August 2023

@NjbBari3 ?

Instead of the ridiculous tug of war between ‘the economy’ and public health and action against climate change, we need to understand that these are the SAME PROBLEM. Defending an industrial revolution that’s 150 years old, instead of starting the next one. /2

Fixing Covid and climate change will make ‘the economy’ (if you must use the word) take off. Look at what the last industrial revolution did. That revolution was a response to centuries of social problems, it liberated us from age-old problems. There are no economies. /3 https://t.co/biftVXrtxr

There are just societies. Societies that fix massive problems prosper in unprecedented ways. Look at the graph! The people who profited from that last industrial revolution are hindering the next one. We can tell them to get out of the way of ‘economic development.’ Flip it. /end https://t.co/VnMYHSQYJB

...that reality through popularity politics? It added NOTHING to the process of giving Australia decent broadband. Not one tiny thing. Voting for this or that side contributed zero to the eventual outcome. But it did waste billions, and delay the reality for years. /2

What we call politics is literally - not by analogy - a team sport attached to the face of the actual material realities of our lives, like a parasitic alien. Using our social problems as raw material for popularity-based bunfights. /3 https://t.co/697EAvJaSU

Some actually believe this is a winnowing process, the 'democratic' sorting of the wheat from the chaff. It's nothing of the sort, reality knows what needs doing, and it always has its way. The team sports is the gaming of a s(election) mechanism. /4

Invented in the 19th century, and not even much use then. It's toxically useless now. Societies are now so complex in the material-technical sense, all the ideologies that fire up the team sports are as relevant as lettuce on a Bunnings sausage. /5

Nearly everything we urgently need done is stuff that just needs doing, and will end up done anyway, after we detour through pointless years of political team sports, wasting vast money to bolster individual political careers. Covid will be the same, it will be controlled. /6

Not because 'Left' or 'Right' think it should be, but because REALITY already knows it has to be. Societies won't continue to function, without that control. We will of course kill and main millions arriving at that revelation. Because deep down most love the team sports. /end

Politicians are our leaders. Despite the apparent resistance to them, they remain who decides what ‘trends’ in public health. That resistance to them is the same adolescent resistance to authority from high school. Ask the kids though. /2

They never respect and therefore never emulate a teacher who *doesn’t* lead. They eat them alive. Libertarian politicians giving us our ‘freedom’ are actually leaving the class to do whatever it wants. We’re living in the ruins. 3/3

Reference: https://t.co/uvuPxtzAjk

They’re blissfully surfing only the Likelihood axis. And even there we’re surely somewhere between possible and likely, already, with long-term damage from Covid. Add in impact and we’re locked into high-risk behaviour, negligent behaviour. 2/2 https://t.co/uQnM035kka

Imagine if the advice you’ve given government is that infecting the *entire* population with a novel virus, repeatedly, is the best option. Even if (as is the case) politicians have also strongly signalled that’s the advice they’re after. /2

Politicians will escape consequences, because they always do, they write the laws to be sure of it. But expert advisers won’t, accountability will come for them. Politicians will throw them under a bus with glee, as human shields. Officials are held to a higher standard. /3

Because that’s what officialdom is, governed by a set of customs and traditions that cross generations, to inject that longer-term view and experience into present-day decisions. I wouldn’t want to be one of those officials or experts, I think the clock is ticking for them. /4

It’s a NOVEL virus. We have little idea of long-term impact. The most basic risk management would advise to avoid infection. Instead we’ve gone to the exact opposite extreme, and let it rip. Everybody is not only expected to get infected, repeatedly, expert advice says…/5

…that’s NECESSARY. There isn’t one way I can think of that makes that sensible advice. It follows not one basic process of risk management. Experts and officials may have been flattered to be the centre of public attention, or they may feel they were ‘only following orders’. /6

People were hung for that defence, at Nuremberg. I don’t think we’ll end up there, but the public attention cowardly, self-promoting expertise garnered in this pandemic will eventually be a scrutiny they won’t enjoy. They’ll be on trial. Time for them to reflect. /end

We call this ‘child labour’ now, kids working alongside adults, even in dangerous jobs. And it often was dangerous. But it was also a social and cultural arrangement that has very deep implications. Primary here is the world of the adult. Kids were seen as mini-adults. /2 https://t.co/jrkvTUaWB4

There were obviously all sorts of problems with this, particularly when the work was dangerous. But it wasn’t all bad, socially and culturally. Kids are highly suggestible, and this way they emulated adults and adult life. They do that still today, before going to school. /3 https://t.co/MH42hZWsE7

They often idolise a parent and their profession, or want to be a fireman, or doctor, or bulldozer driver (me), or any other adult roles they’ve observed. There’s a clear progression in their mind, into the adult world, in an adult role. They ‘look up’ (literally) to adults. /4 https://t.co/fntXUwc09o

And then we did something maybe profoundly stupid. We took all kids, and isolated them from the adult world, entirely. We put them in schools. Now there’s nothing at all wrong with schooling, or knowledge, in fact knowledge is the most important thing in the world. /5 https://t.co/QGEzYEIcHO

But schools are about much more than knowledge. They’re social and cultural things, predominantly. All human things are. And when we severed the link to the adult world, we changed everything about our cultures, in ways we’re only now discovering. Very bad ways. /6 https://t.co/HelO7wGTUd

