FWIW, while I agree with you that people have been lying about your positions here, it’s not because you’re WINNING!!!.
Part of it has to do with the fact that many of the people you’re arguing with are not too bright and much of this discussion is simply over their heads.
But the larger part has to do with the fact that you’re simply not LOSING!!! by a margin that would be consistent with the over-the-top rhetoric that has emanated from these blowhards throughout this thread. To maintain consistency with that rhetoric, these people can’t just win, they have to win in a very big way, and if you can come off as even semi-reasonable it would be a blow for them. So they need to distort your words to be consistent with their attacks.
I don’t know if that counts as WINNING!!!, though.
This is another one of these comically false assertions. Where do you get this stuff? When did liberals or gays seek to “champion anal sex”, or bring it into the mainstream of public consciousness? Do you really, honestly believe that most straight people didn’t know about (or perform) sodomy before the last few decades?
I seriously doubt that Joe Pat had the hiliarious lack of knowledge about human anatomy and human sexuality that you do. So, so much of this paragraph is incredibly factually incorrect- especially the anatomical stuff (as are pretty much all of your posts about anatomy and human sexuality). I think you just don’t really understand how much of sex between humans works.
And Joe Pat didn’t need to know exactly what happened in that shower, or foresee ten years of abuse- he just needed to follow up, and inform law enforcement. That’s it- he should have thought “a child may be being abused in a PSU facility- I need to make absolutely sure it was false, or that no more children are abused in this way”. That’s how a moral human person would respond.
You’d be surprised at what I know, and for how long I’ve known it. But I people I know post here so I don’t get into it. Still, the point is what Paterno likely knew, and not, as you so desperately keep trying to change the focus to, what I may know.
And I think that most of the rest of your thinking is just as wrongheaded as this.
No, a moral person would realize that the situation calls for address by people more well versed in how to handle the situation than he is, and therefore he would follow prescribed practice and report the allegations to people whose experience and authority place them in the proper position to know how to deal effectively with what he’d learned. Which he did and they did, based upon what they knew at the time. The position of you and your cohorts is all ten-years-after-Monday-morning-quarterbacking based on what you think they should have known after the fact. It’s a nonsensical position, antithetical to all logic and sense of fair play. It is ascribed to by people who are simply out for blood and who grasping at any old straw in order to justify it.
I know it, you know it, everybody knows it. The rub comes from my exposing it to daylight, and that’s why everyone on your side thinks I’m a bad guy. I’m supposed to just go along with the nonsensical illogic that any good person properly opposed to child abuse would be happy to countenance, because after all it’s in service to the good fight, and only someone who doesn’t care about kids would make an issue of the fact that these guys truly didn’t know and had no way to predict that Sandusky was doing harm to any children, serious or otherwise.
But bullshit is bullshit in my eyes, and if you can’t find a way to condemn Joe Pa (and it’s Joe Pa, dumbass, not Joe Pat, which sounds like some shit-kicker redneck from a roadside bar in Texas somewhere) that stands up to reason and reality, then you simply ain’t got no way to condemn Joe Pa and your reasoning about who cares about children and who doesn’t is just plain idiocrity. Which of course is in perfect keeping with the rest of your thinking. You and your cohorts, that is.
At this point, I’m starting to think I have more respect for Paterno than Starving does. I’m prepared to accept that Paterno crossed his fingers, lived in denial, followed the bystander effect, etc. This wouldn’t make him a shining beacon of morality, but his was typical (if unfortunate) human behaviour.
Starving’s consistent interpretation, in contrast, is that Paterno was some kind of idiot who deserves a pass because he just didn’t know any better.
No, he was simply a good man whose almost sole focus in life was on his football team, his university and his family and who was blessedly ignorant of the…ahem…ins and outs of sexual perversion.
I’m not the person likely to be swayed by calling any form of ignorance “blessed”, but I assume Paterno was Catholic. Was he completely unaware of the well-publicized abuses going on in that organization such that the suggestion of similar abuses happening in his own were still utterly unfathomable?
