This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I’m somewhat familiar with the work of the reactionary blogger Jim and one thing I definitely never expected him to do was to use the Japanese light novel series KonoSuba and its anime adaptation as a talking point. But now it’s here:
One aspect he left out is that Aqua basically exists a comic relief character and not as a potential romantic interest (also the notion that she is ‘drawn as about Sydney Sweeney’s age’ is questionable at best) and that the other main female character who can be called a fanservice woman (Darkness) is basically a delusional pervert which rules her out as a love interest as well.
Anyway, that’s not the main reason I’m linking to it here and I also know this subject matter has been done to death here. The reason instead is the reference therein to mainstream accusations about the ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ among single men. I think it’s a fascinating culture war phenomenon and I also think Jim misses the point about it here. It’s not that it’s a pretext for aging and frumpy hags to whine, it’s that it’s based on the assumption that women are innately mature enough for marriage. I’ll quote a 2011 blog post from an Australian Catholic social conservative author who is also critical of the Manosphere:
Anecdote: I was recently at a dinner with a family and their early 20s daughter... the level of bitchiness was off the charts. Bitchiness directed towards her own parents mostly, which was unbecoming. Seemingly every second sentence she spoke was some kind of expression of above-it-allness, disinterest, disdain for explaining some topic further. Very unattractive. Even allowing for the fact that she probably didn't want to be there, that's not at all how you're supposed to behave at dinner even if you don't want to be there.
They aren't making women like they used to. Nor men for that matter.
Women learning more cute anime-girl mannerisms would likely raise fertility and supercharge pair bonding. Probably we need more anime-boy mannerisms too, which means a good deal more fighting and high stakes competition. Women like handsome, confident 'the greatest of all time' characters like Gojo Satoru.
But we do all this social engineering for what? Children? Fertility could drop to zero tomorrow and there would be no true existential consequences. There are many reasons why it'd be bad, people not caring about the future, the intrinsic good aspect of raising children. Many people not falling in love is a bad thing too, obviously. From Jim:
OK, that's kind of true.
But we won't need new 18-year old human workers in 2044. We hardly need them today, there's a huge oversupply of young people relative to actual demand for labour. Employers are acting like the pickiest hot-girls on dating apps with all the bullshit they're pulling because they simply do not want or need more people. If they actually had a labour shortage, they'd act like it and scrap the 'we interview you 5 different times and make you pass 3 tests' approach. The modern dysfunction in dating markets and the workplace reflects a breakdown in the core assumptions of our civilization, rooted in the technologies we have available and how that affects the social system. The combination of mobile phones, social media, mass automation, deindustrialization, microplastic/chemical pollution would surely be disruptive to whatever we had 70 years ago, just from first principles?
Whatever gross dysfunction going on with our civilization's inability to reproduce or pair up properly doesn't really matter at all, it'll be blown out of the water by AI.
Imagine if we set up anime battle schools to turn out legions of super attractive, cute couples. Men are men again. Women are women. Korea has TFR 5. Even if that was somehow possible, so what? Either AI goes well or it goes badly. Whatever mild or gross dysfunction pales in comparison to being dead or immortal. I think a functional society would do better - but a functional society is also going to get torn to pieces. It's like spaghettification when one gets close to a black hole. How could ASI not disintegrate our society at minimum, when it nukes all the basic assumptions we have about the role of people, labour, economies, even what it means to be human?
Or imagine even that I'm wrong about AI. Even if AI is a nothingburger, there are still way more people than there are jobs for them. There's this gigantic disability/welfare architecture built up for this very purpose, ever expanding layers of education to keep young people out of the labour market, ridiculous regulations requiring employment of useless people that necessitate even more to fix up their mess and still huge oversupply. As time passes, we get more machinery that can do more work in agriculture, manufacturing, more robots and so fewer people are needed. I think the root cause of the dating market dysfunction is driven by technology destabilizing all old equilibriums simultaneously. A mere social fix isn't going to work, it's like building a castle on the sand in an hourglass. And especially Christianity cannot work, since that's the very thing we observed completely failing!
There's also the option of "it goes banned", with countries that refuse to implement the ban having their independence revoked.
In that one, fertility actually does matter to a reasonable extent.
(From where I sit, aligning neural-net ASI - i.e. figuring out whether it will produce omnicidal outputs, and then tweaking semi-randomly until it no longer does so - is almost certainly flat impossible. "What does this program output when run" is literally the (proven-impossible-in-the-general-case) halting problem, and here you don't even know which outputs are omnicidal because reality is complicated and the ASI is smarter than you. So the "it goes well" case is ruled out, and the only case worth planning for is "it goes banned".)
We are so far away from 'it gets banned' though. Trump commands US nuclear forces and Trump has made clear that he's all for AI development, bigly and with great speed. Who wins AI, wins! And then there's Jensen whispering in his ear.
China doesn't want to get left behind and they consider US AI progress a strategic threat, Dario especially they fear and hate. They spent the last 100 years trying to catch up in technology to the West, they're not likely to stop now. A pause is to their advantage if the US halts and they catch up in semiconductors. That makes the situation more volatile. A Chinese leader is hardly likely to say 'we accept an inferior position indefinitely in this valuable field of technology by treaty', that would be humiliating.
This is not something we can hold back from, AI is obviously lucrative and potent and beneficial. More potent and lucrative and beneficial as the danger rises. It's not like competing to stack up H-bombs in deserts somewhere, where you pay lots of money and get very little for it.
It seems much more likely that we just have to go through the event horizon than a ban being manageable or sustainable. In the worlds where anything vaguely human survives, it's more likely that 'something mysterious and good happens beyond our ability to predict' than a ban being sustainably implemented.
Trump could still flip. He could also die (he's 80 and there have been... what, a dozen assassination attempts on him already?), or be impeached/removed (the Republican Party and even the Republican base are not really behind him on this).
There is the possibility of agreeing to parity, or to a gap that's smaller than currently exists. There is also, as you're probably sick of hearing from me, the possibility that we have WWIII over Taiwan and nobody has to worry about China for the next 100 years.
The international moratorium on human gene editing is holding up pretty decently IIRC.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
*gets banned not goes banned
Good luck «revoking» Chinese independence. Anyway it getting banned is impossible but if it happened it would increase the salience of eugenics because the fundamental risk is human alignment / relative untintelligence.
He said "goes well" and "goes badly". I was following the pattern.
I think the Chinese could be convinced to sign on; they don't want the world to end any more than we do. In extremis, though, I will point out that the USA does possess enough nukes to return China to the 1930s in population and infrastructure.
Then we're dead. The fact that >99% of humans don't want to be dead is the reason I think it's not impossible.
Maybe. So?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Love existing doesn't interact negatively with AI. If anything it does positively, which means AI makes fixing this problem more important, not less. Under superabundance people will still want romantic partners, it's of terminal value, unlike jobs.
More options
Context Copy link
Well this is an externalized locus of control. I don't think this is random, I think a functioning society is better able to get its priorities in order and not fight about petty stupid stuff, and therefore is significantly more likely to figure out how to make AI go well. Imagine if all of the culture war stuff was absent and AI was the ONLY serious issue people were discussing, debating, arguing about, and talking to politicians about. People would spend more time learning about it, educating people about it, discussing it, understanding it. It doesn't guarantee we'd get it right, but it would surely up the chances. It would also prevent people from getting confused and thinking AI "alignment" means making it not say offensive things for PR reasons.
Obviously this is an unrealistically exaggerated scenario, but on the margins every amount of less time people spend hating each other for gender reasons is more time they can spend figuring out other things. Also, having stable happy marriages with children would get people more invested in the future and long term thinking which would adjust their priorities to care more.
I said basically what you're saying... it's true that getting our act together would probably help. But the extent to which it would help is pretty small compared to the magnitude of the problem.
It's automatically proportional because it increases the probability of
A significant part of the reason why socialist policies are awful and doesn't work in real life is because it disincentivizes work, and people need to work in order for the economy to function. In a world where these assumptions are no longer true, the conclusion that socialist policies are awful won't necessarily hold and the balance will shift. If we increase the chance of doing this properly by 10%, then that's 10% multiplied by the magnitude of the problem. To the extent that current problems don't affect AI they will be blown out of the water by whatever AI does, but to the extent that they do, they matter proportional to their impact. If 1000 fent zombies in San Francisco cause $1 billion in damage (summed over property damage, consumed welfare, hospital bills, court costs, economic friction of people not wanting to be near them, etc.) and ten years from now AI can produce $100 quadrillion per year, yeah we can just pay to repair everything and solve the issue and undo long term damages and whatnot. But if 1000 fent zombies cause harm, discomfort, and disgust in AI researchers and cause them to become more reclusive, selfish, and less sympathetic to people with less than themselves, decreasing the probability of a good outcome by 1%, that's a HUGE deal.
All of this stuff affects people's thoughts and behavior, which in turn affects the direction we travel in as we attempt to navigate a future with AI. We're not trying to build enough of a solid economic and cultural foundation to weather the storm, we're trying to build a steering wheel and steer the ship away from the storm in the first place.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I suspect this undersells how the economy works. The economy in a free-market system is a network effect; more able-bodied workers generates more opportunity, all else being equal. A better demographic pyramid requires less taxation per capita to support a social safety net for the elderly, allowing more reinvestment into other economic opportunities. It also would create different, potentially beneficial governance effects in democracies.
It seems quite possible that AI goes fine and that humans are still a valued or even necessary part of the economy. But even if it turns out so "well" that most people do not need to engage in labor, I think it behooves us to figure out how to get romance and childrearing right. In a good AI takeoff scenario, that will quickly (over civilizational time-scales, anyway) become the focus of most human beings, in all likelihood.
What are you talking about? When practiced, Christianity shows better results in dating markets (and tfr) – this is pretty well known social science. Broadly speaking steady religious practice (not limited to Christianity) correlates well with better life outcomes, at least in the United States.
They have to generate more than they take, not just generate some. Most people do not. How many people have ever created even 1 job?
More options
Context Copy link
Even China can't find enough work for all their young people, they have high youth unemployment despite an enormous pool of well-educated young people and intense capitalist pressure.
If the economy is primarily acting like a network effect, then why don't we see the network effect in action? Why can't Johnny walk in with a firm handshake and get a good job with all these opportunities being made? The US has a pretty free market and a pretty large population. I don't deny that there are some aspects of a network effect, certainly with elite talent there are. But adding merely able-bodied workers is not helping much at all.
This is the mass-immigration school of economic thought. Adding 10 million able bodied Haitians or Hondurans isn't going to make America much richer at all. All the Arabs and Africans going to Europe aren't bolstering the eurozone economies, largely because they don't work. Even if they did, it only impedes automation of low-value labour. Domestic births are naturally better but even then, automation is already chewing through these roles.
I agree but it's a lot easier to handle that later. There will be all the time in the world to fix that up.
So why isn't it being practiced, then? Church attendence rates fell from 70% in the mid 20th century to 30% today. Even these remaining nominal Christians are mostly not acting like it's 1950 either, they're largely feminists and progressives who show up for a sermon about progressivism from a priest. They don't act like Christians used to act with regards to divorce, marital roles or the things that Jim is calling for.
It's true that small pockets of highly religious-reactionary people are high fertility. But there is no evidence that a technological country can be run this way by usually-isolated population of the highly devout. Why would the Mormons or Amish or Hasidic Jews not immediately act like everyone else when they end up having to run a whole country?
Sorry for the delayed reply; I was traveling.
You can't get domestic births without good fertility to begin with, and the US is adding jobs, not losing them, right now. Interestingly the latest stats show additions in construction and manufacturing even as we lose jobs in financial services. In fact, right now there's a skilled manual labor shortage in the US that is slowing down datacenter construction.
What's your source for this? "Church attendance rates" is very vague, but only somewhere around 40% of Americans never attend church (as of 2022), whereas "past seven days" attendance in 2020 or so dropped to 30 percent from...40 percent in 1940 and a high of nearly 50 percent in the 1950s. I suspect you're indexing on non-American data. There's definitely been a real religiosity shift in America, but a lot of that was "vibes" as the not-very-engaged shifted from being nominal to nones.
This doesn't really describe America at all (it certainly may describe other nations; my recollection is that you're an Aussie.) In the US, the conservative religious (which are a large fraction of the population - evangelicals alone are >20% of the population, and there are of course plenty of conservative Catholics, Jews, Mormons and other minority religions as well) is roughly at or above TFR, and they are basically "normies" - they use modern technology, go into the armed forces, work at Lockheed and Boeing, serve as cops and judges and legislators, go to grad school (in the US, higher education is correlated with religiosity) and generally take on roles that fill the "full stack" that a modern civilization needs to function, from farming to forging to fighting to filming. (Mormons in particular are very valued by the intelligence services because they often know a second language and have been abroad for mission work; as a result, the FBI, NSA, military etc. is swarming with them.) And they're not isolated; the doctrines of evangelical Christianity, traditional Catholicism, and Mormonism basically prevent the isolation you might seem from the Amish or some Jews.
The US right now could do with more electricians, more doctors, more semiconductor fab workers, more shipbuilders, more engineers to make optics, missiles, R&D. All high-skill jobs. Automation will get through to them eventually, automation is probably working faster than human reproduction. We're not just talking about an 18 year lead time, for skilled labour it's a 22, 25, 30 year pipeline.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/642548/church-attendance-declined-religious-groups.aspx
It says three in 10 Americans say they attend religious services every week (21%) or almost every week (9%). I confess that it doesn't show the 70% figure, I don't know where I found that, it does seem wrong. Probably not comparable statistics anyway, adding in almost every week would push it up to 55% or so. But let's say 50-55% down to 30%, that's a pretty big drop. Christians trend older than other groups too:
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
See also: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-religious-composition-has-changed-in-recent-decades/
You can see a fairly steep fall in US Christianity and a rise in 'unaffiliated'.
More generally, my point is that if Christianity worked, then we wouldn't see that drop in religiosity in the first place. Losing the commanding heights of the social landscape is a pretty serious blow. I recall the 1990s Simpsons, it was notably more religious than most shows today.
I agree that Christianity is, for individuals, more functional and appropriate. I'm confident the church girls are happier and better off and innately better than the tattooed danger-hair goblins. But as a systemic solution on a wide scale? Why are there any danger-hair goblins at all? Why are there Pride Parades at all? Why aren't there hate crimes being prosecuted for anti-Christianism, like there are for anti-black, anti-feminist, Islamophobia? Once the first couple of Baphomet statues go up in state legislatures, then I think that's a pretty good sign that Christianity is in steep decline.
It's not like the US lost a war to the Soviet Union and the Soviets imposed this. Christianity as a system (the old kind of Christian system that Jim talks about in the OP link, considerably more conservative than any conservative Catholic accepted in the mainstream) was a good systemic solution a few hundred years ago but why should we expect it to work today? We wouldn't imagine that a liberal democracy could work in Bronze Age Greece or that Japanese Shogunate-era samurai Shinto society would fit Japan today, so why should Christianity be any different? Why should it be appropriate for an even more radically different post-ASI society?
Christianity doesn't seem to compete well against progressivism and that alone is fatal. Waiting for progressivism to burn out isn't working since progressivism has a higher conversion rate and elite capture. We see church girls becoming danger-hair goblins but not the other way around nearly so much. Or more commonly, we see perfectly well-brought-up respectable men and women switch their ethos to unaffiliated and do as they please.
Correct.
Some of these (particularly electricians) will be very hard to automate, even if AI pays off. I do not think electricians will be 100% automated in 25 years.
Certainly.
It's entirely possible that "doing the right thing" is a good thing to do and also not the systematic solution to anything because it cannot be forced - even if it would solve systematic problems if a critical mass of people did it.
Well, as I said, because it does! It's one of the very few things that does (as you seem to agree). And one of the neat ways in which it works is that it works regardless of systematic solutions. The West can be going to hell in a handbasket and church girls can still be happier and better off (and more importantly grow to know and love their Creator).
