We're all learning to navigate uncharted territory.
Monday, May 9, 2022
Not "Never Again"; Just "Again"
I continue to be both fascinated and inspired by the performance of Ukraine President Zelensky as a wartime leader. But since the reemergence of Israel as a nation-state after World War II, we've had a succession of Jewish wartime leaders comparable to Joshua, King David, and the Maccabees. Now we have a Jewish politician in Ukraine who's performing comparably, and he's going so far as to assert Jewish identity as a full component of Ukraine's emerging national identity.
This is a major theme in his May 8 address (or addresses) commemorating V-E day, of which a YouTube version with English subtitles is linked above. An English version is available in text here. However, he says things in the YouTube version that aren't in the official text, and they may in fact be entirely separate addresses. Near the start of the YouTube at 1:05 but not in the text is this important statement:
[W]e had no idea that our generation would witness the desecration of the words, which, as it turned out, are not the truth for everyone. This year we say "Never again" differently. We hear "Never again" differently. It sounds painful, cruel. Without an exclamation, but with a question mark. You say: Never again? Tell Ulkraine about it.
"Never again" is the Jewish motto referring to the Holocaust, but Zelensky is making the point that Ukrainian history can't be separated from the Holocaust. He certainly isn't unique; the Ukraine historian and YouTuber Rabbi Henry Abramson makes the continuing point that Jews generally fared better in Ukraine than in other parts of the Russian empire, and when much of Ukraine was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jews and the dominant Polish Catholics in Ukraine got along especially well. In the text versioin, he says,
Today we celebrate the Day of Victory over Nazism. And we will not give anyone a single piece of our history. We are proud of our ancestors who, together with other nations in the anti-Hitler coalition, defeated Nazism. And we will not allow anyone to annex this victory, we will not allow it to be appropriated.
Our enemy dreamed that we would refuse to celebrate May 9 and the victory over Nazism. So that the word "denazification" gets a chance. Millions of Ukrainians fought Nazism and went through a difficult and long journey. The Nazis were expelled from Luhansk, the Nazis were expelled from Donetsk, and Kherson, Melitopol and Berdyansk were liberated from the occupiers.
The Nazis were expelled from Yalta, Simferopol, Kerch and the entire Crimea. Mariupol was liberated from the Nazis. They expelled the Nazis from all over Ukraine, but the cities I named are especially inspiring us today. They give us faith that we will drive the occupiers out of our own land for sure.
At 11:09 in the YouTube version, after enumerating Nazi atrocities in Poland, France, the Netherlands, the UK, and then-Chechoslovakia that parallel Russian atrocities in Ukraine, he draws another parallel:
And together, we are going through new, no less difficult battles. This is remembered by all Holocaust survivors -- how one nation can hate another. Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Danes, Georgians, Armenians, Belgians, Norwegians, and many others have not forgotten this -- all those who suffered from Nazism on their land and all those who defeated it in the anti-Hitler coalition. Unfortunately, there are those who, having survived all these crimes, having lost millions of people who fought for victory and gained it, have desecrated the memory of them and their feat today. The one who allowed the shelling of the cities of Ukraine from his land.
. . . Today, on the day of Remembrance and Reconciliation, we pay homage to all those who defended their homeland and the world from Nazism. We note the feat of the Ukrainian people and their contribution to the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition. Explosions, shots, trenches, wounds, famine, bombing, blockades, mass executions, punitive operations, occupation, concentration camps, gas chambers, yellow stars, ghettos, Babyn Yar, Katyn, captivity, forced labor.
He's incorporating the Holocaust in the overall Ukrainian and European experience of Nazism and making the point that, espcially as they apply to Ukraine, the experiences of Jews and Gentiles were not fully distinguishable. But he's also making the point that current Russian actions represent a full resuscitation of Nazism insofar as certain countries again are regarded as subhuman, without a right to separate existence.
And of course, especially in the YouTube address, he's wearing a T-shirt that says in English, "I'm Ukrainian", which stresses the global audience he's actually addressing.
Once again, I have to express my admiration for a masterful rhetorician who's operating at a Winston Churchill level of world leadership.
Let's start with that strange word. I don't believe it was commnon in the language before the 1980s. and certainly by the time I reached aduldhood in the late 1960s, more Freudian terms like "neurotic" were in use. I don't recall the word appearing in Jules Feiffer cartoons of that time, for instance, and his characters were typically riddled with uncertainty and self-doubt (or should have been), anything but the conventional image of a "narcissist". On the other hand, narcissists are at least identifiable in modern literature, maybe most recognizably as Wickham in Pride and Prejudice. though Austen doesn't use the term, which didn't exist.
