May 2023

There’s no mechanism whatsoever to ensure that all of that effort is targeted at socially useful need. This business was, so it’s a sad ending. It just proves the point of the disconnection. Anything you can whip up a desire for, even if useless, can fuel a business. /2

Even more damningly, about 50% of business who fail inside 3 years are actually profitable, when they fail. So it’s not just about money, the social model itself is flawed. But what could you replace it with? Small business is the darling of economic politics. /3

Economy folk love small business because their prejudice is against scale, against the regulation it brings. The ‘red tape’. Against being a grown up, doing some basic administration to ensure things are being done properly. It’s the social life least infected by the ‘State’. /4

They despise the State. And with it the public, which they replace with a market of individual consumers. They’re the iconoclasts of our age, like those in previous ages who smashed idols inside churches. Iconoclasm is a constant movement throughout history. /5

The problem with business is, like the economy itself, it doesn’t exist. I use that phrase a lot with everything surrounding the economy, because it’s all a fairytale, every last part of it. Yes you can set up a business, in law (courtesy of the State!). /6

But business itself, the activity or transactions, is entirely driven by customers and their desires. (And whether they have any money.) If nobody wants what you’re selling, your business ceases to exist. Or if you can’t supply what customers want, you also go belly-up. /7

An ‘economy’ is just ordinary people with or without money to spend. That’s it. It’s not business, business is the usually temporary setting up of activities that satisfy certain desires, of these ordinary people. *By these same people*. /8

As with the libertarian nonsense, there’s no binary here. The State is just the people too, not some separate actor. People invented States just as they invented business, to satisfy the needs and desires, of the people. The see-saw tedium of politics doesn’t get this. /9

Pro-State and anti-State parties swap time on the government front benches, depending on the prevailing mood. As if either position makes any sense at all. Individuals and groups are not two separate things. They’re ONE thing. /10

Groups are made up of individuals, it’s all the same raw material. Groups are set up by individuals, to make life easier, for individuals. Setting groups and individuals up in opposition is delusional, the distinction isn’t even real. Progressives don’t get this either. /11

They wail about the ‘selfishness’ of individualist politics, and demand we become more selfless. Captured by the same delusion. Helping others doesn’t need sacrifice, it’s the best thing for us all as individuals too. A functioning group makes INDIVIDUAL life easier. /12

That’s why humans act collectively. To make their individual lives better. We’re not run by systems ending in -ism, of any kind. We’re a society of people. Always and everywhere. Politics focuses on facets of this social mix, the different groupings (businesses, States). /13

And the different individuals comprising our society. As if those are independent entities, interacting. That’s where all the -ism nonsense comes from, belief in those being separate things, interacting. But it’s all just society, acting socially. Always, and everywhere. /14

George Bernard Shaw used to shock by suggesting everybody just be paid the same money for what they do. The -ism folk cry ‘communism!’ for that, even though communism never did that or even suggested it. Shaw was making a point though that was a social point. /15

Again, a society, or an economy, is just people with or without money. If you want to make the share of that money different for different people, you have to justify why. We do that the way social groups do everything, through conformity, hierarchy and status. /16

‘Business’ is a social status group. A particular, social way of justifying a share of social resources. Just as the State is, and any other collective entity, like any of the jobs people do. Teachers are paid less because their social status is less. Ditto for nurses. /17

We should ditch our politics to recognise again that humans always only act socially. They just give that social activity different names, to hide the same underlying mechanism. The -isms gave status, socially, to their proponents. They don’t exist. Like business. /end

If you read the history of monetarism, the first thing that will strike you is that the people who invented it were rabid free market zealots. Like Milton Friedman. If that doesn’t tell you it’s an entirely political invention, slap yourself in the face a few times. /2

Free-marketers love monetarism because it allows them their fantasy of an ‘economy’ run with minimal State intervention. They hate the State. They think money supply can be the ‘invisible hand’ their whole set of crazy ideas lacks. /3

Believing the market will self-regulate, provided you control money supply in just the right way. Politicians were seduced by this because it means they were absolved of responsibility for ‘economic’ downturns, because hey, the central bank is ‘independent’. They didn’t do it. /4

They’ll sack Philip Lowe before the end of the year, after he’s done all of the unpopular things they don’t want to be associated with. How’s that for independence. A double win, he’ll do the dirty work, then became the sacrificial lamb to absorb public anger. /5

And I have little sympathy, because again monetarism is destructive bullshit that destroys societies. Journalism doesn’t even ask the question whether monetarism, the reason for the whole central bank apparatus, has failed miserably. /6

Economies (which don’t exist) crash regularly, using this same set of ideas. If you did something in any other walk of life that was an abject failure, over and over, questions would be asked. It shows the deep propaganda the entire ‘economy’ malarkey is. /7

The economy was a political invention, a replacement for society that allowed conservatives to do politics, while pretending to be doing ‘objective’ economics. You might have noticed governments can do nothing useful for anybody who isn’t wealthy and powerful, in an economy. /8

That’s not an accident, that’s why it was invented. Every law of the economy forbids doing anything that helps the less powerful. It’s feudalism, back and disguised in the loon ideas of modern equilibrium economics. /9

Ideas that say societies reach a natural and optimal equilibrium, provided you don’t regulate them. To let the market rip into every tiny corner of our lives. Except there is no market, the ideas about how humans act socially that inform this theory are wrong. /10

Outrageously, almost hilariously wrong, except destruction of societies isn’t funny. The idea that we all act as independent individuals, maximising what’s best for ourselves, provided government regulation doesn’t get in the way. Humans always act socially, not individually. /11

ALWAYS. Even when acting in ‘individualistic’ ways, we’re performing for our chosen group, of fellow individualists. It’s a club, a team. Brownstone Institutes, that sort of group. That rail against rules even in pandemics, allowing unfettered infection. /12

Often people who grew up privileged, attributing their prosperity to their own ability and hard work, and accusing everybody else of being too lazy to be rich, like them. Some of them actually believe this rubbish, because their lives are so socially removed from ours. /13

They play the same social games as the rest of us, because that’s all society is. Societies act socially, how hard is that to understand? Never economically. Economics is just one team, a Premier League team, while most of us are permanently relegated to the minor leagues. /14

None of this is an analogy. Football leagues are the same social process as the economy. All social processes are. We jostle for hierarchy and status by conforming with the rituals of our particular team. Sports are so popular because that’s how social groups operate. /15

You did it at school and it continues into adult life. Read Linkedin for a bit if you can bear it, watch that jostle going on every day. ‘I’m pleased to share’ that I’ve gone up a few more rungs on my particular team ladder. The economy folk are clever, misdirecting us. /16

Forcing us into ‘jobs’ at the behest of employers or ‘business’. And then starting the same social comparison and hierarchical status games all over again, inside those jobs. Meaning society as a whole loses any sense of collective direction in doing anything. /17

Except protecting jobs. That’s why we ditched public health measures, so we could all go back to our bloody jobs. Making rubber ducks, while millions die. The economy did all of this, the great swindle. It’s Middle Age feudalism, not an analogy. In disguise. /18

Have Tweeted before that from the 1950s onwards, this is how old elites took back the reins, after the world wars and Spanish Flu devastated their grip on societies. They invented an ‘economy’, to bring back the feudalism they thrived under. Under cover of modern economics. /19

That’s why we don’t fight pandemics, or climate change. It’s not capitalism, or greed, or even ‘neoliberalism’. It’s feudalism, history’s dominant social and cultural form. Feudalism is the social framework of comparison, hierarchy and status. All societies are that. Always. /end

"One of those teachers then sent her kids to school (same school), infected with Covid. We have kept our daughter home today whilst we test. People do not care." 2/2

Mostly, colds and flu. Politicians directly invoked the flu when letting Covid rip, as if ‘just like the flu’ meant ‘this isn’t dangerous’. Never mind that most people hardly ever get the flu, they were also drawing upon deep social memories of living with colds as well. /2

Nobody treats colds seriously. The research showing antibodies to common cold viruses in the cerebrospinal fluid of Parkinson’s patients was interesting. The development of vaccines and antibiotics has lulled us into complacency against infection. And to its ‘economic’ cost. /3

Some estimates put the cost of common colds for example to the US economy at over $40 billion per year. We were already failing at public health when Covid began, and that failure became the baseline ‘normal’ we’ve been told we have to return to. /4 https://t.co/PjCjgu6v4O.

So much of this is the eternal public health basics. Clean air, clean water and food, adequate living conditions. All the things the economy couldn’t care less about, unless somebody can privatise it for profit. And then they still don’t care. /5 https://t.co/AxeisRt52e

The main point of this thread though is to ask that we constantly question the ‘normal’ baseline we’re told is optimum. It was already strongly sub-optimum. The damage to societies caused by the pandemic was damage that was pre-existing. Covid was only an accelerant. /end

The annual budget ritual is next week in Australia, the great religious festival of economic society. The ALP like most major progressive parties don’t even realise that this is them ruling from inside the cells that framing has created for them. /2 https://t.co/fx2QuCQfwz

The truly ridiculous idea that a country is run by money. By what it can ‘afford’. Nobody even questions it, except the MMT folk. As if a country is a business, with cashflow. Exactly how modern conservatives want you to think of a country. That’s why they invented the frame. /3

This isn’t some hippie argument about ‘there are more important things than money’ either. Money is a medium of exchange, nothing else. Wealth is what a country has by means of its social arrangements and natural resources. Not money. A country is a society, not an economy. /4

By drastically narrowing society to that handful of social transactions we call ‘economic’ transactions, the people who benefit most from those transactions benefit even more. That’s all that the economy is. A political strategy to redirect all politics, to those transactions. /5

Here’s another frame that the ALP and other progressives globally have swallowed hook, line and sinker. ‘The vulnerable’. We’ve heard that a lot in this pandemic, and it’s spreading, now into talk about unemployment benefits too. Increases are targeted at ‘the vulnerable’. /6

