Penn State and the NCAA

[Riverwind (imported)]

No, I haven't minimized anything. I'm just pointing out that the punishment has collateral effects, and that is the basic problem with the concept of punishment. It tends to increase the misery rather than merely stopping the unwanted behavior. You may recall that this issue was already pointed out by Kant in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunf.

Exactly, as I said in an earlier post, this was not a punishment this was revenge.

Was/is the crime committed horrific you bet, that guy is in jail.

Are those that were told about it gone, yep and if the NCAA wants to ban them from college sports for life I am all for it.

NOTE so far this has only gone after those that were wrong.

Now comes the head of the NCAA.

In his statement he was he was going to make an example out of Penn St. He did not say he was going to punish them for wrong doing, that is why this is so over the top.

Case in point, The Saints problems, punishment was handed down, its was a very stiff fines and banning etc but it was not vindictive. This guy at the NCAA looked for every way possible to make Penn St bleed.

This was not justice handed down, remember justice must be blind, he did this with his eyes wide open.

River

[moi621 (imported)]

The "collateral damage" is sad.

What would you suggest considering the degree "college sports"

needed a hard knuckle rapped on the head.

Moi

[Elizabeth (imported)]

No, I haven't minimized anything. I'm just pointing out that the punishment has collateral effects, and that is the basic problem with the concept of punishment. It tends to increase the misery rather than merely stopping the unwanted behavior. You may recall that this issue was already pointed out by Kant in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunf.

Listen, we are mostly in agreement here. I just felt that when you boiled it down to "some old fart showering with naked boys", you were minimizing it. It wasn't a shower, it was rape. It was being forced to suck his dick. It was humiliating, degrading and will fuck up these people for their whole life. And he had help. All these people who knew did nothing, so as to protect the football program and the school, instead of the children.

So everyone who supported that football program, including the illumni, and players, fans, and boosters, all responsible. They put in place and helped maintain a culture of football over everything else. That is why they all deserve to be punished. Those who benefit from it, meaning the students, are just as culpable for allowing their leaders to have no accountability, so they could benefit as well. Their greed for the prestige of Penn State and the job they might get because it, are all part of the problem.

Everyone has to be punished so people will know that if their leaders make bad decisions, they pay for it. It's called accountability. There are no innocent victims in this, except those who got raped, by everyone else trying to gain. Be it a job in the NFL or a degree from the prestigious Penn State.

Elizabeth

[janekane (imported)]

Agree, the guilty need to be punished, not the kid that is going to go to college, this punishes everybody, mostly the innocent. If I were in charge of Penn State I would be calling other schools and starting my own league, it would only take about 8 schools to drop out of the NCAA to make a lasting point. I have never been a fan of college sport, and the NCAA has proved over the years to be vindictive this is a case in point.

Punish the school, but do so without hurting more people then deserve it. This steps over the lines of punishment, its vindictive but its also what this country has become and is part of a larger problem, we as a country don't want to punish the wrong, we want blood. More people are in prison in this country then any other country on the face of the earth, more then Russia, more then China.

So I ask the question Penn State should be punished no question on that, now the hard part, what would be fair?

River

Punishing "the guilty" makes perfect sense to me, only what constitutes "the guilty"?

My bioengineering-based theoretical and applied biology research resoundingly informs me that the late Alice Miller (author of "The Drama of the Gifted Child" and many other books on the child abuse spectrum) was terribly correct in stating that "the child is always innocent."

Over the past several decades, work in social psychology has focused in part on attribution theory, there being dispositional attribution and situational attribution. Situational attribution exonerates a person from responsibility because situational attribution is, in fact and by definition, always outside a person's actual locus of control, such that the person in question neither caused nor could have prevented whatever is the focus of attribution. Or, if it is situational, it is not the fault of anyone.

Dispositional attribution is attribution to a person because the focus of attribution was within the person's actual locus of control.

Using every tool of science I have been able to find, every aspect of disposition is actually situational, an argument that I hesitate to make here in rigorous form because it would take me into explaining how high-dimension-space complex-variable relational tensor calculus works, so, without the rigorous math here given, I simply state that using that form of tensor calculus with biological pattern recognition techniques (my doctoral advisor's area of research expertise), I find that every aspect of what is deemed dispositional is actually situational. Even put this way, the words sure do get messy, don't they?

Where I end up, is with a view not at odds with that of Philip Zimbardo, as told in his book, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil," Random House, 2007.

Let me put my research finding in very direct terms. From an accurate understanding of biology, guilt is a delusion; no person can actually be guilty of anything. Not only, as in Alice Miller's writing, is the child always innocent, all people are always innocent. The belief that people can be guilty is what traps humans in vicious cycles of escalating, defeating retaliation.

How, then, to punish the guilty, if the guilty are only mistaken beliefs? Expose them to the "light of day."

Or, tell the stories.

Therefore, the Eunuch Archive?

[Riverwind (imported)]

Listen, we are mostly in agreement here. I just felt that when you boiled it down to "some old fart showering with naked boys", you were minimizing it. It wasn't a shower, it was rape. It was being forced to suck his dick. It was humiliating, degrading and will fuck up these people for their whole life. And he had help. All these people who knew did nothing, so as to protect the football program and the school, instead of the children.

