March 2026
Complete authored posts and demonstrable self-threads.
I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in societies founded by some kind of revolution. It’s always the same desire to overthrow the status quo. That’s the revolutionary…
I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in societies founded by some kind of revolution. It’s always the same desire to overthrow the status quo. That’s the revolutionary…
I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in societies founded by some kind of revolution. It’s always the same desire to overthrow the status quo. That’s the revolutionary…
I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Heck, like millions I’ve even owned a Volkswagen, even though the Nazis founded the company. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in societies founded by some kind of…
I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Like millions I’ve even owned a Volkswagen, even though the Nazis founded the company. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in societies founded by some kind of…
The shift to celebrity as an income stream for writers and thinkers, with their social media and Substack followings, generated a demand for regular content that also triggers something more insidious, I think. Many become sudden experts in everything, commenting well outside…
The shift to celebrity as an income stream for writers and thinkers, with their social media and Substack followings, generates a demand for regular content that also triggers something more insidious, I think. Many become sudden experts in everything, commenting well outside…
The shift to celebrity as an income stream for writers and thinkers, with their social media and Substack followings, generates a demand for regular content that also triggers something more insidious, I think. Many become sudden experts in everything, commenting well outside…
The shift to celebrity as an income stream for writers and thinkers, with their social media and Substack followings, generates a demand for regular content that also triggers something more insidious, I think. Many become sudden experts in everything, commenting well outside…
Our short memories. Remember this, from the George W Bush years? Trumpism takes this and magnifies it many times over. Nothing much has really changed except the degree of resistance to it, which populism spent the subsequent years dissolving. Ironically this sort of imperial… https://t.co/CZmj7gcJiC
I still remember the rampant hubris of the George W Bush White House. The belief that those who served under that administration were untouchable, above due process, above the law etc. Creating new realties, rather than respecting actual reality. Populist revolutions are always…
I still remember the rampant hubris of the George W Bush White House. The belief that those who served under that administration were untouchable, above due process, above the law etc. Creating fleeting culture war realities, rather than respecting actual reality. Populist…
Period drama reminds us of a time when the negotiation of social status was much more visible. Period drama is almost entirely about the negotiation of social status. Status is the central mechanism of all human life. We're social animals. Status is just as important today, but… https://t.co/579auBdzNZ
Period drama reminds us of a time when social status was much more visible. Period drama is almost entirely about the negotiation of social status. Status is the central mechanism of all human life. We're social animals. Status is just as important today, but we lack the… https://t.co/bWW79Ts26R
Period drama reminds us of a time when social status was much more visible. Period drama is almost entirely about the negotiation of social status. Status is the central mechanism of all human life. We're social animals. Status is just as important today, but we lack the… https://t.co/DD7055BZZP
Period drama reminds us of a time when social status was much more visible. Period drama is almost entirely about the negotiation of social status. Status is the central mechanism of all human life. We're social animals. Status is just as important today, but we lack the… https://t.co/xbQLtQmJln
Given that we know human life expectancy doubled in the last century die to control of infections, the idea that long life = avoiding infection should be obvious. In a social media society, only what trends is actually real. 'Living with' infection is trending. https://t.co/pTLhRqfXTD
Given that we know human life expectancy doubled in the last century due mostly to control of infections, the idea that long life = avoiding infection should be obvious. In a social media society, only what trends is actually real. 'Living with' infection is trending. https://t.co/pTLhRqfXTD
Given that we know human life expectancy doubled in the last century due mostly to control of infections, the idea that long life = avoiding infection should be obvious. But in a social media society, only what trends is actually real. 'Living with' infection is trending. https://t.co/pTLhRqfXTD
In our populist age, which would be more accurately described as a fundamentalist belief in ‘the people’ as some cogitating equality of input, it’s frowned upon to recognise that ‘elites’ of every kind actually determine all social movement and progress. Hierarchy. The thing we… https://t.co/pACCclsdQ6
