July 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Remembering that we ARE the 'wave'. We're not surfing here, waiting for them to roll in. What we do here, right now, today is what generates the next wave. https://t.co/T3G4zcHb45
The new government wants 'vaccines and treatments' for Covid. Let's be Africa, who has few of either and is kicking our arse. O wait, they don't test much or collect data, you say? We've already got that bit covered. https://t.co/cO05F8uE27
Less than half of Australia has had a flu shot this year, despite free jabs and urgent messaging. Covid vaccines still stalled. Politicians did this, minimising the risk of infection for economic purposes. The public health system may not recover.
Many not coming forward for jabs now, since they were told to 'live with the virus', 'like the flu'. For many this = do nothing, what they normally do for flu. They're also not getting flu jabs. Covid minimisation is fostering a new anti-vaxxer nation. https://t.co/tlhOVp2QFk
The pandemic was 'over' as soon as the socio-economically advantaged felt safe. Always thus. And the disadvantaged do worse if they're unvaccinated or have co-morbidities? Bugger me if that isn't part of the definition of being disadvantaged. That's why we invented public health. https://t.co/O2RlJ0j5BI
Like Julius Caesar, right after being stabbed in Act 3. https://t.co/U8WrmsgOtR
Are there serious medical/public health professionals who genuinely still believe repeated reinfection with SARS2 will generate herd immunity? #covid19
Lots of talk from National Cabinet and their health advisers about a ‘new wave’ coming. The geographical metaphors are wrong, there’s not really any rising and falling here? No waves. It’s a mountain of persistent and growing infection. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/D6ymX4Ptfr
Infection Nation. Imagine this was a flu curve, of a few years ago, and governments and their health officers said ‘we’ll fix this with flu vaccinations, using the strain from 2 years ago’. That’s public health in Australia, 2022. People stopped getting the 2-year old vaccine…/2 https://t.co/w0Aj4PR0dZ
…shots months ago anyway, because political messaging minimised the risk to pretty much zero in peoples’ thinking. The long-term damage to our public health system? Who knows if it will even survive. Stats suggest we swapped it for a nation of anti-vaxxers. /end
Christina skewering the idea of ‘learning to live with the virus’. We’re not learning anything, it’s a slogan that actually means ‘do nothing’. The Economy is people, you can’t live with them constantly infected in vast numbers, how dumb do you have to be to not get this? https://t.co/DW84BojAzV
Two Covid reframings. 1) A ‘mandate’ isn’t somebody telling others what to do. It’s a community deciding on rules for the community. 2) It is a great idea to improve indoor air quality. But also, let’s look at why we have so many people in shared spaces?
Minimising maths at work again. The shambles of other countries’ Covid public health efforts constantly used now to justify Australia killing over 7000 people since Christmas time. Because we’re still killing less than them, or something. /1 #covid19aus https://t.co/pXENWiHHi5
In World War 1 about 8000 Australians died per year, on average. For World War 2, it was just under 5000, on average, per year. So 2022, about half-over now, is already worse on average than either World War, for Australian deaths. And this is described as ‘the new normal’. /end https://t.co/BrURCSTL8D
Spent several hours in a small closed room with pretty much zero ventilation on Monday, with somebody who tested positive for Covid the next morning. I wore an N95. Escaped infection. I’m thinking the mask worked.
Colin has done something so important here for Australia. Share with your friends and families too, who are told nothing about what’s going on. https://t.co/yfGMra0ZU3
Personal Covid stories Part 2. My wife is a primary school teacher, I have 2 kids still at school. I work in an open office with several hundred people. We’ve just finished 2 tough school terms, masked, with HEPA filters and ventilation, where possible. We’re still Covid-free.
National Cabinet and their senior health advisers presided over a complete stalling of Covid vaccination in their ‘opening up’. Flu vaccinations have been widely rejected too. And now this. We’re looking at the destruction of our public health institutions here, in real time. https://t.co/wcRpHDgqlR
more power to @queenchristina_ for calling out the ridiculous SKY News host, policing the description of Boris Johnson as a ‘pathological liar’. Wtf is that all about? That’s what journalists are supposed to do.
Another #insiders that doesn’t follow the usual whining Twitter script of it (apparently) lurching to the Right. https://t.co/5978mOR9Fz
To help those who think a ‘wave’ is something that ‘looks like a wave on a graph’. https://t.co/uvDOlYLiFZ
Great, important thread. https://t.co/yDkI3bzCKO
So epidemiologists are deciding what the public will or won’t support? On what evidence? And is that part of their job brief? Or are they regurgitating political messaging to stay in a job? https://t.co/vyAFOeCpzn
Not only has business had full suck of the public teat under the LNP, with tax cuts and other largesse, at the same time its own investment in the Economy has been in free fall. Rent-seeking, a parasitic organism on public wealth. https://t.co/gkBEt7Ftqj
Governments and sympathetic experts have devoted most of their time in this pandemic to ‘messaging’ the low risk of Covid to populations. Having succeeded, they now use this as a reason to continue to do nothing. https://t.co/VqQlidcRbj
I’ve just opened a packet of Ibuprofen. Or as the Tories call it, a new hospital. - Coral Fineman, via Graeme Meek
As I awake to another post-pandemic day, I wonder if all the people missing at work have just had a really tiring weekend.
Worth repeating that the true function of National Cabinet was to weaken the close link between Premiers and their public health situation and teams in each State, and force them to fight against the bland groupthink consensus of the National Cabinet. All deliberate. #auspol https://t.co/lYLu5AoGXX
A teacher friend is the sickest she’s ever been. On her second Covid infection, has been masked, is triple-vaxxed, is despairing. This is ‘personal responsibility’ pandemic action, individuals repeatedly smashed against the rocks by the absence of collective public health action.
Sharon Lewin this morning, quite correctly restating that the national Covid strategy is reduction in severe disease and death. That's what's tying our hands. We need it to be a public HEALTH strategy, against DISEASE. Against infection. All of it, not just severe. #auspol /1
The reason we can't make progress against Covid is this initial national framing, where public health has been derailed and become a logistical hospital-protection strategy. Which in itself is not even working, if you allow mass infection, the hospitals will be overwhelmed. /2
A hospital may still function, sort of, but like schools it may be running well into the rev-limiter red, permanently. You can't run key institutions permanently in emergency mode, it destroys the staff. /3
Too many, including journalists, were duped into thinking it was fine for the entire community to be constantly infected - SICK - provided only a precise number of them ended up in hospital. Not only have you then failed in public health , because the public isn't HEALTHY,.../4
...but you've created a ludicrous fantasy of being able to precisely titrate the seriously ill into hospital beds, with hospitals running more than flat out, 365 days of the year. We're already seeing people being medicated at home, if they're lucky, because there's no.../5
...actual 'titration', no primary assessment, going on. 'If you think you're at risk of serious illness' - how would many non-medical people know if they are? What sort of public health strategy is it to ask people to ring their GP if they think they're.../6
...seriously unwell, on the off chance (which by anecdote seems to often fail) they might get some drugs mailed out to them? This is Australia, 2022, a national disgrace. Smash the LNP's straitjacket hospital-protection strategy, and get back to people and their health. /end
One of my favourite data sites in the pandemic, for assessing local Covid cases. https://t.co/KwXspp2vqB
Phase D, final stage of the National Covid Plan, that we've arrived at. Um, 'minimise cases in the community'? Anybody seeing that, somewhere? And interesting that it says 'Managing Covid-19', not 'Living with Covid-19'. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ZrrFvLBLpU
I know the 3M Aura is considered the top drawer in masking for us ordinary folk. I have some, they're great, but I find the elastic straps flimsy. I prefer the N95 masks builders use, with the braided elastic. Really sturdy, and I get more days out of them. Half the price too.
In workplaces people are returning to work after the laughable 7-day isolation, and nobody is even told why they went missing the week earlier. To ‘protect their privacy’. Pfft, it’s to keep the business running. You’re supposed to tell close contacts. Not happening.
Listening to the car radio on the way home about how quickly communities have mobilised with the floods. That’s what Australia does, with fires too. It could do the same with Covid, if politicians and motivated experts stopped running interference.
A friend sent me this. It takes skill to write 3 paragraphs about elephants, without mentioning the elephants. https://t.co/F8tLlsXpaF
Another friend, triple-vaxxed, experiencing their first Covid infection. Vomiting, splitting headache, body aching all over, fever. We have senior leaders and experts in this country wishing this on people multiple times per year. How long can this farce continue?
More minimising fun with numbers, this time the ABC. Look, Australia is doing well! We’re killing relatively far fewer than the pandemic bloodbath overseas! Maths and language are the biggest weapons of this pandemic. Have a look at this next Tweet. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DnAk7Fg6fT
Thanks as always to @KarenCutter4 and the actuaries for cutting through the spin. This is us, relative to us. All through the ‘lockdown’ part of the pandemic (where we weren’t locked down for most of the time, we were just controlling the virus), we were the healthiest…/2 https://t.co/GREIjaBwSV
…we’ve been in generations. Excess deaths plummeted below historical averages. Then from late 2021, when Covid was allowed to let rip, we’ve been the unhealthiest we’ve been in generations. Excess deaths soaring. Those who use relativities to minimise Covid are living off…/3 https://t.co/lyIyvBJOmF
…the fat of the lockdowns (really public health controls) they despised. /end
Last week a group of people I know were having a chuckle about me wearing a mask That group is now all home in bed with Covid. I'm sending them all my schadenfreude. https://t.co/6mpxq7sQdp
Hospitalisations and ICU numbers climbing steadily in NSW. Vaccinations (our apparent strategy) haven't budged in months. How much is NSW Cabinet paid? Is anybody doing anything? https://t.co/fsm81iSdL1
It seems we're not going to see mandatory masks, in NSW anyway. Too many years of libertarian Liberals in charge. There was a time a mandate was just a community decision, to protect the community. Not some ludicrous imported freedom narrative. https://t.co/D5lnrAFlML
“We need to act now to slow the spread of the virus in the community.” (Kerry Chant, today.) Government not interested. It's fine for people to do fevered vomiting, with headaches & exhaustion, 3-4 times a year. While Covid potentially destroys their immune systems. #auspol
It costs $600 to get vaccinated against shingles, but we’re going to give $180 billion to people who don’t need it, in tax cuts.
In emergency operations centres politicians just get photo opportunities. The emergency is managed by experts. We do this for fire and floods, but for pandemics, the most lethal of all disasters, the experts get photo opportunities, and the politicians run the response. https://t.co/SQF4mx19Cm
Brad Hazzard’s plea for wider eligibility for a 4th dose of vaccine would be more admirable, if the NSW Government’s only motivation for doing it wasn’t their determination to do nothing else. Let’s ‘follow the health advice’ again, and attack spread. #auspol #covid19aus
I think Peter did Australia a service with this Tweet. An articulate guy across much of what’s going on in society. But had absolutely no idea of the scale of the Covid disaster. Demonstrates so clearly the magnitude of the political suppression of the threat going on. https://t.co/swCb8qz54R
In politics, what is popular gets done. It’s always been the job of a politician to make what needs to be done, popular. Covid minimising politicians refuse pubic health measures, saying they’re unpopular. But they made refusing them, popular. That was their strategy.
