February 2021

How do those who support the NSW Government and Gladys possibly justify that only 1% of the $177 million of bushfire relief money went to Labor electorates? And that the Blue Mountains electorate (Labor), that had the Gospers Mountain and one other mega-fire in the same outbreak, got NOT ONE CENT of the bushfire relief money? Some of this money went to LNP electorates for projects like local sporting clubs, nothing to do with bushfires at all. Large portions of it went to major LNP donors, again with no connection to bushfires at all. There wasn't even an application process, no records (again) of how decisions were made. Can poor Glady's broken heart from dipshit boyfriend distraction make people ignore this latest round of corruption too? This is populism, where nobody pays attention to details of anything important.

The national strategy for Covid *is* elimination. Agreed by National Cabinet in July 2020. Do people need any clearer proof that NSW (this is the Deputy Premier) isn't following it?

The ad has 'crossed a line', the government says. Heh, this from the people who used a pandemic to smash working conditions and wages, give tens of billions in tax cuts to the wealthy, and free access to the Treasury to a foreign-owned gas industry. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/porter-calls-union-ad-a-new-low-in-politics-20210201-p56ycr.html

The PM said today we can’t run the Australian economy using ‘taxpayer’s money’. Curious what people think the circled word below means?

The rest of the developed world is trying to use vaccines to escape this pandemic quickly. They won't succeed. A disgraceful collapse of international public health processes, driven by fools who think we live in economies, and not societies. What's more Europe and the US's continued refusal to control the spread of infection is undermining these same vaccines, as they roll them out.https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/01/world/australia/perth-lockdown.html?smid=tw-share

Still think this will be the big shitfight. Politicians have been keen to tell people vaccines will end the pandemic. That’s very unlikely, all the same social distancing and masks etc. will need to continue. Rich countries refuse to understand the seriousness of a pandemic, and what it takes to beat one. Spoiled, precious dears.

Several people I know have said they won’t be getting a vaccination any time soon, because they’re worried the vaccines haven’t been tested enough. To them I offer one of the hundreds of thousands of ‘tests’ that the alternative can be death for the whole family.

Happy birthday!

Obviously botox, fillers and plastic surgery are good for the body though. 'Natural', presumably. https://thenewdaily.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/2021/02/02/olivia-newton-john-anti-vaxx/

Help me again here. The debate is about sex and gender, which are said to be not the same thing (fine). And some people don't identify as the sex they were born with. But a sex doesn't have a gender, by this logic, so there's nothing to identify with? You can't feel like or identify as a 'male' or 'female', because those are sexes, not genders.

The PM refuses to understand that an ‘Economy’ is just people with money. He’s doing everything he can to stop ordinary people having more money. It’s what his big donors want.

You’ll hear the same argument here I’m sure from the Economy crowd. Once the most vulnerable are vaccinated, get rid of the restrictions. An idiot suggestion.

Australia's greatest Covid risk is hotel quarantine. To say it again, who is responsible for quarantine in Australia? The federal government. Why are States doing it, through hotels? Because ScoMo is too lazy to do it. And people think he's doing a great job, we may as well just elect our own Trump now. https://www.news.com.au/world/coronavirus/australia/coronavirus-perth-lockdown-nsw-restrictions-cases-numbers-victoria-and-qld-borders/live-coverage/5a1251ce0354dc501a808afe4e1f3235

Radio host today, asks why Australians are so ‘compliant’ with health orders? Bizarre, how collective action is now seen as compliance. The victory of those who want to turn citizens into consumers, and countries into businesses.

Liberal Party logo on this announcement? Insiders say an early election is planned, capitalising on the pandemic. Just as they used the pandemic to run toxic policies through. They disgust me. (Incidentally there’s been no announcement *when* these extra doses are coming, let’s see.)

Happy birthday!