On the other hand, if you search YouTube for "narcissists" now, it's certainly possible to conclude "narcissists" are the dominant problem of our time. Typical subjects are "Understanding the Narcissist: Wny Do They Treat You This Way?"; "10 Signs You're Dating A Narcissist"; "How do you Get Beyond the Hurt a Narcissist Inflicts?"; and "8 Questions a Narcissist Simply Cannot Answer". But there's also "Everything you Need to Know About the 7 Types of Narcissists", because there are indeed grandiose ones, vulnerable ones, covert ones, antagonistic ones, communal ones, oblivious ones, and more -- lists of seven actually differ widely.
Our Roman Catholic pastor occasionally refers to an "epidemic of narcissism", but that implies a certain medical quality to the term, which isn't all that precise. The demotic term "narcissist" covers a range of intensely self-absorbed behavior that includes dishonesty, manipulation, hidden agendas, and betrayal, often accompanied by grandiose projection. But a problem arises when using the term connotes a medical or scientific sense of precision. Let's face it, if you call someone a "narcissist", you haven't actually accomplished anything, but you think you have.
This is a murky, perplexing trial. While it’s technically a defamation trial over a newspaper article — with Depp suing Heard — at its center is one big conflict. Amber Heard says Johnny Depp abused her. Depp says Heard abused him. So what’s the truth?
Strikingly for our post-Me Too world, it looks as though the loudest voices on the internet have overwhelmingly sided with Depp. While there’s compelling evidence that there was violence on both sides of this marriage, it’s not quite so clear that the evidence supports Depp’s story, or that he has much of a shot at winning this case.
So it's a trial in a court of law, which is prohibitively expensive, even for faded Hollywood celebrities. Depp is the plaintiff, and he's suing Heard for $50 million, which Heard doesn't have and never will. He's spending multimillions of his own on a case that he could well lose. Why is he doing this? For that matter, Heard could likely have headed this off years ago at minimal cost, at least in dollars, though retractions and apologies don't seem to be in her nature.
And neither Depp nor Heard is an attractive public person. What puzzles trial observers is that the whole narrative is a he said-she said covering useless lives wasted in a sink of depravity -- but somehow, one of the protagonists, Depp, has overwhelmingly achieved public support. This may well be what Depp intended with his investment in the trial, but in some ways it's as big an upset as Ukraine's victories against the Russians, or maybe Trump's defeat of Clinton in 2016, or maybe even Rich Strike's 80-1 win at the Kentucky Derby.
Here's what I think is going on. Both Depp and Heard are actors, acutely conscious of their public personas. Their presentations of themselves in the trial, not just to the judge and jury but to a national TV audience, are carefully managed -- Heard, for instance, maintains a minimalist, understated, WASPY, upscale, ice princess image, utterly controlled and tightly held together, buttoned up to the chin -- except when it suits her to get weepy and hysterical, which it always does. The public knows a narcissist when it sees one.
Depp is a stranger case. His long hair is pulled tightly back in a severe pony tail. Not only is he in a suit, but it's a three-piece suit with a display handkerchief matched to his tie, which isn't normal courtroom attire -- attorneys don't wear vests, and their suits are often loose and rumpled so they can wave their arms and ruffle through papers. But the sleeves of Depp's suit can't conceal the tattoos on his hands and fingers. Like the pony tail, they're always peeping out. But Depp's facial expressions are masterful. He normally conveys a furrowed gravity, but now and then, in reponse to one or another gaffe by Heard or one of her witnesses, he glances at his counsel with a genteel chuckle.
The odd combination of Depp's image, controlled and respectful of the forum even if the tattoos and pony tail peek out, against his prior reputation as an out-of-control hellion, reinforces the narrative he and his attorneys are telling, a changed man who doesn't deny the sins of his youth and earlier adulthood, but who now insists that Heard's allegations are over the top and false.
This is a problem for Heard, because even the teary testimony she gives is a tacit acknowledgement that she was in some way a willing participant in those years of depravity, despite the buttoned-up image she now tries to convey. The overwhelming impression is that she's a phony and a liar, everyone's nightmare of an ex they've all had at some point in their lives.
