Manhunt: Unabomber - Discovery's new scripted series on the hunt for Ted Kaczynski

I never said anything about crazy. I said he was a paranoid schizophrenic.
Are we done?

There were political motivations to place the "crazy" brand upon him. It was the "happy meal" diagnosis the public would consume and accept. But is was far from the truth...

The guy wasn't crazy or a paranoid schizophrenic. And no amount of "paid for" diagnosis will change that.

He was declared competent to stand trial even by corrupt psychiatrists.

End of story.
 
Are we done?

There were political motivations to place the "crazy" brand upon him. It was the "happy meal" diagnosis the public would consume and accept. But is was far from the truth...

The guy wasn't crazy or a paranoid schizophrenic. And no amount of "paid for" diagnosis will change that.

He was declared competent to stand trial even by corrupt psychiatrists.

End of story.

Are we done? I didn't rattle your cage buddy, Ted was living secluded from society in a shack in the mountains, his journals and his actions show that he was delusional. The guy 100% suffered from mental illness, he was sending bombs in the mail to stop technological progress.
 
I assume you want to talk about it or are you in a "no spoiler" zone? I'll put some of my thoughts in a spoiler tag and you can click it or not.

Ted did his bombings from 1978 to 1995. His manifesto ended up being 35,000 words long but the main thrust of the idea, as taken from Wiki, is the following.

Kaczynski states that technology has had a destabilizing effect on society, has made life unfulfilling and has caused widespread psychological suffering.[89] He argues that because of technological advances, most people spend their time engaged in useless pursuits which he calls "surrogate activities", wherein people strive towards artificial goals, such as scientific work, consuming mass entertainment, following sports teams, etc.[89] He predicts that further advances in technology will ultimately result in "extensive genetic engineering of human beings, so that man in the future will no longer be a creation of nature, or of chance or of God," and that "social systems will not be adjusted to suit the needs of human beings. Instead, human beings will be adjusted to suit the needs of the system."[89] He states that "[m]any people understand something of what technological progress is doing to us yet take a passive attitude towards it because they think it is inevitable. But we don't think it is inevitable. We think it can be stopped,"[90]

How close is he, or how accurate is he to today's world? I think he's spot on concerning where society has gone as a result of our industrial revolution and then technological revolution. Computers and entertainment have become ubiquitous in society. We have an epidemic of fat kids because most of them don't go outside anymore, they play on ipads and computers and their friends are mostly online friends for many of them. That's just one example of dozens of negative effects that Kaczynski feared.

I find the guys story incredibly fascinating because he was a math prodigy, attended Harvard, was a professor at University of California, Berkeley at the age of 25. That's the youngest professor ever hired by the University of California at Berkeley. He was a P.h.D. in Mathematics. How smart was Ted? Check this out. When he wrote his dissertation on Boundary Functions, his dissertation advisor had this to say about it.

Kaczynski's doctoral thesis was entitled "Boundary Functions".[32] Regarding the thesis, Kaczynski's doctoral advisor Allen Shields stated it was "the best I have ever directed".[30] Maxwell Reade, a retired math professor who served on Kaczynski's dissertation committee, also commented on the thesis by noting, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it."[31

My point here is what happened in this guy that made him end up the way he did. Was he so smart shit just drove him nuts or what? This is not your normal lowlife killer story. Kaczynski's story is unusual in scope.

We've talked about this before, but my main concerns regarding technology have to do with the Internet. There are times where I think that we were living in a better world before the Internet came along.

Sure, some things weren't as easy as they are now. But the Internet has also brought problems into our society as well.

Ted was wiley like a fox. He was all about natural man, untainted by technology and he actually put tree bark in his bombs. The F.B.I. knew it had something to do with nature but couldn't figure out what was going on completely. Ted would leave them false clues to make them look in the wrong places and waste their time. He would sign the bombs with initials FC so they would have to guess who or what FC was. There were many different false clues he gave them.

The guy was wicked smart. Like I said, they never would have caught him if not for his brother and I've never heard of an F.B.I. agent figuring it out. This is taken from a 1996 article and it specifically mentions his brother figuring it out and reporting it to the F.B.I.

But even Unabombers are not infallible. Exulting in his apparent mastery of the FBI, the master criminal made his mistake, in the form of a 35,000- word treatise on the "Future of Industrial Society", which he submitted to the Washington Post and New York Times. If they published the rambling, anti-technology manifesto, the writer said, he would cease his campaign. After much soul-searching, the two papers did so on 20 September 1995, on the advice of the FBI.