I don't think this is true.
Just an illustrative anecdote: this summer I went to a legal conference and rubbed elbows with people on both sides. One of the things that was interesting was the degree to which the progressives were interested in compromise.
Now, I think there was some selection bias at play here on multiple levels. But generally speaking, you don't pursue compromise when you think you are crushing the opposition (which in the United States includes but of course is not limited to conservative Christians).
Except the unaffiliates aren't hardcore progressives - people often miss this. Unaffiliates tend not to be engaged. People who are engaged religiously vote; peeling people out of their religious engagement doesn't make them vote (D) it makes them not vote at all. (In the United States, voting is not mandatory). From a raw political angle (which, frankly, is a horrible way to view religion) the disengagement of religion is potentially in fact very for the left because the churches that are increasingly fragmenting are left-wing organization hubs. We could see a future where the conservative religious right shrinks but loses little if any political power simply because they still turn out to vote.
Well, it's funny you should say that. Recent polling in the US is very interesting - youth identification as LGBTQ (and positive sentiment towards LGBTQ) is going down and interest in religion is rising.
I think the former was a fad and so it makes sense that it will regress towards the mean. I'm not sure about the latter. I think there's a good chance that automation increases interest in religion, for fairly obvious reasons, but it also might hollow it out, for equally obvious ones.
I don't think that the future is set in stone, though. I tend to think the trend lines for the conservative right in the US are actually looking better now than during COVID. But it's unclear to me which way those trend lines will go.
The main goal is not to have the West go to hell in a handbasket, in my mind. That's what Jim was writing about I think. I'm sure there were plenty of people having a normal one in Nicholas II's Russia and that was fine but it wasn't sufficient to avoid disaster.
So far as I can see here, there's a slow and steady trend downwards in roughly all aspects of religiosity/Christianity in America, up to 2026: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1690/Religion.aspx
This doesn't seem like the vital aspect that can save the West.
Furthermore, if in 25 years electricians, shipbuilders, engineers and so on haven't been automated, then it follows that AI was not that big of a deal. We are talking about a fundamentally different scenario.
On the whole, what's been remarked on in the most recent years isn't that this trend reversed, but rather that it slowed or stopped, and you can see it in this data. For instance, there's a five point drop in importance of religion between 2012 and 2016, but only a two point drop between 2021 and 2025, and the trend basically stops after 2022. The number of people saying that religion's importance was increasing actually spiked massively in 2025; the past-seven-days question numbers have roughly returned to pre-COVID numbers, etc.
I worry that you're taking me as overstating things – I'm optimistic on this, not triumphalist. I recommend Ryan Burge on this, he tends to have decent takes that I think don't overstate the evidence.
The goal of Christianity isn't to "save the West" today it's to save souls forever. The beneficial effects on civilization are a byproduct of this, not an end goal. Twisting it to political ends is (I think) likely to fail at both (for instance, Catholicism triumphed very briefly in Ireland; a few decades of formal authority did what the British never could). If you want Christianity to save the West, let it start by saving you.
I think that AI can be a big deal and fail to automate away plenty of aspects of our society. For instance, if AI made every man a coder whenever he cared to set his mind to it and dropped the price of all industry and manufacturing by 50%, the economy would be radically different! But humans would still be pulling wire and unstopping clogged toilets.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Oh, so that's how mass immigration serves the lower/underclass.
Because the State has incorporated most of Christianity's community-building aspects. You don't make the choice to donate your time to the soup kitchen any more; the government simply confiscates your time (through a process known as "income tax") and runs that program itself (at times it will pay religious groups to do this). Same thing with permitting crime, actually- the way Western society donates to the poor is simply by permitting them to walk into any store, take what whatever they require, and the cost of that is redistributed through something called an "insurance premium".
The education, of course, was mostly just to dissuade young people from dealing with unemployment the traditional way. Education to those who can't use it provides no bonus.
Most Christian Churches do still do things like soup kitchens and community meals and similar things. The Mormon Church has a whole internal welfare system and huge pressure on members to volunteer for the Church which most do. Churches actually can do these things if they are vibrant and organized. Also Christianity first grew under the oppression of the Roman state. If the Romans couldn't kill it do you really think it's JUST income tax?
More options
Context Copy link
I think the lower classes would rather have robots doing their jobs than a flood of immigrants rendering them strangers in their home towns, not to mention abusing their daughters. Everything gets automated eventually but there's no need to import populations with wildly different values.
Well, if you squint at it, single mothers are now married to the state who provides benefits for their offspring. But this is not really what Christians mean by 'marriage'. The modern state does perform some community aspects but in a totally different way to how they're done under a genuinely Christian society. A mountain of abortion here, euthanasia there, pornography on the left and fornication on the right and directly in front of us a great big Pride Parade... doesn't sound very Christian to me!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is by no means a Catholic critique at all. There are two completely different ways of how modern feminism or even modern thinking breaks down intersexual relationships. The first one is that the basis of Catholic teaching is not some maturity or anything like that, our morality is Virtue Based. Both men and women should strive to be virtuous: humble instead of prideful, chaste instead of lustful, generous instead of greedy, kind instead of jealous, balanced in moderation instead of gluttonous, patient instead of wrathful, diligent instead of slothful. Above all these virtues we have Christian love, caritas as guiding principle. There are of course other virtues such as courage or wisdom which are subsided in there. The point is that Christian ethics is Virtue Ethics, it is not utilitarianism or harm reductionism - it is centered around personal virtues related to deification and individual relationship toward God and other people.
Catholic anthropology follows this in sacraments. In baptism, a child is introduced into a community where mother, father, godfather and godmother take responsibility to educate the child toward these virtues in form of caretakers utilizing methods of discipline and consistency to teach the child. This results in first communion around age of 7 o 8, this tracks the ability to discern between good and evil, the child is capable of sacrament of confession and to decide on what is good and evil. From there there is the period of theological grounding for child's decision making, the parents are there as teachers with the child having more autonomy to explore these realities. The child is a catechumen and this period ends around age of 15-16, where he is considered and adult but still to be mentored by other people, including parents and the community.
Now the point is that in terms of maturity, by age of 16 you as a Catholic should be fully aware of what is Christian moral teaching, what are vices and virtues and live you life accordingly. There is no eternal "kid" mentality where somebody can be 28 and still "exploring" as some forever university student, it is preposterous. You can be 17 or 18 years old and preparing yourself for marriage and taking care of children in the same loop. Maturity is not about wealth, "responsibility" in terms of being a manager of team of 50 people or anything like that. While this is of course one way to grow, it is by no means implied in catholic teaching. You are mature as long as you posses ability to discern good and evil and as soon as adult Christian you know the doctrine to live virtuous life. The catholic teaching of responsibility is stemming from subsidiarity, by age 15-16 you are fully capable of thinking and managing yourself, and you are preparing to take care of your closest family such as husband/wife and even children and whole community. But this is reciprocal, The Church is proper way to live Christian life and the community is helping everybody till their last days. The process of deification is a lifelong process where the whole community including your priest is helping you in this endeavor.
That is not lack of maturity, these young adults are mature enough to have capacity to understand what is going on. It is lack of virtue. You can be 80 year old alcoholic bum jerking off on your pissed matrass doing stupid shit. We do not think that such a person did not mature, they are just lacking virtues.
More options
Context Copy link
I think it's interesting to try to figure out how this works. Kazuma is totally a pervert, yet he doesn't have any romantic or even sexual interest in the apparently attractive and well endowed fanservice characters. And us as the viewers empathize with him, agreeing with him on that aspect. Why is this?
As other posters say, Kazuma is shown having romantic and sexual interest in a number of characters. But I'm not sure there's anything to take from it, since the show at its core is a comedy and parody of the Isekai genre, not something with any serious intent. That Megumin "wins" in the end is probably just a reflection that there are a very large number of paedophiles creating and watching Japanese anime. And technically that might not even be relevant, given the anime is an adaptation of a novel in which I believe all the characters are teens
Yeah, the worldbuilding of Interspecies Reviewers was much more serious. (Konosuba isn't actually that thoughtless though I stopped watching it after S1.)
Yes- by the social conservative and feminist definition, "wanting a decent-ish relationship with a relatively-close peer at any age where you'd actually be attracted to said peer" is absolutely indistinguishable from pedophilia. She was only barely post-menopause, you sick fuck.
The reason men tend to watch anime is mainly because it's free from this bullshit. Even though their birthrate is relatively poor Japan really doesn't seem to be a country whose men and women hate each other. Perhaps it's because women look way younger for way longer, so there's correspondingly less temptation for the collective of older women to re-enact Snow White on everyone younger.
Which, it turns out, is easiest to do simply by pathologizing natural attraction to them (by any group whatsoever).
Megumin is a character that looks 12 and acts 12. As mentioned, the original material had all the characters being teens and perhaps different descriptions, but in the anime Kazuma and many of the other characters are basically depicted as adults. I struggle to believe anyone would consider Megumin a suitable partner or find her attractive without serious paedophilic tendencies
I am not sure what you are talking about. When I watch the anime Kazuma seems like a boy and it explicitly starts with him getting run over coming home from school.
The joke is that she kind of looks 12, but I think she acts a little older being the most intelligent member of the party and so on.
More options
Context Copy link
In the show I think she's 14 and acts 14. IIRC Kazuma is 17 in the show. It's less weird they end up together, considering they're both NEETs at heart.
I dated a girl once with the megumin body type. She was 28. And starved as a child. Whoops.
Yunyun best girl.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
She's given the nickname 'Useless Goddess' for a reason.
Ie, sometimes character design isn't enough to save a character. They have to actually be likeable. Unless that's the point, like we get with Aqua.
I haven't read the manga, but in the anime, it's spelled out that intelligence is Aqua's dump stat. It's pathetically low and she is "max-level" so it's never improving. It's also strongly hinted that basically all of the problems in the world have all been caused by Aqua, through various short-sighted acts. Several of her previous choices for reincarnations created civilization-ending disasters, her followers/cult are pretty much responsible for the demon-king, and I read some theory that the demon-king is actually someone she reincarnated.
Essentially Aqua is on the hot-crazy scale where her crazy-selfish-stupidity needs to be graded on a log scale, relative to her hotness. That's the joke.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nearly every anime girl is designed to be impossibly hot. With such an abundance of superstimuli, it's easy enough to look over the hot and crazy women for the merely hot ones.
That being said, I think you're operating on bad priors. There are still plenty of fans attracted to aqua, and dedicated kazuma/aqua shippers. The same goes for darkness.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm pretty sure he's shown as being into Darkness and Wiz physically. He just doesn't like their personalities. I think the non-attraction is specifically towards Aqua, on account of her being a massive dumbass.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I saw the preface of reactionary and thought I'd be reading some Yarvin-slop, but this guy is reactionary-reactionary. Certainly it's the case that when you hold up the state of the world to the light in just the right way, a few reactionary glimmers appear. Speaking this strongly, though, seems irresponsible to me and there are so many disagreeable assumptions made that undergird this article that it's hardly possible for me to respond to it in a meaningful way. If there was one claim in particular that you wanted to highlight, what would it be?
Edit: I saw "reactionary-reactionary" and thought you meant the second blogger, but after posting I realize you may have meant the Dread Jim. I am leaving this post up in case I got it right the first time.
I'm not the O.P., but I would be curious to see how you frame them, if you've got the time and energy to make it legible to folks like me who probably share many of those assumptions.
My summary of the central claim: The complaints that modern men are immature or poor marriage material aren't wrong, but they are incomplete; modern women suffer similar faults, but they aren't discussed because socially prevalent forms of feminism excuse them, or even laud them, in women.
I think this false notion that women are somehow innately fit for marriage by virtue of having been born with an uterus whereas men need to basically be domesticated into this role is remarkably widespread even among people who should know better. I’m guessing there are two main reasons for this. One is that most people are capable of noticing that the average woman is only interested in one man at a time and thus practices monogamy even when she’s not interested in marriage. (Serial monogamy = promiscuity, as practiced by women.) The other is that when relationships are formed, the man is usually more averse to initiating commitment (averse to making this big change in front of his entire social circle, that is) than the woman is whereas the woman is more likely to be averse to staying committed. This means men and women are actually equally picky in this regard but it’s men’s pickiness that manifests earlier in the process which creates the notion that the average man is somehow a ‘commitment-phobe’.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm using "reactionary-reactionary" as repetition for emphasis. Like how on the schoolyard people used to say "like-like" when they mean you have a crush on someone, that sort of thing. And yes, I was referring to the first article.
What else is The Motte for than writing a treatise on gender relations on a weeknight? Unfortunately, I attempted to write this reply and found that I was unable to do it sufficiently. I've been sitting at my computer for an hour and am simply not satisfied with the argument I've constructed because it effectively requires me to describe my worldview from first principles. This is proving to be a task too great for right now. I'll give you a bit, but it's not my best work. Feel free to ask me to clarify as necessary.
The nugget I can share is this: paying attention to the behaviors of "women" and "men" as a whole, when examining the dating world, is an incredible fool's errand and bound to produce resentment. I have a lot of respect for the courtship woes that swathes of modern men have experienced. Certainly, we can examine studies on hypergamy and track fertility rates and bemoan the state of the world when the latest ragebait Hinge exchange populates our Reddit feeds. However, that does not mean that anger is the appropriate response, nor do I think it necessitates wholesale societal revolution or a RETVRN of some kind. The pessimism that these authors radiate is entirely voluntary.
Let's say you are a conservative, marriage-oriented 25-year-old man. It behooves you to not give a shit about what the median woman is doing. It is incredibly easy to view the bad behavior of many women online, the vapidity, the promiscuity, the double-standards and essentialism and the blah blah blah. You can sneer 24/7, if you so choose. But you shouldn't. You likely aren't going to date those women. You absolutely won't marry those women. If you think modern woman is dooming herself to romantic suicide borne out of the sexual revolution, you can think that. But you wouldn't marry her anyway, so why sneer? Turn your gaze elsewhere.
Fundamentally, this is a multiculturalism and visibility problem. Past people had minimal exposure to dating norms outside of their community. The gentry did not pay attention to how the peasants were dating, and yet we insist on examining "men" and "women" as a whole. The women who get riled up at comments from traditionally minded men, too, are playing this game of vicarious imagistic anger. But she wouldn't date or marry him, either. We're driving ourselves crazy by looking at people who hardly exist in our dating sphere in the first place, with entirely different values and goals. The reality is that dating norms are so much more granular than that.
For the man struggling, the solution is to find your tribe as quickly as possible and be social within it. Find people, institutions, and places that give you the best odds to meet people with the same norms as you. Living in a coastal city and think the women are too feminist? Move. Having a hard time meeting religious people? Move. No luck on dating apps due to demographic asymmetries? Move. Dating and marriage, on the experiential level, have so little to do with the aggregate behaviors of the sexes, and everything to do with how one spends their time and the people they surround themselves with.
In the past, perhaps it didn't take as much effort to find your community, so I suppose there is some justified anger there. However, this appears to me a much more economic problem, borne out of our increased social atomization a la Putnam's Bowling Alone. Perhaps there used to be greater numbers of dateable women in one place. Interconnected economic networks result in more transience, less community, and more variance in local values, making it harder to find a mate that aligns with you. I just don't think "feminism" is the appropriate target. For every man that decries feminism, there is another man who finds the modern, liberated woman attractive. For every woman that decries traditional marriage, there is another woman who remains committed to those values. We can get into the fine-grained demographic data about how values are shifting between the genders, and so on, but again: what's the point? Know your place, surround yourself with people with similar values, and work hard at putting yourself out there. You will have a much better success rate than if you direct your attention toward those whose lifestyle you disavow in the first place.
