When I looked at the Amazon page, the first book on the list of other recommended books is the Unabomber manifesto. All but 2 of the reviewers thought he was a genius. Reminds me of a game Rush Limbaugh played back then, like the games they play on NPR. He would read a passage from it and a passage from Al Gore's first book, Earth in the Balance, and the audience had to guess which was which. It was always a toss-up.
Can't say I've been to Lagos but I've been to Tokyo and I don't think a suburb of Tokyo looks a great deal like a suburb of Cleveland at anything other than a superficial level.
Tokyo was a smoking ruin in 1945 and the Allied powers had a fair amount of say in how it was reconstructed, it's somewhat remarkable it doesn't look more like Cleveland than however it does.
"Western junk"! the Levis jean is a classic and timeless design, little wonder it's been so universally popular, in part I think because it was a pragmatic design of clothing that wasn't a slave to history. Mostly clean-sheet, designed for a purpose. It was designed by Jewish clotheirs tho and whether the Jews are actually part of "Western Culture" has been a question Western culture seems to ask itself regularly.
Vintage Levis sell for thousands to Japanese collectors if you happen to have any from the 19th century.
I think it's a little weird that the author includes "democracy" as one of the defining characteristics in WEIRD since to my understanding of history the Western world wasn't even fully democratic until after the invention of the jet aircraft.
If you go down the long list of e.g. English kings for the past thousand years it's a long list of James, Richards, and Edwards many of whose encyclopedia entries could begin "James XVII was a tyrannical psychopath..." or "Richard VIII was known to be a fair king for the three years he ruled until he was deposed by the tyrannical psychopath Edward etc."
That is to say democracy in Western civilization seems to be more of a summer fling so far than a marriage. Summer flings sometimes turn into marriages but Western civ and democracy haven't even been dating that long, it seems uncertain whether it's even entirely sold on the concept, its top fans are the billion people in India.
Other fun games to play are "Bible, or Koran?" and "Latest new drug you should ask your doctor about, or Pokemon?"
Ask your doctor about Charidizard today!
Typical prejudice. Criticize a book that you won't read, based on its cover.
I'm impressed by how many people already know everything, so never need to consider anything new.
The world sucks, doesn't it. At least your world sucks.
Do you think I won't consider reading "Weird" or do you think I should consider reading the Unabomber?
It's not the only book that's ever been written on this topic! I'm sure its arguments are novel but not the premise.
Pat Buchanan's book "Deconstructing America" is a rather good book in the part that identifies a lot of problems and many of his critiques of American society are spot-on.
Where I and Pat might disagree is on solutions, or Al Gore and the Unabomber for that matter.
To a rational person it would probably seem more likely that some issues are so readily identifiable and graspable that even Al Gore and a terrorist in a shack, or Pat Robertson and myself, are able to pinpoint what a number of them are, not that Al Gore and the Unabomber are the same person, but I don't know if being "rational" is a charaacteristic the bulk of Rush's listenership is regularly accused of.
If you do read WEIRD, we can talk about it.
It has a lot to say about what influences what people think, and even about what they see.
John Larkin seems to be a gullible twit. Whatever he knows comes from the first book he read on the subject, and he seems to choose them on the basis of how thoroughly and shamelessly it flatters the reader.
When people point out that he's got stuff wrong, he rejects the suggestion - which is to say he doesn't find it flattering - and suggests that everybody else has chosen to believe the wrong book, while rejecting his chosen bible as an unproven novelty.
When it comes to anthropogenic global warming, the tripe he chooses to believe was invented recently, with just one idea in mind.
By which he means that many people notice that John Larkin doesn't know what he is talking about, and call him on it.
It has failed one important test - John Larkin likes it.
It's one more big-picture chunk of social-philosophical theorising. If John Larkin likes it, he must find it flattering, which isn't a good start.
The genre as a whole doesn't offer anything worth reading, and this particular example of the species doesn't look promising. Publishers do churn out a lot of this kind of junk, and it has it's aficionado's, but so does "true romance".
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