Im not a Kaczynski scholar, so maybe it is possible to embrace the philosophy and come to sperate conclusions, but that is rarely the case for manifestos. They usually make strong positive claims about the necessity and justification of the author's actions.

2) There is a contraction in saying the manifesto has nothing to do with the killings, while its pulication is the primary motivation for the killings.

3) Kaczynski started bombing in 78 and mailed the manifesto to the news in 95. Kaczynski has similar essays before bombing, but at no time between 78 and 95 tried to leverage killings for exposure.

There can exist a corpus of ideas, and there can be actions people take due to their beliefs in those ideas, but if those actions don't particularly have much to do with the actual ideas, we can say one doesn't have much to do with the other. I'd give the New Testament as another example where the idea corpus and actions taken in its name tend to diverge.

The claim "The Unabomber manifesto had nothing to do with bombs" is one of fact and easily refuted by history.

In a parallel universe, someone else could have penned similar ideas and not conducted the bombings. In this universe, the bombings were entirely motivated by the ideas stated in the manifesto.

I think the reason this discussion is frequently had, is that people will read the manifesto, recognize that it discusses some interesting issues in a self-consistent way, and want to discuss those ideas without simultaneously heading off semi-veiled accusations of "are you going to blow stuff up now too?".

In fact, I would argue that considering that the Unabomber manifesto has been inspiration to at least two very intelligent people as they commit targeted murder against strangers, there is something interesting and unusual about that corpus of ideas compared to other writings by other figures.

I'm unaware of any highly educated people who have become similarly radicalized after reading Mein Kampf. Something is uniquely appealing about Kaczynski's writings.

I agree that there's a distinction between having an outside opinion about the direction of society, and becoming a terrorist.

It ultimately comes down to if someone truly believes that the ends justify the means.

In my opinion, deontological morality is primarily what prevents terrorism, followed by individual humility and acceptance of fallibility.

Unfortunately, I think utilitarianism and consequentialism are currently in Ascension in the USA.

For what? The insurance company has to put some guardrails on unnecessary treatments or else the rates for everyone go up even further.

I don’t want to be pooled with a hypochondriac that hits up 30 specialists in a year.

There are a lot of problems with the healthcare system, but it's reductive to point at this one guy and say "you're evil".

And if you aren't going to extend that to others, why should you expect it be extended to you? Do you want someone to, completely apart from the courts, to judge your guilt, and act as your executioner? Because that's the problem. Someone decides that you are guilty, is unhappy with the lack of action by the legal system, and takes it upon themself to bring about "justice".

So, are you guilty of something? Anything? In anyone's eyes?

That's a sensible procedural rule for courts to follow, but I'm not a court. I have no legal or moral responsibility to presume someone is innocent. I exercise my own judgement on the matter.

I agree we don't want vigilante executions in nyc to become more normal than they already are. But don't get it twisted and think that means we are obligated to believe, or act as if we believe, that someone is innocent.

As long as you don't impede their freedom to live their own life. We have laws that prevent you from harming other people. Not only you cannot murder them but there are also laws around stalking, defamation etc.

Nobody is forcing us to like the people who we think are terrible human beings.

It's baffling to me that people are calling this a righteous cleanse when it was purely the murder of an innocent man with a family.

Anyway, it’s the State’s and regulations fault, as usual.

Understanding that the role of a CEO is essentially a replaceable cog in a vast and complex machine is beyond the capabilities of most people’s good-bad moral system, and so it’s easier to scapegoat one guy instead of looking at the deeper structure.

We spawned an emergent disembodied super-human organism called "society" that lives through the action of individual humans like an ant colony lives through the actions of individual ants.

But yet we have the strong need to put a human face on it. We need to attribute agency to something that has behaviour.

In order to explain phenomena like thunder, earthquakes etc, humans throughout history have often felt it much easier to imagine some "person in the sky" being the cause of it.

The same mechanism powers many conspiracy theories. "Global financial system that's hard to understand? Nah, it's just the Rothschilds".

Now, in some cases like CEOs of companies that do harm, it's harder to dismiss the individual responsibility, because there is a freedom of choice that the individual could do.

It's easier thus to pin the blame on that single cog rather than blaming the whole society for not voting the right people who would fix the problem at the root.

But ultimately, if that one cog would refuse to do harm then another person would take their place until the rules of the game would be patched to prevent that.

Punishing culpable people is effective only inasmuch it deters from the unwanted behaviour.

Letting people administer "justice" via violence is not conducive to a just and peaceful society. The side effects of letting that happen will backfire and will undo any "justice" improvements you may seek to achieve.

I think we all can personally loathe big bad CEOs and still think that murdering them is the wrong thing you do no matter what your moral theory is.

