Shakes
11hr ago
Wars where the losing party refused to surrender long past the point of inevitable defeat:
- Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance
- Nazi Germany 1944-1945
- Jewish resistance after the fall of the Second Temple
- Siege of Nanking 1864 Taiping Rebellion
Wars where the winning party (or parts thereof) thought they were losing, or going to face much greater resistance than they in fact did:
- Israel before the Six Days War
- Gulf War 1991
- US after Gettysburg
- Battle of Jutland
It is really not that hard for the losing party to be delusional or the winning party to be dismayed.
Here, the US has total air naval and space superiority, Iranian strength is diminishing, Iran’s economy is collapsing, America’s is almost unaffected, Iran suffers catastrophic military losses, America suffers almost none at all, trade through the Straits is picking up and Iran is becoming weaker and weaker at stopping it. And yet a large part of the commentariat is not just skeptical but actively reversing cause and effect or reading unvarnished Iranian propaganda. Not to put too fine a point on this but: it’s really not hard to imagine a lot of people believing something that is demonstrably false.
Shakes
11hr ago
>America lost
>America’s leverage is growing
>This is bad news for everyone but America
What are we doing here what is the argument.
But since they were not a threat to anyone before the war outside of zionist expansion plans
You can just say America is winning and you wish they lost because you’re on Iran’s side. That’s more respectable than whatever this is.
Shakes
14hr ago
Yes, the fact that the MOU was adapted on the 14th means that this was happening in the period of negotiations leading up to the MOU.
Furthermore, Iranian drones targeting UAE ships is evidence against UAE paying a massive bribe.
“Four sources familiar with the matter” is like a bad parody of a source, because it could mean anything. But if we want to take it seriously: the story still doesn’t prove anything close to what you are suggesting.
Shakes
17hr ago
How are you going to rely on Reuters to prove your argument if they themselves don’t have the proof? You said UAE paid a $10 Billion dollar bribe and now have to admit even Reuters doesn’t know that for sure.
The likeliest explanation is the one I supplied: this two-month-old story was part of the negotiations over the MOU, which means Iran never got that money back because the deal fell through. That would also explain why there’s no follow-up reporting anything close to what you alleged: it never happened.
I’m not the expert on their missile cities so I’m deferring to the Intel guys on this. How would we know? It would require a pretty serious understanding of how their tunnels work.
Please look into “Deep Sensing” technology, also called “Ground Penetrating Radar”. For example:
I think one difference that surfaces in these discussions over and over again is our different priors about military technology. My sense is that the public thinks of satellites like giant cameras in space, and so they ascribe to satellites all the limitations that cameras have. I believe this understanding is 30-50 years out of date.
I think a lot of people are interpreting the American military’s posture as empty bluster because they don’t realize how good the tech is. Thousands of satellites in space, a few dozen sites that need monitoring. Iran is not invisible to us.
Shakes
17hr ago
This is an unfalsifiable position. “If your argument was right, it would convince me. But I won’t allow it to convince me, therefore it can’t be right.” It could simply be the case that a large number of people refuse to admit that Iran has lost, which is actually very common in the history of war.
Shakes
1d ago
I'm reasonably optimistic but I agree that that's reasonable skepticism and it may be too soon to count it yet.
The UAE paid Iran $10-20bil to stop its attacks
- This story does not allege that UAE paid Iran, but that it released (was going to release) Iranian money that had been seized during the war
- The government of UAE categorically denied that this even happened
- The original America-Iran MOU would have effectuated the same release as part of any peace deal
- That has not actually happened because the MOU has fallen through
- There is no further reporting that the UAE has subsequently paid billions of dollars to Iran
So this idea that UAE is paying massive bribes to escape Iranian attacks is flatly not true, or at least not verified in anything you have shown here.
Iran is only 9mo away from nukes, per a May Reuters report,
The argument here is that Iran can still produce a nuclear weapon because the unfinished nuclear material is sitting buried underneath the rubble American bombs entombed it in.
