Talk:Jack Thompson (attorney)

I'm not sure on his nationality even after giving a sight to Wikipedia - US? Aphaia
 * 2nd line of Jack Thompson (attorney): born in Ohio, practices in Florida (paraphrased). Will copy that text over. ~ Dread Lord C y b e r S k  u  l  l  ✎☠ 04:32, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

~ MosheZadka (Talk) 17:00, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

Are you sure this isn't a parody? (Kidding. What a moron...)

W....wow. That's... sad. He actually said all this stuff? Jeez. That's really sad.

Hey, im one of the people who keeps this upto date.

These have all been posted by him, on various internet sites and at various times.

In fact i just added a few from today. IanC 17:51, 12 March 2006 (UTC)

Revision
Livejournal has blanked Thompson's past posts (marked as "Suspended User") on Gamepolitics, so anything using this as a "source" really can no longer be used, despite actually ocurring. When I get some time, I'll go through and see which links are and are not valid, and remove quotes which can no longer be sourced (possibly via temporary commenting-out to preserve them for research).

Can we have some review of the current state of the page and attempt to find other sources for these, as well as perhaps inclusing other sources to back up the rest of the quotes? It'd go a long way toward improving this article. --Keyne 14:54, 17 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Perhaps we should comment out the quotes which are no longer cited until we can properly cite them (hopefully from a reputable source). --Bakkster Man 16:20, 17 March 2006 (UTC)


 * I just found the sources for most of the ones you commented out, one of thems an audio interview. The other one "Or Else" he has said a fair few times IanC 20:16, 17 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Update, Or Else is clearly seen on the conversation he had with the VGCats suthor, so ill use that for the source.

Trimmed
I've taken out all the sections for letters that Mr. Thompson wrote to various people and organizations. Wikiquote is not a place for posting the full text of letters or other works. It also is not a place to record every single word he says, and as such, there should probably be a lot trimmed out of what remains. &mdash;LrdChaos 19:24, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

AS a side note, the longer quote in the "About" section at the bottom of the article should probably be sourced to the movie "Billy Madison", where the same statement was delivered about Adam Sandler's eponymous character.

1st Thessalonians 5:26
At the very end of the article, the verse used to defend homosexuality from the Bible is taken way out of context. At the time this was written, a kiss on the cheek was the same as shaking someone's hand now. Culture changes over time.

Clean up?
This article is rather long, and scouring it seems to suggest that there is some criticism of Jack Thompson among the quotes. I have neither the time nor the energy to fix the problem, so if anyone could, it would be appreciated. CKnapp [from Wikipedia]

First quote
The first quote, "Facts are overrated BS, Junior. Hooah!", has no source. Does anyone know where this came from, or whether Jack Thompson even said it?

it's not from him, it was vandalism. the thing is, it was vandalism on my part. the key to vandalizing a Wikiquote page is to make it sound like something they would say, not "I eat turds cause they good lol". 71.200.98.184 14:35, 20 April 2007 (UTC)

There are a few other "questionable" quotes attributed to Thompson laced throughout the page, unfortunately (including the first two). I'm reluctant to go and change the page without being absolutely certain that something was NOT a Thompson quote, since he knows how to use sarcasm quite well. --Nekojin 17:27, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

After a few minutes' thought: It looks like the entire article could stand to be trimmed. There are a lot of quotes that seem to be truncated, with a significant section completely missing. Also, there are a number of quotes that don't seem to make sense out of context, or are just plain pointless repetition of his favorite claims. --Nekojin 17:40, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Who put the quote saying in horrible grammar that Jack thompson was gay because he did NOT play video games? It has been removed, but could somebody report who did this from the history, I don't have the time or energy-tnfan22

Some parts are quotable, but
For a person "often cited in the media" according to the lede, the article seems to consist in very large part of chatter from internet discussions. I seriously doubt the quotability of most of this material. ~ Ningauble 16:39, 26 June 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced

 * We are going to have a hearing here in Florida to stop release of the game to minors. But you all wouldn't know that at Joystiq, because all you apparently can read is cheat code books. Duh.
 * 

Unsourced

 * Sims 2, the latest version of the Sims video game franchise...contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penis, labia, and hair.
 * 


 * Honestly, are all of you gamers on drugs, or what!
 * Thompson to Scott Ramsoomair ,


 * 'EGM: You once compared Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, to Saddam Hussein. JT: If I did, I want to apologize to Saddam Hussein. Doug is a propagandist to whom the facts don't matter.'
 * 


 * Are you, crazy? ... People are threatening to kill me. Either report what I have said, having been provided the emails, or stop bothering me.
 * Thompson to GameSpot.


 * You know, there are sociopaths everywhere. Some of them are in government, some of them are at TakeTwo. In fact, we got a bunch of sociopaths in Edinburgh, Scotland, sittin' around in kilts sippin' their single malt whiskey spreading racial, hurtful stereotypes in this country.
 * Audio Link


 * The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does. Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels. Not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition.
 * Sun-Sentinel, , ,


 * ...Or else
 * 


 * Video gaming is an escapist activity and you’re being exploited by these companies. It’s not healthy; I worry about someone who would play Grand Theft Auto for ten hours a day. It’s a masturbatory activity, and it would be better if people put down the controller and went outside.


