aerojockey:

Bunch of drunken frat boys ought to all be expelled. They serve no purpose to society and shouldn't be encouraged.

Its really sad when this kind of thing happens and gives the rest of fraternity guys a bad name. That's just wrong no matter what you might think about hazing.

Don't have frats here... but they always look like gaybos.

Should get an obvious tag.

Someone did that in Iceland two weeks ago and they're being charged with attempted murder and the victim has fled the country.

Now THAT is a pussified society.

Once again, there's no reason for fraternities.

I'd like to know if it was an actual pellet gun or a toy airsoft gun. Shooting folks with either item strikes me as a rather stupid hazing ritual, but the former is the only one that would put people in any real danger of injury.

I've never really understood the point of frats and sororities. And why do they put themselves in a position where a school can tell them what to do? Do they rely on school resources for something like budget money?

Oh yay - another frat boy bash thread. Jesus people, can't we all just accept that there are some good fratboys, and there are some idiots, and that the idiots are getting more TV coverage because... well... they're idiots?

So are they on double secret probation now or something?

Galland:

I've never really understood the point of frats and sororities. And why do they put themselves in a position where a school can tell them what to do? Do they rely on school resources for something like budget money?

Where I go to college, the school tightens the ropes occasionally, but they also give us some wiggle room. Especially because we get to deal with them before we deal with any local cops on any incident.

Since my house owns our property, we don't have to jump through quite as many hoops - but all in all, as long as we can keep our national organization feuding with the college, we get to duck low in the middle

Yeah, it's been a while since there was a freaternities doing something stupid link.

I was in a frat in college. Our activities consisted of pooling money to throw lots of keggers. It was fun.

letoofdune: Oh yay - another frat boy bash thread

I second that. The rotten apples get all the attention. The whole point of pledging is to get the individual to think as a group. Made some of my best friends in a frat. We did more community service than most of the rest of the campus. Personally I had more hours of service than the entire engineering fraternity, that sort of stuff gets unnoticed.

Ahh, Lyndie England is back on US soil?

Fraternities and organizations are fine, but if you're willing to submit yourself to that type fo humiliation and abuse in order to join, then you deserve to be shot repeatedly.

"Okay, you guys go back to doing something latently homoerotic..."

sullyman: Why is it that every fraternity hazing incident always has homosexual undertones?

because anything is more embarassing and humiliating if you are nekkid at the time. See Abu Gharaib for further details.

This kind of thing makes me nuts, but if the shootee doesn't press charges, it sorta means he was cool with it. The libertarian in me says go with it.

Coming from Ole Miss, I have to say this is business as usual for Fraternities. And Sororities.

Re: the worthlessness of Fraternities, they do a great deal of philanthropic work. OTOH, it's hard to imagine anyone putting up with them if they didn't.

.

Halfnaked? Pelletguns? What a bunch of weiners.

I'm not surprised that Fark contains a very high percentage of people who are against the Greek fraternal system as a whole, without ever being involved in it or taking the time to see what it is all about.

And trust me, I've heard every single line.."You frat guys are gay, you pay for your friends, you suck each other off...

And as a Beta, I tried not to let this bother me and get me upset, and it usually worked. Especially when I was balls deep in the object of some poor farking geeks object of desire. God bless you, Theta girls.

/did a lot of charity and community work too
//usually wicked hung over doing said work
///very good for networking
////just saying it worked for me, flame away GDI's

GDI=God damned Independents.

"The whole point of pledging is to get the individual to think as a group."

Ya know, that reminds me of when the army was trying to get me to sign up. I told the recruiter I wouldn't make a good soldier, because the first drill sergeant that called my mother a whore and said my girlfriend was slutting around on me would find himself knocked on his ass.

The recruiter gave basically the same excuse you just gave - that it teaches you to think as a group and it builds character.

So I told him that I farked his wife, and his mother was a whore on Dort, and asked him how much character did I just build for him.

Verbal and physical abuse does not encourage most people to learn how to think like a group. All it does is fill them with a desire to humiliate the next person.

