Australian public life

@AntonyGreenABC this tells a worldwide story stretching back many decades? https://t.co/cwZR4Vy85p

@MichaelWestBiz @BernardKeane how is the NSW $500 million 'Dine and Discover' program not just another grants rort? Tourist destinations and hospitality venues seem to have been packed solid for months, you can't get a booking. Just…

#auspol Staggers me that parties can win elections for 25 years by spending billions on border measures. But when the border is being used to keep out a lethal pathogen over a very short time, we suddenly get this patronising 'Fortress…

@gvconroy hey, in your fine piece for the ABC on AZ and clots, can you expand on what 'peak time' means, of 6 to 14 days? Does that mean most clots have occurred in that time period, after the first dose?

#auspol #covid19 funny (not ha ha funny) that the inventors of the ‘Fortress Australia’ line, to mock public health control of a lethal pathogen, also spent more than 2 decades winning elections by building this. https://t.co/0dymoWCYDD

@InsidersABC how about having a public health expert on the panel for the duration of the pandemic, even to one side (i.e. 4 on the show)? I suggest @Globalbiosec You include indigenous journalists for indigenous issues, why not experts…

Idiots gather under hashtags like #defundtheabc Making it easy to prevent anti-social suicide cults from self-organising. They're wearing name tags, all the time.

@auspol #covid19aus Dear ABC, if you're reading. Please ask Fran Kelly to stop dishing up Dorothy Dixers to guests, inviting them to blame ATAGI for the government's vaccine rollout.

#auspol #covid19aus can we remember Australia, that during much of 2020, when the federal government could have been improving quarantine and getting the best vaccine procurement deal for Australia, it…/1 https://t.co/YBVFcjZtxr 1)…

#covid19aus #auspol representative democracy works if political representatives operate within a web of public institutions that embed the expertise accumulated over generations. Watch Yes Minister, the show is all about that web. If that…

#auspol #covid19aus so transparent. The National Plan always was just a re-election document. It shifts attention off both of his failures - vaccination and quarantine - claiming that at 80% it’s vaccination job-done, and people can…

#auspol #covid19aus here's a proper National Plan, not just focused on winning the next election. https://t.co/JZcPweNFdA

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

‘Authoritarian’ and ‘free democratic’ are both PR terms. As a governance person, I’m more concerned about ‘free’ democracies electing reality TV stars who advocate flushing lungs with floor cleaner against Covid, and who reject election…

#auspol we all know, right, that the 70% and 80% numbers mean 70 and 80% of the way to the next federal election? The National Plan was always just a re-election plan. Has about as much epidemiology in it as a Corn Flakes box.…

#auspol #nswpol Yet again officials and institutions have had to try to rein in rampant cronyism and corruption. Yet again populist politics will try to make them the enemy. If you win elections by attacking your own institutions,…

#auspol this is the definition of populism. Win elections by attacking the institutions that keep society running. It’s decades of shock media attacking ‘bureaucrats’, becoming real. Those institutions are the continuity that keep society…

#auspol "New Zealand has abandoned its strategy of eliminating COVID-19 and will instead...live with coronavirus and control its spread as vaccinations rise." Translated into public health terms: "NZ has abandoned elimination, in favour of…

#auspol this rare HD footage of Queen Victoria has profound hints (I think) to how we don’t understand politics. The adulation for the monarch was genuine. Quick thread on why the wrong people keep winning elections. /1…

Nothing shows our imperial roots better than spending 25 years winning elections by putting up borders and walls, and moaning violently for 2 years when borders and movement restrictions apply to us instead. Free movement across the world…

Two conservative politicians arguing over who can open borders fastest. And it might win them elections. You can’t make this stuff up. #auspol

I agree with Walter Lippmann (from his 'The Phantom Public') that we have a far too idealised view of what politics is, and how it works. And this drives our cynicism towards it. Some quotes to see if you agree. /1 #auspol…

Hooray, now we can hopefully vaccinate the younger kids before they go to back to school! (Breaking news: I’ve just been informed we already sent all of the kids back to school, so that Qantas can return to profitability and the PM can win…

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021. This apportioning of territory after the Thirty Years War was in some ways the birth of what we call countries today. Why I think…

The German elections may be the start of inter-generational pushback. A sense that the young shifted the seats. The Germans do many things well, but as an example of how the old dominated, there is no common school day across Germany. Some…

Track what libertarian conservatives do across the world. It's a very cosy plagiarism club. In the UK today for example, they're having their own Christian Porter moment. Owen Paterson, a Tory MP, was found to have taken money.../1 #auspol…

Well done to the ABC for this digital journalism piece. It highlights the trap of believing too much that the daily political debate represents underlying realities. It rarely does, maybe more than 90% of the running and changing of the…

Why do we stick with our ideas about democracy as being rule by the public, when we keep voting for people who kill the public? Elected leaders are the tiniest tip of the democratic iceberg. A thread about our current madness. #auspol…

You have to wonder how much this isn’t about ATAGI guidelines, and all about the political reality that allowing 3rd doses at < 6 months would mean an admission that 2 doses isn’t ‘fully vaccinated’, just prior to the election. #auspol…

Twitter so often is just another venue for supporters of political parties to slug it out. Each to their own. The International Space Station (ISS) is an example I think of how politics, and our lack of understanding of it, hides…

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

Mission accomplished, in the yellow highlight. Runway cleared for re-election. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/kK5wlcH3yC

Representative democracy only works when its delegation to expertise and officials is actually in place and functioning. That's why we invented it, to free most of us from the concerns of keeping things running. If the delegation isn't…

Must be an election coming. #auspol https://t.co/7Z8jy1JMXG

The surge in informal voting for NSW local government elections is attributed to the absence of 'How To Vote' handouts at polling booths, due to Covid. Many assumed these were 'how to pick party X' flyers, all these years. But for many…

Democracy only works if elected representatives take no part in 99% of the running of the State. That is actually how representative democracy was designed. Mature democracies should have only minuscule changes as a result of elections.…

Have Tweeted a few times about how society is a high school. And that this is literally true, not an analogy. (See: https://t.co/1stDMhEXNh). You can understand everything going on with Covid using that lens. /1 #auspol #covid19aus…

Hey LNP, in a break from your election planning, how about doing some actual work and implementing your own announcements? Or is everyone already skiing in Europe? Hello, hello? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/NKttMz0pyA

If you're not sure who to vote for at the next federal election, try to get a 3rd dose of Covid vaccine before Christmas. That will tell you. #auspol

This Tweet is 6 hours old, and was used by ABC PM, including interview, today, in a story that was advertised as a possibility of Omicron being only half as virulent as Delta. It’s possibly an interesting hypothesis, but that’s pretty…

This year’s federal election will test a hypothesis. The Australian libertarians believe we share the same dislike of government as the public in the UK and US. I think the Oz public has shifted there, and will entertain elements of…

SKY News obediently shifting the narrative this morning to ‘ICU numbers are low’. Reality check for hospitalisation hopium from the ABC here. Robert Booy suggests hospital staff are just being ‘too careful’. Can we find him a gown?…

Reclassifying election results is only a couple of steps further down the road. https://t.co/bmOnfXUGaX

Walter Lippman believed that people choose governments based only on their perception of whether things are ‘working’ in society. If he’s right, the federal election could be unprecedented electoral slaughter. We can only hope. #auspol…

What are the achievements of the Morrison government? The only visible activity is the daily spinning of inactivity, as activity. Undergraduate culture war debating games, every day. I imagine Malcolm Turnbull leading the LNP through…

So we passed the 3-week mark since Christmas. And as night follows day, deaths followed hospitalisations, followed cases. Remembering these infections were a deliberate political act, to win a PM an election, and give the NSW Premier a…

My gut says the feds are toast at the election. But my brain says many treat politics like football, and the parties are their teams. And we all know people will back a losing team for generations.

‘Endemic’ is something always present in a population, at a certain level. Like low wages, vast gaps in wealth, underfunded public schools and hospitals, and low tax rates for the wealthy. ‘Epidemic’ is peaks within this. Like massive tax…

We’re well past the point where who wins the next election will make much difference for our major problems. Democracy’s problems aren’t in who is and isn’t winning elections. It’s that the populist bit of democracy - elections - has…

So at this point the only thing stopping 3 doses being called 'fully vaccinated' is that only 35% of Australians being fully vaccinated didn't run well with the election focus groups? https://t.co/pXsOge6jS1

One of 3 ‘endemic’ puff pieces from the ABC today. Highlights: 1) “Professor Jenkins believes the virus will soon become endemic on the east coast of Australia…/1 https://t.co/GFMPprFhJR …(and many other developed countries) which means…

Democracy is failing not because politicians are rorting and lying and pursuing only what is popular. They've always done that. /1 #auspol https://t.co/4uoofWcyzn It's failing because all the checks and balances to control the populist,…

Political journalism is largely infected with the same populism virus as the rest of society now, so we'll struggle to get much useful analysis while elections are underway. Let's talk about the ONS survey and trends here. /1 #auspol…

Ongoing ANU polling shows how populism fails. The country is clearly unimpressed with 'Let it Rip' Covid, but is powerless to do anything in real time because populist democracy is only constrained by elections. /1 #auspol #COVID19aus…

Victoria has had about 10,000 Covid cases in schools, in the past week (according to the ABC). NSW? Who knows. Actually, the NSW government knows. #auspol

Yesterday we got details about school infections in NSW. Over 20,000 children infected in the first 2 weeks, more than 500 staff infected last week alone. Is it a headline? No. In populist democracy, elections are Prom Night. All focus is…

I'm predicting by the end of the day this shark will be a Chinese Communist shark bred and released by Anthony Albanese. If Albo had some gumption, he'd be planting the seed 'which PM do we know who is a big fan of sharks?' #auspol

Just a tip to any politicians watching, those brutal by-election and fed election polling results mean 'we Australians don't want to live with this fucking virus'. You won't need a focus group.

Paul Keating in 1997. Contrast with the slogan-spewing 'leadership' we have today. The decision to expand NATO by inviting Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to participate and to hold out the prospect to others—in other words, to move…

Covid almost completely absent from the news now. Failed Western leaders like Johnson and Morrison see an opportunity to rescue their own careers, wars are tremendous platforms for populist politicians. We can walk and chew gum, deal with…

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for…

I guess we shouldn't have been surprised that the NSW Government introduced the same rigorous methodology for tracking Covid cases, as it uses for allocating grants prior to an election. You collect the data you want to see.

It’s a flaw in current democracy that it makes much difference at all who gets elected. Well over 95% of what needs to happen in a country every day is done by its institutions. Our elections have become pivotal only because those…

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

This graph from Roy Morgan I think shows an essential truth about Australian politics. People hate their governments in good times, and love them in a crisis. Look at 2008 (GFC) and early-mid 2020 (national lockdown). A few implications…/1…

SKY News currently screening a half-hour party political featuring Josh Frydenberg, under the pretend cover of journalism about the budget. Nauseating. His opponent, an independent, described as ‘cashed up’, the latest LNP-Murdoch election…

This piece on the state of country roads is a window into something much more seriously wrong with how we understand democracy. Short thread. /1 #auspol https://t.co/r61wcjtptP As the article clearly points out, roads funding is beholden…

The day’s events suggest the leader who punches the other in the face at the televised leadership debates will win the election in a landslide.

Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An…

What political opponents to the current conservative, neoliberal, libertarian orthodoxy in the developed may need to do is be as populist as their opponents. Good people are too nice, politically. We’ve seen outrageous populism from…

So, non-LNP members of NSW parliament. Now's the chance to reverse the State's Covid 'strategy' (a flattering term for it). https://t.co/vGgUyXzTrd

The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real…

“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

At about 20 seconds in, a close-up of his wedding ring, when talking about an unstable world. Albanese is not currently married. I doubt this is accidental. https://t.co/RNT1zx7zy9

Paul Keating was the last Prime Minister before Morrison who had a ‘miracle’ win. We know what happened to him at the election after that.

If I was Labor, I’d be running ads between now and the election with the PM’s voice saying these words about risk, overlaid upon images of the bushfires, floods and aged care homes. https://t.co/JT4oatzCpl

The election narratives from both sides will be mostly irrelevant. Letting Covid rip violated the Australian expectation of what governments should do. Covid even removed Trump, and that's in libertarian heartland. Carnage may be on the…

The @AusElectoralCom Twitter feed is fabulous. The now famous response to 'can we draw dicks on the ballot paper' a case in point. Organising elections is a shit job, more power to these guys. https://t.co/wm9eIAbaDg

The triumphant genius of conservative politics is that an entire election can be framed as being about a percentage point or two on one of their meaningless economic indicators. This is what they designed the ‘Economy’ to do, to suck the…

Now that the election has arrived, I urge everybody to read Lippmann’s wisdom on how these things work, and on democracy in general. Re-Tweeting a thread. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts

This is a Covid election, as the US election also was. The journalists who cover it won't see it as that, because they haven't registered Covid as a story to even write much about for 6 months. But the infected families of Australia see it.

Politicians in an election campaign throw buckets of money at problems that should just be funded irrespective of who’s in power. We shouldn’t need to vote to get basic things funded.

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

The sclerotic personality. Rigid, unable to adapt. That’s most developed countries, and this is why, if you’re frustrated. We’re giant nursing homes. Staffed by cheap immigrant labour, who we simultaneously vilify to win elections.…

#insiders demonstrating everything about the ‘Economy’. A non-existent fantasy that has replaced society, and dominates politics. One whole week of the election campaign dominated by a cell in a spreadsheet.

We desperately need a change of government in Australia. The character of the leader drives a lot of voters, they don’t pay much attention to anything else. Albanese is coming across as bumbling and apologetic, which is inexcusable with…

1) Undecided voters this close to an election are people who pay no attention to politics. Their vote is equivalent to ‘trending on Twitter’. 2) The parties who win elections spend most of their time pitching to people who *don’t* agree…

Noting that ‘living with the virus’ wasn’t even a decision of parliament. The LNP closed parliament. https://t.co/d7FoBIeYgh

The Opposition Leader and candidate for PM gets Covid mid-campaign, and Covid still won't be an election issue. Sing it with me: "Australians All Let Us Rejoice For We are Dumb and Free..." #auspol I had meant to tag @YouAreLobbyLud as I…

72 no longer living with the virus in NSW this week. A day to go. How much death is acceptable? Anybody in the press gallery fancy asking, on the election hustings? Or are we all still focused on fractions of a percent of some idiot…

If elections are needed to change your country in any sort of fundamental way, your democracy is already broken.

Elections are glorious. I think there are only 21 countries in the world who still mandate a vote. The conservatives will keep trying to remove it here. It's only by requiring the apathetic to vote that we avoid politics run by zealots and…

7-day average for deaths has hit 42 now. We need the election out of the way so that hopefully somebody in Canberra can do some grown up public health work. Including reporters, @michellegrattan and @michaelpas two of the few who still…

The government who doesn’t believe in government, will fund election promises by…getting rid of more government. Who saw that coming. Further diluting actual expertise in Canberra, replacing it with more populist buffoons with Napoleon…

Who remembers the entire nation put on hold for a week in the last LNP term, while they argued over who was going to be leader? And they won the next election. Voting has lost pretty much all connection with the assessment of basic…

#auspol A close election result is still bad for Australia. It means that blatant incompetence and corruption doesn't sway votes. That's how the US and UK began their descents into populist madness. Competence is objective, it's not about…

On this election eve Australia, you can choose between a government who doesn't believe in government, and...anybody else at all, really.

