10 Comments

The “franchise for women” is being aggressively reversed RIGHT NOW all across the western world by trans rights lobbyists. I wouldn’t expect you to know it, though.

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Great point. How can one support "women's rights" without recognizing what a woman even is?

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It's surprising just how intellectual and articulate the Unabomber was. But it's even more strange how the progressive Left seems to agree with all of his talking points (e.g. opposition to capitalism, climate alarmism). This is an incredibly insightful article, thank you Michael!!

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This was really lazy. TK did not think the world was ending, like some of your other examples. He thought the world had become less good for humans, and that it should be changed. Much different than someone who is saying AI or climate change will wipe out humanity.

Also lack of awareness of your own assumptions and positions. If you think it is folly to argue that America may be near its peak or end, I guess your argument is that America will last forever? Or that 150 years is a totally sufficient amount of time to know that industrialism is permanent?

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I suspect hardly a year goes by without at least one unsolved bombing. The ones ATTRIBUTED to the Unabomber stoped beccause the FBI, thinking they hads got their man, stoped blaming the supposed Unabomber for whatever unsolved bombing cases happened.

Yes, in modern times, with computers so important to the functioning of the modern police state, a computer scientist who is developing better methods for the government to keep track of people is just as much an enemy combatant as an armed police officer, so he was a fair target.

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I note one factual error in your article: You said, ''At his trial''. He did not have any trial. He was denied that right by procedural manipulation and adverse rulings by the judge and coerced into a guillty plea by the threat of mental hospital incarceration if he insisted on his right to a trial.

It should be noted that around 95% of all criminal cases are settled without a trial by plea bargining. So most convicts in American prisons, guilty nor not, were deprived of the right to a trial and forced to plead guilty.

ALLEGED UNABOMBER HAS DIED

I just saw the news that Ted Kaczinski, the alleged ''Unabomber'', has died.

The FBI searched for 17 years for the person who supposedly mailed letter bombs to several high-profile individuals who were targeted because they were harning the environment or helping develop survailance methods for the police. They called the unknown bomber the "Unabomber".

Several people were killed by letter bombs. At least one more was injured. One of the killed was a public relations hack for the timber industry who was campaigning for the repeal of the Endangered Species Act. Half the population of Northern California stood up and cheered when he got killed. Another was a computer scientist who was helping create better ways for the FBI to track people. Such people are hardly ''innocent victims''.

Then, after massive publicity of the unsolved case. someone claiming to be the Unabomber sent a long Anarchist / environmentalist essay, a brilliant critique of industrial civilization, to the New York Times and the Washingtom Post, offering to stop his killing people if they would print it. After a public debate on the ethics of doing that, they caved and printed it.

https://www.josharcher.uk/tags/unabomber-manifesto-pdf/

Soon after that, a man contacted the FBI and said he recognized the essay, some of it word-for-word from letters written by his brother several years ago. The brother, Dr. Theodore Kaczinski, a former math professor at the University of California at Berkeley, regarded as a genius in his field, was living in a remote cabin in the mountains in Montana. The FBI arrested him and searched his cabin. They found two draft manuscripts of the Unabomber essay, and that was enough evidence to show he wrote the essay, but not that he actually sent any bombs.

His cabin had no electricity, but some of the bomb componants had been hand-crafted in a machine shop, which they never found or could explain how he had access to. The bombs were of different kinds, sent by different methods, to different types of targets, in different parts of the country, over a period of 17 years.

There was no real evidence that there ever was any single Unabomber. It looked like the FBI had spun several unrelated unsolved bombing cases together and thought they were all related and Dr. Kaczinski had taken advantage of the publicity to get the media to publish his work, a brilliant critique of civilization, by claiming to be the famous bomber.

I think the FBI screwed up. They really thought there was a single super-bomber on the loose and spent 17 years hunting for a phantom who did not exist. They had to save face by finding him.

A good lawyer should have been able to get him off since the evidence only showed he wrote the essay, not that he actually sent the bombs, but he was denied a trial and forced to plead guilty by the threat of being found insane if he insisted on his right to a trial.

The judge was obviously either bought by the prosecution or else fell for the media claim that Dr. Kaczinsky was insane, a claim widely believed and often repeated but for which there has never been any evidence presented except articles in the media.. He refused permission for Kaczinski to represent himself despite his obviously having the intelligence and education to do so, refused to allow well-known defense lawyers who had offered to take the case pro bono to represent him, and demanded that he be represented by the public defender's office, which insisted on a defense of mental illness, which would have meant his writings, his intellectual legacy, would be dismissed as the ravings of a madman, something intolerable to an academic.

So faced with the choice between being held ( and probably drugged ) in a mental institution for the rest of his life, or in a prison, where at least his work would still have the respect of that of a sane person, he pled guilty and was given a sentence of life without parole.

He wrote a book while in prison, but was not allowed to publish it.

His brother, who had turned him in with their mother's permission, got the $2,000,000 reward for solving the case.

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After he was arrested, the bombings stopped. Doesn't that rather undermine your thesis?

And do you think other victims like computer scientist David Gelernter were deserving?

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The mega view is that the explosion of civilization based on harnessing carbon based fuels over the last three or so centuries will fade out as those fuels, of which there is only a finite amount, are exhausted. We will then revert to something close to the dark ages.

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Right on cue: my 90 yr old father noted to me yesterday the threat to civilization from AI, as warned by Ted Kaczynski.

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It's ???

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