Tag: Zoomers

My Own Take on Super Sunday

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I had to postpone my trip to see “Iron Lung” with my grandson.  We got another six inches of snow between yesterday and today and had to spend the day clearing it.  And I really think the meteorological profession is retrogressing.  A couple of days ago they said we would get a “dusting.”  Some dusting!  And unfortunately for me the wind was wild.  I ended up with an ice beard and a frozen face.  But it’s done and tomorrow morning we’ll see what cosmic horror lurks at the bottom of an ocean of human blood!  I’ve read a bunch of reviews and what I’ve gleaned is that this is an homage to the video game of the same name and anyone who isn’t a fan of the game will find it a bit long (maybe quite a bit too long).  But that’s okay.  It will give me a chance to hang out with my grandson afterward and find out what he especially liked about it.

Basically, this movie is sort of the “Star Wars” of his generation.  Because it’s for them.  It’s a nerdy touchstone that they bond over.  So, I want to show deference to their choice of insider totem.  I want to get a sense of what they enjoy.  Should be interesting.

Going through the news is becoming goofier every day.  Apparently, Trump called the Obamas monkeys in some kind of video meme.  I think CBS was angry that Trump hadn’t apologized.  Well, calling Obama a monkey is kind of insensitive to monkeys.  As far as I know monkeys treat all humans equally.  Whereas the Obamas are anti-white racists, which I consider much worse than monkeys.  They’re awful human beings.  I hope Trump apologizes to monkeys for comparing them to the Obamas.

There was another article stating that Starlink has been shut off in Ukraine and now the Russians can’t control their drones.  The article made it sound like the Russians were cut off because they didn’t have legitimate accounts with Starlink.  So, does that mean that Putin was doing what most people’s young adult children do when they use their parents’ Netflix and Disney Plus accounts?  The idea that this war in which hundreds of thousands of men have been killed is being run on pirated GPS usage just seems a bridge too far.  Is this really what’s going on?  What’s next?  Will we find out that ChatGPT has been drafted by Putin and is running the battlefield strategy?

And of course, tomorrow is Super Bowl Sunday.  I guess it must be at least seven years since I’ve watched a Super Bowl.  And honestly, I can’t imagine why I’ll ever bother watching it again.  And that goes for all of professional sports.  All the virtue signaling over race and homosexual identity have made all of it nauseating and I’d rather watch a test pattern than endure their nonsense.  I did see that Anheuser-Bush has put together some commercial for the Super Bowl that involves a Clydesdale horse befriending a bald eagle.  Well, the only thing I could think of was, “Which one is a stand-in for Dylan Mulvaney?”  I don’t think horses and eagles are going to get Bud Light their customer base back.  Enjoy your Sunday.

A Light Bulb Turns On at Disney

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According to Variety magazine:

Disney’s Boy Trouble: Studio Seeks Original IP to Win Back Gen-Z Men Amid Marvel, Lucasfilm Struggles

Disney has realized that young men are tired of their girl-boss inhabited movies.  And now it’s a problem because Disney needs their money.

And I quote:

“Numerous studies show that Gen Z men in particular are a lonely, gaming-obsessed group who were hampered in their formative years by COVID-19 lockdowns — not the easiest segment to grasp.”

So even when their desperate to attract an audience they can’t help but mock and belittle men and boys.

Rather than rant on my own I’ll borrow the Critical Drinker’s rant.  He is much more amusing than I am.

 

 

A Self-Correcting Problem

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Most of the end of civilization stuff seems overly dramatic.  The dysfunction we see around us is distressing but somehow the lights stay on and the stores still have overpriced hamburger meat and eggs on their shelves.  And although it seems like the kids have given up on living the lifestyle their parents and grandparents had, well, they still seem to feed themselves and have the latest Apple electronics when they complain about their poverty.

So, it’s interesting to think about just how much life in these United States will differ from even today in let’s say a decade.  In 2034 what will be radically different?

Well, for one thing the oldest Millennials will be well advanced into middle age.  For instance, the crop from 1980 will be fifty-four years old and retirement will be on a lot of their minds.  The ones who didn’t get married or have children are maybe looking around at the world they “saved” by refusing to procreate and may be discovering that the world has completely passed them by.  What might that situation do to their world view?  Well, maybe very little.  After all, when you’ve opted out of family life it doesn’t much matter whether you’re sixteen or sixty-six.  You can still spend most of your time sitting in front of a computer screen playing some game or other.  And in fact, playing video games is a viable option even when you’re eighty-six.  So, a large proportion of Millennials will probably check out on the couch, joy stick in hand and eventually be scraped off the furniture and carted off to the Soylent Green plant without anyone even knowing they were gone.  And the Millennial cat ladies will suffer a similar fate.  Except in their case, they’ll provide a temporary source of cat food for their feline roommates.

But there will be a subset of the Millennials that buck the trend and have families.  And they’re the ones that will determine what the future looks like.  If like some of the parents of Zoomers that we read about, they sacrifice their kids on the altar of woke parenting then basically all they will accomplish is a one generation reprieve from the extinction of their genetic lines.  Their children will follow the majority of their parents’ cohort down that sterile avenue to childless oblivion.

