September 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Most tradies I know earn substantially more than people I went to university with. Only the latter had to repay their tuition. Still the dumb country pretending to be the clever country. https://t.co/CYeBztUShI
When governments announce more spending on skills and training, just remember the largest beneficiaries are usually the business community. More corporate welfare, the amount Australian business spends on training its own workforce has apparently dropped significantly. https://t.co/kydEL0xcFs
Remember all the theatre from Covid minimisers about how flu this year would be a killer, because we'd missed two years of being sick? The 'get infected so you won't get infected' herd immunity Catweasels. https://t.co/gKvFhc6USv
From the SMH: "...the virus is not the killer it once was. At the start of the pandemic, one in 100 people who caught it died. Now, that figure is as low as one in 3000." A disease that infects millions and kills in 1 in 3000 of them is a public health disaster.
ABC radio on the way home, talking about vulnerable people having to isolate themselves more and more to avoid Covid. Some staggering number of people with blood cancer (over 100,000?) just for starters. A quick thought experiment. Crime, and jails. /1 https://t.co/rfs75PwBMb
We isolate criminals from the wider community. We don’t ask the community to find a way to live with them, to ‘care for one another’ (the going phrase). Very few of them are as dangerous to you as Covid is. And their crime doesn’t grow exponentially. /2 https://t.co/cRhJGDYRnB
Threats to communal life are quarantined from that life. Crime, disease, wild dogs. Etc. We need to call out the nauseating bullshit that allowing a pandemic virus to spread is some normal anything. It’s an assault on society, propaganda-driven violence on the common good. /end
What we’ve learned from Covid is that musicians are all for a cause if there’s no loss of income and live gig adulation involved. Has even one major international act spoken out for Covid action? We had a few speak out against it. Most of the darlings are back doing full shows. https://t.co/mYdu8RXV6y
The callous disregard for public health our leaders show with Covid? Welcome to how the developing world has experienced us for decades. We’ve happily called diseases ‘endemic’ there for years as an excuse for doing nothing about them. ‘Globalisation’ means this is now all of us.
When economic thinkers hijack public health and make it a logistical operation to manage hospital capacity. Infection is illness. Mass infection is mass illness. Public unhealthiness. Infection is not only the definition of a pandemic, it’s also the great health burden. https://t.co/I4xcwAoTJL
Australia is on the brink of eliminating HIV. It's taken 40 years. Those who are 'tired' inside 3 years with Covid can contact the same mental health lines they offer to those forced to live in Covid soup. https://t.co/2o2fl1VOLD
You could almost have hope reading this, that the freedumb narrative has an even higher power - 'life'. Sadly it appears to apply only to enforced pregnancy, and not preventing mass infection, morbidity and death. https://t.co/0jXwMhDOXY
I felt exactly the same with discussions about taxpayers footing the bill for training workers and also paying their extended parental leave. The real welfare parasites in this country wear expensive suits. https://t.co/sIpufIlj7c
Two days after pushing through 7 to 5 day isolation, the push is already on for zero. Conservatives are not a political party, they're the old donors now having captured the mechanism of government. Regulatory capture. Why they have only token policies. /1 https://t.co/g6RRUEEX7c
The Morrison government had almost no policy agenda at all during its time in government, which confused some people. But it's the same the world over, conservative governments are not governments, they want to remove governments. They don't pretend otherwise,.../2
..."getting government out of peoples' lives". Cut taxes, cut regulation, cut government. What donors want, no civil society agenda. When we appeal for governments to do more against Covid, we're talking to a void. Nobody's home. 3/3 https://t.co/9F7BuNizBB
Business is going to play the ALP like a piano. The ALP already implementing the LNP Covid 'strategy'. Skilled migrant numbers up. Now pensioners back in the workforce. Business - 3, ALP -0. https://t.co/meAa64Luse
Business - 4, ALP - 0. https://t.co/VwBEUFXFxR
We’re not living with Covid, we’re ignoring it. Like we live with domestic violence, inequality, crumbling public infrastructure, and runaway climate change.
Biden wanted decency in politics. He misread the situation badly as old Left v Right politics. Populism destroys all politics. Biden is floundering. Albanese a carbon copy, and adopting LNP policies, to be decent i.e. not break promises. Danger. https://t.co/uDqyQ3EpSi
Let’s apply the laws of the market, to the market. ‘Enterprises’ who can’t afford decent wages and working conditions are inept and should always have been allowed to fail. Instead we impoverished workers to protect hopeless businesses. #auspol https://t.co/DlfZaRgoI6
Both think the problem with our politics is bad manners. They want ‘decency’ back. But those bad manners are the populist attack on ALL politics, by external parties. Deliberately weaponised propaganda, 24/7, to undermine civil society. That’s the enemy. It will eat them alive. https://t.co/ZgSABuIPHg
We’re ‘living with’ Covid the way dysfunctional couples stay together, because breaking up seems too hard. Covid is controlling that relationship. And it’s an abuser.
It’s almost like the dislocation from home is the most unpopular thing. People who felt ‘locked down’ wouldn’t answer in this way. More spin now unspinning. https://t.co/6lYmN38tDm
Let’s hope. https://t.co/pVd9Wfi0qC
Getting that apron and secret handshakes vibe from National Cabinet now. https://t.co/2UP92Ij2nO
Individual freedom is the politics of the privileged, where the invisible labour of others can make it possible to believe you can shape reality to your individual whim. When you infect, sicken and kill those invisible others, the fantasy collapses. https://t.co/4RU5B0rWvR
Around 1 for months. Huge caseloads. Everybody is infecting everybody i.e. no control. But you only need to get that Reff below 1 to drive the virus to elimination. We can’t be bothered. Like driving the Bathurst 1000 and stopping a metre short of the finish for a picnic. https://t.co/2enCAFCwEd
Climate scientists are a long way further down the road than Covid scientists. They know what decades of being ignored feels like. ‘The science’ has no political power of its own. What to do? Change politics. The fastest way? Mass joining of unions. https://t.co/eSqDGcktBl
Governments do nothing about Covid because they do nothing about anything. They represent privilege. Unions were always the counterbalance. They’re the way the politics of ordinary people are enacted. Like them or not, mass, even token membership would change everything, fast. /1 https://t.co/QB3xUjyRcp
Instead of marching in the streets or complaining on social media, organise mass membership drives for unions. I will guarantee you nothing will make neoliberal governments shit themselves faster. Look at their relentless hatred of unions, they’re TELLING US what to do. 2/2
“…children in the UK were weaponised, exploited in an ideological battle...” The disgusting, deliberate infection of children, using outrageous propaganda equating SARS-Cov2 with colds and flu, and nonsense about mental health and educational outcomes. https://t.co/XBBx6ABxnH
The big wins from the Jobs and Skills Summit were wins for business. All the wins for workers were kicked down the road to the White Paper, where they’ll be vigorously opposed by business lobbies. #insiders
We’re so domesticated by the politics of the economy. Like the idea we have to be able to ‘afford’ urgent social investment. A tiny increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio would erase budget deficits immediately. We’ve been trained not to see that. #insiders
Weekend reports are so far from reality that maybe dropping them isn’t a disaster. They give a very false sense of actual infections and illness/death. https://t.co/iFbzsPx6Qk
For conservatives the State = oppression. But compulsory infection is oppression, it’s violence perpetrated on populations, by States refusing to do their public health job. Inaction is negligence, to not act can be even more oppressive than to act. https://t.co/3bSvYFp6zs
Industry-wide employer groups say industry-wide employee groups will end the world. https://t.co/51Xq10S7jR
Re-Tweet this one occasionally as a reminder to the ‘we locked down for 2 years’ people that they’re remembering slogans, not life as it was. All the white in the diagram is no-lockdown. Any larger coloured bits after JQ20 were the premature removal of basic protections. https://t.co/NxYR0S6qqR
The moment questioning of Covid inaction gains traction somewhere, the denialism media immediately launch a counter-offensive. (The Torygraph in this case.) Ditto for climate. The ‘hardline’ article called for basic public health action in schools. https://t.co/KzEAh8qHai
The greatest oppression in a pandemic is to do nothing. To force others to become infected, to give them no choice, is violent abuse. It kills people. The refusal to lead is not freedom for me. It puts me under constant assault from infection, in everything I do.
Is there another example of a government decision to knowingly INCREASE death in the community? Surely this distinguishes Covid decisions from anything else in the history of civilised societies? https://t.co/grIE7x5ps3
“Total federal and state taxation revenue as a share of GDP is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average.” Ross Garnaut Worth remembering every time we’re told basic social investment is ‘unaffordable’. Time to ruthlessly take on vested interests.
A beautiful example of why a mandate isn’t a restriction, it’s a permission. A permission to act against the usual status quo of doing nothing, without having to go against the crowd. https://t.co/EJ1wLaHRDx
Listening to the Covid minimising propaganda, you’d think staying at home, not travelling, or wearing a mask were some modern version of the Battle of the Somme. https://t.co/SIwOTzUGwr
I sometimes ask Covid minimisers, what great human project are you engaged with, that makes killing all of these people unnecessarily worthwhile? It’s rarely anything more than basic socialising, or overseas travel. Like grounded teenagers.
