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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Yes, I know what jihad and religious martyrdom is. I also think it's stupid. Making the other dumb bastard die for his country has been the American warfighting strategy for over a century now, and if the Iranians want to indulge in dumb sand people strategies they're more than welcome to.

Also... what the hell gives you that impression? If they have Russian/Chinese communication tech, they're not using them. They're meeting in person, for God's sake. They're so thoroughly infiltrated by Mossad they've given up on communication technology altogether.

In previous conflicts they were not able to reign missiles down on Tel Aviv. Also we had other crazy sand people dying for us. Neither Americans nor Israelis are able to sustain consistently high sand people mortality figures. The key questions of this war IMO are (1) can we actually find all the ballistic missiles and (2) how easy is it to make a TEL. I haven’t found any expert even hazarding a guess on these except to say that making a TEL is pretty trivial stuff.

They're meeting in person, for God's sake

I don’t think anyone has a clear idea what is happening. But we have not announced any new leaders being killed after the “trick your opponent into coming to the negotiation table and then slaughter their family” strategy, right?

In previous conflicts they were not able to reign missiles down on Tel Aviv.

They didn't have to because Hezbollah and Hamas did it for them. But they can't now, because we destroyed them.

Hezbollah just launched the largest volley of the war a few hours ago so clearly you've got a funny definition of "destroyed"

If Iran is "destroyed" yet they continue lobbing missiles and drones at every country with an American presence and the Strait remains closed weeks if not months later then clearly being "destroyed" doesn't count for much

how easy is it to make a TEL.

This presumably depends on the technology for your missiles: if they're dumb ballistic things, you probably need to be very confident of where you are launching from and where they're going to point them the right way. If they're liquid-fueled you may need extra targets tanker trucks to fill them once they're vertical. Smarter missiles help a lot with that (see why the Navy now uses VLS instead of missile turrets), but doesn't necessarily solve your problems like precisely initializing guidance systems.