June 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Well said, and so often not observed is how human groups without ‘strong leadership’ just reinstate it in other ways. Including surrendering their agency to corporations or populist despots who are even more authoritarian than any government. https://t.co/dzbFWCwf7a
A trick the N=1 crowd use to win at everything, is to make people think you have to choose between individuals and groups. But what’s good for everybody is also what’s best for you. Groups are just individuals, individuals live in groups. It’s all just us.
Walter Lippmann wouldn’t have been surprised that rich countries didn’t change their lives to beat Covid. "Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism."
The Teals stumbled upon the heart of Australian politics. Community. We’re a communitarian country. Not capitalist, or communist, or socialist. Community is a politics, independent of scale. A politics defined by social relations, not territory or ideology. Unique in the world. https://t.co/na1KizDABp
Did monkeypox give up in Australia already? Everything seems very quiet. https://t.co/7Vx2iNDett
In pandemics microbes invade the ecological niches or ‘homes’ of other living things. Destruction of habitat. Our hyper-mobility is petrol on a pandemic fire. We are never ‘home’, never grounded. Our imperial DNA still lays waste to the homes of others. We now call it ‘travel’. https://t.co/QNEawXUKIY
Has the Australian community ever been this sick? Hospitalisations as the key metric, hilarious, it’s a microbial sewer out there. You can’t do even the most basic social or work thing without a very high risk of being laid flat for weeks. A national disgrace. #auspol #covid19aus
What more could we do to defeat Covid? Treat it like a bushfire. Put experts in charge, while politicians get out of the way. Why did we let politicians lead the operational work? Especially ones who 'don't hold a hose'? We smashed HIV under Bob Hawke. He got out of the way. https://t.co/9AR728jGJT
Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a global market. A 🧵/1 https://t.co/emeHZxZBPU
Many wonder when the Covid debacle will end, any day now surely governments will come to their senses. (In Australia this MAY still happen.) But we may have reached a tipping point. And the idea of ‘endemic’ Covid might hold the key to understanding where this might go. /2
As Katherine Wu showed, ‘endemic’ can mean many things. But historically it practically meant a disease that couldn’t be eliminated. And just about always, that meant a disease left to fester in poor countries we didn’t care much about. /3 https://t.co/XhVx8PdBxw
We told these poor countries to ‘live with’ these diseases, because we couldn’t be bothered helping them to control them. But with the politics of market economies, there are no countries. Just global markets. How we used to just treat other countries…/4
…is now how we’re starting to treat our own people. They’re all just market economy consumers, where they are is irrelevant. You can see this with the amount of labour we import, which our lockdowns highlighted, when they couldn’t come. The reason modern governments decided…/5
…to ‘live with’ a lethal virus, is because that’s what they’ve always done, when it was other countries. And now the globalised market (as they see it) is reaching its apogee, the distinctions between rich and poor countries are reproduced *within* rich countries as well. /6
It’s an evolution of the same colonial model, now within our societies, not just between countries. Note the obsession with ‘jobs’ in the Covid recovery, the only territorial remnant people are now allowed is their attachment to a workplace. /7
You’re interchangeable now with the poor in countries who have historically been plagued with malaria and other endemic diseases, which is why you’re now told mass infection here is ‘endemic’ too. Your government doesn’t defend you as an Australian, because we’re not citizens…/8
…now, we’re all (global) employees. Every bit of agency and identity people have, including their relationship to their own land, has been increasingly replaced with a global job market. Look at how often conservatives say ‘move to where the jobs are’, and how transport…/9
…infrastructure is one of their greatest passions. The hyper-mobilisation of humanity, nobody should ‘work from home’, because their home now is increasingly their job. Their identity is as an employee. You’ll be treated like a citizen in a developing country now, because…/10
…to the market economy, that is in fact what you are. What all of us are. This is the endgame of neoliberal and libertarian politics, where it was always going to arrive. /end
@YouAreLobbyLud
Today we discussed how to give the virus even more opportunity to evolve towards vaccine evasion, by vaccinating even more people who will all be allowed to become repeatedly infected. https://t.co/txu3ViSdAG
Recent decades saw the strip-mining of workers’ wages and conditions. The ‘Economy’ boomed during this time, join the dots. It’s a bunch of statistical indicators favouring the interests of employers, invented by pollies to replace ‘society’. /1 #auspol https://t.co/oqlvnw9URt
To market economy politics, we don’t live in society. We live ‘in an Economy’. It’s a trick, and a hugely successful one. The ’Economy’ lets pollies who push these ideas do politics, while looking like they’re doing objective economics. All necessary social action then…/2
…is judged by whether ‘the Economy can afford it’. See how the trick works? All political discussions disappear, in favour of a handful of economic indicators, pre-designed to favour existing wealth. /end
The economies of scale that public institutions provide are now all collapsing, as those institutions are destroyed. Each to their own = each pays their own way. And boy do they pay. https://t.co/c4L7U0wMPM
I'm not a public health professional. But I wonder if using immunity as the basis for a pandemic strategy is like making sandbags the basis for a flood mitigation strategy. https://t.co/bmJJ3yUFNk
Queensland research showing millions may have a fatal kidney disease, from Covid infection. Chinese research showing SARS2 attacks T cells, a bit like AIDS. Imagine being a top health official or doctor, and advising ‘just jab them mate, it’ll keep them out of hospital’. https://t.co/Ohn2HoVk91
“More supply is the issue, not more regulation.” APPEA acting CEO, about the gas crisis. Lobbyists write most of our public policies now. The property lobby the same, ‘release more land’. Airlines, travel and business, ‘relax Covid protections’. We’re customers, not citizens.
For years FB frustrated me, Australians use it overwhelmingly as a social/community thing, not for debating. Then the penny dropped, it’s our communitarian culture, doing what it does, making everything about community. As Hsu et al found: https://t.co/YK7vYOi4N7 https://t.co/48c7xzk9Db
Public health should be socially contextual. Historically we didn’t really see voting as ‘compulsory’, nor public health measures as ‘mandatory’. Both were seen more as community action, for community good. Like fundraising for bushfires. Pollies need to remember that. https://t.co/uY11VZ9yYm
The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1 https://t.co/2mBF8OARpI
It shows really obviously a society not just using money as a tool of exchange, but reliant upon ‘cash flow’ to function at all. Lockdowns showed the same, there’s no fat in the system, without the immediate injection of vast amounts of cash, the entire ‘Economy’ shut down…/2
…almost immediately. What it shows is a financialisation of society, of our actual lives. Without money, nothing works. There’s no resilience, there’s so much debt that even a day without ‘economic activity’ risks breaking society itself. Even the basics…/3
…of human existence, like food and shelter, are completely reliant upon having money. Nobody had significant stores of anything to allow them to subsist without a new injection of money, through wages or loans etc. And as for shelter, we’re decades past the time…/4
…when the finance industry hijacked and financialised it, turning it into a capital gains casino-like circus that has ‘priced’ whole segments of society out of owning basic shelter. (It’s not ever something that should have had a ‘price’ attached.) /5
If this intrinsically valueless medium of exchange suddenly drives the entire society, what does it mean? Another obvious answer, that whoever ‘owns’ that medium of exchange, is calling all the shots. Who owns it? Technically we all do, governments create and own money. /6
But the financial industry has long been able to issue money, through loans, issuing debt, without there needing to be some connection to government-issued fiat money or commodities like gold. A debt/loan after all is really just a legal promise to repay, a piece of paper. /7
We saw in the GFC the complex ways the finance industry creates ‘instruments’ to hide the lack of provenance of debt, decoupling it from reality. It’s a story as old as civilisation, several major religious traditions even forbad the use of debt, aware of the social damage…/8
…it was capable of. The much bigger story here is what this has allowed. My grandparents used to say to me never to buy something you couldn’t afford without borrowing. That was a common view in their generation. We see it as quaint now. But there’s maybe a deep wisdom there. /9
They lived the aftermath of the Great Depression, after all. They saw what debt could do. It made them frugal for life, which we mistakenly think means ‘careful with money’. Frugality isn’t that, it’s care with the provenance of things. Respect for how things are created and…/10
…nurtured, the effort needed. Free-floating debt breaks all of that, because it offers you everything right now. You’re borrowing time more than money, the time it would normally have taken to create the things you want. And this is how the ‘Economy’ ultimately won. /11
As a construct designed to screw everybody except a tiny handful of the already-wealthy, it should never have got off the ground. But personal debt saved it, by offering everybody else lives that had the appearance of prosperity. If we’d required people to actually have the…/12
…money saved to buy something like a house, before they could own one, it would have osmotically created the pressure on wages to make sure that happened. But personal debt allowed us to keep suppressing wages, because debt would buy us that home. Let that run long enough…/13
