History & memory

Those hopeful that a reshuffling of the ministry may bring justice for women, might remember that the current government has had a Minister for Climate Change for many years.

Service industries are about 80% of the Oz Economy. Do people remember that 'service' was what servants do? They were 'in service'. These are some of the worst paid jobs in the country, with the worst conditions. We've trendied them up,…

Who remembers tonnes of strawberries being destroyed because of the risk some may contain needles? Now explain to me how this is different to a vaccine potentially killing a few people? Why did we junk the strawberries, but keep that…

@MikeySlezak @liammannix another example of population vs individual risk? Peanut allergies. Some kids have them, peanuts are banned in schools. 1/n There isn’t a low risk every child will react to a peanut. There are a handful of kids who…

Bruno Latour: "We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is…

@arthistorynews was photorealism actually, as the name suggests, inspired by photography? Or are there earlier precedents of extreme 'likeness'? This modern work by Gottfried Helnwein startles people. https://t.co/MDB6bHqeVL

#covid19 when the history of the pandemic is written, it won't be lockdowns that caused mental health problems (if there are any problems above normal). It will be the people who put economies ahead of people. https://t.co/SQeUWfgcfj

#covid19 #auspol @billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @GregDore2 a thread asking some questions about global public health programs. 1/n Normally for an epidemic outbreak, for example Ebola, the country of origin is rapidly…

@ProfPCDoherty have you done any work on the concept of immune amnesia? I see that measles infection can sometimes 'wipe' the immune system's memory of other diseases a person had been immune to?

#insiders let's remember wars. People may want clear and simple promises. The situation doesn't allow it. The messaging has to be about collective, ongoing fight against a lethal foe.

#covid19 #auspol dedicated quarantine facilities have 100% efficacy against all variants of Covid. And can be made locally with 12th century technology.

#auspol a century ago, the metric for successful business was the ability to pay a living wage. Really there's no such thing as 'business', just as there's no such thing as traffic. There are just customers, with or without money to spend.…

#auspol #COVID19Aus conservative governments began the pandemic not trying to prevent infection, but just making sure there were enough hospital beds for those infected. We've arrived back there again. /1 https://t.co/8ZmmWVqVIT I saw even…

#auspol #COVID19Aus when the history of this pandemic is written, will you be a person who fought against infection, or a person who fought to keep the social status quo? https://t.co/Iddr1UctPt

#auspol #COVID19Aus great response from @CrabbBrendan to the question on 7.30 last night, about whether NSW is paving the way to us all living with Covid. "I don't think anybody wants to live with Covid." (possibly paraphrasing, going on…

#covid19 #auspol pandemics about the only thing in all of history that alter the distribution of wealth. https://t.co/jrqJqOBExq

#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…

#covid19 #auspol extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#covid19aus #auspol they say history teaches us nothing. Usually you’d assume that meant over generations. Not a year. Australia announces roadmap out of the pandemic today, ‘at last’! Like it did last year, as pictured. Nobody remembers?…

#covid19 #auspol in clear and deliberate violation of Godwin's law, imagine if during WW2 it all seemed a bit hard, and we decided to adopt a 'live with the Nazis' strategy. Let's give up on this defeating them thing, we need our holidays…

#covid19 #auspol two definitions of freedom doing battle in this pandemic. It IS the pandemic, the virus is just opportunistically hitching along. Developed nations, infected with an extreme libertarian virus about 50 years ago, generated…

#auspol #covid19 if you feel that conservative politicians will continue to 'follow medical advice', remember they've happily ignored climate science for several decades. Their only use of expert advice is to keep hospital numbers…

#covid19aus #auspol Remember this? Compare and contrast this collective determination to FIGHT an existential threat, with the shock and awe ads of individuals gasping for air in hospital, today. Deliberate, strategic bullshit to shift…

#auspol #covid19aus haven't been following the numbers closely, but from memory Victoria seems to be getting on top of the Delta outbreak there? That thing the NSW Premier says 'nowhere else in the world' has done? Twice now, in Victoria?

#auspol #covid19aus always remember that many argued that the acceptable level of a lethal pandemic virus wasn’t zero. You don’t need data whizzes to understand the pandemic, this is all it’s been, every single day of it.…

#auspol the bully pulpit is strong in this one. It's infuriating to those in bully pulpits to see others with expertise get a word in, in the public conversation. Still remembering it on Q&A. https://t.co/IW0rrWwJ62

#auspol #covid19 for all modelling and government reports, people get lost in the details, and ignore the framing. This report just operationalises National Cabinet’s 4-stage strategy for pandemic exit. It’s not advice on how to best exit…

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

#covid19nsw this is what the libertarians in Macquarie Street (who, remember, don't believe in rules) want us to do. Blame the catastrophe on us 'not following rules'. Turn on each other, rather than on them. https://t.co/Av8J1JXkEw

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

#auspol #covid19aus Josh Frydenberg’s whinge about turning off government support, like all ‘we can’t live like this forever’ whines, needs to be looked at with this data as context. /1 https://t.co/MkWzvjXRUe Look at that spending in WW1…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the key elements from the Doherty Report which are not being prosecuted daily in NSW press conferences. For those who don't understand it or are too lazy to read it, which appears to be most political…

#auspol #covid19aus I remember Nick and Sharyn tag-teaming on Q&A. Sweet. Drunk with access to the seat of power. It’ll eat them up and spit them out, they haven’t realised that yet. https://t.co/HEiY91t2Ic

#auspol #covid19aus the thing to remember about a pandemic is, it only gives you an illusion of choice of action. You can go 'softer' or 'harder', but the former becomes the latter, in time, with added deaths, morbidity and economic…

#auspol #covid19aus I still remember a time when staying at home was called a holiday. The homicidal cunning of the modern political libertarian, to reframe ‘freedom’ as going to work, and oppression as being in your own home. Gotta love…

I’m one of thousands of experts on Twitter. Some engage with the public and with other areas of expertise, others, not so much. The thing to remember with a pandemic (I think) is, it’s the public who will physically end it. With what they…

#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA Let’s consider those,…

The main reason action on air quality is slow, is that it requires collective action. Just as action on water did in the 19th century. In modern libertarian politics there is no collective action. So we focus on ritualised individual…

Some get a bit upset when you compare a pandemic to a war. On excess death calculations, Covid has already killed about the same number of people as World War 1. In under 2 years.

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

#auspol #covid19aus I remember doing literature reviews, where you came to categorical conclusions based on a newspaper article. Actually I don’t, my thesis passed examination. https://t.co/qudOsi7pvA

#auspol #covid19aus look at government spending during both world wars. That boost gave us prosperity for about 50 years afterwards. Never believe economic thinkers who say we can’t afford to spend a lot more to beat Covid. It would also…

#covid19aus #auspol The normalisation of throwing kids under a bus. Pertussis deaths in the past century. Pre-vaccinations, annual deaths from whooping cough in Australia were in that 50-120 range. Significant morbidity as well. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus here are the top 5 epidemic diseases humanity has been able to 'live with', in history. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

#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…

⁦@RichardfromSyd1⁩ ⁦@OrinCordus⁩ history doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme. https://t.co/DIegxWghm7

#auspol #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on JobKeeper alone. Until mid-2021 it was winning too. Then came maybe the most inexplicable act of bastardry in the history of the…

#auspol both the Liberal and National parties were formed in response to the creation of the ALP in Australia, our first party. Both represented existing wealth in Australia, through farming and business mostly. They were formed to…

#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…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

Worth remembering this stat when we choose to not eliminate Covid. And this is business-related costs, add healthcare costs to those as well. We’re just kicking the can down the road for future generations. We’re very good at that.…

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…

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

Worth remembering that what we have 'freed' today is Covid. Like the freedom to leave the parachute in the plane.

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…

#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU Notice…

Worth remembering that in the ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’, the unvaccinated are mostly young kids, who can’t yet be vaccinated. The kids the Deputy Premier of NSW said it was ‘ludicrous’ to protect with masks.

#auspol ZeroCovid bad. Net-zero emissions bad. I’m seeing a connection. A War on Zero. Maybe it’s what a lot of them got on science tests, and the memory stings. https://t.co/VAiPsu4ftn

The extraordinary pace of vaccination has upset all of the modelling (in a good way). Many countries look on with envy at how Australia mobilises the community for a challenge. We need to understand how Australia builds and maintains a…

The ‘service sector’ employs about 90% of Australian workers, and generates about 80% of our GDP. We’ve forgotten that ‘service’ historically meant servants. One ‘went into service’. What economic mumbo-jumbo is hiding is that most of us…

80 years ago, Robert Oppenheimer discovered the adrenaline rush of being courted by the powerful. It destroyed much of the rest of his life. A warning in his story for experts in this pandemic. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/t3eXFhd1VP

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

How the ‘Economy’ changes everything about the world. This is Nordlingen in southern German. About 1100 years old. Urban patterns reflect social patterns. Notice the clear geometric organisation of the town, centred on the church. A very…

This will succeed if we remember that international came before national. ‘Countries’ were created by international agreement. Trying to create international things from national things is a type of Frankenstein’s monster. #auspol…

There is a fast-track way to change the world. It would take 10 minutes. Everybody join a union. And it’s not just about money. Political libertarian ideas are stupid. But they win because they’re organised. Unions have always been the…

The overriding reason given for surrendering to the spread of Covid is that we can't continue (apparently) to do the public health work needed to eliminate it. About 20 million people are so far thought to have died from Covid. That's more…

Remembering 2 of our leading journalists, fresh back from Europe, said on the weekend Europe was leaving Australia behind. In coffin construction, maybe. Same continent, same ‘live with the virus’ from last year. Same lethal outcome.…

Comparing pandemics with war. Before the 20th century, the biggest killer in wars was? Infectious disease. Like the American Civil war, where the biggest killers by far were diarrhoea and dysentery. Pandemics kill many more than wars. But…

This is the only case numbers we should be looking at. The total world figure. Does the pandemic look over to you? Or just oscillating between idiot 'open up and live with the virus' euphoria and 'o shit' rapid retreat? International…

NZ is one of the few places left on Earth that hasn't gone batshit crazy. What they're arguing for here would have been considered common sense only 30 years ago. Libertarian politics is destroying our sanity and societies. #auspol…

Some still point to Sweden as a Covid role model. So far Public Health Sweden has killed more people than died in World Wars 1 and 2 there, combined. Public health is under assault, worldwide. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/7HCDaOgNRb

We all remember this? People mocked for worrying about clotting risk, with AZ? 4 per million. The same mockers now say extreme caution is needed with Pfizer in children. Oz running at about 10 (mild) myocarditis cases per million. #auspol…

Remember the same libertarian ideas that call it a 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' are responsible for the unvaccinated being unvaccinated. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/xnYogmxC8y

Some Liberals remember that government is about people. And that the 'Economy' is these same people. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/yfTGUfNCch

Covid reminds me of asbestos. Hardly anybody showed ill effects from asbestos, when it was introduced as a wonder material. (My father was one, he died years later of the effects.) Airborne = maximum precaution. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus…

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

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

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

Remember Groundhog Day only ended when repeat after repeat of ever more extreme versions of the status quo failed, and then Bill changed his old ‘normal’? I feel there’s a message there. #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/jGgzTAppL2

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…

Because a feature of populist democracy is zero attention span or memory. Look at what was said about Delta when it arrived in July. Then look at how that turned out. We don’t even notice our Groundhog Day public sphere. #auspol #covid19…

If we’re going to copy the UK Covid strategy, how about we also track how that’s going? The CMO for the UK saying big Omicron hospitalisations a ‘nailed on prospect’ after Christmas. Remember they also began with the ‘mild’ nonsense. Not…

I ask Covid minimisers just how many deaths might sate their bloodlust? Now over 18 million, well past World War 1 deaths. We’ve had vaccines for a year now, which were supposed to end the pandemic. The minimisers use them like junkies.…

As a break from the incessant whining from rich countries in the pandemic, it’s worth looking at historical material from WW1 and WW2. 2 to 3 times longer than our current privations. We’re such fundamentally different people now. And not…

I didn't need to be hospitalised for the breakthrough pertussis infection I got a few years ago. If hundreds of thousands of us got that same pertussis infection at the same time, society wouldn't function. Experts need to stop enabling…

Does anybody remember Moses saying'God gave me some tablets, but I treated them only as advice, let's do something else'? #covid19aus #nswpol https://t.co/X9jnPzD0r0

UVC is ok now? I remember ventilation experts questioning its usefulness. https://t.co/qm6epW3bSo

Infection is disease. That thought has been continuing to emerge in my mind as I watch the attempts by the smart few to stop mass infections. We need to understand that infection is bad, because the way the mass infection crowd get away…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

History. Polio. A mostly ‘mild’ disease, for those who caught it. Did we say ‘ok let’s just let everybody get it?’ We know the answer. In an average year, polio killed 50-100 people. Covid has killed >2000 Australians, in less than 2…

Complete social breakdown. Remember when even having a cold, or a headache or stomach ache, was considered obvious reason to take a day off work? Now you’re forced to go, with a potentially lethal disease that you can also pass on to…

Numerous things to be taken from this data. 1) World Wars 1 and 2 are in this data. 2) See 1). 3) Pandemics are far more lethal than wars. 4) Governments spent 100-120% of GDP to fight WW1 and WW2. 5) Government spent about 35% of GDP to…

Severity is the magic key that unlocks all of the politics of the pandemic. Using polio again as example, which was mostly mild, in the majority of people who contracted it. Covid the same. But both are public health emergencies. /1…

Christmas 2021 should be remembered as the time the people of Australia, tired from 2 years of fighting Covid, were thanked by their governments by infecting them with it. #auspol #COVID19Aus

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…

A hospital is beds, buildings and machines that go ping. The LNP has been very upfront about this, the whole time. Keep business open, have enough beds for the maimed workers. I guess the latter is some minor improvement on the 19th…

Trying to remember who suggested that epidemiology books should now be shifted to the self-help section of book stores.

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

We may come out of this pandemic understanding that politicians should never ‘run the country’. That’s not how democracy works. When they try to take over, people die. Sir Humphrey tried to tell us this 40 years ago. We thought it was…

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…

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.…

The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short…

Brilliant thread on the historical origins of the term 'endemic'. The science hasn't clarified that for me, but the history has. https://t.co/Tfoa01JJ03

We don’t understand time. We’re born old, and get younger every day. A baby carries the biological and evolutionary history of its species, going back millions of years. Old. As it grows, it learns the customs, language, knowledge and…

This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much of the rich visualisation public health has used for centuries to analyse outbreaks has been stripped back to the barest data -…

More social science and the humanities, please, to beat this pandemic. Who remembers the 1920 variant of the Spanish Flu? Nobody. A pattern repeated throughout the 20th century. https://t.co/9mZfocEylx

Remember when delays to elective surgery were used as a battering ram against lockdowns? Reckon the same battering rams will come out to oppose letting Covid rip? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/KIi6Ib8ZMw

In years to come, Covid will seem a storm in a teacup. Because we won't be able to remember it. https://t.co/KPIJ96LGYn

Influenza! (US data) 1) Plummeting mortality over the 20th century. 2) Pandemic influenzas after 1918-20 often less lethal than non-pandemic influenzas. 3) Vaccination not responsible (wide use only since 1980). Ecological causes…

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

I thought Grace Tame’s speech at the press Club was one for the ages. Like Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech. The only ‘but’ for me is a more general observation. As we’ve lost the ability to think and act collectively, the neoliberal…

I'm getting a bit misty-eyed remembering the days when a Premier would refer to 'health advice' when making decisions like this. It's naked industrial farming now. Buckets of antibiotics in our food next. https://t.co/BT6QCNVn6U

The government relentlessly attacks super because it’s maybe an even greater threat to them than unions. VAST amounts of the nation’s wealth is now in super funds. And we - me and you - own those. /1 #auspol https://t.co/owb063cMgA This is…

Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

Most (rich) governments around the world are basically giving up, with Covid. Think about what great collective projects societies put on hold to fight Covid, that they want to get back to. Their moonshots. There aren’t any. /1…

Now the libertarian conservatives here and abroad are acting like the old cotton mill industrialists of the 19th century. It really is just unrestrained, naked battery hen farming for the masses. https://t.co/kZHKPgpgje

The reason I plead with people to join unions is not because I’m a union organiser (I’m not), or closely associated with the ALP (not either). But because politics is not just belief, but also power. /1 https://t.co/VhKM13BDIV Ultimately…

Populism is like sugar for politicians, they love the instant and wide attention. They don't read history though. Past a certain threshold, the crowd discards them entirely. The Republicans in the US have now lost their party.…

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…

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

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…

Some conservatives say technology will fix climate change. They say the same thing about ending wars. And yet despite the overwhelming technological might of Western powers, when was the last time we won a war? Kuwait? A triviality in…

Hey #insiders, remember this? Still killing more people every day in Australia that at any other time of the pandemic. https://t.co/AojdS1bWBD

Some point to the growth of ‘service’ industries in our economies as a form of social progress. It’s actually quite funny that we even use the same word for slavery as we did 150 years ago - service. One ‘went into service’. Re-badged,…

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

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

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…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

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

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

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…

While on how to speak truth into power (rather than to power), I think it pays to remember that privilege is never offended by what you say. They're offended that you think you have the right to say it. Know your place, seen and not heard…

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

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.…

I’m an Economy minimiser. The Economy is the greatest, most laughable and lethal fiction in all of human history. It’s some graphs and stats of social activity overlaid upon old-time feudalism. Except the old feudal lords actually had more…

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

When I caught whooping cough a few years ago, never at any time did a medical professional reassure the rest of the community that they were all going to get whooping cough, and their vaccines would protect them. They told me to go home…

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…

That's 49 for the week, come on NSW, we can crack the half century! Keep living with that virus. Let's see if we can get to a Bradmanesque average. https://t.co/kIxe1YZ9z2

