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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   2931 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 25, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The reaction to fraternity hazing incidents is extremely funny to me. “These poor willing adult male participants were socially pressured to do something humiliating to strengthen the bonds of friendship. Such harm can’t go unnoticed; we must publicly humiliate them on the news for millions of people to see and comment on while showing their faces on video whenever possible.” It’s just so stupid.

Frats market themselves as a conspiracy against outsiders that demands your dignity if you want to get in on it. It's not a bad thing that this is being attacked as bad and suboptimal and worthy of being shamed over. The victims of hazing are actually unscrupulous people trying to get in on it to perpetuate it, so it's fair if everyone sees their humiliation on the internet.

I mean that’s certainty one theory, but another theory would be that stressful experiences build brotherhood, which I recall reading in a study involving militant groups a long time ago. If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse, but we see them perform better. In any case, America is one long humiliation ritual so it’s not actually a bad thing for young men to become habituated to this early, provided there is no actual harm being committed.

If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse, but we see them perform better.

This is fallacious. We want to know the causal effect of frats not the cross sectional. You assume the cross sectional effect is the causal.

In any case, America is one long humiliation ritual so it’s not actually a bad thing for young men to become habituated to this early, provided there is no actual harm being committed.

This is more or less whatabboutism.

stressful experiences build brotherhood, which I recall reading in a study involving militant groups a long time ago.

Vague. Equivocated too. Stressful experience as a pack against the outside is different than antagonism within the pack. You know what real men are supposed to do to those who humiliate them?

I mean that’s certainty one theory, but another theory would be

Yes, I mean, another theory is we live in a simulation and frat boys are demons that come from the higher world to mess with virtual prisoners. Do you care which is true or is it enough for you that you can come up with «another theory».

You’re welcome to do a twin study on fraternity membership. You have my total support there. If modern American life involves a lot of humiliation, then training for humiliation is beneficial. Has nothing to do with Whataboutism.

You’re welcome to do a twin study on fraternity membership

Thank you. What do you think the point of that is though? First off it's the wrong method and the wrong parameter. Second off if you are good at understanding the current set of facts, your theory is already at <10% probability while mine is >90%. So, thanks for giving me your blessing to spend $100k on a study, maybe I will get on that when I have all of the money I should have.

If modern American life involves a lot of humiliation, then training for humiliation is beneficial.

Yes, good logic, Also, if fallout American life involves a lot of radiation, then exposing oneself to radiation is beneficial. Agreed?

Of course, that’s called hormesis. There are some interesting studies which concluded that small amounts of radiation are protective against larger radiation exposure and are conducive to longevity. I believe there was one interesting study about an apartment complex in Korea that had constant low levels of radioactivity. But it’s been a long time since I read about this. Probably back on SSC

I would advise you to not put your money where you mouth is, in this case. You really do not want to start sleeping next to uranium.

I believe there was one interesting study about an apartment complex in Korea that had constant low levels of radioactivity.

Unless there's another, it was Taiwan (page 56).

Unbelievable effect sizes. Are you willing to make a bet with me that those won't hold if you correct for cross sectional confounders? Where you take the position that the positive effect will hold. Or are we just making performance here? Do we really believe that something that shreds DNA has such a ridiculous dose-response curve?

If fraternities selected and promoted suboptimal norms then we should expect to see members perform worse

Than what?

Than non-Greek students. But Greek members typically perform better than non-students

Do you believe that Greek students and non-Greek students differ only in whether or not they undergo stressful experiences?

America is one long humiliation ritual

Care to elaborate?

You’re liable to be replaced by H1B or passed over for AA hires, your tax dollars may go to a senseless war or random Somali / Haredi scams, your town might become +60 foreign in a decade, that sort of thing. There’s just a lot of humiliation involved with being an American today, so it’s good to get training in dealing with that early.

It's interesting, my read on you (and I try to keep Mottizens sorted in my head) is a Christian who takes his faith seriously. I associate that (perhaps wrongly) with goodwill toward one's fellow human, love one another, if he hath all this yet hath not charity, etc. So... that, but you also have this other, angry, intolerant, legalistic, pessimistic side. I don't think you're as old as I am but maybe you've personally had many negative experiences? None of ny business. We all contain multitudes, to misquote Whitman.

I would say that I take Christianity seriously, not that I take my personal faith seriously, which would involve a lot more activity etc.

goodwill toward one's fellow human, love one another, if he hath all this yet hath not charity

This was historically counterbalanced with a hatred against injustice. You can read where Paul says a true Christian “abhors evil”, or where Christ is enthroned because He loves righteousness and hates evil, or where Christ commends the Ephesians for their hatred. The absence of hatred in American churches is why so many suffer from all sorts of personal and civic problems. The passion-less modern Christianity doesn’t work, and it doesn’t even bring people into the religion. It is, IMHO, “fake and gay”.

