April 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Some now pushing the narrative that people should feel sorry for the PM, because people are being so mean to him. I think they (and the PM) should be advised that this is just a basic case of 'sour grapes'.
Those campaigning for justice in schools for the mass infection there, a suggestion. Contact one of the top litigating law firms and sound them out about a class action under WHS law. That law seems very clear that responsibility for infection rests with the employer.
So, non-LNP members of NSW parliament. Now's the chance to reverse the State's Covid 'strategy' (a flattering term for it). https://t.co/vGgUyXzTrd
Business does not create jobs. Customers with money create jobs.
I’m not convinced we can fully understand epidemic waves purely in terms of some dialectical dance between virus and immunity. So many things lead to infection, many of them social, behavioural, political and geographical. https://t.co/6txz6txAIE
I think it’s worth focusing on the scale of National Cabinet incompetence in 2021-22. Also, electorally I think that Victoria-driven outbreak in 2020 was maybe much more fundamental politically than we realise. Let me show you another graph. /1 https://t.co/S529j9H7Ml
Notice the voting intentions started to diverge at the end of 2020. That trend has been relentless, unwavering. My hypothesis again is that Australians expect their leaders to manage crises. The die was cast in 2020 already, Australians expected better. /end https://t.co/WOUaHnxUNR
From the FT, UK. Politicians desperately want hospitalisations and deaths to be the metric. But back here in reality, infection = sickness. Communities are sick. Ongoing mass infection cripples societies. Infection is the metric. It’s how pandemics are defined, ffs. https://t.co/ZR7roKicC9
Day after day, we keep racking up new lows of public administration. Key experts respond from the sidelines with bizarre campaigns to remove even more public health measures. Can we have grown ups back in charge? h/t @Mike_Honey_ https://t.co/f8zk4w6yJM
Living with Covid is like running every part of your society permanently above the rev limit. https://t.co/RkfzPJ4Hrx https://t.co/FEkYC2tQwT
One of the disturbing experiences of the pandemic is the revealing of thoughts and beliefs of close friends and family. Beliefs they had often kept to themselves until now. And the nastiness of some of those beliefs, that are now seen in the light of day.
It may have been these stats that prompted some to demand kids be unmasked. Maybe they think the paediatric staff in hospitals need more to do. https://t.co/iBrBiHWSue
With very few exceptions, I’ve found that those who are causally indifferent to mass infection are nearly always light years from the operational front-line of society’s basic services. Working from home, opining from the safety of a keyboard and good cuppa.
Humans only extremely rarely resolve their differences by one side persuading the other of the logic of their position. Change comes when a 3rd idea comes along that completely reframes the whole debate.
In which the ‘balancing’ of the Economy against public health turns out to be the equivalent of trying to lift yourself up with your own shoelaces. https://t.co/3Ktt1r3UGw
We foolishly thought the herd immunity folk were being metaphorical. Little realising that as modern economic work units, medicating to keep productive output going is us as well. https://t.co/tdANhM51E8
I loved waking up to the sun today. Daylight Saving societies are societies who ‘live with’ lethal viruses. Who take basic facts of human life and redefine them to try to make them go away. Daylight Saving is the ‘economic’ way to not give people a shorter working day.
Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter. We’re ideas’ puppets. /1
If ideas were the property of humans, you couldn’t share the same idea amongst millions of people. It couldn’t become a ‘belief’ held by all of those millions, even at the same time. ‘My idea’ is a nonsensical statement, no person owns an idea. The ideas own us. /2
They exist before we’re born, and after we die. Why is it not seen that ideas have this independent existence? They must do, as otherwise they couldn’t be shared, nor could they live this eternal life separate to our own lives. Ideas, which we call beliefs, as if we own them. /3
Think about what beliefs you’ve had in your life, and how you’ve discarded some, adopted others, constantly. I like everybody else think back to some beliefs from my early life and cringe. But what I didn’t realise until much later, was that this was something else going on. /4
Ideas enslave us. We are their instrument. When we ‘change our minds’, it has nothing to do with our minds. It’s one set of ideas out-competing another in the battle to occupy us. I know it seems bizarre to say ideas have this independent existence, but again, if they didn’t…/5
…they couldn’t be shared between people, and nor could they survive for millennia. All of society is literally, physically, made of ideas. And all of history is the battle between different ideas. We’re their pawns. No behaviour, technology, cultural practice, no thought…/6
…or economy exists except as the manifestation of some idea. It can be startling when you realise this, it was for me. Watch yourself ranting about an idea, pause and physically feel how it has its claws in you. How that passion you feel can completely disappear over time,…/7
…showing that it wasn’t you driving that rant, it was the idea, and all that rescued you was another idea coming along and occupying you in its place. The objects in our lives, from the simplest brick to the most complex quantum computer, are all made with ideas. /8
They look ‘physical’, but it’s the ‘know-how’ that creates and sustains them. Why IP is such huge business. Society is quite literally ‘made from’ nothing but beliefs. Ideas. Competing ideas, eternal ideas. Creators and inventors are long dead when their ideas and beliefs…/9
…continue to circulate amongst others. And this is the absolutely critical role of education in our lives. Modern ‘economic’ societies have been left to believe that education is about training. About giving people ‘job-ready’ knowledge and skills. Just an (economic) idea,…/10
…enslaving us. Education’s role is to teach us to not be slaves to ideas, to be able to work with them in a nuanced and careful way. All ideas are dangerous, we have festivals of dangerous ideas, but the ideas talked about there are much less dangerous than ordinary…/11
…everyday ideas that are so taken for granted that we don’t even notice them manipulating us. True education doesn’t just dump ideas in our heads, that makes us even more dangerous than the ignorant, because a little knowledge just makes us more dogmatically accepting of…/12
…the ideas that enslave us. The uneducated at least have some degree of scepticism towards ideas. In my experience a poorly educated person is much more dangerous than an uneducated person, for this reason. And the number of truly educated people is dwindling fast, as…/13
…education succumbs to more and more job training, ideas simply transmitted to people with no capacity to process or question them. Often high specialisation assists with this, where we have highly educated specialists with no experience at all with other types of ideas. /14
What we call populism is like an endgame to this surrender to ideas. In the absence of true education to tame ideas, they get total dominion over us. People become literal acolytes to particular ideas, thousands of different fundamentalisms in conflict in society. /15
Twitter is such a great example. Watch the wars, every day. So easy to see these as battles between people. Really these are battles between competing ideas, using different human patsies as their mouthpieces. It can be incredibly liberating to reframe human debate this way. /16
Sit back and extract the ideas from these different debates, and see the battles as those ideas in conflict, with us humans as only the pawns typing the words. Ideas are absolutely critical, they’re the eternal part of our societies, this isn’t about getting rid of them. /17
But it takes so much of the sting and heat out of these debates when we consider ourselves as the puppet mouthpieces of ideas, using us. And again if you don’t believe this, remember the ideas you would have died in a ditch for 30 years ago, that seem ridiculous to you now. /end
Good on @IanVerrender for reminding us that wages = power. Supply and demand is a fantasy of the Economy crowd. We hear wages have stagnated over the past decade or more. This is why. Continuous gutting of bargaining power of working people. Join a union. Change the country. https://t.co/uiYrIfJFEy
I’m an Economy minimiser. The Economy is the greatest, most laughable and lethal fiction in all of human history. It’s some graphs and stats of social activity overlaid upon old-time feudalism. Except the old feudal lords actually had more concern for their peasants.
