of menace on the main thoroughfares – deepened by a huge police presence – doesn’t exactly broadcast safe family fun. I mean hey why do they need battalions of officers? Aren’t we supposed to be having a relaxed carefree sort of experience?
Any family with the means to vacation someplace better than Myrtle Beach should certainly be expected to do that. Your chance of getting shot might not be great, but you can count on feeling menaced and cheapened by the setting.
And of course everyone says that thing about changing the culture, but there’s real big piles of real big money behind the purulence, and the business owners making all that money aren’t about to fuck with their model.
Don’t call 911 or anything as he’s dying, because you’re not supposed to be at the secret illegal destination, and your fraternity isn’t supposed to be beating people to death. Keep it quiet, lie about everything, and let the guy die.
In Iran, you get whipped 74 times for singing songs about women who choose not to cover every inch of their whorish flesh; in some US states, condemned murderers can opt to be shot to death by the state.
Shame seems to be the big thing at the moment (“And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”) as the US regresses to Second World status, with our would-be dictator and primitive public realm.
Our emerging civic models are disease-vector cults (fringe Mennonites, the Ultraorthodox) and it’s INSANE that we keep giving zealots vaccination exemptions and education exemptions and civic existence exemptions but this is where we are. Eventually our sense of shame will disappear, and it’ll be all Ostrogoth and Visigoth and Mad Max Fury Road.
At least we’ll have plenty of guns for the incipient permanent warfare.
Yeah, well a kid already died of measles because unfortunately for the kid he/she lived in a state that thinks freedom means ignoring everything primitive cults within the state do (go, Texas!) — wouldn’t want to interfere with the fringe-Mennonite cluster out there that doesn’t educate or vaccinate its children. Too cute! Leave ’em be! It’s Trump DEI.
And just wait til a lot of other anti-vaxxers in Texas and New Mexico get a load of the effects of HUGELY contagious measles on their children.
A heady mix of martinis, machine guns, and masses of paying underage partiers (no guest list – you simply respond to flyers advertising it all over town) just exploded — whodathunkit? — into mortal combat! A sixteen year old is dead, and a bunch of other kids are injured, and somebody filmed the fun, with tons of people racing and screaming down the driveway into the night.
Here’s the house, in case you also want to pack a bunch of armed strangers into a random unguarded location and get them drunk.
As with the late-night lounge massacres UD tracks on this blog, the megamansion massacres have become routine; but just as no one wants to shut down the lounges, so no one seems interested in messing with the bullet-spewing big houses.
Maybe the extremely wealthy neighbors of mansions like this one? Does it bother them a tad?
UD also wonders about the people who build insanely massive houses like this one. Did they intend for some rich person to buy it, and when that didn’t happen they decided to rent it out to swarms of teenage shooters? Me don’t get it.
The gang used to be a recognized JMU fraternity, but its lethality/perversity was too much even for a southern frat school, so JMU took away its recognition. Right away, under a different name, and now free from school rules, the frat reconstituted itself and kept up the killing.
It killed two members, and one would-be member, in a car crash, and the parents of the dead boys are suing the gang and each of its members.
JMU should have taken action against the reconstituted gang as soon as it learned of it. As twisted as it is for a university to have to police and surveil itself in this way, if you’re going to let frats go wild on your campus, as JMU notoriously has, you have an obligation to understand that eventually one or more of these groups is going to go very seriously rogue, and that before multiple students of yours are drugged unconscious, dumped in a car, and driven into a tree, you need to rid your campus of the killers.
An appeals court just ruled that his family’s case against the school can go to trial. WSU, one of the scummiest schools it’s been my duty to follow on this blog, stands around while their frat system hazes like a motherfucker, and if the frats occasionally kill someone so what. But the court says this one has to go to trial.
It’s like that quarter-billion dollar WSU athletics debt. So WHAT. Shut up man.
Wonder how much the settlement of this case will run the school.
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Well. Washington’s a really rich state and can increase WSU funding by a billion next year.
