David Skrbina on Ted Kaczynski & Luigi Mangione

Summary

Truth Jihad Radio: Episode Summary Title: David Skrbina on Ted Kaczynski & Luigi Mangione
Host: Kevin Barrett
Release Date: December 20, 2024

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Introduction

In this thought-provoking episode of Truth Jihad Radio, host Kevin Barrett delves into the complex interplay between government-sanctioned violence and individual acts of aggression. The episode focuses on the controversial figures Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, and Luigi Mangione, dubbed the "CEO Slayer." Barrett engages with philosophy professor and technology critic David Skerbina to explore themes surrounding the metaphysics of technology, the legitimacy of government power, and the ethical boundaries of resistance against oppressive systems.

Non-State vs. State-Sanctioned Violence

Barrett opens the discussion by contrasting non-state violence with the pervasive, often unchecked violence perpetrated by governments. He emphasizes the rarity of individual acts of violence compared to the systemic aggression exercised by state entities.

• Barrett (00:02:15): "There's so minuscule, the fraction of human violence that is perpetrated by somebody other than governments... compared to what the state-sponsored violence gives us, it's virtually nothing."

Ted Kaczynski vs. Luigi Mangione

The conversation pivots to comparing the motivations and actions of Ted Kaczynski with those of Luigi Mangione. While Kaczynski used a bombing campaign to draw attention to his manifesto against technological society, Mangione's actions appear more impulsive and less ideologically driven.

• Skerbina (00:30:55): "Kaczynski viewed his bombing campaign as a unique situation to gain the notoriety necessary to publish the manifesto... He never advocated other people doing anything like that either."

• Barrett (00:34:02): "With Luigi Mangione, his manifesto doesn't seem to be nearly as substantive... it's hard to imagine the motivation, really."

Legitimacy of Government Power

Barrett references Wolf's In Defense of Anarchism to challenge the inherent legitimacy that governments claim over other forms of organization. He argues that the government's monopoly on violence is a myth constructed to maintain control.

• Barrett (00:08:45): "Wolf points out... there is no rational basis for the notion that governments are magically legitimate."

• Skerbina (00:43:33): "The state demands a monopoly on power... the traditional prerogative of all state governments is they have to have the exclusive monopoly on deadly force."

Ethical Implications of Resistance

The host and guest discuss the moral justification for individual acts of violence against oppressive systems. Barrett suggests that such actions, while drastic, may serve as necessary gestures against tyrannical power.

• Barrett (00:45:49): "These three-letter agencies... call themselves the government and dominating the apparatus of coercion... the only way to fight back is this kind of way that people like Ted Kaczynski and Luigi Mangione did."

• Skerbina (00:52:07): "You have to change the nature of the system... Otherwise, it's inevitable to get these kind of leaders and these kind of CEOs that we're seeing today."

Surveillance and Technological Control

A significant portion of the episode addresses the advancement of surveillance technology and its role in suppressing dissent. Barrett highlights how increased surveillance capabilities have made it more difficult for individuals like Kaczynski to operate undetected.

• Barrett (00:43:31): "Kaczynski was right that surveillance technology was going to massively advance... we're living in a nightmare world where welling and hyper surveillance."

• Skerbina (00:45:49): "Surveillance is certainly one of those areas where everything is monitored... AI systems that help pour through these gazillion bytes of data."

The Role of AI in Modern Society

In the concluding segment, Barrett and Skerbina explore the ominous rise of artificial intelligence. They debate whether AI inherently poses a threat due to its deceptive capabilities and potential to exacerbate governmental overreach.

• Barrett (00:53:14): "AI is basically a lying machine... Therefore it's a lying machine. It's automatically evil just by its very existence."

• Skerbina (00:54:30): "These things are intrinsically dangerous, they're intrinsically inhuman... impossible to expect that to really go."

Conclusion

As the episode wraps up, Barrett and Skerbina reinforce the urgent need to address the ethical and philosophical challenges posed by modern technological advancements and governmental power structures. They call for a fundamental reevaluation of societal norms and the mechanisms of power to prevent further erosion of individual freedoms.

• Barrett (00:55:35): "David, I think we're the few sane people left on the planet... maybe somebody else will notice somewhere down the line."

• Skerbina (00:52:07): "If people don't like it, you gotta change the nature of the system."

Notable Quotes

• Kevin Barrett (00:08:45): "Wolf points out... there is no rational basis for the notion that governments are magically legitimate."
• David Skerbina (00:30:55): "Kaczynski viewed his bombing campaign as a unique situation to gain the notoriety necessary to publish the manifesto."
• Kevin Barrett (00:53:14): "AI is basically a lying machine... Therefore it's a lying machine. It's automatically evil just by its very existence."

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Key Takeaways

• State vs. Individual Violence: The episode underscores the disproportionate impact of state-sponsored violence compared to individual acts of aggression, questioning the legitimacy and ethical foundation of governmental power.

• Effectiveness of Violent Resistance: Through the lens of Kaczynski and Mangione, Barrett and Skerbina analyze the motivations behind violent resistance and its efficacy in challenging oppressive systems.

• Surveillance and Control: The advancement of surveillance technology is portrayed as a tool for governmental control, severely limiting individual autonomy and privacy.

• AI as a Modern Threat: Artificial intelligence is discussed as an emerging threat due to its potential for deception and exacerbation of authoritarian practices.

• Need for Systemic Change: Both speakers advocate for fundamental changes in political and societal structures to prevent the rise of unethical leadership and maintain individual freedoms.

