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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 16, 2025

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Iran originally decided to pursue 60% enrichment after Israel attacked their nuclear sites in 2021. This attack happened 3 years after Trump ended an agreement to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, which was criticized by NATO, EU, France, the UK, etc, but was clearly requested by Trump’s Zionist funders. Iran’s radiopharmaceutical industry is genuine — they commercialize isotopes that only Germany has been able to produce. Iran needs to pursue its own cancer treatments because sanctions prevent access to state of the art treatments.

I hope Iran gets a nuke now. We can’t have religious extremist states have nukes — Israel is well on its way in becoming majority Haredi, whereas Iran is on a clear secularization path. A nuclear Iran would counter the power that Israel exerts in the region and may even prevent the genocide of Palestinians.

whereas Iran is on a clear secularization path

[citation needed]

Wishcasting, as has been going on with respect to Iran since the waning days of the Reagan administration. Most likely they're reaching a non-representative set, with religious Iranians being more likely to eschew their survey. Islam tends to the more strict, not less, from the bottom up; any moderating influence comes from a "degenerate" (or Westernized) elite, which Iran lacks (largely because they killed them or drove them out in the Revolution)

What metric would you trust?

  • TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam

  • Hijab is becoming less common. The requirement is for the veil to fully cover the hair, but from watching any video of Iranian streets most women totally ignore this — it just barely covers the back of their hair

  • a majority of Iranians use VPNs

TFR is going down, indicative of women no longer internalizing the values of Islam

TFR is going down in almost every country. In Iran, which had a brief 1970s baby boom under the Shah, TFR has declined almost every year since the Islamic Revolution, even when it was rapidly becoming more conservative.

Yeah.

Any argument based on "TFR is going down, which clearly shows that X is the cause" is trivially defeated by the fact that every country has this same outcome regardless of the cultural starting point.

Its almost legitimately bad faith to deploy that argument.

If the argument is “Iran is a religious extremist country”, then we should see religious extremist TFR, which coincides wherever there is religious extremism, always. In such diverse places as

  • Minnesota, where the Salafi-infused Muslim households have a TFR of 5, and the women wear niqab with more frequency than Iran

  • Brooklyn New York, where the Haredim have a TFR of 6

  • The rare regions of traditional Catholicism in France

  • TLM-attending Catholics throughout America (simply represents the most extremist branch of Catholicism)

If you’re telling me that Iran has a religious extremist problem, and yet they can’t manage to get their women to have more than 2 kids or wear a veil property, I am going to conclude someone has lied to you. Because this is the hallmark, textbook sign of a society filled with Abrahamic conviction. Especially among Muslims, where the particular sphere of women has always been greatly delineated. Religious extremism means “clerics tell me what to do and I obey”, and if not even the women obey then no one cares. So I conclude that there is no extremism, based upon this fact in addition to other facts.

I remember filling out the Latin mass survey. To note-

The population filling out the survey is not the same population attending the TLM today. The average TLM grew by 40% over the covid freakout. Obviously, these aren't unselected new arrivals- they're covid-skeptics who agree with large parts of the rad trad program. But still, those numbers are super duper outdated.

The rad trad fertility advantage is 100% due to the serious prohibition on birth control(which Shia Islam does not have). I don't know that much about Iranian social norms, they might be very similar to what rad trads have, they might not be. But 1.6 or whatever doesn't seem like an obviously out of bounds estimate for the TFR rad trads would have if we thought birth control was A-OK. It's not hard to find unhappily single people of either gender at the TLM- most of them conventionally eligible for marriage. The stereotype that our women marry at 19 is really only true for very extroverted, fairly bold, girls from very conservative families. For obvious reasons that's a visible demographic but it doesn't reflect the average experience(which is much shyer with everything that implies for one's love life, sends the girls to college and expects them to get at least some of it under their belt before seriously pursuing marriage[yes, really, rad trads are negative on dating during college], etc). Yes this is an example of the clerics telling people what to do and the people obeying(Humanae Vitae will never have anything negative said about it in our circles, ever- despite coming after Vatican II). But twelver shia islam doesn't have an equivalent to Humanae Vitae.

Getting women, especially young unmarried women, to follow dress code rules which are annoying is simply a hard problem to solve. It doesn't shock me that even genuinely pious Muslim women in Tehran wear their veils improperly most of the time because veils are probably a bit annoying and uncomfortable when worn 'correctly', and when everyone else is doing it wrong it clearly isn't that important.