Election logic is actually pretty simple. Walter Lippmann used to say that a public votes in a new government when problems overflow politics and start to enter their lives. Representative democracies delegate problems to politicians, they…

All elections are now battles for the institution of government. Pollies are a sideshow. If the libertarians continue to win, generations of expertise in government institutions will continue to be gutted. Those institutions are society’s…

Walked past a local polling booth and none of the usual election atmosphere was there. People queued for miles, some in masks. No democracy sausages cooking. Another public carnival the Covid deniers have ruined. So many voted early to…

No matter who you vote for, the beautiful thing about Australia is how many of us treat an election day as a national event, like a grand final. We need to not lose sight of the basic community nature of what makes us who we are. Most of…

Standing ovation to the @AusElectoralCom I doubt many know the enormous complexity of organising any election. To do it for the whole country seamlessly - it’s a mind-boggling task. #auspol

Anybody else smiling at the thought of how much money Clive has pissed up a wall in this election? Australia doesn’t want Trump wannabes. #auspol

A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1…

Chris Kenny blaming voters for the loss of blue ribbon Liberal heartland is the clearest indication yet that if the Liberal Party is to survive, it has to either close SKY News down, or stop visiting it and equating its bubble with the…

Hey @SkyNewsAust, keep running that ‘so-called independents’ line, even though the election is over and won. I’m sure it will motivate the so-called independents to support a Royal Commission into you and the rest of the so-called…

Would love to be able to see the thoughts in Dominic Perrottet’s head last night, as the election results unfolded in NSW. Less than a year to the NSW election, and he’s not a moderate Liberal.

The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not…

Those occasional experiences which jolt you into sudden realisation about how fast time can pass you by. I had one today when I heard it's 14 years since Natasha left parliament. 14 years! https://t.co/B2zeX1AQKD

I think it’s a mistake to claim the election result for any particular group. That tribalism is what the election is a victory against. It’s a victory for the community of Australia, reasserting community as our focus. Not mutually…

The Australia Institute tracked primary voting trends in a report in 2016. This last election restores the ALP to the trendline, followed by both major parties for decades. https://t.co/3AE1pOMzpU

The Liberal Party's primary vote has dropped for the past 3 elections. Alone it never achieves a primary as high as the ALP. The total primary votes for major progressive (ALP + Greens) parties exceeds the LNP primary vote consistently.…

It cost over $370 million to run the 2019 election. I'm guessing with Covid the 2022 poll could top $500 million. #auspol

Queensland is an outlier in federal elections. Paradoxically, it’s the most European and American in how it votes. The most receptive to small government, neoliberal and libertarian ideas. We don ‘t look enough at demography and geography…

Dutton’s dilemma is that to be an effective opposition leader in the LNP vein he has to be an attack dog. But if he does that he drives away the moderates he desperately needs to regain. A problem entirely of the LNP’s own making, by…

If the federal election told us anything, it’s that whining freedumb warriors don’t register politically. And yet they’re so often given as the reason we can’t go harder against Covid, because the ‘community’ won’t tolerate it. They’re not…

‘The ABC Election Computer’. Do you reckon it has a name tag that says that? (I’m betting it’s actually a Dell.) https://t.co/KRa107fsDE

What led the Liberal Party astray in Australia, the 'bubble' they now live inside. Laughably tiny viewer numbers, but like Puss in Boots contrived to convince the ultra-cons they have an audience. The only pathway out of the wilderness for…

Seriously? This is just continuing the Howard-Abbott-Morrison agenda. Surrendering small-l liberal ideas, and shifting the LNP to a conservative party, kept afloat by culture war politics targeted at the ALP heartland? Isn't this obvious?…

Now the election is over, time for political journalists to return to the greatest crisis facing the country. Covid. It’s clear the previous government workshopped spin to respond to the alarming number of ongoing weekly deaths from Covid.…

Paradoxically, progressive voters are the main cause of populism. The most divorced from the basic realities of power and how it’s exercised to bring about change. Conservatives rarely protest, they know it changes hardly anything. They…

Over 1300 Australians have died of Covid since election day. 'No major hitches'. #auspol https://t.co/w1ZFnChw09

A crucial educative thing. Conservatives have been winning the political wars for decades not by winning elections, but by both destroying and perverting institutions. Institutions run our societies, not politicians. https://t.co/eHVnEfChtE

Over 1600 people have now died of Covid (not with, of) since the election. More vaccines and quarantine is good, but the vaccines don’t stop Covid, and quarantine is a bit moot when we have higher Covid density inside than outside…

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol…

More minimising fun with numbers, this time the ABC. Look, Australia is doing well! We’re killing relatively far fewer than the pandemic bloodbath overseas! Maths and language are the biggest weapons of this pandemic. Have a look at this…

Thank you ABC for putting faces to the statistics. Maths has been a key weapon of Covid minimisation. And language. These are the cannon fodder we've decided as a nation had to die to keep coffee shops open and airlines flying.…

Watching Tory candidates for PM on @SophyRidgeSky pitch to the fantasies of their own colleagues, totally divorced from most of the basic issues destroying the UK. It’s like an election for the polo team at Eton or Winchester.

Omicron wave 1 was largely caused by the (then) pending federal election. Omicron waves 2 & 3 will be caused by the pending NSW and Victorian elections. It's why they won't act, for fear of spooking donors and voters. Never let…

Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol…

'We inherited a trillion dollars of debt' - true. Also inherited - 8073 deaths from Covid. Since the election: - over 2400 more deaths - over 1.7 million more infections.

Lippmann was deeply distrustful of government, and yet this was his advice. Also clearly saw the future of populism, in his wise words that in a mature democracy, an election should change hardly anything. The fact it does shows…

'Balance' always means 'let the status quo continue. Albo suggests this is a matter between employer and employee. Went to the election saying employers had been suppressing wages and working conditions for a decade. I'm sure they're…

The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody…

The huge Omicron wave over Christmas was the previous PM in pre-election mode. NSW and Vic are allowing catastrophic infection levels because their leaders, like Morrison, fear spooking voters. Covid will only be over when we get…

A useful graphic to determine which States have elections next. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/j2DH9FZDPc

Some say the red arrow represents the point where ordinary Australians had had enough of fighting Covid. No. It's where the previous PM began his run for the election. JobKeeper ended months earlier at the purple arrow. Most had not been…

Even if it’s true (it isn’t) that ‘Australians won’t tolerate more public health protections’, so what? I was a teacher, most kids would rather do nothing at school all day. It’s not an option. If you put your hand up for election, do your…

All along, like Trump, when Morrison said he wanted ‘government out of peoples’ lives’, he also meant his Minister’s lives. Populism always leads to ‘Great Leader’ tinpot dictators. https://t.co/HperjT7DOf

But WHY did Morrison do this? Many have been saying why for more than 2 years. The same reason he set up National Cabinet. He was in emergency mode to head off a proper public health response, to Covid. Like Perrottet, he saw Covid as a…

The Anglo democratic heist (get rid of government and hand over the keys to the Treasury, for the donors), Trump-Johnson-Morrison, is wounded but not beaten. Populism is the smoke and mirrors they’ve used to do it. The damage may already…

Morrison demonstrated how populism works today. When the questioning got tough, the immediate ‘the public doesn’t care about this sort of thing’. The public wouldn’t even know about these powers. It’s irrelevant. The public can’t fly the…

This is the US. But this is exactly what the previous government was doing here, and National Cabinet was a crucial part of the strategy. At first Premiers (representing public health departments) resisted. But they’re all now lined up…

About 5% of the population are strong believers in the conservative cause célèbres of the past 30 years. That 5% is funded by the top 1% to make enough noise to create an impression of majority support. Stats on Americans who believe the…

As an Australian, I'm preparing for the abolition of the NSW Premier at the 2023 election. https://t.co/pSBDbaP9co

The ALP knows these tax cuts are a Trojan Horse to destroy progressive income taxation in Australia. That was the LNP plan, has been for years. But Albo worries breaking an election promise will be unpopular. Popularity is the Achilles…

When Albo’s honeymoon period ends, he may want to look back at these headlines and wonder why swathes of Labour voters have headed to the Greens. What possible ALP constituency is he protecting here? Donors? #auspol https://t.co/ZPDkiZOLXZ

The LNP are a coalition between two fundamentally different belief systems. Agrarian socialists (Nats) and free market neoliberals (Libs). About all they have in common is hatred of Labor, and unions. If the ALP and Greens formed a…

I’m trying to remember if that’s the Auslan for ‘gifting my core voters to the Greens’. https://t.co/jHFQaAS9Nh

Not being Donald Trump got Joe Biden about 100 days of popularity. Not being Scott Morrison has lubricated Albo’s first 100 days. He should look at what happened to Biden after his first 100 days. You don’t last long being a more polite…

When the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986, the eventual enquiry found that an internal NASA culture of suppression of individual criticism led to the disaster. I thought of this in relation to National Cabinet and AHPPC, short thread.…

ABC radio on the way home, talking about vulnerable people having to isolate themselves more and more to avoid Covid. Some staggering number of people with blood cancer (over 100,000?) just for starters. A quick thought experiment. Crime,…

Two days after pushing through 7 to 5 day isolation, the push is already on for zero. Conservatives are not a political party, they're the old donors now having captured the mechanism of government. Regulatory capture. Why they have only…

Biden wanted decency in politics. He misread the situation badly as old Left v Right politics. Populism destroys all politics. Biden is floundering. Albanese a carbon copy, and adopting LNP policies, to be decent i.e. not break promises.…

What looks like epidemic waves of infection, with the virus coming at us in repeated waves, is really not that. We are the waves, we’re not onlookers. Australia shows this, because the waves didn’t really start in earnest until end-2021.…

Sounds like another ex-PM we know. The big Anglo troika of Trump-Morrison-Johnson now all gone. All brought up being told they would lead the world. The world didn't agree. https://t.co/rekqTExCJa

I think we need another public holiday to commemorate all of the thousands who have died in Australia this year from a mysterious disease that disappeared in late-2021, leading up to an election.

The response to the Queen’s death. It seems almost a given that you’re supposed to celebrate the destruction of that institution, and replacement with a republic. But what model of republic can escape outright populism, our current…

“We remain of the view that if people are sick, whether from Covid or from other health issues, they should not be at work and that is important,’’ Mr Albanese said. Keep up these LNP public health-free talking points, Albo. It's driving…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

The extraordinary coincidence of every single vaccination metric flatlining in Australia on the feel-good Covid is over boosterism lead-up to the federal election, and not budging since. I wouldn’t let a politician even walk my dog.…

The embarrassing failure of democracies on climate change and now Covid has to force a re-think of the idea that complex societies are best run by popularity contest, which we call elections. It worked while those elected were guided by…

We elect populists and actually let them run things. They say Covid is over. They also say their hospitals are collapsing under the weight of public illness. In the SAME meetings. Time to appoint administrators and get rid of elections.…

What is the actual point of elections, for democracy now? Most of our big problems have known and agreed solutions in the expert community. All elected twits do is intercept the money for the required actions, and use it to fund…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

The perfect example of how elections were the best thing ever invented for the worst people in the world, to take charge of every nation. Nothing is easier to manipulate than popularity. https://t.co/CesDptOuKm via @ABCaustralia

This is the NSW control guideline for whooping cough. Also a vaccine-preventable disease. This and the influenza control guidelines both recommend isolation of the infected. How much of the State's public health system does the Premier…

The LNP must be wondering who won the last election. A disgraceful stain on public administration that will never be forgiven. The ALP will never get another vote from me. https://t.co/MPvK6bENk0

The thing politicians fear most is being totally ignored. The ALP flicked the switch to irrelevance today, for me anyway. This is also what all election-democracy will always produce. Time to select leaders by sortition, as we do for…

Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

Mark Dreyfus has put forward a pretty good anti-corruption body. But it’s worth remembering that almost none of it would be necessary, if we got rid of elections and selected representatives another way. By random, for example, as we do…

“There’s not a role for government in running every bit of peoples’ lives forever.” Anthony Albanese Great, we can all stay at home on permanent holiday. Unless there’s some other group that runs every bit of our lives already. 🤔

Societies are literally made out of ideas, out of beliefs. Conservatives have known this a long time. The framework of how we think about public issues has been provided by them. When the ALP win an election, they still inherit that…

The Teals are a fantastic way to break up stale party politics. The much bigger question though for democracy, which is flailing on any fair measure, is whether it can get rid of popularity as its foundation. Elections have to go. /1…

Another live with the virus democidal sociopath hopefully confined to electoral oblivion. Trump, Johnson, Morrison gone. Political commentators are too stupid to understand how much role Covid played in their downfall. Albo needs to wake…

When an unelected king comes up against electoral populists, I'm putting my money on the king being the more democratic way forward. We delude ourselves in thinking elections make democracy democratic, they do the exact opposite.…

Why won't they ditch the tax cuts? Because they're worried it will be unpopular. Popularity is toxic to democracy, you can't run a complex society using popularity. Popularity is not democracy. Get rid of elections. https://t.co/Wv3XhQCqql

"The democratic idealists of practically all schools of thought have managed to remain remarkably oblivious to the obvious facts." Reinhold Niebuhr Democracy is failing because we don't understand it. Populists used spin to make people…

I know some suspect me of having drunk the authoritarian Kool Aid, by suggesting we abolish elections. But I often Tweet about how societies are now modelled after high schools, and their popularity networks. It's not an analogy. Elections…

The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so that even the other side continues to do their work, when…

This bad thinking was always there. What's changed is that it's now allowed to run countries. How was it allowed to do that? By populism, elections. Elections allow millions of unqualified idiots to put their favourite idiots in charge.…

In my war on elections and populism, on my side is the fact that even where elections are offered, people increasingly don't bother to show up to vote. There is no 'will of the people'. There is a won't though. https://t.co/Pk0fWtoZfs

Re-sharing this as more background to my crusade to rid us of populism and elections. https://t.co/9cYYvWDFAg

The war on popularity, part something. Power is achieved by a majority of votes. This is how the voting system works. The problem with it is, ‘majority rules’ is profoundly undemocratic. We’re in a public health emergency where public…

Epidemiologically, what happened at the purple arrow? A previous PM wanted to 'end' the pandemic and allow fun Christmas holidays, to give him a launchpad into the election. Popularity did it. Elections. We need to get them out of…

Why would they do this idiot thing? Because - elections. They promised in the election. Popularity breaks everything, again. Making this argument is like taking candy from a baby. https://t.co/k9zXoyTx4Y

Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a…

The dropping of isolation requirements dovetails nicely into upcoming Victorian and NSW elections, just as the explosion of Omicron cases coincided with the lead-up to the federal election. National Cabinet’s only function is electoral…

This bromance shocked many. But it’s simple to understand. Both have imminent State elections. Election-based politics makes all politics converge on a single issue: popularity. Eventually it becomes an end in itself, crossing all…

Dramatic waning of effectiveness of vaccines, in a public health strategy that is vaccination only. The herd of elephants in the room for our Covid ‘strategy’. UKHSA data (see link at end). Symptomatic disease first. (Experts welcome to…

Andrews is doing this because he has an election coming up. Elections are popularity contests. Popularity destroys democracy, and ruins health and lives. The overwhelming majority of infections and deaths in Australia in this pandemic have…

If elections are so essential to democracy, why do only 10% of countries with elections make voting compulsory? And why do only half of those bother to enforce it? You’re fined more for parking your car incorrectly than you are for not…

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

See the culprit? Elections. My local member is swamping us with taxpayer-funded glossy colour ‘news’ about their drip-feeding of politically-targeted novelty cheques over the past term. Ready for the NSW election. Meantime many local roads…

A measure of just how much elections destroy public administration is that Australia now has weaker Covid protections than even the US. Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of the ritualised popularity contest.

