Interesting.

He says that the planet doesn't need humans and he doesn't approve of the fastest way to get rid of a massive quantity of them (war).

If we could find a more planet friendly way to do it I'd wager he'd be for a full on death fest.

Maybe change the headline to James Lee with new info.

Agent Smith said it best, "There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet."

that having been said, this guy is just crazy.  He's recognized the failings of his fellow humans and spun himself off the deep end trying to fix what he can't fix.

Let us pray, "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Right... there is no god, but it's still sage wisdom that James should have taken to heart before taking hostages.  The premise (humans have serious serious issues) is sound, but the solution (I should blow up the Discovery Channel) is wacko.

 

 

Then one of the "Gawd and guns" tea party folk that Fox loves would've shot him.

 

lol true a .40 cal can really help in situations like this.

Brian, while we can agree with the sentiment of getting angry at the world, the unannounced shock of weapons in your face when you are not expecting to be on a battlefield and are merely at your work place is going to cause extreme emotional trauma to the workers there. I doubt you'd get those people to agree that what he did makes sense.

I know if someone showed up to my workplace with weapons and I had done nothing to them personally, not only would I be scared shitless at possibly losing my life, I would be angry at them as well.

There are 6 billion people on this planet and there is already enough violence amongst humans. I think the one place all of us would like to feel safe at is our place of work. I think those workers at that network would feel the same.

People who do this type of thing are not leading a cause, something in their life was lacking and this was their way of cheaply making a name for themselves.

 

I've been hearing all afternoon (from christians) about how this guy is an atheist. Now I hear an atheist calling him christian. I almost would like to hear what he says about this, but I think it's irrelevant.

Of course, you realize that nobody in mainstream america is going to get behind this guy, so the short term results of his actions will be positive for Discovery.

 Thanks everyone for posting your thoughts.  I'm feeling bad about how I phrased my first post.  I didn't have enough time to reflect or read his views thoroughly before I posted it.  I knew the guy was crazy and I don't endorse illegal actions in order to get a view across.  He reminded me a little of the movie John Q.  If you're not familiar, that's the movie in which Denzel Washington holds everyone hostage at an emergency room until his son is given a new heart, he did so because "the system" would have his son die.  

Nevertheless, I'm on the verge of being ashamed that I posted this without more contemplation.  Sorry if anyone felt let down.  I did need to hear your views though, thanks.

 

I didn't say he was Christian. I don't know what his religious beliefs are. I said that his hate for Humanity was similar to the Christian hate for Humanity (i.e. we are all evil sinners and inherently evil). 

 

  I'm with ya.

Staks, I knew what you meant. I don't know what the man was, and it doesn't matter. I was just commenting on the irony.

Brian, people can have a kneejerk reaction, I know I have had them myself. It seems to me that in reading this guy's history he simply was driven to make a name for himself and when that didn't happen, when he wasn't becoming the hero he wanted to be, he resorted to this. I think he also had mental issues as well.

There are lots of things about this country that bother me and lots of things that humans do world wide, to each other and to this planet, that bother me. But what this guy did was selfish and self centered and counter productive. And certainly if believers want to jump on his claim of being an atheist, you know damned well some will. Like we need that.

I will say this, I don't think our society helps by selling utopias like "purpose", celebrity worship, hero worship, money worship. When people don't get to a certain level or a position of power they can end up having family problems. They can end up with addictions. They can end up committing suicides. They can end up comitting crimes. They can end up doing things like this.

Mansion for example, was obsessed with becoming a rock star and when he got rejected, when he couldn't kill the record producer who rejected him, he convinced his followers to do what they did.

This guy is responsible for his actions and the police did the right think in killing him to protect the hostages. But I highly suspect he had swallowed a delusion of grandure and wanted to be "part of something". He also probably disn't have enough of a support structure in his life and when he didn't "make it" he took it out on others.

That is one thing that I hate about sports stars, actors and singers and even business men who sell "you can be whatever you want to be". But what happens when those people don't reach that? Most people do not reach the level of Tom Cruise, or Bill Gates or Lady Gaga or even social leaders like Martin Luther King,

I think our society sets people up for failure by only selling them utopias and does not teach them pragmatic things. I think combined with this guy's mental problems, we don't help by selling the idea that labels and status are the only measure of a person.

In any case, there was no excuse for his actions no matter even if we agree with some of his statements.

 

 

Wow! What a total nutbag. The manifesto sounds oddly like a cut down version of the crap that the unabomber published. The largest difference being that the unabomber would stop for a good long while and think about what he was doing. This guy just seemed to have set a date to go nuts and went all out.

 

That much being said, I don't think that any sane person would have a large problem with how he went about what he did. However, some of the things that he said, do seem to be rather, umm, on point.

 

Case in point would be his rant about overpopulation. I have said this much before but it remains a fact that the population of the world has doubled in my memory. If there is not something seriously fucked up about that, then I don't know what is seriously fucked up.

 

Now, there is a large problem with telling people to stop having babies. While the idea sounds fine on paper, there is a whole series of events that follow should this be done on a practical level. Sure, a century from now, world population will be down to a rather more manageable level. However, getting there is going to be a huge problem.