Because now kids had to emulate each other, not the adults they were working with previously. They had to set up social hierarchies within the school, to replace the hierarchies they had in the adult world of work. This is where societies were setting up social time bombs. /7 https://t.co/zF0dXGAFL1

Because let this process run for a few generations, and what happens? The kids who leave school enter the adult world they’d been separated from, and rather than slot into an existing adult hierarchy, they remake that adult world in the image of their experience at school. /8 https://t.co/4f44h5Mn1K

Gradually, the adult world disappears, almost entirely. The entire locus of society shifts to the culture of schools. Kids as they grow don’t reproduce and propagate adult culture, they reproduce school culture. It’s all they know. The infrastructure of adult life is there…/9

…, the technologies and workplaces etc. But the way of *socially* processing this infrastructure has shifted completely. The dominant mechanism of school culture is popularity. And that’s what now takes over the adult world. Whether workplaces, social life or politics. /10

Popularity becomes the new infrastructure of social life. Competence at a task, as in the older adult world of work, is replaced with ‘climbing the greasy pole’. ‘Networking’. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s who you know’. Etc. All schoolyard behaviours. Politics, the same. /11

Everything becomes about winning elections, the route to ultimate power. Being the most popular person. A focus on solving adult problems becomes a focus on being the person most ‘liked’ or recognised in relation to the problem, whether it gets solved or not. /12

So this is how we end up with the void, for Covid, climate and much else. Nobody is focusing on fixing the actual problem at hand, because they’re focusing on negotiating their place in popularity-driven status hierarchies. Popularity includes ‘esteem’, and ‘recognition’. /13

Grown-up sounding words to disguise the same basic underlying mechanism. We’re unable to solve anything because we replaced the adult world with a child-world. We completely flipped our cultures. If you’re looking for the grown-ups, you’ll find kiddults. /14

Nothing perpetuates all of this more and faster than social media. An economy of ‘likes’. Popularity. It took that cultural shift and pumped it full of steroids. The world burns while humans sit on these platforms all day, using imitative rivalry to try to build status. /15

All because we forgot that humans act socially, in everything they do. By fundamentally shifting how kids related to adults (i.e. hardly at all now, through schooling), we fundamentally changed our cultures. To an adolescent culture. That’s the void. /16 https://t.co/UlMa3tiY6s

Adolescents are interested in fun, travel, parties, ‘discovery’, resisting authority. Sound a bit like our adult world now? Where we travel and party and scroll through social media, while it all collapses around us? We did it to ourselves. /end

…why was Australia’s main pandemic modelling and strategy formulation outsourced to non-government bodies? Federal and State health departments have immense expertise in those areas. Great work @c_s_wallace 2/2

We treat place with total disrespect, because we don’t even know what it means any more. If you found a home or person breathtaking, you wouldn’t turn up at the home and wander inside, or stalk the person (I hope). We know those things are not right. /2

But with places, we just automatically assume it’s our right to invade them, whenever we like. Economies encourage it, it’s ‘great for tourism’. We have absolutely zero conception of the sanctity of PLACE. We treat it all as space, a completely different thing. /3

Place is as much if not more sacred than the personal space of a human being, or the space of somebody’s home. If we admire those things, we do it from a respectful distance. But we don’t do that with places. We charge n there like a herd of rhinos, trashing it. /4

To feed our ‘experiences’. It’s ‘broadening our minds’! Pig’s arse. How many people have you met who became fundamentally different people, because they travel? Very few to none. This casual invasion of place is the exact way we don’t understand Aboriginal Australia. /5

We think their passion and connection to place is some archaic thing, a primitive throwback. We’re the primitives. Descendants of empire, with no respect for place. We accumulate it like stamps. ‘I’ve been everywhere, man’. 6/6

1. Removal of border restrictions are obviously long past. Our COVID strategy since that point, of let everybody get infected over and over ('hybrid immunity') - where's the modelling for that? 2. Note how tight the scope of advice requested is. /2

Not advice on the best way to end the pandemic. Advice on implications for ending it in the way National Cabinet wanted to end it. Not 'following the science', but asking the science to follow the politicians. It was around that time we heard all the BS about 'leaders lead'. /3

So let's hold them to that. What's happened since they dropped the science as a guide for action is entirely their doing. And like everywhere else in the world, hybrid immunity is a train wreck. Killing and maiming widely, crippling economies. /4

Pandemics are defined by number of infections. That was also conveniently, politically, changed to be number of hospitalisations and deaths. And when both of those went into the stratosphere, hybrid immunity appeared as the new 'strategy'. /5

Again I don't think we've seen any of 'the science' behind hybrid immunity that decision was based upon. We've heard the CMO mention it, even give a timeline for when it'll be job done. When do we get to see the modelling? /end

The LNP milked this particular H-bomb for multiple election wins, the UK Tories are now copying the same script, probably assisted by Australian political strategists, who have worked for the Tories for years. The damage populism leaves behind is often irreparable. /2

This is what it did to Europe in WW2. We haven't learned. Fascists are populists, fascism IS populism, in its purest form. This is why politicians had a gentleman's (mostly men) agreement never to tread this path again. But that pact was broken. /3 https://t.co/BfYFUUUNvW

