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MadMonzer

Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.

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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
And Singapore executes an order of magnitude more, per capita, than the US. It is a stretch to call Singapore a democracy, but it is clearly part of "the free world" or "Western Civilisation" in a way which most dictatorships are not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But female popstars don't attract a straight male audience with the fanservice. Swifties and Arianators (who seem to be the biggest still-active popstars with that vibe) are overwhelmingly female - men aren't willing to pay that much money to see Taylor Swift gyrate in a bodysuit while singing chick-orientated music. (Male artists who use female backing singers and dancers as fanservice is a different proposition - that isn't going anywhere and the male fanbase like it).


Google AI says that the female solo artist with the largest male fanbase in absolute terms is Mariah Carey (who was as thirst-trappy by the standards of her day as Swift and Grande are now), but her fanbase is mostly female with queers over-represented - she's just big enough that the substantial minority of straight male fans is a big number.


Female soloists with male-skewed fanbases (again, per Google AI) include Joan Jett (and the Blackhearts), Stevie Nicks, Alanis Morisette, Pink, Hayley Williams (leads Paramore), and April Lavigne. Of those, only April Lavigne does sexy, and her sexy persona is much more gothy and less girl-next-door than the singers with female fanbases. (I also think there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians).


Whatever Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande doing with the minidresses and bodysuits, it is appealing to young women far more than it does to men. The Freudian analysis would be something on the lines of women wanting to be the centre of attention for their sexual desirability and therefore wanting the icons they vicariously live through to perform sexual desirability when they are the centre of attention. An interesting point about female popstars' slutty stage outfits I remember reading in a dentist's waiting room was that the outfits are designed like technical dancewear - and suggesting that part of what is going on is that "slop-creating female pop musicians" (great turn of phrase, @Botond173) see themselves as dancers (who were always more sexualised than singers).


The other point of comparison is women's athletic uniforms - where the only reason they aren't continuing to get skimpier is because they can't without an unacceptable risk of wardrobe malfunctions. It is very obvious that most (but not all) female athletes want people (probably other women at least as much as men) to look at their toned bodies. And this isn't just a chick thing - straight male bodybuilders are desperate for other men to look at their toned bodies.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Greater DC has an urban area population of 5.2 million vs 9.8 million for London and something similar for Paris (the French don't publish urban area population estimates). Metropolitan area population (defined by commuting patterns) is 6 million for DC, 13 million for Paris, and 15 million for London. And DC hosts a bigger, richer government and so has more government and government-adjacent jobs.


There just aren't the people to staff another industry in DC. The US is a big enough country that (apart from NYC, which does everything except government) its major cities are functionally specialised.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.


The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives.




We have now been referred to social services twice, both routine and in one case leading to a 15-minute home visit and a no-action letter, and in the other case to literally nothing at all. Plenty of mandatory reporters consider "Toddler with head injury of unclear origin" to be a mandatory report. It wouldn't surprise me if 30% of all kids get this kind of routine referral - and apart from the waste of CPS resources I don't see it as a problem.


The problem is where CPS see "free range 7-year old" as the kind of referral that needs more than a no-action letter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Which is about $1900 a month, and babies are more expensive than toddlers. Seems entirely consistent with the other numbers we are seeing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So the easy scam is to just put pretend kids in and unqualified staff in place with fake credentials if ever interrogated. No auditor will investigate on their own and the local vote boss just says ' I will take care of it'




Checking staff genuinely have the paper qualifications they are supposed to have is very easy and the government does in fact do it if it isn't deliberately tolerating fraud. Part of the problem with non-fraudulent daycare costs is that the IQ floor for getting the paper qualifications is higher than the IQ floor for keeping a 1-year-old alive, so a system which tries to pay the going rate for keeping a 1-year old alive can't hire staff with the legally-required paper qualifications.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The consequences for the pakistanis are miniscule




They got 10+ year jail terms, eventually. (The exceptions were minor players where the only crime they could prove was consensual-looking sex with a 13-16 year old, which normally gets 5 years in England). The rapists who were not British citizens (the vast majority were) have long since been deported.


The Pakistani rape gangs scandal that Musk and right-wing X poasters latched onto is about behaviour which was allowed to continue for far too long in the 1990-2008 period with minimal accountability for the political machines that protected the rapists, not behaviour that is tolerated in 2025.  I don't know what is going on between 2nd-generation Pakistanis and chavettes in 2025, but the race/immigration/crime story that right wing media in the UK are pushing nowadays is about crimes committed by more recent humanitarian-route immigrants.