…and we arrive at today, at the start of the thread where people are so hocked to the eyeballs that a day without wages makes the whole society grind to a halt. The ‘cost of living’ crisis, another set of words the Economy obscures. It ‘costs’ to live, we have to pay…/14
…somebody now to live. Ultimately that somebody will be somebody in the finance industry, or associated with it. We could structure our society to have more resilience, even military thinkers have been asking us to for decades, because they saw this day coming. /15
We could respond to shocks like pandemics or wars, without the basics of life crashing inside a week. But we’re held hostage to finance, and the people who own and run it. The moneylenders, as the Bible calls them, that’s how far back in history this problem was known. /16
I’m not religious in the way that word is normally used, this isn’t an argument from that viewpoint, only a recognition from that ancient source of this same problem, which never leaves history. The Economy is the financialisation of life, which in turn is the handing over…/17
…of the keys to society itself to the finance industry. Which will resist with all its might action that might damage the continuing issuing and repayment of debt, for example action against climate change, or Covid. /end
Second most vaccinated country in the world. And yes, vaccines work. But not enough, alone. https://t.co/jVG1N6KIE8
Forcing schools to be open with a pandemic raging, with minimal to no protections, crosses a threshold of immorality that disqualifies a country from calling itself civilised. Karma is coming for those who did this. https://t.co/xwLfQ4em5M
Stories about meltdown in both schools and hospitals today. Critical public institutions. Decades of ‘individual aspiration’ now leading to systemic collapse. Icing on the cake the gutting of public health, unloading vast waves of sickness on the ruins. https://t.co/2In3I66t85
Political libertarianism has succeeded in savaging public institutions using fundamentalist ideas about ‘freedom’. Of action, but also of speech. We’re in a bind now, this fundamentalism stops beliefs from being regulated. Fish knows it. /1 https://t.co/MapyR46V50
Beliefs and knowledge have always been regulated, it’s why we have education and universities. But libertarians have been so successful with their bullshit, that even the mention of the regulation of belief invokes Big Brother authoritarianism. /2
Beliefs are regulated by peer review, not by governments. By a community of scholarship. It’s not the case that all opinions are equal, just as you either know how to plumb a toilet or not, when you work as a plumber, knowledge in every field is regulated by the community…/3
…of expertise, in that field. Freedom of speech fundamentalism levels the entire playing field, and makes every dimwitted opinion and prejudice as loud as knowledge regulated by institutional scholarship. The urgent task our democracies need to survive is to excise the…/4
…cancer of sponsored propaganda, working 24/7 to disrupt and destroy basic civilised life. The people who spout freedom of speech ideas spend millions creating think tanks and organisations to do the exact opposite, to dominate the flow of belief and opinion. /5
David Littleproud back with the ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogans. Know where the sun also doesn’t shine? That’s where all the old LNP slogans need to be retired to. #insiders
Saying ‘vaccines work’ is like saying ‘seatbelts work’. They do. But you still need the brakes.
‘If we had more infection, we’d have less infection.’ One of many stupidities we’re now supposed to live with. https://t.co/YIbotBec6n
Too much wasted time arguing science in this pandemic. We had public health systems and procedures tested over 2 centuries that knew exactly how to beat Covid. The reason they didn’t isn’t scientific, it’s political. It’s the same politics that refused to fight climate change.
Public health is defined as the health of the population as a whole. We’re all vaccinated for infectious disease, vulnerable or not, to prevent illness, not just death. How is the level of illness in Oz right now not a national crisis? https://t.co/ADxSqHiqmh
Existing economic interests won over many working people by reframing their lack of money and freedom as theft by government. But when you read the policies of business lobby groups, on deregulation, you can see who actually took that money and freedom away. https://t.co/ke6FS1ruUp
A reminder that getting our 'freedom' back with Covid meant all of us going back to work in underpaid jobs. Always interrogate the slogans.
I'm more concerned that: - Covid is killing hundreds a week and government says nothing - people are catching a potentially lethal virus multiple times, and no public health mitigation is occurring - we're infecting everybody at will with no idea of long-term effects. https://t.co/uzWDguMnXj
A health system is like an immune system. The last line of defence. Using both to try to defeat a pandemic alone? Nobody says in wars ‘pull back, the medics will finish them off’.
The RBA to announce the new cash rate tomorrow. Economics is designed to make the simple look ridiculously hard. What sort of society holds its breath about a cash rate, the cost of borrowing? A society where most don’t have any money.
The only thing we’ve become immune to as a herd is the infection and death of millions of people. No biggie.
Microbes live in ecosystems, which we’re a part of. Public health measures are designed changes to the ecosystem. Pandemics are the breakdown of ecosystems. It’s all ecology. ‘Live with the virus’ people utter ecological words, without doing a single ecological thing. #covid19 https://t.co/d6BD6lFNa4
Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is really just the Reformation all over again. A secular version of it. I see so many bewildered by what they see as social breakdown and chaos today. A short 🧵/1 https://t.co/pTeidrmS6M
The Reformation was driven by a movement of people passionate about individual rights and freedoms (the Protestants). Like our neoliberals and libertarians today. Both ‘protested’ against the institutional establishment of their day. It’s a tension as old as humanity. /2
Both also have their iconoclasts, believers so fanatically individualist that they smashed the institutions, not just reformed them. Today in the West these are the people who break up and sell off public institutions. It looks more refined, but it’s just smashing-in-ties. /3 https://t.co/fNRRSWpO3o
None of this is a play of analogies. These are the same basic collective movements, religious and secular. How does this all end, if history is a guide? With reformed institutions. In some orthodox churches they still celebrate the triumph of ‘orthodoxy’ over the iconoclasts…/4
…in a Feast of Orthodoxy every year. Societies can’t function without institutions, it’s how stuff practically gets done, so we always end up back at them. Much of what we take to be the ‘modern’ world repeats the same patterns humans created throughout history. /5 https://t.co/fR37wY3LQp
To me that puts some calmer context around the apocalyptic narratives we hear from all sides when these clashes happen. It also focuses us on the key to all peace and prosperity, institutions. Not personalities or other qualities of leaders. /6
Institutions are the way societies accumulate lessons learned through generations, they’re societies habits, operating without us needing to think, just as we don’t need to think about how to breathe or walk. When we smash them, suddenly individuals have to try to negotiate…/7
…both basic and existential threats, alone. I’m sure we can all feel that, right now. The reformation is coming. /end
@CdrHBiscuitIII
Covid minimisers who flat out deny being Covid minimisers, are always followed by roving packs of Covid minimisers. They know. Useful for blocking, they flush each other out. One juicy thread can help you identify and remove sometimes dozens in a single 5-minute purge.
I think we need Robo-ICAC. Software that scans political grants and donations and automatically sends infringement notices to politicians.
There’s been a clear attempt by ultra-conservative politicians in Australia to replace our communitarian politics with US and UK-style ‘personal responsibility’. (Of which these same pollies demonstrate none.) It’s untenable to allow widespread community illness with no action. https://t.co/rhK4YYENVH
‘Mandatory, compulsory.’ Politics is cultural. In Australia these words have never meant ‘government giving orders’. They’ve meant the community, through its elected government, looking after the community, through collective action. We need to lose the US-style libertarian lens.
Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the community together. /1 https://t.co/jzSdxXCvJH
Events with little practical outcome, apart from tourist and other business dollars. At the same time as the old community-focused clubs like Lions, Rotary and Apex are on their last legs, clubs that focused on community bonding and community projects. /2
The big push for decades has been to ‘mobilise’ the population, with transport. Lots of debates over private vs public transport, hardly any about why transport is so central to our society now. It’s central because the whole ‘economic’ shift has been to displace people. /3
From their communities. Where we spend most of our days, working, is rarely where we live. If a society is expending little energy doing things within its own communities, those communities will disappear, replaced by suburban quarter-acre car parks for commuters. /4
Suburbs are now rarely real communities. People flock to events like Vivid because the desire for community is healthy and deep, and it’s all that’s on offer. It’s not Amish barn-raising, a community doing something, for its community. It’s us being tourists in our own land. /5
Zoom out and it’s the old colonialism now extending within our borders, where there are centres of power and wealth that mobilise people and resources to funnel them, towards those centres. Just as I tweeted previously about how citizens of rich countries now are also just…/6
…’customers’ of a global market. And infected without conscience with ‘endemic’ disease, as we used to do only for poorer nations, in the earlier days of colonialism. It’s all connected, the same colonial framework still playing out. /end
What our international jet-setting lifestyle costs in practical terms. We use about 300 million tonnes (yes, tonnes) of jet fuel every year. 300 MILLION TONNES. Let it sink in.
