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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7770668" data-attributes="member: 4937">I love a good healthy argument.Actually, agreed.  The arrested development in society and the failure to accept adult responsibility has been a very large topic of conversation, not just by Bill Maher, but by many of the communities - conservatives, the religious, etc. - that Bill Maher is noted for being highly critical of.  And it shows up in a lot of aspects of society, which I won't get into because, well, it will get political.  But suffice to say, Bill Maher isn't making a particularly novel observation and that it an observation which you'd normally expect from a conservative that thinks society is going all to heck in various ways.What it chiefly says to me is that a parent in the 1960's could generally take his kids to see a movie aimed at an adult audience without fear that it would be inappropriate viewing for them.  They might not catch all the nuance, but there is hardly anything in the 'top films of the 1960's' that I wouldn't have let me kids watch if they wanted to.  Indeed, 'Lawrence of Arabia' contains so very serious subject matter - rape, sodomy, torture, murder, suicide, etc. - but it's handled generally tastefully and without gratuitous obsessing over the matter, so that I do remember watching (and enjoying) 'Lawrence' when I was like 9 or 10 even when I might not have gotten exactly what was going on in every scene.  By contrast, it's a rare films these days that is aimed at an adult audience that doesn't show a juvenile obsession with depicting sexual acts and graphic violence.  I think there are still plenty of dramatic epics in the mode of Doctor Zhivago that are not considered fringe art house films.   Speilberg's 'Lincoln', for example, is I think a very serious adult film and it grossed like $275 million domestically.  Many other examples could probably be cited, and its worth noting that 'Zhivago' in edition to being a film for an adult audience was in its day a grand 'effects' film designed to be visually stunning.  Some notice needs to be made of the advances in technology that have allowed more and more spectacular effects films to be made - for example, as badly made as it actually was and as low brow as he directed it, Peter Jackson's 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy of films could very much be considered a spiritual successor to the old box office epics with casts of thousands.I think it says that we've gotten much more sophisticated in terms of the media that we target to 15 year olds.  One positive thing that I see in the current culture is that while we may be dumbing down what media we feed to adults, we've gotten much more respectful of the intellectual abilities of children and young adults.  If you look back at what was available in children's literature 30 or 60 years ago, the pickings were pretty thin.  Today, not only is that a huge market, but books like 'Harry Potter' have provided to children long sustained story telling with complex themes and a rich vocabulary.  (Seriously, I occasionally have to look up words in 'Harry Potter' - for example, 'serried' comes to mind.)But, while we may agree generally that there is something wrong with the maturity of society, I don't at all agree it has to do with things like reading comic books or watching comic book movies.  I won't attempt to diagnosis it here, but what I will do is ask whether - if this is a serious problem - someone like Bill Maher in any way acts as if this is a serious problem.  Is Bill Maher a serious thinker and a serious and astute critic of society's immaturity?Well, this is a 62 year old man who appears to be emotionally arrested in young adolescence.  He pursues women nearly half his age.  He's never been married.  Heck, he's never had a long term relationship of any sort - his dating usually lasts less than two years.  He's raising no children.  He's never been to a PTA meeting.  He's never served in the military.  He has virtually no business experience.  He has no religion, no externally reviewable morals to live up to.  Even the few standards he claims to have, such as being a member of PETA, he freely confesses he violates when he feels like it.  He has no scientific or intellectual credibility on really anything.  He never has to present a rigorous or defensible opinion.  He can always say, "Hey, I'm just an entertainer." or "I'm a comedian." or "Why so serious?"  He doesn't have to discipline himself in anything, because he doesn't have anything that he feels he ought to do that isn't what he Bill Maher prefers to do.  He's thus never had any real adult responsibility and he's made his money essentially as a professional troll whose gimmick is to gather an audience of people who largely hate the same things he does and then validate the audience by vulgarly mocking the things that they approve of, thereby getting them to feel smart.  The emotional maturity of his jokes are essentially that of a kid on the playground accusing another kid of being a bedwetter, and his audience is essentially those kids at the playground who upon viewing a popular kid say something like that would laugh along with him.  This is a guy that never has really even had to worry about being called out as doing something offensive or losing his career because he does one absolutely stupid and objectionable thing, because what else would you expect from him?  Pick which one you consider the worst?This is not someone whom I feel has the stature to critique my maturity, or really that of anyone else.</blockquote>

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