I'll add:
This made me laugh. If anything, modern woman is less concerned with her looks than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less parasitically materialistic than women in eras past. If anything, modern woman is less of a gossip-vulture and has far broader interests than women in eras past. In eras gone by, when marriage was an economic institution above all else, women had so few opportunities to be interesting. Yes, perhaps the life of the historical homemaker was, in a sense, honorable, which hedges against accusations of shallowness. But her primary purpose was to be a womb, a pretty thing, and a domestic servant. Now, marriage is about romantic love - an extremely contemporary development. Consummate, equitable love is much harder to achieve with women who don't have lives of their own. We take for granted the extent to which feminism has encouraged increasing numbers of women to have dynamic personal lives, a developed intellect, and the inner richness necessary to be an equal partner. I cannot deny that there have been some unsavory excesses produced by the sexual revolution, and vapid, unscrupulous women exist. I just harshly question the hypothesis that if not for feminism, we'd be better off.
Feminism excuses women who aren't as well-suited for marriage because feminism is broadly about giving women more paths forward in life than dependency on a man. It's practically tautological. Further, women suddenly getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex doesn't make them fundamentally unattractive, even if it alters their trajectory vis a vis marriage. In contrast, the ways men are dropping the ball - gambling, porn, anger, laziness, isolation - are extremely unattractive. I don't think it's a double standard for precisely this reason, even if there is some sociological analysis to be made about how these behaviors affect marriage. I'll save that for another post. My hands hurt from typing. Cheers.
Oh boy, I can relate to that. I appreciate the effort.
I want to give your post some more thought, probably review it after I've slept. But two differences stand out to me: One is that I think that different relationship practices vary in their conduciveness to human flourishing far more than you do. The other is that I'm not looking primarily at potential mates but at other people I care about being led into costly mistakes by a society that encourages them.
Sure, I did my best but judging by other responses, it leaves a bit to be desired.
I'll add that I don't believe in a libertine blank-slatism where all relationship types are created equal. I will assume that you believe marriage or stable monogamy are ideal for human flourishing? I don't disagree. I just think that the excesses of a state in which traditional marriage is enforced or even encouraged are less tolerable than the excesses of a state that is permissive of individual relationship choice. I do not believe experimenting with casual sex or premarital sex generally in your 20s, as a man or woman, is an inherently detrimental event, so long as it is done within reason. I do not believe that matters of the heart ought to be addressed with market-style approaches, wherein we examine the "price" that "women" "set" on "men." It's far too broad a level of analysis to be personally useful. Call me ignorant if you wish, but I think this is a situation in which ignorance is adaptive.
You could argue that marriage is unfairly pilloried these days to our societal detriment, which is fair, but a different conversation.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You have correctly identified that DreadJim is a male feminist. Feminists take the posture that women are better than men and tend to take "well, what are they good for" for granted. So does DreadJim, with the valence swapped.
Anyway:
Yes, it absolutely fucking does.
It does in the same way and for the same reasons as the listed behaviors make men unattractive to women. You're making the same tired mistake the social conservatives and feminists (though I repeat myself) do where they fail to weight the desires and worth of men and women equally in an environment where they by all rights should be.
Which is why the assertion it's a double-standard is correct: what you've listed are all the ways men want to skip the bill for providing what women want, and you claim that's bad, and then you list all the ways women want to skip the bill for providing what men want, and you claim that's good.
Now, in the before times, "it's worse for men to skip the bill" was OK because there were external factors that balanced it out; mainly that, because women were not capable of primary resource extraction, women were dependent on those resources and had to sell (which is why you correct observe marriage is an economic bargain).
But, exactly coincident with the dawn of feminism, men destroyed that constraint in a massive wave of automation. So the instinctual double-standard remains, but now nothing else exists to moderate the impulse.
I'm not really going to bother refuting the rest of the post since most of it's just a word-for-word transposition for why the dead weight loss in a market that a cartel inherently creates (the cartel here is "all women" and the product is "family") is morally justified.
I really don't believe you are as free of resentment as you claim to be. Systems design begins with observing the users.
That is completely acceptable and is reasonable as an individual preference. I am not so stupid as to suggest that no one cares about promiscuity when thinking about family formation and long-term relationships - read me charitably here, please. I'm not trying to moralize: every person's icks and turn-offs are acceptable in my books. I'll admit it wasn't a very well written sentence. I'll clarify:
It's a matter of prevalence. I imagine there are far more women who are turned off by the median man than there are men who are turned off by the median woman. Of course, there are women with stratospheric body counts, and for those hoping for virgins, any number above 0 is too high. Still, I am doubtful most men would throw a fit that their girlfriend wants to have a career or slept with 4 or 5 people. These women are not "skipping the bill" for most men - the bill has simply changed as attitudes have shifted, and perhaps your attitude has not shifted with the majority. That is completely fine.
Truthfully, this idea is not a lynchpin of my views if you still find yourself in opposition. What follows is more important and definitive to me.
If one is a family-minded traditionalist, it's fair to say that one's values have decreased in influence over the years. That's certainly upsetting if one wants to preserve that way of life. That said, these values haven't decreased in frequency just among women. This is a society-wide change, with plenty of men along for the ride. The idea that there is some grand war in incentives between women, as a class, and men, as a class, is precisely the mindset that I think is fallacious.
If you honestly think that "all women" are in a sort of cartel where they determine the cost of entry for "family formation" or engage in "resource siphoning," I'm not sure we will ever see eye to eye. Cartels coordinate. Certainly, social movements have developed since the 50s, feminism among them, but I don't believe that the outcomes of feminism were a coordinated effort to create intractable dating standards for men. I have not observed any sort of unity in female behavior. Instead, I think there are loose federations of women with their own sets of values, who coordinate to the extent that their values change concomitantly. Perhaps you find some of these federations virulently offensive to your preferred way of life. My suggestion remains the same: disassociate from the federations of women you find disagreeable, and associate with the federations of women that you find agreeable. Otherwise, it just is an utter waste of time to talk about "the women." It's a floating signifier, so broad as to be practically useless on an individual level.
I'm not sure where you're deriving resentment from my comment. I think it's fairly lucid, even if you disagree with it.
That's called an in-group bias. Women have one, men not so much.
Since the amount of available product on the market depends on women and not men (also for biological reasons), we put women on the selling side and men on the buying side.
If sellers co-ordinate, then it's a cartel, by definition. Slut-shaming (a classic practice among women) is kind of the basic example of this: given women form a union, that is scab behavior [it's working at a discount from the cartel's perspective, defeating the power of collective bargaining], and discouraged accordingly. See also the concept of a "pick-me", where the woman throws in some other value-adds to gain an individual advantage, and the chain is similar: why would you do that, unless you want to sell -> you're trying to undercut everyone else = slut = scab -> punish.
This isn't really a conscious thing; it's merely human instinct. Revealed preferences by the relevant actors (as buyers compete with buyers, as sellers compete with sellers, and as both negotiate between each other) demonstrates the collective negotiation between men and women has the character of a market, so economic analysis is the correct framing with which to make predictions.
'What the average market participant is willing to afford' is actually kind of the central issue here, so 'attitudes' are inescapable here (and again, this has biology/instinctual roots). Sexual attraction obviously has a lot to do with that, and that's something you simply don't get to decide.
In this case, the clearing price of the sexual marketplace has risen to the point where it's created a much larger proportion of men and women who are either unwilling or unable to afford each other; even when they can, they have far smaller families as a result.
Feminism is to blame for a little bit of that (in the "why bother buying into someone they're only marginally attracted to" and "government-enforced wealth transfers from men to women handicaps buyers and frustrates price discovery for sellers"[1] senses- this also matters on the seller side, particularly when considering [2], but inherently affects buyers far more than sellers), but a lot of it is that the substitute goods have become far better and cheaper than they used to be (and the cost of everything else associated with supporting a family has become far higher), so the value each party must bring also must be correspondingly higher.
Which means that, at the clearing price floor, attraction (and perhaps the compromises thereon) is making most of the difference (and perhaps providing more of the buyer's remorse upon purchase), so the fixation on it at that point makes sense.
[1] Forced-diversity initiatives as well as intentional subsidy of college degrees increase a seller's perception of their real value; once they realize they're overvalued, their more advanced age has devalued them further (again, this is a thing men value, and no, you don't get to pretend they don't). Discovering this is more likely to lead to their leaving the market entirely, creating further distortion.
[2] Divorce laws in the "she took everything including the kids" direction result in buyers perceiving more risk than there actually is. This should actually decrease the price a woman can charge due to fewer buyers willing to take that risk, and can lead to sellers competing with each other in ways like "known adherent to a religion where divorce is a sin".
If you can't agree on the facts there's nothing further to discuss. Having interests is not inherently malicious; good and evil are not life's concern.
More options
Context Copy link
Slut-shaming is an obvious case of such coordination, isn't it? Not the slut-shaming done by angry incels online, which is a huge social crisis existing only on the minds of feminist journalists, but slut-shaming done by other women.
This has always been the case though.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Attraction is in the eye of the beholder. Many men are repulsed by women having more sex. Thus they say 'ran-through', 'whore', 'roastie'... Same with girlboss for that matter, with regard to careers.
Women are often repulsed by virgins. Their opinion isn't illegitimate. They use it as an insult: 'virgin' or 'have sex, incel' how could they be lying about what they believe?
Things that give men the ick aren't illegitimate while things that give women the ick are fine.
See my reply to ThisIsSin.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m sorry but the female equivalent to male gambling, porn, anger, laziness and isolation is by no means merely ‘getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex’; it’s credit card debt, female anger (publicly directed at men and usually getting zero social pushback), (obsessive) female porn consumption (of trashy YA literature, dark romantasy or whatever and emotional porn marketed to women in general), social isolation (see the latter example), trashiness, frumpiness, OF ‘modeling’, camwhoring, pigging out, getting addicted to painkillers and alcohol etc.
What getting careers, delaying childbirth, or even having more sex represent on the part of women is simply them abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them – it does not necessarily entail personal degeneracy and dysfunction. Men abandoning the social roles that the bygone Christian patriarchy expected of them simply manifests as one no longer interacting with women from the perspective of responsibility and protection but from the perspective of pleasure and fun – in other words, delaying marriage and fatherhood, not marrying your first sweetheart etc. It's an overall situation where women no longer feel accountable to men and men no longer feel responsible for women.
Do you think it's a reasonable request to be made to average single men or women to upend their entire lives just to supposedly increase their personal chances of finding a suitable partner?
Honestly? Yes, because that’s probably not their only tension with their local community, and the alternatives (changing the rest of the community for your niche, or resigning to loneliness) are more unreasonable.
We should normalize people intentionally moving to regions with like-minded individuals. It would reduce tension and restore community, desperately needed in this era. Already, moving once or twice in a lifetime, like leaving for college then working somewhere else, is fairly typical and not hard for most people, especially with fast travel and instant long-distance communication. Moving more shouldn’t be necessary.
This has actually been happening on such a scale and for such a long time that a popular book was released on its harmful effects back in 2008. I know this is somewhat off-topic but still.
Interesting. Looking at district maps like this, I had the impression that even many “one-sided” areas had a decent share of the other side: the darkest red and blue regions still have 1 of every 5 members voting the opposite.
More options
Context Copy link
That link is dead for me, just fyi.
Maybe you were trying to open it on a company network. Do these links work?
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/92292747 https://www.hoover.org/research/myth-big-sort https://www.broadstreetreview.com/articles/why-was-the-big-sort-overlooked
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
People prefer those like them, attempts to disturb this amount to the Berlin wall, the argument against it happening within the US afaik is «it's bad for undesirables» whether they be blacks (in the case of white flight) or the dumb (in the case of whatever Charles Murray was complaining about in the first part of the Bell Curve). Personally if you want me to be around such people you have to grant me elevation and authority, or else I will resent it and try to escape. From what I see of arguments like the one you link to they tend to refuse or ignore the authority component and instead they want people like me to accept some kind of duty to lower ourselves by living equal among people we don't want.
"elevation and authority"? Are you a fan of feudalism?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
+1, fair elaborations. I'm not claiming that the current dynamic is perfect, just t
I suppose I was speaking a bit harshly in my haste to respond. My ultimate point is that changing one's voluntary associations is likely to have a far greater impact on one's romantic satisfaction than paying much mind to aggregate female behaviors. "Moving" in the sense of physical relocation is one way to do that, and perhaps the most dramatic way to do so. To those unwilling to move, there are still many ways to change one's voluntary associations.
You're correct that in many cases, it is unreasonable for one to move and it's a highly personal decision. However, for the motivated partner-seeker, taking concerted steps to engage with more potential mates, up to and including moving, is hardly upending one's life - it's choosing the life that one wants. Under the age of 30, it pays to be flexible.
Now, there may be some dissatisfaction that such a suggestion is even necessary these days. Again, I don't think this is "women's" fault any more than it is the fault of cultural balkanization in the U.S., and women often find themselves in similar demographic quicksand that they have to escape by moving, too. For example, many young heterosexual women bemoan the fact that NYC has a highly skewed male-female ratio, making dating much harder.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My main gripe with arguments along these lines is that they're basically cope. "From the vantage point of the past" doesn't matter. From the PoV of the Aztecs, we are colossally fucking up. But who cares? The same goes, to a lesser degree, for catholic social conservatives.
The reality remains, the average young man is attracted to the average young women in a way that is not reciprocated. For literally all my acquaintances who are or were single for a sustained period of time, the problem was always that in their peer group, the single women do not judge the single men as worth it. The men are single because they got rejected; The women were single because they are rejecting.
Just to be clear, I even think the argument is largely correct! With the benefit of being a father and family man who has no interest in dating ever again, it seems obvious to me that most young modern women have an inflated image of self-worth, an excessively negative view of young men, and a serious problem with even just acknowledging that any perspective but their own might matter. And, to be further clear, the men aren't great, either; They're merely not worse.
More options
Context Copy link
Could you please make the point you're trying to make more explicit?
See the reply from Hieronymus and the response I posted here.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Schmitt hits the fan in a judicial hearing, as senator Eric Schmitt embarrasses himself with a flawed accusation against Jack Smith. I'll be using their first names since last names are so similar.
First as a small recap, Senator Eric was trying to prove that Jack had secretly traveled to Atlanta to conspire with local prosecutor Fani Willis, who was pursuing criminal charges against Trump for the attempted overturn of the 2020 elections. He asked Jack if Jack had been to Atlanta, and when Jack denied it, Eric accused Jack of perjury. It was made into a big show with them even making a giant poster for the media pointing to text messages showing Jack had watched a joke game in Atlanta between the Hawks and the Golden State Warriors only for things to immediately fall flat when it turns out Jack was actually in Maryland attending a WNBA game Maryland Terrapins and the Iowa Hawkeyes. This has been confirmed with both video evidence of Jack Smith at the Maryland game, and analysis of the stadiums (the specific seats they had mentioned do not exist in the Atlanta Hawks stadiums). Barring a clone, Jack Smith was not in Atlanta that day.
Eric Schmitt had the rollout planned with conservative influencers such as Benny Johnson and Sean Hannity, who have since deleted their tweets celebrating his callout in the hearings. Eric and his associates also seemed to have a planned article in Axios to come out afterwards as a potential 2028 VP pick. Basically, he went all in on making this his moment to shine, and he flopped.
Of course as per modern politics, there is no apology for the false accusation. As Hanania puts it
And as Johnathan Chait jokes, there's a funny nominative determinism to be seen here
I think some of the reaction is overly harsh, but there's also no denying that the reaction to his mixup among the right has been weird. Eric Schmitt was actively being praised on the Charlie Kirk show right after!
But as the community note points out, and as Eric Schmitt was already aware of at the time the text messages did not (and could not) confirm Jack Smit was going to a Hawk's game because Jack was not at the Hawks game to begin with. Of course he's dumbfounded by the claim, he literally was not there.
