Jack Thompson - A Rant

(WARNING: This post was made at God knows what time in the morning. Hence, there will be a greater amount of swearing, bile and typos than normal. Reader discretion is advised.)

Over the past few weeks, a combination of University stress and general boredom have been causing my tension levels to rise to somewhat uncomfortable levels. And although I have managed to let off a good whine or two in Chatzy about problems that apparently only I can see, I haven't had anything that has been actually worth getting angry about come up in conversation yet. What I need at the moment is a good long rant - something to blow off steam and help me calm down and not lash out at my good RP buddies.

So thank you, Jack Thompson. Thank you for this chance to unwind by calling you a psychotic little dickbend.

I know people will say I'm beating a dead horse - making fun of the recently disbarred, anti-gamer attorney general is nothing if not low-hanging fruit, after all. But up until now, I've always assumed that the man was at least sane in some degree, if a little bit misguided in his attempts to censor gaming culture. Then I discovered his page on Wikiquote, and Jesus Crunchy Christ on a pogo stick, all of what I could only call "tolerance" for the man went out of the window faster than Max Fucking Payne doing another of his crazy bullet-time stunts. If the page is to be believed, JT is a dangerously unhinged, self-glorifying cock-gobbler with the same grasp on reality God would bestow to the average nematode worm. Except that would be an insult to nematode worms - at least they have some sort of function in the natural world.

I'm not going to link to the page, because I assume everyone reading this has access to Google at the very least, but here's the general gist for you people. This man, this lowlife masquerading in human form, has literally come to believe that the word "gamer", a term tentatively used even in the best of circumstances, denotes some kind of fantastical fucking religious movement or subhuman species. He literally claims that gamers are incapable of rational though or reasoning because Grand Theft Auto is a brainwashing device, apparently, and that anyone who plays games is a future Boston Strangler or Columbine Massacrer waiting to burst from it's cocoon like some filthy fly. He has blamed Half-Life, one of the greatest PC games of all time, for the Virginia Tech massacre, not even bothering to do his research beforehand, and talks down at gamers as though they're Alice in fucking Wonderland, claiming they are incapable of connecting with reality where "grown-ups" get this done. And all the while, the smug bastard constantly builds himself up as an avatar of God, a righteous, infallible messenger sent to cleanse the world of the sinful gamer plague and rid the world of anything that might damage our children's minds. Oh, and he sometimes talks in third-person, just in case he doesn't sound retarded enough.

Most of the time, I would just laugh. As someone who doesn't play video games that much, yet sympathises deeply with the problems facing today's gaming culture, I would merely tolerate the ravings of this senile old fogey trying to prove his law degree wasn't a complete waste of money. The self-glorification, the flimsy arguments, the ham-handed attempts at enforcing what little legal power he has - I would have been able to dismiss it all as the ramblings of a harmless old wierdo and move on, confidently playing Mortal Kombat safe in the knowledge that I would not be inspired to slice up my classmates, no matter what the Daily Mail says.

And then I saw the quote comparing gamers to the fucking Hitler Youth.

Listen up, you pasty-faced, shit-spewing old fart. You can call gamers many things. You can call us fat nerds who don't get out much and subsist on pizza and Wotsits (the Brit equivalent of Cheetos). You can call us wierd for forgoing human compansionship for a few hours just to beat those last few levels on Call of Duty. But when you have the balls to compare us to the subjects of an evil brainwashing scheme created by history's biggest prick, that's where you cross the fucking line. That's where you shut your giant twat-mouth up, take a good step back and listen to what the fuck you're saying, because at that point you begin to sound exactly like the brain-damaged future serial killers you have invented in your ongoing quest to demonise an important setting stone in cultural development. I'm not joking - you sound exactly like your dipshit of a mother dropped you on your head when you were a baby, which wouldn't surprise me.

What you don't seem to realise, you is-dribbling, donkey-headed circus child, is that there is no actual conspiracy behind the gaming movement, despite whatever your mad ocelot god may tell you. Games companies do not have some massive machinations in place to turn us all into mindless zombie slaves in the hopes of one day taking over the world like a James Bond villain. Zelda was not created to train us in sword-fighting, because Link's sword fighting technique bears as much resemblance to the real article as my arse does to the Turin Shroud. Games companies exist, first and foremost, to make money, like every other company does. And they do this by creating products that we can enjoy and talk about, like every other company. And to imply that this is the same as Hitler covertly teaching little children army drills and to hate anything other than blond-haired, blue-eyed Supermen is not only incredibly fucking disrespectful to the memory of those who suffered in Nazi Germany, it's also incredibly disrespectful to the video games companies who don't even have or want the kind of resources required to raise their own private armies. Simultaneously insulting and offensive in one backhanded middle finger. Well fucking done.

And it's not even like you've got any evidence to clarify that point, either. You've just made the assumption because you want to feel good about yourself. You want to demonise gaming culture so you can jerk off to how clever you think you've just been, because why would a messenger of God need to prove that all gamers are psychos? Have you not ever heard of games that don't involve pointing a gun at something? Like Tetris? Oh, wait, you'd probably invent some bullshit about how Tetris is a Freudian symbol for anal sex and therefore is unconstitutional. You're building your entire argument around a stereotype that is both completely incorrect in the majority of cases and was almost always based on uninformed, scaremongering dick-baggery, with your head too far up your own arse to realise that you need things called arguments and evidence to back your claims. Admirable, in a way - making your arguments look like a Year 7 student's shitty history essay takes real effort.

Moreover, you need to realise that video games are not some alien force created by Satan to turn us all into the real/life equivalent of the Combine (although that would make a kickass movie if Jack Black and Leonadro DeCaprio were in it). Video games are a huge stepping stone in our evolution as a race, the cutting edge of a whole new form of technological and cultural development - Interactive Media. Now, while I'm not one to claim that games are art because I'm not the right sort of person to debate that issue, such a development is as important to humanity as the day Leonardo Da Vinci scribbled out his first flying machine drawing, as it's one of many measures of how far our technology has come from those days of hiding in caves and stabbing rhinos for breakfast. And as society develops and becomes more accepting of things like sexuality and the occasional knife-fight in a crowded street, games evolve to reflect those changes in attitude. To build this entire ass-backwards campaign based on decrying blood and tits in video games shows that not only are you trapped in the mindset of your childhood past before your first damning changing-room stiffy, but that your are inherently opposed to the development of technology, culture and society. You are literally trying to stop humanity from progressing by pulling the old Godwin's Law farce on us. That is not a thing to be proud of. That is a badge of shame made of frozen turd and you should feel ashamed.

In short, well done, you miserable old fuck. You have finally gotten me angry enough to devote an entire blog post to how manically damaged you really are. I'd end this post by saying thank fuck you've been disbarred, but I personally think that's too good for you. What I think should have been done was that you ought to have been dragged from your home, put out into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, tied to a block of concrete and thrown into the sea. And eventually, your corpse would have reached the stinking slime and rot on the ocean floor that is your real home.

There, I feel much calmer now.