Broken bones and other injuries heal. And yet we still avoid them. Relying upon immune memory, the body’s last line of defence, as society’s front-line of attack - it’s the Middle Ages. And Covid may trigger little immune memory, even damage the immune system. https://t.co/vsdZhrTSte
Yesterday when discussing with someone that it might be a good idea to have Covid protections for an indoor event, they said society is in the phase of Covid where we let it ‘burn out’. We could try it for bullying, or domestic violence. Get enough of it, and it’ll burn out. /s
“As Health Minister I am not at all keen to be heading back the path that has exhausted everybody with all the restrictions.” BH, March 2022. Sitting on the couch watching Netflix isn’t exhausting. Being a teacher or HCW with the population infected to zombie levels is.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. https://t.co/LsUTceFSuX
Last week's school shooting in the US wasn't a problem, because it only killed the tiniest fraction of a percent of all children. That'd be a heckuva paper to write, hey. https://t.co/UmD9Ob93ao
The LNP's 'just pick up a phone and call the gas companies' response to the energy crisis reveals that they had them on speed dial for the past 9 years. Which is why we have no energy policy.
I talk about community a bit, a 🧵about community and Twitter. It seems social media builds out a platform that reflects certain ideas and assumptions about society, that we don't always question. /1
Twitter and other social media mostly regulate behaviour using a customer service type of system. Individuals mostly have to complain, and if you're lucky claims are investigated, though rarely quickly. Sometimes algorithms moderate content, and sometimes actual moderators.../2
...are employed, but given the volume of information daily, it's all a bit tokenistic. Other Twitter users can also report Tweets that seem to violate rules, but again that's very hit and miss. I wonder if the community itself can be more active in regulating what goes on. /3
For example, many trolls are serial offenders who constantly harass people. But their victims often have to try to deal with them alone. And the offenders know it, even if they're banned they'll reappear almost instantly with new or other accounts, behaviour unchanged. /4
Some are also paid agents, of government or corporations or other interests, to try to manipulate and control community discussions. In a nutshell, while the platform is designed as if it's all a lovely free world of individuals expressing their points of view, an embodiment.../5
...of simplistic, fantasy views of what 'democracy' is, in reality bad people mobilise extensively in collective ways, and good people are often vastly outnumbered because they're trying to deal with the scum on their own. So I wonder, in what ways could the good people.../6
...mobilise in more community-type ways, to tip the balance a bit more the other way? It's not easy, because you also don't want more lynch mobs. It has to be evidence-based, not just 'this person is a dickhead, everybody block him'. And you don't want people excluded only.../7
...because they have a set of views others don't agree with either. It's more about etiquette, basic community behaviour. Also cultural, because in some places each person aggressively vomiting out their personal opinion is considered ideal, and the idea of a community.../8
...regulating any speech at all is anathema. So no easy way forward here, the platform obviously has to be able to cater for a variety of possibilities. And maybe others are already aware of ways these problems have been worked with, within Twitter. /9
I'm aware other platforms have been set up as new utopias free of the troll-type behaviour, I'm not so interested in those. They're good for those who want them. But maybe for example, if a person encounters appalling behaviour, they can share it simply as a way of saying.../10
...'be aware of this'. Then others can block, report etc, and it becomes more a community action than individual action. It gains scale and effectiveness, without being a lynch mob because it's still up to each person to decide how to act. I know this already.../11
...happens, but if there were better ways to get this sort of thing to scale, trolls would face a more collective resistance. They have nothing of interest to share themselves, they feed upon the Tweets of others. So starving them of that raw material. /12
There may be no way to do this without it running the risk of persecution and witch-hunts, who knows, but I am very interested in viewing social media as a community rather than as an aggregate of millions of separate individuals. Thoughts or examples, anybody? /end
Again and again, why do we bother immunising for most of the infectious diseases on our schedule if the rationale is only protection against ‘severe disease’? Most of them don’t cause severe disease, or kill many. It’s irrelevant. We do it to stop sickness. Except for Covid. https://t.co/3HKVsrnNVo
The politics of the Economy adapted easily to Covid. ‘Confidence’, for example. Consumers ‘lack confidence’. Meaning they have no money, and have to be seduced into going further into debt. Conservatives are skilled at seducing people into doing things that are bad for them. https://t.co/2xgpcICZVt
It feels like Dan thinks copying Dom will save him politically from the freedom crowd in Victoria. But Dom is deeply unpopular, and the freedom crowd is a minority in Victoria. Seems like dumb politics to me. https://t.co/Jg5YG7Pp1w
So National Cabinet and CMO, this was the metric you announced you would be shifting to. It's not hiding the deaths. What's the plan? #auspol https://t.co/QbuIG5o96I
The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/zAzjeDwxTY
The principle of a heat pump is to extract heat from one place, and pump it to another. The science amazes, for example there’s 85% as much heat in air at -18 degrees celsius as there is at +21 degrees celsius. That heat can be extracted and pumped inside, to warm us. /2
The key fact - there is always heat. Not to be confused with temperature, a crucial distinction. The heat pump extracts and concentrates the heat, with its compressor. And this is where we can cross over into an analogy with social media, that I think is more than an analogy. /3
There is always hate in society. The ‘temperature’ of society, how intensely that hate expresses itself, varies. From peace to war. But even within the peace, as with heat, the hate is still there. And so along comes social media. The hate pump./4
Social media extracts the hate, and compresses it, magnifies it, like a heat pump. By gathering it in its diffuse state, circulating in society, and compressing it within the platform, in groups. It then pumps the result back into wider society itself, using the platform. /5
It’s a hate pump. It can also ‘pump’ other emotions, but hate gets the most clicks, far and away. I think it’s important to understand this pumping, because we need to understand not just this compression and pumping process, but just as much the circulating, diffuse hate. /6
The idea that peace and war are opposites is dangerous. It’s during our peace that most of the damage is done to society, by ignoring the hate. It’s in peacetime we dismantle the institutions that ensure the ongoing peace, and adopt fantasy philosophies of individual freedom. /7
And that’s where we are now, incapable of fighting a pandemic, because many are delusional, thinking that the freedoms they’ve enjoyed are the natural state of things. Rather than a highly regulated and continuously maintained state. Hate pumps, social media, compress and…/8
…pump the disaffected emotion of millions of people, and perversely ends up turning it back against themselves, by further destroying the institutions like government that gave them any freedom and wealth they may have had. So where to from here? I think it’s critical to…/9
…remember that the hate pump magnifies something that was already there, but diffuse. We need to call that out, to not mistake that grossly compressed and magnified hatred for society itself. We need to use a reverse-cycle hate pump, just as we use reverse-cycle heat pumps. /10
To switch them back into cooling mode, so that we extract the heat from our shared public spaces and move it back into that default, diffuse state that creates peace. Use the platforms to compress and magnify counter-narratives instead, that can then be pumped into those…/11
…public spaces to counter the hate. That’s much more than just individuals complaining to a platform when they’re a victim of the hate pump. It’s the community as a whole taking back the space and re-shaping it. Switching the hate pump to cooling mode. /end
@JonHaidt
“…being online did not make most people more aggressive or hostile; rather, it allowed a small number of aggressive people to attack a much larger set of victims.” (Jonathan Haidt) Social media is a hate pump. It vastly amplifies tiny things. As heat pumps do with heat.
I think the minority of trolling Covid-minimising scum here on Twitter should have to meet with the families of the daily slaughter. https://t.co/qHCsGacEiz
One of the main reasons the ‘public’ isn’t more concerned about Covid, is that the public may no longer exist. You have to physically create and maintain it. There is no more public square, no broadcasting space where everybody dips in to share the same narratives. https://t.co/MIsvYlpUMq
The pleas on Twitter for Covid sanity are not looking for answers, because those are obvious. They’re looking for that disappeared place where those questions didn’t need to be asked. That’s much harder to solve.
Supply and demand is one of the founding myths of the ‘Economy’. It’s what replaces the need (it’s said) for any sort of regulation. In practice there’s no supply of things for which there’s enormous demand, and no demand for things for which we have enormous supply. https://t.co/gRgnSAq8zU
Covid being airborne is likely why nobody with influence is really trying to beat it. Air is the last ‘commons’ left, almost impossible to appropriate for private profit. As the economic wankmonkeys would say, it’s the ultimate externality. https://t.co/wX3NisHqAP
#Formula1, where 20 of the world’s best drivers compete to drive 4 fast cars. The formula is a joke.
