Ted Kaczynski has died
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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
What did the CIA do? I checked his Wikipedia page, not mentioned there.
He participated in about 200 hours of experiments from the age of 16 to 19 which basically consisted of "roasting" and bullying him. The experimenters intentionally sought out the most insecure "maladjusted" students at Harvard (Kaczynski was accepted at 16) and lied about what the experiment was going to do. The entire thing was horrible and profoundly unethical. His brother has stated it really changed Kaczynski. S…
Source? What is the incidence of terrorism in that group and in the general population?
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority). He said and did a lot of things. It's normal to variously agree and disagree with each thing in a vacuum. This is true of most political/societal figures, no matter how horrific they are, taken as a whole.
> This isn't as indicative of ignorance or hypocrisy as it implies (and it comes off as a petty "gotcha" with an attitude of superiority). I don't think it implies any of that. The GP just means some people can't or won't separate the art from the artist.
I'm just going to make up an example: let's say the quote in question is "Democracy requires active participation." If I saw this posted by an anonymous internet commenter in a political discussion, I would completely agree. The obvious interpretation is that democracy works better when people vote, speak to your representative, organize, etc.
Now let's say the commenter reveals that this is a quote from a presidential assassin. Well, now I'm a little uncomfortable. Why did they choose this particular quote? Do they agree with the assassin's fringe definition of "active participation"? The intended meaning has completely changed with this new information. The identity of the author is part of the message, because we aren't talking about objectively true or false statements, we're talking about philosophical ideas that are much bigger than the quote provided.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#294Anyone 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…
It's unfortunate that people stop at the Manifesto, as Kaczynski has other critiques, but also admits to limitations or failures in his thinking. In one correspondence he admits he has no criteria to decide if a given technology is benign (small scale) or harmful (organization-dependent), a critical distinction! He tries to shore it up with analyzing a primitive Steam Engine, but I would point to Bronze as a contradiction harboring both characteristics. My interpretation is that the distinction is political, not based on any aspect of the technology itself including production. Technology acts as a magnitude, and how we apply it is the essence of our social/political organization.
This is, of course, one interpretation among many. Like professor Ellul, there are many other voices. There is Society of the Spectacle (a style ISAIF is imitating), or the works of Jean Baudrillard where he (early years) analyzes commodities under Consumerism or (later years) his work on Spectacle and Image. Even Karl Marx has a detailed understanding and critique of Machine Society in Chapter 15 of Capital [0].
Finally, Kaczynski is harmful to many anarchist spaces. His True Crime reputation attracts tons of media footage and mystique, which furthers misunderstandings. Crimethink has a great essay, "The Unabomber’s Unending 15 Minutes of Fame" [1], which details how this warps perceptions and action while ignoring who the victims are.
> As individuals within a movement professing a desire to reconstitute the world on the basis of love, harmony, peace, and sharing, an ethical question arises when a means inconsistent with an end is presented. In this case, the tactic of non-self-defense violence. This is not a question of armed defense such as was the case during the 1930s Spanish revolution, for instance, but rather, the validity of aggressive violence against those who are designated as The Enemy.
> The question of who is our enemy is a slippery one. Most of the dead and maimed from the Unabomber campaign were involved in this massive, almost entirely inclusive system of destruction and repression in a manner little different from most of us. Under the Unabomber rubric of complicity, almost all of us are potential targets. It should be remembered, his toll of three dead and 29 wounded was severely limited only when his bombs failed to go off in an airliner and outside a university classroom. Apparently, all of us were indiscriminately designated as The Enemy.
> I don’t have a lot of interest in people who advocate “armed struggle.” In this country, it usually comes down to those enthusiasts for armed adventures constituting a rooting section without taking the leap into the fray themselves. This is often accompanied by an arrogance and set of judgmental politics that condemn anyone not in the claque as timid, or reformist, or worse, counter-revolutionary. The latter, by the way, has historically been a pre-execution category, so I watch my back when ever I hear that phrase being thrown my way even by someone claiming to be an anarchist.
> My experience is that advocates of violence have a short shelf life. They break windows or plant a few bombs while furiously condemning everyone else for a lack of revolutionary ardor and then they are gone, usually with some wreckage that has to be cleaned up by those committed to long range organizing.
[0]: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm
[1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/walker-lane-pseudony...
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#295Ted 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.
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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#296I wanted to understand his point of view to see if it could be changed, but I never got a response so I dont know if one of the five eyes (US or UK) or some other entity was interfering.
My position/point of view is something caused the events, so what where they?
Those events are what need tackling, Mr Kacynski is the product in much the same way as Google users are the product!
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#297It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
That however is unfortunately true for quotes from many of history's dark figures, be it Hitler, Stalin or Nero.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
I saw Charles Manson and a few others on the MKUltra Wikipedia page but they use phrases like "alleged", "according to author...". Without an idea of the sample size of people subjected to experimentation it's still inconclusive.
I’m sorry, is your point that MKUltra experimentation on people isn’t proven to be bad for them? Unexpected high doses of LSD, attempts at programming, manipulation and what can only honestly be described as torture… the CIA destroyed all the records of this and because we don’t have complete records we just have to make a big shrug and say “ah well JKCalhoun isn’t convinced, guess it’s not bad for you.” What would i…
Not at all. Rather, drawing a line backward from Kaczynski's bombing spree to experiments done on him as a part of MK-Ultra I think is questionable "science".
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#299Certain points in Kaczynski's manifesto greatly influenced how I view the world, and I feel they have positively influenced my life in many ways (e.g., trying to live life less wastefully, using nature to ground oneself in reality, evaluating the true total cost of ownership of products of industry). RIP.
It was recently bombed into rubble.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#300It’s fun to drop verbatim quotes from his manifesto into random internet discussions without attribution. A lot of people agree with his ideas without realizing it.
one of the funniest things for me is the fact that many left-wing people add Kaczynski quotes without realizing that left-wing people are basically the first people to be criticized and almost mocked in Ted's main piece, "Industrial society and its future"