It’s no coincidence that those who say ‘schools must stay open’ said nothing about schools until 2 years ago. Nothing about plummeting academic performance, about widespread bullying in schools, pre-Covid. About the gutting of funding. About underpaid teachers.
Another 58 dead last week in NSW. That's 58 people not living with the virus. https://t.co/0DGMQ0b0K9
Age and 'underlying conditions' would be used to rationalise the fact that most deaths ARE vaccinated. The public health point here is, these are preventable deaths, if we could get off our complacent arses and control spread. https://t.co/D2drLxw1BB
It says something about Australia in 2022 that we need philanthropists to fund a review of our pandemic response. https://t.co/mQB4Epd23M
I defy anybody to read this table from the NSW Government, and make sense of allowing the entire State to become infected. A potential public health catastrophe in the making, where's the risk management? https://t.co/sZpB0ZeGV5
h/t @annatime94
We have this strange idea that global Covid is an aggregate sum of national Covids. But as all the failed attempts at 'ring-fencing' Covid showed, it's the other way around. National Covid derives from international Covid. Countries are interconnected to the deepest levels. https://t.co/xC0RuRf48L
Imagine 3 years ago saying 'if your child has impetigo, send them to school anyway'. Now you can say it for infections that can actually kill them. https://t.co/T8F07oFhV3
I used this in the AZ vaccine rollout. Where all talk was of likelihood of events, but not of consequences of events. You need both for risk management. The same should now apply for mass infection, for Long Covid. How likely sequelae are, PLUS their consequences. https://t.co/jJA4wQeZUL
‘Lockdowns’ were the perfect test case for neoliberal, libertarian politics. They made us into isolated individuals. The libertarian dream. But it stopped their society substitute, the ‘Economy’, stone dead. Nobody is ever free, alone. We act collectively, to be free.
Recipe. 1) Make people pay for their own tests. 2) Make reporting voluntary. Bake, and hey presto. https://t.co/weTQQoRcq5
Western tourists unconcerned about Covid pretty much sums up the entire pandemic. https://t.co/PPsHYtRy5X
When I caught whooping cough a few years ago, never at any time did a medical professional reassure the rest of the community that they were all going to get whooping cough, and their vaccines would protect them. They told me to go home and not come out until I was recovered. https://t.co/DA27KamyZQ
It’s not a vaccine ceiling. It’s a governance ceiling. A vacuum where leadership was needed. Thus, everything ground to a halt. What happens when you elect governments who don’t believe in government. https://t.co/757YVJ6Opq
The NSW Government has doubled its leave provision for employees, it seems. When booking your leave, use the ‘Kerry Chant’ code to automatically turn 3 weeks into 5 or even 6 weeks.
The biggest mortality group right now in NSW is the triple-vaxed. Not because the vax doesn't work, settle petals. But because by not restricting spread, the virus is reaching all of the most vulnerable people anyway, who are now left with few social options. https://t.co/GXVL6tsMTc
58 dead last week. Already 33 this week. Not one story on it, anywhere. What a sick, self-absorbed culture. https://t.co/7f4AgbDo1R
The 'don't mention the war' Covid strategy. This makes the front page. 91 people have died of Covid in the past week and a half, in NSW. https://t.co/AhVybeE5py
Imagine pollies suggesting that from now on we won't announce rorts of the grants system, just the 'excess rorts' above current baseline. And yet this bullshit gets through the daily tidal wave of bullshit with barely a whimper. https://t.co/Cuo0avs50G
This is just one of the basic questions that the Covid minimisers need to answer. https://t.co/L80HZ1pYw6
Fewer than 50% of kids under 11 in NSW have been vaccinated. There’s a public health PhD in there, about why this is.
Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who remembers workers and school children…/1
…pre-pandemic being devastated every time a holiday arrived? Anybody? How did these pandemic narratives ever survive the pub test of ‘you have to be kidding’? We’re seriously supposed to believe that our psyches have gone into a foetal position, because our work and…/2
…schooling was interrupted? What planet are these people from? Well paid jobs working from home planet, maybe? Retired and opining on tax-free super about how all those monstrous poor people and children aren’t engaged in productive work? Newsflash for these numpties. /3
The most mental health distress by a country mile I’ve seen in this pandemic, is people trying to cope right now with rampant infection. The fear and stress of becoming infected, of their children becoming infected, of trying to continue putting food on the table when their…/4
…sick pay runs out. Of not being able to socialise with older and more vulnerable members of their families, for fear of killing them. Of worry about getting repeatedly infected, and wondering how many years that may be taking off their life. What sort of staggeringly stupid…/5
…society have we become, that all other social priorities have to be surrendered to the great engine room of commerce, manufacturing crap we mostly don’t need, paying us chicken feed to do it, while every part of our lives becomes continuously more unaffordable? /6
There will be a reckoning about the disgrace of the past 2 years. About the venal, idiot politicians who were too lazy and stupid to do basic public health work. Too beholden to their donors. But even more, for the ‘experts’ who offered themselves as their human shields. /end
That's 49 for the week, come on NSW, we can crack the half century! Keep living with that virus. Let's see if we can get to a Bradmanesque average. https://t.co/kIxe1YZ9z2
"In the first quarter of 2022, excess mortality is expected to be nearly 10% (around 10% excess for January and February and around 5% for March)." (Actuaries Institute.) If we're going to use excess deaths as the metric now, somebody better get cracking.
It feels like a sane democracy should preclude from running for office, any person or party whose platform is 'we hate government and want to dismantle it'.
I know the boomers are a disaster (teasing), but it's either them, or some climate thingy. https://t.co/W8fjhDsIXn
Has anybody heard 'endemic' for a while? Has it been renormalised too, like cases-->hospitalisations--->ICU--->deaths--->underlying condition deaths--->excess deaths? Is endemic now excess deaths? Will excess deaths now become low, medium, high? 10, 20, 30% democide?
