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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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The general reaction to Kaczynski is that he makes valid points in his criticism of society and technology and how it alienates but violence he commited was bad and industrial civilization being destroyed seems as a bad solution. He does shit more on the left and makes valid points about leftism creating certain problems at least much more than one of the figures you mentioned and this might also play a factor in how people appraise him.

And there is also an understanding that he did succeed to make people pay attention to his ideas due to violence.

If someone is to reject Kaczynski, I don't see why they shouldn't reject other figures who criticise technology for enabling authoritarianism, alienation, and thinking industrial civilization was a mistake.

If someone is right to do so in that case, they probably would be right with other figures. If they are being close minded, then appeasing them is surrendering to anti-intellectualism based on prejudices.

BTW Simon Weil is not a figure with unblemished history since she hosted Leon Trotsky and was a Bolshevik in her youth. Then as a non orthodox marxist did participate in the Spanish civil war and generally the wiki article has her behave in nutty manner and her suicidal war plans were rejected by both her far leftist comrades, De Gaul until she died through starvation because she wanted to eat what people living under occupation did.

She appears nutty, and her pacifism represents at best only a part of her life, and that is mixed by her philosophy in practice being nuts as she applied it. I believe anyone who hosted mass murderous totalitarian monster Leon Trotsky, deserves a lot of negative points for that alone.

Of course she is treated as more respectable for being far leftist aligned but so what? Its hypocritical to bring her up as an example of an influence of a non extremist sort. Both her initial more marxist ways were deplorable and her move to a more sincere anarchist has been a movement towards a philosophy that hasn't been shown to not be extreme. If anything she shares plenty in common with Kaczynski eventually, that is after she becmae less of a marxist, she made some valid points about society but had an unworkable and extreme vision of the world. And I am not sure she would prove herself a consistent pacifist considering her politics, behavior, and willingness to participate in wars including after writing articles against war she joined anarchists who took part in it and was willing to use weapons.

The reality is if the people who talk about respectability were consistent, much of what they deem respectable which has a problem of extremism of the more leftist, and liberal form would be found wanting. So we are left with appeasing the prejudices of specific crowd or using such claim of appeasing for the sake of respectability as a means of promoting ideological conformity. This is an enormous problem and it is extremely pervasive here.

If you want to focus towards respectability please consider where doing so is a genuinely respectable thing to do, or is it promoting dogmatism and political tribalism.

Anyway, I reject without having to bother with Enul's argument if it is in favor of getting rid industrial civilization for the same reason I reject Kaczynski's. And I assume that like Kaczynski he probably makes some valid points about problems relating to modern industrial civilization. You don't actually need even familiarity with the specifics of the ideas of such people to reject certain ideas they promote as wrong. Although you do need familiarity before pretending that they only promoted nonsense. There can be genuine value there.

I.E. You don't have to engage at all with details of Marxism to think that dictatorship of working class and centralization of all power is a bad idea. But you still got to think of the issue of course for a while. I kind of reject the framing of the intellectual who can make black as white and white as black. There are limits to what someone can reasonably argue in favor of.

TLDR you can reject certain extreme ideas of various extremists (spoiler alert many supposedly respectable figures are extremists), but sometimes there are also in their ideology what is valuable criticism of real problems in a manner that stands on its own merits.

The Internet and probably before 2015. The reason people read his work has something to do with the fame that relates to the violence. It also relates to the quality of his writing, maybe that extreme conclusion influences people to be curious to see what is all about. It does matters that he makes good arguments against alienation of modernity and how technology contributes to it and also the problems of leftism. Although he does not make a convincing case that getting rid of industrial civilization is good.

This doesn't make his violence a good thing. It is true that he succeeded in getting people engage with his ideas by committing violence.