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Hi All,
We have now, from the news service Axios, a list of points that make up the Trump plan which has been presented to Ukraine as a take it or leave it offer. This is what Trump has been pressuring the Ukrainians to sign, using the threats of the US walking away from the negotiations. The plan that Axios has seen is arguably the worst possible deal for Ukraine—far worst that most were saying Trump would try to impose. Here are the salient points.
To understand the most terrible parts of the deal, and where the US is bending over backwards to help Putin, you have to start with points 1 and 4.
Point 1 on Crimea ends the strategic world that the US has tried to institute since 1945 and in particular would end the European settlement that has governed the continent as well. It might come as a shock to you, but not a single European state has expanded its borders by conquest since 1945. Yes there have been countries dissolve (Yugoslavia and the USSR) but they broke up into constituent parts. However there has been no case of a country expanding its size by militarily seizing the territory of another for 80 years.
This will end that world, and establish a new principle that basically puts every European state on Russia’s (and Belarus’s) borders in real jeopardy. Now if you invade, ethnically cleanse and hold—its yours legally.
I will write much more about this later—but if Ukraine gives up legal claim to Crimea (which would require a constitutional change in Ukraine) Ukraine is establishing legal precedent that could be used by Russia to take over the rest of the country eventually.
Its the thin end of the wedge in the Russian plan to end Ukraine.
Point 4 on sanctions is almost as bad. This lifts all the restrictions on trade with Russia that have been in place since Russia invaded Crimea—its a permanent Russian economic victory. It would allow the USA and China to help rebuild the Russian military and economy rapidly (China as I said on monday could flood Russia with finished military production). Sanctions have been one of Europe’s continuing pressure points to try and moderate Putin’s behavior—they would now be gone.
The other devastating thing that point 4 implies is that all Russian assets are unfrozen and returned to their owners—so Ukraine and Europe have no access to these funds to help Ukraine rebuild.
The other points are either concessions to Russia or things that sound like they mean something when they do not.
Point 2 and “De-Facto” recognition of the occupied territories (with not a single Russian withdrawal it seems) basically starts the process of them eventually becoming de jure parts of Russia.
Point 3 on NATO and the EU is the USA and Russia basically dictating the future of European security—and in one case where they clearly have not right to do this.
When it comes to NATO, this is just clear evidence of what Trump has believed—and it accepts the Russia lie that the war started because of NATO. I suppose the real change is that this seems to be a permanent ban on Ukraine in NATO.
As for the EU part of Point 3, Ukraine is a sovereign European state and its membership is not something to be decided by Trump and Putin. The US and Russia have no right to say which states can or cannot join the EU. The fact that its even in the text of point 3 shows how they were looking for things to seem like concessions—which are not.
Frankly the EU should tell the US to stuff itself on this.
Point 5 on enhanced energy cooperation is just a restating of the arm twisting minerals deal that the US has been trying to foist on Ukraine. Its meaningless as is, there seem to be no investment amounts, agreements, etc.
What is not thereis almost as important as what is. There are no security guarantees for Ukraine, no reparations that Russia will have to pay to help rebuild Ukraine, no US commitments of any kind for Ukraine.
Under this proposal the US has become formally an enabler of dictatorship and a supporter of the expansion of a dictatorship in Europe and the enemy of freedom and democracy. I hope European states have the courage to stand with Ukraine in opposition to it.
People Should Have Seen This Coming For A Long Time
Its all there—Russia keeping the territory, Russia getting sanctions relief, no new aid for Ukraine, no NATO for Ukraine, no security guarantees for Ukraine. Even the negotiating respectfully with Putin and suspiciously with Zelensky was exactly what we have seen.
Trump is what he has always been. The sad thing is still, even now, not all Europeans understand this.
Thanks for reading Phillips’s Newsletter! This post is public so feel free to share it.
For a second in 2020, I thought we might be able to breathe again. (Photo: Salwan Georges, from the George Floyd/BLM protests in Minneapolis)
I move in a world of relentless, bland, unbending white man pragmatism. It binds me like swaddling cloth; it smothers me like cotton batting. “We have to be reasonable,” they say. “Don’t get so emotional,” they drawl, with a heavy weight of disgust on that penultimate ‘o’, a fraying at the bottom of their vocal cords, a touch of glottal ash.
White man pragmatism makes statements like, “We know global warming is real, but we have to rationally consider the pros and cons of different actions. We don’t want to hurt the economy.”
White man pragmatism looks at an egg line of women giving brutal testimony about the latest celebrity abuser and says, “I believe in due process. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty.” White man pragmatism will buy his next book, watch his next movie, play his next song.
White man pragmatism does not believe in humility. It knows, axiomatically, that whatever makes it comfortable makes it good.
Whatever makes it uncomfortable might be bad, but not in the way that we mere flies might think, trembling at the edges of its web. Genocide, for example, is not in itself a bad thing to the white man pragmatist. The people who insist on dragging it to light—particularly the ones who insist on showing all the dead babies—they are bad. The deaths, pragmatically delegated to footnotes and caveats, are a casualty of war, of “self-defense,” even. The visuals, on the other hand, should be condemned with that devastating flick of of a Rolex-clad wrist and a sneer. We, the “unserious,” are now the unseen.
Or take the disruption of every climate system and massive ecocide, not to mention the inevitable creation of billions of climate refugees and uncountable human and non-human suffering. Every time a voice raises itself above the soothing tones of an ASMR video, the white man pragmatists are there, ready to hose us down with exclamations about our impropriety, our exaggerations, our alarmism. If that doesn’t do the trick, they’re quick to remonstrate that nothing will get done with such pessimism, that we must have “hope.” What that hope entails, apparently, is building the next bitcoin server farm, investing a few more billion dollars in generative AI that erases with every search every gain made by the adoption of green energy. If we’re lucky, they might stop talking about the moon or Mars long enough to suggest some vague technological solution that will save us from our human-made disaster at the last possible moment.
What I have realized over the last few years about the sober intellectual class, the white men who aren’t in thrall to Trump or Musk or their legion of white man supremacist minions, is that by and large they will agree with a coarse-grained picture of the major challenges facing the world. They’ll admit that the “war” in Gaza is tragic and that human-made climate change is real and worsening. They might even be able to acknowledge, in a general sense, that capitalism as practiced in the west might be overflowing its banks at the moment and needs some reining in. They will admit these things, but their white man pragmatism is so predominant in their thinking that they seem incapable of taking premise A and following it to the perfectly logical conclusion B. They leap and jump and obfuscate to find any reason why premise A needs absolutely zero meaningful response from them or any of their class.
I should be explicit and add that many women and non-binary people and non-white people are white man pragmatists to the bone. Oh they had to swallow it, for sure. And sometimes it stings when the white men pragmatists step on something that has direct personal value to them (reproductive rights, say, or DEI). Nevertheless, these non-white-men preach the gospel of white man pragmatism because they have married in—they have subordinated their own interests to those of the system of white male supremacy in the hopes that even though they might lose rights as a class, they will still gain as individuals. In other words, they’re not like other girls. And they do not like other girls. They do not—this might be the tragedy—even like themselves.
I’m thinking of the parade of blondes that the Trump administrations sends up to the podium to repeat talking points with an air at once pedantic and uncomprehending. They’re the popular girls who would kick you when no one was watching but cry to the teacher because you threw the ball too hard.
You did throw the ball hard. You’re still throwing the ball hard. Because it’s not fucking right. Murdering tens of thousands of children and journalists and poets and doctors and elders and mothers and fathers and ancient olive trees is not fucking right. Deporting and detaining non-citizen students indefinitely because they spoke up against genocide when the white man pragmatists obfuscated and looked away is not fucking right. Collaborating with a fascist authoritarian government in order to abet their deportation and detention of their own students as Columbia (my alma mater, to my shame) has done is not fucking right! Auctioning off the last of the world’s forests—rightfully indigenous land—to lumber companies while we are actively blowing through worst-case climate scenarios and we already have the technology on hand to get to net zero carbon is so single-mindedly nihilistic it’s like we’re being governed by a crew of comic book villains. Go to Mars, you idiots, please! We’ll all pay for the trip, and gladly.
White men pragmatists, do you think these things aren’t related? Are you beginning to feel a little alarmed by the defunding of science and medical research because, well, you might need cutting-edge cancer treatments one day? But you can’t stretch your empathy to see how that connects to the genocide in Gaza, and to indigenous land rights, and to the punitive, racist immigration policy pursued by every single presidential regime since Clinton? You “believe” in climate change, but you don’t want your stocks to go down if governments forced companies to pay the costs of their pollution? Buddy, I’ve got news for you: Your 401k won’t matter if the habitable land on this planet decreases by forty percent. Your Bermuda time-share will be, quite literally, underwater.
I am tired of you. I am tired of every white man pragmatist who’s just sitting here in the boiling water, even acknowledging that the water is, you know, maybe a bit uncomfortable? And yet you seem to prefer death—of yourself and everything you claim to love and value—over examining the status quo and declaring it unfit for human life. Because that’s the truth. Our status quo is unfit for human life, human dignity, human flourishing, human existence. It’s also unfit for whale life, for octopus life, for redwood life, for cicada life, monarch butterfly life, for garden lizard life, for apple tree life, for heirloom corn life, for crab life. It might be provisionally fit for Monsanto corn life and cockroaches. Is that what you want? A world with desperate humans, cockroaches, and billions of ears of tasteless corn the color of margarine?
I do not want to spend another second of my life trying to convince a white man pragmatist that something is wrong. The trouble is that they have all the power. But they would have significantly less power if the rest of us didn’t cede them so much of the argument. I understand: we’re overworked, exhausted, struggling, often in imminent danger, traumatized. Nevertheless, why give them ground they don’t deserve, if only in our own minds? There is nothing wrong with alarmism if there really is a fire spreading. There is nothing wrong with outrage and anger when we see a genocide happening in real time. There is nothing inherently anti-semitic in criticizing Israel. You are not “unserious” if you’ve begun to suspect that the Democratic party of the US will never, ever do anything to genuinely alleviate human suffering. Why not? Because they are also white man pragmatists who believe in the status quo, and our status quo is human suffering. Our status quo is cruelty. Our status quo is the superiority of certain parts of humanity over others, and of all humanity over the rest of the planet. But we are the planet. We are a miracle, a sentient ball of stardust, and we are turning ourselves to ashes.
And if you think the planet will survive this, even if we don’t? It might not. Look at Venus—a once-livable planet that’s now a hell-furnace of runaway greenhouse gasses. I hope it isn’t likely, but it’s entirely possible for us to destroy this planet—not just the life that has adapted to the climate conditions of the Holocene, but all potential life that could come after us. Our beloved blue ball has about a billion more years left before the sun will heat up and destroy complex life. But we might knock her out long before she has to go.
These are the wages of white supremacy and its intellectual defenders. I don’t know when we planted the seed that’s borne this destructive fruit—certainly by the time Columbus set foot on Hispañola, certainly by the time Europeans were buying humans by the boatload on the Gold and Ivory Coasts. But you can see the same destructive impulses, the same logical games as far back as the Roman empire. People like to talk about our current problems of runaway destruction being part of some generalized “human nature,” but that strikes me as another kind of white man pragmatism, a denial of the vast majority of humanity’s presence here on our beautiful blue ball. Have people always fought one another? Of course. Have humans moved around and taken resources from other human and non-human animals without thought for the common good? Absolutely. But the scale, the weaponization, the sheer lack of any human brake to our objectively self-annihilating mode of existence strikes me as fundamentally distinct from previous (and some contemporaneous!) modes.
What makes it distinct is white man pragmatism: a highly sophisticated social-philosophical framework which has evolved in lockstep with white supremacy in order to circumvent our human nature. It’s there at every moment to tell us that the core within us—that which cries out with empathy at the sight of a beheaded child, of grieving family, of bleached coral reefs, of degraded sacred lands, of unmitigated poverty (on a scale unprecedented in human history), and gluttonous wealth (on a scale unprecedented in human history)—is what must be discounted and ignored. It keeps us so marginalized, so poor, so unconnected to our history and our planet and our very bodies that we repress ourselves and attempt to ask for things that they might find reasonable in the ways that they deem appropriate. And then we get sicker, more desperate, more exhausted, and we die. Our needs are not met. Our natures are ignored.
Calling our actions as a human species today “human nature” is like calling the growth of a metastatic cancer “human behavior.” Perhaps technically true, but a shallow truth that obfuscates a deeper one.
If I can think of one revolutionary act that we can all do right now, without any infrastructure, without any funding, without any central organization, without even any hope, it would be this: Stop ceding ground. Stop ignoring what you feel. Stop trying to package your own survival into a shape that fits their pragmatism. Stop, even if you still have enough stolen resources to live comfortably. Stop, even if you’re not a member of the groups being targeted today. Stop believing in the system. Reject the status quo.
I’m sick of white man pragmatism, but I am not and will never be sick of us. I long for a world that will be kind to itself. I long for every one of us to reclaim our human nature.
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ForeverAstrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction:
Becker investigates the personalities, the ideologies, the coalitions, the histories, and crucially, the grifts behind such science fictional pursuits as infinite life-extension, space colonization, automation panic, AI doomerism, longtermism, effective altruism, rationalism, and conciousness uploading.
This is, loosely speaking, the bundle of ideologies that Timnit Gebru and Émile P. Torres dubbed TESCREAL (transhumanism, Extropianism, singularitarianism, (modern) cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and longtermism):
While these are largely associated with modern Silicon Valley esoteric techbros (and the odd Oxfordian like Nick Bostrom), they have very deep roots, which Becker excavates – like Nikolai Fyodorov's 18th century "cosmism," a project to "scientifically" resurrect everyone who ever lived inside of a simulation:
In their modern incarnation, these ideas largely originate in science fiction novels. That is to say, they were made up and popularized by people like me, the vast majority of whom made no pretense of being able to predict the future or even realistically describe a path from the present to the future they were presenting. Science fiction is something between a card trick and a consensual con game, where the writer shows you just enough detail to make you think that the rest of it must be lurking somewhere in the wings. No one in sf has ever explained how consciousness uploading could possibly work, and neither have any of the advocates for consciousness uploading – the difference is that (most of) the sf writers know they're just making stuff up.
Becker's central question is how many "smart" people (some of them very smart and accomplished, others merely very certain that they are smart despite all evidence to the contrary) can mistake futuristic allegories made up by pulp writers for prophesy?
In answering this question, he uncovers a corollary of Upton Sinclair's famous maxim that "it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it," namely, that "it is easy to get a person to believe something when doing so will make them feel good about themselves."
The beliefs that Becker explores in this book sometimes make the believers rich (like the AI grifters who run around shouting about AI taking over the world and turning us all into paperclips). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about being selfish assholes (like longtermism, which holds that all the misery in the world today is worth it if you can make 24 heptillion hypothetical simulated people just a little happy in 10,000 years). Sometimes, they make their believers feel good about life after death, or eternal life – the same pitch that religions have been roping in followers with since the stone age.
What differentiates these beliefs from other faith-based claims is that their followers claim that they aren't operating on faith, but on science, reason and rationality. This is where the fact that Becker is a bona fide astrophysicist comes in. Not only is he personally qualified to debunk claims about space colonization, but he's also familiar with the rigorous process of scientific inquiry, and capable of consulting experts and listening to them. That's how he concludes, for example, that having your head cut off and frozen when you die is just a form of corpse mutilation, with a zero point zero zero zero zero percent chance of someone recovering your mind from your freezerburned brain.
