Mr Speaker

[Des]

Mr Speaker (aka Charlie), the Right Honourable Member for Catford [a collective mumble of yay, yay, yay] whom I have pledged never to have anything to do with [oooooooh!] insists on commenting on my posts [shocked 'yes, yes'] and has even called me.....[house erupts in a noisy shouting maelstrom] let me finish...let me finish....yes, he has called me a TROLL!

Mr Speaker, I call upon the Honourable Member to withdraw that statement.....no let me finish....give way sir....give way.....

[Sound of Charlie banging his gavel thingy] ORDER! ORDER!

[Adam Blake]

Are you the only one here who is allowed to mis-behave and generally act like a c***, Des? You're the classic example of someone who can dish it out and can't take it. You used to campaign for the Green Party - now they merely provide material for your mockery and class-obsessed disdain. When people make an effort, however doomed, to actually stand up for something you merely snipe from the sidelines and then complain to the site administrator when someone points it out. You really ought to take a break. This site does not belong to you, or me, or anyone else, and your whingeing bitterness disguising itself as weak humour fools no-one.

[Des]

I've said elsewhere how to fight the BNP. It is not by going to hippyfests.

This is nothing to do with you anyway Adam. Just a bit of fun. I can take it.

[jackdaw version]

Mr. Speaker, I've heard this pledging never to have anything to do with some other Forum member before. It's like the weather — comes and goes, but happens all the time.

A TROLL complete with whingeing bitterness! Now, that's something to make one pause for a moment and admire the beauty of the English language, if not the idiosyncrasies of human (or Troll) psychology.

I'd like to propose that since it's summer and we have so many other things to do like go to festivals or harvest vegetables or drink beer in the afternoon or whatever that we postpone any fighting until winter when we can fully and properly exercise our discontent, not to mention that we'll have had time to sharpen our knives by then. I just wouldn't want anyone to think I was proposing a hippyfest, although I wouldn't mind if we had one. All in favour, say, "Ay."

I yield the floor to the Tight Honourable Member for Mumble-Mumble.

[Des]

All in favour say ay ay ay the beat is crazy.

[jackdaw version]

Puts me in mind of that Nora (Norma?) Dean song about the boy with barbwire in his underwear. Not sure if every detail there is correct, but no time to check.

I once knew a girl called Norma. Gave me barbed wire alright, I can tell you.!

"Ai, ai, ai."

[Adam Blake]

Also, can we agree to no longer use "hippy" as a term of abuse - when it becomes clearer and clearer day by day that the hippies were right all along...

[Dominic]

Puts me in mind of that Nora (Norma?) Dean song about the boy with barbwire in his underwear. Not sure if every detail there is correct, but no time to check.

We had a record when I was a kid about a woman who patched her huband's trousers with hedgehog skin, with the prickles in, because he was so lazy. (Was it Burl Ives?)

Also, can we agree to no longer use "hippy" as a term of abuse - when it becomes clearer and clearer day by day that the hippies were right all along...

Sexton Ming recently released a CD called Punks Are Sad, Hippies Are Cool. On his website, it says underneath "(but this is NOT a hippie album! It's a Sexton Ming album!)"

[NormanD]

....you come over as a defender of the downtrodden forumista too often. You take it upon yourself to plead on behalf of others and it sounds just so patronising. Let them fight their own battles.

If that's the worse you can say about me, then I'm not doing so badly.

I see things more simply: I'm not pleading on behalf of others, I'm just standing up against bullies. You've thrown enough insults around. It's time you stopped.

[joel]

when it becomes clearer and clearer day by day that the hippies were right all along...

If you mean replacing rational thought with half-digested pseudo-mysticism, then you are very wide of the mark.
Hippydom, and it's reverse side (the reactionary "mansonist" right-wing pseudo-mysticism still so prevalent in the US) is anti-intellectual, anti-science and just-plain-wrong.
Utopian dreams are in practise the stuff of totalitarian nightmares.

[Adam Blake]

Actually I meant advocating peace over conflict, drawing attention to the importance of living in tune with one's environment instead of destroying it for personal greed, attempting to live in harmony with nature and having nothing to do with the capitalist-military-industrial complex - or at least, as little to do with it as humanly possible.