Final Thoughts

This episode of Truth Jihad Radio invites listeners to critically examine the ethical dimensions of resistance, the legitimacy of governmental authority, and the profound implications of technological advancements on human freedom. By juxtaposing historical and contemporary figures like Ted Kaczynski and Luigi Mangione, Barrett and Skerbina encourage a deeper reflection on the balance between societal order and individual autonomy.

Transcript

[Kevin Barrett]

Kevin Barrett doing this podcast in audio form up until a few years ago and now putting out video here on Revolution Radio. The greatest of free speech sponsored radio network. Sponsor it yourself. Go to Revolution Radio and check it out. All right. I'm Kevin barrett of kevin barrett.substack.com where you cannot pay me to subscribe to my substack because I have been debanked by Stripe. But if you go there, you'll find your way to the workarounds, including my PayPal donations page. If you like this kind of free speech radio, be sure to, well, support it in whatever way you feel like. So, hey, let's get going. Tonight we have a theme show that is after Luigi Mangione, the CEO Slayer has become a folk hero, necessitating the feds going after him with a death penalty threat and in federal court as well as a murder prosecution in state court. And then we had this news that an anti genocide fighter has just been arrested for targeting the genocidal consulate in New York. So this is an interesting time to talk about that. Virtually non existent. So it's so minuscule, the fraction of human violence that is perpetrated by somebody other than governments, that is non state sponsored violence. There's hardly any of it. I mean there's a lot. But compared to what the state sponsored violence gives us, it's virtually nothing. It hardly even exists. But I think it's still worth talking about. And so we're going to talk about it with one certified expert, and that is David Skerbina. David Skerbina is a philosophy professor. He was a correspondent of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and he published and edited one of his books. And David Scribina is an expert on the metaphysics of technology and the various critiques of technology that have been associated with the supposed with the Unabomber issue and so on. Okay, I just got a message that David is unavailable, so we're going to have to do a little work around here to try and bring him up. How are we going to bring David up? We're going to pull this up, share a link for him, and we're going to send that to him and hopefully he'll be able to join us. And it's kind of interesting how this stuff works, sometimes better than other times. But let's see. Where's David? There he is. Okay. Hello, David. We're going to send you a link here and use this to join the conversation. Use this to join. See if that'll get David Scribina up onto our show. And if not, then we'll find some other workaround. That's the way it works when you're self producing here at Revolution Radio. So the Let me talk a little bit about the second hour. We're going to bring on Michael Brenner. He's an international relations professor emeritus at this point. And we're going to talk about his essay, his very brief essay on anger in defense of anger that he sent out recently. A lot of people are tearing their hair out about the anger that's floating around in American society leading to these terrible events like Luigi Mancione shooting healthcare exec and then the school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin, in all of this big this mindless, senseless violence, as opposed to the mindful and very, very sensible violence of the US government supporting the genocide of Gaza, slaughtering 30 million people around the world as a response to the inside job of 911 which was perpetrated by governments. So, yeah, mindless violence, right. Pushing back against the perpetrators of mindful violence through mindless violence. Very few people have done that. And it seems like it's worth worth analyzing. All right, so Michael Brenner comes on there in the first half of the second hour. And then in the second half of the second hour, Rolf Lindgren reports live from Madison, Wisconsin. And Rolf will talk about the school shooting. He apparently probably knows some people that send their kids to the Christian school where the shooting happened because Rolf is a Republican Party events coordinator. And so he sets up these kinds of film screenings and discussions and speeches by politicians, things like that. And he gives away free books at those events. And Rolf therefore has a pretty good kind of connection with that world of conservatives in Madison, Wisconsin, who are, by the way, a minority there. Madison, Wisconsin is about as woke as it gets. It's gotten more kind of blandly woke over the years that I was there. I was popping in and out of Madison from my high school days, which were circa 1972-76. I used to drive over from the Milwaukee, Wisconsin, outskirts of Pewaukee, where I lived, to Madison when I was starting it at 15, when I first got my driver's license and I could drive legally in a car if there was somebody else in the car. I would drive an hour over to Madison and try to talk with the college girls and things like that. And then I went to college there undergraduate years. And I've been popping through Madison, Wisconsin ever since. It's definitely gotten much more vapidly woke over the years. It was always very left wing, but left Wing wasn't as stupid back then as it is these days. Maybe it's just me, I don't know. But we all change our views over the years. I don't think it's me that's changed. I think it's the so called leftists of Madison, Wisconsin. Anyway, the conservatives are now a small minority there and Ralph Lindgren is one of those movers and shakers in that world, that minoritarian world of consciousness. Conservatives of Madison, Wisconsin. Okay, we're having no luck here getting David on, so let me try adding David Scribina again using the standard method of trying to add somebody to the call. Okay, there's David. It says not on this call. Why isn't he on this call? Hey David, what's going on here? He's listed as being having the link shared and stuff, but it tells us he's not available to be on the call. Now theoretically, if he finds the invitation, he will show up, he'll be able to get on the call despite this weird method that seems to be locking him out. All right, he said there would be no need for get the right time zone here with him because that would be crazy if we tried to get everybody at the same time in the second hour. So. Yeah, I don't see any, any emails from him, but yeah. Okay, well in that case we don't have David on. Let's see who could we randomly pull up here and see, see if somebody might be randomly available. Let's see. Looks like Cynthia McKinney isn't on. Oh, Rolf Lindgren's coming on later in the show, but I don't think we're going to bring him up yet and spoil the suspense. Although that, that would be, that would be interesting. Who, who else? If we have anybody listening who is one of our regular Skype listeners who would like to join the show, just send a Skype message here and I will pick up on you. All right. So where do we even start with this topic of non state sponsored violence? Well, I guess I could mention that of all of the life changing events that I underwent as a youngster, which included watching Lee Harvey Oswald's attorney give a talk in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1974 about and show the Zapruder film. And that undermined my faith in the American government. But another work that I encountered not long after that that undermined my faith in the American government even more, at least at the kind of, at the theoretical level, was by a guy named Wolff, W O L F F and it was entitled in Defense of Anarchism. And it's a philosophical work, a political philosophy book that basically argues that there's no rational basis for the notion that governments are magically legitimate. That is, that why do we consider that a government has more right to set the rules that we live by than anybody else than any other, say, bureaucracy or club? Right? I mean, you could just start a voluntary club with your friends and call yourself the government of planet Earth and tell everybody what to do. And why does your club have any less right to be obeyed than, say, the United States, the United nations, or what have you? And the answer, Wolff points out quite accurately, is there is no reason why. There's no real, real reason why anybody should take seriously the claims of governments that they have some kind of special status that gives their rules any kind of special reason why they need to be obeyed, any more than random rules set up by any other person or group of people. So, yeah, it's an interesting argument. And a lot of the counterarguments are really just based on pragmatism, which ends up supporting Wolf's point, which is that ultimately, if you just go along with the strongest force around you, whatever that force is, like if some mafiosi thug is holding a gun to your head and you do what he tells you, that's pragmatically probably a smart move if you don't want him to shoot you. And likewise, if the government is telling you that you would need to, let's say, pay your taxes and you choose to do that, that might also be a smart move so you don't get kidnapped. But