And where are those hippies today? Not all, but many, went to work making their own obscene fortunes within the system they railed against. Fortunately, some didn’t and are now the main voice against this on-going insanity. The kids of today have been so successfully succored by the system that they don’t effectively use what could be a very profound voice. The “mother-fucking hippies” were faced with being forced to go to war on behalf of the monster, and fought it. Today’s youth face a wiser monster, that simply makes it impossible for a small, struggling segment of the population to take the money and run – into the battlefields of the Middle East, while their brothers and sisters of greater fortune can sit at home, attending classes, largely oblivious of the outrages discussed in this video.
Canucksays
I was just about 4 or 5 years late to be a DFH, but I took on a lot of the ethic, which is probably why I spend most of the time chronically depressed because I live in a world in which the prevailing mythos is completely fucked up. But I hitched up with a girl who is a neo hippie. And she’s very cool. We’re 16 years together now, and she’s about the only thing keeping me sane.
Prillotashektasays
Oddly enough, I remember back in Junior High to High School (so this would have been late ’90s) when, for some reason, “hippie” became a common insult amongst the youth. Calling someone a “stupid hippie” or the like was common. I remember, at the time, thinking that most of these kids probably had no idea who the hippies were or what they stood for.
Around this same time, I remember my cousin used “stupid hippie” as an insult once while we were playing a video game (I don’t really remember exactly, but I seem to recall it was 007 Goldeneye on the N64). Our grandmother (who was, I think, in her 30s during the 1960s) overheard him and began lamenting that she “didn’t understand why hippie would be considered an insult” and that “the hippies that she knew were all very nice people and that though she didn’t agree with everything, they seemed to be just nice people trying to do nice things and not hurting anyone”
Even today, I’ll still hear “hippie” used as an insult, and I still do not fully know why.
Prillotashekta – it’s a manufactured meme brought to you by the same folks who made “socialist”, “atheist” and “intellectual” into dirty words.
Cappysays
I remember in 1968 or so at five years of age telling my father that when I grew up I was going to be a hippie. He didn’t say much to that; Dad was OK. In my own way I think I did it. Anyway, I have often thought that the reason conservatives deny global climate change, resist environmentalism, spread fear and mistrust, refuse responsible regulation, and all the other nasty stuff they do is because the thing that causes them the most dread, that wakes them from nightmares in a cold sweat is the prospect of having to admit that the Dirty Fucking Hippies were right all along.
Let your freak flag fly! (Even if it’s metaphorical ’cause your hair is falling out)
I tend to use “hippie” to refer to things like crystal-waving alties, astrologers, and such. Not the peaceniks who were quite right.
Annoyance with the video: The mention of all the caveats on pharmaceuticals. Well, how would you cut down on the complexity of medical science? Those caveats are there because the human body is complex. No one’s got a better alternative to offer.
It makes some good points and also some sweeping generalizations. I think there were some great thinkers in the hippie movement maybe they were right about a lot of stuff. but, the majority of hippies are just like the ones out of the south park episode “die hippie die” Too full of themselves to realize that having giant parties and getting high was for there own self gratification and for no one else. The fact is, if they were SOOOO right like this video tries to show then when the party ended why did they all go home? Thats like having a superpower and instead of using it you sit on the couch.
I’m going to have to disagree on this one. This video is full of victimization and advocating naive BS.
Newfiesays
To paraphrase my favourite politician of the day, Sen. Charles (Chuck) Grassley:
Jump You Fuckers
Smidgysays
Oddly enough, I remember back in Junior High to High School (so this would have been late ’90s) when, for some reason, “hippie” became a common insult amongst the youth. Calling someone a “stupid hippie” or the like was common.
The same thing happened to me, until one day someone called me a ‘hippie’, and I replied, ‘yeah!! Peace, bro!!’ and gave him a peace sign. Since then, any time anyone has called me a ‘hippie’, meaning it as an insult, I’ve deliberately acted as if they’ve complimented me – it confuses the fuck out of them.
DaveLsays
The mention of all the caveats on pharmaceuticals. Well, how would you cut down on the complexity of medical science?
I have to admit that as much as I understand and appreciate actual medical research, I haven’t found myself overly impressed with the drugs being marketed on TV these days. I’ve seen pills for arthritis that have been known to cause death, pills for psoriasis that may cause leukemia, asthma control medication that “may increase the risk of asthma-related death”.
My favourite is Treximet, which is the migraine drug Imitrexcombined with a common, non-prescription pain reliever. I think the commercials should include the sentence for honesty: “Treximet works by effectively extending our patent protection on Imitrex without the need to actually research a novel drug.”
BEAUTIFUL. And all the hippy-haters, I’d hate to remind them what would still be, that they take for granted every day, if it hadn’t been for that little revolution… a revolution I’m afraid wasn’t big enough.
2 centssays
The goal of the hippies was to change society and correct some egregious wrongs. Their rallying credo was “question authority” and always ask why. The movement got us out of Vietnam, made abortion legal, elevated women and minorities to first class citizens, made government more tranparent, protected the environment, etc. Frankly, without the hippy philosophy, this country would be in an even sorrier state than it is now. The drug use was a downside, of course. Too many gifted people died too young.
I’ve always been proud of my generation and wish more people today felt that passion to make life better for all of us.
Another benefit of the 60’s: The music was fabulous!!
Faidsays
“Hippie” as an insult during the late nineties… Hmm. I, for one, thought it was because of South Park.
Tenebrassays
You had me until they started on the “Big Pharma” horseshit. :P
I tend to use “hippie” to refer to things like crystal-waving alties, astrologers, and such. Not the peaceniks who were quite right.
I’l grant you that, though I tend to equate most of that with so called New Age Woo.
Annoyance with the video: The mention of all the caveats on pharmaceuticals. Well, how would you cut down on the complexity of medical science? Those caveats are there because the human body is complex. No one’s got a better alternative to offer.
I have no argument with medical science, nor do I dispute the complexity or the difficulty of coming up with results that have the potential to make fruitful lives possible where circumstances would otherwise have led to misery or worse, so my hat is off to the medical doctors and all the scientists in the related fields in the biological sciences.
However I have lived around the world and while I have no idea how to change what we have here in the US and therefore I’m guilty of not having a better alternative to offer, but Jesus Fucking Christ, if anyone truly believes that this best that we can do in terms of the exsiting system for equitable and just delivery of the results of our scientific endeavors to the general populace then I fucking give up on everything that this country is supposed to stand for, because the system as it is now sucks big time and it is truly beyond repair. It needs to be torn down a rebuilt from scratch because the current paradigm is hoplessly unsustainable! DFH are still right on that score. good luck to us all!
“Treximet works by effectively extending our patent protection on Imitrex without the need to actually research a novel drug.”
I blame the U. S. Constitution for this. Our Free-Market-bedazzled Founding Fathers gave Congress only one way
“(t)o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.
We need a better way.
Joeyesssays
I guess I should jump in here for a moment.
When I refer to DFH’s, it is mostly tongue in cheek. Atrios, Digby, Kos, and many other lefty bloggers often note that rarely do people in power listen to anyone on the left because we’re still engaged in a silly culture war that began in the ’60’s. A ridiculous retread of tired stereotypes and generalizations i.e. Tom Brokaw’s BOOM!! bullshit. When the fact of the matter is that if our advice had been taken, cranks like George W. Bush would have remained just that………… cranks. Instead, we lost the debate and a b-film actor smiled at us and we all felt better. Gahhhhh!
The issues raised by environmental groups, women’s issue advocates, gay rights, anti-war, anti-corporate, big pharma, the insurance industry, etc. etc. were all part of the hippy agenda and were and are relevant. Not to mention that progressives embrace these very issues. So, it kind of feels good to rub it in. The DFH’s were right.
Right?
Thanks, P.Z. Thanks one hell of a lot.
Newfiesays
I’m a Newfie hippie of the 70s… we were close to a decade behind trends back in those days :P
Many of the commenters here have taken umbrage at the “Big Pharma” references. It’s important to remember that there is a difference between medical science and HIGHLY questionable company decisions to put drugs on the market (often way prematurely) and to aggressively market those drugs to people who may or may not need them (even if they do work as claimed). The dual aspect of “Big Pharma” thus must always be monitored. Sure we want the science, sure we want new cures… but always be suspicious of the man who is getting rich off it. To blind yourself to this reality simply because you support scientific advance is pure foolishness.
Oi! Perhaps an NFSW tag for those of us at work might have been warranted?
Keefsays
A lot of over-generalizations, simplifications and falsehoods in that video, but, overall, yeah, I get it. Problem is: the dirty fucking hippies really didn’t have much of a platform other than vague notions about peace, sex, drugs and mysticism. I don’t remember them accurately foreseeing all of these problems, nor providing succeeding generations with detailed alternatives. Absolute peace is not attainable, nor is a corruption-free government or market. The dirty fucking hippies are bygone.
Dan Jsays
I’m not quite a Dirty Fucking Hippie, but I do resemble one. Besides the long ponytail and occasional tie-dyed shirt, I’m an opponent of war and corporate greed, and a proponent of environmentalism.
I think there are definite parallels between large corporation mentality and organized religion mentality. The people at the bottom are only “doing their job” (because that’s what the boss told them), and the people at the top will lie and cheat any way they can in order to preserve their organization, desiring nothing less than total control of the market.
One Eyed jacksays
Not so much.
DFH were great at raging against government and society, but they were very weak on offering viable alternatives. Some good came from the movement, but it wasn’t the panacea that the video implies.
As someone who watched the hippie movement flower (heh), it’s a little surreal to hear a tough-sounding guy with a southern country-music accent sing their praise.
#29Posted by: John Evo,
Yes, well said. I love science, but does every fucking 3rd kid have to be on Ritalin?
dfhsays
I was a dirty fucking hippy. I’m dirtier now, I fucked more then, and you really had to be there to get it. Tune in, turn on, and drop out. I got the drop out part down pat. I no longer turn on and the voices in my head makes it hard to tune in. Get rid of the fluff (and there was a lot) and the message has always been solid. There is a better way to live. Western civilization has always been doing it wrong. Funny thing is, the Jesus Freak movement was an offshoot of that and I was part of it too for a while. Leave out the Jesus part and it was pretty much the same thing: love your brother and leave the world a better place if you can.
The political/social climate has alway been a pendulum. As far to the right as the pendulum has swung is how far to the left it will eventually swing (at least for some). Although Obama may serve as a damper on that pendulum. He is so not a hippy.
procyonsays
The hippy movement, as I recall, led tto a lot of great things, like feminism, stopping the Vietnam fiasco, Earth Day, questioning authority (the military industrial complex) and generally making everyone more aware of our power to change the world in a good way. Unfortunately it also led to the Yippies and the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers,the SLA and violence on campuses all over the country, including Kent State. Not to mention the drug abuse. It was a coin with two sides, but I remember those early days in the late ’60s fondly…the “70s not so much. And the music was, indeed, really great. It definitley changed America for the better.
Dudesays
War, greed, and pollution are bad. Those are some really extreme positions to hold. If only people listened and ended those things with the power of positive thinking.
joeyesssays
One Eye Jack:
DFH were great at raging against government and society, but they were very weak on offering viable alternatives. Some good came from the movement, but it wasn’t the panacea that the video implies.
For the first time in this country’s history, they ended an illegal and lethal war, they drove apartheid out of this country, they exposed the CIA and FBI as the fascist organizations that they are and were, they began the environmental movement, they advocated for free healthcare. I could go on all night.
However, they were painted as dangerous and delusional by the very people that have brought us our present circumstances today. Now that’s stepping thru the looking glass, isn’t it?
Now.,,,,,,, who was right and who was wrong?
Abbie Hoffman or Ronald Reagan?
Yep.
Newfiesays
J. Jonah Jameson don’t like his employees slaggin’, Parker. Maybe you should visit adult sites on your own time?
TheThomassays
You had me until they started on the “Big Pharma” horseshit.
RyanGsays
#35
Yes, well said. I love science, but does every fucking 3rd kid have to be on Ritalin?
Generally the kids taking stimulants like Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, and Vyvanse actually have ADHD. Also, not properly treating these kids can cause this already vulnerable group to self medicate with alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs when they get older. Treating kids that have ADHD actually lowers the probability they will become addicted to destructive drugs in the future.
Ugh, otherwise I like the warnings that come along with Lamictal. Specifically entertaining are the warnings about Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis. These conditions start off with a rash and progress to your skin sloughing off in large patches.
cmsays
Fwiw, I found this musically and politically trite and imprecise.
gardenguysays
Hey !!!
