December 2022
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
Maybe the SA Premier needs to strip to the waist and take a selfie ASAP. https://t.co/S43O2wRiCk
In the interests of good public messaging, do we have a list somewhere of how many infections all of our senior advisers and politicians have had, that encourage 'rich hybrid immunity'? @YouAreLobbyLud this sounds like an initiative for them, to show the way for the rest of us.
Wow, that's big numbers after 6 months. Did we end up throwing away our 13 million doses, because we were too busy trying to win elections and infect everybody? https://t.co/wMgwv72GeW
Stay tuned for this, as well as Karen's weekly unpacking of the NSW epi report. And if you're not following Karen, now is a great time to start. https://t.co/ULtTMSTPq2
What's the highest number of documented Covid re-infections in an individual?
Christian Drosten says the population getting infected multiple times is all that will end the pandemic, without mucosal vaccines. But on the other hand he (and others) say don't get infected if you can avoid it. I think this comes down to timing. /1 https://t.co/tWyTRb6bEM
It may be true, that if we don't get good mucosal vaccines, reinfections are all that can stop Covid longer-term. But the minimisers mistake this to mean we have to do it all right now, letting it rip. I believe Drosten to be saying it's a process that could take.../2
...generations, and our task is to control spread in the meantime, to prevent mass morbidity and mortality. But people more experienced and schooled in this than me may have a different view. /end
@CrabbBrendan ?
Karen’s forensic weekly dissection of the NSW epi report is a Twitter highlight for me. If you want one of the best windows into what’s really going on with Covid in the community, watch for this thread on Thursdays. https://t.co/XvSxb4ov1Z
I seem to have developed a change to my sense of taste in the past 24 hours. Not the absence of taste, but more like a de-emphasising of some flavours. Did a PCR this morning, will see.
PCR result in - negative. Must be some other neurological disease, hooray ;)
The clear libertarian Trojan Horse that social media has been. That set of political beliefs frames the technology itself. It embodies a US-style libertarian outlook, in its idea ‘the people’ generate society. They don’t, the collision with reality begins. https://t.co/YzTRgKTRiN
One of my areas of expertise is political strategy. We’re losing against Covid for the same reason we lost against climate change. We’re mistaking politics for a scientific debate. That debate is a fiction, minimisers only use it to distract and delay.
To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be getting infected. The two don’t go together, but that (to me) is where it gets interesting. /1
I think the hybrid immunity folk never talk about time. There’s this sort of implicit assumption that we can achieve it all in a generation. That if we infect *individuals* multiple times, the *population* will maybe achieve hybrid immunity. That’s suicidal, but it opens…/2
…up the question of how pathogens evolve with populations *across* generations? Like influenza, with us for maybe 1500 years, and our immunity (I assume) reflecting that co-existence across all of the generations. Across infections of millions of people, over thousands…/3
…of years. Again not arguing that we should ever infect people, only reflecting on what happens if we can’t eliminate or eradicate a pathogen in the short to medium term. I wondered yesterday if this is where Covid minimisers and sane public health actually collide. /4
Those arguing for infection, using the influenza example, their logic is forced to the sane public health position if they recognise that immunity is a relationship that evolves over many years, hundreds or thousands. Which leaves the task as controlling spread and infection …/5
…in the present, because otherwise we won’t survive beyond it, to co-evolve with the pathogen. And that’s just the sane public health position anti-minimisers argue for. Minimisers collapse pathogen co-evolution into individuals rather than populations over…/6
…centuries, it’s another example of how their politics collapses everything into individuals, and excises all the collective and historical elements. Everything is present moment, there’s no institutional or immune history to any of it. /7
Of course they’re also bad faith actors and aren’t interested in these niceties anyway. Beating them is a political and industrial issue, not scientific. We need to leverage any remaining institutional power we have that represents collective things. And as I say a lot,…/8
…the only candidate left standing there that I know of, is unions. I’m not a union organiser or particularly fond of them, I just read the history. They are the only way ordinary people have ever achieved anything politically, outside wars and plagues. /end
Today class, please explain what ‘midway point’ means in the sentence below. (5 marks). https://t.co/z5zHxR5mjC
It’s a very complex task fixing energy without cutting off the rich vein of money from donors. https://t.co/d8pipzSROO
Happy Christmas Australia! Keep buying from your sick beds, the economy needs you. https://t.co/RxPawtRzDC
It seems like only yesterday all leaders were interested in children’s health. The end of corruption exceptionalism. https://t.co/n4IeXYO6Wp
“We are in the grumbling finishing stages of the pandemic where we settle into the new norm…we still don’t know what it is, but we suspect it will be ongoing smaller waves for many years, possibly decades.” Tony Blakely, saying the end of the pandemic is decades of pandemic?
The ‘end of Covid exceptionalism’ means still killing well over 100 Australians a week, and calling it ‘a new normal’. https://t.co/I9kWXe7OzS
Gratifying to see an article like this without one mention of the fairy tale ‘immunity debt’. https://t.co/hSBXrtmJ3p
A friend who had to be admitted to hospital with Covid because they couldn’t breathe responded with ‘it is what it is’. These adolescent slogans, or ‘You do You’, are how adolescents think. But that’s now our entire culture. Fatalism, rather than basic, grown-up problem solving. https://t.co/l1OFfr1BUB
Fatalism is a childhood philosophy linked to powerlessness I think. Because often children can’t do anything about things. The fact it’s now our adult philosophy of life shows how adolescence has become our dominant cultural model.
I remember discussion here earlier in the pandemic about memorialising those who have died. Right now we know these people mostly as data points in graphs. Until even the data was suppressed, so now they’re completely invisible. This is beautifully done. https://t.co/yeSrGLII1n
The UK keeps racking up the social collapse. And the same bullshit in the news reports, that this is caused by not enough strep infection during lockdowns. I must remember to get some TB this year, to protect me next year. https://t.co/RdmMhoxbG2
I’m a parent and this sort of thing makes me very angry. What I was ‘taking away’ from my kids was their exposure to a lethal virus. The stuff grown ups have done forever, until the last 2 years. Now they have to weigh up having those social lives and infecting their families. https://t.co/bKPMBLXMNT
Nothing will be done against Covid. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt the inexorable march of the economy. COP27 proved that too, with climate change. The ‘economy’ is a fiction created by economists and politicians to protect the status quo.
If we had freedom, we could avoid infection. We’d be free to take evasive action. But we’re not, we have to work and kids have to go to school. And many workplaces are doing nothing to protect us. Only caged chickens, pigs and cows get mass disease.
All sides still operate under the delusion that ‘business’ is even a thing, like the economy. Here’s the simple test. How many ‘businesses’ would survive the public having no money? Not one. How many of us would survive without businesses? All of us. https://t.co/WhQWdXZTO5
A nice window into the adolescent culture we all live is the saturation grief on social media when a rock star dies. But the response to millions of ordinary people being infected and killed by Covid is ‘here’s some pics of me living my best life.’
The ridiculous claims about lockdown are not accidental. Those in charge know children now dying is political dynamite, so the propaganda is immediately rolled out to knee-cap any momentum building around it in the wrong direction. Standard procedure, deflect, misdirect. https://t.co/OSnkUnMR6Y
The UK had a by-election this week. What’s not shown here or commented on much, is that only just over 40% of people even bothered to vote. If democracy is synonymous with elections, that should represent a failure of democracy, and the result should be disallowed. https://t.co/gI2HPeOtg8
The dreary world cup soccer games easily surpassed by absolutely scintillating hockey games against India this weekend. We’ve been world champions for years in hockey. Deserves a much bigger audience.
There are more stringent controls against head lice in schools than there are against Covid. But don’t expect ‘the people’ to rise up. Social conformity runs society. Only regulation can give them permission to rise above it. Not science. https://t.co/ZlV7iI15O1
Politicians were blindsided when public health institutions swung into action when Covid emerged. That won’t be allowed to happen again. Note the criticism they use of CHOs - ‘unelected’. Elections are how these political bastards destroy society. https://t.co/lLujWLNwJS
Can we get rid of billions of taxpayer subsidies to a hopelessly inefficient industry, private health insurance? If politicians want market-based public services, let them live by the market. Private health insurance never worked. https://t.co/FSEo8EEduH
This week’s ‘how long are you going to keep wearing that mask’? comeback… ‘How many times are you going to get Covid?’
The politicians who dumped Covid regulations to give you ‘freedom’, at the same time fight election campaigns on the ‘rule of law’, and wars on a ‘rules-based order’. The answer to Covid is regulation, not medicine or science. Covid exists because of the removal of regulation.
That kid at the front is the mask-wearer. Not an analogy, Western culture was an adult culture, embedded in its institutions, which school kids graduated into. N=1 politics destroyed the institutions. All that’s left is the social conformity of the schoolyard. https://t.co/fSpM1e0R00
School discos and presentation ceremonies should prime the pump for a Covid Christmas. All completely avoidable if we had a country not run by populists terrified of losing a vote, and economic zealots who will never understand an economy is just the people who live here.
So many stories of people so sick, churning through RATs at $10 a pop to try to get to the bottom of it. I'll never forgive Australian governments for not only releasing a pandemic virus into the community, but then also making them pay for their own testing.