 

This is to some extent going on in China today with the one child per couple laws. However, each couple will, one day, be old and no longer economically productive. Then, they will have one child to support them. They will be a huge strain on the economy because one child simply cannot do that and the general population will be too small for any kind of state dole system.

 

Really, at some point, in order for such a system to be workable, governments are going to have to do something to assure that people remain economically productive or they die. Seriously, the older people are going to have to be removed from the population at some point in order to have a viable economy.

 

Regarding his rant on illegal immigration, he really is out of touch with the facts. Probably the major reason for someone moving to another country is because their life will suck less in the new home. So why do they need a new home in the first place? Yah, that would be because where they come from the governments are so corrupt that they sell out their own populations for individual gains on the part of the leaders. Who cares if the people are starving if I can live in a nice mansion surrounded by the finer things in life?

 

Also, it needs to be said that some of the fault lies in the hands of the large corporations in those nations that have developed a better standard of living.

 

For example, a coffee farmer in Sri Lanka thinks that he is growing coffee. I doubt that he knows that by the time his product makes it to my store, it is going for like $10 a pound. That farmer is not getting paid one red cent more than the same guy in Africa who makes the swill the serve at drive through burger joints. All the extra cash is going to the coffers of the business men in the middle of the supply chain.

 

There are of course many other examples. Several years ago, I remember a local imported carpet shop was going out of business and advertising 80% off. So I went in to see what I could get, only to find out that that steep price reduction brought a nice carpet for my living room down to a mere $3,000! When I asked, I was rudely informed that they were very special hand made carpets from India.

 

Trust me on this, the guy in India who made the carpet made pennies a day. However, the price increased at every step in the distribution chain. If this store could offer such a discount, then they were probably selling at close to cost. The old price reflected an original 500% markup from what they paid.

 

In the mean time, Nike moved the shoes factories from the Philippines to South Vietnam because the Filipino workers tried to demand a minimum wage of perhaps $1/day, where the Vietnamese still don't have the level of organization to make such demands.

 

While this is going on, I have to pat $100 for a dam pair of sneakers, all so that the CEO of Nike can have dozens of oriental rugs hanging on the walls of his apartment in the Trump Tower, which he is only in twice a year because he has a business meeting in NYC and can't possibly stay at the damn Marriott.

 

In other news, studies show that when people start to feel economically secure, birth rates drop. So instead of letting balls crazy amounts of money concentrate at the top of the economic food chain, let the money that we are willing to pay for expensive shoes and coffee get through to the people who are actually doing the work and world population will stabilize.

 

The current population is still probably way to big and eventually, we may have to deal with that. Which is probably a good thing. If there were half as many people on the planet, and they were economically secure and not driven to have huge families, would we even be hearing about global warming?

Here's a perspective from someone I have a lot of respect for... Dr. Keith Ablow... if you are prone to hate anything from the FoxNews website... please keep in mind that he is a medical contributor, not political...

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2010/09/02/dr-keith-ablow-james-lee-discovery-channel-mentally-ill-terrorist-hostage/

 

What, this guy came with guns and good intentions? He was crazy. A sane person would put together, as is the saying, that fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity.

About half of his points is good, but the rest is bullshit about overpopulation and immigration. That guy probably never heard of Demographic revolution. All his ramblings on how babies are dangerous and filthy is bullshit - it's just effect, not the cause.

I'm sorry, war doesn't work. It will destroy what, about 60 millions at most, which is nothing, it will only encourage subsequent procreation because the place will be poor and messy. The only war that could effectively decrease global population would be nuclear, which is not what we want, when we have 2000-times stronger nukes than there were in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Demographic revolution is the only way to decrease population effectively and safely. Plus more contraception, how wonderful thing this is, specially for women.
Women aren't particularly happy to squeeze out at least a dozen of little future slaves and nurse them till the women's boobs reach the ground. They would gladly exchange such future for education, career, travel or culture. That's the effect of economic security.

OK mr. smartass, have you ever heard of smillies? They're something like yellow Jewish star that should be kept visible to safely distinguish smartasses from other citizens

 

Ok, who kidnapped the real Answers in Gene Simmons? Did you have a Christmas Carol visit where ghost of  Jefferson spoke to you?

 

If you keep this up I might just have to marry you.

Damn you, I always fall for this!

 

I think I found your mascot.

Sometimes crazy people (in my book anyone who uses violence) take sane positions. This guy was against the population explosion. So am I. The population explosion is the number one cause of all of our environmental problems. Read Steven Kotler's excellent "The Five-Year Baby Ban" piece (http://bit.ly/95OAtS) on the issue and see if you don't agree!

The guy said, "The humans? The planet does not need humans."

That's a bit more than just being against the population explosion, don't you think?

You can't force someone to get help without police power.

I didn't know this guy like some of the others. So my comment is general. There's not really a lot of help out there for atheist YET. Think about it most of your mental health centers are based strongly on religion. This could have just added fuel to the fires in his head. Just saying. That's my opion. I'm sure there out there, the ones that are not religious but there few and far between. This is something that I hope changes over time.

The atheist ethicist has an interesting perspective

http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2010/09/james-lee-discovery-headquarters.html

 

 

I remember that. He went out, his jaw dropped, he went back in. He came back out, basically said "What the hell?" and went ahead with the class. 

 

"Work that Satan out, girls!"