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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."
Is the enemy of my enemy my friend, or is he still an asshole?
It's sorta like Alien vs. Predator, but backwards. Whoever loses, we win.
I bet you Slashbots are just foaming at the mouth.
jack thompson: greatest troll who ever lived
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The time is approaching when someone is going to have to put this guy in the nut house. I hope all those self-serving pandering politicians who like to align themselves with Thompson against the invented evils of video games start seriously considering the kind of delusional maniac they've decided is their ally.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
My guess is that it's to prove that if Bush can be completely incompetent and misguided as President, then Thompson has the right to do so as a lawyer.
Ok, now that I've trolled in another post, I'm wondering if the folks trying to get him kicked out of the Bar could enter the subpoena ITSELF as evidence of JT's unfitness to practice law.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Jack is currently suing the mediator, Judge Dava Tunis, along with the Florida Supreme Court and the Florida Bar.
like he's a lawyer, alright...
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
Then he'll make elaborate laws that restrict our rights with promises that it will stop video game-ism, only to have video games become better at hiding, stockpiling weapons, and money laundering.
Resistance is futile. Your technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. You will become one with the morgue
Bar associations are not courts. They're unions for lawyers. You can sue unions. You can sue bar associations.
Get off your high horse. Jack Thompson is of interest around here, because of his links to the anti-gaming lobby. It's Friday, it's a hilarious story, and we're all enjoying it. You know who Thompson is, if you have been around for a while. That's like asking "Which Bill Gates? How should I know?"
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Rule 29: The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy, no more, no less.
he can claim that gaming has driven at least one person to raving lunacy... Himself! (at least in my personal opinion.)
More Caffeine. NOW
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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.
George Bush sends Jack Thompson to Guantanamo
Someone asked me the other day about the difference between psychotic and psychopathic. Here it is laid out nicely.
The psychotic Jack Thompson is sending a subpoena to the psychopathic George Bush.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney!
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Jack better watch out. Some of out government officials have already been trained on violent video games. I hear Cheney is pretty good at Duck Hunt.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
Human Rights Watch
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.