Like his subjects, Becker has a complicated relationship with science fiction. He, too, enjoys the imaginative flights of the genre, its delightful thought-experiments, its gnarly moral conundra. I love these too. They make for a fascinating and often useful lens for understanding and challenging our own relationship with technology and our very humanity. Ultimately, Becker is exploring the difference between reading sf because it makes you think in new ways, and reading sf as a kind of prophetic text, and – crucially – he's asserting that it's perfectly possible to enjoy this stuff without organizing your moral life around hypothetical heptillions of virtual people living in the year 25,000; or, indeed, having your head cut off and frozen.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla
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SEOUL, South Korea – “Unless these two are smiling and happy to go back to North Korea or Russia, we Koreans would not be happy [for them to be exchanged],” the retired military officer told me. “You better tell them. You can quote me.”
Retired Gen. Chun In-bum in a Seoul cafe, explaining how S. Koreans feel about the N. Korean POWs being held in Ukrainian custody.
Chun In-bum is a retired South Korean Army Lieutenant General who has fiercely advocated for his country to help Ukraine’s efforts against Russia’s invasion. Since the invasion, Chun, 66, has been pushing for items such as anti-aircraft missiles and mine-clearing devices to be sent to the frontlines.
Yet his support for Ukraine may be dramatically affected if President Volodymyr Zelenskyy decides to exchange with Russia the two North Korean prisoners captured by Ukrainian forces in January. Zelenskyy has suggested he’s ready to make the exchange.
“That I would think is a war crime,” Chun, who previously served as the lieutenant general of South Korea’s Special Warfare Command, told The Counteroffensive. “They go back to the Russians, they [are] dead men. If Zelenskyy does that, he's gonna lose half of my support. And a lot of the South Koreans will do that as well.”
Ukraine is between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, it is trying to defend itself from Russia’s army, which includes about 14,000 North Korean soldiers that the Kim Jong-un government has sent since 2024.
On the other hand, if Kyiv uses the North Korean POWs as a bargaining chip, it risks alienating South Korea — a key partner that, despite the long-standing division, still views the people of North Korea as brothers. In December 2023, The Washington Post reported that Seoul indirectly provided more artillery shells for Ukraine than all of Europe combined.
This difficult geopolitical juggling act comes from an unexpected reality: many South Koreans express a surprising degree of empathy toward their northern neighbors. And adding to the complexity is the constitutional crisis that South Korea has been roiled by in recent months.
Kim Ki-euk, a 56-year-old housewife on the right end of the South Korean political spectrum, said she saw the North Korean POWs being tragically forced to fight by dictator Kim Jong-un. "They're victims, essentially," she said, referring to them as "frogs in an urn [who] don't know the outside world."
A protester in Seoul, Kim Ki-euk, expressed concerns about the well-being of the North Korean POWs.
Zelenskyy said earlier this year there would “undoubtedly be more” North Korean soldiers captured. The Ukrainian president added he would be willing to exchange two captured North Korean soldiers to Pyongyang in exchange for Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russia.
It’s an option that lacks understanding of the affinity that South Koreans have for ordinary North Koreans.
“Bad move,” Chun said of Zelenskyy’s suggestion. “Let's say these two kids were exchanged to Russia, and they didn't want to go. Who's going to take responsibility for this hideous situation?”
Why do many S. Koreans feel sympathy for N. Korean POWs?
South Korea’s constitution says that “the territory of the Republic of Korea shall consist of the Korean peninsula and its adjacent islands,” meaning it legally considers people in North Korea citizens.
Seoul sees North Korea as a territory that is under an illegitimate government instead of recognizing it as a sovereign state. Under this position, many believe that South Korea has the legal obligation to protect people in North Korea, including defectors.
Seoul is facing a dilemma, explained Junghoon Lee, the dean and professor of International Relations at Yonsei University's Graduate School of International Studies.
“Are they North Korean enemy soldiers or prisoners of war, or can there be a different angle to approach them as South Korean citizens?” he said.
Cho Tae-yul, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea, attends a meeting on the maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine at UN Headquarters. (Photo by Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
South Korea’s Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul asked Ukraine earlier this year for cooperation in the handling of the North Korean prisoners, saying Seoul would accept all North Korean soldiers if they requested to move to South Korea.
“Technically, our constitution recognizes them as our citizens,” Chun said. “But are we going to fight for their repatriation to South Korea?”
Meanwhile, South Koreans are also facing turmoil at home. They will be heading to the polls on June 3 to vote for their country’s next president, who will replace the impeached leader Yoon Suk Yeol. Yoon was removed in December after trying to impose martial law. The events plunged South Koreans into political uncertainty and left a deeply divided society.
Amid the South Korean constitutional crisis —and the high-stakes U.S.-Ukraine negotiations — no decision has been made on exchanges.
Сommunication between a captured North Korean POW and Ukrainian investigators. Video screenshot by Volodymyr Zelenskyy`s Telegram.
In January, President Zelenskyy published a video showing the two captured North Korean soldiers, Ri, 26, and Baek, 21. One of the two men said he wanted to return to North Korea, while the other one said he would like to go to Ukraine, later adding he would return home “if required.”
The Security Service of Ukraine said in a statement that one of the soldiers thought he was going to Russia for a training exercise instead of to fight. He had a Russian military ID card issued under another name. The second soldier had no documents.
Many South Koreans have expressed concern about the POWs' safety if they return to Pyongyang. According to a 2024 survey, 58 percent of South Koreans say only selected defectors from North Korea should be accepted. About 30 percent believe all should be welcomed.
During an interview conducted in February 2025, one of the North Korean soldiers said being captured is seen as a betrayal in their army, and he added that things would be difficult for him if he returned home. “I’m planning to apply for asylum and go to South Korea. Do you think they’ll accept me?” he said.
Hong Saewoong, who was protesting during South Korea’s political crisis, posed following a demonstration in Seoul.
Hong Saewoong, 81, a journalist living in Seoul, told The Counteroffensive he does not agree with Zelenskyy’s approach to exchange the pair, as the decision should be left to the soldiers.
“Explain to them the options about where they could go,” Hong said, “and let them decide.”
In 2024, North Korea deployed about 11,000 troops to Russia’s Kursk region after Kim Jong-un and President Vladimir Putin agreed on a mutual defense pact to defy the so-called U.S.-led “Western hegemony.” North Korea has not yet publicly acknowledged sending troops to Ukraine.
North Korean troops have been helping their ally regain the Russian Kursk territory seized by Ukrainian forces in a surprise attack last August. Their involvement has come at a high cost. South Korean officials claim that about 300 North Koreans have been killed in battle and 2,700 wounded.
What S. Korea has done for Ukraine so far
People gather during a protest to mark one year since Russia unleashed its invasion of Ukraine, in Seoul on February 25, 2023. (Photo by ANTHONY WALLACE/AFP via Getty Images)
South Korea, which has a longstanding policy of not providing weapons to countries at war, has limited its support to Ukraine.
Yet in 2023, South Korea indirectly supplied about 500,000 rounds of artillery shells to Ukraine via the United States, positioning Seoul as a greater provider of artillery ammunition to Kyiv than all European countries combined. Seoul has also given Kyiv demining vehicles, body armor, and other non-lethal aid since February 2022.
Sending direct aid to Ukraine is seen among South Koreans as “unnecessarily provocative,” said Peter Ward, a research fellow at the Sejong Institute focused on North Korea.
In November last year, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko told Russia’s TASS news agency that the relationship between Russia and South Korea would be “completely destroyed” if Seoul were to directly supply arms to Ukraine.
“One can provide aid indirectly anyway, so why does one need to provide it directly? And when one does provide it directly, how will Russia respond?” Wang said.
Chun said that even though Seoul has been providing Kyiv with non-lethal military assistance throughout the war, the government still worries and aims to protect its relationship with Russia, as it has “huge investments” in the country.
Before the full-scale invasion, some of South Korea's largest companies, including Hyundai, LG Electronics, and Samsung, had operations in Russia. They are now reportedly monitoring the situation closely and assessing the possibility of resuming business in Russia.
Chun added another reason for the lack of a harsher policy in Seoul: North Korea’s involvement in the conflict does not directly affect South Korea’s security interests.
“Unless the North Koreans were to attack us, sink one of our ships, or fire some artillery into us, a missile test no longer garners that much interest for the Korean people,” Chun said.
A survey conducted in November by Gallup Korea revealed that 82 percent of South Koreans oppose sending weapons and military equipment to Ukraine despite North Korea’s involvement in the conflict.
Last year, as then-President Yoon Suk Yeol received a Ukrainian delegation, protesters gathered in front of his office, asking their government not to send arms to Ukraine.
But there are other ways to collaborate. The South Korean government has begun discussing cooperation opportunities between Kyiv and Seoul over the next decade, said Roman Hryhoryshyn, the chairman of the Ukrainian-Korean Business Council.
Roman Hryhoryshyn in Kyiv, 2024.
At the moment, the cooperation between the two nations is low, but it has the potential to be “very high,” Hryhoryshyn said. “Korean companies are coming, events are taking place, and information is being exchanged regularly.” What’s next for South Korea in this conflict
South Korea’s main antagonist is also developing deep friendships. Chun, the retired general, believes North Korea's and Russia’s cooperation will persist even after the war ends.
“No matter how deep you try to push your head into the sand, this problem is not going to go [away]... even if there is a ceasefire or end of the conflict in Ukraine,” Chun said. “I see this relationship developing and increasing.”
The two North Korean prisoners who are currently awaiting their fate have been key to opening the eyes of young South Korean men who can relate to the two 20-year-old defectors.
“[South Korean youth are] realizing that their problem[s] now, which is my [cell phone] battery is at 5 percent, ain't that big of a problem compared to those two kids [the North Korean POWs],” Chun said.
Kwon Jang-Ho contributed to this reporting in Seoul.
Good morning to readers; Kyiv remains in Ukrainian hands.
PUTIN OPEN TO DIRECT ZELENSKYY TALKS: As pressure mounts from the possible American abandonment of peace talks, Putin has stated that Russia is ready for bilateral talks with Ukraine, CNN reported. It is the first time in recent years in which Putin has signaled his desire for direct participation in negotiations.
After the supposed ‘Easter truce’ by Putin, which was violated nearly 3,000 times by Russia, Zelenskyy called out Russia for continuing attacks on civilian infrastructure.
The U.S., European and Ukrainian officials are also planning to meet this week in London to discuss the Washington peace framework, which involves Ukraine being kept out of NATO and the potential US recognition of annexed Crimea as Russian territory.
UKRAINE TO LAUNCH DEFENSE SATELLITES: Starting in 2026, Ukraine plans to co-develop defense-oriented satellites with international partners as part of a 10-year roadmap by its Ministry of Defense. The goal is to establish a real-time satellite constellation by 2035.
Developing its own satellites is crucial for Ukraine’s national security, as it ensures independent access to real-time intelligence, especially vital after the pauses in the US intel sharing exposed the risks of reliance solely on foreign support.
KREMLIN’S PLAN TO BUY TRUMP’S SUPPORT: As Moscow prepares for possible negotiations with Washington, Russia is seeking more than just a ceasefire – it aims to reshape the global order.
“We need to milk Trump as much as possible, dangling the possibility of a ceasefire like a carrot before him,” one Russian source said.
To do so, it’s devising a strategy to draw Donald Trump into a sweeping geopolitical deal that would recognize its dominance over Ukraine and parts of Eastern Europe, according to The Moscow Times.
Moscow is reportedly crafting a package of proposals that align with Trump’s personal brand and political ambitions. It ranges from rare earth deals that align with Trump’s “America First” economic agenda and diplomatic leverage in Iran and North Korea to potential real estate projects like Trump Tower in Moscow.
CAT OF CONFLICT:
Today’s cat of conflict is Puha, who belongs to Veronika’s friend. Puha was moving around the globe fleeing the war with its family.
The US government is on the back-foot in its own courts because it is not thinking strategically
*
Over at his Substack the great historian of strategy Lawrence Freedman has provided a magisterial account of why the economic strategy of President Trump is in such a mess.
From Freedman’s conclusion:
“Some bad strategies are the result of incompetence, miscalculation, and inattention. Most fail to consider how other key actors will behave. But the worst are the result of bad theories, so detached from reality that efforts are directed towards achieving goals that are unattainable, employing methods that are bound to fail. To extricate a country or an organisation from a bad strategy it is essential to acknowledge its wrongness and retreat, but with a truly bad theory that requires abandoning an embedded world view.
“In this case a bad theory, nurtured over decades, has led to calamitous policies devised in haste and enacted impetuously in defiance of all received wisdom on the impact of tariffs on the national and international economy. The severity of the impact was accentuated by the chaotic and contradictory nature of the implementation. Much of what has been lost over the past month, in trading rules and economic trust, may never be recovered.”
*
Much of Freedman’s conclusion, and indeed much of the content of his detailed and insightful post, can be transferred from economic policy to Trump’s use and misuse (and abuse) of law and the courts.
Same problem, different context.
*
It must have seemed so clever and – for the instigators – fun.
They would invoke an ancient law and then, in a show of brute power, they would deport human beings to another country to be held indefinitely in a terrifying super-prison. The human beings would not have any access to due process, and indeed there may even be no evidence against them.
The instigators would then clap and cheer at their public display of cruelty.
And when it seemed a court order had come too late, the president of the receiving country tweeted “Oopsie” and this, in turn was re-tweeted, by the actual Secretary of State from his personal account.
What larks: they must have found it hilarious.
And as this blog has set out, this a point where it became clear there was a constitutional crisis in the United States.
Not only were the orders of the courts not being taking seriously, the courts were being mocked openly by senior members of the administration.
*
It is now becoming apparent that not only was this policy nasty, but it was also not thought-through legally.
There was a rush on 15 March to put in place this shock-and-awe policy, but there was no underlying legal or litigation strategy.
And that lack of a legal or litigation strategy explains the frustrations the administration is now having with pushing on with this policy.
Indeed, the policy now is blocked by an extraordinary order of the supreme court of the United States, issued at just after midnight on Good Friday.
All but two of the justices of the supreme court – including all three of Trump’s appointees from his first term – supported this order. The only dissents were from justices Thomas and Alito.
(“Justice Alito dissents” is a welcome legal phrase in any supreme court judgment, and it perhaps should be set to music to the tune of “Miss Otis Regrets”.)
The sheer extraordinariness of this emergency supreme court order can be seen from Alito’s dissenting statement (which significantly the court did not wait for before issuing the order).
So incensed is Alito you will see that he loses all power of normal judicial prose and is reduced to listing his grievances in bullet points.
Alito was not a happy Easter bunny.
And in his bullet points he makes what would otherwise be some sound points: the majority of supreme court did act of its own volition, and at speed, and in highly unusual circumstances.
But what his bullet points miss is why the majority of the supreme court – including four usually conservative judges, including three Trump appointees – felt the need to do this remarkable judicial act.
Why did the majority of the supreme court feel there was no alternative?
*
Earlier on Good Friday, the official White House Twitter account published this remarkable tweet.
Back on 15 March the Secretary of State was (perhaps) careful to re-tweet the sarcasm of the El Salvador president from his personal and not official Twitter account.
Now the official White House Twitter account was itself stating that an order of the court will not be taken seriously.
You will recall that the supreme court – unanimously – ordered the United States government to “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia.
Whatever the meaning of the Good Friday tweet, it shows that the United States government is not taking seriously that they must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia.
He is, according to the White House, “never coming back”.