Most of the serious problems confronting our societies have known solutions. The real problem societies have is that all of these solutions have to cut their way through a jungle of grinning populist elected leaders to happen. Name me one serious thing popularity ever solved. https://t.co/Xj6usnAYNb
Who's going to be the Al Gore of Covid? Remember how people gasped when he rode the lift to the top of that graph? Some of the Covid graphs are even higher and steeper, showing even greater divergence from sanity. https://t.co/7JxClWg9re
@CrabbBrendan what are you like with heights? ;)
Why can't we fight Covid? The Economy. Why can't we fight climate change? The Economy. Imagine inventing something that is no use to society in its greatest need, and then making it the entire basis for your society. https://t.co/korw4uCQH2
So China will relax restrictions under the 'Omicron is mild' banner. Thousands of Australians would remember us doing the same. If they were still alive. https://t.co/UOyRHLaXTX
Imagine telling a tradie cutting in a dusty environment that their mask represented their anxiety, rather than their safety. Many of them in fact wouldn't wear one, unless required to. It's called public health, and WHS. https://t.co/kyDB02jaFW
Using elected leaders (popularity) to solve an energy problem is like taking a poll of the passengers to fly a plane, rather than using a pilot. https://t.co/csWPiJIl33
Who thinks infecting the entire population with SARS-Cov-2 is a bigger risk to 'our way of life' than sitting on a bridge? https://t.co/xAoElhd8BO
A fish rots from the head. By the way what are ‘routine’ PCR tests? https://t.co/7Du1WtzjzZ
A timely reminder to wear a mask, open windows and doors, avoid crowds. You know, avoid catching Covid in the first place. https://t.co/n5JxLD3bat
Local school being smashed by Covid. We have a Premier who learned his trade as a Young Liberal, relishing the ideological warfare that he now brings to a pandemic as well. Like conservatives globally, sees public health as State oppression. These people should be in jail.
It's an almost perfect standard pandemic pattern, showing no signs of going away? And pandemics are defined by infections, not deaths. Infections. You'd think even one journalist would have worked that out by now. https://t.co/J7feLqFab3
Thoughts and prayers. Or how about we throw all of our current leaders in jail and leave public health to our public health teams? https://t.co/qdprYHI6wJ
Heart-warming to just walk past an auditorium packed with local elderly folk, listening to local school choirs. Nobody is masked. They should have introduced local HCWs as well, 'hi, my name is Jane, I'm an ICU nurse, I may be seeing you over Christmas.'
Anybody warming to my 'get rid of elections' theme yet? https://t.co/sSezPWmQ6q
Well said Adam. Imagine putting anything before the health of your community. https://t.co/5I24EcIxzx
My experience with dentists in the pandemic as well, so often cavalier with Covid protections. It shouldn't be difficult for them to use P2 masks and to have at least a HEPA filter in the surgery rooms. One I visited had a fully functional window, which I had to ASK them to open. https://t.co/fmzCoHpJfn
The genius of the economy. Get business to charge lower prices by bankrupting its customers. https://t.co/0NEiUl7JoY
Applause to Professor Crabb for being open with his anger. Polite counter-arguments have got us nowhere, this isn't a scientific debate. It's the collapse of basic, decent public health practice. #auspol https://t.co/iA6b74nkPP
Grandparents on both side of the family now hospitalised in the latest Covid surges. No sympathy please, it’s not about that. They took every precaution possible. They were isolated from social life, and still got infected. The pro-infection lobby did this.
When I say hospitalised, one of them is stuck in a hospital waiting room, critically ill, and has been for hours, surrounded by a sea of coughing and illness. Unable to have their partner there because of the high risk to them as well. Australia, 2022.
Some ‘vaccines work!’ minimisers again yesterday. Yes, they work. Like seatbelts work. Nobody goes out and deliberately crashes the car 4 times a year, just because they have a seat belt.
We’re at the troughs full of antibiotics for feedlot animals phase of the pandemic. https://t.co/ge4T8QA9i8
Because it enrages halfwits, I like to point out that ‘lockdowns’ just means ‘people get to stay home’. Anybody who watches the faces of people heading home on a Friday afternoon knows this used to be true freedom. Before the minimising spin viruses infected us.
We know reasoned debate about pandemic science is getting no cut-through at all. It's time for prominent Australians to get angry, and to express that anger daily. That might actually shift narratives and agendas.
Covid minimisers trotted out false balance early in the pandemic ('balancing' public health action against the economy). It's what they'd already been doing with climate change for decades. It's the same people. We've spent 3 years trapped in this strategy, arguing 'the science'. https://t.co/k2IdKCkAZe
If you only have time to read one Tweet thread per week, I'd make it one of Karen's. https://t.co/MJFi0HlT2N
Viral Parkinsonism, another piece of the chronic infection/impact of infection puzzle. Alongside other research suggesting Parkinsons and artherosclerosis may be Long Influenza. Causality being tested. It took over a century to find gravity waves. https://t.co/Yp50La9cUR
Neoliberalism has a chronic or 'long' form too. Long neoliberalism is what we're living now, where society is under siege from problems in every direction, and we can do nothing. Because there is no society. The neolibs deliberately destroyed it. /1 https://t.co/pCPxSoFCvN
The acute phase of neoliberalism feels great, it's euphoric. Everything is flogged off and the proceeds are used to create rivers of budget gold, which then fund tens of billions in election bribes. Personal debt skyrockets as the flood of money inspires dreams of riches. /2
Then you arrive at long neoliberalism. Where the money has all evaporated, together with all of the collective institutions that are what society actually is. The things the neolibs sell and dismantle. Suddenly everything from plagues to weather catastrophes meet no response. /3
There's nothing left to respond with. The lot has been either destroyed or sold. Replaced with 'personal responsibility', for everything. Meaning those who pocketed the dosh in the acute phase are the only people who can afford to live, constructing gated communities.../4
...to replace the societies they sold and smashed. From where they lecture the rest of us about how we just need to 'live with' the social collapse we inherited, because only in that way will we be 'free'. /ends
You superstar @KarenCutter4 ! This sort of thing may shift the pandemic in Australia. Did they contact you? https://t.co/2Bq6J6eGMy
An update on this. One sent home because the hospital was deemed a much too risky place to be. So HITH instead. The hospital, too risky. Australia, 2022. https://t.co/TQN9sdWIhH
You know when we Tweet here about the appalling stupidity of Covid strategy? Who are we talking to? The sad answer is - the vacuum where society used to be. Like there’s still some clearing ground for injustice and stupidity. There isn’t. There’s just an economy. A market.
The basic act of democracy is a parliament passing laws. What do our current leaders do? Describe those laws as oppression, and removing them as freedom. The most democratic way to deal with Covid is to pass laws about it. Also the most effective way to get rid of it.
Dan using polite words to say ‘we surrendered to the cookers, because they were scary’. Get in the bin. Get rid of elections, popularity is destroying society. https://t.co/q0AUAE3KXw
Weak political leadership, exactly. And absolutely pissweak political journalism holding it to account for this public health disgrace. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/jxfuFUmpPK
Because an economy replaces all societies with a globalised economy, we're all on a race to the bottom, because life is driven by the lowest bid. Deepti describing brilliantly how this will mean all of us getting used to what the underprivileged have experienced forever. https://t.co/93saTY0qUE
It wasn't always how it would be, because it's also never how it has been ever before, in all of human history. It's a disgusting collapse of basic leadership.
Plug and play is down to one thing. Regulations. Rules create freedom, repeat it often to annoy libertarians. Covid rules gave us many more degrees of freedom than not having them. https://t.co/FfSymPK6q1
We have to regulate our way out of the pandemic. When we wanted to lower the risk from guns, we regulated. Only law can capture all domains of society at the same time. The same politicians who told us removing Covid law creates freedom make laws as their day job. https://t.co/61n1sGDnoj
Any ambulance-chasing lawyer should be licking their lips over Covid. For many jobs you don’t even need to prove you caught it at work, work has to prove you didn’t. What’s the delay? Let’s get moving, make business pay for using no Covid protections. https://t.co/tRNdhiDY87
1) Why do these tougher questions have to come from the public? What are journalists paid for? ‘A lot of people have said’ would be a fail in a first-year journalism assignment. 2) I never agreed to any ‘deal’. Consumer law has stricter rules about buying a fridge. #auspol /1 https://t.co/q0AUAE3KXw
3) As Andrews said, a 3rd vaccination a year ago is as good as useless. But that’s most of the country. That’s National Cabinet’s KPI, not the public’s. Australia’s politicians have been a disastrous failure in the past 12 months. Get out of the way. /end
I’ve Tweeted about the same here in Australia. The narrative that we were ‘locked down’ for 2 years is absolute rubbish. For most of that time much of society was open, and the virus was controlled. https://t.co/RQbaFTvk3f
This is fantastic news for Australia. Welcome, @dgurdasani1 https://t.co/WC6MVyz7xZ
Ouch. Apparently the carnage levels off next week to just a bus load again. https://t.co/viz3YTTWxF
Australia should be the richest country in the world. Read this for how 3 decades of LNP government pissed it all away for a few piddling donations. Elections destroy democracy, it’s what made this possible. https://t.co/HWYSkfBrTO
Electricity generators in NSW often have contracts with local coal mines to supply at a set rate. Just curious how a cap on coal prices impacts that, anybody know?
