July 2021
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
#auspol #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1 https://t.co/GZLlxl4NFg
More widespread QR code use too. On the surface a sensible measure. But never trust a person who thinks a society is an Economy. I’d be quite confident that part of this is a behind-the-scenes discussion about ‘never having to lockdown again’. Whack-a-mole 2.0. /end
#auspol #covid19 very interesting hypothesis for cause of VITT. Accidentally injecting into vein instead of muscle. https://t.co/iWfewGqLD2
#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1
For this reason, all of the ways the pandemic has been described in biological terms can be more accurately re-cast in social and political terms. A thread exploring just some dimensions of this re-framing. /2
Most generally, the idea that SARS-Cov-2 is something that invaded our 'normal' life is wrong. Its existence and then development and spread is intrinsic to what we call normal life. The landscape clearing for example which drove the zoonosis was our social/political creation. /3
Once in our societies, varying amounts of mobility at all scales (local, regional, national, international) created the spread of infection, overlaid upon degrees of socio-economic disadvantage, which usually forced the poor to continue to work and become infected. /4
A virus can't move on its own. People are its transport mechanism. All spread is therefore driven by these patterns of social and political organisation. If SARS-Cov-2 had emerged in a village separated from the rest of the world, it would have begun and ended there. /5
To emphasise the political, the pandemic to date hasn't been a story of societies battling this particular virus. It's been the competition between various models of social and political life. Most generally an extreme libertarianism.../6
...opposing just about all restriction on these existing patterns of social and political life. Up against a more traditional public health approach, recognising the need for collective effort to overcome the collective challenge. /7
It's that libertarianism, most prominently seen in the US, UK and Brazil, which quickly led to mass infection and casualties. That set of political ideas frames societies as 'economies', and throughout there has been constant calls from these true believers.../8
...to 'balance' public health action against economic damage. A clearly nonsensical, oxymoronic framing, when what they're calling the Economy is the socio-political arrangements actually creating the pandemic spread. Similarly, the idea of 'variants'. /9
There are variants of SAR-Cov-2 at the biological level. However just as with the original appearance of the virus in Wuhan, these in turn were generated by specific socio-political conditions. Continuous spread, giving the virus access to fresh hosts to allow it to mutate. /10
We can re-cast these variants therefore in socio-political terms. There have been several, perhaps beginning with education. At the start of the pandemic libertarians openly said children should continue in school, so parents could work. Naked economic self-interest. /11
As resistance to this grew, this morphed into the variant that 'children's mental health and education will suffer if they miss school'. Said by people who previously had so little interest in education/children that they presided over decades of plummeting school outcomes. /12
This mental health/education variant is virulent, and continues to this day. Perhaps next chronologically was the evolution of the 'live with the virus' variant. (Note I'm not trading in analogies here - these are literally the socio-political causes of these variants.) /13
The 'live with the virus' variant has various sub-strains, such as minimisation of the apparent risk of SARS-Cov-2 - Trump's 'Kung Flu', and many describing it as 'just a flu'. A set of beliefs to encourage people to see the pandemic as typical, a standard flu season. /14
Another sub-strain links back to the mental health idea, that action against the viral spread will irreparably damage all people's mental health. More recently the libertarians have adopted endemicity ideas, cloaking their 'just a flu' with the idea that the virus is.../15
...already endemic, and we should just get back to normal life. Vaccines have now been cast as treatments against this (apparent) incursion of a virus into 'normal' life, and the sooner we all get the treatment, the faster normal life will be back. /16
Which of course bring us back to the idea of the virus invading society, rather than society (the Economy) generating it. All of these socio-political variants are our true enemy in this pandemic, they create and prolong it. They will continue to mutate as needed. /17
As we've seen with the same groups opposing climate change, continuously shifting their strategic framings to generate socio-political resistance to action. We need to ruthlessly deconstruct all of these framings, every time they appear. /18
Ultimately the pandemic is just one other symptom of our social and political arrangements, not some event that appeared out of nowhere, like an asteroid from space. It's the outcome of many decades of repeated reconstruction of societies along extreme libertarian lines. /end
@billbowtell https://t.co/bSZZ1EkUt6
#auspol #covid19aus there's a certain human hubris around any of these schemes. Traffic lights, percentages, opportunities etc. The virus will ultimately determine this, not any of these metrics. https://t.co/AkQ1UZ1jeW
#covid19 #auspol so interesting that we smashed flu in NSW last year, with national lockdown, but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021, with society broadly open for the past year. Potential long-term good (inc. economic) that comes from flicking society's on/off switch. https://t.co/f0vBE07RHw
#auspol #covid19 new variant of 'live with the virus' discovered at National Cabinet. Hospitalisations, not cases. PR drivel, a la UK. I don't recall a time when influenza or measles or whooping cough was in wide circulation, alongside the vaccinated. https://t.co/kgUQ5Z3mex
#auspol #covid19 people want a 'plan' and some 'hope' to end the pandemic. The only meaningful plan is 'when the virus is domesticated or eradicated'. Everything else is Powerball.
#covid19aus #auspol they say history teaches us nothing. Usually you’d assume that meant over generations. Not a year. Australia announces roadmap out of the pandemic today, ‘at last’! Like it did last year, as pictured. Nobody remembers? The virus ignored it. https://t.co/YpuIsRwmFL
#covid19aus #auspol can somebody please ask National Cabinet if part of their 4-stage plan is to infect all children, as the UK is doing? It seems important. https://t.co/2jIvbYSBzh
#covid19 #auspol in clear and deliberate violation of Godwin's law, imagine if during WW2 it all seemed a bit hard, and we decided to adopt a 'live with the Nazis' strategy. Let's give up on this defeating them thing, we need our holidays back. /1
Metrics could be devised, along the lines of how many Nazis we can have circulating, with thresholds above which we would start shooting them again. And/or leave them be, so long as they only put a manageable number of us in hospital. /2
Sounds ridiculous? Remember again that pandemics kill orders of magnitudes more people than wars do. They're a far greater threat. And yet the 'live with the virus' variant is still winning, trying to persuade us that the solution here.../3
...isn't to defeat this foe, but to live with it. Appease it. Have it join us in all of our family and social transactions, but with better manners. Like those people who keep tigers as pets, and then one day the tiger mauls them to death. /4
At what point will we wake up and say to those so desperate for a return of the status quo, get some backbone mate? Fight this fucker. I don't want it, my kids don't want it, let's put our boot on its neck and hold it there until it expires. /5
Heck, you'll get your Excel-generated mythical 'Economy' back at the same time. /end
@SkyNews Press Preview discussing gleefully the wilful infection of children with Covid, and a range of other nonsensical 'live with the virus' variants. The damage Maggie did to the UK is sad to behold. Each to their own, Spirit of the Blitz long dead.
Note how this hawk's head is absolutely still, its attention unwavering even while its body undertakes the most extreme movements. A short thread about how bodies work, potentially life-changing. /1 https://t.co/qofYhonw0g
We tend to separate our attention from our body and movement. We see those as two separate activities, paying attention, and supporting/moving. The hawk shows this is false. /2
It's not 'doing' any of its movements. Nor does it when hunting, without a person doing the movements for it. It puts its attention with laser-focus on where it wants to go, out into the world, and its body automatically follows it. /3
Bodies are elastically-sprung to *release* into movement and activity. We don't need to do it. A surgeon can tell you that cutting into a body is cutting into elastic tissue, it rebounds. Our bodies, as well as hawks and many other animals, store elastic potential energy.../4
...which they then continuously release into activity, following our attention. They use gravity to create this elastic potential, gravity doesn't weigh us down, it holds us up. You can feel this directly. /5
In any activity you're doing, even one where you're not moving, have your attention on what you're doing and *simultaneously* feel your body elastically releasing, to follow your attention. Not 2 activities - attending and moving - but 1, integrated, elastic release.../6
...of our entire attending being, out into the world, to what we're attending to. All sense of weight and effort will disappear, as these are (falsely) thought to be caused by gravity. In fact they're the outcome of splitting our attention off from our movement, as 2 things. /end
#auspol #covid19 there are many possible meanings of ‘live with the virus’. The political/economic meaning of it is a long way from the expert meaning of it. A desperate need to challenge anybody who utters these words to be specific about what they mean. https://t.co/ov6QTDkqw5
#auspol #covid19 funny (not ha ha funny) that the inventors of the ‘Fortress Australia’ line, to mock public health control of a lethal pathogen, also spent more than 2 decades winning elections by building this. https://t.co/0dymoWCYDD
#COVID19nsw #auspol Matt Lucas understands a NSW ‘lockdown’. It’s a Boris lockdown-lite. https://t.co/OfB93vYKlw
#auspol #covid19 worth noting that 'live with the virus' advocates are mostly concerned with costs to the 'Economy' of suppressing Covid. For comparison, annual costs to the Oz Economy of influenza are over $40 billion. /1
A shift to an endemic phase of SARS-Cov-2 is a shift to significant new costs. Not a return to 'normal'. Morbidity from this virus appears to be significantly higher, and possibly even life-long in some cases, dramatically increasing these costs. /end
#covid19 probably spectacularly unpopular to say it, but watching the UK's collective orgasm over a fucking soccer game just seems symptomatic of how divorced from reality rich nations have become. The last days of Rome, bread and circuses.