Leading to an explosion in electoral success. Which never lasts, and ends in destruction and chaos, always, at every time in history. Populism isn't politics, it's not Left or Right or centre or any of that nonsense. Those are just teams that normally regulate popularity. /4 https://t.co/Z2uqLdCUfj

Popularity was de-regulated. The genie was let out of the bottle. It's the bullies at school, allowed to run the school. It will end in destruction and chaos. It always has, all through history. Societies are (literally) schools, running them with popularity destroys them. /end

h/t @LeastIThoughtSo

I think the wisdom and experience is because we know that allowing ongoing infection enables a range of public health disasters. It enables ongoing pathogen evolution. It enables the development of widespread chronic infection, rather than just acute. /2

And from that it enables the development of chronic disease, from chronic infections. It adds TIME to the equation. Something our adolescent world now won’t tolerate, with its instant gratification. /3

Why don’t more health professionals oppose the outrageous reframing of a pandemic as hospitalisations, severe disease and deaths? ALL of those are traditionally the outcome of disease control FAILURE. They treat a public health event as a medical event. /4

If you’re using medicine for a pandemic, you’ve already lost. We invented public health because we used to understand that. Engineers are far more important in a pandemic than doctors. We’re not using them. Bring the focus back to INFECTION. That’s the crisis. /end

Ever since the invention of the car, societies have tried to manage the traffic that vehicles get stuck in. The problem has been misinterpreted as there being a ‘demand’ for new and bigger and better roads, and that’s what’s then been built. /2 https://t.co/LXkarpA5TQ

Except that always made the problem worse, not better. More cars, more traffic. As Wired point out in this article, what creates traffic is roads. Not cars. Building roads ‘induces’ demand for driving. /3 https://t.co/LXkarpA5TQ

Just as building dams induces demand for water. This isn’t hard to see, if you’re not an economist. If you make something available, people will often want even more of it. Travel another good example. Whole industries will be created using this new supply. /4

You need to strip the concept back to its roots. ‘Supply and demand’ is premised on the idea that left to themselves, people and groups will reach an equilibrium point of optimum efficiency in not only provision of goods and services, but also in how they live socially. /5

That’s ‘the market’, the same concept. It’s pure libertarian fantasy, projected into supposedly objective economics and from there into public policy. It has not one connection with the reality of how humans actually act. Because people always act socially. /6

They imitate and emulate one another, in status hierarchies. What we call politics and even business is the same social process, re-badged with other names. All political parties are just teams in these social status games. All companies too. /7

Nobody lives in a market, there is no equilibrium reached through the competition of billions of individuals, all maximising the utility to themselves. All nonsense. Supply and demand is a fairy tale. ‘Induced demand’ shows it, build bigger roads, you’ll get more traffic. /8

Supply and demand is a political/social belief, designed to replace existing social relationships with ones that favour the status and therefore wealth and power, of those who profit from there being no social regulation. It’s as simple as that. /9

It allows rank piracy and looting and pillaging to be described as ‘the market’ at work. Except there is no market. There’s what there always is, and always has been. People acting with imitative rivalry to build social status hierarchies, through emulation and imitation. /10

Listen to how politicians say the answer to major social problems like housing or energy, is ‘more supply’. More dwellings, more gas etc. All PR from the housing and gas industries, who of course profit handsomely from more housing, and more gas. /11

More housing, unsurprisingly, induces demand for - more housing. People accumulate properties, because it makes them rich. And it becomes a social status, being a property owner. Having more and bigger and better located properties. /12

It’s not even an elephant in the room that many people own multiple properties, while many others own none at all. And that every support to more ‘supply’ over the years just meant the former group grew in size even more. And increased their portfolios. /13

As I say with Covid a lot, we will not understand humans and their problems if we keep applying a laughable set of concepts like supply and demand, and the market, to social behaviour. Which is what ALL human behaviour is. Those concepts simply excuse anti-social bullies. /14

Who take over everything, and justify it by pointing to these ridiculous beliefs, saying it’s the market at work, producing some fantasy equilibrium of efficiency. Unfettered by the basic regulation which actually enables all societies. Rules, law. To finish with Covid. /15

I’ve said a lot of times that we need to stop thinking that we stopped all action on the pandemic. That’s not what was done. That action was *privatised*. We privatised lockdowns, for example, by forcing people to do (and pay for) their own isolation when sick. /16

We turned a pandemic into a market, as we do for housing, energy and everything else. Assuming that it would all reach a glorious equilibrium, through supply and demand. And like with energy and housing, that’s not actually happening, because the whole thing is a fantasy. /end

Source: https://t.co/6I1YXtxwek

Challenging the euphoria in particular will cop you a backhand for being a miserable sod without a life. But you can enjoy a game and a win without buying into the euphoria. Or the misery of loss. It’s a fucking game. And not just soccer, this is all sports now. /2

Even in the tough world of rugby league, it’s become almost expected now that the losing team will sit on the ground and have a cry after the game. Hard not to see this as a collapse of collective social behaviour. Immaturity. Adolescent high school life, again. /end https://t.co/Qdu5uIvCqx