I’m anti-elections because no good can ever, using any logic, result from vesting ultimate authority in a society to popularity. Convince me otherwise. https://t.co/556Cpet1a3
There are only two ways to meaningfully control energy prices. One is to make it a public resource again and regulate it. Politicians won’t even regulate against a virus, so no to that. The other is generate it yourself. Can’t see this plan doing much. https://t.co/AglmbysJNB
Societies are not capitalist, they’re not economies either. They’re high schools. Elections are, literally, the transposition of popularity hierarchies in high school into adult life. https://t.co/yJDzf3KAQ9
The major ‘authoritarian’ regimes, against which we define our own democracies. Both created by democratic revolutions modelled on Western political ideas, in reaction to imperial rule. In the West those same ideas are crumbling, leading to imperial rule by populists. /1 https://t.co/SDfT0KUy9I
What really matters is social stability, over the longer term. Both China and the UK had that. Both because of one thing, their bureaucracies. The UK bureaucracy is modelled on the Chinese. Look up ‘bureaucracy’ and the definition will include ‘non-elected officials’. /2
The Chinese bureaucracy is rooted in actual expertise. It’s the secret of their longevity. The democratic revolutions in China sought to bypass this bureaucracy. The libertarian revolution in the UK the same. Both lead to the same outcome, increasingly autocratic rule. /3
But more dangerous than the old imperial autocratic rule, because expertise is removed from the governance. Bureaucracy was the way humans invented to get expertise into decision making. Not elections, which are easily gamed by autocrats. /end
Infection is a rising star in so many major chronic health conditions. I think it’s a paradigm for chronic disease that has a long way to run yet. https://t.co/heWO2vVqnq
I wonder if Victorians read the fine print on Dan’s ‘deal’. https://t.co/RmX4W6NkG7
I hear the frustration at Covid inaction. The only thing standing between all of us and the end of the pandemic is 9 elected politicians, who refuse to do anything. Their public health teams know what to do. They won’t let them do it. 9 people. Elections are the obstacle. https://t.co/ffhLl7trys
Dan Andrews’ ‘deal’ with the public never happened. Elections take the voices of the people, and turn them into numbers. Politicians are then free to project whatever meaning they like onto the numbers, because only they retain a voice. ‘The people’ don’t speak, they’re counted. https://t.co/AAFizn84DS
The inaction on Covid is not some radical break with ‘normal’ life. The old normal already didn’t care less. What Covid did was make that visible, rather than create some break with our past. https://t.co/WbV08SfAiP
I don’t think social media is an information platform. It’s a technology for mobilising groups, socially. It’s a libertarian operating system, which is why it’s accelerating the collapse of democracies. https://t.co/qnarZDVOsl
Let us count the ways elections don’t solve problems. How long have you got? https://t.co/9sAqESXLWl
If you think change will come by ‘mobilising’ people through social media, it’s worth remembering that the communist parties of Russia and China began as democracy movements, in the name of the people. Social media magnifies and accelerates these movements. https://t.co/kdyR0wfmX2
Australians have spent more than 20 years being the top dark blue line. But in elections it’s voted for the pale red line. I can’t think of a better example of how the choke point of genuine democracy is elections. Explain it any other way. https://t.co/mvQrwcZPcO
This was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite show, because she thought it was about bureaucratic obstruction, that she despised. But it was a show about how that obstruction protects us from populist windbag politicians, like her. https://t.co/vI2mN55lUL
Nope, it relies upon most people not having a clue how anything much works, because they’ve delegated it to a civil service and elected representatives to do for them. The idea everybody knows enough about everything to run society is libertarian fantasy. https://t.co/QLX3IUou3q
As journos join millions of other Australians in Covid-spreading Christmas parties, maybe they can share ideas for 2023 penance for the public health disaster they co-inflicted on the Australian community in 2021 and 2022, together with our elected dullards? #auspol https://t.co/LFSQkh3BLd
Most defenders of democracy defend the wrong things, because their experience of actually running one is zero. Nothing but idealistic fairy tales. They should be required to spend a day on the switchboard of their local council. They would learn a lot. https://t.co/dYNezx57Jj
Wanted to re-Tweet this, because those so adamant elections are central to democracy don’t even seem to register that in the world’s leading democracies, most people don’t even vote. And that’s only the beginning of the problem with elections. https://t.co/GVAykE2Jiz
Go electric, get your own solar panels. The fossil fuel industry fluffers we elect are so symbiotically dependent upon donations that the planet will be incinerated before real change happens. https://t.co/MO2fiGLn23
The RBA’s report into consumption during the pandemic is a very revealing insight into modern Australia. This is how a spoiled, snowflake society responds to an emergency. It missed its cafes, restaurants and recreational travel too much. /1 #covd19aus https://t.co/zV4CyVizQD
This first graph shows how the consumption of goods not only barely declined, it actually went up during the pandemic. But services crashed. What services were these? /2 https://t.co/wKiLT5iMSd
‘Out and about’ services, predominantly cafes, restaurants and travel. Spending on eating out more than doubled in Australia between 2004 and 2019, pre-pandemic. That has been the main driving resistance to public health action during Covid, both from consumers and businesses. /3 https://t.co/KFkt1Xfn7N
To this mix of hedonistic lifestyle interruption we can add the other great vampire squid on the face of Australian democracy, gambling. Public health action really upset the pokies. In NSW in particular, this was intolerable to the political donors, many of whom…/4 https://t.co/yDudgmfShy
…were also keen users of JobKeeper. Modern Australia increasingly is like a holiday resort for its own residents, who wine, dine, travel and gamble while foreign interests plunder their natural resources. /5 https://t.co/CGWqTnysby
RBA analysis is here: https://t.co/7NvvoLeQCn /end
So many watched the show. What about this scene for example suggests that elected politicians should run a country? https://t.co/uRvCjaTaIB
All groups of all sizes are functionally the same. We label them with big floppy categories like capitalist or authoritarian or scientific, because we’re lazy. All groups operate using status hierarchies. Through social conformity. All that varies is what defines the status. https://t.co/TAOgxecA3j
Our peaceful, prosperous lives of the past 70 years weren’t the result of our democratic freedoms. It was the massive post-war boom, where war industries built consumer goods. Those markets are long saturated. Stagnant wages, minimal job security and mass infection is us now. https://t.co/rVUAL1wAZF
Have lost track of the number of false dawns this technology has created. Even if they have done this, it’ll be under highly controlled, hugely expensive lab conditions. It won’t be any help against climate change, though it’ll be used by climate minimisers to say that. https://t.co/Pt2QLNIhOk
Note that he’ll be isolating for 10 days. I doubt that’s a coincidence. 5 days and then zero days were always political measures, not health. #auspol https://t.co/5oV1gWHHyM
RN breakfast this morning, a panel predicting ‘Chinese propaganda’ would say Zero Covid was a great platform to open up China from. That’s what our government said here too. Interesting that it’s ‘propaganda’ when the Chinese say it.
Mark Butler - a GP referral for a PCR test from 1 January is the right ‘balance’. Meaning the public doing the work. Also, this is managing Covid ‘in a similar way’ to other viruses. Just as we all manage Covid in a similar way to what leaders would do, if we had any.
“When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realise that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with…you all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.” Kurt Vonnegut. Who understood how societies really work.
The ‘like any other virus’ line from National Cabinet requires the endorsement of the CMO. I’d like him to explain how Covid is just like ordinary seasonal viruses. And also to share the science on using mass infection to control a pandemic. https://t.co/lTVZN9SnLO
‘Protecting the vulnerable’ is neoliberal safety net democracy. No democracy, just a market, and you have some minimal public assistance as a safety net for those who fall through the market’s cracks. A LABOR government is doing this. https://t.co/QBvl6wjpUQ
@theprojecttv , grilling @AdamBandt about a windfall profits tax, saying it would be ‘sovereign risk’. That’s a sponsored talking point from these bloody companies, does anybody do journalism any more? The UK did this some time ago. https://t.co/mEnAikcfqy
‘The economy returned to growth’ literally means the old normal, the old status quo, has ploughed through a couple of hundred thousand dead in the UK to protect its status. https://t.co/Qye36O3C5x
If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only reinforces the existing tribal groupings. /1 https://t.co/ldFgO6oi6D
It marks you out as part of an opposing group of some kind, to the Covid minimisers. It’s the oil in the whole machine. Society is much more like football than like science (and even science is much more like football than like science). It’s competing teams, quite literally. /2 https://t.co/rxM9Utamde
So how do we shift this? It’s not about replacing social conformity with facts, social conformity IS society. It’s what holds it together, at every scale, from schoolyard groups, to workplaces, research teams, sporting clubs etc. /3
Like I say a lot, you have to look at society as a high school, because it’s what it literally is. That’s the model that we use implicitly to construct all of these social groupings, our teams. There is a type of person, pretty rare, in high school who manages to surf all…/4 https://t.co/kH636jhdOT
…of the different teams, who’s popular or at least tolerated by all. Think back to those handful of people who manage that at school, what they do. I’ve thought about that a lot, and I think they act orthogonally to the conformity that drives all human groups. /5
Not antagonistically, which again just marks them as part of an opposing team. They focus on the *individuals* inside groups, as individuals. Not in some ingratiating or toadying way, that will just trigger the group conformity mechanisms. /6
They touch the insecurity inside every person that drives them to social conforming behaviour, as shelter. They speak to that insecurity, in a ‘I hear you’ sort of way. If you speak to a Covid minimiser, try to talk to the insecurity that drives them to join that team. /7
They’re nearly always already outsiders in a social sense, that’s what drives so many to these reactionary groups, it offers them a sense of belonging. The handful who lead these groups are alpha-bullies, and you can talk to them differently, drawing out their real agenda of…/8
…social domination. In every case talk orthogonally, to that underlying social mechanism, rather than getting bogged down in the facts. The facts are weapons social groups use, they don’t really shape society themselves. /end
Just one of the luminaries in Australia who has been patronisingly telling us all we have to live with Covid. A quality team, the Covid minimisers. https://t.co/T1LOD0ii2j
Yep though the ‘mystery why people do this isn’t a mystery. It’s social conformity. Without that society would cease to function. The solution isn’t less conformity, it’s making that top 5-10% do their job, to lead the rest appropriately. https://t.co/N9XoZ6SvdX
The only thing China has set free is SARS-Cov-2. The minimisers baying for this for 3 years can own the consequences. But they won't. https://t.co/daFHGnsVdz
Listening to a conservative commentator in the UK spitting with rage today about planned strikes by nurses and rail workers. Demanding these jobs be forbidden to ever strike, being ‘essential services’. Pay them as essential then. Society is not a pool of servants.
