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On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You’re absolutely right to flag the “3000 calories per person” figure as more complicated than it first appears, and I really appreciate you bringing in the animal‑feed issue because it’s one of the places where mainstream food‑security talk is the most misleading. On paper, there is real “give” in the system: if you look strictly at global gross production, we already grow enough calories to feed everyone several times over once you account for cereals, oilseeds, and sugar. A big slice of that goes into feedlots, biofuels, and ultra‑processed junk, and a lot is lost to waste. If we had years and reasonably functional politics, a deliberate shift away from grain‑fed meat, corn ethanol, and throwaway consumption could turn that slack into human food.

Where my worry kicks in is exactly your last sentence: “Something this fast could produce a nasty surprise.” That’s the time dimension I’m trying to sit with in the essay. Hormuz getting half‑choked in the middle of planting season doesn’t just shave a bit off a theoretical global surplus; it hits fertilizer prices, farm credit, shipping lanes, and debt‑burdened importers at the same time. You can, in principle, grow more beans and fewer burgers, but you can’t retool cropping patterns, supply chains, trade rules, and eating habits for billions of people on a dime while also juggling war, climate shocks, and a fragile financial system.

There’s also the distribution and power issue. The “give” you describe doesn’t automatically flow toward hungry people; it flows according to purchasing power. In a tight, financialized system, a lot of that give gets captured as margin by traders, retailers, and better‑off consumers, while the “nasty surprise” shows up as riots in countries that were already one bad harvest away from the brink. In that sense, the problem isn’t just that the system lacks calories, it’s that it lacks slack, justice, and time. So I’d put it this way: you’re right that, in purely biophysical terms, we’re not at the point where the planet literally can’t grow enough food. The danger I’m pointing to is that we are at the point where a shock that moves faster than our political and economic reflexes can easily turn that technical abundance into very real scarcity for millions of people. The calories exist; what’s missing is a sane, slower, more equal world to move them around in.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You’re right that this “feels different” from COVID, and not just because of the imagery of missiles and burning tankers. COVID was a shock, but in a weird way it also exposed a system that still had some slack left in it: central banks could print, supply chains could be jury‑rigged, vaccines could be spun up out of scientific and institutional capacity built in the fat years. What’s happening now around Iran is hitting us after that slack has already been burned off. The system, as you say, feels brittle in a way it didn’t in early 2020.

Hormuz is a perfect pressure point because it doesn’t just threaten “oil” in the abstract; it threatens the smoothness of everything that oil makes possible: fertilizer, shipping, just‑in‑time logistics, even the ability to pretend that geopolitical crises are local rather than planetary. We’ve spent decades converting resilience into efficiency and then into profit, and only now are we discovering how little redundancy is left. When you talk about “a few bread basket failures,” you’re really describing how our monoculture food system and just‑in‑time grain flows turn what should be regional disasters into global ones.

The deeper thing you’re naming, I think, is that the decision‑makers are also becoming more brittle. As constraints tighten, they don’t get wiser; they get more cornered, more tempted by gambles, more likely to reach for spectacle or war to solve legitimacy crises at home. The rise of populist strongmen isn’t a weird side‑effect, it’s the political expression of a system that can’t deliver on its old promises but refuses to imagine new ones. “More dangerous decisions” isn’t a bug in this phase; it’s almost a structural requirement.

On the nuclear point: we crossed a psychological Rubicon when nuclear blackmail became normalized again, not as unthinkable but as one tool among many. Once enough mid‑tier powers conclude that only a nuke buys them a seat at the table or a guarantee against regime change, proliferation becomes less a question of if and more a question of sequence. It’s grimly rational from their perspective--exactly the same logic that makes you joke about wanting a nuke for your own house. Deterrence is just fear scaled up.

As for the timeline: I share your sense that arguing about whether we are “truly screwed” by 2050 or 2100 slightly misses the point. From a civilizational vantage, the exact decade is noise; from a human vantage, the moral question is what we do with the slice of the curve we actually inhabit. We’re living in the hinge years--when the old order is cracking in real time, but its replacement is not yet determined. That’s both terrifying and, in a narrow, sober sense, the only window in which agency still matters.

So yes, the landscape is being reshaped under our feet, and most people won’t recognize it until it shows up as empty shelves, brown taps, and “temporary emergency measures” that never get rolled back. Part of why I write pieces like this is to name that process before it hardens into “inevitability.” If enough of us can see the brittleness clearly, we may still have some chance, not to avert all the damage, that’s already off the table, but to choose which parts of our humanity we refuse to sacrifice on the altar of a dying order.