The explosion of talk about mental health. Much of it driven by politicians who want to blame the public for the damage political inaction causes. Social life is imitative. We’re becoming very good at blaming the inside of our own heads for the actions of bullies outside them. https://t.co/j2lxbZklGc
Populism says the best people to run countries are the most popular people. (‘Let’s solve our most complex problems by picking the most popular people to do it’ means we quickly forget how stupid the most popular people were at high school.) Like all populism, it’s a lie anyway. https://t.co/uH9XsA2CPk
‘Get sick so you won’t get sick’ apparently just makes people sick. All the time, all year. The public is in a controlling relationship now with its governments, who gaslight them and violently abuse them with compulsory infection with lethal viruses. https://t.co/gVtvtxlmdA
What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021. It’s a CYCLE, not waves. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/9ke7nKZJOT
Infection is a social and political process, because it’s caused by how people interact. If we all could stay home, there’d be no pandemic. The epidemic ‘waves’ we saw in Australia from late-2021 matched those from many countries overseas the entire pandemic. What changed? /2
We can draw on work on abuse in relationships. The waves we see are actually a cycle of abuse, of the public. The public is in relationship with its governments, just as it is with each other. Cycles of abuse cause the rise and fall of ongoing waves of violence and calm. /3 https://t.co/Aiy1H4tb3d
This isn’t just an analogy. A cyclical process will tend to produce a wavelike outcome, when mapped over time. You’re cycling between maxima and minima. Except in a pandemic, it isn’t the virus causing the cycling. It’s what we do socially and politically that does that. /4 https://t.co/oSXij8qjP5
Look at the stages of abuse in individual relationships, and see how they map to collective relationships (publics and their governments) too. 1. Calm - no obvious problems, the public and the State peacefully coexist. 2. Tension building - infections start to rise, and…/5 https://t.co/2UVsRRqPS8
…the impact of those infections on social processes rise as well, creating tensions. The public becomes fearful, communication begins to diminish from government. 3. Incident - full-blown outbreak, widespread infection, disease and death. Violence, against the body politic. /6 https://t.co/dmRufnWlBh
4. Reconciliation - government apologises, blames the public, rationalises the outbreak, says this will be the last time. All behaviours you’ll hear in abusive personal relationships too. And we’re then back at calm. Or in shorthand: /7 https://t.co/BDq19wlXLd
1. Calm - low point of a wave 2. Tension building - wave going up 3. Incident - wave at peak 4. Reconciliation - wave going down. /8 https://t.co/8zZL1n9Nly
Epidemic waves are waves of abuse because they’re caused and prolonged by one party to the relationship - government - not actually being IN relationship with the public. I’ve Tweeted how this is not even denied - modern neoliberal governments deny the public is even a thing. /9
And as in personal relationships, abusers can be terribly nice people in every other way, just not in relationship with others. When you elect governments who think those relationships, between government and the public, shouldn’t even exist, you will be abused. /10
When that overlaps with the emergence of a pandemic pathogen, you will get the epidemic waves we’re all familiar with. Australia shows this beautifully because for the roughly first two years of the pandemic, the government DID maintain relationship with the public. /11 https://t.co/oXXOBVwT3V
Public health, that’s what it means. Then in late 2021 our local neoliberal libertarians, with one eye to the federal election, stripped that relationship away, and the relationship became abusive. And thus, we got ‘waves’. /end https://t.co/hRiZ50U7cO
A defining feature of political libertarians is the refusal to take personal responsibility for anything, except telling others to take personal responsibility for all the things the political libertarian is paid to do. https://t.co/UXJSDIbTKz
"RBA lifts rates as it races to bring inflation under control". (SMH) So refreshing to see something that is growing out of control, being controlled. Almost like that approach could catch on elsewhere.
For the local public health professionals concerned yesterday that an article about the impact of Covid on young people pre-dated the vaccines, here’s one from this week. A $3.5 trillion dollar problem. Remember you helped enable this. https://t.co/O4564ALjBZ
The world’s first privatised pandemic continues at pace. Soon letting the virus rip will shift from loss to profit. #covid19aus https://t.co/cDUw4C6B3v
The honeymoon of remnant immunity will be over by the end of the year. The cupboard is currently bare after that. Pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus is the can you can’t keep kicking down the road forever. https://t.co/osehSYXo9t
Ask the National Cabinet what the Covid plan is for late-2022, into 2023. Make them say out loud their 'strategy' is 'you will all get infected and sick and we hope this will make Covid go away, but really we have no idea and hope you'll all just stop talking about it'. #auspol
Experts who haven't sold their soul for public and political attention stating the obvious. To stop a pandemic, you have to stop the infections. A pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not hospitalistions. Not economics. INFECTIONS. https://t.co/StGhdcltlI
Phew, finally the average daily deaths is down to about double the daily average in Victoria's nightmare 2020 outbreak. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/BrdehfOURQ
/sarcasm
The 'preventing serious disease and death' strategy. The greatest failure in public administration in Australian history. The greatest mass casualty event. I tag auspol here because that's what the political discussion should be about, but isn't. #auspol https://t.co/XqYUpe0QW4
"...no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences." Camus, The Plague
This is about normalising the forgetting of Covid, suppressing public interest in it. Premiers have openly attacked daily updates for this reason, they don't want the Covid conversations happening. It has nothing to do with public health. #covid19aus https://t.co/dPEEI4Ujrh
Such an important point. The spin that we're shifting risk management for Covid to individuals is exposed as a lie by us simultaneously stripping away the data they need to do that work. https://t.co/JF5ok2MVKZ
When politicians want individuals to take individual responsibility for core services like energy or education, they produce sites like this to maximise the information consumers have. With Covid they shut the information down. They don't want it managed, they want it forgotten. https://t.co/MB2TzIYxoJ
What National Cabinet want is to get away from the drama of daily Covid updates. But that's long gone, the trickle (busloads actually) of daily deaths is already ignored by the public. Making this now a weekly release, with big numbers...it will become an event? Geniuses. https://t.co/lCQvwjiRIs
Sounds like another ex-PM we know. The big Anglo troika of Trump-Morrison-Johnson now all gone. All brought up being told they would lead the world. The world didn't agree. https://t.co/rekqTExCJa
The best way to regulate your speed when driving wouldn’t be to remove the speedo from the car. But that’s what we’re doing with Covid data, stripping it away, flying blind. We haven’t had anything approaching local data for months. Now even the aggregated State data…/1
…is being cut back. Of course boy racer types have always said ‘drive to the conditions’, meaning drive as fast as they like. That’s the libertarian mindset also stripping Covid data. The anti-social bastards in our midst, as Monbiot calls them. 2/2 https://t.co/qYwK1ZgA3C
The ‘economy’ produces these ridiculous existential debates around what you can ‘afford’ to do. Conservatives invented it as a way to re-route wealth to their people. Reset the tax to GDP ratio up a few percentage points, and most of this goes away. https://t.co/0KbaOhRChs
A friend’s colleague was sick on Tuesday, came back to work yesterday. Says they have ‘a bit of a runny nose and a headache’, in that ‘just a head cold’ way. I’m sure this is a story repeated across the entire country. No indication they’d even tested.
When pirates take over your politics, lots of you will end up walking the plank. https://t.co/iEZdSLE8hl
We did a deal with the Chinese. They’d control Covid so they could keep running the entire manufacturing sectors of our outsourced economies. While we let everybody at home get infected while we fly around on planes ‘living our best life’. https://t.co/x18nYoS9E6
Free TAFE study is not the progressive political statement it’s made out to be. It’s mostly training trades for business, a massive taxpayer subsidy. Many graduates destined for the prime lobbying group, the housing industry. At the same time we sacked over 40,000 uni workers.
"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial industry and its political stooges. /1
They make people believe that a simple medium of exchange, created by government, is the location of society's wealth. As if money has actual value in itself, and without it a country can do nothing. Tremendously good for their business, which is to lend money. /2
But it's bits of plastic and metal of negligible value, or cells in a spreadsheet. The wealth of a nation is its resources and people, and their institutions. Money was created by government to allow all of that actual wealth to circulate. It's a tool, with no intrinsic value. /3
But when the top 1% strip mine most of a nation's money for themselves, sitting on it like a dragon on its gold, it leaves nothing in circulation to mobilise that circulation of people and resources. The actual wealth of the nation is all still there, but can't mobilise. /4
You'll get inflation then, because the vast majority starved of money will tend to raise prices to try to get things moving again. (My theory.) As the MMT people say, provided a country has spare capacity that's unused, print the bloody money to get it going again. /end
Since WW2, we've experienced prosperity and peace probably without parallel in history. The prosperity was largely re-purposed massive war industry, and fossil fuel driven. The refusal to fight Covid is the outcome of that 80 years feeling free of existential constraints.
If China were to adopt the Covid 'strategies' of the West, the entire global economy would collapse. We mock them for disease control, while being utterly reliant upon their workforce staying uninfected. https://t.co/B7w9BHh8jH
The @theprojecttv segment on whether we’re declaring the pandemic over too soon was a pathetic example of how broken public health is. Serious story, great contribution from @enenbee, then 10 seconds into the discussion it’s terminated with a cross to a joke YouTube video. /1
And that was it. One panellist regurgitated the government spin about isn’t this how we were supposed to end the pandemic? (By not talking about infections and deaths.) Stunningly dumb. 2/2
If the ALP really believes in the stop talking about Covid and it will go away strategy, do the same for the budget. Stop talking about the fucking economy, and it’ll fix itself. Elected politicians are going to kill us. Popularity as a solution to complex problems is insanity.