I’m not trained in these areas, but it does seem that the debate over whether SARS2 is damaging T cells and the capacity to create immunity is still playing out. Are we getting a consensus on this yet? https://t.co/uTTAW9tYyU
The reason what you learn at school often seems irrelevant to your later life, is that society is increasingly the daily grind of bullshit, unthinking jobs. Let’s make life more like what we learn at school, rather than make school more like those bullshit jobs. https://t.co/4cfxZT71nc
#insiders ‘baseload power’ isn’t a basic amount of energy we can draw upon for basic things. It’s the amount of energy we need to consume to prevent having to turn coal-fired power stations off overnight. $$ to restart them. It’s a metric of the inflexibility of coal-fired power.
It’s nearly 75 years since the 5-day, 40-hour working week was approved in Australia. As I enjoy the long weekend, that seems a long time since any great advance for working people. Wages don’t grow, hours don’t decline. They already stole the weekend back, for work.
The existence of local councils was driven by public health action in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sewer, clean water, garbage collection, drainage. The shape of our societies was driven by public health. Ventilation should be next. The ‘Economy’ doesn’t understand this. #covid19 https://t.co/JtxxlD74je
@CrabbBrendan
Easy to be gobsmacked by the gun drills in US schools. But we, like they, still have no Covid mitigations in schools. Covid has killed orders of magnitude more children than guns in schools. You don’t want Covid or guns, in schools. https://t.co/RBCG6KFhqX
Climate denialism was the seed bed of Covid denialism. Climate deniers are now using the ‘wind and solar farms use a lot more minerals than a gas or coal plant’ spin. A log fire uses less than both. It’s a meaningless distraction, and designed to be.
Your body is not a temple of health, it’s part of an ecosystem of other living things, that is healthy or not. Just as you’re not an individual customer of democracy, you’re a citizen of a community, that functions or not.
I’d like to clean my teeth and get my hair cut once a year too, much easier. People should be prepared for the possibility that an annual vaccine may be 3 too few. https://t.co/r28EvgX0i1
Anybody feeling like decades of ‘personal responsibility’ politics has led to everything we can’t provide personally - food, water, energy, education, transport, clean air, wages, equity, climate, healthcare, the arts etc. - falling apart? Duh. https://t.co/9pvfsKeNaj
Work in Australia is predominately in varieties of care (health, aged, social) and services. That’s our ‘economy’. Privatising those areas for profit has led to death and system dysfunction. Conservative angst over ‘welfare’ mistakes demographics for aspiration, or lack of. https://t.co/HI7OnSzg77
Demographics and politics. We knew the demographic tidal wave of the boomers was eventually going to arrive at aged care. That’s where we are now. A country heavily reliant upon care and related services, with few younger workers available and budgets starved by tax cuts.
Unfortunately the rule of law is usually defeated by the cost of law. https://t.co/xBJ68cYL12
Healthcare is underfunded. But within healthcare, a GP might earn $300K+ a year, and specialists multiples of that. It feels a bit like universities, which cry poor, but where senior managers earn more than cabinet ministers and Prime Ministers. Explain the disconnect.
Consistent with the developed world's Covid response. Where we just rename all the bad things as good things. https://t.co/coW7zdGUxb
'We gave you all vaccines, what else do you want?', said no public health textbook, ever.
Remember when we threw all the strawberries away, as a potential risk to public health because some dimwit put needles in some of them? Covid is killing over 300 Australians every week. I guess by analogy we're throwing the Australians away, not the virus. https://t.co/7KOkPOYDx5
The moral of the story is, have a net worth of about $250 million, and an understudy in your job, and you'll be fine. https://t.co/PieOf7e5J0
Every year for more than 250 years, humans have combusted more than 100 times the amount of our massive 2019-20 bushfires. More than 100 of those massive fires, every year. How did we not notice? Because the fire was inside. Internal combustion. https://t.co/eZljpEdHLm
Has there been a typo here all along? Is it ‘Principle’ Committee, maybe? As in ‘in principle we’re protecting health’? https://t.co/4XadYnp3gh
We mobilise whole societies for many years at a time for wars, but now try to live with pandemics. Check the thickness of the Covid line, compared to 1918. That’s ‘living with’ Covid. https://t.co/lpTSCd5zJ2
The ‘you’re unlikely to get reinfected by the same variant’ belief is crumbling. https://t.co/efAQe8QBkD
Populism says that politicians ‘run’ a country. They never have. They have authority, but others with expertise run the country. Symbolic sod-turning is as close to ‘running’ anything politicians should be allowed to be. Covid would be over by now if we’d remembered this. https://t.co/XrdE30ACJc
There's not a single number here that has moved meaningfully in months. The State has given up, in every way. And I think it gets worse, in terms of our ongoing public health. #auspol /1 https://t.co/nOFQTUqI4Y
Fewer than half of the State's children under 12 have had even ONE vaccine shot. What this says about the future of public health programs in NSW is a bit worrying. It's parents not getting their kids vaccinated, against a potentially lethal and high-morbidity disease. /2
We're looking at a potentially lost set of generations here, in public health terms, the parents and now their children. There should be immediate action to build a community understanding of public health and how it works, because that can take years. /3
I see no indication there will be political leadership to fix this. Most conservative and even progressive governments around the world are 'living with' a pandemic virus, ffs, a public health oxymoronic farce. /end
In the 'Economy', workers are 'costs'. Which is why people who turn societies into economies by design impoverish most of society. Businesses don't create jobs. Customers with money create jobs. https://t.co/2sgLR1CuWM
Personal responsibility health = 6000 Australians dead this year. Personal responsibility gas and electricity = no gas or electricity. I’m seeing a pattern.
ScoMo’s and Dom’s gravest Covid concern was ‘daily Covid press conferences’. Not Covid; the discussion of Covid. And here we are, a public health response entirely shut down. Not even vaccinating. But remember too, you only had to be given the ‘opportunity’ to be vaccinated. https://t.co/AZNKCbSFit
Now the election is over, time for political journalists to return to the greatest crisis facing the country. Covid. It’s clear the previous government workshopped spin to respond to the alarming number of ongoing weekly deaths from Covid. Some questions to ask…. #auspol /1
Firstly, it’s also clear the dominant spin response would be ‘yes but a lot of these people are dying with Covid, not from Covid’. That’s just a lie, and the ABS have given clear numbers to counter it. Some journalists even read them. /2 https://t.co/EdqyjsPZDv
Secondly, vaccination in States like NSW has basically stopped. The leaders who gave the green light to let Covid rip before Christmas justified that decision using vaccination. But nobody is getting vaccinated, and these same leaders are doing next to nothing about it. /2 https://t.co/AibpqjU9hc
It’s not just that people aren’t getting a 3rd dose. More than half the children in NSW for example have not had even ONE dose of vaccine. The same spin doctors will no doubt say people were given an ‘opportunity’ to be vaccinated. That’s public health dangerous nonsense. /3
Vaccination for example was already compulsory to access basic public facilities and services, like childcare and family tax benefits. The ‘No Jab No Play’ scheme. The idea that vaccination should be optional for a disease far more dangerous than…/4 https://t.co/l5b8KRZ3EX
…those you need to be vaccinated against to attend childcare almost defies belief. And while millions of vaccines are on the brink of being thrown away, at the same time Chief Health officers have been apparently marginalised, barely appearing any more in public. /5
Surely a journalist can look at all this and call it out for what it obviously is? The shutting down of a public health response to a pandemic? And to do enough basic research to not be immediately cowed by one of the counter-spin slogans they’ll face? /end
Spirit of the Blitz. Print out this image say 200 times, and have it on hand tonight if the lights go out. You can burn it for light and warmth. https://t.co/OJ5N2CKxPK
The harsh truth here is the worshipping of small business, an ideological not economic thing. It's always been an unaffordable way to sustain a country, and a major factor in the progressive destruction of wages and working conditions. https://t.co/0ZxNlBOG5T
If you’re already sick of Albo because he hasn’t fixed your pet grievance after 3 weeks in office, you’re part of the populist problem.