Besides, if his focus was so “sole” that the sexual abuse of children on the Penn campus just. does. not. compute… well, that’s hardly praise for Paterno, wot? I suppose you could say he was a good football coach, university staffer[sup][/sup], and family man… but also a lousy human being.
[sup][/sup] His short-term willful blindness may have helped the school temporarily, and if Sandusky had died circa 2004 and his victims and McQueary remained silent, we might never have heard about it at all, but the long-term effect certainly wasn’t a plus for Penn. Paterno did them no favours.
So, you not only shut your ears to the conversations around you as you grew up, you clearly never took Phys Ed in high school where jokes about such things were pretty much endemic. The notion that a guy who coached football for multiple decades was not familiar with the concept of “buttsex” is just ludicrous. I realize that you have to take that position to maintain your stance in this discussion, but I doubt that even you really believe what you are posting.
I agree that anal sex is probably offputting to a lot of guys, but your claim was that Paterno would not even have considered the possibility due to the delicate times in which he was raised. This means that you claim he was too ignorant to have read The Thin Red Line (1962) (or much of anything else by Mailer), and so out of touch with his players that he never heard them engage in typical jock humor for the entire length of his tenure as coach. He also managed to miss all the publicity about “day care sex rings” that permeated the news media in the mid 1980s. Heck, all the hoopla about Rock Hudson occurred 13 years prior to the 1998 incident. Where was Paterno, buried in the basement reading Xs and Os? You appear to be saying that Paterno was so devoted to his football that he was completely unaware of any events in the outside world, (or even his own locker room). I guess that would be a solid argument if one believed that jocks are as dumb as the stereotypes would portray.
Then, despite your backpedaling, you very definitiely made the claim, (which you have now repeated in a slightly wishy-washy form), that it was “liberals” and the “internet” that brought both anal sex and hysteria over pedophilia to the attention of the American public.
How were the multiple displays of public panic in the early 1980s a result of a technology that did not make it into the homes of the majority of Americans for nearly 20 years? (And why would you portray a program like To Catch A Predator–a clearly conservative leaning Law-and-Order mindset show–as part of the “liberal” movement?)
I, for one, have made no claim that you have disparaged either gays or the internet. I simply pointed out that you have, (as part of a persistent pattern of behavior), chosen to make anachronistic claims in order to bolster your odd world view that all evil comes from “liberal” ideas even when the ideas have preceded the “liberal” events.
The odd blog piece posted by NoLittlePlans follows the same trend. The author makes a point of claiming that no evidence was presented that the school administration had ever coerced anyone into silence. He carefully ignores the testimony of multiple people that they were quite aware that any action that caused the program to be cast in a bad light would result in the loss of their jobs and their alienation from the community. (This is the sort of traditional way to keep things quiet–a method employed by “conservatives” for centuries and only adopted by “liberals” more recently, following the conservative lead.)
Can you clarify your position for me? Do you think like SA that Paterno did all he could and his response to hearing the report from McQueary was reasonable?
One can be aware of abuses without being aware of all the gory details and without automatically assuming that whenever one hears of any sort of child abuse at all it ipso-facto means an equivalent damage to all it happens to. The relationship between the Catholic priests and the boys they harmed was completely different than the one Sandusky had with the boys in his charity, as was the nature of their time together. Plus Sandusky’ time with them was brief. Plus much of the harm done by the priests had had decades-long impact on its victims. Combine all of that with the relatively scant wrongdoing Paterno was aware of with Sandusky and there’s no equivalence to be drawn. He did what he thought was the right thing to do and turn it over to the proper authorities to investigate and deal with, whereupon he then went so far as to join in on a plan to try to force Sandusky into treatment. He clearly wanted to do all he could to do his part to get the problem stopped. He just didn’t realize the extent of it or how far it would go in the future.
This is all readily apparent to those of us lacking the lynch mob mentality, and it will become more and more apparent to others as passions die down and reality sets in as more evidence comes to light.