Maybe it’ll drop below about 50 per million again, for the first time in a long time. But testing is so pathetic now, who knows what that even means. https://t.co/wqXr1CKTRz
We face our own possible extinction, and our politics in response is pure high school. Look at the grown up world around you and you can’t miss that it’s almost entirely adolescent tribes fighting for popularity. Adolescence IS our culture. Not an analogy. https://t.co/3dZ92EXXE1
It’s common to see monarchy as a relic of a superseded age. But look at the complete train wreck of the popularity politics that has replaced it. Monarchy at least retains historical continuity in its core DNA. Populism reinvents the world with every media cycle. Who occupies…/1 https://t.co/0or19lhiIl
…the throne is almost unimportant. Monarchy represents enduring institutions, of whatever form, of which we have precious few left. If Charles (as many have always feared) became an activist king, how would that be any worse than our current crop of…/2
…democratically-elected leaders? Really just populist show ponies, trashing our customs and traditions, including of basic governance. /end
We’re in the Commonwealth, the Queen is still our monarch. I think a public holiday for her death would be logical. The throne-thumping economic zealots in charge…let’s see how skin-deep their commitment is. Maybe her funeral should be the public holiday. #auspol
Altman, an avowed republican: “...intrigued by the possibility that constitutional monarchy might be a bulwark against the worst sort of populist authoritarianism.” The last thing we need is Heads of State closer to the populist machine. https://t.co/Nv2N2C6l96
"Many of the deaths aren’t counted in the official Covid tally, he said, because they happen months after Covid infections. “The deaths that are being reported as Covid deaths greatly understate the actual death losses among working-age people from the pandemic. /1 #auspol
"It may not all be Covid on their death certificates, but deaths are up in just huge, huge numbers.” J Scott Davis, CEO OneAmerica Insurance. 2/2
My profile says 'anti-vax and freedumbs blocked immediately'. Just for the information of people I block in future, who whine about a 'thin skin'. Not that, love to debate. It's a de-platforming thing, not giving any space to their BS.
Two competing civilisations in one photo. https://t.co/z9sylag1lI
Yes, this. Just block, immediately. Starve them of oxygen. They have nothing to say, they unify around attacks on what others say. https://t.co/xjNaZ1CcQE
‘Shielders’. Lockdowns didn’t end. We privatised them. We dumped the entire burden *on* the vulnerable, forcing them to lock down their entire lives. Forever. Their mental health also now in free fall. Some public health professionals cheer. #covid19aus https://t.co/loGj1T7HKk
Medical folk, what might be the cause of that discolouration on the Queen’s hand? Steroids? https://t.co/h855hujbFC
Yes, we’re hiding a plague. Pretending problems don’t exist. We always did that for the developing world. We’re all the developing world now. It’s called globalisation. https://t.co/B8L88Stb7L
The pretty impressive results from UV air disinfection makes me think light itself should be a much bigger public health topic. It’s not just about air. It’s about the built environment, which is hugely about light too.
The number of people who now explain death to me with ‘they were old’ reminds me of the old Gary Larson cartoon about vets and horses. ‘Shoot them’.
Lockdowns should always have been called sheltering, or shielding. To shelter from harm. Libertarian politics coined the word ‘lockdown’ to make sure everybody thought of it as oppression. Language is politics, all very deliberate. And it worked. https://t.co/bIju8I5SO5
‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a cell. /1 https://t.co/ZPqq4cKMUf
I don’t know about you, but home is my favourite place in the world, and the place I love going to after a day’s work. I would happily miss work every day of the week if I could afford to. I still find it ludicrous and offensive to have staying home described as oppression. /2
As Orwell said, “we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty…”. But it goes further. The assumption is that it’s government locking us down. But that’s always been a lie. The virus locked us down. Look at this photo. /3 https://t.co/bs6VBWBkLc
The government didn’t lock these Lismore residents down. The flood did. Governments needed orders for Covid only because a virus is invisible. But far, far more lethal. On average about 13 people a year die in floods in Australia. Covid is mowing that many down…/4 https://t.co/2qFv6Jn2k8
…multiple times every day. Nobody is issuing stay at home orders out of some desire to lock anybody down. The known, dire, social threat of infection historically forced the invention of public health orders to act as the ‘floodwaters’ for pandemics. /5
But to me the greatest mythology around lockdowns is the idea that they ended. If you think it’s governments locking down, that it’s entirely a matter of choice, then you believe we have a choice whether to have lockdowns. But it’s not government locking down. It’s the virus. /6
We could ignore floodwaters, and head out into them. And likely die. But we can at least swim. You can’t float on a virus. If government doesn’t introduce public health orders, the floodwaters of infection don’t stop. This is where it gets really nasty. /7
The worst form of actual imprisonment is solitary confinement. If you let the floodwaters of infection rip, nobody is sand-bagging. You’re on your own. What the public messaging currently says is life without lockdowns, is really a much more sinister form of lockdown. /8 https://t.co/XuOVKQw01A
The virus is flooding every room in every building, every public space, every vehicle. Each individual then has to make the choice, to allow infection or not. And they will usually fail, after enough time. All that keeps society from total collapse is millions of individual…/9
…lockdowns. Shelterings from the virus. Many choose not to do that, and as we’re seeing, many then fall ill, many die, and many take on chronic disease states we barely understand. Economies slow to a crawl, with no staff, and/or workforces unable to function. /10
It’s a lie that lockdowns ended. I’ve Tweeted before, we didn’t end them, we privatised them. We threw millions into various forms of solitary confinement, to escape infection as best they can. The virus is still locking us down, but individually. /11
You can ignore it, but it will then infect you. Repeatedly. You can only keep your head above floodwater for a finite time. The virus is running our countries now, locking everything down. /end https://t.co/txBjevqQTk
Thanks to @stephenjduckett. A low fatality rate for a disease = thousands of deaths with mass infection. But also older people dying of Covid may only lose a handful of years of lifespan, individually, but aggregated it’s thousands of years of lost life. https://t.co/rfYSim316K https://t.co/YXw3b2J472
(Noting this is technically those with ‘underlying conditions’, of any age. Same argument applies.)
“…modern states are founded on the curious and contradictory principle of “popular sovereignty,” that the power once held by kings still exists, just now displaced onto an entity called “the people.” Populists use the myth of ‘the people’ to occupy the vacant place of the King. https://t.co/PH6edggM9p
If the whole world took a holiday for 6 weeks, at the same time, we could probably be free of Covid. The ‘Economy’ wouldn’t allow it. Essential workers could have strong PPE to keep the lights on. It’s all doable. But, the Economy wouldn’t allow it. Our most lethal invention.
As we celebrate the ascension to the throne of our new sovereign, Covid, be thankful that King Covid is decimating the infirm, at a time there will be no young to look after them anyway. https://t.co/yJS3ybavxQ
Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role, an institution. Now imagine current leaders did the same with Covid or climate change, putting…/1 https://t.co/Qan8QK3On0
…aside all personal belief in favour of performing the role we have collectively defined for them. Being the apex of the public health and environmental health pyramids we invented generations ago. Doing their duty, to carry out the work of these institutions. /2
Don’t be so quick to ‘ffs’ this Royal event. It represents a history and society we’ve lost and the replacement of which is now killing us in the millions. Where we now know the infinite excruciating details of everybody’s personal life, but nobody does their public duty. /end
The Oz data is still being published daily, just not here, to meet international data-gathering requirements? That's where OWID gets its data, via Johns Hopkins? https://t.co/qxIq1TzwcT
Scratch the surface of most Covid minimisers, and you'll find somebody who thinks the purpose of human civilisation is their recreational travel. Or they own an airline.
To put some perspective on the insanity of our baseline level of international travel, pre-pandemic the world burned about 360 billion litres of jet fuel every year. That's a billion litres a day. And it was trending UP.
I don't think it's possible to re-Tweet this one too many times. Australia didn't 'lock down for 2 years and then open up'. All that white space = most of the 2 years = no lockdowns. The longer periods towards the end were premature dropping of protections that were working. https://t.co/PsNnYzrzxp
Listening to the complaints about the public holiday from business. Business stops for nothing now, not even death. The weekend we all won 75 years ago has largely been re-taken by it. A day of cost pales next to the mass infection business and the economy forced upon all of us.
Australia’s Head of State needs to be…Australia. The landscape, for want of a better word. Indigenous people see themselves as part of it, and even a European scientific culture is discovering its agency. Nations that don’t re-ground in this way won’t survive climate change. https://t.co/ZrPsmqOvVb
“So if you've had four … you would have had the most recent one within the last few months, and that would protect you until at least Christmas…so it might be something you do in March or April, at the same time you get your flu jab." Robert Booy. A question…/1 #covid19aus
This is a statement on the new bivalent vaccines. On what data or evidence is the statement based? There’s now good immunity for 9-10 months from existing vaccines? Or is this more ‘just like the flu’ propaganda, softening people up for their ‘annual flu/Covid shot’? /2
I haven’t seen a single piece of science that suggests an annual Covid shot will be effective. Maybe it’s out there, I’d be happy to be educated. But this ongoing attempt to pretend a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus is public health vandalism, for mine. /end
Educate me. No amount of preventing severe disease and death will make a dent in ending a pandemic. The definition is, again, INFECTIONS. Number and geographical extent of infections. https://t.co/jzgdBkQH8r
In the wave after wave of minimising Covid fairytales, ‘it will become endemic’ is the equivalent of the climate war’s ‘the climate is always warming, it’s a natural process’.
'We can't just wish Covid away'. I wish Monique was invited to National Cabinet, she may even ask for agenda papers, at the moment it seems to be only phones, for selfies. https://t.co/1BFQYCBZJb
I think we need another public holiday to commemorate all of the thousands who have died in Australia this year from a mysterious disease that disappeared in late-2021, leading up to an election.
