Digging Deeper.

Because the alternative is worse.

First, I’m pleased to say that Yannick’s latest translation of one of my essays into French is now online at

https://cercle-albert-roche.fr/2025/06/24/apres-la-victoire-toujours-plus/

It’s a translation of my essay “After Victory” of a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to Yannick once more for his efforts, and francophones among you, please go and visit the site and support its work and that of Yannick.

There has also been a very welcome influx of new subscribers—we are almost at 10,000 now—and I would like to thank and welcome them all, especially those who have, unprompted, dug into their pockets and tossed alms in my direction, or bought some coffees. A reminder that these essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here. And many of my articles are now on line on the site Italia e il Mondo: you can find them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And after all that …

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Perhaps the greatest of all traditional political skills is timing. Not just deciding when to launch an initiative or make a speech, but also knowing when an issue is ripe, when to join a bandwagon and most importantly when to get off, because you recognise that something is just too difficult, or even that a cause is now lost and there’s nothing you can do about it. The great British Labour politician Denis Healey famously said “when you’re in a hole, stop digging,” by which he meant that above all you should avoid making an already bad situation worse, and look for a way out, instead

Although today’s western political class has forgotten even the basic skills of everyday politics, you might nonetheless reasonably expect that fear alone would make them think seriously about their Ukraine policy, and how they would survive a defeat politically. After all, the Curse of Zelensky has struck down nearly all of the major western political leaders since 2022: only Mr Macron is grimly serving out the last two years of his term. Traditionally, changes of leader, and especially changes of government, are an opportunity to rethink policies and, in Denis Healey’s words, to get out of the hole your predecessors have left you in. Yet with Ukraine this has not happened, and as western leaders replace others, they take their place one by one in the herd of lemmings headed for the cliff. Only in the United States does a new government appear to offer the possibility of change, although I cannot pretend to know what Mr Trump’s confused thought processes will eventually produce, if anything.

In turn, this unanimity in government is largely a product of the unanimity in the in-grown and incestuous western political class, such that one identikit figure with identikit views is simply replaced by a clone. I’ve written before about the quasi-religious hatred animating much of the European political class, and its obsession with the destruction of Russia as the “anti-Europe,” or at least the anti-Brussels. But even the most fanatical liberal-libertarian, gently simmered for years in the Brussels court-bouillon, should at least be capable of recognising reality. After all, few if any politicians these days are inclined to sacrifice their career for their ideals: it’s almost always the other way round. So why is an entire political class apparently sacrificing its political future in a hopeless cause, and with every appearance of enthusiasm and dedication, at that?

The purpose of this essay is to try to answer that question, at least for European nations, and to do so by looking at the mechanics of how politics typically operates, and how politicians typically think. I’m not going to reveal any grand plans or intricate conspiracies (you can find plenty of those elsewhere) and in the end you may be disappointed by the prosaic, unreflective and self-serving nature of the motives I’ll be discussing: but that’s our contemporary political class for you. And although I have never hidden my views on this class or its behaviour, I’m not here concerned with polemic, or with the rights and wrongs of various interpretations. The Internet is knee-deep in all that, and since the beginning of these essays I have tried to do something different: not to complain that the clock is wrong, if you like, but to remove the clock-face and peer around in the workings. I’m not a great fan of Spinoza (I will finish the Ethics one day), but I’ve always been impressed by his remarks in the Tractatus theologico-politicus that he had attempted “not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” That’s the spirit of this site (as you will recall from the name) and of this essay as well.

So let’s start. I’ll offer two relatively mundane reasons for the current state of affairs, and a third which is more speculative, but I think well founded. The first thing to say is that as things stand, there is no political or electoral advantage for any political figure in opposing western policy towards Ukraine. There’s no country I’m aware of where a significant part of the electorate, or a major political party, is calling for a change in that policy. There are dissident voices, of course, in and out of government, and some of the latter have followings of hundreds of thousands on the Internet, but they have little or no effect on public opinion in any western country, and even less on governments. Thus, even at the most basic level, there is no popular cause to embrace, no current of opinion to support. Moreover, the average western politician never comes across dissident or sceptical voices on the question, and anyway lacks the basic understanding to disentangle useful knowledge and insights from the mass of propaganda flying around in all directions. Defence and security are complex and not especially popular subjects, and few western politicians have even a vague grasp of them. Even if they were to accidentally happen across some well-informed and objective analysis, they probably wouldn’t recognise it, nor be able to understand it.

