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Philosopher - ethics, politics, music | Slowly writing a book on Isaiah Berlin | Born in USSR, home is London | Living with ME since 2003. youtube.com/vladvexler (main channel) youtube.com/vladvexlerchat (chat channel) youtube.com/@vladvexlerphilosophy
9,884 followers 119 following 589 posts
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Sunday live on the Chat channel - ONLY personal questions about your worries about politics . . . www.youtube.com/live/_AKbiYO...
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"Trump despises Europe as a project" - my analysis quoted in @indiatodayfacts.bsky.social
Good character is not enough to resist fascism. Under fascist circumstances, decent people fold. What saves you is not good character but grounded good character - sound intent plus psychological stability.
70% of citizens are fascisizible. They are not bad people - it takes circumstances, not bad character, to turn fascist.
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To the victims of Soviet imperialism, Putin’s Russia and the USSR may look the same. But they’re not. The USSR was a distorted, hard-left import of the Enlightenment. Putin’s project is a mystical, hard-right, fascisised enterprise.
When You Can’t Breathe With Long COVID #longcovid #pwme youtu.be/CdeSy6xGgLs?...
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The deeper problem isn’t the mediocrity of these leaders. It’s that their job is so difficult compared with 10 or 20 years ago, that meeting its challenges without passivity and evasion takes historically exceptional leadership skills.4/4
Behind it all is the magical thinking that the best way forward is to get on Trump’s good side and nudge his stance a little in Ukraine’s favor. A collective tactic by European leaders that is based on illusion and accelerates their own replacement by Trumpism in Europe. 3/4
European leaders turning their back on crucial issues in order to keep the show on the road, such as Putin’s demand for the Donbas. European leaders speaking of security guarantees without being clear about what they can actually do, and without seriousness about being taken seriously by Putin. 2/4
The WH meeting was a spectacle of decline. A U.S. President too self-serving to be strategic, in a ludicrous narcissistic marriage with Putin, while also undermining institutions and state capacity at home in the US - which will make it difficult for future US administrations to be strategic. 1/4
a light hearted Chat - youtu.be/m0KVHThBSRQ?...
🔴🎥 MAIN CHANNEL VIDEO! www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K3y...
Trump got nothing in exchange for rolling out the red carpet for Putin. He didn’t even try to leverage his concession - partly because he knows so little about the world and didn’t know how to.
Big symbolic win for Putin. The biggest impact of the Alaska meeting is a disinhibiting effect - it will feed and normalise Putin romanticism in the West.
Putin lands in Alaska with two goals: 1. Bilateralism - let’s do things together and forget about Europe and Ukraine. 2. For Trump to pressure Kyiv into a weaker position - Putin’s aim is not territory but an undefended, authoritarian, Moscow-friendly Ukraine.
Chat on imperial borderlessness www.youtube.com/watch?v=7g2V...
… the borderlessness of a might-is-right imperial politics Putin and Trump largely share in common. What’s mine is mine until someone takes it; what’s yours is your until I take it - and Putin would add, what’s mine is mine only so long as I preemotively defend it by taking yours.2/2
Trump’s slip, that he is going to Russia when he is going to Alaska, and the meeting itself, and Trump’s latest attack on Zelensky - all of this is a commentary on … 1/2
A provincial mind: one that engages with Beethoven’s compositions or Cézanne’s paintings without meeting them on their own terms - substituting what the works actually say for what educated-class chit-chat says about them.
The strongest urge I have as an ill person is to work. Not to be stopped from working by illness, incapacity and suffering.
The only major politician in the UK who deeply taps into citizens’ concerns is also a politician who rides the public mood for self-gain, with little regard for truth or institutions: Nigel Farage.
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This too is an embarrassing lesson for Europe: failing to see how much Trump and Putin are in the same ideological camp - calamities generated by a global wash of revolutionary monarchism. 4/4
In Europe, this kind of weakness may soon be washed away at the polling booth, and replaced with a new bogus version of strength - our own home grown Trumpism and Putinism. 3/4
Democratic decline affects Europe too, and what we’ve seen is Europe spectacularly unable to act, and spectacularly unable to understand how to act - namely, by leading and proposing its own table of politics, rather than lamentably trying to influence Trump. 2/4
The Trump-Putin meeting in Alaska, with Ukraine and Europe sidelined, is a product of imperial decline - secondary to democratic decline. Democratic decline creates foreign policy incapacity - and even farce. 1/4
Rapid notes on a Trump-Putin meeting open.substack.com/pub/vladvexl...
Instead, journalists need to dig into the history of ME denial. A history of inappropriate psychologisation of ME to service not patients but psychiatry - a profession in existential crisis. You wouldn’t write “human-influenced climate change is real” in 2025. Don’t do it with ME. 3/3
Because in UK health journalism, “getting the facts” often means repeating what a GP mate told you over lunch, rather than reading the research and checking the facts. These headlines aren’t just lazy. They echo the distortions that stalled ME research in the first place. 2/3
The #DecodeME study is terrific - a milestone in biomedical science. But headlines like “ME is real” are not good journalism. ME was already scientifically established by the mid-1990s. And clinical evidence has supported its reality since the 1950s. So why do we get these headlines? #pwME 1/3
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It’s impossible to return to the stability of 1989-2014, and what is happening now is much closer to a version of historical normal.