National Cabinet took a distributed, federalist governance structure for public health, and replaced it with a small group governed by its own internal social conformity. That was the plan. A forum where to act on public health advice violated the conformity of that small group. https://t.co/mbF3ayf6T9
We should always be worried when leaders get very chummy. Populism claims this is ‘team Australia’, but our Westminster federalist system is built on contestation. Without contestation it collapses, it ceases to work. As we’re seeing with Covid. /1 #auspol https://t.co/bCl8XRGDpJ
That contestation is where claims and decisions are tested. Say you were on trial, and your lawyer and the prosecution lawyer took chummy photos together like this. Who’s looking out for you? It may be your dream to be a ‘consensus’ leader. Consensus is not being chummy. /2 https://t.co/i0sy4hKsvd
Especially not when that chummy togetherness is group-based. Contestation then becomes like the proverbial fart in an elevator, violating the social norms of the small group. Conservatives know this, their ‘freedom’ from regulation replaces it with rigid social conformity. /3 https://t.co/AEDkyOvQCW
And they know how to manipulate that at will. How to offer that conformity unifying slogans that create a sense of group cohesion, like ‘border protection’, or ‘living with the virus’. All decoupled from any contestation, or other rigorous challenge. /end
The UK, in a state of collapse after years of Tory ‘there is no such thing as society’ rule, now seriously debating whether they need tougher laws to stop unions striking for a living wage. The libertarians! Their freedom is literally just their freedom. Not mine or yours.
In the world of snowflake privilege, ‘division’ is a dirty word. But to divide is to share. The reason society seems divided, is because it’s not. Things are not shared, creating divisions. To rectify that. That’s what debate and argument is, a KPI for lack of sharing. https://t.co/SEDt1QvJ9Y
In the UK the Tories are throwing everything they have at protecting a dying generation of stale privilege. Adopting Oz-style refugee-bashing, and accusing unions of killing cancer patients. You can viscerally feel the ‘know your place’ behind the rhetoric. https://t.co/OKEMpwIvvw
The ABC, on China: “The elation that met those changes has quickly faded amid mounting signs that China may pay a price for shielding a population that lacks "herd immunity"…” Great Barrington Declaration: “We know that all populations will eventually reach herd immunity…”
The CMO and National Cabinet need to openly declare that the public health approach they’re using is the GBD. It’s indistinguishable from it. Has one journalist asked this? #auspol https://t.co/m1DlswoZJ9
It’s also predictably unsurprising that the overwhelming majority of GBD signatories are from the world of Anglo-American-European privilege. https://t.co/xGRHtCKw6g
Finally on GBD, it was drafted at an American free-market think tank. Have a look at the articles on their site for the flavour of extreme libertarianism they endorse. This is now Australia’s public health policy. Under a LABOR government. #auspol https://t.co/4nMG7t9AMT
From the AIER. Sponsor of the ‘protecting the vulnerable’ Covid policy adopted by the Australian Labor government. If you lie down with dogs you’ll get up with fleas. They do know they’re being played by the extreme Right of politics, surely? Are they that dumb? #auspol https://t.co/yKiVBqK9ze
Tragically @KarenCutter4 is on holiday (which she deserves), so looking at the NSW weekly epi report without her guidance. - lead summary point is that ‘we are likely to have reached the peak in infections’. - this based on stable PCR positivity and ‘declining’ hospital…/1
…admissions and admissions from EDs. - I know Karen has been scathing about the hospital admission data, so will be interesting to see if that still has the issues she’s identified for the past 2 reports. - diagnosed cases up 3.6%. - PCR positivity stable at 20% (ouch). /2
56 NSW Covid deaths reported this week, remembering again that NSW now only uses deaths finalised through Births Deaths and Marriages in its reporting, from memory. Anyway, full report here: https://t.co/TH0iWOORVq /ends
Was at a school end of year presentation today and the school leader said 2022 was a ‘lot better than 2020 and 2021’, things much more ‘back to normal’. Like all schools sickness has been off the charts in 2022. The leader coughed and sneezed into a hanky about 7 times.
We’re hopelessly vulnerable to basic political strategy. The UK Tories for example, battling domestic chaos, right now running a so-obvious distraction campaign against refugees, copied straight from the Oz playbook. The ‘evil people smugglers’. https://t.co/ePvaNN0ZGw
Insurance for avoidable disasters is like infection for immunity. It’s a symptom of none of the risk mitigation being done properly or at all. Watch the pile-on on the insurance industry for problems caused by populist politicians doing nothing. https://t.co/Lq1vV2bL3f
As always in election-driven democracy, the outcome we get is about placating donors and voters, and not about what actually needs doing. https://t.co/aP70hVWJ9L
‘Unelected’ has become an insult under populism. Do you elect your dentist, car mechanic, or airline pilot that flys you to your holiday destination? Or are they in their jobs because of a tested competence? What’s the test of running a democratic country? How popular you are.
Most people have a much greater fear of doing something different to what everybody else is doing, than they do of dying. Social conformity is the essential glue that holds society together, but led in the wrong ways also the fastest way to collective suicide.
It’s not that people understood public health before, and now they don’t. They didn’t then either. But we had leaders who understood its importance and led accordingly.
Let the squirming discomfort of the Sloganator before the Royal Commission be a salutary warning to National Cabinet of their futures, when the Covid enquiries begin. https://t.co/tUF8hRZR4i
Such an important point. Please can somebody report this sort of thing? #auspol I had a feeling Karen would peek ;) https://t.co/QsCvC60ccH
So our PM has had Covid twice. Do we have a tally for the rest of National Cabinet? Surely they should be leading the way, building their rich hybrid immunity with frequent infections?
Don’t be fooled by the ‘focused protection’ herd immunity crowd. When they say herd, they don’t include themselves. They’re ‘35 miles behind’ the front line. Nothing changes much in history. https://t.co/III65A6XsL
“If you are out and someone is wearing a mask, they are either anxious…[or] they’re vulnerable…or…they may be out and about with the virus”. Catherine Bennett, in today’s Guardian. Or they could be ordinary people trying not to catch or spread Covid, hey.
At least The Guardian is reporting the disappearance of the disappearing peak. Cases to ‘stay high’ means out of control, in plain English. https://t.co/RUosF1Oin1
Unions in the UK still have some clout. https://t.co/vIKhzhjJKW
PCR this morning as a close contact, making use of the system before it disappears to the end of a 10-week wait for an appointment with my GP. The testing person swabbed my nostril, suggesting not a HCW removed from frontline duties. Keep drive-through clinics open.
The genius of the libertarian wrecking ball is that it creates extreme distrust in government and institutions. And that’s exactly what they want. For us to throw all civil society away, and return to the Wild West. Which incidentally is the origin of much libertarian politics. https://t.co/cXT3v98Bo0
Anybody sharing Christmas with Domicron this year knows that ‘protecting the vulnerable’ means no Christmas. The normalisation of mass disease and death in 2022 highlighted here, when less than 10,000 cases a year ago was seen as an emergency. https://t.co/N4VKEmIPVH
Before the end of 2021 in Australia, what was ‘locked down’ was SARS-Cov-2. We stopped it spreading widely. The propaganda victory of the libertarians is to substitute people, for the virus. We weren’t locking down people. Being at home is usually called a holiday. #covid19aus
Say it every day. We’re not living with Covid. We’re ignoring it. The status quo, often called ‘the economy’, wants us to pretend we’re back in 2019. It’s social inertia, the enormous accumulated wealth and privilege of a predominantly older population is not for budging.
The word ‘lockdowns’ replaced ‘quarantine’. The difference is profound. Quarantine clearly implies that a pathogen is being locked up. Lockdowns implies people are. None of this was accidental. Neoliberal politics is almost entirely about language, about slogans.
The reason lockdowns became so potent politically is that the default state now is to be away from home. For work, for socialising, for travel. Like our homes are saucepans, and lockdowns sealed them up so that they were ready to blow. We’re losing all sense of place, of ‘home’. https://t.co/yzKipfPwJ8
The people probably least surprised at the capitulation to Covid, is teachers. (Nobody asks them anything.) The ‘live with the virus’ folk were their students, and they saw that shift in them and in their parents. Schools have been coping with this social breakdown for years.
@SkyNews how about some fact-checking on your Press Preview segment on ‘immunity debt’ i.e. not catching colds and flu for 3 years has supposedly lowered our individual immunity. It’s a myth, that’s a population immunity term, not individual.
