Chess has lost one it's greats

Am I the only American who saw this post?  I find it hard to believe that nobody put this "gentleman" in his place yet.  Does that fall to me now?

 If you can't judge a person by his perception of the world, whatever incidentally is it's cause, what can you judge him by?

If he had spent as much time thinking before he spoke as he did before he moved he'd have been world champion for many years and probably not pi&&ed so many people off.  At times he probably had a point but more often than not he was just ranting.  He probably just wanted to play chess but let his politics get in the way and being deprived of what he wanted to do more than anything basically drove him to resent everything around him.

... sigh, and here I thought my "I can haz fishur flaymwarz" lolcat might've helped diffuse things.

I for one think it's in super-poor taste to claim to admire someone and vilify them in the same breath, as if you can seperate the person into categories. Fischer's anti-americanism/semitism is clearly a charged issue and if we explore it it will get this thread locked in a heartbeat (if the admins are on their game today).

I for one say I like Fischer altogether. I'll take the whole package, thank you, and no, I don't have to defend it. Who I privately admire is my business, and if you're like many of the posters here who have to engage in the cognitive dissonance of "liking the player but hating the person" you can keep out of a Fischer memorial thread. I like Friedrich Nietzsche too, and people say the same things...

Like so many Americans, I happen to agree with you about the crimes of my destructive government.  This doesn't make Fischer any less of a nutcase, though.  America treated him poorly.  I don't think you'll find anyone to argue that point.  Fischer's anti-semitism and general insanity were his own.  Dont shift his blame.

 I dislike Fischer on the whole.  I think very little of him.  Still, one can admire the beauty of the games he played.  There are pros and cons to any entity.  Fischer, in my opinion is 'net-negative.'

Fischer himself said he had nothing against arabs and they are semitic too. Has anti-semitism been redefined? I think he was anti-zionist myself, is that also considered "anti-semitic" too ?

I think we're entering the world of semantics now. True Semites are actually Arabs, most Jews (Ashkenazi) are a mixture of Turko-Slavic blood but they are accepted as Semites in general vernacular. Fischer did specifically mention Jews as being evil as well as being a critic of Israel.  

I think judging a man on the basis of the beverages he prefers is pretty low. I mean, some people like milk, some people like tea, I dunno...

just 'cause he didn't like juice...

 HAHAHAHAHA!!! Try to put nobody in his place because that's not your role, yeah?? You CANNOT STOP ANYONE FROM EXPRESSING THEIR VIEW EVEN IF THAT IS NOT PARALLEL TO YOURS!!!! Comprende silly boy??? 

Just to deviate more from the subject...

Transgender dad says he'll give birth in July

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5651558.html

I accuse you of being anti-semantic.

American Heritage Dictionary 

an·ti-Sem·i·tism   (ān'tē-sěm'ĭ-tĭz'əm, ān'tī-)
n.  

1. Hostility toward or prejudice against Jews or Judaism.
2. Discrimination against Jews.

Online Etymology Dictionary

anti-Semitism 

 I very rarely laugh out loud at posts on the internet.   That being said:

LOL 

 Shut up,you are new here and you already started doing troubles. lol

Chess has lost one of it's greats... society certainly hasn't.  I think that's fair.

 Now can we all let this poor man die!

I think overall Fischer's public personna (since no one can truly know the inner state of another person--most of the time we don't even understand our own inner workings!) is a very sad one. Yes, he was a great chess player--easily the greatest American and one of the greatest of any nationality.

But he said some vile things. His words were frequently full of hate and contempt for other human beings. And his contempt and suspicion were not things that came late in life. Even before defeating Spassky he was a childish and loud-mouthed paranoid egomaniac.

And his understanding of the world was amazingly childish, and very possibly autistic. He judged life through the rather silly lense of chess to a degree that most normal adults would never come close to.

But I say this is sad, not villainous, because it is not hard to see how he was in many ways a scared and maladjusted child who was catapulted into public greatness without the maturity or mental stability needed to survive it intact. What, exactly, went through his mind is unknowable, but if his words and deeds matched his thoughts and affections, then he clearly was deeply troubled for most of his life.

But who of us isn't troubled? What makes Fisher different is his chess. If not for chess, no one would know his name, and very few would mourn his passing. If not for chess, we would not be having this discussion. If not for chess, all the little insecurities and dark demons he dealt with--some no different than yours or mine, some maybe greater or lesser--would not have been magnified and multiplied and lit up for all the world to see and blown up into one of the greatest public disappointments in the history of public hero figures.

And to say America did this to him is just silly. America adored him.  If he had not gone off on a paranoid mental bender after Reykjavik, we would have had a generation of children named after him, cereal boxes with his face on them, Presidential candidates wanting to have their picture taken with him, and kids wanting to be him. Even as things did turn out, many of us still have a tender place in our hearts for him.

Bobby Fisher was a great chess player, unlike all of us. And he was a terribly flawed person, like all of us. And now he has moved on from this life. And now I do not mourn for him, but can finally stop mourning for who he might have been, and move on with my own life.