Rediscovering Van Creveld

But there is more to social justice and social justice convergence than simple feminization:

Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition. Other writers who have proposed their own versions of the Great Feminization thesis, such as Noah Carl or Bo Winegard and Cory Clark, who looked at feminization’s effects on academia, offer survey data showing sex differences in political values. One survey, for example, found that 71 percent of men said protecting free speech was more important than preserving a cohesive society, and 59 percent of women said the opposite.

The most relevant differences are not about individuals but about groups. In my experience, individuals are unique and you come across outliers who defy stereotypes every day, but groups of men and women display consistent differences. Which makes sense, if you think about it statistically. A random woman might be taller than a random man, but a group of ten random women is very unlikely to have an average height greater than that of a group of ten men. The larger the group of people, the more likely it is to conform to statistical averages.

Female group dynamics favor consensus and cooperation. Men order each other around, but women can only suggest and persuade. Any criticism or negative sentiment, if it absolutely must be expressed, needs to be buried in layers of compliments. The outcome of a discussion is less important than the fact that a discussion was held and everyone participated in it. The most important sex difference in group dynamics is attitude to conflict. In short, men wage conflict openly while women covertly undermine or ostracize their enemies…

he Great Feminization is truly unprecedented. Other civilizations have given women the vote, granted them property rights, or let them inherit the thrones of empires. No civilization in human history has ever experimented with letting women control so many vital institutions of our society, from political parties to universities to our largest businesses. Even where women do not hold the top spots, women set the tone in these organizations, such that a male CEO must operate within the limits set by his human resources VP. We assume that these institutions will continue to function under these completely novel circumstances. But what are our grounds for that assumption?

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

If the Great Feminization poses a threat to civilization, the question becomes whether there is anything we can do about it. The answer depends on why you think it occurred in the first place.

The author is entirely correct to be concerned about the consequences for every industry in which women become the majority, because all of those industries will cease to be able to perform their primary functions. We’ve already seen that, for example, in elementary education, where predominantly female teachers working under female principles and female-majority schoolboards cannot teach schoolchildren how to read, write, or do arithmetic.

As we are observing in real time, female-dominated politics are not compatible with civilization because women have different priorities and perspectives than those required for its construction and maintenance. A feminist society, if left unchecked to its own devices, will look very similar to the average African society before European contact. The episode of Survivor in which the two tribes were divided by the sexes is a very vivid example of this.

But the author is confusing the symptom for the disease. Women are more akin to the vector of the disease than the disease itself, as can be observed from the way in which men who are social justice warriors are every bit as incompetent and even more insane than the women are. The disease is ultimately spiritual and eventually ends in either societal collapse, pyramids dedicated to child sacrifice, or both.

The good news is that a) converged societies will inevitably fail, b) women’s commitment to feminism and social justice will vanish as soon as the government funding fails, and c) men stop supporting female influence over them.

This is a unique moment of history, and it is already observably coming to an end.

The lesson, as always, is this: women ruin everything.
—Bill Simmons

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On Facing Age

Even after a man’s fifty or sixty, he can still know happiness, even do useful work.
—Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi

As a man moving from middle age into old age, that’s certainly good to know. Personally, I’m hoping for eight more years of soccer and at least 23 more years of active writing. AI has been a real godsend with regards to the latter.

And apparently, I’m just hitting the peak of my mental powers now. So I should be able to produce one or two more original thoughts in the next few years.

Scientists in Australia say that overall mental functioning in the brain actually peaks between the ages of 55 and 60. People in this age range may be at their best for complex problem–solving tasks and high–ranking leadership roles in the workforce.

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Leave the Dead Where They Lie

Andrew Torba writes eloquently on the necessity of building new platforms and moving away from the dying old mainstream ones:

Let me start by being perfectly clear: you are not going to infiltrate the system and magically take over legacy institutions. This isn’t some Mission Impossible movie or Fight Club, it’s real life. Anyone who genuinely believes this is possible has clearly never set foot inside a real legacy institution. I am talking about the corporate boardrooms, the government agencies, the universities, and the mainstream media conglomerates. These are not blank slates or neutral grounds. They are highly sophisticated systems engineered over generations with one primary purpose: to perpetuate themselves and eliminate any threat to their established dogma.