Regime change is not in itself a bad idea, it at least understands that human groups are run by a tiny elite, which can be targeted, rather than slaughtering civilians en masse. Where it all goes horribly wrong is Stage 2, where ‘the people’ are asked to rise up to replace the…
The spread of infectious disease in our communities is largely down to the fact we haven’t bothered with the same basic HVAC in schools that pretty much every other large public and private building has used for decades. https://t.co/dTIx1X64gc
The spread of infectious respiratory disease in our communities is largely down to the fact we haven’t bothered with the same basic HVAC in schools that pretty much every other large public and private building has used for decades. https://t.co/dTIx1X64gc
The spread of infectious airborne disease in our communities is largely down to the fact we haven’t bothered with the same basic HVAC in schools that pretty much every other large public and private building has used for decades. https://t.co/dTIx1X64gc
No. He’s creating a new monarchy for the US, replacing government. Neo-royalism. With a good mix of theocracy thrown in. Monarchy is the absolute dominant form for most of human history. It’s the default state. These aren’t analogies. We can’t understand what’s happening in the… https://t.co/8cPf8Bp3i5
A world where everything has become a never-ending argument is not ‘democracy’ in action. It’s a business model. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’. A globalised ‘look over there’ sleight of hand, while new wannabe Kings raid the treasury. I ask people to think every day about…
A world where everything has become a never-ending argument is not ‘democracy’ in action. It’s a business model. ‘Flooding the zone with shit’. A globalised ‘look over there’ sleight of hand, while new wannabe Kings raid the treasury. I ask people to think every day about…
Trump’s ludicrous adventures in Iran may be the best thing to ever happen for EV sales.
The destruction of public health was really the privatisation of it, as we’d already done for energy, education, transport etc. The pathogens are still there, but now you have to deal with them at home. Matthew, see if you can get some Metformin from a doctor. It’s all that’s… https://t.co/lruFXb4xnb
It’s the hubris of existing elites that often catalyses the catastrophic collapse that leads to actual social progress. This is how history works. Human societies run on status. If status rivalry isn’t managed, it blows up the society, leading to catastrophic destruction.… https://t.co/EtmJaXfmQw
Mutually-assured destruction (MAD) did sort of work as a brake on human status games. An extinction level catastrophic threat throttled our global fights for status. It’s interesting to ponder whether AI can act in a similar way, becoming a force so capable and powerful that we… https://t.co/blRIfHYDwX
One of the great vain prejudices of human history is the idea that complexity increases with size. Not coincidentally we think it maxes out at about human scale. In reality complexity increases the smaller you go. All life and existence really happens at the ‘micro’ level. Most… https://t.co/DXG41t1Vxn
Global capitalism was never really a thing. It’s an artefact of 19th century social theory. In reality ‘capitalism’ was a strategic fiction, to undermine the State, which obstructed uncontrolled status rivalries. The idea of individuals self-organising through a fictitious… https://t.co/SXLvxy7uJr
I’d love the evils of social media to trend in the same way the evils of AI trends. It won’t though. Entire populations now live inside it, utterly co-dependent. We’re already slaves to the machines. https://t.co/46YDPtVbei
In a kidult culture like ours, where all historical precedent and tradition is replaced by trending fads and fashions, what happens with emergencies and disasters? Like pandemics, but also climate events, etc. They become platforms for the expression of our kidult emotion. A…
In a kidult culture like ours, where all historical precedent and tradition is replaced by trending fads and fashions, what happens with emergencies and disasters? Like pandemics, but also climate events, etc. They become platforms for the expression of our kidult emotion. A…
In a kidult culture like ours, where all historical precedent and tradition is replaced by trending fads and fashions, what happens with emergencies and disasters? Like pandemics, but also climate events, etc. They become platforms for the expression of our kidult emotion. A…
Any methodology that relies upon interpersonal mechanisms will be gained by humans building and maintaining status hierarchies. https://t.co/Li7nHfFvDF
Human beings are the AI that bacteria built. https://t.co/Ahr2T5yYz8
There’s little hope humanity will exit the team sports imitative status games that define most of history. Particularly now when we live inside social media, the platforms have replaced society itself. Look up from the various battles you’re engaged in on these platforms, and… https://t.co/Fn9AtbtPGP
One Nation and a populist Nationals under Matt Canavan wil be loving that @abcnews is reporting the severing of the main road link between Sydney and the State’s vast Western interior as a ‘regional’ news story, buried down the main pages. Nationals and One Nation’s pollies are… https://t.co/3PgohdOKWI
I’m genuinely looking forward to the national directive that tells us to work from home to conserve fuel.
