November 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
The big slaughter over summer for the federal election is easily beaten by the mass slaughter for the Vic and NSW elections. Daily average deaths now still over twice what they were at Christmas. #covid19aus https://t.co/LwSXOsueZx
3 people close to me this week have had serious medical episodes. Previously healthy people. All have had Covid recently. Am guessing there’ll be no way to prove a connection unless somebody looks hard. And who’s going to do that?
People on Twitter saying that ‘in November 2022’ Covid is no longer dangerous. Like the passage of time somehow has made Covid inert. Another variant of ‘living with the virus’, that if you live with it a bit longer, eventually it’ll be your friend.
We now know you can’t vote your way out of a pandemic. Just as we haven’t been able to vote our way out of climate change. Voting serves only politicians, not societies. If you have to try to make something popular to get it done, nothing hard or unpalatable will ever be done. https://t.co/LRzYQsD7qR
New ‘living with gambling’ changes, where personal responsibility will fail, again. Populist politicians captured by our big industries, desperate for donations to fund more elections, to achieve…winning more elections. https://t.co/lqT9mli4Hz
The previous CHO was made Governor, likely to shut her up and smooth the way for Queensland ‘consistency’ with the National Cabinet approach to Covid i.e. do nothing. Premiers in 2022, heroes to zeroes. Tamed by the Morrison Groupthink Committee. https://t.co/thEQPdCdnd
By #ZeroCovid I mean elimination of wide community spread. In the West we have a God complex where we assume reality will be what we choose it to be. #ZeroCovid is not a choice to make, it’s likely the only way our societies can survive.
It makes as much sense to say we can choose to live with Covid as to say we can choose to live with runaway climate change. Existential realities care diddly squat about what we prefer.
'Mainstream media' is a myth invented by cookers of all forms to act as their strawman bad guy. In reality things are more dire than that, the mainstream disappeared with the 'public'. Society is fragmented into multiple universes. Many of these universes are completely insane. https://t.co/rY3XVnZsot
Useful idiots are in turn followed by thousands or even millions of useless idiots. Many of them resident on social media, which is an idiot amplifier. It even makes idiots into leaders of the free world. https://t.co/8iWCDLVXvW
I'm sure the US and allies want to defend Taiwan because they like them. But I'm also sure the fact they make most of the world's semiconductors is right at the top of their list of concerns. As @EdConwaySky is saying, look at the material realities underneath our politics. https://t.co/tSsJBbuOro
Described as 'bipartisan' politics at the time, what it really shows is that both men have an election coming up. Elections were once a (poor) means to an end, now they're an end in themselves. Pollies get elected so they can get re-elected./1 https://t.co/3fd7goUgvi
They'll do anything, including ignoring a pandemic, provided they think it's a path to electoral victory. So why bother, if the whole purpose of winning elections has become just to win more elections? Regulatory capture. /2
The vested interests who own modern politicians provide the actual agendas to be implemented. Elections are their way in, through donations to compliant pollies. Win-win, the pollies get to be famous and run continuous polling and electioneering, the vested interests get to.../3
...write public policy. Again, elections is all that makes any of this charade possible. Get rid of them as an easily gamed access route to the parliament and treasury, and democracy might have a fighting chance. And we might actually fight Covid. 4/4
As with the shift to independents in politics, I'm less convinced this is people getting smarter. And more the ongoing collapse of all shared, public spaces/events. https://t.co/MONquxv83r
With the ban of single-use plastics, an entrepreneur might start making a lot more of these. https://t.co/CSB7PgzXJZ
I'm an unalloyed supporter of vaccination. But given we used them to turn a public health approach into a medical one, and not in conjunction with a strategy to suppress infection, the public health outcomes would probably have been better if no vaccines had been developed.
The Australian community has been smashing the rest of the world in energy transition to renewables. Our current crisis is entirely due to elected fools providing no infrastructure to use this tsunami of renewable energy. Elections are the problem. https://t.co/MqkrlcfRt1
The more followers a person has on social media, the less likely they are to be able to engage in conversation with them. These platforms show the fallacy they promote, that democracy functions by wide discussion among ‘the people’. Hierarchies always reassert themselves.
On evolutionary or moral or any other terms, what is the ultimate point or purpose of all life if it isn't to protect the next generation? Eating out and travelling and cash-flow are our new Gods? https://t.co/boeZgybSfu
Premiers, Prime Ministers and CHOs who declare this the 'next phase of the pandemic' need to explain what else that means apart from 'the phase where thousands of people die'. https://t.co/akdzqwS2Dk
The ridiculous process of raising the price of money, to lower the price of the things we buy with money, doesn’t even register as absurd. Instead of price controls on business, let’s impoverish their customers to force businesses to lower prices. https://t.co/jOJczIMYMH
The half-dozen people I know personally who’ve had unexplainable life-threatening medical episodes this week are still on the brink. Every day of their confused terror and their families’ suffering, I think of this photo. These grinning populist excuses for leadership. https://t.co/og73OMOnML
The Brits now copying our immigration strategy. What charming ex-imperial powers we are, shunting the poor off to other poor countries, while deliberately infecting all our own people because we can replace them with workers from these same poor countries. https://t.co/8Cko2RuarE
Cases and deaths both up. https://t.co/btPEhzyfE6
Ah the modern LNP. Getting the government out of (rich peoples') lives. https://t.co/KGtWQylMB2
To a rank amateur like me, that last question in particular seems like a BOOM. I'm sure some failed economist will correct my public health naivety. https://t.co/mbvXZ1Xgoq
The explosion of cybercrime. The IT industry is built around a set of libertarian free-market beliefs. (As with all libertarian things, it's rank hypocrisy, the big IT firms are behemoths.) A dislike of regulation as always sends society spinning rapidly down the toilet. https://t.co/6eAT506otJ
For his fine work ending the pandemic. https://t.co/xpWe4ZbjcU
The 'next phase of the pandemic' I mistakenly said yesterday was just the phase where thousands of people died. It is that, but also the phase where the system collapses. https://t.co/tHw6TAMdvJ
The reason much of the public hasn't realised society is collapsing, is that they never had much responsibility for running any of it. That's what a representative system is, you elect representatives to run society. When they in turn don't, the whole thing collapses.
And as David says, how do they do it? They rig elections. None of the Trumpian rubbish about rigged elections, this is in plain sight, with gerrymandering. Elections are the way vested interests destroy democracy. https://t.co/CglBJgtFBe
All of populist, election-based politics is theatre. Politicians don’t run the country, officials do, so it’s all a show. Not only are they only the tiniest veneer of what happens in government, government itself represents just a tiny fraction of what happens in society. https://t.co/F8jfjQOrfa
This next phase of the pandemic feels a lot like every other phase of the pandemic. https://t.co/Qq7qCtKKX1
Again, this ‘next phase of the pandemic’ CHOs and National Cabinet talk about - is this in the fine print somewhere? https://t.co/EdM2ADYeG8
How many years did politics deny climate change? It’s surprising that we’ve been so amazed that the same politicians decided to ignore Covid. And that we didn’t notice them encouraging debates over ‘the science’, in the same way. To stall and deflect.
The comparisons I’ve seen try to redress HIV/AIDS denialism by suggesting the same minimisation at early stages of knowledge of the pathogen. In a ‘let’s not make that mistake again’ way. And both viruses seem to target similar parts of the immune system. https://t.co/iGl8Z2NkAl
The reason universities are offering so many early-entry places is because they see it as a way of getting enrolments. Neoliberal governments trained them to compete for customers. It has nothing to do with the tosh in here about education at all. https://t.co/neQr2FYspf
I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate on TV right now) do we seem to be constantly in political impasses, such as at the UN? /1 https://t.co/EdhcVG1oVg
Pretty simple. Because the leaders of our nations are competing populist tribes, like gangs in high school. What they say and do has almost no relationship with the operational reality of the world, it’s the tiniest veneer draped over the top of it, suffocating it like cling…/2 https://t.co/tYwJUnPnDO
…wrap held over a person’s face. The monumental technological and social complexity of the world has almost no connection with these populist representatives at all. But because we have a fundamentalist faith in election-based politics, which makes popularity the route…/3 https://t.co/XVVcy233v8
…to power, all of that extraordinary complexity is beholden to these tinpot popularity gods, shuffled and changed every handful of years, tearing the complex fabric of actual life asunder as they beat their ideological drums to stir up their gangs. /4 https://t.co/7HQ5SGdqYw
This isn’t a plea for ‘technocracy’ either, that’s an idea the populists invented to make it seem like they’re essential to us. The enormous social and technological complexity of life isn’t just an experts thing, it’s our actual lives, run by billions of people in their…/5
…daily work. Nearly all of that work knows what needs doing. But it has to negotiate these popularity orgies we call elections and polling, to get anything done, with all key decisions re-routed through the popularity gods. As I’ve also Tweeted about, anthropologically…./6 https://t.co/BFG220Oe0t
…(not just by analogy), this is because we rolled out the cultural model of high schools to all of adult life too. The popularity pollies are the influencers and bullies from school, now able to ply their trade in adult life. The perception we have that the world is falling…/7 https://t.co/l1OFfr1BUB
…apart is true, but at the same time the actual problem is just that tiniest veneer of cling wrap suffocating the complexity of our lives with ridiculous popularity politics. Get rid of that and most problems will sort themselves in very quick time. Get rid of elections. /8
And don’t be fooled that this would be the end of democracy. That’s populist propaganda again. There are many ways to replace elections, to involve people in decisions more directly than the mono-dimensional popularity festivals we have now. /end
I dunno, I feel the collective attention span is about 5 seconds. It doesn’t seem along ago we were all pointing out that social media being free meant ‘we were the product’. Subscription-based social media wouldn’t solve all problems, but in principle it’s not a bad start. /1
Look at the ‘golden age’ of television subscription services brought to us, and how absolutely dire the remnant free-to-air offerings are, all ludicrous reality shows saturated with product placement. The shows on paid subscription services are some of the finest…/2
