[HN Gopher] Ted Kaczynski has died
___________________________________________________________________
Ted Kaczynski has died
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 367 points
Date : 2023-06-10 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| mberning wrote:
| Blowing people up is wrong. But his manifesto was right about
| many things. It's interesting to skim through it every couple
| years.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > Blowing people up is wrong.
|
| So is performing torture experiments on them to see what
| happens them locking them up when they crack.
| davisr wrote:
| Melting the polar ice caps, killing most if not all life on
| Earth, is also wrong. While Ted overstepped his boundaries on
| a man-to-man basis, the argument can certainly be made that
| it's _more_ wrong to see the wreck of this sick society and
| where it leads (death to all Earthly life) and doing nothing
| to stop it.
|
| I don't agree with Ted's actions that directly hurt other
| people (not random people by the way), but god damn he was
| hurting too. We should all feel the same pain he felt. The
| world would be better if we did, and maybe then we could kick
| our addiction to finite resources and short-term monkey-brain
| thinking.
| spurgu wrote:
| The problem he realized was that there's no political solution.
| Bombing people is obviously wrong but if you're convinced that
| humanity is heading down a destructive path then doing whatever
| you can to stop it makes sense, where the damage/suffering of
| the bombings would be comparatively (way) less than letting
| said future play out.
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| he moved into a shack in the mountains searching for tranquility
| and silence. just to get tormented there by noise from local wood
| industry and dogs. So, he kills the dogs and then sabotages
| machinery. for me - he's an unsung hero. may he finally rest in
| peace now.
| jmull wrote:
| He's a hero for killing dogs because they annoyed him?
|
| I think that's sick, not heroic.
| LatteLazy wrote:
| A sad end to a sad life.
| Blackstrat wrote:
| Kaczynski's ideas are irrelevant. What matters are his actions.
| For those, he should have been executed. Why he did what he did,
| what he believed, what he said, are all irrelevant.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| [flagged]
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| [flagged]
| dijondreams wrote:
| Anyone else find it strange that Ted and Robert Hanssen died at
| the same time? Locked in the same place....
| sgift wrote:
| Why would that be strange? One was born in 42, one in 44. Old
| age is a killer.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| We have Bayesian formulas to scalarly determine
| "strangeness".
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| We cannot escape that "all our inventions are but improved means
| to an unimproved end" (Thoreau).
|
| The perversion of knowledge is a paradox that was known to the
| writers of Genesis: it's the Tree of Knowledge that gets the
| first humans in trouble.
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| Gotta love the terrorist sympathizers in the comments. Always bet
| on a certain side of the political spectrum to violate the 'force
| is only justified in response to force' rule when they find it
| convenient.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Which side is that?
| api wrote:
| I have never been able to accept any form of primitivism or
| reactionary ideology for many reasons.
|
| Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this
| imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and
| revive this past would we not end up right back here "repeating
| the grade" so to speak?
|
| The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely skeptical
| of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I think it's all
| a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem better in the
| past because we are experiencing only those cultural artifacts of
| the past that survived, which tend to be the most memorable or
| interesting.
|
| Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of revisiting
| the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional. I can't think of a
| way we could even attempt to return without an insanely
| totalitarian system that attempted to forcibly suppress modernity
| at incredible cost in human life and freedom. That would end up
| looking like the worst caricature of precisely the totalitarian
| tendencies of modernity that these authors often call out. Pol
| Pot is kind of an example from history of someone who tried to
| return a society to a pastoral mode of existence by force.
|
| At their core these writers are critics, and I've come to see
| mere criticism of any form as broadly intellectually weak. It is
| far easier to criticize than it is to improve or fix things.
| Creation is infinitely more difficult than accusation or
| destruction.
|
| All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or they
| would already be solved. If they seem simple it's because we
| haven't fully grasped their scope, which in most cases includes
| ourselves.
|
| The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They don't
| even bother to propose an unworkable solution. That's too much
| work for them. They just point back at an imagined past and blame
| people for having done things between then and now.
| kodah wrote:
| > if everything was so great in this imagined past, why are we
| here and why if we did go back and revive this past would we
| not end up right back here "repeating the grade" so to speak?
|
| "Progress" doesn't occur because things are "better" it occurs
| because things are incentivized. A system can incentivize bad
| things, and at many points in life we may choose bad things for
| one group and good things for another. Progress is merely
| another point further down on the timeline, as is the past.
| Qualitatively judging these points in isolation is difficult,
| but when viewed in collective over time I think people will
| often reflect that some things have gotten better, some have
| gotten worse, and we also have new problems. I view the past
| less as a former grade and more as just a different state of
| things, neither better nor worse in totality, but I'm also not
| cynical enough to say that restoring a previous state is the
| right choice either. Somewhat anecdotally I hardly ever believe
| in software rollbacks, I almost always bias towards rolling
| forward but I understand why some people think rollbacks are
| something they'd want.
|
| > The second is that (as I hinted above) I am extremely
| skeptical of narratives that excessively glorify the past. I
| think it's all a bunch of survivorship bias. Things often seem
| better in the past because we are experiencing only those
| cultural artifacts of the past that survived, which tend to be
| the most memorable or interesting.
|
| Again, the present doesn't necessarily mean that things are
| better for people. We make choices every day to marginalize a
| group or way of life over another. A lot of times, this is just
| necessary but I can understand why people don't like it.
|
| > Lastly, I have doubts about the very possibility of
| revisiting the past. The arrow of time is unidirectional.
|
| You and I agree here, in that I understand the state of the
| past, even yesterday, can never be fully recreated. Again, I
| understand why that's difficult for people to wrestle with.
|
| It sounds like for you and I, life is mostly good, so it makes
| dealing with the present and optimism for the future quite
| palatable. For others, I think that's challenging, so the past
| looks favorable even if unviable.
|
| > The reactionary is a particularly lazy kind of critic. They
| don't even bother to propose an unworkable solution.
|
| Unfortunately this is most of our politicians. Pretty much
| anyone that media would call a "firebrand" from Matt Gaetz to
| AOC is a reactionary, and they're so absorbed in their own
| thoughts, world, and problems that they can't help but take it
| out on the rest of the world. It's a symptom of a broken,
| tired, and frustrated system that we put trust in people who
| are simply meant to agitate rather than build comprehensive,
| intersectional systems.
| notacoward wrote:
| You've buried an assumption in there: that there is only one
| possible future. That we can only choose between that one
| future and the past. Since at least the original Luddites, the
| real tension has been between _multiple_ futures enabled by
| technology. Kaczynski was in this tradition. It was an argument
| against inevitability, against the same glorification of one
| future that you condemn when it 's about the one past. I
| suggest that you consider the possibility of one or more
| _different_ futures, where technology still exists but is
| applied in ways that enhance our humanity instead of
| suppressing it.
| api wrote:
| If this is the case then these writers should be spending 95%
| of their words talking about how to go from here to a
| different better future, or even better rolling up their
| sleeves and attempting to live or create such a future here
| and now.
|
| The only criticism you need is whatever it takes to frame the
| problem.
|
| I've read Kaczynski and numerous other primitivists and
| reactionaries and that's not the dominant theme. The emphasis
| is on a lost golden age (that I do not believe actually
| existed) and accusing modernity in a moralistic tone.
| bmitc wrote:
| > Chief among them is this: if everything was so great in this
| imagined past, why are we here and why if we did go back and
| revive this past would we not end up right back here "repeating
| the grade" so to speak?
|
| This is a quite limited perspective that ignores momentum of
| change. In the book _Against the Grain_ , the author observes
| that the earliest societies that transitioned from hunter-
| gatherers to agrarian worked harder and longer hours with less
| time to relax and have leisure and were actually less healthy
| and didn't live as long. That's just one example where
| "progress" was not such. We see this again and again though.
| Yea, we've amplified the amount of stuff we can grow but at the
| great cost of the environment and even our own health and well-
| being. We now ingest food filled with plastics and toxins, like
| mercury.
|
| Human technological progress has occurred at rates that we
| cannot emotionally and biologically keep up with, and the
| distance is only accelerating.
|
| > All our significant problems must be very hard to solve or
| they would already be solved.
|
| Most significant problems were created by us in the first
| place.
| paganel wrote:
| RIP to one of the few real prophets of our time.
|
| We're long past gone the point where anything could have been
| done to avert all this current dystopic madness (two years ago,
| when I entered a bookshop, I had to show some QR magic code that
| I had gotten as a result of having a needle inject me stuff in my
| body), but we can't say we hadn't been warned.
| hn2017 wrote:
| [dead]
| tyingq wrote:
| I'm very surprised he didn't die earlier. Take his mental state
| at sentencing, then consider he was in ADX Florence Supermax from
| 1998 to December of 2021...23 years. The regimen there is 23
| hours a day by yourself in your cell. There's one hour a day
| outside in a sunken concrete area, each prisoner is placed in an
| individual 12x18 foot wire-mesh cage, and can speak to other
| nearby caged prisoners under the watch of guards. There's a thin
| slit window in the cell that shows only the sky, no landscape
| visible. All meals eaten in the cell, passed through a hole. They
| did transfer him to a medical prison in December of 2021.
| arp242 wrote:
| His cell was apparently 12x7-foot, or 3.6x2.1 metres (I was
| curious). Seems awfully tiny, and personally I consider it
| inhumane no matter what he has done, but apparently he wasn't
| too unhappy with it: _" I consider myself to be in a
| (relatively) fortunate situation here. As correctional
| institutions go, this place is well-administered. It's clean,
| the food is good, and it's quiet, so that I can sleep, think
| and write (usually) without being distracted by a lot of
| banging and shouting."_[1]
|
| Come to think of it, I might prefer a smaller cell over a
| larger one if it's clean and doesn't have "a lot of banging and
| shouting", but that probably says more about the general state
| of the US prison system than anything else.
|
| [1]: https://news.yahoo.com/the-unabomber-s-not-so-lonely-
| prison-...
| boppo1 wrote:
| did they allow much of his writing out of the prison? Who
| holds the rights to something written in prison in the US?
| tyingq wrote:
| There's not a universal country-wide law in the US. Some
| states have "Son of Sam" laws that keep prisoners from
| profiting from publicity about their crimes.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam_law
|
| Though with Ted, he probably had things other than his
| crimes he could have published and made money from. Of
| course, any earnings could end up going to a civil suit or
| existing orders of victim restitution.
|
| None of that seems directly related to intellectual
| property rights though. The prisoner retains those just
| like anyone else. I suppose there might be some cases of
| asset forfeiture for remediation or fines?
| arp242 wrote:
| As far as I know he was able to correspond fairly freely,
| but all of mail was being read (which is standard practice
| for high-security prisoners I believe). In my other comment
| I linked to an author who corresponded with Kaczynski and
| wrote down his experiences:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36273216
|
| He also published some books ( _Techno1ogica1 Slavery_ ,
| _Anti-tech Revolution_ ), which is his manifesto with some
| additional essays and letters.
|
| > Who holds the rights to something written in prison in
| the US?
|
| The author; nothing changes about that.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Approaching the era of AGI we will see a lot of more occurrences
| of technofobia, violence and probably new movements to go back to
| sq1 and live like 200k years ago. It looks inevitable if the pace
| grows exponential.
| [deleted]
| nimish wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD4xrnzKN1Y is a good exposition
| of his mathematical work for the non-mathematician.
|
| His other work is better known, of course.
| George83728 wrote:
| [flagged]
| fallingmeat wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| George83728 wrote:
| [flagged]
| arp242 wrote:
| Gary Greenberg's _" In the Kingdom of the Unabomber"_[1] is a
| pretty interesting write-up of the palace intrigue stuff
| surrounding Kaczynski while he was in prison, Greenberg also did
| a great interview with Errol Morris about it.[2]
|
| [1]: best quality I can find right now:
| https://www.garygreenbergonline.com/media/unabomber_letter.p...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECNsiK5MB-4&list=PLVmRJGCDzW...
| neilv wrote:
| Many of the comments are taking the occasion to speak favorably
| of the Unabomber's manifesto.
|
| IMHO, there's a time to consider ideas, but I think it would be
| better not to do that when talking about a terrorist who attacked
| innocents to promote exposure of those ideas.
|
| Otherwise, it would seem to be validating and rewarding
| terrorism, and thereby encouraging future terrorists.
| Shinma wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| IceHegel wrote:
| Best manifesto of the 20th century imo. Modern man is an animal
| in a cage. He behaves increasingly abnormally because his
| environment is unfamiliar and out of his direct control.
| miramba wrote:
| I don't think that's modern, it was the same in the centuries
| and millenias before. Unless you were born into the 1% upper
| class, you were ruled by them with random degrees of
| benevolence. I would argue that although you could say that
| this hasn't changed much, everyday life for most of us ruled
| subjects is equal or better in almost every respect, for
| example being able to write this comment to you, my fellow
| underling.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Graeber & Wengrow would like a word with you about that
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36276100
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| The modern man is the best man that has ever been. Ted was just
| a nutcase.
| IceHegel wrote:
| On what measure? Certainly he is quite healthy and even
| considered sick.
| rs_rs_rs_rs_rs wrote:
| On every measure, there was never a better time in the
| history of civilization to live.
| IceHegel wrote:
| Obesity rate.
| krapp wrote:
| Obesity in a world where you could diet and exercise is
| still preferable to starvation in a world without easy
| access to food. At one time it was a sign of wealth and
| privilege to be able to afford enough calories to put on
| any weight at all, and enough leisure time to not have to
| work it all off through brutal, constant labor.
| [deleted]
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Graeber & Wengrow propose an interesting set of 3
| measures:
|
| >But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not
| talking here about 'freedom' as an abstract ideal or
| formal principle (as in 'Liberty, Equality and
| Fraternity!'). Over the course of these chapters we have
| instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which
| one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to
| move away or relocate from one's surroundings; (2) the
| freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others;
| and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social
| realities, or shift back and forth between different
| ones.
|
| >What we can now see is that the first two freedoms - to
| relocate, and to disobey commands - often acted as a kind
| of scaffolding for the third, more creative one. Let us
| clarify some of the ways in which this 'propping-up' of
| the third freedom actually worked. As long as the first
| two freedoms were taken for granted, as they were in many
| North American societies when Europeans first encountered
| them, the only kings that could exist were always, in the
| last resort, play kings. If they overstepped the line,
| their erstwhile subjects could always ignore them or move
| someplace else. The same would go for any other hierarchy
| of offices or system of authority. Similarly, a police
| force that operated for only three months of the year,
| and whose membership rotated annually, was in a certain
| sense a play police force - which makes it slightly less
| bizarre that their members were sometimes recruited
| directly from the ranks of ritual clowns.
