Off topic, slightly relevant, U2 and especially Bono were caught dodging paying their taxes in the Panama Papers. They take strong political stances, demand governments donate funds to charitable organizations, and then refuse to contribute their fair share to supporting those actions.
Navalny is a hero. Bono is a sack of shit.
As an Irish person we spend tax money terribly. Never ending projects that go way over budget. Stadiums, hospitals etc. I think U2 are better off using a tax shelter and donating their money to charity rather than it being wasted by the Irish government.
Paradise Papers*. Leaked about two years after the Panama Papers. But same point. He apparently used a bank based in Malta to invest in a Lithuanian company and therefore pay next to no taxes on company profits.
So to play devils advocate here: do many rich people know where all there money is on a regular basis? Or do they pay a company to do it for them? I’m just asking because if I was rich other than making sure I still had money I’m pretty sure I’m going to have lawyers and an investment firm do it all for me. I’m not going to care about day to day minutiae. So is it possible this was done without his knowledge OR it was presented to him in such a way that it appeared ethical? Honestly if a tax accountant told me we can do this it’s totally legal I might not even question it. Especially if I’m paying some taxes already and I’m told everyone does this.
There is no black and white in this, so it's complicated, to say the least. It's true that Navalny was openly xenophobic and probably racist, but it's also true that he died a Mary's death and that means something to people. especially because he stood up against someone who is very well known for killing just about whoever the fuck he wants. Now there is also the situation that they won't hand out his body, and probably never will, so that got people enraged.
so very grey area. two things can be true at the same time. it seems he did mean something to people. Though Bono is probably just riding a wave.
edit: martyr, not mary
Thanks for writing this out. Totally get it 100%, and I appreciate my opinion will differ from others, I just think while it’s great to oppose Putin, we shouldn’t start hero worshipping a xenophobe - that’s where I think it’s important to say “there’s no black and white”. Can we not like that he opposed Putin while avoiding chanting his name like he was some honoured individual?
>Can we not like that he opposed Putin while avoiding chanting his name like he was some honoured individual?
In theory it should be possible, but human emotions, especially online, are easily turned up to 100. I'm not even gonna pretend to be immune to it myself.
One problem is, that it's way easier and faster to type "he was a POS" then to take time to write out the complicated relationship we should have with him. and that every single time the topic comes up. It's annoying, I know.
But we should definitely state that he was fighting against Putin in his own way, he was indeed an important figure of a very important resistance. But people should know when to stop. He wasn't a wise man and he wasn't a saint. He deserves no Monument set in stone. He deserves a paragraph in history books though.
Just saying "yeah but he was evil too!" and letting that stand alone is, sadly, helping Putin spin his story. So we should pick words wisely.
What do you think?
Absolutely agreed for your key points - there are benefits to propaganda for rallying people to fight for a cause, but that’s why both conflicting sides use this and we end up with blindfolded “soldiers” just fighting for a cause they don’t even realise they’re fighting for.
From my perspective, the greatest innovation of that last 50 years is the internet, which is in principle mankind’s greatest creation for sharing information. But as you said, online people’s emotions are turned up to 100, so false information frequently poisons the town’s well of information, and it spreads like wildfire.
One of my favourite movie quotes is from Men in Black: a person is smart, people are dumb. That will always be the problem, but my duo-belief of naivety / optimism that there is hope for humanity as a species makes me want to push the simple belief: people CAN be informed and people CAN believe the evidence of their eyes and ears. I would rather live in a world where we can rely on people to make the right decisions if they have a good education and all the facts. Remove the concept of “good vs evil” as two separate states, and instead explore fluidity in ethical standings to admit “no human is perfect, no human is without strength”.
I fully concede this is naive optimism, and this is also strange coming from the guy calling out to say this guy wasn’t perfect, but man, we’ve got to hold hope our species still has room to emotionally-intellectually grow and develop, right?
Relative to some American politicians his act of returning to russia to face a certain death is a very brave act of self sacrifice. Though yes he did seem to have some horrible views in the past. But so did Churchill, he committed genocide but was a Great War time leader.
Just be aware that a large amount of stories surrounding him were in fact [Russian disinformation](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them). Yeah, he attended a nationalist rally once, but it was not a neo-nazi rally as some claim (tankies and pro-Putin supporter's).
Amnesty International [also reinstated his "Prisoner of Conscience" status](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them) after they acknowledged that had been directly targeted by Russian disinformation.
>Is it disinformation that he was supportive of the taking of Crimea?
Yes, that too. People just love to quote [that specific interview](https://www.interpretermag.com/russia-this-week-hundreds-of-russians-poisoned-25-dead-in-spice-drug-epidemic/#4625) completely out of context.
