Re: A thread for Charles Pierce columns and any related discussions
Posted: Fri Jan 26, 2018 2:23 pm
Spoiler alert: they don't.
It's the sixth version of The Swamp. What could possibly go wrong?
http://www.sportsfrog.net/phpbb/
I agree. They're part of the culture of enabling this kind of abuse frankly. They pay lip service to defending and supporting "student-athletes" until it gets more comfortable to cozy up with their billion dollar corporate partners than actually protect teenagers from getting raped.
Simon said she worries about ethics in college sports and at Michigan State as well. She reminded school employees by email last month of their obligation to report sexual abuse and assault. She said everyone from janitors to student-athletes have been spoken to about the issue.
Yeah, the lesson MSU learned from Penn State is that it actually makes sense to try and cover it up for as long as you can because the NCAA is toothless, fans have short memories and bad press doesn't last forever.mister d wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2018 3:39 pm So the solution would be ... less punishment? You change the entire equation by acknowledging sexual assaults will happen and have programs know the ramifications that go beyond the person committing the assault will be in how its dealt with by the school. Right now, there's incentive to cover up because it keeps the player on the field and the program out of the headlines and because even if you're letting someone serially fuck little kids inside your buildings, you can still be right back in the top 10 in a couple years. If you burn them to the ground, completely, sacrificing the individuals who deserve to be sacrificed in the first place becomes a far easier choice for even the most ethics-void admin.
I don't see how that literally does anything to curtail the kind of abuses documented at Penn State and Michigan State.testuser2 wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2018 3:50 pm I don't think punishment is the solution. If it's more punishment then there is incentive to cover it up. If it's less then you never do any prevention. Many Division I sports have long ago lost any semblance of being amateur or being for the benefit of the athletes. Take away the money that schools make on the backs of their students. Make them all non-revenue by paying players like the minor league it is or find a way to make them like FCS or division II.
$$ is the problem.
The central point is that Michigan State’s obsession with sports success is the key to understanding both why Nassar’s reign of terror lasted so long, and why in recent years the department turned a blind eye toward or actively covered up sexual assaults by numerous athletes from the two teams responsible for funding the athletic department, football and men’s basketball.
This is a failure AT EVERY LEVEL and it extends beyond football, basketball, and/or gymnastics.The structural situation at MSU – an obsession with sports success, a closely connected obsession with fundraising, and a governing board that shares and intensifies those obsessions while featuring no discernible qualifications in regard to regulating a research university (none of the board members have ever worked in higher education, and only one, a lawyer, has an advanced degree) — is a very common one in contemporary American higher education. The scandal at MSU should be a cautionary tale for the many institutions that resemble Michigan State in more ways than one.
If the NCAA punishes the school because their trainer or DC or point guard sexually assaulted someone, then there's incentive to cover it up (if you're a shitty person). If the NCAA punishes a school that covers up or doesn't report that sexual assault, its the deterrent we're talking about. You remove, completely, the incentive to cover up because the potential harm of the cover up is made to be 1,000,000x more harsh than the potential harm of reporting an incident.
Yes. This isn't hard.mister d wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2018 4:23 pmIf the NCAA punishes the school because their trainer or DC or point guard sexually assaulted someone, then there's incentive to cover it up (if you're a shitty person). If the NCAA punishes a school that covers up or doesn't report that sexual assault, its the deterrent we're talking about. You remove, completely, the incentive to cover up because the potential harm of the cover up is made to be 1,000,000x more harsh than the potential harm of reporting an incident.
A fucking menA_B wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2018 10:48 pmYes. This isn't hard.mister d wrote: ↑Fri Jan 26, 2018 4:23 pmIf the NCAA punishes the school because their trainer or DC or point guard sexually assaulted someone, then there's incentive to cover it up (if you're a shitty person). If the NCAA punishes a school that covers up or doesn't report that sexual assault, its the deterrent we're talking about. You remove, completely, the incentive to cover up because the potential harm of the cover up is made to be 1,000,000x more harsh than the potential harm of reporting an incident.
Just like I wish they'd let some of those banks fail instead of propping them up. Let one or some fall and the others will figure it out.
I hadn't seen that but yes you are correct.
Michigan State portrayed Mr. Fitzgerald as reviewing the Nassar cases even as he was hired to defend the university from lawsuits.
“Michigan State led the public to believe that there had been an independent investigation,” Tom Leonard, the Republican speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, said on Friday in an interview. “And then as we continued to dig into this, we found out it was not an independent investigation. It was an internal investigation to shield them from liability.”
This is right out of the Penn State playbook(Freeh report). What PSU had that MSU doesn't is a dead coach to blame and limit pushback.Pruitt wrote: ↑Sun Jan 28, 2018 12:42 pm In Nassar Case, Michigan State Wanted Famed Ex-Prosecutor to Both Examine and Defend It
"Shame" isn't a strong enough word for what the powers that be at M.S.U. should be feeling.
