My shame is making me violent.

[The_King_of_Soup]

Rilchiam, thanks for being the kind of person with whom one can disagree and still get along.

@Rilchiam

Okay, but I didn’t see it that way.

There’s a good line, and I’ll borrow it here. And I’ll admit that my interpretation of the OP lacks any appreciation of the meta-criticism of common reactions to rape that you imply, partly because I haven’t seen the “rape is just a natural phenomenon and rapists have no choice” argument here, or, really, anywhere. My reading is certainly not definitive, and unless the OP disavows yours I’ll let it be the last word on his intentions.

@Rilchiam

Rapists are not of us; they’re creatures of the night. We can’t understand them and we can’t stop them.

You posit this as a fallacy and I agree with you, but I think, actually, that this suspicion is what’s bugging Happy Scrappy: all that expensive moral instruction of carefully selected elite individuals from the very best families and still something like this happens. If my sense of self was very heavily invested in my belief that I was a Hill student and Hill students can do no wrong, I’d be shaken too. It might make me question whether a personal sense of honor based on pride in my heritage is really better than a plebeian sense of obligation to others when it comes to truly moral and ethical conduct.

@Rilchiam

I got the impression that HSHP was pitting Buncamper because the two of them do have something in common.

Yeah, me too. What sent me off tilting at either windmills or giants was that I saw **Happy Scrappy ** pitting a violent crime against a young girl because of its effect on him. If the drunk driver of a green Toyota crashed into and killed a busload of nuns and orphans, and I opened up a Pit thread attacking the miscreant because (a) the accident made me 20 minutes late getting home and (b) I also drive a green Toyota and I’m afraid of how this will make all drivers of green Toyotas look, I’d expect someone to come along and point out that the fact that the drunk driver and I have something in common may have caused me to mistake myself for the real victims. I still see that, but because you have offered another interpretation, I’ll table it for now.

@Rilchiam

They went to the same school; they were indoctrinated the same way.(…)HSHP is in a position to have a pretty good idea what the point of divergence was between Buncamper and himself.

Is he really? Does he know Buncamper at all? I mean, we can all assume that **Happy Scrappy ** isn’t a likely rapist, but I don’t think we can assume that there’s an obvious demonstrable difference between him and Buncamper that would account for the latter committing this crime. In fact, the focal point of Happy Scrappy’s pain is the fact that in the signally important formative experience of their lives, six years at the Hill School, they were exactly the same.

This thread didn’t turn out quite the way I expected. If I had it to do over again, I would have encouraged the OP to not conflate the current and future history of the Hill School with his own experience there, and (probably) left it at that. In any event, Rilchiam, please accept my best regards and wishes. It’s a pleasant rarity to disagree with a gentleman.

[Rilchiam]

@The King of Soup

In any event, Rilchiam, please accept my best regards and wishes. It’s a pleasant rarity to disagree with a gentleman.

Thank you. But I’m a lady!

[The_King_of_Soup]

Phooey. I have got to quit making gender assumptions on this board. I apologize. Not only that, I am fruminous at my error. Justice demands that my Shallow chauvinism be punished, though I hope not by a Pistol. I apologize again, and a third time.

Please strike “gentleman” and insert “lady” as the final word in my previous post.

[EddyTeddyFreddy]

@The King of Soup

I think, actually, that this suspicion is what’s bugging Happy Scrappy: all that expensive moral instruction of carefully selected elite individuals from the very best families and still something like this happens. If my sense of self was very heavily invested in my belief that I was a Hill student and Hill students can do no wrong, I’d be shaken too. It might make me question whether a personal sense of honor based on pride in my heritage is really better than a plebeian sense of obligation to others when it comes to truly moral and ethical conduct.

Well, not necessarily “very best families”, considering the link HSHP gave above to his post about his background. If you mean “pride in my heritage” to be the school experience, okay, but if that phrase ties back to the “very best families” descriptor, it’s wide of the mark.