*
The Good Friday tweet was unpleasant and crass and infantile – but crucially from a litigation perspective, it was also unwise.
And here we go back to Freedman’s post, and to the importance of strategic thinking.
In litigation a properly thought-through strategy means that one should not close down options and, in particular, one should not alienate the courts. The courts are the source of most useful options in serious litigation – courts can make orders, impose stays, strike cases out.
But the US government here advertised that they are not taking court orders seriously – and not just from a sly re-tweet from a personal account, but from the official White House account itself.
And the tweet does not stand in isolation – it is in the context of the ongoing failure of the United States government to properly provide requested and required information to the courts about the deportation cases.
In essence: the courts simply do not believe what the government is telling them.
And in litigation, there is no worse situation for any party to that litigation to be in than to lose the confidence of the judges.
Generally it means that at each round of litigation – each interim hearing, each application, each appeal – the judges will go against you.
And at its extreme, the courts will, of their own volition, make orders against you.
For the supreme court of the United States to make that midnight order was an absolute rebuttal of whatever litigation “strategy” the United States government was following with these cases.
Perhaps those at the US government thought the conservative majority of the Supreme Court meant that favourable decisions were in the bag.
But all they have now been left with are Alito’s worthless bullet points instead.
*
And this brings us to another point about litigation strategy.
You do not really need a litigation strategy for when things go well straight away.
You need a strategy for when things go badly: to work out what you do in various foreseeable unwelcome situations that may flow from your initial decisions.
But the evidence of the deportation cases indicates that there was no thought put into what would happen – other than a vague notion of weaponising a clash with the court – if the policy had setbacks.
Take the case of Abrego Garcia.
Taking the government’s position seriously for a moment, what should have happened when it was obvious a mistake was made and someone had been deported in breach of an order, was for that mistake to be rectified.
The government could then have used rectifying that mistake to show that its general policy had safeguards, and so should not be legally challenged.
But instead the government doubled-down, thereby indicating the whole policy scheme had no safeguards.
There had been no contingent thinking about what to do if a mistake was made.
If Abrego Garcia had been returned promptly and safely, it would have perhaps made the rest of the scheme harder for critics to discredit as being unfair.
Of course, the whole scheme is nasty and inhumane – but here we are looking at what strategic options could have been open to a supporter of this evil scheme.
Again, it seemed that the US government had not thought this through beyond the 15 March flights.
As with the tariffs, no thought was put into what could happen next.
*
A similar lack of strategic thinking is apparent in the attempts to bully Harvard University.
Those attacking the university seem to have not thought about what would happen if the university rejected the demands and sued instead.
But Harvard seem to be putting serious thought into their strategy, as this post indicates.
*
Overall, Trump and his government appear to have three general impulses:
– to demonise and monster in the media and the courts those who can be demonised and monstered and thereby humiliated;
– to intimidate those who are capable of being intimidated, such as law firms and universities with weak leaderships; and
– to manipulate and gain leverage over those who cannot be demonised or intimidated, such as foreign trading states, so as to do “deals”.
None of these bullying impulses add up to a strategy – or even to a tactic. They lead only to first-move antics, which may or may not work depending to the Trump government’s cynical assessment of those involved.
And this is true not only of their approach to law and litigation – but also, as Freedman avers, to economic strategy.
This is not say that that the bullying impulses set out above will fail – many rulers have managed to keep power a long time with such an approach, for it is based on unwelcome truths about human nature.
But such an approach will tend to fail with complex processes such as litigation and trade negotiations, where the confidence of other parties is essential to keep options open, and where contingent planning is required for when things do not go as originally intended.
Shock-and-awe can work – and keep working – in certain limited contexts, but in complex matters, the shock-and-awe approach can soon become shockingly awful.
Trump's FTC opens the floodgates for tariff profiteering (permalink)
Have you heard that tariffs are going to drive prices up? Me too. There's a good reason we're hearing a lot of talk about tariffs prices: tariffs are a tax that is ultimately paid by consumers. Trump plans to raise $6t in tariffs, making them the largest tax increase in US history:
But that $6t is just for starters. If there's one thing we learned from the pandemic supply-chain shocks, it's that corporate CEOs never let an emergency go to waste. Bosses, knowing that you'd been warned to expect higher prices, went ahead and jacked up their prices way over inflation, blaming it on covid, on stimulus checks, on Biden, on the phase of the moon. Blaming it on anything – except greed. That's why we called it "excuseflation":
How do we know that bosses were jacking up prices? They told us so! In investor calls, corporate executives boasted that "consumer expectations" gave them "pricing power," and that they were making bank from it. From oil to eggs, excuseflation – greedflation – is everywhere:
Neoclassical economists insist that this is impossible. For greedflation to be real, companies would have to somehow collude to raise prices. After all, if prices go up for one seller and not another, shoppers will follow the invisible hand as it points them to those bargains. There's some truth to that, in a competitive market. But what if we were to waste 40 years, waving through anticompetitive mergers until most sectors of the economy were dominated by five or fewer companies:
When a sector is controlled by a handful of firms, there's plenty of opportunities for "tacit collusion." And not all the collusion is tacit: in concentrated sectors, all the C-suite types know each other. They've worked with each other for their whole careers, jumping from one company to another. They're godparents to each others' children, executors of one-another's estate, members of the same polycules. No wonder the Communist revolutionary Adam Smith wrote:
People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.
But we live in the computer age. We aren't cavemen, confined to whispering price information to one another with our flapping meat-mouths. We have computers! Better still, we have data brokers, who allow for collusive price-raising, gather price data from all the dominant players in a sector, then "advising" each company on how to set its prices. Somehow, the optimal, coordinate pricing strategy is always to make prices higher. That's true with meat:
This kind of third-party price-rigging is illegal, of course, but decades of antitrust neglect allowed these "economic termites" to multiply and fill the walls of our society:
But never let it be said that monopolists can't innovate. Thanks to the total failure of Congress to pass consumer privacy legislation since 1988, the humble price-fixing data-broker has transformed into the "surveillance pricing" industry:
With surveillance pricing, sellers buy your financial data from the unregulated data-broker industry and use it to set a different price for every customer. For example, McDonald's has invested in a company called "Plexure" that can tell when someone at the drive-through has just been paid, so that the seller can add a dollar to the price of their daily breakfast sandwich. And surveillance pricing isn't limited to buyers – sellers can get surveillance-priced, too. Take nurses, whose staffing agencies have been replaced by a cartel of three apps that buy nurses' credit data before offering them a shift, so that they can offer a lower wage to nurses carrying high credit-card debts (indebted, desperate workers will sell their labor for less):
The industry calls this "personalized pricing," and they tout the possibility that it will result in poorer people getting bargains from sellers who know just how little they can afford. In their telling, it's a kind of cod-Marxism, organized around "to each according to their ability (to pay)":
There's precious little evidence that personalized pricing is lowering anyone's prices. Indeed, the main benefit of personalized pricing – apart from price-gouging, that is – is that it's hard to detect. When prices are different for every customer, how does a customer know they're getting ripped off?
That's what Biden's FTC set out to discover. Last summer, they opened an investigation into surveillance pricing, with the goal of cracking down on the practice:
Then came the election, and a change in leadership at the FTC. Out with Lina Khan, the most effective FTC chair in generations, in with Andrew Ferguson, the decidedly mid Trump footsoldier whose first official act was to kill the surveillance pricing investigation and replace it with an internal snitch-line where FTC employees could report each other for being "woke":
This is a damned shame, because the country's largest, most successful "pricing consultancies" – like PROS Holding – are advising their clients to get ready to jack up prices in order to take advantage of consumer expectations of inflation from tariffs, as Katya Schwenk reports for The Lever:
Zawada works for PROS Holdings, a notorious price-setting technology provider. In the webinar, Zawada tells viewers that thanks to tariffs, "there is perhaps more of a window to make changes to your pricing than there has been before…customers expect change. Now is the time to take advantage."
Of course, you're the one he wants them to take advantage of.
PROS is one of the firms targeted by Khan's FTC and let off the hook under Ferguson. A former FTC official summed it up nicely: "The message that is coming out of this administration… is that the watchdog is gone and companies feel emboldened to rip people off. It’s open season on American consumers."
What's open season look like? Pricing consultant Drew Marconi hosted a webinar where he advised clients "You may just have to rip the Band-Aid — jack up prices and see what happens. You’re going to be surprised by how much room you have":
And the firms are listening. Autozone's last 2024 earnings call included this reassuring news: "if we get tariffs… we’ll generally raise prices ahead of — [when] we know what the tariffs will be":
Pricing consultants are advising their clients against charging "tariff surcharges," noting that customers will expect these to go away when (if) the tariffs end. Instead, they advise businesses to raise prices in expectation of "faster, lasting implementation of price increases":
Ferguson has warned that the FTC will crack down on tariff profiteers who raise prices over and above the additional costs imposed by tariffs. But he said this even as he was shutting down the agency's investigations into the companies that facilitate exactly this kind of profiteering. Still, Ferguson is ridding the FTC of "woke." I'm sure that'll be a comfort to Americans as they fill in a loan application so they can afford a new tire for their car.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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The one time I was to meet Pope Francis, I had to wait. Others, more knowledgeable than me, will write memorials today. I want to share a single detail from one day in Rome, in January 2018.
The site was a Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, St. Sophia; the occasion was the conferring of the honors of the Blessed Martyr Omelian Kovch.
The namesake of this distinction was a Greek Catholic priest who rescued Jews during the German occupation, and who himself died inside the Majdanek concentration camp. While in Majdanek, Kovch wrote that he did not wish for anyone to intervene on his behalf, since he wished to minister to the needs of the dying: "They die in different ways, and I help them cross this bridge into eternity. Is this not a blessing? Is this not the most splendid crown that God could place on my head? Precisely so. I thank God a thousand times each day that He sent me here. I ask nothing more of Him. Do not be troubled, and do not lose faith on my part. Instead, rejoice with me. Pray for those who created this concentration camp and this system. They are the only ones that need prayers."
The award was for courage in ecumenical understanding, and it was a great honor to be among a small group of distinguished east Europeans that day, Ukrainians and a Pole. I was moved by the golden beauty of the interior of St. Sophia, and overwhelmed by the occasion. Perhaps naturally, I was thinking of myself, of what I would say to the pope when he arrived. Our common language was Spanish, which I speak very poorly, and I was rehearsing in my mind what I wanted to say, which was to thank him for recent statements about ecology, and to describe the little book I wanted to give to him. As I understood over the course of the morning, everyone wants to give something to the pope.
Awaiting Francis, I was sitting with the other honorees in a pew towards the front and on the left. The church was very full of people, sitting and standing. I noticed, though, that the people with disabilities were led carefully to the first pew on the right. In this setting, I was reminded of the practices of the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv, which is dedicated to the "martyrs and the marginalized," including the service of the disabled. I do not know whether Francis would have expected this particular arrangement when he entered the church. I can only report on what he did.
Francis was led down the aisle, resplendent in white, very erect, walking slowly and greeting people along the way. Just before he reached the sanctuary, he halted suddenly and turned to his right, noticing that pew. Then, as the rest of us waited, he walked to its far end, and bent himself to speak. He greeted each person in turn, touching them. As the people with whom he was conversing could not rise, he had to lower himself. So, over and over, Francis knelt down to look someone in the eye and to hold both of their hands in his. This took about fifteen minutes. It was a moment to think about others, and in that sense, for me, a liberation, from my own anxiety and selfishness.
Many words and much grandeur followed. But that moment is what I remember. None of us is perfect. Even Father Omelian Kovch was not perfect. Pope Francis was not perfect. The institution they represented has much to answer for. But imperfection can represent itself as service, in the acknowledgement that we can transcend ourselves when we see others first.
“Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” When Francis made the rest of us wait so that he could greet the less fortunate, of course he was doing something symbolic. But such symbols matter, because in them we can glimpse something higher through something human, something that remains even as the memory of white garments and golden artifice fades.
Well, not long after I sent out yesterday’s weekend update with an outline of what seemed to be a US-Russian Pact, it was confirmed in the Wall Street Journal that this is indeed what the US was trying to force Ukraine to accept. The Trump plan seems tailor-made to give Putin what he wants. The Russians keep all occupied territory and in the case of Crimea, Ukraine must cede legal title. This alone makes the deal horrific, as it means that conquest would have been legalized, indeed sanctioned, in post 1945 Europe. However that is not all. Its also made clear in the deal that Ukraine is to be kept out of NATO. And we can assume that sanctions on Russia would either be strongly relaxed or even eliminated. We know that because Trump, in a tweet that seems aimed to try and pressure Ukraine into agreeing the deal, discussed doing “Big Business” with the United States.
This was where we were heading since the US started threatening to walk away from these negotiations if the different parties (actually mostly the Ukrainians) did not accept. Its why we seem to be approaching a real crisis—which might see either the US walking away or Ukraine being bullied into a bad deal. Both are fraught with some real dangers.
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I’ve seen some comments saying it would be a good thing for Ukraine if the USA withdrew from active involvement in the Russo-Ukraine War. I understand some of what they are saying, but being the miserable pessimist that I am, I also see a chance that such a move could go badly wrong (because the USA would not in essence become neutral but side more openly with Russia). I thought it might be useful therefore to sketch out the possible good news and then contrast it with the possible very bad, to show the different possible permutations of the USA is “done” with the war.
The big reason I’m a pessimist is that the possible second and third order effects of such a development are very worrying. For instance, its not clear that the optimistic case takes into consideration the impact that such a move could have on other powers—particularly China. So to try and sum up the different visions, here are the reasons for optimism and the reasons for pessimism.
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Russian President Vladimir Putin shakes hands with US President Donald Trump's envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Saint Petersburg on April 11, 2025. (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Trump and Witkoff share deep passions for three things:
Real estate. Golf. And oligarchs who made their money in Russia.
Steve Witkoff, appointed as Donald Trump’s special envoy, has repeatedly shown not just an affinity for Moscow but has openly stated that he “spent a lot of time talking and developing a friendship and relationship” with Vladimir Putin — a dictator responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Ukrainians.
After a meeting with Putin, he told Trump that the fastest way to a ceasefire would be to give four Ukrainian territories to Russia – views that drew direct condemnation from Ukraine’s president this week.
"I think Mr. Witkoff has chosen to follow the strategy of the Russian side. I see this as extremely dangerous because he — whether consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know — is spreading Russian narratives. In any case, this does not help,” Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Thursday.
But what has gone under the radar is that Witkoff has personal stakes at play, as he has business ties to Leonard (‘Len’) Blavatnik, an influential businessman with significant relationships in Kremlin circles – and who was sanctioned by Ukraine in 2023.
Blavatnik, who became a U.S. citizen in 1984 and later also held U.K. citizenship, built his fortune during Russia’s large-scale privatization period, shortly after the USSR collapsed.
Witkoff’s connections to Blavatnik raises an important question: can someone genuinely serve as a fair-minded peace negotiator when a business partner has ties to Russian oligarchs?
"The danger from Witkoff's experience… is heightened because he is a mere ‘special government employee’ – that is, a part time consultant to the US government. Because he is not committed to spending even the full Trump term of four years within government, Witkoff is almost certainly thinking about his next moves in business even while flying to Moscow,” said Jeff Hauser, the executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group. “It is far too possible that Witkoff is currently planning investments in partnership with Russian or Russian friendly money while conducting ‘diplomacy' with Russia.”