These institutions possess a powerful immune system. It is a literal set of defensive mechanisms designed to identify and expel dissident thought. They have endless bureaucratic procedures that can bury any reform effort in red tape. They have human resources departments that function as ideological compliance units, enforcing a secular progressive creed. They have anonymous reporting hotlines that encourage coworkers to snitch on each other for wrongthink. There are layers upon layers of protection designed specifically to prevent what some would naively call a dissident coup.

If you enter one of these institutions, you face a binary choice with no middle ground. You will conform, or you will be annihilated. You will slowly, inevitably, become the very thing you claim to oppose. You will be pressured to attend mandatory training seminars that label your Christian faith as hate speech. You will be forced to sign loyalty oaths to ideologies that dismantle the natural family and deny biological reality. You will be expected to celebrate degeneracy and mock tradition. If you refuse to comply, you will be ostracized, investigated, and finally ejected. Your career will be terminated and your name will be blacklisted across the entire industry. This is not a theory. This is the lived experience of millions of our people who tried to make a stand from within.

Just look at these institutions themselves. Do we really want to encourage young people to spend the next thirty years living a lie so they can magically “capture” them at some distant point in the future? They are rotting husks. Hollowed out cathedrals of a dead century. They operate on pure inertia and a deep, desperate fear. They are managed by cowardly souls who long ago traded their convictions for a steady paycheck and a vague sense of prestige. They believe in nothing but their own self preservation. They can smell your dissent, your faith, your love for your people, and they will react like a body rejecting a transplanted organ.

The idea that you can simply lay low for thirty years, hide your true beliefs, and slowly rise through the ranks to take over this dying establishment is not a strategy. It is a fantasy. It is a voluntary life sentence in a spiritual prison. It is a plan to waste your one precious life chained to a corpse.

He’s absolutely right. Look how much effort, and how many tears, were wasted on Wikipedia and the biases of its 500 admins. If everyone who cried about Wikipedia’s falsehoods and slanders had simply become an editor on Infogalactic and edited the article they were crying about, Infogalactic would have far surpassed Wikipedia by now.

Because they are subversive by nature, SJWs are keenly sensitive to interlopers and heretics who have not entirely succumbed to convergence. They will never, ever, permit anyone who is not entirely infested by the mind-virus to come anywhere close to positions of power or influence, unlike naive conservatives who couldn’t wait to vote for a black man for president and get a little spring in their step when they can preen about the new female pastor at their church.

No one seeks their enemies’ approval and scorns their friends like a conservative.

In keeping with this theme of new platforms, I’m very pleased to be able to say that Arktoons will not only be continuing, but will even be undergoing a renovation of sorts, as we have a new dev taking responsibility for the maintainance and development of the platform who is already very experienced with it and is fully in sync with the needs of the creators.

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A Special Interview

This is a real treat! Big Serge interviews Dr. Sean McMeekin, the author of the excellent book STALIN’S WAR:

Big Serge: “One of the first things that stands out about your work is that you have found success writing about topics which are very familiar to people and have a large extant corpus of writing. World War One, the Russian Revolution, World War Two, and now a broad survey of Communism – these are all subjects with no shortage of literature, and yet you have consistently managed to write books that feel refreshing and new. In a sense, your books help “reset” how people understand these events, so for example Stalin’s War was very popular and was not perceived as just another World War Two book. Would you say that this is your explicit objective when you write, and more generally, how do you approach the challenge of writing about familiar subjects?”

Dr. McMeekin: “Yes, I think that is an important goal when I write. I have often been called a revisionist, and it is not usually meant as a compliment, but I don’t particularly mind the label. I have never understood the idea that a historian’s job is simply to reinforce or regurgitate, in slightly different form, our existing knowledge of major events. If there is nothing new to say, why write a book?

Of course, it is not easy to say something genuinely new about events such as the First World War, the Russian Revolution, or World War Two. The scholar in me would like to think that I have been able to do so owing to my discovery of new materials, especially in Russian and other archives less well-trodden by western historians until recently, and that is certainly part of it. But I think it is more important that I come to this material – and older material, too – with new questions, and often surprisingly obvious ones.

