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The terrifying prospect is that it's quite possible, if you ask Americans to choose between "mass molestation, but I get to watch sportball" and "children saved, but no sportball" it's quite possible Americans will choose sportball. In terms of general American culture, pedophilia seems like an act that is stigmatized because its commission Otherizes the perpetrator ("one of those sick fucks" etc), not because of the crime itself. Therefore if the crime is committed by someone who is definitionally not an Other -- i.e., say, a sportball coach like Paterno, a political leader like Roy Moore -- the crime is simply ignored.
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Jan 23, 2018 16:02
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PT6A posted:Why do Americans think this? It wouldn't destroy sports, but it would destroy a lot of colleges. Most colleges rely on sports to drive alumni donations and fundraising, to the point that many, many, many schools are functionally just support systems for a sportball team. There are multiple states where the coach of the state university football team is the highest paid state employee -- i.e., higher than the governor, higher than the guy running the nuclear plant, the single highest paid state employee period.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:04
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Kalli posted:In helpful map form: Yeeeeup. I mean, you'd think that "this literally destroys your brain" would have killed college football, but nope. I'm not sure any force in American public life, short of racism, is powerful enough to unseat or even significantly reduce the prominence of college sports.
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Jan 23, 2018 17:42
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Work Friend Keven posted:I’m glad guy made the sports thread in a forum where people think “sports ball” is funny or acceptable. http://www.somethingawful.com/news/its-time-be/
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Jan 23, 2018 18:17
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I clearly should have said "foopball" instead If we're doubling down though, yeah, focusing on whether or not the word "sportball" is "acceptable" seems like misplaced emphasis here
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Jan 23, 2018 19:10
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axeil posted:Here's how this happens: One big step is educating people to take allegations seriously and investigate them and document that they have investigated them, and hold people responsible for not investigating. That said it is going to be a frequent occurrence that specific allegations will be "unfounded," especially among vulnerable populations, because prosecutors have discretion and aren't going to file a case unless they are very sure of conviction, but the more you establish a track record the more credibility each independent allegation adds.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:25
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axeil posted:Exactly. Typically what you get for bringing abuse or wrong-doing to light is the destruction of your career and everything you love and care about because the institution you've destroyed uses the last of its power and influence to smear and destroy you. It doesn't have to even actively destroy you. Everyone else has something to hide too, so you don't get hired. Our society is so pervasively unjust that whistleblowers are inherently terrifying.
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Jan 23, 2018 19:50
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I read (ok, skimmed) that article and I am *extraordinarily* skeptical of it. Chase the Google results a bit deeper and there are several articles pointing out that universities get a lot of peripheral revenue from athletics that isn't on the actual books of the program itself. It drives alimni donations, etc. I mean, I agree that for a lot of schools the athletics program is a vampire squid draining every other aspect of the schools' finances, but that happens because school alumni, administration, faculty, staff, and students all view athletics as the raison d'etre for the school as a whole and allocate the athletic programs primary importance.
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Jan 24, 2018 17:37
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The Muppets On PCP posted:similar to sports revenue, donations accrue to a handful of schools This was the article I was thinking of that explained all the different kinds of peripheral revenue colleges get from athletics, which aren't necessarily counted as "athletic revenue" : quote:athletic departments aren't supposed to report revenue that is generated outside of the sports it sponsors. For example, if an athletic department owns a golf course that is open to the public, it wouldn't report the revenue from the golf course, even though it's real revenue deposited in the department's bank account. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristidosh/2017/06/12/the-biggest-misconceptions-about-the-finances-of-college-sports/#5dbb808a366f Athletic programs survive (in part) because they're cash cows for the college or university as a whole, often in indirect ways that aren't on the official books of the athletic department.
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Jan 24, 2018 21:34
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jabby posted:Even now people are pretty trusting of doctors. It doesn't surprise me that with a convincing enough manner he could brazen out sexual assault as 'internal myofascial release' or something of that nature even if he was caught in the act. As long as you give people a tiny amount of doubt there's always going to be massive psychological resistance to making accusations, because people are terrified of being wrong. He cultivated a persona as an advocate for the gymnasts. quote:Nassar said he was able to earn the trust of the Karolyis back through hard work and employing the same attitude he’d held since he started his work— “Gymnast first, gymnast first, gymnast first. Nothing gets in the way of gymnast first.” https://deadspin.com/in-one-interview-larry-nassar-laid-out-exactly-how-he-1794176276 Then he characterized the actual abuse as medical treatment: quote:Time and again, over years of unfettered abuse, he would subject the girls he was meant to be helping to degrading physical examinations he described in a shameless distortion of medical terminology as “intra-vaginal treatment”. Predatory, perverted and bogus: this was the doctor from hell. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/us-gymnastics-sex-abuse-scandal-shows-comes-sport-one-thing/ edit: the medicalization of sex has a really bizarre history (see, e.g., https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/all-about-sex/201303/hysteria-and-the-strange-history-vibrators ) Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 16:12 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 16:06
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gaj70 posted:I thought we've moved on to the Karolyi's. The complaints there seem mostly around harsh training methods / bullying (honest question: is there evidence they knew of the sexual abuse and didn't say anything?) Just in the five seconds of googling I did to research exactly how Nassar characterized his "treatments," I found multiple references by Nassar to "falling outs" he had with the Karolyi's over "complaints."