It sounds such a lovely, caring thing to be doing, looking after the vulnerable. But that’s not what the framing means at all. Conservatives set it up to mean people who are reliant upon the State for assistance. By doing that they’re also arguing something else. /7

That there are far too many people who are not vulnerable in that State-aid way. They’re not truly vulnerable. Thus their constant assault on social welfare programs. This subtle difference in meaning has enormous outcomes, quite deliberately. /8

It replaces the idea of an inter-connected and inter-dependent society, with a nation of individuals, more or less ‘having a go’ to make themselves prosperous and thriving. Never forget that they don’t hide, this, for them ‘there is no such thing as society’. They say it. /9

The vulnerable are the people who aren’t yet having a go, but we can give them (temporary) aid to help them have a go too. This is what the framing means, and the ALP like the usual deer in the headlights are doing it all for the LNP, even though the LNP lost the election. /10

That’s the power of framing. Once your frame sticks, you own the space. Winning the election is no longer necessary. Progressive voters can gnash their teeth about how the ALP isn’t doing progressive things. If they did the framings would crucify them. /11

The public lives and breathes the framings, not the daily policy debate in parliaments. Unless they develop alternative framings and spend years promoting them widely, they’ll keep losing, even when they win. To finish, here’s another angle on the ‘vulnerable’ framing. /12

When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded after lift-off in the 1980s, the eventual cause was found to be some O-ring seals in one of the booster rockets. A relatively minor part of the whole shuttle assembly. But a vulnerable part, as it turns out. /13 https://t.co/b7FexlgJT6

Now imagine treating that vulnerability in the way we’re treating vulnerabilities, in politics. By treating it as a separate, isolated thing that can be allowed to go its own way, while the less vulnerable carry on. As if the Shuttle could have just kept on flying. /14 https://t.co/Mxz4cfiQ5t

Obviously ridiculous. Because the vulnerable part was completely inter-connected with the whole Shuttle assembly. This is what the stupidity of economic politics completely misses, inter-connection. Societies invented ‘the public’ in the late 19th century for this reason. /15

Not to look after a handful of separate unfortunate people. But because they realised their society was collapsing, because the suffering of the vulnerable was creating an explosion everywhere else. Modern conservatives seem completely incapable of understanding this. /16

You are only as strong as your weakest link, as the saying goes. If you let society fail for that weakest link, the whole lot comes tumbling down. We’re doing that with Covid right now. Letting the vulnerable die, thinking that’s an isolated problem. It’s not. /17

It’s the symptom of our entire society collapsing. /end

Nearly everything that needs urgent action right now has not one tiny bit of relevance to any political ideology. They only hijack those urgencies as a platform for their boring, centuries-old ideologies. Often to profit from them. /2 https://t.co/iX0nZlDXUj

This is where our electoral systems, 19th century social technology, are far and away the greatest obstacle to getting action on any of these urgent problems. Where we have to detour every possible action through a ridiculous popularity contest, for it to happen. /3

Politicians won't act, if they think something will be unpopular. They might lose votes. Or they make idiot things popular through propaganda, marketing. Popularity is what breaks it all. There's no connection at all between what objectively needs doing, and popularity. /4

Even where something is broken and is unpopular, an election has space for about 2 or 3 major issues, the rest are forgotten. Popularity is a logjam, completely unnecessary. We don't vote for who will fly the plane, when we fly. /end

That’s just one of the teams in our usual process, to turn it into team sports between two opposing sides. Over and over and over again. The monarchist and republican teams will be out in force today, barracking for their side. All completely irrelevant for me. But the bling? /2

Very relevant. The Crown Jewels will be on display today. Many on the republican side will scoff at what to them will be the archaic and irrelevant symbolism. But don’t people notice that wherever we get rid of Kings, we replace them with new ones? The bling! /3 https://t.co/TZFkbyBvQX

Why is bling so important to hip hop culture? Why is ‘luxury’ more generally the big trend of our times? Humans are doing what they always do, because they’re social animals. They conform with or imitate those they admire and want to emulate. That’s what structures groups. /4

The US President for example is a more monarchical future in the US now than the King in the UK. The strictly anti-monarchist ‘world’s greatest democracy’ couldn’t wait to reinstall a monarch, just called a different thing. Hierarchies of value, that’s why luxury is on-trend. /5

Dennis Altman, a staunch republican, wrote this book about why we can’t seem to shake monarchies. Studying it led him to admit we’re too clever by half if we think we can just get rid of them. If we do, again we just reinvent them, with new names. And why? /6 https://t.co/WHyT7qzRYT

Like I said, because it’s that same social process that drives all societies. The building of status hierarchies, through emulation. Luxury or royalty or bling are the peak of the hierarchies, the things others then aspire to and want to emulate. /7

No matter how clever we think we are, you can’t escape this fundamental social process. We all emulate those we admire. That’s what shapes our behaviours. Not ‘politics’. Politics is the same social process, called by other names. I agree with Altman. /8

We can’t better constitutional monarchies, because they combine both ‘democratic’ mechanisms and this emulation mechanism, in the most manageable and productive way. If you strip away the monarchical component, people will reinvent it in ways that we won’t like. /9

Without any grounding in our long history, in our customs and traditions, in our institutions. Tinpot demagogues, with all the royal trappings. Social media influencers. That same passion we seem to feel to step away all of that is a dark desire, which needs light. /10 https://t.co/6qSFoJPNhg

It’s that same iconoclastic desire the minimisers weaponise to strip away public health in this pandemic. Down with institutions! They’re no longer ‘relevant’, apparently. Except nobody can say what is relevant, instead. Elected, local leaders? Look at the mess they’ve made. /end

Here’s how I see an event like this. Putting my cards on the table, my passionate interest is social continuity. Nothing else. When I watch the coronation, the overwhelming thing that impresses upon me is how completely impersonal it is. And that’s a good thing. /2 https://t.co/tysuBvTPSL

It’s irrelevant who the specific Kings and Queens being crowned are. The people themselves. They’re bit-players to a set of customs and traditions going back many centuries. Here’s Henry the 8th being crowned in 1509. It’s a tightly woven web of both Church and King. /3 https://t.co/U0HrJXnZV1

That’s forgotten today, because we’ve had decades of atheist drivel about religion being all about fairytales. Religion is far and away more important as a cultural institution than it is about any particular beliefs, in anything. It built our societies. /4

It crowned the King yesterday, in a modern secular State. That’s not an anachronism, that’s the greatest weight of our history on display, of which most of us are pig ignorant. How many understood even a handful of the complex rituals on display in the coronation? /5

I can promise you that it pays to learn about them. Each will make a light bulb come on in terms of understanding how societies work, and where in history this or that thing came from. Ditch all the tedious team sports of the present day which will restrict you to a team. /6

Which will force you to see the whole thing only as grist to some dialectical debating mill, raw material for some current tedious argument. The event and the traditions and customs that drive it transcend any of our individual lives. Sure, argue monarchies are irrelevant. /7

But suggest what will replace them. A local head of State, with no connection with anything earlier than the day they’re appointed? To me this isn’t about any particular fondness for the Brits, they’ve been bastards in so many ways. /8

But in a world where social continuity doesn’t stretch further than what’s ‘trending’ on social media, where our societies are torn asunder by competing fads and fashions every day, we need grounding. Some connection to what’s come before. /9

Centuries of suffering-generated wisdom is in these customs and traditions. It disturbs us, because we don’t have any. It just looks like ‘pomp’. Again, if you think it’s an anachronism, you need to have an alternative that doesn’t rip our present moment completely…/10

…away from its own history. A history none of us even seem to know any more, which proves the point. These grand events and rituals make us feel profoundly uncomfortable, because in our populist age the idea of being only servants to a tradition is anathema. /11

Of life not being centred on ourselves only. I see it in wedding dances, marriage being a tradition that again now has lost its deeper meaning, to many. So they invent their own, nearly always some twee social media-driven choreography. Imagine for one moment being Charles. /12 https://t.co/E7PgW1bG5J

A life given entirely to what his mother called ‘service’. A life that is not theirs to live. Every single day some new event they have to host or be a part of. Where they can’t say what they think, a year mostly diarised by the requirements of the role of Head of State. /13

Lives entirely given over to a set of customs and traditions, of which they’re only temporary bit-players. The exact opposite of ‘living your best life’, the facile philosophy that drives modern populism. I likely won’t support support an Australian republic. /14

I’ve seen the US republic. And all republics, that replace custom and tradition with popular presidents. It doesn’t matter if that popularity is at arm’s length, by parliament selecting the head of State (which i can guarantee the public will resist). Popularity will win. /15

The reason we have the customs and traditions we saw on display at the coronation, is that we’ve been down this road many times in history before. We know how it ends. Churches evolved to halt the dumb descent into populism. To structure a society using impersonal values. /16

Yes that has gone more or less well, throughout history. But absolutely guaranteed, modern populism is offering nothing new or better. It’s the disastrous path humans learned to avoid at all costs, before, and have now forgotten. To finish, two things. /17

There will never be a tell-all expose of life as Queen, from Elizabeth 2. She died taking all of her personal impressions to the grave, with her. That shows what life as servant to a tradition is. Imagine your entire life determined by that service. /18

Dying not even being able to tell anybody outside your immediate family how it impacted you personally, what you felt or thought about it, or about anything. That’s what the deepest aspect of social continuity means. Secondly, listen to the music in the coronation. /19

The depth of history in what we heard, magnificent. Try replacing that. You could build another tradition that would give you a similar richness to draw upon. But it would take centuries. Have the humility to watch this event as if it’s not about you. But about eternity. /end

Goosebumps for me. Read the history, it’s all of these skills that the church offered political conservatives in the US from the 1950s onwards, millennia of experience in mobilising populations. It’s why they’ve been so successful, they learned from the masters. 2/2