This is a silly precis. If the Iranians dig up those tunnels, we can bomb them again. They are at our mercy. "He might have broken my arm, but he didn't really hurt me at all because bones heal."
the Houthis closing Bab al-Mandab Strait
Traffic is still passing Bab al-Mandab, although at reduced levels because of the threats. We will see what the US does.
but you mention random strikes on Shia militants in Iraq
"random strikes"
The Iraqi government is disarming Iranian-backed militias in its territory in concert with Saudi and American forces. What is "random" about that? Do I need to explain why this implies that Iran's influence is shrinking, not growing?
And Iran’s economy is hurting, but we’re not at war with the Iranian people, so this doesn’t really matter.
Your position is that Iran's ability to wage war doesn't depend on its economy?
What are we even doing here?
Shakes
1d ago
You’ve completely confused object and subject. The victory is the agreement to disarm Hamas, not that the BoP is the one announcing it. You can be skeptical of the deal if you want but ignoring the deal to attack the BoP is genuine SVO-SOV level confusion. “What did he mean by this?”
Shakes
1d ago
To concede a minor point, I don’t find it ridiculous to imagine that some Gulf states would be bribing Iran. It would actually be very natural. So I don’t want to come off as pointing and laughing - dismissing.
But it doesn’t really make a difference if they are.
US sanctions and blockades are taking tens or hundreds of billions of dollars out of Iran’s economy.
Iran makes a few billion in bribes.
Iran lets traffic through the strait.
In effect, Iran sells its only possible leverage for pennies on the dollar.
The war can continue indefinitely on those terms: America strangles Iran out while global trade is basically unaffected.
That really only trends in one direction and it’s not an Iranian victory.
Shakes
1d ago
ATACMs are old missiles from 1991 that have been gradually replaced with newer models.
PrSMs are brand new missiles essentially being prototyped tested live on the battlefield.
Shakes
1d ago
The UAE is the worst possible example because they literally flew a cargo plane loaded with billions of dollars in cold hard cash to Tehran to pay the Mullahgeld. The fact that Iran's neighbors are now paying them protection money to use a strait that was previously free is a point for "Iran is winning".
Your source for this is Iranian news outlet Tabnak, which offers as proof two pictures of a plane flying over Tehran.
A bizarre example considering Israel also rejected the deal.
If you would read the article you linked, you would see that Israel rejects the deal because it asks them to make certain withdrawals, and the Board of Peace is making clear that Hamas will be disarmed before Israel has to commit to any such withdrawals.
Again, you keep giving examples that prove the exact opposite of what you intend. The Saudis attacked Iraqi militias because they launched a coordinated attack along with the Houthis on their oil infrastructure, effectively demonstrating that Iran can cripple Gulf oil production relying entirely on proxies hitting the production sites directly should a Hormuz blockade be insufficient.
America attacks Iranian allies, this is proof that Iran could win if they want to... Ok, when should we expect Iran to finally cripple Gulf oil production? Or barring that, since Gulf countries are paying the Iranians bribes, when should we expect Iran's financials to turn around?
It would not be particularly hard in any case for the Iranians to turn said HEU into a bomb regardless but I personally think the odds they race for a bomb are actually pretty low,
Iran can produce a bomb whenever they want to, they just don't want to.
The deal Iran cut with Oman includes a 5-7% toll, a ban on "Zionist shipping" and an exemption for the Chinese, hence why the oil price is rising again. If we count confirmed Mullahgeld payments like the UAE's moneyplane then not only will Iran toll the strait but they have already tolled the strait so even by your definition Trump lost.
You are just repeating the worst sort of slop Iranian propaganda while calling me credulous. Do you want to defend the position that, any day now, "The Strait would become about as profitable as Alphabet ($132B in 2025)"? Can we make a bet on this? Please?
It seems like Iran is just months away from tolling the strait, months away from building a nuke, and months away from winning the war. Just like they were a few months ago. Curious why they haven't won yet.
