Tag: philosophy

In over his head

Now, I generally enjoy reading both John Derbyshire and Zman, and I think they’re both intelligent iconoclasts, but every now and then I am surprised to discover how conceptually limited various would-be critics can be when they attempt to criticize me. They preen, they posture, and they pontificate even as they demonstrate that they neither understand me nor know whereof they speak. That may sound a little arrogant, but bear with me a moment and you’ll see what I mean.

The Zman mentioned this in his interesting summary of attending the Mencken Club:

John was first up and he used Vox Day’s 16-points blog post as the framework for his talk. He made the point that Vox is by no means the leader of the alt-right or the voice of it, but a representative sample that is useful for analyzing the movement. His comments about item number eight were laugh out loud funny, to the empirically minded. What John was doing was introducing the general ideas of the alt-right to a crowd that is not spending their evenings in the meme war. He did a good job presenting the broad strokes.

This is all very well, but it led to the following string of comments which revealed some unexpected conceptual limitations on the part of the Zman. His failure to grasp either the obvious linguistics involved or to understand the basic nature of science is, to put it mildly, surprising. I find myself wondering if these failures are a logical consequence of his atheistic philosophical incoherence running headlong into its own conclusions, a kneejerk reaction to displeasure with something I have said, or simply an indication of his cognitive limitations.

Toddy+Cat
Personally, I’d be very interested to hear what John Derbyshire had to say about Vox’s point number eight. Derbyshire is great intellect, a fantastic writer, and has enough moral courage for several men, but he (like all of us) is a product of his Time, and sometimes has way too much respect for “science” and the “scientific community”. He sometimes does not seem to realize just how politicized “science” has become in our day. As much as both he and I might regret it, this ain’t 1955.

thezman
He comically analyzed the possible entomology of the words, “scientodific” and “scientody”. He also pointed out the absurdity of the claim that scientific conclusions are liable to future revision. For instance, Mars is closer to the sun than Jupiter, a conclusion of science that will never be liable to revision. John correctly pointed out that number eight is gibberish.

I’ve written a little about this topic. I’ll be revisiting it frequently. I think there may even be a book in it, if I can manage to squeeze more than 24 hours from each day. Suffice it to say that I don’t think science and technology can be jammed into the moral philosophy of the 17th and 18th century. Therefore, we wither kill all the scientists or create a new moral philosophy.

Heywood
Mars is closer to the sun than Jupiter… Anyway, that’s a stupid argument. While facts may be immutable – for a time, which may be long, like in the case above – our interpretations in the form of theories are always placeholders. Good till something better comes along, which, btw, must have the same predicative power as the old theory had where it was applicable, while extending the range of predictability. See classic Newtonian mechanics vs. theory of relativity. And as it happens, neither addresses Vox’s point of all so many modern “scientists” who employ the trappings and outer forms of science while gleefully ignoring everything that makes it actually useful. Nothing of this strikes me as overly difficult to either comprehend or establish, given the state of sciences today.

thezman
I’ve heard every iteration of factual nihilism and I have no interest in taking it seriously. It’s just another way of putting the goal posts on roller skates.

Man of the West
Zman said: “He also pointed out the absurdity of the claim that scientific conclusions are liable to future revision” I am assuming and hoping that what John meant is that SOME scientific conclusions are not open to revision, as his example — though questionable as science — shows. Because if not, and if the above statement is what he actually meant, then it is foolishness of a high order given the provisional nature of science and the fact that we know that there are unknown errors in scientific conclusions (as the replication crisis is presently showing us) that may be discovered at a later time.

Of course, John may have a unique definition of ‘science’ or of the word ‘conclusions’ which gives him some wiggle room, but then he is just playing semantic games.

thezman
Think of it this way. There is a set of things that have to be true or nothing is true. There is a set of things that are most likely true, but have yet to be conclusively proven. There are a set of things that may be true, but there’s either no way to test them or the efforts to prove them have fallen short. Finally, there is the set of things that are unknown.

Scientific conclusions are the first set. The second and third sets are open to revision and challenge. It’s not a matter of semantics. It is about definitions. People tend not to grasp the definitions of science, because the have had little exposure to math or science.

Byzantine_General
Your first category encompasses logic and mathematics. Your second includes theories of gravitation, where Einstein’s superceded Newton’s. But your words seem to place today’s scientific “conclusions” in the first category, rather than the second. Can you explain without casting nasturtiums?