Listening to Phil Coorey chat to Hamish McDonald on RN Breakfast, saying there's no way people would accept closing businesses again. Hey fellas, they're already broken, vast numbers sick. And is selling things more important than people being alive and well? /1 #auspol
Unbelieveable that outbreak control (with businesses open) is still called 'lockdowns' by senior journalists. Do they pay any attention to hospitals, schools, airlines and other businesses crippled by infections? /end
Thank you ABC for putting faces to the statistics. Maths has been a key weapon of Covid minimisation. And language. These are the cannon fodder we've decided as a nation had to die to keep coffee shops open and airlines flying. https://t.co/16IncRmqee
Personal responsibility public health is an oxymoron. https://t.co/hgMhlAc1pL
"The pandemic isn't over", politicians say, in grave tones. Followed by...nothing. Like saying 'these fires and floods are out of control. Have a nice day.' https://t.co/feuZKorltt
Thanks to @SuffragetteLane for sharing this one. The magnitude of the catastrophe we may be in the middle of is light years from what the public is told. Also an excellent critique of public health professional failure, with lashings of political assistance. https://t.co/ILRLc9gSLH
Governments invented public health. They said to their experts 'find us a way to prevent widespread disease and death, so we can keep society going.' It's why we have local councils, for example, that was one recommendation. No 'balancing' needed. Public health IS the balancing.
The flood coverage, like bushfire coverage, is heavily about individual stories of loss. The ‘human tragedy’. More people die in a fortnight from Covid than died in these floods and the black summer bushfires combined. Property damage concerns us. 10,000 dead of a virus? No. https://t.co/KXcXmnxTaw
The real cause of traffic is property development. Property developers literally just build houses. Houses divorced from social, cultural and economic life. To connect people to those things, they have to drive. Thus, traffic. Suburbs are car parks, with a dwelling attached. https://t.co/1FVuwkc9RQ
The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a society to function. /1
A public school (in Australia) for example, isn’t just a school that is open to all. It’s a school where people from all parts of society mix and have to accomodate their differences, in some way. A ‘comprehensive’, as some used to call them, a more descriptive term. /2
The public is also not consensus, or any sort of uniformity. It’s fundamentally about difference. A recognition that differences both exist and are critical to how society operates. With public health for example, it matters that all people are healthy, no matter their…/3
…circumstances, because it’s the differences between people that actually make society function. So if we try to apportion sickness to selected groups (i.e. the disadvantaged), there’s no escape for us ultimately, it will find its way to us, not least in the social breakdown…/4
…it causes. They are the staff of our key services for starters, as we’ve discovered in the pandemic. The Covid minimising politicians and experts nearly always have no conception of the public. They think in minorities and majorities, with majorities winning. /5
What they forget is that those majorities cease to function if they ignore all of the interdependencies with the people they’re excluding. To beat Covid we need to rediscover the public, as a political concept. The ‘there is no such thing as a society’ political libertarians…/6
…will never see it, it’s a core article of faith for them not to. We’re losing against Covid because of the politics of these beliefs. Until we challenge their ridiculous separation of individuals and groups, they’ll keep winning. Their reality is a laughable fiction. /7
It’s not about always opposing their N=1 thinking by saying ‘but think of the group’. That binary is how they win. It’s about pointing out that individuals only have freedom through the interdependency of all people, of the public. They’re shooting themselves in the feet. /8
Their society-substitute, the ‘Economy’, cannot function without the interdependencies they constantly ignore, or portray as some version of themselves, only lacking in aspiration. Schools, hospitals, airlines and other business right now are broken. It’s a direct threat to…/9
…their core beliefs. Ram that point home, relentlessly. Fight them on their own ground, exposing the absurd, deadly paradoxes of their own beliefs. Rather than appealing to some sort of better nature, they’ll just see that as ‘bedwetting’. /end
More magical thinking. I’ll be glad of a 4th shot for my own protection, but shots aren’t the way out of this pandemic. Here’s an idea. Albo wants to emulate Hawke, with a business-unions accord on IR. How about using that same model to fight Covid? /1 https://t.co/EkVo9eJ2A6
He can say politicians the world over have tried to beat Covid, and have had some wins, but the virus is still making normal life impossible. Far too many Australians sick and dying, and businesses horribly disrupted. Now is the time to get those at the front line to drive. /2
Get a broad range of expertise, business and unions to sit down together and come up with a map out of Covid, for Australia. No politicians for the deliberations, only for any implementation. Get the politics out of it, use the outcome as a de-politicised way forward. /end
#auspol
I don't know who coined 'vaxed and relaxed', but I love it. I got it from @lisa_iannattone. And also 'Infinite Covid' as a counter to the critics of 'ZeroCovid' .
Populist politicians try to convince people that politicians run countries. They don't, they wouldn't know how. First the US, and now the UK, discovering this the hard way. https://t.co/tsUFv7VIWJ
We can rescue democracy with a simple change in beliefs. The job of a politician is to make popular the things that need doing. The things that need doing are advised and carried out by their officials.
A professor told me that the Chinese Covid strategy shows they have 'no regard for their own population'. It's curious that trying to stop their citizens becoming infected is a lack of regard, while the West deliberately infecting entire populations isn't.
Let's not blame any more institutions for political failures. In what world would 1-2 more years of lower rates tip the balance between affordable and unaffordable new mortgages? https://t.co/YVDhVfEmSb
Longish quote about Marek's Diseases in chickens in next few Tweets, and then I wanted to ask those who understand vaccines if the Covid vaccines are 'leaky' in this same way, with the same possible consequences? (Thanks to @iko_iko11 and Wikipedia). /1 #COVID19Aus
"Under normal conditions, highly virulent strains of the virus are not selected for by evolution. This is because such a severe strain would kill the host before the virus would have an opportunity to transmit to other potential hosts and replicate. Thus, less virulent..."/2
"...strains are selected. These strains are virulent enough to induce symptoms but not enough to kill the host, allowing further transmission. However, the leaky vaccine changes this evolutionary pressure and permits the evolution of highly virulent strains." /3
"The vaccine's inability to prevent infection and transmission allows the spread of highly virulent strains among vaccinated chickens. The fitness of the more virulent strains is increased by the vaccine." /4
"The evolution of Marek's disease due to vaccination has had a profound effect on the poultry industry...Highly virulent strains have been selected to the point that any chicken that is unvaccinated will die if infected." /end
@MackayIM is there anything here that's analogous with our Covid situation?
On the edge of my seat waiting to see which Tory will now step up to not lead the UK either. https://t.co/bHQ0aaJVnr
Covid removed all of them. Political journalists fiddling on their phones swapping their insider gossip won’t see or understand that. https://t.co/e7w1U8rls9
The greatest lesson for democracy would be to not replace governments at all for a year, in a situation like the UK. People would see the country continue to run, quite calmly and smoothly and without fuss. Politicians don’t run countries.
Many have been puzzled by the health advice given to National Cabinet. It’s not a great mystery, if you dig a bit. https://t.co/IL9X8nN5DC
When you stop an ‘Economy’, nearly everybody gets healthier and wealthier. We’re still not seeing that I don’t think, allowing the profiteers of the old normal to frame the true narratives of fear. The fear of changing the old normal. https://t.co/AyU0aGDOdq
Twitter is a wonderful resource in so many ways. Apart from trolls, the only thing that makes me despair of it is how it becomes a game of team sports, with every issue converted into sides for and against. Most things that need understanding will be impenetrable to team sports.
Ah, ‘walls of immunity’. I’d be getting a lawyer if a tradie built you a wall, and it lasted 4 weeks. https://t.co/6ZtHlT8oU2
Newton’s 3rd law of pandemic action - for every proposed action, there is an equal and opposite obstructing reaction from a small group of Covid experts. The same pattern happening in every country. Whether it’s airborne spread, masks, or now 4th doses. #auspol #covid19aus
‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP
The central planning of an ‘authoritarian’ society is mirrored almost exactly by large corporates in market economies. We’ve seen how they increasingly take over entire supply chains, to get greater control over the ‘market’. ‘Home brand’ products are this. /2 https://t.co/5jkrJ9BmKV
Another way we’ve been infected by libertarian ideas is our gut reaction to this as somehow bad. That ‘big business’ is corrupt, scale is bad, let’s all worship small businesses. But big business emerges when you have small government. There’s a certain amount of coordination…/3
…and planning needed to get a society to function properly, and if you don’t do it with government, business will need to do it instead. Look at how we exercise ourselves over ‘monopolies’, we don’t see that the slavish worship of small business is just the economic version…/3
…of neoliberal/libertarian political ideas about the primacy of the individual. Scale is good, it brings economies of scale. The reason monopolies get bad press is because we’ve allowed them to operate in essential services, which should really be publicly governed. /4
So many of the corporate behemoths, particularly out of the US, make so much money because they occupy a space which is really a public space, offering essential services that have been stripped from government in the big libertarian ideological push. Look at our own Telstra,…/5
…how our telecommunications infrastructure collapsed into expensive dysfunction because we forced a market mechanism onto the most basic 21st century service, telecommunications. Scale is not the problem, destruction of the ‘public’ is the problem. ‘Authoritarian’ societies…/6
…retain at least some sense of a public sphere. It’s a practical, logistical thing as much as anything else. Societies don’t function without it. They also collapse under plagues, you can’t have public health, without a public. All our current problems are one belief. /end
When you zoom out from the highly partisan blood sports of local medical egos, it’s pretty clear what’s going on. Prominent voices overseas see it. https://t.co/TC6vvglpu6
I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livestock. This isn’t an animal rights thing (though it is that too), nor just a colourful analogy. /1 https://t.co/R2CtI1m29l
When we replaced geographical territorial concepts like regions and nations with the idea of an abstract global ‘market’, at the same time we removed all personalised characteristics of the people who occupied those old territories. We now treat local workers the same way…/2
…we’ve always treated imported workers, and before that slaves. All interchangeable work units, from anywhere, globally in the global market. No need to take extra care of your workers if you can import fresh, cheaper labour from overseas. But back to culls. /3
Animals are culled when they get diseased, because it’s ‘uneconomic’ to do anything else. They could be saved, with better conditions, but they’re long past occupying anything like a practical, healthy ecosystem at this point. They’re goods sold ‘at market’. There is no…/4
…’natural’ habitat to return them to. So I think, and not just by analogy, we will see the continued culling of ordinary people, by Covid, because that’s what market-based politics does. Anything else will be ‘uneconomic’. We no longer retain a national right to protection. /end
What stands out here is that deaths barely budge, even with *declining* cases and hospitalisations. That black line is endemic death. Now showing signs of becoming epidemic death, again. https://t.co/Hw7GuQLloP
Managed to book in a fourth dose for Monday. Vaccination is something that could easily be done outside, under a shade etc. Annoys me you have to go and sit inside a surgery or clinic that has had potentially infected people inside it all day. Simple things, not being done.
Here we go again. Solemnity of ‘Covid is not over’, followed by…nothing. ‘Please get vaxed’. Even though the vax won’t stop Covid. Covid will not (ever?) be over, if all we do is vax. https://t.co/li2wcXDOy5
We took responsibility, Mark. We voted you lot in because the previous bunch wouldn’t take responsibility, for anything. Tip: repeating their slogans is a bad career move. #auspol https://t.co/PzrAck36ML
NZ and Albo now parroting ‘personal responsibility’ too. It’s the personal responsibility of a political leader to lead a country out of a pandemic. Let’s have a new populism, one that rejects ALL politicians as populist windbags. #auspol https://t.co/TPogIA13OA
Albo repeated this exact same drivel in a press conference this weekend. It killed thousands in NSW after Christmas. Politicians who don’t understand that public health is something THEY invented, staffed by THEIR staff, to beat pandemics, need to go. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/XBqCb4trTM
For progressive politicians frozen in the headlights of conservative Covid slogans, asking people to take ‘personal responsibility’ for a pandemic is like asking them to regulate air safety and road construction. #auspol #covid19aus
Hey @jacindaardern and @AlboMP, surrendering to the conservative spin that the only alternative to mass Covid infection is more government measures betrays your political traditions. Most people catch Covid in workplaces. Enforce WHS law rigorously. Just an idea.
