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Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

theatlantic.com

81–90 of 190 posts

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#81
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I grew up in a fairly out of the way area in a red state, but we had this cool elective in high school called simply enough "Technology". We had AutoCAD, computers, little bridge building things, etc. One of the few lessons that really stuck with me was when the teacher was discussing technology one day and one of the students grappled with this very philosophical point. Basically the posed it as something like "we s…

> people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain Except, this isn't empirically true. It's the same argument made by the NRA ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the gun debate here, only pointing out that if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by…

...if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by guns

... because guns are a "force or thought multiplier".

I read that about 40,000 people are killed/injured by guns per year, with 44% of households owning one. Meanwhile 1.3 million people die in road crashes - let alone injuries. If we simply judge "empirically" what happens by sheer ratios of ownership, the NRA's arguments make even more sense. That isn't to say I agree with their jingoism, but let's not oversimplify the issue.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#82
post #76
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me an example of no-nothingism on the right.

"People in this country have had enough of experts" -- Michael Gove, in 2016, then Secretary of Justice in the Conservative Party government of the UK

I believe this was said while he was campaigning for Brexit. And it worked. There's a fascinating article in the FT today where people who voted leave are asked what they think of the current status. It is astonishing how uninformed the vast majority were and are. One person, for example, thought that we'd be out of Europe a week after the vote. Another - 6 months. Nobody understands why there should be a transition, negotiation, or the reasoning for the poorly named 'divorce bill'. Unfortunately, people listened to Michael Gove instead of the experts. They didn't even pay a cursory glance to expert opinion and now we're in a situation where even the people who 'won' the vote are unhappy. All of this could have been avoided by listening to the experts instead of an ex-journalist.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#83
post #55
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much "Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos." Lots of mentally ill people defend what they believe in very vigorously.

Not what I'm saying, I'm saying it is well thought out and has reasoned arguments. Not just that he believes in it a lot.

When someone goes crazy they don't lose the ability to use sophisticated language. I feel like people are reading the words and respecting the sophistication yet ignoring the meaning. What is he actually saying? Nothing that makes sense, hence the crazy part.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#84
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"People in this country have had enough of experts" -- Michael Gove, in 2016, then Secretary of Justice in the Conservative Party government of the UK

I believe this was said while he was campaigning for Brexit. And it worked. There's a fascinating article in the FT today where people who voted leave are asked what they think of the current status. It is astonishing how uninformed the vast majority were and are. One person, for example, thought that we'd be out of Europe a week after the vote. Another - 6 months. Nobody understands why there should be a transition,…

Your comment implies people who voted the other way were more informed, which I really doubt. This happens every election. Someone does a survey and finds out the majority of voters know nothing about the candidates or issues. The majority of people don't even know who their representatives are. Democracy is terrible.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#85
post #52

A really interesting read and imho it's quite relevant to our current times. This is the current political climate in a nutshell: > Dualists in a relativistic environment tend to see themselves as surrounded; they become increasingly lonely and alienated. This attitude “requires an equally absolutistic rejection of any ‘establishment’” and “can call forth in its defense hate, projection, and denial of all distinction…

Do you have a links to alt right writings and thought leaders that push forward this view? I hear endlessly about this alt right ideology from the left but I can't seem to find a single person other than a few clearly fringe white nationalists who use this label. I try to follow both left and right, anarchist and libertarian groups, on Twitter and elsewhere quite closely and I've been struggling to connect the breath…

> Do you have a links to alt right writings and thought leaders that push forward this view?

You mean like White Supremacy groups or neo-Nazi groups along the lines of Vanguard America? Have you ever read Mein Kampf? Doesn't seem like it because then you wouldn't ask such a weird question akin to "Is the sky actually blue?".

You should hang around more "social media", especially YouTube and reddit has certain "circles" where you can meet quite a collection of individuals arguing from the Illuminati being reptile people to the more traditional stuff like "Jewish bankers controlling everything and forcing communism on everybody to eradicate the white race".

If you need a place to start, try the comments on this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qs0kv_58ZA

Yes these kind of nutter fringe views have always been around, but in recent years they've found a new, real scary, popularity.

> I hear endlessly about this alt right ideology from the left but I can't seem to find a single person other than a few clearly fringe white nationalists who use this label.

Alt-right is not an "ideology" it's a general term for a whole slew of right-wing fringe groups which strive on being so far "anti-establishment" that even the traditional right is embarrassed by them. Many of them could probably simply be described as internet-trolls who took their trolling to the political level, pepe wasn't a coincidence.

Just like "the left" is not an ideology, but rather a whole collection of different ideologies who share a side of the spectrum.

But not everybody on the left is a communist and not everybody on the right is an ethnonationalist, a fact that gets just ignored with a dualist world view.