In the meantime minor parties and independents (yellow and grey) surge when both major parties are on the nose, and sink when they’re not. Apologists for elections explain all of this by saying a nation, particularly ‘swinging voters’, decide which party is best for now. /2 https://t.co/FuXSd2AWHY

It’s a nice try. The ideologies of major parties are usually so fundamentally different that the idea that every few years voters rationally determine to throw the whole country into reverse again is pretty silly. Voting patterns are social patterns. They’re trends, fashions. /3 https://t.co/OveKVze4wa

None of the ideologies really exist in the real world, most of the machinery of state operates independently of any of them. Voters back a team like they back a football team, as a thin veneer on top that actual machinery. The parties go in and out of fashion like shoes. /4 https://t.co/ktGnHNkEX2

Or musical acts. Or recipes. None of it has anything to do with the actual running of a country. Occasionally an Aldi makes some inroads to a Coles/Woolworths duopoly (yellow and grey lines), but the duopoly reasserts itself once the public has tired of that new distraction. /5

At a minimum the time series shows that none of the ideologies, if that’s what voting actually represented, have any lasting success or impact. Voters swap them like they swap haircuts. It’s almost totally divorced from what it’s said to be about (running a country). /6 https://t.co/80XFZrPg31

It’s a popularity-driven fluctuation of fashion thing. At best some voters think ‘ok better give the other lot a go’, mostly not even knowing what the other lot or their lot have really done for the past 3-4 years anyway. They’re just bored, or their lives aren’t going well. /7 https://t.co/GXfqPv8ppo

In reality the machinery of State operates independently of the whole popularity theatre. If we’re lucky the elected twits stay out of the way of that machinery for their term. We’re unlucky though because they now increasingly believe they’re actually ‘running the country’. /end https://t.co/6PlEkbeRv8

It’s basic group psychology and also logistics. No group ever acts, as a group. One or a handful of them leads the group in a certain direction. If you want to resist the Economy-god right now, starting at the ‘grassroots’ is like cutting your lawn with scissors. /2

Trying to mobilise ‘the people’ is what human societies did centuries ago, when our current institutional framework for democracy was invented. We don’t want to go back centuries to start that all over again. It plays right into the hands of economy politics to even try. /3

It wants us to think that to defeat it we need to do all of that work all over again, somehow mobilising entire populations. It doesn’t believe any of this ‘the people’ nonsense for one second. It targets the keystones with great precision, instead. /4

It captured our regulatory apparatus with laser guided strategy. It took 50-70 years. The advantage we have today is that social media allows this sort of thing to happen infinitely faster. Things ‘go viral’ in a day that used to take years. /5

But we’re too often using it *within* the frames of the economy pirates. We try to use it to mobilise whole populations. Most people aren’t interested, or are off in la-la land being sovereign citizens and anti-vaxers. Or we fire off limp missives about capitalism. /6

We can use social media to shift the frames. To question the very existence of the economy, and everything that strategic political concept does to structure all of our public conversation and now government. Mock the existing frames. Invent new ones. /7

Most of the population don’t use Twitter. But the 5% who make the decisions mostly do. That 5% is what the economy pirates targeted, 70 years ago. The economy framing is the outcome, and is the root cause of all the crap happening now, including ‘living with’ Covid. /8

The framing to resist is simple. Society is not an economy. Nothing is an economy, it’s a make-believe entity that apparently is the engine room of society. It’s just economic transactions, which themselves are social transactions. And all social transactions are society. /9

Society has not stopped being what our countries are, no matter how many years of Thatcherism and its free markets claim otherwise. Nothing needs to be ‘balanced’ here, what we call economic things are also just social things. As the great Gabriel Tarde said, the root of all…/10

…‘economic growth’ is the basic human act of conversation. That’s the process that creates, circulates, and modifies human desires. Social media brings that conversation to scale. We have to use it in the right ways, by re-framing the dominant frames. /end

It all sounds a bit tyrannical by our modern experience of community, where people are free to settle anywhere without having any connection to anybody or anything. But it’s a case of being careful what you wish for. That freedom is also what strips communities of power. /2

‘Go to where the jobs are’ becomes the community agency, in an economy i.e. no agency at all. Jobs become the foundation of community, owned by people usually who live somewhere else. Without jobs, the community ceases to exist. Not much agency there, for the community. /end

The disparity between households (with the least money) and business disappointing. But the overall level of support for the shift embarrassingly tiny by world standards. This matters because ‘go households’ is the fastest way to create ‘economic’ change. /2

Electrifying households collapses the usual distinction between local and global. It slashes cost of living for individual households, while at the same time transforming the entire ‘economy’ to a renewable base. Energy is the root of what we call the economy. /3

I re-Tweet AEMO’s graph a lot, because it shows that Australians have already been doing this for years. By 2025 they’ll have built so much home-grown solar, it will overwhelm the grid. That’s less than 2 years away. /4 https://t.co/Vd9w9vbGyn

The $2 billion allocated to green hydrogen in the budget could have put a battery on 150,000 homes. No party in Australian politics understands Australia. It’s a community-driven country, almost uniquely. Our politics is imported European and US ideological claptrap. /5

Look at the graph. All through the climate culture war, Australian households ignored it and built a whole new electricity generation system. Go households, the Ken Henry line. Households in communities. For the economy households are just car parks for workers. /6 https://t.co/iVBJ0EEyfE

With Covid, lockdowns were shunted into households, to allow the economy to continue. You can see directly the hostility the economy has for this most fundamental unit of social life. And thus of economic life. Nation building begins and ends in homes, not in businesses. /7

The ALP captured by this same rubbish, thinking business drives change, and households can at best get some minor assistance (but increasingly only ‘vunnrable’ households). Re-frame the bloody economy at the household level. Prosperous households are business customers. /8

Not just by handing out cash (but also, why not), but by electrifying the nation, literally. It’s easily the fastest way to transform both the economy and our climate change trajectory. The urgency required wasn’t seen in the budget. /end

It doesn't matter what field you work in or what area of life you're involved with, a dominant conceptual framework will be the distinction between the specific and the general. The micro and the macro. The local and the global. Case-based reasoning rejects *all* of that. /2

It's most easily seen in the law, which uses case-based reasoning extensively. Every legal case is both highly specific, and also universal in that it draws upon universal principles, and the 'global' set of precedents relating to that case. /3

The decision in a case can then in turn create universal or global precedents and principles, for other cases. At no point is there any real distinction between the specific details of the case, and the more 'general' aspects. The case collapses them into a single thing. /4

You can look at Covid in a very different way, using case-based reasoning. We've all seen case graphs a lot in the past 3+ years. Our prejudice and training says it's only by aggregating thousands or even millions of cases that we see the real pattern of what's going on. /5 https://t.co/nrvPEaxafp

The problem is, the cases themselves disappear when you do that. Again our training tells us that all of the rich explanatory data is at the aggregate level, and anything at the individual case level is anecdotal at best. Qualitative. /6 https://t.co/yn3ZLUxPvK

I can't emphasise enough just how wrong that is. The idea that individual cases (of anything, not just Covid) are localised, separable atoms which only have meaning when combined with other cases is probably our greatest intellectual blindspot. /7 https://t.co/iioMBjk48j

As with the law, every specific case is as general as it is specific. The distinction doesn't even exist. A person who contracts Covid in a school, if you examine their specific case, will unfold *everything* throughout that connected society that led to that infection. /8 https://t.co/KKY1xLBPBd

This is the reason politicians have been happy to stick to these aggregate graphs, because the case details are explosive. Tabloid newspapers have always known this, they focus obsessively on specific cases, to draw *general* conclusions. /9 https://t.co/c26ERab5Th

This is also key to the apparent distinction between society, and economic markets. In a market, every individual is an isolated, benefit-maximising consumer. But in a society, every individual is connected to every other individual, in every 'specific' thing they do. /10

Those things are never specific, or general. They're both, at the same time. Each individual has a view of how the *entire* society works, which shapes their thoughts, feelings and behaviours. They're not isolated atoms at all. /11

I've Tweeted before that detailed Covid case stories are the most powerful weapon against Covid minimisers. Try it, watch how those stories attract immediately explosive interest, from others. Minimisers will bluster about how it's all anecdotal. Bullshit. /12

Every Covid case connects to every failing of our public health system in this pandemic, if you look at the details. In that explosive way that again tabloid media understand very well. The key to debunking the parasitic vampire squid 'economy' that took over our societies.../13

...is to focus on cases in all of their glorious details. That will reveal society again, the thing the economic politicians desperately want us to forget about. They say it doesn't exist. It not only exists, their economy would be dead without it. /14

It's that huge network of social ties that looking at each case reveals, which are the interactions that generate societies. Economic transactions are just a small handful of those connections. Social connections. /15

Economic believers when talking about their beloved (fictitious) economy always refer to statistical aggregate measures. This is why, it's the only place that fairy take exists. Even 'micro' economics won't go as far as individual cases. It would expose the myth. /end https://t.co/VXxdWZCH8s

Nope. Like many of my Tweets talk about, from the 1950s, and particularly since the 1970s, the status quo displaced by Spanish Flu and two world wars launched an all-out assault on this extraordinary invention. It’s crucial to understand that invention, to protect it. /2

The public is NOT ‘a majority of people’. It’s not the majority that wins an election. Libertarians want you to believe that. The public is totally different. It was a recognition that society only works because of interconnection and relationship. /3

Like the links in a chain, you can have the most powerful chain, but if even one link is compromised, the lot is worthless. It breaks. The ‘vulnerable’ in society are not some gated community you can give lollies to, to appease them. If they fall, we all fall. /4

That’s what ‘the public’ actually meant. Recognising that we needed to look out for everybody not to give the vulnerable a helping hand, but because they are us, we’re all fundamentally linked. Nothing even to do with compassion or empathy. It’s logistics. /5