For Covid, we continue to interpret what’s happening as a tug of war between public health and Covid minimisers. Teams. Reality pays no attention to any of that. For example the idea we can choose to have ‘lockdowns’, or not. But the spread of infection is a physical process. /2

You have to control it, or it controls you. We never got rid of lockdowns, we privatised them. We now ask individuals to do the isolation, to control spread, at their own expense. That’s the reality framing, the only one that will ever be real. Climate change the same. /3

What people and the teams/groups they align with think about it all will be irrelevant. The physical reality of climate change will determine the outcome, no matter what anybody thinks. And so to the Voice, for a very different reality-based conceptual framing. /4

Debates around the Voice, and around reconciliation and Indigenous politics in general, operate under a very common framing. That post-1788 Australia is the baseline, and we need to develop mechanisms to connect what’s left of pre-1788 Australia, into that baseline. /5

But Australia, the land and its people, is tens of thousands of years old. And you don’t have that unprecedented amount of time working a continent in history, without baking in a way of operating and thinking that 200 years of occupation can just shift. /6

What if that whole past 200-odd years was our European-based clumsy collision with that ancient operating system of people and land, with the latter shaping the former rather than the other way around, as is usually assumed? Even the famed Aussie accent bears almost zero…/7

…resemblance to any of the accents imported during the European occupation, but it sounds a LOT like Aboriginal English. Just one of so many ways that ancient Australia may have been shaping Europeans, rather than the other way around. And the land? /8

We have no idea what we’re doing. Most of the continent is classified as ‘outback’ or ‘bush’. We have to ‘hazard reduction burn’ much of it, because out own land is a ‘hazard’ to us. Imagine that. Our famous explorers often died ‘discovering’ an inland. /9 https://t.co/OFTq1kvKv2

An inland known intimately by First Australians for tens of thousands of years. We could have just asked them. Instead they often looked on bemused as people dehydrated and starved to death, with (in their eyes), plentiful food and water around them. And why did we explore? /10

Most Australians weren’t even looking to live anywhere inland. We tasted the inland, and rushed in fear back to the coasts, where we still huddle today. Meanwhile slaughtering First Australian inhabitants of that inland, and then leaving it empty and untended. /11

Where it now unsurprisingly then bursts into continent-sized fireballs. Reality-based framing. We arrogantly frame Australia in 2023 still with those European culture eyes. But the continent and its people have never paid any attention to that. The REALITY ignores it. /12

Stop and think that the entire history of what we call modern Australia is as a failed State. A desperate attempt to graft European culture onto far and away the world’s oldest land and culture, which just didn’t take. It’s failing in almost every way. /13

A collision of the (at the time) most advanced European culture, with the world most ancient culture, by tens of thousands of years. That had been shaping an entire continent. Why do we assume that collision is over? That it’s not us that is becoming more Aboriginal? /14

Rather than First Australians having to find a way to reconcile with European culture? That culture is failing, and has always failed in Australia. We don’t notice for the same reason we don’t notice Covid never ended. We focus only on the teams, and not the reality. /15

We have no idea how to ‘drive’ Australia, and as time goes on, that becomes more and more obvious. A continent and culture that evolved for aeons before times that the rest of the world even began to call ‘ancient’. It’s like one of those sci-fi movies where you find an…/16

…alien ship that’s incredibly advanced, that nobody knows how to do a thing with. Which button to press. Here at the relative bottom of the world, for tens of thousands of years before the pyramids, a civilisational experiment took place. An astonishing thing, a miracle. /17

No other culture has come within light years of the longevity. And we think just over 200 years of ham-fisted stumbling around in that ancient ship is the baseline for where to go next. We haven’t scratched the surface of our transformation into Aboriginal Australians. /18

But reality will keep being the arbiter. We won’t succeed on this continent until we understand it. And we may never understand it, at which point reality will caste us aside. /end

*cast Damn typos.

Some will say that will drive the value of existing homes down as well. But that’s what we want, that’s what all the rubbish about ‘more supply’ is supposed to be doing. Except it won’t, while that supply is in private hands. This was also the genius of ‘public’ anything. /2

Which we’ve forgotten. Political libertarians succeeded in portraying public goods and services as a ‘safety net’ option for ‘the vulnerable’. But actually the whole idea of ‘the public’ is as economic as you like. It’s just economies of scale. /3

The same principle used for Medicare. The same principle that should still be used against Covid, where the economies of scale of action against this horrible virus have all been privatised, to individuals. Grossly inefficient and ‘unproductive’. Basic economics. /end

Where Homer’s rich brother believes cars should be built in libertarian ways, freeing the ordinary Joe to drive the innovation. It destroys his business. Life again imitating art. We don’t see this libertarian rubbish running Tesla. /end https://t.co/hdaWnfcqd6

We can keep firing facts at people all day. In an environment where hierarchies of trusted expertise have already been terminally damaged, it’s shouting into the void. But we can shift our focus to trust. For me one of the fastest ways to progress arguments in these key areas? /2

Ask the minimiser (of Covid, climate, or whatever) if they welcome members of the public into *their* workplace, with no background in that area, telling them what to do every day. Of course they don’t, it would make them furious. But THEY do it all the time. /3

