Gregory Salmieri

For months I’ve been contemplating the title “What to an Immigrant is This Fourth of July,” but didn’t think anyone could write an essay worthy of it. I mentioned it to @Philosophic_Ali, and he pulled it off: open.substack.com/pub/societaldy…

The SCOTUs can’t be a problem like that *on its own* and it wasn’t in reconstruction. If Congress wants to maintain a right that the courts are chipping away at, it has means it can take to start affirming the right, which at can and should take first, before any questions about whether the court is rogue should be raised. In the case of reconstruction, as I understand it, it was the whole federal government that decided to abandon the freedmen not only or primarily the Court.

@GSalmieri @Philosophic_Ali Makes complete sense, thanks for explaining. Last question: what if the congress improves, but SCOTUS starts chipping away at the reforms the same shameful way they destroyed the reconstruction? That shameful history is a big part of what worries me about a rouge Supreme Court.

Fixing the number wouldn’t be bad and it doesn’t matter that much what the number is. But rotating with term-limits such that we know how many would be nominate in a given term would be a disaster. And a bunch of new members added at once would be very bad unless we were at a point where the Court was unambiguously more anti-freedom than congress and the president. In any case, congress would be required to make any changes to the court, and if congress was good enough to make them, then they wouldn’t need to because congress could effect change by other means. And if we are talking about Constitutional changes, then the ones I’d favor have to do with limiting presidential power directly, not with the court.

@GSalmieri @Philosophic_Ali I'm actually much more sympathetic to this position. Perhaps term-limits isn't the right proposal (E.g. we could lower/redefine the constitutional bar for impeachment instead). But a constitutional amendment that raises and fixes the number at 13 sounds like a no-brainer.

I’m saying term-limiting the court wouldn’t fix any hole, and it would make the court much worse in all the essential ways it’s bad right now. The court, for all its problems, is better than the rest of the federal government. We can’t improve the government by making the court more like the other branches. We have to things that will improve the rest of the political system first. If they’re fixed, the court will improve over time. If they’re not, there’s no fix to the court that will help.

@Philosophic_Ali @GSalmieri So you're saying we shouldn't fix a hole in the constitution that authoritarians like Trump and FDR used to pressure the court because we *might* mess it up?

Yeah, I read that article. I don’t think the author doesn’t understand why the court isn’t any better or worse than it is now, and so he has proposed an amendment that would make it a lot worse. If was were known how many court picks a given president would get, the picks would get advertised in advance and become part of ticket, making them more narrowly partisan and worse.

@GSalmieri I think the question isn't whether tempering with the court system is good in principle, because it isn't. But once a court has destroyed its own legitimacy through arbitrary and immoral-enough decisions, overhauling it would be necessary for the country. theunpopulist.net/p/the-unfortun…

@PNikmand No. *All* the justices are *part* illiberal partisan hack. And the same applies to all the people who will be nominated by any other administration to replace or augment them. The solution isn’t just changing the personnel.

@GSalmieri I sympathize with this position. However, I think if done right it would be a boon for the country: 1. Half the justices are illiberal partisan hacks, and will throttle the post-trump reconstruction the same way SCOTUS throttled the original reconstruction...

You’re kidding yourself. The Republican president dined with Fuentes. Until the GOP is ready to disown Trump, it has no resistance at all to any form of nihilism (anti-semitism included). The best it can do is semi-isolate some of its more respectable members from the worst of it.

Part of the reason many Jewish Democrats aren't especially concerned about the antisemitism festering within their party's ranks is that they hold a similarly hostile view of both traditional Judaism and the Jewish state. A lot of these folks will not even have children or grandchildren who are themselves Jewish. For many of these voters, progressive universalism is simply more important than most of what particularist Judaism offers. In the more faith- and nationalism-friendly Republican Party, by contrast, to the extent an antisemitism problem is beginning to rear its head, the antibodies for fighting it are much stronger. Nick Fuentes has no defenders among members of Congress. Candace Owens is persona non grata among GOP leaders. Tucker Carlson has been directly and repeatedly condemned by the president. While Democrats hit the campaign trail with Hasan Piker, Republicans near-uniformly disavow right-coded antisemites.

The answer is because “we”—i.e., the people running the country and especially the people pushing the anti-immigration narrative—hate, resent, and fear motivated, ambitious, and hardworking people. That’s always been the reason for anti-immigration movements in American history. The other reasons offered (all of which involve problems that are either imaginary or easily solved in times of high immigration) are just fig-leafs for hatred of competence and freedom.

I understand why we don’t want people to come to the US to be criminals, mooch on welfare, open learing centers and otherwise undermine the country. But I don’t understand why we make it harder for motivated, ambitious, hardworking people to come to the land of opportunity.

In other words you don’t think your fellow Americans are good enough to compete with people born elsewhere and so you want to use the state to muscle out the competition and compel businesses to pay current Americans salaries they can’t earn. Anti-immigration sentiment has ever been about making the country great. It’s always been the voice of envious mediocrities who imagine that having been descended from Americans should simply confer the country’s greatness on them, without their having to earn it as their ancestors did.