It’s no surprise that some Asian nations have already begun various programs to ration fuel use. Just as it retained many public health measures during Covid while the West riffed over freedumb hysteria, trapped inside social media bubbles. Asia is resurgent, returning to the…
It’s no surprise that some Asian nations have already begun various programs to ration fuel use. Just as Asia retained many public health measures during Covid while the West riffed over freedumb hysteria, trapped inside social media bubbles. Asia is resurgent, returning to the…
Nations that succumb to the idiot idea that ‘the people’ run countries are reduced to ‘urging’ emergency action against major threats. Tiny groups of sponsored cookers hold them to ransom. The people is a fiction. https://t.co/YyGfYfIJCI
Only catastrophes change societies. The disaster in the Middle East may accelerate the global shift to action on climate change. Because we’ll have no other choice. When we have choice, we always default to the status quo. https://t.co/zACXeZx4xA
Only catastrophes change societies. The disaster in the Middle East may accelerate the global shift to action on climate change. Because without fuel, we’ll have no other choice. When we have choice, we always default to the status quo. https://t.co/qhYLMSZDkK
That tragicomic meeting of two forces in Western society, social media social contagion, and fossil fuels. https://t.co/pig4ak8jij
Our problems are all social/cultural. Not political, which is just a re-coding of these social and cultural problems into imitative rivalry team sports. Alas the entire boomer shift in our culture was towards this suicidal permanent adolescence. It can’t be fixed by suppressing… https://t.co/hyJMwLzGSJ
The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the cultural separation of child from…
Populism replaces centuries of hard-won knowledge and experience not with its claimed ‘democratic’ flattening of all hierarchy. It creates a new hierarchy, based only on popularity. High school culture. This is where the two currents link. A culture for which only a present…
Replacing institutional life embedding multi-generational insights, not rationally created but constructed out of the ruins of cataclysmic destruction and death, throughout history. Our institutions always emerge to repair cataclysms. /3
The lethal overlay upon this populist shift which exists throughout history, is the relatively modern separation of child from adult life. Only a century ago that was new. Until that point in history, children were mostly little adults. They shared adult work. /4
Mass schooling shifted this profoundly. Now children were extracted from adult life for their entire childhood, and placed in schools. More than anything they learned there, they learned a culture. School culture, which they largely created. /5
Emerging from school as young adults, that’s the culture they then re-made adult life with. The boomers were the vanguard, and their phenomenal numbers created the tipping point which overturned adult life. Now everything is a high school. At all ages. /6
In the West at least, we have entire populations of adults who are incapable of conceiving of adult life except in adolescent ways. That’s the culture they were raised in. They’re not bad people. They’re ordinary people, enacting a dysfunctional culture. /7
Like the often maligned 60s hippies, who confronted existential problems as old as time, like violence and war, with sweet flower-power requests for everybody to just stop doing it. Often to some soundtrack, popular music became a substitute for action. /8
Tragically, even comically naive. And yet to this day our ‘activist’ culture is still this, unalloyed. When married to populism, which pre-dates this split by millennia, the whole Western edifice faces collapse. /9
It was one thing for a populist like Caesar to use the ‘power to the people’ schtick to overturn a Senate. Populist insurgencies like that always returned to an adult life when they ran out of puff. But there is no adult life now for us to return to, when populists like Trump…
Just whole populations of permanent teenagers, who sweetly think electing a new Prom King will fix it. This populist-kidult assault is so universal and entrenched that we don’t see it. Fish don’t know water is exists until they’re beached. Culture is invisible to those living…
For example the idea that the task of a family is to raise their kids, who then each individually go out into the world to ‘make their own way’, creating their own families. That’s the child-adult split above. The cultural mechanism here is designed to permanently upend and…
The culture can’t consolidate or build when the task of every new child is to become a revolutionary, a counter-cultural stormtrooper, continuing the 60s revolution. To forge the world anew in their own image, disconnected from the world of their parents or grandparents. /13
Every single component of that mechanism leads to social collapse. Welcome to 2026. /end
Exploding prices for petrol and diesel are only problems for the driver too stupid to have ditched their combustion clunker years ago.
