site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang caught having affair with Chinese spy.

There was some discussion of this in the Sunday thread, but I think this is a big deal worth a top-level post.

The woman, Alice Huang (no relation), is an executive at Singapore-based cloud computing company Megaspeed. The official story from Nvidia, up until last week, was that this was a totally normal nothing-to-see-here business relationship with a client. Jensen himself now seems to admit this is not the case.

Jensen has been strongly opposed to chip export controls for some time. No doubt prosaic conserns about margins and market expansion were a major factor, but now we have to wonder how much corruption, blackmail, and CCP blackops might have played a role. There have been rumors of... irregularities regarding some Nvidia chip shipments to Asia. There is new reporting today that Nvidia itself intervened to squash a Commerce Department investigation into Megaspeed.

I feel like the board has to fire him after this, but on the other hand it seems almost unthinkable. Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs. There might be pressure from investors to keep him on. It will be interesting to see how the National Security apparatus responds to such a massive persistant vulnerability if it comes to that.

It's been quite fascinating (and frankly disappointing if unsurprising) to me to see the people wax poetic about how Western values are dying and how America needs to be first and how China needs to be stopped rush to Jensen's defense and go on about how it was a "mistake" (it went on for over a year if the Trump admin is to be believed) and how it isn't a big deal or how he had "good intentions" or how it is actually somehow actually justified.

All of the VC people (Shaun McGuire, etc), stock scammers (Bill Ackman, etc), GPU sellers (Elon Musk, etc), podcast talking heads (Gavin Baker, etc), just to name a few. It wasn't enough for them to lightly "condemn" it or even just say nothing at all. They had to be part of the Jensen Defense Force.

I'm not surprised that when they said "America first" they really meant "my stock portfolio first" but it is another in a long list of revealing actions by these guys.

Even if they are Christian infidelity to his wife doesn't have any bearing on him leading Nvidia, or does it? If he knew she was a Chinese spy or somehow extortet/compromised him is the important thing.

As somebody who's been involved in business circles in East & Southeast Asia I'd be very shocked if Huang's relationship didn't operate on 'don't ask don't tell' at the bare minimum considering how much of network revolves around escorts in that part of the world. Thus would be surprised by a divorce.

How uniform is Southeast Asia? Do vietnamese people or whatever share a lot with filipinos and islanders? Or is it like Europe but with Asians?

From what I can see she's currently being investigated as a potential spy but there's nothing confirmed yet. Either way, the potential there is meaningful as it shows a weak spot in industries important to national security, same way a plane need not actually crash. If she is a spy, the potential to either get information out through covert means/manipulation, or through blackmail is obvious.

That being said, just like with plane crashes Nvidia is hopefully set up in a redundant manner that things stay secure even if the CEO is compromised. I doubt it, but this sort of thing should be the goal for our tech industry and government.

Founder-CEOs are a single point of failure for their companies, and investors like it that way for a good reason. There are controls you could have in place that would detect a compromised CEO, but the type of controls that would prevent an undetected compromised CEO screwing the company/country/investors/future of humanity are not compatible with the benefits of a founder-controlled company.

I feel like spy as applied to this is such an odd continuum, too.

Like if 10 were 'literally trained espionage operative of China on an explicit mission to seduce Jensen' I'd expect this to be more like a 6 where it's more 'High-tier Chinese national likely has strong relationships with CCP and a strong overlap in interests with stuff the CCP also wants to have happen without being an explicit government operative'

Or the maintains relationships with (or surveils) all significant people and exert pressure on them when they believe they can do something that would be beneficial to the Chinese state.

Imagine Apple firing Steve Jobs.

They.... did? Is this some sort of Mandela Effect thing?

Imagine if they had fired him after the iPod, but before the iPhone.

The good timeline.

Yeah, but, like, a second time.

So, I'm mostly just seeing a lot of jokes and memes about this. Which, understandable, it's a juicy scandal.

But one semi serious response that I saw on Twitter got me thinking. Is this just an inherent weakness in all men? An unpatchable security flaw? We're already vulnerable to just normal human temptation. What are we supposed to do when foreign governments target us with professional seductresses? Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?

Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?

Chemical castration is a common and reversible medical procedure. Designate them all as sex offenders.

Prior honeytraps done by e.g. the Stasi targeted women.

Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?

No, they should be married. Our ancestors understood this.

I mean casual side prostitution was a lot more normalized in essentially every Western society until the last 100 years or so. The current model with Japan having a ton of random prostitution/prostitution-lite options but also a way-lower divorce rate than Western countries since it's just kinda is what it is societally is how most of human history functioned.

Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?

The ancient Chinese tried that. Eunuchs ended up ruling them until the oppressed non-eunuchs slaughtered them. A general recognizing the problem and plotting their extermination, but they murder him first, then other people slaughter them. Googling this I see it also happened a second time a few centuries later in which the eunuchs won the series of plots and attempted coups and successfully slaughtered their would-be murderers and continued their unpopular rule.

Not a small number of deaths in either instance. Your make men trade their balls for critical positions in the government, you'd better buckle up.

So that's start, twice in 2000 years? Seems like a pretty decent track record, overall.

Eunuchs were not created to make un-honeypottable officials, they were created because the emperors had large harems and did not want to get cucked.

It’s important to keep in mind that everything we know about these periods was written by the political rivals of the eunuchs. Don’t fall for the Confucian officials propaganda that eunuchs always lead to corrupt rule. It’s true that they often did when child emperors were on the throne, but with powerful adult emperors, they were often effective and loyal officials. The emperors kept using them for a reason. They knew history and knew that eunuchs had a failure mode, but kept choosing to use them. It’s not like they tried them in the Han dynasty and then were like “whoops, that went poorly, let’s never do that again.” The Qing still had eunuchs 2000 years later.

