Dan Riehl’s post, Syria Attacked American Embassy, takes a second look at something he posted on last September.
If you haven’t read Steve Salerno’s book, SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, but you watch daytime TV, you should read it. Shawn Macomber interviews Steve Salerno, Self-Help Cries Out for Help
“We are each, to varying degrees,” you write, “victims of ‘second-hand self-help.'” Further: “You may think Dr. Phil is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or you may chortle at his braggadocio and his sagebrush sagacity. But almost no one worries about Dr. Phil.” How, exactly are we with neither subscription to Oprah’s magazine nor $7000 tickets to a Tony Robbins weekend caught in that web? Why should we fear Dr. Phil?
SS: Where to begin? Moral relativism, with its blurring and rationalization of good and evil, comes directly out of self-help’s concept of “personal truth” — that is, each of us is entitled to define his private reality, with all such realities enjoying equal stature. Self-help also gave us the self-esteem movement, and its idea that the very worst thing you can do is hurt someone’s feelings. This has been especially disastrous in schools, where the practical effect is to teach kids to pride themselves on second-rate performance; test scores clearly show this. Today’s entitlement culture had its genesis at the intersection of those two constructs: self-esteem and personal truth. The “diseasing of America,” too, can be traced to AA’s successful crusade to de-stigmatize alcoholism. That reasoning has since been expanded to cover myriad behaviors that once were regarded as character flaws. Further, since diseases are things you have to recover from, companies now find themselves in the curious position of committing a disproportionate amount of resources to their least productive workers. You don’t just summarily fire people anymore. You send them to rehab. The menu now includes paid programs for substance abuse, gambling, “anger management,” sexual addiction, etc. Then there’s the whole Culture of Blame and all of its documented ills. At the other end of the spectrum, “empowerment” dogma is inducing millions of Americans to abandon medical orthodoxy and instead “tap their inner healing energies.” Major medical centers now include mind-body regimens as part of the overall treatment for no better reason than patients increasingly are asking for it. So you have medical protocols driven not by validated research, but by consumer demand. What a terrifying notion! I could go on and on.
Via Maria, self-help yourself to a nap.
Also from Maria, Bert Preluski asks, Will Jimmy Carter please just go away? The problem is, every time Jimmy goes away he blesses the pseudo election of some tinpot dictator or another.
Scrappleface self-helped himself:
and also, Stuck Mojo:
Stuck Mojo reminds me of Iron Maiden, only with guts.
More on Stuck Mojo here. Here’s their official website.
If you love French movies, you’ll love Hezbollah, Mon Amour
