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Comment by tanseydavid | Hacker News Reader

Here's a stunning passage from the article, when considered in terms of 1967-attitudes-and-anxieties vs the technological world we live in today:

> "...historians argue that the postwar period was marked by an acute set of anxieties...about the potential for large institutions, states and technologies to control the arena of the personal self."

Those hippies (while tripping balls) were remarkably prescient!

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Too bad we minimized them with our war on drugs. We could have done more to prevent it.

We're in the process of making the same mistake against the Anti-Covid-Mandate people. They're defending freedom and calling attention to government and big-business overreach. And their demonization as Nazi's is more or less working.

This is a grab bag of rhetoric with no clear path to a point.

It's a clear parallel to the way hippies were dismissed as just druggies, without considering the actual points they were making. And with hindsight, we see that in fact, they were making some good points. Someday, the same thing will be said about those who opposed the tyranny and erosion of personal liberty, that was taking cover behind a fig leaf of medical necessity.

Thanks for unwrapping all the implicit assumptions in your comment. I can at least agree that the few reasonable issues people have with attempts at containing covid get buried under the much greater volume of absolute nuttery and grifting, and that certain factions use the latter to ignore the former.

Even though I generally disagreed with that crowd, I'm just starting to realise that some of them were raising the same concerns as others during the post-9/11 mania.

Unfortunately, they just got lumped with the anti-vaxx nutjobs, and whatever they said was dismissed. It was a proper "either you're with us or with the terrorists" rehash.

Now people are in this weird position where they want to talk about it, but are afraid of being lumped with the weirdos.

Oh and don't forget how we weaponised the word "science" as a thought-terminating cliché, even though few of us actually expressed actual scientific curiousity or checked our sources.

It was weird to see "my side" pull all the nasty tricks, and being powerless to criticise it.

I can see just fine right now that we need to oppose tyranny and the erosion of personal liberty. I just wish the people most vocal about it didn't also believe that vaccines are a conspiracy to sterilize their women.

I probably would have been on board with most of the 1960s hippies' basic premises too, and equally disgusted with the conspiracy-minded side of their beliefs.

Or, it's entirely possible that the hippies had some good ideas, mixed in with some bad ideas, and overlaid by a generally hopeless lack of actionable strategy that prioritized individualistic self-actualization over collective action. Thus, the hippies were a red herring, a useless nostrum, another layer of control.

https://gravityglobal.com/news/the-death-of-subculture-part-...

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/adam-curtis-on-hyperno...

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/adam-curtis-bbc-cant-get-you...

This was the war on drugs intended purpose.

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