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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26010 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Because your take is pure Arguments as Soldiers. When I saw the NYT article on the topic, clawing at implication and carefully phrased vagaries to push a narrative as hard as they could with extremely limited facts and knowledge, it just made me recall the old line "They're not anti-war. They're just on the other side." Remember, the only source we even have for the casualty count is the Iranian government. How much do you trust them? The US has hit Iran with thousands of bombs and the general level of precision is terrifying sci-fi absurdity. There's Iranian doctors purportedly reporting that literally every single casualty they've seen is non-civilian. Meanwhile, Iran responded by flinging missiles willy-nilly all over the region, including a bunch of civilian targets that no one cares about because it's just brown people failing at killing brown people.

Focusing all your attention on the single incident that might possibly have been the US hitting a civilian target is so obviously bad faith that it requires years of brainwashing and hyper-selective framing to take your performative outrage seriously.

"The US fired 3000 bombs and only a single one was possibly a misidentified target or misfired. That means the US has less shit happen during war than any other army in the combined history of humanity. Maybe that should make them much more comfortable going to war than any other polity that has ever existed on the face of the earth."

Christ.

I think we have some reason to believe we did strike a school and plausibly hit children (who, on priors, spend much of their waking time in schools): https://archive.is/9bWjL

An ongoing military investigation has determined that the United States is responsible for a deadly Tomahawk missile strike on an Iranian elementary school, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the preliminary findings.

Officers at U.S. Central Command created the target coordinates for the strike using outdated data provided by the Defense Intelligence Agency, people briefed on the investigation said.

A visual investigation by The Times showed the building housing the school had been fenced off from the military base between 2013 and 2016.

Satellite imagery reviewed by The Times showed that watchtowers that once stood near the building had been removed, three public entrances were opened to the school, ground was cleared and play areas including a sports field were painted on asphalt, and walls were painted blue and pink.

I think this incident is of little overall significance, it's the sort of thing that happens in every war. At the same time, it probably did happen.

The US has hit Iran with thousands of bombs and the general level of precision is terrifying sci-fi absurdity. There's Iranian doctors purportedly reporting that literally every single casualty they've seen is non-civilian.

Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.

Suddenly they've developed incredible accuracy and precision, in the last couple of years? Under the watch of Hegseth 'slash and burn, oohrah, real manly warfare no legal bullshit', just as they cut the office who's supposed to be preventing this? And they can manage this precision in a country with much more sophisticated air defences than Afghanistan or post-invasion Iraq, where ISR drones can and are being shot down?

How can this be? AI? Israel makes great use of AI and they killed lots of civilians in Gaza in some combination of neglect and malice.

Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.

Focusing all your attention on the single incident that might possibly have been the US hitting a civilian target

It's not going to be just a single incident, come on. Weapons miss, intelligence is faulty, fog of war is fog of war.

Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.

The conditions and scrutiny of most recent US military campaigns would be totally insane by any historical metric. 'You must only hit confirmed military targets in a hostile populace who have every incentive to deliberately misreport the status of casualties and have a bunch of weapons that can be profoundly lethal out of nowhere plus you have an aggressive media operation actively jumping on any excuse' is not a proposition that could really exist in any prior period.

Killing civilians is part of the nature of war, that's the risk taken on when starting a war, just like how losing soldiers is inevitable.

I didn't say 'you must only hit confirmed military targets'. I say that this innate risk must be taken into account, wars must not be whitewashed as squeaky-clean 'precision strikes' against just the buddies. There is no 'sci fi precision' killing just combatants, there is no 'literally every single casualty is military' outside a propaganda reel.

I don't think even Hegseth would disagree with me here, if he were being honest.

It appears the Trump administration has completely surrendered the propaganda war. All the MSM including the Wall Street Journal is assuming the administration doesn't know what they're doing and the war is hopelessly lost, and that everyone at the DoD is murdering war criminals who killed an ever-increasing number of schoolchildren and nothing else while ignoring the Straits of Hormuz because no one even thought of it. Maybe they just figure there's no way to win that one so they're not bothering. Only way out for them is a decisive victory in the real war, and honestly, I can't see one -- there's no Iranian organization able to take advantage and revolt, so without troops on the ground, there's no way to take down the regime or even force them to the table for real.

There's Iranian doctors purportedly reporting that literally every single casualty they've seen is non-civilian

I've only seen reporting going the other way, that a significant amount of the casualties are civilian. Presumably the source is also "Iran" and it's being accepted at face value, because what other sources are there at the moment, really?

because what other sources are there at the moment, really?

None. Even "independent" news are required to toe the Iranian party line as a condition on being allowed into the country.

Not here to argue either point but what’s the source on these precision claims?

Pretty big warfare development if true!

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