Regulatory capture, when the mechanisms of government are captured by vested interests. Seen in modern conservative parties having only a single major ‘policy’ - cut taxes - no matter the situation. It’s the unmediated conversion of lobbying into policy. https://t.co/RzCHk5wloC
Mark Butler on #insiders, saying ‘at this stage of the pandemic’ mandates aren’t needed. That must be the stage where everybody gets infected and thousands die. Maybe the mandates stopped that happening before. The Chief Health Officers are REALLY suggesting this? https://t.co/Ouu42yTs1X
If you have an ‘extraordinarily difficult budget position’ Mark, which you do, mandates will be a cheap way to get bang for your buck. But you’re not doing that either. #insiders
There’s no such thing as choice in terms of whether to eliminate wide community spread of Covid. It’s only about time, the longer we delay it, the harder and more expensive it gets. You can’t function as a society with wide community spread of a pandemic virus. #auspol https://t.co/9vGwFbLoG7
Politicians and CHOs/CMOs seem all to be captured by the LNP framing of the pandemic. All believing you either lockdown/mandate things, or do nothing. But the public is everybody, make it a multi-layered response. /1 #covid19aus #auspol
- individuals and households? Give them free, good masks to use. Making them free acts as some incentive. - ask businesses to ensure people at work are at minimal risk of Covid, as required under WHS law. Provide a hotline mechanism for employees to report poor practice. /2
- ask unions to help monitor workplaces. - provide free tests for people. State governments should be paying some of that bill. - create RATs with QR codes for automatic registration of results, as in the UK. - provide tax incentives for businesses to upgrade ventilation. /3
- mandate working from home where that’s not difficult for a business, and have unions help assess rather than allow business to make that determination alone. - cancel planned tax cuts to pay for Covid measures. - mandate mask wearing in all public buildings. /4
- wearing of masks in private businesses should be part of the WHS assessment above, but hard to see many becoming exempt. This is a WHS basic requirement, politicians should not be hopelessly scared to require it, it was already the law. /5
- increase significantly the number of mobile, OUTDOOR testing and vaccination hubs. - do a LOT more workplace-based testing and vaccination. Getting either a test or vaccine should be as easy as going to get a cup of tea. I’m sure there are many more ideas any public…/6
…health professional or politician with the tiniest amount of wit and imagination could come up with. The previous government did everything in its power to avoid placing any Covid burden on businesses. That’s the big funding gap. It’s their job, under WHS. /end
Watching Tory candidates for PM on @SophyRidgeSky pitch to the fantasies of their own colleagues, totally divorced from most of the basic issues destroying the UK. It’s like an election for the polo team at Eton or Winchester.
Not 'mixed messaging', it's the use of vaccines as drugs rather than as part of an integrated public health strategy. Also pandemic leave was government funding business' failure to follow WHS requirements. The ALP should use that as a pivot. #auspol https://t.co/oVetzEzBr5
Like many businesses ever advanced, ffs. Fleeced JobKeeper, did SFA on the WHS front in their own workplaces, made their employees buy their own masks and tests, never notified any contact etc. etc. https://t.co/QSYGhFThbt
We can't even require people to wear a mask apparently. History will judge us to be the pathetic whinging babies that we are. https://t.co/YUdkbUbmBC
The genius of mandates is that they apply equally to all, irrespective of socioeconomic status or privilege. The law was designed to do that, it's a much more powerful tool than medicine in a pandemic.
Rang my GP practice today to ask if I could get my shot outside this afternoon. 'No, we don't do that, in case we need equipment'. I asked if people inside are masked. 'We ask, but we don't provide them'. Reminded me that doctors are the worst hand-washers in hospitals too.
Unravelling the libertarian framings destroying our societies. Mandates again. A mandate is law. Law is justice. The impartial weighing of truth. Libertarians want us to believe that a mandate takes our ‘freedoms’. They’re saying justice is oppression. It’s idiotic nonsense. https://t.co/Uddsn5tBVM
Great segment on The Project, where a spokesperson for business says he prefers the advice of some prominent Australian doctors over the AHPPC, in arguing for fewer Covid protections. A critical insight into how key medical people are undermining our public health response. /1
Steve Price on the panel the only person to argue the common sense position, that society has to bring infections under control. RW shock jocks are now closer to public health practice than some notable doctors. /end
It took the PMG 40 years to install a telephone service to every part of Australia, no matter how remote. No remote areas were sacrificed, no Australians told to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their phone connection. Nobody said ‘we need to learn to live without a phone’. https://t.co/AEZqSruNFZ
Today’s big Covid whinge from business reminds us again of the national benefactors they’ve been with the LNP in power for the past decade. Much easier to raid the Treasury than actually produce or invest in anything. https://t.co/no4DbUvgzU
Covid minimisers love to speak for ‘the people’. Like on masks, apparently ‘the people’ no longer support them. Thanks again to the ABS for skewering more of the minimising spin. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/EuG3PqNaOg
Climate change deniers concocted a deliberate Steve Bannon-type strategy to ‘flood the zone with shit’. Overwhelm and disorient the public discussion with junk science. This is exactly what Covid minimisers are doing now. Arguing ‘the science’ with them is what they want.
‘Working from home’ is another framing that needs rethinking. It’s like ‘work-life balance’. We keep framing work as an opposite to life and home. Many workers like working from home because they want their work to happen in their community, where they live. /1 https://t.co/UuV0h9fqVv
(Graph from Roy Morgan and the Melbourne Institute, their ‘Taking the Pulse survey). Decades of border protection politics should have taught us that being grounded in at least some way to where we live still matters deeply to people. The ‘Economy’ is mostly a process…/2 https://t.co/PwtVKZVcwV
…of severing that grounding, as I’ve Tweeted about. To mobilise people and resources towards a constant accumulation machine of wealth to small groups. The old imperial model, just rebadged in modern ‘economic’ jargon. Working from home should be seen as people asking…/3
…to reinvigorate their communities, to stop them just becoming suburban car parks for workers forced to commute daily to ‘work’. Why the Economy crowd love transport. ‘Move to where the jobs are’, as they love to say. Why we can’t use our labour to constantly enrich and…/4
…improve the communities where we actually live is never asked. /end
Two observations from getting my 4th dose. 1) GP surgery was packed, most I’ve ever seen there, sick folk queued down the corridors. 2) Every single person in that building was masked. Of their own choice. The idea people no longer have the appetite for masking is nonsense.
Here’s @StevePriceMedia belting it out of the park. This is a lesson for everybody, keep it simple. Infecting the entire nation is unjustifiable and insane. The AIG - this is how Australian business wants to appear? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/iTKgh4Belj
'Business community' is not quite right. 'Business cabal' might be closer. Utterly devoid of any sense of community responsibility or of the collective nature of all wealth. Rent-seekers. https://t.co/0mRcLLRkcY
From a friend. "A friend just got back to San Fran from a cruise. Required to test negative 3 days before. 50% ended up with Covid." Isn't living with the virus going well?
Who has personal responsibility for NSW? That's a job I think, a well-paid one. https://t.co/HWUiejNsIq
The infect everyone and titrate just a handful into hospital beds strategy is not going well. 'Everybody will get sick, but we'll try to stop people getting REALLY sick'? Imagine an economic plan that said 'everybody will be broke, but we'll limit the bankruptcies'. https://t.co/k5SMNO9buh
NZ is the same as here, masks required in some situations and not others. Business there (as here) is mostly exempt from having to provide or enforce masking. Always follow the money, in politics and in a pandemic. https://t.co/GX9Y9qAxrp
Omicron wave 1 was largely caused by the (then) pending federal election. Omicron waves 2 & 3 will be caused by the pending NSW and Victorian elections. It's why they won't act, for fear of spooking donors and voters. Never let politicians run an emergency response. #auspol
Professor Ian Harris was speaking on RN about how increases in life expectancy over the past 150 years are overwhelmingly the result of public health measures, not medicine. The exact same public health (I'll add), an arm of government, that politicians now sideline. #auspol
People need permission to wear masks. Freedom is not letting individuals do what they want. Society is so obsessively social that this just leads to slavish, collective imitation. What frees people is permission to act, through mandates that bypass peer pressure. https://t.co/NpfSb1QB8a
@YouAreLobbyLud more power to you.
Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol https://t.co/0E5XmMw1iV
For 70 years we’ve had the politics of privilege, and mistaken that for politics. There’s rarely much need for politics if you’re privileged, because there’s enough wealth and freedom to paper over the differences between people. Nobody is really fighting for survival. /2
So all of that lovely bipartisanship we grew up with, the politics where we could not pay much attention at all except occasionally at elections, was really hiding fault-lines in our societies. Division is a key concept, because it has two different but related meanings. /3
To divide is to share. Like dividing up a loaf of bread between a group. But division also means conflict, and that’s how we use the word much more now. What we’re not seeing I don’t think is that they’re the same meaning. It’s conflict that creates sharing, equity. /4
The reason our politics looks so ‘divided’ right now is that we’re not divided enough, as a society. Huge disparities in wealth and freedoms. Those disparities aren’t redressed in our lifestyle lives, so percolate up to the political level, where they explode. /5
So many years of ignoring this lack of division of society’s wealth and opportunity has led to a pressure cooker situation at the pointy political end of the boat. Those who pine for peaceful, friendly politics are arguing for a return of the old order of privilege. /6
We need more debate, more conflict, more fighting in general, to fix things. Not less. We’re so timid, holidaying on this planet with our privileged lifestyles, oblivious to enormous injustices. Conservative politics is desperately trying to save that life. /7
It’s always played the polite, genteel card, in politics. The expensive suits, the calm words, of those who occupy the most privileged places in society, and say it was all their own doing, and the rest of us should just work harder. These people need many rude awakenings. /end
I’m not a virologist, but so this really was just another minimising trick, to bury new variants as obscure sub-numberings inside Omicron? https://t.co/GxEhJWh9Re
I like many struggle to reconcile the insights of Dilbert with the Tweets of its creator. https://t.co/eV3pWGmZ8F
The ALP is using the 'we inherited a trillion dollars of debt' line a lot to explain why it can't afford to do more on Covid. But retaining $180 billion in tax cuts to people who don't need them. Damaging the brand, Albo. Permanently. Do better. #auspol https://t.co/TyHIOoOZGv
The danger in Albo's consensus project, modelled on Hawke, is centrism. Finding a consensus somewhere 'in the centre'. Politics has been dragged first to the Right, and then into populism. There is no 'centre' now, cosily between Left and Right. Populism rejects both.