My take on this is that the OP does in fact expect a higher standard of conduct from members of his school precisely because they’ve been selected based on merit – whatever their background – with merit being assessed on the overall character of the student, not just grades or athletic ability. Furthermore, the school demands a higher standard of conduct by its students than does the average school, and enforces it rigorously.

I’d like to posit a question to those slamming him for elitism. Why is pride in your group’s higher achievements and/or standards than the average a bad thing? If it’s earned, based on merit, and not used as a club to beat others down, is it still intrinsically evil? Or are you engaged in reverse snobbery? Some of you, frankly, remind me of the kids I went to high school with – a 2000+ student public high school rife with cliques, jock worship, and contempt for the brainiacs, where achieving beyond the accepted norm was a sure route to being pissed on.

Go tell a Marine he’s an arrogant, snobby elitist for feeling he’s a cut above a regular Army grunt. Then duck.

[catsix]

EddyTeddyFreddy said:
My take on this is that the OP does in fact expect a higher standard of conduct from members of his school precisely because they’ve been selected based on merit – whatever their background – with merit being assessed on the overall character of the student, not just grades or athletic ability.

In other words, they’re better than people who did not go to that school. Well, I think that’s bullshit.

Some of you, frankly, remind me of the kids I went to high school with – a 2000+ student public high school rife with cliques, jock worship, and contempt for the brainiacs, where achieving beyond the accepted norm was a sure route to being pissed on.

Or maybe I don’t accept that someone’s a higher caliber person than me because of the price tag of their school. If someone actually is smarter than me, that’s fine. I’m not the smartest person in the entire world. But to assume that someone is an overall better person because their high school diploma says ‘Hill School’ and mine doesn’t is being an elitist moron. You cannot assume that Hill School students automatically have more ‘merit’ than Podunk Public Senior High students do.

[Rilchiam]

@catsix

You cannot assume that Hill School students automatically have more ‘merit’ than Podunk Public Senior High students do.

Not automatically, no. But what the OP is saying is that Hill tries to exert influence on each and every student. I went to Podunk Public High School (okay, Joliet West, same difference) and the faculty tried, some of them, but they weren’t united in trying to mold each and every one of us. If you or I or anyone is a “better” person, however you measure that, than a Hill student or alumnus, it’s due in part to our filtering out bad influences and focusing on good. The OP is claiming that Buncamper got nothing but good influences, and still this happens.

[catsix]

Well then the OP is being unrealistic in assuming that just because it’s ‘Hill School’ that the only thing there is good influence.

It reeks of the ‘not in this neighborhood’ attitude that I find disgusting coming from the people who believed drugs were an inner city problem and not something that my rural town ever had to worry about. It is not worse that this alleged crime happened because the alleged parties involved were prep school students, and it’s not safe to assume that because they were prep school students that they only had good influences.

[Rilchiam]

Would you prefer that he take the attitude that, since Buncamper is a Hill student, he couldn’t possibly have done this, and must have been framed?

[catsix]

Talk about not understanding me.

I think it matters fuck-all that he’s a ‘Hill student’. I think it’s no more shocking than if some kid from Wilkinsburg got accused of rape. I don’t think it’s any less likely that he actually did it than some kid from Wilkinsburg.

I don’t think it has a goddamn fucking thing to do with what kind of school he went to.

[Rilchiam]

Okay, so you don’t think a Pitting is justified. How unusual for you.

[catsix]

I don’t think this big shock and awe of ‘How could you tarnish the reputation of the precious school where we are better than that and from which only good things flow’ is justified in the least.

If the guy committed rape, he is a criminal and should be dealt with. Where he went to school has no bearing on that, nor is it an affront to some perfect community that some student there got charged with a crime.

The only damage to be concerned about is that of the alleged victim herself.

[Rilchiam]

cat, I said it already in post #29.

[catsix]

Yeah, I said it before already too. But, you were too busy arguing with me to read what I wrote.

[Rilchiam]

Pot, meet kettle.