When the unchecked spread of a pandemic cripples the workforce of the people burying and burning the bodies. https://t.co/8Dxz11J0F9
If you're on a flight and there's a technical problem, would you rather: A. take a poll of the passengers as to what to do, or B. leave it to the flight crew? For Covid, societies have answered A.
The 365 days per year job of controlling infectious diseases. Not jab-and-forget. https://t.co/CIPvZ1Mv3j
Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the revenue, the States and local government…/1 https://t.co/CNAqeOa3lD
…do most of the work. Vertical fiscal imbalance, an artefact of income taxation being concentrated at the federal level since WW2. The workaround is grants, from federal to State and from State to local. These are systematically rorted for political gain, a booming industry…/2
…in novelty cheques and photo ops. Department heads at both federal and State levels, as well as local government general managers, could easily identify the essential spending needs of the nation. But populism demands that elected buffoons get to decide where the money goes. /3
Maybe 80% or more of the business of government needs no popular input at all, it represents no great divide in beliefs where the community needs to be brought along by elected leaders. It’s just obvious work that needs doing, like water, sewer and roads infrastructure. /4
Try driving either urban or regional roads after recent rains, a lunar landscape of potholes and other damage. Local government has nowhere near enough money to either build or maintain roads, or water or sewer infrastructure. Unless they get a grant, accompanied by the local…/5
…political rep with their novelty cheque and photographer in tow. And now of course with Covid, there are obvious public health procedures to be followed, which require no political input, just as no politician is needed to fix a water pipe. But all of our governance is…/6
…waylaid by grant-funded vanity projects linked to ludicrous ideologies and personal prejudices of elected representatives. The mythologies of democracy allow all of this, when again more than 80% of the time we just need competent administrators. /end
As our societies age, their mindset doesn’t. The explosion of adolescent culture in the 1960s was carried forward into boomer old-age, issues are now all framed in adolescent ways. Having a good time is now the only priority, a pandemic is a killjoy drag. https://t.co/OXw6YoHDt7
As with climate change, the reason big money has torpedoed public health attempts to suppress Covid is that the people with the deep pockets are planning to be free of any danger. If you’re a patsy on their payroll, even well down the chain, it’s likely you don’t even see it. https://t.co/unuM6zYpzD
The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current political plague? /1
Whether the people or the parliament choose a Head of State, both are populist decisions. One is just by proxy, and we’ve seen how the wallies we elect act already now, under the supposed checks and balances of the popular vote. In the US, elections are run by over 10,000…/2
…separate electoral agencies, and bizarrely often the person or people responsible for elections are themselves elected. It’s layer upon layer of populism, leading to reality TV stars becoming Presidents of republics. The root problem here is a belief. /3
An ideology even, of ‘democracy’ and what it means. It does mean governing for ‘the people’, but the people is not an actor in itself. The public is a shifting set of groupings, that varies from issue to issue. Democracy is the assessment of that shifting, from issue to issue. /4
Democracy is also entirely hierarchical, hierarchies of expertise formed by custom and tradition. It’s that hierarchy that does the assessment of the shifting of public sentiment, for different issues. It creates rules, regulations, legislation, in response. Not to oppress…/5
…anybody, but to give everybody the freedom to live with their interests taken into account in some sort of expert way. Populism bypasses all of this, and tries to pretend the sole arbiter of what is right is what is popular. Populists don’t even run their own families in…/6
…ways consistent with this belief, let alone their businesses. Nearly always a person gaining and exercising power on a strong platform of ‘for the people’ is a tyrant. Democracy is already for the people, it’s what it was set up to do. So back to the Head of State. /7
Edmund Burke used to say custom and tradition are our best guides, because history has tested them. Our customs and traditions aren’t chosen by any individual, even if popular, they survive if they have utility. That doesn’t mean you can’t have bad institutions. /8
But the test of that will not, ever, be a popularity contest. I was a teacher once, you couldn’t do 10 minutes work in a classroom using popularity as your benchmark. Society has expertise in all of its areas of operation, to tell others what to do. It’s not oppression. /9
The benefit of constitutional monarchies is the vesting of the Head of State inside a process immune to popular sentiment. While dynastic succession seems terribly ‘undemocratic’, it’s supposed to be. Dynasties can lead to oppression and corruption, but it’s why we…/10
…at the same time remove any really meaningful operational role for a constitutional monarch. I’m not sure what a republic can offer here as a replacement that again doesn’t just end up populism by another means. I Tweeted the other day that the most sane solution for…/11
…Australia would be to make the land we live in/on the Head of State, as indigenous people do. But that would also need a lot of thought as to how to make that land ‘speak’ to us in meaningful ways, as it did for them. But at the same time, do we have a choice?/12
Not knowing that land is what led to the climate catastrophe. Until we recognise again the criticality of expertise, and of hierarchy, and how that connects us with actual reality and ultimately our own land, we’ll just keep fucking up the world in various popular ways. /end
Phil Coorey this morning saying who knew August was the pandemic's deadliest month in Australia to date? This is the National Cabinet information suppression strategy, to make Covid fade from view while it mows down thousands of Australians. (A journalist should know this.)
The reduction of publication of Covid data in Australia happened just after the month that more Australians were killed by Covid than any other so far. Is there more than a handful of journalists in this country actually doing their jobs? #auspol #covid19aus
Loving her work. The National Cabinet virtual hook up today may as well be a Fortnite gaming session, for what it will achieve for Australia. https://t.co/7O2GA2kSKW
Still pretending a pandemic virus is a seasonal flu virus. People are already staying home when they're sick, but asymptomatic carriers are infecting everybody else at work anyway. Respect would be to stop applying political ideology to a public health crisis. https://t.co/eUO9omt6wj
Of course the gutting of Covid reporting is a behavioural psychology rather than public health decision. Out of sight, out of mind. The experience in Ireland seems to confirm how effective it can be. https://t.co/jw3jVFSSJE
“We remain of the view that if people are sick, whether from Covid or from other health issues, they should not be at work and that is important,’’ Mr Albanese said. Keep up these LNP public health-free talking points, Albo. It's driving voters to the independents and Greens.
I'm still waiting to see how they're going to pretend this one away. https://t.co/RONr91ymeb
Hey National Cabinet, 'treating people with respect' includes telling them how much Covid is out there, so they can do your job of managing it.
In NSW, Covid is not listed in the Public Health Act as a vaccine preventable disease. Which is correct. But it does contradict the political assertion that vaccination has ended the pandemic. https://t.co/hFVh3yLbd7
‘Covid fatigue’ is just an adult version of ‘are we there yet?’
The ‘bludgers are rorting Covid leave payments’ Albo we saw today was a new low. Less than 3% of claims needed investigating, pretty much par for the course in any scheme. Softening us up to remove it altogether, using a time-honoured script from conservative politics.
So does Australian government believe in the WHO or not? Or just Pentecostal raptures? “Still is an acute emergency” in my understanding of English doesn’t mean ‘we’ve moved onto the next phase of the pandemic’. https://t.co/0vWGLkc1gk
Can we stop saying new variants may emerge, and start saying that we’re producing them by not controlling transmission? Just as ‘waves’ of Covid don’t appear magically. We are the waves. And the variants. Every new political capitulation to Covid produces both. #covid19aus
A beautiful example of the barren stupidity of libertarian politics. ‘Personal responsibility’ on the roads leads to gridlock. But if every individual driver drives slower via a collective speed limit, everybody drives faster. /1 #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/BaS7RAO6N3
Covid protections, public health measures, are speed limits on the virus. They appear to slow us down individually, but the alternative of personal responsibility leads to virus traffic jams - gridlock, where nobody moves at all, not individually or collectively. /2
I Tweet a lot about how we can’t understand society by opposing individual and collective. Here’s an empirical example of why. Collective and individual freedom are the same freedom, they’re not opposed. The more we act collectively, the more individual freedom we have too. /end
These aren't analogies, they're the same public administration processes. Telling people vaccination against severe disease is all we need for Covid is literally the same as telling them to smash their cars with abandon, because their seat belts will keep them alive.
NSW has had average speed cameras for years, for heavy vehicles. The government refuses to use them for cars. I suspect more libertarian, populist nonsense about freedom. Nothing energises the libertarian project more than cars. https://t.co/l6xK9yF64t
@AdamBandt, @DavidPocock @JacquiLambie hold the balance of power in the Senate. Given both major parties' policy on Covid is to pretend it's over and do nothing, these 3 hold the only hope for Australians tired of compulsory infection. Freedom from infection, there's a slogan.
There’s some bitterness in me that I could have become a senior government adviser on big money just by saying ‘let 500 people die every week’. I thought it might need more training.