#auspol #covid19 the perverse calculus of 'freedom' in this pandemic. The loudest voices for removal of public health measures have been libertarian political voices. This is dangerous, disingenuous, deliberate strategy. /1 https://t.co/AsMYkC3vlv
To a political libertarian, the pandemic SHOULD be all of their dreams come true. 'Locking down' removes social life, generated and managed by the State, not individual life. Each individual in their own home with negligible State contact is the libertarian idyll. /2
The 'freedom' so liberally bandied about in this pandemic is the freedom to engage in social life, not individual life. The freedom to shop, travel, to do business etc. All things the State makes possible. So what's with the libertarian 'freedom' push? /3
It's framing. Strategy. Aimed at everyday folk, who genuinely love these social, collective lives, and want them back. The libertarians though aren't thinking about holidays returning, or peoples' freedom to socialise. /4
To them 'opening up', getting the borders down, is about restoring the free flow of capital and labour. About commerce. About people able to work, and goods able to flow. There's no mention at all of people having greater freedom to balance work and life,.../5
...to allow the flexibilities actually favourable to ordinary folk, like working from home, to continue in any widespread way. Workplaces have been exempt from public health orders in NSW for the entire pandemic, which indicates the real agenda here. /6
Businesses have been able to pack staff into workplaces with no requirement to calculate social distancing for them. No obligation to do anything about ventilation. Some employers even require staff to purchase their own masks. /7
Political libertarians are our most sophisticated political strategists. They learned many of their skills from churches, with whom they're often closely aligned, and who have thousands of years' experience in mass mobilisation and persuasion. /8
The task of thinking people, daily, is to continuously unravel every new PR-variant these libertarians produce to obstruct public health action. Just as they have to obstruct climate change action. /end
#insiders yet again a desperate need for somebody with basic public health knowledge in Insiders discussions. The journalists do zero homework in the area, and just repeat various slogans in circulation.
#auspol #covid19aus @AlanBixter the less asked question around Phase 2 of the plan is if we're just swapping suppression of virus with suppression of case numbers. Is there an undertaking to continue publishing these? Or will they be suppressed? https://t.co/rTzIg6sopy
#auspol #covid19 understand this, and you understand not only what caused the pandemic, but what keeps it going. An 'economic' world where work = freedom, and being in your own home is being 'locked down'. As the Nazis said, 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (work sets you free). Uh huh. https://t.co/Ca3o0By1K8
#auspol #covid19 love Ian's work, so no criticism of him. But 'opening up' is not medical or scientific advice. Like a trade deal, where you decide the degree of access and protection for the flow of people and goods. /1 https://t.co/Ps5O5DWrIu
Borders are never actually 'open', there are always differential restrictions for trade, tourism, immigration etc. Different visas, levels of protectionism. We should strongly resist the idea that the pressing need is to throw borders wide open. /2
We didn't even do that in our recent trade talks with the UK, for agriculture. Industries to protect, etc. This is even more serious, lives are at stake. As experts say, we need to 'titrate' them open. A cautious bit at a time, alongside public health measures, and assess. /end
#ausol #covid19 drivel, from beginning to end. 'Fortress Australia', another weaponised political slogan. Australians have loved Fortress Australia, when it meant keeping brown people out. Privileged whining when it's applied on the outbound traveller. /1 https://t.co/o0lijLNQWE
And yet another article that suggests countries overseas have found the way out, and we're lagging their wisdom. The UK has terrible ongoing problems, and only got halfway back to the human race by hogging world vaccine supply. /end
#covid19 The elephant in the vaccine-soaked room. Rampantly mobile cultures still trading on old imperial DNA needed slowing down. They're not liking it. https://t.co/kxF2eK06aS
#covid19 #auspol https://t.co/Fj5lfg0Ga7
#auspol comparing COVID to flu, again. Like 18 months ago. Rings a bell, something about a 4-part plan. https://t.co/q8rtuWzC04
#covid19 #auspol yet another uncritical puff piece, describing widespread infection of children, and of the vaccinated, both highly risky (and also unethical, with children) strategies. https://t.co/Z2cLceq1DI
#auspol #covid19 the big push is on to shift the world to a 'continuous re-vaccination' strategy for Covid. Not actually a strategy, a weaponising of one public health tool in isolation. Not everybody is stupid enough to fall for it. https://t.co/OlzvMoJthE
@auspol #covid19 to understand why countries are so casually infecting children with Covid, you have to understand that most of them are rich, old, and living off migrant labour. There's no generational thought, just an eternal 'lifestyle' present, serviced by migrant slaves. https://t.co/F61YzXiSKd
#auspol the same calculations worldwide, on climate change too. Public policy driven by attempts to maintain fragile coalitions of reactionary and populist conservatives. NSW's Covid strategy the same. https://t.co/o5BmDO1HUr
#auspol #covid19 vaccination data is the current currency of much pandemic analysis. Showing the apparent world 'leaders' in pandemic action. /1 https://t.co/PW6VhaC1xY
You get a different story when you map deaths. Often the leaders with vaccination are also the world's pandemic butchers. For the same reason, no public health strategy before, none now either, except to hog world vaccine supply and 'open up'. /2 https://t.co/c84vdiQj7Z
Much of the Australian internal narrative around us now lagging the world is clearly ridiculous. Those who win in a pandemic are assessed over its duration, not at a moment in time, on one isolated metric. To me those who kill the fewest people will always be the winners. /end
@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @Globalbiosec https://t.co/O2by79otFZ
#auspol #coivid19nsw the NSW Premier just refused to classify teachers as essential workers for vaccine access, with school returning next week. They join the queue with everybody else. Pretty clearly seeing that the default will always be a high risk appetite for schools. https://t.co/CCcAQfydJ7
#auspol #covid19aus Targets, traffic lights - all meaningless corporate drivel. The virus pays no attention. https://t.co/UzJxcDYGm5
#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1 https://t.co/Grb2bQFtiS
From Day 1 of the pandemic, most conservative governments have had zero intention of following any sort of public health response. They immediately saw the threat to their protected economic status quo that public health restrictions create. /2
They've been undermining them ever since. Whether it's to cast doubt on the actual lethality of the virus, or to talk about balancing public health work with economic activity, or to continuously weaponise public health concepts in ways that.../3
...allow them to enter public health discussions and completely pervert and distort their meanings. Re-framing endemicity as 'live with the virus', faux care for mental health and education outcomes.../4
... to force schools to remain open and infect children, so that working parents can keep clocking in for work. Now weaponsing vaccination as a quick-fix 'back to normal'. They're ruthless, relentless, and lethal. /end
#auspol #covid19aus I had no idea the expert medical advice the PM refers to comes from the Treasurer. We can throw everything off Medicare that doesn’t kill you or put you in hospital, ‘live with’ hundreds of diseases and conditions. I bags head lice. https://t.co/4gHFxxF8yR
#covid19 I can see us all becoming pincushions by the time this is over. Watch every permutation of the vaccines being used to try to rescue declining effectiveness. https://t.co/jLF7QVqUto
@KateEMcCann in summery cornflower blue, saying smart things to Adam Bolton, is a good day.
#covid19 #auspol the ultimate libertarian, lunatic endgame. Public health replaced entirely by 'personal judgement'. A pandemic created by collective behaviour, now left to the irrelevant and powerless resources of individuals. /1 https://t.co/3Ph3szbmLt
As with climate change, it's also a lie. Those making these decisions will be much better protected than those encouraged to take their 'freedom' back. Cocooned in wealthy enclaves, while ordinary working people and children cop the brunt of the virus. /end
#covid19 'public health' reduces to the basics. Clean water, clean air, less crowding, sunshine. Industrial pollution was a symptom of an absence of concern about these basics. Pandemics the same, Covid came from filthy air, caused by ordinary people treated like battery hens. https://t.co/btt1Kv4j95
#covid19 #auspol ultimately you need to limit social movement and gathering to beat a pandemic. You can pretend you're doing it 'proportionately' by taking baby steps, but you just need a lot more steps, and for much longer. https://t.co/sxDFQaYQ1T
#covid19 #auspol a vaccine is a momentary shift in balance of an entire microbial ecosystem, which continues to evolve. The public narratives around vaccines see them as medications, take and you're cured. https://t.co/ToZEHcKFgM
#covid19 #auspol it's worth pointing out I think that the standard we're expecting of aged care workers is not consistent with the 'vaccines protect us from harm' foundation of the 4-stage national plan. /1 https://t.co/e4D4yHnUGe
On the logic of the national plan, it shouldn't matter if staff aren't vaccinated, when residents are vaccinated. The vaccines should protect them. If we don't believe that, then why is it the basis of the national plan? /end
#covid19nsw Premier saying she wants this to be the 'last lockdown' for NSW. Current restrictions likely extended to ensure elimination. This pandemic would also be over faster if leaders would ask people to be ready to fight on, rather than promising freedom.
