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.
… won.
Even if you don’t subscribe to the Atlantic, all you need are the first three paragraphs that they provide.
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.
Here’s some wisdom from a very young juror:
James said that the prosecution’s argument that there was a “perfect storm” gathering, and Murdaugh was on cusp of a devastating financial reckoning was a good theme – but wasn’t a persuasive motive.
“I don’t think I’d ever be able to answer why somebody would do something like that,” he said. “But I know that there are people in the world that don’t make sense, and they do things without making it make sense. So I don’t know that there is an answer other than that it happened and that it shouldn’t have.”
Yup. Here’s UD‘s take, FWIW:
Since that morning, when his firm’s financial officer confronted Murdaugh about his extensive theft from the business and its clients, he had been in a deepening, increasingly unmanageable, panic. Thoughts of his family’s ruination, and the ruin, at his hands, of the proud Murdaugh legacy, gripped him more and more tightly.
I don’t think that when he summoned his family to the rural property (Buster was too far away to summon) he did so with any clear motive of killing them; I think he was simply at wit’s end and wanted their help in some way. Or maybe he wanted to confess to them, the way Bernie Madoff gathered his sons to his office and confessed, as the FBI circled, his Ponzi scheme. I don’t think Murdaugh knew what to do; I think he was melting down, and he, in an unspecified atavistic way, wanted his family around him.
Reveling in the beautiful normality of hanging around with Maggie and Paul, with the dogs and the birds, Murdaugh was suddenly overcome with the pointlessness of it all, the loss of it all, the oncoming nothingness of his shattered existence. This was not excruciating self-punishment, or self-hatred; if it were, of course, he would have grabbed one of the hundreds of available guns and killed himself. It was a bleak nihilistic vision of a demonic world all of whose denizens, including his own wife and son, were committed to destroying him. His wife and son, after all, had been getting into his pills, and they were demanding a family conference in which they clearly intended to give him a hard time about the oxy. His drunk out of control son, who’d already racked up booze-related legal problems – hell, who’d already killed someone – could only benefit from having his existence ended. His wife was a nervous wreck about the tens of millions of dollars the bulldog lawyer the dead girl’s parents had hired was promising to get out of the Murdaughs; and she’d already been driven out of the neighborhood of their primary residence because of the horrible publicity about the lethal boat wreck. All that, plus his unmasking, that morning, as a career larcenist…!
Everyone here, he thought, in his nihilistic panic, would be better off dead.
So in the darkness, in the night, facing trusting heedless loved ones, he grabbed his weapons and began blasting away at Paul and Maggie. Make them go away. Make it all go away.
When it came to it, he couldn’t complete the nihilistic horror. He couldn’t turn the weapons on himself. He knew the rest of his life would be litigation and imprisonment but he simply couldn’t end his life. Narcissism, cowardice, whatever. Couldn’t do it.
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But. When all is said and done, remember that great scene in Black Widow, when Debra Winger (as an FBI agent) says to her motive-sniffing boss: “Don’t you understand? No one knows why anyone does anything.”
