Gregory Salmieri @GSalmieri

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.

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.

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.

@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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

I think the piece conveys that you think Mishma's views are very wrong and destructive. But what it doesn't convey that I think is also necessary when dealing with this sort of figure is the *concept* and *disgust* that is the proper reaction to the craven travisty he made of his life and death. That aesthetic reaction is part of what I think people who are starved for heroism and attracted to its pretenders need from those of us who are alert the actual heroism in the world (and literature). But we can talk about this sort of thing more off line and one-on-one. I'm really glad to see you making videos addressing these sorts of figures and issues.

Check out my new episode with @GSalmieri on free speech: elucidations.vercel.app/posts/episode-…

@kglightspire A contract that lets you use my property to do some things and not others isn’t a veto over what you can do. It’s my assertion of my right to control my property.

Amodei is right to stand his ground here. It’s a good time for people to (re-)read Ayn Rand’s “To Young Scientists” (in The Voice of Reason).

Anthropic @AnthropicAI

3 months ago

A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on our discussions with the Department of War. anthropic.com/news/statement…

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Traditional morality is bad and Marxism is just a variant of it. America and capitalism are based on a new, implicit morality, which Rand articulated. It’s a morality that honors reason and production and that respects the rights of producers to their products. It’s a morality according to which government exists to protect the rights of individuals. Anthropic is a company that’s produced a valuable product and which has the right to offer or withhold it from any customer, including the government, on whatever terms they judge best. Whatever moral failings they may have in other matters, Anthropic is being eminently when it asserts these rights in the face of an increasingly collectivist government which presumes to dictate the ends to which Anthropic’s achievements will be put.

@kglightspire Anthropic isn’t trying veto any military ops. The pentagon is trying to coerce it into changing the terms of its contract.

courses.aynrand.org/works/to-young…

Another moving post by my friend @PNikmand. open.substack.com/pub/outliving/…