GamePol­it­ics is report­ing that Jack Thompson is back in the legal fir­ing line, this time for spam­ming one of his sup­port­ers — the Pres­id­ent of the Utah State Sen­ate, Michael Wad­doups — with “offens­ive” images from GTA4. Need­less to say, Mr Wad­doups is no longer quite so sup­port­ive of Mr Thompson and not only has he vowed not to sup­port his anti-​​game legis­la­tion again, he’s attempt­ing to have him sued for mis­use of email.

This sort of thing really makes Jacko no friends, and it’s tempt­ing to think that he’s just a mad old fool who doesn’t real­ise he’s fast run­ning out of them. My take on it is some­what dif­fer­ent though; if you actu­ally look at how the man acts it’s clear that he’s not actu­ally inter­ested in mak­ing friends, or advan­cing his cause, or even in mak­ing money. What he craves is atten­tion. It’s that simple; he wants people to notice him, and he’s real­ised the best way to man­age that is to piss them off. He’s basic­ally a troll, except that instead of hanging around on anonym­ous mes­sage boards annoy­ing Star Trek fans, he’s quite suc­cess­fully trolled the entire com­puter game industry, the US legal sys­tem and is mov­ing on to their gov­ern­ment. Ladies and gen­tle­men, I put it to you that Jack Thompson is not an idiot at all; he’s the most suc­cess­ful troll the world has ever seen.

You have to respect him for that.

I’ve just fin­ished read­ing about the death of Scott Norberg and, to be hon­est, I’m lost for words. I feel a strangely potent mix of numb­ness and out­rage, but I have no way to express it.

One thing I can say is that there is no way this should have been an insur­ance pay­out; people should be doing time for murder.

This speaks for itself really. How can any­one who claims to stand for free­dom, demo­cracy and human rights, veto a demo­crat­ic­ally passed law that would have pre­ven­ted inno­cent people from being tor­tured? I think we all know the answer.

The guy makes my skin crawl.

Well this is some­what heart­en­ing; it seems like pretty much every­one agrees with me on the recent state­ment from Dr Rowan Wil­li­ams, that the UK should adopt aspects of Sharia Law.

This also neatly demon­strates some­thing I’ve been say­ing for a while; The UK really is a much more sec­u­lar nation that the US, state reli­gion not­with­stand­ing. Brit­ish people tend to know this, but some (by no means all) Amer­ic­ans seem to labour under the impres­sion that the Church here is actu­ally wields some real power. This is the Arch­bishop of Can­ter­bury, the head of the Church of Eng­land, and yet pretty much every­one in gov­ern­ment has come out and pub­licly cri­ti­cised him for speak­ing rub­bish. Can you ima­gine the US pres­id­ent speak­ing out against a reli­gious leader like this?

The White House has indic­ated that the pres­id­ent is likely to use his veto to block legis­la­tion out­law­ing employ­ment dis­crim­in­a­tion based on sexual pref­er­ence, because — get this — it would infringe the reli­gious freedoms of employ­ers, and thus be unconstitutional.

If you’re think­ing that argu­ment sounds famil­iar, it is. It’s the exact same argu­ment used by many reli­gious people to oppose sim­ilar modi­fic­a­tions to the UK’s Pro­vi­sion of Goods and Ser­vices Act late last year. Of course, that was a group of reli­gious pro­test­ers that no-​​one took par­tic­u­larly ser­i­ously, whereas this is the most power­ful man in the world, and while they held a torch-​​light vigil and prayed a lot (with pre­dict­ably neg­li­gible res­ult,) the pres­id­ent actu­ally has the power to pre­vent the law passing.

It’s depress­ing.

Linked from Dis­patches from the Cul­ture Wars.

I know it might sound like obvi­ous advice, but read­ing this really ham­mers the point home. Basic­ally, it looks like they’ll con­vict (and execute, this is Texas, remem­ber) you for a murder com­mit­ted by someone you were with. I really won­der how they keep a straight face when they call them­selves “the land of the free”.

This is an inter­est­ing one. An Aus­tralian man, who’s never set foot in the US, and who’s infringing activ­it­ies all occurred within Aus­tralia has been extra­dited to face trial for intel­lec­tual prop­erty theft (that is, soft­ware pir­acy) in the US — and has, actu­ally, already plead guilty.

It’s inter­est­ing because while the man has clearly done wrong, it’s also pretty clear that the US has no (or should have no) jur­is­dic­tion to try him. He’s never been there — everything he did, he did in Aus­tralia. Why then shouldn’t it be an Aus­tralian court that tried him (as he reques­ted? It’s not like their copy­right laws are par­tic­u­larly lax.

The reason, as far as I can see, is quite simple. The US has had enough of those other coun­tries and their dif­fer­ent laws get­ting in the way of it per­us­ing it’s own com­mer­cial interests and is look­ing to estab­lish its own laws (and courts) as the de facto global stand­ard. This is a pretty safe pre­ced­ent case for them, since the sus­pect is clearly guilty, and what he did was illegal in his home coun­try any­way, but that shouldn’t lessen the worry the world feels about this res­ult. Why should we, as non US nation­als — out­side the US — have to worry about whether our activ­it­ies are legal by US standards?

It’s not even like they’re try­ing to hide their agenda; US Assist­ant Attorney-​​General Alice Fisher has said

This extra­di­tion rep­res­ents the (US) Depart­ment of Justice’s com­mit­ment to pro­tect intel­lec­tual prop­erty rights from those who viol­ate our laws from the other side of the globe.

As though it goes without ques­tion that they have the right to enforce their laws on the other side of the globe. I’m usu­ally pretty reluct­ant to use the phrase US-​​imperialism, but to me this sure looks like a spade.

Obvi­ously, it’s a long way from “that bad” yet. This one case doesn’t estab­lish a pre­ced­ent, and even if it did it wouldn’t need to influ­ence the actions of other nations, but nev­er­the­less we should be wary; every time some­thing like this hap­pens it becomes a little less of an excep­tion, and a little more like nor­mal prac­tice. After the 1,000^th extra­di­tion of someone the US says has done some­thing wrong, how many people will be out­raged about the 1,001^st? How long before it’s just assumed that US’s extra­di­tion requests are reas­on­able and above board? How long before other national gov­ern­ments stop even both­er­ing to check?