Maher makes fun of Bpat, I mean comic book fans

[Dill]

(11-20-2018, 04:39 PM)samhain Wrote: It's not that hobbies, frivolous or not, are inherently bad.  I'll be at the theater for the first weekend of Avengers 4, guaranteed (I have a 6-year old), and I'm sure it'll be just as good as everything MCU puts out.  It just seems like comics, video games, and guns have become things that overtake people's personalities.  Their interests become who they think they are vs what people see them as/what they really are as an individual.  People see themselves as weak, so they plaster crap and ads and symbols all over themselves to be something else.  That's kind of crazy.  These are the things that they want others to identify them with.  It just seems to detract from people's actual personalities.  It's another layer of phony crap for the insecure.

Good insight here. (and you might throw in tattoos now as well.) That's why I think it very much worth looking into these kinds of pop cultural phenomenon, though I'd leave the moralizing as a final, not a first step. First is to figure out what's happening in the larger culture/economy to explain this change in identity formation.

The answer, however, will not likely be "guns/video games/comics cause X behavior" since addictive behavior towards these objects is for those involved (and as you have framed it) the solution to some other, larger problem.