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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#151

Post by JKCalhoun »

drones wrote: post #118
JKCalhoun wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to suggest that Kaczynski murdered as a kind of marketing strategy for his ideas. I highly doubt that.

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.

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#153

Post by waihtis »

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#154

Post by ahoy »

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#155

Post by theodric »

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 €200k 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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#156

Post by Shinma »

justinator wrote: post #8

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.

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#157

Post by siftrics »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #69
californiadreem wrote: post #32

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 ana…

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#158

Post by [deleted] »

californiadreem wrote: post #32

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 ana…

[deleted]

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#159

Post by sph »

anon291 wrote: post #100
sph wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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