It’s only 24 miles wide at its narrowest point. You’re right that they couldn’t clog it completely, but making the waters un-navigable for large oil tankers seems doable. Especially since the crews wouldn’t just have to watch out for the sunken ships, but also large and dangerous chunks of floating debris and hazards they can’t see under the water.

The imagery conjured by “death valley” to me is a boat graveyard - endless wrecks from shore to shore.

One needle can’t. Wanna find out how many flaming wrecks Iran can fill the Strait with?

Never mind the fact that workers aren’t going to sail to their deaths into “death valley”. Even with hazard pay it’s going to be hard to actually find crews for every vessel, and the costs of insurance would be enormous.

Iran saving the world from endless US aggression by keeping them occupied.

Yeah, if the Strait becomes “death valley” then that quickly transforms into economic collapse anyway.

A bunch of immovable wrecks will close of the Strait just as well as a blockade.

Unless the US stops all of its oil producers from engaging in international trade

It could, though. The fossil fuel lobby would oppose this, of course, but they’re not the only lobby. Never mind the fact that all of Trump’s supporters drive oversized vehicles. Amazon doesn’t want high fuel prices, neither do Uber or DoorDash, neither do GM or Ford or Stelantis, neither do farmers, neither do construction companies, neither do data centers, neither do military contractors or the Pentagon, and so on. There are a lot of economic and political forces that want to keep fuel prices down.

This would begin a collapse of the old economic order, of course. If Canada and Mexico could be convinced to go along with this, lead by the US’s new “hemispheric dominance” strategy, we might see oil prices totally diverge between East and West.

I have no idea what is going to happen.

The US briefly tried out democracy during Reconstruction but the white terrorists quickly defeated that experiment.

The difference between 2008 and today is that the US is a net exporter, which means the US has the option cut its exports to keep oil prices down at home. That’ll have fascinating effects on global oil markets.

Adjusted for inflation in today’s dollars: $220

Highest oil got was in July 2008 at $147.27

Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in September 2008

👀

The whole stock market has shaved off 2%, with the Dow down 900.

I wonder if we’ll see the markets trip their circuit breakers tomorrow and halt trading.

I could see this playing out. Already, people in the admin and media are saying that we started this war to protect Israel (or because of Israel, or even dragged into war by Israel) and that seems like the first step to an off-ramp.

It’s also going to impact fertilizer prices and shipping prices. No one is going to be fine.

WW3

Unlike your doomsday religion, which believes it is waging an apocalyptic war to immanentize the eschaton. 🤡

The country is under an economic siege war and there’s constant meddling from CIA/Mossad to institigage color revolution. In the most recent protest we know that they were directly involved because they openly admitted it. They smuggled guns to people on the ground who then attacked police and military targets. This is not normal for a society either.

That’s the context in which Iran kills “protesters”. It’s far more complicated than you seem to want to acknowledge.

But let’s revisit this in a year and see if Iran is better off.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

This one is especially spurious - should they leave the children in a warzone? Evacuating them is humane, hardly genocidal.

That has to be harder after they armed and then betrayed the Kurds in Syria, right?

Obviously in any society there are going to be people who hate their leaders and want them dead. The question is who do we give voice to? Who gets shown on our TVs and social media feeds, and who is silenced? That’s what makes it propaganda.

Also, is Libya better off after the imperialists killed Qaddafi? Is that what you want for Iran?

Maybe it’ll split up, and there will be more Americas in 20 years!

It’s not just a limited sample, it’s a biased sample. That makes it worse than useless for gauging public opinion.

You wouldn’t keep contact with the kinds of people in Iran that respected and supported Khamenei; they wouldn’t want to talk to you and you wouldn’t want to talk to them. This is the equivalent of people who think Thing is popular because everyone in their social circle loves Thing, and thing Other Thing is unpopular because everyone they know hates Other Thing. Worse than useless.