Love it. I already am eating from the trashcan, and so on, and so on.

Updates:

The discussion spaces are now on this Discord & Matrix

The Ted Kaczynski Archives is now this website

The various versions of Ted's book Truth versus Lies are now here: Truth versus Lies

A preview of the biography is here: The Ultimate Ted Kaczynski Research Document

Video & audio transcripts I sent Ted are now here: Video & Audio Media

Collecting together a timeline of writing on his brother David was a nice break from writing about Ted, and helped with the biography on Ted, but would still need a lot of work to publish as a biography.

So the mere sadness I feel about crop deaths that happen in the production of bread should prevent me from dumpster diving bread otherwise I'm not truly relating to wildlife with dignity?

Me dumpster diving lots of edible material is fast and means money saved on buying food, which means I don't have to work to earn as much money, which means I have more time I can put into projects I care about like environmental ones. If I was growing a food forest and dumpster diving it would mean I could give away more food I've grown or leave more to wildlife. So, for me, all of that is relating to the wildlife that died in crop deaths with more dignity than I would be if I was leaving perfectly edible material in triple wrapped plastic in the trash.

I'm 6ft 3 and cycle everywhere, a sandwich with wholemeal bread as a snack is a cheap tasty way of getting my carbs in. It might be that I should stop buying it for ecological reasons and crop deaths, but that's not an argument against dumpster diving it.

For me putting the time into dumpster diving bread with whey in it is absolutely me better achieving a goal I decided I wanted to take on with veganism, that of wanting to relate to the world with more compassion.

Seeing animal material from farms always brings the sadness closer to mind of the cruel lives animals live on farms. But, I just would feel that I'd be treating the animal with less dignity letting any of their final remains rot in dumpsters when the material has been used in items like bread similar to the vegan bread that I would otherwise go out and buy.

Eating that animal material for me is about treating the animals’ final remains more similar to the way the animals’ wild ancestors would have been treated after death. So, with more dignity than the way we bred infantile traits into them and with more dignity than the toxic relationship we would be perpetuating by anthropomorphically infantilising them as infant humans who could have grown up to be people who could suffer a worse quality of life worrying about how other people might intend to treat their body after their death.

Further reading on my position:

• Is Freeganism a Positive Form of Advocacy for Legal Animal Rights?

• My Last Will & Testament as a Vegan Atheist

Free talking to the wind: Boringly predictable biological father gave a 3 hour long insult filled lecture/grilling at the end of a family holiday that I went on to see more of my brother and his kid.

He explained his boringly ignorant and rigid views on the world which included the idea that I have a personality disorder for living an unconventional life, and that he's never contemplated getting assessed for neurodivergent aspects to his character because 'no one who lives an averagely functioning working life with relationships under capitalism could have any psychological problems.'

Got told 'we made the wrong choice with [the name] Theo' because he said he should have chosen something more popular to encourage me to fit in. Told my brother to pick something middle class for their newborn on the way, then said upper class if he planned to send their kids to private school.

Said that I started failing from 14, and that he wished he spent more time 'solving the problem'.

Gently disagreed with him on some politics subjects and he said "you think everyone is beneath you."

Basically tried to be a domineering asshole all night, to win me over to his way of viewing the world or kamikaze the connection trying, 'well I can't go soft or it won't sink in' and 'I just want to save you'.

Cutting comments like 'you're the life of the party aren't you?' When I talked about not wanting to work or study abroad because it would mean being away from brother and his kid, he said that 'you don't go see them much anyway'.

Told me his paranoia that I had been the cause of my brother calling him Rob, instead of Dad, said "did you create a 'hate dad club'?"

I could have walked away, but just stoically sat there to see his mask slip and get a refresher on why our childhood was so fucked up.

Told him as I was leaving the airport "cya, let me know when you have 3 hours free to be told how shit your life is. I'll get you into alternative lifestyles."

There's certainly a lot to dislike about his political theory too, for example it's an open question whether in Ted's view some forms of racial and religious conflicts should be encouraged in the short-term, so long as they are stresses useful in breaking down the industrial system:

It seems to me, that there are discontented groups that could be very useful if we could, so to speak, recruit them.