Supporters of the new government will require patience, so often progressive political wins are trashed within a single term by the puritanism of belief of its own supporters. It’s quick and easy to destroy society, it’s much, much harder and slower to rebuild it. https://t.co/qT0PmzSzto
The danger of populism is the belief that politicians ‘run’ a country. They never have. Thousands of expert officials do that. It’s incredibly complex. Fixing the LNP mess will take those officials years. Not a magic wand from a new leader, that’s populism again.
Paradoxically, progressive voters are the main cause of populism. The most divorced from the basic realities of power and how it’s exercised to bring about change. Conservatives rarely protest, they know it changes hardly anything. They organise. /1 https://t.co/NWgXdk9ek0
Progressives understood this in the 19th and earlier 20th century. They organised actual physical change processes, unions and their associated political protests. Now they mostly make heartfelt speeches and protest, expecting that to magically change things. It won’t. /2
To be clear, I voted for a change in government in Australia. I’m not arguing to have back the laughable mess of the LNP. But for a couple of years I’ve also been attacking populism, our biggest enemy. The idea that leaders run countries. And so a change of leader will…/3
…somehow change the country. Nope. It will help, but it’s the tiniest top tip of an iceberg. This is why progressive politics has had its arse kicked for decades, because it’s forgotten about organising change. Independents are now reminding them of it again. /4
No amount of righteous certainty at the truth of your position will change a single thing in a society. You have to organise the change. It takes years, it takes thousands of people. And this is how progressives then also lose the victories they win. Watch this space,…/5
…impatience that the leader doesn’t fix everything that took decades of criminal incompetence to create, in 3 years. The most sure way to return the LNP to power in 3 years is to set the bar of expectations ridiculously high for the ALP right now. /6
It’s preparing the cannon fodder for the next LNP election campaign, where they can run on the ‘failure’ of the ALP to change the mess they created. It’s not ‘fix all this Albo’, it’s ‘fuck it’s a mess, we’re with you for multiple terms to try to get it sorted.’ /end
It’s clearly not over. And it won’t be over just by having enough hospital beds. Hospitals don’t stop Covid @AlboMP, hopefully you’re getting wider advice than the previous government. https://t.co/WuAvRHHGyw
If you want to change the world, join a bloody union. Twitter won’t do it. Organised political action changes the world. No matter how loudly you want to yell your opinions, it will change nothing unless the change is organised.
“Good journalism is about reporting, just the facts — not opinion.” Ita Buttrose, repeating the lie that is destroying journalism. Journalists aren’t stenographers. There are no facts independent of values. ‘He said, she said’ journalism isn’t journalism. https://t.co/Ip7DSTrLlx
I’m not a union organiser or ALP member. But the way the vast majority of the population have always organised themselves politically, is unions. And their political parties, like the ALP. The mess of the past 50 years is simply a lack of power balance. We stopped joining unions. https://t.co/hpMFVz2M4x
Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist, has flipped economic wisdom: “…when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees.” Highlighting the true function of the ‘Economy’, to rationalise a tiny number hoarding all the money. https://t.co/juMOkBJJlE
Dear National Cabinet. This is a hospital. Hospitals don’t stop Covid. Titrating bed numbers to Covid illness is a failure of public health. We don’t do it for any other disease. #auspol https://t.co/6vhz5ikTq9
Where are the experts and politicians who say kids had to be back at school because they were missing too much education? My kids learned a helluva lot more in lockdown than they are in the Covid soup at school. #auspol https://t.co/F2TbOGt90j
That employers don’t see this as the shifting of risk to them, away from government, probably shows how little they intended to do to implement risk management measures anyway. https://t.co/QcaDt8Kuq5
Look at from around September 2021, when the NSW (at that time under Gladys) and the federal LNP decided to unilaterally change Australia’s Covid strategy to…no strategy. The perversity of calling everything after that time on the graph ‘living with the virus’. https://t.co/hE7TAayedt
The funding shortfall at Netball Australia sounds like the equivalent of about half the annual salaries of an NRL or AFL team. Seems a ridiculously small amount of money for somebody to find, for a sport with far more players.
In the constant debate about our Head of State, everybody talks about the ‘Head’ part. Nobody talks much about the ‘State’ part. It’s the much more urgent, existential problem, rescuing the actual machinery of democracy from the libertarians. https://t.co/VJEUYOhFPT
Very important thread about the need to back off the constant assault on institutions. It’s playing right into the hands of the libertarians. The reason institutions often perform poorly is this long history of them being undermined. Blame the wreckers. https://t.co/arNOMdumgE
Angus Taylor on SKY saying the energy crisis is all about supply. Supply to a modern conservative always means just doing what the vested interests in the industry in question want i.e. more of what they’re selling. ‘Pick up the phone’, they say (to call the relevant lobbyist).
I thought of George Monbiot’s critical piece when discussions about energy needed to run electric cars came up on Q&A this week. We don’t question mobility itself. That mobility is dislocation, fundamentally anti-social. Cars are corrosive to democracy. https://t.co/wUMWBwy2Ql
It enrages people to say it, but Barrie had, as regular guests: - Piers Akerman - Andrew Bolt - Gerard Henderson - Tim Blair. We’re not in high school people. Move on. https://t.co/3LA8wacodH
The divide between city and country is another fiction. Cities didn’t evolve from the countryside. This fake divide was invented by property developers, who pushed all of the vegetation and growing space out to the fringes. https://t.co/dLSup9K9Gr
@powell_robs @ErinVincent1 have you seen the format of ‘The Pledge’ from SKY UK? The disparate viewpoints engage in conversation with each other, rather than just express individual views through a host. Add key experts and I think it’d be a superb format for Oz. https://t.co/OE9P5NHJ4d
It interests me that musos, normally climbing all over each other for a cause, are happily out organising big-earning Covid superspreader gigs again. Let’s not pretend these are artists in financial difficulty. https://t.co/Yw0RcBVyFw
“So, you learn all these knobs, and I’ll do the other knobs.” https://t.co/iweUMVYOXB
Catching a few moments of the Logie’s red carpet, and wondering if free to air TV and commercial radio would be orders of magnitude less stupid if people just paid for them. It’s been pretty much ‘will drop pants for food’ for a lot of years now.
Neoliberals replaced nations with a global market. That destroyed the agency of many people, so they diverted that anger with token ‘border control’ (only for the poor). Which is mostly fake, because it restricts tourism and the flow of slave labour. https://t.co/Nh6U5i4IzD
Modern economics provides a veneer of pseudoscientific language to disguise ongoing colonial feudalism. For example, cheap labour from overseas used to be called slavery. Now called ‘labour hire’, transacted through companies who would previously have been called ‘slavers’. /1 https://t.co/yPn24f1Ur5
‘Border control’ is performative theatre to distract people from their agency being stripped away by a globalised market, replacing all of their old territorial roots. But it’s also a mechanism to protect the business of labour hire companies, who ship/fly in thousands of…/2
…modern slaves from poorer nations. The evil ‘people smugglers’ are competitors to labour hire companies, which is why they’re ruthlessly stamped out. And it again provides token ‘sovereign’ theatre for the sense our nations are being strip-mined by globalised companies. /end
7-day average, deaths, Australia. Still going up, has been for months. Imagine being a leader telling people this is a new normal. When's the Royal Commission start the ALP promised? They may end up in the stand too. #auspol https://t.co/39Q5cSP9Ww
Over 1300 Australians have died of Covid since election day. 'No major hitches'. #auspol https://t.co/w1ZFnChw09
The pandemic showed few understand exponential growth. But it was right at the heart of the 'Economy' the whole time too. Compound interest. All those 'growth' forecasts - economic, super etc. - are exponential growth. Even tiny growth numbers. They're a fairy tale. https://t.co/WUmWoyWRFs
I’m not sure one leader or expert for hire framed PH measures as freedoms here in Oz. Despite us living the truth of it for nearly 2 years. The ex-PM had a rat cunning, describing them as ‘lockdowns’ from the beginning and their absence as freedom. Language is politics. https://t.co/jXqZyMWXqR
Getting close to the ‘oops’ and ‘fuck’ stages for Covid now too. https://t.co/stGAdCX88y
It’s breathtaking that there are prominent people working in public health who have argued you can’t eliminate the circulation of dangerous pathogens, from the *beginning* of the pandemic. It’s not clear to me what profession they’re now in, except maybe shameless self-promotion. https://t.co/0pzTFfe74y
I’m loving the actuaries riding into battle against the Covid minimisers. Very short thread on deaths, based on recent analysis of US death data from https://t.co/4zjjZrbXKB /1
Covid minimisers switch between absolute and relative figures depending upon what they’re trying to minimise at the time. With deaths, very often absolute numbers are used when discussing who is dying from Covid, because those numbers show an overwhelming skew to older ages. /2
Which is excellent minimising fodder, because these are the ‘people who were going to die anyway’. The ‘dry tinder’, who with a bit of controlled burning (i.e. killing them) allows minimisers to declare the pandemic over. But the actuaries aren’t buying it. /3
They need to know, for insurers, the *relative* risk of death from the pandemic, across age groups. That data is bad news for the minimisers. Because it’s younger age groups who have the much higher relative risk of dying, with Covid circulating. 35-44 is the peak. 2020 here. /4 https://t.co/kvHDo1WC3H
2021 data here. Younger people have a much higher *increased* risk of death because of Covid. Fewer of them die, and that’s what minimisers pick as their metric, the absolute figure. But the change (increase) to their risk of dying is much higher than the old. /end https://t.co/c1nKuwHscG
I love how economics can give you graphs and formulas to explain inflation. When it’s really just people who have supplies of scarce goods and services extorting everybody else.