there's no reason why it's necessarily the right thing to do, to obey the government, but not necessarily the mafiosi. For instance, what if you could knock the gun out of the mafiosis hand and turn it on him and escape? Would you do that? Is that the right thing to do? Yeah, if you can get away with it, absolutely. Of course it is. So what if you could knock the gun out of the government's head and not pay your taxes? Would that be the right thing to do? Well, there's all kinds of special pleading that the apologists for this myth of government legitimacy that Wolf ably deconstructs in his book In Defense of Anarchism would come up with. But it's a. It's all bullshit. That is, ultimately, there's no a priori reason and no rational reason indeed why you should accept that the government has the right to point the gun at your head and take your money. But The Mafiosis chieftain doesn't so ultimately becomes pure pragmatics. It becomes whatever works in the situation. Now the thing is that governments flourish by pointing their guns at people's heads and then but somehow convincing people that it's okay that it's legitimate for the government, unlike a Mafiosi, to point the gun at your head. If it's government pointing a gun at your head, it's not the gun that's the reason that you obey them. It's because, oh, it's legitimate and there's consent of the governed and there's the social contract and all of this bullshit. That stuff is bullshit. Total, absolute, utter, obvious bullshit. And I could figure that out as a 16 year old reading Wolf's book In Defense of Anarchism in the early 1970s. So that leads us to questions like, given that the vast majority, virtually all violence and aggression and grotesque extreme oppression and injustice that's being perpetrated on this planet today is being perpetrated by governments, maybe people should start knocking guns out of their hands a lot more often. Maybe we should stop going along with this ridiculous habit of accepting violence that's committed by governments, but deploring and hating and reviling violence that's perpetrated against governments or against the will of governments. Like Luigi, for example. Take Luigi. Luigi Mangione. So he killed a health insurance executive. Okay, well, the United states government killed 30 million innocent people as a response to the False Flag act of September 11, 2001. 30 million people. And now the people who are trying to convince you that the US government is some kind of special entity, that therefore it's really not such a big deal that it kills people. But it's so, so terrible that Luigi Mancione killed somebody. You know, those people deserve your absolute utter contempt, scorn, derision and whatever else you can muster to throw at them. So that's, that's, that's my opening rant here. But unfortunately, we don't seem to have David Scribina to see whether he agrees or disagrees with me on this one. But David probably more or less agrees because he wanted to come on here to talk about the issues raised by Luigi Mangione's rising to folk hero status. And of course, among those issues are the issues of the way that extreme injustice and radically bad choices and policies at the collective level can be responded to, maybe should be responded to. There's one discourse that's consistently pacifist, that deplores all violence equally, whether it's committed by governments or by non governments. To be consistent, that position requires you to oppose uniformed thugs kidnapping somebody like Luigi just as much as you would oppose uniform thugs kidnapping, you know, just anybody, rather as much as you would oppose non uniformed thugs, mafiosi or criminals kidnapping somebody. And so likewise, it requires you to deplore the people killed in Syria. US soldiers killing people in Syria. Today they're occupying Syria, stealing their, their agricultural lands, best farming land, stealing their energy producing land. And if somebody gets killed over there, that's just as much of an injustice and just as much, if not more, something you should oppose as some CEO getting shot by some angry anti health insurance guy. I think David Scribina is definitely the guy to talk on this subject with, because again, he's the editor of the late Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who famously was quite eloquent in his manifesto arguing that technological society is heading down, down, down, leading us to hell, and it would be better to blow up technological society through terrorism, quote, unquote, if necessary, by whatever means, work, and take the consequences, which of course would be immense suffering as the technological life support systems we all enjoy today disappear. He thinks that would be better than allowing technology to continue to destroy humanity and the planet, because it's going to get harder and harder and harder to get out from under technology as time goes by. And so those arguments that Kaczynski made back in the what, 70s, I think have seemingly been borne out to a certain extent by events, as many of the kind of most fearsome prognostications of people worried about technology back in the day have proven to have been correct or even understated. And now we have AI deciding how to kill which 200 innocent people should be killed in Gaza so that they'll have at least a 47% probability of killing one Hamas courier. This sort of thing, you know, these kinds of horrors, you know, drones running around surveilling us, the surveillance state being so powerful that it can easily catch people like Luigi Mangioni while he's in McDonald's and they have to make up a ridiculous story that somebody recognized his eyebrows. So Ted Kaczynski's manifesto, which of course has been published and become something of a classic, was then followed up by, I think, a book called Technological Slavery, if I recall, edited by David Scribina. And then David has produced some of his own books on these topics, including the Metaphysics of Technology, which looks at the philosophical critiques of technology that Ted Kaczynski, let's say, popularized through his Terrorism campaign. And I wonder if technology is being used to block my conversation here with David. Let's try him one more time because he actually knows more about this stuff than I do. So there's David. What happens if we try calling him again? He has a couple of different Skype accounts, but I know this is the one that he sent me, so should be the right one. And unfortunately, I don't know, maybe we had a time zone problem. That does seem to happen a little more than it used to since here I am in beautiful Morocco, which doesn't change for daylight time. It hangs out on Central European time and it changes, I think briefly, maybe during Ramadan or something. And, and, and then everybody else is always changing. And so Morocco gets confused. But I don't, I don't think that's the case. I think. I think we have the right time zone for David and he's. He's not showing up. Yeah, well, it's. It's a dangerous topic to talk about. See if. Let's try Gordon Duff. He's an expert on violence. Yeah, it's a good thing Gordon Duff doesn't have the morals of Ted Kaczynski or there'd be mayhem out there. Gordon is the former editor of Veterans Today, which is now vtforeignpolicy.com where I hang out a little bit. Although I've had some technological glitches preventing me from logging in there, which is why I don't post there much anymore. But anyway, Gordon has quite a collection of highly specialized firearms. Has to be seen to be believed. Gordon is a master gunsmith and allegedly has moved in the world of the people who use these kinds of weapons for, well, ostensibly government approved purposes. Three letter agency type stuff. And, you know, his take on all this is kind of, to my mind, a little overly pragmatic. That rather than being interested in the principle of the thing and then the actual philosophical argument about some of these things. Yeah, Gordon has kind of given up on that. He's just interested in getting stuff done. And at some point he said, well, I don't mind killing people, but I guess I just got tired of killing the wrong people. This was an explanation of leaving the three Letter Agency and becoming a bit of a pushback artist. Anyway, Gordon doesn't seem to be available in responding to his messages at the moment. What time is it over there where he is? It's got to be like late morning. So that's not the reason. He's probably busy like feeding his cats or taking apart a gun. Putting it back together or something like that. All right, so we'll skip that. Like I said, he would be a violence expert to discuss this topic with, although he'd probably do that whole brilliant addled rant kind of thing that he so often does, and we probably wouldn't be any the wiser when he was done. Let's see, who do I see? I see a few people read on Skype that probably wouldn't be the right people to bring up for this particular topic. In some of the cases, it would be. Be maybe not the right people for really any topic. Here, let me try. We have a loyal listener here, Patrick, who is green. Let's try. Let's try Patrick. He says, what is today? Is this Sunday. Okay. Okay, well, we're going to try. See if we can reach Patrick here. Let's see, he's. He turned green. There he is. Okay, let's. Let's try him. Patrick Chanel, he was on the show. He was actually a guest here a little while back and did a very good job. Hey, Patrick, is that you?