Blavatnik and Witkoff’s close business ties
Before becoming Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff built his own fortune as a real estate mogul at the helm of the Witkoff Group, the New York-based real estate development company he founded in 1997.
Steve Witkoff, a special envoy for President Donald Trump, on March 06, 2025 in Washington, DC. Witkoff spoke to the press about a range of foreign policy issues including peace talks involving Ukraine and Russia. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images).
Among Witkoff's recurring business partners is Len Blavatnik, a billionaire born in the former Soviet Union who now holds U.S. and U.K. citizenship. Together they have made fortunes through real estate development in New York and Florida.
Blavatnik and Witkoff’s business entanglements are recent and ongoing.
While Witkoff claims to be distancing himself from his business, there’s no evidence of this – and transparency watchdogs say that even the steps he’s purporting to take are not enough to prevent a conflict of interest.
In 2021, Witkoff and Access Industries company, established by Len Blavatnik in 1986, acquired the One High Line project in New York. The deal consisted of two buildings, 236 condominiums and 120 hotel rooms.
This year, they announced that One High Line surpassed $1 billion in sales, it the fastest residential project in downtown New York City to do so in ten years.
Notably, this partnership has continued after Ukraine sanctioned Len Blavatnik for ten years in December 2023. He was included in the list of people who pose a “threat to the national security” of Ukraine, alongside billionaires like Roman Abramovich, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg and Oleg Deripaska.
In January 2024, the Witkoff Group and Len Blavatnik’s Access Industries bought the troubled Banyan Cay Resort & Golf Club in West Palm Beach, getting a $75 million loan to do so. Afterwards, they divided it into two parts: Dutchman’s Pipe Golf Club and the Belgrove hotel. Dutchman’s Pipe Golf Club was launched in November 2024, while Belgrove Resort & Spa, a luxurious new resort in West Palm Beach, opened on April 8, 2025.
Len Blavatnik (Photo by Clint Spaulding/Penske Media via Getty Images),
And in February 2025, the Witkoff Group partnered with Blavatnik’s Access Industries and real estate developer Sandor Scher to develop a luxury mixed-use condo project in North Beach, becoming the majority owner and refinancing the property with an $85 million pre-construction loan from J.P. Morgan.
The grounds for the Ukraine’s Blavatnik sanctions have not been officially released. The Counteroffensive sent a letter to the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine asking why Blavatnik was sanctioned. They said that the decision was made in response to a proposal submitted by the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), submitted in a letter containing restricted information marked 'For Official Use Only.'
"A more detailed disclosure of the matters in question cannot be provided," the SBU told The Counteroffensive.
Blavatnik made his money alongside Russian oligarchs, and is sanctioned by Ukraine
Although Blavatnik is said to have sold his last major asset in Russia when it invaded Ukraine in 2022, his past and connections with Putin’s friends could not be erased so easily.
Blavatnik’s ties to Russia go back decades, as he returned shortly after the USSR collapsed during the 'aluminum wars' on the invitation of his friend and now-billionaire Viktor Vekselberg.
There, Blavatnik took part in post-Soviet privatization and co-founded with Vekselberg the Access-Renova company, which later was expanded with the arrival of another businessman close to Putin, Mikhail Fridman.
Their consortium later partnered with British Petroleum (BP) and created TNK-BP, which became one of the largest oil companies in Russia before its 2013 acquisition by Rosneft, a Moscow-based energy company controlled by the Russian government through the Rosneftegaz holding company.
Blavatnik spent years building his fortune with influential Russian oligarchs in Putin’s inner circle, including Viktor Vekselberg, Mikhail Fridman and Oleg Deripaska — all of whom have been sanctioned by the U.S. due to their Kremlin ties.
Russian businessman, co-founder of Alfa-Group Mikhail Fridman (L) and Renova CEO businessman Viktor Vekselberg talk during a conference of the Israeli Keren Hayesod foundation in Moscow on September 17, 2019. (Photo credit should read PAVEL GOLOVKIN/AFP via Getty Images).
Officially, Blavatnik denies any connections to the Kremlin.
A spokesperson for Access Industries has said in the past he has no engagement in Russian politics or in the Russian government.
But the origins of Blavatnik’s wealth were explained by his friend and business partner Vekselberg, who in 2019 said that Blavatnik made “almost all his money [in Russia], and then just made investments outside.”
The White House and Witkoff Group did not respond to our requests for comment on this story.
Witkoff has conflicts of interests over the Russia-Ukraine conflict
A screenshot from the Witkoff Group’s website.
After Witkoff became a Special Envoy, he claimed to be in the process of divesting his real estate company and crypto assets to his sons. The Witkoff Group has tried to make Steve Witkoff’s son, Alex Witkoff, the face of the company since his father joined the Trump administration.
It remains unclear whether Witkoff has completed the process of divesting his assets, as no official confirmation has been provided regarding the transfer of ownership rights.
And even so, it’s not a step that neutralizes the conflict of interest.
“Formally divesting ownership to one's sons does not significantly reduce the risk of a conflict of interest. There is no way of ensuring that father-son conversations never touch upon management of the family financial interests or that ownership will not revert back in the future,” said Josh Rudolph, the head of German Marshall Fund’s Strategic Democracy Initiatives, a group focused on defending democracy and countering authoritarian threats.
U.S. ethics laws generally bar federal government employees from participating in negotiations or decision-making if they have business ties with any of the parties involved in the negotiations.
But the U.S. code affords Special Government Employees special privileges that can permit them to participate in matters that could affect their financial interests so long as the matter will not have a “special or distinct effect” on the employee other than as part of a general industry or class of persons.
SGEs are generally required to file financial disclosures if they are classified above a certain level of federal employment and serve over 60 days, but they don't necessarily have to file a public version.
The Office of Government Ethics has no certificate of divestiture available for Witkoff as of April 18, though disclosures go through an agency review process that can take several weeks or even months.
"It would be all too easy for the Kremlin to funnel money to the Witkoff or Trump families—or at least give the Witkoffs or Trumps hopes for future enrichment — through dark crypto channels or opaque real estate dealings. It poses an obvious and grave national security risk for Witkoff to construct dark money channels — the crypto firm in the second half of 2024 and the real estate ventures in early 2025 — precisely when he is moving into the position of leading high-stakes negotiations with Moscow and Tehran, malign kleptocracies known for funneling covert money to key officials," said Rudolph.
Despite this, according to the New York Times, Trump has entrusted him to handle the Russia-Ukraine war. But his lack of diplomatic experience and expertise is showing: in an interview with Tucker Carlson, for example, Witkoff forgot the names of the regions he was negotiating over.
On April 11, Witkoff visited Moscow and met with Putin. After that, two U.S. officials and five other sources told Reuters that Steve Witkoff told Trump the quickest way to achieve a ceasefire in Ukraine is to support a plan granting Russia control over four eastern Ukrainian regions it tried to annex in 2022.
The developments raise a disturbing question: can Trump’s envoy, with business ties to a billionaire who built his wealth in Russia and is sanctioned by Ukraine, serve as a genuinely neutral mediator in peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine?
The Russians started a Spring Offensive a few weeks ago, and so far they have little to show for it. Russian advances have been small and extremely costly for them. Reports are that Russian forces are running short of some vehicles. Had the USA elected a president who wanted to help Ukraine, the war would be heading in a far more positive direction. However, what we can see is how Trump’s election mattered so much. His tenure in the White House has been a huge boon to Putin and allowed the Russians to consider pressing forward in their present way with the hope that the USA is changing sides. I do not think we can underrate that.
Russian AFV losses on the Donbas—Are the Russians Running Out of Tanks?
As part of this process, we had the negotiations this week, and a US threat (aimed as always to get concessions from Ukraine) to walk away from involvement in brokering a ceasefire/peace. We seem to be reaching a crunch moment in the negotiations. The key thing to understand, as this week highlighted, is that the US and Russia have reached a common position on most of the major points, and are now trying to bully Ukraine and Europe to accept them. The US-Russia Pact is basically in place.
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The Lost Opportunity--We Are Seeing Why Trump's Election Mattered So Much
Its worthwhile going back to what was written at the end of 2024 and the very start of 2025, to get some idea of just how certain (poor) narratives of the war had become ingrained. One of the most common was that Russian advances while slow, were steady and inexorable and going into 2025 they were set to continue grinding Ukraine down.
In eastern Ukraine, Moscow's war machine is gradually churning mile by mile through the wide open fields of the Donbas, enveloping and overwhelming villages and towns.
Some civilians are fleeing before the war reaches them. Others wait until the shells start exploding all around them before packing what belongings they can carry and boarding trains and buses to safety further west.
Russia is gaining ground more quickly than at any time since it launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, despite Kyiv's impressive record of well-publicised asymmetric attacks against its powerful neighbour.
As the invasion reaches the end of its third year, at an estimated cost of a million people, killed or wounded, Ukraine appears to be losing.
Unless something unexpected intrudes, Vladimir Putin is on course to win the war in Ukraine. His troops are now within military spitting distance of the city of Pokrovsk, in the Ukrainian oblast of Donetsk. Pokrovsk is an important hub for the Ukrainian military. Last year’s fight for Bakhmut, which cost the lives of many thousands of Russian soldiers, served no known military purpose. Pokrovsk is of a different category. Its capture would signify the most important military achievement for Russia since the start of the trench warfare in eastern Ukraine.
These kinds of stories started appearing after almost a full year of stories about how Ukraine was on the verge of collapse. Here is the piece I wrote about that two months ago.
And what has happened. Well, since 1 January 2025, Russian advances have reached the miniscule state, while Russian losses have stayed exceptionally high. In other words, the trend of losses to gains has gone in reverse for Russia.
Here is a map of the main Donbas area of the front (centering on Pokrovsk) on January 1, 2025.
And here it is today—one small Russian advance around Kurakhove of less than 10 miles—but otherwise hardly any movement.
The even more telling thing is that this one gain happened early in 2025, Over the past 2-3 weeks, which has seen the start of a new Russian offensive, with attack numbers up across different parts of the line—Russian advances have been almost indiscernible. A kilometer here and there, but nothing of note.
The reality of the war is that the mass production of drones—combined with legacy defensive weapons systems such as artillery and manpads—were handing Ukraine an attritional advantage at the end of 2024 and into 2025. The Russians were being engaged further and further behind the lines by Ukrainian UAVs that made any kind of large offensive action not only difficult, but extremely costly.
This trend was not something that should have been a surprise, and as Eliot Cohen and I argued in the Atlantic—Ukraine had the ability to turn the attritional struggle to its advantage. Since that piece came out in early March, its basic argument has been shown to be right. Russia has limited resources and Ukraine has an opportunity in an attritional struggle,
The problem, as that article highlighted, was that the Trump administration seemed more than willing to throw those advantages away for Ukraine. And that is where we find ourselves now. The first few months of 2025 have shown that Ukraine was nowhere near collapse, that Russian advances were not to be unstoppable and inexorable, and that Ukraine is actually capable of winning the war.
The big change in the war is that the USA is no longer a supporter of Ukraine under Trump. No new aid has been approved and the administration seems set on getting a good deal for Putin—which includes putting massive pressure on Ukraine.
In other words, if Donald Trump had not been elected President and the USA has stayed as a strong supporter of Ukraine, willing to provide a great deal of military aid to Ukraine while ramping up sanctions on Russia, Ukraine could have planned on a 2025 in which they inflicted massive losses on a Russian war machine.
Now, however, we have a USA trying to help Putin—and that is the single most important development in the war. It could take what was an improving position for Ukraine and help Russia a great deal. Just as Russian advances are increasingly slowing, the Russians can look forward to getting back to business with the USA soon (which will have second and third order effects on other countries that could be very ominous for Europe). The American people have done Putin a great service.
The US negotiating strategy has been pretty consistent, but not very successful. The US has repeatedly made public concessions to Russia while asking nothing from Putin beyond a willingness to take part in discussions. At the same time, their are extensive private talks between the US and Russia so that the two states can align their positions.
It seems now that there is a common framework for an agreement that the US and Russia established. All the elements of the US-Russian accord (maybe we should call it a Pact) were mentioned publicly by US sources this week.
And let there be no mistake, this is a threat to the Ukrainians to take the bad pact. The US walking away from negotiations could be seen as a good thing in Russia, if its accompanied by a unilateral US relaxation of sanctions and getting back to business with Putin—which is what Trump wants. Walking away means no more US aid for Ukraine but potentially alot of economic benefit to Russia.
So this week reaffirmed point by point that the US and Russia share a similar version of piece, and the US is now trying to strong-arm Ukraine and Europe into accepting it. This is what I mean about the election of Trump transforming the war against Ukraine.
And on that note—All those who celebrate—especially in Ukraine—Have a Happy Easter.
Phillips’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Exciting times! I’ll shortly be relaunching A kitchen in Istanbul and resume posting of new recipes and other content.
In the meantime, we’re continuing our weekly look at the best and most popular dishes in this newsletter.
This week: Lahmacun.
Photo: Bahar Kitapcı
Sometimes referred to as “Turkish pizza”, lahmacun is so much more than that.
The name comes from Arabic, simply meaning “dough with meat” – a fair description. The dish rose to prominence during the Ottoman era, though similar dishes existed in the region much earlier.
But let facts be facts. It’s the cultural significance and sublime flavour that makes lahmacun such an important dish in Turkish cuisine and beyond.
Turks are crazy about it. Many will go to great lengths to try places famous for making excellent lahmacun. To many, few joys in life are as great as biting into a particularly good specimen of lahmacun.
And after ten years in the country, let me put this on record: I agree!
Luckily, lahmacun is easy to make at home as well.
You can find my recipe – and a little more background – here:
Thirty years ago today, I was driving a moving van across the country, from the west coast to the east. The hold was packed well; the ride was wobbly, and I kept the heavy vehicle between the lines, mile after mile. Driving carefully, I was surprised to be stopped by state troopers. When I rolled down the window to face some polite questioning, I didn’t know that Timothy McVeigh had bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring 684 more.
In the days that followed, the horror was treated for what it was: an attack by a racist, right-wing anti-government terrorist. I worry now that, thirty years on, a similar attack is very likely, and would have a different outcome. I don't want us to be more frightened than we should be. But I do want us to be ready, so that a moment of predictable shock does not become a lifetime of avoidable subjugation.
As I will try to show, the present government invites a terror attack. Most of the people directing the relevant agencies are incompetent; the next few layers down have been purged in culture wars; much the remaining personnel have resigned, been fired, or are demoralized; resources have been diverted away from terror prevention; Americans has been distracted by fiction and chaos; and potential attackers have been encouraged.
And so we have to think — now — about what would follow such an attack. Musk, Trump, Vance, and the rest would try to exploit the moment to undo remaining American freedoms. Let me cite Lesson 18 of On Tyranny.
18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
In just three months, the Trump people have made the unthinkable much more likely. They have created the conditions for terrorism, and thus for terror management. This is true at several levels.
Most obviously, they have debilitated the services that detect terrorist threats and prevent attacks: the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the National Security Agency (NSA). The CIA is a foreign intelligence service. The FBI is the federal police force. The NSA, which specializes in cryptography and foreign signals intelligence, is part of the Department of Defense. Homeland Security is a cabinet-level department that amalgamates a number of functions from immigration control through disaster relief and anti-terrorism.
