While today the description of windmills as "giants oppressing the people" seems ridiculous, at the time it was well understood to be an accurate description. Prior to windmills each peasant had their own handmill, and ground their own grain. This made them hard to tax. But with a mill the miller would take his share, and set aside the landlord's. This made peasants far easier to tax. (Guess what happened to the tax rates?)
This was why windmills were introduced and handmills were banned. And the peasants objected, resulting in the rate of spread of windmills being a good measure of how little power the peasants had. In particular peasants were strongest in Scandinavia, and windmills never arrived there. And I do mean never, in WW II the Germans were shocked to find that they could not take any central control of food production - people were still using handmills.
As for the rest of what you say, I largely agree. However there are two qualities about princepawn that deserve comment. First of all it is a poor workman that blames his tools, and by that measure he is shoddy indeed. I will be the last to say that Perl is perfect, but most of his criticisms are stabs in the dark. He also has this amazing tendancy to repeat good advice as a slogan and badly misapply it. I never quite know what to do with this. Do I point out why his use is bad and accidentally discourage people from following the advice in the slogan? Do I explain why the slogan is good and not make the point that he is doing something bad? Do I just figure it is not worth my while and ignore? (I mostly do the last.)
On a more personal note, I will not miss the sexist and sexually explicit garbage he spewed into the chatterbox from time to time. I really won't miss that!
In reply to Re (tilly) 2 (windmills): Parallels...
by tilly
in thread Parallels Between Perlmonks.ORG and Religious Cults (Retirement Announcement)
by princepawn
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