The major drop in life expectancy in the US (for example) because of Covid, in only 2 years, is pretty dramatic proof that public health is what shifts that metric. Not medicine, not hospitals. Population-level morbidity and mortality. https://t.co/DadmWE02es
SO much this 👇 https://t.co/E2Hq7ioY6d
We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y
Watching the UK leadership race reminded me of all the same core beliefs the current political class have used to also undermine Covid action. Every Tory lining up to replace Boris pledges to 'free' people from the tyranny of the State. /2 https://t.co/K0uTzCyKw6
This is the core belief that has shaped our politics globally for over 50 years. That States and their regulations and taxes 'restrict freedom'. You need to challenge this core belief, because the slaves to this belief are easily replaced, if you only attack the person. /3 https://t.co/e7moMGJyY6
The neoliberal/libertarian framework says the default state of society is as a collection of free individuals. Governments and their laws then restrict this freedom, and must be either removed or gutted, to restore it. Very few go back to basics and challenge this core belief. /4 https://t.co/78goQUYtHl
But Defoe had already done it for us, over 300 years ago. With Robinson Crusoe. Place a person outside the restrictions of society the libertarians so hate, and what happens? They have no freedom at all. Crusoe labours constantly to recreate the society he's lost. /5 https://t.co/DSGIWbr14l
It's exhausting, all-consuming work, never-ending. To have any sort of freedom to live at all, Crusoe has to reproduce all of the social things back at home, all by himself. The default state of human society IS the social relationships we have, including government. /6 https://t.co/A8ho4nXG6S
The libertarians have it inside-out and back-to-front. To have any sort of freedom at all, you need to engineer an enormous number of social ties, regulations, processes. Without them Crusoe would have been dead inside a week. /7 https://t.co/k9HPnuBGP8
Unsurprisingly, what makes us free is the economies of scale we get by working together with others, to free up any space at all for us to be individuals. Without that shared work, we're Crusoe, labouring all day to just survive. /8 https://t.co/E5LzVcpSYo
It's amazing really that this even has to be said, and that the libertarian alternative of 'freedom' wasn't just a laughing stock from the moment it was invented. What libertarians mean by freedom is free-LOADING, off that social labour of others. /9 https://t.co/XUKfR7pjN7
They want the luxury of individual choice without the collective work of creating it. But this isn't just about work, it's also about psychology. Many are surprised people don't choose to wear masks, in a pandemic, if it's left to their choice. /10 https://t.co/zmCsZkvD1o
Defoe makes that easy to understand. Our default state is as social animals, not individuals. We will do what others do, we imitate others. Without a change being led into existence, people will do nothing and copy others doing nothing. Nobody wants to rock the boat. /11 https://t.co/oVHs0QXcmC
Regulations, social rules, BRING freedom by allowing individuals to act in ways that go beyond the peer pressure of social imitation. Nobody has to make anybody else uncomfortable socially, they can all say 'hey, it's the law'. /12 https://t.co/NEKKidQqGt
Libertarians have a rat cunning I think and know this. It's why many of them don't actually believe removing tax and regulation means freedom for anybody much except themselves. It's just a useful propaganda tool to sell support for their freeloading. /end https://t.co/4yGD2Pomic
They’ve been ignoring public health basics from Day 1 of the pandemic, saying it’s about keeping people out of hospital. That’s a hospital management/mass disease strategy, not public health. The advisers should be held to account. #auspol https://t.co/nDw1F96Ct3
Mark Butler talking about whether the public will ‘support’ further measures is in the libertarian headlights of the LNP. You lead the public, it’s what leaders are paid to do. Remind them it’s like a bushfire or flood, and they’ll overwhelm you with community support. #auspol https://t.co/qevYotiEXY
More than any country, Australia knows how to mobilise as a community for a disaster. But rather than tap into that, effortlessly, political leaders imported culture war nonsense from the US and UK, saying Covid mobilisation was taking our freedom. A pox on experts who help them. https://t.co/qltyNvl9Or
It's excellent to see the penny dropping, the previous government's Covid response was largely about using its libertarian political ideology to replace basic public health practice. Those are *fundamentally* incompatible belief systems. #auspol https://t.co/P5MZzedMFD
Anybody working in private or public organisations right now might be experiencing the community anger at the difficulty in providing basic services, with the nation awash with infection. You want to say, 'let me put you through to the National Cabinet...' #auspol
Another busload dead. The personal responsibility pollies taking no personal responsibility for any of it. Their public disease strategy based on a herd immunity fantasy that has never happened anywhere, in history. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/N3K6Rf1WFI
'We inherited a trillion dollars of debt' - true. Also inherited - 8073 deaths from Covid. Since the election: - over 2400 more deaths - over 1.7 million more infections.
Straight to the Pool Room. https://t.co/1iM06Vkdcy
Albo is a good bloke. But for the love of our sanity, the best way to keep the costs of Covid action down is to suppression transmission. (Business should shoulder much of that load). The ‘Economy’ IS people. Infected people can’t work. #auspol https://t.co/ss7Md5eTMM
Sigh, suppress* transmission. Bloody typos.
Infections don’t come in ‘waves’. The virus doesn’t decide to infect in an alternating way. It just infects. What causes waves is us pretending the pandemic is over, then realising it isn’t. Over and over. It’s a dialectic between ‘it’s over’ and ‘oh shit’. https://t.co/bNNqcfwaBF
2020-21 = being told what to do. 2022 = freedom. OR 2020-21 = being told to control the virus. 2022 = being told not to. We do as we’re told.
The James Webb telescope cost over $14 billion and allows us to see deep into space and time using infrared light. The National Cabinet Covid telescope cost over $300 billion, and can filter out wavelengths of infection and death, revealing the Economy in breathtaking detail. https://t.co/qJip3WfVCL
These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question values. /1 https://t.co/Cov7JoIzHC
These protesters a clear case in point. They’re a coordinated group, with shared values and aims. Despite what they say and maybe even think, they’re not after freedom from being told what to do. They want to be told what to do by *somebody else*. /2
Like Trump’s freedom warriors. They’re not after freedom, they’re desperate to follow somebody. Trump. We have to replace the stupid libertarian idea that the default state of society is free individuals. The default state is social groups, who want to be led, guided. /3 https://t.co/pGVmNhAKpX
Not because they’re sheep or too stupid to think for themselves, but because we all delegate leadership in all areas of life to those we think have greater expertise than we do, in a particular area. I don’t do my own orthopaedic surgery, for example, I’m happy to surrender…/4
…to the judgment of that group of medical practitioners to tell me what needs doing, and who should do it. The message for the current debate on Covid public health measures? I think it’s to stop thinking this is about restrictions vs freedom. /5
The people who don’t want the measures don’t want to be any freer than you or I. They want to be led by the hierarchy of the group they’re in, who have their particular reasons for not wanting these measures (usually ‘economic’). They need persuasion to shift allegiance. /end
@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus
Australia (and the world) will never escape this pandemic until we abandon our root strategy, to 'minimise severe disease'. That's a hospital management strategy, or as I call it, a public disease (rather than public health) strategy. /2
It directly causes the infection of the entire population, over and over. It makes the public sick, potentially permanently. A total collapse and failure of public health responsibilities, we don't manage any other infectious disease in this way,.../3
...and trying to do it with a novel pathogen is bananas. It's the politics of the 'Economy' parading as public health. The root strategy has to change to what it is for most other infectious disease - to PREVENT INFECTION. /4
Not, as the journos suggested, to go down the idiot UK path of relaxing isolation requirements or removing them entirely, that only accelerates and magnifies all the problems we're wallowing in. We have to stop people catching Covid, whether mild or moderate or severe. /5
We won't stop all of it, the infinite Covid crowd always raise that straw man. We just need to control spread, as we do for all other infectious disease. Jump on outbreaks, minimise spread through the community. We have public health teams and engineers who know how to do it. /6
Without 'locking down' everybody, more infinite Covid straw man logic. Though a very brutal, reasonably short national lockdown might be the circuit-breaker that would give disease control a lower baseline to start with, but I doubt there's an appetite for it. /7
Critically, this isn't a choice of A or B. If we don't stop infections, the 'Economy' is toast. Infections are orders of magnitude more damaging to the Economy than hospitalisations and deaths. If you work just about anywhere right now, you're living it . It can't go on. /8
The only way to stop the drain on the Treasury (all politicians enslaved to Economy politics care about) is to stop mass infection. That Economy is just us, the people. Infected, we can't work, and there goes the Economy. How hard is that to understand? /9
There are also no 'waves' of Covid, a wave is just the outcome of all the non-wave idiot times of pretending to 'live with Covid', which is really just months of mass, saturation infection, priming the Covid pump. /10
Until we change the root national strategy to a public health strategy, of preventing people getting sick, preventing infection, none of this will change. Not doing that is already overloading hospitals, so the current strategy doesn't work anyway. /end
If the ALP thought like the LNP, they'd realise that the enormous pressure building on them on Covid is the PERFECT opportunity to ditch ridiculous tax cuts they don't believe in anyway. #auspol
We had quite a few selling the 'Omicron will be mild and end the pandemic' hopium here too. At what point will people be held to account? https://t.co/D8HK49cAAa
Some mock 'Zero Covid' as an ambition, telling people it means 'no Covid'. It should be called Net Zero Covid, like net zero for climate. Still Covid in pockets, but balanced by control elsewhere. It's how we manage pretty much all infectious disease. #COVID19 #auspol
37% of Australians now have no statutory sick leave. Brought to you by the party of getting government out of peoples' lives, and business into them.
Imagine the work the NSW Government has done over the school holidays to make schools Covid safe for beginning of term 3 next week. I said imagine. There was no work.
The smell of fear. https://t.co/adyvhe5uXJ
Emergency payments can’t go on forever, sure. So, do we: A) stop the payments, or B) stop the emergency? Choosing A gives you a seat on National Cabinet. #auspol #covid19aus
If you feed chooks and cows a constant diet of antibiotics, you can keep them working for you while up to their bellies in their own shit. If we copy this UK and US Covid idea, prepare to get a warm belly. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/oeOPGNDca7
“…we need to look at the periods of time in which we are forcibly requiring people to not be able to work and provide for their families.” NSW Premier, describing the suffering we inflict upon people by ‘forcing’ them to rest away from work, when infected with a lethal virus.
More NSW Premier: “…we have to get to a point where if you are sick you stay at home and if you are not sick you can go to work.” With HIV, this is what we did when we told HIV+ people to keep having sex with other people without protection, if they felt fine. Or not.
I’ve always said, watch the UK if you want to see our future. This will be one of the ‘solutions’ National Cabinet will discuss in their meeting. This ‘solution’ has been another disaster, in the UK. Even key journalists are pushing it here. #auspol https://t.co/7At9wZgHO4
The reason we ‘can’t afford’ to beat Covid, and the reason most of us catch it, is work. Business. Covid is a WHS issue, but we’re told it’s up to government or us personally, to fix. As always, we’re privatising the good times, and socialising the bad ones. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/fKc7voqKig
If the ‘Economy’ can’t function without infecting the entire population, then it has failed as a mechanism for organising human societies, and must be scrapped. It’s not the bedrock of society, it’s one set of social transactions, chosen to dominate all others. It’s a choice.
If a business can’t afford WHS of a standard that prevents Covid spread, should we: A. close the business and charge it under WHS law, or B. allow workers to get infected, and to infect their families, some of whom will die? Right now we’re choosing B. #covid19aus #auspol
The REAL problem is the vast number of workers without sick leave. Again business is socialising its losses onto us. Whether it’s non-existent WHS, or strip-mined wages and working conditions, Covid remains a creation of business. Of the ‘Economy’. https://t.co/nfUc4KN0Yq
Does that bottom row say ‘we need to reduce or remove the isolation period for infected workers’ to you? Me either. https://t.co/4f2kd7L3ee
The pool room is getting full. https://t.co/ZLkQIgem6V
Unsurprisingly, National Cabinet decided to fix the emergency payout problem by fixing the payout, not the emergency. Kicking the Covid down the road. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/tjBk4vAVCX
There was a time when hierarchy in work represented expertise and experience. More often now it represents a protection racket for mediocrity. Some like David still have the bravery to challenge those whose main interest is themselves and their positions. https://t.co/XWEtBmCAVD
A pandemic response has to challenge the status quo, because ‘normal life’ is what the virus feeds off. The discomfort people like @YouAreLobbyLud cause is like a vaccine, priming our social immune system to respond. It could save your life. #auspol https://t.co/ltojmX5psc
The Herd Immunity Taskforce met yesterday and affirmed its commitment to a fantasy that hasn’t stopped a single pandemic in all recorded history. For an encore it tweaked a few things to ‘get us through the winter’, no doubt reassured by last summer. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/zlUWCz7jEd
It’s remarkable how often the health advice is a verbatim match with what politicians say in the week leading up to that advice. Watch the pollies when the advisers speak, it suggests the true direction of information flow. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/kQX0VNtS3W
Pollies enslaved to the Economy will hide behind a tiny number of top-level KPIs like employment and inflation. Went to a KFC the other day and was told I couldn’t buy coleslaw, because ‘they can’t get any’. The true economics of mass infection is anywhere you choose to look. https://t.co/6n0vowbsc1
@KatherineBode I’m immediately curious what ‘computational literary studies’ are? As in genuinely curious, not critical in any way.
