Yulia Navalnaya will not be in attendance when President Biden delivers his annual message to Congress on Thursday
  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
    98·
    10 months ago

    Man… don’t involve her in our bullshit.

    I love the idea of Biden giving her honors, inviting her to the White House and talking with her, basically so that she can know that there are people on her side, to some degree, something like that.

    The State of the Union isn’t that. Marjorie Taylor Green is going to scream at her that she’s secretly a transgender dolphin and Navalny was trying to steal all the gold that Dr. Evil buried under the Kremlin in 1966. Jim Jordan will try to serve her a subpeona so he can finally get to the bottom of Hunter Biden’s laptop. There’s all kinds of weird bullshit that goes on in the U.S. congress, and I genuinely don’t think it’s polite to expose her to it.

    Just let us have our weird governmental thanksgiving with all our weird uncles and have the serious stuff happen somewhere else.

    • spider@lemmy.nz
      16·
      10 months ago

      Marjorie Taylor Greene…Jim Jordan…all our weird uncles

      If only we could find a way to lock 'em all up in the same basement.

      • ZorsithEnglish
        2·
        10 months ago

        Hey! The basement is reserved for the catholic church. Weird Uncles get the attic.

        • spider@lemmy.nz
          2·
          10 months ago

          It’s amusing to see Weird Uncles spelled in caps, but not the church.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zipEnglish
      6·
      10 months ago

      I agree all the crazy stuff will happen, but I think she’s dealt with worse at this point. Her husband was literally poisoned and imprisoned by her government. I don’t think the lunatics in our government can do much worse.

    • FiniteBanjo@lemmy.today
      2·
      10 months ago

      Actually, MTG’s compromisation aside, the two of them actually have a lot of policy stances in common. Navalny was anti-muslim xenophobe. Sure, he was the only one with the balls and following to stand up to Putin for so long, but it doesn’t change the quality of their character.

  • anticolonialist@lemmy.world
    13·
    10 months ago

    What is it with western countries like the US and Canada elevating right wing xenophobic nationalists, in this case the widow of one?

    • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
      28·
      10 months ago

      I cannot for the life of me imagine who your target audience for this comment is.

      I think most likely is just that you know it’ll get people riled up, and that’s fun.

      • HonkyTonkWoman@lemm.ee
        20·
        10 months ago

        I’ll continue to respect Navalny for standing up to Putin, but dude was not an egalitarian by any stretch of the imagination.

        “He used to attend the Russian march, a very far-right nationalist group generally behind the slogan of ‘Russia for ethnic Russians’. Anybody who expects Navalny to be an ideal Western liberal Democrat has been mistaken,”

        His ultra-nationalist sentiment was prominent in a video dating back some 17 years filled with xenophobic comments.

        “Everything in our way should be carefully but decisively removed through deportation,” Navalny said in the video dressed as a dentist, comparing immigrants to dental cavities.”

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
          18·
          10 months ago

          I mean… yeah, I respect. He was an opposition candidate for a government that regularly kills its opponents. He organized for a while, he left Russia for Europe, and then he fucking went back to Russia to organize more. I barely know about any of this stuff and I still knew there was about a 90% chance he’d be killed. And look, they killed him. Because his aim was to bring an improvement to his home country’s system of government.

          I know one thing: If your goal is to have a comfortable life and more for yourself, and you’re not that worried what happens to other people or what kind of world you leave behind when you’re gone, you don’t do that.

          He could have had a long hug and a tongue kiss with Nick Fuentes and I’d still find a lot that’s good to say about him. There’s a lot I respect about Heinz Guderian even though he was a Nazi. There’s a lot I respect about Martin Luther King even though he cheated on his wife. Lyndon Johnson had a ton of things wrong with him and I still like him. I have no idea if any of this about Navalny being far-right is in any way true; it’s the type of thing the Putin regime likes to make up and repeat about its enemies, so maybe it’s a load of horseshit, but honestly it doesn’t impact my assessment of him all that much even if it’s the God’s honest truth. It is ok for people to support bad things and still be good people and have good things about them. Honestly, just the fact that whatever he was doing was enough for Putin to make him public enemy #1 is good enough for me.

          This thing that certain segments of the Lemmy community try to do where you CANNOT support a person, full stop, if they have ever done thing X, Y, or Z, and it COMPLETELY NEGATES anything good they may have done even if there are significant qualifiers to the thing you’re blowing up as X and they only were friends with people who did Y or Z, never did it themselves, and it was all twenty years ago… man, it’s just a bunch of horseshit. I don’t care. Navalny was clearly good, on the total balance, and you’re not gonna be able to convince me otherwise unless he was secretly a serial killer and even then I would want to know how many people were involved and if they’d done anything to deserve it.

