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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#661

Post by PartiallyTyped »

Roark66 wrote: post #653
fsckboy wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes. We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczy…

Seriously, why do we so often see mental illness as an excuse for simple evil? As far as I know in most non-authoritarian countries if a mentally ill person commits a crime the factor that decides if they get punishment, treatment, or both is not if they are mentally ill, but if they knew what they were doing at the time was wrong. The burden of proving that is on the defense and it's not easy to do so as it should b…

I don’t think it’s an excuse or justification, but rather an explanation or motive.

Unfortunately the brain is rather complex and can break in surprisingly many ways. One such example is the shooter who had cancer that pressed against his [iirc] amygdala.

For Ted, we know that he was a subject of mkultra experiments, and that he was tortured. We know that he was deeply troubled and had communication issues. Perhaps he felt that the bombings were the only way he could garner focus on the problems he saw; but that is likely rationalisation on my end. It should also be noted that Ted lived very isolated, and that can cause severe damage to the brain. If you find yourself alone in a foreign country that you work in and no social support system or many interactions, you might experience this and see yourself changing.

In Greek αιτιολογώ and δικαιολογώ exist, where the former identifies causality and uses that to reason on the events and the latter is the same as justifying. To my knowledge the former doesn’t have a translation in English.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#662

Post by theodric »

dbcooper wrote: post #172
theodric wrote: post #155

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…

[flagged]

I addressed that. You must separate the art from the artist.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#663

Post by eptcyka »

xorvoid wrote: post #584
tymekpavel wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sure you didn’t mean it, but in the English language “Pollak” and its variations are derogatory terms for people of Polish descent. The preferred term is “Pole.”

I also came here to say this. Thank you! It’s a slur and not everyone seems to realize that…

Because it isn't a slur in all English speaking cultures.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#664

Post by 9991 »

jdkoeck wrote: post #658
fsckboy wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes. We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczy…

He was not a terrorist because of his mental health issues, he was a terrorist because of his convictions. No excuses.

Can you cite a reference for that?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#665

Post by PartiallyTyped »

ars wrote: post #646
fsckboy wrote: post #633

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes. We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczy…

> And we're talking about stochastic processes. No we aren't, because that's not a real thing. That's just something people make up when they want to demonize someone for their words, but don't have any actual evidence that their words are causing harm. People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality.

> People aren't random agents of evil, that may or may not trigger. That's simply not a description of reality

That is not what stochastic terrorism means.

Stochastic terrorism is the observation that while you can not express specifically, where and how terror will occur, you know that with prob 1, it will occur and is a consequence of people rallying and exploiting crazy people.

Of course, anyone can deny that they explicitly told people to commit acts of terror, because they didn’t, and therefore they can not be held responsible for what the mentally ill did; that doesn’t mean there isn’t a cause and effect.

A constant barrage of people expressing “think of the children”, or blaming minorities for the perils of society is going to slowly but surely deteriorate and rally people into supporting murder and other heinous acts by distorting their reality and allowing them to justify atrocities.

Expressing that some [hero] needs to do something, nudge nudge wink wink doesn’t mean you did not cause an event, people don’t exist in vacuums, and all of our interactions provably matter.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#666

Post by lelanthran »

sam2426679 wrote: post #604
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system. 'In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study described by author Alston Chase as a "purposely brutalizing ps…

>> How does a person go from being at Harvard to concluding the only way to make it better is to first make it worse

> Harvard is where TK racked up hundreds of hours across several years as a participant/victim of an MKULTRA experiment investigating how to break down someone's belief system.

"Because Mkultra" is not a valid mitigation or explanation of TK's mental health or lack of it. After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

Sometimes a sausage is just a sausage, and sometimes an evil murderer is just an evil murderer.

There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#667

Post by inglor_cz »

fsckboy wrote: post #637
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It still has potential to be misunderstood ofc > It can't just be the struggle of a Pollak getting people to pronounce his name correctly I just happened to research this recently, rabbit hole a propos nothing: (1) in English, "Polack" is an ethnic slur for a Polish person; (2) in a handful of unrelated European languages, Polak is just the word for a Pole; just so y'all know.

It is interesting that the native word (because in the Polish language, "Polak" is a neutral standard word for a male Pole; a female would be Polka, just like the dance) mutated to a slur an ocean away.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#668

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

jmull wrote: post #333
2-718-281-828 wrote: post #248

he moved into a shack in the mountains searching for tranquility and silence. just to get tormented there by noise from local wood industry and dogs. So, he kills the dogs and then sabotages machinery. for me - he's an unsung hero. may he finally rest in peace now.

He’s a hero for killing dogs because they annoyed him? I think that’s sick, not heroic.

i find it reasonable if the owners don't discipline the dogs effectively.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#669

Post by perfmode »

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

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#670

Post by kevincrane »

fsckboy wrote: post #633
tptacek wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When threads about Kaczynski come up, I try to remind people that the guy attempted to take down an American Airlines jetliner. He got a bomb on board in the cargo bay designed to explode at altitude --- and it did indeed explode, caused the plane to lose pressure, and filled the cabin with smoke. There were 78 people on board that flight, and but for the skill of the pilots, Kaczynski would have murdered all of them…

We're talking about someone who suffered from very serious mental illness. And we're talking about stochastic processes. We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but I'd stress the mental illness part so perhaps society will get serious about treating mental illness with seriousness. Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczy…

> We can agree that killing people or trying to kill people is terrible, but

That last word in this quote should’ve been a red flag.

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