I was a tad old to be a hippie and too young to be a beatnik. I am several years ahead of the baby boom. For some reason I was on the leading edge of a lot of this stuff so I did all the acid and speed before 1965 and things like that. From my humble perspective what the hippies did was liberate the uptights from Protestant work ethic. Our parents struggled thru the depression and then the war created a boom into which we were born. I saw McDonalds appear in an old apple orchard where they cut the potatoes in the stainless steal back area and a burger was 15 cents. Problem is, the boom allowed us to get way too selfish and even when we thought we were doing good with that, the media just found a way to sell it and before you know it free love turned into flower scented douches. It has been all down hill ever since. We unleashed greed and now it has come home to roost.
Andrewsays
WHY PEOPLE LAUGH AT HIPPIES TODAY:
Is this cause good? Yes, but that isn’t enough…..
NewEnglandBobsays
I’m still a DFH, although I was never dirty.
terrencesays
Goddamnit, the computer is acting up again and the link I saw was garbled – can anyone provide me with a good link? You know, the version that includes the black-garbed evil capitalists videotaping themselves sawing off heads with a rusty knife and blowing women’s brains out while chanting Allah Akbar? I also don’t have the segment showing the bearded Spanish-speaking former leader of the country that has universal health care sojourning to Europe and the USA when his medical condition caused the rubber to meet the road. Sigh….
Realistsays
I guess being competent in science doesn’t make one competent when it comes to politics. How incredibly naive!
dWhispersays
It was interesting, but mostly a gross over-generalization. Yes, they were right about a lot of things, but to be fair, they were also wrong about a lot of things as well (as things usually go). As mentioned, the medical over-generalization was a huge skip; one of the interesting quotes from a Tim Minchin video a couple months back… “You know what they call Alternative Medicine that’s been found to work, and is backed up by research and science? Medicine.” Yes, there’s a certain push to market “profitable” drugs, but in a lot of cases, they were discovered by accident while researching something else (take Viagra).
The same really applies to some of the concepts like mercury in fish (it’s not wild fish, unless you live up in PZtopia, it’s typically farm-raised cold water fish like Salmon) or Big Box retailers. While they get blamed for killing mom-and-pop stores, across the country, Malls were around killing them off well before that. And every “big” business was once a small business that took off. Somehow, success is good in some things (let’s say, Whole Foods), but bad in others (Walmart employing some two-million people and enjoying an employee satisfaction and retention unheard of elsewhere in retail). That’s the odd thing about it, overall, and in a lot of cases, what made them successful didn’t come from being big, but rather from what they did when small.
So, the DFH were right, but so where the other guys. A scary world we sit in…
#29 I have to agree to an extend about Big Pharm. But the issue is more complicated than some people think. Research cost money. The funds of tomorrow’s life saving drugs come from today’s sales. To drive of sales to pay for future research, companies have to advertise.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as overdoing it. There are good reasons why prescription drugs need a prescription. Instead we have Big Pharm running commercials with the goal of passing their drugs out like Halloween candy.
The movie “Brain Candy” a research creates a pill to cure depression. His company rushes it out and encourage everyone to take it. In the climax the protagonist says the line, “I made Gleeminix for people who were clinically depressed. People who were too depressed to get up off the floor. Not because you missed your bus or you look stupid in a yellow hat.” (Woman in the background was wearing a yellow hat and took it off in shame.) It’s an accurate line. We’re being taught that any problem can be solved by seeing our doctor and asking them about the wonder drug we saw on TV. That doesn’t sit right with me.
There needs to be less greed, more idealism, and more humility in businesses.
Akikosays
Born to teen hippie parents who were traveling through Europe at the time I remember the lifestyle well. It was a lot like socialism, communism, utopia. All great in theory but in reality just a mess. Most hippies my folks knew got hooked on drugs due to the experimentation, drop out phase of things or got smart and got jobs. By the early 70’s being a hippie was an excuse to smoke dope, draw checks from Big Brother and bitch. My parents grew up and got smart and got over themselves. The hippies were whiners who never really had a plan or a true leader. Like the Women’s movement. There have been no hippies since the early 70’s and anyone who says they are a hippie now is just trying to justify living some else’s lifestyle. Get your own.
RamblinDudesays
I don’t really know enough about the Ritalin statistics to go on a rant, but I do hope that, with great regularity, it’s restricted responsibly to those kids who actually do need it. It’s just that I’ve seen kids who are constantly hyped up on sugar and who don’t get a balanced diet, and when they go through their daily and very predictable cycle of bouncing off the walls and then becoming moody and inattentive, I hear people talking about giving Ritalin to them, and it’s just one more example of how dumb this country can be about things like diet and nutrition. But I certainly don’t mean to single out Ritalin. Not at all. There are shelves and shelves of antacids, laxatives, cholesterol controllers, sleep aids, etc., that advertisers compel us to take because other advertisers induce us to consume huge quantities of truly mediocre, non-nutritious food.
So, um . . . I guess I’m a hippie at heart. Lot’s of good whole foods, fresh grown, vine ripened, working with nature, yadda yadda yadda . . .
RamblinDudesays
Sorry, that was for RyanG #42
Pierce R. Butlersays
Geez, a lot of ahistoricity goin’ down here.
The Civil Rights/Black Power campaigns, the Women’s Lib movement, the Sexual Revolution, and (most of) the Environmental/Ecology struggles all had different roots: like everything else in the ’60s – even GW Bush & Danny Quayle – they picked up a little color from the hippies, but they started earlier and would’ve risen anyway.
There were two countercultures back then, the (political) Movement and the (lifestyle, for lack of a better word) Freaks.
The first group was focused on the streets; the other, on Nature. They overlapped, but they didn’t get along. The Movement despised the hedonism, lack of discipline, and fuzzy-mindedness of the Freaks; the Freaks couldn’t stand the uptightness, obsessiveness, and urge to control of the Movement.
Both were right. I moved back and forth between the two, I oughta know.
“Hippie” is a media term (generally blamed on Life magazine) – those of us in the hard core sneered at hippies. We called ourselves freaks, or freeks, and those who stayed inside the box we called straights. (It took me more than a decade to accept that word as a sexual self-label…)
The corporate media lied about us then, just as they lie about almost everything today: even the few who tried to be sympathetic got it wrong, and our own media left out most of the messy parts (at best). Whole Earth Catalog probably captured the zeitgeist most effectively – but their goal was to search out the best, not the most representative.
We tried too much – to transform everything, all at the same time, down to the psychological/ecological roots. We succeeded at too little, and most of that came from co-optation by marketing experts in super-wide ties, bell-bottoms, and salon-trimmed sideburns.
All the above is gross and misleading generalizations: you had to be there – and even then…
A lot of the same effort is being tried again, btw – this time away from the cameras and microphones and quick cheap labels (though repeating too many of the other mistakes from 30-40 years back). So far the “lifestyle” emphasis prevails, though economic pressures are likely to produce the same sorts of resistance that the draft did. More power to ’em!
Aquariasays
Walmart employing some two-million people and enjoying an employee satisfaction and retention unheard of elsewhere in retail
Evidence, please, because it doesn’t seem that way, from some of the things going on with Wal-Mart vis-a-vis employee relation.
For instance:
The Houston woman that Wal-Mart expected to work 12+hours a day, but thought they could get away with paying her for only 8. She sued and won.
The butchers at the Jacksonville, TX Wal-Mart who are the only American Wal-Mart workers to successfully unionize–so that they could get decent pay and working conditions. The only reason they got the union in there was that they conducted their union meetings–IN SPANISH. Wal-Mart’s response? Get rid of all butchers, all stores. They fucking fired the organizers and all butchersnationwide, rather than having their butchers unionized. Now Wal-Mart shoppers get meat processed at some plant, rather than cut up for you by local workers.
How about the long-term lawsuit about Wal-Mart’s discriminatory practices towards promoting women, and being paid less in all levels, anywhere from 6-16%, depending on the position? It’s been fought in courts for about 11 years now. Surely you’ve heard of it?
There is a popular bumper sticker that says: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
I hate war, I really do! Been there, done that, and I truly hate it! And every time I see that bumper sticker I am reminded of how much I hate war.
But since we sure do seem to live in a world where there are and always have been people who do and would do great harm to other people for fun, profit or prophet, I just hafta ask:
Is war never ever the answer?
Autumnsays
Meh.
When I lived in a VW van and drove around the US with a couple of friends, we would read aloud from “On the Road” before retiring to our tents. We looked like “hippies”, but if anyone ever asked, we replied that we were beatniks, who were like the hippies, only beatniks could read and write.
@ gardenguy, the beatniks predated every idea the hippies pretended they had come up with twenty years before the Summer of Love.
Also, Kerouac noted in Desolation Angels that the beatnik idea was already a sad parody of itself in the early sixties.
The hippies were a sad lot of hangers-on to a culture that was dead before they even imagined that they had invented it.
Modern hippies are just a bunch of smelly criminals who have found a niche that makes them more palatable to their potential victims (I’m talking to you, Rainbow Family).
Someone tell them to comb their freakin’ hair.
Craigsays
The video contains many truths, as well as a lot of fear-mongering.
The DFH may have been right, but so what? When I die, and that’s that, no afterlife, no heaven, no god or gods coddling me like a small child for an eternity, do I get to turn to the theists and say “I told you so!” Nope. Ain’t gonna happen.
That’s why the message of this video means nothing. Talk is cheap. Do something about it, all you DFHs.
lovetoykilljoysays
People use hippie as an insult because of all the things that go with it. I live in a town (austin) which prides itself on the hippie culture which as far as I can tell has mostly to do with doing a lot of drugs and avoiding hygiene.
I came to this same conclusion a while back. Or maybe we should say, Ghandi was right. MLK was right.
Janis Chamberssays
I think the Hippies did have a lot of good points, but you have to remember their support of alternative medicine and a whole load of other woo. As most things the truth is somewhere in the middle. I hate being considered either a Liberal or a Conservative, I think my answer to either of those two changes depending on what you ask me. The best thing to keep in mind, I think, is that insanity can happen when *anything* becomes an Ideology.. and yes that includes hippies :p.
joeyesssays
A sizable contingent here is stuck on the “hippie” thing. The title and refrain is more of an inside joke with progressive political junkies.
Look at the upcoming schedules for the sunday talk shows. Contrast and compare the number of progressives with the number of rightwingnutjobs that appear. We’re always out-numbered 3-1. So, we progressives carry the banner of DFH as a flag of honor. Our corporate media shuts us out because they are dependent on corporate dollars by, yes, big pharma, insurance companies and plutocrats that create nothing but paper piles that have turned out to be more than just worthless, but truly deadly. We’re shut out of the debate because to seriously examine our arguments would mean that the American public might actually demand that these Masters of the Universe that control the wealth, actually go out and work for a living creating something of value.
So, my point is not that I pine for the days of nude romps in the mud (not that I’m against that) and bathing in patchouli oil, but I am stating that progressive voices have been shut out by the monied interests in this nation for 35 years. They want to keep the money they didn’t earn. To them, poverty ROCKS!!! It creates low wages and high profits for a small minority of connected douchebags.
I just had to rant and chose to rub their noses in the facts that lay before us all. Progressives (heretofore referred to as “DFH’s”) were right. We were right about all the things that I talked about in the video. And much more that I omitted.
thank you. that is all.
J.
Chadsays
Right in so many ways and wrong in just as many.
DaveLsays
The coolest people of that era weren’t the “hippie”(there were all to few of them) but the “diggers”. These were the doctors, nurses and, yes, business people, ordinary citizens who took it upon themselves to care for these gentle fools when they needed help the most. They didn’t do it for profit but for love. The Diggers were the true heroes of our time.
Posted by: Chad | March 18, 2009 1:20 AM
Right in so many ways and wrong in just as many.
ha ha ha ha ha ha …….. whatever that means. If you were to expound I may engage. I offered a nuanced explanation of my meaning. Unless you’re willing to get a little deeper in the weeds with your assertion above, your post is meaningless.
J.
Pareidoliussays
Is it getting insufferable in here? Anybody? Open a window or something, and take off those rose-tinted granny glasses.
My mom is a hippy.
She evolved through the years, became a yoga teacher, went to india over 10 times. Plays the tampura, wears indian clothing all the time.
My dad is now retired and together they travel the world, mostly in a campervan. At the moment they’re in Australia for 2 months.
They (but especially my mom) brought me up to be the socialist, atheist critical thinker than i am now.
I inherited her drive to want to heal the world, solve the world problems.
A lot of what i see in this world, greed, greed, hunger, greed, war, greed, pollution, greed and greed pains me so much i can’t put it in perspective and deal with it.
But when i’m done with my therapy to learn better coping mechanisms you bet ya i will go into politics and follow my drive for change.
adornosghostsays
Well, you were on the Bus, or off the Bus. I don’t see many who were on the bus. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, your story and myth is even more challenged than your imagination, and are completely clueless in their interpretation of a time and culture they know nothing about.
petersays
joeyess @39
Now.,,,,,,, who was right and who was wrong?
