Education & universities

#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of…

#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#auspol #covid19 I guess it was this sort of thing that prompted the government to cut funding again from universities, and give it to rent-seeking parasites as tax cuts. https://t.co/nSgsJCN3fq

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#auspol @JaneCaro the obvious story is the pitiful amounts on offer. The wider story is, millions of kids were being left behind BEFORE the pandemic, and nobody cared. Still no priority vaccinations for teachers and students. Childcare for…

#auspol more Economy-driven nonsense, for other natural events. This an advisory yesterday for snow-impacted roads. I was on this particular road, there's no way it should have been open. What's 'necessary' travel? School? Work? Who knows?…

#auspol be immediately suspicious of those who paid no attention over the past 10-15 years as educational outcomes in Australian schools went backwards, now calling to get kids back in school in the middle of a pandemic, for the sake of…

#auspol and with school holidays imminent. When NSW has pulled this off before, the fact they did was taken as a sign of good management, rather than the absence of risk management. You only get so many rolls of the dice...…

#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

#auspol #coivid19nsw the NSW Premier just refused to classify teachers as essential workers for vaccine access, with school returning next week. They join the queue with everybody else. Pretty clearly seeing that the default will always be…

#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1…

#covid19aus #auspol John Barilaro saying that kids must get back to school, for the ‘Economy’. And that NSW is ‘riding the wave’ of its current outbreak, waiting for the ‘peak’. Close your eyes and it could be a member of BoJo’s cabinet.…

@JaneCaro @auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde think we need to be very careful here, the political strategy is very cunning from conservative politicians. Interest declared, my wife is a teacher, and I once was too, so a real interest in…

#covid19aus #covid19nsw this one didn't get a lot of airtime when reported a few days ago. Proposed traffic light system for schools in NSW and Covid. The amber level is key, where cases are in a community. Schools are the greatest…

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#covid19 another conversation yesterday with a ‘vaccines will set us free’ person, convinced it’s fine to allow virus to circulate freely, provided we’re all vaccinated. Jabs in, job done, etc. Try this little gedanken experiment…/1 If a…

#covid19 #auspol watching the the UK acrobatically deny it’s even in a pandemic for the past 18 months gives us many lessons. More weaponised spin - ‘sever’ the tie between cases and hospitalisations. /1 https://t.co/rt6ybUxO0N Both the PM…

#covid19aus #auspol I'm imagining a half-day education session for all of our leading political journalists, after listening to @frankelly08 on RN this morning describe 'Zero Covid' as meaning 'zero cases and zero deaths'. It doesn't mean…

#insiders Health Hazzard talking about ‘balance’, another strategic conservative word. They use it for climate change too, it means ‘we won’t actually act, to save the Economy’. Ask them to ‘balance’ the Economy with childcare, and wages,…

#auspol #covid19aus when I was a teacher, some staff had kids climbing the walls while the classroom next door was quietly learning. I’m sure the staff with kids climbing the walls thought it was a resounding success that they at least…

#auspol #covid19aus like they care less about education or children's' mental health. To a modern conservative, a school is childcare for the workforce. Or it's a hugely subsidised private networking tool for the upper classes.…

@auspol #covid19aus not one word about ventilation in schools in the NSW school re-opening timeline. Knock me over with a feather.

@juliette_io @RichardfromSyd1 @Mike_Honey_ the announced threshold for allowing NSW school re-opening when stay at home orders are lifted and the community transmission in an LGA is lower than 50 per 100,000 population. Do we have that…

Thanks to @rossleedham for digging this out. The current metric NSW is considering for deciding whether a school should be re-opened, from the CDC, is the cases per 100,000 LGA population. NSW suggesting 50. That’s in the high risk range.…

#auspol #covid19aus Greg Hunt regurgitating the laughable ‘kids need to be at school for their mental health’ line. Why would anybody believe conservatives on schools? Oz school performance has been in free fall, and they just fund…

#auspol #covid19aus @DrZoeHyde @RealOzSAGE I was going to do a detailed break-down on the latest NCIRS report which the NSW Government used today to assure people sending the kiddies back to school is safe. But maybe.../1…

#auspol Imagine if Australia had nuclear powered: - vaccine procurement - progressive taxation - funding to public universities, schools and hospitals - political donation laws - controls on political grants schemes - independent…

#auspol #covid19aus the only thing that might slow the 'live with the virus' variant is a national strike. People refusing to get vaccinated or to send their kids to school until all of the roadmaps include time for *all* Australians,…

#auspol #covid19aus Serious question. Is this the first time in the history of the world that a pandemic strategy is 'deliberately infect hundreds of thousands of people'? /1 https://t.co/BL9Aoohxpp Every day I'm lost for words, that we…

Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas or opinions, they have an independent existence that crosses millennia. All ideas are dangerous ideas, they need to be tamed.…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus news from the front lines of ‘living with Covid’, from the UK. Today’s figures standard. 35,623 new infections. Another 180 dead. About 1000 dead per week. That’s just under their average *annual* deaths from a…

#insiders Bananaby talking about protecting the coal industry, as our top export industry. Universities are another of our top export industries, and this government has already presided over more job losses there in the past year than are…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus NSW 2021 is probably best compared with England 2020-21, when it comes to Covid strategy. Bugger the models, they're nearly all hopeless, let's go back to some basic empiricism. Real-world outcomes there for our…

Hats off to the @GrattanInst and @stephenjduckett for calling it so early (July), and it's still bearing up well. There will be nothing like 'normal' life back until populations get to at *least* 80% total population vaccination. /1…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

Two things explain most of the world’s craziness. 1. Society is really a giant high school. That’s our actual culture, we get our social models there. 2. We all want to be ruled by Kings and Queens, the -isms and democracy are both…

If you were asked ‘what is society made of?’, what would you answer? Many might say ‘people’. But you can have people, without having a society. A thread about ideas, and one particular idea that is destroying our socieities. /1 A society…

I’ve enjoyed the advice from infectious disease physicians on building ventilation and education. https://t.co/XBBtl0cmVp

@RichardfromSyd1 @rossleedham @OrinCordus some great educational use of Ro and Re here. https://t.co/cMR2oMFpTz

The same NCIRS who advised governments that kids are damaged more by missing school than by Covid, have also endorsed the ‘No Jab No Play, No Jab No Pay’ scheme for years. Most diseases in that scheme are less harmful than Covid. #auspol…

There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1…

Nothing about this data screams 'we need to get those kids back to school fast'. To me anyway. #auspol #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/x6IPsSGUJo

#auspol #covid19aus The NCIRS and the MCRI are the government’s go-to for advice on children in schools. Neither have the slightest connection with schools or education in their remit or research expertise, that I can see?…

Have watched and read numerous things on the apparent mental health and social damage done during the pandemic. A few thoughts about that, going back to some key assumptions. /1 #COVID19Aus Nearly all of this analysis makes the assumption…

Wanted to re-share this superb analysis, as a way to put a bit more flesh on the bones of the idea that ‘lockdowns’ have removed our basic freedoms and damaged many of us mentally and socially. Society is a high school. Not an analogy. /1…

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…

#auspol #covid19aus Nick Coatsworth on SKY right now, bashing Burnet mask studies and trashing the idea of masks in schools as being scientifically unsound. Maybe he could comment on Covid school safety studies based on a sample size of 18…

Where I live, this is the official advice from the NSW Department of Education, via NSW Health. A nationally prominent medical practitioner is providing the advice I’m re-Tweeting, to the public. This seems a breach of professional…

For a while there the let it rip crowd pretended their concern about schools was about kids missing out on education. They’re saying the quiet bits out loud now, Alan Tudge yesterday. It was always about business. #auspol #covid19aus…

Might need some guidance here. The CDC's guidelines on Covid and schools at no point refer to their use as 'ludicrous' (Deputy Premier) or an idea of 'ZeroCovid academics' (ex-Deputy CMO). Perplexing. #auspol #covid19aus /1…

The same politicians who are demanding students return to school mid-pandemic, often almost completely unprotected, because of apparent concern for their education, presided over this for the past 20 years, and did nothing. #auspol…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain 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…

My son explaining why being back at school is better than online learning. “It’s easier to bludge at school, the teachers can’t tell if you’re doing anything”. #auspol #covid19aus

Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

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…

The experts who say child vaccines aren't a priority, also argue against masks for kids in schools. Now they're slowing rollout of vaccines to under-12s, because of myocarditis and pericarditis risks. Didn't stop teen vaccines. /1 #auspol…

Looking at Israel’s data last night made me think about how we look at Covid data as being about the virus. When actually it’s much more about us, the people. These epidemiological curves show social behaviour more than virus behaviour. /1…

h/t to @RichardfromSyd1 for highlighting this one. The UK infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of its children aged 5-14. Something I want to understand. A short thread. /1 #auspol…

The new NSW Health guidelines regarding ‘venues of concern’. If your kids are wondering what to train for when leaving school, I suggest WHS litigation, based on the underlined bit in red. Decades of guaranteed income. #auspol #COVID19Aus…

The 3 most pointless weeks of school remain this year. Send the kids home out of Covid’s way, ffs. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/CXY17dNyV7

Laura Tingle makes the point that our truly essential workers don’t wear high-vis or hard hats. They’re nurses, teachers, supermarket workers, cleaners, sewage workers etc. The ruling LNP code their true allegiances in their rapid return…

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…

My Year 5 daughter's teacher is a libertarian anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-anything public health person. Yesterday she told the class not to follow rules, not to let people tell you what to do. This will be her last 2 weeks at the…

My kids were gutted when school went back. Like all kids ever, in history, until the past 2 years. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7FPWNhpSor

We needed ‘more data’. Remembering we re-opened schools using data on 18 students. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2zm54MJd7p

The UK facing an Omicron ‘tsunami’. Business interests are peddling the same BS about the importance of infecting children in schools, regardless. It’s about childcare for business, ignore the spin about education and mental health.…

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 Australia, if you can, give your kids the week off school. Only politicians and business really want them there. Have a Covid-free Christmas. #auspol #covid19aus

One of my favourite Beatles stories also shows I think the fantasy at the heart of modern libertarian politics. And Covid. McCartney was the prodigiously talented Beatle - the best bassist, guitarist, drummer and singer in the band. Also…

I find it’s usually people who have never worked in schools, and/or were popular at school, who think kids are damaged by not attending them. https://t.co/gIQu1Hrch4

@TeachersFed what action are you taking to demand schools are being made safe for the beginning of the 2022 school year? Ventilation, air filtration, masks? Or is it all just salaries and conditions for you, as always? #COVID19nsw

If you think it’s more important to have a child in school, than it is to have them not infected with Covid, you’re a lethal idiot.

Let’s ask the professionals who run schools - teachers - about opening them in a pandemic. Not opinionated windbags like some paediatricians and other non-education professionals? Teachers don’t dictate paediatric care, non-school…

If the school is on fire, you call in the firies. They tell everybody else to fuck off, while they put out the fire. The end. https://t.co/GfbQlAGre3

My pinned Tweet talks about society being a high school (literally). Here’s more evidence. The crime is ‘we wanted a party too’, not ‘you’ve killed 150,000 people in the pandemic’. https://t.co/QLgmTesuat

How is this even believable? Missing a few weeks of school to get vaccinated against a lethal virus will harm children? Imagine putting your name to this letter. Let history judge the depths to which some have sunk. #auspol…

“(PM) says that modelling work was presented today relating to NSW to get an understanding on how the return to school may impact the workforce.” Note that. Not the kids. Not the teachers. The workforce. We’re all pit ponies now.…

Bought an air purifier for my wife to use in her classroom. School won’t buy them. I reckon if you asked parents to chip in $10-$20 each to have one in each classroom many would be delighted. None of this is rocket science.