This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about ‘lockdowns’. /1 https://t.co/4SvdLu9vRv
What was done to Mary has been controversial ever since. How do you balance individual health and freedom against collective health and freedom? In Mary’s case, it was clearly a time when collective health and freedom were prioritised. /2 https://t.co/mnJfePzQTA
Though important to note she was still cared for, fed and housed etc. But a not very satisfactory solution, and her lower class background a great driver or prejudice against her in the decision to isolate her for much of her adult life. /3
Fast forward to today, with Covid lockdowns. I think we’re seeing something superficially more enlightened, but on close examination disgustingly, inexcusably worse. The freedoms being denied people under lockdowns are social freedoms, not individual freedoms. /4
The freedom to go out and socialise, to go to restaurants and movies, to go to work, to travel. All social freedoms, not individual. People were free to do whatever they liked in their own homes, individually, during lockdowns. Individual freedoms weren’t touched. /5
The greatest opponents of these lockdowns, the political libertarians, also believe that society doesn’t exist. It’s rank hypocrisy, all of that freedom is created by society, which they don’t even believe in. I’ve Tweeted before how they’re really free-loaders,…/6 https://t.co/UWdT6Y1BXC
…living off the fat of collective effort. The let them eat cake crowd, accustomed to privilege and thinking it happens magically, or by their own genius. Lockdowns were the real test of their political philosophy, the stripping away of social things, leaving just individuals. /7
It should have been a libertarian carnival, a huge celebration of the removal of the society they despise. Of course it wasn’t because their beliefs are bullshit, and they’re bad faith actors. They only ever meant THEIR individual freedom, not yours or mine. /8
In reality, lockdowns were a humane, vast improvement on Typhoid Mary’s experience. It was society saying yes we need to restrict movement, to contain this terrible disease. But we’ll all do it together, we won’t just isolate the vulnerable, the infected, and the marginalised. /9
All of us will chip in, will make some sacrifices, to bring this disease under control. Even the uninfected, because that’s not only fair, but this impacts all of us. We all have to carry the weight. The libertarians fumed for 18 months, while we did this. And plotted. /10
Their counter-attack was the singling out of specific localities as responsible, locking them down while everybody else lived normally. No individual freedom for them. This is the nonsense these BS beliefs lead to repeatedly, when they fail the reality test. /11 https://t.co/rdMuP6FDMw
Make everybody ‘personally responsible’ for everything, then when society breaks blame the individuals who happen to cop the brunt of the breakdown. Send in the police, and the army, in a real show of ‘freedom’ in action. /12 https://t.co/ky3s4mQ0XO
Lockdowns were a community acting to save a community. Not a State oppressing individuals. The spoiled rich private school kids who mostly lead these libertarian movements can barely boil an egg, but are brought up being told by mummy and daddy how the State is stealing…/13
…their money, forcing them to downsize to the 1-series BMW as a third car. All their freedom rubbish is…rubbish. It just means their freedom to do whatever they like. All of the actual work will be done by you and me, not them. They couldn’t run a cake stall in reality. /14
Lockdowns never ended. They can’t, a circulating lethal virus destroys society. They were privatised. Now everybody is Typhoid Mary, but they have to lock themselves up, for their own safety. The only possible outcome of these idiot beliefs. /end
Public health alerts for spinach. Personal responsibility for mass infection and death. https://t.co/XRpGa7TGO8
Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain. It failed, they lost badly. But…/1 https://t.co/7TMjVmnV5Z
…the legacy they left us makes it now seem impossible for existing leaders to do anything about Covid at all. That’s not actually true, bipartisan action could shift things. But State elections then got in the way, Victoria and now NSW. Elections are a total hindrance. /2
Name one complex problem that was ever solved using popularity as a method. There isn’t one. That’s why vital social processes are always run by non-elected officials, not by politicians. There are objectively known risk management methods to be applied, and a politician’s…/3
…only job there is to build public support for that objective action. Not to create their own version of public health, to try to drum up votes. We’ve been here before with climate change. We can only hope that once the nonsense of the NSW election is out of the way, there…/4
…may be some breathing space at National Cabinet level to try to turn the Covid disaster around. But I’m not holding my breath, societies that vest ultimate authority in popularity cannot survive. /ends
Apologies if some of my Tweets disappear occasionally, I have an ongoing technical issue which forces a reboot, and it seems to take Tweets with it.
@FoxCricket probably a dumb question, bUt does a green pitch help bowlers because that extra grass allows the seam to grip better, for movement?
Thunderbirds are go! Maybe some of our homegrown paediatricians and ID docs can get over there to herd (ha) the kids back into the schools, before they suffer critical damage to their mental health from learning at home. https://t.co/j6VXO2th9W
Australians travel obsessively, accumulating ‘sights’ like we used to collect stamps. Trying to rediscover a grounded sense of place, by going to lots of places. But it just marks us as children of empire. A ‘big lap’ is our own domestic Cook’s Endeavour, collecting specimens. https://t.co/W4QFWS2kKc
AEMO’s graph. Look at that tsunami of rooftop solar. By 2025 already, so much that it will threaten the stability of the grid. Exports throttled already to prevent overload, at a time existing energy companies say ‘supply’ is the issue. 2 decades of government inaction. https://t.co/J5NiYAin6I
Imagine a target range for infection, like we have for inflation. In the old days (i.e. 3 years ago), that’s what controlling a disease meant. Heaven and Earth are being moved to get us back into the target range for inflation. Infection numbers have permanent hyperinflation. https://t.co/2wvIEEiOHF
Often forgotten is that social media was designed to implement a set of libertarian political beliefs i.e. that interaction of ‘the people’ is democracy. But the people is not even a thing. It’s just a group of people, each acting in their own way. Reality always returns. https://t.co/kaoMuSMW7W
Saw a conservative commentator say this is China’s fault for not vaccinating its people. The same sort of person who declared the pandemic over with most of the developing world unvaccinated. https://t.co/GcQKPEBpRP
Content moderation is social media trying to reinvent the institutions that used to regulate knowledge and information. It’s a very thin gruel as a replacement, hopeless. And often just algorithms anyway. Knowledge, like society, has never emerged from the ‘bottom up’. https://t.co/O2H7yhFNAm
UK news yesterday, claims of this being the most ‘normal Christmas since the pandemic began’. More gaslighting rubbish. As a family currently having its Christmas ruined by having to manage Covid as a new house guest, the previous two were much more normal. /1
When we had the virus under much greater control. I’d like to challenge the minimisers about ‘living with the virus’ at Christmas time. How do you do it? Let the infected sit at the table, infecting the rest of the family and friends? Let’s unpack the slogans for once. /2
The idea that a Christmas is more normal when a large number of the population are infected with a lethal virus - how much longer do we have to sit here and put up with this meaningless propaganda? The only meaning of ‘normal’ that minimisers mean is ‘economic activity’. /3
Businesses running, businesses open, including travel and entertainment businesses. Cash flowing. Flying on planes. Pathologically abnormal is people doing all of these things infected with a lethal virus, and infecting and reinfecting everybody else as they go about it. /4
Just recently I asked if our CMO and National Cabinet would confirm that our Covid ‘strategy’ is nothing but the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD), a free market think tank propaganda document. The two are indistinguishable. Of course they won’t listen to me. /5 https://t.co/N50RA1ku9y
But not one journalist I’ve seen has asked this critical public administration question. A pox on the Fourth Estate. Criminal negligence, I’d say disgustingly lazy journalism, but that has the word journalism in it and dignifies the vacuum where journalism used to be. /ends
Overheard conversation at work, where somebody has Covid at home. Colleagues offering advice: “just let the whole family get it at once, like chickenpox, then it’ll be done with”. Slogans work.
We’re at about the first anniversary of letting Covid rip in Australia. The replacement of a world-leading public health response with…nothing. Just mass, repeated infection.
Those who will minimise any Covid disaster in China by saying they should have vaccinated more, need to remember that Australia stopped vaccinating when it let Covid rip too. And will likely kill 25,000 people this year alone, while lecturing others in what to do.
China’s economy unsurprisingly more disrupted by allowing infection than it was by preventing infection. And Western journalists explain this by lack of preparation by ‘the authoritarian’ Chinese. As if in the West things were any different. https://t.co/i2RYHxAMbc
The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated PUBLIC. /1 https://t.co/OP2ltPw6BB
The hilarious irony now is that one of the world’s most promiment libertarians, @elonmusk, has rectified this for us, by offering the same broadband to all, irrespective of location. A brilliant, bold initiative. Australia used to be brilliant and bold in public projects. /2
Now like most of the world, the whole idea of the ‘public’ has more or less disappeared. Replaced with the libertarian alternative, majorities and minorities. Itself driven by electoral methodologies, which we now mistake for democracy itself. Faced with the challenge of…/3
…turning society into nothing but millions of sovereign individuals, how do you then undertake any sort of group or collective action, under political libertarianism? You just count. Majority rules. The problem though is that it then means the proposed individual sovereignty…/4
…of each citizen may be violated, if they’re not in that majority. They have to suck it up, they lose. As regional Australians did with broadband, until Starlink. As many do now with Covid, if they’re ‘vulnerable’ (minority). Our Covid response evolved from the same set of…/5
…ideas that gave us our string and tin can broadband. And notice the response to the energy crisis is going the same way, towards ‘protecting the vulnerable’. It’ll fail in the same way that’s failed for Covid, and for the NBN. The public is not a majority OR a minority. /6
It’s everybody. It’s a very complex, sophisticated and badly understood idea, the public. It’s not about counting anything. It’s about recognising the complex interdependencies of all types of people, how we need all of that diversity to be stronger collectively. /7
Often in ways we won’t see, there’ll be no logical causal connection between how all of that diversity somehow fits together. That become visible during the pandemic, though, when the interdependencies started to break. When toilet paper ran out. When nobody could get staff. /8
Government for all of us is not government for the majority, with various sop schemes for the minority ‘vulnerables’. That’s what I call safety net democracy. It doesn’t work. Because we’re electoral fundamentalists, we take that one simple method, counting votes,…/9
…and substitute it for the real task of democracy, always. To govern for the people. The public. Not for a majority of the people (which shifts with every issue), or with band aids for the minority vulnerables. For all of them, at the same time. /10
Not because that’s kinder, or fairer, in some patronising way of ‘looking after’ everybody. The vulnerable often despise being patronised in that way, it’s insulting to them to be seen as deficient. It’s why they vote for aspiration rather than welfare, given the choice. /11
We govern for all because it’s all that works. It’s all that respects all of those interdependencies. Without that society ceases to function, as we’re finding across the board now. Look at the UK, falling apart under decades of libertarian minority and majority nonsense. /12
We need to use a PUBLIC health process to defeat Covid because that’s all that will respect those complex interdependencies. The libertarian ‘focused protection’ of the ‘vulnerable’ is failing in the same way the NBN failed, and energy is now failing. /ends
For Covid minimisers, the pandemic is not a novel and lethal virus spreading globally. It’s State intervention in economies. That’s what they see as the actual disaster. Our previous PM and the NSW Premier are in that camp.