Shakes
1d ago
No matter, Google and ChatGPT have everything cached anyways:
4 months ago you wrote
I suspect they [America] weren't prepared for the most obvious of Iranian responses - blocking the Strait. If it were easy to rectify the block, the US would have just done it weeks ago. They don't have enough troops or hardware in the area; an aircraft carrier was put out of commission ((Russian intel-aided) missiles/drones) and had to leave the theater; the replacement aircraft carrier left Norfolk three days ago and will take another 10+ days to arrive near Iran. The US is lacking popular support at home for the deployments that would be big enough to break Iran militarily, Trump's only diplomatic gift is to offend allies, and at the same time they can't just leave either, because leaving right now is tantamount to surrendering the petrodollar without a real fight and losing hegemonic credibility.
Two months ago you wrote:
This is what your country's parties only offering up two midwit incompetents to choose from gets you. Anyone who had studied Iran would have known that they would grab the world economy by the balls by blocking the Strait.
A month ago you wrote:
Iran's strength is worrying, IMO. They hold the strongest hand of cards. We won't get any accurate information on the damage done (aided by Russian satellites) to US bases and forces, but I suspect it's significant, given how unafraid and bold Iran has seemed lately.
And you wrote:
That's what I'm saying. They have the upper hand and can't be forced into submission.
Is it still the case that Iran has the strongest hand of cards because they hold the world economy by the balls and America wasn't prepared for this most obvious response? Does Iran still have the upper hand?
Shakes
1d ago
How is Iran going to rebuild their manufacturing when we can bomb it whenever we want and they are running out of money?
Iran's not California, they can rebuild and rebuild quickly.
Cute, but California’s GDP is ~10x Iran’s. There are military bases in San Diego with more military capacity than Iran.
Shakes
1d ago
We decimated Iran’s military capacity and what little remains is dwindling. Their influence throughout the Middle East is being extirpated at every level. They will never have nukes. They will either surrender their foreign policy ambitions, or they will wither away unable to do anything to change their fate.
I think we’re making progress here. A few months ago war critics told me that Iran was winning outright and would emerge stronger than ever. Now the argument is that we’re somehow at the status quo, with a concession that what America achieved was not “really a big deal” and could have been done a different way.
Shakes
1d ago
- Iranian influence purged from Iraq
- Hamas disarmed
- Iran’s leverage over Straits discredited
- Iran’s drone manufacturing industry devastated
All that’s left is for America to collect Iran’s nuclear dust. Or not, we can keep it buried under the mountains forever. Either way we completely decimated one of America’s greatest adversaries, and we did it for cheap.
Shakes
1d ago
The war is still going on. Iran obviously was pretty badly damaged, but the Iranian regime wins if the US gives up. If they toll the strait (with Oman's connivance or not), they win pretty big. If they just retain the HEU and keep the US from interfering in the future, they win; they'll start their nuclear program back up and nuke Tel Aviv if they can't restrain themselves... New York, D.C., Haifa, and Tel Aviv if they can hold out until they can get more bombs and some really long range ICBMs.
Yeah, if America surrenders for no good reason Iran would technically win. Why would America do that?
Trump could also do something stupid like agree that Iran and Oman toll the strait in order to get a deal. He really likes deals.
Trump could also shoot someone on Fifth Avenue I guess. A meteor could fall on the Pentagon.
Iran's economic situation almost doesn't matter. As long as they can keep the IRGC running, they can absorb a LOT of civilian hardship, and they've got 90 million civilians to feed into that fire.
War runs on economics, you actually can't continue fighting a war when your economic base runs out. When Iran is locked out global trade they are not going to scrounge under the cushions to keep the war going indefinitely, they are going to lose.
resume killing officials until either the regime falls apart or whoever is on top has both the power and the will to make a deal they'll actually follow
This is currently America's strategy.
Shakes
1d ago
From an essay endorsed by Pete Hegseth on twitter:
The victor gets to define victory.
[...]
