RIP James Jay Lee

He's the guy who terrorized Discovery Channel today and took hostages as a way of protesting the false heroism of artificial baby factories glamorized on reality TV. Here's a snip of his manifesto:

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions," it reads. "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."

I'm very sad about this tragedy because I totally think the terrorist had a legitimate point. He was deranged in his choice of communicating the message, but he's right about how much harm influential cultural vehicles like TLC can do in defining people's values. And mindless reproduction is not a "God" thing or a phenomenon to be celebrated. The world is way too over populated. Almost every social problem I can think of will be vastly improved if we could only have fewer people in the world. This goes beyond our environmental problems.

Lee was shot to death by the police. I hope his death was not in vain. Putting aside any question of whether he "deserved" to die - which implicates too many philosophical questions including, but not limited to, is eye for an eye true justice, especially when he died before he could take an eye - he obviously felt we needed a loud wake up call on this issue. I agree with him. I hope that the cause is not tainted by the violence of this episode. I hope instead that people will start thinking critically about how serious this issue is.