In contrast, the impression Depp puts out is that he isn't pretending to be other than what he is. In fact, his courtroom demeanor is something like an example of Samuel Johnson's dictum that a man's duty is to bear and to forbear -- and indeed, that applies even in the midst of testimony about him, addled with drugs, writing on the walls with blood from his own severed fingertip.
On one hand, it's an indication, with figures like Zelensky, that a certain type of manliness is in style this year, and maybe it's not a coincidence that this is in the wake of the 2020 COVID-and-BLM moral panic. And just maybe it'sd also not coincidental that narcissists and phonies, at least this year, are overwhelmingly out of style.
It doesn't hurt Depp that win or lose in the courtroom, the current public mood could support a resuscitation of his career, which I think is the basis for what could be a shrewd investment.
Over the past few days, a consensus has begun to emerge that the Russian attempt to encircle the Ukrainian army in Donbas has stalled. For whatever reason, nobody is using the Clausewitzian term they'd been using around Kyiv, "culimination", but it seems pretty clear from the discussion that Clausewitz would say the Russian attack has culminated without reaching its objective. For instance, the BBC reports,
Russian forces are not making "the sort of strategic breakthrough" they have been looking for in Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, Justin Bronk - a research fellow from UK security think tank Rusi - tells BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
He says Russia continues to gain a few kilometres in some areas but their forces are taking "very heavy losses" and "may be out of momentum".
The 1945 site, which I'd linked just the other day for its pessimistic appraisal of Ukraine's chances in Donbas, has changed its tune:
When Russia redeployed tens of thousands of armored troops from the environs north of Kyiv and Sumy last month to the northern shoulder of the Donbas front, there was concern that the added manpower would produce an armored breakthrough of Ukraine’s lines. However, after almost three weeks of fighting, the Ukrainian troops have held the line.
Russia’s failure to affect [sic] a breakthrough represents a noteworthy accomplishment for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF). Whether that initial success can carry Ukraine to an ultimate victory will depend on how several key factors play out in the coming weeks and months.
. . . Russian military authorities likely expected to achieve a breakthrough in the northern shoulder of Ukraine’s defenses in the Donbas by this point – and failed. The reason is that Ukrainian troops continue to exceed expectations on the ground and Russian troops underperform (from inadequate/poor tactical pre-war training). In practical terms, however, the UAF’s successful defense results from the elaborate defenses Kyiv had ordered in the years since 2014.
The defenses in the Donbas include concrete bunkers, mutually-reinforcing positions, interlocking fields of fire, anti-tank mines, and pre-sited artillery targets on likely Russian avenues of approach. These defensive works and schemes have inflicted significant harm to attacking Russian troops and have been primarily responsible for preventing any penetrations thus far.
By far the best observer of the Ukraine war is Col Markus Reisner, who holds a PhD and is on the faculty of the Austrian military academy. I've linked another of his YouTube presentations here already. This one is on the current, Donbas phase of the war. My German is pretty good, but his is fast and technical, and I had to rely on both German and English subtitles to keep up with his full meaning.
A full English translation is available here, although it doesn't really carry the clarity of the German version. A few highlights:
The decisive phase then began
just about mid-April and that was the attempt by the Russian side to encircle Ukraine's forces along
the line of contact. There were two options: An encirclement in depth, following the Dnieper, or a
short encirclement. In the last few days we have been seeing this short encirclement, where they are
trying to encircle these Ukrainian forces with a northern pincer grip and force deployment and a southern pincer as well as force deployment.
Now, at the beginning of May, this Russian attack is obviously not taking the course that was
expected. . . . The first factor is the terrain
itself. . . . Looking at
the terrain, we can see that, firstly, the Ukrainian side has set itself up in several defense lines
staggered in depth. . . . The next terrain factor that limits the
Russian side concerns vegetation and terrain structure. You can see it very well here: it took the
Russians a while to be able to move out of this area, which is forested and also has a river flowing
through it, in order to then develop the northern pincer grip [.]
As a second factor, let's now look at the forces and
compare them. . If we look at the situation in the possible
encirclement, we see a ratio of 48 to 68 battalions. This means that the ratio the attacker needs -
namely 1:4 - is not met by the Russian side. This is because on closer examination one finds that the
forces are roughly equal and the Ukrainian side also has the advantage that its forces are massively
entrenched.
