October 2023
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
A true revolution in thinking would be to unpack the ‘job’ as the centre of social life. Because it’s a social creation, vesting ultimate authority in society to an employment relationship. How many people have jobs is a banal, secondary thing. https://t.co/epBXvCb3Zo
There’s not one part of Western populist culture now that isn’t about joining a team, and fighting other teams. Social media has cemented this as an adolescent cultural form, for all ages. Once a year we celebrate this cultural form in GF weekend. Every 3 at elections. https://t.co/6ngk81Svai
When you strip away any social, community basis for relationship between strangers, who live and work inside job markets, it can seem a solution to the ‘loneliness’ this creates to re-form adolescent style friendship groups, for adults. I think we’re missing what’s broken here. https://t.co/GpsaOUBt3o
Yes. Though culturally, the standout here for me is how casually we (2-4% of the world) fly around the world for social events. Like going to the shop for milk. https://t.co/tyxcX8RZbk
Politicians know populism is lethal. They know democracies have never been about what’s most popular. That it destroys them. It’s electoral Viagra though, which is why some such as Howard, following the GOP in the US, couldn’t resist. https://t.co/mdd5rZYw0o
The push to do something over a long weekend. Or during any time off. To me time off is time to just be, not do. We do all week. The great driver of travel culture, the inability to be. We’re not grounded, the grass is always greener somewhere else. https://t.co/CBYDqFIrmV
I’m yet to see a conservative who talks about ‘working hard’ who looks like they’ve done even a day’s work in their life.
One of my favourite Tory UK slogans is ‘levelling up’. They mean ‘we’ll reduce inequality by making everybody else as rich as us.’ Like saying ‘you can all climb Everest now, we’re going to fill the space around it with 6000m of gravel.’ But it’s even worse than that. /1 https://t.co/bYBmz3ymCV
Because the summit of Everest is about 3 times the altitude of where climbers begin the trek. But the gap between the richest and poorest in the UK? The rich earn more than *230* times what the poor earn. This slogan should have been a laughing stock. /2
But the whole point of slogans is to replace any thought. So they even now have ministerial-level appointments, working specifically on levelling up. Really they’re working on more varieties of spin and slogans to disguise the task they’re not even attempting. /3
This is the same Tories who defend this by saying they’ve ‘worked hard’ for their riches. Here they are, exhausted after a day lugging sacks of potatoes. This is the power of slogans, that such blatant rent-seeking parasitic rubbish can be seen as championing the poor. /end https://t.co/K2l5qGHDR1
The Tories’ latest scapegoat for infecting the entire workforce over and over with Covid is that people are ‘workshy’. And they’ll use this to target more cuts to welfare, they like to kill two birds with one stone. https://t.co/kqxmMwayGV
Sunak’s Tories are jettisoning much of their climate change action, in favour of ‘practical’ net zero. There’s one of those weasel words, like ‘balance’. Means do nothing. In ‘balancing’ Covid action against the economy, can anybody identify any Covid action now?
Societies who outsource all public/collective risk to individuals and their insurance (if they have any) can expect to see this in their insurance policies more and more. https://t.co/AIgYFsdWsF
Politicians who refuse to manage collective risk dump the risk onto individuals and their insurance. It's already destroying that industry. The same populist pollies then mobilise the mob, against the insurance companies. https://t.co/y5UE27dB9n
If you unpack economic growth, nearly always it's about people. As in simply having more of them. Because there's no such thing as an economy, societies are social. That truth is going to hit us harder every single year, until we understand it. https://t.co/SpcCR9BW2M
Overpopulation is such a common belief. The population is going up, but it’s all pipeline growth. The growth *rate* started plummeting in about 1968. https://t.co/fGqQVeABaX
The UK Covid Inquiry screened an incredibly powerful film today of impact of the pandemic on peoples’ lives. The sorts of details minimisers have ruthlessly suppressed for the entire pandemic. Hopefully the video will be published separately.
Ffs, lockdowns given as a possible cause. It’s the same shift to libertarian freedumb that’s the cause, magnified and accelerated by using social media as our dominant method of social transaction. The removal of ‘public’ everything. https://t.co/8K0W6dRlJS
I wonder every day when we’ll figure out that societies can’t run via social media, with the team sports there pursuing increasingly insane anti-social campaigns, on everything. It’s a literal wrecking ball. https://t.co/n5nSI9HOzC
From the UK Covid inquiry, the stories minimisers have been suppressing for over 3 years. One of the most powerful weapons against them yet produced, I would say. Watch it, distribute it. #auspol https://t.co/0nxrQx6P6S
Coming back to this, the ABC has done a great job here, showing how public health used to be done. Leaders didn’t baulk at public resistance, they pushed through. But then, social media wasn’t a leviathan organiser of mass dumb for them to fight. https://t.co/jpa0XunYMl
We are. And it's inevitable when popularity is the only measure of who wins. Try hiring staff or raising children using that metric and see how you go. Until we remove popularity as the selection mechanism for power, nothing will improve, it will only get rapidly worse. https://t.co/REXMHNzm2P
Tell me again why social media isn't THE problem in democracies. It needs to heavily regulated, or shut down completely. https://t.co/H9bk9GlxmX
Remember integrity? So unpopular now. https://t.co/I8rgHF5DxZ
NSW had an eat out to help out scheme. I don’t think I saw a single journalistic critique of the stupidity of it. It was more sinister than just a fillip for the economy too. It was gaslighting, to normalise mass infection. https://t.co/60HNxHIrK9
Imagine your entire adult life being driven by a hatred of government. Of the basic tasks of regulating our collective life, for collective benefit. These idiot ideologies and their adolescent obsession with infinite freedom and fun. https://t.co/ktubl9KuUF
It’s some chutzpah to say people being unable to visit critically ill family members in hospital was the problem in the early pandemic, rather than the absence of public health that allowed them to get infected in the first place.
This is the concept our adolescent travel cultures can’t understand. Country. Not land, not real estate. Country. ‘It is not cartographic’, take note cultures for whom travel is mostly accumulating places on maps. We travel inside those maps, we have no understanding of place. https://t.co/z8amQvPMKU
The great con of ‘the economy’, and also the fastest way to see its true reality, is that it never changes. No matter how complex and different the problems facing societies are, the economy’s metrics remain the same. Inflation, jobs, growth etc. It’s the status quo, rebranded.
To paraphrase Proust, who gives a fuck about your lifestyle?
Community-based organisation is the unique lynchpin of Australian democracy. It's been trashed by economy politics and populist blowhard politicians interested only in their petty careers. https://t.co/MSnbnaYG1U
“You meet saints everywhere. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society.” Kurt Vonnegut
About mid-paragraph Camus described ‘living with the virus’. https://t.co/MOUfpr70bK
You can’t see it more clearly. Social media is now running our societies. Which means anybody who can generate the likes, is in charge. Look at Trump. This, for the Voice debate, where an ex-Neighbours star is easily the dominant influencing public voice. https://t.co/lxnkS917EO
The same people who 10 years ago would have strongly agreed that media tycoons were using self-regulation to game mass media and take over democracies, will now defend to their last Tweet the free-for-all of social media that replaced it. Also owned by billionaire barons.
Australia has 2 million more dogs than children. I bet if Covid killed a lot of dogs, we’d be doing more to stop it.
