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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13150 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Who cares if it was an errant US, Israeli or Iranian strike? War happens. All this struggle session about it is lame.

Let me just get this out there. When you go to war with anyone in the whole wide world, more civilians will die than soldiers. If you're very (un)lucky, you'll be facing a world superpower with good enough targeting to keep that ratio low. In a standard conventional military without smart munitions, the civvy/oppo ratio exceeds 5:1 for conventional operations and 10:1 for irregular warfare. Which is why irregular combatants are not protected under the Geneva Conventions.

This is what war is. There are, ultimately, no rules to the war game. Anyone cherry picking the one-off mistakes of any country in an armed conflict is doing so for their own reasons, not some established corpus of imaginary "international law" of which they seem to be the only lawyers.

Yes well that is exactly why we shouldn't have started another pointless war. Accidents happen in war, but that's why it should be a last resort.

Sounds good, problem is that democracies, far from preventing war, reliably produce it. War is always popular, so as long as being popular is how politics is done, wars will be launched for silly yet popular reasons.

Who cares if it was an errant US, Israeli or Iranian strike?

Nobody. If the US hit it through intelligence error, the US is responsible because the standard for intelligence is perfection. If the US hit it through targeting error, the US is responsible because the standard for targeting is perfection. If the US hit it due to a inaccuracy in the missile's guidance, the US is responsible because the standard for guidance is perfection. If the US hit it because Iran attempted to intercept the missile, the US is responsible because the standard for not being intercepted is perfection. If Iran hit it because it fired a missile that the US jammed, the US is responsible because the US jammed it. And if Iran hit it and the missile simply malfunctioned, the US is responsible because the US started this war and we could have simply not done so.

All depends on when you start the clock, I suppose. If you think the war started in 2026 versus 1979 versus 1953 versus 1952 for instance.

When you go to war with anyone in the whole wide world, more civilians will die than soldiers.

Does not look so clear to me today, wars like Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Gaza are not the normal. In Ukraine, well below 25% of the military deaths. In Nagorno-Karabakh, completely marginal. Iraq-Iran, below 1:1. Soviets in Afganistan, Russians in Chechenia, US in Iraq, something between 1:1 and 5:1 looks plausible. In conflicts that are more a civil war, varied and unclear.

Calling it lame is rather shameless. You start a war of aggression, on your own terms and schedule, from a position of strength and near total security, and you immediately fuck up a school then lie until the video surfaces, like some desperate, barely functional shithole. Don't know, maybe you are consistent, but for americans in general, there is a gap between reputation expected and actual conduct (targeting, behaviour afterwards, cynical excuses); very grating considering the advantages the US has.

Exactly, if the war is worth fighting then it's worth killing some civilians over. If the war isn't worth fighting, than it isn't. Lying about the strike is lame and stupid, but what more do we expect?

I feel the same way about the attitude around the American dead. Trump and Hegseth appear to be accidentally telling the truth here. If this war was just and a good idea, you have to be willing to trade a dozen dead Americans for an Ayatollah, or you're just not serious about it.

Thus the interesting argument, being had below, is: is this war a good idea? Is it just? Is it likely to succeed? Because the answers to those questions answer the question about the civilian and military deaths and costs of the war.

The first casualty of war is truth, they say. War covers a multitude of sins. That's one of the reasons people like them. If you think you're going to get some clear-cut war like the "good ol days", you missed the second half of the twentieth century. War is fought in the media, everyone is lying. Trump is lying about Iran, Clinton was lying about Kosovo, Bush was lying about Iraq, Kennedy was lying about Vietnam.

The convenient thing about Trump is that you know he's lying because he'll say two entirely different things in the same day.

Yeah I pretty much agree with this and I'm very opposed to the war, but the school doesn't do much for me because if the war was worth fighting it wouldn't be an issue. i'm sure we bombed a school or two when we fough the Nazis.

The bombing of Dresden in WW2 killed about 25k civilians, and the firebombing of Tokyo killed about 100k. And those are just the two most famous ones (outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

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