This Week I Thought – 06 March 2026

This week I thought a lot about things I didn’t really want to have to think about.

Last week the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran just as, at least according to officials from Oman which was mediating the talks, they were nearing agreement on many of the US’ demands, including that they degrade their current stockpiles of nuclear material to “the lowest level possible”.

It hasn’t exactly been easy to figure out what is going on or why, especially seeing as figures within the US government keep seeming to contradict themselves. Code named “Operation Epic Fury”, it is a war that isn’t a war, but is rather, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson: “a very specific, clear mission and operation” – even though both Donald Trump and Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth have called it a war. It a war, sorry an ‘operation’ that was prompted either by, as US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, says the knowledge that Israel was going to attack Iran forcing the US’ hand because they knew that should Israel attack Iran, Iran would retaliate and attack American forces, or by Donald Trump’s “feeling” that Iran was going to attack – or as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt so ‘newsspeakishly’ put it: “his feeling “based on fact” that Iran posed an imminent and direct threat”. It is also an ‘operation’ that was at first supposed to only last 3 to 4 days, then it became a week, then 3 to 4 weeks, 4 to 6 weeks, possibly several months, and now “until the US’ objectives are met”. What those objectives are is also unclear, at first it was said to simply be about stopping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, then it became about regime change, then “unconditional surrender”. Jon Alterman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says he’s not sure “[the US are] committed to any particular outcome”. And all the while we prepare for record fuel price hikes, and an increase in food prices and overall inflation.

The ‘fog of war’ is also especially thick when it comes to this conflict. 1991’s ‘Operation Desert Storm’ saw the first real live TV coverage of a war with live images of missile strikes and night-vision technology, it also inadvertently led to the birth of the ’24-hour news cycle’. While we’re still seeing the news channels flooded with content about the situation in the Middle East (to the exclusion of just about anything else that is happening in the world) there seems to be a lot less clarity about what exactly is happening. Reports are being filed based on statements from government’s rather than actual investigations, we’re seeing a lot of “Israel says…”, “The United States says…”, or “Iran says…” without any investigation into the veracity of what any of them are saying. Different new agencies are telling us different things, and where Twitter was once a wonderful tool for keeping on top of the news by following what is being said by verified people ‘on the ground’, with X’s new ‘blue tick’ system you instead no longer know who to trust, and I’m not the only person who seems to have noticed a throttling of content to do with the situation by ‘the algorithm’.

Don’t even get me started on all the AI content being shared and how hard it is these days to ‘trust what you see’.

I am not trying to take sides and the only thing I know for sure is that I am glad that I am no longer in charge of the news department because it is hard enough trying to stay on top of everything that is happening, trying to make sense of why exactly it is happening, and at the same time wishing that I could just ignore it completely and live my life in blissful ignorance. I once again found myself this week thinking back to an interaction I witnessed involving a professor at Rhodes University whose daughter had died in a car accident. He was sitting in a coffee shop and when offered the newspaper by a lady who had just finished reading it, said to her something along the lines of (I have to paraphrase because I can’t be sure of his exact words): “no thank you, the world is depressing enough without looking at those things!”.

Some of the justifications for bombing Iran also got me thinking about the importance of a so-called ‘World Police’ (as flawed a model as policing can be). The problem comes when one country decides to elect themselves to that position, adopting an Imperialist, paternalistic view of the world where they believe they know what is best and they should be in charge of ensuring that things are they way they believe they should be. The United Nations was supposed to fulfill the role of an impartial body that could police the world but it was also flawed from the start and has increasingly become not much more than a toothless dog – how though was it ever expected to get the whole world to work together, not even Disney’s fairytales work that way anymore …

Social media of course also needs some kind of policing, though there too the companies that own the platforms are doing a horrible job of handling it. This week Future Media News posted a story about a Namibian father who had assaulted his child, along with a video which I haven’t seen, but which Facebook apparently decided went against their Community Guidelines. They therefore limited access to the Future Media News Facebook page and, in their wisdom, seeing as I am a member of that page, also to my private Facebook page as well as the Urban Friction Facebook page. Now I’m not saying that the video would necessarily have been an easy one to watch, or one that many people would have wanted to watch, it was posted as a work of journalism and should therefore have been seen as such. The fact that Meta locked up multiple different, and often completely unrelated, accounts because of a video they could not view as having been posted in the context it was, was made painfully ironic to me when I came across an article about how their new, dystopian, Ray-Ban smart glasses are reportedly recording everything their wearers are seeing, with teams of thousands of moderators in Kenya having to watch footage of people “using the toilet, undressing, and engaging in intimate acts” – all of it happening without the users knowledge or consent.

Of all the things I thought this week though perhaps the funniest was prompted by a story I saw just this evening about a local economist claiming that the “increase in sin tax on alcohol and tobacco products is expected to discourage consumption because prices will be expensive”. This is an economic theory, much like ‘trickle-down economics’, that seems to work really well in a textbook but is completely shattered when put into practice. There has never been any trickle-down and the price-elasticity of demand for cigarettes and alcohol doesn’t hold up to the reality of addiction – when I smoked I distinctly remember saying how I would quit smoking when the price hit a certain level, then when the price hit a new level, and then a new level, and a new level, and a new level. And when it comes to alcohol consumption, even those who are not addicted will be forgiven for not cutting back on their consumption based even just on the content of the first few paragraphs of this week’s column…