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Ted Kaczynski has died

nytimes.com

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Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#811

Post by bondarchuk »

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…

If you don't mind, what would you say is the most worthwile of Ellul's books after The Technological Society and Propaganda?

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#812

Post by spiralx »

SllX wrote: post #682
PartiallyTyped wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

> 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. In an effort to understand your post, I ran those through the English Wiktionary which some may not know, also has foreign words. αιτιολογώ: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%B1%CE%B9%CF%84%CE…

Are you talking about the difference between proximal and ultimate causes? As in the proximal cause of these people dying was an explosion from a bomb set by Kaczynski, while the ultimate cause was that the things that caused Kaczynski's poor mental health that led him to those actions.

Separately I like the phrase "a reason is not an excuse" quite a lot. I can empathise with people who make terrible decisions and understand their reasoning, but that doesn't make me excuse the choices that they made.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#813

Post by spiralx »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #718
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…

Our cities are full of mentally ill people living on the streets. Are they a ticking time bomb? was Kaczynski? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65867291 His crimes seemed to begin shortly after he was fired from the family business by his brother for posting abusive limericks to a female colleague who had dumped him after two dates. From there he retreated to the Montana wildness and to the cabin he had built…

Engineers are famously over-represented amongst terrorists, so probably.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/magazine/12FOB-IdeaLab-t....

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#814

Post by bondarchuk »

lelanthran wrote: post #666
sam2426679 wrote: post #604

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. '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 participa…

>After all, the other participants didn't turn into serial murders, now did they?

I've seen this argument a few times in this thread, and I hope I can explain my disagreement here. Even if not everyone subjected to this experiment becomes a terrorist, and even if there is something specific to Ted K.'s psychological makeup that made him become a terrorist after undergoing the experiment, that does not mean we can totally shift the blame away from the experimenters. Suppose that in the parallel world where he did not get experimented on, he would not have become a terrorist, we can still blame Murray (and/or the CIA) for taking (abnormal and extreme) actions that turned him into a terrorist.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#815

Post by spiralx »

shrimpx wrote: post #784
avgcorrection wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. Ask an anthropologist if this is true. You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards. I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (…

> I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society. My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level o…

Really “cavemanship” was small tribes with basically a socialist economy and that only scales so far, what we have today is 14,000 years worth of societal progress towards social structures that can support more than 150 people who all live together and know each other. If we fell back to that state we'd start developing past it as soon as there were enough resources available to support more than that amount of people - the end result might not be what we have today, but it probably would be more similar to it than to the starting point.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#816

Post by lanstin »

armitron wrote: post #797
lanstin wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating how good writing and surface intelligence can make absolutely insane ideas seem sensible. Deductive reasoning is, unfortunately, not absolutely reliable for people who have pattern loving brains and good enough memory to make long chains of deductions; evaluating the entire chain as a gestalt and with an eye towards the great amount of data we lack, about the present and past and true material causes, is…

Can you point at something in his manifesto that you'd classify as an "absolutely insane idea" ? I have the vague impression that people either don't engage at all with TK philosophy -but are happy to pass verdict nonetheless- or if they do, simply can't handle the cognitive dissonance that arises and immediately reach for quick relief ("madman", "insane ideas", "MKUltra" etc) Few if any called Ellul a madman or char…

“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” First sentence. Does he object to the diminution of child hood death or violent death, or in his mind does being alienated from nature (fixable in principal by personal choices) outweigh the death of ones children? Totally insane.

On a more personal note, I am always getting panicked by emails from virus vendors about some grand new threat till I walk around for fifteen minutes. I bought toed shoes believing it would transform my experience of walking and hiking. I worried about Congress canceling NPR back in the 90s. When I try to remove some plastic toxic stuff from my diet,mit is extremely hard to avoid a big slide into “purity eating” where a choice to make a slight alteration to the effects on my world i to a matter of moral virtue. From “less antibiotics for the chickens slowing the spread of anti-biopics” to “why do you ask me to consume this swill of the devil?!” Is a small delta in my mind.

