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Notes -
Iran has allegedly mined the strait of Hormuz
I've seen a lot of discussion online about whether or not Iran would mine the strait, and it looks like it's happening.
I'm curious as to what is driving this. My understanding is that the Iranian military is structured so that military units can operate with a lot of autonomy if the chain of command breaks down. Is this a small, but official action, or is it the action of units who are operating with what they have in the absence of official orders?
What are the global economic impacts of mining the strait? I tangentially work in insurance, and talking to the Actual Insurance Guys, it seems like this is probably just as bad as regular missile attacks, if not worse. Do commercial ships have any way to protect themselves against mines, other than "don't be where the mines are"?
I've also been seeing vague rumblings in the news that non-Israeli Mideast nations may materially contribute to the conflict. Does this move the needle?
It seems to me that this represents a pretty significant escalation. While sea mines are not land mines, they are both indiscriminate area denial weapons that have significant risks of civilian casualties that can last long after the end of the conflict that caused their emplacement. They're hard to find and create significant anxiety for anyone who has to traverse the area.
Is this a good strategic move by Iran? I'm not an expert on global geopolitics, but my gut tells me it harms them more than helps them. Fighting a defensive war against the Great Satan put the Iranian government in a very sympathetic position with their neighbors, but shutting down one of the most important economic transit corridors in the world with weapons that most governments find distasteful at best seems like a signal to the region that Iran will drag everyone into the flames along with them. Theoretically, this might pressure those countries to abandon the US, but that's a high stakes choice.
The impossibility of negotiations with the US and Israel. It doesn't really matter if Iranians have coherent command or not, even a midwitted officer can independently realize the payoff matrix here. Israelis will keep killing their leadership because the official Israeli objective is regime collapse or at least degrading Iran to the condition where it can be gradually collapsed with "mowing the lawn" tactics. American negotiators (Kushner, Witkoff) are now known to be a) incompetent and b) represent Israel first, so any possible ceasefire agreements will be immediately exploited to kill Iranians with more freedom of action, like the US has done to Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq after a recent ceasefire agreement.
They don't have moves that improve their situation left, sans imposing costs on the global and regional economy and hoping to provoke a strategically unsound concession via international pressure on the US&Israel, to genuinely win time and reestablish deterrence. It's a pretty absurd bet, especially seeing as neither Israel nor the US are directly harmed by the closure of Hormuz Strait and consider giving Iranians room to develop nukes (or even maintain a ballistic missile program) unacceptable. It's also arguably backfiring with GCC countries (though this is largely irrelevant as they have little offensive capability beyond hosting American forces and allowing the use of their airspace, which they've been doing anyway).
I mean. They could voluntarily reform themselves into a peace-loving liberal democracy. They could even ally themselves to the US outright, or even to Israel!
And I know, I know, they're not gonna, it is to all intents and purposes as much of a ridiculous fantasy as "all Iranian weapon stores could spontaneously transform into rose petals overnight", but… on the other hand, no it isn't. These are human beings with moral agency and rational minds. In principle there should be nothing stopping them from just ceasing to be an oppressive warmongering theocracy, and then, miraculously, the rest of the world would stop trying to blow them up.
At some level I don't think we should lose sight of that basic fact when evaluating the decision-making ability of Iranian leadership. There is a right answer here, and although it's completely correct to start from the premise that they are simply never going to pick it, that fact alone should tell us something.
Haha. Holy shit man, get off your high horse. Could you, in principle, reform yourself into a sensible person? This is just laughably tone-deaf in 2026. It's not "the rest of the world" – you don't represent the world, this won't even work as a polite fiction, "the world" is overwhelmingly against this lunacy, and not because the world likes Ayatollahs. You're on the side of a clearly fascist nation committing genocide in the name of a crude ethnosupremacist theological doctrine, you endorse the second tier version of that doctrine due to being too low IQ to understand Christianity without sectarian perversions, you're ruled by millenarian fanatics worse than Shia Muslims. You openly and proudly commit perfidy, you bullshit all the time, and you're boasting of how these interventions are not even designed to create peace-loving liberal democracies but to, like, appropriate muh oil. Your democratically elected representatives are worse than their authoritarians. I'm quite serious, we can just take a glance at "them" and see that Iranian leaders you're murdering look and talk like normal white Europeans from a developed nation, while yours, authorizing those strikes – Hegseth, Trump – are barely human but instead some degenerated swine from a Fromsoft game (and unsurprisingly detest Europe and revel in harming and humiliating it directly and indirectly). There's a limit to how much you can avert your eyes from the nature of your society and people. Or is there?
