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I responded to baal's argument that trying to censor (which, for the record, is not the only, nor even the best, tool available to fight misinformation) Holocaust denial will just lead to a future bad government censoring other stuff at least twice.
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On March 25 2026 00:57 Jankisa wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 00:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 23:43 Jankisa wrote:On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. EU countries are now "accomplices" and "facilitating" the war, the same countries who weren't notified and said they won't participate. What an absolutely brain rotten take. I mean, it's par for the course for a Tankie like you, but it's still pretty shocking to read something this stupid being written down. The ones literally facilitating US attacks, yeah!? While many European leaders have publicly decried the U.S. attacks on Iran, behind the scenes their military bases are facilitating one of the most logistically complex operations the U.S. military has been involved in for decades.
In recent weeks, U.S. bombers, drones and ships have been fueled, armed and launched via bases in the U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece, officials say.
Attack drones are being directed from a sprawling U.S. base at Ramstein in Germany, the nerve center of America’s operations against Iran, according to German and U.S. officials. Heavy B-1 bombers have been photographed loading munitions and fuel at RAF Fairford in the U.K. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is currently docked at a naval base in Crete to undergo repairs after suffering damage from a fire.
U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military commander, said in recent Senate testimony that most European allies “have been extremely supportive.” Spain is a noted exception: So far, political dissent at the top hasn’t translated into operational constraint on the ground. The exception is Spain, which has denied the U.S. permission to use jointly operated military bases on its territory to attack Iran. Some U.S. aircraft stationed there have been relocated to bases in Germany and France instead. www.wsj.comI can forgive your emotional outburst lashing out at me personally, but I am curious if you genuinely didn't know this or are just in denial? You are using deliberately deceptive language as if this is a coalition of the willing because you, above all, hate the idea of "the West". + Show Spoiler +As always, you can go ahead and feign victimhood, as you always do, after doing your useful idiot shtick.
NATO is a thing, USA has bases which are basically their territory, short of kicking USA out of these bases ahead of time there is not much these countries can do in order to prevent USA from doing it's operations at these bases.
I am personally, and always have been critical of feckless fools like Mertz and Meloni because they kowtow to Trump and are big supporters of Israel, you on the other hand are saying things like "European accomplices" because you have an extremely myopic view of the world and geopolitical understanding of a 17 year old Tankie.
It's not a coincidence that you spend most of your time attacking the same people who are being lambasted by Trump and his cohort.
So, yeah, another in a long chain of dumb, counter productive posts from you, congratulations!
So that sounds like both that you didn't know and are in denial upon finding out.
I'm not using deceptive language. I'm using accomplices because they are accomplices. You are attempting to rationalize them being accomplices while facilitating the US's illegal attacks, not providing an argument that they are not accomplices facilitating illegal US attacks (as one arguably could for Spain).
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On March 25 2026 01:21 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 01:09 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 25 2026 00:57 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 00:29 Gorsameth wrote:On March 25 2026 00:07 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 23:16 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 24 2026 22:47 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 21:11 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 24 2026 19:00 baal wrote:On March 24 2026 16:43 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
I mean, technically, there is no new party called the nazi party anywhere, so in that sense, what you're saying makes sense. However, I could easily argue that many of the elements of what made up Nazi ideology (besides the gassing the Jews bit) are rather popular today.
However, I think that that's a bad example as it is hard to define an experiment or methodology that unambiguously proves a political ideology wrong, because it's a thing that is hard to measure, besides the obvious "maybe don't set up a plan to gas millions of Jews to death".
I was more interested in how you think the psychology of this works, so the actual mechanism.
Take something that it is much easier to prove: "vaccinations save lives". There is overwhelming scientific evidence that this is true. You couldn't prove that statement any harder. Yet, the antivax movement has not stopped growing. When confronting an antivaxxer with this absolute mount of evidence, they just dig in and their antivax sentiment is reinforced. What's your take on the psychological mechanism at play here? Why does shining light on this topic, proving with absolute mounds of evidence that it is wrong, not kill the idea?
