TW for rape-apologist bullshit about the Penn State cases.
Dennis Prager has a strong entry!
Mr. Prager wishes to inform us that the really important bit about Penn State covering up the rape of children is not, you know, Penn State covering up the rape of children. No! The really important bit is that California is requiring schools to teach about people of color, poor people, and LGBT people occasionally.
“Wait, Ozy,” you say, “those two things have absolutely nothing to do with each other!” Yeah, well, that sort of logic is why you, O Reader, are not currently a Worst Person In The World candidate.
First, Mr. Prager objects to the NCAA decision stripping Mr. Paterno of his wins:
Before explaining why this decision is morally wrong, I should note that I consider what Jerry Sandusky did to be an indescribable evil.
You will notice here a perfect example of the Rape Is Bad But defense. It is a little known fact that if you say “rape is bad” you can say whatever rape-apologist bullshit you like and no one is allowed to complain because you made the trite and obvious statement that rape is wrong. It doesn’t matter that you victim-blamed, apologized for abusers, minimized the crime of rape, or otherwise contributed to the rape culture that allows predators to victimize people again and again. You said rape is bad! You cannot possibly be a rape apologist!
However, Mr. Prager continues, his indescribable respect for the truth means that he cannot help but object to this part of the punishment. You see, the NCAA is officially lying! This is the worst thing ever! Is it as bad as covering up child rape?
The lesson the NCAA is teaching young people — that history and truth don’t matter if enough powerful people don’t want them to matter — can be as injurious to society as the cover-up was to the victims of Sandusky.
It is, in fact, as bad as covering up child rape.
But God, he said that raping children is an indescribable evil! He couldn’t possibly be a rape apologist!
Here’s a few points for your consideration, Mr. Prager:
1) It is not like the NCAA is memoryholing the truth. They aren’t Minitrue. Everyone knows that Penn State won those games. Everyone also knows that they were stripped of those wins because they allowed child rape.
2) Those wins are, in a sense, illegal, because they were achieved while their assistant coach was a known child molester and while all the coaches were committing conspiracy to cover up child rape.
3) BullSHIT you’re “concerned about the student athletes.” The student athletes know they won those games. They can brag about them! It doesn’t change the actual truth, it just changes the officially recorded stats.
4) If you look at your life and say “football, preventing child rape, which is more important?” and then pick football, you deserve to lose the fucking games you won because you made that morally vapid decision. It’s not just motivation (because now everyone knows that if they cover up child rape to protect their football program they’ll lose the wins they got), it’s poetic fucking justice.
5) I would be perfectly happy to give Mr. Paterno his wins back if, in exchange, every time the NCAA or an affiliated entity refers to anyone who covered up the rape of children at Penn State, they affix “who aided child rape” to their name. “Joe Paterno, who aided child rape, is the winningest coach in college football history.” Mr. Prager, you believe in the truth, right? You’d be happy to agree to this plan, right?
And then we get to Mr. Prager’s real subject of ire, namely, the fact that we’re teaching history courses about people who aren’t WASP men.
In California… elementary- and high-school students, by law, must learn about the contributions to California and America of women, African Americans, Mexican Americans, entrepreneurs, Asian Americans, European Americans, American Indians, and labor… gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people.
No, I can’t imagine why any of those would be important. Clearly no one needs to know about the systematic commission of genocide against Native Americans. Or slavery, the biggest political issue for a century, that directly lead to a civil war (not to mention an entire race of people having their human rights horrifically violated). Or the concentration camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II. Or the reasons we have a minimum wage, the weekend, an end to child labor, and employer-based health care.
…Maybe the reason that Prager wants us to only talk about rich WASP men is that if we talk about literally anyone else the rich WASP men end up coming off looking like shit?
I mean, Black History Month and Women’s History Month are usually pretty bullshit. Five years of projects on A Famous Black American and A Famous Female American? Please. But that’s not because black people and women have no history, it’s because we’re too cowardly to teach kids how it actually went down. I mean, sheesh, they might realize that those in authority aren’t always right!