It's possible this CEO was fighting to reduce claim denial rates but was squeezed or cutoff from his legal team in every attempt. It's also possible he pushed to deny as often as possible. But until we have evidence, it seems a bit wild to attribute "willingness to work in an influential role at a company massively disliked" with complicity in crimes against humanity. And as you point out, it is never acceptable to use violence offensively against such a person, even if he was foaming at the mouth to hit the deny button daily.

10M is my number but I'm sure all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires on here would be shocked by such a low number.

Anything over that and I'd be quite happy to see them "adjusted" and all the cogs replaced.

I think all of these things can be true. It is possible for one person to be ambivalent about the killing of a bad man, acknowledge that he had a family and that is unfortunate, and accept that the system is flawed and that systematic change is required to materially improve things.

I agree it's fair to criticize executives who are responsible for suffering.

But I also think we have to be very careful with the messaging about that.

Because I don't want to live in a society where we think that violence is an acceptable solution to injustice.

It doesn't lead to a good place.

Yes, sometimes it's necessary. But very very very rarely.

You don't want police to apply excessive force. You won't want innocent bystanders to be shot by the police. You don't want the police to hurt people just because they think they may be guilty, etc. Those things do happen and when they happen people get upset and rightfully so.

Personally, I'm with you. I absolutely don't want justice delivered via a mob or a vigilante without due process or the other protections that a fair justice system is supposed to provide us with.

This is why it's so important that congress, police, prosecutors, judges, and even juries do their jobs. If the people have no legal, accessible, and effective means to get justice they might resort to illegal means to get it. The longer people are denied justice, the more likely it is they'll take it into their own hands.

This election cycle nobody quite focused on healthcare; more abstract culture wars were in focus instead.

You can't blame that on congress and on judges etc. The whole society is responsible. The way we talk (or not talk) to our relatives and neighbors has profound effects on the society you'll live in

There's a lot of space between "knowingly kills people for profit" and "collects user data from an app/works on a manipulative algorithm" which could make it easy for some people to pretend that they aren't doing "real" harm or to believe that the CEO was a "real problem" while they personally aren't.

I hope that the more people are held accountable for what they do (regardless of how that happens) it'll force others to do some self-reflection even if only out of a sense of self-preservation, but I'd be careful about generalizing too much. The people posting here are a pretty diverse lot, and you can find hypocrisy in any sufficiently large group. I wouldn't call HN a "glass house" but it's got a few big windows.

Yes, all of "us" doing it industrial scale and getting paid for it are guilty. Not me, but maybe you.

I'm all for changing the system, but this action likely won't do that.

In his later writing like Anti-tech Revolution he advocated for strategic actions that would make a return to a pre-technological society (apparently 18th century pastoralism or something similar) inevitable, but sort of threw up his hands over figuring how to meet that criterion.

Context for the confused: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_444

It was a sawmill!

When I saw the documentary about him, I remember thinking that he went to such extremes to get away from people, living without power or water, absolutely in the middle of nowhere, only to have his peace shattered by the reopening of some stupid sawmill.

I feel a bit like Ted when my stupid neighbors decide to use their leafblower many times each week.

God forbid anyone should have any peace. Oh my god, a leaf!! I must blow it somewhere else at once!!

Peace comes from within

If everyone made that amount of noise, the area we live in would be completely unbearable.

I wouldn't complain if he only used his stupidly loud blower when some leaves had built up, or used a rake for the three leaves he's blowing every time.

Or picked them up by hand. Or any of a number of different options that don't ruin the environment for everyone within 100m. But no.

Personally, I believe that ruining the environment should have a cost attached. But it unfortunately doesn't, so selfish dickheads gonna dickhead and ruin the environment for everyone.

Let me guess, a leaf blowing aficionado? Giant truck with big manly exhaust driver? Muh rights?

You're being really hostile and assuming the worst of me. You know nothing about me.

I'm just saying that you _might_ be the problem here. I'm not saying that others don't need to be more considerate, but that you only have control over yourself and your reaction.

What difference does it make? Doesn't your peace come from within?

I'll explain why:

>Why do you have a greater right to peace than your neighbors do a right to clean?

I think this was quite a rude statement, somehow even more rude because it was posed in a weak, backhanded way as a question.

It is also a question with the embedded presupposition that I actually do think I have a "greater" right to peace than my neighbors do a right to clean. "Assuming the worst of me".

This presupposition is also irrelevant because moving leaves is not inherently an operation that generates large amounts of noise.

I simultaneously believe my neighbor has a right to clean and also that I have a right to peace. These beliefs are not mutually exclusive and also not measurable so cannot be directly compared.

Notably however, my cleaning does not disturb my neighbors peace.

You don't know me or my situation except what I've stated, which was that I am living next to someone using a leafblower many times per week.