Tut, the UK is so backwards. It's excess deaths now, people. On a rolling baseline average, meaning magically there are never any. https://t.co/TSel60Uyok
Term 1 has been a farce. An epic farce. Every single prominent voice who said this would be better than what kids had last year should be publicly ridiculed. https://t.co/u9ftf5clMx
It’s not clear to me if the alternative being proposed here is a pandemic that never ends. Even colds and flu are at least seasonal. What’s the proposed endgame here? https://t.co/kcE3QbW6wJ
Let’s go back to public health as stopping people getting sick. Rather than the imported battery hen model of medicating the livestock just enough to keep them laying. https://t.co/rWF99RaeI2
The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real battleground. /1
The N=1 political crowd want us to think the public is ‘majority rules’. They can easily mobilise a majority, they’re the prom Kings and Queens who learned the skills of organising factions in high school, and have never stopped. It’s marketing, target your segment. /2
They call it their ‘mandate’, every time they win an election. Their excuse for abandoning all promises made, and inventing new toxic ones, because ‘they have a mandate’. But public health has never, ever been about majorities. About some idea of ‘balancing’ health and jobs. /3
By definition, public health was set up to look after the health of the population as a WHOLE. All of it, every last person. We already had medicine to deal with individuals or even groups. Public health isn’t ‘medicine for the majority’. In many ways it’s not medicine at all. /4
It’s something set up by governments to look at the collective, social, political and economic ways we live that promote ill health, and to rectify those. The first second politicians stood up in this pandemic and said we need to ‘balance’ public health action with…/5
…economic things, they should have been laughed at and immediately shouted down. Because that balance is what public health practice IS. In this pandemic our PM has followed his earliest stated intentions, with this sort of expertise, of ‘implementation, not advice’. /6
In other words, we politicians will decide what’s going to happen, and you experts will make it happen. Populism 101. The same politicians who are ignorant of 99% of the actual workings of public administration. Public health is about the health of every single person. /7
Not out of some noble sentiment, but because it recognises that populations can’t be ring-fenced into separate groups. No matter how you churn the data, such as making it percentages (common in this pandemic) to convince people some should be left to become sick and die,…/8
…we’re literally ‘all in this together’, because we actually are. Nationally and internationally. All of it is already connected, the dreams of the privileged to create gated communities and bunkers to remove them from wider population issues always fail. /9
Right now we’re asked to ‘live with the virus’, repeatedly justified by highlighting the small percentage of people who will be hospitalised and die. The entire society can become infected, can become sick, but that apparently doesn’t matter. It’s political spin, abhorrent. /10
This is really a political battle that has been going on for decades, between libertarians/neoliberals, and the rest of us. The former want us to think of society as an Economy, full of individual democratic customers. And the ‘will of the people’ then becomes on-trend fads…/11
…and fashions. Like selling clothes. There is no ‘public’, no society, they think that’s a myth. This is why they’re completely unmoved by current mass infection and illness. To them that’s only a whole lot of individuals who made bad choices. The Covid battle is the…/11
…battle to retain any notion of a ‘public’, as a whole. Of a society. Not an Economy, with different market segments. /end
Still on track to beat last week's 58 no longer living with the virus. 57, with 2 days to go. https://t.co/iMp3zgMFEG
"Britain has led from the front in removing social distancing restrictions, having rightly taken the view that once everyone who can and wants to be vaccinated has had that chance, then the Government has essentially fulfilled its public health duties and should stand aside." /1
Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph UK and SMH. I'm guessing most dictionaries would suggest you can only lead 'from the front'. And as per my longer thread today, here are the libertarians being open with their (lethally laughable) definition of public health practice. 2/2
The federal government's take on Long Covid is unsurprisingly the same take it and all other Covid minimisers have on everything Covid. Get vaccinated. Yes, people have done that. They're still getting Long Covid. https://t.co/LcqTHfkoD4
‘Past’, not ‘passed’, ffs. Isn’t the Herald doing well under Nine. It must be the 50+ people dead per week that triggered the next Covid recruitment drive. https://t.co/Qed95bUYte
“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the virus’. 🧵 /1 #auspol #covid19aus
You see the problem here is, Dom, that everybody is getting sick at once. And over and over and over. And being ‘sick’ isn’t the same as being symptomatic. Sending asymptomatically sick people back to school and work makes all the non-sick people there - wait for it - SICK. /2
Asymptomatically infected people are still sick. That’s why they’re isolating. I’m glad we’re now talking about sickness as a metric, rather than just deaths and hospitalisations. And when this latest idiot plan of yours simply accelerates sickness in the non-sick, we know…/3
…what happens next. We‘ve already seen this movie, in the UK. People and children will be forced to go to work and to school, sick. Adults will have little choice, their sick leave (if they have any) will be exhausted quickly. /4 https://t.co/0IXlsz1L6s
It really annoys the Covid minimisers to compare democracy 2022 with cattle feedlots. Which means we need to do it a lot, because right now most of us literally are the ‘herd’ in their fantasy ‘herd immunity’. But they don’t even bother pretending with the immunity part now. /5
We’re just a herd. In feedlots, medicated with whatever they can get hold of, to keep us ‘productive’. Like many others, I despair that this is now Australia. We held out against this insane shift in politics in the US and UK, for a long time. The election may show if…/6
…the tipping point has been reached. and we’re all now good cows for the Economy. /end
Epic public health fail. Cheered on by epic political failures, and their expert enablers. https://t.co/g2zIDChECt
Smashing it, NSW. 58 no longer living with the virus last week. 67 this week, with a day to go. Must be time to relax more protections. https://t.co/U70tXxJhxO
At about 20 seconds in, a close-up of his wedding ring, when talking about an unstable world. Albanese is not currently married. I doubt this is accidental. https://t.co/RNT1zx7zy9
Boris Johnson hasn’t ruled out further lockdowns for the UK, if ‘more serious’ variants come along. Killing over a thousand a week there at the moment.
Fighting a pandemic with immunity is like fighting gun violence with bulletproof vests.
In Camus’ meticulously researched novel, the town is locked down until the pandemic is over, reflecting practice over millennia. There’s no ‘living with the virus’. What we’re doing right now is without precedent in human history. It is uniquely stupid. https://t.co/Lr1K8VwP79
Mental health is worse when kids are at school, which the research is quite clear about. Academic performance was often better under lockdowns too, because students got individual attention. ‘Disruptions’ is sanitised drivel, it means ‘infected children and teachers’. https://t.co/ei4iXuFrOr
It’s sad that respect for these children and their families was entirely absent when they were sent to Covid-saturated schools to become infected. https://t.co/a7WezUb9kB
First person to board the PM’s plane, after the PM himself? His personal photographer. Travelled in the car with him. Tells you everything you need to know about him as a leader. #auspol
Paul Keating was the last Prime Minister before Morrison who had a ‘miracle’ win. We know what happened to him at the election after that.
Come on Patricia, enough with machine-gunning the government’s talking points. As if anybody in Australia even cares who Richard Marles is, let alone what Ministry he’d like to have. #insiders
“The government says you are a stinky poo bum. Are you a stinky poo bum?” What passes for political journalism in 2022. #insiders
If I was Labor, I’d be running ads between now and the election with the PM’s voice saying these words about risk, overlaid upon images of the bushfires, floods and aged care homes. https://t.co/JT4oatzCpl
Remote learning during polio epidemics. The children appear to have survived without civilisational collapse or lifelong mental illness. https://t.co/LsWiH1PndN
The country runs just fine, without politicians to run it, in the caretaker period. Because politicians don’t run the country. They never have. If we understood that, we might save our democracies. https://t.co/2lfgOkLKES
So, we’re away. The choice between a government who doesn’t believe in government, and…anybody else really. Anybody who wants to do any sort of governing at all, by definition would be better. https://t.co/B2xbiQnFDy
NSW school holidays are underway. Read any significant changes in case numbers with that firmly in mind, I think. Perversely, reduction in spread from kids being out of school will be used as an excuse to have even fewer protections in Term 2, with removal of close contact rules.