JestersTear

about that whole verbal and physical abuse thing.. When we pledged, we certainly got our fair share of both. But you see a funny thing happened, it actually worked. Before pledging we were maybe a collection of about fifteen kids who shared the same interests at most. After you go through such a crappy ordeal (you don't even want to know what we went through) you've got no other choice but to get support both mental and physical from your pledge brothers. We came out of pledging five men short (they quit) but I can tell you now that we were indeed much, much, closer and shared a high level of respect for fellow men, which is a lot more than can be said for most people.

...and what the hell is Dort?

im going thru the frat system right now, and im actually mad that the frat that i found the best friends in doesnt have any hazing. I think hazing brings people together, when people go thru something that is difficult, they band together. This is why many pledge groups become VERY close during hell week and such. It also is a way to weed out the people who arent sure they really wanna be in the frat.

/// flame away GDI's

That's the first I've heard of hazing as a form of male bonding.

I'd imagine playing Soggy Cracker wouldn't make me closer to my fellow man so much as it would make me want to avoid eye contact.

"I'd like to know if it was an actual pellet gun or a toy airsoft gun."

My son teaches at Berkeley and told me about this shortly after it happened. At that time, the "rumor" had them using and old Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

Oh yeah, this is sooooooo gay.

wesleyzero

Way to go posting stupid urban legends. Whats next? Are you going to tell me that Pop Rocks and soda will kill me?

Are you just mad that you had to walk by all those huge houses with the giant parties raging and unfortunately your Jenga partner bailed out on you?

Genocide

Any fraternity that doesn't pledge and have an actual pledge program...isn't. You're 100% correct. We had Delta Chi at our school and they didn't pledge or anything, it was open enrollment. They got very little respect from any legitimate Greek organization on our campus.

/and no sorority would ever, ever, dare to party at Felta Guy. (not that Delta Chi sucks at every school, just mine)

thepostaftermeisgay: GDI=God damned Independents

Wow, I had forgotten the GDI saying

JestersTear: the same excuse you just gave

I'm not defending these idiots with the pellet guns. They are just stupid and have crossed the line. You bring up an interesting point of the sick cycle of hazing. There are several ways to build group structure other than abuse.

Every organization does this to some extent. Major companies, the miltary, even the church. A shared experience with strangers gives you something to connect you as a whole.

It is not an excuse, just the way of doing what amounts to team building. You don't have to give up your individualism to join a frat, just think of your self as a member of a group with responsibilities to that orgainzation.

/Once again, these guys are idiots.

thepostaftermeisgay: No offense, but if being verbally and physically abused helps you, then you have severe issues. It might make you identify with the poor bastards suffering it with you, but it should make you feel nothing but rage towards your tormentors.

As for Dort, that's the main street the hookers work in my city. I forgot to put "road" at the end of it.

Five students at Frostburg State University were arrested yesterday in a hazing incident. Kids BAC was more than 0.35.

About 10 years ago, a student died from drinking a shiat load of water.

Cumberland Times-News is a registration link, so I won't bother to link it.

thepostaftermeisgay

Ripping on my Jenga addiction? Oh snap!

/believes you ate a cum covered cracker about as much as you believe I actually play Jenga

JestersTear

No offense taken here. Its definitely not for everyone, I'll say that. And yes, you do feel rage towards the tormentors, but you must keep in mind that next semester... you're not a pledge anymore.

wesleyzero

The difference being people, somewhere, actually play Jenga.

"The cookie" and "the elephant walk" among others...are fake.

letoofdune: Especially because we get to deal with them before we deal with any local cops on any incident.

Bullshiat. If you assault someone, or kill someone, your "deal" isn't worth jack shiat, and the cops will still bust your ass. The fact that you think you are protected from the cops is why you'll do something stupid like these kids did - you think you can get away with no real repercussions.

And I'll have no sympathy for you when your dumb-ass story is the one we're reading about.

JestersTear:

So I told him that I farked his wife, and his mother was a whore on Dort, and asked him how much character did I just build for him.


Suuuure you did, tough guy.