Penn State’s Board of Regents fucked up majorly. They just couldn’t immolate themselves and the university they were charged with managing quickly enough. They bought into the hysterical press and lynch mob narrative 100% and have virtually ruined that school for at least the next twenty years. I kept expecting them to pull a Dobby and put on a demonstration of public hand-ironing. In time their actions will be seen as extraordinarily foolish and unnecessary and Joe Pa as the innocent victim of an unthinking and lustful rush to judgement.
And I will be smiling gloatfully as it all goes down.
Why the fuck can’t you people comprehend words in front of your very eyes?
I never said Paterno did “all he could.” Nobody short of executing Sandusky did “all the could!” :rolleyes:
What I said was that he did exactly what he supposed to do under the circumstances, which included not involving himself in the investigation and not pestering everyone afterward to make sure they were taking what he had decided were the appropriate measures with Jerry Sandusky.
A dubious claim, at best. Besides, the point isn’t that Paterno being Catholic offers him any special insight into the mechanics pf pedophilia, just that concept of man/boy abuse couldn’t have been as alien to him as you suggest.
Unless, of course, Paterno was rather stupid.
Anyway, I’m not eager to single out Paterno for any special complicity. There are three or four other people involved with comparable guilt. Were Paterno still alive, his fate would correspond with theirs.
Don’t know why you’ve chosen to post this as I’ve never said Paterno had no idea that man/boy abuse existed. What I’ve said is that I don’t think he knew of man/boy anal sex. Therefore his knowledge of the mechanics (and abilities on the part of the child) would come into play, and I’m thinking it’s highly doubtful he would have learned of those simply by virtue of having been a Catholic and attending services at church.
ETA: And of course he wasn’t stupid. No one gets to be a big-time college football coach by being stupid. Your position that he would have to be either fully versed in man/small boy butt-fuckage or be a dumbass merely reveals the strength of your bias and the lengths you’ll go to in order to support it.
Another demonstration of your superhuman powers- not only do you know for a fact that a certain event in that shower did not take place, you know for a fact that Paterno had a childlike naievete about sexual matter. I think it’s patently absurd that an adult male (especially an intelligent one like Mr. Paterno) would be so ignorant, but I’ll sarcatstically defer to your superhuman powers.
I hope you aren’t in a position of authority. If you had reason to believe there was a possibility (not a certainty) that a child in the facility you worked might have been sexually abused, I would hope you would do more than Joe did. But based on what you’ve posted so far, I’m inclined to believe that you’d pass it up the chain and wipe your hands of it.
I learned the concepts of responsibility and accountability in my service in the Navy- and it was most strongly demonstrated in the aftermath of a collision on the submarine I served on. Late one night we hit a freighter (or more accurately they hit us). One officer on duty as the Navigation Supervisor (responsible for navigating the ship around fixed hazards like shallow spots and undersea mountains) knew that the submarine might be dangerously close to the freighter, but he said nothing, because he thought his only duty was to keep the ship safe from fixed nav hazards. He was properly (and strongly) disciplined for this- he could have kept the ship safe if he had spoken up (even though he wasn’t certain- he just didn’t want to speak up). Even though he wasn’t responsible for the collision, he was accountable- because he had the knowledge, even if not certain, to prevent it.
That officer (a friend of mine) should have spoken up. Luckily, no one died. And obviously, no one was abused. If only Joe Paterno had had such a lesson in his life…
Nothing childlike about it. Most men during most of the countries history were quite likely blessedly unaware and unthinking of such things as man/boy butt-fuckage. Or man/man butt-fuckage for that matter.
Ignorance and intelligence are two quite separate things, and all of us are ignorant of far more than we’ll ever know regardless of how smart we are. If you were smart you’d know that.
And it would be a good idea for you to make deferring to my judgement your standard operating procedure. You’ll find that you’re right almost all of the time. It’ll be like a whole new world for you.
