Saturday Commentary and Review #197

The Goonverse, The Failure-to-Date of The Russian Sanctions Regime, China Squeezes Europe on Rare Earth Minerals, Canada's New Racial Hierarchies, Australia vs. Science

Oct 25, 2025

Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.

Please hit the like and re-stack buttons at the top of the page as this helps my writing get more visibility. Thank you.

When I was a young boy, I used to really enjoy hearing things about “the old days” from older people that I knew. It allowed me to gain a better understanding of where we were (or where at least I was) at the point in time, and why certain older people were the way they were. Resistance to change is natural, but change is inevitable.

Big societal changes appear to come in subtly and gradually when you are younger, to the point of barely noticing them at all until they are hardcoded into your daily existence. When you reach a point in middle age, change appears more abruptly…if you’re paying attention. Our modern western cultures have for decades been centered around youth as the driver of changes in cultural trends. If you’re young, new things come naturally to you. When you’re in your 30s and early 40s, these same new things might appear a bit different, but not too foreign to get a quick grasp on. By the time you hit 50, you begin to look at the youth as somewhat alien…at least to you.

Online dating popped up on the scene when I was still a participant in that market, but I could never take part in it myself. It felt too cold, too commercial, too meat marketish. Where was the spark in e-dating? The subtly? The seduction? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it and never dipped a toe in that pool. I made a conscious decision to distance myself from “The New” because I was content with what was already available. Friends of mine used it regularly, but it was simply not for me. This was probably my first step into the world of being “old”. A fissure appeared where a gap is now present, one that will become a chasm as I get older.

I am Gen X, which means that a whole generation separates me from Gen Z, the youth generation of today. Gen Z grew up in a world that was networked to the hilt, where everything was already on the internet, and where the “meatspace” had already begun to lose its central role in human socialization. This is a generation that has grown up facing electronic screens, to the point where eye contact is in retreat when Gen Zers actually do encounter real humans in person. Their understanding of media, and more importantly, media consumption, is very different than mine. I like to make the joke (and it’s not really a joke as it has happened to me several times) that if you ask someone from Gen Z to explain something to you in a simple fashion, they won’t respond with a one or two line description, but will instead send you a link to a 4 hour podcast that kinda-sorta touches on the subject. Gen Z is the first truly online generation.

This also goes beyond the consumption of media, as it also floods into personal relationships. It is quite common for young people these days to have very few friends IRL (in real life), preferring those that they meet online in shared spaces. This goes wayyyy beyond e-dating. We are dealing with a generation of people for whom socialization has been almost entirely virtual, and whose friends circles are also quite often wholly online. The old rules of friendship and romance have changed, and they have changed significantly to the point where they appear very foreign to us “olds”.

One of the most dramatic changes has been young people’s relationship to sex. Sexual relations have not been a constant throughout history, as the Sexual Revolution upended much of what was in place for eons already, but unlike the newest changes, that revolution still involved actual people sharing a physical space. Now, being in the same room is no longer a prerequisite, as the massive world of online pornography has situated itself as a competitor to traditional (and newer) sexual relations. In many cases, the individual feels that he or she (and it’s almost always a “he”) no longer requires another actual human to satisfy their sexual needs. The individual consumerbot now reigns supreme.

The reason for all the nonsense that you just read is that Harper’s has published one of the best essays of the year to date: “The Goon Squad”. This is a new, online culture that is completely foreign to me, but one that makes perfect sense in light of the transformation of society thanks to rapid growth in electronic communication since the World Wide Web arrived on scene over 30 years ago. You’re going to learn a lot, and much of it is not pleasant….but this essay is very informative, making it worthy to share with you:

Gooning is a new kind of masturbation. More precisely, a new kind of masturbation at the heart of an internet-based, pornography-obsessed, Gen Z–dominated subculture every bit as defined and vibrant as the hippies or punks in their prime. The act itself resembles “edging”—repeatedly bringing oneself to the point of climax without actually climaxing. But gooning is more goal-oriented and more communal. The gooner goons to reach the “goonstate”: a supposed zone of total ego death or bliss that some liken to advanced meditation, the attainment of which compels them to masturbate for hours, or even days, at a time.

Gooners goon. I’m sorry that you had to learn this.

The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

These are young men who have checked out of the dating pool, pairing nicely with the young men who have removed themselves permanently from employment.