Personally I had more hours of service than the entire engineering fraternity, that sort of stuff gets unnoticed.

Because everyone figures it's for one reason: so, did it look good on your resume?

Personally I would have measured my service by how much good it did, not how many hours it was.

OTOH, while I, the top compsci student in my class, sit here trying to figure out where my next mortgage payment is, the know-nothing cheat-on-every-test frat boy compsci student in my class is now a VP of CompUSA. Maybe there is something to this "group dynamic" thing. Still, I wouldn't try to hold a grape between my buttocks so some other guy could eat it, in order to become a VP at CompUSA. I know the corporate world requires some loss of dignity but come on.

"Dude?... Can we bring the brewskis?"

the whole "battle to keep our frat alive" has happened before!

The whole point of pledging is to get the individual to think as a group.

Sounds like communism to me

Looks like a troll to me.

Undertoad: I know the corporate world requires some loss of dignity but come on.

Thank you for doing the old stereotyping. I did the comunity service because it was one of my frats tenents and because I enjoyed it. It never showed up on a resume. I also continue doing what I can now that I am out of school. I state the hours because you can't quantify a "goodness", it is an abstract quantity. The point I was trying to make is that everyone knows some bad fraternity story, no one ever hears the good ones, not a news item I guess.

Everyone pay attention to the fraternity stigma. You judge us with out knowing the whole story.

I am also sorry that the world is hard and life is not fair.

Wow a bunch of know it all internet geeks who don't like frat boys..

Jealous of the girls and good times I see....

Summation:

Blah blah blah, Frats are bullshiat, blah blah blah.

- Or -

Blah blah blah, Frats are good, build character and bonds, blah blah blah.

Personally, I'm in the first camp, only because while having never been in a frat, I've gotten enough dirt from people close to me who were. Two of them were girls, so I got the sorority perspective, which guys, I'm sorry to say, they do you more out of pity/group think mentality/sense of duty than any real interest in you. Or there are at least two sororitys who do.

I knew this girl freshman year, gorgeous girl, from somewhere in eastern Europe. Drop dead gorgeous. I never dated her or got down or anything, we just on friendly terms and would hang out now and again. She was dating a guy who was really into her, he pledged to a frat, and was then strongly discouraged from dating her because she was not in their sister sorority. Eventually he dumped her and started banging some nasty-looking skank from the above mentioned sorority.

On the other hand, I have a friend who's not in a frat, but hangs out with one that his cousin is in at MIT. He loves it. Says it's a great place to be. I'm guessing that it really depends entirely on whether or not you can be led along in a group-think mentality. The connections you make can definitely help you go a long way in some career fields.

I saved the best for last. I didn't see or know the guy involved in this, but I saw it in the paper, and somebody I ran into did know him. This guy was pledging at some frat at Clarkson University (I believe, it's been a while), and was going through the hazing process. Well, they had pretty much pushed this guy as far as he was going to go. Well, they didn't know his parents had pushed him through martial arts classes since he was 6 (somehow they convinced his instructor to push him into "adult" classes earlier than he should have been, but that's neither here nor there), and had like two or three black-belts, or their equivalent in whatever school it was. One of them was Kempo, but I don't remember the others anymore. Well, this guy just want ballistic after being hassled for so long, and they kept him from sleeping, and shiat like that. Broke one of the guys arm, a bunch rushed him to try and take him down, and I guess he just went to town. The details were spotty at best (it's a newspaper article with some anecdotal evidence provided by a second party), but he apparently did a number on them. I don't know what happened, but I remember laughing my ass off when I read it.

Stopped reading after Blah, blah, blah . . .

I was never in a frat in college. I'm not against them, I just didn't need to "fit in" with the clone mentality that bad. To me there's just something wrong with the idea of "if you eat a grape from between my butt cheeks I'll be your friend for 4 years."

O pass the loving cup around
nor pass a brother by
we all drink from the same canteen
in beta theta pi.

i actually sang that with my (now) boss on my job interview. we shared a laugh, told some stories and he gave me my job without even asking me if i knew shiat about marketing. (which i do).