Abbie Hoffman or Ronald Reagan?
….yep, you got it right : Ronald Reagan – he ended the cold war, and liberated hundreds of millions from the slavery of communism.
Even some of the more left-wing sources are prepared to admit that nowadays, and he did it not by smoking pot and droning “peace”, but by facing them out with the SDI…
And on the single most important factor behind most of the ills of the world today – overpopulation – the clip is completely silent of course, because that’s no easy one. Posting pics of cute kids is no answer.
yep, you got it right : Ronald Reagan – he ended the cold war, and liberated hundreds of millions from the slavery of communism. Even some of the more left-wing sources are prepared to admit that nowadays, ( cough, bullshit, cough) and he did it not by smoking pot and droning “peace”, but by facing them out with the SDI…
SDI !!!!! You’re a funny one. SDI was a fantasy in his already deteriorating brain. It has been a financial boondoggle that has produced not one single successful test since it’s delusional inception 25 years ago. Here’s the facts: Every president from Truman to George H. W. Bush was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, not to mention that their little foray into Afghanistan bled them dry.
Now, you can argue Randian Fanboy fantasies all you like, but they’re still…… well….. Randian Fantasies.
Ronald Reagan was at the right place in the right time. And he’d been practicing his lines for decades. (as all actors are wont to do) The fall of the Berlin wall happened on Bush Sr.’s watch, not Ronnies. So let’s not rewrite history here. Next thing you’ll be spouting is the nonsense that Ronnie never raised taxes.
To give you some perspective on the man behind the myth of Reagan, he launched his Presidential bid in January of ’79 in Philadephia, Mississippi. Where he uttered the immortal words” I believe in states rights”
We all know what that meant to those racist pricks.
Save your Ronnie Reagan fanboy bullshit for people with a lesser sense of history and an even larger penchant for being sucked in by bullshit.
You know, your crowd.
As to your second point:
And on the single most important factor behind most of the ills of the world today – overpopulation – the clip is completely silent of course, because that’s no easy one. Posting pics of cute kids is no answer.
Spoken like a true member of the neo-enlightened conservative: Cull the herd.
It is not directly advocated here, but I need to take a pot shot at something: Non-interventionism is an immoral philosophy. War sometimes is the answer and sometimes even the best answer. Iraq war should have been fought, although much earlier and for humanitarian reasons. I don’t continue to ramble on, just point out that Screem Bloody Murder by CNN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4vI18HJM2o
and ask what non-violent solution could have saved those lives.
Ask yourselves a question: When was the last, truly necessary war that this nation was engaged in? Hmm?
You know the answer. Every war since then has been part and parcel of our need to justify what has grown exponentially each year to the now absurd sum of one 1/2 trillion dollars per year in defense spending. Off the books of course.
What could our nation do with half that money? For our nation. For our kids. For the world.
TheSingingZombiesays
Hey PZ, a moron on another site wrote the following:
“…the “beneficial” mutations (the ones that are supposedly “good” for you) are always deletions – in other words, the supposed “beneficial” mutations which you can read about in the scientific literature, are actually information in the genetic code that is LOST. … We are losing valuable information in our genetic code over time. ”
Have you ever heard this before? What do you make of it?
PLEEEEZE reply–thanks.
Equisetumsays
“Ronald Reagan – he ended the cold war, and liberated hundreds of millions from the slavery of communism.”
You seem to have confused Ronnie with Michael Gorbachev.
Blakesays
Does PZ actually believe this silly horseshit woo? I mean really? or is he just being cheeky with these kinds of posts? I sure hope it’s the latter. It’s so anti-science and irrational. yuck. Whenever he veers into his hippiedom and “ahhh!! the patriarchy!” kicks, my eyes roll back into my head and my bowels spontaneously empty. It’s quite the inconvenience.
There is no way ANYBODY in the late 60s early 70s would have mistaken me for a hippy, but anybody looking back would definitely label me as such.
I had a lot of qualities that would be considered hippy, like lots of drugs, loud music, dead head, anti-war, long hair.
However, I dressed in leather and jeans and boots, rode motorcycles, did not embrace non-violence nor the new left, didn’t smoke pot, drank too much, carried weapons and was more along the lines of what you would consider a 50’s style juvenille delinquent, or prototype 80s style punk. I was also a jazz freak, loved to dance, wrote poetry, got in bar fights.
There was all kind of shit going on back then.
People look back and talk about ‘the Civil Rights Movement’, but there was a hell of a divide between the Northern Black Muslims, the SCLC, and the Black Panthers. The Panthers were an Atheist org, the other two were faith based, and also there was the less political Pan African cultural movement going on at the same time, all very different.
What’s being talked about in the vids are very watered down 60’s stereo-types that have been assimilated and popularized to some degree.
I find it amusing, but I have no idea what a DFH is or was, or how it thinks, and I was there.
There was a lot more diversity of ideas and FAR LESS consensus across the board.
I thought all the non-violent stuff was stupid, and more shit needed to get blown up, guys like Bill Ayers were hardly uncommon, there was shit blowing up and burning down all over the place.
By today’s standards those are some pretty aberrant, if not pathological behaviors and belief systems. Today, you think ‘Hippy’ you think drum circles and Rainbow Gatherings, not Thermite and Cordite, but everybody was rockin and rollin pretty hard back then, and the sixties was anything but a fathomable homogeneous definable period, and there certainly was no ‘movement’, there were thousands, including some really nasty ones.
John Moralessays
Peter @70,
And on the single most important factor behind most of the ills of the world today – overpopulation – the clip is completely silent of course, because that’s no easy one. Posting pics of cute kids is no answer.
No.
The juxtaposition of images of fat plutocrats and emaciated children, however, should be consciousness-raiser.
I’m not fat, nor a plutocrat, but I confess I am guilty of inaction. I confess I’m a selfish bastard who just wants to live out a comfortable life without going out of my way to change the world; but at least I’m aware of it.
(Humanity already, as I see it, has the capacity to feed, house and care for the existing global population).
I am heartened by those such as Pascalle @68, however. I hope you make it, Pascalle, and that you do make a difference.
shonnysays
Posted by: peter | March 18, 2009 2:18 AM
joeyess @39
Now.,,,,,,, who was right and who was wrong?
Abbie Hoffman or Ronald Reagan? –
….yep, you got it right : Ronald Reagan – he ended the cold war, and liberated hundreds of millions from the slavery of communism.
Even some of the more left-wing sources are prepared to admit that nowadays, and he did it not by smoking pot and droning “peace”, but by facing them out with the SDI…
Was there more than one Ronald Reagan?
Because I presume you are not thinking of the cheating, war-mongering, sleep-walking fuckwit that was the US president who could deliver his lines when they were well rehearsed, but a blundering fool like GWB when he had to deliver something off the cuff. And to whom events took a fortunate turn every so often, because the world had a few intelligent leaders as well, like Mikhail Gorbachev.
If you really mean that motherfucker, then you’d better get some more in-depth analyses on the Reagan maladministration.
Reagan was a shit actor, but a better actor than president.
And of course he was fully supported by Hitler’s bastard daughter, Maggie Thatcher.
Frederik Rosenkjærsays
It is SO easy to be in opposition. I may agree with much of the videos content, but this form and style is just naive.
“Let the sunshine in, let the sunshine in…, sing along…”
petersays
And on the single most important factor behind most of the ills of the world today – overpopulation – the clip is completely silent of course, because that’s no easy one. Posting pics of cute kids is no answer.
Spoken like a true member of the neo-enlightened conservative: Cull the herd.
I was well aware when I posted that that I was going to get cheap shots – but I wanted to highlight the mindlessness that was part of the hippy culture and is still pervasive.
Michael Gorbatschow superficially makes a more attractive hero than Reagan perhaps, but the fact is he was forced into what he did by the policy of Reagan and his predecessors. His hagiographers conveniently forget that Gorbatschow, in his many years as a leading communist, must have been responsible for many atrocious acts.
Reagan was no great intellectual perhaps, but he knew one big thing, and went about it with a determination which tipped the balance.
This reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word creations. Some of Gil’s stuff from the 70’s and 80’s are on youtube. I can’t even remember how I came to know about GSH’s political stuff. I was in junior high school in Australia, and GSH was a relatively unknown black leftist activist in the USA. Wow!
Taliesansays
Pretext: I am a business reporter, so yeah.
What people seem to forget is that the DFH, were the university students. The origin of the movement?
The frigging universities. These weren’t the dumbasses.
As to the big pharma comment? It is actually right.
You in America get adverts for drugs which require “asking your doctor” about them, when seriously if they really worked shouldn’t they be advertising them to your doctor, or better yet, your chemist, who might actually know what he or she is doing?
Instead, the market them with a laundry list of symptoms in the hopes that just hearing them you are suddenly going to think “Yeah, I am really sick” so that you can go to your doctor, ask about the drug, get a prescription for something you don’t really need. It is marketing to hypochondriacs, and hypochondria by proxy!
And it is pretty much the same sleazy technique used by the snake-oil salesmen of the alternative medicine market – except they somehow claim that it is healthy because it is natural. Evidently nobody introduced them to the concept of hemlock!
Then you have “privatised healthcare” which is the most expensive in the world, but hey, you somehow can’t afford the cheaper alternatives which cover everybody.
The big financial institutions, systematically insured that nobody could figure out what the hell they were buying when it came to the securatisation market.
The ratings industry, instead of noting that these packages were designed specifically to exploit how the ratings system worked, just merrily applied their spread sheets and ignored the fact that they didn’t know what the hell was going on either.
This is what led to the massive contagion of the financial crisis, as the largely unregulated end of the mortgage market (The non-depositories) sold on their risk to “suckers” who though they had no fucking clue as to what they were buying thought it must be good, it is triple A rated.
Which kind of bypassed the people who actually knew about how to go about lending money in a manner which would generate a profit – via the aptly named brokers.
In the middle of this you had people advertising using this line of reasoning: “I used to think. Now, I just read The Economist.” Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corp. That’s right people, you don’t have to use your brains, just read an economics rag! Brilliant!
And when the market goes to hell, blame the guys who were least qualified to know what they were doing (You know, the people who were getting subprime loans because they couldn’t get better ones) for not paying up.
And of course, helping out the people who couldn’t afford to take the hit is socialism while funding the “Retention bonuses” of the people who actually caused this mess (and who thus, are not exactly people one wants to retain) is just plain responsible.
In short, the DFH, were right.
/endrant
Kittysays
Those of you criticising this as naive or too simplistic need to lighten up a bit. It’s a u-tube video not an academic paper.
It’s pointing out that 40 years ago a bunch of kids had more awareness about where the world was heading than their elders and so-called betters who were, and still are, willing to abuse their positions for selfish reasons.
They were mostly white, middle class, well-educated kids from good all-American homes and for a short time they scared America stupid because up until then white, middle class, well-educated kids grew up to be like their parents and didn’t form into a mass youth movement which set out to capsize the boat not just rock it.
They certainly weren’t supposed to advocate equal rights for blacks, gays and women, or contraception for the unmarried, or abortion on demand, or banning nuclear weapons, or not interfering in the sovereign rights of other countries, or saving the environment…
Many of the movements which still scare the shit out of your Republicans come out of this time.
taliesansays
peter
The hippy sexual revolution was largely based off of the widening availability of birth control – which the hippies actually favoured.
Pimientitasays
Posted by: Autumn | March 18, 2009 12:28 AM
Meh.
When I lived in a VW van and drove around the US with a couple of friends, we would read aloud from “On the Road” before retiring to our tents. We looked like “hippies”, but if anyone ever asked, we replied that we were beatniks, who were like the hippies, only beatniks could read and write.
@ gardenguy, the beatniks predated every idea the hippies pretended they had come up with twenty years before the Summer of Love.
Also, Kerouac noted in Desolation Angels that the beatnik idea was already a sad parody of itself in the early sixties.
The hippies were a sad lot of hangers-on to a culture that was dead before they even imagined that they had invented it.
Yea and Kerouac was a revolutionary without a progenitor…he *obviously* thought up a counter culture on his own. :rolleyes:
What is wrong with Newton’s idea of “standing on the shoulders of giants” applying to cultural movements? Why is there so much snobbery involved in younger generations becoming involved in movements? If it is because they aren’t as “pure” then doesn’t that say something about the previous generation and their ability to transmit the message (and/or the necessity of it) and not necessarily the intelligence or “coolness” of the next generation?
Modern hippies are just a bunch of smelly criminals who have found a niche that makes them more palatable to their potential victims (I’m talking to you, Rainbow Family).
Someone tell them to comb their freakin’ hair.