In Camus’ meticulously researched novel, the town is locked down until the pandemic is over, reflecting practice over millennia. There’s no ‘living with the virus’. What we’re doing right now is without precedent in human history. It is…

On this Good Friday, let us remember our political leaders of religious passion, who would no doubt say to us that Good Friday’s meaning is to turn death into numbers. And to then stop publishing the numbers. https://t.co/mOJLKqBGw5

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

Reading this brought home again the joke the developed world now is. Where infectious disease becomes a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Imagine even 20 years ago saying something like ‘we’ll let malaria spread, it’s up to each person…

In my entire adult life (30+years) I remember getting flu once. Sure I may have had it asymptomatically other times. But every year I do everything I can to avoid it. That’s what ‘living with’ nasty bugs has always meant. Avoiding them at…

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1. Remember how the Doherty modelling was used to justify ongoing removal of Covid protections? These numbers were based on a good faith assumption that National Cabinet would keep other measures in place (they…

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

Dear National Cabinet. In the last 4 months, since you let Covid rip, Covid has killed more people in the country per day than any other event in Australian history. And we have vaccines. The greatest failure of government in all of our…

Is there even one example of a pandemic pathogen that humanity has tried to ‘live alongside’ before? Surely this is a monumental lie, the Covid Emperor’s New Clothes? We know politicians lie, but how do experts get away with spruiking this…

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…

Australia was in the Vietnam War for ten years. Just over 500 Australians died. 5000 Australians have died of Covid in the past 5 months. Can I just clarify that this Tweet isn’t an attempt to minimise what happened in Vietnam. It’s the…

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

Remembering HIV in the late 20th century, how we made at least some attempt to control the spread of an immune system-smashing pathogen. Now we’re happy to let the entire globe get infected with SARS2. It’s hard to over-egg the…

Is it possible Covid wipes immune memory for other pathogens, as measles does? https://t.co/XGXFLdHS7s

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

Saw Domicron interviewed at a NSW polling booth. He goes to the polls in less than 12 months. Never forget. Every single member of that National Cabinet should be wiped out electorally. The Australia of 50 years ago would have jailed them.…

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

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

Just to re-use this graphic, this is why the ALP is sometimes called the 'natural party of government' in Australia. It's the only party in most of our history who can win enough votes to govern alone. Only by cobbling together various…

Libertarian politics is fundamentally at odds with everything about Australia’s community-based history and politics. Australia needs to urgently look at stronger regulation of all media, including social media, to protect its unique…

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…

‘Because of lockdown their resistance is down to disease’, says layperson, parroting what politicians tell us. That the key to getting rid of infections, is to give everybody infections. Be that person who didn’t believe this rubbish at…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

Public health should be socially contextual. Historically we didn’t really see voting as ‘compulsory’, nor public health measures as ‘mandatory’. Both were seen more as community action, for community good. Like fundraising for bushfires.…

The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

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…

Broken bones and other injuries heal. And yet we still avoid them. Relying upon immune memory, the body’s last line of defence, as society’s front-line of attack - it’s the Middle Ages. And Covid may trigger little immune memory, even…

The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/zAzjeDwxTY The principle of…

Remember when we threw all the strawberries away, as a potential risk to public health because some dimwit put needles in some of them? Covid is killing over 300 Australians every week. I guess by analogy we're throwing the Australians…

Populism says that politicians ‘run’ a country. They never have. They have authority, but others with expertise run the country. Symbolic sod-turning is as close to ‘running’ anything politicians should be allowed to be. Covid would be…

ScoMo’s and Dom’s gravest Covid concern was ‘daily Covid press conferences’. Not Covid; the discussion of Covid. And here we are, a public health response entirely shut down. Not even vaccinating. But remember too, you only had to be given…

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

Very important thread about the need to back off the constant assault on institutions. It’s playing right into the hands of the libertarians. The reason institutions often perform poorly is this long history of them being undermined. Blame…

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…

In history political changes from pandemics were in direct proportion to the impact on the labour force. Elites will take a pandemic seriously only when they can’t get workers. With Covid this was the real cause of the spin of ‘getting…

I don’t remember life in Sydney pre-lockdown including pretty much every person and place I know swimming in viral soup. Wait until we see how ‘scarred’ they are 5-10 years from now, from repeated infection. https://t.co/oR5xV1myXU

If Mantovani had played at Woodstock, he’d have been 16 years younger than McCartney is at Glastonbury. Except Mantovani wasn’t invited to Woodstock, it was boomers-only. The generation always determined to replace history and succession…

NSW whooping cough epidemic a few years ago. Looking back at the news stories, this caught my eye: "Ms Payten was horrified to learn that her fully vaccinated children had been out in the community for many days, while highly contagious…

I think it’s worthwhile to always re-remember that ‘living with’ Covid literally is ‘doing nothing’. It’s the triumph of the most disgusting spin and slogans over public health. https://t.co/InNoOZijE0

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…

Remembering that we ARE the 'wave'. We're not surfing here, waiting for them to roll in. What we do here, right now, today is what generates the next wave. https://t.co/T3G4zcHb45

Lots of talk from National Cabinet and their health advisers about a ‘new wave’ coming. The geographical metaphors are wrong, there’s not really any rising and falling here? No waves. It’s a mountain of persistent and growing infection. /1…

Minimising maths at work again. The shambles of other countries’ Covid public health efforts constantly used now to justify Australia killing over 7000 people since Christmas time. Because we’re still killing less than them, or something.…

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

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP…

We can't even require people to wear a mask apparently. History will judge us to be the pathetic whinging babies that we are. https://t.co/YUdkbUbmBC

We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

Another busload dead. The personal responsibility pollies taking no personal responsibility for any of it. Their public disease strategy based on a herd immunity fantasy that has never happened anywhere, in history. #auspol #covid19aus…

The Herd Immunity Taskforce met yesterday and affirmed its commitment to a fantasy that hasn’t stopped a single pandemic in all recorded history. For an encore it tweaked a few things to ‘get us through the winter’, no doubt reassured by…

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…

Can we please have just one example from history of a pandemic we ‘lived with’? One that doesn’t involve mass death, disease and social chaos.

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId…

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

The surest guide to the UK leadership race is history. Is the political situation dire? If yes, a woman will win, given a hospital pass to try to fix it, before the conservative men then remove her to regain the top spot.

Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of…

When you read the history of public health, governments invented it to DO the ‘weighing up’. It’s spin that public health is something to be ‘balanced’ against ‘economic’ considerations. Like climate balanced against the Economy.…

I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again…

From the RBA’s own timeline history. The ‘economy’ was invented in the 1950s. By the 1960s the major responsibilities of elected governments, as highlighted, were largely flick-passed to the moneylenders. And thus we reach today, where we…

There is no centre in politics, it’s an entirely relative, shifting place. ‘Centrist’ views 50 years ago would be far-Left today. https://t.co/AhjVLolrzc

Thanks to @OrinCordus. 'Lockdowns' = people at home. To understand why the Economy folk fight lockdowns so viciously, read this. The Economy can't tolerate 'home', it was built on the destruction of place. My constant theme. /1…

I remember many saying a few weeks ago that a cumulative death curve can only go up, so it going up didn’t matter. Meantime, people paid 6-figure salaries in public health tell us every day that Covid is now domesticated, like flu. Who’s…

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 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…

Cost of living is exploding at the same time in history nearly everything can be provided to people at zero cost. Inflation is really vested interests trying desperately to retain profit margins in the face of that fact. Energy will be…

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…

43. History will have a reckoning for the thousands killed in Australia this year. Politicians, experts and journalists who did nothing while this happened should think long and hard about their testimony at future Royal Commissions and…

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…

Paul Ewald has suggested infectious causes for our main chronic diseases. So while we notice big acute disease events, like pandemics, we maybe miss the possible chronic disease these infections go on to cause. Here are 2 tables of…

Great thread, on a favourite theme of mine. The main game may be the sequelae, the acute infection phase could be just the overture. Past history suggests pandemics play out with chronic disease for the following century at least.…

Australia should be the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century. Instead Saudi Arabia may still be, with our help. It should be humiliating to us as a nation that these Australian companies have to work with the HQ of world oil, because of 3…

The whining from the LNP and business about union ‘domination’ at the Jobs Summit. Can anybody remember unions having a single voice in the past decade? Do as the conservatives do, make the changes and let the other side whine. Then make…

National Cabinet members only comment on Covid to suggest removing protections. More than 11,000 Australians are dead from Covid this year. How is this not the largest news story in modern Australian history? 11,000! https://t.co/TSqsrmyn5Q

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

When governments announce more spending on skills and training, just remember the largest beneficiaries are usually the business community. More corporate welfare, the amount Australian business spends on training its own workforce has…

Remember all the theatre from Covid minimisers about how flu this year would be a killer, because we'd missed two years of being sick? The 'get infected so you won't get infected' herd immunity Catweasels. https://t.co/gKvFhc6USv

Re-Tweet this one occasionally as a reminder to the ‘we locked down for 2 years’ people that they’re remembering slogans, not life as it was. All the white in the diagram is no-lockdown. Any larger coloured bits after JQ20 were the…

Is there another example of a government decision to knowingly INCREASE death in the community? Surely this distinguishes Covid decisions from anything else in the history of civilised societies? https://t.co/grIE7x5ps3

“Total federal and state taxation revenue as a share of GDP is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed country average.” Ross Garnaut Worth remembering every time we’re told basic social investment is ‘unaffordable’. Time to…

For the local public health professionals concerned yesterday that an article about the impact of Covid on young people pre-dated the vaccines, here’s one from this week. A $3.5 trillion dollar problem. Remember you helped enable this.…

The 'preventing serious disease and death' strategy. The greatest failure in public administration in Australian history. The greatest mass casualty event. I tag auspol here because that's what the political discussion should be about, but…

Since WW2, we've experienced prosperity and peace probably without parallel in history. The prosperity was largely re-purposed massive war industry, and fossil fuel driven. The refusal to fight Covid is the outcome of that 80 years feeling…

It’s common to see monarchy as a relic of a superseded age. But look at the complete train wreck of the popularity politics that has replaced it. Monarchy at least retains historical continuity in its core DNA. Populism reinvents the world…

‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

Ponder that somebody reigns for 70 years, and we know pretty much nothing about her, as a person. Nothing about her beliefs or opinions. She served a collectively-defined role, an institution. Now imagine current leaders did the same with…

Listening to the complaints about the public holiday from business. Business stops for nothing now, not even death. The weekend we all won 75 years ago has largely been re-taken by it. A day of cost pales next to the mass infection…

Imagine if politicians couldn’t touch a cent of public money until essential public services had been built and/or maintained. This is an old cast iron pipe central to the big Sydney water outage this week. The feds have nearly all the…

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…

Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1…

@arthistorynews there's a doco begging to be made here: https://t.co/tiFWPgEFBa

It's very common for Covid minimisers to say that letting Covid rip in late-2021 is justifiable because our deaths compared to the rest of the world are still very low. Yeh, nah. A disgrace, the greatest failure of governance in our…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

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

In the working from home debates, it might be useful to point out that for the vast majority of human history, working AWAY from home was the exception. I think it helps highlight what's really in play here.

This superb series notes that the English used the same tactics here as they used against the Irish. Identify the leaders, and kill them. As the Koreans did in POW camps as well in WW2. Lessons for Covid here too, change in any direction…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

Plagues and wars are about the only things that have ever re-balanced inequality in history. Why vested interests today are so determined to not let us fight Covid. https://t.co/1YeX1YJS83 @YouAreLobbyLud the deepest layer of resistance to…

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

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

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

Flood. Plague. Usury. The Old Testament is back. Trying to remember if it said something about 'living with' plagues. Some sort of divine punishment for corrupt societies is the stronger memory. https://t.co/rSOsJpEc00

Is ‘let’s live with a pandemic’ the greatest farce in the history of the human race?

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

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…

The history of public health is so vital I think to understanding the Covid debacle we're living right now. There's maybe an assumption that the public health practice politicians are now shredding with abandon to try to win votes was a…

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…

Wrong ideas about democracy also lead to despair about the millions of followers of people like Trump, and Alex Jones. Because we believe democracy is some magical aggregation of all of our millions of views, we see Trump/Jones as…

The most minimised thing is infection itself? Lived experiences of mild acute infections with colds and seasonal flu viruses are used to imply infection is even healthy. Many died in history creating that lower morbidity. And it ignores…

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…

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

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…

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

Every time a politician says the pandemic is over, unless a new variant of concern comes along, it helps to remember not naming new variants means the pandemic is always over. Orwell would be proud. https://t.co/Zy6G7bYItT

I worked in schools, and think we criminally downplay their formative role in our entire culture. (See my pinned Tweet.) This image shows us nearly everything important about societies today. Kids in the playground, with the classrooms off…

Brad Hazzard on RN, describing the early days of Covid as 'silly' when we were concerned about 200 cases in the community. No Brad, what's silly is you and your libertarian mates infecting thousands of people every week with one of the…

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

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…

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

The authoritarianism/China narrative misses so much of what’s important geopolitically. Our supposedly free markets are not doing any of the things that need doing, while China dominates nearly all of the industries that will dominate the…

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…

Most human progress we attribute to democracy is really the work of engineers. It’s engineers who scale knowledge to the material wellbeing of people. That includes pandemics, where engineers have saved more lives than any medical science.…

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:…

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…

I have a hunch when we watch Downton Abbey, if we were to project ourselves into the story we imagine ourselves as one of the family. Not as one of the servants. But we’re nearly all the servants, by exact historical comparison. We’re just…

In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to…

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…

Isn’t it time to actually do some of this ‘balancing’ politicians and business leaders talk about with Covid? Right now there’s nothing on the Covid side of the see-saw, everything is on the economic side. A proposal. /1…

As with Covid, it's pointless addressing pleas and arguments to the neoliberals. They're just representatives of industries who aren't interested. The only effective opposition is organised labour - unionism. That's the historical,…

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

Those thousands dead will remain dead. If you're a Covid minimiser, nothing you do or say from this point on will absolve you of responsibility for those deaths. History and justice have long memories. https://t.co/7zK9ye2BTq

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i Serres…

There are only 3 things in history (you can check) that have ever interrupted the continuous flow of privilege to society’s elites. 1. Plagues 2. Wars 3. Unions Let’s skip 1 and 2 and go straight to 3.

Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics of small government. As these same politicians like to say,…

In any field, or even any part of life, the truth of what’s going on is extremely unlikely to be the most obvious thing. If this wasn’t true, everybody would be a genius. I remember that with climate and Covid. None of the popular…

There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics…

Thought of this watching Rae Duncan talk about chronic Covid. The possibility that the cardiovascular disease pandemic of the 20th century may have been the chronic phase of Spanish Flu. There's other research that posits the same link to…

To clarify my interest in Christian Drosten’s musings about hybrid immunity, that’s not a theory I agree with. What interests me is his simultaneous belief that we shouldn’t be getting infected. The two don’t go together, but that (to me)…

I remember discussion here earlier in the pandemic about memorialising those who have died. Right now we know these people mostly as data points in graphs. Until even the data was suppressed, so now they’re completely invisible. This is…

The UK keeps racking up the social collapse. And the same bullshit in the news reports, that this is caused by not enough strep infection during lockdowns. I must remember to get some TB this year, to protect me next year.…

Who's going to be the Al Gore of Covid? Remember how people gasped when he rode the lift to the top of that graph? Some of the Covid graphs are even higher and steeper, showing even greater divergence from sanity. https://t.co/7JxClWg9re…

So China will relax restrictions under the 'Omicron is mild' banner. Thousands of Australians would remember us doing the same. If they were still alive. https://t.co/UOyRHLaXTX

Viral Parkinsonism, another piece of the chronic infection/impact of infection puzzle. Alongside other research suggesting Parkinsons and artherosclerosis may be Long Influenza. Causality being tested. It took over a century to find…

It wasn't always how it would be, because it's also never how it has been ever before, in all of human history. It's a disgusting collapse of basic leadership.

If you think change will come by ‘mobilising’ people through social media, it’s worth remembering that the communist parties of Russia and China began as democracy movements, in the name of the people. Social media magnifies and…

Tragically @KarenCutter4 is on holiday (which she deserves), so looking at the NSW weekly epi report without her guidance. - lead summary point is that ‘we are likely to have reached the peak in infections’. - this based on stable PCR…

Don’t be fooled by the ‘focused protection’ herd immunity crowd. When they say herd, they don’t include themselves. They’re ‘35 miles behind’ the front line. Nothing changes much in history. https://t.co/III65A6XsL

Imagine a target range for infection, like we have for inflation. In the old days (i.e. 3 years ago), that’s what controlling a disease meant. Heaven and Earth are being moved to get us back into the target range for inflation. Infection…

Those who will minimise any Covid disaster in China by saying they should have vaccinated more, need to remember that Australia stopped vaccinating when it let Covid rip too. And will likely kill 25,000 people this year alone, while…

“A year later, and Australia has embraced a great forgetting with almost no historical parallel.” https://t.co/Q00bnSPmCd

At the end of another terrible Covid year, I think we need to zoom out and recognise we’re in the middle of a pattern that repeats throughout history. Plagues and wars are all that really change societies, that level them. 2023 will show…

POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

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’.…

Following best practice throughout history, the pandemic became ‘endemic’ when richer countries and richer groups within those societies decided they were relatively safe. About end-2021. Endemic means ‘killing somebody else, mostly the…

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including…

I misted up remembering an ‘abundance of caution’ here earlier in the pandemic. And access to epidemiological data. https://t.co/BfLjSbDLDR

Chris making the return to work easier for our senior journalists, a story here that was writing itself all through 2022. History will remember those who ignore it. https://t.co/LSX0ESYLeD

How long would Covid survive if we all just decided to stay home for a couple of months, globally? We can plan and coordinate world wars that run for years, I’m sure we could coordinate staying home for a couple of months.