First, some people actually treat their marriage vows seriously. More than you'd think actually and any billionaire can easily divorce their wife and find a model to shack up with.

Second Hot lady spies are actually harder to produce than you think otherwise this would be more common. You need someone who can plausibly be introduced to the target, is hot enough to make them forget themselves and seduce them, is controlled/smart enough to get useful information and the hardest part actually agrees to do all this most stunning women have better things to do than be spys/hookers.

America supposedly stopped honeypotting with their spies for a few reasons:

  1. The blackmail didn't work. There was one mullah that asked for copies of his kompromat for 'personal use'.
  2. They had a hard time telling their best and brightest female agents to go and sleep with terrible people so they could be in a position to steal secrets. This left them with using whores as agents which made them only really able to generate kompromat (See #1)

I mean the immediate issue I'd see with America trying to use honeypots for other countries/cultures is that extramarital stuff is way less of an issue in the vast majority of other country/cultures, especially if it's of the 'powerful man with a sidepiece' variety.

Sure but that's what I'd call "normal human temptation." We can resist that. But china has a billion people, and state resources to push them at us. That's not just "take your marriage vows seriously," that's "pray to God to save you from the temptations of Satan."

Also Western women range from 3 to 8.1 and Asian women range from 8 to 11. This is an undisputed fact and if you argue with me then you're wrong.

The male weakness for females is needed for class balancing.

Otherwise, the male class would be too OP, given its greater strength, speed, agency, mental constitution, and perhaps average intelligence. And the female class would be unviable in gameplay.

@HereAndGone2, get right over here, you can't let him get away with it.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Not in all men. Some men find the idea of causing the loved one such harm, and going against their own moral standards, more painful than the prospect of cheating is pleasurable.

Is it possible that a finely-tuned enough seductress might overcome even this? Yes, but even then some men would successfully resist. Others would decide that a break-up or divorce is the right thing to do, rather than dishonesty.

I love my wife. But these days she only speaks to me to push more tasks onto my plate, complain, or complain about how I performed the task she pushed onto me. Often she doesn't even speak to me. She just sends mispelled and unintelligible texts from the bedroom while she nurses our baby. My days are long and thankless, and I die a little inside every time my phone beeps and I know it's never anything good.

If my friends and coworkers are any indicator, this is not atypical. I doubt even being the most powerful CEO on the planet changes that dynamic much. Most men just aren't important enough to have women who's entire job is being nice and pleasant hunting us down.

Sorry man. I was once in a bad marriage myself. Eventually got divorced. You have my deapest sympathies.

I didn't read this as this as a description of a bad marriage. It's just a "parenting a baby" slump, which is practically unavoidable. Babies are demanding little shits that eat and sleep and shit and monopolize mom's attention, but they grow out of it.

Yes - there is a period where your wife is overloaded with being a new mum and the only lovable thing about her is that she is the woman nursing your child. I was lucky enough to have three adults in the house for the first two weeks (I had paternity leave and my MIL moved in for the duration) but I can't imagine how tough it is being the second adult (grandparents are absent or acting like entitled Boomers) in a house with a newborn while also working full-time.

One disadvantage we have in the west is that Chinese guys are just not interested in our thots.

Can you really see Jack Ma going for this?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=anna+nicole+smith&ia=images&iax=images

Maybe, just maybe, we can draft a corps of Ryan Reynolds type guys with soft eyes to empathetically listen to the concerns of lonely Chinese housewives.

I feel like that guy would be very hard to crack if only since he's so public with what he's up to.

Depends on the route. The easy way is a blackmail op with a professional sex worker doing the seducing and the spy holding the camera. That wouldn't work on Xu Bo because there is nothing to blackmail. But the Huang op looks like a hard mode honeypot where the spy does the seducing and the information you are after leaks via pillow-talk. That works even better on a man like Xu Bo.

I agree with @CertainlyWorse that the reason why the US (or another western country) can't do a hard-mode honeypot is that western culture doesn't allow us to ask a professional-class young lady to do that for her country.

What are we supposed to do when foreign governments target us with professional seductresses? Should all men in critical positions get castrated for national security?

You could back marriage oaths by law like in every society until 1960 and arrest these guys for being Sex Criminals.

Even many working class guys cheated on their wives back then. Someone with Jensen Huang's level of power would probably have found it easy to get around every single one of those laws before 1960.

A lot of times they cheated with teenagers but we don't have any issue locking them up now for that, so I don't see the problem.

That's probably the best solution. We could also try the brute-force Dr. Strangelove solution of recruiting a strategic reserve of young, attractive, patriotic women to saturate the desires of our top officials and scientists, therefore rendering them immune to foreign honeypots.

There are men who will be mostly honeypot-immune as long as their aging wife remains pleasant to be around, with no government-issue mistress needed. There are also men who will be mostly honeypot-immune as long as they have access to at least one woman who is pleasant enough, hot enough, and appears to be devoted, but are a risk as their wives age. (By all accounts Jensen is in this group). Government-issued mistresses might work for the second group, but given today's sexual morality what is really needed for both groups is government-issued second wives. (Late 20's, 9's, IQ about 10 points below the executive, pleasant and sexually available, give them short-hours NOC jobs in appropriate prestige fields like PR or arts administration).

A true horndog is not going to be kept away from the honeypot by providing alternative women - for this type of guy you can never have too many women. As pointed out elsewhere in the thread, they are probably immune to blackmail, but not to pillowtalk.

As a separate issue, my sources tell me that the training new high-level clearance holders get includes a warning about honeypots, and part of what they say is

  • Even a wifeguy is unreasonably susceptible to a skilled honeypot if they are drunk and their colleagues don't intervene.
  • A professional honeypot is more likely than not to spike your drink.