What do these people want from us?

Luke O'Neil

12 Mar 2026 • 12 min read

Says here in the newspaper that the U.S. was in fact responsible for the strike on an elementary school in Minab that killed 175 people. Most of them children. So I guess everyone can believe what was always obvious this whole time now. Despite the president and many others lying by suggesting they had bombed themselves. With the kind of missile that we use and that they do not have. For some reason. Who can ever know the devious mind of the perfidious Mohammedan I suppose. So mysterious.

What do these people want from us?

I know one thing.

I'm very sorry about the therapy those pilots are going to need one day.

On shooting and crying from 2024:

The way what is happening right now in Gaza is treated in much of the media is no different. Think of how difficult it must be for the bulldozer driver to roll his terrible machine over the bodies of the living and the dead alike.

I imagine it must be hard to do so much killing. I certainly do not believe I could do it. I imagine that would take a toll on a person. Engaging in mass murder. Torture. Slaughter. It's something Frantz Fanon saw in his treatment of French torturers in Algeria. It's something even fucking Heinrich Himmler knew. Murdering women and children is a difficult thing for a man to do. Most men anyway. It must nevertheless be done of course so what if there were a way to depersonalize it? To remove the intimacy of it? To industrialize it?

To the point where it is no longer one human being killing another human being it is simply the maintenance and operation of a vast machinery. Insert ammunition on one end and it spits out corpses on the other.

"Sean Parnell, the chief spokesman for the Pentagon, said Tehran was growing 'increasingly desperate, deliberately positioning missile and drone launchers in densely populated civilian neighborhoods, near distribution centers, and inside residential areas.'" the Times reported.

"'This is a blatant and intentional tactic: using innocent Iranian civilians as human shields,' Mr. Parnell wrote on social media. 'We’ve seen this cowardly strategy before — it’s no accident.'"

Well there's one cowardly strategy I can think of on display here that we've seen before but it's not the one he means.

"Taken together, the administration’s statements underscore a strategy to try to suggest America’s hands are clean from the deaths of civilians in the war."

In other words:

They bombed themselves.

What a sick fucking joke on all of us and humanity itself. There are no consequence harsh enough for these monsters.

I published five new short pieces at Flaming Hydra yesterday. Here's a related one.

I'll share another longer one down below for paid HW subscribers.

At least 1,300 Iranian civilians have been killed by our bombardment as well as many others around the Middle East where Israel is of course still massacring anyone they can reach.

To be left dead by attacks is the natural state of the Middle Easterner while in the Western culture (also Israel somehow) being killed is a major taboo.

Seven U.S. soldiers have died in this "not really a war" war so far too. Not that I care more about the life of an American more than anyone else but you would think our leaders would.

And all of this for what? What goal has been accomplished? What if anything was the goal in the first place besides just such slaughter? Whose lives have been improved here? Has yours?

I've been thinking about another piece I wrote in 2024 this week.

This is the one story of the world right now. Yes the U.S. election is important (and I still hope Trump loses) and yes climate change is an existential threat. But if we cannot pressure our government to do something as easy as just fucking stop arming and funding a genocide then what hope is there that they will ever do anything much more difficult down the line? (Killing people is easy as I said and saving them is hard). What hope is there that when the climate does finally take an even worse turn that this sort of wanton indifference to human life isn't how we'll start treating everyone? First at the border and then everywhere inside the country. Imperial wars always come home after all. If we can do all of this killing (with zero benefit to our country or our people by the way) then something like Palestine awaits us all in the near future.

Stop this nonsense now. There may be some vestigial instinct within you that hears the words "no war" and thinks it sounds simplistic. The naivety of a child. Children are indeed often stupid but they get this one right from a young age almost every time. It just has to be beaten out of them later on by the supposed sophistication of adulthood.

"Why do we hurt other people?"

"Well uh it's complicated..."

No it's not. Things are almost never as complicated as the bad guys – and there are in fact bad guys – want us to believe.

"A.I. is complicated."

No it's not.

"Trans issues are complicated."

Nope.

"Gaza is complicated."

It's not! Wrong again.

Life is not a prestige drama it’s a network procedural. There’s right and wrong and the bad guy is obvious right away. When it comes to war it's always us.

Here's another fucking thing.

By free Palestine we mean stop bombing them (as a start). By free Iran they mean bomb them.

From 2020 the last time we were about to go to war with Iran:

“I think it is entirely possible that this is going to be a catalyst inside Iran where the people celebrate this killing of Soleimani” Ari Fleischer said on Fox News that night and then Mike Pompeo went on and said “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom” and it occurred to me that the way we talk about the bombing violence we export to other countries is similar to the way we talk about the gun violence that we insist upon inflicting upon our own country in that in both cases it always comes framed in terms of extending freedoms and I suppose that’s true in the sense that a bullet and a bomb do provide their target with a kind of freedom.

Good taste-havers of the week award:

Ok a bunch more from me below for paid subscribers. The latest in Fuck "A.I.", some of the best stuff I read or watched or listened to this week and whatever else I think of in the next hour or two.

Thanks as always for reading. I love you and you will never ever die.

Here's another new one from me. It starts like this:

Persons living or dead

You have to imagine the last guy he ever drank margaritas at the mall with was like what hell Dave? Whole time I thought we were having a few laughs there. Talked mostly about the game. I didn’t know you were thinking all that.