Covid becoming endemic was the rationale given for removing protections. But it never became endemic. How do even prominent health experts get away with advocating a seasonal flu strategy for a pandemic virus? At the very least use a pandemic flu strategy. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/rVFrvsbEEA
This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know their wages are still going nowhere, their jobs are insecure, they're all getting sick with Covid. /1
The 'Economy' is literally a political construction, invented by conservative politicians, to avoid having to talk about basic political issues like wages, health, inequality, etc. It's the tiniest handful of indicators overlaid upon the vast complexity of social life. /2
It's their substitute for society. They can then bypass all social problems, and talk about the 'Economy' like some objective mathematical machine whose 'laws' we all have to follow. Even more laughably absurd, they then say all of those social problems can't be fixed until.../3
...'the Economy' is going well enough to provide money, to fix them. Like all of society ceases to function without the money the supposed Economy provides. It's a complete, back-to-front fiction. Covid showed it, economic activity stops when people get sick. /4
What generates wealth is people, doing social things, like working. That's what generates the money, not the other way around. When a conservative says 'we can't afford' to fix something, what they really mean is they don't want to fix it. Society can choose to do whatever.../5
...it likes, and the money will then flow to that. Conservatives right now in Oz have allocated about $180 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy. They didn't ask how we can afford that. /end
This enquiry should ask why the LNP was allowed to take everything we did in 2020-1, up to Delta, and flushed it down the toilet by ramming through a UK do-nothing strategy. A travesty of public administration. #auspol https://t.co/CZwDj97jBv
The election narratives from both sides will be mostly irrelevant. Letting Covid rip violated the Australian expectation of what governments should do. Covid even removed Trump, and that's in libertarian heartland. Carnage may be on the cards. https://t.co/l3ikv5p6qr
Day 1 of the campaign proper, and we see the LNP focus on economic indicators, its substitute for the whole society. Albo returns fire with humble apology, I'm guessing to contrast with a PM who never apologises. Fascinating to watch the messaging. https://t.co/1PnPBdcLcr
6 bloody weeks. Can’t we just vote, please.
Political strategists don’t believe in voter compasses. They know that any person can be all over this grid, depending on which issue they’re asked about. That’s how they get people to shift their vote. It’s also why the idea of a ‘political centre’ is a fiction. https://t.co/qcPaEcY9Re
Mapping of peoples’ ‘moderate’ political views reveal they’re all over the ideological spectrum. But it goes deeper, mapping of even one person’s views is all over the spectrum too. Winning in politics is not about sides, it’s about ideas, and targeting them with precision. https://t.co/jBc0WHpRzH
Is it possible that #LongCovid is chronic rather than acute infection?
About 6000 Australians have died since the NSW Government unilaterally decided during the Delta wave to shift the Australian strategy to let it rip. That's not far off the Australian lives lost at Gallipoli.
The @AusElectoralCom Twitter feed is fabulous. The now famous response to 'can we draw dicks on the ballot paper' a case in point. Organising elections is a shit job, more power to these guys. https://t.co/wm9eIAbaDg
My audition as a political journo. "Prime Minister, you now know the price of a loaf of bread and litre of milk. Can you tell us how many people have died of Covid since you let it rip?"
The triumphant genius of conservative politics is that an entire election can be framed as being about a percentage point or two on one of their meaningless economic indicators. This is what they designed the ‘Economy’ to do, to suck the oxygen out of meaningful political issues. https://t.co/J0lBNabl7n
Blood donation and Covid feels like a real sleeper issue. And the same absence of caution, driven by desperation, as we’re seeing for close contact rules. The claims about no transmission here - nobody is tracing transmission now, so how would we know? https://t.co/RcwLtXYQ37
Now that the election has arrived, I urge everybody to read Lippmann’s wisdom on how these things work, and on democracy in general. Re-Tweeting a thread. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts
Easy. Nothing. Thus the graph. https://t.co/pvNnR7WI2D
Actually I want to know if the dentist has Covid, or at the very least will be wearing an N95 and has a ventilated office. https://t.co/xYdm0KOO7O
Today's suggested press conference question. "Prime Minister, what percentage of workers are currently at home sick because they're infected with Covid?"
This is a Covid election, as the US election also was. The journalists who cover it won't see it as that, because they haven't registered Covid as a story to even write much about for 6 months. But the infected families of Australia see it.
In today's trivia, name 6 Australian political leaders who have abandoned "any interest in Covid whatsoever". https://t.co/P8qsFtn0BO
How does @elsadreisig have fewer than 800 followers on Twitter?
The AFR got owned. Well said Adam Bandt. What a ridiculous question, name the current wage price index. https://t.co/u83ax0WkQf
The PM didn’t just miss competent governance of aged care by 🤏 much. He missed it by 🤏…………………………🤏 much. https://t.co/ctJ8HByzvs
If you have expertise, and you also have political views, that’s obviously fine. But save the public a whole lot of confusion by not disguising the latter with the former.
We’ve had so many excellent experts describe the ‘health’ part of public health. It’s the ‘public’ part where nowhere near enough people are looking. That’s still the main battleground, competing definitions of what a public is. In Anglo countries, it’s more or less disappeared.
Politicians in an election campaign throw buckets of money at problems that should just be funded irrespective of who’s in power. We shouldn’t need to vote to get basic things funded.
Australians hug the coastline in our homes and holidays in desperate denial of most of the continent we occupied. Travel is our passion i.e. being somewhere else. We’re never just here. We have no understanding of place. https://t.co/qJkAMShEE0
Today’s virtual press conference question. “Prime Minister, how will your planned $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy find its way to aged care, roads, schools, hospitals, climate action and legal aid? A working bee for the well-to-do”?
Ed Yong’s astonishing piece on the ‘disenfranchised grief’ of Covid. To the minimisers who do this disenfranchising - fuck you. Your obsession with pretending Covid is a ‘sniffle’ has made people’s tragedies meaningless, as a final kick in the guts. https://t.co/bKPg2XBUZI
We have significant expertise saying we just need to ‘burn out’ Covid, and it will be over. And then at the same time other significant expertise, like this, modelling catastrophic scenarios. Either could be correct, how do we decide? https://t.co/4EeWpT1iVf
Talking to a car dealer today about the trouble they have getting cars from the factory. It’s Covid, supply chains full of it, it only needs one component supply chain to be impacted and the car just sits on the factory floor. Infection and sickness, not hospitalisations.
