I thought that was a Stephenie Meyer/Ryan Seacreast crossover.
I assumed you were referring to the “physically taxing” quote, in which case I was pointing out that it need not necessarily be unwillingness but inability.
Your “That sounds, in some instances, lazy to me,” is a dangerous sentence, even if it’s not technically a generalization. Hey, maybe you’re right, maybe there are 3 people in Alabama who really are just turning down work because they’re lazy. Sure, you’re technically correct.
But by focusing on them or intimating that lazy people make up any kind of a significant portion of the unemployed population, that then drives perception and, if that perception is in certain heads, public policy. Sure, there may be some lazy people. But should those lazy people permit us to then condemn the whole of the unemployed? Should we screw over honest people who want to work just because there may be a few grifters hiding among them? That’s what happens when all the focus is on rooting out the lazy people.
Instead of saying “In some instances, it looks like laziness,” why not acknowledge the opposite? “In most instances, it looks like decent people are having trouble finding work they’re suited for.”
And I have met exactly one such person, ten years ago.
So-called “libertarians” and “Objectivists” are a vanishingly small group. Usually the label is used to avoid seriously engaging with any objection to a socialistic policy, e.g. this chain of logic:
A: “I object to the individual mandate portion of the Obama health care plan”
B: “Oh, you object to all government involvement in health care? You must be one of those libertarians who wants to privatize the roads. I’ll give you a five-minute argument as to why privatizing the roads is a bad idea. I have now proven that the Obama health care plan is good.”
As we can see by the laughable notion that the Tea Party, a group which is entirely Christian and mostly concerned with yelling racial slurs at the President, is made up of “Randroids,” when Ayn Rand is well-known for being an atheist and, for all her flaws, really can’t be accused of being a racist, this thread is itself an example of the above fallacy. Right-wingers have all manner of conspiracy theories, seeing gay Muslim Mexicans behind everything they don’t like. The left-wing equivalent is this notion that “libertarians” or “Randroids” are some sort of massive force that is out there secretly controlling everyone to the right of Stalin.
This.
The free market argument seems to be just great when it comes to paying CEO’s or charging exorbitant amounts for necessary drugs… but not when it comes to paying salaries.
Really? Most of the Tea-Baggers I’ve met were drunken frat boys.
Same difference I guess.
No, the right-wing equivalent is that everyone is a Socialist or Communist. Now, there are more actual libertarians and Randroids amongst high-ranking GOPers than there are Socialists amongst democrats, but I wouldn’t quibble too much at the equivalency.
(Also, there are way more raves against so-called socialists than there are against libertarians or Randroids.)
I love that quote. Fairly accurate.
PS Did Condescending Robot just complain about straw men by letting loose a giant straw man in his post? Terms might be wrong, but the post’s idiocy remains.
So it would not be accurate to call him her idol, then, would it? Not without a lot of qualification.
Only if you know nothing about Nietzsche’s philosophy. Nietzsche was, at heart, an existentialist. That’s anathema to Objectivism.
Other than the fact that Rand wanted to call her theories Existentialism, but the name was already taken (I can find a direct quote from her on that, if you’d like).
Well, yes. I have done Farm labor, and for free (my relatives own a farm in Canada, and I was sent there many summers to “help out”, and then I also worked with the farm laborers here in CA for social issues). I admit that I thank the gods that I have a college education and thus a easy desk job instead of field labor.
BUT- just like doing a 5K run, it’s not something you just jump into and do on Day 1. Any one not disabled can do it, after they get in shape a bit. In fact, it’s likely healthier than sitting on my fat ass all day.
Also, once you get good at it, and are willing to put in the work the pay is quite decent. The drawback is that the pay is only good during certain seasons, during other seasons there’s little or no work.
There ARE a few dudes that don’t want to work. About 1/3 of the homeless are that way by choice. But that means that only less than 1% of Americans are simply unwilling to work.
Budget Player Cadet- great quote, thanks!
What is the actual pay. I tried to get through the Arkansas jobs site the article mentioned, but it wouldn’t let me see the actual job listings.
Here in FL I see a fair number of migrant farm workers around town, and they certainly don’t look like they’re making good money, but maybe thats due to sending it back to their hometowns or something.
In one of the articles I read the farmer was complaining that American’s wouldn’t work hard enough - they wouldn’t put in the long hours, demanded breaks for water and bathroom…
I may know why we have bacteria in our food… workers have to crap in the fields. Sounds like there may be some working conditions issues.
In CA a fast worker can earn about $1000 a week. Mind you, that’s for about a 10 hour day and very hard work. At least in CA the weather is pretty nice most of the time. But yes, you’re right many send a high % of their pay back home. In fact that’s mostly why they are doing it. I also need to again point out, that you’re lucky if you get FT work like that half the year. The rest of the time it’s hanging around the local hardware store, hoping for some day work.
http://ucanr.org/repository/cao/landingpage.cfm?article=ca.v050n06p5&fulltext=yes
I’m not a Rand apologist and I haven’t read any of her books in years, but I thought the bad guys were the people making money without any discernable skills and then asking the government to bail them out when their mismanagement caused the shit to hit the fan.
Sounds like there was a Twilght of the Idols.
There are plenty of ‘bad guys/gals’ to go around. If engaged in conversation well enough (it’s not easy) almost every businessman, salesman, and financier that I’ve talked to has strong Objectivist leanings, whether they have read Rand and are aware of it, or not.
Unfortunately, not having read Rand in many cases, or having gotten it distorted, they remove from the philosophy it’s one saving grace - rational thought.
I’m so glad I read this. When I saw the title I thought it was about Rand Paul and hemmoroids.
Bri2k
Well, it kind of is. 
I’m in an almost unique middle position – to date, damn near no one agrees with me on this – but…
I detest Ayn Rand’s philosophical ideals. Objectivism is a puerile, useless, badly phrased jumble of inane ideas, nowhere near worthy of being called a “philosophy.” (It’d be like calling a train-wreck a form of “engineering.”)
But… I liked reading The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. I thought they were interesting books, full of flamboyant characters, doing and saying engaging things. The plot was a tad thin, but it was still good enough to keep my attention.
The chapter in Atlas Shrugged about the train going into the tunnel, killing everyone on board, was as good as any textbook example of how bad management leads to industrial accidents. The Chernobyl disaster might almost have been a re-enactment of that chapter!
The “rape scene” in The Fountainhead was a powerful example of moral conflicts. The fact that serious debates are still extant over where it was, or was not, a “rape” indicates that the scene found a crevice in our collective social moral tenets.
Even Atlas Shrugged’s 100-page speech, while a bit tedious, was readable. I entertained myself by annotating the logical errors and fallacies.
And the “alternate history” is a fun riddle. At what point did Atlas Shrugged’s timeline break from our own? There apparently was a WWII, but nuclear weapons weren’t used. The USSR seems to have taken over all of Europe. The U.S. Presidency is weak: no FDR. Congress is the strong central power, but still ineffective. It looks like a world without any of the strong leaders of the 1930s: no Hitler, Stalin, no Churchill or Roosevelt. But, as far as alternate history goes…why not?
Great literature? No… But good, solid, well-paced “thriller” novels – yeah!
I enjoyed the read. I read them originally as a youth, and honestly believed they were just science fiction books, with no more real moral content then Avatar. It was only later that I learned people took the books seriously. In fact, I can remember reading them and thinking of them as a cautionary tale (meaning, I thought the author actually meant the exact opposite of what she was writing).