The thing that is so compelling about JCS is that he keeps his distance from the subject, and lets the facts speak for themselves most of the time. The only time he really talks about psychology at any length it is pretty textbook criminology that you could find on the wikipedia entry about criminal psychology.
Would you also argue that TV shows like "The Search for Bigfoot" and whatnot should be banned? I can understand removing something because it contains personal information or something really obscene (like terrorists beheading someone), but videos like this are mostly just entertainment.
Quite the slipper slope you got going on there. I fail to see how a youtube video discussing interrogation techniques is going to magically cause people to 'think they're master criminal psychologists and get innocent people put in prison.'
By your reasoning anything discussing anything could be 'harmful'.
How about we decide for ourselves what we want to watch/listen/read.
This channel was a flaming pile. It was some guy wildly speculating in hindsight and throwing the word "psychology" to argue that his SWAGs were some kind of scientific endeavor.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or name-calling comments to HN? You've been doing a lot of it lately, unfortunately. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. And we've already had to ask you repeatedly not to do this.
Is it just the use of "flaming pile" that you take issue with or the underlying content of the post? Can I call the channel terrible or something? I don't feel that this content is "bad" or "not good". A sandwich is "not good". This channel is dangerous and insidious and I feel like using a phrase that is on the pretty restrained side of strong language is relatively in line. I'll be more careful to avoid it but I also see 20 things a day on here that are more strongly worded and less constructive.
This channel promotes an incredibly dangerous narrative and ideology that has the potential to do real damage to peoples lives. He accuses people of terrible crimes that could lose them their freedom for life because he thinks they seem "nervous" or like "they are giving too many details" and then uses a false veneer of science to justify what essentially boils down what I will standby as SWAGs or hunches. This is psycopathic behavior IMO and i believe it deserves to be openly ridiculed. At least having some voices say that they feel this is serious I really don't think is damaging the conversation.
I don't feel that I have an obligation to be positive on every topic. Nothing I write is written to elicit a negative response for the sake of eliciting a negative response ie trolling. I write plenty of positive posts. And I don't think the language I used here was even that colorful again especially relatively to the seriousness of the thing being discussed. If something is bad I might criticize it. In this case I think the tone was relatively in line to the seriousness of how dangerous the thing being promoted is and there is a real risk to normalizing these kinds of insidious things if the only response allowed is to agree or dissent with flowery language.
I come here generally because it is well moderated but I feel that there is a difference between trolling and expressing a viewpoint that something is genuinely really bad and it's not very interesting to have a discussion where the only acceptable viewpoint is to agree/support or even to make very weak statements of disagreement. If someone actively supports genocide or something like that politely saying "I disagree" is not a measured response. In this case they are advocating for things that not only could ruin people lives but aim to use the megaphone of youtube to normalize this philosophy. I'm not equivocating it with genocide but it is serious and I would suggest that saying "I disagree" is similarly not proportional to the seriousness of the topic at hand.
If you really feel like I'm trolling / flamebaiting just ask me to leave and I'll kill my account. I get vastly more positive feedback for what I write on here than negative and I think it's because I try to write honestly and clearly both on the positive and negative side of topics. I will try to avoid use of phrases like "flaming pile" in the future but if it's more than that than I wouldn't even know what I'm supposed to be saying or not saying
The problem with the GP comment is that it was a shallow dismissal combined with indignant rhetoric. Those are reliably bad comments, and they tend to evoke worse from others, hence the term flamebait.
Of course you don't always have to be positive. Thoughtful critique is welcome, but it should be substantive and add real information, not just rhetoric. As the site guidelines say, a good critical comment teaches us something.