Again, few western politicians ever actively promote the interests of another, hostile, country in preference to theirs. But contemporary discussion of Ukraine (like some other subjects) tends to be hugely and rather pointlessly polarised. Here’s a YouTube site that says Russia is a barbaric dictatorship which plans to conquer Europe, and we must resist and support a democratic Ukraine to the uttermost, and anyway in Europe we have a much larger population and GDP, and look, Russia is obviously losing and Putin will soon be gone. But here’s another YouTube site that says it’s all the fault of the West which has been trying to destroy Russia and get its hands on the minerals, and Ukraine is a Nazi dictatorship, and Russia is blameless and a model democracy, and its GDP is much higher than we think, and it’s very close to defeating Ukraine and humbling NATO. And within these broad categories there is also furious disagreement on certain issues. There are sites that try to be objective as possible about the fighting and try to avoid taking political sides, but often these are technical and require some familiarity with military concepts and vocabulary if you are to understand them. In any case, it’s obvious that you can’t draw a line down the middle labelled “truth,” and that it’s possible to argue endlessly about the rights and wrongs, and the interpretation of specific issues. (Indeed, if that were not so, it would be the first crisis in recorded history without such controversies.)

But that’s not really the point. A sensible and rational western politician with their country’s best interests at heart, if we could find one, is not going to say “our country and our government, and by the way you the public as well, are evil and deserve punishment.” That politician would say something like “Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the situation which we can argue about later, the current policy will be disastrous and even suicidal for our country and it needs to be changed.” The problem, of course, is that the argument is effectively circular: to be motivated to do the research to support the conviction that your country is heading for disaster, you need already to have done some research …

All of this —second point—is massively magnified when you consider the wider context. Our politician is surrounded by people they know, organisations they respect, experts they assume to be well informed, telling them that Russia is near defeat and it’s just a question of waiting. Every newspaper, all the main TV channels, all the prestigious Internet sites, are giving variations of the same message. But imagine for a moment that you are in government: a Defence Minister, or Foreign Minister of a medium-sized western country, and that you arrived recently, after a change in government, or after a period as Minister for Pensions. It takes you a while just to master your basic brief on Ukraine (you will have many others of course) and inevitably, since your country can’t influence events much on its own, your working day will be consumed with second-order questions. What to tell Parliament, what to say in that speech engagement you’ve inherited, what to say to TV next week, what to tell potentially restless party members, should you go to the next NATO meeting? how to react to this proposal from country X, how to deal with the sudden offer of mediation from country Y, should you tell the military to have one more look for things they can send to Ukraine? how to react to photos of volunteers from your country with what might be Nazi tattoos except that they claim the photos were manipulated … it goes on and on, and by the time you’ve dealt with the rest of the day’s business and the various crises and scandals, attended various meetings and engagements and spent an hour or two signing (and maybe even reading) letters that your officials have drafted for you, well, you don’t have the time or the energy to ask awkward questions.

And if you did? Western politics is essentially a gigantic echo-chamber on the subject. Everyone who briefs you, everyone who attends the meetings you attend, everybody who briefs them, everybody you meet at receptions and in the margins of meetings, has basically the same opinions. Your colleagues in other governments, the Opposition spokesman on your subject, the Parliamentary Committee, the Secretary-General of NATO, the journalists who interview you, the EU Commission, think-tanks and influential retired politicians, will all be saying much the same thing. What we have here is quite close to a collective fantasy, a collective hallucination, or a process by which people collectively hypnotise each other. It’s groupthink on an epic scale. Now because this is politics, there will of course be disagreements. Do we send This Weapon or not? Do we provide this training? What do we think of this initiative? How do we respond to Zelensky’s latest diatribe? But everybody you meet will basically have the same broad picture of events. In a twenty-minute bilateral meeting at NATO or the EU, you won’t get much further than exchanging banalities like Must Support Ukraine, Important for our Security, Stop Putin Now Rather than Later, Putin will Fall Soon, and so on. In fact, most of your interlocutors will themselves be uncomfortable about getting into details.

