January 2023

…which translates into about 50 less working days per year. 10-12 weeks of working days. A Covid-smashing 2-month lockdown could just be an extra 2-month holiday granted to all, in lieu of a 4-day week, until Covid is defeated. Annually even, if required, until it’s done. 2/2

As I’ve Tweeted before, all of the debates about ‘lockdowns’ argue whether we should have them or not. Because that’s what our different political ‘teams’ support. But lockdowns DIDN’T END, because they can’t end, with a pandemic virus rampant. Without some restriction on…/2

…movement and gatherings, society *stops working* with a pandemic virus in circulation. We never stopped restricting movement and gatherings, we stopped STATES applying these restrictions. That’s the libertarian Oedipus complex. But we then outsourced those restrictions, to…/3

…individuals. Now of course like all privatisations, this meant a job mostly badly done, or not done at all, with little pockets of excellence amongst a sea of dysfunction, and a handful also profiting handsomely from the shift. /4

For political libertarians, dismantling the State is only ever Step 1. Step 2 is monetising the dismantled services, and redirecting the money to themselves and their buddies. Chumocracy, as some call it. /5 https://t.co/YafYkzZBXh

We’re not ‘living with the virus’, we’re still running public health measures to try to control infections and illness, because again, a society can’t function unless you do. But those public measures are now private measures, funded and enacted by you and me. /6

And that’s another critical part of this paradigm shift. Because the political libertarians like us all to think our lives are a binary of individuals and governments. But the largest elephant in the Covid room remains business. Because when public health orders were removed,…/7

…the ‘public health’ work, responsibility for nearly all of our daily encounters with Covid didn’t pass to us, in legal terms. It passed to the workplaces we spend our days inside. To the WHS that has regulated those workplaces for decades. There’s little evidence any…/8

…meaningful WHS work is going on, for Covid, in most workplaces, in flagrant violation of WHS law. But the libertarians will have you believe that our only Covid choices are big government-funded lockdowns, or all of us doing the Covid control individually. Business is again…/9

…privatising the gains and socialising the losses. It gets off scot-free. The same businesses, what gets called an ‘economy’, who pressured for the removal of public health protections, now do almost nothing to fill the gap with their own money. Complete regulatory capture. /10

We need to completely reject the nonsense idea that not fighting Covid is an option. Again, we’re not living with it, that phrase just means privatising all of the things that need to be done to try to keep society functioning. The physical reality of infectious disease…/11

…doesn’t allow us to do nothing. Reality-based politics bypasses all of the team sports debating points and returns to these underlying physical realities. Our choice is not governments controlling Covid, or nobody controlling Covid. /12

It’s us collectively doing and paying for this via our collective public health teams, our elected and non-elected officials. Or us doing and paying for it all ourselves, as individuals. The first option is orders of magnitude cheaper, and actually works. /13

The second is a con. Only the wealthy and powerful have the means to mount any sort of defence against Covid individually. And they’re too venal and stupid in 2022 to recognise that Covid will eventually smash them as well. We’re already seeing it. /ends https://t.co/RONr91ymeb

And they will call this demand that you return to your old work practices your ‘freedom’. While sitting on your couch watching Netflix was apparently the worst oppression, or kids getting extended holidays from school. You have to be seriously stupid to swallow any of this. /2

Like education, child care, health care, transport, energy, and other critical parts of our lives, what they’re doing is shifting the burden to us, as individuals. Privatising the pandemic, as I’ve said. We’re not living with Covid, we’re all individually now…/3

…paying for our own testing and masks, trying to coordinate all of our social and work activities to minimise chances of infection, including fights within families that this creates, and tension with employers. All because the collective mechanism humans invented to buffer…/4

…us against these sorts of threats - government - is now spun as the greatest evil facing humankind. As massive corporations swoop in to monetise the destruction of public institutions, because in reality somebody has to coordinate what we do. The mythology that ‘the people’…/5

…will all grab shovels on their weekends off (if they get weekends off) to rush out and build new hospitals and airports is so ridiculous that you wonder how it ever became a dominant political paradigm. But by beheading government, it left a vacuum of leadership, and…/6

…humans function by social conformity first, and everything else second. So alternate leadership is provided for the now headless corpse of the old public, slogans about how you paying for everything yourself now represents your freedom. /7

I read all the scientific analyses of Covid here every day, so important. But they won’t shift even the tiniest part of the mechanism I described above, society hijacked by the libertarians. And the libertarians themselves are really just teenagers in adult clothes. /8

It’s not capitalism or neoliberalism or any of those grand words that did any of this. It was our previously adult-led culture, with each generation playing a critical role, replaced by a mono-dimensional adolescent culture of high school. Popularity cults jostling for status. /9

Even the scientists do it, look at the number of scientific experts in pandemic management who utter the most obvious nonsense every day, because they’ve chosen a team and are going into bat for their team. 10/10

@CrabbBrendan I believe why the Spanish Flu ended is still contested? The rapid and almost simultaneous waves globally weren’t easily explained by antigenic drift and immunity?

This was an interesting read: https://t.co/4gEXDxyoxD

No analogy here, very often the two institutions involve the same players. For example in the US much of the ascendancy of the libertarian Right from the 1950s and particularly after the 1970s until today is due to many alliances between key Church figures and politicians. /2

Not to go into the history here, but figures like Billy Graham were absolutely crucial in the cross-over of religion and politics, as conservatives there strategised together to head off what they saw as a deeply disturbing surge of progressivism. /3

Churches have millennia of expertise in mobilising populations. They invented the process. To recognise their work, it’s not a stretch to say they pretty much invented Western society. For the majority of time our civilisation has existed, they’ve been in charge. /4

Secular States are very new inventions, historically. To be clear here, it’s also common in our modern world to read this history and assume Church = bad, State = good. I don’t think that’s necessarily true at all, I look at it it entirely as what works, and what doesn’t. /5

Included in the State camp are of course monarchies, the other major player in human history. Notice the Church both crowned and buried Queen Elizabeth 2. These connections never went away. The highly individual N=1 libertarian politics of our time are the same movement…/6