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

No, the West trashed its vital institutions and tries to fix it by running endless polls and elections. We broke the grown up world and now run massive high schools where spots in the hierarchy are won by popularity. https://t.co/nwx8oIYfDe

People who really understand democracy know that removing elections would only compromise populist jocks who want to game it for their own advantage. Imagine Trump trying to gain power with any sort of competency test. Like a job…

People like this only get traction in our societies via elections. Popularity is easily manipulated, it’s called marketing. Introduce even basic competency requirements for political leadership, or make selection random, and the keyboard…

Truss was a student politician who, like most current politicians, realised you could make an entire career out of having no connection with reality at all. Just undergraduate debating points. Elections is the pathway these zealots use to…

Another (welcome I'm sure) reminder that popularity (elections) are the way these beliefs achieve sitting members in our parliaments. The beliefs would survive no other test of suitability. https://t.co/UgLOOOViGZ

Neoliberalism was always such a stupid set of ideas that you have to look deeper to understand how it wasn’t a laughing stock from Day 1. It got up because popularity-based politics is content-free. It has no test of the empirical reality…

Listened to a piece on ABC Radio this week about building ventilation. @DrPieterPeach made a guest cameo. Innes Willox said new buildings could factor in better ventilation, but it can be a very difficult task for old buildings. And that…

Chesterton said: “Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive.” Public health similarly used to be us following the advice of trained and experienced professionals, on matters we…

The Tories went through excruciating weeks of fully democratic internal party processes to select Truss. Simple proof that elections achieve nothing, and are not the same thing as democracy. You shouldn’t have to make important things…

This is more like it, ask why we need targeted grants at all. They’re entirely a mechanism to pork barrel popularity. The feds collect most of the money, and use it to buy election victories. Give it back to local and State governments to…

On a continued theme, how do think tanks succeed? By creating marketing strategies for ideas, that then become popular. Once popular, they win elections. Every cesspit of our democracy links back to popularity and elections. We don’t need…

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

If you think elections are important for democracy (I think they destroy it), why is it that where voting isn’t compulsory, so many can’t be bothered? Not an argument for voluntary voting either, that’s a gaming of elections. An argument…

Social media is like a daily populist election. Yesterday’s stories about Medicare rorting, for example. It quickly became a slugfest. But for all public programs, there has to be governance and accountability. You know, the stuff the…

Great piece here on the endgame of populism. Elections, voters and weaponised media create a mutually reinforcing 'triangle of doom' that continuously ramps up insanity, until everything implodes. Note that elections are the keystone.…

I've seen some updated Covid advice from schools, following the ending of isolation requirements. All I've seen say that's the change they're making, i.e. no isolation. 'Attendance will be prioritised'. No indication of any WHS…

Elections can’t fix elections. https://t.co/YSqAff7jAZ

The Imperial Examination ‘cells’ (these at Jiangnan) used to select workers in the Chinese Imperial civil service. A practice more than 1500 years old. A thread on this window into the hidden secret sauce that runs our own societies, and…

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

Election results and polls won’t tell you who leads. Statistics will tell you the real story, these from the Australia Institute for example. The LNP still say the answer to the energy crisis is to ‘pick up the phone to the gas companies’.…

You see? The solution to the failure of elected dimwits to govern is always seen as - another election. The Tories in the meantime want to win the next election. Elections, elections, elections. This is popularity politics, popularity is…

While the UK collapses, the governing Tories see the true emergency as a possible 'election wipeout'. I don't know how much more obvious it needs to be that our politics is terminal because of elections. Kevin Rudd was resuscitated for the…

Widespread elections began only at the start of the 20th century. You can see a bit of a surge in popularity (ha) for democracy after that, but trends are all heading the wrong way again now. Fast. https://t.co/u7MQiUe8Ba…

Re-Tweet. We’re fetishists of a procedure. “It would appear that the fundamental cause of democratic fatigue syndrome lies in the fact that we have all become electoral fundamentalists, venerating elections but despising the people who are…

The leadership battle, the grown up popularity contest. Nothing excites the punters or political journalists more, it’s a frenzy. We don’t even wait for elections now, we have mini-elections throughout every term. It’s all we know. It…

I really hope Teals dominate Vic and NSW elections. But because they’re escalating critical issues that should already have been core business of government. How they’re forced to do it, by trying to make this action popular, is a damning…

The problems aren’t coming from the hereditary head of state or the House of Lords. It’s all in the Commons. Anthony’s second sentence describes the root cause. Elections. https://t.co/ne6wZK5H3Y

I’m interested in this debate only because it’s a window into minimisation, the rage of the age. The claim that the ‘vast majority’ don’t commit fraud or waste is true for all jobs. The vast majority also drive safely, and don’t die of…

Budget day, the most sacred of all religious ceremonies in democracies replaced by economies. Where the most popular ideologues of the day get to divert all of the essential resources of the country to funding their re-election.…

Plenty of sensible things in the budget last night. Lots still to do, not least action on Covid. I sat there pondering that we have to endure the populist drivel of elections coming between us and necessary change, waiting for essential…

It doesn’t escape the Chinese I’m sure that the same Western leaders who bray about a ‘rules-based international order’ argue for ‘personal responsibility’ based order at home, weaponising the shredding of domestic law to win populist…

Political libertarians are democratic hackers. They take democracies and insert destructive anti-social code into the operating system, ideas and beliefs about individual freedoms that are fundamentally opposed to the whole idea of…

The public can seem really stupid. But representative democracy was designed so that they didn’t have to know how most things work. It won’t survive leaders who replace it with a market. How’d they get the job? Elections. Popularity is how…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why…

For democracy to survive, social media has to be shut down. (Bear with me.) The really dangerous thing about social media isn’t the technology itself, it’s the core idea behind it, that society builds itself from the bottom up. That ‘the…

The ABC captions one of the images: “Only a small proportion of the population has been infected and built immunity.” Like not infecting everybody is China’s failure. I’m not aware of another pandemic where infecting everybody was seen as…

The problem with US-based democracy theory is that it only knows the cartoon extremism of the US experience. So everything is these boring big binaries of authoritarianism vs ‘bottom-up’, ‘grassroots’ action, centred on elections. /1…

The fact Bolsonaro is still in the race, let alone might win, should be a challenge to anybody who believes free and fair elections express the 'will of the people'. They're just popularity contests, easily gamed. https://t.co/gEkIq2ShXM

The big slaughter over summer for the federal election is easily beaten by the mass slaughter for the Vic and NSW elections. Daily average deaths now still over twice what they were at Christmas. #covid19aus https://t.co/LwSXOsueZx

New ‘living with gambling’ changes, where personal responsibility will fail, again. Populist politicians captured by our big industries, desperate for donations to fund more elections, to achieve…winning more elections.…

The previous CHO was made Governor, likely to shut her up and smooth the way for Queensland ‘consistency’ with the National Cabinet approach to Covid i.e. do nothing. Premiers in 2022, heroes to zeroes. Tamed by the Morrison Groupthink…

Described as 'bipartisan' politics at the time, what it really shows is that both men have an election coming up. Elections were once a (poor) means to an end, now they're an end in themselves. Pollies get elected so they can get…

The Australian community has been smashing the rest of the world in energy transition to renewables. Our current crisis is entirely due to elected fools providing no infrastructure to use this tsunami of renewable energy. Elections are the…

And as David says, how do they do it? They rig elections. None of the Trumpian rubbish about rigged elections, this is in plain sight, with gerrymandering. Elections are the way vested interests destroy democracy. https://t.co/CglBJgtFBe

All of populist, election-based politics is theatre. Politicians don’t run the country, officials do, so it’s all a show. Not only are they only the tiniest veneer of what happens in government, government itself represents just a tiny…

I’ve Tweeted about how the ISS shows the enormous degree of inter-relationship and cooperation between countries, at historically unprecedented scales. So why (climate stalemate on TV right now) do we seem to be constantly in political…

Voting is against democracy. Many Americans won’t vote, even if they want to, because the election is a work day. Generally only about 60% bother anyway. The winners always claim this gives them a ‘mandate’ from the ‘will of the people’.…

The ABC could mean ‘will be returning after Covid-19’. But sadly they mean that Covid-19 is already over. Difficult to see these kids reaching the same age as the elderly folk they’re buddying with here, with several Covid infections each…

The problem isn’t that the Gregs of the world don’t understand. It’s that elections give the Trumps of the world a mechanism to mobilise the Gregs, to take control of societies. https://t.co/TgfBp9iQ62

Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as a window to the real answer. /1 (source:…

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if…

I re-watched Nosedive on the weekend, a great Black Mirror episode. About a society where nearly every transaction is carried out via ‘likes’, via popularity. This is us now. Populism IS this. Election-based politics for every granular…

Libertarian politics was an indulgence of rich nations with few existential challenges. Its time is over. Societies are collapsing. Uprooting it will be brutal, because it already hijacked elections to entrench itself.…

Reality is invoicing us for 50 years of pretending that popularity (elections) solves any of the world’s problems. You remember the popular people at school, so often stupid, vain, venal. They’re now running countries, because we made…

The much more likely explanation is that a series of pathetic provocations by the LNP to try to win an unwinnable election have now passed, and normal diplomacy has returned. The idea China 'capitulated' is ridiculous. To what? #auspol…

Trump’s agenda is the same as all populists. Gut the institutions that are actually the foundation of all democracy. His ‘Schedule F’ promises, that’s what they’re about. Nothing about Left or Right. Using elections (popularity) to destroy…

Elections allow private school toffs who couldn’t even boil an egg to run countries. Elections are democracy’s fatal flaw. https://t.co/1n6fDnS6xu

Using the G20 to illustrate again that how we think about politics may be upside down. And how those who oppose 'neoliberalism' actually use all of neoliberalism's framings, without even being aware of it. Huge consequences for Covid too.…

The people who swear the best way to manage energy is to keep shipping tens of billions of dollars offshore every year to buy it from Texans and the Arab states, also say the best way to beat a pandemic is to do nothing about it. And they…

“It’s time to consider removing decisions about climate change from the short-term political cycle.” Let’s add Covid to that list. Elections are destroying civilisation. https://t.co/9E1LVEvLdF

Firing up my broken record again, let’s give up the idea we can have accountability bodies to keep check on politicians. Just get rid of elections and pretty much all of the corruption evaporates. https://t.co/AYUh11Gxif

ABC PM this afternoon found 3 experts to say that China needs to let the virus ‘circulate’. No indication of how much. Claims the current variants are milder. This may destroy our economic supply chains. Let’s see if that’s the ‘living…

What using popularity (elections) to drive society's decisions does. A simple calculation of home-grown almost free energy, versus buying it from overseas at the cost of tens of billions per year, while incinerating the planet, comes down…

I haven’t seen one piece of analysis that gets to the real reason Morrison probably did this. He was determined that the pandemic would not be allowed to interrupt his beloved economy, and his re-election campaign. https://t.co/Ax8HFGQVxe

Election today. We’ll say ‘the people have spoken’. But they won’t say a word. They’ll put some marks on a bit of paper, and be counted. Numbers, not words. Politicians will then make up what the numbers mean, for the next 3 years. ‘The…

Hooray, like every other election for the past 30 years, somebody is more popular than somebody else. Like being back at school. If you want a job you usually have to demonstrate some sort of competence. To run the country, you only have…

Limited action on climate and Covid, even with changed winners at elections, shows how democracy has been gamed. The conservatives win long-term not by winning elections, but by manipulating what is popular. That way even their opponents…

Anybody with me yet on getting rid of elections? Why would grown-ups ever think popularity would solve any grown-up problem? We don’t raise our kids that way, we don’t run our businesses that way. https://t.co/aZsQqR6Kt4

The ‘voice of the people’ isn’t a voice. It’s a simple count of votes. The actual voices of the people you can hear in a stadium. Incoherent noise. Elections squash the noise into a content-free number. Populism uses the number to brand…

Wow, that's big numbers after 6 months. Did we end up throwing away our 13 million doses, because we were too busy trying to win elections and infect everybody? https://t.co/wMgwv72GeW

The UK had a by-election this week. What’s not shown here or commented on much, is that only just over 40% of people even bothered to vote. If democracy is synonymous with elections, that should represent a failure of democracy, and the…

Politicians were blindsided when public health institutions swung into action when Covid emerged. That won’t be allowed to happen again. Note the criticism they use of CHOs - ‘unelected’. Elections are how these political bastards destroy…

The politicians who dumped Covid regulations to give you ‘freedom’, at the same time fight election campaigns on the ‘rule of law’, and wars on a ‘rules-based order’. The answer to Covid is regulation, not medicine or science. Covid exists…

Anybody warming to my 'get rid of elections' theme yet? https://t.co/sSezPWmQ6q

Neoliberalism has a chronic or 'long' form too. Long neoliberalism is what we're living now, where society is under siege from problems in every direction, and we can do nothing. Because there is no society. The neolibs deliberately…

The basic act of democracy is a parliament passing laws. What do our current leaders do? Describe those laws as oppression, and removing them as freedom. The most democratic way to deal with Covid is to pass laws about it. Also the most…

Dan using polite words to say ‘we surrendered to the cookers, because they were scary’. Get in the bin. Get rid of elections, popularity is destroying society. https://t.co/q0AUAE3KXw

Australia should be the richest country in the world. Read this for how 3 decades of LNP government pissed it all away for a few piddling donations. Elections destroy democracy, it’s what made this possible. https://t.co/HWYSkfBrTO

I’m anti-elections because no good can ever, using any logic, result from vesting ultimate authority in a society to popularity. Convince me otherwise. https://t.co/556Cpet1a3

Societies are not capitalist, they’re not economies either. They’re high schools. Elections are, literally, the transposition of popularity hierarchies in high school into adult life. https://t.co/yJDzf3KAQ9

The major ‘authoritarian’ regimes, against which we define our own democracies. Both created by democratic revolutions modelled on Western political ideas, in reaction to imperial rule. In the West those same ideas are crumbling, leading…

I hear the frustration at Covid inaction. The only thing standing between all of us and the end of the pandemic is 9 elected politicians, who refuse to do anything. Their public health teams know what to do. They won’t let them do it. 9…

Dan Andrews’ ‘deal’ with the public never happened. Elections take the voices of the people, and turn them into numbers. Politicians are then free to project whatever meaning they like onto the numbers, because only they retain a voice.…

Let us count the ways elections don’t solve problems. How long have you got? https://t.co/9sAqESXLWl

Australians have spent more than 20 years being the top dark blue line. But in elections it’s voted for the pale red line. I can’t think of a better example of how the choke point of genuine democracy is elections. Explain it any other…

Wanted to re-Tweet this, because those so adamant elections are central to democracy don’t even seem to register that in the world’s leading democracies, most people don’t even vote. And that’s only the beginning of the problem with…

The ABC, on China: “The elation that met those changes has quickly faded amid mounting signs that China may pay a price for shielding a population that lacks "herd immunity"…” Great Barrington Declaration: “We know that all populations…

As always in election-driven democracy, the outcome we get is about placating donors and voters, and not about what actually needs doing. https://t.co/aP70hVWJ9L

Brendan’s point towards the end of this interview that Covid is now a ‘toxic’ political issue that politicians won’t touch, is so important. At the end of 2021 some politicians decided to weaponise public health action for electoral gain.…

Electoral politics give people a magical sense of how power works. Winning an election doesn’t give the winner power to change things. 80-90% of power is framing issues across multiple elections. That’s what the ‘economy’ is, for example,…

2 ways conservatives have dominated politics. One is framing all issues in economic terms. The economy is a con, a substitution of society by a set of numbers that reflect the status quo. And second, by owning our public communication.…

Our own culture is the one most invisible to us. Where politicians win elections denying asylum to the international homeless, and win more elections saying that staying in your own comfortable home to avoid infection is a restriction on…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

And this is a perfect example of how elections destroy democracy. Our elected leaders are deliberately blocking the linkage between data/modelling and required action. They shouldn’t even have that option. Emergency management should be a…

This is how they do it. Eviscerate existing due process and expertise, and replace it with pliable consultancies, with pre-determined outcomes determined at time of tendering. Then game elections and call it all ‘the will of the people’.…

All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group at any scale will determine the direction the other 95% will…

In NSW, if your job is listed below and you catch Covid, it’s assumed you caught it at work, if claiming workers’ compensation. The onus of proof is on the employer to prove otherwise. Note under (o), additional jobs are: cafes,…

Workers compensation is a ‘no-fault’ system. The principle behind it is to compensate workers injured at work, without liability having to be attributed to either employer or employee, except in cases of gross negligence. Where this gets…

The Victorian election told us the loudest anti-public health action voices in Oz are a tiny minority. Why are we still listening to a word they say? It’s smoke and mirrors, a con.

