English Portfolio Entry no. 4

'Reality' game sparks outrage

Pay me to take it down, says jobless youth behind game

Electric New Paper, Singapore

Give me US$3,000 and I'll throw in an apology.

That's the snide response of a jobless Sydney animator to the furore sparked by his online shooting game.

Australian-based Ryan Lambourn, 21, posted a game called V-Tech Rampage on his own website and a US gaming portal three days ago.

In it, the player manipulates a character carrying a handgun around a campus in search of people to shoot. It boasts 'three levels of stealth and murder'.

It makes clear references to the Virginia Tech killings and gunman Seung-Hui Cho, the student who shot to death 32 people on 16 Apr before turning the gun on himself.

It also makes reference to a violent play written by Cho, titled Richard McBeef, by berating players who fail to kill 'Emily' - the name of Cho's first victim - with 'Are you always full of s..., McBeef?'

The game has generated a furious debate online, with many contributors to forums and newsgroups demanding that it be removed.

FOR 'LAUGHS'

Mr Lambourn said no one had taken him up on his offer to pay him to take it down.

'That's exactly the point I was trying to prove,' Mr Lambourn told AAP.

'These people talk and talk and are angry and are telling me 'you have to take it down' and no one's even come near it because they would rather talk about it.'

The unemployed man said he created the game for 'laughs'.

He said he had previously composed music about Hurricane Katrina and the death of Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin.

Despite his demands for money, MrLambourn vowed that he would not take down the game under any circumstances, even if he was asked to by the victims' families.

'Yeah it's staying up - freedom of speech, man,' he told the Daily Telegraph. 'Someone is offended by something all the time - it doesn't matter what it is.'

He then claimed the cash demand was 'just a joke'.

'People were angry, so me and my friends thought it would be funny,' he said.

He said he empathised with Cho, as he had also been bullied at high schools in the US.

Mr Lambourn was born in Australia but lived in the US for some years before returning to Australia when he was 14.

He told AFP that he had left school in secondary two after been bullied in schools in five US cities.

Since then, he says he has become a self-taught animator, but is supported by his mother, who still lives in the US.

Mr Daniele Ledonne, who created a similar online game after the massacre of 12 people by two students at Columbine High School in 1999 said he was 'torn' over whether to support MrLambourn, as he did not agree with his demands for cash.

At press time, the game remained online.

As a humanities student I must confess that, if humans are supposed to posses a certain modicum of empathy, I find it very hard to believe that the creator of this game even deserves the title of human. The reason Lambourn can be so callous and utterly unfeeling about the victims and other members of Virginia Tech faculty, frankly, evades me. And his justifications only seem half-baked twisted arguments that serve only to degrade the value of human life.

The massacre was a hideous experience for the many people affected. The trauma and the horror of that experience is still fresh on their minds, even as they try to pick up the pieces and realign the psychological terror to realign their emotional syzygy. And we are only talking about the people who lived though the ordeal—what about the 33 members of students and faculty who died under the nozzle of Cho-Seung’s gun, some of whom gave up their lives the protect more people in the path of the rampage? Were these not people with feelings, aspirations, dreams? The brutal, merciless annihilation of such fellow human beings is a crime of indescribable proportions. We, those living, can only, and should, respect their memory. One would be inclined to think that any sane person would understand in at least some small way the suffering of these people, and not try to re-enact their suffering over and over again in something as casual as a mere game. One would be inclined to think that no person would even dare to insult and trivialize the lives of the people who died, making them seem useless flotsam and jetsam in an unfortunate accident. One would be inclined to think that no person would gain pleasure, save through pure sadism, through gunning down virtual people and hearing their screams, even as the virtual people are symbolically representative of the many affected people in the real world.

And what of Lambourn’s claims of “empathy” for Cho? I find it extremely hard to believe that a person who can ignore the feelings of hundreds of people and remain smug about it has so much empathy as to actually empathize with the perpetratopr of these crimes. I admit that I am not Lambourn, and am probably biased against Cho, finding it easier to relate to innocent victims more mentally smilar to me, but granted that Lambourn, due to his similar past experiences, may be able to empathize with Cho better than others, creating such a game is no way to express empathy. If Lambourn can truly understand Cho’s internal affliction, his anguish and suffering, then he should then be trying to help other people in this position, trying to make sure that no-one ends up at the same despairing ultimatum as Cho. Yet he creates a game that, contrarily, encourages other people subliminally to do the same. I think Lambourn should really learn how to express his emotions more appropriately and with more due sensitiviy.