Because it really annoys cookers to mention lockdowns a lot, it’s worth remembering that lockdowns applied to all of us. Whereas personal responsibility public health is ‘as much protection as you can afford yourself’. Which for most…

It really is. Ridiculous. ‘Let’s just go back to work, and all get infected multiple times a year, with a lethal virus’ - has anything more stupid been done, in all of history? https://t.co/GQZQgQrqhG

Societies have a geology as well as a politics. Deep, tectonic movements. The big political libertarian push of the past 50 years is deeply linked to one of the founding tectonic plates of all human history. The battle between Church and…

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…

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

This is fascinating. Influenza vaccination also shown to significantly reduce risk of heart disease, from memory. https://t.co/WhhCU9CiHe

Few years old now, this campaign. I don’t remember trolls hyperventilating around ‘Road Zero’. https://t.co/eOloAJ2H0L

413 dead in a week. Imagine even 3 years ago thinking any politician could keep their job, with that statistic. https://t.co/LMVBcsOHGO

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…

I have a longstanding debate with a friend about Covid. They say PH measures had to be relaxed to ‘balance’ action against a lot of other social priorities. I say to them that this is is what PH was designed to do, to do that balancing.…

I remember in the early days of HIV, how anybody engaging in unprotected sex knowing the risks of HIV was condemned by the community, even charged. But with Covid social and economic activity without precaution is celebrated.

One of the most disgraceful episodes in the pandemic. As if poorer suburbs were to blame for Covid. Disease shaming, we saw it for HIV 40 years ago too. This is today’s politics, no public, just playing invented groups off against each…

Great change in politics comes because it’s forced. Not from politics itself. It took millions of men being killed in the great wars to advance women’s rights significantly, by opening up opportunities for them with the men gone. The…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

Everywhere the race to return to feudalism is gathering pace. It’s far and away the dominant social model from history. It requires massive disruption to dislodge, like wars and plagues. Ordinary politics won’t do it.…

Politics never has been a rational conversation. It’s about balances of power. The reason public health used to be a priority but now isn’t, is because the balance of power shifted. Away from the ‘public’, which current politics openly…

The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is made of millions of individuals, each choosing their own fate.…

Our politics is hopeless technology, overlaid upon a socio-technical world of enormous complexity. The ISS as an example. Took the equivalent of 3 million people years to build, or 26 billion work hours. Almost ten times the collective…

The pandemic may be the greatest counterfactual in human history. I’m not sure humans have ever denied being in a pandemic before.

A few of us raised this at the time. I don’t remember one media report querying why National Cabinet were requesting modelling of the mass infection of children. https://t.co/t0YbE00gNG

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

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…

Heart disease in the 20th century followed a pretty classic epidemic-type curve. Have Tweeted before that some believe the ‘Spanish Flu’ pandemic may have been responsible, that heart disease was the chronic after-effects of that pandemic.…

We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater historical shift, to unwind most of those post-war years. /1…

The thing to remember on this topic, and tying into my broader theme of the stripping away of public institutions, is that the LNP already abolished universal health care once. In 1981. Never be fooled into thinking that’s not still their…

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

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

Australia’s top 10 natural disasters in history. In a clear first place and still streaking away from the field, Covid. It only took the lead AFTER we said the pandemic was done, in late-2021. How do leaders not end up in jail for this,…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

As a member of the public, what to do when NSW Health recommends you wear a mask in healthcare settings, and medical professionals who work there say the opposite? https://t.co/ITlBMkPg4q Is this one of those AHPRA things, @YouAreLobbyLud…

I have expert-fatigue. I can’t remember a time in the past year for example where NSW Health wasn’t recommending masking in indoor crowded places. But then the media is full of expert opinion directly contradicting the need to. Social…

20-21st century ‘neoliberal’ politics is a fancy name for the return of history’s dominant social form. Feudalism. These modern movements exist only to reverse the gains of the late-19th and 20th centuries. Gains only enabled by social…

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

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

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

Super, introduced by Paul Keating, is the most extraordinary transfer of national wealth to ordinary Australians in our history. Which is why the LNP despise it, with passion. The first time in all of history where ordinary people hold…

David Coleman, on Q&A last night. ‘It’s your money’ (about super). Most of it is your employer’s money, plus public-funded massive tax concessions. With a legislated time at which it becomes yours, at age 60+. It’s your infection too,…

Blake makes the excellent point in this article that the supposed invulnerability of children to disease is only about a century old. Prior to that most of them died young. Public health achieved that. The thing we’re not doing now.…

The trivialisation and normalisation of infection. For most of its history public health saw infection as a bad thing. During Covid flu and colds have been used by minimisers to suggest that widespread infection is a legitimate and…

Rather than mobilising and monetising trolls, could expert Covid minimisers : - show us where ‘immunity debt’ and ‘hybrid immunity’ are in the textbooks? - show us where the same textbooks and even historical practice show the use of…

The death numbers last year and into 2023 would have left the Australia of only 20 years ago aghast. The breaking of Australian society that’s been going on right under our noses is stunning to see in its endgame now.…

Who remembers when a Royal Commission was called because a government decision ended 4 lives? Good times. https://t.co/wJDYMWKRzT

Organisations and societies can suffer a form of collective dementia. The ‘live with’ Covid strategy forgets what we did for infectious disease in the 20th century. The destruction of institutions does this, they hold societies’ collective…

In a week where (astoundingly) leading health figures openly mocked action promoting clean air, it’s worth remembering that all Australian governments have been committed to that since 2015. https://t.co/f4Wd86Iwh1 @RealOzSAGE

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

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

Who remembers this happening after our Banking Royal Commission? Me either. As Nick Hanauer says, we can do basic public administration, or we can just leave it and wait for the pitchforks. https://t.co/bZCl5KiHsu

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to…

"It is just assumed that the free market will look after things and we will have vets wherever we need them but that is not the case." Another victim of ‘the Economy’ fantasy. Society is falling apart. And remember, that was the actual…

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

NSW copied this scheme. People will remember the vouchers. Designed to break down psychological and emotional resistance to being infected. Sold as helping the economy. https://t.co/TS5ZShTws5

Quotes that trace a shift. “the unconditional surrender of microbes”. Dwight D. Eisenhower “Children born in the next decade would no longer face the ancient scourge of pestilence”. JFK “The future of infectious diseases will be very…

From @EricTopol. I remember looking at annual costs to the bloody ‘economy’ of influenza, pre-Covid. It ran into the billions, in Australia. Clean air is one of the best ROIs imaginable for modern economies. https://t.co/vO1hktEItE

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that…

It’ll be no surprise that I think ‘the economy’ is hokum. If (as I believe) it’s just people, I’d predict that the countries who will flourish throughout this century and into the next, are those who aren’t in retirement homes. The…

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

Covid is by far the greatest death toll from a natural disaster in Australia. Most of that is 2022. Nearly double the deaths of the second greatest disaster (Spanish Flu), and still climbing. Between 3-20 times more than any other disaster…

Yes broken. In plain sight, ‘there is no such thing as society’. Only once in the entire history of most societies has it been any different. In the period between the end of WW2, and the early 21st century. /1 https://t.co/aAIJvrcRk2 The…

It already collapsed. Replaced by a market economy. 50 years ago. We’re much, much too late to this party. (The market economy is pretend, masking basic feudalism.) https://t.co/0qmRLF8398

As evidence that we’re in the midst of a deliberate reversal of social progress from the first half of the 20th century, the 1.15 million dead from Covid in the US is less than the 1.5 million who died from workplace injuries there in the…

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

From the late-19th, through to the early-to-mid 20th century was when humanity invented ‘the public’. From the 1950s onwards, social elites started stripping it away again. We’re living in the final stages of that tug of war. From:…

People huddled around a single TV at Sydney Airport in 1969, to watch Apollo 11 on the moon. What was the last ‘moonshot’ you can remember society pursuing? The accelerated destruction of the public began just afterwards, in the 1970s, and…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

Some of the the themes I Tweet about a lot. How it took 2 world wars to suppress power structures enough to provide a momentary space for the ‘public’ (though I think the 30 glorious years Cory talks about here were the years the clawback…

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

So the never-elected-as-Premier, who unleashed the worst public health disaster on NSW in its history, is gone. (Yay.)

If mammals don’t pass on immunity to their offspring, those arguing for infections to generate immunity are arguing for perpetual sickness? Using ‘we get hundreds of infections in our lifetimes’ as support. Itself just historically filthy…

Remember health alerts for other infectious diseases? They never stopped. Brings into stark relief the unprecedented public health vandalism that our Covid response is. https://t.co/v97EAfK2jq

The first casualty in the shift from a community-based to an individualist politics, is the weakest people in that community. That’s why we invented ‘the public’, at the turn of the past century. The loons in power since the 1970s think…

One to remember when the Infinite Covids claim those reluctant to be infected are some sort of minority holding back the tide of freedom. There are many more people uncomfortable with mass public infection than vote for any major political…

Both Israel and the US are showing that the deepest currents driving political populism are the push for the return of theocracies. Church v State, the motive force of so much of our history, never left. Societies have tectonic plates -…

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.…

When we destroy institutions, we enter an eternal present, where the most powerful define reality as anything they like. They can say a pandemic is over and it is, because they say. Institutions are society’s memory. Power based only on…

Speaking to families this week struggling with every variety of -itis. Conjunctivitis & tonsillitis are biggies. They say ‘lockdowns reduced our immunity’, to rationalise their suffering. So I asked them ‘when was the last time you had…

Has there ever been a demonstrated achievement of herd immunity, using hybrid immunity? Any empirical/historical examples?

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

Some will have seen the multiple threads I've written suggesting that 'the economy' is actually a deliberate strategic invention to return societies to their default historical state. Feudalism. Every piece of the jigsaw fits, now…

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…

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

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

Adrian Esterman was on PM yesterday, giving a Covid state of play. Spoke of a shift in his own thinking towards less concern about Long Covid now, and about infection of younger Australians. It reminded me again about Paul Ewald’s mission.…

Nearly all of the history of the staggering innovation in the US was government-driven and funded. Much of it through defence spending, directly or indirectly. Its political philosophy is totally at odds with how the country actually…

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 great hidden infection hypothesis. I love AIHW’s work, the charts are all from them. The common theory says that mortality shifted from predominantly infectious disease, towards chronic disease, in the 20th century. Due to advances in…

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…

It feels like the currency of the rest of the 21st century is going to be young Indian workers.

On current projections the median age in Australia will be almost 50, by the turn of the next century. Like many Western countries, our future is as an (unstaffed and under-resourced) aged care facility. https://t.co/B0fqJBF5WH

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

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

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

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…

Hard to fathom sometimes that the entire pandemic is only the absence of fresh air. We went to the moon over 50 years ago. But fresh air? No. The milestone Clean Air Act was introduced in the US in the 1970s. The same time as free market…

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…

Bruno Latour did a brilliant essay years ago to debunk the mythology around cognition that AI debate is currently wallowing in. We think more with our eyes and hands than we do with our brains. Intelligence has always been fundamentally…

And let's remember we chose this 'extra burden', egged on by prominent health professionals. At a time our health system is on its knees with an ageing population. https://t.co/ZerPlYk7WY

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

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

The bling. It tells a story we don’t want to understand, which response to the coronation today highlights for me. I don’t think we recognise that the knee-jerk rejection of constitutional monarchy is another disguised infection by the…

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

Church services were the original rock concerts. The lights (stained glass), the huge sound, particularly with full choir and a massive pipe organ. It shakes the ground. All deliberately engineered to cement the faith every Sunday. Listen…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the…

Escapes to a life of populist celebrity, and excruciating tell-all reveals of every fart. Southpark has this one right. I despair that people on the one hand can’t see the historical importance of constitutional monarchies, while cheering…

History changes less than we think. Living with the virus is good ol' Middle Ages public health. https://t.co/S7EaYr7h1Z

Trying to remember the ads showing people ripping their condoms off during the initial HIV pandemic. https://t.co/B7JQonfdyV

A great summary here of half a century of all-out assault on political accountability. By elected politicians. If you want to know how basic processes like public health are ignored in a pandemic, this is how. It's been a long project,…

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

I still remember the LNP when it had actual policies, and not slogans and stunts funded by donors. https://t.co/3kiJZpbgd2

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

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

Eurovision is appallingly bad. Mimed kitsch. The Anglo world pioneered modern popular music. Europe has no clue, with rare exceptions like Abba. I wonder if it’s the melting pot of immigration in the US, UK and Anglo territories that…

From somebody who sells a lot of history books. https://t.co/0LqNLFHTwX

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

Have tweeted before about the possible links between the 20th century epidemic of heart disease and infection. Another 20th century epidemic was obesity. Is there a possible link to infection for this chronic condition? You betcha. /1…

A Part 2 on Get Back. This movie is very important, and it’s irrelevant what you think about Beatles music. The beliefs that are now destroying our societies were taking root at exactly this time in history. The Beatles were a major…

Astounding that many young people I talk to are active, almost rabid, followers of Gerard Rennick. This is young people without any history of conservative political (or any political) belief. The Right in the US is using social media to…

20 years ago this would have been a news headline in major newspapers. Now it’s the public health strategy of the National Cabinet and Chief Medical Officer of the country. Itself a word-for-word copy of a free market libertarian…

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1…

“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…

We’re into year 4 of the pandemic. For maybe half of those 4 years most countries have done almost nothing to fight it. So let’s say 2 years of having a red hot go, at best, for most. WW2 went for 6-7 years. There was no let-up. We have no…

We're into World War 1 territory, with deaths. You know, that global emergency where we all gave up after 2 years and went back to work. https://t.co/wcbXaAJBE1

It really is only a handful of years ago that Australia still did public health. Even the Murdoch press was into it. https://t.co/LGx5CG65Dw

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

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.…

Yet more research showing an infectious origin for chronic disease. In this case, plagues from centuries ago (bubonic) now linked to autoimmune disease in the 21st century. We don’t learn, as we happily infect the entire globe with a new…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

Remember the argument for years for negative gearing on property? That without it there’d be no rentals? lol, as always nobody will be held to account for the lies. https://t.co/yI5GYlQKQp

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 conversation with @c_s_wallace and @CrabbBrendan on his podcast, @markgkenny mentioned the narrative about the public being tired of Covid action. That narrative was part of the Covid minimisation messaging. Australia endured much worse…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

Malaria wasn’t always just a tropical disease. It killed across about twice the area historically than it does now. It was eliminated in richer parts of the world, by public health action, land use and better housing. Not by living with…

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…

Riddle me this. Enormous demand for housing, no supply. But not because there’s no land available, lots of those houses are sitting unfinished, unable to find a builder. Builders are going broke. The fantasies of the economy. /1…

Just as renaming feudalism as 'capitalism' hides the historical continuity of societies, in this article substitute 'slaver' for every mention of 'labour hire'. https://t.co/T5KXfL8uMy

How prepared are you to take on your own friends, to end this pandemic? What created and maintains this pandemic is the social dynamics of friendship, what I sometimes call ‘team sports’. Social conformity. Not politics, or rather that’s…

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

Historically what makes economies boom is action against emergencies. It 'stimulates economic activity'. Like after the great wars in the 20th century, or cholera in the UK. Leading to decades of prosperity. The problem is the solution.…

Remember the orgasmic populist surge of Johnson’s landslide? When will we learn that popularity is a false god? In just 3 years he went from hero to zero, because he was a lethal, clueless populist. Hundreds of thousands of Brits died on…

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

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

In Australia’s black summer fires, I remember almost no real attention to air quality. The pandemic has changed us. Now the US very focused on air quality. Proof again that the anti-public health crowd are a loud hysterical minority.…

Actual problems are what expose populism. Remember Trump in Korea, and the zero progress that resulted in? Populists don’t solve problems, that’s too hard. They invent fake problems that are really just digestible slogans and sound bites.…

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

If you’re old enough, think back to life before social media. If somebody didn’t know something, what did they do? Often it never came up, they didn’t know what they didn’t know. If it did they could use a library, or Google search etc.…

Entering the rankings at number 3 after not being there at all 4 years ago is some achievement. Especially when the direct result of government policy. Imagine being a journalist and this not being newsworthy. Government policy, creating a…

Can't remember how much attention this got late last year. I particularly like the last two dot points, beginning 'doctors not sure why'. https://t.co/DP6aLkCVl9

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

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.…

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

Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most common objection to the comparison - that ‘we have a lot more…

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…

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…

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

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

After a pandemic of heart disease in the 20th century very possibly caused by the Spanish Flu pandemic and other infections, now we're repeating the same mistake in the 21st century. https://t.co/ykH7NTmE7b

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

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

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

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…

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…

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

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change…

Maybe there was a typo somewhere in the budget papers, 'renewable infection' instead of 'renewable energy'. I remember innumerates telling me cumulative death curves can only ever go up. No, they can be flat. Like ours was, with public…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

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…

@samirashackle loved your Guardian long read on hoarding. Maybe hoarders represent an older cherishing of things, now overwhelmed by the sheer volume of consumer goods. Maybe it’s the rest of us throwing so much away who are pathological,…

“…it is as though a significant segment of the ruling classes (known today rather too loosely as “the elites”) had concluded that the earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else. Consequently, they decided that it was…

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…

‘War footing’. What the world should be on right now. What’s confronting us is the greatest existential threat in all human history. There’s almost no sense of urgency, at all. I’m not joking, voting and discussing and debating are…

I think the paradigm might shift now, because of Covid. The acute phase of the pandemic may just be the on-ramp to a century of chronic effects. As some hypothesise about the Spanish Flu as well, in the 20th century. https://t.co/H3fTbnlmyB

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

I have training and experience in advanced science, in the history, philosophy, public policy and administration of science, and teaching it as well. That causes a question to keep pestering me in this pandemic. Why is science not doing…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

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…

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…

I don’t remember my kids ever having influenza, and two of them are now adults. I don’t remember having it myself more than once in my decades of life. Is there asymptomatic influenza, or mild influenza? Or is this just more perversion of…

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…

Remember when elected leaders, the media and social media not only all failed in Don't Look Up, but actually accelerated the end of civilisation? Did that not resonate? Why do we take to social media every day thinking that will do…

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

No daily discussion here or electoral politics anywhere will have any meaningful impact on the global catastrophes we’re living. History is repeating, total catastrophe is all that will rupture the imitative rivalry/team sports. We’ll…

‘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…

Expertise has never ‘spoken truth to power’, that’s just chest-beating. The only way ever that knowledge and expertise has ever shaped government is the invention of a civil service. Like this one in Victoria, early 20th century. That’s…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

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

Every day I think it’s worth remembering that people would rather die, than act in a way that is different to the people they mix with. You can viscerally feel the terror - not too strong a word - at appearing different. Imitation is the…

Yes! I dream of a day when we recognise ‘the economy’ as the greatest sleight of hand in human history. A substitute for society, favouring the privileged, masquerading as an ‘objective’ measure of all social life. https://t.co/KLfWKRmN5X

Remember how staying home stopped Covid in its tracks? The economy fairies tell us that’s not a ‘sustainable’ ongoing model. But it does show that pandemics only exist because of mobility. 15-minute city type initiatives make societies…

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…

I don't remember seeing this last year. @DrPieterPeach did you see this at the time? https://t.co/NmvMtTlx4F

Just as societies had flushed out remnant chronic impacts from an early-20th century pandemic, we decided to do it all again, for the 21st. https://t.co/oMvjGa3b9R Source: https://t.co/6I1YXtxwek

I think the greatest progress in knowledge comes from conceptual leaps, not from data or methodology. From the framing. For Covid and now for the Voice, you see something entirely different if you use reality as the framing, rather than…

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

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

I can’t remember if this is one you made, @scott_squires? Love it. https://t.co/6F5aNBoj5o

We’re seeing old privatisations now having to be bailed out with massive amounts of public money. In electricity, in water, in gas, in housing. Now we’ve privatised a pandemic, and we’ll have to ‘socialise the losses’ there over the next…

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…

We had the technology to all live lives of leisure 100 years ago. The reason productivity always stalls is parasitic rent-seekers repurposing human innovation for private gain. https://t.co/V1IKQbNaiL

Historically it was a colonialist term, for the countries we'd captured, and then left to get infected and die. Like saying crime is 'endemic' to poorer neighbourhoods.

