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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#551

Post by notjulianjaynes »

spurgu wrote: post #474
basisword wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting. Far too much support and excusing of a deranged murderer in these comments.

The positive comments are mostly in response to his view/ideas/philosophy, as in Industrial Society and Its Future and his subsequent books - I don't think there's a single person here condoning the bombings. If you were to read his works you might find that he wasn't so deranged after all, quite the opposite. Edit: In terms of the philosophy/view I mean. The bombings were made out of bitterness and anger and are ine…

Had Kaczynski not conducted his campaign of bombings he would have had no leverage to get the Washington Post to publish his manifesto.

I re-skimmed the manifesto earlier today. It's not uninteresting, but I don't think it's the sort of thing which can be considered or appreciated outside the context of his violent acts. For one, no one would have read it if Kacynzski had been a nonviolent academic.

As for bitterness and anger, well, here's a quote I pulled somewhat randomly from the text.

"We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society."

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#554

Post by ersatzz »

inpdx wrote: post #534
resolutebat wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His argument is basically that industrial society increases net suffering from violence and disease, because large populations are unsustainable and rely on the exploitation of the third world's poor. So instead of having one person die from a curable infection because nobody has antibiotics, you have five dying of infections because the population has exploded and antibiotics exist but they can't afford them.

Someone who claims to care about humans while murdering them really has zero credibility.

Kaczynski would've probably said the same thing honestly.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#555

Post by ETH_start »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429
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…

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss. I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". 15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started b…

I suspect the isolation misleads the subject. The subject loses their modes of interaction with civilization, that make civilization so far superior to the low-population density existence of prehistoric hunter gatherers.

Without those modes, the subject returns to civilization seeing only what civilization deprives one of: the great expanses of unspoiled wilderness.

And that produces the existential crisis and criminal insanity of TK.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#556

Post by nine_k »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429
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…

thanks for posting and sorry for your loss. I've heard the name TK first when reading Bill Joy's "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". 15 years later I was burnt out and increasingly aware that Tech was not a force of good. I went on a 3 year journey trying to understand what made TK chose violence. It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly, however hard that is. I started b…

Thank you; this elucidates a lot.

So it boils down to a question: would you exchange the life of a lone top predator (in a forest with a firearm) to any other kind of life?

For some people the answer would be in favor of the top predator life. To choose the life of a tiger, one just should stop loving anyone. After this, killing becomes mere killing (predators do not "murder"), and the whole idea of destroying everyone else, or at least reducing them to a comparable state of a worthy adversary, becomes pretty natural. Of course technology becomes an enemy, because it gives the rest of humans an unfair advantage; first of all, the key human technology, the society. Certainly a city is an uninhabitable place for a lone tiger, and of course it limits the tiger's freedom in uncomfortable ways.

Some people just really want to see the world burn.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#557

Post by spencerchubb »

I don't find Ted Kaczynski's manifesto to be insightful. It points out that technology has flaws, which is frankly quite obvious and is a fact that everyone already agrees with. Furthermore, his proposed solution is crap.

He proposes that we just go back to wilderness, which is bad for many obvious reasons. Technology and division of labor has allowed us to spend our days improving humanity rather than finding food just to survive. We need to find better coordination mechanisms that allow us to apply technology towards good things.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#558

Post by dang »

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…

In the GP comment, I was reacting to this:

> your intellectual dishonesty

On the internet, combining a second-person pronoun with a pejorative is going to come across as a personal attack.

Even this:

> what you have written is intellectually dishonest

is likely to land as a personal attack.

Moreover, (1) you can't know whether someone is being dishonest because you can't know their internal state. Nobody says to themselves "i'm being dishonest right now", so a comment like this is almost always going to get flamewar-style pushback, which is what we're trying to avoid here. Also,

(2) you don't need this! You can make your substantive points entirely without calling names, getting personal, etc. If you'd please do that in the future, we'd be grateful.

Does this help?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#559

Post by l33t233372 »

lucaspfeifer wrote: post #483
l33t233372 wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Harvard. It's unfortunate in the present day that so many naive tech individuals don't understand that they've been deliberately recruited by the left in universities worldwide via indoctrination one class at a time Can you elaborate what you mean by that? I find the notion ridiculous, but I’d like more detail before I write it off.

Universities, especially the more prestigious ones, have been trending towards aggressively simplistic labeling of complex social issues. While their stated goal is to protect minorities, the oversimplification increases polarization and division. These doctrines in fact harm the minorities that they were intended to help, by forcing people to choose a side. Plus, they focus too much on the negatives, when we need mo…

You specifically said “one class at a time” what did you mean?

> trending towards aggressively simplistic labeling of complex social issues

I think that’s the opposite of true.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#560

Post by stubybubs »

sph wrote: post #67
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

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…

> If the name on the front page was not of a murderer, I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs.

I disagree. His ideas are not novel or new. There are large bodies of work around the evils of technology, increasing polarization, isolation, disconnection from nature etc. Leftists are trending toward authoritarianism is old hat. It's all pretty standard stuff. There have been literally hundreds of popular books and films about these very subjects.

The only reason people are reading it is because he murdered people. He said as much:

“In order to get our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression, we’ve had to kill people.”

You can get everything he said elsewhere, without accidentally or intentionally lionizing a murderer.

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