For Trump, a win is to squash Iran’s capacity to destabilize the region, creating space for regional collective security, reconstruction, and economic resilience, providing a long-term deterrent against a resurgent regime. From the Abraham Accords to the work of the Board of Peace, and major economic initiatives like IMEC and Tripp, the expectation is that the real measure of Iranian defeat is if these initiatives flourish. That’s the theory of victory.
Critics say that Iran is winning because they now control the Straits of Hormuz. In reality it appears that trade in the Gulf is returning to pre-war levels as it risks the Straits or bypasses them entirely:
Energy Resilience. Only a year ago, the Iranian regime could threaten to shut down up to a third or more of the world’s oil exports. Even today, while fighting in the Strait of Hormuz still lingers, that is no longer true. Regional exports are rebounding, by some estimates up to two-thirds of pre-war levels. The UAE, for example, is already exporting at 85% of pre-war levels.
Critics say that the Iran War has driven America's allies to shake off American leadership. In fact we see the opposite:
Reconstruction. Recently, the Board of Peace announced, over the objections of Iran, an unprecedented agreement to disarm Hamas, a precursor to the reconstruction of Gaza. The board also announced a pilot reconstruction project in Gaza to begin in November. Further, the U.S. is leading a trilateral framework with Israel and Lebanon and aggressively working to normalize relations with Syria.
America recently carried out strikes in Iraq, working with the Saudi military, to push out Iranian militias, and is now concluding multi-billion dollar business deals:
Economic integration. The U.S. and Iraq recently announced over $60 billion in future economic deals. Washington also trumpeted an additional multi-million dollar investment in TRIPP in Armenia.
[...]
Security Cooperation. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia recently took action against Iran-backed militias in Iraq. Saudi Arabia just announced the establishment of a multinational coalition to provide maritime security in the Red Sea. Israeli recently expanded defense cooperation with the UAE.
Meanwhile, how's America's blockade going?
Iran’s oil exports stall and Kharg Island idles under US blockade
No tankers have loaded at Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil export terminal, for at least a week, according to shipping and satellite data providers, suggesting the renewed US naval blockade has brought Tehran’s crude sales to a halt.
Washington reimposed a naval blockade on Iranian ports in mid-July after an interim deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz collapsed. Kharg Island, which is critical to Iran’s oil industry, fell idle on July 31, according to ship tracking company Kpler and consultancy Energy Aspects.
It's possible that Iran has been unable to successfully sell it's oil for even longer:
United Against Nuclear Iran (Uani), a Washington-based lobbying group which tracks Iranian oil shipments, said it had not observed any tanker laden with Iranian crude successfully leaving the Gulf since July 12.
Iran is still able to make money from oil tankers that left the Gulf during the last ceasefire and are currently in Asia, but that crude will all be sold soon and Iran will start to be squeezed even more, unless they come to a deal with the US or somehow engineer a military miracle.
Iran is facing inflation of ~87.9%, which is to say, the average Iranian has lost almost half of their wealth compared to this point last year:
Iran’s point-to-point inflation rate reached 87.9% in July, while annual inflation surged to 66% and the spring unemployment rate rose to 9.1%. Meanwhile, escalating medical expenses have forced an increasing number of patients to seek care at under-resourced public health centers.
According to the latest report by the Statistical Center of Iran, Iranian households spent an average of 87.9% more on an identical basket of goods and services compared to the same month last year. The agency also reported an annual inflation rate of 66%, up from 62% in June. Worldnews analysis
How's Iran's Nuclear Program doing? The New York Times put out this report today concluding that Iran's program is "slowed but not stopped":
[https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/07/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-program.html](Trump Vowed to Thwart Iran’s Nuclear Program. Here’s Where That Stands.)
However, under the headline, here's where things stand:
Because Iran has barred U.N. inspections of its most sensitive nuclear sites — a key part of any eventual peace deal — the precise fate of its highly enriched nuclear fuel is unknown. And despite strikes on three key nuclear sites in 2025 and 2026, Tehran appears to have retained a stockpile of enough near weapons-grade fuel to quickly develop as many as 10 nuclear bombs, according to U.N. inspectors.
