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Jack Thompson's Letter To Take-Two Exec's Mother
Posted by
timothy
on Sun May 04, 2008 04:58 PM
from the an-insult-to-actual-slime-molds-everywhere dept.
from the an-insult-to-actual-slime-molds-everywhere dept.
debatem1 writes "Apparently, anti-violent-video-games crusader Jack Thompson is at it again, this time writing a letter to the mother of Strauss Zelnick, Chairman of Take-Two, the company that produces the GTA series of video games. In it he compares Zelnick to a member of the Hitler Youth, advocates beating the young Zelnick, and contemplates the existence of a Ted Bundy merit badge for boy scouts."
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Games: Referee Recommends Disbarment For Jack Thompson 139 comments
spielermacher writes "GamePolitics is reporting that Jack Thompson — the lawyer every gamer loves to hate — has apparently lost his court case and is facing disbarment. The Referee in the case has gone beyond the Florida Bar's request for a 10-year disbarment and is recommending a lifetime ban. From the Final Report issued by the court: '... the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes. He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior ...' All I can say is that it's about time."
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Like herpes (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Like herpes (Score:5, Funny)
Just a thought.
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Re:Like herpes (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Like herpes (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Like herpes (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Like herpes (Score:5, Funny)
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call jacks kids/family (Score:5, Insightful)
and see how they feel about their dads conduct
fairs fair right ?
Re:call jacks kids/family (Score:5, Funny)
Gah, I don't believe it.
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Jack's utter lack of a sense of irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Jack's utter lack of a sense of irony (Score:5, Funny)
... including, apparently, the Pope.
Go figure.
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Re:Jack's utter lack of a sense of irony (Score:5, Insightful)
Did he have a choice? And was there really anything fundamentally wrong with the group that would be obvious to a 14 year old child at the time? At the time, Hitler wasn't considered all that bad in Germany. Until the late 1930's he wasn't considered too bad by most of the world.
Actually, it's claimed that Ratzinger was pretty defiant and avoided going to meetings, but I suspect that's something made up by the Vatican's PR people.
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Re:Jack's utter lack of a sense of irony (Score:5, Insightful)
... including, apparently, the Pope.
Go figure.
That being said, the Nazi deal just doesn't stick. He was basically forced into the Hitler Youth, and he ran away when they tried to enlist him in the army.
So please, can we just stay on target and let this stupid argument die here?
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Chutzpah (Score:5, Informative)
Stop submitting Jack Thompson stories. (Score:5, Insightful)
Mental Health (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to seriously wonder, is this man mentally ill? The only reason he receives any attention now was due to his previous work, but as the things he says and does keep getting stranger and stranger I have to wonder.
In the US, people are only forcibly evaluated for mental illness under the most obvious conditions. If you have a person who is slowly slipping off the edge no one will do anything until he becomes an obvious problem. Even then it is usually be ignored unless he harms someone.
It is quite possible that Jack Thompson is out of his mind. But no one will step in until after he has practically killed someone.
Re:Mental Health (Score:5, Insightful)
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Letter to Barbara Bush (Score:5, Funny)
Your son, as you may know (or maybe you don't know), is the President of the United States, whose most popular foreign policy adventures are killing hundreds of thousand of people. Though they are a different color, I do believe they are still people.
Your son last week was reported to have said the following about Iran: "A nuclear Iran must not be allowed."
Taking your son's thought, I would encourage you either to join the Marines, or encourage all of your grand-children to join up, especially Jenna and little Barbara.
What you will see in the next war, if this iteration of war is anything like its predecessors, is incredible interactive violence aimed at everyone (whom you can shoot in the head and see the blood spray), innocent bystanders (whom you can run over with your Humvee or tank just for the heck of it), and of course the plentiful indigenous female prostitutes you can have sex with and then filet with a knife or stomp with your feet in order to get your money back. Experts note that the recent plethora of killings is caused in whole by your darling son's Administration and philosophical flunkies. There are four thousand dead soldiers in Iraq, and perhaps almost a million dead civilians. No, really - it was on 60 Minutes. I hope Bush has provided you with a flat screen TV to see the grief of the bereaved families that fills the screen. I mean, if reporters were allowed to say such things.