Economics looks dry and boring, because it's designed to, to make you not pay attention. Look at this train wreck coming, hidden in a graph. At the moment that big dip down to about -15 is the government spending to keep the 'economy' going. But look what it plans to do in the next 2 years. Reduce that to less than -5. That, people, is what is called 'austerity'. Society will be trying to recover from the pandemic, and what does ScoMo plan to do? Slash spending. Eviscerate it. What the Tories tried in the UK, a disaster. ScoMo hopes the 'private sector' will fill the gap. It won't, it's in critical condition.

The reason the PM is reluctant to act against the likes of Craig Kelly is that he hoovers up all the Trumpians here in Australia, to vote for the LNP. That vote is significant, otherwise the PM would just cut him loose. And shows, again, that Australia is deeply infected with populism already, the same virus destroying the UK and US. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/scott-morrison-defied-by-craig-kelly-posting-covid19-treatment-misinformation-on-facebook/news-story/04ab5622da9454bbca91725530900577#.q32fu

The average working person's wages and conditions have been decimated for decades (mostly because they stopped joining unions). Private debt creates an illusion that people are well-off. Now you may be forced to sell your home - if you even own one - via a reverse mortgage, before you get a sniff of old aged pension. Notice they already raised the pension age. Homes ridiculously over-valued by the same private debt, so the whole scheme will collapse anyway (who will pay if sale of the home at somebody's death doesn't cover their reverse mortgage?). And we still line up to vote for the bastards who decide this, every time. Dumb slaves, that's us.

The mythology of ‘children aren’t impacted by Covid’ is joining the long list of anti-lockdowner myths in the rubbish bin.

We should look on with shame and alarm that when tested by a true collective threat, our response in the developed world has been overwhelmingly about individual complaint. We’ve used a collective threat as a platform for individual complaint. We’ve lost the idea of the ‘public’. The same people who turned our societies into economies, also turned the public into individual consumers. We respond to collective threats like pissed off customers.

Those who wear glasses, what’s your experience with self-tinting lenses? I’m told the technology has improved a lot.

A lot of my working life has been about running meetings. If you didn’t see this today, it’s a hoot. Also why I don’t bash pollies, ordinary people are mostly pretty incapable of working together on anything. And they then just delegate all the crap to politicians to sort out.

The Sun has 99.8% of the mass of the solar system. It’s not called a solar system for nothing, we’re bit players.

See how desperate the LNP are to destroy super? First they let you raid it in the pandemic, rather than them give you money. Then they suggested first homebuyers use it to buy a house. Now they’re gradually replacing all forms of government assistance with ‘raid your super’. How bad do they have to bitch slap us before we start to ignore their marketing slogans and actually think?

Also why Sizzlers always made me nervous. People are disgusting.

I think it’s fair to say that in Australia, university work is still considered some sort of waffle. Tradies are the heroes, they do ‘real work’. Ideas are the source of all wealth.

Surprising that demographics isn’t more often used to explain things. Crime has plummeted, because our societies are old.

Have had horrible foot problems for the past month. On the mend, but it’s been a perfect example again of how our ideas about medicine divvy the body up into (billable) bits, and farm you off to a specialist on each bit. Unfortunately nearly always medical problems are about how all the bits work together. There are no doctors for that. So I do that bit myself, figuring out the connections. The problem had nothing to do with my feet. The same problem is impacting my eyesight.

Walking looks entirely different from above. What you can see is how it’s a rotational act, with the whole body rotating clockwise and anti-clockwise with alternate steps. @[100062898426616:2048:Ben] showed me that Darwin said the movement of all living things is foundationally this spiralling or rotation, and now I can’t remember the technical name! It has profound implications for your body and health - many, many illnesses are the result of a breakdown or fixation of these rotations, creating lingering torques in your tissues and bones. Even eye problems. https://youtu.be/lYIQy0-geiY

Gotta wonder how farmers feel about their party spending most of its time trying to further the interests of multi-national mining companies. It’s probably why they’re now voting for the Shooters and Fishers.

Freedom is going to work? Arbeit macht frei, as the Nazis said? Heh, not only did we stop joining unions who fight for us, but we embrace the spin from business leaders, who somehow convinced millions of us that staying in our own homes (you know, where we usually are on ‘days off’) is destroying our freedom. Going to work is freedom, people! Lol. You can’t make this stuff up.

