Weekly Grounding #144
Israeli espionage; American power; post-identity politics; male breadwinners; Euro in China; trauma porn
Weekly Groundings are published every Friday to highlight the most interesting news, links, and writing I investigated during the past week. They are designed to ground your thinking in the midst of media overload and contribute to Handful of Earth’s broader framework. Please subscribe if you’d like to receive these posts directly in your inbox.
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“Pentagon Sees Growing Espionage Threat From Israel”
The New York Times reveals that “Recent U.S. intelligence reports have raised concerns about Israeli spy agencies eavesdropping on American negotiators working on a peace deal with Iran, amid rising concern over a more general counterintelligence threat by Israel…The reports include concerns that Israel has stepped up its efforts to eavesdrop on senior American officials, including Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s top negotiator, Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official, and one of his main deputies, Michael P. DiMino IV.”
The article continues: “The Defense Intelligence Agency report was drafted after incidents in which American defense personnel in Israel detected that software to tap their communications had been surreptitiously installed on their phones…The report, which incorporated contributions from a number of military intelligence agencies, also details several episodes in recent years. In 2021, Israeli military intelligence officers were caught planting listening devices at D.I.A. [Defense Intelligence Agency] headquarters. Last year, officers from Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, were discovered to have tried to plant a listening device in a Secret Service vehicle.”
“The aggressiveness of the Israeli intelligence collection on top U.S. officials during the second Trump administration has been ‘unhinged,’ one senior official said.”
“Controlled Chaos”
In a German interview re-published in English on his eponymous Substack, Thomas Fazi argues that “For all its waning power and apparent internal fractures, the Western imperial bloc remains remarkably united; meanwhile, the Global Majority continues to lack a comparable strategic coherence.” He believes that “Washington’s strategy is not aimless, but is rather the deliberate engineering of permanent chaos and disorder. Unable to defeat its rivals head-on, the US seeks to prevent any stable alternative order from consolidating. The logic is straightforward: a multipolar world requires, by definition, some degree of international order and predictability. By systematically dismantling that order—discarding treaties, weaponising sanctions, launching illegal wars, destabilising peripheral states—Washington ensures that no stable, coherent alternative international system can take root.”
Fazi elaborates: “Both China and Europe are targets of this globalised proxy-war strategy, which targets the weaker links of the rival system, though they face it very differently. China is the US’s principal long-term adversary whose rise must be slowed at all costs, but China is also large, nuclear-armed and too economically integrated into the global system to attack directly. Europe is far more vulnerable, and in many ways a more immediately useful target. Keeping Europe destabilised, dependent and tied to Washington through NATO and energy prevents the emergence of the one geopolitical bloc that, if it ever achieved genuine autonomy, could decisively tip the global balance: a Eurasian economic space fully integrated within a new multipolar or polycentric global framework.”
He observes that “there is a good deal of complacency in pro-multipolarity circles, a tendency to treat the transition to a new international order as essentially inevitable and the US as capable of slowing it only marginally. I take a less deterministic view. As said already, a new international order requires, by definition, some degree of order and stability. By engineering permanent destabilisation, the US can create serious structural problems for the BRICS project without needing to win any direct confrontation.”
“The vulnerability the US is best placed to exploit is the strategic incoherence of the Global Majority’s collective response,” Fazi writes. “Russia is engaged in a de facto military confrontation with NATO. Meanwhile, China continues to avoid direct conflict at virtually any cost, and Iran has largely been left to rely on its own military means to respond to the US-Israeli aggression (albeit with indirect support from China and Russia). The BRICS has no unified security doctrine, no shared deterrent framework and its members continue appealing to UN mechanisms and a rules-based order whose fictional character the situation in Gaza has made impossible to deny. Continued reliance on frameworks that demonstrably do not function risks signalling to the Western bloc that escalation carries no serious cost.”
“What Comes After Identity Politics?”