I thought about this while installing a lock on a new door, to avoid ‘lock snapping’. Doors with fantastic strength and even multiple locks around the entire frame can be rendered useless in seconds by snapping the main lock with a pair of pliers. /6 https://t.co/nUnDeOH8vd

A perfect example of how the weakest link defines the strength of the whole system. The rest of us are that strong door. The vulnerable are that weak lock. We need to look after them because otherwise we’re all doomed. The Brits did this with cholera. /7

The upper crust of society in the 19th century couldn’t have given a toss about the poor or vulnerable, dying of cholera. What they did care about was it spreading to themselves. That’s what spurred THEM to invent the public. /8 https://t.co/sUslQhGFOY

This week the ALP said multiple times that part of their core work is to look after the vulnerable in society. What no career politicians seem to remember is, that used to be the SAME work as looking after everybody. Not a couple of dollars extra a day to those in poverty. /9

With Covid, they haven’t registered or remembered that letting the vulnerable (whoever that even is) all catch Covid repeatedly will destroy the whole society, or economy if you use the stupid modern framing. They can’t be isolated out at arm’s length. /end

Australia is sports-mad. But not in the same way other countries are, it’s not so much the viewing of sport (which we do as well). It’s the participation in *community sport*. A practice which many (including me) are surprised to hear is almost non-existent in other countries. /2 https://t.co/xEZMrfrtzT

9.5 million Australians are involved in some form of organised, community sport. This graph shows the inclusivity of that activity as well. That’s critical. There’s lots of talk about how all of this sport is important for our physical and mental health. /3 https://t.co/mioIPD42LS

But its importance is MUCH bigger than that. This is the training ground for how Australians learn to live as communities. Where they learn and invent the skills to mix with others, from all walks of life. Those weekend games, where entire communities mix on the sidelines. /4 https://t.co/DZHVRV6za9

And where people volunteer, to organise all of this community sport, the coaches, managers, club officials etc. All of this activity is about organising communities, sport is almost incidental to the real importance of what’s going on here. /5 https://t.co/izvY61UopI

And yet to this day, our political parties organise through a series of tired, old ideologies imported from an entirely different context, in Europe and the US. Non-Australians comment on the non-partisan nature of Australian politics, how traditionally pragmatic it’s been. /6

Voting is compulsory, and people just do it. They’re difficult to mobilise into Pavlovian political hate apparatchiks that dominate politics overseas, they don’t relate to it. They’re used to community life, which in many of those other countries barely exists. /7

There schools organise any organised sport, or physical activity is much more individualised, through gyms and sports that don’t need community organisation. Isn’t it obvious that if you teach how to organise groups of people to work together as a core part of your culture,…/8

…your overall culture will reflect that? We take it for granted in Australia, this incredible gift of community, which doesn’t fit the models of democracy from overseas. I sometimes use solar panels as a good example, how ordinary Australians installed them. /9

Look at that tsunami of renewable energy, which Australians organised themselves. They acted as a community. The technical name for this in politics is communitarian politics. Not capitalism, not socialism, all those tired war-generating European ideologies. /10 https://t.co/lcImzim7NI

European football is like European politics. Intensely territorial, aggressive, the focus much more on the local team being a competitor for other local areas. Local identity is largely defined through the local team. Compare this with Australian community sport. /11 https://t.co/lwWmKxBW8b

Our democracy, but what we have here isn’t really consistent with how that term is used overseas, is focused on community. That’s where the practical everyday work of building and maintaining Australia happens. It’s Saturday, go look at the local sporting ground. /12

Look at the diversity of people down there, from all walks of life. That’s the genius and magic of Australia happening, right in front of your eyes. We’ll lose all of this, if economy politics continues. If we keep rehashing tired European and US themes. /13

US-driven social media is already driving toxic counters to this community way of life into Australian life, with its libertarian obsessions. Creating those same Pavlovian hate apparatchiks inside Australian life. So far we’re holding them off. But it won’t last. /14

And our politicians lack the intelligence or awareness to see the difference here. The economy is the mother ship for libertarian politics. We just had a budget obsessed with ‘controlling inflation’, the great libertarian con, courtesy of monetarist politics. /15

Now is the time to be bold, to be protective of what’s unique here. Not to be just another boring set of people in business suits implementing the same economic nonsense. I’m not confident. Our institutions retain the history of our community-based politics. /16

But our politicians take all of their cues from Europe and the US. They’re career apparatchiks. And since the 1970s those institutions have irritated their petty ambitions, and they’ve been trying to destroy them. I fear it’s too late to save us. But there’s one more thing. /17

Not coincidentally, the Aboriginal Australian way of life we tried to supplant here is also resolutely community-based in its focus. It’s not the first similarity between that culture and the one we’ve developed since. A type of osmosis has happened there, I’m sure. /18

One that we don’t recognise. Just as we don’t hear the profound similarities between the Australian accent we pride ourselves on, and Aboriginal languages. There have been profound, hybrid evolutions between these cultures. We’re far more Aboriginal than we realise. /end

Black music was fundamental to lifting those nations out of schamltzy kitsch. Eurovision reflects how Europe does everything - a battle of nations. Their football the same. That whole sovereignty thing has dominated their entire history. /2 https://t.co/fyC76ISPly

Maybe only forced mixture through immigration in nations that escaped European sovereign wars is powerful enough to generate something like a musical creole, that we experience as popular music there. /3

I’m guessing they’ll give the win to Ukraine, because again, for Europe it’s always about the fight for sovereignty. /end

Because modern conservatives so often reproduce a patriarchy of privilege and arrogance. Their fathers are critical. In Rees-Mogg’s case, this is his. Lord William Rees-Mogg. A purveyor of ‘sovereign individual’ ideas that are very on-trend with modern conservatives. /2 https://t.co/ZuHRWrL3fY

It’s a tedious yarn about getting rid of the State entirely; you can’t underestimate how much modern conservatives despise the State. And to understand that, as I Tweet about a lot, remember this same State emerged during the catastrophes of the late-19th to mid-20th century. /3

The State that removed a lot of the powers of these members of existing aristocracies, to fight plagues and wars. From the end of hostilities in WW2, in the 1950s, these aristocrats fought back, viciously. That’s where the ‘market economy’ came from, it was their invention. /4

Their way to bypass the hated State, and replace it with a mechanism that would ensure their perpetual dominance in society. I Tweeted this thread to show that this link survives to this day, in modern politicians. Dressed in expensive business suits and speaking the…/5

…pseudo-economic gibberish of ‘the city’, but underneath all that just old-fashioned aristocratic privilege, sneering at the common folk. Society is always social. Our own LNP is soaked in our own historical aristocracies. The wealthy landowners and industrialists. /6

They never even had a political party, they didn’t need one, they just ruled by birth, and divine right. Then unions organised the Labor Party. That’s the single only reason the LNP even exists today, as a reaction to that early ALP. Wealthy farmers and industrialists formed…/7

…a coalition, which survives to this day. They have almost nothing in common, except their hatred of unions and workers, and the temerity of those same workers organising access to the front bench of parliament for themselves. /end

(Diagram from: https://t.co/FScePwZqe7) The explosion in obesity in the 20th century coincided with something deeply linked with infection. The invention of antibiotics. The dysbiosis in gut bacteria caused by antibiotic use is well known. /2 https://t.co/1cdcYbZ7oI

Research linking this dysbiosis to obesity is well advanced. And farmers know feeding animals lots of antibiotics fattens them up. Of course antibiotics were a boon in so many ways as well, this is not at all to suggest they were a bad thing. But we’re very ham-fisted here. /3 https://t.co/WT4Ut4fvq4

Our current ridiculously casual attitude to infections was largely driven by the success of antibiotics. Prior to their use, cutting your finger in the garden could kill you. Now we deliberately infect entire populations and call it public health. With viruses too. /4

Vaccination was the key there, our other great advance but also a prompt to become ridiculously casual about infection. Politicians have been completely cavalier with Covid because they used vaccines the same way farmers use antibiotics. Infecting the herd, it’s in the name. /5

Anti-vax, ‘natural’ health types go even further, openly embracing infection as some kind of immune system workout. We’re well down the road to complete collective insanity. It’s also interesting that obesity is given as a key cause of that other 20th century epidemic. /6

Heart disease. As per my previous tweets, there’s significant evidence that may actually have been an epidemic of chronic infection, with various pathogens. And now it appears also of side-effects of the battle with those infections. Look at the chronology. /7 https://t.co/mHe1xedyP7

All of this aligns, the casual indifference to infection, and particularly chronic (’invisible’) infection. And now dysbiosis, caused by set-and-forget treatment of these same infections, to pretend we now live lives free of concern about infection. /8 https://t.co/eALvnFf3eV

We’re not creatures with some microbes here and there. As Lynn Margulis argued, we’re fundamentally societies of micro-organisms. Endosymbiotically constructed, from the ground up. Deliberate casual infection and casual treatment of infection screws up our wiring. /end

The group is transformed, instantly. Suddenly happy, productive, churning out new music. Like immigration, on a tiny scale, this is how societies are re-energised too. Strangers brought into the group, adding energy and dynamism. But…the group still ends up failing /2 https://t.co/RVNtL1DVay

Nobody leads, or rather the group labours under the same illusions we do, with democracy, that they should all lead. Which means it all collapses. McCartney was clearly the organisational leader of The Beatles. They resented him for it, while relying upon it. /3

That’s what our current political populist leaders don’t understand. True leadership is not often popular. Just as parenting isn’t. It’s knowing what’s right, and doing it despite the protests. /end

Counter-culture. An all-out assault on the culture of the time, from a generation which Bruno Latour acutely observed (he was one of them) had never experienced privation or suffering. Their parents had, in spades, in WW2. Their grandparents in WW1 and Spanish Flu. /2 https://t.co/f21zqGo8xE

