I think it's true that crude flows through Hormuz are more or less back to pre-war volumes, people who think it's some kind of propaganda campaign orchestrated by the Trump administration that somehow managed to get independent analysts like Kpler on board are delusional, but the US hasn't won anything. First, although volumes are back to pre-war levels, price isn't because this has been achieved by a complex and very expensive system of shuttle tankers to get the oil out of Hormuz and ship-to-ship transfers to move it to its final destination and insurance costs have skyrocketed because risks are still very elevated, so the cost of moving oil out of the Gulf is now $30-$35 per barrel compared to less than $7 before the war according to Reuters. Since moreover inventories have been depleted everywhere, there is strong upward pressure on demand and this will remain the case for a while even if the US can keep the volumes of crude flowing through Hormuz at this level, which explains why the Brent is still hovering around $100/barrel and will likely continue to do so for several months, compared to ~$70 before the war. This means the worst case scenario will likely be avoided, but that's hardly a victory. But perhaps more importantly, people and businesses don't consume crude, they consume refined products and their price is still very high and rising, because unlike crude the flows of refined products through Hormuz still haven't recovered (they're down to ~600,000 barrels from ~$3.6 million before the war according to Kpler), Russia stopped exporting because Ukrainian attacks on its refineries cut its production capacity and inventories are depleted everywhere. This will also continue for the foreseeable future. The US has severely depleted its stockpiles of interceptors and to a lesser extent of standoff offensive munitions, had to evacuate most of its bases in the region and the blockade plus the patrols in the strait impose a heavy price on its navy. Of course, Iran is also under a lot of pressure because of the blockade, so I still expect that eventually both sides will agree to some bullshit deal that won't fundamentally solve anything but will relieve the immediate strains on their economy and military. However, I now think it's likely there will be another round of escalation before that, because I don't think Trump will be able to wait months for the Iranian economy to collapse while the prices of refined products remain so high or get even higher and now that Iran has lost control of the strait to a large extent it has incentives to escalate to increase the pressure on Trump to make a deal. People say that the US can simply wait Iran out until its economy collapses, but if the Iranians think that's where they're headed, they have nothing to lose and can credibly threaten to destroy energy infrastructure in the region they have mostly spared so far because they were afraid of retaliation in kind. I think that the US knows that, and that the economic deterioration will pressure Iranian hawks to moderate, so that both sides will eventually make compromises to enable some kind of deal. Whatever this deal is, I don't think it will even come close to initial US objectives, which let's be real was to overthrow the regime or at least force it to capitulate and do a wholesale change of its foreign policy like Venezuela after Maduro's abduction. Iran will not abandon its hostility to the US and Israel, it will keep its ballistic missile program and drones, the regime will stay in place and its nuclear program will remain a point of contention with the US and Israel for many years. It's hard to predict how this will end exactly because Trump created a situation that is very difficult to unfuck, so maybe I'm wrong, but even if I turn out to be wrong in the end we don't know that yet and the victory laps that plan trusters are taking right now are premature and frankly ridiculous given what a disaster this war has been so far. It's like we're back at the beginning of March, they just never learn. If the US had been able to restore a semi-normal situation in Hormuz by April, maybe it would have been a different story, but it wasn't and now it's objectively in a much worse situation than it was before the war and hasn't obtained anything from Iran yet, so I don't know what this amazing victory people are talking about is supposed to be. They just never learn.

There is so much wrong with this comment, I do not know where to begin. I’ll stick with: -Puberty blockers are means to DELAY access to HRT treatments. They actually are a barrier to HRT access -“there are cases” & “this is the serious and mainstream view” are not the same thing

Kind of a shame that the notion of empathy being a potential source of dysfunction and social atomization was bogarted by the right with the “suicidal empathy” crap, it demands serious analysis.

The surest way to get in legal trouble in public education is to fail to follow an IEP, and under IDEA kids with disabilities must be integrated into the gened classroom as much as possible (“least restrictive environment”).

Basically, if your position is “teachers should kick out misbehaving students and fail ones that don’t work,” then you must change federal law around how we deal with students with disabilities! And those changes will have real consequences for those students and families!

It’s both politically unpopular and SCOTUS would never allow it but if we could ban private schools and force bussing it would be good

In both cases, the Left succumbed to a politics of resentful abandonment: “these institutions are bad and I have no answers except Less Of Them.” Of course not only abolish/defund police, but abolish SATs, abolish requirements, abolish phonics, abolish charters, etc etc. (notably, we didn’t achieve much of this in either crime or education, but it did sap the energy for any kind of competent reform agenda). In both cases we looked at institutions that kept showing us racial inequality in outcomes and said “fuck it, just get rid of any part of it that shows disparate outcomes” instead of “how do we *fix* these disparate outcomes?” Raise test scores for Black students? No, just get rid of the tests! Reduce the amount of crime in Black neighborhoods? No, just stop arresting people! (Again, the latter didn’t really happen, but it was our answer—that we also failed to implement). It’s simultaneously radical—tear down the institutions!—and remarkably unambitious. We felt that rooting out racism from our institutions was so impossible that the best we could offer was abdication. Simply abandon the field; the state could not provide equal services with equal outcomes, and providing nothing at all was better than providing inequality. Some in the center or the right will also say there was a kind of “soft bigotry of low expectations” going on—a disbelief in, for example, the ability of Black children to perform well academically—but outside of a few outliers I don’t think this was the case. I think the Left’s conclusion was much more that these institutions are so fundamentally corrupted by racism that they can’t be salvaged; the best we can do is diminish their ability to enforce any kind of outcome. Simply pass every student, admit whomever to college, etc etc. Just give up. As it turns out, people quite dislike this—especially those people, like Nikole Hannah-Jones’ daughter, who were supposed to benefit from this abdication. It turns out people want an imperfect system over nothing, and they dislike when your answer to help them improve the imperfect system is a very angry version of “just give up.”