“Factual nihilism”. Hmph.

thezman
I wrote, “Scientific conclusions are the first set.” That seems to cover it. Science, like mathematics, is about the accumulation of axioms, things that are assumed to be true by their nature. Put another way, if everything is open to revision, there is no truth.

Byzantine_General
I am gobsmacked, and I say this lovingly, by your wrong-headedness.

Science deals in theories, not conclusions. Theories are always contingent; we strenuously fail to falsify them, accumulate partial belief in them, build on and with them, but can never reach axiomatic mathematical certainty.

Not long ago, the best available theory was that neutrinos had zero mass. It could have been loosely said that science had concluded that this was the case. But the progress of science demands that it does not make conclusions.

A pesky observation (that the wrong kind of neutrinos were arriving on Earth from the Sun) forced that theory to be abandoned. A better theory accounted for the observation (and all previous observations), and entailed a non-zero mass. This is a perfect example of scientific progress.

Axioms are not subject to abandonment. Had the zero mass of the neutrino been treated as an axiom, we would have been forced to reject the observation and the better theory, because the contradiction of an axiom is automatically false.

Karl Popper’s criterion for deciding whether a theory is scientific is whether it could by some conceivable observation be falsified. Theories that can withstand any contrary evidence are called “religions”.

thezman
Karl Popper was wrong. If everything can be falsified, then there is no truth. That’s nihilism.

This is one of those moments when you suddenly realize that someone simply isn’t as intelligent as you had previously thought they were. One does not need to be a Popperian to recognize the obvious fact that many, if not most, scientific conclusions are intrinsically provisional, if not based entirely on false foundations. The Zman is making a common error in confusing the scientific method with a means of determining absolute truth; scientody is actually nothing more than a tool for determining what is not true from a material perspective and therefore can only ever be a means of narrowing the possible scope of the truth of things that remain firmly within the temporally accessible aspects of the material realm.

History, for example, is a matter of firmly established fact, and yet remains largely outside the realm of science and its conclusions.

In claiming that a correct understanding of science is nihilism, he confuses the subset of observable facts with the much larger set of scientific conclusions. And in asserting that science is about the accumulation of axioms with the alternative being nihilism. he demonstrates that he understands neither science nor mathematics nor the philosophy of science. Or, for that matter, nihilism.

Speaking of etymology, it seems we’re going to need to coin a new term for this sort of high midwittery.

UPDATE: I don’t think the Zman properly grasped what John Derbyshire was saying at all. But I will post my response to Derb’s comments in a separate post.

UPDATE: Yeah, he’s just not very bright. He didn’t even hesitate to double down in response to this post.

Much more is known now about the natural world, than was known fifty years ago, and much more was known then than in 1580. So there has been a great accumulation or growth of knowledge in the last four hundred years.

This is an extremely well-known fact. Let’s call this (A). A person, who did not know (A), would be uncommonly ignorant. To assert that all scientific conclusions are open to revision, as Vox Day has done, is to deny the existence of (A). I see he is now pushing around the goal post on wheels to try and obscure the fact he made a ridiculous statement, but that changes nothing.

Liberalism: the dying faith

Pat Buchanan rightly observes that Europe is awakening to fact that liberalism is a societally suicidal lie:

Asked to name the defining attributes of the America we wish to become, many liberals would answer that we must realize our manifest destiny since 1776, by becoming more equal, more diverse and more democratic — and the model for mankind’s future.

Equality, diversity, democracy — this is the holy trinity of the post-Christian secular state at whose altars Liberal Man worships.

To traditionalist Europeans, our heaven looks like their hell.

But the congregation worshiping these gods is shrinking. And even Europe seems to be rejecting what America has on offer… Europe is rejecting, resisting, recoiling from “diversity,” the multiracial, multicultural, multiethnic and multilingual future that, say U.S. elites, is America’s preordained mission to bring about for all mankind.

This is the dilemma facing conservatives now. For sixty years, their tango with liberals was a simple matter of saying “yes, but not so fast”. Now, like the liberals, they are being forced to confront the ugly reality that the end game of their ideology is the end of their society and their civilization. Not only has conservatism conserved nothing, it has aided and abetted the destruction of that which it purported to be defending.

Losing is good for you

Ed Latimore explains why losing can be beneficial, even losing in a public and humiliating manner:

Despite my obnoxious posting about my fight on Showtime this last weekend, I hope you had something better to do than watch. If you didn’t, then I’ll fill you in. I got stopped in the 1st round.