Happy Birthday Nige!

Straya! And the people who brought you all this are *gaining* in popularity with voters. Which means, basically, that as voters you and I are stoopid. (And, to be fair, it means we have an old society that doesn't really give a shit about most of these things, it's holidaying with fat super payouts and fake franking credit refunds.)

I'm close to just whacking people who go on about kids missing education in the pandemic. As if they actually give a shit about that, they never did before, when schools were looking after the kids and student results were in freefall. The kids will be fine, stop pretending that this isn't really about free childcare so parents can work.

These are the guys who reconstructed my old school, which burned down in 2005. If you ever need virtual buildings created, couldn't recommend them highly enough. Staggering reality in the finished product.

Happy birthday!

Israel has by far the most aggressive and progressed vaccination program underway for Covid. It’s also in a national lockdown. People willing to accept yet that a pandemic is a war? Many never saw what the danger was in the first place, they thought we could ‘manage’ the virus to save our economies. The virus doesn’t give a shit about economies. Like wars don’t.

I wonder if Australians will join the dots to figure out why we don’t make the top tier as a democracy? NZ does.

Happy birthday :)

Happy birthday Legend!

Sometimes the dots all join. The appalling response of the majority of the developed world to the pandemic, millions using it as a platform for individual grievance, is matched exactly by how people post to social media. They see the whole world as their own feelings. The fragile narcissism of it all stuns me every day, a society that goes into the foetal position with the slightest challenge, and no sense of the collective at all.

Here's the distribution of federal government grants since 2013. Does there come a point when diehard LNP people look at what's left of their party, and wonder when corruption became the main policy?

NSW about to rollout 'Dine and Discover', free vouchers for food and entertainment. To prime the economy. This is Rishi Sunak, Treasurer to the UK, who rolled out 'Eat out to Help Out' in the UK, similar scheme, last year. It killed thousands of people. Why wouldn't a government just give the money directly to eateries and entertainment venues?

Margaret and Derek Firth were married for 70 years. They died together in hospital. Fuck Covid.

Day 1 of multi-focal lenses. Bit of an adjustment, do people who’ve had multi-focals for years find it just becomes seamless over time?

Brendan Murphy, main adviser to government at the start of the pandemic, in March 2020. The Brits started the pandemic saying they’d just let everybody get infected with a lethal virus, to make them immune. They were an international laughing stock. What’s forgotten is, Australia wanted to do the same. The Premiers saved us.

Happy birthday Belly!

Grants finally being exposed as the biggest mechanism of outright corruption in politics. Please people, corruption matters. If it doesn't matter to you, go and live under Trump in the US. Or Bolsonaro in Brazil. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/why-peter-dutton-has-questions-to-answer-over-grants-20210211-p571p2.html

There seems to be an epidemic of gingham smocks at work. Is this a new fashion trend?

The Victorian lockdown will be the main virus story today. But the fact NSW is currently looking for 7000 people who travelled to Victoria is just another reminder how mobile our society now is, and the dangers of that long-term. It's the habit I think we're least likely to even look at, let alone break.

Did you notice last year governments pegged public sector wage rises to private sector pay rises? Sold it as fairness, but the numbers tell the story. Private sector wages have been going backwards for years, was just another sneaky way to keep smashing wages. An economy is people with money in their pockets. Not big tax cuts for businesses. Without cashed-up customers, they can't sell anything.

We’re all taught that big things are complex, small things are simple. It’s absolutely wrong. The world gets more complex the smaller you go. Tarde saw it all more than a century ago, it changes everything we think we know. Not just for quarks either, even society and life - same rule.

Isn’t this graph a beauty? For hundreds of years, the UK had no real ‘economic’ output at all. Then look at it explode. Same pattern in all developed countries. 1.6 trillion times as much ‘economic’ output today as for most of history. Now - hands up if your lifestyle is 1.6 trillion times better than all of those generations of humans? No? The economy is a myth.