But the boomers? Nope. The world was their oyster. Caught up in the great excited relief after the war was over, everything seemed possible. The world was going to remake itself, to put all that sordid nastiness behind it. The politics of causes began. With a soundtrack. /3 https://t.co/bBzaCQFK0I

The great philosopher Michel Serres once called that age the ‘age of the shit-eaters’. By which he meant the age of the Beatles (play on words with beetles, who eat shit, if the connection wasn’t clear.) Not because he thought The Beatles were shit, far from it. /4 https://t.co/uMgPLnuoYT

But because he saw a fundamental shift in social models taking form at that time, with music at the centre. It’s still there today. Where centuries of custom and tradition were being swept away in a range of popular fads and fashions, New Age mumbo jumbo and protest songs. /5 https://t.co/mTd3qGXWpT

Serres believed music was a very thin gruel to be substituting for the actual physical reality of the time. The iconoclastic wave it began is still with us today, where deep distrust in anything established or institutional is a badge of honour for all sides of politics. /6 https://t.co/094uWCL5cs

Both sides of politics occupy this same framing, without even realising it. Conservatives want to destroy government, progressives want to destroy monarchy, and also much institutional government. We’re 60 years deep into this iconoclastic movement now. /7 https://t.co/SohZAcVdv0

The Beatles are so important to this history because they, inadvertently in many ways, are at the vanguard of it. Beatlemania was a political (and thus social) phenomenon much more than it was a musical phenomenon. It meant something. A big something. /8 https://t.co/4nCfZy6DAB

Societies were shifting their focus of importance, to widespread protest and destruction. And yes of course every age has things that NEED changing or destroying. But the magnitude of this was new. And its danger was its origin. Popularity. ‘Pop’ stars led the charge. /9 https://t.co/ANi6hb3Gl2

It’s in the name. Pop-ular. You can see this even within The Beatles, where McCartney for example wrote nonsense lyrics, much more interested in the music itself. Lennon was more about changing the world, about ‘meaningful’ lyrics. To this day he gets the plaudits. /10 https://t.co/WneQShd4Mz

I think that’s terribly misplaced. McCartney’s instincts were much sounder. They were a band, playing songs. They weren’t equipped to change the world. And to their credit, their sense of humour and intelligence never let them get carried away with it anyway. /11 https://t.co/njwrWJ5d47

You can see it in the film, where 3 of the Fab 4 mocked their time in India seeking enlightenment. That cheeky, smart humour always brought their feet back to the ground. But the shift was on, socially. And they will always be seen as the advance guard. /12 https://t.co/HKSEpReEqT

Part 1 of this thread talks a bit about how these ideas failed even inside the band itself. The idea of them all driving the band (like ‘the people’ in our ideas of democracy), ‘down with hierarchy’, led to their destruction. Fabulously wealthy and successful, and broken. /13 https://t.co/fK7fcSM4YW

If that doesn’t describe our societies right now, I don’t know what does. /end https://t.co/Cy3VkaiCuR

Australia is a hot target for the global libertarian movement, for its actions on public health and guns. Social media is mobilising every force imaginable to bring down established democratic customs and traditions. 2/2

This sounds drastic, but I think the longer anybody looks at this question, the more they'll end up in the same place. It may just implode of its own accord anyway, as the article suggests. It may be humanity's dumbest ever idea. /2

The things many of us like about social media are at the same time the things genuinely bad people use to dramatically accelerate their spread and influence. Every day we're all here feeds that process, by keeping the platforms afloat. /3

We don't need to mobilise change using social media. The fastest way to do that is to shut it down. Imagine the pandemic, without social media. How much different it would have been. No amount of good people Tweeting here every day made the slightest difference to the outcome. /4

They were vastly outnumbered. By definition public health is run by a small handful of expert people, who were always going to be easily overwhelmed by millions weaponised by bad faith actors. You could say we just need to weaponise a counter movement. /5

But that misunderstands that societies are run by hierarchies of expertise, which are always overwhelmed in size by people outside those hierarchies. Previously those people left those hierarchies mostly alone, to do their work. Now they're the red meat that feeds loons. /6

Social media conflates connection and community. By doing that it replaced our existing communities, set up over centuries, with communities of likes and influencers, often set up in a month or less. Those social media communities are now a dominant force in modern politics. /7

Community, with all of its complex relationships and intrinsic stickiness, created by a constant negotiation over conflicting needs, has been replaced entirely by popularity. Only likes hold social media communities together. Everything else is run over in the rush. /8

Those communities, like 'the vulnerable', are fully connected to our communities outside social media. And they're destroying them. I ask people again to stop and think whether the fastest way to end the madness, is to unplug the lot. /9

So that decisions, and the information that they're based on, have to return to doing the hard work of negotiating the incredibly complex and evolved institutional hierarchies of our societies again. Structures that evolved for good reason, over a LONG time. /10

You can't isolate a society's information and communication from everything else it does. That's why RWNJs weaponise 'free speech', because they know they can therefore control everything. Speech is the operating system for everything else. /11

Social media allows the creation of an entirely different society to those we've evolved over centuries, in the blink of an eye and where the only currency is popularity. It can only end one way. Total social collapse. /end

People cling to it like a life raft. Social media is owned by the same billionaire class that people rail against, on social media. Do you think they’d create these platforms if they threatened their way of life? /2

It’s pure genius, they found a way at last to own social life as well. To weaponise it, to monetise it. It’s like social heroin, people can’t look away, the economy of likes and the team sports of comparison are irresistible. They’ve targeted our core ways of being. /3

The simple, practical things that need to happen to fix our societies won’t happen, because most of us are transfixed every day by the ‘debate’ on social media, a platform provided by the same class of people who create these problems and resist their solution. It’s a con. /4

They have us believing that all of this hot air is ‘the people’ acting in a democracy. That if you ‘mobilise’ enough followers, you can change the world. Trump managed that, but it’s nearly always those who already have power and influence who use social media to do it. /5

No power, no leadership, ever comes from the ‘bottom up’. Social media is endless distraction, a perfect way to divide and conquer the millions you’re screwing every day, and have them just argue with each other, while you keep on plundering the Treasury. /6

Simple, practical things like mass joining of unions would actually change societies. People won’t do that, they’d rather log on every day and join their teams in fighting the social media fights they’re engaged with. Like online gaming, not even an analogy. /7

Like all technology, social media was created with a founding set of assumptions, which then create the social effect of that technology. Those assumptions are well known, SIlicon Valley beliefs. Political libertarian ideals of freeing individuals from custom, tradition. /8

And here we are. Existing customs and traditions, like public health, being smashed with gay abandon. Replaced by huge armies of online loons and their freedom fairy tales. Cybercrime growing exponentially, the same technology, implementing the same beliefs. /9

As David Roth says, the entire IT industry, not just social media, loves to invent things it thinks will make it fabulously rich. It has zero interest in actually maintaining any of it, for taking responsibility for its ongoing social impact. But people won’t give it up. /10

Social media is addictive, because these charlatans have now targeted the most addictive thing humans possess. Their own social relationships. The economy of comparison, popularity and likes. Societies won’t survive. We’re trapped in high school now, perpetually. /end

Social media is NOT SOCIAL. It’s the libertarian world of individuals and their individual universes of meaning, brought to life. We’re not all sharing a ‘public’ melting pot on social media. We’re occupying these tiny bubbles. The algorithms create and reinforce them. /2 https://t.co/20nkxuFLnv

Each now sees all of society through their tiny bubble-lens. It’s a reality distortion field, the splintering of society into ever-smaller and harder fragments. The conflict this creates further feeds the algorithms, and creates even more bubbles. /end https://t.co/Mb1rnZVZvM

That fantasy has many of the victims of political libertarians madly ‘organising’ and ‘mobilising’ every day, thinking they’re creating a better world by all their ‘bottom up’ action. It’s a con, designed to distract them and absorb all of their energy. /2

Energy that could be used to take over the world, but which instead is engaged in the futile task of daily trying to rebuild societies one brick at a time. Societies that *already exist*, and don’t need rebuilding. We did that all, already, with many fights and struggles. /3

At the same time communities fractured and destroyed by libertarian politics cling to social media for the social connection it gives them, in the ruins of those fractured communities. That’s a noble thing to do. But it’s perverse to praise the platforms for it. /4

These platforms are the vanguard of the libertarian movement. Their beliefs created the platform, the profits from them go back to libertarian billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It’s really astonishing that people don’t join those dots. Follow the money. /5

They’re using this technology to weaponise and monetise the destruction their political beliefs wreak on societies. Not only are they destroying societies, they’re using social media to both assist the destruction, and profit from it at the same time. /6

The seductive social connection people feel here IS the business model. We shouldn’t need billionaires to have social connection, who then profit from it. They now own our social space as well as our economic and political space. /7

Ultimately though the technology distracts from the underlying beliefs in play here. And both sides of the current political battles converge upon that same idea, that democracy and society are ‘bottom up’ processes. They aren’t, they never were and never will be. /8

All change, in all groups of humans of whatever size, is LED into existence, by about 5% of the group. Our representative democracies were set up in exactly this way, not bottom up. They’re led, by a small handful of representatives. /9

The role of the people or public is to select representatives, who then lead an intrinsically *hierarchical* system, like all systems. Hierarchies of expertise. But the libertarians, largely through social media, have now replaced this with populism. /10

An idea that counties are now run by ‘the people’ (which isn’t even a thing, except as a description of a group that has no necessary connection). And if we all chatter away on social media every day, that’s democracy in action. /11

And when that leads to exponential increases in conflict and bullshit, the libertarian masters of the platforms intervene to remove any remaining hint of actual hierarchical management, to regulate the thing. So that it becomes a true sewer. /12

I’m still here, that’s not a contradiction of my own beliefs. I don’t for a moment think anything here is changing the world. Like others I use the things that the platforms make possible, but at the same time criticise the much bigger damage the platforms are doing. /13

