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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.
P.S. (given the length of the ban, btw thanks for FINALLY dropping this blat and treating me like a normal user as I've been requesting, I feel the need to say this in an edit:) I would very much prefer it if @self_made_human did not disseminate my contacts on any external platforms, for many simple reasons, not least being fed up with condescension here, and also not having any valuable thoughts to share with mottizens. I'd rather you treated me as braindead.
But speaking of the patronizing discussion about being "fried", social media incentives, speculative real life struggles, clout etc.: far as I know, other people's feelings and approval have always had negligible effect on my posting, or generally actions. There are very few internet strangers who matter enough (mostly instrumentally) to deserve any amount of charity or patience, and a tiny number of real life friends whose opinion and goodwill I value above that of any amount of internet strangers. To be frank, I actually struggle with remembering or paying attention to people at all, it often takes me months to read DMs or mail or respond to calls, even with money, glory or other rewards on the line; it's a major problem that has cost me multiple communities, friendships and relationships.
There is very little change in my modus operandi anyway; the only difference is who/whom, my ire no longer being trained on people you're entertained to see savaged, fairly or not. I've gladly taken a permaban on the original subreddit for much the same behavior many years ago now, and would have accepted a permaban on TheMotte at any later point of time if that were the cost of speaking honestly. Not all communities are for everyone, certainly not this one.
My views on the US in general and this community in particular have soured in response to new evidence, such as Resistance Libs (which we've collectively hounded off here) having been, in my opinion, strongly vindicated (unlike my own sympathy for American conservatives), and not in response to having gained some number of "followers" somewhere else. What an immature idea.
There's just nothing to be said. If there's anything to apologize for, I apologize for my recent top level posts that attempted to force an unwelcome discussion.
Entitled misinterpretations of minutiae of my rant (eg "genocidal dehumanization" of Trump&Hegseth who don't constitute a genus) do not merit a comment.
So in the post which earned me the ban, one specific line that invited complaints, glib pontification about my being brain-fried by Twitter, and even concern for my wellbeing (eg from @Throwaway05) was:
I stand by this line, and I believe it had aged very well indeed, complete with the claim of superiority of Iranian leadership material. In particular Ali Larijani, the butcher, the Kantian, had been vindicated, and killing him proved to be utterly futile. This is a triumph of the human over the bestial, reason over dogma, intellect and will over emotion and matter. Pretty clear-cut actually. I think Americans should reflect on this phenomenon, it's like their movies and cartoons, except they weren't the underdog protagonists.
The bolded part was labeled «Nazi talk», and: «Systematic dehumanization of someone you dislike and leadership figures of them is a classic sign of disordered thought processes that often lead to things like the rise of authoritarian states, ethnic cleansing, justification of deaths of people in that group (ex: Charlie Kirk).» Throwaway, being Mentally Well and Socially Adjusted, felt it prudent to only say that «the current admin has plenty worth complaining about».
I am obviously tempted to snark, but let's be civil. Throwaway, upon everything we've seen while I was out – do you think calling Trump and Hegseth, these two powerful men in particular, swine and worse – was undeserved? Do you think that after a perfidious attack during negotiations, Minab girls' school targeted by Palantir using SoTA AI and maps 10 years out of date and triple-tapped by supposedly Iranian Tomahawks, stealthily sinking a defenseless ship, «a whole civilization will die», «bridge and power plant day», «Death and destruction from the sky. All day long», moving goalposts and retroactively changing objectives of the operation, making up «regime change» with the regime getting unprecedentedly legitimized, lashing out at allies, withdrawing defensive arms from allies and freezing supplies to allies, insider trading, 30+ fraudulent declarations of victory and/or Deal to mislead the markets, bringing the global economy to the brink where SPRs would run dry and serious demand destruction would begin, and eventual concession of military defeat in Versailles, complete with thanks to Xi and Putin for not making it more pathetic – after this entire immense, destructive, disgraceful, fractally embarrassing, entirely unnecessary, wholly CHOSEN, heavily DEFENDED and RATIONALIZED here, shitshow that has defiled American reputation and deflated American mythos (not the LLM from Dario, which sort of saved the day) – …
…
do you think it was reasonable of you to give me a lecture on how I'm losing it, just because I expressed anger and disgust with what was happening and what it meant?