Yeah there are too many variables on the Nazi example for it to be proof, but it was still a good point. On the anti-vaxxer yeah we sadly aren't as a rational species as we'd like to believe and many are immune to evidence yet, however do you know what not only didn't help but backfired hard? censorship. Facebook, Twitter and Youtube aggressively removed any comment that mentioned the "lab leak theory" also any post calling it China-virus or anything alike. Also the WHO/governments lying about mask efficiency (early on they said It didn't work to keep people from hoarding), calling Invermectine "horse dewormer", flip flopping on vaccine efficacy, and a long list of lying and obfuscation, not open and honest debate. You know what I think works much better? There's a video of Dr Mike (some youtuber dr) debating in those panels where people rush to the chair against antivaxxers and it is a total embarassing destruction, the difference in knowledge is palpable, these are very effective for people on the fence. This is why I wanted to get your take. Your thesis, as presented, rests on convincing evidence being used successfully to debunk a bad idea. I.e. prove the idea wrong and kill it, in your own words. You presumably agree that that doesn't really work. So does that make you rethink your approach here? How would you kill a harmful idea? Having someone debate the bad idea with someone on the opposite side as it were has been tried. It turns out that platforming bad ideas and setting them on the same level as good ideas legitimises the bad idea and makes it spread. How do you tackle this, in your view? You need only weigh censorship’s contribution to greater belief in official claims, some which turned out to be dead wrong, versus a fair hearing of the other side, which includes the nutty as well as the arguable. They both have downsides. So what's your approach to stop harmful ideas from spreading? You didn't refute or argue for either option. Admit that even the most totalitarian of fascist state is incapable of stopping ideas from spreading no matter how dangerous or harmful the government considers it. Then lower your expectations towards stuff that Democracies can achieve, like spreading better ideas with it and establishing trust that dissent is welcomed but challenged. Ask yourself which examples that Baal brought up that you would consider a harmful idea, or if you’d like your most hated political party to decide which ideas are harmful. In terms of lowering the reach or persuasive power of the absolutely looney conspiracies, I advocate almost no censorship. They thrive on telling you the “truth that the government doesn’t want you to hear.” For platforms, just pin the note on HIV or COVID sourcing to WHO or CDC or AMA. That’s an example of more speech, not less. edit: I see Drone posted while I was composing this, so I’d like to agree with him that education on questioning the source and skepticism of claims more broadly is very important. Your answer is basically to keep doing the thing we are doing that we know isn't working. Because letting people spread misinformation with a little note attached is what we have now Unless you think the world isn't currently drowning in an ever deeping ocean of misinformation, lies and outright propaganda that feeds polarization and violence, keeping the current course seems like a bad idea. We’re living with the entirely foreseen consequences of not doing what I suggested. Go read Baal’s post and tell me where your disagreement is. The disagreement is that undeniable proof can kill a bad idea, which is the central hypothesis Baal put forward. Are you sure he didn’t quote examples illustrating the downsides of censorship? The argument is that you’re doing more harm than good with the described censorship. Re-read his post, or maybe Drone’s response to the response to discover it. You aren’t getting away with straw-manning a post we can all still read.
I do not think saying a thing is so, makes it so. If you want to make an argument that letting harmful content just go out unfiltered, you have to actually argue why that would be better, not just state that that would be better. His argument specifically was that it's better to let stuff just rip through the population because the bad ideas will just get killed when they're proven wrong. I believe that argument to be flawed.
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On March 25 2026 01:28 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 00:57 Jankisa wrote:On March 25 2026 00:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 23:43 Jankisa wrote:On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. EU countries are now "accomplices" and "facilitating" the war, the same countries who weren't notified and said they won't participate. What an absolutely brain rotten take. I mean, it's par for the course for a Tankie like you, but it's still pretty shocking to read something this stupid being written down. The ones literally facilitating US attacks, yeah!? While many European leaders have publicly decried the U.S. attacks on Iran, behind the scenes their military bases are facilitating one of the most logistically complex operations the U.S. military has been involved in for decades.
In recent weeks, U.S. bombers, drones and ships have been fueled, armed and launched via bases in the U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece, officials say.
Attack drones are being directed from a sprawling U.S. base at Ramstein in Germany, the nerve center of America’s operations against Iran, according to German and U.S. officials. Heavy B-1 bombers have been photographed loading munitions and fuel at RAF Fairford in the U.K. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is currently docked at a naval base in Crete to undergo repairs after suffering damage from a fire.
U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military commander, said in recent Senate testimony that most European allies “have been extremely supportive.” Spain is a noted exception: So far, political dissent at the top hasn’t translated into operational constraint on the ground. The exception is Spain, which has denied the U.S. permission to use jointly operated military bases on its territory to attack Iran. Some U.S. aircraft stationed there have been relocated to bases in Germany and France instead. www.wsj.comI can forgive your emotional outburst lashing out at me personally, but I am curious if you genuinely didn't know this or are just in denial? You are using deliberately deceptive language as if this is a coalition of the willing because you, above all, hate the idea of "the West". + Show Spoiler +As always, you can go ahead and feign victimhood, as you always do, after doing your useful idiot shtick.
NATO is a thing, USA has bases which are basically their territory, short of kicking USA out of these bases ahead of time there is not much these countries can do in order to prevent USA from doing it's operations at these bases.