I’m more bothered that so many Australians are so pleased with his handling. He hasn’t handled anything.

Don’t we miss the days of ordinary, unshaven and unripped bodies? I still remember those days, where only a handful of bodybuilders were ripped (and were thought of as a bit weird). I see more evidence of ‘mental health’ problems in ripped bodies than in any depression, anxiety or whatever.

What happens when you try to share a photo of Monty Python on Facebook.

Notice the pile-on on Victoria in this pandemic, orchestrated by the PM and his ministers? He’s a marketing man, a genius at misdirection. He does it to distract people from noticing that quarantine is his responsibility. This week, when asked if he should take over quarantine? Said Victoria is doing a good job. When the rubber hits the road, the marketing man runs away.

The PM. Notice what he’s saying here? Same as Boris. Vaccinate the high risk groups, then let the virus rip. It would be a disaster. This is not like other viruses in the community, it’s a vascular disease that can kill any age and leave some permanently disabled. There is no immunity to it in the population. This is not the science, this is the same old economic BS politics. Your health is at risk, spend some time paying attention Australica.

Statistics reveal that collectively we behave in ordered, patterned ways. That’s what ‘we’ is. But we don’t know we’re doing it, we need statistics to reveal those patterns to us. Why I saw ‘we’ is one of our greatest mysteries, that we don’t even see as a mystery. Statistics is good at describing the patterns, but much less good at explaining how or why we create them.

Well said, Delma. A retired teacher. Smart people, teachers.

What a vegan world would look like.

Very soon you'll be given vouchers to use in restaurants, cafes etc. The government will tell you it's about stimulus for a damaged dining and entertainment industry. It's nothing of the sort - they could give assistance directly to those industries, with much less hassle. They're doing this to force behaviour change in the community, to force people to drop their Covid guard. To make us all more receptive to 'opening up' again. Not a conspiracy, it was already done in the UK - they're copying it. Conservative governments now have 'behavioural nudge units', to try to force changes in behaviour. (NSW's is here: https://www.dpc.nsw.gov.au/programs-and-services/behavioural-insights/) Incidentally this was a public health disaster in the UK. It killed tens of thousands of people. https://qz.com/1896837/how-eat-out-to-help-out-uses-psychology-to-change-behavior/

Australians returning from overseas in the pandemic. A clear public sense that NSW is doing the ‘heavy lifting’, taking more than its share of the arrivals. But the data tells a different story. Very little difference in the percentages of arrivals taken by each State in the past year.

Somebody used Duplo to explain the various outcomes from using vaccines.

When we’re not in a pandemic, libertarians will tell you society doesn’t even exist, there are only individuals. In a pandemic, they will tell you your ‘freedom’ is being destroyed because of lack of access to society and its benefits. The same society they say doesn’t exist. In both cases their mission is to destroy society.

This is interesting. Not ‘here I am on my last holiday’ interesting, but nevertheless. This is data for the whole world. Nobody’s quite sure why this is happening. It’s not the vaccines. They suspect it’s countries finally restricting new infections, instead of focusing on their economies. It could also be the virus packing up and going home.

Hands up if your risk management idea for children in this pandemic has been ‘they don’t get it, they’re at no risk’. Very powerful, venal people who wanted parents at work to keep their businesses running, wanted you to believe that.

Who remembers ‘on-water matters’?

Who else has been stung by huge 'gap' payments for health care? Medicare is creaking, and unfortunately this is deliberate, a death by a thousand cuts and cost-shifting to private individuals. Again, the LNP, who despite their rhetoric actually hate public health care. Fascinating that doctors can also charge whatever they like, *via the constitution*. How's that for power. https://www.pwc.com.au/health/health-matters/out-of-pocket-healthcare.html

Listened to a debate last night where one of modern society’s increasingly numerous and brazen bullies bleated on about ‘free speech’ (how to pick these people, one of their favourite topics). And how ‘offence’ is entirely in the ears of the beholder, there is no such thing as offence. Have been disappointed to hear even luminaries like Stephen Fry, John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson sign up to this sort of bullshit. The same afternoon I listened to a radio interview about the evolution of men’s business suits. The host said ‘why do women get to choose what they wear to work, but men have to wear the same type of outfit?’ Which to me is backwards, and related to the free speech bullshit. Dominant groups get the luxury of *not* needing to constantly find new clothes to wear to work, they don’t need to differentiate themselves via their appearance. Similarly the people who moan about free speech have platforms of millions of eager listeners to their every word. Dominant groups, feeling their dominance threatened.

