I’ve read every post in this thread. How’s about we all just agree not to fuck minors up the ass from now on and move on?
Well, and take more than bare-minimum action when we hear reports of our coworkers doing that sort of thing.
But it’s OK to shower naked with them if you are an old perv – and carry a paper towel tube. That way, it’s impossible to fuck them.
Or something.
Well, except for the fact that the paper towel test could be tried by anyone with a sincere interest in finding out whether or not I might have a valid point and determine it’s credibility for themselves, and that no counter-evidence was presented to demonstrate its fallibility, you might have a valid point. As it is though, there’s really no comparison. Besides, everybody knows the point it illustrates is valid, and that’s why no one has tried to debunk it. A person simply cannot stand in the position that Sandusky was described as having been in by McQueary and get low enough to acheive and carry out copulatory movements two feet off the ground, especially if they’re 6’3" tall, as Sandusky is.
Remember when I said that mockage was the weapon of the lazy and the impotent? The fact that the paper towel tube is such a perfectly cromulent illustration of the difficulty involved in trying to carry off copulatory motion in the position described by McQueary is the reason so many of the thread’s posters have opted for mockage rather than debunkage, which should be easy except for the fact that it isn’t.
Reporting alleged on-campus offenses according to decades-long established practice is not doing the bare minimum. That was a dodge invented a decade after the fact as a way to pin blame on Joe Paterno, when in fact even the local police had had a hand in establishing the practice decades earlier of notifying campus authorities first so the local police wouldn’t be fielding multiple reports of the same crime from different parties. It’s both dishonest and specious to allege that Joe Paterno did the “bare-minimum” in reporting McQueary’s allegations to the Penn State administration.
I’m confident in the validity of my point, insofar as your explanation relied on extrapolations about the relative sizes and relative positions of Sandusky and the boy. It’s exactly as though you took the minimal description of McQueary’s that was widely quoted, took it as literal exact fact, then tried to, heh, poke holes in it.
My point exactly. It’s like those guys who maintain Oswald couldn’t have shot Kennedy because Wesley Frazier’s estimate of the size of the paper-wrapped package he said Oswald described as “curtain rods” was too small to be his rifle.
Well, I disagree with that, too, so any conclusions you draw off that premise will be unsupported in my view. Anyway, how the other posters treat you isn’t my concern, except when it’s funny, which it often is.
You poor soul.
I was being generous. Paterno’s actions strike me as well under the bare minimum. I suppose if McQueary’s report had been the minimalist version you repeatedly quoted earlier, and it was the only such hint Paterno received over the years he and Sandusky were associated with Penn State… I suppose I’d give him a pass.
Since this wasn’t the case… I don’t. The most generous I can be is that Paterno engaged in willful blindness and denial.
Well, it would hardly have done to deviate from from McQueary’s description of what he’d seen now, would it, especially since what he said was at the very heart of what everyone was so het up about! The entire point of the argument was to show that what McQueary said he saw was not consistent with what a rational examination would conclude was anal rape.
No, it’s nothing like that, exactly, because anyone can try it out for themselves. That was the whole point. They don’t have to rely on what I or anyone else tells them. They can just put themselves in the same position and give it the old college try. Then they’ll either fall on their ass or they’ll wind up squatting and spreading their feet and assuming a position completely different than that which McQueary described, and most of them won’t be 6’3" tall and 60-something years old either.
Why am I not surprised?
No het, here.
Well, I understand that was your goal…
Well, let’s assume I reported that I tried it and it was indeed possible (at least theoretically) and someone else reports that they tried it and had to assume a position other than the “same position” you describe McQueary describing. I’m not sure how it proves anything, one way or the other. I gather an assumption of sexual assault on a minor is at least suggested, even if one wants to debate the mechanical probabilities of anal penetration.
I wasn’t expecting otherwise.
I’m about to call it a night so we can resume this tomorrow. When we do I’ll want to know what this so-called “minimalist version” of McQueary’s testimony is that I’ve supposedly been quoting.
But for now, the only thing involving Jerry Sandusky and impropriety with a child happened two years prior to the shower room incident when he hugged a kid in the shower and the kid’s mother raised a stink about it. The local authorities investigated and found no law was broken and the matter was dropped. That was the only thing Paterno knew about prior to what he was told by McQueary. It’s worth noting also that Sandusky was no longer in the employ of the the football program at the time of either incident and no longer under Joe Paterno’s supervision or purview.