…we see within churches and monarchies too. Protestantism, the push for the replacement of an institutional relationship with God with an individual relationship with the deity. Many of the politicians today who fight what they see as the illegitimate State are motivated by…/7

…replacing it not just with God and the church again, but with each individual’s relationship with God. As Bruno Latour always said, we delude ourselves in seeing the modern world as having left these debates behind. The same drivers, still there. /8 https://t.co/XqMqiVfbfx

How to see the Covid debacle through this lens? One thing churches brought to society, and probably is the reason they were able to build and run societies for millennia, while secular States are fumbling after only 2-3 centuries, is a ‘higher’ arbiter of human affairs. God. /9

You don’t have to believe in God to recognise that having the deity in some way involved in politics introduces an arbitration of difficult issues that sits beyond the team sports of human popularity politics. And yes, of course the translation of God’s will into human…/10

…affairs is rife with corruption and cronyism too. But the key thing the Church invented here, is the church itself. An institution, not just God’s word and individual interpretations of it. A set of traditions and customs that are multi-generational. /11

No one person gets to interpret God’s will. Though the push towards individualist theologies is the push to allow that. But the societies we live in today are the victory of the institutionalists, not the individualists. And those are todays’ Covid battles too. Between…/12

…‘personal responsibility’ governance, and institutional governance. We built institutional expertise to defeat pandemics, over centuries. That’s being sidelined by an aggressive individualist politics, egged on by aggressive individualist theologies. /13

It’s often the same people, as our ex-PM shows, and this is all much more obvious in the US, where ‘God’ is a frequent player in political debates. The ongoing assault on the secular State is not just political. It’s that Church-State battle from all of our history. /ends

…the persuasion of the public by all of these slogans. The public will tend to follow traditional lines of authority, no matter what they say. They will wear masks if they’re mandated, with minimal fuss, for example. Our problem isn’t the slogans or even the hegemony. /2

The 5 will always lead the 95. The slogans just oil the existing mechanism. Our problem is the 5 itself, that it’s been hijacked by populist libertarians. We don’t need to undertake a mass de-programming of the entire population, we need to target that hijacking. /3

How do the wrong people end up in charge? I Tweet about that a lot, they use elections to game the democratic process. Popularity is placed as the ultimate authority, and then what is popular is easily shaped and marketed, to suit the hijackers. /4

Once elected they claim ‘mandates’, to speak for the ‘will of the people’. In most democracies a majority don’t even bother to vote, through voter suppression. So it’s an even more ridiculous claim, to speak for the public. The public is not a thing, it’s an ever-shifting…/5

…’market’ of desires that can be shaped. That’s what marketing is. Right now in the UK ‘brown’ (traditional) antique furniture is on the decline as a sale item, whereas for years it dominated. It’s the same furniture, but the desires have shifted. Earlier in the pandemic…/6

…Australians happily went along with public health measures, because that’s what the 5% led into existence. Maybe 1% of the 5% (the anti-State libertarians) then led a counter-movement, to ‘live with the virus’. And now most Australians seem content enough to do something…/7

…the exact opposite of what they did only 2 years ago. The answer isn’t to try to shift the people, it’s to close-off the ways the anti-State crowd decouple popularity from institutional expertise and accountability. They use popularity to destroy democracy. /8

If you think popularity IS democracy, that democracy is ‘what the majority want’, you’re a perfect example of their victory. Anti-State libertarians change ‘the public’ into minorities and majorities, and then work the numbers. They take our voting mechanism and use it…/9

…to destroy the much more important institutional bedrock of democracy. They bypass experts in their departments almost entirely, hiring pliable consultants and other external expertise to give them ‘advice’ that matches what they’ve already decided to do. /10

@latingle tried to warn us a few years ago now. We weren’t listening. /end https://t.co/oWFCZGY6pL

The article from the US Department of Transportation gives a summary of both the principles involved and the work that has already happened (including in Australia). For years. The principle that drives everything else is ZERO DEATHS. /2 https://t.co/sVnFSr8x87

This was already the principle employed in aviation and train transport. Can you imagine anything else? ‘O we’ll let the odd plane and train crash, you have to balance things’. It brings into focus the ludicrous spin we’ve been expected to swallow in this pandemic. /3

What’s important about the comparison is that this is also a part of our lives that impacts the entire population. Roads and road transport are the lifeblood of modern economies, impacting every single person. So it’s not some isolated, small thing that’s easier to control. /4

The approach prioritises health above all else, even mobility. That locking into place of health-first then cascades through the vast range of measures, in infrastructure, regulation, education etc., so that they all align around that fundamental principle of saving lives. /5

ALL lives. Zero deaths is not an aspirational ambition. It’s an achievable aim, and you can see from aviation which uses a similar principle, how it drives dramatic improvement, and fast. This is regulation at work, what humans designed it to do. To make life safer and easier…/6 https://t.co/J4NpSLPSHq

…for all. And it’s working, in Sweden, which (ironically, given its Covid efforts) pioneered the approach. An important additional detail here is that at the centre of the strategy is not just the planning towards zero deaths. Coupled to that is a *causal* mechanism. /7 https://t.co/qcseMesKdt

The strategy recognises that what kills people on roads (including pedestrians and cyclists) is the kinetic energy of impact, on bodies. So everything in the strategy, like road and car design, focuses on reducing that kinetic energy at impact to safe levels. /8

For Covid and other airborne diseases, the obvious pathway forward would be to make zero deaths (or even zero infection and illness) the grounding principle, coupled to a causal mechanism of clean air. I like many others am tired of having to listen to minimising nonsense…/9

…every day from bad faith actors about how all of this is impossible fantasy. We’re already doing it with roads, and we’ve been doing it with planes and other forms of transport for years as well. At enormous cost, at enormous scale. Internationally. /10

What has changed with Covid is not that we now face an impossible foe. What has changed is our politics, the decades of undermining of this sort of basic public administration and regulation. The enemy has become that regulation itself, rather than injury and death. /11