@aqouta do you still think it was my brain that got fried, and not of everyone here who treated this war as business as usual and a cause for armchair chuckling about… all manners of tedious war nerd minutiae?
@WandererintheWilderness do you still think Iranians have underperformed your standards for "human beings with moral agency and rational minds", and that Americans were more up to it?
And what have the warmongers got to say for themselves? @Shakes? @Iconochasm? I'm not even mad anymore, after all you lost, contra my expectations. I'm just kind of curious: can you process that this was a terrible idea and many supposedly cuckoo people who pointed out that the US will lose the war (like Scott Ritter) were, actually, straight up correct, at least?
America won. America killed a generation of Iran's leadership, destroyed Iran's military industrial complex, destroyed Iran's nuclear facilities, and is now negotiating how to destroy the dust. Casualties, 13 killed in action, a plane was hit with an Iranian missile and landed safely, another plane was lost in an accident. An American pilot had to eject above Iran and America was able to infiltrate Iranian land space and build an airstrip to get him out while Iran couldn't do anything. Iran declared the straight closed and the Americans launched night operations to escort ships in the dark. America blockaded the straight and Iran started to run out of energy and food.
Months ago the war critics made all sorts of predictions about how America was going to lose. Iran would be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. They would toll the strait. America might suffer hundreds of casualties or suffer a dramatic naval defeat. America's allies would turn on it. Gas prices would rise so high that the global economy would collapse. Basically none of these things happened. War critics have simply continued onto the next set of predictions. Because the Iranian regime didn't completely collapse, and sanctions will be lifted as part of a peace deal, America is supposed to have lost. Whatever you guys say. I don't think any of you want to be convinced. I think you just want to hate America.
But I think the case is going to become more and more obvious as time goes by. America is building an economy in space. We have rockets that catch themselves in the air and wifi where there are no cell towers. We revolutionized energy, we export energy now. We are leading the AI superrace. We still have the strongest navy and the strongest planes in the world. Europe is falling behind. China can't catch up. We are building a next-generation tech stack the entire world will rely on and nobody else is close to catching up. It's an American century.
For the record, you're definitely not mentioning all of the US losses there - the US lost or suffered damage to lots more aircraft (including even some that Iran managed to shoot down despite what seems to me to be a pretty anemic air defense performance, and others they hit on the ramp with missiles) and Iran seriously damaged or degraded a lot of American military facilities.
I actually tend to think that the facilities isn't a big deal, especially if Trump Venezuelizes Iran (what are we gonna use them for?) but it's not like Iran didn't get in a few solid punches.
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Let's break this into three segments:
Factual correctness: important, but also not important. You can be right while being wrong because: discussion value-add and moral worries matter.
Darwin's greatest sin in my mind was never saying anything interesting, I would just assume his posts would be filled with maximally infuriating and inconsistent arguments as soldiers woke nonsense. Discussion rarely led anywhere useful. I didn't have to read his posts, I would read the responses and sometimes see something interesting but he himself was seldom useful.
I remember you being a high quality poster with a perspective and information that was useful for me to hear and I enjoyed hearing from. Of late I have not felt that. Many of us have been around long enough that we've become caricature of ourselves in some ways (I am certainly guilty of this). Yes some of this is that an anti-Western perspective does not flatter my biases. But that's not all that's going on here, I think most people would say that they feel what you write has changed and not for the better and that they have to pick harder to get to the meat. Only you can tell me why the change.
However both of those matter a little bit less than the moral worries. The way you are writing is worrying, it makes me worry about how you are doing, where this dehumanization is coming from, and so on. It's not always easy to spot internally that something has changed but a lot of people here who have seen much of your writing are like "okay what's going on here."
This community has been together for too long for me to enjoy flame-outs at this point, especially when I am worried that some topic (Charlie Kirk, Geopolitical Bullshit, The Joos/anti-joos) is having an active impact on someone IRL - both for real and in the mind alone.
Please take care of yourself.
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Yeah, basically. I'm unusure how any happening of the Iran war is supposed to interact with the social media induced brain frying hypothesis. Like if somehow the war had ended unambiguously on good terms for the US was this supposed to be evidence in my favor? If it had ended up even worse for the US how would interpretation of your behavior have been shown to be more wrong?
