Texas town strips funding for monthly art event over drag show.
The arts center that organizes the monthly art walk, which draws 20,000 to downtown Lubbock, said the drag show happened at an off-site location and had no association with it.
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Luddites in Lubbock.
The Luddites had a point about the 'de-skilling' of work and the alienation of labor. And they regularly cross-dressed.
These people are just obsessed with enforcing misery.
General Ludd is my hero:
The Luddites weren't wrong. Their name has been badly misused. They were skilled professionals who were concerned that they would no longer have work as a result of the industrial revolution. They were largely right in that assessment. That doesn't mean you should try to hold up societal/technological progress like they did, but their concerns were valid. They weren't just afraid of technology as they are generally portrayed.
That doesn’t mean you should try to hold up societal/technological progress like they did
A lot of what they protested was industry consolidation and price fixing.
Technology has not resulted in reductions in employment.
Depends on the field. Ain't no milk man or ice box delivery anymore.
Depends on the country, but that was not my point. Overall employment has not suffered at the hands of technology; it improved efficiency, yes, and resulted in some occupations needing fewer (or no) people, however people found work in other areas.
You seem to be missing the Luddites point, which is that the benefits of industrialization all went to oligarchs and shareholders while the displaced workers suffered economically as the value of their skills evaporated.
The problem is Capitalism, having a machine do the work should liberate people from toil rather than income.
Unless efficiency increases as the population does too.
Those aren't skills. Driving a truck is a skill, and there's no shortage of demand for truck drivers today.
You completely missed the point.
Please highlight it for me.
The industrialization of industry under Capitalism benefits Capitalists, not Workers.
The luddites would never have been a thing if the rewards of automation were distributed among those whose labor they devalued.
Industry consolidation and outsourcing reduces the local labor demand by setting monopsony rates for workers.
This consolidation is often facilitated by legal enclosures, environmental degradation, and state subsidies/contracts for political insiders.
So you end up with working people who lose access to primitive accumulation, while big industrial owners are able to undercut skilled tradesmen with below cost merchandise in a recessionary economy.
Sure but sometimes individuals do lose their jobs so it would have been ethical to stop technological progress back in the 1800's
It would not have been ethical with increasing populations and no means to scale up effectively to meet their needs. Individuals, sure, but not overall; technology has replaced people in specific situations, people who then went on to get employment in other areas.
So those workers who were made redundant got severance pay and training for the new jobs they were assigned to, right?
No? They got thrown out on their asses with no means to provide for themselves and their families?
Geeze, sounds like the Luddites were right.
Looking at the bigger picture.. layoffs happen all the time for many reasons. Overall, technology has not increased unemployment.
layoffs happen all the time for many reasons
Layoffs are the result of primitive capital being monopolized through enclosure and the local labor force being corralled into industries that generate more goods than the deflated economy can absorb.
There's no layoffs for yeomen farmers and independent craftsman. You only experience the phenomenon when land barons control the property and dictate how many people they wish to employ.
