October 2021

@RichardfromSyd1 @OrinCordus a ripper I think, like Aris’ thread but pitched for the general reader.

I Tweet a lot about the transformation of our societies into ‘libertarian’ societies. By which is meant the political movement that transformed Western democracies from the 1950s onwards, and accelerated greatly from the late 1970s. The Thatcher and Reagan revolutions. /2

‘There is no such thing as society’, Maggie Thatcher famously said. The idea that what we call society is really just millions of isolated individuals. Reagan’s economics derived from these underlying beliefs is what we’re all living now. /3

All productive work focused on individuals getting ahead. On their ‘aspirations’. But it extends into all areas of life. To go back to public conversation, if you look at most social media, it doesn’t seem very social. Overwhelmingly you’ll see curated individual…/4

…personalities, people positioning themselves in the space and trying to ‘stand out from the crowd’. ‘Look at me’. Now that seems very anti-social, but actually I think what we’re seeing is that this IS how libertarian cultures view society. They’re incapable of seeing…/5

…a ‘social’ or ‘public’ act as anything except them presenting themselves, as individuals, to the collective gaze. Not interaction or conversation, the ‘public’ space is just where we, as individuals, display that individuality. /6

Have a look at the response to the pandemic, as an example. The pandemic became fertile ground for all manner of individual grievance and posturing. We used the massively intensified collective focus on this emergency as a stage to perform our individual gripes. /7

Protests on all sorts of matters. This collective emergency triggered not much more than individual complaint. Very little of it related to the pandemic at all. No big street marches to demand the virus be eliminated from our societies. No collective solidarity towards../8

…achieving a collective pandemic-related end. Using the pandemic instead as an opportunity to express our pre-existing individual grievances. Like society had provided us with poor customer service. Citizens *are* ‘economic customers, in libertarian countries. /9

Have also Tweeted before about how libertarians transformed societies more generally into ‘economies’, collectives of these individual customers. Our major challenge with defeating Covid isn’t the virus, it’s that our ‘economies’ don’t tolerate collective aims. To an Economy…/10

…a pandemic is an unacceptable restriction of trade. It crushes our individual economic aspirations. Small business owners going broke is seen as equal in gravity to thousands dying. To be ‘balanced’ against public health action. Unless we continuously come back to…/11

…the underlying beliefs that are the actual raw material of society, those beliefs will continue to make us puppets. They will even kill us in the millions, what war or pandemic isn’t generated by some obsessive idea(l)? I love daily Twitter, am not really fussed about…/12

…the team sports aspect of it, trying to frame everything that happens according to which political team you back. Society isn’t a footy game. But at least there are remnants of public conversation here, amongst all of the posturing. /13

As to how this libertarian lunacy actually succeeded, it’s mostly about schools. Not in what they teach, but in the sub-culture they became which then spread. Modern schooling separated out an entire demographic, removed it from real connection to wider adult life. /14

Lots of that is a good idea, to focus on childhood as a distinct development stage. But the consequences have been much wider than I think is realised. Because putting aside the maths, languages, music etc. we learn at school, what we learn most deeply is how to be social. /15

School became the model for society as a whole. Give kids 13 years in a sub-culture divorced from wider society, and that’s the only model they will then have to take into adult life, to understand society. And gradually society has been re-made as a giant high school. /16

In essence libertarianism is really nothing more than society seen through an adolescent lens. We all know teenagers focus extremely heavily upon their individual selves, that they chafe against restrictions and rules. No analogies here, we never leave high school. /17

It’s not a political shift, not just ‘neoliberal’ or libertarian political strategy. This was a shift in our culture itself, that drove the political changes. Through that lens, look at the posturing on social media, from all ages, and see if you recognise high school again. /end

If you see disease in this social and political way, it was never a surprise that libertarian politicians grasped vaccines and turned them into ‘biomedical weapons’ in this pandemic. It was obvious that the second vaccines arrived, basic public health work would be ditched. /2

And the use of basic germ theory and technology to individualise disease and medicine, we’re seeing it with the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ again now. Well worth your reading time. /end

When even the ABC journalists can't get basic public health concepts correct, 2 years into a pandemic, what hope do we have?

@RichardfromSyd1 this one is an absolute corker.

@OrinCordus I winced looking at projected Victorian hospitalisations. Seems Burnet may have been close to the mark all along?