You can see this very clearly in the US. Previously its road safety performance was aligned with much of the rest of the world. But its descent into libertarian political extremism in recent decades has led to a rapid decline in road safety. /12 https://t.co/szm9Rp6AL0

This pandemic is a political phenomenon, not a health issue. We’ve known how to deal with pandemics for centuries, millennia. What’s changed with Covid is a politics that is sidelining and bypassing all of that expertise and knowledge, in favour of a ridiculous politics…/13

…of individual freedom. Ridiculous because the only way to be individually free, is to work collectively. It’s a false opposition. Nothing needs to be ‘balanced’ here. We don’t balance plane crashes against freedom to fly. Safe flights = freedom to travel. /ends

@RealOzSAGE

Party-based popularity politics leads people to believe that decisions about what has to be done by societies need to go through the detour of the different ideological filters of competing parties and candidates, before anything should happen. That we can’t fix anything…/2

…until we know what the most popular things are. That without popularity, nothing can be done. It’s self-serving BS. About 95% of government is basic operational things that happen whether there’s an elected person there or not. It’s what government departments do. /3

Ask anybody who works in government how much the work of elected people is to take advice from their departments, because the elected person hasn’t a clue how anything works, and nor could they. For years this worked, because politicians would mostly follow the…/4

…recommendations of their departments. Their role was to build public support for these recommendations. Now with populism we’ve flipped that on its head, and politicians wade into all basic operational areas of government, declaring that they make all of the decisions. /5

At the same time they strip-mine the funding for these basic operational things, and re-purpose it in dedicated vote-buying grants, targeted at marginal electorates. So while Australia’s roads fall to pieces, for example, a federal government promises…/6 https://t.co/4D4yOwXVz1

…over $100 billion in tax cuts to people who don’t need them. They shouldn’t even have the discretion to do that, but populism makes the elected ninny the emperor of all they survey. There’s no real ideological difference on these basic operational things, a department for…/7

…example can allocate the work to both private and public entities, depending on what might work best in a given situation. And it will be able to completely ignore whether the work is in a marginal electorate. We should have a list of these operational things that need…/8

…urgent attention, and those should all be left to government departments to coordinate and fix, before ANY politician gets a say on any of it, at all. That’s probably 50 years of work, right there, before we’d ever need to call on a politician again. Get rid of the annual…/9

…budget ritual, where the ideological student politics warriors of the day shell out dosh to their preferred culture war causes. Leave politicians one job, the job they’re actually there to do. To be the touchpoint for the public, in government. To ‘bring the public along’…/10

…in what needs doing. Not to make many decisions at all as to WHAT needs doing. They don’t have a clue. We have a to-do list of urgent repairs and operational fixes that could keep us busy for many decades. Almost none of it dependent on any of the ideologies elected…/11

…Napoleons cherish over all else. They’ll watch society collapse and burn if it means winning a debating point over their rivals on a given day. We need reality-based politics. Focused on basic operational things. /ends

…about 10,000 schools in Australia. So the 32mil would cover about 10% of schools at maximum amount. Some or even many schools will get little or nothing, others will spend it on something else entirely (it doesn’t have to go to Covid mitigation). 2/2

…balance at all. We’re seeing economic imperatives pursued with the same full commitment they attracted before the pandemic, and nothing being done on Covid. The same ‘balance’ spin the same deniers used to undermine climate action. It shows me again that…/2

…public understanding of what public health actually is remains very low. That it already was a way to consider multi-factorial social, economic and health things, that’s why politicians commissioned it over a century ago. 3/3

Note that there’s a Bill before the NSW parliament to repeal this clause.

Most work injuries are traceable to the work you’re doing. If you’re a bricklayer and your back or your hands get damaged, it’s not rocket science to trace a link. But with (particularly airborne) infectious disease, you could theoretically catch it anywhere. /2

This creates a problem for workers compensation, because it becomes almost impossible to prove a person contracted the disease at work, even though many will. The sensible thing to do, as the Greens to their credit actually got up in NSW parliament,…/3… https://t.co/gDkdld3j8V

…is to recognise jobs where exposure to the infectious disease is very likely, and to capture that risk in the onus of proof for claims. Presumptive employment, as it’s called. The NSW Government has been trying ever since to have that presumptive clause removed. /4

Their view seems to be that if you can’t prove you caught Covid at work, then you will never be compensated for it by workers compensation. It reflects no risk assessment of the work itself, of probabilities. As with most conservative political reaction to the pandemic,…/5

…there is no focus on risk assessment. A low likelihood of dying becomes a reason to do nothing at all to prevent infection, ignoring the potential impact of infection, as any basic risk assessment would be required to do. This is all a flagrant breach of even the most basic…/6

…work practices we all follow every day. We need to do risk assessment even to take kids on an excursion, or to run a community event. But for a pandemic now, where the entire population is at risk, political leaders say let’s do wing and a prayer instead. /7

Where are the work regulators in this? The SafeWork type bodies? The unions? Why are so many seemingly surrendering to this hatchet job? Why is it not reported, wtf are our journalists DOING in this pandemic? Hundreds die every week and it’s not even considered newsworthy. /ends

@DavidShoebridge where is this now up to in NSW?