Then when the right moment comes, they will be in a position to strike. The thing is that people will tend to be attracted to a movement not only on the basis of agreeing with its ideas, but if they see it as effective, having a clear-cut agenda, cohesive, purposeful and active.

In certain quarters, there is a rejection of modernity, among muslim militants, and I’m wondering what extent it might be useful to our movement to carry on discussions with the Muslim militants and see whether there is sufficient common ground there for any sort of alliance.

If he were simply that, I might be inclined to support him, but my guess is that his motive is less an opposition to modernity than a desire to create an Islamic ‘great power’ that would be able to compete on equal terms with other great powers of the world. If that is true, then he is just another ruthless and power-hungry politician, and I have no use for him …

Concerning the recent terrorist action in Britain: Quite apart from any humanitarian considerations, the radical Islamics' approach seems senseless. They take a hostile stance toward whole nations, such as the US. or Britain, and they indiscriminately kill ordinary citizens of those countries. In doing so they only strengthen the countries in question, because they provide the politicians with what they most need: a feared external enemy to unite the people behind their leaders. The Islamics seem to have forgotten the principle of "divide and conquer": Their best policy would have been to profess friendship for the American, British, etc. people and limit their expressed hostility to the elite groups of those countries, while portraying the ordinary people as victims or dupes of their leaders. (Notice that this is the position that the US. usually adopts toward hostile countries.)

So the terrorists' acts of mass slaughter seem stupid. But there may be an explanation other than stupidity for their actions: The radical Islamic leaders may be less interested in the effect that the bombings have on the US. or the UK. than in their effect within the Islamic world. The leaders' main goal may be to build a strong and fanatical Islamic movement, and for this purpose they may feel that spectacular acts of mass destruction arc more effective than assassinations of single individuals, however important the latter may be. I've found some support for this hypothesis:

“[A] radical remake of the faith is indeed the underlying intention of bin Laden and his followers. Attacking America and its allies is merely a tactic, intended to provoke a backlash strong enough to alert Muslims to the supposed truth of their predicament, and so rally them to purge their faith of all that is alien to its essence. Promoting a clash of civilizations is merely stage one. The more difficult part, as the radicals see it, is convincing fellow Muslims to reject the modern world absolutely (including such aberrations as democracy), topple their own insidiously secularizing quisling governments, and return to the pure path.”

...

"134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification. It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties). We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology." [Emphasis added.]

...

"150. As we mentioned in paragraph 134, industrial society seems likely to be entering a period of severe stress, due in part to problems of human behavior and in part to economic and environmental problems. And a considerable proportion of the system's economic and environmental problems result from the way human beings behave. Alienation, low self-esteem, depression, hostility, rebellion; children who won't study, youth gangs, illegal drug use, rape, child abuse , other crimes, unsafe sex, teen pregnancy, population growth, political corruption, race hatred, ethnic rivalry, bitter ideological conflict (i.e., pro-choice vs. pro-life), political extremism, terrorism, sabotage, anti-government groups, hate groups. All these threaten the very survival of the system. The system will be FORCED to use every practical means of controlling human behavior."

As well he is now a kind of Machiavellian vanguardist:

(ii) If a member of the anti-tech organization can find a place on the editorial board of a radical environmentalist periodical (for instance, the Earth First! journal ), he will be able to influence the content of the periodical. If a majority of anti-tech people can be placed on the editorial board, they will be able in effect to take the periodical over, minimize its leftist content, and use it systematically for the propagation of anti-tech ideas. ...

How can anti-tech revolutionaries get themselves into positions of power and influence in radical environmentalist groups? The most important way will be through the moral authority of hard work. In every organization which they seek to capture, the communists are the readiest volunteers, the most devoted committee workers, the most alert and active participants. In many groups, this is in itself sufficient to gain the leadership; it is almost always enough to justify candidacy [for leadership].

The [Communists] in penetrating an organization... become the 'best workers' for whatever goals the organization seeks to attain.

...

