He stopped because he was arrested. At that time they found two completed bombs in his cabin, so he was planning to renege on his deal not to plant any more bombs.
As asinine as it sounds, I agree with them. In this specific case, there’s no reason to believe that a completed bomb is the same as an intent to bomb anybody. I’d be surprised if any 20-year veteran bomb builder didn’t have a couple fully-working prototypes, the same reason I’d be surprised a 20-year veteran coder had no fully functional prototypes.
Crafting is crafting, whether you’re doing woodworking or killing. Is it impossible to believe that someone like Ted might find bomb building every bit as gratifying as we find programming?
He was unhinged. But it’s hard to argue he wasn’t a master craftsman. Few lone-wolf bomb makers survive 20 years without accidents, let alone evade authorities till their family turned them in.
I know very little about Ted, and almost nothing about his philosophies or any of the subject matter. But it seems entirely consistent and reasonable that there would be deployable bombs that were sitting around for unknown amounts of time when he was captured.
Dude’s a murderer. I’m glad he was stopped, and it’s sad he wasn’t caught on day one.
I agree. And history shows that it’s important to acknowledge skill in situations like this. One of the primary reasons Germany was so deadly to my ancestors is due to the oratory genius of one man. I’ve been reading though The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which is a fantastic and dispassionate analysis of such evil. It makes you question what might’ve been different had others studied the means by which evil people exert power, as Ted has done here.
Remember, authorities weren’t able to catch him. His family turned him in. It’s only through luck that his spree came to an end. That alone makes his particular case worth intensive analysis.
Is there? Whoops. I’ve been doing it wrong for about 20 years now.
(My sense of humor has gotten me in hot water more than once, so I may as well go all-in. Probably a matter of time till it nips me though.)
In seriousness, the goal here is to have curious conversation, and follow that curiosity wherever it leads. I agree it sounds asinine, but think of the sheer number of details he had to get right merely to survive. He was one inch away from blowing himself up, quite literally, for years. I’m not at all ashamed to point out the obvious skill required.
If he pulled the pin on a few grenades and casually tossed them at people, we’d be having a different conversation. But he built things, just as we do. Certainly a different kind of thing, as you say, but he was still a builder.
It was a live bomb. You don’t just keep live bombs sitting around your house unless you plan on using them…
Also wait what even is this comment. Why are you just praising the Unabomber unprompted? That’s not what the person you’re replying to was even talking about…
I'm not claiming to know the timeline, but he could have built them before "the deal", then made the deal and decided not to plant them.
Innocent until proven guilty. There is more than enough evidence to put away Teddy K for life. Lean on real evidence. Don't stretch the truth and muddy the waters for the innocent. Your line of reasoning could be used to convict the innocent.
There was only one live bomb found and he did intend to use it.
> Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post.
Don't do victims of terrorism a disservice by suggesting a mass murderer deserves the benefit of the doubt as to whether he has any qualms about reneging on "deals" made with a society he doesn't respect. His calculus for who got to live and die hinged on factors as arbitrary as nitpicking over which periodical was willing to publish his bullshit. He was a fucking Narcissist to the extreme, who would waste no time coming out of retirement at the next perceived slight.
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't apply to the fucking Unabomber. Bombing people is kind of his thing. He proved it, what, 16 times?
I'm not defending him. I'm simply stating the fact that him having a bomb in his possession is insufficient evidence to convict him of the crime in question.
I am exonerated by fact. The prosecutors did not have enough evidence to convict him of a crime related to the live bomb they found.
What are you going to do to argue against that? Deny history? It already happened. He wasn't convicted.
I didn't even call you out, yet here you are acting like you've been personally attacked. You weren't. Whatever your fascination with Kaczynski, his manifesto is only of significance because of his terrorism. We're better off that he was found, arrested, and convicted.
Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted. (I'm not arguing this evidence doesn't exist.)
I don't get what the big deal is. We already have more than enough evidence from his previous plantings to convict him as a bomb planter and put him away for life. Is it just that you can't compartmentalize and separate the two things in your mind?
Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt.
It's analogous to coming up with one counterexample to disprove something in mathematics.
I can reasonably theorize that he fully intended to stop bombing people based on this "deal". There. Done. I can doubt he planned to bomb people in a reasonable way.
The onus is on you to remove all reasonable doubt. You have not done so by simply showing that there are bombs in his cabin. He could have built them before he made the deal to stop bombing people. That's a completely reasonable scenario.
>Again, that's the standard for criminal punishment. Not moral judgement.
I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
> And have you heard of civil law? Despite the high stakes that's usually decided based on the preponderance of evidence.
Unrelated. Please, do share a link where Ted Kaczynski was convicted of a crime in connection with the unplanted bombs in question, because that's what I have been talking about in this entire string of comments.
I am exonerated by fact. Ted was not convicted of a crime for the unplanted bomb because there was insufficient evidence to do so. End of story ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
> I never said anything about moral judgement. I was never talking about moral judgement.
"Just because he bombed people previously doesn't mean he intended to do it again. You have to have stronger evidence, like writings or postage stamps, to prove beyond reasonable doubt that these two bombs were going to be planted."
"He is doing moral judgement and that one requires only reasonable probability."
"Yeah but I only have to come up with a reasonable doubt."
Aren't those lines all replies in order? Then you're using "reasonable doubt" as a couterargument to a moral judgement.
I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
Sorry, I really am trying to be as charitable as possible with my interpretations of these comments.
I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
> I should have made it more clear that "Yeah but I only have to come up with..." meant "With respect to what I claimed..."
That's fine with respect to your claims, but it means your claims can't be used as-is to counter other claims that aren't on the same framework. Those people aren't trying to convict him.
> I just hate to see people conflate emotion with logical soundness and validity. Appeals to emotion are human and valid and expose interesting points, but I can't stand to see them used to tear down the intellectual value (whether or not something is logically true) of ideas.
I don't think anyone is doing that in this thread? "he stopped because he was arrested" isn't an invalid takedown of his ideas. There was a mention of ideas further upstream, but from that comment on they don't come up.
I suppose it would be like how the U.S has a history of using nuclear bombs, has a bunch more assembled and ready to be used, but claims to have no plans to actually use them.