In reality, it’s quite possible that various people in different governments are beginning to get nervous, and to wonder how this is going to turn out. But in the absence of a properly articulated counter-discourse, it’s hard for sceptics to know where to begin. Actual informed, non-polemical analysis of the type that governments might find persuasive is desperately rare on the Internet (I have tried to produce a little myself, and so have others, but governments don’t read Substack.) And this is really the problem, or at least the origin of it (it gets much worse, as I will describe in a moment.) For the moment, at least, people are clinging to the discourse they have because, for all their potential private nervousness, there isn’t another, and nobody wants to be the first to express doubts.

In any case, what’s the alternative? The biggest problem its the one Denis Healey identified: the deeper you dig the hole, the harder it is for you to get out of it without sustaining a prohibitive level of political damage. Imagine you, as Foreign Minister of a medium-sized country were to explain the potentially-disastrous effects for your country of continuing on the current course of action. Even if others were convinced, the obvious question would be, OK, what are we going to do? Now obviously there are hand-waving replies like “stop support for Ukraine,” but nothing in this area is simple, and everything has consequences and consequences of consequences, for your government, for your country, for your allies, for third countries, for your position in international organisations and so on. It’s taken you three years, at least, to get wrapped around the axle of this problem in an ever-more complicated and inextricable fashion, and a point arises in politics when the hole you have dug is so deep you can’t see the top any more, or even remember where it is. So the majority view will be, Yes, you may be right, we’ll have to see, so let’s wait while things clarify themselves. Anyway, it will be added, there are elections coming so the problem might be for the next government to deal with.

What I have discussed so far could be described as Permanently Operating Factors of politics, which apply in most situations. Here, though, I think there are other, more speculative, but also more dangerous factors operating. Let’s begin by postulating a final state for the current conflict in Ukraine, one which western politicians would hate, but which at least they would understand, since the elements of it are well known and have been widely discussed. Let’s assume that the territories of Ukraine claimed by Russia, as well as Odessa, have been occupied, and that in addition the Russians have established a security zone anything from 50 to 100 kilometres forward, including the whole border area. Let’s assume further that there has been a change of government in Kiev, that a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation has perhaps been signed between the two countries, that the Constitution of Ukraine has been modified to remove references to NATO membership, and that the country has pledged eternal neutrality. It has demobilised most of its armed forces, and Russian “liaison officers” are now deployed throughout the country. All foreign forces have left, and a law has been passed preventing foreign forces from being deployed in the country ever again. Oh, and the Russians, who are extremely pissed at the western support for Ukraine, have begun a policy of forceful displays, including Corps-level exercises in Belarus on the borders of Latvia and Lithuania, probing flights up to the national airspace of NATO nations, and maritime exercises in the North Sea. They have also tabled a draft treaty text similar to that of December 2021, and made it clear that they hope for signature—with not much room for debate—within six months.

Now this, I stress, is a reasonable, middle-of-the range politico-military outcome of the current fighting. It could be better, but it could be significantly worse. Nonetheless, it would represent the most catastrophic defeat the wider West has ever suffered, and a political and military humiliation as complete as the surrender of Germany in 1918, except on a massively larger scale. Think of it, if you like as Suez, Algeria, Vietnam and Afghanistan, all happening at the same time, with the volume turned up to eleven. And of course it’s not Over There, it’s just down the road. Any political system would struggle to survive such a crisis, and the current western system, full of mediocre greasy-pole climbers and empty of any real ideology, would find it harder than most. It’s not just the mechanics of it: yes, governments will fall, individual political careers will be over, and new political forces will arise or be strengthened. But every foundation of western security policy, and much of its economic policy as well, will start to crumble under the feet of the hapless western governments. A political void will open up, the like of which hasn’t been seen in politics for a very long time, if ever.