So too will be the censure for the Somalians since the US is already a low punishment society that can barely punish the most easy criminals to indict,




The US is not a low punishment society. You are the most punitive society in the rich world for the criminals who are actually caught and punished - the only countries with a higher incarceration rate are Bukele's El Salvador and countries in the middle of severe political repression. (The US is also one of a small number of countries which still execute people, although not many). You guys are also perfectly capable of punishing black criminals roughly proportionally to the number of crimes they commit. The problem is that the US is a capricious punishment society with third-world quality policing and a somewhat random judicial system such that most criminals (and particularly white-collar criminals) go unpunished.  (We are still noticeably better off than you on this point in the UK, although moving in the wrong direction fast since the government decided that the criminal justice system would be shut down first as the welfare state for the old eats the economy).


But that isn't relevant here - the point in Minnesota, as in noughties Rotherham, is that the miscreants are protected by a powerful political machine. Tolerating this kind of thing was, and is, a choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There is a world apart between making rhetorically weak arguments and fabricating evidence whole cloth.




There is also a world apart between a zero on a single assignment which is 10% of a single course grade and firing a tenured academic in disgrace. Both would be the appropriate punishments in a sane academia for the respective crimes, but are enforced far too rarely.


In both cases, the argument being made is of the form "A fundamentally righteous but rarely-enforced rule was enforced against an obviously-guilty member of a protected group - and discrimination by selective enforcement is worse than the underlying crime" (and the scissor is "Given the history of malign discrimination and current underrepresentation, should conservatives in academia be a protected group?"). The structure is symmetric, even if the relative severity is not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Explicit meritocracy’s emphasis on grinding, explicit competition and credentialism does not seem to produce maximally good results.




I think this is key. As I see it, most successful societies historically either had open aristocracies (a small number of exceptionally able outsiders could get in, often by marrying into aristocratic families) or enarchies (my coinage based on the French ENA - the point is that you select down to an aristocracy-sized elite by a single high-stakes exam which is more heavily g-loaded than the modern American meritocratic grind).


"Being from an aristocratic family" is sufficiently g-loaded to select a plausible class of potential elites if the aristocracy is open and not inbred. In the alternative patronage system, so is "sufficiently interesting to attract a patron", providing that patrons actually have to patronise their proteges rather than just writing a note in exchange for a favour from the proteges father (see for example the role of patronage in the Royal Navy when it was the winningest organisation in human history).


I may do an efforpost later on the broader advantages of this approach.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
US Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg gave a somewhat surprising briefing in Brussels to the European press today. See the Official transcript and UK Grauniad coverage - the most comprehensive coverage in an English-language publication.


The quote that attracted most attention is in response to a question about EU AI regulation. Helberg says "I know that the National Security Strategy, the language around Europe and around civilizational erasure, drew a lot of attention in Europe.  What I’d like to highlight is that that language is a warning.  It’s not an insult.  And – because there is a growing sense of concern and alarm in the United States about the fact that Europe’s economic – relative economic decline as a share of the global GDP is a crisis." The Guardian's headline writer describes this as "doubling down" on the criticism of Europe in the published strategy, but the actual article correctly points out that Helberg is doing the opposite - he is walking it back. The published strategy is crystal clear that "civilisational erasure" the US wants to prevent is about cultural change driven by mass immigration, that the main threat to the Atlantic alliance is the possibility that major European countries will cease to be majority white*, and that concerns about economic policy are secondary.


The reason why I wanted to post about this is that this is the latest in a number of pieces of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the US has fallen into the common trap of running one foreign policy out of the White House and a different one out of the State Department. Rubio being both SecState and National Security Advisor should make this impossible, but Vance seems to have taken over the usual role of the NSA as the principal opponent of the State Department in intra-administration battles. A dual foreign policy seems to be the best way to make sense of why the Trump administration is trying to make nice to Putin (in order to end the Ukraine war) with one hand while bombing and invading his clients with the other.


Two things are unusual about the way the Trump national security strategy was published - neither my search-fu nor ChatGPT identifies who wrote it (this would normally be a relatively senior person working for the NSA, and they were unofficially identified with previous strategies), and it wasn't publicly launched by the NSA (i.e. Rubio) at a major press event. Apart from a linguist helpfully pointing out that (unlike the 28-point Ukraine peace plan), the national security strategy was not translated from Russian, the only name mentioned by the press is Vance, with multiple outlets comparing the discussion of Europe to Vance's Munich speech. Does all this suggest that Rubio as NSA was not responsible for the document? Helberg, of course, works for Rubio, and quietly but publicly said that the strategy does not mean the Vance-aligned things it says.   [Helberg is also, personally, a China hawk, and a major theme of his press briefing is that the main thing the US wants from Europe is for us to work with you on keeping China out of key supply chains].