By the way people, you may notice if you try to share news from papers and other sources on FB now, it won’t appear in Australia. Due to the government’s battle on Rupert’s behalf to shut down Google and Facebook in Australia, because they’re eating in to his profits.

It will irritate my rusted-on LNP voting friends no doubt, but the list of ways that party is destroying this country is growing to be very long. And no, I don't give a flying fig about the ALP either. I care about Australia and its future, and its rapid descent into American libertarianism and populism. (Incidentally, FB without news makes it even more boring and lifeless than it is now.)

“The Andrews Government has made its position on keeping a bit of the virus around, ostensibly because it’s good for the economy, pretty clear. The medical experts here, without being too reductive, think that’s a stupid fucking idea.” David Milner

Lots of criticism of FB for blocking a whole range of non-news sites as well. Because we’re too lazy to investigate anything, we miss that Rupert had specifically advised that the government’s social media legislation use a ridiculously broad definition of ‘news’, to screw the social media companies in favour of his own.

Why doctors aren’t the best guides to a pandemic.

Happy birthday Rach :)

Do news organisations need FB more than FB needs them? This is traffic to the major news sites yesterday after FB turned off the tap.

To me the Harry and Meghan story is the story, again, of populism. Their wedding gave it away, they’re absolutely obsessed with celebrity. Oprah Fucking Winfrey in the front seats of the Chapel. Now they’ve severed all royal ties. The difference between royalty and celebrity, is that royalty is an institution, with associated responsibilities. That’s populism, the cancer of our time. Where TV stars become President, and royalty become TV stars.

Rupert maintaining the rage against Facebook. It’s inaccurate to see FB as stealing ‘content’ from news. FB is a collective conversation platform, news is a one-way broadcast medium. News has always been a type of mythology, a tiny constructed story each day of ‘what’s happening’, of the millions of things actually happening. People don’t need news for that as much now, they tell each other what’s happening through social media. This is an anthropological shift, just as it was when news stole the role of public storytelling from oral culture. Oral culture is fighting back.

“Being a homebody means you're comfortable enough being alone that you consistently seek it out just to get some quality time with your favorite person: yourself.” There’s an immaturity about obsessive social life, a nice insight.

Marshall McLuhan once wondered why researchers spend so much time surveying people to find out what they think. McLuhan pointed out the billions spent on advertising does all that 'market research' for you. Every ad is precisely targeted to what many of us think and desire. What gets called 'materialism' is a precise mapping of our collective psyche.

'News' is a really bizarre thing when you think about it. It replaced stories told between generations in multi-generational families, to make sense of the world. What we call news is in the third person, the view from nowhere. Just as maps are a view from nowhere - nobody lives in a map. News is the legend for maps. We're a map culture. Why travel is our greatest passion, to move though the map.

Another view from nowhere. Seeing the Earth from space is said to have created some sort of Earth-consciousness. Actually I think it distanced people even more from the planet we live on. Nobody lives in this viewpoint, just as nobody lives in the spaces we see on a map. How we occupy time and space *is* our culture. Our culture is a timeless view from nowhere.

Social media undermining traditional media is the First Person striking back against the Third Person.

Vaccine efficacy is badly explained to the public I think. For example, if a vaccine has a 95% efficacy, I think many (including me) assumed that meant about 5% of people would still get symptomatic Covid disease. Doesn't mean that at all. In a trial they may test 100,000 people, 1% (1000) of which might develop Covid. The 95% efficacy for that 1000 - it means about 50 people would still get symptomatic Covid, 5% of 1000. So 99.95% of that 100,000 total sample would not get symptomatic disease.