What appalls me,though, is that Lambourn can actually dare to ask for money as a prerequisite for him to apologise. When people rightfully express outrage at what he has done, he not only ignores them at first but then shows the he has nothing but his own personal profit on his mind. And no true apology is one that is gained via payment--and no one is going to buy an apology which means nothing. What Lambourn is trying to prove is that no person is willing to satiate the selfish desires of a person who creates a game that mocks the very inherent dignity of people. Maybe Lambourn was doing it for mere "fun", but that would have been done in ignorance of the genuine feelings from others involved, something that I would never condone.

And now on to his primary justification for his actions: the Right to Freedom of Speech, probably the most oft-cited right of them all. What Lambourn does not understand, however, is that all rights stem from the concept of Human Dignity, the concept that every human has an inalienable, intrinsic value. It is because of this inherent value that Rights exist as a form of empowerment, realization, and the fulfillment of this potential. Human Dignity ultimately deserves protection above all other rights, because it is their source. And Lambourn, because he created this game that is inherently and necessarily degrading to the preciousness and value of human life, deserves, more than anything, to have his the Right to Freedom of Speech curbed to protect Human Dignity. Maybe Lambourn should take a step back and have a good look at what he is really doing before he tries to gain the moral ground.

(487 words)

footage of the game with Cho-Seung's favourite song playing in the background:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmOxRQkvaoo&NR=1

English Portfolio Entry no. 3

BBC, Scientologists battle on Web about documentary and shouting reporter

By ROBERT BARR

LONDON (AP) - The British Broadcasting Corp. and the Church of Scientology are both using the Internet to air a dispute in which a reporter shouts angrily at a church official while researching a documentary scheduled for broadcast Monday.

John Sweeney's outburst came as he was interviewing Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis, who had previously objected to Sweeney's use of the word "cult." Sweeney was captured by BBC's Panorama program and Scientology video cameras during a rant which continued for about 40 seconds.

"I look like an exploding tomato and shout like a jet engine and every time I see it, it makes me cringe," Sweeney said in a story posted on the BBC News Web site.

"I apologized almost immediately, Tommy carried on as if nothing had happened, but meanwhile Scientology had rushed off copies of me losing it (my temper) to my boss, my boss's boss and my boss's boss's boss, the director-general of the BBC," Sweeney said.

The Church of Scientology, whose members include Hollywood stars John Travolta and Tom Cruise, shadowed the Panorama team with its own camera crew.

A church spokesman denied that Sweeney apologized, and said the organization was putting its own documentary about the dispute on the Internet.

Mike Rinder, a Los Angeles-based spokesman for the Church of Scientology, said he had taken the documentary to the BBC.

"Not one of them would look. The arrogance that has been displayed in this is a little beyond comprehension," he said.

The first clip on the Scientologists' documentary shows Sweeney describing the BBC as sometimes "hideously hidebound" and hampered by bureaucracy. "There are people there who claim salaries who frankly are morons," he says.

Excerpts of the Scientologists' documentary have been posted on YouTube, apparently taken from one of the 100,000 DVDs of its program that the church distributed, Rinder said.

Another clip on YouTube, from the same documentary, shows Sweeney at a movie premiere shouting at Travolta, "Are you a member of a sinister brainwashing cult?"

The BBC offered links to its footage and its own news report on its Web site.

Panorama's editor, Sandy Smith, said Monday he was "disappointed" by Sweeney's outburst but added that the Church of Scientology has "no way of dealing with any kind of criticism at all."

Rinder said it was not the first time that the church had made its own recordings of reporters doing stories about it.

Sweeney refused an invitation to visit the church's headquarters in Florida, Rinder said.

"When we found that he was refusing to literally come inside the building, it was at that point that we went, 'OK we better document this,"' Rinder said.

Sweeney said his outburst came while he was touring a Scientology exhibition in Los Angeles, "Psychiatry: Industry of Death." The exhibit included a mock-up of a Nazi torture chamber, he said, adding that he lost it in the "Mind Control" section of the exhibition.

"I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a 'bigot' by star Scientologists, brainwashed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock-up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers."

Rinder said the material in the exhibition came from psychiatric archives. "It's all documentary and its all on video, that's why we did it," he said.

Before reading the article below, PLEASE watch the videos below. They really help in a better understanding of the situation.

Scientologists’ audio manipulated video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqR5NPhtLI&mode=related&search=

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J8-Zfzd55E&mode=related&search= documentary, pt 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0UZ7xeni28&mode=related&search= documentary, pt 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPnoqGHhmWc&mode=related&search= doc pt 3 (this one has the original footage)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39mRWMR142U&mode=related&search= doc pt 4

It is usually assumed, nowadays, that making extremely loud and dissonant noises with one’s voice as an expression of a particularly heightened rage is a trait displayed only by women. (Yes, feminists, another noble cause for you to fight for!) It would also be considered very surprising to see a man dressed in tie and jacket screaming like a banshee in a public place.

