or next year or last year or whatever. And look at the America they've made!


actual hippie girls from the Summer of Love!


America seems more angry, repressive and divisive now than it has been since the fifties.

Many of the gains achieved at the cost of blood by the civil rights movement have been lost.

Much of liberal America has lost it's way, and now it wanders in the wilderness.

At all levels of government, the left has become as diversionary and uncooperative as the right, and just as unwilling to work for consensus and to find a middle ground. The very idea of "Bipartisan" has become a thing of the past.

There are no moderates anymore. Everyone has fled the middle ground for one extreme or another.

The "Alt-left" is becoming just as scary and dangerous as the "Alt-right."

Where did it all go wrong? Or, conversely, do you think it's going right?

Anyone?

Some of them already died just fyi.

baby boomers will be renamed "The Worst Generation" when i am president

the free-loving hippies everyone pictures when they thing of the 60s werent all that representative. for every girl in san francisco dancing around with flowers in her hair there were 20 angry reactionary young men with crew cuts out in the countryside

Yet in the sixties, when they were children, they had the power to end Jim Crow and the Vietnam war.

Pretty sure neither of those ended in the 60s. Good effort though.

I didn't say they ended in the sixties. I said these pretty hippie girls (and many of their friends) played a major role in bringing them to an end.

Many people hold that the "Jim Crow" era ended with the repeal of Anti-miscegenation laws via the 1967 Supreme Court ruling in Loving v. Virginia. I suppose that you could say the era continued until the school desegregation controversies of the early 70's but whatever. The Vietnam war did last until 1975 as everyone knows. That does not belie the fact that activism by the Hippie movement, including these pretty hippie girls, played a major role in demolishing support for the war and contributed immensely to it's end.

Full disclosure: My Mom was a Hippie girl during the Summer of Love. And one of my childhood memories is of her being beaten down by a cop with a billy-club during an anti-war protest that the police turned into a riot. I was there, I saw them walk the walk.

If you need to work out mommy issues do the forum a favor and she a shrink.

Dude, you're wanted back in the basement. Your Call of Duty match is about to start. Don't forget you promised Dad you'd move out before you're 40.

Who cares? There is an endless supply of new hippie chicks being produced.

The liberals are the middle ground tho. Just because Republicans are insane doesn't mean that I've fled the middle. We have all kinds of easy access to facts and statistics now that we never did before. That's a game changer imo. Like, believing in science isn't a radical idea of the left, no matter how loud a racist yells that it is.

Just goes to show how far to the right the Overton window has moved.

As for hippie girls, they're still being made. The summer of love group is merely a midpoint between the flappers of the 20s and the lot we have now.

Leftist: poor people shouldn't die due to lack of money to afford things like health care
Right-winger: rich people deserve all the money, **** the poors, they should work harder
Centrist: oh man will you guys stop arguing and find some common ground, it's really destructive! You alt-leftists and alt-rights are scary and harshing my good time over here!

Like I said:

America being more divided now than in the 60's is one spicy hot take.

Maybe we can middle it and right-wingers can admit poors need money for health care and donate some scraps to charities which provide nice beds for the poors to die in, and the left can compromise and admit the rich are entitled to every red cent and whatever other rent-seeking wealth they can acquire with their skills persuading bureaucrats. Compromise, what happened to it?!? The alt-left just keeps insisting and getting more crazy, a real shame. As the radical centrist I just want everyone to agree, maybe the poors deserve a fast death due to lack of ingenuity and the alt-right can agree blacks aren't temperamentally prone to violence and don't deserve to be shot on sight by the police. It's too bad we don't come to those grand bargains any more.

Leftist: actually hugo chavez was good
Right-winger: actually apartheid was good
Centrist: maybe we should try to expand the earned income tax credit or negative income tax

American Right winger interpreting Karl Marx "lol I write all these fancy words, but all I really want is some free sh*t cause I'm too lazy to work, gimmie, gimmie."


American Left winger interpreting Ayn Rand "The poor are parasites extracting useful production from the industrious rich by demanding handouts, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. Burn them all!



American Centrist interpreting Marx "It's actually the poor that do the bulk of production and their wages are nowhere near a fair level of compensation for their efforts."



American Centrist interpreting Ayn Rand "The employer may not always work harder than the employee, but he takes risks the employee does not, as the business owner is not guaranteed to make a profit, and he therefore deserves a larger share when there is profit.

Liberals: Muslims.
Centrist: Muslims?
Conservatives: OMG HE HAS A BOMB!!!

Sorta sums up how I feel. It's like you're not allowed to agree anymore with some of what this guy said and some of what that guy said too. My Dad once told me "if it pisses both sides off, it's probably a fair deal." But now everyone goes in pissed off and nobody makes any deals at all.

At my age, I don't want to have to deal with a realistic chance that somebody will nuke Seattle. Let alone all the other crazy things going on. If they do that I'm ******.

I look back at how idealistic my parents were and how much they and their ilk accomplished, at how much positive change they effected at such a young age, and I wonder where they lost their way.

I haven't forgotten that Trump is 70 too.

Anyone who is familiar with psychoanalytic materialism will understand how hippies are 100% responsible for the exponential rise of consumer capitalism.

Im hungover right now, and am too lazy to explain **** at the best of times anyway, but it goes a little like this:

Two psychological poles in society, the repressive pole and the schizoid pole.

In the repressive pole, you have tradition, religion, authority, family, etc etc, at the very extreme of the schizoid pole you have anything goes, I want try childrens kidneys on toast and shag a horse etc.

Capitalism is a pressure to the schizoid pole. It wants the freedom to continually make new associations, new desires, new markets, new commodifications.

A classic example of repressive pole bumping into capitalist schizo pole is in all regulation on sale of drugs, sex, etc. Repressive pole wants that stuff super heavily regulated if not all utterly illegal, capitalist schizo pole wants you to buy MDMA at Walmart etc, in short freedom to sell/buy whatever you desire, but also to continually create new desires to satisfy. I guess AC land is schizo pole land.

50s America. Capitalism is breaking out, but whats this? Tons of repressive pole everywhere getting in the way. Deferring to Authority, traditional strong family bonds, only missionary position allowed, protestant work ethic where you actually save money, lol saving money, we want borrow borrow spend spend spend spend. Conformity and little to non life style diversity, safe and boring consumption. Even vanilla desires frowned on a bit, (no dancing on sunday) lol continual creation of new ones. Basically tons of social structure/culture not delineated by capitalism and getting well in the way of moah $$$$$$$$$$$$$.

Solution = hippies. lol authority, lol traditional family structure, lol only missionary position allowed, lol safe and boring consumption. Anything goes, and if anything goes we can sell moah moah moah $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$. Also loving the drugs. New desires.

Yes the hippy movement will have some non consumption based ethics, but lol that, via the power of marketing and advertising we will soon commodify and colonise and soon only a few authentic die hard hippies will remain living in the woods somewhere, most hippies will buy there hippiness off the rack (as will all the other life styles) but capitalism is now freeeeeee, free at last.

So basically hippies are the outcome of capitalism breaking out of the shackles of the uptight consumption inhibiting mores of the 50s.

Hippies were one of the most powerful social weapons of capitalism. Its vanguard shock troopers.

Groovy post man. I dig it.

Wavy Gravy's still fighting the good fight at 80.