At From The Forests of Arduinna, Rhyd Wildermuth draws parallels between the White Feather Movement during World War I and contemporary political shaming rituals. The White Feather Movement was “a public shaming campaign that started first in England and then quickly spread to all English-speaking nations involved in World War I. The idea first appeared in a 1902 novel that had become quite popular in Britain during the war, in which the main character who refuses to fight overseas is given a white feather by his fiancée for his cowardice. Later, a British vice-admiral popularized the idea, and an early group of 30 women began to hand out white feathers to men who refused to enlist to fight Germany.”
The purpose of the Movement was to “to shame…men in as public a way as possible so they’d feel forced to go die for no good reason at all. And here’s where things get really strange and very relevant to the question of ‘what is going to replace identity politics?’: the White Feather Movement became a suffragette movement. In fact, the most famous British suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, became one of its fiercest activists. The energy that the women who fought for the right to vote put into shaming pacifist and anti-war men was quickly rewarded by the British government in 1918 with the ‘Representation of the People Act,’ which granted women over 30 who met certain property requirements the right to vote while also stripping the right to vote from pacifist men.”
Wildermuth argues that “If you want to know what will come after identity politics, the White Feather Movement is exactly where to look. Though some might object that not all suffragettes threw their support into the movement (most notably Virginia Woolf), or that this was a problem just of ‘white feminism,’ we’ve already seen examples of this kind of reorientation during the pandemic years. The most extreme public shaming of people who resisted vaccine regimes and government restrictions on private activities came from the very same activist groups and individuals who have the most claim to being ‘intersectional feminists.’”
“The Male Breadwinner Model Was Never Traditional”
At The Institute for Family Studies, Grant Martsolf argues that “the breadwinner model is not traditional but was a radical invention that was little more than a century old at its peak. It carried within it the very pathologies that now afflict the dual-earner model that succeeded it. If we want to understand why men and women struggle to build genuine partnerships today, we need to go further back than the postwar golden age to really understand what the breadwinner model replaced.”
He uses the example of linen production to discuss gender and labor in the pre-industrial family: “[F]lax is extraordinarily difficult to process. The pulling of the plants and the initial retting required substantial physical strength which was men’s work. The spinning was women’s work. But the entire process was a family project oriented toward a single shared end: clothing the family. Neither contribution was meaningful in isolation. The philosopher Ivan Illich calls this arrangement ambiguous complementarity. The roles were not formally prescribed or legally enforced, but emerged from locally evolved custom, biological reality, and shared practical need. Both men and women had essential roles. They needed each other. They would not survive otherwise. Nearly 90% of American families in 1850 lived something like this corporate family model. This was the family model that existed before the breadwinner model. What undid it was industrialization.”
After industrialization, a new arrangement emerged in which “men and women shared a household but not a daily life. The male breadwinner model retained some semblance of gender complementarity. Each spouse had a prescribed and necessary role. However, unlike the more fluid interdependence of the frontier farm, these roles were now rigidly formalized.” Martsolf contends that “The dual-earner model was a natural continuation of the logic of the breadwinner model but dissolved even the formal interdependence between men and women that this model had preserved. The dual-earner model put women into direct economic competition with men for the first time. Both partners now perform similar functions in the formal economy and compete for status in the informal one. There is no longer a shared project.”
“A European in China”
Reflecting on a recent trip to China at the Human Carbohydrate, Stella Tsantekidou writes that “The Chinese, at the tip of their empire rising, still have time to prevent the fall of their own Rome. They clearly know that: they’ve already banned unrealistic romance movies where poor girls elope with rich guys, because they agree with Aella that Disney does to marriage what porn is said to do to sex: raises your standards unrealistically and keeps you from doing the real thing. If the UK were a proper country, we would treat Tony Blair’s essays like violent incest porn. His perception of the world is so disgusting, it makes me lose the will to live.”