Overall guidance over the intelligence agencies is exercised by Tulsi Gabbard, who is known as an apologist for the now-overthrown Assad regime in Syria and the Putin regime in Russia. The director of the FBI is Kash Patel, an author of children's books that promote conspiracy theories, and a recipient of payments from sources linked to Russia. Patel plans to run the agency from Las Vegas, where he resides in the home of a Republican megadonor. The deputy director of the FBI is Dan Bongino, a right-wing entertainer who has called the FBI "irredeemable corrupt" and indulged in conspiracy theories about its special agents. He now draws FBI special agents away from their usual duties to serve as a personal bodyguard. The director of Homeland Security is Kristi Noem, who lacks relevant expertise.
Noem has distinguished herself by posing in front of a cell full of prisoners in El Salvador. Homeland Security is focused on spectacular abductions at the expense of its other missions. Its programs to prevent terrorism have been defunded, and it is no longer keeping up its database on domestic terrorism. As one insider put it: “The vibe is: How to use DHS to go after migrants, immigrants. That is the vibe, that is the only vibe, there is no other vibe. It’s wild — it’s as if the rest of the department doesn’t exist.” The obsession with migrants means that local law enforcement, all across the country, is being in effect federalized in the service of an objective that is essentially irrelevant to core missions. That, too, makes life easier for aspiring terrorists.
The National Security Agency sits within the Department of Defense, which is run by Pete Hegseth, a right-wing entertainer and culture warrior. He has fired people who were qualified, and is unable to keep even his own people at work — he just lost four staffers in one day. The “meltdown” at the top of the Pentagon bodes ill.
The leadership of the NSA itself was recently changed, under bizarre and troubling circumstances. After a meeting with conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, Trump fired the NSA director, General Timothy Haugh. Wendy Noble, the deputy director, was also fired. This decapitation was part of a larger set of firings initiated by Loomer. It takes place during an ongoing purge of military leaders and national security officials. From the perspective of potential attackers, the culture wars mean vulnerability.
Meanwhile, other Department of Defense agencies that are central to the twenty-first century security of the United States, such as the Defense Digital Service, are destroyed by Elon Musk’s DOGE. It is worth contemplating the reaction of a former Pentagon official: “They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything.” In general, the penetration of the federal government by DOGE has weakened its functions, and likely made critical data available to adversaries who wish to hurt Americans.
The rank and file of the critical institutions are subjected to administrative hostility and chaos. The names of active CIA officers have been sent on open emails to the White House, and in a Signal chat in which a reporter was included. CIA employees have been urged to take early retirement. CIA officers involved in any way in diversity recruitment have been fired (a judge has blocked this, for the time being).
FBI special agents have been exposed to similar indignities. Top FBI officials have been pressured to resign and have done so. Musk-Trump is pursuing FBI special agents who were involved in prosecutions of people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th 2021. Patel proposes that special agents be trained by a company that promotes commercial fights that is based in Las Vegas. Sending FBI special agents to Nevada to simulate Fight Club for Patel’s personal delectation is not going to keep Americans safe.
The Musk-Trump people run national security, intelligence, and law enforcement like a television show. The entire operation of forcible rendition of migrants to a Salvadoran concentration camp was based upon lies. It is not just that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly apprehended. The entire thing was made for television. Its point was the creation of the fascist videos. But this is a media strategy, meant to frighten Americans. And a media strategy does not stop actual terrorists. It summons them.
Terrorism is a real risk in the real world. The constant use of the word to denote unreal threats creates unreality. And unreality inside key institutions degrades capability. Security agencies that have been trained to follow political instructions about imaginary threats do not investigate actual threats. Fiction is dangerous. Treating the administration’s abduction of a legal permanent resident as a heroic defense against terror is not only mendacious and unconstitutional but also dangerous.
Moreover, Musk-Trump make the United States look vulnerable. Americans under the spell of Trump’s or Musk’s charisma might imagine that strength is being projected. Not so. To prospective terrorists we look erratic and weak. Even apparently unrelated policies — such as enabling foreign disinformation, gutting environmental protection, undoing weather forecasting, ending food inspections, and undermining disease control — make life easier for terrorists and open avenues of attack. By taking apart the government, crashing the economy, and dividing the population, Musk and Trump invite attention of the worst sort, from people who wish to hurt Americans.
Who are such people? Three possible groups of perpetrators of a major terrorist attack in the United States are native right-wing nationalists or white supremacists (“domestic violent extremists”), Islamicists, and Russians.
Most terrorism in the United States is domestic, and most of the domestic terror comes from the far right. We have recently seen a series of white supremacist killings. Cody Balmer, who wanted to kill Pennsylvania’s (Democratic, Jewish) governor, wrote that “Biden supporters should not exist.”
It might seem counter-intuitive that the far right would carry out acts of terror under Trump, but this is already the norm, and there are good reasons to expect worse. Musk pushes the story that civil servants deserve pain. The most lethal domestic terror attack in US history, McVeigh’s bombing, was directed against federal workers. Right-wing terrorists might believe that terror is what Trump wants. The suspect in the recent Florida mass shooting “advocated for President Donald Trump's agenda and often promoted white supremacist values,” according to someone who saw him regularly. Trump has long practiced stochastic violence. His pardon of the January 6th criminals encourages terror with the promise of forgiveness. Patel promoted a recording of the January 6 criminals singing the national anthem. This coddling culture of martryrdom makes more killing more likely.
There is also another scenario. Far right movements can divide, with the more impatient angry with those they see as compromised. This is a lesson from the history of fascism. Some supporters of Trump will be disappointed with him. The assassination attempt on Trump was carried out by someone whose social media posts conveyed hatred of Jews and immigrants. Bongino now has to contend with fans of his show who think that the January 6th criminals should be running the FBI.
The Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City, 19 April 1995
And our guard has been dropped. Even at the best of times, the FBI has generally had trouble articulating the centrality of domestic right-wing terrorism. Now the risk is denied. High officials of Musk-Trump tend to share the views of right-wing nationalists, which makes it less likely that they will be seen as a threat. Under Patel, the FBI will deprioritize this important area of investigation. In keeping with his and Noem’s priorities, FBI agents have been assigned away from domestic terrorism. Thus far, the main "terrorist" threat seen by Trump-Musk are protestors in front of Tesla dealerships. Diverting attention to parking lots will not keep Americans safe.
Musk-Trump are also generating scenarios for Islamicist terror. A motivation for Islamicist terrorists is contention over territory in the Middle East. The Trump administration advocates the ethnic cleansing of the entire (surviving) population of Gaza. The US armed forces are also firing ordnance into Yemen with the announced goal of "annihilating" the Houthis who hold power. In a Signal group chat, top national security officials rejoiced (with emojis) over a strike in which a building collapsed. It seems unclear that Musk-Trump will have accounted for the related terrorism risk.
Russia is now a risk in a way that it was not before. It has special units that carry out acts of destruction abroad, such as assassinations and sabotage. In the last three years, these operations have accelerated inside Europe, and include blowing up military sites. Russia also pays people inside other countries to carry out acts of terror and sabotage. Russia has been carrying out cyber attacks inside the United States for years.
Before Musk-Trump, the United States had been fastidious about including Russia as a possible source of foreign terror. Now Russia is presented as an ally and Putin as a friend; intelligence and defense work designed to monitor Russian sabotage inside the United States have been scaled back, as has tracking of Russian war crimes in Ukraine and public reporting on Russia. Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, rationalizes Russian aggression. Patel, the FBI director, owes his career to the claim that people who (truthfully) speak of Russian operations inside the United States are carrying out a hoax. Trump’s nominee for US district attorney for Washington, DC, is a media star in Russia.
This is all beyond the wildest dreams of the Kremlin. The Putinism on display in the federal government creates an atmosphere in which a Russian operation inside the United States would be much easier.
It is not hard to see what Russia would gain from a false-flag terror attack on American territory. Moscow would be seeking to weaken the United States, and by generating a response from Musk-Trump that suits Russia. Having Trump blame his enemies for what was in fact a Russian attack is in the interest of the Russian Federation.
Other actors than these three are also possible. I fear, though, that whether I am right or wrong about the specific source, there can be no doubt that we are far more vulnerable than we were three months ago. And any major attack, regardless of origin, would lead to the same kind terror management. The people in the White House have no governing skills, but they do have entertainment skills. They will seek to transform themselves from the villains of the story to the heroes, and in the process bring down the republic. Please indulge me if I ask you to consider Lesson 18 again.
18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. Modern tyranny is terror management. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power. The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Do not fall for it.
That lesson arises from two notorious twentieth-century examples: the Reichstag Fire in Germany in 1933, which Hitler used to declare a state of emergency, and the Kirov assassination in the Soviet Union in 1934, which Stalin used as an excuse to expand terror. In both cases, it is the reaction that we remember, rather than the event itself.
I wish that terrorist attacks were a moment when government could be trusted. But the temptation, for any government, is to take the shock and to divert it in a convenient direction. And the temptation, for us, is to imagine that our leaders will rise to the occasion. After 9/11, I listened to President Bush address the nation, sitting in my pickup, on the driveway outside a friend’s house. Though my own politics were very different, I remember the pull inside me, the wish to believe that he would do the right thing. I didn’t let myself believe anything of the sort, but I remember the feeling: and it is that tug that we cannot let get the best of us.
Our present government would be the last to resist the temptation to exploit terror. Musk-Trump would, I fear, make little if any attempt to apprehend the responsible people, especially if they are Americans or Russians. They might blame the Democratic Party, or Americans they hate for other reasons, or the opposition generally, or Canadians or Ukrainians or other Europeans. They will likely try to put an end to the American republic.
Right then comes is the critical moment when we must prevent ourselves from going along.
I do not relish describing this chain of events. But the only way to cut the chain it is to see the links. And when we can imagine that we ourselves have the power to cut the links, as we do, we can also imagine ourselves more free.
History teaches us how terrorist attacks are exploited. Our advantage is that we know this history, and so react sensibly. Do not give the present regime the benefit of the doubt after it allows a terrorist attack to take place on American soil. Be skeptical about its account of who is to blame. Insist that Musk-Trump take responsibility. And understand that freedom is the first condition of security. A terrorist attack is no reason to concede anything to this regime. On the contrary: such a failure by Musk-Trump would be one more reason, and a very powerful one, to resist it.
Throughout history, and around the world right now, government indifference and incompetence that leads to civilians deaths has been seen as a reason for protest.
The night before I was stopped by the police, I had been driving that truck through water. It was a time of high rain in the central United States. Highways were flooded.
In the pre-revolutionary France of the eighteenth century, decadent rulers said “après nous, le déluge” — “after us, the flood.” We care not at all about the consequences of our actions; we are here to profit so long as we can. This is the attitude of Musk, Trump, and the rest. They are in it for themselves, provoking disasters for the rest of us along the way.
A few days before that drive began, I finished my doctoral dissertation, about revolutions, based on research in post-communist Poland. One of my supervisors was the the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. Considering the task of Poland’s new democratic government, he reversed the formula of French royalty, writing: “après le deluge, nous.”
After the flood, we remain. The disaster brought by the decadent is part of the story. But it is not the conclusion. It is what we do next that matters.
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Editor’s Note: The key to good Easter bread, as Zoriana’s grandmother will teach you today in this story, is peace in the household.
We here in Ukraine wish you a serene, peaceful Easter to all who observe. We haven’t given up on a just, lasting peace here – thanks for reading along with us, and supporting us in that conviction.
We’re in the midst of our second anniversary subscription drive. If you can, will you support us to last another year?
Zoriana with her grandmother Hanna holding their Paskas.
The smell of the Easter bread tempted me so much that I wanted to bite into it immediately.
But if I did, I knew the treat would be gone, and the holiday spirit would slip through my fingers.
I felt like a little girl again.
Not just because, like a child, I had to resist the immediate urge to eat the tasty bread, but also the fact that I was back in touch with my family traditions, which have been under threat for centuries.
Easter holds a special place in Ukrainians' lives, as the main Christian holiday and a family and cultural event. It symbolizes the victory of life over death and light over darkness – a message which also brings faith during wartime.
During the Soviet era, Ukrainians were forbidden from celebrating Easter.
Baking Easter bread, attending church, or simply blessing food could label you as a dissenter.
However, these traditions never disappeared. Through them, our ancestors encoded what it means to be Ukrainian. This weekend, families gather to bake and bless Easter bread, send it to the frontline, and pass recipes down through generations.
After the paywall:
What are the main attributes of Easter in Ukraine?
How the Soviet government tried to steal Easter from Ukrainians.
Why do volunteers no longer as many Paskas to the frontline
Go behind the scenes: cooking paska with Zoriana and her grandmother
Walk down any street in California for more than a couple minutes and you will come upon a sign warning you that a product or just an area "contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer."
These warnings are posted to comply with Prop 65, a 1986 law that requires firms to notify you if they're exposing you to cancer risk. The hope was that a legal requirement to warn people about potential carcinogens would lead to a reduction in the use of carcinogens in commonly used products. But the joke's on us: since nearly everything has chemicals that trigger Prop 65 warnings, the warnings become a kind of background hiss. I've lived in California five times now, and I've never once seen a shred of evidence that a Prop 65 warning deters anyone from buying, consuming, using, or approaching anything. I mean, Disneyland is plastered in these warnings.
The idea behind Prop 65 was to "inform consumers" so they could "vote with their wallets." But "is this carcinogenic?" isn't a simple question. Many chemicals are carcinogenic if they come into contact with bare skin, or mucus membranes, but not if they are – for example – underfoot, in contact with the soles of your shoes. Other chemicals are dangerous when they're fresh and offgassing, but become safe once all the volatiles and aromatics have boiled off of them.
Prop 65 is often presented as a story of overregulation, but I think it's a matter of underregulation. Rather than simply telling you that there's a potential carcinogen nearby and leaving you to figure out whether you've exceeded your risk threshold, a useful regulatory framework would require firms to use their products in ways that minimize cancer risk. For example, if a product ships with a chemical that is potentially carcinogenic for a couple weeks after it is manufactured, then the law could require the manufacturer to air out the product for 14 days before shipping it to the wholesaler.
"Caveat emptor" has its place – say, at a yard-sale, or when buying lemonade from a kid raising money for a school trip – but routine shopping shouldn't be a life-or-death matter that you can only survive if you are willing and able to review extensive, peer-reviewed, paywalled toxicology literature. When a product poses a serious threat to our health, it should either be prohibited, or have its use proscribed, so that a reasonable, prudent person doing normal things doesn't have to worry that they've missed a potentially lethal gotcha.
In other words, transparency is nice, but it's not enough.
Think of the "privacy policies" you're asked to click through a thousand times a day. No one reads these. No one has ever read these. For the first six months that Twitter was in business, its privacy policy was full of mentions to Flickr, because that's where they ganked the policy from, and they missed a bunch of search/replace operations. That's funny – but far funnier is that no one at Twitter read the privacy policy, because if they had, they would have noticed this.
You know what would be better than a privacy policy? A privacy law. The last time Congress passed a consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact is that virtually any privacy violation, no matter how ghastly or harmful to you, is legal, provided that you are "notified" through a privacy policy.
Which is why privacy policies are actually privacy invasion policies. No one reads these things because we all know we disagree with every word in them, including "and" and "the." They all boil down to, "By being stupid enough to use this service, you agree that I'm allowed to come to your house, punch your grandmother, wear your underwear, make long distance calls, and eat all the food in your fridge."
And like Prop 65 warnings, these privacy policies are everywhere, and – like Prop 65 warnings – they have proven useless. Companies don't craft better privacy policies because so long as everyone has a terrible bullshit privacy policy, there's no reason to.