You can watch as the people driving this invent new fantasies with every perceived expert threat. Red meat for the foot soldiers, who then tie everybody in knots for months arguing the number of angels on heads of pins. Is it airborne, or droplets? Do masks work? /2

Are kids more damaged by missing school than by catching Covid 4 times a year? Is it endemic? On and on and on the bullshit flows. Laughable non-debates. Bypass it, block the foot soldiers, do not engage. They feed off your engagement, it’s the only reason they’re here. /3

It’s very simple, use basic risk management. A lethal virus is spreading throughout society, repeatedly infecting people. Thousands are dying in Oz alone, hundreds of thousands so far are showing chronic health effects. There’s only one solution , everything else is Covidgate. /4

We have to stop the spread of the virus. Using whatever means. Ask the engineers. Stop asking academics drunk on the celebrity of being human shields for cowardly and corrupted politicians. 5/5

The idea Twitter is some bubbling pot of public opinion, a huge society-wide conversation, is marketing guff that all social media repeats every day. It’s a lie, and will always be a lie. Societies have never been a level playing field of conversation, nor will they ever be. /2

I’ve Tweeted before that social media implements an underlying set of beliefs, mostly out of the US, about the way societies and democracies work. It’s a strongly libertarian set of beliefs, that ‘the people’ drive social change, through their interaction. /3

I’ve also Tweeted a lot about what I think is actually true, and is matched by empirical reality. That about 5% of people in any group, of whatever scale, drive the beliefs and behaviours of the other 95%. Humans are social animals, and social conformity creates societies. /4

Now the same libertarian beliefs immediately make us react to the idea of conformity, as ‘sheep-like’ behaviour. It’s nothing of the kind. If you’re a painter, you will follow other painters you think are geniuses, who guide you. That’s all conformity is. /5

All areas of life, at every scale, have hierarchies of expertise and values. It’s how societies function. About 5% of people are the leaders in any activity or field, the rest emulate them. Not least because none of us has time to try to become expert in everything anyway. /6

It’s a distribution of labour. No matter how much social media tries to pretend it’s inventing an alternative to this, which it calls more ‘democratic’, the same hierarchies re-appear here, and in fact many more of them. It’s a set of tools that magnifies this process hugely. /7

The danger of social media is that it’s like a libertarian Trojan Horse, which takes previously reasonably stable societies, and inserts thousands of new often mutually contradictory hierarchies within them. It erodes existing social stability and expertise. /8

Look at how Trump used it to even sack the Capitol. We use social media, me as well, because it has some fantastic affordances. But mostly it’s a wrecking ball, and we may think it’s helping us solve problems. But it created many of the problems we’re trying to solve. /end

@juliette_io sorry, cut off the attribution to your fabulous site at https://t.co/IzVl6mbs0u

This reflects the fact that a tiny handful of vested interests have captured democracies. Nobody except this tiny handful is being spared infection. They’re doing it by gaming elections. Popularity is just marketing, child’s play to manipulate. Funding to ambitious pollies…/2

…is the loophole that lets them in. Elections are democracy’s unfixable weak link. Vested interests will define democracy *as* elections. Duh. 3/3

…the libertarians again have framed public debates so that it’s now almost universally accepted that the unregulated flow of any sort of speech is some sort of non-negotiable. Anything else is immediately seen as ‘authoritarianism’. Rubbish. /2

Speech has always been regulated, like everything else. Whether as media, as laws of libel and slander, as all of the various ways a person’s expertise qualifies or certifies them to speak on certain topics, as acceptable language in public, as bullying and harassment etc. /3

Some of the common behaviours on social media would get a person fired in a workplace, or arrested in other areas of life for ongoing harassment and bullying. Or sued for defamation. But this is the point, which I don’t think is seen enough. /4

Social media is a set of political and social beliefs, translated into code. The idea that societies emerge from the ‘bottom up’, through the free exchange of ideas and conversation. But they don’t, and you can see it on the platforms themselves. /5

All the hierarchies social media pretends it’s sweeping away just reassert themselves, on the platforms. Through followers and likes. Plus many more, often mobilising what were previously disconnected and disparate vile beliefs, giving them a new power and extent. /6

The institutional ways societies have regulated these interactions of belief are bypassed almost entirely. Not to produce some fairyland of equality of all belief, either, but instead replacing empirically tested hierarchies of expertise and wisdom - our institutions - with…/7

…hierarchies of likes and followers. Anti-vaxers share the platform with researchers with decades of experience, and there’s nothing to recognise that difference in the platform itself. Total BS mingles with Nobel laureate opinion, and the platform makes those equivalent. /8

I think societies are actually built from beliefs. And if you don’t regulate belief, like you regulate traffic or sewage, you destroy your society. Regulation is not the evil libertarians want us to believe. It only means negotiated compromises, based on empirical evidence of…/9

…what works and what doesn’t. It’s why you can plug your device into any powerpoint in the country without killing yourself. Societies invented universities centuries ago, to help regulate beliefs. Libertarians supplant them now with hyper-partisan think tanks. /10

Those think tanks in turn are heavy users of social media, to mobilise their hyper-partisan beliefs. And the more sensible people long to social media to try to restore what the same platforms have taken away from them. Some semblance of civil society. They’re not winning. /ends

Time URL is: https://t.co/FLEv64RUJX Free speech is the spin vested interests use to undermine democracy. They use these platforms to replace our existing institutional structures with one of their own making. Nobody is more free, in fact everybody is much less free. /2

Every day I watch as smart, sensible people try to help repair a damaged society here, and face constant harassment, bullying and sometimes borderline assault. The platform does little to nothing to prevent it, it encourages it because it drives business. /3

We’ll wake up eventually that we’ve allowed the most fundamental act of the flow of information and beliefs in a society to be surrendered to platforms who weaponise its destruction for profit. And I love social media, but its sins far outweigh its usefulness right now. /4

Every social issue is poisoned by a set of rubbish libertarian framings that often aren’t even seen. Free speech a critical one, but also ‘free and fair elections’, when in fact in most democracies voting is actively suppressed and the same libertarians claim ‘mandates’ with…/5

…well under half the vote, and with half or even less of the country not voting at all. Political donations poison what’s left, giving the same interests easy inroads to the institutional heart of government, where they use populist libertarian rhetoric to unwind centuries…/6

…of regulation designed to make societies fairer and more peaceful and more prosperous. Even something as noble-sounding as freedom of information requests is a libertarian weapon, where government institutions are tied in knots providing documents to libertarian conspiracy…/7

…fruit cakes, who never let up in their campaigns to bring down what they see as corrupt and oppressive governments. (Which for libertarians, is all government.) Nothing makes libertarians angrier than regulation, legislation - laws. Which tells us the way out of this mess. /8

Whether it’s Covid or social media, or political donations or elections, or energy prices, or climate change, or education and health care. All of it needs regulating. We’ve had more than 50 years of libertarian de-regulation, which has unsurprisingly corresponded with the…/9

