Indeed, for all my convictions and philosophies of freedom of thought this is the price. The world is unfair and tough.
In this Christmas I thanked not living afraid of warlords changing my way of life.
There's bravery and then there's stupidity. I'm not sure what he thinks he can achieve as a prisoner in an Arctic prison (and presumably one day, a corpse) that he couldn't achieve as a free man, but I don't find his choice very aspirational.
True acts of bravery are done in the service of others, martyrdom is a pointless waste of human life.
What do you think Navalny would've been able to accomplish from afar? Him remaining in the West and subverting the Kremlin would have only fed the ideas that he's a Western agent.
He made a courageous and respectable move. The ball is now in the court of the Russian citizens on whether they want to fight for justice.
"They enslave their children's children, who make compromise with sin."
It's a recurring motif in Unsong (https://unsongbook.com/) which gets linked here occasionally. I haven't been able to get it out of my head since I read it.
Compare and contrast Assange and Prigozhin and Nacchio. Or Kadyrov, for that matter.
I’d rather be alive and unimprisoned. It’s not brave to get murdered or jailed. You can’t do the work from jail, Solzhenitsyn notwithstanding.
I can’t believe Navalny went back to Russia, given the situation. They’d already poisoned him in Russia. Sure, maybe the FSB hits him with novichok in Germany anyway, but flying straight back into the lion’s mouth makes no sense.
I don’t understand your first sentence; Assange, Prigozhin, and Nacchio seem too different in background, objectives, and actions to compare meaningfully. What are you trying to demonstrate?
As I understand it, and this is down to rumor I have to say at the start, he was told that he could return to Russia, or his friends and family would be abused/killed. In that context his behavior makes a lot of sense, he's angry, he has nothing to lose, and the only way to he can keep his loved ones remotely safe is to suffer through this nonsense.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot, and we've had to ask you this more than once already.
I think you are seriously overreacting. The guy armchair judges a man who deliberately takes on an oppressive regime and then it's against the policy to point that out in a way that is neither using insults and even leaves room for me being wrong? Go ahead and delete my account. Couldn't care less. I think you are doing a great job here - seriously - but you are not doing yourself a favor by wasting energy on such harmless comments like mine.
Comments like that one aren't harmless—they're the sort of attack which would quickly destroy this forum if we allowed them.
There's a common pattern where people underestimate the provocation in their own comments by (say) 10x and overestimate the provocation in the other person's comments by another 10x. Put those together and you get a 100x distortion in self/other perception. That's a lot of skew.
I don't mean this in a personal way—as far as I can tell, we all have this bias.
Reading some of the comments on that Reddit thread, I think a lot of folks need to come to terms with how illiberal society can become, particularly how hard won individual freedoms are, how easy they are to lose, and how diligent folks have to be to protect them. Often protecting rights means standing up for folks you may not identify with, who you might have difficulty tolerating, since rights can be eroded subtly over time on the back of reasonable concerns.
Nelson Mandela spent almost 30 years of his life in prison, a huge percentage of his life, practicing civil disobedience to affect change. Navalny is likely to suffer a similar fate, and there’s no guarantee that he’ll affect change in Russia. Those two men are so inspiring because of their raw courage and equanimity, but that doesn’t mean that you have to have that to make some difference, society is upheld by people making small brave decisions every day; James C. Scott remarks in Two Cheers for Anarchism an exercise he calls “anarchist calisthenics” wherein you break small, insignificant rules so that you’re ready when you need to make the big decision in the name of humanity. Arendt’s term the “banality of evil” in reference to Eichmann’s trial in Israel is relevant here insofar that evil is often mundane and a result of falling in line, though I’m simplifying the argument a little.
…what that essay reminds me of is the importance of local social participation, the vacuum of political discourse from the loss of the public square and third places, and the expansion of the ingroup and expulsion of the outgroup—you can really go through life nowadays avoiding any disagreement, even in college where exposure to challenging ideas is the whole point.
I typed this on my phone, so bear with me and my sloppy ideas, I just wanted to throw some interesting discussion in this thread.
What use is Navalny being alive to Putin?
I’m only casually familiar with the situation, but my ignorance analysis is that Putin’s underlying message is “don’t F with me”. Navalny alive and in prison or dead that message seems to ring clear. Just curious.
I’ve assumed it’s the combination of having a lever on anyone who cares about him and keeping him around to make it harder for opposition to crystallize around someone else who isn’t as well known.
Point taken. I guess avoiding his martyrdom is the idea. It all seems as though the emperor has no clothes, since there is such little effort to mask what is going on and why — and what the possible outcomes for him are.
Posts like this are seriously against HN's rules (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and we have to ban accounts that do it. Moreover, we've had to ask you more than once (before this thread) to stop posting flamewar comments:
... and it's unfortunately clear from your comment history that you've been continuing to do this. I don't want to ban you, because you've also posted some good things, but if this keeps up, we won't have much choice.
No nationalistic flamewar on HN, please, regardless of which country you have a problem with. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Russian government and oligarchs make it so; like almost any(all?) other dictatorial countries, the locals don't want the status quo either.
Maybe that's what you meant, but as appealing as a shorthand as it is, we should be careful to conflate the desires of the common people to those of the rulers.