…television ever made, surely? Social media as free, anonymous free-for-all is trashing societies, and anything that tries to connect it back to ordinary lives, including by asking you to commit your own money to what you do, might help. I’m all for anonymity, it protects…/3
…some, as well as enabling trolls and bots. But verification needn’t be the removal of anonymity, for those who want or need it. We all sign up to things with verification without releasing those details into the public domain. Just needs management. 4/4
The LNP’s ‘just pick up the phone to the gas companies’ is one of the most hilariously open admissions that your donors own you I’ve ever seen. #insiders
Voting is against democracy. Many Americans won’t vote, even if they want to, because the election is a work day. Generally only about 60% bother anyway. The winners always claim this gives them a ‘mandate’ from the ‘will of the people’. Elections are a con. https://t.co/iMMkRikMqd
We didn’t get rid of lockdowns. We privatised them. https://t.co/iyHIFPZ5P7
The ABC could mean ‘will be returning after Covid-19’. But sadly they mean that Covid-19 is already over. Difficult to see these kids reaching the same age as the elderly folk they’re buddying with here, with several Covid infections each every year. #covid19aus https://t.co/Th8QzMfwpV
Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a meaningful way. /1 https://t.co/Y4LKAbKvlB
WW2 did this, and between 1945 and the late-1970s, the previously wealthy licked their wounds after staggering war losses, patiently re-building their wealth or giving way to others. That process was complete by the late-1970s, which is when neoliberalism was born. /2
As I’ve also Tweeted about, neoliberalism was really just the wealthy using modern language and concepts to restore their position lost during the last Great War. Economics gave them cover with ridiculous fantasies of societies as free markets run by equilibrium equations. /3
The whole point of free market equilibrium economics is to rationalise the status quo, by saying everything that happens is a natural emerging evolution, and the ‘invisible hand’ of market equilibrium removes the need for any regulation or politics. Utter self-serving tosh,…/4
…but we swallowed it hook, line and sinker. Society became an ‘economy’, a fictitious construct capturing this free-market equilibrium fantasy. And again, all it really means is we returned to feudal serfdom, dressed in modern economic jargon. There are only two ways…/5
…I differ from Cory and others on what this all means. One, populism, which Cory rightly says is ordinary working people resisting their serfdom. It is that, but the problem is that populism is also a tool of the same wealthy elites. They invented it to weaponise this…/6
…dissatisfaction. To turn the anger at being screwed back against the people being screwed, by giving them fake enemies (academics, ‘MSM’ etc.) to attach their anger to, to divert it from the actual elites screwing them (the wealthy). And secondly, I disagree that real…/7
…progress in history would be a permanent levelling of hierarchy. Hierarchy itself is not a bad thing, it’s the unavoidable outcome of there always being a a gradient between bad and good, a gradient of quality, in all things. Between truth and fiction too. /8
That’s what we all work for, to aim for the ‘better’, in whatever we do. The problem is when it’s distorted to become a hierarchy of material well-being. People will always want to be led and have somebody to look up to, in every sphere if life. If you’re a guitar player, you…/9
..idolise great guitar players, there’s a fully visible hierarchy of them. None of that is elitist. But impoverishing 99% of all guitar players so they can’t afford to eat while 1% order superyachts is bad. Distribution of the wealth of society, that’s the key. /10
Preventing any of the natural hierarchies of quality in life and work taking that one extra step and demanding extra shares of wealth for their work. There may be an argument that royalty is an exception, that historically having the riches of royalty on magnificent display…/11
…acted as a circuit-breaker to widespread avarice, by displacing it to be about ‘noble’ wealth rather than social comparative/status wealth. Remembering that monarchical systems are usually accompanied by complex systems of ‘noblesse oblige’, requiring those with wealth…/12
…and status to perform an ongoing social responsibility role of care for others, in their employment and otherwise. All of that was stripped away by free-market ideas, which made all working people interchangeable work units for whom the wealthy employers and owners…/13
…had no responsibility at all. And we’ve discovered with Covid, that has meant a ‘globalised’ return of serfdom, for both developed and developing worlds. If we all get infected too many times and die or become unable to work, they can always import more serfs from overseas. /14
This is why neoliberalism is a true death cult. The wealthy recaptured control of society, and at at the same time removed any obligation they think they have to anybody except themselves. That was never what the old regal societies did, even in their worst versions. /15
This current plague tried to upend the status hierarchies in the same way WW2 did. We’ve seen how quickly and brutally the wealthy elites fought back against that, trying to implement a mass, global ‘live with the virus’ campaign. It’s complete nonsense of course. /16
We’re now living in the slow (or even rapid) collision between that nonsense and the virus’ ongoing takeover of our societies. Reality won’t be fooled. /end
Always follow the money. The International Energy Agency predicts a doubling of net income for oil and gas producers in 2022, to US$4 trillion. Any guess who’s funding the ‘live with the virus’ and anti-climate propaganda with their loose change?
As this mechanism continues to be elaborated, the outcome will determine whether Covid minimisers have committed public health crimes due to a staggering lack of caution. https://t.co/bgoTMc8sVt
Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science. And all of our ordinary comforts…/1 https://t.co/jJqawWwdi2
…of life like clean running water, transport, heating and cooling, shelter, travel, energy, telecommunications etc. is…engineers. To put this in perspective, the total weight of built things humans have added to the planet in history is about 1.1 trillion tons. /2 https://t.co/GHqWUKtRQ1
That’s greater than the weight of all living things on the planet. And we’re still adding 30 billion more tons of built things every year. Who’s doing a lot if not most of that adding? Engineers. It’s the defining thing about humanity, which the Romans knew very well. /3 https://t.co/QFB1bffZtm
You could say democracy makes all of this engineering possible, but I think this is a chicken and egg question that has an answer. Human groups never agree on anything for very long. But when you embed agreement in stone and metal and machines, you bind people together. /4
This is what the late and very great Bruno Latour tried to explain for his entire career. Engineering isn’t ‘technical’ or ‘just a tool’. It weaves societies together, building and maintaining something is an intrinsically contractual process. You commit people today…/5 https://t.co/KgdeYzZLq8
…and into the future to the upkeep of the things you build, in a way they wouldn’t commit to any argument or debating point. One way to see that is to watch films and TV from around the world. While the customs and language and culture may vary widely, what rarely does is…/6
…the material built environment you see people living in. The engineering. It all looks very similar. That’s the engineering, the literal bedrock of all civilisation. I’ve Tweeted before that the fastest way to end this pandemic would be to ask engineers to do it. /7
They know how, they’ve stopped pandemics before. Get rid of populist grandstanding politicians and medical professionals curating public identities, and just put the engineers to work. They’ll fix it for you, and fast. /end https://t.co/2aJBdROLUe
It all helps. But it still seems ridiculous that with all of our lauded expertise and knowledge, ‘let everybody get infected’ is still the best baseline we can come up with. Need to decouple that expertise and knowledge from the electoral process, from populist politics. https://t.co/88NfqQaAO2
The idea that countries implement a ‘system of government’, like democracy or socialism, to me attributes amusing levels of coordination to human groups that simply doesn’t exist. All countries are a mixture of all sorts of things. There are no systems.
Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health, energy etc. /1
That’s what the ‘cost of living crisis’ is. Shifting the economies of scale of public services, to individuals. This is important, the false binary of Covid action or freedom is really action done with the economies of scale of government and business, versus action funded by…/2
…individuals, out of our own pockets. We’re not living with the virus, we’re still fighting the pandemic, because you can’t not fight a pandemic, societies collapse. We’re making individuals do and fund all of the fighting. That’s the political belief system driving our…/3
…pandemic response, to ‘get government out of peoples’ lives’. They don’t even hide it. The entire pandemic to them is seen as a threat to their political belief system, they have zero interest in any of the science. /end
Politicians who say they 'follow the science' frame the terms of reference well before any work is done. That way they only hear what they've already decided they want to hear. National Cabinet has been doing this for the entire pandemic. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/k3TO4B8uBS
Isn't it funny that we need to 'take sensible precautions' to live with Covid? Like it's dangerous, or something. Who knew. https://t.co/ArromFV9p4
If we're trying to hold off next shots until next winter, 'just like the flu', can we hold off Covid infections until then too, just like the flu? Asking for a friend with only half a brain. https://t.co/sSTInieRWS
'Rich hybrid immunity' is the same as 'rich creamery butter', only less tasty. Subliminal spin. A virus that infects T-cells and immunity are non-intersecting sets. https://t.co/RpuGVzlFzI
Kelly says: "contribute to our collective effort to slow the spread of the virus". We're suppressing transmission now, collectively? I thought the strategy was mass infection to create 'rich hybrid immunity'? Serious question, this is a significant distinction. #covid19aus https://t.co/aC3B60T2W3
“Infecting an entire generation is irresponsible. We don’t yet know what this infection does to children’s immune systems when it occurs repeatedly.” Karl Lauterbach, Minister for Health, Germany. https://t.co/PVGmxgeg8c
This is what an actual health minister says. Why Germany is what we call an advanced economy, and Australia is a big quarry with kickbacks at the gate for local casual staff. https://t.co/BQOxcAr3Lx
Contrasting German and Australian Covid leadership. https://t.co/SmHPTa21va
Time to get the risk matrix out again. ‘Infecting all kids cripples our future’, as an example. Minimisers always talk about likelihood. They never talk about impact. Even at unlikely or very unlikely, impact would be severe. So risk is at least medium. We’re managing it as low. https://t.co/lf34dBzCjM
One of the most frustrating things in this pandemic is arguing to prevent widespread infection, because of the catastrophic effects it has on peoples’ lives. And realising the people opposing you are literally just trying to win debating points.