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…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

Two years ago, 18 minutes and 10 seconds into this presentation by the Doherty modellers, the previous PM interrupted to reinforce that what they were presenting meant 80% vaccination made Covid ‘just like the flu’. No it didn’t. /1…

The probably irreparable damage social media is doing to societies. Through the lens of renewable energy development. Take the current objection to just about every pumped hydro project proposed. Lake Lyell, as an example. /1…

One of the great things to learn from Rachel Perkins’ wonderful Australian Wars series, is how much the very existence of the States was just as a mechanism to manage the massive land grab of that time. European Australians have always…

Every time I hear the phrase ‘closing the gap’ I chuckle. The arrogance of the idea, that original Australians need to somehow catch up with we advanced other Australians. The gap is in the other direction. The continent is broken, and we…

If you aggregate the number of people who will be maimed and die in generations to come, allowing a novel infectious disease to become permanent (‘endemic’) ranks higher than any historical dictator or genocide for death and suffering.

Vote Yes because what were doing now isn’t working. If you want to vote No, remember the proposal is for a committee, which should mean nothing will change anyway. Either way, Yes is the only vote that makes sense.

Always look for the untold stories. Like why are we vulnerable to catastrophic bushfires? Yes climate change. But the much bigger reason is that we don’t live in our own landscape, we don’t manage it, we barely interact with it. /1…

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

One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily team sports of politics, and back onto reality. Rosling could show how so much was actually going much more right than we believe…

Societies won’t change without total catastrophe. The lives we led pre-Covid were the happy remnants of action taken after 20th century catastrophes. https://t.co/FZxT1R305P

The only recipe for social stability over generations is to build things. Not to have the things, but because building things disciplines human desire and behaviour in a way that debate never can. We will never agree because desire is too…

Who remembers Covid vaccination in Australia? Memories. https://t.co/Bz1CX0HQAi

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

Have met a few CEOs who have resisted the flexibility in working arrangements the pandemic ushered in. They're quite openly waiting for conditions to 'tighten' so they can reinstate their preferred 'you should feel lucky you have a job'…

What I know, because I looked, is that for many diseases we vaccinate against, mortality hasn't historically been high. Public health used to focus on preventing infection and disease. Now it seems to be about...actually, what is it now…

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

This is what social media does. Unravels millennia of social progress. It decouples societies from their institutions, which are that history. I'm constantly amazed we don't see it, and that we allow it. https://t.co/eFjYlurAwm

You can’t review the pandemic response without being upfront that it’s the greatest public health disaster in Australian history. Ongoing. Here’s my review of our response, a year ahead of the official review report. /1 We began the…

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…

Remember all of those bushfire press conferences where the Premier interrupts to stop the chief fire officer talking? Me either. Politicians should have NO operational role in disasters or emergencies. Not one. https://t.co/coejmYiIA1

Very few of the original Let it Rip Cabinet left. This is what happens when you give politicians operational roles in emergencies. They weaponise them for a few votes, then they disappear (sometimes in only months), while societies can…

About 20 times as many Australians died in 2022 of Covid than died in the Vietnam, Korean and Afghanistan wars combined. On current trends we'll equal Australian deaths in 7 years of WW2, in 2 years of 'living with' Covid. No politician or…

A great insight. In countries like Australia with great public health procedures and history, when a pandemic strikes, the public have almost no experience of the disaster of mass infection. So the disaster they *feel* is the public health…

The grand narratives about travel all being part of a timeless human adventure falter a bit when you see that what we call travel today really only began in 1950. The first jet airliner arrived in 1949. A lot of this is down to WW2. /1…

Remember integrity? So unpopular now. https://t.co/I8rgHF5DxZ

The same people who 10 years ago would have strongly agreed that media tycoons were using self-regulation to game mass media and take over democracies, will now defend to their last Tweet the free-for-all of social media that replaced it.…

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…

The growing use of 'short illness' and 'mystery illness' in death announcements. Is the former a privacy thing? I don't remember that being such a concern previously. 'X died of cancer' for example wasn't ever a controversial thing.

If you feel despair about Covid, I think it helps to remember that everything you do as an individual to counter it is automatically multiplied many times over, even exponentially. No other social problem is that tractable to individual…

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…

Remember the constant talk about how unreliable Chinese Covid data likely is? Irony is dead. https://t.co/on5ok0N3EZ

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1…

Settler culture still dominates the Australian inland. The culture of imported slave labour, unchanged in 150 years. A loud No in the referendum from modern settlers. David Marr’s new book talks about settler culture, the crime part of…

Yes! This is the social collapse we're seeing, where we mistake the past 70 years as some sort of default normal life that happens by itself. Without institutions there is no collective memory to remind us of this. Why libertarians attack…

Same age, same generation. At the exact moment the pre-war elites were laying siege on everything public, the public disappeared into perpetual adolescence, thinking singing songs is politics. How different history might be today if we’d…

Imagine historians writing about our age. ‘In the early 21st century many humans actively fought against cheap, almost free, pollution-free energy, and advocated entire populations being infected with pandemic viruses.’

We’re getting nowhere with Covid talking about health and disease. The rich buy enclaves for that. This is really a story about clean air. Look at how (regular) amendments there stalled over 30 years ago, in the US. The same time climate…

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables.…

Flu and even colds are often given as comparators for hybrid immunity. In my entire life I don’t remember a single cold or flu season where we were all exhorted to get a good top-up of infection.

Yep, we’re repeating the 20th century. Begin with a pandemic, with chronic disease impacts that will fill much of the rest of the century. https://t.co/jSpFppssC0

Antibiotics and vaccinations made us complacent about infectious disease. We’ve wasted antibiotics raising animals, and on human infections that were easily preventable with basic sanitation. Here’s a counterfactual, how the last century…

The ‘United Nations’ was always a project with no understanding of history. It assumes nations are like the atoms of collective life, the raw material. The word ‘inter-national’ shows it, the idea we create a global community by getting…

Nearly half a century later. From a time when adult problems got adult-level analysis, rather than hysterical team sports posturing. https://t.co/mDDxkjUIwT

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…

We're sadly relatively close to a time when there will be no living Beatles, Paul and Ringo now both into their 80s. Why I think there's a lot more meaning to this socially and culturally than is often said. /1 https://t.co/yshh7YOhfn Yes…

Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That number is projected to double by 2032. That capacity is already…

Church v State remains the engine room of our history. It never went away, and while I have zero skin in this battle, in purely historical terms secular States are not really a success. So it's not a simple Good v Evil fight.…

For the first 20-25 years after petrol and diesel cars were introduced, there were no service stations. You had to buy the fuel in a tin at the shop, like milk, and lug it home. Worth remembering with the hysteria about shortage of…

ICEs have been rubbish technology since the day they were first created. Under 30% efficient in most cars even today. EVs were winning even in the late 19th century, until Rockefeller flooded the world with cheap oil. The EV revolution is…

‘Stubborn inflation’ is really stubborn refusal to rethink monetarism as a theory of society. Where money replaces ordinary regulatory democracy. Thats what monetarism was invented to do, replace democracy with a market, mediated by money.…

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…

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

Geoff's data is so useful to debunk the idea there's a meaningful 'mainstream media' now. I don't remember my own kids watching free to air TV for example in at least 6 years. Social media is the new public square. Which should terrify us.…

I believe Covid is the first disease in recorded human history that humans have deliberately chosen to ‘live with’. Because that’s an empty slogan, it deliberately disguises two fundamentally different meanings. /1 We have of course had to…

People endured far worse in world wars, and stuck with it for years. The difference today is the leadership void, a vacuum where action should be led from. The State beheaded, in favour of a fictitious market, which is really just every…

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

The casual indifference to infection, ‘living with’ infection, began just over a century ago. It’s monumental hubris. Microbes own this planet, not us. Infection was once our greatest foe, we had whole schools of tropical medicine devoted…

It’s frustrating that it’s not more obvious that ‘the economy’ is just ‘the market’. A social invention, a fiction, pretending humans live as isolated individuals. They never have, and never will. The proponents of the economy don’t, they…

Again, socially the only reason we had 70 years of pretty good public health practice was that 2 world wars and an earlier pandemic suppressed existing social hierarchies enough to open a space for a public to emerge. Without those, the…

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

The 20th century made massive progress in public health, schooling, and a whole range of other public things, for only one reason. Wars destroyed existing social hierarchies. Only the near destruction of society itself allowed progress to…

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…

What’s that Twain line? History doesn’t repeat. But it sure does rhyme. https://t.co/jXJfulfdga

All major progress in history comes from catastrophe, the only force strong enough to break social hierarchies. That’s what happened in the early-to-mid 20th century, and why we got 70 years of public health. Now over, until the next…

I grew up not far from major coal-fired power generators. I wanted to use them as an example of social shifts, rather than technological. The engineering case for shifting to renewables is a no-brainer. But it’s the social environment that…

Only catastrophe brings social progress. Look what the Black Death did to inequality in the 14th century. Humans are incapable of acting outside their own social status games of imitative rivalry. These platforms pour petrol on that same…

One of the mysteries of motoring is why hybrids have been allowed to wallow in the Greenie/Granny car category in the public mind for so long. Yes they save you a lot of fuel. But they do a lot more than that. In many ways they’re the…

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…

Remembering an ex-PM saying we need to ‘live alongside’ the virus, and open our economy. Looks like Covid isn’t keeping to its lane. https://t.co/pNq9zyfyFX

Emergency Covid action which was said to be unsustainable really was only the slightest wealth redistribution, towards low and middle income earners. ‘The economy’ is code for the old distribution. Thus desperate efforts were made to end…

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

Many will remember this cringeworthy press conference, where the CHO was allowed out for a brief chat, with deeply uncomfortable body language from the alpha political males behind her. Maybe one for the Premier to contemplate from his…

All social evolution: 1) Catastrophe (natural or human made) 2) Institution invented to manage if it ever happens again 3) Institution governs human behaviour, sometimes for generations 4) Absence of further catastrophe makes institution…

Heart disease showed an epidemic pattern in the 20th century. Prior to that time it was an uncommon cause of death. Some attribute this to smoking, though the timelines don't really align, you'd expect significant lag between the curves.…

There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging with them here because the team sports is so fanatical. But to…

Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing into a casino. WW1 and WW2 made modern Australia, short thread.…

Using the risk management lens that should have been applied from Day 1, if Covid does create longer-term serious chronic disease, the world is already fucked. We’ve infected everybody. That level of disease to come over the next century…

Paul Ewald talks about the need to live with pathogens by engineering their evolution towards mildness. (Something that won’t happen by itself.) Rather than doing nothing or trying to eliminate the pathogen, you *domesticate* it. /1…

There is no 'we'. The politics of the past 70 years was all about removing that we, put there after WW2 to solve problems, after control was wrestled from high-status members of society through the wars. RIP the public, 1945-1979.…

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

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…

And that was always the point. To reverse the post-Victorian changes, the invention of a ‘public’, as a response to the catastrophes of WW1 and WW2. The social hierarchies that preceded those wars never accepted that shift.…

70 years of pretending we live in economies was really the old feudal hierarchies stripping away modern public institutions, which they despise. It’s a con. Those institutions were only allowed because 2 world wars sidelined the old…

The income share of the top 0.1% of key (and representative) English-speaking societies. This history is usually written economically. But it’s much more interesting than that. A thread about the real origins of ‘the economy’. /1…

A sad fact of history is that many irreconcilable differences are resolved only by the destruction and extermination of one of the points of view in dispute. Much of the peace and prosperity we’ve experienced in our own lives has this as…

We’re living through the greatest revolution in all human history. Get out of the social media fray and you might even notice it, stop listening to the great collective Wormtongue. Come over to reality politics. https://t.co/eafEXLfQYg

That feeling that society is falling apart and there’s no hope is an adjustment. It’s the developed world coming back to the pack. It’s how the developing world has lived for generations. Privilege is when your individual needs are met…

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

The idea of ‘hybrid immunity’ seems to draw heavily upon human experience with influenza. A vague hand-waving idea that through living with it for centuries, we eventually reached a workable equilibrium. Couple of questions about that, for…

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

How did we get affordable housing for all? The same and only way we ever got better outcomes for all in the 20th century. Two global wars that smashed existing social status hierarchies. 70+ years of peace restored those hierarchies.…

If you’re wrestling with the most polite way to avoid pre-Christmas socialising, to skip Covid, remember it’s morally much better to tell a lie, than it is to live one.

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

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…

What I love about populism is that you can have a pandemic that kills more people than World War 1, and is still killing, and some respond as if it was a delayed connecting flight. https://t.co/KxLUbxwsZ3

Service associations from over a century ago show how what we call 'business' has changed. Networking was a focus, but very quickly it became about community service. Today's business operates under a model (the economy) where…

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

British railways began as privatised, more than 120 companies. It caused chaos. Then consolidated by government before WW2, and fully nationalised post-WW2. Then privatised again with the big libertarian surge after the 1970s. And here we…

Christmas is actually a festival of materialism. The Christmas story not only has gifts, it’s the story of the material embodiment of the deity, in human form. I’ve never understood the anger directed at ‘materialism’. /1…

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…

You’d think this would be considered a national emergency. But like all modern conservative parties, the only solution being proposed, for anything, is more tax cuts. Feudalism is back, except historical feudal lords actually felt some…

One for those who oppose regulation to markets/competition. Australian financial institutions. It was only with heavy regulation after WW2 that competition increased. With deregulation in the early 1980s, that trend went into complete…

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

The response to collective emergencies today is to use them as platforms for the expression of individual grievance, and self-promotion. They generate a space of attention where the problems of ‘we’ become problems about ‘me’. A logical…

Multiple locations showed the same pattern with cardiovascular mortality in the 20th century. A big surge after WW1, peaking mid-century and then steady decline. Like an extended epidemic. A possible range of epidemiological factors. Mass…

Watching this series extension of the original movie it struck me how similar the narratives should be for possession and infection. Infection literally aspires to and often does possess your body. But there are even more resonances. /1…

It was Lynn Margulis I think who said all life is really bacterial. That the huge variety of flora and fauna on Earth is all the product of microbial activity, mostly bacteria. This matters fundamentally in a pandemic. The example of…

In conversation with a very learned professor friend over the past few days, about Covid. And it highlighted for me the magnitude of the damage to public heath that's been done in the past 4 years. Because he's firmly in the cooker camp,…

Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that…

Bentley years ago described something I say a lot here, that all society is social, team sports between groups. Even politics. Great summary here, really worth your time to understand the world we’re living in. h/t @cityatlas…

We need to completely re-frame the challenges we're currently facing. They're not 'Covid and climate change threatening the economy'. Let's keep it all in-house, in the economy itself. Covid and climate change are the economy being held…

A favourite example of how deep libertarian slogans are embedded in societies now is FOI. Freedom of Information. All sides say FOI is a great thing, to 'hold government accountable'. About as much thought goes into saying that as putting…

The lands of Thatcher and Reagan, the champions of libertarian politics, are what they were centuries ago, again. Feudal societies. That's not an accident. 'Markets' were designed to throw history into reverse by stripping away post-war…

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

The comfort space of ‘living with’ infection is less than a century old. And it was brought to us almost entirely by public health measures. The exact thing we’re jettisoning now, to try to ‘live with’ infection. Those who ignore history…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

Those labelled as Zero Covid seem to be arguing for disease control. I’m not aware of anybody in history arguing against disease control, for serious disease. Those who believe in hybrid immunity need to specify when it will happen, and…

The common minimiser theme, that they and their friends and families want to have their social lives back, and ‘Zero Covids’ are free to continue to obsess about Covid alone. There’s a very recent public health shift that highlights how…

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

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…

We were living with infection at A. And without it, at B. Now we’re told that ‘normal life’ is a return to A. Without institutional memory humans do about 1-2 generations of smart, before reverting to stupid. https://t.co/rcDugMNi4e

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the…

I’m yet to hear ONE member of National Cabinet acknowledge the tens of thousands of Australians killed by Covid, as a direct consequence of decisions made by them. None of our Covid debates talk about deaths in any meaningful way.…

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…

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…

In 1928 DH Lawrence wrote ‘A Letter from Germany’. Novelists are necessary to diagnose a zeitgeist. This is more than 10 years before WW2. He knew then what was coming. Compare with our ‘peace-and-production’ fake normality today. /1…

It’s ludicrous we’re all going on with our ‘normal’ lives in ‘the economy’, when as a civilisation we’re facing the greatest emergency in all of history. We should be on a war footing. Who cares about our bullshit jobs? The economy does.…

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…

Imagine hitting the campaign trail to advocate for higher inflation and higher costs of living. People would think you were unhinged. But you can lead rallies to undermine action on the greatest threat to humanity in history, and it’s just…

Pathogens often follow a similar pattern to human societies. An invasion stage, with a lot of deaths, as pathogens fight to occupy territory (our bodies). Followed by a long occupation stage, where casualties shift to ongoing chronic…

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…

The common wondering we do about why nothing is being done against existential threats. Have Tweeted about how this is due to the removal of the administrative construct of 'the public', invented in the late-19th to mid-20th century. But…

That this wasn't done years ago already shows how damaged democracy is. And the easiest way to remove all lobbying? Don't run countries using popularly-elected politicians, beholden to donors. https://t.co/dVzHAyHI03

A lot of people who swallowed the living with viruses slogans ask ‘what else can we do?’ We can do what we’ve always done, throughout all of history. Stop diseases spreading in communities. That’s it, it’s not tough to understand.…

We need to take back control of the overall narrative of this pandemic. That we’re now living with Covid because anything else was impossible. That outcome, that surrender, was planned from the start and succeeded. It was politics, pure…

There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is a good way to see the disconnect. Our politics is dominated by the idea of ‘economies’, (apparent) markets of individuals…

Surely the greatest achievement in all human history has been the staggering increase in life expectancy since the mid-19th century. Nearly entirely due to control of infection. This is what 'living with the virus' spits in the face of.…

Allowing measles to spread is genius with a hybrid immunity strategy, given that it can wipe your immune memory.