More hybrid immunity, from the ABC here. You’d think it wouldn’t be hard to notice that mass infection and vaccination here hasn’t stopped surges. https://t.co/NwyNImYCqq

Lots of mention Davos and various Houses of Parliament today. The federal government could only find roughly $3000 per school for Covid mitigation measures this year. And it’s contested funding, most will get less or none and will compete…

All societies are an equilibrium of forces or power, not rational designs. For example policy on home ownership will reflect those who have power in that area, like developers and existing homeowners. For Covid, nearly everybody is being…

Good on @latingle (today’s ABC news). Deal with Covid like we do bushfires. Hand it over fully to public health teams, experts. Politicians’ only role is to build public support for and fund what those teams require of us. Public health…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

I wonder if our dogmatic faith in elections as a democratic tool will survive this one. Elections are hopping on a plane, and an announcement saying ‘if passengers could all now vote for which buttons we should be pressing up the front…

Populist politics, where we believe that politicians run countries (and not the thousands of expert officials they employ), has hit roadblocks in every direction. Faced with hugely complex issues to solve, it has nothing except symbolic,…

SKY News UK. The red line is the UK, compared to other countries (blue). The massive drop from 2010 was the election of the libertarian Tories. The true agenda there as in the US and here is to destroy the public system, while mouthing…

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

@InsidersABC is back today. I imagine a weekly political show without politicians, or even talking about politicians. Focused instead on the major issues facing us, and what progress has been made in fixing them. Starve populism of its…

Roy Morgan polling. (Pre Nazi dress up scandal.) Repeat of the federal election. People fed up with the LNP, progressive ALP voters migrating to the Greens. Primary vote pathetic. Populism fracturing the public into multiple competing…

Elections enable this insanity, there is no test at all of the competence or even sanity of who’s elected. They’re just popular. https://t.co/9HiriTzBUK

Trying to think of any other job where if as a result of a decision I make, 2600 people die and 4 million are infected in a few months, there are no consequences. This is how elections kill democracy. Politicians get away with this because…

James Valentine on ABC Sydney this morning with Julie Leask, talking about why the public has gone lukewarm on vaccinations. Lots of talk of ‘vaccine fatigue’. But the real reason not mentioned, that political leaders deliberately led a…

While here in NSW we wait for a March election, to swap out one group of politicians ignoring Covid for another, in Turkey a senior architect points out that elections are responsible for the earthquake deaths there. Popularity can’t solve…

How many times do we need to go through the great collective orgasm of elections, with little progress on major issues no matter how many we run, before we realise they’re the problem?

Feudalism is returning. Has been for 50 years, that’s what the economy is, a political tool to strip away ‘the public’. The public was invented in the 19th and 20th centuries, to deal with disasters. Just as kings invented parliaments…

2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depressing story. But the other parallel movement isn’t. Hans (RIP)…

To go back to this. The spin is that we restricted transmission of Covid while we got everybody vaccinated, to protect the vulnerable. But actually the vulnerable kept right on dying. Politicians had no intention of ever protecting them.…

Whenever you get exhausted with the political stupidity of doing nothing about Covid, study traffic engineering (I say). Roads are the front line of modern politics, in multiple ways. They’re the real-time proof that the politics we live…

Elections are the loophole that has allowed vested interests to access the inner workings of democracy, and destroy it from the inside out. Even ‘free and fair’ elections are openly bought with massive sums of money. https://t.co/NCWDxITphn

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy…

6025 people have died from Covid in NSW since the current Premier was anointed. Election in March, just weeks away. #auspol

Those confident that democracy = elections, and elections deliver ‘the will of the people’, might explain how we spent a decade with the previous government actively working against the clear public preference to act hard on climate…

There are 3 masks in this photo, that I spotted. Dr Ryan of course. But the other 2 tell a more interesting story. Parliamentary staff have been required to mask in this pandemic. Like many parliaments, the level of protection for…

Re-using this photo for another reason. These are our ‘elected representatives’. Have a look at the job sheet of a modern democratic government, it’s enormously complex. What specific expertise do elected representatives bring to that…

Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as history. But that’s *not* ‘the economy’. It’s that ‘the’ that…

Brought to you by elections. Where the only test of competence or morality is popularity. https://t.co/UXta8OURtP

The hubris of the idea that humans decide reality. That a win over Covid will be defined as a win for the ‘Left’ or the ‘Right’, in an election. Covid couldn’t care less. It doesn’t even occur to many that it may not be us who defines the…

The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about…

But he won an election. That’s the only test we use to select the people who decide whether we live or die. Popularity. https://t.co/YycBzhz59X

‘The poor’ don’t see themselves as the poor. They see themselves as the equal of the rich, but unlucky and obstructed. They don’t want pity or help, they want to not be thought of as low-status citizens. They learn that in high school, we…

Better than the LNP. My cat could run a country better than the LNP, who don’t even pretend they want to. They want to shut government down, they’re honest about it. But the ALP just as enslaved to the framing of ‘the economy’. Elections…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

The AUKUS submarines are an Anglo Judeo-Christian last performative gasp, circling Asia, which is busy building the new world. Often for us, outsourced. #InsidersABC

The disastrous myth that societies are market economies continues to destroy them. And to stop them fighting a pandemic. Until the complete nonsense of markets and economies is called out, nothing will change. Elections are pointless…

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living…

Nuclear subs. Like a week-long episode of Utopia. #InsidersABC

The fact the government which spearheaded the deliberate infection of Australians, leading to thousands of deaths, is even still in the running in the NSW election, tells you that electoral democracy is useless. Not democracy, which is…

I’m calling it early. Covid wins the NSW election.

Chris Kenny on SKY blaming the ‘moderates’ in the NSW Liberal Party for the election loss. Years of the echo chamber of SKY has now sent the entire Australian mainland red. I reckon that’s a better place to look, for blame.

The loons over at SKY have decided Matt Kean is to blame for the election loss. The only member of the train wreck NSW Liberals that actually keeps them as an option for sensible, ordinary Australians.

The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, working conditions, driving up the prices of these same homes.…

Not mentioned in the NSW election was the LNP’s attempts to alter 19B of the Workers Compensation Act. 19B says employees in a long list of ‘prescribed’ employment don’t have to prove they caught Covid at work. The employer has to prove…

Elections allow anybody into politics, so long as they’re popular. Getting a job in a supermarket requires more expertise. https://t.co/ohOy2TCOwF

Great piece on PM yesterday, on excess deaths, with @enenbee and @KarenCutter4. The ABC ended the piece with Catherine Bennett rehashing the old ‘reaping’ argument. And saying we can’t go back (to lockdowns, presumably). Which nobody was…

Society is social, not political. What we call politics is hierarchical social status games, with different names for the different players. Just as Grease has its T-Birds, Scorpions and Pink Ladies, we have an ALP, LNP and Greens. /1…

I’m almost completely disinterested in what any politician is doing or not doing, saying or not saying. Team sports politics is a distraction, the thinnest veneer of hot air overlaid upon actual, physical problems. Electoral politics was…

Insights into public health, 2023, from Tony Blakely. Two quotes, ABC news today. The first, where using vaccination to protect the wider community is described as a ‘philosophical or ethical question’. I thought it was actually one of the…

I so often see people say that to bring about change, you need to mobilise lots of people behind a cause. This is the mythology that lets the bad people win, over and over. It’s the same libertarian political spin that says ‘the people’…

Who remembers the National Covid Coordination Commission? The ‘gas-led recovery’ folks, not coincidentally often fossil fuel executives. That’s a true voice to parliament, fossil fuel dollars. In fact it replaced parliament itself. The LNP…

The ALP in 2023 seems mostly about symbolism, reflecting the times we live in. No real mongrel about them about better outcomes for ordinary Australians. Sanding the rough edges off LNP non-policy with values-based capitalism (a laughable…

The true voice to parliament speaks. Watch this space. https://t.co/u1xGa1HeGA

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

There's good stuff here, and just getting this process happening was an achievement, for which we owe people thanks. But we're also cycling back to the earliest days of this pandemic in the underlying assumptions. /1…

It's depressing when even political journalists don't understand political framing. The reason all parties can't act is because 'the economy' - a political framing of society - won't allow it. The economy wins all elections. That's why it…

Brought to you by...elections. https://t.co/FqnKKVz96P

Infection is the ultimate bitch-slap from reality for individualist belief systems. Reality-based politics, not popularity-based politics. Not the politics that wins the daily news cycle or even elections. But it always wins in the end.

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains…

The Inflation Reduction Act in the US is a type of re-birth for industry policy. The idea that governments should shape productive capacity. I still remember the Button Plan, which set in motion the dismantling of the car industry here. An…

Why did he attend the wedding? We know why. The currency of leadership in 2023 is popularity. Lots of potential voters listen to Kyle. Make it stop. Ditch elections. Pick leaders by random lot. Like we do for juries. https://t.co/cw64TehEb3

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because…

The more societies are 'engineered', the less we need any political ideology at all. Political ideologies evolved at a time when life was much simpler, and less technical. The ideologues would call that a call for 'technocracy'. Rubbish.…

I watched it. It’s a difficult topic to discuss, because like most modern topics the teams are already defined, in the team sports we mistake for understanding anything. If you argue for, you’re a monarchist. Against, and you’re a…

Time series charts of results show the true nature of elections. This one from the UK, for local government. Red and blue, Labour and Tory. Mirror images of each other, one is in fashion, the other out, and that position swapped regularly…

Remember that sweet time we declared the pandemic was over, so somebody could sweep to electoral victory? Marked with the red cross. Elections, the greatest enemy of public health. And public wealth. h/t @ToshiAkima https://t.co/0HFia3Cj4F

The decline of rage farming is a significant outcome of the election of both Biden and Albanese. Invented in the US to energise apathetic voters, the deliberate engineering of a permanent sense of outrage is one of populism’s most toxic…

The vulnerable. To go back to the saying, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This was the insight that led to the invention of ‘the public’ in the late 19th century. Something we all grew up assuming was a natural part of the…

The simplest explanation for why this won't happen is because the rich are too powerful. But the rich are also vastly outnumbered by the poor. Fans of elections need to explain why the poor worldwide don't vote to stop this. (Hint: it's…

We vote for what we would like to be. Not for what we are. Progressives might win elections more often if they understood that.

This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole institution of government in his pose. But it gets even more…

Political parties are ephemeral. It’s who founds them which is the real politics. Namely: A) Organised labour, and B) the employers of that labour. A) outnumbers B) by at least 6 to 1. B) should never win an election, but wins most.…

“I think we have the balance right”. If a politician says this, it means “this is as far as the focus group polling and party donors will allow us to go.” Two things will prevent action on Covid, climate change or anything else. /1 1) The…

Australia even turns elections into community events. It's a unique model, not focused on the individual or on government (as Europeans and Americans do, in their politics based on European nationalism). It's focused on community. A lot of…

See, elections fixed everything again. Only the haircuts have been changed. https://t.co/V38x2FnOrA

"...in all cases studied, adding random legislators improved the performance of the parliament. Specifically, there were more acts passed with social benefit." Get rid of popularity i.e. elections. It refocuses government on problems and…

When you have a vax-only pandemic strategy, and then don't vaccinate. Anybody who performed this well in their job would be fired. Politicians just have to win an election, which they can game easily with bribes and propaganda.…

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

If you doubt the focus of libertarian think tanks is not just to continue to stymie Covid action, but to ensure public health action will be obstructed for future pandemics as well, you only have to read their mission statements.…

The debate over the Voice to parliament. Conservatives are using strategy, and progressives are assuming as always that the intrinsic logic and morality of the position will win the day. It won’t. Just as it won’t create a republic.…

Fans of elections can explain why free and fair elections produce authoritarian rule. https://t.co/moU95zDNVC

Dutton and Morrison both playing the ‘all Australians are equal’ card in opposing the Voice. Classic feudal conservatism. Accumulate all the power and wealth, then say that’s the natural equilibrium of society, which regulation will…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

Were you ever able to persuade bullies and the most popular kids in your year to do anything at all, at school? Did they not even acknowledge you exist? Albanese below, before becoming PM. Now he’s the head boy at school.…

I’m sure everybody thinks the social collapse facing the UK has an obvious answer. Tax cuts to the wealthy toffs who caused the social collapse. But popular! Way to go, elections. https://t.co/NYwPl6E6F9

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

I track the UK news, because what happens there often follows here, as conservative strategists share IP. Australians will know ‘Stop the Boats’ only too well, nothing to do with immigration or boats, everything about winning elections. /1…

Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That ideology hates anything public, it ‘distorts the market’, even…

This painting of Spinoza is a deeply profound entire worldview for those despairing of our current situation. Spinoza was excommunicated by his own community for heresy. It’s what the image shows. He was unmoved, also what the image shows.…

The greatest populist boofheads of our time, Trump and Johnson, both now being smashed on the rocks of basic due process, which they had gleefully trashed for so long. Morrison already gone here. Institutions fighting back.…

Brought to you by…elections. https://t.co/68BpQrAsXm

The reason Australia abandoned public health in late-2021 was the same thing that is destroying all democracies. Elections. Scott Morrison wanted a happy, ‘pandemic is over’ vibe to begin 2022, election year. Remember this message?…

History shows that people mostly don’t change their minds. Belief systems and the social groupings that rally around them will continue to the point of catastrophe. Only the deaths of the holders of the beliefs brings change. Only one…

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

Saul Griffiths and others told the Albanese government this. They listened to the fossil fuel industry instead. Go households. Fix the ‘economy’ and inflation and cost of living, in one go. The economy is households, not businesses.…

This sort of stuff always makes us think about ‘authoritarian’ governments. But all societies are controlled, just in different ways. They don’t function otherwise. For example most of our lives in the West are now almost completely…

When Covid arrived, standard public health processes kicked into gear. An influenza-based plan maybe, but the public health systems fired up. Then in 2021 they were switched off. How was that done? You're looking at it. That was the true…

The No vote on the voice to parliament seem to be mostly those who are used to voices to parliament carrying big bags of donations.