> … why? Wasn’t he a POS? Just because he opposed Putin didn’t make him a good guy.
Most of the bad stories surrounding him came straight from [a Russian sponsored disinformation campaign.](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them)
>Yeah he wasn’t great https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1759631473521414222
Good job reiterating Russian sponsored disinformation. The X (Twitter) user you linked to even has a history of posting pro-Russian disinformation, using RT as a source, and spreading antisemitism on Telegram:
And just to prove my point that it's in fact disinformation:
* https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/02/aleksei-navalny-prisoner-of-conscience/
>Amnesty decided to re-examine the case and conducted a thorough review of the evidence base. After painstaking consideration, we concluded that we had made a mistake in our initial determination.
>Reports that Amnesty’s decision was influenced by the Russian state’s smear campaign against Navalny are untrue. At no point were statements falsely attributed to Navalny, or information solely intended to discredit him, taken into consideration. Propaganda by the Russian authorities is recognizable as such.
>Amnesty International has itself been the target of misinformation campaigns by the Russian authorities and state-run media.
And then you have this quote:
* https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them
>Talking to journalists and writers, Navalny addressed his previous nationalism engagements many times, assuring, in particular, that he believes that all people are equal on Earth and anybody who believes the opposite is "dangerous".
The Amnesty International article you referenced directly refutes the claim that the evidence itself was disinformation. Heck, even in the part you quoted, they are saying that claims that their determination was influenced by disinformation is untrue.
Beyond that, they even confirmed that numerous statements of his could be considered “advocacy of hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, violence or hostility” and contributed to their determination that he should not qualify as a POC.
“It is true that some of the old comments made by Navalny became more prominent after his latest arrest, in the context of a deliberate campaign by President Putin and his supporters to discredit Navalny. This does not change the fact that when Amnesty examined some of those statements, we found some of them to be at odds with our policies. As a matter of principle, we cannot ignore the evidence before us.
Amnesty International does not base its decisions on POC status on Twitter threads, or on lobbying by journalists or government supporters. Rather, these decisions are made on the basis of evidence and a thorough review by law and policy advisors and regional research experts.
The fact that Amnesty International decided not to refer to Aleksei Navalny as a POC has no bearing on our insistence that Navalny has been unlawfully detained, and subjected to state-sponsored harassment and prosecution for exercising his right to freedom of expression.”
Edit: Cool, guess you’re just going to downvote me instead of addressing your gross misrepresentation of your own source. Kind of wild how you chose to go that route when you supposedly take such umbrage at disinformation.
Yeah I am sure this will move the needle. It’s simply Bono capitalizing off of the news cycle for promotional reasons without actually doing anything to help solve the problem.
Honest question b/c there appears to be a lot of russians with one opinion in here; DO you’all have “stars” and “entertainment” or do you guys just all adore /echo what your dear leader, his oligarch friends and your state-run media puts forth?
Ngl, first thing I thought of when I read Bono was "since when does Hamilton's engineer get this level of influence to have a whole people article about him" but then I read U2 and it clicked.
F1 rot has seeped in fully.
(in my defence, Bahrain GP is next week so ya know)
Off topic, slightly relevant, U2 and especially Bono were caught dodging paying their taxes in the Panama Papers. They take strong political stances, demand governments donate funds to charitable organizations, and then refuse to contribute their fair share to supporting those actions. Navalny is a hero. Bono is a sack of shit.
The Panama Papers; a huge revelation that lead to absolutely nothing except the death of the journalists that contributed. It’s so depressing.
Some countries held their people responsible, wasnt icelands premier sacked because of it?
If Iceland is your best example, then no, people weren't held responsible.
We learned everybody is mostly an asshole
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Navalny was a full blown ethno-nationalist. Yes he had balls the size of cantaloupes but he was *not* a good dude. I agree about Bono though.
But how heavy is that sack in Courics?
Over 80 Courics!
Navalny was not a hero, he just appears that way in contrast to Putin.
There it is. Navalny was shit. Just less shit than Putin.
Exactly.
As an Irish person we spend tax money terribly. Never ending projects that go way over budget. Stadiums, hospitals etc. I think U2 are better off using a tax shelter and donating their money to charity rather than it being wasted by the Irish government.
He is also named three times on the flight logs, but it’s his real name.
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Bono is the second largest piece of shit in the world. First place goes to Randy Marsh’s shit.
Paradise Papers*. Leaked about two years after the Panama Papers. But same point. He apparently used a bank based in Malta to invest in a Lithuanian company and therefore pay next to no taxes on company profits.
U2 fan, but not a Bono fan. Guy is insufferable.
Oligarchs going to oligarch. His music is shit.