We need to learn from decades of strategic stalling on climate change, by arguing ‘the science’. I don’t even argue the science of Covid, it’s so patently obvious that infecting everybody repeatedly with a pathogenic virus is idiotic. Attack the political beliefs. https://t.co/4OsztEeqBD
The problem isn’t that the Gregs of the world don’t understand. It’s that elections give the Trumps of the world a mechanism to mobilise the Gregs, to take control of societies. https://t.co/TgfBp9iQ62
Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as a window to the real answer. /1 (source: https://t.co/7yfLBvAsGo) https://t.co/VV1t5tJpc6
US data, but not dissimilar to anywhere in the developed world. Since WW2, a huge shift in labour from actually building things, towards providing services. 'To go into service' used to mean being a servant. I don't think we connect a 'services economy' with servitude. /2 https://t.co/jKNtLUAG7x
But we should, it's just a modernised terminology for the same process. Some of this is us getting more efficient at production and manufacturing, because of technology. But much more it's about trying to redress falling profit margins after the enormous boom in consumer.../3 https://t.co/RqKcCef2nm
...demand after WW2 was satisfied. All those washing machines, cars etc. Which massive war industrial capacity re-tooled to provide, after the fighting was over. As @doctorow says, rather than settle into a stable just-enough profit with a good share to workers arrangement.../4 https://t.co/6cbLT9FHS3
...at that point, instead the West chose to utilise the ridiculously cheap labour and resources of the developing world, to keep churning out consumer goodies, but with rock-bottom wages and costs, to maintain profit margins. /5 https://t.co/TYfJPXVd9q
In the meantime Western consumers managed this loss of income and jobs by taking on massive personal debt. That's what's maintained the illusion of prosperity, while in fact most of the workforce transitioned back 'into service'. /6 https://t.co/nNcrbvuseB
The important point about this shift for me isn't the victory of 'neoliberalism' or 'capitalism'. It's the gutting of manufacturing, of building actual stuff. The glue that binds all societies, longer-term. Not parliament or elections. Building stuff. /7
Building stuff unifies societies because it commits them to the expertise and labour of designing, manufacturing and maintaining it. It gives agency to the workers who build the stuff, their expertise is a vocation. They're not just in service. /8 https://t.co/rJk1NTitBw
It's this vast group of skilled tradespeople, with their jobs long-since off-shored, whose loss of agency is being mobilised by populist demagogues. Their anger and lack of purpose if re-directed towards various scapegoats, like migrant workers, or academics. /9
Nothing shows more clearly the engineering root of social stability than this modern mobilisation by neoliberal populists of the previous 'working class' to causes that screw them even more. You can call it a 'shift to the Right', or capitalism, or whatever. /10
But practically, we just stopped building stuff. That's why our democracies are now failing, and why the cost of living is soaring. We're societies who can't sustain ourselves, we use speculative financial instruments to create an ongoing illusion of prosperity. /11
But we're ageing fast, can't produce most of what we need ourselves, and even have the gall to make the poorer countries who do make all of that stuff for us the targets of our xenophobic political slogans. The only thing that has ever maintained social stability.../12
...over historical lengths of time in societies is building things. Building stuff is the critical social activity that binds us to each other, not just the technical provision of goods. It gives the people who build stuff their central social role, and the income and.../13
...more importantly bargaining power that maintains their status. I don't think it's widely seen how engineering or building stuff is much, much more than just making widgets. As the Romans knew, it's the centre of any lasting civilisation. /end
Thanks to Victoria and @dbRaevn we still have a view of the new normal. Which is just the old normal, plus mass disease and death. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/eobbztfcV6
If you don't follow @KarenCutter4, you really should. Actuaries cut through the noise and spin surrounding the data. https://t.co/SZKkht8uji
I missed this one at the time. Ah well, at least they didn't miss any school, which would have caused a lot more mental health damage. /s https://t.co/SLEM78Pjtm
Has anybody been able to access 3M 9210 Auras in Australia? With the braided elastic? https://t.co/viELfX2rTd
Yep. But they won’t, because the engine room of society is conformity. They need leadership to provide pubic health action to conform with. Otherwise they’ll just conform with what everybody else is doing i.e. nothing. https://t.co/vlZwmXKtid
Today I’ve had close friends send me two lots of climate-minimising rubbish, both sourced from YouTube. Social media platforms are engine rooms of social destruction, despite the positives they also have. They must be strongly regulated, if we want our societies to survive.
A university. And a ‘Trust & Safety Council’. Society entrusted stewardship of knowledge to universities more than 1000 years ago. Institutions. Social media employing well-meaning people with pretty lanyards is no substitute. This is the true battleground for democracy. https://t.co/SaAOnrm7LU
Victoria, then Queensland, now NSW. It’s like a State of Origin of stupid. https://t.co/8FYh2ZI2yu
I still think it’s vital to say viruses never go viral.
Another backwards thing. The idea that school should prepare us for life. But the point of education is to change life. To shift the status quo. Education should shape business, not business shape education. https://t.co/LMM08seOXi
Thankfully we got all the kids back to school to get infected, otherwise their education would have been left behind. https://t.co/rrX1wymEgU
Because we listened to busybody, politically-motivated health experts about what to do in schools and not to people in schools themselves, this is where we’ve ended up. https://t.co/ibk9kt7vjs
You won’t find a clearer example of society being replaced with an economy, than the determination of central bankers and politicians to inflict financial armageddon on average people to tame inflation, but total casual indifference to mass infection. https://t.co/i4jqAplILx
More rich hybrid morbidity. A family member battling multiple opportunistic infections, which doctor says suggests they’re immunocompromised (they weren’t prior to their 2 Covid infections). A friend in hospital today to have exploratory surgery on ‘mysterious’ lung inflammation.
Big jump in hospitalisations, ICU and also almost doubling of PCR positives. How many more cycles of burning off the dry tinder do we need to reach rich hybrid immunity? https://t.co/6CuU5xw0Rw
When the actuaries say 'Faaark', it's bad. https://t.co/xOwN4pOZjU
Have a friend with recent onset Bells Palsy, and was looking at the research on connection between that and Covid infection. Any knowledgeable folk know what the current thinking is?
It's when you see these ads that you know this is what 'balancing' the economy against public health really means. "Be prepared for this next wave of Covid with all our PPE 10% off."
When we were asked to manage Covid with 'personal responsibility', at the same time all the data you might use to do that was taken away, this sort of data work became even more essential. #auspol https://t.co/fYqDohj00h
The simplest answer to ‘when should we start treating Covid like any other infectious disease’ is ‘when it starts acting like any other infectious disease’. https://t.co/ySMQfl4gbg
Astounding really, that the government's own health people can say this, and the government response remains...do nothing. One to file away for the Royal Commission. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/dpu6N8fR8o
I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry this is the last one I have.' /1 https://t.co/Qw8J5jGSl1
And sell it for the same price as all the others. But instead they force all the people who want it to bid against each other, and then sell it to the highest bidder. They could have just drawn lots. But easier to use extortion instead, and call it 'supply and demand'. /2
That's what modern economics is, techno-twaddle rationalising the basest human behaviour. I had somebody tell me this morning that our current inflation is due to lockdowns. (Is there anything lockdowns can't do?) /3
The theory goes all that pent up demand of people locked up at home, with no supply because everything was closed, forced prices up. It's true we saved a lot of money during 'lockdowns' (we weren't locked down most of the time). But let's ditch the econo-twaddle to explain. /4 https://t.co/4F3jkFqkl7
Maybe, just maybe, business saw all of that accumulated savings, and put prices up to tap into the increased spending power. It did what it always does, charged people the maximum it thinks it can get away with. It maximised profits. /5 https://t.co/evshSP1o1U
Not the miracle of 'price equilibration', as econo-twaddle would say. There's an enormous demand for teachers and nurses right now, for example, but no supply, and so using the twaddle argument the price (salaries) of teacher and nurses should skyrocket, right? /6 https://t.co/H2mvqO9dPs
Yes, we know that's not happening. Society isn't a market that equilibrates as some magical balance of supply and demand for things. That equilibrium is the econo-twaddle way of rationalising the status quo as an automatic balance. /end
Headline should be "States Ignore Danger in Varying Ways". I love that NSW is "open and free". Libertarian slogans to fight a pandemic. Like bringing a knife to a gun fight. https://t.co/VyDTUcYMEu
Watching the news, with members of the public expressing dismay that Covid is ‘back’. It’s great proof of the success of the propaganda campaign, that they thought it had gone away.
The NSW Premier rehashing his same fantasy slogan of staying home if you’re sick, and going to work if you’re not, for Covid. Completely ignoring asymptomatic spread, and finite sick leave. He needs to go.