It is also surprising that a religion which dictates with no basis whatsoever that an alien ruler of the "Galactic Confederacy" called Xenu, 75 million years ago, brought billions of people to Earth in Douglas DC-8 airliners (NO joke here, please), stacked them around volcanoes and blew them up with hydrogen bombs, causing their souls to cluster together and stick to the bodies of the living, causing all sorts of physical ailments, can exist in a world where I am seriously inclined to think most humans posses lumps of fat in their heads called brains. (Welcome and that was your crash course into Scientology, the 100000-member religion of Tom Cruise and John Travolta, founded by the science fiction writer Ron Hubbard. Don’t laugh. They’ll sue you like the PAP. )

It is then that I find this article about a male BBC reporter screaming at a highly-ranked scientologist so disturbingly interesting. (for a sudden realization that I lack a better phrase.) Humorous innuendos aside—yes, I admit that I find scientology, frankly, a religion lost in the stone age. Yet, even as I express my personal disbelief in this private medium of a blog, I think there is fundamentally wrong about a BBC reporter losing his cool at a member of a different religion so drastically in the course of his work—a supposedly objective and unbiased profession, I might add.

I believe that both parties involved in this dispute have proven to be equally at fault—the reporter, for losing his temper, and the Scientologists, for their extremely disgraceful reaction, as well as the precedents that they set for this scene to occur.

The Humanist would condemn Sweeney for his disrespect for other’s religions, (read: pseudoreligion, cult, classified in Germany alongside Islamic Extremism and Organized Crime as a National Threat) and, indeed, my stance must share several similarities with the humanist. Every human being has a connate, inalienable value, and hence his personal beliefs, which on a philosophical level (sorry for sounding so arsty-fartsy here, but I think that ultimately what has to be said has to be said) he cooses in order to infuse his life with a higher meaning, have to be respected as a tenet of his person. To mock or show disregard for a person’s religion, then, would amount to a slur of the person’s personal choice as to how he defines his life—a decision that, I personally believe, can be attained logically, but is also very much a personal, one. I am not saying here that one cannot express disagreement with another's religion—it is just that I believe that this must be done with respect and understanding for the other party involved. And quite certainly Sweeney’s corybantic reaction does not fulfill this criterion.

And yet, I feel that we must understand that Sweeney was dealing with a person who believed in a religion that must have looked nothing short of preposterous to him, was being very stubborm about pressing a point, and who belonged to a organization whose members had been harassing and trailing him for a very long time, not to mention having a notoriously Western-Jihadist like history. Under such circumstances, I think that is it all too easy for a person to lose his fragile hold on his temper, and that even if we do not forgive Sweeney, we must at least empathize with him.

This does not in any way imply that the scientologists are not to blame for anything at all. They were certainly people who did NOT empathize with Sweeney in any way—in fact, they went on a personal revengeful putsch against the BBC and Sweeney, going so far as to tamper with the video they released by making Sweeney’s shouts impossibly loud, and even distribute 100000 copies of this video to various scientologists. Steps to reconciliation? If anything, they are flagitiously seeking to widen what was a mere misunderstanding to something far worse out of nothing but spite. And who says reciprocity is justice? In many cases reciprocity serves as a convenient excuse for a malevolent counterblow to satisfy one’s vindictive, almost sadistic pleasure at seeing what was done to you being inflicted back upon the person who did it to you. Justice? Hardly.

As Ravi Zacharias, a logician and Christian Apologist once said: “The worst part about slinging mud at others is that you get your hands dirty in the process.”

Now that this fight starts to take on a distinctly puerile but malevolent form on the internet, I think that it is time to call a halt to this ultimately petty squabble of two parties trying desperately to protect two immensely fragile egos. Sure, a reporter lost his cool and shouted, but please do not forget that whatever someone’s profession, one must judge someone both according to the ideals of the profession, and according to his human connate propensity to let his emotions override good judgment. Get over it, both of you.

Mistakes are mistakes, nothing more. Do not make them worse by deliberately using them as stumbling blocks to halt progress simply for the sake of satisfying your own desires. If everyone in the world refused to settle disputes but rather pursue their own personal “morally right, only-according-to-justice” tirades, this world would not be worth living in.

My message to the two parties is this: Get over it, and stop trying to make yourself appear more stupidly stubborn than the other. Forgive, and please do try, like civilized people, to forget.

(500 words)

excellent readings on scientology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_and_the_legal_system

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Freakout

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White ----this operation was the largest largest program of domestic espionage in U.S. history. The Church of Scientology merely said that its members were convicted of stealing "photocopy paper"