There really is something hopeless in us not seeing the connection here with the ‘debate’ on the Voice. Donors have had the strongest voice to parliaments for years. In fact as we’ve seen with Covid, they have about the only voice to…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

People think it's crazy to suggest ditching elections. (There is serious work in public policy that suggests the same.) But use the empirical evidence. What did winning the entire mainland achieve? The main policy of the federal ALP is to…

The only functioning voice to parliament (the fossil fuel industry) won again. The industry captured our political class years ago, it has elected numpties from both sides rabbit on about ‘supply’ i.e. more of what the industry produces…

After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’re winning either. Albo’s small target politics means nothing…

In this movie, when the Earth was faced with a catastrophe, did it hastily run elections in every country to see what was the most popular thing to do? Even Hollywood would see that as ridiculous. But here we are. Trying to vote our way…

HG here in the 90s, describing in my view the choice in every election. Get rid of them. https://t.co/EYvdf3VNtq

Housing Minister on #InsidersABC parroting the housing industry talking points on ‘supply’ being the solution to the housing crisis. Electing and maintaining hundreds of MPs to just repeat what donors tell them to say is a waste of public…

One of the idiot things about populism is the obsession with ‘division’. Division is taken to be intrinsically bad. Only happy agreement is good. Which violates the most basic procedures of our democracy. When a matter can’t be decided in…

Only two things will bring the rapid change we need. Total catastrophe, or removing elections. History suggests the former is the most likely. Those who use popularity to run society will never relinquish it. https://t.co/g9UAZy5Gqb

School. A small handful rule, based on popularity and bullying. Most do nothing to stop them, the kids in the background. This is what elections turned adult society into as well, the same social mechanism. Not an analogy. That kid in the…

Leaders who do this are committing a crime against their own populations. What stops them doing it? Nothing, all they have to do is be popular. That's their licence to do pretty much anything at all. Popularity (elections) need to go.…

Worth sharing this again. Just one of many studying the damage elections have done to democracy. Libertarians managed to convince nearly everyone that elections *are* democracy. That’s because it’s the way they game the system.…

When even the ALP lines up to minimise this set of findings today, you can see how elections/popularity give licence to anything at all, that suits elected leaders. People refuse to see it, because secretly they all love popularity games.…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

From The New Daily. If politicians want independent bodies to stop revealing their corruption, they need to stop acting corruptly. It’s popularity that enables it. Elections. Corruption is inevitable with that mechanism. Trump uses his…

When I hear discussions of the voice to parliament, this is the image that always comes to mind. Another game of popularity politics, to see whose team, Yes or No, wins. No social progress will ever be made using popularity.…

One of the findings of the Robodebt RC was that senior public servants failed to act on appalling government decisions. What's enabling the Albanese government's current refusal to do public health for Covid is the non-action of senior…

The LNP still on about ‘baseload power’. Baseload means the minimum amount of power we need to USE, to stop us having to turn coal plants off and on daily, which is hugely expensive. There’s so much rooftop solar right now, by 2025 it…

Campbell was Secretary to the DHS during the setting up of Robodebt. Renee Leon ran DHS from 2017-20 when the scheme was mostly operational. The ALP didn’t remove Campbell from that role, she’d long left it? #InsidersABC

You would have to be some kind of stupid to think the delay was anything but political, to avoid the findings being released near the last election. The populists have ICAC in their sights. https://t.co/1leoXZ8NXc

Why are we continuing with ‘normal life’ at all? Why isn’t every country on the planet in full emergency mode, like it would be if it had massive bushfires and floods? The answer is always…elections. Only elections shift things, and…

State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions are equally as good as examples. Your most popular team…

Again the Albanese government has about as much policy ambition as Telly Savalas had hair. https://t.co/d1oSI3VlaX

Does anybody seriously think that ploughing through 3-year electoral cycles driven entirely by popularity polling is going to progress any of our problems at the speed that’s required? The Albanese government’s vision is predominantly…

Let’s dissolve both houses of parliament indefinitely. Let the public service run the country, and emergency teams led by experts to deal with Covid and climate change. Have citizen assemblies for public input. https://t.co/T1ybon9Aw1

Many conversations in recent times with people retiring. Some have reached retirement age, many are going early. A disturbing sense of foreboding is behind many of their decisions. They see organisations collapsing, flailing with the…

If you’re looking on in despair as we do nothing about a pandemic or climate change, I encourage you (again) to stop interpreting adult life as…adult. It’s adolescent. School. Jennifer Senior’s magnificent essay is one more path to…

The problem with housing is not supply. Just as it isn’t the problem with gas. That’s spin invented by the housing and gas industries, who want to sell more houses and gas. The problem is the collapse of public housing. And public energy,…

Everything we call 'politics' is the tiniest thin veneer of hot air, overlaid upon the actual material realities of life. A total waste of time and resources. Like the NBN, reality always said we'd need full fibre. We wasted how many years…

Albanese’s misdiagnosis of Australia’s problems as ‘division’ is catching up with him. Division is a political strategy, turning issues into team sports. People LOVE it. Twitter and all social media and elections exist because of it.…

Another glaring problem with popularity-based governance, through elections. Decisions that can impact a society for generations are made by people whose political careers at the top last less than 3 years. Total disconnect of timelines.…

Every day you can read stories like this, of some desperate social need. Because we force decisions on the basic material realities of our lives through a popularity mechanism. Elections. The elected use the resources to fund ideologies…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

The East Germans used almost these exact words. Pure populism. Hugely effective, populism is an electoral H-bomb. There was an unspoken agreement never to do this, because wise heads knew it ends in catastrophe. It was done anyway. /1…

OK, after long tutoring this morning, I’ve figured out the pandemic will be fixed if Anthony Albanese cries about it. Got it. Like he did for The Voice, which is hurtling to the ground in flames. But he’ll be expressing his emotions, and…

Popularity-based electoral politics has only one aim. Winning elections. For Albo the focus has never shifted from winning 2 or 3 terms. History shows each will be more timid than the one before, as paranoia grows about losing. Nothing…

Imagine if Indigenous Australians had the same 'voice to parliament' as property developers do. https://t.co/r5RMNKkXo8

I wonder if the ALP remembers how parlous its primary vote was at the last election, and how it’s been trending down for years (like the LNP). It’s trashing the brand with all the younger voters it desperately needs to turn that around.…

And to bypass the team sports, this will always happen when you turn democracy into a popularly contest, run by elections. The elected will focus on nothing but winning elections, because that’s their literal job. Only banishing popularity…

#InsidersABC repeating that supply is a fix for housing. Economic thinkers reject actual intervention in the ‘market’, because they want to protect values of existing stock. But if their supply solution worked, it would do the same thing -…

Here's a lens to view the Albanese government through. And to be clear, it's infinitely better to have a government trying to govern, rather than trying to dismantle government. But a pattern is appearing, and it's not a good one. /1…

And we still trust elections to bring about change. None of these populists will ever change a single significant thing. Their only skill is winning elections, so that they can win more elections. That’s all popularity has ever done.…

The Electoral Commission mentioned this one. You can see how much of the libertarian rubbish firing up many Australians now is actually driven from overseas. Social media is an unlocked door to our own democracy, eating it from the inside…

It's why Australia 'opened up' too, because a previous PM wanted to go to an election as the person who ended the pandemic. His career ended, not the pandemic. Tell me again why elections are a good thing. https://t.co/LOijkoH9Xq

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

Meanwhile in the UK, Labour promises it will just be the cuddly friendly face of the economy, and do nothing remotely resembling a Labour government. This is what the economy is for, to win elections even when you don’t win. Albo’s…

We don't hire employees or raise children using popularity. We know that would be stupid. And then we wonder why running a country using it, via elections, is a total disaster. https://t.co/PqAJC8Cg6j

When we say ‘free and fair elections’, what we mean is that the electoral process itself is free and fair. And it is, the AEC is a wonder of the world. But when getting your name on the ballot paper and getting the most votes is mostly…

So often the anti-everything (climate and Covid action, referendum changes) people remind me of Homer Simpson's gang assaulting people with sacks full of doorknobs. https://t.co/E6LeAg8uJD

My wife bought me this t-shirt a few years ago. Thinking about wearing it to vote at the referendum. https://t.co/lG1vo4uFSN

Think back to who were the most popular people you went to school with. Now imagine them running an entire society. That's what elections brought to democracy.

Re-Tweeting this in the interests of decoupling elections from democracy. https://t.co/GVAykE2Jiz

The difference between this referendum and the one in 1967? We have social media now, an institutional home for things that previously were rejected as disgusting, ignorant and absurd. It needs to be turned off. https://t.co/7ryNrNkhHf

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

Many blame ‘capitalism’ for our woes, or praise it for what’s best about our lives. Like all -isms, it doesn’t even exist. The private ownership of the means of production through supply and demand markets is mythology. All of it reliant…

Yes the ALP have been hopeless in many ways. But politics is 99% framing, 1% elections. Once society was reframed as an economy, no electoral victory could save it. Until we stop talking about 'the economy' as an existing thing, nothing…

If populism (elections) doesn't make you angry, think that we're about to spend several hundred million dollars on a referendum that one party has hijacked as a brand differentiation exercise. It's little more than a massive…

Elections and populism more generally are the way all those kids at school who ran brutal status hierarchies maintain control when they enter adult life. They can't believe their luck. Look around and tell me you don't see it.

“But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” The LNP got multiple terms dog whistling the race vote, through Stop the Boats. They see the referendum the same way, as a fast-track back to…

The biggest lie and founding myth of the economy is that mobility = freedom. Whether it’s our obsession with roads and cars, or travel, the more mobile we’ve become the less free we are. Another way we don’t understand Covid too. /1…

The cause, again, is elections. We’re going to elect ourselves to extinction. Popularity can’t solve a single real problem. It will derail any solution you do manage to get up. https://t.co/TLdJsWzpRH

It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But…

Elections, popularity-run democracies. It doesn’t matter how important something is in reality, if there’s a vote in breaking it, it will be broken. Newton’s law of gravity wasn’t ‘this is the most popular thing an apple does when…

The Albanese government needs to GO HOUSEHOLDS, who are smashing records as always. As @GriffithSaul has suggested. Add subsidies for batteries and more appliances. The centralised generation and transmission line focus is old-energy…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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.

Parliament without politicians would progress Australia in extraordinary ways. https://t.co/kszO6neyhL

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.

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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.…

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.

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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?…

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

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…

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote…

Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in a funny way. The energy grid is Shakespearean. Have a look at…

Albanese came to power trying to emulate Hawke, the consensus-builder. But Hawke was working with an older sort of opposition, still aiming for public policy outcomes. The LNP, like the Tories and Republicans, hasn't been like that for at…

Populist attack politics were imported from the US and UK by the LNP under John Howard, and they’ve been accelerating the use of these methods ever since. It’s destroying what’s left of Australian democracy. Social media is populism’s…

Despite almost universal obstruction politically, notice that action on renewable energy has been underway for years. Our popularity contests (elections) are irrelevant hot air sideshows to objective, material realities. Come over to…

Social media has won another election. https://t.co/3e5tvwfGvb

And they'll get away with it why? Because the only test of competence and probity is winning an election. If they can still manage to be popular, they can allow well over 200,000 Brits to die. https://t.co/AV78l1DWlm

Really is ambitious public policy. One of the things the Hawke cabinet that Albanese so admires had was ministers who could drive major change in the face of major resistance. Bowen and Chalmers get a tick here. The other portfolios?…

The world doesn’t run on information. It runs on relationships. Social relationships. On trust, on the people we trust to know different things. Replace that with popularity contests, such as elections and all of social media, and it’s…

Dutton, like the UK Tories, is back on Stop the Boats, like a dog returning to its own vomit. Remember a time parties spent time in opposition to re-build policy platforms? Under populism that’s over. You just scattergun slogans, hoping to…

‘We need to at least have a conversation about nuclear power’ is classic political strategy. The LNP doesn’t want nuclear power, it’s electoral suicide. But they want to sow seeds of doubt in peoples’ mind, and leverage that doubt for…

Those still confident elections are a valuable tool for democracy only need to look to NZ. Where several years of sensible governance now flipped completely back over to the regulatory capture of small government ideologues, funnelling…

Watching governments do effectively nothing for decades on the existential threat of climate change, through multiple rounds of elections, somehow didn’t prepare us for them doing nothing about Covid. Popularity solves no problems. It…

Boris Johnson’s testimony at the UK Covid Inquiry begins. Over 230,000 dead, and counting. If you or I were responsible for the death of even one person, we’d go to jail. Popular election grants politicians amnesty from any accountability.…

This journalist got the slap-down they deserved. Albo, like Biden, misdiagnoses our political problems as ‘too much division’. Dutton is whipping the division horse every day and is taking huge handfuls out of the polling deficit. Team…

I imagine Peter Dutton winning the next election, and then having to install nuclear reactors that don't exist, into communities that don't want them. Every cloud has a silver lining.

None of the States are likely to break free from the national ‘strategy’. Groupthink and group loyalty, at National Cabinet. It’s why Morrison invented it, to bypass public health infrastructure. https://t.co/E3UHNCQNr4

Put elected representatives in a room and the outcome will be - nothing. Most totally beholden to vested interests who fund their election campaigns and/or the disinformation campaigns to remove them, if they don't do what's asked. We…

Progressives tend to assume change comes from 'bringing the crowd along' in endless discussions. But major change comes when things 'go viral'. Rapid imitative behaviour, where large numbers of people get behind a cause, seen as a rival to…

Following the etymology of the word, economic politics is going to be forced to the realisation that households are ‘the economy’. Not business. Albanese needs to recognise fast this is his solution for energy. Just as it was Rudd’s for…

Conservatives in the UK desperate now. Following the Australian script. Dutton is back there again too. Remember the days when political parties wrote policies instead? https://t.co/Z88S6f19Ol

Imagine presiding over a drop in life expectancy, for the first time in a century, and still be considered a good leader because people are voting for you. This is the wreck surrendering democracy to popularity (elections) has left us.

