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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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I shoot at you. In retaliation, you throw a grenade into a crowd. I knew you had the grenade... who is responsible for the grenade damage?

In other words, yes, this is still American hyper-agency syndrome.

You are. You provoked a psycho (threatened his life, really) who in turn became hyper aggressive. The psycho is also responsible, but you absolutely carry part of the blame. This was a predictable result of your actions, and you did nothing to mitigate the harm you knew (or should have known) would occur.

Your position denies agency to the "psycho", and in doing so makes hostage-taking a perfectly reasonable strategy.

I shoot at you. In retaliation, you throw a grenade into a crowd. I knew you had the grenade... who is responsible for the grenade damage?

If you shoot at me from far outside my reach, and the only people I can reach to hit back are some of your friends who happen to be very economically important to you, then yeah, you're the one responsible for your friends getting hit. Your crying about them being attacked is roughly equivalent to hypothetical Iranian crying that you parked your forces out of range, or are using stealth tech.

If you shoot at me from far outside my reach, and the only people I can reach to hit back are some of your friends who happen to be very economically important to you,

It is worth pointing out that in case the "friends" are also holding the gun, helping you reload the gun and hosting a bunch of your employees who help aim and fire the gun.

No, they were not. That's kinda the point; Iran fired at those who were and those who were not.