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Jack Thompson Walks Out On Hearing
Erik J writes "Apparently Jack had heard enough.
The Florida Bar asked for an 'enhanced disbarment' in the disciplinary hearing of Jack Thompson, held earlier this afternoon. The recommendation means Thompson would be disbarred and prohibited from applying to practice law again for ten years, according to 11th Judicial Circuit of Florida spokesperson Eunice Sigler.
Thompson's disciplinary hearing apparently ended in the attorney walking out of the courtroom after saying the judge did not have the authority to hear his case."
One has to understand that this man is most likely very unstable but has a loud voice. He knows a squeeky wheel gets the grease.
A friend of mine, when I asked him why he was yelling to the crowd of students (in the cafeteria) instead of just speaking to them told me someone told him that if you want to get elected, then speak real loud. He was elected to the student board.
Jack Thompson has his followers but obviously this man is a kook. I can't imagine anyone getting away with the bullshit he has and not be punished. So now, he's saying they have no authority over him? He'll be surprised when he's arrested for practicing law after he's been disbarred.
Good riddance to him.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Oh, there's some optimism. Has the lack of a license to practice stopped Dr. Phil from being a pain? (Answer: no).
The worst thing that Jack could do is stop talking, though. He's like PETA. Some people could agree with his points, but he makes it very hard to espouse those positions without being lumped in with the loonies.
Quiet censorship is far more nefarious.
In 1990, the Florida Supreme Court wanted his sanity checked.
"In 1992, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare the Florida Bar Association unconstitutional. He said that the bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflict with what he called the bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda."
I'm not seeing it on Wikipedia, but I've read that he has filed suit against George Bush as well. He repeatedly files ridiculous law suits that demonstrate he has little working knowledge of how the judicial system is supposed to operate, and abuses his power as an attourney.
He should have been disbarred years and years ago for his tactics. He filed a lawsuit here in Omaha against the police chief for not handing over evidence on a sealed, active investigation on Robert Hawkins. He sues people for not pressing video game angles in criminal investigations, even before any evidence presents itself to suggest it a factor.
He "predicts" people's guilt ahead of time based on video games, and then uses legal threats to enforce those predictions that repeatedly turn out to be false.
He isn't just a nut-job, he is a bully who violates court orders and makes fairly serious threats. I'm shocked Florida has let this guy practice law for decades now.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Thompson started his career as a loudmouth by complaining about some rap from "2 Live Crew" back in the early 1990s. I bought the 2 Live Crew CD to see what all the fuss was about. They were a terrible rap group, at the low end of the garage-band level. My comment at the time was that "this group would never have gotten off the South Florida club circuit without the censorship attempt".
Not to mention if you read his response, he attacks the florida supreme court, and claims he will get them all removed from office. His career = over.
... in the form of a GTA style car-jacking by two teenagers just after the game was released... I still am happy to see this happen. Those 17 year old kids whacked out of their heads on speed were going to commit a crime either way. They probably would've just beat someone to death. It wasn't the game that caused the crime, it was two kids from broken homes with easy access to amphetamines that caused the crime.
Correlation is a situation where two things happen with statistically significant coincidence. Simply said, if there are effect A and effect B, and if you have significantly more occurences of A and B happening together and of neither happening together, than occurences of A happening without B or B without A, then there is a correlation between A and B.
If A is "the person played violent videogames" and B is "the person murdered someone", then every case where someone played violent videogames and soon before or afterwards murdered someone is a statistical point in favor of the correlation between the two, but only if there also are cases where someone did not play violent videogames and did not murder someone soon before or after: unfortunately for Jack Thompson, the latter is becoming extremely rare, which reduces the significance of the former. Also, every case where someone plays violent videogames and does not murder someone is a statistical point against the correlation. Similarly, every case where someone did not play violent videogames yet did murder someone goes against the correlation. So far, evidence shows that any correlation between the two is extremely improbable.
Illusory correlation, like that inferred by Jack Thompson repeatedly between violent videogames and crime, is the situation where someone insists on considering two events to be related despite being not significantly correlated. Despite popular belief to the contrary, such illusory correlation behaviour is not correlated to schizophrenia (paranoid or non-paranoid, delusional disorder), nor with depression. So Jack Thompson is probably not technically insane on such grounds.
However, illusory causation, where the person infers causality between two supposedly correlated events, is a trait of paranoid disorders. Jack Thompson goes as far as making public claims (and suing according to those claims) that a causation exists between people playing violent videogames and murders despite the absence of even mild correlation between the two, and even interprets much of what happens to him in his professional life as having a causal link to this illusory causation in the first place (as evidenced by his claims of collusion between the Florida Bar or Supreme Court and the videogame industry). When his interpretations are rejected by the public (like when he unsuccessfully sued Janet Reno and RockStar), he rejects the result of the scrutiny instead of questioning those interpretations: that's a symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. At one point he even fantasized himself as being Batman, FFS ! It makes him a very dangerous man in my book, because the paranoids are often capable of nurturing delusory fantasies of persecution and injustice that can push them to commit serious crimes.
Given some of his more religious statements I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that he has auditory hallucinations which he attributes to God... The other symptoms (disorganized thinking, absent or inappropriate emotional behaviour, etc.) are easier to hide and less prominent in paranoid schizophrenia.
Even if the guy is disbarred for ten years, if he really has paranoid schizophrenia, I would only consider the general public to be safe when he is committed to a mental institution.
Maybe we deserve this world ?