It’s heavyweight boxing. When you have two men over 200 lbs throwing hard shots, someone is bound to go down. My opponent (quite the affable fellow outside the ring), landed a great short right over my jab and the fight was short lived after that.

It’s a terrible way to lose. Worse, it was live for the whole world to see. It’s awful but it’s part of life. I move on and become better from it.

In many ways, I learned more from this 3 minutes (technically speaking, the referee called a stop to the contest sometime after the 2-minute mark) than I did from the rest of my 9-year career in boxing. Life is funny this way.

If you can look at things the right way, you learn more from failure than success. Jay-Z once said, “I will not lose for even in defeat, there’s a valuable lesson learned so that evens it up for me”.

Here are 8 valuable lessons I learned from losing on national television.

Embarrassment is the worst emotion to feel 

It’s miserable because there’s no real way to confront or conquer it. You can face your fears. You can cheer yourself up if your sad. Embarrassment is just a burden you bear until it heals. The one fortunate thing about embarrassment is that like all other negative emotions, it is extremely susceptible to the power of gratitude.

These are the lessons that gammas never learn, because their fear of failure and the humiliation they wrongly believe it necessarily entails precludes them from putting themselves at risk of failure. They don’t understand that the lessons one learns from losing not only makes success more likely in the future, but that there is no shame whatsoever in a defeat in which one genuinely did one’s best and was simply overcome by a superior opponent.

The most ferociously competitive team with which I was ever associated was the kid’s soccer team I coached about ten years ago. Their first year, they lost every game, and usually badly. As a result, they developed a total immunity to any fear of losing, and, much to the confusion of the other teams, would celebrate every rare goal as if they had won the game. Two years later, they upset the provincial champions who were affiliated with the main professional club in the region by beating them in the championship games of both of the major tournaments. The next year, they went undefeated, won both tournaments again, and this time, only allowed a handful of goals the entire season.

They weren’t particularly big or particularly skilled, but the combination of their intensity and their total lack of fear was intimidating, even to the parents watching them. “They are wolves with a taste for blood,” one opposing coach memorably said, shaking his head, after a game in which I put our leading scorer into goal to prevent him from running up the score, started talking to one player’s father, then looked up to see the kid bringing the ball up past midfield to send a perfect cross to a teammate for another goal. The kid was so goal-hungry that I practically had to tie the kid to the bench to keep him from putting the ball in the net.

And it was their season of “humiliating failure”, all those 13-1 and 10-0 losses, that forged them into an extraordinarily successful team.

Read the rest there.

The morality of immigration

Correcting the common confusion of Churchian dogma with actual Christian philosophy:

In looking at the debate over immigration, it is almost automatically assumed that the Church’s position is one of unconditional charity toward those who enter the nation, legally or illegally.

However, is this the case? What does the Bible say about immigration? What do Church doctors and theologians say? Above all, what does the greatest of doctors, Saint Thomas Aquinas, say about immigration? Does his opinion offer some insights to the burning issues now shaking the nation and blurring the national borders?

Immigration is a modern problem and so some might think that the medieval Saint Thomas would have no opinion about the problem. And yet, he does. One has only to look in his masterpiece, the Summa Theologica, in the first part of the second part, question 105, article 3 (I-II, Q. 105, Art. 3). There one finds his analysis based on biblical insights that can add to the national debate. They are entirely applicable to the present.

Saint Thomas: “Man’s relations with foreigners are twofold: peaceful, and hostile: and in directing both kinds of relation the Law contained suitable precepts.”

Commentary: In making this affirmation, Saint Thomas affirms that not all immigrants are equal. Every nation has the right to decide which immigrants are beneficial, that is, “peaceful,” to the common good. As a matter of self-defense, the State can reject those criminal elements, traitors, enemies and others who it deems harmful or “hostile” to its citizens.

The second thing he affirms is that the manner of dealing with immigration is determined by law in the cases of both beneficial and “hostile” immigration. The State has the right and duty to apply its law.

Saint Thomas: “For the Jews were offered three opportunities of peaceful relations with foreigners. First, when foreigners passed through their land as travelers. Secondly, when they came to dwell in their land as newcomers. And in both these respects the Law made kind provision in its precepts: for it is written (Exodus 22:21): ’Thou shalt not molest a stranger [advenam]’; and again (Exodus 22:9): ’Thou shalt not molest a stranger [peregrino].’”