I am personally, and always have been critical of feckless fools like Mertz and Meloni because they kowtow to Trump and are big supporters of Israel, you on the other hand are saying things like "European accomplices" because you have an extremely myopic view of the world and geopolitical understanding of a 17 year old Tankie.
It's not a coincidence that you spend most of your time attacking the same people who are being lambasted by Trump and his cohort.
So, yeah, another in a long chain of dumb, counter productive posts from you, congratulations! So that sounds like both that you didn't know and are in denial upon finding out. I'm not using deceptive language. I'm using accomplices because they are accomplices. You are attempting to rationalize them being accomplices while facilitating the US's illegal attacks, not providing an argument that they are not accomplices facilitating illegal US attacks (as one arguably could for Spain).
What is Croatia doing to facilitate attacks on Iran that makes my country an accomplice? Is Slovenia also doing things? How about Serbia?
You are using deceptive language because you are calling countries that have absolutely nothing to do with this war very strong words.
I am not attempting to do anything, I'm not a fan of rhetoric coming from most of the big EU countries, I don't like that France is sending ships or that UK is allowing use of it's bases, on the other hand, doing these things to avoid your petulant mad king enacting economic pain to their populations is a perfectly rational thing to do, much more rational then what some of these countries did by helping in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As usual, none of this is enough for you because you, again, have an extremely immature and shallow understanding of the world.
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On March 25 2026 01:39 Jankisa wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 01:28 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 25 2026 00:57 Jankisa wrote:On March 25 2026 00:26 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 23:43 Jankisa wrote:On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. EU countries are now "accomplices" and "facilitating" the war, the same countries who weren't notified and said they won't participate. What an absolutely brain rotten take. I mean, it's par for the course for a Tankie like you, but it's still pretty shocking to read something this stupid being written down. The ones literally facilitating US attacks, yeah!? While many European leaders have publicly decried the U.S. attacks on Iran, behind the scenes their military bases are facilitating one of the most logistically complex operations the U.S. military has been involved in for decades.
In recent weeks, U.S. bombers, drones and ships have been fueled, armed and launched via bases in the U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece, officials say.
Attack drones are being directed from a sprawling U.S. base at Ramstein in Germany, the nerve center of America’s operations against Iran, according to German and U.S. officials. Heavy B-1 bombers have been photographed loading munitions and fuel at RAF Fairford in the U.K. The USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, is currently docked at a naval base in Crete to undergo repairs after suffering damage from a fire.
U.S. Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s top military commander, said in recent Senate testimony that most European allies “have been extremely supportive.” Spain is a noted exception: So far, political dissent at the top hasn’t translated into operational constraint on the ground. The exception is Spain, which has denied the U.S. permission to use jointly operated military bases on its territory to attack Iran. Some U.S. aircraft stationed there have been relocated to bases in Germany and France instead. www.wsj.comI can forgive your emotional outburst lashing out at me personally, but I am curious if you genuinely didn't know this or are just in denial? You are using deliberately deceptive language as if this is a coalition of the willing because you, above all, hate the idea of "the West". + Show Spoiler +As always, you can go ahead and feign victimhood, as you always do, after doing your useful idiot shtick.
NATO is a thing, USA has bases which are basically their territory, short of kicking USA out of these bases ahead of time there is not much these countries can do in order to prevent USA from doing it's operations at these bases.
I am personally, and always have been critical of feckless fools like Mertz and Meloni because they kowtow to Trump and are big supporters of Israel, you on the other hand are saying things like "European accomplices" because you have an extremely myopic view of the world and geopolitical understanding of a 17 year old Tankie.
It's not a coincidence that you spend most of your time attacking the same people who are being lambasted by Trump and his cohort.
So, yeah, another in a long chain of dumb, counter productive posts from you, congratulations! So that sounds like both that you didn't know and are in denial upon finding out. I'm not using deceptive language. I'm using accomplices because they are accomplices. You are attempting to rationalize them being accomplices while facilitating the US's illegal attacks, not providing an argument that they are not accomplices facilitating illegal US attacks (as one arguably could for Spain). What is Croatia doing to facilitate attacks on Iran that makes my country an accomplice? Is Slovenia also doing things? How about Serbia? You are using deceptive language because you are calling countries that have absolutely nothing to do with this war very strong words. + Show Spoiler +I am not attempting to do anything, I'm not a fan of rhetoric coming from most of the big EU countries, I don't like that France is sending ships or that UK is allowing use of it's bases, on the other hand, doing these things to avoid your petulant mad king enacting economic pain to their populations is a perfectly rational thing to do, much more rational then what some of these countries did by helping in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As usual, none of this is enough for you because you, again, have an extremely immature and shallow understanding of the world.