A table of Tories who have been unmoved as 180,000 Britons have died of Covid, furious about trains not running. People can’t get to work! Call it an Economy and you can run a slave State in plain view. https://t.co/5LhBshRGqY
Instead of calling it Covid transmission, let’s call it Covid inflation. They do things about inflation.
Are we at the ‘send them back down the mines’ point yet, in our evolution of care for children? I can’t believe I live in a society that wilfully infects children with dangerous diseases, and then reinfects them, repeatedly. Egged on by leading ‘experts’. https://t.co/iz8SJdSnMR
Mark Butler interviewed about Covid this week, repeated the line from the previous government that leaders have always followed the health advice. We have multiple clear examples of this not being true. No journalist said boo. #auspol
The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IhSI02Ww0r
It’s a beautiful schematic, from the ABS, showing the ‘lockdowns’ in Australia. What should jump out at you is that we spent most of the past two years not locked down at all. Look at all that white space. And the ‘NSW Lockdown’ was only some suburbs of one city, mostly. /2 https://t.co/MdruqmFF0N
Politicians deliberately conflated lockdowns with basic public health action, like contact tracing and the suppression of individual localised outbreaks. I’m sure I’m not the only one who remembers living through most of this time with my ‘freedoms’ mostly unaffected. /3 https://t.co/WS55rhjjlQ
Compare with today, where infection is almost universally present, causing crises in healthcare and schooling, and disruption to businesses in almost every sector, with astronomical levels of sickness. How is this an improvement over how we were living in 2020-21? /4 https://t.co/V5JHt1WuDR
Simple. It isn’t. Some will say ‘but international borders were closed’. Actually they were never really closed, they were selectively open. We could have continued a simple public health response of isolate, contact trace and suppress outbreaks with international borders…/5 https://t.co/pDD5U7rseE
…open too. If the previous government had organised more extensive quarantine facilities, as has been the practice for centuries. They didn’t do it. That could be the tour t-shirt for their entire time in office, really. ‘Getting government out of peoples’ lives’…/6 https://t.co/yOyC53LvXW
…unsurprisingly means government does pretty much nothing. Now core public, social systems like education, healthcare, food production and distribution etc. are repeatedly paralysed by mass infection. And this is the sleight of hand, because we were much more ‘open’ before. /7 https://t.co/TLgrcC8TJ6
Before we ‘opened up’. This takes us to the root lie if the political belief systems that forced this shift in Australia. The neoliberal, libertarian idea that government intervention ‘restricts freedom’. We just lived 2 years disproving that lie. /8 https://t.co/FKE1vRv6N4
The public health stringency studies globally show the same. That those nations who used the most extensive public health measures were MORE free, more open, more ‘economically’ healthy, than those who didn’t. The reason is obvious. Government done well creates freedom. /9 https://t.co/AdNQlaGNP4
It’s why we invented it, it was never imposed on us. To give ourselves, as individuals, more freedom to do more things, through the economies of scale of collective organisation. This is the true Covid battle line, these core political beliefs. /end
This line from the SMH on 4 September 2021: "Friday brought the chilling announcement of 12 more deaths, against a new daily case record of 1431." The numbers seem almost quaint in 2022. #auspol #covid19aus
JobKeeper ended before Delta. Before even 2nd doses of vaccine were rolling out, let alone 3rd. It forced States to relax restrictions in the absence of the financial capacity to pay businesses to do anything else. I doubt very much this was accidental. https://t.co/2G01sWtwdk https://t.co/wcgmKysL4d
I hear politicians say we’ve entered a new phase of the pandemic. Do you reckon it’s the more than 50 deaths per day phase? Up is bad, right? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2FE49YGShA
In history political changes from pandemics were in direct proportion to the impact on the labour force. Elites will take a pandemic seriously only when they can’t get workers. With Covid this was the real cause of the spin of ‘getting borders back open’. https://t.co/Ry4ttc4LaE
Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid. 1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections is like a government giving its military slingshots instead of guns and missiles. /1 #covid19 https://t.co/A1fPDhn3Ox
2) The madness of removing public health protections in this pandemic is driven by the access to cheap labour from poorer nations. Western governments are less concerned about their own citizens now because the neoliberal project of the past 50 years replaced nations with…/2
…a globalised ‘market’. There’s no need for a leader with neoliberal beliefs to look after their own population, if they can access workers for the Economy elsewhere. All workers then become equivalent, in a global race to the conditions found in the poorest nations. /3
This in turn is the root of the massive propaganda push to ‘get borders back open’ during Covid, sold as giving people freedom back. it’s really about restoring the work of the labour hire organisations. /end
An actuary is like an economic epidemiologist. Will tell you very quickly which public health strategy is legitimate, because it'll be the one that makes the most economic sense too.
Notice the panic about a possible 'wage-price spiral' in talk about inflation, and paying people more. No talk at all for the past 30 years of capital-price spirals, in housing for example. That's good inflation, because it enriches the right (rich) people.
'Wage dynamics permanently changed' = 'workers aren't getting pay rises because employers are importing cheap labour from overseas instead'. Also a main reason the push was on to get borders open again, disguised as 'freedom'. https://t.co/zgw7rWgpex
We won’t defeat Covid until we understand it not as a medical or even scientific problem, but as a political one. Public health can’t function when you’re governed by political beliefs where the public doesn’t exist.
It’s not rocket science to understand that ‘small business’ is small, because it’s unsuccessful. Nobody says a band is great because it can’t sell any albums. #qanda
I am concerned about the massive income-price spiral that will be caused by $180 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy in the next few years. How about it Albo, let’s fight inflation together as a community, ditch the tax cuts. #auspol
I like to track the politics of language. Right now the climate change denial monkeys are keen on 'we're not there yet', when referring to battery storage. By which they mean we can't store gigawatts of power to replace a power station. Which nobody wants to do anyway.
Another struggling artist fighting to end the pandemic. https://t.co/y8gOO5HN9O
Same pattern the world over. Listen to the actuaries and the insurers they advise. Having to put dollars and cents against Covid statements cuts straight through the BS. Many insurance folk here in Oz are also still working from home. They know. #auspol https://t.co/mrwKuM8NQQ
This is the stuff that makes the most difference to how we'll be governed for decades to come, and which will be invisible to most. These are the people who actually 'run the country'. Great to see, after years of assault. https://t.co/AQwZIyenGg
What happened to the herd immunity train up in Queensland? Trackwork? https://t.co/zYr5Fsgeue
The most powerful anti-viral for Covid is to not saturate the entire community with it.