Spare me more journalists with no public health expertise, we’ve had that for over 2 years. One referring to the ‘emergency’ phase of the pandemic, in the past tense. Back when we infected and killed hardly anybody. #insiders
It is is absolutely irrelevant who does or doesn’t want to wear masks, or any other measure. Unless we stop the infections, we’ll never leave the pandemic. A pandemic is defined by NUMBER OF INFECTIONS. Do your bloody homework. #insiders
Would we ever say ‘we’re living with crime, and just making sure we have enough cells for serious crime’? Of course not. Not least because accepting low-level crime at a mass scale destroys your society. And even that will be healthier for you than infecting everybody with Covid. https://t.co/VyYeZ13H4S
In truth there is a herd immunity in play, with Covid. The immunity of the developed nation herd to reality. #covid19aus https://t.co/QsoU5ULjOe
The line that really gets me is that ‘people won’t tolerate’ any more action against Covid. As if we can choose what reality is, like reality gives a shit what we can tolerate. We’re not within light years of ration books. That was real action, for many more years. https://t.co/QfW987yYdH
@juliette_io any chance that the national 7-day death average line could be a prominent colour rather than that very pale grey?
You can believe democracy means all people getting a say in how society is run. But the facts will be against you. https://t.co/8KjdxGU4Tb
Climate and Covid deniers are often the same people. They already support carbon capture and storage. A simple HEPA air purifier will do Covid capture and storage. Not a giant leap for mankind.
A reminder that ‘endemic’ is just a polite word for ‘out of control’.
I don’t think we fully grasp the impact of neoliberal and libertarian beliefs. For example the so common idea that the public will somehow drive change, for anything. That’s pure neoliberal/libertarian belief. It’s a fantasy.
Decisions are not made ‘by the people’, even in a democracy. The people follow the lead of somebody, be it leaders, experts, influencers etc. The opposition to masks and other public health measures is being led, but is described as popular opposition. #auspol #covid19aus
If we need expert advice on how to manage Covid at home, then it shouldn't be being managed at home. #auspol https://t.co/VjKKAuTRyN
This is what NSW provides as guidance for those who get Covid. While you're responsible for notifying all of your personal contacts, it's entirely up to your workplace whether they tell any of your workmates. They rarely tell anybody, which is the plan. https://t.co/s7rE5ZLGj1
The idea that the public lead the country, and politicians have to follow them, is libertarian nonsense. 'Strongly encourages', asking the public to do things. In reality the public are looking for direction, without it they'll follow what everybody else is doing i.e. nothing. https://t.co/77hFlf8QYA
"The Prime Minister explained Australia would move away from isolation mandates when the Australian public develops a 'greater acceptance' of staying at home when sick or with flu-like symptoms." lol, the mandates are to teach us to stay home when we're sick! #covid19aus /1
Or...people need to work to make enough money to survive, and the refusal of business and government to prevent infection means they're forced to work when sick. Trashing the brand a bit more every day, Albo. /2
Glorious morning blocking panic-stricken peddlers of calm.
Lippmann was deeply distrustful of government, and yet this was his advice. Also clearly saw the future of populism, in his wise words that in a mature democracy, an election should change hardly anything. The fact it does shows institutions are broken. https://t.co/gwaGT8ACFz
This will happen when the current emergency payments cease. Because we fixed the payments, instead of the emergency. As in the UK, with no chance infections will come down, and no appetite to control them, removal of isolation will be next. Watch this space. https://t.co/tYYFhJpdES
Singapore flirting with infecting people to stop them being infected, like we tried here about 10,000 deaths and 8.5 million cases ago. https://t.co/nRBs1lGBv8
For the 'you're Hitler' freedumb folk, saying the public don't run democracies is just a statement of fact. In a representative democracy the public vote for representatives to run the country for them. It's in the name.
Broken record, but the options to beat Covid aren't: 1. government spends tens of billions more, or 2. the public accepts mass infection. We've been played, as we were for climate change. The answer is: 3. business funds the basic WHS, required by law, to suppress Covid.
Life is now farce. https://t.co/7DxJeULz6s
The NSW Premier goes to the emergency Herd Immunity Taskforce meeting to discuss Covid being out of control, with a suggestion to relax protections even more. Like the UK and US conservatives, tax cuts will be the next ‘cure’. Complete regulatory capture. https://t.co/WRrPYJxks4
Actuaries rock. https://t.co/zS3seW6mRl
Where we are now with Covid, with calls for ‘personal responsibility’, is a road we already travelled with climate change. Not a coincidence, the same fuckers using the same strategies. Collective problems as individual problems IS libertarian politics. https://t.co/mMq7DZBnru
One of my projects is to unwrap neoliberal, libertarian framings of our collective lives. I don’t think it’s widely understood just how deep these are, how entrenched in how we see the world. One that I think may challenge many is secrecy and freedom of information. /1 https://t.co/aF4k1IJRxJ
I think most of us instinctively get warm feelings about freedom of information legislation. And about whistleblowing warriors who use it and even go well beyond, breaking the law to release restricted information. But do we stop to think about why we instinctively love this? /2
Here’s a first warning bell. It’s neoliberal, libertarian governments who are often the greatest champions of FOI, and who write the legislation for it. It’s not hard to figure out why, they despise government, and love nothing more than a narrative that suggests it’s corrupt. /3
Ask anybody who processes FOI requests what the bulk of their work involves. Very little of it is Assange-type exposure of corruption in government. Nearly all of it is crackpot conspiracy theorists determined to prove the guv’ment is screwing them in some way. /4
FOI is a magnet for libertarian loons, entire departments are bogged down constantly processing their relentless, never-ending crusades. This was the intent of the libertarians, to add another layer of assault upon public institutions. And how they FRAMED it is key here. /5
Sure, FOI has also exposed corruption and maladministration that should be exposed. But it’s ALWAYS about the framing. This exposure takes place within a framing that says individuals face off against the ‘government’, to protect the free flow of information between them. /6
Ringing any alarm bells yet? The idea of societies composed of individuals and governments? It’s the neoliberal/libertarian model of society. Devoid of all of the institutional mediation between these two that do most of the actual work in society. The institutions the…/7
…libertarians despise and are committed to destroying. Look at how our ex-PM almost spat out his contempt for the institutions of government and the UN, in this week’s jolly over at the Margaret Court do. It’s their deepest passion. Think for a minute how powerfully we’ve…/8
…nearly all swallowed this framing, how easy it is to mobilise people on all ‘sides’ of politics to smash the ‘secrecy of government’, to ‘expose its lies’. We’re doing the libertarians work for them, and that’s what framing is meant to do, to twist your opponents’ energy…/9
…towards your own cause. I can imagine some asking, but shouldn’t government be held accountable? It is, *that’s what the institutions were designed to do*. That accountability is what professional civil servants were invented to maintain. The same institutions the…/10
…libertarians destroy with such relish, and the same civil servants they sack with such glee whenever ‘savings’ are required. They don’t want to be accountable. They support FOI, but anybody who tries using it on them will encounter an avalanche of redactions. /11
They don’t support FOI to hold government to account, they support it to destroy civil institutions. There are good uses of FOI, institutional uses too, it’s a staple of political journalism for example. And institutions themselves need their own accountability mechanisms,…/12
…and this is one of them. But again, ask anybody who processes FOI requests as part of their job what proportion of the ones they see are a noble holding to account, and what proportion are just vexatious libertarian spite. It’s unpopular to say it, but secrecy is also…/13
…a good and sometimes necessary thing. Even in a relationship, it’s that. Societies function with the trust that we can delegate a lot of what we need to other people to do. Libertarians attack that trust. Societies then collapse. There are many ways to have accountability,…/14
…without using the big libertarian framings of individual v government. /end
There's the moment in Groundhog Day where the Bill Murray character recognises he will have to change fundamentally to escape the infinite loop of suffering. 7 times around the loop isn't doing it yet, for politicians. https://t.co/Z8VWhs8ZdK
'Push through' NSW! The promised land of mass morbidity and mortality awaits. Come into the light. https://t.co/DdWyCLRJ8u
People who vote for populist anti-establishment pollies aren't voting for freedom. They're voting for a single autocrat to replace all government. They don't even deny it. Never, ever believe the freedom narratives. Of speech, of mask-wearing etc. https://t.co/EeCeXWQiEf
Another politician on the radio at lunch time, saying schools must stay open. Just looking through my press clippings for any politician (or health adviser) saying in this pandemic 'children should not be infected with a pandemic virus'. Nope, nothing. #auspol
Most people catch Covid in a workplace. By law employers are supposed to move Heaven and Earth to prevent that from happening. Employers are not short of a quid, even during the pandemic. We're being played. https://t.co/fkYmVZyAOH
Many say that it's difficult for an employee to prove they caught Covid at work. It is. But in NSW at least, for a long list of 'prescribed jobs', they don't have to. The employer has to prove they *didn't* catch it at work. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/m0BbhHA2Bg).
Well this 'urge' has gone off here. Not a mask in sight. https://t.co/uY33SJSg0d
Tony Blakely on The Project saying now isn’t the time for mask mandates. We need to wait a few weeks to see if the health system is falling over first. Those were almost the verbatim words.
People won’t wear masks even though they’re begged to because nobody wants to be the one to stand out from a crowd. Treat it like shouting a drink, carry a box of masks to group events and offer them around. Break the ice for others. Mandates would too. https://t.co/WtRG1tRxiE
It’s sad we assume people are just stupid for not doing something like wear a mask. They don’t really need an education campaign, ignorance isn’t the real problem. Most know masks help. Without leadership all of life is a high school. Peer pressure needs a circuit-breaker. https://t.co/l1OFfriEWB
Public health paradoxes. Where we use ‘personal choice’ in banking, or supermarkets etc., despite the ideology of choice everything coagulates into a handful of monopolies. Give people ‘freedom’ and they *always* reinstate hierarchy. Why? /1 #covid19aus https://t.co/5HxzyiNGhG
Because the default state of society is social interaction. And social interaction is created by imitation, by status. We all look for leadership, for a hierarchy of value in which to assess the decisions confronting us. The idea of a free-floating individual making choices…/2
…is a fantasy. The only place it exists is that persecuted, bullied outsider on the fringe of groups. And even that person’s life is dominated by exclusion from that same social group. Public health has to be led, like anything we do in society. If it’s not led, people will…/3
…find some other person to lead them. Influencers, experts with libertarian views, friends, colleagues etc. Governments who wash their hands of Covid and delegate it to the public to solve are not giving the public freedom, they’re leading an ignoring of the problem. /4
We’re not seeing a shift to personal responsibility for Covid, we’re seeing the replacement of a single, coordinated public health response with tribal warfare between competing social groups. Just as the old nationalised CommBank became 4 mega banks with ‘loyal customers’. /end
Parents and primary school teachers spend years teaching us essential personal responsibility skills like sharing and cooperation. And then libertarian private school boys who become leaders undo it all in 2 years. https://t.co/JT7jKDGIPJ
Paul Kelly on RN avoiding questions about mandates. The Herd Immunity Taskforce applies those. Phil Coorey then with some claptrap about getting the chills at the thought of more mandates. Over 5000 in hospital, more than 50 dead every day, leaves him unmoved. #auspol
We're following a market-based Covid strategy. The infected are individual Covid customers, with the invisible hand magically coalescing us all into something resembling public health action. Regulators ensure competition by breaking up any emerging monopolies of Covid pushback.
Thanks @juliette_io that black line can't be missed! We almost hit a 7-day average of 60 yesterday. How's that for chilling, journos? 60 dying a day is less worrying than people having to put a bit of paper over their faces? Professional ethics is more than protecting sources. https://t.co/wVOmNZqEVV
In plain English, our Covid strategy is ‘we can’t afford to stop people getting sick’. Submarines? Fine. Huge tax breaks to property investors? Fine. Tax cuts to the wealthy? Fine. Stopping population-level illness? ‘We inherited a trillion dollars of debt’.
