RE: the last retoot. We need to talk about Luddites.

Your whole life you have been fed a pack of lies about the Luddites. They were not technophobes.

The Luddites were activists, guerillas, saboteurs, a labor movement which did not shy away from action; breaking certain machines that the wealthy were using to kill their livelihoods (lowering wages, worsened working conditions, inferior products), and in some cases stealing their art. Their machine-breaking brought about the Perceval’s Frame Work Bill which enacted a death penalty for machine breaking. A. Death. Penalty.

They were not scared of new technology, the common use of the name now, many were machine operators. They were scared of starvation. Some of them lost their lives at the hand of the govt while fighting back.

This was not a case of the automobile supplanting the horse and buggy, (true, there was some reluctance to change, but that was not the gist) this was the wealthy slowly killing off a class of workers for profit (while working them to death) through loss of livelihood or, if that didn't work, the death penalty.

Agree or disagree with the methods, the Luddites were hard core. Not sniveling technophobes.

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