Another factor is time. In order to be able to develop an operation quickly and
purposefully, it is quite crucial to act quickly. It was here where the problem of the Russians was, if
you think back to the terrain: that they needed time at the beginning to be able to move out of the
difficult terrain, to get ready for the attack, which was planned to take place southwards. . . . The first attack by the Russians was repelled. So it took some
time before the Russian side was able to conduct an envelopment through this forested area, which
is actually not suitable for the deployment of mechanised forces[.]
Let's recall that the retired US general talking heads kept insisting weeks ago that the terrain in Donbas was not like around Kyiv, it was instead open country, like Kansas, good for tanks and maneuver! But just looking at the YouTube videos of Ukrainian ambushes in Donbas made it plain this wasn't the case. Col Reisner continues,
The next factor that is decisive is information. The Russian side
is constantly trying to create a common operational picture regarding the deployment of the
Ukrainian forces. UAVs, in particular, are being used for this purpose. Time and again, the Ukrainian
forces manage to shoot down these UAVs, such as the "Orlan-10" system, which makes it difficult for
the Russians to actually create a common operational picture and, above all, to use their own combat
support - i.e. artillery - effectively. . . . Only after . . . preparatory
artillery fire they try to advance slowly with mechanised forces, supported by infantry. Of course, this
brings the challenge that the surviving Ukrainian forces can attack the Russians again and again with
anti-tank weapons.
Finally, he explains the actual historical parallel with the Battle of Kursk, which unintentionally refutes the retired US generals in their assessment that the terrain and the tactical situaiton benefited the Russians:
. . . . After
this description of the situation, I would like to take a brief look at the past and try to use a historical
example to draw conclusions about how this situation may develop in the coming days and weeks.
The fact is that in the same area in 1943 there was already a battle of encirclement, namely the
famous Battle of Kursk - the German "Citadel" operation that took place north of Kharkiv. Here, the
Soviet side held a bulge towards the west and the German side tried to encircle the Soviet forces in a
pincer movement from the north and from the south.
The situation today is very similar: south of
Kharkiv we also have a bulge, this time formed by the Ukrainian side, towards the east and the
Russian side is trying to encircle the Ukrainian forces in two pincer movements from the north and
from the south. If we look at the outcome of the Battle of Kursk in 1943, historians agree that there
were essentially three factors that decided this battle for the Soviet side. The first factor was that the
Soviet side knew exactly where and at what time the German attacks would take place – due to the
decoding of a German cipher machine of the type "Enigma", it is assumed.
The second factor was
that the Soviet side prepared very precisely for this attack for months and set up defensive positions
in the depth, especially along the flanks, to defend against the German attack. The third factor was
the doggedness of the Soviet soldiers in fighting and defending against these German attacks, and in
the end the German side had to stop both of these pincer movements and the Soviet side was able to
decide the battle in its favour.
If we transpose this situation to the Donbass, we see that these three
factors also apply here. The first factor is that the Ukrainian side obviously knows very much about
the methods of the Russian attacks. The second factor is that the Ukrainian side has been preparing
for years and has set up defence positions in the depth in anticipation of a Russian attack. The third
factor is undoubtedly the doggedness of the Ukrainian soldiers who are defending virtually every
metre of ground with the intention to attrit the Russian side so that this attack will finally fail and
does not bring the success expected by the Russian side.
It's gonna be like Kursk. Right. Everyhone forgets that the outcome of Kursk was that the Germans failed to break through the Russian salient.
Ukrainian forces captured several settlements north and east of Kharkiv in the last 24 hours, reducing the ability of Russian forces to threaten Ukraine’s second-largest city. This Ukrainian operation is developing into a successful, broader counteroffensive—as opposed to the more localized counterattacks that Ukrainian forces have conducted throughout the war to secure key terrain and disrupt Russian offensive operations. Ukrainian forces are notably retaking territory along a broad arc around Kharkiv rather than focusing on a narrow thrust, indicating an ability to launch larger-scale offensive operations than we have observed so far in the war (as Ukrainian forces predominantly retook the outskirts of Kyiv following Russian withdrawals rather than in a major counteroffensive).
The Ukrainians are consistently outperforming expectations, but in large part, that's because expectations have been unrealistically low.
s
Russia’s Admiral Makarov warship has been hit by Ukrainian missiles and burst into flames, according to Ukrainian officials.
The frigate would be Russia’s latest high-profile naval loss in a troubled campaign, coming after reports that US intelligence helped Ukraine locate and sink the Russian warship Moskva weeks ago.
