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Mighty Hiker
climber
Vancouver, B.C.
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Nov 13, 2011 - 11:36pm PT
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you're becoming Mighty jaded for a Canadian
Bureaucracies are the same the world over. They've perfected the evasion of responsibility as an art form.
Hence the aptness of Harry Truman's famous desk sign "The Buck Stops Here", which must have infuriated his bureaucrats.
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Crimpergirl
Sport climber
Boulder, Colorado!
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Nov 14, 2011 - 12:17am PT
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Never tried to get out of jury duty. Wish I would be called.
It's an important service to serve on a jury. Anyone who has blown it off has lost their ability to criticize jury conclusions imo.
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Ken M
Mountain climber
Los Angeles, Ca
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Nov 14, 2011 - 01:54am PT
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Ken M,
Lucky that you are practicing medicine and not law. Take a closer look at this portion of the Penn. statute:
comes into
contact with children shall report or cause a report to be made
Neither Paterno, the graduate assistant, the university president or athletic director works with or has "contact with children" during the course of their employment.
atrocious judgement, certainly, protecting their product, yes, guilty of that legal section.....NO.
The president and AD may be guilty of perjury, at this point it looks like Paterno and the Grad Asst. will walk.
The evil one
You are correct. You are lucky I don't practice law.
http://law.onecle.com/pennsylvania/judiciary-and-judicial-procedure/00.063.002.000.html
According to Pen law:
"Child." An individual who:
(1) is under the age of 18 years;
(2) is under the age of 21 years who committed an act of
delinquency before reaching the age of 18 years; or
(3) was adjudicated dependent before reaching the age of
18 years and who, while engaged in a course of instruction or
treatment, requests the court to retain jurisdiction until
the course has been completed, but in no event shall a child
remain in a course of instruction or treatment past the age
of 21 years.
If you think that Paterno does not come into contact with 17 year olds in the course of his work ROUTINELY, either young teens who enter college early, or recruitement activities, you don't know sh!t about college sports.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 15, 2011 - 10:28am PT
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one of the things i enjoy most about teaching english is that our discussions of literature so often turn to questions of morality...i always take advantage of the opportunity to ask my students, "what would you do if you were hamlet, huck, etc.?" for example, when discussing elie wiesel's "Night", i might ask, "how many of you would be willing to hide jews in your home?" of course, the hands shoot up...but there's always that one kid, the one with best insight and empathy, who doesn't raise her/his hand...so, i ask, "you wouldn't help your jewish neighbors?" this kid confesses, "i hope i would do the right thing, but i'm afraid i would probably try to protect myself..."
of course, that's the kid who would do the right thing without hesitation; it's the rest of us who...well...you know, don't you?
Let’s All Feel Superior
By DAVID BROOKS
First came the atrocity, then came the vanity. The atrocity is what Jerry Sandusky has been accused of doing at Penn State. The vanity is the outraged reaction of a zillion commentators over the past week, whose indignation is based on the assumption that if they had been in Joe Paterno’s shoes, or assistant coach Mike McQueary’s shoes, they would have behaved better. They would have taken action and stopped any sexual assaults.
Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.
Some people simply can’t process the horror in front of them. Some people suffer from what the psychologists call Normalcy Bias. When they find themselves in some unsettling circumstance, they shut down and pretend everything is normal.
Some people suffer from Motivated Blindness; they don’t see what is not in their interest to see. Some people don’t look at the things that make them uncomfortable. In one experiment, people were shown pictures, some of which contained sexual imagery. Machines tracked their eye movements. The people who were uncomfortable with sex never let their eyes dart over to the uncomfortable parts of the pictures.
As Daniel Goleman wrote in his book “Vital Lies, Simple Truths,” “In order to avoid looking, some element of the mind must have known first what the picture contained, so that it knew what to avoid. The mind somehow grasps what is going on and rushes a protective filter into place, thus steering awareness away from what threatens.”
Even in cases where people consciously register some offense, they still often don’t intervene. In research done at Penn State and published in 1999, students were asked if they would make a stink if someone made a sexist remark in their presence. Half said yes. When researchers arranged for that to happen, only 16 percent protested.
In another experiment at a different school, 68 percent of students insisted they would refuse to answer if they were asked offensive questions during a job interview. But none actually objected when asked questions like, “Do you think it is appropriate for women to wear bras to work?”
So many people do nothing while witnessing ongoing crimes, psychologists have a name for it: the Bystander Effect. The more people are around to witness the crime, the less likely they are to intervene.