Commentary: Here Saint Thomas acknowledges the fact that others will want to come to visit or even stay in the land for some time. Such foreigners deserved to be treated with charity, respect and courtesy, which is due to any human of good will. In these cases, the law can and should protect foreigners from being badly treated or molested.

Saint Thomas: “Thirdly, when any foreigners wished to be admitted entirely to their fellowship and mode of worship. With regard to these a certain order was observed. For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher says (Polit. iii, 1).”

Commentary: Saint Thomas recognizes that there will be those who will want to stay and become citizens of the lands they visit. However, he sets as the first condition for acceptance a desire to integrate fully into what would today be considered the culture and life of the nation.

A second condition is that the granting of citizenship would not be immediate. The integration process takes time. People need to adapt themselves to the nation. He quotes the philosopher Aristotle as saying this process was once deemed to take two or three generations. Saint Thomas himself does not give a time frame for this integration, but he does admit that it can take a long time.

It takes at least four generations, and even that is not enough when people have a strong tribal identity that supersedes their residence du jour. Regardless, the reasoning of Thomas Aquinas is a powerful rebuke to the Churchians appealing to false teachings in the name of Christ.

In remembrance

In remembrance of Jerry Eugene Pournelle

I have been asked today to say his eulogy. From the Greek, as he would tell us, meaning true words, spoken in praise of the dead. And as the eldest of his children, presumed by age to know the most about his life, that duty falls to me.

But how is it possible to write truth in praise of a master of fiction? How is it possible to eulogize a man who rose to public acclaim while I was mostly away? Away to school, away to the Army, away to university, away to build my own career?

I cannot say truth about the personality—the public figure, known far better to many of you here than to me. I can only do my best to say truth about the person; about the man. About what I know to be true about the son, the husband, the father, the grandfather—and the loyalist of friends, to those fortunate to know him as a friend.

I begin with what we all know of him: his insatiable intellectual appetite. His breadth of subject was literally encyclopedic: as a child, alone on the farm, his parents away working, he entertained himself by reading the Britannica from A to Z. That reading foreshadowed an essential, but surprisingly inobvious, core trait of his character: iron discipline. Not imposed on others, but imposed on himself. The chaos we all observed around him, immortalized in the household epithet “Chaos Manor,” was actually symptomatic: the result of him making everything—absolutely everything—secondary to being done.

He quite openly expressed this sense of discipline about his writing: writing, he often said, was work. It was not difficult: you merely sat in front of a typewriter until beads of blood popped out on your forehead. Yet he did it, time and again: dozens of novels and anthologies authored and co-authored—eight of them bestsellers. Hundreds of columns, delivered weekly, on time, over decades.

But both his joking aphorism and prodigious output belie the other disciplines that lay behind them. First, his disciplined reading. He read voraciously. He read everything, on every subject. His walls at home are literally lined with enough books to fill a small library—and those are only the ones he kept. Thousands more no doubt fill others’ shelves today, donated to book sales or simply given away. And that’s the books: the breadth of periodicals, online and in print, is staggering.

Read the rest at Chaos Manor.

I only met Jerry Pournelle once, in my early 20s, at a computer trade show, possibly Comdex. It was a brief encounter, I merely shook his hand, told him that I enjoyed his Byte column and was a big fan of his There Will Be War series. There is no chance he would have remembered it.

But he was, and is, one of my few intellectual heroes. Like Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Guy de Maupassant, and Umberto Eco, I encountered his works at a key nexus in my life and they left an impression on me that has lasted until this day.

Just create. Just do it.

Davis Aurini commends those who go out and create rather than sit around and complain:

Rather than trying to distribute the ideas – and handing them over to the Obsessives and Extremists who turn them into a farce – we need to own them.  We need to implement them.

We must go out there and create.

Roosh V took this theory, and put together a series of books which explained it’s application to his audience.  He wasn’t lecturing about theory – he was writing about practice.  He created something useful and marketable, a solid base which he owned.  This expanded into his forum, a community which has taken on a life of its own.  It is worth noting that the RVF exists for its own sake, not as a counter-reaction against an ideological opponent.  While feminists are frequently ridiculed on its pages, those who comprise the membership would be just as happy if there were no feminists to oppose.  RVF members don’t derive their identity from being anti-X – their identity comes from their individual accomplishments, and they frequent the forum for the sake of intellectual debate, entertainment, and networking.  Any political actions which derive from this shared identity will be as organic as the community-group that participates in local politics.