My blog, pluralistic.net has two privacy policies. One sits across the top of every page:
Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.
The other one appears in the sidebar:
By reading this website, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.
The second one is a joke, obviously (it sits above a sidebar element that proclaims "Optimized for Netscape Navigator."). But what's most funny is that when I used to run it at the bottom of all my emails, I totally freaked out a bunch of reps from Big Tech companies on a standards committee that was trying to standardize abusive, controlling browser technology and cram it down two billion peoples' throats. These guys kvetched endlessly that it was unfair for me to simply declare that they'd agreed that they would do a bunch of stuff for me on behalf of their bosses.
My first response was, of course, "Lighten up, Francis." But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that these guys actually believed that showering someone in endless volleys of fine print actually created legal contracts and consent, and that I might someday sue their employers because I had cleverly released myself from their BOGUS AGREEMENTS.
Of course, that would be very stupid. I can't just wave a piece of paper in your face, shout "YOU AGREED" and steal your bike. But substitute "bike" for "private data" and that's exactly the system we have with privacy policies. Rather than providing notice of odious and unconscionable behavior and hoping that "market forces" sort it out, we should just update privacy law so that doing certain things with your private data is illegal, without your ongoing, continuous, revocable consent.
Obviously, this would come as a severe shock to the tech economy, which is totally structured around commercial surveillance. But the fact that an extremely harmful practice is also extremely widespread is not a reason to keep on doing it – it's a reason to stop. There was a time when we let companies sell radium suppositories, and then, one day, we just banned companies from telling you to put nuclear waste up your asshole:
We didn't fall back on the "freedom to contract" or "bodily autonomy." Sure, what you do with your body is your own business, but that doesn't imply that quacks should have free rein to trick you into using their murderous products.
And just as there are legitimate, therapeutic uses of radioisotopes (I'm having a PT scan on Monday!), there are legitimate reasons to share your private data. We don't need to resort to outright bans – we can just regulate things. For example, in 2022 Stanford Law's Mark Lemley proposed an absolutely ingenious answer to abusive Terms of Service:
Lemley proposes constructing a set of "default rules" for routine agreements, made up of the "explicit and implicit" rules of contracts, including common law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and the Restatement of Contracts. Any time you're presented with a license agreement, you can turn it down in favor of the "default rules" that everyone knows and understands. Anyone who accepts a EULA instead must truly be consenting to a special set of rules. If you want your EULA to get chosen over the default rules, you need to make it short, clear and reasonable.
If we're gonna replace "caveat emptor" with rules that let you go about your business without reading 10,000,000 words of bullshit legalese every time you leave your house (or pick up your phone), we need smart policymakers to create those rules.
Since 2010, America has had an agency that was charged with creating and policing those rules, so you could do normal stuff without worrying that you were accidentally signing your life away. That agency is called the the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and though it did good work for its first decade of existence, it wasn't until the Biden era, when Rohit Chopra took over the agency, that it came into its own.
Under Chopra, the CFPB became a powerhouse, going after one scam after another, racking up a series of impressive wins:
The CFPB didn't just react, either. They staffed up with smart technologists and created innovative, smart, effective initiatives to keep you from getting ripped off:
Under Chopra, the CFPB was in the news all the time, as they scored victory after victory. These days, the CFPB is in the news again, but for much uglier reasons. For billionaire scammers like Elon Musk, CFPB is the most hated of all the federal agencies. Musk's Doge has been trying to "delete the CFPB" since they arrived on the scene, but their hatred has made them so frenzied that they keep screwing up and losing in court. They just lost again:
Trumpland is full of the people on the other side of those EULAs, the people who think that if they can trick you out of your money, "that makes me smart":
If Musk can trick you into buying a Tesla after lying about full self driving, that doesn't make him a scammer, "that makes him smart." If Trump can stiff his contractors, that doesn't make him a crook, "that makes him smart."
It's not a coincidence that these guys went after the CFPB. It's no mystery why they've gone after every watchdog that keeps you from getting scammed, poisoned or maimed, from the FDA to the EPA to the NLRB. They are the kind of people who say, "So long as it was in the fine print, and so long I could foist that fine-print on you, that's a fair deal." For them, caveat emptor is a Latin phrase that means, "Surprise, you're dead."
It's bad enough when companies do this to us, be they Big Tech, health insurers or airlines. But when the government takes these grifters' side over yours – when grifters take over the government – hold onto your wallets:
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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This week (and probably next) I want to talk a bit more Tolkien, but in a somewhat different vein from normal. Rather than discussing the historicity of Tolkien’s world or adaptations of it, I want to take a moment to discuss some of the themes of Tolkien’s work, which express themselves in the metaphysical architecture of Arda itself. In particular, I wanted to do this because it struck me how badly Rings of Power had fumbled the core story of its second season, the Fall of Celebrimbor, seemingly failing to understand the underlying moral themes of Tolkien’s legendarium and thus not understanding which elements of Celebrimbor’s story were ‘load bearing’ and why.
That said, for those who are just here for the history, this isn’t entirely a ‘skip week!’ As historians, we don’t simply document events, but also seek to understand past societies and the unique, often quite alien, ways that they understood themselves and their worlds. In short, the historian tries to, in a way, inhabit the worldview of people long gone and to communicate those values and assumptions to a modern audience. One of the ways we do that is reading the things those past people wrote carefully for exactly that: values, morals, assumptions about the world, mentalités as the Annales school would phrase it or Weltanschauung (‘worldview’) as German would express it. When you find the same idea or assumption about the world appear multiple types through a work or body of work, we call that single strand of worldview a ‘theme,’ and so in a sense when we read a work for its themes, what we’re really asking is, “in what ways do the worldview or mentalities of the person-or-society that produced this work ‘poke through’ the page?”
So we’re going to do a bit of that with Tolkien, looking at the way his legendarium treats sin and redemption, through the lens of two ambiguous characters: Celebrimbor and Boromir. I think the comparison of these characters is especially useful, in my view, because of what their contrast reveals in what Tolkien thinks is valuable and important. Both figures die fighting against Sauron and evil, but equally display character flaws that make them vulnerable at key points to the manipulations and machinations of Sauron. In terms of achievement, we would almost certainly regard Celebrimbor as the greater of the two: a king of the Elves and the maker of the Rings, the greatest of Elven craftsmen apart, perhaps, from his own ancestor Fëanor.
Yet the verdict of the text is quite different: whereas Celebrimbor fails quite completely, Boromir is redeemed and conquers, even in defeat.
But first, as always, if you want to help support this project you can do so on Patreon! And if you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or following me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) and Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social) and (less frequently) Mastodon(@bretdevereaux@historians.social) for updates when posts go live and my general musings; I have largely shifted over to Bluesky (I maintain some de minimis presence on Twitter), given that it has become a much better place for historical discussion than Twitter.
The Fall of Celebrimbor
Our main points of reference for Celebrimbor’s fall are a few short paragraphs in “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age” (as part of the Silmarillion, henceforth in citation as Sil.) and a few equally short pages in “The History of Galadriel and Celeborn” (as part of Unfinished Tales, henceforth Tales). It’s not a lot to go on, but I think we can get a broad sketch of Celebrimbor’s character. What I think we see is a character who is not evil, per se, but who is overwhelmed by his character failings and as a result fails in his role. Celebrimbor is not, I would argue, a tragic hero redeemed in sacrifice, but more akin to Denethor: a flawed ruler who at some times tried to do the right thing, but whose own moral shortcomings lead to the sins that led to the failure of his rule. Rings of Power, I think, got this character quite wrong, attempting to portray Celebrimbor as a good man (well, elf), undone in part by his pride but chiefly by his gullibility and compassion.
The best way to show this is simply to move through Celebrimbor’s arc in both the legendarium and Rings of Power in parallel, to show both Tolkien’s moral vision and how Rings of Power fumbles its execution by pulling out some of the load-bearing components of his character.
Charles Edwards as Celebrimbor from Rings of Power. For what it is worth, I think Edwards works pretty hard to capture Celebrimbor’s vain ambition (often despite the script), though his rendition of the character sometimes comes off as a bit bumbling, which I think is unfortunate as it somewhat diminishes the character’s ‘greatness’ (as distinct from ‘goodness’).
We begin with Celebrimbor’s motivation for making the rings in the first place. Put frankly Rings of Power reframed Celebrimbor’s motivation, from something arrogant and transgressive in the books to something compassionate and altruistic in the show. I found when I pointed this out on social media, some folks were confused, but there really isn’t much doubt in the text. In the Silmarillion, we get both Sauron’s arguments and the Elves own reasoning for accepting them. Sauron, as Annatar, presents his case thusly:1
Alas for the weakness of the great! For a mighty king is Gil-galad, and wise in all lore is Master Elrond, and yet they will not aid me in my labours. Can it be that they do not desire to see other lands become as blissful as their own? But wherefore should Middle-earth remain for ever desolate and dark, whereas the Elves could make it as fair as Eressëa, nay even as Valinor? And since you have not returned thither, as you might, I percieve that you love this Middle-earth, as do I. Is it not then our task to labour together for its enrichment, and for the raising of all the Elven-kindreds that wander here untaught to the height of that power and knowledge which those have who are beyond the Sea? (Sil. 287; emphasis mine)
I want to pull out a few things from this argument. First, it is a call, however pleasantly worded, for something approaching blasphemy: an effort by the Elves, under their own power, to craft what is effectively a heaven on earth and to reverse the grand plan and will of Eru Ilúvatar (the singular creator god) that the Elves should come to dwell in Valinor and Middle-earth pass to Men. But note also how it is ‘sales pitch’ that aims to play off of the ambition and arrogance of the listener, rather than their compassion or generosity, bidding them to raise their greatness (that of the Elven-kindreds) to match those “who are beyond the Sea” (which could mean the Elves in Valinor, but equally the Valar themselves).
And the Elves of Eregion (chiefly, we find out in the Unfinished Tales, the smiths of the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, the “people of the jewel-smiths”), understand the appeal in basically those terms:
It was in Eregion that the counsels of Sauron were most gladly recieved, for in that land the Noldor desired ever to increase the skill and subtlety of their works. Moreover they were not at peace in their hearts, since they had refused to return into the West, and they desired both to stay in Middle-earth, which indeed they loved, and yet to enjoy the bliss of those that had departed. (Sil. 287; emphasis mine).
Note again the twin strains of ambition – to increase the skill and subtlety of their works – twisted with a desire for something that contravenes the will and plan of Eru – to have the bliss of Valinor while still living in Middle-earth. I should note, this temptation – that the immortality of Valinor could be seized by art or craft, outside of the planned will of Eru – is also exactly the temptation Sauron will use to lure the Númenóreans to their destruction under Ar-Pharazôn (Sil. 274-5). Indeed, this temptation is at the root is effectively all evil in Tolkien’s legendarium: the beginning of evil is in Melkor’s decision to try to bend the Song of creation to his own tune.
In Tolkien’s distinctly Christian worldview, both the real world and his created secondary world are ordered to the will of divinity and that will is fundamentally Good; choice is given to Men and Elves but defiance of that overarching plan is the most fundamental act of rebellion, the very root of sin. And it is what Celebrimbor is contemplating in his creation of the rings. Moreover, let us note that this motivation is wholly and entirely selfish: the purpose of these rings is to make the ageless, unending bliss of Valinor available for the Celebrimbor and the Elves. There is no intent to share it with anyone else. The motivation here is understandable – immortal beings grieved that the world changes even as they do not – but Tolkien’s morality says, in essence, ‘thems the breaks.’ Or, to put it in the rather more eloquent words of Gandalf, “but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Rings of Power fumbles this element almost completely, substituting new and different motivations. Whereas in the legendarium, Gil-galad, Elrond and Galadriel all want nothing to do with Annatar!Sauron (Sil. 287; Tales 227), in RoP, Gil-galad in particular is consumed with worry about the fading of the Elves and in particular that it will leave the rest of Middle-earth vulnerable to Sauron. Lest the audience think this is simply a rationalization, we are treated to a ‘ticking clock’ in the form of a sacred tree and repeated insistence that when the last leaf falls, the Elves will be compelled to sail for Valinor. Suddenly, rather than embracing the rings as an act of revolt against the will of Eru, the Elves are seeking a way to divert their decline – no longer presented as part of the divine plan – in order to shepherd and safeguard the other peoples.
Celebrimbor in Rings of Power celebrating the friendship of Elves and Dwarves. This isn’t an unreasonable scene: Celebrimbor’s Eregion was friendly with the Dwarves of Moria. But it serves as part of a broader framing of Celebrimbor’s ring-making project as being for all of the Peoples of Middle-earth, when the text is quite clear: the rings were really only ever for the Elves (to the point that even the claim by the Dwarves of Moria that their ring came direct from Celebrimbor and not via Sauron is sometimes treated with suspicion).
That change in motivation extends to Celebrimbor and here it is worth noting that Rings of Power has changed the order in which the rings are made. In the legendarium it is explicit (e.g. Sil. 287, Tales 227-8, RotK 415) that the lesser rings were created first, the Three Elven Rings second and the One Ring last; RoP inverts the first two, having the Three created before the Seven and Nine. Moreover, it changes the motivation: in RoP the first three Elven rings are sufficient to avert the decline of the Elves, which would of course remove the original motivation for making them. So the show has Sauron, in disguise, suggest Celebrimbor make the other rings of power for the purpose of giving them to Men and Dwarves. Now on the one hand, I would argue this is not a deception Sauron would actually use: Sauron understands power and domination, not altruism and he does not tempt Men or Elves with the better angels of their nature. Even when the One Ring – a shadow of Sauron’s own corrupting power – tries to tempt Boromir or Sam, it tempts them not with altruism but with greatness and adulation, with “great alliances and glorious victories….and he cast down Mordor and became himself a mighty king” (FotR 469; RotK 195-6). ‘Thankless service’ is not a language Sauron speaks and so not a temptation he would use.
But more broadly, this shifting plot point, which seems to me to have been a product of the show shifting around events and characters to try to make its multi-threaded structure work, fundamentally alters Celebrimbor’s motivation: rather than a bad end (overturning the will of Eru) which turns out badly it becomes a good end (aiding the other Peoples of Middle-earth) turned to evil.
The next disconnect in the two stories is broadly in culpability. Rings of Power does quite a lot to limit Celebrimbor’s guilt (if not his broader responsibility) for the fall of his kingdom, in part because the writers of Rings of Power have not quite grasped the sorts of arguments Sauron uses – and thus the sort of arguments Tolkien imagines would be persuasive to figures like Celebrimbor. As mentioned already, the show has Sauron, disguised as Annatar and presenting himself as an emissary of the Valar, encourages Celebrimbor to make the lesser rings in order to aid Dwarves and Men. Rather than preying on Celebrimbor’s pride, he preys on his compassion, an emotion Sauron ought not consider or understand.
But the larger break comes once Adar’s siege arrives. In order to keep Celebrimbor working on the rings, in the show, Sauron alters Celebrimbor’s sense perception, causing him to see his city at peace and flourishing even when it is under attack and burning and I do not think the writers and showrunners quite realized what giving Sauron direct mind control powers does to the moral arc of Tolkien’s universe. In a later scene (s2e7 at 58:05) Sauron seizes direct and total control over a group of Elf warriors, compelling them to kill each other over their apparent struggles. The show’s excuse is that in allowing Sauron in, the Elves of Eregion put themselves ‘under his power,’ but this makes little moral sense for soldiers who had no idea who ‘Annatar’ was and no say in letting him in regardless. Instead, giving Sauron straight-up mind control – the ability to make Celebrimbor see whatever he wants, to make other Elves do whatever he wants – obliterates Celebrimbor’s moral responsibility for his own actions. Celebrimbor doesn’t respond incorrectly because of his moral failings but because he is prevented by force majeure from seeing the world as it really is. Indeed, the moment he does see the world as it is, he responds correctly – trying to organize the defense – but is prevented because Sauron uses magic to make it seem like Celebrimbor has callously murdered one of his smiths.
