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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?
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.
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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