I don’t minimize how thoroughly Comey bungled at the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. If what he’s doing now is atonement, that’s only right. He has a lot for which he should atone. But the sense of dislocation in these e-mails shows where the current propaganda war against the FBI first took root. It’s where the water first went muddy.
It is the most elemental form of the ongoing damage that is no worse than even money to keep us from ever knowing everything about the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election, and to prevent us from taking the steps we need to prevent the same thing happening in 2018 and 2020. This, of course, may be the whole point.
Scrapie is a prion disease, similar in its effect to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (Mad Cow Disease) and to the wasting disease that afflicts herds of deer, and to kuru, a disease first seen among tribes in Papua New Guinea that was transmitted in part through the ritual cannibalism of the tribe’s dead. Elsewhere in Asia, the custom of eating the brains of a monkey was responsible for cases of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, yet another prion illness. Once established in the victim, prion disease destroys the human nervous system. It eats away at the higher functions of the brain. So, when I talk about the prion disease that afflicts the Republican Party, and the conservative movement that is its only life force any more, I do not use the metaphor idly. The party has lost what’s left of its mind.
Far too many people are far too delicate about this. The Republican Party is completely mad, and it has been going in that direction for a very long time. It has been raving through all the halls of all the governments, large and small, like a lost soul with a big knife. The symptoms of the enveloping disease have been obvious for decades, ever since Ronald Reagan served up the first helping of monkey brains in 1976, when he nearly wrested the party’s nomination from Gerald Ford. It is full-blown now, and it is general throughout the Republic. The Republican Party has infected every institution with its own private insanity.
Compared to ending an unjust war in Southeast Asia, or demanding the rights that should have accrued to you as an American at birth, what these kids are demanding doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. They would prefer not to take live fire in their classrooms and watch their friends, and prom dates, and football heroes, and beloved teachers shot down in front of them. That really doesn’t seem like that heavy a lift for an evolved democracy
10) Please explain how close you came to resigning from the party when George W. Bush’s campaign slandered John McCain’s child during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.
Good lord.Pruitt wrote: ↑Thu Aug 02, 2018 6:28 am Largely citing a ProPublica piece, but...
Kobach Takedown Better With Pierce's Comments
...What is there to be learned about Jason Kessler that we don't already know? What "context" was provided by having Kessler rank the races by intelligence?
My sneaking suspicion is that the elite political media wants to make the forces that produce our Kesslers and our Goodwins as mysterious and unfathomable as possible, so that we don't have to face the fact that they are produced by something that has been fundamental to the American identity since its founding, the same thing that kept a memorial to the treasonous Robert E. Lee in that park all those years, and that kept the banner of sedition flying proudly over the South Carolina state capitol until Dylann Roof gave us all a vivid illustration of that for which the flag really stood.
I'm wondering now if we aren't in a kind of extended Reconstruction period in the wake of the triumphs of the civil rights movement and the demise of Jim Crow and, ultimately, a reckoning with the truth of our history that we have tried mightily to avoid. Certainly, the resistance to this second Reconstruction is similar in tone and rhetoric to the language and actions that broke the first Reconstruction. The president* today is even crazier than crazy old Andy Johnson was, and he seems to have just as deft a touch for the politics of hate and division, as well as an instinct for salving the vestigial consciences of his most fervent followers.
In 1866, President Andrew Johnson told a crowd in St. Louis:
"But while I have strived to emancipate the colored man, I have felt, and now feel, that we have a great many white men who need emancipation."
And today? You're not racist. They're racist. And today, from the president*, there were "many fine people" on both sides in Charlottesville. Pity some of them wound up under the wheels of James Fields, Jr.'s Dodge. Jason Kessler ranks the races and Scott Goodwin's "path" leads him to a parking garage with a pipe in his hands. And all over the South, the statues come down, and there's blood on the streets in Mr. Jefferson's town.
Nothing about the previous president*’s desire to be a strongman was performative. That becomes clearer every day. He really meant to become the American Erdogan, and he had enough like-minded people around him to make that happen. And, as we learned to our horror on January 6, he was capable of summoning mob violence to make his case for him.
"...McCarthy earlier this week suggested Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack. “I also think everybody across this country has some responsibility,” he said in an apparent backtrack to Van Susteren, citing divisive rhetoric on social media from people on both sides of the aisle."
I was home all day January 6, Mr. Leader. I have witnesses. I spent the night watching you lead your caucus, while the bodies of the dead were still warm, in voting for the very thing that the mob demanded. Here’s a big bowl of dicks. On the house. Bon appetit!