Sauron, having spent several episodes drastically altering Celebrimbor’s perception of the world so that he could not take proper action, caps it off by openly controlling six Elven warriors all at once. The problem, of course, is that if Sauron is capable of such mind control, it strips away the guilt of all other parties: they could hardly have done otherwise.
In short, Sauron’s ability to control perceptions and minds substantially reduces – if it doesn’t entirely remove – Celebrimbor and his smith’s agency in the story, which in turn reframes them are relatively more innocent victims of Sauron’s power.
Which is very much not how the appear in the legendarium! As noted above, in the Silmarillion, we get a direct report of the arguments Sauron, as Annatar, uses to persuade the Elves and there is nothing of compassion for Men or Dwarves in it, but an open invitation to attempt to build heaven on earth, to achieve “the height of that power and knowledge which those have who are beyond the Sea?” which is accepted because “in that land [Eregion] the Noldor desired ever to increase the skill and subtlety of their works” (Sil. 287). In short, Sauron is from the beginning asking the smiths of Eregion to do something wrong, which they know is wrong (as it defies the order set by Eru), his trickery which they do not know is that he intends to betray them, but that they do wrong, they know at the outset.
As the narrative continues in the Unfinished Tales, we see that not only the business begun wrongly, it continues wrongly. Sauron, as Annatar, convinces the brotherhood of Elven crafters under Celebrimbor, the Gwaith-i-Mírdain, to join his plan and they and Celebrimbor begin working under him “in secret, unknown to Galadriel and Celeborn” who were, at the time, the rulers of both Eregion and Lórinand (later to be Lothlórien; Tales 228). They’re working in secret because while Galadriel and Celeborn don’t seem to know that Annatar is Sauron, they can tell something is up with him and refuse to treat with him – after all, he keeps suggesting people do a bad thing, as noted above. Sauron, however, is able then to persuade the Gwaith-i-Mírdain “to revolt against Galadriel and Celeborn and seize power in Eregion” at which point Galadriel flees to Lórinand, while Celeborn remains in Eregion but “disregarded by Celebrimbor” (Tales 228).
Which is to say that when the rightful rulers of the kingdom, Galadriel and Celeborn, correctly point out, “hey, this Annatar guy is sketchy and seems to be asking you to do something that at least shades into evil,” Celebrimbor and the Gwaith-i-Mírdain respond by launching a coup, forcing Galadriel out of the kingdom and excluding Celeborn from the government. Having already begun a task at the advice of Annatar which is, at the very least, morally dubious, they have then taken an action – revolt against lawful authority – which is clearly morally wrong in its pursuit.
Celebrimbor only repents of this choice once the One Ring is made and the trap revealed, not before (Tales 228; Sil. 288), which again means that Celebrimbor only turns against Annatar!Sauron when it becomes clear it will be bad for Celebrimbor if Sauron achieves his aims; he was fine when it was merely an evil against Galadriel, Celeborn and the order of creation set out by Eru Ilúvatar. In this sense, I would note, Celebrimbor’s arrogance and pride in a way neatly mirror that of Denethor’s: both characters are notionally on the side of Good against Evil and that’s certainly what they’d tell you if you asked them, but equally both characters are, in their pride, rebelling against rightful authority (“I will not step down to be the dotard chamberlain of an upstart…I will not bow to such a one, last of a ragged house long bereft of lordship and dignity” RotK 142). Indeed, Gandalf’s rebuke to Denethor, “authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death” (RotK, 141) could equally have been given to the Elves seeking to recreate in Middle-earth the deathless, eternity of Valinor.
Likewise, I do not think in the books that Celebrimbor is redeemed in his death. In Rings of Power, a great deal is made of Celebrimbor’s resistance to Sauron at the end and his unwillingness to give up the locations of any of the rings, as well as his desperate efforts, as things come crashing down, to do the right thing: he tries to organize the defense, but is prevented by Sauron’s trickery, he tries to attack Sauron, but is prevented when Sauron mind-controls his guards, and he refuses to tell Sauron anything even under torture.
By contrast, the portrait in the Unfinished Tales is not so flattering. When Sauron’s assault falls on Eregion, it is the disregarded Celeborn who makes the initial sortie. Celebrimbor only appears after the attackers breach Eregion, defending “the chief object of Sauron’s assault, the House of the Mírdain, where were their smithies and their treasures” (Tales 228). While this is after the “repentance and revolt [against Sauron] of Celebrimbor” (Tales 228), I think it is revealing that Celebrimbor is taken defending the thing he fundamentally cares about this most: the works of his hands and those of the Mírdain, their treasures. It is instead Elrond who takes care for those who survive the fall of Eregion (Tales 229): so while Elrond and Celeborn seek to save people, Celebrimbor, in his last acts, seeks to save things. According to the Tales, the Nine Rings were there in the House of the Mírdain and Celebrimbor, tortured, revealed the locations of the Seven “because neither the Seven nor the Nine did he value as he valued the Three…the Three were made by Celebrimbor alone” (Tales 229). Note of course, those Seven rings were “bestowed” to people (Tales 229) whom Celebrimbor is giving up instead of the Three not because he cares about the people but because he cares about the things and in particular he values the Three not for who holds them but because they were the works of his hands.
To summarize then, Rings of Power‘s Celebrimbor was a basically good Elf, who sought to solve a real and pressing problem (the fading of the Elves, which might leave Middle-earth defenseless), unknowingly enlisted the aid of a bad fellow in solving it, who – once he discovered that fact – immediately set about trying to right his mistakes, albeit failing in the process, because Sauron has Magic Mind Control Powers.
By contrast, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Celebrimbor is not an evil Elf, in that he does not desire domination – which is the sine qua non of capital-E Evil in Tolkien’s legendarium. Tolkien writes, after all, “Celebrimbor was not corrupted in heart or faith, but had accepted Sauron as what he posed to be” (Tales 228). But Celebrimbor is an arrogant and proud Elf who does much wrong and is undone by his wrongdoing. For reasons we’ll get into in a subsequent post, the cause and effect here is direct: the moral universe (the Unseen) of Arda has a direct, causal impact on the physical universe (the Seen); Celebrimbor is undone by his wrongdoing – that is, had he done right he would not have been undone. This version of Celebrimbor pursues an aim that was wrong in its conception, attempting to turn aside the plan of Eru for how the world would change (demanding heaven on earth instead of Heaven and Earth, as it were), then executed wrongly with a coup. And in his final moments, Celebrimbor reveals what always mattered to him most as he defends not his people but his things, the products of his hands that he valued most, a sort of love I have no doubt Tolkien would view as inordinate – in a literal sense ‘out of order,’ and thus inappropriate.
Consequently, while Celebrimbor revolts against Sauron, he never really changes his character, remaining prideful and ambitious to the end and unwilling to see his prized creations destroyed – as the text notes, “they should have destroyed all the Rings of Power at this time [before the fall of Eregion], ‘but they failed to find the strength.'” (Tales 228); another indicator, by the by, that the rings of power themselves ought not to have been made under any circumstances. Celebrimbor doesn’t redeem himself and fall heroically, but rather is, at last, consumed by his folly.
The contrast with Boromir is marked: where Celebrimbor, for all of his artifice and greatness fell, Boromir, we are told, conquered.
Why Boromir Conquered
First, I think we ought to get the facts of the narrative out of the way. In a straight reading of events of the Breaking of the Fellowship, Boromir does not come off tremendously well. When Frodo splits off from the group at Nen Hithoel, Boromir follows him and falls to the Ring’s temptation, first trying to persuade Frodo and then eventually trying to take the Ring by force. He recovers himself once Frodo vanishes and flees, but then wanders for at least half an hour (FotR, 476) before returning to the rest of the Fellowship, where he then refuses to be entirely truthful, though he does not lie (FotR, 475-6) and then, as if the full import of the moment has finally hit him, just sort of breaks down, “put his head in his hands, and sat as if bowed with grief” (FotR, 476) while the Fellowship begins to scatter.
As an aside, I think this is one point where I think the notion that Peter Jackson’s films are a bit more favorable to Boromir than the books deserves some credit. First, this returning scene – where Boromir wastes time and breaks down, is gone entirely, but I think more importantly, whereas in the books Aragorn, heading off, never finds Frodo in the film he does. And we see Aragorn tempted by the Ring too, something we do not get in the books. The edge in Viggo Mortensen’s voice and the threatening way he is shot in the scene is not just, I think, a fake out, but rather we are to understand that Aragorn here too is struggling to resist the Ring and succeeds only with difficulty, which is why he sends Frodo away. There was real peril in this moment and Aragorn, in his wisdom, realizes the answer to Frodo’s question, “Can you protect me from yourself?” is “no.” I think that moment does a lot to humanize Boromir’s failure – he wasn’t the only member of the Fellowship to be broken by the Ring, merely the first; the others would have fallen, one by one, given time (which I think, for what it is worth is the correct reading of the text: the Ring would have destroyed all of them, given the time, just as it eventually, in the very last instance, claims Frodo).
Peter Jackson also has the advantage of Sean Bean, who has just a few seconds to sell Boromir’s sincere regret, with a quivering lip and stumbling speech as Boromir comes to his senses and realizes what he has done.
In any case, Aragorn bids Boromir keep the other hobbits safe while he searches (FotR, 476). Boromir meets this charge, attempting to protect Merry and Pippin even to the cost of his life. Here, of course, he fights and apparently fails utterly: he is mortally wounded and both hobbits in his care are taken bound by his enemies once he is too wounded to fight back. The orcs focus on what they think is their objective (no, I will not let Saruman live down this bit of terrible operational planning, thank you) – capturing hobbits – but do not (in the book) bother to finish Boromir off; they simply leave him to bleed out (TT, 18).
In short, then, we might say Boromir succumbed to temptation, then lost his head at a critical moment, then tried to accomplish something in battle, failed entirely and was slain. That sounds a lot like Celebrimbor, but whereas the basic facts of the two more or less match, what is in their hearts does not and that makes all the difference.
Boromir’s verdict on himself is sharply negative, focusing on those facts: “I have tried to take the Ring from Frodo,” he said, “I am sorry. I have paid…Farewell Aragorn! Go to Minas Tirith and save my people! I have failed” (TT, 18). Except of course, that is Boromir speaking and one thing we’ve learned is that Boromir, whatever his virtues – and he has them – is not among the wise. One of the key things for understanding The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s broader legendarium is that statements should be evaluated by the speaker; words from the wisest characters, like Gandalf, are often deeply true to the point of being prophetic, but less wise or even foolish characters, like Saruman, frequently err or say more than they mean. Critically, what makes one wise is not an understanding of the Seen world (the physical, ‘real’ world) but an understanding of the Unseenworld and its deeper, more profound moral realities. Boromir cannot see that while he has failed in the Seen world, he has triumphed in the Unseen world.
But Aragorn, Aragorn is one of the relatively wise characters, even though he is not without fault (indeed, he spends much of the chapter “The Departure of Boromir” reminding the reader that “All that I have done today has gone amiss.” (TT 19)), and so we can put a fair bit more stock in Aragorn’s judgement. And Aragorn immediately corrects Boromir, with a judgement that gives us the title of this post:
“No!’ said Aragorn, taking his hand and kissing his brow. “You have conquered. Few have gained such a victory. Be at peace! Minas Tirith shall not fall!”
Boromir smiled. (TT 18; emphasis mine)
First I want to note the use of the word ‘conquered’ here, which may strike readers as strange. In modern English, we generally use ‘conquer’ to mean the capture of territory (that is, conquest), but Tolkien was a classically trained philologist and so, like many Latin and Greek students before and after him, he will have used ‘conquer’ frequently to translate Latin vincere and Greek νικᾷν both of which have a sense of winning a victory or prevailing in a contest in a much broader sense (for instance winning in an athletic contest).
Note that Aragorn at this point no longer merely suspects that Boromir tried to take the Ring, but knows it, as Boromir has told him. He likewise knows that the hobbits have been taken, though he does not yet know for certain it is just Merry and Pippin (he’ll realize Frodo and Sam went elsewhere in a couple of pages). In short, Aragorn has encompassed the full magnitude of Boromir’s folly and failure and fears yet more besides. And yet he declares “You have conquered.”
Likewise, I think the blocking here does a good job selling that what Boromir is doing in this moment is not fighting for his life but actively defending Merry and Pippin as they try to escape.
If you were somewhat unfamiliar with the way Tolkien’s characters work, you might read Aragorn’s statement as merely a comforting lie told to a dying man, but I think that would be profoundly out of character for Aragorn, who does not lie casually. You might also read it as Aragorn merely commenting on how many orcs Boromir slew – at least twenty before he fell – but that too would be surprising for Aragorn, who you may note does not take part in Gimli and Legolas’ game at Helm’s Deep.2
But then of course Gandalf returns later in the book and offers his own judgement:
Poor Boromir! I could not see what happened to him. It was a sore trial for such a man: a warrior, and a lord of men. Galadriel told me that he was in peril. But he escaped in the end. I am glad. It was not in vain that the young hobbits came with us, if only for Boromir’s sake. (TT 118)
And we should remember here that Gandalf is, in fact, Olórin, the wisest of the Maiar. He isn’t all-knowing and indeed in this passage admits to gaps in his knowledge, but his moral intuition and understanding of the spiritual structure of Arda is unsurpassed by any character we meet or really could meet in the context of the narrative. We may take his judgement here as essentially axiomatically true. He too, knows Boromir’s folly (right before this sentence, he essentially tells Aragorn this, without revealing it to Gimli and Legolas) and is a bit more reserved than Aragorn, framing Boromir’s death as an escape from the peril he was in, which Galadriel perceived – and he chalks up the hobbits having more than a little role in this escape, declaring himself glad of it.
I think the “young hobbits” role in this is our key to understand why Boromor “escapes” and “conquers” whereas Celebrimbor fails and falls: evidently Gandalf would have us understand the presence of the “young hobbits” accomplished something “for Boromir’s sake.” They certainly didn’t change the ‘facts on the ground,’ as it were: their presence changed nothing for Boromir in the Seen world. But they changed everything for Boromir in the Unseen world, which is, I hope we’re coming to understand, the more important one.
We see Boromir, like Celebrimbor, succumb to a moment of temptation – he tries, by his own admission, to take the ring, a grievous failure. In the period that follows, I think we should understand his sullen silence as a wrestling with what that moment means. Boromir recognizes his failure and regrets it, instantly, after all, but then has to sit with the guilt; it would be all too easy for him to rationalize away his failure – to say it wasn’t a failure at all, but that Frodo was the fool – or to fall into despair. But Aragorn bids him to do something and that seems to snap Boromir out of his sullen state.
More to the point, the thing Aragorn bids Boromir to do requires the rejection of his false thinking and the embrace of something selfless. Whereas Celebrimbor, at the last, fell defending the very things that had been his sin and ruin – his pride in his craftsmanship, made manifest and tangible in the Rings – Boromir does not rush to defend his ambition or the glory of Gondor, or his dreams of conquest. He does not seek a grand audience and indeed when the deed is done, requests scorn, not praise, for it. Instead, otherwise alone, unwatched and unnoticed, he fights a battle he must know is hopeless to answer his charge and defend two young hobbits who are entirely superfluous to the quest as he understands it. They don’t matter in the Seen world, which is part of why they matter so much: Boromir isn’t doing this for glory or praise, but merely because it is the right thing to do.