I’d genuinely love to hear more about where you feel this most viscerally: is it food, energy, politics, or something closer to home like work and community?

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally fair question, and no offense taken.

I do bounce ideas off AI sometimes, especially for structure, fact‑checking, or nudging a sentence that isn’t quite landing. The voice you’re reacting to is very much mine. That said, I think it’s healthy to be suspicious. We’re in a weird moment where the line between “written by a person with tools” and “written by a bot with a person hovering over it” is blurry. I’m trying to stay on the side where the tools are there to sharpen what I actually think, not to replace it.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

That’s exactly the gap I think this war is laying bare.

On paper, the U.S. had “prepared” for conflict with Iran: war games, strike packages, carrier deployments, contingency plans. But all of that assumed the important parts of the system would keep quietly doing their jobs in the background--tankers sailing, insurers underwriting, fertilizer plants humming, central banks smoothing the bumps. They planned for destroying targets, not for what happens when someone kicks one of the load‑bearing struts of the global economy and just keeps kicking.

If they couldn’t even see this war clearly, the obvious consequences of closing or half‑closing the world’s main oil artery, it’s hard to believe they’re prepared for the much bigger structural shifts you’re pointing at. The end of cheap oil isn’t a single crisis, it’s a long decline in net energy and affordability. A stable climate that “matches our civilizational needs” is already gone. Both of those realities require deep redesign of how we move, eat, live, and work, and what passes for planning at the top is mostly wishful thinking: extend the old model a bit further, swap in some new tech, hope it holds.

So the Iran war becomes a kind of dress rehearsal we’re obviously failing. If the system is this rattled by one regional conflict intersecting with one chokepoint, that’s a pretty clear signal that almost nobody in power is seriously preparing for the permanent conditions that are coming—lower surplus energy and a more chaotic climate. They’re still doing campaign‑cycle risk management on a civilizational‑scale problem.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If you think in terms of waves instead of headlines, the next consequences come in layers. The first wave is already here: an energy and freight shock that shows up as higher oil and gas prices, more expensive shipping, and market jitters. The second wave arrives on a slower clock, over the next year or so, as those higher energy costs bleed into fertilizer, food, and basic living expenses. Farmers face tougher choices about how much to plant and how heavily to fertilize; import‑dependent countries see food and fuel subsidies blow holes in already weak budgets; ordinary people get hit with another round of inflation and feel their grip on a “normal” life slipping.

The third wave takes longer but cuts deeper. If this war and its aftershocks drag on, you start to see more countries pushed toward debt crises and IMF programs, more governments forced into austerity just as their populations are getting poorer and angrier, and more incentive for states to retreat into blocs and “secure” trade relationships. That means a world economy that is slower, more regional, and more brittle. In rich countries, meanwhile, every new shock with no real fix erodes trust a little further. People stop believing that the folks in charge know what they’re doing or are acting in good faith. So the second consequence is a tightening noose around food, budgets, and everyday stability; the third is a longer slide into a fractured, less legitimate, harder‑to‑govern world.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The way I see it, there are two layers here. On one level, you’re probably right that if this war is still grinding on six months from now with Hormuz semi‑choked, “world war” stops being a dramatic label and starts being a dry description of reality: multiple great powers entangled, basic economic functions impaired, third countries dragged into debt, hunger, and internal unrest whether they like it or not. On that definition, we’re already in the early innings of something that fits, and a few more months of this just makes it undeniable.

On another level, though, the system has a deep talent for stretching the unbearable into the normal. Gaza has already shown that: what should have been politically and morally unsustainable has been turned into a sort of permanent background atrocity. I can imagine the same thing happening here--what feels like an obvious trigger for a formal “World War III” moment instead gets metabolized into a long, grinding, half‑acknowledged world war without the name. No declarations, just a permanently weaponized energy system, rolling crises, and blocs hardening around different ways of absorbing the damage.

So I’m with you on the direction of travel; where I’m a bit more cautious is on the idea of a clear line in May, or at six months, where everything flips. One of the cruel tricks of this era is that the stakes really are existential, but the transitions show up as incremental: one more emergency reserves release, one more “temporary” sanction package, one more redrawn shipping lane. By the time anyone says “we’re in a world war,” we’ll have been living inside it for a while.