People could add the weekly cases and deaths to their profile descriptions, as a way of highlighting what National Cabinet is trying to suppress. They’re hoping there’ll be a bit of attention only once per week. #COVID19Aus
Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/fLO3Hd1z57
With their phones these mourners are converting a collective spectacle into a million different private universes of meaning. The pics will irrigate their preferred social media feeds, providing whatever meanings they and their chosen communities apply to them. /2 https://t.co/DwK9XBoAxg
You’ll see that in every social activity now, even basic tourism. The ‘sights’ transformed into selfies and other pics, to weave into millions of personal narratives. We transform all of our old collective spaces into raw material for these disparate universes of meaning. /3 https://t.co/BLNbTO5RtW
You can see and feel it, the absence of attention to or feeling for the place itself, what’s important is how it will be used to curate an ongoing virtual world of meaning. You could celebrate this as some great explosion of diversity and plurality. /4
I don’t think it’s as benign as that, as much as social media companies might market it in that way. What the exponential growth of social media did was capitalise on the progressive atomisation of society by neoliberal politics. Millions of brutally isolated market…/5
…consumers now had a way to try to re-build some sense of collective space. The rest is history, and is still in the making. We’re in pre-monotheism days again, society is now a fractured pluriverse of personal gods. Competing collective adolescent groupings, tribes. /6
Want to know why we can’t do a basic thing, like try to stop a pandemic? Because there is no ‘we’ now. There are thousands of we’s. We’re more likely to use public health protections as opportunities for selfies, to weaponise our private universes of grievance. /7 https://t.co/gDDxguEO2U
The most unasked question in social science is also the only one that really matters right now. What does ‘we’ mean? The old societies we’re replacing knew, but they’re being pulverised by phones and social media platforms. Who knows what might emerge from it all. /end
Tales from the Covid front lines. 1. RN Breakfast, Jane Halton asked how her review into vaccine procurement is going. Couldn't reveal details, except to give a general sense that we have the '4th lowest death rate' i.e. it seems the whitewashing is on. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
Given our very low death rate was mostly caused by our strong public health action pre-vaccines, it's not clear to me what relevance it has to vaccine procurement, except that it's exactly the same spin the previous government used too to avoid questions. /2
2. Covid cases and deaths are reported today, on the graveyard news day of Friday to suppress interest leading into a weekend. Almost certainly deliberate timing. We could add the cases and deaths to our profiles, so they retain visibility for the full week. /3
3. The RN discussion with Jane Halton and Tony Blakely again spoke of variants and waves as things that happen to us, like we're floating on surfboards waiting for the next set to roll in. No sense (as always) that what we do right now determines whether there will be more.../4
...waves and variants. But now there's no shared public space of sanity, we can have multiple worlds of parallel bullshit running 24 hours per day, which suits the political libertarians just fine. Divide and conquer /end
Added to my profile description. https://t.co/0ToP9UiYxr
The actuaries always know, @KarenCutter4 https://t.co/37TvXFlRQG
Despite all the rhetoric from Premiers and PM about reduction to isolation periods, NSW Health continues to emphasise the importance of 10 days. They try, deaf ears alas in Macquarie Street. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/1BK9aKP0L5
"Undoing 7 years of mortality improvement." https://t.co/UjDUUNtmsS
@arthistorynews there's a doco begging to be made here: https://t.co/tiFWPgEFBa
I think we need to move on to the 'next phase' of a trillion dollars in debt, to just pretending we aren't.
All the rubbish about not being able to afford to take stronger pandemic action. Much more was spent in the last war (this is UK data, but same for Oz), and it led to decades of unprecedented prosperity. Investing in the country does that. https://t.co/n4ent8sqC7
Powerful thread. Experts and politicians who not only allowed but actively promoted infection in entire younger generations, will have questions to answer for many years to come. https://t.co/jfrrtsZ75E
An immune system is like a crumple zone on a car, it can stop you dying, but you don’t smash randomly into every car you see. It’s a last line of defence, after speed limits, driver training, road rules etc. ‘Natural’ healthers think it makes the car stronger with every crash. https://t.co/5BdA0wWlGY
It’s vanity to assume that the progress of a pandemic is based only on the degree of our own immunity. The agency of pathogens is now being recognised. Interestingly Camus’ novel ends with the virus inexplicably easing off. SARS-1 seemed a bit like that. https://t.co/mrLn5RNqpV
“Sky News host Andrew Bolt says independent MP Dr Monique Ryan is “addicted” to the “panic” associated with COVID-19.” Like Alan Jones, Bolt moved to a country retreat to lecture us about Covid bedwetting.
I call Covid minimising experts Lord Haw-Haws. Spouting propaganda in favour of the enemy, Covid. Like Haw-Haw (Joyce) though, often with better media skills than those who haven’t sold their expertise for 30 pieces of silver. https://t.co/S2wimozgF1
All civilisation is only a bulwark against plagues. Plagues dissolve every social construction that ignores this basic fact. They reboot societies. They’re the on/off switch. https://t.co/qTmjtbxKWh
Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular level of empire, now called an economy, the push to total mobilisation. Of everything. /1
You might have a cubicle at work, where you re-breathe everybody else’s air and ‘hot desk’ what little agency, what little place (as opposed to space) you have granted to you. You’re allowed space, provided the economy and your employer defines it. You’re not allowed place. /2
Any attempt to re-ground people in place will be called a ‘lockdown’, and ruthlessly suppressed. A politics that worships individuality will strip every last vestige of yours, because it’s not your individuality it protects. But in doing it, it invites microbes, who respect…/3
…no boundaries, no place. Microbes love symbiosis, the most social of all living things. Societies that abandon the social for the individual invite their own infected destruction. /end
While technology is never simple determinism, gig economy software and also social media software were spawned in the highly libertarian environment of the US. They act as enablers of that social context when introduced in other countries, as we’ve seen. https://t.co/sYXh0hzYI3
Every day on Twitter people desperately try to speak to a public that no longer really exists. It’s platforms like Twitter which helped destroy it. There are multiple publics (plural) now, including on Twitter. All speaking to themselves, echo chambers.
Day after day, this is the elephant in the room. National Cabinet’s entire Covid strategy is ‘get vaccinated’. (We stopped even doing that months ago, and they do nothing to address it.) And the vaccines aren’t good enough to become ‘annual flu shots’. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/nOPvkq6UkC
The irony of the criticism of ‘MSM’ by just about everybody, is that it ceased to exist some time ago. There is no mainstream. It’s a marketing trick to enlist recruits who feel alienated, by anything, to make them think they’re a special cabal. https://t.co/LLTs3fuOaP
In the absence of competent non-corrupt government, today's Covid report. Thousands were infected. Probably between 50-100 people died.
That last sentence is the key. 'Australians' are doing all the work, and government will give some (of our) money. So essentially, government is doing nothing. Also ALP, money just for the 'vulnerable' is pure free market politics. https://t.co/vXOuGcoVag
It could be a tipping point to an ending, or not. Cases are still higher than at many points of the pandemic, and that's with much less testing. Deaths certainly lower. But a pandemic is defined by infections, not deaths. https://t.co/k4YwEBQNc1
Never ask a popularly elected person to run a pandemic response. No matter how decent they are. Serious problems are never fixed with popularity contests. https://t.co/MF3RAr5LmY
It's very common for Covid minimisers to say that letting Covid rip in late-2021 is justifiable because our deaths compared to the rest of the world are still very low. Yeh, nah. A disgrace, the greatest failure of governance in our history. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/JfdjYqMqVp
Central banks raise interest rates because whole societies now run on debt instead of savings. Why don't we save instead? Because we don't earn enough to save. Debt has been the way we've created an illusion of widespread prosperity. https://t.co/oR9dPVr67b
The Chinese delegation were the only people I saw at the Queen’s funeral wearing a mask. Damn those authoritarians and their obsession with Western public health practice. We’ve moved on from all that stuff, now we embrace mass disease and death, for the economy. https://t.co/lyrnbumjrr
More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it was a pivotal moment, for Covid too. /1 https://t.co/nM6kCngVJb
That formality is often seen in our iconoclastic age, since the 1960s in particular, as unnecessary stuffiness that needs to be swept away. As the protector of privilege and oppression. But we’ve been here before, even within these traditions. The idol-smashers. /2 https://t.co/yvTcru2PDT
The iconoclastic urge is always driven by the idea of a more ‘authentic’ existence. That resists tradition and custom as somehow stifling and preventing us accessing a more pure truth of life. But when you step back, all it generally is, is the refusal to engage in anything…/3
…that isn’t the present day. A refusal to see that custom and tradition are the inherited lessons from multiple previous generations, compressed into ritual and symbolism and habit. A refusal to have the discipline to use that as the foundation for new innovations. /4
So the iconoclasts force us to relive all of human civilisation in every generation, Except you can’t, so they really just destroy everything. But this is also where I want to talk about Covid, because the greatest iconoclasts of our day are the worshippers of the Economy. /5
The Economy is humankind’s greatest iconoclastic wrecking ball. It’s a name for a brutal process of continuously stripping all of the agency or self-determination from all things, alive and dead, for continuous mobilisation towards a handful of centres of extreme wealth. /6
It’s the old empire methodology, but re-badged in modern pseudoscientific economic terms. Helped by ideological economists who want us to believe we can replace all of human history with a simple equilibrium-seeking market, which removes the need for any custom, tradition…/7 https://t.co/W8R71CxcLD
…or hierarchy. You can’t get more iconoclastic than that, anything at all can only be an obstruction to this grand ‘invisible hand’ equilibration. And speaking of formality, this is mathematical formalism. The formality of a ceremony like the Queen’s funeral is at least…/8
…based in many centuries of human experience. The mathematical formalism of the market isn’t tempered by any of that. Which is why the economisation of the world can be brutal beyond any historical reference point, because it’s ‘objective’ brutality (they say). But to Covid. /9
Humanity has wrestled with plagues as long as it’s had religions and monarchies. Longer. The Bible is full of mention of them. Why humans also invented traditions and customs to deal with them, from the earliest quarantines through to modern public health procedures. /10
The Economy of course has zero tolerance for anything except mobilisation and accumulation, so public health practice has to go as well. The Economy calls it ‘lockdowns’, revealing very clearly that it sees it as it sees all things, as an obstacle in the way of its single…/11
…obsession. Mobilisation. The movement of people and things, and their accumulation in a small handful of centres of wealth. Which (to the economy folk) looks like their lifestyles ‘locked down’. But to finish, I wanted to tap into the great republican debate as well. /12
We’ve all been infected in some way by this modern iconoclasm, beginning in the free love of the 1960s and bizarrely ending up in a mathematical deity of equilibrium diagrams. The urge to replace a monarchy with a republic is more idol-smashing, the unthinking urge to…/13
…replace the idol with some more ‘authentic’ new. I think we probably should decouple from the British monarchy, but I’m much more concerned about what happens then. Because simply coming up with ‘our own head of state’ to me is not going to do anything except create a…/14
…homegrown King or Queen of some description, minus the moderating custom and tradition that surrounds existing monarchies. As has happened with the American Presidency, in their republic. And this is where living in Australia gives us an opportunity that is unprecedented. /15
Because when it comes to custom and tradition, Australia is world champion, and by such a large margin it’s embarrassing to the rest of the world. Our indigenous population managed something no other culture has, tens of thousands of years of sustainable civilisation. /16
No other culture managed even a tenth of that longevity. We desperately need to understand how our indigenous people did it, and that work is underway, and we can only hope the knowledge is not lost. The push for reconciliation to me is about that more than anything,…/17
…about respecting their culture enough to be in awe at what they did, and to want to know how. To let them lead us for once, because we’re comparative simpletons. Restorative justice, of sorry, but also of ‘um, how did you do that, that’s amazing’. /18
I’ve Tweeted before that our Head of State should be (from what we understand anyway) what it was for those tens of thousands of years already. The land or landscape, both poor words but we have no equivalent for this extraordinarily sophisticated cultural concept. /19
Our indigenous people again need to lead us much more than we need to lead them, the paternalistic way we sometimes think of saying sorry as like a sop to our past sins. Rather than us having the humility to recognise genius beyond any measure we have. The feeling of sacred…/20
…history and tradition in the Queen’s funeral is utterly dwarfed by the land we inhabit, a miracle of all human civilisation. But we’re not equipped to see it. It may also be our only chance of survival, to start that learning. /end
Can't quote-Tweet 2 Tweets at once, so will screenshot it. The decision to bastardise public health to mean only prevention of acute severe disease and death is coming home to roost. Infection is illness. Public illness, not public health. https://t.co/OWVOVnNhpk
Because only sheep wear a mask. https://t.co/xVPRvtFbXA
I'm still trying to figure out how you get a career as a senior public health person, and then say a pandemic is over while infections are off the charts. It's pretty much the entire reason the job exists, to stop infections. Infections are also the definition of a pandemic.