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Jan 25, 2018 17:03
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PT6A posted:This brings back to memory a story I heard. Apparently, a paediatrician administered a rectal exam to "check for abuse" without the parent in the room, using the explanation that it might be one of the parents who is involved in any abuse. I don't believe there had been any accusations of such. That might depend on context. Like, I know a (female) pediatrician whose job it is to do those kinds of examinations. She works at a state run clinic and kids are brought there after reports are made to law enforcement etc. Sometimes the parents bring the kids. Sometimes the parents are the alleged perp. Sometimes the parents are sheltering the perp. Sometimes the cops put the kids in emergency protective custody right there in the waiting room.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:45
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botany posted:
This is a point that is absolutely true in the abstract but false in the practicality. In the abstract, the justice system should not be punitive at all, but purely rehabilitative; the only thing society gains by seeing a criminal punished rather than rehabilitated is the joy of vicarious vengeance. Norway and Sweden and the scandinavian nations have much more rehabilitative systems and those systems get much better results overall at far lower cost. In practice though that vicarious vengeance is socially necessary. If we somehow rewired Nassars' brain to ensure he would never offend again, and then released him out in the world to practice medicine again, society would gain a doctor, but his victims would have no sense of justice, and their families wouldn't either, and that dad who tried to jump Nassar in the courtroom and the hundred other dads would all eventually find Nassar and probably kill him. And in reality we can't re-wire Nassar's brain, and we can't undo the harm he did to his victims; all we can do is give them a sense of judicial vengeance.
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Feb 12, 2018 15:42
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botany posted:nobody is talking about rewiring his brain. even if we rehabilitate him, that doesn't mean he gets to work as a doctor. also you're jumping from "we can't rewire his brain" to "all we can to is give the victims a sense of judicial vengeance", as if the only options were brain-washing or retributive punishment. It is an argument for punishing that felon, though? One of the primary purposes of retributive "justice" is to prevent vigilantism. It's a very large part of why the American "justice system" -- and I use that term only in its loosest sense -- punishes; without that visible punishment, there are a lot of Americans who would take matters into their own hands. Look, in the abstract I agree with you: the Scandinavian systems are better, and I would like to see a more strongly rehabilitative and less punitive system put in place in America. But American society is a lot more spiteful and angry and vindictive than Scandinavian society is, and we're going to need some minimum degree of punishment within our system for the foreseeable future, if only to satisfy victims and prevent vigilantism.
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Feb 12, 2018 16:25
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botany posted:there is no correlation between capital punishment and violent crime rates. From everything I've read on the subject at least -- and I'm no criminologist -- the evidence is quite clear that "capital punishment" as such is basically indistinguishable from a ten-year prison sentence in terms of deterrence. From what I've read there is support for sentences of up to ten years having increased deterrent effect, it's just that once you're past the ten-year mark it's all a washout and equivalent and you don't get any additional increases in deterrent effect for increases in punishment. Focusing on capital punishment in this particular debate is like focusing on the minimum wage when it's set below the market wage; of course it doesn't have an effect, it's not set at a threshold where its effect is felt. Similarly, of course you aren't going to see any correlation of the death penalty with anything; it's a gratuitous excess under any rational metric. When I'm talking about deterring vigilantism and so forth, I'm pointing out that there's a minimum level of punishment that is necessary to make victims feel that justice has been served and to prevent vigilante reprisals. We know this because we've seen vigilante reprisals both attempted and suggested (in this thread even!). The death penalty is a gratuitously excessive maximum punishment; it's the opposite end of the scale from what I'm talking about. Even short of the death penalty, America's criminal penalties are, generally speaking, pretty excessive for almost everything; we could reduce most of them drastically and still retain whatever deterrent effect exists. Your argument also seems to equate "death penalty" with "deterrence," and that doesn't hold, because we can see deterrent effects at much lower criminal penalties. For example, with the removal of criminal penalties for the use of marijuana in select American states, use of marijuana in those states has risen (though admittedly there's a lot of debate as to how and why and which demographics and causation there). A converse example might be the recent widespread institution of smoking bans in public buildings. Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:17 on Feb 12, 2018 |
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Feb 12, 2018 16:59
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