4 ms·

This article is giving an interesting insight at the situation, and you're reading too much into it. Whether weed is harmful or not is totally irrelevant to wh

This article is giving an interesting insight at the situation, and you're reading too much into it. Whether weed is harmful or not is totally irrelevant to what the article presents. Zealotry is stupid, be it pro or anti weed.

rhizome 13y ago
What is "the situation," though? The legacy of hippies is much, much more than just "the kids who wear those clothes and hang out in that area." Someone mentioned that the post was tongue in cheek, but it reads to me more like tone-deaf. It's like basing commentary on the current state of internet business on people who have the "Bill Gates in the 70s" Poindexter look.
- seldo 13y ago
  I for one will weep no tears whatsoever if the ending of easy money for people dealing drugs causes the end of hippy culture. The cost-benefit analysis of "worldwide drug war" versus "some chilled-out kids living in SF" is pretty simple.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  It's funny you use that analogy, because the hippie subculture is a bit more complex than just scruffy kids in hemp shirts. As a very very brief capsule summary, the 'hippie trail' that started up in the 60s features stops in India, particularly Goa - a bit more westernized than other parts of India, nice weather, very very cheap, and so on. In the late 80s and early 90s the hippie community there turned on to a subset of industrial/electronic music and melded it with a flavor of middle eastern music (thanks to the Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula a few centuries prior to the Portuguese colonization of Goa) to produce a musical fusion that became known as Goa Trance. The Levantine musical influence combined with fairly high-tech electronics shortly made Goa a very popular destination for Israelis who had just completed their military service, and Israeli musicians who had a lot of the musical heritage at their fingertips became major players within that scene, resulting in distinct sub-genres. Meanwhile, the music and the small industry of all-night parties and record labels etc. spread to other popular destinations such as London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, and Tokyo (which also happen to be foci of audio/synthesizer engineering excellence). I made a whole bunch of Israeli friends in the 90s who came to SF because it was part of that music scene while also being in close proximity to Silicon Valley; almost all of them joined or founded startups. I know for sure some of them read Hacker News. Now, I wouldn't say that the current state of Internet business depends on hippies any more than it depends on Bill Gates' Poindexter look, but there's a closer connection between hippies and the tech scene than you might imagine. While I'm not a hippy myself, as an electronic musician/audio pro/hacker I think the hippie movement has had an important rule in cultural and technological cross-fertilization.
  - vidarh 13y ago
    For another take on that "What the dormouse said" by John Markoff that traces a whole lot of the early beginnings of Silicon Valley culture back to 60's and 70's counter culture, including extensive LSD and pot experimentation (in some cases on corporate time, encouraged by people in charge...) and participation in the anti war movements etc..
zem 13y ago
how is pro-weed zealotry stupid? it's essentially saying that people's lives are being ruined, staggering amounts of government money being wasted, and entire classes of criminal being created by trying to ban something that (a) shouldn't be banned in the first place and (b) cannot be banned effectively anyway. if the zealots are all on the wrong side, that just shifts the entire centre of gravity of the discussion (see the overton window for more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  The original comment is deleted by now, but it jumped into arguing whether weed is harmful or not, which is totally orthogonal to what the article discusses, to then conclude that it isn't and because of that it should be legal, without backing any of the arguments and just using HN as a soapbox. This is zealotry.
  - zem 13y ago
    okay, fair point. i missed that about the parent.

rhizome 13y ago

What is "the situation," though? The legacy of hippies is much, much more than just "the kids who wear those clothes and hang out in that area." Someone mentioned that the post was tongue in cheek, but it reads to me more like tone-deaf. It's like basing commentary on the current state of internet business on people who have the "Bill Gates in the 70s" Poindexter look.

seldo 13y ago
I for one will weep no tears whatsoever if the ending of easy money for people dealing drugs causes the end of hippy culture. The cost-benefit analysis of "worldwide drug war" versus "some chilled-out kids living in SF" is pretty simple.
anigbrowl 13y ago
It's funny you use that analogy, because the hippie subculture is a bit more complex than just scruffy kids in hemp shirts. As a very very brief capsule summary, the 'hippie trail' that started up in the 60s features stops in India, particularly Goa - a bit more westernized than other parts of India, nice weather, very very cheap, and so on. In the late 80s and early 90s the hippie community there turned on to a subset of industrial/electronic music and melded it with a flavor of middle eastern music (thanks to the Moorish conquest of the Iberian peninsula a few centuries prior to the Portuguese colonization of Goa) to produce a musical fusion that became known as Goa Trance. The Levantine musical influence combined with fairly high-tech electronics shortly made Goa a very popular destination for Israelis who had just completed their military service, and Israeli musicians who had a lot of the musical heritage at their fingertips became major players within that scene, resulting in distinct sub-genres. Meanwhile, the music and the small industry of all-night parties and record labels etc. spread to other popular destinations such as London, Amsterdam and San Francisco, and Tokyo (which also happen to be foci of audio/synthesizer engineering excellence). I made a whole bunch of Israeli friends in the 90s who came to SF because it was part of that music scene while also being in close proximity to Silicon Valley; almost all of them joined or founded startups. I know for sure some of them read Hacker News. Now, I wouldn't say that the current state of Internet business depends on hippies any more than it depends on Bill Gates' Poindexter look, but there's a closer connection between hippies and the tech scene than you might imagine. While I'm not a hippy myself, as an electronic musician/audio pro/hacker I think the hippie movement has had an important rule in cultural and technological cross-fertilization.
- vidarh 13y ago
  For another take on that "What the dormouse said" by John Markoff that traces a whole lot of the early beginnings of Silicon Valley culture back to 60's and 70's counter culture, including extensive LSD and pot experimentation (in some cases on corporate time, encouraged by people in charge...) and participation in the anti war movements etc..

zem 13y ago

how is pro-weed zealotry stupid? it's essentially saying that people's lives are being ruined, staggering amounts of government money being wasted, and entire classes of criminal being created by trying to ban something that (a) shouldn't be banned in the first place and (b) cannot be banned effectively anyway. if the zealots are all on the wrong side, that just shifts the entire centre of gravity of the discussion (see the overton window for more on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window)

hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
The original comment is deleted by now, but it jumped into arguing whether weed is harmful or not, which is totally orthogonal to what the article discusses, to then conclude that it isn't and because of that it should be legal, without backing any of the arguments and just using HN as a soapbox. This is zealotry.
- zem 13y ago
  okay, fair point. i missed that about the parent.