But the fraction of Millennials that succeed in bringing up their children with normal old-fashioned values and priorities will inherit the Earth.  Think of it.  The Millennials were an echo of the Baby Boom.  Not as numerous but still the largest cohort currently on the scene.  If they only produce a small generation of children and most of them fail to reproduce, then the ones that do will be an island of youth in a sea of old dead-enders.  They will be the only game in town.  They will be the future.  And maybe that will put an end to all of this anti-human nonsense that the Gaia worshippers have invented.  Maybe when Greta Thunberg hears her biological clock stop ticking, she will realize that she’s been sold a bill of goods by the Left and wasted her life fighting a moronic war against human flourishing.  Hopefully when she reaches fifty, she can watch a video clip of herself hectoring some government panel, “How dare you destroy my childhood by providing modern inventions to allow me to live beyond neolithic conditions which are all I deserve!”  I’ll already be gone but maybe historians can get a statement from her to act as a cautionary tale for future young idiots.

So even if the luddites get rid of gasoline cars and force us to eat crickets, I think the demographic trends will bring about a changing of the guard that will favor rationality and begin to eliminate those who bought into the anti-human cult that currently has most of the young under its sway.

That’s not to say that this irrational mindset won’t have damaged this country and the rest of western civilization terribly.  It will have.  There’s no way now to prevent the damage.  But in some senses, it will be a self-correcting problem.  Basically, the sane will inherit the Earth.

To Paraphrase Huey Lewis and the News, “It’s Hip to be Unwoke.”

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According to the New York Times there is a troubling trend among some avant-garde kids to assume the trappings of traditional institutions, like the Catholic crucifix, and defy the virtue signaling mantra of their generation’s elite guardians.  So, the Times is looking for a sleuth to ferret out the details of this heresy and hopefully expose the malefactors so that they can be properly punished and then allowed to recant and declare their love for Big Brother.

This New York Times project is described in an article in the City Journal that goes on to try and explain these young rebels as the first fruits of a rebellion of the young against the dominant culture which in this case is the current all encompassing orthodoxy of woke-ism.  In other words, these young people are organizing a counter-culture against what used to be described as the Left’s counter-culture against western civilization.

The author states: “Few things are more natural for young people than to push back against the strictures and norms of their day, even if only to stand out a little from the crowd and assert their independence. A counterculture forms as a reaction against an official or dominant culture—and today, it is the woke neoliberal Left that occupies this position in America’s cultural, educational, technological, corporate, and bureaucratic power centers. In this culture, celebration of ritualized, old forms of transgression is not only permitted, but practically mandatory. Dissent against state-sponsored transgression, however, is now transgressive. All of what was once revolutionary is now a new orthodoxy, with conformity enforced by censorship, scientistic obscurantism, and eager witch-hunters (early-middle-aged, zealously dour, tight-lipped frown, NPR tote bag, rainbow “Coexist” bumper sticker, pronouns in email signature—we all know the uniform).”

Apparently, these young rebels can be found in trendy areas of lower Manhattan and their cachet as members of the avant-garde worries the gatekeepers of public morality at the Times and the author equates this worry with genuine peril that the youth among the elites could be corrupted and driven over to the dark side where one day they would produce a new consensus to shift the balance of power away from the monolithic progressive world view.  And a new regime could populate the Deep State with acolytes of the Dissident Right.

Well, I don’t know about that.  I know that Curtis Yarvin is interested in the lower Manhattan scene being discussed and he is of the opinion that the only way to neutralize the Deep State is to peacefully displace it with a new elite.  But in both of these examples I wonder at the circumstances and the time line that would bring about such a transformation.  Some kids in Manhattan adopting Christian symbology isn’t a bad thing but what is the larger significance?  Do these young people hope to change the values that guide modern life?  Are they looking to traditional values to give meaning to their existence?  And how many people are we talking about?  A handful, a few thousand or a growing trend?

And what will be the reaction of the gatekeepers?  I’m sure they’re already busy looking to siphon off any discontented teens with a Tik-Tok influencer who sports a trans-friendly pseudo-Catholic rosary that involves anti-Pope Francis’ official rainbow seal of approval.

I guess, on balance, any fear on the part of the official organs of the state like the Times is a good and promising symptom.  Therefore, I won’t rain on their parade.  But I think I’ll wait to celebrate until I see some larger more widespread evidence that the Zoomers have begun to rebel.  Possibly the “Let’s go Brandon” cheers (or their actual words) at football games could be interpreted as the first real sign of popular unrest of the young against the Left.  But I’ve assumed that was more of a reaction to the COVID lockdowns by the Biden administration and not a general anti-woke reaction.  We’ll need to see clearer signs such as voting trends or support for traditional institutions like religion and marriage.

But I’ll end by saying that anything that hints at the young abandoning the woke cult is encouraging.  Even if it’s a minority movement, it’s a start.