Seven Navy SEALS Reprimanded for Actions Linked to Videogame | Hacker News Reader

Seven Navy SEALS Reprimanded for Actions Linked to Videogame

nytimes.com

22 points001sky19 comments

That's great marketing for Medal of Honor: Warfighter right there. I wonder if EA gave that to the NY Times.

>> The seven each received a punitive letter of reprimand and were docked half pay for two months...

I wonder how this dock in pay compares to the amount they were paid as consultants by EA.

Less than they paid in taxes (with allowances, etc., they make $3-8k/mo). The letter of reprimand is the bigger deal, if it prevents promotion or assignments in the future, and potentially makes it so they can't get to 20 years and retirement.

One military analyst I was listening to on the news said that this would effectively end their careers.

I doubt they were paid anything by EA. The article doesn't mention that they were and it would be a much more serious charge if they divulged classified material for money. It's more likely that they just wanted to show off their gear and get it into a video game.

The dock in pay would be around $3000 total; half-pay for two months. This is a pretty typical punishment for enlisted personnel who divulge or mishandle non-critical classified material and probably won't end their careers. It won't help but probably won't hurt much, either.

"CBS said the seven worked for two days this spring and summer as paid consultants on the videogame."

MoH had some issues earlier with a MoH branded SOG tomahawk:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-08-14-the-medal-of-ho...

http://soldiersystems.net/2012/08/20/an-american-perspective...

On a side note I think there were a lot of neat ideas in MoH but sadly it seems the game had to be rushed out in order to beat Halo and CoD:BO.

Jesus H. Christ. My impression was that Medal of Honor/Call of Duty had turned into soulless, corridor shooters with no open gameplay at all, all the while painting a picture of a black and white world where you get to kill people for the crime of having a beard. This was bad enough, but that was just nauseating.

An odd way to begin a moral rant. Anyway nobody plays the campaign mode and all the high-speed low-drag cool guys have beards now.

Odd, perhaps, but mocking things which some consider sacred is how one gains credibility on the 'net!

This wasn't the idea. Not living in a particular religious country, I did not think for a second something this mild could give offense. Religion, as demonstrated by current events, is a very poor way of trolling people.

No worries; I didn't think you were trolling. If I did, I would have ignored it.

Still: to many, it's not as mild as you think.

Eh? It's not odd at all ... "Jesus H Christ" is a bog-standard exclamation with which to express extreme surprise/disgust.

Its a bog standard unclassy way to lose any moral high ground before describing someone else's choices as nauseating. Personally I am not religious but I still think its important to respect other people's faiths in meatspace and in threads on HN.

Er, no. It's so common that it's essentially lost any religious connotations. It implies nothing about "faith", lack of faith, lack of respect, or anything else.

Maybe it originally had such connotations (and thus initially had shock value), but it long ago made the jump to a simple generic exclamation, and a rather mild one at that.

If that's your idea of a "mild" one what would you regard as religiously offensive?

It has nothing to do with what I think, it has to do with the way the phrase is typically used, and the reaction it gets: In normal usage, it's mild.

This is true of many religious words used in this manner ... they've pretty much lost any bite they once had. E.g. "God! <complain complain>" is similar: 75 years ago maybe you'd have had people up in arms over that, but these days nobody will even notice.

> but these days nobody will even notice

Clearly 2 people on this forum alone have already noticed.

I don't think your goal is to offend. But I think we'd all be better off if we tried to make our points here without needlessly causing tangential offense.

And you're right: it has everything to do with the reaction it gets. Many would disagree about your characterization of it as being "mild," or whether it's "lost any bite," and there's the rub: whether or not that's correct is up for debate, but I'd also submit that it's largely irrelevant whether or not that is, in fact, as inoffensive as you believe it to be.

While you may not think it offensive, many do, and would consider it a thoughtless treatment of something that's important to them. We can all argue about whether or not that's reasonable, but it's the reality, nonetheless.

It's one thing if you know your audience, but it's another thing to be commenting in a public place.

Consider this variation:

---

It has nothing to do with what I think, it has to do with the way the phrase is typically used, and the reaction it gets: In normal usage, it's mild.

This is true of many religious words used in this manner ... they've pretty much lost any bite they once had. E.g. "[racial epithet/gay slur/nationalistic slur/etc.]! <complain complain>" is similar: 75 years ago maybe you'd have had people up in arms over that, but these days nobody will even notice.

---

I'm sure inside those brackets there are plenty of things I could say that wouldn't feel offensive to me, or even many of the people I'm around in the real world, but if I care about making my point without it instantly becoming about how I made my point, then I'm probably not going to start my comment off with something completely irrelevant to my point that runs a non-trivial chance of offending someone who reads it.

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