a Christmas message for abitagirl

[i_like_1981]

Regarding the beating case, did Ryan Tucker spend a single day in jail? NO! The judge let him off, despite the fact that the doctors treating the victim at one point had expected him to die. You could say that our hypothetical rape victim (Incidentally, there are such victims in real life) and our real-life beating victim had sports shoved down their throats in a rather painful way. Do any such acts of gross injustice disturb Cyclo the self-professed "progressive"? I doubt it.

The nature of the crime you mentioned here does sound extremely severe, but it does not surprise me that a popular football player would be let off by a judge. The problem is, that these athletes usually have legions of supporters who attend every one of their team's games and enjoy following the progress of each player, and if a particularly good player of theirs ends up in trouble after committing a crime, it threatens to put the progress of the whole team in jeopardy. Therefore a judge has far more pressure when deciding a punishment for such a high-profile criminal in court - does he want to risk upsetting thousands of fans of the team that player is in, and possibly receiving threats from them for sending one of their team's players to jail for several years, or will he just let the guy off with the optimistic hope that having his crime brought to court will discourage him from committing any more? I agree that it's outrageous how celebrity status can work such a great influence over the course of justice - personally, I'd see to it that every criminal got their just desserts no matter how famous they may be, but sadly, in a high-profile case where the accused has got support of many fans who don't want to see him go down, this just puts the judge under more pressure. Yes, there are fans who would go off a player if he committed such a serious offence like this Tucker guy, but there are also die-hard fanatics who will stick with him no matter what. And many judges nowadays just buckle under the pressure of knowing that they'll upset many fans of the team the guy plays for and possibly affect the team's progress in their future games, and just decide to let the player off. Sadly, this has been the way for many years and it will continue to be this way for the foreseeable future. No matter what sort of offence they commit, it is likely that a celebrity will receive a lighter punishment than your average Joe. I've seen it happen before many times over here. It's not fair, I know, but fame and fortune have their ways of making the world FAR easier to manipulate.

I'm surprised to hear Cyclo is a liberal myself. Based on his aggressive tone of voice and derisive attitude to those with different opinions to him on a certain matter, he sounds much more of a hard-line conservative to me. Doesn't seem to have much sympathy for victims of bullying either... which is especially poor from him, as he claims to have been bullied in the past at school. He should understand how it feels. I expect his sympathies for the sports cause for most of his life have kind of worn away his memories of being bullied. Dare I say, he seems to have adopted the tough-talking and unsympathetic tone of his former aggressors now.

Best regards,
i_like_1981

[Fat Man]

Hey boys and girls!

Can you say, Vigilante Justice???

Yeah! I hate to say this, but if our courts and our judges are too fucking chicken shit to punish professional athletes who commit violent crimes, then we might have to take the law into our own hands.

I say, lynch em' and hang em' high from the ol' sour apple tree in the town square!

Yeah! I'm talking about a good ol' fashion neck tie party!

Maybe after a few such incidents the courts and the judges will finally start doing their jobs.

Also, it would help if the juries weren't made up of mostly sports fans.

The deck is stacked and the dice are loaded.

[Earl]

Fat Man, vigilanteism is not the answer. I need not remind you of the dark history of lynchings in this country's past. Those who were lynched frequently included innocent individuals (such as Leo Frank, the victim of an infamous 1915 anti-Semitic lynching in Marietta, Georgia). These were terrible injustices. Even when justice is not done today, rule by law must prevail. The alternative is social chaos, often followed by rule of men (i.e., dictatorship). I know that I'm about to talk "apples and oranges" here; but if black Americans living under Jim Crow had responded only with violence to injustice, there never would have been a successful civil rights movement (which I believe is still not appreciated as much as it should be for the good that it did for our country); and we would still have Jim Crow today. We just celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. He never advocated violence, not even when his followers were subjected to violence.

I_like_1981, in the A2K thread "Welcome Sports Haters!" in December of 2009 during his heated exchanges with you, me, and David, he said that when he was in high school, one of the football players poured a slurpie down the back of his shirt. But two of the other players came to his assistance and brought him a clean shirt and then told the coach what the other player had done. (Those two players should have been commended for doing what was right. They could have chosen to do nothing.) It was as if Cyclo had not been bullied at all. You, Fat Man, and greencom (not to mention other members of this forum, active or formerly active) never had anyone on your side. No one came to your defense. To the contrary, coaches sided with the bullies. Cyclo showed his insensitivity by not being able to identify with someone who was in your situation. There is a derisive slang expression that professional football players use to refer to men who constantly want to be in their presence, looking up to them with expressions of abject adoration; and that is, "jock sniffer." (That's their term, not mine. I didn't make it up.) That's what Cyclo is -- a jock sniffer.