Church v State is the defining framework of most Western history. It’s not clear why we thought it was over. https://t.co/PlVHHYTgwG

3 busloads of Australians dead from infection in aged care, in less than 2 months. Even 20 years ago this would have been a national scandal, front page news. You cannot set the bar any lower. https://t.co/sFKw7oLDOY

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…

Maybe an economist can explain why floor coverings/carpet don't drop significantly in cost? Had that drop already occurred much earlier in history, it being an extremely early technology? https://t.co/4lD5XEVnTK From:…

Exploring risk. The RHS of this diagram is now mostly not operating. But neither is much of the LHS, for most. Personal responsibilities crystallise out of shared framings and priorities. There are no easy answers for how to manage a…

I’m sure the history of vaccination was about getting immunity, without the deadly side effects of infection. https://t.co/VgkoEfhO3C

We need to talk about disease eradication. Those delighted with the uncontrolled spread of Covid often justify it by saying nothing else can be done, that it can’t be eradicated. Like most public narratives in this pandemic, that’s a…

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…

Why persist with Covid questions? Because our greatest achievement in history was the invention of public health. Nothing else comes close. We went to war on infections, and suddenly people lived twice as long. Living with infections is a…

Switzerland, Sweden and Spain were neutral in both world wars, useful for excess death analysis. See the stabilisation in excess deaths from the mid-20th century. That’s when public health institutions fired up. Politicians sidelined these…

Love this, courtesy of @ActuaryByDay I think we can see here the dramatic impact of the escalation of public health work post-WW2. Constant declining death rates from mid-century. Also the outlier Covid then became, largely from countries…

Remember the days when a threat to anybody in a community was perceived as a threat to the whole community? https://t.co/iC5TzQaarV

Housing another example of how post-WW2 institutions created what we call public life. And decades of unprecedented peace, health and prosperity. Then pulled apart gradually from the 1970s, with the politics of the economy and free…

Why are societies not mobilising in the way they did for world wars? I know why. Because the great con, 'the economy', captures all of our leaders' attention. A handful of statistical indicators invented by monetarism, a Right-wing…

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…

Everything I read of the history of infectious disease (a context lacking in Covid times) suggests that immunity has never been the critical factor. Control of the spread of infection is the key thing. Even vaccination has only been…

The thing anti-government people want you to believe is that government somehow appeared in history, to oppress you. But humans invented government, because they were sick of life without it. The life we’re now all returning to, after 7…

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

The question many ask here is the one I also ask myself, every day. What does or can an individual do, when facing so many critical issues that are being ignored? Covid, climate change, mass slaughter in Gaza etc. A thread about the…

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the…

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

This is orders of magnitude more dangerous than tyrants in Europe in the mid-20th century, where we stopped everything for more than a decade to stop them. 'The economy' is why we're doing nothing. Designed to obstruct all action, to…

It’s been enjoyable to see the concept of a ‘per capita recession’ trotted out. A slow realisation that the statistical indicators we call ‘the economy’ often bear little relationship to our actual lives. It reveals what’s really in play…

Coming back to this, the genius of Asia was to take the factories we sponsored there, to free ourselves of doing any thinking or work, and use them to restore Asia at the centre of the world. Where it had been for much of human history. /1…

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

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.…

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

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.…

Societies are not just collections of millions of people. Those millions are grouped into networks, organised around hubs. Understanding this is the key to bringing about change, as I’ve Tweeted about with ventilation. Another example…

Lockdowns were the emergency response, while scientists assessed Covid. Yes to what Peter suggests here as the way forward, but add ventilation not just vaccination, as permanent control. Like I say, find the hubs, control the spread…

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.…

“I remember when Glenn was in the ICU with Covid, one of the nurses came in and said ‘when we get these people home, how they’re going to actually live with Covid, and the destruction to their bodies?’ And I remember thinking, why is she…

Look at the date. We knew we had to target hubs (‘epidemic engines’), at least 3 years ago. It’s not public health rocket science. It was transformed by political minimisers into the idea we had to target everywhere, all of the time. To…

Unless my sums are wrong, Australia currently has enough superannuation savings to pay for the entire aged pension for well over half a century.

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

The collapse of the post-WW2 massive investment in public services is accelerating. And that complete reversal isn’t limited to economics and politics. It includes culture. You don’t need a time machine, we’re living inside one.…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

Those who say ‘not all boomers’ are correct too. Like everything else, wealth is networked, concentrated in a small number of hubs. Many boomers in fact have been hopeless savers, and will have difficult retirements. 1/3…

All change is led. So yes, it's not true an entire generation conspired to do this, no groups act in that way. But they have consistently, for 50 years, voted for the people who did. To pretend there's no culpability here is disingenuous.…

From my pinned tweet, American POWs in the Korean War. Groups of any size, right up to organisations and full societies, don’t have tops and bottoms. There is no top-down or bottom-up. So what is hierarchy? The Korean War experience shows…

Remember when Australia had industry policy, before the LNP decided 'the market' would do all of that for us? There is no market. All change is led. The PERFECT symmetry of the red and blue lines here. https://t.co/JcjB9P921P

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…

How does the Land of the Free (market) manage to have house price-to-income ratios less than half of us here in Oz? Well, it's an interesting story. Much of the magic happens in this building, Fannie Mae HQ. /1 https://t.co/NKI4H0ZCmb…

Why are societies not on a war footing? This is much more serious than the fascism in Europe mid-20th century, that we 'locked down' for, for 7 years. https://t.co/evGzEBy6ux

Fun to remember that our ideas of democracy and free markets assume the optimum outcome will be to allow everybody the freedom to figure everything out for themselves. https://t.co/aa2HTZWAZO

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

I’m happy to be in the control group for the ‘if we all keep getting infected with Covid, we’ll stop getting infected with Covid’ experiment. Doing my bit for science. Remember that? Memories.

We're living this mythology right now, with the continuous epidemic waves Raina said 4 years ago would happen, now described as an 'endemic' disease pattern. Endemic epidemicity. https://t.co/k70dlguEJz https://t.co/l2FnqoWAIj

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

My great friend @DavidJoffe64 taught me about dysautonomia. When your body’s automatic functions suddenly go haywire, as he sees sometimes in Long Covid. There’s a social correlate of dysautonomia. Populism is social dysautonomia. /1…

Is sovereignty the framework of thinking needed to solve Israel-Palestine fighting? The two-State solution proposed is old thinking, as was used in Ireland and India, both fraying. Sovereignty itself may be the problem. /1…

We only need to stop some Covid, to stop all Covid. Going back to Jeremy’s work nearly 4 years ago, on masks. But the same applies across most aspects of Covid. /1 https://t.co/AEBgD00M7b The expression ‘making the perfect the enemy of the…

Powerful thread by Stephen in ICU, about how we’ve lost our way with infectious disease. That way was the outcome of massive institutional intervention post-WW2. Politics since then has been hostile to all institutions. Sadly only…

‘Lockdowns’ reduced intimate partner violence. It also made many disadvantaged people better-off than they’d ever been. The outcome of a greater share of our common-wealth going to more people. And why privilege demanded lockdowns end. /1…

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

There is only one ocean in the world. It’s all the same water. Territory and sovereignty blind us to some obvious truths. /1 https://t.co/aAwfJqheaR Most of modern history is humans shifting to life inside maps. That basic physical fact is…

After WW2 we built a public-focused society. From the 1970s, that was replaced with an economy. https://t.co/UiTXHNjkXF

Re-sharing this from almost 3 years ago. Lippmann’s insights into electoral politics from so many decades ago still haven’t registered with us. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts

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

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

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven…

I wince at the memory of the certainties of teen and early adult life, and how forcefully they were sometimes presented to others. That’s part of being young. It brings energy to a society. And sometimes necessary disruption. But something…

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…

Societies are always just social. And historically all that has created significant social change has been disaster and catastrophe. Housing as just one more example. The hierarchies of social life are not disrupted without catastrophe.…

The same social models repeat throughout history, just with different names. The landed gentry were once the great landlords. The Top 5 landlord occupations in Oz today are: 1. Surgeons 2. Anaesthetists 3. Internal medicine specialists 4.…

We don’t need to stop Covid. We just need to slow it, and keep it slow. Maths does the rest. As exponentially fast as it grows, it dies. Politics makes us believe we have to do everything, or nothing. /1 https://t.co/AsZZvQTSDB But we just…

People who don't study history think fascism is like an operating system you install, somewhere, off a USB drive. In reality it's when popularity politics overwhelms the checks and balances of civic society.

Looking at the latest UKHSA data on VE for bivalent and XBB vaccines. And I thought, yeh, this is crap. Then I remembered nobody is getting vaccinated anyway. So VE is effectively 0. Go us. The vax-only pandemic where we don't even vax.…

I don’t think many realise just how powerful social conformity is, and how it explains human behaviour. Covid is a great example. The in some ways misleadingly called ‘desire lines’ - self-generated footpaths - are a great way to see it.…

Those shocked at the cavalier approach to public safety with Covid may not remember the open-air atomic bomb tests that flourished in the 1950s, post-war. Las Vegas, 1953. https://t.co/YAsaDLRv6x

Did the French Revolution usher in a new golden age of freedom for the liberated masses? It created an Emperor even more powerful than the royalty and aristocracy it beheaded. Being non-conformist rigidifies conformity further. /1…

In the heady days after WW2, when rebuilding societies rather than accumulating wealth in existing status hierarchies was central to our societies, we took real joy in defeating infectious disease. https://t.co/QQM5rYQHwj

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that…

'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,…

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…

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

'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…

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

"The Great Compression". Only catastrophe brings about meaningful social change. The data is compelling. And the logic. Without catastrophe, social conformity and imitative rivalry are too strong to allow significant change. /1…

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

More about place, in a culture that lives in maps. The English countryside. A wonder of the world. How does it exist? Well, it’s absolutely NOT a ‘natural’ thing. Place is made. Why this matters. /1 https://t.co/sxrljQevJN The architect…

The ridiculous levels of illness in the community right now are coming up against 19th century command and control sick leave policies. The same command and control economy that caused this pandemic. Beginning with the idiocy of the…

We have a ‘target band’ for inflation. If we move outside this band, the universe implodes, or something. Remember having a target band for Covid infections? Somewhere around zero, or at least IN a band. That was (apparently) oppression.…

Human activity is driven by desire. But we don’t desire the object of our desires. We desire something because somebody else desires it. It’s social, a rivalry. The love triangle is an archetypal form of this mimetic desire. And it extends…

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…

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

Pretty much the entirety of human history is ‘ok, everybody do whatever you like, and then when that explodes, we’ll come together at last and re-build from the rubble.’ Rinse and repeat. https://t.co/fH2E3g5NzX

Only disasters shift societies meaningfully. When Hitler was mobilising in the 1930s, the world mobilised at emergency levels to oppose him. Climate change is a much, much bigger problem than Hitler. Why we need the Chinese right now. /1…

Our culture of adolescence worships the present moment. There is no history, no future. Just a lifestyle, of right now. Nowhere is this clearer than with nuclear energy. The wastes need to be stored for up to a million years. 1/5…

It's brilliant, the Germans of course pioneered and mastered it years ago already. Still worth remembering the problem with housing though is not 'supply'. https://t.co/v0jJavtACV

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…

The greatest achievement in all human history was public health, including vaccines. Doubling life expectancies in about a century. It’s a measure of how lethal populism is that even that can become a team sport. To generate social status.…

We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://t.co/j4KxaimtUw At that price, if we were to replace our…

As I try to find anybody at all at work, I remain thankful for my mask. And remember their chuckling about masks.

The incredible inertia of the status quo is already dampening recent efforts in renewable energy and EVs, as prominent examples. You can’t gradually change a status quo. It needs to be disrupted. Smashed. This is a key fact of social life.…

Remember when Labor’s NBN was mocked by the LNP as ‘picking winners’? Let the market decide? The economy is a con. The people who promote it never act like it even exists. Because it doesn’t. https://t.co/d3lWO7s23m

Excellent. But remember Abbott's string and tin can NBN being fact-checked too? It made no difference. Nuclear is a stalking horse. A strategy to mop up votes of those who want renewables, but don't want the ALP. Societies don't run on…

Person at work today. "We lost World War 1, right?" Societies don't run on information.

Remember when even footy codes cared about infectious diseases? Even now players can't share a drink bottle. https://t.co/hFNM8g1kQn https://t.co/Oozk2ZZlGk

You don’t ’speak truth to power’. Power doesn’t care or listen. You speak truth INTO power. We already won against Covid. It’s the minimisers who lost. A message from Puss in Boots. /1 https://t.co/ZRxHhEwtWG Pretty much all the narratives…

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…

Remembering that Simpsons episode where the ‘voice of the people’ was allowed to replace experts in the car factory, and the car factory went bankrupt. https://t.co/X0slAJE7Pb

Breathe your best air. There’s a vision for the 21st century. h/t @YouAreLobbyLud https://t.co/BBqrO35iOp

I bought one of these (Xiaomi Pro H) over 3 years ago, to have in my office space at work. It's never registered the need for a filter replacement. Checking, it's still at nearly 50%, after 3 years. My wife uses one in a classroom, a…

One of the great Covid minimising tropes was how ‘lonely’ people get if they’re not allowed to mix socially. Our culture is always in plain sight. Sociality is our default. Being alone is the reality of all life. Even when being social.…

Populism is always the restoration of hierarchies. Led by old men of high status. If we stopped looking at politics through the lens of politics and used a social/historical lens instead, more would be clear. https://t.co/XM678nIXOR

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

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…

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

The enormity of this decision for democracy everywhere. Not since 1215 have Western rulers been above the law. These aren’t analogies. This is the literal Return of the King, and the end of democracy. The reversal of the Magna Carta. /1…

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

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

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

Popularity is like chronic infection. You can be so infected by the pathogen that it becomes normal life. When, ever, in history was the truth or the right thing the most popular thing? Peoples' whole lives are infected by popularity…

Post-WW2, war industries mobilised to churn out massive amounts of consumer goods, housing, agriculture, etc. Re-building societies. We're now living in the last afterglow of that collective focus. It's why we don't fight pandemics or…

I’m fascinated by us, as a culture. Nothing is more invisible to you, than your own culture. It just seems like the natural order of things. Here’s why I think our culture doesn’t understand Covid. And throw in climate change too. /1 There…

Slacktivism. I don’t really like the term, because it suggests there’s a better activism people should be doing instead (more on that in a second). But the idea we can use these platforms to change the world is dangerous in multiple ways.…

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” (McLuhan) Our sense of inevitable failure to address our problems is due to them being badly understood. 1/4 https://t.co/uF2SqtrBSu…

China may be a more ‘authoritarian’ culture because it’s a much older culture, and it’s discovered that nothing else works. It may be WHY its culture has lasted. /1 https://t.co/RSeTwfEBZX The cultures criticising it today are a bare…

Because social media has no collective memory, re-sharing this for those who want to see some of my previous analysis on highly targeted action on Covid, rather than mass campaigns (on masks, or anything). https://t.co/288Vi56sCm

When causes are pursued on social media, status hierarchies are set up within the crusading groups, as humans do off social media as well. For example, ventilation groups develop a hierarchy of bad to good to perfect ventilation. Or the…

Those European and US lines have barely budged in 40 years. Leaders there now desperately trying to curtail the Chinese line with tariffs, to protect domestic vehicle and energy industries. Fossil fuel industries that should have been shut…

Populists don’t see how Deep Church interests use them. From the days of Billy Graham, much conservative strategy has been written by Church strategists. They have millennia of experience in mobilising people. Their long game is Church v…

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

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

The social process I Tweet about, where only catastrophe leads social change, was also seen by Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun, in the 14th century. He called it Asabiyya. Meaningful change only comes from external threat. Not internal…

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

There was a moment in time when the disruption of Covid opened the possibility of more flexible work practices. As always, only catastrophe forced a possible change. In many workplaces that door slammed shut again quite some time ago, with…

And so castles made of sand Fall in the sea Eventually. Join reality politics. Where who’s winning the latest popularity competition is irrelevant to life. And where people remember how populist victories end, as well as how they begin.…

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…

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…

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…

Public health action was shut down through a deliberate campaign of highly organised hysteria. ‘Grave concerns’. By the same people who call hysteria every attempt to do the opposite. A few notes about the use of hysteria. /1…

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

I would like us to see all of our problems as the outcomes of quite simple to understand human behaviour. To rediscover societies for what they are - 100% social. Not political, not economic. Social. Ordinary meetings show this, the same…

Remember real experts saying 4 years ago that Covid would never be an endemic disease? I’ve seen many experts who should know better doubting that ever since. Reality is not on their side. https://t.co/6oLFcUGZ6F

We’re still expected to believe that spending a few months at home a few years ago so damaged our acquired immunity that the whole population is now under continuous assault from a range of infectious diseases. I feel the worm is turning.…

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…

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’…

A couple of months ago I shared the experience of my elderly mother here, who was admitted to hosptal with serious heart and lung issues. She contarcted Covid while there. What happened next. /1 I wrote to the Health Care Complaints…

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.…

About a decade ago I got whooping cough. While recuperating, I decided to read some of the history, to see if there were any forgotten options for symptomatic relief. I found Ormerod’s 1937 paper. On the use of vitamin C. A fraught topic.…

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

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…

Australians shouldn't fear mpox, we have excellent public health procedures. (Can anybody remember which storeroom we put them in?)