Men have been a particular target for modern conservatives. Much of the toxic filth you see is men regurgitating the conservative propaganda fed them daily by conservative messaging. All quite deliberate. https://t.co/Vmw7FTCn26
On this Good Friday, let us remember our political leaders of religious passion, who would no doubt say to us that Good Friday’s meaning is to turn death into numbers. And to then stop publishing the numbers. https://t.co/mOJLKqBGw5
Maybe I misjudged our conservatives. Maybe Christ’s death was the first ‘personal responsibility’ death. The guy died to absolve the rest of us. He took personal responsibility for us. Maybe those millions dead of Covid were doing the same. Whatever their names were. https://t.co/2jRRWmc1gf
Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at all. /1 #Rwanda https://t.co/DYNwTehtG0
As the Australian conservatives discovered, it’s a way to weaponise an actual problem, largely of their making, for almost endless political gain. The ‘Economy’ they substitute for society, its main methodology, is to strip people and things of their homes. To turn the world…/2
…into a ‘globalised marketplace’. To ruthlessly strip away anything that prevents the free flow of goods and people. They love roads, ships, planes, they love movement, to carry people and goods to and from different businesses. This displaces humans, animals and landscapes. /3
As Bruno Latour says, the best definition for the ‘Economy’ is any place that isn’t ‘home’. And for the modern conservative, the whole world is an Economy. Meaning increasingly, nobody has a home, except the conservatives. The rest of us are work units, cheap labor exported…/4
…and imported in ways barely distinguishable from the old slave trade. Look at how modern economies collapsed without their regular supply of cheap imported labour. We haven’t really moved on very much from those old slave days, some of the technology is newer, but…/5
…the underlying mechanism is pretty much as it always ways. The privileged strip-mine poorer nations (and their own) of resources, decimating landscapes (homes to other living things), while ferrying the labour to do this from poorer to richer nations, to save paying wages. /6
Boats of poor and displaced people cut out the middleman of parasitic ‘labour hire’ firms, who gorge on this modern slave trade. And at the same time, the constantly screwed workers inside rich nations themselves, who feel their own displacement too in their stagnant wages,…/7
…completely unaffordable housing and insecure jobs, can be easily made to focus their anger on these boat people, whom the conservatives portray as coming to steal their jobs. Which they actually are, but the people organising that are the conservatives themselves, and their…/8
…labour hire mates, who ferry these cheap work units to the businesses owned by friends of the conservatives and the conservatives themselves. It’s genius politics, create the problem, then weaponise it as somebody else’s doing, to deflect attention from the fact…/9
…it’s you doing it. The LNP here in Australia has used this same ‘illegal arrivals’ shtick for about 20 years now, winning election after election, vacuuming up the disaffected workers at home, who historically voted for working class parties. Their Economy screws workers,…/10
…and their illegal arrivals narrative then targets the anger this causes, and shifts it to the modern slaves themselves, and the people smugglers who are taking the substantial wealth out of the mouths of labour hire companies. It’s like a political perpetual motion machine. /11
The Tories are dribbling down both sides of their mouths, desperate to get one of these perpetual motion vote winners for themselves. Those opposing it will target all the wrong things - morality, decency etc. The conservatives already factored that into their machine. /12
It’s the evil people smugglers and queue-jumpers that are immoral. Etc. I can promise UK people of sound mind that trying to stop this by appealing to basic decency and humanity WILL NOT WORK. You have to target the above, the perpetual motion vote winning machine. /end
@KateEMcCann @SophyRidgeSky @queenchristina_ just some observations from here Down Under, on the UK shift to the Australian way. We’ve had a couple of decades of this already, it’s all very predictable how it will play out. https://t.co/Z7YpOZ2qcr
“The massively disrupted Easter for Australians wanting to travel should be a clear signal to health officials that their rules are no longer fit for purpose.” Innes Willox The intellectual vacuum at the top of Australian business. Where planes flying = public health.
Another over 200 Australians no longer living with the virus in Australia this week. Let us worship our god Mammon, on this holy day. https://t.co/8T8WL2YKtO
As Michel Serres said, education can be in person or virtual. But what you learn, is always virtual. Knowledge. The entire point of education is to move beyond ‘face to face’. In most schools knowledge is buried in a jungle of interpersonal bullshit.
Is there a public health subject in the infectious disease physician curriculum? I’ve seen many rank amateurs here on Twitter who seem to have a better grasp of basic public health concepts than some of our prominent infectious disease doctors.
So much of this pandemic has been an old battle, between public health and medicine. Medicine has the power, and thus the loudest voice. I doubt the distinction between these 2 fields is even widely understood. Much of the tension between experts we’ve seen is this battle. /1 https://t.co/8d5D8HaVS1
(Table from https://t.co/Br9MSLHr5S) It irritates some health professionals that people with expertise and experince in other areas even dare to talk about a pandemic. One of the earliest things I Tweeted about Covid is that a pandemic is not a medical event. Medicine is…/2
…a last line of defence against a pandemic. It only appears in the front-line of Covid because idiot politicians refuse to do public health work, they make a pandemic a matter of ‘individual responsibility’. So, just you and your doctor. Medicine. /3
It’s exactly like saying Ukraine’s best weapon against Russia is its medics, tending to the wounded soldiers. How does this nonsense get up? Public health has been fighting infectious disease for centuries, it knows how to beat it. If it’s allowed. Almost exclusively…/4
…experts who side with government in this pandemic are doctors. Medical people. It’s them using the pandemic as a platform to continue long battles within health between them and public health professionals. The arrogance has often been astounding. And it goes beyond health. /5
Experts in ventilation - engineers for example - are repeatedly sidelined. Experts from the social sciences on behavioural change, on how to best generate support for ongoing pandemic measures, also ignored. The Go8 did a great cross-discipline report early in the pandemic. /6
It was mostly ignored by government, and its medical advisers. Even novelists and playwrights have vital insight into plagues, but again, are all ignored in favour of ‘making sure we have sufficient hospital capacity’ i.e. ‘we’ll let you all get sick’. /7
There’s an even more interesting thing to look at here though, for me, and I’ve Tweeted about it before too. These battles happen where the ‘individual’ meets the ‘population’, or the ‘public’. Public health people deal with the latter, medical doctors with the former. /8
That fault-line is central to our politics as well. We have a currently dominant, ‘neoliberal’, ‘libertarian’ political movement across much of the developed world, which says society is just individuals and their freedom. No population or public is mentioned, replaced by…/9
…’majorities’ (of individuals). So obviously resonant with the medicine view of the world, and openly antagonistic to the public health view. You can’t do public health with no conception of a public. What we’ve seen with Covid is what we’ve seen with climate change. /10
A multi-dimensional, existential problem, dealt with by a unidimensional political ideology of the individual. It’s really just bog standard politics, medical doctors have been used as human shields to disguise this. /end