Relatives in Chicago were struck by similarities between some of Ted Kaczynski's earlier writings and the rambling musings of the Unabomber's tract, and eventually his brother informed the FBI. And so the trail of 18 years, dotted with 200 detained suspects along the way, led to a hand- built cabin near the Continental divide. But the tale may not yet be over.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/have-they-now-caught-the-unabomber-1303341.html

Even though it's going to spoil me somewhat on the show, I went ahead and did some digging. Apparently the FBI agent's name is Jim Fitzgerald. From one article I found:

Fitzgerald had already clocked 11 years as a police officer and another nine years as an FBI agent when he received his first assignment as a young criminal profiler fresh out of training: the Unabomber case. In 1995, the Unabomber mailed a 35,000-word, anti-technology manifesto to the Washington Post and New York Times, threatening to blow up a plane if they didn’t publish it—and promising to stop his attacks if they did. Fitzgerald urged the FBI and attorney general to convince both newspapers to publish the screed.

“I was very adamant about that,” Fitzgerald says. “A few bosses were against it. We didn’t want to cede to the demands of a terrorist. I said, we may run that risk, but there's so much in the way of idiosyncratic language features, someone will recognize it — a teacher, a professor, a friend, a family member.”

He was right. On September 19, 1995, the Washington Post published the manifesto, unedited, and soon after, a man told the police that the writing sounded just like his brother, Theodore Kaczynski.

Fitzgerald set to work comparing the Unabomber’s prose to Kaczynski’s, and his 50-page affidavit with side-by-side sentence analysis became the first time language analysis was used in a criminal case in federal court to get a search warrant. On April 3, 1996, the FBI arrested Kaczynski at his cabin in rural Montana, where he’d been living as a hermit after abandoning a promising career as a mathematician. He’s now serving a life sentence without parole.
 
Don't feel like reading thread.

Watch this? Yay or nay?
 
Are we done? I didn't rattle your cage buddy, Ted was living secluded from society in a shack in the mountains, his journals and his actions show that he was delusional. The guy 100% suffered from mental illness, he was sending bombs in the mail to stop technological progress.
I tried to open you up to greater truths and you turned it into a point scoring contest. So I out pointed you to prove a point.

Keep telling yourself he was mentally ill. I already told you he was deemed mentally unstable due to him believing in a shadow government. Something both of us claimed to believe in. But you ignored that point because you can't counter it. Third paragraph.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/aron/kaczynski122697.htm

There was a political agenda to put the "mentally ill" label on him. It didn't stick. Not only was he deemed competent to stand trial (epic fail on your part) but once he plead guilty two prison psychologists saw him for 4 years straight and deemed him fully competent.

There is zero evidence he was mentally unstable. None.

His actions were calculated, something mentally unstable people fail at because they are too emotional.

He was a cold stone killer just like your politicians. Nothing mentally unstable about that.
 
Excellent casting choices except for Worthington. He's a can.

You think every actor is a can. Didn't you call Martin Sheen a can?

Go watch Worthington in Sabotage if you want to see him put on a good performance. He's also good in this series.
 
I tried to open you up to greater truths and you turned it into a point scoring contest. So I out pointed you to prove a point.

Keep telling yourself he was mentally ill. I already told you he was deemed mentally unstable due to him believing in a shadow government. Something both of us claimed to believe in. But you ignored that point because you can't counter it. Third paragraph.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/aron/kaczynski122697.htm

There was a political agenda to put the "mentally ill" label on him. It didn't stick. Not only was he deemed competent to stand trial (epic fail on your part) but once he plead guilty two prison psychologists saw him for 4 years straight and deemed him fully competent.

There is zero evidence he was mentally unstable. None.

His actions were calculated, something mentally unstable people fail at because they are too emotional.

He was a cold stone killer just like your politicians. Nothing mentally unstable about that.

You can't open me up to greater truths. It makes me consider the possibility that you have delusions of grandeur. Those delusions though are quite the opposite of what Ted Kaczynski had which were delusions of persecution. Ted was diagnosed by two psychiatrists as being a paranoid, delusional, and schizophrenic. Ted's own brother says Ted was mentally disturbed as early as 6 years old. Both of Ted's lawyers wanted to argue that Ted was mentally defective, which doesn't happen most of the time in the U.S. justice system because it almost never works and quite frankly our prison systems are filled with mentally defective people. Don't mistake that for crazy, Ted was not crazy, he was mentally disturbed, which is why he was sending bombs in the mail and living in a shack in the mountains.

The problem is that the U.S. Justice system is not looking for justice, its stacked to put people behind bars. You can be quite delusional and borderline batshit crazy and the U.S. justice system doesn't really care. The only time it works is if you are so much of a lunatic that you literally don't know what you are doing is wrong, which almost never happens because even batshit people know they will be harmed if they are found out. There are thousands of examples. Jeffrey Dahmer was about as mentally defective as they come and they couldn't even get a judgement to support that claim. The guy was snacking on humans.