The current political turmoil provides an environment in which a revolutionary movement should be able to gain a foothold. … Present situation looks a lot like situation (19th century) leading up to Russian Revolution, or (pre-1911) to Chinese Revolution. You have all these different factions, mostly goofy and unrealistic, and in disagreement if not in conflict with one another, but all agreeing that the situation is intolerable and that change of the most radical kind is necessary and inevitable. To this mix add one leader of genius.

...

189. Prior to that final struggle, the revolutionaries should not expect to have a majority of people on their side. History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants.

...

When the system becomes sufficiently stressed and unstable, a revolution against technology may be possible. The pattern would be similar to that of the French and Russian Revolutions. French society and Russian society, for several decades prior to their respective revolutions, showed increasing signs of stress and weakness. Meanwhile, ideologies were being developed that offered a new world-view that was quite different from the old one. In the Russian case revolutionaries were actively working to undermine the old order. Then, when the old system was put under sufficient additional stress (by financial crisis in France, by military defeat in Russia) it was swept away by revolution. What we propose is something along the same lines.

I think similar statements he made after he was arrested make it more likely he honestly thought of himself as an anarchist.

That's not to say I necessarily think he was an anarchist or that the way he thought of anarchism is anything like the way I do. For further reading on this issue see: Is the Unabomber an Anarchist?

Before his arrest:

We call ourselves anarchists because we would like, ideally, to break down all society into very small, completely autonomous units. Regrettably, we don’t see any clear road to this goal, so we leave it to the indefinite future. Our more immediate goal, which we think may be attainable at some time during the next several decades, is the destruction of the worldwide industrial system. Through our bombings we hope to promote social instability in industrial society, propagate anti-industrial ideas and give encouragement to those who hate the industrial system.

...

Man is a social animal, meant to live in groups. But only in SMALL groups, say up to 100 people, in which all members know one another intimately. Man is not meant to live as an insignificant atom in a vast organization, which is the only way he can live in any form of industrialized society.

...

Leftism is unlikely ever to give up technology, because technology is too valuable a source of collective power.

215. The anarchist[34] too seeks power, but he seeks it on an individual or small-group basis; he wants individuals and small groups to be able to control the circumstances of their own lives. He opposes technology because it makes small groups dependent on large organizations.

...

34. This statement refers to our particular brand of anarchism. A wide variety of social attitudes have been called “anarchist,” and it may be that many who consider themselves anarchists would not accept our statement of paragraph 215. It should be noted, by the way, that there is a nonviolent anarchist movement whose members probably would not accept FC as anarchist and certainly would not approve of FC’s violent methods.

After his arrest:

I would like to comment on some statements that were made in reference to the Unabomber’s manifesto in GA 40–41. In an article on pages 21–22, Anti-Authoritarians Anonymous wrote:

"[A] return to undomesticated autonomous ways of living would not be achieved by the removal of industrialism alone. Such removal would still leave domination of nature, subjugation of women, war, religion, the state, and division of labour, to cite some basic social pathologies. It is civilization itself that must be undone to go where Unabomber wants to go."

I agree with much of this. ...

But the removal of civilization itself is a far more difficult proposition, because civilization in its pre-industrial forms does not require an elaborate and highly-organized technological structure. A pre-industrial civilization requires only a relatively simple technology, the most important element of which is agriculture.

How does one prevent people from practicing agriculture? And given that people practice agriculture, how does one prevent them from living in densely-populated communities and forming social hierarchies? It is a very difficult matter and I don’t see any way of accomplishing it.

I am not suggesting that the elimination of civilization should be abandoned as an ideal or as an eventual goal. I merely point out that no one knows of any plausible means of reaching that goal in the foreseeable future. In contrast, the elimination of the industrial system is a plausible goal for the next several decades, and, in a general way, we can see how to go about attaining it. Therefore, the goal on which we should set our sights for the present is the destruction of the industrial system. After that has been accomplished we can think about eliminating civilization.

...

After the techno-industrial system has been eliminated, people can and should fight injustice wherever they find it. ...

How are you grouping people together when you think of 'you lot'? Because for me, I just think he's going to be remembered as a true crime curiosity anyways, so I might as well promote critiques of people with similar politics to him and help with similar mental health issues to him.