A society might be more accurately described as a set of relationships between people. That’s closer I think, but again you can have relationships between people without having a society. I’ll cut straight to the chase - the raw material of all societies is ideas. /2

It’s ideas that are the literal building blocks of all societies. Ideas are what people relate over. Look at any social interaction, and if you peel away the layers, it reduces to an idea or set of ideas. Ideas about family, work, love, about cars, about medicine etc. etc. /3

I’ve Tweeted before about how ideas are also not personal. They’re actually eternal, and shareable amongst millions of people, across generations. (Plato talked about this eternal nature of ideas a lot.) They have agency, they act, across generations. /4

For this reason a society that is functioning well is a society whose underlying ideas are in some sort of harmony. Ideas are the most dangerous of all things, some will literally kill millions of people if allowed (when they often get called ‘ideals’). /5

Have also Tweeted about why universities are so critical to societies. Universities tame ideas, they discipline them, bring them into harmony. One of the reasons for a growing lack of social cohesion is the development of ‘think tanks’, to weaponise ideas for specific ends. /6

These ends are not only antithetical to harmony with society’s other existing ideas, a think tank’s ideas are often designed to deliberately disrupt that harmony. To disrupt. Narrow focus, with a pure strategic aim of achieving some pre-determined outcome. /7

I think one idea or set of ideas not only explains most of our current social structures and behaviours, they also contain within them the seed of a continuous, corrosive undermining of society itself. Sometimes I call these ideas political libertarianism. /8

But stripped back to its essence, libertarianism is really one take on the age-old question of individual versus group. What is an individual, what is a group, and what relationships exist between them? I’m betting you’ll struggle to find any social or political issue…/9

…that doesn’t orbit this particular set of ideas. How you understand individuality and group will define you both socially and politically. Most of the debates we see in society are really only foot soldiers co-opted by different variations of these core ideas. Ideas act. /10

Libertarians see the individual as not only intrinsically separate to the group, some go so far as to say the group doesn’t even exist. ‘There is no such thing as society’ (Margaret Thatcher). Those of the ‘Left’ (labels are really only foot solider livery) on the other hand…/11

…often see the group as primary, with individuals subordinate to broader social requirements. Most of our politics is the ping pong between these two positions. A battle of ideas, literally, with human beings the soldiers each variant of the ideas co-opts. /12

I’d like to share an extraordinary take on these ideas. That of Gabriel Tarde. Tarde has been dead over a century, and his thinking wasn’t much noticed in his day. Tarde said that there are no individuals, and no groups. He rejected this set of ideas entirely. /13

Reading Tarde, you can literally gasp with the audacity of his thinking. It’s so unlike anything that came before him, or after him. It resets much of our whole framework for thought and life. I’ll focus only his thinking about individuals and groups here. /14

For Tarde, every group we see is comprised solely of the individuals that are members. But those individuals in turn already pre-share the characteristics that define group membership. Examples can help. A netball club. That club or group is made up of individual members. /15

Each of those members though share a commitment to playing netball, views on uniforms, refereeing, courts, etc. There is no magic ‘emergence’ of the group from the individuals. The shared DNA of the group’s interests (ideas about uniforms etc.) pre-existed the group. /16

In fact the group is a fiction, it always remains just these individuals, acting according to their already-shared interests. Anybody who has tried to run a club knows how strongly individuals in it hold on to their individuality. /17

You might think this makes Tarde a libertarian. Not on your nelly. Those shared interests are not individual. They’re ideas and passions and beliefs people picked up socially. There are no individuals either, because what constitutes an individual is just a particular slant…/18

…on a set of social, shared ideas. The group is just individuals, and individuals are just perspectives on shared, group ideas. Or in other words, there are no individuals, and no groups. Society is an interaction of different viewpoints on the same shared ideas. /19

Some use a chemistry metaphor to describe Tarde’s wonderful thinking. Just as water can exist in different phases - solid, liquid, gas - a group is just a different ‘phase’ of social life. It’s all water (individual people), but that water can sometimes aggregate, disperse,…/20

…boil over etc. People form groups for entirely individual aims, to make their lives easier. Many hands make light work. They never stop being that individual, even in a group. Libertarians are only the mirror image of ‘authoritarian’ States. /21

One pretends groups are the important thing, the other individuals. Both live in the fantasy that groups and individuals are distinct things. There are no individuals without groups, and no groups without individuals. Neither actually exist, they’re perspectives on ideas…/22

…that sometimes have wide scale, and sometimes none. We all know this intuitively, we feel our individuality, but we feel the raw material of that individuality as the things we accumulate socially: ideas, beliefs, feelings, etc. There’s no binary here. /23

Right now in a pandemic, we have those who argue for individual freedom from public health action, and those who argue for collective priorities. As a Tardean, I reject both. We need to focus on collective public health measures, to protect our individuality. Our ‘freedom’…/24

…is collectively generated (many hands make light work). But our collective effort is driven by our individual desires and beliefs. We act collectively to protect and strengthen our individuality. Again, no binary here. /end

The problem with our ideas about democracy are, we don’t really have any ideas about democracy. We have some vague sense that it means ‘the people’ (whatever that means) are in charge. It hasn’t ever really meant that. They get a say every few years as to who will lead. /2