Online you can find videos of savage beatings, with dozens of people watching blandly. The Kitty Genovese case from the ’60s is mostly apocryphal, but hundreds of other cases are not. A woman was recently murdered at a yoga clothing store in Maryland while employees at the Apple Store next door heard the disturbing noises but did not investigate. Ilan Halimi, a French Jew, was tortured for 24 days by 20 Moroccan kidnappers, with the full knowledge of neighbors. Nobody did anything, and Halimi eventually was murdered.
People are really good at self-deception. We attend to the facts we like and suppress the ones we don’t. We inflate our own virtues and predict we will behave more nobly than we actually do. As Max H. Bazerman and Ann E. Tenbrunsel write in their book, “Blind Spots,” “When it comes time to make a decision, our thoughts are dominated by thoughts of how we want to behave; thoughts of how we should behave disappear.”
In centuries past, people built moral systems that acknowledged this weakness. These systems emphasized our sinfulness. They reminded people of the evil within themselves. Life was seen as an inner struggle against the selfish forces inside. These vocabularies made people aware of how their weaknesses manifested themselves and how to exercise discipline over them. These systems gave people categories with which to process savagery and scripts to follow when they confronted it. They helped people make moral judgments and hold people responsible amidst our frailties.
But we’re not Puritans anymore. We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness. So when something atrocious happens, people look for some artificial, outside force that must have caused it — like the culture of college football, or some other favorite bogey. People look for laws that can be changed so it never happens again.
Commentators ruthlessly vilify all involved from the island of their own innocence. Everyone gets to proudly ask: “How could they have let this happen?”
The proper question is: How can we ourselves overcome our natural tendency to evade and self-deceive. That was the proper question after Abu Ghraib, Madoff, the Wall Street follies and a thousand other scandals. But it’s a question this society has a hard time asking because the most seductive evasion is the one that leads us to deny the underside of our own nature.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 19, 2011 - 08:10am PT
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why do we allow the media to determine the "truth"?
Editorial by John Ziegler
Penn State vs. Syracuse Equals Massive Media Double Standard
11/18/2011
It is early yet, but from here it seems pretty clear that the media has decided that the allegations of sexual abuse against a current Syracuse basketball coach are not going to be treated with nearly the gravity as those against a former Penn State football coach. This double standard is particularly obvious when it comes to the scrutiny of the two head coaches "involved."
While in the media's world the Penn State scandal is far worse (Sports Illustrated, which didn't even do a news story on the grand jury indictments last week, suddenly called it on this week's cover the worst in college history), a look at some of the facts might tell a very different story.
Here is a starting tale of the tape:
Number of known victims who are accusing Jerry Sandusky of engaging in overt sex acts with them: 1
Number of known victims who are accusing Bernie Fine of engaging in overt sex acts with them: 2
Number of Sandusky sex victims to go public: 0
Number of Fine sex victims to go public: 2
Number alleged Sandusky victims directly connected to Penn State football program: 0
Number of alleged Fine victims directly connected to Syracuse basketball program: 2
Number of years Sandusky was on Penn State staff after the school became aware of allegations of inappropriate behavior: 1
Number of years Fine was on Syracuse staff after school become aware of allegations of inappropriate behavior: at least 8 (and still going)
Number of victims publicly called a liar by Joe Paterno: 0
Number of victims publicly called a liar by Jim Boeheim: at least 1
Number of times Paterno has publicly asked for prayers for the victims: several
Number of times Boeheim has publicly asked for prayers for the victims: 0
Number of positive statements sent out by Joe Paterno supporting Jerry Sandusky after the allegations became public: 0
Number of positive statements sent out by Jim Boeheim supporting Bernie Fine after the allegations became public: 1
Number of libraries at Penn State built by Joe Paterno: 1
Number of libraries at Syracuse built by Jim Boeheim: 0
Number of national championships won by Joe Paterno:2
Number of national championships won by Jim Boeheim: 1
Number of times Penn State football has been on NCAA probation: 0
Number of times Syracuse basketball has been on NCAA probation: 1
Number of major media calls for Paterno to be fired: infinite
Number of major media calls for Boeheim to be fired: 0
Yes, there have been indictments in the Penn State scandal (getting an indictment is notoriously easy) and yes there are far more anonymous accusers of “misconduct” (not sex) and one more apparent witness, but the similarities in the two cases are far more than the differences.
Despite that, there seems little doubt that the media will not presume Jim Boeheim had the same knowledge as they have with Joe Paterno and won’t hold him to a brand new standard that they have seemingly made up after the fact in order to justify an obsession with a very juicy story during a slow sports week.
Both Paterno and Boeheim might be “guilty” and both might be innocent. We just don’t know yet. But we do know that one is getting the benefit of the doubt that the other did not.
