Point one is a a kind of copium. Honestly, the people who talk about le doomscrolling being bad and unplugging are people who can't find solutions so they go into a kind of escapism. If anything people aren't doomscrolling enough. This is a dramatically different type of conflict, Iran isn't going to make peace because it knows the US and Israel are just biding their time to rearm again. The present leader had multiple members of his family including his father, wife, and a child killed, so you can imagine he's not in a hurry. Iran's conventional weaponry (drones, hypersonic missiles) and men under arms is far beyond what the West can counter. Western Anti-air is being depleted and can't be replaced at scale. They have cities underground and production tailored for war, they've been preparing for this war for nearly 50 years. They have 90 million people and a million men under arms, last i heard they were planning to call up 20 million men. Iran is basically a sky-fortress with mountains ringing and running through it on all sides. They need very little to close the strait its just 20 miles across, you can honestly do it with just mines. But since Trump hit Iran's biggest natural gas field they've been targeting gulf state oil infrastructure, and if that goes far enough then it doesn't matter if the strait is open at all near term. They coordinated the biggest oil reserve release in history between 38 countries with 400 million barrels and the price of oil is still climbing because the level of oil output being lost is worse than the output that was lost in the 70s at its worst point.CantChainTheSpirit wrote: Fri Mar 06, 2026 4:54 pm I'll put my two cents in.
I don't like to use terms such as liberals or conservatives, left or right. I don't see our situation as a political situation, it's a distraction, a red herring, it removes our focus on real issues and divides the community. Left and right, neither is openly pro-map. No party is, no political group is, our situation isn't going to be improved by either side. I hate terms like woke or liberals, they're lazy terms invented to antagonize people while solving nothing.
To the original point, I'm not as fatalistic but I do like the points raised because they are important.
I don't think we're out of time because there is no time limit. Change can take a year, 10 years a hundred years.
1. Is this the start of WW3 and a new world order? I doubt it. Maybe it is, or maybe it's a TV celebrity and influencer given his dream platform making the most of it for fame and attention. Presidents, prime ministers, dictators, monarchs come and go, societies and their people last a lot longer. Since leaving social media 9 months ago and adopting a policy of avoiding the usual news stories, instead focusing on family and friends and local news, I've found that my life is much more balanced and I'm no longer suckered into believing all the garbage online. Trump is an old man who loves attention, the Middle East has conflict and I've never known a time when there was conflict to one degree or another, the markets are down then back up, shipping lanes are closed yet again, politicians are slinging mud at each other still. I would advise to not get swept along by all the news stories and political fighting since only around 5% of it is true, the rest is to trigger people which it's good at.
2. Our situation can change quickly or slowly. The current hysteria about maps doesn't have to endure. We've been a convenient soft target for a long time but with change in the world, new targets can spring up quickly, new groups spring up, new arguments, new politics. We have presidents and prince's being targeted in the media and we have normal non-maps being branded maps for the most random of reasons. Take a photo of your kid in a school play or film them in public and someone is out to brand you a pedophile.
3. But I do agree that we're not really that methodical in our approach. If we want to bring about change we have to be honest with ourselves about why efforts have failed in the past and really push forward either with many small unrelated initiatives or an organised joined up initiative.
Is adopting the LGBTQ+ model the right approach? I don't know. There is an assumption that because this set of strategies worked for them, then the same strategies would work for us. That is a leap that might be wrong. They may work, or maybe we should be taking an entirely different approach.
We need to stay calm and focused and be strategic, the worse thing we can do it panic or lose hope or be defeatist or turn to a blame game. If you're right that the world is about to change dramatically then that could be a good thing, it could be the catalyst that makes a real difference in our favour. But I don't think we can rely on that, we need to really rationalise our way through this which I'll write about separately.
If you know anything about WWI, Gallipoli was the greatest military failure in British history and it was so bad Winston Churchill had a hard time having much of a career in politics for decades after because he was its planner. Even just taking the Iranian coastline will be a massive problem but at the same time the strait is so important they almost have to invade. The only other alternative would be to use nukes to try to scare the Iranians into surrendering, which probably won't work and won't be as effective as they think -- not to mention the blowback of such an action globally.The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), in an assessment published on Friday, compared such an operation to the Gallipoli campaign of 1915—the catastrophic Allied attempt to force open the Dardanelles by landing British, French, Australian and colonial troops on Ottoman soil. At Gallipoli, the navy could not clear the strait, and the army was sent to do what the navy could not. The result was eight months of slaughter, a quarter of a million casualties on both sides, and a complete Allied withdrawal with nothing achieved but mass death. The defenders, fighting on their own ground, proved impossible to dislodge.
The institute’s assessment of an equivalent operation at Hormuz is devastating. It would be “Gallipoli times ten, with the difference that the Iranians could always pull back to interior lines of defence.” The Iranian coastline commanding the strait stretches more than 150 kilometers—three times the length of the Gallipoli peninsula—backed by mountains that offer defensive positions in depth. “There is no defensible line that US forces could ever secure,” the ASPI wrote.
Anyways, I agree that the best course of action is to stay calm and think clearly but its something we should start on and people generally only begin to start on things like this when the danger is made clear.
