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Comment by davidgoudet | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

It's funny this guy was worried about the luddites hurting people when several luddites were ultimately gunned down.

You people need to understand that the Unabomber was also a Luddite. Propaganda works in both ways.

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.

Violence certainly wasn't the first thing they tried here

> 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 ?

Not a strike, damaging machines and planting bombs.

The Luddites of today throw paint on art and glue themselves to it, or to roads stopping traffic, to make some kind of point about wetlands.

You don't understand either group.

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?

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.

That is not what the prejorative mean, I don't see the point in making this political.

Everything is political my friend.

Yes, but not everything needs to analyzed politically.

Nor making a political assumption about someone.

When everything is X, nothing is X.

When everything exists, nothing exists?

There are no universal properties?

A non-trivial universal property for a domain asserts something non-trivial about everything in the domain. You think 'political' is a trivial property?

Who knows?

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.

Everything can be politicized

Indeed. Lets leave politics out of a political labour movement.

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.

When you are a top dog in a system it is easy to say cute things like this.

> 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.

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