Libertarians are already aware of this danger, they call it credentialism, they know referring to hierarchies of expertise exposes their con. They set up their own opposing hierarchies, through think tanks, pay-for-view radio and TV, social media influencers etc. /4

All to damage and eventually destroy existing hierarchies of expertise. But they’re not gone yet, because the libertarian alternatives couldn’t make a vegemite sandwich. Reality still requires our existing hierarchies, to function. /5

Everything is social, that’s the key point. If people are paying no attention to public health basics, for Covid, or climate science, it’s not because they’re stupid, or because they need more facts. It’s because their locus of trust has shifted. /6

There are many ways that could be turned around, but above all we need to target trust, not facts. The social mechanism that’s creating the problem. The basic respect people should have for the expertise and experience of others. /7

The respect THEY expect others to have for them, in their areas of expertise and experience. Call them out for their hypocrisy, sabotaging existing institutions every day. And this isn’t to have blind faith in anything either, part of trust and hierarchies of expertise…/8

…has always been mechanisms to test claims. For example you could say we are following the existing hierarchies of expertise with Covid, the chief health advisers are telling governments to let everybody get infected. But…nobody is allowed to see the actual advice. /9

And increasingly that expertise is not allowed to speak anyway. That’s clear evidence that the existing mechanism has been debased and distorted, by politicians in this case. Trust us, they say, because we’re popular, we get lots of votes, so we must be right. /10

I often say to people at work who ask why I’m still masking, ‘who do you trust with your health? A politician, or a medical scientist?’ Target the trust, which in turn targets the foundational social act - imitation. Emulation. We emulate who we trust, we imitate them. /11

Democracy has never been millions of individuals all competing with their opinions in every area of life. It’s not like selling coffee. An essential part of all *representative* democracy is to trust others to do work we don’t have the time or knowledge to do ourselves. /12

That’s the mechanism the libertarians (really Queen Bees and Prom Kings from high school) have been attacking for decades. They attack trust, not facts. Don’t trust ‘the elites’, they say. It’s quite easy to make the point every day that trust needs to rest with expertise. /end

We’re following the same script with Covid. Except this time we didn’t beat the pathogen at home. We called it endemic, as we’ve always done with other countries. We replaced nations with a global economy. The economy has no public, and therefore no public health. /end

Massive public health costs are accumulating because of what we’ve done with Covid, which again I encourage people to identify for what it really is. Not ‘living with the virus’, but instead the privatisation of the pandemic. Just as we’ve done for water, land and energy. /2

The idea of market-economies is so obviously a failure, in all of these and other areas, that it’s heroic really that just about everybody still uses the concepts and terminology. ‘The economy’ is a failed concept, and the States that adopt it are failed States. /end

A common response to critical issues right now is to set up a new advisory body or committee. This from a government that not only (rightly) is prioritising repairing the public service, but also had 10 years in opposition to have policy shovel-ready. /2 https://t.co/JcPLqPIAWu

Like the current National Housing Supply and Affordability Council. Headed up by somebody with a prominent history in the property development industry. Spoke very well on RN this morning. But really, we have no in-house expertise in the APS? /3 https://t.co/JcPLqPIAWu

Nobody there who knows what the issues are with housing, and what to do about them? I bet we do. We've just been through weeks of discussion on the blurring of lines between government and industry through consultancies. @4corners and @c_s_wallace opened that window for us. /4

But here we are with housing, immediately bypassing the APS again, setting up new bodies with politically-appointed memberships? What were the ALP doing in opposition for 10 years, if they don't already know what to do here? /5

At the same time on RN this morning we had Jason Clare, describing again the review mechanisms he's set up to advise on what's wrong with education. Surely the APS already know? Surely the ALP had 10 years in opposition to already have shovel-ready policy here? /6

Yes Minister covered what's probably going on here brilliantly. These 'advisory' mechanisms are mostly about getting issues off the front page, and passing accountability to non-politicians. The people selected, either consultants or hand-picked for advisory bodies,.../7

...will usually tell you what decision the government has already made on an issue. That and the terms of reference given to the advisers. We saw that with Covid too, how 'the science' was listened to only in very narrowly controlled terms of reference, designed by Cabinet. /8

On housing now all we hear is 'supply, supply, supply'. That's all we ever hear about gas too. A rule of thumb I use is to immediately question policy that leads to the industry concerned making more of what it produces. It suggests regulatory capture. /9

Macrobusiness at least seems to be asking the same questions, on housing. /end https://t.co/WPsCVl2NU7

Fears about 'free speech' won't allow it, the same people who produce this weaponised propaganda have also framed the entire debate as a free speech argument. There is not and has never been any such thing as free speech. /2

All information and communication is mediated through social rules, customs and traditions. Accumulated expertise, precedent. By decoupling speech from that, largely through social media, we're like farmers leaving the chicken coop door open 24 hours a day for foxes. /3

We're wide open to everybody who wants to trash democracies. Homegrown, or even State actors, feasting on centuries of hard-won democratic institutional life. It needs to be shut down, rooted out, ruthlessly. These bad faith actors know it, they're ready to.../4

...respond with claims of 'authoritarianism' and 'totalitarianism'. That needs to be ignored. For example even off social media, how gutless are politicians that propaganda arms of some of these same interests are allowed to broadcast blatant propaganda? /5

For years now entire networks are laughing at us as they trash any sense of actual journalism or reporting, hiding behind 'opinion' when challenged. No sane society would tolerate it for a day. But it runs 24/7. All because of this belief in 'free speech'. /6

That and elections, together, will sink democracies. I think it may already be too late to save them. Populism, and completely unregulated information and communication. Or to strip it right back, vesting ultimate authority in who's the most popular. /7

And letting them and everybody else say and think anything they like, without any testing by custom or tradition or accumulated expertise. We don't run any business like that, or families. Running societies like that will destroy them. /end

@Globalbiosec ?

