Ship of Fools

554 words

What lessons can be learned from the demands and sayings ^[2] of James J. Lee, eco-martyr? No race or movement is devoid of crazies, including my own. Shit happens. What can be said, though, is that few movements are more ideologically directed toward the extermination of human life than radical environmentalism ^[3]. Even the homicidal Luddite Ted Kaczysnki ^[4] rationalized his decades-long killing spree as being an investment in the greater good of humanity.

For James J. Lee, killing off humans is the message. He’s angry about how they’re breeding at an unsustainable rate and believes cruel and genocidal measures are necessary to save the planet. In fact, he got so angry about breeders doing it like they do on the Discovery Channel ^[5] that he went there with a gun to demand that they add more anti-human programming. After a prolonged hostage crisis, the FBI agreed to a compromise in which one human life was terminated on behalf of Planet Earth. His.

Fortunately, nobody at the Discovery Channel, including MythBusters’ Kari Byron ^[6], was killed or injured during the traumatic stand-off.

One lesson this episode reinforces is that while Asians rarely carry firearms, when they do, death ^[7] is ^[8] imminent ^[9]. Another lesson is that these sorts of outbursts are a bad idea. The Unabomber brought some pretty sensible objections to the Industrial Revolution down with him. James von Brunn reinforced the worst stereotypes about people who are critical of Jewish influence. I suppose it’s admirable when people become so passionate about what they believe in that they’re prepared to take decisive action, but going around killing people is not only morally reprehensible . . . it’s bad for the cause.

James J. Lee does raise some serious questions about the sustainability of our current course, though I believe others have had a better understanding of the problem and a better ability to communicate than he did. Kaczynski, for instance, forces the open-minded person to critically examine whether technological progress is necessarily a good thing in his manifesto ^[4]. He even wrote an amusing play, “Ship of Fools ^[10],” that drives home his thesis.

The bottom line is that we do need to be careful to guide technological progress. We do need to protect the environment. We do need to be competent stewards of the land. We do need to assure that population growth and consumption rates are sustainable. But we don’t need to do it in the spirit of self-flagellating neo-puritanical moralizing that Al Gore, James J. Lee, and the rest of the environmentalist movement envision. We need to do it with immigration restriction ^[11], cessation of incentives for invasive populations to reproduce at unsustainable rates, and practical efforts toward sustainable agriculture and simple living.

We need to do it in the spirit of conservationism. In a better time, one in which the White American spirit was healthier, serious men took serious measures to preserve the splendor of this majestic Continent and assure the proliferation of its wildlife and ecosystems. President Theodore Roosevelt’s efforts to create our national parks accomplished far more than Al Gore could dream of. America’s foremost conservationist, Madison Grant ^[12], left a lasting legacy of preserving North America’s endangered species, with a special emphasis on one endangered sub-species of primate in particular: the White race ^[13].

From Fair and Delightsome: http://delightsome.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/ship-of-fools/ ^[14]