|
| >It's clear that something about human societies really
| has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic
| freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a
| majority of people living today can barely comprehend
| what it might be like to live in a social order based on
| them.
|
| --David Graeber & David Wengrow (2021) The Dawn of
| Everything, p. 503.
|
| https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsim
| pre...
| perardi wrote:
| I know the tendency to mythologize serial killers and terrorists
| is disgusting--serial killer TV shows and movies are sure-fire
| hits, which is a pretty dark insight into human nature. _(I mean,
| Netflix is like half serial killer shows now.)_ And trying to
| generalize and overanalyze and learn lessons from one-off
| instances of people snapping and killing is just not productive.
|
| But...
|
| ...it's hard _not_ to mythologize and over-analyze Kaczynski. He
| had what appears to be a totally average suburban upbringing, he
| was unambiguously wildly intelligent, and yet he done broke bad.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
| mypastself wrote:
| It's been years since I've read _Industrial Society and its
| Future_ , but I remember it felt like the author was
| rationalizing his own emotional state into a philosophy
| supposedly explaining society. It contained many subjective ideas
| presented as hard fact, as well as some naive romanticization of
| pre-industrial societies.
|
| He was right about one thing, though. No one would give his
| writings a second look if he wasn't a terrorist. Even if the many
| copycat manifestos would be much worse.
| icpmacdo wrote:
| Here is a timestamped clip of George Hotz Twitch stream from 6
| days ago making the same point about rationalizing his own
| emotional state of powerlessness in Industrial Society and its
| Future
|
| https://youtu.be/Mr0rWJhv9jU?t=7169
| californiadreem wrote:
| >It contained many subjective ideas presented as hard fact, as
| well as some naive romanticization of pre-industrial societies.
|
| You may enjoy reading this:
|
| https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-tr...
| mypastself wrote:
| Interesting, will check it out.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > I remember it felt like the author was rationalizing his own
| emotional state into a philosophy supposedly explaining
| society.
|
| Your intuition is correct. Here's TK's own words on the matter
| [0]:
|
| > But even leaving aside all questions of "political" utility
| and considering only my personal predilections, I have little
| interest in philosophical questions such as the desirability or
| undesirability of the "herd mentality." The mountains of
| Western Montana offered me nearly everything I needed or
| wanted. If those mountains could have remained just as they
| were when I first moved to Montana in 1971, I would have been
| satisfied. The rest of the world could have had a herd
| mentality, or an individualistic mentality or whatever, and it
| would have been all the same to me. But, of course, under
| modern conditions there was no way the mountains could have
| remained isolated from the rest of the world. Civilization
| moved in and squeezed me, so...
|
| [0]: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/ted-kaczynski-s-
| lette...
| j3s wrote:
| i read ted's manifesto awhile back and wrote a review about it:
| https://j3s.sh/review/industrial-society-and-its-future.html
|
| overall i was pretty disappointed. ted's writing wasn't very good
| at all & his arguments did not convince me. i was surprised
| because of his writing seems to be universally praised in tech
| circles.
|
| in my opinion it isn't worth reading. it's philosophical cosplay.
| andrewinardeer wrote:
| That's two heavyweights from Florence Supermax dead in two weeks.
| Hanssen is the other.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I find it deeply disturbing the number of people here who take
| this complete historical illiterate seriously. Seriously get some
| self-esteem and stop with this self-flagellating "technology is
| the source of all problems" bullshit.
| dbcooper wrote:
| [flagged]
| comeonbro wrote:
| > He targeted people like me and you, and would probably kill
| you in person if he had the choice.
|
| Yeah. I initially came into this news ready to edgelord out
| with everybody else, but, synthesizing from some other comments
| I've read on the internet today:
|
| Thinking of the dads that owned their little computer stores in
| the 80s getting their fingers blown off and dying in their
| parking lots while reading these comments.
|
| > Friends recall Hugh as a man who embraced life, a gentle man
| with a sense of humor who had traveled around the world,
| climbed mountains, and studied languages. He cared about
| politics, was "fair and kind" in business, and was remembered
| as "straightforward, honest, and sincere." He left behind his
| mother, sister, family members, a girlfriend who loved him
| dearly, and a circle of friends and colleagues who respected
| and cared for him.
|
| Kaczynski's account of the killing:
|
| > Experiment 97. Dec. 11, 1985. I planted a bomb disguised to
| look like a scrap of lumber behind Rentech Computer Store in
| Sacramento. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Dec. 20,
| the "operator" (owner? manager?) of the store was killed,
| "blown to bits, on Dec. 12. Excellent. Humane way to eliminate
| somebody. He probably never felt a thing. 25,000 reward
| offered. Rather flattering.
| whatscooking wrote:
| [flagged]
| mdp2021 wrote:
| Points #171 to #178 - chapter "The Future" - of ISaiF contain the
| discussion about Artificial Intelligence and general Automation
| (and further prospective areas such as Genetic Engineering).
|
| The analysis, while lucidly exposed, lacks the sophistication
| which should reveal more major possibilities (e.g. the machine as
| an enhancer for the decisor and the public).
|
| Nonetheless, we read
|
| > _On the other hand it is possible that human control over the
| machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have
| control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car
| or his personal computer, but control over large systems of
| machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite_
|
| where the missed addition of quantifiers and specifiers in the
| expression <<may have control>> makes said relative "lack of
| sophistication" even optimistic.
| BMc2020 wrote:
| There was a lot of controversy about publishing his manifesto,
| but his brother saw it, recognized his writing style and tipped
| off the police.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| A lot of comments here talk about how terrible Kaczynski's
| actions were, and I agree with them. I do wonder, though, at what
| point does such behavior qualify one as mentally insane? He seems
| fairly insane to me, and I'm not sure whether we should see him
| as an evil person with true agency or someone with a mental
| illness.
| fairity wrote:
| My takeaway from Kacynski's manifesto is that he makes an astute
| observation about the root causes of unhappiness, but then
| proposes an absurd solution.
|
| The astute observation is that a lot of unhappiness is driven by
| over-socialization and a commitment to inauthentic, subjective
| values.
|
| The solution, to tear down technology to force mankind to work on
| more primitive goals, only makes sense if there are no
| alternatives.
|
| Thankfully there are many alternatives. First and foremost, I
| think people like Ted just need to realize that the yearning to
| be important and useful is natural, but something you can let go
| of if you stop taking life so seriously.
| [deleted]
| waihtis wrote:
| Kaczynski's entire opposition to technology seems to focus purely
| on amplifying the negative aspects of technological advancement.
| But after reading David Deutsch, I cannot but think all and any
| technological advancement is desirable and there's little merit
| to technological doomerism.
| notacoward wrote:
| "Any and all"? It's not a particularly surprising attitude to
| find here, but I think it's a hard one to justify. Does
| ubiquitous surveillance technology not bother you at all, no
| matter how it's likely to be used? Are new methods of killing
| people _always_ good? How about mind control? Not that we have
| it, but "any and all" would cover it. Is "doomerism" the only
| alternative you can think of to infinite optimism? That's a
| textbook example of the excluded middle.
|
| I hope you just phrased that poorly, because if that attitude
| were widely and sincerely held it would be scary indeed. I say
| that, BTW, as someone who's generally optimistic about the
| possibilities inherent in new technology, and has even created
| a bit here and there. The uses and effects of technology must
| _always_ be considered, not just naively assumed to be
| beneficial. Un-nuanced optimism is just as simplistic and
| "meritless" as its mirror image.
| pierat wrote:
| To be fair, he seemed to line up pretty strongly with Ned Ludd,
| and the evils of capitalism in relation to 'who owns the
| machines'.
|
| Note: the original Luddites weren't against technology. They were
| against technology minimizing worker power.
|
| I don't follow why he chose to send bombs to people. But at least
| to the Luddites, sabotage of the means of production was
| considered laudable.
| ahoy wrote:
| Kaczynski was essentially a blackpilled fascist. He spends the
| huge bulk of his manifesto ranting against leftism. I think its
| fine to attack the ideas as well.
| j-krieger wrote:
| None of his ideas have anything to do with fascism. Rallying
| against leftism does not make one a fascist. As far as I
| remember, in Industrial Society and its Future, Kaczynski did
| not propose authoritarianism or nationalism in any way or form.
| adamrezich wrote:
| it would be nice if that word wasn't overused to the point of
| becoming essentially meaningless in contemporary discourse--
| it seems like a word that should probably retain a
| significant amount of gravitas!
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| "Rallying against leftism does not make one a fascist."
|
| You must have missed the memo that defines "fascism to be
| anything someone more conservative than AOC believes in.
| [deleted]
| mihaic wrote:
| The one thing I still wonder about Ted is actually how many more
| actually good and thought provoking "manifestos" like his are out
| there, only for nobody to push them to in the public's eye.
|
| After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable
| truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually
| giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.
| kandel wrote:
| If you like manifestos the futurist manifesto is pretty cool.
| drones wrote:
| There are way more Ted K's running around today - it's just
| that you don't need to kill people to get heard anymore.
| Nowadays the spectacle of ruining your own life is enough to
| get noticed. Anyone with an internet connection today has
| access to world stage provided they are interesting enough.
| Back then you'd need to catch the eye of a producer for a
| mainstream news broadcast to get any coverage. Now you can just
| fire up a camera and there's a 50% chance you'll end up on a
| podcast circuit and end up talking to Joe Rogan.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You seem to suggest that Kaczynski murdered as a kind of
| marketing strategy for his ideas. I highly doubt that.
| brvsft wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unabomber_Manifesto
|
| > Between 1978 and 1995, Ted Kaczynski engaged in a mail
| bomb campaign[4] against people involved with modern
| technology.[5] His initial targets were universities and
| airlines, which the FBI shortened as UNABOM. In June 1995,
| Kaczynski offered to end his campaign if one of several
| publications (the Washington Post, New York Times, or
| Penthouse) would publish his critique of technology, titled
| Industrial Society and Its Future, which became widely
| known as the "Unabomber Manifesto".[6]
|
| In a sense, he used the murders as a marketing strategy,
| but honestly it was more of a threat to force his manifesto
| to be published.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| From the manifesto itself: "In order to attract attention
| to our ideas, we've had to kill people."
|
| Quoting from memory - may not be word for word.
|
| So, if you can believe him, then yes, he murdered as a
| marketing strategy.
| timeon wrote:
| That is also marketing. He was hiding his personal
| grievances behind these ideas.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's interesting.
|
| I'm skeptical enough though (having read books about the
| Zodiac Killer, for example) that I see it just as likely
| to have been an unexpected opportunity that Kaczynski
| exploited.
|
| I guess I'm not surprised that a murderer, enjoying their
| new-found public lectern, might engage in rationalization
| of their murders.
| adamrezich wrote:
| it's 2023 and everyone has an Internet-connected smartphone
| in their pocket at all times--in 1995 this was not the
| case.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| And yet people in this internet age still go on shooting
| sprees and leave behind "manifestos".
|
| My take away is that there are and always have been sick
| people. Citing lack of a megaphone shouldn't even be a
| sliver of rationale for a murderer's behavior.
| drones wrote:
| Terrorism isn't marketing? Marketing is all about
| advertising your ideas and changing people's ideas. 9/11
| wasn't marketing for Al-Quaeda?
|
| Even if he was purely driven out of self-interest and ego,
| the result of his actions is that today we are discussing
| his ideas when we should be working.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I think it comes down to order of operations and intent.
| If we knew that he first had a manifesto to present, then
| decided to murder strangers to draw attention to it then
| I grant you it was terrorism as marketing.
|
| I'm just suspicious whether this was the case.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that
| "manifestos" are inherently elitist. I'm only aware of
| manifestos coming from people who speak with an air of self-
| importance. Kaczynski seems no different.
| sph wrote:
| That's tautological. You write a manifesto if you think you
| have something worthwhile to share with the world.
|
| Same with writing books, asking people to subscribe to your
| blog newsletter, shouting on a street corner or asking people
| to vote for you.
|
| That said, who says having some self-importance is inherently
| bad? Trying to be humble is a cultural and religious virtue,
| not an absolute truth.
| opportune wrote:
| The Declaration of Independence was a manifesto
|
| Had the American revolution not succeeded it would be
| relegated to being classified as a typical rebel manifesto
| that people basically do not care about
| Fricken wrote:
| The notion that industrialization and modernity in general
| bring about feelings of profound alienation has a rich lineage
| of philosophy and storytelling going back to the dawn of the
| modern era.
|
| Nietchze, Carl Jung, Marshall McLuhan, William S Burroughs,
| Franz Kafka, Fritz Lang, PK Dick, Stanley Kubrick, Jared
| Diamond, Pink Floyd... this list could go on for a while.
| theodric wrote:
| Ted is, for better or worse, one of my heroes. Not for his
| entirely ineffective, pointless, counter-productive explosives
| work, but because reading his work, Thoreau's, and others, helped
| pull me out of a serious funk at the bottom of my burnout curve
| and find a new direction for my life after tech. It inspired me
| to spend EUR200k of the tech cash I'd hoarded on a farmstead and
| land in the Irish countryside, and try to do something that
| doesn't make the world worse in the way that working in edtech
| (one of the parasites keeping tuition high) or finance/fintech
| (no explanation required) does. I'm not a Luddite, and I'm
| certainly not opposed to technology - I use it everywhere - but I
| agree with Ted that surrogate activities hamper our capacity for
| fulfilment. That they stop us from seeing the fruits of our
| labors and connecting them viscerally, emotionally to positive
| outcomes in our lives. That focusing on meta-level societal noise
| only serves to make us unhappier. That living deliberately
| empowers and breeds satisfaction.
|
| I'm poor as shit now, from an income perspective, but I've never
| been more fulfilled. Pity it took me 40 years to figure this all
| out.
|
| RIP TedK.
| dbcooper wrote:
| [flagged]
| drones wrote:
| It's frustrating how he articulates so well the problems of
| modern society as it pertains to progress in human development,
| equality, and the environment, yet his actions were essentially
| the result of personal grievances against coworkers he didn't
| like. If only the 80's had twitter he'd be such a great poster.
| fredgrott wrote:
| you are aware that his mind was harmed when he was a child at
| Harvard, right?
|
| See https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-that-
| le....
| drones wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't do this here.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Dang, I am not sure he is wrong. His comment is snarky,
| but there are reasons to think that the explosion of
| social networks has led to a major mental health crisis,
| especially among the young, and it may indeed be true
| that social networks are optimized to make you angry,
| depressed and resentful.
| dang wrote:
| On HN, not being snarky is more important than not being
| wrong--especially when it comes to drive-by oneliners.