Everything old is new again. What a noisy, polluting, wasteful century we just had, all to make oil barons rich. https://t.co/tzLNfju6Sg

Refusing to accept the boundaries of your own and others’ homes is also the definition of a pandemic. A travel culture is a pandemic culture. Ecologically pathogens are controlled by strictly controlling access to territory. But that’s all…

My apologies for the re-post. A technical issue. Attitudes to public health. Cholera epidemics in England in the 19th century prompted construction of 1300 miles of sewers in London alone. Using over 300 million bricks. At a cost of about…

If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing. The health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world,…

Much of the tension in watching Hitchcock’s Rear Window stems from the shared voyeurism of spying on other peoples’ lives. That was 70 years ago. Do we want to imagine a Rear Window of a social media-dominated 2024? I think we should. /1…

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…

Always remember reality will decide the outcome. Whichever team is patting itself on the back for ‘winning’ is delusional. Reality always decides. It’s just a matter of time. Humans have much less control over reality than they like to…

Because it took longer here in Oz for the massive public health action after WW2 in the Anglosphere to surrender to resurgent social hierarchies. Disguised as 'the economy'. We're now rapidly trying to catch up with the pack.…

Research on the collapse of States in history shows them to last on average about 201 years. One of the indicators of a State at a tipping point to collapse is the dramatic slowdown in speed at which critical problems are resolved. Welcome…

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…

In one image, the expiry of the post-WW2 consensus, to allow public health to run public health. The locus of authority now is all there with grim cross-armed impatience, in the background. No votes in public health now.…

The unspoken truth is that we CAN’T do it. The magnitude of the revolution needed is unrivalled in human history. No variant of business as usual will get us even close. James Lovelock used to say it. He thought it was already much too…

‘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…

Trying to remember the name/URL of the more detailed alternative to AEMO's real-time NEM dashboard... Remembered.

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

Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have to be invented to explain why anything happens at all.…

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

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

Only catastrophes shift societies. The big gains feminism made in the 20th century were largely the result of two world wars killing many men, and sidelining others who survived. It took the wars to dismantle existing status hierarchies.…

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…

Lippmann saw the team sports populist democracy would become a century ago. I extracted some brilliant insights of his in this earlier thread. I recommend it. https://t.co/kxE4vUznts

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…

Professor Johan Rockstrom. This is a threat well beyond why we had two world wars. Every nation should be a on a war footing. They aren't because we replaced nation states with 'economies'. A social fiction, to strip away democratic…

There’d been suffragette movements in various places throughout the 19th century. The floodgates only opened after World War 1. It took the death of millions of men and disruption of status hierarchies to bring about genuine change.…

Our robust democracy was only ever the post-WW2 institutions created to rebuild societies. Once that work was done, we went back to the Battle for Status. All human history is aristocracies, topped by Kings or their equivalent. We rename…

Interesting things here. - plateauing of UK emissions in the 20th century probably due to de-industrialisation - the massive jump in Australian emissions with the introduction of coal-fired electricity - the staggering injustice of the…

When catastrophes disrupt societies, it often triggers a desire to rebuild the world through a mythical utopian shift. Often a bucolic ‘tree change’ or ‘sea change’. Areas of Natural Beauty (AONB) in the UK. How I think they teach us about…

Every major social change attributed to activism is traceable to a catastrophe of some kind, that weakens existing status hierarchies. The 40-hour week for example was introduced when? Right in that sweet spot I always talk about .…

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

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…

All life is microbial. The illusion of 'living with' pathogens is only a century old. Infection has always been the greatest killer of humans. Now we advocate it as health care. https://t.co/aOd3KUu791 https://t.co/YY3CmuNS7a

The sad (social) truth playing out in the Middle East is the same truth underlying all societies. Only catastrophe brings change. We’ve had decades of the peace process there going nowhere. Hoping to discuss our way out of the detente.…

I encourage everybody working in or closely associated with schools to share stories like these. What’s happening in schools is historically unprecedented. It’s criminal. https://t.co/DVisQDXjEK

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…

How do you live when basic things like public health aren’t being attended to? You live like the majority of the world has always lived. It was never politics that was looking after us. It was the remnant rebuilding after WW2. Now gone.…

Only catastrophes change things. It seems Israel is determined to be the catastrophe that ‘fixes’ the Middle East. I have no interest in the team sports, just in how history works. The Middle East was never going to discuss or vote its…

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

If you see this common factoid from anti-EV folk, remember: 1) ICEs have higher resale (for now) because new ICE models are always more expensive than what they’re replacing. You’re being gouged, and 2) you pay a pittance for fuel and…

People remember that the fastest way by far to mobilise a crowd in a schoolyard is to yell 'fight!' And there's the root method of all populist politics. Pick fights. Mobilise teams behind each opponent. Convert teams to votes.…

Teddy Roosevelt is attributed with ‘if you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’. What’s happening in the Middle East right now is a repeat of a pattern throughout history. Societies change when they’re forced to…

Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status quo, well beyond those specific industries. 1/5…

On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

Debate, discussion, agreement - politics - will not shift a status quo. Politics IS the status quo, playing team sports. So we await catastrophe to do it for us. This is how history always, sadly, works. https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

A dear friend who’s throughly wedded to market ideas about societies (happy to see them as economies) was discussing climate change with me. I shared this quote with him. Here’s how it unfolded. 1/7 https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

This is the value of the global personal luxury goods market (see: https://t.co/gTqRmcP9eI) Why the big growth in demand for luxury? Luxury is status. Societies are shifting from being centred on a public, to being centred on status. This…

History shows republics to be almost universally violent. Rome was far more violent as a republic than it ever was under emperors. It’s status, again. If you don’t have a strong status hierarchy at the core of your society, violence…

Of the 12 men who walked on the moon, these are the only 4 still alive. I still remember the sense of possibility and excitement of those times. ‘Moonshot’ culture, the sense of exciting social progress. And today? 1/4…

The current Middle Eastern conflict offends our sense of how we thought modern countries work. The ‘rule of law’. Democracy. It’s revealed the deeper status hierarchies. A literal continuation of the Crusades. History is never linear.…

We stopped normal life for years to fight world wars. That threat was a pimple on the arse of what's coming now. And what are we doing? Nothing. That's the power of 'the economy'. The status quo re-badged. To quote... 1/2…

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…

What do you do, in a world where public services like public health have been destroyed? This is the question for every day. Most of the world never had those public services. So we’re now returning to the pack. I think we sometimes forget…

Thanks to @Kerbrech for sharing this excellent illustration of the status-drives-societies idea. The work Peter Turchin has done on ‘elite overproduction’. The bit in green is where I would offer a different view. 1/8…

Al Gore’s anger. The status quo won’t respond, to this or anything. History shows it. It will need to be destroyed by disruption. China’s renewables are doing this. It’s why the status quo has ramped up the attack rhetoric on China. But…

I often talk about the status quo as the controlling force behind every society. It’s very easy to take all the baddies from existing narratives and just make them the status quo. Like it’s a group of people doing the bad things. It’s not…

You'll find stories every day of the clash of a status quo in collapse in the West, panicking in response to a new Asian-led status quo. The new Industrial Revolution began years ago already, in Asia. https://t.co/bWekW4gHLl

A colleague recounted how their family is just back on its feet. One child had pneumonia, then both children and mum caught whooping cough. The whole family then contracted one of the circulating virus nasties (she couldn't remember the…

The Chinese industrial disruption that is (thankfully) shattering our status quo. The BYD Shark ute. Utes are central to our status quo psyche, a previous PM loved to reference them, for votes. Mocking EVs in the process. China is having…

Economic ideas (like supply and demand) are powerless to understand the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the same reversal of public-focused governance, back towards status-driven societies. High status historically was always the…

A possible repeat of the post-Spanish Flu experience. Some believe the epidemic of heart disease in the 20th century was caused by that pandemic. The smoking hypothesis is weaker, levels of smoking and mortality almost overlap (there…

We inherited a framing of religious questions from the Enlightenment, in the West anyway. That religion was just one other way to know the world. Like an inferior science, based on ‘belief’ and ‘faith’. That framing is the same idea that…

There was never a time when status hierarchies in societies promoted public health. The public health we grew up with is a remnant by-product of post-WW2 social reconstruction. Once that work was considered complete, ‘peasants’ could go…

We are bringing back the past. A status-driven society (feudalism), where if you don't have status, you have nothing. Debt was all that gave the illusion of most of us having some status. We borrowed our way into the hierarchy. 1/2…

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

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

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…

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…

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

Nuclear power stations are like coal-fired power stations. Basically just steam engines. The steam engine was invented in the 17th century.

Nuclear power stations are like coal-fired power stations. Basically just steam engines. The steam engine was invented in the 17th century. Let's move on.

If you want to understand the continuity of today with our history, Trump is Henry VIII, and America’s billionaires are our modern nobles, circling the King, trying to gain favour and carve out their part of the country for themselves. 1/2…

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

Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises. The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same ideas useless to prevent them. Can status explain it? You bet.…

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…

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

It’s demoralising for some (many?) to come here each day, state obvious truths about the state of the world and then for nothing to happen with those obvious truths. Many are reluctant to recognise the world has never run on information.…

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

In a period of only 5 years in the early 16th century, Henry VIII had over 800 monasteries demolished, and their land and treasures looted and gifted to nobles, to boost the Royal coffers. Puts a Trump in perspective. We forget just how…

There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1 https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj…

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…

We stopped the world twice in the 20th century for a threat orders of magnitude smaller. We 'locked down' everything, for over a decade. Only catastrophe can shift the status quo. https://t.co/eM8iq1VZaq

"The public health responses to COVID-19...have been based on the faith that this coronavirus is a one-time, short-term event, and that after a period of lockdowns and facemasks, vaccines will bring about a return to normal. This faith is,…

If you use a social instead of a political or economic lens for society, you’ll see the same patterns repeating throughout history. Take a classic Agatha Christie story. So often the lynchpin of these was the social mechanism of families…

Historically societies not only had status hierarchies, they were explicit about how they were the structure of the society itself. Like Hobbes' Leviathan. Our world today is all of us trying to negotiate an absence of that structure.…

It'll be interesting to see how the Yellow Peril AUKUS narrative holds up as Australians are showered with bargain, quality Chinese goods. The US is on a fast-track back to the 19th century. https://t.co/mG0fAYJGMg

Change will not come from talking. It will only come from catastrophe. That's how history always works. Humans will not, ever, surrender status games unless they're forced to. https://t.co/DyQ4X7cSHv https://t.co/ZMRtLk935s

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

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

Covid minimisation is status-driven insanity. History suggests it has a lot further to run. This is Francis and Dan Keller. Falsely convicted of sexual abuse of children in a daycare facility. They spent almost 22 years in jail. Status did…

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

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

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

Here’s a fun status game from the UK. Uproar over the Labour Party there now modifying the tax-free inheritance on farms, introduced to help sustain the industry. ‘Tax-free’ attracted the wealthy like flies are attracted to a pile of shit.…

We classify countries along a rough continuuum from 'freedom-loving democracies' through to 'authoritarian dictatorships'. And we assume these are either choices countries make, or have imposed upon them. Michele Gelfand has news for us.…

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

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

Australia begins pandemics with world-leading public health. It then leads the race to the bottom. The turnaround in our Covid response from world-leading to nothing at all is the greatest public administration failure in our history.…

When people are stripping basic public infrastructure to make money, you can feel the collapse of public everything. ‘The public’ is an administrative construct, invented between the late-19th and mid-20th century to repair social…

Edmund Burke, 234 years ago. We've learned not one thing in the interim, about politics. https://t.co/rYwXm2wJZJ

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

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

The ‘Top 1%’, the narrative goes, oppress the other 99%, hoarding everything for themselves. In reality it’s about status, not wealth. The 99% *want* to be the top 1%. This social model repeats throughout history. Feudalism then,…

The cost of nuclear power has risen over 25% in the last 10 years, while in the same period the cost of solar power has fallen almost 90%, the cost of wind power has fallen nearly 50% and the cost of batteries has fallen roughly 90%. /1…

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 solution to most of society’s problems is to tell engineers what the problems are, and then to get out of their way. If you don’t believe that, I encourage a much closer reading of history. And a broader understanding of what…

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

Looking back through old Covid files, you need history. Here, the previous PM, framing public health as the taking of ‘freedoms’ from Australians. Which being vaccinated will (he says) reverse. Now we don’t even get vaccinated. Only…

Project 2025 now underway. Ooops, sorry, that’s the Magna Carta being signed. How’d I mix those two up. History repeats the same patterns, over and over. https://t.co/0Mt8NZxbhn

My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now. Let’s think about that bait and switch. Through the lens again of…

The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one. I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality and connection is actually the root of most violence. Let’s…

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

Gabriel Tarde a century ago made the (mostly ignored) intriguing point that existence is best understood and managed through having, rather than being. Through possession, rather than identity. Our status games throughout life are all…

When ‘living with’ a disease was seen as a trial, something people needed (sometimes desperate) help with. Hats off to politicians and public health professionals who now advocate infecting our way out of pandemics. May history see you for…

Covid minimisers, climate change deniers, all the loon modern contrarians. I call them social status whores. Because that’s what they’re up to. 1/7 Dewey and Lippmann in their famous early 20th century debates on democracy more or less…

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 most common question I see from good people here. Why don’t ‘we’ do obvious things? The culture of the past 50 years has been the deliberate destruction of ‘we’. That’s why. ‘We’ was a creation, post-WW2. https://t.co/lnaWoBlwZu

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

For me the most important story out of the LA fires was the fire hydrants. Because they show the enormous chasm between a politics focused on actual material need, versus the lunatic adolescent team sports we have instead. There’s little…

Negotiating the world of alternative social media platforms. It’s one of those things where I think we need to zoom out and reframe the entire question. Before we focus on technical characteristics of each platform, do we really understand…

Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of…

40 years ago McLuhan said the medium is the message. It’s not the content of media we should be focusing on. It’s the way the specific media shape our social relationships. Social media implements a worldview. Those who own it own our…

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…

It is a fun challenge to come here and openly criticise popularity as a mechanism for running societies, on platforms structured around it. There is no connection between popularity and competence. No amount of electing anybody will ever…

The barons/nobles attend the coronation of the king. These aren’t analogies. I don’t understand why we don’t see the same historical patterns recurring, just with different names for the key roles. https://t.co/YU08k9my1c

My constant theme. The illusion of democracy as a flattening of hierarchies occurred only after the cataclysmic disasters of the first half of the 20th century. The disasters flattened the hierarchies, it wasn’t democracy. Now the…

I remember when I learned the ‘common cold’ is any of 100 or more viruses. Evidence of an earlier normalisation of so much disease. A disease is common when it isn’t controlled. Covid will end up just one more of the ‘common’ cold viruses.…

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.…

While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’ begins to implement exactly what they openly promised to do. And there’s even more to see here. /1 https://t.co/r4xdkH6DQW…

We stopped everything we were doing to fight two world wars. For threats a tiny fraction of this one. Why are we all going to work tomorrow in bullshit jobs? https://t.co/zoZUZ0I7hx

Democracy always was only the public institutions we used post-WW2 to rebuild societies. Once that work was done, they reverted to what preceded them. Feudalism. History’s overwhelmingly dominant form of social organisation.…

To be fair, dispossessing and killing existing populations and turning their land into biddable real estate is also the history of Australia. https://t.co/OT4fzICN4n

The entire dynamic of human life and history. Change comes only when the status quo is reduced to rubble. https://t.co/M3Lt0oQvFT

Indebted to @DavidJoffe64 for this share. While we flail and wail with hysterical concepts like fascism, and the tired old Left and Right rubbish, the specific thing going on gets missed. And here it is. ‘Competitive authoritarianism’.…

