Slashdot Mirror
Jack Thompson Sends Subpoena to Bush
Ariastis writes "Jack Thompson has filed documents with a federal court in Florida requesting to subpoena President George W. Bush for a deposition to retain Thompson's license to practice law. Ah, and Jeb Bush too, for good measure."
Considering that not even congress can get Bush, Rumsfield, Cheny et al to respond to subpoenas -or even off the record chats ire the Plame affair, the attorney firings etc (maybe they can get Gonzales now that he has stepped down) I don't think he's got a prayer.
And when he loses his license he can blame Bush -just like everyone else
-I'm just sayin'
I don't know if it can be directly referenced or not. Is it necessary? The guy's record speaks for itself. This delicious piece of irony is just icing on the cake.
I'm more concerned about his fitness to walk down the street. I really do think Thompson is completely out of his mind. I think what's needed after the disbarment is a 30 day psychiatric review in a closed facility. Maybe there's some meds they can give him.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Anyone have a picture of this guy. You cannot make up some of the stuff this guy does and I am curious to see if you can see the crazy in his eye.
That's a really nice rant, and I agree with you somewhat in your general assertion that Slashdot has drifted pretty far away from being a nerd site (WTF is up with the Politics section, for example). However, I have some issues:
1.) I haven't been around quite as long as you have, but I don't recall the slogan ever being "News for Nerds on the Stuff that Matters". That may have been the original intent, but I don't think that was ever the actual slogan. The oldest page from Slashdot I could find on web.archive.org is from November, 1998, which was prior to the Andover.net buyout (thereby presumably before the major corporate influence began). On that page, the slogan is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters."
Now, I grant you, prior to maybe 5 or 6 years ago, the "stuff that matters FOR NERDS" was sort of implied, but that hasn't really been the case for a long, long time.
2.) Jack Thompson has been going after the gaming industry for a long time. Seeing his long, slow descent into madness is of great interest to gaming nerds, even if not to you particularly. Even if you decide that the site should be limited only to things that the typical nerd would care about (not your decision or mine to make), this still would fit that category.
So, even though I agree with you that Slashdot in general has strayed pretty far from its roots (but what site this old hasn't), I disagree with you about this particular story.
So user ID doesn't mean you know everything? Wow. (Admittedly mine is huge, but mostly because I've never botherd to make an account until recently...so I never judge based on UID).
I'd say the majority (at least 80%) of Slashdot regulars know and despise Jack Thompson. It started with that trial, but he has been an annoying wart on the video game industry's toe ever since then, constantly proclaiming how video game violence is destroying society, etc. He has also been in a couple good squabbles with the guys that run Penny Arcade. And since you may not be in the 80%+ of regulars who know who they are, then I'll just sum it up by saying they are probably the most-read video game webcomic on the net, to the point that they have a pretty substantial video game expo every year.
So perhaps if you'd checked Slashdot since you created your account, you might have known who this guy is and not made a fool of yourself. I will give you some credibility on the fact that this might deserve to be under video games instead of politics...but that's about it.
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable Slashdot 2.0.
I'm with you on the editors (remember how kdawson would put almost everything into the Enlightenment category?), and the overall quality of the site over time. I pretty much agree with your other points as well.
On another note, something that may only be funny to me:
I was browsing your comment history briefly, and noticed that the VERY FIRST comment that Slashdot shows you having posted is from January 1999, and is complaining about the QUALITY OF AN ARTICLE ON SLASHDOT! That is just hilariously awesome.
The comment.
It makes me wonder, though. Schizophrenia quite often starts mild, debatably sane, and progresses over time to padded-room calibre. Just because at some point you might look like just a bit eccentric or slightly bizarre or a bit of a bad case of cognitive dissonance, doesn't mean that 17 years later you can't be diagnosed with proper schizophrenia.
And this guy's delusions started from half-way between mildly annoying and mildly funny, and progressed to outright bizarre. I can't diagnose him anyway, but it makes me, you know, wonder. Maybe a second examination would find it a bit worse than the one almost 2 decades ago? It's a possibility.
Plus, to the best of my knowledge, a lot (most?) doctors tend to prefer to err on the conservative side, especially when it would bury someone's career. If slapping a "yup, he's schizophrenic" label on him would terminate his right to act as a lawyer, even temporarily, they'll give him a lot of benefit of the doubt. He'd pretty much have to be at the raving lunatic stage to get that. It's just a different standard. Even if you'd consider giving him neuroleptics in a private consultation, you'd have to be convinced that he's to deranged to do his job to actually slap that on his dossier.
Plus, in that kind of context, I figure it's hard to diagnose anyway. Noone will start telling you about the voices in his head, when he's sent there to determine whether he's fit to keep working and doing his crusade. Being insane carries a major stigma. So unless they're deranged past the point of hiding it, a lot of people _will_ try to hide it, if you just send them to a psychiatrist. They might admit stuff to their therapist if it was their idea to go there, and it's going to be kept secret. But not to the guy who has to determine whether they're fit to keep their job, and whose conclusion will probably be public record.
What I'm trying to say is that it's entirely possible that he just slipped through the cracks the first time. (_If_ he's indeed nuts.) There's no telling if he'd still pass after all this time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I wonder how many /.ers, who are against Guantanamo on average, would feel about that. I'm sure there would be some mixed feelings.
There are two kinds of fool One says 'This is old therefore good' Another says 'This is new therefore better'- Dean Ing
I'm hoping that it's a trick for the president to set a precedent of answering to subpoenas. Hopefully during the next administration, there will be quiet a number of neocons called to take the stand.
We are all just people.
was allegedly under the influence of Grand Theft Auto
Whoa.. I've heard of people smoking some crazy stuff, but a video game? How the hell do you smoke that? You can burn the cd, but then you're smokin the cd.. burn the computer? How the hell do you burn a series of 1s and 0s? And how do said binary digits "influence" you?
XenoPhage
Technological Musings
From the link you gave to the oldest slashdot page:
Booker writes "So IBM announces a 25 gig hard drive... does the world need this yet? Unless this is in a RAID, would you really want to trust 25 gigs on a single drive? What would you use this for? 400+ hours of MP3s comes to mind... "
I don't know what's scarier, the echoes from the past, or the echoes from the present
SB
(remembering with fondness my first 5MB IBM PC drive)
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.