Why? Why should they comb their hair? Because it’s more comfortable for you? How many “Rainbows” do you actually know? Who are their “victims?” (Granted there are quite a few woo-meisters in the movement, but kookiness of any kind would seem to draw the gullible in…)
And who are the criminals? All of them? Some of them? Just a few?
Just askin’…
bassmanpetesays
“Humanity already, as I see it, has the capacity to feed, house and care for the existing global population.”
As long as said population is happy not to go fishing, hunting, tree chopping, house building, fresh water drinking, etc., etc. All of these activities are conducted at the expense of other species. In fact we rely on some of these other species for our existence. If we carry on as we are doing, one day we’ll drive one species too many to extinction and we’ll go too. And when I look at some of my neighbours, that day can’t come soon enough :)
Peter McKellarsays
Procyon @37
Unfortunately it also led to (…) and violence on campuses all over the country, including Kent State
I must have been 6 yrs old at the time and I remember this as clearly as if yesterday (and that was from all the way over in oz). Kent State was a bunch of fucked in the head, deluded and scared toy soldiers firing into a crowd of unarmed students. Murders, no more. Then the white wash started (eg one of the girls was unmarried and pregnant, so by inference obviously was a slut whore who deserved to die). If there had been MORE violence from the hippie side I suspect that we would be living in a far, far better world today and would not have had to put up with Reagan, Thatcher or any of the other fuckwits since. Problems? sure, but nothing like what we have today. But like me, they were pacifists and long overdue housecleaning did not happen.
Could I suggest a belated but justified use of “Special Rendition” for the AIG pricks that are doing more damage to the USA than Homeland Security, the CIA and the millions of other departments that have been springing up under the oppressive regimes around the so-called “free world”?
Not to mention the drug abuse.
roflmao. pull the stick out of your arse procyon.
Speaking to a young university friend recently I said “It’s weird that all the good music from the 60s and 70s is so popular amongst young people these days” (it went out of fashion for a while there). He looked at me like I was an idiot and replied “Its all the hallucinogens”. I smiled and realised that there truly was hope for the world’s future.
Wowsers are the greatest threat to freedom and any future worth living. The uni students today are far more savvy than we ever were, plus they can use the net as a weapon like nothing that has ever existed before.
Woody Guthrie once pointed to his guitar and said “this kills facists”. Truer words were never spoken. Places like phyrangula, dawkins.net and the websites and blogs springing up daily are our only hope.
Wasn’t it Jim Morrison that sang “you may have the guns, but we have the numbers”? A war of ideologies is being waged today that we must not lose. This time we ex-hippies and sympathisers, with young smart people, have a chance to get it right.
The Australian Government is trying like crazy to censor the net, as are other countries. This must be stopped AT ALL COSTS. I am not prepared to advocate violence on this…yet.
PZ needs to run for prez (well, state government). Every single person here should be thinking about running for political office – local, state and federal. There is no other non-violent way I can see. Politics may suck, but the alternative is to forever do the bidding of inferior masters.
JBliliesays
“it’s a manufactured meme brought to you by the same folks who made “socialist”, “atheist” and “intellectual” into dirty words” — Bullseye.
“I was just about 4 or 5 years late to be a DFH, but I took on a lot of the ethic” Me too. My nitwit colleagues in engineering used to call me BHL, bleeding heart liberal. With some justification, I admit.
“PZ needs to run for prez (well, state government). Every single person here should be thinking about running for political office – local, state and federal.”
No way baby! No way I’d get elected with my record. Not only did I inhale, I LOVED IT (past tense though.) And I won’t lie (total disqualification for politics.) And, anyway, I don’t want to get slimed …
JBliliesays
Taliesan@90
Brilliant, thank you.
mksays
I get it. I’m in general agreement with the sentiment. I think as a work of art it stands strong. However…
The truth is, about a third of the way through I started to roll my eyes. Felt it was a little too “rah-rah-siss-boom-bah!” Trite.
So, for the record…
The DFH were not right. The scientists were right. The intellectuals, philosophers and politicians who had a strong grasp of history were right.
The DFH believe in chakras and auras and want the federal government to fund “complimentary and alternative medicine.” They think “big pharma” is consciously trying to kill people for profit.
Call me humorless, but credit to the actual heroes is due.
RedGreenInBluesays
I agree with Kitty (#91) and similar comments.
There’s a classic Irish joke which I think sums it up. Someone is lost on a country road, a long way from their destination, and asks a local for directions. The local’s reply is “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”
Of course the hippies didn’t solve all the problems. What they (and others in the counterculture) did was to publicise a radically different way of thinking about the world’s problems, and show people that they could effect change without the necessity of confront the dominant social, economic and political system, by side-stepping it and making it an irrelevance (“dropping out”). Thanks to the hippies, phenomena such as co-operatives, intentional communities, sustainable living, self-sufficiency and ecopolitics are increasing in popularity, and given the current economic crisis, peak oil and climate change, it looks like we will need all of these in spades – plus plenty of the music (and even the drugs) to cheer us up as we go.
KIsays
Scooter, you nailed it. The idea that there was some sort of monolithic “Left” is a complete fabrication. I was a bit young for the hippie thing, and went punk when I got old enough. We said we hated the hippies, but it was mostly blow to make us seem different (we had many philosophical points in common, and needed something to differentiate ourselves). No one I knew, hippie or punk, could be categorized, filed or put in some kind of box, all were individuals, with quirks and deeply held contentions.
Johnsays
IMHO the hippies were right about alot of things. However, much like Americans today they missed the target. They got so wrapped up in “Counter Culture” they forgot about their responsibilities as citizens. All it did was give ammunition to those whose best interest is to keep Americans fighting Americans. The same exact thing is happening today. The only difference is the dividing line. Today it has been narrowed done to republican and democrat. Because Americans disregarde their civic duties in the ’60s and ’70s this country got Nixon, adn the next 30 years of massive deregulation that has led us to the current economic state.
Everyday I hear people arguing democrat or republican. In the meantime nobody is paying any attention to what their govenment is doing. None of the regulations have been put back into place. Our money is being thrown at big business with no hope of creating jobs. And we get news about Stem Cell Research (while an important issue) only serves to continue the division.
The hippies did get some things right. Most important was to show that they had a voice. But they got alot of things wrong too. The same things we have wrong today. Having a voice is not enough if your yelling at the wrong people.
Jadehawksays
Ronald Reagan – he ended the cold war,
ahahahaaahaa
no.
the CIA in the 70’s believed that if left alone, the USSR would collapse within 20 years. and they were right. People like Gorbachev and Walesa had more to do with it than your precious St. Reagan. And if we’re talking outside influences, I’d credit a Willie Brandt and a Helmut Kohl before that numbut
Geoffsays
I don’t get the inclusion of drinking water.
Isn’t that technically socialist?
Knockgoatssays
I’m getting a “sorry, this video is no longer available”. Whether this is just UK, just non-US, or everywhere, I don’t know. However, it’s still available at http://www.wikio.com/video/933243.
I was never a hippie in the full, dropping-out sense (and lamentably little of that “free love” came my way in a youth I would like to have misspent far more extravagantly), but I did enjoy some of the more hedonistic aspects of the counterculture. The hippies were only one bunch of threads in the counterculture, which had three overlapping bunches: hedonistic, mystical (*sigh*) and political. Politically, the DFHs (using that as shorthand for the entire counterculture) were indeed largely right: militarism, hierarchy, over-centralisation, corporate power, conformity, puritanism, and environmental destruction are great evils, which need fighting now even more than then. That the DFHs failed to overcome them (despite their important role in achieving many desirable goals) in unsurprising: there was a great deal of naivety about them – unsurprising in people mostly in their 20s – and the counterculture generated a powerful backlash from those who saw their power and wealth under threat. This backlash triumphed in 1979-80 with the second oil shock, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the elections of Thatcher and Reagan. The backlashers have remained in control ever since.
On the collapse of the USSR, Jadehawk, I’d be very interested in a reference to the CIA’s 1970s forecast! In historical perspective, the extraordinary thing is how long the USSR was able to continue the Cold War against an antagonist with far greater resources (just compare the state of the USSR and USA in 1945, leaving aside the USA’s far more useful allies). The invasion of Afghanistan was surely the beginning of the end; whether Reagan speeded it I’m unsure, but he certainly nearly got us all killed (google “Stanislav Petrov” and “Able Archer”). The collapse itself had very mixed results – those who did best out of it were in the east European satellite states and the Baltic republics, who got political democracy and EU membership; those in the rest of the USSR have seen collapses in social support systems, steep rises in death rates, and only very limited advances in political freedom; while elsewhere, capitalist elites took the collapse as a signal that there were now no limits to the extent they could hog the goodies. Until then, they had felt obliged to compete with communism for public support – hence, at least in part, welfare provision in the rich world – even the USA, decolonisation, civil rights, etc. Post-USSR, the attack on redistributive taxation, welfare provision and civil liberties has intensified. The crash of 2008 (caused by the increasing imbalances anti-egalitarian policies have produced), the increasingly obvious environmental crises, and the election of Obama, now provide the first chance we’ve had to end backlash rule. Let’s not fuck it up!
Rational Worldsays
Some of the DFH’s are still out there telling the truth. Many though crashed and burned and found baby jesus and are part of the problem today. At 56 years old, I have had to endure soooooo many idiots declare their born again status, and basic sell out to the nonsense that we see all around us. I can only hope that our internet never gets squashed. It is a beacon of hope to be able to find smart people out there on websites like this and at least know there is some sanity.
anthonzisays
Youtube comments:
joeyess: “yes, I would agree that you are entrenched. Stubborn, ignorant and petulant is no way to go thru life, son.” “I think that person learned that phrase at the Army War College.”
sirwinfredsmith:”how much do the neocons pay you to post your bullshit?”
Obviously I’ve done something right lol. I like how they immediately jump to conclusions and throw out baseless assertions. If only they knew that I was an ACADEMIC LIBERAL. The irony in calling a biology student ignorant *facepalm*. If only they realized that I’d won long before I pressed a single key on on my keyboard. Perhaps they should read a bit of Sam Harris, particularly the parts about Gandhi. P.Z., Surely you don’t agree with this person fundamentally? Doing so would demonstrate a lack of understanding of cruel realities of life.
inb4 false dichotomy.
JasonTDsays
joeyess @ 77,
Ask yourselves a question: When was the last, truly necessary war that this nation was engaged in? Hmm?
The judgment to call a war “necessary” or “unnecessary” depends entirely on what you consider to be worth the inevitable death and destruction of war. As was pointed out by the video Lotharloo linked in #76, it is actually part of international law that nations have an obligation to stop genocide. The obligation is not to condemn it, to issue sanctions against countries that commit it, but to stop it. And the international community has repeatedly failed to do so. It is just naive to think that totalitarian regimes will play nice just because more enlightened countries do the diplomatic equivalent of shaking their finger at them. We add to that the problem of terrorist groups with no central government to engage diplomatically and that won’t follow anything resembling ‘civilized’ behavior to achieve their goals anyway. Also, I’m curious what the DFH’s of that era would have thought we should do about 9/11.
Also, I’m curious what the DFH’s of that era would have thought we should do about 9/11.
Well, they certainly wouldn’t have advocated attacking Iraq. Just in case you missed it, millions of DFH’s were in the streets of this country and around the world in March of ’03 protesting the impending Shock and Awe. I think they advocated the correct response. The support of hunting down the perps of that attack: Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Then the criminals of this government started to point at shiny objects and the misdirection began. The result: A Aggressive War Of Choice. Or, as I like to call it: A War Crime.
The fact is, if they were SOOOO right like this video tries to show then when the party ended why did they all go home?
A few went awry. I met a bunch of them in the Reagan administration — often with pictures of their old selves framed on the walls of their offices.
More frequently I find them now in many other places. District attorney. Head of criminal enforcement. Director of outreach. Lead scientist. Bureau director. Mayor. State Representative. State Senator. Principal. Teaching the AP courses. Volunteering — Girl Scout leaders, Boy Scout leaders. Even bankers.
Look across America, you can find the former hippies, making the nation work. Why did they all go home, you ask? Where in the hell did you get that idea? Tom Wolfe told us we can’t go home. So we changed things. Oh, yeah, we got eclipsed at the polls in 2000 and 2004. And truth be told, it wasn’t hippies who won it for Obama, though there were a lot of them pushing that vehicle along.
Where did you think all those recycle bins came from? Who do you think invented eco-tourism? Who do you think makes the backpacking, ski and fishing industries so big these days?
In comment #57 (half this list of comments back), I wrote:
There is a popular bumper sticker that says:
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
I hate war, I really do! Been there, done that, and I truly hate it! And every time I see that bumper sticker I am reminded of how much I hate war.
But since we sure do seem to live in a world where there are and always have been people who do and would do great harm to other people for fun, profit or prophet, I just hafta ask:
Is war never ever the answer?