I get lots of ‘love it or leave’ from people who object to that, not even seeing their behaviour as like the anti-immigration knuckleheads they’d normally be appalled by. Their view of society through the tiny bubble of shared interests here on social media demands it. /14

It’s what the libertarians want. Society fractured into millions of individual realities, endlessly at war with each other. It’s what this platform feeds off. I want the public back. The public has no hope of surviving social media. Most of them don’t even use it. /15

A public is people living together, solving problems together, through their elected representatives and the institutions that regulate that public life. Not teams set up on social media platforms, blocking and assaulting the things they don’t like. It’s online gaming. /end

Conservative strategists deliberately ‘flood the zone with shit’. We need to flood the zone with the eye-opening individual stories of what’s going on out there. Especially in schools, to our kids. Bastards are getting away with it, because the stories aren’t out there. /end

Nearly all of the existential problems we face at this point in history revolve around landscape in some way. Whether food production, water, biodiversity, every dimension of climate change, sovereignty, reconciliation etc. That's telling us something. /2

The 'economy' as people call it, when you zoom out is really a massive stripping away of every geographical basis of our lives. Where you live is not important, just an address on a map, in a 'globalised' market. Transport is the economy's passion. Moving things around. /3

A road for example is a no-place, inserted into actual places with significance and meaning. It's worth feeling that disconnect, by just standing on a road for a moment in a quiet time, in your community. That entire black space has no meaning anywhere where it actually is. /4 https://t.co/UDJ4azl9zU

Its meaning is entirely where it can *take* you. All roads in a modern society are connected to all other roads. The significance of that space is that it's always about *somewhere else*, not where you are right now. And it's right there, outside every door. Space has meaning. /5 https://t.co/Ykm2yij1dh

Add our obsession with travel and modern Western societies are obsessed with never grounding themselves. Never being anywhere, always somewhere else. Contrast that with the Indigenous peoples they displaced, for whom the land under their feet is the most sacred of all things. /6

For Indigenous Australians, the land already was the Head of State. I think a lot of the reconciliation we talk about but can never seem to achieve is the misunderstanding of that fact. Land is sacred to them, and it should be to us. But for us it's 'sights', to be 'seen'. /7

Something to take a selfie with, as a backdrop. And now with climate emergencies even the most tedious consideration of that land as a 'resource' says we're in the shit. It's definitively non-partisan, and existential in the deepest way. /8 https://t.co/7Wuuohcblh

It doesn't belong to any human group, this isn't about asking geographers to run the country. Or geologists, or farmers, or property developers (help us), or environmentalists. The land contains all of those things, it exists across generations. /9

Every living organism and everything those organisms create comes from the land, and returns to it. Indigenous peoples never speak of the land in that ownership way, but in a stewardship sort of way. They tend the land to sustain themselves and it, in perpetuity. /10

One of my favourite sections of Bill Gammage's book is on 'farming without fences'. How Indigenous Australians didn't fence land in an ownership sort of way, but instead engineered it to be appealing to wildlife, which roamed freely over it. /11 https://t.co/lNYPuXuE2I

Animals and plants then flourished in abundance, to be used by people as sustenance, but also the fauna and flora benefited enormously. It was a genuine win-win. A symbiosis of people, plants, animals and landscape. Incredibly sophisticated. /12

It's figuring out how they did that for tens of thousands of years, humankind's greatest ever achievement and still a mystery to European minds, that I think is an untapped key to reconciliation. Because we're going to need to know how they did it, fast. To survive. /13

It reverses our assumptions, that they have to adapt to us. Our lifestyles are a mere few centuries old, and crumbling into dysfunction. A mutual recognition that the land itself is the converging key to all of our survival seems not even a choice. It seems our only hope. /14

I don't even pretend, nor do people like Gammage, to understand a fraction of what Indigenous Australians know and what the land itself knows and could tell us. But to me it's the way to join all of the dots, to find that out. Australia, the land, should be our Head of State. /15

As it has been for tens of thousands of years. /end

@DrPieterPeach have you seen any of the latest on far-UVC? Is it commercialisation-ready?

Notice the % of government spending to GDP has been stuck at the entirely political and artificial level of around 25% for 30 years. That’s the victory of small-government political libertarians, who were so politically successful that this is now seen as a fact of nature. /2 https://t.co/jcldvEte9u

It’s privatised societies, the entire conservative political project today is to try to gradually strangle the State. To return your taxes to you, because it’s ‘your money’! Money you will now have to use to buy all of the things public services used to provide for you. /3 https://t.co/VQPjFwNmYW

That’s why humans invented the State, to create economies of scale in public services. To make life easier and cheaper for everybody. By artificially strangling government spending at that ridiculous 25% figure, the State can’t function. The conservatives know that. /4 https://t.co/dwfDJVZImx

It’s their plan, to strangle it. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of individuals affording the services the economies of scale of the State used to provide for them. That’s why we’re seeing mass economic distress right now. But to zoom out. /5

The con is much clearer if we can get away from idiot daily news cycles. Yes the government spent a lot on the pandemic. But it spent a lot more on WW1 and WW2, relative to GDP. It’s the role of the State, to buffer populations from disaster as well as to provide services. /6 https://t.co/r7eMjraiRT

I’ve Tweeted a lot about those big surges of State activity from 1914-1945. They broke the back of generations of aristocratic privilege in societies. The idea of ‘the public’ had arrived. Society as an interdependent mix of all people. The old aristocratic class was furious. /7 https://t.co/VG6VSPGX1o

And that explains most of the conservative fight back since the 1950s. To destroy the State, the obstacle between the old aristocratic privilege, and the modern public-oriented societies enabled by the State. To return now to the pandemic. /8

The hysteria over ‘lockdowns’ was really the hysteria of these same aristocratic elites terrified that a new global catastrophe, a pandemic, might reverse the gains of the past 70 years of their cause, of destroying the State. The fear was palpable, if you knew to look. /9 https://t.co/w6tNg6eO4B

All the propaganda, happily circulated by assisting numpties in the health sciences, about ‘living with’ a pandemic would have been rightly seen as ridiculous in any other time of the past century. But the public and the institutions which created and sustained it are gone. /10

Gone, or crippled. We’re all living our best lives now, taking selfies in the wreckage, using catastrophe for dramatic backdrop in our curated social media lives. We’re back cheering on ‘the economy’ again, the thing that destroyed the public. /end

1) The ‘economy’ won’t allow it. The economy is a set of indicators deliberately invented to favour existing wealth and privilege. If you doubt that, give an example of one important thing that needs doing, which the economy will actually allow. /2

2) Elections, popularity. No modern politician will do anything that damages their popularity and thereby votes. This is perfectly rational behaviour, the problem is the system itself. Making popularity the gatekeeper to ultimate power. /3

You can make anything popular. It’s called good marketing. The people with the most money will be able to do the best and most marketing. So they will win the most votes, and therefore have the most power. This is where 1) meets 2). /4

Those with the most wealth will fund the electoral popularity contests, to ensure they also gain political power. This includes the framing of ‘the economy’, which will ensure their interests are looked after even when no election is due, and even when their team loses. /5

Like I’ve Tweeted a lot, we’ll get nowhere until that loophole in democracy is closed - elections. It’s the way wealth and influence games the entire system. Select leaders at random, and remember politicians don’t ‘run’ countries. Tens of thousands of skilled officials do. /6

This is all so obvious, that all that keeps the whole stupid thing going is that we actually LOVE popularity games. It’s high school carried into adult life. It’s why people won’t give up social media, even though it’s a wrecking ball through societies. They love the likes. /7

It’s social heroin. They also love being connected, but don’t stop to wonder why the only way to do that in an economy is now platforms, owned by the people who own the economy. Popularity is our poison. Public policy has been replaced with what’s ‘trending’. /end

Exhibit A. https://t.co/WwaSGRacVg

@DrPieterPeach what’s your take on humidity as a factor against spread? Interesting in this set of experiments that even with a good HVAC system with 15 air changes per hour, it was only when they raised the relative humidity that spread was dramatically contained.

There’s the worry about winter, about how this can work when it’s cold. But it appears you don’t need these open much, to get good ventilation. My house is over 100 years old, and it’s bloody cold here right now. There are no windows open, but CO2 readings are excellent. /2

We also have modern double-glazed windows, the house doesn’t leak a lot. But we have upper wall vents, like this one, designed into the house originally to remove exhaust gases from coal and gas fires. Ventilation experts have advised we seal them, because of heat loss. /3 https://t.co/mZ2F76GEpH

We haven’t done that, and I’m glad. It seems to create good ventilation in the home, even in deep winter, without any noticeable draughts of cold air or enormous heat loss impact on heating bills. Tilt and turn double-glazing is also useful because the tilt setting…/4

…allows for ventilation without draughts. Most commercial buildings moved to almost hermetic sealing, relying entirely upon HVAC. I do wonder if that was a terrible mistake in building design. /end

P.S. I’m also persuaded that encouraging more ‘vertical’ ventilation in this way is better than cross-ventilation, which tends to shift dirty air across a room, from person to person, rather than exhausting the dirty air up and out.