As you've blocked me on X and have been banned from this site I have not collected any evidence that could have updated me on this subject and so my opinion remains unchanged.
Yes, because it'd suggest that my opponents were largely correct to treat it as another culture war side show, and demand charitable discussion of American efforts and speaking of their leaders Trump and Hegseth as imperfect, maybe not highly moral, but rational actors with non-insane motivations, who have a plausible, debatable opinion on what's best for America (specifically, another war in the Middle East). And that insisting that the war is a wholly unjustified crime perpetrated by basically murder clowns is "TDS", "twitter fried his brain", or some such.
To be clear, I expected the war to end in Iranian defeat, but not really "good terms for the US". As in – probably ground operation, some more atrocities, more losses, high reputational damage, high economic damage, attrition of stockpiles, unmanageable conflagration in the region, dangerously inflated belief in capabilities vs China, and other assorted wages of insanity and malice that make it all not worth it. American defeat was well outside my model, so this is "winning too much", as it were.
Yes, you trusted the experts, as we all did. Nothing to be ashamed of.
"Well, plan A (kill the Ayatollah and watch whole Iran collapse like Sauron's tower) failed, there must be plan B. The best and the brightest working for the world's first super power were preparing for this day for all of their lives, there must be brilliant plan B that guarantees success of this special operation!"
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I did not necessarily expect this outcome either, and I remember arguing with users here at the start of this war who were pre-emptively gloating about America having global unrestricted power to bulldoze everybody Chyna decided to associate with, that the good ol' US of A enjoyed such an overwhelming military dominance over virtually everyone else that they could just walk in, topple regimes and replace them with puppets, then walk away in slow motion while explosions detonated behind them.
Turns out none of these takes aged well at all. It was ridiculous hubris then and it's ridiculous hubris now, and at this point one would expect to see grovelling mea culpas from anybody remotely capable of updating their priors.
Eh, There's this kind of weird definitional game that's being played for what "winning" means. We've known that we have very little ability to nation build in the sense that we can use our military to get other nations to be governed the way we want them to be. Anyone paying attention to the other middle eastern adventures would have to conclude we cannot reliably do that. That this war was started with those aims was dumb and wasteful. But then there's this idea that Iran meaningfully "won" in some kind of conventional military sense which is just ridiculous. A whole lot of the arguments on this topic has been people with these two different definitions of "winning" hallucinating people who disagree with them.
If by "Iran won" you mean the US did not accomplish its war aims then absolutely, Iran won, and it seemed very plausibly they'd win from the get go. If you by "Iran won" you mean they have some kind of dominant military position then just no, they had the ability to take pain and sustain enough of a threat to close the strait.
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might. The military executed its missions very well. The problem was our war aims basically required stoking something like an Iranian revolution to actually succeed which didn't happen.
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My diagnosis wasn't based on the rough content of your post. I even mostly agree with the analysis of Trump and hegseth as contemptable individuals. I was engaging in the, admittedly often annoying, classic past time of discourse on the discourse. Why is dase crashing out so much more frequently? Yes, lib centrists are right about everything, especially Trump, but that hasn't changed. What has changed is the xitter algorithm.
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I was more "passively war-tolerant". War with Iran was not something I was actively rooting for, and if you'd asked me beforehand I would have urged against it, but I was willing to let bro cook and see how it played out. Both in terms of reasons for the war and how the negotiations are going, I think the degree of misinformation and chaff is so extreme that normies watching the news (including all of us) have little ability to distill a signal from the noise. Especially for the latter, as I expect everything from the Trump administration to be positional maneuvering rather than statements of fact, and of course the same has always been true for Iran.
In fairness, that's also pretty much how I interpret everything you say, and why I usually just skim your posts.
See, this is what I mean.
See what? You're basically hiding in the fog of war and proposing a deeply nihilistic epistemology that Trump's tendency to brazenly bullshit everyone makes every circumstance completely open to interpretation. I don't believe this is how this works. Operation Epic Fury had been declared Over in early May already, by the Secretary of State, who doesn't have remotely Trump's reputation. The US and Iran have signed - not announced, not "leaked" – an MOU which is clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective of the US, and a bunch of obvious Ws for Iran. Could Trump ignore it all, restart the war, and actually beat Iran this time? Quite possibly. Such things happen in history. But that'd be another, separate war. The terms accepted now suggest the US was pretty desperate for an off-ramp.
