I think of the Unabomber every time I see one of these plastered on a car:
There is a famous reference to his academic work in a mathematics paper which may contain the World’s Biggest Understatement In A Footnote:
This reflects poorly on the prison administration.
We paid good money to have safe prisons. It seems to me we did not get the government services we paid for.
Absolutely not.
Suicide has been confirmed. This proves my assertion. He did not want to spend one more day in captivity.
He escaped.
Or he was ill, did not want to live another day and would have done the same thing if he was not in prison.
FTS.
Fuck that shit.
Or, you know, he’s an elderly man with terminal cancer and wanted to end the pain and illness.
The man was smart, he could probably have found a way to kill himself years earlier if that had been his desire.
On the other hand, suicide in late stage cancer is hardly unknown whether the person is in jail or not.
Either way, he’s not worth shedding a tear over.
a quick Q from a non-'merican …
Why did the guy become so famous/emblematic/Charles Manson v2.0ish? (in public perception, that is)
A quick google tells me about “3 killed” over 20 or so years …
Just in 2023 there must have been what felt like 20 mass-shootings in the USofA with more deaths each, (let alone those from 2022, 21, etc… yet none of those killers are nearly as much of a household name as the unabomber)?
Did the par-for-the-course change so much over the past years in what constitutes an egregous crime?
He got a lot of airplay as a “terrorist mastermind” in an era when there were no such things … yet.
So a bit like DB Cooper the famous parachuting airline hijacker, he became (in)famous while his identity was still a mystery. The fact the actual person proved to be a wacky hippy sort just played into the anarchist scare that was a fresh echo of the 1960s counter-culture, Weather Underground, SLA, etc.
… who had also (apparently) worked his way into “the system”.
A Harvard man (with a Ph.D. in mathematics) going that route was a shock to many of us.
Sending out something like ~15 different bombs at random over the course of years will do it. Three people were killed, but many more were maimed. He came close to taking out a 727 in flight, but the bomb misfired and the plane was able to do an emergency landing.
Because of him, I opened all academic mail packages with my non-dominant hand and away from my face.
The song was actually written by Eddie Rabbit who, ironically, also wrote “I Love a Rainy Night”.
Yep. Part of my grad-school orientation was how to potentially recognize mail bombs.
I think I’ve posted this before, but I was on campus the day his first bomb was dropped off. It was left in a parking lot at U of Illinois at Chicago Circle. Really scared the crap out of me. From Wikipedia:
Kaczynski’s first mail bomb was directed at Buckley Crist, a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. On May 25, 1978, a package bearing Crist’s return address was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The package was “returned” to Crist, who was suspicious because he had not sent it, so he contacted campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package, which exploded and caused minor injuries.
Actually, it doesn’t. Your assertion requires knowledge about his state of mind that you don’t have.
All murders are not created equal, or something like that. It went on for a long time, and involved federal authorities, state lines, and seemingly random explosive devices sent through the mail. They tried to catch this guy for a long, long time and were unsuccessful. I get your point, but “serial killers” and sensational crimes got a lot more attention in those days before everything slipped off the rails into bizarro world.
I don’t recall what postal regs changed, if anything due to Kaczynski, but not too long after 9/11/2001 mailing parcels got to be a lot more of a pain in the ass.
I did not know that. Thank you. Assuming that’s not a whoosh.
Which is interesting because I think of Eddie Rabbit as a no-talent loser and that song as one of the top 3 worst ever written or performed by anyone anywhere anywhen. It’s right down there with Rod Stewart and some of his worst.
He delayed at least two flights that I was on and triggered emergencies every time someone left a bag unaccompanied anywhere or a university or business received even the most innocuous unidentifiable package. Even if you weren’t a potential target, the Unabomber’s activities affected (or at least inconvenienced) almost everybody in some way
In regards to the particular notoriety of Kaczynski, he was evoking the fears of a ‘Mad Bomber’ like George Metesky. Both appeared to be lone bombers holding a grudge, and both were diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Their bombings weren’t in support of identifiable political causes. These things raise the fear that anyone could be a victim of their insane bombings like random shootings that plaque us now. At the time the political turmoil that created political violence in the 60s and 70s had died down and this became the new public danger of the time, coupled with the mystery of totally unknown perpetrators it was something the press would promote heavily, and an actual major law enforcement concern.