Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with…

Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privatised the public health work. This is fundamental to bypassing the team sports politics of our time. /1 https://t.co/QKEQRoufCS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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