Lol i actually didn’t know he beat his wife until this thread, but I had seen a video of the son get upset at someone for continually asking about John and that’s what I was referring to

In the video the son made it sound like he just kind of casted him and his mom out to fend for themselves

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Because hippies are just white people who didn't like their parents. By and large, they were the same as their parents or worse. They took some ideas from various eastern philosophies and just applied them randomly outside the original context with no concern. They took drugs and treated this as revolutionary at a time when people were fighting and dying in the streets for basic rights. They considered themselves wordly and educated because they lived in a van for a week. They thought war was just dick measuring rather than about real material concerns. In short, they were white boomers.

I have got to do some kind of analysis sometime over why white hippies in the 60s sucked so much compared to militant civil rights movements

Idk, talking to some cool older people I know who live in that time, the actual line between the two was murky. If you were a "politico" (the term they used back then for people who did hardcore anti-Vietnam activism and worked in other causes) you probably also had long hair, smoked pot, dropped acid, and went on on a road trip to the southwest. At least according to one old time anti-war guy I used to drink with the hippy "drop out" culture was a good way to get-out-of-dodge if you political activism got you in trouble. If the FBI showed at your parents place there was a whole host of communes in California that'd let you crash off the grid for a few months in.

But maybe these guys were romanticizing things.

Not entirely true there were those two guys from the chicago 7

My take on that is that America has broadly "tolerated" counter-culture movements that are chauvinist and either toothless (like hippies) or largely aligned with capital (like libertarians). They may still face repression, but they don't get the sort of complete institutional shut-out that communists get. The hippy movement came from that sort of tolerated counter-culture where however scandalous the mainstream may have found them they had at least some degree of support in academia, music, and hollywood, and was a highly-individualistic movement that replaced solidarity with nonsense mysticism and was concerned mostly with the personal liberation of its adherents from the restrictions of the world around them (and, as always, that went along with the chauvinist idea that personal liberation means the freedom to act however and on whomever one wishes, regardless of the desires, wellbeing, or rights of others).

I've talked before about how that sort of chauvinism dominated the American "left" up until relatively recently (spoiler: the turning point was gamergate and its related culture war bullshit) when the worst chauvinists split and got sucked into propaganda machine that sought to reconcile their self-interested chauvinism and desire for personal freedom to act however and on whomever they pleased with the previously rigid public-facing moral ideas of the far-right, creating a true fascist movement almost overnight, with the upside that in their absence/in reaction to this the left also started crystalizing and turning against that sort of chauvinism, leading to a resurgence of actual leftist ideology instead of just the "I sort of want healthcare, am ambivalent about LGBT rights, and find the theocratic far-right unsettling and bad" umbrella that previously defined the American "left." It's not enough, and there are still plenty of other sorts of chauvinists like vaushites and breadtubers muddying the waters, but it's better than it was twelve years ago, hence why the old institutional shut-out machines are starting to turn and the left is increasingly under attack again.

Hippies turned into Boomers...