This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Their first plan was to overthrow the government by killing a handful of people in an undeclared war during negotiations. They ended up killing 160 school girls and the theory of the mass spontaneous pro American popular uprising failed spectacularly. Then the strategy morphed into a mass bombing campaign in which a vast amount of munition was wasted. This ended with the largest loss of aircraft in a single day since the Vietnam war and the US missile stockpiles being too depleted to continue. Then there was lots of hype around a land invasion that wasn't feasible and they had to give up on.
Their last face saving measure is that the country that has been three weeks from having nukes for 30 years doesn't have nukes. Never mind that they obliterated and annihilate their nuclear program last year according to themselves.
They are desperately seeking an off ramp and trying to get something they can show as a win.
This is the part that kills me about this.
Iran purposely slaughters 30k protestors: I sleep.
America has outdated targeting data on one bomb out of 30k: Real shit.
It just seems fundamentally unserious. It's impossible for me to take criticism from someone espousing this position as anything other than bad faith. You would need a thousand words of throat-clearing denunciations of the Iranian regime to counter the obvious who/whom.
The same people who sold us the atrocity propaganda before every other war want to sell this fanciful number. I highly doubt they gave us an honest number in this case.
Also, Trump openly admitted that they were armed and financed by the US. If one accepts money and weapons from the enemy to attack the state I have no problem with them being pwnd when their revolution fails
Again and again you've read a headline and not managed to make it to the details.
Trump admitted to sending arms to the Iranian protestors, but those arms never made it to Iran. They were given to the Kurds to pass on, but the Kurds kept them for themselves. Trump says this in the same interview where he admits to sending the arms. He also, as should be blindingly obvious, sent them after the revolution was already underway.
It is completely unacceptable for you to keep spouting such low-effort nonsense. That's not how we do things here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Others have discussed your fixation on the school strike, but as far as I can tell your entire understanding of the conflict comes from propaganda headlines.
That was never a stated goal. You should know that.
There was already a mass spontaneous uprising, and there still is an Iranian dissident movement. If you're actually curious there are plenty of interviews available with Iranian activists who will explain this for you.
No, that was the strategy from the beginning. You can't 'morph' into a bombing campaign, you need to have the bombs and their launch systems already in the region - but besides that, they started bombing on day 1, hour 1, so this is an insane claim.
Sorry, says who? The accuracy of US munitions has been incredible, and 99% struck their intended military targets. 'Wasted' here only makes sense from a strategic perspective of 'we shouldn't be striking Iranian targets to begin with' - in other words, your reasoning is circular. The war is bad because we're wasting munitions, and the munitions are wasted because the war is bad.
Another emotional headline. It's also false. The September 2012 Taliban raid on Camp Bastion destroyed nine aircraft. But you saw the headline somewhere and decided to uncritically repeat it.
This may be an even more ridiculous claim. The number of missiles in US stockpiles is quite literally Top Secret. But I guess you've concluded from all your military expertise that the real reason for the cease-fire was that the US has no weapons left?
I gave an argument against this in my initial response, and you did not address it. Instead, as I've demonstrated, you threw out a bunch of wrong-headed and often simply false claims to back up your emotional reasoning that the war is bad. Maybe you can do better with your next response?
It does have the echo of the totally-not-pro-Russians of yesteryear who were very adamant that the west was giving too much aid to Ukraine, and very evasive about what an 'appropriate' amount of aid was.
More options
Context Copy link
No, it is built on a decades long pattern of wars that have cost trillions, killed millions of people and flooded Europe with migrants. This is just another example of the US trying to wreck a country in the middle east to divide and conquer and the world paying the price.
Regime change was widely talked about in the initial stage of the war. That failed. They were going to save the women through a collapse of the state. The former dictator's son was paraded around because they wanted to topple the government.
Trump has openly admitted that they were funded and armed by the US.
Patriot missiles failing on launch and 8 patriots being fired at a single target isn't impressive. A substantial portion of the US airforce munitions were wasted on a war to replace an Ayatollah with his son.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-04/us-deploys-bulk-of-stealthy-long-range-missile-for-iran-war
A quarter of all tomahawks were fired. They couldn't have gone that much longer without making the US too weak.