Sometimes my answer to 'why are you still wearing a mask?' is 'one day you'll know why, and by then it'll be too late.' https://t.co/8ckUAAG3nC
Populism allows anything, including the definition of reality itself, provided it's popular. Social media then provides the infrastructure for populism to replace all social institutions. https://t.co/4VtdcpDwFE
The Viagra-rush of votes populism provides always has an (ignored) final act. Where the crowd turns on the populist leader, who they see as betraying them when the gap between populist fantasy and reality gets too great. /1
The mechanism is the same, every time. Demagogues sweep to power promising popular things that completely ignore due process and existing institutional arrangements. When they can't deliver those populist fantasies, the crowd's rage at being betrayed is brutal. /2
The GOP for example thought Trump would be an excellent populist patsy for them, vacuuming up votes and delivering continuous election wins, which they could then do with as they pleased. But they forgot that populism always - always - overwhelms any attempt at control. /3
Trump took this energy and redirected it all towards himself, leaving the GOP in his wake. The Republicans are terrified to oppose him now. What Trump doesn't understand is that eventually all populist leaders will betray their supporters, in the supporter's view. /4
And be replaced, and eventually even any attempt to maintain the framework of power will be cast aside by the crowd, into an incoherent, destructive rage. That's when the looting and violence starts. Here in Oz the LNP, through John Howard, decided to tap populism for votes. /5
Generations of Australian politicians had a gentleman's agreement never to go there, because of the danger. Howard ignored it. Multiple elections were won with populist campaigns on refugees and boats, the politicisation of race. /6
At the same time key players in the public service, which is supposed to hold elected leaders to account, were removed or moved, and ministers given new authorities to make decisions without consultation. All to cement the new populism, which is always just Viagra for votes. /7
And as always, the effect is temporary, with the crowd retaining no affection for their populist liberators once delusional promises are exposed as fairy tales. A succession of LNP leaders have been cast aside, and the populist rage they engineered is starting to break loose. /8
We saw it with the 'lockdown' hysteria in this pandemic. The main reason National Cabinet capitulated to a man and woman was the visceral terror they felt at witnessing the anger of the populist crowd. Social media vastly accelerates this transition. /9
Making popularity the sole metric for power - populism - always ends the same way. In violence and destruction. The cynical politicians who decide to evoke populism don't even believe their own populist spin. It's 100% about engineering votes. /10
The damage to societies is catastrophic and long-lasting. I Tweeted before that what we love to call 'fascism' is really just the end-game of all populism. The authoritarian attempt to force reality to fit the populist narrative. /11
And that's why democracies are now all shifting towards authoritarian framings. It's not a 'shift to the Right', populism ignores all politics. It's a shift to making popularity the only measure of what's right, and even to define reality itself. /12
The pandemic is over. Because that's popular. Climate change isn't real, because it's popular to say it isn't. We still have a long way to go with the destruction and chaos. /end
Only institutions, the embodiment of lessons learned from past suffering, relieve us from stupidity. Institutions are that past suffering acting in the present. Why the stupid destroy them. https://t.co/BtXFvuh8U6
Tony Abbott called for First Australians to ‘integrate’ with European Australians, an old White Australia, colonialist favourite. Not once in 235 years has White Australia tried to integrate with Aboriginal culture. It still defines over 70% of the continent as empty ‘outback’. https://t.co/WapoYlZ7fS
Come across to reality-based politics. Where it’s irrelevant what any party or ideology says about anything. Like arguing if gravity makes things fall up or down. All our team sports daily populist politics does is more or less delay outcomes that reality will demand anyway.
How about a show each day or week that focuses only on the reality of the issues debated? The actual progress against outcomes? A complete rejection of ‘he said, she said’ journalism? That asks only ‘ok, what’s happening in REALITY on this topic?’ No pollies, no activists. /1 https://t.co/zY0pZFmlLu
That strips away the irrelevant opinions and ideologies, and looks only at what’s actually happening. That ignores the daily populist team sports of humans mobilising different teams around different ideologies, using reality as fodder for their petty debates. /2
Yes, it sounds like ‘fact-checking’. Which gets no traction in populist politics already. Humans are social, reality will always be much less interesting to them than the machinations of their imitative rivalry in social groups. /3
It’ll always be more interesting to them who says something, than what the person is saying. And that’s necessary too, we have to imitate and emulate others, unless we all want to do everything ourselves. We have to *trust* others. And also, facts never speak for themselves. /4
They always need a spokesperson, to integrate the fact into social life. A scholar, for example. All of this makes it incredibly difficult to re-route discussion towards reality rather than the team sports. But there are ways. Entertaining ways, just waiting for the will. /end
This really does tell a powerful story about vaccination. Not the ‘pandemic over’ story some are desperate to sell, pandemics are defined by infections, not deaths. But still a powerful story. https://t.co/XQCTJtRjwQ
Richard Glover spoke last week with a guest about how generations now seem to occupy their own independent bubbles. That’s what high school culture does, each generation takes its own high school experience and lives it for the rest of their lives. /1
No mixing, no maturing through encounters with older generations at different stages of development. No circle of life, just separate coexisting high school bubbles. Everyone is a teenager, the greatest variability being the music each bubble listens to. 2/2
The only way Western democracies will survive is leaders with courage to be ‘authoritarian’ enough to call out the BS that ‘the people’ know much about anything at all. The people is a fantasy concocted by populism. This is happening everywhere, for every critical issue. https://t.co/banfkgkZDt
Rich pickings today for populism + its platform social media destroying the world. Why don’t people see it? Until we give up the idiot idea that ‘the people’ run societies, we’re fast-tracking our own extinction. https://t.co/WCUdmLAqsJ
As @CrabbBrendan always says, have patience, keep masking, the tools are coming. https://t.co/9TPrQlEdOK
Has humanity ever infected the *entire* population with a novel pandemic virus, before Covid?
Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just one decade of their life. School. /1 https://t.co/5sNVvDURry
Like I Tweet a lot, societies changed fundamentally when they invented schooling separate to the adult world of work. That’s the point where kids no longer took their cues from adults, except teachers, in a highly structured environment. - the school. It was a CULTURAL shift. /2 https://t.co/l1OFfr1BUB
To extend what this means. It means the rough decade you spend in school is the decade you live more or less for the rest of your life, culturally. It’s your cultural reference point. Lives are no longer defined by various stages, from infant to toddler, to child,…/3
…to adolescent, to adult, to middle age, to old age etc. They’re now infant-toddler-child-adolescent. The generational process was curtailed at high school. From teenage years onwards now, socially and culturally, the majority live as adolescents for the rest of their lives. /4
Not in biological age, but in social/cultural reference points. Ways of seeing and understanding the world. The decade you were at school, and particularly high school, becomes your main adult worldview, for the rest of your life. People aren’t Gen Y or millienial or boomer. /5
They’re 60s kids, Or 80s kids. Or 2010 kids. Etc. Their founding decades at school shape them. You can see this most obviously in the obsession every age now has with the popular music of their decade. Which doesn’t end as they grow biologically older. /6
That’s their decade-school-bubble. They leave school, and instead of entering some adult world that previously existed, they now become just one more adolescent decade-bubble broken free from its base, to bobble up against all the other decade-bubbles. /7
The soundtrack varies between bubbles, because popular music will be different in each decade. But the social and cultural framework, including the central role of popular music, and the popularity team sports of school, is identical across all bubbles. /8
It’s not just what music people like and its centrality to their life that is the school culture. It’s the ways people organise into groups (what I call ‘teams’), at work, in politics, with popularity as the currency. The social media world of ‘likes’. That’s school culture. /9
Likes, and elections, the latter now increasingly replaced with daily trends on social media, a 3-yearly electoral ‘like’ is woefully insufficient for popularity-based culture. Now it’s done every minute of every day. What’s ‘trending’. None of this is analogies. /10
This is our culture now, it was a fundamental shift in how we organise our societies. Societies are 100% social. All of the grown-up categories we think distinguish an adult from a child world, like ‘the economy’, are really that same adolescent school culture, rebranded. /11
Look around at the decade-bubbles, not at the old demographer’s generations. That’s society now. Maybe as school attendances continue to drop, we’ll see another shift in this coming century. But for now, it’s all decades-bubbles. /end
Fighting over land seems archaic to us, because we’re colonial occupiers. In the week of the referendum, I doubt the connection will be drawn. We view land as places to ‘see’, in recreational travel. Our existential terrors are travel advisories, or even worse, ‘lockdowns’. https://t.co/XhEwPK32dX
If meekly surrendering to a pandemic and climate chaos isn’t clear proof that ‘the economy’ is a toxic cultural model, what else would be? Astounding that it’s still seen as some form of immutable baseline of living.
