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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

181–190 of 823 posts

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

He was an MKUltra victim, which was a CIA project

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brittney Spears comes to mind, she is still under a conservatorship after her mk-ultra caused mental break.

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?

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...

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If Ted's ideas lead to the destruction of human lives, I think invoking the victims' experience is a valid point in the discussion.

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#184
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Them finding two completed bombs is not evidence that he planned to plant them.

Who wants to keep live bombs in their house? Obviously he was going to put them elsewhere. Which is what planting is.

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#186
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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#187
post #137

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…

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#188
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> real terrorists Did the CIA fabricate and mail the bombs?

No, but they've bombed a lot more innocent people than TedK did. For one example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Lawrence_Pope

How does this make Unabomber not terrorist?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#189
post #154

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.

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.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#190

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?

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.
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