We also have a vague sense democracy means fairness and equity, and sharing wealth. History shows that’s never really happened. Material living standards have risen, but relativities between wealthy and poor are worse, and much of the rising tide is funded by personal debt. /3

What makes progressively-minded people tear their hair out is that conservative politics, a promoter of the status quo, keeps winning elections. Even when it kills hundreds of thousands of people in a pandemic, popularity is barely dented. Why? /4

Back to Queen Victoria. Conservatives understand very well that peoples’ deepest desires aren’t for uniformity, for equity and sharing. The engine room of all societies is comparison, status. In a monarchy, the King or Queen represents the pinnacle of a hierarchy of status. /5

Take the monarch away and people will reinvent the hierarchy using other metrics. This is what conservatives understand, and progressives don’t. Conservatives speak about ‘aspiration’. About the ‘politics of envy’ when inequality is attacked. They know what they’re doing. /6

It may seem a sad truth (more on that in a second), but people are much less concerned about the relative wealth and status of social groups, than they are about their personal position in the social hierarchy. What will fire them up is a perception they’re moving up or down…/7

…this hierarchy. It’s easy to be a bit superior about that, seeing it as shallow behaviour. But underneath status is a perception of value. We all rank the things that interest us according to our perception of quality. Hierarchies derive from these perceptions of quality. /8

Progressive politics needs to find a way to tap into this foundational social psychology. Promising to level hierarchies is disastrous strategy. People don’t believe it, they know there are legitimate distinctions between better and worse, in everything. /end

All just code for ‘we only act for the Economy’. 2/2

Social media makes peoples’ beliefs visible. Often these beliefs clash. The people who hold them haven’t always clashed in the past, because wealthy societies can buy their way out of conflict. When there’s plenty for all, rarely do we need to argue anything. /2

Wealthy societies don’t discuss, they don’t argue. Life is good, disagreement is corralled inside platitudes like ‘each to their own’. As Google say about themselves, revenue fixes most problems. ‘Let Them Eat Cake’ is the mindset, why are those poor people arguing? /3

Pandemics reboot socieities. They’re the literal on/off switch, nothing else achieves it. Traditional natural disasters like bushfires unite people behind (often jingoistic) causes. Pandemics keep stripping every layer of social fiction away, making each of us alone. /4

All the usual attempts at pulling together ultimately fail, because the virus undermines every type of social grouping. There’s no ‘strength in numbers’, the virus loves all groupings. The ultimate defence against it is being alone. And that’s why these communities…/5

…are beginning to fracture. The fantasies and delusions we use to maintain social unity in normal times are being stripped away by the virus. People are on their own, because ultimately you are always alone. Even in normal times. The pandemic is just revealing it. /end

The US is obviously highly shaped by a libertarian belief system. Widespread antagonism to any notion of the public and to institutional support for social life. But you still have to implement your belief system, and I think it’s on sporting fields that key answers lie. /2

It struck me again reading Damien Cave’s experience moving his family to Australia. What he found, which we take for granted, was to him almost unique in the world. A ‘a way of co-existing with nature and all its chaos, danger and unpredictability.’ /3 https://t.co/YBhHFg6aP8

And he saw that via community sport. “You had all these parents taking care of all these children — not just their own kids — and you had all these kids who were expected to move in these risky situations together.” No child was allowed to give up, but no child judged either. /4

‘Collective coaxing’, as he called it. Now living here, this is exactly the experience of community sport, every week. People from all backgrounds mixing, collectively coaxing others to take on challenges and risks. I now think this is where Australian democracy is made. /5

It’s a truism that Australians love sport. But the social and cultural importance of community sport is much more than about throwing balls around. It’s the logistical training ground for Australian democracy, where we lean to live as a community. /6

I hadn’t realised that community sport is not as common internationally. It may be declining in Australia too, so we may be on the pathway to idiot libertarianism too. /end

…what’s the precedent here? What other diseases to do we allow to have such high prevalence, with vaccine-moderated virulence? Are there any? Genuine question @RealOzSAGE or anyone? Also: “When we are thinking about 80-year-olds, where the danger of COVID is really obvious…/2

…[about] a third of people die,” he said. “When we are looking at kids, who rarely go to hospital and as a rule don’t die from COVID, then that’s sort of a different equation.” Wouldn’t most of the childhood immunisation program not reach that bar? /end https://t.co/mDuD5CT7cm

What he doesn’t say (he’s either deliberately misleading, or innumerate) is that by *definition* at both 70% and 80% figures, nearly half the State won’t have even had the opportunity to be vaccinated. No matter how keen they are to be jabbed…/2

…the State would have re-opened anyway, without them. That’s how the target is designed. ‘When 56% and 64% of you are vaccinated, we’re opening’. Is this so hard to understand? More slogans, ask many in the street and they’ll say anybody not vaccinated at 70 or 80%…/3

