I was in Junior High at the time.
While you are on the subject of ignorantly associating Rat and Koan with Manson, I can share this, from REALITY. Our Scout Troop at the time was being recruited to associate with a church that turned out to be run by a Catholic pedophile. Not a group of hippies but the Boy Scouts of America, who enabled magnet environments for same-sex pedophiles, whiles tolerating bullying of boys who weren't gung-ho, or flag waving, militaristic Jesus followers. A predictor of what the Republican Party base became 30 years later.
On the "left" as you label it, we abhorred violence locally and globally, unless absolutely necessary which we generally saw as rare. We weren't the kids with guns or knives (we liked bottle-rockets and firecrackers - we were after all, still kids) . We were into Jim Morrison and John Lennon, Martin Luther King and Gandhi; not Charles Manson. We were smart enough to know that fookers with swastikas were fascists and/or mentally ill, not hipsters on Magic buses. We certainly knew the vast difference between what was inside Manson's long hair and say, Neil Young's.
You propagate without question many lies about liberals and atheists; nobody here can deprogram that. It appears to me your intellectual curiosity about history and science rides a set of tracks and all the truths and evidence that is off your strict path is reactively a target of smear and lies.
Koan, a great and unique SI contributor, writes from his own head and heart -- not a Soviet style echo machine that after the cold war, morphed ironically into the recently self-destructing US right wing . It is virtually IMPOSSIBLE to see see you and many others as equivalent merely on another side of a spectrum; it would be like comparing quantum mechanics to Scientology. Or poetry to a slot machine. No equivalency.
I hold out hope for you, someday the remarkable truths of evidence will wake you up from your addiction to a fixed (T)ruth. You and others will be welcomed to the dynamic world of genuine critical thinking and transparency. |