The West will experience a brutal transformation away from its recent experience of giving orders, making demands and acting without needing to take account of the consequences. Suddenly, it will be receiving demands rather than making them, and having to take very seriously the reaction of other states to its actions. Playtime’s over, boys and girls: it’s time to grow up. And this, I think, is the basis of the apparently irrational obsession with continuing a war that cannot be won. The alternative is to recognise and accept a situation which will be much worse, which is almost literally unthinkable. In the short term, of course, it is possible to deny that anything like the above will actually happen, and the western political class, the media and much allegedly informed opinion will no doubt continue to do so for as long as they possibly can. But then it is surely enough to ask precisely how the type of events sketched out above can be falsified. Is it really feasible to suppose that the Russian advance can be stopped? Is it likely that western behaviour since 2022 will make Russia more kindly disposed? Is it likely that public and parliamentary opinion in Russia will have become more moderate and pro-western during the course of the war? Can the West massively expand its ground and air forces over the next couple of years? You can draw your own conclusions, I think.

In effect, the western system is hoping for a miracle of some kind. Putin dies or is overthrown in a coup, perhaps China forces him to stop the war, perhaps … well, I don’t know really, but when you begin from the proposition that what look like inevitable developments are in fact unacceptable to you, and thus can’t be allowed to happen, then all you can hope for is that some magical force will intervene to prevent them actually happening. The future reality is too terrible to contemplate, and, no matter how bad the current situation is now, how much it is deteriorating, and indeed how much you are making it worse, it is better than the alternative. In a nutshell, this is why western leaders are carrying on with their present suicidal policies, and also why an entire generation of strategists and pundits are supporting them.

If there is a single overriding explanation for why governments have historically done stupid things, it is precisely that: the alternative was worse. From a well-stocked cupboard of examples, let’s pluck out a few. The German offensive of 1918 was undertaken because, whilst war games had shown that it was almost certain to fail, and lead to defeat, they also showed that there was a very small chance it would work. So between probable defeat at the hands of the Allies and certain defeat, they chose an option which at least gave them a sniff at victory. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 made no sense strategically, but was preferable to effective surrender and withdrawal from Manchuria, with only a few days’ supplies of oil left in the country. And there was a faint chance it would work. The Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 was pointless—negotiations were under way to give the islands back—but was seen as preferable by the military junta to their own removal from power and the end of the regime: typically, perhaps, defeat in the war accomplished exactly that. We know that the Soviet Politburo agonised at length over the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, and eventually decided that going in was the less bad of two bad alternatives. And so on.

The Japanese example is especially interesting because when it came to 1945, it looks as though the Japanese regime could not actually get their minds around the concept of “surrender.” We say lazily that certain things are “unthinkable” when we mean just that they are unacceptable to us. But there are also things that genuinely cannot be thought, because there is nothing in our experience to make that possible. Beyond the militaristic and ultranationalist mindset of the regime, and beyond the cultural specificities, was the simple fact that Japan had been victorious in war throughout its history, especially recent history, and the only attempted land invasion—that of the Mongols—had been defeated by the Kyushu samurai. It’s not fanciful, I think, to see the western ruling class with much the same mental deficiency: since the end of the Cold War, victory has been assured and, if it has sometimes gone wrong later, as with Afghanistan, there were never any consequences for western countries. For the western ruling class, then, defeat is literally unthinkable: the required neurones are not present. And anyway, defeat would lead to a type of existential terror that it is incapable of dealing with. Better to pursue the current policy, even if there is almost no chance it will work, rather than admit defeat. After all, a miracle might happen, who knows? The alternative is worse.

And the longer it continues, the worse will be the final consequences, and the harder it will be to explain. One of the things you have to do in government on occasions, is to provide the political leadership with plausible sounding excuses for a change in policy. There’s a whole series of clichés about circumstances changing, adapting to new realities, need for fresh thinking and anyway it’s not our fault it’s somebody else’s. As late as the Istanbul talks in 2022, this would have been feasible, if only just. We can imagine a coordinated response from the West that would have gone something like the following:

We are surprised and disappointed that Ukraine has agreed to the terms proposed by Russia. We have supported Ukraine for many years against the increasing Russian threat, and we have done everything in our power to prevent this situation occurring. We shall continue to provide Ukraine with political and economic support where possible, in the hope that it will one day be able to recover its lost territories by peaceful means, when a more moderate and sensible Russian government comes to power. In the meantime, as we have been emphasising since 2014, the West must look to its collective defence to deter an increasing powerful and aggressive Russia.

