re: Let's all take a moment to point and laugh at what is going down on the 40 Acres

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The liberals in Austin are posers for the most part. Try-hards.

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Total poseurs. The "liberal-ness" of Austin is greatly exaggerated. In reality it's a conservative city with a liberal veneer. I like to say that it's full of white collar office people who "bought their liberalness at Whole Foods." Basically, people here cop to claiming to hold trendy liberal viewpoints and drive Prii, but when it comes down to it, at the end of the day, it's a city that intentionally hasn't constructed a highway system because the belief on the city council and in county government has for decades been that if there isn't a way to get around people will stop moving here and invading the city. There's nothing more conservative than that. That they have used things like "endangered blind cave nematodes" and setting up nature preserves in the path of common sense future highway corridors in order to accomplish the mission of keeping out growth-inspiring highways is an example of that "veneer" of liberalism I identified earlier. Even in the '60s and '70s there weren't really many real hippies in Austin. What you had instead were laid-back Texans who liked music and having a toke, but who, being Texans, also drove old trucks with gun racks. We're not talking about people living in tepees on communes or chaining themselves to trees here. It was not the same scene as what was going down in the Bay Area.