The first type:
Although this was quite the story 30 years ago, I have no interest in preserving this structure and potentially romanticizing or mythologizing it like we did with the outlaw murderer, Jesse James. Please don't speak of this killers hut in the same breath as Thoreau's or Lincoln's cabins. I say put a match to it and post the video.
The second:
Saying this may put me on a list, but everyone should read his manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future." It's one of the most compelling and profound analyses of what ails the modern world I've ever read. Just to be clear: just because his ideas are worth engaging with doesn't remotely justify his barbaric crimes.
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44 comments:
Having an NYT reader praise the insane leftist/anarchist rantings of a terrorist murderer is about what I would expect.
To many people, especially libtards, nothing objectively good or bad. It all depends on who/whom. You can bet that if Kacynski had been sending letter bombs to lawyers or Hedge fund managers, the NYT's and some of the readers wouldn't be so "romantic" about him.
When are we going to romanticize the mason family. Weren't they "rebels" trying to "change society"?
Can I vote for both? He was a bad person who did bad things and keeping his cabin serves no purpose but his manifesto is also worth reading.
Oh if he'd only mailbombed a health insurance CEO, what a heartthrob he could've been!
"Is It Wrong to Write a Book With A.I.? The nature of authorship isn’t as straightforward as it seems"
"The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race."
Seems he was concerned about high tech taking over and running our lives. Memorable scene in story about his capture, FBI agents in a car, middle of nowhere, 2 lane country road, no traffic visible for miles in either direction. Stopped at red light, waiting for it to turn green before they drive off. Following the rules.
Guy was a crazy terrorist, but was right in some respects. Every commenter here is concerned about getting our computer hacked and our info stolen. Hospitals are shut down for ransom when hackers access their systems. etc.
ChrisC, if you think he was pro-leftism, you are mistaken. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
Need a cabin?
"If it says Unabomber, you got a good one."
/Boston accent
Fullmoon,
2-lane country roads in the middle of nowhere, Montana have *stoplights*???
Go ahead and pull the other one.
Planned personhood is neither novel nor engaging. Redistributive change schemes are a plague on civil viability. Labor and environmental arbitrage through Green schemes, immigration reform, outsourcing, womb farms, etc, are transhumane and myopic.
Wasn't Ted Kaczynski basically turned into the Unabomber by the CIA?
"The scene you described is a pivotal moment for the protagonist, FBI profiler Jim "Fitz" Fitzgerald (played by Sam Worthington). While driving home late at night, he comes to a complete stop at a red light on an entirely empty road. As he sits there waiting for the light to change, despite no other cars being in sight, he has a realization about how technology and societal systems exert control over human behavior—a core theme of Ted Kaczynski's (the Unabomber's) manifesto"
"stopped at a red light in the middle of nowhere
The movie (specifically a television miniseries) you are thinking of is Manhunt: Unabomber"
People willing to murder strangers for their ideas usually have far-out, semi-insane ideas, but the correlation is not absolute, and there are exceptions. After the Unabomber was arrested, someone made a quiz in which half of the quotations came from his manifesto, half from Al Gore's 'Earth in the Balance'. Average score was 50% because the ideas were indistinguishable. The Unabomber's ideas were not all that far out, it's just that he thought they justified killing strangers. (Luigi Mangione could probably say the same, though I haven't examined his ideas.) I seldom have anything good to say about Al Gore, but at least he doesn't believe in killing those who disagree with him. To repeat: extremism and terrorism are not always correlated.
@Boyd, lol. I wonder how much news he had access to before he died and if he saw the CIA turn into the Unabomber.
P.S. And there are plenty of extremists who are entirely non-violent, like the British guy, David Icke (accent on the 'ick'), who thinks the world is ruled by shape-shifting aliens, including at least one of the Bushes, at least one recent Pope (I forget which), and Queen Elizabeth II. That's about as extreme as one can get, but, to his credit, he doesn't encourage his followers to try to kill our alien overlords.
I wonder if Kaczynsky would have contributed something valuable to mankind if he hadn't been experimented upon by mad scientists. He spent 20 years in Supermax. Was anyone ever held accountable for what was done to him?
Lots of people see the modern world as a gross mistake, full of inferior beings, but very few send bombs to essentially random strangers.
If you don't have a manifesto you're just half assing it.
Lots of people see the modern world as a gross mistake, full of inferior beings, but very few send bombs to essentially random strangers.
Exactly.
"Saying this may put me on a list"
All the cool people are "on the list", don't be loser.
Kacynski's writing is full of gibberish, nonsense, and fantasy and should be thought of as the absurd rantings of a lunatic who wasn't happy just to leave society - he had to do his little part to wreck it. You don't like the modern world, fine, go live in a hermit's cabin. Let the rest of us enjoy modern life with all its attendant possibilities and problems.
Leftists and utopians are suckers for a manifesto, any manifesto. They dive deep into a complicated dream and wallow in abstractions. If you've ever tried to slog through a postmodern, deconstructionist, "Critical Theory" journal -- all the same, all overwrought, all derivative of Marxism (aka secularized Christianity seeking heaven on Earth).
Conspiracy theorists who look for universal principles.
