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I don't really know much about the 60s but tinder et al exist, which feels pretty in line with what I imagine "free love" was all about.
Ironically people are having less sex, but I think that's for other reasons, because sex outside of marriage is now the social norm for the supermajority of Western Civilization.
The modern online dating market is nothing like the concept of free love that was extremely common and important within progressive circles. Maybe on Fetlife or whatever the modern equivalent is. Read Stranger in a Strange Land some time. That's what progressives in the 60s pictured as the enlightened future.
It failed. Young couples today are, if anything, more jealous and possessive than they were in my grandmother's day.
This is what I mean by a Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. It's circular reasoning. You don't even know what progressives aimed for but assume that it must be pretty much what we have today because progressives always get what they wanted so this must be it.
I've noticed this tendency as well. First, progressives claim that changing the law or cultural mores on something will improve this or that, or everything altogether. When their predictions inevitable fail and the changes turn out to be somewhere between less good or outright negative, but everyone already got used to the new norms, the claim becomes that this is what we wanted anyway. Ideally, you start a bunch of tv shows how terrible life as before [X] changed. Didn't chesterton have a quote to that effect?
Ah, found it:
"The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected."
The implication here being that the progressives of old are now the contemporary conservatives.
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I was mostly making that comment to learn more, I was taking a shot in the dark in the hope someone/you would correct me and I'd learn something.
I love the book Stranger in a Strange Land. Excellent point and I totally grok Free Love now.
Cheers!
I have a long effortpost I need to get around to about the political things you see in a 1968 Playboy that are vastly more radical than you see today.
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