Breakdown of reinfection data from the UK. From the latest UKHSA update report (https://t.co/v4cFa7Qz8I) Reinfections showing the same pattern as infections. Driven mostly by school and young adult age groups. Some *third* reinfections jin…

So @CHaythorpeAEU and @TeachersFed, what are you going to do about it? Allow mass infection of students and staff? What would be the point of you, if yes? #COVID19Aus #nswpol https://t.co/b8KsnAPv9N

"If schools don't open and stay open, that's another 5 per cent of your workforce that gets taken out and that has a very serious impact”, said the Education PM. Calling it ‘Covid safe’ opening, like ‘Covid safe’ infections in other…

The embarrassing dysfunction of rich countries during the pandemic should force us to take stock of what we’ve become. But it probably won’t. Sir Richard Barrons, former Commander Joint Forces Command in the UK, is a good place to start. A…

Seems sensible to make them the cornerstone of a school opening plan. https://t.co/IQkfj8nPCw

I’m waiting for every blowhard expert who has opined on Covid in schools to welcome reciprocal advice from teachers as to the best way to do their job. https://t.co/f37tqOqszp

This pandemic and all of its problems stems from societies that have been shaped as high schools. That’s where we learn our social models, and we construct the adult world to match. Look at the desperate pleas to get kids back to school,…

We need kids back in school, so that Australia can continue its decline towards the bottom of the OECD. Spare me the bullshit about us caring about education or mental health. There was little meaningful action on either, pre-pandemic.…

The great public health achievement of the 20th century was the massive reduction in child mortality. The 21st century is sending children to school in the middle of a pandemic wave, unvaccinated or only partially vaccinated.…

Conversation with a colleague, about back to school RATs and her children. "I won't be testing them twice a week, only if they have symptoms, it's too upsetting for them". I sympathise. Disease control should never have been outsourced to…

It’s such beautiful proof that society is a high school. Boris kills over 150,000 Brits with Covid. But what might sink him is ‘why can Boris have a party, when we can’t have parties?’ https://t.co/zRFePXobtf

The softening normalisation never ends. Deputy CMO out today, to explain that we’ll see a spike in cases when all those school RAT results come through. In a ‘nothing to worry about’ way, as if extensive asymptomatic infection in the…

Those 'bumps' are the children, teachers and parents of NSW becoming infected with a lethal virus. #COVID19Aus https://t.co/c9hR9Cb5Jv

Public health, libertarian style. My wife, a primary teacher, said her year 3 class were discussing the RAT testing. One of the kids said 'what's that?' The other kids explained. Nope, never heard of it, the other kid said. Parents not…

Life in libertarian Australia. My wife is a teacher, and in the absence of any measures from the NSW Govt: - I put an air purifier in her room. I didn't ask. - I got her better masks, KF94. - I got her to measure CO2 levels in her…

Less than 1 week into the new school year, my youngest (10) is one of only 4 students in her class still wearing a mask. We can and should blame the NSW Government for this. But also, that's a lot of parents who aren't insisting. We get…

School cases building now in NSW, more each day. Parents notified of confirmed cases, but not of close contacts (close contact kids disappear, not even teachers are told why). Of TTIQ, only T is operating. It’s theatre.…

Two (true) stories from inside NSW schools that highlight how RATs have become the new public health magic beans. 1) A teacher came to school for 2 days, with symptoms, 'because I tested negative on my RATs'. /1 #COVID19Aus 2) A year 3…

Don’t believe the spin about how well things are going in schools. Week 1 was badly disrupted in many, and that was nearly all infection carried forward from holidays. School spread is only just beginning. My local school is already unable…

NSW Teachers Federation leading the charge on school infection. Remember this in the coming weeks. https://t.co/Mbz959CdXK

Schools, week 2. Talking to a parent whose primary school aged child has Covid. Diarrhoea and vomiting so bad the child is hallucinating. And to what end? It won’t stop them catching it again. Children and staff disappearing every day,…

Hearing anecdotally that many schools are already not even bothering to notify parents if a child is positive in a class. I know it from my own school, several kids are positive, but nothing has come from the school. #nswpol

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,…

Why do we celebrate removing public health measures, and not removing infections? Because society is a high school. Worth repeating that, as I do. It’s not an analogy. A society of teenagers will always see PH measures as being ‘grounded’.…

After the first week of school this year, the NSW Government quantified the infection numbers in schools. Have we seen an update since then? They hold that data, it doesn't appear to be available elsewhere. #nswpol

One cutting edge of inter-generational tension is surely pathology waiting rooms. Pathologists open early, presumably to allow working people and school kids to get tests before the day. It doesn't work, at 7.30am waiting rooms queued out…

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…

Any journo who wants a good Covid story should do a bit of snooping around residential colleges on university campuses right now. Tales of widespread infection. #auspol

In which several benches of private school old boys who probably can’t even make a sandwich, declare an international event over. Nationally. Or something. https://t.co/1WtBhhtgVk

Two of my kids are still wearing a mask. Next week the NSW Government removes all school mask requirements. This weekend we'll discuss what to do. One is still weeks away from a 2nd vaccine dose. 21st century Australia feels like 17th…

Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’. We see our democracies as naturally more peace-loving. In reality those democracies are held in place by force, mostly the $600…

Why were we 'living with' colds and flu anyway? Most of that was always poor workplace and school air, and insecure work with insufficient sick leave.

Schools in NSW have now been back almost exactly one month. Either a lot of kids have caught Covid at school, or we have a major truancy problem. #auspol #COVID19Aus https://t.co/MXCihTnvgL

A friend with kids in a Catholic High School. They will celebrate lifting of restrictions with a whole-school mass. Singing, the works. Small country town. I smell danger, to the entire town.

On top of the total radio silence on actual details of Covid in schools, is the vacuum of reporting on what’s happening on university campuses right now, with infection. Particularly residential colleges. #COVID19Aus

As an ex-teacher, I’ve tried as well to point out that the NSW government was never going to take ventilation seriously in schools, when they still haven’t even bothered tor remove unflued gas heaters. We all remember these from our youth.…

The conservatives used all of these schemes the same way they use schemes in private education. As Trojan Horses to undermine the whole universal provision framework. Let’s not fix the bloody horse. Burn it. https://t.co/rLjwSsw9bQ

It’s glorious watching the flailing confusion of those who screeched the educational apocalypse of lockdowns for the past 2 years. And how wrong they were, and still are. Their crocodile tears over child mental health will be the next…

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…

Remembering that loud, ignorant voices insisted we send our children back to schools to get infected with Covid, so they could rescue their mental health and education. Education results have been in free fall for at least a decade. And…

Nothing says ‘society is a high school peopled with adolescents of all ages’ better than the social media response to Taylor Hawkins’ or any rock star’s death, compared to the silence about the ongoing mountain of Covid bodies.

Anybody remember being told to go to work or school, with the flu? Every day, some new normalisation of the indefensible. Don’t think this won’t happen in Australia. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/RYC0aJ9fnX

Life is a high school, you can’t unsee it. High school speech night, with one boy storming the stage to whack another, because he disrespected his girl. Yeh, this is how grown ups behave. https://t.co/99NFotFMuh

Nearly 3 months since school went back. Reckon the government accidentally reversed ‘vaccination’ and ‘open schools’ on their Gantt Chart? Me either. https://t.co/kq0C9NDTfC

“The department has deployed more than 350 staff from head office into schools, and more than 2000 final-year university students...” A measure of how little teaching is respected, that the same thing would be seen as suicidally…

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…

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter.…

It’s no coincidence that those who say ‘schools must stay open’ said nothing about schools until 2 years ago. Nothing about plummeting academic performance, about widespread bullying in schools, pre-Covid. About the gutting of funding.…

Imagine 3 years ago saying 'if your child has impetigo, send them to school anyway'. Now you can say it for infections that can actually kill them. https://t.co/T8F07oFhV3

Fewer than 50% of kids under 11 in NSW have been vaccinated. There’s a public health PhD in there, about why this is.

Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who…

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…

Mental health is worse when kids are at school, which the research is quite clear about. Academic performance was often better under lockdowns too, because students got individual attention. ‘Disruptions’ is sanitised drivel, it means…

NSW school holidays are underway. Read any significant changes in case numbers with that firmly in mind, I think. Perversely, reduction in spread from kids being out of school will be used as an excuse to have even fewer protections in…

As Michel Serres said, education can be in person or virtual. But what you learn, is always virtual. Knowledge. The entire point of education is to move beyond ‘face to face’. In most schools knowledge is buried in a jungle of…

What a disgusting joke. Don’t blow smoke up our arses by pretending this is due to the end of the Omicron wave, at 15,000 cases per day (that we know of). This is entirely due to Term 2 of school starting next week. The timing is…

Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough…

Lest We Forget. We sang Kipling’s Recessional as a hymn, at school. And…we did forget. Today we’re told lest we forget means to not forget the ‘sacrifice’ of those who died. But Kipling’s poem asked us to not forget the futility of empire…

The reason populism is destroying politics and democracy is because it makes people believe there are no objective criteria for good government. If you’re popular you win votes, and you’re then by definition the best people for the job.…

I want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1…

Political libertarianism has succeeded in savaging public institutions using fundamentalist ideas about ‘freedom’. Of action, but also of speech. We’re in a bind now, this fundamentalism stops beliefs from being regulated. Fish knows it.…

Because our education is now mostly training in jobs, I think we miss obvious things. 2022, for example, is really just the Reformation all over again. A secular version of it. I see so many bewildered by what they see as social breakdown…

“As Health Minister I am not at all keen to be heading back the path that has exhausted everybody with all the restrictions.” BH, March 2022. Sitting on the couch watching Netflix isn’t exhausting. Being a teacher or HCW with the…

Last week's school shooting in the US wasn't a problem, because it only killed the tiniest fraction of a percent of all children. That'd be a heckuva paper to write, hey. https://t.co/UmD9Ob93ao

The reason what you learn at school often seems irrelevant to your later life, is that society is increasingly the daily grind of bullshit, unthinking jobs. Let’s make life more like what we learn at school, rather than make school more…

Anybody feeling like decades of ‘personal responsibility’ politics has led to everything we can’t provide personally - food, water, energy, education, transport, clean air, wages, equity, climate, healthcare, the arts etc. - falling apart?…

Healthcare is underfunded. But within healthcare, a GP might earn $300K+ a year, and specialists multiples of that. It feels a bit like universities, which cry poor, but where senior managers earn more than cabinet ministers and Prime…

Where are the experts and politicians who say kids had to be back at school because they were missing too much education? My kids learned a helluva lot more in lockdown than they are in the Covid soup at school. #auspol…

It enrages people to say it, but Barrie had, as regular guests: - Piers Akerman - Andrew Bolt - Gerard Henderson - Tim Blair. We’re not in high school people. Move on. https://t.co/3LA8wacodH

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1…

If you won’t wear a mask because ‘nobody else is’, it’s time to re-enrol in high school so that you can be amongst peers in your stage of emotional development.

For those who cry ‘alarmist’ when Covid is described as a shitshow, what would concern you? A. More dead than World War 1, in 2 years? B. Mass infection, disease and death? C. Losing your Twitter platform of minimising trolls? Teachers say…

I was a teacher, more power to them for demanding better pay and conditions. The great enigma of this pandemic though has been the meek acceptance of mass infection of staff and students. Teacher unions were among the meek.…

Personal Covid stories Part 2. My wife is a primary school teacher, I have 2 kids still at school. I work in an open office with several hundred people. We’ve just finished 2 tough school terms, masked, with HEPA filters and ventilation,…

A teacher friend is the sickest she’s ever been. On her second Covid infection, has been masked, is triple-vaxxed, is despairing. This is ‘personal responsibility’ pandemic action, individuals repeatedly smashed against the rocks by the…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

Imagine the work the NSW Government has done over the school holidays to make schools Covid safe for beginning of term 3 next week. I said imagine. There was no work.

