A Pathetic, Exclusively Masculine World of “Unbearable” Violence

Tunisia’s sports minister coins the term “stadium terrorism.” The FIFA representative reviewing the situation in Greece (he’ll be lucky to get out of Athens alive) calls it “unbearable that people are scared to go to a stadium.”

You never see women or children at many world soccer games. Before (on transportation to the games), during (at the games), and after (on the streets; in the pubs), the host city is on fire with drunk, rioting, gun-bearing men. Despite the measures governments have introduced (games played in empty stadia; tv blackouts; massive police presence and massive arrests; physical separation of opposing fans; targeting of known thugs and gangs) everything’s getting worse and worse and unbearably worse.

*****************

Only it isn’t unbearable. Scores die after games, and cities are torched; armed black-shirted gangs rush the pitch during the game and go after referees. So what. FIFA – a virtually all-male, ridiculously corrupt organization – will do nothing about the latest atrocity in Greece. It’s bearable. It’s all bearable. It’s all boys incorrigibly and escalatingly being boys.

And when it gets even worse – when players and referees are beaten to death during games televised all over the world – FIFA will still do nothing. Unfathomable amounts of money are being made, a lot of it by that organization’s corrupt officials. No one’s going to mess with a good thing.

‘“I think that the minute that you have a backup plan, you’ve admitted that you’re not going to succeed,” Holmes says.’

Here at University Diaries, we respond to high-profile fraud cases like the Elizabeth Holmes thing by scrolling back to the fraudsters’ university years. That happens to be our angle.

Stanford University celebrated its high-profile alumna – and why wouldn’t it? No one knew until a year or so ago that she was lying about her blood testing technology in order to get money out of investors – and one of Stanford’s celebrations quotes her wit and wisdom.

Which includes that thing about the lack of a backup plan… which, in retrospect, doesn’t sound all that wise. Assuming she’s no Bernie Madoff, chances are awhile back she realized she was hemorrhaging, and – having no backup plan… like, say, admitting there was blood all over the floor and returning investor money… she just kept, uh, bleeding out until the SEC noticed.

Disaster at Florida International University

A pedestrian bridge FIU installed only days ago has collapsed, trapping and killing multiple people beneath it.

It costs a lot of money to get this level of performance from your employees, and the University of Michigan isn’t afraid to spend the money.

The director of performance for UM’s football team receives $250,000 a year for knowing how to perform.

Recently, during a very long night of challenges, he hit all his marks and then some.

UM, a once impressive school, is now mainly known for drunks and Rich Rodriguez.

UD is always looking for an occasion to quote her hero.

Saccone:

Meet Zappa.

“I’ll leave my board position when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Everyone’s all ooh wow ooh about St Thomas University’s CFO resigning her position at that way-Catholic school rather than leave the board of AR-15-mad Smith and Wesson. (She was given an ultimatum from the school.) Everyone’s like: Look! She chose assault weapons over a church school!

But read the fine print, kiddies. Smith and Wesson (they’ve given themselves some new all-natural name… who knows why? … it’s like… can’t remember but it’s like Gentle Valley Breezes…) pays people willing to be associated with it upwards of $100,000 a year — and you and I know what service on a corporate board entails: Two free trips to Hawaii to sit in a room for a half hour and get excited about how much shit (here, AR-15s) the corporation’s selling.

If you had to choose between actually working – as a chief financial officer – and sitting on your ass all year and still pulling in a hundred thou, what would you do? Plus you get all the free AR-15s you want.

Young and FABULOUS

Around 3 a.m., a [Stetson University] security guard noticed a car with a blown tire pull into a handicap parking spot in front of a dormitory. The guard approached the driver, and 20-year-old Preston Barrow told the man that he had just smoked marijuana and had a rifle in his car, according to police.

Police responded and found an unloaded rifle, scope and 27 rounds of ammunition scattered throughout the car.

He’s got the cutest little baby face!

‘When Kim first tried to raise the plagiarism issue during the public comment portion of a school board meeting, Walton ruled him out of order for making a “personal attack” on Baldwin.’

Like the Howard University student who dared address the school’s great and powerful president about a lack of housing, Ridgefield High School senior Paul Kim dared point out that the superintendent of schools in his region of Connecticut was a career plagiarist.

Both students got slapped down real good; but the truth has a way, sometimes, of winning out — especially the truth that the first instinct of inept authorities faced with subordinate truth-tellers is to slap them down.

“Walton” is school board chairwoman Fran Walton, currently working out a resignation agreement for plagiarist superintendent Karen Baldwin.