Just 5% of the money raised went to feed starving Ethiopians. The other 95% was used by rebels, to buy weapons. Social media has dramatically accelerated this bullshit so that now every actual problem becomes just a platform for individual self-expression. /2

And we’ve seen what this same industry has done with Covid. Sweet f-all. It would have meant a hit to rock star income. So they did - nothing. In fact they’re out there now spreading the virus with abandon, to crowds of thousands. Our teenage culture is cradle to grave now. /end

The 5% figure is actually incorrect, as is the claim 95% was spent on weapons. The BBC apologised for broadcasting the stats. Just adding a correction.

h/t @DavidAshleyDavi

There’s probably not a lot of data that will tell you that it may be the mammoth-sized elephant in the room in all medical science. It’s worth remembering key aspects of Einstein’s General Relativity received no confirming data until a century after he devised the theory. /2

Rheumatic fever for example had contested casual explanations, until antibiotics to clear strep also eliminated rheumatic fever. The human body is being shown more all the time to be in essence a microbial system, rather than a physico-chemical system, with some bugs added. /3

So many medical paradigms are mechanical, physico-chemical. That’s the conceptual foundation, rarely discussed. It’s actually quite bizarre how little actual biology informs many of our dominant medical theories. It’s like we’re working on a car in the shed. /4

Similarly the battle over Covid measures is largely a conceptual battle, between public health and medicine, with an enormously unhealthy dose of free market baloney hidden from view in many of the concepts. Public health and medicine have always slugged it out. /5

But the politics of our time, of the economy, is a huge fan of medicalising pandemics. Giving everybody a quick shot, and then back to work. Living with pandemic viruses, outrageously ridiculous nonsense. The greatest conceptual reinvention we need is ‘the public’ itself. /6

Mistaken for a majority of people in a society, the libertarian political idea, which replaces a public (all people and their interrelationships) with majorities and minorities, concepts derived from the electoral processes the same politics uses to achieve power. /7

The public is an administrative construct. It’s not ‘the people’, the fascists’ favourite concept, they love to evoke the people in their brutal schemes. The people doesn’t exist, it has no voice. It gets to vote, which is just numbers on a page. /8

Numbers which politicians then overlay any meaning they like on. I call it a voice-over, not a voice. The public is none of that, it’s a regulatory invention, a constant assessment of inter-relationships between all people, assessments of issues and their solutions. /9

It’s what the hated ‘bureaucrats’ do, bureaucrats invented and maintain the public. That’s why they’re called a ‘public service’. Not just because they serve the public, but because they create and maintain it. It’s not visible from polls or elections. /10

It needs reams of data and analysis, to tease out of our complex social relationships. Public health is not a quick jab and then living your best life. It’s a sophisticated state of constant analysis and intervention, towards an optimum state for all people. /11

All of that has been swept away with the economy and markets, the idea that all societies are just markets of individuals. And those who do badly are now ‘the vulnerable’, and just need a bit of a leg-up, until they ‘have a go’ like the rest of us. Utter bullshit. /12

But that’s what this pandemic is really about, these conceptual frameworks. No amount of data will fix it. Only by conceptually unravelling our deepest beliefs will we be free of it. /end

Unfortunately progressive parties swallow that spin (together with 'the economy', 'living with the virus', 'getting the balance right', 'the vulnerable' etc. etc.) and come to power with most things in urgent need of repair. But all they offer is a 'kinder' politics'. /2

Comprehensively, strategically outplayed, as always. The wreckage left by conservatives is mostly untouched. But people speak more kindly, about the wreckage. /end

In our building design, we have this tug of war between open and closed. You can have fresh air exchange in winter, but only if it’s piped in and out mechanically in some way and pre-heated. Or you have to filter it in hermetically-sealed buildings. Termites reject all that. /2 https://t.co/1SDDNxLWWH

We use air/gas gaps between windows and walls for example to insulate. Termites use the air they breathe, to create that same insulation. It’s part of the engineering. A termitarium is not only not closed to the outside, that whole inside/outside distinction is meaningless. /3 https://t.co/uKPr3cmxVO

The structure of the termite ‘building’ *is* that interplay of elements, re-purposed in multiple ways to perform multiple functions. Porous cavities both create air exchange, and insulate. Nothing is waterproofed in the way we think of that. /4 https://t.co/99rDqE0a1f

Water is drained away, but used as further insulation in the process. Etc. Fascinating paper on this design here, thanks to whoever it was that pointed me in this direction: https://t.co/isehhCPDYg /end https://t.co/W18vQgcVSo

@DrPieterPeach not sure if you’ve ever dipped your toe into this research, but it’s quite a paradigm shift.

My friend got regular boils, mostly on the back, buttocks and upper legs. All of the advice they were given focused on trying to eliminate the staph - antiseptic soaps, for example. Reading about boils, one thing that struck me is where they’re most commonly found. /2

Buttocks, between the butt cheeks, torso, sometimes behind the ears, the navel etc. A lot of these areas are places that people don’t always dry throughly after showering or bathing. They may also be people (like my friend) with a significant amount of body hair. /3

I don’t know how thoroughly people with a lot of body hair dry that hair, I suspect often not. So they throw clothes on after a shower with a not insignificant amount of damp still on their bodies, in different areas, including in their body hair. It made me wonder. /4

Wouldn’t this be fertile ground for the growth of staph or other organisms? My friend also had occasional fungal skin infections, often where their body hair was thickest. I suggested they focus on really drying all of these areas of their body after showering, including hair. /5

More than a year later, they haven’t had a single boil. N=1, I know, and also perhaps advice already given to patients with boils, I don’t know. @lisa_iannattone ? But the wider way of thinking of this as an ecosystem thing is pure public health, in miniature. /6

With Covid it’s interesting how little of the discussion is ecological. That’s what public health measures mostly are, ecological interventions. Even a vaccine is an ecological intervention, an attempt to steer an ecosystem. Not a medicine. Antibiotics the same. /7

I often mention the work of Paul Ewald, because that’s his focus, though he overlays evolutionary biology on it too. I think we can do a lot with ecology before we even need to dip into evolutionary theory. One of the founding tenets of public health is that much disease…/8

…is contextual. Social, and I would say also ecological. Difficult to even make a distinction between those things. Covid for example would likely never have been a pandemic, if we’d ventilated our spaces properly. If we’d paid attention to our own ecology. /end

I hate social media used in that way. It’s not popular to point out that friendship is mostly an adolescent stage of life, there as a first taste of dealing with an other outside a family group. You’re supposed to grow out of the need for it. /2

Of course you will always have friends, and enjoy having them. But you lose the *need* for them that teenagers have. They’re people to have fun with, to discuss things with and do things with. But emotionally, you shouldn’t need them. /3

The famous Orson Welles quote: “We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone.” People quote that a lot, but you don’t see much thought about what it actually means. /4

Social media would collapse if there was thought about it. That clinging co-dependency of team sports you see on here, around every issue, where the actual facts and details are just banners different groups march under, in battle with other groups. /5

My Tweets about societies as high schools are all about that. How every part of adult life is now infected with the same adolescent culture that we all learn in high school. Our politics is pure high school, dressed up in drag names like capitalism, Left, Right etc. /6

Watch it here, every day, people can’t resist refracting all of our shared problems through the lens of what ‘Albo’ or ‘Dutton’ is doing. Like it actually matters what any popularly-elected person thinks or does about anything. Who the fuck cares. /7

If you think it matters because they ‘have power’, spend more time questioning why they do? How popularity became the doorway to world domination. Popularity is the currency of high school. We never left. Given the choice between understanding something, and mobilising…/8

…the team to go into battle against other teams, actual understanding is never going to win in high school societies. You might lose friends! You’ll betray the team! What Welles’ quote means I think is that you should of course love and socialise, but as you. Always as you. /9

Not as part of any team, even of two. No co-dependency. No desperate need to be liked or even recognised. DH Lawrence once said our entire lives are a journey to find out just who we are, individually. It takes mighty effort to strip away the co-dependency of social life. /10

We won’t beat Covid for the same reason we won’t beat climate change. The ‘economy’ is just a mega-machine of high school psychology. People aren’t selfish, quite the opposite, that’s always been the worst explanation of economic politics. /11

They’re incapable of breaking free of sociality. If they were genuinely selfish, looking out for their true selves, we might have a hope. What’s best for any of us individually is also what’s best for the group. The libertarian fantasies of free individuals? /12

Another banner another team marches under. Deeply, fanatically social and collective. Despite what it says. The libertarians on here stick to each other like dog shit to your shoe, they’re utterly incapable of any independent thought or action. /13

The lethal genius of ‘the economy’ as an invention is that it’s an engine of eternal adolescence. Again, it’s not a mechanism to individualise everything, it’s the exact opposite. It’s the framework that allows the team sports of high school to never end. /14

Every custom and tradition, every bit of knowledge earned through centuries of human suffering, can be cast aside if it can be made unpopular. Or something else trivial can be made more popular. Popularity, popularity, popularity. It’s all that’s left. Fads and fashions. /15

It’s why ‘economic growth’ goes up and down like a yo-yo, as fashion does. Driven by huge waves of popularity, ever-shifting in their focus. All those laughable ‘objective’ graphs showing the economy at work, as if there’s some stable underlying mechanism to it all. /16

Nobody asks why economies never stabilise, why they always boom and bust. It’s because they don’t exist, it’s just social life, unbridled high school popularity contests. Social media dramatically accelerates this shift. We know how to solve most of our problems. /17

We don’t solve them because all of it is only fodder for these eternal high school social games of building popularity, teams and hierarchies, status. Question a member of an expert group on here, for example, and watch the rest of them suddenly appear. Backing the team. /18

Even the most serious-looking expert groups are really part of the same social games. We see accounts on here set up by senior experts, purely to throw shit at OzSAGE. Social media again is entrenching this behaviour, we’re becoming blind to just how ridiculous it all is. /19

I like Spinoza. He always backed in knowledge as the only solution to our problems. Not mobilising people politically, that’s just more social status games. More team sports. Understanding is all that changes the world. Not always fast. But everything else is high school. /end

@Globalbiosec ?