| This is not a borderline call!
|
| Your longer explanation would have been fine as the GP,
| for example, but the GP comment wasn't anything like
| that.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Yeah, he wasn't wrong about some things-the industrial
| revolution and its consequences have had some pretty big
| downsides.
| veave wrote:
| [flagged]
| DirectorKrennic wrote:
| Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high
| noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts:
|
| > 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women
| are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged
| by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as
| men.
|
| > 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of
| being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they
| hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate
| rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the
| West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives.
| They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike,
| imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where
| these same faults appear in socialist countries or in
| primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at
| best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he
| ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates)
| these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus
| it is clear that these faults are not the leftist's real
| motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and
| the West because they are strong and successful.
|
| > 22. If our society had no social problems at all, the
| leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide
| themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
|
| > 35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the
| physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever
| clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But
| the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort.
| Hence his boredom and demoralization.
| drones wrote:
| For the most part the underlying observations are hard to
| disagree, even if you disagree with the conclusions.
|
| 14: - Yep this is quite off. I disagree.
|
| 15: (Some) Leftists do operate under a slave morality,
| which does lead them to morally binary modes of thinking,
| resulting in things like supporting the Russian invasion of
| Ukraine (because America is an imperialist, illegitimate
| state and therefore NATO is too).
|
| 22: Not unique to leftists - the political machine demands
| conflict to justify it's own existence
|
| 35: Mazlow's hierarchy of needs. This is undisputable. Why
| do billionaires waste money on backyard space experiments
| and vacuous social media platforms? Existential boredom and
| ego.
| arp242 wrote:
| Reading Kaczynski is a little bit like reading the Bible:
| you shouldn't take everything literally but instead think
| about what's trying to be said, and you should ignore some
| bits.
|
| e.g. paragraph "15" is excessive and inflammatory, but he
| wasn't wrong that some people will try to find fault for
| anything that happens in the West while ignoring much
| greater crimes in other countries. See e.g. all the HN
| posters who trivialize China's problems while attacking the
| US (I'm sure this thread will have some of those types of
| comments, too). This point also wasn't original to
| Kaczynski, e.g. George Orwell also wrote about it, as did
| many others.
|
| Also remember much of this was written an era when people
| were _literally_ collaborating with the USSR and East-
| Germany out of "socialist ideals" and (rightful) anger
| over the shady activities of the CIA or FBI, while also
| ignoring that those countries were significantly worse in
| almost every way.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty
| specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching
| towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you
| can expand a bit?
| happytoexplain wrote:
| No need to be ominous. Those topics are forever the high-
| noise, high-politics topics. It's not eyebrow-raising to
| find them in this kind of manifesto, or for somebody to
| disagree with them.
| DirectorKrennic wrote:
| > 77. Not everyone in industrial-technological society
| suffers from psychological problems. Some people even
| profess to be quite satisfied with society as it is. We
| now discuss some of the reasons why people differ so
| greatly in their response to modern society.
|
| > 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but
| they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might
| be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According
| to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially
| an element of a social machine and has only a certain set
| of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are
| designed to serve the needs of the social machine more
| than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois's "free"
| man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and
| progress; he has freedom of the press because public
| criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he
| has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the
| whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This
| was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people
| deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress
| (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois
| thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere
| means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, "Chinese
| Political Thought in the Twentieth Century," page 202,
| explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-
| min: "An individual is granted rights because he is a
| member of society and his community life requires such
| rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the
| nation." And on page 259 Tan states that according to
| Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist
| Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of
| the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of
| freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone
| else prescribes? FC's conception of freedom is not that
| of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The
| trouble with such theorists is that they have made the
| development and application of social theories their
| surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are
| designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than
| the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live
| in a society on which the theories are imposed.
|
| > 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system
| exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual
| increase in the number of people who cannot or will not
| adjust to society's requirements: welfare leeches, youth-
| gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical
| environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of
| various kinds.
|
| As I said, a whole bunch of nonsense.
| throw4548 wrote:
| 14 doesn't insane
|
| 15 seems spot on to me. It's definitely how conservatives
| see leftists.
|
| 22 and 35 do seem like rambling
| 13of40 wrote:
| I haven't read it in years, but I think 35 was part of a
| bigger argument that past a certain point everything in
| modern life is either impossible or trivially easy to
| achieve, so people seek outlets in hobbies, etc. Not
| universally true, as anyone who's ever job hunted or quit
| smoking knows, but not just thoughtless rambling.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| I find it very curious the fawning treatment this murderer's
| death is receiving here. The guy killed three innocent people and
| maimed a number of others because he went crazy and wanted to get
| back at the world. What is wrong with you people?
|
| You know there's plenty of people that are smarter than him,
| being able to produce more coherent, balanced and informed views
| of society, and also not murder people.
| sneak wrote:
| Barack Obama murdered hundreds of innocent children via drone
| strikes he ordered or approved. Donald Trump continued the
| process, killing hundreds more. Both received widespread
| support from millions of citizens.
|
| Our society already celebrates mass murder of innocents, and
| those who do the murdering. Once you see it, you cannot unsee
| it.
| brvsft wrote:
| This moral argument doesn't really work on people from the US
| after about 20 years of global militarism, especially that
| whole stint in Iraq and Afghanistan.
|
| I hate murder as much as the next guy, but our political and
| military leaders constantly make decisions that result in
| needless deaths. You don't even know how upset I personally was
| after voting for Obama and seeing him continue using drones to
| target terrorists while also killing innocent civilians as
| collateral damage.
|
| Please, grant me the luxury to like this one guy who killed
| three innocent people because I just think his manifesto was
| pretty good. My 'leaders' have already taught me that murder
| can be overlooked by the vast majority of the public, or at
| least one half of it, every 4-8 years. I think I'm allowed to
| like Uncle Ted.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| You know what we did before drones were developed? Carpet
| bombs. Drones are a huge improvement.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski
| catminou wrote:
| I remember in the 90s a classmate in my junior high lived across
| the street from the house that Ted grew up in (evergreen park,
| il). When all this was going down he mentioned how before it went
| public that there was a suspicious amount of people visiting that
| house and removing things in boxes (I guess Teds brother owned
| the house and still had his writings in the attic).
| celtoid wrote:
| Kaczynski is a warning to all intellectuals with an an activist
| streak. If harming and killing innocents is your solution, you're
| already off the path. In this regard, he was no different from
| many of the people and institutions he critiqued.
| chasing wrote:
| On one hand, he murdered a bunch of people and ruined a huge
| number of lives. On the other hand, wrote a mildly interesting
| manifesto that only attracted any sort of attention because it
| was published by The Washington Post in a desperate bid to figure
| out who he was so we could get him to _stop murdering people._
| (Which worked, by the way.) So, y 'know. Evens right out...
|
| Interested in his ideas? Read better manifestos by people who
| gained notice for their words and ideas, not because they
| murdered a bunch of people. Maybe there were explanations for why
| he did what he did, but at the end of the day his was a wasted
| life that made the world a worse place.
| catiopatio wrote:
| None of what you said has any bearing on the intellectual
| validity of his manifesto. There's nothing to "even out" -- we
| can and do separate the work from the author.
|
| I found some degree of edification in reading his manifesto,
| and I see no justification for your attempt to dissuade others
| from reading it.
| digbybk wrote:
| Do we know how his views changed, if at all, over the years?
| carabiner wrote:
| [flagged]
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| Not to mention nearly every prediction in the Manifesto came
| true. He was a genius broken by the government.
|
| We should blame the CIA, not him. He was just a math nerd in
| the beginning.
| relyks wrote:
| He was literally a murderer... no one like that deserves a
| black bar here even if they did make important contributions to
| technology, sciences, and/or engineering
| crhulls wrote:
| His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a
| twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily
| prescient.
|
| http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf
| moffkalast wrote:
| I don't suppose anyone has a short summary?
| knbknb wrote:
| There is a section "The Future" which talks about Artificial
| Intelligence (AI):
|
| The author postulates that if computer scientists develop
| intelligent machines that can do all things better than
| humans, all work will be done by machines and no human effort
| will be necessary.
|
| There are two possibilities: either the machines make all
| their own decisions without human oversight or human control
| over the machines is retained.
|
| 173. If machines _are_ allowed to make all their own
| decisions, it is impossible to predict the outcome and the
| fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines.
| The author suggests that society may become so dependent on
| machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept
| all of their decisions, eventually leading to a stage where
| machines are in effective control and turning them off would
| amount to suicide.
|
| 174. If human control over machines is _retained_, the
| average person may have control over certain private
| machines, but control over large systems of machines will be
| in the hands of a tiny elite. The elite will have greater
| control over the masses and because human work will no longer
| be necessary, the masses will be superfluous.
|
| If computer scientists do not succeed in developing
| artificial intelligence and human work remains necessary,
| machines will still take care of simpler tasks resulting in
| an increasing surplus of human workers at lower levels of
| ability. Employed workers will face ever-increasing demands
| and will need more training, ability and conformity. Their
| tasks will be increasingly specialized and out of touch with
| the real world.
|
| The author envisions scenarios where machines take over most
| important work while humans are kept busy with relatively
| unimportant work in the service industries, which the author
| finds contemptible.
|
| The author acknowledges that the outlined scenarios do not
| exhaust all possibilities but indicates that if the
| industrial-technological system survives the next 40 to 100
| years, individuals will be more dependent on large
| organizations and their physical and mental qualities will be
| engineered into them.
|
| Technology is creating a new physical and social environment
| for humans that is radically different from the environments
| to which natural selection has adapted the human race and
| humans will either be adjusted to this new environment by
| being artificially re-engineered or through natural
| selection.
|
| 179. The author concludes that it would be better to dump the
| whole system and take the consequences.
|
| (That was all summarized by ChatGPT. I have removed
| concluding sentences from some paragraphs containing deeply
| pessimistic motives of insubordination, enslavement, and
| extermination)
| brvsft wrote:
| reject humanity, return to monke
|
| Edit: In all seriousness, it's been a while since I read it.
| His general ideas are that technology has been a disaster for
| humankind because, among other reasons, it's freed up time
| for us to be preoccupied with unimportant bullshit, to the
| point that it causes mental problems with people. People
| start to act out in various ways in resistance of our current
| state because we 'know' somewhere in our bodies that this
| existence is meaningless. People without the luxury of free
| time do not have to preoccupy themselves with this struggle
| for meaning.
|
| He also goes on at length about how leftists are self-hating
| people and worship victimhood, and their mentality is partly
| a product of this existential dilemma.
|
| But these are just a couple of points I took away. It's much
| more well-written than I could personally attempt to
| summarize in an internet comment.
| murderberry wrote:
| "Technology bad."
|
| It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern
| critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never
| existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony
| with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral,
| societal, and environmental decay of today.
|
| Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are
| evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle
| Ages, and throughout history.
|
| Misplaced nostalgia aside, another problem with most such
| ideologies is that the prescription for returning to that
| utopian bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is
| that our minds are too corrupted to understand what's right.
| Whether that's blowing things up or taking away your rights
| is just an implementation detail.
| yeck wrote:
| I think you are forgetting that the "modern society" you
| are familiar with is not ubiquitous and in our present
| moment there are many people that lead completely different
| lives than you. If you are not ignorant of this, then you
| are supposing that no one in a different circumstance may
| prefer it and fight for it.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _He falls for the same trap many modern critics of
| progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed_
|
| There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to
| understand that there are people who have actually
| experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer
| it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then,
| that's why they like it" compared to the present.
|
| And that, depending on your inclinations and ideas about
| how to live, it's not true that nothing better "ever
| existed".
|
| > _is that the prescription for returning to that utopian
| bygone era inevitably involves force: the premise is that
| our minds are too corrupted to understand what 's right_
|
| Well, the future comes at people with force too. People
| thrown out of employment into poverty because of technology
| and being told "just learn to code" for example.
|
| Or things getting integrated with the state and business
| world, and becoming increasingly necessary to have, even if
| you don't want them.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I've mentioned before and there was a thread yesterday
| about a modern Usenet which I think falls into this line
| of thinking. In the early 90s there was an egalitarian
| messaging system that wasn't actively and continuously
| abused. I would love to be able to be in a world like
| that, however, that world can't exist again (at least not
| in the way it did).
|
| As the saying goes, the only constant is change.
| rough-sea wrote:
| Thank you. It's depressing to find so many people on HN
| expressing sympathy for the nonsense written in the
| manifesto.
|
| People should read "Beginning of Infinity" for a strong
| counter argument.
| katamarimambo wrote:
| Sadly, it seems that for one to be taken seriously as a
| thinker, it takes minimal coherence, median compatibility
| of ideals with the readers and maximal violence in
| advertising yourself.
| dsego wrote:
| > "Technology bad."
|
| I didn't read it like that, it was more like "I don't want
| a six lane highway in front of my house", "Oh, you're just
| against progress and modernism, so shut up", "Ok, maybe I
| blow your shit up"...
| j9461701 wrote:
| Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the
| scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient
| humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't
| recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being
| some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived
| in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been
| humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to
| destroy our long term prospects for short term gain. At
| least in modern western societies we have the power to
| recognize this part of ourselves, and put aside areas like
| national parks free from our grasping fingers.
| yeck wrote:
| That is post-agricultural revolution humanity. Sure it is
| ancient by the standards of an individual, but it is only
| a relatively recent and small part of the more than 100
| thousand years of human pre-history.
| hackermailman wrote:
| The real summary isn't just technology bad. He claims mankind
| as evolved is not compatible with the industrial world we
| have created therefore humanity will never be able to adapt
| to it. In order to force adaptation he then lists all the
| ways those in power will attempt to do so from psych drugs to
| pleasure bribes to gene editing in order to remove this trait
| of mankind of needing personal power over one's own destiny
| so we can better adapt to being serfs in the industrial world
| (his claims, not mine). He lists numerous scenarios where we
| will be an unrecognizable species in the future serving the
| machines too, many of them familiar like how medicine will
| become too complex to understand so reliance on machines to
| cure us of problems which in turn becomes irresistible to
| those in power to make us even more dependent on them for
| survival.
|
| He also is definitely not any kind of primitive man utopia
| shill, that's why he rants in the beginning against 'green
| anarchy' type ideology. He is more of an evolutionist saying
| even if we returned to primitive life before the industrial
| revolution we would at least still be human and would have to
| accept all kinds of terrible things that come with primitive
| life as the alternative is being a spiritless organism
| serving machines (again his ideology not mine).
| sph wrote:
| Yes. Someone linked the manifesto in an HN thread ages ago, and
| I found more level-headed and thought-provoking than I would
| have imagined from someone able to commit such evil acts.