I wouldn't suggest I have a handle on modern Christianity, though your use of the word passionless is brutal and poetic. I would however suggest that hating evil and hating people are quite different. But I am not personally interested in having a meta or even base-level discussion on Christianity as a phenomenon in the world. Nothing against you as an interlocutor, just not my thing.

To me, loving neighbor means ensuring that the commons are clean and beautiful, that drugs and bad influences are exterminated from neighborhoods, that media for those under 20 are censored for morality, ensuring men get good jobs so that marital bliss increases, ensuring food is healthy, hanging fentanyl dealers publicly, that kind of stuff. The stuff that we can reasonably predict will lead to the happiness and peace of my neighbor, especially my poorest neighbor. There’s not really any benefit to someone just yapping about how much they love their neighbor, which is just worthless signaling at best, and actually a horrible illusion at worst.

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Read Lamentations or the Prophets sometime, or the last five chapters of Judges. Or if the New Testament is preferred, Jesus cleansing the temple is overdone as a reference, but there's no shortage of other examples in the gospels ("brood of vipers", sons of satan) from Christ himself, or if you prefer something a bit more visceral, there's always the Whore of Babylon.

Your observation fits me as well, I think. On the Red side, there is a pervasive sense that things are very bad and probably going to get a lot worse, and that very likely it is not going to be possible to do anything about it. It's acutely frustrating from the Christian perspective because, as many of us see it, Christianity and the Christians in it have been trying to accommodate the secular world for quite some time now, trying to find some way to fit the secular image of what Christians are supposed to be, and at this point it seems pretty clear that this was never going to be possible and many of the compromises we made appear to have been foolish in the extreme. On the one hand, this world is not our home, and so the amount that the present decline can matter to us ought to be sharply limited. On the other hand, we do have to live through it, and it does seem quite woeful.

When I was young, I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. When I got into my teens and started grappling with theological questions seriously, all the social push was toward Liberalism; we looked at the previous generation, and we asked, "isn't this too rigid and hidebound, too legalistic, too dogmatic?" We looked at a structure that claimed it was the one correct way to be a Christian, and we asked, "Is it really plausible that the codified rules of this one group of churches in late-90s southern America is the only way to follow Christ?"

Looking back, that question was dishonest in several ways, but none of us noticed at the time, and we, for lack of a better term, declined to harden into the shape the previous generation sketched out for us. If all humans fail, sin, go astray, then no church has ever been what Jesus wanted us to be. If we presume that at least some Christians are doing the job that Jesus laid out for us, then it follows that the job does not require perfection, and further that there must be a channel of acceptable Christianity, not a single line. And so we, well to the conservative side, opened up to the idea that those further out from us might nonetheless also be Christians attempting to follow Christ to the best of their knowledge and ability. Despite the questionable starting point, it seems to me that this was a good conclusion to arrive at.

Coming back to the church after some years away, though, I noticed that this logic only ever ran one way. It was always applied from a "conservative" position toward "liberal" positions, but I noticed how neither I myself nor anyone around me ever ran this logic the other way, to the people more conservative than ourselves, whether in the previous generation or throughout history. We were open to considering the idea of a looser Christianity being valid, but not a tighter one. We entertained the idea that the Unitary Universalists might be in some way valid Christians, but never the Westboro Baptist Church. I get why the secular world might prefer it to work this way, but it's not clear to me why, from a Christian perspective, drawing the boundaries much too tight ought to be considered a worse failure than drawing them much too loose. If Christianity is a channel, and perhaps even a wide channel, why suppose that the center of that channel is the midpoint between modern liberal and conservative Christians, rather than somewhere like the midpoint of all Christians since Christ? Should one argue that the only true understanding of Christian love, charity, etc is the one from some particular tribal slice of post-2000s American Christianity?

It was Kierkegaard who said in Works of Love (1847) (I did a paper on him in undergrad for some reason):

I wonder if a man handing another man an extremely sharp, polished, two-edged instrument would hand it over with the air, gestures, and expression of one delivering a bouquet of flowers? Would not this be madness? What does one do, then? Convinced of the excellence of the dangerous instrument, one recommends it unreservedly, to be sure, but in such a way that in a certain sense one warns against it. So it is with Christianity. If what is needed is to be done, we should not hesitate, aware of the highest responsibility, to preach in Christian sermons—yes, precisely in Christian sermons—AGAINST Christianity.

I didn't take this to mean Christianity was dangerous in the sense of violence, but in the sense that it will upend one's life. If I were to start noticing motes in eyes, I'd say I have met precious few I'd say lived up to my idea of Christianity. Maybe one or two of them in a church. And none of them were particularly into proselytizing. And all of them held a kind of charitable goodwill and patience toward others--that always took the form of actual behavior and proactive doing.

I've also met a lot of people who claim Christianity as their guiding principle and are full of a seething anger (I'd characterize the stereotype of the Westboro Baptist members here. Mind you just before I attended Catholic churches for a few years I had been attending Baptist churches.)

I mean pledging is great, hazing walks a fine line. When I was in Greek Life a student at another Fraternity died and several more ended up in the hospital. I wasn't at one of Those schools.

