Ok, so that means you think he didn’t have training to call the police.
In which area do you think he needed more training for this phone call:
- How to dial a phone
- How to speak into a phone
- The phone number of 911 (hint: it’s 9-1-1)
The difference is that Paterno wasn’t fired for fielding losing teams but for supposed moral turpitude. I do believe that if someone is to be fired for some moral failing - theft, embezzlement, sexual harassment, etc. - it should have to be demonstrated that that person was indeed guilty of that wrongdoing. Joe Paterno was summarily fired in a blatant CYA move by Penn State’s board of regents in capitulation to the hysteria surrounding this incident so as to make it appear they were taking a hard line on child abuse. Joe Paterno was a sacrificial lamb fired for no real wrongdoing of his own but because as the alleged most powerful man on campus, his head must roll whether he personally was guilty of any wrongdoing or not. And what I surely don’t want to see is people being fired for their alleged but unproven culpability in someone else’s wrongdoing.
SA, I doubt you will answer the above post, but how about answering this question:
You do know that anyone can call the police, right?
It doesn’t require any training or any legal standing.
Again you’re trying to be deceptive, and in the same way that didn’t work the last time you tried it. You asked me purely and simply if the word “fondling” ever had non-sexual connotations. You said nothing about Sandusky, which was your dodge last time, and you said nothing about “connotations,” which is your dodge this time. Then you chose to lecture me on the meaning of the word “standing” and you’ve been shown to be ignorant of that word’s other meanings as well. So as I suggested, you need to admit to yourself that your grasp of word meaning is limited and you need to stop exposing your shortcomings in this area by trying to lecture me in word meanings you clearly know very little about.
No, this is why I concluded you’re a pure and simple troll. This thread is about Sandusky and Paterno and your defense (which is what it amounts to) of boy-raping and enablement thereof. It’s never been about (why in the world would it be about?) alternate Olde English meanings of words that have nothing to do with the context here. What makes you a troll (or exposes you as one) is your garden variety retard belief that you can fool people by saying that “fondling” or “standing” can have alternate meanings in completely unrelated and irrelevant to this thread contexts (threadshitting, hijacking – check and check), then playing the three card monte game of using this inconsequential “fact” to imply that Paterno might have thought he was being told of hugging or patting on the head, or might have worried about his “standing” to confront Sandusky, on these actual facts.
RP nicely encapsulated your bullshit word games by juxtaposing your “had neither the training nor legal standing to do more” with your bitchy little word-parsing pretense that “I never said Paterno didn’t have standing to call the police.” You may think your trivial re-phrasings and Jesuitical distinctions between “standing to do more” and “standing to investigate” and “standing to call the police” or between “fondling” and “non-sexual fondling” and “sexual contact” are significant, meaningful, and (in your deluded sick too-much-time-on-your-hands troll mind) deserving of your many self-declared victory laps, but it’s only, I assure you, in your diseased mind that this is the case.
No one is saying it gives them a fee pass on ethical behavior. But people are going to react differently to behavior they only know of vaguely as child molestation and envision as behavior that is more skeevy than harmful, rather than involving oral and anal or penetrative genital sex. During the time Paterno was growing up most of those activities were regarded as perversions and even illegal, and moral people generally wouldn’t allow themselves to ponder them or listen to descriptions of them. I can assue you that every person I’ve known from my parent’s generation and the generation before would not begin to listen to tales of anal sex between a sixty something man and a ten year old boy, and if they were to think about it they’d probably regard it as virtually impossible because the relative difference in sizes would almost certainly create injuries that would result in horrific screams while happening and trips to tbe hospital or bleeding to death as a result, and therefore so unlikely as to be given short shrift. In other words, it’s one thing to know of investigations into child molestation and another thing entirely to know precisely what that molestation involves. My take on this matter is reflected in Paterno’s own words when he said that he likely wouldn’t have known what McQueary was talking about even if he’d been more specific about what he thought he’d seen. Such behavior simply seems so unlikely morally and impossible physically that someone like Paterno would have a hard time imagining it even while being told things that allude to it.