This is unfortunately hilarious to me, because my hyper-political family member regularly posts the phrase "Costing trillions, killing millions" on Facebook, often as part of particularly unhinged rants, and it's therefore rather difficult for me to take seriously just due to overexposure.
Contrary to your stance, however, she sees Europe being flooded with migrants as a good thing, because they're so much more virtuous and intelligent and hard-working than the average European national (and, of course, even the worst European native is far superior to any white American!)
More options
Context Copy link
Based on this what would you estimate the odds are that a deal is negotiated and Iran cedes its enriched uranium supply?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sad you mentioned the school girls because people are going to fixate on that and not this, which is a much stronger point
The strikes last year targeted a specific nuclear enrichment base built underground in the mountains that was supposed to be impenetrable to attack. The strikes this year are attacking, among other things, the nuclear enrichment as a whole. They are basically two separate events and the latter does not imply that the former was all propaganda and a lie.
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-prime-time-address-iran-air-strikes-june-21-2025/
"Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror."
"Tonight, I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular military success. Iran's key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are the "160 school girls" supposed to be special in some way?
The fundamental problem that the Iranian regime faces is that even if we take their claims at face value, who are we to care?
They can throw all the shade they like but they still need to convince Rubio, Vance, Et Al. that there is an advantage to the US to be had in not dismissing them out of hand.
Has the number even been verified to any deep degree? I personally don't doubt that a school was hit but it feels like a pretty significant highroll unless they happened to hit an assembly or something.
Not that I am aware of, and even if it were verified I don't think I would care. Much like @Iconochasm above, I find the complaint fundamentally unserious. The Iranian Regime purposefully kills thousands of it's own people and habitually threatens to attack it's neighbors and everybody just accepts this as normal, but the US accidentally kills 160 due to outdated information and suddenly "A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing."?
I don't buy it, and I wouldn't expect Trump, Rubio, Vance, Et Al. to either.
More options
Context Copy link
What, are you suggesting that Iran, leader of the axis of resistance that routinely hides military assets in restricted sites, might... lie for propaganda purposes?
Or exaggerate a real but smaller number of casualties? Or obfuscate if there was a valid military objective moved inside the school during the pre-war dispersals? Or benignly omit any past history or context of the infrastructure that might lead non-psychopaths to believe something nefarious?
Surely not. If you can't believe the government that months prior was killing thousands to over ten thousand citizens in the streets, who can you trust?
More options
Context Copy link
Who cares about exact numbers. One is too much for some, a thousand is just a shrug for the others.
The exact number determines how many martyrs you can justify, right? 160 would mean that up to 2 freedom fighters could securely murder-suicide themselves, but a third would only get about 22% of what he's owed in the afterlife.
On the other hand it is thocratic Muslim country so the number of virgins between them may be less than the body count. In Iran marriage under 13 is allowed in some circumstances.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
A decent portion of the world's population is horrified by America's actions and psychopathic killing.
The big problem for the US is that the US is up to its eyeballs in debt and the US has an oil intensive economy. Since Trump decided to focus on starting wars in the middle east instead of America first there is now an energy crisis that can only be solved by Trump TACO-ing.
To quote our Vice President, I don’t really care.
More options
Context Copy link
A decent portion of the world thinks that the meat comes from the back of Costco and have no understanding of the amount of violence and stuff that modern society is built upon as a brief island in the chain. Without even getting into the old 'if X regime found themselves in the position of dominance occasional civilian casualties would be a tiny fraction of what they'd immediately, enthusiastically got up to'
More options
Context Copy link
A decent portion of the world's population apparently also would have demanded the Allies sue for peace during WWII as soon as the first civilians were killed during D-Day, or the first reports of a soviet atrocity, or the first news that the Japanese on the mainland were struggling with food insecurity.
Look, every single civilian death is a goddamn tragedy, and the US military can and should do better, particularly in the opening salvos of a campaign against a long-hostile regime. But unlike the Iranian regime, the US appears to be trying to only target military and military-use infrastructure, and I refuse to accept special pleading as valid in this case.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link