|
| I do not agree with everything he wrote in the manifesto, and
| certainly not with his violent methods, but it's stuck with me
| in this era of naive techno-optimism which I find myself more
| disillusioned with by the day.
|
| If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly
| believe it would be recommended reading in schools and
| philosophy clubs.
|
| As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique of
| the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the
| factionalism and alienation we see today; he's not arguing as a
| 21st century conservative, but as a third position that is not
| represented by any mainstream camp. I had to read the manifesto
| of a killer to remind myself that there is more social critique
| to explore than the binary Liberal vs Conservative that's all
| the rage in our politicised world.
| watwut wrote:
| > If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I
| truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and
| philosophy clubs
|
| I assure you a lot of incredibly smart writing doing
| absolutely accurate predictions is ignored by schools and
| clubs.
|
| Literally only thing that sets Kaczynsky apart are the bombs.
|
| > , I quite enjoyed his critique of the modern Leftist ideals
| and why they would create the factionalism and alienation we
| see today
|
| Considering overwhelming majority of violence,
| authoritarianism and fictionalized is from right, by a large
| margin, this is massive meh.
| anon291 wrote:
| > As a very progressive person, I quite enjoyed his critique
| of the modern Leftist ideals and why they would create the
| factionalism we see today, and he's arguing not as a
| conservative, but as a third position that is not represented
| by any mainstream camp.
|
| Realistically his opinions are held by a substantial amount
| of people that most would label conservative, although it's
| not mainstream conservatism for sure. And certainly not
| mainstream republicanism.
| sph wrote:
| As a non American, the dichotomy that is all the rage
| nowadays is two camps whose position is literally just "we
| hate everything the other side loves".
|
| The point of Kaczynski is that both camps are mostly
| composed of middle-class Western academics living a
| sheltered life that are deciding who is socially accepted
| and who need to be cancelled. Our culture wars are not
| minorities shouting for a better life, our culture war is
| made of middle-class white people getting offended _on
| behalf_ of minorities. They are no Martin Luther King, no
| Malcolm X, they just are posers that are making the racial
| (and gender and sexual) divide even worse than it is, by
| polarising or alienating the silent neutral majority.
|
| This is a longer argument that's put more eloquently in the
| manifesto than I could ever write on a comment box.
| katamarimambo wrote:
| Kaczynski was a middle-class Western academic who tried
| to literally cancel the lives of those he deemed
| unacceptable, which included people from both camps.
|
| Thank god there's a divide, otherwise I would be obliged
| to agree with you.
| watwut wrote:
| You don't know much about Martin Luther King, do you?
| timeon wrote:
| > I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools
| and philosophy clubs
|
| Andreas Breivik copied large part of it in his manifesto, but
| then again he is murderer too.
| sph wrote:
| Both are murderers, that doesn't mean they have the same
| ideas or ideals.
|
| Breivik is a right-wing fascist obsessed with racial and
| religious purity, Kaczynski's manifesto is critique of the
| Industrial Age not very distant from any 19th century
| anarchist essay. I'm not sure if he got more politicised in
| his later work, I'm only talking about that document.
|
| The point I'm trying to make is that people are more
| nuanced than your observation is trying to imply.
| rvz wrote:
| > many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient
|
| Especially as his predictions were also true in technology in
| the past decades and is now more relevant with AI.
| jmull wrote:
| He's really not coherent.
|
| His premises aren't grounded in reality, and his conclusions
| don't follow logically from his premises. It's also lacks
| humanity or empathy.
|
| It's an interesting read, because you can really see a broken
| mind at work, but there's really not anything to learn from the
| ideas themselves. E.g., his mental model of "leftists" is truly
| bizarre. It would be funny except I know what it lead to.
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| He can't even define who the leftists are and even admits it.
|
| > Our discussion of leftism has a serious weakness. It is
| still far from clear what we mean by the word "leftist."
| There doesn't seem to be much we can do about this. To- day
| leftism is fragmented into a whole spectrum of activist
| movements ...
|
| > To the extent that it is defined at all, our conception of
| leftism is defined by the discussion of it that we have given
| in this article, and we can only advise the reader to use his
| own judg- ment in deciding who is a leftist.
|
| So yeah, just pick whoever you want as leftist. Some
| characteristics of the leftists:
|
| > He tends to be for gun control, for sex education and other
| psychologically "en- lightened" educational methods, for
| social planning, for affirmative action, for
| multiculturalism. He tends to identify with victims.
|
| Wow, sounds like those leftists are pretty cool, actually
| intelligent people!
|
| Seriously, I could make fun of this shit all day, but perhaps
| I'll do something more productive.
| dilap wrote:
| Really? I would completely disagree.
|
| Reading his manifesto at 14 after seeing endless newspaper
| descriptions of it as incoherent, rambling, crazy, etc. was
| an eye-opening moment for me:
|
| I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.
|
| In a moment of shock I realized you can't trust the
| newspapers, at all -- a judgement I hold even more strongly
| today, with a few decades more of experience.
|
| I'd encourage anyone who hasn't to read it themselves and
| form their own opinion!
| varjag wrote:
| 'Reading a manifesto at 14' explains so much of Twitter
| cogman10 wrote:
| > I found the manifesto to be lucid and well-argued.
|
| > For example, if one believes that affirmative action is
| good for black people, does it make sense to demand
| affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously
| it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and
| conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and
| symbolic concessions to white people who think that
| affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist
| activists do not take such an approach because it would not
| satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not
| their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse
| for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need
| for power. In doing so they actually harm black people,
| because the activists' hostile attitude toward the white
| majority tends to intensify race hatred.
|
| To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes
| white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the
| real secret goal of leftists".
|
| Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because
| of affirmative action? I can even grant that you think
| affirmative action was a bad idea for any reason you like,
| that's not the question. The question is, did it make you
| or anyone you know mad at black people? My guess is anyone
| mad at a black person because of affirmative action would
| still be mad at them without it.
|
| This is what people mean when they say it's incoherent. He
| rambles for several paragraphs offering no evidence for his
| position (after all, he was pooping in a bucket in the
| middle of the woods... so not much opportunity to cross
| reference things). The examples he comes up with are
| laughably dumb.
|
| I don't mean this too harshly, but maybe you reread the
| manifesto with a more critical eye. 14 is too young to be
| reading stuff like this critically. You simply weren't old
| enough to spot the bullshit.
| sebmellen wrote:
| For a person who exhibited such deranged behavior, his writing
| and arguments are remarkably clear and cool-headed.
| anon291 wrote:
| He was an extremely intelligent subject of mkultra so we
| should bear that in mind when talking about his violent
| tendencies.
| ripourhero wrote:
| Out of curiosity, have you ever heard of operation condor?
| project mkultra?
|
| As far as I know from studying history, it's impossible to
| win (= survive as a culture against encroachment from
| different cultures) without violence.
|
| Today's mantra of pacifism and non-violence is just
| propaganda from current governments (all of which were
| originally installed through bloodshed, and kept in power
| through never-ending bloodshed) to keep the masses impotent
| and avoid being toppled like their predecessors
| Supermancho wrote:
| Violence one of the most effective means of motivation,
| known to man; second only to shame.
|
| Nonviolent change (toward peace)is somewhere down the
| imaginary page, but it can be effective. It is both less
| timely and long lasting.
| kneebonian wrote:
| Interesting you mention MKUltra as one of the reasons
| claimed for Teds "extreme" personality is because he was
| unwillingly drafted into and forced to participate in
| MkUltra.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I had no idea that he may have been part of MKUltra.
| Thanks for that rabbit hole!
|
| As I'm reading through The Devil's Chessboard (recommend
| a few weeks ago in another thread) I'm increasingly
| despondent about the "people"'s role in the US (i.e. we
| are now just chattel for the ruling class), and I haven't
| even gotten to MKUltra yet!
| FpUser wrote:
| >"and avoid being toppled like their predecessors"
|
| Ok. You topple one. If you do not create a replacement
| government you will have people preyed upon by violent
| gangs when eventually one become powerful enough to form
| new government. And if you do you are back to square one.
| So maybe it is better to try to fix what you have while
| trying to avoid violence. I am not telling it is always
| possible but at least it can be a goal.
| ip26 wrote:
| _As far as I know from studying history, it 's impossible
| to win without violence_
|
| The threat of violence can be both effective and
| nonviolent. Every battle is won before it is ever fought-
| and by corollary, it is possible to win without ever having
| fought.
| jongjong wrote:
| It's weird reading the first page and realizing that this was
| written in 1995. I didn't get a sense that any of these would
| have been relevant at that time in the country I was living
| though it seems highly relevant today everywhere. The problem
| seems to have spread like a contagion.
| WheelsAtLarge wrote:
| I'm one that believes that advances in technology aren't
| necessarily a plus for society. We have a brain that was tuned
| for survival over millions of years. Our ancestors survived
| therefore those surviving traits were passed on to us.
| Technology is changing our environment in an evolutionary blink
| of the eyes. Our brain cannot adapt fast enough so we will use
| those survival traits as our technology gets more powerful.
| Survival in the past has mostly meant force. We literally fight
| to stay alive and that means we create ever and ever stronger
| weapons. Technology has already shown that we can and have
| created weapons that can destroy earth as we know it. New
| technology will only make that worse since we have never
| invented any new tech without ultimately using it for war. No,
| tech is not necessarily a plus for society and our world.
|
| My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an
| idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about
| change through force and destruction. Through out the history
| of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like
| a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return
| to whatever the force was trying to change.
|
| The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The
| majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type
| of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the
| only way to bring about long term change.
|
| There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people
| should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should
| really erase him from history rather than praise him.
|
| User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here
| that can get people started.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Ironically his manifesto is apparently what led to FBI
| arresting him.
|
| > The big break in the case came in 1995. The Unabomber sent us
| a 35,000 word essay claiming to explain his motives and views
| of the ills of modern society. After much debate about the
| wisdom of "giving in to terrorists," FBI Director Louis Freeh
| and Attorney General Janet Reno approved the task force's
| recommendation to publish the essay in hopes that a reader
| could identify the author.
|
| > After the manifesto appeared in The Washington Post,
| thousands of people suggested possible suspects. One stood out:
| David Kaczynski described his troubled brother Ted, who had
| grown up in Chicago, taught at the University of California at
| Berkeley (where two of the bombs had been placed), then lived
| for a time in Salt Lake City before settling permanently into
| the primitive 10' x 14' cabin that the brothers had constructed
| near Lincoln, Montana.
|
| > Most importantly, David provided letters and documents
| written by his brother. Our linguistic analysis determined that
| the author of those papers and the manifesto were almost
| certainly the same. When combined with facts gleaned from the
| bombings and Kaczynski's life, that analysis provided the basis
| for a search warrant.
|
| https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| Wow Pocket browser extension refuses to save this link.
|
| Never seen that happen
| ren_engineer wrote:
| not sure why people are so surprised he got some things right
| or was at least able to create compelling arguments for this
| ideas, the guy was a legit genius. Got into Harvard at 16,
| youngest math professor ever at Cal Berkley at the time he was
| hired
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I know I am stereotyping, but you're describing for me
| exactly why he was probably emotionally immature.
|
| Maybe related to something like Piaget's theory of cognitive
| development, I believe that if you advance too fast
| intellectually, there are other things, developmentally, that
| are trodden on, or left completely behind.
| [deleted]
| testacct22 wrote:
| Kind of odd that you post an http link for this...
| dennis_jeeves1 wrote:
| Hey, thanks for the link, read a few paragraphs, it's an
| excellent read.
| Eumenes wrote:
| It should be required reading in public schools
| Shinma wrote:
| [flagged]
| Aunche wrote:
| Even if Ted Kaczynski is in the top .1% of people worth
| listening to, which I don't think he is, that means that there
| are millions of people with equally profound ideas. You should
| prioritze learning from those people first rather than one who
| resorted to violence as a means to spread his message.
| californiadreem wrote:
| Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came
| from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul
| instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction.
| The Technological Society is the clearest influence on
| Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's
| Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age.
|
| Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist.
| Attacks the ideas, not the man.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| Also Lewis Mumford [1], Gunther Anders [2], or if you want to
| go truly underground, Gilbert Simondon [3] [4] or Friedrich
| Kittler [5].
|
| If there are thinkers who have been in the conceptual space of
| the 23rd century and beyond, Simondon was surely one. Also
| radically of the future and forgotten is FM-2030 [6] [7].
|
| All in all, blowing up people is easy, blowing up antiquated
| concepts, grasping for the grounds of a new metaphysics,
| painstakingly implementing and debugging is the hard part.
|
| Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called
| _technology_ (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive
| after following to conclusions systems such as the Grotthuss
| proton translocation mechanism driving motion in a F_0 /F_1-ATP
| synthase rotation mechanism [8] [9].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnther_Anders
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Simondon
|
| [4] Gilbert Simondon - 'The Technical Object as Such',
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXDtG74hCL4
|
| [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Kittler
|
| [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM-2030
|
| [7] Futurist FM-2030 Appears on CNN's Future Watch,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT__dTtX2ik
|
| [8] Prof Levin, Prof Frasch (2022) Mitochondria, bioenergetics,
| information, electric fields, https://youtu.be/MEhrMR-
| Jaw0?t=3429
|
| [9] 2021, _Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines:
| Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of
| Machine Behavior_ ,
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2021.65072...
| golemotron wrote:
| > Besides, to think that there even is such a thing called
| technology (as distinguished from what) is incredibly naive
|
| The same could be said about Capitalism.
| dbspin wrote:
| This is an ideological position, termed Capitalist Realism
| [1]. Given the failing of social reproduction,
| environmental protection, long term planning against
| existential and systemic risk, the mental health crisis and
| the collapse of civil and political life, under entrenched
| and victorious capitalism - an increasingly absurd one.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| All of those happen in non-capitalist societies too and
| some times to a more larger extent.
| dbspin wrote:
| Both of us seem to agree that there is such a thing
| called capitalism.