Glass houses and throwing stones. Those who say the Chinese vaccines weren’t as good leave out that at least they were using them as part of a fuller public health strategy. We’re a disgrace. https://t.co/AKgu1XOMt7
“A year later, and Australia has embraced a great forgetting with almost no historical parallel.” https://t.co/Q00bnSPmCd
Sounds like it starts with a fact, and ends with a fact. I don’t give facts emotions myself, but each to their own. https://t.co/1MPCfauOzN
The original National Cabinet was more streamlined. https://t.co/QOHkzYnUxu
Electoral politics give people a magical sense of how power works. Winning an election doesn’t give the winner power to change things. 80-90% of power is framing issues across multiple elections. That’s what the ‘economy’ is, for example, a long-term reframing. /1 #auspol
When progressives win an election, conservatives have already poisoned the well by reframing all issues as economic issues. By reframing all of society as an economy. Bill Clinton acknowledged this with his ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. /2
When the ALP won power here, it didn’t suddenly become able to reverse our Covid disaster, for example. As @CrabbBrendan said recently, the issue is now toxic, politically. Nobody will touch it, from the major parties. That was deliberately done by 2 preceding years of…/3
…framing public health measures as ‘restrictions’, and removing them as ‘freedom’. I’m not Ned using the ALP’s capitulation here either, just restoring the reality of framing and how it determines politics much more than elections do. /ends
(‘Ned using’ was an auto correct of a mistyped ‘justifying’)
The Tories frantically upping the propaganda in the UK, with the mass strikes. The gall of this one, the party who deliberately let Covid rip, killing over 200,000 Britons. And still climbing. https://t.co/LfwWlaNSnu
2 ways conservatives have dominated politics. One is framing all issues in economic terms. The economy is a con, a substitution of society by a set of numbers that reflect the status quo. And second, by owning our public communication. They don’t even need to win elections. /1 https://t.co/01Y3aOVim2
The two work together, the ‘media’ (of all varieties) owned by conservative interests repeat the framings 24/7. Meaning conservative politicians hardly even need to campaign, the work has all been done for them. And it’s done for them even when they’re not in power. /2
The frames and media interests never stop doing the political work they were set up to do. Hapless progressives think they win by winning the odd election, now and then. But their elected leaders are like deers in the headlights of these framings and media interests. /3
And their supporters berate them for not magically overturning the whole country, just because they won an election. Gough tried that, we saw how long the conservatives put up with it. Our electoral fundamentalism means we miss all of this, how politics really works. /ends
Democracy as ‘the people’ running things now means celebrity dating experts running public health responses. https://t.co/chNhkLEgiu
Replacing regulation with self-regulation is like replacing sex with masturbation. An unregulated social media is a wrecking ball through societies. Self-regulation is an oxymoron. https://t.co/bZCTGwrQNA
Notice how quickly weekends off became weekends on again? And as for safer working conditions, whose union has done any sort of Covid audit? Anybody? https://t.co/H9SUAm1rx4
A bit sidetracked with our own Covid Christmas guest last Friday. That’s 233 families with fewer presents to buy this year. Think of the Economy. https://t.co/AmmzcQDMZQ
Probably should have copied Covid into the ‘peaking before Christmas’ email. Politicians too gutless to front up with this message, which means many won’t even be aware of it and will slaughter members of family. https://t.co/cOX2CYjvVu
Personal responsibility public health. Story from a friend’s workplace, where Covid is rampant, and a staff member laughing and saying ‘as if you can catch Covid from workmates!’
Perversely, it’s neoliberal/libertarian politics which laid the foundations for social media, by gutting communities and social groupings more generally. Then they monetised the desire for community, offering what people had lost, but for sale. https://t.co/TKoXOMn2sw
Yesterday a friend posted to Facebook how they were feeling rubbish with a dose of Covid. Tonight’s picture is them dining out in a local restaurant. Personal responsibility public health.
What was the reason countries opened up? Business. Who were the greatest users of Covid welfare? Business. After public health orders, who is now responsible for managing Covid for most of us? Business. In aggregate who is spending and doing nothing about Covid? Business.
Let me reference myself here (sorry), and point out that libertarian politicians WANT us to blame each other for this farce. When the blame is entirely theirs. https://t.co/up8mpWSIUf
This is a surveyor, helping to build a road. It takes time, money and effort. Nobody says ‘we won’t use surveyors, everybody can do their own surveying’, because that’s obviously ridiculous. But that’s our Covid strategy. Globally. https://t.co/1jdGhvsTeu
This thread got some prominent attention. Does the US RSV data show what Michael says it does? The ‘immunity debt’ debate. https://t.co/wT9r7bOxw9
One of those ‘flat peaks’. Like Close Encounters of the Covid Kind. Made of mashed potato. (Pssst, Dom and Brad got you some Covid for Christmas, spoiler alert.) https://t.co/A1o5m8zxgV
Conservatives think long-term. This is their long-term aim, to strip away anything ‘public’. And it’s not that they don’t want to fight Covid, they just don’t want the ‘State’ to gain importance. They privatised the pandemic. https://t.co/C6xDL2IiWI
If our strategy is to reduce severe disease and death, we clearly should go back to what we were doing before the end of 2021. As a bonus it will also stop continuous ongoing mass infection and illness, and all of the disruption that causes. #covid19aus https://t.co/MqoCFPDJwi
At the end of another terrible Covid year, I think we need to zoom out and recognise we’re in the middle of a pattern that repeats throughout history. Plagues and wars are all that really change societies, that level them. 2023 will show us whether…/1 https://t.co/QZPwjEyY2I
…society’s current elites will get away with trying to escape that pattern, with their ‘living with the virus’. The great push to protect the status quo. If SARS-Cov-2 remains strong and flexible, they can never win this fight, but they can kill a lot of us trying. 2/2
Happy Christmas Straya. Enjoy your gift from National Cabinet. https://t.co/60YXkH06cx
So is this the age-old territorial pissing contest between medicine and public health? Some of the most aggressive Covid minimisers both publicly and in my own private experience have been GPs and ID docs. https://t.co/bUMplmap9d
Won’t happen until business has to pay for the consequences, rather than offload them as externalities on the taxpayer. We could start with enforcing basic WHS law, which seems to be flagrantly ignored in most workplaces right now, with Covid. https://t.co/f2QVaK13mb
@jburnmurdoch https://t.co/6TVyD3hYnW
(This explains the Covid debacle.) We’ve lived a delusion of prosperity. Only a very tiny number are. The rest use personal debt to create faux-prosperity. Now that interest rates have ended that, the feudal nature of society has been revealed. Live with the virus, peasants. https://t.co/AGI6BWOLaf
Many have noticed letting Covid rip hasn’t fixed the economy, it’s made it worse. So why don’t the ‘live with the virus’ econo-zealots change course? Because that would involve the ‘State’ doing something. And that to them is the deepest evil. https://t.co/MLIngciqub
My virtual Christmas card for National Cabinet, ATAGI and the AHPPC. https://t.co/r3OF9uYtA1
Herd immunity is the market-based mechanism to attempt to deal with infectious disease. Not an analogy, this is the political epidemiology of Covid. Public health is intrinsically political.
A public health farce. Saying there’s real benefit in being reinfected, but please don’t get reinfected. In the context of a national strategy of ‘infect our way out of the pandemic’. But don’t get infected. https://t.co/dyuYVzRnfc
Established artists went into well-heeled safe isolation when Covid started. Then hit the road in 2022, to restore the adulation and big earnings they crave. Who knows how many fans they infected. Let’s not pretend they needed the money. https://t.co/fC8XMGXjUw
And so 2022 draws to a close, a year of mass infection and death, an opening up driven by the recreational travel that seems now to be the only purpose of Western life. The whole society on a permanent gap year. Merry Christmas. https://t.co/sz1Dpk3nCL
‘Why are you Tweeting, go and celebrate Christmas with your family!’ I can’t do that, National Cabinet gifted us Covid for Christmas. Trying to find their guidelines about how to have Christmas lunch with your elderly mother, without killing her.
On FB (where brains go to die), somebody asked ‘why don’t you ever let up about Covid’? I said it’s like having a toilet leaking raw sewage into your house. You don’t say ‘let’s leave that until another day, and go and have some fun.’
‘Battles’ is wrong, they were battling Covid before. Now they’re just letting it infect everybody, cheered on by the Infinite Covids here at home. https://t.co/TdZ2a5Cqch
I have @NjbBari3 to thank for a revelation today. A couple of weeks ago I thought I’d contracted Covid, because my sense of taste started to go a bit wonky. But 2 PCRs and multiple RATs since that time, and nothing. Then I saw Noor mention ‘mask mouth’. /1 https://t.co/295JMjDH46
Apparently a not uncommon ailment amongst HCWs who have to mask for hours every day. Shifts the balance of microbes in your mouth, leading to taste changes, calculus, caries, and also build-up on the tongue. So I took a basic soup spoon and did a bit of tongue scraping,.../2 https://t.co/5gHnFMVCXP
…having read that brushing and even mouthwash are not always effective in cleaning the tongue. The change was instant. The sour-bitter taste in the mouth gone, and the taste of foods restored to normal. Anybody experienced this, with frequent masking during the pandemic? /3/3
I’m sure an Infinite Covid will explain how this is ultimately down to lockdowns. But separately, so many black Teslas? Are they having a Henry Ford moment? https://t.co/SFhB9Z11TS
You’d have to be pretty thick to not see conservatives have been gradually dismantling public health (in the funding and disciplinary sense) for several decades. All the while saying they’re its greatest fan. They couldn’t lie straight in bed. They despise it. https://t.co/pkHkF6RkqT
This is the pressure cooker that blew open any attempt to control SARS-Cov-2. The obsessive need to travel. Understand why we can’t be settled, can’t be ‘home’, and I think we understand everything. What is the actual purpose of all of this movement? https://t.co/FUzMCm5KJb
Criticising travel incenses many people, which to me suggests it’s much closer to the root of our problems than nebulous terms like ‘capitalism’. For example, we burn about a billion litres of jet fuel for this travel, per DAY. A billion litres per day. How does this story end?
