771–780 of 823 posts
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> He could easily have deemed a person who drives a car as worthy of death based on the same flimsy reasoning. > I am engaging in moral absolutes. You and the person I originally responded to are engaging in moral relativism. I'm not trying to engage in moral relativism. How do I word this... When we want to judge how evil his actions are, that's a moral question. When we want to consider who he would have targeted ,…
When we want to consider who he would have targeted, that's not a moral question. What you’re missing here is empathy. When he considered his targets for murder that is indeed a moral question for him. He could have considered anyone driving an automobile. Why do I say this? Because for me the relationship between someone who buys gasoline and someone who sells gasoline is mutual and a PR executive is even farther re…
But it's using his moral system, which was relative when it comes to murder.
It's not how you and I think about murder that matters.
> The point is that when you allow for individuals to come up with their own personal reasons for murdering a member of a certain group that you allow for an infinity of reasons and targets.
If you allow anyone to do so, then across all of them you'll see an infinity of reasons, yes.
But this isn't about allowing, and this is about a specific murderer. A specific murderer won't use an infinity of reasons.
> for me the relationship between someone who buys gasoline and someone who sells gasoline is mutual
Let's just assess harm here and not talk about murder or anything. I don't think Ted K had much reason to disagree with this statement. But you're missing a crucial factor. The consumer buys one lifetime supply of gas. The producer sells a million. If we split the blame equally for each transaction, then each consumer has .5 blame units and the producer has 500 thousand blame units.
On one hand, he murdered a bunch of people and ruined a huge number of lives. On the other hand, wrote a mildly interesting manifesto that only attracted any sort of attention because it was published by The Washington Post in a desperate bid to figure out who he was so we could get him to stop murdering people. (Which worked, by the way.) So, y'know. Evens right out... Interested in his ideas? Read better manifestos…
Are you saying only those manifestos who gain organic public attention are worth reading/can hold significant truth? Are you a the-majority-cannot-be-wrong or if-everyone-agrees-it-must-be-right person?
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Graeber & Wengrow propose an interesting set of 3 measures: >But for us, the key point to remember is that we are not talking here about ‘freedom’ as an abstract ideal or formal principle (as in ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity!’). Over the course of these chapters we have instead talked about basic forms of social liberty which one might actually put into practice: (1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’…
Huh? At what point in human history moving was more accessible than now? Prehistoric humans could barely move around and until recently slavery ment average Joe had 0 freedom.
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…
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"Technology bad." It's really that. He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed, when men lived meaningful lives in peaceful harmony with nature... juxtaposed with all the purported moral, societal, and environmental decay of today. Many people find it alluring today, but the themes are evergreen. They crop up in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages, and t…
> He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present. And that, depending on your incli…
Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative power is inevitable is just the messaging from those corporate powers. And it isn’t more than PR - when society gets unbalanced enough, you get changes even if most think it is impossible. Anything from the French Revolution to the end of Apartheid.
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Not correct? Ad hominem? Moralist knee-jerk reaction? Absurd? Extreme? There is probably a more reasonable version of this disagreement, to put it lightly. Unlike Hitler's opinions on snow, Ted Kaczynski's murders are inextricably linked to his ideology.
And how would you know what, exactly? Have you actually taken the time to read any of the man's writing? Because I've been picking my way through his manifesto off and on this evening and so far what I'm encountering is calm, lucid, internally consistent, and a fairly accurate critique. Something about this exchange is reminding me of all of the decades of inarticulate hyperventilating about "communism" by individual…
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> “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? Cigarettes cause cancer, and someone’s cancer can be directly linked to smoking even if not everyone who smokes gets cancer. There is no point diagnosing a dead person we don’t know personally, but dismissing the effect of an organised and l…
> but dismissing the effect of an organised and long period of psychological torture just because not every participant ended up a terrorist sounds a bit myopic. And dismissing the fact that the environment didn't produce the same outcome for all the other individuals isn't myopic? There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment". All the participants in that environment had the same agency, but it was on…
That’s just his statistics work… Making a rare event more common does not make it a certainty. Again, we don’t know about any possible other people who might have been seriously disturbed in other, less attention-grabbing ways.
Nobody said that it was the only reason, but let’s be honest: if you take unstable people and condition them that way, such outcomes are not inconceivable. Saying that the experiment (weekly hours of psychological torture) did not affect this is not really believable.
> There's more nuance here than "Well, it was the environment".
It’s a good thing nobody said that, then…
> If the sample was large (more than a few hundred), then it becomes more probable than the environment was not the deciding factor in TKs state of mind.
Regardless of sample size, people who go full rogue that way are exceedingly rare in the first place. You’d need thousands upon thousands of subjects to detect increases over a baseline chance of 1:10000000.
> Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.
Again, nobody said that. In any case, I certainly did not. I think we can have a rational discourse between “he was inhuman and absolutely evil” (he was not) and “he was actually right” (he was not either). In the end, he was just a human. His nature, upbringing, and environment all played roles.
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This "third position" is basically anarchy, or anarcho-primitivism. It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive whi…
> It's not really a political position, it's more like a pathological insistence that civilization should be destroyed. Kaczynski went as far as saying we're biologically wired to live primitive lives and we're misusing ourselves in perversions that he calls 'surrogate activities', which include science and art. To him, hunting or trying to survive while being hunted in the woods is the perfect utilization of the hum…
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> He falls for the same trap many modern critics of progress do: the nostalgia for a world that never existed There's the opposite problem most have: the inability to understand that there are people who have actually experienced the past (within their lives) and might prefer it for reasons other than the cliche "they were young then, that's why they like it" compared to the present. And that, depending on your incli…
If your ideas of how to live include less childhood mortality, and long and healthy lives, then I doubt there is a better time than the last hundred years (except probably the next hundred years). Everyone alive has only been in a modern time. Now what characteristics you want your world to have, certainly many people are fighting for different visions. The idea that a particular balance of corporate and legislative…
And if your ideas of how to live examine other metrics, there are much better times in the past.
Especially since if changes to bring back aspects of the past that were better were taken today, it wouldn't mean we have to give up technologies that improved the mortality rates. How about that, huh?
In fact, even if your ideas of how to live are solely about less childhood mortality and long and healthy lives, you might be better served with a couple decades past:
https://ccf.georgetown.edu/2023/04/26/research-update-u-s-se...