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> 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.
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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.
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I can't tell if you're being serious.
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You seem to suggest that Kaczynski murdered as a kind of marketing strategy for his ideas. I highly doubt that.
it's 2023 and everyone has an Internet-connected smartphone in their pocket at all times—in 1995 this was not the case.
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.
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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"
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
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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"
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.
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.
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"
Blowing people up is wrong. But his manifesto was right about many things. It’s interesting to skim through it every couple years.
> Blowing people up is wrong. So is performing torture experiments on them to see what happens them locking them up when they crack.
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.