I think Boromir must have had something of a crisis of identity in those sullen minutes. Boromir had imagined himself as the great hero of Gondor and it was this false pride that the ring had used to wedge itself in his mind; in accepting his failure, that false image has to fall away. Boromir has to become someone different and Aragorn, perhaps unknowingly, gives him the opportunity by charging him to do something good with no promise of glory or renown or power, a chance to take the new Boromir forming in the soul and make him real in the world. I think we see a hint of this new Boromir in his dying words, where he bids Aragorn, “Go to Minas Tirith and save my people!” – the old Boromir would not easily have yielded the glory of saving his people to another, but the new Boromir, a wiser Boromir, recognizes this task was not the one allotted to him; his task was to defend the young hobbits, a task with little hope of glory or power (TT, 18). It did not matter if Boromir succeeded or failed in that task, because the outcome of the battle was less important than the moral choice to fight it.
The hobbits matter for Boromir’s sake because they provided the opportunity for him to take his moral transformation and make it real by putting real sacrifice behind it. This is the thing Celebrimbor, defending his rings to the last, does not do. It is necessary to note, of course, that this is a very Christian worldview that Tolkien is advancing: what matters is Boromir’s soul, which is influenced by his decision to sacrifice even if the battle is not. Celebrimbor’s actions have the same influence on the battle, but not the same impact on his soul, for he does not abandon his vain ambition, even at the end.
Of course, in Tolkien’s legendarium, the moral force of actions has its own logic to it and bears out its consequences in the Seen world in its own way. Boromir has, after all, in his stout – if forlorn – defense of the hobbits, helped to save Gondor, though he knows it not. For the hobbits will now go to the Ents and so help topple Saruman, and from there to Gondor, where Pippin will help to save Faramir from Denethor’s pyre and Merry will help to fell the Witch King on the field of battle. As we’ll see next week, we ought not dismiss that chain of events as ‘mere chance.’ In Tolkien’s world it is the moral universe, the spiritual value of our choices, that matter most, far more than the physical results those choices produce. It is the choice to fightfor the good rather than victory in battle, that matters to Tolkien and to his world. Yet at the same time, Tolkien exudes a confidence that if we choose to do right, things will be right, even if we do not live to see it.
On Borormir then, I think it is best to give Pippin the last word, “But I honor his memory, for he was very valiant. He died to save us, my kinsman Meriadoc and myself, waylaid in the woods by the soldiery of the Dark Lord; and though he fell and failed, my gratitude is none the less.” (TT, 29).
As an aside, I think it is striking and fits with the differing verdicts on these characters that Boromir’s horn arrives back in Gondor and his funeral raft sails out the Anduin to the Sea (from whence his people came), an honorable end, whereas Celebrimbor’s body is made into a banner of Sauron, one last humiliation repaid to the proud folly of the greatest of Elven smiths.
Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case (permalink)
It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.
It's a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it. What am I, a mind-reader? But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company's CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company's history.
Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.
Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.
At long, long last, the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta is underway, and this week, Zuck himself took the stand, in agonizing sessions during which FTC lawyers brandished printouts of Zuck's own words before him, asking him to explain away his naked confessions of guilt. It did not go well for Zuck.
In a breakdown of the case for The American Prospect, editor-in-chief David Dayen opines that "The Government Has Already Won the Meta Case," having hanged Zuck on his own words:
The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complemented Facebook's core product offerings).
This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:
they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos
and how that could turn them into a future competitor:
[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.
These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that complements his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:
[Instagram's growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.
At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."
Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."
Did Zuck buy Insta to neutralize a competitor? Sure seems like it! For one thing, Zuck cancelled all work on Facebook Camera "since we're acquiring Instagram."
But what about after the purchase. Did Zuck reduce quality and/or raise costs? Well, according to the company, it enacted an "explicit policy of not prioritizing Instagram’s growth" (a tactic called "buy or bury"). At this juncture, Zuckerberg once again put fingers to keyboard in order to create an immortal record of his intentions:
By not killing their products we prevent everyone from hating us and we make sure we don’t immediately create a hole in the market for someone else to fill.
And if someone did enter the market with a cool new gimmick (like, say, Snapchat with its disappearing messages)?
Even if some new competitors spring up, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, these new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
Remember, the Insta acquisition is only illegal if Zuck bought them to prevent competition in the marketplace (rather than, say, to make a better product). It's hard to prove why a company does anything, unless its CEO, founder, and holder of the majority of its voting stock explicitly states that his strategy is to create a system to ensure that innovating new products "won't get much traction" because he'll be able to quickly copy them.
So we have Zuck starving Insta of development except when he needs to neutralize a competitor, which is just another way of saying he set out to reduce the quality of the product after acquisition, a thing that is statutorily prohibited, but hard to prove (again, unless you confess to it in writing, herp derp).
But what about prices? Well, obviously, Insta doesn't charge its end-users in cash, but they do charge in attention. If you want to see the things you've explicitly asked for – posts from accounts you follow – you have to tolerate a certain amount of "boosted content" and ads, that is, stuff that Facebook's business customers will pay to nonconsensually cram into your eyeballs.
Did that price go up? Any Insta user knows the answer: hell yes. Instagram is such a cesspit of boosted content and ads that it's almost impossible to find stuff you actually asked to see. Indeed, when a couple of teenagers hacked together an alternative Insta client called OG App that only showed you posts from accounts you followed, it was instantly the most popular app on Google Play and Apple's App Store (and then Google and Apple killed it, at Meta's request):
But why did the price go up? Did it go up because Facebook had neutralized a competitor by purchasing it, and thus felt that it could raise prices without losing customers? Again, a hard thing to prove…unless Zuck happened to put it in writing. Which he did, as Brendan Benedict explains in Big Tech On Trial:
I think we’re badly mismanaging this right now. There’s absolutely no reason why IG ad load should be lower than FB at a time when . . . we’re having engagement issues in FB. If we were managing our company correctly, then at a minimum we’d immediately balance IG and FB ad load . . . But it’s possible we should even have a higher ad load on IG while we have this challenge so we can replace some ads with [People You May Know] on FB to turn around the issues we’re seeing.
So there you have it: Zuck bought Insta to neutralize a competitor, and after he did, he lowered its quality and raised its prices, because he knew that he was operating without significant competitors thanks to his acquisition of that key competitor. Zuck's motivations – as explained by Zuck himself – were in direct contravention of antitrust law, a thing he knew (because his execs explained it to him). That's a pretty good case.
But what about Whatsapp? How did Zuck feel about it? Well, he told his board that Whatsapp was Facebook's greatest "consumer risk," fretting that "Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp." He blocked Whatsapp ads on Facebook, telling his team that it was "trying to build social networks and replace us." Sure, they'd lose money by turning away that business, but the "revenue is immaterial to us compared to any risk." Sure seems like Zuck saw Whatsapp as a competitor.
Meta's final line of defense in this case is that even if they did some crummy, illegal things, they still didn't manage to put together a monopoly. According to Meta's lawyers – who're billing the company more than $1m/day! – Meta is a tiny fish in a vast ocean that has many competitors, like Tiktok:
There's only one problem with this "market definition" argument, and that problem's name is Chatty Mark Zuckerberg. On the question of market definition, FTC lawyers once again raised Zuckerberg's own statements and those of his top lieutenants to show that Zuckerberg viewed his companies as "Personal Social Networks" (PSNs) and not as just generic sites full of stuff, competing with Youtube, Tiktok, and everyone else who lets users post things to the internet.
Take Instagram boss Adam Mosseri, who explained that:
Instagram will always need to focus on friends and can never exclusively be for public figures or will cease to be a social product.
And then there was Zuck's memo explaining why he offered $6b for Snapchat:
Snap Stories serves the exact same use case of sharing and consuming feeds of content that News Feed and Instagram deliver. We need to take this new dynamic seriously—both as a competitive risk and as a product opportunity to add functionality that many people clearly love and want to use daily.
And an internal strategy document that explained the competitive risks to Facebook:
Social networks have two stable equilibria: either everyone uses them, or no-one uses them. In contrast, nonsocial apps (e.g. weather apps, exercise apps) can exist [somewhere] along a continuum of adoption. The binary nature of social networks implies that there should exist a tipping point, ie some critical mass of adoption, above which a network will organically grow, and below which it will shrink.
Sure sounds like Facebook sees itself as a "social network," and not a "nonsocial app." And of course – as Dayen points out – when Tiktok (a company Meta claims as a competitor) went up for sale, Meta did not enter a bid, despite being awash in free cash flow.
In Zuckerberg's defense, he's not the only tech CEO who confesses his guilt in writing (recall that FTX planned its crimes in a groupchat called WIREFRAUD). Partly that's because these firms are run by arrogant twits, but partly it's because digital culture is a written culture, where big, dispersed teams expected to work long hours from offices all over the world as well as from their phones every hour of day and night have to rely on memos to coordinate:
When Dayen claims that "the government has won the Meta case," he doesn't mean the judge will rule in the FTC's favor (though there's a high likelihood that this will happen). Rather, he means that the case has been proven beyond any kind of reasonable doubt, in public, in a way that has historically caused other monopolists to lose their nerve, even if they won their cases. Take Microsoft and IBM – though both companies managed to draw out their cases until a new Republican administration (Reagan for IBM, GWB for Microsoft) took office and let them off the hook, both companies were profoundly transformed by the process.
IBM created the market for a generic, multivendor PC whose OS came from outside the company:
Trump being Trump, it's not inconceivable that he will attempt to intervene to get the judge to exonerate Meta. After all, Zuck did pay him a $1m bribe and then beg him to do just that:
But as Dayen writes, the ire against Meta's monopolistic conduct is thoroughly bipartisan, and if Trump was being strategic here (a very, very big "if"), he would keep his powder dry here. After all, if the judge doesn't convict Meta, Trump won't have wasted any political capital. And if Meta is convicted, Trump could solicit more bribes and favors at the "remedy" stage, when a court will decide how to punish Meta, which could be anything from a fine to a breakup order, to a nothingburger of vague orders to clean up its act.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
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So it turns out that Donald Trump could not end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. In fact, he could not even arrange a ceasefire in the almost three months since his inauguration. Nor was he ever going to. Trump’s priority was never to achieve peace, it was always to end the war on the best terms for Russia. And that means what the US has been doing is bullying Ukraine into a terrible deal which would give Russia Ukrainian territory, end sanctions on Russia, and provide Ukraine no meaningful security guarantees.
We Are Getting Closer And Closer To The US Getting Back To Business With Russia
If Trump was going to bring an end to the fighting (an extraordinarily difficult task) it was going to have to be because of a subtle and intelligent application of US power to make both sides believe he has a plan. Alas, he does not and never did. His plan has always been to step away from Ukraine and move closer to Russia.
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And his plan seems to be reaching a tipping point whichmeans European states might soon be confronted with an entirely different war in Ukraine, one they should have been preparing for for at least a year, but instead one that they have wilfully pretended would never happen. This is the great crisis that we have been moving almost inevitably towards since Trump returned to the White House.
“If it’s not possible, if we’re so far apart that this is not going to happen then I think the president is probably at a point where he’s going to say we’re done,”
The repercussions of this could alter the war—in ways Europe is not yet ready to face. Trump saying that the US is “done” does not mean US neutrality in the war. It almost certainly means the US getting back to business with Russia, maybe even ending all sanctions that it can, while at the same time giving no more aid to Ukraine. Even while trying to broker a deal, Trump has been refusing to sell arms to Ukraine.
“I want to use sanctions as little as possible….You’re losing Iran, you’re losing Russia. China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency,”
“There’s so much conflict with all these countries that you’re going to lose” the dominance of the dollar.”
Everything he has done since becoming President has shown how committed he was to this. He has talked repeatedly about restoring business links with Russia, and his personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, has spent hours negotiating with the Russians, partly about getting back to business. Trump is chomping at the bit to end sanctions on Russia.
And remember, Trump deliberately exempted Russia from his tariffs list.
If Trump does end, or even just seriously water down sanctions on Russia—the war could be transformed. Basically Russia would then receive the open or tacit backing of both of the superpowers of the moment—China and the USA. That would be unprecedented, and I think explains why Russia has been so desperate to continue with the war even in the face of their losses. Russia will be backed by the majority of the world’s economic and military might.
And who knows how both the US and China might up their support for Russia. I was planning on writing more about this in my next piece, but if China felt it could flood Russia with military aid and suffer no economic repercussions, that alone could have a massive impact on the war.
Europe and Ukraine will be left alone. European leaders will no longer have the luxury of pretending everything will be alright in the end. They will either have to act with energy and decisiveness to support Ukraine, or we could see the end of a liberal and democratic Europe.
I hope they have not left it too late.
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Hi! I don't have a lot to say to you this week. I'm very sorry about that. Well, I mean, I do have an essay below, due to the whole format-of-the-newsletter thing, but honestly I don't know that I have tons more to give currently. It happens.
I did read a good piece recently and I'm not going to pretend it's going to be for everyone but, on the off-chance that it could be your thing - here are, I would say, roughly 4,000 words on John Updike, by Patricia Lockwood. She actually wrote the piece a few years ago but I only got to it recently, as I finally read my first Updike and, presumably like every woman before me, found myself in urgent need of Thoughts About Updike And Women, ideally written by a woman. That really hit the spot.
If somehow - somehow! - that doesn't feel like your jam, I also enjoyed this short but v compelling little piece on Lobsang Rampa, the man who pretended to be a Tibetan lama, with limited success. It's really fun.
That is all. Thank you. I will now show you some posts. Good bye.
A column
For a long time, being a young or new journalist meant doing the jobs no-one else wanted to do in the newsroom. You'd tackle the really minor news stories, go knock on the doors of recent widows, all of that. It probably wasn't pleasant, but I wouldn't know.
For my generation, being a young or new journalist meant being a clickbait monkey for a while, or possibly forever, if you couldn't escape. I worked at a few different places in my early twenties, back when the internet felt bewildering to execs and editors. I was hired to write pieces that would "go viral" - a novel concept, at the time - and I was pretty good at it.
In practice, though, it was awful. There was this one website I worked at, which I won't name, which needed us to write seven articles a day. We were never told not to make any calls and do any original reporting per se, but we didn't have the time to do it anyway, so it was a moot point.
Instead, we were sent links to MailOnline stories, sometimes from other places too, and our job was to rewrite those pieces, using words and sentences that were different enough that we couldn't get done for plagiarism. Again, that last bit was never said out loud, but we knew. We weren't stupid.
It was, in a way, quite an interesting intellectual exercise. In retrospect, I wonder if it made me a better writer, purely by accident. Spending eight hours a day trying to swiftly come up with synonyms is quite good practice, especially if English is your second language. In any case, I ended up jumping out of that particular ship after a year and a half, and got myself a job which actually felt and tasted like journalism. My clickbait monkey days started in 2013 and ended in 2015, and I've not returned to them since. What a beautiful decade it's been.
That doesn't mean I never think about those months, even now. Soul-sucking jobs tend to burrow under your skin, and you just can't quite get rid of them. I was so bored by the end: so bored! I felt like a sad little robot, probably because the job I was doing could have been done by one.
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