In terms of the major foreign policy priorities of the Trump administration, Rubio is clearly in charge on Latin America - now apparently adding Paraviceroy of Venezuela to his increasing stack of hats. Vance has the unenviable job of going from TV station to TV station telling the ridiculously obvious lie that the ousting of Maduro was actually about drugs. (To anyone paying attention, including e.g. other corrupt Latin American leaders, the Hernandez pardon is a credible signal that it isn't). Whereas on Ukraine Rubio appears to be largely cut out, with diplomacy handled by people who work directly for Trump (Kellogg, Witkoff, and now Jared Kushner) and Vance conducting most of the open mouth operations.


If I had to sum up the difference between Team Rubio and Team Vance it would be that Team Rubio sees the number one threat as Chinese influence (and particularly Chinese influence in the Americas), Europe as a crappy ally that needs to stop freeloading, Russia as a committed Chinese ally, and defending Ukraine as a good idea in principle but a dubious use of US resources, whereas Team Vance sees the main threat as ideological, Europe as part of the woke enemy, Russia as a potential ally that needs to be brought in from the cold and offered a better alternative to their current arrangement with China, and the war in Ukraine as an obstacle to this. All factions seem to agree on Israel/Iran.


* The strategy says "majority non-European" but the meaning is clear in context.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Day 0 was executed successfully in Iraq and Afghanistan as well.


The US is very good at applying ordinance to targets. It is a lot worse at running countries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Your examples aren't "white guy fixed it" - they are either
"Local government is responsive to the kind of thing a basically functioning local government is responsive to if the requestor is a white English-speaker, but not if it is a brown Spanish-speaker" (unlikely in my view) or "Local government is basically functioning for everyone but recent immigrants from dysfunctional countries aren't aware that responsive local government is a thing" (seems like a racing certainty).


I don't see how expecting local government to be basically functional is a superpower that works in Venezuela. It wouldn't work in California either.


But given the demographics of blue-collar workers in metro Miami, I suspect the guy who actually fixed it on behalf of the relevant local government was Hispanic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Straight women can get physical affection from female friends without it being weird, whereas men can only get it from immediate family members or a sexual partner.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


That's a bit misleading. We are not seeing the same kind of increase as we did earlier, so we do definitely see relaxation. We are also quite definitely observing the rest of the population living under sunshine and rainbows.




Given that the level of imprisonment in El Salvador is not something where there is trustworthy data, I am not going to get into an argument about the second derivative.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


people's regard for the state of the law?




The state of the law varies by time and place. Crime in El Salvador shortly before Bukele was elected was an order of magnitude worse than it ever got in America. At some point (which the 2020s US has not reached, except in the deluded minds of a small number of San Francisco leftists) there are more people with a friend or relative unfairly imprisoned than there are crime victims. I think the US would hit that point if you locked up an additional 1% of the population Bukele-style - i.e. without explicitly targetting proven repeat offenders.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Luckily for everyone, once Bukele arrested all the duck-typed criminals, he relaxed and everyone now lives in sunshine and rainbows.




Is the relaxing part happening? My read of the data (which Bukele is trying to obfuscate) is that the prison population of El Salvador is continuing to increase even after the murder rate stabilised at a low level. If you want to lock up the most criminal-looking 5% of each cohort as they enter the peak crime-committing years, you either need to start letting them out in large numbers (which Bukele has promised not to do) or you end up with 5% of the population in prison, which is probably unsustainable.


The US didn't scale back mass incarceration because of soft-on-crime Democrats, they scaled it back because Republicans stopped wanting to pay taxes to pay for prisons once crime dropped in the noughties. Despite the calls for longer sentences on the populist right, there still seems to be a consensus within the MAGA movement that the Trump tariff revenue and DOGE savings should be used for tax cuts, not prison building.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you had real political parties rather than primaries then the parties would have an incentive to get the expertise they needed into the House by running the experts in safe districts.


If each subcommittee has 15 members (about the average for current House subcommittees) and each part-time Representative sits on two, then you could have about 1500 sub-committees - roughly one for each Senate-confirmed executive branch officer under the current system. So as long as the required expertise was there and there was a working system for getting less-controversial legislation that passed after a detailed markup in subcommittee through committee and to a quick yes/no vote of the whole House, you could indeed replace regulations with legislation.