Just get rid of elections. Big money flows to them because they’re the loophole that turns popularity into a fast-track to power. Democracy is government for the people, not elections. Popularity is high school culture, not democracy. https://t.co/8JC416fO3p
I'm more staggered that we killed 20,000 people last year because of Covid, and the problem is still seen as the attempts to prevent those deaths, rather than the deaths. https://t.co/skjOprPP8x
Getting viruses out of your body seems a bit like trying to extract the yolk from a scrambled egg. https://t.co/3ORwAKH2cB
Tedious, but I screenshot the actual headline and then include the link in the message body or alt text. https://t.co/TprLJODc38
The greatest threat to the economy that public health measures represented was the rediscovery of a public, community focus to our economic activity. The hysteria over ‘lockdowns’ was the economy’s counterpunch.
Employer-led public health. Employer: Where should we have the Christmas party this year? Me (masked): how about the Italian? It has outdoor dining. Employer: I don’t feel like Italian.
We need a new minimiser production of The Wall. Where kids rise up and demand to be sent back to school, singing ‘we need our education’. https://t.co/F55mdQOSzB
This idiot referendum is a perfect example of how electoral mechanisms are crippling democracies. The outcome will be a popularity contest between two teams, divorced from any actual material reality. Premier League Politics. Yes or No.
Politics today is done with language. With slogans. Can we get rid of the highly-emotive, deliberate propaganda of calling basic sheltering and quarantine 'lockdowns'? That word was designed to make people feel avoiding infection as being locked up.
The growing use of 'short illness' and 'mystery illness' in death announcements. Is the former a privacy thing? I don't remember that being such a concern previously. 'X died of cancer' for example wasn't ever a controversial thing.
How stupid and sloganised the world now is, that anybody ever believed kids would be traumatised by not going to school. https://t.co/E9ulmzigpn
Had lunch with a friend today, who'd been at a funeral. The deceased was happy and healthy, and then developed a bad case of strep, and died in a matter of days. Have to wonder what the death certificate will say, and how close to actual cause of death that may be.
The reason insurance is unaffordable or unavailable is that idiot politicians have privatised society's risks. The same politicians will rally the public against the insurance companies, in their usual diversionary, populist ways. https://t.co/30ZmAFFpCD
Minimisers will see this as a reason to ignore Long Covid. Smart people will see that there's no such thing as a safe infection. And that the infections minimisers compared Covid to, to normalise infection, were never harmless. https://t.co/wsV1mXLVur
Travellers love to justify their orgy of jet fuel guzzling by saying it's 'broadening their minds.' Many will no doubt celebrate this broadening by voting No on the weekend.
Hands up who knew that in 'balancing' the economy against Covid, both of them were on the same side of the see-saw? https://t.co/y2tpoeLpjA
Forgot the P.S. for this. A nurse caring for him as he died asked if he'd been vaccinated. He said yes. 'Ah, that may be a cause, the vaccines weaken the immune system'. https://t.co/lTbeZdcj3P
Friend just recovering from a pretty bad bout of Covid. Is experiencing crippling dizziness. Is that most likely POTS? Or could be like any inner ear infection, in this case with Covid as the infection?
The enormous displacement and dispossession of colonialism continues unabated in its modern form, free markets and travel. The destruction of place. Which creates ecological chaos, including pandemics. https://t.co/xBEcrtT4km
This is in the ballpark of the ‘unaffordable’ NDIS, in terms of dollars. Nothing is said, or done. Yet. https://t.co/87c1DpSyCU
If you feel despair about Covid, I think it helps to remember that everything you do as an individual to counter it is automatically multiplied many times over, even exponentially. No other social problem is that tractable to individual action. I’ll come back to this. https://t.co/ouQKfj4t2t
The great swindle of this pandemic was the jump from government emergency action, to 'personal responsibility'. Leaving workplaces completely off the hook. They were already required under WHS law to prevent Covid infection in the workplace. It's now where most people catch it. https://t.co/3vrcKxHfue
I’d be fascinated to know how much of the gain at every age level is the reduction of infectious disease. Sanitation, antibiotics, vaccination. https://t.co/4uodfFlmVw
The intrinsic stupidity of recreational travel is highlighted by Australians doing so much of it, and not even registering how ridiculous a No vote will seem to the international community.
Nobody highlights the doomed collision course between a politics of individuals and the basics of life on Earth better than Lewis Thomas. https://t.co/xLHy0V2YOU
War as we know it is mostly a European disease. The clash over territory, that entire continent never lets up on it, going back centuries. The US owes its existence to that obsession, its dis-united States were all European fiefdoms.
Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1 https://t.co/MfgGYidzL6
Friendship is like L-plates and P-plates for the maturation into adult life. It absolutely dominates adolescent and early adult life, where we use friends to develop the social skills of beginning to live outside our families. Why the sitcom of the same name did so well. /2
And we all of course have friends, throughout our lives. But what's changed is the absolute centrality of that now to life at all ages. Men for example who retire are encouraged to join friendship groups, Men's Sheds and Men's Tables. /3
As if the loss of extensive and close friendship groups as we age is some form of problem. It's not a problem, that's what being an adult always used to mean, moving beyond the need for a constant culture of friendship. The claimed epidemic of 'loneliness' to me is the same. /4
A symptom of something broken, in the cultural sense. Friendship has come to dominate all ages because the traditional social structures and frameworks of adult life have been stripped away in favour of what we call a market, an economy. /5
The economy and its markets ensure that you never leave school, where you were that individual constantly jostling for attention and recognition, to find a group of friends to belong to. Markets by definition only recognise individuals. /6
Anything that might represent a level of collective organisation of adult life will be ruthlessly suppressed. We saw it with 'lockdowns', where a timeless method of controlling disease was transformed by economic propaganda into some form of oppression. /7
Grown adults responded in exactly the same way as teenagers who are grounded for bad behaviour. Because that's how their adult lives are now structured, it's not an analogy. The focus was entirely on denied freedoms and recreational fun. /8
None of that older historical adulthood, of accepting a struggle for a higher cause. All deliberately engineered over many decades, by the 'there's no such thing as society' economy cult. And it goes even further. /9
Because one thing friends rarely do is challenge each others' beliefs. That violates the cohesion of the friendship group. 'Never discuss politics or religion', as many now say. The total capitulation that represents needs to be unpacked every day. /10
All of the difficulties of adult life are now off-limits to even discuss, for fear of damaging friendship groups. It's the most perfect mechanism for infinite servitude ever devised, which is why I say 'the economy' is humankind's most lethal invention. /11
To defer to the man whose face I borrowed for my profile picture, Freddie Mercury, when asked what the internal dynamics of his band Queen were like. 'We hate each other, we hate each other's guts'. Of course they loved each other, but he meant that they argued incessantly. /12
It's what adults used to do. To achieve difficult and necessary outcomes. Now social media, the infrastructure of perpetual adolescence, is curated positivity crap between friends. There's argument between different groups, but that's just the team sports of adolescent life. /13
The relationships that matter most to people, between friends, have a self-inflicted taboo on discussing anything that might involve disagreement. We're strait-jacketed by friendship. It creates a rigid self-enforced status quo. /14
When shit happens, as it does now at an exponentially increasing rate, as no problems are even discussed, let alone solved, the positivity shots of us on holidays and 'having fun' proliferate to try to paper over the cracks. It's a catastrophic charade. /end
That's 50% of Melbourne missing their dose of hybrid immunity? https://t.co/8OfsO40PHY
Remember the constant talk about how unreliable Chinese Covid data likely is? Irony is dead. https://t.co/on5ok0N3EZ
What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1
This also means doing anti-social things, including repeatedly infecting people with viruses, is destructive of the economy. It’s not two separate things, it’s one thing. Tarde always gave the example of railways first coming to towns. /2
How it literally, physically connected the people there, socially, to everywhere else. How a local farmer was now socially tied to urban diners. Electricity networks the same. They don’t just provide power, they tie societies together socially. /3
By creating networks of people and technologies, socio-technical networks that simultaneously create new social roles connected over vast distances. A train driver or boilermaker is a social role as much as a technical one. /4
Fast forward to today and that process has been multiplied exponentially in the vast socio-technical complexity of modern society. It makes our lives more and more social *at the same time* as they’re becoming more technological. It’s the same process. /5
Quarantining for Covid showed this, how everything was connected to everything else. It’s taken years to be able to get cars available again, as just one tiny example. The lesson here is the opposite to the one we’re told. /6
That inter-connectedness, that intensely *social* nature of modern society, through its technological developments, doesn’t need us to stop action against a pandemic so it can carry on. It needs us to stop the pandemic. What harms us socially destroys the economy too. /7
This is how pandemic action will be forced upon us. And climate action too. The incredibly inter-dependent complexity of modern technological life won’t function with these threats. The idea we can run ‘the economy’ while ignoring the threats is nonsensical. /8
A set of ideas by modern nobles, who throughout history have never got their hands dirty doing the basic work of keeping life running. Who often don’t even know it exists. Life just happens by magic for them. Reality-based politics will end that illusion. /end
Parliament without politicians would progress Australia in extraordinary ways. https://t.co/kszO6neyhL
I wish more public authorities had a decisive social media presence. Attack the BS at its source. https://t.co/ZdV9GwnJmE
Given the glorious confluence of electoral fundamentalism and social media, we could hold a referendum on whether we should wipe our arse after going to the toilet, and No would win.