@fleetstreetfox in case of interest. https://t.co/Z7YpOZ2qcr
We’re going to intubate our way out of this pandemic. https://t.co/Boshys1Dbe
74 dead so far this week. More than last week, day to go. https://t.co/MkrN6m5BVy
74 people died of Covid in NSW this week. Watch the vid. Why aren’t ‘Towards Zero’ road safety campaigns mocked as ‘hysteria’? Road safety is hugely expensive, and complicated, and takes decades, and impacts every single person. https://t.co/hnjWzVAYOs
h/t @pepeMcGee
Does virology encourage a breadth of view that doesn’t extend much past the stage of a microscope? https://t.co/OidTssmQtq
Reading this brought home again the joke the developed world now is. Where infectious disease becomes a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Imagine even 20 years ago saying something like ‘we’ll let malaria spread, it’s up to each person now’. /1 https://t.co/LNWcGHwuCW
It’s all politics. Rich, privileged nations adopted political beliefs of infinite personal freedom, enabled by their vast wealth. They won’t let those beliefs go, even in the face of a pandemic. So reality will do it for them, crippling and killing as it goes. Imagine being…/2
…an expert that publicly supports this complete abandonment of public health work, of the idea of the ‘public’ itself. It doesn’t matter how much you gaslight people every day with your claims of ‘hysteria’, what you’re supporting is stupidity without precedent…/3
…in all of history. You’re being played by libertarian politicians, and you don’t see it. Is this really so hard? You ‘live with’ a pandemic pathogen AFTER you’ve controlled it, to make it non-pandemic. Not while it’s a pandemic pathogen. It literally is like moving people…/4
…back into bushfire or flood areas, while the fires and floods are still happening. ‘People of Lismore, live with your flood, get back in your homes, and back to work, take personal responsibility for this disaster’. It’s ridiculous, but it’s what’s happening with Covid./ end
What alternative society has to letting Covid rip? We have basic public health work, which we’ve been using for pathogens as infectious, for generations. Like measles. Even today, with a great vaccine, look at the public health work that happens: https://t.co/wW6alVIlTu https://t.co/k2MKMH2ObZ
The sclerotic personality. Rigid, unable to adapt. That’s most developed countries, and this is why, if you’re frustrated. We’re giant nursing homes. Staffed by cheap immigrant labour, who we simultaneously vilify to win elections. https://t.co/bVBv1HuE7f
#insiders demonstrating everything about the ‘Economy’. A non-existent fantasy that has replaced society, and dominates politics. One whole week of the election campaign dominated by a cell in a spreadsheet.
Business doesn’t create jobs. Customers with money create jobs. #insiders
It’s not 14 days since David Speers tested positive? Not sure I’d be sitting in that studio with him, without a mask. #insiders
In my entire adult life (30+years) I remember getting flu once. Sure I may have had it asymptomatically other times. But every year I do everything I can to avoid it. That’s what ‘living with’ nasty bugs has always meant. Avoiding them at all costs.
At a social event tonight, reflecting on the power of political slogans. Multiple people talking about Covid, saying ‘we’re all going to get this now, it’s like the flu, we’re going to have to live with it’. No independent thought, just parroting the neuro-programming.
“We need to start living with this virus, a similar way we live with the flu.” Tony Blakely. ‘Living with’ other infectious diseases was always about avoiding catching them. Like living with your dog’s farts, it’s not about shoving your nose into its anus. /1
Language is politics. ‘Living with’ is ‘putting up with’, not ‘embracing’. Tolerating something you may not be able to get rid of entirely, but which you will do everything to avoid. Traffic, tinea, toxic bosses. Not chocolate, beer, swimming at the beach. /end
Politicians who preach personal responsibility never show any. None of them ‘hold a hose’. What they actually mean is that the job they’re responsible for, is now your responsibility. https://t.co/IZfWl02UpS
We desperately need a change of government in Australia. The character of the leader drives a lot of voters, they don’t pay much attention to anything else. Albanese is coming across as bumbling and apologetic, which is inexcusable with his experience. I wish that didn’t matter.
Pre-2022 we were ‘living with’ Covid in the same way we live with other infectious diseases. We were controlling it. How many of us are currently running around with tetanus, mumps, diphtheria, measles? We ‘live with’ them = we CONTROL them. 2022 is surrender, not control. https://t.co/hD5PQKQIxA
1) Undecided voters this close to an election are people who pay no attention to politics. Their vote is equivalent to ‘trending on Twitter’. 2) The parties who win elections spend most of their time pitching to people who *don’t* agree with them.
From the Financial Times’ editorial board. An ‘economic’ HQ. Calling out the true agenda for ‘living with Covid’, and the emerging disastrous costs. https://t.co/0IVzwfAmus
Noting that ‘living with the virus’ wasn’t even a decision of parliament. The LNP closed parliament. https://t.co/d7FoBIeYgh
The real reason ‘living with the virus’ had to become the strategy. Poor people were forgetting their place. ‘Endemic’ was originally a term applied to infectious diseases when they were left to fester in poorer countries. Now endemic = ‘rich people are fine’ at home, too. https://t.co/Sr7R6jUao8
Source is the Grattan Orange Book 2022.
Pandemics and wars have always revealed the true underlying functioning of societies. Their dysfunction creates the pandemics and wars, which then strip away the old ‘normal’ and its justifications. https://t.co/V7aoYBJPRR
Removing close contact rules to hep with business disruption is like trying to fix traffic jams by increasing the speed limit on busy roads. The whole thing just gums up much faster. Also a good indicator of how astonishingly stupid a person is, if they support it.
The obsession with 'jobs' amongst conservatives is explained easily in this way. A job is the way conservatives regulate the flow of society's wealth through their own activities. We already have way more than we need as a society, jobs are a form of control, not production. https://t.co/M4LwCrK4ji
Hey 'Covid is like the flu' folks. When was the last flu season that began in November, and was still going strong in the 3rd week of April?
Hey 'Covid is like the flu' folks. A P.S. When was the last flu season: - that started in November - was still going in the 3rd week of April - where most of the population was vaccinated - that killed 5000 people in 5 months?
The gap is narrowing to a chasm. https://t.co/SyOTtOdMSV
By Canley – Get the code and data - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://t.co/QZwsSFLJ6U
“Mediscare”. The LNP swear their commitment to universal health care. It’s toxic to their core beliefs, they already got rid of it once, under Malcolm Fraser. Out-of-pocket payments up 50% in the past decade, under the LNP. And vast subsidies to private health. (Grattan image.) https://t.co/pkGnkrjQhF
What a disgusting joke. Don’t blow smoke up our arses by pretending this is due to the end of the Omicron wave, at 15,000 cases per day (that we know of). This is entirely due to Term 2 of school starting next week. The timing is absolutely targeted. https://t.co/TOE6afXU7K
Let’s see when removal of close contact rules is announced how many of the risk mitigations AHPPC said should accompany that (below) are implemented too. My guess is, we’ll go full UK again. Meaning - none. And nobody will report it. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/KKoQC9QkqA
Do you reckon: 1) business has realised removing close contact rules is the government shifting liability from itself, to business, under WHS? 2) people realise they’ll have to use their own sick/carer’s leave (if they have any) to stay home with Covid-infected family now?