The ALP here and Democrats in the US are using the same Covid strategy i.e. using the same framings to justify doing nothing. For the same political reason. Conservatives fouled the public health well, they created indifference, progressives feel snookered. https://t.co/eSmSfTOIpg
If we don't want a political solution to a health crisis, don't ask politicians to run a pandemic response. Amazing that their eagerness to do it didn't ring immediate alarm bells at the start of the pandemic. They had no intention of fighting it.
Working while sick was already the standard practice in the US before Covid. Many workers have no entitlement to sick leave at all. Pandemics are about politics, not health. https://t.co/fXlrQjCA7N
We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed. /1 https://t.co/euu2c241nO
If you study the history of governance (a passion of mine), something that jumps out at you is that most of what we’re taught about it is a myth. The royal funeral this week was a perfect time to revisit this. The two main myths I think are crucial: /2 https://t.co/MFnhV3Kgas
1. that democracy is the transferring of sovereignty from the monarch to ‘the people’, and 2. that democracy emerged as a replacement of royal power. With 1, the idea that a group of people can have sovereignty is like a left-handed hammer. It’s an impossible object. /3 https://t.co/6eUL4BQKvG
To be sovereign is to have power or control over something. Vesting sovereignty in the same thing you want to have power and control over is bootstrapping, like trying to pick yourself up by your shoelaces. The history helps here. Parliaments were invented by kings. /4 https://t.co/uQqBtLmjTT
Parliaments are the evolution of the old councils kings set up, made up of the nobility and clergy, to advise them. Kings grudgingly did this to keep these powerful people happy, but also more cunningly to make it easier to levy taxes on the people. Once these councils…/5 https://t.co/fUaMNu2R4l
…grew into parliaments, it was parliaments who collected the taxes, for the king. It have legitimacy to the taxes. And this is where point 3 comes in, because it’s a myth the people invented parliaments to depose kings. Kings invented parliaments to extend their control…/6 https://t.co/32ncqr8KX6
…over people. Not just with taxes, but also legislation itself, which kings saw as a tremendous way to extend the scope and detail of their control. Rather than short royal edicts, now they could issue vast lists of detailed rules. /7 https://t.co/Z1t8AGUhiI
Notice even today legislation needs ‘royal assent’, a vestige of the origins of legislation. But to bring this back to the modern day and what it means for our Covid debacle. We can defeat Covid quite easily with public health methods. But I say a lot, public health can’t…/8 https://t.co/OU4jMWzGu5
…exist without a public. Kings and nobles had at least a sense of the need to protect their subjects because they worked their farms and fought their wars for them. Noblesse oblige was a concept that meant the nobility had a mutual obligation to these subjects. Downton Abbey…/9
…serialised the last remnants of that idea in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The entire household, upstairs and downstairs, were the story. But that all changed with the birth of (you probably guessed it) - the ‘economy’. /10 https://t.co/3v0wGVZtId
Now the sovereign became a set of self-equilibrating equations. A ‘free market’, a society stripped of all structure and conceptualised as free-floating individuals. Of course in reality this was nonsense, hierarchies continued to exist and exercise sovereignty. /11
Now those who control the levers of this fictional economy not only get to be sovereign, they can say nobody is, it’s all an ‘objective economic law’. Brilliant spin, ultimate and total power, while pretending nobody is in charge. The important point is, there will *always*…/12
…be a sovereign. It may not be called a king or queen, but sovereignty will be there and cascade down in hierarchies. A republic just changes who sits at the top, and republican presidents end up as emperors, with even more power than kings could have dreamed of. /13
While in the past some sort of noblesse oblige might have given leaders some concern for our health, with the economy as cover they can just use us up and import cheap workers from overseas. As kings did with mercenary soldiers. What we need to fix this is to drop the…/14
…ridiculous idea that electing somebody else will do it. Elections derive from the fallacy of popular sovereignty. We need somebody to look at all this and who sees it as a debacle to take charge, and lead an alternative. With brutal determination, like Walsingham in…/15
…Elizabethan England. Conservatives have their Walsinghams, their play makers and tacticians, who don’t buy any of the power of the people rubbish. It’s why conservatives keep winning, even though they represent a tiny minority. We need to stop good people to stop believing…/16 https://t.co/CO15elS9U1
…all of the democratic myths. Like our current government, deer in the economic headlights, obsessed with showing how pro-business and pro-economy they can be. Doing the conservatives’ work for them, with a compassionate vibe. We need progressives to dump the wishy washy…/17
…group hugs of impossible ‘bottom up’ politics and just be bastards for the good causes. To act as what they are, sovereign powers. /end
One of my favourite modern conservative stupidities is their complaint that ‘rich people pay most of the tax’. That it doesn’t even occur to them that this is because they’re hoarding most of the money.
Consistency, thank goodness, so now if you accidentally hop on a Melbourne tram in Sydney, you won’t be confused about different rules. https://t.co/UI2aQeY9sF
It’s funny to imagine a society without rules, infinitely ‘free’. Not even games would survive. Why do games, an ultimate expression of freedom, to PLAY, still use referees? Why not just let the players officiate themselves? https://t.co/8OkbZ50W7x
A testing scandal! Like not testing thousands of people for Covid every single day. And the ones we are doing mostly have to be paid for by the victims themselves. https://t.co/1PBsOQ1aou
Anecdotally Musk’s Starlink has almost brought tears to the eyes of some people in remote Australia. It’s taken a foreign billionaire to deliver modern telecommunications to the bush. Our governments just want tax cuts. https://t.co/MA89UIS1Sv
A deaths-led recovery. h/t to @KarenCutter4, up in lights! https://t.co/zsoLJVkDRb
See how ‘the economy’ is spoken of in the third person? As if it’s something that ‘runs’ separately to us? Us stopping work is just us stopping work. If it’s ‘costing’ somebody something, that tells you who really owns the economy. Not us. https://t.co/BbnYaCxL3z
“…largely contained in richer parts of the world…”. We live with pathogens we’ve contained (and that’s a full-time job). Not with pathogens out of control. We’re rolling out the poor country model internationally and calling it ‘living with’. https://t.co/PidE7BLVED
The death-and-disease-led-recovery continues apace in the UK. And where they go, we always follow. https://t.co/mmbhm3cbbl
Watching the UK Tories smash their HCWs and wondering why they do nothing? It’s all part of the plan. The LNP also say here that they love Medicare (they despise it and funnel billions to private health insurers to undermine it). The real goal is removal of universal health care. https://t.co/5QguSvaTY5
All societies have a constitution. Older societies we don’t understand did something that was pure genius. They included non-humans in their constitutions. Animals, plants, the landscape more generally. We think they’re being ‘spiritual’. To us all of that is just ‘resources’. https://t.co/jO8EBcQcDu
Sting says his kids don’t ask him for money. Maybe they’re waiting for him to offer, it’s a manners thing. Like many boomers, he plans to spend all of his intergenerational larceny before he goes. https://t.co/8ybWckHyHM
I’m sure the only way we can get on top of these damn variants is to stop sequencing, which we’re halfway towards by cutting back on testing. Charging for PCR tests next year should get us across the line. https://t.co/HQjkPJHYFm
The extraordinary coincidence of every single vaccination metric flatlining in Australia on the feel-good Covid is over boosterism lead-up to the federal election, and not budging since. I wouldn’t let a politician even walk my dog. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/qk1vV9t98v
Looking at those beached whales in Tasmania, and thinking, what sort of idiot species knowingly kills itself en masse? https://t.co/nkSAggUp6P
What are the moral and ethical implications of the West sending advanced weaponry to this war now to kill Russians soldiers who don’t even want to fight it? https://t.co/tZf7eWO1s8
The embarrassing failure of democracies on climate change and now Covid has to force a re-think of the idea that complex societies are best run by popularity contest, which we call elections. It worked while those elected were guided by their institutions. Not now.
