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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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This is a government that has literally over a decade of practice in collecting taxes, performing policing, and running a judiciary against essentially a partially very hostile civilian population. They are really good at it. The idea that the police or judiciary are going to collapse is nonsensical. This really only ever happens when e.g. police are displaced by another powerful force - either literal revolutionaries (in which case taking over tax and police duties in particular is very visible and obvious), gangs (like Haiti, or some villages or neighborhoods in Mexico maybe), or foreign powers (literal invasions, UN forces, etc). There basically are zero exceptions.

The modern era actually makes revolution significantly harder, not easier, because we have so many bureaucratic tools to administer (or, worst case, defer) typical state functions. In theory, total breakdowns can still happen if a country is widely illiterate with extensive fraud, bribery, local power structures, and poorly maintained central identification regimes (e.g. Afghanistan), but Iran is not even remotely like that. IIRC, their literacy rate is actually very high.