Another prominent example of the Red Pill in application is Vox Day’s various endeavours.  Of note are Castalia House and InfoGalactic.  Upon realizing that the publishing industry and Wikipedia had been taken over by far-left interest groups who eschewed objective truth and good fiction in favour of ideological nepotism, he didn’t go on a quest to ‘raise awareness’ of the problem; instead, he saw an opportunity for action.  While both of these projects are still finding their footing, by all accounts InfoGalactic is not only providing unbiased information, it’s providing it at a superior level to the equivalent articles on Wikipedia.   Castalia House, meanwhile, is free to pick up the talented authors who are being ignored by the mainstream publishers due to their race or sex.

The truth is that the SJWs are creating more opportunities for us than we can reasonably pursue. The trick is to identify the institutional weakness and hit it hard. For example, one thing I’ve learned about the comic industry is that the artists are often not paid royalties, just a flat per-page rate. So, one thing we are going to do to ensure that we eventually secure the best talent over time is, in addition to the flat fee, pay royalties for an extended period of time on our comic book sales, just as we do on our regular book sales.

You can’t start at the top, but you can come up with a plan to get there eventually. The Castalia House team goes over every print book carefully; if you compare our earliest print editions to the latest ones, you can see that we’re continually trying to improve the product. Creation is a dynamic process, and so the more you focus on improvement, the more you will gradually improve, until one day people suddenly blink and say, “Hey, you know, that’s actually rather good.”

Ever notice that no one calls Castalia House my vanity publishing house any more? I never had to say one single word to convince people otherwise. We just keep working on improving our offerings, one ebook or print edition or audiobook at a time. (I’ve always said that we’ll know that Castalia, or Infogalactic, is truly successful when the SJWs start denying that I had anything to do with it.) There is no magic plan for success and no easy path. You simply have to choose your path and walk it as tirelessly as you can.

Speaking of Castalia House, it turns out that today is a dual-release day. THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES is now available on Amazon and Audible. Narrated by Jeremy Daw, our wonderful new narrator, it is 9 hours and 13 minutes of epic fantasy set in Selenoth. It includes “The Wardog’s Coin”, “Qalabi Dawn”, and “A Magic Broken” as well as the three stories from the ebook edition, “The Last Witchking”, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, and “Opera Vita Aeterna”.

The next Selenoth audiobook will be Summa Elvetica & Other Stories, which will also be narrated by Jeremy Daw.

Ideas must be sold

The Z-man observes that too many ideologues resist accepting the fact that their ideas have to be sold rather than simply accepted as holy writ from on high:

Good salesmen never lose sight of reality. That’s the problem with outsider political movements. They allow themselves to be trapped in narrow ideological ruts so any sales effort, that deviates in the slightest from dogma, results in civil war. The only pitchmen the ideologues accept are the guys waving around the severed hand, talking about how their product is great at cleaning blood stains. Any concession to public sensibilities is treated like heresy. The result is a self-ghettoization of the movement.

This has always been the problem with the libertarians. You can get a large audience in favor of limiting state regulation of commerce, but you are never getting a critical mass around the idea of abandoning paper money. You can talk people into loosening up marijuana laws, but no one is signing up for legal meth sales. That’s why the limit on libertarians is to have some of their language appropriated by Buckleyites. Otherwise, they are seen as a collection of eccentric weirdos.

That’s what’s happening with the alt-right and its fellow travelers. The core believers refuse to give in on basic tactics, like banning Nazi gear or minimizing the JQ stuff. The result is anyone that tries to soften the image is attacked as a traitor. That’s what you see with the Stormies. Anglin can’t accept even the token compromises at a site like Gab, so he goes to war with it. This ensures that his followers never stray from the ghetto that he has created for them. It also means potential recruits have a reason to ignore him.

This does not mean the alt-right is condemned to having fat guys in their tighty-whities, dancing around at their events. To avoid that fate, they need to produce leaders with the credibility to swat down guys like Anglin, when he gets out of control, but also aware of the fact that growing the movement means appealing to the general public. That means softening the pitch and making some compromises. They don’t have anyone capable of doing that at he moment, but they better find some.

He’s absolutely right. That’s why I reluctantly accepted the need to move into video despite the existence of Castalia House; I realized that we will never reach the non-literate majority through the medium of books. We have to speak their language and meet them on their ground. We need to accept that our preferences are irrelevant in this regard.

This is always difficult. The literate don’t want to deal with non-literate media. The dialectic-speakers don’t want to deal with rhetoric. The non-aggressive don’t want to deal with aggression. The socialists don’t want to deal with subjective value. The pagans don’t want to deal with the Christian roots of the West.