There's a comment I need to make about the way people behave and what their political inclinations are, and this is an observation that I've been able to make over the years. Some liberals are nice people, but some are jerks. Some conservatives are nice; and, yes, some are jerks. Some people who are politically apathetic are nice; some are jerks. Some people are liberals because they have compassion and want to help people. (Now, whether their programs are effective or not is another issue open to debate.) But some people are liberal for purely selfish reasons. For example, they want to smoke pot (which, incidentally, is something that Cyclo likes to do, as he has readily admitted online at A2K) or otherwise want moral social standards to be lowered so they can do what they want to do without legal or social sanction.

Even though I was a staunch liberal at the time, my best friend in college was a guy from a small town in Texas who was a conservative Republican at a time when the state was dominated by conservative Democrats. He hated living in small towns and wanted to live in the big city. (He was inclined towards Dallas.) He was refined in his mannerisms to the point of being slightly effeminate. (But he definitely was straight. He later got married and fathered several children.) Anyway, he was staunchly conservative; but he wasn't intolerant of me for being liberal in that time of our lives. We actually had political discussions in which we disagreed with each other, but we never raised our voices. He once said, "I suppose liberals serve a purpose. They keep us conservatives on our toes." I wish I had kept in touch with him when I dropped out.

He probably would get a kick out of this website. During the first month or so of our freshman year, he was assigned a dormitory room on a floor that was populated almost exclusively by "jocks." There definitely was a culture clash there, especially since many of the "jocks" were from small towns. They frequently got noisy and rowdy (drinking and *ahem* messing with coeds ) while my friend was rather quiet; and, to be fair, compared to them, he was effeminate. So, I suspect that they might have picked on him, although he definitely was not gay. Anyway, he hated it. Referring to the people who were in charge of assigning students to dorms, he would say, "Earl, they've got to get me out of there!"

[Fat Man]

Good evening Earl.

Yes, I know what you mean.

Our society is in a state of decline, and sometimes people will refer to drastic measures.

When our courts and our judges are too chicken shit to prosecute criminals because they happen to be professional football players, and the prosecutors try to stack the jury with mostly football fans, then justice is dead in the USA!

Our courts have often punished the innocent while letting the guilty go free just because the guilty party happened to be a professional jock.

Our system of justice is a sham, and if it weren't such a tragedy it would be a farce!

The court trials, when it comes to professional football players, is more like a Monty Python version of The Inquisition where the innocent are punished while guilty jocks go free and are even rewarded for their criminal behavior.

It's just one great big Mickey Mouse Club out there!

Only this time, Mickey Mouse has blood on his hands!

[Earl]

Dear reader, isn't it funny just how far we have strayed from the original subject of this thread?

[Fat Man]

Hey Earl!

Go to the OFF TOPIC section, where I had congratulated you on your forum post # 2001!!!

[Earl]

I just did. Thanks!

[i_like_1981]

Can you say, Vigilante Justice???

Yeah! I hate to say this, but if our courts and our judges are too fucking chicken shit to punish professional athletes who commit violent crimes, then we might have to take the law into our own hands.

Sadly, I don't think this would quite work out the way you wanted to, as if there was a complete breakdown or overthrow of law and order, I'm sure the so-called "tough" and "rebellious" jocks and other potentially-criminal "hard men" would be the first ones to take advantage of it. What we need is a judge and jury who can actually try a celebrity who has committed a crime and give them the exact punishment that they would give to an ordinary person in that situation. Sadly, everyone seems to class celebrities as a "superior" form of being, in social and financial ways, and it kind of acts as a shield towards them. I suppose... there's no way to stop the madness nowadays. But if you can see that it's madness and know that there's a problem with it, you are the one in the right.

Best regards,
i_like_1981

[Fat Man]

Can you say, Vigilante Justice???

Yeah! I hate to say this, but if our courts and our judges are too fucking chicken shit to punish professional athletes who commit violent crimes, then we might have to take the law into our own hands.

Sadly, I don't think this would quite work out the way you wanted to, as if there was a complete breakdown or overthrow of law and order, I'm sure the so-called "tough" and "rebellious" jocks and other potentially-criminal "hard men" would be the first ones to take advantage of it . . . etc. etc.

There has already been a breakdown and an overthrow of law and order, and the jocks have already taken advantage of it.

So, it's already here! It has arrived!

I have read somewhere, that some parents have taken vigilante action against pedophiles in their neighborhoods, and some of them were even killed, and the judge let the parents off with a much lighter sentence and in come cases, they didn't even bother to file charges against the parents. They just let it go, as if a stray dog got killed.

So yeah! It's already coming down!