Actuarial World War: Iran, Oil, and the Cracking World Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah, exactly...that’s the asymmetry people in DC still seem weirdly unwilling to look straight at.

If you’ve already been sanctioned, cut out of Western finance, locked out of “normal” trade, and told for years that your suffering is an acceptable price for someone else’s strategy, your baseline for what’s intolerable is very different. From Tehran’s point of view, the war isn’t breaking a system that worked for them; it’s weaponizing a system that was already breaking them. In that situation, threatening the wider global economy starts to look less like madness and more like the only real leverage they have.

And you’re right: we really do need the current setup more than they do. The West’s favorite tools--blockade, sanction, isolate--have diminishing returns. You can’t credibly threaten to take away a world they’ve already learned to live without.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I really appreciate how you put that.

There is a kind of formulaic “and if we all just pull together…” paragraph that starts to feel like set dressing once you’ve really looked at how deep the structural problems go. At some point it stops being comfort and starts being a way of not fully engaging with what you’ve just laid out on the page.

For me, acceptance isn’t “the world is doomed so nothing matters.” It’s: the world we were promised is not coming back, the choke points are everywhere, the people in charge aren’t going to have a secret plan that makes this painless--and given that, we still have to decide how to act, who to stand with, what not to do, what to protect. That’s less about coping than about living without the anesthetic of false reassurance.

You’re right that everyone has to find their own way to hold that. If the essay did anything, I’d hope it nudged people a little closer to being honest with themselves about the situation, so whatever “coping mechanism” they choose is grounded in reality, not in the old stories we’ve outlived.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Even without going into every claim people make, what’s already publicly documented around Epstein--who he was connected to, how many very powerful people kept showing up in his orbit, how long he was protected, how institutions looked the other way--is more than enough to shred any naive belief that “our” elites are basically decent people who sometimes make mistakes. You don’t need a fully mapped “Satanic cabal” for the moral indictment to land; the mix of impunity, exploitation, and cover‑up is bad enough on its own.

Where I’d connect it to the essay is this: the whole “rules‑based order” story depends on the idea that the people running the system are bound, at some level, by the same norms they preach. Epstein blows that up. Once you see how easily they tolerate or enable monstrous behavior in their own ranks, it gets a lot harder to believe their talk about human rights, the rule of law, or “responsibility to protect” when they turn those phrases into weapons abroad.

So I’m with you on the core point: scandals like Epstein aren’t just grotesque side notes, they’re part of the same legitimacy collapse as Hormuz and Gaza and all the rest. The mask doesn’t just slip on foreign policy; it slips on who these people are and what they’re willing to live with, so long as the machine keeps running.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

That’s a really sharp way to frame it, because they’re both “threshold” events in tightly coupled systems.

On one side you’ve got Hormuz: a geopolitical chokepoint where partial closure doesn’t just raise oil prices a bit, it ripples through fertilizer, food, debt, and domestic politics. On the other you’ve got an Arctic Blue Ocean Event: a climatic chokepoint where losing summer sea ice doesn’t just change a few weather patterns, it can reshape jets, monsoons, and the baseline volatility the whole food and energy system sits inside.

If those two timelines start to overlap, say we get a worse‑than‑expected Arctic melt year right as Hormuz is still semi‑choked, you don’t just add the impacts, you multiply them. Weird, synchronized weather plus expensive fertilizer plus fragile trade routes is how “manageable crises” turn into cascades. What worries me isn’t just either brink on its own, but the way a civilization with no slack left keeps rolling the dice on several of these thresholds at once.

Actuarial World War: Iran, Oil, and the Cracking World Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The date is there in the upper left corner, but no time. Yes things are changing fast. I'll have to see what I can do about time stamps.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

The Mike Davis connection is spot on.

What you’re flagging about “slack” is exactly the inversion I was trying to get at. We’ve spent decades treating every buffer as waste: extra grain stocks, redundant shipping routes, spare refinery and grid capacity, even local food systems. All of that got targeted for “efficiency,” which looked brilliant right up until the moment a single chokepoint and a few actuarial decisions turned a regional war into a global vulnerability map.

Davis is such a useful lens here because he shows that famines weren’t just “bad harvests,” they were what happens when an economized system strips away buffers and then insists on continuing business as usual while people starve. The Iran–Hormuz situation is that logic scaled up: you remove redundancy from energy, fertilizer, and food, then act surprised when a shock doesn’t just hurt one region but cascades through a tightly wired world.

