Geopolitics

Alexey Navalny’s widow has been suspended from Elon’s “free speech” app

surgeon, technologist, writer, humanist. read.pourteaux.xyz 

the account is back now

context: it was created on monday, and she posted a video accusing Russia of waiting for traces of Novichok to disappear from her husband's body before releasing it to their family which was followed by the account’s suspension

cypherpunk • human rights lawyer • actress • queen  // hosting /aaina • also indivisible.fm 

Context sometimes does that!

In fact if your "gut reaction instinct" is calibrated well, then it should be the case that learning the context makes a situation seem worse about as often as it makes a situation seem better.

(in my case, my initial guess was that Putin didn't make an order to kill Navalny this week, the "order to kill" was just the instruction to move him to northern Siberia which he knew would be too much for Navalny eventually, and so this potential new context is actually making things look worse than before)

Do you think he would have gone back to Russia if he could do it again? Could he have continued from abroad or was being in Russia important to keep the heart of the people? 

I wonder if even for his principles, he didn’t miscalculate the protection afforded by his popularity and global status.

There is definitely "a thing" where authoritarian regimes try to discredit exiled opposition by saying "their social circles and context are all Western now, they are disconnected from the feelings and needs of our people", I imagine if Navalny stayed outside he'd be hit a lot with that, and he wanted  to avoid that.

Of course, ultimately it became clear in Feb 2022 that Russian opposition strategy as a whole was totally misunderstanding the threat and hence miscalibrating its approach, so yes Navalny was wrong (as was I) but what would have been better is a more complex question

He always seemed like a fundamentally brave and decent person fighting for democracy and against corruption in Russia. I donated a bit to him back in 2017 when he accepted BTC. Though it was always clear he was fighting a difficult battle.

(I wasn't aware of his nationalist side until after the full-scale war started)