its not about the ideas. i dont have a problem with his ideas, i have a problem with how he goes about spreading them. that's why we should not allow this.
"How he goes about spreading them" - unsuccessfully? He's spent the last twenty-one years in prison. He will die there. That, and the pointless harm he did a few innocent people, are the whole extent of his legacy.
I'm impressed to hear that you don't have a problem with his ideas. I certainly do! I went into some detail about that, not long ago: https://aaron-m.com/2017/07/09/on-kaczynski
Perhaps I have failed to take your meaning here. But the trouble with an idea is that you can't kill it by excluding it from what we please ourselves to regard as polite discourse. Kaczynski isn't the only radical anarchoprimitivist in the world. Don't you think it might be a good idea to give food for thought to the next one who might be thinking about blowing people up?
Part of a philosopher's job is to take seriously ideas that no one else much does, and the modern breed tends to thrive on controversy because it shows they're being heard. I suspect that's a lot to do with why Skrbina uses Kaczynski as a hook on which to hang a fairly quotidian, if not to my mind misguided, opinion that our increasingly intimate relationship with technology poses a meaningful risk of deleterious effects too subtle to be obvious in the short or even intermediate term.
I don't think it does much, to help his thesis gain traction, that he should argue it the way he seems to do. But that's his mistake to make, I suppose, and even he strongly disclaims the "blow shit up and kill people" part of Kaczynski's analysis - and that's the only part of his analysis which is genuinely original; Against His-Story, Against Leviathan, just off the top of my head, predates Kaczynski's publication by over a decade.
So I'm not sure that we really can add one otherwise obscure adjunct professor to one otherwise forgettable NYT opinion columnist and end up with meaningful uptake of anything that Kaczynski actually had to contribute, rather than simply an early attempt to find in anarchoprimitivism what value may be there to synthesize with the culture in which we live. A subtle distinction, I concede - but, I maintain, a worthy one nonetheless.
> Perhaps I have failed to take your meaning here.
I cannot pretend to know what timwaagh thinks, but it seems overwhelmingly plausible to me that his comment communicates the view that Kaczynski's behavior turned irretrievably inexcusable at the point when he resorted to actual violence.