It’s sad we assume people are just stupid for not doing something like wear a mask. They don’t really need an education campaign, ignorance isn’t the real problem. Most know masks help. Without leadership all of life is a high school. Peer…

Parents and primary school teachers spend years teaching us essential personal responsibility skills like sharing and cooperation. And then libertarian private school boys who become leaders undo it all in 2 years. https://t.co/JT7jKDGIPJ

Public education campaigns. The problem with Covid isn’t public ignorance. It’s political negligence, a refusal to lead a public heath response. The public is no more likely to spontaneously self-organise a public health response than they…

The pandemic isn’t mass stupidity. It’s the extension of privatised market-based politics, to public health. We already have privatised healthcare, transport, education, banking, defence, etc. The same political operating system responded…

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…

Young adults in a workplace told me they’ve been avoiding ‘anybody who has kids’. They’re the people at work they see getting repeat infections. Hello experts who tell us kids catch Covid in the community, not in school. Infecting our kids…

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…

For the first time in 2.5 years, I’ve caught something. Dunno what it is yet, though identical symptom-wise to what my wife and youngest brought home from school last week. I was as ‘personally responsible’ as a person could be. But…

One of the ways conservatives win is to change education into job training. Leading to ‘job-ready graduates’ without any breadth or depth of actual learning. Skilled to keep the economy moving without any capacity to question its basic…

Watching the UK news about the terrible drought in Europe. In the UK ‘water companies’ are asked to take a range of measures. Another basic service, privatised. Why can’t basics like education, health, water and energy be not-for-profit?…

This seems some sort of counter to those who argue against controls and protections in education environments. https://t.co/KqjfEwa9zS

How did high school/adolescence practically become the model for all of society? Social media mostly, severing the institutional connections people previously made after leaving school, and perpetuating the always-on social network of…

An expose into the way top officials are neutered now by populist politicians in NSW. We've all watched Utopia, it's not parody now. What's less seen with populism I think is that this infects an entire culture. Look at the constant…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

We all went through school watching the ‘geeks’ being bullied, and now scratch our heads wondering why nobody listens to the science. Nobody has ever listened to the science. The science got wedgies.

We all went to school. Groups never self-organise, those who say ‘this is what the people want’ are telling the people what to want. If you think science and facts will beat this, remember how much help they were at school if you were…

The concern for child mental health in this pandemic, and the assertion not being at school damages it. Here’s the last (2015) major survey on this. About 1 in 7 females aged 16-17 had considered suicide. About 1 in 20 had actually tried…

To this day not once have teachers, the actual professionals in schools, been asked to advise on Covid in schools. Instead government-friendly paediatricians and infectious disease doctors are seen as the experts. https://t.co/5e1mKQ0gI3

The greatest sin in the muddled mess of ideas we have around democracy is to say that some people know more than others. The cult of opinion forbids hierarchy when it comes to ideas, though we have hierarchies of expertise in every other…

Teaching friends say they’re having to test sick kids at school for Covid, and send them home if they test positive. Some parents aren’t bothering. Governments allow the parents to not bother.

Some claim the greatest epidemic in human history is the surge in Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) in the 20th century. Heart disease is (many don’t realise) mostly unknown before that century. This may be an example of the danger of the idea…

Governments and schools have been very good at suppressing details of Covid impacts on education. But the evidence is there, if you look. https://t.co/yhVsVql0f6

Some public health experts say a pandemic is over when people stop talking about it, and countries stop fighting it. Imagine them advising on school bullying, ‘just keep it to yourself, and we’ll stop the school doing anything about it’.…

Most Covid minimisers believe in Covid, it’s just that they want to privatise it. Like they have education, energy, childcare, water and other non-pandemic health care. The Covid debacle is just the latest privatisation debacle. The…

Jane Halton on The Project saying we need to remove masks on domestic flights so that children can get back to face to face education in schools. I got nothin’.

Most tradies I know earn substantially more than people I went to university with. Only the latter had to repay their tuition. Still the dumb country pretending to be the clever country. https://t.co/CYeBztUShI

“…children in the UK were weaponised, exploited in an ideological battle...” The disgusting, deliberate infection of children, using outrageous propaganda equating SARS-Cov2 with colds and flu, and nonsense about mental health and…

Populism says the best people to run countries are the most popular people. (‘Let’s solve our most complex problems by picking the most popular people to do it’ means we quickly forget how stupid the most popular people were at high…

When politicians want individuals to take individual responsibility for core services like energy or education, they produce sites like this to maximise the information consumers have. With Covid they shut the information down. They don't…

Free TAFE study is not the progressive political statement it’s made out to be. It’s mostly training trades for business, a massive taxpayer subsidy. Many graduates destined for the prime lobbying group, the housing industry. At the same…

We face our own possible extinction, and our politics in response is pure high school. Look at the grown up world around you and you can’t miss that it’s almost entirely adolescent tribes fighting for popularity. Adolescence IS our…

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…

Not once have teachers, the professionals in schooling, been asked about how to manage Covid and schooling. Instead a caravan of patronising and paternalistic government-friendly experts from other fields have consistently spruiked no…

This is an important argument to continue. Technology is meaningless without a context. The US, with its extreme libertarian beliefs, mostly invented social media. Think about how it taps into all that idealistic tosh about ‘the people’…

"Democracy is not the problem. Voting is the problem." We're now 'electoral fundamentalists'. It's the popular, usually stupid kids from school who love electoral democracy, because it reproduces the way they dominated the bullying…

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 UK is in a death spiral, created by politicians whose entire lives from their student days has been devoted to sterile debates about fanatical, hardened ideas. The type of ideas teenagers have, which is what they still are, not…

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…

If you know the cunning fanaticism of neoliberal political belief, you’ll know that the determination to get kids back into school during a pandemic was really about those schools being businesses who had been disrupted. Not about…

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…

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…

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…

Sat through a school presentation today where the principal gave a speech about going against the tide of popularity to do what’s right in life. Not one staff member and only one student in the entire hall was wearing a mask. That student…

Yesterday my son said to me “you know, wearing a mask is the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do.” He was talking about being the only kid at school masked, and the social pressure to conform. This is key to…

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…

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…

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…

I know a lot of NSW teachers who quit last year. Not one of them has said it was about wages or working conditions, even though those aren’t great. It was Covid. https://t.co/O8pRq4jgqf

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…

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…

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…

No prizes for guessing which bit the AFR cherry-picked from the independent (of evidence) review. As an ex-teacher and parent, one of the things that most disgusted me in this pandemic is the total disregard for children and teachers. /1…

Notice the Trumpian shift in Andrews Labor? Give the 'elites' in universities a kicking. The pandemic certainly wasn't academic. It is - still is - political. National Cabinet is the greatest roadblock to ridding us of Covid.…

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…

The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselves. This is one of the greatest of all political libertarian…

Here's an example of 'living with the virus' and 'protecting the vulnerable'. What options does this poor mother have to do either? Not send the kids to school, where no real effort is made to prevent them becoming infected?…

To link two themes I Tweet about, social media replaces the adult world, mediated by institutions going back multiple generations, with a high school culture. It’s a technology that allows the cultural and social life of high school to…

We need birthday cake Covid questions to politicians. John Hewson’s GST campaign derailed when asked a specific question about how it would apply to birthday cakes. With Covid politicians get away with ignoring it by sticking to…

‘Immunity debt’ is really public health debt. Australia swapped an established and powerful public health approach in late-2021 for a neoliberal, libertarian political approach to a pandemic. It privatised the pandemic, as part of the…

The reason universities are offering so many early-entry places is because they see it as a way of getting enrolments. Neoliberal governments trained them to compete for customers. It has nothing to do with the tosh in here about education…

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…

Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

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:…

I missed this one at the time. Ah well, at least they didn't miss any school, which would have caused a lot more mental health damage. /s https://t.co/SLEM78Pjtm

A university. And a ‘Trust & Safety Council’. Society entrusted stewardship of knowledge to universities more than 1000 years ago. Institutions. Social media employing well-meaning people with pretty lanyards is no substitute. This is…

Another backwards thing. The idea that school should prepare us for life. But the point of education is to change life. To shift the status quo. Education should shape business, not business shape education. https://t.co/LMM08seOXi

Thankfully we got all the kids back to school to get infected, otherwise their education would have been left behind. https://t.co/rrX1wymEgU

I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry…

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…

Political libertarians turn State health bodies into their compliant pheasant-dogs. “Just a friendly reminder”. And a personal favourite: “…what actions you may like to take”. The same libertarians issue edicts like, “you must fly a flag…

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…

A teacher friend told me teachers are now often working sick, and feeling terrible about it, but their schools can't function. There are no casuals available, and it's either work sick or the school collapses. The cynical 'live with the…

The political and business types who demand we 'learn to live with the virus' are often the type of men who tell their wives to shut the kids up. Private school boys raised to lead the world, but somebody else will do the washing, cooking…

'Schools must stay open'. Apparently for education, though actually as childcare for business. Some kids haven't had a regular teacher (or even much teaching) in months. https://t.co/e2jjKyJ1Bs

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

I don’t yet have a Mastodon account. I’m not sure I’m really interested in being part of reinventing this space all over again, just because we tribally hate Elon Musk. Not my thing, more high school politics. Leaving here in droves just…

This is how modern conservatives work. Engineer the collapse of public institutions, then use that collapse to accelerate the collapse even further, by blaming the institutions themselves. HCWs, like academics, fall for this too, they…

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…

Tradies, who earn more on average than university graduates, pay nothing for their tuition, and are even paid as they study. But university graduates deal with years of debt, and only earn as they learn if they get a separate job. The dumb…

This year's NSW Schools Spectacular had about 5000 students from across the State, belting out the tunes in close proximity to one another, with thousands of others looking on. One of the sponsors was the NSW Teachers Federation. Call me a…

I know a few have shared this (thanks @NobodyImpawtant). Extremely powerful and educational explanation of current thinking on Covid sequelae and Long Covid, and the criticality of avoiding infection. https://t.co/PqzqSSnKSi via @YouTube

Teachers want to live with a bit less virus. Or to live, full-stop. https://t.co/KS3kEW5ePS

‘Personal responsibility’ public health, as well as being an oxymoron, means paying for it yourself. Like private education, and toll roads. It doesn’t mean individual freedom.