If your objection is now that I could have specified the "U.K., Germany, Portugal, Italy, France and Greece" rather than said "the European countries facilitating..." (which wouldn't include countries that aren't) to avoid confusing you, I can understand your frustrations more clearly.
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On March 25 2026 01:28 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 01:21 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 01:09 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 25 2026 00:57 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 00:29 Gorsameth wrote:On March 25 2026 00:07 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 23:16 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 24 2026 22:47 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 21:11 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 24 2026 19:00 baal wrote:
[quote]
Yeah there are too many variables on the Nazi example for it to be proof, but it was still a good point.
On the anti-vaxxer yeah we sadly aren't as a rational species as we'd like to believe and many are immune to evidence yet, however do you know what not only didn't help but backfired hard? censorship.
Facebook, Twitter and Youtube aggressively removed any comment that mentioned the "lab leak theory" also any post calling it China-virus or anything alike.
Also the WHO/governments lying about mask efficiency (early on they said It didn't work to keep people from hoarding), calling Invermectine "horse dewormer", flip flopping on vaccine efficacy, and a long list of lying and obfuscation, not open and honest debate.
You know what I think works much better? There's a video of Dr Mike (some youtuber dr) debating in those panels where people rush to the chair against antivaxxers and it is a total embarassing destruction, the difference in knowledge is palpable, these are very effective for people on the fence.
This is why I wanted to get your take. Your thesis, as presented, rests on convincing evidence being used successfully to debunk a bad idea. I.e. prove the idea wrong and kill it, in your own words. You presumably agree that that doesn't really work. So does that make you rethink your approach here? How would you kill a harmful idea? Having someone debate the bad idea with someone on the opposite side as it were has been tried. It turns out that platforming bad ideas and setting them on the same level as good ideas legitimises the bad idea and makes it spread. How do you tackle this, in your view? You need only weigh censorship’s contribution to greater belief in official claims, some which turned out to be dead wrong, versus a fair hearing of the other side, which includes the nutty as well as the arguable. They both have downsides. So what's your approach to stop harmful ideas from spreading? You didn't refute or argue for either option. Admit that even the most totalitarian of fascist state is incapable of stopping ideas from spreading no matter how dangerous or harmful the government considers it. Then lower your expectations towards stuff that Democracies can achieve, like spreading better ideas with it and establishing trust that dissent is welcomed but challenged. Ask yourself which examples that Baal brought up that you would consider a harmful idea, or if you’d like your most hated political party to decide which ideas are harmful. In terms of lowering the reach or persuasive power of the absolutely looney conspiracies, I advocate almost no censorship. They thrive on telling you the “truth that the government doesn’t want you to hear.” For platforms, just pin the note on HIV or COVID sourcing to WHO or CDC or AMA. That’s an example of more speech, not less. edit: I see Drone posted while I was composing this, so I’d like to agree with him that education on questioning the source and skepticism of claims more broadly is very important. Your answer is basically to keep doing the thing we are doing that we know isn't working. Because letting people spread misinformation with a little note attached is what we have now Unless you think the world isn't currently drowning in an ever deeping ocean of misinformation, lies and outright propaganda that feeds polarization and violence, keeping the current course seems like a bad idea. We’re living with the entirely foreseen consequences of not doing what I suggested. Go read Baal’s post and tell me where your disagreement is. The disagreement is that undeniable proof can kill a bad idea, which is the central hypothesis Baal put forward. Are you sure he didn’t quote examples illustrating the downsides of censorship? The argument is that you’re doing more harm than good with the described censorship. Re-read his post, or maybe Drone’s response to the response to discover it. You aren’t getting away with straw-manning a post we can all still read. I do not think saying a thing is so, makes it so. If you want to make an argument that letting harmful content just go out unfiltered, you have to actually argue why that would be better, not just state that that would be better. His argument specifically was that it's better to let stuff just rip through the population because the bad ideas will just get killed when they're proven wrong. I believe that argument to be flawed. He argued on how an alternate idea is worse and gave examples that you’re either unwilling or unable to take up. Thats simply a critique of a proposition. It isn’t proposing that his own preference doesn’t have downsides, any more than saying that the free election of leaders by the population at large proposes that no bad leaders will ever be elected.
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Northern Ireland26431 Posts
On March 25 2026 00:11 Billyboy wrote:
I think if people are making money off it, including indirectly from getting clicks, then they should hold accountability for what they are saying. We as consumers should also have the right to know the actual person and where they are actually from that is giving the information.
Less so to just people talking.
Indeed, was it Twitter (I don’t use so it mightn’t have been) that it turned out shitloads of folks were completely spoofing where they were from when locations got publicised?
Never mind actual bots as well!