We’ve had 7 Prime Ministers in 16 years. ‘The people’ is a fiction, it’s just marketing, desires are easily shaped, fickle and increasingly short-lived under populism, where only what is popular determines winners. https://t.co/wpyuiTjVaE
For me any election or referendum win *or* loss is meaningless. Popularity contests are worthless. What is popular has never and can never represent anything except a temporary shift in social group dynamics. It has zero connection with reality.
Rich pickings in the popular stupidity of popularity politics this morning. ‘The people’ in NZ do a complete U-turn inside 3 years. Only slightly longer than the fashions for winter jackets, or mixed drinks. We run countries on fashions, fads and whims. https://t.co/LL00JFOTH2
Stupidity of popularity politics No.2. Voting always gives you a ‘divided’ result, it’s how voting is designed. 100% would be non-divided, which never happens. All referenda and elections are meaningless popularity contests. https://t.co/JO4VrAsW7q
We’re running schools without teachers, because of Covid. We can easily run a country without politicians. They should all resign. Reality doesn’t care which team wins. If you woke up feeling you won or lost the referendum, you’re part of the problem. https://t.co/fUZz8U46YS
Everywhere voting isn’t compulsory, most people don’t even bother. The answer isn’t to make it voluntary. It’s to get rid of it. It isn’t a mechanism that works, to translate collective need into action. It titrates what’s popular instead of what’s needed. https://t.co/DhTQ6lX3ZY
Settler culture still dominates the Australian inland. The culture of imported slave labour, unchanged in 150 years. A loud No in the referendum from modern settlers. David Marr’s new book talks about settler culture, the crime part of Oz’s conquest and crime history. https://t.co/MesC5oW3NM
People think I’m mad when I say we need to get rid of politicians and let the public service run countries again. Politicians are already well underway in doing the opposite. And that’s a very, very bad thing. https://t.co/cBbv6KWirT
The AEMO Quarterly Energy Dynamics reports are a wonderful example of the sort of rich information that never makes it through the fog of populist bullshit we call politics. https://t.co/3ZTPKAS21J
Hidden by all the polly waffle of the referendum, Australia hit a new record on Friday. Over 70% of its electricity came from renewables, around lunch time. That number projected to hit 100% by 2025, less than 2 years’ away. https://t.co/q8F8zRAkRH
So far the people we vote for have fucked up climate change, Covid, and now Indigenous recognition. The constant there is voting, that mechanism fails at every hurdle. Time for reality-based politics. 2+2 = 4, irrespective of how popular 4 is.
Much of the ‘division’ is just the team sports of social media. Hot air. The division that isn’t is a corrective response to an undivided world where tiny numbers hoard most of the wealth. https://t.co/bx5SorXA7i
You could say Straya has progressed from stealing land, enslaving, slaughter and child-stealing, to just telling First Australians to fuck off. It can surely keep the no-mentum going, finding ever more cunning ways to do the same thing.
I imagine primary teachers all over the nation today using the referendum in their maths lessons, teaching kids how you 'end the division' by splitting something 60/40.
The peak energy problem, where we get big surges morning and evening, has a lot to do with the structure of our working day. The economy creates a lot of the problem. WFH mitigates it. https://t.co/5pIdaRo54f
Politics is social, not political. It never works by people processing information. It's about trust. We elect people to deal with things for us. When one side opposes, No will always win, because it breaks the feeling of trust that things are being taken care of. /1 #auspol https://t.co/oOphgjJcy5
This is the real reason people say they hate 'division' in politics. Division means what they delegated has now come back to them, to try to deal with themselves. What they trusted others to do, has now been dumped back on them to do. You can see it here in the numbers. /2 https://t.co/zzJKd0cbKu
A year ago nearly 70% of Australians said they'd vote Yes in the referendum. They trusted that it was the right thing to do, because their leaders had put it forward, just as they trust a mechanic to fix their car. And then the Opposition decided to promote No. /3 https://t.co/ILrV04VQdr
What that does again is nothing at all to do with information or the details (or lack of details). The public isn't bothered with details. Trust is the currency of politics. The fact there was no agreement at the top end of politics meant that trust was broken. /4 https://t.co/QEypPr7KZF
The referendum was dead from the moment that decision was made. Everybody knows referendums fail without bipartisan support. This is why, it introduces a lack of trust. Suddenly people weren't sure if they could trust this change. That's all it needed to kill it. /5 https://t.co/xukzTyHRLA
Societies only make sense socially, because that's what they are, social. The perfect symmetry of the shift from Yes to No in the data doesn't represent individuals digesting new information. That would create an erratic line. It represents the wholesale loss of trust. /end https://t.co/qhGjXfMU7N
Go households. Also bypasses the community resistance to new transmission lines, for a fast transition. https://t.co/3EoRCvoD8V
Rory saying everything I say about elected politicians. The whole thing is a theatrical performance. A crafted image of being in charge, of something they have no actual understanding of, and couldn’t have. Electoral fundamentalists refuse to see it. https://t.co/9SusCYBaC6
@djf0001 I raise you one Rory.
Wanted to re-post this thread, about how politics works. It’s the tiniest, mostly irrelevant popularity contest on top of a reality that always just continues on, without it. Voters use a gut feel of trust rather than detailed analysis. As we do everywhere else in life. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts
Very relieved that everybody I know who’s had Covid multiple times is ‘not susceptible to an infection’. We’ve had several years now of RCTs for hybrid immunity, and the infections just keep coming. Can we demand a projected end-time for the process? https://t.co/XuMdIbiqwW
I love that reality carries on mostly oblivious to what social media thinks, about anything. For example energy companies rushing to solar and wind and storage, because it’s hugely profitable for them. While morons sit here every day ‘debating’ whether they should.