If we had freedom, we could avoid infection. We’d be free to take evasive action. But we’re not, we have to work and kids have to go to school. And many workplaces are doing nothing to protect us. Only caged chickens, pigs and cows get…

That kid at the front is the mask-wearer. Not an analogy, Western culture was an adult culture, embedded in its institutions, which school kids graduated into. N=1 politics destroyed the institutions. All that’s left is the social…

School discos and presentation ceremonies should prime the pump for a Covid Christmas. All completely avoidable if we had a country not run by populists terrified of losing a vote, and economic zealots who will never understand an economy…

Local school being smashed by Covid. We have a Premier who learned his trade as a Young Liberal, relishing the ideological warfare that he now brings to a pandemic as well. Like conservatives globally, sees public health as State…

Heart-warming to just walk past an auditorium packed with local elderly folk, listening to local school choirs. Nobody is masked. They should have introduced local HCWs as well, 'hi, my name is Jane, I'm an ICU nurse, I may be seeing you…

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

“When you get to be our age, you all of a sudden realise that you are being ruled by people you went to high school with…you all of a sudden catch on that life is nothing but high school.” Kurt Vonnegut. Who understood how societies really…

If you’re an expert who understands the disaster of Covid, arguing the facts is a dead-end. Societies run using social rules, not facts. You have to interrupt the social conformity process. Your current fact-based resistance only…

Was at a school end of year presentation today and the school leader said 2022 was a ‘lot better than 2020 and 2021’, things much more ‘back to normal’. Like all schools sickness has been off the charts in 2022. The leader coughed and…

The people probably least surprised at the capitulation to Covid, is teachers. (Nobody asks them anything.) The ‘live with the virus’ folk were their students, and they saw that shift in them and in their parents. Schools have been coping…

This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same social dynamics. A society is not a collection of ‘the people’.…

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…

As 2023 begins, I think it’s becoming clearer that to save the world, we have to leave high school. Sadly I’m not confident we even know where to start doing that.

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

The basic social dynamics of the schoolyard now discovered in science. (Planck discovered it a century ago.) Our politics is the same. All of society is social groups jostling for status. It’s all school, it doesn’t end. Only plagues and…

It’s been a real disappointment to me to discover just how much Covid minimisation seems driven out of departments in universities. Professional jealousies obviously in conflict.

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

Science-led denialism was already well underway when Covid arrived. This is people within the scientific establishment. Some of the most vicious Covid denialism is from within established fields too. Universities and disciplines have some…

Minimisers will always stick to the likelihood axis, and ignore the impact axis. Basic risk management, not being done. Mostly because we ask individual experts, who have academic axes to grind. And not public health departments, who do…

Parties where people wear Nazi costumes become parties that run States. It’s the same people. Politicians are still trading in the fundamentalist ideologies of student politics, while people become infected and die. https://t.co/HleYOge33X

Have spent a second Christmas holiday helping the local school improve its ventilation for the coming year. Some of the changes I’m funding myself. Meantime academics on 6-figure salaries, often working safely from home, cheer on another…

The federal government is offering grants of up to $25,000 to each school in the country, no matter the sector, to do Covid mitigation work like improve school ventilation. Worth asking your local principal if they’ve bothered to apply.…

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling…

Worth remembering this government, like the one before, is still sitting on over $100 BILLION in unnecessary tax cuts. $32 million available for Covid mitigation, on a contested basis. If every school were to receive $25,000, that would…

Filial piety, and Covid. How casually we let Covid kill our Western elders, age is seen as a comorbidity. Burning off the dry tinder. In China elders and ancestors are venerated. We call that ‘authoritarian’, because we’re teenagers. Our…

We’re in Covidgate right now. Climategate was the model. Flood the public spaces with bothsideism BS, to distract. Get people arguing the science every day, not to find a truth, but to delay any action and make the public mistrust…

The 95% will always follow the 5%. All that changes is who occupies the 5% position. First law of high school, thus first law of economic societies. https://t.co/JP6n4M9pKT

Unfunded gold-plated boomer super will cost the public more than $200 billion. Much of the proposed $120 billion tax cuts will flow to that demographic as well. The government couldn’t find more than $3000 per school (about $30 million) to…

Politicians: ‘do as we say, not as we do.’ I’ve also seen very little to zero interest from teacher unions on this topic since the time of this Tweet. There isn’t a teacher I know who didn’t get Covid last year, some multiple times.…

Wonderful to have these threads back. Depressing how hard it is to figure out anything, given the data available. We may however get a test case again when school returns in just over a week, of ‘school infections just reflect community…

First libertarians destroy societies (that they don’t believe exist). Then they mobilise the anger through social media to viciously attack anybody who tries to fix things. They’re bullies from high school, now running the world. I don’t…

I love Twitter, but it shares the life is a high school disease. Every day the focus is more upon somebody’s team or group outdoing somebody else’s team or group, than it is upon actual reality. With each team lining up its experts and…

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…

So it turns out lockdowns are to blame for this. Lockdowns of most of the educationally disadvantaged kids in public schools, and lockdowns of most government money in private schools to build new swimming stadiums. https://t.co/P0QvrwDITA

If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours you see on these platforms would be deemed acceptable anywhere else. Not a reactionary thing, I’ve researched on these platforms…

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…

A shorter way to explain why nothing is being done to beat the pandemic, is to point out that under current politics nothing is being done to fix any public problem. Education, health, roads, climate change etc. The politics that rejects…

George Monbiot’s latest piece for The Guardian. School starts again in NSW next week. For another year, no meaningful action has been taken to prevent spread there. The Doherty modelling earlier in the pandemic modelled the mass infection…

The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free…

Everything you need to know about why teaching is in crisis is in the determination to infect teachers and their students repeatedly with no mitigations, in this pandemic. Peel away the spin and you’ll see they’re valued only as childcare…

A group of career student politicians we call National Cabinet turned one of the strongest public health nations in the world into a nation of anti-vaxers, in a year. And the same BS in here about doses only in winter, and the young not…

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…

“However, South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas on Tuesday said parents were loving the consistency of knowing the same rule applied to everyone.” But with Covid, everybody can bring it to school whenever they like, hey Peter.…

People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated essay I Tweeted earlier, from 2021. To me they’re interchangeable in the way they conceptualise things - a more compassionate…

Douglas Adams’ observations about technology are another way to see how the world we live in is 100% social, and 0% economic, capitalist, socialist or anything else. Nearly everything we don’t understand we attribute to some abstract -ism,…

Tim Brooke-Taylor died right at the start of the pandemic. While quite old he was also in a tier of society that usually manages to avoid public health problems. He may be a good entry point to discussing the politics of individuals and…

The Audit Office of NSW, school attendance trends. Kids were escaping already before the pandemic, the continuing decline in attendance follows the same negative slope. Anybody who’s worked in secondary schools knows missing school is not…

Re-Tweeting this to a more general audience. Look at the calamitous trend in school attendance, driven by ongoing mass infection. This measure of attendance level is one designed to show educational damage, kids away for more than 10% of…

Two things, here. Another article that manages to avoid mentioning Covid even once. Millions of kids and their teachers being infected, multiple times, doesn’t even come up as a hypothesis. Ask any teacher about Covid absences, the tsunami…

Attendance rates dropped by over 4% in Australian schools in 2022. (Multiply by number of kids and that’s a lot of kids away.) Attendance level (who was there more than 90% of the time, a key educational metric) fell over 21%. Acara…

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)…

The principal at a local school has followed kids and other staff into isolation this week, as the virus feasts on an entire generation again. Is spending on school ventilation inflationary? Asking for a few million friends.…

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.…

On the still open scientific question of whether SARS-Cov-2 does permanent damage to the immune system. Where would you draw the circle? If you were in public administration and political leadership, not battling with other academics for…

While bad people rename the hierarchies that favour them, so that nobody notices nothing has changed, good people sing songs, thinking that changes the world. Nobody’s done a Covid benefit yet. It damages the business model. Life is a high…

The Project running a story on kids not wanting to go back to school. A problem of ‘lockdowns’. No, school is a hostile environment for a lot more children than we’ve bothered to understand, and the pandemic made that visible. Just as…

Over 25% of students persistently absent from school in the UK, due to ‘flu and other viruses’. The virus that shall not be named. https://t.co/SGOOzgRgg4

School kids and their parents driving repeated waves of Covid into the wider community? One Australian minimiser loves to say that spread in schools just matches the wider community. Probably because that’s where the spread starts.…

I’m a broken record, but the thin line between our problems and the solutions to those problems is always the electoral system. It does almost nothing except get in the way, infecting grown up life with high school popularity.…

If you really believe democracy is about educating the public to run the country, worth scrolling through this trending topic. If you do believe it, I’m also guessing you’re not a teacher. https://t.co/3ingKIIFpy

You’d think ‘let’s infect everybody in the country’ would have a risk assessment. Running a school fete has a risk assessment. Can we see the risk assessment?

Students were never told to go sit in the library when they had colds and flu. Covid exceptionalism, anyone? https://t.co/wjVpQK3pv5

Failing to meet child safety standards is pretty much every school in Australia right now. They’re nearly all Covid incubators. https://t.co/ukPPUZ0war

Society is structured using high school as a framework. Not as Left or Right. Imagine the geeks and nerds petitioning the cool kids for changes. How do you reckon that would go? Politics is social, and social is status.…

‘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…

Clean air beats most *pedagogical* interventions, for improving educational outcomes. https://t.co/sMy6C6eL34

Longer article on installing air filtration in classrooms. The increase in educational performance the equivalent of cutting class sizes by one-third. One for politicians AND unions, at a fraction of the cost of standard pedagogical…

Regional Australia will need an additional 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are projected to retire between 2020 and 2025. This is what running your society as a free market economy for 50 years does. No planning, no…

In today’s minimiser maths lesson, a school excursion can either use cars, or a bus. On the trip a car or the bus crashes, killing 3 children in each scenario. Which is the greater tragedy? Minimisers? The car, because the 3 dead on the…

Society is a high school. This is what we abandoned public health to do. Our moonshot. https://t.co/xf3C7VlW9H

Week 7 of term now, and very little visible Covid in school this term so far. Very few absences at work either. World data (cases fairly meaningless) suggesting a similar quiescence. Who knows. https://t.co/Y5eFibm6Ai

Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden target ‘division’ in politics, as if the problem is people just not…

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

Mandates give people permission to do the right thing. School camp this week, relented and let our youngest go because into our 4th year of this, didn't want to keep denying them shared experiences. Is now sick. Thanks to the school and…

The school and the government are what created the ‘harm’s way’. Difficult for some to comprehend, it seems. https://t.co/cUDIZSj3lY

Look at the glee when popularity contests are won. It feels like high school, because it is. High school is the social and cultural model used to shape modern societies. Like all popularity, it’s incredibly fleeting, and changes nothing…

Political libertarians latched onto ‘mental heath’ as a scapegoat for social collapse (that they caused). Just as they discovered an interest in education only when schools weren’t babysitting the children of employees. It lets them appear…

Remember when your kids (or if you're a teacher, your students) complained when you gave them direction? Basic psychology, they wouldn't respect you if you didn't. A tiny whining minority convinced weak politicians otherwise, with Covid.…

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…

Thanks to @DavidJoffe64 for pointing out why it was so important to get kids back into school. The bullies had nobody to beat up. https://t.co/5jFnWaxzK9

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…

Both the LNP and ALP relish sinking the boot into students. Either the pollies got their free degrees already, or they’re too stupid to have one and resent it. Imagine taxing education, and not taxing corporations. The joys of the economy.…

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace…

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…

Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a sensible discussion about the quality of music, without…

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…

The 'Sick and Tired' report mentions the need for clear definitions, and clinical care linked to data. The problem with chronic disease is, this can take years. Decades. This is the priority right now - risk management. It's public policy,…

Every year on Anzac Day I suggest people read Kipling’s Recessional, from which we get ‘Lest We Forget’. We had to sing it at school, it’s always stayed with me. Its meaning is not the one now commonly given to that phrase, I’d suggest.…

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,…

30% of businesses fail in their first year. 50% by their second. 75% by their 4th. Business (especially small business) is a terrible model for a society. But that’s what the ‘economy’ is. Not only does it mostly fail, it’s even worse than…

This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that invented central banks is stupid. It’s a key plank of free market…

Everyday stories. From a local FB page. "Our daughter's teacher placed an Ad on a local FB page asking if any local teachers were able to fill shifts this week at our school. Turns out her and another two teachers that are “besties” all…

You see, it can be done. The same NSW school I was told about which reintroduced masking for all staff and sent sections of the school home to study, is also imposing compulsory RATs for all students still at school. Every day.

