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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 8, 2024

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Your inability to comprehend the Iranian government’s underlying motivation and the causal chain that brought us to the present situation is remarkable.

They’re not secretive about it. I’m making no claim about their ideology that you can’t hear from their own mouths. Do you think they support Hamas and Hezbollah just for fun?

If I’m understanding you, you somehow think that the Israelis could simply choose to be friends with Iran by deciding to stop being friends with the Saudis and/or the US. Just a simple switching of teams. Iran and Israel’s enmity is because Israel has chosen to side with the Arabs and the US against Iran. The Saudis and the Iranians are rivals primarily over oil and longstanding ethnic rivalries. Iran and the US are at odds primarily because we support the Saudis and interfere with Iran’s ambitions. The Iranian regime’s particular brand of Islam is not the most significant driving force behind their ambitions in the region. The Iranian regime is just a standard mostly rational actor jockeying for power in its region, where nearly everyone has united against them. Iran would welcome Jewish allies against the Arabs if they would offer.

That’s my honest attempt to characterize what you’ve written.

Did you come up with these views on your own, or is there somewhere this is a common view?

Roughly correct.

We just disagree. Geopolitics is bigger than what the masses shout.

The Jews controlling territory in the Middle East is an eyesore for many Iranians but it’s a small piece to the bigger regional hegemony.

You’re delusional if you think “eyesore for many Iranians” is the belief of the Iranian elites currently in control of the Iranian government. It’s not about what the average Iranian thinks (and for Arabs, the man on the street is way more against Israel than the governments typically are).

It’s not that we disagree, it’s that you’re simply unwilling to acknowledge a huge body of generally uncontested evidence regarding the Iranian regime’s stance towards Israel.

You think the “regional hegemony” bit supersedes the “Iran is controlled by an aggressive ideology that opposes Sunnis and Israel” without being able to acknowledge that this results from the present Iranian regime making particular choices, because the situation was quite different in 1978 under a different leader with very different beliefs guiding his choices.

This has been an interesting experience in presenting clear facts I’ve never had anyone else contest before and witnessing a clear refusal to acknowledge reality as it is.

I have no idea what evidence I could present, even in theory, to change your mind.

I guess it’s probably related to the flaw, typically seen on the left, of “religious people don’t really believe their ideology such that it is the driving force behind their actions.” Some kind of typical mind fallacy.