So, for all Paterno knew, this was just another hug in the shower and McQueary was over-reacting and seeing things that weren’t there like the previous kid’s mother appeared to do, or maybe he thought that perhaps Sandusky really was up to no good and that it ought to be looked into. Either way, he had no personal knowledge of what had happened, his football program was not at risk as Sandusky had not been a part of it for several years, and in following long-established protocol in reporting what McQueary told him to Penn State’s administration it most likely never occurred to him to to report it to anyone else.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me over a hundred times, shame on me.
I’m 6’3" and I just tried it. No problem at 2 feet. No problem at 18 inches. It’s very easy to do.
I’ll hit this post real quick and then I’m out.
The paper towel tube wasn’t originally intended as proof. It was suggested as an experiment whose purpose was to get people to face the mechanics and difficulties involved, which they had previously been dancing around and refusing to acknowledge, and secondarily to demonstrate the mechanics and difficulties themselves. It was only after a fairly lengthy amount of time had gone by and no one had seemed able to debunk the experiment although it was raising great ire that I began to refer to it as having proven my point. If you’ll recall not too far upthread I mentioned that this was probably an error and that I should have said merely that it was only “virtual proof.” 
So it really wouldn’t matter what you or anyone else said about your particular effort. The main thing would be to get you to look at how difficult it would be to engage in sexual activity in that position and then consider whether the position you had to get into and the effort you had to expend seemed to match that of Sandusky as described by McQueary.
McQueary testified at the trial that he saw Sandusky “standing behind a boy who was propped up against a wall.” I take this to mean that Sandusky was standing with his feet together and at roughly his full height. When you were pumping away 18 inches to 2 feet off the ground, were your feet together and were you in a position that Mike McQueary would have been likely to describe as “standing?”
Okay, Auto, now I’m out!
I’m impressed by the level of detail your brain allows you to extract from an eyewitness account that some other portion of your brain is firmly convinced is completely mistaken and unreliable.
As always, very entertaining.
Well, it was quite a while back - probably 40 or 50 pages. [checking…]
Ha! It wasn’t even in this thread, but in the related thread titled Pitting ALL those who are Ok with a man watching a child being raped, which ran for a mere 126 posts (pfft, lazy bastards!) last November-January. You were there, and advancing the idea (which ran a close second to the cardboard-tube test for bizarrely inappropriate suggestions) of lining up 100 boys and surveying them if they’d prefer naked hugs over being sodomized.
The eight-word phrase I couldn’t quite remember was “fondling or doing something of a sexual nature”. At a fast check, you used those words or a close paraphrase three times before I noted it, as I found it to be a tad suspiciously specific, i.e. someone is asked “the witness says you killed that man with a blue hammer, is that true?” and responds “no, I did not kill that man with a blue hammer” as though a narrowly-constructed denial implies complete innocence.
Well, then that should have been sufficient for Paterno to act on behalf of Penn State’s reputation to completely disassociate the school from Sandusky, as the allegation was that Sandusky was still using Penn State athletic facilities to assault children. I rather doubt Paterno was without influence in this matter. At best, at the very very best and most generous interpretation (i.e. assuming that these two incidents truly were all Paterno could have known about Sandusky’s activities), Paterno turned a blind eye.
Of course, I have the benefit of hindsight in saying this, and cheerfully acknowledge such. Paterno’s culpability is the tiniest sliver (arguably smaller even than McQueary’s, who was a direct witness) compared to Sandusky’s guilt, and I can understand his hoping that if things stayed quiet, it would all just go away somehow.
Well, that goes to my long-ago questions of: “So you’re assuming that eight-word summary (“fondling or doing something of a sexual nature”) was the sum total of McQuery’s report? That Paterno asked absolutely no follow-up questions whatsoever?” Paterno sounds like kind of an idiot, in that case. This was a serious allegation, after all. If McQueary was lying or grossly mistaken, it would be better to find out quickly, would it not, lest he repeat the statement elsewhere and embroil the school in a slander case?
In any case, we can never know for certain what Paterno thought about the situation, of course. The interpretation I think best fits the evidence as that he chose not to think about the situation at all, which is actually the exact same position I held back in January. Heck, silence worked for nearly a decade before the whole thing blew up; it could have lasted quite a while longer. There’s a good chance Paterno might still be alive and coaching, and Sandusky still free and raping, and what a lovely noble image that is with nothing bad abut it at all as far as the public knew.
So someone actually DOES do this little “experiment”, finds no problem, and Starving Artist STILL finds some other way to nitpick it away. Hmmmm…those goalposts must be on the dark side of the moon by now.
Reading that smaller thread gave me a chuckle, though:
2000 posts wasn’t even close to the end of this train-wreck. By the way, the thing digs is calling “fucked up” is, need I say it, Starving Artist.
Why? There’s nothing that specific in the testimony - this bolded bit is entirely your own invention.