Shot in the Dark

Category: Ch-ch-Changes; Generational Politics

  • Eras

    Do pseudo-religious cults reflect the times in which they develop? Or does popular culture make the various cults the symbols of the times? I’m sure there’s an online sociologist or philosopher, somewhere, who has thought this before – feel free to point them out – but what the heck.  It’s my blog, I’ll derive if…

  • Seed Corn

    I’ve got leftist acquaintances who chuckle derisively every year about the “War On Christmas”. I meet them halfway. The war isn’t just on Christmas, of course; it’s on everything that builds a stable, functional society Especially families. The “hild-free”/movement is one of modernity’s more galling little affectations. Not so much the people who just decide…

  • Honest Question

    Did people like this exist 30-50 years ago? Not just people who don’t want to have kids, but people who actively detest children in their lives? Or did our society just not exalt this kind of narcissism?

  • A Small Win

    Mia Schem is a 21 year old Israeli who was kidnapped at the Nova EDM festival on October 7, after her arm was mangled by a terrorist with an AK. She tells her story on Israeli TV. I’m trying to imagine a 21 year old American of either (any?) gender responding to 55 days of…

  • Want To Feel Depressed Out Of Your Mind?

    I mean, even more than the results themselves? Then read the comments. Otherwise, avoid both. I stipulate this may be just this guy’s audience, but I don’t want 90% of these people reproducing, much less babysitting. .

  • Open Letter To An Entire Generation, Maybe Two

    To: Millennials, And Maybe Some ZeepersFrom”. Mitch Berg, Obstreperous Peasant, Millie Parent And Generational AgnosticRe: Stop Digging Dear Millennials – and many of you in Gen Z, It’s not like I don’t understand the anger. When I was in high school and college, the “Baby Boom” was barely entering its prime years. The oldest ones…

  • Compromise

    Someone walks up to you with a baseball bat. They say they want to kill you. Your response is “no, I don’t want to get beaten to death with a baseball bat”. Looks like you have a standoff. A controversy. A conundrum. Someone else steps in and asks “How about we compromise? Will you settle…

  • Ray Of Hope

    Maybe, just maybe, the kids will be all right: Us Gen-X grandparents will have a role in helping our Zeeper/Alpha grandkids reclaim this nation’s actual legacy. Also: I bet if this keeps up Big Left will stop trying to register teenagers to vote.

  • Six Vs. A Half Dozen

    Not gonna prevaricate: This kid had me pretty depressed (in a “howling with laughter” kind of way) last week: This young lady was the perfect antidote: Let the Great Sort continue!

  • Stochastic Terror, Part II: Whitewashed

    Yesterday, we talked about the Five Christians You Meet in the Movies. And it started me thinking. Last year, I started but didn’t quite follow through on a statistical study of race and gender characteristics in TV advertisements, as well as the tone or general sense of stereotype associated with the “Characters”. Spoiler alert: white…

  • Dubious Identity

    Gen Z has a shockingly high suicide rate: The new data suggests Gen Z – or the generation of Americans born during 1997 onward – might be seeing a mental health crisis even worse than that faced by the older millennial generation. Since 2014, millennials (or people who turned 23 to 38 in 2019) have seen a…

  • Somewhere In Hollywood, Tomorrow Morning

    SCENE: At a studio at “Yoicks”, a new streaming service. On one side of the table, Bernie BRICKMAN, head of development for Yoicks, sits, brow furrowed, reading a script. By his right elbow sits Beyonce CAPRIÉ, his assistant. Across from him is Ashley KLEIN, age 27, graduate of Oberlin’s screen writing program, veteran of the…

  • Recessional

    David Mamet, the playwright and screenwriter, is among my favorite writers. (My other favorite to pull off that particular daily double is Tom Stoppard.) In 2008, Mamet wrote a piece at the Village Voice entitled “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’.” In it, he described the beginning of his journey away from conventional…

