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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26326 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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I can't disagree strongly enough.

I don't know or care about Ellul, or Weil. I know and care about Kaczynski, and the reason I know and care about him is because he was willing to commit violence in service of his ideals. The very fact that he is willing to kill or die live in prison for his ideals gives them weight that simply writing never can.

The reason is simple: it allows the following: if you're critical of technological progress, you're endorsing the worldview of a domestic terrorist.

Ted was a man of both words and actions, where too many people are simply men of words. That engenders admiration, and rightly so. His "domestic terrorism" was him following his thoughts to their natural conclusions and then acting on them. It is that last part that is so rare, and it is the last part that gives the Unabomber the long shadow across history that Ellul can't ever match.

I don't care if he was wrong or right, not really. I admire him for being willing to risk his life and his freedom on ideals, so long as those ideals have the least bit of appeal to me.

This is fallacious thinking. Anyone can kill for any ideal, so admiration for the willingness to go that far is a dubious reason to care about such a person or what they wrote. Imagine someone who wrote about and then killed for the preference for waffles over pancakes. Sure, they had the courage of they convictions - which might be inherently admirable to a degree - but its not a good reason to care about them, what they wrote, or their ideas. Jihadists routinely kill for their ideals, and they're full of bunk.

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