Iran has enough nuclear material to manufacture 10 nuclear bombs? Wow, what are they going to do with it?
The Isfahan complex was heavily damaged during U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran in June 2025. Currently, two facilities to convert or enrich uranium remain significantly damaged, but the stockpile likely remains there, according to the Iran Nuclear Monitor, which runs an ongoing assessment of the country’s nuclear capabilities.
American intelligence agencies have determined that Iran could get to the stockpile, through a very narrow access point, although it is under constant U.S. surveillance.
America destroyed Iran's capability to "convert or enrich" that uranium, and then locked the uranium that remains deep under collapsed tunnels that can be bombed again as soon as Iran tries to retrieve it.
Iran long considered its deeply buried nuclear enrichment plant at Fordo its best-protected and most advanced site. It was badly damaged, and potentially rendered inoperable, by 12 massive bombs in the June 2025 attacks, according to U.S. intelligence assessments last year.
The sites that were bombed last year appear to remain inoperable, which is to say that, after America bombed them, they have not been used.
(The New York Times then concludes that this is both a significant setback and also doesn't actually matter at all. Well, that's what I heard three months ago. I'm sure that three months from now, people will still be saying that Iran can build a nuke anytime it wants to, it just doesn't want to.)
So here's where we're at now:
- Iran is suffering an acute economic crisis and is further away from acquiring nukes than it was before the war
- Iran's leverage over the Strait of Hormuz is shrinking
- Iran's military strength is waning
- Trade in the Gulf and across the global economy is continuing almost uninterrupted
- America's leverage in the Middle East is growing, not shrinking
Trump, Iran, and Oman are apparently on the cusp of announcing another deal to reopen the Strait. But it increasingly doesn't matter: Iran needs to make a deal because their economic crisis is so acute, while America and the rest of the Gulf can shrug it all off as increasingly a minor inconvenience.
Trump won. Trump was right from the beginning. The Iran war is below-the-fold news now.
Iran will never toll the strait, Iran will never bring the global economy to its knees, Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Iran cannot defeat America militarily or overcome the blockade. The Iranian regime will eventually fall, or make significant concessions, or surrender, or continue to limp along losing strength and relevance -- it doesn't matter which. Either way, Iran loses, America wins, the writing is on the wall.
Trump won. Iran lost.
Shakes
2d ago
You said something very unusual and, when I asked for elaboration, proceded to defend a different statement.
Now you want me to defend my position when I have not advanced any.
Ok.
Here are some things I use AI for every day:
- Spanish practice, translating tweets
- Complicated queries (“what’s that movie I saw when I was five that…”)
- Recipe substitutions (“I’m one egg short”)
- Collating recommendations (“List all the histories of China that… but that also…”)
- Debugging and troubleshooting
- Quick logo design, photoshop replace
Here are some things I know my friends have used AI for:
- Coding apps around which startups were founded
- Translating whole books
- Processing a breakup text
- Writing a breakup text
- Job and interview prep
- Summarizing lawsuits, business transactions, bills, laws
- Writing monetized content
- Diagnosing novel health problems without going to the doctor / ER (hemorrhoids, sprained arm)
- Processing email, digesting messages
Here are some things I have seen AI being used for on the internet:
- Art, Television, Entertainment
- Solving novel mathematical problems
- Hacking state-of-the-art security systems
- Decoding burned papyri
- Prototyping federal landmarks
- X-ray analysis
- Drug discovery
- Satellite image processing
These are all multi-billion dollar industries. Translation alone is probably $100B+, dare I say even more if people get over the privacy concerns and we have babelfish auto-translation wearables.
Nobody has been able to explain any benefits of AI to you? What on earth are you talking about?
I’m not even sure what a charitable explanation looks like. Maybe you just got out of a coma? Maybe all your previous interlocutors couldn’t speak English? Maybe you are blind and use text-to-speech and have missed a lot of news?
