Maher makes fun of Bpat, I mean comic book fans

[Dill]

(11-20-2018, 01:44 PM)Au165 Wrote: I play video games, which means I don't want to grow up. I also bought a house at 23, got married, made it into a director role and carry no debt other than a mortgage, but damn it I apparently just can't handle growing up because of those pesky video games. The activities you choose to spend your free time doing don't mean anything in regards to your ability to be mature or to be an "adult". I know plenty of guys who sit around and read history books and watch PBS that can't figure out how to hold a job. Outdated stereotypes are just that....outdated.

First I want to agree with most of your points here. That is why I critique social analysis, especially of pop culture, which takes the form of "comic books cause X."  Doesn't seem like we disagree there, though I don't see guys sitting around reading history books as wasting their lives.  

Where we begin to diverge is where you use the very small sample of yourself to make claims about the effect, or lack thereof, of "entertainment" on people's lives. How one chooses to spend one's free time may have very much to do with one's ability to "be an adult," especially in a consumer culture driven by marketing.

And I have more questions about the following--

(11-20-2018, 01:44 PM)Au165 Wrote: The complaint about "adulting" is still the old guy screaming to get off his lawn. People have bitched that "being a grown up sucks" since the dawn of time but the difference is now people post it on social media instead of sitting around saying it in a living room with friends. Again, somehow drawing some sort of parallel between casual activities and "not wanting to grow up" is just maturity gate keeping. It is propped up by outdated cultural stereotypes of certain activities and the people who partake in them.

It is not only "cultural stereotypes" that can be outdated, but also entire modes of social/economic organization upon which they are based. As a form, the distinction between adult/child, grown up and not, is intrinsic to every human society, but as content it is not.  People we now call children were once regularly married off at 13 and 14. "Maturity" had very different requirments back then than it does now, when children began working at very young ages and fewer hours of the week could be devoted to leisure.  The sociological concept of "childhood" itself, as opposed to "adult," only emerged in the 19th century with a sufficiently large and leisured middle class, and has undergone some major redefinitions since then.

What I am getting at is that the belief that complaints about the immaturity of the young are just part of some permanent eternal cycle, such that paying attention to them tells us nothing about what is going on now, is ill advised.  The advent of electronic culture/amusement, the extension of the market into homelife and family relations, the massive leisure, priviledge and overprotection masses of children in Western nations now grow up with can certainly have an effect on "maturity" as it was defined by, say, the WWII generation. Hence phrases like "30 is the new 21" have a certain resonance with oldsters like myself.

Maturity gate keeping is important. Most of my complaints about Trump--and some of yours too I think--easily fall under this rubric.