Hands up if you know when school went back in NSW. https://t.co/vDWYad17Po

Damn commies. Making useful stuff. When will they learn that freedom is letting private school boys hijack all of your productive capacity to game the stock market, and invent financial instruments, so they can buy Lamborghinis? h/t…

The late Stephen Toulmin. Studied something I think fundamentally important to getting ourselves out of the mess societies are now in, with Covid and elsewhere. Casuistry, or casuistic reasoning. Case-based reasoning. Much, much more…

Here's a case-based Covid Tweet. A friend and his wife have 3 kids. All of them have Covid right now, contracted through the local school. All up all night vomiting. Have had Covid multiple times. No immunity appears to be forthcoming.

A friend’s wife, a teacher, is celebrating Mother’s Day sick in bed, where she’s been all week. Infection picked up in a school full of sick students and teachers. Thanks for the selfies, National Cabinet. They’re really helping everybody…

Social media IS high school, extended to every age of life. Not by analogy, it literally is. That’s why the bullies are winning. Their popularity games were how they won high school. Now they can win adult life with popularity too.…

Humans are social creatures. First, foremost, and always. Even when they’re being ‘political’ they’re being social. For a long time that social life was a relatively independent domain of life, free of the clutches of commerce and…

How many times was your school closed for infectious disease outbreaks as a kid? How much has gross incompetence and corrupted public health been normalised in the past 3 years?

Schools are only closing because teachers aren’t turning up to work, apparently. Why might that be? 🤔 In the meantime another expert suggests the best way to keep viruses out of schools is to get infected, and then stay home.…

See? Totally normal. When we all went to school I'm sure this happened all the time. Together with the unicorn rides. https://t.co/Cvfodzk6XP

“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…

Ventilation science seems to suggest that the closer you can get to being outside, the better. And that includes light and humidity, as well as air. I wonder if the old school opening windows, with upper opening clerestory windows and/or…

Are people agreeing yet that our culture is a giant high school? So many adult problems to solve, all ignored while we spend every day in petty adolescent squabbling and status games. Social media is the accelerant that turns it into an…

People can ignore 200 Australians dying of Covid every week, but a rock star dying prompts an avalanche of 'vale' social media posts. From people well into and past middle age. Society is a high school.

The ad even says kids being sick is a major cause. But then says they should come to school more. I assume that means come to school sick, but then maybe logic is too high a bar for anything now. https://t.co/Fk4k3kBYfr

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.…

Superb conversation with @CrabbBrendan and @c_s_wallace on the desperate need for a circuit-breaker at government level, to return sanity to public health in Australia, with Covid. Every day I think about that circuit breaker. I fear the…

In so many ways the collapse of public health and other social problems stems from a lack of respect for teachers and education. For two fundamentally important reasons. Teachers mediate our relationship with knowledge, and also to each…

All of our social behaviours now emanate from this one crucible. The school. We put all sorts of grown up names to these behaviours, as adults, but it's the same behaviours. As politics (more schoolyard) stripped away our existing…

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.…

This is ‘normal life’. Team sports. Nothing creates more passion. All social groupings are really teams. All political parties. All groups in a school playground. All workplaces. Covid minimisers. Covid fighters. Etc. The same social…

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…

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

I think some of our homegrown experts who still actively advocate for child infection should be made to work in schools as casual teachers. There’s a desperate, critical shortage. https://t.co/sWtPgeLG1u

Society is a high school. Not an analogy, an actual cultural fact. This also means you can read all politics through your time in the classroom and playground. Libertarians are that tiny handful of kids who disrupt everybody else and…

If you’re not shedding friends in your 50s, you’re not doing the work you were put on this Earth to do. The only thing that frees humans from the stifling focus on interpersonal social games they first experience in school, is adults…

So much for the idea that children are so fragile that missing a bit of school will render them mental health wrecks. My kids still laugh when i ask if missing school in ‘lockdowns’ was tough for them. Imagine a world believing that kids…

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1…

The black armband sportspeople wear now speak volumes to the culture we're living in. An adolescent culture. We can make a huge drama in the moment about bad things that happen, with us as the key players, the centre of attention. /1…

It's not hard to trace the team each person sees themselves as part of, on Twitter. Their followers, likes and replies to their threads will identify them. And sometimes they even set up groups, which makes it even easier. /1 Once you do…

Choosing who to lead a complex nation using only popularity as a metric not only gets you incompetence, it gets you sleaze and every other base human behaviour as well. Remember the most popular kids at school? Often sociopaths.…

I have no interest in most debates in public life. Most are adolescent identity politics, conservatives and progressives all the same. They reflect cultures who no longer build things, with the calm adult effort and persistence that…

Political libertarianism is mostly just private school old boys having a jolly jaunt excising the dreaded State from mummy and daddy’s huge endowments to them. https://t.co/xwogbZYMKs

The more you understand the way societies materially operate, the more you also see politics as the tiniest veneer of pointless hot air getting in the way of things that actually matter. For example, this machine is far more important than…

All history is a tug of war between knowledge and popularity. Not coincidentally also the defining culture of schools. Popularity invented think tanks to replace universities, so that knowledge could also be governed by popularity. Social…

I assume the engine room of medically-trained dumb in some Australian universities immediately fired into gear with their anonymous troll groups, to troll Williams' account. https://t.co/loDaGfnmBW

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…

The sad truth of why we find some deaths worth our attention and others not, is that in an adolescent high school-based society, if it’s related to a movie we’ve seen, we’re interested. https://t.co/oc9tMRW4PT

The frustration of genuine expertise in this pandemic is palpable. But expertise has never translated directly into political action. Even the collective of a university doesn’t. Humans solved this problem though. They developed…

Musicians are all for a cause, provided it doesn’t cost them money or crowd adulation. They have the capacity to lead change in the way politicians won’t. Their efforts in this pandemic have been non-existent. Society is a high school, led…

Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. /1…

Teachers chuckle at the contrast between school years where nobody is interested in learning anything, and adult lives at war over ‘facts’. Teachers socialise knowledge, that’s their role. That’s what’s now terminally damaged, because we…

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…

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…

Steve Price on The Project arguing that Gladys suffered no reputational damage as a result of ICAC, and would easily win a seat again if she wanted. He may be right. Just shows again that popularity is a disastrous way to allocate power in…

Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with…

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

It’s social media on the phones that is the problem, not the phones. And if those apps are a wrecking ball for education (they are), why don’t we realise they’re doing the same thing to the adult world of work too? Why not ban them across…

There’s a chasm between what people say, and what they actually do and think. Everybody lies. For example despite the trend for despising politicians, it’s abundantly clear people still look to them to lead. The most fanatical libertarians…

The Republicans not only attacking attempts to rein in mis/disinformation, they’re also now going after universities who even research it. Social media is the weaponisation of libertarian lunacy. And we invite into the core of our…

What’s happening in the UK is very interesting. It’s not just because it’s summer and more people are outdoors, and also school holidays. Thoughts? https://t.co/LjvIvnZyTH

Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social phenomenon. The resistance you get is for violating social norms. People are literally terrified of varying from ‘what everybody else…

Even without a pandemic air quality in rooms should be an issue. I worked with un-flued gas heaters in hot stuffy rooms as a teacher, with people nodding off. Yesterday’s training hit 2500 ppm, and was still climbing when I got the door…

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

The rot of schools being childcare for the economy then leads to universities and VET being seen as providers of 'jobs for the economy'. The whole educational system corrupted. Unis have been castrated, fighting each other in a 'market'…

Experts need to think long and hard about why think tanks and consultancy firms have the ear of governments, and universities are completely ignored, except as training providers for the economy.

When you Tweet any of the disaster that is Covid, who are you speaking to? So many Tweets in this genre. All speaking to absent leadership that could fix things. So is there a point to it, given we’re speaking into a void? I think it needs…

The embarrassment that Australia now is. Friend in a university tutorial, which was cancelled last week because the tutor had Covid. The tutor was there this week, masked. Said ‘I’m still testing positive, but my GP said I’m fine to work,…

Covid obviously a major cause here. But I think there’s more, the pandemic gave both students and parents permission to separate themselves from institutions they haven’t respected in years. We have a culture based on schooling, and we…

‘Fascism’ is one of those words sprayed around with abandon on social media. The 20th century’s two most famous fascists here. In reality fascism is just populism, in its endgame. Both hugely popular leaders, and came to power using…

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…

Populists first impoverish ordinary people, then use that poverty with staggering hypocrisy as a reason to do nothing to fix other problems facing the same ordinary people. Popularity is the root cause of all of our troubles. High school…

Vonnegut saw it. Until we see that our culture is a giant high school, we won’t understand it. https://t.co/FVhSGaRmEW

The best description I’ve seen of a school is as a ‘box of strangers’. It’s also a perfect description of social media. To strip away all social structure, and force people to reinvent one of their own. Incredibly dangerous, the gutting of…

Politicians heap praise on service personnel for 'putting their lives on the line'. And fair enough. Right now I'd add teachers, childcare and healthcare workers, and a whole range of other services, working in a soup of infection every…

I think we were all exhausted after 6 years of high school. Now we have decades of working life with the same model, trying to negotiate for basic human needs every single day. It’s exhausting. https://t.co/xOJ8rlCB5c

People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how societies work. Public health has to be led as a ‘trending’ thing.…

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…

Journalists might do stories on the deep penetration of universities by big consultancy firms as well. Spectacular stories to be told there. Remembering also that most Vice-Chancellors earn multiples of a Prime Minister’s salary.

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…

Isn’t it strange that people cry now when they lose in sport? As a kid playing sport, it was a disgrace to cry, if you lost. Bad sportsmanship. And winners the same, with their orgasmic euphoria. Any coach of my childhood would have been…

High School 101. If you’re not frothing at the mouth with the latest crowd fad, you’re miserable. I promise you it’s the only path to actual happiness. https://t.co/muJDokxd8D

I used to watch Sunday morning shows about politics. But it’s all just more team sports, people hoping that their team will get up next time, and everything will change. Nothing changes. Did popularity contests at school result in a single…

Society is social, it’s not a deficit of facts we’re suffering from. It’s a deficit of trust, of respect. We can’t do basic things like public health because millions get in the way with their opinions, people who have no background or…

Medicos are jumping all over this, because like academics, they often despise administrators. But I'd ask them to notice they're sharing the same bus as the Daily Mail here. There's an agenda. Kicking administrators is privilege, but we…

Society is a high school. Socially, culturally, that’s what it actually is, that’s where our culture is formed. And it’s on a gap year that never ends. You can see why ‘lockdowns’ were vehemently resisted by some. It interrupted their gap…

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…

The Anglo world’s problems with education can all be read through one fact. It’s deliberately infecting all of its children with a pandemic virus, in schools. Over and over. It doesn’t value children, or education. It’s childcare for…

Call me a plonker, but "Prevalence will rise and fall, influenced by seasons, school holidays and new subvariants, but it will always be pulled back towards the equilibrium level" sounds like the definition of epidemic disease to me, not…

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…

One thing that’s clear through this pandemic is that expertise as a whole has no political power. Our modern societies run on expertise, they’d collapse in an instant without it. But expertise has zero coordinated power to shape what’s…

As time goes on, Covid minimisation is revealed to just be straight out brutalising social conformity. Like at school, because it is school. We never leave. The kid being beaten up for wearing the wrong shoes. https://t.co/MV3tehZ8z4

I find Twitter like all social media is so infected with the team sports of high school culture, that it’s mostly a pointless waste of time. Even the best people here mostly just go into bat for their own team. Unless you trigger the team…

Because there are no countries. No societies. Just millions of teenagers ‘living their best lives’, well into old age. That’s what the market and the economy always was. Society stripped of everything adult. High school.…

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid,…

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.