…and in all the comments added here since, no one has even tried to answer my question one way or the other — not a single one — leaving me disappointed and wondering: Why? Why won’t anyone either answer “Yes, war is never ever the answer” and explain why war is never, ever the answer, or else candidly answer “Alas, no, unfortunately sometimes war is the answer”?
aratinasays
Frank Lovell, perhaps you should consider the context of the “War is not the answer” bumper sticker. And sticking with the general approach toward claims on Pharyngula, it is your job to show that war is the answer. In other words, which wars are you talking about and why were they the answer? What future wars would be the answer? More importantly, what questions have been answered by war?
Frank Lovellsays
Aratina, I do not claim to know for sure if any war was the only — or even best available — answer to human suffering at the hands of oppressors and/or violent aggressors.
But what struck me about the popular bumper sticker I mentioned makes it clear that some people do think they know the answer, and that the answer they think they know is: “War is not the answer.”
Whenever I see one of those bumper stickers, I wonder, “war is not the answer, ever???“
And so, I asked (twice now): “Is war never ever the answer?”
And now, I ask yet again: Is war never, ever the answer?
And I ask you, Aritina: do you know the answer to the question, “Is war never ever the answer?” And if so — if youdo know the answer to the question I’ve now asked three times, will you please tell me what your answer to my question is?
…but not about everything…
Would be better if rage against the machine did the song in the style of hadda be playin on the jukebox http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPepcAvPbUA&feature=related
Yep. So true.
And where are those hippies today? Not all, but many, went to work making their own obscene fortunes within the system they railed against. Fortunately, some didn’t and are now the main voice against this on-going insanity. The kids of today have been so successfully succored by the system that they don’t effectively use what could be a very profound voice. The “mother-fucking hippies” were faced with being forced to go to war on behalf of the monster, and fought it. Today’s youth face a wiser monster, that simply makes it impossible for a small, struggling segment of the population to take the money and run – into the battlefields of the Middle East, while their brothers and sisters of greater fortune can sit at home, attending classes, largely oblivious of the outrages discussed in this video.
I was just about 4 or 5 years late to be a DFH, but I took on a lot of the ethic, which is probably why I spend most of the time chronically depressed because I live in a world in which the prevailing mythos is completely fucked up. But I hitched up with a girl who is a neo hippie. And she’s very cool. We’re 16 years together now, and she’s about the only thing keeping me sane.
Oddly enough, I remember back in Junior High to High School (so this would have been late ’90s) when, for some reason, “hippie” became a common insult amongst the youth. Calling someone a “stupid hippie” or the like was common. I remember, at the time, thinking that most of these kids probably had no idea who the hippies were or what they stood for.
Around this same time, I remember my cousin used “stupid hippie” as an insult once while we were playing a video game (I don’t really remember exactly, but I seem to recall it was 007 Goldeneye on the N64). Our grandmother (who was, I think, in her 30s during the 1960s) overheard him and began lamenting that she “didn’t understand why hippie would be considered an insult” and that “the hippies that she knew were all very nice people and that though she didn’t agree with everything, they seemed to be just nice people trying to do nice things and not hurting anyone”
Even today, I’ll still hear “hippie” used as an insult, and I still do not fully know why.
Prillotashekta – it’s a manufactured meme brought to you by the same folks who made “socialist”, “atheist” and “intellectual” into dirty words.
I remember in 1968 or so at five years of age telling my father that when I grew up I was going to be a hippie. He didn’t say much to that; Dad was OK. In my own way I think I did it. Anyway, I have often thought that the reason conservatives deny global climate change, resist environmentalism, spread fear and mistrust, refuse responsible regulation, and all the other nasty stuff they do is because the thing that causes them the most dread, that wakes them from nightmares in a cold sweat is the prospect of having to admit that the Dirty Fucking Hippies were right all along.
Let your freak flag fly! (Even if it’s metaphorical ’cause your hair is falling out)
Re: John Evo @#6:
I figured as much.
I tend to use “hippie” to refer to things like crystal-waving alties, astrologers, and such. Not the peaceniks who were quite right.
Annoyance with the video: The mention of all the caveats on pharmaceuticals. Well, how would you cut down on the complexity of medical science? Those caveats are there because the human body is complex. No one’s got a better alternative to offer.
Texas State Board of Education final vote in ten days:
http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=6476
It makes some good points and also some sweeping generalizations. I think there were some great thinkers in the hippie movement maybe they were right about a lot of stuff. but, the majority of hippies are just like the ones out of the south park episode “die hippie die” Too full of themselves to realize that having giant parties and getting high was for there own self gratification and for no one else. The fact is, if they were SOOOO right like this video tries to show then when the party ended why did they all go home? Thats like having a superpower and instead of using it you sit on the couch.
Oh my, is this the dawning of the age of Aquarius?
notice the face of baby jesus in the cars headlamp on the right….
I’m going to have to disagree on this one. This video is full of victimization and advocating naive BS.
To paraphrase my favourite politician of the day, Sen. Charles (Chuck) Grassley:
Jump You Fuckers
The same thing happened to me, until one day someone called me a ‘hippie’, and I replied, ‘yeah!! Peace, bro!!’ and gave him a peace sign. Since then, any time anyone has called me a ‘hippie’, meaning it as an insult, I’ve deliberately acted as if they’ve complimented me – it confuses the fuck out of them.
I have to admit that as much as I understand and appreciate actual medical research, I haven’t found myself overly impressed with the drugs being marketed on TV these days. I’ve seen pills for arthritis that have been known to cause death, pills for psoriasis that may cause leukemia, asthma control medication that “may increase the risk of asthma-related death”.
My favourite is Treximet, which is the migraine drug Imitrex combined with a common, non-prescription pain reliever. I think the commercials should include the sentence for honesty: “Treximet works by effectively extending our patent protection on Imitrex without the need to actually research a novel drug.”
Penicillin they’re not.
BEAUTIFUL. And all the hippy-haters, I’d hate to remind them what would still be, that they take for granted every day, if it hadn’t been for that little revolution… a revolution I’m afraid wasn’t big enough.
The goal of the hippies was to change society and correct some egregious wrongs. Their rallying credo was “question authority” and always ask why. The movement got us out of Vietnam, made abortion legal, elevated women and minorities to first class citizens, made government more tranparent, protected the environment, etc. Frankly, without the hippy philosophy, this country would be in an even sorrier state than it is now. The drug use was a downside, of course. Too many gifted people died too young.
I’ve always been proud of my generation and wish more people today felt that passion to make life better for all of us.
Another benefit of the 60’s: The music was fabulous!!
“Hippie” as an insult during the late nineties… Hmm. I, for one, thought it was because of South Park.
You had me until they started on the “Big Pharma” horseshit. :P
I need to work on that guitar riff.
Posted by: Bronze Dog @ #9,
I’l grant you that, though I tend to equate most of that with so called New Age Woo.
Annoyance with the video: The mention of all the caveats on pharmaceuticals. Well, how would you cut down on the complexity of medical science? Those caveats are there because the human body is complex. No one’s got a better alternative to offer.
I have no argument with medical science, nor do I dispute the complexity or the difficulty of coming up with results that have the potential to make fruitful lives possible where circumstances would otherwise have led to misery or worse, so my hat is off to the medical doctors and all the scientists in the related fields in the biological sciences.
However I have lived around the world and while I have no idea how to change what we have here in the US and therefore I’m guilty of not having a better alternative to offer, but Jesus Fucking Christ, if anyone truly believes that this best that we can do in terms of the exsiting system for equitable and just delivery of the results of our scientific endeavors to the general populace then I fucking give up on everything that this country is supposed to stand for, because the system as it is now sucks big time and it is truly beyond repair. It needs to be torn down a rebuilt from scratch because the current paradigm is hoplessly unsustainable! DFH are still right on that score. good luck to us all!
Before South Park there was this.
Posted by: DaveL | March 18, 2009 02:32
I blame the U. S. Constitution for this. Our Free-Market-bedazzled Founding Fathers gave Congress only one way
“(t)o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”.
We need a better way.
I guess I should jump in here for a moment.
When I refer to DFH’s, it is mostly tongue in cheek. Atrios, Digby, Kos, and many other lefty bloggers often note that rarely do people in power listen to anyone on the left because we’re still engaged in a silly culture war that began in the ’60’s. A ridiculous retread of tired stereotypes and generalizations i.e. Tom Brokaw’s BOOM!! bullshit. When the fact of the matter is that if our advice had been taken, cranks like George W. Bush would have remained just that………… cranks. Instead, we lost the debate and a b-film actor smiled at us and we all felt better. Gahhhhh!
The issues raised by environmental groups, women’s issue advocates, gay rights, anti-war, anti-corporate, big pharma, the insurance industry, etc. etc. were all part of the hippy agenda and were and are relevant. Not to mention that progressives embrace these very issues. So, it kind of feels good to rub it in. The DFH’s were right.
Right?
Thanks, P.Z. Thanks one hell of a lot.
I’m a Newfie hippie of the 70s… we were close to a decade behind trends back in those days :P
I was one of those Dirty Fucking Hippies. Even if we correctly identified some of the problems, we had no coherent, practical approach to fixing them.
Many of the commenters here have taken umbrage at the “Big Pharma” references. It’s important to remember that there is a difference between medical science and HIGHLY questionable company decisions to put drugs on the market (often way prematurely) and to aggressively market those drugs to people who may or may not need them (even if they do work as claimed). The dual aspect of “Big Pharma” thus must always be monitored. Sure we want the science, sure we want new cures… but always be suspicious of the man who is getting rich off it. To blind yourself to this reality simply because you support scientific advance is pure foolishness.
Oi! Perhaps an NFSW tag for those of us at work might have been warranted?
A lot of over-generalizations, simplifications and falsehoods in that video, but, overall, yeah, I get it. Problem is: the dirty fucking hippies really didn’t have much of a platform other than vague notions about peace, sex, drugs and mysticism. I don’t remember them accurately foreseeing all of these problems, nor providing succeeding generations with detailed alternatives. Absolute peace is not attainable, nor is a corruption-free government or market. The dirty fucking hippies are bygone.
I’m not quite a Dirty Fucking Hippie, but I do resemble one. Besides the long ponytail and occasional tie-dyed shirt, I’m an opponent of war and corporate greed, and a proponent of environmentalism.
I think there are definite parallels between large corporation mentality and organized religion mentality. The people at the bottom are only “doing their job” (because that’s what the boss told them), and the people at the top will lie and cheat any way they can in order to preserve their organization, desiring nothing less than total control of the market.
Not so much.
DFH were great at raging against government and society, but they were very weak on offering viable alternatives. Some good came from the movement, but it wasn’t the panacea that the video implies.
@John Evo
Very concise. Thank you.
As someone who watched the hippie movement flower (heh), it’s a little surreal to hear a tough-sounding guy with a southern country-music accent sing their praise.
#29Posted by: John Evo,
Yes, well said. I love science, but does every fucking 3rd kid have to be on Ritalin?
I was a dirty fucking hippy. I’m dirtier now, I fucked more then, and you really had to be there to get it. Tune in, turn on, and drop out. I got the drop out part down pat. I no longer turn on and the voices in my head makes it hard to tune in. Get rid of the fluff (and there was a lot) and the message has always been solid. There is a better way to live. Western civilization has always been doing it wrong. Funny thing is, the Jesus Freak movement was an offshoot of that and I was part of it too for a while. Leave out the Jesus part and it was pretty much the same thing: love your brother and leave the world a better place if you can.
The political/social climate has alway been a pendulum. As far to the right as the pendulum has swung is how far to the left it will eventually swing (at least for some). Although Obama may serve as a damper on that pendulum. He is so not a hippy.
The hippy movement, as I recall, led tto a lot of great things, like feminism, stopping the Vietnam fiasco, Earth Day, questioning authority (the military industrial complex) and generally making everyone more aware of our power to change the world in a good way. Unfortunately it also led to the Yippies and the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers,the SLA and violence on campuses all over the country, including Kent State. Not to mention the drug abuse. It was a coin with two sides, but I remember those early days in the late ’60s fondly…the “70s not so much. And the music was, indeed, really great. It definitley changed America for the better.
War, greed, and pollution are bad. Those are some really extreme positions to hold. If only people listened and ended those things with the power of positive thinking.
One Eye Jack:
For the first time in this country’s history, they ended an illegal and lethal war, they drove apartheid out of this country, they exposed the CIA and FBI as the fascist organizations that they are and were, they began the environmental movement, they advocated for free healthcare. I could go on all night.
However, they were painted as dangerous and delusional by the very people that have brought us our present circumstances today. Now that’s stepping thru the looking glass, isn’t it?
Now.,,,,,,, who was right and who was wrong?
Abbie Hoffman or Ronald Reagan?