Exploding prices for petrol and diesel are only problems for the driver too stupid to have ditched their combustion clunker years ago. Natural selection in action.
Exploding prices for petrol and diesel are only problems for combustion clunkers. We’re well past the point where affordable alternatives are clearly available. You have stupid beliefs, you pay for them.
Exploding prices for petrol and diesel are only problems for combustion clunkers. We’re well past the point where affordable alternatives are clearly available. Far more powerful and low maintenance options to boot. You have stupid beliefs, you pay for them. Let’s call it a…
Heaven and Earth will be moved to try to rescue the fossil fuel status quo. This is how meaningful change always happens, it will need to be completely smashed and crippled to change. It is never incremental or gradual or rational. China will be the great disruptor. The…
The ‘international rules-based order’ man of us grew up in, which seemed a much more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when human status games had been…
The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when human status games had been suppressed by…
The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when human status games had been suppressed by…
The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when human status games had been suppressed by…
The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when human status games had been suppressed by…
The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when human status games had been suppressed by…
The world seems a mess. No meaningful change was ever going to happen gradually or without lots of things breaking. The status quo will never surrender to needed change. Only its destruction brings change. That destruction is usually self-inflicted. Those whom the gods would…
We’re in the end stages of status games now, where rivalry is amplified to such an intensity by social media culture that the material conditions of life are just like gambling chips for the battling teams. This isn’t fascists taking over the world. It’s us living inside a… https://t.co/QYnkdwyQr5
We’re in the end stages of status games now, where rivalry is amplified to such an intensity by social media culture that the material conditions of life are just like gambling chips for the battling teams. This isn’t fascists taking over the world. It’s us living inside a… https://t.co/QYnkdwyQr5
Hearing people at work openly lauding Donald Trump, and saying Pauline Hanson would continue his good work in Australia. Anybody in the same workplace who questioned this was labelled as having ‘TDS’ (Trump Derangement Syndrome, a US label pro-Trump folk use against those who…
Elections were ostensibly introduced as a mechanism to try to translate the ‘will of the people’, into governance. The idea was lethally flawed in almost every way. ‘The people’ is a nonsense concept, popularised by fascists. Hitler’s ’volk’, and every populist twit today… https://t.co/tbnHX6k6VY
Uh oh. Large numbers of Australians could be lifted out of poverty again. For the second time in their lives. https://t.co/yUeT37h0rT
The great possibility of AI? That it will smother the great tidal wave of opinion that we confuse with democracy, which has pulverised centuries of social progress under cover of nonsense about free speech. There are signs people will shut up with their meaningless opinions…
I don’t care about Thiel, but ‘liberal democracy’ never began. It’s a trick of the light caused by the catastrophic destruction of status hierarchies by two world wars, an economic depression and a pandemic, in the 20th century https://t.co/DHbbkaqs6a
We make our tools and then our tools make us. The medium is the message. The two battling mediums today are social media, and AI. A battle of ‘everybody knows everything about everything’ (opinion culture, social media) v they don’t and should shut up about most things…
The real existential battle in the world right now isn’t political. it isn’t even human. It’s technological. It’s social media, vs AI. The future of civilisation depends upon social media losing that battle. There are encouraging first signs. https://t.co/cnRWkvB3f2
The real existential battle in the world right now isn’t political. It isn’t even human. It’s technological. It’s social media, vs AI. The future of civilisation depends upon social media losing that battle. There are encouraging first signs. https://t.co/OwKkyyjECX
You can be completely anti-Trump, while still recognising that the destruction he’s creating is the only way societies were going to change. His team even planned that destruction. Their stupidity is thinking that destruction will favour them. As long ago as The Iliad humans… https://t.co/cmOU84iyl6