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Yes, and I can even bet that unless a species is a hive
| mind, any intelligent species will have something like
| capitalism. The inverse is that to enforce a non-
| capitalist system, you have to brutally shape a society
| into something that is like a hive mind.
| sgregnt wrote:
| I personally don't see these failing that you mention,
| far from it. Whatever you believe, this kind of
| propoganda claims stating your opinion as a fact, is very
| transparent, and just discredits your argument.
| dylkil wrote:
| >collapse of civil and political life
|
| civil and political life is terrible and still better
| than it has ever been
| jlkanowski wrote:
| This is the correct list everyone, I wrote a thesis about the
| parallels between those thinkers and Ted K
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I may listen to Ellul. I won't listen to Kaczynski, even if
| it's allegedly the same ideas. I've bumped into one of
| Kacsynski's victims twice, once before the bomb and once after.
| I've seen the cheerful smile replaced by permanent pain. No, I
| won't listen to Kacsynski.
|
| And Ellul differs from Kacsynski in one very important respect.
| Ellul was a pacifist, and Kacsynski was a violent terrorist.
| That colors at least some of the ideas, colors them in ways
| that matter.
| Shinma wrote:
| [flagged]
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| unless you can show with substantive research that there are
| some ideas that cannot be held by violent terrorists I don't
| see why that would color these particular ideas.
| watwut wrote:
| That still does not imply we should listen to people like
| Kaczynsky or take his ideas seriously. He sux and should
| not matter. If someone else with better decisions making
| recond expresses same ideas in another context, we can
| listen to him.
|
| The only thing that distinguishes Kaczynsky from, well, any
| random dude, are the bombs. Otherwise he is a no one. And
| random dude that did not send bombs makes more sense to
| listen to.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| I'd argue that these ideas cannot be held by violent
| terrorists:
|
| * Commitment to avoid causing physical or emotional harm to
| others.
|
| * Absolute respect and preservation of all human lives,
| without exceptions.
|
| * Unconditional rejection of violence under any
| circumstances.
|
| * Belief that every human has the right to live, and
| recognition of the dignity, worth, and autonomy of every
| individual.
|
| * Full acceptance of differing viewpoints, cultures,
| religions, and lifestyles.
|
| * Consistent practice of understanding and sharing the
| feelings of others, and alleviating their suffering.
|
| * Refraining from initiating force against others.
|
| * Resolution of differences and conflict through
| conversation and mutual understanding, rather than force or
| coercion.
| tbrownaw wrote:
| How would someone with those beliefs handle the trolley
| problem?
| fossuser wrote:
| Most people hold wildly inconsistent views in their head
| all the time, despite obvious contradictions - it's the
| default human behavior.
|
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-
| in-...
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| The other angle is future deterrence. If a society
| collectively shuns ideals from violent terrorists, they
| will have less incentive to be violent.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| It's not their _ideas_ , exactly. It's their moral
| judgment.
|
| See, the unabomber manifesto was essentially a moral
| argument. "These things cause damage" is a moral
| observation. (Because how are you going to define "damage"
| without moral judgment?) "Therefore we should destroy
| technology" is a moral judgment (because you can't get
| there without the moral judgment of "humans should not be
| damaged").
|
| So, the point is, I'm not going to trust the moral judgment
| of a murderer. Every fact he says in the manifesto may be
| correct. But his moral judgment is self-evidently terrible.
| And he reaches his conclusions through that moral judgment.
| bmitc wrote:
| People are human and not logical, purely rational (whatever
| that would mean), data machines. We're emotional. I can
| certainly understand the perspective when the above
| commenter has seen the pain and suffering that those ideas,
| threaded amplified through either mental illness and/or
| pathological personality, led to. Okay, maybe Kaczynski had
| some points that resonate and concur with other more
| respected scholars and critics, but it is quite difficult
| to dissociate his ideas from his actions, especially when
| one can easily find others who did not violently kill and
| maim others with the same ideas.
|
| The substantive research is all of human psychology,
| biology, and sociology.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _human_
|
| Those things endowed with the capability of effortful
| judgement, abstracting from more "primitive"
| (biologically ancestral) instances.
| siftrics wrote:
| [flagged]
| AmpsterMan wrote:
| If Ted's ideas lead to the destruction of human lives, I
| think invoking the victims' experience is a valid point in
| the discussion.
| siftrics wrote:
| Ted's claim is that these people must die because they
| are propagating suffering via technology.
|
| I don't see how "but proponents of technology died" is an
| argument against his claim that stopping technology will
| stop suffering caused by technology.
| arp242 wrote:
| It's not really about intellectual honesty or validity, but
| about morality.
|
| The _only_ reason any of us are discussing Kaczynski now is
| because he sent those bombs; he would almost certainly be
| an unknown if he had not. This gives us an moral quandary,
| because do we really want to make murderers famous, even
| when they have something interesting to say? Won 't this
| incentivise future acts of murder and terrorism?
|
| And for what it's worth, I read his book and I thought it
| raised interesting points, but I am somewhat troubled by
| this, and I can 100% understand if someone would choose
| different, even more so if they personally know one of his
| victims.
| siftrics wrote:
| > Won't this incentivise future acts of murder and
| terrorism?
|
| Yes, that's what he was trying to do.
|
| Ted claims we must stop technology, even with violent
| means, because technology causes greater suffering than
| the violent means to stop it.
|
| You claim "but that's violent!"
|
| That's not an argument. If you did try to make an
| argument (against Ted's ideas), I would agree with you. I
| would try to make that argument myself.
|
| We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving to
| "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
| arp242 wrote:
| I never intended to make an argument against Kaczynski's
| ideas, I'm just pointing out that people could have
| reasonable moral objections against distributing his
| work. It's "negotiating with terrorists" kind of stuff.
| Whether his ideas are good or bad is an entirely separate
| matter.
|
| > We can have an intellectual dialogue without devolving
| to "this made me feel bad therefore you're wrong!"
|
| The people who are dead or wounded feel very bad indeed.
| And I never said you're wrong, either, or that
| Kaczynski's ideas are wrong.
| siftrics wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| I misread your comments because I'm too triggered by
| people stating their emotions as if they're arguments.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yeah, "morality" is a good word.
|
| See, Kaczynski's theory is _also_ about morality. He 's
| complaining about the _damage_ that technology does.
| Well, why do we care that it does damage? That 's a moral
| question, not a scientific or technical one. He's making
| a moral argument.
|
| So, if he's making a moral argument and murdering people,
| that means that I for one am unwilling to trust his moral
| judgment. It means I can't trust him when he says that we
| would be better off without technology. I can't trust his
| whole argument, because it's primarily a moral one.
| siftrics wrote:
| That's a reductionist moral framework you have.
|
| Are we not justified in killing Hitler to prevent the
| suffering of millions?
|
| I think Ted is wrong, but I also think your
| counterargument is ridiculous.
| dang wrote:
| Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of how
| wrong someone is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that
| do that, so please don't.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Edit: it turns out, unfortunately, that you've been doing
| this repeatedly:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605613
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605547
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558731
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34328210
|
| That's seriously not ok and we need it to stop if you want
| to keep posting here.
| siftrics wrote:
| I am writing now as earnestly and charitably as possible:
| could you tell me how what I wrote is a personal attack?
|
| I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not
| mean to personally attack anyone.
|
| I think the reason you were able to link to so many
| instances of me personally attacking someone is because I
| genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal
| attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas and
| statements, not attacking anyone individually.
|
| I'd consider personal attacks to be _ad hominem_ , which
| is exactly the opposite of what I am trying to do in my
| comment -- I am trying to point out what is and what
| isn't a logically valid and argument.
|
| Would you please help me understand? I'd like to learn
| and be able to engage in a manner that is accepted.
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| I think "Are you insane?" from the first link is a clear
| example. Not so sure about the others.
| [deleted]
| quetzthecoatl wrote:
| who knows who Kaczynski would have ended up as a person if
| not for the horrible, abusive mind control experiments that
| he had to endure through in his early adulthood.
| californiadreem wrote:
| While this is totally understandable, it's also an example of
| the Identfiable Victim Effect. Kaczysnki's actions are
| humanly understandable with the ability to impute human
| motivations. He _intentionally_ maimed and killed people.
|
| Yet, from a utilitarian perspective, I honestly don't know if
| intent _matters_ when we 're talking about third-party
| maiming and death. Our society disrupts and injures the
| bodies, minds, and livelihoods of hundreds of thousands, if
| not millions, if not billions, on a daily basis.
|
| And in that sense, Kaczynski, Ellul, or really any dissident
| of the status quo could, can, and do point out victims of
| society that outnumber Kaczynski's by several orders of
| magnitude. The victims are not directly and immediately
| visible, don't have power-holding advocates, and have little
| to no incentive to disrupt their own lives to discover, let
| alone undo, the causes of their problems. And if they do,
| they encounter a system most unwilling to listen or change.
|
| All of this contributes to _these_ innocents being left
| unmourned and the causes of their tragedies, like minefields
| for future generations, left unresolved (Kaczynski mails
| mines and dies in prison; Kissinger sows fields of mines and
| lives to be a centenarian and the eldest diplomat).
|
| For an example directly related to maiming, consider the
| allegations of SawStop. A technology was invented to prevent
| serious maiming when operating table saws in 2002. The
| inventor attempted to license the technology to manufacturers
| only to (allegedly, their lawsuit was dismissed due to
| supposed tardiness in filing) encounter a cartel among tool
| manufacturers that colluded to prevent adoption of the
| technology because it would become obligate to _all_ models
| to prevent legal liability, which would largely eliminate
| budget saw models.
|
| The number of finger or hand amputations in the US annually
| is in the thousands, for one type of tool.
|
| Or consider meat packing (excluding power-butchering injuries
| that typically include hand and finger amputation):
|
| "There are many serious safety and health hazards in the meat
| packing industry. These hazards include exposure to high
| noise levels, dangerous equipment, slippery floors,
| musculoskeletal disorders, and hazardous chemicals (including
| ammonia that is used as a refrigerant). Musculoskeletal
| disorders comprise a large part of these serious injuries and
| continue to be common among meat packing workers. In
| addition, meat packing workers can be exposed to biological
| hazards associated with handling live animals or exposures to
| feces and blood which can increase their risk for many
| diseases."
|
| And this is an industry where undocumented workers are
| prioritized because they lack the language and advocacy to
| receive adequate compensation and legal protections.
|
| Even something as benign-seeming as a Nalgene bottle follows
| a similar kind of delayed statistical violence. BPA, shown to
| be independently unsafe, gets replaced with Triton, unshown
| to be anything. Triton is effectively an analog with likely
| xenoestrogenic and endocrine disrupting capabilities, yet can
| slip through a loophole with decades of profitability before
| the externalities start directly emerging.
|
| I lost my grandmother to ovarian cancer, likely caused by
| long-term use of asbestos-laced baby powder. A certain
| corporation gets a single $9 billion penalty for poisoning
| millions over decades; I and countless others lose their
| family members. This corporation's gross profit last year was
| something like $64 billion.
|
| Now I also understand the argument that if industrial society
| has caused these things, they have also enabled untold
| material prosperity globally and billions of additional lives
| _to_ live. Maiming, industrial accidents, and toxicity are
| the price to pay for this and they all "happen" to be the
| aberration rather than the norm, with constant incremental
| improvements as circumstances allow.
|
| And yet, I think I'd rather have less sophisticated stuff and
| fewer unhappy people alive at any present moment if I could
| guarantee that those living on this planet now and those born
| in the future could live healthier, happier, and more
| meaningful lives as a result. Killing and maiming people in
| retaliation is a terrible way of getting there. As a final
| note, I'm currently in the process of my own exodus to leave
| the city (wish me luck!) to follow this path of voluntary
| simplicity and pacifism, lest anyone accuse me of trying to
| improve society somewhat.
| cvalka wrote:
| And both are morons.
| Convolutional wrote:
| [flagged]
| happytoexplain wrote:
| People don't disagree with him because he was a convicted
| terrorist, they disagree with him because of the specific
| things he did to be convicted of terrorism. That's reasonable
| (correct, even). People might know or not know each opinion he
| expressed, and might reasonably agree or disagree with each
| one, but that's not the same thing.
| lm28469 wrote:
| > People might know or not know each opinion he expressed,
| and might reasonably agree or disagree with each one
|
| Isn't that the definition of agreeing (or not) with someone ?
|
| > but that's not the same thing.
|
| How so ?
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > Attacks the ideas, not the man.
|
| It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as
| Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations
| or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he
| has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign
| (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical
| distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive
| Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction
| harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the
| distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the
| technology itself including production. Technology acts as a
| magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our
| social/political organization.
|
| This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like
| professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society
| of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of
| Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities
| under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and
| Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique
| of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].
|
| Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many _anarchist_ spaces. His
| True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and
| mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a
| great essay, "The Unabomber's Unending 15 Minutes of Fame"
| [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while
| ignoring who the victims are.
|
| > As individuals within a movement professing a desire to
| reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace,
| and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means
| inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic
| of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed
| defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish
| revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of
| aggressive violence against those who are designated as The
| Enemy.
|
| > The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of
| the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved
| in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of
| destruction and repression in a manner little different from
| most of us. _Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost
| all of us are potential targets._ It should be remembered, his
| toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only
| when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a
| university classroom. _Apparently, all of us were
| indiscriminately designated as The Enemy._
|
| > I don't have a lot of interest in people who advocate "armed
| struggle." In this country, it usually comes down to those
| enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section
| without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often
| accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that
| condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or
| worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has
| historically been a pre-execution category, so _I watch my back
| when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by
| someone claiming to be an anarchist._
|
| > My experience is that advocates of violence have a short
| shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while
| furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary
| ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that
| has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range
| organizing.
|
| [0]:
| https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
|
| [1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-
| pseudony...
| [deleted]
| Convolutional wrote:
| > Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted
| terrorist
|
| The reason Kaczynski stopped is he saw a social movement taking
| root with similar ideas, sometimes even more radical ideas -
| Kaczynski saw the industrial revolution as the problem, while
| people like John Zerzan saw the agricultural revolution as the
| problem. While these primitivists are all over the place, a lot
| of them live from Seattle down to Oregon and the north coast of
| California, maybe down to Berkeley.
| canjobear wrote:
| > The reason Kaczynski stopped
|
| He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found
| two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to
| renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
| siftrics wrote:
| Them finding two completed bombs is not evidence that he
| planned to plant them.
| irq wrote:
| Who wants to keep live bombs in their house? Obviously he
| was going to put them elsewhere. Which is what planting
| is.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| As asinine as it sounds, I agree with them. In this
| specific case, there's no reason to believe that a
| completed bomb is the same as an intent to bomb anybody.
| I'd be surprised if any 20-year veteran bomb builder
| _didn't_ have a couple fully-working prototypes, the same
| reason I'd be surprised a 20-year veteran coder had no
| fully functional prototypes.
|
| Crafting is crafting, whether you're doing woodworking or
| killing. Is it impossible to believe that someone like
| Ted might find bomb building every bit as gratifying as
| we find programming?
|
| He was unhinged. But it's hard to argue he wasn't a
| master craftsman. Few lone-wolf bomb makers survive 20
| years without accidents, let alone evade authorities till
| their family turned them in.