Not just because of individualist belief systems, though they're the drivers, enabled by a cultural shift in the past century where adult and adolescent culture merged, through mass schooling. But because that 'we' is the same thing as 'the public'. /2

The public in turn is not just a counting concept, 'all of the people'. It's an administrative construct. Created by and maintained by dreaded bureaucrats. Who measure and analyse collective interactions, and design policy and procedure to maximise collective benefit. /3

I've Tweeted many times how, from the end of WW2, the old privilege that was pushed to one side by the Spanish Flu and both world wars, so societies could survive, reasserted its historical hold over societies via a new politics, that disguised what they were doing. /4

How they invented a whole suite of new concepts, like 'the economy', and 'free markets', to restore the laissez-faire arrangements that had allowed them to dominate societies for centuries. Under cover of a supposed 'objective' and 'modern' shift. /5 https://t.co/mU0jhcdwXR

In reality they were just dismantling the public. The institutional infrastructure that both created and sustained the public. That made 'we' a thing for the first time in all of human history. They pretend that we is now 'majority rules', a concept they got from elections. /6

Elections they game with complete ease, not believing their luck when societies decided to make a popularity mechanism the direct route to ultimate power. Popularity is easily gamed, it's just marketing. 'We' has no connection with a majority. Not in any way. /7

You'll be better off trying to break through a brick wall with a plastic spoon though, than convincing people of this. We're all electoral fundamentalists now, mistaking democracy for elections. Universal elections are barely a century old. /8

They're categorically not what created the democratic surge of the 20th century. Institutions did that, bureaucracies, creating and maintaining a 'we' forced upon societies by catastrophes - pandemics and wars. Copying the Chinese, we employed hundreds of thousands.../9

...of experts in every area of social life, to analyse, design and maintain social arrangements that maximised benefit to society as a whole. Ken Henry was on the radio this morning, describing the disastrous inaction of the past 20 years in Australian politics. /10

He's an ex-Mandarin, he and the thousands of others like him who work(ed) in our 'public service' (it's in the fucking name people) have had to sit back and watch popularly-elected show ponies trash our society. Part of that trashing was trashing the institutions themselves. /11

Those old vested interests despise those institutions, that's their main target every time they're in government, how do people not notice this? Tens of thousands of 'public servants' (again, it's in the fucking name) sacked in that 20-year period. /12

Replaced with pliable chums in the consultancy industries. Because we're ultimately populists, still stuck in our high school culture, we can't take our eyes off the popularity games, what we call 'politics'. They're a sideshow. /13 https://t.co/MxUIoos5i2

Most politicians know next to nothing about anything they govern. That's what their thousands of expert officials are for. And why they've sacked those officials, and perverted the systems for those left, to make sure they'll ignore their expertise.../14

..and do the bidding of elected politicians instead. This isn't even an argument from first principles, it's a basic fact of history. The UK developed a public service because it was facing social problems its elected people had no idea how to solve. Australia followed suit. /15

The UK copied the model from the Chinese, who were one of the inventors of expertise in government, through their civil service. In this pandemic we've seen how little we understand this now, with experts in scientific disciplines shouting at governments over the parapets. /16

Nobody recognises that societies already solved this. That entire middle ground between the public and government is occupied by the public service. Expertise harnessed to social ends. Experts *in* running societies. In creating and maintaining the 'we'. /17

Instead we think politicians 'run the country', and that our role is to yell our individual opinions at them in hopefully a loud enough way that they'll pay attention to us. Politicians couldn't run a cake stall on the lawn outside parliament. /18

They not only don't have a clue how to run countries, they never have had a clue, and have never run them. People like Ken Henry run countries. The role of a politician is to be a conduit to the community, a liaison point. Not to run anything. /19

Meantime the same old vested interests dismantling the institutions that created the public for the past 70 years, now developed platforms like this, where we can all gather with our ludicrous ideas about democracy, and yell at each other angrily all day. /20

That diverts our energy and attention from the things that might actually shift this mess. We build up our little teams and engage in the daily team sports, not even seeing we're wallowing *inside* the frames those same old elites devised for us. /21

Wailing about how 'we' aren't fixing climate change or Covid. There is no we, we're pissing into the wind. /end

To begin at the end, what we call ‘the economy’ has always been a trick to redistribute wealth and power away from the public. It’s society stripped of anything even remotely social. It’s the measurement of the flow of resources and wealth, decoupled from social life. /2

Social life that creates that wealth. But we don’t talk about that any more, about societies. Only economies. That’s deliberate. ‘The economy’ is described as some big objective machine, that you can prod fiscally and monetarily, to try to get it to run in an optimal way. /3

