The future of the US is fucked if people are this dumb...

[DBTrek]

Sometimes it’s Friday, and folks are just paraphrasing popular quotes to pass the time until beer o’clock.

[The Conservative]

Sometimes it’s Friday, and folks are just paraphrasing popular quotes to pass the time until beer o’clock.

Beer O'Clock is whenever you have a beer in your hand...

[Fife]

Sometimes it’s Friday, and folks are just paraphrasing popular quotes to pass the time until beer o’clock.

This is the time-travel thread now. :goteam: :drunk:

[C-Mag]

... and nine years later than the rest of us, TC encounters his first SJW.
Lolz

Hey, that's not fair. You live on the Left Coast.

[DBTrek]

I know.
My view is colored by my location.
The shit you read about in the media that sets your hair on end has often been my daily life for at least a year or two.

Could be worse.
I could be in California.

[C-Mag]

I know.
My view is colored by my location.
The shit you read about in the media that sets your hair on end has often been my daily life for at least a year or two.

Could be worse.
I could be in California.

My work takes me out there occasionally and I think I'm ready for it, but every trip something surprises me. People can talk about Berkeley or Minnesota being Liberal, but all pale compared to Portland and Olympia.

[BjornP]

Someone came in with the book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche and decided to tell us that we as Americans need to stop spreading our "Americanism" all over the world. I asked them what they meant, and they started to go on about the book, etc... and how that people around the world see doctors in the US or visa versa and they are told that they don't like themselves because of "x" and are prescribed medication for it or another way of life...

Saying how male privilege is the reason for anorexia, etc... I asked them to explain. They told me that men want women to look a specific way and women think they need to live up to those ideals...

Read a couple of reviews and an excerpt of the book on Amazon. Doesn't mention "male privilege" at all, and if you are accurately repeating her recap of the book, she also seems to have misunderstood what the book's about.

Not that it reads as particularly groundbreaking or intelligent. It's only valid point I can gleam from excerpts and reviews, is that culture has a significant effect on understanding mental health disorders (I suppose for example a Japanese national might get, and deal with, a depression for other reasons than an American), but aside from that, it reads like another guide for needless American cultural self-loathing. It is observable and true that Americanisation isn't just commercial, but also occurs culturally - that's not new to the US, after all. But these parts of the excerpt:

We promise people in other cultures that mental health (and a modern style of self-awareness) can be found by throwing off traditional social roles and engaging in individualistic quests of introspection. These Western ideas of the mind are proving as seductive to the rest of the world as fast food and rap music, and we are spreading them with speed and vigor.

What motivates us in this global effort to convince the world to think like us? There are several answers to this question, but one of them is quite simple: drug company profits. These multibillion-dollar conglomerates have an incentive to promote universal disease categories because they can make fortunes selling the drugs that purport to cure those illnesses.

Well, despite the author going on and on about the evils of America spreading its cultural weight around, he apparantly thinks Americanization only happens to non-Western countries. Indeed, he doesn't seem to understand that "throwing off traditional social roles and engaging in individualistic quests of introspection" is less universally Western, and more specifically American.

Mostly, though, the problem is this premise (and I suspect conclusions), again from the amazon page:

"Traveling from Hong Kong to Sri Lanka to Zanzibar to Japan, acclaimed journalist Ethan Watters witnesses firsthand how Western healers often steamroll indigenous expressions of mental health and madness and replace them with our own. In teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we have been homogenizing the way the world goes mad".

So, what he does here is essentially paint anyone who is not American - or "Western" - as being passive recipients of aggressive and active American culturalisation. Which, as coming from someone who has been observing Americanization firsthand for all my life, is not just factually bullshit. It's also bullshit thinking. It is an idea that only America can be responsible for its own choices, and everyone else therefore must be a victim of you, being unable to make their own decisions.

Iow, it's a book advocating itself as an attack on an American-centric patronzing of foreign cultures, by assuming that foreign cultures must be unable to make decisions for themselves, by and about themselves. The only possible decision-maker in the process of Americanisation, the only center imaginable in the eyes of this author (and most of the people complimenting it), seems to be the US.

So...

I suspect the woman at your work interpreted the book in her own, "special" way. But the book itself isn't really advertising itself as all that clever, either. To the "We Americans are the root of all that is evil in the world!" -crowd, I'm sure it's all very groundbreaking, though.

[StCapps]

If you can’t point out the SJW in the room, you *are* the SJW.

[TheReal_ND]

Oh and not to mention the fact that she and/or the author left out the actual culprits behind (((psychiatry))) and (((pharmaceuticals))) being so fucking huge in this jewed country.

[DrYouth]

Someone came in with the book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche and decided to tell us that we as Americans need to stop spreading our "Americanism" all over the world.

Came in where TC?

What are you up to these days?

Did you tag and collar that SJW?
We could learn something about their migration patterns.
That was a prime specimen.