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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Women are viciously competitive

There are multiple kinds of competition. Are women known for violently beating or killing eachother for a stranger looking at them the wrong way? No, that's a male thing. Women do not compete like men compete. What kind of man does this:

Bari Weiss, in her letter of resignation from The New York Times, described how colleagues referred to her in internal Slack messages as a racist, a Nazi, and a bigot and—this is the most feminine part—“colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.”

What helped get sanctions on apartheid South Africa was the largely male Western governments being afraid of the almost entirely male governments of the Soviet bloc and almost entirely male government of red China and the almost entirely male governments of various third world countries fomenting a more intense global anti-western movement if they didn’t support the end of apartheid. Indeed this drove the entirety of ruinous American ‘decolonial’ and ‘anti colonial’ policy back to the late 1940s, through Suez and Algeria and onward.

And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended? No, of course not, people believed this stuff. It was the Cold Warriors like Nixon and Reagan who were amongst the more positively inclined US presidents towards South Africa, not the reverse. South Africa was actually on their side in the Cold War, possessed useful naval bases, fought communist-backed states.

Most importantly, Andrews has this statistic:

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.

What is that if not indicating wokeness? Maybe it's not 'conservative' or 'liberal' since that depends on context. In the imagined Trumpenreich, it would be very left-wing to fight for free speech and Stand Up against His Lies about a cohesive, all-white society. But in the modern day, in the real world, we know the polarity of 'free speech' vs 'cohesive society'. I fail to see how calling for the undermining of free speech in the America of today to protect a cohesive society could be interpreted in any other way than as woke.

And if women are woker, then having more women in places of prominence where they can implement this mindset can only make everything woker. If those two lines of argument hold, then everything else falls into place.

And so it stopped when the West won the Cold War, all sanctions on South Africa were ended?

Apartheid ended before the Soviet Union fell.

Good point, for some reason I thought it was like '92 or something... Nevertheless foreign aid and support for black South Africa continued and still continues today. It's not exactly the height of Cold War realpolitik to support putting the Soviet-trained, Soviet-funded guerrillas into power.

?? Apartheid ending was a relatively long process lasting into the early 90s. The Berlin Wall came down in '89.