…has themselves to blame, they should have gone and got a jab. That’s what the political strategists want them to think, and it’s worked. Under the definition of the opening, they were never going to be given the chance for that jab, pre-opening. /end

In speaking with many people I know who don't follow the pandemic much beyond what they see in the news, the slogan that 'it's not cases that matter, it's hospitalisations and death that matter' has done its job. It's uttered as the pinnacle in common sense. /2

Like all public health ideas transformed into slogans, the devil is in the details. Here are the main causes of death in Australia, across all age groups (thanks to AIHW). There are two important things here I think: /3 https://t.co/dAmj1tkCfJ

1) the vast majority of people with these conditions are not in hospital, most of the time. They will have hospital stays at various points of their illness, but they're mostly living in the community, and 2) the overall load on the health system from these conditions.../4

...goes well beyond the hospital stays. These conditions kill more Australians than any others, but their seriousness isn't assessed according to how much time people spend in hospital, or whether they go to hospital. /5

When politicians say hospitalisations are the key metric, they're not talking about health. They're talking about logistics, about the capacity of hospitals to meet demand for beds. That's part of their job, all fine. But the spin has transformed that logistical imperative.../6

...into a health one, in peoples' thinking. They now believe that the seriousness of Covid from a health point of view is defined by how many people end up in hospital. So long as we have the beds, Covid has been tamed. But Covid patients in hospital beds is only the tiniest.../7

...tip of the public health implications of Covid infection. Imagine taking all of the conditions on the AIHW table, shown again here, and saying their seriousness is defined only by how many hospital beds people occupy, with these conditions. /8 https://t.co/KsGw3xhr8S

For all of the conditions listed, we move Heaven and Earth to try to *reduce* their incidence, to minimise the harm they cause, to stop people ever developing these diseases, and reduce suffering when they do. Many of these people die in the community, not in hospital. /9

And their pathway to that death is travelled overwhelmingly outside hospital. Imagine saying that heart disease is not an issue in Australia, everybody can get a coronary care bed if they need one. And yet this is the narrative even some experts are now peddling, for Covid. /end

Thanks to Biopolastics News for the image.

Political libertarianism is really just iconoclasm. The destruction of existing institutions. Institutions that carry the accumulated learnings of societies, across generations. As we did in the Reformation. We're going through another iconoclastic phase now. /2

You can see this everywhere if you look. For example in the pandemic, where politicians deliberately set up an opposition between their decisions, and expertise. Expertise lives in institutions. Institutions force you to apply accumulated wisdom to a decision. /3

Populist politicians obviously hate that. So for decades now they've made the real opposition in politics not the Left, or the Right, but institutions. 'Bureaucracy', as they call it. But it's a full-culture phenomenon. For example.../4

...in organisations and businesses, we've had MBA-led assaults on existing 'administration' for decades, with constant outsourcing of expertise away from the accumulated internal knowledge. The failures and costs of this shift have been phenomenal. /5

Going back to Peter Ridd and universities, ironically nothing will fire up an academic's anger more than their university's administration. It's the same iconoclasm. Academics don't like you pointing out that universities are almost universally run by...other academics. /6

Academic freedom has never meant the freedom of individual academics to say what they like. It also hasn't meant that they can, provided it's 'in their area of expertise'. All libertarian nonsense. Politicians want to turn this into a free speech issue, to dovetail with.../7

...their wider culture war. That war is always about finding an individual who shares your views, and setting up a straw man situation where it appears their view is being oppressed. Ridd is the perfect patsy for the climate deniers in politics, and they will always.../8

...use people like Ridd as their Trojan Horse to undermine another institution they see as in their way. They'll chew him up and spit him out when they're done with him, he's a fool if he thinks they actually care. /9

Academic freedom is peer-review. The right to have a view, provided it's tested by your fellow experts. Society knows ideas are its deepest layer, and universities therefore will always represent a threat to those in positions of authority. So in the history of universities.../10

...society has put this proviso on them being allowed to uproot the status quo of ideas. You can have that 'freedom', provided it's within a culture of peer review. Academic governance, as it's called. In recent decades the New Public Management (NPM) zealots.../11

...in universities (usually failed academics who took the management career path) have tried to marginalise academic governance as being only about the 'quality' of a university's offerings. TEQSA believes and enforces the same rubbish. So the management can make any idiot.../12

...decision it likes, and it will be the job of academic governance to ensure the outcome is 'quality'. Bizarre that academics fell for this, but they're usually individually brilliant, and collectively quite stupid. A university's core 'product'.../13

...(NPM-led unis spend years arguing over what their core product and core customer is) is ideas. Not students. Ideas. That's their job, to be the steward of ideas. Peer-review is the only management and governance method that can work for that, because no individual.../14