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My mind is broken atm, but how were the win’s illegal? I’m a lil confused as to why they removed the wins, did the players have some advantage?
I’m also wondering, will this hurt the current n past players career’s? Of course it’s insanely bad what happened with the abuse but I’d say it’s also bad for the players (who I presume are innocent unless I have missed something) to be penalized.
If I discovered any of my coaches were raping children back when I played, I’d support even harder action. Wipe the scum from memory or scream from the mountaIntops their name and crimes. If the players are so petty as to think what’s changed on paper changes real life, they shouldn’t be allowed to even play jacks.
I have no qualms with the institution, coaches etc getting hammered hard by the law but I just hate to see the players get harmed any more, if that makes sense. But as the others say, talent scouts will probably realize their skill without needing the official stats so they should get by fine.
Toysoldier has a post about the punishment of Penn State from NCAA : http://toysoldier.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/ncaa-punishes-penn-state/
The win’s are not illegal, bit they are being struck from official records. That and other aspects of the punishment will mean that it will be harder for Penn State to attract and keep talent. Players who did play in that period will lose the numbers of wins in their official statistics, but I believe any talent scout worth their money will know about this and they will know how good the player is regardless of the “lack” of any official statistics.
I hope you’re right about the talent scouts. It’d be sad to see the players harmed even more for the actions of the institute. The institute of course should be punished.
The idea, I think, is that the coach should have been in prison during those games, and that the cover-up allowed him to continue managing the team, which improved their performance (relative to his going to prison). It’s important to deny people who seek advantage (like the continue role of a coach in managing a team) through illegal means (like covering up child rape) to be denied the effect of that advantage.
Ah ok, thanks for the reply. I just find it sad that the players may be harmed in the action. I hope the innocent players are still able to play their game somehow, whilst the institution gets hammered hard.
Sorry, but I don’t agree that the wins should be obviated. Not everyone who played for the team, or perhaps even worked for it in all cases, knew about this. Child molestation and rape are horrible, but the hysterical (if social) reaction (which this is) distances these things and demonizes them even more in our minds. That’s why things like this can be significant social problems and moral panics at the same time. Let’s focus on treating or incapacitating the Sanduskies and the non-reporters in an adult way.
How exactly does striking the wins from the record cause anybody to suffer? The players who went pro aren’t going to be cut or go unsigned because they’ve suddenly not participated in a single college win. In general, it’s a pretty safe assumption that the extent to which NFL management cares about whether you were on a winning team in college is zero. What the NFL cares about is whether you’re a football player who is likely to perform in the NFL. Winning games in college is not that well correlated with that; if it was, Eric Crouch would have taken at least one snap in a regular season NFL game (instead of NFL Europe and the CFL). The only modern cases, really, where college success led to someone being signed in the NFL are like Joe Germaine, who was likely signed by the Bengals in the hope that he would sell tickets to Ohio State fans. In the unlikely event that the Steelers or Eagles need help selling tickets and sign a PSU player, the fans that would be targeted by that signing are going to remember that player’s PSU performance anyway.
The same is likewise true for those who are parlaying their being a Nittany Lion into better insurance sales or whatever: for potential clients that are PSU fans, they’ll remember the wins anyway and the benefit is as it was. Post-Sandusky, there may well be some number of people who when hearing that the insurance salesman is a Nittany Lion will decide not to buy insurance from him. Would any of those people have been willing to buy insurance if the wins hadn’t been vacated but since they’ve been vacated they’re not buying insurance?
The only party that’s remotely harmed, as far as I can see, by the vacation is the institution of the Penn State Nittany Lions Football Program. They have to officially show a record of zero wins for over a decade (a worse record than Prairie View A&M back in the 90s). Whether that’s really harmful, I don’t know, but if it is, the fact remains that the program covered up the rape of kids. That the program has changed its personnel since then is immaterial.
