a little dab will do, see

In longer items I post from time to time in the older ongoing blog on this site, I refer pretty often to YouTuber Vlad Vexler, whose ‘high liberalism,’ as I like to shorthand it for myself (here with a more historical and general, less Americanized idea of liberal in mind), increasingly I reject.

Crudely speaking, you’d place me to Vexler’s left on the spectrum. You won’t hear me speak as Vexler does, for instance, of a Western world of democracies losing their democratic way, since with many generations of e.g. anarchists and socialists I see this West’s standard liberal-democratic democracy as sham democracy, largely, to begin with. Separately but not unrelatedly, I’m quite doubtful about Vexler’s talk of a line recently crossed from an alternative-reality to a post-truth form dominant in political messaging, useful though it can be to think in those terms.

That acknowledged, I share the video below because to my mind it’s a very good one. Anybody living with the last decade’s shift in global political conditions precipitated by (among many factors) the Mid-East / Central-Asia wars of (with large supporting cast) the Bush and Obama governments can profitably lend Vexler an ear here.

Note that Vexler sometimes records from bed owing to a severe myalgic encephalomyelitis turn since contracting Covid last summer.

Vexler in quotable mode at about the 10-minute mark:

Repressions, as they extend in a de-politicized society taking authoritarian turns, will be pointillistic. — um, It’s easy to have the effect you want to have by picking up very very very few people, in the contemporary context. That’s very well illustrated in Russia; the number of political prisoners in Russia is in the low thousands. But that’s sufficient — in a modern society — to have a desired asphyxiating effect.