Yep.
J. Jonah Jameson don’t like his employees slaggin’, Parker. Maybe you should visit adult sites on your own time?
You had me until they started on the “Big Pharma” horseshit.
#35
Yes, well said. I love science, but does every fucking 3rd kid have to be on Ritalin?
Generally the kids taking stimulants like Ritalin, Concerta, Adderall, and Vyvanse actually have ADHD. Also, not properly treating these kids can cause this already vulnerable group to self medicate with alcohol, tobacco, or illicit drugs when they get older. Treating kids that have ADHD actually lowers the probability they will become addicted to destructive drugs in the future.
Ugh, otherwise I like the warnings that come along with Lamictal. Specifically entertaining are the warnings about Stevens-Johnson Syndrome and Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis. These conditions start off with a rash and progress to your skin sloughing off in large patches.
Fwiw, I found this musically and politically trite and imprecise.
Hey !!!
I was a tad old to be a hippie and too young to be a beatnik. I am several years ahead of the baby boom. For some reason I was on the leading edge of a lot of this stuff so I did all the acid and speed before 1965 and things like that. From my humble perspective what the hippies did was liberate the uptights from Protestant work ethic. Our parents struggled thru the depression and then the war created a boom into which we were born. I saw McDonalds appear in an old apple orchard where they cut the potatoes in the stainless steal back area and a burger was 15 cents. Problem is, the boom allowed us to get way too selfish and even when we thought we were doing good with that, the media just found a way to sell it and before you know it free love turned into flower scented douches. It has been all down hill ever since. We unleashed greed and now it has come home to roost.
WHY PEOPLE LAUGH AT HIPPIES TODAY:
Is this cause good? Yes, but that isn’t enough…..
I’m still a DFH, although I was never dirty.
Goddamnit, the computer is acting up again and the link I saw was garbled – can anyone provide me with a good link? You know, the version that includes the black-garbed evil capitalists videotaping themselves sawing off heads with a rusty knife and blowing women’s brains out while chanting Allah Akbar? I also don’t have the segment showing the bearded Spanish-speaking former leader of the country that has universal health care sojourning to Europe and the USA when his medical condition caused the rubber to meet the road. Sigh….
I guess being competent in science doesn’t make one competent when it comes to politics. How incredibly naive!
It was interesting, but mostly a gross over-generalization. Yes, they were right about a lot of things, but to be fair, they were also wrong about a lot of things as well (as things usually go). As mentioned, the medical over-generalization was a huge skip; one of the interesting quotes from a Tim Minchin video a couple months back… “You know what they call Alternative Medicine that’s been found to work, and is backed up by research and science? Medicine.” Yes, there’s a certain push to market “profitable” drugs, but in a lot of cases, they were discovered by accident while researching something else (take Viagra).
The same really applies to some of the concepts like mercury in fish (it’s not wild fish, unless you live up in PZtopia, it’s typically farm-raised cold water fish like Salmon) or Big Box retailers. While they get blamed for killing mom-and-pop stores, across the country, Malls were around killing them off well before that. And every “big” business was once a small business that took off. Somehow, success is good in some things (let’s say, Whole Foods), but bad in others (Walmart employing some two-million people and enjoying an employee satisfaction and retention unheard of elsewhere in retail). That’s the odd thing about it, overall, and in a lot of cases, what made them successful didn’t come from being big, but rather from what they did when small.
So, the DFH were right, but so where the other guys. A scary world we sit in…
#29 I have to agree to an extend about Big Pharm. But the issue is more complicated than some people think. Research cost money. The funds of tomorrow’s life saving drugs come from today’s sales. To drive of sales to pay for future research, companies have to advertise.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as overdoing it. There are good reasons why prescription drugs need a prescription. Instead we have Big Pharm running commercials with the goal of passing their drugs out like Halloween candy.
The movie “Brain Candy” a research creates a pill to cure depression. His company rushes it out and encourage everyone to take it. In the climax the protagonist says the line, “I made Gleeminix for people who were clinically depressed. People who were too depressed to get up off the floor. Not because you missed your bus or you look stupid in a yellow hat.” (Woman in the background was wearing a yellow hat and took it off in shame.) It’s an accurate line. We’re being taught that any problem can be solved by seeing our doctor and asking them about the wonder drug we saw on TV. That doesn’t sit right with me.
There needs to be less greed, more idealism, and more humility in businesses.
Born to teen hippie parents who were traveling through Europe at the time I remember the lifestyle well. It was a lot like socialism, communism, utopia. All great in theory but in reality just a mess. Most hippies my folks knew got hooked on drugs due to the experimentation, drop out phase of things or got smart and got jobs. By the early 70’s being a hippie was an excuse to smoke dope, draw checks from Big Brother and bitch. My parents grew up and got smart and got over themselves. The hippies were whiners who never really had a plan or a true leader. Like the Women’s movement. There have been no hippies since the early 70’s and anyone who says they are a hippie now is just trying to justify living some else’s lifestyle. Get your own.
I don’t really know enough about the Ritalin statistics to go on a rant, but I do hope that, with great regularity, it’s restricted responsibly to those kids who actually do need it. It’s just that I’ve seen kids who are constantly hyped up on sugar and who don’t get a balanced diet, and when they go through their daily and very predictable cycle of bouncing off the walls and then becoming moody and inattentive, I hear people talking about giving Ritalin to them, and it’s just one more example of how dumb this country can be about things like diet and nutrition. But I certainly don’t mean to single out Ritalin. Not at all. There are shelves and shelves of antacids, laxatives, cholesterol controllers, sleep aids, etc., that advertisers compel us to take because other advertisers induce us to consume huge quantities of truly mediocre, non-nutritious food.
We are bizarrely obsessed with drugs, and it’s a combination of ignorance and gullibility. We don’t have to be such a freaking fat, drugged-up nation. Actually, I don’t even blame the drug companies as much as the naïveté and lack of discernment on the part of the public.
So, um . . . I guess I’m a hippie at heart. Lot’s of good whole foods, fresh grown, vine ripened, working with nature, yadda yadda yadda . . .
Sorry, that was for RyanG #42
Geez, a lot of ahistoricity goin’ down here.
The Civil Rights/Black Power campaigns, the Women’s Lib movement, the Sexual Revolution, and (most of) the Environmental/Ecology struggles all had different roots: like everything else in the ’60s – even GW Bush & Danny Quayle – they picked up a little color from the hippies, but they started earlier and would’ve risen anyway.
There were two countercultures back then, the (political) Movement and the (lifestyle, for lack of a better word) Freaks.
The first group was focused on the streets; the other, on Nature. They overlapped, but they didn’t get along. The Movement despised the hedonism, lack of discipline, and fuzzy-mindedness of the Freaks; the Freaks couldn’t stand the uptightness, obsessiveness, and urge to control of the Movement.
Both were right. I moved back and forth between the two, I oughta know.
“Hippie” is a media term (generally blamed on Life magazine) – those of us in the hard core sneered at hippies. We called ourselves freaks, or freeks, and those who stayed inside the box we called straights. (It took me more than a decade to accept that word as a sexual self-label…)
The corporate media lied about us then, just as they lie about almost everything today: even the few who tried to be sympathetic got it wrong, and our own media left out most of the messy parts (at best). Whole Earth Catalog probably captured the zeitgeist most effectively – but their goal was to search out the best, not the most representative.
We tried too much – to transform everything, all at the same time, down to the psychological/ecological roots. We succeeded at too little, and most of that came from co-optation by marketing experts in super-wide ties, bell-bottoms, and salon-trimmed sideburns.
All the above is gross and misleading generalizations: you had to be there – and even then…
A lot of the same effort is being tried again, btw – this time away from the cameras and microphones and quick cheap labels (though repeating too many of the other mistakes from 30-40 years back). So far the “lifestyle” emphasis prevails, though economic pressures are likely to produce the same sorts of resistance that the draft did. More power to ’em!
Walmart employing some two-million people and enjoying an employee satisfaction and retention unheard of elsewhere in retail
Evidence, please, because it doesn’t seem that way, from some of the things going on with Wal-Mart vis-a-vis employee relation.
For instance:
The Houston woman that Wal-Mart expected to work 12+hours a day, but thought they could get away with paying her for only 8. She sued and won.
The butchers at the Jacksonville, TX Wal-Mart who are the only American Wal-Mart workers to successfully unionize–so that they could get decent pay and working conditions. The only reason they got the union in there was that they conducted their union meetings–IN SPANISH. Wal-Mart’s response? Get rid of all butchers, all stores. They fucking fired the organizers and all butchers nationwide, rather than having their butchers unionized. Now Wal-Mart shoppers get meat processed at some plant, rather than cut up for you by local workers.
How about the long-term lawsuit about Wal-Mart’s discriminatory practices towards promoting women, and being paid less in all levels, anywhere from 6-16%, depending on the position? It’s been fought in courts for about 11 years now. Surely you’ve heard of it?
Damn hippies
There is a popular bumper sticker that says: WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
I hate war, I really do! Been there, done that, and I truly hate it! And every time I see that bumper sticker I am reminded of how much I hate war.
But since we sure do seem to live in a world where there are and always have been people who do and would do great harm to other people for fun, profit or prophet, I just hafta ask:
Is war never ever the answer?
Meh.
When I lived in a VW van and drove around the US with a couple of friends, we would read aloud from “On the Road” before retiring to our tents. We looked like “hippies”, but if anyone ever asked, we replied that we were beatniks, who were like the hippies, only beatniks could read and write.
@ gardenguy, the beatniks predated every idea the hippies pretended they had come up with twenty years before the Summer of Love.
Also, Kerouac noted in Desolation Angels that the beatnik idea was already a sad parody of itself in the early sixties.
The hippies were a sad lot of hangers-on to a culture that was dead before they even imagined that they had invented it.
Modern hippies are just a bunch of smelly criminals who have found a niche that makes them more palatable to their potential victims (I’m talking to you, Rainbow Family).
Someone tell them to comb their freakin’ hair.
The video contains many truths, as well as a lot of fear-mongering.
The DFH may have been right, but so what? When I die, and that’s that, no afterlife, no heaven, no god or gods coddling me like a small child for an eternity, do I get to turn to the theists and say “I told you so!” Nope. Ain’t gonna happen.
That’s why the message of this video means nothing. Talk is cheap. Do something about it, all you DFHs.
People use hippie as an insult because of all the things that go with it. I live in a town (austin) which prides itself on the hippie culture which as far as I can tell has mostly to do with doing a lot of drugs and avoiding hygiene.
I came to this same conclusion a while back. Or maybe we should say, Ghandi was right. MLK was right.
I think the Hippies did have a lot of good points, but you have to remember their support of alternative medicine and a whole load of other woo. As most things the truth is somewhere in the middle. I hate being considered either a Liberal or a Conservative, I think my answer to either of those two changes depending on what you ask me. The best thing to keep in mind, I think, is that insanity can happen when *anything* becomes an Ideology.. and yes that includes hippies :p.
A sizable contingent here is stuck on the “hippie” thing. The title and refrain is more of an inside joke with progressive political junkies.
Look at the upcoming schedules for the sunday talk shows. Contrast and compare the number of progressives with the number of rightwingnutjobs that appear. We’re always out-numbered 3-1. So, we progressives carry the banner of DFH as a flag of honor. Our corporate media shuts us out because they are dependent on corporate dollars by, yes, big pharma, insurance companies and plutocrats that create nothing but paper piles that have turned out to be more than just worthless, but truly deadly. We’re shut out of the debate because to seriously examine our arguments would mean that the American public might actually demand that these Masters of the Universe that control the wealth, actually go out and work for a living creating something of value.
So, my point is not that I pine for the days of nude romps in the mud (not that I’m against that) and bathing in patchouli oil, but I am stating that progressive voices have been shut out by the monied interests in this nation for 35 years. They want to keep the money they didn’t earn. To them, poverty ROCKS!!! It creates low wages and high profits for a small minority of connected douchebags.
I just had to rant and chose to rub their noses in the facts that lay before us all. Progressives (heretofore referred to as “DFH’s”) were right. We were right about all the things that I talked about in the video. And much more that I omitted.
thank you. that is all.
J.
Right in so many ways and wrong in just as many.
The coolest people of that era weren’t the “hippie”(there were all to few of them) but the “diggers”. These were the doctors, nurses and, yes, business people, ordinary citizens who took it upon themselves to care for these gentle fools when they needed help the most. They didn’t do it for profit but for love. The Diggers were the true heroes of our time.
ha ha ha ha ha ha …….. whatever that means. If you were to expound I may engage. I offered a nuanced explanation of my meaning. Unless you’re willing to get a little deeper in the weeds with your assertion above, your post is meaningless.
J.
Is it getting insufferable in here? Anybody? Open a window or something, and take off those rose-tinted granny glasses.