You didn’t just stop there. You said that data centers themselves have no benefits for regular people. Need I point out that we would not be having this argument without data centers. Data centers are not some new category of invention. They are large networks of computers specialized for processing data. We would not have militaries or banks without data centers. We would lose a lot of industry and a lot of farms.
Now, if the statement is just that nuclear is more important than data centers, well, that’s debatable, that’s fair, I can squint and I can see the case. Energy is pretty important. Nuclear would probably be even more transformative if it hadn’t been limited by so much regulation. Nuclear and data centers, it’s hard to say which is more important, the water or the glass.
Now not all of these changes have been positive, and if you want to we can debate whether the good outweighs the bad. (I lean toward the good.)
And there has been a lot of hyperbole about what AI is ultimately capable of up to the belief that it could destroy the world. (I say not.)
And there are a lot of practical problems that merit a lot of caution, and I don’t like the way AI art makes everything uglier either.
But if your position is that AI has done nobody any good and nobody can explain to you how it has… I’m not even sure how to parse that. I think the most charitable explanation has to be that you’re just strawmanning, because that makes a lot more sense than the ignorance otherwise required. There are wars being fought on intelligence produced by AI, financial markets are being optimized by inputs from AI, satellites in space, computer chip factories, farming schedules, weather forecasts.
You are benefiting from AI in hundreds of small ways right now even if you don’t touch a chatbot.
If we went back five years and described this technology people would call it fantastical. It’s changing the way we understand language and thought itself, this is before we get robots and self-driving cars and satellites to blanket the earth in WiFi. The worst AI slop applications are wildly more impressive than what was thought possible even a few years ago. Science fiction.
And now that we have a miraculous machine that can turn dirt into thought we have a political movement that wants to stop this because they don’t like data centers.
Actually I don’t think that’s it at all, I think they’re just worried, with a lot of justification, and data centers are just how you attack this thing that’s changing everything.
Unfortunately, though, all that’s going to do it make this world-changing technology more expensive, and therefore rare, and therefore concentrate its power in the hands of the few.
It turns out it’s a property of math, you string enough transformers together with enough data and computers can translate into arbitrary languages and draw pictures and write code and do math. There’s not really any stopping it, the question is whether we can harness this change for good or will passively sit and let it change us for the worse. Because the genie’s not going back into the model.
Anyways, I hope that the above goes some way toward clarifying my position, which I hope is not too bloomer or too doomer. But when I hear that you can’t think of anything good to come from AI, I wonder if you’re doing yourself a disservice, because all that belief is conditioning you for is passively accepting or even resisting changes that you could actively harness to your own great good.
Shakes
2d ago
IIRC, this woman was already a serial fabulist who my aunt had caught before in other lies. It didn’t take much for the scales to drop when my aunt realized that the diagnosis was a little too convenient.
Shakes
3d ago
If she challenged the lie, they would have doubled down. When she repeated the lies, credulously, they thought a lot more critically about them.
I asked you a question about something you said, and you proceeded to defend a different statement. You then claimed that data centers do not have “solid returns that would benefit the common consumer directly,” and that nobody can come up with any. Now that I point out that this is an obvious strawman, you become hostile accuse me of bad faith.
This is ridiculous.
This is besides the fact that it appears you appear to misunderstand simile. At least, when people say “opposition to data centers is like opposition to nuclear,” it is not relevant for you to assert that nuclear is more important than data centers.
I’m happy to continue this conversation, but I’m confused as to whether: 1) You want to defend the notion that AI is useless 2) You want to defend the separate notion that AI is less important than nuclear 3) You want me to introduce some other opinion so you can argue against that instead of having to defend your own contradictions
Shakes
3d ago
Data Centers you point to with the returns that basically boil down to 'Big Businesses need it, LLMs are magic bro, trust me, we've got to beat China!'
> is it a strawman or an argument
> "it's a good argument sir"
> look inside
> it's a strawman
We wouldn't be having this conversation right now without data centers.
Why not? We can bomb whatever we want.
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