My strongly-held opinion is that there's no legitimate reason to use a leafblower many times a week in a highly-populated area unless you're being a selfish asshole. I think it was pretty clear that I would hold that opinion.

Do you disagree? I don't know because you haven't stated a position, only insultingly and weakly implied what you think my reaction should be (which is: no reaction, lobotomized and happy, everything is ok because I am non-reactive).

If you disagree, then I know where we stand and consequently what I think of your advice.

But your armchair psychology ("what do you think?") I found insulting.

>You know nothing about me.

I know something.

I know that your response to someone being disturbed by a neighbor using a leafblower many times per week was to imply (once again, in a weak backhanded non-committal way) that that person is being unreasonable to think that was excessive, and to offer a pithy one sentence non-solution to the problem.

A "solution" that is basically just me ignoring the fact my own home environment is being ruined by an asshole so I can't enjoy music, read a book or do basically whatever activity I would like to quietly enjoy.

Once again, in my own home, disturbing nobody.

>I'm just saying that you _might_ be the problem here.

Sitting quietly in your own home _might_ be a problem. I mean, what is there to be said about this? Do you want to step back and reflect on how this sounds?

Thanks for your concern. I'm comfortable with thinking my neighbor is an asshole. I don't love the situation, but that's my burden. I don't see any way around that without extreme action.

My original post was an impotent shout into the void, in the vain hope that maybe someone somewhere might be influenced to not be such a noisy asshole. Maybe my neighbor is reading!

>Peace comes from within

I find this pithy response to minimize the legitimacy of my concerns, and also insulting, as if I wouldn't have thought to ignore the noise without this insight.

Do you honestly think I wouldn't have thought to ignore the noise? I haven't tried? Do you actually believe you were offering any useful advice here?

If I didn't care about enjoying quiet activities in my life, and also somehow hadn't managed to discover this insight myself, then your pithy response might be helpful.

Unfortunately for me, I do value my own quiet activities.

And I don't actually see a way to simultaneously enjoy peaceful quiet activities, while also tolerating extremely loud annoying noise. And let's be honest, it's extremely loud annoying noise. Do you disagree?

If you don't have a solution to that conundrum, then perhaps it's best that you don't offer advice.

Sometimes people are assholes and there isn't a solution. I realize that. Unfortunately I'm not capable of being happy about it, as I am not comatose and my peace, the quiet enjoyment that I am supposedly entitled to inside my own home, is unfortunately somewhat dependent on external factors.

So, I'm unhappy about it, and telling me that I'm the problem because I'm not trying harder to ignore that unhappiness doesn't help.

It is actually a very nice area with some pretty fancy homes not far from where his cabin was.

I think it has been long enough to say that the bombings were not productive.

>I think it has been long enough to say that the bombings were not productive.

We can revisit this conversation in another 30 years if you wish.

Ted K made virtually no reference to Ellul in his manifesto either. In either case, both were quite sane. Ted's manifesto is not a philosophical analysis of technology like Ellul or Skrbina. Ted's manifesto is a practical treatise agains technology and its primary thesis is that technological society must be destroyed.

I don't regard him as a philosopher but rather an agitator, not unlike Thomas Paine or (insert your preferred historical figure here). This largely because his writing is not in a spirit of inquiry over where technology might go, rather it is conclusory - industrialism is path-dependent and net negative, with the only open questions being how to undermine it effectively.

He's no different than the many, many cranks writing ill-informed manifestos online.

A book with similar sentiment that is more approachable is Neil Postman’s Technopoly.

And your takeaway is, for me, infantile, naive and dangerous. This guys is not a victim of a system, this guy is a killer, whether we like that CEO or not.

I thought he just wanted to kill any random person who attended the conference.

For the majority? Come on, if you guys don't like private healthcare (and why would you?) then there's a democratic process you can follow to change it. Encouraging executions on the streets might feel good, but it's not going to achieve anything, even if you think it's justified.

This is such a bad taste joke.

This is a joke, right?

Pretty much. Look up "citizens united". It turned USA into an oligarchy. Billionaires are allowed to buy elections, and politicians are beholden to the billionaires.

It's the reality of modern campaigning. People don't give candidates millions of dollars because they like the cut of their suit. They expect reciprocity.

Just because corporate media is supported by big business doesn't translate to the actual politicians being pro-corporations.

Especially when ironically enough big donors towards democrats are almost all ultra-progressive socialist types.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/us/politics/dnc-emails-sa...

https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/04/politics/bernie-sanders-2016-...

Superdelegates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdelegate

"I don't care who does the electing, so long as I get to do the nominating."

- Boss Tweed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_M._Tweed

https://calgara.github.io/PolS5310_Spring2021/Broockman%20&%...