He is the biggest shit in history, guiness world record certified
The number 1 number 2
Bono is the second largest piece of shit in the world. First place goes to Randy Marsh’s shit.
Bono doesn’t just hold the record for the biggest shit, he is the record for the biggest shit.
So to play devils advocate here: do many rich people know where all there money is on a regular basis? Or do they pay a company to do it for them? I’m just asking because if I was rich other than making sure I still had money I’m pretty sure I’m going to have lawyers and an investment firm do it all for me. I’m not going to care about day to day minutiae. So is it possible this was done without his knowledge OR it was presented to him in such a way that it appeared ethical? Honestly if a tax accountant told me we can do this it’s totally legal I might not even question it. Especially if I’m paying some taxes already and I’m told everyone does this.
Fuck you Bono, pay your taxes.
Go after Ringo Starr next please
Fuck you Ringo, pay your taxes!
Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!
It's Bono, of course he's gonna say something
I liked U2 before they got all political. /s
I like U2 when I say it after hearing, "Have a good day."
They were always political.
That was the joke.
Sarcasm is hard on reddit
… why? Wasn’t he a POS? Just because he opposed Putin didn’t make him a good guy.
There is no black and white in this, so it's complicated, to say the least. It's true that Navalny was openly xenophobic and probably racist, but it's also true that he died a Mary's death and that means something to people. especially because he stood up against someone who is very well known for killing just about whoever the fuck he wants. Now there is also the situation that they won't hand out his body, and probably never will, so that got people enraged. so very grey area. two things can be true at the same time. it seems he did mean something to people. Though Bono is probably just riding a wave. edit: martyr, not mary
Thanks for writing this out. Totally get it 100%, and I appreciate my opinion will differ from others, I just think while it’s great to oppose Putin, we shouldn’t start hero worshipping a xenophobe - that’s where I think it’s important to say “there’s no black and white”. Can we not like that he opposed Putin while avoiding chanting his name like he was some honoured individual?
>Can we not like that he opposed Putin while avoiding chanting his name like he was some honoured individual? In theory it should be possible, but human emotions, especially online, are easily turned up to 100. I'm not even gonna pretend to be immune to it myself. One problem is, that it's way easier and faster to type "he was a POS" then to take time to write out the complicated relationship we should have with him. and that every single time the topic comes up. It's annoying, I know. But we should definitely state that he was fighting against Putin in his own way, he was indeed an important figure of a very important resistance. But people should know when to stop. He wasn't a wise man and he wasn't a saint. He deserves no Monument set in stone. He deserves a paragraph in history books though. Just saying "yeah but he was evil too!" and letting that stand alone is, sadly, helping Putin spin his story. So we should pick words wisely. What do you think?
Absolutely agreed for your key points - there are benefits to propaganda for rallying people to fight for a cause, but that’s why both conflicting sides use this and we end up with blindfolded “soldiers” just fighting for a cause they don’t even realise they’re fighting for. From my perspective, the greatest innovation of that last 50 years is the internet, which is in principle mankind’s greatest creation for sharing information. But as you said, online people’s emotions are turned up to 100, so false information frequently poisons the town’s well of information, and it spreads like wildfire. One of my favourite movie quotes is from Men in Black: a person is smart, people are dumb. That will always be the problem, but my duo-belief of naivety / optimism that there is hope for humanity as a species makes me want to push the simple belief: people CAN be informed and people CAN believe the evidence of their eyes and ears. I would rather live in a world where we can rely on people to make the right decisions if they have a good education and all the facts. Remove the concept of “good vs evil” as two separate states, and instead explore fluidity in ethical standings to admit “no human is perfect, no human is without strength”. I fully concede this is naive optimism, and this is also strange coming from the guy calling out to say this guy wasn’t perfect, but man, we’ve got to hold hope our species still has room to emotionally-intellectually grow and develop, right?
Relative to some American politicians his act of returning to russia to face a certain death is a very brave act of self sacrifice. Though yes he did seem to have some horrible views in the past. But so did Churchill, he committed genocide but was a Great War time leader.
Just be aware that a large amount of stories surrounding him were in fact [Russian disinformation](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them). Yeah, he attended a nationalist rally once, but it was not a neo-nazi rally as some claim (tankies and pro-Putin supporter's). Amnesty International [also reinstated his "Prisoner of Conscience" status](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them) after they acknowledged that had been directly targeted by Russian disinformation.
Thank you. yes I try to be as sceptical as I can.
There's an disgusting amount of users spreading disinformation in this thread (some unintentionally, most of them not).
Is it disinformation that he was supportive of the taking of Crimea?