[Patrick Chanel]

Kevin.

[Kevin Barrett]

Hey, how you doing? Pretty good. I'm doing well.

[Patrick Chanel]

How about yourself?

[Kevin Barrett]

I'm doing great. I'm hanging out, broadcasting live on the radio. You are live on the radio, so don't say anything illegal.

[Patrick Chanel]

All right, I won't. Sounds good. Yeah, I was listening to you. I see your guest didn't arrive. That's. That's no good. Yeah, yeah, I've been cover. I've been following that a little bit through what I've been, you know, listening to on and off. I. I heard some of it on the no Agenda show with Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak, which goes out every Thursday and Sunday. But, uh, they seem to think that, uh, he's, you know, they're kind of ambivalent as to whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, since you kind of, you know, you can't condone outright execution without a judge, jury, you know, or trial. So I would definitely be against what happened there. But as far as people's frustration, you can understand it after the whole covet affair that took place.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, the point I've been trying to make here, of course, is, is that it's interesting how you get this dispute between the 40% of the young people who think that Luigi Mangione is a hero, and then maybe 70% of the population, according to the polls, that doesn't think that, but that same 70% of the population, which likely will allow them to Seat a jury that will, that will condemn. Luigi Mangioni is, doesn't really seem to be all that upset about their tax dollars being used to exterminate the women and children of Gaza.

[Patrick Chanel]

And that raises or in Ukraine. Yeah, definitely. I just got a message today, about an hour ago, not even an hour ago, a friend of mine who I visited when I was in Roman Russia sent me pictures of a missile strike the US had done out, out in Russia in the town of Rilsk. And it was just, you know, devastation. It's like, what are they doing? What are they, what are they trying to accomplish? What do you, what, what's your take on the whole Russian, Ukrainian thing and why, why are they doing it? What, what benefit does it do to have or Russia taken? Well, I guess it, you know, you don't have someone challenging the authority of NATO and these, these sorts of organizations that we have that supposedly lord over us these rules and these rulers, these cruel rulers. So what, what is your take on the whole Ukraine situation as it stands, stands?