Nick Dyrenfurth with an excellent piece today. What too many maybe haven't realised yet is that anything is possible, with populism. And pretty much anything can be made popular. Dutton is doing nothing except populist slogans. But that…

Laceratingly funny. Though you can't vote your way out of the problems voting causes. We need to stop being disappointed with who we vote for, and shift the anger to popularity politics, to populism. Elections are a century old, and…

What would the LNP do if it won the next election? Tear out the fast-chargers, the new transmission lines, the solar and wind farms? Ban sales of EVs, and heavily subsidise sales of ICEs? Build coal and nuclear power stations (that don’t…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

UK news discussing whether ‘political chaos’ will end in 2024, with elections there. The chaos is caused BY elections, populism means you change PMs more often than some people change their sheets or underwear. Popularity will never lead…

Get rid of all elections. Select public representatives via random lot, as we do for juries, when required for specific decisions. Citizen juries. The moment you allow popularity to determine governance, it's game over.…

Anthony Albanese said a whole lot of florid nothing when pressed about Stage 3 tax cuts this morning on RN. The LNP governs even when it doesn't win elections. That's what 'the economy' was invented to do, create continuous political wins…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and…

The Tories have given the UK 5 Prime Ministers in their 13 years in power. This is the nonsense populism and elections produce. They’re now at the circular firing squad stage. Meanwhile the UK is collapsing. https://t.co/UKe7EzATT5

One of the useful things about this platform is that it gives you a direct way to see the myth of the idea that societies are made up of a collection of individual viewpoints. Like LEGO blocks stuck together. It’s absolutely not how…

Elections attract corrupt money like shit attracts flies. The solution isn’t donation reform, it’s to get rid of elections. We don’t select any other person for any other position in society using popularity as the metric.…

Fashion is imitation, the core human act. The greater capacity we have to imitate, such as with social media, the smaller and faster the imitation cycles become. Also why you end up with revolving door prime ministers, because popularity…

I’m not a # or ‘Stand With’ person. Yelling into a void. If there’s a problem, we should just fix it. The only reason we don’t do that is because we created a roadblock - elections - between problem and action. Now urgent actions need to…

Meanwhile the actual architects of the scheme are not only not being charged, some are still members of parliament. Because in popularity-based governance, you can act criminally and unethically, but winning the popular vote cleanses you…

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

Brought to you by…elections. Because what’s popular must be the best thing. https://t.co/qSyg6ObFCl https://t.co/GqP1y5tluB

This isn’t a funding question. It’s a status question. The answer is always social. Comprehensive education was dismantled in Australia by turning education into a status rivalry. People will bankrupt themselves to try to climb this status…

Democracy’s lethal weakness is the elected dimwits at the top of it, who turn all brilliant policy and necessary action into a popularity contest, for votes. You can’t vote your way out of the problems voting causes. Elections are a failed…

I may have just missed it, but I was waiting yesterday for somebody to headline this as ‘Albanese finally manages to get somebody to say Yes’. https://t.co/aNGa1dLuL6

The all-out assault on Google search by search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing is a story that should be front page news. In a world where we outsource expertise to the web, Google Search is our gatekeeper. If it becomes compromised,…

At a time when collective action is almost non-existent, we have the strange apparently counter-evidence of huge masses of people acting in a coordinated way. Thoughts on living in a ‘majority’ society, and why it isn’t anything like a…

#Insiders focusing like all political journalism on something that makes no difference to any of our problems. Election results. Popularity contests. What needs doing is completely indifferent to how popular it is.

August 2021. The triggers Scott Morrison said where government 'obviously would take steps'? 1,300-2000 deaths in the first 6 months. There were nearly 10,000 deaths in that 6 months. No action was taken. 15,000 more have died since. Still…

The outer suburbs is where Peter Dutton wants to win the election. Unfortunately it’s also where people are living the complete opposite of bullshit LNP slogans, for example with EVs. It’s saving them a fortune. https://t.co/5lOwq5sW6y…

We can't vote our way out of the problems voting (populism) causes. This year is the RCT for democracy as it's currently (mis)understood. All of these elections should fix things, when 'the people' speak, hey? Hilarious.…

GOP and Trump zombies reposting Russian attack-memes make it clear the US election this year is really Putin vs Biden. https://t.co/y3fJVS1lgf

The purpose of elections has become mostly just to win more elections. Most elections also change very little public policy in meaningful ways. And they’re also *very* expensive. A federal election for example costs about $400 million.…

Early in the 20th century Walter Lippmann said that in a mature democracy, nothing much should change because of an election. That most of the work of government happened outside elections, the basic logistics of keeping a country running…

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

Politics’ Bazball moment. Losing and claiming victory, in the best spirit of modern English cricket. Elections are a farce. In the case of Tasmania, we learned that no one person or party was super popular. What relevance does that have to…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

Well done to the Greens. But HEPA is less important than ventilation. Schools should be ventilated like most other large public and private buildings. Better than just cleaning stale air. #auspol https://t.co/cmCyBm1hps

What I call team sports. Political parties are like peoples’ Ur-teams, their foundational team that shapes all of their others. You can waste a lifetime arguing topics with people, who really are just arguing for a team. There’s no actual…

ABC radio story about DST. Used an example of a woman scared to run after dark, as a justification for keeping it. What if you run in the morning? The science has been in for years. It’s an IDIOT, harmful practice. Get rid of it.

Soon after winning elections, all politicians get down to the real business. Of winning the next election. https://t.co/NHWD6KzXOA

I don't believe elections do anything except destroy democracies. But the complete demolition of the modern Tory Party? I'll buy tickets to watch that. https://t.co/Qq7HqTPPPk

Australia is by many orders of magnitude the world’s oldest civilisation. Most of the history and meaning of that civilisation escapes modern understanding and is ignored. But it works on you, often unnoticed. It’s deep time, acting…

It’s local government election day in the UK. Not democracy day. Elections are not democracy, they’re one mechanism of one tiny part of democracy that has grown to be a populist cancer on the entire idea. https://t.co/YgolSvGtUr

The ABC reports that some men are uncomfortable with the focus on ‘gendered violence’. And that they should be. I think some men and women just don’t subscribe to social media gender team sports. The Council of Europe helps here. /1…

Needing IDs to vote is another conservative voter suppression strategy. (You know, elections, those things people mistake for democracy.) Which makes it delicious that Boris forgot his. https://t.co/HAtfAhGcKi

Scene from current UK elections. The elation of victory! The UK is collapsing. Elections are popularity contests in the ruins of democracies. There’s not ONE way popularity contests solve problems. The best person to fly a plane is a…

Our problem is that this sort of question isn’t subjective. But elections make it that. There are clear objective measures for which politician does a better job. Populism won’t allow objective measures. https://t.co/XfksN0D9R8

In a mature democracy nothing of real consequence should be determined by an election. If it is, your democracy has been hijacked by populism.

On any objective assessment the past 14 years of Tory rule in the UK have been the worst governance in modern Anglo history. And yet they’re there because our only test of competence is popularity. Elections. Popularity has zero connection…

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

To be clear, my cat would be a better government than the current LNP. But this is typical electoral politics. $300 cash splash with an election looming. Smarter policy would have been targeted electrification of low-income households,…

This is the sort of taxpayer-funded party political advertising that the ALP seethed about in opposition. The purpose of winning elections is only to win more elections. Popularity is now an end in itself. That’s what populism is.…

Elections make this possible. Imagine selecting a CEO using popularity. https://t.co/duL3D3furn

Come on people, we argued every day for years to get this in front of parliaments. Thank you Amanda! https://t.co/H5t6ldoeaW

#Insiders tying itself in knots over the details of Peter Dutton’s latest slogans. It’s much simpler. The LNP still wants slogans instead of public policy. It has no plans to do anything except dismantle democracy.

For those who believe democracy = elections. There’s not one objective way in which this race should be close. Close to two decades of abject incompetence from the LNP, and they’ve provided no policy in Opposition. 1/4…

“And yet it moves.” (Galileo) I sometimes advocate for something I call ‘reality politics’. Meaning politics that recognises that most of the things we argue about aren’t in our power to change. Our normal politics merely delays outcomes…

Another example of reality politics. People can go to elections dog whistling about immigration. The country is in desperate need of workers. And that desperation is about to become utter desperation. https://t.co/z1R4X0ORAZ

The 2022 debate over whether 2 or 3 shots was 'fully vaccinated' was about one thing only - Scott Morrison's re-election campaign. Waiting for a third shot would have bypassed the election, people couldn't feel like he'd ended the pandemic…

The question I haven't heard asked of Peter Dutton's nuke dreams is - who's going to build the new coal plants he'll need, while they build the nuclear power stations? The existing coal plants are falling apart. #auspol…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

Australia should be the richest country in the world, per capita, for the next 2 centuries at least. What’s stopping it? Elections. Manipulated popularity games obstruct obvious physical realities. https://t.co/wZE6KWx1fV

They’re also happily buying petrol at more than $2/litre, and telling pollsters Peter Dutton is a credible alternative PM. There is only one underlying logic to our public lives now. Imitative rivalry (team sports). All things can be made…

To escape the team sports that infect our understanding of ‘politics’, you have to look to history. Take the two most famous ‘autocrats’ in the world right now. Putin and Xi. Said to be running ‘systems of government’ opposed to our…

We KNOW that destruction of the checks and balances of our institutions is what leads to authoritarian government. You can’t elect your way out of this problem. Popularity IS the problem. Trump gets away with this because he can win…

This was less than 5 years ago. Now the UK looks set to completely reverse this landslide with even greater force. Nothing changed after Boris won. Nothing will change if/when Labor win. The world is awash with elections and the excitement…

For those persuaded by populism that democracy = elections, 2024 is an orgy of democratic delights. So democracy must be flourishing, hey. Let’s see. /1 https://t.co/sNI98hJP3n https://t.co/Rnzu2pY4Z9 Oops. In steady and quite spectacular…

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

I think we need to recognise the literal meaning of the term 'public health'. It means the public being HEALTHY. It doesn't mean 'the public not being in hospital or dying', as Covid minimisers have twisted it to mean. People are SO sick…

Sweden's V-Dem Institute measures the quality of democracy worldwide. It classifies India as an 'electoral autocracy'. There's a challenge for those who equate elections with democracy. (Note: they're not saying Indian elections aren't…

On a cumulative graph, flat means nothing is happening. In Oz's case, since Scott Morrison went to an election pretending the pandemic was over, in early 2022. That was the plan. It's actually deceptive to call our approach 'hybrid…

George picking up on the work I discuss here a lot, about the terrible mechanism that elections are. My only quibble is the idea we need even more 'participatory' democracy. No we don't. We need proper hierarchies of expertise, so we can…

I think all elections are a lethally pointless waste of our time. But I still find them entertaining, even if they change nothing. Sunak’s campaign is a wonder of incompetence to behold. Just like his party. https://t.co/6q5sNyuDOr

#Insiders debating the LNP and ALP condemning The Greens for their stance on Gaza. The usual hot air of all our politics and commentary. The actual reality is whether the Greens pitching to young voters on Gaza is worse than the LNP…

The ‘radical Right’ is just, as the headline also says, populism. When complex problems aren’t being solved by popularity contests (elections), popularity is set to 11 as a last gasp. That’s all fascism is. Popularity is the true enemy of…

All human activity is just social activity, even political activity. Which means the categories of ‘Left’, “Centre’ and ‘Right’ are meaningless, and need to be replaced with social descriptions. In reality Left-Centre-Right is a continuum…

Tim Costello’s piece today. The centrality of popularity-based governance to the problems of our time. Popularity is the beast that all societies must tame, to survive. In the big year of elections, a festival of popularity, it will be…

Many audience members said they were 'undecided'. Apparently killing nearly a quarter of a million people in a term isn't decisive one way or the other. Get rid of elections. https://t.co/P08yZVzBX9 https://t.co/VOE5U890vs

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

Democracy as elections deciding what to do will drive humanity to extinction. It's time for governments to lead. Dramatically, fast. As Alan Finkel says. https://t.co/5Ve7yaB348

Dutton’s nuclear power play is vintage Tony Abbott. Take an obvious, expert-backed solution to an essential public service, and turn it into a team sport. By offering political product differentiation. Now it’s energy. /1 #auspol…

Peter Stahel understands what Dutton is up to. I fear the ALP don't. And most commentators don't either. We'll wallow in the 'facts' of nuclear, thinking that will win the argument. Always the same mistake. https://t.co/n2PpMZcoXJ

Simple. There are a lot of voters (including in Teal seats) who want action against climate change, but don't like Labor or The Greens. Dutton's nuclear mirage now gives them a way to vote LNP again. Even though he'll never build a single…

Electoral politics could be summarised right now as us choosing the most popular of several pathways to human extinction. Populists have convinced us all that elections ARE democracy. They’re really not, they’re the destruction of it.…

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

Peter Dutton is looking for a chain reaction. But not a nuclear one. An electoral one, like he got for The Voice. The latest polling from resolve suggests ‘the people’ see through it, they hate nuclear. But like I always say, people act…

Notice the whole country is talking about nuclear? That was the point. The more outrageously stupid the idea is, the more it gets airtime. It’s sucked the oxygen out of every other public issue. A marginal Opposition with no polices now…

Anthony Albanese can say, ‘do you want to wait 15-20 years for a nuclear fantasy that won’t happen, that we’ll need to mortgage the country to afford, or do you want us to help you make your household all-electric TODAY, to drive your cost…

We're entering a new Restoration. In the 17th century, a relatively brief experiment with a republic in what's now the UK, led by a democratic parliament, collapsed with the restoration of a monarchy under Charles II. The same script our…

Society has material problems with known solutions. None of those solutions happen because they have to cut through the fog of the completely redundant popularity contests we call elections. All those popularity contests do is weaponise…

So much of the US right now is Rome. A failing Republic, with a surging imperial Presidency that is more like a King or Emperor. By far the most successful period in Rome’s history was its rule by emperors. Its Republic was endlessly…

Keir Starmer is a decent, intelligent guy. He'll be much better for the UK. But like Albanese he reveals the fundamental weakness of modern progressive politics. Good people are far too timid and nice. The trajectory to power for Starmer…

I'm a bit quieter here for a bit, just because with Gaza and elections and nukes and 'crossing the floor', the team sports quotient in public discussion is off the scale. It's like trying to talk to a hungry Rottweiler.

All of these elections are so exciting. The fight over who gets to sit to the left or right of the Speaker. And then do nothing for 3-5 years.

The common response to the useless team sports of electoral politics to take action on anything important, is to mount campaigns of righteous indignation against the system. Often from the crossbench. These campaigns also don’t produce any…

Voting about to close in the UK. At 10pm. Gotta make sure the peasants can get a full working day in before voting. Then the count goes most of the night. Many won’t bother voting. Those who win will claim a ‘mandate’. Commentators…

A conservative MP in the UK describing the emerging election results as 'devastating'. The party who oversaw the death of over 230,000 Brits, from Covid. And still dying. Not even registering. Electoral politics. Humanity's most lethal…

The UK vote is now at the 'the people have spoken' stage. People don't speak at an election. They're a number, that is then translated into whatever candidates want that number to say.

Believers that elections mean anything can explain why the UK has now had 2 landslides in diametrically opposite political directions, inside 5 years. Like everything, elections have been hijacked by naked populism. They're as meaningful…

The rituals of election. The losing side says it ‘hears’ what the public has told them, and ‘will reflect’. And then return to the next election with exactly the same ideologies, often winning in a landslide.

More election favourites, from the UK. The winners always ‘promise to govern for everybody’. In reality they quickly govern for their favoured ideologies. They think those ideologies are what’s best, for everybody. Elections are us at our…

Zoom out from the euphoria of electoral victory for Labour in the UK, and you see the real social mechanism that drives the country. Starmer is the 58th PM. There have only been 7 Labour PMs, in UK history. SEVEN. What this means. /1…

If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad infinitum. Nonsense, of course. There’s a much simpler…

If you applied for a job, and you said 'somebody tried to shoot me and it nicked my ear', would they put you top of the list? Elections destroy democracy.

Because America is violent. America is violent because the default state of all societies is violence. Only collective regulation reduces violence. America hates regulation. Thus it’s violent. And it’s exporting the business model, via…

Still wrapping my head around the logic of a member of Trump’s own political party trying to kill him, and this catapulting him to absolute favouritism to win the election, under the banner of ‘fight!’

