It's not pejorative for you if you are a liberal, for me it is pejorative, I see Luddites as people who damage important parts of production systems and threaten people's lives.
I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
It is sometimes scary how long propaganda continues to work. In the case of the Luddites, ot was factory owners propaganda about, rightfully, discruntled workers opossing abuse and exploitation.
In a sense, this propaganda win in England gave us the current oppossition to unions we see in the US and among corporations.
Not to speak of all the injuries and fatalities happening in those factories day in day out. On top of all the other negative health effects from dust and such.
But somehow the rich dudes in their villas, and especially their money, need protection.
Luddites were very careful not to hurt any people (I think in one case they were cornered by defensive action, but that was clearly in self-defense), and they even only targeted specific machines they had problems with, leaving all other machines intact.
But just the same I don't agree with their methods since any violence is easily co-opted to paint them as bad and ultimately hurts the goals they were trying to achieve.
> understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
Do you mean a strike? A very common event in many first-world countries like the US or France ?
I'm not aware of a violent non-state actor that exclusively or primarily attacks the means of production instead of military personnel and regular civilian targets. Is there any?
Insurgencies often employ such tactics. One example is the ANC's miliatry wing uMkhonto we Sizwe. They only targeted such infrastructure (power plants, transportation lines etc.) for almost a decade before any civilian/military attacks occurred.
I like these kind of different takes that makes me think, but this one left me a bit confused. Isn't salvation through new technology a main doctrine of the climate doomsday believers?
A non-trivial universal property for a domain asserts something non-trivial about everything in the domain. You think 'political' is a trivial property?
But this is reference to exceptional (low entropy) properties. If you multiply highly informational properties, they stop being informative. And move more towards white noise.
In this case, you have reached a context in which a property is of zero bits (trivial), but still has useful content, which is already recorded in the context.
I never stated nor insinuated that you shouldn't form opinions about "things", my point was very clear about the fact that you don't need to _always_ analyze something politically and can instead analyze it differently or choose not to because it doesn't serve much interest or benefit for you, the community or society.
Unless you are willing to bite the bullet and agree then that we ought to analyze politically why a ball is round or why birds fly.
The alternative is to oppose the political class that has been manipulating popular opinion for a hundred years now in order to maintain their positions of power. Our current form of representation, although it’s a joke to call it that now, has been obsolete for decades. Examine the principals upon which it’s based, they make no sense with modern communication technology.
Luddites was the precursor to the labor movement, I never dispute this.
It's the attempt made to label someone as "liberal" because they didn't know that Luddites was/is used as a pejorative, to someone who clearly has not stated they identify as such.
Which is just absurd, like labeling someone as a supporter of imperialism because they didn't know that royal means "of having the status of a king or queen or a member of their family".
Not only that but to then also indirectly insinuating this is because they are essentially too sheltered/spoiled to understand the value of goods.
Specifically:
>I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.
Despite the original poster never stated something that would highlight such a point of view, beyond admitting not knowing the definition/use of a word.
I don’t think “only rich people are worried about automation” is a very reasonable take. And the scale is a bit different - the luddites weren’t throwing the economy into disarray, they were trying to stop it from changing.
Who said only rich people are worried about automation? And about the second point, yeah, of course, the Unabomber was not trying to throw the economy into disarray...
You keep mentioning the Unabomber. OP and the original article are talking about the original luddites, a group in the early 1800’s that fought back against poor working conditions (by destroying machinery, etc after discussion got them no where with their employers). The luddites were actually fine with the implementation of machines, and many of them were actually factory machinists themselves, they just wanted better pay and improved and safer working conditions.
Not exactly sure what your point is regarding the unabomber (who is considered a neo-Luddite, not a traditional Luddite). Is it that movements and labels change over time? Because what the unabomber wanted vs what the luddites wanted (almost a full two centuries before the Unabomber), were completely different things.
But even if we’re comparing the Luddite movement within their respective times, you’re taking an extreme example of a mentally ill domestic terrorist and conflating him with the entire Luddite movement, a movement that barely even exists in the 20th/21st century. Luddite is now used pretty casually to describe a technophobe or someone bad with technology. It doesn’t really describe a member of the Luddite movement anymore.
No
It is pejorative in First World also.
I'd say the dominant view is that it is pejorative .
Really, all through collage and career, in the US for last 30 years.
Calling someone a Luddite was an insult, someone that is standing in the way, not smart, desiring to just go live on a farm without any technology because it is all just too complicated.
I've never heard the term used in a positive way.
Not saying this is true of the actual Luddites, just how the term is used in the US.
The sense of the word "luddite" (I guess until this recent rethought) has always been pejorative, and has zero dependency on political ideology. Why even bring it into the conversation, unless you're trying to stir some shit up.
> important parts of production systems and threaten people's lives
Which is fair and proportional if people doing it got their own livelihood threatened by introduction of said systems. Especially in 19th century when not having a work to do meant not having food.
It all depends on who prevails. The american revolution would be viewed through a different lens if the British had won. The french resistance blowing up trains could be considered terrorist acts if ww2 ended differently.
I understand your point of view if you're from a first-world country and you never experienced the terror of having people interfering with the means of production.