23 Jun 25 Monday Briefing
To the brink
Greetings from Singapore, where I’m finally back at my desk at home after a month of travel – and what an eventful month that was. In DC, we took a jaunt down to the edges of the military birthday parade turned out to be a gross failure, and the next day I promptly yeeted to Riyadh, only to realise I’d flown from one frying pan into the fire, geographically.
It seems that we are being pushed ever closer to the brink by three mentally-ill geriatrics, each pathologically driven by the self-perceived rightness of their causes, and to hell with the rest of the world. What an interesting time to be a pacifist (per
), and to observe armchair theorists yap on about things they know very little, which only goes to show that anyone who attempts self-assured prognostications (like those “China watchers” we are all so fond of) should be distrusted on principle, as says. (Do read his quick hot take, though.)All this jockeying for power takes me to another unformed train of thought, inspired by
’s post – well worth a slow read in itself – about the salvation of psychopaths, in this case, facilitated by women. My instinctive reaction was to recoil, being far too attuned to the spiral of “emotional labour” that women are expected to perform, both mundane and extraordinary. On an individual level, women are no less in need of grace and salvation from their impulses and desires. The key difference is that the way in which the violence of those impulses and desires manifests tends to be turned inwards, towards self, or to be transplanted onto a man to achieve power and glory. History abounds with examples of women who gained power via proximity, manipulation, and outright physical violence. If men of the ilk Corazo writes about could possibly find salvation, or some temperance, in strong women, could the same be said about women of similar ilk? Or, perhaps, the answer could be found in BDSM clubs or dynamics. The lust for power is a beast that respects no sex or gender.On a more cerebral plane, our friends at MIT have released the results of a study looking at your brain on ChatGPT. So far the responses mirror that of the “China watchers” – anyone who says anything with great confidence should probably not be trusted. I will say, however, that so far I’ve resisted writing anything substantial with the assistance of AI, and I’m going to see how long I can hold out. I predict a few more months, if that, given my current workload.
And finally, to send us all into what could be a hellhole of a week with such hope about the efforts of a few good men that help shape culture profoundly, here’s the story of how a David took on Big Blue Goliath… and won.
Stay sane, friends.
I did not know it yet when she first appeared in the story, but by the end I was pretty sure the novel’s main female character was also a psychopath, though the Bene Gesserit inspired sisterhood she belonged to molded her gifts toward their institutional mission. My sense is that IRL the women who can handle psychopathic men (think Melania Trump and Imelda Marcos) were themselves… special. What seems like emotional labor to a normie are transactional to them, just part of the cost of power.