Ted Kaczynski has died • Hacker News Board

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#721

Post by csydas » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #630

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…

> Kaczynski May have said some interesting things That take is strange to me. He reminds me a lot of people I've been close to who suffered mental illness. He didn't want to be considered mentally ill, and his apologists don't like it either, and further, many who focus on his victims and crimes don't like it. But for me, that's the major story about him. It was clear to me the first time i tried to read the manifest…

I think this is an unkind assessment to Kaczynski. What he did was wrong, there isn't denying that, but I think people forget he really was a very good mathematician and that he very likely was a subject in the MK-Ultra experiments without realizing it.

This is not to excuse all his actions as we cannot know really the full extent of the experiment he participated in without a proper understanding of what was going to happen to him and the potential outcomes.

His positions in his manifesto aren't exactly bad positions to take, his actions in bringing attention to it were bad and hurt many innocents.

I think it's possible to condemn his actions while also recognizing his non-violent contributions and the elements in his life that may have contributed to the creation of the Unabomber. After reading about the experiments he attended, it's very hard for me to remove those as a contributor to the Unabomber; they weren't the sole contributor, but I can't imagine having such derision and psychological abuse for 200+ hours without walking out of it maladjusted.

The purpose of such statements I think isn't to excuse Kaczynski's actions, but instead to ensure that we aren't just imagining some video game or movie villain that appeared and the FBI heroically stopped; he was a human being who lived a pretty normal life, and then he changed and became the Unabomber. The latter is extremely sad and appalling given the damage, and I think the latter is made even worse by remembering the former; he used to be a pretty smart guy and contributed well to society.

It's a sad story no matter how you view Kaczynski, but I think that we are worse off if we don't recognize that he was at some point a fairly normal human being, teaching maths and studying maths, who went through a lot of psychological issues, and came out as the Unabomber.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#722

Post by avgcorrection » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 10:42 AM UTC

j9461701 wrote: post #355

murderberry wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Something that blew my mind long ago was learning the scottish highlands used to be a massive forest. Ancient humans clear cut the entire landscape and it still hasn't recovered. That sort of broke the illusion of there being some forgotten past of arcadian perfection, where we lived in one and balance with nature. Humans have always been humans. Exploitative, expansionist, perfectly willing to destroy our long term…

Like the sibling commenter said, this happened during agricultural times. A lot of Europe was deforested during the Middle Ages.

Someone like the Unabomber doesn’t long back to the past of being a Middle Age serf…! Get real.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#723

Post by avgcorrection » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 10:46 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #599

lumb63 wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a different take on his writings than yours. Rather than thinking his solution was bad, he encouraged me to question why we “spend our days improving humanity”. What does “improving humanity” even mean? What’s the metric we are optimizing for? Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ours…

> Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ourselves in. This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could. It’s possible in the same way that anything is possible, but cmon - the world is objectively less violent,…

> This seems crazy to me, leaning heavily on the proof that you yourself obviously are not choosing that life when you easily could.

Yeah, you know who already did that? The Unabomber! And instead of just keeping to himself, he eventually realized by all the development being done near him that Civilization would eventually encroach upon him and keep him out.

As a politics, “choosing that life” is not sufficient because only a small amount of people can do that; it is not sustainable for a large mass of people to opt into that lifestyle since we (at least in population dense areas) haven’t been able to live like that for thousands of years.

The idea that you can just shut up, f off and “choose that life” is a liberal fantasy. But political liberalism is the dominant ideology so that’s the usual response.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#724

Post by FrustratedMonky » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 10:54 AM UTC

bbor wrote: post #586

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, Kaczynski did make some good points. Maybe if he had learned to channel that energy better.

What points resonate with you? With as much sincerity as I can express, I’ve gotta ask: why aren’t you living in the woods if you think the guy who said that industrial society was a mistake “had some good points”?

Oddly, the "why don't you go live in the woods", is the extremist view. Like "if you believe in God, why are you not going to church every day and out proselytizing", "If you are a vegan why aren't you out shutting down factory farms.", "If you care about environment why don't you live in a hut".

Why do you have to be an extremist about something or it doesn't count.

Think this is all the same mistaken view that a lot of extremists have. IF you can't be 100% dedicated without any slips then you are a failure and hypocrite.

So what if a vegan is stuck in an airport and has to cheat once and eat a burger, or I have family over for dinner and we do 'waste' more, or if I am vegan but on Thanksgiving, it is easier to eat some turkey and not argue about it.