@simonahac @GriffithSaul are you seeing much appetite in Australia yet for the idea of virtual transmission lines, using battery storage to replace some transmission? Quite different to a VPP model? https://t.co/Fme0QJZKxs https://t.co/9r67ENGJLV
Storage is increasingly the solution to energy grid upgrades. Much faster and cheaper than building thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines. Already happening out on the ground. Social media will mobilise resistance to every other option anyway. https://t.co/NaQxLZfBIP
Fossil fuels are just buried solar energy. It's all solar, whether you choose oil, gas and coal (stored solar), or use today's sunlight directly. But you don't need to extract, transport and refine today's sunlight. You can store it too, and with minimal pollution. https://t.co/mfaaRZ1QEt
Yes! This is the social collapse we're seeing, where we mistake the past 70 years as some sort of default normal life that happens by itself. Without institutions there is no collective memory to remind us of this. Why libertarians attack institutions. https://t.co/S9RNWsdaeH
The ABC is leaps and bounds ahead of most of our other mainstream media. But 'impartially presenting a diversity of perspectives' isn't journalism. It's he-said she-said pretend journalism, journalism brutalised by power. https://t.co/BKlJkvR36i
In another place as well now. https://t.co/2AdG8A1OGC
This is the problem, which nobody will confront. Social media is a wrecking ball, a corrosive assault on the trust that is the glue that holds all societies together. What we need to do to fix that is already pre-weaponised by the same platforms as ‘authoritarian’. https://t.co/q7vRao6I2a
Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the people’ supreme. /1 https://t.co/rawbzDvm9b
You might think that sounds a good thing. Pretty much everybody I talk to think that’s what democracy is (a measure of how successful libertarian propaganda has been). Democracy is government FOR the people, not BY the people. The problem is ‘the people’. /2
It doesn’t exist. it was a favourite phrase of dictators like Mussolini and Hitler, because fascism is just populism in its endgame. It’s populism. ‘The people’ isn’t even a thing, it’s a counting construct. Populists love to evoke it for a very practical reason. /3
It allows them to bypass every other established hierarchy of expertise and authority, in favour of this fictitious ‘people’, who they claim to speak for. In reality it’s at best a cobbled-together majority of votes, which they overlay with any ‘mandate’ meaning they like. /4
It makes popularity the ultimate and only measure of what’s right, and the route to ultimate power. How do we not see the crazy stupid disaster that is? Anything can be made popular, the most insane, lethal things, like ‘living with’ pandemics. It’s just marketing. /5
‘The people’ have no voice. They’re a set of numbers, counted votes, which the populists then make say whatever they want them to say. You’re part of the 61%, or the 49%, that’s your ‘voice’. Populists get the voice, to say what being in those majorities or minorities means. /6
Humans figured all of this out before, and now forgot. ‘The public’ was the answer, entirely different to ‘the people’. The public is an analytical dynamic creation, the continuous assessment of collective need by thousands of experts in different areas of social life. /7
The public or civil service. It’s IN THE NAME. Invented by elites! To save their own societies in the late 19th and early-to-mid 20th centuries. And then dismantled by them from the 1970s, when memories of the tragedies faded. Libertarians hate nothing more. /8
It’s why they invented these platforms, to rapidly accelerate and escalate the assault on public institutions. To replace them with an infrastructure where popularity dominates all. An economy of ‘likes’. Any sane society would shut every single one of these platforms down. /9
Yesterday already. But the platforms are ready for that, even the suggestion of it will attract immediate cries of ‘oppression’ and ‘authoritarianism’. Look what these platforms mobilised against clean energy, Covid action and climate change. All no-brainers. /10
Hierarchies of expertise built over generations, which people used to trust, are not authoritarian. They were there to identify what needed doing, and to reject bullshit. Now we’ve flipped that all on its head, and bullshit reigns. Thanks to social media. /11
It’s an infrastructure that builds high school popularity culture into every age of life. Permanent adolescence. We’re completely stalled, socially and culturally, at adolescence. Not an analogy. /end
@djf0001 try this for BlueSky: bsky-social-zivwm-56v63
Same age, same generation. At the exact moment the pre-war elites were laying siege on everything public, the public disappeared into perpetual adolescence, thinking singing songs is politics. How different history might be today if we’d listened to Germaine instead. https://t.co/nvfEyoDLUu
I recommend everybody attend their local council meetings, to see firsthand the incredible damage social media is inflicting upon societies. It’s the front-line of a collapse that’s happening frighteningly fast.
The only reality modern governments will acknowledge, whether Left or Right, is 'the economy'. Which isn't even a thing, it's a slogan uttered to defend the status quo i.e. doing nothing. https://t.co/KOinr08aHr
It's not greed that runs societies. 'The economy' really means a society refusing to regulate anything. Each to their own. Without regulation everything needs to keep running no matter how stupid, or the lot falls over. There's no 'why' to anything.
They don't have a clue what to do, because nobody does. It's like reading tea leaves. People who defend 'the economy' can't explain one thing about how it works, when it stops working. There is no 'it'. It's a handful of indicators extracted from wider social activity. https://t.co/j6mkBZvY8y
Was talking with someone about selecting leaders by random lot, as we do for juries. They said 'but how do we know the person randomly selected would know what to do?' It made me laugh. Still does.
Mr 60/40 uniting Australians again. https://t.co/gwejwJAT8B
It's the bedside manner that keeps me coming back. https://t.co/2RC0dHcRVS
@i_petersen genuine question. If we are going to immune our way out of this pandemic, how many infections each are people likely to need? What timeframe should we expect?
Not one journalist in this country has the brains or backbone to ask National Cabinet how many years of infecting the entire country they’re projecting will be needed, to achieve ‘hybrid immunity’. And what that even means.
Genuinely curious what people make of this analysis. @KarenCutter4, @NjbBari3, @jeffgilchrist @GidMK @YouAreLobbyLud and anybody else? https://t.co/LjOlBzbCL5
“This was a scheme to encourage people to take an epidemiological risk”. That’s exactly what it was, and what NSW’s Dine Out vouchers were as well. Behaviour modification, normalisation of infection. Taxpayer’s money used to actively accelerate infection. https://t.co/D3NRd1deTV
If you want an indication of how the economy cares so little about fresh air in schools. A primary teacher told me yesterday kids as young as Year 2 have been caught vaping in their school. But at least the free flow of commerce is maintained.
I’m not here for pile-ons, I’m interested in beliefs and ideas. I still as an amateur epidemiologist am led to believe by everything I read that a pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not by how damaging those infections may or may not be. https://t.co/QlupUR2v0s
Modern conservatives NEVER let up on strategy. It was reported on RN this morning that Abbott has re-ignited these same calls, post the referendum. To them 'divisive' means anybody not applauding colonialism. They saw the Voice as a Trojan Horse to drive their aims even faster. https://t.co/TPCK849aSY
Also reported this morning is that this debate from 2022 is back on. Spurred on by the referendum result. The No camp who swore it was all about details clearly saw it as a strategic leg-up to reverse as much reconciliation action as they can get away with. https://t.co/LHlbvk5FNH
So if it is once every 5 years on average, it's an interesting contrast with once per year on average being described as a good outcome, for Covid. I think it's fair to say Covid is an even more dangerous disease, as well. https://t.co/UugmGqQXVT
@CrabbBrendan on prevalence and frequency of infection, do we know how often malaria sufferers tend to go between infections? Obviously that may vary widely between locations too, just curious.
It’s looking terminal for the Tories in the UK. But at the end of the day, it’s a false dawn. We can’t elect our way out of our problems. How many elections and referendums do we have to go through to understand that? https://t.co/81xE2Dmkv9
Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con. /1 https://t.co/O3J4UsB7np
The idea that ‘democracy’ is millions of isolated individuals, who need to act together to create change, is a libertarian fantasy. But pretty much everybody believes it, and that’s why libertarians are winning. How powerless does it make you feel? Enormously. QED. /2
There’s no local, and no global. The ‘global’ problem of electricity costs was over for us in 2 days, by installing solar. We’re exporting more than half of it, powering 3-5 other homes, every day. Our ‘local’ action is having ‘global’ effects. The distinction is meaningless. /3
The same with Covid. The actions I take every day have global impact, in terms of whether I interrupt or assist transmission chains. Societies are NETWORKED. Not individuals. Actions ‘go viral’, all the time. Our problem is we harness that virality for the wrong things. /4
Far too obsessed with the team sports of what we call ‘politics’, thinking elected politicians are the obligatory passage points through which ‘global’ action has to go. They’re certainly key players, but thinking you’re local and they’re global is the con. /5
Underneath that tiniest thin veneer of hot air of their populist daily battles, reality is going on without them. The Australian community for example endured 10-20 years of anti-renewables hot air. What did it do? It built a new grid without them. It didn’t wait. /6 https://t.co/KsGoQlnSzN
That tsunami of action from everyday folk is about to collapse the entire grid, unless the political windbags start acting. Don’t hold your breath. Buy your own battery too. It’ll cost you money, but a lot less than a boat or jet ski, or OS trip. Not to be a survivalist. /7
You still want the grid, it’s fabulously useful. None of that individual vs collective stuff is even real. Act knowing that what you do is impacting many more people than just you. The more networked we are, the more magnified those actions are. /8
Act for Covid as if public health actions never ceased. You’ll struggle, in many situations. But you can do a lot, even without political windbags helping. Covid is the same, both local and global, at the same time. Most of its spread is specific locations and situations. /9
Places that are your local places, like schools and restaurants. Places you can act to shape, or even refuse to have anything to do with (also an action). I turned a pointless 3-day compulsory training Covid-fest into a Covid safe event, just by doing a few quiet things. /10
I chocked open doors and opened windows subtly, driving the fresh air numbers way up. There were no reported illnesses after the training. Who knows if it stopped multiple transmission chains, I hope so. I wasn’t waiting for politicians or employers to act. /11
Don’t see it as heroic individual action in the face of mass resistance. Humans act via imitation, conformity. The tiniest acts can ‘go viral’. It just takes creativity in becoming the thing that people want to imitate. Feeling like an isolated individual is how they win. /end
Imagine historians writing about our age. ‘In the early 21st century many humans actively fought against cheap, almost free, pollution-free energy, and advocated entire populations being infected with pandemic viruses.’