Any business claiming reintroduction of public health measures would be catastrophic for their business should be subject to an immediate WHS audit, to understand why statutory workplace safety requirements aren't already in place.
Update on earlier, 7-day average now recalculated. We smashed through the 60 mark today. https://t.co/UqfnEyLSPZ
Something about Twitter. I rarely use it as a mobilising tool to try to generate wide public action, because most of the public never use it. (Last estimate I saw was less than 20% of Australians). But the small proportion who do are often in positions of influence and power. /1
You can shape the narratives for that group here, in some ways. And that can be effective, because they can make real change. It's a reflection of the reality of democracy, rather than the mythology. The public don't drive change, they follow a small number of others who do. /end
'Balance' always means 'let the status quo continue. Albo suggests this is a matter between employer and employee. Went to the election saying employers had been suppressing wages and working conditions for a decade. I'm sure they're likely to make WFH their top priority. https://t.co/Qo6CkfKSwH
Public education campaigns. The problem with Covid isn’t public ignorance. It’s political negligence, a refusal to lead a public heath response. The public is no more likely to spontaneously self-organise a public health response than they are to build an airport. #auspol
Something no journalist I’ve seen is asking is ‘what’s the endgame of Australia’s Covid strategy?’ Given the vaccines don’t stop infections, and infections always lead to hospitalisations, deaths and economic havoc. #auspol #covid19aus
Personal responsibility public health. Overheard yesterday, a woman who’s recovering from Covid saying her husband had tried desperately to catch it off her, so they could get it over with and go to Fiji.
The pandemic isn’t mass stupidity. It’s the extension of privatised market-based politics, to public health. We already have privatised healthcare, transport, education, banking, defence, etc. The same political operating system responded in exactly the same way, to a pandemic.
An 80-year-old mother of a friend, with COPD and hypertension, had NBN installed yesterday. Two installers. Neither wore a mask. One has now tested positive. Obviously didn't feel the 'urge' from the CMO. What a disgrace this country has become.
Favourite personal responsibility public health things. Workers returning after only 7 days' isolation, masked, but removing the masks to eat and drink at their desk, a metre away from others. The whole country should have the Benny Hill soundtrack playing in the background 24/7.
Australia demonstrates so well that there are no waves of infection. The waves are public health action, of varying intensity. We are the waves. Descending wave is strong action, ascending weak. Prolonged strong action is flat. https://t.co/kwMwpdZ4uK
The expression ‘going viral’ was always assumed to be an analogy. But viruses never go viral. Going viral is always a social process. We don’t live ‘alongside’ viruses, as politicians say. We’re their hosts, they live inside us. They spread through our social activity.
There’s a collective form of bipolar disorder. We’re seeing it now with Covid. We keep attributing ‘waves’ to the virus, but the virus isn’t an independent entity ‘coming at us’ in waves. The waves are alternating collective euphoria (cases going up) and dejection (going down). https://t.co/ErKUn23k32
The fastest way to figure out who politicians represent in politics is to watch where they end up after they leave. https://t.co/Zv0Q2HW6T5
One of the reasons Covid is such a mess is that the previous government medicalised it, refusing to listen to a vast range of other expertise about what causes and stops pandemics. Medicine is where a failed pandemic strategy sends people. https://t.co/gM9vllAeq0
Is it too naive to ask when boosters and anti-virals will turn the death trends around? Can we make it a KPI? It feels like just waiting for the 'wave' to pass is what we did all the other times. #auspol #covid19aus
In an era of DIY public health, cough syrup is a good investment. Now sold out year-round. (Canada, mid-summer.) https://t.co/QwxASQhAkQ
We don't get to choose. No pandemic has ever been allowed to run. It destroys societies. Also why we invented public health. A 'living with the virus' strategy is really just a delayed elimination strategy. There's no choice here, except how many you choose to kill with delays.
The Christian Right must use the King Rupert version of the Old Testament. My King James version says both plagues and usury are very bad things. A usurious plague, allowing a plague to run to protect the Economy? Mammon be praised.
Neoliberal governments despise public health systems, and trashing services so as to be able to sell them off is 50 years old. No Tory is losing a minute’s sleep over this, they see Covid as a tremendous opportunity to keep destroying public institutions by stealth. https://t.co/Ueu0KM4Pka
The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody watches but which shapes Australia. /1 #auspol https://t.co/CDrNVy6rBe
The N=1 crowd understand something their opponents don’t, and it’s why they’ve been winning for so many decades. Including on Covid. They understand that there is no such thing as a group will, groups never, ever guide themselves in any direction. Attending any committee…/2
…meeting will tell you that. It’s always a tiny number within a group that provide the direction others follow. I say 5%, based on research showing that’s roughly how many ‘lead’ groups. The N=1 crowd themselves, the financial elite of society are themselves a tiny group. /3
And yet they’ve dominated politics now for over 50 years. They’re the ‘top 1%’ of society, they’re vastly outnumbered. But they’ve been in power most of the past half-century. Understanding how is the key to beating them. SKY News is a good window into that how. /4
SKY News targets the 5%, it’s as simple as that. It plays continuously in the offices of LNP politicians, for example, and (until recently) in airports where the 5% are constantly getting on and off planes. It doesn’t try to educate or persuade ‘the public’. /5
It knows the public doesn’t have any agency. Groups don’t work like that, of any size. Democracy, despite its own PR, has never been the public doing anything much except attend elections. It delegates the expertise and work to the 5%. Makes life better for everybody. /6
The top 1% keeps winning against the other 99% by targeting that 5% of society who actually decide things and hold power and wealth. It then portrays that as the ‘will of the people’ (SKY News at night commentators never shut up about being the voice of the people.) /7
In this way it on the one hand gets the 5% to do everything the 1% want, while making the 99% feel they have champions looking after them. The 99% get slogans and spin, the 1% get everything else, all the spoils of our collective work and wealth. /8
They’re playing the same games again with Covid. Sending funding and support to the 5% to flog anti-public health messages because the 1% find protections distasteful interruptions to their lifestyles. There is no mass movement against Civid measures, for example. /9
There are a tiny handful of agitators, the 5%, sometimes funded by the 1%, mobilising noisy action to provide an illusion of mass resistance. Populist politicians fall for it, the ones not already on the 1% payroll. The battle against Covid minimisation is a battle against…/10
…a TINY group of people. Not against the public. We don’t need mass education campaigns to fix Covid, we need to focus on the 5% who are trying to stop us stopping Covid. They’re winning right now by leading the public to reject public health. The public can easily be led…/11
…to support public health. It’s what we elect people to do. Right now those elected leaders need to dig out their old copies of Puss in Boots and figure out how a tiny group of people is influencing another tiny group of people, and winning everything. /end https://t.co/qi6UXRh7jC
@KarenCutter4 what are the deaths notified through the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages? https://t.co/bOD59OKsXh
The business press, joining forces with the Covid minimising loons, to describe the immune system as a muscle that gets stronger with exercise. https://t.co/H55cKoK8Xh
Still waiting for Australian teaching unions to get serious about Covid. https://t.co/CmjjMtJsTa
Southend is deserted, going broke. Combination of Covid and Brexit. Part of the global libertarian movement of unwinding centuries of human progress, to pretend all of civilisation is the consuming individual. Human evolution ends as a giant empty shop. https://t.co/VlQEG0p7uE
Can we please have just one example from history of a pandemic we ‘lived with’? One that doesn’t involve mass death, disease and social chaos.
Ordinary working people here are now equivalent in status to the billions in the developing world we’ve left to their ‘endemic’ diseases for years. Market-based politics made us all interchangeable. Business is looking to double the working visa intake. https://t.co/8hj7KLqFtB
The infinite Covids always championed a model of cocooning aged care and other ‘vulnerables’ while the rest of us wallowed in continuous Covid infection, kept at work with vaccination. They’re not even bothering with the cocoon now. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IjBqehyXxZ
Many are booking “revenge travel” after pandemic restrictions stopped them living life to the fullest - Brent Novak, Flight Centre. Whole nations of adolescents express their boredom with an existential threat. About 20 million now not living at all, let alone to the fullest.
This is exactly what’s going on. Regulatory capture means most modern conservative parties don’t actually have policies. Just 2 main imperatives, repeated for every situation. Cut taxes, and privatise (destroy public institutions). https://t.co/fcG9Ob9Mug
Albo on SKY agreeing decisions on mask mandates are decisions for politicians. But on the basis of health advice. The current health advice is everybody should be wearing a mask, in most indoor locations. So…where’s the mandate to reflect the advice? /1 #auspol #covid19aus
Also his chat with the NSW Premier about how half of people are not complying with existing transport mask mandates. Typical libertarian white-anting, of course compliance is patchy, we’re living in a politician-led laissez-faire culture of ‘living with the virus’. 2/2
People don’t wear masks because they don’t have *permission* to wear them. Permission is granted to individuals by a social group, to violate current social norms (in this case, not wearing masks). Libertarian ‘freedom’ sacrifices individuals to mob rule, the worst oppression.
I think this maybe shows the tension between medical and public health thinking. Medical ‘management’ is focused on risk to the individual. But the greatest risk from Covid infection can be risk of infecting others, and accurate testing is critical. https://t.co/iiXOdx3aJe
The huge Omicron wave over Christmas was the previous PM in pre-election mode. NSW and Vic are allowing catastrophic infection levels because their leaders, like Morrison, fear spooking voters. Covid will only be over when we get politicians out of the driving seat. #auspol
Saying ‘non-severe’ disease requires no action for a pandemic virus is the equivalent, again, of saying all crime should go unchecked, provided it’s not serious. Or all assault that requires no hospitalisation. Etc. #covid19aus https://t.co/Mg3eYWO03H
Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt
Australians have gone gangbusters over rooftop solar. Their personal responsibility for it is the same as it is for most community-focused projects, world-leading. Governments got the ball rolling with generous rebates and tariffs, but this is where the story shifts. /2
Government incentives (feed-in tariffs in particular) have been gradually wound back over time, until sometimes people are now blocked from exporting any excess energy to the grid at all. This is largely because governments didn't do their personal responsibility bit.../3
...in building new transmission and storage for all of this home-grown energy. We've been led by governments focused on 'getting government out of peoples' lives' for decades, and it's now showing. And here's the critical bit. /4
The 'grid'. The grid makes a lie of all of the political bullshit about individual freedom versus government oppression. The grid is both individual, and collective, *at the same time*. Australians use the grid to help themselves personally, but also as a mechanism to.../5
...share that personal benefit with others. That's why humans invented government itself. All this tiring rubbish about individuals vs the State, imported from the UK and US with their libertarian hang-ups and fantasies, has no place in Australia. /6
Personal responsibility in Australia has ALWAYS been community-focused. We lead the world in collective mobilisation to face problems, because we don't have all the historical baggage of political systems developed in the territorial politics of Europe. /7
Right now with Covid, politicians indebted to that old European politics through inherited privilege here in Australia have taken away the 'grid'. The public health framework inside which any personal responsibility public health work we individually do works and makes sense. /8
They've been trying desperately for decades, with the assistance of Murdoch media and think tanks, to graft that neoliberal/libertarian framework onto Australian life. It's not really taking though, because Australia's entire existence as a society rejects every.../9
...premise of that framework. It's the framework of the people who sent us here as a penal colony, why would we want it back? Indigenous Australians also had a communal framework, before we arrived (and I'm sure we learned some of it from them, without even realising). /10
When Australians use personal responsibility, it doesn't mean they want to look after themselves, individually. Australian society and politics is communitarian - not socialist, capitalist, communist, or any of those European categories. The 'community' is individual AND.../11
...collective, at the same time. Until we get rid of politicians trying to transplant centuries of European failed territorial politics into barren Australian soil, what's unique about living here will be constantly under threat. /end
Climate deniers talk about 'baseload' power. Which they think means minimum supply, when in fact it means minimum demand before you have to start switching off power stations. Look at this, solar panels in Australia may remove baseload altogether. And fast. https://t.co/Vqaqo1RlcD
A mandate is like the rules for a game. Without the rules, there is no game. It’s the framework that the group needs to play the game. Mandates enable, not restrict.