#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier saying her government avoids 'burdening' people with restrictions. While leaders continue to make restrictions the problem, and not the virus, this pandemic will continue.
#covid19nsw #auspol Dear Premier/CHO, can you say specifically whether children will be allowed to become infected as part of the National Plan?
#covid19aus #auspol language does much of the work in politics. Orwell knew it. How did we ever allow the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic act of sheltering from a lethal threat? Spin designed to prevent that sheltering. Not a public health term. https://t.co/L1cr8bJyHn
@MJA_Editor @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole horse has probably bolted on this one, but strategically imagine refusing to use the word 'lockdown' to describe the basic public health act of sheltering from infection? Weaponised terminology, used to undermine public health work. https://t.co/BwseaD5YaJ
#covid19aus #auspol vaccination data has quickly become the proxy metric for pandemic success. Australia is actually tracking the world average. In a true global pandemic strategy, that would be seen as a noble thing. /1 https://t.co/2YmAWxmCRN
The gap, represented by the red arrow, between that world average and the countries at the top, is interpreted as the superior public health work of that top group. It isn't that. It's a supply gap. Created by those same countries, hoarding vaccines. /2
The call for vaccination targets in Oz, to get jabs in arms ASAP so we can get the borders open, is just a global pissing contest. A league table of vaccine hoarders. The entire global pandemic strategy has been driven off course, by the hoarders. /3
Instead of the main strategic aim globally and for each country nationally being 'ending the pandemic', it's become 'who's vaccinating the fastest?'. Pathetic, disgusting actually. Vaccine nationalism, as some call it. /4
We're taking our eye off the only goal, of ending the pandemic. Watch this space, the Oz feds are desperate to throw the country open, a la UK, once those jabs are in arms. They won't care who's infected at that point. Lock up your children. /5
The slow vaccine rollout in Oz is the greatest protection we have right now, because it forces the retention of other public health measures. Guaranteed, if we'd had quick vaccination, we'd be the UK right now, flinging life open to infection. /end
#auspol #covid19 @ProfJohnDrury the longer the pandemic goes on, the more we see that it isn't a biological/medical battle against a virus, but rather the endgame of deeply conflicting political beliefs. Beliefs that themselves generated the pandemic. https://t.co/B9Ql1Z01Hb
#covid19 #auspol two definitions of freedom doing battle in this pandemic. It IS the pandemic, the virus is just opportunistically hitching along. Developed nations, infected with an extreme libertarian virus about 50 years ago, generated and prolong the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/oKcJd2u9KD
To most of them, freedom is the freedom from attachments. From State interference. Living off the grid, the ultimate libertarian destination. The problem with this viral set of ideas is, to live off the grid, you need a grid. It's in the name /2
Attachments - mutual social obligations in all aspects of life and business - is what gives us our freedom. That collective effort is what frees up space and time for individuals to flourish. Try doing a Walden and living in your log cabin in the woods. Exhaustion. /3
The pandemic has been defined by the competition between these two definitions of freedom. Masks and movement and gathering restrictions give us freedom to continue to live, uninfected. To the libertarians, they represent tyranny. /4
Ironically it's those most concerned about social life who support restricting it, to protect it. The political libertarians freeload off this same social life, pretending they're economic free agents unfairly harnessed by society. /5
Libertarian freedom is the freedom of the virus to infect at will. Libertarians only ever believe in society (remembering Maggie T said it doesn't exist) when there's a pandemic. Then they clamour to have social life back, realising it's the same thing they call the 'Economy'. /6
Without social life, there is no economic life. The only aspect of this social life political libertarians promote is work. Jobs. They're desperate to get people back to work, selling it as people getting their freedoms back. Really just the freedom to return their earnings. /7
The virus will spread under libertarian social ideas. And it won't under the freedom-as-attachment ideas. Different countries demonstrating this right now. The virus remains a bit-player to this ultimately political event. /end
#COVID19nsw #auspol have a look at the contrasting lines here for the Melbourne Delta outbreak, and the Bondi/NSW Delta outbreak. Go hard/go early IS the 'proportionate' measure. https://t.co/QjNEeSUjYL
#auspol #covid19aus NSW's stay at home orders. An awful lot of people still going to work? https://t.co/dHuZyKfPAl
#covid19aus #auspol "‘[It] is not because schools aren’t a safe place, they are a safe place, but what we really need to do in greater Sydney is reduce mobility,” Ms Berejiklian said. Pay attention Australia. Once adults are vaccinated, Cabinet is planning to infect kids.
#auspol the tangled web we weave, when we think society is just a whole lot of separate individuals. https://t.co/cSVRsRL5Yd
#auspol #covid19aus one day the sun will explode and incinerate the entire solar system. One day journalists might need to actually know something about the topics they report on, to keep getting paid. https://t.co/jqZMcSQEQz
#auspol the economic hysteria over at the AFR is something to behold. https://t.co/LjspVyyyCD
#auspol #covid19 if you feel that conservative politicians will continue to 'follow medical advice', remember they've happily ignored climate science for several decades. Their only use of expert advice is to keep hospital numbers manageable. They have no other interest in it.
#covid19 heretically, the UK might put its reality filters back on if it loses this game against Denmark. Right now the football is distracting the entire nation from the criminal, almost genocidal, decisions of Boris' government.
#auspol #covid19aus on the one hand this is a good measure, masks are rarely wasted in a pandemic. On the other it's suspicious that this is a priority now. Suggesting virus will be allowed to circulate in the community, and in schools. https://t.co/cMnAGB1675
#auspol @SkyNewsAust how's the weather in the Southern Highlands Alan? You big, brave boy. https://t.co/jED9G7Rdhd
#QandA lockdown isn’t a choice. You either do it earlier, or later. The virus determines it, not us.
#covid19 sometimes these death and hospitalisation emphases seem a bit to me like backing airbags for pedestrians, rather than crossings. https://t.co/CefPRypkYJ
#QandA conservatives won’t live with debt or refugees, but will embrace a lethal pathogen.
#QandA controversial ideas are much less dangerous than simple habitual ideas which are wrong.
#covid19 always a glorious morning when you awake to a flood of anti-lockdown Tweets, from masturbating adolescent males who want their freedom back. To hide in their parents' basement and eat Dominos while playing Fortnite.
#covid19 #auspol another day, another realisation that beating Covid is quite easy. It's beating people that don't want to beat Covid that's the almost impossible task. https://t.co/yoiC6O89fk
#covid19aus #auspol I suggest allowing the virus to circulate in the homes of these 3 Ministers first, and in the homes of all of their relatives and friends. A trial run. https://t.co/wj5iPG536s
#covid19aus #auspol as one GP pointed out yesterday, changing peoples' second dose to 8 weeks also means a practice's entire vaccination schedule gets thrown out of whack, with the 8-weekers then clashing with already booked in other patients. https://t.co/WrpGJhVVV5
#covid19 Nothing sums up England's global approach to this pandemic better than fans shining a laser pointer in the Denmark goalie's eyes, and booing during the Danish national anthem. https://t.co/zilN47evcX
#covid19 Eventually all debates if they continue return people to first premises of arguments and ideas. In this case, ideas in health care around individual vs collective have also collided with political ideas in the same area. . /1 https://t.co/6zA4LA1spn
Political libertarians have been the main drag upon worldwide pandemic efforts, but we're also seeing ongoing tensions between public health professionals and physicians, which reduce to the same ideas. Individual vs collective. /2
All of these fields share the idea that there are individuals, and groups/society, and you have different methodologies for dealing with each. At best they suggest some sort of compromise, where individuals sacrifice some freedom for the greater good. /3
What's less studied is that the distinction itself is nonsense. There are no individuals, just as there are no groups. You can't define an individual without using collective elements, just as you can't define a group without using individual elements. /4
Individuals create groups, to empower them as individuals. Groups in turn are nothing but those same individuals, delegating some small part of their agency to the group, for mutual benefit. /5
Nearly all of the daily Left v Right rivalry is arguments over a fiction. Individuals don't exist without groups, groups don't exist without individuals. It's not two things, it's one thing. Just as material, like water, can exist in different phases (solid, liquid, gas).../6
...individuals are one phase of human life, groups another. Made of the same thing, agencies with shifting scale, at one moment you might be alone in your yard, the next part of a global Twitter conversation. It's all you, at different scales. /end
#auspol #covid19aus more power to Gladys for strongly repudiating the boneheads in her own Cabinet who want NSW to live with the virus. Not often a fan, but good strong leadership this morning on at least that topic.
Though just asked - she won't close more retail. That'll be, I'd wager, red meat for her rabid boneheads.
Repeating the criticism of the live with the virus view multiple times. Obviously under extreme pressure internally from her own party.
#covid19 #auspol sad that Dave Graeber is no longer with us. He'd have been angry and amused at the idea a pandemic threatens the 'Economy', of which more than half he contended was 'bullshit jobs'. https://t.co/RkH4CRD9b1
#auspol Walter Lippmann knew why conservative politicians are often boring rich men in suits. "Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism."
