Is it OK to be anachronistic?

[jbor]

"Edward Ludd was framed":

http://www.fastlink.com.au/subscrib/hit/smash.htm

    [...]

    It is important to remember that the target even of Ned's original
    assault of l779, like many machines of the Industrial Revolution, was
    not a new piece of technology.

    [...]

    This new band of deconstructivists is being primed and pushed in part by
    radical historians, authors, and journalists who dislike a particular
    view of technology. One such critic, Kirkpatrick Sale, has written such
    books as _Rebels Against the Future_ and demonstrates his hatred for the
    current technology by doing public demonstration of computer smashing.
    His views are not like the old Luddites at all, other than the fact that
    they both broke machines. Sale argues that the machines are "destructive
    and evil". Much of that point of view is just wrong.

    [...]

    The stocking-frame had been around since 1589. The knitting machines
    which provoked the first Luddite disturbances had been putting people
    out of work for well over two centuries.

    [...]

best

----------

>> > Well, yes, and no. It seems to me that it depends on how you parse Mr.
>> > Pynchon's original sentence. Specifically, the referent of "this". I
>> > originally read it to mean that the willful destruction of stocking
>> > frames had been going on since 1710, not the popular references to Ned
>> > Lud. The most immediate antecedent to the "this had been going on"
>> > phrase is the "whenever a stocking-frame was sabotaged" phrase, which
>> > lends support to that reading.
>>
>> This reading seems most natural to me as well.
>
> Can anyone find another source for the 1710 date? I can't. It's not even
> in the Encyclopedia Britannica that Pynchon cites.
>
> Yours,
> Eric R
>
> P.S. A nice quote: "all Machinery hurtful to Commonality" -- That's what
> the Luddites opposed, according to a March 1812 letter to a
> manufacturer. The industrialization of a "cottage" industry had
> destroyed their communities. As the demand for stockings changed with
> the fashions, their communal lives were replaced by a factory system
> that traded in desperate workers.
>
>
>
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