I’ll admit, this was originally my thought. I could see how McQueary might be scared of losing his job, or of reprisals from Sandusky.
However, there is not one shred of evidence that he was afraid of losing his job, or of Sandusky. All the evidence tells us is that he was too fucking stupid to attempt to stop a child rape that was in progress, or to tell the appropriate people about it afterwards.
Seriously, on what planet is the head coach the right person to tell about a rape? If you were at work in an office and saw one co-worker raping another, would you call human resources or their supervisor? Or would you maybe, just maybe, call the fucking police?
This was one of my first thoughts. How fucking brainwashed/braindead do you have to be to think you owe it to your boss to report child rape to him instead of calling the cops yourself or, if you are of the large college QB build, getting the kid the fuck out of there and then calling the cops? I don’t know how he can live with that picture burned into his brain for the rest of his life knowing he walked away.
And yet, for some reason the law as written specifies reporting to one’s supervisor as one of the proper courses of action.
Even more so in this case, as JP did not himself witness anything and could only relay what he had been told by someone else.
I appreciate that there is a contrary view in this matter, and there are intelligent people who disagree with me. But for the most part, those calling for heads are nothing more than a frenzied lynch mob. In other times and places it would be obvious to these people that we need to burn the heretics, hang the witches, lynch the nigger, blacklist the commie-lover etc. etc. And it would be obvious to all these people that this is clearly the only proper course of action and it’s amazing that anyone could disagree about how forcefully we need to deal with these dangerous threats. And look how everyone agrees with us - it’s only a few fools or evil people who disagree.
As previous, IMO JP did nothing wrong (unless he knew more detail than what’s been made public so far). What’s immoral was for the university to fire a guy to whom they owed so much and for so long over some passing outrage.
But them’s the breaks for people in public life. Public opinion is fickle. I once saw a good line from a British politician whose career was brought down by some scandal. He said “it was a tempest in a teapot, but in politics we ride paper boats”. Doesn’t make it right, but that’s how it goes.
Luckily I am not banking my integrity on your ability to judge people. Apparently I’d have to win a few more football games, be fearful of public accusations of protecting a child rapist, and perform the bare minimum legally required when reporting said child rapist to my superiors for you to really have respect for me.
To the extent that a sad, sad thread like this is winnable, you have done so. I really wish this were any kind of overreaction by the Trustees. It is not.
Yes, the repeated butt-fucking of 10-year-old children is just a bit of passing piffle, tempest in a teapot, nothing to really be upset about. Certainly not as important as PENN STATE FOOTBALL. Certainly nobody would have the moral responsibility to stop this from happening when they see a known predator parading his prey around campus openly.
Well, shit. Nobody told me it was THIS kinda pitting. And here I am wearing my combat fatiques and fuck you boots. Let me go change into my short short skirt and red fuck me pumps.
Least some little shit rioters got maced so a tiny bit of justice is leaking out. Bet those little shits get IDed from the videos too. Hope some parents receive some large bills in the near future and some students see the inside of the big house.
No I didn’t. My question to you is WHY they would all engage in a cover up if they all KNEW he was guilty, and was continuing to assault kids?
But this doesn’t make a whole lot a sense. While possible, it fails on a number of levels to actually succeed in the goals you put forth. Perhaps if they all thought it was an isolated incident, but they continued to let the guy you assume they KNEW to be a brazen pedophile to continue to work with kids on their campus. If people plan to sweep something under the rug, they usually try to actual SWEEP it under the rug. They don’t just pretend like it never happened while allowing it to continue to happen since there is NO plausible deniability after they were told about it.
But the relationship between him and the GA, and that of his former right hand man is not really comparable. I suppose you could say I overstated the dearth of contact between the two, but the point still stands.
Common sense would lead one to believe he DIDN’T know seeing as there is little benefit, and lots of downside, to him ignoring it. The foreseeable “media shitstorm”, and the brazen, high-profile nature of the attacker is a large reason WHY someone like Paterno would not try to engage in a cover-up.
Per your own link, one officer involved in the 1998 allegation stated the following:
Why would the guy lie? Why would he knowingly allow a monster to remain free? I think what everyone seems to be getting worked up over is a pretty common blindness most have coupled with a lack of all the relevant information. If we are just lynching people for placing seemingly well deserved trust in the wrong people, I am not sure we should feel comfortable associating with others at all. As I said before, at WORST, Paterno is guilty of doing what 47% of people do. The question should be less about Paterno, and more about why people make such costly mistakes. If you attend to that issue, you will do far more good than tearing down a generally well-respected institution, and forcing a generally well-respected football coach to not coach his last game. As if that really matters in the grand scheme of things. People should really get some perspective.
If I were going to make a bet, I would say this is totally bogus. We had a similiar case in Nebraska a few years ago, and it was a complete hoax tacked on to a credit union failure.
That said, I would never have dreamed that ANYTHING that has come out of State College this week would have ever happened, so anything is possible. Not bloody likely, but possible.
I am prepared to cut Joe Pa a little slack for one reason: there was absolutely no reason he should have been involved in the first place. McQueary should have gone straight to the police. Still, once Joe Pa was involved, he made a complete pig’s breakfast of things.
There is no question that Paterno’s actions in reporting the rape to his supervisor were compliant with the requirements of the law.
There is also no question that tweeting “God, I hate them niggers and kooks” is not illegal. Does that mean a coach- even a long-serving, beloved one- shouldn’t be fired if that shows up on his Twitter page?
He’s not being fired because he broke the law. He’s being fired because he did something stupid. Let me ask you what I asked Starving: if you witnessed the rape of a child at work, or were told that one of your employees was raping a child the previous day, would you report the matter to your supervisor* and forget about it?
*I’m being generous here by categorizing the athletic director as Paterno’s supervisor for the purpose of this analogy. It should be clear by now that Paterno answered to the trustees and no-one else.
College students can be such dumbasses. Most of us manage to vent our dumbassery without committing felonies though. I’m reminded of this guy from the UK student protests last year - there need to be consequences. If they aren’t, it’ll happen again, and worse.
And yet they did. Demonstrably. It’s not rational but people aren’t, especially in the face of this sort of thing.
BTW, my response to the riot at Penn State was…is it Tuesday? I witnessed far bigger riots during my time there. IIRC the biggest one was because allegedly some woman was standing at a window topless, then refused to flash the crowd again as it got larger. Yes I know that previous sentence makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, but neither do most actions involving college students and alcohol.
I know this post was made an eternity ago, but I think it reflects a point that had been ignored by a lot of people in this discussion—both on this board and elsewhere.
There is a lot of armchair quarterbacking of morality going on. It’s easy to talk a big game when it comes to what you would do in a given situation. But the fact is that real people in real situations are notorious for making fantastically bad decisions. The right answer may be clear to an impartial observer, or even clear to the person in question a long time after the fact. But when confronted by a situation like what McQueary walked into, the number of people who would actually do the right thing is far less than the number of people who think they would do the right thing. That’s because at that particular moment, mitigating circumstances or sheer shock can make people rationalize action (or inaction) that is at complete odds with their idealized standard for behavior. We all like to think we won’t stand idly by when someone is getting victimized…that we’ll stop the rape or tackle the purse snatcher. But if we all believe that, why does the opposite happen so often?
The fact that it’s just human nature doesn’t excuse it. And it doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t be made to suffer the consqeuences for their inaction. But it does explain how it can happen, why it may have happened in the PSU case, and why it happens elsewhere so regrettably often.