The story of Australian governance not being told right now is the infiltration of local government elections, by groups in the US using social media. A lot of that infiltration is flying under the radar, people don’t pay much attention to…

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

"The professors are the enemy". Republicans are not seeing their own self-destruction. Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason. Understand the aphorism. Popularity victories (elections) are not victories. Reality/God…

Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

What gives me hope for the US election is that Trump already lost an election, at the height of his popularity. The only US President to lose the popular vote two elections in a row. 1/2 https://t.co/1aPEtXpJt4 https://t.co/TdweAwxbMs And…

This is social media at work. Not the ‘far Right’ or any ideology. The practical, simple mechanism of connecting people to each other. This is the paradox of sociality. The more we connect, the less cohesive we become. /1…

It was the same politicians who'd spent years winning elections by closing borders, who then made hay electorally by opening them in a pandemic. Travel culture. Free movement to anywhere we want is an assumed absolute right. It's privilege…

The people of NSW can be sicker than at any other time in modern history. But we must protect the CBD, apparently. Elections solve no problems. The economy is a killing machine. https://t.co/rjXDCl6Z6C https://t.co/oSOwjeyqbU

The ABC looks at Covid at the Games, and decides to frame it as a case of Codral - soldier on. Chin up, most people had a great time, etc. Now would be the time to ask about herd immunity fantasies, but no. https://t.co/ostBHTZQWf

1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never really have. It’s actually not their job, to fix anything. /1…

This government still believe people 'want an end to the division'. The entire culture is a festering sewer of daily team sports. People LOVE the stoush. Why Dutton (and Johnson, Trump, Abbott...) start fights every single day.…

Listening to the technical lead from the WHO on ABC radio this morning, talking about mpox. Appears to be no risk to coffee shops at this stage.

In the UK election, now the US election, and in this and many previous Oz elections, conservatives play the immigration card. No public policy of any substance, except to dismantle government for their cronies. Meanwhile fear and hysteria…

Meanwhile in Australia, we're introducing legislation for politicians who behave like idiots in parliament. https://t.co/691DTfilUf https://t.co/dw5qKfw2sr

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its…

When I watch the obsession with elections I imagine saying to friends ‘should I mow the lawn with the mower or the vacuum cleaner?’ And them splitting into two groups, one with signs yelling ‘mower!’ and the other yelling ‘vacuum cleaner!’…

Every single election we get excited for this or that team. Because all we’re interested in is the team sports. Then we’re bored and cynical between elections, because nobody was ever focused on anything practical, just the success of a…

‘Chinggisid’ sovereignty is what I Tweet about in describing the perennial love of Kings. Trump-type populist leaders are this sovereign form, in modern clothing. This extract has so much to teach us. /1 https://t.co/HzabNd0V4Y…

Another snorable distraction from urgent things. Though I find it incredible that people say simply putting a question can't lead to divisive damage. Like the recent referendum never happened. All politics is now loaded questions, for the…

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

Elections solve no problems. If the things that urgently need doing were popular, they wouldn’t need doing. https://t.co/xZYRjogCc9

Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, whining complaint. This is populism’s destruction at work. /1…

There’s no greater indictment of elections as a component of democracy than Peter Dutton and his team being viable in the next election. Booted out just a few years ago after a decade of destructive inaction. Elections are not about…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

An excellent Covid 3-eyed fish moment would be to ask politicians to meet in a primary school classroom, while the class gets to use the 8 air-changes-per-hour parliamentary offices and chamber. https://t.co/coXjVYL1Zu

Trump will apparently end the Ukraine war even before being sworn in, if he's re-elected. And will apparently stop migrants eating peoples' dogs and cats. This is where elections lead us. Popularity as the sole test of suitability.

The excitement of the US election. Hilarious that we still think elections change anything meaningfully For example, the only reason anything at all is happening with renewables isn’t about who gets elected. It’s China’s astronomical…

The libertarians are targeting local government, that nobody pays much attention to at all. Much of this is social media, from groups in the US. In my own town a Trumpian SM group is currently leading in local government election counting.…

In populism, you have an orgy of excitement for a year or more leading up to the election. Then disillusionment within months, not so much because the politicians have failed (which they do), but because everybody misses the team sports of…

The disgusting emptiness of much Western culture now is all there in the idea of ‘revenge travel’. This is why we refused to keep fighting a pandemic. Our entitled travel in the world was interrupted. So we took ‘revenge’ on that…

Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

The great electoral orgasm that was going to usher in massive change to the UK. The status quo won’t ever budge using elections. The US elections will be the same. And Australian. We’ll keep up the waves of euphoria and disillusionment,…

I’m not anti-democracy, to clarify feedback I get. I’m anti confusing it with elections. Democracy is over 2000 years old. Elections are 100. Elections destroy democracy, popularity is not a system of governance. We don’t raise families or…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

Peter Dutton is in contention at the next election because his opponents are still 'fact-checking' him on things like nuclear power. He knows nuclear is BS. Societies don't run on information. He's starting a fight. Fights generate teams,…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him…

#Insiders with Greg Sheridan droning on with the failed anti-State conservative talking points that we voted into the bin only 3 years ago. Already back in vogue. Elections are popularity contests that make no meaningful change to the…

The ALP seeing success as being puppets to the framings of 3 decades of conservative dominance. ‘We’re not the debt and deficit people!’ This is all ‘the economy’ ever was. A way for conservatives to be in power even when they don’t win…

Elections don’t change anything. This is the sort of blatant use of taxpayer dollars to run party political advertising that enraged the ALP when in opposition. https://t.co/ZAzo1x4Heg

The serious problems the UK faces haven’t budged an inch with a new government. Elections are a populist charade performed on the stage of our actual material problems. Asian disruption is the least damaging way forward for the Anglo…

Imagine again being on the Tesla board. Maybe they do good sandwiches at the meeting. Not much else seems to happen there. (Picture: ABC) https://t.co/flMlO2977W

Elections fix no problems. You can’t vote your way out of the problems voting (populism) causes. The useless UK Tories are gone. The new Labor government is flailing after only months. It doesn’t matter who you elect. Nothing will be done…

"The JN.1 boosters that hopefully we'll have soon will be really important for protection in our country and we want really high levels of uptake." Haven’t had high uptake in 2 years. There’s an election coming. Expect bipartisan sweet…

This is the Eastern Brown Snake. Lethal. Causes about one death per year. We’re being led to believe that because a lethal virus isn’t causing huge numbers of deaths, it’s not lethal. Games of minority and majority. /1…

At the time universal suffrage was introduced, it didn’t occur to many that it would destory the democracies using it. Many came to see it *as* democracy. A ‘voice of the people’. There are no voices in voting. Only numbers. /1…

The fact that Trump and Dutton are real possibilities in upcoming elections should be enough to indict the whole mechanism of electoral politics. The mechanism hasn’t been perverted. This is its logical endgame.

Are we at peak denial yet, that elections are ridiculously dangerous? https://t.co/uRSY9adu8z

We get awfully excited by elections. They’re the Superbowl of team sports. The master framework of all team sports. It matters who wins elections. But not much. The UK is already miserable again, less than 6 months after the disgraceful…

#Insiders the $5 billion Peter Dutton is promising for utilities to speed house building are costs developers normally substantially pay (i.e. it’s a transfer of public money, to them). Developers aren’t building lots of affordable housing…

My campaign to get rid of elections altogether has me sleeping well at night. If you’re for them, each new day must bring fresh embarrassment. https://t.co/CqgnEQjTQm https://t.co/RXJ2m9apRG

For a few years now I’ve argued for what I call ‘reality-based politics’. Not really ever explaining what I mean by that. I’ll use Covid as an example. /1 In a nutshell, it’s the humility of knowing that how things turn out is rarely in…

They're buying it and going back for second helpings. All electoral politics is populism. The calculus of modern power is all popularity. Because that's the key that unlocks the throne room door, via elections. https://t.co/RtSc9eErXO…

“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections.” Autocracies are thousands of years older than elections. To unpack that concept - autocracy. /1…

So many elections. So little change.

Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about ‘polarisation’. /1 https://t.co/uSTXem8d68…

Our health departments so obviously do nothing only for one threat to human health. Covid. That’s driven from the top-down, by their political masters. They think fighting Covid will lose them votes. Elections are destroying us.…

For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies. But now the evidence that these are fantasies is right there in…

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

Look at what elections produce. This is our governance. Gossip and scandal. Who gives an actual f**k. https://t.co/Je97ZsMIpz https://t.co/HrtdtdqSYs

Elections can't solve the problems that elections create. Nothing that needs doing will be popular, and you only win elections by being popular. https://t.co/TanGsHu9nc

At the start of the pandemic I wrote about the strategy with National Cabinet, how it was nothing about ‘all working together’, or any of that nonsense. National Cabinet was the key weapon to destroy the public health response. Time to…

The whole world waits on the edge of its seat for this week’s election, to see if Team Blue or Team Red will lead the great charge to do nothing meaningful against climate change and Covid. Elections create our greatest passion. The…

Why don't we see how perverse it is to 'win' an election? Like governance is a competition to be won. That's team sports culture, staring right at us. https://t.co/MYfhmuSxLb

This is the new power demographic in politics. Young men. Often driving utes. And towing stuff. Unpacking status hierarchies. /1 (Image: https://t.co/KlpaW5WJg7) https://t.co/iohLUxNqr3 In all of the Anglo countries, this is the hot…

I weighed up the various Australian US election coverage options, and decided on SKY News UK instead. The ABC tries, but it does such dull political coverage now. Lightweight.

It's funny in a way that the US has always been considered the world's leading democracy. For example they still hold elections on a working day. Many need to have time off, to vote.

In the battle of election coverages, CNN is winning for me. John King is like their Antony Green. SKY News Australia has ads for a banana sealing device, or something. The most intelligent thing on their broadcast so far.

Just re-Tweeting this here, on this day. Elections are re-instituting monarchies. https://t.co/5K4cuoLT7N

The team sports of elections blinds us. Brexit and MAGA are the same social shift. Anglo nations selling populist fantasies of lost empires. It will accelerate their collapse. Just ask the UK, it knows what’s coming for the US.…

In the post-orgasmic euphoria and devastation of another election, I invite people to zoom out and see the farce we’re trapped inside. 5 outcomes here from the annual review of the state of democracy, worldwide. /1 https://t.co/uLWtQnaUyL…

In reality politics, the election yesterday is irrelevant. Reality doesn't care which team won or lost. It's not a football game. 'But if Team A had won, we'd be closer to following reality'. No, Team A would then just prepare for the next…

Post-election analysis is even more excruciatingly stupid than pre-election team sports euphoria. If things are going well in peoples’ lives (if their social status is healthy), people vote for an incumbent. If not they vote for the…

‘America is divided’ is another post-election analytical dead-end. Of course any country is, that decides to govern by forming teams, like a football league, to determine who will ‘win’ control of the entire country. Elections are what…

Most of my career I’ve worked in governance in one form or another. One thing that amazes me is the belief that people engage in the details of politics. They overwhelmingly don’t. Why this matters, fundamentally. /1 People aren’t stupid,…

Under populism, political leaders attribute all election victories to themselves, as do commentators. It's a popularity bubble. In reality, people vote mostly according to the material conditions of their lives. This is a critical…

Underneath the meaningless hot air of elections, the status quo is copping a belting. Team sports are meaningless. Look at reality. https://t.co/hAPeYC7IaD https://t.co/966cPm7naI

Without elections, this would automatically have leaders of nations in jail. https://t.co/PZhBbIMKkX

This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles. 100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or despair at the relative success of the two teams, Red and Blue.…

Starmer won a landslide less than 6 months ago. When are we going to give up winning elections and ask - why aren’t we fixing the material problems of society? Ordinary people want the problems solved. The polls show only interest in that.…

This was Keir Starmer’s triumph, July 2024. The red. In the ensuing 3 months his approval rating has plummeted by 49 points, to -38. The greatest post-election fall of any UK PM in the modern era. A landslide represents a desperate…

While I think elections are destructive wastes of time, it amazes me that repeated electoral drubbings from conservatives over several decades now has still failed to produce a *single* populist progressive alternative. If progressives…

And our response to these truths will be to call everybody stupid. Elections are the stupid in the room here. Using popularity to run countries. https://t.co/njGnOttaa5

An election is literally a type of Miss Universe competition. A popularity contest oblivious to most of the material realities of the world. It’s delicious that Trump once co-owned the Miss Universe competition. His election is not just…

#Insiders notes it was a ‘change election’ (because people are struggling, then moves on to all the (very common) meaningless babble about why people voted the way they did. We’re on track to completely misunderstand yet another election.…

One of the things to understand about China is that it plays ‘the long game’. In the West we’re hopelessly glued to meaningless short electoral cycles, which have degenerated into perpetual populist posturing aimed always at the next…

Post-election there’s always that post-orgasmic euphoria at having ‘won’ a country (elections are crazy). The Trump cabinet is as equipped to run a country as I am to play in the NBA. Which is the point, they’re not there to run anything.…

John Howard pissed away nation-building mining revenue as tax cuts and election bribes to boomers, like tax-free super. Now we’re staring down the barrel of ignoring our chance to be the Saudi Arabia of the next century, with our…

Societies don’t run on information. They run on status. It’s very common to think of information or ideas in this way, as connected semantic bubbles. (from: https://t.co/k9sdX5FYtW) But each of those bubbles is a status game. A team,…

One of the most destructive myths is the idea of ‘top-down’ vs ‘bottom-up’. Human groups and societies have no tops or bottoms. Implicit in the belief that they do is also a belief about how groups behave, that is also wrong. /1 The belief…

Abolish elections entirely. We won't because it's universally believed that democracy = elections. For most of its history, there were no elections in democracy. Since they were introduced, it's gone into a terminal nosedive.…

I look on every day as our most serious problems have nothing done about them. Activism won’t shift that. Somebody called me cynical for continually pointing this out. To me cynical is pretending all of these daily team sports solve…

In mature populism, you have empty slogans tapping into engineered frenzies of emotion. Dutton doesn’t have a single policy. He’s like the job applicant who turned up without even a CV. He could win. Populism *is* the crazy idea of…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

I love that moment when the fantasy BS of elections meets reality head-on. Like Dutton having to actually build nuclear power stations. https://t.co/cNIS94FOQj

Stop me when you figure out which country and government this is. 1) Government comes to power and within 3 years has built 3,500 km of high quality new roads. 2) Within that same 3 years, tens of billions spent on job creation schemes. /1…

The most common assumptions about democracy, what it is or even should be, are wrong. Democracy is not ‘the people’ running societies. That’s populism. That’s Homer’s car, the idea that ordinary people have the expertise to run a country.…

In feudal times a small number of families (the nobles or aristocracy) hoarded most of a society's wealth, in alliance with a King or Queen. Like I say, 'the economy' is really a social deception to reinstate feudalism, history's default…

And the people doing this to us are the most popular in elections. Inequality is a hierarchy of status. People don't want to be rid of inequality, they want to be higher up that same hierarchy. https://t.co/3pzGMiFr7z

Storr is absolutely right that all of society is status games. What I call team sports. There’s no escaping that, but there is shaping those sports so that they focus on more productive things. ‘Games of success’ include modern science and…

Dutton’s nuclear policy is clearly not even promising a major role for nuclear in the grid. It’s really a policy to replace battery and pumped hydro firming, with gas. As others have said, it’s really a policy for the gas industry. The…

Spending over $300 billion taxpayer dollars to provide less than 40% of the grid’s electricity, in a grid already well on track to provide 100% without spending a cent? Don’t blame me. I’ve always thought elections were a stupid idea.