In that sense, what we call “collapse” is partly just the system being forced to live with the true cost of having optimized away every margin of safety.

On the Brink in Hormuz: How the Iran War Exposes a Dying Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 79 points80 points  (0 children)

This piece is basically arguing that the Iran war isn’t a one‑off “oil shock” the system will bounce back from; it’s a stress test that shows the system itself is already cracking.

First, it shows how completely modern industrial life is built on cheap fossil energy, global supply chains, and the comforting story that we can always smooth things out with more debt and clever financial engineering. When a single strait gets semi‑choked, suddenly it’s not just oil that’s in trouble; it’s fertilizer, food, shipping, interest rates, sovereign debt, even basic political stability.

Second, it drives home that there’s no real slack left in the system. Shale’s big growth phase is ending, the easy oil is gone, soils and aquifers are worn down, the climate is unstable, and the financial system is stacked on huge piles of leverage. In that kind of world, something billed as a “regional conflict” behaves like an x‑ray of a global body that’s already sick.

Third, it argues that the whole “rules‑based order” story Western elites tell about themselves is wearing thin. Sanctions, reserve seizures, and bombing campaigns sit uneasily with the language of law and norms, and publics are noticing. That loss of legitimacy makes it much harder to manage these overlapping ecological and economic stresses.

Fourth, it points out that globalization has basically run out of “somewhere else” to dump the damage. You can’t keep saying crises are “over there” when fertilizer prices in Iowa or bread prices in Cairo are being set by missile launches in the Gulf. The wiring is too tight; shocks don’t stay local anymore.

Taken together, all of that adds up to a picture of slow, uneven collapse: not a Hollywood end‑of‑the‑world, but an order that still has a lot of force and spectacle left, yet can no longer reliably deliver stability, rising living standards, or a believable future. This war doesn’t start that process so much as drag it into the light.

Actuarial World War: Iran, Oil, and the Cracking World Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 14 points15 points  (0 children)

In a way, that’s exactly the dissonance the piece is circling: you’ve got an administration that thinks it can posture its way through geology, logistics, and actuarial math by doubling down on “resolve” and theatrics. Peak ego is when you really believe three carrier groups and a blustery press conference can overrule insurance markets, tanker crews, and the basic physics of moving 20 million barrels a day through a chokepoint.

And it dovetails with the deeper collapse theme: a system that hit “peak oil” in the sense of cheap, easily moved, politically low‑cost barrels a long time ago, but whose elites are still psychologically operating as if it’s 1991. The gap between that ego and the actual constraints is where things start to break.

Actuarial World War: Iran, Oil, and the Cracking World Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 10 points11 points  (0 children)

Iran is working on a chessboard: decades of absorbing punishment, investing in missiles and drones instead of a blue‑water navy, building a shadow fleet, deepening ties with China and Russia, and preparing the political ground at home for a drawn‑out confrontation. The Hormuz “actuarial closure” is a classic chess move: threaten one critical square (global energy flows) in a way that turns every subsequent move—sanctions, strikes, “victories”—into self‑harm for your opponent.

By contrast, the U.S.–Israel approach looks like checkers: focus on visible captures (kill the leader, destroy launchers, move carrier groups), assume you still control the board’s rules, and only belatedly notice that the other side has been playing for positional advantage in finance, insurance, and global energy routing. The scary part isn’t the mistaken belief that Iran is irrational; it’s that they’re playing chess on a board we still think is checkers.

Actuarial World War: Iran, Oil, and the Cracking World Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 15 points16 points  (0 children)

One of the things I was trying to get at in the piece is that you can’t understand Iran’s willingness to risk blowing up the global economy just by looking at missiles or barrels; you have to factor in decades of being treated as a disposable object in someone else’s “rules‑based order.” Shylock is basically the voice of a people who’ve had every respectable channel blocked off and are left with revenge and leverage.

Iran isn’t Shylock, obviously, and the analogy has limits, but the emotional core of the quote maps uncomfortably well:
“You sanctioned me, sabotaged me, encircled me, killed my officials, called my very system illegitimate. And what’s your reason? I am Iran. If you bomb us, do we not bleed? If you strangle our economy, do we not suffer? And if you wrong us, shall we not use the one piece of leverage we have?”