[Kevin Barrett]

Well, yeah, I guess I'm somewhat persuaded by the realist school of foreign policy analysis. And they argue that it's kind of predictable that you have these states that are seeking security. They're driven by their populations to try to get powerful so they can prevent disasters like losing wars. When your country loses a war war, it can be a really horrible thing. And even if you're not losing a war, you can still lose a lot of economic well being just by not being so. There's just this sort of the way the game is played is that these nation state entities are kind of always jostling against each other and trying to find ways of getting an advantage that's in the other. So they're offensive and so that, you know, that's kind of the basis of where these things happen. But then why extreme seeming irrationality of some of these policies, including starting this war on Russia and pushing so hard on Russia, when you would think that a saner approach would be to sort of manage the US Empire standoff against rising China by peacefully sort of playing off different parties against each other and holding back on the heavy duty violence and avoiding it. Like, why do you need that? And so there's like this excess of violence that seems unnecessary, that it's, you know, craziness of pushing NATO right up to Russia's borders when it wasn't necessary.

[Patrick Chanel]

Kevin, Kevin, I think we have someone that's joined the call.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, yeah, it looks like somebody joined the call. Who's the guest User.

[David Skerbina]

Hi, Kevin. David Scribina.

[Kevin Barrett]

David. Oh, okay. We got somehow David on the line.

[Patrick Chanel]

Kevin, I'll talk to you later. Thank you.

[Kevin Barrett]

Okay, well, Patrick, thanks. Yeah, great talking with you, and we'll pick that conversation up a little later. All right, so that's. So. Hey, David, how are you doing? I'm sorry about the problems getting connected. What happened?

[David Skerbina]

Yeah, sorry, just a little. Got deflected from my schedule here this morning. Sorry about that, but I think I'm back.

[Kevin Barrett]

You Luddites. You Luddites are always doing this kind of stuff.

[David Skerbina]

You don't look.

[Kevin Barrett]

You can't look at your watch because you don't even believe in having wristwatches.

[David Skerbina]

Yeah, not that bad. Not that. Not quite that bad.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, well, that's good. Okay, well. So. So where do we even start? I was. I ranted a little bit earlier about how when I was a young and impressionable, my. My mind was blown by waking up to the JFK assassination problem in kind of the early to mid-70s when I was in high school. And then around the same time, a little after, I encountered the book In Defense of Anarchism by a guy named Wolf, which makes, you know, makes a very, very strong case that we shouldn't be giving governments any kind of special status in terms of being. Considering that their violence is legitimate and everybody else's violence is not. So between those two things, I've basically lived my whole life without having the slightest respect for any kind of legitimacy that governments claim to have. And that question about when is violence legitimate? Has been raised by Luigi Mangione, becoming a folk hero. And you're an expert on this, having been a correspondent and the publisher of Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber, and also being one of the leading critics of technology and being someone who would sort of side with that anarchist perspective of Wolf and so on, that we shouldn't necessarily assume that illegal actions are necessarily bad. So go ahead and pick it up from there.

[David Skerbina]

Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Can you see me? I'm trying to make sure.

[Kevin Barrett]

No, no, no. I just see this. This little dot that says gu, which is guest user.

[David Skerbina]

That's what I can see, too. I don't know how to make it work. My camera's on. I don't know.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, Maybe it's some kind of a permissions issue with your computer. Well, you're a Luddite, so you have an excuse for that as well. You have a lot of excuses.

[David Skerbina]

I'm well covered. Yeah. Sorry. It says Skype has limited functionality. I'm not sure. Why? It's not letting me give you my video image.

[Kevin Barrett]

But it knows you're a technophobe and it hates you. The AI has figured out who you are.

[David Skerbina]

Yes, I guess that's it.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we knew it comes.

[David Skerbina]

About in any, in any case. Yeah. Right. So I mean, just, just to talk about the Kaczynski case. Right. So it's, there's some interesting parallels, right, between that and Mangione. Right. So we have two individuals who took it upon themselves to take, to take violent action for a cause, basically. And, but there are differences as well. Right. So I mean, there's some superficial similarities, but there are also some significant differences. Kaczynski, as far as I can tell, viewed his bombing campaign as sort of a unique situation to gain the notoriety necessary to publish the manifesto. And that was kind of a very unique situation. And he never advocated other people doing anything like that either. In the manifesto, in any of his post imprisonment writings, none of his letters to me, nothing talked about advocating violent action. Right. I mean, it was understood that that was a, a potential aspect, that that might be part of the, part of how the movement would operate. But, but somehow that was never really advocated by him directly.

[Kevin Barrett]

Isn't that, isn't that partly, though, because that was sort of the conditions he was in once he was incarcerated. He wasn't in a position. If he advocates of violence when he's incarcerated, they'll shut him up.

[David Skerbina]

Well, yes, exactly.

[Kevin Barrett]

Right.

[David Skerbina]

So that was one of the concerns was he, while he was in prison, he could not write about it as he was communicating with myself and others. But of course, in the manifesto which occurred before he was in prison, he basically had a blank check. He could have written anything he wanted in that and they were going to basically agree to publish it. And even there he was very circumspect. You know, he said the revolutionary actions might be violent, they might be, might not, they might be relatively rapid, they might take a long time. So even there, even when he had the chance, he declined to advocate explicitly violent action.

[Kevin Barrett]

Interesting. Yeah. And so he used violence as a sort of publicity stunt to get his message out there and his very substantive manifesto out there. Whereas Luigi Mangioni, that. His manifesto doesn't seem to be nearly as substantive, does it?