> In terms of rejection of establishment this can equally be found on the fringes of the left as well. Not to mention 'paranoia' and 'feelings of being surrounded' when I frequently read about the rise of 'Nazis' and fascism which again seems to be limited to a fringe at most, unless one takes seriously the extremely broad group of people who are now given these labels.

This can be found anywhere where dualist views rule the day, I merely used the alt-right as an example because it's relevant and quite fitting to our current time, especially considering how familiar some points of Kaczynski's "manifesto" sound in that regard.

> Therefore I'm extremely wary to buy into these narratives generalizing the 'other' tribes views.

I knew in advance my comment would ruffle a few feathers because discussing these kinds of issues is pretty much impossible these days, at least without being accused of being a communist/neo-Nazi by the more extreme ends of the fringes. That's the issue I'm alluding to here, not that "one side" is worse than "the other", I don't do that because I realize fully that there's always way more than just two sides to anything.

Imho simplifying political ideologies into this dualist "left vs right" view is one of the main reasons why there's been so much social conflict these past years. People don't want any nuance anymore, they want their dualist world-view reinforced where their side is the "good one" and any opposing side is automatically considered the "bad one".

I get it, it's an appealing view on the issue, making all this complicated stuff so simple. You've got problems and then you find a scapegoat and you get peace of mind, I think pretty much everybody is guilty of this, just to different degrees.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#86
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Give me an example of no-nothingism on the right.

Well, I do think that honest people can disagree in good faith over complicated topics, like how to run the economy, or how much of a problem global warming is, or what to do about illegal immigration. So how about some simple, unambiguous fact that should submit to easy verification? As of late last year, about 42% of Republicans polled disagreed with the assertion that Obama was born in the US, while only 27% of Re…

Ouch. That is an excellent example.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#87

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…

You can use a T Bone from a steak and use it as a shiv.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9FDbgCzkVFE

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#88
post #31

> The "Bad" Parts of Technology Cannot Be Separated from the "Good" Parts. [1] I thought this was one of the most prophetic statement from his Technology Manifesto. Written in 1995, still true today. Take any technology, and you'll see it has been used for doing "good" things as well as "evil" things, and it's impossible for anyone to separate the two and enforce usage of only the "good" parts. Example: Drones. Used…

> You cannot invent drones and tell people it should only be used for good things, not bad things. Sure you can. This is the purpose of laws and law enforcement. Try to fly a drone with a knife to stab people and people will destroy it and arrest you. Internationally we have a lack of laws and a lack of enforcement, therefore we had only limited success at preventing nuclear proliferation or chemical/bio weapons uses…

Laws don't separate good from evil. They serve to legitimize (think of the root of that word) the exercise of certain behavior. But there can be good laws and evil laws. If you have trouble understanding this point, look at another country besides the US when thinking about it.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#89
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem to you like the right is increasingly reliant on shadowy conspiracies to explain events? I haven't heard the phrase "false flag operation" come up except from my infowars friends. A Republican chairman from my state said the violence in Charlottesville was caused by "evil Soros money," which seems to imply a conspiracy to me. Doesn't the whole "fake news" thing strike you as an attempt on the part of…

Soros is merely the rights version of how the Koch brothers are behind everything to the left. Sorry I'm struggling to take this as anything new or special with the right in the Fox news/CNN world of US politics. But as I said we're in a new era of extreme political tribalism. What disappointments me is that so many smart people on the left think they are engaging in 'resistance' when they are largely just fueling fu…

> What disappointments me is that so many smart people on the left think they are engaging in 'resistance' when they are largely just fueling further tribalism by going deeper down their sides rabbit hole - instead of engaging in rational discourse, focusing on party output instead of tribal wins, and rejecting FUD.

Couldn't agree more, I still can't believe "we" actually had to discuss if it's okay to sucker-punch people out of the blue just because of their political beliefs. That was some serious hypocrite BS.

Re: Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber (2000)

#90
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people are the ones doing the bad things. Technology is just a force or thought multiplier. He explained it so well. It sort of clicked into my brain Except, this isn't empirically true. It's the same argument made by the NRA ("guns don't kill people, people kill people"). To be clear, I'm not weighing in on the gun debate here, only pointing out that if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by…

...if people have easy access to guns, you will have more deaths by guns ... because guns are a "force or thought multiplier". I read that about 40,000 people are killed/injured by guns per year, with 44% of households owning one. Meanwhile 1.3 million people die in road crashes - let alone injuries. If we simply judge "empirically" what happens by sheer ratios of ownership, the NRA's arguments make even more sense.…

> Meanwhile 1.3 million people die in road crashes

You're comparing a global number to...something else.

In the US (~33,000 deaths annually by firearm, including suicide, ~32,000 traffic fatalities).

What was your point again?

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