Educate Me Here: WHY Is Our Gov't Still Targeting Bobby Fisher?

[matcom]

what the hell is the point?

jeeze the man played in a CHESS TOURNAMENT!! :eyes:

or

is there more to this case than i am willing to Google?

THANKS

[bobbobbins]

1. bah, i have no remorse for that man

[matcom]

2. could you be any LESS specific?

thanks

[Zuni]

12. He is VERY anti-semitic

despite being part Jewish himself.

[lottie244]

25. So that makes him almost a "terrorist?"

He is a Weapon of Mass Dissention. Just because he played chess in a place we didn't like? Or does it have more to do with is stated anti-Semitic views? We wouldn't chase all the way around the world for a person expousing any other kind anti-rhetoric, but if it has anything to do with Israel of Jews we will lock people up and even go to war?

[allemand]

26. Actually, both his mother and his biological father were Jewish

"Generally, Fischer's biological father has been thought to be a non-Jewish German named Gerhardt Fischer. Gerhardt left Bobby's mother three years before Bobby was born, and in researching "Bobby Fischer Goes to War," Eidinow and David Edmonds discovered 900 pages of FBI documents that strongly suggest Bobby's father was, in fact, the Hungarian-Jewish physicist Paul Nemenyi."

http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=popper200407211120

[kodi]

40. he has denied that, pointing out he has many arab friends

but he don't like jews.

[On the Road]

3. Imagine a Bobby Fischer Controversy Now

The New American Taliban! He said the US is evil and deserved the 911 attakcks! How dare he! Everybody be patriotic and act all outraged! (And BTW, reelect our supremely patriotic president.)

And it certainly gets the real issues off the front page.

[Wickerman]

5. consorting with the Japanese!

rotten bastard!

[Zuni]

He also made some comments about 'bloodthirsty Jews'

he sounded like Borat at the Country Bar on the Ali G Show.

[Cleita]

18. I thought he was a Jew.

It seems you should be free to criticize your own if you think they are wrong?

[DrWeird]

4. No kidding.

There must be something better we can spend our time and money on than a mentally ill former child star who never really hurt anybody.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

6. He pissed the Gov't off big time

I'm a chess player and a big fan of Fischer. Loved his matches with Spassky. My theory is that Fischer got tired of bieng used as a propaganda tool against the Soviets back in the 1970s (not that he has any love for the Soviets mind you), and that was a big part of why he disappeared. Chess never commanded any big money before Kasparov came along, and Fischer probably lost a lot of his winnings to Uncle Sam. These things I think made Bobby very anti-gubiment. No matter whether you are left or right, if you piss off the gubiment, they will get you.

Bobby showed back up in '92 and scored a big win, I think like $3 mil, and thumbed his nose at Uncle Sam. Probably didn't pay a penny of tax and now he's getting horsewhipped.

Truth of the matter is you can't fight city hall. The gubiment has a monopoly and they want bodies.

[Catholic Sensation]

10. do you ever play online?

if so where? I can't find any consistently good competition online x(

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

14. No, I hardly have time to play anymore.

I'm a class B player. Tied for first though in the 1991 Florida State Open for class C.

Love the game. Probably the only artistic thing I enjoy.

[lanparty]

38. GO gets less attention ...

... but it's a way tougher game and more complicated game.

The best chess engines can beat Kasparov. The VERY BEST Go engine cannot beat a good amateur. The pros are COMPLETELY out of the computers league because the numbers of premutations is WAAAY of the scale in GO as compared to chess. Brute force cannot hope to challenge the pattern matching capabilities of the human brain.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

41. Never played GO.

Seen it but never played.

Incidentally, Kasparov can beat the chess engines when he sticks to playing solid moves. The reason he occosionally gets beat by them is because the machines are machines (boring, perfunctory moves). Kasparov, being human, likes to get creative to spice things up. Just the fact that humans act human is a deficit when playing a computer.

Just a guess, but I doubt GO software has evolved to where chess software is at currently. Back in the mid eighties, chess software was the same way (easily beaten by a good player).