That might have worked then, at a pinch. There’s no way that anything remotely comparable could work now. If I were the person charged with writing some anodyne self-exculpatory words for a head of state or government in, say, 2026, I have no idea where I would even start. And let’s not even get into what NATO could possibly agree to say collectively: it probably wouldn’t be worth the effort of attempting, because before you can agree on words you have to agree on what you think, and the chances of NATO being able to do that are probably too close to zero to be worth trying to calculate. This is actually part of the problem. There is no vocabulary and no set of concepts that the West can use to explain to itself, let alone to others, the mess it has got itself into, and why it was so wrong for so long. There is no area for debate, no more and less radical positions, only a single rickety edifice of blind belief which no longer corresponds, except accidentally, to reality. When this edifice collapses there will be nothing rational to say, and no way to say it, and this could be extremely dangerous. Oh, there will be much stamping of feet, shaking of fists and sporadic promises of “no surrender,” but in fact the West can do very little. The “escalation” some have detected in western policy over the last couple of years is essentially rhetorical, mixed with a few trivial gestures of defiance. Very soon, the West will no longer be able to afford even such gestures.

The radical polarisation of the crisis, beyond anything that might have been expected a decade ago, means that even under ideal circumstances the West will find it impossible to talk to the Russians with any coherence. So poisonous have relations become, so deep is the mistrust and hostility between the two sides, so stark and nuance-free are their positions, that it’s hard to know how even the most tentative and informal of talks could actually start. The conceptual gap between the two sides, which was growing worryingly large even before 2022, is now unbridgeable. Western governments will find it impossible to explain what they are doing and why to their own populations, let alone to the Russians.

One of the least-remarked but most powerful forces in international relations is mutual incomprehension. This goes beyond ethnocentrism—though that’s part of it—and often amounts to a failure to accept that anyone can see the world differently from the way we do. This mutual incomprehension, dangerous enough in peacetime, can become lethal in crisis and conflict, where the historical tendency is for positions to harden and become more radical anyway. This is why I don’t expect any substantive talks between Russia and the West, and why the best we can hope for is a ratcheting down of tension and a mutual snarling match.

Now of course we shouldn’t assume that nothing will change and that each side will stick rigidly to everything it has said. Normally, nations overbid their hand in a crisis, and privately identify things that they will quietly drop once the bargaining really starts. The Russians, for example, have toned down their remarks about Zelensky’s government not being legitimate, preparatory, I suspect, to throwing that card away if by that they can guarantee a negotiation. Normally, the West would be dong the same, but we are involved instead in an unseemly and unprecedented rush to extremes where western leaders seem determined to out-radicalise each other. This is understandable, of course, if you accept the analysis above, because it is a way of keeping hope alive, no matter how small the spark may be.

But I suspect that the gap in understanding is now so profound that the normal rules will not apply. There are precedents for this, of course. During the Cold War, both sides flattered themselves that they understood the other, and on detailed and technical issues, it turned out that they often did. But when the first western explorers visited the East after 1989, they returned glassy-eyed, with frightening stories of just how much the two sides had misunderstood everything of real importance about the other. This never got the publicity it deserved, for obvious reasons, but it showed how big a gulf of understanding was actually possible between sophisticated nations. It’s obvious that the West doesn’t understand Russia any better than it did then, And whilst the Russians have a much more solid and professional approach to the crisis, I think it’s also very probable that they don’t understand the West nearly as well as they think they do, either.