This assessment seems very far from defensible to me.
Trump on February 28 in his speech articulating the rationale of the attacks [excerpts]:
From the MOU:
I think it's completely reasonable to:
I criticized going to war with Iran before it happened on here. I still think it's too soon to tell how things are going to fall out, so I've been withholding judgment, but my preliminary assessment probably wouldn't be viewed as exactly a pro-Trump gloss.
However, I think you are badly mistaken if you to look at a US declaration of war that emphasizes "no nuclear weapons," look at an MOU where Iran agrees "no nuclear weapons" and then claim that the MOU is "clearly an admission of defeat relative to any claimed early-war objective."
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The explicit early war objectives laid out by Trump and Hegseth were
What kind of benchmarks would you consider success for 1 and 2? 80%? 99%? I suspect you'd call anything short of 100% a "humiliating loss", and probably even then. Their Navy is about 90% destroyed.
And the MOU is "an agreement to talk out a future agreement", but one of the points purportedly agreed upon is 4. Which is still very far from a done deal, and very much obscured in the fog of the negotiating table. And that describes the entire situation. This isn't some trad war where a total surrender happens at a formal event. Both sides are going to posture and threaten and build contingencies, likely for years to come.
I will admit that this whole ordeal has strengthened the conventional wisdom that airpower alone is limited. But "we blew up most of their shit and crippled their economy, total W for them" seems like a retarded and delusional take.
Trump called for Unconditional Surrender and made regime change a clear goal of the war from the get-go. That objective was clearly unachieved. Replacing Khamenei with Khamenei is a joke.
On 1, 2, 3 we don't have any data that shows a significant decline in capability. The ability for Iran to project power has not been meaningfully reduced in any way that is testable, as they still possess the naval/missile capability to shut the Strait of Hormuz, threaten their neighbors, and force a deal that benefits their proxy Hezbollah.
The problem here is that some people think this is Team Deathmatch rules and some people think it's Capture the Flag. The objective isn't to kill a lot of Iranians, it's to achieve some kind of strategic goal. The K:D doesn't matter, the objectives do.
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Compared to who? As long as it's the Iranians I can agree, but none of this is new for Western, or any other sort of leadership. There's another post of yours that has not only aged well, it reached out back in time and is perfectly applicable retroactively:
It's all there is to it, and all there ever was.
Call me a Western supremacist and racist but on Feb 27th I did not expect Iranians to come out looking more decent.
Many old things are vile and, worse, not even effective. There's a point to having standards.
That's because it's not such a small thing as you try to make it out to be. It's not like Hegseth has bad facial features or that I get the ick. It's that his entire shtick is shit. His… ah, I've already covered that, didn't I. Aesthetics is correlated with holistic value. This is how a commander presents himself when he's likely to wage a nonsensical war in a reprehensible manner. This is how a secondary antagonist in a Disney adaptation of a children's fable looks like. Apparently, this is also how a guy looks when he's about to blow it. We're not on SlateStarCodex, but Scott would surely say that nothing is ever a coincidence, or something to that effect.
But anyway, there is something new to it. Again: the US has lost the war. So:
I concede I should have added the third line, for example: "and then Trumpists fucking lose, having debased and betrayed themselves for nothing".
Maybe you haven't been paying too much attention to them - I've been mildly impressed with Iran since the Global War on Terror days under Dubya - or maybe it's my own bias - I have nothing but contempt for western elites. Perhaps a bit of both.
My personal opinion on the matter is that paying too much attention to aesthetics got us Ursula von der Leyen, and the entire European establishment.
I see where you're coming from, and there's something to be said for the argument. I'll even add that I hope we end up with someone better after Trump leaves office. President Hand Grenade was fun as a protest against the treasonous ruling class, but someone like him is not viable when you want to actually wield power, rather than permanently play the plucky underdog.
No argument there. I've been calling this whole affair a disaster since day one.
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