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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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It's not a Kafka trap, it's an army sitting outside a castle building siege weapons shouting "when these are done are we'll kill you all with these weapons." You attack before they are done, and "wow that was fucking close."

Alternatively, it's seeing a big fortress, choosing to attack it directly from the front, taking heavy casualties, failing to take the fortress and then going "Whew, we sure took heavy casualties but if we had waited longer for them to improve their defenses then we would have lost even harder" while failing to consider the possibility of attacking from a less defensible angle or even avoiding the fortress entirely.

Iran is an aggressor and has been for decades, they are very upfront and explicit about some aspects of it, and other aspects are very well understood by those paying attention (like cyberattacks, proxies).

This is not North Korea that utilizes some strategic ambiguity for face saving purposes.

Iran and its proxies have gotten very good at using gaps in Western cultural thinking to engage in violence without triggering an immune response.

Ultimately this is a defensive war and needs to be modeled as such - Iran is an attacker who is attacking now, was attacking previously, and stated they will attack again in the future.