Then again, I realize that talking to Americans is as pointless as talking to demons from Frieren, you're only responsive to kinetic and financial arguments at this stage.
Believe it or not, "Americans" is also a category of people you aren't allowed to just say "You're a bunch of demons" about. Criticize American culture, foreign policy, and whatever else you hate about America and Americans, sure. But when you want to criticize a group you have to ground it in specific behaviors and traits, not just label everyone in the group as crazystupidevil. (Yes, I'm sure you don't literally think every single American is crazystupidevil , but that's beside the point.)
You've gotten a lot of slack because you've been around a while and as unwilling as you are to claim "emiitus" status, we do weigh positive contributions against negative ones. But something has happened to you, and lately your contributions are far more negative than positive,.and you repeatedly curl your lip and bark angrily when told to chill.
I'm giving you 90 days in liueu of a permaban. Being perfectly honest, I personally don't care whether or not you come back. I got @KMC snapping at me for "driving off the regulars," but the problem is, some regulars have never contributed anything but shit. And others stop contributing anything good. Emeritus status only goes so far.
I was inclined to go lighter on him, but then you already acted and I remembered that Dase had specifically rejected special consideration and demanded that he be treated like the average user.
So be it. He can take his ball to Twitter if he's unwilling to play along with rather basic civility standards.
It's Twitter that has fried his brain. Like many he has succumbed to the pattern where he spends his time quote tweeting the most deranged examples of his outgroup which the algorithm recognizes and then serves him more of. He's built a machine that serves him almost nothing but idiocy that he can happily dunk on. He's built up a heuristic where he pattern matches any argument made to something stupid he's seen on twitter posted by someone who he didn't need to use any intelligence to dismantle; his wit and charity have atrophied from disuse.
I didn't want to get into his Twitter, but yes, I agree. After he became a reasonably big name and a sort of authority on AI/ML (which is justifiable), the boost in popularity only encouraged him to spout far less technically grounded hot-takes on topics like politics.
Twitter moderation is not The Motte's moderation (lol, lmao). I know I code-switch a little when switching context, I'm more polite and formal on LessWrong than I would be here. But most of the time, I speak exactly as I would on our platform.
That's the thing. Some people are innately in tune with our ethos, our rules don't strike them as unreasonable because they're inclined to act that way by default. Others don't agree, on an instinctual level, but follow the rules because of the value the forum provides them.
This is hardly a binary, on one hand we have we have consistently polite effort posters, and on the other side trolls and shitposters. I hope I land pretty left on that spectrum.
And now that I contemplate it, the main reason that I lurk and rarely comment or post on my Twitter account is because the pressure towards being concise or dropping zingers isn't my style at all. I could probably do it, but I don't want to. You can do long-form text and intelligent analysis there with some success, but it's clearly not the default.
So we have Dase, who is clearly smart and talented, but has an abrasive personality, displays clears impatience for those he considers fools, and holds a few rather questionable and strongly held opinions. When he started here, with minimal X clout, he was in an environment that encouraged the the good stuff and came down strongly on the bad.
But X? The negative feedback mechanism is nowhere near as strong. Some of his insults and hot takes took off, or caused him no real harm. And sometimes, he does have a point when he's mad, the number of idiots or hostile interlocutors here is not zero, let alone on X.
Further, he's shifted mostly to posting there, only rarely visiting our site. I don't begrudge him for this, not at all. But that makes the relative impact of a ban or a warning far less meaningful to him. He knows he can pivot to X completely (and I doubt he's the kind to make an alt and scurry back, he's too proud for that).
In other words, we're less important to him than we used to be, our validation and our negative feedback means less, and he's got a fallback at hand. Shame, I like him despite all of that, and that includes tolerating him despite his anti-Indian bias. I wish he'd clean up his act, I can't defend him anymore.
He has now blocked me on X : /
I don't know how to put this in a way that won't be interpreted, incorrectly, as condescension but I think he's going through a rough time and hope he can get through to the other side alright. He wrote some posts that I cherish and arguing with him in long form helped me think particularly about the AI race with China even if I don't quite agree with him on the conclusion.
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What’s his X handle?
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