What was the last TV show you watched?

[jamespowers]

I wouldn't know...I've never been to California, and 1961...well...I wasn't around then.
Which was better, the gangs, or those clowns coming to San Francisco with flowers in their hair?

Anything is better than the hippies.

 

[Zombie_61]

Anything is better than the hippies.

I know a few people who were shot by gang members that might disagree with you.

 

[Ernest P Shackleton]

I know a few people who were shot by gang members that might disagree with you.

Yep, gangs are a nasty business. Not sure how you can side with people who create tension, feed on intimidation, and who generally disrespect and snub social contracts that serve to hold chaos at bay. I get how we've romanticized gang culture, and oddly enough stigmatized hippie subculture, but geez. And it isn't as if you're going to take a hardline stance against drugs by either. I hope we aren't at a point when gangs sound more appetizing, because...well, that's scary.

 

[1mach1]

48 Hours on ID

 

[Gregg Axley]

Yep, gangs are a nasty business. Not sure how you can side with people who create tension, feed on intimidation, and who generally disrespect and snub social contracts that serve to hold chaos at bay. I get how we've romanticized gang culture, and oddly enough stigmatized hippie subculture, but geez. And it isn't as if you're going to take a hardline stance against drugs by either. I hope we aren't at a point when gangs sound more appetizing, because...well, that's scary.

I'm certainly not siding with them.
The gangs in that short, were WAY different from those today.
In fact, I mentioned that to my wife while watching it.
The level of violence, is unthinkable to those in that short, believe me.
I live in a town where gang violence runs rampant, not as bad as Chicago, but we are up there.
I've also seen quite a lot of members myself due to my job.
They are nothing like those in the short.
Maybe I didn't explain myself well when I posted about viewing the short.
The time period was interesting to me, as was the way the gangs dressed.
Neatly, not covered in tattoos, for the most part clean cut, and oddly enough some of them were in slacks.
Do you see that today? No....

 

[jamespowers]

Not sure how you can side with people who create tension, feed on intimidation, and who generally disrespect and snub social contracts that serve to hold chaos at bay.

You just described hippies.

 

[jamespowers]

I know a few people who were shot by gang members that might disagree with you.

Two words---Charles Manson.

 

[1mach1]

Right? Surprising!

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using Tapatalk

 

[Worf]

Two words---Charles Manson.

C'mon man he was the exception NOT the rule. I've dealt with my fair share of hippies and Dead Heads and alike and they're generally harmless individuals who aren't interested in hurting other hunam beings for sport or profit. Give me Hippies over your run of the mill NRA/Pro-Gun/Anti-government lynch-mob (which by my working in the State Capital I'm forced to endure from time to time) anyday.

Worf

 

[jamespowers]

C'mon man he was the exception NOT the rule. I've dealt with my fair share of hippies and Dead Heads and alike and they're generally harmless individuals who aren't interested in hurting other hunam beings for sport or profit. Give me Hippies over your run of the mill NRA/Pro-Gun/Anti-government lynch-mob (which by my working in the State Capital I'm forced to endure from time to time) anyday.

Worf

Obviously you don't deal with the ones we have out here and old Charlie is representative of what we have out here.

 

[Ernest P Shackleton]

Obviously you don't deal with the ones we have out here and old Charlie is representative of what we have out here.

Where do you live? I've dealt with hippies most of my adult life (goes with my business), and while they can be socially awkward, and sometimes make things uncomfortable, if I had to describe them in a word, harmless would be the first thing to come to mind.

Manson was no more a hippie than the Hell's Angels were or are. If that is your definition of a hippie, then we're definitely not working from the same playbook.

 

[jamespowers]

Where do you live? I've dealt with hippies most of my adult life (goes with my business), and while they can be socially awkward, and sometimes make things uncomfortable, if I had to describe them in a word, harmless would be the first thing to come to mind.

Manson was no more a hippie than the Hell's Angels were or are. If that is your definition of a hippie, then we're definitely not working from the same playbook.

The San Franfreako Bay area. If you are in the Midwest you would never understand. You don't have the rabid ones back there. They are not harmless nor are they just awkward. They are demanding, entitled feeling and overall have the idea that what you have belongs to them because you are The Man.
Manson was a more rabid hippie but he was one. His commune style living and all. When his music career went caput, he flipped out because he thought everyone was against him and in his drug stupor condition he was dangerous. They're all one bong away from dangerous.

 

[Zombie_61]

Manson was no more a hippie than the Hell's Angels were or are.

Right on the money. Manson was a wolf in hippie's clothing--he presented himself as an ally to gain confidence and get people to drop their guard, then the control freak/master manipulator in him took over and he slowly converted them into seeing and doing things his way, making them think it was their idea and/or their choice all along. I wouldn't necessarily say "The Family" was exclusively a group of weak-minded individuals (though some appeared to be), but he preyed on people with low self-esteem and little or no self-confidence using mind games and drugs to tear them down psychologically and rebuild them as he wanted them to be.

And he's still "playing the game" his way. Have you ever seen the news footage from his parole hearings? He gets in there and spouts off a bunch of nonsense; the parole board sends him back to his cell, and the general public sees the footage and thinks he's a nutjob. But he's crazy like a fox--he's doing it deliberately because he doesn't want to be released. At the time he was arrested in 1969 he had already spent two-thirds of his life in the prison system, so life imprisonment wasn't a big deal to him. In fact, I think he's more comfortable in prison than he ever was out of it, so being sent there for life was also exactly what he wanted.

 

[jamespowers]

Right on the money. Manson was a wolf in hippie's clothing--he presented himself as an ally to gain confidence and get people to drop their guard, then the control freak/master manipulator in him took over and he slowly converted them into seeing and doing things his way, making them think it was their idea and/or their choice all along. I wouldn't necessarily say "The Family" was exclusively a group of weak-minded individuals (though some appeared to be), but he preyed on people with low self-esteem and little or no self-confidence using mind games and drugs to tear them down psychologically and rebuild them as he wanted them to be.

So he was the Pied Piper of Hippies? I don't think so. He was one of them and you just described why. He was a control freak and a manipulator who converted people to his way of thinking---using drugs and other persuasions. From the beginning the hippie movement was exactly that. You had your dupes but then you had your leaders who were tuning in and turning on other people to use for their own purposes. They were NOT harmless an still aren't.

Oh and back to the subject of this thread---I watched Game of Thrones.

 

[1mach1]

Oh and back to the subject of this thread---I watched Game of Thrones.

 

[Ernest P Shackleton]

The San Franfreako Bay area. If you are in the Midwest you would never understand. You don't have the rabid ones back there.

I lived in Oakland, near Fruitvale and the Alameda estuary and in Berkeley. Dealt almost exclusively with hippies and punks. Met lots of intimidating, quick-to-violence people in the Bay, but none of them were from the hippie subset and only a few from the punk subset.

They're all one bong away from dangerous.

I hope I'm not the only one who found the humor in this sentence.

 

[1mach1]

Adventure Time

 

[HoosierDaddy]

Swamp People
Twisted barrel

 

[Gregg Axley]

Are You Being Served, season 8.

 

[Zombie_61]

So he was the Pied Piper of Hippies? I don't think so. He was one of them and you just described why. He was a control freak and a manipulator who converted people to his way of thinking---using drugs and other persuasions. From the beginning the hippie movement was exactly that. You had your dupes but then you had your leaders who were tuning in and turning on other people to use for their own purposes. They were NOT harmless an still aren't.

Ah, but the difference is that Manson studied the mind control techniques used by the Nazis in Germany during World War II, something most hippies probably haven't done.