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Last night I went to bed with the tweeted words of an Aussie compatriot echoing in my mind:
"I'm not an American, but American politics affect world stability. If you're an American, please vote well. Your vote affect the rest of the world"
@DrEricLevi
I awoke today to the news that Alexei Navalny appears to have been poisoned at a Russian airport, and via an emergency landing in Omsk was first hospitalised there, and then, despite attempts by the Russian authorities to interfere, he was transferred to a German hospital. He remains in a coma, in a stable condition.
NPR News via Sloum's Gemini News Site (NB - seems to be a transient page, so...)
Navalny is a hero of mine - he is a crusader against fascism and corruption, and is the owner of a strong voice who has the balls to stand up to the likes of Vladimir Putin, putting himself in the literal firing line on a regular basis. This poisoning is classic KGB / FSB modus operandi, and to me smacks of a new phase of brazen "house cleaning" and power consolidation that Putin seems to be spinning up, serving the dual purpose of a warning to key anti-Russian activists in Belarus.
An "Alternate Universe" Economist Cover Atwork depicting Navalny that I cooked up a few years ago
Why do I connect my bedtime thoughts with the news I was reading with my morning coffee? Because I think that age of Trump is the age of Putin, and that Trump's self-serving greed and narcissism makes him, if not a direct shill for Putin's interests, the perfect impotent "opponent" of Putin. Trump has done more to destabilise the existing geopolitical order in the last 3 years than Putin had managed in the previous 20, and it suits Putin down to the ground. I strongly believe that Navalny would not be in hospital today if Trump had not been president for the last 3? years.
Smolnetter kvothe this weekend wrote a gemlog post reflecting on transparency, authenticity and non-traditional fidelity:
This got me to thinking about the role of intention in authenticity and fidelity. Is true authenticity innate, or is it born of directed intent? Fidelity is a complex thing to negotiate, and is subject to interpretation of rules and boundaries that can be difficult to identify and communicate. It appears that fidelity, and the effectiveness of it as a stabilising force, is quite dependent both on transparency and authenticity.
Trump is ironically transparent, but certainly not by intention. The person he presents to us through his words is egregiously inauthentic, and through his actions he clearly is committing a range of infidelities, of many varieties.
Just what is Trump's contract with the world? His contract with the US is clearer - he took an oath of office, and the terms are, even if broad, quite clearly laid out. With the broader world, his obligations are less transparent. They are not codified, but instead implied, and also are rarely negotiated or even discussed. I think these obligations have become clearer through omission. The Trump presidency has left an unprecedented vacuum of fidelity in the world's leadership echelons, and in the wake of this missing but important element of leadership, the absence of this ethereal quality has rent open a portal through which chaos has flooded. Some of this world's chaos has not been of Trump's creation, but his lack of authentic fidelity in engaging with his obligations has led to us not only failing to overcome these challenges, but in many cases, it has made them far worse than they might have been had Trump simply not been in the role he currently fails to fulfil.
It is with this thought that I come to the conclusion that intentional authenticity is the true authenticity, and it is intentional authenticity, along with transparency, that is the connective tissue that makes true fidelity hold value. Fidelity does not mean being true to an unrealistic ideal. It means being true to our obligations to those with whom we engage, and to the implied and explicit contracts we build with those who matter to us.
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