I assume that members of the main committees would be full-time. I also suspect you would need some kind of Grand Committee of a few hundred senior full-time Representatives (probably the same ones that sit on the major committees) that could handle bills which are sufficiently important that you don't want to pass the text reported out of committee without further debate, in the same way that current legislatures allow for amendments to be proposed and voted on on the floor. I assume that Grand Committee members would get Washington offices and larger staffs, and that Grand Committee members plus a random selection of part-time Reps would get seats in the House Chamber for important ceremonial events.


In this model the work of a backbench part-time Representative has three components:


    

  • Constituent service.
    • 

  • Ensuring "their" Grand Committee member (what "their" means depends on how the Grand Committee is elected and how the party caucuses stitch up those elections) is aware of issues that particularly affect their district.
    • 

  • Legislative work in sub-committee.
    • 



Sub-committee chairs also need to spend a lot of time managing their subcommittee's business through the parent major committee - they might need to be full-time as well to do that job.


Full-time Representatives would have similar jobs to what they do now, except that their "constituents" would be the backbench members of their own party, rather than voters.


It feels like an experiment worth trying.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Every century would be essentially sovereign with respect to every individual who is a member, including up and down the hierarchy.




This doesn't make sense - the whole point of sovereignty is to solve the problems that can't be solved by freely-formed associations (like . In practice those problems tend to exist in physical space, so practical sovereignty is territorial. A century of people who don't live together can't provide policing, defense, roads, environmental regulations etc. and a century that net contributors can leave at any time can't provide social insurance unless there is some kind of shared bond that means that the other 99 members won't just leave if one gets expensively sick.


A similar system that functioned purely for allocating voting power (so there is still a single sovereign, but it is controlled by a vote of the nine meta-meta-meta-century representatives) is part of Eliezer Yudkowsky's sort-of-utopia dath ilan, and the general approach (which is a good idea and should probably be tried) is called liquid democracy


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would like to second the linked post about political parties (as understood in the rest of the democratic world) being illegal in the United States. This is something where Americans don't realise how weird their political system is - in most of the world, parties make their own rules for how they select candidates.


One of my not-widely-held views is that Duverger's law is not the main explanation for the US two-party system - other FPTP countries have fewer serious parties than PR countries, but they don't normally have exactly two (Canada, the UK, and India all have systems with two dominant parties but the smaller parties consistently get seats in Parliament and aren't going anywhere).* The big difference between the US and other FPTP countries is that in the US the easiest way for an outsider to run for President is to capture one of the existing party lines with an outsider primary campaign, whereas in other FPTP countries the easiest way is to set up a new party. Ballot access laws in the US are a relatively small part of the difference - the main one is that the primary system makes it easier for an outsider to skinsuit an existing political party.


If the US had a Commonwealth-style political system, the Republican party would have kicked Trump out - in the same way Kinnock kicked Militant out of Labour in the 1980's or the Tories kicked out their remaining pro-EU MPs between 2016 and 2019. He would have had to do what Farage did, and set up his own populist political party.


FWIW, I think that political parties which can police their own political boundaries are a good thing and skinsuit candidates are a bad thing. The American system appears to produce worse candidates than allowing party organisations to select candidates, and there is an obvious reason for this - if you are a professional politician or a serious activist, you are a lot more motivated to take electability and competence into account when voting in an internal party election (being in power is a lot more fun than being in opposition) than you would be as an armchair supporter. American primaries are either successfully managed by party insiders so they don't actually function as open primaries (the The Party Decides thesis), elect the candidate with the most cash and/or name recognition, or elect an ideologically pure candidate who is going to turn off the median voter.


* Any discussion of two-party systems gets confused by the period c. 1945-1980 where almost every democracy including Germany (PR) and Australia (AV) had something close to a two-party system because of the dominance of class-based politics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Normally, "sanctions" refers to laws a state makes which restrict its own citizens, residents, businesses etc. (including foreign-owned businesses operating on its territory) from doing business with the sanctioned country, and increasingly to laws which restrict its banks from financing (even indirectly) transactions to and from the sanctioned country. (And it is effectively impossible to transact in USD without a US bank being indirectly involved, which is why US sanctions even in the conventional sense have such a powerful extra-territorial effect). Enforcement of traditional sanctions, like enforcement of the vast majority of laws, is territorial. States enforce laws against activity taking place on their own territory - even if in this case the aim is to produce an extra-territorial effect. The US has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting US-based entities who trade with/finance sanctioned parties, and the EU has a long tradition of effectively enforcing sanctions by prosecuting EU-based entities likewise.




The ship was sanctioned (for Iranian connections, not Venezuelan) and thus subject to seizure.




