The legal case is so facially without merit that it is not worth considerable discussion, and also not super germane to this thread. You feel like he didn’t want it removed because he disliked the video, my take is that is exactly why he wanted it removed. I won’t quibble with you along those lines much further. No one said his flawed legal knowledge or his personal morality weren’t reasons for his dislike, there isn’t even a conflict there.
[The Geneva Conventions literally does not apply to anyone not party to the conflict, the idea there is any legal liability for the SDMB or any other website, news outlet or media of any kind in retransmitting a video of a POW is not even controversial–it is simply well understood. If someone committed a war crime–and just taking a photograph or video isn’t necessarily a war crime, it is more nuanced than that, it would be the party who captured the POWs, media outlets dealing with their produced content later on are just simply not party to the GC at all. If anyone thinks they are, they are so far afield from the law that it’s not a serious claim. Note that because filming POWs for propaganda purposes is generally a war crime, many media outlets will blur or redact their retransmissions of such content for journalistic ethical reasons, but not legal–and they do that on a case-by-case basis, there is no universal journalistic rule.]
FWIW I can absolutely see removing videos, especially if they load an inline preview, of POWs since they are generally fairly unpleasant and can be referenced for discussion without doing a direct link.
Since we aren’t party to the specific claims gdave made–I will note that generally there is no legal liability (in terms of “war crimes” under the GC) for anyone in sharing those videos unless they are a party to the conflict, quoted in this link is a Duke university law professor (and retired 3 Star General from the U.S. Air Force) who is an expert in this exact field:
Replying to this from my perspective, not intending to speak for gdave.
On the other hand, this board is not anonymous and impersonal because it really isn’t all that big. So if a poster perceives that the authorities here dismiss and minimize something that is enormously important to him, it can seriously taint the entire board experience, taking all the enjoyment out of it. I’ve been close to that point myself a couple of times, but while I took breaks on those occasions I didn’t think anyone would be interested in why I (possibly) left. Now gdave has been gone for more than 2 months and he still feels so strongly about this, I think I can understand to some extent how he feels even though his issues are not my issues.
You’re doing it again. I did not say anything about my feelings. I pointed out that he factually did not claim at any point to merely dislike the video. At no point did he say “this video should be removed because I don’t like it.” Both of those choices of words are being used to downplay the actual arguments being made.
Sure, you can say his legal argument isn’t correct. But it is factually incorrect to make the claim that he said the video should be removed because he disliked it.
Morals aren’t likes and dislikes. Those are mild emotions. Morals are based on principles. They guide our actions. They motivate both what we ourselves will not do and what we fight against others for doing. It is how we try to make the world a better place.
Can’t you see how, if someone said “He wants to ban murder because he dislikes it,” that would minimize the issue. The laws against murder don’t exist because of dislike. They exist because the action is gravely immoral, and damaging to wellbeing of everyone.
Again, you can disagree with a moral argument. But you seem to be trying to sidestep it.
But it wasn’t dismissed. I still don’t understand this. The video was removed almost immediately upon the flag. I know as I did so and everyone supported that. A large number of mods were involved in trying to understand what the legal part of the issue was. Chronos asked questions which I thought were good as I don’t know this stuff. No one except for Aspenglow is in anyway a legal expert. And this was probably far from anything she has dealt with.
I hasten to add that my “expertise” in legal matters is confined to legal procedure. I am not a lawyer and had nothing to contribute to the subject discussion. I just worked in courtrooms for many years.
I will say that as a spectator to the flagged thread, I was baffled over why the OP was so outraged by Chronos’s questions. I saw nothing wrong with them.
I didn’t say it was dismissed, I said he perceived that it was dismissed and minimized; that’s how I read what he wrote (again, he can speak for himself). My post was intended specifically to speak to what Martin_Hyde wrote, not to attempt to adjudicate the dispute itself.
You’re exerting a lot of energy looking for quibbles. Like I said I’m not going to debate what the word “dislike” means. My intent was clear. You misunderstood. Further communication on it serves no further interest to me (or you.)