For example, in The Russian Origins of the First World War, I simply took up Fritz Fischer’s challenge, which for some reason had been forgotten after “Fischerites” (most of them less than careful readers of Fischer, apparently) took over the field. In the original 1961 edition of Griff nach der Weltmacht (Germany’s “Bid” or “Grab” for World Power, a title translated more blandly but descriptively into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), Fischer pointed out that he was able to subject German war aims to withering scrutiny because basically every German file (not destroyed in the wars) had been declassified and opened to historians owing to Germany’s abject defeat in 1945 – while pointing out that, if the secret French, British, and Russian files on 1914 were ever opened, a historian could do the same thing for one of the Entente Powers. I had already done a Fischer-esque history on German WWI strategy, especially Germany’s use of pan-Islam (The Berlin-Baghdad Express), inspired by a similar epigraph in an old edition of John Buchan’s wartime thriller Greenmantle – Buchan predicted that a historian would come along one day to tell the story “with ample documents,” joking that when this happened he would retire and “fall to reading Miss Austen in a hermitage.” So it was a logical progression to ask, if Fischer can do this for Germany’s war aims, why not Russia?

Both the interview and the book are highly recommended.

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Asymmetric Economic Warfare

Despite being more vulnerable to trade war pain due to its export surplus, China has adroitly managed to gain the upper hand in the economic conflict by taking advantage of the fact that semiconductors require input factors that are almost entirely under Chinese control.

Despite the show of progress and professed optimism for a potential de-escalation in the Madrid trade talks, the US wasted no time to launch a series of trade and tech sanctions against China immediately afterwards, just like it launched the sneak attack on Iran shortly after its 5th round nuclear talks with Tehran.

  • The US Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) tightened its chip ban on China, expanding the embargo to cover all semiconductor related software and equipment sales to China, in an effort to completely choke off China’s ability for chip production
  • Washington expanded its entity list (i.e. black list) to deny high end sales to businesses outside of China that have 50% or more Chinese ownership
  • It announced a plan to charge million-dollar port fees for any Chinese-operated shipping companies, Chinese-made ships, or non-Chinese shippers with Chinese-made ships in their fleet or on their order books, in an effort to undermine China’s shipping building industry
  • Washington also put a 721% tariff on Chinese clean energy products such as solar panels
  • It imposed 50% tariff on semi-finished copper products and copper-intensive goods (e.g., wiring, batteries) under Section 232, targeting China’s dominance in EV/tech supply chains
  • It ended de minimis exemption for low-value packages, hitting e-commerce from Chinese platforms such as Temu and Shein

Faced with the bad faith from the Trump regime, China retaliated swiftly with a suite of counter actions:

  • Beijing published its latest restrictions on rare earth products to deny any sales of China-sourced rare earth magnets, processing technology, and equipment to foreign military and semi-conductor industry
  • It revoked import license for US lumber and soybeans. China was the biggest buyer of US soybeans in the past and accounted for over 50% its export. But it has ordered no purchase in 2025
  • Beijing announced it would charge reciprocal port fees for any US-operated or US-owned shipping companies. China runs 7 out of the world’s top ten container ports and has by far the highest port calls. Though the US builds few ships and few large shipping companies are US operated, US pension funds and asset managers own large shares in some of the world’s top shipping companies like Maersk which are now subject to the port fees. This move directly targets US financial interests
  • China also tightened up export of lithium ion and graphite anode, critical for green transformation
  • It expanded the unreliable list (China’s answer to the entity list) to cover more US defense contractors, tech firms, and critical mineral companies. It also launched anti-trust investigation against Qualcomm, a large US chip manufacturer

The latest tit for tats strongly indicates China is ready to move up the escalation ladder in its confrontation with the US on trade and technology issues.

In particular, Beijing’s enhanced rare earth restrictions are expected to deal a massive blow to high tech and military production in the US and its vassals.

In its embargo of chip technology against China, the US utilized the Foreign Direct Product Rule (FDPR) to block chip export to China if non-US made chips use any American technology, software, or equipment somewhere along the supply chain.

In essence, the FDPR allows US to claim jurisdiction to any products US technology touches even if it is made overseas such as the case with TSMC and ASML. The rule gives the US extraterritorial reach.

With the new rare earth restrictions, China flips the logic back to the US. Beijing has announced any non-Chinese companies operating anywhere must obtain Beijing’s approval to export rare earth magnets or semiconductors if those products contain Chinese original rare earth, or if they are produced using Chinese rare earth technology, process or equipment.

Beijing is denying all rare earth products, technology, equipment, and technical support to foreign end users it doesn’t approve.

The Chinese economic strategists understand that in an economic war, pain flows downstream. The US thought it was in the driver’s seat – and indeed, I assumed much the same due to the fact that the US economy would benefit greatly from refraining from importing goods from China and onshoring its now-absent industrial manufacturing capabilities.

