Apropos of nothing, one observation I’ve heard people who used to be involved in labour negotiations here in Iceland is “people with American brain worms don’t know how to negotiate with unions”
(Paraphrasing, since the original is always in Icelandic.)
This is noticable in that you can guess with reasonable certainty, which company is run by an executive trained in the US just by how badly they are handling union contract negotiations
This frequently becomes a problem for them because 98-9% of the working population in Iceland is union
Their big mistake is they always do something absolutely horrifying as a show of force which then backfires because in collective bargaining, the unity of the collective doing the bargaining and its support in broader society matters a lot.
“American brain worms” is a thing we talk about regularly among my friends and family here in Iceland. It’s become really noticable that people who go to study in the US come back with extremely strange ideas. Noticably anti-union, libertarian (by Icelandic standards), pro-violence in all sorts of context, etc (Iceland is a broadly pacifist country with no army). You don’t see the same massive indoctrination in people who go and study in other countries.
My dad just reminded me of what my granddad used to say about Fulbright scholarship students.
If you aren't familiar, the Fulbright program gives out grants to help non-US students come to the US to study.
My granddad (who worked for the US Navy as a translator and researcher for decades) used to call the program Halfbright, because all the students came back from the US half as bright as when they left.
Which suggests that this isn't a new phenomenon.
Ayn Rand and the NRA aren't a thing in Europe.
In fact, Rand is virtually unknown, and the NRA are mostly seen like a band of gun toting hillbillies with no brains.