One of the windows into the success of political libertarians is the absence of any sort of collective ‘moonshot’. No ambition to achieve anything much at all, except personal lifestyle goals. The pulverisation of politics into ever more personalised goals and grievances. https://t.co/6aXHGS626I
Another example of a mandate, doing what they do. Not boss people around, no oppression here. Providing a framework for collective action. Tell the political libertarians to quit their whining and fear-mongering. Every day. https://t.co/xZdLY1HF6C
These numbers, we know now, won't shift a single thing, politically. When you relentlessly 'message' and lead that society is an 'Economy', not even death will be a bump in the road. The Economy is humanity's most lethal invention, with daylight second. https://t.co/RHCvsG5KLE
This is the Covid equivalent of a first homebuyer's grant. Government money used to 'prime' the Economy, but actually making the situation much worse. Thankfully now expired, but with the damage already done. The purpose of the scheme was to normalise the ignoring of Covid. https://t.co/knzGMSb9LR
A useful graphic to determine which States have elections next. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/j2DH9FZDPc
It's interesting to compare absolute and per capita case numbers. When you do it becomes clear what the true function of National Cabinet is. Absolute numbers first, suggesting some States doing better than others. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/hNywGT5FqI
The per capita tells a different story, about how the role of National Cabinet is to sever the link between Premiers and their public health teams. Universal, homogenised Covid denial. Unanimity of inaction. 2/2 https://t.co/LE4eSSNvyX
I love the intent, but it feels like 1980s Hawkean politics applied to 2022 problems. Growing numbers of people see the enemy as institutions themselves. Kumbaya won't fix that, you have to fight. Beginning with shutting down the populists. https://t.co/Fet1It38xm
Amazing piece reframing resilience as a collective rather than individual concern. "This framing was wrong. Our vulnerability lay not on our individual skins, but in the collective spaces between us—at the level of our very breath." https://t.co/qth1nf1E75
It seems the 'new phase' of the pandemic in Australia is just the old phase from the UK and US. Maybe we got a discount for it being second-hand. https://t.co/LBfpk8ZsXf
You don't even need agenda papers when the sole function of your Herd Immunity Taskforce is to ignore everything you're advised. https://t.co/pA0dTp2HhC
Do senior journalists now write opinion pieces? @TheRealPBarry https://t.co/JMvfT0Asbs
Social behaviour is led, it isn’t spontaneous. Why are Australians not wearing masks? Because they were led to refuse them. People ‘take their lead’ from…leaders. The politicians who led the ignore Covid and masks strategy? There they are on the right, bare-faced. #auspol https://t.co/5A61qcFVEL
The LNP, unnecessarily contributing to fear of masks and public health measures in the community. https://t.co/7U0FPLWwFl
Another favourite - ‘fear mongering’. People who use the phrase say we shouldn’t fear Covid, while they relentlessly prosecute fear mongering campaigns against public health protections. You have to be truly insane to fear protections more than the virus. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/VgBoRJ5rf2
We’ve shot past 70 deaths per day now. Still climbing. Australia’s most lethal disaster was Spanish Flu. We’ll easily go past the deaths in that pandemic in 2022, with no controls in place to stop this continuing into 2023 and beyond. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/WjghBZUs9S
We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play in this pandemic. /1
The raw material of society is beliefs. Beliefs are the building blocks of all societies. Everything solid or ‘physical’ you see is constructed ultimately of beliefs too. Like our ‘hybrid’ junk NBN. Beliefs aren’t separate, they’re woven into the fabric of everything. /2
The Covid pandemic is the same. It doesn’t matter how many dire health and medical statistics you throw at it, the trajectory never shifts - more infections, more deaths. The most dangerous illusion is that facts have some sort of free-floating existence that compels action. /3
They just don’t. Even basic history and philosophy of science teaches you that all facts only exist within a context of assumptions and beliefs. Covid minimisers have given people a masterclass in this for the past 2.5 years. Every fact is easily re-framed by them as meaning…/4
…something else entirely, some positive thing. They don’t need to argue the facts, they reframe the context instead. A ridiculously out of control novel virus becomes ‘living with the virus, just like the flu’. And so many other examples. /5
The message here is, go after the core beliefs. The context. Covid is entrenched because we’re not doing that, though there are green shoots of resistance. The context of Covid is *exactly* the same beliefs that stymied action on climate change. I Tweet about them a lot, the…/6
…assumption that there is no society but rather just billions of individuals, who interact in a ‘market’ and somehow miraculously produce civilisation as we know it, with plenty of assistance from a mysterious ‘invisible hand’. To Covid minimisers, action against Covid…/7
…is bad because it represents interference with the market, that delirious fiction of individuals magically figuring out all of our problems by themselves. Our NBN again is just one of thousands of obvious examples of the insanity of this belief, we’ve all struggled for…/8
…years with the stupidity intrinsic to its design. It made no difference, all of those frustrated individuals were powerless to actually change the network architecture, until that change was led, now by the ALP. (And more importantly, it was the telecommunications ‘market’…/9
…which gave us the telecommunications mess in the first place that the NBN was designed to overcome). This is the true enemy here, the belief that societies don’t exist and everything is just individuals, and anything that tries to regulate or coordinate those individuals…/10
…is a form of tyranny that destroys the free-flowing market. Why the minimisers are determined to reject masks, it has nothing AT ALL to do with science or medicine, it’s a political freedom thing. All public health actions are tyranny in this belief system, because…/11
…(they think) the ‘public’ is a fiction. It’s why they focus on medicine in this pandemic, and reject public health. Individual health fine, collective health - tyranny. But this all gets more interesting, because reality clearly shows that these beliefs are false. /12
Every time these political libertarians strip away some public or other coordinating mechanism, people just reinstate it in another way. Getting government out of peoples lives more generally just puts business into those lives instead, for example. Things that were…/13
…previously offered as public services are now offered by private providers, with much lower of economies of scale and coordination, and thus higher costs and inefficiencies. The point is, the coordination is always needed, they’ve just shifted who does it. And for many…/14
…who hold these beliefs, that’s the actual intent. They don’t believe in a free market of interacting individuals any more than I do. They just want to shift the coordinating hierarchy in charge to one directed by themselves and friends instead. I said I’d use Twitter as…/15
…an example, and will end by doing that. Twitter on face value looks like a political libertarian dream, a free market of ideas and discussions, free of regulatory interference. But look at how Twitter actually works. It’s as hierarchical as anything else, the overwhelming…/16
…majority of Tweets revolve around a small handful of Tweeters with large followings (my back of the envelope estimate is that all groups follow about 5% of their members, in any context). The free market fails again, reinstating the same hierarchies it wanted to replace. /17
And notice how as a person accumulates more and more followers on Twitter, their capacity to interact with any individual there diminishes exponentially. They physically can’t possibly maintain the connections and conversations. That’s not a limitation, that reflects how…/18
…society has always worked. 95% of people follow the 5% who they find useful and persuasive. Once a person passes a threshold of follower numbers here, they become much more a broadcaster than a participant. Which is the model Twitter was designed to replace, coming back…/19
…in through the back door. There’s no reason to be alarmed by that either, it reflects the basic reality of all societies, of all eras. The 5% will always emerge, hopefully connected to accumulated wisdom and expertise (social media is much weaker there). /20
To finish, the way to beat Covid is to attack the core market-based beliefs that create and sustain it. And to do that, to target the 5% of ‘influencers’ of those beliefs, rather than the 95% of people who follow that belief system. Twitter does a bit of that, but with Covid…/21
…too often it goes after medical experts, and not the underlying political beliefs that gives them a platform to minimise Covid. I would bet nearly every Covid minimising expert subscribes in some way to market-based politics. /end
The question seems to be, does combining vax and infection make hypermobile humans enough like fenced cows that this doesn't become just another production line of immune evasion? https://t.co/EVRwgMsIOa
'Alarming' data is more than 70 people dying every single day of a preventable disease, that we're not preventing. Headlines you get when you replace a society with an economy. https://t.co/GVlGwNd3OD
The cure for Covid is fresh air. Imagine arguing against it.
If you get a Legionnaires’ Disease outbreak in your building, this will happen. People will be evacuated, the air system will be sanitised. But right now people wander through office buildings infected and shedding a lethal virus. Nothing is done. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DKD6HVka2A
All great progress in public health begins with doctors, and ends with engineers. Right now we’re destroying doctors and nurses, because nobody has called in the engineers. Providing fresh, clean air is not difficult, for engineers. https://t.co/aP1OoeTpY8
There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId
This is the history of GDP growth over the past 60 years in Australia. A proxy for the ‘Economy’. (All things about the Economy are proxies, because it doesn’t exist.) See that up and down, recurring pattern? It looks a bit familiar, like an epidemic curve. Not a coincidence. /2 https://t.co/4u7oOfXbhq
All ‘economic growth’ is exponential growth. Even a 1% compounding return on a child’s saving account is exponential growth. We base our entire society around an exponential function. I thought of this in recent days because of stories about how Australians need to keep their…/3
…nerve with their superannuation investments, that you have to think of the ‘longer term’ in your investment decisions. There will be ups and downs, the wisdom goes, but in the longer term, it’s all up. Unfortunately, as the GDP shows, that’s bollocks. /4 https://t.co/XnhbRRgldK
It’s an infinite epidemic of booms and busts, fortunes and bankruptcies, while you retain an exponential growth function as the engine room of your society. But society has figured out one way to moderate this roller coaster. It’s called existential disaster. Wars and plagues. /5
Have a look at GDP across the entire last century in Australia. Before the big world wars, there’s that cycling boom and bust, very dramatic. But then after the wars, a miracle. Decades of continuous prosperity, with only one bar below the line. How did we do it? /6 https://t.co/pHVroK7WMs
We did it with massive collective intervention. By governments. Fuelled by their massive war efforts, the legacy industrial capacity from the wars was turned into the production of peacetime goods. Society discovered by accident that massive collective mobilisation, massive…/7
…INVESTMENT, to some great extent tames the economic epidemic curves. Welfare states in particular, huge redistribution mechanisms to level out some of the booms and busts. You can’t ultimately tame an exponential function, the first graph shows you still get booms…/8 https://t.co/8dmZhjE5Xu
…and busts. But they’re mostly above the zero line, GDP slows rather than declines. So…lessons from this pandemic? In Australia, the ‘lockdowns’ were akin to the big wars, with big government intervention. Deeply alarming to the political libertarians… /9 https://t.co/7uu1qVLB2v
…and not surprising at all to the economic historians. Still much lower spending than in the wars, and with death rates now equalling or exceeding those of both wars. The need is obviously there. And public investment needed should fuel another few decades of prosperity. /10 https://t.co/JqgjdE4A13
But I’m less confident that will happen, with the political libertarian/neoliberal fantasies in dominant position. That framework of lunacy sees all this investment as a dire, State-sponsored assault on our freedoms. As always, they love to free ride off the good times, off…/11
…past massive public investment, and then circle the wagons around their accumulated wealth when the next exponential existential disaster hits. We could abandon exponential functions as the basis of a society altogether, but until we do it will need recurring catastrophes…/12
…to force changes as we saw after the wars. Whether we get that correction after this catastrophe will also depend on whether we stop the bloody catastrophe. We’re not seeing much appetite for that, from behind the circled wagons. /end
As we move on to the ‘next phase’ of the pandemic, the mass illness, economic disruption and death phase. https://t.co/y6XT2KOAht
Here’s our real inflation problem. Might hit 80 tomorrow. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2jv6JlR1Yd
“Cost of living” = you need to pay somebody now to stay alive.