Like a popular text on the website is simply 'how to unfuck your friendships' and the discord server for the website atm is a wholesome discussion between people encouraging each other to think rationally about their depression diagnosis.

And here's some nice I think suggested reading topics from the Table of Contents:

--- Suggested Reading ---

Some Lessons We Can Learn

Maintaining Our Humanity

• Holding to Compassionate Principles

• Compassionate Cultures

  • Environmentalist Cultures

  • Radical Buddhist Cultures

  • Radical Taoist Cultures

  • Radical Christian Cultures

Promoting Solidarity

Rejecting Vagueness

• Anti-Authoritarianism is Essential

• Efficient Organizing 101

• Having A Coherent Ethical System

  • Secular Ethics

  • Buddhist Ethics

• Articulating a Future Worth Fighting For

• Connecting Up Our Campaigns Internationally

• Articulating Clearly What We Oppose

  • Labour Exploitation

  • Imperialism

  • Environmental Destruction

  • Civility as an End in Itself

Rejecting Puritanism

• Post-Left Anarchism

  • Various Critiques

• Insurrectionary Anarchism as Primary

  • Various Critiques

• Anti-Civilization

  • Various Critiques

. . .

• Two Potential Antidotes

  • Minimalist Anarchism

  • Pragmatic Left-Anarchism

. . .

--- Broader Topics ---

Education

• Political Science

  • Anarchism

  • Socialism

  • Anti-Imperialism

  • Social Justice

  • Marxism

  • Situationism

  • Environmentalism

  • Transhumanism

. . .

Work

• Campaign Organising

. . .

Leisure

• Self-Help

• Social Skills

• Travel

• Writing

  • Non-Fiction

    • Social Commentary

    • True Crime

    • Cults

  • Fiction

    • Joseph Conrad

    • Dostoevsky

    • Leo Tolstoy

I've started it off here if anyone wants to carry it on: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/crimethink-workers-collective-days-of-war-nights-of-love

Obviously it can be posted to theanarchistlibrary or wherever afterwards, that site just allows half-formatted texts to be published for anyone to be able to carry on working on them.

I can highly recommend torrenting ABBYY fine reader also for the best pdf to word conversions.

Yes, and I expanded on it in my book: https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/theo-slade-disrupting-the-purist-anarchist-pipeline

You people who caricature reasonable anarchist arguments against religion make me ashamed to call myself an anarchist.

Here is an actually coherent egoist anarchist acknowledging the usefulness of applied virtue ethics language:

However, if postanarchism questions this sort of moral foundationalism, can it still maintain a commitment to ethical action? Not according to Benjamin Franks, who argues that postanarchism leads to a radical subjectivism – a moral relativism where the individual, in a solipsistic fashion, determines his or her own moral coordinates – thus, making it unsuitable for developing ethical and political relations with others. This subjectivist position is attributed to Stirner, who, Franks argues, rejects the universal moral and rational discourses embodied in Enlightenment humanism and proposes in their place the supreme individualism and amoralism of the selfcreating egoist:

"However, the alternative [to consequentialist and deontological anarchisms] adopted by some egoist individualists and postanarchists, i.e. radical subjectivism, is inadequate on similar grounds. If subjectivism is right, then it restricts the possibility of meaningful ethical dialogue, recreates hierarchies between the liberated ego and the rest, and cannot adequately account for the creative ego, without recourse to the other social forms it rejects." ...

As an alternative to both Stirnerite ‘subjectivism’ and moral universalism, Franks proposes a situated ethics: an understanding of ethics as situated within, and contingent upon, specific social practices, communities and organisations. Different situations demand different ethical relations and rules, rules which can nevertheless change over time, and are open to dialogue and critical negotiation. I fully agree with this application of ethics, and I see it as a useful way of thinking about ethics in terms of autonomy and pluralism.