One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to shift our own framings of these debates away from the ALP/LNP…

Dutton’s policy is so bad that it should disqualify the LNP from eligibility for office. Our natural advantages in energy completely abandoned. We should be the Saudi Arabia of coming centuries. Elections mean they may still win.…

Anglo nations are living a Judeo-Christian last gasp wet dream of symbolic culture warring irrelevance. Victory for Trump is total victory for China, and Asia more generally. Countries that build things societies need. We only focus on who…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

If this election isn’t a test of the idiocy of electoral democracy, I don’t know what would be. A Dutton victory would destroy all of Australia’s natural advantages in the 21st century. Energy is literally power. https://t.co/Hab4CzqRh8

Why the ALP isn’t running a ‘Peter Dutton’s nuclear plan is coming to turn off your solar panels’ line is a mystery. 4 million Australians have solar panels, and nuclear doesn’t play nice with solar. https://t.co/V15pTyi2ps

We’re not within a million miles of fixing either Covid or climate change, the two greatest issues of our time. Because our politics is focused on winning elections - populism - and not simple, practical, material outcomes.

The basic act of segregating children from adult life in schools caused a violent change to our societies, that we’re still living through (and not understanding). When you put people together, they form a ‘culture’. That becomes their…

Democracies still cling to the idea that their societies are shaped in parliaments. The more cynical suggest it’s corporate boardrooms. But our societies now are mostly run by algorithms. Social media algorithms. That control what and who…

That period post-WW2 is when the magic of ‘public life’ began. None of it had a single thing to do with elections or democracy. It was societies rebuilding after 4 major catastrophes. Catastrophes that swept away old status hierarchies.…

Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

Bruno Latour once suggested ( think rightly) that we aim for an ‘object-oriented democracy’. What does this mean? Read on. His magisterial essay at the link below too. /1 https://t.co/F042joQa4O When we think about humans acting together,…

For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done. A few years ago I realised doing that is part of the problem. Mistaking these platforms…

For most of history, there was no separate culture of children. Kids joined the adult world at a very young age, and never left it. Then we invented universal mass schooling. That literally inverted our cultures. At first schools…

Populist landslides always lead to triumphalism. Because our entire understanding of politics is elections, we think these victories mean the complete opposite to what they actually mean. Broken societies have populist landslides. Winning…

After spending several years here writing about the idiot ‘team sports’ of social life, where you back a position inside a group or team, and then battle other teams, it apparently astonished some people that I made a material decision…

I probably give up trying to persuade people to ignore elections and focus only on material realities. Back to reality politics. It’s irrelevant who wins elections. Material realities determine actual outcomes. https://t.co/omiCFAm97q

There’s a lot of hysteria about Trump’s Presidency. It’s a clown car, it’ll be over in 4 years, and impotent in 2. We’re fools who focus on elections as somehow important to reality. You don’t ‘win’ a country. It’s not a team sport, but…

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

The ‘Deep State’ hated by populists is the basic core of our societies. The institutions and public servants who do actually run countries. Public health will be just one casualty. Anybody who believes elections (populism) are democracy is…

Trump is proof that it’s only existential threat to societies that has ever held status games in check. That creates a ‘we’. Without those threats, it’s each to their own, fighting for top dog. Elections were always a sideshow, gamed by…

I don’t think it’s understood what populism is, or how lethally dangerous it is. This is populism. The ‘elected’ without checks or balances. The bureaucracy *should* have more power than the elected, it runs the country. The elected have…

Humans will turn everything into team sports (imitative rivalry). The terms ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ in politics derive from which side of the Speaker’s chair politicians are sitting on. A parliament is one room. Both the left and right wings…

Social media is not part of society. It is society. We now transact the entire continuum of our lives, from the most intimate and personal through to the economic and political, inside it. It’s owned by US and Chinese billionaires. From…

Because we think elections are democracy, we think Trump won. He thinks he won. ‘What’s this button do?’ governance will be his ending. https://t.co/kC2itMYYAF

Wonderful piece from Timothy Burke about how Trump-Musk are destroying the very power they want to wield, right under their own feet. This is what happens when ‘elections/popularity = democracy’ folk meet the real world. Some highlights.…

While attentions are focused obsessively on the team sports of who wins elections, Nicholas Gruen notices what actually runs societies. The dreaded bureaucracy. Red tape. Break that, and your society is over. https://t.co/GFtzru9zn1

Could be issued free to all Dutton voters. To wear with fiscally destructive pride. https://t.co/YBlWbMMZy9

The Dr Seuss of populist gibberish. To be fair to Musk, pretty much everybody I know equates democracy with elections. Suggesting elections are the problem leads to accusations of you being an ‘authoritarian’. https://t.co/gz5hesmtxM

Waiting for the passions to fire up as the election approaches. And then 3-4 years of wailing disillusionment because it didn’t change anything. A popularity contest can’t change the world. It seems we can go through this farcical process…

Greber here clearly describing our descent into populism, with politics decoupled from actual material need. Nothing but taxpayer-funded team sports. It doesn’t need policy bravery. It needs the removal of social media, and elections.…

The checks and balances that actually define ‘democracy’ (elections don’t) mostly derive from the Magna Carta. Rule of law, limits on power of the King and Church, just taxation, a role for the aristocracy/barons, etc. It was never about…

All social systems that survive are eventually ‘authoritarian’, to control the mobilisation of stupidity and violence. Populists set up hierarchies as soon as they game and win elections. Their populism is just a ruse to replace existing…

Dutton will be worried about the cyclone. Leaders who play it right can ride waves of emergency euphoria to big election wins. Catastrophes are all that change societies. Dutton engineers fake ones every day, he knows it.

I want to continue to openly challenge our most basic assumptions about democracy. Like the idea that sustains social media, that somehow allowing entire populations to interact is democracy in its purest form. What can stadium crushes…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now…

“…activists focusing ire on a corporation has a long history in America.” ‘Troubling’, yes, rather than people cheering on the destruction. It’s deeply unpopular to say this, and in populist cultures, that’s why it has to be said. /1…

Earlier in the pandemic, in Australia we saw the process beginning that I often Tweet about. Catastrophe disrupting a status quo. ‘Lockdowns’ were tremendous for the poor/low-status, and terrible for the rich/high status. We know what…

The genius of populism was to convince people that democracy is doing what is the most popular thing. Then suddenly the most popular thing was Trump and the same people are thinking WTF?! Elections are not democracy. Believing they are…

The climax of populist culture is away, the election! 3-4 years of team sports foreplay, culminating in the great orgasmic rush of an election. ‘Politics’ is the central, master hierarchy of populism. Our ur-teams, ‘Left’ or ‘Right’. All…

Far and away the greatest cost in household energy budgets is fuel for vehicles. It costs next to nothing to fuel an EV. The same idiots going to an election promising cuts to fuel excise despise EVs. Elections are a gathering of the…

We know elections won’t fix our major problems. At best a victor may make more progress than somebody else. But it isn’t anywhere near enough. The problems we face are orders of magnitude greater than those that made us stop everything to…

Because we use elections, a popularity contest, to apportion ultimate power in our society. Popularity has zero connection with material reality. This is what populism, the belief in elections, will always produce. The schoolyard.…

The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capitalism, and State-driven democracy. Left *and* Right. /1…

The myth of ‘the people’ and its power refuses to die in the US. The data shows it to be a myth. I don’t agree with the rest of this thread from Cory, about ‘groundswell’ politics. Anti-trust. That’s the great American political delusion,…

The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

Calling everything fascism is an attempt to import mid-20th century Orwellian gravitas to (we think) give our mostly hot air words more impact. Our narrative is ‘things were going OK, then suddenly fascist tech overlords somehow took…

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping point where reality itself is defined by the fads and fashions of social life. Where what’s real becomes what trends. /1…

For a few years I’ve argued for what I call reality politics. Galileo’s ‘and yet it moves’ is the motto. This is not about plugging some science into what we call politics. It’s something fundamentally different. /1 https://t.co/XHZXCQSke8…

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope…

The euphoria of victory in team sports taps into something that goes well beyond sport. It’s only one manifestation of a deeper cultural framework. Girard said, the root of all society is imitative rivalry. Team sports. In sport, but also…

I can promise you the entire world will appear fundamentally differently, with this one reframing. The battles and debates of our adult lives are not the adult world. They’re us trapped in a permanent childhood. How this happened is…

Most of humanity’s urgent problems have known, often simple solutions. Much of it is engineering. We don’t do the things that need doing because of our belief that democracy means routing all those problems through a popularity contest…

Think about how perverse elections are. Today Australia waits to hear who ‘wins’ the right to try to deal with its problems. Like a football game. We don’t need the football game. It’s only interested in football, not the problems.

It’s more accurate to say SKY Australia were walloped in the election, the Howard-Abbott-Morrison-Dutton-Joyce LNP is really just a franchise of SKY Australia, one of Murdoch’s sewers. Not an analogy. They say the answer is even more of…

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

This is a pivotal story, those dedicated to the team sports status games of ‘politics’ won’t understand why. Note the Trump administration’s immediate response, calling out ‘unelected’ judges. The worst insult to a populist is ‘unelected’.…

‘Community opposition’ is a subset of belief in ‘the people’. Both are myths. There is no such thing as ‘the community’. Every time somebody evokes the people or the community, look for an activism in play from a tiny handful of people. /1…

Trumpian populists don’t get that the institutional checks and balances he’s running aground on *are* democracy. Populists want democracy to be just elections; they can game those. But the rest of us forget where the checks and balances…

I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the opposite. That they oppress you. Let’s unpack that bullshit. /1…

The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

Most of us can look on and wonder what do we do about this nonsense? Well, we can read history. Human societies always degenerate into status/popularity games, led by buffoons, unless forced to respond to existential crises. 1/3…

Sir Francis Walsingham, England’s first spymaster, takes us back to a time when it was understood how power and influence works. There was no tosh then about needing to route information or education through a fictitious ‘people’, to get…

The solution is to stop thinking democracy is a cognitive activity. Societies don’t run on information. And to stop elections, which are an empty popularity contest overlaid upon the material realities of our lives. https://t.co/1tTuxvstN8

The Albanese government’s attempt in its first term to ape the status quo by simply replacing fossil fuel generation in the electricity grid with renewables was a lost opportunity. They should have ‘gone households’ right from the start.…

Millions believe democracy means letting entire populations opine on things they mostly know nothing about, with the most popular opinions the ones that then win the day. Social media is now the tool where this farce is carried out. /1…

Leaving to one side the usual US attempt to monetise the whole show for a handful of billionaires, our societies would be orders of magnitude better off with a lot more AI, and a lot less social media and elections. Put knowledge at the…

Headlines yesterday about this meeting of ‘authoritarian’ leaders. Our democracies are dying because of the ludicrous ideas we have about them. That we in the West are led by ‘the people’ while these evil regimes are led by authoritarian…

Watching RFK Jr. at the Senate hearings should be a wake-up call to all of the terminal danger of allowing elections to grant ultimate power in a society. And yet many if not most still mistake elections, for democracy. Popularity has no…

The Nepalese government tried to regulate and restrict social media. ‘The people’ burned down the parliament in response, and took selfies for their feeds. When are we going to give up the idiot Left, Right and -ism stuff? These are…

‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

Lawrence’s Letter from Germany in the late-1920s was a novelist’s perception of a dangerous shift in human social life. It was prescient of what happened next. That danger is back. Mostly we see it as the danger of one or other teams in…

If you include the linear regression trend line, it’s clear that American democracy is getting worse, the more people come out to vote. I’ve Tweeted about how elections clearly have failed in their stated aims. But historically, if you…

Elections enable such flagrant, venal stupidity to run the most powerful nation on Earth. The people in this administration wouldn’t pass most basic job tests. But an election allows them to run the world. https://t.co/xwxN8zJFaf

The truths of life are neither popular, or unpopular. The whole continuum of popularity is a status continuum, not a truth continuum. What is unpopular is just popular to another team, in the social melee. Popularity and unpopularity are…

Checkmate. If you first define democracy as ‘the people’ (never defined) running the show, and then measure their ‘will’ using a popularity contest (elections), you get Trump. Trump isn’t doing an authoritarian takeover. He’s the logical,…

Parliaments/legislatures began as bodies Kings were forced to consult when imposing taxes. They were part of a ceasefire between a King and his court. They were never about ‘the people’. And now they aren’t again. Democracy itself never…

As always our populist culture dribbles with excitement over who we do or don’t elect. Elections can’t solve the problems elections cause. Popularity fixes no problems, it creates the problems we can’t solve. https://t.co/B6l3dwX4tG

This is how disasters are usually managed. Somebody with expertise in the specific disaster leads the response while politicians step to one side. Scott Morrison convened National Cabinet to drive a wedge between Premiers and their expert…

We can live inside Hollywood movies and pretend this nonsense is ‘totalitarian’ politics. Really it’s just bog standard democracy, crippled by a populist mechanism (elections) coupled to social media, that bypasses any connection between…

Elections always promise complete social transformation. (They never deliver.) All of the indicators of democratic health have been in free fall since the introduction of mass elections. Elections are pure populism. It’s bizarre for us to…

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…

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…

What does Angus suggest to fix the international Trump-created chaos? Be Australia’s own Trump. Make Australia Great Again. Drill, Baby, Drill. The Liberal Party is officially dead. https://t.co/YhZjTmxh6T https://t.co/2tqPpF495o

The terminal failure of electoral democracy is the centrepoint of it, which many equate with democracy itself. Elections. Introduced as a mechanism to try to sound the ‘popular will’. (That will itself is a fiction.) Using popularity to…

It took a catastrophic challenge to the status quo to shift working habits. (Gemini-compiled data.) We shouldn’t immediately think fixing the Trumpian populist era means a shift back to business as usual. Somebody beating him in an…

There are remnants of Australia’s superb public health system and pride in its achievements. Trashed since Covid. When a bunch of National Cabinet numpties sent everybody out to be infected, so that they could hopefully win upcoming…

The great delusion of populist/electoral politics is that we’re always just one election away from salvation. No governance system run by popularity can ever change the world in meaningful ways. https://t.co/kt4nh1WVgt

Dunkelman traces how nation-building institutions now struggle to build anything at all. We can easily list those who obstruct this building work, like the sponsored small government movements that are really about entrenching established…

Turchin isolates two things that trigger societal collapse. 1. A proliferation of rivals amongst elites, for control/status. 2. Immiseration of everybody else. Anger drives them to identify with one of the elite rivals promising salvation.…

Populism swings between landslides for either side, often within only a few years. The UK has had 6 PMs in 10 years. Politics has been transformed into trending fads and fashions. Because societies are now social media. Popularity…

The chattering team sports of ‘politics’ will be awash with discussion of One Nation’s win in a by-election. Big material shifts in society are ignoring the political team sports. Routing our material problems through those team sports -…

Following every election is the search for what it means. Elections have no meaning. They’re a popularity contest. That’s all they are. There is no link between popularity and our material lives. It’s a status game overlaid upon those…

If you surrender control of societies to a mechanism - elections - that grants ultimate power to those whose only capability is popularity, this is how it ends. No business would last a year using that same mechanism. Competence needs to…

It’s amazing that most admit no meaningful action can be taken on serious issues close to an election. But few say, ‘so - are elections the problem here?’