#auspol #covid19aus Meet the Covids. Tomorrow they're going to the shops. Bunnings, then IKEA. Then maybe to buy some lingerie. Everybody is very excited. https://t.co/q4t8B8nW95
#auspol #covid19aus Have been saying this for 18 months. It's only when this threatens peoples' lives that Australia now notices. A pandemic is a political event, not a biological event. https://t.co/kDPoKwvpkw
#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our pandemic? /1 https://t.co/vRmK5YCNhw
A pandemic is a social and political event, not a medical or biological event. The patterns of human gathering and movement are created by our social and political arrangements. For this reason, pandemics don't just appear out of a blue sky. /2
They appear when humans are too crowded, mixing too much and too rapidly, with poor ventilation and sometimes also absence of clean water and food. Mass transport, mass shopping, mass work are breeding grounds for pandemics, as well as the habitat destruction they produce. /3
We should see infectious disease outbreaks as a warning signal, that the way we organise our societies is defective in some way(s). That our political ideas in particular need correcting. /4
In 2021, mass mobilisation of our populations, driven by 'economic' flow of people and goods, has rendered us sitting ducks for Covid. The days when the village integrated the many aspects of life are mostly gone, with suburbs now mostly parking lots for mobile workers. /5 https://t.co/6NO4v820mR
Not to pine for a mythical perfect world, but the message is that the more we displace people and animals and plants in favour of centralising economic networks, the more we will generate pandemics. Old-style villages were more resilient.../6
...they didn't even need to 'lock down' much, they were fairly self-reliant and that modality of life created much less cross-nation movement in the first place. A pandemic is created by the continuous displacement of people and other living things.../7
...for the political (economic) benefit of the few, who control the supply networks. The same people trying to convince us all that our own homes are prisons, and driving along expensive, clogged tollways to and from work is freedom. /end
It doesn't even exist. All the -isms are retroactive projections over specific things that do exist. Communism socialist, capitalist countries all share so many features.
#auspol #covid19aus the economic forces opposing public health action in this pandemic first weaponised contact tracing, as some silver bullet. NSW showing right now how ridiculous that was. Now they’re moving on to vaccines, as the next silver bullet. Globally. More pain coming. https://t.co/S2iRGttVWv
#covid19aus #auspol count the 'please' in the NSW press conferences. The endgame of libertarian nonsense, treating society as individual customers. Please NSW Government, do the job you're paid handsomely to do. Increase restrictions.
#covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/2pDGbWMu2O
@CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @auspol #covid19aus seems a good time to dust this one off again. https://t.co/kCrk5HpDDQ
@YouAreLobbyLud
#covid19aus #auspol I used a sophisticated algorithm to track the flow of Covid around Sydney in lockdown-lite. https://t.co/oDExCkot59
#covid19 #auspol just as climate change mostly isn't about the small actions you take at home, the pandemic also isn't mostly up to all of us. It's up to a handful of leaders to make strong decisions. Don't become the scapegoat for their failures. /1
This daily tabloid hunt for people breaking rules is exactly the distraction those weak leaders want. You only need a lot of rules if you're keeping things open that shouldn't be open. /end
#auspol #covid19 it's extraordinary, the passion for rules that libertarians develop, when their refusal to do basic leadership leaves them with no other option. Like lockdowns, your ideology might reject it, reality will correct it. https://t.co/suoH2860JK
#covid19 @auspol "In sum, then, we have a clear choice: /1 https://t.co/Jn1QS6TNUz
on the one hand, a psychology which is at odds with the medical advice, which is counterposed to systemic interventions and which both disrespects and dismisses those who are best able to respond to this crisis. /2
On the other hand, a psychology focused on how best to implement the medical advice, which advocates for systemic change that makes optimal behaviours possible, and which harnesses the power of the group to face up to COVID-19." /end
#insiders #auspol learn from bushfires. The community doesn’t need ads to persuade it to do the right thing. It needs to be honestly told the scope of the emergency, at which point it always self-mobilises beautifully. ‘Hesitancy’ is a by-product of paternalism and secrecy.
@billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @Globalbiosec absolutely critical insights here from @ReicherStephen on the social, psychological and political understanding needed to defeat a pandemic. https://t.co/uV1gD8WVW3
#auspol #covid19nsw would be lovely to move away from the naughty children narrative libertarians are forced into, 'if you all do the right thing', to 'come on NSW, let's smash this". You know, NSW, the collective, non-libertarian thing.
#nswlockdown #auspol #covid19nsw this is the time to think. Large test numbers show again that the community is self-organising beautifully. The daily stern 'naughty children' narrative from the police, government and CHO underway. There's a dangerous disjunction here. /1 https://t.co/NE6yTCeanX
The community is clearly mobilising when asked. But government libertarian beliefs can only see that community as disconnected individuals, who are either 'doing the right thing', or not. Stern stories about non-compliance each day only reinforce that. /2
The gap here is at government level. The community is mobilising, but inside a framework that encourages the opposite. Too much mobility, too much pressure on people to go to work because too much non-essential work is allowed to be open. /3
At the same time, pitch the narrative at the already strong community mobilisation, reinforce it. "Let's all smash this thing, together", etc. Not 'these naughty people aren't doing the right thing', a completely counter-productive narrative. /end
#covid19aus #auspol Remember this? Compare and contrast this collective determination to FIGHT an existential threat, with the shock and awe ads of individuals gasping for air in hospital, today. Deliberate, strategic bullshit to shift pandemic responsibility to individuals. https://t.co/xlvm7w4GCl
#covid19 comparing and contrasting with the idiot scenes of 'freedom' jubilation in the US and UK. Never a clearer indication of the ignorance and arrogance that generations of empire produce. https://t.co/oz7I6iGV8U
#covid19aus #auspol this stuff about 'severing the link' between cases and hospitalisations seems a bit to me like celebrating because we can all get milder forms of syphilis. https://t.co/qwsB1qZKr5
#covid19 this disappointment is a necessary practice run for the UK, when its 'Freedom Day' from Covid turns out to be a steaming pile of lethal propaganda. https://t.co/eUTLaBHf9H
#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw it seems NSW is following its usual absence-of-risk-management approach. Sightseeing the exponential curve. 'Don't leave home', but leave all the businesses open, so people will be sacked if they do stay home, or unpaid. https://t.co/Ie3KpGYxOu
#covid19aus #auspol both the Premier and CHO refuse to answer about leaving businesses open in Sydney. Throwing responsibility back on the community. To what? Not go to work? 'Hey boss, not coming in today, avoiding Covid'. This is a train wreck in real-time.
#auspol #covid19aus by not ruthlessly challenging the NSW Government's 'live with the virus' statements at every point in the past 18 months, we've arrived. https://t.co/IIsH9hHRMd
He wasn’t in ‘zero gravity’. The gravity where he was is about the same as it is here on Earth. https://t.co/ZJTxvn5K1l
#covid19 #auspol have people looked at the *global* rate of vaccination? Is it too much to ask spoiled rich countries to stop the pissing contest over vaccination speed and refocus on ending the pandemic, globally? Rich counties with minimal virus SHOULD be slow to vaccinate. https://t.co/dNqB8TlN0q
@CrabbBrendan great 7.30 story tonight. Can others access the modelling referenced in the story?
As Sir Humphrey said, it’s not that the Brits hate the French more. They’re just closer. Xenophobia is like a national UK religion, almost amusing that this still ‘shocks’ people, when it’s seen. https://t.co/MhoRn4adTM
#covid19 Open-air hospitals had much greater survival rates for both patients and staff, with Spanish Flu. The Florence Nightingale insight, open the windows and doors. We’ve gone backwards with building ventilation, including hospitals. https://t.co/mfLOKOT5SZ
@YouAreLobbyLud @patientsafe3
@covid19aus #auspol does NSW want to wait until Christmas to beat this outbreak, with only Stage 3 restrictions? Or swallow its pride and go for Stage 4? Guess which is better for the ‘Economy’? Nothing to ‘balance’ here people. https://t.co/UthTtA3JG9
#covid19aus #auspol John Barilaro saying that kids must get back to school, for the ‘Economy’. And that NSW is ‘riding the wave’ of its current outbreak, waiting for the ‘peak’. Close your eyes and it could be a member of BoJo’s cabinet. Lethal stupidity, asleep at the wheel.
@JaneCaro @auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde think we need to be very careful here, the political strategy is very cunning from conservative politicians. Interest declared, my wife is a teacher, and I once was too, so a real interest in getting this right. /1 https://t.co/5zuQi95Ddd
Of course teachers are essential workers. But we need to be EXTREMELY careful about the narratives here. The justification for health care staff getting early jabs for example, as essential workers, is that they *will* be exposed to infection. /2
THE NSW Education Minister this morning said teachers are essential because once they're vaccinated it will mean schools can continue to operate. It's abundantly clear that Australia is currently planning to allow children to become infected. Teachers need jabs because.../3
...they'll be exposed to these infected students. The virus will be allowed to circulate in schools. Not one journalist I've heard has asked this basic question, to politicians - will children be allowed to become infected? /4
The Premier repeatedly says 'schools are safe', but parents dropping kids off and picking them up is dangerous. Clearly implying again that the virus is no threat to children. This is early-2020 nonsense, completely at odds with subsequent events and research. /5
Children get infected as easily as adults. Schools then drive community transmission. They're lethal when virus is circulating. Children get sick, some very sick, some even die. Australians must demand clear undertakings that children will not be allowed to become infected. /6
Both for their health, and the control of the pandemic within the community. /end
@drgregkelly had meant to include you, apologies. https://t.co/EAVjWh31dy
#covid19nsw #auspol in the regions now. Again, 'essential work' the driver of this outbreak. Still undefined. https://t.co/IzyeqL0oNK
#covid19aus #auspol NSW Health Minister, asked to define 'essential work', says that's a matter for an employer and their employees. In other words, if you can't sell the lingerie without staff there, they're essential. Looks uncomfortable, suggesting this is a Cabinet fight.
