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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 5, 2026

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Brushing your teeth every day, applied to Iran's nuclear ambitions, would mean that we have to go bomb a uranium deposit or something every few years. Fine, whatever.

Trump seems to be attempting to extract a single tooth in the belief that it will remove the chance of cavities in all our other Iranian teeth, which will not work and is a pretty deranged dental philosophy.

Destruction of the Iranian regime would be the tooth extraction in this analogy, yes. Or filling a cavity. This seems basically precise.

You still have to brush your teeth in this analogy.

Using America’s military resources to quash the plans and designs of America’s enemies on a regular basis is good military hygiene. If you have to repeat it multiple times it doesn’t mean you’ve failed, if you think that you’ve failed to understand a huge portion of the spectrum of military action.

This has happened basically since time immemorial.

As someone generally against nation building / neoconservatism, Iraq & Afghanistan really mind-raped a lot of westerners into thinking every military action in the greater Middle East is either some expression of goy-inservitude or some hopeless forever war secretly backed by corporations.

This, plus World War 2 has clouded the mind of many westerners to think that the only good use of military is 100% non ambiguous decisive victory against an aggressive peer opponent.

Sometimes you really can just kill a bunch of people and knock your enemies down a peg. It’s super Lindy.

Yes. Grandparent is espousing the extremely common fallacy that "anything which is not a permanent fix is not worth doing".

Most commonly seen in opponents of taking Ozempic.

"But if you stop taking it you'll gain the weight back".

"Okay, but what if I don't stop taking it".

ChatGPT tells me closest match is the Nirvana Fallacy.