Brownstone’s “vision is of a society that places the highest value on the voluntary interaction of individuals and groups while minimizing the use of violence and force including that which is exercised by public or private authorities.” Now read the red underlined sentences. /2 https://t.co/NQn58YleWC

In what way is that second underlined passage consistent with a ‘highest value on…voluntary interaction’? How it is it believable that this set of beliefs would care about institutions being ‘shattered’? And to go one step further. /3 https://t.co/dXuZPB3gtc

These think tanks are institutions. Collective institutions. The freedom libertarians rally behind is nothing but a war cry to do the exact thing they oppose - to mobilise people into large groups of coordinated political action. This has been going on for decades. /4

When the historical home of arbitration of belief, universities, were focused on due diligence, the libertarians set up their own institutions to counter them. That’s what a think tank is. Don’t believe for one second they actually believe any of the freedom guff. /5

It’s a rallying cry only to set up their own counter-institutions. A rival social grouping. All societies are 100% social, nothing else. Libertarians may claim they’re only doing all of this to bring the whole oppressive institutional structure down, from the inside. /6

And yet once there, they clearly relish the power. Trump is running again. There’s no shortage of libertarian ‘liberals’ here and elsewhere gouging each other’s eyes out to get pre-selection for parliament. The whole thing is a con. They’re just one more team. /7

In the team sports of high school societies. The ‘freedom of the individual’ team, with all the same social behaviours of the groups they say they vehemently oppose. I’m sick of all of the teams, not just the libertarians. Leave governance to institutions. /end

We debate lockdowns, we debate immunity. We debate everything. At the end of the day all of the debates are pointless. The virus will act a certain way, and that will have real-world consequences that our opinions have no bearing on at all. We don’t get to choose. /2

Lockdowns a good example. We debate whether to have them or not. But we don’t get to choose. A certain amount of control is needed of the virus, for society to function at all. The anti-State fanatics have everybody believing lockdowns are over. But the control never ended. /3

It can’t end, society won’t function. We’re all doing the control now, not the State. We’re funding it ourselves, like we increasingly fund all the things that were once public service functions, before the anti-State fanatics had their way. Zoom out from the hot air. /4

This pandemic is playing out in ways reality will determine. It won’t matter who says what or believes what, overlaid on top of it. Like some pathetic debating victory will mean anything to reality. You can argue all day about whether a stone will drop to the ground. /5

It’ll drop no matter who wins the debate. The only thing that the debates do determine in reality, is how many are maimed and die. To save lives, we need to stop the debates, to just treat the objective situation. But popularity politics has made that impossible. /end

Ostrom was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics. Mostly for a career studying how commons work. An example of a commons, and one she studied at length, is water. One of the most contentious things to manage, worldwide. Our Murray-Darling disaster a clear example. /2 https://t.co/TfvGUe5i3Q

Ostrom, like many women (if I can stereotype), wasn’t convinced by the black and white binaries that dominated water management when she began studying it. When she looked at what was *actually happening* out on the ground, she found enormous complexity and sophistication. /3 https://t.co/XqTuB4Tryh

Yes there was government regulation. Yes there was individual action by impacted stakeholders. But often not some binary between those two things, which our politics always assumes will be the case. Over decades of studying lots of commons, she distilled the key components. /4 https://t.co/OXLEFoSdos

Into 8 key principles. Here they are. Notice they look nothing like ‘the State needs to manage this’, or ‘a marketplace of individuals will find the optimum solution’. The two tired bookends of our political debates. Read them, and imagine how they could be applied for Covid. /5 https://t.co/lxz0oystm5

It’s not actually that difficult. And in fact good public health work in history has followed many of these methods. Notice regulation is in there, but not in some cartoon ‘oppression’ way. As is plenty of ‘free’ individual action. A mixture, based on outcomes, not ideology. /6 https://t.co/SHwvy9a71h

To come back to another thing I Tweet about, how Australia is very badly understood using any of the traditional European or US political categories. We’re not capitalist, or socialist, nor Left or Right. Australia has traditionally been governed predominantly by community. /7

For a range of historical reasons, not least having to find ways to survive in a prison colony at the other end of the Earth, and not having the luxury of space to debate ideologies. It was invent, or die. And this community-based politics is very much like Ostrom’s commons. /8

Read the 8 principles again. That beautiful mixture, ruthlessly pragmatic and compromising. That’s Australian modern history, not coincidentally also very like the Indigenous history it ignores and tried to wipe out. Osmosis was in play, I’m certain. /9

We learned about commons partly from the Indigenous Australians we were trying to displace. It’s how we survived. Indigenous Australians managed an even more sophisticated commons than those Ostrom studied. Their ‘stakeholders’ included the fauna, flora and geography as well. /10

In a civilisation spanning tens of thousands of years. Because of that incredibly sophisticated management, of a commons. That should be Australia’s contribution to the world right now, we have the operating system here for social stability stretching over millennia. /11

Unfortunately we also have remnant politics from the wealthy landowners and industrialists whose main interest was wiping all of that out and replacing it with the English motherland. It’s testament to the power of the politics of the commons that they haven’t won yet. /12

Look at our first 2 years of Covid here. Classic public health, but so successful because it tapped into that commons-based, community governance that defined this country. The COMMUNITY acted, together. Then at end-2021, the old patrician elites said enough. /13

Their ‘economy’, really spin for ‘the status quo’, was allowed to smash the commons-based work. And that’s the battle we’re in, right now. But the answer isn’t those boring, tired State vs individual debates, imported from Europe and the US. It’s to go back to the commons. /end

@RealOzSAGE a possible framework for thought and action The 8 principles are powerful, and empirically tested.

It’s almost astonishing that this narrative survives and if anything is even stronger today. We KNOW what happened next. Dan Andrews was returned in a landslide, at the next election. The whole thing was smoke and mirrors, by the political libertarians. A trick, a con. /2 https://t.co/XVoz9MYvBk

This is how magicians work, and also good political strategists. They use misdirection. Tweeted yesterday about the literal tiny handful of people on social media who generate nearly all of the *global* anti-vaccine and anti-public health disinformation movements. 12 of them. /3 https://t.co/Y5Zk3h2Pv3

The Victorian election should have completely reversed National Cabinet’s reversal, on Covid action. It showed the community wasn’t behind any of the anti-vax, freedumb rubbish at all. That tiny handful of loons have won, out of the cowardly populist fear of elected leaders. /4

So terrified of losing even a single vote, that all of this theatre representing the tiniest minority of Australian public opinion destroyed Australia’s public health strategy. Opinion injected via social media into a tiny handful of feeble Australians, mostly via the US. /5

The Australian community, probably more than any other in the world, will bend its back to a fight. It relishes it, it’s the most definitive thing about Australian life. The magnitude of the failure of leadership, to ignore this fundamental feature of Oz life, is breathtaking. /6 https://t.co/6WXgL6BDnE

Total capitulation to US libertarian attack politics, run by the tiniest handful of disaffected whingers. Trashing generations of community-led action against disasters. Adopting a manifesto from a tiny free-market libertarian think tank AS our national public health strategy. /7 https://t.co/dwLdkHTnQQ

That last point leaves me speechless every day. That not one journalist for example has even asked why our public health strategy was written by a free market think tank on the other side of the world. With a LABOR government in power. It defies belief. /8

There’s a positive here too. This so, so tiny handful of loons derailed generations of genius Australian public pragmatism. It means you don’t need to mobilise millions to turn this around. They didn’t. The community is ready and willing, it always is. It needs strategy. /9

It needs only a small number of people to ‘influence’ the opposite. The biggest social media draw cards here need to weaponise the good old Australian way again. To instantly tap into the sort of community passion we see in bushfires, and floods. It’s our DNA. /end

Have Tweeted about the origins of public health practice, and how what made it possible was the invention of ‘the public’ itself. Triggered by catastrophes in the late-19th through to the mid-20th century. Those catastrophes forced a consideration of social inter-relationship. /2 https://t.co/9uWl8tkXQB

It wasn’t a choice, it was about survival. Privilege and hierarchy was thrown aside, in a fight to survive. Look at the destruction of much of the existing aristocracy in the world wars. As some researchers show, only wars, plagues and natural disasters really change politics. /3

Sir Richard Barrons, previous Commander of Joint Forces Command in the UK, put it succinctly. Without disaster and catastrophe, old social hierarchies re-form. That’s where we are right now, at the end of that 70 years. Read what he says. The libertarian fantasies of our time. /4 https://t.co/93iuiCdJrj

“…it’s all about the individual and perfect freedom to lead your life, really without commitment or expectation, or any sense of harm.” Without a sense of existential threat, the idea of a public simply disappears. And with it, public health. /5 https://t.co/zmND2Ixtbu

I would like to believe we don’t need an even greater catastrophe than we’re living right now to change this. But I doubt it. Societies will always act socially, like we’re all still at high school, without huge threats to that society. Covid is a huge threat, but…/6

…for now the acute sense of that threat has been lessened for many, through vaccination. It’s the long-term, chronic destruction of bodies and societies that may be that disaster. /end (h/t to @DavidJoffe64 for the link to the podcast)

All of our social problems right now can be traced back to social activity decoupled from the knowledge humans have accumulated over generations. It’s pure bullying schoolyard. That’s all populism is. The essence of teaching is not to impart knowledge. Knowledge is social. /2 https://t.co/2NiTPGfTd3

The essence of teaching is to take rooms full of kids who without guidance will just act socially, all day and every day. And to guide them into a world where those social relationships will have to be modified by knowledge. /3 https://t.co/V2KAsk9TiY

Where the social relationships they use in the playground have to be modified and transformed, towards a completely different end. Towards learning, truths that cross generations. School is where the accumulated lessons of humanity are supposed to start shaping our behaviour. /4 https://t.co/wRNj21Fqup

Not only do we have to learn to deal with a much bigger range of people at school than we do at home, but all of that relationship is also shifted into another gear. Towards knowledge. Good education teaches people how to escape the oppressive sociality of the playground. /5 https://t.co/It05r5rwAG

And right now, at the same time you can see societies starting to collapse, it’s no coincidence at all that education failed first. Decades of treating education only as childcare for workers. As a material one-person shooter game for sociopaths with guns, in the US. /6 https://t.co/5prTlyCLKE

And now, the crowning triumph, of mass infection of an entire generation of children, over and over and over. The most despicable thing we have done in my lifetime. I have white hot contempt for the experts who played human shields for the politicians who did it. /end https://t.co/ZqkhUIcNzU