Wednesday, November 9, 2011

End College Sports Now III

Jim Litke argues that
Like everything else in this still-evolving mess, Paterno's acknowledgment that he shared plenty of responsibility for it came way too late. Fashioning a graceful exit is Paterno's only chance to prove it and he's earned that right.
How has Paterno earned the right to fashion a graceful exit? By showing that real leaders let child rapists go free? Or because he won a bunch of games that make no difference to anyone? Just win baby isn't a justification for avoiding moral action. Good God, yall, it's like Camus never existed. If he were a decent human being, I think, Paterno would acknowledge his error and retire never to be heard from again. The whole episode is disgraceful and everyone involved should quit.

UPDATE:
JoPa and the President of Penn are gone. None too soon and presumably, for the children raped, far too late.
See also.

UPDATE:
I suspect that these players will regret this:
Still, Paterno’s talk was not all about the turmoil. Morris said Paterno’s main message was “Beat Nebraska,” referring to Penn State’s next opponent. When he left, his players gave him a standing ovation.
It is not just win baby; the claim of college athletics is that it provides athletes with some kind of moral compass and leadership ability. At the very least, the current evidence suggests that Paterno had neither. Inasmuch as his various defenders defend his indefensible behavior by pointing to his nice guyness, the clear implication is that he wasn't athletics don't, and in general the world would be a better place without institutions of higher learning pretending that athletics have a place in institutions of higher learning.

Oh, and as by the way, the various apologists who insists that nobody could know what they would do when confronted with this kind of evil, my response is: If I behaved like Paterno and company and did nothing to end the child rapist's child raping then I would be a moral monster just like them. Cowardice in the face of obvious wrong isn't excusable because anyone might be a coward; the fact that we might any of us be cowards in the face of evil is a condemnation of any of us who fail to act as decent human beings.

2 comments:

  1. I would like to think that if I walked in on some guy raping an eleven year old I would stop it, and call the police. The fact that the guy who caught Sandusky mid rape first told Joe Paterno and then didn't say anything else tells you a lot about what athletics teaches people.

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  2. It's not so much athletics as it is big money sports. It's almost as if money perverts everything.

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