All nonsense, because again it ignores that what generates all of the wealth is the social life of nations. But to focus here on the pandemic. Rather than see the pandemic as an interruption to ‘normal’ life, it’s much more accurate to see it as the breakdown OF that normal. /4

That’s what pandemics (and wars) always are. The breaking down of social life, through neglect of basics of life like adequate shelter and income and food, and clean water and air. We know Covid is likely a zoonosis, caused by widespread environmental destruction. /5

Pandemics, like wars, are symptoms of social breakdown. Of the ‘normal’ that prevails, the status quo. I’ve Tweeted a lot that it’s catastrophes like this that are the only thing in history that has ever shifted the actual social arrangement of societies. /6

The idea of the public itself emerged from infectious diseases and war, when the elites at the time invented public health to try to control the outbreaks of disease. The first time they had ever conceived of society as everybody, interconnected. /7

Here’s another way to see this. In Australia, in this pandemic, the government originally funded a complete shift in social life. What some call ‘lockdowns’ . A lockdown is really just a pause button, on the old normal. /8 https://t.co/h4ysDWeB2G

This was a fundamental redistribution of our common-wealth, towards ordinary people. After decades of economy-driven politics stripping that wealth away. It lifted huge sections of the population out of poverty. (From: https://t.co/vMJrUJ8SEA) /9 https://t.co/YGKrXztPOg

Think about those ‘Covid support payments’. How they were used to keep people and businesses solvent. The entire ‘economy’ was so lacking in resilience that nobody could even do a basic thing, like shelter from an infectious disease. The economy *required* dangerous mixing. /10

That’s the old normal, the unhealthy, power-skewed set of social arrangements that both generated and perpetuated disease, injustice and poverty. The normal those who did well out of those arrangements have been desperate to put back. /11

And you can see here again how that began already in 2020. The red line plummeted already before we even got to 2021. The government at the time didn’t see this crisis as a pandemic. They saw it for what it actually was, a shift of our common-wealth, back towards the public. /12 https://t.co/bvAUqeRwAA

Which they opposed with every fibre of their political beings. This whole pandemic hasn’t been a medical phenomenon, it’s been the same political battle humans have lived for centuries. For example, we’re still told that the money spent on Covid nearly bankrupted the country. /13

Bollocks. We spent FAR more on WW2, as an example, as a proportion of GDP. And we’ve now lost about the same number of Australian lives in under 2 years to Covid as we lost in the nearly 7 years of WW2. Let that sink in. /14 https://t.co/nIiyD6nKpR

Here’s the figures updated to take into account the pandemic. Still under half of what we spent on WW2, as a proportion of GDP. (See: https://t.co/zc3E3rrpoX) We’ve been conned. The previous federal government rushed to staunch the flow of money to ordinary folk. /15 https://t.co/PFpgqq2ziL

Because that flow violated 7 decades of ‘economic’ politics, whose purpose always was to reverse that flow. To restore the ‘normal’ of pre-WW2. Suddenly Covid looked like undoing all of that work. The pandemic didn’t have to be stopped, the action against it had to be. /16

Because that pandemic was the breakdown of a social life, which that economic shift in politics caused. The economy crowd are desperate that we ‘live with’ Covid, because otherwise their balls-out con on ‘the economy’ might be exposed. Guess what happened after that enormous…/17

…government spend in WW2? Australia had DECADES of prosperity, the greatest it has ever experienced. Re-purposing public spending towards public ends led to a collective wealth of unprecedented scale. Governments redistribute wealth, it’s why we invented them. /18

And why economic politics attacks government harder than anything else, with its ‘small government’ obsessions. It wants the old normal back, not just the pre-Covid normal, but the pre-WW2 normal. Feudalism. That’s all the economy ever was. Feudalism in drag. /19

To end with an interesting statistic. One that shows the profound inter-connection of disease and social life. (Thanks to The Guardian.) What was the greatest killer of Australian troops in WW2? Not bullets, not shells. Disease. Infectious disease. The battles in the tropics. /20 https://t.co/gEdPTJQEsV

People uprooted from their normal social environments, under assault from pathogens. Pandemics are just an extension of this. A breakdown of societies. Of their ‘normal’, unhealthy lives. We won’t ‘live with’ Covid because it already was a breakdown of how we were living. /21

Some of that is self-inflicted. Universities are some of our oldest institutions, the way humanity institutionalised expertise to have power in societies. They’ve been under assault for decades, and now are like dogs doing tricks for treats. They ‘compete’ in fake ‘markets’. /2

Set up by populist politicians to divide and conquer. A Vice-Chancellor today is much more passionate about beating other VCs in the competition for students and funding, than they are about think tanks and shock jocks and social media governing our knowledge. /3

Academics treat universities as glorified travel agents, funding and organising their ridiculous number of conference junkets in glamorous foreign locations. Like doctors, they’re more passionate about starting wars with their own ‘administration’ than collective action. /4

Expertise could shut down all of the populist blowhards running the world today inside a day. If they used some of the intelligence to coordinate their activity. The world can’t function without that expertise, it’s in the driving seat. /5