Jessica rightly noticing that there are no grown-ups left. Society is a high school. https://t.co/GnkIvKFD5R

Sending the kids home because the school ceilings might collapse on them. Given the Tories, it can't be long until they're all given hard hats and told to get back to school. https://t.co/H8ZCP2f5rD

None of this happens. In the UK kids are told to go to school when they test positive. Nobody is isolating (or even testing) anywhere I have any contact with, in any workplace or school, unless they're so sick they can't stand up. (From:…

The huge disadvantage for regional people with university. A friend has 3 kids to put through uni. Will cost them $200,000 just in accommodation and food. If they lived in a capital city, that cost would be $0. The feds offer a measly…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

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.

An an ex-teacher, the tragedy of social media is maybe more visible. We spend 13 years of slow, hard slog socialising children into knowledge. Social media undoes it inside months.

I’ve had to sit through end of year school speech days this week, where principals extol the virtues of ‘leadership’. No Covid precautions existed for any of the events. True leadership is only EVER doing something that is unpopular.…

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…

#Insiders deciding that school closures are vital in a Covid inquiry. And ‘civil liberties’. 25,000 deaths? Nothing. The entire population infected repeatedly? Nothing. Forcible infection is authoritarian violence, impacts can last a…

If you think widespread ignorance of basic science and maths is bad now, talk to your local school about the impossibility of finding maths and science teachers. Societies are in a STEM death spiral, a self-reinforcing implosion. /1…

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big but…

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

Richard Glover spoke last week with a guest about how generations now seem to occupy their own independent bubbles. That’s what high school culture does, each generation takes its own high school experience and lives it for the rest of…

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…

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.…

We need a new minimiser production of The Wall. Where kids rise up and demand to be sent back to school, singing ‘we need our education’. https://t.co/F55mdQOSzB

How stupid and sloganised the world now is, that anybody ever believed kids would be traumatised by not going to school. https://t.co/E9ulmzigpn

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

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…

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.

Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the…

If you want an indication of how the economy cares so little about fresh air in schools. A primary teacher told me yesterday kids as young as Year 2 have been caught vaping in their school. But at least the free flow of commerce is…

Some Oz schools now employing 'attendance officers', due to decline in attendance rates for students. I'm yet to see one action these officers list for parents that the school will be undertaking to improve attendance that includes any…

Postman saw that schooling created a unique cultural artefact, driven by literacy - childhood. He thought TV would reverse the process and return children to the place they occupied for centuries, the adult world. He missed I think that…

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…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

Education has never been a growth industry in the Dumb Country, nobody wants to say it. Unless it's job training employers are too entitled and lazy to pay for themselves, and/or a river of international student fee gold.…

It was patently obvious this was the rationale for re-opening schools here too. Business needed its childcare back. The academics and health professionals who provided a human shield for this clearly political act should have a Wall of…

There are no grown-ups left to do anything about it. The Western world is now a giant high school where only bullies and show ponies get attention. Social media transforms all disaster into an attention-platform for more performative team…

@DrCameronMurray showing how functioning societies involve governments intervening. The small government politics of the past 70 years has reversed social evolution to entrench adolescent high school life as adult life. A ‘market’ is a…

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, allowing us to live by trusting others with expertise in other…

There is only one freedom. Everything else is just team sports. Also why universities are so important, as a constant irritation to the wider team sports of society. And why societies constantly attack them. The LNP sacked tens of…

I’m amazed the basic social mechanisms of life go so unnoticed. How the exclusionary group dynamics of school replicate in the workplace, with even merit-based systems ruthlessly gamed for personal advantage, and widespread cliques. That’s…

Pandemics are the on/off button for societies. All major catastrophes are. We talk of the health impacts, but there’s a much deeper social, cultural and psychological impact that I think goes unnoticed. The breaking apart of illusions of…

I feel mixing thousands of students from all over the State right now was probably not smart. https://t.co/Dbmks02Gdh

All of modern populist culture is in this picture. The tension between playground and classroom, between group life driven by social status, and knowledge, doesn’t end with school. Populism destroys the classroom, our knowledge-based…

Nowhere is the fundamentally social nature of all human behaviour more visible than in fashions. An area we at the same time say is our own ‘subjective taste’ at work, ‘each to their own’. Nothing could be further from the truth. /1…

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

Extraordinary that this statement could come out of a School of Public Health. How long have we known that Covid kills orders of magnitude more people via transmission than virulence? Full population infection as a lower ‘health risk’,…

A calming suggestion for anybody's life is to stop thinking the ideas people argue about have any relevance to why they're arguing with you. People use ideas purely as ammunition to promote their own social group, and to oppose rival…

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

The push to ignore a pandemic and get back to ‘normal life’. What is that normal life? What great visionary projects are we engaged in, as a human species? What’s our moonshot that makes ignoring a pandemic worthwhile? Sadly it mostly…

Covid was more fuel for the same libertarian bonfire, that had already made its way through education, transport, government in general, and all of our other institutions. Public health is one of the last dominos to fall.…

The pandemic is part of a long political tradition. The 70-year assault on all things public, the privatisation of society. Public education, transport, housing, roads etc, had already fallen. Public health was just next on the list.…

We’re living in a completely fake political war. Where one side of the war argues for the benefits of government, and the other argues to get rid of most of it. A thread on why it’s a fake debate. /1 https://t.co/JWYRBTxtOS Sometimes you…

It’s slowly dawning on sensible people that social media’s economy of likes is just high school culture, and destroys adult life. Good on New York. https://t.co/aieobkLve9

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

Gen X may be the last generation for some time who experienced adult life as socially and culturally distinct from school life.

The picture says it all. How retirement went from being a time of winding down after a lifetime of hard work, to some sort of perpetual orgy of recreation. It will be scaled back when the boomers are done with it, as every other…

A teacher friend maintains a CO2 reading in the low-500s in a classroom full of primary school children, using open windows. Also bought 2 HEPA filters out of their own money. 4 years of teaching like that, never infected. /1 This was so…

While even primary and secondary schools, usually the arse-end of any priority list, have air conditioning today, university residential colleges often don’t. It’s not justifiable, students given little more than a ceiling fan to cope.

It’s not evil corporates. It’s the social mechanism of school, popularity or likes, extended to adult life. Both kids and adults use social media. These platforms built-out adult life to be socially and culturally equivalent to school…

I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

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…

Been talking with a senior academic about Covid, who insisted the danger is over and it’s time to move on. It finally emerged they believed the vaccines stopped Covid, deaths and transmission. ‘Like our other vaccines’. Had not a single…

If you feel like much of what happened at school was pretty dumb and only a handful of people ever called it out, welcome to adult life, 2024. Social media is school life, for all ages. An economy of likes. Popularity.…

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…

This is a LABOR minister. Saying that all the benefit of education goes to students, so all the cost should as well. A LABOR minister. A LABOR EDUCATION minister. Whitlam would be spinning in his grave. #auspol https://t.co/0AIhV6Dpsd

The basic public health fact that every family in every community has a touchpoint in a school? That’s where the most mixing happens? Adults don’t need to go there, the kids bring it home? That’s been the only uncontrollable entry point…

Australia's educational performance was in free fall for years before Covid. Pandemics are accelerants of existing problems. That we couldn't do something as simple as mandate open windows and HEPA filters when schools re-opened remains a…

My wife and kids are part of the cascading health and social problems that are still multiplying from shoving teachers and kids back into schools with zero Covid protections. The big push is on to prevent any future public health action of…

Awaiting the latest Flat Earth Covid minimisation garbage after yesterday’s global wet dream on schools and lockdowns. Again. I suggest the know-alls from yesterday actually go teach in a school for a while, where they can test their…

We have people who actually work in and study schools who have disproved that lockdowns caused major harm to students. In fact in many cases it was the healthiest they'd ever been. Whereas right now they're a constant sewer of infection.…

Time to revisit actual expertise on school closures and pandemics. So tired of people freelancing on this topic whose only experience with schools is having been a student there decades ago. https://t.co/sxPAo8nsbg

In the past 20 years, Australian students' performance on science was a year behind the international benchmark. Maths was 2 years. Literacy 1.5 years. Covid exposed the pre-existing problems in the system. https://t.co/TuLBqvfJAw

Do we think the local 'missing school is worse for kids than infecting them with dangerous diseases' loons anticipated sending kids to school with measles too? I'm sure they'll line up behind it. https://t.co/9zWLQL3TMD

Three have been many outrageous slogan-driven violations of public health in this pandemic. But to me the most fundamental violation is one that is still not spoken about enough. That we’re simply ignoring what a pandemic actually IS. We…

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…

Not one teacher absence during lockdowns and remote learning. The bullshit about Covid and schools all comes from people who haven’t set foot in one for decades. https://t.co/mDqM8kAkx5

Nobody talks to the actual schools and teachers. The useful idiots who speak on schools instead don’t know a thing about them. https://t.co/6p9OOQUqaq

We’ve had two Covid infections in the family. Both courtesy of the education system. None of the rest of the family were infected, due to simple measures taken at home. So simple that it highlights the ‘couldn’t give a shit’ non-existent…

The irony of life today is living under a political belief system of extreme individualism, which in reality is the exact opposite, societies driven by a pathological social conformity. Libertarian leaders run obsessive mass-cults, with…

The sad thing about this wonderful donation is how excited the students are about it. That's higher ed today, where the excitement of learning is replaced with the excitement of not going bankrupt to get a degree. https://t.co/BXhu43hDk6

History will judge those who advocate for the mass and repeated infection of children, with specious arguments about them being damaged more by missing school. Missing school! You can’t make these narratives up, they’re so disgustingly…

Beautiful formulation. It takes a lot more time, money and energy to manage an epidemic/pandemic state than a disease elimination state. It’s why elimination of disease was central to democracies, until the madness of ‘living with’ Covid.…

The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

The ‘politics of impossibility’, where a problem-solving focus is replaced with a fatalist do-nothing. That’s what political libertarianism is, it wants to castrate collective political action. But it’s deeper, culturally. /1…

The LNP at the time said government shouldn't 'pick winners', leave it to the market. The same fallacy that says democracy is what 'the people' decide should happen. Groups of people don't decide anything. In markets or democracies. All…

Populism is Revenge of the Jocks. Our technically complex world is a creation by ‘nerds’. That used to be their victory, post-school. The jocks weren’t having it. Social media gave them a way to reassert their pathetic puny bullying, to…

Orwellian to watch GPs act as human shields for incompetent politicians. Not once in my life, as a child and then as a teacher in schools, have I EVER heard parents urged to send their kids to school sick. Until now. A disgrace.…

We needed to get schools back open because kids were suffering. Yeh right. Kiddults drove it. Now back on their child-free cruises and in their child-free restaurants. Every teacher knows school’s greatest importance to politicians and…

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.…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

It’s worth remembering that the prevalence numbers are not independent by age group. Much of that 18-54 year-old prevalence for example is likely parents and other family members catching Covid from their school-aged children.…

Ventilate schools. Not just to protect teachers and students (though why that isn’t reason enough is damning proof what a shithole social model an economy is), but because schools are where Covid goes to breed, and then spread everywhere.…

Those who step back and look quickly discover that adult life is now high school life. https://t.co/TThWMFe90m

Covid’s John Snow water pump is school classrooms. Identify specific causes, target those. No need for grand political narratives, society-wide disruption or the team sports of ideologies. https://t.co/RmWYUNqJNj

Even Departments of Education knew the obvious, before Covid. Research shows influenza outbreaks for example are clearly driven by children. For even more targeted action (and reduced cost), primary school-aged children are the greatest…

Incorporating social mixing patterns into epidemiological modelling. This (to me) is where society understood as networked hubs is critical. And this: "...school children are the ‘bridge’ linking household and community transmission."…

Covid minimisers are a classic case of a network structure, mistaken as a society-wide phenomenon. They’re a *tiny* number of players, who form hubs that then feed skinny networks out into society. Creating an illusion of mass support.…

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

Overheard at a school drop-off, one mother speaking to another. “Every other bloody person sends their kid to school sick, I can’t have a day off, she’s coming to school.” Privatised public health.