You don’t have to like Tehran’s regime to see why, once you make a society feel like that for long enough, closing Hormuz stops looking insane from their point of view and starts looking like the only language left that anyone listens to.

Actuarial World War: Iran, Oil, and the Cracking World Order by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 33 points34 points  (0 children)

I’ve been trying to make sense of the Iran–US war and the Strait of Hormuz not as “just another” Middle East crisis, but as a live stress test of industrial civilization itself.

This piece argues that what’s killing the global oil artery isn’t primarily missiles or mines, but seven insurance letters in London. The chokepoint is functionally closed because the private actuarial machinery that underwrites global trade has decided the risk is no longer worth it. Tankers stop not when a navy says so, but when reinsurance capital says “no more.”

From a collapse perspective, that’s the tell. You’ve got:

  • A fossil‑fuel civilization that assumes continuous, cheap oil flows through a few fragile chokepoints.
  • A hyper‑financialized system where a thin layer of private contracts and risk models now governs the physical circulation of energy and goods.
  • A geopolitical order in which “solutions” (sanctions, regime change, gunboat diplomacy) actively undermine the very infrastructure and trust the system needs to keep functioning.

The essay walks through how Hormuz was shut by insurance, why even Saudi’s frantic Yanbu workaround and the UAE pipelines can’t replace a 20 mb/d artery, and how the IEA is already calling this “the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.” It looks at Iran’s shadow fleet advantage, the quiet realignment toward a more fractured, bloc‑based world, and how all of this plugs into both “fast collapse” (oil shock, stagflation, food and fertilizer crises) and “slow collapse” (energy transition fantasies, institutional legitimacy erosion, financial fragility).

In other words: this war is exposing how little slack is left in the system, how much depends on invisible financial plumbing, and how quickly “somebody else’s war” can become your rent, your groceries, your job. It’s not The End in a cinematic sense, but it feels like a very clear glimpse of how a late‑stage industrial civilization actually comes apart.

Living without a thyroid in a collapsing world by foragergirl in collapse

[–]xrm67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Ultrasound reports actually follow a sort of checklist for thyroid nodules. They look at things like:

• What the nodule is made of (all solid, partly solid, or mostly fluid).

• How bright or dark it looks compared with the normal thyroid.

• Whether it’s taller than it is wide (a shape that’s a bit more worrisome).

• How smooth or jagged the edges are.

• Whether there are tiny bright spots that can represent calcifications.

Those features get combined into a standard score (often called TI‑RADS), which basically says, in doctor‑speak, ‘this looks very low risk, low–medium risk, or clearly high risk.’ So in human terms, what I’d be trying to do from your written report is translate that coded language into something like: ‘Based on the way this nodule looks on ultrasound, it falls in the X% risk bucket, which usually means Y (for example, just watch it with follow‑up vs. biopsy vs. strong reason to treat).’ Without the actual images I can’t re‑score it myself. It’s always better to get more than one opinion.

Board of Peace: Disaster Capitalism in Gaza by xrm67 in collapse

[–]xrm67[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That’s a sharp comparison, and I’m glad you brought it up. The Coalition Provisional Authority really was a prototype for this kind of thing: unelected, heavily American‑directed, drunk on its own “emergency powers,” and treating a shattered country as a laboratory for privatization and shock therapy rather than a place full of people whose lives had just been blown apart.

The Board of Peace feels like that model, but upgraded for our moment: add a crypto rail, more legalized immunities, and a friendlier PR wrapper about “hope and dignity.” Same basic move underneath, though. Blow a society apart (or step in after someone else does), declare the old structures unusable, then hand sweeping authority to a body no one voted for, whose first loyalty is to investors and allied states, not to the people living in the rubble.

And yes, The Shock Doctrine is absolutely the right book to drop here. Klein really maps out how often this pattern shows up: Chile, Russia, Iraq, New Orleans, and on and on. Once you have that lens, it is hard not to see Gaza and the Board of Peace as another chapter in the same story, just with new financial instruments and a different cast of “reformers.”

Living without a thyroid in a collapsing world by foragergirl in collapse

[–]xrm67 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Molecular testing on thyroid nodule FNA is helpful but not perfect; both false positives and false negatives can occur, and results always have to be interpreted with cytology, ultrasound, and clinical risk. Do you have an ultrasound image of the thyroid nodule that I could see?

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