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Joe Paterno, dead at 85
Atomika
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
Live fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered User regular
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/22/us/pennsylvania-obit-paterno/index.html?hpt=hp_t1
Fired this past November for his role in a sexual abuse scandal alleged against a former assistant coach, Paterno was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. He reentered the hospital a few weeks ago after suffering a broken pelvis related to cancer therapy, and died early this morning. A candlelight vigil was held on-campus for him last night.
He was voted National Coach of the Year 5 times, and became the winningest coach in NCAA football last year.
Fired this past November for his role in a sexual abuse scandal alleged against a former assistant coach, Paterno was recently diagnosed with lung cancer. He reentered the hospital a few weeks ago after suffering a broken pelvis related to cancer therapy, and died early this morning. A candlelight vigil was held on-campus for him last night.
He was voted National Coach of the Year 5 times, and became the winningest coach in NCAA football last year.
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The guy deserved worse and deserves no sympathy or pity.
A lot of chemical therapies can decrease bone density, which is already pretty shit in older folks. Also, if cancers metastasize to bone tissue, they can erode them from within. There's a long history of people only finding out about their rampant bone cancer after suddenly breaking a bone, usually after only a slight trauma.
Cancer is basically a bitch, and the treatment even moreso. It's kind of like setting you on fire to treat your hypothermia.
Fired for failing to respond adequately to ALLEGED sexual misconduct by a staffer, and then dead of cancer a few months later. Yea - guy totally got off easy.
Well yeah except he himself admitted he should have done more but he didn't want to tarnish the weekends or some stupid bs like that also yes having only a few months to live the shame of allowing children to be violated when you could have done something is pretty easy especially now that penn state and co will redouble their efforts to saint him
Try "child rape".
All I've seen him admit to, is that at 80 or however old he was, he was scared to rock the boat over an allegation and instead passed the buck onto someone else, who in turn dropped the ball. So nope, still not seeing how dying of cancer after being directly linked in social circles outside of Penn to molestation, measures up as some appropriate punishment.
Also, in my mind the punishment wasn't death, but rather seeing his reputation in shambles and knowing that everything he'd accomplished wasn't enough to make up for his failure to do the right thing when it really mattered.
https://twitter.com/Hooraydiation
I feel bad for immediately snickering at a mental image of a judge sentencing someone to 60 Marlboro Reds a day.
To the asbestos chamber!
The kid who brought the fact that he was getting raped to light was bullied so hard he had to drop out of school because they blamed him for Paterno's firing.
Joe paterno. He croaked. Now we are discussing it
Tooooootally.
To swap high-fives over the death of a geriatric from cancer for failing to personally drag Jerry Sandusky by the ear in front of Penn State President, and instead passed the buck to Penns Athletic Director (who in turn dropped the ball).
Either way we are all on our high horses here
But sure, lung cancer is totally getting off too easy for a man who did exactly what he was supposed to.
By the way, one of the guys he reported to? He's the guy that the police report to. Sandusky also had retired a few years earlier to this coming to Paterno's attention.
I don't have any particular desire to rush to Joe Paterno's defense, but the guy did have about six decades of positive influence on a huge number of people. If Jonas Salk cured polio, then immediately set a homeless man loose in a game preserve to be his quarry, I think the moral capital of that first thing probably deserves some acknowledgement.
We can agree that there's some space between mourning the loss of a saint and celebrating the death of a monster. People (and history) are generally more complicated than that.
Welp, I know what the next Atomic Robo plot should be.
People who take college football too seriously.
Selectively ignoring? The guy didn't work for Paterno, or for Penn State for that matter. Beyond reporting it to exactly the people whose job it was to investigate this stuff, what exactly should the man have done? Publicly drug the guys name through mud for an allegation made by a graduate student?
I'm fairly confident were not only on horses of a different caliber, but that mine is a low seater.
College football can lead to dramatically improved outcomes for lots of people, as I've been pointing out in all the Sandusky related threads for two months. And Penn State is the very best case for that.