I use Reddit a bit, not religiously, it’s not just myself that’s noticed various geographically-centred subs have gone ‘weird’ to the point of being basically unusable in the semi-recent past. By geographically-centred I mean something like a UK sub, Northern Irish sub or say a Belfast one or something (where I reside)
It’s just non-stop spamming of a handful of topics which, while absolutely part of our various conversations, it sure ain’t to that degree.
It wasn’t always thus, certainly nowhere near to the current degree and I’d strongly suspect outsiders with an agenda play a big part. Be that individuals with some axe to grind, or something more orchestrated. But it definitely does cultivate a rather artificial feeling environment, to the degree it can bury the kinda varied legitimate purposes the various subs were set up for.
Also some good posts and food for thought from many of you, cheers for that
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On March 25 2026 01:49 dyhb wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 01:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 25 2026 01:21 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 01:09 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 25 2026 00:57 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 00:29 Gorsameth wrote:On March 25 2026 00:07 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 23:16 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 24 2026 22:47 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 21:11 EnDeR_ wrote:
[quote]
This is why I wanted to get your take. Your thesis, as presented, rests on convincing evidence being used successfully to debunk a bad idea. I.e. prove the idea wrong and kill it, in your own words.
You presumably agree that that doesn't really work. So does that make you rethink your approach here? How would you kill a harmful idea?
Having someone debate the bad idea with someone on the opposite side as it were has been tried. It turns out that platforming bad ideas and setting them on the same level as good ideas legitimises the bad idea and makes it spread. How do you tackle this, in your view? You need only weigh censorship’s contribution to greater belief in official claims, some which turned out to be dead wrong, versus a fair hearing of the other side, which includes the nutty as well as the arguable. They both have downsides. So what's your approach to stop harmful ideas from spreading? You didn't refute or argue for either option. Admit that even the most totalitarian of fascist state is incapable of stopping ideas from spreading no matter how dangerous or harmful the government considers it. Then lower your expectations towards stuff that Democracies can achieve, like spreading better ideas with it and establishing trust that dissent is welcomed but challenged. Ask yourself which examples that Baal brought up that you would consider a harmful idea, or if you’d like your most hated political party to decide which ideas are harmful. In terms of lowering the reach or persuasive power of the absolutely looney conspiracies, I advocate almost no censorship. They thrive on telling you the “truth that the government doesn’t want you to hear.” For platforms, just pin the note on HIV or COVID sourcing to WHO or CDC or AMA. That’s an example of more speech, not less. edit: I see Drone posted while I was composing this, so I’d like to agree with him that education on questioning the source and skepticism of claims more broadly is very important. Your answer is basically to keep doing the thing we are doing that we know isn't working. Because letting people spread misinformation with a little note attached is what we have now Unless you think the world isn't currently drowning in an ever deeping ocean of misinformation, lies and outright propaganda that feeds polarization and violence, keeping the current course seems like a bad idea. We’re living with the entirely foreseen consequences of not doing what I suggested. Go read Baal’s post and tell me where your disagreement is. The disagreement is that undeniable proof can kill a bad idea, which is the central hypothesis Baal put forward. Are you sure he didn’t quote examples illustrating the downsides of censorship? The argument is that you’re doing more harm than good with the described censorship. Re-read his post, or maybe Drone’s response to the response to discover it. You aren’t getting away with straw-manning a post we can all still read. I do not think saying a thing is so, makes it so. If you want to make an argument that letting harmful content just go out unfiltered, you have to actually argue why that would be better, not just state that that would be better. His argument specifically was that it's better to let stuff just rip through the population because the bad ideas will just get killed when they're proven wrong. I believe that argument to be flawed. He argued on how an alternate idea is worse and gave examples that you’re either unwilling or unable to take up. Thats simply a critique of a proposition. It isn’t proposing that his own preference doesn’t have downsides, any more than saying that the free election of leaders by the population at large proposes that no bad leaders will ever be elected.
Are you going to make an argument at any point?
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United States43738 Posts
On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw.
The question doesn't really make sense.
Let's imagine a town filled with people. And not civic minded Nordic people who pick up litter when they go for a walk in the woods, let's imagine it's filled with people who would steal Amazon packages from each others' porches. Fortunately there's a chief of police and a police force and they mostly get everyone to behave and as such everyone in the town can benefit from the predictable order of law, they can order things from Amazon, they can leave the house to go to work and still have their stuff when they come home etc. If you start breaking the rules then you're excluded from the society, people won't let you in their shops, they won't sell you gasoline, you get disconnected from utilities, it's a bad time.
Now let's imagine the chief of police fires the police force and burns down the courthouse.
What you're asking is what he should be convicted of and how long he should spend in jail.
It doesn't work.