...can own an idea. Ideas exist separately to people, and are the raw material of society. This will never change. And so the only method of taming them is a collective method. Academic freedom, the freedom to collectively decide on ideas. Anything else is fundamentalism. /end

Notice that the Economy crowd are always relentlessly on message, a slogan for every eventuality. People need to be the same, in opposing them. They literally workshop this every single day, whether there's a pandemic or not. /2

Listening to constant calls to 'balance' public health action against 'the Economy' should have galvanised us from the beginning of 2020. It's the same schtick the Economy crowd pulled with climate change, that 'balance' framing. What it actually means is 'we will use.../3

...the existing status quo as an excuse to change nothing, but sound reasonable doing it.' Balancing is such a warm, cuddly-sounding activity. Like all the slogans, spend even a minute with it, and it's revealed to be totally devoid of content. /4

The question this pandemic should have led our societies to is: what is this 'Economy' thing, that we use to describe what we used to call a society? How could something we constructed with our ow hands need to be 'balanced' against our own health? We made the Economy.../5

...and so we're completely free to make it do anything we want, including saving lives. We should have been led to this question because this mythical Economy is also used to oppose action on climate change. *There's* a clue to what the Economy actually is. /6

The idea of an economy came from the early 20th century, where it began as a measure of national income. It measured *one* aspect of society. Nothing wrong with that. But over that century, a dangerous shift occurred. A measurement, something out of double-entry bookkeeping.../7

...or a spreadsheet, was granted agency of its own. THE Economy. Suddenly a small measurement of one aspect of social life, commercial transactions, became a thing. The Economy became an independent social entity, alongside society. All very deliberate political strategy. /8

Now people who were doing very well out of those commercial transactions could gradually replace consideration of society itself, with this idea of an economy. Economics came to the party, and made it a self-regulating equilibrium machine. Now political decisions.../9

...on any matter at all, from anywhere in society, could be said to impact the Economy. In fact it got worse, because gradually the Economy was seen as what enabled all other social activity. The Economy makes social activity of any type possible. It pays the bills. /10

Complete sleight of hand here, because society didn't have bills, before we invented the Economy. It's not a business. We're always able to undertake social tasks using a variety of methods, the economic one is just one of many. /11

The genius of all of this as political strategy was, now some politicians and their backers could make intrinsically political decisions, while pretending they were just following the laws of economics. They have to follow the laws, they say, to keep the Economy going. /12

Otherwise society, they say, will grind to a halt. They've now replaced the idea of society entirely with that of the Economy, and its enabler the market. Both abstractions of wider social activity, stripped of its complex multi-dimensionality and replaced with.../13

...a handful of metrics and indicators. Usually graphed. Notice the Treasurer and PM when talking about the Economy are unable to do so, without pointing at graphs. That's the only place 'the Economy' actually exists. /14

Anyway, this deliberate substitution of the Economy for society leads us to a situation now where vast existential threats, like climate change and the pandemic, are laughably claimed to need balancing against the Economy. The Economy is only a spreadsheet.../15

...specifically designed to rationalise existing commercial interests. It's politics filtered through pseudo-mathematical mumbo jumbo. Again, all deliberately done, we're patsies. Every journalist now says 'the Economy' as if it's as real as Mt Everest. Both sides.../16

...of politics the same. Never mind that Covid showed comprehensively that what disrupts society, like people getting sick and dying, destroys the economy too. Such overwhelming evidence of the non-existence of the Economy as a thing still hasn't budged it. /17

Bugger all the Left and Right nonsense. Our collective enemy is the Economy. This nonsensical mathematical construct that has been substituted for our complex social lives. /end

…what is ‘business’? Business is one of those terms, like ‘the Economy’, that rolls off all of our tongues. We just assume these are things. Actually ‘business’ is a social activity, like everything else, not a separate activity. Utterly reliant upon social life. And further…/2

…while it’s of course true that businesses are legal entities with a certain structure, do they actually exist? By which I mean, without customers, would we have businesses? Obviously not. Businesses go broke, they fold, without customers. 50-75% of businesses…/3

…in Australia fold inside 5 years of being set up. This isn’t semantics, look at the debates over stimulus payments, should they go to ‘business’, or to customers of businesses? Modern conservatives overwhelmingly say the former. Empirical evidence show the latter to be…/4

…orders of magnitude more effective. As with the Economy, let’s be blunt - ‘business’ isn’t a thing. There are just customers. There are businessES, sure, but those are just mechanisms for servicing the needs of customers. People with (or without) money. When a conservative…/5

…advocates for ‘business’, it’s identical to them advocating for ‘the Economy’. They’re constructs designed to rationalise the interests of those who are socio-economically advantaged. Stimulus payments will go to established businesses, not to customers - existing interests. /6