“If Blair gets his way, which he often does, by 2046, there will be no more ‘journalists’ or ‘writers,’” she continues. “These will be relics of a decadent age, no more rooted in reality than ze/zem gender pronouns…Chinese tourists visiting ‘London’ will be able to walk into the Guardian’s headquarters and pay for the ‘political journalist’ experience. People like my friends will be sitting on desks, typing gibberish into empty documents. For a premium, tourists will be able to sit down with one of the ‘Political Journalists’ for an interview. The jobber will then pretend they are on a deadline and perform stress by pulling out their hair, huffing, puffing, and refilling their coffee cup. The Chinese tourists will be filled with suspense as they watch the British jobber toil. Will the lad make it, or will his tough editor fire him for being late? At the end of the tour, they will be handed a printed, handmade copy of the paper, complete with a full cover photo of the premium tourist payer. Now, where is the recycling bin?”
“Then they will visit a TV studio. Packed on a viewing platform, they will watch a panel of political commentators battle it out like MMA fighters. Not unlike how we do it now. The tourists will be given remote controls for ratings. Every time the ratings dip bellow an acceptable level of entertainment a jolt of electricity will run through a clip-on device on our fingers to remind us we are there to awaken the capitalist spirit, not put the cash cows to bed. At the end of the ‘debate’, the tourists will come into the studio to take selfies with the ‘celebrity’ jobbers. These tours will, among other things, work as a precautionary tale for starry-eyed, newly minted middle-class Chinese people. This is what happens when the desk people overtake the factory people.”
“Trauma Porn”
At The Dark Side of Development , Mila Agius writes: “In January 2026, the Chinese studio Jade Flame released a first-person interactive game on Steam called Blood Money: Lethal Eden. For $8.99, you get to walk through the story of a trafficking victim trapped inside a scam compound in Southeast Asia. By May 2026, the game had a 93% positive rating on the platform.” She argues that Blood Money illustrates “how we learned to build not just games, but worlds where blood on a screen feels more real than the real thing—and how the hyperreal version of suffering ends up replacing the actual suffering. The entertainment industry pulls off the perfect crime against reality and sells us our own moral collapse back at retail price.”
“Why does the hyperreal version of pain and suffering keep pushing the real one out of the frame?” she asks. “The answer lives in Jean Baudrillard’s thinking. The actual reality of the scam compounds in Asia is too heavy, too dirty, too hard to grasp for the average consumer to look at directly. Real suffering demands empathy and responsibility. Hyperreality, on the other hand, takes that humanitarian crisis, runs it through aesthetic filters, and serves it back as something you can actually consume. Following Baudrillard’s logic, that is the ‘delightful catastrophe’—the state in which horror gets objectified and turned into a routine marketing tool. Catastrophe becomes lovable, as long as there’s a screen between you and it.”
Agius writes: “The perfect crime is the murder of reality itself, where the body was never found, there is no obvious killer, no motive, and the forgery becomes more real than the original—what he calls integral reality. The team at Jade Flame, by turning torture into a product, didn’t just make something morally questionable. They killed the reality of the suffering of 300,000 people and replaced it with a simulacrum that, as it turns out, some people enjoy. In a perfect crime, the perfection of the forgery is the criminal act itself. Baudrillard wrote that within this logic, humanity ends up being both the killer and the victim: the player voluntarily kills off their own humanity by going into the simulation, and becomes the victim of the same digital alienation.”
She concludes: “Blood Money: Lethal Eden is not a glitch in the system. It is not an unfortunate anomaly. It is a mirror of a consumer society that has reached its final stage: feeding on someone else’s grief. The main product of this assembly line is not the lines of code or the visual novels about Chinese scam compounds. The main product is not the game—it’s the state the player ends up in: a person being offered the amputation of their own capacity for compassion as a form of interactive experience. And as long as we keep believing the commercial fairy tale that simulations like this ‘teach’ us anything or ‘raise awareness,’ Baudrillard’s perfect crime will keep going, unpunished, with the silent approval of the majority.”
What grounded your thinking this week? Share in the comments.