You're talking about national elections, and even then the people will vote for whichever candidate that gets the most votes by the delegates (as Bernie and Trump showed with Trump winning the nomination 3x times, while Bernie got good numbers despite having been seen as an relatively unknown person).

Even in your articles there was never any clear evidence of DNC top officials actively going about directing CNN/NBC to attack Bernie, having email leaks showing the DNC not liking Bernie and thinking of ways they could potentially push against his campaign is not the same as actively doing it.

This of course is fair if you believe we should have the low bar of seeing an offhand comment as incriminating evidence (i.e. if you and I talk about someone we hope could just fall off and die and it turns out they fall off and die - we would be accused for causing said death).

As an example from your second link (https://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/04/politics/bernie-sanders-2...):

> Sanders ran strong and beat Clinton in states like Michigan and Wisconsin, parts of the Democratic wall she would go on to lose in November.

>He trounced her among young Democratic voters, who did not show up for her the same way they did for Obama.

>None of this is to say that Democrats shouldn’t have treated the process differently, but it doesn’t change the fact Clinton dominated the process from start to end. Or that Sanders, surprised by his own success, didn’t have the infrastructure to win a long campaign.

>There’s also the simple fact that Sanders ran in the primary of a party to which he was proudly not technically a member.

>Sanders ran a strong race, to be sure, and surprised every Democrat in the country. That’s beyond doubt. But so is the fact that, despite her flaws, Clinton didn’t need the DNC to win the nomination.

You can critic the superdelegate system 100%, you can critic the DNC's not being neutral, but your claim is that they actively worked against him, despite your links not providing this crucial evidence for such an accusation & the CNN conclusion seems to highlight more that it's likely due to Sanders just not having the infrastructure and long-term cred that Clinton had.

I wonder why she resigned right before the convention.

>Big donors in the democratic party overwhelmingly support ultra-progressive policies:

Here's a list of DNC top donors.

https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties/DPC/2024/contr...

You can believe what you want.

When there's a scandal you tend to try and ensure at the very least to distance yourself from those who caused the scandal, hence why she left "right before the convention", I just do not understand why you want to die on this hill that there's a grand conspiracy to keep bernie from winning the 2016 DNC nomination.

>Here's a list of DNC top donors.

>https://www.opensecrets.org/political-parties/DPC/2024/contr...

>You can believe what you want.

These are corporate donations, which btw Democrats gets more and yet have been pushing for more anti-trust cases and been the most pro-union government in almost 20 years and this is the smoking gun of "corporate shills in the Democrats!"?

And again I bet you didn't read my link did you? When you look at rich partisan donors which has way more direct influence than corporate donors, it does sync up with what the democrats have been pushing for (ultra progressive social issues).

I'm not dying on any hill, especially for the farce that is modern politics. They are all corrupt, both parties. I typically support whomever is in office because I want to country to succeed, and they've all disappointed me.

I'm sorry you can't see it, just keep that in the back of your head when you consume political news. Try to watch both sides, it might become clearer. Keep in mind, each news source has a favorite and they typically won't report on the bad things their favorite does, you have to find that elsewhere. It's like having a defendant with no prosecutor and vice versa.

>These are corporate donations, which btw Democrats gets more and yet have been pushing for more anti-trust cases and

Their remedy for Google is to have them divest Chrome? That's not meaningful at all. How many mergers have they allowed in the last 20 years? Mergers are by nature anti-competitive. They just allowed Activision-Blizzard merger that cost 1900 jobs so far. This is what donations from Google buys, a slap on the wrist by still allowing the Democrats to look like they actually did something; spoiler, they didn't. This also pretty much ensures Google won't face any other anti-trust legislation, at least from the Democrats, probably in my lifetime. Pat on the back, job well done.

Thinking about it, this is the exact same remedy they wanted for Microsoft in the late 90s. That is just for show and no real anti-monopoly remedy. We need real breakups like AT&T in the mid 80s. Something that restores competition and jobs. You won't find any of that from today's Democrats.

Remember when the Obama administration bailed out the banks but let everyone else in trouble lose their house and a deep discount? I sure do.

>been the most pro-union government in almost 20 years and this is the smoking gun of "corporate shills in the Democrats!"?

They have done almost nothing legislatively to reverse the damage the GOP has done to unions. They also support neoliberal economic theory and globalization, just like the GOP. Talk about killing jobs. NAFTA was pitched to the public supported by Clinton/Gore. Ross Perot, of all people was the lone objector in the 1992 race, stating "We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fi8OOAKuGQ

Today's Democrats are all talk and no action because the public buys that and they don't risk their donor's affection. We used to call this "lip service." Keep believing they are actually doing something; and that's what they will keep doing: nothing but lip service.

There's a lot of things that can be justified for the good of society (when in Rome and all that), but I just firmly think this isn't one of them.

People see what they want to I suppose.