…strip-mining of the common wealth of all people and its concentration in the hands of a tiny few. Mostly the libertarians themselves. (Many of them don’t even believe the libertarian rubbish, they just use it cynically to benefit themselves.) To focus on Covid, to end, the…/10

…fastest, cheapest, fairest and most effective way to end the pandemic is not vaccines. Though we need those. It’s regulation. The very thing the libertarians launched an assault on in Australian in late-2021, and much earlier in the UK and US. /11

Legislating or regulating makes the problem one for all Australians to bear the burden of fixing. Libertarian ‘personal responsibility’ alternatives dump everything on those least able to do anything. That’s why humans invented parliaments and laws. /12

To balance the scales back towards all people. The constant assault from libertarians on these basic acts of democracy, on regulation, the making of laws (not elections, which they game easily for personal gain) has to be stared down. In all areas of our lives. /13

The ‘rule of law’, which they cynically invoke when it involves suppressing resistance to libertarian agendas. Let’s put it at the centre of democracies again. Law. /ends

…into existence by cholera and other epidemics in the 19th century. Post-war economic booms came from war industries needing to be re-purposed to do other work. Unfortunately Covid is going to need to disrupt and kill a lot more yet, to create real change. 2/2

…you have to add ‘the economy’ to the mix to really understand. Have a look at this chart. Post-WW2 there were glorious economic decades of rebuilding, where nearly everybody in the West got wealthier. Massive government investment, in ordinary people as well as elites. /2 https://t.co/gdbb7eAaeW

But when this work was mostly done, by the 1970s, the previous hierarchies in societies strategised to take back control. They invented the modern politics of ‘the economy’. Decades of collective effort after the war had to be dismantled, they thought, to return societies…/3 https://t.co/uw2O1ZBHt3

…to the hierarchies they’d been pre-war. But ordinary people by this time had a taste for growing prosperity and opportunity, so what to do? Simple, describe that shift with a set of beliefs that re-framed it as the victory of individual aspiration, in ‘markets’. /4 https://t.co/X3ptC3sQWy

And while doing that, gradually shift the distribution of wealth and resources in society away from the State, from collective or common wealth, towards individual responsibility. And so finally to the graph. Keep people happy by letting them retain their new lifestyles,…/5 https://t.co/sNWroM9tvp

…but now funded by their own personal debt. Look at how it exploded at the same time these new more libertarian, market-based political beliefs were introduced. It was cost-shifting the post-war social miracle, back onto ordinary people. Ably supported by the stripping away…/6 https://t.co/IUYUtPd1uV

…of financial industry regulation at the same time. The famous Glass-Steagall Act, signed into law in 1933 to help regulate banking after the Great Depression - have a guess when it started to be watered down and removed? The late 1970s. The same time these banks started…/7 https://t.co/kEXc1Ht8BP

…the massive refinancing of social progress by personal debt. When societies were turned into ‘free markets’, or labelled as that anyway (that fantasy has never actually existed, it’s spin, used to rationalise the shift to personal debt). So to get back to today, pandemics. /8

The excellent public health institutions most developed nations had developed in the late 19th century and used during the 20th, were tolerated by those who engineered this shift to personal debt-driven societies, so long as they didn’t threaten a return to collective…/9

…’common wealth’ driven government. So long as that great fiction, ‘the economy’ (a re-badging of society, in the new market-labelled personal debt societies) wasn’t interrupted. And there we arrive at our past 2 years, in Australia. In 2020 and for most of 2021, Australia…/10

…used that old-style public health, a massive collective endeavour, collectively funded and regulated. To the libertarian politicians and their backers, this was a moment of utter panic, the threat of undoing all of their work from the 1970s onwards, in reversing post-war…/11

…collective mechanisms. Immediately the pandemic started they issued the spin, about needing to balance all of this against ‘the economy’, they saw the danger. And by about a third of the way through 2021, schemes like JobKeeper were shut down, to starve States of support…/12

…and force people back to work. And then in late-2021 the floodgates were opened, letting Covid rip and prompting an orgy of Covid de-regulation in 2022. Politicians falling over themselves to see who could strip away the old collective mechanisms fastest. /13

And that’s why you won’t see fast action to fight this pandemic further. It threatens the whole project since the 1970s of reversing the gains made post-war to collective wealth, heath and democracy. It won’t be allowed for the same reason action on climate change hasn’t…/14

…been allowed. It threatens returning economies to being societies again. The economy always was a con, to rationalise this shift back to old hierarchies, by pretending society was some objective economic machine, that had to perform in certain ways to afford our lives. /15

It was the way these previous elites disguised the re-assertion of their pre-war dominance. Now they could go back to feudal-type life, but hidden behind a handful of economic indicators, that give the veneer of ‘objective’ science. /16

It was only total, lethal destruction that shifted these hierarchies during the wars, that gave birth to true government for the people, including women. As I Tweet a lot, only natural disasters and wars create real change in politics. To current governing elites, the…/17

…only real emergency of Covid is the threat to the economy-driven reversal of collective life they’d been engineering for over 50 years. It will sadly take a lot more death and disruption to force them to shift again. /ends

It’s been telling us that for decades. We mistook it for a debating point, because we love team sports. But that was the reality that was being constructed, all through those decades. And we could ignore it because we weren’t faced with an existential threat. Now that we are,…/2 https://t.co/Rau7C1TxCM

…it’s there in plain sight. The public was invented after the great 20th century wars, as a concept to try to capture the inter-dependencies of all of society, in the great re-building. Once that re-building was done, the old hierarchies threw the concept away. /3

We can be ‘right’ about Covid all day long. It won’t change much. Just as being right about climate change never prompted much action. Climate action is coming now only in the ‘o shit’ way, when businesses are losing money. This is why I’ve always said…join a union. /4

Mass joining of unions would instantly shift balances of power. It’s the only other thing that has ever shifted politics. Yes unions have their problems, what doesn’t? But it’s the removal of power from ordinary people in the past 50 years that is the source of all of our…/5

