Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I don’t think it excuses it at all but I wonder at what point it would? If MKUltra had removed 70% of his brain, would that excuse his actions?
This line of thinking has always puzzled me. At some point one’s brain must be so compromised that we really can’t expect them to function as a human, but most people’s reaction to that is “excusing” their behavior. If you’re willing to admit that they don’t really have self-agency at that point, don’t they become an object at that point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that bit a child, let alone a…
Ted Kaczynski has died
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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#52Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#53The one thing I still wonder about Ted is actually how many more actually good and thought provoking "manifestos" like his are out there, only for nobody to push them to in the public's eye. After all, almost all smart people that identify uncomfortable truths won't go to extremes to convince strangers of actually giving their non-mainstream ideas a chance.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#54His 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
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#55[flagged]
Ted Kaczynski is more acceptable to like than most terrorists because of MKUltra and since his ideas are more advanced than "my religion is good" or "I hate $minority!". Doesn't mean it's not wrong to bomb people, but he is easier to understand than a guy who brings an AK47 to a concert.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#56Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#57[flagged]
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. It's a lot of disorganized nonsense with a high noise-to-signal ratio. Random excerpts: > 14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men. > 15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civi…
Are those "random"? It seems like you chose them pretty specifically, actually. You seem like you're inching towards a point here, but not quite making one. Maybe you can expand a bit?
> 97. Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what might be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a “free” man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual. Thus the bourgeois’s “free” man has economic freedom because that promotes growth and progress; he has freedom of the press because public criticism restrains misbehavior by political leaders; he has a right to a fair trial because imprisonment at the whim of the powerful would be bad for the system. This was clearly the attitude of Simon Bolivar. To him, people deserved liberty only if they used it to promote progress (progress as conceived by the bourgeois). Other bourgeois thinkers have taken a similar view of freedom as a mere means to collective ends. Chester C. Tan, “Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century,” page 202, explains the philosophy of the Kuomintang leader Hu Han-min: “An individual is granted rights because he is a member of society and his community life requires such rights. By community Hu meant the whole society of the nation.” And on page 259 Tan states that according to Carsum Chang (Chang Chun-mai, head of the State Socialist Party in China) freedom had to be used in the interest of the state and of the people as a whole. But what kind of freedom does one have if one can use it only as someone else prescribes? FC’s conception of freedom is not that of Bolivar, Hu, Chang or other bourgeois theorists. The trouble with such theorists is that they have made the development and application of social theories their surrogate activity. Consequently the theories are designed to serve the needs of the theorists more than the needs of any people who may be unlucky enough to live in a society on which the theories are imposed.
> 116. Because of the constant pressure that the system exerts to modify human behavior, there is a gradual increase in the number of people who cannot or will not adjust to society’s requirements: welfare leeches, youth-gang members, cultists, anti-government rebels, radical environmentalist saboteurs, dropouts and resisters of various kinds.
As I said, a whole bunch of nonsense.
Re: Ted Kaczynski has died
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah I don’t think it excuses it at all but I wonder at what point it would? If MKUltra had removed 70% of his brain, would that excuse his actions?
This line of thinking has always puzzled me. At some point one’s brain must be so compromised that we really can’t expect them to function as a human, but most people’s reaction to that is “excusing” their behavior. If you’re willing to admit that they don’t really have self-agency at that point, don’t they become an object at that point? Like we would have no problem putting down a dog that bit a child, let alone a…