The passive voice is obfuscating what happened here. The US declared the ship "sanctioned" despite the ship being entirely outside its jurisdiction. (The claim that it was sanctioned for Iranian connections is a distraction - the ship was seized because it was trading with Venezuela. The US does not generally seize ships on the high seas based on vague "Iranian connections", because you are not pirates).  The ship is "subject to seizure" as a matter of US law, because the US made a law which applies outside its territory. As a matter of international law, it probably isn't. (There are some technicalities here because most of the flags of convenience used by oil tanker operators are US client states - the situation where the US seizes a Liberian or Panamanian-flagged ship and the country of registration doesn't object is messy).


Regardless of legal technicalities, the policy here is seizing ships which export Venezuelan crude. That is the essence of a blockade. Is it an act of war? The Trump administration is deliberately blurring the distinction between peace and war here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The US is seizing tankers transporting Venezuelan oil in international waters close to Venezuela with neither the ship nor the cargo having any connection to the US. In plain English this isn't sanctions, it's a blockade. The US carefully avoids saying this through official channels, although Trump has used the word in social media posts.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It does not sound like he policed things such as gambling problems or household debt the same way he did affairs,




Every bank I have worked for has a policy on employee gambling. It is policed, but it doesn't need to be policed noisily off trading floors because the sort of person who is at risk for problem gambling doesn't make a good banker. On trading floors it is mostly self-policed because all traders are gamblers, but all traders also know that a problem gambler is a shitty trader. Banks are also all over their senior employees' (and their wives') personal finances - they aren't explicitly looking for consumer debt problems, but I suspect they would notice.




It does sound like he was using his position to enact a personal view, in firing executives based on his sentimentality toward marital fidelity and/or sense of personal loyalty toward him. Many would say this is unethical, unlawful even—in breaching a director's fiduciary duty toward shareholders when it comes to maximizing shareholder benefit. And this is on top of the aforementioned weird intrusiveness into his employees’ personal lives.




Boards of Directors (as a matter of corporate law) and the CEOs they delegate to get a lot of discretion in how to be long-term greedy - the legal term is the Business Judgement Rule. If Fuld and the Board thought that creating a culture where the execs and their wives were part of a Lehman "family" (which he did - that Fuld ran retreats for execs' wives attracted a lot of bemused coverage after the bankruptcy) was the best way to align incentives at the top of a bank, they were absolutely allowed to do that. And part of that culture is prohibiting affairs.




Ultimately, it's a "just-so" story. One could similarly argue that male executives who have extramarital affairs are more valuable employees, as they have a Demonstrated Track Record in Leveraging Core Competencies to Think Outside the Box for Alternative Growth Opportunities.




Your just-so story sounds entirely plausible and a Silicon Valley startup which regularly needs to break laws or act immorally would probably do well to preferentially hire rakes, with Uber being the proof of concept. A bank is a different type of organisation and needs to have a more small-c conservative corporate culture.


On the merits, execs having mistresses creates conflicts of interest (particularly if the mistress is employed by the bank or a client) and avoidable complexity. I understand why banks would want to discourage it. Managing conflicts of interest is part of the core competency of a bank (for both client trust and regulatory reasons) and the simplest way to manage them is to avoid the ones that don't come with a profit opportunity. Allegedly (I am not senior enough for this to be visible at my level) banks don't like exec spouses having careers that could create the impression of a conflict of interest, and mistresses are more trouble for multiple reasons.


Personally, I favour the mafia rule for mid-to-senior employees of high-trust organisations - you can shag your wife or a whore, but shagging respectable women you are not married to is verboten.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's also reclamatory when used by Anglos  (like @ChickenOverlord?) in Japan - like rappers saying "nigger".


Racial slurs (and other slurs) cut differently when the context means that the possible meanings include "You are a member of my outgroup and I consider you sub-human" than when they don't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Are the old men "monopolising" the prime-age women? I'm not sure I understand the mechanism if so. They all work in the same office building. The women are - I hope - permitted some choice in their mate.




Baxter is still single at 30, and the implication is that (as a reward for being an effective movie-plot protagonist - not by right) he ends up with Fran who is (a) used up and (b) from a lower social class than him. The women of Baxter's own class and age (within the context of the movie, this means the secretaries) are unmarriageable because they are busy fucking the bosses. From Baxter's perspective (and therefore the audience's), the women in his dating pool are being monopolised by the execs. The implication is that if things had gone the way the execs wanted, he would have remained unfucked until he was eventually promoted to the grade where he could have multiple women himself.


In real 1950's America, Baxter would be married to a woman of his own social class in his early twenties, and she would probably have been faithful to him.