Rapid technological change birthing a new culture:

But the gooners’ rise does, in retrospect, possess a certain inevitability. Anyone paying attention to online porn’s evolution over the preceding twenty years could sense, in its brain-melting variety and abundance, the blueprint for a new kind of person, a new relationship to human sexuality. In my own lifetime, I have seen incredible advances in the world of pornography. When I was a boy, there were still porn magazines; fathers hid them on high shelves. You stood on stools and gawked at them in a state of mortal terror. But by the time I started college, in the late Aughts, the foundations of our present porn environment were firmly established. Widespread broadband internet had enabled the rise of the so-called tube sites: platforms like Pornhub, which streamed untold numbers of clips free of charge. Then came the smartphones, transforming every toilet stall into a potential porn theater. The very air, suddenly, was misted with pornography.
In this earlier stage, if you wanted to watch porn, you still had to actively seek it out. That has since changed.

Vice has never been more available than it is today. Think about the rise of sports gambling, for example.

The author of this essay threw himself head first into the Goonverse:

So where were the gooners? A few seconds’ research revealed their home base: Discord, a social messaging platform not unlike Slack, offering a multiverse of chat-room servers accessible by invitation. If Instagram was where millennials went to post infographics about racial disparities in income and policing, Discord was where zoomers went to swap the screeds of lesser-known school shooters. Or to talk about gaming. Or whatever zoomers did. This was supposedly where the online youth were headed: away from their parents’ social platforms into private, self-policed spaces, little islands of affinity. I joined the first relevant server I could find: the GoonVerse, which had more than fifty thousand members. I examined the rules, which were at once surprisingly woke (no hate speech, no misgendering) and strict enough regarding the posting of child pornography as to suggest a serious and recurrent problem. Before entering, I was prompted to choose my “roles.” Age, region, and gender I could make sense of, but things grew confusing from there. Did I want to be “pinged for tournaments”? Was I a “hentai wankbattler,” or merely a “regular wankbattler”? These questions I answered at random, and then I entered the “stream room.”
Picture this: you work for a masturbation factory in hell. You log on to your scheduled workplace Zoom call. What do you see? You see what I saw in the GoonVerse. There was, inescapably, the porn itself, which occupied most of the screen, a hyperkinetic montage of tremendous penises barreling into and out of Japanese cartoon heroines, crudely rendered CGI horse-women, and actual female porn stars. Then, of course, there were the gooners, arrayed side by side in boxes at the bottom of the screen, their heads obscured—cut off by their cameras at the neck—and their hands in frantic motion. Primitive fears from childhood surfaced in an inchoate rush: a gigantic omnivorous worm I once saw in a movie on TV; the uncontrolled swarm of color that consumed the screen whenever my family’s PC crashed, suggesting something organic and harm-intending in what was supposed to be just a machine. One of the guys in the stream room was masturbating on the toilet. One of them looked like he was masturbating in jail.

He also created a questionnaire to learn about this culture:

For one thing, and crucially: most gooners do not regularly masturbate for eight to twelve hours at a stretch, as I’d initially been led to believe. They tend to do that only a few times a month, the rest of the time masturbating for—and I really did try to calculate this—an average of two or three hours a day. In other words, the goonstate, so central to the subculture’s branding and self-conception, is only rarely attained. (A sizable minority of respondents claimed never to have reached it, although none doubted its existence.) Like runner’s high, or epiphany in prayer, the goonstate is not the point of the practice, but rather its occasional and unbidden reward. You’ll never get there if you don’t put in the work. As for what “there” refers to—what the goonstate actually feels like—a sampling from the Questionnaire should get the point across:
It’s like being high while high
Intense bliss pure happiness and love
It’s so beautiful! It’s sublime. Like being washed away.
It’s like I’m in antigravity or covered in liquid. tingles all over me, brain fuzzy, skin tingling all over. No fears about cumming, because this was the real pleasure I was after, and I couldn’t cum at that point if I wanted to anyway.

What is immediately noticeable here is both the sheer amount of time spent “gooning”, and how alienated they are from real life.

What you hardly need an amateur goonthropologist to tell you—and what the Questionnaire amply bears out—is that this phenomenon in its full sweep can be traced at least partially to the fact that, in the span of about five years earlier this century, virtually every child in the developed world was granted instant, unrestricted access not merely to hardcore pornography but to some of the most extreme examples of it ever produced in human history. Many respondents have been regular porn viewers since the fourth grade; few were older than twelve when they picked up the habit. And they were watching some serious stuff. Stuff that, in earlier eras, you’d need to go out of your way to find—stuff that you could only get your hands on with the help of a middleman.
On a near-daily basis over the past decade, opinion columnists have fretted over this state of affairs, primarily over how all of this porn—a fair share of it violent and explicitly misogynist—was affecting the sexual behavior of young men in real life. What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself. This was certainly true for some before the pandemic, but the lockdowns appear to have disastrously accelerated this particular outcome in younger members of Gen Z. I’d been surprised at first to find that out of 107 respondents, 47 claimed to be sexually active in some capacity—roughly 47 more than I’d expected. But a quick crunch of the numbers set things straight. Median age of the sexually active gooner: twenty-seven. Median age of the non–sexually active gooner: twenty-three—i.e., someone in high school or college when the lockdowns began. It was this latter group that, in the Questionnaire, was likeliest to identify not merely as a gooner but also as a “pornosexual.”