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 19, 2011 - 08:34am PT
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let me spell this out for you, dmt:
the media has decided penn state should be demonized even though the facts against syracuse seem to be much more damning, granted sans the graphic testimony
ziegler, on his blog, cannot compete with the broadcast and cable networks; however, it seems you equate a single blogger who has provided unreported facts with the entire popular media that, for whatever reason, has chosen to ignore those facts thereby manipulating their audiences toward their determined "truth"
aren't you even curious about why? or why, even now, you choose to criticize me rather than consider the new facts presented to you? or why your first reaction wasn't even greater outrage at syracuse and the media for seemingly trying to keep that story quiet?
as a great teacher once said: "i can explain it to you, but i can't make you understand it"
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bookworm
Social climber
Falls Church, VA
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Nov 19, 2011 - 08:35am PT
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No Man’s Land
Penn State’s moral adolescents
There is a famous if apocryphal tale of a Fleet Street theater critic covering the first night of a new play in the West End of London. At the end of the evening, he went to a public telephone and dictated his review. The following morning, a furious editor called him and demanded to know why he had neglected to mention that, midway through the third act, the theater had caught fire and burned to the ground. The critic sniffily replied that it was not his business to report fires, but that, if the editor had read more carefully, he would have observed that the review included a passage noting discreetly that the critic had been unable to remain for the final scenes.
That, more or less, is the position of those Americans defending the behavior of the Penn State establishment: It would be unreasonable to expect the college-football elite to show facility with an entirely separate discipline such as pedophilia-reporting procedures, and, besides, many of those officials who were aware of Jerry Sandusky’s child-sex activities did mention it to other officials who promised to look into mentioning it to someone else.
From the grand-jury indictment:
On March 1, 2002, a Penn State graduate assistant (“graduate assistant”) who was then 28 years old, entered the locker room at the Lasch Football Building on the University Park Campus on a Friday night. . . . He saw a naked boy, Victim 2, whose age he estimated to be ten years old, with his hands up against the wall, being subjected to anal intercourse by a naked Sandusky. The graduate assistant was shocked but noticed that both Victim 2 and Sandusky saw him. The graduate assistant left immediately, distraught.
The graduate assistant went to his office and called his father, reporting to him what he had seen. His father told the graduate assistant to leave the building and come to his home. The graduate assistant and his father decided that the graduate assistant had to promptly report what he had seen to Coach Joe Paterno (“Paterno”), head football coach of Penn State. The next morning, a Saturday, the graduate assistant telephoned Paterno . . .
Hold it right there. “The next morning”?
Here surely is an almost too perfect snapshot of a culture that simultaneously destroys childhood and infantilizes adulthood. The “child” in this vignette ought to be the ten-year-old boy, “hands up against the wall,” but instead the “man” appropriates the child role for himself: Why, the graduate assistant is so “distraught” that he has to leave and telephone his father. He is pushing 30, an age when previous generations would have had little boys of their own. But today, confronted by a grade-schooler being sodomized before his eyes, the poor distraught child-man approaching early middle-age seeks out some fatherly advice, like one of Fred MacMurray’s “My Three Sons” might have done had he seen the boy next door swiping a can of soda pop from the lunch counter.
The graduate assistant, Mike McQueary, is now pushing 40, and is sufficiently grown up to realize that the portrait of him that emerges from the indictment is not to his credit and to attempt, privately, to modify it. “No one can imagine my thoughts or wants to be in my shoes for those 30–45 seconds,” he e-mailed a friend a few days ago. “Trust me.”
“Trust me”? Maybe the ten-year-old boy did. And then watched Mr. McQueary leave the building. Perhaps the child-man should try “imagining” the ten-year-old’s thoughts or being in his shoes. Oh, wait. He wasn’t wearing any.
Defenders of McQueary and the broader Penn State protection racket argue that “nobody knows” what he would do in similar circumstances. In a New York Times piece headlined “Let’s All Feel Superior,” David Brooks turned in an eerily perfect parody of a David Brooks column and pointed out, with much reference to Kitty Genovese et al., how “studies show” that in extreme circumstances the human brain is prone to lapse into “normalcy bias.” To be sure, many of the Internet toughs bragging that they’d have punched Sandusky’s lights out would have done no such thing. As my e-mail correspondents always put it whenever such questions arise: “Yeah, right, Steyn. Like you’d be taking a bullet. We all know you’d be wetting your little girly panties,” etc.
For the sake of argument, let us so stipulate. Nevertheless, as the Canadian blogger Kathy Shaidle wrote some years ago: “When we say ‘we don’t know what we’d do under the same circumstances,’ we make cowardice the default position.”
I quote that line in my current book, in a section on the “no man’s land” of contemporary culture. It contrasts the behavior of the men on the Titanic who (notwithstanding James Cameron’s wretched movie) went down with the ship and those of the École Polytechnique in Montreal decades later who, ordered to leave the classroom by a lone gunman, meekly did as they were told and stood passively in the corridor as he shot all the women. Even if I’m wetting my panties, it’s better to have the social norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.