[lanparty]

42. I'm not sure about that ..

It's certainly possible that GO engines aren't as evolved. But I doubt it.

Computer Scientists have been hammering on this problem for quite some time using the same methodologies used to create good Chess engines (brute force exhaustion of permutations using scoring systems).

The problem is that with an 18x18 board, and non-structured nature of the game, the number of permutations go right off the chart. Good go players need to no some basics. But they also have to be EXCELLENT at pattern recognition. This is something that machines do poorly despite the best efforts of AI researchers.

I have played both GO and Chess. And I find GO to be a much more difficult game to it's wide open, unstructured nature.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

43. Interesting.

It's good to know there are still some things that people are better at. Maybe the human race isn't slated for obsolescence as soon as I thought.

[allemand]

21. Did you try out ICC or Playchess.com ?

http://www.chessclub.com/

http://www.playchess.com/

[camero]

7. another question.

Why did they wait 10 years to file charges?

Frankly, it's brain candy for freeps as their lust to quelch all dissent no matter where in the world it is. Whatever happened to America, love it or leave it? He left it and now they want to lock him in.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

9. He's been operating under the radar

They couldn't find him. He's been expatriated.

[allemand]

30. They issued him a new passport in 1997, added new pages in November 2003

"Furthermore, why was he even issued a new passport, in Bern, Switzerland in 1997, and why was he allowed to add pages at the same embassy as recently as November?"
http://metropolis.japantoday.com/tokyo/541/feature.asp

Maybe they should check their radar... :eyes:

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

32. Excellent questions.

I don't know. Great article though.

This smacks of a COINTELPRO type operation.

Big Brother vs. Grand Master Fischer: It will be interesting to watch how this chess game plays out.

[7th_Sephiroth]

13. that and the freeps have a war on

in-tai-lectuals

[Catholic Sensation]

8. He used an illegal us passport to enter Japan

he went to Yugoslavia when there was a ban on such visits.

And he didn't play in a Chess Tournament since he's given up on competitive chess since he replayed Boris Spassky in Yugoslavia.

[Cleita]

11. Doesn't chess have a potential for becoming a

WMD? :eyes: Fisher isn't a likable person and maybe he shouldn't have ignored the travel ban, but I definitely think this is overkill. Lots of people have ignored travel bans on their passports before, but because they weren't famous, no one was the wiser and no one went on a crusade to get them.

[bobbobbins]

15. In response to 9-11 he offered these comments...

"This is all wonderful news , I applaud the act. The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out."

[allemand]

33. If you do interviews in an asylum you will be astonished

by the commentaries you get. Believe me, it's no very pleasant. There is a reason that we don't turn to mentally ill persons for political commentary.

So why do we even know of these comments by Bobby Fischer? Because he was "being paraded around by exploiters/enablers like Philippine GM Torre", as chess journalist Mig Greengard put it.
http://www.chessninja.com/dailydirt/archives/000511.htm

While Fischer is clearly mentally ill, Eugenio Torre simply is a self-serving idiot.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

34. I don't think he's mentally ill

I don't necessarily agree with his political views, but the man is clearly brilliant. Read his "My 50 Most Memorable Games". The man's thought patterns are so far beyond and ahead of most people's it's bizarre. He is a genius. Some people though Einstein was insane too. We denigrate what we do not understand.

[allemand]

37. It's unclear if he wrote the book all by himself

He did the chess part, of course, nobody else could have done that.

Mentally ill persons can be quite intelligent (reportedly he has an IQ of 184). They need our comprehension and compassion, and if we thus enable them, they will not fail to amaze us.

[Cronus Protagonist]

16. Nope, that's (just about) all he did

And if you read Chess Life magazine, you'll find similar questions and tons of vitriolic knee-jerk Fisher bashing for "breaking the laws of the land" and other such nonsense.

It seems most people ignore Halliburton and Cheney's selling weapons and aiding their military build-up around the time of Fisher's offense is negligible, but Fisher, well, HE played chess and won - how dare he?

Of course, he also said a few nasty things about America out of that, and he's being penalized more for that than anything else. Apparently free speech is not well supported in the chess community either.

