Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
"with a large student element."
Maybe these words have some obscure meaning with which I'm not familiar.
New age cosmic hippies and the far right
- Thread starter Blagsta
- Start date
Maybe these words have some obscure meaning with which I'm not familiar.
Not 'moral failures' necessarily, I'm sure some of them were very nice, but, as I keep having to say, blind (often wilfully so) to the inescapable reality that they were completely reliant on the wider society they rejected, which is kept functioning by those who do not have the option of dropping out.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
I guess that's true to an extent. The people I know in the Kootenay Valley didn't have running water, and they grew their own food and livestock; but I think they wore shoes that were made in a factory somewhere, and their farming implements were made from steel, not stone or bone.
What lesson should we take from that?
Meltingpot
Living in our pools we soon forget about the sea
(Got logged out just as I was replying)
I've had a look Butch, and honestly it's like looking for a needle in a haystack. The problem is that Bill Ayers was interviewed a lot in the past 10-15 years, and it's difficult to find the one article where he said that exact thing. Finding an article where other people (often their detractors) call them hippies is a lot easier, but also meaningless because to a lot of right-wing Americans anyone with long hair is a "hippie."
The lesson that if they'd fallen seriously ill, for example, they'd have willingly resorted to the nearest hospital, staffed and run by doctors, nurses, porters, admin workers etc etc who were decidedly not dropouts.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
What's wrong with that?
Anyway, here's an interesting exerpt from the above-mentioned Atomised novel:
'On 14th December 1967, the Government passed the Neurwith Act on contraception at its first reading...the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this that offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professional, artists and senior management... It is interesting to note that the 'sexual revolution' is usually portrayed as a communist utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the rise of the individual. As the lovely phrase 'hearth and home' suggests, the couple and the family were to be the last bastion of primitive communism in a liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit seperating the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.'
By placing themselves at the forefront of this 'revolution,' the hippies were complicit (although not on their own) in the ongoing 'marketisation' of personal relations and the creation of a new hierarchy based on youth and physical attractiveness.
'On 14th December 1967, the Government passed the Neurwith Act on contraception at its first reading...the pill would now be freely available in pharmacies. It was this that offered a whole section of society access to the sexual revolution, which until then had been reserved for professional, artists and senior management... It is interesting to note that the 'sexual revolution' is usually portrayed as a communist utopia, whereas in fact it was simply another stage in the rise of the individual. As the lovely phrase 'hearth and home' suggests, the couple and the family were to be the last bastion of primitive communism in a liberal society. The sexual revolution was to destroy the last unit seperating the individual from the market. The destruction continues to this day.'
By placing themselves at the forefront of this 'revolution,' the hippies were complicit (although not on their own) in the ongoing 'marketisation' of personal relations and the creation of a new hierarchy based on youth and physical attractiveness.
It gives the lie to the idea that you've dropped out of society.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
They wanted to drop out of the bad parts.
Who would want to drop out of modern medical treatment? Nowhere have I read that most hippies wanted to return to the stone age.
Yes-to get on with running all the things on which we all depend, hippies included, instead of arseing around like overgrown children.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
This is just a crude stereotype isn't it though?
The people at say Centre for Alternative Technology are hardly 'arseing around like overgrown children' (unless you're Bernard Ingham) that's just your stereotype of hippies, some of whom turn out to be competent at engineering and agriculture.
I'm talking about the general impulse. Only a fraction of them went on to do anything halfway useful. Mostly, as with their still existing offshoots, pissed about for a few years and then got normal jobs, although some of them, as I think I said somewhere above, get themselves a wacky van and put those smiley sun face things on the kitchen wall just to show they're hippies at heart.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
They didn't want to leave the world. They tried to reject what they saw as bourgeois, hypocritical values. That doesn't mean a rejection of all science, medicine etc etc.
They
What a pity their own views were, as has been demonstrated, hypocritical and bourgeois.
It doesn't matter that they don't reject modern industrial society. What matters is they think they don't have to contribute while still reaping the benefits.
What a pity their own views were, as has been demonstrated, hypocritical and bourgeois.
It doesn't matter that they don't reject modern industrial society. What matters is they think they don't have to contribute while still reaping the benefits.
Proper Tidy
Arsed
Hippies smell. Fact.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
Contribute how? Paying for private health insurance premiums? Taking on a mortgage? Buying a new car every five years?
Sigh. By working and paying taxes etc like most other people. And as I said, by helping to keep the society on which they too depend functioning.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
If they get income, they'll have to pay tax. If they live communally and sell any of the produce of the farm, they'll have to pay taxes.
If they want medical services, they'll have to pay medical premiums, at least in this country.
Btw, there are a number of people here on the boards who don't work and are supported by the govt. Are you including them with hippies in your general disapproval?
Being on the dole isn't for most people dropping out. So no.
In fact, I'm not at all bothered if people do drop out to live hippy-style. I'm just pointing out that they're deluding themselves if they think they've rejected society.
Johnny Canuck3
Well-Known Member
They are/were rejecting values prevalent in society that they considered bourgeois and hypocritical. It's possible to want to transform society, without bombing the whole thing to ground level and starting again.
But not as satisfying. True change needs a Stalin figure.
TruXta
tired
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Fucking hell. After the hiding you got on the jewish resistance thread I'd thought you'd given up this type of shit.
DaveCinzano
WATCH OUT, GEORGE, HE'S GOT A SCREWDRIVER!
That wasn't me what said that what you quoted.
Did I mangle the quote tidy-up? Apologies, I was on a tablet.
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