If you want to see the uncontrolled violence that comes from replacing adult/institutional life with various permanently adolescent gangs, defending their cultural brands? Wait until the combustion vehicles gang, one of the most toxically adolescent of all gangs, has its speed… https://t.co/hEDI9KwuUs
If you want to see the uncontrolled violence that comes from replacing adult/institutional life with various permanently adolescent gangs, defending their cultural brands? Wait until the combustion vehicles gang, one of the most toxically adolescent of all gangs, has its speed… https://t.co/4PpWxMquMs
If you want to see the uncontrolled violence that comes from replacing adult/institutional life with various permanently adolescent gangs, defending their cultural brands? Wait until the combustion vehicles gang, one of the most toxically adolescent of all gangs, has its speed… https://t.co/lAsTT0EwaN
A modicum of history tells us that Iran was a democracy in many of our lifetimes, that dared to want more of the proceeds of its own oil reserves. Which the Brits and Americans, who wanted the proceeds for themselves, couldn’t stomach. So they organised and sponsored a regime…
A modicum of history tells us that Iran was a democracy in many of our lifetimes, that dared to want more of the proceeds of its own oil reserves. Which the Brits and Americans, who wanted the proceeds for themselves, couldn’t stomach. So they organised and sponsored a regime…
Covid lockdowns were extremely difficult for countries who’d had decades of business-as-usual life. The idea of global emergency action against a threat hadn’t been seriously evoked since WW2. Interruption to fossil fuel supplies could make Covid emergency action look easy.…
Covid lockdowns were extremely difficult for countries who’d had decades of business-as-usual life. The idea of global emergency action against a threat hadn’t been seriously evoked since WW2. Interruption to fossil fuel supplies could make Covid emergency action look easy.…
Covid lockdowns were extremely difficult for countries who’d had decades of business-as-usual life. The idea of global emergency action against a threat hadn’t been seriously evoked since WW2. Interruption to fossil fuel supplies could make Covid emergency action look easy.…
The casualness of the Western response to the global energy crisis, which could actually break Western nations across every dimension of their operations. It shows the way their surrendering of public life to social media has strangled them inside a web of social conformity.…
The casualness of the Western response to the global energy crisis, which could actually break Western nations across every dimension of their operations. It shows the way their surrendering of public life to social media has strangled them inside a web of social conformity.…
The proposed EV road user tax is one more example of public policy becoming the implementation of social media attack memes. https://t.co/ykjxuvMGYY
I shared Lawrence’s prophetic A Letter from Germany during the early pandemic. A good novelist feels a future coming long before it happens. I feel this today, and have felt it ever since Covid. The hope of peace-and-production from the post-war period destroyed by the return… https://t.co/9rsZrwJ2ay
I shared Lawrence’s prophetic A Letter from Germany during the early pandemic. A good novelist feels a future coming long before it happens. I feel this today, and have felt it ever since Covid. The hope of peace-and-production from the post-war period destroyed by the return… https://t.co/MiWDu9fkSE
I shared Lawrence’s prophetic A Letter from Germany during the early pandemic. A good novelist feels a future coming long before it happens. I feel this today, and have felt it ever since Covid began. The hope of peace-and-production from the post-war period destroyed by the… https://t.co/ehIeUTlYZT
Those who advocate for a muscular free speech as the basis for democracy like you to think it means a society being open to new things, a sort of free market of ideas constantly in competition. But argument does the opposite. It creates social conformity. The more argument you…
Those who advocate for a muscular free speech as the basis for democracy like you to think it means a society being open to new things, a sort of free market of ideas constantly in competition. But argument does the opposite. It creates social conformity. The more argument you…
The turnaround in Australian governance that Covid revealed, where leaders now cower to the social media mob and vested interests, is a disgrace to the history of the country. Australia was famous for its strong, innovative governance. Now we can’t even discuss things that… https://t.co/wtSXHdjqgo
I own an EV. There’s a real chance that with the pissweak void where governance in Australia used to be, I’ll become one of my employer’s involuntary taxi drivers for workers who can’t otherwise get to work, if fuel becomes scarce.
