Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised.…

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really means. /1 https://t.co/Z7ytSGrzpK

At the same time as Australia’s international education performance has been in free fall, the select few have never had more opulence in education. We decided to ‘live with’ this poor educational performance. But not all of us did. /2 https://t.co/TKWc0EJQVZ

Education was privatised, with the public or common system relegated to safety net status. For those who can’t afford to send their kids private. (Hierarchical status games, this is how all groups work.) The privately-educated are still doing just fine. And that’s Covid too. /3

The same few are still shielding from the virus, or at least have the option to do so. Many don’t work so can shield at home. Private schools often have extensive infection control measures, for the kids. This really matters, to unpack this bullshit narrative of opening up. /4

Opening up only ever meant removal of *government* or State measures. The privileged despise the State. They had no intention of ever living with Covid, they had every intention of the rest of us doing that, for them. It’s a charade, looking around as if ‘normal’ life is back. /5

Like tours by fabulously wealthy rock stars, hooray, life is back to normal! Rock stars who retreated to their luxury estates and islands during the early pandemic, and now cocoon themselves with extensive Covid control measures behind the scenes. Like the Davos mob too. /6

We’re ‘living with’ Covid in the same way as we’re living with plummeting educational standards. As in, those who decided that aren’t living with those things at all. They don’t care that we are. They use the State they despise to subsidise their enclaves. /7

Abandon any idea that they see the world as a space of common life or interests. They think they’ll survive climate change because they’ve bought whole islands and built bunkers there. They have Paxlovid at home in case the virus slips by. It’s bog standard feudalism. /8

History’s most common social form, only once interrupted, from the late-19th to mid-20th century, when both natural (Spanish Flu) and human (world wars) catastrophes forced emergency suspension of the feudal structure, to create a ‘public’. A common world. /9

They wasted no time dismantling it again. Since the 1970s, that’s all our politics has been about. Small government, anti-State libertarianism. Just the old feudalism, using new words. Know your place, peasants. /end