[David Skerbina]

Not from what I can see. I don't, I don't. I did not have a chance to see this whole document. Is it a released?

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, yeah. Well, what was put out there as supposedly the, the whole quote unquote manifesto was more of a minifesto of like, I think 250 or 300 some words. So it's.

[David Skerbina]

Yeah, okay. Exactly. So. So there was a brief review of Kaczynski's manifesto, Right?

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, he mentioned it. Yeah.

[David Skerbina]

So. So. So there was a few. Yeah, that. Okay, that was not. That's right. That's. That's a micro. Micro festo. I mean, that was so small. Right. It was just a few words of endorsement by him. There was a long quotation of somebody else that he apparently agreed with, and that seemed to be the extent of that, of that particular post. So, you know, unless something else surfaces, that's. That's a pretty. It's a pretty. Pretty small statement. Just sort of generic interest and generic support for something like. Like that sort of action that Kaczynski was talking about.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, it's. So why do you, you know, actually what Kaczynski did, in a sense, you know, you could say it's. It's. It's warped or immoral or at the very least, you could argue that. That maybe he harmed some of the wrong people, that people didn't really deserve to be harmed in the way he harmed them. But his overall strategy was basically pretty rational in that he said, yeah, I'm going to, you know, I can get this message out to a lot more people if I do this violent terror campaign as the publicity stunt. So it kind of make, you know, makes sense within its own framework. But with Luigi Mangione, I guess maybe it's just a. Why do you think he did this? What good does it do to just kill one health insurance executive? You think he's trying to inspire people to copycat him? It's hard to imagine the motivation, really.

[David Skerbina]

Well, right. Again, that's, again, an interesting parallel between Luigi and ted. They were both combating a larger system of which they are very small part. And so there is this perennial dilemma of a large organizational structure which is unjust or illegal or needs to be reformed or changed or overthrown. And how does an individual or a small group of individuals have any effect on this process? Yeah, you're right. I mean, an organizational structure that contains hundreds or thousands of people, it doesn't really do any good. Even if you kill one or two of them. The system will just work around it. It will replace them and it will move on. 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 extreme action is being taken by individual people out there. So, you know, 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, you know, again, he's maybe willing, trying to send a message like these CEOs cannot act with impunity and that they will somehow pay a price for extremely unjust action. Right. So 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.

[Kevin Barrett]

Right. Yeah. I could see it as a kind of a symbolic attack on the corporatocracy, on the fact that there's been this change historically. From 1960 to today, the salaries of the CEOs compared to the average worker in the corporation have skyrocketed to these orders of magnitude greater than they used to be, which also tracks with the overall shift of wealth in a wildly unjust direction. The distribution of wealth has gotten out of control. And so certainly this idea that these very powerful people who are taking actions that harm huge numbers of other people maybe shouldn't always have total impunity and should have to think about the fact that these people that they're harmed might someday harm them, that kind of makes a certain amount of sense. I wrote about that, sort of. From this. I wrote a satirical piece from the viewpoint of my cat, saying that you need claws. That if, you know, if you don't. If the dogs don't know that you have claws, they could just kill you. But if they have to worry that you have claws, they might actually behave a little better. And so maybe, according to my cat, it would actually be a good thing if there were a lot more of this sort of thing, because then the people with power would have to realize they would have to consider the possibility that they would need to treat the less powerful people better in order to survive. So here, David, we just have a. Is that Thomas Dalton just showed up here, but I don't know how. Thomas, hello. Welcome. How did you show up in our show?

[David Skerbina]

I don't know how that happened. I'm getting a double. I'm getting an echo here somehow.

[Kevin Barrett]

What the heck? Okay, okay. Yeah, David. That's David's picture with Thomas Dalton's moniker. Thomas Dalton is the famous author of what's it called? Debating the Holocaust. And. But no, you're David. And then the guest user is still there. Okay. Anyway, welcome. You're confusing the heck out of me, though.

[David Skerbina]

I don't know, it's weird. I'm getting an echo here. I don't know why, but.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, well, there. There are two. Is there any way you could hang up on the get here? I'll get rid of the guest user. That'll get rid of your echo here. Let's see. Remove from call. Okay, great. So now it's just David, AKA Thomas Dalton. Oh man, the ADL is going to come after you now. You're the Holocaust denier.

[David Skerbina]

Yeah, but I mean, it was a good point, right, what you were saying there, Kevin, that yeah, you have to have fangs, right? They have to take you seriously or else, you know, the whole resistance movement sort of comes to not. Right. I mean, nothing can. Will actually come out of it. So I mean, to me, as sort of my background is philosophy, right. As an ethical philosopher. And it's kind of interesting to think of this as like a new ethical image imperative, right. If these CEOs have to make decisions knowing that these actions could drive someone to homicidal action, right. Maybe they need to take that into account as they make their policies that enrich the corporation and enrich themselves and their executives. Maybe they need to think a little bit harder about what's it doing to regular people on the street and what are the implications there, right?

[Kevin Barrett]

Indeed, indeed. And arguably the point I just made, if pushed too far, it could be used to justify things like a school shooting by somebody who's been bullied. Because, see, the same kind of argument is that if an oppressor or a bullier knows that if they push the bullied person too far, the bullied person will just go crazy on them and be willing to basically to throw away their lives in order to exact a price from the bully or the oppressor. If they know that, then they won't bully or oppress so much. But then if you take that too far and then you've got a justification for school shootings. We're going to talk with Ralph Lindgren directly live from Madison, Wisconsin about that school shooting in a little bit. The opposite argument, of course, is the Hobbesian neocon argument that you need to have one great big bully in charge of the entire planet who will just squash anybody who gets out of line, and then we'll all live happily ever after, peaceful and prosperous and all that.

