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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#361

Post by siftrics »

watwut wrote: post #339
siftrics wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted. (I'm not arguing this evidence doesn't exist.) I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more than enough evidence from his previous plantings to convict him as a bomb planter and p…

He does not need any of that. He is not about to put Kaczynsky to jail. He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability. > Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind? They are not separate. Past behavior predicts future one. And ignoring probabilities is just demanding that people act as if they were stupid.

Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt.

It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to disprove something in mathematics.

I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.

The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely reasonable scenario.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#362

Post by cogman10 »

msla wrote: post #214
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…

He sounds like an ecofascist to me, someone willing to use violence in pursuit of a "green" ideology.

Funnily, Kaczynski was an ecofascist, he was also an anti-leftest.

You have to remember that when he performed the bombing in the 70s environmental protections had bipartisan support (Nixon famously created the EPA [1]).

It wasn't until much later that being green turned into a radical partisan issue. I mostly blame Rush Limbaugh [2] and the Koch brothers [3] for that shift. Turns out, a lot of big oil propaganda [4] can really sway public opinion.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/history/origins-epa

[2] https://www.mediamatters.org/rush-limbaugh/rush-limbaugh-cli...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/23/opinion/sunday/david-koch...

[4] https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/big-oils-electric-fight-aga...

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#363

Post by fatfingerd »

netdoll wrote: post #85
bheadmaster wrote: post #35

Ted Kaczynski was a genius, a mathematical child prodigy, became a professor at Berkeley at 25 and had a bright future. I completely blame CIA experiments for his downfall into radicalism and extremism. His ideas were very valid, but his mind was too tortured to deal with them in a healthy manner. Rest in peace.

[flagged]

I would generally discount any claims that someone that is a problem for the CIA is a sexual deviant.

He had a serious problem with authority, needed to draft dodge and had a meeting with a psychiatrist where he planned to practise discussing feelings of being a woman with a psychiatrist.. I'm not really sure I should believe a forensic psychiatric evaluation decades later by a psychiatrist with a motive on what evaluation to give.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#364

Post by tyingq »

boppo1 wrote: post #340
arp242 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His cell was apparently 12×7-foot, or 3.6×2.1 metres (I was curious). Seems awfully tiny, and personally I consider it inhumane no matter what he has done, but apparently he wasn't too unhappy with it: "I consider myself to be in a (relatively) fortunate situation here. As correctional institutions go, this place is well-administered. It’s clean, the food is good, and it’s quiet, so that I can sleep, think and write…

did they allow much of his writing out of the prison? Who holds the rights to something written in prison in the US?

There's not a universal country-wide law in the US. Some states have "Son of Sam" laws that keep prisoners from profiting from publicity about their crimes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Son_of_Sam_law

Though with Ted, he probably had things other than his crimes he could have published and made money from. Of course, any earnings could end up going to a civil suit or existing orders of victim restitution.

None of that seems directly related to intellectual property rights though. The prisoner retains those just like anyone else. I suppose there might be some cases of asset forfeiture for remediation or fines?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#366

Post by ginko »

SergeAx wrote: post #271
HKH2 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which ones?

"If you want to shine like sun first you have to burn like it" "If freedom is short of weapons, we must compensate with willpower" "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people" He was quite a speaker, old Adi.

Compared to the Kaczinksy quotes from this thread I have to say that these are mostly lame truisms.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#367

Post by alphanullmeric »

bkohlmann wrote: post #352

One of my good friend’s dad was brutally murdered by Kaczynski when she was a young teenager. A small bomb in a package that used razor blazes, nails, and other bits of metal to nearly tear his head off while his young family was in the house with him. And it turns out the victim was the “wrong” man, as he didn’t even work on the project Kaczynski wanted to bring “retribution” for. Kaczynski May have said some intere…

[flagged]

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#368

Post by SpaghettiCthulu »

siftrics wrote: post #350
dang wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal attacks aren't allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it turns out, unfortunately, that you've been doing this repeatedly: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605613 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35605547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34558731 https://news.yc…

I am writing now as earnestly and charitably as possible: could you tell me how what I wrote is a personal attack? I want to engage on HN in a productive way and I do not mean to personally attack anyone. I think the reason you were able to link to so many instances of me personally attacking someone is because I genuinely do not understand what you consider a personal attack. I thought I was arguing against ideas an…

I think "Are you insane?" from the first link is a clear example. Not so sure about the others.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#369

Post by Invictus0 »

brvsft wrote: post #208
martythemaniak wrote: post #94

I find it very curious the fawning treatment this murderer's death is receiving here. The guy killed three innocent people and maimed a number of others because he went crazy and wanted to get back at the world. What is wrong with you people? You know there's plenty of people that are smarter than him, being able to produce more coherent, balanced and informed views of society, and also not murder people.

This moral argument doesn't really work on people from the US after about 20 years of global militarism, especially that whole stint in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hate murder as much as the next guy, but our political and military leaders constantly make decisions that result in needless deaths. You don't even know how upset I personally was after voting for Obama and seeing him continue using drones to target terrorist…

You know what we did before drones were developed? Carpet bombs. Drones are a huge improvement.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#370

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

crhulls wrote: post #31

His manifesto is worth reading. Although he was obviously a twisted man many of his predictions for the future were eerily prescient. http://editions-hache.com/essais/pdf/kaczynski2.pdf

I'm one that believes that advances in technology aren't necessarily a plus for society. We have a brain that was tuned for survival over millions of years. Our ancestors survived therefore those surviving traits were passed on to us. Technology is changing our environment in an evolutionary blink of the eyes. Our brain cannot adapt fast enough so we will use those survival traits as our technology gets more powerful. Survival in the past has mostly meant force. We literally fight to stay alive and that means we create ever and ever stronger weapons. Technology has already shown that we can and have created weapons that can destroy earth as we know it. New technology will only make that worse since we have never invented any new tech without ultimately using it for war. No, tech is not necessarily a plus for society and our world.

My issue with reading Kaczynski, which I have not but have an idea of his manifesto, is that he was trying to bring about change through force and destruction. Through out the history of men, force has always been a temporary fix. It may seem like a relatively easy fix but once force is removed, we all return to whatever the force was trying to change.

The only way change can thrive is through consensus. The majority needs to agree that a change should happen. That type of change is very time consuming, messy and long. But it's the only way to bring about long term change.

There are better more deserving thought-leaders that people should read. Kaczynski is not one of them. His actions should really erase him from history rather than praise him.

User californiadreem posted a few authors on a comment here that can get people started.

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