That is absolutely not the same thing as him getting away with the crime of burning down the courthouse, it's just no longer functional to think of burning down the courthouse as a crime. Getting away with a crime would be continuing to benefit from the society built on a system of rules without being held accountable for breaking them (Israel gets away with having nukes for example). What he has done is remove the rules entirely and return the town to the natural state of anarchy.
That is not to say that there won't be consequences, it's just the concept of being prosecuted has gone. The consequences will show up with the power goes off because someone decided to steal the copper in the substation for scrap metal. They'll be more or less self imposed.
In the scenario in which the US engages in an illegal war and sends the world into a global recession while destroying its own alliance system there are no more pariah states and there is no more accountability. This is what Carney was explaining so beautifully at Davos.
https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/
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On March 25 2026 01:55 EnDeR_ wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 01:49 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 01:28 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 25 2026 01:21 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 01:09 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 25 2026 00:57 dyhb wrote:On March 25 2026 00:29 Gorsameth wrote:On March 25 2026 00:07 dyhb wrote:On March 24 2026 23:16 EnDeR_ wrote:On March 24 2026 22:47 dyhb wrote:
[quote]You need only weigh censorship’s contribution to greater belief in official claims, some which turned out to be dead wrong, versus a fair hearing of the other side, which includes the nutty as well as the arguable. They both have downsides. So what's your approach to stop harmful ideas from spreading? You didn't refute or argue for either option. Admit that even the most totalitarian of fascist state is incapable of stopping ideas from spreading no matter how dangerous or harmful the government considers it. Then lower your expectations towards stuff that Democracies can achieve, like spreading better ideas with it and establishing trust that dissent is welcomed but challenged. Ask yourself which examples that Baal brought up that you would consider a harmful idea, or if you’d like your most hated political party to decide which ideas are harmful. In terms of lowering the reach or persuasive power of the absolutely looney conspiracies, I advocate almost no censorship. They thrive on telling you the “truth that the government doesn’t want you to hear.” For platforms, just pin the note on HIV or COVID sourcing to WHO or CDC or AMA. That’s an example of more speech, not less. edit: I see Drone posted while I was composing this, so I’d like to agree with him that education on questioning the source and skepticism of claims more broadly is very important. Your answer is basically to keep doing the thing we are doing that we know isn't working. Because letting people spread misinformation with a little note attached is what we have now Unless you think the world isn't currently drowning in an ever deeping ocean of misinformation, lies and outright propaganda that feeds polarization and violence, keeping the current course seems like a bad idea. We’re living with the entirely foreseen consequences of not doing what I suggested. Go read Baal’s post and tell me where your disagreement is. The disagreement is that undeniable proof can kill a bad idea, which is the central hypothesis Baal put forward. Are you sure he didn’t quote examples illustrating the downsides of censorship? The argument is that you’re doing more harm than good with the described censorship. Re-read his post, or maybe Drone’s response to the response to discover it. You aren’t getting away with straw-manning a post we can all still read. I do not think saying a thing is so, makes it so. If you want to make an argument that letting harmful content just go out unfiltered, you have to actually argue why that would be better, not just state that that would be better. His argument specifically was that it's better to let stuff just rip through the population because the bad ideas will just get killed when they're proven wrong. I believe that argument to be flawed. He argued on how an alternate idea is worse and gave examples that you’re either unwilling or unable to take up. Thats simply a critique of a proposition. It isn’t proposing that his own preference doesn’t have downsides, any more than saying that the free election of leaders by the population at large proposes that no bad leaders will ever be elected. Are you going to make an argument at any point? Censorship has huge downsides. The examples in Baal’s post are ones I’d select too. We’re seeing the bad results of past censorship actions today. The best path is to add notices and pick more speech instead of less speech.
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On March 25 2026 01:58 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. + Show Spoiler +The question doesn't really make sense.
Let's imagine a town filled with people. And not civic minded Nordic people who pick up litter when they go for a walk in the woods, let's imagine it's filled with people who would steal Amazon packages from each others' porches. Fortunately there's a chief of police and a police force and they mostly get everyone to behave and as such everyone in the town can benefit from the predictable order of law, they can order things from Amazon, they can leave the house to go to work and still have their stuff when they come home etc. If you start breaking the rules then you're excluded from the society, people won't let you in their shops, they won't sell you gasoline, you get disconnected from utilities, it's a bad time.
Now let's imagine the chief of police fires the police force and burns down the courthouse.
What you're asking is what he should be convicted of and how long he should spend in jail.
It doesn't work.
That is absolutely not the same thing as him getting away with the crime of burning down the courthouse, it's just no longer functional to think of burning down the courthouse as a crime. Getting away with a crime would be continuing to benefit from the society built on a system of rules without being held accountable for breaking them (Israel gets away with having nukes for example). What he has done is remove the rules entirely and return the town to the natural state of anarchy. + Show Spoiler +That is not to say that there won't be consequences, it's just the concept of being prosecuted has gone. The consequences will show up with the power goes off because someone decided to steal the copper in the substation for scrap metal. They'll be more or less self imposed.