A prominent Australian woman said this today. Thoughts? To me it defines feminism as the search for some sort of validation by men. "Feminism: the centuries old fight by one half of the human race to be taken seriously by the other half."

An age of extremes not just in politics. Extreme exercise and wellness techniques too. Hyper-vigilant minds trying to get ever more control over poor bodies. As if shaping your body according to the dictates of your mind is a good idea. They're not even two separate things. The more trapped we are inside those heads of ours, the more superhuman fantasies we have to try to escape that prison. As if a ripped ego can free us from the ego.

Can’t share the ABC story on FB about how tourism is destroying Byron. People know I think tourism and travel are a type of disease. People literally consuming beautiful places, before moving on to consume the next one. We live in a map, we don’t understand any more how to occupy space, to enrich it and make it sacred. The doco on Kakadu last night showed the same thing.

England lifting its lockdown. Step one? Get the kids back out in the front line of the pandemic. The joy of living in an ageing society.

It’s been a week when the human scum leading the country revealed their true skill. Screwing people. Young women and the unemployed - anybody young really. A truly disgusting $3 something extra per day for the unemployed, still hundreds under the poverty line. Often people with families to raise. Meanwhile pensioners still get hundreds more, at the least expensive time of life. Buys a lot of votes. This isn’t the Australia I grew up in. Shame on you if you support turning Australia into the US. Australica.

The danger of ideas. Texas just had a massive winter storm, which cut off most essential services, including power. Many died. Some had to sit in their car, the only heater available. Many of them were then hospitalised with carbon monoxide poisoning. Texas’ power network is completely isolated from the rest of the US because of its libertarian fanaticism - it hates government. It privatised that isolated power network, to drive competition in power prices. None of the winning firms were required to undertake any network maintenance. The whole thing collapsed in the storm.

Collective psychology and the Korean War. The Korean POW camps were unique in that there were not only no escapes, but also no attempts at escape. The Koreans began by observing all prisoners as they arrived. Those who showed leadership qualities amongst the prisoners - about 5% of them - were killed. Another 10% were identified as good informers on their mates, who helped root out any troublemakers. About 40% of the American POWs died, because without leadership or direction, they simply gave up. In corporate environments, that 5% is usually given meaningless, often unpaid pseudo-leadership jobs like ‘team leader’. The 10% of snitches are used by team leaders to undermine other staff.

Getting older is grabbing a pair of scissors to trim your nose and ear hair, getting to the bathroom and realising you can't see your nose or ear hair, because you forgot your glasses.

Want to know the most disgusting thing about ‘mutual obligation’ requirements for people on the dole? Modern economics REQUIRES unemployment, to keep wages and inflation low. They call it the ‘natural rate of unemployment’. A large pool of unemployed people means businesses always have fresh people to hire, if the ones working now get too bolshie about their wages and conditions. A good supply of labour means existing labour has less bargaining power. The unemployed are punished for a deliberate design element of the economic system.

"Mr Dutton, the Home Affairs Minister, admitted on Thursday “a mistake was made” in Scott Morrison’s office when the PM’s staff failed to pass on details of former staffer Brittany Higgins’ allegations." The staff, pigs might fly. I've worked in an organisation when senior people flicked blame to their staff. Scum.

Australians have amassed over $200 billion in savings during the pandemic. Global warming gases have plummeted. Crime has collapsed. Cities have their cleanest air in decades. Hundreds of thousands were lifted out of poverty for the first time ever. So...is it sinking in yet that the ‘Economy’ was the problem? After WW2 governments kept going with the stimulus, we had 5 decades of booming good times. Our pollies are desperately trying to cut spending everywhere. Morons.

Beautiful graph, showing that the pandemic allowed hundreds of thousands of Australians to move out of poverty for the first time. About to be reversed, because the government and the many who support them think if you give poor people less money, they’ll work harder. They also think you need to give rich people more money (tax cuts) to work harder - the opposite. See how they’ve brainwashed millions of Australians to do the bidding of wealthy people?