 * Why don't you go buy a suicide game, practice that, and get real good at it.
 * (said to prank caller)


 * We don't need to play the game; it's irrelevant to the subject.
 * posed question: "Considering that Bully hasn't yet come out, do you think it's fair to protest the game before its release?"
 * posed question: "Considering that Bully hasn't yet come out, do you think it's fair to protest the game before its release?"


 * These flowers were sent to harass me.
 * 


 * Listen up, Joystiq Jackasses!
 * 


 * Nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer.
 * 


 * "This idiot illspirit apparently can't read. The lawsuit will be on behalf of the "surviving" family members. That means the victims are dead. Duh. Yet he says the victims are still alive. Of course, what do you expect from a crazed gamer?"
 * Saturday, February 25, 2006 news story


 * The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius, In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS.
 * 


 * I am counsel for all of the plaintiffs, they are still my clients, I was the one who won the First Amendment argument in the hearing on November 3, 2005, which trial record was what was appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court, and I fully expect to be in the courtroom trying the case when it is tried.
 * 


 * I'm a little too busy to care about pissant t-shirts right now. Please note the below:
 * 

I am also working with the LA District Attorney. All of these efforts have resulted in a diminution in the value of Take-Two's stock and a real possibility that government and private action will drain the company of all its assets. Only a bunch of gamers would think that the only way to destroy a company is with an explosive device. Grow up and wake up. I'm on the verge, with God's help, of destroying the most out of control video game company on the planet, which even Warren Spector recognizes. Jack Thompson
 * Actually, "destroy" means destroy. My methods of choice have been numerous television exposes of the Grand Theft Auto games, in the US (60 Minutes, Today Show), in the UK (BBC, etc/), Canada, and elsewhere; preparing Hillary Clinton for her severe hit on Rockstar in July 2005 re Hot Coffee; and litigation. As to the latter, the Alabama Supreme Court said this past week that GTA is not First Amendment speech. I am working with the various law firms suing Take-Two on behalf of shareholders over the Hot Coffee matter.
 * 


 * Oh, and what was the previous image? Do I have to get a subpoena issued to find out?
 * 


 * Hey, how about a video game depicting the killing of the people who run Joystiq? Bet they'd be real interested in doing something about a certain game then.  Maybe then they'd feel how cops and women feel about GTA.  Oh, but that would require some actual thought, and I forgot:  You're all gamers!
 * 


 * Kids took guns to school for 200 years in this country without turning them on one another. President Clinton understood that if we want to do something about gun violence, we need also to look at the stimuli to use those guns. 3000 gun laws on the books. Not a single law on the books to stop the sale of murder simulators to kids. Idiotic.
 * 


 * It breaks my heart to realize that the culture has basically transformed the church rather than the church confronting the culture and trying to transform it," "You've got a generation of boys in this country who are spending sometimes dozens of hours a week blowing away people, Now they're going to have the opportunity to do it in a Christian setting and, you know, where does it stop?
 * 


 * There’s direct link between violent video games and the kind of incident we almost had in Riverton, Kansas,""They took that affidavit and went to the homes of some of the suspects and found some of the games I suggested they would find,""These games are murder simulators used by the military to teach new recruits how to kill,
 * 

I had represented abused women and children, and that album ("As Nasty as They Wanna Be") was totally inappropriate for minors...
 * Lets say you make a kid feel angry; he is going to act out what he has spent hundreds of hours doing. He has spent hundreds of hours hurting people in virtual reality. And the thing that is doubly troubling now is the graphics are so crisp and so virtually real that the brain can literally not differentiate between real violence and virtual violence, I'm a lawyer who for 20 years did medically related work. As a citizen, I entered the violent video game arena with the Paducah, Ky., shootings,
 * 


 * Killing is such an incredibly dramatic thing to do. But I quickly became disabused of that skepticism. Now it's a whole body of thought that is very, very troubling. And we are seeing these instances with incredible frequency. Here we had one in Kansas and a day later in Alaska, Playing the games desensitizes the person to the act of killing, because there is no guilt. It's a game. You are winning the game, and it's a pleasurable thing. You can get a gamer's high killing people. And there's no need to feel guilty about it -- that's how you win the game. In the Civil War, for example, soldiers were found dead on the battle field with loaded muskets. It wasn't because the guns were malfunctioning. The soldiers were young men who had been trained by their parents to go hunting with guns -- not use them to kill others. And they couldn't do it, even in the face of hostile fire. So time and again these men would load their guns, raise them and pretend to fire. Those soldiers had not been trained to overcome their inhibition to kill, If somebody else's kid plays a video game and puts my kid in harm's way in school or someplace else, I have a legitimate interest in that, The Grand Theft Auto games immerse you in a lonely world of violence, cheap sex, and pixelated nihilism, Most experts say it takes more than 100 hours to complete all of GTA: San Andreas just once...
 * 


