I agree (with zuma)
(although I’m not so convinced it’s real - still quite undecided) - when people cry ‘fake’ on YouTube, they’re not really being skeptical - at least not in any useful sense. They’re just being idiots, a fair bit of the time.
I haven’t been to the guy’s blog itself yet, but there’s a thread at Fark that has screenshots of a David Motari, inlcuding his photo and his attempt at a defense for his behavior. Take everything with a grain of salt, but this very much lends to the ‘it’s real’ camp.
scroll to near the end.
Of course the two situations are different, but that wasn’t my point. The point is that one cannot simply “accept the evidence.”
In the case of the puppy video, there are reasons to be skeptical.
Agreed.
Huh. Well, the bit form the guy’s board (yeah, grain of salt) does make sense. The bit about ‘What were we supposed to do with a sick puppy?’ Though, really, that would have been reason to shoot the puppy, or, say, leave it alone… But yes, this is an almost perfect example of people being okay with dead humans and not okay with dead puppies. Just like in the movies! (Yes I know plenty aren’t okay with either, or would prefer puppies over human, but on some of the boards where this is being discussed it’s clear that some who find puppy killing unforgivable were happy to get the Towelheads).
That has absolutely nothing to do with it. If it were a sick human tossed off a cliff there would still be outrage. If the puppy was dying and he shot it, this would not be a story. It’s the act of throwing a living creature off a cliff to it’s death that is what is disturbing. Not that it was a puppy.
(I have not watched the video, and I will not do so.)
OK, so I read his myspace thing and I buy his explanation, but I do not excuse his actions. We have thousands of people over there and I completely buy that a couple of them lost their perspective and their compassion and did this. Let me repeat, I do not excuse it at all, Murderers have their reasons, too. I just buy that instead of him being a generally bad person, he was a normal guy in an abnormal situation and he didn’t handle it well at that moment.
And I hope he gets punished accordingly.
I’m not disputing this, I just wanted to point out that it’s also possible that the puppy is real AND one of the soldiers was making the yelping noises, which would explain how loud they were. I could see someone doing that for humorous effect.
The fact that he threw the dog off of the cliff instead of just shooting it is kind of fucked up. I remember Bear_Nenno once posting about how he’d come across a sick cat and wanted to help it but couldn’t take it back to camp with him, so the only thing he could do was kill it right there. I can’t remember if he shot it or how he killed it, but he definitely tried to do it humanely and quickly. And I suspect he probably wasn’t laughing about it while he was doing it, or filming it for Christ’s sake.
I think it’s definitely true that guys in combat can be driven to do strange or disturbing things from the stress of the situation. I admit I was being a little harsh before when I said that whatever combat experiences he had didn’t excuse this behavior - I’m not a veteran and I have no place trying to talk about what men are or aren’t capable of when they’re putting their lives on the line. One of our military posters would surely be able to address that better than I could.
With that said, the whole thing seems to me like: sadistic, immature asshole does a sadistic immature asshole thing (the kind of thing he probably would have done before ever setting foot in Iraq) and is now trying to cover his ass and justify his behavior after the fact. Whether it’s out of genuine contrition, or simply a desire to salvage his reputation (since, being that he’s obviously a computer user, he probably learned fast about all the vitriol being directed towards him) I cannot say. It could be either.
I do not think those words mean what you think they mean. Although commonly used as synonyms, if a distinction is to be drawn at all it would be that empathy is understanding or appreciating another’s feelings, and sympathy is sharing them.
I blame Star Trek.
I don’t see what’s so extraordinary about this video that’s provoking all this skepticism. It just looks like a common act of animal cruelty. Despicable, but stuff like that happens all the time all over the world.
So are you saying let it go. No problem. Or do you think animal cruelty reveals something about a person and we should deal with him now better than later.?
His Myspace profile appears to be private, and I don’t think I care to add him as a friend.
No, this is a very bad example. It’s been said before but appearently bears repeating that when an armed forces member kills another person, there’s usually at least the claim that it was done in self-defense, to protect someone else, or in the heat of battle. The men are obviously in no danger from this puppy.* Nor can it be dismissed by claiming they had no other way of dealing with a sick dog. What some of us find most disturbing about this video is not that an animal is killed, but the glee with which it is killed. The men not only display a lack of compassion, but their interaction with the camera suggests that they are aware of and deliberately mocking the compassion of others. And do you really doubt that if they had treated a human the same way and it had been posted on YouTube, the outrage would have been many orders of magnitude greater?
He didn’t say anything remotely like that.
I’m quite aware of what words I use and how I use them. I am using the terms most commonly used by psychologists in the definitions most often used by them. This paper published in 1986 identifies that there has not historically been a clear distinction between the two, although this has changed drastically in the past twenty years. Sympathy is understanding another person’s negative emotions and their need to relieve them, empathy is putting yourself in their place and feeling the emotions yourself. I don’t have my copy of the APA Dictionary of Psychology on hand, but you’ll find it agrees with me.
Your own cite contradicts your definitions.
Goggled “dog marine” just now to see if there were any updates. Saw a two to one ratio of good dog/marine to bad dog/marine stories. I the USMC Public Affairs Officer working overtime or what?
…
At the risk of generalizing, Iraq Muslims wouldn’t have the outrage of Americans because dogs are just a step above pigs in uncleanliness. But I would put it past people to use the incident as a rallying point, although that doesn’t seem to have materialized.
Do Muslim puppies get 72 virgin puppies when they die a martyr’s death?
My take is he’s saying such acts of cruelty are so commonplace worldwide that it’s against common sense to be straining for reasons to call this particular video fake. Notice he said the act itself was “despicable”.
I was waiting for someone to inject a callous remark so I could feel better about saying something to the effect of “Who cares about that dog, anyway? It was an Iraqi dog, after all, not nearly as valuable as an American dog!”