The vast majority of Enron employees weren’t engaged in the malfeasance that led to the company imploding and them losing their jobs. Should Enron have been bailed out (i.e. not punished) because the failure of Enron would harm people who hadn’t done anything wrong?
Should a murderer not be sentenced to prison because zie has kids at home who will suffer from not having their parent around? Or perhaps because it means that zir employer will have to spend time and money hiring and training a replacement, prison is too harsh.
Any punishment will cause harm to innocent parties. To categorically argue against punishment on the basis that innocent people will be harmed is to categorically argue against punishment. Attempting to quantify the harm to innocents vs. the target of the punishment and deciding that punishments which cause more harm to the former than the latter are ill-advised is something different.
You wrote “Not everyone who played for the team, or perhaps even worked for it in all cases, knew about this”, as opposed to something like “The extent to which this harms innocent players, or perhaps even innocent people who worked for it, who didn’t even know about this outweighs the harm to the institution and so this punishment should be rejected.” That you chose the former phrasing, unless you’re in the habit of writing stuff you don’t mean (in which case learning how to write what you think is perhaps advised), indicates that you were making the categorical argument and thus arguing that Sandusky shouldn’t have gone to jail (because now that he’s in jail, the waitress at the diner he sometimes has breakfast at will miss out on his tips and maybe even not be able to pay the rent and become homeless, all because we decided that Jerry Sandusky is a criminal who belongs in jail!).
The problem is that, in this society, group punishment (unless every member of the group is actually guiilty) is something we don’t do. We have bondaries in law, and, when institutions practice sanctions, we expect them to act in accordance with our legal culture. As we should. Massive horrified reactions by organizations always have a post-hoc CYA aspect I’m suspicious of, as well. They usually have the subtext: “the buck stops one level below me.” I do think Sandusky should go to jail (or get treatment, or both.) Since you ended your screed with some non-sequitor ad hominems, I need to respond. I always say what I mean. (I’d like you to tell me what you mean by a categorical argument. I guarantee you that what you wrote does not logically follow.) Your use of novel pronouns is unappealing.
“How exactly does striking the wins from the record cause anybody to suffer?”
Because the entire team has effectively been blamed for what went on. The whole thing smacks of a large organisation scrambling to “react” and “do something” when, really, the only things worth doing have either been done, or should have been done years ago and now it’s too late.
” Or the concentration camps that imprisoned Japanese Americans during World War II.”
No. You are not going to compare the temporary removal of Japanese, German and Italian foreign nationals and immigrants from areas deemed critical for defense to the systematic and mechanized German Nationalist-Socialist death machine that killed 12 million people. Even if you want to argue that Executive Order 9066 violated the due-process rights of these people, temporary interning these people during the war and seeing to their wellbeing is not the same is systematically killing them and extracting slave labor from them. Nor can you compare it to the political imprisonment of thousands of Soviet citizens and foreign nationals in the GULAG system in the Soviet Union, for the same reasons. Simply put, no one ever died of of starvation or overwork in a US internment camp.
“No. You are not going to compare the temporary removal of Japanese, German and Italian foreign nationals and immigrants from areas deemed critical for defense to the systematic and mechanized German Nationalist-Socialist death machine that killed 12 million people.”
Not that I think it was directly comparable to the holocaust, but you seem to be minimising the impact of their interrment quite alot (not to mention trying to justify it).
“Simply put, no one ever died of of starvation or overwork in a US internment camp.”
No, but several were shot for getting too close to the perimeter. They weren’t soldiers or spies or any threat to the US public, they were the US public.
I really don’t see how punishing the rest of the team (who had nothing to do with the cover-up) helps prevent rape. One could easily extend this argument in favour of shutting down the entire university, after all, what’s more important? Preventing child-rape or awarding some degrees?
I’m glad they removed the statue, I hope they scrub both those men’s name from the record, but those wins were earned by alot more people than them.