My mom is a hippy.
She evolved through the years, became a yoga teacher, went to india over 10 times. Plays the tampura, wears indian clothing all the time.
My dad is now retired and together they travel the world, mostly in a campervan. At the moment they’re in Australia for 2 months.
They (but especially my mom) brought me up to be the socialist, atheist critical thinker than i am now.
I inherited her drive to want to heal the world, solve the world problems.
A lot of what i see in this world, greed, greed, hunger, greed, war, greed, pollution, greed and greed pains me so much i can’t put it in perspective and deal with it.
But when i’m done with my therapy to learn better coping mechanisms you bet ya i will go into politics and follow my drive for change.
Well, you were on the Bus, or off the Bus. I don’t see many who were on the bus. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, your story and myth is even more challenged than your imagination, and are completely clueless in their interpretation of a time and culture they know nothing about.
joeyess @39
I’m a clean, celibate hippie. Unfortunately.
@69:
Far out,man.
SDI !!!!! You’re a funny one. SDI was a fantasy in his already deteriorating brain. It has been a financial boondoggle that has produced not one single successful test since it’s delusional inception 25 years ago. Here’s the facts: Every president from Truman to George H. W. Bush was responsible for the fall of the Soviet Union, not to mention that their little foray into Afghanistan bled them dry.
Now, you can argue Randian Fanboy fantasies all you like, but they’re still…… well….. Randian Fantasies.
Ronald Reagan was at the right place in the right time. And he’d been practicing his lines for decades. (as all actors are wont to do) The fall of the Berlin wall happened on Bush Sr.’s watch, not Ronnies. So let’s not rewrite history here. Next thing you’ll be spouting is the nonsense that Ronnie never raised taxes.
To give you some perspective on the man behind the myth of Reagan, he launched his Presidential bid in January of ’79 in Philadephia, Mississippi. Where he uttered the immortal words” I believe in states rights”
We all know what that meant to those racist pricks.
Save your Ronnie Reagan fanboy bullshit for people with a lesser sense of history and an even larger penchant for being sucked in by bullshit.
You know, your crowd.
As to your second point:
Spoken like a true member of the neo-enlightened conservative: Cull the herd.
Bye.
I don’t see many who were on the bus.
What bus?
Sometimes a great notion.
It is not directly advocated here, but I need to take a pot shot at something: Non-interventionism is an immoral philosophy. War sometimes is the answer and sometimes even the best answer. Iraq war should have been fought, although much earlier and for humanitarian reasons. I don’t continue to ramble on, just point out that Screem Bloody Murder by CNN http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4vI18HJM2o
and ask what non-violent solution could have saved those lives.
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
Ask yourselves a question: When was the last, truly necessary war that this nation was engaged in? Hmm?
You know the answer. Every war since then has been part and parcel of our need to justify what has grown exponentially each year to the now absurd sum of one 1/2 trillion dollars per year in defense spending. Off the books of course.
What could our nation do with half that money? For our nation. For our kids. For the world.
Hey PZ, a moron on another site wrote the following:
“…the “beneficial” mutations (the ones that are supposedly “good” for you) are always deletions – in other words, the supposed “beneficial” mutations which you can read about in the scientific literature, are actually information in the genetic code that is LOST. … We are losing valuable information in our genetic code over time. ”
Have you ever heard this before? What do you make of it?
PLEEEEZE reply–thanks.
“Ronald Reagan – he ended the cold war, and liberated hundreds of millions from the slavery of communism.”
You seem to have confused Ronnie with Michael Gorbachev.
Does PZ actually believe this silly horseshit woo? I mean really? or is he just being cheeky with these kinds of posts? I sure hope it’s the latter. It’s so anti-science and irrational. yuck. Whenever he veers into his hippiedom and “ahhh!! the patriarchy!” kicks, my eyes roll back into my head and my bowels spontaneously empty. It’s quite the inconvenience.
– A gay, atheist, liberal
There is no way ANYBODY in the late 60s early 70s would have mistaken me for a hippy, but anybody looking back would definitely label me as such.
I had a lot of qualities that would be considered hippy, like lots of drugs, loud music, dead head, anti-war, long hair.
However, I dressed in leather and jeans and boots, rode motorcycles, did not embrace non-violence nor the new left, didn’t smoke pot, drank too much, carried weapons and was more along the lines of what you would consider a 50’s style juvenille delinquent, or prototype 80s style punk. I was also a jazz freak, loved to dance, wrote poetry, got in bar fights.
There was all kind of shit going on back then.
People look back and talk about ‘the Civil Rights Movement’, but there was a hell of a divide between the Northern Black Muslims, the SCLC, and the Black Panthers. The Panthers were an Atheist org, the other two were faith based, and also there was the less political Pan African cultural movement going on at the same time, all very different.
What’s being talked about in the vids are very watered down 60’s stereo-types that have been assimilated and popularized to some degree.
I find it amusing, but I have no idea what a DFH is or was, or how it thinks, and I was there.
There was a lot more diversity of ideas and FAR LESS consensus across the board.
I thought all the non-violent stuff was stupid, and more shit needed to get blown up, guys like Bill Ayers were hardly uncommon, there was shit blowing up and burning down all over the place.
By today’s standards those are some pretty aberrant, if not pathological behaviors and belief systems. Today, you think ‘Hippy’ you think drum circles and Rainbow Gatherings, not Thermite and Cordite, but everybody was rockin and rollin pretty hard back then, and the sixties was anything but a fathomable homogeneous definable period, and there certainly was no ‘movement’, there were thousands, including some really nasty ones.
Peter @70,
No.
The juxtaposition of images of fat plutocrats and emaciated children, however, should be consciousness-raiser.
I’m not fat, nor a plutocrat, but I confess I am guilty of inaction. I confess I’m a selfish bastard who just wants to live out a comfortable life without going out of my way to change the world; but at least I’m aware of it.
(Humanity already, as I see it, has the capacity to feed, house and care for the existing global population).
I am heartened by those such as Pascalle @68, however. I hope you make it, Pascalle, and that you do make a difference.
Was there more than one Ronald Reagan?
Because I presume you are not thinking of the cheating, war-mongering, sleep-walking fuckwit that was the US president who could deliver his lines when they were well rehearsed, but a blundering fool like GWB when he had to deliver something off the cuff. And to whom events took a fortunate turn every so often, because the world had a few intelligent leaders as well, like Mikhail Gorbachev.
If you really mean that motherfucker, then you’d better get some more in-depth analyses on the Reagan maladministration.
Reagan was a shit actor, but a better actor than president.
And of course he was fully supported by Hitler’s bastard daughter, Maggie Thatcher.
It is SO easy to be in opposition. I may agree with much of the videos content, but this form and style is just naive.
“Let the sunshine in, let the sunshine in…, sing along…”
I was well aware when I posted that that I was going to get cheap shots – but I wanted to highlight the mindlessness that was part of the hippy culture and is still pervasive.
Michael Gorbatschow superficially makes a more attractive hero than Reagan perhaps, but the fact is he was forced into what he did by the policy of Reagan and his predecessors. His hagiographers conveniently forget that Gorbatschow, in his many years as a leading communist, must have been responsible for many atrocious acts.
Reagan was no great intellectual perhaps, but he knew one big thing, and went about it with a determination which tipped the balance.
Did someone mention Mrs T? Steve Bell has been indulging in some funny wish fulfilment on the anniversary of the Miner’s Strike. Starts here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/cartoon/2009/mar/09/margaret-thatcher-miners-strike
enjoy.
This reminded me of Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken word creations. Some of Gil’s stuff from the 70’s and 80’s are on youtube. I can’t even remember how I came to know about GSH’s political stuff. I was in junior high school in Australia, and GSH was a relatively unknown black leftist activist in the USA. Wow!
Pretext: I am a business reporter, so yeah.
What people seem to forget is that the DFH, were the university students. The origin of the movement?
The frigging universities. These weren’t the dumbasses.
As to the big pharma comment? It is actually right.
You in America get adverts for drugs which require “asking your doctor” about them, when seriously if they really worked shouldn’t they be advertising them to your doctor, or better yet, your chemist, who might actually know what he or she is doing?
Instead, the market them with a laundry list of symptoms in the hopes that just hearing them you are suddenly going to think “Yeah, I am really sick” so that you can go to your doctor, ask about the drug, get a prescription for something you don’t really need. It is marketing to hypochondriacs, and hypochondria by proxy!
And it is pretty much the same sleazy technique used by the snake-oil salesmen of the alternative medicine market – except they somehow claim that it is healthy because it is natural. Evidently nobody introduced them to the concept of hemlock!
Then you have “privatised healthcare” which is the most expensive in the world, but hey, you somehow can’t afford the cheaper alternatives which cover everybody.
The big financial institutions, systematically insured that nobody could figure out what the hell they were buying when it came to the securatisation market.
The ratings industry, instead of noting that these packages were designed specifically to exploit how the ratings system worked, just merrily applied their spread sheets and ignored the fact that they didn’t know what the hell was going on either.
This is what led to the massive contagion of the financial crisis, as the largely unregulated end of the mortgage market (The non-depositories) sold on their risk to “suckers” who though they had no fucking clue as to what they were buying thought it must be good, it is triple A rated.
Which kind of bypassed the people who actually knew about how to go about lending money in a manner which would generate a profit – via the aptly named brokers.
In the middle of this you had people advertising using this line of reasoning: “I used to think. Now, I just read The Economist.” Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle Corp. That’s right people, you don’t have to use your brains, just read an economics rag! Brilliant!
And when the market goes to hell, blame the guys who were least qualified to know what they were doing (You know, the people who were getting subprime loans because they couldn’t get better ones) for not paying up.
And of course, helping out the people who couldn’t afford to take the hit is socialism while funding the “Retention bonuses” of the people who actually caused this mess (and who thus, are not exactly people one wants to retain) is just plain responsible.
In short, the DFH, were right.
/endrant
Those of you criticising this as naive or too simplistic need to lighten up a bit. It’s a u-tube video not an academic paper.
It’s pointing out that 40 years ago a bunch of kids had more awareness about where the world was heading than their elders and so-called betters who were, and still are, willing to abuse their positions for selfish reasons.
They were mostly white, middle class, well-educated kids from good all-American homes and for a short time they scared America stupid because up until then white, middle class, well-educated kids grew up to be like their parents and didn’t form into a mass youth movement which set out to capsize the boat not just rock it.
They certainly weren’t supposed to advocate equal rights for blacks, gays and women, or contraception for the unmarried, or abortion on demand, or banning nuclear weapons, or not interfering in the sovereign rights of other countries, or saving the environment…
Many of the movements which still scare the shit out of your Republicans come out of this time.
peter
The hippy sexual revolution was largely based off of the widening availability of birth control – which the hippies actually favoured.
Yea and Kerouac was a revolutionary without a progenitor…he *obviously* thought up a counter culture on his own. :rolleyes:
What is wrong with Newton’s idea of “standing on the shoulders of giants” applying to cultural movements? Why is there so much snobbery involved in younger generations becoming involved in movements? If it is because they aren’t as “pure” then doesn’t that say something about the previous generation and their ability to transmit the message (and/or the necessity of it) and not necessarily the intelligence or “coolness” of the next generation?
Why? Why should they comb their hair? Because it’s more comfortable for you? How many “Rainbows” do you actually know? Who are their “victims?” (Granted there are quite a few woo-meisters in the movement, but kookiness of any kind would seem to draw the gullible in…)
And who are the criminals? All of them? Some of them? Just a few?
Just askin’…
“Humanity already, as I see it, has the capacity to feed, house and care for the existing global population.”
As long as said population is happy not to go fishing, hunting, tree chopping, house building, fresh water drinking, etc., etc. All of these activities are conducted at the expense of other species. In fact we rely on some of these other species for our existence. If we carry on as we are doing, one day we’ll drive one species too many to extinction and we’ll go too. And when I look at some of my neighbours, that day can’t come soon enough :)
Procyon @37
I must have been 6 yrs old at the time and I remember this as clearly as if yesterday (and that was from all the way over in oz). Kent State was a bunch of fucked in the head, deluded and scared toy soldiers firing into a crowd of unarmed students. Murders, no more. Then the white wash started (eg one of the girls was unmarried and pregnant, so by inference obviously was a slut whore who deserved to die). If there had been MORE violence from the hippie side I suspect that we would be living in a far, far better world today and would not have had to put up with Reagan, Thatcher or any of the other fuckwits since. Problems? sure, but nothing like what we have today. But like me, they were pacifists and long overdue housecleaning did not happen.
Could I suggest a belated but justified use of “Special Rendition” for the AIG pricks that are doing more damage to the USA than Homeland Security, the CIA and the millions of other departments that have been springing up under the oppressive regimes around the so-called “free world”?
roflmao. pull the stick out of your arse procyon.