I’ll tell ya what I will do: you post an instance where I said that Paterno didn’t have the training or standing to call the police and I’ll answer your post above.
Sorry, Huerta, but you’re still showing your ass. In fact it’s glaring like a beacon in the night. The fact is that you asked me simply and without qualification whether the word “fondling” ever had a non-sexual meaning. I replied accurately and truthfully that it did and posted dictionary definitions to prove it. I also posted numerous ways in which children are fondled lovingly and innocently every day.
I also said at one point that Paterno lacked experience and legal standing to to investigate McQueary’s allegations, interrogate Sandusky, or to supervise Curley and Schultz’s investigation and make damn sure they got to the bottom of it. In response you initially attempted to parse “standing” in such a way that I was not allowed to use it :rolleyes:, and then aftet being shown you don’t know what you’re talking about, you shift gears and attempt to claim I said Paterno had no standing to call the police.
Once upon a time on this board, posters of integrity existed who would call people like you down for their dishonesty, stupidity and inability to think straight even though they were on the same side as you in the argument. They seem to have fled in the wake of the reshuffling of the Pit, and it’s a loss to the board that they aren’t still around.
You’re kidding, right? In this very thread people have called out other posters when they thought the personal attacks on you were too extreme.
I thought of answering each of your erroneous points individually but have decided that would only play into the compartmentalizing you’re doing to somehow justify/minimize unethical behavior. Instead I’ll just say this:
The elderly are not fragile, unworldly people who don’t understand cruelty, abuse and monstrous behavior. They’ve lived longer, experienced more & learned more than younger people. They may not have spoken as openly about such issues but they are no stranger to them. They are not incapable of learning and understanding when new information is presented. They are able to adjust their responses to illegal/immoral behavior to conform with cultural and societal norms.
Whether Joe Paterno chose not to know something or actively didn’t care doesn’t matter. He did not utilitize either a public venue to protect children or a private one (based on his influence and power).
I doubt you’ll ever get that.
Ok, there it is.
Oh, no, you’re fabricating and misconstruing his words, when he said that, he was only talking about the “interrogate” part of “call the cops or confront Sandusky,” (yes, I know “interrogate” was his invention), not the call the cops part, that was totally clear from his post, how dare you massively distort his clear and consistent message, and besides, he was just talking about a hypothetical case in which the law would require that you not call the cops, nothing to do with what Paterno could have done, and in sum, this proves that you are stupid and don’t understand words, which proves that Joe Paterno was a great man who would have been gravely wrong to call the cops, not that SA ever said that he couldn’t have done so, just that this all proves that McQueary was deeply uncertain whether he saw rape or lessons in showering, and when he said standing to do more, he was relying on OED meaning 3(c) of “more,” and in conclusion, Paterno couldn’t have done or known anything other than he did because it’s impossible to anally rape a child without his bleeding to death, or at least it was up till 2002, or at least that’s what all reasonable elderly people demonstrably thought, and in conclusion, SA is being persecuted as badly as Paterno, I mean Christ, I mean, is there a difference?
I think that covers the high points (and covers why whoever said we were feeding the troll was right, which I sort of knew at the time, just found these particular “arguments” so foul).
Back before the late '60s nobody blinked an eye if someone was a serial child molester and members of an institution with a vested interest in silence failed to do anything to stop it.
I blame liberals for making such a hoopla over this, frankly.
You seem to know a great deal about that subject. Care to tell us how you learned it?
It’s pretty fun to read his responses when he paints himself into a corner with contradictions, etc. I predicted a few responses correctly.
But this isn’t a standard applied in the real world. The University of Pittsburgh fired their head football coach only a couple of days after his arrest for domestic violence. Now, those charges hadn’t been proven - there hadn’t been a trial on those charges yet.
Doesn’t matter - the university was within its rights to make a personnel change in this area. Now, where other things enter into it, like tenure agreements and the like, those ought to be respected, and in light of that it should be noted that Paterno is still tenured faculty at Penn State, and is negotiating his retirement at this time.
Apart from some hurt feelings, there is nothing improper about the Paterno firing.
Oh, I’m sorry. But I’m sure you can find someone who’ll listen.