But time to get started on the overall point here. Schmitt claims his job is to "ask questions" but that's clearly not what he was actually doing. Schmitt wanted to put on a show and advance his political career, not to engage in fact finding. If he was just asking questions, why did he have all the theatrics planned afterwards? Why did he so readily accuse perjury? Why won't he apologize now for the false accusation? And why break protocol like this? It would have saved him from embarrassment if he went through the normal process
Congressional hearings are political theater, they don't serve for fact finding anymore. And why is this? Because they're public. They're on camera, so politicians put on a show. Like reason writer Binion says
The more directly public that politics has gotten, the more it's become a trashy reality TV show, exemplified of course by the trashy reality TV show host president. I live in a pretty red district and one thing I've definitely noticed with many around me is that their political interest is one of entertainment. It's why I'm one of the few people who can even name our governor (Josh Stein) yet alone the local mayor. Local politics are boring, too much sausage making and not enough fun despite having far more direct impact into our life. Eric Schmitt's failure here might be funny, but it's also just another sign of the degeneration of politics in the modern social media era and I don't think that's going away anytime soon. Nate Silver might think this is one of the greatest self owns in the history of the Senate but I say, it's one of the greatest so far. Just wait and see.
MAGA's contentious relation with objective reality is a bit of a double-edged sword for them. On the one hand, it is pretty great -- it is much easier to find fodder with the right vibes when you don't have to actually filter for stuff which happens to be true. Trump entered politics by promoting the birther conspiracy, after all.
On the other hand, in some domains you will want to favor objective reality simply because convincing your base of your delusions is not enough. If something is perjury is in decided by the courts, so as long as you can not gaslight the courts, being overconfident in the Senate gets you nothing.
Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will concede that the woke crowd also has their persistent delusions. But unlike MAGA, I see their delusions more accurately modeled as ideological blind spots (i.e., anything related to gender and race), whereas for MAGA it seems to cover anything from the nationality of Obama at birth to AI x-risk, the whereabouts of some DA, the relative IQ of US presidents, the cost of living and most other things.
For this particular case, my reality model says that any democratic Senator asking questions in a committee in a similar setting would have competent PMC staffers which had made sure that she knew the factual answer to any question she was asking.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm just confused about how this could even happen. Does he not have staffers? Was there anyone in his life who had the wherewithal to suggest that he was being an idiot?
What, you've never worked for a boss who steadfastly refused to accept any version of reality that did not chime with their view of what actually happened?
I'm currently still embittered from the work week just finished about my boss making a dumb jumping-down-my-throat accusation of me making a mistake I did not make, and luckily for me I had the evidence to prove it, but Boss was bound and determined Boss was in the right, Boss can never be wrong, Boss said I dunnit so I must have dunnit. Ah well, hopefully by the time Monday rolls round I'll have cooled off, but I can forecast that it'll be work to rule on my part all Monday and it might even happen that some browsing the Internet on work time might occur, who can say? 😁
I have, but if any profession should select for individuals who can subtly lead a horse to water AND make him drink...
Tough to do. If you can pull it off, the world is your oyster. Politics selects for fellas (and women) with necks like a jockey's bollocks, to quote the pithy saying. Part of that is an unwavering conviction that "I am so supernally important and so obviously correct that I deserve to be governing the people", and getting around that sort of high level of self-confidence is tricky. See Katie Porter for one example of a lady who does not share the limelight well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you ever make threads about democrats acting like retards? There's plenty of examples I can share if you'd like somewhere to start.
I'm not denying that there are plenty of people on my "side" that act like buffoons, I'm just trying to point out that you only ever seem to care when Republicans do it.
well, perhaps OP can't, but "the rightful calif" can
What's going on with the hostile response to Scott's tweet? I thought it was a pretty anodyne joke (although well below Scott's usual quality standards). Believing Christians, is this unusually offensive?
In Scott's specific case, yes.
He's simultaneously pissing off his atheist friends by agreeing with Christians and annoying his earnestly religious Unsong fans by seeming dismissive of their beliefs.
More options
Context Copy link
Comparing yourself to Jesus is generally not done.
A rat blogger making an awkward comparison of his weirdo buddies to the Jesus movement is more offensive than the President posting AI slop of himself performing a Jesus miracle. Another reminder that Twitter is fake and gay.
More options
Context Copy link
Which is, of course, a retarded meme. If a group of people revere some figure highly, a perfectly valid defence of some other figure is to point out how they're similar. If someone gets offended by a comparison, it's purely a them problem.
It's not a meme, it's just straightforward blasphemy. You are not supposed to suggest that you or your friends are basically like the Son of God for the purposes of self-aggrandisement, especially when you and your friends are neither holy nor christlike in their behaviour.
Comparing people to Jesus in order to learn from his example is obviously different.
Yes, the people who actually believe in god are retarded, obviously.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the comparison is an attempt to demonstrate that the arguments being used against Yudkowsky could also be used to dismiss Christianity, and thus prove too much.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the delivery is obnoxious and confusing, especially for Scott. The message is OK: “You think rationalism is weird and problematic? Look, it’s very similar to Christianity.”
That's not a plus in my book, but then again, I have not seen the tweet in context.
There's no context at least on Twitter: https://xxcancel.com/slatestarcodex/status/2105786054058164627
The context is that there is kind of a civil war in Scott's general sphere of twitter over the AI saftey question. Scott, having a history of being tolerant of religious rightists during the culture wars, has a wide number of Christians within his social web. These Christians and rightists variable side with or against his positions but often remain civil. It wasn't obvious that they were going to take the anti-ai-safety position but it's starting to seem like the worm is turning that way and there are a lot of attacks on EA/Rationalists/Safetiest from the Religious right direction. The subtext is kind of clear "We know we're weird by today's standards and but were you and your people not once weird by today's standards?" He's being accused of doing the meme but scott has engaged earnestly and in good faith the christians frequently enough that I don't think you can accusing him of cynicism here. He does in fact think it's admirable that Jesus forgave prostitutes and preached against a corrupt moral order, in many ways his movement is downstream of christian enlightenment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
For one, he is insisting on a non-central and offensive characterization of the religion. Christianity is to “Jewish guy’s apocalyptic cult” as “Bay Area EA” is to “Atheistic Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy”; I think Scott would realize why the latter might offend. It betrays a poor theory of mind to think a Christian would actually believe that this characterizes his religion. Labeling Jesus’ evangelism to prostitutes “consorting with prostitutes” is like calling Aella an international human trafficker of vulnerable women. Calling his critics Pontius Pilate is like a Christian calling EA a Sanhedrin of Christ-Killers.
It’s hard to see a charitable way to extract rhetorical force from his post. If the post instead said like, “ Oh, you're worried about a group of people who want to distribute money to those who need it […] you’re scandalized by a fellowship of individuals who want to help the poor […] you are offended by an absolute moral obligation to neighbor”, or something, then this would have some rhetorical force, as this similar to a central-ish characterization of Christ’s message. It would still be a little weird though, because not even saints liken themselves in importance to Christ with such chutzpah, so the Pilate part is best left out no matter what
More options
Context Copy link
I think a lot of it stems from the fact that he did the meme.
I mean, the meme has always been very stupid and its proliferation indicative of the lack of an actual rejoinder. The people making those kinds of arguments don't think they'll be persuasive because they already know the people they're talking about don't believe the nominal tenets of their own religion. No one thinks a guy saying something like "do not commit the sin of empathy" is going to be moved by quoting the Bible. The point is to needle them about this fact and highlight their hypocrisy to onlookers.
Religious fundamentalists (particularly the extremely online variety) want to grandstand about their strict adherence to the principles of their religion, but are at least as guilty of picking and choosing as religious liberals. This creates a problem for them since, unlike churches with liberal theological stances, their legitimacy is grounded in the aforementioned rigid adherence (or rather, is claimed to).
I find the meme convincing because the times I see people piously quoting "Didn't Jesus say [X,Y,Z]?" it has been in the context of "I have nothing but contempt for Christianity and I am only cherry-picking texts to try and make it out that you don't even know your own religion and are all hypocrites".
They don't know their own religion and are all hypocrites. That's the point. The typical conservative Christian in the US is not only a bad Christian by the notional values of their religion*, they profess a dizzying array of heresies. Rather than being a serious moral/philosophical commitment, Christianity becomes just another hollow tribal marker. To my previous point: this would be less of a gotcha if they didn't anchor their morality legitimacy to a strict interpretation of Christianity.
*by which I mean not merely that they fall short of Christian ideals, which is obviously priced in, but that they do not even aspire to live up to Christian ideals.
This is the definition of uncharitable. Do you really think there aren't any Christians who know the tenets of the religion? What an absurd thing to say.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That can sort of, maybe, sometimes work when you're citing actual principles, like questioning the compassion of a Christian, or pointing out when a progressive is being racist and sexist. And it still mostly fails because real ideologies have already grappled with those topics. The Christian will say that forgiveness requires repentence so they can fully condemn unrepentant evildoers; the progressive will say that they feel like a scrappy underdog so their hatred is righteous.
Scott's post is mostly very defensive snark on trite descriptors, except for the compassion thing which is already fatally undercut in that he's making that argument on behalf of people who are half a step away from being Nurgle worshippers.
More options
Context Copy link
Which is precisely why "doing the meme" gets met with hostility and denigration. You don't care, you just want to shit on them, and it's easy to tell you just want to shit on them.
More options
Context Copy link
I think the meme is annoying precisely because the people who use it don’t really understand Christianity but instead think it’s just the hippie version.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
No, I'll give Scott enough benefit of the doubt on him being generous with believers that the tweet just made me go "Don't make me come over there" rather than have a full-on meltdown. I'm not going to speculate on the state of Aella's soul, she could well end up like St Mary of Egypt (are we not told "Jesus said to them, “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you"?), but Big Yud is - well, like the guy said, You're no Jack Kennedy if we're gonna talk Jewish cult leaders.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Was that tweet in response to something specific?
I think probably the discussion surrounding this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-morals-ai.html
Whoa, how did I miss this story? (Probably because I am not subscribed to the NYT). Thank you for the link, this is indeed relevant to my interests, especially after the pope's encyclical.
More options
Context Copy link
https://archive.ph/LrX1z
Although they mention “ religious and philosophical thinkers — Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, Ubuntu and others”.
I think here, Scott is referring to the rationalist movement and comparing it to Christianity. Eliezer is the Jewish founder and AI apocalypse doomsayer, Aella is a notable member who’s done sex work (I’m not aware of others), and “compassion for everyone” is one of their (especially Scott’s) opinions. But also, Jesus is Christianity’s Jewish founder who forewarned apocalypse, apparently some part of Christianity involves working with prostitutes, and Christianity preaches compassion for all. Pontius Pilate is the judge who ordered Jesus’ crucification.
Also Anthropic and EA more broadly which has gotten a lot of mainstream attention recently with their proximity to all of the AI stuff, including from government tweets such as this one: https://x.com/DoWCTO/status/2099536442594582922
Probably culture war subthread worthy of its own.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be fair, mon poulet, there is enough stupid shit done by politicians of all stripes in every nation under the sun that it's a simple matter of putting one's thumb in and pulling out a plum for any and all parties.
More options
Context Copy link
Come on. Along one axis or the other, that describes a substantial number, if not the majority, of regular posters. There are very few people on the Motte with credibility to point that particular finger.
Sure, but magicalkittycat seems particularly egregious in this regard. You don't see me making a thread about Brandon Herrera's Democrat opponent being a fat illiterate retard who claimed a photo of him clearly holding up a copy of the Communist Manifesto was actually him holding up a copy of Mein Kampf.
Can anybody shed light on something I saw in passing, about allegations that James Talarico (Democrat nominee running for the Senate elections in Texas) is from a family of slave owners? And the defence being (1) he is adopted and (2) his adoptive family are Italian and emigrated to America after slavery was abolished?
I could look it up myself but I'm not that interested, and I think you guys would have funnier replies anyway. I don't know if I think these allegations are remotely plausible, but Talarico annoys me sufficiently (due to theology) that I don't mind seeing stupid stories like this. Uncharitable of me, I know.
I'm descended from slave owners. Is this something that needs to be defended against?
My 7th great grandfather was a refugee in England from the Palatinate before securing passage on The Union to South Carolina.
By the time of his death at 63 in 1792, 28 years after arriving he owned several slaves that he was able to leave to his widow and children. This is a refugee success story.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm descended from slave owners too, I think most Americans of colonial descent are with fertility patterns being as they are. I'd guess at least half of whites here probably are, it's completely unremarkable.
More options
Context Copy link
Most white southerners who are in a position to be elected to public office are descended from slave owners. Nobody actually cares because the only thing it actually means is having at least one ancestor who was in the top 10% of the population of the antebellum south; Talarico is in a feud with jasmine Crockett and thats thé only reason anyone’s bringing this up.
More options
Context Copy link
Probably most Southerners are descended from slave owners. What percentage of the current Bundestag do you think are descended from Nazis?
I mean yeah, but by the left's own logic one carries the sins of their forefathers. Shouldn't Talarico step aside for a more deserving person, possibly black, or female, ideally both. Someone like Jasmine Crockett?
He talks a lot about paying for the "reverberations of slavery". But apparently the payments must fall to others, not him personally.
Ultimately I do think this will doom Talarico's chances. He's taking a seat from a black person. And black voters are just not going to turn out for a gay-coded white boy.
I don't get that impression of him, but he is a bit milk-and-water.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Including most black southerners, especially those from wealthy enough families to enter politics.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Surprisingly haven't heard this one yet. But it reminds me of the George W. Bush housing deed "scandal" where someone found out the deed to his house had a covenant that it couldn't be sold to black people. It had been put there by a previous owner decades before and hadn't been enforceable since the Civil Rights Act and there was a decent chance that Bush didn't even know about it but that didn't stop the media from making hay from it.
Honestly Talarico being descended from slave owners would be a complete non-issue to me if it was actually true. The heretical stuff his pastor says is far more concerning: https://cbn.com/news/politics/james-talaricos-pastor-makes-shocking-statements-no-way-knowing-if-jesus-really
Oh, the church stuff is way worse so far as I am concerned, both the main minister of his church and the lesbian retired-then-came-back Pastorette Babs who isn't sure Jesus even existed but is darn sure Jimmy boy is only bluffing on his u-turns to appeal to the redneck rube voters and once safely elected will revert to being a Good Boy.
But this only counts for people who do in fact care about the alleged Christianity, plus Paxton is such a god-awful candidate that an empty bucket could probably run and defeat him at this point.
More options
Context Copy link
And a cynic might be inclined to suspect that it's all intentional, blue tribe technocrats trying to flood the field with talk about how he's descended from slave-owners (which almost nobody in Texas is going to care about) to distract from the all the LGBTQ/Furry stuff that would seem far more likely to sink his chances.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Admittedly, it took me a while to realize this wasn't Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google.
More options
Context Copy link
Kindly remember that some of us aren't American and do need reminders such as: who the heck is Jack Smith and why should I care? and also don't I remember something about Fani Willis having her own troubles when she tried to prosecute Trump, or am I mixing her up with another prosecutor who mixed business with pleasure and used the public purse (allegedly) to bankroll her hunny-bunny?
Anyhoo, seems Ms. Willis managed things so wonderfully that eventually the case against Trump was a resounding - nothing?
I'm American and I have never even heard of these people. I have no idea why @magicalkittycat finds this interesting, but it definitely isn't something that would be of interest to most Americans imo.
IF you are the sort of person who finds powerful people humiliating themselves funny, it was hilarious despite the total lack of real political importance. The comedy is redolent of this incident where the Canadian Parliament accidentally honoured a Ukrainian Nazi.
I think Klobuchar putting the boot in was particularly well-done, and it bothers me that nobody has made the obvious joke and said that Schmitt was Klobbered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Jack Smith was the special prosecutor Biden appointed to investigate and bring charges against Donald Trump. Essentially it was his job to put Trump in jail c. 2023, this was extremely big news when it happened.