This culture is even deeper than at first and second glance. Click here to read this great essay in its entirety.

Leave a comment

The safe assumption on February 24, 2022 was that the Russian Army would race against time to prevent an economic collapse brought on by western sanctions targeting its various industries and banking sector. Who could have predicted that the Russian economy would prove to be so resilient, and that the Russian Armed Forces would underperform?

Russia spent an entire decade building up a war chest and “sanctions-proofing” their own economy to the best of its ability in the run up to the war. Conducting very little direct trade with the USA certainly helped them in their efforts. Up to the time that this article was published (October 12th of this year), the Russian economy was slightly bruised by sanctions, but was still humming along relatively well, especially when compared to those in the neighbouring EU. Since then, a new round of sanctions have been unveiled, one that might have some actual teeth (to be determined).

Here’s a helpful analysis of the sanctions regime up until this latest round:

Since 2014, Western nations have hit Russia with a total of 26,655 sanctions (to mid-September 2025), with 23,960 coming after February 2022. The largest target group, with 13,611 sanctions, is state officials, business owners, and well-known public figures. The declared intention of sanctions was to force the Kremlin to alter its geopolitical course, i.e. to quickly withdraw from Ukraine, by causing a shock crisis in the economy and creating a backlash by prominent businesspersons and the public against the Kremlin.
The economy did suffer from disruption in 2022 (-1.2%), but growth returned in 2023 (+4.1%) and in 2024 (+4.3%). The economy also received a huge boost to income in 2022-23, as the EU was not ready for sanctions and was forced to stockpile Russian oil and other materials. The external trade and current accounts have remained comfortably in surplus since 2022.

The first miscalculation:

As mentioned, over 13,000 of the sanctions have been directed at individuals, especially Russian billionaires and business owners. The assumption being that these individuals would increase pressure on the Kremlin to withdraw from Ukraine to alleviate pressure on their businesses and to recover their wealth from sanctions orders. But here is where there is a lack of understanding about how Russia has changed since 2000. billionaires do not have political influence in Putin’s Russia and, as such, cannot be properly referred to as Oligarchs, i.e. as originally defined in ancient Greece. So, while these individuals were targeted by sanctions intended to pressure the government, they hold little to no political influence, and the measures have therefore failed to bring about any meaningful change in state policy - and nor will they.

Mikhail Fridman (one of the original 7 oligarchs and one of those who has retained his businesses and wealth) of Alfa Group had to explain the above fact to the British when prompted by the Financial Times.

Repatriated wealth of Russia’s billionaire class:

Moreover, while some assets – modest volume - belonging to the business elite have been frozen under Western sanctions, the bulk of their wealth remains in Russia or in so-called friendly jurisdictions. This is largely because, in the face of an increasingly unpredictable external environment – where sanctions were often imposed based solely on high net worth – many saw no viable option other than to redomicile their wealth and business interests to Russia or allied countries. And they had plenty of notice to do so since sanctions against Russia started quite meekly from spring 2014.
The 2025 Forbes billionaire Report showed that there are now 146 billionaires in Russia, up 21 from 2024 and with 15 new names appearing. The combined wealth of the billionaires is assessed at $625.6bn, a record high for Russia. Most of that wealth is now in Russia or in so-called friendly jurisdictions and has helped create a strong financial base in the country. This is one of the reasons why the government is now able to switch from financing the federal budget deficit from the National Welfare Fund, Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund, to tapping into the local debt market. With state debt at only 16% of GDP, the Finance Ministry has considerable scope to borrow and still keep Russia as a low indebted country.
Instead of staging a revolt, some of the sanctioned businesspersons have adapted to the new environment and have refocused their repatriated wealth on bolstering Russia’s domestic economy. Others have pursued investments or private activities outside the West, particularly in countries “friendly” to Russia. In essence, rather than weakening the Russian state, the sanctions inadvertently reinforced it by redirecting wealth and investment into the domestic market, while also simultaneously pushing away many of the pro-Western businesspeople who were essentially punished because of their nationality. Had policymakers heeded the advice of several prominent voices in the west to not sanction Russian billionaires but to make it easier for them to settle in the west and to bring the bulk of their wealth with them, it would probably be a different story in Russia today.

The sanctions regime alienated this class, resulting in massive injections of wealth at home.

