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Armed Man Takes Hostages At Discovery Channel HQ
An anonymous reader writes "The manifesto of the man holding the Discovery Channel hostage with a bomb has been released. He has fired shots and taken hostages. His main complaints are about overpopulation, religion and civilization. He wants them to avoid encouraging people to produce more 'disgusting human babies,' to get people to accept 'Malthus-Darwin science,' reject civilization and its 'disgusting religious-cultural roots,' and to stop 'ALL immigration pollution.'" The man has now been shot by police, and the hostages have been freed.
It's always refreshing when Atheists are the psychos. I'm mean, c'mon! This guy is a representation of all atheists, right? :)
eliminate yourself first and maybe others will follow.
This disturbed jerk has provided the Pave the Earth right wing with a new Emanuel Goldstein.
"SEE? We told you all the environmentalists hated humanity! This is all the proof we need that global warming is a hoax and that Yellowstone Park should be sold off to create timeshare resorts!"
well, obviously the guy was deranged, but some of his points are valid.
The problem is that most countries rely on ever increasing population for their economy to strive and the politicians to do well (starting with social security that is not funded by people other than the ones who get the money).
The world clearly could do better with a decreasing population, but most governments encourage exactly the opposite, so indeed right now humans are going to spread until they've taken over all the resources available and at the expense of pretty much all other lifeforms on the planet.
I'll be dead before then, but thinking about it makes me sad.
The food supply curve is not exponential. It has exceeded exponential growth for a century, but only by consuming ever increasingly scarce resources to do so. Soil quality and aquifer levels are dramatically declining, soon even oil based fertilizers (that will become prohibitively expensive with peak oil) won't be enough to keep up production.
Malthus was failed to account for technological advances and declining human fertility. But he also failed to account for destruction of the soil and irrigation systems from over production. His ideas were far from perfect, but they do have merit.
What sucks about this is this guy has got a point, but that's lost because his actions are plain nuts and will drown out most mainstream discussion. But the point is that we are at a point where we are deeply concerned with climate change and resources on this planet, and people think that it's not at all irresponsible to have 19 children, and then the media encourages it!
China may be run by dictatorial fuckwads, but they have a point with their laws on having children. The entire society can't sustain it's population now, so adding another billion hungry mouths over 20 years is just going to fuck things up even more. With the scientific information I've been seeing as of late with global warming, potable water, oil, etc, I can actually envision near future where first world countries start considering birth limits. I understand the personal liberties some people feel they have a right to, but there comes a time when your insistence on having more children affects me and my family. If just you, me, and your spouse left on the planet, and there is only enough food to feed 3 people, and you and your spouse go and have a child without asking me, someone is going to have to give up food. You just impinged on me and my ability to stay alive by having a child. This is not a matter of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, this is good old fashioned primitive instinct of I want to live.
This guy might be an insane fuckwad, but he has a point. We should not be glorifying having 19 children when every new child strains our resources. Sure, we need to have babies to keep the species alive, but without resources to sustain them, there will be a huge population crash.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
This guy is not a teabagger despite the fact that he hates immigrants. He isn't a liberal despite the fact that he likes the environment. He is a dead crazy guy because he took hostages. He didn't need any help from political partisans to achieve his stunning degree of lunacy, I'm pretty sure he got there all on his own.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Some of his points are valid, but I don't think telling any lifeform that their babies are disgusting is good marketing, considering any successful species is pretty much hard-wired to love babies..
which is totally what she said
This guy is not a teabagger despite the fact that he hates immigrants. He isn't a liberal despite the fact that he likes the environment. He is a dead crazy guy because he took hostages. He didn't need any help from political partisans to achieve his stunning degree of lunacy, I'm pretty sure he got there all on his own.
The mantra of fanboys everywhere goes something like "never miss an opportunity to associate a nut with any group you don't like. It furthers the whole 'us against them' bullshit that is so easy to exploit. This is so important that a false association is better than none."
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I'm sure the Right will be just as understanding about the fact that this man does not represent liberal environmentalism as the Left was over the fact that Michael Enright's drunken attack on an Arab driver didn't represent conservative opposition to the Ground Zero Mosque.
Karma's a bitch.
Considering the guy who attacked the arab while drunk worked as part of a group supporting the ground zero mosque and was a devout leftist, you're going to have problems running that one by. This guy however takes many points of the hyper-leftist environmentalism an ran straight forward with them.
But hey, what does it matter? The left have been screaming wildly and blindly for the last year that all members of the tea party are conservative, and racist.
Om, nomnomnom...
Some of his points are valid,
WTF? Some of his points? Are you arguing that civilization/technology is bad ... on an internet forum? If you're arguing that we need to "reduce the surplus population", well, you first buddy.
Malthus was wrong. Overpopulation has not lead to unsurmountable obstacles, nor is the human population growing out of control. The worlds population is better fed than ever before (more people are overweight than underweight). Diseases are better controlled than ever before. High population density is usually a sign of a wealthy area, these days. This guy was a tool, and the only good thing about him is that he's dead.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
more war == less humans. It comes out equal in the end.
You're kidding, right? A modern war does not reduce the net world population except in the very short term. I challenge you to demonstrate otherwise. After the two bloodiest and most destructive wars in recent history, WWI and WWII, the population tripled within two generations, as pointed out by our illustrious manifesto writer du jour.
Malthus merely got pushed out and the curve extended. We found a new resource (oil) that allowed the curve to move substantially. Unless we find another resource to replace it, we'll eventually hit the curve again.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
but crazy or not, a man died.
Man, I don't even know who Malthus is, but you should probably research a little bit before you talk.
First, more people are not overweight than underweight. That might be the case in your country, but I assure you that your country does not constitute anywhere near the majority of the planet. The number of obese (dangerously overweight) people in the world number about 300 million (from WHO). The number of malnourished (dangerously underweight) people number over 900 million (from the Wikipedia article on malnutrition).
Maybe you are right about diseases being better controlled. But I for one can't find any data on the rates of pandemics. So who really knows. Our understanding is better, but our odds of world wide contagion is much higher due to the international travel.
Finally, here is the list of the largest cities by population density. Stop me when you find one that doesn't have a huge poverty problem: Mumbai, Kolkata, Karachi, Lagos, Shenzhen, Seoul (maybe here?), Taipei, Chennai, Bogota, Shanghai, Lima, Beijing, Delhi, Kinshasa, Manila, Tehran, Jakarta, Tianjin, Bangalore, Ho Chi Minh City. Well, that's the top 20 anyway. There is wealth in many of these cities, but for the vast majority they also have crushing poverty.
That guy may have been a tool, but he was crazy and is now dead. There's nothing we can do about him. But education is available for the rest of us. Please make use of it.