  • Meet The Gatekeepers

    Washington Post correspondent David Weigel – with whom I had a few minor interactions, back in the 1990s when he was working at the late, unlamented “City Pages “– got suspended from the WaPo last week for retweeting an un-PC joke that was around most likely before man landed on the moon. Now, I’m not…

  • DeSantis: Troll Level PhD

    Fatherhood is high on Big Left’s hit list – especially Big Feminism and Big Intersectionality. Without strong fathers, families are missing half of the behavioral background the children need to grow to be strong people. Debasing fatherhood is key to Big Left’s crusade to “reinvent” – i.e. destroy – the nuclear family. Ron DeSantis signed…

  • Energy

    I personally detest inter-generational politics, and the identitymongering that lt breeds. Few things make me want to clap a couple of cinderblocks around someones head like Bugs Bunny playing the cymbals on Elmer Fudds noggin like some moronic little twerp chirping “OK, Boomer”, or “Go get your participation trophy, Millie”, for that matter. But you…

  • Scratch A “Progressive”, Find A Totalitarian

    “So, Mitch – why do you say that the democratic party in United States is the party of authoritarianism? “ Because they tell us they are. Strong majority of Democrats approve of Justin Trudeaucescu‘s treatment of civil disobedience:treatment of civil civil disobedience: 35 percent overall approved of Trudeau’s crackdown, while 10 percent said they were…

  • “Captain Obvious? Your Promotion To Admiral Came Through”

    Study shows that “racial justice” protests that include “Anti”-Fa are at least 18 times more likely to end up in violence than protests where they didn’t show up. And no, the same does not hold true for “right wing“ groups: They continued on to question whether the right-wing groups were the real source of the…

  • Maybe He’ll Give Up Umbrella Man!

    10 year sentence – a downward departure from sentencing guidelines by nearly half – in the burning of a Minneapolis pawn shop during the George Floyd riots: Black Lives Matter rioter Montez Terriel Lee Jr., of Rochester, New York, was sentenced Friday to 120 months in federal prison for his role in burning down a…

  • The Triumph Of The Trite

    The opening chapter of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times: A History of the World from the 20’s to the ’80s, relates the reporting, academic as well as journalistic, of the discovery of the theory of relativity – and the intellectual shockwave it sent through the intelligentsia and technocracy of the day. Which was dwarfed, over time,…

  • Never Thought I’d See The Day

    I’ll admit it – I thought it was impossible for.a ‘woke’ lefty to get charged with a “hate crime”, and that the entire category was designed to try to gin up numbers for Big Left’s “there’s a wave of white supremacist terror coming that will dwarf 9/11″ thesis. I stand, well, partially corrected.

  • Just So We’re Clear On This

    I’m far from “Anti-Vax”. I got the J&J vaccine – partly to shut Karen up, and partly because the science that exists convinced me it was worth the fairly minimal risk. But there are times I wish this country had a national organization, one dedicated to disseminating unvarnished, unbiased, scientific information about public health to…

  • Other Than That, Mrs. Lincoln…

    SCENE: Cat SCAT, the designated “fact checker” at the (possibly fictional) progressive blog “”MinnesotaLiberalAlliance.Blogspot.com“ and office manager at a small phrenology practice, approaches Mitch BERG at the afterparty for an AM1280 event. BERG doesn’t notice until it’s too late. SCAT: Merg. Nobody is coming for your guns. BERG: Oh, hey, Cat… SCAT: It’s just a fantasy…

  • Go Ask Lyle

    Liquor Lyles, my old band’s former headquarters and the “Dive Bar” that made “dive bars” safe for a generation of Gen-X and Millennial hipsters, is yet another casualty of Covid. I haven’t been down Hennepin Avenue – north or south of the freeway – in over a year. I can’t imagine there’s much left.

  • He/She/Whatever Who Forgets History Is Susceptible To Democrat Drivel

    It’s possible that the collapse of public education isn’t a plot to make society dumber and more susceptible to totalitarian meddling. But it’s hard to figure how they’d do a better job of it if they were trying: Nearly 20 percent of millennials and Gen Z in New York believe Jews caused the Holocaust, according…