The social media to prison pipeline gets shut down, fortunately

Being a member of the United States military is an aweseome responsibility. 18 year-olds operate machine guns. 24-year-olds fly million dollar jets. 

One's obligations extend beyond handling dangerous and expensive equipment. You have duties to your brothers and sisters in arms, your leaders, subordinates, and to the reputation of the service—you can't do anything that discredits it to the public. 

In fact, engaging in conduct that discredits the service, or in conduct that is found to be unbecoming of someone in the officer corps, can result in criminal charges.

The military also gives 26-year-old attorneys more opportunities to try cases than you get almost anywhere in the country. While young military attorneys do not control the cases that go to trial, they advise (and influence) those that do, advocating with commanders and supervisory attorneys who do not know the cases as well. 

So it's understandable how a case of bad judgment on social media by a 54-year-old lieutenant commander (the equivalent of a major, for those who understand normal ranks) ends up at a court-martial. 

Navy Lt. Cmdr. James Dickerson posted a video to TikTok, In it, he lip syncs a Frozen video with curse words and flips off the camera while wearing his uniform. The Air Force Times published a story on his court-martial and acquittal here. 

So an officer does a dumb thing, faces too harsh of a penalty for it, but fortunately he gets acquitted. Everybody spends way too much time dealing with a poor sap with bad judgement. Hopefully everyone learns their lessons and moves on. 

To help ensure this happens, I'm going to post the following lessons explictly, even if most people figured this out on their own. 

1. Don't try someone at court-martial because they did something stupid. There was no real underlying crime here. Just a guy being weird, recording it and publishing it.  

2. If you're posting stuff while in uniform on social media, keep it more to the LinkedIn style. It's a profession after all.  

3. If you're past your 40s, don't post videos of yourself on TikToklip lip syncing Frozen songs, regardless of whether you're in uniform or not. While maybe not service-disrediting to the point of criminal conviction, you've just discredited yourself in front of your leaders and subordinates forever.   

There's probably a few more lessons in there, but I think I wrang all the juice out of this one. What an embarrasment for everyone involved.