Too late. We got there first.
Ayn Rand was a hateful, poisonous human being with a hateful, poisonous worldview. I have neither sympathy nor compassion for people who have no sympathy or compassion. Objectivism is an objective evil.
Did you read this whole thread? I think Blalron’s posts refute the above.
OK.
Just curious–which of Ayn’s books have you read?
He’s barely posted. It’s hard to say what advice he’s taking or rejecting. Mostly what you’ve done is made this thread about the abstract idea of personal responsibility instead of a place where people talk about concrete ways he can improve his situation.
:smack:
You’re right! I totally forgot to add “criminally boring author” to that list.
Well, if everyone else understands it, why don’t you lay it out, clearly and explicitly, as you’d explain to an eight-year-old. Because it seems to me that now you’re hinting that all along you meant only a hyperbolic point, not a literal one… and you’d prefer that we don’t examine too closely how long you defended the literal point.
Let me tell you why I’m obsessed with your lie: because you didn’t look for want ads and find “NO, repeat NO” such ads, but you said you did in a thread started by someone who is having real problems in an attempt to garner sympathy for yourself – sympathy you didn’t deserve because you were too clueless or too lazy to look for actual want ads. Now that this lie is exposed, you’re hoping to skate by without actually admitting anything explicitly by saying “everyone knows what I meant.”
Tell me about it. I couldn’t even get through the first couple chapters of Fountainhead before I gave up in exasperation and tossed the book away.
Since everyone but you understands that is not necessary. I’m sorry if you are either having a reading comprehension problem or are too stupid to get it. It puzzles me that you are still seeking some odd sort of “brownie point” with this. What a sad life you must lead to spend so much effort on attacking someone in an internet thread.
Nice backpedal there. Move the goalposts often in life? This thread started with “work” in the employment sense. If you meant it in the “life sense” you should have been explicit. Please take responsibility for your sloppy wording.
So tell us - how is that 401(k) doing? Not so well this year? Guess you should have made better stock decisions. Your fault if you lost money, right, and not the fault of mis-management in any company or on Wall Street, right?
Your home insurance - does it cover flooding? Most don’t. I have neighbors right now who are homeless and, despite homeowners insurance, ain’t getting jackshit because flooding isn’t covered and flooding is what destroyed everything they owned.
How good is your disability and health insurance, really? Does it cover in-home care? Kinda sucks if it doesn’t, and damn hard to work from a nursing home if you’re crippled up.
YOU miss two points here.
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The occurrences I listed are by and large NOT the victims fault. Your “I’ll accept whatever responsibility I have” is just an example of your overwhelming blame-the-victim mindset and the “(if any)” is a weak modifier at best. Your first assumption is ALWAYS the victim is at fault regardless of situation.
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After most of those occurrences, whether or not you’re responsible before or after, your life will never be the same. Never. You will, through no fault of your own, be at permanent disadvantage or at least decades-long.
You speak from a hubris that can only be born of relative wealth and your so far good luck.
I don’t have a lot of specific job hunting advice, but I have some general job application advice for anyone who’s interested.
When there are lots of applications, it ends up being a matter of “let’s find anything we can to toss applications to make this pile more manageable.” You have to try to keep that from happening to your application, and to any callbacks. I know some things simply aren’t under your control, so these won’t all be useful to everyone.
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Spell things right.
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Fill out everything. If you have a resume, don’t just mark on the application that the info is on the resume even if it is. That makes an extra step for the person looking over the application. Make everything as easy and clear as possible. Don’t leave things blank unless it’s absolutely imperative.
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Make sure the contact information is actually a way to contact you. If it’s not your home, make sure that anyone answering the phone knows what’s going on and won’t be a doofus if the workplace calls to set up an interview. There are few things more offputting than being annoyed when you’re trying to call to set up an interview.
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Improve your telephone manners. Don’t grunt or say “Yeah” or answer the phone with a “What” or otherwise act like a complete fucking moron on the phone. If it’s your own phone, try to be the person who answers and answer with a “Hello, this is <firstname>.” If someone else will be answering, school them on how to answer the damned phone. Be a professional even if the job is beneath you. (If I sound annoyed it’s because of too many conversations where it was like running a damned gauntlet just to get the applicant on the phone.) If you are calling the workplace, treat everyone with respect. Don’t grunt or mumble. Say please and thank you and hello. Say “Can I speak with X please?” Don’t say “X there?”
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In a related point, the person who is answering the phone might have more input into the hiring decision than you know. The person at the front desk might. Treat people pleasantly. Don’t wear too much cologne or perfume (none is best). Don’t gross people out. Don’t invade their space. Don’t touch them! Don’t tell them how close you live. Don’t tell them how often you’ve been past the location but never knew they were there. DON’T TOUCH THEM. Don’t bring your kids unless it is absolutely necessary that you do and even if it’s absolutely necessary, think again. Do not give complicated instructions for how someone should reach you. Brush your teeth. Don’t drink before going in. Use your indoor voice. If someone is planning on doing interviews that day, the person at the desk will let you know. Pushing that you have to be interviewed that day now now now now won’t impress anyone.
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Follow the instructions on the ad. If it says apply in person, don’t mail an application. If it says mail an application, don’t call.
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Before applying, in fact, don’t call unless you need to apply in person and using all of your wiles you are unable to find directions any other way. Don’t call just to ask about the job. Asking if it’s still available is fine, but calling and saying, “Tell me about the job opening” is not going to do anything for you. Having someone else call on your behalf is really really not going to do anything for you.