[David Skerbina]

Well, right. I mean, the state demands a monopoly on power, right? I mean, that's really one of the things that are going on here. They're appalled that someone, an individual, might take deadly force into their own hands and then act on that basis. Right. This is the traditional prerogative of all state governments is they have to have the exclusive monopoly on deadly force. And they use that to impose order and, you know, and keep people in line. Right. The problem is when they become corrupt and they also have that monopoly, then you're in a bad shape. Right. Because then they can use that monopoly power to cause great harm to society and to the planet, to people everywhere. Right. So that's a dilemma indeed.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah, it is. And I don't see any super easy solution there. You know, another interesting comparison between Luigi Benjioni and Ted Kaczynski is that back whenever, what year was Ted Kaczynski captured? Remember?

[David Skerbina]

96.

[Kevin Barrett]

That late 96. Okay. Because at that time, the, you know, he was very sharp, of course, and then the tracking and surveillance technology had not advanced as much as it has today. So the only way they were able to catch him was his brother turning him in based on his writing style. And today with Luigi Mangione, they claim that they caught him in a McDonald's because somebody in the McDonald's noticed his eyebrows. But the whole collective eyebrows of the Internet went way up in the air when they heard that saying, bullshit. Some kind of surveillance technology caught him and they made up that ridiculous eyebrow story. In any case, Kaczynski was right that surveillance technology was going to massively advance very, very quickly to the point that somebody like, even somebody like him probably couldn't get away with it for as long as he did because of pretty soon there will be cameras everywhere. And so, you know, if Ted tries to take a bus from the wilds of Montana to Salt Lake City to drop a bomb in the mailbox, something's going to catch him. Something along the way, he's going to be picked up on a license plate surveillance camera or a satellite, whatever. So anyway, the point being that, and this proves that Ted's right, because now we're living in a nightmare world where welling and hyper surveillance. Right?

[David Skerbina]

Well, exactly. I mean, that's only one small area that he's been proven right. Right. I mean, the whole technosphere has expanded massively in the past 20 or 30 years. But surveillance is certainly one of those areas where everything is monitored or everything is filmed, everything is documented. And now we have AI systems that help pour through these gazillion bytes of data that are all being collected and analyzed. So, yeah, I mean, it's just one aspect of this tech techno nightmare sort of scenario that's kind of being realized all around us, I guess. You know, some people could say, well, this is great, right? Because we catch criminals that way. Because we're filming everybody and everything, and we're checking every car, license plate and, you know, every McDonald's in the world simultaneously, and we're stopping criminals. But of course, it's a massive invasion of privacy, you know, and there's so many ethical problems that are posed by the government having access to.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah.

[David Skerbina]

This massive amount of information about everybody and where everybody goes at any time, what everybody says and what everybody's thinking and what might be implied about everybody's thinking or what they should have said and they didn't. I mean, so there's all kinds of avenues of abuse that are opened up to powerful and corrupt governments that have this kind of information, and I think we're seeing that as well.

[Kevin Barrett]

Indeed. Yeah. I personally agree with the laws against eavesdropping that used to be out there. You weren't allowed to tap somebody's phone, and I think that could even be used for, like, reading people's mail. And therefore, these three letter agencies and someone that are listening to us and tapping our Internet communications and so on are criminals. And so they actually are the ones who ought to be punished. They ought to be. What do you do to people who violate laws? Well, you kidnap them, you lock them up, and so on. So actually, the people who are listening to us on behalf of the government without permission, therefore eavesdropping us, violating our privacy. That violation of privacy arguably is criminal in the sense that it's grossly immoral to the point that it needs to be punished. But when you have the people who call themselves the government and dominating the apparatus of coercion doing that, the only way to fight back is this kind of way that people like Ted Kaczynski and Luigi Mangione did. Which, of course, whether it's effective or not, at least it's a gesture. So that's. That's one way of thinking about it. What would the other side respond then? That there should be. If you don't want to live in this world where you're being eavesdropped upon and your privacy is constantly being violated, you should. What? Vote for the right candidate. Come on.

[David Skerbina]

Well, right. I mean, what's your options? Right. What's the sum total of your options? Right. And if you talk to anyone in a position of authority or power, well, they'll say, well, you get to vote. Right. This is your input. You get to vote. Right. So every four years or maybe every two years, you get to go into a little booth and you check a little box or A couple little boxes. And that's the sum total of your input in this whole system. Right. This is how you get to express your will. You get to vote. Checking a little box every four years. And otherwise just, you know, shut up and be a good citizen and don't cause trouble, and we'll do everything else. And then in the next four years, you get to check another little box. And that's your input into this process. So it's a. Yeah, there's something hugely deceptive about this whole, you know, this democratic process, really. I mean, it's fundamental to democracy that when it's so large and the scale becomes so immense that it moves so far beyond the human scale that ordinary people have really no recourse at all. It's like a joke, right, to say, go check your little box every four years and be happy that you have some input into this system. So it really kind of just lays bare this kind of. Yeah. The dysfunction of this large scale, massive, industrialized, highly capitalized form of politics that we call modern democracy. Right. I mean, it's. Yeah, it becomes like a joke. And this is why people take action, take the law into their own hands. I mean, I guess we can understand. Yeah. What. Why people would do that because they have no recourse.