#covid19aus #auspol Premier: 'our absolute obsession is getting out of lockdown'. Not 'beating the virus'. The greatest enemies in this pandemic are those who make public health measures the enemy, and not the virus.
#covid19aus #covid19nsw this one didn't get a lot of airtime when reported a few days ago. Proposed traffic light system for schools in NSW and Covid. The amber level is key, where cases are in a community. Schools are the greatest concentration of people in any community. /1 https://t.co/0TYwDORmux
Levels 2 and 3 as proposed are meaningless. They assume the school itself is some sort of virus-free zone inside the community. It's the opposite, anything in the community will be hyper-concentrated, within the schools. /2
All of these wanky metrics for 'opening up' partially or wholly in a pandemic have failed, globally. It's like having a shark attack at one end of a beach, but swimmers in the water at the other end, because the 'shark is over there, not here'. /end
#auspol #covid19aus great to see these measures. But how do we have leaders, more than 18 months into this pandemic, still talking about health and economic issues as two separate things, to be 'balanced'? https://t.co/OGDbPi3stC
#covid19 conservative governments from the first day of the pandemic have emphasised medicine, not public health. They’ve never denied it being for them about having enough hospital beds for the sick, not about preventing people becoming sick. https://t.co/IUrdiaqIk1
Pretty sure there are still regulations around maximum number/minutes of ads per hour on Freeview TV? Surely @theprojecttv sails pretty close to whatever that line is? Anybody counted?
#covid19aus #auspol what sort of society knowingly and willingly infects its own children with a pandemic virus? When will even one journalist ask for a commitment from any Oz politician that children will not be allowed to be infected here? https://t.co/wt8zMbkYyr
#covid19aus #auspol yes, sort of. We need to test by actually asking politicians whether this is now a priority because they’re planning for schools to have infection circulating within them at will. As in the UK. https://t.co/ssHhi1EENt
#covid19aus #auspol #covid19nsw I noticed this last year, see circled in red. What that was doing on a public health sign is a mystery, except insofar as it reveals the true underlying agenda in NSW. We're living the consequences. https://t.co/agRr5Higjv
#covid19nsw #auspol it seems a very similar calculus is going on in Macquarie Street right now. Between the 'end of their tether' Ministers, who likely are isolating in luxury somewhere, and the Premier and CHO. https://t.co/5JelIexgNP
#auspol workplaces. What would be a way to prevent that transmission...🤔 https://t.co/YODTeCe3ot
@Globalbiosec #covid19aus the Premier, confirming your hunch from yesterday: "There’s a smattering all over the place, including the Eastern Suburbs and elsewhere..."
#covid19nsw #auspol when 'following the health advice', always best to have it harnessed to the carriage, and a good whip at hand. https://t.co/EPkIGSpmQL
#covid19aus #auspol it’s abundantly clear that the NSW strategy is about 90% designed simply to retain Cabinet unity. The refusal to define ‘work’ of any form is a strategic device to leave as much work as possible open, to appease the economic zealots in Cabinet. https://t.co/7FoSxr3WJu
#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw Matt Lucas’ brilliant impersonation of Boris, this is literally the NSW Strategy. They’re not stupid, they want businesses open, and their strategists have found a way. They pretend to be doing public health work… https://t.co/OfB93vYKlw
…but twist the public health terms into meaningless open-ended phrases that mean whatever you want them to mean. Employers can then keep trading as usual, confident that whatever they do is acceptable under the Public Health Orders. /end
#auspol #covid19aus it’s not, as commentary claims, that people don’t have common sense that is the problem here. It’s that common sense is meaningless in controlling most spread of the virus. It’s not lack of common sense that makes us move and gather, it’s mostly work. https://t.co/oaE1RHun0s
#auspol #covid19aus the most important graphic of the pandemic? The nonsense of the term ‘lockdown’, a set of strong public health measures to *free up* people to live normally. Political libertarians don’t understand how regulation creates freedom, wallowing at the bottom. https://t.co/PvRPfUZubH
#covid19 you can be so successful with political strategy that you can get ordinary working people to even desire their own death. The #EnoughisEnough craziness trending globally. In a sane society, it would mean 'we've had enough of this virus'. https://t.co/XPOpmg01Jf
#auspol #covid19nsw workplace mobility data is worse (i.e. there's more people moving around for work in Sydney) than last week. https://t.co/CL9UbW9R6f
#auspol #covid19aus Fantastic, pointed question about the loose Sydney restrictions from @aclennell Other journalists note - go hard, go early, with your questions.
#covid19nsw #auspol pressure building daily is showing that the NSW Government is still running a 'live with the virus' strategy alongside the eliminate the virus rhetoric. 'Live with' meaning 'businesses open'.
#covid19aus #auspol if something is confusing you about a person's behaviour, always dig until you find their most deeply held beliefs. https://t.co/cHmpzTlYsL
#covid19aus unfortunately Greg blocked me some time ago on this very topic. But a leading public health professional challenging the very measured reasoning of ATAGI? The risk assessment ATAGI did is very sound. https://t.co/bFxxLEhDNA
#auspol Is there a more disgusting notion than the UK Tories’ ‘levelling up’? Not to adjust the obscene wealth of the top 1%, but instead parade the fantasy of everybody becoming a billionaire. /1 https://t.co/XjAk4BtJ2N
Modern conservatives are ruthlessly focused on only one thing - protecting privilege. Not content with killing over 130,000 Britons with COVID to protect these vested interests, while those bodies are still warm in the ground they’re already plotting their next big steal. /end
#QandA can we please ask whether Australia plans to vaccinate children?
#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1 https://t.co/UKslXr4qmO
The one and only reason they want schools open is because that way working parents can go to work. To keep their beloved Economy going, something that doesn't even exist, a brilliant recasting of society as a handful of financial transactions, favouring existing wealth. /2
Even journalists and ordinary people talk about 'the Economy' now, as if it were an actual thing. They use the word more than they use the word society, the substitution (a conservative political strategy) almost complete. /3
It's brilliant politics, re-framing social issues as 'objective' economic indicators, so that you can pretend you're not even doing politics, while you're screwing everybody who isn't part of financialised society every single day. /4
The obvious examples? Climate change, and the pandemic. Where the number 1 reason given for not acting on both is possible damage to 'the Economy'. Never mind the possible extinction of society itself, the Economy has replaced the idea of society completely. /5
Anyway, Murray last night was blathering on about getting the kids back into school, how they should just 'kiss and drop' to remove all the Covid risk of parents mingling. This is another weaponising of public health ideas, like contact tracing has been weaponised. /6
Public health experts rightly point out that schools create enormous social mixing, of all age groups. The conservatives grabbed this, and are now saying 'schools are safe, it's just parents dropping kids off that isn't'. They started the pandemic saying kids in school.../7
...are magically immune to the virus, and they're sticking to it. Despite the obvious evidence from overseas that it's bullshit. We've even seen recent infections in Oz schools. Like overseas, schools will be the next battleground. There's an urgent need to press government.../8
...on what its strategy is for Covid and children. To do a UK, and just infect them at will, without vaccinating them? That's clearly the trajectory we're on, and nobody is asking about it. Not one single question in a press conference to date. /end
#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier’s dismissive snigger yesterday - literally a snigger - when it was suggested to her that Victoria’s essential work guidelines had been effective, was one of the most disgusting and revealing insights into underlying character and motivation.
#covid19aus #auspol the NSW Premier ‘won’t hesitate’ to use harder measures. Going to need my dictionary here.