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The West’s failure to resist Putin, and the Democrats’ failure to oppose Trump, are parts of the same crisis. 2/2
We think of our conflict with Russia too narrowly - as just international relations. But it’s part of a deeper global conflict: new authoritarianism vs an exhausted liberal-democratic worldview. And that conflict plays out within nations as much as between them. 1/2
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Prof Tim O'Hagan (1945-2025) The Philosopher Who Taught Me Has Died open.substack.com/pub/vladvexl...
White identity politics is coming in the 2030s, on a bigger scale than anything we see today. To stop it, we must stop grounding the rights of disadvantaged groups in difference and separateness. And ground them instead in solidarity and the public good.
Many pro-Ukraine Westerners are defending Zelensky the way depoliticised Russians defend Putin: “he loves his country, so even if something he did looks bad, there must be a good reason for it, even if don’t know what it is.”
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Very rapid notes on a shifting moment. Trump wants to break Europe - but he is wrecking American power. open.substack.com/pub/vladvexl...
A video on the philosophy channel about that makes one a professional artist, musician, painter, philosopher, wine taster . . . www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKHq...
Thank you!
To shield Europe from Putin, we must spend more on defence. But if that spending guts the welfare state, trust collapses even faster, and our defence budgets fall into the hands of authoritarian populists who admire Putin. Protection risks becoming submission by other means.
When democratic decline looms, it’s scary and there is a tendency to react with the minimal effective dose. But minimal doses don’t work in the age of democratic decline. In fact, they fuel our crisis.
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Trump is incapable of arriving at a stable understanding of any major issue. The idea that he’s “progressing” misunderstands who he is. He doesn’t grow - he relives the same day over and over, hunting for narcissistic supply.
Correction to the commentariat reaction that Trump has lost patience and done an about-face with Putin: Trump is episodically frustrated with his ideological ally, Vladimir Putin.
I wheeled myself in my electric wheelchair to the kitchen and made tea. First time in two months. Don’t know what it will cost.
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The most underestimated emotion in politics is fear - in particular, fear that becomes fantastical and attributes danger to things which are not dangerous.
My initial take on the latest wave of talk of Russian economic collapse www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFPU...
You don't challenge unless you have intimacy with this person, but you can point out that you have a different view. Remember, the psychology of conspiracy is that what really matters is what you can't see. So it's very hard to challenge.
Death of Putin's Minister - a regime that feeds on itself to survive (latest Substack) open.substack.com/pub/vladvexl...
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Important epistemic Chat - www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBua...
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Rutte’s flattery of Trump is a humiliating demonstration of Western decline: it normalises the monarchist ideology spreading across the globe.
When language deteriorates here on social media - it deteriorates everywhere in society from politics to academia.
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Kind of you Chris
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What can I do better?
Trump feels might is right so he is constitutively pro war 🌻
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The Real Reason Trump Bombed Iran - Trump's terrifying lack of strategy. My first Substack piece. open.substack.com/pub/vladvexl...
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A special Chat today celebrating Alfred Brendel - I wouldn't be Vlad without him. #AlfredBrendel www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9Q0...
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Alfred Brendel has died. Alfred means more to me than I can say. I will be taping a little tribute tonight, but here is an interview about Brendel's career I did around his 91th birthday 4 years ago - #alfredbrendel www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMcL...
Trump’s “everyone should evacuate Tehran immediately” line is a sadistic version of narcissistic supply - wanting drama, and specifically, drama in which others suffer mentally or physically.
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Is this an intellectually lazy left-wing meme? Yes and no. Yes - because claiming both are just “oligarchic tyranny” is childish. No - because neoliberalism has a structural risk of leading to and morphing into exclusionary authoritarianism.
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From Vlad's ME Diary on YouTube: First Wheelchair Trip to Kitchen - Crash! www.youtube.com/watch?v=d34l...
If you love me, watch this film. It’s about my illness - ME - and it’s powerful. It's in Ger with Eng subs, co-directed while severely ill by my online friend, the filmmaker @sibylledahrendorf.bsky.social You can rent it on Vimeo. It’s only up for a short time. vimeo.com/ondemand/chr...
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Musk won't move back to centre. He will radicalise and want to break the system more.
Chat - Trump-Putin call, Putin's reaction to Spiderweb, and a critical reading of Stanovaya piece. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlaa...
My thoughts on illness and loss, on the Vlad's ME Diary channel www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxh8...
He thinks all of the above. The one he is most worried about is Trump actually. That's my analysis of what he thinks.
Putin is so cocky despite Operation Spiderweb because he thinks - (1) Russia will inevitably progress on the battlefield (2) The West is in decline and Europe can't carry Ukraine (3) Trump isn't pressuring Russia seriously (4) The Russian economy will not collapse
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Ukraine's unprecedented drone attack on Russia's strategic aviation - analytical Chat www.youtube.com/watch?v=UblQ...
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People who are able to be positive in our time have a responsibility to communicate that. A lot of people need someone to lean on.
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