Still spot-on. We’re insane to allow unregulated social media loose on societies. It will destroy them. It already is. It’s irrelevant that some people find some good use for it. Far more really bad people find toxic uses for it. https://t.co/B7Je9bhCdf
Everything is dead in Australia. Except the economy. All of our politics pays no attention to anything, except the economy. That should be the giveaway that it’s a colonialist con, but all sides still speak of it like some underlying infrastructure for life itself. https://t.co/AHbZY3rMIG
Up early watching the Penalty-Ball World Cup, South Africa v England. Surely there’s a problem with the rules of this game, with so many games having all the points coming from penalties?
We’re getting nowhere with Covid talking about health and disease. The rich buy enclaves for that. This is really a story about clean air. Look at how (regular) amendments there stalled over 30 years ago, in the US. The same time climate change action stalled. Also about air. https://t.co/dGivEANB3c
It can be lonely being Gen X, the smallest generation to boot. Wedged between an older generation who think life is an episode of The Love Boat, and younger generations off with the social media fairies. h/t @NobodyImpawtant https://t.co/hEDJwsFDHy
From https://t.co/IzVl6mbs0u Politicians think daily focusing on Covid numbers is damaging. I think them focusing on polling and popularity is far more dangerous. Can we suppress that instead? https://t.co/0EGZ5blgVS
Seems a lot of nationally insignificant deaths. https://t.co/HdTc4weot7 https://t.co/yi7wIpG6eU
Colonialism, the dispossession and displacement of people, didn't stop. That exact same movement continues to this day, within the old colonial powers as well. We now call it building a real estate portfolio. 'The economy' and its markets ARE the old colonialism, re-branded. https://t.co/WeFEczHiUu
Do we know when the first effective nasal vaccine for Covid will be available? I see a few are in late-stage trials. #COVID19
Turn off social media. Most of our problems would evaporate immediately. https://t.co/vzCHV5J2Xm
Herd immunity was first proposed as a deliberate anti-Covid weapon, then rightly ridiculed and dropped. Hybrid immunity seems just the same push, with a bit of (usually outdated) vaccine added, and the same 'um, no don't do this'. From: https://t.co/Hv5IdrubZr. https://t.co/fRDCBrGosY
We’re not going to get a choice, so long as social media is allowed to operate completely unregulated. It’s a libertarian tool to transform every country it enters into a libertarian loon wonderland. https://t.co/7eAdiviGdY
The pattern repeats and repeats. Social and community goods destroyed by social media activism. Social media is the problem. Look at local governance if you want to see the front-line of the assault. https://t.co/Qhw11o2b5z
4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables. But the slogan was always a fantasy. /1 https://t.co/RazT4iRCPz
When the sun doesn’t shine most of us are in bed. We don’t need much electricity. There’s still plenty of wind though. And batteries are so much faster and cheaper to install to ‘firm’ the supply, the engineers in the episode point that out as well. /2
But the slogans are still acting. The ALP and AEMO are focused on thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines, which won’t get built anywhere near the time they’ll be needed. (Not least because communities will use social media to obstruct every pylon.) /3
They’re stuck in the idea that big energy will be generated in a few locations, and then distributed to everybody else. That’s 19th century energy thinking. If the ALP want a fast and cheap transition to renewables, they should focus much more on batteries, at all scales. /4
Batteries can even replace the need for most major transmission lines, as ‘virtual transmission’. And they’re cheap and fast to install, and create virtually zero community resistance. It’s a fundamentally different model for the grid. And GO HOUSEHOLDS. /5 https://t.co/yakZE7ElcG
As Saul Griffith always says. This also addresses major cost of living pressures for households, fast. Not years into the future. We pay nothing for electricity in my house, in fact we make money selling our surplus. It took 2 days to make that shift. /6
Households are the centre of ‘the economy’. Not businesses. They rescued us from the GFC, and they can beat Covid and climate change too. /end
'Economics' derives from the Greek for 'household management'. Go households. Electrifying households, including removing barriers to EVs, would solve this problem. If you want to fuck OPEC forever, go households. 'The economy' is households, not businesses. https://t.co/OCPHYQmrPf
What 'reality-based politics' means, have a look at our shift to renewables. All through the years of LNP anti-renewables drivel, we were shifting anyway. Reality was ignoring them. Voting didn't do this. It only speeds or slows inevitabilities. https://t.co/N8hKFUMDUk
'Uber' energy is coming. Peer-to-peer energy sharing, disintermediating existing retailers. Where your solar surplus can be sold-on to others in the community, directly. Solar owners as 'prosumers'. https://t.co/OhVbgQRLuf
Some Oz schools now employing 'attendance officers', due to decline in attendance rates for students. I'm yet to see one action these officers list for parents that the school will be undertaking to improve attendance that includes any mitigations against Covid.
I wonder if we're getting closer to an understanding that only 'the economy' gets action from any government. And that's just a handful of indicators of how well the status quo is operating. It's a status quo perpetual motion machine. https://t.co/bSwLinNrWA
I don’t think anybody begrudges any musician playing until any age. The issue is more them occupying a cultural space created for adolescents, when they’re 80 years old. https://t.co/RKrUOy9uHM
Same age as my elderly mother. If you want to see a culture of permanent adolescence, how about 80-year-old rock stars? There were no 80-year-old rock stars headlining festivals when I was a teenager, we’d have considered that ridiculous. We’re not seeing the cultural shift. https://t.co/HsyNCzTevs
We could dramatically accelerate the renewables transition if we stopped trying to keep the old poles-and-wires system by swapping out only the generators. Batteries are a paradigm-shift. They can even replace some transmission lines, in virtual transmission. https://t.co/gRSpQIbcvF
Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occupied for centuries, the adult world. He missed I think that schools did the reverse. /1 https://t.co/qcbqRxS4L3
We went from a world where children occupied the adult world, including of work, from a young age. To a school world where a child and adult world became two separate worlds. To now, a world where the adult world has been remade as a giant school, culturally. /2
We swapped a world where everybody was an adult, to a world where everybody is a child. An adolescent. That's our cultural framework. Adults well into their last years of life still use the same framings of social life they learn in high school. /3
Popularity as the currency of social life, including political life. Status hierarchies of imitative rivalry. The entire world of work and politics is this, now. Spend 10 minutes on Linkedin if you don't believe it. Or 'live with' a pandemic, because that's popular. /end
Come on lawyers, speed this process up. https://t.co/7rbMTz8uSd
CEO at work has some throat infection, sounds like he's covering the hits of Barry White. 'I've had 2 negative RATs!' Now you can come to work with anything at all, because it's 'not-Covid'. It's normalised working while sick at an even higher level.