…current crises. That power wasn’t achieved using rational argument. It was achieved by brutal, bare-knuckle political battle, as the unions in the UK are trying to re-ignite now. It may be too late, who knows. /ends

I was thinking about this when reading the regular stats about hospitalisations and deaths, and how they remain criminally high into our 4th year of the pandemic. Excess deaths way above what would have been considered normal or acceptable even a handful of years ago. /2 https://t.co/UKF6SXJj0F

I use this image of a train platform to illustrate the clash of the belief systems. Who on this platform is ‘vulnerable’ to severe disease, from Covid? Would they even know? If they did know, if they were immunocompromised for example, would they ever be able to catch a train…/3 https://t.co/1vdGwYwGiG

…like this again, without risking their life? The great fallacy of the severe disease, personal responsibility belief system is that it ignores how profoundly interconnected our societies now are. How everything we do is reliant upon the work of others, in ‘supply chains’. /4 https://t.co/MS0ytDpVvA

Society isn’t a free market of isolated individuals, each contributing their individual bit in isolation from everybody else. Take the meat packers, heavy victims of Covid infection. Societies quickly realised that without them, people got no meat. They were forced back…/5 https://t.co/cCD3sWlBSJ

…to work to keep us all fed. The reason we need to target transmission, as @CrabbBrendan argued so forcefully again this week, is because it recognises this interconnectedness of our social processes. The reason the hospitalisations and deaths are still at historically…/6 https://t.co/uv3SLrbFEk

…high levels is because with wide transmission, the virus will eventually always find ‘the vulnerable’. (And in the longer term, that may be all of us.) It will always find them because everything we do is interconnected. Our ‘economies’ are really societies that are more…/7

…socially complex and connected than any from history. Whether it’s energy, transport, health, food, schooling, or whatever, all of it is layer upon layer of social bonds woven together. Which makes ‘personal responsibility’ particularly obnoxious, a freeloading parasite…/8

…on our complex social lives. We have to control transmission, because we can’t control the virus any other way without all retreating to Thoreau’s hut in the woods. There aren’t 8 billion huts, and there are only a handful of woods. And no economy, just birds. /ends https://t.co/I7a1X853re

…at Giza, and about 30 times the collective effort to build the Coliseum. And an international effort, across multiple nations. Humans know how to cooperate, at a scale unmatched in history. It’s just that our politics is populist rubbish sitting on top of it, in the way. 2/2

When you replace societies with economies, you’re really replacing them with a single global economy. Nations lose sovereignty to this global market. Citizens of nations lose any special relationship to their own governments, they become customers of global supply chains. /2

Public health can’t exist, without a public. It’s in the name. When we replaced publics with a ‘free market’ of individual customers, it was game over for public health. Now every ordinary person, anywhere in the world, is functionally equivalent. Just one more customer. /3

Meaning the inevitable race to the bottom. The public health action we used to reserve for developing nations (i.e. mostly, none) is now the public heath action we can expect for ourselves too. Our own governments offer us no special protections, they’ve been replacing us…/4

…for years with imported labour, because it was cheaper. Our wages have stagnated, because government and business, both slaves to the economy, decided long ago we were too expensive to employ. You can’t understand a pandemic as a health event. /5

People mixing causes Covid infection. They mix for ‘economic’ reasons in today’s world. It’s the economy that created and continues to drive this pandemic. And economies, again, have no public. So expect no public health action. 6/6

Whether Covid, or the voice to parliament, or climate change, or energy policy, countries have been led into rabbit holes of social media-driven debate. The problems that need solving have practical solutions, but those are hostage to the tedious politics of popularity. /2

The world in 2023 is more complex and inter-connected than at any other time in history. We’re using a politics of the schoolyard to try to run it. A ludicrous layer of popularity-driven daily debate, because you can’t get change without making something popular. /3

Elections are to blame for that, if something can’t win an election, it doesn’t get done. Never mind that there isn’t a single other part of our lives that we run using popularity as the metric. We don’t vote which car mechanic or dentist is best. /4

Until we refocus our politics on specific, practical problems to solve, and embrace solutions whether they’re popular solutions or not, nothing will change. /ends

Alt text didn’t work, so to clarify I age is headline from the Daily Mail in the UK talking about getting older people back to work to meet gaps.

For this entire century, in fact. The education policies of the 1990s were the major driver. And what were those policies? The libertarian economic market-based (N=1) politics that we’re seeing now with Covid. John Howard’s policies, originally. Aspirational American-Dream…/2 https://t.co/cJF51IWZ3C

…politics, grafted onto Australia. The AFR is still cheering it on. Where you replace a collective focus, a ‘commonwealth’ (it’s in our name), with individual aspiration. If you have a go, you’ll get a go, that sort of stuff. /3 https://t.co/SqCazeVQVQ

Ever since John Howard the focus in education hasn’t been on outcomes, that’s not a N=1 concern. It’s been to destroy the State option, the public system. For N=1 politics, there is always only ever one policy, to destroy the State. The public. They don’t pretend otherwise. /4 https://t.co/3oJWTcjMI8

While our education system has crashed and burned, with nearly all government assistance being to find creative accounting ways to shovel public money into private schooling, in true N=1 fashion the response to the obvious decline in performance has been to blame? Teachers. /5

The quality of teachers. Not the systemic dismantling of the comprehensive education system, but individuals. It is N=1 politics, after all, individuals are their only true reality. But also curriculum, too much wokey stuff, to be replaced with the…/6 https://t.co/4mcDGTmxcs

…only collective-flavoured thing in the N=1 cupboard. Jingoism, flag-waving patriotism and ‘traditional values’. The 3 Rs. The reason education is collapsing isn’t the fact the government actually planned to do that, o no. It’s that these Leftie teachers are sub-standard…/7

…and non-aspirational. We’ve seen the same in health care, where billions of public dollars every year are spent trying to force people to adopt private health care. All of this has been going on for the entire century, and before. /8 https://t.co/l07KB6g77H