This isn’t really very surprising when we reflect on our personal experience. Whatever your views of the Ukraine conflict, how ready would you be to articulate the views of the opposite side in terms that they would accept? Not very, I suppose. Would you even accept that they had legitimate views to articulate? I’ve tried this kind of experiment over the years in various settings, without much success. Even highly intelligent people often struggle to articulate fairly views that they don’t support, and after a couple of mumbled sentences will say something like “but of course that’s not true,” as though thereby wanting to ritually avoid contamination. At oral examinations, I’ve asked students with strong views on subjects to outline what they think are the major objections to them, or a plausible counter-argument, and the result is an embarrassed silence. Ironically, it wasn’t always thus, even in times that we like to think were less tolerant. (Most of what we know about Gnosticism, for example, comes from polemical writings against it, such as those of Irenaeus, who nonetheless quoted extensively from its arguments.) These days, even admitting that your opponent can make a logical argument for their case is regarded as a kind of weakness, and makes you suspect. Back in 2022, in my small way, I was asked by a few people who knew my interests why I thought the Russians had invaded Ukraine. But after a few minutes, the reaction was often “but how can you say that?” as though it was me who was making the arguments. And after a while, when I was attacked in print by some people for being pro-Russian and by others for being pro-western for saying the same thing, I decided I wasn’t going to answer such questions any more.

All of which I find very worrying. I don’t think the West has the intellectual capacity to deal with defeat and failure, and I’m not sure the Russians have the capability to understand and predict how the West will react. This, unfortunately, is quite common in history, but here it could be extremely dangerous. Countries that suffer unexpected and inexplicable defeats often relapse into self-pitying victim mode, complete with complicated conspiracy theories. There are plenty of models of conspiracy theory available in the world today, and I think we can easily assemble something that would both justify western conduct and provide a comforting myth of betrayal and victimisation. Putting together various things I have read and heard in the last few years, it might look something like the following. (And remember: this is not me speaking!)

After the fall of Communism, the West sought good relations with the new Russia and, under Yeltsin, we thought that might actually come about. Even when Yeltsin was replaced by Putin, a former KGB agent, we were still prepared to trust Russia. But of course the KGB’s main job was to weaken European cohesion and the transatlantic link, and it’s obvious now that this was always Putin’s plan. After all, Putin described the fall of the Soviet Union as a “catastrophe” and ever since has been trying to recreate it through the promotion of lapdog states like Belarus. The plans for a “Greater Russia” were described several times by Aleksandr Dugin, Putin’s mentor, and by several highly-placed Russian defectors. And the whole scheme was laid out in an influential anonymous article in the official journal of the Naval Engineering Institute in 2011, under the title Russia Should be a Great Power Again. So while western governments trusted Russia and transformed their militaries away from warfare in central Europe, the Russians quietly and steadily built theirs up. Like Hitler, Putin tested the West’s resolve. The invasion of Georgia in 2008 was not challenged, nor was the seizure of Crimea in 2014. It was only with the so-called “rebellion” in the East of Ukraine in 2014—Ukraine’s “Sudetenland”—that the gloves came off. On that occasion the West displayed some firmness, and managed to persuade Putin to agree to a ceasefire which prevented Russia seizing more of the country. We hoped that strengthening Ukraine’s forces and publicly supporting its government would be enough to deter Putin, but his plans went deeper than that. And Putin’s plans to divert US attention from the crisis and destroy transatlantic solidarity involved not only interfering in US elections, but also encouraging Hamas to attack Israel and heating up the Iran crisis. It’s now clear that the whole war was a maskirovka operation. By looking weak at the start and seeming to be losing, the Russians trapped the West into supporting Ukraine militarily, bankrupting its economies and emptying its military arsenals, all in the defence of international law and justice. And now all Putin has to do is to walk in and take over.

It may not some out quite like that, of course, and there will be national specificities (“Le Pen’s campaign was financed by Russian banks!”) but you get the idea. Something like that is the only way I can imagine that the West will be able to construct an even vaguely coherent theory of its own defeat that it finds just about acceptable. And it contains enough of The Truth as seen from Brussels and Washington that western elites would probably sign up to it. (Needless to say, the Russians will find it utterly incomprehensible, and probably suspect trickery.) Of course, presenting yourselves as naive and gullible for trusting a foreign leader doesn’t make you look very good. But the alternative, if there is one, is certainly worse.

The only way such a disaster could be avoided is through the rise of a pragmatic tendency among western decision-takers and influencers which recognises the depth of the hole we are in and stops digging. Unfortunately, there is not the least sign of that happening. The hole grows deeper by the day, because the only alternatives anyone can see to keeping digging are all worse.