Chickenpox outbreak at a university residential college. Students advised to get a second chickenpox vaccination, if they've only had 1. My reading of varicella guidelines is you only need 2 if you never got 1 as a child? Or never had…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

Local high school has about 800 students. They run an award now for 100% attendance, each term. Only 20 students qualified in Term 1 this year. Living with Covid.

Society is social. All of it. There are always social reasons for things, even things we call political. And those things will be network phenomena. Take the resistance to the shift to EVs. The combustion car was a critical locus of agency…

I have no time for the woke/anti woke culture battles, but when unis are offering students seven days extension on assessment deadlines because of the Bondi Junction event, even when the students have no connection with that event, I don’t…

There's bipartisan agreement that HECS is a good idea. It was never a good idea. A person who earns more because of their degree will already pay more tax, you don't need additional education tax on top of it. And degrees aren't the path…

Schools were the 'sacrificial anode' of most countries' Covid response. Infect all the kids to (apparently) create herd immunity. Spin it by weeping crocodile tears about lost education and social contact. https://t.co/dVI6Q1xfPh

Isn't it curious that when we travel, supposedly to 'experience the world' and 'see new things', we just end up playing exactly the same games of imitative rivalry we use in everything else we do? Imitating others, to try to outdo them.…

Because some paediatricians and infectious disease doctors said them missing out on being infected and bullied at school was bad for their health? https://t.co/Ye0mijquyK

Comment on public policy 2. Primary school teaching is dominated by women. Primary schools are likely the main hubs of Covid infection. Nothing is being done there to prevent these women being repeatedly infected.

Cancel the debts, forgive them. The US is beginning to do that. Countries have birth rates in terminal decline because the young can’t afford to live, let alone breed. You don’t need to tax education. If students earn more, they’ll pay…

‘Authoritarian’ leaders are just populist leaders, whose populist fantasies aren’t working. Like the school teacher or parent who yells all the time, because they can no longer control the kids.

Saw a letter from a local school to parents, pleading with them to keep sick children at home. The school is struggling to function. We’re more than 2 years into ‘living with’ Covid. When can we expect this to be actually doable?

Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is the key thing to understand, if we want change. We need to…

SO many people sick right now, at work and in schools I'm in contact with. Most of the people sick at work caught it from a school. Ventilate schools. Easy, and will make Covid a sporadic infection, rather than a continuing pandemic.

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…

The idea that education prepares you for life is perverse. In a sane society, what you learn at school is what should *change* the world. New knowledge, to fix problems. We’ve flipped this, and it changed everything. /1…

Thanks to @GosiaGasperoPhD for this. The problem we’ve had selling this message I think is that Covid minimisers have successfully created an impression that Covid is everywhere, always. So life as we know it has to be shut down to beat…

'Un-retiring'. Why would a retired teacher want to enter the shitshow of Covid-infested schools? Particularly as they're in a higher-risk age bracket for the disease? Only catastrophe will turn the minimisers around. History's main lesson,…

Local school principal dismayed at the number of 'minimal supervision' classes the school has to run. They can't get staff, permanent or casual. Principals have returned to the classroom just to provide even minimal supervision of…

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…

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…

'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just…

We’re not making progress against our biggest problems because we have the wrong models of the societies we’re trying to change. (Beautiful network diagram of the whole Internet here, from: https://t.co/eyAcgxBXxy) /1…

“Academics, more than anyone, should understand that the future lies in services, not manufacturing. The good jobs come from what you know, not what you can make.” Ross trotting out the standard economic line. /1 https://t.co/1ntb6pFiYv…

Like I always say. People will rather die than go against the group/team. We never leave high school. https://t.co/L9Nw9z2Ka1

All change is led. Not a single mask here, during a clear surge of Covid? School leaders. Why you won't see masks in schools. https://t.co/xevxroPGpX

All change is led. Not a single mask here, during a clear surge of Covid? School leaders. Why you won't see Covid action in schools. This is the viral network hub to lobby. https://t.co/xevxroPGpX

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’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…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

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…

A primary teacher friend has a kid in class today with known Covid (tested positive earlier in the week). Was off for a few days, parents sent the child back today, for the last day of term. Child still clearly has Covid, coughing and…

Maybe 3 years of Tweets about how popularity culture is destroying societies, and now some think I'd be concerned about posting an unpopular thing. Leave high school behind, people. Be free. https://t.co/EYl6VR44RP

If we seek solidarity and support, we seek to release the anxiety that we’re not alone in what we do and think. In other words, we act as we have since the days of high school. Peer pressure. We want to fit in. Social connection is not…

Still the most beautiful meditation on the brutal tension between sociality and knowledge. Spinoza. Sociality uses knowledge as fodder, to build and unify teams. To fight other teams. The team’s success becomes what is true. /1…

The public sees the disconnect between what politicians promise, and what they do. But not because we have bad politicians. They're forced to compete inside a popularity bubble. Any teacher, parent or boss knows popularity will never…

Remember at school if anybody yelled 'fight!', how people would come running from miles around? The social group who already owns the country doesn't need to fight. But fights mobilise those who don't own anything. https://t.co/vy2kByD8cd

Those sceptical about eating out/take away culture as a social change. Many towns in Australia are raising council rates to meet increasing costs. it’s creating a lot of social anger. But when you look at the numbers for these towns,…

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…

At a time when we’re facing a catastrophic shortage of young workers, and the young will never afford a home, HECS/HELP debts should be removed entirely. Conservatives gamed both education and health, to force a shift to privatisation.…

I call toxic sociality the underlying problem behind all of our other problems. And the vanguard of toxic sociality is social media. You can see in this student post that there’s dawning realisation. /1 https://t.co/aWP2zXeGHl…

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

Discussed this with a local principal. They said 'but we have sanitiser'. Now I encourage individual teachers to bypass principals and just do this themselves, and invite Safe Work inspectors if the principal complains.…

True adult life is the gradual weaning of yourself away from the social ties of friends and even family, and towards pursuing where knowledge says we need to go. The two cannot exist comfortably side-by-side. Knowledge will always betray…

To be social is to conform. To not conform is also social. You can’t avoid conformity, when you act socially, it’s the currency of social life. The more social we are, the more rigidly conformist societies will become. /1…

I often see accusations of ‘activism’ levelled at those advocating for continued action against Covid. If those advocating are working in their area of expertise, they’re doing their job. It’s not activism to do your job, it’s…

Who grew up in an Australian classroom heated by an unflued gas heater? And can remember the drowsiness, an indication of the crap exhaust gases we were breathing? Nobody loses cleaning school air. Many don’t even have basic HVAC, which…

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…

Most of the men (and it was mostly men) who advised us all to just soldier on with infections have wives who dealt with the snot and phlegm and fevers, in their sick children. Or they sent them to boarding school so never dealt with it at…

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because they survived by having strong restrictions on much social…

As social media continues to fracture societies, we’re still fixated on the message, rather than the medium. Blaming one team, the ‘far Right’, so that our opposing teams have somebody to fight against. The medium is the message. 1/2…

On a freeway yesterday, I observed the use of variable speed limits. A great idea, to modulate traffic flow. Except maybe only 5% of drivers pay any attention to them. It hasn’t occurred to us yet that societies that appear ‘authoritarian’…

From the UK Sunday Tele. Once again responsibility for social problems dumped on teachers, because of our idiot idea that societies run on information. ‘Putrid’ SM platforms organise and monetise the collapse of society. There’s a very…

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

When you believe societies run on information, who gets the responsibility for fixing everything? Always the teachers. Societies don't run on information. Leave the teachers alone, we can't get any as it is. https://t.co/FFGTskyYF1…

Ask a school teacher if a model of society that says ‘just let the group interact and order will spontaneously emerge’ is a good idea. This is our idiot idea of what democracy is. It’s how social media sucked us in, that was its bait. Also…

Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their…

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…

No justification is ever given for why we can offer free vocational education, but tertiary education is ruinously expensive. It’s the worship of the ‘tradie’. Howard’s battlers, now with gold plated wankpanzer utes. Never stand between a…

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising. The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever…

There is extensive research on social collapse, it’s not just shock and awe social media language. (From me anyway.) Previous societies have been extensively studied, to identify causal factors. Here are 4 key indicators of collapse, seen…

‘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…

A footnote to this. I don’t think many of the sick people in my workplace actually caught things at work. Nearly always it’s those with young, school-aged children who get sick. My Tweet was about the public health debacle we’re all…

There’s resistance to the idea that Covid is not everywhere, all the time. Social media’s team sports runs on sweeping apocalyptic generalities. Both ‘sides’ need that everywhere, all the time, to run their campaigns. Another way to see…

If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

If you see a friend come back from an international trip or large event, Covid-free, it reinforces the sense of ‘maybe Covid is a spent force’. The importance of infection and disease patterns. Covid is not everywhere, all the time. That’s…

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…

Another social problem dumped in the ‘teach kids about it at school’ category. Kids already have a more sophisticated understanding of social media than adults. It doesn’t matter what size the boat is in the sewer. It’s still a sewer.

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

My daughter’s teacher asked a class how many of them had not had Covid. She was the only one to put her hand up. Also the only one masked. I’m sure minimisers will say she’s been damaged by not fitting in. I prefer to think her vascular…

Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

I worked in schools, so advice from people who don’t doesn’t interest me. Teachers (not mentioned) also work in schools. I’ve never seen them as sick as they’ve been in the past 2 years. I’ve never seen children as sick. I’ve never seen…

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…

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by…

Those who work in schools know that it would cost just a fraction of the casual relief budget, to fit out the entire school with good air purifiers, many times over. Continuously sick teachers are prohibitively expensive. That’s if you can…

Don't conceptualise children and disease. Just ask a primary school teacher, or a parent. Or a school principal who can't find any relief staff. https://t.co/rGeiobQYOa

My kids still laugh when I ask them if lockdowns were hard for them. One even asked if I was joking, not having to go school was the best time of their life. https://t.co/dgLqT7fnfw

Superb insight into the actual culture we live in. These aren’t analogies. When Western societies decoupled education from adult life, they caused a transformation of the entire culture to high school culture. It’s all graduates of school…

Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe. It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1 A field…

I watched this launch today. A few thoughts. I think Tesla do some fantastic technology, brilliant engineering. It's hard to talk about because of the minefield of team sports battle surrounding the CEO. /1 https://t.co/gQpk0mbgOP I think…

The people who argue that closing schools during the early pandemic was bad for kids? They haven’t been inside a school for a long time. https://t.co/XFaFo26Kbt

As societies we only functioned with a plurality of beliefs when the essential infrastructure of social life didn’t depend on those beliefs. Now what you believe also determines how you live, and what threat you are to others. 1/5…

Many can escape the pandemic already. They can just refuse to socialise. Yes if they have kids, if they need hospitals or aged care (for example), they will have enforced high-risk situations. But quite a lot of people are not in that…

And again, those who said kids missing school was harming them haven’t set foot in one in a long time. We’re brutalising an entire generation. Infecting them all - the lot - over and over with a novel and lethal virus, is just the latest…

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…

"School closures – which were not recommended by health experts – caused long-term harm to children..." Yes they were, the AHPPC recommended them as required. Thankfully we're infecting all the kids now instead. https://t.co/nMtMxZJyEd

Today is Friday. The day most people I know celebrate as the end of the working week. Fri-yay. They celebrated particularly during lockdowns, when they didn’t have to come to work at all. Just as many kids rightly celebrated missing…

Status. How many occupy higher-status positions in their working life, relative to others, than they did in their school life? Those who have shifted, how many now have a status in adult life that instead reflects their parents’ status…

Heh, missing school during lockdowns was damaging for students. People who say that are either clueless, or dealing with a handful of individual anecdotes. https://t.co/bqy7dVgtuA https://t.co/1W0Ty7Phkl

Sigh. Somebody won a popularity contest. Somebody lost that popularity contest. It means the same thing those contests meant at school. Absolutely nothing.