"...Paul Kelly said rates of reinfections were expected to rise as not enough of the population had received a third booster shot." Is there a vaccine now that prevents infection? Did I miss something? https://t.co/KauJmCPOGG via @newscomauHQ
What am I missing in the yellow here? A short reporting week? https://t.co/rb77nsRlet
I’m not sure we see our own culture as still infected by empire. The need to always be invading the space of others, to accumulate places. No real understanding of place at all, of home. Home to us is just an address, defined by a road, itself a pathway to somewhere else. https://t.co/lqdMDaN39w
A crucial educative thing. Conservatives have been winning the political wars for decades not by winning elections, but by both destroying and perverting institutions. Institutions run our societies, not politicians. https://t.co/eHVnEfChtE
For the umpteenth time, all of the diseases we immunised for before Covid were mostly not ‘severe’. We still didn’t let everybody catch them. Time for expert regulators to step outside the straitjacket framings of their political masters. https://t.co/Eb7VyzLm04
Doesn’t the US seem a mess in just about every way right now? It’s like the majority of people there have no power at all 🤔 https://t.co/EiQhZkMNBa
As an engineer, my advice to SKY is that engineering is a very complex field, and it’s best for them to begin with training closer to home. Journalism, for example. https://t.co/K7STLEwCe8
The only way to get tough regulation in the land of the free is to vest the right for something in women. If women owned a lot of guns, they’d have been banned decades ago. https://t.co/gC2tlBXyRh
Cancel culture, living with the virus style. https://t.co/d6EjbHGg9g
I don’t remember life in Sydney pre-lockdown including pretty much every person and place I know swimming in viral soup. Wait until we see how ‘scarred’ they are 5-10 years from now, from repeated infection. https://t.co/oR5xV1myXU
I saw other studies that said similar things about reductions in heart disease risk. Supports the theories of scientists like Paul Ewald, that many if not most of our chronic diseases may have an infectious origin. https://t.co/qhfAJT4WLg
If you won’t wear a mask because ‘nobody else is’, it’s time to re-enrol in high school so that you can be amongst peers in your stage of emotional development.
Whether it’s climate, Covid or abortion, very loud minorities are holding sway over majority and expert opinion. That’s because the loud minorities understand political strategy, and the majority don’t. It’s smoke and mirrors, a massive bluff. https://t.co/ZgFGAbf7w2
Governments who wind back public health protections in favour of business activity, when a pandemic is surging, are demonstrating clear regulatory capture. They’re little more than point men and women for business. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/HAPFCnGbFx
It’s beyond my comprehension that the UK Tory response to trickle-down inequity, ‘levelling up’ (i.e. if you’re poor, we’ll make you rich too, rather than share what we have) isn’t an international laughing stock.
Data wonks, is there an easily accessible data source of Covid deaths by postcode, for Australia? #covid19aus
Inflation means business is increasingly having to ‘pass costs on to consumers’. The junior in the office forgot to bank 60 years of record profits. https://t.co/EfyEuSmNUC
Stories of ‘personal responsibility’ public health. Relented and let my youngest go to a small sleepover, after 2 years. Says one of the kids was sick, coughing, ‘but wasn’t contagious’. I asked how they knew? ‘She coughed on her grandmother and she didn’t get sick’.
Because the ruling class spends millions persuading the working class that the only difference between them is that the ruling class is smarter and works harder. https://t.co/Dqad7w5O9K
Many say the Chinese think and plan long-term, across generations. But conservatives do as well, they worked with conservative church leaders in the 1950s in the US to map a long strategy to cripple the secular State, each for their own reasons. It’s well documented. https://t.co/RJmIkN28bA
If Mantovani had played at Woodstock, he’d have been 16 years younger than McCartney is at Glastonbury. Except Mantovani wasn’t invited to Woodstock, it was boomers-only. The generation always determined to replace history and succession with their own eternal youth. https://t.co/636tFwR6JS
Why the conservatives always win. Because while they work hard *organising* their dominance, every day, their opponents just find new ways to artfully express their anger, while organising nothing. But it feels good, righteous. Join a union. Takes 10 minutes. They organise. https://t.co/dK4omvmDIN
Over 1600 people have now died of Covid (not with, of) since the election. More vaccines and quarantine is good, but the vaccines don’t stop Covid, and quarantine is a bit moot when we have higher Covid density inside than outside Australia. #auspol https://t.co/XBcLtHpb2u
At what point does this public health debacle end? When will those who tell the population that catching Covid is like a bit of flu be held to account? https://t.co/nKMzd9vl7i
NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye: "Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious with a potentially deadly condition." /1
What happened to that horror, with Covid? This was how the public used to think, when led by politicians who believed in public health. You cannot even imagine even 5 years ago the public being advised for any serious infectious disease to just go out and live like normal. /2
And some experts are leading this shift, it's...I don't have the words to describe the bloody-minded perversity of what we're seeing. The more of a disaster Covid becomes, the more these experts redouble their attempts to make everybody think Covid is just an inconvenience. /3
Just get vaccinated they say, there's nothing else we can do. When I had whooping cough a few years ago, they told me much more than just get vaccinated (I already was). I had to isolate, for starters, because the community and PH expectation was 'don't spread this disease'. /4
I expect this from many politicians. But when I see public health professionals peddling the 'live with the virus' nonsense? How can you work in public health and promote widespread infection, in a PANDEMIC? Link to original story below. /end https://t.co/WLjLIujyTp
The name of the elephant in the room is always Covid. https://t.co/NpTFws3ZYC
I wonder if the greatest gift for anti-vaxxers is the (failing) use of vaccines in this pandemic without supporting public health measures. We don't allow diseases for which we have vaccines to spread, just because we're vaccinated? They're part of an integrated PH strategy.
Steven Moffat invented The Silence. Aliens who make everybody that encounters them forget everything, except for subtle deadly suggestions. The forerunner of the modern Covid minimiser. https://t.co/RRJ4w5YntR
Conservative politicians were already saying in early 2020 that their Covid strategy was to maintain public health measures ‘until vaccines are available’. Vaccines ARE public health measures, they only work in a wider context of control. They’re using them like drugs. https://t.co/PDoU6tRNfD
I think it’s worthwhile to always re-remember that ‘living with’ Covid literally is ‘doing nothing’. It’s the triumph of the most disgusting spin and slogans over public health. https://t.co/InNoOZijE0
Silicon Valley is one of the engine rooms of modern libertarian anti-government politics. And yet libertarianism always was an embarrassing lie, because who built Silicon Valley? The US Navy. Government is what gives libertarians their freedom. https://t.co/3PQQJ2O9mv
For those who cry ‘alarmist’ when Covid is described as a shitshow, what would concern you? A. More dead than World War 1, in 2 years? B. Mass infection, disease and death? C. Losing your Twitter platform of minimising trolls? Teachers say always pick C if you’re not sure.
A couple of weeks ago 40 deaths in a day was around the national average. Now NSW is mowing them down in those numbers, alone. Political and health leaders who say nothing more needs doing, smile for the Royal Commission camera. #auspol https://t.co/s0AaA5I44Z
@michellegrattan any chance of you stirring up the somnambulist press gallery to force a government response on this ongoing carnage? Including refusing the 'this is deaths with, not from, Covid' spin politicians use, a blatant lie the ABS can refute for them? https://t.co/tMdh6IgP6v
The 7-day average for daily deaths is actually going down, though NSW is going against that trend. https://t.co/5Qy947FhIM
Not sure if it's BA.5, but I'm hearing of a LOT more people infected in my community (home and work) this week? Anybody else? Some are reinfections too.
See how 'stopping the boats' never really stopped the people arriving (thankfully), all a political stunt. Stopping the planes did though. https://t.co/HDh0jLeYa7
What makes it possible for governments to ignore public health processes in a pandemic is the suppression of information about what’s really going on. A short thread about strategy, about taking our society back. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
All Covid data is depersonalised, then calculated and re-calculated in ways to minimise the scale of what’s going on. The testing that generates the data is undermined or removed entirely, or made user-pays, to suppress the magnitude of the numbers. /2
All of the maths, all of the descriptive language, is spun by strategists to minimise the sense anything serious is happening at all. At no time is it permitted to link the data back to the human reality producing it. Just as ‘economic’ data deliberately hides the political… /3
…reality of producing and distributing wealth unequally. It’s the same strategists. In a way then, what we need to do is staring us in the face. We need the stories of what the pandemic is actually doing to people to be told, widely. The suffering and social dysfunction. /4
The stories of what ‘living with Covid’ is REALLY like. What it’s doing to societies, how it’s destroying them. Every public platform should be saturated with those stories. Mainstream platforms will pick them up, it’s journalistic dynamite. /5
Generalities don’t win in politics, specifics win. Boris Johnson was invulnerable until his partying was revealed, now he’s toast. Powerful, specific stories about what happens to people can change a country in a day. /6
Send them to your MP, post them here, Tweet them to journalists. Expose the truth of a community under assault from pathogens. Assaults that are being allowed to go unchecked, every day. Health stories, economic and social stories. All of them. /end
That ‘national mood’, if true, is just the successful marketing campaign of ‘living with the virus’, deliberately propagated and reinforced over the past year. It’s a political ear worm, coming to fruition. https://t.co/SLbdWZwAfq
We follow the UK Covid strategy (do nothing) to the letter, so have a look how that’s going. In the UK the spin has rubbed off, people are seeing the herd immunity debacle for what it is - the politics of privilege pretending to do public health. #auspol https://t.co/9kM0yWHjtZ
Societies run by imitation. Power is really imitation, we copy those we admire. Our best weapon against Covid is ‘influencers’ acting against Covid. Often that’s musicians. What are they doing? Stroking their neglected egos at huge super-spreading events. https://t.co/qsZMtyRLWz
When populists talk about 'unelected officials', they're talking about people selected on competence. As opposed to elected officials, who are chosen purely on popularity. They pretend that's 'democracy', because they know popularity is just marketing, and money. https://t.co/cO3c37L2hn
Governments follow a herd immunity strategy for one brutal reason. To them we are literally a herd. Livestock. Replaceable by workers from anywhere else in the 'globalised economy', if needed. This was the actual plan, when nations were replaced with a single global market.