My understanding of advanced epidemiology gleaned from the NSW Premier today is that this is easily fixed. Those who ‘feel sick’ should stay on the ship. And everybody else should get off and wander broadly through the community. https://t.co/zgCcrtFENK
For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if we’re to survive. /1 https://t.co/ncslkDXEeW
Because we all managed to struggle on, despite our health care and education and transport and everything else being sold off to the highest bidder and then used to enrich the buyers. We all got poorer and the outcomes in all of these areas declined. But society limped on. /2
Now we’ve reached a genuinely existential tipping point. Because we’ve privatised a pandemic. Across the world, entire populations are having forced infection and re-infection, in perpetuity, to satisfy this political belief system. Crumbling public life is joined by…/3
…widespread sickness and death. At a time these societies are ageing and already struggling to provide health care for people, we’re now deliberately sickening the entire population. It’s difficult to see how societies can survive this final act of libertarian lunacy. /4
I’ve Tweeted a lot about how democracy and elections won’t save us either. The N=1 zealots privatised democracy too, using elections to hijack the institutional bedrock of democratic life, replacing it with a popularity mechanism which is easily gamed. /5
Our institutional expertise knows how to fix all of these problems. It’s been completely sidelined by populist election-anointed N=1 politicians, who appoint their own advisers to replace them. Even progressive politicians refuse to tackle Covid, for a single reason. /6
They think they’ll lose votes. Without votes, nothing can be done. That’s how the N=1 crowd captured our democracies and now hold them to ransom. Everything has to pass through elections to get done, and N=1 politicians are experts at making all the necessary things unpopular. /7
So we have to return to the core beliefs. The N=1 crowd get away with all of this vandalism because everybody accepts their framing of some basic ideas. That individuals and groups/societies are two separate things. Even those who oppose N=1 politics use that same frame. /8
They say N=1 politics is ‘selfish’, and we need to act for all of us, etc. Greeting card philosophy. They’re puppets in the N=1 theatre. Look at how this trick works, it forces you to oppose (or ‘balance’) what’s good for you personally, with what’s good for everybody. /9
But those were never two separate or opposed things. The reason humans always created groups and institutions was to make *individual life better*. It’s economies of scale, to share the load of life so each person ends up freed to do more individual things. /10
The only individual freedom in the whole N=1 charade is their own. It’s a philosophy of freeloading, off the work of everybody else. They want to be free of all of the institutional attachments that actually create individual freedom, so they get a sort of infinite freedom. /11
They don’t intend you or I to ever share that freedom. We’re supposed to keep working to enable their freedom, as their modern-day serfs or peasants. Have also Tweeted how N=1 politics, and its handmaiden economic theory, are really a re-branding of old-style feudalism. /12
Call society a free market economy, and say it finds its own equilibrium, and hey presto the status quo (where the N=1 folk are already winning) becomes the natural state of things. Anything that interrupts it must be opposed on the grounds of ‘distorting’ the free market. /13
That includes any attempt to restrict basic things like disease. If it restricts the ‘economy’, it must be opposed. The NSW Premier defends doing nothing in the face of yet another wave of mass illness and death by saying we’re ‘open and free’. Pure N=1 fantasy. /14
Freedom is never individual. It’s a space opened up by collective effort. The idea an individual can defeat a highly contagious virus, or provide their own education and health care and transport, is too stupid to believe. But believe it we do. /15
The idiocy of all of this is that what the N=1 people say they want, maximum freedom for individuals, is what they destroy by destroying collective institutions. They’re crippling their beloved economy every day, while saying they’re freeing it. /16
This isn’t a battle of two competing belief systems, it’s just a basic empirical error of fact. Individuals and groups are not two things. And certainly not two opposed things. Individuals form groups, institutional collective action, to create more freedom for individuals. /end
Hands up if your workplace reacted to the news of a new wave of Covid with complete indifferent silence and inaction? https://t.co/xeizI9gluX
‘Open and free’. https://t.co/OhF0a6o6bU
Political libertarians turn State health bodies into their compliant pheasant-dogs. “Just a friendly reminder”. And a personal favourite: “…what actions you may like to take”. The same libertarians issue edicts like, “you must fly a flag or the school will lose all funding”. https://t.co/vHQ7VbKEnw
You have to pinch yourself sometimes, that so many of the public have been made to feel like they’re doing something powerful by surrendering to repeated infection by a pandemic virus. Political spin is extraordinary to watch in action. https://t.co/1mB0RNJjXw
We don’t ask enough what sort of person looks at life, and decides the most oppressive thing about it is government regulation. It’s a simple one though - rich people. Most regulation is to protect people who aren’t rich. https://t.co/5GAvd8597G
I have a hunch when we watch Downton Abbey, if we were to project ourselves into the story we imagine ourselves as one of the family. Not as one of the servants. But we’re nearly all the servants, by exact historical comparison. We’re just no longer allowed in the big house. https://t.co/2TWS8iZIg5
The privatised pandemic. If we still had widespread PCR testing, and if we followed the advice of ‘stay home if we’re sick’ during these mass waves of infection, society would be ‘locked down’ in the same way as when we did that to prevent infection. /1 #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/V17vYLcytL
The anti-lockdown people didn’t remove lockdowns. They privatised them. We can’t live with a rampant pandemic virus. So we either restrict movement and gatherings to control it through public means, or private. /2
Telling people to stay home when they’re sick ‘locks them down’. If vast numbers of the population are infected/sick, and you tell them to stay home, that’s a ‘lockdown’, by their own definition. It’s taking people out of circulation. /3
The one appalling difference is that public health lockdowns keep people healthy. Privatised lockdowns still lock everything down, but everybody is infected and sick as well. You could not invent a more stupid thing. Literally nobody wins. /end
Sky News blathering about how ‘we need to learn to live with this thing’ (Covid). We do, it’s what we were doing, before the likes of Sky News decided to abandon the learning and just go back to what we were doing before there was a virus. That’s the refusal to learn. https://t.co/OnEPm14fmo
My favourite part of the Covid cruise stories is disembarking infected passengers, while the next several thousand Covid sacrificial victims queue to get on for the next cruise. The new normal, cruising abattoirs. https://t.co/0PO1utmsfF
The magnitude of the public administration failure in Australia from late-2021 is best shown by comparing with the previous world champion Covid imbeciles, the UK and US. Yes death rates in Oz have been much lower. That’s due to the virus control we did before end-2021. https://t.co/VmtPSbsKAh
Other epidemiologists can help us here. The argument seems to be that Covid is out of control everywhere anyway, so no point trying to control it on cruise ships? https://t.co/VMNMW1tHFE
1) Lockdowns restrict circulation and gatherings to prevent infection. 2) Mass infection restricts circulation and gatherings as people ‘stay home when sick’. Both are ‘lockdowns’. You cannot live with a pandemic. Lockdowns are inevitable. Option 2) maims and kills.
It’s a theme today. A pandemic is a physical event, like a flood. What we *want* to do about it is irrelevant. You stop the flooding, or your society breaks. Not stopping it (‘living with’ it) is not a choice. You can’t live with perpetual natural disasters.
“Chief medical officer Paul Kelly saying it was not likely Christmas would be spent under restrictions.” Smoke and mirrors. Infected family members will be eating in their bedrooms so as not to kill grandma. Privatised restrictions.
Uni debt is an actual thing. Unlike immunity debt. I fear people taking up these jobs may have their actual immunity wiped though, along with the rest of us. https://t.co/1XIy6iCeaR
You can’t have public health policy if you have political libertarian governments who don’t believe the public is even a thing. https://t.co/tUHVadWRR3
The complex problems we face are untouched by popularity-based politics. We CANNOT elect our way out of them. The problems are independent of ideology. Even basics like local roads. Social media is accelerating the disconnect between these problems and our politics. https://t.co/zVnR79CHgK
I re-watched Nosedive on the weekend, a great Black Mirror episode. About a society where nearly every transaction is carried out via ‘likes’, via popularity. This is us now. Populism IS this. Election-based politics for every granular social and economic transaction. https://t.co/mlWdzbhMtx
We've got the tools. Now we need the leadership. What's the point of electing a government if it then just flick-passes its responsibilities back at the electors? https://t.co/Z0dFgzdFBG
So tired of the debates over whether to have Covid restrictions or not. We don't get to choose. Either we do them, or the virus does them. Either we stop circulating, or it stops us circulating. Either we run society, or it does.
Libertarian politics was an indulgence of rich nations with few existential challenges. Its time is over. Societies are collapsing. Uprooting it will be brutal, because it already hijacked elections to entrench itself. https://t.co/yl1mIe54pg
I’ve done a submission to this Inquiry. Everybody who feels passionately that repeated deliberate infection is a betrayal of public heath should have their say. Great made-easy-to-submit tool here (link). https://t.co/HxV663XAYS
The question Project hosts, aka highly-paid celebrities able to isolate at will, isn’t whether people are ‘scared’ of Covid. It’s whether they understand a single fucking thing about it. You don’t, so they’re going to be none the wiser from your stories. https://t.co/nFlg21VdKs
Problems that disrupt the economy are framed as individual anxiety. Reports that residents in flood-affected towns demanded basic precautions yesterday, like getting kids and workers across a river as levels rose, and were told to ‘stop panicking’. https://t.co/rWmqHNGF1W
In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to remove the public, and its welfare state. /1 https://t.co/RtDD7xIwZp
With Covid and climate change we’re seeing the endgame of that push of the past 50 years, by what we call neoliberals, and political libertarians. ‘Small government’ politics is really just them trying to extinguish the public again, and the welfare state that supports it. /2
Many feel astonished that basic problems with the health and survival of ordinary people leave political and business leaders completely unmoved. But they’ve always been completely unmoved by these things. The only thing that caused them to pay any attention to them at all…/3
…was fears for the ongoing ‘economic’ stability of their own lives. If their beloved (and fictitious) ‘economy’ is impacted, then they act. If not, know your place, peasants. This is the true politics of ours and every age. Hidden in plain sight. /end
“Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.” James Surowiecki https://t.co/I9U7guCggT
Returning to this, notice the framing here, the mythology that ‘the people’ determine the outcome of a pandemic. They do, but only an outcome that is LED by somebody. Doing nothing is a LED outcome. ‘The people’ is not an autonomous thing that acts. People are always led. https://t.co/nFlg21VdKs
Some Covid minimisers and politicians say we'll need to cycle through waves of Covid for another decade. Many industries are already on the brink of collapse. Ideology doesn't heal the sick, care/teach children, or keep food in supermarkets.
One of the amusing cooker things is the certainty Covid escaped from a Chinese lab, and the simultaneous belief that Covid isn't dangerous anyway.
'Get through' meaning 'infect everybody, and try to save as many of them as possible, while minimising impact on votes.' https://t.co/wcj28QYymc
Singapore is being used as a guide for what to expect with our current wave in Australia. Singapore had about a 10% greater level of stringency of public health restrictions at the time of its wave, and nearly 25% greater booster rate for vaccination.
ATAGI was likely to implement new booster recommendations in early 2023 in preparation for winter. (Mark Butler.) To my knowledge Covid still isn't seasonal? Is the hope that if we keep talking about it like flu, it will become flu?
Reality is invoicing us for 50 years of pretending that popularity (elections) solves any of the world’s problems. You remember the popular people at school, so often stupid, vain, venal. They’re now running countries, because we made popularity the way to power. https://t.co/aNk37oipoR
In the UK, ‘balancing’ the economy against Covid by loading everything on the economy side of the see-saw still isn’t working. Covid must be very heavy. https://t.co/ij67PAfAL1
Across the world politicians and business leaders spoke often of the need to ‘balance’ action against Covid with economic activity. Now action against Covid has been removed, leaving only economic activity. No surprise, it’s the climate inaction script. ‘Balance’ there too.
I thought ruthless suppression of data and information and endless cooker propaganda was doing it. Maybe that's what hybrid immunity is. https://t.co/uP4QgprpAU
A teacher friend told me teachers are now often working sick, and feeling terrible about it, but their schools can't function. There are no casuals available, and it's either work sick or the school collapses. The cynical 'live with the virus' bastards know this. They don't care.
The political and business types who demand we 'learn to live with the virus' are often the type of men who tell their wives to shut the kids up. Private school boys raised to lead the world, but somebody else will do the washing, cooking and cleaning.