Isn’t there some saying that thank you’s cost nothing? Why the Tories endorsed clapping for the NHS, meaningless symbolism. This should be ‘apologies to those who have to work over Christmas, to deal with the mass disease we inflicted on you in 2022’. https://t.co/iCnsa9IhRd
There’s no public health effort against Covid, because our politics has no public. Res publica - also ‘common-wealth’ - means something held in common by people. Replaced by a global market, which allows no collective component. Europe at least tried, with its ‘common market’. https://t.co/7VlrdRkoa7
Our own culture is the one most invisible to us. Where politicians win elections denying asylum to the international homeless, and win more elections saying that staying in your own comfortable home to avoid infection is a restriction on your freedom. https://t.co/nAnqMCzRAD
‘People have always travelled’ is used as a justification for our jet-setting culture. Nomads travelled to have enough food to eat, not to take selfies in front of tourist sites. https://t.co/n8PRMcx3GP
The Tories boosting the classic Christmas message of “get back to work (sick) peasants, we have a lot of recreational travellers to satisfy”. https://t.co/SoQrYrimp0
What this great graphic doesn’t show is the privatised lockdowns which replaced PHOs. People isolating when sick. Having lived through that entire time, I can say everything pre-Nov 21 felt much more ‘free’. Unless you wanted international flights. Travel busted public health. https://t.co/It0u6IzwBV
“…society is behaving like it’s reached disease-free equilibrium. The harsh reality is that we are still in the grasp of a global COVID-19 pandemic and the ending is going to be brutal.” https://t.co/YG2MsCK6k1
Another way to unpack the myth of ‘bottom up’ Covid victory. Countries, nations. Today the international community is thought of as made up of nations. But the international community pre-existed nations, who were invented at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. /1 https://t.co/Qz4oOFcwLb
The international created the national, not the other way around. Why this matters is that our nations are currently resisting doing things like fight climate change and pandemics, citing their sovereign rights. But that sovereignty is an international agreement. /2
Just as the national borders the bottom-up libertarians milk for political gain are also international agreements, not sovereign instruments. Modern political belief is upside-down. This matters a lot, for Covid. The idea control of SARS-Cov-2 should be outsourced to…/3
…individuals and their personal responsibility is the same basic belief that led to the Thirty Years’ War, which only the drawing up of sovereignties in 1648 brought to a close. A collective agreement decided who would have which territory, which sovereignty. /4
That’s what public health was invented to do. Using laws to allocate responsibilities and authorities, to defeat pathogens. It’s nonsensical to say these laws violate freedoms, because those freedoms are allocated by the same collective mechanism. Just as it’s nonsensical…/5
…to ask countries to reach international agreements using their sovereignty, when that sovereignty was given to them by international agreement. We always start with a totality, with a universal foundation, like the Holy Roman Empire in 1648, or with the ‘public’ for Covid. /6
All responsibilities and sovereignties are allocated by that totality. Law is written by the public, through its government, for the public. It’s not somebody bossing somebody else around. It’s the same people, in both cases. Only 5 decades of fairy tale political…/7
…libertarianism has led to the nonsense of seeing the ‘State’ as somehow something separate. It’s us, the collective part of us. And all that can defeat a pandemic. Because societies function collectively, and can only be steered collectively. 8/8
Can we hear from the freedom protestors and Infinite Covids now? Or maybe they can staff the wards? https://t.co/clFJmttwzQ
POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food and water and were usually not tortured. /1 https://t.co/jWsArtRtuj
In fact prisoners were often rewarded with sweets and cigarettes. Nobody tried to escape, despite the absence of barbed wire or often even armed guards. But prisoners would often sit in their huts with a blanket over their heads, and just die. /2
After liberation, very few prisoners even wanted to do the basic act of calling family at home. And there was little camaraderie amongst survivors. The overwhelming culture of the camps and in survivors was one of hopelessness. That hopelessness was deliberately engineered. /3
For example, prisoners were observed interacting, and the small number among them (about 5%) who other prisoners looked up to, the socially popular leaders of the group, were then removed and killed. The Koreans also targeted the rewards (sweets and cigarettes) to those who…/4
…informed on other prisoners. Snitches. Also encouraged was extreme self criticism amongst prisoners, of the wrongs they had done and the good they hadn’t done. Confession, to erode self respect and personal worth. There were a variety of other techniques used to undermine…/5
…self-worth, and to sever any collective ties between prisoners and to their loved ones and country back home. (Some summarised here: https://t.co/MaNDHPVhgu) The relevance to Covid? Twitter for example is awash with the same feeling of hopelessness, every day. /6
Focused not just on the authorities who are doing nothing to lead a fight against the virus, but also against fellow members of the public who are perceived (often rightly) to be doing nothing to fight the disaster either. The core message for me is one I tweet about a lot. /7
That all of society functions by social rules, not political rules. What we call the economy, and capitalism, and power, are really all just manifestations of some basic underlying social dynamics. Conformity is the glue that holds all societies together, of any belief system. /8
Conformity is not the universal negative libertarians would have us believe either. To emulate others is a great way to learn and build upon progress in human affairs. The evil here comes from how conformity is led, because as the Korean camps show, it’s what that 5% do…/9
…that drives what everybody else does. Not because the 95% are sheep, but because nobody can do everything. We all ‘follow the lead’ in everything we do, there’s always a hierarchy of expertise and value that we draw upon, whether it’s playing guitar, cooking or voting. /10
The total Covid capitulation was and is led. Just as inaction on climate change is led. And for both, just like those US POWs, the majority of us feel hopeless, like there’s nothing that could be done, and we even turn on the public more generally, shocked at their apparent…/11
…stupidity. It’s all part of eroding the social dynamics that might lead to resistance to what’s going on. Government-friendly Covid experts are given the sweets and cigarettes (media attention, plum postings in advisory bodies etc.), to snitch on the rest of us. /12
To police the acceptable beliefs. Constant ‘freedom’ narratives saturate all media, but it’s not freedom from Covid or even from government, it’s freedom to conform to something once libertarian politics has removed as many of the hierarchies of basic social life as possible. /13
Clearing the jungle of complex, sophisticated due process of democratic society, with its overlapping hierarchies of expertise, and replacing it with a handful of simple rallying slogans. ‘Live with the virus’. ‘Just like the flu’. Removing that 5% that guide in every tiny…/14
…part of life, in everything we do, and replacing them with these rallying slogans. If you feel helpless and hopeless right now, it’s because that was always the plan. So that you’d hopefully then grasp the first slogan that came along, to ease these feelings. /15
The politics of hopelessness, or neoliberalism or libertarianism, whatever you want to call it, is entirely about taking control of that 5% space, so that social conformity will then do the rest for it. Telling everybody they’ll be free if they get infected, because then…/16
…not only can you avoid doing any public health work at all, but people will actually celebrate that absence as freedom. Millions die, and people do nothing, because conformity has been used to weaponise helplessness. 17/17
That’s exactly what it is. All behaviour is led. People don’t hate masks, some of the most popular characters in fiction wear masks. They’re being led to hate them. https://t.co/Nn235KOnya
I think powerful anti-virals might make inroads into many if not most chronic health conditions. https://t.co/my3btyTySP
Just as background to my earlier thread about Korean POWs. This is a direct quote from Major William E. Mayer from the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Mayer was commissioned to study the returned prisoners. See full quote at: https://t.co/5gc0BCYtiu… https://t.co/wEeodU1IqP
‘The people’ is an illusion. Western societies are high schools. 5% of the population lead, the other 95% follow. The 95% aspire to be the 5%. Conservatives know this and pitch aspiration to them. Progressives pitch pity. The 95% vote for the 5%. https://t.co/7spghO7icY
To clarify, this isn’t an argument to make the 95% like the 5%. That’s the myth of ‘the people’ running democracy. They never have, and never will. Everybody leading everybody means nobody leading anybody. It’s about how you select the 5%. https://t.co/xs9uVL1sY8
My favourite woes of the entitled holiday stories are people complaining in airports, because an industry crippled by and also driving infection isn’t providing the customer service they demand.
Infection is the empirical proof of the bankruptcy of libertarian political ideas.
Only people who know nothing about schools thought sending kids home was bad for them. https://t.co/WH9JUHhk1K
The UK is suffering from Long Libertarianism. Where they go the rest of us will follow. https://t.co/uuwGTuSO0n
This is what voting enables. Popularity is the worst possible method to choose to determine ultimate authority in a society. https://t.co/80B72SG99l
A pandemic is not a disruption. How stuck up your own privileged backside do you have to be to understand a pandemic only as a disruption to your life?
THIS. The 5% is the key. https://t.co/MjvAhkiz1j
So your primary care physician can make sure you’re not getting tested for the wrong reason. Like stopping a pandemic. https://t.co/ojao8wEMRt
“I don't think it fundamentally would have reshaped the approach that Australia has taken to managing the virus this year.” James McCaw. We didn’t manage the virus this year. A free-market libertarian think tank wrote our Covid strategy. https://t.co/Kf1dOUOlvN
Leaders are pushing on with even more suppression of Covid data. It’s time for the non-elected officials who oversee that data to draw a line in the sand. Part of your position description is to hold the elected and their populist fantasies to account. https://t.co/QdunEY1tAV
I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same social dynamics. A society is not a collection of ‘the people’. /1 https://t.co/xs9uVL1sY8
It’s a highly stratified collection of nested hierarchies, each following the rough rule of 5% leading, 95% following. Populist, libertarian/neoliberal (N=1) politics has led us to ignore nearly all of this complex nested set of hierarchies, replaced with a simple binary. /2
Between elected leaders, and everybody else. Still that rough 5%/95% split, but only one, replacing the many thousands in a modern democratic society. Those leaders are supposed to sit within that nested set of hierarchies, taking advice from thousands of officials, who…/3
…in turn source expertise from thousands more throughout society. Doesn’t matter if you’re a musician, farmer, plumber butcher, teacher, sportsperson etc., you will have your own set of 5/95 hierarchies reflecting the expertise in your area of work. About 5% of the people…/4
…in your work will be the elite, the top experts. They will then guide everybody else, who emulate them. That’s how all groups of all sizes work, it’s fractal, scalable. If you’re on a committee, roughly 5% of the members will drive the activity of the committee. /5
If you’re in a sporting club, about 5% of the members will drive what the club does. About 5% of staff of any larger organisation will be ‘management’. You can’t miss this pattern once you start to look. Conservative politics represents about 5% of the population, as its base. /6
The wealthy, the powerful, that’s its core constituency. It’s therefore very smart in understanding that this is how societies work, and it targets that 5% ruthlessly and relentlessly. While hapless progressives try to ‘mobilise’ the entire population against them,…/7
…N=1 politics ignores that fantasy and focuses exclusively on the 5%. It offers the 95% aspiration, because the social dynamics of 5/95 is that the 95 want to be the 5. Progressives offer the 95 pity, which they reject as (rightly) patronising. /8
Conservatives do politics as social dynamics, and that’s why the tiny handful of people they are wins so often. That’s the whole history of politics, of a tiny group of elite business owners (5), in modern parlance, lording over a vastly greater number of working people (95). /9
Only natural disasters and wars ever change this pattern, because until now progressives have been too wedded to the fantasy of a non-hierarchical society. So they pitch their strategies at something that doesn’t even exist. And thus they lose. /10
Just before their deaths, Dave Graeber and Marshall Sahlins published a book on this same topic, focusing on the role of Kings in history. I wanted to finish with just one quote from them, because Kings are history’s dominant 5%. Get rid of them and humans just reinvent them. /11 https://t.co/2PQ6f0aGRX
Notice their critique of the idea of ‘popular sovereignty’, which is the progressive view of how ‘democracy’ works. Where the King is replaced with ‘the people’. As they say, it’s a contradictory impossibility. Everybody leading everybody means nobody leading anybody. 12/12 https://t.co/3qn9i5HpKY
Most people happily wear masks when political leaders mandate them. Despite all the freedom rhetoric, people mostly do as they’re told. People are not wearing masks now because the same leaders have told them not to bother. It’s not freedom v orders. It’s two different orders.
