Earlier quoted context omitted.
did the CIA put crack in the hood?
No. This has been pretty thoroughly refuted.
what about bombing merchant ships in indonesia, has that been refuted too?
Ted Kaczynski has died
211–220 of 823 posts
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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.…
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.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who wants to keep live bombs in their house? Obviously he was going to put them elsewhere. Which is what planting is.
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.
Like the French arresting people for using encryption and linux
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#214Anyone 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…
He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#215Great to see that most of this site is celebrating a mass murderer. He would have killed any of you by choice.
Have you read the manifesto?
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#216Best 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.
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.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there more precise and credible information about MKUltra program and Ted K.?
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.
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.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#218Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#219I 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…
> 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.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#220Anyone else find it strange that Ted and Robert Hanssen died at the same time? Locked in the same place....