If you’re wondering why there is no public health action for Covid, there’s your answer. There’s been decades of determined strategy to remove public-everything. Across all walks of life. We notice it now more acutely in an emergency, but the change is longstanding. /9

N=1 politics has known about this decline in collective performance. It doesn’t care. It strongly believes most kids whose performance has dropped shouldn’t be aspiring to anything better. Despite its claim to aspiration, that always ONLY means the…/10 https://t.co/Iy9HGY1p8p

…top layer of society. It’s spin designed to explain their much greater wealth. They worked harder, they aspired. But they have no intention of ever sharing that layer with the unwashed. They allowed 40,000 sackings in universities during Covid. /11 https://t.co/IRl6gg38Pj

Pay attention to what they do. They did that because they actually think far too many people are at university. That’s a place for their layer of society, not for everybody else. Those other people should be in trades. This is age-old feudalism. /12

And that’s what we’re seeing right now, with Covid. People are being allowed to die, because under feudal politics they always have been allowed to. We all sat here allowing it to happen in the ‘developing’ world our entire lifetimes, and much before. And look at the global…/13

…vaccination numbers. Rich countries have decide the pandemic is over, with barely 60% of the world properly vaccinated. ‘Twas ever thus. Now this same feudal ‘let the peasants die’ attitude has entered our own societies too though. I’ve Tweeted about why. /14 https://t.co/ItHdzP6Of5

When you substitute economies for societies, the absence of public health action in developing countries is what we should expect in developed nations too. They’re all part of the same ‘market’, of individuals. The apparent exceptionalism of do-nothing-against-Covid was…/15

…a long time coming. We just weren’t paying enough attention, using personal debt to hide the dismantling of our commonwealth, of the entire public sphere. Covid is making it more visible, that’s all. /ends

Burke’s work is too vast to capture in a thread. But the essence of much of it, and why he’s seen as the founder of conservatism, is his belief that the most important thing in society is custom and tradition. And his reasoning isn’t on first principles, he thought those…/2 https://t.co/M86q6c6rSV

…were the essential things because they were the empirical testing of ideas, in actual life. Customs and traditions are the ideas and practices that survive all debate, because somehow they worked. That’s not to say all customs and traditions are noble, not at all. /3 https://t.co/cNJ57wAl7b

Burke’s pragmatism simply recognised that customs and traditions are the glue that hold societies together. You ignore them at your peril. Right now for example the customs and traditions surrounding the management of a pandemic are being almost completely ignored. /4 https://t.co/JnF7mWgvot

To Burke that would be a recipe for social destruction, an unmitigated evil. The fact political conservatives are doing this he would have found unfathomable. And the way they’ve done it, by calling government action oppression, would have disgusted him. His words: /5 https://t.co/QGiwedMiRi

“But let it be once understood, that your Government may be one thing, and their (the public) Privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; the cement is gone; the cohesion is loosened; and every thing hastens to decay and dissolution.” /6

Modern conservatism is a con. It doesn’t conserve anything. It’s a radical assault on all custom and tradition. It’s the parties of ‘the Left’ who conserve now, who respect and try to maintain institutions. Look at Trump’s assault on the Capitol. Burke saw that danger,…/7

…centuries ago. The dangers of populism, read the quotes below and think how exactly they describe our world right now. And yet it’s politicians who call themselves conservative who are doing these things. Conservative politics has been hijacked by libertarian extremists. /8 https://t.co/I9CcWrtMZn

There’s nothing in libertarian conservatism that Burke would have tolerated, he’d have been aghast. Don’t be misled into thinking what we’re seeing is ordinary politics. It really is a hijacking. The wilful destruction of customs and traditions - institutions. /ends

Many immediately come back and say it’s smoking that’s mostly responsible. The problem with the smoking hypothesis is that there’s no lag between the two curves. Smoking drops at the same time heart disease drops. You can see that lag for lung cancer, in the red. /2 https://t.co/iKWLFsQBie

But if smoking really was the cause of the heart disease epidemic, why would heart disease and smoking drop simultaneously in the 1950s-60s, without a lag from one to the other? Reducing smoking instantly reduced heart disease? These changes need time. /3 https://t.co/kZSwu5P1Lt

The more persuasive argument (to me) sees the take-off of heart disease in the 1930s as the chronic impact of pandemic flu infection up to the early 1920s. There’s the lag between one to the other that’s more persuasive, you need to allow time for impacts to flow through. /4 https://t.co/WuthHdUbAV

Similarly the decline from the 1960s marks very well the gradual dying out of the generation directly impacted by that earlier pandemic. One thing all on this topic seem to agree on is that the epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century is a one-off, and won’t be repeated. /5 https://t.co/iyofxKvvhf

Though who knows, with the flow-on chronic impacts of Covid. Separately the dietary hypothesis for the heart disease epidemic, that it was due to consumption of fats mostly, seems increasingly rejected. Have never understood it anyway, why does eating fat fill your arteries…/6

…with fat, but eating broccoli doesn’t fill your arteries with broccoli? It ignores metabolism. And humans ate a lot more fat in the centuries before the 20th as well, without the same epidemic heart disease pattern. No matter the answer here, at a minimum it seems…/7

…that infectious causes of chronic disease have been grossly neglected in medical thinking, and that paradigm may now have found its time to shine. I first saw it in the work of Paul Ewald, but it’s crossing many disciplines now. /ends

Wars and plagues, the only two things that really change politics. Everything else is theatre, team sports. The 20th century began with a global war, triggering a global pandemic. The mid-century period was dominated by a second global war. /2

Meantime the public health techniques we know about and which aren’t being applied now, mostly became operational in the late 19th century, in response to epidemics. And then the other major societal response to these great upheavals came post-WW2. The ‘welfare state’. /3

Just as public health was invented to respond to crippling social problems caused by disease, not because of noble foresight (elites invented public health to save themselves, which they’ve forgotten today), the welfare state was a similar response by elites…/4

…to rescue societies from collapse. To keep the lights on, to keep ‘economies’ going. It was desperation, the fear of social collapse, taking the economy with it. Then post-WW2, for several decades life seemed fantastic. On the back of these massive public investments,…/5