In the scenario in which the US engages in an illegal war and sends the world into a global recession while destroying its own alliance system there are no more pariah states and there is no more accountability. This is what Carney was explaining so beautifully at Davos . https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/
I think we're largely in agreement, though I believe Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the US's aiding and abetting of it was enough already.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
Basically there's always been "winners and losers" in this scheme (my personal perspective is a bit different), and people like Carney are basically saying that if they're slipping into the "losers" side then it's a good time to abandon ship.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
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Northern Ireland26431 Posts
From my particular British/European perspective, in both a general sense but also something I argued specifically in the Israel/Palestine instance, was that keeping Trump out of assuming office was so important precisely because other nations and institutions either lacked the capacity or will to rein in a US that abandons all pretence of a lawful world order. Illusory though it might be
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On March 25 2026 02:38 WombaT wrote:Show nested quote +On March 25 2026 02:13 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 25 2026 01:58 KwarK wrote:On March 24 2026 23:23 GreenHorizons wrote:On March 24 2026 12:14 KwarK wrote:
There is no “walk away” option for the US. Abandoning the Persian Gulf entirely would be an absolute surrender. There are a dozen reasons for Iran to keep the strait closed for a long time.
Iran has, so far this war, taken orders of magnitude more damage than the US. The US has lost a handful of planes and crew and a lot of interceptors. Iran has lost its navy, air force, hardened bunkers, warehouses, stockpiles, bases etc., in addition to the new Supreme Leader having had his father, wife, and teenage son killed.
As I keep repeating, the US and Israel peak immediately, they do the most damage on day 1 where they destroy all the highest value targets. On day 2 they destroy the second highest value targets because they can't destroy the highest value targets a second time. On day 3 the third. The longer the war goes the less damage bombing can do. They already killed his wife, they can't do it again.
Iran's retaliation grows steadily over time but doesn't even start to kick in until day 150 or so. There is significant latency between crude oil leaving the Gulf and the diesel in a gas station. Consumers haven't actually seen any impact in supply yet. The prices increases are speculative, suppliers don't want to sell today if they think that the price will be higher tomorrow and they won't have oil tomorrow to sell. And even once the supply does drop the strategic reserves have enough to cover months of the missing output from the Gulf. As the strategic reserves run low the prices will increase. As prices increase additional more expensive sources of oil will be brought online which will be priced accordingly. The longer it goes the higher the price gets.
That is Iran's retaliation. It hasn't started yet and it won't have any deterrence impact if they sign an early ceasefire. Even if Israel and the US stop bombing entirely they still need to interdict it, or charge such high transit fees that prices are higher. They need people to remember that 2026 was the year where there was a global recession caused by high oil prices so that the next time someone wants to bomb Iran they think twice. If Iran opens the strait early then they have no deterrent. They'd be saying "feel free to bomb the shit out of us for a week, we'll announce a disruption but as long as you stocked up the reserve ahead of time you can weather it". They'll get bombed by Israel once a year.
The idea that the US and Israel can beat the shit out of Iran, kill the leader's wife, kill his son, and then call a timeout before he hits back is absurd to me. It would undermine every single part of their publicly stated strategy of using the strait as a last resort deterrent bargaining chip. They constructed this strategy over decades, they know this. It would be national suicide.
The idea that Iran, one of the largest oil exporters in the world, has nothing to gain from spiking oil prices is nuts. The regime and country have been absolutely savaged. I've been hating on American strategy a lot here because the American strategy is nonsensical but that doesn't mean that the USAF can't demolish buildings. They were in terrible shape before and much worse shape now than they were then. If the regime is to survive they need hard foreign currency. They need their oil on the market and as few of their competitors as possible as a matter of national survival. The rebuilding project will not be cheap and there are a lot of regime loyalists who will need to be paid.
Additionally it simply wouldn't make sense not to continue the position that they control the strait. Free navigation of the seas is a postwar American invention enforced by the US Navy. Lots of countries would like to declare that actually they own this bit of water or that bit of water and that everyone has to pay them transit fees or whatever but they haven't been able to because the US Navy will disprove that notion. These waterways aren't just open by default, they're national territory by default, open is an artificial state of affairs that has been constructed and maintained by the US Navy. If the US declares that they're no longer interested in keeping the strait open then it won't suddenly revert to free neutrality under a ceasefire. It'll be owned by the strongest.
