Thread by @wesyang

I think a lot of polarized online politics are presaged by punk/hardcore/post-punk youth subcultures of the 1980’s and 1990’s

Straightedge, skinhead, riot grrl etc

This essay by Aaron Lake Smith discusses the origins of call out culture in the anarchist/punk subculture and seeing it go mainstream oldwaysways.com/tryhard-lateco…

Just seem really clear that puritanical straightedge are today's Woke, that the Goths and kids lipsynching to midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings are today's trans, Gavin McInness is a direct link between the right wing fringe of 90's punk to Proud Boys...

And it's hard to quite grasp how these cartoon adolescent politics became mainstream, which is why I think that these dramas are palliatives for the "terminal boredom at the end of history"

Maximum Rock n Roll columnist Mykel Board's early 1990's version of "both sides are bad" punk politics "Don't you know you're just the same? Don't you know you're just as lame?" etc.

I was in a band with Artless' guitar player who earnestly believed that Board was an FBI informant who went undercover in the punk world and went native and never left

Which calls to mind this amusing theory that the musicians in Laurel Canyon that created the hippie subculture, some of whom were the sons of naval intelligence officers, had been planted to subvert the Left ...and became huge rock stars... pleasekillme.com/cia-rock-roll/

It is absolutely amazing that Jim Morrison's father basically started the Vietnam War