Interesting how quickly the spector of Manson is produced whenever anybody has the temerity to stick up for the hippies. He really was the great bogeyman wasn't he?

Don't patronise me, Joel. I may be only a musician but I'm not quite as stupid as you seem to think. Also, what precisely IS "half-digested pseudo-mysticism"? It sounds fascinating. Would you care to elaborate?

[joel]

Don't patronise me, Joel. I may be only a musician but I'm not quite as stupid as you seem to think.

I'm not patronising you, just disagreeing with you.
If Manson is trundled out time and time again it is because he is relevant, at least for the US and as far as the history of neo-rightism and the so-called "culture wars" in that country are concerned. Perhaps he is only a totem. But to the superstitious, totems have power.
Auras, crystals, channeling, healing, string theory... The list of nonsense is really long...
As far as being in tune with the environment goes, this usually consists of saying there are far too many humans in the world, and wouldn't it be really great if there were fewer of us - by which I guess is meant "them" (in what way is that loving I wonder), and in doing so we could return to our "ancient" hunter-gatherer roots (though no doubt vegetarian/vegan - which BTW would require really low population densities). How exactly population levels might be reduced is left unsaid - although Mao Zedong and Pol Pot had some practical notions in this area, as is the fact that our hunter-gatherer ancestors led brutish, nasty, violent and very short lives, and that bloody in-fighting is endemic to small hunter-gatherer communities.

[Adam Blake]

I'm not patronising you, just disagreeing with you.

Fair enough.

I should have added to my earlier list the (at the time) completely revolutionary notion that the white caucasian children of Nietsche's killer WASP's should listen and pay attention to the accumulated wisdom of indigenous peoples such as Native Americans and Aboriginals - who were, undoubtedly no strangers to the short and brutish lives you describe.

As for Manson: blaming the hippies for Manson is like blaming the Germans for Hitler. Manson was a psychopath, pure and (far from) simple, and psychopaths have a nasty habit of popping up from time to time in every time and culture.
He is no more relevant or irrelevant than any other psychopath and, although he was certainly a perfect product of his environment, his barking mad "philosophy" is no more relevant to America than anywhere else.

Auras are nonsense? Ascribing power to crystals? Channeling, healing, string theory? All nonsense. Wow. What's it like to be so sure? Scientific theory is such a comforting God, isn't it? What a shame it's sometimes so utterly confounded - (Bose Einstein Condensates, Neutrinos, Quarks etc.)

Face it, for whatever reasons, you and so many others have been raised to unquestionably believe that the hippies were just a bunch of idiots who should be mocked and disregarded for peacefully trying to present an alternative way of living to the one which our lords and masters in power have prescribed for us. It's so much more convenient (for them) if those pesky and ungrateful middle-class (gasp!) white people are beaten, jailed, mocked and abused forever more. They who had so much money lavished on their educations and upbringing only to be so rude as to point out that the industrial-military complex was evil and that capitalism was a form of slow suicide. Goodness, how dreadful they are, how stupid. Imagine wanting to live in peace and peer at crystals and smoke marijuana! Heavens, whatever next? You mean they don't want to go to war? Or acquire money, power and property? Beat them up and throw them in jail and put them in the cultural pillory and stocks for the remainder of their unnatural lives. Filthy hippy scum. Lynching's too good for them.

[Dayna]

There's really a lot I've actually agreed with in this. I've always believed we are a part of nature & should respect it & to love & respect people whatever their race or background.
The channeling,ect., It is very real. When I was a teenager, I got very interested in Spiritualism, out of body experiences, & things like that. Something happened that I wouldn't want to ever happen again. Whether this was something really there, or a dream, it's still dangerous. I went to sleep one night & woke up half way & in the corner of my room I thought saw some type of dark cloaked figure, that I descibed to my friend. She said it sounded like the Grim Reaper. I had never heard of him before.

[Des]

In a completely non-bullying way I'd just like to say that crystals, channeling and all similar new age mumbo-jumbo is a load of bollocks. If I've offended any goblins I'm very sorry.