This is existential for Iran. Either they establish a convincing deterrent by confronting the US Navy over the strait and winning (which includes the US Navy forfeiting) or they die. There's no deal to be made here where the strait is reopened any time soon, it'll stay closed until such a time as a country with sufficient force projection to open it opens it. Can/should the world make the US a pariah state for an illegal war of choice leading to global recession? How about the European countries facilitating it? Or is the US integrated into the global economy (and their European accomplices dependent) in such a way that they can't be held accountable for their crimes? What would any of that look like? Those are general questions not specific to Kwark btw. + Show Spoiler +The question doesn't really make sense.
Let's imagine a town filled with people. And not civic minded Nordic people who pick up litter when they go for a walk in the woods, let's imagine it's filled with people who would steal Amazon packages from each others' porches. Fortunately there's a chief of police and a police force and they mostly get everyone to behave and as such everyone in the town can benefit from the predictable order of law, they can order things from Amazon, they can leave the house to go to work and still have their stuff when they come home etc. If you start breaking the rules then you're excluded from the society, people won't let you in their shops, they won't sell you gasoline, you get disconnected from utilities, it's a bad time.
Now let's imagine the chief of police fires the police force and burns down the courthouse.
What you're asking is what he should be convicted of and how long he should spend in jail.
It doesn't work.
That is absolutely not the same thing as him getting away with the crime of burning down the courthouse, it's just no longer functional to think of burning down the courthouse as a crime. Getting away with a crime would be continuing to benefit from the society built on a system of rules without being held accountable for breaking them (Israel gets away with having nukes for example). What he has done is remove the rules entirely and return the town to the natural state of anarchy. + Show Spoiler +That is not to say that there won't be consequences, it's just the concept of being prosecuted has gone. The consequences will show up with the power goes off because someone decided to steal the copper in the substation for scrap metal. They'll be more or less self imposed.
In the scenario in which the US engages in an illegal war and sends the world into a global recession while destroying its own alliance system there are no more pariah states and there is no more accountability. This is what Carney was explaining so beautifully at Davos . https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/01/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/ I think we're largely in agreement, though I believe Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestinians and the US's aiding and abetting of it was enough already. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. Basically there's always been "winners and losers" in this scheme (my personal perspective is a bit different), and people like Carney are basically saying that if they're slipping into the "losers" side then it's a good time to abandon ship. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination. From my particular British/European perspective, in both a general sense but also something I argued specifically in the Israel/Palestine instance, was that keeping Trump out of assuming office was so important precisely because other nations and institutions either lacked the capacity or will to rein in a US that abandons all pretence of a lawful world order. Illusory though it might be
I know the point you're trying to raise and we don't disagree that keeping Trump out of office was an inflection point. We disagree on how that could/should have been done. The fact is that Democrats tried what they wanted (including elevating Trump to the leader of Republicans in the first place) and lost. Twice. Then Biden failed to use the potential power the SCOTUS gave him to prevent Trump from taking office.
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If you are supporting the literal Nazis with you speech in Germany, you go to jail. That is good. The people that are willing to do this have no place in society. The only issue with that is that most people will find ways around it. But if someone is denying the Holocaust, is told that he is wrong and is breaking the law, and keeps on trampling on the graves of millions of not only but mainly jewish victims, they can actually go to prison. And that is a good thing. You cannot just print a leaflet denying the murders and advocating for a false narrative of why Germany was better off during the Third Reich. So all the actual real harmful Nazi ideology has to be communicated on peer to peer platforms, in private, face to face.
A party that gets in power can then censor things that are dear to you? Yeah, but if a party willing to censor stuf we consider to be free speech, the issue is not precedent. Like does anybody believe Trump would have destroyed the fabric of democratic soeciety in the US by now if only he were allowed to censor diversity in federal....oh wait, he just did.
Society decides what is allowed in the social contract. What is allowed and what is not changes with changes in the social contract. If we get a problem with people that want Stalinism back and deny that millions were murdered for this episode and say we should enact Stalinism in the exact same way it was implemented back then, millions to the Gulags, then we have to forbid this as well. The lack of it in german law is also the lack of people that want to sacrifice every second newborn child to the Bloodgods from outer space, while people wanting to remove every "element" in german society that poisons the blood of the nation or whatever are still there and only shut up about what exactly they want because they don't want to go to jail. Good thing imho.
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I always hold that the right to free speech ends when it damages others. Just as my right to freedom of action ends when I steal or kill other people.
I think the disagreement here is that some people (including me) think that speech has, can and will cause massive loss of freedom for others. While others thinks that freedom of speech includes speech that directly damages others in society.
Anti vax promotion directly kills people if successful.
Many variants of alternative medicine directly kills people if trusted.
If we cannot agree that those should be eliminated and then discuss what the most valid way of doing that is then our values are too far apart for meaningful discussions.
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EPT
