Health allowing, I’ll go live later - from a more horizontal position than usual. I’ll take any Qs about my illness - ME, Long Covid - and how it shapes my work and limits. You can also bring Qs about your chronic illness journey. We’ll explore together. www.youtube.com/live/dQuJPpH...

Health update! Covid on top of ME and Long Covid. Day 5 has been the worst yet, with an episode similar to one that sent me spiralling in hospital 5 months ago. Didn’t get monoclonals as impossible to travel by ambulance. Didn’t take anti virals because of drug interaction, reactivity & rebound risk

What we are losing in politics is ethical adequacy. Political decisions can’t ever be just an application of ethics to politics - politics is too much a craft of the necessary and the possible for that. But it’s a disaster when ethical considerations simply fall by the wayside.

Health update! Covid on top of ME & Long Covid. Day 4 has been the hardest yet. I wasn’t well enough to get to the monoclonal antibodies infusion we’d fought so hard for - not even with an ambulance. If you’re freaking out politically, I got you and watch this space for my return to the channels 💛

Historical probabilities are ludicrous, but they offer psychological clues. The US is heading for democratic collapse in the 2030s. Odds: 50–70%. The key variable is whether a pro-institutional but anti-technocratic/neoliberal project will rise to counter authoritarian populism.

Was Stephen Miller’s speech fascist? Let's rate it on my ideological intensity scale for fascism. open.substack.com/pub/vladvexl...

"The Coming Age of American Putinism". Putinism and Trumpism share ideological DNA. They are two versions of the same global ideology - a kind of consumerist monarchism that makes might into right. 🎥Watch now on the main YouTube channel

We need to snap out of the idea that Russian interference is the main threat. Our democracies are going Putinist organically. If we strip away the mysticism of the Putin regime, we get a mix of monarchism, neoliberalism, and fascism. 1/2

Slightly odd cameo on BBC, but glad my comments about normalising post-truth populists are getting traction -

I'm truly sorry to hear about the horrific shooting of Charlie Kirk. Political killing is the paradigm of friend and enemy politics, and friend and enemy politics is the enemy of democracy.

The Russian population are betting on Russia’s political system, which is opaque to them, to save them from a crisis which is opaque to them, by means which are opaque to them.

To understand our culture, one of the first things you need to grasp is that the magical thinking of Trump voters is mirrored by the magical thinking of people who think that Trump is an aberration.

Sunday live on the Chat channel - ONLY personal questions about your worries about politics . . . www.youtube.com/live/_AKbiYO...

"Trump despises Europe as a project" - my analysis quoted in @indiatodayfacts.bsky.social

70% of citizens are fascisizible. They are not bad people - it takes circumstances, not bad character, to turn fascist.

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?...

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...

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.