So everyone who supported that football program, including the illumni, and players, fans, and boosters, all responsible. They put in place and helped maintain a culture of football over everything else. That is why they all deserve to be punished. Those who benefit from it, meaning the students, are just as culpable for allowing their leaders to have no accountability, so they could benefit as well. Their greed for the prestige of Penn State and the job they might get because it, are all part of the problem.

Everyone has to be punished so people will know that if their leaders make bad decisions, they pay for it. It's called accountability. There are no innocent victims in this, except those who got raped, by everyone else trying to gain. Be it a job in the NFL or a degree from the prestigious Penn State.

Elizabeth

That is the same kind of logic that was used right after Dec 7th 1941 when the US put ALL Japanese in concentration camps because they were guilty of being Japanese.

The Japanese did not get a hearing either.

River

[Cainanite (imported)]

janekane,

In the interest of keeping this forum easy to read, I won't quote your text again. We have had dialog on this topic before, and I find no fault with your argument, save for one aspect.

People make choices based on their education and understanding. I feel that those choices should have consequences. Merely exposing them to the light of day, is not always enough.

In the case of Penn State, choices were made to protect what people saw as the greater good. They sought to protect the athletic institution from criticism and protect the individuals involved. They did so because, from what they had learned and experienced, they saw the money and prestige coming in as a greater good, than the lives it destroyed. They did so knowing of the wrong they were allowing to happen. They justified it to themselves, because they did not want a loss of donations, scholarships, or faith from the community. At that point, they thought they were protecting something at the expense of something lesser. Perhaps, as you said, they could make no other choice, because they had not learnt differently yet.

If the NCAA were to ignore this situation, it would be giving tacit approval of those methods. They would be forced to agree that the university made the correct choice in devaluing the lives of the child victims in the name of the greater institution's good works. Would the university learn anything from that?

The NCAA had to make sure that the university lost exactly what it feared to lose, and simultaneously send a message, that those lives that were destroyed were worth MORE than the good Penn State wished to protect. By leveling this punishment they add something new for people and institutions to learn. There is now more risk to you by hiding crimes, than there is by exposing them.

It sets an example, and provided the "learning" that needed to come from this "mistake". If they had done nothing, then Penn State would likely make the same choice again, given the same circumstances.

To me, this is the nature of "punishment". If there is to be justice, then the making of a choice has to be balanced against, "If the same situation occurs again, how will I choose?"

Therefore I think that all justice and punishment must match or exceed the damage originally done. There is a reason that scales are used for the metaphor of justice. When we make decisions, we weigh options. We need to influence the scales in the direction we want.

In this case, universities now know that protecting pedophiles and criminals in their athletic programs, for the sake of glory, comes at a greater risk than simply exposing those criminals to the world. If you protect them, the result will be worse than if you expose them.

That the university has the ability to pass on that punishment, and make their future students suffer in the place of those that oversee the university, is the contentious issue in this case. Now that the university will be receiving less money, they will shutter programs in other areas to make up the shortfall. Students and teachers who had nothing to do with the original issue, will now be punished.

Unfortunately, the NCAA does not have the ability to affect anything outside of the athletic program. If they had, then I am sure they would have added the rider, that the monetary penalty cannot be offset by closing any other programs outside of the athletic program.

The real question being addressed here, is not if punishment should or should not have been given, but if those scales of justice have tipped too far, or not enough.

It is in the finding of that balance, that is the core question whenever one looks to understand justice and punishment.

Punishment is about teaching a lesson. It is about that learning you spoke of. Now the university has learnt something new. Will they make a different choice in the future (given similar circumstances) now that they have new knowledge?

[Cainanite (imported)]

That is the same kind of logic that was used right after Dec 7th 1941 when the US put ALL Japanese in concentration camps because they were guilty of being Japanese.

The Japanese did not get a hearing either.

River

Seeing a school get hit with monetary fines, and being forced to cut back, is NOT equivalent to putting the Japanese Americans into concentration camps.

Those students will be forced to look elsewhere for their education and athletic glory. They are not being rounded up against their will in the name of prejudice and fear.

These are VERY different things.

River, I do see this kind of argument you are making as equivalent to someone in the Tea Party movement, who disagrees with health care reform, calling Obama, Hitler.

The two things are not remotely the same.

It is certainly NOT what Elizabeth is saying at all.

She is saying the whole community practically canonized those involved. They were complicit in this cover-up, even if they knew nothing of it. They refused to hear ANYTHING negative about their heroes, and actively attacked people who spoke out.

That this community is now being inconvenienced for worshiping Penn State's golden calf, does not break my heart.

Inconvenience is a lot different from persecution. In my mind, it is a fair price to pay for their part in the whole mess.

[Dave (imported)]

Penn State reported that the alternative to agreeing with the NCAA's memorandum of understanding or Consent Decree (it's one of those two legal things) was a four year death penalty -- no football at all for four years. Penn State chose to take that deal and not fight with the NCAA.

The real challenge here is to structure a football program without the sins of the past in it.

[Mac (imported)]

But the current students who were never part of it have to pay the price. Is that right?

[moi621 (imported)]

Design a fair and just punishment.

I believe the University should also pay some of the surrounding communities' economic losses.

Moi