Why are we letting Covid do whatever it likes? Because adolescence has never been interested in risk management of any kind. https://t.co/R3vmekOQ6S
Yesterday's 'Biden Time' on Radio Sydney was cut to under 5 minutes while we listened to the B52's Rock Lobster, with Fran Kelly describing the studio dancing. I think ABC radio is going dumb in search of listeners. https://t.co/jtl1RYZptC
We can't vote our way out. Everybody will vote for the economy, which is our problem. https://t.co/A05AF3VD4d
Listened to an excellent discussion about clean air chaired by @dom_ma and including @c_s_wallace. A key topic for discussion was how to de-individualise public health again, to get scale and traction on topics like clean air. I think the bad guys have already shown us how. /1 https://t.co/VRwowT6cJH
You tabloidise information (I may have invented a verb there). That's what tabloid media is. It's not just scaremongering and sensationalism, it's much, much more precise. It collapses the distinction between individual and collective. /2 https://t.co/tHNF6OP3x4
You don't need a million messages to build a collective narrative. You need one tabloid message, to go viral. The whole purpose of tabloidism (might have invented a noun there too) as a genre is to *individualise collective issues*. That's why it works. /3 https://t.co/PaMGRABbwY
It uses the universal/collective emotion of a given situation to give it immediate collective relevance, even if it's about just one person. Because emotions are universal, not individual. They convey a universal message. I've Tweeted a bit about the need to go tabloid. /4 https://t.co/ERJK897R6H
To universalise the disaster of Covid by constantly posting individual stories about it, in tabloid style. And that just means being highly emotional and engaging and focused on *individual* stories, not fake or misinformation. /5 https://t.co/AdNqrf0gWu
You can try it right here on Twitter. I guarantee you'll get a lot more follows or likes if you Tweet in a tabloid genre i.e. powerful emotional stories about individuals. They needn't be melodramatic, just individual and engaging, because life is that. They go viral. /6
That's how you get Covid attention to scale. Flood the zone with tabloid stories. About fresh (or filthy) air, or about the insanity of destroying a public focus, on anything. Doesn't have to mention Covid, the baddies won by tabloiding 'freedom' instead. /end
Dear AHPPC, CMO, National Cabinet, and other purveyors of hybrid immunity. A question about my mum. She’s 80. Doesn’t have great lungs, but lives a good life. Her doctor says Covid might kill her. She’s been isolating for nearly 4 years now to keep safe. When can she come out?
You’ll feel less powerless if you stop thinking society is millions of independent people. 5% of people determine what happens, the other 95% imitate them. Anything can ‘go viral’ and be part of that 5%.
We’ve spent 30+ years talking about the science of climate change. Almost none of that talk changed our politics. Politics is about creating the stories that make the global individual. That’s what the opponents of climate change action did, and why they’re winning.
The moment personal debt becomes unaffordable, EVERYTHING people do becomes unaffordable, in an economy. ‘Cost of living’. Which clearly shows ‘the economy’ is only accessible to ordinary people, through debt. Obviously ‘the economy’ is just privatised common-wealth. https://t.co/Mw8USquc4l
I don’t know about you, but I felt my ‘freedom’ much more under assault from governments driving infection deep into my home and family, than by them stopping me buying coffees and flying to Europe and Bali.
To be clear, I love both the Beatles and Stones. And they should keep playing as long as they like. My point is about the place of what was teen culture, in modern adult life and 'economies'. An indicator of a profound shift. https://t.co/FJQONw0H3G
It's nice NSW Health acknowledges we're still in a pandemic, and not 'post-Covid', as many others say. Pretty telling that our only indicators of infection now are who turns up half-dead at ED, and sewage treatment plants. https://t.co/HKSESl0Rl9
We can't elect our way out of a pandemic. Or even a wet paper bag, really. https://t.co/f4ktERHjfc
Heck I wear it to protect others too, but I'm a bit retro. https://t.co/TLfIFZloiJ
To the experts in this area I talk to who assure me hybrid immunity is a thing, I'm still waiting to hear about any pathogen we've ever used it for as a deliberate strategy, pre-SARS2.
The producers of 'Smiles Are Back' bring you “Covid-19 has not established a predictable seasonal pattern as yet...". https://t.co/sm1OuC2QVa
Another day watching on as we cheer on this or that political team, thinking that changes anything. Like Sportsbet taking odds on the apple falling on Newton’s head. (It fell anyway.) ‘The world’ isn’t this daily farce, it’s the practical, invisible work of keeping stuff running.
Flu and even colds are often given as comparators for hybrid immunity. In my entire life I don’t remember a single cold or flu season where we were all exhorted to get a good top-up of infection.
Sure America has way too many guns. But something culturally encourages using them to try to get attention, and to solve problems. A mystery. https://t.co/Utb7VSQOV2
I'm still stuck in the part of the Covid maze too where hybrid immunity is given as the way out of the pandemic, and in the same breath its advocates say 'but we don't suggest people should become infected'. https://t.co/KKj8K3GkQz
The problem isn't really mis- or disinformation. It's information. It's people having opinions on everything, including things they have no idea about at all, and which they then obstruct with their opinions. That's what social media does.
Like Covid, this is mostly a WHS issue. A ban will fix the problem, but what's not being said is that it represents a widespread failure of basic WHS, on worksites. That would put employers on the hook, and economy politics won't do that. https://t.co/AccV14wL8R
This to me is why pandemics are defined by number of INFECTIONS. If you don't control transmission, you create the perfect breeding ground for the pathogen to evolve to avoid all of your immunity, no matter how derived. https://t.co/ZngeeWssLi
If a pandemic wasn't going to stop the travelling zombies, inflation certainly wasn't. Whole societies on a permanent gap year from reality. https://t.co/3mAvTjs4vo
This is the libertarian project succeeding, dismantling institutions. Social media is now easily the most powerful weapon in their armoury, it replaces this trust with likes. Popularity replaces all of our institutional checks and balances. https://t.co/1Pg1Gmy393
The genius of the Tupperware party was that it bypassed peoples' natural resistance to being sold things, by getting their friends to sell it to them instead. Social media is this model extended to every part of society, including knowledge and politics. https://t.co/5tELS9Ym3I
“This is an expected part of the ongoing evolution of COVID in the community, as our immunity wanes with time.” Our Covid strategy is to let Covid evolve. We can drive every other species on the continent to extinction. But Covid gets the red carpet. https://t.co/wsfRUB9iT2
While social media is allowed unregulated existence, journalism, like all other public institutions, will be destroyed by populism. Also being ‘objective’ would be asking why a ‘proportionate’ approach ended up meaning doing nothing about Covid at all. #auspol https://t.co/RhtbZwLrY3
There are signs the government understands that its only path to renewables in the time required is to target households. Electrify households, and install batteries at every scale. Will also address cost of living. Everything else will be crippled by social media. https://t.co/M5plEP3TP2
Asia and particularly China is far and away the most important international relationship Australia has. But our populist ninnies prosecute an Anglo UK/US culture war against the Chinese, while expecting them at the same time to keep our ‘economy’ afloat. We wouldn’t tolerate it. https://t.co/6XeDnNqIOa
The fastest way to head off this latest LNP wrecking exercise is to continuously ask Dutton and Littleproud which communities they plan to install the nuclear reactors in, and which communities will be getting the waste. Fight populist fire with fire, for once. https://t.co/PUwZoM0pz3
Yep, we’re repeating the 20th century. Begin with a pandemic, with chronic disease impacts that will fill much of the rest of the century. https://t.co/jSpFppssC0
I think the messaging needs to shift away from the idea that population-level measures are required. Much more saleable to target key spreading sites, like schools and other workplaces. Places that are already required to be acting by law. https://t.co/HI6iqk9F2m
Lewis Thomas had a wonderful mind. If we’d combined these insights with a focus on public health basics like clean water and air over the past 100 years, I think we’d have an entirely different health system right now, and far healthier populations. https://t.co/5ubrqYJIbq
Meantime in his home country populist boofheads are still beholden to existing generators and grid providers. This could be such an enormous, fast and cheap win for Oz. And it would bypass all of the LNP’s bag of dirty populist tricks. https://t.co/dWmQXwVYGV
Another window into our increasingly adolescent society is Halloween. The rapid growth of it as a celebration in Australia. If you go to one of the local events, what stands out is the passion adults have for it all, including the dress-up. Kiddults.
Antibiotics and vaccinations made us complacent about infectious disease. We’ve wasted antibiotics raising animals, and on human infections that were easily preventable with basic sanitation. Here’s a counterfactual, how the last century could have been so different. /1 https://t.co/b1iUgpSYZn
If we’d avoided antibiotic use for fattening animals, and avoided many of the human infections that we use antibiotics to treat using basic public health measures, humans could have occasionally taken a broad-spectrum antibiotic to address any hidden infections. /2
I’d bet that one shift would have prevented an extraordinary amount of chronic disease. Rather than freely allowing infection and then vastly over-using antibiotics, we could have used them prophylactically. The paradigms of disease in the 20th century were flailing. /3
Endless and inconclusive debates about nutrition, and little efficacy from billions invested in research on genetic causation. Thinking about the body like it’s a physical and chemical machine, rather than an organism. Bodies are societies of microbes. All life is. /4
Infection was always going to be the key to understanding health. Mostly by using simple measures to avoid it. Instead we used vaccines and antibiotics to encourage a reckless orgy of constant infection. /end
It’s increasingly our culture. I didn’t invent the category, but it’s everywhere you look. https://t.co/UdmgmNMavB
If you shift to reality-based politics (not team sports politics), it’s clear the shift to renewables would happen even if there were no climate change threat. Follow the money. Nuclear the only technology getting MORE expensive (*wave to the LNP*). #auspol https://t.co/AXLo7FhUBn
@ChrisMinnsMP why is NSW the only State not to use average speed safety cameras for cars? I’m over feeling like the patsy taking ‘personal responsibility’ out there, like for Covid, while adolescent boy racers in their 3-tonne wankpanzers ignore all speed limits.