US parents following the NSW Premier's advice. Pity they don't have any sick leave, and are either being fired or getting no income. https://t.co/K0ApBN8KVr
The much more likely explanation is that a series of pathetic provocations by the LNP to try to win an unwinnable election have now passed, and normal diplomacy has returned. The idea China 'capitulated' is ridiculous. To what? #auspol https://t.co/9cmvtWoUTa
'Schools must stay open'. Apparently for education, though actually as childcare for business. Some kids haven't had a regular teacher (or even much teaching) in months. https://t.co/e2jjKyJ1Bs
It's the darndest thing, that the Oz community apparently stopped tolerating Covid measures the exact second 'Freedom Day' was announced by the then PM, and NSW Premier. All change is led. 'The people' is a fiction. https://t.co/Gv7c5ejjO0
For rank amateurs like me, these seem obvious questions about hybrid immunity as an approach to Covid: 1) other diseases which are said to use this model, like colds and flu, are much less dangerous diseases. Do we just accept that each wave will mow down thousands? /1
2) Where is the actual evidence that infection with Covid creates any lasting immunity? Is it just a leap of faith? 3) Seasonal colds and flu have much lesser spread in societies and globally than pandemic Covid? What level of collective illness is acceptable? /2
4) Why do all of the other diseases on our existing immunisation schedules have detailed control strategies in conjunction with immunisation? But not Covid? 5) How do we shield the ‘vulnerable’ from infection? There has been almost zero success with this to date. /3
6) What will be the consequences of killing 20,000+ people in Australia this year to try to achieve hybrid immunity? Where was this foreshadowed in the national strategy? 7) What are the KPIs to tell us whether a hybrid immunity strategy is working, and over what time scale? /4
8) Given key industries including health care are already under emergency levels of strain, what’s the strategy to allow society to run well past the red rev-limit in perpetuity? /end
Anybody else’s notification numbers not displaying?
There’s a tipping point beyond which masking becomes a protection against society itself. It’s why superheroes and bank robbers wear masks. And increasingly, it’s true of those of us who still mask for Covid. https://t.co/y6nfhGhHaG
Trump’s agenda is the same as all populists. Gut the institutions that are actually the foundation of all democracy. His ‘Schedule F’ promises, that’s what they’re about. Nothing about Left or Right. Using elections (popularity) to destroy institutions. https://t.co/F4Oaiftntk
So in the past few days I’ve learned that Singapore: - has much higher masking rates than us - has much higher rates of vaccination (boosters) - still isolates people when sick - allows 5th vaccinations to people over 18. Comparing our current wave to theirs is nonsensical. https://t.co/6UelHLxC1t
It’s a very safe bet that a person who tells you we need to learn to live with Covid, is not involved in doing a single important thing to keep society running. They don’t even see the damage.
Here’s a song for everybody demanding that ‘the people’ rise up and fix Covid. Miller-Heidke knows (now) that conformity is the basis of all social groups. People are ‘caught in the crowd’. They have to be led out of that conformity. https://t.co/32qEYQeqfQ
Elections allow private school toffs who couldn’t even boil an egg to run countries. Elections are democracy’s fatal flaw. https://t.co/1n6fDnS6xu
Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too. /1 https://t.co/fzjp4yyrdB
The word 'international' is misleading. It leads to the idea that nations came first, and then they created an 'international community'. That's not what happened at all. The international came BEFORE the national. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is key. /2 https://t.co/EAs1N41sVn
During the peace negotiations to end the 30-year war, for the first time the idea of 'sovereign nations' was created and used in a widespread way. That's the rough origin of countries or nations as we know them today, and of the idea of sovereignty. /3 https://t.co/J4zb1nmyIq
The critical point here I think is that we had an international community long before we had national communities. Unified by the church and by the Roman empire/Holy Roman Empire, mostly. Why does this matter? Because to this day our ideas about politics forget this origin. /4
The neoliberals want us to believe political action comes from the 'bottom up', this myth that 'the people' have a will, and that will drives political change. Bizarrely the people who oppose the neoliberals tend to believe exactly the same thing. That was the neoliberal plan. /5
There is no such thing as 'the people', except in the most generic sense of pointing at a collection of people living somewhere. The people is not a political actor, it has no will. Go back to 1648, and you can see directly that the sovereign will of nations had to be.../6
...created FOR them, by international fiat. It wasn't pre-existing. Groups, of whatever size, from the tiniest family or committee right up to nation states or the G20, NEVER spontaneously generate anything. It's always a tiny (about 5%) number of people within those.../7
...groups who mobilise everybody else. Without that mobilisation groups operate entirely using social conformity, everybody just imitates or copies what everybody else is doing. Not because people are stupid, but because if they didn't nothing would hold groups together. /8
The neoliberals know this, which is why they create fantasies like 'free markets', to generate the illusion they're giving individual freedom, when really they're just offering an idea to rally behind, collectively. Something for people to conform to, but in the direction.../9
...neoliberals want them to. We're seeing the same now with Covid, where neoliberals delegate all responsibility to individuals (which they know means nothing will happen). While those who oppose them also call for individuals to rise up and fix Covid. Which won't happen. /10
And now at the G20 the world waits to see if a bunch of populist elected windbags will agree to do anything useful for the rest of us, wielding their beloved sovereignty as if it represents the will of their people. It doesn't, it's whatever these windbags say it is. /11
Until we can ditch this myth that democracy or politics in general is driven by millions of people spontaneously deciding to organise societies in a given way, we won't have any democracy. We'll have the world driven by a handful of populist elected windbags. /12
Windbags who game elections so they can brand their ideological fantasies with 'the will of the people'. Windbags who've let millions die of Covid, because the donors who fund their elections don't want their businesses disrupted. /end
I'm beginning to wonder if there's a single point of similarity between Singapore's Covid strategy and ours. https://t.co/IlNogfrdYE
Another neoliberal propaganda winner is to get the public to call each other stupid, for not doing all of the things neoliberal leaders are supposed to be doing for them.
Again, if the role of a Chief Health Officer in a pandemic is to advise us all to do nothing, why do we need them? Like having firefighters outside your house on fire yelling to you to go back to bed. https://t.co/mrHdez2nVc
Reminiscing on 'balance' and 'proportionate'. Which of course came to mean 'doing nothing except look after the economy'. https://t.co/z4m6XPLx68
Orwell saw all the puff around democracy and what it means. I don't think any of the -isms and -cracies even exist. No society is anywhere near organised enough to qualify as being a system of any kind at all. https://t.co/A0fLOswkWW
What would a cooker/minimiser version of Coronacast be called? The Project?
“We led the country, we were the ones that were taking everybody from overseas for WA because they locked their borders, for Queensland, for Victoria, we struck the balance all the way through, our economy as a result here in NSW is booming,” Mr Hazzard said. /1 #auspol
What’s the balance, Brad? What’s on the Covid side of the see-saw? You keep saying we need to learn to live with this virus - list 3 things we’ve learned? Because right now all the rest of us are learning is that your government will continue to refuse to do a single thing. /2
It’s just empty slogans on constant repeat. You can rely upon a sizeable number of people to be stupid enough to fall for that. But not everybody. It irritates you that the smart ones don’t go away and learn to be infected repeatedly, passively, without complaint. /3
Get used to it. Bullshit is bullshit, and this bullshit is making the entire country sick, and killing thousands. Keep rolling up the meaningless slogans, and keep expecting to be asked to act as a Health Minister and to actually do something to protect our health. /end
Isn’t it time to actually do some of this ‘balancing’ politicians and business leaders talk about with Covid? Right now there’s nothing on the Covid side of the see-saw, everything is on the economic side. A proposal. /1 https://t.co/0fviTqbWwm
That wave of death beginning in late 2021 was the result of deliberate government policy. Those families should be compensated, not just for trauma, but also for lost earnings. I propose a million bucks per life/family. Paid by National and State governments. /2 https://t.co/WsVrzX6smK
#amillionforbalance might do. Because the balance these leaders talk about is all economic, so let’s compensate those who gave their lives to restore the ‘booming’ economy. That curve of death is the blood that created that growth. /3
An estimated 20,000+ people will die as a result of this deliberate government policy, this year. ‘Excess’ deaths i.e. deaths caused by this policy. Avoidable deaths. We compensate people for government action for a lot less serious things. /4 https://t.co/o1LmiVr5of
It seems the exact sort of balance our leaders in politics and business had in mind. Economic balance. Time to restore that, with a million bucks to each family who loses somebody to Covid through deliberate government policy. That could be $20 billion this year alone. /5 https://t.co/0p0wyWOrWh
If you think that’s a lot, remember that’s the price of the ‘booming’ economy. Dead people. If government put a highway through your backyard, you’d get compensation. So if they kill your breadwinner or granny, #amillionforbalance seems entirely reasonable. /end
Throughout the pandemic NSW has been at the bottom of the economic indicators. Infecting its population has unsurprisingly done nothing to improve the 'economy'. https://t.co/5MKVwDEOyz
Imagine if 39 people had died in the floods this week. https://t.co/8N6zIMWn3I
"Health authorities in NSW have asked people to resume wearing masks in public indoor areas and on public transport, although they have stopped short of reintroducing mandates." They don't have the authority to introduce mandates? Only pollies do, and they're busy buying votes.
Latour was writing about religion here, but also about all of society’s institutions. That feeling now of society collapsing? That’s the ‘ruins’ he’s talking about. ‘Once they’ve been destroyed, institutions don’t get back up’. There’s a sting in the tail/tale here too /1 https://t.co/sr49XrXV7P
That sting is that what we call neoliberal politics and the politics that opposes it, both did this. Together. Both return society to a tabula rasa where the whole civilisation has to be reinvented every day, by ‘mobilising’ people. /2
Not even seeing that we already did that. Centuries ago, over centuries. That’s what our institutions were. And whether you’re ‘religious’ or not, the only way it worked was having a higher power or principle - God - to act as the unifying force. Now we have nothing similar. /3
I thought about this during the flood emergency, watching the fractured social response. People using traditional media, and social media, desperately trying to find a common ground for information and action. They mostly failed. The desperation at the possible collapse of…/4
…Twitter shares this same space. People are grasping for any way to put the Humpty Dumpty of our institutions back together, to create a shared space, a shared purpose. I doubt it will work, as Latour says, we’re living in the ruins. /end
This is a regulator. A gas regulator. It regulates the flow of gas so you don’t incinerate your family and house when cooking a bbq. That’s what regulation means, to apportion, to enable. Politicians who remove regulations, like mandates, want to blow things up. https://t.co/S7onH0k77Q
I don’t yet have a Mastodon account. I’m not sure I’m really interested in being part of reinventing this space all over again, just because we tribally hate Elon Musk. Not my thing, more high school politics. Leaving here in droves just makes it more likely here will collapse.