Hopefully if you anyone ends up reading this they can maybe end up with a different perspective on this punishment.
Let’s start with the the legal things first:
1) the NCAA is not a legal entity. Where does its authority to punish the school come from? Their integrity rules and conditions explicitly refer to things like recruiting and the treatment and education of football players. If Sandusky had been discovered to have beaten his wife I guarantee you no one at the NCAA would have given a shit. They would have said, “this doesn’t affect the football program. The courts are the ones who should deal with this. We hope that schools will use more discretion in their hiring practices.” As despicable as their opprotunistic morals are, in that case they would have given the correct response. There is a reason that vigilante justice is illegal in America. This whole attitude of needing to take the law into your own hands is the same one that zimmerman had when he decided that he would be an armed neighborhood watch batman. He ended up killing a young man. Likewise, however distasteful the Penn State scandal may be, the appropriate venue is the courts. Justice in the courts prevents innocents from catching the ire of the mobs. I would argue that historically far more people have been hurt and killed (civil rights anyone?) by people thinking their beliefs can translate into law.
2) The NCAA violated their own internal due process in the assignment of these sanctions. They didn’t even perform their own investigation. Instead, they used an investigation Penn State commissioned and paid for as the sole evidence. I agree, the freer report is probably right, but in my eyes, the right thing to do is not punish a university for voluntarily trying to improve itself. Imagine if Penn State had decided not to conduct its own investigation (they should be applauded for that proactive action). I highly doubt the NCAA would be able to mete out any punishment at all. Penn state is being punished for trying to improve itself?
3) how are these punishments appropriate? Of the people who knew about the crime, 3 are on trial and 1 is dead. They are being punished by the legal system, and 1 is beyond any reach. These punishments hurt the football players. You are supposed to be ale to transfer but who will take you of you arent a star or are just average? You have to uproot your entire life and go to a school of possibly lower quality or play on a team that will not succeed during your tenure. And it hurts the students. Where does anyone think 60 million is going to come from? You can say “you aren’t allowed to hurt academics” all you want, but everyone who lives on a budget realizes that the money has to come from somewhere and that the football team won’t be making much in the future.
3) Finally, I personally disagree with trying to rewrite history. I think that perhaps we would be better served by realizing that people can be complicated and achieve great things while still doing terrible things. How does this change the problem of thinking a person is beyond reproach? Instead of saying, “you were a person just like anyone else” this says, “you never deserved that acclaim, but if someone who does deserve it rolls around we will be sure not to learn from our mistake”
“Before explaining why this decision is morally wrong, I should note that I consider what Jerry Sandusky did to be an indescribable evil.”
And this is a deflection. The NCAA is punishing Penn State not for Sandusky’s indescrable evil, but for Penn State’s indescriable evil, in covering it all up.
“1) the NCAA is not a legal entity. Where does its authority to punish the school come from?”
It has authority over the records it maintains and over the games it allows member schools to play in. That’s its authority and it has acted within those bounds.
“No. You are not going to compare the temporary removal of Japanese, German and Italian foreign nationals and immigrants from areas deemed critical for defense to the systematic and mechanized German Nationalist-Socialist death machine that killed 12 million people. ”
… I kind of agree with this. While the removal of Japanese people did seem to be some kind of racist attack on them and them specifically (IIRC it was by descent, even if a native born citizen) , and while the camps fit the definition of concentration camps, ‘concentration camp’ to most people means the lethal, Nazi/Soviet/WWII-era Japan variety. (sometimes also called death camps).
Wow. I REALLY want to get to the work of redeeming Europe and Authority.
I didn’t compare the Japanese internment and the Holocaust, because that would be horrible. But it’s still a concentration camp if no one gets killed. I will be sure to award the Allies their shiny Didn’t Commit Genocide award. Good on them for leaping over that astonishingly low bar.
Why’s he so upset about students being forced to learn about entrepreneurs?