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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6420 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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@GBRK @The_Nybbler I still call bullshit. If that happened your response would not be “well we’ve been propping up their regional adversary and bombing the hell out of them for three years so fair play I guess”

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding our point. Terrorism is a specific word with a very particular meaning. Saying that something isn't terrorism isn't a defense of that thing, it's an insistence on using nomenclature in a useful way. If you really want to call anything that causes terror "terrorism" then you dilute the category so much it ceases to have any meaning. That's why terrorism has to specifically be actions taken by an irregular force. If instead of Al-Quada an organized state had committed 9/11, I would have had the same emotional response-- but I would not call it terrorism. Similarly, if the actions taken by the US military against iran had instead been taken by a non-state actor, they would indisputably be terrorism. But the word is simply inapplicable to military actions taken by a sovereign nation. You're free to be mad anyways, you're free to issue moral condemnation or propose retribution, but you are not free to use the word "terrorism."

What is the point of this obstinacy? They're all correct, it is an act of war. We constantly commit acts of war by bombing the shit out of Ukrainian residential blocks, and this gets called terrorism because civilians become collateral damage, even if terror is not the point (terror is the point in human safari and arguably in infrastructure destruction though). If Russia could surgically annihilate Ukrainian generals no matter where they are, that's be merely war.

Ukrainians do commit terrorism, but not in this case.

What is the point of this obstinacy?

Because I am subjected to a perfidious media apparatus and the casuists on this forum that constantly justify the most appalling horrors on the basis of spurious “who, whom?” logic and thought terminating cliches, and it has made me salty.

If it happened I would say "Well, looks like they're fucking around so we should make them find out". But it's still war, not terrorism. The boundaries can be blurry sometimes (because it's advantageous for states to blur them) but the hypothetical here is that Iran is doing it, not one of their associated "terrorist" militias, right?

Contra MadMonzer above, I would say it's not "perfidious", but just because it's "fair play" doesn't mean the US doesn't get to respond.

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