 * It shows you how to -- by bullying -- take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts. This is the most knuckle-headed thing I think any entertainment entity in the history of American entertainment has ever done. The word 'Columbine' means something. Everybody viscerally understands that you don't want to teach kids to bully one another. Suspects in the Kansas and Alaska incidents have bullying components just as Columbine's Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris did. Then you give them a simulator on how to exact their revenge and settle scores? It's crazy.
 * 

"He's in his room. We don't hear anything and he not in the streets, But that's lazy parenting. Companies are making a product they know is problematic, but parents bear a responsibility.
 * His parents let him sit in his bedroom 12 or 13 hours a day on weekends, He had a bucket between his legs to urinate in. He had food and beverages on either side of the television screen. He did that because he couldn't pull himself away from the game.
 * 

1. E3 will once again turn down my offer to appear on any stage and debate anyone about the harmfulness of violent games, and 2. There will be discussion of the following story that appears today in South Florida:
 * Two predictions:
 * 


 * By the way, I was just watching G4 with my son. Who in the world watches this garbage? People with no lives, obviously. Pathetic.
 * 


 * There's a lot of parental angst over the fact that these games are coming at out kids, and there must be some way to keep them away from our kids," "there's more evidence of that than there is that smoking causes cancer." "leave it up to a jury to find that the material is harmful to minors because of sex or violence. Don't have a statute defining what is harmful.
 * 

“It is not a game,” Thompson told lawmakers. “It is to teach you to kill, to enjoy killing.”
 * “It’s a murder simulator,”
 * 


 * We're going to push this game at Christian kids to let them know there's a cool shooter game out there," "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game.
 * 


 * The video game industry gave him a cranial menu that popped up in the blink of an eye in that police station," "And that menu offered him the split-second decision to kill the officers, shoot them in the head, flee in a police car, just as the game itself trained them to do.
 * 


 * "It's a murder simulator, it's not a game." "The U.S. military literally uses modified versions of these games, as well as their own video games, to do one thing: to break down the inhibition to kill among new recruits,
 * 


 * Jack Thompson on Free Talk Live debating his viewpoints. Thompson becomes so angry he hangs up on the hosts Ian and Mark.  There are plenty of good quotes here.
 * http://www.freetalklive.com/files/thompson.mp3

Looks like the profanity in GTA has filtered into the pixelante subculture. Anyway, we got the law passed unanimously in Louisiana and Video Game Nation got nothing passed, so is this a great country or what?! I'm working with the Louisiana AG's office, and we expect to have the law held constitutional as it is not like the other laws that have been passed. But you all here wouldn't know, because you haven't read the federal court rulings, I have, and then I drafted the law, which deals with the rulings. God bless Louisiana! Hooah! Jack Thompson
 * Wow, the level of comments here indicates why it is a good thing that gamers' standards are not the community's standards for discourse and entertainment.
 * 


 * The corrupted and corrupting video game industry will, of course, challenge this law once it is signed by Governor Blanco. The reason is that this industry, through the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), its developers' lobbyist, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), and the retailers' lobbyist, IEMA (Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association) are involved in ongoing fraudulent conduct in marketing video games that contain adult material to children.
 * 

Additionally, not real smart to hire a crew that has put out a t-shirt featuring a Jesus Christ who says "Don't be a dick." That shows how totally out of touch the coquettish Patricia Vance is with mainstream America. I love it. Boy, am I going to have fun with the "Dick" t-shirt. Jack Thompson
 * This would be a great idea if only the ESRB had the sense to hire an outfit whose principals had real talent.
 * 


 * Radical, fascist Islamists recruit to their cause partly with the cry that American pop culture is raw sewage flowing to the rest of the world from a corrupted West. Take-Two helps cut the legs off the rebuttal to that argument. That is precisely why your corporate legs must be cut off
 * 

If this court in any fashion proceeds toward issuing a show cause order, given its utter baselessness and the bad faith goo in which it slithers, then Thompson will add whatever judge should do so as a defendant in the aforementioned federal civil rights action…
 * You want to play hardball…? You want to try to throw me in jail?  You have no idea what you are unleashing in doing this.  You’re at the brink…
 * 


 * Bully contains homosexual activities between Jimmy Hopkins and other male students. Is this a great country or what?
 * 


 * I've got more Bar complaints than Judge Friedman has reversed opinions.
 * 

… I am going to have an absolute ball pointing out to the world that Take-Two, the self-righteous, great defenders of “freedom of expression,” simply CANNOT abide Jack Thompson’s agent using allegedly protected trademarks of Take-Two. Freedom of expression my butt.
 * Are y’all threatening CBS and ABC and Rolling Stone and every gaming site and magazine in the universe, or just my college debate booking agent because you and your bullying company think they can get away with it?
 * 


 * Take-Two is also stating that the sun does not rise in the east because Take-Two makes no money from its rising in the east.
 *