|
| I know very little about Ted, and almost nothing about
| his philosophies or any of the subject matter. But it
| seems entirely consistent and reasonable that there would
| be deployable bombs that were sitting around for unknown
| amounts of time when he was captured.
|
| Dude's a murderer. I'm glad he was stopped, and it's sad
| he wasn't caught on day one.
| op00to wrote:
| Dude. There is a difference between a bomb that has
| significant ability to kill and destroy and sample code.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| Is there? Whoops. I've been doing it wrong for about 20
| years now.
|
| (My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than
| once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of
| time till it nips me though.)
|
| In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious
| conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it
| leads. I agree it _sounds_ asinine, but think of the
| sheer number of details he had to get right merely to
| survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up,
| quite literally, for years. I'm not at all ashamed to
| point out the obvious skill required.
|
| If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually
| tossed them at people, we'd be having a different
| conversation. But he built things, just as we do.
| Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he
| was still a builder.
| siftrics wrote:
| I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have
| built them before "the deal", then made the deal and
| decided not to plant them.
|
| Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough
| evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real
| evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters
| for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to
| convict the innocent.
| jstarfish wrote:
| There was only one live bomb found and he did intend to
| use it.
|
| > Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than
| The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said
| that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff
| published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would
| "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb
| intended to kill, after our manuscript has been
| published" if Penthouse published the document instead of
| The Times or The Post.
|
| Don't do victims of terrorism a disservice by suggesting
| a mass murderer deserves the benefit of the doubt as to
| whether he has any qualms about reneging on "deals" made
| with a society _he doesn 't respect_. His calculus for
| who got to live and die hinged on factors as arbitrary as
| nitpicking over which periodical was willing to publish
| his bullshit. He was a fucking Narcissist to the extreme,
| who would waste no time coming out of retirement at the
| next perceived slight.
|
| "Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the
| fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing.
| He proved it, what, _16_ times?
| siftrics wrote:
| Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he
| intended to do it again. You have to have stronger
| evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove
| beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going
| to be planted. (I'm not arguing this evidence doesn't
| exist.)
|
| I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more
| than enough evidence from his previous plantings to
| convict him as a bomb planter and put him away for life.
| Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate
| the two things in your mind?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| TBF, we incarcerate people like him partially _because_
| benefit of the doubt no longer applies for some crimes.
|
| Reasonable doubt shifts based on past behavior. The
| parable of them scorpion is retold for a reason.
| watwut wrote:
| He does not need any of that. He is not about to put
| Kaczynsky to jail. He is doing moral judgement and that
| one requires only reasonable probability.
|
| > Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate
| the two things in your mind?
|
| They are not separate. Past behavior predicts future one.
| And ignoring probabilities is just demanding that people
| act as if they were stupid.
| siftrics wrote:
| Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt.
|
| It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to
| disprove something in mathematics.
|
| I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop
| bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can
| doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.
|
| The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You
| have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs
| in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the
| deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely
| reasonable scenario.
| noarchy wrote:
| >"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the
| fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing.
| He proved it, what, 16 times?
|
| That won't stop people determined enough to defend him
| here, and as you can see people _will_ die on that hill.
|
| How many lives were saved due to his arrest? That we will
| never know, but I suspect the number is not zero.
| op00to wrote:
| Isn't it illegal to have a bomb intended to maim or kill?
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| Like the French arresting people for using encryption and
| linux
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| The deal was that he won't kill any more people with his
| bombs, but property was fair deal.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Deal?
| vaccarium wrote:
| He agreed to stop sending bombs in exchange for
| publication of his manifesto.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ribs wrote:
| [flagged]
| tenpies wrote:
| His published works aside, it seems he was corresponding with
| people and answering letters until fairly recently. Many of
| these letters (or quite convincing forgeries) are archived in
| your favourite 4chan archive of choice.
|
| Also worth mentioning what was essentially a partial
| autobiography by Kaczynsky: Truth Versus Lies[1]. I'm not sure
| it was ever completed and there are a couple versions floating
| around. He was still working on it well into the mid 2010s.
|
| ---
|
| [1] One version:
| https://archive.org/details/TruthVersusLiesPart1
| cvalka wrote:
| What's the point of reading well written bullshit?
| Kye wrote:
| You know how sometimes you'll see someone [dead] on here making
| salient points, then wonder why they're dead? Then you check
| them out, and every so often they go off on incoherent tirades.
|
| That's Ted Kaczynski. He may have had two good ideas for every
| bad one, but he was still a piece of shit who deserved to be
| isolated from society where he couldn't hurt anyone, and there
| are better advocates for whatever good came out of his head.
|
| Or to paraphrase the dril classic: you do not, under any
| circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"
|
| edit: to be clear, I think the dude was little more than an
| ecofascist and not worth taking seriously. But if you're going
| to, you ought to know he was the worst advocate for any
| position he held. You can do better than propping up a dead
| asshole.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| bmitc wrote:
| Thank you for the reference to Jacques Ellul, as I hadn't heard
| of him before. From looking a few reviews, I'm liking what
| appears to be him having a critique of the worship of
| technique, which is an interesting thought.
| msla wrote:
| He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use
| violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-
| leftest.
|
| You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in
| the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support
| (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]).
|
| It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a
| radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and
| the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big
| oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion.
|
| [1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa
|
| [2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-
| cli...
|
| [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-
| koch...
|
| [4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-
| aga...
| gota wrote:
| Plugging in my (tongue-in-cheek, but maybe not a 100%)
| conspiracy theory that Big Oil was the financier and
| culprit behind the flat earth, anti-vax, moon landing
| conspiracies, and many others -
|
| As a way to discret the whole of the scientific and
| academic establishment in the minds of enough (voting)
| people, so as to delay the inevitable consensus that fossil
| fuel consumption is killing everyone slowly
| [deleted]
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Agree, Kaczynski did make some good points. Maybe if he had
| learned to channel that energy better.
| Slava_Propanei wrote:
| [dead]
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| [flagged]
| noobdev9000 wrote:
| [flagged]
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| What do you mean? Half of US will like you for doing the latter
| two.
|
| Ted Kaczynski is more acceptable to like than most terrorists
| because of MKUltra and since his ideas are more advanced than
| "my religion is good" or "I hate $minority!". Doesn't mean it's
| not wrong to bomb people, but he is easier to understand than a
| guy who brings an AK47 to a concert.
| darkclouds wrote:
| I wrote to him a few years ago after hearing about him.
|
| I wanted to understand his point of view to see if it could be
| changed, but I never got a response so I dont know if one of the
| five eyes (US or UK) or some other entity was interfering.
|
| My position/point of view is something caused the events, so what
| where they?
|
| Those events are what need tackling, Mr Kacynski is the product
| in much the same way as Google users are the product!
| ehsankia wrote:
| Maybe a stupid question, but I'm curious what he's been up to in
| the decades since in prison. A brain like his doesn't stop
| working just because he's in jail, does it? I'm not sure what
| kind of terms he had, was he allowed to read? to write?
| spurgu wrote:
| He's written a couple of books (didn't have complete freedom to
| do it, I remember him complaining about some hurdles) and done
| mail correspondence with various people.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| > and done mail correspondence with various people
|
| I hope the prison guards checked those mails thoroughly
| ehsankia wrote:
| From some cruising on Wikipedia, apparently all his
| correspondence is available University of Michigan's
| Special Collections Library (over 400 letters), though the
| identity of the people won't be unsealed until 2049.
| whatscooking wrote:
| [flagged]
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Ted Kaczynski was a genius, a mathematical child prodigy, became
| a professor at Berkeley at 25 and had a bright future. I
| completely blame CIA experiments for his downfall into radicalism
| and extremism. His ideas were very valid, but his mind was too
| tortured to deal with them in a healthy manner.
|
| Rest in peace.
| miramba wrote:
| What did the CIA do? I checked his Wikipedia page, not
| mentioned there.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Search for the section "psychological study" under "Early
| Life".
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| "Some sources have suggested that Murray's experiments were
| part of Project MKUltra" doesn't really seem like strong
| evidence.
| quetzthecoatl wrote:
| right after that sentence, you have -
|
| "A Freedom of Information Act document released by the
| Central Intelligence Agency in 2018 states that "a
| considerable amount of credible circumstantial evidence
| suggests that Theodore Kaczynski. also known as the
| Unabomber, participated in CIA-sponsored MK-ULTRA
| experiments conducted at Harvard University from the fall
| of 1959 through the spring of 1962".[26] Chase and others
| have also suggested that this experience may have
| motivated Kaczynski's criminal activities"
| moffkalast wrote:
| > [1] The CIA was carrying out its mind control program at
| this university, using the most varied techniques for this
| purpose. Thus, he endured the administration of substances,
| hypnosis, electric shocks, and sophisticated psychological
| techniques. This Harvard experiment lasted almost three years
| and Kaczynski was one of those experimental subjects.
|
| [1] https://exploringyourmind.com/the-harvard-experiment-
| that-le...
| arp242 wrote:
| He participated in about 200 hours of experiments from the
| age of 16 to 19 which basically consisted of "roasting" and
| bullying him. The experimenters intentionally sought out the
| most insecure "maladjusted" students at Harvard (Kaczynski
| was accepted at 16) and lied about what the experiment was
| going to do.
|
| The entire thing was horrible and profoundly unethical. His
| brother has stated it really changed Kaczynski.
|
| Some people have claimed that it was run by the CIA as part
| of MKUltra. This is certainly possible but not really
| substantiated by clear evidence as far as I've seen, and even
| if the CIA has some relationship they probably didn't
| instigate the experiments but just asked for research notes
| or something relatively benign like that. We'll probably
| never know for sure though.
|
| Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that were
| subjected to these abusive experiments only one became a
| terrorist, so "the CIA created the Unabomber" is rather
| simplistic IMO. The primary blame remains with Kaczynski, no
| matter what.
| lvass wrote:
| >Whatever the case may be, of the group of students that
| were subjected to these abusive experiments only one became
| a terrorist
|
| Source? What is the incidence of terrorism in that group
| and in the general population?
| ginko wrote:
| Well, whatever the size of the group is (let's call it X)
| it's at least 1 out of X. Which is almost certainly more
| than the general population.
| amelius wrote:
| And the p-value?
| arp242 wrote:
| I don't have any data or sources on this; if my memory is
| correct the participants were actually anonymous and the
| only reason we know Ted Kaczynski participated is because
| of his brother, so we don't even know who the other
| people were. However, I expect if another one had also
| become a terrorist, we would have heard about it. There
| were just a handful of participants (1 or 2 dozen or
| thereabouts), so it's not really enough for a "proper
| study" anyway.
|
| Also: many people (myself included) were extensively and
| viciously bullied in their childhood and/or teen years.
| Many suffer profoundly negative effects from this,
| sometimes for decades or even their entire lives, but
| most are not terrorists. And even if it did turn out that
| the incidence of terrorists was higher: that still
| doesn't absolve them or their own responsibility in
| committing violent acts against random people (i.e.
| terrorism).
| catiopatio wrote:
| Are you claiming that childhood bullying is equivalent to
| a program run by the CIA exploring the use of
| psychological torture and mind-altering substances?
| netdoll wrote:
| [flagged]
| fatfingerd wrote:
| I would generally discount any claims that someone that is a
| problem for the CIA is a sexual deviant.
|
| He had a serious problem with authority, needed to draft
| dodge and had a meeting with a psychiatrist where he planned
| to practise discussing feelings of being a woman with a
| psychiatrist.. I'm not really sure I should believe a
| forensic psychiatric evaluation decades later by a
| psychiatrist with a motive on what evaluation to give.
| jmull wrote:
| In the article it says he made an appointment to see a
| psychiatrist but left the waiting room before actually
| meeting with the psychiatrist (and then had an epiphany to
| kill people instead).
|
| Not sure you can really blame that on the University or
| psychiatrist.
| jstarfish wrote:
| > he went to a psychiatrist to discuss his wishes for a sex
| change operation. But in the waiting room, he decided he
| could not go forward. Instead, he told the psychiatrist he
| was depressed about the possibility of being drafted.
|
| He sure went from transgender to draft dodger real quick. He
| "chickened out" of transitioning and never brought it up
| again. The military sure as shit wouldn't touch him in the
| 60s though.
|
| Not convinced a malingering terrorist is a sympathetic poster
| child for the trans cause. Enough of them already threaten
| harm when their demands aren't met.
| s9w wrote:
| [flagged]
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| The media will report on this as the death of a terrorist. None
| of the real terrorists will be brought to justice - the CIA has
| done so many abhorrent things here and abroad.
|
| We act like the KGB/FSB is this unfathomable, foreign evil. We
| have the bigger, scarier thing that killed it in our backyard.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| > real terrorists
|
| Did the CIA fabricate and mail the bombs?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Whether or not the CIA was behind the psychological abuse
| he was subjected to, _that_ it was made the bomb _maker_.
| Sebguer wrote:
| No, but they've bombed a lot more innocent people than TedK
| did. For one example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Lawrence_Pope
| timeon wrote:
| How does this make Unabomber _not_ terrorist?
| Sebguer wrote:
| I mean, Ted was definitely _a_ terrorist, but the size of
| his crimes pales in comparison to the institution that
| experimented on him and continues to exist to this day.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Not those specific bombs.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| No they broke him mentally with MKULtra
| adamrezich wrote:
| did the CIA put crack in the hood?
| torginus wrote:
| To stick to the facts, LA's biggest cocaine supplier got
| his stuff from a pair of Nicaraguans were members of the
| CIA-backed Nicaraguan contras raising money for the
| organization. A journalist named Gary Webb covered the
| whole thing, who later murdered by two gunshots, and his
| death was ruled a suicide.
|
| Make up your mind on this.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| No. This has been pretty thoroughly refuted.
| adamrezich wrote:
| who refuted it? _other_ federal agencies? the crack just
| materialized on its own?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| There was never any evidence to begin with. The author of
| the often cited investigative report even refutes the
| assertion that the CIA was involved. It's pure fantasy.
| adamrezich wrote:
| right, and then the guy who wrote the report later
| "killed himself" with _two_ gunshots to the head.
| Sebguer wrote:
| what about bombing merchant ships in indonesia, has that
| been refuted too?
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| What are you on about? Ted Kaczynski was a "real" terrorist,
| and none of this has anything to do with the CIA or KGB/FSB.
|
| Kaczynski was the victim of a "brutal" psychological
| experiment at Harvard, which has zero connection to the CIA.
| And in Kaczynski's own words, he was "quite confident that
| [his] experiences with Professor Murray had no significant
| effect on the course of [his] life".
|
| Get out of here with your anti-CIA FUD.
| brvsft wrote:
| > CIA FUD
|
| I can't tell if you're being serious.
