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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 9, 2026

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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.

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?

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

He's already married.

Then prosecute him for adultery.

How many captains of industry did our ancestors prosecute for adultery?

For actions committed in foreign countries lacking adultery laws?

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.

Huang (J.) could have had discreet escorts if he wanted. He didn't, he was targetted (allegedly) and fell for the romance scam. This is the flip side of why "don't have affairs at work" is a good rule. Presumably the thing started with an approach about doing business together, then propinquity and working off similarity in backgrounds (son of Taiwanese immigrants, she's Singaporean or at least based in Singapore) to let sympathy build and then attraction.

Won't matter if the guy is single, married, in an open relationship/poly, wife accepts that he has mistresses, wife accepts that he hires escorts, guy is gay - unless it's strict adoption of The Mike Pence Rule, older men in positions of power and influence will always be vulnerable to younger, attractive women (or men for the gays) flattering their vanity and getting them to think with their dick.

EDIT: Not to sound too cynical, but all the discussions we've had on here about the difference between men and women when it comes to dating, sex, marriage and the rest of it - come on, men are easy. Men generally have a higher sex drive and are interested in novelty and not interested in turning down "this chick will sleep with me if I let her". Men generally seem to have less difficulty justifying affairs if married with "it's just sex, it's you I really love" or "men have affairs to save their marriages, women have affairs to end their marriages" thinking.

Sleeping with a professional prostitute while married is a lot less socially harmful than keeping a mistress, which in turn is less harmful than leaving your wife to marry your mistress.

Which in turn is less harmful than leaving your wife to marry a prostitute.