These two paragraphs from the very article you referenced illustrate perfectly how fucked the U.S. Justice system is when it comes to mental health.

They may also attempt to use Kaczynski's own writings -- the journals, manifesto and letters -- to show that he harbored delusional, paranoid thoughts for decades.

These, however, are the very same writings that prosecutors will use to show that Kaczynski was a cold, calculating killer who knew exactly what he was doing.

His journals showed he was paranoid literally for decades and the prosecution wanted to use the very same journals to show he was a killer. Haha, prosecution attorneys are a bunch of clowns. This is what I'm trying to explain to you. you cannot go by American courts to determine if someone is mentally ill. We put mentally ill people in prisons by the tens of thousands.
 
You can't open me up to greater truths. It makes me consider the possibility that you have delusions of grandeur. Those delusions though are quite the opposite of what Ted Kaczynski had which were delusions of persecution. Ted was diagnosed by two psychiatrists as being a paranoid, delusional, and schizophrenic. Ted's own brother says Ted was mentally disturbed as early as 6 years old. Both of Ted's lawyers wanted to argue that Ted was mentally defective, which doesn't happen most of the time in the U.S. justice system because it almost never works and quite frankly our prison systems are filled with mentally defective people. Don't mistake that for crazy, Ted was not crazy, he was mentally disturbed, which is why he was sending bombs in the mail and living in a shack in the mountains.

The problem is that the U.S. Justice system is not looking for justice, its stacked to put people behind bars. You can be quite delusional and borderline batshit crazy and the U.S. justice system doesn't really care. The only time it works is if you are so much of a lunatic that you literally don't know what you are doing is wrong, which almost never happens because even batshit people know they will be harmed if they are found out. There are thousands of examples. Jeffrey Dahmer was about as mentally defective as they come and they couldn't even get a judgement to support that claim. The guy was snacking on humans.

These two paragraphs from the very article you referenced illustrate perfectly how fucked the U.S. Justice system is when it comes to mental health.

They may also attempt to use Kaczynski's own writings -- the journals, manifesto and letters -- to show that he harbored delusional, paranoid thoughts for decades.

These, however, are the very same writings that prosecutors will use to show that Kaczynski was a cold, calculating killer who knew exactly what he was doing.

His journals showed he was paranoid literally for decades and the prosecution wanted to use the very same journals to show he was a killer. Haha, prosecution attorneys are a bunch of clowns. This is what I'm trying to explain to you. you cannot go by American courts to determine if someone is mentally ill. We put mentally ill people in prisons by the tens of thousands.
I can offer people greater truths if they are humble. And not everything is a delusion buddy. There are some legit people in the world who have paid the price for greater understanding/enlightenment. I am one of them.

After all the gas he was deemed fit to stand trial. I don't care for your explanation. The FBI and everyone else involved wanted this guy to plead guilty. The OJ trial had just happened and they didn't want this to go to trial. They used the "Mentally ill" tagline to put pressure on Ted to plead guilty.

What a coincidence! Once Ted agrees to plead guilty all the "Mentally ill" accusations go away and he is deemed fit for trial.

<LikeReally5>

You lost all credibility. To call Ted mentally ill is a cowards way out because it stops everything dead in it's tracks. There is no need to dig deeper because the mentally ill stigma is a bag of cats no one wants to even attempt to understand. So everything is dismissed after that.

I kept digging and found the truth. His human nature got the better of him. It wasn't his mental facilities that failed him. It was him believing, in his pride, he could bypass his own human nature.

He's an example of what not to do when it comes to searching for ultimate truths.
 
You think every actor is a can. Didn't you call Martin Sheen a can?

Go watch Worthington in Sabotage if you want to see him put on a good performance. He's also good in this series.

Worthington is one of those actors that are hot or cold. His performance in Avatar was horrible which makes him a can.

I did call Martin Sheen a can in another thread. His best work is behind him and he should retire.
 
I found it really disturbing that this Fitz character sold out his colleague. That was really lame.
 
Reminds me of that Rampage series of movies by Uwe Boll for some reason.
Lead actor in that was awesome, rest of cast, not so much.
 
I found it really disturbing that this Fitz character sold out his colleague. That was really lame.

All right, I got caught up. I totally agree that it's fucked up that he sold that bitch out. Sold her out and then didn't even seem to feel too bad about it. He had been a fairly sympathetic character for most of the show, but in that moment he became totally unlikable.

On another note, going back to episode four, the whole surveillance plot where they staked out that one newsstand was pretty crazy. I have to assume that was based on fact because to just make something like that up is too sensational. I do wonder about that foot chase, though. I wonder if that actually happened; it felt more like an embellishment to me.

Anyway, only three more eps to go.
 
@MusterX, you really should consider giving this show a look. I think you might like it and the whole thing is only eight eps.
 
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