There was a conspiracy that Jack Smith coordinated with the DOJ and other state prosecutors to bring cases against Trump. (I.e. it was not “just the law” they presented it as but a coordinated campaign.) I remember seeing good evidence of this at the time but I don’t remember exactly what it was anymore. All of this stuff was obviated when Trump won in 2024.
Fani Williams was one of the state-level prosecutors bringing charges against Trump. (I believe she filed RICO charges against Trump and his entire inner circle.) However her case was jeopardized when it was revealed that she was having an affair with one of her clients and that she was paying him six-figure sums of consulting without disclosing the conflict of interest.
More options
Context Copy link
Jack Smith is the special prosecutor who went after Trump for the Mar a Lago case and a January 6 case. The first was dismissed by Trump appointee Aileen Cannon who said (with some backing from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas) his office was illegal. The second was actually dismissed by an Obama appointee after Trump won the 2024 election.
At this stage, there have been so many attempts to get Orange Man Bad that I can't keep count or remember the cast of characters (it's like a triple-decker fantasy novel, I need the list of 'who's who and what's that' at the start) particularly since some Democrat has launched yet another impeachment attempt the other day.
But never fear, Kathy and Letitia are out there to keep the world safe by making sure they take over from the rubes and hicks unable to handle high-profile cases properly! Why it's almost like it's election season or something (though surely NY city and state are both sufficiently blue that such efforts are not needed?)
This is one of two recent cases that have me annoyed. Usually I am defending the members of my sex, but the Cornell case is clearly "she was damn well willing to take drugs and have sex with multiple partners, except it got a bit more spicy than she bargained for, but nobody raped anybody" and there's a case in Northern Ireland where my view is "she did commit murder". If it was a case of the accused couldn't get the guy out of her home and couldn't get away from him, then yeah, sure: killing in a fit of desperation. But she had a restraining order against him and yet the dumb bunny invited him back in to her house, then methodically murdered him. And I say murdered because this was not done in fear.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My dude, come on. You're going to make the world's most basic error in facts in a post about people making basic errors in facts?
The error here being that these are women's college basketball teams and not WNBA teams, right?
Yes.
More options
Context Copy link
It was an extremely basic error, but somewhat understandable. I expect the average person on the street might be able to name exactly one WNBA player, and she did play for the Hawkeyes in college.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Imagine falsely accusing someone and then not apologising for it! You're right, that would be embarrassing.
I'm sure you personally didn't do exactly the same thing to me lower down in the thread, where you mistook me for another commenter and threw a bunch of accusations at me:
Then, when I pointed out that I hadn't said any of the things you were accusing me of, what was your response?
Nice apology after accusing a person of throwing a tantrum based on your lack of reading comprehension.
The absolute chutzpah to accuse your political opponents of beclowning themselves with false accusations, and then not apologising for those false accusations, a couple of hours after doing the exact thing yourself. Truly incredible.
Damn you are so right, a sitting senator falsely accusing someone of a crime at a public hearing is on the same exact level as a random mixup between two people with very similar usernames on an online website.
A sitting senator falsely accusing someone may be a bigger deal, but so is a sitting senator publicly admitting wrongdoing and apologising. Either way, the bottom line is that no amount of sophistry can really wash away the bad look of making ethical demands of someone else but showing no desire to be bound by them yourself at whatever smaller scale is applicable to you.
(On the meta level, a teaching moment. Even after conceding that you made a mistake, and even after this callout, you clearly are deeply averse to just saying sorry, even though it would resolve this altercation and improve your reputation considerably. Apologising to adversaries who you disdain and believe have wronged you in countless ways before is psychologically hard.)
Well such apologies improve one's reputation in some circles but not necessarily in others. I would guess that among ultra partisan progressive types, it would diminish one's standing to publicly make that kind of concession to the out-group. Probably few, if any, ultra partisan progressive types read this message board but all of our minds are haunted by the ghosts of tribesmen from the ancestral environment.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Too much heat. You've actually eaten a previous ban for letting this user get to you before, and this response is moddable on its own. Relitigating grudges in every thread does not make for quality discussion.
I'm making it a two day ban this time, in hopes that you get the idea.
I argued against this sort of ban when it was applied to someone calling out Dean, and I will argue against it here as well. I don't think prohibiting this kind of response is actually improving discussion quality. There are few things as infuriating as hypocrisy, where people seek to reap the discourse benefits of having principles when it is convenient, but refuse to pay the tax of being bound by them. The "heat" was already introduced when OP decided to be a hypocrite; stopping people from venting it will not let you cheat the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but just make them bottle it up and release it gradually over the course of future interactions with him (amplified by the additional anger over him getting away with the initial offense thanks to jannie cover). Presumably, this will result in OP feeling treated unfairly/diffusely persecuted by the community, which will in turn encourage him to needle his opposition more.
I tend to think that paying enough attention to people's usernames to stay mad at them for stuff they said in other threads is the wrong way to use this website.
We're not running for President here, people should be able to change their minds or try out new opinions without getting grilled on their previous record. And as someone who mostly lurks, I find that posts that attack a specific user rather than their argument are usually not very interesting to read.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure if this is what you are referring to as "the initial offense," but magicalkittycat was banned for it. What is "jannie cover?"
It's not strictly that call-outs that are banned, I would say, so much as heated ones. Posters who are aggravatingly hypocritical can certainly have that spelled out, but it still has to be within the context of a rule-abiding post--more light than heat, ample charity, etc. We do actually mod people when it seems like they are baiting others deliberately, but that doesn't mean we're going to refrain from moderating people who snap at the bait. As always, bad behavior is not excusable by other people's bad behavior.
It looks like he was banned for attacking @stoatherd, but the offense I am talking about is in the opening post of this thread (invoking a principle (apologise for false accusations that you make) that you provably do not consider to apply to yourself). "Jannie cover" is moderators banning people for calling this out.
I think you could analyse all that transpired in this thread as an extension of an initial offense (magicalkittycat's (mistargeted?) attack on stoatherd), but in that case, looking at the sequencing of posts, this reveals a more general structural problem with moderation. As far as I can tell, the chronology was:
magicalkittycat attacks stoatherd, seemingly based on a mixup of usernames, and they have the exchange in the thread you linked where the mixup comes out but magicalkittycat does not apologise
magicalkittycat makes a new top-level post attacking some outgroup senator for not apologising after making a false accusation
stoatherd calls him out on this
you ban stoatherd for his callout
I see that snapshot of the situation and start writing my response
you go back to the above thread and ban magicalkittycat for the original attack
I post my response to your ban of stoatherd
Between the beginning and the end of the chain, almost a whole day had passed. Not only is this a whole day in which the situation was allowed to fester in ambiguity (with plenty of opportunity for readers to build the expectation that this is yet another of the numerous cases where the moderators will not punish someone who manifestly deserved punishment), but the order in which you then proceeded to respond to the situation (punish the downstream reactions first, and only then move up the chain) created a window in which the above expectation would be confirmed (initial act unpunished, reactions cracked down on).
Moreover, due to how slow the response was, by the time the punishment for magicalkittycat's original post was dispensed, the community's attention window has long moved on, and hardly anyone will even see that ban. Therefore, it neither conveys deterrence to others who might commit a similar offense, nor a sense that justice was served to those who were offended by it (unless they were so obsessed as to save magicalkittycat's original post and make a note to come back to it the next day). The bottom line is broken window upon broken window was lined up and left a large number of readers with the diffuse sense that moderation is unfair.
Concrete suggestions to improve this situation (any subset of them would be an improvement):
when untangling heated situations where you are going to punish multiple people who attacked each other, moderate in chronological order
if a post was reported but the mod response is delayed because of internal discussion or nobody having time, have some way to flag "we received reports and are currently deciding how to proceed" to distinguish this state from "we consider this post good and won't do anything about it"
if moderation was slow to respond, consider the delay a mitigating circumstance for "vigilante justice" posts that offended back against the initial offender
link to related moderator action, so it doesn't wrongly appear one-sided if one side's punishment is prominent while the other's is buried (i.e. your modhat post against stoatherd should have linked to the modhat post against magicalkittycat)
Thanks for the suggestions, none seem unreasonable. In case it helps you understand anything you don't already understand, here are some of the thoughts I had while reading them.
I did not actually set out to "untangle" anything. The mod queue is chronological, and the posts at the top are the newest, while older posts spill onto other pages. So when I go into the mod queue, I see the newest complaints first. Sometimes I go down to the bottom and work my way up, but most of the time I do not do that, instead moderating from the top down, because that is the most natural way to navigate the queue. Design flaw? Maybe!
We do actually do this when there is internal discussion going on. But most of the time, mod response is slow because there's just no one watching the queue. The only really plausible solution to this would be professional moderators. Sadly, every single one of us has other things to do.
We actually not only encourage community policing, but sometimes make positive mod notes on the accounts of users who do it properly. But "vigilante justice" is not the proper way to do it. There are ways to suggest that others are abusing the rules without breaking the rules yourself. It does seem like most people would rather do it the "mob justice" way than the "patient patrician" way! But in general I think the foundation calls for the latter and forbids the former.
This makes more sense to me if I'm trying to "untangle" things, but in most cases that's some combination of difficult, annoying, and pointless. The more effort we have to put into moderation, sadly, the less happy we are to do it! It's much more straightforward to moderate on a case-by-case basis, and when people start into "but he said--" we can just drop "your bad behavior is not excused by the bad behavior of others."
This is also why serial boundary testers are such a heavy drain on the community. You tell someone to "fuck off," we ban you. Easy peasy! But if you carefully write a rule-abiding post where the subtext is "fuck off," probably we won't ban you, at least not the first time. The problem is that when we do eventually decide that, yes, on balance, this poster is up to no good and the community needs a break from their shenanigans, we have to knit together a post linking to multiple semi-infractions and explaining that, no, generally we're not going to ban this level of fisticuffs, but the user has become egregiously obnoxious and therefore...
Well, hopefully you get the idea. You're right: the mod team could probably do better. Hopefully no one is surprised to hear that! But the level of effort it would take to deliver on these suggestions is, I suggest, extremely unlikely to manifest, at least in most cases. It's not a question of approach, it's a question of resources--specifically, time and attention.
This is the part where you accept a bunch of NEET/retired moderators and then they ruin the site.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
With links and timestamps (in my time zone, EDT):
2026-10-01 11:04: Magicalkittycat attacks Stoatherd, seemingly based on a mixup of usernames, and they have the exchange in the thread you linked where the mixup comes out but Magicalkittycat does not apologise
2026-10-01 17:47: Magicalkittycat makes a new top-level post attacking some outgroup senator for not apologising after making a false accusation
2026-10-01 22:48: Stoatherd calls him out on this
2026-10-02 07:29: You ban Stoatherd for his callout [8:41 after Stoatherd's comment]
Indeterminate: 4bpp sees that snapshot of the situation and starts writing his response
2026-10-02 07:45: You go back to the above thread and ban Magicalkittycat for the original attack [20:41 after Magicalkittycat's comment]
2026-10-02 08:01: 4bpp posts his response to your ban of Stoatherd
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Bloomberg: JPMorgan and Goldman See Mideast Oil Flows Near Pre-War Levels
Oil is passing coming through the Middle East again, at essentially pre-war levels. Some of this is from oil bypassing the Strait of Hormuz, and some of this is from oil transiting the Strait under American protection.
Diesel and gasoline are still stymied, but, mostly, because Iranian exports are being blockaded by the US.
But other Gulf States are increasing their own exports to compensate for the missing Iranian piece.
It appears that the Iranians are not capable of stopping exports from flowing through the Straits, and so oil exports are returning to normal.
Meanwhile, Iran seemingly wants to end the war, although none dare call it "surrender":
New York Times: Iran Proposes 7-Day Plan to End War
Iran wants, essentially, to return to something close to June's MOU, except on a faster timetable. Iran agrees to "reopen" the Straits in exchange for getting its confiscated $12 Billion, an end of the sanctions and blockade, and then to open discussions as to the future of its nuclear program.
Contrary to expectations that Iran is biding its time in hopes that Democrats will retake Congress, Iran says that it would prefer to reach a deal before the midterms.
Trump, however, is not interested:
AP: Iran indicates it’s received an official US response to its latest offer on ending the war
Iran prefers to call it a "win-win":
So, here's the current state of the war:
Shipping is moving through Hormuz and is increasing week-to-week. Total traffic out of the Gulf is approaching pre-war levels.
Iran has no ability to seriously threaten shipping in the Straits.
Iran is seemingly unable or unwilling to continue striking other American targets and assets in the Gulf
Iran remains blockaded and unable to export its own products, contributing to severe stress on the Iranian economy.
Iran is more interested in negotiating peace than Trump is.
Forgive me for repeating old arguments but I need to be clear about this: Trump was right about Iran and America is winning.
I think the four vessels Iran just struck is evidence that they retain the ability to threaten shipping, as there are costs to damaging ships and American marines even if the ships technically pass through the strait
Doesn’t seem to be making much of an impact.
Four vessels struck in Hormuz in 24 hours
As for the other three:
To recap: Iran strikes four ships, sinking none and causing no casualties. It attacks ships both compliant and non-compliant with its transit rules, putting the lie to any notion that it is in control of Strait traffic, let alone itself. It is, ultimately, capable of inconveniencing individual ships but is nowhere close to controlling anything, putting it at the same threat level as minor pirates. Which is why Strait traffic continues to increase from week to week: nobody fears Iran anymore.
More options
Context Copy link
What does "struck" mean? What were the names of the ships? How much damage was done? How many casualties? Many of these reports fall into the category of 1) never happened or 2) got hit by a bullet or drone with minor damage
Since casualties weren't mentioned, I am guessing there weren't any. I think it's likely that these ships successfully transited the Strait and will come back again for more.
Imagine if this forum gave even 10% of the attention it gives to these stories as it does to debating each frame of police body cam video. We need to be a lot more skeptical.
These are UKMTO reports so we can be sure they’ve happened. They constitute an absolute minimum on the happening scale. The guy I linked in my last comment is consulted by like every news org. I would also think that Gregory Brew, “Senior Analyst Iran and Oil EurasiaGroup • Formerly ISSYale” is worth trusting, and he concurs.
This is all a mystery, but the 30 or so sailor casualties that were added to our total casualty figures probably means it’s a bit more than a bullet.
It’s not like these tankers are required to report everything to UKMTO right now, let alone accurate casualty figures.
That tweet is exactly what I'm talking about.
He apparently thinks the UKMTO is fake and that Iran's propaganda is real? Iran said not too long ago that a VLCC hit two mines caught fire and stopped. Cool, what was the name of the ship? We have to discount Iran's pronouncements to near zero. The fact that this "serious" person isn't doing so shows that he's far from serious.
Ships are transiting the strait with impunity even if a few get dinged from time to time. I think there was an actual casualty event a week or two ago, so it's not completely nothing. But when an actual power like the US wants to attack a ship, they sink it, name it, and post the video.
We don’t really know if it’s “a few get dinged” though. The UKMTO number is the lowest number that US/UK are willing to release so that people continue taking the figure halfways seriously. If 20 vessels were struck, we might still find only 4 on the UKMTO. If we just added +38 sailor / marine casualties for September, either Iran hit one of our important military ships or Iran has hit a number of oil vessels being operated by sailors. Apparently there were 8 sailors on one oil vessel transiting that were injured, so perhaps Iran struck about five oil vessels sufficient to cause injury. Or perhaps even the +38 casualty number is lower than the true figure. The fact that we need our own soldiers operating oil vessels in yet another tell that it’s worse in the strait than Trump would like us to believe.
'Governments lie in their self interest' is self evidentally true. 'Therefore, the UK and US are just as credible as Iran' is a logical leap that requires a extraordinary level of evidence to demonstrate.