A woman I know had to mask on doctor’s orders, to reduce her risk with another condition. She spent the next days apologising to everybody she knew, for masking. Social conformity drives society, not individual freedom. Freedom is regulation, permission to rise above conformity.
I haven’t tried Mastodon, but it’s this exact thing that makes me wary. https://t.co/0ikDXLUUFu
The people whose politics is heavily about the ‘rule of law’ will at the same time describe Covid laws as authoritarian oppression. They’re bad faith actors, their freedom is literally their freedom, from laws they don’t like. Not from law itself.
This is the most powerful medicine humans have ever invented. Law. Easily the fastest, fairest and cheapest way to end this pandemic is regulation. Viruses need bodies to spread. Bodies are regulated by laws. Law is justice, not oppression. Mass infection is mass injustice. https://t.co/G4ILPOasFs
@Mike_Honey_ @RichardfromSyd1 are there are meaningful estimates of Reff for the current variants in Australia?
We took so many of our Covid leads from the UK and US, and not from the region that we actually live in. It’s not just nuclear subs which betray the real project of modern conservative politics, the rearguard Judeo-Christian culture war. https://t.co/plTJRNEIFh
https://t.co/u45u6Nm03R now closed for registrations on Mastodon?
Elon Musk and other champions of free speech have a different definition of free to me. $44 billion isn’t free. https://t.co/WNlKtIzSmU
This is how modern conservatives work. Engineer the collapse of public institutions, then use that collapse to accelerate the collapse even further, by blaming the institutions themselves. HCWs, like academics, fall for this too, they despise ‘administrators’. https://t.co/nD9BMTA9mf
It was the most popular thing to leave the EU, and now the most popular thing to go back. That’s popularity, fads and fashions. And we use it to run countries, and wonder why everything is breaking. https://t.co/m8fhtGh6Kc
Australia deliberately modelled the mass infection of children it then carried out. We don’t even think about doing that for much less dangerous diseases that we vaccinate our kids against. Infection and sickness used to be considered intrinsically bad. The Economy changed that. https://t.co/vKWi1ylrDp
You can see the emotion in Oppenheimer, the science he led and what it created. About 200,000 have died through the use of nukes. Somewhere between 5 and 20 million have died of Covid. The science that promoted that shows no sign of similar reflection. https://t.co/wJInXwGLYP
Mastodon’s chief selling points are indistinguishable from any deregulation and privatisation. It’s like crypto for conversation. Splintering of the public into semi-independent domains run on decentralised servers etc. This solution is pure neoliberalism. https://t.co/7sLoeKYWCL
The way to solve pretty much all of our problems, in all areas, is to regulate. Removal of the regulation is what caused the problems. Regulation is a technology to solve problems. Oppression is the removal of regulation. We regulate to counter oppression. https://t.co/zUpSMi92Kv
What would the phrase ‘the rule of law’ even mean, if not the removal of oppression? How did we become so stupid that we bought the neoliberal idea that regulation is restriction, oppression? The sheriff holds the oppressing gangs in check. He’s a ‘lawman’. https://t.co/yGPgkvuHFI
The fossil fuel industry won again. We ended up with a Covid strategy for climate change this time. They take turns. The only significant progress seems mitigation for the most vulnerable, like for Covid. It will probably not happen too, like for Covid. https://t.co/tLZscC4q0O
As with Covid, it's pointless addressing pleas and arguments to the neoliberals. They're just representatives of industries who aren't interested. The only effective opposition is organised labour - unionism. That's the historical, empirical fact. Join a union, give up debating. https://t.co/HSnMK7xjZC
There's lots of good in social media. But its core philosophy is lethal for societies, allowing mobilisation of every belief, no matter how toxic. It's a libertarian tool kit that undermines every country it's introduced in. https://t.co/gECinFxJVx
Trump already at 60 million followers again, on Twitter. He's not using it yet, but that honeypot of dumb love will be irresistible to him. Leaving here will do not one thing to halt those tens of millions.
Can we ask the prominent Australian experts who have consistently advocated for our current Covid strategy whether it included killing an additional 13000+ Australians so far this year? Was that a deliberate plan? #auspol #covid19aus
Who thinks a government with years of runs on the board in workers' compensation mismanagement was ever going to prioritise Covid protections in the workplace? https://t.co/6TMt6W9Qh2
The engineering and the ideas are inseparable. Brilliant point about possible limitations of platforms like Mastodon. https://t.co/csgWIBi2w8
Another illusion of social media is that all of that 'free speech' creates power in some way. It doesn't, those with power and wealth are happy for us to talk or protest all day and night. It distracts us from doing things that actually shift power and wealth. https://t.co/6DWFGovulE
The whining of entitled Western travellers, one of the greatest drivers of the removal of Covid protections. Even in my own childhood international travel was a once or twice in a lifetime thing. Now it’s like buying a coffee. https://t.co/I33QXVt4B4
The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power balance. A short thread. /1 https://t.co/nO8sqP14iA
Try engaging in conversation with anybody of international fame, on Twitter. Nearly always you’ll fail, not because they’re bad people, but because with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, they have to prioritise. Many openly claim they never read any comments,…/2
…it’s unmanageable. And it is, they’re right. The problem is our core belief, that society changes by everybody talking to everybody else, ‘the people’ driving change. That never happens, because it can’t physically happen. Conversation IS the engine room of all change, but…/3
…it’s never a non-hierarchical thing where everybody talks to everybody else. Again, physically that’s not even remotely possible, even if we thought it was desirable. Hierarchies of attention have always solved this problem. We all ‘follow’ a conversational space…/4
…pre-structured by key players. Hopefully by expertise, but often just by popularity, for whatever reason a person becomes popular (this is the social media model, though they sometimes overlap - there are wonderful, popular experts here for example). /5
The point here is that we’ve been duped into thinking that by spending our days talking to each other, we’re changing the world. That’s only true to the extent that talk is itself hitched to organised action outside social media. Action coordinated by these hierarchies. /6
The ‘powers that be’ don’t listen to us, because they don’t have to. Not only is it physically impossible for them to listen to all of us, but there’s also no power balance there. They don’t feel any threat. But we solved this problem more than a century ago. /7
I know I always say it. Because it’s true. The real players in politics are not Left and Right, not LNP and ALP. They’re employers/business, and organised labour. In fact organised labour got there first in Australia, it was the first to set up a political party. /8
Prior to that the wealthy and powerful just ruled, they thought that was their right. Suddenly working people organised an alternative, a political party. Conservative political parties emerged in response, quickly, in a panic. To this day that mass organisation of organised…/9
…labour, unions and their political parties, is the only thing outside wars and plagues that has ever shifted the course of political decision making. The first priority of every conservative government worldwide is *always* to attack and undermine unions. /10
They know, we’ve forgotten. We don’t need to spend endless wasted hours here and elsewhere trying to mobilise millions of people to resist climate and Covid inaction. We did all of that already, more than a century ago. We have our collective institutional weapons. /11
We’re just not using them. Many of us have swallowed the anti-union propaganda put out by conservatives, that they’re corrupt etc. But you don’t have to do a single thing, except join. They’ll do the rest. 10 minutes with a credit card would change the world overnight. /12
Until we do that, there isn’t even a bargaining table. Let alone a seat at it for us. The wealthy and privileged will ignore us, again because they can, and don’t have any other choice anyway. We’re not presenting them with any coherent, organised counter to what they do. /13
I’m not a union organiser, but I do know the history of politics. All of our clever witticisms and ideas will change diddly squat unless hitched to mobilised, coordinated action. Protests won’t do it, petitions won’t do it. A union foot to the throat of organised Covid…/14
…and climate denialism will. It’s the only thing that will, and the unions are sitting there primed and ready to go. They just need members. If we all joined overnight, conservatives would literally shit themselves. And that’s all we’d need to do. Takes 10 minutes. /15
Or we can let plague do the change for us, which will be a tragic, lethal option. Wars, plagues and unions are the only forces that have ever shifted politics. /end
When you 'balance' public health action against the economy, it doesn't work if you don't put anything on the Covid side of the see-saw. https://t.co/DTGQB2eXxZ
Thanks to @Mike_Honey_ for this one. We can't vote our way out of a pandemic. https://t.co/rZ5oxWGi0b
Can the Infinite Covid crowd explain to me why we can isolate people with mumps for 9 days, but not people with Covid? Mumps kills on average less than 1 person a year in Australia.
The entire idiot edifice of economic politics is floundering, without a clue what to do except inflict more suffering upon the people who can afford it the least. When pushed to its limits, any system shows you its real underlying motivation. https://t.co/RR9n2rdDep
Journalists don’t point out the obvious use of the same strategies across both climate and Covid. COP27 agreed to little except ‘protecting the vulnerable’, to give rich nations an excuse to do nothing. Like with Covid. That protection also won’t happen. https://t.co/kloU1eabkm
Given that our entire culture is now adolescent, I can’t see this mattering a lot. Do it. And hey, let’s have more voting, because it’s really helping us deal with problems right now? It’s what we need, more popularity. /s https://t.co/E7WmUYMURj
The people who swear the best way to manage energy is to keep shipping tens of billions of dollars offshore every year to buy it from Texans and the Arab states, also say the best way to beat a pandemic is to do nothing about it. And they win elections. Get rid of elections.
Those thousands dead will remain dead. If you're a Covid minimiser, nothing you do or say from this point on will absolve you of responsibility for those deaths. History and justice have long memories. https://t.co/7zK9ye2BTq
Australia 2022. Where a workplace has compulsory drug and alcohol testing, which requires people to remove any mask they're wearing, in an enclosed environment with a production line of staff coming in and out.