That’s the issue at the heart of Penn State’s institutional wickedness and its many deluded defenders. In my book, I also quote the writer George Jonas back when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were revealed to be burning down the barns of Quebec separatists: With his characteristic insouciance, the prime minister Pierre Trudeau responded that, if people were so bothered by illegal barn burning by the Mounties, perhaps he would make it legal. Jonas pointed out that burning barns isn’t wrong because it’s illegal, it’s illegal because it’s wrong. A society that no longer understands that distinction is in deep trouble. To argue that a man witnessing child sex in progress has no responsibility other than to comply with procedures and report it to a colleague further up the chain of command represents a near-suicidal loss of that distinction.
A land of hyper-legalisms is not the same as a land of law. I’ve written recently about the insane proliferation of signage on America’s highways — the “Stop” sign, the “Stop Sign Ahead” sign, the red light, the sign before the red light instructing you that when the light is red you should stop here, accompanied by a smaller sign underneath with an arrow pointing to the precise point where “here” is . . . One assumes this expensive clutter is there to protect against potential liability issues. It certainly doesn’t do anything for American road safety, which is the worst in the developed world. We have three times the automobile fatality rate of the Netherlands, and at 62 in the global rankings we’re just ahead of Tajikistan and Papua New Guinea.
But that’s the least of it: When people get used to complying with micro-regulation, it’s but a small step to confusing regulatory compliance with the right thing to do — and then arguing that, in the absence of regulatory guidelines, there is no “right thing to do.”
In a hyper-legalistic culture, Penn State’s collaborators may have the law on their side. But there is no moral-liability waiver. You could hardly ask for a more poignant emblem of the hollow braggadocio of the West at twilight than the big, beefy, bulked-up shoulder pads and helmets of Penn State football, and the small stunted figures inside.
— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. © 2011 Mark Steyn
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sandstone conglomerate
climber
sharon conglomerate central
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Nov 19, 2011 - 08:41am PT
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Joe Paterno was diagnosed with lung cancer. The wheels of karma are turning, turning. A belt and a closet are calling Sandusky's name.
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Brokedownclimber
Trad climber
Douglas, WY
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Nov 19, 2011 - 01:45pm PT
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While I was in Grad School in the early 70's, my better half was pursuing a MA in sociocultural anthropology. One of her profs wrote a paper describing football as a male homosexual ritual, and presented it to my then-wife's class. Everybody bent over--the quarterback bumfuking the center, etc. It was pretty explicit.
Athletic locker rooms can be filled with sexual inuendos, too.
Jes' sayin'.
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Reilly
Mountain climber
The Other Monrovia- CA
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Nov 19, 2011 - 02:47pm PT
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One of her profs wrote a paper describing football as a male homosexual ritual,
Yeah, whenever I'm watching football the wife goes into hysterics when she
hears the term "tight end".
"Why are they called that?"
"Uh, 'cause they're not a split end?"
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:19pm PT
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The f*#ker is guilty of 45 of 48 counts.
From Penn State to the State Pen.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:27pm PT
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hah! good one,
ding dong the bitch is dead,
what made him like that?
bad parents?
wrong dna?
he is us, we could be him,
do not condemn but try to understand,
for we are all responsible to some degree,
i shouted out who killed the kennedys, when after all it was you and me,
but foget all that bs, this guy was a monster left over from the monster days, a few survive, we must make sure that the monsters die before inflicting their attacks,
by speaking up, which did not happen at the mighty penn state, for football at penn state is holy,
sandusky is gonna get some protective custody, because that hole will be reamed if he goes to town with the san quentin crowd,
i didm 2 to 10myears in levvenworth, somthey gave me 2 to 11 and twelve worth,
nobody remembers that joke because it was graucho, who die3d 2 days after elvis so nobody cared,
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juar
Sport climber
socal
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:32pm PT
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so,
their going to dig joe up and drag his body through the street tonight?
to kind i say
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zBrown
Ice climber
chingadero de chula vista
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:36pm PT
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I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.
Adios Sandusky.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:39pm PT
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hid his his crap for 15 years,
his wife, i mean, is she not guilty?
how could she not know?
behind every good man is a good woman, so what did the monster marry>
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:40pm PT
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All it will take for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing.
That explains a lot.
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Dr.Sprock
Boulder climber
I'm James Brown, Bi-atch!
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:41pm PT
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just like jesus,
so how much tax money do i have to pay to support this freak until he kicks?
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dirtbag
climber
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Jun 22, 2012 - 11:42pm PT
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Well, the Romans tried.
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