James Jay Lee, who has a history of protesting against the Discovery Channel, reportedly entered their headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. armed with a strap on bomb and at least one handgun. This lead to him taking three hostages and a standoff that ended when police shot Lee in order to protect the endangered hostages. While Lee’s actions were in no way caused by any political ideology or agenda, they clearly were inspired by his extremist views on environmental issues.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s global warming documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” and "Ishmael," a novel by environmentalist Daniel Quinn, influenced his views. Lee wanted the Discovery Channel to air more extremist environmental programming to his liking and alleged the programs run on the channel were “about more PRODUCTS to make MONEY, not about actual solutions,” according to a web site owned by Lee. On that site, Lee also stated “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."
What Lee espouses is clearly the logical conclusion of the extremist environmental movement; at its heart it is patently against human life. While many who are followers of this agenda might not themselves view humans as parasites on the earth or be anti-human life to this degree, by advocating and supporting the extremist environmental agenda they too are support this ultimate direction and goal of the extreme environmental movement. There is not doubt the environmentalist hard left is against human life. This is why they are so consistently in favor of euthanasia of humans and abortion as well. This is why they have absolutely no problem sacrificing individual rights and economic prosperity in the name of “saving the planet” from human beings.
While Lee engaged in the behavior of a sociopath in his advancement of this agenda, his desperation to “save the earth” and the use of fear are not much different intellectually than that used by other who support this same agenda. Lee carried out the threat himself, using a gun to take hostages and demanding his environmental agenda as the desired result of his violent actions. Those who non-violently pursue this agenda do not threaten us with a gun or take hostage, but they engage in desperation arguments and hold up the threat of death by alleged human destruction of the planet as reason we should support their agenda. Leftists who agree with the content of Lee’s views will say we don’t have time to debate, discuss, and deliberate over alleged global warming, that we must act now, and do what they want to be done (taxes, regulations, cap and trade, and other economically destructive legislation) or otherwise we won’t have time to fix the problem later on and we’ll be doomed. Since we don’t have time to waste, enact their extremist agenda, even if it destroys our economy and way of life, and it ultimately MIGHT save the planet. So they say. This convenient non-sequitur argument attempts to take us intellectually hostage because it says we either do what they want or the earth will burn.
What James Jay Lee did, and let’s be clear, is far more wrong than the behavior of those making the fallacious argument above. But his actions have brought attention to the agenda that inspired the behavior of a sociopath, and highlighted desperation of both his actions and the arguments made by those who inspired his rage. Intelligent citizens won’t be persuaded to change public policy by the rage of a sociopath with a gun, a rogue government with guns, or leftist extremist alarmists telling us we need to destroy the economy to save the planet. We can have clean air and water, economically viable renewable energy sources and a clean earth without devolving our economy to the Stone Age.
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Comments
I think that pyschotic extremests can go screw themselves with environmentally friendly pencils. because yes we should watch the environment but dont put a fucking animals life over every humans life. i know this seems like a low mentality opinion, but if i even go into religion its basically states they are there for us. animals can feel pain, but they connot feel emotions, they also have a lower intelect, which means they are meant to survive we are meant to prosper. so tell me how do they become more important even if it is the most immoral pyschopath on earth?
as someone who identifies with the "far left 'earth agenda'" as you describe it (we live in a culture that behaves like a psychopath, and asks us to behave regularly like psychopaths), i completely agree that Lee is a nutjob with more than a few screws loose. He's also not an exceptional case in our culture, which rewards sociopathy in so many other forms (e.g., profits over commonweal) ...he walked into fucking Discovery Channel and took hostages demanded that they change their programming *to save the environment*? wow...check out more of that crap on his "manifesto" available here:
http://abcnews.go.com/US/gunman-enters-discovery-channel-headquarters-em...
Racist anti-immigration screed as "disgusting filth" -- maybe he was trying to build a coalition with the right-wing and left-wing nutjobs, eh?
Lee is evidence of another failure of our system: he obviously needed psychological attention and didn't get any. His quote of "Ishmael" is actually one of the most constructive, positive things he had to say: "solutions to save the planet...by people building on each-other's inventive ideas." And from there on it's all down hill... "Filthy immigrants" and "humanity" aren't the problem. He seems obsessed with "filth" an "disgust." He is definitely exhibits misanthropic and racist sentiments. Lee wasn't an actual "environmental militant" -- environmentalism was just the conduit for an underlying psychological disorder that seemed to cause the steady deterioration of his mental health. It could have just as easily been space aliens and tin foil.
That said, humans ARE dependent on our environment. We witness and experience massive increase in cancer rates, persistent endocrine disruptors, mass extinctions unlike any in geologic history, the acidification of the oceans, factory trawling and farming, the loss of 97% of forest ecosystems (the middle east -- the cradle of civilization -- was covered in forests before civilization appeared), smog-filled air and tainted freshwater...civilization (read: not "all humans" and not "humanity") is systematically destroying our planet. To put it another way: Civilization is is systematically destroying the global life support systems. In other words: civilization is systematically destroying us. The biggest "anti-human" element here is the fact that we let it continue to do so with each passing day. Talk about fear, laziness and low self-esteem...
Our government isn't going to provide any solutions (although liberals don't want to hear that), and neither are the corporations that exist for the sole purpose of turning life into dead product just for more green paper or, increasingly, a few more abstract numbers attached to their name. Nobody's going to give a fuck about 3G and iPads a couple of hundred years from now when there's no drinkable water left because we let industry clear cut, mine, pollute and otherwise destroy.
We're better off with breathable air, drinkable water, and productive terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems than we are with massive government and capitalist destruction. In the face of constant growth, intensifying pollution and destruction, the question of collapse is not whether, or when, but how: Are we going to work to smooth the transition, or are we going to deny, fight tooth and nail and turn it into a messy, violent affair? Those who choose the latter are no less misanthropic -- or "sociopathic" as you say -- than Mr. Lee.
"Lee’s actions were in no way caused by any political ideology or agenda" End of story
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