I see the RBA, business and politicians are concerned about a possible 'wage-price spiral'. Unlike the multiple profit-price spirals of the past 30 years that left them all completely unmoved, because those are 'the economy'.
Isn't living with the virus grand? We need to get rid of anaesthetists too, and go back to swigs of whiskey and something to bite down on. https://t.co/gdHOxjtmi8
I strongly support anything that might restore sanity to public health and society, but I despair that we feel we have to mobilise all of society from the bottom up, all over again, to do it. That's the same libertarian framing the baddies are using, they've snookered us. https://t.co/mAAaRUgZfb
Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i
Serres adored music. But as he aged it began to annoy him, because he felt the function of music had changed. It had become our territory, our way of being in the world. For Serres, the politics of our time removed most of the actual physical gains to ordinary people, and…/2
…replaced them with cheap, insubstantial substitutes, like music. While all living things tend to use sound to mark territory (bird song the most obvious), and this includes human music, Serres felt that process had been used to its extreme, leaving most of us with music as…/3
…our sole territorial purchase on the Earth. And the rise of ‘popular music’, and thus his reference to The Beatles, marked this political shift. (Beetles of course eat shit, thus his allusion.) He thought ordinary people were now being forced to eat shit and accept it as…/4
…a substitute for actual material wealth and power. And you can see that shift in the 2960s, how progressive politics increasingly moved into popular music, into protest music. How adolescents mobilised around their favourite acts, and still do. /5
How their very identity is forged by that association. Now politics came to be seen as making grand statements, to music, the birth of ‘virtue signalling’, a term invented by conservatives who by the way do it more than anybody else. It’s just that they already own everything. /6
We lost the idea of the actual material organisation of power, of winning and holding onto real gains in our lives. What unions in the era before this had fought so hard to do. Conservatives looked on with amusement as our music and art became more and more strident, while…/7
…they casually stripped away all of those material gains from the previous era. They were very happy to let us feel that singing protest songs was politics, that switching basic organisation of power and wealth for ‘raising awareness’ was our way forward. /8
You can see where that ended today. We sit here being infected with a lethal virus en masse, while the world’s climate incinerates us, and still think that raising awareness of these problems will somehow fix them. That powerful songs and speeches and ‘mobilising the people’…/9
…will save us. We act as if the entire 19th century and early 20th never happened, beginning again from Ground Zero every day. Hoping to mobilise the masses to rise up. We already did that, in those earlier times. We built institutions to cement that mobilisation. /10 https://t.co/KgCvRqfpoJ
Now we won’t use them, thinking that politics should be starting all of that all over again, writing more sings, making more speeches, making more grand gestures, to try to mobilise everybody. Just join a union, get your credit card it and join. It’s all you need to do. /11
Just having members and therefore also revenue is all that’s needed to shift the balance of power back. You don’t even have to participate or even believe in unions, just join. I can assure you the bastards who have hijacked our society fear that above all else. /end
(should of course say 1960s)
and ‘songs’, not sings.
There are only 3 things in history (you can check) that have ever interrupted the continuous flow of privilege to society’s elites. 1. Plagues 2. Wars 3. Unions Let’s skip 1 and 2 and go straight to 3.
“It’s time to consider removing decisions about climate change from the short-term political cycle.” Let’s add Covid to that list. Elections are destroying civilisation. https://t.co/9E1LVEvLdF
Firing up my broken record again, let’s give up the idea we can have accountability bodies to keep check on politicians. Just get rid of elections and pretty much all of the corruption evaporates. https://t.co/AYUh11Gxif
People tend to obey their leaders. For all of 2022, health experts have told people to wear masks. Politicians have told them not to bother. Who do the people follow? Not the health experts. Political libertarians know this. Their 'freedom' is just spin to make people obey them.
@KarenCutter4 is today NSW epi report dissection day?
Karen's weekly NSW epi report analysis and breakdown of the weekly NSW Health Covid numbers aren't to be missed. https://t.co/rqaAAypgyw
ABC PM this afternoon found 3 experts to say that China needs to let the virus ‘circulate’. No indication of how much. Claims the current variants are milder. This may destroy our economic supply chains. Let’s see if that’s the ‘living with the virus’ minimisers have in mind.
Somebody. https://t.co/p0QIJLBrpQ
Working Dog nailed this, years ahead of its time in Australia. Institutional expertise meets vacuous populist politics. It was hilarious, now it’s scarily our lives. https://t.co/PWOQYhb8s6
China losing control of Covid would be an international emergency. It astonishes me that so many seem so ignorant of how dependent we are on China functioning as normal. China is the world’s factory, it manufactures nearly as much as Japan, the US and Germany combined.
Phew, we’ve avoided having to redistribute wealth. Just as we avoided changing society because of Covid, and just infected everybody instead. The economy, the greatest political trick to protect the status quo of all time. https://t.co/nrc9jEx1bc
Everything that upsets the status quo is bad for the economy. Paying workers more? Bad for the economy. Stopping people getting Covid? Bad for the economy. Having more flexible work-life balance? Bad for the economy. This is why the economy was invented. /1
Free market theory says society find its own equilibrium, provided you don’t try to change or regulate anything. How is this not the most obvious self-serving nonsense? Economics is the handmaiden, providing expert cover. Just as infinite covid experts do for Covid. 2/2
Politics today isn't a contest of two equally balanced sides. One side has all the power. It invents its own opponents by creating a fake strawman reality that it can manipulate, designed to enrage a particular demographic. Which it plays on infinite repeat.
The most fanatical, slavish following comes from those who worship freedom. https://t.co/ALSUjYCO4Z
The darndest thing, regulations. Like they keep people alive, or something. https://t.co/x5lqkeS9O1
Language, not data. 'Living with the virus.' We live with crime, disasters, pain and suffering, poverty, injustice etc. The key thing is, how much. Living with Covid shouldn't mean everybody catching Covid 4 times a year. We live with whooping cough, most of us never catch it.
What using popularity (elections) to drive society's decisions does. A simple calculation of home-grown almost free energy, versus buying it from overseas at the cost of tens of billions per year, while incinerating the planet, comes down on the side of expensive incineration. https://t.co/PtHulIiKJm
National Cabinet granted itself a half-dozen or more Chief Health Officer roles. Looking forward to that inquiry. https://t.co/qxhpA0g9iE
Vox Populi, Vox Dei. ‘The Voice of the People is the Voice of God.’ There is no such thing as the people. The only way you can make it seem like there is, is to remove the voices and turn them into numbers, through simple counting. Then make the numbers say whatever you like. https://t.co/dl8eh8EvWo
I haven’t seen one piece of analysis that gets to the real reason Morrison probably did this. He was determined that the pandemic would not be allowed to interrupt his beloved economy, and his re-election campaign. https://t.co/Ax8HFGQVxe
Election today. We’ll say ‘the people have spoken’. But they won’t say a word. They’ll put some marks on a bit of paper, and be counted. Numbers, not words. Politicians will then make up what the numbers mean, for the next 3 years. ‘The people’ doesn’t exist. It never speaks. https://t.co/PRYVeYWbWW
Twitter is proof ‘the people’ don’t exist. Theoretically it’s a platform where everybody speaks. But like life outside Twitter, what gets read is only the tiniest fraction of what gets said. About 5% of Tweeters get read regularly. Everybody speaking is just noise.
@MichaelPascoe01 is one of the few journalists paying attention to these collective disasters. On this topic, I don’t think we’ve given up. Societies don’t run themselves, they’re led. We’re being led to give up. https://t.co/SzTyKjoyli
If you’re a journalist, there’s still time to mention the thousands of Covid deaths that are happening in Australia this year. And to ask if that was part of Covid being ‘over’, as many of you have written. Your reputation and integrity into the future may depend on it.
When you believe individuals and groups are two separate things, you never escape this yo-yo. In business or politics. https://t.co/b1y5PioZfA
Politicians lie. And yet given the choice between a politician’s and a medical professional’s advice on a mask, most choose the politician. Especially those who yell for freedom from politicians. Social conformity is the key to understanding all politics.
Hooray, like every other election for the past 30 years, somebody is more popular than somebody else. Like being back at school. If you want a job you usually have to demonstrate some sort of competence. To run the country, you only have to be popular. Thus the world burns. https://t.co/n6111HweMi
The party who won’t do anything about Covid beat the party who definitely won’t do anything about Covid, with a party who won’t do anything about Covid coming in 3rd. Independents who won’t do anything about Covid came last. You can’t elect your way out of a pandemic. https://t.co/kkWHfwE3rS
The evolution of SARS-Cov2, and of Covid minimiser spin. Facing off against each other, with minimiser spin so far proving the more virulent. The world cup of social collapse. https://t.co/S5ItAl6GCE
Limited action on climate and Covid, even with changed winners at elections, shows how democracy has been gamed. The conservatives win long-term not by winning elections, but by manipulating what is popular. That way even their opponents implement their agendas. Framing.
