I'm selling two of my guitars and an anecdote about one of them typifies the difference between a sane hippie and the anti-science kind.

In 2002 I bought a 1968 D-35 12 string guitar (D-12-35 is their odd nomenclature).  In 1970 basically all Brazilian rosewood was banned so this one has the distinction of being pre-ban Rosewood. Shortly after I bought it, I had some recurring problems with my Internet cable and I had this really wonderful tech who came out a few times to try and solve it. He was an older guy, gray ponytail, knew his stuff; we got along swimmingly but the problem was intermittent so by the time dispatch would send him to my house it would be gone. Finally, we caught it and he was able to solve it and he was going around the house checking everything in other connections and saw that 12 string in my den.  He was a guitar player too and I told him that was a '68 Martin, made with Brazilian Rosewood.  Suddenly, a guy who had liked me so much he gave me his cell phone number so he could hurry over to find the cable problem was no longer smiling and no longer talking.

He didn't like that I had a pre-ban Rosewood guitar. We were no longer friends.  He didn't say anything and it didn't bother me, because he was a sane hippie who felt how he felt and that was that. It didn't bother me because so am I.

It will surprise some people to hear me call myself a sane hippie when I have called out anti-science hippies on any number of occasions.  An odd problem the left in America faces is a lack of a real identity; the right will call every Democrat a liberal of progressive or whatever, and the left plays along with it and does the same thing to themselves, while the right happily distinguishes its cranks with 'religious right' or social conservative or libertarian or neo-cons, who just happen to vote Republican. It's unfortunate because it lets cranks on the left have the same legitimacy as sane hippies and liberals who are pro-science. Liberals, bless 'em, are too darn inclusive to call out anti-science progressives in their midst, so they spend a lot of time creating unconvincing rationalizations about how anti-science zealots distrust corporations or have some vague moral issue that washes away their science sins.(2)

In almost any article dealing with anti-science groups, I have to spend some time explaining in a comment that 'progressive' is not liberal and never has been.  A Pittsburgh pro-union liberal has little in common with a San Francisco progressive who wants to ban goldfish. Progressives are instead social authoritarians, just like social conservatives are - those two groups just want to ban different things. And they are both dangerous for science.

I have a book coming out next month, Science Left Behind, and the whole reason to write it was because the intrusion of progressives into the science discourse is the Big White Elephant in the Science Building; everyone knows about it, scientists go out of their way to avoid those people, and science media is either progressive or sure as heck isn't drawing their ire so it does not get a lot of attention. But in chapter one we explain that the problem is not liberals - without liberals, there could be no Science 2.0; there are no conservatives in science these days and progressives refuse to talk about anything but politics and religion - and I note that the right would do better in making its case if they recognize that weird positions about banning Big Gulps and plastic bags are not liberal tenets, no matter what social authoritarians claim and liberals allow.

So my pony-tailed acquaintance, that I shared so much in common with, had a moral stand against that guitar because he saw a slippery slope of environmental consequences. He wasn't advocating that my guitar be banned or taken from me, he just didn't like what it represented and that I had it.  Like I said, as a sane hippie, I know where he is coming from.

Along with too many guitars, I also have too many comic books (and too many coffee makers, and a lot of other stuff I just happen to like) but when I was a young guy I refused to buy really old, rare ones; the sane hippie in me would not allow it.  I was so much a hippie that I seemed positively patriotic; I would not buy a World War II-era comic book despite owning lots of other things from that period and having various family members who served with pride because, to me, those comic books were un-American. 

The reason I would not buy them was rationing; in World War II lots of things were rationed and recycled. Not the modern 'intellectual placebo' sort of government recycling program we have today, actual valuable recycling. You couldn't get sugar, or meat, or plenty of other things, you had to use stamps from a book. I have one of my mother's, from when she was a child.

Comic books then were child commodities. They were expendable newsprint, easily recycled, just like newspapers. Recycling them got kids involved and they understood war was serious stuff and you shouldn't go into it without being willing to make a sacrifice.  Because kids 'got' that message, and comics were expendable and kids don't take very good care of things, comic books from that period were actually quite rare.  

I didn't care about their collectable value or the obvious increase they would incur as time went on, to me that comic book meant some weird adult thought his comic books were more important than stopping Hitler. Obviously other people have laughed at my ethics all the way to the bank in too many businesses to count, I am not here to pretend to be superior - because I am a sane hippie I don't need to hit anyone with my sanctimony so I never met anyone and criticized them for owning a comic book.(3)

I can't even take credit for the sane hippie thing.  Credit for that, though many people have longed for a valid distinction, goes to Dr. Dick Gordon, who I finally met when I was invited to UC Santa Cruz by Dr. Dave Deamer.  Dick, being something of a sane hippie and obviously a science enthusiast, brought me a gift and challenged me with identifying it:

Yes, he picked those in the wilds of Manitoba and brought it all the way to California for me.  Awesome, right?  We need more sane hippies.

He also said that while I was in town I absolutely needed to drive up the hill to the home of Doctoral candidate (now PhD) Bruce Damer. Damer, Gordon said, had the most terrific private collection of computers you could possibly imagine.  

Dr. Bruce Damer, quantum paleontologist/theoretical phys. ed. PhD Bloggy, Dr. Dick Gordon.

Off we went.  Damer, Gordon told me, was a 'sane hippie' and I laughed because I knew immediately what he meant.  His home was a wonderland composite of the scientific and the vaguely mystical but he wasn't telling anyone else how to live their lives; a world run by anti-science hippies and social authoritarians is world where everything is banned with the excuse that it's for the children or for society or whatever. Sane hippies embrace science and actual diversity, including people who believe the complete opposite - just not to kooky extremes, like the ACLU supporting the rights of Nazis to burn down their headquarters. (4)

(2) Yet does not work for Republicans.  President George W. Bush had a moral issue with human embryonic stem cell research yet suppressed it and signed off on funding hESC research, over the objections of more socially conservative, precautionary principle arguments. He was still called anti-science by science media while anti-vaccine and anti-GMO nuts are not.

(3) Once I got older I determined that not everything had to be a value judgment. People kept books, for example, so comic books should not have some special condemnation. I own three comics from the period now but I still like the message it was sending to kids to give something back.

(4) Obviously The Onion at its best but the ACLU did recently agree to represent the KKK, because the state of Georgia refused to allow them to participate in the "Adopt-A-Highway" program.