This is maybe the twentieth post UD has done on high school administrators who plagiarize like crazy. These people are often making enormous salaries (Baldwin’s was close to $250,000), but cannot find the time or the brain cells to write their own simple greetings and announcements to their communities, thus setting a fine example for the legions of young writers under their care.

“It’s not the role of the federal government to step in and dictate whether firearms in the classroom are the right choice for any one specific shooter.”

Sing it, sister!

With the dirtiest and scariest of weaponized Russian oligarchs and their weaponized thugs charging onto the field and threatening the life of a referee, Greek soccer isn’t very family-friendly.

Hell, it isn’t even very non-weaponized thug-friendly.

Terrified spectators are scattering.

Greek soccer has been plagued by pitch invasions and violence on and off the pitch for years and authorities have repeatedly promised to clean up the game.

However, attendances have dwindled and this season only four clubs in the 16-team top division have posted average attendances of more than 5,000 spectators per league game.

In their own defense, referees will soon start packing heat, so that we can expect to see the kind of on-field fire fights that will, to be sure, remain attractive to a certain audience demographic (i.e., fans who also pack, and who can’t wait to join the fun), but will alienate any remaining non-weaponized spectators. Thus the 3,000 or so people who show up for most of the current matches will dwindle to a few hundred fully outfitted maniacs.

But hey. Gangs are people, too.

***************

Corruption, referee intimidation, fan violence has been pandemic for years in Greece.

Take one of the world’s most sickeningly corrupt organizations, which oversees one incredibly violent game scene after another all over the world.

Add a league match in one of the world’s most anarchic states.

Add a team owner who’s a paranoid, violent, Russian oligarch.

*****************

I mean, so far, so good — no one cares that FIFA is hopelessly filthy.

No one cares that people routinely get beaten and killed in and around world soccer matches.

******************

The whole thing: FIFA, club owners, fascist fans — it’s just pigs happy in the swill, and no one wants to interrupt the fun because if you do these people will blow your fucking head off.

They’re Walter Sobchak, at 1:30

******************

But Walter’s so crazy that eventually his mad pistol-whipping ways get him in a little trouble, just like his real-life equivalent, eminent Russian statesman Ivan Savvidis. Ivan doesn’t go anywhere without serious personal weaponry and several heavily armed guards, and when a Greek team he owns ran into some trouble with a referee yesterday, he stormed the field along with his armed guard and with his hand on his gun and informed the referee “You’re over.”

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What a pretty picture. Look at this (scroll down): Proud fascist enforcers, all of them dressed in black, swagger fully weaponized onto the field of play to kill the referee. It takes you back.

And forward. Nihilist kitsch again becomes the way of the world. You can see its most naked return on the fields of FIFA.

‘There are more than 200 students in the class ENGG 401 – Law and Professionalism. More than half of the enrolled students don’t attend the lectures; they just show up for the exams. The professors post their lecture notes online for the students.’

Wotta shocker when these high-quality courses generate systemic cheating! Massive numbers of foreign students, few of whom exist in the physical universe, a professor who doesn’t bother showing up for exams…

And that’s ain’t all, folks. Turns out cheating is everywhere in the University of Regina’s engineering program – faculty as well as students – and reading about all the efforts to break into professors’ offices to get the exams, to hack the system and change grades, to bribe TAs to get, er, special assistance… And then there are the professors stealing their students’ work … It’s quite something.

But the school is on it! For instance, it has sent out a message to all students asking them not to cheat. Plus any day now it intends to deploy shock troops to show up on exam days and take a serious look around.

**************************

UD thanks Jack.

‘Of the 28 complaints brought against [University of Illinois] fraternities in the past five years, only one was a torture practice condemned by the Geneva Convention.’

Great news on fraternities!

POP POP POP POP POP POP POP!!!!!

You know what that sound is, right, kiddies? RUN FOR IT.

HAHA. Just kidding. It’s popcorn!

But if you want to make that other popping sound, c’mon over to RKGuns!

***************

It’s all happening at Stephen Foster Elementary School.

Stephen Foster!

Sing it:

Beautiful semi-, come unto me,
All of my classmates are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the bump stock heard in the day,
Teachers and students have all pass’d away!

Beautiful semi-, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life’s busy throng,—
Beautiful semi-, awake unto me!
Beautiful semi-, awake unto me!

‘Sometimes very big money — like the $10.4 million Texas A&M owed Kevin Sumlin for firing him without cause after last season. Sometimes ridiculous money — like the $35 million Clemson would owe Dabo Swinney if the school did the same to him this year.’

Life of the mind, USA.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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