Ask Defence and intelligence chiefs about the greatest threats we face, and it’s not China or Iran. It’s social media. The social licence for these platforms to operate at all is based on a set of absolute rubbish beliefs about how humans live together, and how democracy works.… https://t.co/ZRZe76lW3x
Ask Defence and intelligence chiefs about the greatest threats we face, and it’s not China or Iran. It’s social media. The social licence for these platforms to operate at all is based on a set of absolute rubbish beliefs about how humans live together, and how democracy works.… https://t.co/kWtn1PZ1jL
Ask Defence and intelligence chiefs about the greatest threats we face, and it’s not China or Iran. It’s social media. The social licence for these platforms to operate at all is based on a set of absolute rubbish beliefs about how humans live together, and how democracy works.… https://t.co/HdFeLMT4Fj
It took Scott Morrison about a year to dismantle Australia’s public health system, under Covid, via the invention of his ludicrous ‘National Cabinet’. An abomination in governance terms, completely at odds with federalism and its checks and balances. As soon as National Cabinet… https://t.co/TUCnRBOF5O
In a populist culture, as a leader you’re doomed no matter what you do because popularity is intrinsically fickle. So just do things. Break things along the way if you have to. You’ll be thrown under a bus anyway whether you do them or not.
No amount of sitting around in committee can solve an existential crisis. And for those brain-dead kidults who have to see everything through the lens of a political battle, one side of politics invented the idiot committee. The other side adopted it. Idiots all-around.… https://t.co/V18B1iY9D4
We haven’t moved from a time when voters were smart, to a time when voters are stupid. We’ve always been stupid. Only institutions create social progress, by embedding knowledge gleaned from repairing catastrophic damage to societies, and then applying it to run societies.…
We haven’t moved from a time when voters were smart, to a time when voters are stupid. We’ve always been stupid. Only institutions create social progress, by embedding knowledge gleaned from repairing catastrophic damage to societies. And then applying it to run them,…
We haven’t moved from a time when voters were smart, to a time when voters are stupid. We’ve always been stupid. Only institutions create social progress, by embedding knowledge gleaned from repairing catastrophic damage to societies. And then applying it to run them,…
Little progress is ever made against inequality because it’s misconceived. The financial outcomes of inequality are a second-order phenomenon, the wealth pumps (Turchin) that vacuum wealth into that tiny elite’s accounts operate with the willing assistance of most of those who… https://t.co/nWBhEp3ZQz
Little progress is ever made against inequality because it’s misconceived. The financial outcomes of inequality are a second-order phenomenon, the wealth pumps (Turchin) that vacuum wealth into that tiny elite’s accounts operate with the willing assistance of most of those who… https://t.co/nWBhEp3ZQz
Little progress is ever made against inequality because it’s misconceived. The financial outcomes of inequality are a second-order phenomenon, the wealth pumps (Turchin) that vacuum wealth into that tiny elite’s accounts operate with the willing assistance of most of those who… https://t.co/nWBhEp3ZQz
Little progress is ever made against inequality because it’s misconceived. The financial outcomes of inequality are a second-order phenomenon, the wealth pumps (Turchin) that vacuum wealth into that tiny elite’s accounts operate with the willing assistance of most of those who… https://t.co/nWBhEp3ZQz
You’ll never find libertarians moving to locations with minimal government. Firstly because none really exist. Secondly they don’t exist because without all of that ‘government control’ human life is Lord of the Flies, on infinite repeat. https://t.co/j1kXtAYzCN
The great contribution of MMT-type ideas is to openly question the assumption from both sides of politics that tax ‘funds’ government work. Once you remove that link, you can start to have sensible discussions about taxation. That link is political and a strategic, and almost… https://t.co/oFP7KON015
The great contribution of MMT-type ideas is to openly question the assumption from both sides of politics that tax ‘funds’ government work. Once you remove that link, you can start to have sensible discussions about taxation. That link is political and strategic, and almost… https://t.co/oFP7KON015
Stats for a fuel crisis. The fuel tankers that deliver fuel within Australia annually travel a distance equivalent of travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use probably over 200 million litres of diesel themselves, on those… https://t.co/aySRUmiKX5
Stats for a fuel crisis. The fuel tankers that deliver fuel within Australia annually travel a distance equivalent of travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use probably over 200 million litres of diesel themselves, on those… https://t.co/9M4lAzCaMn
Stats for a fuel crisis. The fuel tankers that deliver fuel within Australia annually travel a distance equivalent of travelling from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then back to the Sun again. They use probably over 200 million litres of diesel themselves, on those… https://t.co/6bnT7S4DoE
For the nuclear numpties, a nuclear power plant is just a 19th century steam turbine, with fission heating the water. Time to move on.