I struggle with the positivity/negativity people. Who look on at problems, and see them only as people being ‘negative’. No, they’re problems, not perceptions. I struggle even more with their retreat to the ‘positivity’ of fun and happy things, as if that fixes the problems. It’s them dumping them on somebody else to solve, usually politicians, who they then have the complete gall to despise. Happiness, if you’re a grown up, is fixing the world’s problems, not running away from them.

Here’s something to try at home.

I fear for the mental health of people who want to 'live with the virus'. I'm touched by their concern for those of us who want to get rid of the little bastard, that we might all need therapy locked in our homes, away from the joys of our workplaces. But we'll struggle on, it's them I'm more worried about. Stockholm Syndrome for starters, they've learned to worship their hijacker. But also how they will cope mentally when the virus is eliminated, and they won't be able to live with it. A tragedy.

If you were confused about the FB-government battles, this will help. If you weren't confused, this will also help, because you likely just swallowed more government spin (caution, toxic in large doses.)

A populism test. If you think is a great idea, you're a populist. (Tip: take a drive along some of these arterial highways, and see if the stupidity of this idea suddenly dawns on you.)

Consent is back in the news. I think it will always be back in the news, because it’s the wrong concept to solve problems with sexual assault. It’s obvious that nobody should have unwanted intimacy. But that’s what love and courting are all about, testing what is ‘wanted’. You often just don’t know what you want in those situations, it evolves. Consent assumes you know beforehand, so you can have some neat point where you agree ‘yep, right to go here’. I think that’s delusional in all but the most obvious cases. https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/too-many-think-silence-is-consent-victim-says-rape-endemic-in-eastern-suburbs-20210220-p5748u.html

I don’t think we pay attention. At the beginning of the vaccine rollout in the UK, like the rest of the world decision-making was based on risk. Old people get the vaccine first, because they’re at highest risk. we stupidly thought this was some sort of concern for old people. It wasn’t that, it was about keeping hospitals open without overloading them. The rubber was always going to hit the road at the next stage of the vaccine rollout – working age people. Unsurprisingly the economic Nazis in the UK have thrown the risk framework completely out the window now, the priority is to maximise the number of people back at work. That was always the priority, from day one of the pandemic.

Another area of life where consent was a false God. For the same reasons, what people 'agree' to is never quite clear, even to them. We seem to think we live in a highly idealised fantasy world where people operate with clear, unalloyed intent in what they do. Like we've solved the hardest problems of the human condition in the past 5 years. https://slate.com/technology/2019/08/consent-facial-recognition-data-privacy-technology.html

Since the beginning of time I think there have been accusations that the stories people read or watch 'influence' them to act in certain ways. It's never turned out to be true. If it were true you could run the world just by writing a story where you run the world. Sexual assault won't be fixed with simplistic gender-based caricatures. Start correlating it with domestic environments, destroyed self-determination in work, and alcohol, progress might get made.

I miss James. Back when CSU wasn’t a toxic destroyer of lives.

Underneath all of the stories we tell each other about life, are patterns that explain it all. This messy graph says something profound, I think. The more advanced and technological we become, the more hierarchical we become. More managers. Not a bad thing at all, complexity needs expertise, which forms hierarchies. Populism is the opposite of this, saying each person’s opinion is equally valid. It’s never been true.

Australia needs to vaccinate more than 200,000 people per day to meet its target of the population jabbed by October. So far it‘s barely managing 2000 a day. The federal government is in charge right now. That sort of incompetence should ratchet up ScoMo’s popularity another few percent, on past trends. Again, the States will have to save us.

It’s exhausting living in an age of extremes. Where every issue is immediately framed as a war between two extreme, generalising positions. Masculinity is a key battleground right now. I was so grateful to read this nuanced piece from a criminologist. Spinoza always said there is one emotion that points to understanding - joy. If you feel anger or rage, you’re not understanding what you’re looking at. We need to think a lot harder.

Such a democratic version. Used just about every key.