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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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To sort of echo Daste's recent post, it's remarkable the lack of threads for the ongoing conflict given its historic implications for Culture War, but I'll keep the ball rolling for another update/call to register your predictions:

  • On Friday Donald Trump gave Iran an ultimatum to open the Strait of Hormuz, or else the US will target Iranian civilian energy infrastructure. Israel has enthusiastically supported the ultimatum.
  • Iran has vowed to retaliate against Gulf energy and desalination infrastructure if the US follows through on its threat.

It's very possible the next few days will be a turning point in history. I guess I will register the prediction of Trump TACO given any other alternative is too bad for the world to fathom. Yesterday Iran did enormous damage to the towns in Southern Israel hosting Israeli nuclear infrastructure (which actually does not fall under the oversight of the IEA in contrast with Iran's program to this point). The notion that Iran is incapable of following through with its avowed retaliation is bunk, given the recent strikes on Qatar gas facilities that will have long-term impacts on global supply of natural gas.

So what's going to happen tomorrow? All of the public signals point to Trump making the decision to totally destroy Iranian infrastructure in order to destroy the country. But Iran won't back down because it would be the end of the regime. So who's going to blink?

On Friday

You're a day early. He posted the demand on Truth Social at 3/21/26, 7:44 PM Washington DC time. So we've got another day to go.

to totally destroy Iranian infrastructure in order to destroy the country

planefag on X pointed out that the US has Graphite bombs, which are designed to disrupt transformers without destroying them. So the US could cause power outages with repeated bombings until they decide to stop.