But regardless of who we are and what we desire, we have to take reality as it is, not as we wish it to be.

Leadership

This is how you do it. The first step is to understand that your success is not all about you and it never will be.

Lynch did everything right all day, starting with bringing his much less famous backup backs Jalen Richard and DeAndre Washington out on his flanks when he got the loudest ovation in years during pregame introductions. That decision was pure Lynch. When he told Richard and Washington he wanted them to take the field on either side of him, Richard said: “I was like, ‘They cool with this?’ Lynch said, ‘It doesn’t matter what they say. You boys are coming out with me.’ That just got me pumped from the get-go.”

The ideas, they percolate

An article on PJ media about a distressed young liberal woman who keeps finding out that the men to whom she is attracted turn out to be Trump voters.

No woman wants a man she can push around, walk all over, or beat in an arm-wrestling match. Politics be damned. That’s not how biology works. (Now, I realize I may be talking to biology deniers, but you asked “why can’t I stop?” and this is why. Biology.) Women are naturally attracted to alpha males and not that gamma guy in a onesie with fragile wrists. The left has emasculated their men to the point of putting them in dresses and sending them into the ladies’ room. It’s no wonder you need to shop outside your herd. Why the heck wouldn’t you?

The reality you’re facing is that your guys are the ones getting a wedgie and ours are the ones you want to go home with. I don’t blame you.

People often think that influence is somehow related to everyone knowing your name. That’s not influence. That’s fame.

On a related note, I’ve been hearing for the last week or two that the various kerfluffles with the two Andrews, Anglin and Torba, are “bad PR” and bad for my brand.

The objective measures:

  • Twitter followers declined from 33,000 to 32,800
  • Five Infogalactic Burn Unit members canceled their subscriptions. All five have already been replaced.
  • Daily average site traffic increased 5 percent
  • Daily average book sales increased 225 percent
  • 7 8 new Legal Legion of Evil volunteers.
It would appear there is a sound basis for the Fake Right theory that Mike Cernovich became a successful shekel-grubbing book salesman on the basis of metaphorically punching Clown Nazis. That wasn’t my intention, but if this is what “destroying my brand” looks like, I think I can live with it. Although perhaps the more apt term would be “thrive” on it.

By the way, there is going to be a BIG surprise awaiting the self-appointed experts on defamation presently expressing their legal theories on Gab. I have to admit, I was genuinely shocked myself to discover what is actually considered defamation per se in the relevant jurisdiction. I mean, there is not a single non-lawyer, on either side of the issue, who had a clear grasp of the actual legal situation at hand.

Mailvox: so just give up and die?

I have to confess, I find the defeatism of some of the critics of my advice to scratch and claw and stay occupied with genuine work to be more than a little mystifying.

Actually, I’ve been reading this whole comments section as well as the original post in fucking amazement, mouth agape.

For someone like VD who espouses this Lex Luthor type UHIQ evil genius his advice is comically out of date, but not surprising. When you run in rarified air feet usually not touching the ground this is not uncommon.

I know highly qualified people scratching out a living and just getting by who had this whole “keep your chin up, be strong, blah blah” mentality and it has been dragging on for half a decade or more in some cases.

Those days, quite frankly, are over. In the land of the eternal victim and the affirmative action hire your “just be busy and take any job” fantasy is about as relevant as thinking you are the most qualified candidate actually matters.

It is like these people are living in some odd alternate reality where they can -clearly- see the pozzing of the culture at large, but somehow think that in the job climate, there is still something resembling sanity, rationality, or logic.

Odd that… this is one of the worst articles I’ve ever seen here actually.

The thing is, in every single case, the individual criticizing the advice completely fails to suggest an alternative. Crime? Welfare? Suicide? More education? Kidnapping the relatives of HR executives?

I’m genuinely curious if they actually have anything to offer, or if my suspicions are correct and they are simply young, college-educated gammas who have no idea how to find or create a job. The fact that this particular gentleman is talking about “highly qualified people”, “most qualified candidate”, and “affirmative action hire” tends to indicate that he does not understand the distinction between corporate paper-pushing and actual work.

Look, we Generation Xers know what it is like to be prepared for one labor environment only to discover that all of one’s preparation has proven to be useless and misguided and generally inapplicable. The situation is what it is. So, what are you going to do about it? Cry, complain, and give up? Or make your own way?