The Makarov was said to have been sailing close to Snake Island in the Black Sea south of Odesa.
Ukrainian presidential adviser Anton Gerashchenko reported on his Telegram page that the Admiral Makarov was hit by a Ukrainian “Neptune” anti-ship missile. He cited Russian sources.
Ukraine may have shot another Russian warship overnight with an MP saying one of Putin's state-of-the-art frigates is 'in trouble' in the Black Sea.
Oleksiy Goncharenko, head of the council of Odesa which houses Ukraine's largest naval base, identified the vessel on his Telegram channel this morning as the Admiral Makarov - a $500million frigate that was only commissioned five years ago.
He said the vessel ran into difficulties overnight, before reposting a report from a local news outlet suggesting it had been shot with a Ukrainian missile near Snake Island - whose defenders memorably told another warship to 'go f*** yourself' .
Unconfirmed reports suggest rescue vessels and aircraft have set off from Russia's largest Black Sea port of Sevastopol towards the site, while flight tracking data shows an American drone circling nearby.
. . . Nobody from the Ukrainian military has so-far commented on the attack, and there has been no acknowledgement from the Kremlin either.
However, the Ukrainian armed forces did add one boat to its tally of destroyed Russian equipment published today without giving further details.
The Makarov is an Admiral Grigorovich-class frigate, one of the Russian navy's newest vessels and the most state-of-the-art frigate operating in the Black Sea.
A commenter at reddit /r ukraine conflict said, "Looks like the Ukrainians celebrated Sinko de Mayo in a big way!" and that was too good for me to pass up. But the US Right continues to get this sort of thing wrong: yesterday Allahpundit at the Hot Air blog wrung his hands that if US intelligence was involved in sinking the Moskva last month, this could start World War III:
Is there some strategic benefit I’m missing to turning this into a hot war between the U.S. and Russia? Like, “the war will end much faster and with fewer casualties if we let the U.S. Air Force bomb Russian troops in the Donbas for a week”?
Between this and the leak last night about U.S. intelligence targeting Russian generals, we’re like a day away from Biden calling Putin a pussy and daring him to try something.
. . . Lately I’ve been trying to soothe my nerves about the provocations we’re engaged in by telling myself that maybe there’s something important the intel community knows about Russian capabilities that’s left them confident there’ll be no reprisal for leaving our fingerprints all over their failures. What if their nukes don’t work anymore? Or what if we’ve figured out a way to disable them remotely? There’s nothing they can do to hurt us!
It seems to me that Ukrainian performance in the first weeks of the war, whether or not US intelligence was actually pulling the strings (every indication is that it has been, but leave that aside), Ukrainian performance combined with Russia's manifold ineptitude emboldened the EU, NATO, and even the former neutrals Sweden and Finland suddenly to stand up to Putin, nuclear threats or not. The calculation appears to be that if Russia proved so incompetent in attacking a third-rate power like Ukraine, think how they'd do against even a second-rate power like Poland.
Whether by design or by accident, Spain became a proving ground for many of the strategies, weapons, and tactics that would follow later in World War II. And it would be a preview of just how impotent democracies and international bodies were to stop aggressive powers.
. . . Small, skilled Ukrainian teams with Javelin and Stinger missiles destroyed multimillion-dollar helicopters and armored vehicles. Cheap, armed drones are now ubiquitous on both sides. Do these relatively inexpensive arsenals presage a more decentralized brand of warfare, where handheld weapons take out relatively sophisticated tanks and helicopters? Are we back to the superiority of quantity over quality in weapons of war?
Perhaps, but whether armor and artillery prove vestigial weapons and tactics remains to be seen as the theater is now shifting to the rolling wide-open plains of Eastern Ukraine.
. . . Before Ukraine, few, if any, recent leaders of a major nuclear nation had ever seriously threatened to use nuclear weapons against either his enemies on the battlefield or those who sent help to them—not in Vietnam, not in Afghanistan, not in the wider Middle East. Now Vladimir Putin not only brags about his nuclear arsenal and tests long-range missiles but boasts about his right to use any weapon he chooses to defeat Ukraine and its suppliers.
Ukraine, like Spain, has awoken us from our false sense of security that has grown since the end of the Cold War. Unfortunately, soldiers in war sometimes do deliberately flatten apartment buildings and shoot civilians en masse—whether in 1936 or 2022. And some leaders apparently now view nuclear bombs as more or less deadlier conventional weapons.