Who is telling you to trust Iran? Maybe I’m misinterpreting you though. We only need to trust America’s own numbers plus
• Brett Erickson, who is himself trusted by The New York Times (x3) Financial Times (x2) Associated Press (x1) The Washington Post (x13) Bloomberg (x11) Reuters (x19) Al Jazeera (x2) Politico (x5) The Hill (x3) CBS News (x1) Radio Free Europe (x8) Al-Monitor (x3) CNBC (x1) Newsweek (x2) DropSite (x1) Reason (x2) ABC News (x3)
• Gregory Brew, the Eurasia Group's own oil guy (huge), former Kissinger Visiting Fellow at the Jackson School for Global Affairs at Yale University, PhD Georgetown with a dissertation entitled “Progress & Petroleum: Oil, Development, and the American Encounter with Iran” (lmao)
As of writing my last post, another ship got “dinged”. Apparently it’s now on fire. But that’s just a “ding”, I guess, whatever that means. By the way, our soldiers were manning the ship, so they may or may have been on fire too.
Regarding the question of whether we should trust Iran, I have personally never considered it. Someone who pays for one of the expensive AIs and has time on their hands could probably check all the previous claims of Iran against verifiable information that comes out later. It’s not impossible that they tell the truth more often, as so few Americans would ever actually trust what they say that it’s genuinely in their overall interest to build rapport by telling the truth currently.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Meanwhile in reality the straits of Hormuz are not actually open: https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/
Oil and diesel are considerably more expensive as compared to the start of the war, despite Trump's heroic efforts to squander the US strategic oil reserve (now at its lowest level since 1982) and China's decision to reduce imports: https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/crude-oil
If the straits were actually open, as they were before the war, then we would see similar prices as before the war. But they aren't, so we don't. We see $90 oil, not $60 oil. In diesel and petrol, it's worse still.
The Iranian regime has not collapsed. Remember, this war was not supposed to be about oil. Trump was trying to crush the Iranian military and its proxies, trying to induce regime change (as seen by the strikes against Iran's leaders). He failed, as seen by them retaining the power to strike where they please, even far afield against Saudi Arabia's east-west pipeline, which is now at half capacity. They can attack it again if they want.
The US is weaker, poorer and less well respected around the world as a result of this war. It was a huge error. The US gained nothing. The US lost its Gulf bases, which are now rubble. The US lost its positions in Iraq, which have been evacuated. The US lost radars and expended huge amounts of munitions. The US inflicted some damage on Iran but at great expense. No land has been secured, there have been zero territorial gains for America. The Houthis have made territorial gains, Israel had to pull out of Lebanon... How is that winning?
The US entered this war under the delusional belief that Iran was ripe for revolution, the Kurds would rise up and the security forces would collapse. That was why they tried assassinations at the beginning of the war. But the delusion was unreal, so they switched goals to destroying Iran's military capability later. And then reopening the straits of Hormuz. Then a blockade. The US has been going backwards, not forwards.
Iran meanwhile has been advancing with their wargoals, trying to improve on their prewar status quo. Sanctions relief. A toll on the straits. Return of frozen funds. These are now on the table whereas they were not before. They seized the initiative in March and have held onto it the whole time.
>leaders assassinated
>military destroyed
>sanctions
>blockade
>iran is winning
As far as I can see the post above doesn't state Iran is winning, only that USA is not winning.
I do not think a country can win a war, in general. A country can only lose a war, in the case that it ceases to exist. But there is no such thing as a country winning the war, because a country is not an entity that can experience the benefits from the war and thus have some measure of the victory.
People can win benefits in a war. Citizens can win lower prices through their country's higher geopolitical influence. MIC lobbies can win loads of money. Presidents can win reelections. This is all in the descending order of how well-distributed the benefits of a war are.
No one wins benefits simply by bombing some abstract enemy in a vacuum, except perhaps the very thin benefits of morale.
If you want to show America is winning, demonstrate the Americans that are winning - winning something.
A nation certainly can win a war and reap benefits, but the US never quite was one, I think.
As long as you're defining a nation as a group of people.
No; as a kin group.
Of people. And not a territory with a particular set of borders and a flag.
Yes, correct. Though the relationship between the two isn't so arbitrary. The land and the people coevolve.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Ethnicities/races are infinitely fractal. No possible group of people "isn't a nation"; at best you can say they're less of one than other nations.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
World War II, Mexican-American, Punic, Imjin, Franco-Prussian, Napoleonic? Sure there are countries that have benefited from winning wars. It’s one of the reasons they fight them. It’s like saying the Lakers can’t win any games because a team definitionally is an entity that’s not capable of experiencing catharsis. This is a word game.
Trump controlling the Strait of Hormuz and blockading Iranian oil means that a terrorist state that kills Americans is defeated, a supply of energy to the Chinese powering their artificially cheap industrialization is cut off, a major drone supplier for Russia in its war against Ukraine is disabled, OPEC is made subservient to American power. American power makes the average American rich.
More options
Context Copy link
This is the critical point. A drawn war is a bad result for both sides. (The famous example is the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, because Kissinger said "It's a pity both sides can't lose", but the war was indecisive so both sides kind of did).
If this was a Paradox game, the warscore would be something like 20% in favour of the US with no visible path to 100% before the "Vassal levies raised too long" warning was joined by a "There are dangerous factions" warning.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Real life isn't an RTS. Modern conflicts can (and usually do) leave both sides worse off due to their destructiveness.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Meanwhile in reality a complete worthless garbage shit garbage AI slop piece of trash created by an indian grifter who has literally no idea what ais or s2s even means who typed into claude "hey make me a tracker for current_event shill it and buy some SEO slap ads on it too make no errors make me lots of money make no errors" - yeah, anyone who believes this more than hundreds of reputable sources really needs to rethink things.
No I will not chill out. Ban me.
You keep saying that but have offered zero links to even one these hundreds of reputable sources.
The banks?
"The banks" is not a link to a better tracker than the hormuz striaght monitor.
I realize phailyoor can't answer, at the moment, but I asked him to provide the thing a month ago and the answer has been crickets.
I want a link to a tracker that is more accurate, if hundreds of these exist, that should be a simple request.
I don't think any real trakcer with better data exists (for free), rather I think scattered reports based on not free data pop up here and there occasionally, and those are not useful for tracking changes in Straight traffic.
The problem with this is it's easy to selectively report scattered data to create a story that leads to inaccurate conclusions, and there are a lot of people motivated to show cases that traffic is terrible or traffic is back to normal. So I don't trust anyone's scattered reports vs a single source that reports consistent data.
I'm happy to use the best data available, but so far one user has a real problem with one site but has not offered anything better despite his claims that something better exists, so I don't have anything better to use.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I’m not going to defend the argument that there are hundreds, or indeed any, better sources. But it is surprising to me that the conclusion when the opinions of relatively reputable sector and geopolitical research analysts differs vastly from some vibecoded website is that it is the latter that must be more accurate. And it is true that regular reporting from oil analysts (who after all have regular conversations with executives at refineries, majors, shipping companies, commodities trading houses etc) suggests flows are much higher than what the Hormuz tracker website would imply. I also think the efficacy of supposedly accurate satellite based methods of tracking flows would appear questionable. Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m skeptical.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
3 day ban. Semi-user requested.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think you're confusing something -- we are paying a toll to the shuttle tankers that are moving oil out of the gulf. Just not to Iran. That's reflected in crude prices and you're right that "open/closed" is not the appropriate metric.
You're right about the great expense and munitions bit tho. War is not cheap and there are real costs.
That said, I think the Houthis routing the make-believe Saudi forces is 100% worth it as a reality check for MBS. He's no doubt had underlings report to him that the military is in good state while he writes huge checks for gear and not-always-existent personnel. Meanwhile, we see videos of massed Houthi vehicles charging unchallenged across an open desert in the way that would make any Ukrainian drone operator (or US A10 pilot) shudder. I think he's smart enough and adept enough to do what's needed after seeing incontrovertible evidence.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Does this include refined products? IIRC the Gulf states had been moving up the value chain, and had built a lot of refining capacity there, largely displacing smaller facilities in other nations. I recall someone in the industry saying that refiners still operating were doing really well on margins because so much global capacity (Russia and Gulf states) was offline. I hadn't heard if the Gulf refineries are back online, even if crude shipments (or total volume?) are recovering.
More options
Context Copy link
Gasoline and diesel prices are still up so you are wrong. Claims that this is about California shutting down refineries are false because that was not recent. Claims that this is about Ukraine blowing up Russian refineries are irrelevant because the mainstream media will not entertain them.
As for negotiation, the problem is that Iran already made a deal and then reneged. As a result, at this point it's on them to demonstrate good faith by giving up something for free. Announcing a unilateral cease fire in the Strait and actually abiding by it for a few weeks would be a reasonable one, but they won't do it.
Iran is winning because gas and diesel prices are slightly up? Doesn't seem like the Iranians agree with you.
America not winning doesn't imply that Iran is winning. Both are losing. The winners are anyone still shipping oil (Saudis are making bank, UAE too since they also have a straight bypassing pipeline and were never completely shut out like Kuwait etc., and other oil exporting dependent economies outside the middle east). Parts of the US are winning (frackers, and especially refinery owners, the spreads are huge right now) and larger parts are losing (farmers, fishermen, everyone else).
By this definition World War II was a loss because most Americans had to ration their food.
If we’re using the standards of WW2 for victory, then your arguments above are irrelevant. You didn’t have to argue that the US won because it was obvious since they occupied their countries and toppled their regimes.
Everyone knew who was winning the war by 1944. Stalin Roosevelt and Churchill organized conferences about it. It’s just as obvious who is winning in Iran today.
The best case scenario is for everything to go back to essentially to the pre-war status quo. I think what’s pretty obvious is that the most likely scenario is something significantly worse. There’s really no point in us talking any more, we will just see how this plays out.
A scenario where Iran suffers tremendous losses and America returns to pre-war status quo is an American victory.
That’s rather a limited comparison: we’re only talking about prices. The pre-war status quo did not include American control over the Strait of Hormuz or American military veto over Iran’s MIC.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In 1944 the Allies made massive territorial gains. The only territorial gains of the current war have been the Houthis seizing the Red Sea coast.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is great news.
One asterisk to the good news (and I'm not a doomer) is that most tanker fleets (or their insurers) still won't cross the strait. So smaller tankers are "shuttling" the oil to the larger ones and then offloading it via ship-to-ship transfers.
It's a great solution, but it's expensive on two levels: first, it's just plain logistically expensive and second the shuttles are charging a risk premium. So I agree with the top line that America is winning, but at the same time we're all paying higher oil prices.
Yes, although the pain is spread unequally. China is paying a $20/barrel premium for shippings. Others less, and the U.S. very little.
China can afford to pay extra for a bit. For years, they were getting massively discounted oil from Iran, Russia, and Venezuela while everyone else paid full price.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I am glad that we've achieved the pre-war status quo, at an economic cost of a half trillion dollars or so.
Though, you also have claimed oil flows had been restored and complete US victory several times before. Maybe this time it'll stick. It'd be rational for Iran to accept peace on pretty much any terms, but that's been true for awhile.
Yes, because the US has been winning the entire time. Trump attacked Iran and destroyed their ability to threaten traffic in the Straits, and proclaimed that the Straits were open. Everyone laughed and then slowly started transiting the Straits under American protection, hence the current "pre-war status quo".
That's the definition of victory. America is at "pre-war status quo," Iran is doing much worse than before the war. Time to admit Trump won and Iran lost.
I'd call that a draw, regardless of what happened to the other guy. I don't think the United States of America is in the type of zero-sum competition with Iran where destroying Iran's stuff is per se a victory, particularly given that China exists.
It is per se a victory. We are in competition with Iran. Iran supports terorrism, kills Americans and American allies, sends drones to Russia, sends oil to China. Iran was understood by everyone in America as one of our greatest enemies until five minutes ago when everyone went crazy over Israel.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
As I commented before, the only way you come up a half trillion dollar cost is by saying that "oil prices going up" means the extra money spent on oil just disappears from the economy. But it doesn't. That money is recycled throughout the economy. The true cost is much lower.
A half trillion cost could also be arrived at via the cost to Iran's economy. That's probably a fairly accurate figure.
For relatively cheap we were able to almost completely neutralize Iran's navy, air force, missile program, and nuclear program. If we get regime change, the war will almost certainly be worth it. Even if we don't, I think it succeeds on the merits.
The one objection that I think holds weight is that it's been a PR nightmare. If Republicans lose the midterms, the cost will have been immense. But that's not really the way Trump thinks.
The oil is destroyed when you use it as a consequence of what oil is.
By what mechanism? Oil companies don't want to increase production capacity now because they are, inherently, long on oil (and perhaps short on Iran). So the money gets kept- and while sure, oil companies do invest in other areas (as you'd expect them to), they're going to maintain a buffer, so the economic shock of increased profit for oil companies (and decreased profit for everyone who uses oil) is going to take some time to propagate.
I think that describes every modern US conflict, including the intentional provocation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict; jury's out on what was actually more expensive. (It's certainly very expensive for Europe, and one might argue the current admin's strategy of continually blaspheming European powers is one way to bolster domestic American will to wage this type of economic warfare, a strategy also shared by his opponents.)
I think the main question about the reorganization of
Rome'sAmerica's east-most provinces now is whether it's going to turn out Antony (where the East is successfully reorganized in a semi-co-operative fashion), or Octavian (where the East is openly dominated).European elites obviously prefer the Octavian approach, preferably under a Blue consul, and believe they can simply ignore anything a Red consul dictates until they're out of office. The Antony one would germinate a rival power bloc in their nations (as in "you have to, in relative terms to everyone else, reward the people doing the work")- again, something they'd rather avoid.
More options
Context Copy link
This is just the broken windows fallacy, gussied up. Higher oil prices mean that people use less oil than they would otherwise; this is a global economic distortion. The half a trillion dollars number isn't coming from naively multiplying the delta in oil prices (that gets you the trillion dollar number) but from (necessarily counterfactual) GDP deltas. I guess a hardcore climate change person could eliminate a lot of those costs by saying oil usage is a net negative.
And, although I don't expect many people to be sympathetic here to Iran's economy, massive destruction of capital is massive destruction of capital.
The broken window fallacy says there's a benefit to the broken window. The argument here is that the detriment is less than you get with just by counting the price paid for the window, which is true -- the glazier does indeed benefit, even though the net effect is loss.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To be clear, the pre-war status quo was that the strait was only "open" because Iran was using it as a hostage. Meanwhile they were investing heavily in their nuclear, drone, and ICBM programs, plus funding terrorist proxies abroad. Not to mention massacring any of their people who dared to protest.
All of that is gone now. Their missile factories are destroyed, their funds are gone, and most of their missiles have been used up. The only thing left is finding a way to permanently remove their nuclear material, which has been bombed into dust but is still there. And if they won't come to terms on that, the US and its allies can just keep bombing them indefinitely while other nations' oil goes through the Strait and Iran's economy falls ever further apart.
https://www.thenationalnews.com/news/us/2026/09/10/iran-has-resumed-ballistic-missile-production-report-says/
These destroyed missile factories are surprisingly operational, just like Iran's 'destroyed' nuclear facilities back in 2025, somehow undestroyed by 2026. The US track record of destroying capability with airpower alone is so poor that it's surprising anyone still believes what they say.
"missile factories" means an actual, you know... factory. Organized industrial equipment, building large number of missiles, with ever increasing range and capabilities. That newspaper article just sounds like they've still got some leftover parts that they're crudely assembling underground, mad-max style.
It's tyhe same with their nuclear weapons program. They were actively using centrifuges to enrich greater and greater amounds of uranium 238, with the goal of making warheads. That material still exists, it's just been bombed and hard to use now, but it does still exist. That's what happens when you bomb someone... you set them back, but they'll eventually rebuild.