I would agree this seems like a reaction undeserved by the described moderation. Since it had been 2 months since I read gdave’s OP, I didn’t even remember until you mentioned it that the post he complained about was removed fairly quickly. It appears he literally is saying he won’t post here because he doesn’t want to be on a board where someone who would question his legal claim for why a post should be removed is a moderator. That just seems…manifestly unreasonable to me. A legal claim is by its nature complex, and expecting message board moderators to simply accept them as asserted, when said moderators themselves typically are not going to be legal experts, and also have no real knowledge of what sort of expertise the complainant has, is just not reasonable. I would not want moderators to blindly agree with any poster flagging something as being of “legal concern”, without first asking further questions.
I’m honestly trying to understand why @gdave thought Chronos’s questions were so out of line. This was a confusing issue that left me feeling very out of my depth.
@BigT, your entire patronizing diatribe derives from a failure to consider the possible range of meanings of the word “like” in context. Of course to like a sports team is qualitatively different from a moral stance. But this is not a video of a football game, is it? When @Martin_Hyde used the word “dislike” to reference OP’s opinion of this video, do you imagine that he was implying that OP disliked their haircuts? In this context, to say that OP disliked the posting of the video is a perfectly cromulent way of referencing the fact that OP found the video morally repugnant.
I don’t like the Yankees.
I don’t like parsley.
I don’t like the fact that the word “retard” is deemed acceptable on SDMB.
I don’t like the fact that Supreme Court is trying to undermine abortion rights.
And, at the risk of stating the obvious, @Chronos need not be concerned that the majority of us who have not seen the exchange verbatim will accept OP’s account as a reliable description of the exchange.
I think ultimately this is the part of @Chronos’ response that @gdave really objected to, and I must say, if it’s accurately reported (is it, @What_Exit ?) I find it a bit hard to stomach, myself. This is not merely “asking questions”.
That tends to leave the rest of us in a bit of a he said-they said situation, doesn’t it? Are you saying the word “heroes” was never used in the PMs at all?
Which is why I dislike that Star Chamber aspect of moderation. This whole “boot you out of a discussion you were actively part of, and continue the discussion in secret” thing, I mean .
@gdaveshould have the option of linking to that discussion, IMO, or being able to at least see it to copy specific posts out of, and making their case that that’s what Chronos was saying.
If mods want to continue a discussion in camera, they should spin off a new mod-only thread from that message thread, I believe that functionality exists in Discourse. Not kick someone out of their own message stream, which is what flag reports are. I strongly resent when it happens to me, too. I view my messages archive as kind of record I can refer back to. I abhor gaps in it as much as Nature does vacuums.
I would have to see the video and the questions before I could even begin to offer an opinion. Whoever took the video could be a hero in the whistleblower sense (This is what’s really going on) or they could be vile scum (See what we do to our enemies! Ha ha ha!).
I don’t knowChronos, but they don’t seem the sort to glorify assholery. And I don’t know knowgdave, but they don’t seem to be the sort to just make shit up, and this is obviously an important and emotional issue for them.
I’m hoping that it’s all a big misunderstanding with people talking past each other.
Quite ignoring any legal issue, there’s a moral argument for not linking to these videos. They are images of a human being who is being humiliated. If you wouldn’t want images of you being humiliated propagating around the internet, you probably don’t want to propagate videos of other people being humiliated.
I’ve declined to speculate too much on that because gdave chose to bring up this claim in private, and has not chosen to disclose the video. There’s a wide variance in such videos. An ISIS propaganda video showing a Jordanian fighter pilot being burned alive, is a lot different to me than a Russian invader (who is evil and absolutely the bad guy in any such video) caught raping a Ukrainian woman and being captured by irregulars.
As a simple matter of good or bad taste I can agree such videos may not be content the board wants, but the law and ethics is going to vary tremendously based on the circumstances.
I frankly find gdave’s overall performance to be bad form. He chose to raise this issue in private instead of making a thread in ATMB. When he did not like the private conversation, he chose to make a post blasting Chronos based on the private conversation. I tend to think if you want to air something public, then do so, don’t do something private and then angrily denounce a party to the private conversation (without evidence) when it doesn’t go your way.