…there was little social conflict (welfare bought off the tensions), little threat from pandemics due to excellent public health systems. Wars and plagues had been temporarily tamed. But as Planck famously observed, social change mostly happens not because of thought…/6

…and innovation, it happens because one generation dies, with its ideas, and the next then gets to run with its own ideas. (The reason institutions are so crucial is that they allow ideas to transcend generations.) So during that great peace and prosperity post-WW2, whole…/7

…generations forgot what created it. Massive public investment and action. But the new elite generation that came to power in the 1970s forgot that, and began a process of erasing all of those 19th and 20th century public health and welfare actions. What we now call…/8

…the birth of ‘neoliberalism’, and libertarian politics. Just names really, you need to zoom out to see the true social movement it represents. It’s societies’ most common form, throughout all of human history, feudalism topped by some form of monarchical figure. /9

That monarch can be a president too. The US presidency is the most regal figure of power in the world today, populism has transformed that democracy back into the social form the US had desperately tried to escape. /10 https://t.co/1LDUcXM3Ls

The main point is, Covid inaction is just one further part of this same movement that’s been going on for over 50 years. The removal of the ‘public’, an invention of the late-19th and 20th centuries, to restore societies to the form they’d had for centuries previously. /11

Societies have deep tectonic plates, like continents. Kings, gods, religion, these things don’t go away. The great experiment of the late-19th and 20th centuries, to invent a ‘public’ to challenge this centuries-old social model, has been unravelling for more than 50 years. /12

It’s also perhaps inevitable, as some anthropologists say, this social form may be the default for societies. We only ever temporarily escape it, with wars and plagues. Our current plague is not stopping the big push to strip away the public. /13

If it does fail to do that, it will be like all plagues pre-late 19th century. The historical norm. That’s the ‘normal’ we’re now returning to, not the post-1945 normal. The welfare state has been under siege as well - RoboDebt, anybody? /ends

You can see from about 1850 onwards, human life expectancy did something it hadn’t done in any of the centuries beforehand. It started to rise. Mostly in children, but across all age groups, with all converging towards a life expectancy of over 80 today. /2 https://t.co/uCohABcFUq

This is England and Wales, but the same pattern is repeated in most richer nations, and today is also underway in poorer nations. Why did this happen? Because elites in societies were forced to respond to social breakdown caused by things like the lack of basic sanitation. /3 https://t.co/3Nb6WKOl5H

But the conceptual leap this caused is rarely mentioned. For the first time in all of history, these elites had to consider society as a WHOLE. From the birth of democracy in Greece, until the end of the 19th century, democracy had never been about the entire population. /4 https://t.co/F3W12r3iKj

In most cultures there wasn’t even democracy. But in those that had or claimed it, only a portion of the population was enfranchised. Men, men of a certain class, native to the country etc. People forget that parliaments were invented by Kings, to confront earlier social…/5 https://t.co/WS9krk7w8v

…challenges that were beyond them to solve. They were a sop to the feudal lords, to buy their loyalty by giving them a bit more say in how the country would be run. Feudalism not only lived alongside democracy, they were the same system. The same historical pattern always…/6 https://t.co/RIZ0VkfWN2

…repeated. Real political change comes as a response to disaster, from an existing elite being overwhelmed. And that’s what we can see in the graph, the next stage of democratic evolution, from about 1850. When even these feudal democracies with their early parliaments…/7 https://t.co/J9DRHzbCKM

…were suddenly overwhelmed with crises that they couldn’t solve. Plagues and wars. So now, for the first time in all of human history, the WHOLE population was conceptualised as a political actor. That’s what the ‘public’ is. It’s everybody. /8

Don’t think elites of the time liked doing this, they were dragged kicking and screaming to do it, to survive. As I Tweeted yesterday, what cemented this shift, which would otherwise have been snuffed out very fast, was 3 major catastrophes in short historical time. /9 https://t.co/Xn6Rqngjns

Epidemics/plagues (Spanish Flu, and before it cholera too) at the turn of the 19th/20th century. Then two world wars in the 20th century. This all-out assault on societies from plagues and wars over a short time was strong enough to maintain this new public-focused politics. /10 https://t.co/7mc2HT5N2r

Only these catastrophes held pre-existing power balances in check, to allow this shift. And then as I Tweeted yesterday, after WW2 the sense of catastrophe eased, and from about the 1970s, those old power structures have been reasserting themselves rapidly. /11 https://t.co/qLiuB007zK

The anti-public, pro-market and pro-individual politics we all now live in. They invented a substitute for this new public-led society, which they called an ‘economy’. All deliberately designed to reflect their interests, and not public interest. And cunningly, they came up…/12 https://t.co/D5iKr3o04a

…with a substitute for the public too, which is still going strong. They substituted the public - the whole population - with majorities. Something they learned while gaming elections. Majorities win elections. They now, to this day, call that ‘the will of the people’. /13 https://t.co/M6qbJffPbh

Even though the voter suppression they introduced to counter wide enfranchisement in that late 19th and earlier 20th century period means sometimes even a majority of people don’t vote in these elections. But that now is the ‘public will’, majority rules. /14 https://t.co/pR9jOfYxbD

Which has no similarity with the concept of the public at all, the idea of everybody being in something together, all sinking or swimming, together. Rich, poor, marginalised, majority, minority etc. All replaced now with market segments, which they manipulate at will. /15 https://t.co/MEnjoDvk1W

And thus life expectancy is now trending downwards in countries again, after 150 years. Because the idea of the public has been under assault since the 1970s, to try to restore pre-1850 hierarchies. You can’t have public health, without a public. /16 https://t.co/NHQ0bp5YQr

The Covid sickness and death we’ve seen matches more closely plagues pre-1850. And this is why, because the public we invented to deal with plagues is now broken. Deliberately, wilfully broken. They didn’t hide what they were doing. /ends https://t.co/etjivQBfNF

I have no idea why Tweets 14 and 15 of this thread aren’t displaying for some. Here they are. https://t.co/xtBVdfJlyF