Today couples both have to work for financial reasons, even if they don’t want to. That’s 10 person days per household, per week. Reduction to a 4-day week takes that back to 8. Compare with 5 days for a single-earner household, when wages allowed that. Workers still behind. https://t.co/dBx7lgUEW0
Paul Keating used to talk about us desperately clinging to the apron strings of Rule Britannia. Never has it been more obvious than in this pandemic. Asian food keeps our reality cooking shows afloat. We won't bend to masks though. https://t.co/OwKUks5Uuj
Not interested in being drip-fed Covid data by minimising politicians. I'll stick with the cumulative death numbers. Curve still not levelling out. https://t.co/rpRGL9ECQj
In the working from home debates, it might be useful to point out that for the vast majority of human history, working AWAY from home was the exception. I think it helps highlight what's really in play here.
You can read lots of definitions of what the ‘economy’ is. But if you pretend you’re an anthropologist studying another culture, it’s mostly just people driving around everywhere, for no apparent purpose.
Meanwhile in the terminal decline of the UK, feudal barons celebrate the death of a monarch by ransacking the poor even more. With all the problems the UK faces, removing the ban on bonuses to bank bosses was obviously top of everybody’s list of reforms. https://t.co/k7G8tDmgcB
Brett could make “Has Anybody Seen the Pillars?” an agenda item at the next AHPPC. https://t.co/qwB3Y8pt2x
‘Wanting to do the greater good no matter what’. Imagine thinking that was a criticism. https://t.co/npwnqUEUwF
When you use a chronic rather than acute disease lens, it almost reverses who’s ‘vulnerable’ to Covid. https://t.co/EZYgTMRpBC
I saw it in connection with one of @yaneerbaryam’s Tweets, Yaneer do you know the source of the table? It was in relation to the research on telomere length and Covid infection, can find the papers fine, just not the source of this table.
Found it, Yaneer on October 18 last year, I think he may have constructed the table himself but haven’t checked the full thread yet. It was in response to the same paper I’ve included in the thread. https://t.co/OxhGaw8f7X
The obvious response to the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of Covid’, is to say ‘yep, so governments and business need to take personal responsibility and work a lot harder for us’.
h/t to all of those who fought so hard to infect the kids. You must be feeling nothing like the bottom-feeding arseholes people with a brain and a conscience think you are. https://t.co/KZUScLBLW5
h/t @MixtUpMixy
I was touched that the head of the CDC thought this might be too many deaths. https://t.co/IW5wCBKfeU
The ‘far Right’ of politics is always just some new populist wannabe offering even more simplistic solutions than the populist idiots they’re replacing. You can call it ‘fascism’ or ‘capitalism’, adult fairy tales. Populism is the problem, believing popularity solves problems. https://t.co/qdLFZuTXv9
I guess you could say there is international coordinated action on Covid. It’s a global Covid breeding program. https://t.co/OG9I8dGvsq
I think it’s worth repeating that ‘people are tired of Covid’ because people are doing all of the Covid work that governments and businesses are supposed to be doing.
Australian government spending as % of GDP. Politicians say that Covid spending couldn’t go on forever, but why is the choice government spending on public health, or nothing? Businesses are required by WHS law to prevent Covid spread. Where’s their spending? https://t.co/sxajyE24HM
We may never know if Covid hastened the Queen’s demise. Not least because the last prominent regicide in the UK, by Oliver Cromwell, led to his corpse being exhumed, hanged and his already dead head being placed on a spike for the next 30 years. https://t.co/ToYe7eVaqW
John Birmingham points out to pro-nukes conservatives, that the Vogtle plant in Georgia is the only nuclear power plant under construction in the US. It’s years behind schedule, and its initial cost of $21 billion has blown out to $42 billion. https://t.co/cEi2hYk5Q4
I used to think the US would be the place the nonsense of neoliberal/libertarian politics would implode under its own BS. But it has enough power and resources to continue the sleight of hand a bit longer. The UK is the new lab rat. https://t.co/DHb0tTURMk
A great example of the disconnect between the hot air in daily political discourse and realities out on the ground is renewable energy. I’m not sure many Australians realise the utter phenomenon it already is in Australia. The AEMO stats below. https://t.co/z8muMBy0fr
Not once have teachers, the professionals in schooling, been asked about how to manage Covid and schooling. Instead a caravan of patronising and paternalistic government-friendly experts from other fields have consistently spruiked no action. #covid19aus https://t.co/wvLiuVDGEl
This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’ creating ‘bottom-up’ change. /1 https://t.co/4U9Ek3fCsn
Nearly everybody I know believes some version of that ‘the people’ rubbish, trapped inside the libertarian spider web of beliefs that is also woven into the DNA of social media. They seriously feel we can use social media to build social change. McLuhan always got it. /2
‘The medium is the message’. It’s not all that important what content circulates on social media, it’s the nature of the medium itself that creates the actual social change. If you provide widespread access to tools that allow the mobilisation of every belief, completely…/3
…decoupled from existing hierarchies of expertise and authority, don’t be surprised when your society becomes like several million Martin Luthers pinning its list of demands to every institutional door. Protestantism gone viral, a protest society. /4
Public policy is replaced with what’s ‘trending’. Populism metastasizes into an endless series of battles between competing tribes or groups for popular support. Fads and fashions run riot through social organisation, with no settled outcome or link to existing expertise. /5
As I say a lot, it’s society as a giant high school, because this is in fact how high schools have always functioned. Rather than leaving school and being inducted into the older institutions of public life, people now use social media to continue the high school social model…/6
…into adult life. And that’s what we’re living right now, the increasing stuck adolescence of society, incapable of taking on adult problems. /end
The UK is now following us. Labour there faced with outrageous tax cuts to the rich, but refuses to provide any solid resistance. Sound familiar? Says cuts for highest earners are wrong. But, like here, will likely do nothing. Decades of conservative framing terrifies them. https://t.co/1yNQugrDTE
The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity. Libertarians know this, when they call for…/1 https://t.co/Y6vrNfkaks
…individual freedom, they don’t actually believe that exists. They know it will appeal to disaffected people, who will then happily fall in behind (conform) with the leadership offered by libertarians. As a corollary, if we want social change, it’s worse than pointless to../2
…ask individuals to make it happen. They’ll support change if it’s led by somebody they want to conform with. Status. Also how libertarians get working people to support tax cuts, by making it about aspiration, status. ‘You can be rich too’. Why the conservatives use the…/3
…term ‘politics of envy’ to describe attacks on tax cuts to the rich. They know what they’re doing, they want being rich and getting a tax cut to seem like a noble thing, a reward for aspiration and hard work. Paradoxically, politicians who fight for individual freedom know…/4
…best that it’s a fiction, they know societies run with social conformity. So they weaponise it, using freedom spin. Their opponents appeal to a non-existent collective will or justice, they provide no alternative aspiration or status to conform to. So they lose. /5
They offer a condescending view of the working people they say they represent, giving them no agency except ‘being oppressed’ and offering compassionate redress for them. Not aspirational leadership in a different direction. If we want to beat Covid, that has to be pitched…/6
…in aspirational ways. The conservatives undermine public health by offering aspirational ‘freedom’. To oppose them we need public health to be framed as more than ‘helping the poor victims’, it’s patronising. Unions succeeded originally because they offered an aspirational…/7
…image of working peoples’ lives. Now everything is framed as some sort of welfare, helping the oppressed. Again it patronises, describing people only as victims. Defeating Covid should be about giving ordinary people their sense of agency back. /end
Arguing the bleedingly obvious, that we’re in a pandemic and it’s killing millions of people, is the strategy. Like spending decades arguing that climate change isn’t real. It’s delay, not debate. Tying sane and good people in time-wasting knots.