But the stranglehold China has upon the materials required for modern warmaking materials, particularly drones and semiconductors, means that the USA will have to choose between its ability to make war and its ability to maintain the global Clown World economy. And for the first time, it is not possible for Uncle Sam to choose guns and butter.

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Floating on the Sea of Retardery

An SG reader inadvertently discovers the raison d’etre of Stoic philosophy:

I have another 23 or so years left in my career. In reality I do not know if I can make it in my current positions. Being an accounting exec I see everything and it’s sickening. The vast majority of people serve Mammon from the top level employees down to the lowest level. The vast majority lie, cheat and steal with no remorse. They think nothing of doing things that hurt their coworkers to get an extra buck. When they aren’t doing that, they purposely allow people to make damaging mistakes so they can grandstand about it for 5 minutes and feel like they are scoring points.

I honestly don’t know how much longer I can take it. No one argues with me when I point these things out, but no one cares either, they do nothing and hope I shut up eventually, because they largely do the same things.

This is the sea of retardery that is the human condition. Balzac wrote an entire ouvre dedicated to precisely this endless series of bad decisions, shenanigans, and tomfoolery. There is little point in the reader trying to seek work elsewhere, because what is troubling him is not unique to his industry, but is absolutely normal human behavior.

This is why philosophers from the Roman Stoics to the Chinese sages have stressed the importance of not being affected by the behavior of others and refusing to let their antics disturb your equanimity.

I was just speaking with Spacebunny this morning about the distress of men and women working in the Swiss banking industry, who have belatedly realized that submitting to US pressure to give up everything that made banking in Switzerland desirable has unsurprisingly had very negative effects on their employment prospects. In just 15 years, the number of Swiss banks has fallen from 400 to 250, one of its two banking giants collapsed, and the only reason the other one still survives is because it was bailed out by the Swiss government.

All of this was predictable and predicted. Before the financial crisis of 2008, I told a VP at a Swiss bank that all of those things would absolutely and inevitably happen if they were dumb enough to submit to US pressure to change the practices that made them rich and the envy of the world. But I was not even a little bit surprised when the bankers did so, and did so in order to preserve their access to a market where they did nothing but lose tens of billions of dollars, because I would estimate that 95 percent of men and 99 percent of women are simply too retarded to be capable of understanding the inevitable consequences of their own decisions and behavior.

David Foster Wallace understood this. It’s probably one of the reasons he killed himself in his despair.

The so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.

So, too, did the Chinese of yore.

卸磨刀石殺驢

Unload the grindstone to kill the donkey.

This is the way most people and most organizations operate on a daily basis. They readily sacrifice their goals, their objectives, and their material long-term interests for what they perceive to be in their immediate interest, because they don’t realize that the latter necessitates the former.

And there is absolutely nothing that one can do about this behavioral tendency except accept it, as Confucius observed.

隨風搖曳的綠色蘆葦，比暴風雨中折斷的參天橡樹還要堅強

The green reed which bends in the wind is stronger than the mighty oak which breaks in a storm.

And if you will excuse me quoting myself:

The gift of sight becomes a curse when one can’t intervene.

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Why the Gazacaust Ended

Charles Johnson has a very different theory about the sudden end of the Israeli invasion of Gaza that revolves around the funding of the Trump coterie by Qatar:

The second Netanyahu tried to kill Hamas members in Qatar and thereby threatened Witkoff and Kushner family money — which is really Trump money — he was done. So you’re aware about what really caused the Gaza War to end. Netanyahu tried murdering Hamas in Qatar. That’s what it was — an attempted murder.

Qatari officials said if this behavior is allowed in our country, we are going to withdraw investments in the United States, including the money we have put behind your allies and your family.

President Trump said, “Woah, is there anything we can do to make this cool?” The Qataris said, “Yeah, we have a security guarantee. Let’s invoke it against Netanyahu.”

Trump made Netanyahu apologize to the Qataris and the Qataris rewarded America by announcing new investments in America, including an air base in Idaho.

I have no idea if any of this is real or relevant, as it’s entirely outside of my knowledge base, but the whole thing was definitely abrupt and weird. I certainly didn’t expect the ceasefire to hold, much less for Hamas to return the hostages and for the IDF to withdraw from Gaza. But, let’s face it, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising if the whole thing was about corruption and money rather than anything of ideological, strategic, spiritual, or historic import.

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