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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   19128 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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War is hell. Mistakes happen.

a move that has degraded America’s ability to protect civilians amid its largest air campaign in decades.

It is not America's job to protect civilians.

“It just points even more to recklessness in this, in the entire planning and execution of this campaign, the fact that they don’t have any idea.”

Only 8 US dead so far. The campaign is not reckless.

At this point I think that the US doctrine should change to using many dumb bombs. And just say - we don't have the capacity to ensure civilian safety in one kilometer away from a military target and let the other government sort it out.

Why not do some victim blaming though - first putting a school next to military base is stupid, operating the school when knowing war is imminent is stupider. Treating it as just another day in paradise is stupider still. Putting a school in former barracks is once again not a smart move. And it is not as if Iran makes sure to give US information where the real juicy targets are.

here are quotes that are from Al Jazeera article (hardly us friendly outlet)

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/3/questions-over-minab-girls-school-strike-as-israel-us-deny-involvement

On Saturday morning, the first day of the school week in Iran, US-Israeli strikes began on the country. Air raids started hitting various sites in the city of Minab and Hormozgan province.

But life in general was proceeding in a near-normal manner; children went to their schools, and photos and videos showed almost normal traffic on the roads surrounding the school.

Returning to the school in Minab, testimony by Shiva Amilairad, a representative of the Coordinating Council of Iranian Teachers’ Trade Unions, to Time magazine indicates that the decision to evacuate the school was made as soon as the US-Israeli attacks began. But, she said, the time between the warning issued by Iranian authorities (after detecting attacks on the city) and the moment the missile struck was far too short, and most parents were unable to reach the school to pick up their daughters.

At some point the best way to keep civilians from harm is not to entangle civilian and military infrastructure together. And what kind of evacuation is sitting in place waiting for parents to pick kids up. Evacuation is get the fuck out of the building and run away.

There should be investigation, and people should be demoted - but it should be for wasting valuable asset and putting the pilot's life and plane at risk for no good reason.

Why not do some victim blaming though - first putting a school next to military base is stupid

This is standard practice, the US has 160 such schools.

Accordingly it is predictable that there are schools on foreign military bases too .

Also Iranians were negotiating in good faith, this happened in the first hours of the war, because you're incapable of good faith, and demands for evacuation are quite disingenuous. How were they to know you're committed to not just attack while negotiating, but to destroying the country and not another Midnight Hammer type surgical strike on nuclear facilities?

All these excuses are slop, as is the tryhard cynicism. I guess the only possible rebuttal you'd be able to recognize is military defeat.

This is standard practice, the US has 160 such schools.

With the benefit of hindsight, this seems like a bad idea to me. Even if it's a base that's not in serious danger of being attacked, it strikes me as a bad precedent.

That being said, if the US were at war, and the enemy attacked a military base and destroyed such a school, I do not think the enemy would deserve any special condemnation for having done so.

There needs to be a principle that -- as far as the rules of war go -- there is nothing necessarily or inherently wrong with an attack that destroys a school if the attack was otherwise legitimate. Anything else encourages the use of human shields.

Also Iranians were negotiating in good faith

I tend to doubt this. Probably there is no way to know for sure either way, but what's your evidence?

The US military maintains a network of schools for service member’s Children. This is the best public(Catholic schools are better) school system in the country going off test scores and is a regular line item in the budget overseen by the DoD- it’s not ad hoc.

This is the best public(Catholic schools are better) school system in the country going off test scores

Citation needed? I'd have expected that small school districts would dominate the top (and bottom) of test score rankings, just because smaller sample sizes (some of which are effectively much smaller than N_students because of sociological clustering) give higher variance, and I'd have expected there to be too many military public schools for the system to qualify as "small".

Though, admittedly, my first quick search for a small-sized tightly-clustered student population didn't support my theory. Only 56% of Los Alamos High School seniors took any AP exams, and only 43% passed at least one? What the hell? Do the good nuclear physicists just not have enough kids?

Small schools may not have the resources/critical mass of advanced students to justify offering a lot of AP classes. I remember having to organize a year-long campaign to convince my high school there was enough student demand to allow one of the teachers to offer an AP art history class. Beyond that we just had the bare minimum AP History, English, and Physics courses. Occasionally a handful of particularly advanced students would get together with a teacher after school to prepare for AP exams when there wasn't an AP class for the subject, but they tended not to do well on the actual tests.

I applaud you (I think my only AP credits may have been Calc AB and BC, because IIRC my otherwise-pretty-good high school didn't yet offer anything else, and I wasn't awesome enough to lobby to fix that), and that's a reasonable theory, but I'd doubt it applies to LAHS: 22 AP Classes (or 23 now, since the AP people added Precalculus), offered at a school with only like 1200 students.

Ok that is strange. Maybe Los Alamos just has shit water or something...

Heh; was that joke intentional? There's a tiny bit of plutonium in the area, and maybe a touch of strontium and/or americium, but at least they swear that the migration of The Hexavalent Chromium Plume is mostly under control and is still a quarter mile away from the nearest county groundwater well, minimum.

Seriously, though, even if some of modern "we will track every nanogram" society's kids aren't being perfectly protected from all of the sins of their "let's just dump shit in a hole in the ground" forefathers, I don't think a few ppb is going to be crippling the minds of double-digit percentages of kids who would otherwise be taking calculus. I guess it's just numbers. Something like half the county works directly for the Labs and a bit over a third of those are masters-degree-or-PhD researchers, but maybe that's enough to make sure LAHS offers a lot of AP classes yet not enough to make sure all the kids are the type who will take them up on the offer.

I love the canyons nearby, so a decade or so ago I briefly considered going to work out there, to try to give my kids some more academic competition while still only having to pay middle-of-nowhere housing prices. Looks like I was overselling it to myself.

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