#covid19nsw #auspol the tougher lockdown might even be an actual lockdown, who knows. https://t.co/87AE8oABLF
#auspol #covid19 when supermarkets fix their supply chains, 'panic buying' turns out to have been an optical illusion generated by just-in-time lean logistics. The gig economy. https://t.co/Ra95K4zlYs
#auspol #covid19aus I call this painting 'Schools are Safe'. https://t.co/OJqaBRpKS8
#covid19aus #auspol that’s the part of the press conference where they give the order to fire up the helicopter. https://t.co/gd8sszzNQ2
#auspol #covd19aus dodged the question about the first time Cabinet had been advised to go harder. Their advice was 60-months interest free, from Gerry. https://t.co/dSmvTBowFS
@auspol #covid19 funny that the same lockdowns have improved the financial situation of just about everybody who didn't do well out of the old Economy. https://t.co/43dWa3PP4d
#auspol #covid19aus the snigger on display again here, when describing other States. https://t.co/BE2se4xe61
#auspol #covid19 what happens when you turn your society into an economy. White-hot rage at loss of income, basic public health measures and averting the death of thousands not even in the conversation. No question this is the stress many experience. But…/1 https://t.co/9TLeDYCOYF
…we can choose a way of life where we don’t have to oppose basic subsistence, and preventing the death of millions. That way of life will mean taking back society from a handful of statistical indicators, that we mindlessly call the ‘Economy’. It doesn’t exist. /end
#auspol #covid19 "That's not how Australians live. We live with risk and ill fortune or poor health — even death — everyday." Stan Grant, mistaking everyday risks, for risks that grow exponentially and overwhelm a whole society. https://t.co/zL7H6Ecrx4
#insiders #auspol today I have learned from Barnaby that ‘carbon’ is an adjective.
#covid19aus #auspol for the same reason nobody ever asks whether the plan is to allow children to become infected at Stage 4 of the national plan. Because old people and children are expendable. https://t.co/JL8lQi6YfC
#auspol reckon Janet and the other loon libertarians have ever lived in a country without strong 'central control'? Reckon she knows that the people who staff central control are just ordinary people, like you and me, doing jobs we ask them to do? https://t.co/2EkFu4IqDV
#auspol #covid19 "You want to have a set of economic policies that ensure that businesses pay workers enough so that they are economically secure. And that should be the price of being in business." /1 https://t.co/R2oTSkyXK9
"If you can’t figure out how to do that, go be a ballet dancer or a firefighter." Nick Hanauer, on why customers with money are the key to an 'Economy', not business. Economic transactions are customers exchanging money with one another. /2
'Business' is like 'traffic', not a thing, an aggregate word for these individual transactions. Business is those who are currently winning in these transactions. To rescue an Economy, give customers money, not business. Customers not having money caused the pandemic. /end
#covid19aus #auspol finally attention to vaccination of children, in today's NSW press conference. Encouraging signs.
#auspol #covid19 it's very clear in the NSW Government advice and Health Orders that employers across the entire State *must* require workers to work from home, unless it's not reasonably practicable to do so. I wonder how much compliance is happening with that.
@covid19aus #auspolthe league table view of vaccination again. All of those other countries/regions have orders of magnitude greater transmission and death than Australia. A global pandemic strategy would reflect that, and place Oz much further down the list of vaccine priority. https://t.co/NBci0xM7VJ
#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of commercial transactions. /1 https://t.co/upJAYXhtBo
It's not the old moralistic critique of money or commerce. Nothing wrong with either of those things. It's substituting a statistical model of these commercial transactions - what we call the 'Economy' - for society itself. Where that leads.../2
...is the replacement of all basic social activity, including provision of food and shelter, with jobs and incomes. Without the latter, nobody even gets the former. Our greatest obstacle to defeating this pandemic has been this, that our societies cannot function now.../3
...in even the most basic ways, without jobs and the money they provide to ordinary people. We've been unable to take the most basic shelter against this virus, because if we do our incomes disappear, and we don't eat or have a roof over our heads. /4
None of that is necessary. There's no holy writ that says we have to tie basic subsistence to jobs and income. Only the idea of the Economy requires that. A job is the economic lever that displaces people from their homes and communities. /5
There's nothing wrong with jobs per se, but we need to recognise that they create this fundamental displacement. They separate basic subsistence from where we live. 'Travel to where the jobs are', as economic folk often say. QED. In this pandemic these same economic folk.../6
...describe a 'return to normal' as a return to jobs. They resist meaningfully supporting peoples' subsistence as they shelter from the virus, and prioritise 'getting people back into jobs'. This is the economic model of society at its core. /7
That return to jobs is a return to the mass movement and gathering that supercharges viral spread. The daily commute and cramming into workplaces. They're not two distinct things. Without this economic model of society, the pandemic wouldn't even have occurred. /8
The zoonosis that generated the virus derived from landscape destruction, in turn created by economic activity. The ongoing fracturing of communities to ensure the continuous flow of people and resources, via jobs. Everything has to keep moving, people and resources.../9
...otherwise, the 'Economy' stops. It's not coincidental that getting borders open has been an obsession for Economy folk, including for travel and tourism. Displacement of people and goods is all the Economy actually is. /10
Once you displace people and resources, and get them all moving, small numbers of people can then accumulate them and create economic wealth. Normally wealth would be the productivity of the land you tend, the quality of your water and buildings etc. /11
But the economisation of society replaces that wealth with the accumulation of money, a medium of exchange that oils the great movements of people and resources. Nothing wrong with money, but when you replace society with an Economy, money is wealth and power. /12
With money you control people (through jobs), and resources, you get to determine the economic flow that we've come to call society. The financial industry is the controlling agency of an Economy. They're the true agents opposing pandemic action. /end
The real problem isn't people looking out for themselves, it's them not understanding that this means looking out for others too. There's no binary here. https://t.co/wgy38dk9AX
#covid19 trying to think of a better candidate for most idiot line of the pandemic than 'we can't stay locked down forever'. Eliminate spread of the virus, and you can lift lockdowns straight away.
Modern conservative politics isn't government at all. It's regulatory capture, plundering of the treasury for vested interests. These parties have no real policy platform except cut taxes, cut regulation. Thus they can't manage anything, let alone a pandemic. They don't want to. https://t.co/M77m4EE8zK
#covid19nsw #auspol looks like the mole responsible for leaking NSW Health data on daily cases may have been the same person who publishes the daily case numbers to Twitter...
#COVID19Aus three regional towns into 7-day lockdown in NSW now. This is all just locking down the State, one region at a time, and it might be faster to just do a Victoria and lock the lot down.
#auspol I put Alan on tonight to see if anything had changed. Nup, was laying into Gladys, and Kerry Chant, for their apparent alarmism. Them being women I think particularly offends him. https://t.co/Y2VbmM19sB
#covid19 #auspol Bezos flying into orbit in his rocket-powered dildo is where we end up when we turn societies into economies. Most of the world can’t afford to shelter in their own home (if they have one) from a lethal virus. The wealthy few can watch from orbit. https://t.co/72Cnm7kLXN
#covid19aus #auspol ring-fencing suburbs and even whole regional towns is about as effective as trying to avoid a fart in an elevator by standing on the other side of it. https://t.co/SsdGpRzXhY
#covid19aus #auspol a corollary of the 'live with the virus' belief is that public health action is taken not to prevent people being infected or becoming sick, but to protect hospitals. Another strategic death cult trick that flies under radar. https://t.co/vPyd2KBzUx
@auspol #covid19 bad numbers. No further actions announced. 'Waiting to see' if current restrictions bite. That waiting = 'being asleep at the wheel'. https://t.co/eYsjeOyOTw
#auspol #covid19aus the NSW Premier today said NSW has stopped the exponential growth of cases. Hmm. https://t.co/RWEriNvpd8
#covid19 another conversation yesterday with a ‘vaccines will set us free’ person, convinced it’s fine to allow virus to circulate freely, provided we’re all vaccinated. Jabs in, job done, etc. Try this little gedanken experiment…/1
If a school-aged child or even adult gets whooping cough, do we allow them to come to school/work, saying ‘it’s fine, we’re all vaccinated here’? From my own experience, um, no. They’re told to isolate, restrictions are put on their movement and gathering. /the end
#covid19 extraordinary that smart people have to even try to mount an argument that using vaccines as a way to avoid basic public health work is a bad idea. https://t.co/s0U7GhspTV
#auspol #covid19aus Barely removed from Trump's constant Fauci-trashing. If you say you follow the health advice, and then don't like that advice, don't pressure the advice. Just more attempts to disguise a total vaccine procurement fuck-up. /1 https://t.co/l5unlHtVqN
By the way, if you're a journalist, like Fran Kelly on RN this morning, and you take the PM's side on this, you're part of the populist trashing of institutions that led to the disaster that is modern America. /end
#covid19aus #auspol the Premier attributing increased numbers to increased testing. Every single day more rationalisations of uncontrolled spread. 'Leaking' into neighbouring suburbs = spread, just say it. https://t.co/V0lMrGoHH3
#COVID19Aus #auspol together with removing the NSW Government for lethal incompetence, can we de-register journalists whose only question is 'when will you lift restrictions'? The grown-up version of 'are we there yet?' The virus is the problem, not the fucking restrictions.
#auspol damn that ATAGI and their 'overly cautious' advice. No wonder the PM has been banging that drum in the past 2 days. Experts should know their place, as human shields. https://t.co/1oPvrPIfrg
Where is Dr Chant? Yes Minister would say she's on gardening leave. With ATAGI soon to join her.
