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Note: David Skrbina joins at the 29 minute mark.
In the wake of CEO-slayer Luigi Mangione becoming a folk hero, an anti-genocide fighter getting arrested for targeting genocide perpetrators, and less-defensible non-state-sponsored violence reaching epidemic proportions in the USA, it’s a good time to talk about the minuscule fraction of human violence that isn’t perpetrated by governments.
Philosophy professor and technology critic David Skrbina returns to the Truth Jihad podcast to discuss the hoopla around Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s influence on American young people in general, and CEO-slayer Luigi Mangione in particular. While teaching at the University of Michigan, Skrbina corresponded extensively with the imprisoned Kaczynski and served as his editor. He writes: “This whole issue extends beyond technology to that of any corrupt social system (like health care) and how people might respond.”
Excerpt from the interview:
David Skrbina: Again, that’s, again, an interesting parallel between Luigi and Ted, right? They were both combating a larger system, of which they are a very small part. And so there’s this perennial dilemma of a large organizational structure which is unjust or illegal or needs to be reformed or changed or overthrown. How does an individual or a small group of individuals have any effect on this process? With an organizational structure that contains hundreds or thousands of people, (violence) doesn’t really do any good. Even if you kill one or two of them, the system will just work around it and will replace them and it will move on. So so all you can do is gain attention, gain the notoriety, maybe use that to get a message out, maybe to send a message right to others that that extreme action is being taken by by individual people out there.
So, in Ted’s case, he was willing to take extreme action and he was willing to send a detailed message in terms of the manifesto. We can only guess in Mangione’s case that he’s maybe willing trying to send a message like like these CEOs cannot act with impunity and that they will somehow pay a price for extremely unjust action. I guess we can assume that that’s really what Luigi had in mind. It’s hard to know unless we hear from him directly.
Read the full transcript at my Substack by clicking on the “transcript” button above the image to the right.
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america was a total crapitalistic sht hole with shtty empty people
Have you/had you noticed the sudden emergence of the term “stochiastic violence” leading into all of this?
Both Uncle Ted and Luigi seem (former confirmed; later trending that way) slide in. But stochastic violence is only ok if it is controlled (yes, I get the irony) and targeted so as not to conflict with Overclass/Cabal interests.
The Overclass and its controlled media are responsible for the vast majority of “stochiastic” violence as well as real violence.
I have frequently mentioned Kaczynski’s point of view in my comments on this site, and have been doing so here for years. I wonder if Mangione’s interest in Kaczynski’s writing was provoked by this. A lot of people have heard TK’s name and know him as the mad bomber — he’s become a kind of boogeyman, an internet meme, or folk hero, depending on your POV — but few talk about him or seriously discuss his ideas anymore, especially since his recent death, and the text of ISAIF came out a couple of years before Mangione was even born. The case was well out of the public mind when he became an adult. I have to wonder where he got the idea it might be worthwhile to actually read ISAIF. Even so though, it’s noteworthy that he only gave it a somewhat lukewarm review, four out of five stars, and more importantly, he condemned Kaczynski’s violence in strong terms. If anything, this condemnation is evidence against his choosing to employ similar methods.
The whole case contains so many oddities it makes me think Luigi Mangione is merely a random lunatic; that maybe he’s got a brain tumor or something. Why, for example, would he carry around his silencer and gun, along with other very incriminating evidence? The first thing he should have done is to have gotten rid of the weapon. Why take such pains to escape capture in NYC, only to expose his face and risk capture in Pennsylvania? Very dumb, almost bordering on asking to be caught. He should have hidden out for a few months; left the country maybe, but in any case had a hideout prepared in advance. Why would a rich guy with no criminal record choose to manufacture his own gun, when he could easily buy one, and even obtain a silencer for it? This makes it look like he was just trying to show how clever he was. Why wear a mask almost all the time, but lower it to flirt with a desk clerk at a hostel? That may well prove to have been a fatal mistake, and it was foreseeable and easily avoidable. Why be pissed at UHC, when he reportedly was never even insured by them? His evident sudden change of mind about Kaczynski’s methods is just another bit of irrationality that needs to be explained. And why run away in the first place if he just wanted to “send a message” and be a hero/martyr for a cause? If that was his goal, he should have just turned himself in. It’s a strange case.
What is the truth?
Here’s one! It’s “T Ballad of Ted..”
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