This superb series notes that the English used the same tactics here as they used against the Irish. Identify the leaders, and kill them. As the Koreans did in POW camps as well in WW2. Lessons for Covid here too, change in any direction is always led, by a tiny number of people. https://t.co/h3AP4ozThd
I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas Ridley gave them the world, short 🧵/1 https://t.co/YjcWSVHAiE
That’s Ridley on the far right (heh) of photo. Far right would be a perfect description for Ridley in multiple ways. In 1977 he handed Margaret Thatcher a strategy paper on how to smash unionism in the UK. Ridley had a grievance, his wealthy family had their coal and steel…/2 https://t.co/axb3ISDYbn
…interests nationalised by the Attlee government. He had a burning passion to privatise the UK. Part of his strategy plan was to identify one key major union, and create a faux war with it, allowing the government to move in and smash it, while using that as a pretext for…/3 https://t.co/iscgWDVIcz
…wider assaults on unionism and collective worker movements. It worked spectacularly well, people may remember the near-warfare that erupted in the battle with coal miners. The union movement in the UK never recovered from the sweeping decimation Thatcher then launched. /4 https://t.co/Ctvt2HQgfQ
Unions are the way the political interests of ordinary people are organised. Anger without organisation = protest, and nothing more. Which is us now, with social media helping to fracture the anger into multiple non-communicating tribes, while Thatcher’s heirs quaff the Moët. /5
The important point here is, the Tories are smart and know how to organise. They know that’s the route to power. The evils we’re seeing around us now are mostly of their making, but they’re also the result of the refusal of the Tory’s opponents to organise strategically. /6
Good people lack mongrel and strategic nous. They’d rather noble speeches and statements. We need a war room for the good people, to strategise how to fight the Tories and keep them to heel. That’s the ‘balance’ society needs right now. /7
And as I’ve Tweeted before, we actually have a fast and simple way to do that. Everybody should join a union. It doesn’t matter if they like unions or not or even if they want the union to do anything directly for them. Powering up the unions reverses the Ridley Plan. /8
The focus of the Ridley Plan and the Thatcher revolution was to destroy unions. They knew organised opposition was their true enemy. They’re telling us exactly what to do. Nothing has changed, our own LNP still despise unions with passion. They’re telling us how to beat them. 9/9
The magnitude of how screwed we likely are with climate change. The amount of heat that's accumulated in the oceans in the past decade is the equivalent of exploding 5 Hiroshima bombs in the water every SECOND, every day since 1990.
The poor are still voting for the rich. Tories win the poor by targeting their desire, not to be poor. The poor hate being poor, they feel more shame than pride. And public health action reinforces their sense of powerlessness, if described as saving them. The Tories know this. https://t.co/ByZJyZKOVC
We elect populists and actually let them run things. They say Covid is over. They also say their hospitals are collapsing under the weight of public illness. In the SAME meetings. Time to appoint administrators and get rid of elections. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/8i6stmyYw6
"If people are unwell, they should stay home. But if they're not unwell, they should be able to live their lives." (Health Services Union) This is quite the advance in diagnostic medicine. Replacing all imaging, tests and medicine in general with how a person feels. #covid19aus
Surely, by Covid minimising logic, these screening programs are entirely pointless? If you feel well, you are well. I had a friend who died of bowel cancer. He felt fine, until he didn’t. Then he quickly died. https://t.co/RPCTj2g0sa
I like the laws already there too, which say employers will need to make sure you’re not catching Covid at work. The ones nobody reads or enforces. https://t.co/yVrub9ibeD
What is the actual point of elections, for democracy now? Most of our big problems have known and agreed solutions in the expert community. All elected twits do is intercept the money for the required actions, and use it to fund ideological obsessions and their own re-election.
Plagues and wars are about the only things that have ever re-balanced inequality in history. Why vested interests today are so determined to not let us fight Covid. https://t.co/1YeX1YJS83
@YouAreLobbyLud the deepest layer of resistance to fighting Covid is in here.
"Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem." We're now 'electoral fundamentalists'. It's the popular, usually stupid kids from school who love electoral democracy, because it reproduces the way they dominated the bullying hierarchies of school. https://t.co/GVAykDKA4r
Making the denominator zero is consistency. It leads to infinite Covid (for those who skipped maths for a political career). https://t.co/OVhEvHnjxh
Public health as a discipline and practice was invented well before universal voting. It wasn’t a ‘democratic’ invention. It was what we’d now call the top end of town responding to the physical reality of mass disease. Voting (populism) is now destroying it. https://t.co/4hjLiy9oKG
Populism is so insidiously successful. If you ask people what democracy is, I bet most will come back with a definition of voting. Populists have seduced people into believing they’re the same thing. But would we elect juries? Of course not. So why do we elect leaders? https://t.co/rquKxDLmxI
The same genius ideologues who privatised generation here then blocked a transition to renewables for decades. Now nothing to stop these mostly foreign-owned generators from shutting down their stranded fossil assets, with zero care for our transition. https://t.co/Fh84P4zGE5
They’ll do it and get away with it, because we have ace political reporters like ‘Shirvo’ on the job to hold them to account. https://t.co/Y9SzDyDVlG
The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that close group dynamic. /1 #auspol #covid19aus
Say the NSW Premier floats the ‘let’s just infect them all’ idea at NC repeatedly, as he does, and they don’t respond? It destroys the group dynamic, it’s like farting in an elevator. Conformity is the DNA of groups. Again, this is why our previous PM looked at the federalist…/2
…distributed public health structures we have in Australia, with each State able to respond to its own specific context, and wondered how he could destroy it to head off damage to his economy? By taking the leader of each federalist State and putting them all in a small…/3
…group, to create that pressure cooker peer pressure environment, and sever them from their public health teams and processes. Played like puppets, and now Albo haplessly just keeps the charade rolling. /end
The perfect example of how elections were the best thing ever invented for the worst people in the world, to take charge of every nation. Nothing is easier to manipulate than popularity. https://t.co/CesDptOuKm via @ABCaustralia
From the home of 'personal responsibility' public health, and also of zero Covid isolation. National Cabinet could use this empirical evidence to guide decision making, but then they have no agenda papers, because they have no agendas. Just selfies. https://t.co/zGUPOiqhUw
My mask is my 'just like leadership' response to 'just like the flu' politicians.
More people died this week than last in NSW. Must be time to relax all restrictions. https://t.co/LCp0JM9ItR
You may think they paused proceedings to take this group selfie. This is the proceedings. The health advice will be in those folders nobody will open. https://t.co/rXnb5gfI3N
This is the NSW control guideline for whooping cough. Also a vaccine-preventable disease. This and the influenza control guidelines both recommend isolation of the infected. How much of the State's public health system does the Premier want to destroy before losing the election? https://t.co/gkVh5rJOP9
The LNP must be wondering who won the last election. A disgraceful stain on public administration that will never be forgiven. The ALP will never get another vote from me. https://t.co/MPvK6bENk0
The thing politicians fear most is being totally ignored. The ALP flicked the switch to irrelevance today, for me anyway. This is also what all election-democracy will always produce. Time to select leaders by sortition, as we do for juries. Remove all popularity from politics.
We are of course not 'treating Covid like any other virus'. It's just lies, propaganda, unquestioned by a lazy and house-trained journalism pack. https://t.co/olvfG0OU2h
The anger we feel about politicians doing nothing about Covid is the anger the most disadvantaged in society have felt about all politics, for years. Nobody helps them. Now debt is no longer cheap, the illusion of democratic shared power and wealth is dissolving.
The CMO said today we need to stop treating Covid as an ‘exceptional’ infectious disease. Which other infectious disease killed 252 people in Australia this week, and infected 40,000? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/HQMzGANsZ9
@theprojecttv if not now, when? When the virus isn’t spreading throughout the whole community. You send the firefighters home when the fire is out. Grow a brain.
Another repeated line from the PM today is that an emergency response can’t go on forever. A leader would end the emergency. Ours chose to end the response.
The UK is in a death spiral, created by politicians whose entire lives from their student days has been devoted to sterile debates about fanatical, hardened ideas. The type of ideas teenagers have, which is what they still are, not tempered by any real life experience. /1 https://t.co/5cU6JuF28K
Have a look at leaders of the Young Liberals over the past 60 years. Recognise many names? I’m sure the ALP isn’t dissimilar. What gets called ideology is really just teenagers in grown up clothes. Right now it’s killing millions. Electoral…/2 https://t.co/IH6FIKc4df
…politics lets people like this run countries. It’s the only way they could ever achieve power, we don’t elect people to run companies or do surgery. But teenagers know about popularity, it’s their whole world. It’s now ours, voting freezes society in permanent adolescence. 3/3
Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a class using…/1 https://t.co/RPSloaAazM
…popularity as the basis of what you do. It’s laughable. And yet for the most important jobs in the land, it’s everything. Like many I was disgusted with the next Albo capitulation yesterday to letting Covid rip. But ultimately popularity-based politics, populism, elections,…/2
…will always lead you here. Currying favour becomes the entire system, not just the corrupt part. A singular obsession with being liked, whether by voters or donors or the media. As I often say, society is now a giant high school, because we all remember the economy of…/3
…being liked that drives high schools. Social media, the adult infrastructure of high school, even explicitly runs on the economy of ‘likes’. I really don’t think people see how deeply populism infects everything. Get rid of elections and all of this goes away. /end
The introduction of germ theory shifted the entire basis of public health away from collective engineering works, and towards individual medicine and pharmacology. That suited political individualism just fine. We’d be much healthier going back to the engineers. https://t.co/EdLeb80DGA
Forcing territorial leaders into a room to create a faux consensus violates nearly all of the principles of federalism (our system). It’s populism destroying federalism. Albo’s dream of being Bob Hawke forgets Hawke didn’t build consensus by agreeing with his opponents. https://t.co/zHdSdcliu8
“Allen Cheng…said if mandatory isolation laws were lifted, the onus would fall on workplaces to enforce their own rules about when employees should come back to work and whether testing is mandatory.” There’s been no evidence of legal WHS enforcement to date with Covid. /1
Employers are required by law to protect workers from threats like Covid, I see little evidence in workplaces of anything much more than sanitiser bottles, some of which sit empty and unused. Business applauded yesterday’s shift, I doubt very much there’ll be an escalation…/2
…of effort on their part. Nor of any enhanced enforcement of WHS requirements by authorities. Why even bother with WHS? It’s become meaningless when this lethal threat is as good as ignored. Most unions silent on it too. /end
We need to be accurate. Yesterday isolation requirements were not removed. They were shifted to workplaces to implement. That’s a profoundly different thing to them being removed. That not one public story makes the distinction shows how housetrained we are by business. #auspol