Has there been a single survey or poll in Australia to sound out the public on whether it wanted to ‘live with’ Covid? #auspol #covid19aus
Everything about these numbers says: A. Time to remove close contact rules. OR B. The same epidemiology we've had for months, with nothing getting better. https://t.co/CfoudGtINo
Somebody will be in trouble here, how will we live with HIV now? https://t.co/tkqwknx3TS
@kumitaguchi thank you for the Insight program on transgender sportspeople. I thought it was a superbly nuanced and sensitive treatment of what is a highly emotional topic.
Lovely thread on the central thing we should talk about, but don't. Reducing transmission, reducing infections. Reducing sickness. Sane societies don't titrate sickness against hospital capacity. https://t.co/NhXtBmVDlk
Protections stripped away, 'because the 7-day average death trend has turned'. Like the last time it turned, a couple of weeks ago. #auspol https://t.co/9mS52LNrqx
Who would have voted for ‘endemic’ Covid if it meant 300,000 cases per week and 200 dead per week? And yet here we are, celebrating.
@theprojecttv discussing removal of Covid protections without any questioning of several hundred thousand being infected per week and a couple of hundred dying, This is ‘where we always wanted to get to’, apparently. Australians all let us rejoice. We are dumb and free.
Covid minimisers say 'if not now, when?' every time they remove protections. At the same time they promise that Covid has become endemic, that the pandemic is over. To ask them in return, about this endemic state. If not now, when? We've been waiting a long time. https://t.co/SQyLolDRFN
The only meaningful definition of endemic I've found when researching it, for months, is 'the point at which we gave up'. https://t.co/d90s30ucEU
Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1. Remember how the Doherty modelling was used to justify ongoing removal of Covid protections? These numbers were based on a good faith assumption that National Cabinet would keep other measures in place (they didn't). Experts used as human shields. https://t.co/2vZ8LpqXb0
Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at over 10,000. A 🧵on what this means. /1 https://t.co/qwzSZHWonE
There are only two other events that have killed more Australians, World War 1 and 2 (about 100,000 all up). The top 8 mass casualty events at home were all caused by infectious disease. And Covid-19 is still killing, so will likely still live up to @ToshiAkima…/2
…prediction of Australia’s greatest ever mass casualty event, at home. There are a few things to take from this, I think. Firstly, infectious disease is our greatest killer, with daylight second, for mass casualty events. (If we look at some of the research on chronic…/3
…infection, it may also be our greatest killer overall, with some theorising chronic infection is the still largely invisible cause of many if not most of our chronic diseases.) But I wanted to go back to the Aboriginal massacres, and WW1 and 2. I think Covid fits there. /4
Those are what I call colonial or imperial deaths. The result of imperial expansion and colonisation of new territory. Easy to see for WW1 and 2, where Australians were cannon fodder for the Empire. And also for Aboriginal massacres, the obvious expansion of same Empire. /5
Why does Covid fit in this group? Covid is the outcome of a new form of imperial expansion, that of the idea of the Economy, globally. What some call ‘globalisation’. Not limited to any one country, it’s a form of expansion driven by wealthy groups rather than nations. /6
I’ve Tweeted a lot about how the ‘Economy’ is actually a fiction, deliberately constructed by these wealthy groups to bypass traditional politics. There are probably at least 10 references to “The Economy” in public discussion now globally, for every mention of a “society”. /7
People use the term in the way they used to say ‘society’, the substitution is as good as complete. But we can add some history to this to go even deeper I think. Because only once in modern history have societies flirted with the idea of a ‘public’. Of a society. /8
In the late 19th and throughout the 20th centuries, for the first time since ancient times, we described our societies as all of us, as a ‘public’. Prior to that, there were kings (mostly), lords, and a descending hierarchy from there. /9
Most of those big wars at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th century were wars of these old monarchical societies. Empire building, expansionism. Empires have emperors, kings etc. Thus the slaughter, the astronomical../10
…casualties in these wars. Soldiers were subjects of these empires, and in all of history, literally expendable cannon fodder. There was no public, no sense of mutual obligation of all for all. The unwashed at the bottom of the hierarchy were there to serve those higher up. /11
You can see the true function of the Economy here. It’s a modern branding for that old feudal society. It’s the way those who still support that sort of society are able to maintain it in some way, under cover of modern language and equations. Not an analogy, watch every…/12 https://t.co/tGqjBZCc5S
…justification for the lack of consideration of the modern poor, that we could help them, but we can’t ‘afford’ to, the Economy can’t support that largesse. As if society was a dispensing machine, and we’re out of coins. For about 150 years the institutions we set up to…/13
…maintain the ‘public’, our government departments, schools, health systems, welfare systems etc., oversaw the daily balancing of things between *all* members of the public. But then the old feudal folk introduced their neoliberal, libertarian Trojan Horse, the Economy. /14
For the past 50 years, that movement has been progressively stripping away that institutional organisation that created and maintained the ‘public’ as a thing. Replacing it with the old feudal hierarchies, in modern clothes. That’s what populism is, that stripping. /15
Selling people new Kings and Queens, Thatchers and Trumps. And here we are, back at Covid. You may be somebody who looks on in disbelief as this lethal virus is allowed to infect entire populations, maiming and killing at grand scale, with nary a whimper of objection. /16
But in feudal society, that would be expected. Peasants are expendable, there is no idea of a ‘public’ with inter-related dependencies. Peasants exist to serve. That’s what we’re seeing, the institutions who managed all other pandemics in the past 150 years, with equal…/17
…concern for every member of society, have been sidelined. Deliberately. The peasants can now ‘live with Covid’ in the way they lived with (and died with) the Black Death. It’s a reversion to that earlier feudal form, and again not analogously. Literally. In Australia we…/18
…even saw the transition between these two forms, in real time. The pandemic began with our institutional apparatus reining in our economic leaders, imposing traditional public health procedures in the 20th century way. But by the second year, they were mostly swept aside. /19
That’s why Covid is like WW1 and WW2, and Aboriginal massacres. And not like Spanish Flu, or measles epidemics of the 20th century. They’re the infection of peasants, not the public, the letting it rip of feudal times. The cannon fodder. The mass deaths, because there is…/20
…no public. Only total contempt for your fellow human would countenance these sorts of massive death tolls, in such short times, and the lack of concern for preventing sickness, injury and death. To keep the ‘Economy’ moving. /end
The per capita/percentage minimisers are some of my favourites. By their logic the World Trade Centre attacks would have been 3 times less bad if they’d happened in China, and more than 10 times worse if they’d happened in Australia. Stupid is winning.
Dear National Cabinet. In the last 4 months, since you let Covid rip, Covid has killed more people in the country per day than any other event in Australian history. And we have vaccines. The greatest failure of government in all of our history? #auspol
The Opposition Leader and candidate for PM gets Covid mid-campaign, and Covid still won't be an election issue. Sing it with me: "Australians All Let Us Rejoice For We are Dumb and Free..." #auspol
I had meant to tag @YouAreLobbyLud as I think he has a fine singing voice.