You see, your view is the extreme one.

And also there is always Moloch. I may see technology and capitalism heading toward a brick wall, but I still do have to eat and live in the world. I'm not an extremists.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#725

Post by rvense » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 11:04 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #180

timeon wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I truly believe it would be recommended reading in schools and philosophy clubs Andreas Breivik copied large part of it in his manifesto, but then again he is murderer too.

Both are murderers, that doesn't mean they have the same ideas or ideals. Breivik is a right-wing fascist obsessed with racial and religious purity, Kaczynski's manifesto is critique of the Industrial Age not very distant from any 19th century anarchist essay. I'm not sure if he got more politicised in his later work, I'm only talking about that document. The point I'm trying to make is that people are more nuanced t…

> 19th century anarchist essay

I think primitivism is a later invention. Certainly Kropotkin is very pro-mechanization. If there is a point of contention, it's to do with ownership, not technology itself.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#726

Post by denton-scratch » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 11:09 AM UTC

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…

> an excuse for simple evil

What sort of thing does this word "evil" refer to? Is it simply the wish to do harm? Is it evil to want to harm someone that is harming you?

I think the word only makes sense in the context of religious (or pseudo-religious) beliefs about metaphysical forces that drive events. I don't believe in such forces. Believing in evil is like believing in God.

One problem I have with the word is that once you define a person as evil, you've placed them beyond the reach of reason or persuasion. The only reasonable response becomes to remove them completely.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#727

Post by lelanthran » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 11:10 AM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #689

lelanthran wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 participa…

"There's often no point in attempting to find reasons for why someone is evil. " You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them? Short term, sure, but if we want to solve murder in the long term, or just enjoy a stable society, held together by free choice and not fear or domination - then there is really no other choice in trying to understand what makes people go boom, so we can prevent that. The alternative wo…

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

> You mean it is easier to just jail or execute them?

No, I did not. That's you reading something that was never said.

My point is that you cannot say, as you are saying right now, that there is always an environmental reason for why someone is the way they are.

That certainly isn't true. What I've found is that people who go looking for an environmental reason always find one!

What these people don't explain is why all those other people with a virtually identical environment didn't become mass murderers!

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#728

Post by lelanthran » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 11:15 AM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #691

lelanthran wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 participa…

> “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 only TK that went down this particular path.

TBH, if the sample size was small (a dozen or two mkultra subjects), then there's not enough data to tell if it was the environment or the individual.

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.

Simply dismissing all the agency TK had is specious.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#729

Post by blagie » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 11:18 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #442

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…

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…

I don't think anyone disputes that.

However, I think there's a difference between sympathy, empathy, and understanding.

I apologize in advance; the rest of this comment will be a bit long-winded (rambly?), but it's hard to make cultural points concisely:

One of the reactions after World War II was "Never Forget," and we built a whole infrastructure to understand how what happened came to pass. People study many of the most murderous madmen of history, because it's important to understand.

Any serious study will be complex. Germany went from being basically a ruined nation to an economic, military, and industrial superpower in a short amount of time. Hitler did many things to come to power which were effective. The old saying "Mussolini made the trains run on time" isn't quite true, but if he had, any study would show how he did it.

Those are important problems to study. I'll take the Mussolini example, since it's not quite true. Compare two universes:

1) Only Mussolini could make the trains run on time

2) Anyone could make the trains run on time

Which one is more likely to lead to another Mussolini?

This may sound crass in American culture -- there is a tendency to equate any discussion of Hitler with hate -- but I come from a culture which took a different (and I think more effective) stance. We look at what happened, and try to understand, without glorification or downplaying of the problems. The most difficult lies are those which mix fact with fiction, and it's actually important to tease the two apart. If we all acknowledge the facts, the next madman can't use them to support a fiction.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#730

Post by goldenkey » Sun, Jun 11, 2023, 11:23 AM UTC

dudeinjapan wrote: post #704

asveikau wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kaczynski May have said some interesting things That take is strange to me. He reminds me a lot of people I've been close to who suffered mental illness. He didn't want to be considered mentally ill, and his apologists don't like it either, and further, many who focus on his victims and crimes don't like it. But for me, that's the major story about him. It was clear to me the first time i tried to read the manifest…

I'm sure someone else has posted this but... rather than a mentally ill screed I'd say it's a pretty lucid diagnosis of the last 30 years: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-o...

That was a better analogy to reality than the drivel I've read in the last 30 years.