#auspol #covid19 “We’re all responsible for own health”. No clearer evidence of how political libertarianism has undermined public health practice. Always look for the root beliefs. This is the very antithesis of the whole idea of public health. https://t.co/q2Z9abDypX
#auspol #covid19 the development of universal schooling also created a creeping adolescence of all culture. We can see this in the pandemic, the resistance to ‘lockdowns’ is like adolescents chafing at being grounded. Not an analogy, this is our society. https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh
#covid19 #auspol watching the the UK acrobatically deny it’s even in a pandemic for the past 18 months gives us many lessons. More weaponised spin - ‘sever’ the tie between cases and hospitalisations. /1 https://t.co/rt6ybUxO0N
Both the PM and Gladys have started using this spin as well. The clear plan is to allow virus to spread at will amongst vaccinated and unvaccinated people. No more of that pesky public health restriction stuff. /2
Every time you hear a new piece of spin, designed to deny we’re even in a pandemic in some new way, substitute another infectious disease and see how ridiculous it sounds. I used whooping cough yesterday, I’ll use it again. /3
Imagine an epidemic of whooping cough, where millions of people are going about their daily lives with it, at work too, coughing repeatedly, infecting others. Would we tolerate that? We never have before. It wouldn’t matter that only a few might be going to hospital. /4
For every other infectious disease, basic public health practice kicks in. People are sent home, to isolate. Or removed from school. Look at the ‘pingdemic’ in the UK right now. Their Covid app, designed to alert people if they’ve been in contact with an infected person. /5
The person is then supposed to isolate. Infection is so grossly out of control there that these apps are ‘pinging’ to the tune of over 600,000 a day, and climbing. Essential and non-essential work and activity is unable to function, so many are being told to isolate. /6
If you think the response of the UK libertarian government might be ‘we better restrict this transmission’, which rock have you been hiding under? Their response is to now introduce widespread exemptions to the need to isolate. The whole thing is a farce. /7
The main reason this pandemic is still going and getting worse, is that the richest, most capable countries in the world, with very few exceptions like Oz and NZ, are still denying it’s even happening. From Day 1 their narrative has been ‘when can we have normal life back?’ /8
Rich, spoiled children, constantly asking ‘are we there yet?’ The key to beating a pandemic is to acknowledge you’re in one. And to change your lifestyles in ways that prevent spread. Not to try to continue ‘normal’ life with infection raging around you. /end
#auspol #covid19 @AlanBixter 'Money is the greatest vaccine of all'. That's the pandemic explained in a sentence. https://t.co/MT9NRtJEtl
#auspol #covid19aus this constant reference to our 'freedom' in today's press conference is obnoxious libertarian political bullshit. Ring-fencing hasn't worked anywhere, but is still the strategy. Vaccines seen as the salvation. We're all in a lot of trouble. https://t.co/tGZZVksDSg
#auspol #covid19aus haven't been following the numbers closely, but from memory Victoria seems to be getting on top of the Delta outbreak there? That thing the NSW Premier says 'nowhere else in the world' has done? Twice now, in Victoria?
#auspol #covid19aus wonder what ATAGI make of having their expertise scare-quoted in this way? Can somebody find Nick a safe LNP seat so he shuts up and goes away? https://t.co/8UEHfO7Nxz
#auspol #covid19 so much of the daily hysteria doesn’t match the data. This is without much supply at the Oz end, and limitless supply at the bottom end of the graph. https://t.co/oNqPpp6r5L
#auspol #covid19 the only meaningful pandemic metric. If you think Australia is now running far behind the rest of the world, move there. Barring continent-level genocide in the next 6 months, we’re going to win by several laps. https://t.co/fOgyuh0kg3
#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism. /1 https://t.co/ZVwhhnOSgu
‘Battle’ with Covid isn’t prioritising NSW businesses over peoples’ health. That’s completely surrendering to the virus, doing nothing to fight it. Delusional rubbish. This suggested increased appetite for ‘risk’ is just the latest conservative weaponised spin. /2
Their version of ‘battle’ with Covid is the mindless, suicidal ignoring of it, while we go on with our banal ‘economic’ lives. There’s no battle there, it’s like an episode of Blackadder, sending us all over the top into the path of the German machine guns, carrying bayonets. /3
The pandemic was always going to get to a point where our deepest underlying beliefs were exposed. It’s a damning judgment of political libertarianism, just look at the UK and US, who the NSW Government and federal LNP ape so relentlessly. /4
For imbeciles like Hildebrand to suggest we use their beliefs to fight Covid, after the hundreds of thousands dead there and their complete social and economic chaos - how much real evidence needs to hit a libertarian head-on for them to recognise their beliefs are idiotic? /5
Unfortunately we see the answer. No amount of evidence fixes them. They would rather you and I and everybody else die, than change their minds. It’s in Joe’s title. For the people of NSW, this sadly means Covid is coming for you. Every single one of you. /6
You can’t manage the exponential curve. Ring-fencing it won’t work. Blabbering about protecting our ‘freedoms’ is the virus’ favourite stand-up comedy act, Gladys is its favourite comedian. NSW will discover what all other libertarians have, but won’t accept…/7
…that whether to ‘lockdown’ isn’t a choice you make. It’s all that works. You do it early, and save lives and economies. Or you do it late, and kill thousands, and your economy. NSW has chosen the latter. Buckle up, you may be asked to die for their political beliefs. /end
#auspol #covid19aus we have found the lethal virus in our midst. And it is called Murdoch. Our road to Oz-Trump continues. https://t.co/RlHLCC5Cx8
#covid19aus #auspol only some sort of constitutional removal of the libertarians disguised as a NSW Government can save us. https://t.co/jceIxs1zTq
#auspol #covid19aus I think the federal LNP are lethally incompetent. But sometimes the daily team sports of Oz politics misses the important details. We’re already vaccinating significantly faster than the UK and US, even without any supply. https://t.co/wGox3ZWnb2 https://t.co/KHiHbmkb5H
#insiders as always, all journalists with no public health expertise to counter idiot assertions. Vaccines won’t control the Sydney outbreak, the timescales are unworkable. NSW needs to escalate its NPIs.
#insiders again, idiot journalists trashing ATAGI, because they don’t have a single millibyte of public health knowledge between them. Australia’s outbreaks are due to poor quarantine. Countries who have used AZ extensively having even larger outbreaks.
#auspol #covid19aus the refusal of even many experts to resist the gibbering hysteria over vaccination rates astounds me. How often do prominent Oz people say we're running last in the world? Musings on this graph /1 https://t.co/3nj6Mjms7Y
To beat a pandemic, you need an integrated public health strategy. How fast you vaccinate is one component only, of that strategy. Countries who got emergency authorization to start speed vaccinating in late-2020 were already up shit creek, pandemic-wise. /2
Look at their vaccination rates now. Falling behind even the aggregate world rate, which includes the vast swathes of countries who have next to no vaccine at all. Australia easily outpacing both the US and UK, even with limited supply. /3
Some say yes, but the US and UK have already vaccinated nearly half their people. So what? The goal here is to end the pandemic, not to vaccinate the fastest. They have next to zero meaningful NPI. That will cost them dearly, as it did in 2020. /4
Australia knows how to do NPI. And even more importantly, it has the will to do it. Neither the UK nor US, both infected with virulent strains of libertarianism, have that will. My money is still on Oz beating most of the world, in a canter. We're very short-term. /end
#auspol #COVID19nsw after stalling the country on airborne spread for 18 months, Peter Collignon now wades into another area in which he has no expertise. Several prominent experts stopped doing science and started doing politics, some time ago. https://t.co/uBYqPZa5Ul
@InsidersABC how about having a public health expert on the panel for the duration of the pandemic, even to one side (i.e. 4 on the show)? I suggest @Globalbiosec You include indigenous journalists for indigenous issues, why not experts for pandemic issues?
#covid19 the libertarian idea that 'fighting' Covid means being infected by it, is akin to asking soldiers to go over the top and march into the machine guns, unarmed. https://t.co/mws4D0Ah2Y
#covid19 #auspol today's reading, NSW Cabinet, is from the Book of Leviticus. https://t.co/8Zq2SOOklr
#auspol #covid19aus curious that the advice of conservative-leaning experts is all about travelling with vaccine passports, nothing about public health strategy at all. OK, not really curious, just a figure of speech. https://t.co/rPD4bMiLOg
#covid19aus #auspol it seems very dangerous to promise people a ‘way out’ based only on a percentage of people vaccinated? Control of all highly infectious disease involves much more than just vaccination. The public will rebel unless that’s clear. https://t.co/slettFmkf2
#covid19aus #auspol I'm imagining a half-day education session for all of our leading political journalists, after listening to @frankelly08 on RN this morning describe 'Zero Covid' as meaning 'zero cases and zero deaths'. It doesn't mean that, it's never meant that. /1
Our journalists have a responsibility to be basically equipped with the public health concepts in a pandemic. They're not stenographers, there to merely convey 'he said, she said'. They're supposed to filter the crap from the facts, for the public. /end
#auspol #covid19aus it's called federalism. It's what made us succeed in 2020. Also curious that other experts, right up to the Nobel level, have suggested vaccines are not the solution to the Sydney outbreak. Another expert freelancing as a politician. https://t.co/zre7foajS3
#covid19 Q: how many libertarians does it take to change a light bulb? A: stop oppressing that fucking light bulb. https://t.co/UyQ426y2u0
#covid19 the Spanish Flu pandemic lasted just over 2 years. No vaccines, no real treatments. Covid will easily go past it in duration. And possibly still with deaths. WITH vaccines. A damning indictment of modern economic life, which refused to fight it. https://t.co/Pb8fiTQGaQ
#covid19 the WHO renamed viral variants with Greek letters to remove the geographical references. That's nice. But actually they should be named after the fuckwits of the pandemic, who generated them. The Trump, Bolsanaro, Johnson etc. variants. https://t.co/7NXvln5wdY
“…saying she was "putting people ahead of our budget and people ahead of our economy".” The lethally dangerous belief system that we accept daily without blinking. Where an ‘Economy’ is a separate thing to the people. https://t.co/wQFNtx9dOj
#covid19aus #auspol there’s no mystery as to why NSW isn’t progressing out of this outbreak, like Victoria has. It’s been in plain view for over 18 months. The NSW Government thinks the ‘Economy’ is separate to society. The Economy is humanity’s most lethal fiction. https://t.co/wrnwO4jcUr
#auspol #covid19 I think we need to see evidence of who these ‘critical workers’ are. Right now they’re being used as the excuse to not go harder with lockdown. Melbourne also has critical workers and was able to lock down harder. https://t.co/RiFORSXzMB
Idiots gather under hashtags like #defundtheabc Making it easy to prevent anti-social suicide cults from self-organising. They're wearing name tags, all the time.