Compare the school's status when he arrived (tiny agricultural land grant school) to now (major research institution). As depressing as this may be, football has a LOT to do with that. Football got them their Big Ten invite, which is ALSO a research alliance (12 Big Ten schools + University of Chicago, a former member) that controls something like 10% of all research money in this country. Resulted in something like doubling PSU's research funding.
This is the positive for Paterno.
The negatives all involve his stubborn protection of his empire, which range from stupid bureaucratic crap to things like his profound failure in the Sandusky case.
Seriously. Can we just lock this thread now? It's just going to be people feeling good about themselves because they can feel better than someone who was knocked off his high horse, and is now dead. Everything interesting to say was said at the time of the scandal, and now all that's left is the gloating.
And the only reason football has any positive impact on penn state or people is because of the seriousness with which people take sports.
Paterno didn't report anything to the police. Only to the person responsible for funding the police on campus. Which did nothing. He should have talked to a detective at said police force and taken McQueary with him to do it. And also kicked Sandusky out of the campus altogether once he knew something shady was going on, whether when McQueary told him or by noticing the police investigation into Sandusky a decade earlier.
Paterno didn't even do the absolute minimum to protect the students on the campus. That's why he deserves the scorn send his way.
I feel completely vindicated in my opinion, because this is completely stupid. This isn't a thread about the actual molesting, the actual criminal, or anything about the circumstances that would promote further incidents or not. It also isn't 'as soon as possible', it's months after the incident, during which the events were discussed intensely and thoroughly. This isn't a whitewashing or a coverup, this is me being tired of watching a morality circle jerk with nothing interesting to say.
Feeling better than an child molester enabler is fairly easy to do. Not that anyone in this thread is gloating. Why are you against people being on their "high horse"? The case is pretty clear. So what if he's dead? He was still scum for protecting Sandusky when he was alive.
As for the in charge of police thing, the UP Police chief himself testified in court that he had weekly meetings with Schultz over police matters. Yeah, McQuerey should have gone right to the police. Joe probably should have turned his ass around and marched him there. He said he didn't know how to handle it, I believe that to a point.
In the late 90's my grandfather passed away at 79. The man was sharp, intelligent, and trend savvy. After he retired from his managerial job at Nickle's Bakery, he ran a little shuttle service in Ft. Lauderdale. He had a cell phone when they were still Zach Morris Bricks. He had a pimped out van with TV and VCR in like 1992. He had a home computer and internet access as long as I can remember. But up to the day he died, we got into arguments about evolution and such. He was not a dumb man, and he was not against changing his beliefs, but it was something he just could not grasp.
It seems like this was the same case. It wasn't malicious. It wasn't to protect Penn State, or Sandusky. It was just something that he didn't grasp the seriousness of, and failed to act with the vehemence required by today's culture. That alone, definitely made him unfit to keep coaching. Penn State fans often worried that he would fail to adapt in some way, and the end would be messy. We assumed it would have came on the football field in a vein similar to Bobby Bowden and just a failure to win. Instead it was a social failing where Joe trusted those around him and they failed in their duties, and he assumed their failing meant it wasn't a big deal. He was wrong, and it rightly cost him his job. If you cannot grasp the importance of those kinds of allegations in this day and age, then no, you should not be in the position where you have to deal with them.
But the amount of good he has done for the school is immeasurable. He has personally donated tens of millions of dollars, rough estimates put him directly or indirectly responsible for hundreds of millions to the University in funding. He consistently maintained some of the highest graduating averages in college, while actually winning consistently for 46 years. Say what you will about "Oh they don't get real degrees" but if it's so easy, why is it so hard for other colleges? Penn State was also one of only a handful of schools that graduated it's non-white players at an equal or greater rate than it's white players.
He helped build a powerhouse educational institution out of an agricultural school in a valley full of cow fields that now has a world campus and is considered by pretty much every major list to be a top 50 university world wide. To push all of that good he did aside, and revel in his death because of his one failing is as morally irresponsible as what he did. Take what he did both wrong and right, learn from it, and try to be a better person for it.
Reaches like this ridiculous line of reasoning is why I refrained from the actual thread this new one should be in.