Is there even one example of a pandemic pathogen that humanity has tried to ‘live alongside’ before? Surely this is a monumental lie, the Covid Emperor’s New Clothes? We know politicians lie, but how do experts get away with spruiking this nonsense? History tells us it’s a lie.
Those spruiking the end of the pandemic, or ‘endemic’ Covid, surely have to answer some basic questions. How long is this line allowed to stay at this level? What’s the KPI here, have we arrived? Or how long can this continue without further action? #auspol https://t.co/JY5KJgKNng
72 no longer living with the virus in NSW this week. A day to go. How much death is acceptable? Anybody in the press gallery fancy asking, on the election hustings? Or are we all still focused on fractions of a percent of some idiot economic indicator? #auspol https://t.co/BwHH2Xdt2d
The original United Australia Party of 1931-45 performed the same role as Clive’s. To vacuum up cranky conservatives on the fringes. Conservative politics in Australia has been a reactive movement to protect entrenched privilege. The ALP predates the Liberals by 50 years. https://t.co/akTk5CY3FY
Fighting a pandemic using personal responsibility is like telling dad jokes. Funny, in a really bad way. https://t.co/zIaZWOkOh4
Personal responsibility for Covid really means personal financial responsibility for it. Everything must be done to ensure taxpayer money is kept from people who actually need it. Robodebt the clear precedent, no personal responsibility allowed where money is involved. https://t.co/uewqxhwTnI
If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid. /1 https://t.co/qGzKzOD0Hd
Without comparison, there is no pressure on wages, and each employee is forced to try to negotiate an adequate salary themselves, with no idea what’s reasonable. (This is actually the process the government announced as their mechanism to drive up wages, in the last budget.) /2
Some employers even ask applicants what they think they should be paid, to test how low they can get them to go before hiring them, in the pressure of a hiring process. All the fun and games of N=1, personal responsibility politics. /3
To Covid. It was considered the grossest form of dehumanisation to refer to prisoners by number rather than name, in wars. But with Covid, this was the rule from Day 1. Almost nothing is published about the personal details of those who have died. Cynically this is said to be…/4
…a ‘privacy’ issue. A defence often used by employers when they don’t publish salaries. We see deaths reported, by name, every day in the news, we should know this is just more expedient lies. Journalists were actively stopped from even visiting hospitals to report on the…/5
…Covid waves. As the deaths continue to pile up every week, for now we’re still getting the numbers. And in aggregate too, not even individualised like prison camps. But that’s ending too, in another shameful capitulation from senior health experts. /6 https://t.co/5MgxHHp7Wq
Soon excess deaths will be the only measure, you’ll have to try to figure out how much of a problem Covid is by wishy-washy vague averages based on previous years, all conditions lumped into one average. Everything to suppress attention from this disaster. /7
Ed Yong, one of the few journalists with the brains and courage to still call a spade a spade in this pandemic, highlighted something even more disgustingly insidious going on here. By ruthlessly suppressing everything except the virus in this…/8… https://t.co/bKPg2XBUZI
…pandemic, we’ve ‘disenfranchised grief’. The millions who have died and their families have nothing to hang their grief off. In our rush to constantly declare the whole thing a sniffle, and over, we’ve rendered these deaths meaningless. Bumps in the economic road. /9
I Tweeted yesterday that 72 people died in NSW this week, of Covid. It hasn’t been discussed anywhere by our leaders. Week after week, this is the pattern. And soon to be much worse, if you lose a loved one, it’ll be buried deep in retrospective averages. This is us, 2022. /10
The real battle here is political. We’re moving rapidly to the same lethal N=1 politics that is destroying the UK and US. The idiot idea that there is no society, just individuals, with individual responsibility. A rich country’s fantasy, drunk on generations of privilege. /end
Social media is the only contact tracing we now have. I’ve also used it to avoid people who are obviously higher risk, because of what their SM feed shows about their activities. https://t.co/wny5Nv1dV2
I speak to people who say things like ‘we need to DO something about what’s going on with our society, with Covid. Twitter is just talking.’ As a society we do little BUT doing. “Just do it”. Without thought or discussion. What we need is a lot more of those things, not action.
Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough food to eat. /1
They lost 100,000 soldiers. We sacrifice our kids and elderly. Deaths then are commemorated a century later. Ours won’t even be counted today, let alone named. Lest We Forget should now be Lest We Remember. Death is now invisible sacrifice on the altar of the Economy. 2/2
If elections are needed to change your country in any sort of fundamental way, your democracy is already broken.
We need a monument to the Covid dead in every major town, with names, constantly updated. A visible reminder of what has gone on and is going on, and to commemorate those dead. Monuments have power.
Lest We Forget. We sang Kipling’s Recessional as a hymn, at school. And…we did forget. Today we’re told lest we forget means to not forget the ‘sacrifice’ of those who died. But Kipling’s poem asked us to not forget the futility of empire and war. /1
To not forget the ‘captains’ and ‘Kings’ who lead the slaughter of people, in war. A slaughter in defiance of God. Those who died in wars weren’t ‘noble sacrifices’, they were mostly cannon fodder for the godless captains and Kings. We’re asked to be ‘humble’ and ‘contrite’…/2
…before God’s great sacrifice, of his own son. Whether you’re Christian or not, today’s meaning of ‘Lest we Forget’, as the death of millions to protect our ‘freedoms’, is not what Kipling was talking about. It’s the jingoism Kipling was criticising, the rallying cry of... /3
…all sides of these conflicts. They were all fighting for their own version of freedom. Kipling asked us to not forget that the only true freedom was to surrender these desires for human empires, to succumb with humility to the greater glory of a higher power. /4
Lest We Forget. But we did, forget. We forgot the exact thing the Recessional asked us not to. And every year we celebrate the forgetting of our forgetting. /end
Australia was in the Vietnam War for ten years. Just over 500 Australians died. 5000 Australians have died of Covid in the past 5 months.
Can I just clarify that this Tweet isn’t an attempt to minimise what happened in Vietnam. It’s the opposite, it asks people to remember and respect all those who sacrifice their lives for our freedom. Vietnam vets were treated disgustingly. As Covid victims now are too.
That 140-character Twitter limit can be so frustrating, half the first sentence missing. ‘Josh’s team wargamed with Pete Costello at Nine, and @9NewsMelb…” https://t.co/IuT5QnncjK
@abc730 it wasn’t ‘lockdowns’ that pushed out elective surgery times. It was allowing spread of Covid.
As Term 2 begins, feel comforted that the reason we’re infecting all of the kids is so that people can get their below-the-poverty-line income from a job, rather than welfare.
If you’re never sure that your conversations can change the world, wealthy elites can prove it to you. They already own mainstream media, and now social media. They know what changes a society. It’s not money. It’s ideas, conversation. https://t.co/7sxSSd5Nxt
NSW Health's guidelines for allowing close contacts back in the workplace include the possibility of employers requiring all employees to wear a mask. I'm betting we won't see that, in most cases.