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…

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.…

“In free governments, the rulers are the servants and the people their superiors and sovereigns.” (Benjamin Franklin) This is the American political DNA. It’s also impossible nonsense, that is destroying the world. /1…

We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

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…

One of the most important parts of status as the mechanism of all societies, is the scapegoating mechanism that Rene Girard talks about. The relentless battles for status - status games or team sports - lead to chaos. We’re seeing that…

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…

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…

DH Lawrence was also a primary school teacher. His writings about that experience are remarkably prescient about the world we’re now confronted with. Thinking is a specialised skill, like plumbing, that the majority of people should (and…

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution. Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the…

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…

The sociopathic stupidity of Australia’s Covid response. A friend, a teacher, wanted a booster, ready for the next school year. Because technically their last was in February 2023, they were refused a shot ‘because it hasn’t been 12…

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…

Bought a Tesla yesterday. Superb engineering. Disbelief from many friends, ‘but what about Elon?’ Who gives a fuck. We’re not at school any more, this idea we can change the world using personal vendettas is pure high school. Musk’s cars…

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.…

Every time I go to a GP or dentist, I think about the small fraction of their income I earn, which still allows me to buy air purifiers for my local school. And with very rare exceptions, not one of them can be bothered adding one or more…

I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all human life. There’s a very anti-trust thrust to Cory’s proposed solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I…

Scientific American trapped in the web of Infinite Covid framings. The Infinite Covids say kids missing school is a reason to let them all be infected with viruses instead. The sane response is to use public health to stop infections, and…

America is not becoming a fascist nation, and believing it is plays right into Trump’s hands. The strategy of apocalyptic hysteria. We saw it with Covid too. /1 The way Covid action was destroyed was to portray Covid as everywhere, all the…

I’ve been called too ‘dark’ or cynical, in saying that very little humans deliberatively do changes our overall fate. That only catastrophes really change societies. But I live a very happy life, believing that. Because it grounds me, I…

I’ll use one of Vera Kober’s wonderful paintings to talk a bit more about imitation, the core of all human life. How do some smears of paint ‘capture’ a flower? How is that ‘likeness’ or imitation achieved? There’s a fundamental magic in…

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because…

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…

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…

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…

The building industry is falling off a cliff. All that will save it is building public housing, for government, to create affordable homes for ordinary people. Marketisation destroyed housing, energy, health and education. The market is a…

The idea that democracy is ‘the people’ running nations is like self-organisation theory. That we’ll together spontaneously decide upon the optimum thing to do. It’s also the basis of market-based econo-politics. Democracy and markets,…

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…

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy are not capitalist, fascist, socialist or any variety of -ism. They’re giant high schools. Cultures stuck in permanent adolescence. Not an analogy, this IS our…

Institutions run countries, not the idiot Left-Right team sports we overlay upon them You can see it in real time here. Trump, vs the law, and universities. Two of the mightiest institutions. They will hopefully prevail.…

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’.…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1 When human groups are under threat.…

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…

It’s not that people lack skills. It’s that the adult culture of society itself has been dismantled. There’s nowhere to apply the skills of being an adult, even if you have them. Social media IS our society now. Social media is high school…

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…

Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century. You can see here how the 4 great catastrophic disruptions of the first half of the 20th century drove the emergence of a…

What to do when governments and business refuse to control disease in public places. Just as they offloaded the costs of education, transport, and energy onto you, to ‘free’ you from the tyranny of government. https://t.co/uxNjWDMcN5…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

All modern civilisation is a tension between the school classroom and school playground. The classroom is where a society grafts its knowledge onto its present-day culture. The playground is where kids bring their outside social lives to…

So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around…

Staff member turned up to work sick yesterday. It was an insight into ‘living with’ infection culture. I told them to go home. ‘No, I’m fine, I have too much to do.’ Then others in the office approached me in private to ask me to make them…

The 40th anniversary of Live Aid. Adult culture looked at a critical problem facing the world, and thought ‘we should hold a gig’. Kidult culture. Still active from the counterculture 60s. Still active today. Gig culture. Adult life as an…

Trump isn’t bringing fascism to America. We don’t know our own culture, and that’s not unusual. Fish don’t know water exists, until beached. Trump is the apotheosis of the countercultural movement, going back 70-odd years. Down with the…

Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking about the countercultural revolution of our era, with friends. Because it’s our culture. And it’s largely invisible to us, I suspect.…

Not only is social media a way to take over politics, it’s the location for our culture’s personal, professional and political transactions. And it’s modelled on high school culture. Likes and followers. It’s the final victory of the…

So many see the world as competing -isms. Capitalism takes on socialism and communism, with authoritarianism now the flavour of the month too. The underlying belief here is that societies are like computers, with an operating system. But…

Those sceptical that Western life is really highly school culture should maybe consider this. From an age when humans can only just walk and talk, they go to school. They remain there until they reach adulthood. Throughout their entire…

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…

A teacher friend tells me parents often complain if their children aren’t featured on the school social media feeds. That’s where people live, in kidult society. Social media replaced public life, it’s not a communication tool. It’s our…

If you don’t know your culture as a culture, you know nothing about why things happen. Our culture believes that there is no greater catastrophe than the denial of social life. That is its deepest, most unquestioned assumption. /1…

‘Living with’ Covid is the privatisation of public health. In cultures that had already privatised transport, education, healthcare, jails, water, energy etc. Privatisation had already largely failed in all of those other critical areas of…

I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the dominating principle of governance. Rebuilding broken…

In kidult culture, everybody who acts badly is labelled a ‘narcissist’. To adults who see the world through the lens of rampant adolescent culture, all pathology is deviation from the normative behaviour of the group. We never leave high…

I think it was McCartney who recently called out the nonsense of the lyric and vibe of this sort of song. It’s a window into the massive social/cultural shift that became our culture. The counterculture. When high school took over the…

The more we socialise human life, the more unequal the outcomes will become. This contrasts with our common assumptions about sociality, that it’s a type of leveller. An experiment in the early 2000s demonstrated this in a novel way.…

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…

In a society of teenagers, both ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ converge upon attack on institutions. Institutions who become the proxy parental and teacher figures in adult life, denying the kidults ‘freedom’. Grounding them with ‘lockdowns’. Etc.…

The medium is the message. Social media is not an information or communication tool. It’s our societies now. The cultural and social spaces we live inside. And it’s structured like a high school. Likes and followers. https://t.co/LTrsw4LZn4

Kate grew up in a boarding school. Social media is creating the disconnect. Not devices. https://t.co/gUUVvqjUXG

Watching academics and public intellectuals, disillusioned with the inability to change the world through social media posts, retreat to Substack to monetise their work. I went to leave a comment on one and got the alert “comments only for…

In cultures that reformatted adult life as a giant high school, retirement is now when you finish school and go on your ‘gap year’, travelling the world. We should see the utter perversity of this as a social and cultural model. But we…

Lord of the Flies was a great window into our assumptions about how societies work. The idea that without wider social life, we become savages. In reality this is completely backwards. We know from real life experience:…

It was Edmund Burke who saw human institutions as humanity’s past and future, folded into the present. As humanity’s memory, its capacity to act outside the present moment. We need him again today, in a time where only what trends is real.…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

Public transport, education and health mean the provision of these services TO the public. Not by them. ‘The public’ itself only came into existence with the collective provision of such services. It’s not just a mob of people gathered in…

Why aren’t we interested in *why* populism works? And why it’s so toxic to the checks and balances we call democracy? What is popular under populism is the destruction of those same checks and balances. How could ‘the people’ like that?…

It's a damning indictment of university teaching and of the understanding of educational technology that AI represents the threat that it does. https://t.co/yjqeJ5l97N

I have zero interest in electoral politics, it simply reproduces the cultural mechanism we learn in school, of different groups jostling for social supremacy, via popularity. You can’t vote your way out of the problems voting causes. All…

Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

The world where the public good led government decisions was not the outcome of voting or of better leaders. It was a world led by the public institutions that surged between 1945 and 1975. Elected leaders were just the public liaison for…

The conversations with AI when researching and analysing various topics, sometimes in highly complex areas, are far and away the most intelligent conversations I’ve had at any time in my life. And that includes many years working at elite…

One of the enduring disconnects in modern life for me is that most of us lived the culture of popularity in high school. And we refuse to see that electoral systems simply reproduce this same culture, in adult life. And then we wonder why…

Yep. And ultimately the purpose of social media is to destroy trust in existing institutional sources of knowledge. So that the culture of likes and followers (populism - high school culture) can replace institutions that took centuries to…

What social media does is make visible just how unbelievably stupid most of us are. And then gives the stupid a mechanism to mobilise and coordinate that stupidity, to take over the world. Culturally, it goes one step deeper. 1/3 Compare…

If it frustrates you that there appears to be widespread resistance to understanding basic facts, ponder the status of teachers in 2025. Teachers know what most of the rest of us don’t know. That learning is a socialisation, not…

Why aren’t most schools as well ventilated as other public and even private buildings? Because these are low-status spaces. Shit-holes in a whole range of ways, ventilation just one of them. Education has very low status. Children have…

Education as an industry is mostly stupid. Right now it panics about AI delivering undetectable plagiarism. But it might just be better at education’s core work as well. https://t.co/VDJKO8ygv6

The destruction of public health was really the privatisation of it, as we’d already done for energy, education, transport etc. The pathogens are still there, but now you have to deal with them at home. Matthew, see if you can get some…

The critical drivers or currents of Western life right now? Populism, the deliberate destruction of hierarchies that run societies, the destruction of trust built upon experience and expertise. And the severing of the circle of life by the…

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 notes that mass tertiary education causes a dramatic escalation of elite rivalry, as frustrated graduates excluded from the elite develop ideological war machines. ‘The people’ don’t create revolutions. They’re foot soldiers to the…

Few ask why university (or any other) pedagogy is so easily disrupted by AI. Education remains the only major industry where evidence-based practice is almost entirely at the whim of individual institutions and practitioners.…

Like entire crowds of graduates booing speakers who talk about AI, in universities. Social media has transformed democracies into gang warfare, each gang with its particular righteous cause, in imitative rivalry within the gang and with…

Again, what does it say about university pedagogy, that it’s so easy to cheat? Nobody asks the more important questions. https://t.co/v7DpwwG2Rp

We’re not living in ‘late-stage capitalism’. We’re living in a giant high school, full of kidults. Adolescents have always loved cars. In Australia, there are 4 times as many cars, as there are children. This pattern of ownership is…