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

The Russians will be kicking themselves that they didn’t invent social media 50 years ago. The US now putty in their hands. https://t.co/i1qlhhxlwc

History isn’t a tug of war between democracy and fascism. Societies are (100%) social. They run on status. Democracies are pauses created by catastrophic events, suppressing the status quo. Without those events, a status quo will always…

The Cult Archipelago. How social media is shaping our world. The medium is the message, as McLuhan said. How we transact our lives socially is unsurprisingly how our society is then shaped. Social media, now our society, shapes societies…

Do we get yet that democracy was only ever a temporary redirection towards the collective good, forced on populations by two world wars, a pandemic and Great Depression in the first half of the 20th century? Without catastrophe there are…

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…

The greatest threat to the stability of the Trump regime is Musk. We should be cheering him on, every single acolyte around that table will be seething at the attention and influence Musk is getting. Also, buy a Tesla. The same acolytes…

Sound advice from so many experts here every day. What we don’t have is a ‘we’. ‘We’ are not doing any of these things, because there is no longer any we. It was an artefact of the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century.…

Vanity lets us think of history as the slow progress of ideas and innovations. In reality we just fight each other for status, and reality then periodically belts us with catastrophes, often caused by the fights. Ideas and innovations only…

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

Mob rule doesn’t discriminate between just and unjust causes. The fact this behaviour is not universally condemned, but ordinary people actually applaud it, is a symptom of how far gone we now are. Let me say it again. Mob rule doesn’t…

An essential component of team sports populism is accelerating moral panics. Mob rule, when huge numbers of people suddenly pile-on to a chosen scapegoating target. This is a critical thing to understand. /1 https://t.co/hQqBRdf863…

It’s feudalism, not fascism. My theme for several years now (just saying). It absolutely matters that we diagnose things correctly. These are fundamentally different things. Also this piece’s solutions to me are nonsense. /1…

How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial…

Maybe Trump will end the war in Ukraine. Or, he’s just full of shit, as always. Remember the ‘breakthrough’ meeting in North Korea? All piss and wind. https://t.co/p6VPPZdKn1

Henry VIII is a far better historical comparison for Trump than any fascist or Nazi. Far, far better. https://t.co/7k727GZWKN

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

All the talk of ‘fascism’ in the US is ridiculous social media team sports hype. Trump and his team are too hopeless to organise anything. Remember his trip to North Korea in his first term? Achieved nothing. He’s a bone-idle conman, not…

‘We’ won’t do anything of the sort without a world war or catastrophic natural disaster. There is no we, without that level of disruption to status hierarchies. Australians got affordable housing after WW2. Governments built it as part of…

It’s very difficult for residents of rich countries in particular to understand that human will and rationality has little impact on how life unfolds. Rich nations assume that, and think information runs societies, because they’re rich and…

Calling it fascism is historically clueless. Trumpism is a social media war, that’s all it is. Turn social media off and Trump is immediately history. https://t.co/nUqZuGltW0 https://t.co/PNz8T0xZfQ

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

Those pesky other arms of democratic governance. And if you read Trump’s drivel and hear Mussolini, rather than Henry VIII, read more history. https://t.co/Im06CQCiKl

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…

Rene Girard’s passion was to understand violence. Why are humans violent to one another? People who follow me know what he discovered. It had nothing to do with individual human psychology or emotion. Sociality causes violence. Humans…

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…

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

People horrified at Trump’s wreckage should remember how far feudalism can really go. Like Henry VIII looting and then selling pretty much every monastery in England, and systematically debasing the currency to cheat on his debts. Not…

Reality is completely indifferent to human arguments. The arguments are bubbles we live inside, that reality pricks. Remember that and it brings calm, no matter how stupid the world seems. Life is not a team sport to be won.

One of the symptoms of entire nations and cultures now transacted through social media is the total absence of memory and perspective. The belief that Trump-Musk are Nazis or fascists is social media cartoon politics. Trump told us what…

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

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…

Trumpism isn’t fascism. It’s feudalism, history’s dominant social form. Reintroduced via populist social media politics, that appoint a ‘King’. Democratic checks and balances were also part of a feudal system, the baron’s truce in the…

What’s happened with car reviews illustrates a wider socio-cultural shift. The exponential growth of two connected things. Team sports (imitative rivalry), and what I call spec culture. /1 https://t.co/jGm3Kb7bRr Vehicles are a dominant…

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

“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is…

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

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

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…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

The idea we live in nation States is now quaint. Social media has rapidly assumed dominance as the place where we transact every aspect of human life, from the most personal, to the professional and political. Just think of the…

As Paul Ewald said years ago, we need a new germ theory. Infection is the Copernican revolution needed for understanding chronic disease. Not physics, chemistry or even genetics. Biology. It’s the infections, stupid. https://t.co/gnsNMBWDfx

Remembering my life before a wide-acting public health system was replaced by my individual immune system under continuous assault… Health care is now survivalism.

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…

Listening to a Tory toff on UK television still championing ‘levelling up’, or ‘growing the pie’. All the BS high status folk invented to try to avoid the inescapable fact that they’re robber barons. Again, none of this will ever resolve…

It’s estimated that 40-50% of humans who have ever lived died from some kind of infection. This doesn’t include chronic and persistent infection. Antibiotics and vaccines drove that closer to 10%. Both require simultaneous control of…

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime…

I'm old enough to remember hospitals designed with pavilion wings, a design advocated by Florence Nightingale to maximise airflow and light. I'm not convinced modern hospitals get it right. HVAC is a wonderful resource, but give me an open…

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’.…

Remember how the 'strategy' for Covid was to protect the vulnerable so the rest of us could get back to meaningless lives of recreational travel, gigs and dining out? That's quarter of a MILLION infections in aged care. Some protection.…

Once you understand that societies run on status and not information, you also see that most problems are much smaller than they seem. The worst things in your life are controlled by a *tiny* number of actors. /1 https://t.co/dzeYRMqVXm…

‘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.…

It’s organised around status, always has been and always will be. ‘Capital’ is just a status hierarchy of 19th century social theory. https://t.co/g8QeBli6PN

I have an American friend who’s a passionate believer in the idea that democracy is about educating and mobilising ‘the people’. I would call this an American cultural disease, except social media has now spread it globally. A synopsis of…

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…

1948. Just after WW2. Public health only became a normalised thing by the destruction of existing status hierarchies in the first half of the 20th century. 2 wars, a pandemic and Great Depression. Status hierarchies now dominate again.…

We think politics runs societies. It really doesn’t, it’s recreational team sports overlaid upon material realities. It’s those realities that determine what happens. Every progress is just a response to reality smashing us out of our…

And I think it’s vital to remember that infections tend to form networked structures, they don’t infect everywhere, all the time. Close down spread in those hubs and you close it down everywhere. You only need to get that Rt<1.…

The obsession with ‘the people’ in politics took off in the counterculture revolution in the mid-20th century. There it is, ‘Power to the People’. At the same time this movement went to war with the ‘establishment’ i.e. institutions.…

The paranoia about any sort of directing central force in a society almost defines American politics. The founding mythology of ‘the people’ ruling themselves, what Graeber and Sahlins called the contradictory notion of popular…

Roman cities are instantly recognisable. What isn’t is that they’re the blatant plagiarising homage the Romans paid to the Greeks, whom they invaded and sacked. The Romans wanted to be Greeks, the Roman empire like all empires first looted…

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

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

So much of the hysteria about ‘fascism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ reflects widespread ignorance of history and its patterns. Rome is instructive. It began with Kings, moved to rule of ‘the people’ through a Senate, and then onto Emperors and…

The distinction between tailoring and designer clothes in this thread is fundamentally important culturally, going well beyond fashion. Tailoring is expertise-based style. Designer clothes are about status. Our entire modern world is in…

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

At the beginning of the pandemic I Tweeted the stats on morbidity and mortality for all diseases on our childhood immunisation schedule. From memory few or none of them would qualify for universal vaccination using the ‘risk of severe…

I’ve always found social media appalling, I come back here as others do to gather information I shouldn’t need, but do to maintain my own life and safety, because of the wreckage to our institutions caused by the same platforms The place…

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…

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…

While so much oxygen and energy is wasted on empty, pointless terms sports of Left v Right, social media warriors are storming the Bastille from every direction. Social media. is designed to substitute adult civilisation with the…

There is no ‘we’ now, just status games. ‘We’ was a creation of the post-WW2 repair, just as communities ‘unite’ around things like bushfires and floods. In good times ‘we’ is an obstacle to status games, or ‘identity politics’ today.…

Follow @IntegralAnswers for some food for the mind that rises above the team sports of much social media. I did a thread recently on how expertise is the thing status culture enabled by populism fears most. The key here for me is to…

Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a high-status person or group, who millions of others then…

I sometimes post about casuistry, case-based reasoning. The genius human invention that is misunderstood, neglected and forgotten. The outrageous injustice meted out to Oscar Piastri at the British Grand Prix is a great way to explore it…

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…

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…

“Today I can measure the folly and malice of those who affect to despise money, that divine institution. Money spiritualizes all that it touches by endowing it with a quality that is both rational (measurable) and universal… /1 …since…

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…

Our culture *is* the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s. A culture that began as teens rebelling against the old, and is ending with adult life replaced by teen life, with its teen rebels now the fabulously wealthy elites. It’s not…

One of the indicators of entrenched privilege is a really pretty bizarre idea that you can change the world in some immediate way. I’ve spent a few years here detailing the mechanics of social life and change. And how deliberative human…

The countercultural movement of the 1960s took credit for a lot of changes that were actually the result of a pulverised status quo, from the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century. https://t.co/8rtAsRXnPl…

The barons are circling the King. History always repeats the same patterns. https://t.co/P8ogJEmUok https://t.co/WjXsB19lgs

At even the central estimate, this is more people than died during World War 1. And the deaths keep coming. If you want the champion genociders of our era, look to Covid-minimising politicians and the public health influencers who act as…

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

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…

Have you heard of catastrophe compassion? How people collectively tend to unite and work together, when facing catastrophe? ‘Prosociality’? Here’s the thing. That IS ‘democracy’. We’ve always misunderstood its origins. /1…

There were 3 revolutions in the 20th century, in all 3 major powers. Russia, China, the Anglosphere. We only notice the disasters of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. We ignore our own, thinking we’re somehow culture-free. All were in…

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…

Again, we stopped everything we were doing for years at a time for two world wars last century. For risks that were insignificant, compared to this. Today’s status quo is impervious to any empirical, material reality or threat. We’re stuck…

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…

It’s estimated Henry VIII executed up to 60,000 English folk during his reign, many of whom he saw as threats to his regime, including clergy. Trump is returning King and Court feudalism to the US, not fascism. History’s dominant form of…

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…

The only reason any real progress is being made against the greatest threat in human history is that China is disrupting our status quo. Only disruption brings meaningful change. We will never voluntarily agree to move the status quo.…

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

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

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

Greg Sheridan talking about the impossibility of Net Zero on #Insiders, based on current progress globally. So the fuck what. Put society on a war footing. Yesterday. A vastly greater threat than the ones we stopped the world for, for over…

Those who zoom out of daily trending obsessions will see patterns. Democracies are collapsing, under assault from populism. Which is really just uncontrolled human status games. We’ve been here before. And misunderstood it then too. 1/5…

One of the tropes of modern politics is that populists like Trump succeed because of millions of disaffected working people. This is just one more delusional variety of the nonsense idea that ‘the people’ is a thing. /1 We so desperately…

Trump clearly sees himself as a King. All leaders are, no matter what else we call them. So we must learn from history. The only thing that checks the power of a King, is his court. His barons. https://t.co/UH5w6UEW3N

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

@gilduran76 quotes Lincoln to fire up Americans against Trump. I get exactly the opposite feeling from what Lincoln said. To me it reveals the cancer at the heart of American society, which is why it’s always at war with itself. /1…

Infection has killed the overwhelming majority of humans who have ever lived. It’s only in the last 2 centuries that shifted. But now we ‘live with’ infections, deactivate public health procedures and attack vaccination. We’re throwing…

More than half the children born in all of history died before they reached their teens. Mostly from infections or infectious diseases. https://t.co/AFSb1o85E3

If you think ‘politics’ runs societies, you’ll see history as a series of Premier League games, won alternately by ‘Left’ and ‘Right’. If you think (as I do) status runs societies, history becomes cycles of humiliation. Humiliation is the…

The engine room of all history: - humans fight one another for status, in teams - the losers in that fight feel humiliated - they enact revenge on the winners - repeat ad infinitum. What we see as political shifts are actually this…

The more social life becomes the winning of pointless daily team sports status battles on social media, the more we stop seeing repeated historical patterns. America has arrived at its next Gilded Age. Veblen wrote one of the guidebooks.…

In Dewey and Lippmann’s famous discussions about the nature of a public and democracy, they agreed on one critical thing. That only problems bring a public into being. As I say, only catastrophe creates the ‘we’ that is the public. 1/3…

The 19th century was a century of rival kings. Here they are in 1815 carving up Europe, after the defeat of Napoleon. “The Cake of Kings.” Most of the two millennia of modern European history were alternating empires and rival monarchies.…

While world leaders aspire to be new Kings, the wider population dreams of buying old aristocratic homes and palaces. Not to occupy them, as kings. But to provide luxury services to guests. A servant’s fantasy. ‘Service’ industries…

The more people vote in the US, the worse ‘democracy’ gets. Socially, this makes perfect sense. Using idealistic claptrap, it’s totally bewildering. 1/3 https://t.co/YUj7Fbq9Qz Socially, power in society has shifted to ‘the people’,…

We stopped the world twice in the 20th century to fight two world wars. Over trivialities, compared to this. Humans fighting humans. For status. That’s all societies will do, unless catastrophe is present. Not imminent, present, total…

We know the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank. Also a climate change denial group. The declaration didn’t even pretend to do the things it…

My belief is we’re blinded to the real social things driving our societies by our obsessive focus on the daily team sports of ‘politics’, really just the names of teams in the same social melee. But here’s a rare window into the engine…

I often post about how all meaningful and significant change in societies comes only from catastrophic disruptions. Historically, wars, plagues, natural disasters. Everything else is status games, dressed up in various costumes. But there…

Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and balances ‘democracy’. This is basic history, have a look. /1…

In my town years back, a tradesman was burned while working on a shop renovation. He was taken to hospital, feeling OK, and asked when he would be allowed to go home. Doctors said he wasn’t going home. He was going to die from his burns.…

This is our framework for understanding the entire world. We’re trapped inside this team sports bubble. Every point on this spectrum is only a status/identity-based team, battling for social position. All of the positions are also entirely…

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:…

A free press is one of the checks and balances we use to define democracy. Again, look to history. Their origin is the battle between kings and their barons. They were never about ‘the people’. When the Kings and barons align, there are no…

Public health professionals, what was the last pathogen that was offloaded onto the populations’ immune systems to control, rather than controlling spread of the pathogen through the community? Are we looking at unique, historically…

Thinking of the importance of institutions, remembering the very many fine minds who fought the pandemic here, who have simply disappeared. Often to other platforms. Disappeared from public life more generally, on Covid. ‘Trending’ can’t…

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.…

John Anderson, on public health. “One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns was the emergence of a sense that essential freedoms were somehow gifts to be bestowed by government, rather than rights inherent to the people.” /1…

Noah Smith. Funny how the worm is turning in understanding the deeper social transformations in play. But he ends with: “ I predict that the new age of kings won’t last.” The age of kings never ends. /1 https://t.co/K9UkkQP0Ux…

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…

It was only the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century which gave ordinary people access to housing for the first time. Prior to that, housing and land were the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful. /1…

For most of modern history, you or I as ordinary people would have been peasants. So why aren’t we today? Only catastrophe really changes societies. The Black Death killed up to half of Europe. That destroyed peasantry as a way of life. /1…

Populism is described as a political strategy of appealing to ordinary people against elites. My definition of populism is any governance system that uses popularity as its main currency. That includes Western electoral democracies.…

The monumental waste of time of our Left v Right team sports. By mid-century, fully half of all public and private expenditure will be the care of retirees. All of our problems are social problems. Including the (social) problem of…

Much infectious disease was historically ‘endemic by attrition’. A dynamic equilibrium with the pathogen through the death and maiming of people, because there weren’t other options. ‘Tragic stability’. Infection by default, not design.…

I spent time with AI on this not because I didn’t already know what it said here. After 5 years of having to listen to even some public health experts advocate for the infection of entire populations with a novel pathogen, I wanted…

Russian culture is still the playing out of the Russian Revolution. Chinese culture is the playing out of its revolution. Both populist movements. The West is the same, but refuses to see it. It’s living out the countercultural revolution…

Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be far superior to electoral democracy. Put public health at the…

For every chronic disease, put infection at the top of your list of suspects. Chronic/persistent infection is the new paradigm for all health. It should have been that already years ago. https://t.co/4AflffpMLa

Whether it’s weaponising the hygiene hypothesis to suggest all infection is good for you, or using co-evolutionary ‘infection has always been with us’ arguments, infection normalisers are the scientific snake oil attention tarts of the…

The Republicans and Democrats in the US have swapped ideologies over the course of their history. Societies don't run on politics, they run on imitation/conformity, driven by status. Political parties will happily swap ideologies to follow…

Pretty much all public debates are fake, distracting noise hiding the real social games going on. Here again, the Dems and Republicans have completely swapped positions over their history, showing those positions are irrelevant. It's all…

@annabelcrabb here using the common belief that democracy is ‘the people’ thinking and acting, in this case to provide checks and balances on power. Why I think that’s a very dangerous misunderstanding. /1 https://t.co/OCFuRrJxZj…

A few years ago I shifted my Twitter contributions away from chronicling the problems societies face, from vomiting ignored facts into the void. Towards what seemed a more useful task, of understanding why nothing is done to fix the…

Democracy never was ‘the people’. It’s one phase of the rivalry between a society’s elite, where no elite group can attain dominance. A balanced elite rivalry. History is always decided by rivalry between elite status groups. Societies run…

We spent millennia ‘living with’ infection. Which killed most of us. We lost adult life through the massive demographic shift post-WW2. Now we only have the casual, cheerful ‘it is what it is’ fatalism of adolescent philosophy to guide us.…

A P.S. to this story. Kids barely in their teens getting shingles and it becoming meningitis is quite rare. Particularly when the child has had both chickenpox *and* the vaccine against chickenpox, previously. The specialist 'puzzled'. Not…

We stopped entire societies for well over a decade in the 20th century, to fight two world wars of much lower risk to humanity. Societies don’t run on facts. They run on status. As the Victorians linked vital public infrastructure to…

The Covid pandemic is a wake-up call to the final dissolution of the post-war consensus that created the ‘we’ of public life. That period between 1945 and the late 1970s was unique in all of history. It was the catastrophes of the early…

Institutions run societies because they’re the collective intergenerational memory of the entire population. As institutions are undermined, authority collapses into imitation without command. A mimetic crowd replacing a stabilising…

‘Politics’ is just Premier League football. Team sports. You need to look at institutional capacity to understand what’s happening to us. Starting with the UK. Look at the density of public service provision. Cut in half since the 1970s.…

Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now is. Desperately hoping they can get something to trend for even 10 minutes. None of that will lead to any meaningful, lasting…

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,…

In the West we’re the last gasps of earlier European empires. Our great populist political surges are mostly people yearning for the old days of empire. Our democracies are only fleeting repair jobs from the last European imperial…

There is no equality between people, and they will fight you if you try to impose it. All that tames status is a central, master status hierarchy in a society, networked to the rest of peoples’ lives. Kings and Popes, historically.…

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…

“Powers that liberal-democratic revolutionaries the world over fought to take away from absolute monarchs in the 18th and 19th centuries are being reconstituted under the American executive in the 21st century.” Yes. Kings are back. The…

Using Turchin's work on elite overproduction, it's possible to conceive all societies as status rivalries between elites. What we call 'democracy' is really the degree of co-option of the wider population, to these rivalries. /1…

A few years ago I shifted most of my posting here to target one thing. Status. Status is the root cause of all human thought, feeling and behaviour. Without understanding status, you understand nothing about human life. It’s also the core…

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends…

Masking hashtags are back. Social change never comes from activism. Activism appeared to work in the 1960s because most civilisation had been pulverised by 2 world wars.

