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Can someone explain American culture to me?
(hexbear.net)
I legitimately don't know what Fraternity is and why it's normal in America and why these dudes are standing like this.
US fraternities are the burger version of UK boarding school noncery. At its core, a frat just a social club for drinking, social networking for careers after school, and organized sexual assault of female classmates. The latter activity replaces the british pederastry since frats are college only and most US colleges are co-ed.
Freshmen wanting to join a frat ("prospects") will "rush" it during "rush week" which always involves dangerous levels of alcohol consumption and arcane hazing rituals, as seen above.
I have very little context here, but I'm guessing the ritual is to stand completely still in a dark wet basement while a stereo randomly blares scary noises from the other room. Any prospects that react are eliminated and can't join the frat.
For an entirely different flavor of toxic american culture see Sororities.
Having to get tortured to build a network is something.
And the new entrants take away from this that they get to do it to others once they're in! Should help people understand why student debt relief is seen as inconveniencing people who already had to pay back their student loans.
Also normalizes getting overworked and exploited for them when they enter the workforce.
At first its way more about having friends assigned to you and access to all the "cool" parties and all the overly intoxicated young women there. Some sororities are sometimes partnered to a frat and encourage sex with members of that frat. Sometimes its a requirement to get in.
The best thing I've been told about frats is they force you to cooperate with people you'd otherwise hate, which is something I've heard unions do as well.
Take me with a grain of salt though. I was never in a frat and my college forced all "Greek Life" organizations to cut national ties decades ago.
Excuse me, what the heck?
Why would anyone join? And how does this not become a national scandal and get shut down?
Well its never a national rule so its always localized to the specific chapter when one becomes a scandal. But also Greek life is heavily institutionalized within most college systems and there are powerful alumni. Every school have a long reputation of trying to make sex scandals go away as quickly and quietly as possible.
But also that requirement is usually presented as a challenge to the prospect to accomplish on their own. To prove you're the right type of hot to be in our clique etc. Many young women will volunteer for this.
Fun fact: This goes back to Leland Stanford wanting to do eugenics with students at Stanford University and encouraging matchmaking to breed ubermensch by encouraging top performing students to pair up. Yall should read Palo Alto a History of California Capitalism and the World, that book is fuckin bonkers. I'll try to find a PDF when I get home.
Johnny, you haven't been around long, but you're a high quality poster. Always informative!
So I went looking to track down the pdf and funny enough the only source I could find was this: https://mega.nz/folder/cuMwjRyK#eDPayQSdYFwaCh9qr8zzPw/folder/UiF1RDpT
Which I found through a link on this site. There is a boatload of other good material in that mega folder too including a bunch of audiobooks. That should probably be linked in the sidebar or something and also @Cowbee@hexbear.net would probably love to have that as one of our resident scholars.
https://annas-archive.li/search?index=&page=1&sort=&display=&q=Palo+Alto+Malcolm+Harris
There are PDFs, EPUBs, and MOBI on libgen, z-lib, IA, etc.
Edit: in Combat Liberalism in that mega folder
And the result is exactly as anyone could predict: Bad.
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Yeah I have not really looked over everything in that folder but I found there was a ton of good shit in there especially audiobooks.
There is. I have downloaded everything and will hopefully look through it soon.
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I'm certainly no scholar, but this is a really cool find! Thanks for linking it for me!
That's kind of you, but I'm much closer to a hobbyist nerd than a scholar, I'm no Losurdo. But thank you!
That's why I respect you though. Of all the people out there the ones that are real good ones are the humble ones. You may not like it but you are one of the best posters on here.
Just because it is a hobby for you the label of scholar still applies in the literal sense.
Well, that's extremely sweet of you to say, thank you comrade!
Also did you check out that archive I posted? There are a lot of works on there I do not see discussed enough here or in general. It's all mostly focused on decolonial Marxism and has been fascinating to go through.
I did get a chance to check! Looks super interesting, and I'll have to dig more into it at some point.
It's actually exploiting a psychological phenomenon, when the more you have to work/suffer to get something, the more it feels valuable.
I don't think hazing is a uniquely American pheonomenon
Frats aren’t above pedastry either, many of them deliberately try to get local high school girls to attend their parties.