I keep this, from December 2022, as a KPI for the hybrid immunity strategy. For context, I’ve circled in red the Delta wave in Australia. https://t.co/Q0bo1MzDBW
The idea that ‘the people’ run democracies is destroying them at an ever-increasing speed. Fanned by bad faith foreign actors through social media. Dip your toe into any of the multitude of community oppositions to anything right now, for a flavour of the insanity in play. https://t.co/AHOkJa5YFe
Of course it did. In social media societies, you can’t burp without it triggering outrage somewhere. That’s what these platforms are designed and funded to to do, mobilise constant opposition to everything. Name one thing ever BUILT because of social media. https://t.co/8qymbLpWTL
It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it with an economy of likes. Populism. /1
If you defend them, you’re defending the very thing that most sensible people agree is our actual problem. The destruction of collective societies. It’s seductive to think social media creates that in an alternative way. That they mobilise the like-minded, in groups. /2
But that’s crumbs from the table of the destruction of everything public, by the same interests who own these platforms. How did we ever think these platforms were pro-democracy, when even just being on them enriches anti-social billionaires? /3
The same platforms bad faith actors, both domestic and international, use to mobilise instant flash mobs of resistance to public health action, climate action, transition to EVs? Time and again people will say ‘but this is the only place I now get valuable information.’ /4
That’s true in some ways, for me too. But that’s a symptom of the destruction, the people who previously worked in our public institutions with their expertise to address social problems, are now driven to rearguard social groups here to try to still have a voice. /5
It’s a con, social media has been around as long as these social problems, and has never solved any of them. They’ve got worse. It doesn’t translate into action, just likes. Or symbolic, protest-type action at best. “I Stand With [insert hopeless cause].” /6
Platforms for the expression of personal feeling, over the backdrop of social collapse. The collapse creates the emotion that makes these such seductive stages for the expression of our personal outrages. The genius of the platforms is that this only accelerates the collapse. /7
The squabbles get ever more granular, I watched a local FB group for example mobilise against a perfectly harmless local project, using categories clearly imported from libertarian attack groups in the US. And as time went on, the same mechanism fractured the groups as well. /8
The points of difference multiplied every day it went on, until the group itself imploded with violent division. That’s how any mechanism which uses popularity as a methodology will always end. /end
Transmission kills. https://t.co/3OudPYhb47
Air pollution from burning fossil fuels kills 3.6 million people globally every year. This is 6-times the annual death toll of all murders, war deaths, and terrorist attacks combined. https://t.co/6bt26aGzzo
If we’re protecting the vulnerable, it appears that means everybody under 80 years of age. https://t.co/nTlNqKbeSV
I think a lot of loyal ALP voters already abandoned them over their complete capitulation on Covid. But those still wavering will rush for the exits if nothing is done about Stage 3 tax cuts. #auspol https://t.co/jVjlSO00p9
The usual inanities about AI on #QandA, that we need humans to do all the creative, innovative things, and leave AI to do the donkey work. Nearly all humans aren’t creative, entirely habitual and imitative in everything they think and feel.
“Hey, at least you’re not dying” has as much public health ambition as drinking from a urinal trough.
The Alice in Wonderland world of a privatised pandemic. Where you’re told repeatedly the pandemic is over, infection will end infections, and in the same breath ‘please wear a mask’. https://t.co/gGcWcHz9t9
This is how social media works. Heat pumps have been around for decades and are superb. But 'this guy on YouTube says...'. https://t.co/F22ymA4eiX
Humans operate overwhelmingly more by word-of-mouth than they do by official information sources. If you construct a technology that takes word-of-mouth to scale, to the level of a country or even globe, you upend everything. And that's what social media is, and does.
What is the 'mainstream culture' of Australia? Just about everybody who says this is already part of a cultural minority here, and lives in a 'mainstream' suburb like Toorak. https://t.co/7mTGJBW7S4
Colleague has developed sneezing fits and hives. Has never had either in their lives before, apparently. Also often tells me we 'need to learn to live with Covid', referring to my mask. I guess they're learning the much harder way.
Smashing it out of the park. For the team sports, the ALP in power there for 16 of the past 20 years. https://t.co/l4MSaBUpIW
Why we need to target households for the transition, not the old poles, generators and wires. Electrify households, to also drive cost of living down. https://t.co/Aue9rozErB
The utter contempt for public health and basic adult responsibility from politicians being revealed here was also matched in Australia, but we will likely never get an Oz enquiry to see the details. https://t.co/nwX4dN8KLR
The social/ cultural foundation of all society - social conformity - continues to confuse us. People would rather die than go against what’s popular. Only public institutions ever bypassed this model by creating processes that transcended individuals and generations. https://t.co/fCCTtlo7Yx
The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting nations to come together and agree. /1 https://t.co/jFuCMCvatN
Historically this is just wrong. Nations were established by a *pre-existing* unity. They were concessions to warring parties within this pre-existing unity. A sop to their demands. Like the granting of land to nobles by Kings before this, to maintain the unity of kingdoms. /2
It’s the same process, one step further along. The Holy Roman Empire, which was that pre-existing ‘international’ (there were no nations really, just various kingdoms) unity, decided to negotiate ceasefires between the warring Protestant and Catholic factions of the empire. /3
The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. That was (many believe) the origin of modern nations. A bunch of concessions to warring parties, to allow them to define their own ‘sovereignty’ to a great degree. It was ‘God’ that was the pre-existing unity, through the Catholic Church. /4
You can’t talk about this today without people immediately evoking all the post-Enlightenment anti-religion war cries. But this isn’t about taking any sides here, saying anything about the Christian God, or the good and bad of the Holy Roman Empire. /5
Just to point out that historically humans of European descent mobilised around a Christian God, as a *universal* measure for social life, through the Church. Well before there were what we call nations. And these nations were created by this same Christian infrastructure. /6
Like Humpty Dumpty, it’s impossible to create that global unity by trying to get nations to agree. The process is backwards, they will always defer to their own beloved sovereignty over all else. Humans will not agree until they again cede that sovereignty to a ‘higher power’. /7
It seems unlikely that will be them re-adopting older notions of divinity, as many modern conservatives hope. It could happen, and most nations seem to be heading towards theocracies more than democracies now. But history rarely actually repeats in that way. My guess? /8
The effects of climate change on the possibility of life itself will create that higher power, which will be those fundamental physical realities of our physical survival on this planet. We won’t so much worship those realities as learn to defer to and negotiate with them. /9
Humans will be forced to coordinate their desires and sovereignties, to survive. As Michel Serres used to say, morality will become objective, in a new way. You follow the requirements of survival of life, or you die. It won’t be a matter of belief or preference. /end
When you preference living with and treating infections over preventing them, eventually the pathogens out-evolve your vanity. https://t.co/FOdG80vqiy
Same colleague today looks like they've done 12 rounds with Mike Tyson, all puffy around the eyes. Double-dosed with antihistamines, says it's 'probably hayfever'. Doesn't normally suffer from hayfever. https://t.co/yPLa4rzhiu
Even aged care facilities trying to prevent these infections won't be able to. Society doesn't exist as a set of independent air-tight bubbles. https://t.co/q3f8JMgOsa
We're still following the 'strategy' from a free-market think tank, instead of 150 years of public health precedent. Still waiting to hear the last pandemic we used hybrid immunity against. Still can't find it in any textbooks or histories. https://t.co/KHPFFDYUbA