This is beyond delightful! The LaRouche PAC report — “The Noosphere vs. The Blogosphere: Is The Devil in Your Laptop?” — refers to me as a “degenerate writer”, “infantile”, and a “disgruntled family man”.

Apparently the political action committee of Lydon Larouche — an economist, political activist, and prolific conspiracy theorist — decided to fund a report on various sourges of digital life, including blogs, Wikipedia, and video games. (PDF copy here.) As you might imagine, the section on video games argues that video games are training kids to become such bloodthirsty psychopaths — so thoroughly desensitized to death — that they are inexorably drawn to suicide.

Their proof? My video game columns at Wired News! The report writers stitch together horrified reactions to my columns on Halo suicide bombings and the infamous Super Columbine Massacre RPG, in a bouquet of prose so garishly purple it reads as if it had been written by a Victorian sexual anthropologist. I don’t even know where to start quoting; it’s all so spectacularly wonderful! So I’ll just excerpt the segment below at length, and let it speak for itself.

I should point out that their research is so dreadful that the errors begin in the header opening up their section on me, where they report that I live in “Worcestershire, U.K.” I also love that picture, which — in addition to clearly depicting my homicidal/suicidal degeneracy and familial dissatisfaction — they appear to have stolen, without attribution, from the web site of the Knight Science Journalism Fellowships.

This is the best thing I’ve read in, like, seven years or something. And who knows? Given that just yesterday I blogged about the aesthetic pleasure of dying in Halo 3, maybe they’re right!

Forthwith:

The Case of Wired Magazine Writer Clive Thompson, 38 years old Worcestershire, U.K., Nov. 5, 2007

On Nov. 5, 2007, degenerate writer Clive Thompson supplied clinical evidence to support the charge by Lyndon LaRouche that, the intended end-game of computer games is to drive the player to suicide. In addition, he provided clinical evidence that it is an obvious intention of certain institutions to popularize this cult of death, in the United States and Western Europe. In his enraged screed, titled, “Suicide Makes Sick Sense After Playing Halo 3,” Thompson wrote, “I used to find it hard to fully imagine the mindset of a terrorist. That is, until I played Halo 3 online, where I found myself adopting — with great success — terrorist tactics. Including a form of suicide bombing.” The infantile Thompson whines that he “sucks” at Halo 3, played on Bill Gates’s Xbox live, because he has a wife, and kid, and therefore only gets “maybe an hour with Halo on a good day.”