For the nuclear numpties, a nuclear power plant is just a hideously expensive 19th century steam turbine, with fission heating the water. Time to move on.
Defenders of the status quo are reduced to saying the situation people are now in, with a global fuel crisis, is better for the poor than the alternative. https://t.co/N6F8qY1eM4
Because many of us grew up in a time when populist idiots were constrained by institutional mechanisms, there’s a sort of hope that what is logical and objective will ultimately prevail. That’s almost certainly delusional. Instead populism, throughout history, destroys pretty…
Because many of us grew up in a time when populist idiots were constrained by institutional mechanisms, there’s a sort of hope that what is logical and objective will ultimately prevail. That’s almost certainly delusional. Instead populism, throughout history, destroys pretty…
Because many of us grew up in a time when populist idiots were constrained by institutional mechanisms set up to repair the smoking ruins of the first half of the 20th century, there’s a sort of hope that what is logical and objective will ultimately prevail. That’s almost…
Because many of us grew up in a time when populist idiots were constrained by institutional mechanisms set up to repair the smoking ruins of the first half of the 20th century, there’s a sort of hope that what is logical and objective will ultimately prevail. That’s almost…
Why are we even arguing about how to generate energy? It’s engineering. Ask the engineers for a consensus view and they’ll tell you straight away what to do. They would have fixed Covid for us too. Civilisation means telling everybody to shut up, ignoring opinions, and…
The bizarre idea of ‘community consultation’ is a window into our most stupid and destructive beliefs. The idea that human groups, of whatever size, have some sort of collective will, a group mind that you need to survey in various ways, to determine what to do. A whole… https://t.co/9dhUoKigl5
It’s almost universally believed that democracy means ‘the people’ running a society. And that community consultation is the way we sound those people out, so that we know how to progress things. I’ve said many times here, ‘the people’ is not even a thing. It’s a lethal…
Humans never, at whatever scale you choose, from a committee through to the UN, become a group mind of some kind, with a ‘will’ to be sounded out. They absolutely do form groups. But LOTS of them, and all competing, for social status. Each aligned around a particular leader or…
Take a ‘local community’, as we see here. The idea is a fiction. Even within a small town the people will be aligned with a variety of social groups, each in competition with each other. There is no ‘community’, there’s only competing social groups. Fighting to be top dog in… https://t.co/IlGSQTNQuh
People form *networks*, with their particular groups being hubs within those networks. All of it is driven by status. The majority in any group are following the lead of somebody, imitating them and each other, to achieve status within the group, and in competition with other…
Societies look like the diagram. Not like the Tweet. All of it is status games. The fight for status, and therefore identity. We’re social animals, status is what gives us identity. /6 https://t.co/3tfcdSgmx2
Yes Minister brilliantly mocked the idea of ‘the people’ running societies by having the leader say ‘I am your leader…I must follow you.’ There are ways in which groups of people can be smart. The sort of thing studied under wisdom of the crowd and collective intelligence…
Neither of those areas of study believes human groups have some sort of collective mind or will. Collective intelligence or crowd wisdom arrives when individuals are able to escape ‘groupthink’. /8
I’ve watched the Trump bull in a china shop at work. I‘m supposed to believe this is a ‘fascist’ takeover of our democracies. Bollocks. Populists like Trump ‘work the crowd’, they don’t waste time trying to sound out what people think and feel. They offer them something.…