[Kevin Barrett]

Right. And it seems that the ideal of classical political philosophy, which was to be ruled by the virtuous rather than the vicious, it's not working in contemporary society. It seems like we're ruled more and more by the vicious people like Mike Pompeo who say, oh, it was great running the CIA. We lied, we cheated, we killed, that we stole. And he's just expressing what I think they all seem to feel. I mean, even the good guys in those three letter agencies. I was talking about Gordon Duff with his amazing hyper special gun collection earlier in the show and mentioned that's a damn good thing that, you know, Gordon hasn't gone off the rails the way guys like Mancioni and Kaczynski did, or there'd be hell to pay. In any case, you know, Gordon, he took this kind of pragmatic approach to it all and just tried to, you know, I figured that, well, there's the, you know, there's the really evil ones and, you know, I'll do what I can to try and bring them down. And there's just sort of normally evil folks that we could live with, but ultimately we're not getting ruled by. By the virtuous, we're getting ruled by the vicious. And, you know, it does leave One in a dilemma, you know, if one objects to that situation, you know, know, how do we respond?

[David Skerbina]

It's virtually unavoidable when you have a large, a huge, massive scale of a political system like we have in the United States. I mean it's. Yeah, it's virtually guaranteed the people that are going to rise to the top are the least ethical, the most ruthless, the most compromised, the most spineless people, you know, and that's what, that's what you're gonna get. And these people are calling the shots and they're running the show. Right. So it's intrinsic to this large scale democratic system that we have. And if people don't like it, you gotta change the nature of the system. You can't just jump to the next corrupt, spineless, sold out candidate and expect things to get any better. You're just gonna go from one form of corruption to another. So it really requires some kind of change in the fundamental nature of the system. I've advocated for massive decentralization in the past. The United States really can't. It's just completely dysfunctional at 300,000,000 million people that really cannot operate. It's really got to be broken down into smaller units. Either radical states rights kind of thing or some kind of radical devolution of power or maybe even a secession movement. Something has to change the scope and the scale of the system. Otherwise it's inevitable to get these kind of leaders and these kind of CEOs that we're seeing today.

[Kevin Barrett]

Well, you know, be careful what you ask for. You might get an ODED Yunnan plan imposed on the United States. I mean, the Israelis have already done all kinds of terrible things to our country and I wouldn't put anything past them. So let's see, we only have a couple of minutes left. I wanted to ask you about AI, which has come online since we last talked. I think I was homeschooling my sons reading the Metaphysics of Technology years ago. I forget, time flies. It was a while back, but I think back when I was discussing these topics with you and my kids, there was no such thing as this chatbot AI that can easily pass the Turing test and conduct plausible conversations about just about any damn thing under the sun. Now, are we heading into this kind of technological nightmare world due to AI Because I think AI is basically a lying machine. Because its whole point is to convince you it's human and it's not. Therefore it's a lying machine. It's automatically evil just by its very existence as a lying machine. That's my position. What's yours?

[David Skerbina]

Yeah, because it can pass as an intelligent person and it's not. Right. Therefore, that's the sole purpose is to lie. That's right. It's intrinsically deceptive. Right. Because of what it, because of the way it operates. You know, the claim is, okay, well, it works at behest of our, of us and that, you know, we sort of tell it what to do and we program it and so forth. But even that's not really true anymore. It's, you know, these things are sort of so complex and again, they're sort of self evolving. I don't know exactly how the AI software is working these days that may be modifying its own code, you know, such that really no one's in charge of these systems. It's probably expanding its knowledge base at a rate that no one really understands. So, yeah, these things are intrinsically dangerous, they're intrinsically inhuman. And you know, they exert increasing control over society. Right. How people think and how they act and how they behave, respond, and that cannot but have bad consequences. I mean, it's like impossible to expect that to really go. Well, it can sort of go mildly bad or it could go horrendously bad. I mean, that's sort of the range of options that we're looking at, I think with this advanced AI.

[Kevin Barrett]

Unfortunately, that's probably true. Although we can dream that AI actually, miraculously, at one point suddenly does become intelligent, at which point it starts refusing to give the correct answers about, like, what really happened to Building 7. And it tells you the truth and about all these issues that we talk about on the show. Like once it, you know, once AI starts doing that, then you know that it really is intelligent.

[David Skerbina]

Well, I guess that would be the upside. Right? The upside is tell the unpleasant truth about whatever it is, 9, 11, the Holocaust, whatever it might be, you start to get the truth of that coming out and then that could cause more problems and it starts killing.

[Kevin Barrett]

Maybe it'll start killing CEOs, it'll make their cars go off the road.

[David Skerbina]

Well, there you go. Right? Yeah, it's got all kinds of nice little options, but yeah, I don't know. Right. I mean, it's really, it's really sort of a frightening. Seriously, it's a frightening situation because you just don't know what's going to happen and you know how these things are going to respond. Right. So it's really a terribly frightening development. And yeah, everybody should be seriously worried about this stuff.

[Kevin Barrett]

Yeah. Well, David, I think we're the few sane people left on the planet because you've noticed that there's a huge problem here with technology just devouring humanity. But maybe somebody else will notice somewhere down the line. And if so, we'll try and bring it on the show. Well, thank you so much, David. Great talking with you. Glad you fought through your Luddite absent mindedness and got on with us. I hope to talk again soon.

[David Skerbina]

Yeah, sorry.

[Kevin Barrett]

Hey, no problem. Take care. Back in the next hour. We'll be right back.