The violence that your son trafficks in is the kind of stuff that most mothers would be ashamed to see their son putting into the hands of other mothers' children, but, hey, your son Bush has recently assured the world that he is "a Boy Scout, everybody knows that." I'd love to see the merit badges that Scout Troop handed out. Is there a Colonialism merit badge? If so, your loving son deserves one now.
There's hundreds of thousands of mothers you would do well to talk to. They have a grief they carry every day that only a mother can know. There are other such mothers in the heartland of Iran whose inhabitants your son simply sees as commercial targets.
Your son, this very moment, is doing everything he possibly can to sell the new Iran war, to "defend" a country in which your son claims you raised him to be "a Boy Scout." More like the Hitler Youth, I would say.
Happy Mother's day, Mrs. Bush, which this year is May 11, and who knows how soon until your son or his predecessor unleash actual death and violence upon other mothers' boys. I'm sure you're very proud.
Re:Letter to Barbara Bush (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't see what all the fuss is about (Score:5, Funny)
Sheesh, can't Jack Thompson do nice things every once in a while?
Have you no shame, Jack Thompson? (Score:5, Insightful)
There are certain limits you don't cross. There are certain things you don't do, no matter what your agenda may be. Writing the mother of one of the people you 'fight' against and likening her son to Baldur von Schirach is one of them.
If this proves anything, it's not that computer games, no matte what content, are bad, but that Jack Thompson is on a witch hunt. It has become obvious that his agenda isn't anymore to protect anyone. This isn't an attempt to end the sale of violent games. It is a direct attack on a person which isn't even in any way connected to the problem he allegedly has with those games. He claims he tries to protect people from psychologic damage these games allegedly do, but he himself caused psychologic damage to a person who doesn't even partake in the whole process of creating those games.
So far, I didn't care too much about Jack Thompson. So far, he was a nut that tried to stop games from being sold. So be it. Whether those games exist, I don't really care. Now he is causing emotional harm to people who don't even have a connection with the game industry, except through some relative. Should we start harrassing his kids about their father's witchhunt?
I wouldn't go down to that level. Punishment for the sins of your kin have been abolished in Germany since... well, given his choice of comparisons, Jack Thompson seems to know since when.
Re:I hope (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I hope (Score:5, Informative)
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There's an advantage to keeping him around (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Glory Hole (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Silly troll (yup, IHBT... *sigh*) (Score:5, Insightful)
GTA isn't for kids, and I certainly think that cases where children are playing it are troubling (particularly for hours and hours on end, but that's true of any video game regardless of content), but the whole violent-videogames-cause-RL-violence meme is silly. It's much more defensible that individuals who are violent in nature are attracted to violent video games -- but I don't see how that's an argument for any kind of a ban, certainly not a strong enough argument to overcome the first-amendment counterpoint. Any rational individual knows that actions taken in real life have real consequences attached to them, and so evaluates such actions using a completely different metric than one might use in playing a game.
So -- I won't complain about the consequences of violent video games being available for sale to adults, because I honestly believe that there are no substantial negative consequences on the scale described. If my family is (against all probability to the contrary) murdered in a random act of violence, I'll do the rational thing and blame the person who pulled the trigger, rather than searching for scapegoats. That said, violent videogames have permeated our society to the point that any real effects on the level of random violence should already be highly visible -- and while there's a highly publicized shooting spree here or there, (1) there's no clear causal correlation, and (2) the death rate from those isn't even close to background noise in the grand scheme of things; it's far, far more likely that my family will die in a random traffic accident, and that's a risk we willingly accept every time we get in the car to watch a movie or go to the store.
Keep your fearmongering. If you want to live in a world where you're afraid of every kid who owns an Xbox, you're welcome to -- but me and mine prefer to go about living our lives (and facing much more real and present challenges), unworried by your imaginary and unrealized fears. I imagine those who were afraid of D&D or rock-and-roll felt similarly to you earlier in this century -- every generation finds some reason to worry needlessly about their youth -- but history proved those fears out as unfounded, and will do so again.
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