Steve Jobs used to say the same thing about business. Don’t waste time surveying your customers trying to figure out what they want. Human desire is fickle. People’s desires shift sometimes within 10 minutes, led again by influencers. You offer people something, and hope they…
THAT will form your ‘people’. You become the greatest influencer in the melee, for a time anyway. The largest hub in the network, if you’re lucky. /end
The dominant propaganda the fossil fuel status quo is rolling out in the face of the international clusterfuck we’re now living in? That renewable energy is only for the rich. We’ve heard that same rubbish before, the ‘inner city elites’ line. Most EVs in Australia for example…
Libertarians, cookers and kidults will be celebrating their victory in Australia. Where National Cabinet has agreed to ‘urge’ people to do things to save fuel. I remember urging as a new spineless nothing invented earlier in the Covid pandemic. It’s pathetic. Weak,…
The question for democracies is how King Trump accidentally managed to get them to mobilise renewables and EVs at last, after decades of standard democracy couldn’t move the dial? https://t.co/hCTb8QPFYb
The upcoming EV tax in Australia is sold under the usual narrative that fuel excise funds roads, and EV’s are therefore free-loading. The link between fuel excise and road funding (hypothecation) was formally severed almost 35 years ago, in 1992. Annual spending on roads in…
The upcoming EV tax in Australia is sold under the usual narrative that fuel excise funds roads, and EV’s are therefore free-loading. The link between fuel excise and road funding (hypothecation) was formally severed almost 35 years ago, in 1992. Annual spending on roads in…
David’s is the only sort of thing I bother with on social media. Empirical, evidence-based, uninterested in culture wars. https://t.co/20IDk3e2Tu
I think we need to be wary with the common explanation for populist movements, that they’re emergent from those groups who have been left behind. They certainly find an audience there. But populism is a universal iconoclasm, it destroys all established order. Once past a… https://t.co/tj9Dv1J6TS
That part of the innovation S-curve where a tipping point is reached, and the change takes off? Human groups run on status. That tipping point is the FOMO point, the point where ‘everybody else seems to be doing it’, and people rush to follow because ‘what everybody else is… https://t.co/Qv6PaX4NNa
I feel like I got this one right. https://t.co/45jIkxKS0z
Cutting off jet flights is the real showstopper for Kidult culture. That’s the one that broke the Covid public health action back. Nobody can stay home. Home would mean place being meaningful to us, rather than bucket lists of collectable places. https://t.co/zqRH6nXiWY
Another manufactured outrage about EVs is that they’re heavily subsidised compared to combustion vehicles. Annual governments subsidies to combustion vehicles are up to 30 times greater than what EVs receive, per year. New vehicle emissions standards will address some of this,… https://t.co/9CIhoy0hJb
Another manufactured outrage about EVs is that they’re heavily subsidised compared to combustion vehicles. Annual government subsidies to combustion vehicles are up to 30 times greater than what EVs receive, per year. New vehicle emissions standards will address some of this,… https://t.co/VwdV9zpfKB
Another manufactured outrage about EVs is that they’re heavily subsidised compared to combustion vehicles. Annual government subsidies to combustion vehicles are up to 15 times greater than what EVs receive, per year. New vehicle emissions standards will address some of this,… https://t.co/vExxzWIKZ9
I can think of two other things Australians also refuse to use now. The Liberal and National parties. https://t.co/YoryYemffA
I might be a bit strategically simple, but it seems to me the US leaving Iran would automatically reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran closed it to make the US go away. https://t.co/eVSw9DHamw