(on edit: more info from others shows my relative ignorance)

Swiftboat Veterans for Bush

JFK - Drop Bush Not Bombs! - FUCK BUSH
http://brainbuttons.com/home.asp?stashid=13

[sui generis]

17. Here's what pisses me off about it:

Fisher wanted to give up his American citizenship years ago. We are being so blatantly fascist when we say that we are going to punish him for disagreeing with us ideologically -- it makes me want to scream.

I don't agree with Fisher at all, or even like him, but first and foremost I am an individual and if I decide tomorrow that I don't want to be American any more, I am damn well going to leave, and I don't expect that America is going to come chase me down and "punish" me.

It's an outrage that we would even consider wasting our mutual tax dollars on this. He doesn't want to be American. Respect that.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

19. Oh you can give up your citizenship if you want.

Just go to the Consulate and renounce it to the Conusulars Officer.

Just make sure your taxes are paid first!

;)

[sui generis]

28. yeah well he shoulda paid his taxes

just the same, we're going to spend a whole lotta dough to put a wheezy crazy sick old man in the Fed. We're getting nothing back from it, and we're not "rehabilitating" him. It's not a good use of our money and a bad commentary on our gestapo government.

It just smacks of serfdom -- serf can't leave the estate of the local lord on pain of death. Or maybe more like indentured servitude: You are technically never "paid up" on taxes, therefore you can't leave.

As long as our government declares you a fugitive, for any reason at all, you can't give up your citizenship. Forgot about that parking ticket back in 1983? Too bad.

The point is we have discretion, and we're not exercising it.

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

31. Depends on who you mean by "we".

"We" have discretion, if by "we" you mean the elites, the plutocracy, the corporations, and the people with power who really run this country.

If by "we" you are including the rest of us, I'd say very little. As Chomsky might say, "we" are the bewildered herd. And we have the bludgeon of propaganda held above our heads just the same as the citizenry of a totalitarian state has the jackboot of a despot placed squarely on their necks.

[Cleita]

22. I agree, and unless he has joined anti-American terrorists or

is funding them, then he has a right to become a citizen of whatever country he wants. The USA also has a right to refuse him a visa to come to the USA, but it really is a matter of personal choice and not a crime.

[Point_n_click]

20. He disobeyed a direct order from

W's father. Plus he has become a completely unbalanced nut which does not help his cause.

[Cleita]

23. I think the "unbalanced nut" is a good assessment, but

that shouldn't really be a good reason to attack him.

[lottie244]

27. An "unbalanced nut" because......?

we aren't supposed to like him because.....?

[Point_n_click]

39. Please, don't misinterpret ...

I did not say anyone was supposed to dislike him.

As a chess player and fan of his skill in the game, I find his current mental state and his hate-filled viewpoints sad and dissapointing.

If you've heard some of the hate that pours from his mouth you'd understand why I call him an unbalanced nut.

Heck, if it weren't for Bobby, I'd likely have not learned chess. It's tough to see one's hero fall apart and reach a state of being like Bobby has done.

And a further note ... W's daddy was in the White House and gave the orders when Bobby went over and broke the law to play against Spassky in 1992. It is quite possible this is more of W's revenge on people that dissed his daddy. First Saddam, now Bobby Fisher, NEXT!

[RUSTY SHACKLEFORD]

24. You have to remember...

this guy was an icon of America during the cold war. He represented us against them (the commies). And he routinely kicked commie ass on the chessboard.

Now, he's a rogue icon. An embarrassment. He must be neutralized. He must be made an example, else the fold will think they can misbehave. Offshore bank accounts, renouncing citizenships to get out of paying taxes, weekends in Havana ... you people best not screw with the gubiment, else you will pay. One way or the other, you will pay.

[FredScuttle]

29. I agree

are we going after Clifford Irving next?

[matcom]

35. THANK YOU ALL

you have "Educated" me and I thank you for that.

IMHO it is just as i suspected. Our Government is once again acting like the SS and this man should be left alone.

Thanks

[laylah]

36. Because they can...n/t