So often in modern history the sane way forward for human progress is sidelined by the metastasising global impact of the latest American billionaire, in this case Rockefeller’s cheap oil at the turn of the 20th century. This is a problem…

You can see here the historical decoupling of engineering from public health, and the shift into medicine. That was a terrible mistake. https://t.co/BJBZAyKAY9

I’ll begin 2026 as I ended 2025, by inviting people to admit that our ideas about how societies work aren’t working. Otherwise change might happen. All societies are rivalries between various shifting elites. The majority of people are…

Of course, what else can they do but surrender to populism? It can't be beaten. Only the social collapse it triggers stops it. A pattern as old as history. https://t.co/VbcMd2WTdk

The cycle of all human life and history. Drawing upon Girard, Burke, Tarde and Turchin mostly. Imitative rivalry. We imitate to have status. Past a threshold this destroys social order. Or that destruction can come from without.…

Trump’s Venezuelan action continues a long US tradition. Which was a Roman tradition. The US has always led the modern world in these actions. Regime change abroad is about managing elite rivalries at home, as it also was in Rome.…

Zoom out. America has been experiencing an elite overproduction crisis (Turchin). Historically this often leads to foreign adventurism, to expand opportunities for domestic elites. Kings often used battles to offer appeasing territory and…

Those in US society who are ‘decamillionaires’ (>$10 million net worth) have expanded TENFOLD in the past half century. This isn’t about inequality. This is the group from which political aspirants tend to be drawn. The number of seats…

Increasingly it’s pointless discussing what’s happening in the world, with the framing of those events lacking any empirical connection to history or social dynamics. Venezuela, for example. The US has done this 60-80 times, since 1945.…

Trump is acting in other countries now for the same reason leaders have always done in history. To create breathing space for domestic rivalries. Kings would grant new land and titles to rival barons, through battle, to appease them. It’s…

I still believe Turchin’s overproduction of elites is a far better framework to understand Trump through. Look at the history of the Trump regime. Firstly the big increase in candidates for Presidency itself. The US is now overflowing with…

The flip side of status, which is the operating system of all societies, is humiliation. Humiliation is the destruction of all status. Germans felt humiliated after WW1, this made them receptive to the Nazi BS. Serial killers also nearly…

Civil rights-era reforms are often evoked as evidence of people-led change in societies. In reality they came at a time when 2 world wars, a pandemic and economic depression had immiserated elites. Status-based rule has been waiting to…

The Iranian protests have already been shoehorned into our usual ‘people power’ narratives. (Social media loves that narrative, it’s what it deludes itself that it’s doing every day.) Revolutions come from rivalry between existing elites.…

European fascism in the 20th century was populations living in the economic ruins of a world war, coupled to a feeling of total humiliation generated by the truce. Are those preconditions in the US today? Or is it the B-grade Western that…

We’re actually living in a time that you could call the reversion to the long mean. In historical terms, there’s only ever really been one superpower. Fossil fuels created a temporary disruption to the historical pattern, now returning to…

Most nations don’t build in time, they build in space. This causes them to lurch from one revolutionary crisis to the next, with collective memory wiped between crises. Like geopolitical measles. China builds in time more than in space. We…

Imagine a new world order where Europe and Asia (including Australia/NZ) all align behind China as the dominant superpower. And maybe even allow Russia back into the fold, it was the Americans that drove them out originally. 1/3…

This view on the progress of human knowledge owes more to affection for the US Constitution than to actual history. Knowledge is like evolution. It progresses one funeral at a time, to paraphrase Planck. Worldviews compete for status,…

McLuhan tried to teach us that the ‘medium is the message’. That first we make tools, and then our tools make us. The escalating apocalyptic narratives of social media made me remember this. Those narratives are symptomatic of our capture…

It really is difficult to not compare the US to Ancient Rome right now. Centuries of a democratic republic now under siege by populist tyrants. The uncomfortable truth from that history is that Rome‘s democratic republic was a river of…

The history of modern Europe is the exporting of violence through imperial expansion. As that expansion has waned, it has used the State to control violence internally. The history of the US is the internalisation of the same violence.…

Because institutions ran our societies (brilliantly) for much of the last 70 years, most of us in the West have a level of knowledge of basic governance along a continuum from non-existent to childish. Take this latest purge. Both Xi and…

Brilliant summary of where geo-politics has arrived. The American Republic gifted a model of institutional stability to Europe post-WW2. Europe is still running with it. The American Republic is following its much earlier Roman…

Hierarchy absorbs violence. Equality releases rivalry. Energy delays the reckoning; information accelerates it. Unpacking this key to understanding civilisations… /1 https://t.co/0ERRxaBh2v Hierarchy seems an evil when our belief is that…

I’ve spent a few years here arguing that the populist autocracy we’re seeing globally is really human societies trying to restore monarchies. The return of the kings. Humanity’s most common and most stable form, across all of its history.…

The behaviour of the Trump regime seems beyond the pale for those who grew up in the entirely provisional post-WW2 re-build of destroyed societies. Where collective institutions guided the repair of the basics of human life, around an…

The Epstein files show just one part of the operation of global elites, acting outside national boundaries established in the 17th century. There were no meaningful national boundaries before the 17th century. That’s the world we’ve…

Much of the illusion of democracy being people-led is really the operation of social security systems. These were pioneered after WW2, or in the case of the UK in the middle of WW2, to bolster popular support for the war effort. Democracy…

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So…

It amazes me every day how ahistorical we are in our thinking. The populism Trump represents is common throughout history. It always represents societies returning to more monarchical forms of governance, after the violence of ‘flatter’…

What we call democracy ran from about 1945, until the late 1970s. When two world wars, a pandemic and economic collapse pulverised our existing status quo. ‘The people’ didn’t come to power. Institutions tasked with repairing broken…

The data is absolutely clear that the only time in all of history where ordinary people owned their own homes in great numbers was after World War 2, when governments built them for them. https://t.co/nhIG1oBvkV

Again, if you use history as a guide, we’re not democracies under assault from far Right fascism. We’re back in feudalism, history’s dominant form. Land is now only for the elite, and inheritance becomes the main fight. Meanwhile leaders…

The reality with inequality is that at no time in history has an established status quo voluntarily relinquished its advantages. Changes to the status quo are always forced, by internal and/or external catastrophe or existential threat.…

Knowledge of even basic history will tell you that the world is rapidly returning to a dominance of Asia that is the historical norm. https://t.co/20zPCHrTLT

The entire history of humanity is one of continuous imitative rivalry, for status. With some controls emergent over time, like monarchies and religions, mechanisms to attempt to control this status rivalry. I have zero time for bleating…

The only historical ways inequality has been reduced is either the catastrophic destruction of the existing status quo, for example by war. Or by governments investing directly in those who are less well-off. Or both. Everything else is…

The entire global infrastructure of governance, deriving from the Westphalian settlement in the 17th century, is falling apart. Most of our interpretations of what’s happening, including the idea ‘fascists’ are taking over ‘democracies’,…

Our short memories. Remember this, from the George W Bush years? Trumpism takes this and magnifies it many times over. Nothing much has really changed except the degree of resistance to it, which populism spent the subsequent years…

I still remember the rampant hubris of the George W Bush White House. The belief that those who served under that administration were untouchable, above due process, above the law etc. Creating fleeting culture war realities, rather than…

Given that we know human life expectancy doubled in the last century due mostly to control of infections, the idea that long life = avoiding infection should be obvious. But in a social media society, only what trends is actually real.…

No. He’s creating a new monarchy for the US, replacing government. Neo-royalism. With a good mix of theocracy thrown in. Monarchy is the absolute dominant form for most of human history. It’s the default state. These aren’t analogies. We…

It’s the hubris of existing elites that often catalyses the catastrophic collapse that leads to actual social progress. This is how history works. Human societies run on status. If status rivalry isn’t managed, it blows up the society,…

One of the great vain prejudices of human history is the idea that complexity increases with size. Not coincidentally we think it maxes out at about human scale. In reality complexity increases the smaller you go. All life and existence…

Global capitalism was never really a thing. It’s an artefact of 19th century social theory. In reality ‘capitalism’ was a strategic fiction, to undermine the State, which obstructed uncontrolled status rivalries. The idea of individuals…

In a kidult culture like ours, where all historical precedent and tradition is replaced by trending fads and fashions, what happens with emergencies and disasters? Like pandemics, but also climate events, etc. They become platforms for the…

There’s little hope humanity will exit the team sports imitative status games that define most of history. Particularly now when we live inside social media, the platforms have replaced society itself. Look up from the various battles…

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…

The ‘international rules-based order’ many of us grew up in, which seemed a more peaceful and rational time, had its origins in cataclysmic conflict. The world wars. That rule-based order arose in the repair work, after those wars, when…

I don’t care about Thiel, but ‘liberal democracy’ never began. It’s a trick of the light caused by the catastrophic destruction of status hierarchies by two world wars, an economic depression and a pandemic, in the 20th century…

A modicum of history tells us that Iran was a democracy in many of our lifetimes, that dared to want more of the proceeds of its own oil reserves. Which the Brits and Americans, who wanted the proceeds for themselves, couldn’t stomach. So…

Covid lockdowns were extremely difficult for countries who’d had decades of business-as-usual life. The idea of global emergency action against a threat hadn’t been seriously evoked since WW2. Interruption to fossil fuel supplies could…

The turnaround in Australian governance that Covid revealed, where leaders now cower to the social media mob and vested interests, is a disgrace to the history of the country. Australia was famous for its strong, innovative governance. Now…

For the nuclear numpties, a nuclear power plant is just a hideously expensive 19th century steam turbine, with fission heating the water. Time to move on.

Because many of us grew up in a time when populist idiots were constrained by institutional mechanisms set up to repair the smoking ruins of the first half of the 20th century, there’s a sort of hope that what is logical and objective will…

Libertarians, cookers and kidults will be celebrating their victory in Australia. Where National Cabinet has agreed to ‘urge’ people to do things to save fuel. I remember urging as a new spineless nothing invented earlier in the Covid…

The upcoming EV tax in Australia is sold under the usual narrative that fuel excise funds roads, and EV’s are therefore free-loading. The link between fuel excise and road funding (hypothecation) was formally severed almost 35 years ago,…

I don’t celebrate the widespread chaos and destruction. But I’ve posted for years here now about how this is the only way change was going to come. The human status quo never surrenders to change. It can only be replaced by its complete…

Keep calm and carry on was a phrase the Brits used in early WW2 to steel populations for the massive challenges ahead. It wasn’t urging them to fight the war on behalf of government. Pleading with them to do the right thing. The right…

It does. But you have to understand why it does. It replaces an extensive network of hierarchies, based on expertise and experience, with hierarchies based only on popularity. Likes and followers. It strip-mines societies of their…

Post-revolutionary societies are mostly stuck in that ‘rise up’ mode for the rest of their short (in historical terms) existence. The revolution destroys every other way of doing things. https://t.co/kIv4DAGk88

The 3 great modern superpowers are America, Russia and China. Russia and China were both crippled by populist revolutions, heavily inspired by the West, creating dysfunctional cultural outcomes. China’s long history gave it some cultural…

Machiavelli understood status as the central coordinating function of all human life. It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take…

If as history suggests meaningful change comes only from catastrophic destruction of an existing status quo, every day this war goes on accelerates needed change to our societies. Covid brought us widespread WFH. Iran may finally break the…

Because populist societies are decoupled from history, interested only in a trending present of whims and fads, we forget the origin of the checks and balances and due process we use to define democracy. They never had a thing to do with…

The US has prided itself on being some supposed break from the ‘authoritarian’ world of kings and their taxation. In reality it substituted a monarchy with a plutocracy. Its ‘no kings’ rallies highlight how deep the history runs, and how…

I don’t celebrate or welcome destruction. But i think the doomscrolling world of the socials misses that without destruction, true social change was never going to happen. History shows this repeatedly. Reframe the chaos of today in that…

Any sane society would have been on a war footing for years already. This is an orders of magnitude greater threat than those we stopped the whole world for over a decade, to fight 2 world wars. Societies that go too long between…

Because the institutionally-driven levelling of Australian society post both world wars, arising from repair after those conflicts, created a ‘we’. Starting in the 1970s, the ‘market’ alternative was targeted at this we, dismantling it.…

America is intrinsically violent. Like other societies founded by revolution, it only knows rising up and overthrow as a way to effect social change. Revolutions generate more revolutions, because they destroy the memory, knowledge and…

We’re stuck in the Westphalian bubble that can only see Trumpism as some sort of authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. Or neo-royalism, as some scholars call it. The overwhelmingly dominant form of all history, re-asserting itself.…

Post the great world wars, social progress flourished because the existing status quo had been smashed and irreparably damaged. Beginning in the 1970s, status returned as the dominant force. Under cover of ‘free markets’, really a con to…

Tipping points are being reached, but it’s at this stage governments need to press even harder, to accelerate the transition. There is no ‘market’ that can create fundamental change. Winning world wars wasn’t market-led.…

When America rejected monarchy, it became a plutocracy. Status will always drive societies, manifested in different ways, unless there’s catastrophic disruption to a status quo. You can see tax rates went up only when world war suppressed…

The redress on capital gains tax and negative gearing was long overdue. But it won’t give us affordable housing. Unaffordability is about status. You need to smash the status attached to land and dwellings. Only once in all of history did…

In the 19th century Jules Verne excited people with visions of collective technological progress. Today we live in an adolescent ‘kidult’ culture of trends. No collective excitement of building anything remarkable. Just fights for social…

Kings are back. It’s not authoritarianism or fascism. It’s royalism. The dominant social model throughout all history, except since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which created ‘sovereign’ nation States. That Westphalian model is now in…

It’s striking that the idea dreams (or memories) reside in the brain isn’t seen as rank mysticism. Henri Bergson more than a century ago said as much. As Bergson said, dreaming/memories return us to the past itself, which never passes. It…

Worth remembering every time the world as a whole looks like a collapsing train wreck. Tiny numbers of people generate the world’s mis/disinformation and obstructive hysteria. It would take about a day for proper regulators to identify…

And yet he’s like Gandhi, when compared to say Henry VIII. We’re not coming to terms with what this populist shift globally is doing. Returning the world to easily its dominant form throughout nearly all human history. We’re stuck in a…

There is no ‘we’ now. Our mistake is not understanding that. Again. That ‘we’ disappeared from the late-1970s, with the invention of market-based societies. Societies became ‘economies’ (apparently - it’s a fiction). The ‘we’ was invented…

Remembering, only catastrophic disruption removes a status quo. We need to think hard about what we’re defending, in scenarios like this. https://t.co/C5rT7FHXNH

Populism is the culture-wide attempt to restore Kings. A quarter of a century is about as good as it gets, which is nothing in historical terms. Populism always founders on succession. Cronyism tries to shoehorn the leader’s family into…

The stupidity of the idea of a housing market. There's no way to create affordable housing without depressing the prices for existing owners. Only once in all human history has housing been widely available and affordable. Post-WW2, when…

It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide.…

AI debates are framed mostly by Terminator movies. Intelligence and consciousness residing in opposing human and silicon brains. In reality AI is the latest stop in a long historical trajectory of humanity gradually externalising and…

The current hysteria around resource usage of AI data centres. It’s entirely in proportion to what humanity has devoted historically to cognition. First as individual brains, then institutionally. AI in fact may *reduce* the resource load…

We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners, slaveholders, and federal bond investors. /1…