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| I am being serious. I have a very low tolerance for
| conspiracy theories touted as facts.
| brvsft wrote:
| Okay, let me point out the funny part to you.
|
| The CIA is still a piece of shit organization that has
| performed disgusting acts all over the world, and we
| don't even know about all of them (but, to be fair, the
| ones we don't know about shouldn't count in our opinion
| of the org). To talk about how Ted K. being a target of
| the CIA's MKUltra program as a "conspiracy theory" and
| "CIA FUD" seems laughably absurd, not because you may be
| correct that Kaczynski was never experimented on by the
| CIA, but rather because we know for a fact that MKUltra
| happened.
|
| So on the one hand, we have an organization that drugged
| and tortured people as part of an experiment, and on the
| other, we have a potential lie that Ted Kaczynski was one
| of the people on whom they experimented. You're getting
| upset about the latter in order to defend the
| organization doing the former from "FUD."
|
| You've literally chosen to stand up against "CIA FUD" to
| assert that even though the CIA performed these
| psychological torture experiments on people, _Ted
| Kaczynski was not one of them!_ Or perhaps you don 't
| believe MKUltra ever happened, I don't know.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_CIA_controversies
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
|
| > Project MKUltra (or MK-Ultra)[a] was an illegal human
| experimentation program designed and undertaken by the
| U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), intended to
| develop procedures and identify drugs that could be used
| during interrogations to weaken people and force
| confessions through brainwashing and psychological
| torture.[1][2][3][4] It began in 1953 and was halted in
| 1973.
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| He was an MKUltra victim, which was a CIA project
| Mechanical9 wrote:
| There does not seem to be any evidence that corroborates
| this. The most I can find are claims that some records
| were destroyed, so we won't know. That doesn't
| automatically mean there is a connection, though.
| boppo1 wrote:
| The CIA has done some bad shit, even to their own citizens,
| but are they really on the level of the KGB? Seems like the
| KGB was a more overt daily-life terror, whereas the CIA has a
| more 'occasional' history of atrocities.
| jmull wrote:
| [flagged]
| martythemaniak wrote:
| [flagged]
| s5300 wrote:
| [dead]
| brvsft wrote:
| At least most of us have the ability to engage in a
| discussion about it. You seem to be here to do some
| backslapping with people who agree with you, and you have no
| response to a refutation of your normie opinion that _He KiLL
| tHrEe PeOpLe = bAd_. Keep on with those deep thoughts that
| fixate on who Kaczynski killed and never turn that ire
| towards your government or society. Real brave of you.
| markx2 wrote:
| FBI: https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/unabomber
| hguant wrote:
| The FBI of course giving the credit to their "linguistic
| analysis team" and "fearless investigators" when Ted's brother
| literally turned him, told them where he lived, and that he had
| talked about bombing the targets in question.
|
| Many, if not most, murder investigations are resolved by
| confessions, or someone turning the culprit in. Absent that,
| after...I want to say 48 hours, the police know that they
| should essentially write off the case. There are obvious
| exceptions, especially if there's public notoriety (crudely,
| young white coeds or "sexy shit"), but most murders are poor
| drug addicts murdering other poor drug addicts.
|
| Source: worked 2 years in DC as a freelance reporter, was
| ultimately not successful there, but soaked up a lot of
| stories/cynicism
| pfdietz wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post unsubstantive comments.
| msla wrote:
| [flagged]
| pfdietz wrote:
| [flagged]
| dang wrote:
| No one is saying you owe convicted murderers better, but if
| you're participating here, you owe better to this community
| than empty pejorative comments.
| RagnarD wrote:
| It's worth noting Kaczynski was the subject of a brutal
| psychological experiment while a young student at Harvard. It's
| unfortunate in the present day that so many naive tech
| individuals don't understand that they've been deliberately
| recruited by the left in universities worldwide via
| indoctrination one class at a time.
|
| https://www.history.com/news/what-happened-to-the-unabomber-...
| pseudolus wrote:
| There was an interesting podcast about the Unabomber and his
| eventual capture - "Project Unabom". [0] Some of the episodes
| feature material about his relationship with his family and the
| pool of other suspects that emerged during the investigation.
|
| [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/project-
| unabom/id16276...
| bm3719 wrote:
| Certain points in Kaczynski's manifesto greatly influenced how I
| view the world, and I feel they have positively influenced my
| life in many ways (e.g., trying to live life less wastefully,
| using nature to ground oneself in reality, evaluating the true
| total cost of ownership of products of industry).
|
| RIP.
| jstarfish wrote:
| The person who erected the Georgia Guidestones had a similar
| philosophy, and engraved his own manifesto for peaceful and
| sustainable living on slabs of granite as a monument for all to
| enjoy.
|
| It was recently bombed into rubble.
| digbybk wrote:
| I vacillate between excitement for the future and fear that
| people like Kaczynski are right (not the violence, obviously). It
| often does feel as though the direction of technological progress
| is independent of what is best for the wellbeing of humanity.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20230610201529/https://www.nytime...
|
| https://archive.ph/e8HVU
| swellguy wrote:
| [flagged]
| constantcrying wrote:
| >Guess I would call him a hypocrite, as I can't imagine living
| in prison for one day much less years and years.
|
| You are usually not asked whether you want to go to prison or
| not.
| [deleted]
| mahathu wrote:
| Why does that make him a hypocrite?
| swellguy wrote:
| I guess he is a hero? I hope he didn't mail you anything
| before he died. He had a grudge and took it out on random
| people. He survived longer in prison than he did in nature.
| Weird/Toxic lifestyle, IMO.
| meepmorp wrote:
| But how does it make him a hypocrite?
| swellguy wrote:
| I you talk big, you must act big. You can't go around
| using a post office and subjecting yourself to prison
| time and lawyers. It's as simple as that. Otherwise you
| are not pure and sane and a real naturalist. In fact
| you're insane and a hypocrite living in prison for ~40
| years.
| meepmorp wrote:
| Can you zero on a particular espoused belief and how he
| practiced other than he preached? What specifically
| should he have done differently that would've made him
| not a hypocrite?
|
| I'm honestly trying to figure out what your point is.
| swellguy wrote:
| [flagged]
| activiation wrote:
| [flagged]
| bkohlmann wrote:
| One of my good friend's dad was brutally murdered by Kaczynski
| when she was a young teenager.
|
| A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and
| other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young
| family was in the house with him.
|
| And it turns out the victim was the "wrong" man, as he didn't
| even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring "retribution"
| for.
|
| Kaczynski May have said some interesting things, but he
| physically tore apart the lives of many, leaving a wake of
| destruction during his crusade.
|
| Actions speak louder than words. Even eloquent ones.
| basisword wrote:
| Thanks for posting. Far too much support and excusing of a
| deranged murderer in these comments.
| tonetheman wrote:
| [dead]
| alphanullmeric wrote:
| [flagged]
| californiadreem wrote:
| Kaczynski killed three people. Given the "project" statement,
| I'm guessing it wasn't the timber lobbyist, but Thomas J.
| Mosser, an advertising executive that was formerly employed by
| Burston-Marsteller, a PR firm.
|
| Notable clients consulting Burson-Marsteller for crisis
| management included: Babcock & Wilcox, following the Three Mile
| Island accident in 1979; Johnson & Johnson, during the 1982
| Tylenol crisis; and Union Carbide Corporation following the
| 1984 Bhopal disaster.
|
| They're also a standard PR firm, so it wasn't necessarily
| covering up and repairing corporate reputations after
| industrial accidents and corporate negligence, but advertising
| pharmaceuticals to consumers and physicians.
|
| Oh, and uh, they supported the junta in Argentina: "[...]
| violence was necessary to open up Argentina's economy since
| securing investment was impossible if a state of civil war
| existed, and that while acknowledging that "a lot of innocent
| people were probably killed", "given the situation, immense
| force was required".
|
| More recently, they've been representing Recep Erdogan and Erik
| "we-commit-warcrimes-for-money" Prince. As well as trying to
| smear Google on behalf of Facebook.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| And that makes it acceptable to execute a random executive
| from the firm?
| getmeinrn wrote:
| I don't know much about the Unabomber's victims. Where can I
| read about your friend's dad?
| searealist wrote:
| There are only 3 victims to narrow down.
|
| edit: Only one of 3 victims was killed in his home:
|
| > In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was
| killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New
| Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he
| had sent the bomb because of Mosser's work repairing the
| public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
| 4gotunameagain wrote:
| Killing somebody is a terrible thing. Even more so in front
| of their family. But then again, one could argue that PR
| executives working for oil giants, cause the deaths of
| thousands - if not millions - of families.
|
| Why are ethical debates so intractable ?
| williamcotton wrote:
| Hey, what about all of the people driving cars that buy
| the products from those oil giants? Why not just go open
| season on all of humanity?
| californiadreem wrote:
| They did PR for Union Carbide following Bhopal, so not
| hypothetical:
|
| "Considered the world's worst industrial disaster, over
| 500,000 people in the small towns around the plant were
| exposed to the highly toxic gas methyl isocyanate (MIC).
| Estimates vary on the death toll, with the official
| number of immediate deaths being 2,259.
|
| In 2008, the Government of Madhya Pradesh paid
| compensation to the family members of 3,787 victims
| killed in the gas release, and to 574,366 injured
| victims. A government affidavit in 2006 stated that the
| leak caused 558,125 injuries, including 38,478 temporary
| partial injuries and approximately 3,900 severely and
| permanently disabling injuries. Others estimate that
| 8,000 died within two weeks, and another 8,000 or more
| have since died from gas-related diseases."
| searealist wrote:
| Sounds like a personal problem.
| dpflan wrote:
| This Netflix documentary on the Unabomber was pretty
| interesting; there are other sources I'm sure, but this
| seemed good. His participation in a multi-year Harvard
| psychology study was a fascinating facet to the story and his
| development.
|
| _Unabomber: In His Own Words_
|
| https://www.netflix.com/title/81002216
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| Wikipedia?
| [deleted]
| justinator wrote:
| His opinions may be credible. His methods to gain attention
| towards them were absolutely not.
|
| A travesty how he was treated in those medical experiments. It's
| always tragic to find out reasons why people hurt others.
| dsego wrote:
| Would his methods be credible if he was doing it in the 40s and
| they were directed against nazi intelligentsia for example?
| margalabargala wrote:
| Of course they would be.
|
| Morality doesn't exist in a vacuum. It's not objective, it's
| collectively determined by society.
|
| As a society we have decided en masse that blowing up
| randomly selected people to draw attention to one's political
| views is not acceptable.
|
| As a society we also have decided that violent actions taken
| against the German government in the early 1940s were
| acceptable.
|
| This isn't a contradiction, nor hypocrisy, simply the ability
| to have nuanced opinions.
| justinator wrote:
| LOL wut? I'm not a ChatGPT prompt - use your own critical
| thinking skills for your thought experiment.
| sneak wrote:
| Credible? Absolutely - I wouldn't have read his manifesto had
| he not systematically engaged in the premeditated slaughter of
| human beings. That doesn't make his methods not reprehensible.
| justinator wrote:
| I think it's worth thinking about how climate science during
| the 80's and 90 s (at least) was suppressed by the very
| companies that were in business to profit from practices that
| actively harmed all life on Earth. There's rarely justice
| against huge multinationals. It's just business as usual.
|
| I don't condone domestic terrorism (especially with so many
| innocent hurt), but I also don't condone climate change
| denial for shareholder profit. Is that ever going to stop?
| Given the velocity already created, I would say: not in my
| lifetime.
| Shinma wrote:
| [flagged]
| fwungy wrote:
| K. made the rational observation that no one would pay attention
| to him unless he did something drastic to force it. He'd just be
| a forgotten loner who scribbled in notebooks.
|
| A politician might kill or harm many more people in the course of
| pursuing their objectives but they'll always have the story on
| their side provided they win.
|
| K. had to understand that the achievement of his objective,
| publishing the manifesto, would likely lead to his capture, but
| he did it anyway. He sacrificed himself in the end.
|
| If you believed you had information that would save the planet
| but you had to kill some innocent people to make it known?
| Utilitarians would say yes because saving billions of innocent
| lives is more important.
|
| K. probably saw himself as someone taking revenge on an evil
| system that had harmed him. He's one of the more fascinating
| characters of modern history in that he was so effective in
| attaining his goals with violence.
| sealeck wrote:
| But he attained none of his goals?
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| It's too bad the CIA isn't even mentioned. Horrible what they did
| to him and other students.
|
| I can't remember, but I think the professors that ran the
| experiments were all mostly killed or killed themselves.
|
| Doesn't excuse what Kaczynski did. Others should have been
| brought to justice as well.
|
| Watch the Netflix series. Really well done.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Rest in piss.