Honestly this all just sounds like motivated reasoning on your part. Like you hate Trump, and you want him to fail, so you're happily cheering for every minor advance the Iranians can pull off. Even though I'll bet you would actually the the IRGC if they were a real power or you met them in real life.
'We destroyed the Iranian navy' = we blew up some destroyers but didn't open the straits, nor are we straying near their shores because then we'd be in danger.
'We destroyed their missile factories' = missile production and firing continues anyway. So it wasn't functionally destroyed, was it?
'We destroyed their nuclear facilities' = damage done is so ineffectual that the US starts another war 9 months later. Nor were they making warheads. If they wanted to make warheads, they'd simply make them like North Korea did. The Israelis and Americans have been hysterical about Iran's nuclear ambitions for 30 years. It's not credible or serious to still maintain that Iran sought nukes but mysteriously remained 6 months, weeks, years away this whole time.
This is not the first idiotic Middle East war over imaginary WMDs. It's not the first time the US has massively overinflated what they've achieved with bombing, lied to everyone about how the war is actually going. Basic pattern recognition is sufficient to discern what's going on here.
I see. So all those news reports over the years, going back to the 90s, about Iran's obvious efforts to build nuclear weapons. And US efforts to stop them, which included Obama's JCPOA. All of that was imaginary to you? Who made up all of thoe news reports then... was it the Israelis? So yes, motivated reasoning for how you're spinning everything else.
Yes, obviously. In the real world, it doesn't take the Iranians 30 years to develop 1960s era nuclear warheads. It's really not that hard. 2020s era advanced ballistic missiles are a lot harder and Iran's producing those at scale.
At no point has Iran actually sought to acquire nuclear weapons. If they wanted them, they'd have them. Iran has sought optionality, they've sought nuclear potential in case the situation changed and nukes were needed. But they don't want the actual warheads for a number of reasons, accelerating proliferation across the Middle East is not an Iranian policy goal. This latest war may well change their minds but that's just one of many stupid consequences of the decision to attack.
There's a fatwa against them and Iran remains within the NPT. Even US intelligence knows what's actually happening, they reported for years that Iran was not seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
From 2024:
It would've taken Iran a week or so to acquire nukes if they wanted them. Despite all the bombing it's highly unlikely that all nuclear materials or centrifuges have even been damaged let alone destroyed.
Yes, the Israelis lie about all this. They have been lying for 30 years saying that Iran was a country of religious fanatics thirsting to acquire nukes (which they were always some dangerously short time away from) and wipe Israel off the map. Trump is the first president sufficiently credulous to believe their fantasies over his own intelligence agencies and common sense.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is that why Trump was toying with the idea of a diesel export ban?
Diesel is also being squeezed by Ukraine hitting Russian refineries. But these are temporary disruptions.
Multiple wars happening concurrently is really straining our ability to reason about the world.
I, for one, suggest they take turns having protracted conflicts in order to preserve sense-making.
More options
Context Copy link
China's refined product exports were also way down in April-July period, but are now back to higher levels.
More options
Context Copy link
Many people call this cope but I actually believe it. Russia is the world's largest diesel exporter besides the us, and they actually did do a diesel export ban.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Some of this seems off to me.
"Diesel and gasoline are still stymied, but, mostly, because Iranian exports are being blockaded by the US." I don't think Iran has ever been a significant exporter of refined products (if anything historically it's been a significant importer do to lack of refining capacity though I think pre-war it was improving in this measure). Damage to refineries in Saudia Arabia / UAE and logistics disruptions or the like would seem more likely?
I'm surprised the oil is flowing so well, a lot can change, but it was only 10 days ago that Saudi Arabia declared Force Mejure on some of it's European contracts and said it wouldn't be able to make October deliveries (some Saudi fed European refineries with longer term contracts are slated to get 0 barrels of their contracted oil delivery in October). This is the kind of thing that's keeping prices (and prices of refined products) high. The Saudi East-West pipeline is still only at 50% after being hit and shut-down a few weeks ago (sounds like repairs are going faster then expected, original reporting was that it might be as much as 6 weeks to get things flowing again, so maybe the Europeans will get some of their Oct. oil after all). This kind of vulnerability though is keeping folks nervous.
I don't think the Iranian government is unified on the issue (indeed this has been part of the problem with the previous MOU etc.). Some parts of the Iranian government want peace now, others don't.
More options
Context Copy link
So they claim, yet real prices are nowhere near pre-war levels. Reminds me of that old Stonetoss comic about Bitcoin.
Then: "Oil rises to $75!"
Later: "Oil CRASHES to $85!"
Later still: "Oil PLUMMETS to $95!"
All this without even mentioning that bond yields continue to soar despite Bessent burning billions in bond buybacks. At this point Trump's best chance to get prices back to normal is to hope for a global depression that kneecaps global demand sufficiently to make the Strait(s) irrelevant.
I would dare, because it's basically an American surrender to expect all the sanctions relief up front, before any discussion of the nuclear issue. Trump obviously wasn't going to accept, the point was to make Trump look obstinate to the neutrals. "Look, we're reasonable but Madman Trump would rather crash the global economy than make any concessions!"
Uh, obviously the Iranians would prefer Trump give up immediately rather than having to endure two more months/years of fighting.
Regardless, the Iranians have already done enough to ensure that the Dems retake Congress. Kalshi has them at 91% for the House and 63% for the Senate. They're already predicted to win Republican strongholds like Texas (62%) and Alaska (70%). The only real question is whether they think they've hurt Trump enough politically to establish deterrence or whether they decide to escalate and give Trump an October Surprise big enough to flip Kansas and Nebraska too.
These are two analyses from JP Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, not the American government.
Prices are falling. We would expect that the longer supply stays at pre-war levels the closer prices will get to pre-war levels too.
Fantasy world political predictions. It would sound more reasonable if you just said you thought Democrats were going to take the House.
Yet those are the actual odds presented by the most accurate forecasting method we have. Maybe if the public has turned against the Trump admin so much that the electoral odds look like fantasy, it should be reason to self reflect on those failures that brought us here? Maybe one of the most unpopular wars in history was a mistake and no amount of propaganda changes that.
And as always with prediction markets, if you don't believe them, then go bet against it and make a lot of money.
As you regularly invoke LLMs' opinions as evidence, I went ahead and asked Claude Opus 5.5:
Its answer begins:
Claude made it clear that the answer varies based on topic, so I went and asked whether prediction markets are the best forecasting method for predicting who will win in a given state. Its answer:
Is this enough to get you to admit that LLMs' opinions aren't actually conclusive evidence?
You do, actually, have to pick one:
a) You were wrong to call prediction markets the most accurate forecasting method.
b) You shouldn't cite LLMs' opinions as evidence.
This is the most hilarious nitpick I've ever seen.
Your response is Claude pointing out "okay prediction markets are really good but they aren't the best at everything all the time and sometimes other methods are just as good"?
Truly incredible. You dismiss the prediction markets as fantasy and yet your own attempt at a defense admits they are really good. Split hairs all you want over what "best" means, the odds are still the odds.
This is how you act anytime someone points out verifiable facts that go against you, you don't actually address the claims (in fact again your own defense is actively acknowledging the prediction markets are top tier and highly accurate), you just throw a tantrum and try to divert the topic. The odds are the odds and your behavior doesn't change that, reality will not bend because it triggers you.
Stop lying.
Stop lying. Where did I say that?
Stop lying. Where did I say that?
Stop lying. Where did I say that?
Are you confusing me with a different user? Because none of what you've said is in my comment.
I actually think that prediction markets are very good. But my comment is about getting you to acknowledge that LLMs are not a source of evidence. This takes basic reading comprehension to understand, so I get that it's easier to make up a bunch of stuff I didn't say. But could you maybe try being honest for once, instead of just lying?
Yep I double checked and you're a different person than who I originally responded to. Their claim was that the prediction market odds were fantasy.
I don't disagree much with Claude's take here! It's very hair splitting in determining which forecasting method counts as "best". Prediction markets are extremely good and some of the other traditional methods are also extremely good and if I would rank one as 94 points and the other as 96 points, and vice versa from Claude, I don't see this as radical disagreement.
We both still agree they're ~95 points good.
I accept your apology for falsely attributing a bunch of claims to me.
Dude, I know. I actually agree with you on the object level. I'm trying to get you to understand that what LLMs believe should not be presented as evidence on the Motte.
You claimed that prediction markets are the best predictor.
Claude disagrees.
No one said "radical" disagreement. I'm solely pointing out that, according to Claude, you are wrong. (I actually back you over Claude here; that's my point!)
This is how it reads whenever someone else posts a comment, and you respond by going "well Claude says not-X". Claude saying not-X isn't relevant! It's just going "my LLM could beat up your LLM".
Do you at least agree that, in principle, if I could show an LLM outputting beliefs you believe are wrong (which I think I'vce done a couple of times by now), that this would suffice to show that LLMs' high-level opinions shouldn't be cited as evidence on the Motte?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Frontier models are definitely a form of evidence just not proof. I think it'd be fair to call their position the null hypothesis from which to argue from, not infallible by any means but if you disagree you should have a reason. And the response you got from claude barely disagreed with MK.
Not in general, and certainly not for culture war issues. That's handing a gigantic unearned advantage to any political positions aligned with LLM biases, which are well documented.
Yes, in the same way that everything is evidence. But that doesn't make their opinion valuable when arguing stuff here.
If we're arguing over some factual point, e.g. "are tomatoes a vegetable?", it might make sense to invoke an LLM's response (though linking to an actual source is probably better). But when we're arguing over some high-level subjective thing (e.g. "who broke more norms, Biden or Trump?") then going "Claude agrees with me that Trump is worse!" is not useful evidence.
The point of this place is to actually discuss things, make arguments, and defend positions; not to invoke an LLM's opinion as an authority.
mkc said that prediction markets were the best predictor.
Claude said they are not the best predictor.
If mkc believes prediction markets are very good, that's fine. Calling them the most accurate is a deliberately strong (maximally strong) claim. Words do actually mean things. You don't get to make the strongest form of your claim for convenience, then swap it out for a weaker claim when "disproven".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Does the word "hilarious" here add light, or heat, would you say?
Speak plainly. Sarcasm (much like humor) is a tough line to draw, because it's not always an unreasonable rhetorical technique. But when it is clearly being employed to needle someone, that is not conducive to productive conversation.
Pots and kettles, all the way down. I've given stoatherd a two day ban for rising to your bait elsewhere, but please don't imagine that this means it's okay to go around baiting people.
Straightforward antagonism. You were somewhat recently banned for "boo outgroup." You tend to press the boundaries on that a lot, but you get some grace because you often take up issues that get you dog-piled, and I think we all know how frustrating that can be. You've even managed to get an AAQC recently!
But here you've allowed your contempt for your outgroup to pour over into disdain for your fellow users. That, we cannot allow.
Three day ban.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think Claude is wrong and both polling aggregators like Nate Silver and betting/prediction markets have consistently outperformed elite pundits at election prediction.
These midterms will be a good test - both polls and prediction markets are predicting a landslide, while the pundit consensus is that the Democrats are narrow favourites to win the House and have no chance in the Senate.
Random conservatives on the internet, of whom we have a great many here, are equivalent to a rock with "The polls are rigged, the GOP will win easily." Such a rock would have called two of the last three Presidential elections correctly (but zero of the last three mid-terms), but I don't think that is good evidence that the writing on the rock is causally connected to election results. The rock probably beats elite pundits, but so do tossed coins, psychic octopuses, the hemline rule, astrology and technical analysis.
Yes, I do actually agree -- AFAICT, proper prediction markets consistently outperform other predictors in this domain.
My goal here is just to get magicalkittycat to acknowledge that Claude saying X shouldn't be used on the Motte as dispositive towards X being true.
I'd hoped that by bringing up an example where mkc and I actually agree on the object level (that prediction markets are very good, actually), this might be enough for mkc to recognise the point.
Unfortunately, this isn't what has happened.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Did I claim otherwise? JP and Goldman have, at different points in this conflict, predicted basically every possible outcome ranging from "total catastrophe" to "everything is fine in two weeks" so I don't put much stock in their claims. What matters is the actual market price which doesn't remotely reflect a reality in which everything is back to normal.
When you began declaring victory the price was somewhere near $80, right now it's sitting around $95.
If you prefer, Polymarket has Democrats winning the Senate at 63%. Are you willing to take even odds against the Dems winning the Senate?
The House is debatable and likelier to go for the Democrats. The Senate flipping is extremely unlikely — it requires them to take multiple seats in Trump states on the back of polling that always understates Republican support. I’ve been hearing about Blue Texas since 2014 at least.
Allow me to repeat:
Are you willing to take even odds against Dems winning the Senate? Would you take even odds on Dems not flipping Texas?
If they do both, would that change your understanding of who really won this war? What if Dems go on to win the Presidency in 2028?
America trivially won the military war even if it costs Trump politically. Democrats retaking Congress is not an automatic “I win” button for the Iranians and this will look very silly in the near future.
I notice you didn't answer the second question so allow me to repeat:
What if Dems go on to win the Presidency in 2028?
Probably* not, but it does guarantee that Trump will spend the remainder of his presidency batting away subpoenas and special prosecutors rather than implementing the domestic agenda he was elected on, increasing the odds that his chosen successor loses to Ocasio-Cortez in 2028. That's the automatic "I win" button for the Iranians.
*Unless the midterms are genuinely cataclysmic, like Nebraska and Kansas flipping, Trump below Bush '08 approval cataclysmic. In that case you might find enough cowardly Republican traitors to vote to impeach and remove, particularly in the Senate.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yields are soaring in large part because of the AI rollout’s spiralling effect on all global credit markets, driving up borrowing costs for everyone, including sovereigns.
More options
Context Copy link
OP is making the mistake too of thinking the Iranians are negotiating in good faith.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
You said Trump had won in your previous posts and the war was over. So is America winning or has it won? Have you accepted the war isn’t over yet? It’s also hilarious to me that you count going back to pre-war levels as winning. Congratulations on getting back to the exact same place we were before the war I guess.
> Iran suffers crippling permanent military defeat > America suffers temporary and minor economic setback
This was true six months ago and it's obvious today. This was always how the war was progressing which is why I have argued so consistently that the war was won: that's a fair vocabulary when Germany is up 7-2 and the game is technically still in play.
So just so we are on the same page: the war is over and Iran has lost. The US has effectively a 100% chance of accomplishing all its goals. So it’s not winning, it has won.
Iran is negotiating its surrender. The war is over and Iran has lost.
What will you say if they don’t surrender and don’t give up their nuclear material?
Then oil will continue flowing through the Straits, and Iran's economy will continue collapsing. Exactly as it has since June.
And when the Democrats win the midterms and invoke War Powers Resolution law because Americans don’t want this to go on indefinitely… what then? This is an unpopular war and nobody wants this to go on for years. Trump is on the clock. He doesn’t have unlimited time.
Maybe they can try Impeaching Trump?
More options
Context Copy link
War powers resolution is toothless. Needs a veto propf majority to mean anything so it's all theater
More options
Context Copy link
Trump vetoes.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sure, but there's a lot of ruin in a nation. Iran might be able to just outlast Trump and end the war with a pinkie promise to President Newsom (or AOC). Then toll the strait and nuke Tel Aviv.
More options
Context Copy link
You need to change your victory proof to oil returning to, say, $70 per barrel or below. There is no doubt that the war is still screwing up the supply of oil, and the proof is the price.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Iran's "negotiations" are fake. They think Trump will be foolish enough to release the blockade on their promise for a peace deal, which will allow them to export a bunch of oil and buy themselves some time. Then they reneg and fire on ships again just like last time. Trump seems uninterested in this idea, fortunately.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The war isn't about oil for the US, it's about Iran's nuclear program. Oil was just away for Iran to strike back. If non-Iranian oil is flowing and their nuclear program is stymied, Iran is losing and America is winning. Except that gas and diesel prices say that's not actually the case.