For a year or so I listened to all kinds of crypto podcasts or YouTubes / twitter spaces, and it was never long till people brought up anti-vax or global finance conspiracy ideas. I have watched flat earth / scientist debates, and the words of the flat earthers don’t parse as insane.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#817

Post by lanstin »

coldtea wrote: post #780
lanstin wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 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 mo…

No other metrics really compare to chance my children will die early.And I lived a couple of decades past, and I am happy to still be alive, and looking forward with interest to the next few decades. If you don’t enjoy your time here, consider therapy, biking, a religious community, meditation, and a strong social network.

I do particularly look forward to the highways being dug up and rewilded, while we get around with Cat Buses or blimps or jet packs. I didn’t get the idea you were advocating that we improve what we have; it came across as what we have sucks and we need to go back, back to the closet, back to less power, back to less information, back to the culture of conformity for the powerful and the culture of fear for the oppressed.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#818

Post by ly3xqhl8g9 »

msla wrote: post #808
ly3xqhl8g9 wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those mentioned are ecofascists, especially not Simondon [1], that was the point: the true radicals destroy the future worlds, not directly the present one. Alan Turing destroyed all the multiverse branches [2] in which we don't use computation. Norman Borlaug [3] destroyed all the multiverse branches in which we don't have high-yield wheat. Perhaps an even better parallel would have been Alexander Grothendie…

You're throwing out a lot of names to defend a White Supremacist Fascist named Ted Kaczynski.

Reading comprehension is certainly irrelevant if one is interested only in their tunnel-visioned thesis.

At no point the impromptu syllabus from above defends anyone or anything. In fact, it is so tame it didn't even mention more problematic, although arguably important and interesting, works such as Martin Heidegger's [1]. To think referencing someone as Günther Anders defends fascism is just too ludicrously functionally illiterate for any other words to be further possible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Techno...

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#819

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

cogman10 wrote: post #511
LawTalkingGuy wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To paraphrase 'ole ted "You see, affirmative action makes white people feel bad and mad at black people which is the real secret goal of leftists". No. It's more like "Leftist activists push AA and other policies with no concern for the impact on the communities they're purportedly intended to help." > Do you, or have you ever, felt mad a black person because of affirmative action? I'm pretty sure you could find a…

> I think the point is that activists don't care about collateral damage. I disagree mainly because of this: > Helping black people is not their real goal. It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral. His point is more that "leftist crave power and hate themselves so they'll push policies to punish their race and social class using a moral justification. These poli…

> It's a weakening of Kaczynski's argument to say it's about activists not caring about collateral.

Maybe, but what you say here isn't supported by the bit you quoted.

That bit actually seemed completely level headed and well written. He defined his terms (leftist) and admitted it's a sloppy term, and then he wrote something I feel is true about most political ideologues - that they care more about their arguments and winning than the correctness of the arguments or value of their opinions.

> He absolutely mixes in there insinuations that this is all by some secret design.

Again, maybe in the overall manifesto, but not there. In the quote provided he just says "Xs works for the goals of X, even if their message is 'Save the Ys'"

That's not hard to believe, it's something we all need to try to avoid in our own thinking.

> ungodly amounts of paper writing about the motives of the leftist.

:D Have you ever read what leftists themselves write? You could fill libraries just with analyses of Marx.

I think the scary thing is that Ted is very well read and could be writing for the New Yorker ... and he justifies violence.

But not because he's the only one doing so, he's just the one who decided to take it into his own hands instead of the acceptable ways to call for violence - to advocate using our military to do it, or hoping that someone 'punches' them for 'being a nazi'.

He's scary because he disproves the narrative of a barely literate, ignorant, conservative-adjacent, god-fearing, terrorist who hates us because of our freedoms, or whatever. He is us, one of the best of us at one time, and we can be vicious.

Re: Ted Kaczynski has died

#820

Post by halothane »

matkoniecz wrote: post #657
californiadreem wrote: post #32

Anyone 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…

> Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead I refuse to read or become exposed to some ideas because one of their proponents murdered people. I want this strategy to be less effective, not more.

Would you apply the same logic then to Winston Churchill, the British monarchy and its government? Under the guise of "civilizing natives", they were responsible for exterminating and murdering large sections of the population across Ireland, Africa, India, Middle-East and East Asia. Churchill was racist and a terrorist to many in the colonized world but was a prolific author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature. What's the difference between him and the unabomber?
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