#auspol #covid19aus this is a farce. Every single day getting worse. Mindless, lethal claptrap from the Premier about peoples' 'freedom'. https://t.co/i96e6qOgpt
#covid19aus #auspol those confused about the NSW strategy (or absence of strategy). Always go back to peoples' core beliefs. https://t.co/3hgF75vRb6
#auspol #covid19nsw #covid19aus clear now that NSW is falling back on a UK strategy. Relying upon vaccines to fix an absence of restrictions. I pity those working in ICUs.
#auspol #covid19aus Not only no stronger restrictions (if true), construction (big donor) gets its way and some loosening. Meanwhile thousands of under-40s, who shouldn’t ever have been taking AZ, will be jabbed in an act of public health theatre. https://t.co/ozzmqidiJE
#covid19aus the point that the ‘live with the virus’ people ignore. https://t.co/G3vIpRimLK
#auspol #covid19aus I want to retweet this one every single day. Australia following the mindless weaponised rubbish from overseas, that get the jabs in arms, and the pandemic will be over. It’ll help, but it isn’t enough. Hugely dangerous to run that as public health messaging. https://t.co/G3vIpRimLK
#auspol Blacktown Mayor on Sky saying we need to get everybody vaccinated. Yes we do, but the framing here is the same as the deadly framing of contact tracing last year. People want a silver bullet, they don’t stop to think that the ‘normal’ life they want back is dysfunctional.
#covid19aus #auspol while you expect more deaths among the vaccinated, when you have widespread vaccination (this is the UK), it's still a sobering reminder that vaccines are not a silver bullet. https://t.co/1rMLTnKvmG
#auspol the comparison with other everyday risks is not the point. Risk exists within a context. The context in NSW is a government refusing to adequately restrict circulation of virus in the community. If it would do that, people wouldn't need to choose vaccines. https://t.co/e3iNavvkmU
#covid19aus #auspol NSW Premier today talking about the 'ripple' effect of people 'not following rules'. This is how libertarians work. Abrogate their own responsibility to do anything (restoring our 'freedom' from government). Then blame individuals.
#auspol #covid19aus a game for people in lockdown. Colour in the infected LGAs. A new LGA every day, sometimes 2 or 3. https://t.co/WnZaIoIwlq
#covid19aus #auspol the cold, dead, genocidal eyes of the loons who think an economy and a society are two separate things. NSW was always going to end up here, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the core beliefs. https://t.co/AbfD21ZVvS
#auspol #covid19aus during the Black Plague, whole towns were quarantined, not to protect the people in them, but to protect the people outside them. People inside the quarantined areas were left to die. W and SW Sydney, welcome to the Middle Ages. https://t.co/8GPvns4HtT
#auspol #covid19aus libertarian theatre. Collective emergencies become individual tabloid pile-ons. Toilet paper, ‘rule’-breakers. (The delicious irony of libertarians getting their jollies persecuting rule-breakers). Sydneysiders 'willing to dob’. /1 https://t.co/g8PfesgYhe
‘Lockdown’ is a libertarian strategic term, designed to encourage people to find public health restrictions an oppression. The narrative every day is ‘when will we be “free” of lockdowns?’ The UK’s ‘Freedom Day’. The sheer perversity of weaponising spin like that…/2
…while at the same time engaging in daily flagellation of rule-breakers, who have been encouraged all along to resist the restrictions. This is the insanity you live when you elect libertarians, identified easily by their belief that society is an ‘Economy’. /end
#auspol #covid19aus you'd shoot a horse for less. https://t.co/G4kd0yB7q1
#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1 https://t.co/g34gE1tUc6
Just as an Ebola outbreak in Africa has us scrambling to lock the Africans in, an outbreak in the West of Sydney has us doing the same. Maximum freedom for the privileged in the East, maximum restriction for the poor out West. /2
Right now rich countries agitating to restore their ‘freedoms’, their ridiculously obsessive travel culture. Their freedom to travel at will throughout the world. Turning other people’s homes into holidays. This is after germinating this pandemic in their own countries…/3
…failing to control it, so that it spread everywhere, then hogging all of the world’s vaccines to try to save themselves. Now they’re jabbed, they want it all flung open again, while the vast majority of the world is being smashed by the virus inflicted upon them. /4
The hysteria over vaccination speed in Australia disgusts me for just this reason, our global view disappeared the second vaccines arrived. We have the resources to maintain control of this virus, while we implement a truly global pandemic strategy. /5
But nobody gives a fuck. Give me that jab, I want to get back on planes. To get the Economy moving, restore my cashflow. Let’s even lock down the Westies, but light touch the Eastern suburbs life. Big tax cuts coming for them. /6
Most expertise has begun to disgust me for the same reason, so hopelessly and narrowly focused on a few health concepts, slicing and dicing data every day. This is a political event, playing out in all the usual ways. All the same people will be screwed. /end
@liammannix interesting. https://t.co/z2uQfsWFzd
#covid19nsw #auspol the breathless excitement from the Premier around 'jabs'. Would that the same passion applied to NPIs. Says the more jabs, the more freedom. Like a Boris Johnson clone. He killed over 100,000 people.
@auspol #covid19aus there’s a tragic comedy about all of these roadmap things. Like predicting the weather 6 months in advance. Here’s the only strategy that will work - at every moment, do what is most likely to drive the virus into submission. https://t.co/1AsJunF2o8
#covid19 the evolving Covid-19 developed world pandemic strategy. https://t.co/ag1fy9d9Hd
#auspol #covid19 Waleed’s thought is the sort we need more of. Not narrowly confined within a discipline or ideology. This pandemic has seen us lurching from one mythology to the next, all to avoid one basic fact. We’re in a pandemic. https://t.co/MBb5AnLm0t
#auspol #covid19aus trying to find expert analysis of National Cabinet’s new 4-stage plan (their 3rd, the first 2 disappeared into irrelevance). You can’t predict the weather more than about 3 days out…/1 https://t.co/sJgSbnCxfn
…but again we have the corporate types in suits confidently predicting a pandemic months into the future. The conservatives using the NSW outbreak to drive us even further towards the genocidal UK pandemic model. Treasury ‘tempering’ the health advice now! /2
The glee with which they can now ignore everything except a ridiculously meaningless vaccination percentage, which doesn’t even include children? How many pieces of silver did the Doherty folks get for this rubbish? /3
There’s only one pandemic strategy that works. Do everything the situation demands, every dynamically changing day, to smash the virus. Everything else is the cashed-up status quo fucking with our institutions /end
#auspol #covid19aus always remember that many argued that the acceptable level of a lethal pandemic virus wasn’t zero. You don’t need data whizzes to understand the pandemic, this is all it’s been, every single day of it. https://t.co/WTDalMxGgt
#auspol #covid19 I’m glad we ditched public health measures to protect our freedoms in NSW. https://t.co/YuEyg80yeZ
#covid19 one of the mythologies of the pandemic is that nations choose the strength of their social restrictions. The only thing we choose is how quickly we apply ‘lockdown’ levels of restriction, and how many therefore die. https://t.co/0HGRvXyBeR
#auspol #covid19 When this dam started to fail in the UK, the nearby town was evacuated while it was fixed. Nobody suggested ‘living with’ the leak. Why is it a ‘leak’ of virus into the community doesn’t register with us in the same way? When that dam bursts, it kills many more. https://t.co/3RQxFLlQWs
#insiders Health Hazzard talking about ‘balance’, another strategic conservative word. They use it for climate change too, it means ‘we won’t actually act, to save the Economy’. Ask them to ‘balance’ the Economy with childcare, and wages, and education and health care.
#insiders #auspol the 2 things Health Hazzard says will end the NSW lockdown - individual behaviour and vaccines - both notably require the NSW Government to do almost nothing.