Certainly the war is not over, not until the US can reduce military presence at least back to pre-war levels without anything bad happening, said bad things including Iran shooting at merchant traffic.
I agree 100%. I actually had a similar comment last week saying basically the same thing you said in your second paragraph. As long as the US military can’t and the area isn’t the same as it was pre-war, the war is far from over. I don’t see any easy solutions for this other than giving Iran concessions that are not acceptable, so this war will continue for the foreseeable future in my opinion.
I also listed Trump’s pre-war aims noting that only one (destruction of their Navy) had been completed so the war is not over by Trump’s own standards. OP said they all had been accomplished, but I just don’t see that being anywhere close to reality.
Concessions won't even work, since they won't stick to their end. They're going to have to be destroyed, or they will win. Whether that can be done through attrition or is going to require actual invasion is still up in the air.
This is essentially the argument I made last week, so I agree 100%. The concessions I was talking about were ones that are a non-starter that would be so humiliating that the US would never accept them. But you are probably right that even if they got those, they will push for even more eventually. Thats why I made the argument last week to OP that the war isn’t over and the US can only win if the Iranian regime collapses.
"if the Iranian regime collapses."
Had a back and forth with "Lion of the Blogosphere" on X, he in favor the war. We agreed on this point about the regime, but I claimed the fallout would be even more refugees flooding into Europe. He responded, "that's Europe's problem." Incredible.
Agreed. The US could potentially cause the Middle East to go into even more chaos and that could have consequences all over Eurasia. Best case scenario to me is we go back to the pre-war situation, and that obviously won’t be worth the cost of the war.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The USA actually seems to be reducing military engagement in the region below prewar levels, with the announcement today that troops are pulling out of Iraq. (Again)
I pray that a peace deal is reached, and to a lesser extent that it is favorable to the United States and does not lead to the destruction of Israel.
Withdrawal from iraq is on a timeline set well before the iran conflict. Regardless of whether it was a good idea it's only fulfilling past obligations made years ago. In fact it was Joe Biden who set the timeline.
This is a near total non-sequitur, Joe Biden made a timeline, sure, but he made a timeline based on our not being at war with Iran.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that many astute geopolitical commenters who weren't blinded by some form of domestic politics bias ever thought that Iran could defeat the US in a war. That's like predicting that a five year old could beat a grown man in a fistfight. Outlast, maybe (and only if, as has so far been the case, the US lacks the political will to launch a ground invasion). Defeat, no. Of course, there are plenty of unastute geopolitical commenters, and there are plenty of people who are blinded by domestic politics bias.
I personally have never argued that Iran had any serious chance of defeating the US in a war.
However, that does not necessarily make the war a good idea for the American people. That's a separate matter.
For me personally, in the sense of my own personal self-interest, I'm not sure whether the war has been good, bad, or neither.
I have probably indirectly been affected by the higher oil prices, but I'm not sure to what extent. I imagine probably badly, but I haven't done the research to find out for sure.
Crude oil prices remain, for now at least, about 1.5 times what they were before the war. It's about the same for retail gasoline and diesel prices in the US. Whatever is going on in the Strait of Hormuz right now, it hasn't translated into lower prices so far at least. I do not think this is because Iranian exports are being blockaded. Iran's share of total world oil and oil products production was not even close to high enough before the war to explain the current high global prices.
I think that the chance of Iran ever using nuclear weapons against the US even if it builds them is so low that it's not something I have ever worried about. In my opinion, the Iranian leadership acts much more like a typical rationally self-interested government than like the "suicidal fanatics who would use a nuke the second they got it" that some consider them. So I'm not significantly more worried about them nuking me, even if they got nukes and delivery systems, than I am about Russia or China nuking me. Which is to say, almost not at all. I believe that almost certainly mutually-assured destruction would hold with Iran. So whatever damage the war has done to Iran's nuclear program, I don't see it as a significant win for myself.
Ironically, I think that Trump supporters might actually have the most to complain about. The war has done significant damage to the populist movement that coalesced around Trump 11 years ago:
If I’m not mistaken, our entire intelligence community believed that Iran would be able to prevent passage through the strait. If that’s what you mean by “winning”, that is still a distinct possibility. We don’t know at what expense the current high of oil transit is maintained and our casualties are quietly increasing. Houthis can still attack pipelines in KSA. If you mean that Iran would be able to defeat America in an all-out conventional military war, that’s a strawman that I personally haven’t seen expressed anywhere.
More options
Context Copy link
It's hard to believe that higher oil prices are ever a good thing, at least within the normal range. It's directly and broadly inflationary.
You can maybe construct a few exceptions: the obvious folks with direct investment in oil/gas/refining, a family with a huge mortgage at pandemic rates and salaries that track inflation or a low-end service worker with college debt that's in a hot labor market. Still, those are pretty exceptional.
More options
Context Copy link
I've been in arguments on this website with many who argued exactly that. There are lots more on twitter and throughout the mainstream media. Granted that this is not the most serious anti-war argument and so it shouldn't be the only argument discussed. But I feel compelled to seriously rebuke it because the idea that Iran was winning and America lost has seriously infected a lot of people and it colors other views about other things.
Anyways, I appreciate a fairly neutral take. In my circles I think I have heard the strongest criticisms of the war from MAGA and other Trump supporters. My argument has been that they are wrong because Trump winning in Iran gives Trump more power to renegotiate global trade (which is exactly how he's reindustrializing the American heartland).
Yes, when it comes to people arguing that Iran could militarily (as opposed to politically) defeat the US in a war, I classify those in the unastute or biased category. Or engagement bait. Twitter is mostly made up of engagement bait, as far as I can tell.
Unastute doesn't mean unintelligent. But some people aren't really aware of the enormous difference in military power between the two countries.
What's the mechanism by which winning in Iran would give Trump more power to renegotiate global trade?
It’s like what happened in Venezuela: the more that comes under America’s control, the more leverage America has in negotiating with other countries.
We want to tariff China to avoid them dumping cheap goods and bankrupting our manufacturers, but Europe wants to profit as the middleman mediating Chinese goods, so now we control the supply of oil that feeds Europe and China doesn’t.
We want Asian capital to fuel an American factory build-up so we can wean ourselves off Chinese rare-earth metals, now we control the supply of oil Asia needs.
This is all done out in the open, South Korea planning 8 nuclear power plants in the US, India announcing a $15 Billion steel plant in Iowa, Europe complying with the latest sanctions against Iran. All told Trump is redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars into America’s economy, which is a much more effective use of his time than negotiating with Lisa Murkowski and Mitch McConnell. He’s making good on his campaign to Reindustrialize and he’s using executive power to do it.
This stuff will compound. By acquiring a controlling stake in Venezuelan oil, Trump is making America more powerful in energy than OPEC. So OPEC can either cut deals to supply energy where Trump wants it, or they can suffer outages while Iran festers — America is fine in either outcome, which gives Trump the most leverage. So he can negotiate an expansion of the Abraham Accords, the beginning of a lasting peace in the Middle East, more investment for America, etc.
Let's say hypothetically that that is Trump's strategy. I understand how Venezuela fits into this strategy. I don't understand how Iran does.
I don't imagine that Iran is going to change who they sell their oil to after the war unless there is a regime change, and maybe not even if there is one.
The US can physically prevent Iran from shipping oil out if it wants, but it could have done so before the war as well, if it had wanted to. That doesn't require a full-scale bombing campaign.
And I think there are probably easier and more effective ways for the US to put pressure on the Gulf States than to play some game of "we'll bomb Iran hard enough to make them bomb you but not hard enough to prevent them from blowing up your oil infrastructure sometimes, so you should do what we say".
On another note, I feel bad for Iranian liberals. Part of me wants to say that if Trump was going to start the war at all, he should have had the balls to launch a ground invasion. Now the Iranian liberals are stuck in kind of the worst of both worlds. Their oppressive government is still in charge, and is extra paranoid and incentivized to crush dissent. Plus their country has been getting bombed.
A blockade is an act of war and therefore does become a bombing situation.
We use many of those levers all the time. It wasn’t enough in the case of Iran, which is why we escalated to war.
By and large it’s the Gulf States that asked us not to bomb Iran back into the Stone Age “Bridge and Power Plant Day” style. Iran’s ability to attack oil infrastructure has greatly declined.
(The Houthis are a separate case but they are not currently undergoing an American bombing campaign.)
Now that a few months have passed, I think the most plausible explanation for the war is that Iran was attempting a traditional military buildup before a nuclear buildup. They could import Chinese and Russian manufacturing techniques to scale up missile production, and then make enough bombs to be uncontrollable. Then they could construct a nuke at their leisure because they could hold the Strait hostage. Trump bombed them before this buildup could be completed.
Which is to say, I don’t think the war happened just so Trump can control global oil markets, but that’s clearly a benefit of prosecuting the war now that we’re in one.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
"Defeat" can mean many different things. Sure, it can mean "conquer and annex". But that is not how it gets generally used. For example, I think it is absolutely fair to say that the US defeated the British in the US war of independence, even though they did not conquer London.
In slightly more asymmetrical conflicts, I would also say that the Taliban effectively defeated coalition forces.
Paradox games like EU4 actually model conflicts like this: the attacking party has a war goal, which is generally a change to the status quo. It could be the annexation of a province, or (in the real world) the legalization of opium in China, or Iran rejoining the non-proliferation treaty. Typically, the defending party wants to keep the status quo, but sometimes you can improve on that if you defeat your attacker.
The US/Israeli goals in attacking Iran were arguably
(1) Destroying the Iranian navy and missiles (which has largely been accomplished, but does not feel like a worthwhile war goal to me, personally)
(2) Preventing Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon
(3) Regime change (sure, it was never stated as a goal officially, but killing the Ayatollah served very little purpose other than that)
(4) Bonus goal: re-securing the freedom of navigation (which was respected by Iran before they were bombed)
The Iranian regime resisted regime change so far. They did lose their navy and some missiles, but that is not changing the strategic landscape. They learned that if they ever want to live in a world where Israel does not bomb them at will, they need some deterrence, whether nuclear or economic. They proved that they can make transit through the strait very costly.
Militarily speaking, the US is laughably more powerful than Iran. The limiting factor for the US is will, as it is often the case with the stronger party. If accepting US independence would have meant the death of every English aristocrat, Britain would probably have fought a lot longer and harder (and might actually have retained the American colonies, I am not a historian). If the world economy was tied to the state of women's right in Kabul, the West would probably occupy Kabul for the foreseeable future without too much trouble.
If every day the Iranian regime it stayed it power, it somehow executed a few thousand Americans on TV, then the US would have the political will to send troops and occupy Tehran. Failing that, the median voter does not care much either way, she is likely unwilling to take on any hardships either to improve the lives of Iranians or to bomb them.
Unlike Maduro et al, the leaders of the Iranian regime seem to be prepared to die for their cause, and they are certainly prepared to also subject their people to hardships. I do not think they will capitulate before Trump turns Iran into Gaza, and possibly not even then. Nor will the people rise up against them, experience shows that foreigners dropping bombs on you generally strengthens the regime.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Let’s be honest, there are a lot of people (not limited to a political ideology, although concentrated on the far left and right, with a large number of more centrist doomers and preppers in between) who just want some major blow to happen to American hegemony so that something interesting might happen, domestic politics might be radically shook, etc etc.
Semi-astute political observers will note this is just a cross-party variant of the ‘heighten the contradictions of capitalism’ thesis beloved of lazy communists, namely that surely at some point everything has to blow up and then we can come to power. Who knows, maybe it will.
So no, America hasn’t suffered some devastating end of an imperial age blow (yet) in this conflict.
Nevertheless, as everyone keeps (correctly) telling you, simply restoring the prewar status quo but slightly worse (eg the Houthis are now emboldened and the Saudi-Emirati split doesn’t seem to be repaired even though that would be in America’s best interests, Iraq is still struggling to keep control of Shia militias etc etc) is not a successful outcome for a special military operation.
For example, if Putin agreed tomorrow to retreat to early-2022 lines of control in Ukraine, this would be transparently seen as an immense Ukrainian victory.
Iran is a defeated power with no ability to contest the Gulf let alone build nuclear weapons: that is simply not the status quo.
Before the war broke out, if we had predicted the above, everyone would have called it a crazy impossibility. It would take boots on the ground, war with Iran would consume thousands of American lives or crash the economy. There was a lot of discussion about how the CIA knew Iran would take the gulf and we couldn’t stop Iran and everybody knew that and this is proof that Trump didn’t have a plan.
Now that that’s over I hear about how this is just pre-war status quo.
No, I feel quite confident that this is better than status quo. America dismantled one of its greatest enemies anywhere on the planet in exchange for some temporarily-raised gas prices.
Not only that. The "pre-war status quo" was never an option to begin with.
The choices were these
Do something
Iran continues to trade cheap oil for Chinese weapons, builds out its ballistic missile program, and within 5 years has a nuke capable of reaching Europe
The idea that we could do nothing and there would be no consequences is just wrong.
There's actually a term for this. It's called "omission bias", treating the consequences of inaction as less blameworthy than the consequences of action.
Unclear if the Chinese were selling much, and either way, if the Chinese intended to sell, they don't need to be paid in oil, and they don't need sea access to deliver.
Iran with a nukes capable of reaching Europe is fine, actually, I don't mind living in Iranian nuclear range at all (not that this was the concern in the US, obviously the ability to reach Israel was). Nukes in Iranian hands are a good thing, it is less likely US launches a retarded war of aggression on Iran that imposes nothing but costs on Europeans.
No, nukes in Iranian hands are not good for Europe. What an incredible thing to say. I think you are suffering from the out-group/far-group delusion where you see the US are your enemy and Iran as just some far away thing that doesn't matter.
This is not at all the truth. Radical Islam is at the doorstep of Europe. It's likely that many European countries will be Islamic by the end of the century.
But let's say that Iran did have those nukes. When the US launched its "retarded" war, Europe would have gotten nuked. And with nukes, they can continue to support terrorist operations all over the world and there's nothing you could do about it.
No, I simply correctly recognize US as the primary threat to Europe: deeply influential, predatory, capable and invested in Europe being a US dependent.
Radical islam or whatever is a migration issue. Iran having nukes makes zero difference, they are not "radically" islamic anyway. They fund regional factions in a regional power struggle. Iran can be mostly ignored by Europe, but you don't need to go that far since it can be negotiated with like a normal nation.
Also, you don't need to accept whatever a nuclear power does, you can fight back without a nuclear exchange.
Iran would nuke Israel, if anyone, if truly threatened. Not my problem.
Well, have fun with your migration issue.
Not sure what you're saying here, but I'd love to solve it, nuclear Iran not changing the approach in the slightest.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
On 1st January 2026, the United States operated a naval base in Bahrain. As long as they remain unable to do so, the Gulf is contested.
On 1st January 2026, the public position of the government of the United States was that the Iran no longer had a functioning nuclear programme - Trump claimed to have destroyed it in 2025. Before Trump started escalating against Iran back in his first term, the agreed position of Iran, the United States, Russia and China was that Iran would not enrich uranium beyond reactor grade, with a verification process in place. I think a non-nuclear-for-now Iran is entirely consistent with status quo ante for various values of status quo ante.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. America has not lost. America has not won. Iran has not lost. Iran has not won. This is what a draw looks like. It is the nature of a drawn war that under all likely scenarios for a negotiated peace before the midterms, both America and Iran are worse off than they would be if they had not fought. This is not a tabletop wargame where you can work out who "won" an indecisive battle by counting up the point values of the destroyed units.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think that in addition, there are a lot of people who don't want Trump to have a win. And a lot of people who don't want Israel to have a win.
I haven't been following the war super closely but it seems like Iran's nuclear program has been set back quite a bit and well as Iran's general military capabilities and ability to interfere with Persian gulf shipping.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link