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| ROTMetro wrote:
| FYI Butner might be a medical designation spot but it's
| definitely the 'where they send the crazy people' spot and also a
| higher security level (I think it's a medium). Would not have
| wanted to do time there.
| hnuser847 wrote:
| It's fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random
| internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree
| with his ideas without realizing it.
| Shinma wrote:
| [flagged]
| znpy wrote:
| one of the funniest things for me is the fact that many left-
| wing people add Kaczynski quotes without realizing that left-
| wing people are basically the first people to be criticized and
| almost mocked in Ted's main piece, "Industrial society and its
| future"
| ldehaan wrote:
| [flagged]
| robobro wrote:
| A lot of the "leftists" Ted K disagrees with in that work
| are not proper Marxists but SJW/radical liberals (what's
| called the American Left but has little relation to Marxist
| thought)
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Virtually everyone who quotes Kaczynski is aware of his
| statements on the political Left, it's just that nobody takes
| that particular aspect very personal or seriously given that
| ecological anarchism, Kaczynski's position, has always been
| overwhelmingly a left-wing position.
| timeon wrote:
| Not sure why is funny agreeing with selected quotes while not
| agreeing with others.
| znpy wrote:
| would you still stand by your point if the quote came from
| (extreme case) Adolf Hitler?
|
| if the answer is no... there you go.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| This doesn't seem like the tough question you think it
| is. I assume Hitler had _some_ opinions that, taken away
| from the context of his goals, are reasonable to agree
| with. What makes you think it 's an exception to the
| parent's point?
| arp242 wrote:
| I would describe myself as left-wing, and I agree with some
| (not all) of his criticisms of "the left" in general. Turns
| out that left-wing people can have disagreements.
| Furthermore, I can reject argument X while simultaneously
| also accepting argument Y from the same person or book.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Turns out leftists love self criticism for self
| improvements. That's inherently bad, right?
|
| (set aside that it often builds up to violent inner
| conflicts)
| znpy wrote:
| > Turns out leftists love self criticism for self
| improvements.
|
| they really don't, and this is one of the reasons why
| there is so much fracturing in the left, usually.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Isn't that backwards? In-group criticism is how you get
| so-called "fracturing", which is arguably healthier (if
| less politically useful) than the alternative: "loyalty".
| I'd be highly suspicious if _any_ group of tens of
| millions of people all ostensibly agreed on everything.
| krapp wrote:
| His "criticisms" of the left read like something a denizen of
| /pol/ or Reddit would come up with. It's entirely possible to
| see the merits of his arguments against technology while
| dismissing his deranged hatred of leftists, feminists, etc.
| hackermailman wrote:
| His criticisms of leftist activism in the 1990s is that it
| will always seek to control and exploit technology to
| implement their ideology so followers of his anti-tech
| movement should not rely on them. He then rants against
| 'green anarchy' claiming it is a kind of naive forest
| worshipping cult that also should not be included in
| whatever anti-tech movement. It is a small part of his
| overall manifesto on who you shouldn't trust to join a
| specific (terrorist) movement and likely came from his time
| in academia.
|
| It's definitely not the standard fare you would find on
| those 2 sites you mentioned just a brief 'don't trust these
| activists they want the philosopher stone for themselves'.
| piaste wrote:
| The OP literally asked to "attack the ideas, not the man",
| and here you go attacking the ideas solely because of the
| kind of men who share it...
|
| What do you mean by " it reads like something /pol/ or
| reddit would write "? Does Kaczynsky use tired cartoon
| memes? Does he accuse the left of insufficient
| weightlifting? Does he challenge them to a 1v1 in a
| Nintendo fighting game?
|
| What part of his criticism do you actually find wrong?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Lol had not heard this one. The left has "insufficient
| weightlifting". Might be true.
|
| Could it be that on the left there are more endurance
| sports, for health. And on the right there are more
| muscle building sports, so they can strike cool poses
| with their guns?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's overly reductive. Kaczynski's political views
| continued to evolve while in prison; his later writings are
| notably different in tone.
| krapp wrote:
| Industrial Society and its Future is the only work anyone
| ever mentions, especially where Kaczynsci's anti-leftist
| politics are concerned.
| pfffr wrote:
| "Leftists" offended by these sentiments are most likely
| centrists. The goal of neoliberalism (read: the DNC) has been
| to shift the left to the center. This has been their
| objective for years. See: Obama, Biden, the Clintons.
|
| TK was post-left before it was cool.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| Why do you think they don't realize (or don't disagree with
| your premise)? I think you'd be surprised by how many people
| are not in fact one-dimensional stereotypes who must disagree
| with everything a person says just because they disagree with
| some things that person says. I'm also confused as to why you
| seem to imply that people _should_ be that way.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it
| implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude
| of superiority). He said and did a lot of things. It's normal
| to variously agree and disagree with each thing in a vacuum.
| This is true of most political/societal figures, no matter how
| horrific they are, taken as a whole.
| HKH2 wrote:
| > This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it
| implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an
| attitude of superiority).
|
| I don't think it implies any of that. The GP just means some
| people can't or won't separate the art from the artist.
| burkaman wrote:
| If we're talking about individual out-of-context quotes, I
| don't think it's correct to separate the art from the
| artist. Human language is very imprecise, and knowing the
| author of a quote can significantly change the meaning of a
| sentence.
|
| I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote
| in question is "Democracy requires active participation."
| If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in
| a political discussion, I would completely agree. The
| obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when
| people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.
|
| Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote
| from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little
| uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote?
| Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of
| "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely
| changed with this new information. The identity of the
| author is part of the message, because we aren't talking
| about objectively true or false statements, we're talking
| about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the
| quote provided.
| Kye wrote:
| I just wonder how many people who could have done better
| were blocked by the actions of all these artists people
| want to make excuses for. How many great works were we
| denied because someone insisted on making space for someone
| who repelled (or worse) better people?
| catiopatio wrote:
| The zero-sum command-economy view of free speech: we have
| to exercise prior restraint on what people can say to
| ensure that there's room for the people we approve of to
| speak.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| This seems pretty un-generous. The parent is citing a
| real, straight-forward cause-and-effect which does not
| necessitate or even imply a zero-sum game, nor does it
| imply the extremist solution you're accusing them of
| supporting.
| Kye wrote:
| I was struggling to figure out how to respond to them,
| but I think you got it. I had that famous Stephen Jay
| Gould quote in mind:
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/99345-i-am-somehow-less-
| int...
|
| "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and
| convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near
| certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died
| in cotton fields and sweatshops."
|
| My post was a call for being smarter about who we invest
| in. I always wonder about people who call for separating
| art and artist over such mediocre artistry.
| [deleted]
| duxup wrote:
| Does that matter?
| danbolt wrote:
| I haven't read the entirety of his manifesto, but his ideas
| always struck me as typical narratives that resonated with
| people's anxieties about modernity.
|
| A bit of a bait and switch. Get attention with something
| shocking and violent, then appeal to worries through
| apocalyptic boogeymen. The solution, of course, is a sense of
| comforting tradition that the naturalness of the past is safe.
| A killer combo!
| molly0 wrote:
| An interesting observation!
| madballster wrote:
| That however is unfortunately true for quotes from many of
| history's dark figures, be it Hitler, Stalin or Nero.
| timeon wrote:
| Why unfortunately? Quotes are just fragments.
| George83728 wrote:
| What are some good Nero quotes? Wikiquotes only has two; one
| of which is _" I wish I could not write."_ which seems a bit
| ironic since it seems most of his writings are now gone.
| SergeAx wrote:
| This also works with some Hitler quotes, what's your point?
| HKH2 wrote:
| Which ones?
| SergeAx wrote:
| "If you want to shine like sun first you have to burn like
| it"
|
| "If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with
| willpower"
|
| "The state must declare the child to be the most precious
| treasure of the people"
|
| He was quite a speaker, old Adi.
| ginko wrote:
| Compared to the Kaczinksy quotes from this thread I have
| to say that these are mostly lame truisms.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _[Death in the battlefield] is what the youth is for,
| after all_
|
| ...Which suggests (cpr. the "treasure" quote) how quote
| dropping is mostly a leisurely activity, given broad
| statements.
|
| > _I use emotion for the many and reserve reason for the
| few_
|
| ...Which suggests - hopefully - how quote dropping is
| mostly a leisurely activity, given its non exhaustive
| intrinsic nature.
|
| --
|
| Edit: related (with the first branch):
|
| > _He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future_
|
| Put the three together ("treasure", "battlefield",
| "owning"), the whole idea gets a sinister tone; take
| "treasure" alone, it may even raise "awww"s - without
| substance.
| HaroldBolt78 wrote:
| [dead]
| lost_tourist wrote:
| That's because he took virtually all of his ideas from other
| people who said it better, and thus I'm not sure why one
| wouldn't quote those sources rather than a known terrorist and
| murderer? Young minds are often easily influenced and bad at
| separating the person and the message of the writing. It's kind
| of like inverse MAGA, where the cult of personality is the
| important thing and the content doesn't really matter, only its
| source.
| mutant_glofish wrote:
| Archived version: https://archive.is/hhw9F
| dbcooper wrote:
| Great to see that most of this site is celebrating a mass
| murderer.
|
| He would have killed any of you by choice.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Have you read the manifesto?
| jzellis wrote:
| Ted's manifesto is a remarkable piece of analysis. It's his
| solutions that weren't really, uh, constructive.
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| No mention of MKUltra, it doesn't excuse his behavior but does
| explain why he may have been pushed over the edge.
| api wrote:
| A big chunk of his manifesto reads like very personal
| grievances because it probably is. He's doing the usual
| defensive thing of globalizing and generalizing something that
| is actually profoundly personal. Kaczynski was a victim of
| unethical human experimentation.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| You'd have a point if other subjects of MK-Ultra allowed a
| similar trajectory as Kaczynski. Were there other cases of
| self-destruction? I don't even know how many people were
| subjected to these experiments.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| Charles Manson. Frank Rudolph Emmanuel Olson.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I saw Charles Manson and a few others on the MKUltra
| Wikipedia page but they use phrases like "alleged",
| "according to author...". Without an idea of the sample
| size of people subjected to experimentation it's still
| inconclusive.
| MarkMarine wrote:
| I'm sorry, is your point that MKUltra experimentation on
| people isn't proven to be bad for them?
|
| Unexpected high doses of LSD, attempts at programming,
| manipulation and what can only honestly be described as
| torture... the CIA destroyed all the records of this and
| because we don't have complete records we just have to
| make a big shrug and say "ah well JKCalhoun isn't
| convinced, guess it's not bad for you."
|
| What would it take to convince you that dosing
| unexpecting people with high amounts of LSD could have a
| detrimental effect on their mental health, possibly
| making people crazy?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > is your point that MKUltra experimentation on people
| isn't proven to be bad for them?
|
| Not at all. Rather, drawing a line backward from
| Kaczynski's bombing spree to experiments done on him as a
| part of MK-Ultra I think is questionable "science".
| elliekelly wrote:
| Why? Different people react differently to things. Especially
| psychologically. What might be merely uncomfortable for one
| person could push another person over the edge.
| jscipione wrote:
| Kanye West was drugged by his Personal trainer Harley
| Pasternak who has connection to Canadian Military where he
| talks about using mind-control drugs on soldiers.
|
| https://vigilantcitizen.com/latestnews/did-kanye-expose-
| holl...
| tenpies wrote:
| Realistically, the CIA will not release full details on MK-
| ULTRA for another couple generations, so we will never get
| official confirmation of the alleged names in our lifetime.
| There is a starting list here under "Notable subjects",
| although presumably there are subjects that were just vanilla
| murderers and subjects that tried (and hopefully succeeded)
| to live a normal life[1].
|
| When this information is finally released, the people around
| for that will say "wow, the CIA used to do some real evil
| stuff against our own people, good thing they would never do
| that these days!" as the CIA carries out some absurd level of
| evil that makes MK-ULTRA seem like a fender bender.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/project%20mk-
| ultra%5B15...
| jscipione wrote:
| Brittney Spears comes to mind, she is still under a
| conservatorship after her mk-ultra caused mental break.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| MK ULTRA stopped in 1973 as far as I know. Claiming that
| Britney Spears' mental issues are caused by this seems
| novel and I've never heard of this before. Do you have a
| news letter I can subscribe to to hear more of your
| insights?
| jscipione wrote:
| The program continued under a different classified name.
| Spears gave testimony of abuse by various doctors during
| her trial. You'll have to decide for yourself if you
| think this is related to mk-ultra or not, but many do.
| There's also circumstantial evidence surrounding the
| Mickey Mouse Club and widespread abuse of child actors
| stretching back decades including everyone's favorite
| intelligence asset: the late great Jeffery Epstein.
|
| https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009858617/britney-spears-
| tra...
| krapp wrote:
| The modern conspiracy theory version of MKUltra is known
| as "Project Monarch"[0,1]. Basically that various
| celebrities are being conditioned by "trauma based mind
| control programming" to engage in satantic ritual sex
| slavery for "the elites."
|
| [0]https://www.vice.com/en/article/9bne7e/the-monarch-
| mind-cont...
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_O%27Brien_(conspir
| acy_th...
| anon291 wrote:
| Yes quite a few mass murderers were purported subjects of
| mkultra. Of course we do not know with certainty the full
| scale.
|
| Sirhan sirhan and Charles Manson come to mind.
| ekaryotic wrote:
| [flagged]
| reaperman wrote:
| Yeah I don't think it excuses it at all but I wonder at what
| point it would? If MKUltra had removed 70% of his brain, would
| that excuse his actions?
| somenameforme wrote:
| It's not about forgiveness, it's about the story. MKUltra is
| a critical factor in this tale. And from a journalistic and
| social point of view, society would be a far better place if
| more people knew about MKUltra [1] than do. Beyond that it's
| also important to ever emphasize that actions have
| consequences which may not always be easy to predict. One of
| the countless reasons Machiavellianism is absolutely idiotic.
|
| [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
| sameolddiffterm wrote:
| They still do it. It's still under the cover of front
| organizations. It's called research. They usually target
| people that don't follow the grain. One group that is
| targeted are expats, nomads, etc... Due to the
| rules/laws/regulations that don't apply because their
| subjects are traveling and in a temporal state and are
| abroad they can get away with much more.
| notquitesurebut wrote:
| [flagged]
| wslh wrote:
| Is there more precise and credible information about MKUltra
| program and Ted K.?
| meepmorp wrote:
| No. The only thing that's really documented is that he
| participated in a psychology experiment at Harvard.
|
| People have alleged that it was part of MKULTRA, but
| there's nothing to support that beyond allegations and some
| circumstantial things (e.g., Murray consulted for the OSS
| on a profile of Hitler during the war). There were also
| just a lot of unethical experiments done on people in the
| 50s and 60s.
| wslh wrote:
| Isn't weird that Ted hasn't written about this? I mean,
| based on his writing style and ideas skipping talking
| about this experience as a lab rat seems like a missing
| piece of a specific puzzle.
| surfingdino wrote:
| This. The CIA story is likely based on the fact that
| Henry A. Murray did work for the OSS, the precursor to
| the CIA. Kaczynski may have been taking part in the
| experiments that led to the creation of the Thematic
| Apperception Test. The CIA may have been interested in
| the results of these experiments as all intelligence
| agencies are.
| ajhurliman wrote:
| This line of thinking has always puzzled me. At some point
| one's brain must be so compromised that we really can't
| expect them to function as a human, but most people's
| reaction to that is "excusing" their behavior.
|
| If you're willing to admit that they don't really have self-
| agency at that point, don't they become an object at that
| point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that
| bit a child, let alone a dog that blew up buildings. The only
| reason we're so accepting of putting down the dog is its lack
| of human status.
|
| In our courts, claiming insanity seems to give you a defense
| against crimes you've committed but also maintaining all the
| rights and privileges of personhood.
| anon291 wrote:
| Well .. I think prison was a good place for him but I also
| think his manifesto is coherent and should be more widely
| read.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Not really. Temporary insanity maybe but I think that's
| harder to prove. Insanity pleas get you sent to a medical
| prison where they keep you low on zombifying drugs.
| morelisp wrote:
| I don't think you know what an insanity claim entails. You
| absolutely give up rights and privileges if you "win" by
| invoking it.
| dang wrote:
| All: please either post thoughtful, substantive comments or don't
| post. We want _curious_ conversation here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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