Again, Hanson's theme is the risks of "starting World War III" amid concerns of nuclear winter, and that Russia and the West are morally equivalent in this sort of war -- and he goes beyond that to repeat the conventionial wisdom that Ukraine may seem to have been winning around Kyiv, but Donbas will be a different kettle of fish. But the weeks following such dire predictions have proved it hasn't.
It's hard not to reply that, Allahpundit and Victor Davis Hanson aside, we're in fact in a proxy World War III as we speak. The one certainty is that our previous assumptions are being upended on a daily basis, and so far, the presumed US intelligence assessments are proving remarkably correct. This is oddly reassuring.
On April 12, I commented on the conventional wisdom of the time that there would be an upcoming battle in Donbas that would be, in one opinion, the "biggest tank battle in Europe since 1943 Battle of Kursk". It would be a "knife fight", a grand contest of maneuver in which the Russians would try to cut off the Ukrainian army in pockets.
. . . After their recent defeat in the north, Russia has made some significant changes. . . . . the Russians will have a single command staff to co-ordinate and attempt to achieve a single focused and ostensibly realistic operational objective[.]
. . . the force the Russians will amass will be formidable, and with shorter and better established supply lines into Russia they may be able to avoid some of the appalling foul ups which have characterised their war so far.
As of mid-April, this decisive battle of maneuver was going to take place "within the next two weeks". It didn't happen. Instead, the daily assessments at the Institute for the Study of War basically continued along the line of the one from yesterday, May 4:
Ukrainian defenses have largely stalled Russian advances in Eastern Ukraine. Russian troops conducted a number of unsuccessful attacks in Eastern Ukraine on May 4 and were unable to make any confirmed advances. Russian forces attacking south of Izyum appear increasingly unlikely to successfully encircle Ukrainian forces in the Rubizhne area. Ukrainian forces have so far prevented Russian forces from merging their offensives to the southeast of Izyum and the west of Lyman, Slovyansk, and Kramatorsk, as Russian forces likely intended.
It appears that the "unsuccessful attacks" by the Russians were met yet again with the Ukrainian rope-a-dope strategy, wiping out enough tanks and infantry from individual BTGs to take them out of action in detail.
It should be said right upfront, however, that the task for Kyiv isn’t wholly impossible, but it is exceedingly difficult. There is a chance that the Ukrainian troops and civilian defenders could exact such a high price in blood and iron on Russia’s Donbas attack that after some extended amount of time, Russian troops withdraw on their own.
To support that path, however, requires Ukraine to understand two key realities: 1) for that strategy to successfully result in an eventual Russian withdrawal, it would take a year or more of fighting that will leave tens of thousands of additional Ukrainians dead – possibly more – and 2) there is a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available.
. . . The primary reasons Russia’s advance into Kyiv failed are that, first, they had too few troops devoted to that axis, their logistics were spread out over hundreds of kilometers from bases in Russia, and the Ukrainian defenders were able to make expert use of the urban terrain. Ukrainians could approach Russia’s armored vehicles undetected from around buildings and often attack at point-blank range.
. . . For the Kyiv axis in February, Russia’s supply lines were dangerously stretched, requiring trips of hundreds of kilometers to keep the frontline troops supplied with sufficient food, fuel, and ammunition. For the Donbas fight, Russia has very short logistics lines, as nearly all the resupply comes directly from Russia and through friendly territory.
But it's increasingly plain that the outcome for Russia has been precisely the same in Donbas as it was around Kyiv. The normative battle has continued to be a skirmish, a Ukrainian ambush on a Russian column in generally open territory:
This continues to be a strategy of defeat in detail. For every such ambush I see each day on YouTube, I shake my head and ask how long Russia can sustain such losses, and I have to keep reminding myselt that with defeat in detail, that's the whole point. The strategy is a series of individual ambushes. What the Russians woulda-coulda-shoulda done to avoid them is beside the point, they happened.
It's beginning to look like what happened around Kyiv is repeating itself around Kharkiv and Izyum: in the end stage around Kyiv, the talking heads were speaking of "culmination", with the Russian advances stalled and tentative Ukrainian counterattacks beginning -- but within days, the Russians retreated completely. At this stage in Donbas, the same conditions exist, although nobody seems to mention "culmination", even though it's just as accurate there. I think there will be an equivalent retreat from Kharkiv and Izyum.
As of yesterday, President Zelensky's appraisal of the war was reported below:
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky has named three stages of the war with Russia.