Well, exactly. When you get right down to it all SA is trying to say is that back in the day, society was ore civil and polite. Before the liberals ruined everything, a decent, upstanding white man could fuck a few kids in the ass and nobody thought anything of it. You certainly wouldn’t want someone to lose their job over it. That’s hippie talk.
Bad things happen when this guy tries to play lawyer and talk about standards of proof (I’m not sure what he means by “demonstrated” but given his predeliction for using words he doesn’t know the meaning of like “due process” and “legal standing,” I’m sure that given time he’d have blurted out “Paterno should not have been fired until a trial proved him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,” 'cause they also toss that phrase around on CSI).
There are basically two types of employment in the U.S. There’s at-will employment, in which the employer can fire you for any reason other than a few categories of discriminatory motives. And there’s contractual employment. Under which you can be fired “for cause,” with the employer having a lot of discretion as to what causes are adequate (hint – just about every non-discriminatory form of not being pleased with the way you’re doing or have done your job, your persona, your interaction with co-workers, etc.). I’ve been involved in at least two for-cause firings. There was no drawn out parliamentary procedure for either – a supervisor got multiple eyewitness accounts detailing misbehavior (they arrived by e-mail on Night X and Morning X + 1). Supervisor followed up with brief phone call to the principal victims of the misbehavior (in one case aggressive sexual propositions, in another, drunken belligerence, both toward co-workers at a work social function). Supervisor called offender in to office at 9:30 on Morning X + 2 and told him he was being let go effective immediately. Did not ask him what happened or give him a chance to let the “full evidence come out.” Wasn’t necessary, would have been a waste of time, there were more than enough data points to support summary termination of employment, and no alternative “hypotheticals or additional evidence” that could have justified the conduct. And, you’d never be able to run a business if you had to stop and hold some grand procedural trial every time a dumbass employee proves himself a dumbass and there are multiple corroborating data points/eyewitnesses confirming this.
Well, no surprise, but his “reasoning” or rationale or whatever you might dignify it with doesn’t even qualify as a coherent attack on liberals or hippies nor a coherent account of conservative policy.
Conservatives typically are pretty damn pessimistic about human nature and in fact roundly tar liberals with accusations of being dangerously unrealistic in thinking that human nature can be perfected (the whole disastrous and homicidal communist experiment comes, on a pretty mainstream conservative purist argument, from the fatal flaw of thinking that people used to be selfish and favor themselves and their families but that in the modern scientific era, we could all agree to get beyond that little artifact of human conduct). “Human nature has no history” is one of the fundamental tenets of modern conservatism. Which means (to quote an old conservative source) that there is nothing new under the Sun. If the Hebrews knew that 3,000 ago it’d be hubris (a sin!) for a conservative to claim that we’re only now learning about particular forms of human frailty and failings, and that people 20 or 50 or 100 years ago couldn’t possibly have been expected to understand human sexual perversions the way we do now (as I’ve noted before, we may have better data gathering and compilation to identify particular micro-traits shared by perverts, such as the specifics of grooming techniques used by pedophiles).
I talked about Leviticus. First time I opened that in fifth or sixth grade I was appalled at just how much perversion they could think of (for the purposes of banning it). Then I started looking at various states’ penal codes when the Supreme Court was considering (and IMHO mis-ruling on) the constitutionality of anti-sodomy laws. The fact that someone enacted a staute with a clause such as “sexual contact with a fowl” tells me that at some point (in the good old days, when these laws were drafted) right-thinking, conservative lawmakers, thought they had a real problem with all sorts of perversities, and suffered from no deficit in being able to envision all sorts of lurid perversion.
Now, we all know that he doesn’t really have a reasoned defense, just an ipse dixit hypothetical anecdote (there’s some solid proof!) that his elders “probably” wouldn’t have been able to imagine anal rape of a child, which off-the-cuff rank speculation he will later circle back and cite as fact that Paterno did not have the ability so to imagine, and, by implication, that perhaps it really isn’t possible so there’s no big deal in Paterno’s lame response because, you know, it’s just so improbable that anything really could have happened given the lack of bleeding to death.