Friday, January 04, 2008

Responding to "Call home immediately" comments

Readers Note: What follows are my responses to parts or all of the comments on the Call home immediately thread.

Commenters are in italics; my responses in plain.

John
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Dear Commenters,

To Anon @ 6:10 PM

Thanks for your nice words but my advice was very simple, wasn’t it?

It was also in my best interest.

Why didn’t Duke do the same?


To Anon @ 2:42 PM

You say, “good sense …is not a quality exhibited by more than a handful of ‘adults’ at Duke.”

I agree and continue to wonder why there were so many at Duke who fell for what was obviously an impossible story.

I mean a young woman's brutally beaten, strangled, and gang-raped by three physically big atheletes in a small bathroom and all four emerge from the bathroom after a 30-minute life-and-death struggle with not one of the four having so much as a single broken bone or a cut which required even one stitch.

A woman who's been beaten by a single strong male for 5-minutes is a terrible sight to see.

How did Duke find so many faculty and staff who'd beleive such a crazy story?

Is Duke still hiring such people?

Anon @ 10:17 AM said:

“In fact, Duke officials advised the players not to engage independent counsel nor tell anyone, including their parents. Duke's behavior from the beginning is consistent with the factual allegations in the Ekstrand complaint, i.e. that Duke officials conspired with Durham authorities to railroad the lacrosse players.”

I’d like to believe you’re wrong, but so far Duke hasn’t given any of us any reason(s) to believe you are.

Anon @ 11:26 AM said:

"Uglier and Dukier."

How about “Much uglier and much Dukier?”

Ken in Dallas @ 12:08 PM notes with tongue-in-cheek Bob Steel “gets his information from the newspapers.”

Won’t it be interesting to learn what information President Brodhead and DU Police Director Dean made available to Steel that we don’t know yet.

Once discovery starts, Steel’s surely not going to say, “All I knew was what I read in the newspapers and what Brodhead, Dean and the others were telling me. And as they’ve said during their depositions, they were in the same boat I was in. We all only knew what we read in the newspapers.”

RedMountain @ 12:25 PM said: “I have stated before that Duke went way overboard in terms of it's cooperation with the Durham police.”

Red Mountain then asked: “Was that due to an interest in getting the case resolved quicky or due to a conspiracy by the Duke consortium to frame the players?”

Red Mountain, can we agree that you could also have asked: “ Was that due to an interest in getting the case resolved quickley due to a conspiracy by the Duke consortium to frame the players?”

You didn’t ask that question.

But all it would have taken for you to ask it was to drop “or” out the compound question you actually asked.

Are you leading up to something?

Anon @ 2:37 PM said: "...about my wife and ME...", not "and I."

Thanks for the correction which I’ve now made.

Ken in Dallas @ 2:37 PM queried regarding when “Steel direct Brodhead to finally meet with the players' parents and offer a sincere apology?”

I don’t know that Steel “direct[ed]" Brodhead to meet with the players’ parents. I'm in the dark on that.

Thank you to you all for commenting.

John

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Duke: In loco parentis or just loco?

Anonymous said...

The ivy tower is really a very different place ... as isolated from the real world as the beltway. Both suffer from raging self interest, lack of common sense and fear.

Anonymous said...

Especially FEAR!

Anonymous said...

Once you grant the raging self interest, the fear is purely rational, and the supposed lack of common sense not in evidence at all.

If one of the current lawsuits succeeds this may change, but so far aside from Nifong and Levicy, pretty much every single "member" of the "consortium" remains at worst unharmed, and many have enjoyed substantial career rewards for their participation.

These people are evil, but they are not stupid or ineffective.

Stuart McGeady said...

"The ivy tower is really a very different place"... Yes, I suppose it is, but not that much different from the Ivory Tower.

Anonymous said...

Had to laugh at "....my wife and ME", not "and I."

My mother was a teacher. French and Spanish but she also taught English (and Math...long story) and there were a few common mistakes she always corrected. May/can, good/well, color/shade but the one that really got her going was me/I.

At one time, most people mistakenly used "you and me" all the time so teachers corrected them until people started using "you and I" all the time. Mother would rail, "Even preacher's now say, He died for you and I!"

I think those of us born in the midst of that have an excuse or at least an explanation. It's not even one of our harder grammer rules but we were beat over the head with "you and I."

It does seem that we as a society consistently overcompensate for a mistake and swing all the way to the opposite extreme.

Anonymous said...

There is so much more to come out of Durham than the LAX case. The entire legal system is broken, the cops are thugs and worse than you can imagine. Countless elected officials from the Governor, down to the City Manager, to the County Clerk are involved. Many fingers have dipped into Durham's cookie jar, and the truth will be extremely explosive to many who have turned their backs on citizens, justice, and any code of ethics or valor. Embrace yourselves for an extreme shock. A tidal wave of truth will boggle your mind, the corruption SHALL be exposed!