Mastodawn

Charlie Stross 16h ago

ACOUP is grimly pessimistic about the Iran war: "it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option." https://acoup.blog/2026/03/25/miscellanea-the-war-in-iran/

Miscellanea: The War in Iran

This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Graydon 15h ago

@cstross Mutual ruin is the expected outcome of wars.

The US is the Oil Empire; people who are not in the US tolerated that and the consequent post-war order because it was, by and large and on the whole, beneficial. Open trade, freedom of the seas, all that stuff.

An authoritarian US is not beneficial and the exceptionalism that went into supporting an expectation that the US would not go there is stone dead. Everyone else now wants to end the Oil Empire even without the food security issues.

Brian Gordon 9h ago

@cstross My expectation is that the US is going to collapse its economy committing genocide against Iran. Once the US economy goes down, a period of global rearrangement happens, only it's going to be happening in a context of repeated famine as the weather gets more angry than hitherto. (Israel does not survive US collapse.)

I think it's also notable that there is no way out of this that doesn't involve "and a miracle"; none of the better scenarios are plausibly materially possible.

Frank Skornia 15h ago

@graydon @cstross As an USian, this has pretty much been my nihilistic prediction since the morning after the 2024 election.
The US needs a serious and brutal kick in the nuts for us as a nation to realize that the Republicans are a suicidal death cult running full bore to slave-feudalism. I think one of the first things I said that morning was that I can't wait for all those Republican voters to be in the position where they're have to consider eating their children to survive.

@fskornia @graydon @cstross Have you met republican parents? theyre probably looking forward to it

@cinebox @fskornia @graydon @cstross There was this TV show in 2016 that got cancelled after its first season called 'Incorporated', that was really Cyberpunk As Fuck, where this fella had infiltrated into a corp as an executive, and the life of the corpos was more or less 1990's suburbia, while the masses of the population lived more or less like refugees. One of the episodes had an in-universe ad for a Chinese charity to help USAmerican families that today sounds like a "joke".

Charlie Stross 13h ago

@cinebox @fskornia @graydon Not being American, I'm happy to say that I haven't met them face-to-face—just observed them from a distance.

Angus McIntyre 15h ago

@graydon @cstross I don’t know if it’s even worth trying to enumerate all the possible bad outcomes, or guess which one is most likely, because the Brains Trust in the White House will almost certainly find a way to engineer something even more stupidly catastrophic than whatever worst-case scenario you can come up with.

Colman Reilly 15h ago

@angusm @graydon @cstross I’ve stopped trying to predict because they seem to take disappointing me as a challenge.

@graydon @cstross in related news: https://theintercept.com/2026/03/19/air-force-academy-charlie-erika-kirk/

Air Force Academy Prepares Ideological Overhaul, With Erika Kirk Bringing “Bold Christian Faith”

As the Air Force Academy dismantles DEI, critics warn the military is becoming "a Christian nationalist praetorian guard.”

The Intercept

Graydon 15h ago

@moz @cstross The US right has been planning on a theocracy for three generations.

They can't give up patriarchal white supremacy and continue to exist; by alternative phrasing, their cultural continuity arises from being free to torture children. Once they are not, they either extirpate whatever functioning social power prevents them from torturing children or their cultural transmission ceases.

I would wish the majority of the US population could get their heads around the problem.

jonathankoren™15h ago

@graydon @moz @cstross I wouldn't say the US was planning on a theocracy for three generations. That seems to misinterpret history.

The alignment with evangelical christians were purely a GOTV effort. Mainstream conservatives never gave a shit about bible thumpers, just like how evangelicals never gave a shit about abortion until they needed a new boogieman to keep the coffers full after segregation was eliminated.

What's happened is that two generations now have been raised on christian nationalist propaganda, and the ones in on the joke have all died off, and so now there are only true believers. The first generation never had any intention of giving power to the nut jobs, but yet here we are, and as long as the line goes up, then it's all good.

Graydon 15h ago

@jonathankoren @moz @cstross The US Right that you have now is, as you note, all true believers, and the true believers have been planning this for generations as their numbers have increased.

(If you're not a true believer you presumably observe all the falsified axioms and alter your positions away from the paleo-conservative views of 1970.)

Billy Smith 2h ago

@graydon @jonathankoren @moz @cstross

Also, remember that the USAF were tracking the Evangelical Christians who were deliberately trying to join the regiments that control the USA nuclear weapons.

There were news articles warning about this years ago.

Algaeman 14h ago

@graydon @moz @cstross Living in a fearful environment encourages conservative values. The more dangerous and chaotic the society becomes, the more people are willing to sign away their rights in the hope of safety. It takes conscious social effort to move toward liberal, equitable values

atopoeia-o 14h ago

@graydon @moz @cstross The US still has a few centuries to go. "We're" going to get stronger+stronger tho' to your point... am not sure who is included in the "we" group.

If the US weather starts to fade "we" already have right of claim to Canada by way of previous administrations (dating back to Churchill). Not sure about Grønland but Canada, yes.

I think Mexico+Southern Texas are at risk but most of the US is likely going to stay strong and in play over time. For a few centuries.

Token Sane Person 13h ago

@moz @graydon @cstross One characteristic of fascist dictatorships is that they promote based on ideological purity rather than ability, and since the two are negatively correlated they actively select for incompetence. This shows up in both Nazi Germany and the USSR, and the USA is going the same way.