When I hear ALP politicians talk about the ‘end of Covid exceptionalism’, I know they’re repeating what their new pal Dom has told them. Progressive politicians have a political oedipus complex, where they secretly want approval from the business crowd and their pollies. https://t.co/irGk0q3jjA
Following best practice throughout history, the pandemic became ‘endemic’ when richer countries and richer groups within those societies decided they were relatively safe. About end-2021. Endemic means ‘killing somebody else, mostly the poor.’ https://t.co/DGEEijmWtk
Watching UK journalists applauding travel restrictions for travellers from China, to prevent Covid getting out of control again in the UK 🤔 Imagine a journalist thinking Covid is under control in the UK now, or at any time. Just regurgitating government press releases.
The mid-December peak predicted by both official CHOs and National Cabinet, and also prominent experts. What happened there, will anybody be held to account? Yes anecdotal, but many communities seem to be awash with infection. Local hospital closed to visitors.
This is a great initiative, because this pandemic is really about political persuasion and outright propaganda much more than it’s about public health. It’s therapeutic adding your favourite spin to the list. https://t.co/LRDRLtqYmr
While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to know. /1 https://t.co/RMEV5O3v8g
Paradoxically for those who think democracy means everybody being involved in everything, our freedom and prosperity actually derived from the opposite. From the delegation of responsibility for most important things to small expert groups - institutions. /2
The fact millions of us now try to understand virology and epidemiology and climate science is a symptom of democracies being broken. We shouldn’t need to have to understand these things, they should be taken care of for us. And the people to do that are already there. /3
It’s just that N=1 politicians have spent decades sidelining those people, and painting them as ‘unelected’, in populist politics the worst possible thing to be. Only the elected are said to be qualified to make decisions and decide on things, under N=1 populism. /4
This is why elections have been the tool bad people have used to destroy democracies. Populism is able to bypass all of that delegated expertise, dismissing it out of hand as ‘unelected’ and therefore apparently illegitimate. Popularity becomes the single measure of authority. /5
But popularity has never solved a single problem in societies, and never will. There is not one way picking the most popular person to do something will make them the right person to do it. It’s just a carry-over of school social dynamics to adult life: /6 https://t.co/l1OFfr1BUB
It’s the jocks from school getting their ultimate revenge on the nerds, who previously took control once leaving school and entering the institutions of adult life. Now those institutions have been captured by the popularity mechanisms of school. The jocks now own the…/7
…entire adult life-cycle. This is NOT an analogy, as people sometimes say, thinking they’re being kind. This is the actual cultural conditions we now live under. We learned our social models at school, and then re-made society using these models. When we severed school life…/8
…from adult life, we created an incubator for complete social re-booting of society. Kids leave school and re-make society as a giant high school, because they don’t know anything else. The institutions who used to take over after school have been progressively undermined,…/9
…if not completely destroyed, by decades of libertarian/neoliberal, N=1 politics, which says there are no societies, just individuals, interacting in free markets. And therefore no expertise, no delegated authority, just personal responsibility, for everything. /10
And so now if you want epidemiology or virology in your life, for example, you better learn it yourself. Because the market doesn’t give a shit. This is the endgame for democracy, there may be no coming back. Once institutions are broken, you can’t put them back. 11/11
All public health involves a politics. Using the immune system to try to defeat a pandemic is the free market version of public health. Not an analogy, it shifts all public health action to the individual. Which is an oxymoron, because it recognises no public. https://t.co/2SxZg20Ucq
NSW ensured that only hospitalisations and ICU numbers are half-useful metrics to assess how we’re going. Maybe a hint of Covid from Santa in the pipeline here. https://t.co/M1PhfAkZI4
That plateau, the fallback spin for the absent peak, is now an incline. And still waiting for some Christmas pipeline infection. https://t.co/f0e60kQXS3
Heading in the direction of the winter peak. In mid-summer. https://t.co/wglWaXmKtj
One of the main arguments used for the current Covid inaction is that the public won’t support anything else. Even some prominent public health experts say it. But surely one of the most fundamental roles of public health is to build support for necessary action?
Living in a scientific and technological age hasn’t changed that every part of our lives is still run using the same basic social dynamics. That includes science. Society doesn’t run on information, it runs on status and conformity. We are always social creatures first, and last. https://t.co/VkRiJyFnOn
The pandemic showed that what the world treats more seriously than anything else is any variety of football. The thing about football or any game is, to define the game, you have to list the rules. The rules create the game. The freedom to play. One for the libertarians. https://t.co/33vuZGfVah
That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including now infecting the peasants. Short 🧵/1 https://t.co/Dm5i9Dkche
My focus every day is on that feeling so many have that the society they now live in seems to have gone batshit crazy. It doesn’t even fight a pandemic. But the real truth here is that all the pandemic has done is exposed how our societies have always worked. /2
It takes existential threats like wars and plagues to reveal how we actually live. Where there are no longer any ways to paper over it with illusions. The public health apparatus we crave to swing into action itself came out of previous existential threats, like cholera. /3
It wasn’t a sudden desire to be more progressive, more democratic, looking after more people. It was about the 5% of society that determine what happens trying to protect their status quo. That is ALWAYS what drives all politics. They invented public health to try to…/4
…protect their status quo at the time, which was under assault by microbes. The moment they felt that threat was over, as our past 70 years of peace and prosperity and relative health has done, they ditched public health. Most if not all progress in history is the same. /5
You have to threaten the status quo, the feeling of safety and security of society’s top 5%. That’s what brings change. Nothing else really does. We’ve fooled ourselves that facts and logic change things. But science and expertise for example are supported, so long as they…/6
…don’t threaten the status quo. The 5% support science when it builds them nice cars and bombs and jetliners. Not when it suggests slowing the economy down to fight a pandemic, threatening their status quo. What we call the ‘economy’ IS that status quo. /7 https://t.co/DR02b9kzR9
It was a genius invention, a set of pseudo-scientific sounding mathematical indicators that could be substituted for society itself. Politicians talk about economies now, not societies, watch them. And none of these indicators point to any widespread improvement in prosperity. /8
Economic growth, inflation, GDP - all of these things can go in the correct economic ways, without ordinary people being any better off. They’re not designed to help the 95%. But as I Tweet about a lot, none of this is to say ‘democracy’ means getting rid of the 5%. /9
You can’t run a society as a 100%, because underneath all of this politics is some basic social behaviour, that never changes. Status and conformity. If you remove the 5%, people will just reinvent something to put in its place. Aspiration and emulation drive society. /10
That’s also where expertise slots in. About 5% of people in any field are its true experts, its geniuses. You can’t change that, it’s just how things tend to be. As Planck said, that doesn’t mean they’ll always lead their fields, because status in a field is rarely driven…/11
…by expertise. As we’ve seen in the pandemic, where experts jostle for status, with ‘minimisers’ facing off against ‘doomers’. Personally I think the doomers have the obvious facts on their side, but I have no status in those debates, so nobody will care what I think. /12
In any case, if we feel now that our interests aren’t being looked after, that’s because they aren’t. They never have been, 70 years post-WW2 where the world was in ruins created an illusion that politics and status games had been left behind forever. They haven’t. /13
We’ve been living off the fat of that last existential disaster. Only those disasters shake things up, shift who holds status, at least for a while. Since the 1970s conservatives, representing those who had status and lost it in that last great war, have been progressively…/14
…trying to restore it. Using austerity programs and free market ideas and self-equilibrating economies, and other sleights of hand, to strip away the post-war collective re-shuffling of status. We’ve arrived at their victory, the attitudes of the 5% to public health and…/15
…well-being are now indistinguishable from the aristocracies of previous centuries. Covid will need to interrupt our 70 years of peace and prosperity and health more yet, to cause a greater threat to the 5%, if we’re going to see real change. /16
Just to finish, note how the 5% are weaponising this carnage of ordinary working people to their own ends. The top of the headline, the suggested solution? Tax cuts. Which will overwhelmingly favour that 5%. /ends https://t.co/tvNnTtAk06
It’s stunning to look at the data and think, this IS the strategy. Not an error. This was intended. The Great Barrington Declaration, substituted for State-driven public health expertise. https://t.co/5zHMuzQuBd
Been one of my favourite cuts of the data for some time. Just what people need to help do their own risk management, where they live. https://t.co/DwFB6XP9xr
So I guess 2023 is the year Covid ends. Again. Trying to think what my favourite ending to the pandemic has been.
As 2023 begins, I think it’s becoming clearer that to save the world, we have to leave high school. Sadly I’m not confident we even know where to start doing that.