The statement came in a video address to the Wall Street Journal CEO Council Summit, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.
The first of them is to stop Russia's advance, which, according to the president, Ukrainians have already done. The second phase is to push Russia out of Ukrainian territory. Work to this end is now ongoing. And the third is to restore the territorial integrity of Ukraine as much as possible.
Now the priority for Ukraine is to push Russian troops back to the positions they were in as of February 24 and to restore Ukraine’s territorial integrity.
Zelensky has in other words stated that Ukraine has completely stopped the Russian advances on all axes, with which commentators like the ISW are in general agreement. The statements on restoring Ukraine's territorial inmtegrity have also been interpreted as an abandonment of any negotiating strategy short of that to end the war.
All this contravenes the defeatist conventional wisdom we'd been hearing just weeks ago suggesting, as above, that a fight in Donbas would represent "a much greater probability that UAF troops won’t win the Battle of Donbas and will be forced to submit to a negotiated settlement on worse terms than are presently available."
Amid everything else in yesterday's news, my main interest was in finding whether the CDC would extend its rule requiring masks on aircraft and public transportation yet again after the latest extension expired on May 3. Indeed, they did.
U.S. health officials on Tuesday restated their recommendation that Americans wear masks on planes, trains and buses, despite a court ruling last month that struck down a national mask mandate on public transportation.
Americans age 2 and older should wear a well-fitting masks while on public transportation, including in airports and train stations, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended, citing the current spread of coronavirus and projections of future COVID-19 trends.
For months, the Transportation Security Administration had been enforcing a requirement that passengers and workers wear masks.
The government had repeatedly extended the mandate, and the latest one had been set to expire May 3. But a federal judge in Florida struck down the rule on April 18. The same day, the TSA said it would no longer enforce the mandate.
The CDC asked the Justice Department to appeal the decision, which the department did. On Tuesday, CDC officials declined to comment on the status of the appeal. DOJ officials did not immediately respond to a request for information.
As far as I'm aware, Los Angeles County via a health department order is the only jurisdiction that is at least theoretically requiring masks on public transit, although the TSA is not enforcing the CDC rule at County airports or rail transit stations. As I've discussed here, the Metrolink rail transit agency had ceased enforcement even before the judge's April 18 order. I'd heard some agencies in the New York area were still enforcing mask rules, but New Jersey Transit's current policy is:
At this time, there are no plans to extend the mask mandate on board vehicles now that the federal mandate has expired. However, masks remain optional, and we encourage all those who wish to continue to wear them to do so if that provides for a more comfortable travel experience.
However, the federal mandate has actually been renewed, but clearly New Jersey Transit has decided to act as if it hasn't. My respect for New Jersey has increased. Nevertheless,
A number of commuters who use the rails to get to and from work -- or wherever -- each day say NJ Transit should make at least one car available only to people who still want to wear face masks aboard for COVID safety reasons.
NJ Transit was among a number of agencies that made masks optional last week after a federal judge in Florida struck down the national federal mask order for travel.
A Change.org petition started two days ago asks NJ Transit to make a special face mask car offering similar to its designated quiet cars.
. . . Signs put in each mask car would explain the rules and enforcement could be handled similarly to disorderly conduct issues, he suggested.
Only about three dozen people had signed the Change.org petition for mask-only cars as of noon Tuesday, but the proposal is also circulating on social media. NJ.com has also reported that at least one board member has asked NJ Transit staff to report back on the feasibility of adopting a mask-only car model.
So, is it under consideration by NJ Transit? Not at this time, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
It looks as if COVID Karens have gone out of style. My anecdotal observation on the street is that maybe half the people wear them outside, but there seems to be a general acceptance that this is optional.
In law, desuetude is a doctrine that causes statutes, similar legislation, or legal principles to lapse and become unenforceable by a long habit of non-enforcement or lapse of time. It is what happens to laws that are not repealed when they become obsolete. It is the legal doctrine that long and continued non-use of a law renders it invalid, at least in the sense that courts will no longer tolerate punishing its transgressors.
The problem for the CDC is that by reinstating the mask rule, which it is currently continuing to do, while agencies are nevertheless ceasing to enforce it, which they are clearly now doing, the CDC risks making any future mask mandates covering new epidemics unenforceable. Apparently the CDC's idea in appealing the April 18 decision is to preserve its future ability to issue such a mandate, but in not allowing the current mandate to expire, they're going to bring about the same result of making any future rule unenforceable no matter what.