Speaking to a young university friend recently I said “It’s weird that all the good music from the 60s and 70s is so popular amongst young people these days” (it went out of fashion for a while there). He looked at me like I was an idiot and replied “Its all the hallucinogens”. I smiled and realised that there truly was hope for the world’s future.
Wowsers are the greatest threat to freedom and any future worth living. The uni students today are far more savvy than we ever were, plus they can use the net as a weapon like nothing that has ever existed before.
Woody Guthrie once pointed to his guitar and said “this kills facists”. Truer words were never spoken. Places like phyrangula, dawkins.net and the websites and blogs springing up daily are our only hope.
Wasn’t it Jim Morrison that sang “you may have the guns, but we have the numbers”? A war of ideologies is being waged today that we must not lose. This time we ex-hippies and sympathisers, with young smart people, have a chance to get it right.
The Australian Government is trying like crazy to censor the net, as are other countries. This must be stopped AT ALL COSTS. I am not prepared to advocate violence on this…yet.
PZ needs to run for prez (well, state government). Every single person here should be thinking about running for political office – local, state and federal. There is no other non-violent way I can see. Politics may suck, but the alternative is to forever do the bidding of inferior masters.
“it’s a manufactured meme brought to you by the same folks who made “socialist”, “atheist” and “intellectual” into dirty words” — Bullseye.
“I was just about 4 or 5 years late to be a DFH, but I took on a lot of the ethic” Me too. My nitwit colleagues in engineering used to call me BHL, bleeding heart liberal. With some justification, I admit.
“PZ needs to run for prez (well, state government). Every single person here should be thinking about running for political office – local, state and federal.”
No way baby! No way I’d get elected with my record. Not only did I inhale, I LOVED IT (past tense though.) And I won’t lie (total disqualification for politics.) And, anyway, I don’t want to get slimed …
Taliesan@90
Brilliant, thank you.
I get it. I’m in general agreement with the sentiment. I think as a work of art it stands strong. However…
The truth is, about a third of the way through I started to roll my eyes. Felt it was a little too “rah-rah-siss-boom-bah!” Trite.
So, for the record…
The DFH were not right. The scientists were right. The intellectuals, philosophers and politicians who had a strong grasp of history were right.
The DFH believe in chakras and auras and want the federal government to fund “complimentary and alternative medicine.” They think “big pharma” is consciously trying to kill people for profit.
Call me humorless, but credit to the actual heroes is due.
I agree with Kitty (#91) and similar comments.
There’s a classic Irish joke which I think sums it up. Someone is lost on a country road, a long way from their destination, and asks a local for directions. The local’s reply is “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”
Of course the hippies didn’t solve all the problems. What they (and others in the counterculture) did was to publicise a radically different way of thinking about the world’s problems, and show people that they could effect change without the necessity of confront the dominant social, economic and political system, by side-stepping it and making it an irrelevance (“dropping out”). Thanks to the hippies, phenomena such as co-operatives, intentional communities, sustainable living, self-sufficiency and ecopolitics are increasing in popularity, and given the current economic crisis, peak oil and climate change, it looks like we will need all of these in spades – plus plenty of the music (and even the drugs) to cheer us up as we go.
Scooter, you nailed it. The idea that there was some sort of monolithic “Left” is a complete fabrication. I was a bit young for the hippie thing, and went punk when I got old enough. We said we hated the hippies, but it was mostly blow to make us seem different (we had many philosophical points in common, and needed something to differentiate ourselves). No one I knew, hippie or punk, could be categorized, filed or put in some kind of box, all were individuals, with quirks and deeply held contentions.
IMHO the hippies were right about alot of things. However, much like Americans today they missed the target. They got so wrapped up in “Counter Culture” they forgot about their responsibilities as citizens. All it did was give ammunition to those whose best interest is to keep Americans fighting Americans. The same exact thing is happening today. The only difference is the dividing line. Today it has been narrowed done to republican and democrat. Because Americans disregarde their civic duties in the ’60s and ’70s this country got Nixon, adn the next 30 years of massive deregulation that has led us to the current economic state.
Everyday I hear people arguing democrat or republican. In the meantime nobody is paying any attention to what their govenment is doing. None of the regulations have been put back into place. Our money is being thrown at big business with no hope of creating jobs. And we get news about Stem Cell Research (while an important issue) only serves to continue the division.
The hippies did get some things right. Most important was to show that they had a voice. But they got alot of things wrong too. The same things we have wrong today. Having a voice is not enough if your yelling at the wrong people.
ahahahaaahaa
no.
the CIA in the 70’s believed that if left alone, the USSR would collapse within 20 years. and they were right. People like Gorbachev and Walesa had more to do with it than your precious St. Reagan. And if we’re talking outside influences, I’d credit a Willie Brandt and a Helmut Kohl before that numbut
I don’t get the inclusion of drinking water.
Isn’t that technically socialist?
I’m getting a “sorry, this video is no longer available”. Whether this is just UK, just non-US, or everywhere, I don’t know. However, it’s still available athttp://www.wikio.com/video/933243 .
I was never a hippie in the full, dropping-out sense (and lamentably little of that “free love” came my way in a youth I would like to have misspent far more extravagantly), but I did enjoy some of the more hedonistic aspects of the counterculture. The hippies were only one bunch of threads in the counterculture, which had three overlapping bunches: hedonistic, mystical (*sigh*) and political. Politically, the DFHs (using that as shorthand for the entire counterculture) were indeed largely right: militarism, hierarchy, over-centralisation, corporate power, conformity, puritanism, and environmental destruction are great evils, which need fighting now even more than then. That the DFHs failed to overcome them (despite their important role in achieving many desirable goals) in unsurprising: there was a great deal of naivety about them – unsurprising in people mostly in their 20s – and the counterculture generated a powerful backlash from those who saw their power and wealth under threat. This backlash triumphed in 1979-80 with the second oil shock, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the elections of Thatcher and Reagan. The backlashers have remained in control ever since.
On the collapse of the USSR, Jadehawk, I’d be very interested in a reference to the CIA’s 1970s forecast! In historical perspective, the extraordinary thing is how long the USSR was able to continue the Cold War against an antagonist with far greater resources (just compare the state of the USSR and USA in 1945, leaving aside the USA’s far more useful allies). The invasion of Afghanistan was surely the beginning of the end; whether Reagan speeded it I’m unsure, but he certainly nearly got us all killed (google “Stanislav Petrov” and “Able Archer”). The collapse itself had very mixed results – those who did best out of it were in the east European satellite states and the Baltic republics, who got political democracy and EU membership; those in the rest of the USSR have seen collapses in social support systems, steep rises in death rates, and only very limited advances in political freedom; while elsewhere, capitalist elites took the collapse as a signal that there were now no limits to the extent they could hog the goodies. Until then, they had felt obliged to compete with communism for public support – hence, at least in part, welfare provision in the rich world – even the USA, decolonisation, civil rights, etc. Post-USSR, the attack on redistributive taxation, welfare provision and civil liberties has intensified. The crash of 2008 (caused by the increasing imbalances anti-egalitarian policies have produced), the increasingly obvious environmental crises, and the election of Obama, now provide the first chance we’ve had to end backlash rule. Let’s not fuck it up!
Some of the DFH’s are still out there telling the truth. Many though crashed and burned and found baby jesus and are part of the problem today. At 56 years old, I have had to endure soooooo many idiots declare their born again status, and basic sell out to the nonsense that we see all around us. I can only hope that our internet never gets squashed. It is a beacon of hope to be able to find smart people out there on websites like this and at least know there is some sanity.
Youtube comments:
joeyess: “yes, I would agree that you are entrenched. Stubborn, ignorant and petulant is no way to go thru life, son.” “I think that person learned that phrase at the Army War College.”
sirwinfredsmith:”how much do the neocons pay you to post your bullshit?”
Obviously I’ve done something right lol. I like how they immediately jump to conclusions and throw out baseless assertions. If only they knew that I was an ACADEMIC LIBERAL. The irony in calling a biology student ignorant *facepalm*. If only they realized that I’d won long before I pressed a single key on on my keyboard. Perhaps they should read a bit of Sam Harris, particularly the parts about Gandhi. P.Z., Surely you don’t agree with this person fundamentally? Doing so would demonstrate a lack of understanding of cruel realities of life.
inb4 false dichotomy.
joeyess @ 77,
The judgment to call a war “necessary” or “unnecessary” depends entirely on what you consider to be worth the inevitable death and destruction of war. As was pointed out by the video Lotharloo linked in #76, it is actually part of international law that nations have an obligation to stop genocide. The obligation is not to condemn it, to issue sanctions against countries that commit it, but to stop it. And the international community has repeatedly failed to do so. It is just naive to think that totalitarian regimes will play nice just because more enlightened countries do the diplomatic equivalent of shaking their finger at them. We add to that the problem of terrorist groups with no central government to engage diplomatically and that won’t follow anything resembling ‘civilized’ behavior to achieve their goals anyway. Also, I’m curious what the DFH’s of that era would have thought we should do about 9/11.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2…
Thank you. You get it. While my rant may have been bombastic…….. well………. it’s art!!
That’s what I intended.
You’re right, I couldn’t write a college paper if my life depended on it, so I didn’t. ;^)
@Kitty………. yep.
@ JasonTD:
Well, they certainly wouldn’t have advocated attacking Iraq. Just in case you missed it, millions of DFH’s were in the streets of this country and around the world in March of ’03 protesting the impending Shock and Awe. I think they advocated the correct response. The support of hunting down the perps of that attack: Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda.
Then the criminals of this government started to point at shiny objects and the misdirection began. The result: A Aggressive War Of Choice. Or, as I like to call it: A War Crime.
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2…
You fail to provide the context of your comments on YouTube.
You claimed that I was engaged in advocating “dogmatic peace”.
I call bullshit. I said that war is always the last choice. Especially wars of choice or War Crimes.
That’s quite a stretch from “dogmatic peace”.
touting your education and intelligence doesn’t excuse your dishonest argument.
And you should know better.
Whoa. So I was watching and wanted to click to Youtube for more details. Vid ended and “Sorry, no longer available” popped up.
Cheney is still alive somewhere.
(Finally) proud to be a DFH
A few went awry. I met a bunch of them in the Reagan administration — often with pictures of their old selves framed on the walls of their offices.
More frequently I find them now in many other places. District attorney. Head of criminal enforcement. Director of outreach. Lead scientist. Bureau director. Mayor. State Representative. State Senator. Principal. Teaching the AP courses. Volunteering — Girl Scout leaders, Boy Scout leaders. Even bankers.
Look across America, you can find the former hippies, making the nation work. Why did they all go home, you ask? Where in the hell did you get that idea? Tom Wolfe told us we can’t go home. So we changed things. Oh, yeah, we got eclipsed at the polls in 2000 and 2004. And truth be told, it wasn’t hippies who won it for Obama, though there were a lot of them pushing that vehicle along.
Where did you think all those recycle bins came from? Who do you think invented eco-tourism? Who do you think makes the backpacking, ski and fishing industries so big these days?
Who did you think Obama’s mother was?
In comment #57 (half this list of comments back), I wrote:
There is a popular bumper sticker that says:
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
I hate war, I really do! Been there, done that, and I truly hate it! And every time I see that bumper sticker I am reminded of how much I hate war.
But since we sure do seem to live in a world where there are and always have been people who do and would do great harm to other people for fun, profit or prophet, I just hafta ask:
Is war never ever the answer?
…and in all the comments added here since, no one has even tried to answer my question one way or the other — not a single one — leaving me disappointed and wondering: Why? Why won’t anyone either answer “Yes, war is never ever the answer” and explain why war is never, ever the answer, or else candidly answer “Alas, no, unfortunately sometimes war is the answer”?
Frank Lovell, perhaps you should consider the context of the “War is not the answer” bumper sticker. And sticking with the general approach toward claims on Pharyngula, it is your job to show that war is the answer. In other words, which wars are you talking about and why were they the answer? What future wars would be the answer? More importantly, what questions have been answered by war?
Aratina, I do not claim to know for sure if any war was the only — or even best available — answer to human suffering at the hands of oppressors and/or violent aggressors.
But what struck me about the popular bumper sticker I mentioned makes it clear that some people do think they know the answer, and that the answer they think they know is: “War is not the answer.”
Whenever I see one of those bumper stickers, I wonder, “war is not the answer, ever???“
And so, I asked (twice now): “Is war never ever the answer?”
And now, I ask yet again: Is war never, ever the answer?
And I ask you, Aritina: do you know the answer to the question, “Is war never ever the answer?” And if so — if you do know the answer to the question I’ve now asked three times, will you please tell me what your answer to my question is?
THANK YOU!!