Planet Earth is like most planets, stone dead. It's that shimmering, gaseous, tiniest veneer of blue that is the difference. Air. Engineered by living things. What the Economy attacks, through climate change and now Covid. Dumb, hey. https://t.co/qL24Lb6xlh
Action on Covid stopped because National Cabinet damaged federalism. States, who drive the public health response, are now bound to a bland, killing consensus. It’s a support group, convened not to end Covid but to end responsibility for it. #auspol https://t.co/uOhaYjlgoe
Wastewater testing would help right now to assess the level of Covid in the community, given that RAT and PCR testing is a farce. As with everything Covid in NSW, it appears to have descended into minimising inaction and secrecy. Anybody seen recent data? #auspol
BA.4 and BA.5 clearly feasting on the NSW community. And this based just on the pathetic numbers of PCR tests still being done. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7l2HPPViP9
Wormtongue in LOTR whispers magical bullshit in the ear of the king so that it becomes the king’s entire reality. His eyes cloud over, no longer taking in what’s happening. This is now Australia, suffering from sloganitis. Twitter is full of Covid experts playing Wormtongue. https://t.co/uFsoJ6N90H
Was reading the NSW Health mission on their Twitter page while accessing today's numbers. "Healthy people, now and in the future." Hats off to them for continuing to try, with government refusing to back public health. 23 more today who won't be healthy now, or in the future. https://t.co/IvMz2ULxy2
The challenge Western democracies face is the need to de-program populations from decades of political propaganda - slogans and spin. Pick any issue and it's like pushing shit uphill, fighting the slogans that now pass as reality, and bypass institutions. All deliberately done.
Wow, imagine how immune Jessica will now be. /s https://t.co/3MmFCKEJfr
The only way to rescue a racing formula that doesn't actually have any racing, was to turn it into a reality TV show. V8 Supercars would know how to fix F1. They won't ever be invited to though. #F1 https://t.co/WKOdO2yjP6
When was the last time any Australian politician, from any party or even an independent, mentioned Covid? When not explicitly asked about it. #auspol
OK journos, here's the primer for the next time you ask politicians why they're casually allowing tens of thousands of infections per day, and hundreds of deaths per week. Because they *will* BS you with 'those are deaths with Covid, not from Covid'. (A lie.) #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ZJHWH9lOos
The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol https://t.co/I1I1SfKlSM https://t.co/SLuPvGdqk3
Those who have spent 50 years substituting a fiction called ‘the Economy’ for society have been extremely successful in painting our past 2 years as a ‘lockdown’. As a stopping of society, that had to end as a matter of urgency. But that’s not what the past two years were. /2 https://t.co/CHIoj2nKRE
It certainly was a stopping of a way of doing things, particularly those things that involved guzzling lots of fossil fuels. There’s a fun joke that says you can identify a bogan by the amount their recreational activities rely upon petrol. But that’s most…/3 https://t.co/nKZZFJIEDH
…of the Economy crowd, everything we call the ‘Economy’ is heavily about the consumption of fossil fuels. About moving things around, people and resources. About transport, roads, ships, planes. I’ve Tweeted before about how the ‘Economy’ is really our old colonial past,…/4.. https://t.co/1dvm7mvYoV
…re-badged with new modern economic pseudoscientific language, but still undertaking those old imperial tasks of dislocating people and resources and moving them to centres of power and wealth. The ‘Economy’ was the way those who profited from empire steered emerging…/5 https://t.co/c8SGyl04tE
…democracies back to their comfort zone of imperial, feudal society, while appearing to be ‘modernising’ things. They basically replaced political economy with a ridiculous equilibrium-based simplified mathematical model in economics, which they call the ‘market’. /6 https://t.co/Pichul3htY
A market which miraculously continuously equilibrates, with an equally miraculous ‘invisible hand’, towards themselves holding most of society’s wealth. Praise the Lord. And then along comes Covid, and we have to shut down much of that imperial, fossil fuel-driven gravy train. /7 https://t.co/T76fFy0S3h
Many peasants (us) in the modern imperial economy actually have never been richer than during the past 2 years. Our savings surged. We spent more time with our families than we have ever, in our lifetimes. We got to stop and think about the meaning…/8 https://t.co/tG116FkcPX
…of it all, leading to an international ‘Great Resignation’, as we peasants started to question the modern slavery our economic societies are imposing on us, with stagnant wages, unaffordable housing and other basics of life, etc. All of this is…/9 https://t.co/mjRsh7aUBH
…a clear existential threat to existing ‘economic’ elites, who have spent 50 years replacing sovereign national states with a globalised market, to promote ‘free trade’ i.e. destruction of any remaining barriers to the great imperial dislocation and accumulation machine. /10
All powered by coal and oil. This is what the study the ABC describes shows more fundamentally, I think. Those who benefit from replacing societies and nations with an Economy know very well what a threat to their privilege the pandemic represented. Here’s what they did next. /11
We know, we’ve lived it. A colossal propaganda war began, very early in the pandemic, to paint all public health action, the stuff that made us all richer and healthier and happier than we had ever been, as a ‘lockdown’ of our lives. Like we were being oppressed. /12
We’re now living in the lethal ruins of the success of that propaganda war. Astonishingly, so successful that many genuinely believe that ‘living with’ a lethal pathogen is not only desirable, but is somehow what we have always done. Both lies, laughable lies. As the study…/13
…shows, the lockdowns weren’t the disaster. We need to repeat them, for years to come. THEY should be the ‘new normal’. The redistribution of wealth towards ordinary people, the massive reduction in fossil fuel consumption, the improvement of quality of life. The authors…/14
…make abundantly clear, this isn’t about stopping society. It’s just about decoupling it from fossil fuels. The greatest funders of the ‘Economy’ idea in the first place? The fossil fuel industry, it’s their money that funds the majority of the ‘economic’ think tanks and…/15
…media that continuously act to obstruct essential action against threats like climate change and Covid. Our ‘lockdowns’, again, need to be our ‘new normal’. We were already finding ways to work, for example, with much less (fossil-fuel driven) mobility, ‘commuting’. /16
The Economy crowd, who love building big expensive roads for that commuting, are already desperately trying to ‘get everybody back in the office’. They know the threat to their lifestyles. Desperately spinning the new normal as a disaster, and let’s have the old normal back. /17
Let’s not. /end
I was a teacher, more power to them for demanding better pay and conditions. The great enigma of this pandemic though has been the meek acceptance of mass infection of staff and students. Teacher unions were among the meek. https://t.co/X6qZt3QbHH
Mark Butler on RN Breakfast, indistinguishable from Greg Hunt and the previous government, on Covid. 'Vaccines and treatments' appears to be the talking point spin. Protecting hospitals is the thing apparently, not people, like Sir Humphrey Appleby. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
When pressed on what people with no sick leave will do with Covid still spreading, meaningless waffle about people always needing to balance sickness with work. Yes, for non-pandemic illness, Mark, where you don't get continuously reinfected. /2
P Karvelas then asking why the 7-day isolation is required, if this is like other illness? It will stop people being able to have an income. Dangerous territory, they'll follow the UK path of allowing them at work sick, just watch this space. /3
Butler genuinely stumbled on that income point, the 'living with the virus' bullshit has no answer to it. Butler also coughed all through the interview, which added some Infection Nation colour. It's clear public health is dead in Australia, vaccines used as treatments,.../4
...people sick at home expected to know when they're at risk of serious outcomes, to chase up their GP and pharmacy remotely in the hope of getting anti-virals. A disgrace, US-style 'healthcare'. I wanted the ALP to be different on Covid. They're not. Get in the bin. /end
The other glaring thing about Mark Butler's appearance this morning was his assumption that the only alternative was for the government to spend more money. What about the business community and its basic WHS responsibility, for a change, at their own expense? It's the law.