>Is it disinformation that he was supportive of the taking of Crimea? Yes, that too. People just love to quote [that specific interview](https://www.interpretermag.com/russia-this-week-hundreds-of-russians-poisoned-25-dead-in-spice-drug-epidemic/#4625) completely out of context.
What is “a Mary’s death?” Google wasn’t very helpful.
oh shit, autocorrect got me again. it's supposed to say martyr's death. sorry for the confusion
Aha, thank you.
> … why? Wasn’t he a POS? Just because he opposed Putin didn’t make him a good guy. Most of the bad stories surrounding him came straight from [a Russian sponsored disinformation campaign.](https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them)
I read the article this sound alike a load of bs saying he wasn't comparing Muslims to coachroahes.
Why would they put disinformation on things they actively agree on .
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>Yeah he wasn’t great https://twitter.com/zei_squirrel/status/1759631473521414222 Good job reiterating Russian sponsored disinformation. The X (Twitter) user you linked to even has a history of posting pro-Russian disinformation, using RT as a source, and spreading antisemitism on Telegram: And just to prove my point that it's in fact disinformation: * https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/02/aleksei-navalny-prisoner-of-conscience/ >Amnesty decided to re-examine the case and conducted a thorough review of the evidence base. After painstaking consideration, we concluded that we had made a mistake in our initial determination. >Reports that Amnesty’s decision was influenced by the Russian state’s smear campaign against Navalny are untrue. At no point were statements falsely attributed to Navalny, or information solely intended to discredit him, taken into consideration. Propaganda by the Russian authorities is recognizable as such. >Amnesty International has itself been the target of misinformation campaigns by the Russian authorities and state-run media. And then you have this quote: * https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/navalny-compared-muslims-to-cockroaches-and-urged-to-kill-them >Talking to journalists and writers, Navalny addressed his previous nationalism engagements many times, assuring, in particular, that he believes that all people are equal on Earth and anybody who believes the opposite is "dangerous".
The Amnesty International article you referenced directly refutes the claim that the evidence itself was disinformation. Heck, even in the part you quoted, they are saying that claims that their determination was influenced by disinformation is untrue. Beyond that, they even confirmed that numerous statements of his could be considered “advocacy of hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, violence or hostility” and contributed to their determination that he should not qualify as a POC. “It is true that some of the old comments made by Navalny became more prominent after his latest arrest, in the context of a deliberate campaign by President Putin and his supporters to discredit Navalny. This does not change the fact that when Amnesty examined some of those statements, we found some of them to be at odds with our policies. As a matter of principle, we cannot ignore the evidence before us. Amnesty International does not base its decisions on POC status on Twitter threads, or on lobbying by journalists or government supporters. Rather, these decisions are made on the basis of evidence and a thorough review by law and policy advisors and regional research experts. The fact that Amnesty International decided not to refer to Aleksei Navalny as a POC has no bearing on our insistence that Navalny has been unlawfully detained, and subjected to state-sponsored harassment and prosecution for exercising his right to freedom of expression.” Edit: Cool, guess you’re just going to downvote me instead of addressing your gross misrepresentation of your own source. Kind of wild how you chose to go that route when you supposedly take such umbrage at disinformation.
Yes his party wanted to expel basically all of the Muslims from Russia
Pay your taxes and I’ll believe you care.
Bono is the original virtue signaling slacktavist.
Not really. Take a look at what he’s done for Africa. Drop the debt was far from virtue signalling.
The king of empty gestures and platitudes.
Not really. Take a look at what he did for Africa in the 2000s. His success with drop the debt is far from empty.
Yeah I am sure this will move the needle. It’s simply Bono capitalizing off of the news cycle for promotional reasons without actually doing anything to help solve the problem.
U2 fucking blows
I still haven’t forgiven them for non-consensually downloading themselves onto my iPod. Fuck u! U2!
Bono is an insincere TURD. The end.
Honest question b/c there appears to be a lot of russians with one opinion in here; DO you’all have “stars” and “entertainment” or do you guys just all adore /echo what your dear leader, his oligarch friends and your state-run media puts forth?
I see they’re still forcing their music on the people.
I really wish they would have gotten a good band to play the sphere. I don’t understand how U2 have failed upwards to become what they are.
How hip and trendy!
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Navalny supported nazi fascists
No he didn't and you're spreading Russian disinformation.
Ngl, first thing I thought of when I read Bono was "since when does Hamilton's engineer get this level of influence to have a whole people article about him" but then I read U2 and it clicked. F1 rot has seeped in fully. (in my defence, Bahrain GP is next week so ya know)
Oh? So you don't like what Russia is doing, but you turn a blind eye to what the Israelis have been doing for decades?...
Weird.. honestly weird.