Anybody with me yet on getting rid of elections? Why would grown-ups ever think popularity would solve any grown-up problem? We don’t raise our kids that way, we don’t run our businesses that way. https://t.co/aZsQqR6Kt4
The ‘voice of the people’ isn’t a voice. It’s a simple count of votes. The actual voices of the people you can hear in a stadium. Incoherent noise. Elections squash the noise into a content-free number. Populism uses the number to brand itself as ‘the will of the people’. https://t.co/x5RhQ6jJAa
A shout out to all Australians about the #VigilAgainstCOVID today. People taking on personal responsibility for the public health action governments of Australia are not taking. @AlboMP
I still invite every Covid minimiser to recognise they’re occupying the far left of the risk matrix, in the black oval. But a pandemic is all to the right, in the 20 rectangles of light green, yellow, orange and red. The ‘what if you’re wrong’ rectangles. Lives depend on it. https://t.co/S4F0DagfjP
This is not said enough. We’re running our critical service and care industries at way above capacity, and burning out the staff. Literally flogging them to the brink of exhaustion and collapse, and beyond, to unstaffed facilities. https://t.co/X68DqBOCW9
Can we regulate media and social media please? Ignore the gibbering free speech idiots, all of our other democratic freedoms are regulated. It’s the regulation that creates the freedom, without it the wealthy and powerful do as they like. https://t.co/t79fip2deH
The freest we’ve ever been individually, in that libertarian way which now dominates politics, was under ‘lockdowns’. We were allowed to stay home, for weeks or even months. What we call neoliberalism is just re-marketing work as freedom, home as oppression. Arbeit Macht Frei. https://t.co/c5jcNp0b1g
Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics of small government. As these same politicians like to say, that’s OUR money. Not theirs. /1 https://t.co/1EvZKeCiDi
In an emergency, we pool resources, we fund our lives collectively. That’s what that blip on the graph is. Incidentally under 35% of GDP is still way lower than the 120% of GDP government spent in WW2. That enormous shift led to decades of booming economies post-war. /2 https://t.co/RWTC0K925b
You can clearly see the shift in savings and loan data for households, during the pandemic. Lockdowns not only let us spend much more time at home - freedom under any sane definition of the term - it also made us richer than we’ve been in decades. /3 https://t.co/AV5Na5ZaLZ
Look at how we paid down the personal debt we’d accumulated to meet the costs of living shunting collective responsibility onto individuals had created. So, lockdowns not only stopped most of us becoming infected with a lethal virus, it also was a boon to us economically. /4 https://t.co/G9U8DzcUI1
Remembering it’s all our money anyway, deciding to apportion more of it to ordinary people unsurprisingly made them healthier and wealthier. And we’ve now arrived at the real cause of the furious hysteria over lockdowns. /5
The neoliberals, the political libertarians, affect hysteria at lockdowns not because they don’t like State power, as their belief system claims. They love it, that tiny cabal gorges itself on that collective honeypot. Lockdowns created hysteria in this tiny group because…/6
…suddenly the public got the keys to the Treasury back. It got access to its own collective wealth. That couldn’t be allowed to go on. So the mass propaganda campaign began to convince the public that not going to work was oppression, that staying home was dictatorship. /7 https://t.co/gGdUax25xd
It’s so ludicrous as to be almost unbelievable. The data doesn’t lie, the only 3 things that shift societies politically are plagues, wars and unions. This plague was beginning to restore collective access to collective wealth. Our PM assumed multiple ministries and convened…/8
…a national public health chokepoint called National Cabinet to stem that tide as quickly as possible. And here we are today all back at work, all being infected 4 times a year by the same lethal virus. All poorer again, with the RBA targeting that momentary windfall. /end https://t.co/aB6fdEmkS3
It alarms me that ‘autonomy’ is being used in a high-risk care environment in this way. Of course aged care residents have autonomy, that’s a straw man. If you’re a HCW, this is helping residents choose safe options that don’t risk death, including of other residents. https://t.co/RpNdnRMioZ
Those who argue quarantining is oppression have to be prepared to accept the consequences of mass infection. No easy answers here, but so often the focus is on the quarantining and not on what it’s trying to prevent. https://t.co/XqIE5iHzFi
Fact-checking with somebody who actually knows something about viral evolution. @TRyanGregory think you saw this clip, have we painted Covid into a mutation corner? https://t.co/JAeL6uAqx4
In any field, or even any part of life, the truth of what’s going on is extremely unlikely to be the most obvious thing. If this wasn’t true, everybody would be a genius. I remember that with climate and Covid. None of the popular narratives are likely to be on the right track.
Australia is still averaging about 15 deaths per day, from Covid. That’s over 5000 deaths per year, and significant and disruptive morbidity for many thousands more. Surely this isn’t the new normal? What are the KPIs for arriving there? Why aren’t leaders and experts asked?
Tradies, who earn more on average than university graduates, pay nothing for their tuition, and are even paid as they study. But university graduates deal with years of debt, and only earn as they learn if they get a separate job. The dumb country. https://t.co/AyArcIwEee
Rich hybrid immunity doesn’t work without truckloads of ongoing ‘natural infection’. The obvious things are rarely said. https://t.co/ld0nCAvMq8
Apparently the most popular search term on SEEK for months has been ‘work from home’. So much for the oppression of lockdowns.
What if an elimination strategy isn’t a choice, but the only way societies can survive? Is there one pandemic of an infection with high morbidity and mortality that societies have ever lived with successfully before? If not, maybe because it can’t be done? https://t.co/aAnLzjfrrt
Covid made visible the total absence of care for ordinary people that was already built into our politics. Personal debt has hidden that contempt for decades, creating an illusion of community. The last sop is token concern for the ‘vulnerable’, safety net econo-democracy.
There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics outsources the cost of living to individuals. /1 https://t.co/NGAzW6EZ1g
The brutality of letting Covid rip is shown by the explosion in cost of living after that strategy was adopted. Previously large government investment during emergencies, like the world wars and GFC, flowed through to continued gains for ordinary people, sometimes for decades. /2 https://t.co/c7OTFlpwQ1
The modern economic zealots were having none of it this time. Capitalising the gains, and socialising the losses, on steroids. The most entitled, whining parasites in Australia right now are the Australian business community. Small and large. /3 https://t.co/7fB2SpUXTD
Look at the rent-seeking performance under the previous government, whose ‘economic strategy’ was cutting keys to the Treasury to any industry group that would donate to them. Business actually investing its own money went into free fall almost a decade before Covid. /end https://t.co/dcinTljPUe
If your business, small or large, is unable to pay a living wage to its workers, it's an unviable business. That's the measure of your competence as a business person, not your profits or returns to shareholders. Being a small business is no exemption from this basic fact.
This year's NSW Schools Spectacular had about 5000 students from across the State, belting out the tunes in close proximity to one another, with thousands of others looking on. One of the sponsors was the NSW Teachers Federation. Call me a doomer. Public health lunacy. https://t.co/QRPGopvaMc
A highlight for me is that Teachers Health, the teacher's health insurance organisation, is also a sponsor. https://t.co/5VEp0Z59nr
If you're confused why many businesses resist working from home, the whole function of what they call the 'economy' is to sever the link between work and home. That's what globalisation means.
I still wonder if Albo is just shrewd with timing. Knows Covid is a mess, but also knows how much the LNP weaponised it as an issue. https://t.co/Xmdexgh4kz
I know a few have shared this (thanks @NobodyImpawtant). Extremely powerful and educational explanation of current thinking on Covid sequelae and Long Covid, and the criticality of avoiding infection. https://t.co/PqzqSSnKSi via @YouTube
Teachers want to live with a bit less virus. Or to live, full-stop. https://t.co/KS3kEW5ePS
Steve Jobs took on the free market libertarianism of the IT industry and called it for the joke it is. It made Apple the biggest company in the world. Musk has collided with Jobs’ legacy. He’s toast. Our politics is embedded in these corporate contests. https://t.co/ttQV5YT2EO
"The global economy is hostage to what China does with COVID”. There’s the elephant in the room the minimisers don’t even see. Financial analysts don’t mean by this ‘we want China to let Covid rip’. They mean if China does, the global economy is cactus. https://t.co/WvbvUpLQa0
‘Personal responsibility’ public health, as well as being an oxymoron, means paying for it yourself. Like private education, and toll roads. It doesn’t mean individual freedom.
The politicians who demanded societies ‘re-open’ in the pandemic, spent the previous 30 years demanding we ‘maintain control of our borders’ i.e. keep society as closed as possible. Except for recreational and business travel, and importation of slave labour. That’s the Economy.
I wish 'public health debt' rolled off the tongue the same as 'immunity debt'. It has the advantage of at least being a thing that exists.
It seems HIV was able to reach pandemic levels because its acute phase was rarely serious. So it took that 8-10 years to register there was even a new kid on the block. Covid can be lethal in the acute phase (got our attention) *and* chronic phase. Potential unprecedented risk?
Thought of this watching Rae Duncan talk about chronic Covid. The possibility that the cardiovascular disease pandemic of the 20th century may have been the chronic phase of Spanish Flu. There's other research that posits the same link to infection. https://t.co/zMvLCF0mh9.
Maybe SARS-Cov-1 was a guide, who knew. None so blind as those who will not see. https://t.co/IkwQnp0qAx
We know how to regulate against harm for pretty much anything. Except Covid. Regulation is easily the most effective and powerful medical intervention for public health problems. https://t.co/j8Ylrmz7ul
Yes these are hypotheses, but a growing number of long-term chronic diseases are being linked to chronic infection. https://t.co/6g4T2GKPdp
Lawyers queuing to have Covid fines overturned feeds the freedumb narrative. The only serious ‘overreach’ in this pandemic is turning off the public health system.
‘Lockdowns’ (really just quarantine) should have been a libertarian wet dream. The ‘there is no such thing as society’ people get very heated when you suspend the functioning of society, as it turns out. They never meant freedom, they meant the economy, people going to work.
Infection has always been a violation of autonomy. Enforced infection is abuse, you’re violated in the deepest, most dangerous way, by a pathogen that may never leave you while you’re alive. In farming we know this isn’t sustainable. In an economy, you don’t even get a trough. https://t.co/vvXo9AsDtC
Local drive-through PCR clinic was apparently playing Christmas Carols this morning. Fantastic facility, well-ventilated, super quick. Governments closing these down so you can spend $10 per RAT to test 6 times to try to detect infection. 'Personal responsibility' public health.
Quite a lot of people use 'capitalism' as some sort of cause of everything going on. Like all -isms, show me where it actually exists. No country is capable of a level of organisation that would implement any system. Capitalist countries are heavily State-funded and regulated.
The people have spoken. Or something. https://t.co/R3n6PHy6ck
@KarenCutter4 NSW epi report analysis coming today? Sorry to be needy ;)
Here in anti-authoritarian Australia, we let Covid rip into aged care homes because...freedom. And anybody have a copy of some National Cabinet minutes they can share with us? https://t.co/ic9kI3c7Kd
Want to vote for a National Cabinet censure motion? "We the Australians who don't want to be infected with a lethal virus multiple times every year for the rest of our lives, censure National Cabinet for replacing a public health system with gibberish donor-friendly slogans"? https://t.co/r5oBisU208