I think the technology is not as bad as the malleable people
The prof played by skargaard notes that will needs to be guided otherwise he could go astray
Robin williams asks why
Mentions a brilliant mathematician
Ted kazynski
Yes he was given lsd so was whitey bulger but pathology is rare
Its like the super soldier (it amplifies your nature)
I didn't RTFA but who TF paid for that shit? Assuming you and me.
They should auction it off. Don't worry bidders, we won't put you on a list or anything.
Bob Boyd,
Kazcynski did contribute to the world of mathematics before the went off the deep end. Look up Kazcynski and footnote for one of the most understated footnotes in a scientific.
"On a personal level I like McVeigh and I imagine that most people would like him, but assuming that the Oklahoma City bombing was intended as a protest against the U.S. government in general and against the government's actions at Waco in particular, I will say that I think the bombing was a bad action because it was unnecessarily inhumane." - Ted Kaczynski
These kinds of contradictory blind spots are prototypical of the schizoid personality disorder and express a kind of 'glitch' in otherwise high-function/high-IQ individuals. It's the same kind of thing that made a man like Oppenheimer rethink his career, but won't motivate him and 99.9% like him to send fission weapons to randos in the mail.
It's ironic that Kaczynski's most useful contribution is an increasing awareness of self-isolation in people like him. He was a path-psych goldmine to the FBI. Some people might know a person like Ted, and if they've become a recluse maybe find out what they're up to.
Ted Kaczynski committed terrible crimes and was punished severely. But he was made an unwitting subject of mind control experiments by agents of the US government. He was only like 16 years old. A student at Harvard. A prodigy. Who would do something like that? It was monstrous, regardless of what Kaczynski did after that.
How those experiments affected him is something we will never know, but what I do know is, what they did to him was evil and wrong and no one was held to account and no one ever will be. He wasn't the only subject.
I've never read Kaczynski's manifesto and I'm not really interested in it. I'm not defending Kaczynski or justifying his crimes, just as I'm sure those of you who seem to be certain Kaczynski would have done exactly the same thing if he hadn't been made a guinea pig are not defending or justifying what was done to him by the CIA.
Even Sherlock Holmes’ Prof Moriarty, the Nepoleon of crime, wrote a monograph on the Binomial Theorem. To Victorian Englishmen the binomial theorem was high math, Gilbert and Sullivan’s modern major general could prove it. Now 6th graders can prove it, by induction.
I remember that SNL had a Batman type song about the Unabomber many years ago. They claimed they were not praising him by doing it.
They should put his shack into the Smithsonian as part of an exhibit about how hard it was for the FBI to find the guy.
Future generations will wonder how, given the level of their police state, it took more than a day to bring him to justice.
...everyone should read his manifesto, "Industrial Society and its Future."
I second this. Ted Kazcynski may have been mad, but his critique and insight was profound for someone writing in the 90s
Sister in law read manifesto, recognized his style and notified fbi.
Read the manifesto if you want, but engage with it, argue with it, don't just agree with him.
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I remember the Philadelphia connection in "Manhunt: Unabomber." The other FBI agents laugh at Worthington's character for pronouncing "water" "wooder." Then he has the eureka moment of realizing that if the manifesto were published someone would notice its stylistic peculiarities. I wonder if that's really how they came to that decision.
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Interesting how Henry David Thoreau's come under criticism in recent years. Was that because Kaczynski?
We’re coming up on the 30 year anniversary of the FBI fucking up the Olympic Park bombing investigation.
The FBI profile of the Unabomber was a fucking joke. We were lucky his brother turned him in after the NYT and WP published his manifesto.
Then Robert Hansen.
Then the anthrax investigation in which Mueller and the boys tried to destroy Steven Hatfill with the help of the Grabd Jerkoff Nick Kristoff.
I recall reading the Manifesto those brief decades ago. I have, undoubtedly. imperfect recollection of the specifics. But IIRC there were some gems that, in hind sight, were reasonable warnings for the technological world as it has changed. There were also a lot of hidden turds of insanity. Those WTF dude moments that color the whole.
Go ahead, tell yourself it was a brilliant, cogent guide if you wish. I'll pass.
"Just to be clear: just because his ideas are worth engaging with doesn't remotely justify his barbaric crimes."
So, NYT commenter, how deeply do you "engage" with the ideas of Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, Jim Jones....?
They did the love note to the ayatollah so
"just because his ideas are worth engaging with doesn't remotely justify his barbaric crimes."
The trouble with this comment is the Unabomber's ideas necessarily lead to his actions.
"Unabomber's ideas necessarily lead to his actions."
Thomas Jefferson's ideas could "necessarily lead to" bathing the Tree of Liberty in blood every 10 years. Does that mean we throw the Constitution out? Humans are complex.
It's almost as if there's an instinct to virtue signal that we don't condone mass murder:
"Hey guys, let me show you just how much I don't support mass murder! Ted adopted a rabbit? Bet I hate them more than you. Bunnies aren't just cute like everybody supposes!
They've got them hoppy legs and twitchy little noses!
And what's with all the carrots? What do they need such good eyesight for anyway? Bunnies! Bunnies! It must be bunnies!"
(sorry, I had "Buffy goes to Broadway" on my bingo card)
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