We don't need allotments either. We NEED to MAGA, not MIGA. There's all the talent in the world already in America. People like you would rather cheat and hire outside the country than to invest into Americans. No American that understands what's going on here will be in support of migration. We never were to begin with. Migration has always been a rich man's way to cheat his labor force. Time to do better.

I'm looking forward to this new course by @Philosophic_Ali: learn.aynrand.org/courses/the-re…. I've been discussing this topic with him on and off for years, and he has a lot new to say on it, and a lot of insight generally into how to think philosophically about history.

Fantastic video from Nikos. "A plague on both your houses" is right. youtube.com/watch?v=q5XaN1…

@mbateman Common denominator: your willingness to tolerate some risk to elevate the human porential.

Things i get ratio’d for here: * liking immigrants * thinking social media is good actually * small children on big ladders

@mbateman @shlevy @ScarletAstrorum But he does think that having young kids play with well designed math materials will prime the best of them to later get turned on numbers when they reach the right age.

@ScarletAstrorum Plato thought good pedagogy was falling in love with boys so you could fall in love with the number 27 so you would never fall in love with anything on earth again

Plato was the original Montessori (in expressing the idea that virtue in children is best cultivated in a designed environment that is beautiful and that balances cognitive and physical pursuits)

@stevenschub Yeah, but the transition is misleading in an interesting way. See my footnote to it in the “Man’s Life” article.

"It is by the real that we exist, it is by the ideal that we live... To live, is to know what one is worth, what one can do and should do. Life is conscience." -Victor Hugo h/t @GSalmieri

I’m not sure which of my books you have, but you’re not actually engaging with any of the points I make in any of them. No matter, I think we’ve each given one another any anyone reading along a sense of how we view the world and what we regard as noble and contemptible. Anyone who cares to explore either vision further knows where to look.

@GSalmieri @Nikos_17 I actually own your book. The essence of real masculinity, or heroism (I, much like the Greeks, treat both concepts interchangeably), is self-overcoming.

Out, as promised. Yukio Mishima vs Ayn Rand: which way, heroic man (and woman)? youtu.be/_gEcFTF9zkY

I’ve written a great deal elsewhere on the nature of Rand’s ideal, how it’s unlike utility, etc. If you cared about any of that you could easily find and address it. But your comments on my posts aren’t about actual arguments, so there’s no point responding as though they were. They’re about you puffing yourself up and pretending there something manly about the idea that something can’t be great if it involves earning a living and represents a profound break with the ideals of antiquity. But real manliness includes the courage to think for oneself, to conceive of new values, and to achieve them in reality. It’s not about aping bronze age kings or Shinto-nostalgic losers (however appealing you may find their physiques).

@GSalmieri @Nikos_17 Ah yes, no substantive criticism. Instead bizarre speculation and personal attacks. How come that someone so devoid of any traditional masculine features even dares to call Mishima a coward? Maybe you must think him a coward for the sake of your own peace of mind.

You tremble at the sight of a heroism to which you dare not aspire, and so you cling to partial, distorted images of greatness from mankind’s prolonged infancy—images that, because they are more familiar, demand less and so feel more approachable to feeble souls. In the same way, you cling to threadbare doctrines that evade the existence of creative work by which spirit reshapes matter, doctrines that smear this work as last-man-like servility to bodily needs and that pretend that true nobility consists in slavish obedience to a code of conquest and sacrifice that kept mankind imprisoned by these needs for most of its history. There’s nothing bold or radical about nostalgia for a brutish past. And it’s not made intellectually respectable (in the eyes of those who think for themselves) by incanting the jargon of your favorite writers. Such posturing by the pseudonymous boys of the aesthetic right shows how deaf you all are to the strands of genuine greatness in the ancient heroes whom you imagine yourself to admire. But it’s not real admiration; it’s a front for insecurity and resentment.

@GSalmieri @Nikos_17 If one were to seriously entertain that perspective, one would have to dismiss all of human history except for the present. The reality, as both literature and serious philosophy attest, is the very opposite of your position. Modern man is alienated from his proper being.

Traditional conceptions of heroism come from a past when human beings knew very little of what we are capable of and so valorized very narrow forms of excellence that could be put in service of their protocol-human way of life.  Some of these types of excellence are admirable in the proper context, but they don’t represent the height of human possibility and they cease to be excellent at all when they’re used copes to evade the fact that living up to our highest potentiality requires so much more of us than any ancient warlord could have imagined.  Finding inspiration in Achilles’ story but not in Rearden’s is no sign of aesthetic sophistication or nobility. It’s evidence of an underdeveloped soul that’s unequal to the challenges and opportunities of the present. But Achilles story is at least inspiring in its context, and it can be fuel for a competent soul. This isn’t true of Mishima’s contemptible suicide. Indulging in the pretense that there’s anything beautiful about his death is shameful confession that one doesn’t know what it means to be a man.

@GSalmieri @Nikos_17 His conception of heroism is simply the tragic conception of heroism. He wades in Homer’s, Vergil’s or Goethe’s footsteps. Rand’s “heroism”, however, is so outlandish that it can’t even be subsumed by any conception of heroism in the Western literary tradition.