It’s a damning indictment of it that it wallows right at the bottom of social status hierarchies, completely ineffectual, despised and powerless. Too obsessed about being right to make that being right politically powerful. On social media all day in righteous indignation. /6

Convinced its mobilising resistance by wailing at the injustice of what’s not being done. Suckered by the same bastards who perpetuate those injustices, who invented these platforms to monetise the anger that causes. Absolutely blind to the power of bureaucracy. /7

The bureaucrat, the only inroads expertise has ever made into genuine political power. Expertise can do so much better than what we’re seeing right now, it has the smarts. ‘Now I am become death’, Oppenheimer saw the travesty of expertise co-opted by populist bullies. /end

Others in that room knew it didn’t. Journalists who don’t just report political gossip should have held him to account in that exact moment. Experts didn’t, journalists didn’t. Nearly 30,000 Australians are now dead, as a result. You can see how important it was for the PM. /2

To interrupt at that point. ‘Just like the flu’ and ‘living with the virus’ were the slogans the political apparatchiks had already workshopped to dismantle the public health response. It was crucial to insert that nonsense there. /end

Energy Australia, owner of both the lake and the nearby two coal-fired power stations (Wallerawang - now closed - and Mt Piper), have proposed the lake be used as a pumped hydro facility. It’s brilliantly positioned, near the major grid infrastructure of the power stations. /2 https://t.co/ufUuq5zFmJ

There’s significant community push-back. First complaints were about the appearance of the new higher dam that will need to be built (now addressed). Then the complaints shifted to possible danger to local platypus habitat. That one is interesting. /3 https://t.co/w1st2j3hUl

Many pumped hydro projects use the same complaint, it’s an obviously shared activist strategy. The hilarious irony of this is that the lake was *built* 40 years ago to BE a pumped energy facility. It pumps vast quantities of water to the nearby coal-fired power stations. /4 https://t.co/hbUW4eFm6u

It’s what the lake was built for, to be a pumping facility for energy generation. I can’t find that there has ever been a local objection to that usage, in the past 40 years. Until now, when the pumping is for a renewables project. This is a common pattern. /5 https://t.co/rJiuD1WBnT

Whether it’s solar or wind farms, or pumped hydro, or transmission lines, or batteries, local activists suddenly discover a whole range of concerns they’ve never had in their lives, until now. Social media feeds the concerns, to them. It’s weaponised, monetised bullshit. /6

Directly or indirectly funded and propagated by fossil fuel interests and their subsidiaries. Basic things that for generations nobody gave any thought to at all, are now the subject of exhausting and endless debates. It blocks progress on critical projects, which is the aim. /7

It’s not that the world is getting dumber, though that’s probably happening too. It’s not that people have stupid ideas, though that’s also true. It’s that they have and are encouraged to have ideas about things they previously never thought about at all. That’s social media. /8

The mobilisation of mass ignorance, but more than that, mass attention and outrage, over the basic operating system of societies. Society is eating itself, and these platforms are enabling and accelerating that process. /end

Not because they had any affection for land itself, for doing anything useful with it (except hopefully get rich), but because land represented power. As it always has back in Europe, with its endless territorial wars. The European disease. /2

The history of ‘modern’ Australia is acquiring land, and then using it as an extractive industry, to get wealthy. To farm it, to mine it. To ‘develop’ it today for capital gains. The series makes the important point that the colonial (imperial) way of life has never left. /3

Much if not most of Australia is still held in pastoral leases. Crown Land, leased to the modern squattocracy, who bulldoze it to graze cattle mostly. There’s no obligation on them to treat the land well - our land, we’re all the landlords. It’s not freehold. /end

Much of the usable topsoil has been blown into the ‘ditch’ between here and NZ. The rivers run dry even when they never have before. Over 100 species have been wiped out in the past 2 centuries. We think none of this matters, because we’re ‘advanced’. /2 https://t.co/Wb9N6BaxRY

We have technology! Like aeroplanes, where you can fly to Bali to get off your tits and run over people on a scooter. I’m an engineer, and technology is great. But the way we use it to portray Aboriginal Australians as somehow primitive is ridiculous. /3

It’s infinitely harder to maintain river systems and other ecosystems, than it is to build any of our beloved technologies. Orders of magnitude harder. We paint that work as some earlier evolutionary phase of humanity. Bullshit, it’s far harder than anything we know how to do. /4

Look at the state of the continent, it’s a disaster. And we did it in just over 200 years. Aboriginal Australians kept it all prodigiously healthy for tens of thousands of years. It’s the greatest wonder of all human history. None of us ’advanced’ Australians would even know…/5

…where or how to start doing it. Tens of thousands of years before every other culture on Earth is even known to have existed, they were doing this. It’s the most astonishing achievement in all human history, every nation on Earth needed to know how it was done. /6

Look at what’s left of the landscape. None of us has a clue where to start to fix any of it. It’s not just an ecology thing, it’s an entire culture thing, the genius is knowing how to make the ‘landscape’ (we have no word that captures it) a full part of your culture. /7

We’re all mostly huddled on the coast, European tourists in our own land. What is the actual point of ‘modern’ Australia? Being a giant quarry for the rest of the world? Travelling? Do we build anything? We don’t even live in most of our own land. Closing the gap. Ffs. /end