The solution is to get rid of these people. The battle needs to continue via the law and the ballot box.
Tech mogul Elon Musk has hinted that he is planning to fire Twitter’s “censorship chief,” who earns $17 million per year at the company.
Twitter’s top lawyer Vijaya Gadde is seen as the leading advocate for censoring conservatives at the social media giant.
Gadde, who earned $17M last year as Twitter’s top legal counsel, has been put on notice that she is among the highly paid executives who stand to lose their job once Musk completes his takeover of the company.
Musk is reportedly planning to slash jobs and reduce executive pay as part of his plan to shake up Twitter.
Wikipedia confirms that Gadde is in fact Twitter's "policy, safety lead director and a chief legal officer and general counsel", which suggests she has a much more wide-ranging role than your typical SVP-legal affairs. Farther down, it notes
In 2018, Gadde joined Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey for meetings in India where they talked with several Dalit activists about their experiences on Twitter; after the meeting, the activists gave Dorsey a sign reading "Smash Brahminical Patriarchy," which he was later photographed holding. The photograph attracted controversy, with some critics calling the sentiment discriminatory against Brahmins while others deemed it an appropriate response to caste- and gender-based oppression in India. Gadde responded to the social media furor with an apology in a series of tweets, "I'm very sorry for this. It's not reflective of our views. We took a private photo with a gift just given to us - we should have been more thoughtful. Twitter strives to be an impartial platform for all. We failed to do that here & we must do better to serve our customers in India."
She was one of the key officials at Twitter involved in decisions to suspend the account of former American President Donald Trump.
In other words, it looks as if for whatever reason, she got to tell Jack Dorsey what to think. Or in other words, she de facto ran the company, which however is unprofitable. No question Musk should put her on notice.
There's a subsidiary issue, which may have affected the timing of Musk's announcement, though I would also guess he'd been advised not to comment directly on the case: just last Saturday, April 30, Judge William Alsup ruled against Twitter's motion for summary dismissal in the case of Berenson v Twitter.
[Gadfly journalist Alex] Berenson, a vocal critic of the government’s pandemic response, sued Twitter after the company kicked him off the site for describing Covid vaccines as an advance therapeutic with risky side effects.
. . . Alsup focused his ruling on Berenson’s allegations that the company changed the ground rules on the content Twitter would allow on its platform, despite assurances from an executive that his posts weren’t up for censorship.
“Collectively, these actions plausibly qualify as a clear and unambiguous promise that Twitter would correctly apply its COVID-19 misinformation policy and try to give advance notice if it suspended plaintiff’s account,” Alsup wrote in his decision.
He also noted that “[a]ny ambiguities in a contract like Twitter’s terms of service are interpreted against the drafter, Twitter.”
I'm subscribed to Berenson's Substack (though not any sort of donor), and his position is that his attorneys have already pursued discovery on the case.
We have just sent Twitter a list of questions we would like them to answer, documents we would like them to produce, and admissions of fact we would like them to make. Here’s a sample:
Here's the situation for Twitter, which yet again is not profitable: Judge Alsup has allowed the case to proceed to trial, at least for now. The trial could be ten years away. But Berenson's attorneys are already making demands for discovery, which are first, expensive for Twitter to answer, and second, likely to damage Twitter's reputation further over that period of years, especially in an environment where corporate managers who play woke are coming under increasing attack.
This is an unusual ruling because, as Jess Miers and I documented, most account termination cases lose on the motion to dismiss. Two factors help explain this aberration. First, the backchannel communications between Berenson and Twitter execs are rare. (Compare King v. Facebook, where a rank-and-file employee’s sympathetic message didn’t help the plaintiff). And if those conversations occur, most trust & safety professionals never imply any promise in any conversation with any user. Second, Judge Alsup often gives plaintiffs chances on the motion to dismiss, only to drop the hammer on them later in the case when he feels like they overpromised and underdelivered. So it wouldn’t surprise me if Berenson loses this case on summary judgment with a derisive Judge Alsup opinion if Berenson can’t prove up Twitter’s promises or the reasonableness of his purported reliance on them.
But that's down the road, that is, if Twitter gets lucky, but meantime, there's all that discovery, and of course all those multimillions already going to Twitter's outside counsel, trial ten years away or no, which Twitter can ill afford.
And Elon Musk was presumably just briefed that Twitter's $17 million general counsel set the company up for this.