Jobs don’t flow from doing that, because jobs come from customers. People spending money. Two chicken and egg questions: can a business survive without customers? Can a customer survive without a business? Answering those will tell you which is actually real./ end

"To support the Ins when things are going well; to support the Outs when they seem to be going badly, this, in spite of all that has been said about tweedledum and tweedledee, is the essence of popular government. Even the most intelligent large public of which we .../2

...have any experience must determine finally who shall wie1d the organized power of the state, its army and its police, by a choice between the Ins and Outs. Although it is the custom of partisans to speak as if there were radical differences between the Ins and the Outs.../3

...it could be demonstrated, I be1ieve, that in stable and mature societies the differences are necessarily not profound. If they were profound, the defeated minority would be constantly on the verge of rebellion... /4

In the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and in certain of the Continental countries an election rarely means even a fraction of what the campaigners said it would mean. It means some new faces and perhaps a slightly different general tendency in the .../5

...management of affairs...even these differing tendencies [between Ins and Outs] are very small as compared with the immense area of agreement, established habit and unavoidable necessity. In fact, one might say that a nation is politically stable when nothing of radical.../6

...consequence is determined by its e1ections. There is, therefore, a certain mock seriousness about the campaigning for votes in well-established communities. Much of the excitement is not about the fate of the nation but simply about the outcome of the game. /7

...the real difference between the Ins and the Outs is no more than this: the Ins, after a term of power, become so committed to policies and so entangled with particular interests that they lose their neutral freedom of decision. They cannot then intervene to check.../8

...the arbitrary movement of the interests with which they have become aligned. Then it is time for the Outs to take power and restore a balance. The virtue of the Outs in this transaction is that they are not committed to those particular policies and those.../9

...particular interests which have become overweighted...The test of whether the Ins are handling affairs effectively is the presence or absence of disturbing problems...for the most part the general public cannot back each reformer on each issue. It must choose between.../10

...the Ins and Outs on the basis of a cumulative judgment as to whether problems are being solved or aggravated." /end

Have Tweeted before that I suspect community sport is the breeding ground of community here, and that it doesn't even exist in many other countries. Whether you like sport or not, that's partly where we learn how to act as a community. In our clubs. /2

Many other countries are struggling with libertarian ideas, undermining any sort of community endeavour (on anything) in favour of aspirational status-driven consumerism. There's a real push to try to introduce that in Oz too, which I think should be resisted. I remember.../3

...John Howard once saying his vision for Australia was a Rolls Royce driving past, and each Australian saying 'that's going to be me'. Aspiration. There has been some success in grafting aspirational ideas here - one reason the 'working class' vote has shifted to the LNP. /4

Ultimately libertarianism fails because it doesn't do the basics of keeping communal life running. It'd be nice to avoid going down that rabbit hole here. /end

In my opinion, you do basic risk management. You do everything you can to stop the spread of the disease. The worst that can happen is you avoid adding another endemic disease to the public health burden. Another piece in the paper today from leading virologists here arguing…/2

…that prevalence doesn’t really matter i.e. ignore case numbers. I struggle with the idea that it doesn’t matter how many people get infected with any infectious disease. And further, infection seems a key indicator of the quality of…/3 https://t.co/hOLAAY5OLf

…a society’s basic organisation. Its food, water and air. Its distribution of wealth and resources. The quality of its work and workplaces. Etc. There’s an ecological dimension to all infectious disease as well, because diseases exist in ecosystems, that include us. Overall…

…it would be nice if we took broader lessons from infectious disease outbreaks, about all of those societal things. Rather than have both politicians and some experts try to rationalise them to protect the status quo. /end

…over the security of MPs, after another murder this week. The same libertarians whose pathway to political success has been to campaign against government, to constantly whip up a frenzy of anti-institutional hatred. To smash communities and borders, to ‘free up markets’…/2

…and ‘supply chains’. All while campaigning to ‘protect borders’, the same things they’re smashing with their other hand. This is the genius of libertarianism, to smash society on one hand, and then weaponise the ensuing chaos for political gain. /end

Nearly all of this analysis makes the assumption that social mixing is our default healthy state. I think for many people this may in fact be true, and without it they feel ‘lonely’. But maybe we need to be a bit wary of equating what’s best with what makes us feel good. /2

As some experts who deal with trauma in children have pointed out in this pandemic, school (as a key social site) is, for many children, the most traumatic place in their lives. Bullying is rife and intense, and the pressures of social comparison and building…/3

…and constantly maintaining status networks is exhausting and damaging. Schools aren’t unique there, the essence of sociality is imitation and comparison, at all ages. We see that on social media, an amplifier of the same essence, with constantly curated presences, and…/4