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Call after applying just once. Call after an interview just once unless you’re given reason to think there’s a specific reason to call again. When you apply in person, ask how long they maintain their applications for any newly opening positions. Ask if you should call if ever there’s a change or to remind them you’re still interested. At my workplace, we keep all applications for a year, and if you call after a couple of months to say you’re still interested, we’ll pop that application up to the front again. If you change phone numbers, etc. after applying we want to know.
I hope some of this is useful. I know a lot of it is plain sense, but you’d be amazed.
Riiight. Everyone but me gets it. And on a message board where everyone loves typing, you’d rather type four sentences explaining why you won’t lay it out explicitly than one sentence laying it out explicitly. Is that about the size of it?
A couple more:
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Apply even if you’re a little unqualified. Everyone who applies might be.
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The reason people get punted for being “overqualified” is the employer thinks that you’re not going to stick around for the long haul and hiring people is expensive as hell. For some jobs, downplaying the level of your accomplishments can be paradoxically effective. If you’re way overqualified for a set of jobs and you’re not getting callbacks, tweak your resume/application a little so you don’t sound quite so overqualified.
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But in a related issue, never lie on the application. Tweak. Don’t lie. Don’t ever say you did something when you didn’t. Don’t ever say you have education that you don’t. And my god, don’t say you don’t have a felony record if you do.
It’s like rain on your wedding day . . .
–the guy that Brromstick has spent so much effort attacking in an internet thread.
Because you seem to expect them to suffer and feel like slime for their problems as much as possible.
OP is trying to go to college to better his life amid the worst recession since the great depression and can’t find a job in this crappy economy. Meanwhile you go after him like a pitbull to a mailman’s leg wrapped in bacon about how it’s his fault and generally try to make him feel like a failure and slime for being in a shitty situation.
Not cool.
Rand Rover, for a long time I studied Objectivism. In fact, I was a visiting scholar (as much as that term means) at the Institute of Humane Studies in the US and the Institute of Economic Affairs in the UK, two libertarian think tanks. I discussed economics with Leonard Liggio, an old colleague of Ayn Rand. I presented a short paper on economic history at the IEA, a presentation attended by two officials who used to work with Margaret Thatcher.
But I walked away from Objectivism. And, honestly, people like you are the reason why. I believe that if libertarianism is to succeed its proponents need to present non-governmental solutions to problems. To tell the truth, the vast majority of libertarians and Objectivists I met didn’t have any of those solutions. But they were great at telling others how wrong their own ideas were, even if they didn’t have any of their own.
You are a great example of this. If you’d started from your first post by offering solutions rather than criticisms, that would have been helpful. Your late-to-the-ball attempts at defining your criticisms as “constructive” aren’t true. Telling someone they’re “lazy” isn’t constructive, it’s pejorative. Actually, I don’t need to tell you this, as you know this. To be honest, I get the sense that your whole life is based around convincing others, and yourself, that you are a successful, not-lazy person, by characterizing others as lazy. It’s a very successful way to beat bad self-esteem, attacking others. Ayn Rand did this herself, as Dr. Liggio admitted. She convinced herself she was successful by sniping at others’ failings (and by surrounding herself with young admirers, one of whom was the then-young Dr. Liggio). Of course, it hurts everyone around you, but hey! Other people don’t count in Objectivism, problem solved.
Objectivism is a dead-end road. Getting ahead at the expense of others is ultimately an empty goal: we reach the end of the race alone. You may well be a successful lawyer, Rand, but everybody here still thinks you’re an asshole, mainly because you act like one.
You mean it’s not possible to do both?
This thread was so nice at the beginning but then just really deteriorated quickly.
You are wrong. It’s that simple.
I don’t see any causality between Blalron’s later posts and the self-congratulatory berating you’ve been directing at him. In fact, the primary thing you jumped on him about was his complaining that the pavement-pounding was a PITA that he we pissed about the necessity for.
Note that he didn’t say he wasn’t going to do it. He just said he was pissed that he was going to have to do it. His not being pissed about it isn’t going to make it an objectively pleasant task. And, face it, you weren’t advising him to brighten up his attitude about it; you were rubbing his face in the point that having a PITA task in front of him was a circumstance that his own choices up to that point had put him into.
Blalron, hang in there buddy. You know what the actions are that you’re going to take, and you’ve got the inner resources to take them successfully. I know this because you’re a Doper.
Empowering people to solve their own problems is a solution, whether you like it or not.
I don’t necessarily disagree with this. As I said upthread, I like to get my RO on like everyone else in the Pit, and threads like this are my drug of choice.
Well, I don’t really care about the sense you get of me based on my posts in this thread or on the SDMB in general. I do realize that I’m really acerbic on the internet for some reason–the anonymity I guess just removes the normal filter I have when talking to real live people. But I don’t think my life is based around characterizing others as lazy–that’s absurd. This thread and the Acid Lamp thread are the only times the issue has come up lately that I can remember.
If I may similarly indulge in some internt psychoanalysis, I think you probably left Objectivism/libertarianism because you found religion in one form or another (e.g., Christianity, U.S. style liberalism, etc.). You basically got soft and think that people should be coddled instead of empowered.
Characterizing Objectivism as “getting ahead at the expense of others” is absurd, and confirms my diagnosis above. I realize that liberal douches think I’m an asshole, as I think they are empty-headed twats.