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Wisconsin frat leaders arrested after 30 pledges found in filthy basement, injured and covered in condiments (www.nbcnews.com)
submitted 2 days ago by to c/news@lemmy.world
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[–] 3 points 16 hours ago

WTF is wrong with people...and pledges? it looks like people volunteer to be tortured just to join the torturers. Its sick and bizarre

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    [–] 9 points 1 day ago* (2 children)

    And this is what every young American is expected go into a lifetime of debt for.

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  • [–] 10 points 17 hours ago

    No, this is a frat. These are rich children playing about to practice exploitation, dehumanizing faces they see every day, and allowing sociopath tendencies.

    There's zero debt in this picture. There's donations to the university to keep most of these people enrolled.

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    • [–] 52 points 1 day ago (6 children)

    Where I went to college, one of the frats just the year before I started had gotten kicked off campus because at a party at the frat house, some of the members beat up a pledge and kicked him down the basement stairs and he broke his neck and died. His corpse wasn't discovered until late the next day. Nobody was punished criminally because they couldn't identify who had actually done it, so the expulsion of the frat was the only penalty. The frat house got turned into a dorm for international students, and every few weeks members of the fraternity (which still existed but off-campus) would run through the building and trash the public spaces and harass any international students they encountered. These students were in a constant state of fear because of this.

    To my great surprise, this college a couple of decades later banned all greek organizations entirely. It was a pretty wild decision because when I went there, 90% of the students were in fraternities or sororities. Good riddance.

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    [–] 66 points 1 day ago (13 children)

    Frankly, any organization that has hazing should be eradicated. It is just abuse dressed up as tradition.

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    [–] 11 points 1 day ago

    Oh, pledge week.

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    [–] 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

    Like….why does this happen?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 day ago

    You know that sickening feeling of horrified remorse deep in your gut you get when you have the intrusive thought of punching a helpless baby? Or when you happen to run over a small animal that darted into the road while you were driving? Yeah, some people just don't feel so bad about such things.

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    • [–] 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (20 children)

    I guess I just don’t get it. What value does frat membership have that people are willing to put up with this crap? The closest I ever got was freshman hazing in high school, and when the seniors wanted me to do something stupid, I just walked away. Like, what were they going to do? Tell a teacher on me, or something? (The hazing kept up until a freshman fell and broke his arm one year, and that was the end of that.)

    The pledges need to grow spines and start calling the school or the police if things get out of hand.

    Eta: now that I think about it, we had hell week in college. Most of it was silly, and I just ignored it. (And ignored it when I was supposed to be running it.) A senior confronted me and told me if I didn’t want to participate, then maybe [school name] wasn’t the place for me.

    Yes, I have a BA from [school name].

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  • [–] 17 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    It's the far right side of school life, where the frat is a hierarchical in-group. The pledges put up with it for access to the priviledges that come with being in the group and ones that go through with it have a mix of a) thinking it's paying their dues now to reap the benefits later, b) don't appreciate how much it might escalate until it does, and then have peer pressure and sunk cost fallacy driving them to continue, and c) the escalations might also excite them because if this is what they have to put up with to get in, if this is acceptable for senior members to subject junior members to, just imagine what the frat will let them get away with when they are full members or senior members. It's like the "it's ok for billionaires to treat my class like shit because I'm planning on joining them one day" mindset, except with an actual path to joining them soon.

    There might also be some S&M aspects to it where some on the M side even enjoy it, though I can't really relate to that myself so it's only speculation.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    To make it explicit, one of the benefits pledges look forward to are group organized parties where they can have easy access to women to try and sleep with them.

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  • [–] 3 points 20 hours ago (1 child)

    I remember going to some sketchy ass frat parties back in 08-09 in Berkeley CA (no relation), it was like a cute lil date rape factory.

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  • [–] 3 points 12 hours ago

    I remember reading an article about a frat that was on trial and some evidence was their emails saying things like "remember boys, assert, [...], insert," with like a guide to how to get women drunk and take them upstairs, it was really awful.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 day ago

    It's also a way for them to reestablish the old boys clubs for the modern day, at least for some of them. The "right" people will get in and then have connections they can turn to for things like getting a job after school, and since there's no standard hazing program, they can just go extra hard on any poor people or minorities that mistakenly join thinking they. too, will be afforded opportunities in the future if they put up with it. Then they can just keep raising the stakes until either the pledge drops out, or they decide that this person is willing to take enough outrageous abuse from them to be worthwhile to string along to keep as a future lackey/scapegoat.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    What value does frat membership have

    Networking? Lots of people in these orgs are good for job contacts.

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  • [–] 3 points 20 hours ago*

    right before the internet all the sociopaths needed somewhere to congregate and mingle. Date rape too let us not underscore the importance of these organizations for helping said sociopaths get laid!

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