…the passion to put something out there that will ‘go viral’ i.e. be imitated and reproduced. “We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.” Orson Welles bells the cat,…/5 https://t.co/zAuHhgx7fJ

…trying to show us that sociality is illusory, in the way we usually think about it. We are always alone. Those who have been forced into ‘loneliness’ in a pandemic may be encountering this truth for the first time, rather than being damaged. /end

I watched the euphoria of re-opening in Melbourne yesterday, and wondered again at what it means, that our societies see social life as liberation, and individual life as oppression. But it all makes perfect sense if you see modern societies as societies of adolescents. /2 https://t.co/mhW20KLJ2M

I won’t describe the ways that’s literally true, that our societies are modelled on high schools. The article does that very well. But adolescents see restriction of social activity as oppression, it was always called being ‘grounded’. At that stage of life and development…/3

…friendship and social life are absolutely fundamental and central to your existence. But as the article describes, that developmental stage has spread into and now dominates adult life as well. Previously adults had fewer friends and social activities as they aged…/4

…because they had matured, were more aware of their own individuality and focused on raising families and their work or vocation. They didn’t need friendship as much, or social life, it had already done its job for them. Not that they were hermits, but they were grown up. /5

The narratives around social and mental health damage caused by lockdowns could be cut and pasted directly from any description of teenage life. The libertarian waves dominating politics are literally this vast adolescent mass, of all ages, railing against being grounded. /6

Grounded by the State, by corporations, by public health orders. Everything outside social life is seen as a restriction. Again, this is how teenagers think, and because we’ve turned societies into high schools, it’s why libertarian politics wins. It joins all the dots. /end

Communities had a greater level of fractal coherence, before mass transport. You had to reproduce community and services at multiple scales, throughout society. Now we just hop in the car and travel to and from massive retail multiplexes instead. /2

All of this mobility strips individual communities of their resilience. Those communities become not much more than car parks for workers. Very few suburban developments have anything more than houses. Vast sums are allocated to try to connect these suburban car parks…/3

…to work and services and entertainment etc., concentrated in metropolitan hubs. At the same time this mass mobility creates mass gatherings, in these hubs. Our buildings and transport are crammed full of people, mixing every day. Covid, anyone? /4

Have Tweeted before about the passion politicians who substitute the ‘Economy’ for society have for transport projects. The Economy is, at root, the dislocation of communities. ‘Supply chains’ of goods, services and labour replace community. /5 https://t.co/8Jk01n3Jdc

People get very worked up about ‘capitalism’. But we don’t notice as much that what allows us to ‘capitalise’ things is their dislocation. The few can only capitalise our collective wealth for themselves if they separate that wealth from communities and concentrate it…/6

…in the hubs at the centre of these vast mobility, supply chain networks. Look at the pandemic, how difficult it has been to ring-fence infection by geographical location, by LGA. Those old geographical boundaries have been rendered mostly irrelevant by mobility. Communities…/7

…have little to no resilience to be able to function outside the supply chains. All the direct result of substituting an Economy for a society. Of all of those roads and rail and planes and trucks. They connect us, sure, but they also strip-mine community. Every place…/8

…becomes inter-changeable with every other. Covid used our highways and flight routes to become global, within weeks of its emergence. And we’ve all seen how easily it crippled our ‘normal’ lives. We need to understand why, a virus alone is puny. The Economy is why. /end

In fact the CDC say: "CDC recommends universal indoor masking by all students (age 2 and older), staff, teachers, and visitors to K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination status." Dated 22 October 2021. /end

@RealOzSAGE

…combustion gases that were released in those 2019 fires. How did we not notice that? The entire world should have been ablaze, every year for nearly 3 centuries. Because the fire was happening inside. Internal combustion. /end https://t.co/n868NgRiWb

One of the remarkable things about Korean POW camps in the Korean War apparently was that nobody escaped. Nobody even tried to escape. This was due to deliberate Korean planning, and that planning sheds key light on our modern libertarian societies. /2

Upon entry to the camp, new prisoners were assessed by the Koreans for leadership qualities (about 5% of prisoners exhibited those). Those prisoners were immediately killed. Another 10% or prisoners became reliable informants to the Koreans, to weed out any leaders missed. /3

The remaining prisoners then gave up, mounted little or no resistance. 40% of them died. The key insight into human and group behaviour here is, a very few people tend to drive the thinking and direction of everybody else. Despite our ideas about 'democracy' as.../4

...some form of collective sovereign will, it's never functioned like that. No society has. How does this link to modern libertarianism? Well, they know this. They deliberately engineer continuous assaults on 'authority', because they want to strip society of all of its.../5

...existing hierarchies. All of its many forms of expertise and leadership. Leaving the public, like the US POWs, with no source of guidance. That then leaves the ground open for them to provide a single source of direction to the public: the libertarians themselves. /6