Look at it this way: the purpose of fraternities is to provide cross-generational help to college students. Do we, as a society, benefit from additional ties between people that are willing to both undergo and perpetuate abuse? "Oh, this applicant is from Alpha Beta Gamma like me, I need more men that are willing to fuck a live duck and not quack about it in my company!"

benefit from additional ties between people that are willing to both undergo and perpetuate abuse?

Well, doctors in residency programs and the marines provide benefits. But the hazing incidents that have been publicized recently recently do not involve abuse like consistent sleep deprivation over months, just mild discomfort like “blindfolded in basement” or “covered in condiments”. We benefit a lot from this because society benefits from fraternity (consider the importance of the mystery cults for Roman society). If you were to make these guys run into each other at maximum speed so that you can guarantee mental disturbances later in life and ~10 injuries a semester, well, this is no longer abuse, these are VIPs whom we have to fund generously and build a stadium for.

Well, doctors in residency programs and the marines provide benefits.

I'd argue Residency isn't really hazing most of the team - the mistreatment can easily continue before and afterwards (it's base for any job in academia, which all Residencies basically are), the hours are bad but they aren't team building it's free labor.

Do we, as a society, benefit from additional ties between people that are willing to both undergo and perpetuate abuse?

Yes. Our institutions have undergone visible decline since we started acting like they are a detriment.

I think outrage normally occurs only when the behavior is harmful, not just humiliating.

What's harmful about it, absent the humiliation, though?

It varies a lot. In decreasing order of normal-audience concern:

  • Stuff that's basically manslaughter, and only avoid premeditated homicide by sheer stupidity. Forcing people to jump off rooftops, playing with knives, where stupid frat tricks resulted in applicants dig their own graves, yada yada. Rare, but becomes state-level and sometimes national news when it happens.
  • Intentional harm that wasn't likely to result in serious injury or death but did anyway: beating someone until they died or they were aggressively bleeding, hits that most people would survive.
  • 'Unintentional' and unpredictable but obvious harm: drinking hard enough to literally kill someone, extreme physical exertion to the point of hospitalization, forcing people to drive after drinking or sleep deprivation or both, that sort of thing. Sometimes this is stuff that the median applicant had survived and someone just was unlucky or vulnerable, or sometimes the hazing got pushed that little bit further for this one person because they gave lip.
  • ... stuff that we don't call sexual assault or rape because everyone involved says they're a heterosexual man and not taking any gratification from it. Where a victim's willing to talk this can jump a lot higher, but since most of the time it's specifically built to be discrediting to reveal, it's mostly whistleblowers talking and that leads it to be pretty low on the concern level.
  • 'Aversives' that generally don't cause lasting injury, but are extremely unpleasant rather than socially humiliating. Forcing people to eat a raw onion, tasers, chemical sprays, and the conventional array of gross or foul-smelling and tasting stuff. This usually only gets local attention, if that.
  • Predicament bondage taken to extremes beyond what RACK would allow. It takes some actual effort to kill or break a bone, but actual BDSM practice keeps to short sessions because you can really screw up someone's musculature or joints in tens of minutes, and frats like to run for hours. Usually only gets local attention if someone's hospitalized.
  • Pure social humiliation, extremely tedious work, labor that's just unpleasant, or stuff that's just gross but not a disease risk (aka 'cleaning the latrines with a toothbrush'). Nobody really cares about this unless there's a culture war nexus, and even then, it tends to be the culture war nexus rather than the hazing.

This should get you started.

In the story du jour, the victims "had visible injuries consistent with being physically assaulted", and the text of the state's "hazing ban" criminalizes only "acts which endanger the physical health or safety of a student", without reference to humiliation. I believe past stories also have involved injury or death.

Kind of elides the nature of the injuries, and emphasizes the condiments though -- I'd think if there were serious (consentual in any case) injuries it would have been mentioned?

Athletes often have visible injuries too -- is college athletics considered harmful? (I suppose I should say "widely considered" given that the outrage machine is winding up on the concussion thing RN)

I don't claim to have investigated this topic in the slightest, but my impression is that hazing is considered bad because the details of the process are known beforehand only to the existing members: the victims don't know whether the hazing is humiliating or harmful, and therefore cannot consent properly. This goes double in sports and military situations where there's no expectation of hazing at all so the victims never consented even to humiliation, and triple in military situations where the victim was drafted and never had the opportunity to consent at all.

The purpose is to add a cost to just joining. This has benefits especially if membership in a group is particularly valuable. And in some cases, being a frat can give you a leg up in job hunting or provide scholarships among other benefits.

I'm the furthest thing from a frat-boy defender myself, but I think pretty much everyone knows that hazing is (by nature, really) going to involve some physical discomfort and embarrassment? In the case of frats I'd expect some pretty extreme BACs to be involved as well; that's about all I know!

"Physical discomfort" is not "harm significant enough to warrant assault charges".

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