          I’m not tryin to jump down your throat about it; I know the “completely negates” isn’t actually what you were trying to say. I’m actually glad for the information even if I’m a little suspicious of the motives behind it. It sounds like we’re more or less on the same page actually. I just thought he showed a ton of courage and commitment and I wish people on the left in the US, whatever they’re going after, would have one tenth of his stones to get out and try to make it happen.

        • rdri@lemmy.world
          3·
          10 months ago

          Yeah and how are those bad things? They are only bad if you forget the context. Context being Russia under Putin with tons of issues and no active legitimate political field. Feel free to ask me of any specific thing if you like, but keep it one at a time please.

      • anticolonialist@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        10 months ago

        My audience would be the people cheering him on without knowing a single thing about him other than opposing Putin. Politically he was as much a threat to Putin being President as the mayor of Wallace Idaho being a threat to Trump or Biden.

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
          5·
          10 months ago

          And yet he did it anyway, and they killed him for it, as he certainly knew that they probably would.

          What have you done?

      • Cosmonauticus@lemmy.world
        5·
        10 months ago

        I mean I didn’t know much about the guys political philosophies outside of opposing Putin until i started seeing posts like this. Sounds to me we shouldn’t really be praising someone who uses the same talking points as the guy running for office who will destroy American democracy

    • frickineh@lemmy.world
      9·
      10 months ago

      I mean, I get where you’re coming from. Navalny may have opposed Putin but it’s not like he was some great guy. But on the flipside, it’s a nice little “fuck you” to Putin, which is rarely a bad thing.

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    10 months ago

    Gotta do something to try and distract from the illegal invasion and genocide Biden does support…

    Can’t be against all of it. That would be progressive.

    Obviously it’s best to oppose one and support the other, it’s halfway between right and wrong, which means it’s moderate and obviously the best choice.

    Imagine if we had a president that was right on Russia and Israel! That would just be too much. We need a leader not afraid to take completely contradictory positions and refuse to even attempt to explain why.

      • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
        5·
        10 months ago

        But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to “hate speech” which was incompatible with the label “prisoner of conscience”. Source

        • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
          5·
          10 months ago

          15 years ago

          A spokesman for the human rights organisation in Moscow told the BBC that he believed the wave of requests to “de-list” Navalny was part of an “orchestrated campaign” to discredit Vladimir Putin’s most vocal critic

          “We had too many requests; we couldn’t ignore them,” spokesman Alexander Artemev told the BBC

          quoted a Twitter thread by Katya Kazbek, a freelance columnist published by the pro-Kremlin channel RT amongst others

          Ms Kazbek, a pseudonym, describes herself online as a “feminist, LGBT researcher, citizen of the world”, but

          other English-language Twitter accounts have regularly

          the move has already been hailed by RT editor Margarita Simonyan on Twitter, who noted the success of “our columnist” Katya Kazbek

          Nelson Mandela had also been stripped of the status in the 1960s

          • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
            1·
            10 months ago

            That’s fair. Many of us have said controversial things in our past, and people change. He can be held up as a symbol for Russian liberation. But, to invite his wife to another country for its annual gathering is to invite those past transgressions and criticisms. It’s problematic.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    4·
    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Tuesday told reporters the invitation had been extended to Ms Navalnaya, but said the Russian opposition figure will not be in First Lady Jill Biden’s box above the House floor when Mr Biden addresses Congress on Thursday.

    Mr Navalny’s funeral took place on Friday in Moscow, with thousands of people paying their respects under a large police presence.

    She is taking on a daunting task, and it remains unclear if she, in cooperation with her husband’s followers and other opposition groups, can seriously challenge the rule of Mr Putin, who’s set to be re-elected once again in March to another six-year term.

    With loyalist security forces, a subservient judiciary, a controlled media environment, and a legislature consisting of a ruling party and pliable opposition factions, the Kremlin manipulates elections and suppresses genuine dissent”.

    While Ms Navalnaya has accused Mr Putin of killing her husband, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called the claim “unfounded” as well as “insolent”.

    At a meeting of the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council last month, she told leaders not to recognize the results of the Russian election in March and to place sanctions on more of Mr Putin’s close allies.

    The original article contains 594 words, the summary contains 200 words. Saved 66%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
    2·
    10 months ago

    Good going… you’ve just given Putin all the evidence he could possibly need or want to show people in Russia that Navalny was a US stooge.

    All the bots in the world couldn’t have handed Putin this kind of propaganda.

    • Rapidcreek@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      10 months ago

      On the other hand, there isn’t a damn thing that won’t conform to Putin’s propaganda machine. If there is nothing, he’ll just make it up. To hell with him.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
        1·
        10 months ago

        You’d think that on a politics community people would have a vague idea how propaganda works… but I guess I was expecting way too much.

                • Rapidcreek@lemmy.worldOP
                  1·
                  10 months ago

                  You seem to think I should give a shit what Putin uses as propaganda. Your latest is to indicate that the Russian people who believe him should be taken into account. Their naivety isn’t my problem and I still don’t care what Putin says.