We've all been living this for years, the constant assault on expertise and traditional leadership. 24/7 weaponised propaganda from shock jocks and think tanks about 'bureaucracy' and 'politicians', and 'unions. Most people today are kinder to venomous spiders than they are.../7

...to their local Council. Mission accomplished. And what rushes in to fill this great anti-authoritarian void? Populist libertarian leaders, banging that anti-authority drum. Down with the elites etc. They're the new prison guards. Don't listen to scientists, or elected.../8

...representatives, or officials. Listen to me, the great libertarian saviour, and my leaderless 'Economy', my 'market'. Have Tweeted before the main way they get away with this: our societies are really large high schools. There's no adult resistance to obvious corruption.../9

...and stupidity, because there are no adults. We severed the 'circle of life' by separating schools off from adult life, while adults pursued eternal 'lifestyle lives, decoupled from history and custom and tradition. Schools then became the seed beds of our socieities,.../10

...the only social model we knew. So we re-made all of society as a high school, packed full of adolescents. And here we are, refusing to fight a lethal virus and rampant climate change, because nobody tells us what to do, nobody can ground us. We're adolescents. /end

The vaccination strategy reflects the (unspoken) shift to a mitigation strategy for the pandemic as a whole, in Australia. The live with the virus strategy, permeating everything. /end @Bertrandization @RichardfromSyd1

What the Wetsphalian carve-up shows is that the world was international, before it was national. This truce carved up the pre-existing Holy Roman Empire into distinct 'sovereign' territories. This is important, because we're in a pan-demic. Pan-, the prefix, means 'all'. /2

The way to defeat a pandemic is to act globally, for all of us to act. But we're not really doing that, we're acting nationally, like we can end a by-definition international event, nationally. We don't know how to act globally, because 1648 is a long time ago. Ideas matter. /3

We are international, by default. Our countries and borders are created by international agreements. We tend to think of this backwards, that countries came first, who then bandied together to create an 'international community'. Historically wrong. /4

Just as ring-fencing LGAs didn't work, because cities are interconnected, ring-fencing Covid action nationally won't work either. It's the libertarians again, whose economic markets act internationally, but who win elections with national borders. National borders that.../5

...are actually international agreements. They bang the drum about sovereignty, but sovereignty is only granted by international agreement. By other countries respecting borders and boundaries. We're going to need to remember that no matter how national we feel.../6

...the world still works as an international thing. Not by choice, but because that's the default. Look at Brexit, the great libertarian sovereign fantasy. The UK is breaking, because it didn't recognise that it only ever functioned by being intrinsically international. /7

Covid will teach us this again. It won't be over in any one place. It can only be over internationally. Not 'think local, act global'. We all act globally, all of the time. There are n alternatives, it's how the place functions. /end

…shape society, which then shapes space. A town united under God, if you like. Only the church steeple reaches skyward. Now Wagga Wagga (chosen because Gladys is in the dock today). Like most modern towns, no real geometric pattern at all. Sprawl. Transport does this,…/2 https://t.co/i5dDjcW7Xm

…it makes every point in town equivalent to every other. You can drive anywhere you want to go. There is no real community here, the space reflects no sense of a collective anything. Each town a parking lot for the Economy. /end

“The NSW road toll isn't simply a number. It is people. Sadly, it's closer to home than you think. It's people like you. Grandparents, mothers, fathers, children. And it's a number that's unacceptable, no matter how small it gets, until it gets to zero.” 2/2

The ‘it’s all too hard’ crowd, who say those who want to fight Covid hard are anxious and risk averse, what alternative vision for community life do they have? None. They’re the risk averse people, the people who need to grow a pair and fight for something , anything…/2

…that isn’t just about reinforcing existing wealth and privilege. Tax cuts is about the only public policy platform of modern libertarians. Not to build anything, no great aim to alleviate longstanding problems or suffering. The most they can offer is the hope that…/3

…if we just leave everybody alone, presumably some ‘free’ individual will then come up with the next moonshot. Moonshots need collective buy-in, no individual creates them. So just start where you intend to finish. Libertarianism is toxic nonsense that destroys societies. /end

The ‘Economy’ is that why. A code word for continuous, energy-hungry dislocation. Travel, trade, supply chains, hypermobility. Do we stop to question why, for any of these things? Why our passion is to continuously move and disrupt? What are we continuously running away from? /2

Underneath these surface outcomes of pollution and infection, are cultures desperate to avoid looking at themselves. Why ‘lockdowns’ sent them into such a spin, to be forced to stop for a while and keep our own company, and not *do* anything? Torture. Always bored, needing…/3

…new distractions. Distracting ourselves, from ourselves. Cultures without grounding. Uprooting habitats and customs and traditions, to force our economic supply chains through. Chains that feed our constant need of distraction, from ourselves. /end