Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

xmodtwo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 1001 posts

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#581

Post by linksnapzz »

wskinner wrote: post #574
koprulusector wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discov…

> The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discovery, acceptance, mutual aid, egalitarianism, free thought. Then it’s worth considering why the prevailing culture at the time didn’t see it that way.

We are the people who support Good Things. Therefore, anyone who opposes us is ipso facto supporting Bad Things.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#582

Post by ldh0011 »

irrational wrote: post #326
undersuit wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because no one needs to change the way they act around you. Christianity and Catholicism are strongly majority groups in the US. You were already treated as a Christian because that's what the majority of our society is based on.

No, where I live you are considered to be a freak if you are religious. Announcing that you have joined a religion is like announcing you are trans in Alabama 50 years ago.

This is patently absurd. I'm neither trans nor religious but hypothetically I'd much rather announce that I joined a religion anywhere in the US than announce being trans in the small town where my grandparents live today. Let alone Alabama 50 years ago.

Yes in very progressive environments you will get more support for announcing the later but that's because being in the later group is actually a challenge while religion has built up a reputation for maligning groups of people for things out of their control and for generally anti-scientific beliefs. Being part of a group that largely denies evolution and climate change is obviously not going to grant you any favors in groups with an academic (especially STEM) background.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#583

Post by yucky »

noobermin wrote: post #533
erybodyknows wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting point. I guess the question is: is power inherently related to culture? And if so, to what degree? If culture is the outline of the dominant group in a society, perhaps the counterculture are those who occupy and inhabit its shadow.

So, I'm not sure this is obvious, but the current "progressive[0]" culture is pushed by the dominant group that does have power. By raw statistics, white men still wield most power in American society (and thus the world), and so the progressive culture that is dominant in media is the culture being written and put into vogue by people who are white men if you merely draw on the statistics. If you've ever observed tw…

  > By raw statistics, white men still wield most power in American society (and thus the world), and so the progressive culture that is dominant in media is the culture being written and put into vogue by people who are white men if you merely draw on the statistics.
Those would primarily be "progressive" white men though, which still gets to the in-group/out-group dynamic where they will more closely associate with a racial or sexual minority then they would to a conservative white male (a value match vs a skin color match). So the effect is the same, is it not?

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#584

Post by dang »

nxmnxm99 wrote: post #35
adamcharnock wrote: post #20

I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part. Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life: - Freelanci…

[flagged]

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33267641 (Oct 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30880209 (April 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25349726 (Dec 2020)

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#585

Post by Taywee »

ipaddr wrote: post #576
Taywee wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4chan is obnoxiously and brainlessly countercultural to the point of contrarianism, though. It used to be a fun place where people didn't care so much about social conventions and focused mostly on having a good time and poking fun at each other, but it's degraded into just hating anything and everything that they can attribute to anybody they don't like. I've seen tons of cases where they were on-board for something…

It sounds like you grew up and are beyond the childness. Don't take that experience away from others.

It's not childish anymore. It's just angry and cynical. It looks less like the shit-talking edgy teenagers having fun being idiots like it was in 2007, and more like unhinged, hateful, contrarian paranoid schizophrenia.

I wish the people on 4chan had the stupid childish fun that I did 15 years ago.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#586

Post by pocket_cheese »

jstarfish wrote: post #342
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, I think it's much more complicated. On one hand Raytheon changes their rainbow to logo for pride month, on the other hand some states are trying to ban crossdressing or force crossdressing people to register as sex offenders. And the majority of youth who are homeless are homeless because their families kicked them out for being gay/trans. I don't think it's reasonable to say that LGBTQ people are compl…

> And the majority of youth who are homeless are homeless because their families kicked them out for being gay/trans. People lie about anything they can get away with. When only one side of the story is being heard, people claiming victimhood because of a singular external issue are almost always grossly misrepresenting the situation. See also: "I got fired because my boss / my car / my dog / etc."

There are peer reviewed studies on this subject and they confirm that trans people are significantly more likely to experience housing insecurity.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#587

Post by jrumbut »

luckylion wrote: post #137
jrumbut wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the present moment, the counterculture is always hard to find and identify. That's what makes it the counterculture. Now you can read and listen to the Beat poets anywhere, but that would have been challenging in the early '50s. You had to go to the right coffee shop on the right night and if you went and saw what was going on you might question if these were geniuses pushing the frontiers of expression or a bunch…

The hippies were the counterculture, weren't they? Yet they weren't hard to find or identify. I guess it can get muddy, but what you're describing sounds more like underground culture to me. It can be happily compatible with the mainstream culture, it's not oppositional, it's just obscure and hidden because of it.

I would argue that a counterculture has to be oppositional and can't be happily compatible.

The hippies who were burning their draft cards, dropping out of school, and living as mendicants were a counterculture that could not truly coexist with the mainstream.

These dramatic characters inspired a youth culture that adopted more moderate signifiers (long hair, folk/rock music, nonviolent protest, maybe vegetarianism/meditation/yoga) that could coexist with the mainstream.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#588

Post by uoaei »

godshatter wrote: post #549
neonnoodle wrote: post #71

The medium is the message dudes. At this point in history, what will qualify a true counterculture is NOT BEING ONLINE. Whatever the true counterculture will be, it won’t be subject to the Internet and its all-seeing eye. It won’t be made out of memes and flame wars. No matter what the political bent, we’re all very much a captive audience online. “Master’s house/master’s tools” and all that.

I was going to remark that people like myself that avoid (most) social media and avoid tracking via vpns and so forth are counter cultural right now. I'm still having to explain to people why I'm not on Facebook all the time.

I routinely get eyerolls for asking people to ask me first before putting pictures of me up on the internet.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#589

Post by graphe »

koprulusector wrote: post #560
narrator wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you know 4chan is the counterculture is every time someone releases a new generative art tool, 4chan figures out a way to do stuff with it that makes the creators have to restrict and/or shut it down. Like in the 1960s how the mainstream culture would whisper under their breath and point in shock and horror at hippies and try to get them banned from various public venues, and send mobs to beat them up, we hav…

The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discov…

You've made a mistake that most people do with hippies. Hippies were not political. Student protestors and hippies are seen as the same thing even though they're not. Hippies didn't go to protest.

4chan is another place you mischaracterize due to the mainstream media. Social rejects go there. Of every kind. You probably ignored the fact that there's been an LGBT board for more than a decade since you don't go there.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#590

Post by z3c0 »

eddsh1994 wrote: post #572
koprulusector wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. The hippies were rooted in things that were objectively good: peace, love, self discov…

> The hippies were shit on during the sixties because of politics and the Vietnam war. The hippies were a big part of the anti war movement. The simplest and quickest way to shutting the movement down was to criminalize its constituents, like hippies, or civil rights activists, through tactics like draconian drug laws and a drug war. That's an interesting point I haven't heard of before, thanks :)

If you'd like to see it stratified as a full-blown fact, here's the interview where John Ehrlichman explained that it was a planned strategy to discredit Nixon's naysayers.

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Post reply on HN