Robot Cultist Battles Luddite Scourge With Fag Jokes And Unspecified "Schemata"

You may recall that I responded to the accusation in comments that I am a "Luddite" by reminding my readers yesterday of a little history:

The accusations and fears expressed by the historical Luddites turned out to be true, and the consequences of their failure exactly as devastating as they expected. Also, these Luddites actually used plenty of technologies that suited their purposes while simply very reasonably disapproving the disruptive impacts of deliberate elite-incumbent deployments of certain technologies. As often happens in discussions among pop-tech enthusiasts about "attitudes toward technology," the notion of technology here is displacing a more relevant but demanding discussion of a complicated, historically situated, social conflict. Your "Luddite" epithet is, as usual, both specifically ignorant but also expresses a dangerously facile attitude toward the substance of technodevelopmental class struggle.

Sputtering in retaliation my critic, one "Milton4ever" responded thus:

Yepp, that's a lot of words, alright. I brought up that subject because it always struck me as fucking ludicrous to include it as a point in your denunciation of us so-called "techno-fetishist-triumphalist cornucopiast fanboy Objectivists" or whatever. Today's everyday life is fucking paradise in comparison to that of Ludd's time and only because it grew on the fertile soil of the industrialized world's surprlus production. You can check that by, oh, reading every economics textbook ever written. So we did good by not smashing all those machines, wouldn't you say? You know, I'm an engineer, I'm one of those guys keeping your cum-filled ass comfortable, and as such I think in definite sums and schemata. So if you can't provide any hard numbers, any solid studies, any tangible evidence showing a correlation between automation and your vague mass unemployment or ominous "devastation", I can't help but note that you're just a regressive platitudinarian who hides behind empty, obscurantist verbiage. Well, where is your evidence?

I thought my readers might find my reply edifying, and so I am upgrading it from the Moot.

that's a lot of words, alright

That single paragraph seemed daunting to you? How disappointing. Some sooper-genius you turned out to be.

everyday life is fucking paradise in comparison to that of Ludd's time and only because it grew on the fertile soil of the industrialized world's surprlus production. You can check that by, oh, reading every economics textbook ever written. So we did good by not smashing all those machines

Needless to say, the Luddites didn't live in the future we call the present, they lived in a present devastated by specific developments they understood very well. You imply that only through the destruction of their lives then could we have come to live now in the comparative comfort that we do, completely indifferent to the possibility that technodevelopment might have proceeded instead in a way that benefited all the stakeholders to its changes then (welfare support and job training for the displaced, actual shares in the new enterprises, reforms that arrived generations later in part because of society's eventual acquaintance with pointless tragedies such as the Luddite example) while still leading us to the presumably better world we live in now -- let alone the possibility of an even better, fairer, freer world than we do. By the way, it isn't actually true that everybody in our present world lives the life of comfort you seem to take for granted. I would say that was beside the specific point at issue in our exchange here, if it weren't for the fact that the lesson of the Luddites in their time speaks very directly to that very circumstance in our own.

I'm an engineer, I'm one of those guys keeping your cum-filled ass comfortable

The voice of "The Future," ladies and gentlemen.

you're just a regressive platitudinarian who hides behind empty, obscurantist verbiage

Who farted?