I’m sure many Covid minimisers do actually care about more than their own interrupted lifestyles. It’s just that their humanity is asymptomatic.
Superannuation is lucky to give a 5% return on investment (ROI) over 15 years. Installing solar panels on your house can give you a ROI of several *hundred* percent over the same period of time. It’s so far ahead of any other way to invest your money. https://t.co/FgjTKPKutL
For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1 https://t.co/PTXt2qrUPS
The most common explanation for that near vertical, sudden climb in economic growth in the 1950s is that humanity got super smart all of a sudden, and developed technologies that freed us at last from the burdens of existence. A miracle! But it’s not that. /2 https://t.co/75HFDuSXzD
For the two thousand years leading up to the 1950s, the amount of stuff or GDP we produced and the number of people alive pretty much balanced. No great accumulations of either. But then something happened just after WW2 that changed all of history. We were infected. /3
Infected by the exponential curve. There, in the green. The religious promise of infinite life, which the world wars beat out of us a bit, was replaced by the promise of infinity elsewhere. Not clever technologies, something else. /4 https://t.co/OoGY2PFgop
Sort of speaks for itself. Infinite wealth, ‘compounding interest’. Even basic compound interest, a child’s savings account, is exponential growth. We were infected by exponentialism, in the 1950s. Everything since, including Covid, derives from that initial infection. /5 https://t.co/LSXBhR6Tos
Massive population growth, for example, world ‘overpopulation’, began - have a look - at *the same moment*. Exponential economic growth, exponential debt, and now exponential population growth. Emerging at the same time. A miracle! For the numpties, maybe. /6 https://t.co/bIl66CxQNi
This shift in millennia of history? The birth of the ‘Economy’. When did people first start talking about the economy? *drum roll*…in the 1950s. Anybody still backing the coincidence horse here? The exponential increase in the use of debt, forbidden even in ancient times…/7
…suddenly transforms millennia of history, in a few short years. The financialisation of society and cultures. That’s what the ‘Economy’ is, literally. All the old restraints on life and work swept aside by the access to infinite, compounding interest. Exponentialism. /8
The reason major religious traditions had outlawed moneylending (usury) thousands of years before, was because they must have known what happens if you don’t. We’re now living what happens when you don’t. Fabulous decades of a feeling of God-like prosperity and freedom. /9
All the old constraints, environmental and otherwise, stripped away in the rush for exponential returns on investment. ROI. Whole ecosystems laid to waste, generating fun things like zoonotic viruses. We say people don’t understand the exponential curve with epidemics,…/10
…but exponential infection is a child of exponential society. We love our fat super returns, with their double-digit hyper-exponential growth returns, not even connecting the dots. The Economy and Covid are one and the same thing. Zoonotic pathogens from exponential…/11
…economic activity destroying habitats. A culture that won’t fight a pandemic for fear of destroying its economy is being entirely consistent with its exponential operating system. /end
@KarenCutter4 UK puzzle. https://t.co/fvNEp0cQk6
Health departments surveying the public to decide what public health actions to undertake. Business groups say just do it. The ‘public’ is not some pre-existing group to be surveyed. It mobilises differently for every issue. If it’s mobilised. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/TTJkqKQQSF
I mean, what do you expect people to answer if asked if they want to be forced to wear masks? If they want to be forced to do anything? It’s push-polling, a joke. https://t.co/fuiUs9gtfy
I like Jim. But watching him stand up every day to talk about inflation, interest rates and the ‘economy’ reminds me how politics has been captured by the financial industry and its backers in conservative parties. All politics now is about finance. The ‘cost’ of living. #auspol https://t.co/j3we7hfai9
When I say the ‘Economy’ doesn’t even exist, it’s based on a very clear, empirically traceable origin of the use of the idea. And it was clearly not a thing then, and isn’t now. It’s a metric of actual things that’s assumed a life of its own. https://t.co/TPpgjokolk
Why waves will never end while minimisation is in play. Every single time a wave peaks and descends, it’s taken as evidence that measures weren’t needed. Which just sows the seed for the next wave. #auspol #covidq9aus https://t.co/CSQO2CdFS3
Damn those lockdowns discouraging childhood vaccination. https://t.co/nHwvXZLyeW
Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics, for her studies on how groups best manage a ‘commons’ i.e. resources that are shared by a community, of whatever size. Air is an example, and thus Covid. She distilled it to 8 principles. See how many you can tick for Covid responses. https://t.co/WvTL7nxA7x
Is there a more violating act than infection?
While personal responsibility is not the way out of the pandemic, it can help. We could simply refuse to go to any inside gathering, be it restaurants, concerts, conferences etc. Crash the economy, the only thing that will get the attention of libertarian leaders. https://t.co/2mQgYMKsiw
Respiratory pandemics are like earthquakes, disasters that are almost entirely an artefact of the built environment. All fixable, if made a priority. https://t.co/3kF1nrIByG
Finally starting to see news articles that don’t sugar-coat the magnitude of the disaster we’re living, and the criminal sidelining of basic public health practice. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DAyNMexvch
The surest guide to the UK leadership race is history. Is the political situation dire? If yes, a woman will win, given a hospital pass to try to fix it, before the conservative men then remove her to regain the top spot.
Politicians unilaterally decided we would all be infected. Consent comes into play here, as it does for intimate relationships. Unlike those, SARS2 infection crosses all degrees of intimacy, from strangers to lovers. The freedom to not be infected is unspoken. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/MUC9ptwJes
Managing risks in workplaces has well-established procedures. We’re not using them in a coordinated way. Covid is a WHS crisis much more than a medical crisis. Too many businesses avoiding basic legal requirements. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/IiMHMO1S7k
@KarenCutter4 sorry to keep flicking questions to you, but I’m not 100% sure I grasp the point here? https://t.co/NdNMlklfwY
Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of controls like the Glass-Steagall Act. /1 https://t.co/FQlki76QCY
This picture shows the Glass-Steagall Act being signed into existence in the early 1930s, with its variety of measures to regulate banking/finance, after the terrible experiences of the Great Depression. Over the next 60 years it and related controls on banks were… /2 https://t.co/zOdgcErVsY
…stripped away. I Tweeted yesterday what happened next. Two millennia of distrust and outright hostility towards money-lending, usury, swept away in a few short decades. For the first time in 2 thousand years, ‘economic growth’ became a thing, and in celebration society…/3 https://t.co/KBT1guO2KL
…was re-labelled an ‘economy’. Much of what we call the ‘modern’ era in history after 1950 is the euphoria this finance-enabled release from the constraints of history produced. And so, back to Covid. This economy, really just an old society saturated with debt,…/4
…requires continuous exponential growth to function. And as we’ve seen, we couldn’t keep fighting a pandemic apparently, because exponential infection was destroying exponential economic growth. ‘Lockdowns’ really mean that, the flattening of the exponential curve. Except…/5
…it actually didn’t. As you can see here, even while we were in the middle of our lockdown period, economic growth took off at a rate we hadn’t seen in years. Investment does that, big government stimulus. But for modern conservatives, public investment bad, private good,…/6 https://t.co/CjwMVO8fWt
…so the burden was thrown back upon the rest of us to recharge our private debt, which as you can see (private debt to GDP ratio) dipped when the government reversed decades of bugger-all public investment, during the earlier pandemic. Even though it’s all our money, whether…/7 https://t.co/o2ykW11YJC
…public or private, individuals will now have to carry the burden, to keep the exponential growth machine running. No economies of scale by doing it at the government level, our collective instrument, each family will have to take on more personal debt. This is ‘getting the…/8
…government out of peoples’ lives’. And getting the banks back into them. But just as we’ve seen with Covid, the problem with anything powered by exponential growth is, it cycles endlessly in waves until you stop the exponential engine. Infections and economies are exactly…/9
…the same, in how they behave, because they’re both exponential processes. In fact they’re the same process, they’re both just people, in debt or infected, at the same time. The same people who need to take on personal debt to keep the economy going also have to be infected…/10
…to keep Covid going. Their debt-funded work is what gets them infected. There’s no ‘balance’ between economy and public health here, debt and infection drive each other. There are two ways this can end. We cycle endlessly up and down epidemic and economic booms and bust. /11 https://t.co/2UuQOD0TJR
As you can see in the S&P stock data, 95% of the time a ‘market’ is just making up for lost earnings, often decades between peaks. With increasing debt raising the baseline over time, of the peaks. Epidemics and pandemics do the same, if left unchecked, they can cycle for…/12 https://t.co/8B3ycAAuqE
…centuries in waves of infection. The point I want to make here though is that these aren’t 2 separate process that are analogous. It’s the economic behaviour that drives the epidemic behaviour, the enslaving of society to debt-funded exponential growth is what makes it…/13
…unaffordable to fight a pandemic. You have to keep dislocating people, making them mobile and gathering them in large groups in workplaces, to keep the economy going, to keep feeding the exponential growth curve. The sad thing is that this is a zero-sum game. Despite our…/14
…euphoria during the up part of waves, over time you go nowhere. Look at the long-term performance of stocks on the S&P 500. Converging to no performance at all. It’s what exponential curves do, they suck the life out of things until nothing is left. To end the pandemic, we…/15 https://t.co/680UKNuji6
…need to end a society infected with exponential growth, in everything it does. Give up our delusional dreams of double-digit super growth, of endless increases in prosperity. Will it happen? I doubt it. The exponential curve is the ultimate drug. /end
Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1 https://t.co/YjceIUpoz3
Yes there are organisations that we call ‘businesses’ that produce things for sale, which customers buy. Undeniable. But as Hanauer has been saying for years, we have the causation backwards. It’s customers, with money, who generate ‘business’, for businesses. /2
Business doesn’t create jobs, as politicians and lobbyists say. Customers with money create jobs. If a population is well paid and flush with cash, any business can thrive and employ people. If all of the money is concentrated in the hands of a tiny handful of owners and…/3
…managers though (our current supply-side model), the whole process stops. The sleight of hand here is to create a fictitious entity called ‘business’, that instead of being the process of creating and selling goods (obviously fine) instead represents the owners and managers. /4
The ‘business community’ always means these owners and managers, never the workers or customers. It’s the next level of scale down from the fiction of the ‘economy’, the economy is just the same fiction at a society level. Both strategic fictions that take the basic process…/5
…of creating and selling things, driven by customer demand, and pretend it’s all driven by the tiny handful of owners and managers. Hanauer says it - customers with money generate business, and generate jobs. But trickle-down, supply-side economics reversed this basic truth…/6
…and created the unbelievable fantasy that everything is created by this tiny group of parasitic owners (including shareholders) and managers, who then pocket most of the money. It’s this tiny group that opposes pandemic action most strongly, on the grounds of ‘keeping the…/7
…economy moving’, by promoting ‘business’. As if infecting and impoverishing workers, who are also customers, does either of those things. Workers and customers are the SAME PEOPLE. How hard is that to understand? An ‘economy’ is always just people, with or without money. /8
Which is also why infecting them all with Covid destroys business and economy. You have no workers and no customers. Infect all the owners and managers, and ‘business’ will carry on just fine. QED. /end
@juliette_io wondering if including 14-day average curves might help with the sporadic big jumps in reporting with deaths for example, where States find new deaths and then report them all on one day, inflating the figures? Or even a 21/28-day average? Would that make sense?
Football, of all varieties, seems one of the most powerful ways to ignore reality. The UK is on its knees, but football keeps everybody drunk on the hopium. Here in Oz football was one of the Covid dambusters. Its team sports mechanism is also the origin of political populism. https://t.co/76d18Fhzxq