Foreign companies (those that stayed) are still doing a brisk business in Russia:

Also, in terms of foreign businesses in Russia, while some left, many chose to stay, either directly or indirectly by selling their operations to local investors or changing their business models. Around 46% of the largest foreign companies operating in Russia in early 2022, sold their businesses to local investors, ensuring operations continued, providing goods and services, employment and taxes and bolstering overall GDP. Ironically, many foreign companies still operating in Russia are often finding themselves in a favorable position. With many Russian founded companies now sanctioned, foreign firms, or those which have evolved from a formerly foreign owned business, are emerging as key players in several sectors, often enjoying a competitive advantage. This has created another unintended consequence in that, according to a recent calculation published by the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE) foreign companies are now contributing significantly to the Russian federal budget, paying taxes in excess of $20bn last year, but remain outside of Western sanctions lists.

Not bad!

What remains to be seen is if Russia’s economy can withstand this next wave of sanctions targeting its oil and gas sectors.

The USA wants Europe to take the lead on countering Russia in Ukraine, via purchasing US weapons to send to Kiev. It also wants to dictate to Europe how to trade with the Chinese. What the USA is seeking from Europe is its total obedience to the point where the continent is reduced to little more than an American protectorate. The question becomes: what does Europe get out of it?

That is a question that has no good answer at the moment beyond 1. access to US consumer and capital markets and 2. the US defense umbrella. Is it worth sacrificing your own sovereignty for these two points? Pretty much no one is asking this question.

At the same time, the bills for this “alliance” continue to pile up, and the latest is the Chinese squeeze on rare earth minerals that Europe needs for its industry, defense, and green transition:

BRUSSELS — As Beijing further weaponizes its control over the flow of minerals that Western countries need for their green, defense and digital ambitions, Europe has to face an uncomfortable truth: It won’t escape China’s dominance anytime soon.
The Chinese government’s shock imposition earlier in October of sweeping export controls on rare-earth magnets and the raw materials needed to make them has escalated a running trade feud with the United States. The embargo threatens vast — and rapid — collateral damage on the European Union and has forced its way onto the agenda of a high-level summit on Thursday.
“A crisis in the supply of critical raw materials is no longer a distant risk. It is on our doorstep,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a pre-summit speech to European lawmakers.

Fully aware of how dependent European industry is on China, European leaders still chose to go head-first in and lecture Beijing on “human rights” and its relations with Russia. This is part of the price for that misstep.

Oops:

The EU, which imports nearly all of its rare earths and permanent magnets from the Middle Kingdom, is caught in the crossfire.
“We have no interest in escalation,” Maroš Šefčovič, the EU’s trade chief, told reporters Tuesday. “However, this situation casts a shadow over our relationship. Therefore, a prompt resolution is essential.”
China and the EU will “intensify contacts at all levels” on the issue, Šefčovič added. Wang Wentao, the Chinese trade minister, has accepted an invitation to come to Brussels in the coming days to discuss the restrictions, Šefčovič said after a two-hour call between the two.

Chinese sector dominance:

Yet, behind the talk of adequate diplomatic responses and potential retaliation there is no escaping the dominance in rare earths that China has built up over decades. For now at least.
“In the short term there’s nothing you can do, except try and negotiate with the Chinese,” said Philip Andrews-Speed, senior research fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies.
Hit where it hurts
Beijing dominates the entire supply chain of rare earths — a group of 17 minerals used in permanent magnets found in everything from electric vehicles and wind turbines, to F-35 fighter jets and naval vessels. Under its new export controls, importers will need a government license to access not only those permanent magnets, but also the refined metals and alloys that go into them.
China already weaponized its leading position in producing and refining critical raw materials — and specifically rare-earth elements like scandium, yttrium and dysprosium — in response to Trump’s first wave of punitive tariffs back in April. Eventually, the White House caved in.

Collateral damage of US-China trade relations:

This time, again, the Chinese export controls are “a tit-for-tat for U.S. policy,” said a person from the Chinese business sector, granted anonymity to speak candidly.
The EU is being hit, too: “The effects are direct and enormous, particularly for the defence sector,” Tobias Gehrke and Janka Oertel of the European Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a commentary. “The EU defence industry risks grinding to a halt as inventory shortfalls could leave it struggling to produce and deliver enough weapons for the war in Ukraine.”

China accounts for 61 percent of rare earths extraction and 92 percent of refining, according to the International Energy Agency. It provides nearly 99 percent of the EU’s supply of the 17 rare earths, as well as about 98 percent of its rare earth permanent magnets.
Global rare earth production
Estimated mine production of rare earth elements in China and the rest of the world, in metric tons of rare-earth-oxide equivalent.

The EU is now scrambling to figure out how to fix a problem that should have never occurred in the first place.

Fisted by Foucault

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?