Re: LUDDISM: "Good Life" debunked

From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sun Apr 20 2003 - 20:06:31 MDT

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    Mike Lorrey summed it up:
    <<As we saw in last year's PBS series "Frontier House", living the
    luddite life has it's drawbacks and limitations. It also has a tendency
    to be 'nasty, brutish, and short', in ways that are quite often glossed
    over and overlooked by those who hate technology so...>>

    The con artists you mentioned in the Nearing article (The Nearings) no doubt
    saw the failure of the economy, and it was a failure (circa 1932) as a good
    idea to have everyone become self-sufficient. My late father, always a New
    York city lad, saw farmers as wise, because they could grow their own food
    during the great depression, they never went hungry. He never saw how many
    hungry farmers there were because they couldn't keep their land, because of
    debt, or couldn't affording to fertilize their crops, or couldn't feed their
    livestock, etc.

    Greater self sufficency is not a bad goal, if one goes into it with their
    eyes open and not as a luddite (19th century romantic?)

    <<Joly and his wife live in Jamaica, Vermont, in an off-grid homestead of
    20 acres. They heat their home with wood and grow much of their food.
    They still find that his wife must work a full time job as a teacher in
    order to make ends meet. "It just isn't possible to homestead with the
    template the Nearings presented, because they never addressed the issue
    of income," Joly explains.>>

    Yes, the Ludds need to realize "its the economy, stupid" and their back to
    the land mentality, is best exemplified by Kampouchea's Pol Pot and Khmer
    Rogue mass murders. Are the Nearings the same as Pol Pot? No, the Nearings,
    far as we know, were not totalitarians, and were not statists. Good article
    though.



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