- The Politics of Post-Anarchism by Saul Newman

Obviously you can relate to someone as having character vices and virtues without it having any religious component. I'm an existential nihilist, but I wish I had the language of applied ethics to describe subjective ways people desire to act and relate to others earlier on in my life: My Virtue-Existentialist Ethics

I guess I can't entirely blame her, as she was probably traumatized living in a horror movie reality where heads can turn 360 degrees on a swivel.

I'm not adding a tonne of commentary, that's the concern, that the copyright holder will say readers can pick up my book and have read their book without the content having been substantially transformed, so simply costing them the profit on their book.

I'm just presenting it in a slightly different way, with paragraphs moved around into the timeline of his life, with light commentary, some boring paragraphs missing and some other sources added.

Alright fuck it, I'm editing it now to include a bijillion references which will likely take a month to finish working on part-time. If I get fined you have to tell me a place where we can meet so that I can travel to meet you and slap you with a dead fish that I'll find in a dumpster.

I wrote that they sent me a "cease and desist email".

I wrote cease and desist email, first you give me unasked for BS advice, and then you call me a liar, another amazing convo on raddle.me. If I tried to publish someone else's book with just paragraphs moves around, and adding my own commentary, without permission, I wouldn't be surprised if I got fined in court for it not being deemed fair use, I just don't much like risking that possibility is all.

The Truth versus Lies book that I would be quoting from extensively was copyrighted by Kaczynski, even though it was never printed on mass. I would have liked to put up a perfectly re-typed up version on the anarchist library for free, but Kaczynski never responded to my letter, and his publishers sent me a cease and desist email. The rights to use the Aileen Wuornos prison letters were also the property of the friend she gave them to, and copyrighted in a book that she signed a deal on.

And no, my interest in true crime simply has to do with my interest in psychology and political activism to try and bring about a better society where less unjustified violence occurs.

I’m fascinated by outcasts like Aileen Wuornos and Ted Kaczynski because of their desire to find healing in unorthodox lifestyles, before everything goes wrong for them and others.

The surface level fascination is I’m convinced that profound changes in lifestyle are needed, for instance I live a low-impact vegan lifestyle myself, so unpicking the knot of what went so wrong for them is important for me, in order to understand the way it may have negatively impacted their lives, so as to better advise people to avoid those pitfalls.

The deeper level of fascination is to understand what meaning they were deriving from their life and unpicking that knot of how can any person get so lost. Finally, we all walk around with naive assumptions that people we know well could never act in evil ways, if we're ever forced to come face to face with the fact that they are, we have this realization of the ways we were blind to being able to help those people.

For Ted he romanticized nature as a boy in the library, reading books about neanderthals, and wishing he could escape into that life.

For Aileen she had set off hitchhiking and began living on communes from the age of 15 with the hope of doing some psychological healing away from the circle she was stuck in in Troy, Michigan, where she grew up.

This was also a very romanticized road to take at the time, although I don’t think Aileen bought into all of that, as she was simply homeless from the age of 13, and traveling further afield was a nice break from relying on friends in Troy. But, she loved the hippie music of the era and cherished every commune she stayed at for the people who attempted a new more compassionate way of relating to one another.

So for me, that was activist circles, the way people romanized the activist life on the road, and my participation in it was partly to heal wounds from childhood. So, it left me with the understanding that you don't get a choice in the strange situational reasons that different people will be alienated from society enough to join this or that campaign, but you can make the best of the journey all the same.

The idea of people being commended for being part of nomadic culture today is; if you’re able to plug the gaps in various local campaigns, like helping out with cooking for activist soup kitchens and giving workshops, etc.

I set off at 16 for Malaysia on a month long outdoor expeditions trip and got to live with poor rice farmers, and at 17 for earth first gatherings and climate camps, and then was on the road from 19 for many years, going from protest camp to protest camp.

I was looking at environmental groups from tree sitters in California, to food not bombs groups in Indonesia. And seeing this movement learning from each other internationally, that had different social and moral norms, that I was really wanting to explore and see if I could make that my adoptive community.

The same way some people have the willpower to put up with horrible bosses in order to pursue a passion at work, I was OK with putting up with physical hardships in order to get to explore this more co-operative culture in its grassroots form, still developing, trying to become the mainstream culture and politics.